NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8318724" data-attributes="member: 82106">GM never rolls, sure, it can and will have some impact on feel, but I'm looking at it from an optimum process perspective. It keeps the dice in the player's hands and gives them decision points, whereas the classical technique takes away player's focus and control. I'm not sold on any difference in feel in 5e though really. The choice of which spells work which way feels almost entirely arbitrary for one thing. IMHO there was simply a decree "to please the AD&D fanbase, saving throws MUST exist and be used in a way analogous to older editions" and the game designers just shrugged their shoulders and concocted a rule that met the criteria, while having as little scope as they could get away with. Then of course when they handed out authorship of spells and whatnot it all got into the inevitable muddle.Well, you could do something akin to the Runepriest design of PHB3, yes. Instead of resources being expended to do 'bigger powers' or something, perhaps you could have a system that was more like "you pay to switch". That could even be coupled with "the longer you don't switch, the bigger the effect you will get from this power." Now THAT sounds like a damned interesting design!So true, computers are like infinitely stupid servants, there's no possibility of generalization or exception whatsoever, and if it exists in the problem domain, then the effort of describing it in code becomes exponentially greater.I don't think there's anything much more that CAN be done without breaking the whole model of GM centrality ot the process. In almost 50 years of endless trying with trad RPGs 5e is basically the apex of what even armies of good game designers have been able to achieve. This is why I've often called 5e a sort of 'tombstone edition' of D&D. Mearls and cruw cast their lot on a purist classical process model, and even doubled down on it. There's neither any going back now, nor any going forward. I mean, granted I'm sure there are minor tweaks that can be made, classes can be slightly improved, the refresh mess could be mostly fixed, those would be modest improvements. You cannot fix 'exploration' and 'social', they are inherently broken due to the occupation of a design paradigm that will never be abandoned at this point. I think WotC D&D will literally die on that hill. Maybe in a few decades someone else will take the IP in a different direction, but there will have to be a whole new group of developers and vision for that to happen. I guess you could call that '6e', but I am dubious it will ever come to pass.</blockquote>

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