Hasbro ruins D&D.

Listen to this shit.
(In a nutshell, Mike Mearls describes his grand conception of The Samurai in D&D. And it's nothing but lukewarm diarrhea. He is very excited and pleased about this attempt to re-package the samurai as a fighter variant. They have dismantled everything remotely interesting about playing a samurai or what that might mean, and reduced it to a mere temporary buff. Because apparently this is what the fanboys want)

This is the public, official version of Satan's Game. And people are paying money for it because they don't know any better.

Now I don't mean to make too much personal slight here; at least no more than a person deserves for having bad ideas about how to play D&D. I'm sure Mike Mearls is a nice guy who loves his family and who pays his taxes. He's clearly very intelligent. You can tell because he has a solid perspective on what The Seven Samurai is about, and he can hardly compress his train of thought into words.

But holy crap, did he say this is what the Forums wanted?? So WotC is now designing D&D by focus group. And an internet forum is like a focus group, except you don't have to pay them.

He says that people want to use the word samurai to describe their character. What an odd way to put it. It is clear to him that people don't actually mean they want to play a noble born warrior from feudal Japan. So what the shit is a samurai if not that? I also wonder why this is clear to him. Was it made clear by people in the forums? Or is it so clear that he just assumes it?

So at WotC, the approach to designing a Thing begins with taking the Thing out of the context which defines the Thing, and imitating the comic book or movie version of the Thing. Whatever that means.

As an aside, he makes clear that they use the same approach with the Knight. According to Mearls and WotC, the knight is another thing that people say they want to play, but they don't mean it.

Mearls clearly knows about knights and samurai: That they swear fealty to lords, and that they are elite because horses and armor and weaponry are expensive. But he throws these aspects out the window when designing the class according to the insights from the unpaid forum members.

(Never mind that having a fealty relationship or economic concerns make great motivations for adventures and are generally solid plot devices.)

At least better plot devices than frickin' Amnesia.

Mearls knows that there is something interesting about the samurai persona. But this whole nebulous thing somehow gets reduced to a temporary buff to attack and HP. I guess this is what they got out of the forums.

"Hey guys. What makes an interesting adventure to you? What makes a game of D&D better?"
"We like it when our characters hit stuff and don't die."
"So you mean an honest-to-goodness tactical challenge?"
"No. Just higher numbers to add to a dice roll."

Mearls finishes by getting really excited: Something about how the use of a temporary bonus will cause the player to cathartically identify with the fighting spirit of the samurai.
Does he really believe this? Are there people who play D&D who are that simple?

"Ok guys. So how big do you think the temporary bonus should be?"
"Oh, really big. The numbers stand for my immersion in the game. The more bonuses, the better the game is."
"We knew it all along! This is going to be the best version of D&D ever. Let's make some youtube videos!"

Jesus. As best I can figure, the reason for this kind of crap is that D&D is not owned by people who care about D&D. Wizards of the Coast is a subsidiary of HASBRO. The same company that owns My Little Pony and keeps licensing Transformers movies. We have to call it a Spirit Board now because the Ouija board is trademarked. Shepherding the refinement of the table top RPG is not their priority.

See?

It grinds my gears.
In my next post, I'm going to present a samurai class of my own design. I don't even care about samurai or plan to include them in any adventures in the future. I just want to show that it can be done better.