NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5707640" data-attributes="member: 2011">I respect your POV, but what you call freedom, I call entitlement.In 3.5, there was an ability called Hide in Plain Sight. Once that monstrosity came into the gaming community culture, players all over the world thought that it was perfectly reasonable for a Rogue to be invisible all of the time, regardless of lighting conditions.I see many of the same types of malformed game design elements in 4E. Illogical game constructs that are part of the game because a designer was taking a leak in the bathroom and suddenly thought "Wouldn't it be cool...". <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:" /> We then get Errata documents that are over 100 pages long.Think about that for a second. Over 100 pages. Most of those pages are because the designers did not actually design. They improvised. They came up with the cool idea without having meta-game design guidelines on things that should be allowed and things that should not.By designing the game from the power source perspective and putting hard limits on what a power can do and cannot do, it puts game balance on the front burner.Call it Metadesign. The concept of making hard and non-breakable rules about what a given power source can and cannot do, how versatile given powers can be at given levels, what feats can and cannot do, it actually makes the game designer's job easier.It's a lot of work and a lot of research.It's actual design.In 4E, it's obvious by just looking at masterwork heavy armor that the game designers didn't actually sit down and do design. They came up with cool ideas, implemented them, and playtested them. When playtesting didn't quite work out as expected, they then modified them. Later on, they put out sourcebooks with things like Battlerage. Nobody noticed that Battlerage totally bypassed the minion rules because there were no limits on what abilities a given power source could possess and how those abilities could be used.Hence, we get 100+ page errata documents and a lot of it is not just cosmetic or typos.Skill challenge DCs took years to get into a reasonable range. WT???Monster damage took years to get into a reasonable range.Everyone has different preferences.But at the end of the day, 5E will be whatever the game designer preferences are, just like 1E, 2E, 3E, 3.5, and 4E were.I prefer that the game designers forget about WOW, GURPS, Rolemaster, Ars Magica, etc.Instead, I prefer that they focus on D&D. D&D isn't just 4E.D&D in reality is 1E through 4E and many many other versions. The game designers should take the best out of all of those versions, but give it the strongest D&D flavor that they can.The "should not" that you are talking about "should" be capable. But, it should be capable via multiclassing, not given to each class or each power source automatically. It should be given based on delving into other power sources, not by being entitled because 4E allowed something.A Warlord is a 4E contruct. For over 30 years, there was no fighter who could heal. Yes, people have (irrationally) rationalized the 4E Warlord out the ying yang.But in the real world, most house painters cannot do brain surgery. They have to spend a significant time learning to do so (i.e. multiclassing) to get there.That's what 5E should do. It should not allow every PC to do most every thing, it should allow PCs to specialize based on class and power source(s), and to generalize based on multi-classing.Now, there are some general lines that 4E does not cross. But, they seem almost random.Teleport occurs right and left in many classes and at very low levels in 4E, but Fly is almost unheard of. To me, teleport should be more rare than flying because flying (i.e. birds, bats, insects) is part of the natural world.It took the release of Arcane Power before a PC could do a low level short team Fly, and even that took a Standard Action. I understand the balance of that with Jump powers, but Teleport blows both of those out of the water. Monks can teleport as an Encounter power at level 6. Why? I have no idea. At level 16? Maybe. But at level 6??? Why are heroic level PCs able to teleport so much?Flying should be part and parcel of the Primal power source because it's something that is observable in nature.Teleport should be rare and higher level, something that low level PCs do not often run into or acquire.Abilities to swim or breath under water should be less rare than teleport, but teleport is common and swimming powers are rare.Players are actually hesitant to have their PC go near water because the game designers mostly forgot about that environmental aspect. It's almost an afterthought.Jump before Fly. Fly before Teleport. Not Teleport first at low levels. The strongest abilities shouldn't be at low levels or as racial abilities.4E is a bit backwards conceptually and mechanically because the magical cool stuff is common place and the mundane stuff is rare.Twin Strike is such a powerful At Will power that virtually no core Ranger PC doesn't take it. Something is wrong with the balance of that. The game should have some metagame rules about what powers, feats, class abilities, and items can do mechanically (and at what levels), and it should have metagame rules as to what each power source can do and at what levels it can first do it.I'd like 5E to make a lot more sense than 4E did and feel a lot more like D&D than WOW. Personally.It's not going backwards to control game design and to play to the strengths of D&D.</blockquote>

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