PF uses states like seen / concealed / sensed / unseen to indicate perceptibility. Here is invisibility in the Playtest. pic.twitter.com/XDczPmpLli
— adam koebel (@skinnyghost) August 12, 2018
Compare to 5e which uses three separate rules to say the same thing, which amounts to disadvantage. pic.twitter.com/r3SkeXJqWu
— adam koebel (@skinnyghost) August 12, 2018
One of the key design patterns of 5e lies in inverting the traditional TRPG design structure – many starting points, one destination, vs. one starting point, many destinations.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
Mike, I’m having a hard time parsing this tweet. Could you explain? Gladly! A lot of RPGs building from the general – I want to attack – and then build lots of specific exceptions and expressions of that. With 5e, as much as possible we tried to use advantage and disadvantage to gobble up all those unique cases.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
That’s the big reason why multiple advantages and disadvantages don’t stack. Once you hit one or the other, the system stops and you go back to playing. In other words, our system looks for the first instance of advantage and first of disad, then stops.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
Most traditional RPGs rely on the user to test multiple cases and cobble together a final resolution procedure. You always risk being wrong if you don’t test everything.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
Conceptually, general to specific seems simpler because from a systemic stand point it often leads to things that look simpler if you diagram them out. 4e’s multiple defenses fell into this trap.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
Making everything into X seems conceptually simpler, but in implementation you’re really creating lots of things that look X-like, but have exceptions or slight shades that make actually using them much more difficult.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
And that ties into another principle of 5e design – as much as possible, make things very different or make them identical.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) August 12, 2018
Thanks a lot for the detailed response, Mike!
— Rick Kittenhugs (@thekittenhugs) August 12, 2018