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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8869015" data-attributes="member: 6696971">For sure.There is a cohort of players out there that don’t like “re-tuning” or “nerfs” even if its demonstrable that it would be for the overall health of the game.That is the trade-off on the one side of the equation; managing the social dilemma of dealing with that particular player.The other side of the equation has the trade-off of attempting to assess the extremely large and entangled engineering project of turning 5e into a functional facsimile of something like Torchbearer and then successfully executing that profoundly complex and fraught undertaking (just thinking on the list of things required alone is daunting enough…in the last game I GMed, the Wizard cast 5 total spells through 4 levels of play and spent about 10 x the amount of time managing the combination of Inventory/Light + thematic resources + recovery of Conditions from The Grind than they did their Spellbook!).Both of these “asks” are significant undertakings with tradeoffs. The designers were clearly going for an Apocalypse World, concentric & collapsible design with 5e. They just didn’t make the core game (AW’s 1st layer/core) nearly basic enough (“The Great Wizard Question” and magic bring so crazily potent, prolific, and reliable is a core component of the issue at hand) and, at some point, they abandoned that project (what Mearls called “modularity” but Vincent called, and executed on, concentric & collapsible design).Which is why I harkened back to what I was saying back in 2012; build the core game off of the smaller unit (“The Encounter”) rather than the larger (and much more fraught) unit; “The Adventuring Day.” In most every project, it is profoundly easier to engineer from small, contained, tightly-bound and build-out from that platform than it is to do the inverse (AW design is a masterclass of that). If something goes haywire with a design element of layer 3 so you get undesired performance or cascading, you just scrap it and default back to the prior layer. If you do the opposite and try to predict cascading problems from layer 4 to core layer 1…and then troubleshoot and re-engineer…god have mercy on you! (Which is the task before One D&D if it wants to produce the experience I outlined in my 1 dungeon play upthread. 5e D&D has the market cornered for that 2 type dungeon play…but 1 is a deeply different beast).</blockquote>

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