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

[Elodan]

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?

Welcome to the interweb. A place were people take something posted early and possibly incomplete and then spend several days going back and forth writing long diatribes about what the definition of the word "is" is.

And to keep it on topic, I feel like the article is too incomplete to have a solid opinion.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

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

Last time I heard, the design and development teams both numbered 3 people. Ever since 4E's launch, they've been firing people and these people haven't ever seemed like they were being replaced. Hell, after Monte quit he was never replaced.

 

[Obryn]

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.

Dungeon World has a lot of really great ideas. I'm looking forward to running it this weekend.

That said, the tactical depth is certainly on a different plane altogether. There's up and downsides to this, of course.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

I noticed Libramarian's statement there too. I think he's right, most players will just default to a sort of detached mode of play where they engage, but the focus changes from active story engagement to challenge play. They'll be happy with interesting things that happen to their PC, and may 'customize' it some as play progresses, but they won't do more than the simplest character development. Obviously if a character survives and the game is of the "you are much more likely to survive at higher levels" type that Gygax seemed to favor then you probably end up with something a lot like what his campaign was like. Higher level PCs got to be personalities, got plenty of development, and got to generally be more rewarding to play. IME that was sort of the way it went, the reward for surviving all the challenge mode play was you got to role play with only very abstract rules for what you did next.

 

[Jester David]

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

If memory serves there's Mearls, Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, James Wyatt, Bruce Cordell, and Rodney Thompson. Plus assorted editors, editors, and typesetters.

But three people designed the bulk of the 3e and 4e core rules. So if only Crawford, Cordell, and Thompson are designing with others working as managers the game is still fine.

 

[KidSnide]

IMHO 4e IS that "new 3.x style game that solved them". It is exactly that game that I hankered for when I read and played 3e and said to myself "ouch, this has big problems, lets go play some X".

Yeah, like I said in my response to Bedrockgames, I think the notion that it isn't possible to make an interesting set of classes from the same basic class mechanics is still not proven. Everyone acts like it is, but I don't agree with them. That leads to my questioning why we have different mechanics for fighters, etc. Sure, I can't prove its never going to be possible to make them balance with spells, but I am advancing that proposition, and I don't see any evidence to contradict it. I see a lot of examples of people TRYING to do similar things and failing. Why not at least try to establish from a proven working balanced starting point that classes and powers can be made that DO work well for more people? Mike and Co took one cut at it and gave up. I'm just not impressed with that, lol.

I don't think it's proven either (see below). But I do think we see a systematic problems with that approach and I haven't seen a proposed solution to get around them. The 4e power structure is based on a shared language of keywords. Those keywords allows the designers to present very precisely defined powers without having to tediously repeat the same language over and over. That's a tremendous innovation, but -- at least at my table -- some players were routinely confused because they weren't willing to invest the time to learn this new language. Likewise, presenting a menu of powers caused some of my players to think more in terms of the powers and the battlemap than in what was happening inside the fiction of the game. And I think it's worth noting that you can have a table of folks where only one or two people are affected by these issues, and yet the whole table is affected because one or two players slow down play or just aren't as into it.

I don't believe that these issues are necessarily inherent to building classes out of a common sense of mechanics. Nor do I believe that these "problems" are problems at every table. (In contrast to my regular game, I didn't notice these issues with the table of more combat-oriented friends we gathered to play 4e when it first came out.) But I do think that these are issues that came from the way that 4e tried to build different classes from a common set of mechanics. As designers, I think WotC correctly asked the question: "What does a common set of mechanics really get us, and is it worth it?"

So I see D&DN as incorporating some reasonable interations of this system. For example, maybe we don't need a single common set of mechanics, if we can have three sets of mechanics: one for weapon fighting, one for spell casting and one for skills, ability checks and resisting maneuvers and spells. It's less aesthetically pleasing, I'll grant, but maybe a "unified theory of player action" is just difficult to understand at D&D's level of granularity? Dungeon World can do it, but that would be very different.

I don't think the presentation and some of the content of 4e are the greatest, nor do I think it is the last word in how a game's mechanics should be set up. I would LOVE to see it iterated on to produce a better game. Which is exactly why in the final analysis DDN really does nothing for me, it is in no way shape or form that game. That is a game WotC can sell me. I think they could have sold it to a lot of people if they did it right. It is pretty much moot at this point anyway.

For what it's worth, I agree that I'd like to see the next iteration of 4e design. After playing 4e for a month, my conclusion is that I really wanted to see a 4.5e that fixed the problems they discovered after playing it for another year or two. To my eyes, the most exciting thing about D&DN is the extensive playtest process and the possibility that it might actually create a game that discovers fewer big problems immediately after publication.

(13th Age is a little intriguing in that respect, although I'm not sure that Heinsoo/4e-style combat mechanics blend terrifically well with Tweet/Over_the_Edge-style story mechanics.)

-KS

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If memory serves there's Mearls, Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, James Wyatt, Bruce Cordell, and Rodney Thompson. Plus assorted editors, editors, and typesetters.

