innerdude
Legend
More and more I'm beginning to believe that roleplaying game designers have to make the decision up front, before they do anything else, whether the fluff, or setting, or milieu, or whatever you want to call it, should control the mechanics--or whether it should be the other way around.
I'm older than many gamers these days (mid-30s), but I'm also not old enough to have been gaming in the "Dawn of Gygax" Era in the mid-1970s. So if some of my commentary here on the origins of D&D are off, please let me know.
(And since Col. Pladoh isn't around to help out, bless his soul.)
That said, the whole "Mike Mearls/Core of D&D" threads have gotten me thinking.
Based on the things I've read and understood--and again, if I'm wrong, let me know--it seems that E. Gary Gygax had Vancian style magic in mind as the "default magic system" for D&D since basically its inception. The concept of memorization, then "burning" the spell energy out of memory had been Gygax's personal "vision" for magic-use, and every rule mechanic that used, or touched on magic, was based on that paradigm.
But did Gygax's partiality to Vancian "fluff" control the mechanics of the system--or was Vancian simply a mechanic that "made sense" to him, and thus controlled the fluff that surrounded it?
It seems fairly clear (at least to me) that based on the commentary of the designers, the rules themselves, and the massive overhaul that the rules necessitated for the Forgotten Realms, that 4e was created with the mechanics primarily in mind, and fluff only secondarily. For good or ill (probably a little of both), the rules themselves took primacy over trying to shoehorn them into any particular setting.
To a certain degree, I respect that. In essence it was WotC saying, "Here's our game, if you want your worlds to work within this framework, you're going to have to mold them to it." It's a bold, probably necessary statement, based on what 4e was trying to accomplish.
The problem is--and this may be partially why the player base fractured so badly--the mechanical approach to the 4e rules allowed less leeway in changing the core model than prior editions. (Bear in mind I'm not saying it allowed NO leeway, only less leeway than other editions historically.) It's simply harder to deviate from 4e's normative paradigms than other editions, thus narrowing the boundaries on expected gameplay style.
Interestingly, I'm not sure 3.x got completely right either. 3.x, it seems to me, was an attempt to "meet halfway" in the middle. 3.x had 25 years of gameplay, and TONS AND TONS AND TONS of 1e / 2e novelizations (that were frankly TSR's cash cows for much of the '80s and '90s) to keep in balance. Vancian magic was hard coded into the Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms novels.
3.x seemed to be an attempt to say, "Well, the novels all say magic works this way, so the rules still need to feel that way. We're just going to try and make it, and the rest of the system, more streamlined, elegant, and refined."
Balance was also an obvious core goal of 3.x--though not as rigidly as 4e turned out--but it feels like to me that if a question came down to "balance" versus "maintaining the core trope and feel this mechanic represents," 3.x erred on the side of the trope. In other words, it was more important for it to "feel like D&D" than it was to for it to be the most mechanically superior option.
Unfortunately, this led to a lot of conflicts down the road, as 8 years of gameplay would show. Stuff that had to "feel like D&D" didn't end up working as well in context of balance and in some cases, playability. For many, it was "close enough," but certainly not for all.
4e put its primacy in mechanics; 3.x in "feeling like D&D" (fluff, existing tropes).
The question for me is, how does making that choice manifest itself in the rules of an RPG, and in any settings they are based on?
Does one particular choice support certain types of styles better? If we as players are looking for a particular type of game, is it important to know which paradigm the rules were based on? Does it change our expectations of how a game should and does work, if that distinction is made clear?
I appreciate what Mearls is trying to do with his posts, to an extent, but it seems to me that if you analyze the "Core of D&D," up through 3.x, the mechanical assumptions are based more on the fluff, rather than the other way around.
I'm older than many gamers these days (mid-30s), but I'm also not old enough to have been gaming in the "Dawn of Gygax" Era in the mid-1970s. So if some of my commentary here on the origins of D&D are off, please let me know.
(And since Col. Pladoh isn't around to help out, bless his soul.)
That said, the whole "Mike Mearls/Core of D&D" threads have gotten me thinking.
Based on the things I've read and understood--and again, if I'm wrong, let me know--it seems that E. Gary Gygax had Vancian style magic in mind as the "default magic system" for D&D since basically its inception. The concept of memorization, then "burning" the spell energy out of memory had been Gygax's personal "vision" for magic-use, and every rule mechanic that used, or touched on magic, was based on that paradigm.
But did Gygax's partiality to Vancian "fluff" control the mechanics of the system--or was Vancian simply a mechanic that "made sense" to him, and thus controlled the fluff that surrounded it?
It seems fairly clear (at least to me) that based on the commentary of the designers, the rules themselves, and the massive overhaul that the rules necessitated for the Forgotten Realms, that 4e was created with the mechanics primarily in mind, and fluff only secondarily. For good or ill (probably a little of both), the rules themselves took primacy over trying to shoehorn them into any particular setting.
To a certain degree, I respect that. In essence it was WotC saying, "Here's our game, if you want your worlds to work within this framework, you're going to have to mold them to it." It's a bold, probably necessary statement, based on what 4e was trying to accomplish.
The problem is--and this may be partially why the player base fractured so badly--the mechanical approach to the 4e rules allowed less leeway in changing the core model than prior editions. (Bear in mind I'm not saying it allowed NO leeway, only less leeway than other editions historically.) It's simply harder to deviate from 4e's normative paradigms than other editions, thus narrowing the boundaries on expected gameplay style.
Interestingly, I'm not sure 3.x got completely right either. 3.x, it seems to me, was an attempt to "meet halfway" in the middle. 3.x had 25 years of gameplay, and TONS AND TONS AND TONS of 1e / 2e novelizations (that were frankly TSR's cash cows for much of the '80s and '90s) to keep in balance. Vancian magic was hard coded into the Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms novels.
3.x seemed to be an attempt to say, "Well, the novels all say magic works this way, so the rules still need to feel that way. We're just going to try and make it, and the rest of the system, more streamlined, elegant, and refined."
Balance was also an obvious core goal of 3.x--though not as rigidly as 4e turned out--but it feels like to me that if a question came down to "balance" versus "maintaining the core trope and feel this mechanic represents," 3.x erred on the side of the trope. In other words, it was more important for it to "feel like D&D" than it was to for it to be the most mechanically superior option.
Unfortunately, this led to a lot of conflicts down the road, as 8 years of gameplay would show. Stuff that had to "feel like D&D" didn't end up working as well in context of balance and in some cases, playability. For many, it was "close enough," but certainly not for all.
4e put its primacy in mechanics; 3.x in "feeling like D&D" (fluff, existing tropes).
The question for me is, how does making that choice manifest itself in the rules of an RPG, and in any settings they are based on?
Does one particular choice support certain types of styles better? If we as players are looking for a particular type of game, is it important to know which paradigm the rules were based on? Does it change our expectations of how a game should and does work, if that distinction is made clear?
I appreciate what Mearls is trying to do with his posts, to an extent, but it seems to me that if you analyze the "Core of D&D," up through 3.x, the mechanical assumptions are based more on the fluff, rather than the other way around.
They were just as wiling to take risks with the fluff as with the mechanics.
