Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[Bohandas]

I would say in the 0e-1e days D&D forged its own path, then starting with 2e's response to the Satanic panic it started becoming a follower rather than a leader.

Wasn't original D&D a mashup of LotR, Dying Earth, and Conan?

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Of course I still maintain that as a solution to cultists and bottom-end monsters, there's no reason they shouldn't be a viable solution in the genre per se; the reasons they aren't in the books are more an issue of the kind of characters involved, and the decisions whether you want that sort of narrowness of character choice is a separate issue from general mechanics.

They literally shoot at the monster in the Dunwich Horror don’t they? And Cthulhu is rammed with a ship. I think people underestimate how much Lovecraft had people successfully fight monsters in his stories.

 

[Aldarc]

So then, should D&D try to follow the then-hot pop culture item or instead try to forge its own path and maybe become the hot culture item other things follow? I ask this because hot culture items don't always stay hot. (that, and I blame M:tG far more for 3e's direction than I do Diablo)

I would say in the 0e-1e days D&D forged its own path, then starting with 2e's response to the Satanic panic it started becoming a follower rather than a leader.

Yeah, I don't think that 3e D&D is influenced all that much by Diablo. IMO, Diablo is just the scapegoat for disliked changes because it was in the mind's eye of the public, so it gets the lion's share of blame for a much larger market trend. In contrast, the beloved video games Baldur's Gate and Planescape were explicitly influenced by Diablo. There we are told by the game developers that the only reason that the turn-based D&D became Real Time With Pause is because of how massive Diablo 2 was at the time. But people weren't upset that the games were RTWP rather than turn-based; instead, they were happy that it was RTWP. A number of people even got mad that Planescape spirtual successor games like Torment: Tides of Numenera or the Baldur's Gate 3 sequel are turn-based instead of RTWP. I personally think that turn-based makes it more D&D like, but many still want them to be RTWP because that's how the first games were.

To answer your question, I don't think that it's a matter of whether D&D should follow the then-hot pop culture item or not, but I do think that it will invariably do so to some extent. But I also think that the cycle for incorporating pop culture trends into D&D tends to be much slower than people tend to imagine. For example, Harry Potter's heyday was in the 00's, with the last book (Deathly Hallows, Book 7) being released in 2007. But there were nothing in either 3e or 4e that incorporated what was undoubtedly the HOTTEST property at the time. We don't see anything Harry Potter like until WotC does Strixhaven for MtG in 2021. And yeah, the Harry Potter IP is definitely toxic and untouchable at this point, though for reasons that have more to do with the author's views.

I think there's kind of a loop when it comes to video games and table top RPGS. It's fairly clear that video games like pedit5 were influenced by D&D and were quite popular on mainframes located on college campuses. But at some point I think pen and paper RPGS have been influenced by video games. I happen to think 4th edition D&D was highly influenced by MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. And I don't mean that as an insult.

IMHO, the grand irony for me is that 4e is not really much like MMORPGs at all; instead, it is more like D&D-inspired JRPGs: e.g., Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Chrono Trigger, etc. And lo and behold, 4e has become an explicit inspiration for JRPG-influenced TTRPGs - e.g., Fabula Ultima, Icon, Beacon, Gubat Banwa - rather than any WoW-like TTRPGs.

 

[Staffan]

If you write a rules set that benefits (in a game sense) those who play counter-genre, in and of itself that's a design error.

Someone should make a thread to discuss that kind of thing.

 

[MGibster]

IMHO, the grand irony for me is that 4e is not really much like MMORPGs at all; instead, it is more like D&D-inspired JRPGs: e.g., Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Chrono Trigger, etc. And lo and behold, 4e has become an explicit inspiration for JRPG-influenced TTRPGs - e.g., Fabula Ultima, Icon, Beacon, Gubat Banwa - rather than any WoW-like TTRPGs.

I started playing World of Warcraft in September/October 2008, and was immediately struck by how the combat mechanics resembled the recently released D&D. In 4th edition, character roles were Striker (DPS), Defender (Tank), Leader (Healer), and Controller (tasks relegated to various classes rather than just one in WoW). When I played a Defender in 4th edition, my primary job was to take aggro from opponents just liket it was in WoW leaving it to the Strikers to do the bulk of the damage.

In WoW, I assigned my Warrior's abilities to certain keyboards. The = button was used for charge, 4 was Thunderstrike, 6 was Taunt, 2 was Devastate, etc., etc. They each had a cooldown limiting the amount of times I could use them. Some of them were effectively once per encounter abilities, most refreshed every "round," and still others took so long to refresh that they might as well have been dailies (10 minutes is a long time in an MMORPGS).

