D&D 5E D&D Next Blog - Wizards Like to Roll Dice Too

[Neonchameleon]

But give the man a break and some respect. Stop assuming the worst every time something is posted. Just because it's possible to twist and misunderstand something he writes about 4e doesn't mean it should be.

Why? Respect should be earned. And the man who deliberately put system mastery traps into 3.X needs to go a long way to digging himself out of the hole to earn mine. And since then he has in his L&L column done things like talked about passive perception as if it was a new thing. And said that 4e doesn't have saving throws.

Respect is also a two way street. I'm seeing none at all coming from his direction - when the communications I see from him are a mix of push-polls and signs that he doesn't respect the game I'm quite happy playing, I have limited respect for him.

And as for "twisting his words", he is meant to be a game designer. I need to change the raw meaning of his words in order to get to the results that he may have intended to communicate. One of the necessary skills of a game designer is the ability to write clearly and unambiguously. Apparently he fails at this.

(And re: the Schwalb article. It was talking about fighters as they were intended to be in 3.X rather than as they were. If that article had been written by Monte Cook, it would be a self-congratulatory pat on the back saying that he'd got things right when in fact he'd failed badly. Schwalb isn't one of the names on the 3e PHB. Context matters.)

I like the idea of the traditional saving throw because it makes affecting someone with magic mechanically different from attacking someone with a weapon. I think that makes each of those activities, and consequently the classes involved with those activities, feel more distinctive from one another in play. This is important to me because I believe part of the choice of which class to play is a choice of what kind of gameplay experience the player wants, and the more distinct those options are the more distinct and meaningful the player's choice will be.

And to me the above gets filed under "a distinction without a difference". I believe that the ability to re-write reality is enough to make things feel different as long as you have any immersion at all, and having multiple separate subsystems just confuses matters. This is important to me as changing characters should not throw me out of the game as I am forced to work out which separate set of mechanics I need to interact with unless there is an actual direct benefit to having separate mechanics.

An example of magic using separate systems to good effect would be the WHFRP 2e magic system. The casting roll means that you can get blowback whether or not the spell is cast, and allows you to control the amount of magic you dare to use (the less, the less blowback you risk). That is a distinct and meaningful difference in the way simply swapping over who rolls the dice isn't.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Monte Cook earned my respect with the d20 Call of Cthulu book. Just really well done.

I have to say, all the Monte hate is something I can't understand. Disagreeing with him, i get. Not wanting him to helm 5e, I get. But hatred and disdain? Don't get it at all.

I mean i really disliked 4e, but I never tranfered that hate to Bill Slavicsek. i still felt he was a good designer. Afterall he co-created TORG and worked on on many products I enjoyed. He just led the design on one game yhat didn't really appeal to me and he made some design choices I disliked. Big deal. That is no reason to blindly dislike or criticize the man.

Arguing passionately for your gaming preferences is great. I encourage it and refused to take the keep it positive pledge for that reason. But at least attack things of substance like the ideas Cook is putting forward. Making personal swipes just undermines your argument guys.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

And the man who deliberately put system mastery traps into 3.X...

This is, at best, a distortion of what happened, and you need to stop saying it. There is not a small amount of "blaming the messenger" here, though I'm not sure you are aware of that. What happened was that the entire 3E design team--not Monte personally--allowed some system mastery traps to remain in 3E--because the options were such that they had uses in other contexts.

If there was a mistake in this, it was in thinking they didn't need to work harder to avoid those traps because some people would turn it into a good thing--i.e. enjoy the system mastery that resulted. That is, they were making lemonade out of lemons. But nowhere has it been said that they deliberately and consciously placed these traps into the system as traps--and if someone did, the whole team let it slip by.

It's true that Monte often projects a more holistic view of design (or "big picture" if you prefer) that is often not compatible with serious attention to detail. I doubt this is as extreme as it appears from his design writing, because if he had little attention to detail, neither Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Ptolus, or the various Books of Might would be as well done as they are. After all, design articles communicating general drift of design should be big picture, especially this early when details aren't even always available, much less set and polished. But to the extent that he contributes more to the forest than the individual trues, it is up to someone else on the team (i.e. WotC "developers", not "designers" to deal with that. It is a team effort.

 

[mudbunny]

Didn't Monte invent Passive Perception in an L&L column?

IIRC, he was talking about past editions, and his words on that basically boiled down to (paraphrased) "It would be awesome if there was a stat that measured what you saw when you weren't really looking hard." The fact that he didn't immediately follow that up with "Of course, that exists in 4E" immediately let people to claim that he has never read 4E.

