One thought on “Mastering Dungeons – Fifth Edition Revisited, Pt. 5 – The Undiscovered One D&D”

1. I see how it’s meant, but I would still somewhat disagree with the word choice when Shawn says picking a class first emphasizes game over story. I’d rather frame it as emphasizing actual story over backstory, because you make the choice with (probably) the biggest impact on what you will be doing at the table, rather than go into the details of who you were before the actual story starts. When you pick a class first, you lock in the majority of the verbs you’re going to focus on to tell your character’s story.

   While I also want to share in a generally optimistic approach and certainly giving designers the benefit of the doubt, especially when evaluating marketing previews like the current UA, as well as not blaming corporate decisions on designers, I’d also like to add the following:

   It’s true that a bunch of mediocre-seeming rules can create great gameplay in interaction. Unfortunately, the opposite case is also very much possible: rules that seem great in isolation can interact in very undesirable ways to produce a poor game experience. It is however much harder for non-game-designers to be able to predict such negative interactions, while it’s easy for them to love rules that seem awesome in isolation. I am a little wary of that dynamic, because combined with the common business sense of giving people what they think they want and the popularity-constest-style survey design I’ve seen so far from WotC, I can see the result being a subpar game that looks and sound great, it’s deep-fried and covered in sugar, but after a while it doesn’t play as well as it could have.

   Anyway, thanks for yet another great episode with interesting thoughts and insights!

   David
   @CinnomanGames

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