HomeDungeons & DragonsDungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition5e Design Goals, A Question Or Two

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5e Design Goals, A Question Or Two — 3 Comments

  1. I don’t see it. The primary paragraph is this:

    Options in the final category—ones that alter the core in a fundamental way—are best used one at a time or with careful consideration for their interaction. Since they alter the core, they might not work well together. When we design them, we’ll always assume that they are the lone, engine-altering option you’re using. That path allows us to keep our sanity and also makes it more practical to implement such rules. A hit location table is one thing, but making one that also accounts for armor as damage reduction requires far more work.

    They’re not saying “don’t use these rules together” — they’re saying “the warranty is off these rules if you combine them, so do so with care” — not that they’ll never be compatable, but that because testing/designing them so that they interoperate is a 2**n operation (where N is the number of different rules) at best, that it’s going to very much be a “GM Beware” situation where the GM may have to do some game design to make them work together. Hit locations and DR as armor is an excellent example — hit locations will make characters more vulnerable by making small amounts of damage disabling, while DR as armor will mean that characters take more damage in smaller amounts rather than bigger, rarer hits. Since combining them without an extra “how to combine them” module will mean that characters are a lot less vulnerable than the hit location rules intend them to be (as DR as armor will mean that damage will tend to get spread around the locations rather than piled onto fewer locations when a hit is scored), doing so reasonably would require a separate module that contained the combination — a big burden on the design team for an option that few groups would likely use.

    So by putting such potentially broken or just difficult combinations out of the realm of the initial design (I’m sure there will be Dragon articles on this kind of stuff) they limit their burden while comitting to a reasonable amount of content they expect people to use.

    I don’t think (though I may be misreading it) that all the items they listed are “advanced content;” I’d guess that some of them are dials, while others are the more “buyer beware” content that can only be combined at the user’s hazard.

  2. There seems to be something wrong with the comments on your site: every ‘comment’ link leads to the most recent post.

    Anyway this was meant to be a comment on ‘Rabbis and Rules Lawyers’: more generally, I think theology appeals to the same sort of people that RPGs appeal to.

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