D&D 5E So whatever happened to the Tactics Variant/Module or Whatever

[Garthanos]

Quite honestly it seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to add on like a patch in the first place so I wasn't really expecting to see it. Just adding in the bloodied condition for its fantasy fighting pacing fun might be extensive let alone a broad tactical boost. 5e design paradigm seems to make it an extensive rewrite not a add on.

 

[Charlaquin]

We’ve known the promise of modularity was an empty one since before the end of the playtest. Unfortunate, because 5e has a really, really solid mechanical underpinning that WotC just doesn’t seem to have any interest in experimenting with. There were some pretty cool variant rules in the DMG, and that was it. If you want any more tweaking than that, it’s 3rd party or nothing.

 

[ccs]

If you want any more tweaking than that, it’s 3rd party or nothing.

Or you just do it yourself.

 

[Lanefan]

As Charlaquin says, the bigger question is what happened to the idea of modularity in general?

 

[CapnZapp]

As Charlaquin says, the bigger question is what happened to the idea of modularity in general?

It died when WotC decided to not rock the boat afraid that any new ideas would jinx the edition and stop the profits rolling in.

They avoid doing anything that could be interpreted as "new edition" like the plague.

 

[Zardnaar]

It's there in the class design and optional rules in the DMG.

I think the fanatics took things a bit to literally. They said fans of 1E to 4E could play together not that it would be 1E to 4E.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Based on what players of the individual editions have said about what was required to make the game like their edition, I suspect they realized early in the process that there was little they could do to make a majority of those players happy. No matter what they put in, they'd be a dollar short.

So they did what they could to put in variant rules to help bridge the gaps between the 5E they were making and the specific edition a player wanted... hoping that enough players and DMs would find the variants fun and useful. But any player thinking 5E would be made to exactly replicate the edition they wanted was going to be disappointed regardless.

And let's be real here... did ANY player really believe they were going to be able to play a single game that could replicate two different editions at the same time? If that was at all possible, the games would have had to have been so close already that we wouldn't have seen such wide disagreements about stuff that had been changed from one edition to another.

The whole reason there were such vitriolic diatribes regarding 3E and 4E for example was because the players thought the gap between the two editions was so huge. So what kind of game could possibly have be made in that gap that would have made both sides happy? I believe (and I suspect WotC learned soon the hard way) that there was none.

 

[MarkB]

They may also have realised that modularity was a bit of a blind avenue sales-wise. It might bring in more people in the initial wave by catering to more varied play-styles, but in the long term creating a fractured fanbase each playing a different version of the same game doesn't actually provide a solid foundation for expanding the market.

 

[dave2008]

Quite honestly it seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to add on like a patch in the first place so I wasn't really expecting to see it. Just adding in the bloodied condition for its fantasy fighting pacing fun might be extensive let alone a broad tactical boost. 5e design paradigm seems to make it an extensive rewrite not a add on.

Why do you think it would be difficult to add? Doesn't seem that hard to me. I guess it depends on what you are looking for. So, what would you want in a tactical module?

 

[Zardnaar]

5E version of Combat and Tactics perhaps.