Design Philosophy: Mark Rosewater

For those that aren't acquainted with him, Mark Rosewater is the lead designer of Magic: the Gathering and the de-facto spokesman for the game. Every week, he writes an article on the design of Magic, but this week's article, "Maro on Maro" has some very interesting insights which I believe also apply to D&D.

In particular, you have this comment:

Mark Rosewater said:

Aren't you essentially trading away old players to acquire new ones?

No, we're not. Some people seem to think that complexity is the thing older players want. It isn't. What do older players want? Interestingly, the same thing newer players want: a fun game. Magic, as is any game, is a diversion, a source of entertainment, a reason to interact with friends. The second that Magic isn't fulfilling those needs, that's when someone walks away.

R&D's goals of the last few years have been to cut to the essence of what makes Magic fun, not just for new players but for everyone. One of the things we've learned is that complexity for the sake of complexity is not it. Having more things to think about than a human being is capable of processing does not make the game any more fun.

What does make it fun? Having cards that do things players want to do. Having flavor that resonates. Having environments that are fun to explore. Having the game be about playing the game rather than figuring out how to play the game. Magic is cresting right now because I believe R&D has done an excellent job of making it fun.

I think I did a disservice many years back by framing the conversation about acquiring new players. Our real goal has always been to enhance the game for all players of which new players are merely a subset. Build a better game and everyone benefits.

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I feel that a lot of what Mark says there also applies to 4th edition... but there are drastic differences between the two situations.

Monte Cook raised the point when 3.5e was released that, because of the revision, DMs would lose system mastery. I wasn't concerned at the time, for I thought the loss due to 3.5e fairly insignificant, but the point does have relevance: A far more significant loss of system mastery has come from the changes from 2e->3e and 3e->4e. When the mathematics that underpins the system changes to that extent, you end up with a different game, and one that strips away any legacy of system mastery.

Does this mean that R&D should not have changed the underlying mathematics? My feeling is that it was justified - for both 3e and 4e. 3e because the old foundation needed to be relaid given how the expectations for the game had changed since the 1970s, and 4e because the major structural flaws in 3e had become apparent. (When those flaws begin to turn away potential DMs, then you have a problem).

However, any further changes? Each major significant change is going to have severe consequences on the player base. 4e has shown that. 3e could get away with it because the base of the game was over two decades old. 4e didn't have that luxury, and paid for it.

When 5e comes along, it will really be the crunch time for the D&D team. I believe that we'll see that stability will be far more important than complete renovation.

Cheers!

I have to wonder if 5e will just be smoothing the edges (((Witch IMHO is too little and not worth a new edtion))) instead of wholesale reimagining...

Mark Rosewater said:

R&D's goals of the last few years have been to cut to the essence of what makes Magic fun, not just for new players but for everyone. One of the things we've learned is that complexity for the sake of complexity is not it.

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With regards to D&D I think most participants actually do like complexity for its own sake. They want long, arcane rulebooks that they can really 'get their teeth into'. They want system mastery to be something that's hard to achieve. They're geeks. They want to show off their knowledge, to have the most min-maxed char, be the respected rules guru, tell the other fellow he's wrong on the internet.

Nothing else really explains rpgs. Why are the rules so damn long? Why the complexity? I don't buy that it's there for simulation. There's a simpler explanation. The rules are complex because rpgers like complexity.

Doug McCrae said:

Nothing else really explains rpgs. Why are the rules so damn long? Why the complexity? I don't buy that it's there for simulation. There's a simpler explanation. The rules are complex because rpgers like complexity.

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that is the paradox of game design...

most of your hard core fans want to be elitiest "I have game mastery" but this builds a wall that stops growth...
new players want simple, and that makes your system grow, but makes the hard core gamers NERD RAGE...

you must balance this...and the closer you come to the middle the more people on the wings you cut out...

Most of my players seem to appreciate 4e's lack of complexity, I have several players who don't consume rulebooks heavily so it suits them.

