When did We Stop Trusting Game Designers?

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I'd of added to those reasons, why the heck would you risk life and limb in such a dangerous profession as adventurer in a dark dungeon when you can just knock over ye old magic shop.

In the longest running 1E game I was in this is precisely what we, the PC's, did do. Not sure when it first started, but I know it was the existence of magic item shops, potion shops, and even jewellers and gemseller shops that lured PC's to a life of crime.

It is eminently logical that if the PC's are SELLING magic items that means that someone is BUYING them. We habitually turned miscellaneous magical loot in for cash. We took the cash and habitually bought large/valuable gems for portability. We turned moneylenders into BANKS - and then robbed the banks. It took a long time and concerted effort on the part of the DM to get us focused again more on adventures than on fantasy-world crime sprees. He had to establish that the magic shops, jewellers and moneylenders had defenses and protections that were not just difficult but EXPENSIVE for our characters to overcome - adventuring became an EASIER way to get money and magic and was more profitable.

It was, of course, quite ludicrous. But that's what logical thinking gets you in FRPG's.

 

[justanobody]

@Moridin:

Well armor class did come form hull ratings that the lower the rating the better, but now it doesn't follow that yet still the class of armor is its damage ratings and has nothing to do with a character class.

What type of armor is it? Chain.
What class of armor is it? +4 material added to natural protection, or +4 magical added to natural protection, etc.

Some work better than others, but just all of 4th seems to have tried to use fewer similar words to make it less wordy, and this can be a problem.

It would be like just calling all swords swords, but some do different damage. This is where slight variation in terms by the use of adjectives comes in handy, and in regards to the things like controller, just picking a more fitting word or even phrase.

I guess calling it a "mass effect specialist" was a bit too wordy for the combat position.

I am glad that you, Rodney Thompson, braved to enter such a thread and specifically responded to one of my, as a severe critic of 4th design philosophy, posts.

It is just that it seems much of the wording tries to be concise but is ambiguous in where it crosses the line of in game and out of game like bloodied as shown above. Would the DM be telling the players the creature is at a certain hit point percentage, or just what the creature appears to look like?

I stand by the fact that looking at the language used should be a key way to resolving many issues in all editions of D&D. Maybe it is why I am so for the ability to "redefine" some terms with the GSL, because I don't think the proper terms are used.

I am sure Mike, Dave, Rich, yourself, et all have dictionaries, and collegiate vocabularies, but was frustrated at trying to say something so light that the context would not be taken serious without the exaggerated example that you quoted.

The language used is one of the reasons some see the game "dumbed down" in parts.

So when you designer something make sure that what looks, walks, and quacks like one, is called a duck from the normal usage, rather than making it some new keyword that will confuse casual talk with technical speak within the game, again aka "bloodied" as one of the better recent examples.

 

[RFisher]

I probably stopped trusting game designers c. 1985.

I started trusting them again c. 2004.

Seth Godin has some interesting thoughts on that. Essentially, he believes people should post with their real names and stand by their words for just the kind of reasons described above.

I know some people on Yoggie have requested their username changed to their real names. It can be easy to see that people would attach more weight to posts attributed to real names than pseudonyms.

Nah. I’m just as big an idiot when I post under my real name as when I post under a pseudonym. ^_^

 

[Spatula]

Um the idea to custom build the cleric class to different Gods, hmmn where have i heard requests for that... Oh wait every time a discussion of 3e and 4e clerics comes up.

Perhaps you've never read the Complete Priests' Handbook... The whole bit with the spheres and whatnot that allowed you to customize clerics' spell lists to their religion is in the 2e PHB (building off of concepts introduced in the 1e Dragonlance hardcover). The Complete book doesn't have any new ideas on that front, but rather has a system for designing custom priests mechanically that always results in a class vastly underpowered compared to the standard cleric & druid. I seem to recall one gem of an example priest that had minor access to a sphere that had no 1st-3rd level spells... I felt robbed that I had paid money for that one.

