ATTACK! MCDM's new rpg and removing the to-hit roll

[mamba]

But for the wotc playtests, are their hands tied behind their backs if the xxx amount of player feedback say that like/want what’s in the play test design? I think not since the vast majority of 80% positive feedback shows a lot of players want it and makes it into the game.

There is a lot they dropped because it reached high 60s to low 70s. What they have to do to get it to 80, so it can be accepted into the books is where they have relatively little say, that is where the hands are tied.

 

[mamba]

Well, it's MCDM...Matt's company...and he's one of the designers involved, yes, but it looks a lot like James Introcaso is the lead designer for the game. Matt's also been pretty clear that it's not "his vision for his game" it's a group effort.

yes, group of designers, not a single person, that is true for both sides. I used the names as a shorthand

WotC has rampant internal politics and we have no idea how bound they are or are not to the playtest feedback.

I'd really like to know that too... Given that pretty much anything that was high 60s was not even iterated on, it seems rather little from what I can gather

All we know is what they report. We don't have access to the raw data. So they could just as easily report whatever numbers they want and design the game however they like and we'd be none the wiser. Of course, they could be 100% honest about it all. We have no way of knowing.

sure, they could just lie to us, do whatever they want and never tell us the real numbers, but I very much doubt that this is what they do. If you believe that, be my guest, I do not

 

[mamba]

That you don't like the vision isn't evidence that there's no vision.

it would not be, yes, but I see none, not even one I disagree with. Unless you consider 'do whatever gets enough approval so D&D remains popular' a vision, I consider that a goal

They've spent thousands of words and hours of video explaining their vision.

I guess we disagree on what a vision is

I don't necessarily think that sales are good design. But I also don't think the people who put out Strongholds and Followers are good designers - it had vision with horrible implementation that barely uses 5e paradigms.

you are free to disagree with their design, I haven't looked at it, so will not comment on it either way

I do think that if the only good designers are the people at MCDM and everyone else is a bunch of tired corporate types without vision that says something about commenters's opinions about things that have nothing to do with design.

I do not think so either, this is not even close to what I said

 

[mamba]

Well that’s the McDonalds conversation. It’s the most popular food in the world. Is it the best food in the world?

No, it isn't. That seems pretty straightforward...

What does quality even mean anyway divorced from personal taste? Is David Bowie better than Taylor Swift better than the Sex Pistols better than One Direction?

there are a ton of ways to measure quality, most have little to do with personal taste

Anybody talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design better bring a solid paper. Otherwise, they’re just talking about what they like. Which is fine, but let’s be honest about it.

Notice that I did not call either design good or bad, I said one has a vision and is free to design something that gets as close to it as he wants, the other does not and cannot.

I might still like D&D 2024 better than whatever Matt creates in the end, but that does not change the above.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

When I first read T&T, I scoffed at its "unrealistic" way of handling combat... like D&D to-hit rolls vs AC are particularly realistic!

I'm reminded in this discussion of the Amber Diceless back in '91 where, since there are no dice, the person with highest Warfare won combat... unless the other person got sneaky and narrated the other person into a bad situation.

It was an interesting system - you had character points, and you 'bid' how powerful you were amongst your generation of Amberites.

 

[darjr]

I'm reminded in this discussion of the Amber Diceless back in '91 where, since there are no dice, the person with highest Warfare won combat... unless the other person got sneaky and narrated the other person into a bad situation.

It was an interesting system - you had character points, and you 'bid' how powerful you were amongst your generation of Amberites.

I usually hate bidding systems but I loved this. What a great game.

 

[Emberashh]

Anybody talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design better bring a solid paper. Otherwise, they’re just talking about what they like. Which is fine, but let’s be honest about it.

I think that this branches out into the greater philosophical question of whether or not games count as an art form.

I certainly believe they are, but I also think that, like all art forms, how a given instance can be judged cannot always be judged with the exact same criteria as the next, especially when the mediums are different.

Watercolors and oil painting can for example be judged on a number of common criteria, but also a number of things exclusive to those mediums.

In music, we can't really judge a symphony of Mozart in the same way we judge a Miley Cyrus song, even if some of the jargon overlaps.

In movies, an action film can't be critiqued like its an art house drama.

But, theres also a complicating factor in that what counts as a medium could actually share nearly all the same criteria but still be unable to be judged the same. TV can't be judged like Movies; a Live show can't be judged like a Studio Recording. Physical vs Digital art. Etc etc.

I think Games have all of these issues, and TTRPGs by their nature have considerable capability to develop these sort of "meta" mediums separate from just being a tabletop game, an RPG, or some mix.

An OSR game can't be judged on the same lines as a PBTA game on the same lines as DND and so on.

Whats good design in one game simply isn't going to be universal. I personally think I came up with a rather brilliant way to systamatize Crafting through dice rolls, but I think itd only really work in the context of my moderately crunchy game. Transplanting it into a PBTA game would simply not work.

Doesn't mean its bad design.

 

[aramis erak]

Like I said. Other games toyed around the idea. T&T used a mass combat wargame mecanic that individuals added to the dice pool. Not individual turns, for instance.

That's not entirely true. 5th ed, if one actually reads the elaborations, notes that there can be multiple melees in a given round. It's not always one big melee. Like AD&D, there are subtleties one discovers only with repeated rereads; unlike AD&D, most of these actually are worth inclusion...

 

[darjr]

That's not entirely true. 5th ed, if one actually reads the elaborations, notes that there can be multiple melees in a given round. It's not always one big melee. Like AD&D, there are subtleties one discovers only with repeated rereads; unlike AD&D, most of these actually are worth inclusion...

Huh. I bounced off of T&T hard and it's been a while. thanks!

 

[aramis erak]

Yeah it all feels very heartbreakery doesn't it. 'Here's a little thing I like to call passive perception'.

Heartbreaker is a term that's lost it's sting in the era of cheap publishing. But no, MCDM's isn't hitting there for me... yet.

Huh. I bounced off of T&T hard and it's been a while. thanks!

Much of what people "know" about T&T is wrong. Especially 5th ed T&T - there's a good reason it remained the standard edition and in print at profit from 1979 to 1995 or so... It's also the second most comprehensible edition of T&T.

I do think things are best if it can be interpreted several different ways, yea.

That's not done any favors for Gygax's non-D&D designs...