In this thread at least, honestly think it's just a terminology thing. Having never played any of the older editions, my own brain thinks of "5.5e" as just exactly that sort of rules-overlay Advanced Patch for the players who're sick of starving to death with the subpar, barebones systems in this game. Other people see "5.5e" and go "NO THEY'RE GONNA REWRITE THE BOOKS AND INVALIDATE MY PURCHASES I DON'T WANT RULES GKHKLEKLWKJERKH!!1!"
I remember, thirdhand and distant, that 3.5e was in hindsight celebrated as a fantastic move in the overall history of D&D. People who were there hated the hell out of it because books are expensive. So maybe that's my bad. Still. The sheer ferocity, the churning hatred, wrapped up in people's resistance to any sort of growth or advancement for this game is confusing and depressing both...
It was how it was handled and how soon after 3.0. It felt more like heavy errata and corrections than any actual new version, with us as players having to pick up the tab. If a restaurant botches your order, do you celebrate and happily pay double simply because they got it right the second time?
That's an apples to oranges comparison. You can't draw parallels like that between product and service industries.
If you bought a new car and it broke down constantly, would you cheer when the manufacturer redesigned the model and then sold you a new one at full price, taking no responsibility for the lemon they sold you first?
You could have kept fixing the previous car rather than getting the latest version. When the next model comes out, you could just not switch and save your money and not have to relearn all the features.
In this thread at least, honestly think it's just a terminology thing. Having never played any of the older editions, my own brain thinks of "5.5e" as just exactly that sort of rules-overlay Advanced Patch for the players who're sick of starving to death with the subpar, barebones systems in this game. Other people see "5.5e" and go "NO THEY'RE GONNA REWRITE THE BOOKS AND INVALIDATE MY PURCHASES I DON'T WANT RULES GKHKLEKLWKJERKH!!1!"
I remember, thirdhand and distant, that 3.5e was in hindsight celebrated as a fantastic move in the overall history of D&D. People who were there hated the hell out of it because books are expensive. So maybe that's my bad. Still. The sheer ferocity, the churning hatred, wrapped up in people's resistance to any sort of growth or advancement for this game is confusing and depressing both...
It was how it was handled and how soon after 3.0. It felt more like heavy errata and corrections than any actual new version, with us as players having to pick up the tab. If a restaurant botches your order, do you celebrate and happily pay double simply because they got it right the second time?
That's an apples to oranges comparison. You can't draw parallels like that between product and service industries.
If you bought a new car and it broke down constantly, would you cheer when the manufacturer redesigned the model and then sold you a new one at full price, taking no responsibility for the lemon they sold you first?
So your argument, then, bringing it back to the actual topic of the thread, is that if WotC publishes any sort of rules enhancement, they should be, what, refunding everyone who ever purchased any book that has rules conflicting with the new enhancement?
As far as I can tell, one of the most requested systemic overhauls would be a concrete set of crafting rules. Both of the versions that exist are extremely weak, and have nonsensical time constraints placed upon them. This in turn forces any party willing to undertake or participate in crafting to spend in-game *years* in some cases to make a single item. Which is honestly ludicrous. And the only way to spice that up is to shoehorn in an adversarial NPC to sabotage the crafting efforts.
This can be done without advancing to 6e. Frankly, it can also be done without advancing to 5.5e. Simply release a new rule-centric book, in the vein of Xanthar's, that puts together a detailed system. Because Xanthar's didn't actually do that, despite having a section on Crafting. It puts 100% of the legwork on the DM for how to handle the entire procedure. There's no premade table of what sort of creatures might produce a given sort of resource, like a list of monsters of varying CRs that produce a material related to Cold Damage, for example. And it gives no explanation whatsoever on how a player might obtain a recipe for a magic item. It simply states that such recipes exist. And it certainly doesn't give an example of a recipe for creating an official item, let alone guidelines or a formula or anything else for you to extrapolate from.
