Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

Satyrn said:

since the Battlemaster can spend Superiority Dice to disarm and shove, does this mean the Champion is prohibited? I'd hope not, but it can be tough to make it work for both players.

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To my mind, this is a sign of poor design, or perhaps - in a mass-market RPG - compromise design.

4e suffered from it a bit, but p 42 and related ideas and methods provided a framework to try and handle it.

But the basic issue is: if player A spends PC build resources to open up a particular option, and player B has access to the same option without having spent the resources, then why did A bother? The 4e solution is that player A's access to the options is (at least in principle; p 42 isn't comprehensive) more robust and more effective. HeroQuest revised (which is a free descriptor game) takes a different approach: if one player has choen a more precise and colourful descriptor than the other, then when that second player brings his/her more generic descriptor to bear in that more precise context s/he takes a penalty to the check.

I don't know how 5e is meant to handle this in any systematic fashion.

This is a little tangential but still related, I think:

Today I ran a Starfinder one shot at a small local convention. I love that game, it is a full of fun science fantasy tomfoolery. (I even have a couple monsters coming out in Starfinder AP #9.) But, it was a stark reminder for me on the differences in design philosophy between the 3.x games and 5e. Starfinder is very much of the latter ilk, and it shows in a lot of ways. the pregens for the players were full packets in order to provide players with the information the needed to run their characters. In addition, the sheer numbers involved were weird after playing and running 5E a lot over the past year (7th level characters with +18 skill modifiers, etc...)

The two schools of game design are very different. i won't say one is better than the other, but they certainly appeal to different sets of preferences. And while there are a few elements of the 3.x school I still prefer, generally speaking the 5e school works better for me and my GMing style. I will be interested to see how high level 5E goes for me when I run my first 17th level playtest next Friday.

Anyway, my point is mostly that there is a real difference and I can understand the design team making a choice and sticking to it. I don't think you can offer the kinds of player facing choices 3.x games offer while still embracing the loosey-goosey GM centric mechanics of 5E.

Psikerlord# said:

I think most of Mearl's tweet is garbage, especially the purported intentions of 3e and 4e, but if their 5e intent was to make a cakewalk game that ensures the party gets from plot point A to plot point Z, via a long winded adventure path, with a "strong narrative" to "enjoy", they succeeded.

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That's probably stronger than I would put it!

But clearly if your basic model for play is the adventure path - or any other module/story which works by starting at event/encounter 1 and then working through to event/encounter N - then either the players need to succeed at each of 1, 2, 3, . . . N-1, or else the GM needs to adjust the consequences to compensate for failure (eg if the players miss the clue at 1, the GM feeds it to them at 2 instead). If and of 1 through N-1 is a fight, in a system which sets the stakes for losing a fight at death, then victory by the PCs better be pretty close to certain.

I'm not sure if that's what you've got in mind by "cakewalk".

5E could certainly use some self contained adventures. I know they are not terribly profitable, but they do serve to create shared experiences for the community as well as support the majority of GMs that run primarily homebrew campaigns. Really, 5E needs Dungeon and Dragon back. At the very least, WotC should curate the DMsGuild in a way that emulates those magazines for the modern era.

pemerton said:

To my mind, this is a sign of poor design, or perhaps - in a mass-market RPG - compromise design.

4e suffered from it a bit, but p 42 and related ideas and methods provided a framework to try and handle it.

But the basic issue is: if player A spends PC build resources to open up a particular option, and player B has access to the same option without having spent the resources, then why did A bother? The 4e solution is that player A's access to the options is (at least in principle; p 42 isn't comprehensive) more robust and more effective. HeroQuest revised (which is a free descriptor game) takes a different approach: if one player has choen a more precise and colourful descriptor than the other, then when that second player brings his/her more generic descriptor to bear in that more precise context s/he takes a penalty to the check.

I don't know how 5e is meant to handle this in any systematic fashion.

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If you look at it, it's actually great design.

The Battlemaster doesn't get extra options there, they just get to do that stuff AND do damage. That's the difference.

Mercurius said:

it is far easier to "dial up" complexity than "dial down." In other words, it is easier to add in bits and bobs to complexify your own game than to take an already complex game and simplify.