D&D 4th edition is very much like an MMORPG and I think that's deliberate. Everquest was released in 1999 and World of Warcraft in 2004, and I think it was viwed as pretty stiff competition for D&D. I know my gaming club lost a lot of regular players for a while to games like Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest. One of the nice things about 4th edition is that every class was useful in almost every encounter. In 3rd edition, I remember an encounter with a golem (I think), where my Wizard was essentially useless because the creature was effectively immune to anything I could throw at it. That kind of thing didn't happen in 4th edition.

 

[aramis erak]

Does it count if the designers expected one result, but the actual mechanics they wrote encourages a different one? That's all too common.

The most fundamental question in re intent was brought up in my English Methods class: Does authorial intent really matter at all?
The general consensus was "Only if they're good authors. Bad ones or mediocre ones fail to enshrine their intent in the text." (Keep in mind, we were all masters candidates between halfway and 3/4 of the way through our programs. Almost all of us with bachelor of arts degrees.)

Really, the meaning of the text is, at the end of the day, it's meaning as absorbed by the reader, rather than its author's intent. It's not VI Lenin's fault I found his address to the first supreme soviet humorous and ironic - and it is a very safe bet he didn't intend it to be... Partly due to my limited Russian proficiency (far better then than now... sigh), partly due to the irony of reading it after knowing all his goals failed, partly because it's written so damned sincerely.

Wraith was in some ways the most impressive rule book I've ever read to this day. And it was at the same time, a game I recognized as unplayable as written and therefore probably a failure as a game. Reading Wraith was when I formulated my ideas about examples of play and processes of play being as important or more important than the rules. The game Wraith was describing was effectively only playable as a single player game - one PC and one Storyteller. It wasn't inherently social. It wasn't clear what any two ghosts would want with each other or even if they would see each other. If the PC's really worked hard they could have created ghosts whose lives had been connected in some way, but the text did hard push players in that direction.

And on top of that it was totally alien. It required a fantastic imagination to realize the seeming intention, because the characters it was describing were actually dead and static and past the apparent end of their story arcs. And on top of that they were probably insane. Which is all good for describing a world of undead, but again doesn't make it likely you'll find a group that can play it.

Wraith works quite well in mixed party games of non-munchkins. WoD has a large munchkin quotient in the fanbase...

The problem with Call of Cthulhu is that, in the fiction it's based on, protagonists are generally hapless witnesses or survivors of brushes with things beyond the pale- if they survive.

Since it's hard to sell people on a game where they play victims and their reward is to be the Final Girl in a slasher film, since most of the things you encounter are basically indestructible to normal things like punches to the head, knives, axes, or even chainsaws, of course people are going to make like Ash Williams!

Funny, but Dread. Alien, and a few other games do just fine ensuring players are popcorn for the bigbads...

It's not that you're going to die or go insane — one or the other is a given in CoC, WFRP 1E/2E, Alien, and others — it's how you go out, and what you do up to that point; play to find out.

It's been selling CoC for 40 years or so.

You are not going to start freaking out and screaming like Luke in the gas refinery: "No, that's not true!!! That can't be possible!!!" I very much feel HPL would have. We live in the universe post all of these revelations about how weird the universe is and we just shrug. But a really good HPL adventure somehow would undermine our confidence in reality just as much as early 20th century science destroyed HPL's belief in the worth of mankind so that even if the investigators kill the monster, it doesn't matter, because it's the existence of the monster that is problematic in the first place.

However, that problem goes way outside the topic at hand.

An adventure that would drive the characters insane at the mechanics based rate is sufficiently unrealistic that it will, at best, make modern players laugh... keep in mind that (in the better school districts) we're teaching some elements of quantum physics and radioastronomy/astrometrics in grades 6 & up... so kids are often actually aware that our perceived reality isn't inherently sensible outside the scale in which we operate. They know that Science says "There's something out there generating gravitic interactions but without being otherwise detectible," and "there is a fundamental randomness to the universe at a VERY fundamental level which means everything's subject to random influences." Basically, we're driving them toward either mental disorder, desensitization, or retreat to religion. Sometimes more than one.

And that's assuming that they're bonded to their characters. Which isn't a safe assumption for many playstyles. Often, those are playstyles of people drawn to watching how their character gets ganked. I've one player who is more interested in an interesting death than character preservation.

If you write a rules set that benefits (in a game sense) those who play counter-genre, in and of itself that's a design error.

Not of need; in at least a few (HōL comes to min, as does KAMB, Ninja Burger, and the original edition of Og) they're deconstructions. Intentionally reinforcing anti-genre play for its value as humor...

Rules should reinforce genre, not encourage you to play against it. The degree of severity varies, and some early designs just didn't have this as a concept, but in a modern game, blaming the players because they're playing the game you wrote is off.

Rein‧Hagen may have utterly missed his intent, but the design is no failure - it turned out to be one of the most popular anti-hero RPGs...
Essentially, "Monsters R Us" as camp rather than serious drama. Rein‧Hagen's intent is irrelevant to play; only the group's intent vs the emergent behavior is important. It's one of the more successful designs, in fact...

