From the WotC Boards: Mearls on 'Aggro'

[Hussar]

Why do people seem to think that this is the first time this has come up. The Knight's Challenge is pretty much aggro mechanics for D&D. Way back when, the Kender Taunt did much the same thing.

So, we've had aggro mechanics in the game for 20 years, but, now, all of a sudden it's making the game more video gamey?

Buh?

 

[Wolfspider]

*Simple*

Because the "bodyguard" role that I'd wager is one of the most common roles in fiction just DOES NOT WORK in D&D. Unless you are in a corridor with your charge behind you, there was nothing preventing the enemy from simply ignoring you (sure, in 3E, you eat an attack of opportunity but the tradeoff...in D&D before AoO? There's nothing for the enemy to worry about).

The thing is, in fiction, this doesn't happen. The enemy can't ignore the bodyguard due to the "one hit, you're dead" feature of most fiction.

The aggro mechanic was created to try and get this _COMMON_ role in fiction to actually work.

Hmm. I'm not quite convinced.

First, I'm not really sure what you mean by this "bodyguard" role of which you speak.

Second, it makes no sense whatsoever in my mind for a monster who really wants to kill the wizard behind the fighter to feel some unnatural compulsion to first stop and whack on the fighter for a bit. If they want to get to the wizard, they should feel free to try (and take whatever Attacks of Opportunity the fighter "bodyguard" throws at it).

Using the logic of your post, would you be in support of a rule that forbade rogues from tumbling past enemies (and their AoOs) in order to get at the badguy behind them? Must they also slug it out with the frontline?

Hmmm....

 

[Wolfspider]

Why do people seem to think that this is the first time this has come up. The Knight's Challenge is pretty much aggro mechanics for D&D. Way back when, the Kender Taunt did much the same thing.

So, we've had aggro mechanics in the game for 20 years, but, now, all of a sudden it's making the game more video gamey?

Buh?

There seems to me to be a distinct difference between an ability that a character can use to make a monster attack him or her and a built-in description of tactics in a monster's stat block that tells the DM what characters the monsters must attack first.

 

[ShadowX]

Gloombunny nailed it when he said that the aggro mechanism derives its existence as a substitute for lack of positioning tactics and, sad to say, good game design. Admittedly, if "tanks" can't punish opponents for marching past them, then it's a little harder to create a realistic and efficacious system to ensure that "tanks" can protect the squishy casters in the back. However, aggro is certainly not the best that the huge teams creating video games today should come up with and it provides one of the main reasons I consider the MMORPG genre the most stagnant genre in an increasingly conservative industry. At the very least it needs modification beyond the very trite aggro lists now ubiquitous in the genre.

I too am upset that this archaic system, easily one of the worst to borrow from a MMORPG, garnered any design effort at all. The concept of aggro disarms one of the best features of P&P RPGs, that you have a living, breathing person adapting to the actions of your character and it would be incredibly stupid to borrow an inferior system from MMORPGs. Like others, I am at least somewhat mollified that they did indeed discard the idea. This is likely the first part of the design process for 4e where I need question the abilities of the designers because up to now nearly every tidbit of information aligns perfectly with my hopes for a new edition.

 

[mhensley]

I don't get it. The way "aggro" seems to work is exactly how every D&D game I've played has had monsters behave - They beat up whoever is doing the most damage to them (typically whomever hit them last, but not always), and if smart enough try to hurt the healer if he's healing people. That's how it's always been for me.

Yep, me too. I've always run monsters this way. Whoever is doing the most damage is going to be the one that is considered the biggest threat. We just didn't have a fancy term for it before.

 

[Celebrim]

Why?

I prefer my designers -- whatever the game -- to try anything that looks like it might be a good idea and to ruthlessly reject any that don't, whatever their source, even from previous editions.

The day the designers start refusing to even countenance certain design possibilities, it's time to get new designers.

The problem is that aggro is so obviously a bad idea that is annoying that it was even considered. It isn't even a good idea in video games. It isn't done in video games because it works, but rather because that's the only option we have. The only way we can have things work in an MMORPG is if everything has simple and predictable scripts underlying thier behavior. It sucks even in an MMORPG and even to the extent that it doesn't, its just people making a feature out of a bug. It's a huge step backward from what is possible in a game.

Granted, they probably figured that out almost as soon as they tried it, but that implies that they didn't understand the above paragraph to begin with. A good designer sees things in his head as they actually are. This is important because nothing is ever perfectly play tested. The designers rough approximation has to be very good, or in play its going to impossible to knock the rough edges off.

 

[RangerWickett]

Oh please. D&D4 is not going to have WoW-cooties on it, for chrissake.

Yay! I think I'll have to fit this into my sig on another board.

 

[Counterspin]

So ENworld has finally stooped to this, a bunch of people berating the designers for trying new things. Blech.

 

[Henry]

I thought it was more inspired by Fallout, but I may be mistaken.

In which case it was inspired by GURPS, which would make sense.

Fallout, people may remember, before a disagreement with Steve Jackson Games, was going to be a GURPS system computer game.

So ENworld has finally stooped to this, a bunch of people berating the designers for trying new things. Blech.

ENWorld, WotC message boards, RPG.net, and, prior to now, a few posters who gravitated to other forums like Dragonsfoot and Knights and Knaves. If it's new, it's not the old.

 

[Fifth Element]

The problem is that aggro is so obviously a bad idea that is annoying that it was even considered.

Bear in mind, of course, that we have absolutely no idea how they tried to implement it. We have no idea how similar it was to WoW mechanics. You can assume that, if it were identical to WoW, it would clearly be a bad idea for D&D, and many would agree, I think. But we have no idea what they actually tried to implement, and how they tried to implement it.

Stop assuming that they just took WoW mechanics and tried to port them directly to D&D. We have no evidence that that's what they did.