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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8352942" data-attributes="member: 18">I would agree and strongly suggest 5E also needed another 6-12 months in the oven, too (probably closer to 6 than 12). I think this is most obvious with the DMG, which is utterly stuffed with half-baked systems and ideas (to the point where at least one optional system seems to be a failure to even work through their own idea, leading to a perverse mechanic), and in the early products for 5E, but also in some of the class design in the PHB, where some classes feel like they got design-in-depth, and others have a very "Well, close enough, go with it!" vibe.(For that matter, you could probably make a good case 3E needed some more dev time, given how rapidly 3.5E followed!)Looking at Dancey's stated issues/goals from 2000 here is absolutely fascinating, because they're a real mix of three things:1) Was an issue then, they dealt with it, no longer really relevant.2) Wasn't really an issue, even though it was perceived to be.3) Not actually achieved until 5E.This last category (which I actually feel is the bulk of them) is particularly fascinating, because it seems like, to me, 3E actually failed at a lot of the goals he set (though it didn't lose money, AFAICT!), and 4E failed at some, and only 5E can roundly be seen as succeeding at the relevant goals. For example:I'd say 3.XE was a massive failure here. Not as big a failure as 2E, sure, but worse than 4E and 5E. 5E finally overcompensated and started undersaturating the market and is now turning that around, but 3E, good god? The sheer volume of books was staggering, and most of them were kind of awful. High production values, though!This is subjective as hell, I have to admit, but I definitely do not feel like 3.XE at all practiced what it preached here. Not at all. On the contrary I felt like 3.XE was worse for this than 2E, with the aggressive usage of hyper-specific PrCs, the bizarre Greyhawk-specific-material obsession (despite not actually supporting Greyhawk as a setting!) and a lot of other stuff that felt like it was supporting specifics, rather than acting as a toolbox - plus it took an insane number of books to get all the bits you might want to use! The second part is more like something they achieved - the "d20" system was more broadly applicable than 2E approaches, but perhaps too broad (and ultimately I think destructive to the industry, but to be fair to Dancey it'd have been nearly impossible to foresee that, and things have since largely recovered).I totally believe that was true in 2000. I have a lot of difficulty believing it was still true by even 2003, and much as I love 4E, I very much doubt it was true in 2007/8. And again, just like 5E overcompensated wildly by cutting the number of books down to a trickle (when a moderate stream would be fine), 5E wildly overcompensated with it's obsessive surveys, and strange approach to playtesting, which caused it to "listen" well but only to a subsection of the audience, and they failed to do what companies who want to listen have to do, and think carefully about who they're hearing from and when to accept input, and when to question it (in particular the arbitrary "70% approval" standard, which was very inconsistently applied and hasn't been mentioned for years, thankfully, was an outright mistake - you listen, but you shouldn't be letting the surveys dictate stuff like that). Still, it feels like maybe they went back and looked at Dancey's ideas here, when approaching 5E.</blockquote>

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