This guy breaks down just how bad the layout of the new PHB is. The cross referencing is non-existent and the subsections seem to go in the order someone thought of them. I’m sadly unsurprised that they’ve not improved on any of these problems which existed in the original 5e PHB.
Yeah, I knew that all those people praising the new and innovative accessibility design of the books before they were even out were full of shit.
It’s WotC. We have criticized their books for over a decade now and they still don’t give a damn. I remember flipping through one of their adventure modules and being flabbergasted by their incompetence.
It’s not just cross-referencing, either. They actively made OneDnD more complicated to run for a number of classes, yet refused to add more depth to the system. Depth remained the same, it’s just more complicated for first time players. It’s disappointing how little they cared, they just rushed the product in time for the anniversary.
The fact that a basic system like stealth and vision is so spread out is probably a big part of the reason why everyone complains that combat is just a slugfest. Why would you use a skill like stealth in combat when that requires checking like 5 different pages when an attack is a simple d20 and damage dice?
And according to RPGBot, after 10 years they still have no clue on how to make mounted combat work, despite Summon Greater Steed now being part of the Paladin class by default.
Meh…there’s an important distinction here to be made, IMO.
The rushing was done by the stupid-fuck of a CEO they’ve got. Not the D&D team. The team only really cares about the game, and you can just about smell the frustration there.
The CEO constantly starves the D&D team. They don’t have the budget they need to make a good product. They need at least quadruple the number of people they have (after that massive layoff round so the CEO could get his fucking bonus…the sociopathic piece of shit…) and really they need to double it again after that.
They need 3 writing teams that can work on stuff.
Team 1 works on large-scale grand campaign books. This is your campaign setting books, and hard-backed adventures. Everything team 1 works on should be campaign world focused somehow. They are the lore-writers and one of the DM’s best friends. As a rule, every campaign setting gets at least 3 adventures written for them before team 1 moves onto the next campaign setting.
Team 2 focuses on smaller gap-fill content, as well as generic major content. If team 1 were to write the planescape campaign book, this team would write a book that describes the major port city features as the backdrop in team 1’s three adventures, as well as a host of minor adventures to help gap-fill areas and plotlines that the hardbacked adventures either leave up to the DM or just don’t address. Team 2’s release schedule would be far more aggressive than Team 1’s, but their supplements would be far shorter most of the time, and would be almost completely either online only or, at best, Print on Demand. Full-color optional, but still PoD. We’re talking about a turn-around time of 30-90 days per supplement, and a new product released weekly on average.
Team 3 would be the Core Mechanics Team. This is the team that writes your PHBs and DMGs. Teams 1 and 2 can produce their own monster books, but the core MM come from these guys. They will contribute to content produced by Teams 1 and 2 when those teams need to include mechanics in some form. Campaign-specific class, subclass, or spell? Team 3 content. Adventure or campaign-specific subsystem? Team 3 content. Team 3 is the excel-powered, math-heavy nerd-fest of the teams. Nothing gets past them without being modeled, tested, and balanced in addition to playtesting. Nothing gets balanced “by feel”. Only idiots balance “by feel” because only idiots think that’s how anything works (hint…“feelings” are subjective. If you “feel” that something is balanced…you’re probably wrong).
The biggest change I would make here, though, would be to have Team 3 release updates to the PHB, DMG, and MM every 5 years to incorporate new balance, new quality of life improvements, changes made due to player feedback, and the inclusion of new core content (like artificers…fucking WotC…). The idea here is that every 5 years the core books should be refreshed (not at the same time…give like 1.5 years between releases and only do one book at a time) to keep the game up to date with what modern players and DMs think the game should be. This doesn’t even mean re-writing everything. Just parts that can be improved and have had improvements tested and play-tested.
Right now we average a new edition every 10 years. I say that if money is really the focus, dedicate an entire team to the effort and do it every 5 years instead. As long as the releases are consistent, and the goal really is to keep supporting the same edition for the foreseeable future, then more frequent releases with a focus on digital sales and goods wouldn’t be a bad thing. Primarily because it would require a dedicated team to constantly research, develop, write, and release a new core book every 1.5 years.
It’s too bad I’m not CEO of Hasbro or WotC. I actually like D&D as a game…
Respectfully, I disagree. I’ve seen much better 3rd party content from smaller creators who charge less than WotC and offer much better value. As much as I’m sorry for those who were laid off, the problem with the DnD team is not their meagre numbers, but their lack of care for the brand.
The DnD team (which consisted of both writers and playtesters) had ten years of consistent player feedback on 5e, and one and a half year of OneDnD playtest, and only did the bare minimum. You don’t need hundreds of people to write a rules update. Heck, it took me (only me, a single person with no collaborators or playtesters) a week to write a replacement for the 5e fighter, and I recon I did a fairly decent job. There were Monk revisions floating around that were miles better than the abomination that they attempted to push in UA6. Heck, I also wrote my Monk revision during that time, and it took me about two/three days at most. During the playtest, Crawford claimed that the Warlock’s Pact of the Chain was never meant to be as “spicy” as Pact of the Blade or Pact of the Tome, which is bullshit (it was clearly presented as an equal option to the other two); instead of rebalancing Chain and Talisman, they just folded the Pact Boons into the Invocation system and called it a day (again, lazy game design). I did that for my homebrew Warlock in about… half a week of brainstorming?
I could go on, but the point is, I would expect those who are paid to create content for the game and do it for a living to do better than what I can do for free in my spare time.