D&D General Explain Bounded Accuracy to Me (As if I Was Five)

[Umbran]

Absolutely, so long as you are honest with the public if, for whatever reason, you do not meet publicly stated goals. This is why I still hold that a company should, when asked a question about their product an/or business that they are not legally prevented from answering, answer honestly (and not evasively). I really don't care how native that viewpoint is.

So, that sounds great. Unfortunately, we, the public do not reward them for honesty. We only reward them for saying what we want to hear, honest or otherwise. We, collectively, don't give them incentive to be just honest - we incentivize them waffling, dodging, and prevaricating, because of how incredibly toxic we can be when we don't like what we hear.

Also, we want to hear from creative folks, but then we expect those creative folks to be on the ball in the same way a trained PR person is. If you want to hear from the creative folks, without cutting them slack, you will be disappointed in the result.

 

[Minigiant]

Well, yeah.

But, you realize that prioritization is fundamental to doing good work, right?

In the real world, we always come up with more design goals and features than we can actually execute on, especially when some goals are in tension, conflict, or outright mutually exclusive. All designs, in the end, are compromises - and prioritization is how you work through what the compromises ought to be.

Yes, and maybe they state goals, and then leave some of them by the wayside. Stating a goal is not a contractual commitment or something. One of the characteristics of "knowledge work" is that we generally do not know all the problems we are going to hit at the start of a project - we find difficulties along the way, and have to change direction. That's normal, and necessary.

I never saying prioritizing or 5e is bad.

I am saying the main cause for how 5e works and doesn't work prioritizing 3-5 design goals over some classic D&D elements. Bounded Accuracy was one of them.

 

[Umbran]

I am saying the main cause for how 5e works and doesn't work prioritizing 3-5 design goals over some classic D&D elements. Bounded Accuracy was one of them.

I am not a fan of phrasing/framing this as a failure on the part of the game or designers, though.

For some folks, the game doesn't do what they want. You know what? Bleu cheese doesn't do what I want from a cheese most of the time. I don't say that the cheese makers had biases, or something - I say it isn't to my tastes, except in some specific situations. I then leave the bleu cheese for folks who like it, and I reach for the smoked gouda instead.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, that sounds great. Unfortunately, we, the public do not reward them for honesty. We only reward them for saying what we want to hear, honest or otherwise. We, collectively, don't give them incentive to be just honest - we incentivize them waffling, dodging, and prevaricating, because of how incredibly toxic we can be when we don't like what we hear.

This applies very much to certain other areas of public discourse, too.

 

[Minigiant]

I am not a fan of phrasing/framing this as a failure on the part of the game or designers, though.

For some folks, the game doesn't do what they want. You know what? Bleu cheese doesn't do what I want from a cheese most of the time. I don't say that the cheese makers had biases, or something - I say it isn't to my tastes, except in some specific situations. I then leave the bleu cheese for folks who like it, and I reach for the smoked gouda instead.

I'm not framing it it as a failure. People are being overly defensive.

I have stated many times that WOTC's design goals for 5e were to shrink the ranges or remove requirement of many aspects of the game. This left them with little design space to design with for classic D&D elements.

 

[Umbran]

I'm not framing it it as a failure. People are being overly defensive.

Eh. Now blaming. I'm done. Thanks.

 

[Lanefan]

Again: it is not. It is not part of:

• Defining some gameplay-concept as valuable
• Setting an evaluation metric to measure the rule's functionality, and (if relevant) the breadth of acceptable results
• Drafting a rule which implements the defined value
• Playtesting and collecting data
• Reviewing and rewriting the rule as needed
• Repeating the previous two steps until the desired function is achieved, or you determine that the initial concept was unworkable

At no point does "financial success" enter into any part of this process. But this is, emphatically, what design is.

The bolded bits are where financial success can (if allowed) not only enter the process, but completely upend it.

Instead, success is factored in before and after this process.

You're perhaps only looking at success of a designed rule at the theory-playtest level. I'm looking at it in terms of the overall system before, during, and after release; in which financial success can very much be a concern if the designers have been told to design with it as a top-of-mind priority.

