Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5938641" data-attributes="member: 6669048">Very much so. The most recent of those quotes (I'm going by your word here) was 7 years ago. That means it was 2005 and long before 4th Edition came out. Up until 4th Edition came out, the style of gameplay where players said "I want to try this" and the DM/GM/ST/whatever said whether they could or couldn't was pretty much universal. I tried to think of another RPG system which has as rigid a structure as that but I never could. This was also around the time that MMORPGs and console multiplayer were hitting their peak or really picking up. Game balance became the rallying call for that style of game design, and it bled over a lot into RPG design. It's now seven years later. He's been working on the 4th Edition of D&D since the beginning (or pretty damn close to it). He's been working on the nuts and bolts of that system for a few years now, and in doing so he's seen what happens when you go too far in the other direction. This culminates IMO with the board games. They're so close in tone and feel to 4e without a DM that it really makes you wonder why you'd want one in the first place? Which, of course, rips out any chance of storytelling or exploration.Right now, what WotC seems to be trying to do is streamlining D&D. They're wanting to take a lot of the complex rules out of it for the core game. They want something simple and easy to understand at the base of the game. Then after that is when they're going to start adding back in all the complexities as modules. They're doing this after what seems like about a year of research around the company, playing through every edition of the game as they went. Mearls's change of heart isn't surprising at all.</blockquote>

Verification