rasmuswagner wrote:PhoneLobster wrote:Don't go in from the start actually intending to design "Class Bloat, the RPG".
Well, it's still supposed to be a business, right?
This absolutely. D&D is a game, but it also needs to keep selling books. Not only to slake the bottomless greed of the people who own the license, but also for the health of the community. If you're gonna get new blood into the hobby, D&D needs to get prominent shelf space. And D&D is only going to get prominent shelf space if it keeps selling. And it will only keep selling if there is more new stuff to buy.
You don't have to go as far as 4th edition D&D - where you could
literally fill up 12 pages creating such options as specific as "like a Rogue, but uses a Longbow or an Ax" or "like a Wizard, but spells are "earth themed" and do physical damage and make physical barriers" in a new PHB or you could spend 4 pages in a Monster Manual to describe Orcish warriors using new weapons. And I don't even mean weapons that are new
to the game, but simply weapons that Orc warriors hadn't been depicted as using in the previous Monster Manuals. Orcs can now use double dagger, trident and shield, heavy crossbow and light hammer, heavy flail, broadsword and shield, or falchion:
four fucking pages. That was obscene, and you don't have to go remotely that far.
4e was designed to be so incredibly rigid, specific, and templated that a single person could write 150k word sourcebooks on their own in a month and keep doing it every month for ten years straight with
no fear at all that they would accidentally cover the same ground as one of the other writers. That's ridiculous. And it's also unnecessary. nWoD was in its way the same, although their shovelware creation system was less "finely crafted" than "the natural endpoint of entropy in the creative process." You
do need to keep cranking out material people need/want for the duration of the edition, but that's a finite amount of time and it is desirable that the reader does not immediately twig to the fact that they are being trolled. Restricting Rogues to just three weapons in the PHB so that you could produce "expansion" material that let you play a Rogue that uses a Morningstar is
fucking offensive. But you do not have to go there. You don't have to go anywhere near there.
It is trivially easy to make an edition that is more succinct than 4e. But there's a
lot of space between 4e's "we have been putting out a core book every month for two years straight and you're still on your fucking own if you want Gnolls who fight with swords." and 5e's "it's been two years and we haven't come out with a single real setting book or a single crunch book." The fact that both of these extremes involve D&D languishing on the vine isn't all that weird. But there are a lot of happy mediums in between that could keep an edition chugging along quite happily for the 8 years that pre-Pathfinder 3e variants trundled along for or even the 12 years that Dungeons and Dragons called itself "Advanced" before coming out with a 2nd edition.
It simply isn't difficult to come up with a sweet spot between 4e's mad shovelware engine and 5e's never produce anything and thus never fail by never trying model. Pretty much anything a sane person would even suggest would be between those extremes and also much better than either. You need to leave yourself 10 years of space for reasonable and stable expansion products, but that isn't a tall order. Your AD&D3 default setting should have large chunks of the map outlined but not filled in so you can write in your Maztica, Rokugan, and Al-Qadim style regional setting books. Your AD&D3 monster manual should reference power sources that player characters don't use in the PHB like Psionics, Shadow, and Magic of Blue so that there's clear space to write up new character types in later books without that being a massive retcon. And so on. But again and still, 10 years of 12 major releases a year before you jump ship to a newerest edition and do it all over again is perfectly plottable.
One thing I think is very much missing is a Google Earth for the fantasy world. The AD&D3 default campaign world should have a digital map that adventures and listed events and nouns from sourcebooks get pinned to that players can look at online. It should look like a 21st century global campaign world, and not like Nentir fucking Vale.
-Username17