I think 4e could change the math heavily as it was a new edition, in fact changing the math so heavily meant that people didn't assume things were the same ( I found this problem switching from Shadowrun 2 to SR3 and 3e to 3.5). This means that system mastery has to be regained but you are aware that you need to relearn it all. I've seen posts and had comments from old school friends that the 1st ed Ad&d to 2nd ed Ad&d change was ignored as they were to close to each other in many ways (the local old timers had house ruled 1st into something that resembled 2nd so never bothered with new books). The trick with this is of course changing everything but keeping enough to still be the "same" game, to me 4e doesn't feel like 3e but does have a BECMI feel which makes me happy.

Doug McCrae said:

With regards to D&D I think most participants actually do like complexity for its own sake. They want long, arcane rulebooks that they can really 'get their teeth into'. They want system mastery to be something that's hard to achieve. They're geeks. They want to show off their knowledge, to have the most min-maxed char, be the respected rules guru, tell the other fellow he's wrong on the internet.

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I don't agree with that at all. I know there is a subset of D&D players who are like that, but I don't believe they're the majority, or even close to being a majority.

I believe that there are a good number of people who enjoy "combo" play: putting various elements together to create more powerful characters and the like, but that's quite a different thing from complexity for its own sake. And, in play, it's not something that's hard to handle.

(Compare "weakened" in 3e with 4e; there is a vast difference in complexity with regards to handling it, but the effects that produce it are similar).

Cheers!

I've took this up with MaRo himself, but the biggest problem with MaRo's articles is that his foremost priority isn't to make clear the best principals of design philosophy, but rather to justify the profit motivated things that WotC does under the guise of it being 'good game design'.

Now, I'm not at all opposed to profit motivated decisions, but if he can't be honest about the fact that a decision was motivated by economic considerations, then I wish he would just avoid mentioning it and talk about something else.

Likewise, even when I agree with MaRo, he has a tendency when developing his argument to focus more on, "Why you should love WoTC.", and less on, "Why this really was a good decision.", often at the expense of his argument.

And to top it off, his articles are often made under deadline (and obviously so) so that many times they are rather half-baked.

So in short, there is a trust gap between me and MaRo. He has said with a straight face so many things that were obviously false, and has argued so disengeniously, that I just have a hard time taking him seriously. He's obviously a smart guy, but I never got nearly the insight into game design from him that I got from reading writings about gaming by Gary Gygax or Richard Garfield so I'm not really into the cult of MaRo the way some people are.

The honest answer is (obviously), "Yes, we are, and that's ok, because that's where we think that most of the new purchases of our product will come from." And that's ok, but also obviously it's not something MaRo can say in his role as company representative. So I'd rather he just not address the issue.

With WotC and D&D, I think the focus of consideration is not on "old" and "new" players in a broad sense (as was the case, for instance, in TSR's publication of Basic sets) -- but rather on a particular subset of potential players at this moment. The overwhelming majority of those potential players are already "gamers", even if not currently players of some version of WotC D&D or D20 System.

I think a big portion of that intended market is people who liked 3e enough to play it for years but are -- precisely because of that familiarity and "system mastery" -- ready to move on to something different for the interest that mechanical novelties provide.

That is quite another kettle of fish from people who might approach 3e (or 2e, or BECMI, or whatever) with fresh eyes today or tomorrow.

I think the situation was much the same with 3e, aimed primarily at folks who had already gone through the piling up of stuff in the course of 2e.

MerricB said:

I don't agree with that at all. I know there is a subset of D&D players who are like that, but I don't believe they're the majority, or even close to being a majority.

I believe that there are a good number of people who enjoy "combo" play: putting various elements together to create more powerful characters and the like, but that's quite a different thing from complexity for its own sake. And, in play, it's not something that's hard to handle.

(Compare "weakened" in 3e with 4e; there is a vast difference in complexity with regards to handling it, but the effects that produce it are similar).

Cheers!

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Yeah, I think RPG players like to do complex things. That necessitates some complexity. But that's a lot different than complexity for its own sake. And the rules get out of hand because making a simple rule set allow complex tasks is exceedingly difficult. That is really the pinnacle of good design.

PS