D&D General "Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued

[Argyle King]

See, I agree with you. But many who have spoken in 5e's defense on this subject insist that the "natural language" concept, which the designers did reference while the game was being designed, is alive, well, and unequivocally good for the game.

My real argument on this specific subject (a narrow application of the overall topic) is that people have pursued a meta-aesthetic--"natural language"--by using language that sounded natural to them at the time. But what is natural in one context may be highly unnatural in another*...or may sound natural to one person and unnatural to another. That's why we develop precise terms: because naturalness is a constantly-moving target, as it should be, while clarity and specificity are far less so. But because it's so compelling to conceive of a game that you can just understand because everything is written and described with natural, common-use words, people were willing to throw most other considerations out the window. And we are now left with melee spell attacks with a target of "self" and "melee weapon attacks need not actually have any weapons, and are different from melee-weapon attacks," or the confusion over whether you have an Action and a Bonus Action or simply can take an Action and a Bonus Action, etc.

*Consider that saying, "I love all people" is a heartwarming and affirmative message when said in a conversation about, say, politics and religion, but an incredibly hurtful thing to say when your spouse asks you in a distraught voice, "Do you love me?"

I wasn't even aware of the new issues. The thoughts I had came from how terms like "natural attacks" and "unarmed..." function in inconsistent ways in D&D.

I do not believe that using "natural language" is inherently bad (and would personally lead toward it being somewhat good). However, even a "natural language" set of rules would need to define common terms so as to facilitate a common understanding between author and audience. I would posit that (in some way) even terms such as "elf" and "dwarf" have a common understanding in D&D and are part of why the brand persists. (I would additionally posit that too many changes to the game which fundamentally undercut the shared understanding of what those established terms mean have a net negative influence on the shared experience.)

I think that, overall, I agree with your general view. However, I am of the impression that part of D&D's "natural language" issue is two part: 1) the game is written in a way which does not consistently use natural language, and 2) there is (in my view) something of a disconnect between how the people designing the game see the game versus how the people playing the game see the game.

For what it's worth, I felt that 4th Edition's design was very aesthetically pleasing. I have a lot of complaints about 4E, but the ease of understanding the rules is/was never one of them. Though, I might argue that 4E sometimes went too heavy in the direction of defining things through keywords and doing so often came full circle back around to creating broken parts of a game born of language being used in strange ways.

I think there are a lot of commonalities between issues with 4th's rules and 5th's rules, in regards to terms being used in inconsistent or ambiguous ways; the two editions simply present the terms in different formats.

 

[Monayuris]

I'm not talking about "results", in either of the following senses: (i) what takes place in the shared fiction; (ii) settling on an outcome of the action declaration.

All RPGs achieve (ii), assuming they're remotely function - the player declares an action for his/her PC and some sort of outcome is established by some process or other.

And there is no particular correlation between various resolution processes, and various things taking place in the shared fiction. Eg suppose a skill challenge resolution results in events A, B, C, D and finally E occurring - the same sequence of events in the fiction could be established by the GM telling a story, which would be a very different process.

What I am talking about is the process of resolution.

Fair enough. I don't really care about the process of resolution. I only care about the results. I choose the process of resolution that most efficiently and effectively reaches the result.

If you want to think that my preference in process is just GM telling a story; you have a right to be wrong. You have this strange predilection that the only way to have a proper process of resolution is to use a hardcoded skill challenge. Again, you have a right to be wrong.

Here we see the relevant differences in processes. The processes you describe all ten to make the GM the determiner of what happens.

And I'm 100% completely fine with that.

 

[Don Durito]

I think the natural language approach was a fine idea, but they didn't really follow through. If having ambiguities for the GM to resolve is part of the plan then you have to completely do away with the idea of RAW. There's no place for Sage Advice under such a philosophy. The very idea of Sage Advice encourages the idea that there is such a thing as RAW and a correct reading of the rules. If you're going to go that way then you need precise and consistent language - and technical terms and keywords would be better for that.

 

[Monayuris]

I think the natural language approach was a fine idea, but they didn't really follow through. If having ambiguities for the GM to resolve is part of the plan then you have to completely do away with the idea of RAW. There's no place for Sage Advice under such a philosophy. The very idea of Sage Advice encourages the idea that there is such a thing as RAW and a correct reading of the rules. If you're going to go that way then you need precise and consistent language - and technical terms and keywords would be better for that.

Well, Sage Advice can still exist as literal advice.

The game is yours to run as you feel. Sage Advice is just that... advice to a DM, nothing more. Sage advice is not official rules... they are just advice to the DM.