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I don't think that this is true in general. Like most things about mechanical design, it depends on the details.

Moldvay Basic is a reasonably simple game. It can be made more complex by eg bringing in bits and pieces of AD&D, like the separation of race and class, or differential weapon damage for size S-M and size L, or more and more complicated spells, etc.

Prince Valiant is a reasonably simple game. I have no idea how you woud go about making it more complex. The advice in the rulebook (at least my version, which is from the recent Kickstarter; I don't know if this was in the original book) is "If you want a more complex Arthurian game, try Pendragon". Which seems the right suggestion to me.

Burning Wheel in its full glory is a complex game, but it can be pretty easily simplified (by dropping the detailed combat and magic systems) to be a game of simply "GM sets the DC, player makes a check on the appropriate attribute on his/her sheet" - which is fairly simple in mechanical terms at least (not necessarily in its demands on the GM's ability to adjudicate).

Classic Traveller is a moderately complex game (though simpler, I think, than any post-Moldvay edition of D&D) and I can't see how any of that complexity could be stripped out without narrowing the range of play the game allows for (ie unlike Burning Wheel, dropping subsystems equates to dropping that aspect of play, be it starship travel or planetary exploration or whatever).

5e could fairly easily be made more complex by eg introducing more intricate rules for setting DCs out of combat, by lengthening the spell lists, by introducing more feats that are more mechanically intricate, etc. But it couldn't be made more complex by eg introducing 4e-style PC gen (ie power-based) - you might write up new classes based on the warlock, but if you look at eg the Champion fighter there's simply not the design space to reconstruct that as a power-based fighter. (Which contrasts, say, with Moldvay Basic which makes it pretty easy to separate race and class and thus take the game closer to its more complex cousins.)

Parmandur said:

It is extremely relevant, as a major part of the Next playtest was going back to basics and seeing what worked in earlier editions. Mearls has been clear elsewhere that bringing the game closer to what worked for people in AD&D and BECMI was a design goal...that has worked very well. They spent a lot of time in Next tuning the complexity to work for the audience needs.

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That is a very different conversation than the one at hand here. There is nothing in Mearl’s tweet or my response to it about pre-3e Editions, and bringing up the similarity between 5e and previous editions does not address my point in any way.

ad_hoc said:

If you look at it, it's actually great design.

The Battlemaster doesn't get extra options there, they just get to do that stuff AND do damage. That's the difference.

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OK, but that just pushes the issue back one step. Why can't my Champion fighter push someone to the ground and do damage in the process?

I can't see an in-fiction reason for that. It's pure metagame that runs directly counter to the idea that in a RPG "I can try and do anything".

pemerton said:

OK, but that just pushes the issue back one step. Why can't my Champion fighter push someone to the ground and do damage in the process?

I can't see an in-fiction reason for that. It's pure metagame that runs directly counter to the idea that in a RPG "I can try and do anything".

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That's not really true though, nor has it ever been. The fighter can't try and cost fireball or turn undead. Why? Because those are class abilities. So is being able to take a complex action (knocking an opponent prone) AND being able to try and hurt them in the process. Once you accept the limitations inherent in the character class system, complaining that you don't automatically have access to the abilities of another class, even if it seems thematically similar to the one you chose, is kind of weaksauce.

Of course, what things are "reasonably" partitioned mechanically is a matter of preference. Some people likely think a fighter character should be able to steal the wizard's spellbook and follow the instructions and pull off the magic because to them the fiction says magic is a function of precise technical performance. Similarly, other folks will be on the side of the fiction saying Battlemasters are highly trained specialists and only they can pull off certain complex feats in the stress of combat.

Neither is right or wrong, but the table needs to come to a consensus about what the truth is before arguments erupt.

pemerton said:

OK, but that just pushes the issue back one step. Why can't my Champion fighter push someone to the ground and do damage in the process?

I can't see an in-fiction reason for that. It's pure metagame that runs directly counter to the idea that in a RPG "I can try and do anything".

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Same as anything else - because you chose to learn other techniques when that choice was presented to you. That’s not simply metagame disconnected from in-character decisions. That’s the opportunity cost of the choices you made.