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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grydan" data-source="post: 6222733" data-attributes="member: 79401">To truly start from scratch, with a fresh slate, would mean abandoning any game mechanic that had ever appeared in any edition of the game before. Toss out the polyhedrons. Forget classes. No more HP. AC is dead. Levels? What are those? No XP for gold, no XP for killing monsters, no XP for completing quests, no XP for roleplaying, no XP for anything. No Dex, Con, Wis, Str, Cha, or Int. No ability scores, no ability mods. Forget Fighters and Fighting-Men, Magic-Users and Wizards, Clerics, Rogues …And most importantly, neither Dungeons nor Dragons can be featured in any way. Clearly, if we lose everything that ever appeared in a previous edition, we're left with precious little that makes sense to call Dungeons & Dragons.Of course, that's a rather ludicrous position, one might say. By clean slate, we might instead mean getting back to basics, stripping things back to what is definitively D&D and working from there to build a new version of the game … which is what they actually did. They've told us about it. They went through and played every edition, and tried to figure out which bits were universal, and thus needed to be kept. They wrote columns about what made that cut (with their list not being entirely uncontroversial, if I remember correctly, but at least fairly widely accepted). Then, working from that list, they built a game. Given that one of their goals was to at least try to appeal to everyone who has played some version of the game before, yes, some of the things they added to that universal base were inevitably going to be pulled from one edition or another, whether directly or indirectly. But when there's reason to believe that at least part of the market wants 'some way to do X', and you've had some degree of success in the past with a mechanic that does X, it's at least going to be one of the options you consider. So you toss it in the playtest, see if it floats. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.They also tried new things (advantage/disadvantage, new variations on spell-casting rules, new saving throws, new death rules, exploration rules) that had never appeared before. So I'm honestly confused as to how they could have made a more 'from scratch', 'clean slate', and 'completely new' D&D game than the one we've seen, without making something that was almost, but not entirely, completely unlike D&D in any meaningful way.</blockquote>

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