 

[Li Shenron]

Call me a nostalgic grognard any time you want, but I still prefer attack rolls vs AC and saving throws vs static spells DC.

There's just something I can't explain that tells me that this is right... that attacking with a weapon and defending against it should probably deserve to be both rolled, but if we don't want to have too many rolls, then it just feels right that the attacker gets to roll.

But not spells... while I can easily picture a fighter sweating hard to swing that sword, I honestly can't picture the wizard "sweating by Intelligence" to cast a spell without laughing a bit. It should be quite the same as with a weapon, but it just doesn't "click" with my imagination, which for some reason stubbornly prefers to think that the wizard just unleashes the spell against you... and you're on your own trying to resist or dodge its effects.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I have to say, all the Monte hate is something I can't understand. Disagreeing with him, i get. Not wanting him to helm 5e, I get. But hatred and disdain? Don't get it at all.

I mean i really disliked 4e, but I never tranfered that hate to Bill Slavicsek. i still felt he was a good designer.

That's just it. To me there are two sources of problem in 3.X. One minor, one major. The minor one is bloat caused by too many sources and weird interactions. Pun-Pun for example is an aberration. The major problem is extremely shoddy design. Didn't they playtest the monk against the druid? Didn't they realise that the shapechange rules were broken? Didn't they realise that, contrary to all previous editions, the fighter has almost no ability to resist spells? Couldn't they tell what PCs easily crafting scrolls and wands would do? Didn't they realise that most of the seeming imbalances (like the treasure table and the differing XPs) were there for a reason? Didn't they see a problem with making powerful spells risk free? All these are examples of seriously shoddy design.

The problems with 4e on the other hand aren't about the system failing to do what it set out to with the exception of monster damage and solos. They are about the system not having set out to do the right things for a certain style of game. That said, I'd be worried if Slavicek was in charge of writing the PHB of a new edition.

To use a board game analogy, I don't often play Knizia games and don't enjoy them much, but I respect the man as a game designer. He just doesn't design games I like to play.

That is no reason to blindly dislike or criticize the man.

It's hardly blind dislike to look at his record and be able to say "This is objectively bad design for many reasons."

This is, at best, a distortion of what happened, and you need to stop saying it. There is not a small amount of "blaming the messenger" here, though I'm not sure you are aware of that. What happened was that the entire 3E design team--not Monte personally--allowed some system mastery traps to remain in 3E--because the options were such that they had uses in other contexts.

If there was a mistake in this, it was in thinking they didn't need to work harder to avoid those traps because some people would turn it into a good thing--i.e. enjoy the system mastery that resulted.

So your defence of him is "cock-up rather than conspiracy"? That there were gaping flaws in the game design that the team knew about and left in so the smart could enjoy that they'd avoided a trap and the foolish could fall into?

And I am good at system mastery and enjoy it. Precisely because I'm good at it means I don't enjoy the 3e version. System Mastery does not need rewarding. In game it comes with its own reward. And it's far more satisfying when it's a challenge. Failure all around.

That said, I am prepared to accept that it wasn't deliberate. (url=http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142]Just a foul-up. And one he compounds by not getting Timmy at all - that's how a pure Spike sees Timmy[/url]).

IIRC, he was talking about past editions, and his words on that basically boiled down to (paraphrased) "It would be awesome if there was a stat that measured what you saw when you weren't really looking hard." The fact that he didn't immediately follow that up with "Of course, that exists in 4E" immediately let people to claim that he has never read 4E.

And your paraphrase misses the critical parts. It was that he quite blatantly used 4e terminology and something that is being done by 4e in the manner he describes, and implying it was a new thing. The combination of the 'I like to call' - implying that it wasn't a standard term, but terminology he'd made up and a rare concept, and the quotes round the words "passive perception"

If by his own choice of words he hadn't done this there wouldn't have been the outcry. If he'd simply cut the words "what I like to call" and the quotes round the passive perception, not implying that this was a novelty, I don't think anyone would have objected. It wasn't the fact that he didn't say it already existed. It's that he was presenting it as if it was something brand spanking new that he only did as an innovative house rule.

Monte Cook wrote:
That's the straightforward, active perception issue, but what about what I like to call "passive perception?" You know: when the PCs aren't actually looking for something, but it stands to reason that some one or more of them might just have a chance of noticing the hidden thing.

 

[mudbunny]

And your paraphrase misses the critical parts. It was that he quite blatantly used 4e terminology and something that is being done by 4e in the manner he describes, and implying it was a new thing. The combination of the 'I like to call' - implying that it wasn't a standard term, but terminology he'd made up and a rare concept, and the quotes round the words "passive perception"

If by his own choice of words he hadn't done this there wouldn't have been the outcry. If he'd simply cut the words "what I like to call" and the quotes round the passive perception, not implying that this was a novelty, I don't think anyone would have objected. It wasn't the fact that he didn't say it already existed. It's that he was presenting it as if it was something brand spanking new that he only did as an innovative house rule.

