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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8490799" data-attributes="member: 18">It seems to me like, until sometime in the mid-late '90s, RPG design was seen as an "unskilled" or at least "amateur" field, both by the companies involved, and by the audience.In discussions in the '90s you almost never heard "Maybe try the rules as they are - the designers were competent and playtested this heavily". On the contrary, the normal assumption was that basically any random DM was just as competent at game design as the people who actually made the game.As the '90s progressed this attitude changed, I think because we started to see more and more designs which didn't seem slapped-together, full of contradictions and peculiarities and so on. Whether it was Feng Shui or Marvel SAGA or whatever people started to realize that maybe there was more to designing RPGs than just slapping some numbers on a page or making up rules that "sounded right".Certainly WotC, with 3E, took a very different approach, perhaps partly because MtG had demanded it, and clearly believed "good game design" existed. And whilst the d20 boom brought "amateur hour" back to some degree, I think since then (and with more discussion of theory behind RPGs) we've seen a big change in how RPGs are designed. 5E actually has some rather poorly-developed bits that I think are the result of coming out of the oven slightly early, moreso than 3E/4E in some ways I'd say, but there's also a lot of very tight math and logic in there (much better logic than 3E too, I'd note).</blockquote>

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