D&D (2024) Do players really want balance?

[Maxperson]

The nature of beauty, and of other values, has been the subject of a lot of discussion over the past few thousands years. It takes more, to show that something is subjective, than simply pointing out that it can't be measure or it can't be proved scientifically or there is ongoing disagreement in respect of it or even there is intractable disagreement in respect of it.

I'm willing to bet that in the entire history of humanity, there was never a time where all humans thought the same things were beautiful. It has certainly never been recorded. We have the entire history of humanity that shows that beauty is subjective. I guess you could assume that God has declared what beauty absolutely is and then let us be confused about it.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm sorry, but...again, you are at best a casual observer with little to no training on the subject, vs someone whose literal actual job is on the topic. A bare appeal to authority is a fallacy. An appeal to authority because it is backed by accredited education and years of professional experience is not a fallacy--it is the reason we trust doctors to advise us about our health and lawyers to defend our interests in courtrooms and accountants to manage our finances.

Go to a court of law and see how experts with accredited education and years of professional experience sit there and say the exact opposite things, with their authority.

All @pemerton said just now is that there might, maybe be something objective about beauty, but we don't know it. We do have the entire history of humanity that shows beauty to be subjective, though. That's a LOT of testing with a LOT of test subjects.

 

[Hussar]

.

Let H be any historical event that ever occurred. And let C be some posited cause of that event. There is no scientific proof that C caused H. This is because claims of causation in history are not amenable to scientific demonstration.

It does not therefore follow that all claims about causation in history are purely subjective.

Conversely it also doesn’t follow that all are objective either.

Which is my point that you are just obfuscating the issue. Whether or not we can find objective causes for historical events has zero impact on the notion that popularity cannot be an objective measure of achieving design goals.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm sorry, but...again, you are at best a casual observer with little to no training on the subject, vs someone whose literal actual job is on the topic. A bare appeal to authority is a fallacy. An appeal to authority because it is backed by accredited education and years of professional experience is not a fallacy--it is the reason we trust doctors to advise us about our health and lawyers to defend our interests in courtrooms and accountants to manage our finances.

So: I'm going to believe the professional philosopher on this one.

Philosophy isn't exactly a hard science with objective facts just saying.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No but you absolutely can design for being more approachable. Being easier to understand. Having a lower bar for entry.

Agreed! But even approachability is not a 100% unalloyed good. This has been a learning point for a number of MMOs. The pejorative term for making options that require less mechanical engagement is "dumbing down," and much of the time that term is pure insult with nothing to back it up. However, from personal experience, I know that this actually can be a serious problem if it is taken too far. FFXIV's developers (particularly producer-director Yoshi-P) have explicitly said that they went too far in removing the "stress" of gameplay, making it "tasteless." (These are translations of the original Japanese terms, so they may not perfectly convey the intended sense; I know you would know better than I.)

I was personally on the receiving end of one of those changes in the previous expansion, where my favorite one went from being arguably the single highest-engagement "job" (=class in D&D terms) in the game to being dramatically the lowest-engagement job, severely outstripping even the two jobs that had previously been held up as the "simple" ones for folks who just wanted to zone out while playing.

This was well-received (albeit not by me!)....for one expansion, because the old version really was crufty with some needless elements, so simplifying it SO dramatically was a breath of fresh air for them. But when it went essentially completely unchanged with the launch of the current expansion, people were Upsetti Spaghetti--not because they suddenly wanted an inaccessible class, but because the accessibleness of this job had been mostly by making it vacant. People enjoy achieving mastery, and you can't really get a feeling of mastery if there's nothing to learn. Fortunately for me (and many others who liked the old version of this class), the new caster, Pictomancer, brought back the same overall gameplay experience, even though it uses a radically different aesthetic--so I've almost completely shut up about my complaints, ironically at exactly the same time the fanbase at large has started loudly complaining!

Point being: "Accessibility" can be done well or poorly just like any other design goal. And accessibility actually IS a design goal, whereas "make more money" is not. Accessibility really is a very important thing and should be considered for all sorts of stuff. But it should also not be emphasized to the exclusion of other virtues, like players having a feeling of mastery if that's what they desire (and many players do!), or diversity of mechanical engagement, which allows many different tastes to be catered to by a single game.

All design points for designing a product with broader appeal.

Only up to a point! Which is what the logorrheic sludge above is trying to articulate. Accessibility taken too far actually reduces the breadth of appeal, because it turns off the folks who want to feel like they have mastered skills and proven their abilities. It is very hard to design things that are dirt-easy to learn but a significant challenge to master. It is usually more productive to offer some things that are fairly easy to learn and easy to master, and other things that are somewhat challenging to learn but quite challenging to master.

You cannot separate the two. One will always impact the other. The needs of the product and the needs of being a game will always influence design.

I never said they could be totally separated. My point was that people so often in these conversations treat things like "make more money" or "attract lots of players" as though they were 100% exactly the same sort of thing as "make accessible classes" or "provide diverse playstyles." The previous two are production goals, things the creator certainly wants to achieve and which will feed into their choices of design goals. The latter two are design goals, which may be wise or unwise, and may be fulfilled well or poorly. You cannot design "make more money"--but you can design "make accessible classes," a design goal chosen because it will help pursue the comparatively abstract, non-design goal of "make more money."

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Philosophy isn't exactly a hard science with objective facts just saying.

Do you really think anyone in this conversation thinks philosophy is a hard science?

