D&D 5E Legend Lore says 'story not rules' (3/4)

[Ratskinner]

Part of it is the content, but the "ultimate" reason, if you will, that the content ends up being substandard is that the lists are too long. Even if a list doesn't start too long, it ends up too long before they are done. And then when someone realizes this and tries to keep the list reasonably short, that gets all mixed up with over simplification--and makes people want to make the list larger again.

Oh I hear ya, there. I think they'd have been better off to be more like Dungeon World: 10 moves for levels 1-5 and 10 moves for levels 6-10. That still leaves you with only 30,240 possible combinations of moves at level 5.

 

[Ratskinner]

Well, yeah, I think the content of the power lists does contain a lot of the feel, and other things like the agenda/playstyle of the game heavily depend on the details of the powers too. I think that's kind of inevitable though. Consider the other extreme, a game which just had classes that were total black boxes with no common mechanics. You'd have to rewrite those too, wouldn't you? I mean some stuff can carry over in either case, but is it more in one than the other? I don't have a reason to think so.

And clearly there would STILL be lists of spells in some fashion. I think where I would change things and where 4e got it wrong was in making exclusively class-based power lists. I think power sources could have profitably subsumed a bunch of that. At least that makes the lists shorter (and I've estimated that a careful rewrite of 4e using 20 levels and some other assumptions could have its current class roster with under 1000 powers, in the ballpark of the full 2e spell list circa 1996).

To your first point...that depends. Sometimes the change in feel you want might be effected by simply changing the way one mechanic works. That's much more an option in the "hodgepodge" system. Especially if a class' black box doesn't include a zillion fiddly bits. However, I would agree that if the game relies on its fiddly bits to convey the feel, you'll have the problem.

The other option (which I dream of but shall never come to pass) is to make the system more lightweight and narrative focused. MHRP's version of Cortex is very lightweight and yet very tolerant of bashing it around. (Its actually somewhat hard to unbalance that game.) I think DungeonWorld does a nice job at that, Old School Hack to a lesser extent.

Your idea there sounds interesting. It might make it harder to keep the roles distinct.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To your first point...that depends. Sometimes the change in feel you want might be effected by simply changing the way one mechanic works. That's much more an option in the "hodgepodge" system. Especially if a class' black box doesn't include a zillion fiddly bits. However, I would agree that if the game relies on its fiddly bits to convey the feel, you'll have the problem.

The other option (which I dream of but shall never come to pass) is to make the system more lightweight and narrative focused. MHRP's version of Cortex is very lightweight and yet very tolerant of bashing it around. (Its actually somewhat hard to unbalance that game.) I think DungeonWorld does a nice job at that, Old School Hack to a lesser extent.

Your idea there sounds interesting. It might make it harder to keep the roles distinct.

Yeah, it might. I have more radical concepts. Instead burn down the whole power system entirely and fold it into the item/treasure/boon system and the feat system. Just bag them all into one big pile and award them for purely narrative reasons.

 

[frankthedm]

To me it looks like WOTC wised up, accepted there are people are happy with the editions they already know and trying to please them with 5E is just not worth the development effort for the little extra money it would garner.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I can't put my finger on it, but [MENTION=697]mearls[/MENTION] recent tone in these articles just sounds distracted and maybe a little shell-shocked. I hope I'm seeing things that aren't there. But it gives me the willies.

 

[I'm A Banana]

To me it looks like WOTC wised up, accepted there are people are happy with the editions they already know and trying to please them with 5E is just not worth the development effort for the little extra money it would garner.

Where did you get the idea that they aren't going to develop 5e anymore?

Man, are we really under the impression that the only way to develop a game at this point is to make superfluous niche options?

 

[pemerton]

My experience running functional, low-conflict classic dungeoncrawling is the players compensate for death as the price of failure by investing less into their characters. However, this doesn't lead to completely emotionless "pawn stance" play -- I want to call it "avatar stance" play. The players express and share emotions, but the palette is limited to sort of basic emotions that pretty much any character in that situation would feel.

I'm glad someone picked up on that part of my post! And thanks for the reply - interesting stuff.

Does this relate to the project you mentioned on another thread of trying to bring the classic D&D experience, or at least its accesories, closer to a board game style?

 

[Balesir]

This is one of the things that I really liked about 4e, and it ties into another of the things I liked - that flavour is explicitly *not* tied to the mechanics. The mechanics suggest flavour, but don't define it.

Very much agreed - but I would add that the flavour doesn't define the mechanics is also an extremely important plank, too. In 4e the mechanics are a skeleton and muscle on which the "skin" of the colour is added, as opposed to starting with a jelly-like mass of colour and trying to stuff a skeleton into it that makes it keep the shape it had that you liked...

That will entirely depend on a few things:

(1) Sufficient mechanical flexibility to allow this to work
(2) Sufficient options to make this a mechanically viable alternative
(3) Sufficient DM advice in the books making it clear that this is allowed/supported/encouraged

Item number 3 was a huge sticking point with some players and DMs near the end of the 3.x era, and still is in some circles. I'm not saying that it's wrong to dislike the approach, but if the books don't support it you will get a lot of folks who may disallow it out of hand.

Right - most common, I think, would be following the least permissive (and least useful) approach possible. "OK, you can have an 'Archer' that uses knives - you get the abilities described for the Archer, and not one jot more, but your range is cut right down because you are using knives and it only 'makes sense' for you to suffer all the limitations of that as well as those of a bow user"... And then we wonder why "no-one used those interesting other missile weapons"

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Where did you get the idea that they aren't going to develop 5e anymore?

Man, are we really under the impression that the only way to develop a game at this point is to make superfluous niche options?

They're more or less developing it with what looks like a skeleton crew.

 

[Pour]

They're more or less developing it with what looks like a skeleton crew.

Not to side track, but could someone provide the active design team roster? I'm curious how true this is.