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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 7924658" data-attributes="member: 6687260">Times change.In the 80s and 90s it was considered pretty much essential for good systems to model reality and to have clear skill systems - it was rare to criticise a game because it's skill system was too long or too granular.  This was pretty much state of the art.  Ad&d was mocked for things like the fact that hit points meant that fighters could survive 100ft falls.  This was regarded by many as self-evidently absurd.In the early 2000s people hacked 3E to give more tactical options and make it more complex (Have a gander at Iron Heroes sometime - looking at it now - it seems like a clear mess - at the time it was widely praised and excited a lot of people).  Many people argued (and some continue to this day) that 3.5 had no caster imbalance.  People thought that things like rolling to confirm criticals were worth the trouble - because realism.  D20 Conan had at least two extra forms of defence and thought that the ability to carry a knife in your teeth was actually a reasonable class feature to give a barbarian.In the early days of 4E many of the less realistic elements of 4E were widely mocked and ridiculed and many people clearly couldn't get their head around how a game could function with so little attention to realism.  Many similar elements either made it across to 5E or were re-introduced with Xanathar's Guide to little uproar.Call it progress, or merely fashion (it's very much arguable) but trends in regard to what is desirable (as regarded by the majority) in rpgs change.  Some of the design elements that seem perfectly reasonable in 5E may well come to seem old fashioned in another 10 or 15 years.  Sooner or later D&D has to change or it will wither away like 2E was doing in the late 90s as other more 'modern' games start taking bigger slices of the pie.At this point it's hard to see what 6E will look like because there isn't a clear identifiable lack amongt the community, nor has there been a noticeable movement of a large proportion of players towards some other hot new game.  If you could have said one thing clearly prior to the release of 3E it would have been that some kind of skill system would definitely be introduced.  If you could have said one thing prior to 4e it would have been that caster imbalance would be addressed.</blockquote>

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