But three people designed the bulk of the 3e and 4e core rules. So if only Crawford, Cordell, and Thompson are designing with others working as managers the game is still fine.

Honestly there are real disadvantages to large teams. There are of course times when you NEED a large team, but I would not think that is particularly true for an RPG in playtest, though some warm bodies never hurt for doing trivia. At some point it starts to make sense to have legions of junior editors and layout people and etc, and there are other aspects of PRODUCT development (art/design) that have their own demands. Still, overall you don't hand something to a dozen people to design unless you want crap.

 

[Jester David]

I don't see how this article is anything new.
It sounds like what their plan was for the last few months of 4e, when they focused on books that were heavy on story and fluff with occasional story-motivated new class and race options.

It's a less is more mentality. Instead of monthly books all with new mechanics or new subsystems we get the content mandated by the fluff, by the story rather than the space of the book. It's less content for the sake of content, so we don't end up with a dozen brand new classes within two years of the edition. But the content we do get is also tested and reviewed.

Rules options are fairly tangential to this, as they can be mutually exclusive and not continually adding to a single game. But there's a finite number of modules we need as well.

 

[Iosue]

This was the primary team, per WotC, in January 2012:

Mike Mearls Team Lead
Greg Bilsland Team Producer

Monte Cook Design Team Lead
Bruce Cordell Designer
Robert J. Schwalb Designer

Jeremy Crawford Development Team Lead
Tom LaPille Developer
Rodney Thompson Developer
Miranda Horner Editor

Monte Cook has left. Presumably one of Mearls, Cordell, or Schwab has taken over his duties. Rodney Thompson has been pretty active at panels, columns and such, so it's possible he was moved onto the design team.

For comparison, this was the 4e design team:
Orcus I, June through September 2005: James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and Rob Heinsoo
First Development Team, October 2005 through February 2006: Robert Gutschera (lead), Mike Donais, Rich Baker,Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo
Orcus II, February to March 2006: Rob Heinsoo (lead), Bruce Cordell, James Wyatt
One Development Week, Mid-April 2006: Robert Gutschera, Mike Donais, Rich Baker, Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo
Flywheel Team, May 2006 to September 2006: Rob Heinsoo (lead), Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, David Noonan, and Jesse Decker
Scramjet Team, same timing as Flywheel: Rich Baker (lead), James Wyatt, Matt Sernett, Ed Stark, Michele Carter, Stacy Longstreet, and Chris Perkins

Flywheel was the final crunch development team, Scramjet was the final fluff development team. Scramjet in 5e terms would be James Wyatt, Jon Schindehette, and Chris Perkins at the least, in addition to any subordinates of Wyatt and Schindehette that are as yet unnamed.

Personally, it doesn't look to me like 5e is working on a skeleton crew, so TCO is either uninformed or making things up.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think it's proven either (see below). But I do think we see a systematic problems with that approach and I haven't seen a proposed solution to get around them. The 4e power structure is based on a shared language of keywords. Those keywords allows the designers to present very precisely defined powers without having to tediously repeat the same language over and over. That's a tremendous innovation, but -- at least at my table -- some players were routinely confused because they weren't willing to invest the time to learn this new language. Likewise, presenting a menu of powers caused some of my players to think more in terms of the powers and the battlemap than in what was happening inside the fiction of the game. And I think it's worth noting that you can have a table of folks where only one or two people are affected by these issues, and yet the whole table is affected because one or two players slow down play or just aren't as into it.

I don't believe that these issues are necessarily inherent to building classes out of a common sense of mechanics. Nor do I believe that these "problems" are problems at every table. (In contrast to my regular game, I didn't notice these issues with the table of more combat-oriented friends we gathered to play 4e when it first came out.) But I do think that these are issues that came from the way that 4e tried to build different classes from a common set of mechanics. As designers, I think WotC correctly asked the question: "What does a common set of mechanics really get us, and is it worth it?"

So I see D&DN as incorporating some reasonable interations of this system. For example, maybe we don't need a single common set of mechanics, if we can have three sets of mechanics: one for weapon fighting, one for spell casting and one for skills, ability checks and resisting maneuvers and spells. It's less aesthetically pleasing, I'll grant, but maybe a "unified theory of player action" is just difficult to understand at D&D's level of granularity? Dungeon World can do it, but that would be very different.

You certainly lose a LOT of generality when you stop using a common vocabulary across different elements of the game. By that I mean a common set of 'hooks', not necessarily 'words' as such, though it makes little sense to call things by different names when you want to treat them the same either. Note how 4e addressed that with layered terminology, you have 'powers' and then specific types of powers are 'exploits', 'spells', etc. This lets you discuss things naturally and allows for common references where required. Anyway, the point is simple enough, if you make your 'road' according to a standard then everyone can drive what they want on it and they can all take advantage of the same infrastructure, and they can more importantly ALL CONNECT. For instance it will be close to impossible to make something like 4e hybrids in DDN. Heck, it isn't really possible to make that work even with Essentials classes, it will never work with DDN martial classes and casters, certainly not without MANY new and complicated rules.

