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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5769750" data-attributes="member: 8461">Based on the tone of their press release, I'm worried that WotC is going to go too far in trying to make a game that appeals to everyone.My concern is that their approach will take the form of designing &quot;meta-rules&quot; - entire systems for various aspects of the game that can be added or subtracted without crippling game-play - and that this will lead not only to divisiveness, but also to the demise of the unified d20 mechanic that characterized the Third and Fourth Editions.To be clear, when I talk about &quot;meta-rules,&quot; I'm thinking of, for example, things like feats and skills in Third Edition. Imagine if you tried to run a 3E game without those; you'd run into problems with prestige classes (prerequisites), magic items (skill boosters), class abilities (bonus feats), racial abilities (skill bonuses), etc. Now, try and design 3E so that feats and skills could be easily removed from the game without causing those problems...that sounds like what 5E wants to do.That worries me because it has built-in fault lines for community fragmentation. Forget about play-styles...if there's no specific set of rules, things will only grow more factionalized among players.The other part of this is that it's easier to design a game where rules sets can be added and subtracted if all of those sets run independently. If nothing else references feats, then it's easier to drop feats. This, however, tends to lead back towards the earlier editions of the game (e.g. 2E and previous) wherein the game was effectively a collection of sub-systems...something that was (not without merit, I think) indicted as poor design when Third Edition came out.If the D&amp;D guys can find a way to pull this off while avoiding those pitfalls, I'll be impressed. But until I see the end result, I'm nervous about what 5E will look like.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 5769750, member: 8461"] Based on the tone of their press release, I'm worried that WotC is going to go too far in trying to make a game that appeals to everyone. My concern is that their approach will take the form of designing "meta-rules" - entire systems for various aspects of the game that can be added or subtracted without crippling game-play - and that this will lead not only to divisiveness, but also to the demise of the unified d20 mechanic that characterized the Third and Fourth Editions. To be clear, when I talk about "meta-rules," I'm thinking of, for example, things like feats and skills in Third Edition. Imagine if you tried to run a 3E game without those; you'd run into problems with prestige classes (prerequisites), magic items (skill boosters), class abilities (bonus feats), racial abilities (skill bonuses), etc. Now, try and design 3E so that feats and skills could be easily removed from the game [i]without[/i] causing those problems...that sounds like what 5E wants to do. That worries me because it has built-in fault lines for community fragmentation. Forget about play-styles...if there's no specific set of rules, things will only grow more factionalized among players. The other part of this is that it's easier to design a game where rules sets can be added and subtracted if all of those sets run independently. If nothing else references feats, then it's easier to drop feats. This, however, tends to lead back towards the earlier editions of the game (e.g. 2E and previous) wherein the game was effectively a collection of sub-systems...something that was (not without merit, I think) indicted as poor design when Third Edition came out. If the D&D guys can find a way to pull this off while avoiding those pitfalls, I'll be impressed. But until I see the end result, I'm nervous about what 5E will look like. [/QUOTE]

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