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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3887867" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't see how.  I don't fully agree with Driddle on both style and substance, but I don't see why I should accept your uncharitable characterization of what he's saying.I don't think it is either.  I believe Driddle comment is what it is on its face - a criticism of a development process which to Driddle is too uncritical of adopting facets of popular computer games into D&D.  I think if I had to paraphrase Driddle it wouldn't be, "All ideas from video games are bad ideas." but rather, "Just because it works for a video game, doesn't mean it should be treated like a good idea."  As a programmer and player of both pen and paper and computer RPGs, I can sympathize with that.  So often computers do things the way they do because they are such a limited platform compared to the human imagination.  And alot of things that they do do well, like say basic arithmatic or book keeping, aren't necessarily applicable to PnP games because humans don't do that nearly as well or as speedily. I leave it to Driddle to decide who has gathered the better sense of his posts.Well, obvious to me, obviously.  And, obvious I would hope to any game designer that isn't so wrapped up in the design process that they've lost track of the reasons why they are doing the things that they are doing.  Mearls is a pretty good designer.  I'm not at all surprised that he rejected this sort of thing.  I am surprised, especially based on his prior comments about his own understanding of what made for a good design, that he tried this in the first place.  It should have been completely obvious that if you tried to impose this sort of constraint on DMs, one of the first things that they'd do was simply ignore the rules.  Much like the 'morale' system from earlier editions, DMs will tend to ignore the rule in favor of thier own judgement of what is fun and will resent players telling them what monsters do.  When you design into the rules a rule that is made to be broken, and which it seems likely most groups are going to ignore, it calls into question whether it should be a rule in the first place.This is also an example of trying to compete with a computer game by playing your weakness against its strength, instead of your strength against its weakness.  One of the strengths of PnP is the richness of behavior and complexity that having a DM can bring to NPCs that computers just can't provide.  Monsters behaving mechanically is one of the weakness of computers, and one of the sources of tedium in those games in the long run.  By incorporating that weakness into a PnP game, you run the risk of having a situation where when 6 gamers get to gather, they'd rather have a LAN party (or get together online) than play a PnP because the PnP isn't offering much of anything that the cRPG isn't, and no one wants to be the DM because the job is reduced to drudgery.  It should be obvious that on the whole, making this a rule rather than a suggestion, decreases DM fun rather than increases it.</blockquote>

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