This is the kind of thing people are looking for when they say they want "5.5e".
As far as I can tell, one of the most requested systemic overhauls would be a concrete set of crafting rules. Both of the versions that exist are extremely weak, and have nonsensical time constraints placed upon them. This in turn forces any party willing to undertake or participate in crafting to spend in-game *years* in some cases to make a single item. Which is honestly ludicrous. And the only way to spice that up is to shoehorn in an adversarial NPC to sabotage the crafting efforts.
The general philosophy behind magic item creation in 5e is "PCs are supposed to be going out adventuring, not sitting around crafting magic items". A year to craft a Legendary magic item isn't particularly unreasonable, a single archmage could craft dozens over his lifetime.
Magic items are supposed to be exceptionally difficult to craft. They're supposed to be exceptionally difficult to buy, and also exceptionally difficult to sell. For some games, all of that's great. For others it's infuriating, and amounts to "you basically don't have any magical gear. All that cool awesome stuff in the books? Forget about it - there's absolutely no way ever in the entirety of the game you'll see any of it". Especially when a class exists (the artificer) that has crafting explicitly built into its class features and even before that, the game had a double dozen tool proficiencies it expects the players to never ever use even once despite many backgrounds and a few species and class features forcibly providing proficiency in those tools. Hell, 'Clan Crafter' is a background choice one can select, alongside things like Guild Artisan.
Wizards cannot have it both ways. It cannot provide a plethora of options for being a Crafty Boi whose job is making stuff, and whose goal for adventuring may well be to collect the materials necessary for an Epic Crafting, and then tell players that crafting is Having Fun Wrong and they should stop doing it and be adventurers already. Nor should it be incumbent upon the DM to do the entirety of the work in deciding what is a fair shake for crafting. I've been there; every single player who's taken a turn at campaign DMing at our table has been in the same shitty position of having players keen to make Cool Things, only to not really have any clue what a fair resolution of that desire is.
Xanathar's crafting rules are basically a placeholder. "Make players find the Secret Ingredient with an ADVENTURE, then charge them [X] weeks and [y] billion gold pieces for their thing whilst making sure to roll at least twenty times for an item-ruining Complication so the players learn that making their own items is FORBIDDEN."
You just can't say that to people when video games have been nailing this for years. Yeah, video games don't generally have to deal with players homebrewing entirely new things to make out of thin air, but y'know what? A set of robust rules that gives DMs a GUIDELINE AND FRAMEWORK(!!!) for figuring this shit out would let us handle those cases, too!
BLEGH.
Anyways. Before this turns into nothing but a complaint about crafting, it's worth noting that in virtually any case save a thread where people ask for new rules, people complain about 5e's rules. Crafting is one of the biggest bugbears, but it's hardly the only one. DDB is already well behind the curve in getting us the tools we need to dispense with these rules when we need to, especially because they can't be assed to do that work when Wizards releases a brand new Forgotten Realms Exclusive ADVENTURE every thirteen minutes; an Official Book of advanced options that would serve the purpose of lighting a fire under their asses would be great.
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I would not hold my breath on either of those either.
Between some of the work done by AngryDM ( for the Monsters ), and riffing off some of the work by Kinematics( for spells, see here ), I can kind of kludge together systems that work well enough for now.
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So what would a formal system look like? Each item have an official set of ingredients needed? Would they have to be researched (which is the current default) or be simply 'known' to all casters? And wouldn't the parts still need to be found regardless? Or do you imagine a system where everyone can just buy any item they please, no questions asked as to how or why it is available?
Adventures are much easier to design and balance than any such system would be.
What do you mean by "which is the current default"? There is no system anywhere in any of the books I have access to that even touches the subject of what an item recipe could look like. Xanthar's mentions that such recipes exist. That's it. That's the sum total of all knowledge regarding magic item recipes that is printed. Are you suggesting that this is the "default"? Because that's neither a guide, nor a framework, nor an example. It's an instruction to the DM that if this is something they want in their game, they have to pull the entire thing out of their ass for their players to use it *at all*. Which is ridiculous.