There was a famous statement by Gygax in the order of an incredulous statement of why would anyone pay them to imagine things for them.

It is not an all-or-nothing thing. You can have 'natural language' alongside rules. I've never ever considered Sage Advice as anything more than that.. 'advice'. My game is my game. I run it the way I so choose. RAW is irrelevant to me.

 

[Don Durito]

Well, Sage Advice can still exist as literal advice.

The game is yours to run as you feel. Sage Advice is just that... advice to a DM, nothing more. Sage advice is not official rules... they are just advice to the DM.

There was a famous statement by Gygax in the order of an incredulous statement of why would anyone pay them to imagine things for them.

It is not an all-or-nothing thing. You can have 'natural language' alongside rules. I've never ever considered Sage Advice as anything more than that.. 'advice'. My game is my game. I run it the way I so choose. RAW is irrelevant to me.

If they were going consistently with the natural language approach the purpose of Sage Advice would just be to clarify intent.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If they were going consistently with the natural language approach the purpose of Sage Advice would just be to clarify intent.

I think Monayuris is saying that Sage Advice would become less "rules Q&A" and more "shop talk" if that makes sense? You wouldn't have narrow questions about how rule X, term Y, or interaction Z should be used. You'd have more "best practices" and "DM philosophy" and "tools for managing player experience" type talk. That might not be enough to sustain a distinct Sage Advice thing....but given stuff like Matt Colville's youtube series, I'm inclined to think it would still work.

 

[glass]

Admittedly, I have not read all 15 pages.

I simply read the first page and had the following thought: I disagree with the claim that 5E uses "natural language." Most of the rules problems are (in my opinion) due to using words in a way which do not clearly mean what the words would naturally mean in another context.

"Natural language" is not, itself, natural language. It is a term of art. A buzzword.

_
glass.

 

[pemerton]

5e D&D has multiple dimensions of PC build - race, class, sub-class, feats, spells - that generate various interacting abilities and modifiers. Those abilities and modifiers live within multiple dimensions of action resolution - an action economy, various categories of check (attack, save, ability), various categories of effect (damage, conditions, movement and distance, etc), various durations and recovery cycles, etc.

Compared to a system like Prince Valiant, or Classic Traveller, or even RuneQuest, this is incredibly intricate. The idea that all those dimensions and their interactions can be handled via "natural language" is not credible.

 

[Thomas Shey]

5e D&D has multiple dimensions of PC build - race, class, sub-class, feats, spells - that generate various interacting abilities and modifiers. Those abilities and modifiers live within multiple dimensions of action resolution - an action economy, various categories of check (attack, save, ability), various categories of effect (damage, conditions, movement and distance, etc), various durations and recovery cycles, etc.

Compared to a system like Prince Valiant, or Classic Traveller, or even RuneQuest, this is incredibly intricate. The idea that all those dimensions and their interactions can be handled via "natural language" is not credible.

This is why I occasionally roll my eyes when I see people who regularly play games in the main thrust D&D-sphere refer to other games as "complicated"; its actually damn hard to have a game with a common build metric even approach being as complicated to keep track of as a game with heavy use of exception based design.

 

[Campbell]

Fair enough. I don't really care about the process of resolution. I only care about the results. I choose the process of resolution that most efficiently and effectively reaches the result.

If you want to think that my preference in process is just GM telling a story; you have a right to be wrong. You have this strange predilection that the only way to have a proper process of resolution is to use a hardcoded skill challenge. Again, you have a right to be wrong.



And I'm 100% completely fine with that.

I do not think the way you play is about the GM telling a story. I believe you when you say that you judge the fiction as neutrally as possible.

Personally I quite enjoy OSR play, but it is not the only way I like to play. In my experience the process of play matters a good deal. I even think it might matter to you a good deal. I just think you have found a process that really works for you. That's a good thing. However, what works for you might not work for everyone. It is also not universal to all RPGs. Speaking with authority that these things do not matter when you lack experience with doing things differently does this discussion a disservice.

There are tons of ways to play and run RPGs. There are no right and wrong ways to do things. Different techniques and different games are suited to different purposes with different benefits and tradeoffs. If you make this a debate about who is right and who is wrong you will miss out on understanding the diversity of play in the hobby.

I mean a lot of time and effort has gone into designing different ways to play these games. I think game design matters. I would stake money that if you ran a game like Apocalypse World in the way it instructs you to run it you would agree. You may not enjoy that sort of play, but I am fairly confident you would not say it does not matter.