Mearls: Abilities as the core?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

He does seem to be going somewhere with these...

The latest article sounds like he's just fallen in love with Castles & Crusades (making ability scores handle the bulk of the work is straight from C&C) or an OSR retro-clone.

It'll be interesting to see what destination, if any, he's heading to here.

 

[Sammael]

[MENTION=5]Mark_CMG[/MENTION]:

You are right, I feel the need to relay how things work in my revision because, for the most part, my revision reflects my stance on many system issues. But, let's go to back to system neutral (insofar as it is
actually possible).

How else would you cap and differentiate skills in a class-based system if not by class? I'm curious...

Passive learning in an adventuring context, I think, is far more successful and meaningful than passive learning in everyday life. For example, over the course of his career, pretty much every adventurer (regardless of class) will have to:

• Climb a wall, rock, or tree, jump over a pit or a crevasse, balance on a slippery surface or uneven floor
• Negotiate, lie, cheat, and deceive other people or monsters
• Deal with cults and churches of all sorts
• Resist and witness a number of different magical effects
• Fight similar monsters multiple times, learning their specific strengths and weaknesses
• Stand guard over his comrades, observing the surroundings
• Search for treasure, traps, or hidden passages
• Exchange information for other information or money
• Trek through the wilderness
• Use a strange magical item

That's a pretty wide range of skills, and I just pulled all those samples without much effort. I'm sure a think tank such as ENWorld could compile a huge list of common adventuring tropes.

Furthermore, becoming a high-level character is a huge accomplishment; not many characters make it that far. In order to reach such heights, each character must learn to be at least a little (and here we likely differ on what constitutes "little") self-sufficient when in comes to pretty much everything.

Imagine a 20th level character who gets ripped off at the market because he did not invest anything in the skill that governs negotiation (despite having participated - passively or actively - in a huge number of negotiations by that point). Is it possible that he learned nothing through observation? I don't think so.

In an ideal RPG (from my POV), every character would progress using a "learn by doing" method (with optional off-screen training rules). I tried building one such system and it became a bookkeeping nightmare. So, I'll settle for "passive learning" as the next best thing that reflects all the little things somebody learns that are outside of his or her core competency.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What I like about the current model (and even more the 3e/PF model) is that there is a distinct divide between a characters 'innate' capabilities (ability scores), and the training he has put in various things (skill ranks, feats, and the like). Thus, the character's ability scores absolutely influence your final modifiers/totals, but they don't determine them - and are, in fact, a fairly minor component next to training.

Mike's proposed system would seem to negate that - if you're stuck with a low-Str at 1st level you're going to suck at Athletics... and you're always going to suck at Athletics.

Only if that's the only stat in the mix. C&C's Siege system includes level bonuses. Obviously, your 90-pound weakling's never going to be a threat to the 18 Strength barbarian who put down Strength as a prime stat (C&C gives extra weight to two or three stats, at the player's choice, to represent what the character focuses on, so you can have charming fighters or arm-wrestling wizards), but he'll still get better over time.

 

[Balesir]

In my mind, though, I think more sophisticated game design should be *easier* to communicate and let people get under the hood. D&D has near 40 years of proof that the audience loves to house rule. If they are moving towards a system that makes the rules more opaque, then something wrong is happening.

This may be only a personal view, but in my mind the reason people used to houserule extensively was because the system(s) then avaialble did not do what they wanted them to do. In many cases, the rules did not do anything coherent at all, so houseruling to some degree was essentially mandatory. In other cases the rules tried to appeal to all tastes, so to get them to appeal to your tastes specifically you had to change them.

For me, 4E was the first D&D edition I didn't feel the need to houserule* because it actually does something well. It's not a "something" that I want in all games, but for other "somethings" I have other games; at least for one "mode" or "style" 4E actually works OK out of the box.

The same consideration also means I feel more constrained not to "fiddle" with 4E, however. The fact that it actually does something well means that, if I start changing things, there is something that I might unintentionally "break". With several older games, they worked so poorly to begin with that the risk of "breaking" something was a sort of "it's already broken in that it does X and Y - how bad could it be if I change it?" deal.

*: When I say "houserule" I am really talking about changing the actual rules and character elements, not adding new monsters or traps. To me, those are more comparable to designing adventures or dungeons; there is a set of 'meta-rules' that I follow to design them without actually "houseruling" anything.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think all these posts are a journey...who knows were...but they don't really stand alone.

He is saying you could play in a minimalist style...not that you should. You should be able to control complexity, so that if you want more elaborate skills or defenses/saves, well, then you get those.

Somehow.

A core game with simple rules and then extra packs with optional rules, monsters, classes, spells, and so on, each to cater to a different flavor.

Not hard to do, and it'd be a great unification product that would be a great way to drive product -- Ravenloft would not only be a campaign setting, but it'd have a ton of new monsters, maybe rules for playing as certain types, and rules for horror, madness and ritual magic. The Dark Sun line would be the home of the psionics rules, which could be used anywhere, but which they'd hope would entice you into picking up other Dark Sun products after grabbing the psionics book.

