D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is great. I am glad you had such a positive reaction to 4E and it fit your style. But not everyone agreed. I felt it was good design for what it was intended, but it also was not a good design for my preferences or style of play. I can sort of see the arguments about it being more modern and updated than 2E (because 2E did have a lot of clunk and confusion). But I dont think it is objectively better design than 3E by any stretch. It just addresses different concerns and problems than 3E (and if those are not concerns or problems one happens to have, or if you dont have them to the degree that the 4E designer assume, it doesnt stand out as good design). Now I am not trying to trash 4E at all. I do think it is a well designed game, but it does get a but tiring hearing form 4E fans how their taste equals good/modern design and ours equals "crap" or "poorly thought out" design. I think we really just want some very different things from the game.

I just had particular issues with 3e and class balance. I wasn't greatly enamored of 2e from the standpoint of it didn't do anything mechanically for me, 1e was the same game. I thought 2e was well-written, but yeah it was just mechanically a bit dated. 3e's writing is as good as 4e's, but I don't see it as better. Rules-wise though, not close. Presentation and human-factors wise? 4e is a clear improvement, mostly incremental but in a few areas substantially more. The degree to which character complexity is front-loaded onto chargen for instance is huge, and the way NPCs are handled, the difference is night and day. Organization and presentation in 4e are often really significantly improved. I think those issues were just barely on the radar with 2e (1e is just a sort of hodge-podge) but not even really clearly well-developed in 3.x (3.x is overall organized well at a high level). 4e takes cleanness of presentation, organization, and graphic/human factors elements into consideration in ways that no previous edition does. Its specific incarnation into the game 4e is somewhat of a different thing. The techniques employed to create the game are just clearly more refined. There's nothing surprising about that. For all that WotC seems to have a hard time internalizing ideas about what to put in their games and how to present the material in a cultural sense, they have clearly mastered all the most modern production techniques and concepts. That isn't surprising, they have a huge toy company to draw on which clearly has vast experience at product design.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I just had particular issues with 3e and class balance. I wasn't greatly enamored of 2e from the standpoint of it didn't do anything mechanically for me, 1e was the same game. I thought 2e was well-written, but yeah it was just mechanically a bit dated. 3e's writing is as good as 4e's, but I don't see it as better. Rules-wise though, not close. Presentation and human-factors wise? 4e is a clear improvement, mostly incremental but in a few areas substantially more. The degree to which character complexity is front-loaded onto chargen for instance is huge, and the way NPCs are handled, the difference is night and day. Organization and presentation in 4e are often really significantly improved. I think those issues were just barely on the radar with 2e (1e is just a sort of hodge-podge) but not even really clearly well-developed in 3.x (3.x is overall organized well at a high level). 4e takes cleanness of presentation, organization, and graphic/human factors elements into consideration in ways that no previous edition does. Its specific incarnation into the game 4e is somewhat of a different thing. The techniques employed to create the game are just clearly more refined. There's nothing surprising about that. For all that WotC seems to have a hard time internalizing ideas about what to put in their games and how to present the material in a cultural sense, they have clearly mastered all the most modern production techniques and concepts. That isn't surprising, they have a huge toy company to draw on which clearly has vast experience at product design.

Again, i for you it clearly was an imprivement. I dont think it is as objectively superior to 3E in terms of design as you think. To me it sounds like you are equating your preferences with good design. But enough people are divided over which edition is better between 3e and 4e that it largely amounts to what you wanted from the game. Even on the level of organization, not everyone agrees 4E was an improvement. I dont think it is a simple matter of progress toward more and objectively superior deign techniques. With 4E they only appear objectively better if you embrace certain assumptions going in. If you happen to like 4E, that is wonderful. But 3E also has a lot going for it design wise. Not everyone is as attractected to the 4E deign approach as you are.

i dont want to get into edition warring. But 4E for me was not fun, and not how i think a good game should be designed. Doesnt mean you are wrong to label it good design. But i there is a lot of subjectivity here and it orbits what you value in a game and what creates problems for your style of play.

 

[Celebrim]

I think the difference is that games like D&D have existed and been established as default choices in the most common genre forever.

I've been hearing that whine from older GM's since the early '80s, and at this point, I don't believe it. Similarly, you hear whines from fans of oop, logical, functional, etc. programming paradigms about how the only reason the procedural paradigm is dominate is it got discovered first; I don't believe that any more either.

