Game design has "moved on"

[dd.stevenson]

It's a crock.

It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".

I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.

Full agreement. "Game design has moved on" is just another way to be a dick on the internet.

 

[Hussar]

A bit more on topic.

I'd say that as time has gone on, we've become much more systematic in our approach to game design. There's a lot less "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" approach to game design. So, yes, I'd say that science has certainly become a much more common approach to game design than art.

Look at how D&D has evolved. The thief to the rogue. D20 vs a host of disparate systems with tenuous connection. On and on.

There's a reason you get new editions of games and it's not simply "well, we want to sell more books". I'm fairly confident in saying that 3e is better designed than AD&D in many measurable ways.

 

[Shemeska]

But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion. It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago. There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.

And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music. And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.

I think it's problematic to try to connect the aesthetics and talk of "advancement" in that to technology that can advance the creation of fashion (or game design) but has nothing to do with the design and aesthetics thereof. I'm certain that at some point, somewhere, someone may have claimed that rayon was the future of fashion. Anyone using natural fibers in fabric was clinging to the past and wasn't going with the future. Clearly wearing 100% rayon shirts didn't work out after people discovered that this one self-proclaimed "future" was apparently highly flammable. Similar situations happen with many many things that their supporters claim are the way of the future and woe be to those afraid of change. It's a role of the dice as to which things end up actually being appreciated and contributing to later generations of society, or products, or art, etc.

We can't assume that changes in aesthetics (or even technology associated with them) operate on a linear scale of advancement. Many "futures" be it fashion, ideologies, economic models, or RPGs ended up being abandoned dead-ends rather than "the future" despite all of them seeing themselves as such. We only know this with clarity in hindsight of course.

Where were you? Good grief, 3e fans repeatedly stated this about earlier editions all the way back to 2000. This isn't anything new at all. You can go back into thread after thread after thread and see exactly this argument whenever comparisons between 3e and AD&D were made. Heck, you see it in THIS thread when people talked about THAC0.

I never played prior to 3e, and I really don't care much about rules when it comes to the aesthetics of an RPG, so (giving you the benefit of the doubt here as to the state of the internet in 2000) I didn't notice those arguments online once I started paying attention to things in 2002 or thereabouts.

 

[Nagol]

But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion. It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago. There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.

And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music. And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.
<snip>

There have been no advances in materials science that affect the stuff we weave stories from. There have been no mathematical insights, no breakthroughs in game theory, no new psychological models constructed that better reflect what/why/how humans enjoy playing RPGs.

What has happened is new designers have adopted different compromises that more appropriately match the experience they are looking for and better reflect the material they use for inspiration as opposed to the material used compared to the original designs.

Some of those changes sometimes include "clean math" like a universal mechanic or a more transparent function for calculating success. Others revolve around genre emulation or expected conceits in play like PC being cut from different cloth than regular humans, or around getting game balance tighter, or more accurately reflecting in play the types of experiences the designers want to explore. All of these things appeal to the audience in a way analogous to fashion or art style. A Picasso painting is not objectively better than a Rembrandt -- but one touched Picasso's contemporary audience in ways the other did not.

 

[Hussar]

The problem, N'raac, is that you're comparing apples to oranges. Sure, Rembrandt isn't better than Picasso, but, since they don't actually share the same design space (other than being paintings), they cannot really be compared. OTOH, if I tried to paint in Picasso's style, I'm pretty sure that everyone would say that his paintings are better than mine.

Why? Because he is far, far more technically accomplished than I am, for one. There are other elements, for sure, but, technique is certainly something that we can use to judge.

Same goes for RPG's. They are games. As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are. And games have math, like it or not. If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules. And, yes, I do say better. A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.

I never played prior to 3e, and I really don't care much about rules when it comes to the aesthetics of an RPG, so (giving you the benefit of the doubt here as to the state of the internet in 2000) I didn't notice those arguments online once I started paying attention to things in 2002 or thereabouts.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/newreply.php?p=6228117&noquote=1#ixzz2mNNpE9f2

Well, if you never played earlier editions, never paid any attention to the criticisms made the last time the editions changed (from AD&D to 3e) then why would you specifically call out the 4e changeover as a "new" time to see these criticisms and then paint it as an edition warrior calling for 4e players?

 

[Shemeska]

The problem, N'raac, is that you're comparing apples to oranges. Sure, Rembrandt isn't better than Picasso, but, since they don't actually share the same design space (other than being paintings), they cannot really be compared. OTOH, if I tried to paint in Picasso's style, I'm pretty sure that everyone would say that his paintings are better than mine.

Why? Because he is far, far more technically accomplished than I am, for one. There are other elements, for sure, but, technique is certainly something that we can use to judge.

Same goes for RPG's. They are games. As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are. And games have math, like it or not. If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules. And, yes, I do say better. A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.

And so does art, and so does music. But yet those are apples to oranges, while comparing the rules of a preferred edition to those of a not-preferred edition are eminently ripe for direct comparison and judgement? Not so much. It's still judgement based on aesthetics, just framed as an issue of mathematics, and I reject that you can objectively declare one ruleset better than another unless you restrict yourself to a very narrow (and frankly arbitrary) basis of comparison.

