D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

No, but it's ridiculous to say that because of one or two factors, system A is better than system B. Such as Hussar saying that because Ironsworn is faster, it is better for sandboxes--when speed is not actually a requirement for sandboxes. No, the fact that Ironsworn (and other, similar games) are faster makes it better for Hussar's preferred style of play. It's not going to make it better for people who like creating or learning world lore.

HE DIDN'T SAY THAT!

Maybe just maybe focus on the argument actually being made, instead of the strawman you want to take down?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A sandbox doesn't have to be all of A or B. Plenty of sandboxes are built on prepped material and also made up on the fly as a result of the players probing the setting and the GM making things or resetting to rolls in the moment

....

So, are we now saying that there's a spectrum with degrees along the way and that some kinds of things called "sandbox" are not 100% fully exclusively sandbox-and-nothing-else?

Because if we are I'd really appreciate some recognition for having made that point hundreds of posts ago. With specific examples and explicit statements to that effect.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's true IMO that it is not objectively possible. All you can do is state your opinion and make your case, ideally in a respectful way, and hopefully be ok with folks having a different subjective opinion on the matter than yourself.

So.

Just so we're clear.

A person telling you, "52 Pickup is better for sandbox gaming than D&D" is something no one can dispute or argue against?

I want to be absolutely clear that you are supporting this claim. Because that is what I referred to and I don't want to be portrayed as misreading or misunderstanding or intentionally doing anything underhanded. I am asking very specifically to be sure that there is no misrepresentation here. And yes, I am choosing an intentionally absurd example to point out a flaw in the argument being made.

Because if "52 Pickup is better for sandbox gaming than D&D" is an acceptable argument, you have just asserted that there literally cannot ever be any form of discussion about game design, at all, ever. All statements about game design are 100% pure opinion and nothing else. No one can analyze a game. No one can point out faults in a game. No one can ask for help improving their game's design--because by definition improvement cannot happen, even in principle.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, it's rather absurd to compare a prank to an RPG, yes.

But yeah. A game may try to specialize in a particular aspect of play, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's actually better at it than other games are.

To keep to the subject at hand, you have two games: one game, A, that is built so that the entire group creates the world as you go along, and the other game, B, that makes no assumptions on that front--you can build it as you go along, you can have a "300 page book of world lore", you can have a tiny area filled in and build the rest of the world at later times[1], or anything in between. Can you really say that one of these games is objectively better than the other when it comes to sandboxes?

As far as I've been able to see, in all of the games I've played or read, the only way to actually make a game not good at something is to have absolutely no rules for something that actually needs rules for it. Like, I've seen lots of games with no combat rules, for instance.

---

[1] This is what my current Level Up game is like--I fleshed out the city a fair amount (with the help of the players) but I know almost nothing about the rest of the world, and I'm not going to bother about it until, or if, the PCs decide to go there.

Whether there is only one way or no way at all, you have now accepted that objective analyses of some forms of design are possible. If that is true, then it cannot be true that all claims regarding game design are 100% pure opinion and nothing else. You have to actually defend why "game X is not actually better or worse than game Y at doing task X" is true.

Beyond that: it's trivially easy to construct counterexamples to the claim that "the only way for a game to be not-good at a task is to have no rules for it". That is, a game that has badly-constructed rules for achieving a particular end is entirely possible. Consider, for example, a stealth game, where the most consistently effective, most consistently successful strategy is to run in, proverbial guns blazing, killing every enemy you come across, because when every enemy is dead, no one can claim you weren't stealthy, and you never have to attempt stealth rolls/checks/actions/etc. Such a game is, objectively, badly designed for the thing it was designed to do: it objectively creates incentives for behavior the designers wanted to discourage, and objectively creates incentives to avoid behavior they wanted to encourage. That is one of the most obvious examples of badly-designed games.