What would that system look like, you ask? Well, it would start with a few examples of very common, very popular Magic Items, like Bracers of Defense. The section would explain how there isn't a single recipe that will craft a given item, but that certain ingredients need to be of a similar nature to produce the desired effect in the item. There should then be a series of tables for the more common kinds of item effects, to be used as examples for more complex or more powerful effects, with examples of monsters at various CRs relative to those power levels. So if you wanted an item that provides, say, Resistance to non-magical Pierce, Slash, and Bludge, you'd need to obtain a material from a monster such as (example) of a CR of (example) or higher. The next section could go on to talk about how many properties is appropriate for a given item, and the concept that a single item holding more properties would require stronger ingredients to bind together in the creation process. Items that allow the casting of spells, in particular, should require significantly more potent materials to make them stick.
There should also be a section helping player characters develop their own recipes. It's inevitable that the pre-generated list of items will be missing some piece of equipment that a player will say "wow I really wish I had an item that lets me do X". So expand the basic framework used in the beginning examples to form something akin to a formula for creating new recipes.
I'd also argue that the time spent in the crafting process should not consist of the mage bent over the forge of the local blacksmith whispering mumbo-jumbo into whatever item is being created, either. The act of creating the item should be rather short lived and very straightforward. The majority of the crafting process should be questing for the materials, which can get very complicated depending on what exactly you need for a given effect. The item itself is the reward for this self imposed quest.
But I'd kill for a well thought out, play tested, and robust spell creation system, or a monster creation system.
That almost certainly means a point-based system of some sort, with the usual problems of such systems -- they tend to have edge cases that are inordinately cheap or expensive, they likely don't match up with pre-existing things in the game, they don't do any enforcement of game flavor, and they're usually math intensive -- but systems like that have existed for years, mostly for superhero games (see Champions, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Mutants and Masterminds, probably others). Such a system also works for magic items, with the same caveats.
As far as spell/power design in video games, there are basically three versions: 'nobody uses the official versions because design your own is so much better', 'nobody uses the design system because it's terrible', and 'some of a, some of b, depending on the type of effect you're interested in'.
But I'd kill for a well thought out, play tested, and robust spell creation system, or a monster creation system.
That almost certainly means a point-based system of some sort, with the usual problems of such systems -- they tend to have edge cases that are inordinately cheap or expensive, they likely don't match up with pre-existing things in the game, they don't do any enforcement of game flavor, and they're usually math intensive -- but systems like that have existed for years, mostly for superhero games (see Champions, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Mutants and Masterminds, probably others). Such a system also works for magic items, with the same caveats.
As far as spell/power design in video games, there are basically three versions: 'nobody uses the official versions because design your own is so much better', 'nobody uses the design system because it's terrible', and 'some of a, some of b, depending on the type of effect you're interested in'.
I agree such systems don't line up with pre-existing things in the game - nor can they. That's because the things in the game - especially the PHB spell list - are such a god-awful kludged together system of tradition ( e.g. Players would flip if we made them wait to use Fireball until they could cast 5th level spells, even though by any rational system I've seen it would be ) and convention built up over 40 years, that I don't think a logical, consistent, system of spell creation could replicate that mess. I'd be all for ripping out the vanilla list, and rebuilding them under some sort of rational system. The names might look the same, but the actual mechanics and levels would shift all over the map. I'd go for 'nobody uses the official version because it's not an option'.
Again, that's just me.
The problem with that is that kicks over the concept of class balance, since you're now changing how casters work.
I don't have any final answers - just a lot of ongoing questions and design sketches.
As for "enforcement of game flavor" - I don't think there's a lack of flavor enforcement under a rational spell or monster creation system, it's just that it's a different flavor. Those "edge cases that are inordinately cheap or expensive" are just the new character of magic under such a system. There are magical abilities in vanilla D&D which are expensive, or cheap - and that's just the flavor of this particular system.
