Monte on the Language of Game Design

Mark CMG · Jun 13, 2012

Monte Cook (one of the designers of D&D 3E, and until recently of D&D Next) has written a short essay on the "Language of Game Design" over on his journal, The Chapel Perilous. It looks at the way in which we all discuss games with one another and past one another.

You can read the essay here.

Ahnehnois · Jun 13, 2012

Well, that explains the content of all those message board arguments I've read.

S'mon · Jun 13, 2012

" the presumption that someone who does this for a living, full-time, for a lot of years was unfamiliar with them was, well, weird"

I don't think anyone would have presumed Monte was unfamiliar with 4e D&D, until they read his DDI columns, which gave a strong and surprising impression that he was not familiar with it.

delericho · Jun 13, 2012

I found this interesting:

You're not likely to hear someone say, "I'm writing a new game with character generation like FATE, a combat system like 4E D&D, and investigation resolution like Gumshoe." That may sound ridiculous, but I have heard people sum up 3E D&D that way: "they took the skill system from Rolemaster, the character creation from GURPS, and the rest from Runequest." It may seem sometimes that that's how game designers work, but I can assure you that I don't know of anyone that actually designs that way. Game designers are influenced by games they like, but I can't imagine someone creating a Frankenstein's monster of a game like that. Most game designers want to do something new.

In software engineering, we call that Not Invented Here syndrome - rather than reuse a perfectly good piece of code (or game mechanic, or whatever), the engineer reimplements it. And so, a lot of time and effort is spent reinventing the wheel, time that could be spent refining and improving the original.

Now, that's not to say that designers shouldn't do anything new, necessarily. But if they only have one or two ideas that they want to try out in their new game, it would make sense to simply reuse another system for the remainder of the mechanics.

(Of course, to a large extent that was the dream of the OGL - that people would primarily build off the core d20 system, gradually refine it over time, and that we'd thus see incremental improvements over time rather than multiple fundamentally incompatible games all doing essentially the same thing. That bit of the dream hasn't worked out so well.)

Bedrockgames · Jun 13, 2012

This was a good article because so many debates here arise out of unrecognized differences in term usage. My response, which I made directly on Monte's article, is that this is actually a good thing. I am glad we don't have a single language of design because I feel it would result in more homogenous games.

Janx · Jun 13, 2012

S'mon said:
" the presumption that someone who does this for a living, full-time, for a lot of years was unfamiliar with them was, well, weird"

I don't think anyone would have presumed Monte was unfamiliar with 4e D&D, until they read his DDI columns, which gave a strong and surprising impression that he was not familiar with it.

I think Monte was referring to recommendations on non-D&D games.

As in the presumption that Monte has never researched games not directly tied to his employer.

Janx · Jun 13, 2012

delericho said:
In software engineering, we call that Not Invented Here syndrome - rather than reuse a perfectly good piece of code (or game mechanic, or whatever), the engineer reimplements it. And so, a lot of time and effort is spent reinventing the wheel, time that could be spent refining and improving the original.

You're not wrong about NIHS being a problem, but I don't think that applies here.

Someone suffering from NIHS doesn't just reimplement it, they make a different solution to the problem, rather than use an existing solution.

Making yet another dice resolution mechanic, skill system, combat system is NIHS.

A designer wants all the parts to be seemlesss. Phrasing the game design as a Frankenstein's Monster implies a clunky implementation of cobbling parts that weren't meant to go to gether. It's rather insulting.

A designer might use ideas from other sources, but to the designer, the effort of making them not just fit together, but to actually become one system.

In software, it's the difference between integrating systems and creating a piece of software that encompasses the features that are sold in seperate projects. Getting stuff to work together can be a challenge, but it's not in the same calibre of effort or complexity as actually making a larger piece of software.

As to why this may or may not be a bad thing, if you can see the seams, it's a Frankenstein's Monster of a solution. Designing from scratch tends to avoid that problem, but takes a lot more work and risk.

Henry · Jun 14, 2012

On Monte's "language of game design" comments: Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra, Buddy -- sometimes it's all we have.

On the "Frankenstein's Monster" comments -- I'd rather see it more often! Re-inventing the wheel is a common problem of game designers, often wanting to keep their IP separate or having the belief that they can design something better than everyone else, but a lot of times they just don't realize that the more dissimilar a game is from every other game out there, it makes it more difficult to attract significant audiences.

Aetherco's Continuum suffered from this, in my mind -- Adams, Manui, and Fooden had an extremely innovative game and concept, one that could have taken off like a bullet in the d20 boom, but their base mechanic system was different from most others out there, and as a result, an awesome product became yet another indy game that didn't stand out. Site hasn't been updated since 2008, from what I see.

Heck, it's what Monte himself did for the sanity system in the d20 Call of Cthulhu product, because, in the words of the intro to the book, they couldn't design a more elegant system to represent that spiral to madness. Sometimes, you just use what works. If it's open content, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to do. (My proselytizing for the thread.)

Jhaelen · Jun 18, 2012

Henry said:
On the "Frankenstein's Monster" comments -- I'd rather see it more often! Re-inventing the wheel is a common problem of game designers, often wanting to keep their IP separate or having the belief that they can design something better than everyone else, but a lot of times they just don't realize that the more dissimilar a game is from every other game out there, it makes it more difficult to attract significant audiences.

Yup. And that's not the only disadvantage of reinventing the wheel.

We recently had this discussion in the context of (collecting) card games: I find it completely unfathomable that there are apparently companies releasing (new) (C)CGs that apparently haven't heard about Magic - The Gathering yet and happily repeat some of WotC's earliest design mistakes.
A company that doesn't closely watch what established competitors have been doing and especially paying attention to things they've already figured out that work and don't work, fully deserves to fail painfully.

Monte on the Language of Game Design

Mark CMG

Creative Mountain Games

Attachments

Ahnehnois

First Post

S'mon

Legend

delericho

Legend

Bedrockgames

Legend

Janx

Hero

Janx

Hero

Henry

Autoexreginated

Jhaelen

First Post

Similar Threads