[Ari Marmell's blog] To House Rule or Not to House Rule

[Galloglaich]

I don't see any deadly Jello cubes, beholders or rust monsters in Kurosawa, to be fair.

Yes, but you don't have to have anything like that in a DnD game, in the early versions, they were options. I think somewhere along the line the idea that every creature in the Monster Manual - which I always saw as a resource so you could play different kinds of games- had to exist together in the same world. For a long time this was a trend in DnD, to merge everything together, it started in EGG's own 'greyhawk' and was raised to a high art in forgotten realms. It may well have been the most popular way to play the game, but you were never forced to buy into it. You could still play the game other ways. With 3.0 and 3.5 they started forcing some of these kinds of expectations into the game when the balance obsession and player empowerment were increasingly built into the rules, and houseruling increasingly forced out.

Which parts of 4e are from comic books?

I really don't want to make this into an edition wars argument, because we both know that is pointless. My point is, per the blog, it's clear that the mutability of DnD has been vastly restricted over time, regardless of specific editions. And the assumptions of one specific way of playing have become much more dominant. As someone who never played with those particular assumptions, never had comic book stuff in any of my games and didn't mix genres, I find myself now left out. As an industry writer, I find myself unable (and uninterested) to contribute in any way to the current version of DnD because the system is essentially closed to the way I play now, which seems to be completely unnecessary. I don't think DnD should be a niche game.

D&D has always been its own genre. The magic system is useless if you want the magic of Elric or Earthsea or that of any mythology.

Not if you are still free to houserule and use various supplmenents, I know there were Elric and Fafhred supplements going way back (how good they were is another issue). If you want to mix up Perseus and Thor and Fafhred and Elric and Charlemagne in the same campaign, I think you should be able to do that, it's a game after all play it however you like. If I want to have a more genre specific game with a high level of immersion and plausibility, and play without chits, cards, miniatures or maps, I should be able to do that too. I don't like that the door has been closed.

Possibly the weirdest thing about D&D is the level track. At low levels, PCs die very easily, in fact far more frequently than any fictional protagonist. At high levels, D&D is a crazy monster-beset magic carpet ride of resurrection and teleportation. Both extremes are very rare in fiction and folklore. The progression itself is unique, as far as I am aware.

I think the game always had a sweet spot at mid-low levels, say 4- 8 but that is one of the reasons I always houseruled and eventually published my own stuff to change some factors of that like level progression, the spell list and (especially) combat. and thereby flatten that arc out a little bit.

Also people died all the time in Elric and Conan and Dying Earth bra.

G.

 

[xechnao]

If you manage to create something of the sort, please share it! It should be interesting,even revolutionary
On the other hand, you'll have to excuse me if I can't take your statement at face value until then, but if I said something to the effect of "it's a fact that people can live forever" and, when asked "how?",I replied "well, I'm working on it" it wouldn't be a very compelling argument

No prob. So are you saying that if I manage to pull something of this sort it could be the equivalent of finding out how to live forever? Nah, it is a lot more mundane than that and hardly I believe anything revolutionary. A bunch of games I am aware of have taken some shots at ideas of this kind although I am sure no game ever intended to make this way something as focused and complete on melee combat as 4e tries to do.

 

[Galloglaich]

The fact is that in the end there can be faster, more useful and more functional ways to implement and encourage tactics than with a battlemap. 3.x may have used battlemaps -even in a fundamental way to its gameplay- but this does not mean that people cannot criticize 4e for entirely focusing its whole gameplay aspect on a battlemap trying to achieve the things that you can do perhaps better without a battlemap. I am talking about "things" like optimizing "D&D adventuring-team member" focused gameplay rather than the generic but solidly D&Dish ruleset that 3.x tried to invoke.

I designed a combat system for OGL specifically so I wouldn't have to use battlemaps or miniatures. I don't mind in the least that some people want them, I don't like them and feel they kill immersion for me and my group. If I have to get some paper and pencil out to illustrate something that is particularly hard to visualize or even once in a while stack some dice up to show positions for a second, I will, but I don't want to play that particular way and I definitely don't want to deal with chips for healing surges or powers or any of that kind of thing.

So the bottom line for me is whether the game still lets me play 'accoutrements-lite' or 'accoutrements-heavy'. I think it has clearly become the latter - mandatory.