It might be argued that the rules light, or rules nebulous nature of 5e is an attempt to try and get away from any particular flavor. If you make the system more rigorous, and more crunchy, you make it more consistent & flexible within it's own design ethos, but you reduce its adaptability to other "flavors". Again - that's highly subjective as to whether that's good or bad.
Is it better to do one particular hyper-focused game extremely well, or keep your options open to all things? I don't see GURPS taking the world by storm.
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I agree such systems don't line up with pre-existing things in the game - nor can they. That's because the things in the game - especially the PHB spell list - are such a god-awful kludged together system of tradition ( e.g. Players would flip if we made them wait to use Fireball until they could cast 5th level spells, even though by any rational system I've seen it would be ) and convention built up over 40 years, that I don't think a logical, consistent, system of spell creation could replicate that mess. I'd be all for ripping out the vanilla list, and rebuilding them under some sort of rational system. The names might look the same, but the actual mechanics and levels would shift all over the map. I'd go for 'nobody uses the official version because it's not an option'.
You can do that already, just convert to a different game system (all of the point systems I mentioned earlier are perfectly capable of running dungeon crawls). People do it occasionally, but, well, players are actually pretty attached to the existing system, quirks and all. Witness the fate of 4th edition; while it had its share of structural flaws, its big failure was being too far away from people''s concept of 'real D&D'.
Spell creation and monster creation are the same problem as the crafting system, just in different lanes. Somebody trying to create a brand new spell that's more than just a minor rework of an existing spell has to eyeball the spell's level through sheer gut instinct, which is frickin' hard for spells that don't deal damage. You can't even know if you've gotten it right because half the existing, canonical spells are wildly out of place. Mordenkainen's Sword has absolutely no business whatsoever being a seventh-level spell, and of course Fireball is a well known example of the devs deliberately overtuning a spell for jollies. It's perfectly fine for them, but Gods Help You if you don't get that balance point exactly right.
The monster creation rules in the DMG are equally sparse and ****y. We all know critters are more or less dangerous than their HP and expected damage entails, but there's absolutely no guidance whatsoever on what that means. A creature that has scant few HP and objectively terrible attacks, but which can easily charm, confuse, or otherwise screw with the PCs would yield a CR drastically below its actual threat level. To say nothing of critters with unusual mobility or exceptional range - a flying critter with a longbow could theoretically assail a grounded party with total impunity if no one on the ground had longbows themselves or a means to pursue the thing. A flock of such critters would be a horrific threat to low-level parties even if they only had fifteen-odd HP and a basic 1d8+2 critter attack, no matter what their sub-one by-the-book CR says.
These are things Wizards is just expecting us top figure out through trial and error because they can't be assed to offer any guidance. Everybody likes to badmouth GURPS because oh-noes-so-much-maths, but man - that game tells you exactly how to handle most of this shit and only if the players are extremely experienced and knowledgeable will you run into the infamous Game Ruining Edge Cases - and at that point, hopefully you're a GM who knows how to shut that shit down ahead of time.
These are things Wizards is just expecting us top figure out through trial and error because they can't be assed to offer any guidance.
This is questionable to me - not because I disagree with the sentiment behind it, but because it assumes that there is guidance to be had. Wizards might not be able to grant any guidance, because there isn't any rational system behind the construction or development of 5e. It could be just 40 years of "sheer gut instinct" and " trial and error". It hasn't been designed, so much as evolved in place - with obvious false starts and evolutionary dead ends.
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That seems to assume that no system is possible. Or rather that it's so generalized a problem, and so dependent on the individual game setting, that specific mechanics aren't possible.
I'm not sure that's accurate either. One could - theoretically - make meta-rules. E.g. - For an item of rarity X you gather Y items of Z rarity, P items of .... ( just to come up with a kuldgy example of a meta-rule ).
