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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6101170" data-attributes="member: 6680772">Man, work, time zones, and thread speed are all moving against.  Let me see if I can catch up... @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=82106" target="_blank">AbdulAlhazred</a> - Regarding our earlier discussion about Mearls' comments and his position in 4e development: I wonder if you are not confusing me with someone else.  I most definitely do not believe that 4e fans should just Trust In Mearls because he was part of 4e development (and certainly not because "he was in charge of its initial design", which I hope we can be clear on as being something I've never said).  I mean, I don't think it's crazy to do so -- pretty much most of the design team are 4e guys, the guys in charge of later-period 4e, which I've seen as virtually unanimously seen as an even better version than the one at initial launch.  I mean, it's not like design is being lead by Jonathan Tweet and Frank Mentzer.  But I think people should happily judge 5e by what the design team says, and what's put out in the playtests.  The question of Mearls' influence on 4e design is a somewhat separate subject.  My beef there, as mentioned in previous posts, is not with the factual statement "Mearls wasn't design lead when 4e was in development", but with the ideas that often accompany that statement, e.g., he was just drone/worker bee, he doesn't understand 4e, he never liked 4e.  To be sure, I don't think he understands 4e as run by pemerton, nor do I think bringing that aspect of 4e into 5e design is a priority.  But I also don't believe that pemerton's style is bog-standard 4e, nor in particular the style the designers were aiming for when they designed it.  (I say this in spite of much admiration for pemerton's innovative use of the system, and the articulate way he explains it.)  What Mearls' experience in the early design of 4e, and the lead role he played in later development, says about 5e design is that, at the very least, Mearls knows what the design team was trying to do with 4e, and he understands the underlying conceits.  I'll expand on this below.Regarding whether Mearls' is Born Again Old School or has always been Old School, I'm afraid we might have to agree to disagree.  In my "Devil's Advocate" post I made clear that I wasn't talking merely his 4e design and development history, but also many personal comments he made even before and after he went to work for WotC.  The B2 review.  The coining of "Mother-May-I".  Recall that we had a thread here a while back titled "Would the real Mike Mearls please stand up?" that specifically dealt with this seeming disparity between what he used to advocate for, and what he's been advocating for with 5e. @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=42582" target="_blank">pemerton</a> and @El_Mahdi: I would characterize Mearls' severed limb comment as stupid, and I did characterize it as weird.  And in fact the weirdness of it is indeed what led me to put forth my Devil's Advocate theory (keeping in mind, it could still be bunnies).  In addition to personal comments he's made before, it makes no sense in the context of his role in 4e design and development (not that I'm saying he was in charge of initial design!)  Basically, what I mean there is that he knows that 4e was specifically and mechanically designed so that hp were not meat.  He'd said as much on previous podcasts and other venues.  He knows that the conception of the Warlord was not about shouting limbs back on or wounds closed, but in encouraging allies to rally on.  (Not because he was in charge of design, but because he was part of the design process from the beginning.)  And then, "shouting limbs back on" is such a trite piece of edition war rhetoric, I'm sure he's heard it hundreds of times.  It beggars belief that this would be a kind of example Mearls would come up with on his own, completely unaware of its implications, unless he'd been living under a rock since 2008.  With this in mind, and also considering that his job, and in particular his current project, requires that he consider the markets not currently reached by 4e, it occurred to me that this may have been an example of him acting in a role of Devil's Advocate, rather than professing his own beliefs.  It starts to seem especially feasible when considering the section El_Mahdi quoted earlier, about "putting [Thompson & Crawford] on the spot" being his job.I think how that relates to what D'Karr and I were talking about is whether taking that roll in a public setting is wise or not.  I think D'Karr is suggesting that the team should not make any ambiguous statements that might be construed as denigrating any edition, its fans, or playstyle.  I don't necessarily disagree with that approach, but I would have said there might be some benefit in credibility for showing the give and take the design team goes through, showing to people not currently served by 4e that they have a voice on the design team, and clearly demonstrating that the issue of the Warlord is not something the design team has decided in any particular way, but something they are continually struggling with.  That said, I'm coming around to D'Karr's position on this because, strictly from a PR standpoint, it seems people are only focusing on what Mearls said and how he said it, while pretty much forgetting anything Thompson said, and the uncertainty and this-is-oh-so-not-set-in-stone message of the conversation.Permerton and @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=6696971" target="_blank">Manbearcat</a>: This might be better addressed in a different thread, but it's tough tracking them all.  I believe I have seen you both express that it seems difficult to set-up encounter-based mechanics in 5e, with the word "shoehorn" being used once.  I'm not sure I see it that way.  First, perhaps you would agree that the Encounter was set out as a separate resolution space in older editions of D&D ("Encounters" indeed being a whole separate section in B/X), with time passing at a different rate in Encounters vs. the standard game.  So a game that set out to emulate that style could be easily transitioned into a more scene-framing mode, IMO.  But more to the point of 5e, the Encounter pacing mechanism was facilitated in 4e with the mechanically-hard-coded short rest.  Rest for this long and you can spend surges, you get Encounter powers back, AP recovery/acquisition is effected in such-and-such a way.  That same short rest is mechanically-hard-coded into the 5e rules, as well, governing the use of Hit Dice, and some of the Warlock's powers when it was introduced.  At the moment, there's nothing (aside from Hit Dice) filling that space, but since it's there, it seems relatively easy to me to delineate use of certain class features in that space, so that you have your at-will, encounter, and daily resource economy.  Say, for example, that a fighter can add another Expertise Dice once between short rests, and add two ED once between long rests.  Prepared spells might be able to be cast once between long rests, but lower powered versions once between short rests.  And so on.</blockquote>

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