Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7715905" data-attributes="member: 996">Is the nostalgia really going to wear off?   I doubt it.  Without nostalgia, 5e is just another FRPG. I doubt it's actual denial, any remotely aware designer's known all along - it's more a matter of PR, of reading and catering to the market.  If your customers are complaining that a simplified product is more complicated (because it's less familiar and they're not willing to un-learn the old way), you come out with a more complicated product and tout it as being simple again. You speak the language your customers understand, and don't challenge their preconceived notions. HD really didn't work much like healing surges - you can't spend them in combat, the don't underlie any healing powers, they don't constitute nearly the fraction of daily hp resources that surges did, etc - and they do correspond fairly strongly to classic HD.  You use them to determine your hps as you level, generally get 1 per level, add your CON bonus to each one, etc.   Spending them on an hour-long 'short' rest to get back hps is a healing-surge-like function, grafted onto the old HD mechanic, or a severely bowdlerized take on healing surges, more than it's 'really' healing surges with the serial numbers filed off (though that gets the point across, too, and I've said it myself at times). That'd be nice, and wouldn't have to impact the standard game at all - just a bunch of optional material - but it would also be a lot of material, tantamount to a separate game, really... Reading comprehension?  <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=";)" />  'Player choices' or 'Player-facing options' would be another way of putting it, I suppose.   You could load down 5e with tons of character abilities, and you'd have something more like 3.5, with both PCs and NPCs very rules-heavy.  To get a 4e vibe you'd only have to present more/better-balanced options on the player side, so PCs become more customizeable, while monsters/NPCs are left relatively simple for the DM to whip up and manage in play.  But, either way, you'd be working against 5e's strongly-expressed classic-feel and DM-Empowerment goals. The whole "TotM is simpler/makes combat faster" canard is real problem.  Visual aids make combat simpler and speed up the process, because you're not constantly describing & re-describing the scene, they don't tempt the DM to sacrifice fairness or consistency for speed, either.  Using visual aids that are all to the same scale makes it that much easier.  Putting them on a grid and making movement/area/positioning less granular is a further simplification. IDK, wouldn't that strip away a lot of options? The more players you have, the slower the game runs.  The more of them that choose to play casters, the slower the game runs.</blockquote>

Verification