What components fit in each rarity category is up to the GM, as well as fitting the components thematically to the item.
Likewise, meta-rules for spell creation, or monster creation could be a generalized framework: you pull these levers, you get these results, you figure out the results that you want.
I believe that mechanics for these sorts of things are possible - I'm just not convinced that WoTC used such a system to create 5e, or has them in their possession.
I also think that "Level Up" might be a long time coming, as these problems aren't easy ones - especially well balanced, debugged, play-tested solutions for them.
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That doesn't actually let them off the hook. If they are designing by sheer gastrointestinal navigation, that's an absolute failure of design and it should be corrected. Game developers who're making literal billions off their product do not get to not know what they're doing. Like it or not (spoilers: not), D&D is the gold standard to which all other games are held up. If they're just slap-assing it with "ehhh, this seems 'bout right", that is horrible and immensely dismaying.
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That doesn't actually let them off the hook. If they are designing by sheer gastrointestinal navigation, that's an absolute failure of design and it should be corrected. Game developers who're making literal billions off their product do not get to not know what they're doing. Like it or not (spoilers: not), D&D is the gold standard to which all other games are held up. If they're just slap-assing it with "ehhh, this seems 'bout right", that is horrible and immensely dismaying.
If it's true that they are "designing by sheer gastrointestinal navigation" ( I love that phrase, btw ) - and I don't know they are, I'm just being cynical - I don't like it much either. I'd much rather see an elegant, multi-level, design framework.
But if I can turn the cynicism up to 11: the purpose of WoTC is not to create stunningly elegant game design. The purpose of WoTC is 'making literal billions off their product'. If they can just 'slap-ass it with "ehhh, this seems 'bout right"' and still make their billions, because people are willing to buy product with that level of design background .... well, it makes the shareholders happy, and enough of the gaming community seems to accept that, that they're able to make those billions.
The other option is that such balanced RPG creation frameworks exist already, and that WoTC is unwilling to let them into the public domain. Which also seems like a plausible theory, since you don't release the secrets to making your product to your competitors.
The only way to judge the plausibility of which scenario it is, is to look at the final product. Does D&D 5e look like it is the product of a well-built game development meta-framework, or not?
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You could have kept fixing the previous car rather than getting the latest version. When the next model comes out, you could just not switch and save your money and not have to relearn all the features.
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So your argument, then, bringing it back to the actual topic of the thread, is that if WotC publishes any sort of rules enhancement, they should be, what, refunding everyone who ever purchased any book that has rules conflicting with the new enhancement?
As far as I can tell, one of the most requested systemic overhauls would be a concrete set of crafting rules. Both of the versions that exist are extremely weak, and have nonsensical time constraints placed upon them. This in turn forces any party willing to undertake or participate in crafting to spend in-game *years* in some cases to make a single item. Which is honestly ludicrous. And the only way to spice that up is to shoehorn in an adversarial NPC to sabotage the crafting efforts.
This can be done without advancing to 6e. Frankly, it can also be done without advancing to 5.5e. Simply release a new rule-centric book, in the vein of Xanthar's, that puts together a detailed system. Because Xanthar's didn't actually do that, despite having a section on Crafting. It puts 100% of the legwork on the DM for how to handle the entire procedure. There's no premade table of what sort of creatures might produce a given sort of resource, like a list of monsters of varying CRs that produce a material related to Cold Damage, for example. And it gives no explanation whatsoever on how a player might obtain a recipe for a magic item. It simply states that such recipes exist. And it certainly doesn't give an example of a recipe for creating an official item, let alone guidelines or a formula or anything else for you to extrapolate from.
This is the kind of thing people are looking for when they say they want "5.5e".
The general philosophy behind magic item creation in 5e is "PCs are supposed to be going out adventuring, not sitting around crafting magic items". A year to craft a Legendary magic item isn't particularly unreasonable, a single archmage could craft dozens over his lifetime.
