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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 6057436" data-attributes="member: 54877">I think it is also inverted from what I was talking about.  I wasn't advocating necessarily separating the simple stuff out--though that is of course yet another way to handle the problem.  (DEFCON1 had a solution too.  We are already up to five options in a handful of posts.  I'm telling you getting to 20 is easy. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />) Rather, I'm looking at the whole picture of all the elements developed in tandem, and facing up to the natural complexity that results from that course of design.  I don't think everyone is so facing it squarely, because we keep seeing all these calls to "Just throw out B-H and leave it A in the default, core, basic rules, then add in B-H elsewhere, later, as advanced, etc."   That's not how you best manage complexity for everyone--by shunting off some little piece of it and pretending that because by so shunting you made it easier for one group, you've maximized ease of use for everyone.  What you've done instead is divided us yet again, between those that have their usability concerns catered to versus those that are more or less second-class or even ignored.   Look at the parallel problem in the early 4E presentation, with similar predictable results.  Problem--they want powers to be simple to pick.  Solution--make every class have its own power list and divide them up by level.  Only, now making it easy to pick your powers for every class means that you get a handful of classe--and need to leave out some of the staples--and this doesn't get any better as you introduce new classes later, as each one takes a lot of space and time.  (You also get a lot of filler powers, but that's another problem from the same cause, not a complexity issue.)  Overall result, WotC realizes at some point that it was a bad design choice, but now they are stuck.  Meanwhile, they've got people ticked off at launch because no druid or bard (though the bard being worth waiting for gained them some ground back here). Very rapidly, the game is going to become complex.  It happened in AD&D.  It sort of happened in BECMI.  It has happened in every version since, in one way or another.  Most people will use a subset of Next, in part to handle the complexity but also for reasons of personal preference, flavor of a campaign, experimentation, etc.  For all of these reasons, the subset will vary wildly.  To manage the total complexity, the selection of options used at a given table should be somewhat independent of the means of communicating each element (class, spell, etc.)</blockquote>

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