I am a bit dubious about the whole "must learn terminology" argument. Lets be real, the terminology of 4e is no more arcane, extensive, or obtuse than that of previous editions. If I say to a bunch of players "your characters were just hit with 19 poison damage" they all know what that basically means and in fact that statement would make sense in any edition. In 4e it has SPECIFIC meaning, the dwarf character's player might pop up and say "well, this racial feat I have grants Resist 10 poison" and we can deal with that. It isn't exactly obscure at all. Every edition has had these things, even OD&D had a "dwarves get a bonus to poison saves of 1/3.5 points of CON" (yeah for obscure facts). The difference is there was nothing like a damage type concept. In say 1e if you were hit by flaming poisonous acid or something and you were a dwarf it was entirely unclear what would happen, whoever created that circumstance would have to come up with a rule. There is IMHO no advantage to this. In fact the repertoire of things that a player might be asked to remember in 1e is literally unbounded and often very fuzzy. IME while players are certainly not all desirous of mastering all the terms in 4e, those same players never grasped the terminology of AD&D either. They are certainly no worse off now than they were then.

NOW, the ways in which the casual player DOES seem perpetually in trouble are things like action mechanics. I have players that have been playing 4e for years who still try to insist they can Second Wind and make an attack, or aren't clear about it (because of course when said player was playing a cleric she could Healing Word and attack, etc). All I can say about that is that this player is perfectly happy and I don't have a problem with that, and we don't dwell on mechanics that much. It would be nice if DDN eased this, but IMHO every edition has these issues in some fashion and it isn't going away. Obviously if you want to play Dungeon World or something then sure enough you can have highly abstract streamlined play that reduces it to a minimum. That's fine, yet oddly even my less engaged players are happy, so is it really an issue?

For what it's worth, I agree that I'd like to see the next iteration of 4e design. After playing 4e for a month, my conclusion is that I really wanted to see a 4.5e that fixed the problems they discovered after playing it for another year or two. To my eyes, the most exciting thing about D&DN is the extensive playtest process and the possibility that it might actually create a game that discovers fewer big problems immediately after publication.

(13th Age is a little intriguing in that respect, although I'm not sure that Heinsoo/4e-style combat mechanics blend terrifically well with Tweet/Over_the_Edge-style story mechanics.)

-KS

Yeah, I don't know what the differences are between 4e and DDN playtest. Is it really vastly different? My understanding of the DDN playtest is that most of the really serious playtesting happens internally and with closed F&F test groups. Public P/T is more or less just a "are you OK with this" level of thing. The closed P/T of 4e was AFAIK pretty large and lasted a goodly time. Maybe it was run badly or somehow got fixated on the wrong things, etc. I'm not sure I can see a reason why we would be necessarily getting a better playtest this time around. I hope it is better, it is certainly higher profile, but that alone doesn't mean much.

Well, I played 13a P/T and I certainly thought it was an interesting game in some respects. I found it had some of the same issues that DDN has. There were a plethora of divergent class mechanics, to the point where Bards at one point had 4 different 'power' systems, and clerics had 3!!! I haven't played or read the current pre-release, so maybe they have cut back on the craziness some, but my main reaction was "You know, I could rephrase all this into AEDU and it would be like 90 times easier to understand, and the rules would be shorter" which is pretty much how I see DDN. 13a's other features really aren't closely tied to the class mechanics. Its background/skill system is a whole other thing of its own that wouldn't be impacted by class design much, feats are really class-specific options and would only be BETTER with a common mechanics to leverage, etc. I think the story-driven aspect of it is GREAT overall, though maybe a bit narrow for a broader game like D&D. Still, you could do something similar, and even 4e's backgrounds and themes could have been turned into something like that.

Still, I LIKE 4e's skill system and want to keep it. I think one answer there is to just fix the terminology. What 4e calls 'skills' can be called 'talents' for example. They're not so much narrow training as they are broad predilections. A guy with Athletics is a guy that naturally has an easy time mastering physical tasks. He's got a knack for them, has honed his general talent in that area, and just habitually approaches problems from that angle. A guy with Arcana has a natural tie to magic and a feel for magical phenomena. He's PROBABLY also learned about it, either by study and/or practice. He may even BE just very well book-learned, but in any case it is "his thing". NOW you can have 13a-like 'skills' that represent specific things that the character has done or studied, and the character's unique background can be emphasized as a source for these skills and an RP hook. I do this now with 4e, it is just not quite so thoroughly spelled out there.

That gets to the final thing. I think 4e's presentation, while professional, just didn't gel. I think a game that is going to emphasize narrative flexibility and 'mechanics support narrative' needs to REALLY focus on conveying that to the players. 4e doesn't do that. It almost seems like especially when James Wyatt was writing the DMG that he was blissfully unaware of the true nature of the game he was writing about. Now and then inklings of what you would want to do with 4e and how to do it peek through, but much of it is shrouded in classic simulationist challenge-oriented play terminology and outlook. The result is a bit wonky. In one sense the 4e DMG is a great book. In another sense it is sort of a terrible DMG for 4e specifically.