Mike Mearls on the Rules

I will put this up here: link from the Sage Advice tumbler (collecting D&D rules tweets) summarizing something Mearls' talked about at GenCon. Gist of it: that streaming and such have shifted the emphasis on game design from rules, and what people talk about in online discussion boards, to how games are played at a table.

It's intriguing, partly because of how it marks the changes in game design, but also in how it notes the changes in the internet's culture. Bulletin board-like things favor talking about the rules - how to build characters, how to exploit the rules - I can see that, skim through ENWorld - or back on the WOC forums, a place like Stack Exchange, and so on. People there talk about how to build better characters - not how to make a session flow, how to play an encounter and so on. But watching people play teaches you to play a different way (Mearls says) - true enough.

I am not all in on the new ways: I vastly prefer reading to watching, at least as far as people sitting around a table playing D&D goes - and I like the detailing you had back in 3E, to invent and work out characters. Though as Mearls mentions - that was ideal for inventing and detailing characters when you weren't playing. Playing - most of that stuff fades. If you get to playing right, you can do the things you had a skill check for in 3 without a huge amount of difficulty - you have the flexibility.

Anyway - a very nice summary of what they are thinking about with 5e, and the effects of changes in the internet, and the way people share their games online.