Not that there weren't good Complete books (the Bard one is stunning), but the choice isn't between "imaginative but zero editing" and "heavily edited but dull." Allowing freelancers to produce supplements with no editing, no overall vision, and no coordination was and is a mistake, and that was the big problem with the 2e books. The 3e splats were somewhat hit & miss, but at least the game material in them was generally usable as-is.

 

[justanobody]

Now to be fair most kit designs were meant to give more diversity with reduce power output than the core classes. That was the give and take idea behind the "complete" series from 2nd wasn't it?

For someone well versed in 3rd how does this translate to how Prestige Classes work? Were they just additional options or did they also change power levels one way or the other?

Also does a change have to add power to something rather than flavor?

Off to dig out my priests handbook to look over it.

 

[Greg K]

Overall, I prefer the 2e Complete Handbooks to the 3e Complete Books. However, imo, many 2e kits suffered mechanicaly, because of the patchwork nature of AD&D itself and would have been better if done under 3e mechanics(as per customizing a character from the PHB and UA style class variants).

Now, as far as no longer trusting designers, the first time was probably either after seeing the original Cavalier and Barbarian classes or discovering non-TSR games which gave me alternative perspectives on game design. More recently, it has been the majority of WOTC offerings which followed the release of the core 3e books to the present (with some noteable exceptions including Unearthed Arcana, Fiendish Codex I, Heroes of Horror, and d20Modern).

 

[Maggan]

So, for something that is not a new concept to millions of gamers, they for some reason had to figure out what the term meant and how to design it.

It's healthy for a game designer to have a level of skepticisim about any existing rule, especially rules that are based on "this is what we've always done".

A good game designer takes a look at what's already done, tries out a few or many variations to see if it can be done better within the premise of the game he's designing.

Sometimes it validates the original design. Sometimes something new emerges.

A game designer that stops creating or considering new takes on rules, is a game designer that's lost his touch, in my book. Without a methodical approach to understanding why a rule works, how it works, and what can be done to change it to the better, the result will be less than stellar.

A good designer challenges what he knows.

And the road to good design is paved with failed designs that's been tried out to learn what works, and what doesn't.

/M

 

[Hussar]

Re: Bloodied.

I'd like to thank JustaNobody for providing yet again such an excellent example of what happens when you decide to use one and only one definition of a word, refuse to accept any other definition and then claim that there are huge understanding issues because of the word chosen.

I think JustaNobody, just to pick on him again, also demonstrates what I was trying to get across in my original post. That people have always disagreed with the designers, regardless of who, is obvious. I wasn't trying to say that we never disagreed. However, I wonder when it happened that we went from, "Hrm, I don't like that, I'm going to do something else." to "What kind of a moron are you for even trying to bring this to the table? Get yourself a decent thesaurus you horrible little person you!"

 

[Maggan]

However, I wonder when it happened that we went from, "Hrm, I don't like that, I'm going to do something else." to "What kind of a moron are you for even trying to bring this to the table? Get yourself a decent thesaurus you horrible little person you!"

I've been thinking about this for while, and it was also prompted by me reading (un)reasons excellent thread where he reads through Dragon.

The conclusion I have come to is that since the Internet is such a wellspring of opinions, I have tended to assign multiple viewpoints to persons who disagree with me, thus creating in my mind a collective that's furthering the same ideas.

This has created the bogeyman of "they".

"They" think that everything was better in the heyday of AD&D.
"They" think that everything Gary Gygax wrote is gospel.
"They" hate 3rd and 4th edition because it's not D&D.
"They" are convinced WotC are lying to them.
"They" claim that there are no multiclassing rules in D&D4.
"They" claim that Castles&Crusades is the only true D&D published.
"They" hate WotC for moving Dragon and Dungeon to digital.
"They" don't trust the WotC game designers.

