The MAYA Design Principle, or Why D&D's Future is Probably Going to Look Mostly Like Its Past

Had to share this article, as it pretty much sums up the last 10 years of the D&D product line. In fact, the very first consumer product that came to mind when I read the MAYA principle was Dungeons and Dragons.


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-four-letter-code-to-selling-just-about-anything


In terms of product design, MAYA stands for the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" version of a given product, with one of the primary keys being familiarity.

Research suggests that we, "The Consumer," want products that are familiar yet contain just enough novelty to hold our attention. In this light, it's not hard to see why 5e has become the most popular version of the Dungeons and Dragons product line of all time. It hit all the right notes in mapping to the familiar 1e/2e/3e core, while providing enough novelty (adv/disadv, revised feats, revised magic) to keep things fresh.

I think for me, though, it reinforced something that the 4e "experiment" seemed to bear out. Based on the MAYA principle, the actual "D&D" product line (as opposed to one of its many OGL derivatives) is unlikely to meaningfully diverge from its current core. As a result, if at any point you're no longer a fan of the "D&D" core product as-is, you're probably better off looking for wholly different systems as an alternative, as the core is unlikely to radically change from within.

If you want a "new" or "different" "D&D", you're either going to have to kit-bash it yourself, or look elsewhere.

The other thing that was interesting from the article is that it reinforced strongly the idea that exposure is also key. One of the reasons it's so hard to get people off of the D&D product is that it's FAR AND AWAY the system that players are exposed to. So if you want to get your group to switch to a new system, you've got to get them actual exposure to it, probably through several different means.

Anyway, found the article interesting and thought I'd share.

Very interesting and informative. I agree this is probably a major contributor to the reaction to D&D 4E. 4E isn't perfect but it is a great game, imho. It definitely strayed too far from the formula and wasn't very popular for that reason.

The interesting bit will be to watch how Pathfinder 2E does with this concept in mind. I think Paizo is a very smart company and won't stray too far but if the playtest taught us anything, they are definitely trying to be innovative.

You're not wrong. I consider 4e to be a step in the game's evolution until it did a backslide into 5e. 5e is closer to what I wanted in 3e, but 4e is what I really enjoyed and wished to see progress and evolve further in 5e. 5e does not innovate with any new ideas for me, so I moved on.

PF2 could get my interest, but I am fully invested now in other games that do things different and (dare I say) better in some aspects.

Familiarity doesn't explain 5e's success breaking into the mainstream? Or rather, it's a different familiarity - for at least the last 10 years, D&D has been, along with nerd culture more generally, exposed to the mainstream. Whether thats seeing a bizare facsimile of it being played on Big Band Theory, or watching streaming play - or playing derivative CRPGs or MMOs - it's a very different familiar than 5e has or 4e lacked with existing fans.

And, it's familiarity that can be gained without exposure to edition warring. Because 4e wasn't broadly unpopular with D&D fans, it was actively maligned and sabotaged by a particular segment of that fanbase.

Tony Vargas said:

Because 4e wasn't broadly unpopular with D&D fans, it was actively maligned and sabotaged by a particular segment of that fanbase.

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Actively sabotaged by Mike Mearls, too.

If 4e had had one quarter of the management backing and marketing resources that 5e has, we'd all still be playing it.

Joshua Randall said:

Actively sabotaged by Mike Mearls, too.

If 4e had had one quarter of the management backing and marketing resources that 5e has, we'd all still be playing it.

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I got the impression that 5e was done on a shoestring, sort of a Hail Mary, pitched to an indifferent Hasbro as maybe rehabilitating the brand enough to use it in other media.
It just happened to be released into a TT renaisance - even then, I thought that'd stay limited to boardgames.
But, in a favorable market, without the negativity of an edition war, the D&D name finally generated the long-looked-for, and genuine come-back.

Jacob Lewis said:

You're not wrong. I consider 4e to be a step in the game's evolution until it did a backslide into 5e.

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Not relevant to any particular game or edition: This is not how evolution works. Evolution does not have a preferred forward, and thus no backward. Either "evolution" is not a proper word to describe the game's change over time, or the concepts you are applying here do not apply.

I can see an argument that the game is evolving - evolution contains the concept of variations *that fail*, that do not fit the environment in which they find themselves, and they die out. I am not sure the evolution analogy fits perfectly, but if you want to use it, that's probably the way to look at it.

Umbran said:

Not relevant to any particular game or edition: This is not how evolution works. Evolution does not have a preferred forward, and thus no backward. Either "evolution" is not a proper word to describe the game's change over time, or the concepts you are applying here do not apply.

I can see an argument that the game is evolving - evolution contains the concept of variations *that fail*, that do not fit the environment in which they find themselves, and they die out. I am not sure the evolution analogy fits perfectly, but if you want to use it, that's probably the way to look at it.

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That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks Darwin!

I'll need to consider better terminology for what I'm trying to say... Hello, Thesaurus!

Jacob Lewis said:

That actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks Darwin!

I'll need to consider better terminology for what I'm trying to say... Hello, Thesaurus!

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I mean, saying 4e was an advance, and 5e a step back works, if that's what you think.

Mulling over the evolution analogy... I note that evolution is not an *overall* statement of a creature's fitness. There is no such thing as "overall fitness". A creature is only judged relative to the environment/niche it finds itself in at the time. It either lives, shifts to a different niche that happens to be readily accessible from where it is, or dies.

Which is to say, failure in evolution doesn't say you are bad, just not right for where and when you were. From the evolutionary standpoint then, we can say 4e's fall doesn't say it is a bad game in a general sense - just a poor fit to be the flagship RPG product (which is the niche D&D generally sits in) at that time. We could imagine it in a different niche - some other company, positioning it as another fantasy game - and it might have lasted longer.

Umbran said:

Which is to say, failure in evolution doesn't say you are bad, just not right for where and when you were.

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Also, evolution doesn't really happen at the individual level. An individual might carry wonderfully 'fit' genes for the environment, but fail to reproduce due to some freak accident, for instance - but, over a large population and many generations, blips like that are overwhelmed, and the sufficiently-fit proliferate.

Games don't /really/ evolve from one ed to another, since they're literally an example of intelligent design (no matter what you think of the designers' talent or artistic merits, they're intelligent). But how a given ed is played out in the wild, that could 'evolve' in a meme-like way, if play that works well at some tables is propagated to others, while that which is dysfunctional leads to tables abandoning the game.

I mean, saying 4e was an advance, and 5e a step back works, if that's what you think.

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4 steps forward, 5 steps back.