I'd add to the traditional settings a kid-friendly fairy tale/Oz/Narnia inspired book (because D&D needs official rules for player character talking animals, damn it), a steampunk/Victorian magic Falkenstein clone, a modern urban fantasy and maybe a Harry Potter-flavored modern magic high fantasy.

Everyone works off the same D20-but-not core, and bolts on the options they want. Or, if they want to make WotC really happy, buy it all and mix and match the rules, monsters, spells and so on.

 

[Sammael]

A core game with simple rules and then extra packs with optional rules, monsters, classes, spells, and so on, each to cater to a different flavor.

Not hard to do, and it'd be a great unification product that would be a great way to drive product -- Ravenloft would not only be a campaign setting, but it'd have a ton of new monsters, maybe rules for playing as certain types, and rules for horror, madness and ritual magic. The Dark Sun line would be the home of the psionics rules, which could be used anywhere, but which they'd hope would entice you into picking up other Dark Sun products after grabbing the psionics book.

I'd add to the traditional settings a kid-friendly fairy tale/Oz/Narnia inspired book (because D&D needs official rules for player character talking animals, damn it), a steampunk/Victorian magic Falkenstein clone, a modern urban fantasy and maybe a Harry Potter-flavored modern magic high fantasy.

Everyone works off the same D20-but-not core, and bolts on the options they want. Or, if they want to make WotC really happy, buy it all and mix and match the rules, monsters, spells and so on.

It's a pity I can't give you more XP, because I'm in perfect agreement with this! Unless I'm mistaken, something similar was also a part of WotC's plan in the early 2000s - revising the PH every years or so, reskinning it with different
"flavor" (Oriental Adventures, Horror Adventures, etc), while retaining the same core.

 

[Balesir]

Not hard to do, and it'd be a great unification product that would be a great way to drive product -- Ravenloft would not only be a campaign setting, but it'd have a ton of new monsters, maybe rules for playing as certain types, and rules for horror, madness and ritual magic.

...which would almost certainly affect the utility of many of the core character elements and monsters and thus destroy the balance of the system as a Gamist vehicle.

Such a system is perfectly possible - it's been done several times before - but to imagine that it will "please everybody" is simply incorrect. It will appeal to the same folk as the older editions already appeal to, and they will houserule it into something that they actually want to play, as they always did. The only cloud in that sky is that there are already quite a number of systems that already achieve that, and some of the adherents of that approach will wise up to the idea that, if they are going to houserule anyway, they might as well houserule what they already have.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

...which would almost certainly affect the utility of many of the core character elements and monsters and thus destroy the balance of the system as a Gamist vehicle.

Ravenloft, for instance, would theoretically be balanced around Core + Ravenloft, with sidebars talking about what's been tweaked and why.

And D&D has never really been a perfectly balanced Gamist-with-a-capital-G vehicle, so I'm not sure the risk of it failing to accomplish something that it's never achieved outweighs all the good that could come from a more modular system design.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

You seem to be implying there is something new afoot in the design blogs where some of us are seeing misinterpretation of the tradtional elements (see rogueattorney's post and my previous post regarding ability score uses) being used as claim to new insights while presenting nothing innovative, something you imply by claiming mature design though I am not suggesting that it is claimed in the article(s) nor that it is or is not a goal of this process. To me, this echoes the design idea behind stripping PC opponents of anything the designer felt was not germane to what could be used or accomplished in a single combat encounter. It misunderstood the reasoning behind having mutlifaceted opponents in favor of rather bland, IMO, cookie-cutter opponents which produce the grind that many games have come to recognize. The design motivation seems to have been ease of play and encounter creation but the resultant, emergent properties in gameplay are generally less desirable. Having occasional opponents be one-dimensional but exteremely effective in their arena is interesting but having most opponents one-dimensional and then countering that planned effect by combining a variety of one-dimensional opponents is a poor substitute for encountering a variety of multifaceted opponents. It might serve the design goal, and the result might be just as expected, but longterm effect on the play experience seems to wear thin.

I can see why you thought I was implying that, but I wasn't intending to. No, getting back to basics (however understood) is what I'd say is a necessary first step in a longer process. When I'm mentioned maturing design, I'm really reading way ahead to where I think Mearls is going with this. There really isn't much in that last article that warrants it on the surface. So I guess I'm a bit off-topic with that line of thought.

I do think where he is going is a more mature design, though. I guess we'll find out.

I will note that having the six ability scores drive things does not necessarily mean something directly analogous to how the older versions worked. It probably wouldn't, in a game with complexity dials.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As for the skill level cap and "equal opportunity" skills, again, I agree - in a class-based system, not all classes should have the opportunity to advance all skills equally, and the "cap" should differ.

The presense of a cap is somewhat of an admission of design failure. In an elegant and thorough enough system, opportunity costs would make the cap never hit, and thus negate it entirely.

Of course, here in the real world, a cap might still be a better choice than complicating your design to avoid having one. But having a safety net is different than constantly falling off the trapeze onto one.