Search results

Because D&D is allergic to actually taking seriously the technology and social structures of early-Renaissance Europe. It wants elements of technology and culture that literally span from a mere couple of centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, all the way up to the late...

Then you are, frankly, being willfully blind to the exact issue and then accusing the non-GMs of being the cause of the problem. The very admission "that's ultimately a DMing problem, not a character build problem" IS saying that bad GMing results in skills that could be useful actually getting...

Yes--but my point is that there are (many) ways to get folks on board with the new thing.... ...and that that's actually one of the reasons to do the performative side of playtesting! Like...if they actually had a real expert on staff to help them design good, well-made surveys, and an actual...

And yet what do we so often actually see? Incredibly cookie-cutter worlds, incredibly cookie-cutter player options, incredibly over-used tropes and themes and such. For all the talk of the potential infinitude that TTRPGs offer, the GMs who actually run them, on average, have absolutely no...

I do, yes. Because I genuinely believe that a competently-designed game can actually deliver on the real, practical version of the airy-fairy "modularity" that they talked up all througout the "D&D Next" playtest, which then was 90% DOA when the books finally arrived.

Of course, as I said back when it was still the incredibly stupidly-named "One D&D" playtest, 5.5e won't have the longevity 5.0 had. Revisions are always diminishing returns. 3rd edition got three of them (3.5, PF1e, PF1e "Unchained"), and none of them lasted more than ~5 ish years. That does...

Statistical testing isn't any more expensive then the incredibly time-wasteful process they went through with 5.0. "D&D Next" wasted nearly two whole years just figuring out the "core four" classes. They proffered only ONE iteration of Warlock and Sorcerer during the entire public playtest, and...

People will like it or hate it completely without regard to how you've designed it, so I see little point in caring about that part.

TL;DR: Mearls and other design team members were doing a game (recorded for a livestream or podcast, can't remember which) as a promo for 5e. They had a basic but decent party and took on like three ghouls vs their IIRC five characters. The ghouls absolutely slaughtered them, completely taking...

I'm afraid I can't see whomever you quoted, @payn. But my point was that, for all the effort they poured into (allegedly) making the thing everyone wanted, they openly admitted to several things they considered blunders, and 5.5e happened specifically because they failed to nail several classes...

Not just consumed nostalgia: instant nostalgia. We're having remakes of shows, games, movies, etc. that aren't even that old. How to Train Your Dragon got a live-action remake...only fifteen years after it originally came out. Like there are literally people who went to see it in theaters as...

Folks have, very recently, told me that this is not true and that the playtest really was there to test things to see if they would work. That it wasn't performative. So...like I completely agree with you! But there are people, even today, who adamantly insist that this isn't true and that the...

I really don't think there's any "self-fulfilling" about it. Performance checks have never been common in any game I've played. Ever. Doesn't matter what system. I've literally never even heard of a GM calling for lots of performance checks prior to @MostlyHarmless42 saying so just now in this...

Except they literally haven't done what I'm talking about. They literally don't do actual, statistical testing. If they had, the "ghoul surprise" could not happen, because they would have already known, from doing simulations, that saving throws fail far too often and need to be bolstered...

And yet....

I really don't think it's wise to be blithe about this. This is a common and thorny design trap in all sorts of game design--the problem of having an action that has the risk of being either so overwhelmingly optimal there's no reason ever to not take it, or so pointless that there's never a...

Wonderful news: we can! Less wonderful news: It requires starting with clear and specific design goals, creating designs which attempt to implement those goals, and then doing rigorous and specifically statistical testing to ensure that those goals are met. To the best of my knowledge, neither...

But that's precisely my point. You are calling it out as bad. I am not interested in arguing with you about that. My interest, here, is simply that you know what you believe is good design; you know that these designers did not practice that idea; you know that they could have, but chose not...

You absolutely can. It just requires actual playtesting, not the performative nonsense that WotC (and Paizo!) have been billing as "playtesting". I'm not doing that, so...not a concern. That is far, far from the best designers can do. That's straight-up pretending designers are somehow utterly...

I think it's perfectly possible to design a game where both concerns can work. It just has to be an active, and rigorously tested, design goal from the beginning that both attrition-focused gameplay and tactics-focused gameplay provide rich, rewarding experiences, with tools for either side to...