The real revelation for me was how little impact on cRPG design continuing experimentation in PnP RPG design was having, which got me to thinking why D&D tropes like hit points, classes and the whole fortune in the mechanic are so enduring.

It may not be the only way to do things, and there may be real value in doing things differently, but the reason that D&D and its heirs with similar paradigms dominate isn't merely that D&D got there first. The fact that they got there first (often by evolution) tells you more about naturally adoptable mechanics than anything else. Even if 'plot coupons' were invented first, they would I think have created an independent small niche like En Garde! or something of the sort - a separate line in RPG development.

 

[El Mahdi]

And if that's not true, and the less divisive players I'm meeting and talking to on the boards are all exceptional individuals who don't represent the majority of D&D players, then I've been living a sheltered life.

There's a reason invasion of the body snatchers is a true account. Friggin' pod people.

[video=youtube;GEStsLJZhzo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEStsLJZhzo[/video]

 

[Balesir]

Isn't he though? These kids; always think their generation was the first to discover things. Toon is so far ahead of its time in every way you have to wonder how it would have impacted RPG development if it hadn't been built as a silly/comedy game. You could have also mentioned Traveller (1977), C&S (1977), Ars Magica (1988) and Pendragon (1990) in that list.

If you are including those, I would say Bushido (1979) and the related Daredevils (1982) should be included for sure. As far as early very targetted "narrative" attempts, Theatrix (1993), for all its faults, was a serious attempt at a radical departure. I ran a fairly successful World of Darkness game using the WoD character ratings with Theatrix resolution systems as an experiment sometime around 1995. Everway (1995) should also get a mention - another not-fully-successful-but-interesting attempt.

Edit: probably should add The Morrow Project (1980) to the list, too.

 

[Bluenose]

Yeah. Well, I'd be very surprised to find that of the major Indie or Indie inspired games out there, that there were more than 30 or 40 tables playing the game on at least a biweekly basis in the entire USA.

My Life with Master? You think there are more than 30 tables playing that?
Dogs in the Vineyard? Maybe 30 tables
Burning Wheel? Maybe 40 tables
All variaties of FATE combined? A couple 100 at most.
Dread?
Monsters and Other Childish Things?

I don't know about the others, but the Fate Core Kickstarter had 10,000 backers. And while some will read it and not play it, I doubt if that applies to all of those people. For that matter, we have figures for the Dresden Files RPG, the first print run sold 10,000 books. My personal guess is that about half the RPG groups that meet regularly play mostly D&D or one of it's offshoots, and the other half play other game(s). That's certainly the case where I live, and close to what I see when I visit a LGS and look on it's "Groups" board.

 

[Obryn]

I don't know about the others, but the Fate Core Kickstarter had 10,000 backers. And while some will read it and not play it, I doubt if that applies to all of those people. For that matter, we have figures for the Dresden Files RPG, the first print run sold 10,000 books. My personal guess is that about half the RPG groups that meet regularly play mostly D&D or one of it's offshoots, and the other half play other game(s). That's certainly the case where I live, and close to what I see when I visit a LGS and look on it's "Groups" board.

Yeah, those estimates are comically small and kind of miss the point... Some are more suitable to pick up games, like Dread or Fiasco. Some are a bit older but still played. Often, self-described "indie gamers" will switch between games regularly, so it's hard to say that there's such a thing as "DitV players" in the same sense as there are "D&D players"

I'm in at least one community that has a thriving FATE player base. 100 is a pretty crazy low estimate.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't know about the others, but the Fate Core Kickstarter had 10,000 backers. And while some will read it and not play it, I doubt if that applies to all of those people. For that matter, we have figures for the Dresden Files RPG, the first print run sold 10,000 books. My personal guess is that about half the RPG groups that meet regularly play mostly D&D or one of it's offshoots, and the other half play other game(s). That's certainly the case where I live, and close to what I see when I visit a LGS and look on it's "Groups" board.

Numbers like that make me think that at least with FATE, I might have been off by a factor of 3 or 4. There might be low thousands of groups regularly playing FATE based games.

