Me neither! Wait, how's he polling? And, more importantly, did he inhale and will he institute a windfall tax on magic items?
Will the real Mike Mearls please stand up?
- Thread starter Libramarian
- Start date
Doug McCrae
Legend
I'm voting for the Don't Split The Party Party. Anyone who doesn't is a splitter!
nnms
First Post
I don't really want a return to 90s game design where what the author presents the game as being about one thing but then has rules for supporting other stuff and nothing for what the game is actually about.
Rules are useful and following the procedures of a game produces actual consistent play results.
The whole point of game design is to make a game that does something to help produce a desired type of play.
So either Mearls can design (which I think is the case) and the whole "DM empowerment" and "rulings rather than rules" talk in that article was just marketing to old schoolers, or he really intends for the rules not to matter nor to support the play of multiple edition users with rules modules.
I think it was marketing fluff to get old schoolers to think "he finally gets it" but I'm still waiting for anything to prove that modules that truly support different play styles will actually materialize. Right now we have what? Drop themes and backgrounds? And a tweet about healing rates?
That's pretty poor considering all the hype about "reunification."
Friends & Family playtest should have sorted the core system so the design team could have lead with tightly designed modules to give the various types of gaming experiences people want.
Modularity to produce specific results to support specific modes of play is simply not compatible with "rulings not rules" and "all the rules are just guidelines that the DM can use or ignore at any time." The DM empowerment play style is just one module/mode of many that are needed.
Steely_Dan
First Post
The Popular Front?
Charwoman Gene
Adventurer
Hey, Mearls' hair was grey when I met him, it's brown now.
He must be a clone!
He must be a clone!
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
I think the problem with 90s games wasn't that the mechanics were bad but that the adventure design advice and modules were trying to reproduce movie and book structures, which basically meant you had to take away player freedom and fudge the results. It was a matter of story being prime over anything else (the GM was there to tell a story and he wasn't supposed to let the game get in the way of his tale). I say this as a big fan of many 90s game lines, but as a critic of the prevelant GMing philosohy at the time. I just ran a bunch of old 2E modules again, and many of them blatantly say things like "no matter what the Pc do don't let them kill this character".
I don't think we should go there, but I also don't think D&D should go in the direction of story games or adopt GNS style design (that would be disasterous for such a mainstream game). If anything I am glad to see mearls move away from indie games in his writing.
Steely_Dan
First Post
And I don't think it's going, 5th Ed has a nice BECMI/1st Ed AD&D feel, where no one is looking out for you.
I am in no way advocating killer-DMs; but I felt 4th Ed went too child-safety (round edges) route.
*twitches* Never again, we never go back to that again!
Bedrockgames
I post in the voice of Christopher Walken
The truly sad thing is this: running those with the railroading stripped out, the adventure became more interesting when players killed the NPCs they weren't supposed to or when they stopped/started events that were on a track. It involved a bit of forethought to run them this way, but they turned out so much better than how they were initially meant to function.
Fifth Element
Legend
Pffft. It's not like there were games that called a GM a "storyteller" or something stupid like that!
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