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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 3756084" data-attributes="member: 2268">Nothing wrong with progress, if it is indeed progress, and not simply change. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> There's been a lot of change in 3.X that didn't turn out to be progress but simply patchwork to fix imagined problems, or problems that didn't really exist before "progress" created them.Example: Polymorph spells.The 3E versions were pretty good, and if you actually read through it once, they were easy to use as well. The one limitation that should not have been just implied but written out was that the caster can transform himself/target into anything he is familiar with, as it is in the Shapechange spell. That would have reduced this "can't force monster designers to check every monster for Polymorph brokenness" argument and the "players reach for obscure monster handbooks for broken monsters to transform into" complaint to smoke and hot air. The revisions after Tome & Blood got more and more silly, ending in a line of polymorph spells that are all utility and no flavour.Example: Scry & TeleportComes up a lot in the current discussions about "game breaker" spell combos. Apart from the fact that nearly everybody of power who lives in a world where Scry is around for millenia already should routinely have scrying or teleporting countermeasures installed, the basic problem is that the risk for "Death by Mishap" has been reduced to nothing, which makes it easy to abuse Teleport whenever you can. This was done because "dying from one unlucky die roll is NO FUN!" to the wizard player, so the death chance was eliminated. So in order to make teleporting less (ab)useful, it got a reduced range slapped on.There's a handful more of those "problems" that were created by patching up imagined problems that could have been very easily dealt with if they really existed, which led to more patches, etc. And all was called "progress", while in the end it was only change.Personally, I'm lamenting that the current "progress" seems to aim D&D in an even more combat-centric direction, with the roles of characters being hardcoded around combat roles, the abilities and niches of monsters built on how useful they will be in a combat situation. And mostly because the percieved "problem" is that the current edition carries too much fluff and flexibility on all sides which causes characters and monsters to have too much useless baggage where combat is concerned.I'd aim for a solution that makes all other situations in D&D games equally important to combat, but that's just me, and I'm just going from my current impressions, so I could easily be mistaken, too. Just looks to me like another "problem" that they try to fix that will cause even more problems in the long run, because a good many gaming groups are NOT focussed around combat, and will find it even harder to bring the game outside that scope with more narrowed monster roles and combat-defined character abilities.On the other hand, folks like Firebeetle won't be complaining about a bard who is "useless" in combat anymore. If he's still useful in other situations remains to be seen. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> (Edit to get my foot out of my mouth again <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> )</blockquote>

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