I do too. It's just that I'm worried they'll somehow won't let the overall craziness of a Battle Master taking options alongside with this Background/feats to be the ultimate Combat Maneuver master like it's supposed to be.
I really like this change. I was a bit disappointed that feats were optional to begin with and tying a bonus feat or two to backgrounds is a great way to give those backgrounds greater meaning and influence in the game.
Most of the optional DMG rules that people are calling modules are just optional rules that we saw in 3e as well. I think it's more modular than 3e was, but significantly less so than they were aiming for in the Cook's quote. I also think that achieving what Cook wanted was probably a pipe dream. They could have gone further, though, and that's what I'm most disappointed with.
Well, on that front, they tend to overpower UA options and pate back in internal playtesting as needed. On the other hand, they are not worried about Level 20 characters being awesome.
I actually hate Feats, and would have preferred no Feats in the PHB at all. However, this Background schene is fantastic, and might bring together people from across that spectrum.
What I'm saying is, they made the modular structure they intended to. What changed is that after Cook wrote that article they teally began the surveying process that discovered how people were playing and wanted to play, and that is what changed their goalposts for what constituted the big tent.
Do you have statements from them to that effect? I think it could just as easily been that it was too much trouble to go through, rather than catering to the playtesters.
Back when they were actively talking about survey results, in the Wild west days, they said that their standard for putting stuff I'm the core rules was 90% approval from the playtesters. The only sources I could find on a quick search were the Sage Advice interviews from a few years back where Crawford talked about lowering thst standard to 70% so they could get any options published for Xanathar's Guide, but the 90% threshold was what they did for the D&D Next playtest. So, any option that wasn't in the 90th percentile was outside of the big tent.
I took that to mean specific options, like Module X, Y or Z, not an over concept like classes, races or modules.
Yeah, I remember it being said at one point that you’d be able to have each player playing a character built like it was from a different edition, and even at the time that sounded like a pretty absurd claim. But, I gave WotC the benefit of the doubt that they were trying to build an edition that would be highly customizable, and I don’t think that ever really came to fruition.
When they were doing the Next playtests and surveys, they covered the most universal concepts of the game, and hyperspecifix elements like the lore of given Monsters. It was pretty comprehensive, UT I think theybmade the business decision that certain playstyles didn't make sense to support, even if the rules allowed it. Hence no Warlord or Psion after 8 years of publications....
I thought it was 80%, but it was a long time ago and memory is unreliable.
Nope, 90%. Though they did fail in the end, notably with the Ranger. But it does seem that certain playstyles they just decided to ignore at some point, and I think that was a business numbers decision (cruel and calculating as that can be), not a design decision. 5E can do a Warlord, they have chosen not to.
They never even tried with the warlord, they just lumped it in with Illusionist and Assassin as concepts that could be expressed as a subclass despite no one who actually wants a warlord agreeing that would be satisfying. And then they gave the Battlemaster a single warlord-ish maneuver and the valor bard Extra Attack and called it done.
I was going to say that I'm a bit saddened to see nobody tackled the comparison with OSE's approach that I mentioned in the OP (my fault for writing a small novel, I suppose!). I might have missed the mark in how I presented the genre rules I suggested (the Basic/Advanced genre rules in OSE play much better with each other compared to my ideas), but I think there is a clear distinction between what OSE did ("Here is an entire ruleset that adds several different rules together on top of the simple engine to make it support AD&D-style games") and the kind of modularity people say 5E already has ("Here are a list of variant rules buried in the DMG, we won't bother telling how you could build a holistic genre by combining which ones with which, you figure that out yourself!")
I am very cybical about what motivates WotC to do anything (money, specifically), and I believe they would have done more of there was the market for it.
I guess I see most if not all combat misses" as in fact being outright misses - you either didn't connect with the foe at all or your connection was of so little impact that the foe could - and did - ignore it completely.
Rolling a 2 and being done is, to me, just part of the game.
They didn't go with 90% even then. There's no way that 90% wanted the inclusion of alignment. There's no way 90% wanted bounded accuracy. There's no way 90% wanted a multiple classes that made it in. There's no way that 90% wanted spells not to scale with level. I doubt very many things at all got a full 90%. That's not how humanity works.
I am similarly cynical about their motivations, but I don’t think the issue with the Warlord was a lack of market for one. It’s just that the presence of a warlord was perceived as more likely to be a deal-breaker for the folks who didn’t want one than its absence would be for those who did.
