Falling Icicle
Adventurer
One of the stated design goals of 5e is that you can have a guy playing a 1st edition style fighter, with nothing more than his six stats, attack bonus, and other basics, and he can be playing alongside someone who has a 3.x or 4e style complex character, and both will work fine together and be balanced. Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea? It's simply not possible to please everyone. I can see alot of problems in trying to do so. There are good reasons why most games don't take this approach.
How do you make characters that have skills, feats, powers, etc. balanced with a 1st edition, plain, basic character? One of the developers mentioned the idea that you could "trade in" the basic things fighters get like attack bonus for special maneuvers or other more complex options. The problem is, balancing these things is not easy to do. Look at the feats in 3rd and 4th editions, for example. All feats cost the same thing, and yet they were far from balanced with each other.
I also doubt that people will like the idea of having to give up basic stats like attack bonus just to get the complexity they want in their class. 3rd and 4th edition players are used to getting both. People are going to see it as a "tax," and rightly so. But as long as the 1e and later edition style characters must be balanced with each other, that will be inevitable. You either must give up something in return for your extra options and complexity, or your character will just be plain better than theirs.
If the core game is extremely simple, like 1e simple, and everything else is optional modules, how on earth do people design adventures, monsters, etc, taking all of those things into account? This will be especially problematic if alot of these "modular" options aren't in the core rulebook. Yeah, great, we might get the option for a real skill system in some other book, for example, but what does it matter if nothing else in the future supports it? There's also the big problem that if the monsters weren't designed with that system in mind, the DM will have to fill in the blanks.
Having too many options can also confuse and divide players. I'm not against having the occasional optional rule, but if the game really is going to be as modular as it sounds, people could be easily overwhelmed by all of the choices. I can see all of this being a real headache for the DM as well, as he's not just going to have to learn one system, but every system being used by every player at the table and he's the one who has the headahce of makign sure they all work together and having to figure something out whenever they don't. One of the things I often hear people praise about 4e was how much easier it made life for the DM. Modular systems do just the opposite.
Different modular systems, even when designed to use the same base system, don't always end up very compatible with each other. I point to White Wolf games for an example. I've seen people try to mix vampires, changelings, werewolves and all the other various world of darkness games into one, and boy, was that a horrible mess. They all used the same basic core storyteller system, but when mixed together, it was just awful. The nWoD made an effort to fix this problem by making the various creature types use as many common rules as possible (or at least alot more than they did before), the exact oppposite approach of what DnD 5e is proposing.
The biggest concern I have, though, is that putting too much emphasis on trying to please everyone will just water the game down and discourage innovation. I want 5e to be a new game that stands on its own merits, with new ideas and improvements over older editions. I don't want a game that tries to be every edition in one. If I wanted to play basic dnd, there's already an edition for that. I don't want to see the desire to try and fit everyone in one big tent discourage the developers from being creative and experimenting for fear of alienating someone. Let's face it, not everyone is going to like every rule. That's just inevitable. And the truth is people usually do just fine making their own house rules to modify what they don't like, anyway.
Who knows, maybe WotC will amaze me and overcome all of these problems. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting what they're saying and the system really isn't going to be as modular as it sounds.
How do you make characters that have skills, feats, powers, etc. balanced with a 1st edition, plain, basic character? One of the developers mentioned the idea that you could "trade in" the basic things fighters get like attack bonus for special maneuvers or other more complex options. The problem is, balancing these things is not easy to do. Look at the feats in 3rd and 4th editions, for example. All feats cost the same thing, and yet they were far from balanced with each other.
I also doubt that people will like the idea of having to give up basic stats like attack bonus just to get the complexity they want in their class. 3rd and 4th edition players are used to getting both. People are going to see it as a "tax," and rightly so. But as long as the 1e and later edition style characters must be balanced with each other, that will be inevitable. You either must give up something in return for your extra options and complexity, or your character will just be plain better than theirs.
If the core game is extremely simple, like 1e simple, and everything else is optional modules, how on earth do people design adventures, monsters, etc, taking all of those things into account? This will be especially problematic if alot of these "modular" options aren't in the core rulebook. Yeah, great, we might get the option for a real skill system in some other book, for example, but what does it matter if nothing else in the future supports it? There's also the big problem that if the monsters weren't designed with that system in mind, the DM will have to fill in the blanks.
Having too many options can also confuse and divide players. I'm not against having the occasional optional rule, but if the game really is going to be as modular as it sounds, people could be easily overwhelmed by all of the choices. I can see all of this being a real headache for the DM as well, as he's not just going to have to learn one system, but every system being used by every player at the table and he's the one who has the headahce of makign sure they all work together and having to figure something out whenever they don't. One of the things I often hear people praise about 4e was how much easier it made life for the DM. Modular systems do just the opposite.
Different modular systems, even when designed to use the same base system, don't always end up very compatible with each other. I point to White Wolf games for an example. I've seen people try to mix vampires, changelings, werewolves and all the other various world of darkness games into one, and boy, was that a horrible mess. They all used the same basic core storyteller system, but when mixed together, it was just awful. The nWoD made an effort to fix this problem by making the various creature types use as many common rules as possible (or at least alot more than they did before), the exact oppposite approach of what DnD 5e is proposing.
The biggest concern I have, though, is that putting too much emphasis on trying to please everyone will just water the game down and discourage innovation. I want 5e to be a new game that stands on its own merits, with new ideas and improvements over older editions. I don't want a game that tries to be every edition in one. If I wanted to play basic dnd, there's already an edition for that. I don't want to see the desire to try and fit everyone in one big tent discourage the developers from being creative and experimenting for fear of alienating someone. Let's face it, not everyone is going to like every rule. That's just inevitable. And the truth is people usually do just fine making their own house rules to modify what they don't like, anyway.
Who knows, maybe WotC will amaze me and overcome all of these problems. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting what they're saying and the system really isn't going to be as modular as it sounds.