Further, although in general I fully agree that it's bad game design to utterly lack rules for something that both (a) really really depends on rules and (b) is an expected/required/important part of the designers' intended play experience, there can still be rare edge cases where having rules is not necessarily as good as not having rules. I'm thinking of 13th Age's Linguist feat, for example; the basic-tier feat makes you conversant but not fluent in basically all commonly-used languages, and the middle-tier version makes you functionally fluent in all but the most totally obscure/unknown languages in the world. Then the designers said in a sidebar, paraphrased, "There shouldn't be any need for a final-tier version of Linguist. If you need one, you know better than we do what you need from it." Totally nailing down the highest-level version of that feat would be worse than leaving a clean, well-defined space for DMs and players to fill with their creativity. The scaffolding is there, the rules provide the necessary and useful foundation, so it's not no rules whatsoever; it's just no rules for a thing the designers cannot possibly predict and couldn't meaningfully help further than they already have.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I really think we should separate "better" and "faster". I certainly see them as different things, so why assume they're the same?

It is one possible valence of "better". It isn't the only one.

 

[mamba]

HE DIDN'T SAY THAT!

are you sure about that?

About the strongest thing that has been claimed is that D&D isn't a particularly good system for sandboxing because it is so prep heavy.

I'm saying that D&D is not a very good sandbox game

my point about how D&D is somewhat more difficult to run as a sandbox than other systems.

There are other systems that work better for creating sandboxes than D&D.

My point is, and remains, that there are other systems where it is easier to run a sandbox than D&D. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And...so?

I fail to see a problem with any of this, other than the part saying "such people do not want to play games". The fact is, they still want to play, but want to play a game rather than multiple games.

You're reading someone who embraces and sticks with one game design (positive) as someone who rejects all other game designs (negative) and even rejects the very concept of game design (somewhat ludicrous).

No.

I'm saying that someone who argues "no game can ever be any 'better' or 'worse' than any other game, period, hands down, no exceptions" is arguing that ALL game design is both pointless and irrelevant.

Which kinda makes all of our conversations on here ever--everything you've ever written, everything you've ever played, everything you've ever designed--completely and utterly pointless. Not just a waste of time, an active antagonism to your own efforts!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

are you sure about that?

Point to me the place where he said D&D was a bad system. Point to me the place where he said Ironsworn is just an inherently, generically better system than D&D.

I'll wait.

Every single example you quoted is him saying Ironsworn is better at one specific task. Completely different thing. Every single time, he has very specifically referred to one specific task, sandbox game running/prep/effort.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So.

Just so we're clear.

A person telling you, "52 Pickup is better for sandbox gaming than D&D" is something no one can dispute or argue against?

I want to be absolutely clear that you are supporting this claim. Because that is what I referred to and I don't want to be portrayed as misreading or misunderstanding or intentionally doing anything underhanded. I am asking very specifically to be sure that there is no misrepresentation here. And yes, I am choosing an intentionally absurd example to point out a flaw in the argument being made.

Because if "52 Pickup is better for sandbox gaming than D&D" is an acceptable argument, you have just asserted that there literally cannot ever be any form of discussion about game design, at all, ever. All statements about game design are 100% pure opinion and nothing else. No one can analyze a game. No one can point out faults in a game. No one can ask for help improving their game's design--because by definition improvement cannot happen, even in principle.

If you think it's necessary, make your case that 52 pickup is terrible for sandbox. I expect you'll get a lot of takers.

Seriously, you really are overstating your case. All I'm saying is that you can't simply claim that game is objectively better at a playstyle than another and not expect disagreement, especially when there are clearly factors that work against such a bold claim, as there are in this case.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No, that is not all he's been saying. As @Faolyn has already pointed out, Hussar has made several comments that were much more judgmental than that:

So, you're just ignoring the parts in what you just quoted where Hussar said

I'm saying that D&D is not a very good sandbox game.

There are other systems that work better for creating sandboxes than D&D.

In other words, explicitly NOT, at ANY point, saying that D&D is just a fundamentally worse system or that Ironsworn is just a fundamentally better system. Each and every time, his claim has been the much more restrained statement that X system is better than Y system for task Z. Which is completely different from saying that X system is just inherently better than system Y at everything you could possibly do.

Like I don't understand why this is such a hard thing. He has made this argument consistently.