"Succeed" is not a functionality of the rules; it is a thing one hopes that will happen once the rules are actually out and about. But it is not actually a function performed by the rules.

Rule-set 1: really well designed, hard to use. Doesn't sell well due to difficulty of use.
Rule-set 2: good-enough design but not great. Easy to use. Sells like hotcakes because anyone can use it.

Success (here measured by sales) is very much tied to the rules.

Like...consider a hydroelectric turbine. There is no part of its design which has the function of "save lives." Nothing the generator does is involved in life-saving; its functions do include safety of those operating it, and it likely has various measures to prevent accidents or disasters, but it is not at any point a device whose function is to save lives.

And yet! That very hydroelectric turbine will most likely provide at least some of the electricity used to power a hospital at some point. Which means that one of the effects of designing a high-quality, widely-used hydroelectric turbine is that lives will be saved. The designer may even intend that such a thing happen as a result of the use of this device. (Certainly, I imagine many such designers today will be thinking about climate change, and thus have at least some intent of mitigating its effects through providing clean energy.) But that intent has absolutely jack-all to deal with the design goals of a hydroelectric turbine.

Well, not necessarily. Even in this analogy the designers could have been told to design the turbine with construction cost-cutting as a top-of-mind priority, and that's inevitably going to affect what the end design turns out to be (or, more likely, how reliable the turbine will be in the long run). A design goal of cheap-to-build has been imposed on the designers; and thus the success of their design is ultimately measured not only by whether it works when first fired up (this would, one thinks, almost be a given) but by how little it cost to construct.

Same is true in corporate-based RPG design. A design goal of financial success may have been imposed on the designers by their bosses, and if this is the case that goal has to be considered first and foremost during the design process if those designers wish to remain employed.

 

[tetrasodium]

The_twig did a good(2hr!) analysis of a bunch of 5e monsters with a great 10ish minute summary a couple days ago

Spoiler: this one timestamped at findings

&

Spoiler: statistical analysis

The scattergraphs in the statistical analysis nicely shows how monsters are shackled by bounded accuracy as the number of rounds monsters cr3-cr20 last against a party of 4 using an at will round after round was summarized with the phrase "it's a flat line". This was very much the stated goal of bounded accuracy and it ignores the fact that PCs have more & more abilities packing a big punch to drop that flat line even further.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, it is. It provides an enormous incentive to actually get better. Which was the whole point why I referenced it.

If you don't like "survival," consider something like "job performance." Imagine that you would get a 5% pay raise--permanently--if you manage to improve your golf game by some amount. I don't play golf so I don't know what would be a good metric here. This isn't a matter of "you must become PGA-level," just like..."if you can get within 10 shots of par, we will raise your pay permanently."

Do you think that under these circumstances, you would continue to have absolutely zero change in your skill, definitely always forever?

Because that literally is an incentive for player characters to get better at all sorts of random stuff. It will, quite literally, help them succeed more. Survival is one aspect of success. Getting paid more often (and better) is another. Achieving personal goals is a third. Etc., etc., etc.

It is genuinely ridiculous to argue that a person who repeatedly risks life and limb on such activities, whose career is actively driven by activities such as this, and whose deeply-held life goals are bound up in such activities, would have absolutely no growth whatsoever, full stop, nothing will ever more be said. That doesn't mean they'll get GOOD at it. They won't, unless they're actively trying to--and we represent that with things like feats, and training/proficiency, and multiclassing, etc. But passive learning IS a thing. To argue it isn't is simply a falsehood. That's not how the world works, and pedagogical science backs me up on this.

Thing is, a person (or a game character) only has so much time to spend; and it becomes a matter of prioritizing whether to spend that time getting better at what you're already good at or trying to get better at what you're not good at. Should Peter Paladin spend his downtime learning how to sneak, or would that time be better spent becoming more proficient at Paladinning? To me the answer is obvious: become better as what you're good at and leave the sneaking to Sally Stealthfoot.

And yes, passive learning is a thing, but it tends to take more time than the length of most in-game characters' adventuring careers to produce any real results.

 

[Lanefan]

That sort of question is, and can't be anything but, a matter of taste. Very few games actually give a damn about training as such after initial rest state.

And for me, the games that do care about training are better for it.