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What would 5E be like if the playtest's modularity promise was kept?
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<blockquote data-quote="Shardstone" data-source="post: 8642286" data-attributes="member: 6807784"><p>THe lack of guidance is crucial to the problem at hand.</p><p></p><p>Having been doing game design for a few years freelance and for my own studio, I've learned that 5E can be a robust system if you're willing to not only design the material for it, but in doing a lot of research in trying to deconstruct the system to figure out why things are the way they are. This second bit is something that WotC has, as a business decision, kept closed off to themselves. They have excel sheet programs (confirmed in recent Crawford interview) that they've updated that produce a lot of their monsters numbers, for example, and almost everything about game design, power level, and what not has been kept secret. This gives the illusion that WotC didn't balance the game or didn't balance some material, but you can clearly tell that much of even the magic items has went through a series of behind-the-scenes changes to fit a behind-the-scenes manifesto of 5E design.</p><p></p><p>However, despite what is given in the DMG (most of which is outdated, such as their monster design charts, as Crawford stated himself in that same aforementioned interview), the ultimate mechanics of the game are hidden. Only Mearls and his Happy Fun Hour ever really gave a peak at how WotC sees their game from their perspective. This makes it very hard to make satisfactory 5E content for the general public, because it can be hard to align your published material with the standards and balance of first party. You don't know, and aren't told, that the 7th level fighter subclass feature is almost always a non-combat related ribbon, or that the final barbarian subclass feature is almost always a passive that keys off entering rage or being in a rage. You don't know that rogues have a huge gap between 3 and 9 for their subclass features because of both the power of the core class, and how much identity the narrative core rogue class is meant to take up (as Mearls has talked about many moons ago).</p><p></p><p>These things, if explained to the public, even in part, would allow your standard DM to be able to intuit and modify the game as they want. You know now that the fighter traditionally doesn't gain much power at 7th level from its subclass, so this homebrew option that gives it two extra attacks at that level is either out of tune or took its power budget from some other part of the subclass. You would know the modern methods of calculating CR, damage, saves, and so on as per the Mordenkainen book. But instead, you don't. You have to figure it out. You have to figure out how to not only play the game and how to run the game, but how to edit the game, how to align with WotC on the game, and how to design your game to even be opposed to the WotC standards. After all, its a lot better to change the rules to fit your desired experience if you just know the basic logic behind the game's design. It wouldn't be very hard at all to make a OSR or 4E version of this kind of D&D (beyond putting all that time in) if they just taught you their reasoning behind things.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shardstone, post: 8642286, member: 6807784"] THe lack of guidance is crucial to the problem at hand. Having been doing game design for a few years freelance and for my own studio, I've learned that 5E can be a robust system if you're willing to not only design the material for it, but in doing a lot of research in trying to deconstruct the system to figure out why things are the way they are. This second bit is something that WotC has, as a business decision, kept closed off to themselves. They have excel sheet programs (confirmed in recent Crawford interview) that they've updated that produce a lot of their monsters numbers, for example, and almost everything about game design, power level, and what not has been kept secret. This gives the illusion that WotC didn't balance the game or didn't balance some material, but you can clearly tell that much of even the magic items has went through a series of behind-the-scenes changes to fit a behind-the-scenes manifesto of 5E design. However, despite what is given in the DMG (most of which is outdated, such as their monster design charts, as Crawford stated himself in that same aforementioned interview), the ultimate mechanics of the game are hidden. Only Mearls and his Happy Fun Hour ever really gave a peak at how WotC sees their game from their perspective. This makes it very hard to make satisfactory 5E content for the general public, because it can be hard to align your published material with the standards and balance of first party. You don't know, and aren't told, that the 7th level fighter subclass feature is almost always a non-combat related ribbon, or that the final barbarian subclass feature is almost always a passive that keys off entering rage or being in a rage. You don't know that rogues have a huge gap between 3 and 9 for their subclass features because of both the power of the core class, and how much identity the narrative core rogue class is meant to take up (as Mearls has talked about many moons ago). These things, if explained to the public, even in part, would allow your standard DM to be able to intuit and modify the game as they want. You know now that the fighter traditionally doesn't gain much power at 7th level from its subclass, so this homebrew option that gives it two extra attacks at that level is either out of tune or took its power budget from some other part of the subclass. You would know the modern methods of calculating CR, damage, saves, and so on as per the Mordenkainen book. But instead, you don't. You have to figure it out. You have to figure out how to not only play the game and how to run the game, but how to edit the game, how to align with WotC on the game, and how to design your game to even be opposed to the WotC standards. After all, its a lot better to change the rules to fit your desired experience if you just know the basic logic behind the game's design. It wouldn't be very hard at all to make a OSR or 4E version of this kind of D&D (beyond putting all that time in) if they just taught you their reasoning behind things. [/QUOTE]
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What would 5E be like if the playtest's modularity promise was kept?
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