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: 8634032" data-attributes="member: 82106">I fundamentally never really got what you were supposed to DO with 3e, it just played like a game that was BORKED, though honestly I have only played 3.5 and even then not a lot. It seems like a very confused 'design'. Like they focused on certain specific stuff, and removed a lot of crazy crufty nonsense that 2e had in it, but there's NO GLOBAL VISION at all. Like the designers really didn't have a clear idea what they were doing...2e is just crufty and awkwardly bass akward because it was mandated that it must be 1e compatible to a high degree. So its a weird mishmash of gamist rules and high concept intent, and then mechanically its just bonkers with large amounts of basically unplaytested and unworkable supplementary material and whatnot. I can see how someone THOUGHT 3e was just a deep cleanup of that, wow did they miss the mark!Clearly though in the 10 years between the design of 3e and 4e WotC did up its game in terms of mastering actual purposeful RPG design. SAGA and 4e both stand head and shoulders above anything they did previously. 4e does have a number of design flaws, but they're pretty tolerable overall, and I think really its problem as a product is purely in terms of people not knowing what to expect, and not really being told what they were getting vs any actual issue with the product at all. 5e DOES learn a lot from 4e in terms of intent, but I just don't like the 2e-ish incoherent design and, frankly it feels strategically like a cul-de-sac of design. There's no direction for it to go in, its what it is and I have this horrible suspicion that as tastes change and evolve 5e and D&D generally really will finally reach obsolescence. Maybe a 5e that was a true successor to 4e would sell less, OTOH there's a heck of a lot of places you can go with that design, it could be explored for 5 more decades.</blockquote>

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