 

[Celebrim]

The most fundamental question in re intent was brought up in my English Methods class: Does authorial intent really matter at all?
The general consensus was "Only if they're good authors. Bad ones or mediocre ones fail to enshrine their intent in the text." (Keep in mind, we were all masters candidates between halfway and 3/4 of the way through our programs. Almost all of us with bachelor of arts degrees.)

Really, the meaning of the text is, at the end of the day, it's meaning as absorbed by the reader, rather than its author's intent.

While there is some truth to that, too often to me the modern readers assertion that what they glean from a text is what matters and not what the author intended to say strikes me as a combination of laziness and narcissism. I very much feel that the "death of the author" is just an excuse for no longer approaching a text ready to do the work and rigor of figuring out what it says. If you claim that the author's intent doesn't matter and that the meaning of the text is what you absorb, then you are excusing yourself of a lack of all reading comprehension.

I do appreciate that you seem to admit that a good author conveys their meaning clearly as that is a more nuanced take than I tend to encounter, but I suspect that poor readers will tend to claim all authors are poor ones.

There is a parallel situation in RPGs where players and even some GMs have a tendency to think like the GM is the only participant in the game that has to act and play skillfully in order for the game to be "good", and that players have no social obligation to themselves play skillfully and put forth effort. We have a tendency to act like in RPGs that all the burden is on the GM to make a good game, and that if anything goes wrong it's something that the GM did - bad GM. But while I agree that the GM has the greater burden and responsibility, I don't agree that the player has no responsibility, or that the player because he is playing a game has no requirement to put forth effort and to try to become a skillful player.

In the same way, I tend to think that in order to make the assessment as to whether a writer is good or bad, you must be a rigorous enough reader to discern what the writer is trying to say, before you can assess whether they did a good job of it.

 

[payn]

...I remember an encounter with a golem (I think), where my Wizard was essentially useless because the creature was effectively immune to anything I could throw at it. That kind of thing didn't happen in 4th edition.

I actually miss things like this. 4E was weird where you could hurt fire elementals with fire and trip snakes. Though, I do get it that running into a golem is one thing, and delving a golem factory is another.

 

[Aldarc]

I started playing World of Warcraft in September/October 2008, and was immediately struck by how the combat mechanics resembled the recently released D&D. In 4th edition, character roles were Striker (DPS), Defender (Tank), Leader (Healer), and Controller (tasks relegated to various classes rather than just one in WoW). When I played a Defender in 4th edition, my primary job was to take aggro from opponents just liket it was in WoW leaving it to the Strikers to do the bulk of the damage.

In WoW, I assigned my Warrior's abilities to certain keyboards. The = button was used for charge, 4 was Thunderstrike, 6 was Taunt, 2 was Devastate, etc., etc. They each had a cooldown limiting the amount of times I could use them. Some of them were effectively once per encounter abilities, most refreshed every "round," and still others took so long to refresh that they might as well have been dailies (10 minutes is a long time in an MMORPGS).

D&D 4th edition is very much like an MMORPG and I think that's deliberate. Everquest was released in 1999 and World of Warcraft in 2004, and I think it was viwed as pretty stiff competition for D&D. I know my gaming club lost a lot of regular players for a while to games like Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest. One of the nice things about 4th edition is that every class was useful in almost every encounter. In 3rd edition, I remember an encounter with a golem (I think), where my Wizard was essentially useless because the creature was effectively immune to anything I could throw at it. That kind of thing didn't happen in 4th edition.

I have no interest in rehashing this debate, but as someone who played 4e extensively and WoW since the beta that my experiences regarding the "similarity" between the two games differ from your take here. I'm not sure that anything that I say to the contrary will dissuade you of that either.

 

[Staffan]

I started playing World of Warcraft in September/October 2008, and was immediately struck by how the combat mechanics resembled the recently released D&D. In 4th edition, character roles were Striker (DPS), Defender (Tank), Leader (Healer), and Controller (tasks relegated to various classes rather than just one in WoW). When I played a Defender in 4th edition, my primary job was to take aggro from opponents just liket it was in WoW leaving it to the Strikers to do the bulk of the damage.

D&D has always been focused around fighters, clerics, rogues/thieves, and wizards. The main systemic difference role-wise was that the designers recognized that you need to fill these roles, and making sure that other classes could do so as well, instead of falling in between the roles and breaking the Ron Swanson rule by half-assing two things. As part of this system change, Defender classes were given the ability to manage "aggro", albeit via punisher mechanics ("You're free to do X, but I'll hurt you if you do") instead of aggro lists like in WoW.

There was also a more specific change with the fighter and ranger, where the ranger became more purely martial and took most of the heavy damage/Dex-based/archery stuff from the fighter, and the fighter became more defined as specifically a Defender.