The crux is that "they" don't exist. Individuals might hold the opinions I've written as examples above, but there is no nefarious collective mind that hold each and every one of these in a pure undistilled perfect storm of opinions.

So, the answer to your question (paraphrased here) "when did we go from just doing our thing to spewing our guts out" is "we've never done that. Some individuals have done that forever and ever. But it's only today you get the opportunity to listen to so many of them, that you risk conflating many people's opinions into one huge meta-opinion that doesn't exist."

On the specific point of dictating fun, which has been a hot topic where WotC have drawn flack and past similar messages from e.g. Gary Gygax have been ignored, I think that it is basically a situation where most of us not having read everything that's been written about D&D.

So when someone is saying "WotC are dictating our fun and I hate it", I take it to read "someone is dictating our fun and I hate it!". The person would hate it if it was TSR who said it, and in all probability did hate it if they read the words in Dragon you are referring to*.

But there are few left now who have the knowledge of D&D to remember all the things that have happened on the way to today, and thus the ire is projected on the latest active publisher.

Anyhow, that's my take on it.

/M

* Of course there are some who will think it stellar advice coming from Gary Gygax, and spiteful bile coming from WotC, but hey that's human nature.

 

[justanobody]

As I said, when the prose become so watered down it bored people to read the books was one step int hat direction, as well my bloodied example where a game mechanic term can be confused with a colorful descriptive term.

But I stopped agreeing with game designers when they decided that MTHAC0 should exist to try to somehow fit a class into the game that never really fit well.

Basically what I call the gradma syndrome. Your grandma comes into your house and starts rearranging things to suit her taste rather than leaving something alone that isn't hers. Likewise designers poke around and change things around to the point where people feel the direction they are taking the game is like kicking someone out of their own house.

Also a if it ain't broke don't fix it kind of feeling compiled with a throw out the old rubbish (including players) for the new concept that started with 3rd edition, then 3.5, and now 4th.

2nd adventures could easily be used for 1st with slight modification, and even 3rd with some tweaks.

4th came along and rather than move the furniture around it threw it out to bring in new furniture of its own liking and caused for many the final straw situation where some feel they need to step up and say to the designers "you have gone to far!"

Crossed the line of acceptable amount of change tot he game.

When you used the term bloodied to someone and that start spouting game mechanic functions of the term rather than a colurful descriptor you will understand, and it shouldn't require time to stop and clearify what you mean because of a few bad term choices.

That is just my favorite because it has come up often and is a term my group likes to describe things and we shouldn't have to change our descriptors because the term was arbitrarily used for a game mechanic that doesn't even fit the mechanic since HP are not representitive of physical damage or a state in which someone is even bleeding.

Mike Mearls' blog has a bit of fix for that, so it seems I am not the only one thinking the term should have a more substantial meaning to it.

So the problem isn't people wanting to choose one term, but the game could have chosen another term. Is "weakened" a keyword in 4th? Or was the problem with using it one that makes people think that they would have their STR score reduced in some way?

"Crippled", oops that one is not PC.

"Enervated", probably too hard for new players to understand the word.

"Unnerved", That seems to fit the theme of what HP represents now as some psychological disorder that needs a healing surge pep talk to fix!

How about just half-HP then you don't need to define bloodied at all the rules state what it is.

"Debilitated" is a good word that would seem to fit.

I think "weakened" would fit best so why didn't they choose it? Because it is a status effect that DOES mean lesser strength, well what could you name that status effect instead? How about "debilitated"?

The entire keywording of conditions and everything is what I don't like. I got tired of it from Magic the Gathering and it was merged to D&D because all the MMOs needed a word to show on screen to show status effects. :yuck:

@Maggan: I was corrected once where Gary said "you must play AD&D the way it was written or you aren't playing it right" was to the terms of the RPGA, which would make sense. For a long time I held that phrase in disgust until either himself or Frank Mentzer corrected people on it from the Dragon issue in the Forum or Sage Advice, whichever it was.