Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

clearstream said:

I could be taking this out of context, but I agree with your observations here. It's part of what I mean about the 5e system being sophisticated and woven across all the rules. I do a lot of tinkering and one of the things that makes mechanics for 5e tough to get right is the way they relate to one another. As you say, you might think - this frighten effect I'm homebrewing seems fine - and then you realise what it interacts with and balances against... and not just spells, but creature saves etc, etc, etc...

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I don't think you've taken me out of context.

Earlier today I GMed a session of Prince Valiant. Each PC has two ability scores - Brawn and Presence - rated from 1 to 6; and a rating from 0 to 6 across a series of 20-30 skills. Action resolution is tossing a pool of coins equal to the sum of the skill rating (if there is an applicable one) and abiity rating (some skills, like healing, don't take an ability score) - we use dice rather than coins, couting evens as successes - either as an opposed check or against a difficulty number (1 is easy, 4 is hard). Some resolution - combat the obvious example - is extended, with the margin of success applied as a reduction on the other person's pool, generating a "death spiral" effect. There is no resource management, except for keeping track of how many lances your knight might have splintered in jousts!

With those rules, plus the skill lists, you could practically run a session of Prince Valiant. You'd need the rules for equipment and other dice pool modifiers - they take a couple of pages.

That's what I think a "light" system, based on "naturalistic" extrapolation from infiction situation to resolution, looks like. Not a system with a 400 page SRD!

5e has intricate mechanics - spells most obviously, but other class features and feats also - and they correlate to the fiction in various complex and frequently overlapping ways (the Battlemaster/Champion discussion upthread is just one exmple), and also interact with complex resource expenditure and recovery rules, action economy, and other purely mechanical phenomena.

(The lightest system I've GMed is Cthulhu Dark - each PC is just a name and a job, with a very simple dice pool resolution system built up out of an occupation die (if applicable), a humanity die (if you're trying something within human capabilities) and a sanity die (if you choose to risk your sanity to succeed). The rules for the game are fewer than 1000 words.)

UngeheuerLich said:

I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. It is not a greatest hits. It is a new game that takes elements of all esitions and merges them to the great game we have now. Having followed the whole playtest process I think I can say it did in no way seem lazy. But yes, a lot od innovations I really loved were thrown out again and if some of them would male it into an advanced dungeons and dragons book I would be happy. Lets see what the future brings.

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I sincerely appreciate the respect. In that same respect, I would ask...are you sure we disagree? If I replace "game" with "album" and "elements" with "songs" I get "It is a new album that takes songs of all esitions and merges them to the great album we have now."

I mean, that sounds like the definition of 'greatest hits.' Especially since, as you rightfully pointed out, a lot of innovations were thrown out again. Put another way, every edition of D&D brought something new, something innovative to my RPG experience...I can't think of how 5e has done that, I honestly can't. And I play the game!

For the bolded part, I'd like to reiterate that I am sure the process, as you pointed out, was hard-worked and not lazy; I am referring to elements of the subsequent design, only.

Kobold Boots said:

I think that you and I have conversations where we spend a lot of time drilling into minutiae that neither one of us intends to elaborate on based on the context of the posts that are quoted.

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I honestly don't understand your post or what you're talking about or alluding to here. I'm making what I think is a fairly straightforward claim - that 4e and 5e differ in respect of more than just options; in particular, that 4e has a non-combat conflict resolution mechanic and 5e doesn't.

Kobold Boots said:

with the intention of the DM as designer of last resort in every version of the rules that any table's actual experience is different from any other table's. It makes conversations about rules and validity nearly impossible when talking about practical application and only useful in the theoretical realm of a table where only "rules as written" are used.

The rules don't exist in a vacuum. No one really plays only rules as written, so whether or not action resolution mechanics establish a difference between systems, doesn't really matter.

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What RPGs do you play?

Today I GMed a session of Prince Valiant. Three weeks ago I GMed a session of Cthulhu Dark. My group also has currently active campaigns using Classic Traveller, Burning Wheel and Cortext+ Heroic Fantasy, and we have a couple of 4e campaigns on hold until one of us finishes building his house and can get back to RPGing. One of our group members is in an active 5e game with a different group.

The inference from "the rules don't exist in a vacuum" to "differences in system don't matter" is so far from my experience I find it very hard to credit.

Kobold Boots said:

I do think that players who are inclined to some degree of anti-social behavior are going to look for reasons to not listen to their DM, and similarly those inclined DMs won't listen to their players. In those cases there's a high degree of passive aggressive behavior that puts the rules in the middle -- because god forbid anyone takes fault on themselves.

If I were to have a horse in the race, I'd be betting this phenomena is what Mearls is talking about and what they're not designing for anymore. Let the DM deal with that sort of thing was smart in the beginning and it's smart now.

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This might be an issue for some club or pick-up games. It's irrelevant to me and doesn't factor into any of my thinkg about RPGs.

From time-to-time I read posters who say that if the GM and players aren't anti-social then we don't need mechanics. I'm not sure if you're saying that, but (i) if it was true then it would apply to PC build as much as action resolution, in which case we could have as many options as we want and it wouldn't matter; and (ii) it's not true, assuming that I want to play a game rather than just sit around with my friends and tell a story, which I don't need dice or rules to do.

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UngeheuerLich said:

4e was the epitome of rules lawyering when you bothered to read forums.

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I can go to the 5e forum on this message board and almost be guaranteed to find a thread about perception or hiding. Look at the 4e threads that are or have recently been active on the old editions forum. They're not debating rules minutiae.

lowkey13 said:

Or, let me try this out- instead of retreating to trying to use logical fallacies in a normal discussion,* how about maybe you just have different preferences?

