D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7

[Craft (Cheese)]

At one point in the process of designing D&D Next, we took a long, hard look at capping the game at 10th level. Most people don't play at high levels.

It's been said before, but I think it needs to be said again: WotC puts no effort into high-level play because "Nobody likes high-level play." But the reason nobody likes high-level play is because WotC puts no effort into it!

And, yeah, I have to agree with the general consensus that skipping around the problem by making high levels identical to low levels is the exact opposite of what should be happening.

As for mundanes, I think they're on the right track with making more interesting non-magical maneuvers (or martial feats, or whatever they want to call them, I don't care), and giving characters access to more of them, but unfortunately they understood the "good start, but keep going" response to the early playtests as "perfect, now stop here".

I suspect the reason for this is they've gotten themselves caught in a local minima: They're scared to death to make any big changes to the maneuver system because the fans might get angry with the new direction. It's just what happens when you go into game design without a vision, just tossing mechanics at playtesters and keeping what sticks.