G.

 

[Nifft]

It's part and parcel of being a creator.

If you're a film director, you'll never see a movie without thinking of pacing, camera placement, etc.

If you work in Advertising, you'll never look at an ad without thinking if the message is getting across clearly, if the font is adequate, etc.

If you work as a game designer, you learn to spot broken rules. By "broken" I don't just mean "overpowered", but also rules that will be a pain to keep track of at the table, or that have unclear definitons, etc.

IMHO, this is no sad thing. It's glorious to be able to look at a rule and say, "Wow, that's a very nice take on this issue", before you play through that rule hundreds of times.

The filmmaker can appreciate great camera work for the technique it uses to evoke its effect. The naive audience can appreciate the evoked effect. Both appreciate good work. There's nothing lost by enhancing one's education, and there is something gained.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Galloglaich]

Sorry, but can you provide some examples? Because I don't think this is true.
There's a reason most generals use visual aids to study and explain their strategies, there's a reason coaches usually use a blackboard to show their strategies and formations to the team, there's a reason why we have maps of the world rather than lengthy description of where the Rocky Mountains are, and there's a reason why games like Risk or Chess are so successful:

Yes but please remember, Risk and Chess, and the War-Games that generals play with, are all BOARD GAMES. They are not role playing games.

I played DnD and various other RPGs for 25 years, with a huge variety of different people from all walks of life, with punk rockers, martial artists, maritime workers, in the Army, in five different states and 3 different countries. We didn't use miniatures ever. I did meet a few people over the years who used them but it was a different style of play I didn't like so I never joined those games. I never had trouble finding people who played the other way with a bare minimum of crap. All you need to play a role playing game is maybe a couple of dice and some paper and a pencil. And in a pinch you can skip the latter two. I used maps when I played squad leader or axis and allies or risk, but not for Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia or DnD. You don't need them.

I don't care in the least if you or 10,000 other people want to play role playing games kind of like a board game, hell I often imagine lot of RPG type fantasies when I'm playing board games myself. But it's really creepy to me that so many gamers today can't even imagine how to play out a combat without a map. And it's pandering to this particular attitude which created gaming systems which make it impossible to play without a map (and miniatures, and chips and cards and etc.) as a self fulfilling prophecy, pandering to a certain segment of the customer base at the expense of others. And making a game which is closed off to a lot of the potential ROLE PLAYING game customer base as a result.

G.

 

[Galloglaich]

If you manage to create something of the sort, please share it! It should be interesting,even revolutionary
On the other hand, you'll have to excuse me if I can't take your statement at face value until then, but if I said something to the effect of "it's a fact that people can live forever" and, when asked "how?",I replied "well, I'm working on it" it wouldn't be a very compelling argument

Are you honestly saying they don't have RPG games that require a battle map to play out combat in?

G.

 

[Desdichado]

Yes, but you don't have to have anything like that in a DnD game, in the early versions, they were options. I think somewhere along the line the idea that every creature in the Monster Manual - which I always saw as a resource so you could play different kinds of games- had to exist together in the same world. For a long time this was a trend in DnD, to merge everything together, it started in EGG's own 'greyhawk' and was raised to a high art in forgotten realms. It may well have been the most popular way to play the game, but you were never forced to buy into it. You could still play the game other ways. With 3.0 and 3.5 they started forcing some of these kinds of expectations into the game when the balance obsession and player empowerment were increasingly built into the rules, and houseruling increasingly forced out.

I think you'll be hard pressed to demonstrate that there's any such shift. Granted, I don't really know much about 4th edition, but 3rd edition was the most mutable, houserule friendly system in the history of systems. They even released the game with a specific license that allowed anyone to publish any houserule they wanted. And they published an entire book that was nothing but a gigantic collection of houserules (Unearthed Arcana.)

If you think there's a shift, it's most likely an anecdotal perception on your part that is not necessarily shared by the community at large, and I doubt it'd be shared by the designers either. I've never seen anyone demonstrate that this is true, and in fact the evidence I cited above certainly seems to demonstrate that the opposite is true.

