D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

[pemerton]

If you hand me a story telling game and then I find that it doesn't do a very good job of telling my story, I might be inclined to feel I simply chose the wrong product. If you hand me a story telling game and then I find that it doesn't do a very good job of telling the story you advertise that should go with it, I see that as being a problem with the product.

Nice!

 

[Grabuto138]

I'll answer your question with a question of my own: Why do you feel the 4E version of Dark Sun includes mechanics not found in other settings?

I'll then say that I do not feel Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms necessarily need different mechanics, but that is because they are generally somewhat similar in a lot of areas. Though, what I'm getting at is that the differences are the important things. If I were looking to get more of a sword & sorcery vibe from Greyhawk, I might choose a different way of portraying that than I would if I were to look to enhance the political intrigue and larger than life nature of Forgotten Realms. For what it's worth, I felt 4E was an excellent fit for some aspects of Forgotten Realms. I know I am in the vast minority, but I found the changes made to FR in 4E to be interesting.

Also, as I've said to others, I am glad the game works for you. In no way do I begrudge anyone for having fun. However, all the things you mentioned are things thrown at the group I'm typically a player in, and it still hasn't made much of a difference. Generally, in the case of minions, I'm surprised if they're still standing after the first round. Sometimes, getting rid of them doesn't even require an attack roll.

Answering a question with a question when my question was "I literally do not understand what you are specifically saying; could you clarify?" complicates my ability to respond. I wasn't arguing with you. I was trying to understand you. But this is the Internet so I guess I'll take a stab at it.

Campaign-specific modifications and additions to a core ruleset are fine and common in my experience. Nautical campaign? Tack on some specific rules for naval combat. You wanna reskin halflings as Christmas elves? Go nuts. Does this answer your question? I have no idea.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In short, I suppose I am saying that I found two problems with 4E. 1) It was grindy; 2) I very rarely took the opposition seriously. The new math helped with [URL=http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=1]#1 [/URL] , but -in some cases-made [URL=http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=2]#2 [/URL] even worse than it already was.

Well, if that was your experience. Still, the 'new monster math' was mostly making monsters more bad-ass, so I don't see how it couldn't have helped at all with 2, let alone easily made it worse.

As with dissociation and realism, at some point you do have to make a willful leap past the game's abstraction and other concessions to being a game to get to the fiction it's helping you resolve. :shrug:

Looking to the DMG 2's Skill Challenge numbers, the new math in that area of the game made [URL=http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=2]#2 [/URL] far worse while also increasing the grind I felt during many skill challenges.

Grind was not something I ever noticed in SCs. Skill rolls don't take long to resolve, and there are only so many required before you inevitably hit n success or 3 failures. Can't really see how that could get grindy... unless it just devolved into arguments about whether given skills were useable or not...?

I disagree that developing the mechanics and fluff hand-in-hand are only good for one story. You have mechanics designed for one story.

And that's that. If you want a different story, you re-design some of those mechanics, add some, maybe delete others. You end up with something that's better than the original for the 2nd story, but probably not as good as something purpose-designed for that story like the original was for the first one.

OTOH, with more 'generic' core mechanics, you can add-on flavor and custom-to-a-setting (or genre) mechanics, without having to substantially mod the core. You get better consistency and probably retain more balance for less re-design work that way. By the same token, when the 'proper' (IMHO) arbiter of story, the DM, goes to design his own campaign, he's not re-designing core mechanics, just tweaking peripheral ones.

However, when designing a "modular" game, I believe it is better to start with mechanics that make sense for the core game and then provide ways to build upon that later.

Sense for the core /game/, yes. But not for just one story or setting or campaign. The more generic you make that 'core game' you're designing for, the easier it'll be to simply add to it to evoke something more specific. The more you build flavor into it, or make the core about simulating /one/ set of flavor, the more difficult you make it to adapt or expand or make 'modular.' Modular games, far from being absolved from having solid core mechanics, need to be very versatile and robust from the beginning. This isn't 1974, and we're not groping in the dark anymore.

I believe that works better than trying to create a modular game where the mechanics don't really correspond to the core story you are trying to tell, and then you try to patch that later with a variety of different methods which may or may not work and may or may not work to different degrees. I've been lead to believe that because I'm familiar with this: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy
and find that it works exceptionally well. I know plenty have a dislike of the system, but I found that -for me- it is an excellent example of how to have a D&D style game and tropes while retaining modularity.

The 'G' in GURPS stands for 'Generic,' y'know. GURPS was designed as system first, story to be added later.

You had mentioned fitting mechanics to a story. Maybe you're right, but that should be what modularity means, right?

If done well, /yes/, a robust core system, able to handle a wide range of concepts, easily tweaked and added to when more specificity is needed.

That last sentence brings what I'm trying to say somewhat back together and saves it from my rambling. Mechanics and fluff should -in my opinion- be built with each other in mind.