Magic items are supposed to be exceptionally difficult to craft. They're supposed to be exceptionally difficult to buy, and also exceptionally difficult to sell. For some games, all of that's great. For others it's infuriating, and amounts to "you basically don't have any magical gear. All that cool awesome stuff in the books? Forget about it - there's absolutely no way ever in the entirety of the game you'll see any of it". Especially when a class exists (the artificer) that has crafting explicitly built into its class features and even before that, the game had a double dozen tool proficiencies it expects the players to never ever use even once despite many backgrounds and a few species and class features forcibly providing proficiency in those tools. Hell, 'Clan Crafter' is a background choice one can select, alongside things like Guild Artisan.
Wizards cannot have it both ways. It cannot provide a plethora of options for being a Crafty Boi whose job is making stuff, and whose goal for adventuring may well be to collect the materials necessary for an Epic Crafting, and then tell players that crafting is Having Fun Wrong and they should stop doing it and be adventurers already. Nor should it be incumbent upon the DM to do the entirety of the work in deciding what is a fair shake for crafting. I've been there; every single player who's taken a turn at campaign DMing at our table has been in the same shitty position of having players keen to make Cool Things, only to not really have any clue what a fair resolution of that desire is.
Xanathar's crafting rules are basically a placeholder. "Make players find the Secret Ingredient with an ADVENTURE, then charge them [X] weeks and [y] billion gold pieces for their thing whilst making sure to roll at least twenty times for an item-ruining Complication so the players learn that making their own items is FORBIDDEN."
You just can't say that to people when video games have been nailing this for years. Yeah, video games don't generally have to deal with players homebrewing entirely new things to make out of thin air, but y'know what? A set of robust rules that gives DMs a GUIDELINE AND FRAMEWORK(!!!) for figuring this shit out would let us handle those cases, too!
BLEGH.
Anyways. Before this turns into nothing but a complaint about crafting, it's worth noting that in virtually any case save a thread where people ask for new rules, people complain about 5e's rules. Crafting is one of the biggest bugbears, but it's hardly the only one. DDB is already well behind the curve in getting us the tools we need to dispense with these rules when we need to, especially because they can't be assed to do that work when Wizards releases a brand new Forgotten Realms Exclusive ADVENTURE every thirteen minutes; an Official Book of advanced options that would serve the purpose of lighting a fire under their asses would be great.
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Crafting has never been a big thing in my games.
But I'd kill for a well thought out, play tested, and robust spell creation system, or a monster creation system.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I would not hold my breath on either of those either.
Between some of the work done by AngryDM ( for the Monsters ), and riffing off some of the work by Kinematics ( for spells, see here ), I can kind of kludge together systems that work well enough for now.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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What do you mean by "which is the current default"? There is no system anywhere in any of the books I have access to that even touches the subject of what an item recipe could look like. Xanthar's mentions that such recipes exist. That's it. That's the sum total of all knowledge regarding magic item recipes that is printed. Are you suggesting that this is the "default"? Because that's neither a guide, nor a framework, nor an example. It's an instruction to the DM that if this is something they want in their game, they have to pull the entire thing out of their ass for their players to use it *at all*. Which is ridiculous.
What would that system look like, you ask? Well, it would start with a few examples of very common, very popular Magic Items, like Bracers of Defense. The section would explain how there isn't a single recipe that will craft a given item, but that certain ingredients need to be of a similar nature to produce the desired effect in the item. There should then be a series of tables for the more common kinds of item effects, to be used as examples for more complex or more powerful effects, with examples of monsters at various CRs relative to those power levels. So if you wanted an item that provides, say, Resistance to non-magical Pierce, Slash, and Bludge, you'd need to obtain a material from a monster such as (example) of a CR of (example) or higher. The next section could go on to talk about how many properties is appropriate for a given item, and the concept that a single item holding more properties would require stronger ingredients to bind together in the creation process. Items that allow the casting of spells, in particular, should require significantly more potent materials to make them stick.
