Back when I was a sales person, very little was more annoying than a supplier representative talking down to me whether it took the form of condescendingly looking down at me as a mere representative of a distributer, or fatuous flattery and a complete inability to talk honestly about the products strengths and weaknesses for all the marketing clap trap coming out of his mouth.
It would be nice if DM's spoke to other DM's as peers.
Right now, I understand WotC's reluctance to leak anything having to do with mechanics. The mechanics probably aren't finalized, and the technology (mechanics are nothing more than technology) is a trade secret. But I think they would do better to just keep quite than deploy any more substanceless articles like this. At the very least, I'm going to try to stop reading this crap.
To start with, they are trying to fix a problem I don't have. I have never been a hidebound designer. I've never felt that anything in the DMG really represented a hard and fast rule, but rather simply helpful advice and material for the DM. Mearl's basic thesis in this essay is that, because the CR system was not perfectly balanced, DM's couldn't design interesting dungeons. Mearls then argues against himself, noting that he could design interesting encounters and dungeons, its just that the EL/CR system when employed without DM judgment might not assign the correct EL/CR to the challenge. I never once thought as a DM, 'Hey, the rules prevent me from bringing reinforcements from this room next door', or 'Gee, I can't throw 40 goblins at a party of 5th level characters, because the rules tell me that the players would get slaughtered even though I can look at the numbers and see that they won't.'
The reason that this is important is that I'm extremely skeptical of the ability of any system to fix the real underlying problem here. We can do away with the CR/EL system entirely, but we are still going to have the problem that any simple algorithm for determining how hard an encounter is and what the reward should be is going to have points of failure. The new system is therefore likely to be as buggy as the old system. This is just the nature of complex systems. Mearls is here claiming not that 4E will fix the game, but that 4E will fix reality. Color me unimpressed.
Moreover, I'm extremely unimpressed with what the vague hints about how they are going to fix it suggest. I've always disliked game systems that need special rules 'mooks' - whether Paladium's rules or AD&D's special rules for '0 level fighters' or M&M's minion rules. Anything that goes much further than D20 modern or WE: SW is in my opinion intrusive, and a step backward in design. (Hopefully, it won't go further than D20 Modern, but even that has limited utility.) Worse yet, for me, the mention of minion rules meshes in exactly with some of my speculation of how they would handle certain problems that arose from other things that they've hinted at, which suggests even more strongly that they are going not in the direction that I had hoped for with any future revisions of the game.
Anyway, some of the assertions in the article are so ironic as to be funny:
First Mearl's says, "The fight would consist of the two sides lining up and trading attacks for 3–4 rounds. Few inherently interesting tactical options can even come into play." Then he says, "The monsters might flee out the secret door in area 9 or one of the doors in area 8, but with such small rooms it would be easy for the PCs to block the exits or move next to any of the monsters before they could run." Ahh, yes, tactics don't come into play apparantly except when they do. No true Scotsman would consider that 'tactics', at least not inherently interesting tactics.
I had a good laugh out of this as well: "Measured in squares, that’s 4 by 6, small enough that even a dwarf could stomp from one end of the room to the next in one move action. That’s doesn’t make for a very interesting encounter. If I tried to squeeze four or five monsters into each of those rooms, there would be barely enough room for the party and their foes to fit." So, how did the new 'more expansive' encounter work out? Mike reports: "The fight was a tense affair in the T-intersection between areas 8 and 9." In other words, the fight ended up taking place in an even smaller location of the map. Surprise, surprise, fights tend to occur in a choke points where movement is constricted, regardless of the rules you employ. Something to do with tactics, I think, and amazingly, tactics still seemed to have broke out in these small quarters.
I can see some younger, new to 3E, DMs having this problem, but to be frank that had more to do with thier lack of experience than the design of dungeons or the rules set. Dungeons designed under every rules set of the game have had the same sort of design that Mearls here is made to pretend is new for 4E, and newer groups of every edition needed time to start thinking of rooms in relation to neighboring locations. For example, it took me a while to realize as a starting out 12 year old DM, that noisy or smelly rooms (and events) ought to be detectable at some distance to both PC's and other monsters and not just when I read the boxed prepared text. This might be an interesting discussion of dungeon design, but fundamentally it has nothing to do with 4E.
