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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AmerginLiath" data-source="post: 8297377" data-attributes="member: 777">This is I’ve disliked about the recent design trend in the game, a filing away of the various silos in which a player keeps the large design chunks of their character. D&D has always been built largely on the engine of “get your Ability Scores, pick your Race, pick your Class,” with those determining in large the mechanical structure of the character by mixing and matching collections of gathered options. The introduction of Proficiencies, Feats, Skills, and such have helped add edge options, but your Elven Fighter was still mainly built around the things determined for an Elf and a Fighter. Even Kits or Subclasses were largely a way of adding more class choices that happened to just be very similar to other choices (while still giving you a set template). Whether that was good or bad, that’s been D&D for fifty years, and (along with the level system this was all built around) differentiated it from other games like Rolemaster, GURPS, World of Darkness, or the explosion on small modern systems.Starting with removing Race as a real determinant for the character build (without the initial Ability Score changes, Race/Lineage becomes more of a feat package of sorts), the current generation of designers — influenced by other sorts of games — is apparently now making Class very DIY. I’m not a power-gamer/build sort of guy, and I wouldn’t really consider myself a grognard (as much as I grew up reading and rereading Gygax’s 1st edition DMG), but I’ve always liked how D&D (even when it batted for the fences with 4e) remained unabashedly itself in structure; lose that structure, you lose the game and all you have is a brand. That’s not to say the things being done here aren’t fascinating (change often is; I remain convinced that the 4e engine should be built into a new Chainmail war game, for example), but it strikes me as going too far in ways that aren’t foreseen.I know that making this argument isn’t popular and I’ll probably be disparaged in numerous slights against my alleged beliefs for doing so, but someone had to introduce the point where a lot of us are: the game-structure, if for the best of cultural intentions, is being shifted in a way that is going to potentially cause certain chaos as the old question of “What is D&D?” comes back to the fore, albeit with new aspersions to cast on those disagreeing with the new game.</blockquote>

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