http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx ... l/20130923
Here is his "to-do list":
You will fail Mearls. You are an idiot. Even if you weren't a total math failure, we know that if your math is "right" it's because it "shakes out as [you] expect", the game will suck crusty scab-covered scrotums. Because what you expect is apparently a game where no one can do anything, all the PCs must suck dicks at everything so the DM can railroad plot-rape them, and Storm Giants cant even break down a fucking door.MIKE MEARLS IS A RETARD wrote:The underlying math of the game. We’ll run stress tests on the numbers, monster abilities, and so on to make sure that everything shakes out as we expect. This work is important to making adventure and encounter design fast and easy. It also ensures that the classes play fair.
For that reason, we should pray that you horribly screw up the math, then maybe Dragons won't have to worry about squads of children with slingshots.
LOL. "best parts of 4th edition." The best parts of 4th Edition are when you cover the books in gasoline and burn them.An optional tactical combat system, with rules for using miniatures, rules for combat that operate like 3rd Edition or 4th Edition in that they remove DM adjudication of things like cover, and expanded, basic combat options to allow for forced movement, tanking, and so forth, as options any character can attempt. This optional system will look a bit like AD&D’s Player’s Option: Combat and Tactics book with key lessons learned from 4th Edition. Its goal is to present combat as a challenging puzzle that pits the players against the DM, capturing the best parts of 4th Edition.
How is this supposed to interact with the regular parts of the game? It's going to be a mess. What a joke. Balance nightmare inevitable.
WTF IS THIS. SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKAn optional dramatic system that emphasizes D&D as a storytelling activity. This system treads ground that D&D hasn’t formally embraced in the past. It casts a gaming group as collaborative storytellers, with the DM managing the action and everyone contributing events, plots twists, and sudden, dramatic turns.
Oh fuck no. You cannot be fucking serious. Note how he says "set of guidelines." Yeah, every fucking thing in 5e is a fucking set of guidelines.An optional system that cranks up character customization by allowing players to build their own subclasses. This system is really more of a set of guidelines that let you mix and match abilities pulled from subclasses within a class. You can approach it as a DM tool (“In my setting, the wizards of the Burning Isle combine illusion and necromancy”) or as a way for players to have more choice in building characters. We’re making this system optional because we know that some players want a lot of ways to customize their characters, but more customization invariably leads to broken combos. We can manage combinations and fairness at the subclass and feat level, but slicing things much finer than that goes beyond what we can reasonably expect to playtest.
But anyway, you really trust these idiots to come up with any kind of balanced guidelines for creating subclasses? Of course you don't. But of course, since it's just a "set of guidelines", Mearls will just say you are "doing it wrong" if you make unbalanced shit. Just like there was nothing wrong with Skill Challenges in 4e, your DM was just doing them wrong.
Sounds desirable. In theory. However, there is a 100% guarantee the rules for these things will be mjostly terrible because Mearls.A campaign system that extends the action beyond the day-to-day adventures, focusing on what we’ve called downtime. This includes managing a domain, running a business, playing politics on a grand scale, and so on. Things like mass combat would naturally slot into this system.