Thread by @mikemearls

It’s a big topic that I will now try to unpack in a series of Tweets. t.co/1TRQh19OTk

3.5 and 4 were very much driven by an anxiety about controlling the experience of the game, leaving as little as possible to chance. They aimed for consistency of play from campaign to campaign, and table to table.

The fear was that an obnoxious player or DM would ruin the game, and that would drive people away from it. The thinking was that if we made things as procedural as possible, people would just follow the rules and have fun regardless of who they played with.

The downside to this approach is that the rules became comprehensive to a fault. The game’s rules bloated, as they sought to resolve many if not all questions that arise in play with the game text.

At the same time, 3.5 and 4 were driven by the idea that D&D players wanted as many character options as possible, presented in a modular framework meant to encourage the search for combinations that yielded characters who broke the power curve.

These two aims play together in an extremely terrible way, at least from a design perspective. Your core system has to cover everything... meanwhile you are adding more cases and content to your game. Good luck with keeping those things in balance!

IMO, the basic design premise suffers from a fatal flaw. It misses out on a ton of the elements that make RPGs distinct and doesn’t speak to why people enjoy D&D in the first place.

With 5th, we assumed that the DM was there to have a good time, put on an engaging performance, and keep the group interested, excited, and happy. It’s a huge change, because we no longer expect you to turn to the book for an answer. We expect the DM to do that.

In terms of players, we focus much more on narrative and identity, rather than specific, mechanical advantages. Who you are is more important than what you do, to the point that your who determines your what.

In broad terms - and based on what we can observe of the community from a variety of measures - we went from a community that focused on mechanics and expertise, to one focused on socializing and story telling.

Mechanical expertise is an element of the game, but no longer the sole focus. Ideally, it’s a balanced part of all the other motivators. If balanaced correctly, every has their fun. Enjoyment isn’t zero sum.

As D&D is descriptive rather than prescriptive, individual groups had different experiences. However, that was the design trend and what we saw in the community as a whole. It’s been interesting to see things change with the change in rules and the flood of new players.