I think everyone has to concede that a fairly large percentage of RPG books are bought and read by people who will never regularly play them, and the more niche the game the more likely that is true. Also many gamers will go years without playing a session at all; lucky is he who always has a table to play at. I have M&M books, Call of Cthulhu books, Chill 2e books, WW books, Star Wars 1e books, GURPS books, etc. and at most I've played those games a dozen times - in some cases decades ago. Often I had a lot of fun, but keeping a campaign going in a rules set even as out of the mainstream as some very mainstream games can be hard. In some cases, like M&M, I've never actually played the game. In some cases, like GURPS, the fact that more people love reading the books than love playing the books is so well understood its almost a trope. And amongst gamers I know, I'm a very parsimonious rules buyer. I know many gamers with shelves and shelves of books that they've not only never played, they never really intend to play them either. I once saw a geek buy the GURPS Disqworld supplement not only without intention to play it, but with no real interest in RPGs, purely because it served as an interesting compliation of information about Disqworld.

I don't think you can remotely take a count like 'They sold 10000 copies of the game rules' to indicate that are are 10000 tables playing the game regularly. You might could take it to mean that 10000 people own the rules but less than half that many have played it, a bit over 10000 people have actually played the game, and during a given week a couple hundred people play the game world wide.

I'm in at least one community that has a thriving FATE player base. 100 is a pretty crazy low estimate.

I said a couple hundred tables biweekly. I was thinking low hundreds of tables with 4-5 players each (counting the GM), putting the number of regular players in the low thousands. The number that have played is probably an order of magitude higher, and the number that play 3-4 sessions in a year on and off for a few years until some other game comes along and pushes it aside in the rotation is somewhere between those estimates.

As for your thriving FATE base, smaller games do tend to be very regional. But I'd be surprised if your thriving base is more than a half-dozen tables. I've lived in more rural regions, and it was possible to reach a point where you could roughly enumerate all the RPG tables in a county simply by making via DMs between the half dozen or so high schools and figuring out whose older cousins where still playing, etc. Granted, that would be harder to do now because the age range of players isn't as compressed and the social links aren't there, but then again, are there really more PnP tables now than in the mid to late 80's? I don't know. My sense is no.

If there is more than that in your region, well, then maybe this FATE thing is about to take off.

What do you think reasonable estimates for the number of regular tables (DMs) in the USA would be? My guess at is that D&D doesn't climb much over 100,000 at best, and its reach and familiarity is massively greater than any other PnP RPG. But even far more accessible games like World of Warcraft only have player bases in the millions. We've got a niche hobby.

There are very few games which have had enough reach that play experience among geeks may be assumed: D&D, if you are of a certain age VtM, and if you are of a certain age Deadlands (which I haven't played, but can remember when it seemed everyone was). I might add Traveller into that if you hit adulthood and played RPGs prior to 1980, but that's really before my time and I'm just guessing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Again, i for you it clearly was an imprivement. I dont think it is as objectively superior to 3E in terms of design as you think. To me it sounds like you are equating your preferences with good design. But enough people are divided over which edition is better between 3e and 4e that it largely amounts to what you wanted from the game. Even on the level of organization, not everyone agrees 4E was an improvement. I dont think it is a simple matter of progress toward more and objectively superior deign techniques. With 4E they only appear objectively better if you embrace certain assumptions going in. If you happen to like 4E, that is wonderful. But 3E also has a lot going for it design wise. Not everyone is as attractected to the 4E deign approach as you are.

i dont want to get into edition warring. But 4E for me was not fun, and not how i think a good game should be designed. Doesnt mean you are wrong to label it good design. But i there is a lot of subjectivity here and it orbits what you value in a game and what creates problems for your style of play.

We're not talking about edition warring. There is a great separation between the DESIGN of a thing, design and production principles used in its creation, and whether or not you happen to like the thing subjectively. You're fighting an edition war that I'm not fighting. The standards of layout, presentation, ergonomics of design, etc were just brought to a higher level in each successive edition of D&D, uniformly. In these respects Basic was better than OD&D, and AD&D was superior to Basic, and 2e improved on 1e, etc.

 

[Nagol]

We're not talking about edition warring. There is a great separation between the DESIGN of a thing, design and production principles used in its creation, and whether or not you happen to like the thing subjectively. You're fighting an edition war that I'm not fighting. The standards of layout, presentation, ergonomics of design, etc were just brought to a higher level in each successive edition of D&D, uniformly. In these respects Basic was better than OD&D, and AD&D was superior to Basic, and 2e improved on 1e, etc.

I tend to disagree. 1e had a better layout and organisation than 2e. 3e had more fundamental failures wrt basics like spelling, consistent editing and with 3.5, the mis-application of the errata developed for 3. I won't comment on 4 as I didn't use the book enough, but of the 3, the best set of books for use at the table by experienced players was 1e. If nothing else the PHB/DMG cross-index was spectacularly useful.