D&D General Does WotC use its own DMG rules?

[Micah Sweet]

Indeed.



Agreed. On the other hand, though, the published adventures are also "mass market" outputs. So to an extent it does seem odd that the DMG guidelines don't match the way the designers design.

Never understood the reasoning behind that. IMO game design shouldn't be "Do as I say, not as I do".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Never understood the reasoning behind that. IMO game design shouldn't be "Do as I say, not as I do".

Its not hard. Its designers who don't confuse their own quirks with how most people play.

Honestly, one of the biggest problems you see in functional published games is designers who over-extend their own tastes and limits to the people they're selling a game to. There's no virtue in producing a game most people using it will need to houserule.

(Now, you can always ask if they're properly interpreting what people buying the game will need, but at the end of the day, if you're just writing a game for the people you play with, why bother to publish it?)

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Maybe in the D&D-sphere; but I saw it used elsewhere long before that, at least back to the early days of 3e..

Actually, the idea that the specific rule trumps the general rule (lex specialis derogat legi generalis) is mentionned as such in canon law since 1298 and is found in the Justinian Digest published around 530 AD. It probably functionnaly existed even before. Exception-based design was just applying a very generic concept known by rule makers, that was, indeed, created by people who made rules a long time ago.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Maybe in the D&D-sphere; but I saw it used elsewhere long before that, at least back to the early days of 3e.. Specifically in contrast to "effect-based design". In other words, the question is whether game elements are designed to a common metric, or designed largely ad-hoc (In D&D this is rampant, between spells, class abilities, monster abilities, feats and similar things).

(Many games attempt to live with a leg in both camps to various degrees of success).

Are you referring to exception-based design when you say "ad-hoc"? Because I absolutely would not do so myself.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That'd be 3e where a lot fo the new designers were big on using computer design terms such as why 3.5 is a .5.

Strange. Particularly given I associate "exception-based design" with 4e's very clearly bottom-up approach, rather than 3e's pervasive (and, IMO, extremely deleterious) top-down approach when it comes to...nearly everything.

 

[Retros_x]

True, but I see that as merely an excuse for poor design practices and poor transparency.

The design goal is to make a broad and flexiple system to have a big as possible target audience and they are clearly very successful with it, so I would argue their design is the opposite of poor. They are also very transparent with that design goal as a different comment you seemingly missed proved by quoting multiple examples from the DMG.

 

[Emerikol]

Are you referring to exception-based design when you say "ad-hoc"? Because I absolutely would not do so myself.

I think ad hoc just means no underlying system which is the definition of exceptions based design. You create an element and you figure out if it is workable by play testing. Many things throughout the life of D&D were just arbitrary decisions. Is fly better or equal to fireball? Well it depends. The only version of D&D that tried to be at all systematic was 3e and the burden of monster design nearly drove the WOTC staff to despair.

In the end, I doubt any system can really do a great job because every group is different. I had two groups playing at the same time years ago and I could not treat them exactly the same. I had to make encounter difficulty different. One group was highly skilled in terms of player ability and one was not. There are just too many factors to consider. So a rough estimate is good enough for me. I will have to tweak it a lot anyway. In 4e, I was regularly running vastly harder encounters than the rules suggested. And I still honestly struggled to challenge my group.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The design goal is to make a broad and flexiple system to have a big as possible target audience and they are clearly very successful with it, so I would argue their design is the opposite of poor. They are also very transparent with that design goal as a different comment you seemingly missed proved by quoting multiple examples from the DMG.

I don't consider "make a lot of money" a game design goal in and of itself. More a consequence of other goals.

 

[Emerikol]

I don't consider "make a lot of money" a game design goal in and of itself. More a consequence of other goals.

I wouldn't say it's a goal when designing a particular subsystem but which subsystems you include might be driven by profit or expense. Often page count limits what goes into a game which is an aspect of expense.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think ad hoc just means no underlying system which is the definition of exceptions based design. You create an element and you figure out if it is workable by play testing. Many things throughout the life of D&D were just arbitrary decisions. Is fly better or equal to fireball? Well it depends. The only version of D&D that tried to be at all systematic was 3e and the burden of monster design nearly drove the WOTC staff to despair.

Er....that's not what exception-based design is though.

Exception-based design says that X thing is true, unless specifically instructed otherwise. It is not ad-hoc at all.

The difference between the actually exception-based design of 4e and the...I'm not even sure what to call it, design of 3e is that 4e is bottom-up, while 3e is top-down.

I think this is best exemplified by looking at the idea of "good/noble undead." In 4e, such a thing is perfectly simple. Use the normal "undead" creature type, then add a feature on your special "good/noble undead" which modifies the effects. The undead creature type remains unchanged, but a new modifier is layered on top, without changing anything else that depends on that creature type. By comparison, in 3e, a thing like this isn't possible. You have to create a new creature type, "deathless," which starts from the ground up as a good/noble undead powered by positive energy etc., etc.

This is just one emblematic example. There are plenty. For example, 4e makes prolific use of "stat-swap" features, so (for example) Dragon Soul Sorcerers can add their Strength modifier to AC instead of their Dexterity modifier. That's an exception-based design solution to the problem that a character pumping Charisma and Strength will end up much too fragile. Doing an equivalent thing in 3e is a much more painful process, almost always involving some sort of feat, spell, or other bespoke structure that from the jump starts with the problem "fixed." This is how you got, for example, a proliferation of optional base classes that were just "X, but with a different core stat." (I'm reminded of the "Battledancer," for example, which was...very nearly just "monk, but based off Cha rather than Dex.")

Exception-based design means you build generically-useful baselines, and rely upon them whenever you need them, but you don't limit yourself to them: you build on top of them, as one does with foundations. Whatever the top-down approach from 3e is, it results in having to carefully, carefully hang each new element off of something that can handle it....and all too often there either isn't such a thing, or any choice you could use will have some negative knock-on consequence (often very difficult to predict in advance.)