I think what you're hoping for from 5e - a very modular game that, like GURPS, can handle a lot of very different stories and tones and styles - would not be best achieved by doing that. A game system designed to work with a specific proprietary world in a specific genre with a specific tone and meta-plot, absolutely, should be designed that way, with the mechanics being designed along side to support and evoke all the fluff and flavor - the result may not be good mechanics, but good mechanics aren't the point of such a game, the point is the setting and feel. In a game that tries to cater to many settings and feels (styles), the mechanics need to be good, because the game /isn't/ the setting and feel, but a toolkit to create them.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

My objection to the game designer going hard on marrying mechanics to story is that 90% of the time, I'm utterly unimpressed with the story half of the marriage. That is, I think good game designers have, on the whole, been pretty lousy story tellers, and vice versa. It's one of the reasons that game design is part art.

Of course, when it really clicks and hits, you get something nice. However, this seems to be predicated on some designer (or maybe two or three game authors working as a team) hitting gold. Somehow, I don't think WotC is going to approach D&D as, "Hire a bunch of talented people, and then let them each write their solo vision of D&D, ocassionally tag-teaming with another person. Publish. See what fans enjoy."

Despite contradictions the last time I said something similar, I still maintain that it's possible for a committee to do good engineering. It's not likely that they will sustain the art half of the equation.

Maybe the answer is that the in-house folks at WotC should be doing the engineering, but outsource the story parts to a lot more people? If we give you mechanic X, what kind of story can you marry to that? Then publish that and see what sticks?

 

[Argyle King]

Answering a question with a question when my question was "I literally do not understand what you are specifically saying; could you clarify?" complicates my ability to respond. I wasn't arguing with you. I was trying to understand you. But this is the Internet so I guess I'll take a stab at it.

Campaign-specific modifications and additions to a core ruleset are fine and common in my experience. Nautical campaign? Tack on some specific rules for naval combat. You wanna reskin halflings as Christmas elves? Go nuts. Does this answer your question? I have no idea.

My apologies, I misunderstood what exactly you were saying as well.

To some extent, I do believe different settings are better with certain styles of mechanics. As you mentioned, a Nautical campaign would probably need things that a different style of campaign would. Some of the D&D settings have feels, tones, and styles which don't necessarily mesh well with the same stock set of mechanics -at least not without a few tweaks.

 

[Argyle King]

Well, if that was your experience. Still, the 'new monster math' was mostly making monsters more bad-ass, so I don't see how it couldn't have helped at all with 2, let alone easily made it worse.

As with dissociation and realism, at some point you do have to make a willful leap past the game's abstraction and other concessions to being a game to get to the fiction it's helping you resolve. :shrug:

Grind was not something I ever noticed in SCs. Skill rolls don't take long to resolve, and there are only so many required before you inevitably hit n success or 3 failures. Can't really see how that could get grindy... unless it just devolved into arguments about whether given skills were useable or not...?

I felt SCs could grind when the outcome was already mostly obvious and they devolved into rolling just for the sake of rolling.

In the context of monsters... yes, they did more damage, but they became even easier to kill than they already were. Their defenses got worse while the PCs simultaneously gained (via newer books) more offense via better feats; more powerful magic items; etc..

The 'G' in GURPS stands for 'Generic,' y'know. GURPS was designed as system first, story to be added later.

If done well, /yes/, a robust core system, able to handle a wide range of concepts, easily tweaked and added to when more specificity is needed.

I think what you're hoping for from 5e - a very modular game that, like GURPS, can handle a lot of very different stories and tones and styles - would not be best achieved by doing that. A game system designed to work with a specific proprietary world in a specific genre with a specific tone and meta-plot, absolutely, should be designed that way, with the mechanics being designed along side to support and evoke all the fluff and flavor - the result may not be good mechanics, but good mechanics aren't the point of such a game, the point is the setting and feel. In a game that tries to cater to many settings and feels (styles), the mechanics need to be good, because the game /isn't/ the setting and feel, but a toolkit to create them.

I do not expect 5E to be on the same level of modularity as GURPS. However, I did point to the Dungeon Fantasy line because it is a particular product line which is meant for a certain genre of game. It takes a modular system and distills it down into parts which are better suited for that genre/style.

That is where I feel 5E should be modular. I feel it should have the idea of what D&D means at the core, but then allow for modularity to fine tune the game and/or to better suit the different campaign settings. As I said in a few older posts, I expect something similar in build to GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, but with a few less steps toward modularity. I expect less steps in modularity because I understand there are certain aspects of the system which will need to be more concrete so as to have the core be D&D. After those less steps, I then expect some D20isms to be mixed in. I pointed to Dungeon Fantasy because -while it is not a d20 game nor D&D- I think it is an example of how you can take a modular game and still build it around a specific genre and/or style. I believe it is a model which the WoTC team could learn from.

Some of the comments about design ideals thus far have me somewhat worried that too much of a particular style is being bolted into the core; so much so that modularity will become a secondary goal. I do expect some particular things to be part of core so as to make the game 'feel like D&D,' but i believe making it too concrete without enough of a mind toward modularity will make it 'feel like D&D' for some parts of the D&D community more so than others. I'm of the impression that a design goal is for everyone to be able to accept the next edition as D&D; to heal a fractured fanbase.

 

[Argyle King]

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[Argyle King]

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[Argyle King]

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[Argyle King]

Four posts; ah ah ah.

http://misc.thefullwiki.org/Number_of_the_Day