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I would have appreciated what Mearls said much better if he had just said it was about different preferences, rather than giving me two fallacies that show that either he was lying to me(no need for fallacies when you tell the truth) or that he didn't understand what he was doing when designing(designing a game based on a False Equivalence and Red Herring).

I'm just going to point out that if someone says, "I'm doing X because of Y," and you happen to not like X, and wish they weren't doing X, you might wish to consider your own point of view before formulating your argument. Otherwise, it might appear that you were ignoring what was being said and simply attacking people and citing logical fallacies regarding a twitter thread (?!?) as opposed to trying to constructively engage with the ideas.

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He was the one who said that the game design he chose was because of two things that didn't equate(player options and rules reliance), and two things unrelated to one another(power imbalance and a loose narrative playstyle). If true, it's scary that he's a designer, and if false he lied to me. I don't really appreciate either one of those.

At least if he had just said, "Hey, we're doing it this way because we want to do it this way." and left it at that, it would have been a more respectable answer. Instead, he's trying to pull the wool over the eyes of people by putting forth reasons that don't make sense, cloaked as why he's not doing things that many people want..

Hi Pem -

Answer to what games I play actively: Rolemaster, 4e, 5e.

In my experience all play differently than the others but the outcomes are the same. None of my players question house rules and in all cases, house rules materially effect how they play. Therefore if I were to have a conversation about any of these systems with folks that aren't in my group, (like on this forum) I'd have to default to RAW to expect a degree of understanding. However, any discussion had here based on RAW would not in any way reflect gameplay at my table.

Which is what I'm getting at when we start hashing out discussions here. Things we say here aren't very reflective of what's actually going on.

Mechanics and rules are two entirely different things. Rules enforce how mechanics are implemented. So when we're talking about anti-social behavior, I find that folks often argue a rule, but won't argue +2 on flanking or +2 for advantage.

Thanks,
KB

*Deleted by user*

Eric V said:

She's not saying the whole process was lazy; obviously, gathering all that data required a lot of work.

If I gather a lot of data and publish a work based on the options that were most popular, the design might be lazy indeed: Just use what was popular (and the options weren't extremely original to 5e).

And hey, 5e is very popular indeed; as you rightfully point out, it "is doing really well and brings a lot of people to the rpg game." Which is great for RPGs as a whole!

5e is not a particularly innovative game, though. It's basically a 'greatest hits' D&D that feels like D&D 2.5. In that particular sense, I could see the design being characterized as lazy.

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Hmmm... we may be working off different definitions of lazy. i do not tend to put "lazy" and "innovative" as antonyms of each other. One refers to effort, the other refers to imagination or making more radical changes - neither of which necessitates effort - just different goals.

I never expect a 5th edition or even really a 3rd or 4th to be particularly "innovative". If you are going to be "innovative" it either hits at 2nd edition or as a new game. By 5th edition i expect them to be targetting portions of their fanbase and so - yeah a "dnd greatest hits album" with a bit of polish and so is pretty much dead on.

Pathfinder is it seems going the same route - in the opposite direction. Their playtest material and design goals seem to be the same as before:
1 - try to hook those who glammed onto DND but want more crunch and tight rules
2 - design mostly tho for hard crunch of the already existing PF audience (rules like computer code)

I like a lot of what they are doing and it appelas greatly to the game system fu part of me (which is a big part of me), but... I cannot think of any game i am playing in or running right now where it would be *better* if we moved to anything like PF2. i think each would be worse and we would lose more players than we gain.

In a way, at the table, in the game, its like I/we make the same trade-offs - how much time do we want to spend on the crunch vs the play vs the story vs the drama?

So it is *not* to me a choice i would embrace.

But neither of those is one i would call lazy or even really innovative.

doctorbadwolf said:

This is a weird argument, IMO. I won’t ever play every option, sure. But my group will eventually play most of them, and all the groups I know will probably play all of them.

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7
Given enough time, yes. But most groups don't play a single game for that many campaigns before switching to a different game, or changing editions.

doctorbadwolf said:

More importantly, there is nothing in 4e that is like the Assassin, or the Gloom Pact Hexblade, or a Cunning Bard who incongruously focused on fighting in melee, or a multi-target focused mixed range rogue (dagger thrower or hand crossbow build), or a Beast Master Ranger, or I could go on and on.

PHB only 5e is fun, but very limited, and most players I have ever known just aren’t going to make certain types of characters if there isn’t a relatively clear option for it. There isn’t a combination of options in the PHB that makes a “Spirit Talker”/Shaman type character that mechanically plays like the concept, so the player just opts to play a different concept. Then Xanathar’s comes out, and that player is thrilled that she can play that earlier concept now. It doesn’t matter that she won’t ever even read through the Sorcerer options in the book, she doesn’t care about sorcerer stuff. Yep book has increased her ability to play her “1st choice” character concept when a campaign is starting, instead of settling for something else.

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The catch is human imagination is infinite. There's an infinite number of character concepts that could require options.
But the game DOES NOT need an infinite amount of content.

5e's options are generally pretty limited, as you say. But how many combinations could be played?
There's 40 in the PHB (without getting into races or feats), 7 non-reprinted in SCAG, and 31 in XGtE. For 78 different options. And that's not considering variable sub-options like champion fighter being a swashbuckler or archer or great-weapon fighter or tank. In the content we have now, there is enough for 19 completely different adventuring parties of four. That's 19 different campaigns where no subclass is repeated.
Even if you play weekly, it would take you close to a year to play a level 1 to 20 campaign. But if you played really long sessions and maybe finished a little earlier, you might knock out a campaign in, oh, 9 months. Those 19 different campaigns would still cover fourteen years. We have over a DECADE of content on our shelves right now. But... somehow we need more?

We don't need annual class content, let alone the bi-monthly class supplements of 3e and 4e. No one goes through content that fast.