Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

Eric V said:

Shove your award, Oofta.

I never said the designers were lazy people, no matter what you and your ilk try to frame it as. They might work very hard in a great many areas (not that you or I would know), but some of the design in the game is lazy, in that it either defaults to a much older edition's framework, or remains ambiguous with few good examples of how to run it for the DM. That's lazy design.

As for 5e being perfect...it's true that no one has said it is, to the best of my knowledge.

It's also true that virtually every single time people try to point out a criticism of it, the criticism goes mostly unacknowledged and the critic gets personally attacked, like what happened with the poster above who had the misfortune of being insulted by Defcon.

So...maybe it's not perfect, but the defenders here sure act like it.

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Parmandur said:

"Lazy design" means that it wasn't worked for: if careful research and testing shows that an earlier edition did something in a way that worked better, it is not lazy to go with the superior rule. If it turns out in play that ambiguity works better, it is not lazy to decide to err on the side of open interpretation.

Lazy is not doing the work to find out what works, or deciding to go with what feels right rather than following the data.

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Kobold Boots said:

I agree, but a page count of a book is not directly correlated to the number of rules in it. If you'd like to do the lift and actually count all of the source books for the editions and figure out how many rules there are for your comparison, power to you. But I think the level of abstraction necessary to make a point is simply the number of books in the edition.

3 and 3.5 had 12 core rulebooks and about 60 WoTC published supplemental works.
4 had 8 core rulebooks and about 26 WoTC published supplemental works.
5 has three official core rulebooks and 8 supplemental rulebooks.

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Eric V said:

I know how I used the term; I don't think I will let someone else, (especially you, of all people) to redefine my statement for me.

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clearstream said:

I'm comparing core book to core book. I don't think it is justified to count supplements for several reasons. The obvious reason is that we cannot say today how many 5th edition will go on to have, whereas there likely will not be any further WotC 3rd edition supplements. Then of course, supplements are not essential to play: they're optional. For a group that doesn't include them they add zero rules weight. Less obvious perhaps is the simple implausibility of the position. Hundreds of pages of core rules seems heavy weight to me. A lighter weight system might be something like Savage Worlds... which, of course, has a great many supplements.

That as may be, there are two kinds of argument being made here. The first is that both 3rd and 5th edition are heavy weight rule systems. The second is that they are of roughly even weight as such. Page count and rules density on a page is an indicator, but cannot be conclusive about weightiness in this sense. For instance, one could envision light weight rules, expressed verbosely. The two arguments can be sustained separately or together: if either is sustained, then 5th edition is a heavy weight rules system.

One might also raise the question of who for? RPGs that posters here might generally agree are light weight, might seem heavy weight to someone unfamiliar with the kind of game manuals these boards address. I think the question of weightiness is rightly a relative one - is 5th edition D&D relatively heavier than Savage Worlds? - and is rightly measured from the perspective of the community of hobbyists who are familiar with them.

Having DM'd 3rd edition and 5th edition, running weekly sessions for years, I find that the systems of equal weight. That's the bottom line, for me. I've played both for hundreds of hours, and in play, 5th edition is as heavy as 3rd edition. I've played Savage Worlds, and it seems lighter than both to me.

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Parmandur said:

I would say 5E is a heavy weight system, true. Option heavy, for most people, even.

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ad_hoc said:

What do we mean by heavy though?

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Parmandur said:

I would say 5E is a heavy weight system, true. Option heavy, for most people, even.

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ad_hoc said:

What do we mean by heavy though?

D&D 5e is a gateway game. There are millions of new players, who aren't hobby gamers, who are playing it.

I am familiar with the scale of light-heavy from boardgames. Perhaps it is used differently with RPGs.

Not all light games are gateway games, but all gateway games are light.

Obviously RPGs are different than boardgames and need to be categorized by different metrics. I just wonder if we all mean the same thing with light-heavy. I don't know what people mean by it when applying it to RPGs.

The way 5e plays is certainly much lighter than 3e. It is designed so that players don't need to look up any rules during play. Just go with what the table deems reasonable and move on - that is probably the rule anyway. The adventures are super easy to pick up and play. When I DM I don't even read very much, I just go along with it as we play.

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clearstream said:

The 3rd edition Players Handbook was 304 pages of mostly rules.
The 4th edition Players Handbook was 320 pages of mostly rules.
The 5th edition Players Handbook is 320 pages of mostly rules.

For me, a reasonable definition of "not as rules heavy" would involve having noticeably fewer rules.

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