Monte Cook wrote:
That's the straightforward, active perception issue, but what about what I like to call "passive perception?" You know: when the PCs aren't actually looking for something, but it stands to reason that some one or more of them might just have a chance of noticing the hidden thing.

So you are agreeing with me. The only reason that he is getting accused of things like not reading 4E or knowing anything about it is because he doesn't mention it! The Legends and Lore series of columns, at the time, was directed towards examining *previous editions*, not looking at how 4E did it.

The fact that 4E has something called passive perception is a given. There is no need to mention it explicitly. Chances are very good that, for each column, the writers are given a set word count that they can't go beyond. A phrase mentioning something that everyone knows is one of the first things that an editor would cut.

This really is a prime example of a mountain being made out of a molehill.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

So your defence of him is "cock-up rather than conspiracy"? That there were gaping flaws in the game design that the team knew about and left in so the smart could enjoy that they'd avoided a trap and the foolish could fall into?

Not exactly. My "defense" is that it was a team effort, and whatever failings the team had in their design and development (and success, too), they get as that team. This is true of any team effort towards design, but in this case I think it applies doubly do to how 3E was managed. Understand that here I'm somewhat reading between the lines (i.e. making educated guesses based on symptoms and what was said rather than any direct information or even insight):

It is fairly clear to me that 3E was developed by a group that had at least two major competing "visions" of where the game was going, and possibly as many as four or five (depending on how you want to count "major" or "minor" when it comes to something as subjective as a vision). This meant that there was a certain amount of, err, "erratic" behavior in the design. No committee of designers and developers, no matter how talented, can navigate that environment without having things slip by them. It's impossible. Now, maybe it is on them to have raised objections to management that some of the design intent was mutually incompatible, and they didn't, but I have absolutely nothing in the way of even a guess as to how that played out. For all I know, it was anything from "clueless" to "raised bloody hell but got overridden anyway."

Furthermore, a lot of the relatively last minute shuffling of things like "paladins having alignment restrictions" and other such things that leaked out during and immediately after the playtest indicates to me that the early playtest did not explose some of the flaws that the later, wider playtest did. The big problem here was that they didn't playtest soon enough to go back and redesign around all the flaws. You'll note that whatever else they are doing this time, this should not be nearly so much of a problem.

Finally, any team is going to have strengths and weaknesses. How well they do is part of that, but you also have to consider the environment they are working in. Do I have serious issues with 3E, especially at higher levels where it was not playtested much until very late? You betcha. But I'm not going to let me blind me to the systematic and thorough good job that team did in covering the scope of D&D into a cleaner product. It seems easy in hindsight, but that was a really tough job to do well while doing anything else. Plus, it was that excavation and foundation work that made 4E possible. You can't get to 4E directly from 2E (practically). Likewise, I'm fairly certain that some of the lessons learned and areas explored in 4E are going to make 5E a better game--even for people that end up liking 5E a lot who can't stand 4E.

So I'm sure this team will make some mistakes. And I'm sure the chemistry of the team is going to lead to some fairly nifty things that we'll be treasuring in our D&D from here on. When they do, both the mistakes and the treasures won't be because Monte was or was not on the team, but will certainly be because he and the rest of them are the team.

 

[borg286]

What was the concensus on the following concept?
Both attacker and defender simply have a bonus.
Attacker chooses to either roll 1d20 or take 11, the defender chooses the other.

The reason it's 11 and not 10, is for the math to work out. Do the math yourself if you don't believe me.

3.5 style play: Attacker takes 11
4e style play: Attacker rolls.
Fencing combat: both attacker and defender roll. Repeat if equal.

To satisfy different spell types (fireball that screams "defender makes a save" vs. Acid arrows that urges "attacker roll d20") this could satisfy all spell types and martial attack types.

 

[dkyle]

Going back to Saving Throws instead of Attack rolls for spells would be like bringing back THAC0 and descending AC. Nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. Any mechanics that can be represented using Saving Throws vs a DC can be exactly replicated using attack rolls vs. a Defense.

Want to make Spells an attack vs a stat? Sure. Want to give situational bonuses like "+2 Dexterity vs. Spells"? Sure.

Having a roll to set a DC, then a roll for the save, is just silly, and trying to have it both ways. Pick a consistent rule. Either the attacker always rolls, or the defender always rolls. Or even, the players always roll. That could work too.