The Things You Care About

One of the great unfulfilled promises of 5th Edition was the hope for a "modular game". Originally, this was sold as part of the "unify the editions" strategy, allowing players of all the different editions to come together around a common core, with 1st Ed players picking up a "classic module", 4e players picking up a "tactical combat module", and so on. It was never clear if the intention was for people to be able to play different 'editions' while at the same table, but it proved to be a moot point anyway since none of that meaningfully came to pass.

That said, I'm never sure that was a realistic aim anyway. I would have thought that a group that wanted to play 1st Ed would be better off just playing 1st Edition, and I suspect the "different games at the same table" would have been a nightmare.

However, one area where the modular design could have been really helpful would have been in allowing people to emphasise different bits of the game depending on what they individually care about. Of course, some of this has always existed, in that players who cared about having, say, a code of conduct could pick the Paladin class, while those who enjoyed magic could pick the Wizard, and so on. (And, of course, the use of supplements could allow the group to expand the game in some directions rather than others.)

And that worked to an extent... but only to an extent, because unfortunately there were almost invariably power imbalances between the options (Wizards beat Paladins in just about every edition of the game), and also because those expansions were generally done symmetrically - if the Fighter wanted a lovingly detailed weapon list and set of combat maneuvers, everyone was thereafter forced to use that same set.

But a modular design probably gives some scope to skipping that - if the Fighter wants the detailed weapons, maybe he could have access to those while everyone else just uses "hand weapon", "great weapon", etc. Meanwhile, the Wizard gets to use the detailed spell lists and components, while nobody else has to bother. And as long as everybody interfaces with the core system (used by the DM) in the same way, everything should remain fine.

Or not. Maybe it's a pipe dream.

But it does seem like something that would be worth investigating - rather than a 300-page core rulebook that's shared by everyone, where fully a third is spells that are of no use to lots of players while the weapon list is too detailed for some and not detailed enough for others, maybe it is indeed best to have a very thin core game, coupled with a set of modules (potentially associated with the classes), where the player picks up only those modules they care about, and ignore the rest.