There should also be a section helping player characters develop their own recipes. It's inevitable that the pre-generated list of items will be missing some piece of equipment that a player will say "wow I really wish I had an item that lets me do X". So expand the basic framework used in the beginning examples to form something akin to a formula for creating new recipes.
I'd also argue that the time spent in the crafting process should not consist of the mage bent over the forge of the local blacksmith whispering mumbo-jumbo into whatever item is being created, either. The act of creating the item should be rather short lived and very straightforward. The majority of the crafting process should be questing for the materials, which can get very complicated depending on what exactly you need for a given effect. The item itself is the reward for this self imposed quest.
I believe when they wrote “which is currently the default” they meant having to learn recipes as opposed to Spellcasters simply knowing them.
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That almost certainly means a point-based system of some sort, with the usual problems of such systems -- they tend to have edge cases that are inordinately cheap or expensive, they likely don't match up with pre-existing things in the game, they don't do any enforcement of game flavor, and they're usually math intensive -- but systems like that have existed for years, mostly for superhero games (see Champions, GURPS, Tri-Stat, Mutants and Masterminds, probably others). Such a system also works for magic items, with the same caveats.
As far as spell/power design in video games, there are basically three versions: 'nobody uses the official versions because design your own is so much better', 'nobody uses the design system because it's terrible', and 'some of a, some of b, depending on the type of effect you're interested in'.
I agree such systems don't line up with pre-existing things in the game - nor can they. That's because the things in the game - especially the PHB spell list - are such a god-awful kludged together system of tradition ( e.g. Players would flip if we made them wait to use Fireball until they could cast 5th level spells, even though by any rational system I've seen it would be ) and convention built up over 40 years, that I don't think a logical, consistent, system of spell creation could replicate that mess. I'd be all for ripping out the vanilla list, and rebuilding them under some sort of rational system. The names might look the same, but the actual mechanics and levels would shift all over the map. I'd go for 'nobody uses the official version because it's not an option'.
Again, that's just me.
The problem with that is that kicks over the concept of class balance, since you're now changing how casters work.
I don't have any final answers - just a lot of ongoing questions and design sketches.
As for "enforcement of game flavor" - I don't think there's a lack of flavor enforcement under a rational spell or monster creation system, it's just that it's a different flavor. Those "edge cases that are inordinately cheap or expensive" are just the new character of magic under such a system. There are magical abilities in vanilla D&D which are expensive, or cheap - and that's just the flavor of this particular system.
It might be argued that the rules light, or rules nebulous nature of 5e is an attempt to try and get away from any particular flavor. If you make the system more rigorous, and more crunchy, you make it more consistent & flexible within it's own design ethos, but you reduce its adaptability to other "flavors". Again - that's highly subjective as to whether that's good or bad.
Is it better to do one particular hyper-focused game extremely well, or keep your options open to all things? I don't see GURPS taking the world by storm.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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I wouldn’t want predetermined recipes for magic items. I like being able to customize the recipe to fit the campaign and it’s PCs.
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You can do that already, just convert to a different game system (all of the point systems I mentioned earlier are perfectly capable of running dungeon crawls). People do it occasionally, but, well, players are actually pretty attached to the existing system, quirks and all. Witness the fate of 4th edition; while it had its share of structural flaws, its big failure was being too far away from people''s concept of 'real D&D'.
Spell creation and monster creation are the same problem as the crafting system, just in different lanes. Somebody trying to create a brand new spell that's more than just a minor rework of an existing spell has to eyeball the spell's level through sheer gut instinct, which is frickin' hard for spells that don't deal damage. You can't even know if you've gotten it right because half the existing, canonical spells are wildly out of place. Mordenkainen's Sword has absolutely no business whatsoever being a seventh-level spell, and of course Fireball is a well known example of the devs deliberately overtuning a spell for jollies. It's perfectly fine for them, but Gods Help You if you don't get that balance point exactly right.