I really don't want to make this into an edition wars argument, because we both know that is pointless. My point is, per the blog, it's clear that the mutability of DnD has been vastly restricted over time, regardless of specific editions. And the assumptions of one specific way of playing have become much more dominant. As someone who never played with those particular assumptions, never had comic book stuff in any of my games and didn't mix genres, I find myself now left out. As an industry writer, I find myself unable (and uninterested) to contribute in any way to the current version of DnD because the system is essentially closed to the way I play now, which seems to be completely unnecessary. I don't think DnD should be a niche game.

Comic book, in this context, being equivalent to the widespread yet meaningless insulting buzzwords of the past such as "too anime" or "too video-gamey" or "too MMOish" or "dungeonpunk."

I think you should re-evaluate who's vision of D&D is niche and who's isn't.

Not if you are still free to houserule and use various supplmenents, I know there were Elric and Fafhred supplements going way back (how good they were is another issue). If you want to mix up Perseus and Thor and Fafhred and Elric and Charlemagne in the same campaign, I think you should be able to do that, it's a game after all play it however you like. If I want to have a more genre specific game with a high level of immersion and plausibility, and play without chits, cards, miniatures or maps, I should be able to do that too. I don't like that the door has been closed.

Maybe you could give some specific ways in which the door has been closed? Again; I'm not really very familiar with 4e, but I have to admit I'm having a hard time envisioning any meaningful way in which any game could possibly exist with the door to houserules being closed. With the obvious exception of video/computer games.

 

[Njall]

No prob. So are you saying that if I manage to pull something of this sort it could be the equivalent of finding out how to live forever?

Ehm, nope, my analogy was more along the lines of "if I state something that's not demostrably true, then I can't use it as a premise to make a point. That may change as soon as I'm able to provide a solid example".
However, I still think that if you find a way to create a method that's simpler and more intuitive than a map it would have a huge impact on board/strategy games and, tangentially, RPGs.
However, the key here is "more intuitive, faster and simpler", not just different: I'm not arguing that there are other ways to create tactically interesting games and situations, I'm arguing that visual aids ( and, in this case, maps ) are usually easier to grasp and more intuitive, and thus, in this context, "better".

 

[Galloglaich]

IMHO, this is no sad thing. It's glorious to be able to look at a rule and say, "Wow, that's a very nice take on this issue", before you play through that rule hundreds of times.

The filmmaker can appreciate great camera work for the technique it uses to evoke its effect. The naive audience can appreciate the evoked effect. Both appreciate good work. There's nothing lost by enhancing one's education, and there is something gained.

Cheers, -- N

I agree, as a fencer I like when I see good fencing, whether in films (very rarely) or in other contexts. As a game designer I like looking at well put together games. I think this balance thing in the Blog which started this thread is a separate issue - it's an obsession which actually distorts the system so that it kind of suppresses good game play, which is not the sign of an elegant game-design feature IMO.

G.

 

[Galloglaich]

I think you'll be hard pressed to demonstrate that there's any such shift. Granted, I don't really know much about 4th edition, but 3rd edition was the most mutable, houserule friendly system

I think as some other people pointed out upthread, this was a trend between 3.0 and 3.5.

If you think there's a shift, it's most likely an anecdotal perception on your part that is not necessarily shared by the community at large, and I doubt it'd be shared by the designers either. I've never seen anyone demonstrate that this is true, and in fact the evidence I cited above certainly seems to demonstrate that the opposite is true.

To you perhaps.

Comic book, in this context, being equivalent to the widespread yet meaningless insulting buzzwords of the past such as "too anime" or "too video-gamey" or "too MMOish" or "dungeonpunk."

You are taking insults, and bandying them back, where none were intended. The emotional investment in game rules is bizarre to me.

I think you should re-evaluate who's vision of D&D is niche and who's isn't.

Maybe you could give some specific ways in which the door has been closed?

I did that once, it didn't go over well. I'll stick to abstractions, comfortable that some people will understand what I'm getting at, some people won't, and some people may even get angry. If I go any further into concrete detail I'm likely to have more of all three types of reactions but the third type is problematic for me since I am an industry writer.

Again; I'm not really very familiar with 4e, but I have to admit I'm having a hard time envisioning any meaningful way in which any game could possibly exist with the door to houserules being closed. With the obvious exception of video/computer games.

Well, rather than try to explain that myself, I'll refer you to the blog linked in the OP.

G.