Interview with Mike Mearls

[Goumindong]

The irony here is that MMOs could handle wound levels and hit location tracking without a hiccup, since the most complicated PnP system ever devised is child's play for a computer. But MMOs are still very much stuck in the D&D mold - hit points, levels, classes, XP for killing stuff, and so on - and have yet to really break out and explore the options the new medium offers them.

Actually they cannot. The servers are not powerful enough to cope with the strain that it would cause. They have problems enough coping with the current load, let alone increasing the complexity and number of calculations and client-server data transactions.

Single player RPG's and sims can do it, and single player RPGs sims sometimes do, but that is just a question of the type of game you want to be playing rather than any limitations based on computational power.

 

[Dausuul]

Actually they cannot. The servers are not powerful enough to cope with the strain that it would cause. They have problems enough coping with the current load, let alone increasing the complexity and number of calculations and client-server data transactions.

Really? MMOs have been around for a good ten years or so now. Seems like computers have advanced enough in that time that they ought to be able to handle a bit more number-crunching. (Though, admittedly, they also have many more players.)

 

[The Little Raven]

Really? MMOs have been around for a good ten years or so now. Seems like computers have advanced enough in that time that they ought to be able to handle a bit more number-crunching. (Though, admittedly, they also have many more players.)

It's less a matter of computer processing power and more a matter of information transfer, especially here in the States.

 

[wedgeski]

It's less a matter of computer processing power and more a matter of information transfer, especially here in the States.

Exactly. The more processing the servers do of the world, the more bandwidth is required to communicate all those complexities to the clients, and the more vulnerable the game experience becomes to latency. The internet itself is the throttle, not the power of the server.

 

[pemerton]

If we're talking "Sim", we really should make a distinction between what I term "Concretism" and "World Sim". "Concretism" is when the game rules are in some way defining how the world actually works ("simulating" it). "World Sim" is purity of setting, maintaining an idea of realism regardless of the underlying mechanics. Edwards seems more interested in the latter than the former, though he certainly mentions both.

I enjoyed this post - thanks. On "concrete" vs "world" simulation, I think that, to an extent, this can depend upon the details of the action resolution mechanics. The more inticrate the action resolution mechanics, the more that "world sim" become unnecessary, as the "concrete sim" of the action resolution mechanics forces the same sort of outcomes onto the game (for example: 1st ed AD&D relies upon "world sim" to make the PCs refrain from marching or fighting through heavy rain; Rolemaster uses "concrete sim" action resolution mechanics, namely, penalties to the dice roll, to bring about the same ingame result).

But I agree with you that trying to use "concrete sim" to force "world-sim"-like outcomes is prone to produce a clunky ruleset.

 

[Abisashi]

Does anyone have a link to the black-box thread Mearls talked about in this interview?

 

[Beginning of the End]

What about that dive through Moria? What about that escape from the goblins caves under the mountains? Dungeon delves by a ragtag, oddball mix of characters. That is a whole whopping serving of D&D right there. Do Howard, Vance, or Moorcock ever really get THAT close to the game?

Howard's "Red Nails" is pretty much a D&D dungeon crawl.

But I basically agree with your point. A lot of people seem to be heavily invested in Gygax's denial of LOTR's influence on D&D's design... based entirely on an editorial he wrote after getting successfully sued by the Tolkien Estate.

My two cents on the general topic of Mike Mearls: I knew something had gone seriously wrong when the guy responsible for designing some of the best 3rd Edition stunting systems was suddenly posting blog entries talking about what a waste of time stunting systems were.

 

[amethal]

If we're talking "Sim", we really should make a distinction between what I term "Concretism" and "World Sim". "Concretism" is when the game rules are in some way defining how the world actually works ("simulating" it). "World Sim" is purity of setting, maintaining an idea of realism regardless of the underlying mechanics.

This kind of thing is the reason why I find the Forge jargon so confusing.

So Sim actually has two opposite meanings, and what I thought of as "Sim" was actually "World Sim".

And if someone says "purity of setting" what they mean is World Sim, which is what I thought was simulation(ism).

 

[VictorC]

While I enjoyed hearing Mearls discuss 4e, the interviewer was the worst ever. I will never listen to another "Theory's Form the Closet." I forget his name, but he seriously needs to work on being prepared for interviews... just dreadful.

 

[Nom]

This kind of thing is the reason why I find the Forge jargon so confusing.

So Sim actually has two opposite meanings, and what I thought of as "Sim" was actually "World Sim".

And if someone says "purity of setting" what they mean is World Sim, which is what I thought was simulation(ism).

Yeah, the use of the term "Simlulationism" wasn't the best choice by Edwards. As he uses it, it's primarily focused on "pure" roleplaying, without a metagame agenda like challenge / winning (Gamism) or exploring a theme (Narrativism). But most people use "Simulation" to mean "mechanics map directly to world model".

The concepts are related, but they are not the same thing. It took me quite a while to figure out what he meant by "Simulationist". It's why I coined the term "concretist" to talk about closely coupled mechanics and model, as distinct from "abstractionist", which is where the world model and the resolution mechanism don't try to mirror one another.