The monster creation rules in the DMG are equally sparse and ****y. We all know critters are more or less dangerous than their HP and expected damage entails, but there's absolutely no guidance whatsoever on what that means. A creature that has scant few HP and objectively terrible attacks, but which can easily charm, confuse, or otherwise screw with the PCs would yield a CR drastically below its actual threat level. To say nothing of critters with unusual mobility or exceptional range - a flying critter with a longbow could theoretically assail a grounded party with total impunity if no one on the ground had longbows themselves or a means to pursue the thing. A flock of such critters would be a horrific threat to low-level parties even if they only had fifteen-odd HP and a basic 1d8+2 critter attack, no matter what their sub-one by-the-book CR says.
These are things Wizards is just expecting us top figure out through trial and error because they can't be assed to offer any guidance. Everybody likes to badmouth GURPS because oh-noes-so-much-maths, but man - that game tells you exactly how to handle most of this shit and only if the players are extremely experienced and knowledgeable will you run into the infamous Game Ruining Edge Cases - and at that point, hopefully you're a GM who knows how to shut that shit down ahead of time.
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This is questionable to me - not because I disagree with the sentiment behind it, but because it assumes that there is guidance to be had. Wizards might not be able to grant any guidance, because there isn't any rational system behind the construction or development of 5e. It could be just 40 years of "sheer gut instinct" and " trial and error". It hasn't been designed, so much as evolved in place - with obvious false starts and evolutionary dead ends.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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That seems to assume that no system is possible. Or rather that it's so generalized a problem, and so dependent on the individual game setting, that specific mechanics aren't possible.
I'm not sure that's accurate either. One could - theoretically - make meta-rules. E.g. - For an item of rarity X you gather Y items of Z rarity, P items of .... ( just to come up with a kuldgy example of a meta-rule ).
What components fit in each rarity category is up to the GM, as well as fitting the components thematically to the item.
Likewise, meta-rules for spell creation, or monster creation could be a generalized framework: you pull these levers, you get these results, you figure out the results that you want.
I believe that mechanics for these sorts of things are possible - I'm just not convinced that WoTC used such a system to create 5e, or has them in their possession.
I also think that "Level Up" might be a long time coming, as these problems aren't easy ones - especially well balanced, debugged, play-tested solutions for them.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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There is no system in the world that they could ever implement that will ever rival with simple experience.
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That doesn't actually let them off the hook. If they are designing by sheer gastrointestinal navigation, that's an absolute failure of design and it should be corrected. Game developers who're making literal billions off their product do not get to not know what they're doing. Like it or not (spoilers: not), D&D is the gold standard to which all other games are held up. If they're just slap-assing it with "ehhh, this seems 'bout right", that is horrible and immensely dismaying.
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Such mechanics don't need to give results that are better than the most experienced DM.
Such mechanics could put that kind of flexibility and power in the hands of low experience, or just low time DMs.
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If it's true that they are "designing by sheer gastrointestinal navigation" ( I love that phrase, btw ) - and I don't know they are, I'm just being cynical - I don't like it much either. I'd much rather see an elegant, multi-level, design framework.
But if I can turn the cynicism up to 11: the purpose of WoTC is not to create stunningly elegant game design. The purpose of WoTC is 'making literal billions off their product'. If they can just 'slap-ass it with "ehhh, this seems 'bout right"' and still make their billions, because people are willing to buy product with that level of design background .... well, it makes the shareholders happy, and enough of the gaming community seems to accept that, that they're able to make those billions.
The other option is that such balanced RPG creation frameworks exist already, and that WoTC is unwilling to let them into the public domain. Which also seems like a plausible theory, since you don't release the secrets to making your product to your competitors.
The only way to judge the plausibility of which scenario it is, is to look at the final product. Does D&D 5e look like it is the product of a well-built game development meta-framework, or not?
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.