Consequences of The "Hidden" Rules...

[Scribble]

Unless you've been living under your bed for about 6 years, you probably know 3.0 and 3.5 seem to have been designed with the idea of balance and "fairness" in mind.

Rules exist for most predictable actions, and those rules try their best not to contradict eachother. It's pretty apparent from reading the book.

Some of the rules, however, seem to have hidden rules behind them, or motivating them, or just reasons that aren't made totally apparent.

Like, BAB, following certain arcs, or why one set of abilities is "balanced" vs. another... Or in 3.0 how sometimes it wasn't very easy to find what it meant to be a certain "type" of monster...

D20 is open source, but a lot of people seem to feel that the "early days" of 3rd edition were filled with horrible un thought out junk, that threw balance out of whack.

Do you think, had wizards, or the designers, released information on the how or why certain rules worked, that this large amount of junk might have been cut down?

Would it have had an effect on where we are now in the system?

 

[Victim]

No.

Even WotC internal projects had problems (Sword and Fist, anyone), and presumeably they could access the hidden rationales for certain rules. I think much of the earliest stuff was developed largely in parallel with some of the core books - Creature Collection I came out before the MM!

Even with rules explanations and guidelines, I think people would have ignored them until they had sufficient experience of their own. People with emotional investments in their creations and/or under deadline pressure probably aren't going to care about some little sidebar.

 

[Joshua Randall]

I think WotC has done a much better job lately of explaining their thought processes. Especially with the "Design & Development" column on their website.

But really, ever since the "Behind the Curtain" sidebars in the DMG, they've been explaining why the rules work the way they do. Unearthed Arcana is another good source of "why".

So are the D&D for Dummies / DMing for Dummies books, if you've read those.

 

[Scribble]

I agree there are more resources now, then there were in the begining. Even in say 3.5 the Monster "type" issue I mentioned seemed to be cleared up.

I realize that accidents will always happen, and some will conciously just ignore the rules but I'm wondering if they had released "clear-cut" info about this before would we have seen "so many" of the improperly constructed materials?

Do you think some companies and designers just had trouble do to not knowing why certain things were as they were?

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I would speculate that, yes, to some degree designers didn't have all the information they needed.

I also suspect, especially in the early days of 3.0, that the rush to print and hop onto the 3.0 bandwagon also led to sloppy design work.

Last, the first supplement books published by other companies, such as the Creature Collection, probably had little to no playtesting to determine where there might be problems.

 

[mmu1]

No, I don't think it'd have mattered.

Most people who write D&D (or OGL) material just don't know the rules very well.

There are professional designers who think they understand the rules well, but they really don't. Or those that know the rules - they just don't like some of them, so they ignore them when writing new stuff.
There are people who are writers, first and foremeost, who just happen to get work writing RPG stuff, and they just aren't "rule people".
There are those who don't have any respect for RPGs, and think their own personal brilliance makes up for small defects like a complete lack of knowledge of the rules.
There are part-time writers who send stuff in because they love D&D, who aren't as up on the rules as they could be, in an ideal world, but making a living takes precedence over studying rulebooks.