Well, if you never played earlier editions, never paid any attention to the criticisms made the last time the editions changed (from AD&D to 3e) then why would you specifically call out the 4e changeover as a "new" time to see these criticisms and then paint it as an edition warrior calling for 4e players?

I started playing with 3e. I have since then played 2e and 1e, and obsessed over the flavor content of both of those earlier editions (in a narrow spectrum perhaps). I'm not sure I see what you're getting at. All I said before was that I never noticed the notion of progress or advancement in game design before 4e supporters used it to compare their edition to 3e, and most recently some of the same group using that as an argument for rejecting 5e. That's what I've noticed. I'm not going to claim it's a perfect sampling of all opinions on the internet, or representative of the RPG community prior to 2008. But like it or not, that's what I've noticed.

 

[Nagol]

The problem, N'raac, is that you're comparing apples to oranges.

I'm Nagol not N'raac.

Sure, Rembrandt isn't better than Picasso, but, since they don't actually share the same design space (other than being paintings), they cannot really be compared. OTOH, if I tried to paint in Picasso's style, I'm pretty sure that everyone would say that his paintings are better than mine.

Why? Because he is far, far more technically accomplished than I am, for one. There are other elements, for sure, but, technique is certainly something that we can use to judge.

Immaterial. Both are painters who often did portraiture and are well regarded in terms of skill and ability. Their styles are very different, but Rembrandt probably had access to sufficiently similar equipment to that used by Picasso to produce similar work had he chosen. The differences exist because of style.

Same goes for RPG's. They are games. As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are. And games have math, like it or not. If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules. And, yes, I do say better. A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.

That depends entirely on what you are trying to emulate at first level, doesn't it? (BTW Open Locks starts at 25% to which you typically add Dex and Race modifiers; my favourite Thief had a 35% starting score in that ability -- it would have been higher except for his racial penalty). It also depends on the environment the characters operate -- if the first character is facing locks that provide no bonus to the roll and the second character is facing DCs are in the 22+ range, the chances are functionally equal.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Same goes for RPG's. They are games. As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are. And games have math, like it or not.

I don't see how this follows. Yes, an rpg is a game, but many games don't have math. Notably, the games than tabletop rpgs have the most in common with, such as children playing house or people of any age engaging in various forms of mock combat, don't have math. In fact, most games don't. Sports don't. Tag doesn't. Improv games don't. Make-believe is a game. Rpgs are a subtset of that.

One could certainly play an rpg that involved no math. As such, I'd argue that the math that does exist in D&D is not inherent or intrinsic to the game, and the math doesn't reflect the game, and changing the math doesn't fix the game.

If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules. And, yes, I do say better. A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.

Oddly enough, this is the perfect example of why. Yes, a thief with 15% lockpick is bad, but not for any mathematical reason. Mathematically, the character works fine. 15% is a perfectly valid number. However, the character's ineptitude is likely to bog down a game session and may not represent the underlying concept well enough. What level of aptitude is appropriate to dispense is a subjective decision.

I'd say that as time has gone on, we've become much more systematic in our approach to game design. There's a lot less "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" approach to game design. So, yes, I'd say that science has certainly become a much more common approach to game design than art.

This analogy struck me because essentially the same thing happened in medicine; the pharmaceutical industry has moved away from testing folk remedies and randomly assaying exotic plants for useful compounds and towards targeted drug design, wherein computer modeling is used to shape a drug to match some molecular target and the result of the modeling is then synthesized in a lab.

Interestingly enough, even though this approach sounds really science-y, it has largely failed to produce useful drugs for humans, because we are too complicated for computer modeling to work to this extent.

But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion. It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago. There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.

I do think that even where progress is not objectively measurable, it as happened. Not in a straight line necessarily, in textiles or in game design, but I do agree that there is a general impetus towards things getting better.

 

[Umbran]

There have been no advances in materials science that affect the stuff we weave stories from. There have been no mathematical insights, no breakthroughs in game theory, no new psychological models constructed that better reflect what/why/how humans enjoy playing RPGs.

I think GNS theory (however flawed it may be), the 1999 WotC Market Research, or the material presented in Section 2 of Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering all count as psychological models that didn't exist when Gygax created the game.

Oh, and hey, look here! Notable RPG game theories!

Certainly there have been mathematical insights that had not been applied to games by Gygax - each innovative dice mechanic counts, for example. As do discussions of "economies" or player and character resources.

And while it didn't provide any new mathematics to the academics, there was a time when nobody considered the tenets of mathematical game theory with respect to RPGs. Now, at least some do.

 

[Hussar]

I'm sorry, but the idea that there is no advancement in game design basically means that there can never be any improvement. That every RPG ever made is the epitome of good design.

That's obviously not true. We have learned things. Thousands and thousands of hours of play have revealed that some things are better than others. An initiative system that requires a dozen pages of explanation is a poorly designed system. A mechanic which requires cube roots in order to calculate is a poorly designed mechanic (and, yes, I have actually seen that in a game).

Now, obviously, mechanics have to be judged based on what that mechanic is trying to achieve, of course.