Just because it isn't a hard science doesn't mean 99.99999% of what it talks about is somehow pure dismissable subjectivity. Likewise, just because physics IS a hard science doesn't mean absolutely everything in it is pure objective fact! Believe me, I would know...I've written multiple papers on critically important conditioned, social elements of physics research. Consider, for example, the "pentaquark" debacle. At the time I wrote the paper, it was a semi-recent issue (within the previous decade), where some labs had reported that they'd discovered a pentaquark (a subatomic particle made up of five quarks, generally four matter quarks and two antimatter quarks), followed by other papers claiming similar things, only to then have later papers cast doubt on these observations because their statistical analysis had been dubious--and then rejected entirely. This cast a pall over pentaquark research for nearly a full decade after the fallout had completely settled. Basically nobody was willing to touch pentaquark searches, because the social stigma could ruin your career and mean nobody would publish what you worked on--and "publish or perish" is itself a social issue.

Philosophy deals with all sorts of things, for good reason. Some of what it touches on is objective. Some isn't. You have to actually say why it's not objective--and, even if you establish that, why subjectivity is actually a problem. Just writing stuff off as "philosophy and therefore subjective...and tacitly, therefore completely dismissable!" is not an acceptable argument.

 

[pemerton]

Whether or not we can find objective causes for historical events has zero impact on the notion that popularity cannot be an objective measure of achieving design goals.

Of course popularity can measure whether certain design goals were achieved, at least in general terms. (There's always the possibility that they could have been done better, and hence that popularity might have been even greater. And conversely, design goals might be achieved and yet sales drop for some other reason - eg a general recession, a competitor innovating, etc.)

I think the design goals of 5e are pretty clear - though they are also quite intricate, in the sense that the design seeks to satisfy a variety of desideratum that aren't easy to simultaneously satisfy.

I've posted about this already, upthread. And re-posted those posts in reply to you!

Of course, popularity is not the only marker of having achieved those goals. If it was, then it would be impossible to make reasoned inferences about what worked and what didn't; about what might reasonably be improved; etc. Doing those things requires identifying what aspects of the design generate popularity, and why.

I think the 2024 changes help us see what WotC regards as some of the strengths in the 5e design, as well as areas of improvement. I'm sure you can see most of them, and so I'm not going to try and go through them all. I'll just fasten on one: the change of stat bonuses from race/species to background. I read a review somewhere on these boards that suggested that this is a "nothing" change, as it just relocates the decision/optimisation point for choosing a stat package to suit one's class. But that remark is obviously wrong: races/species are frequent objects of contention, and it is non-trivial both at the table level and the publisher level to introduce endless new species. Whereas backgrounds - serving no purpose and having no real heritage in the game beyond being little packages of PC build customisation - are trivial to vary, add to, etc. And so putting stat bonuses in backgrounds rather than species clears the field for unlimited variation in stat bonuses (and optimisation, for those who want it). It's a clever design choice, that shows a nuanced understanding of the historical legacies and contemporary debates that accompany different components of PC build.

You might think there is some weakness or incompleteness or even error in my analysis; but it's hardly the case that my analysis is nothing but subjective opinion, such that it is no more amenable to reason than my preference for one flavour of ice cream over another.

Which is a good part of my point. (The other part of my point is about quality.)

 

[Zardnaar]

Do you really think anyone in this conversation thinks philosophy is a hard science?

Just because it isn't a hard science doesn't mean 99.99999% of what it talks about is somehow pure dismissable subjectivity. Likewise, just because physics IS a hard science doesn't mean absolutely everything in it is pure objective fact! Believe me, I would know...I've written multiple papers on critically important conditioned, social elements of physics research. Consider, for example, the "pentaquark" debacle. At the time I wrote the paper, it was a semi-recent issue (within the previous decade), where some labs had reported that they'd discovered a pentaquark (a subatomic particle made up of five quarks, generally four matter quarks and two antimatter quarks), followed by other papers claiming similar things, only to then have later papers cast doubt on these observations because their statistical analysis had been dubious--and then rejected entirely. This cast a pall over pentaquark research for nearly a full decade after the fallout had completely settled. Basically nobody was willing to touch pentaquark searches, because the social stigma could ruin your career and mean nobody would publish what you worked on--and "publish or perish" is itself a social issue.

Philosophy deals with all sorts of things, for good reason. Some of what it touches on is objective. Some isn't. You have to actually say why it's not objective--and, even if you establish that, why subjectivity is actually a problem. Just writing stuff off as "philosophy and therefore subjective...and tacitly, therefore completely dismissable!" is not an acceptable argument.

I don't think the casual gamer cares to much about science or philosophy in D&D.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think the casual gamer cares to much about science or philosophy in D&D.

I never said they did.

I am responding to someone's argument that we can dismiss a thing because it's philosophy, and therefore guaranteed subjective. Both of those components ("subjective things are always dismissable arguments"; "philosophy is always subjective") are false.

That has nothing to do with whether casual players care about science or philosophy. It is a response to a dismissal of an argument that is related to game design.

 

[Zardnaar]

I never said they did.

I am responding to someone's argument that we can dismiss a thing because it's philosophy, and therefore guaranteed subjective. Both of those components ("subjective things are always dismissable arguments"; "philosophy is always subjective") are false.

That has nothing to do with whether casual players care about science or philosophy. It is a response to a dismissal of an argument that is related to game design.

Even in that criteria it's easily dismissable. It's philosophy lol.

Balance isn't really a big concern until it hits game wrecking or overshadowing the other players levels. In 5E that's usually level 17 or 18 comparing PCs. Assuming someone knows what they're doing and tries hard enough.

Game tends to fall apart before then.