Interesting Ryan Dancey comment on "lite" RPGs

[The_Universe]

It's convenient if one is trying to make a case of the superiority and supremacy of the d20 mechanic to lump these games together, but I would argue this is taking oranges, grapes, and bananas and declaring their collective virtues as fruit - it may be true as far as it goes, but it glosses over a great deal of important detail.

Of course, I could argue the same sort of thing on a different tack - you're showing us grapes and raisins (or plums and prunes if you prefer) while telling me one is fruit and the other is meat, when despite some basic superifical differences they're not just both fruit - they're the exact same fruit.

Piss and moan about apples and oranges all you want, but vegetarians will eat both, and they won't eat steak no matter how much you tell them they'd like it.

Am I taking your example to extremes? No. I'm just taking it to a logical conclusion in order to illustrate that "incompatible" comparison we're all up in arms about is hardly that at all.

 

[Andre]

They don't have to gain sufficient noteriety in the player community. They have to gain sufficient notoriety in the design community. Even better: They have to gain sufficient notoriety at Wizards of the Coast.

That may be easier than you think. A lot of people at WotC play a lot of RPGs, and they actively look at lots of RPG products. I suspect that they have dissected in some detail most of the top-selling D20 products, and probably a lot of the top selling PDF only products.

I also think there's a difference between "a whole bunch of feats" and a tightly focused design effort to improve a specific area of the game. (Note in my example, I suggested source material for unqiue cultural reference). Innovating in areas that D&D is weak in (mass combat, non-combat challenge resoution, environments other than forests and caves, etc.) allows a DM/player group who needs that resource to add it without major disruptions to the rest of the game, and it is the kind of thing likely to pique WotC's interest.

I also suspect that we're nearing a time when one or more groups push to make a publisher independent "reference platform" for D20 that can be produced as a PDF document and revised more often than the core D&D rulebooks are. A quarterly "build" akin to the distribution of Linux would do nicely. Once that process starts, and a significant design community aggregates around it, that "reference platform" becomes a one-stop-shop for WotC as they consider things to add to the core of D&D. Such a reference platform would be designed to be a playable D20 RPG that could be used (per the OGL) by any publisher who expressed an interest, which means that such an effort may have a commercial application to provide some kind of funding to support a higher-than-volunteer-only level of development.

That's the kind of thing the OGL enables that we didn't have before.

While it's nice that only designers need to see the (presumably superior) new rules, they still need a mechanism for disseminating those rules to the gaming community in coherent form. Publishing new editions on a regular basis will meet considerable resistance, especially if the new rules necessitate significant changes in the current rules-set. One of the major complaints against 3.5 was that the changes were broad and subtle, so that one's mastery of the system was severely compromised. GM's and players have to check everything, because it's not at all clear what was changed.

Your idea of a reference platform is interesting, but is it viable for the majority of the gaming public? PDF distribution lags far, far behind print. So who's the target market for this platform? A small, passionate fan base, such as tends to congregate at sites such as ENWorld, or the bulk of d20 gamers? I won't dismiss the idea out of hand, but I'd need to hear a lot more to be convinced it would be more than a niche product. And if it is a niche product, we're still left with the main problem of new rules - no simple mechanism for adding the rules to the main corpus that will be used by a majority of gamers.

 

[Zappo]

If the reference platform was freely available, as is the SRD now, distribution would largely be a non-issue.

 

[Silverleaf]

The way I read his statement, people 'are playing' ShadowRun and CoC because of factors other than rules mechanics. I don't think he's saying 'people are 'not playing' SR and CoC because of the rules mechanics'.

In much the same way, there are people currently playing D&D 3.5 despite its mechanics, not because of it. In fact, a portion of those people would rather be playing another game, but unfortunately for them, they're not persistent or creative enough to find a way to accomplish that.
Think about it... You can go dungeon-delving, fight monsters and get treasure without needing 1000+ pages of rules. There are quite a few non-d20 systems out there which allow this kind of gameplay, at a much lower level of complexity & accounting.

 

[buzz]

And how would you interpret the negative responses to d20 Call of Cthulhu?

What? You mean like when it was nominated for an Origins award? Or how it has an average review of 4.75 stars out of eight reviews here on ENworld? And 4.7/4.6 Style/Substance out of nine reviews on RPG.net (a community that, by a recent informal poll, voted BRP as their favorite system)? That Ken Hite listed it as a "strong contender" for an Outie for Best Retread of 2002?

If there are negative responses, they're toward Chaosium for totally dropping the ball on support for the product.

 

[The Shaman]

Of course, I could argue the same sort of thing on a different tack - you're showing us grapes and raisins (or plums and prunes if you prefer) while telling me one is fruit and the other is meat, when despite some basic superifical differences they're not just both fruit - they're the exact same fruit....Am I taking your example to extremes? No. I'm just taking it to a logical conclusion in order to illustrate that "incompatible" comparison we're all up in arms about is hardly that at all.

I suppose it depends on the degree to which you think d20 games are alike - lumpers will say "It's all fruit, now leave off, you stupid git," while splitters will say that while the underlying mechanic is the same, playing M&M is quite a different experience from playing D&D.

I would definitely count myself in the latter group based on my playing experience: I chose to run a two 'Modern' (but definitely not four-color heroics) games using M&M rather than d20 Modern specifically because of differences between the two systems - the differences were the deciding factor for me, not the similarities.

Someone who picks up Blue Rose, or Conan RPG, is playing a different game than D&D, often consciously so, despite the underlying mechanic. I don't think plums and prunes captures this relationship.

(I tried for five minutes to come up with something funny about prunes, and I just couldn't do it - I'm tired this morning... )

 

[The_Universe]

I suppose it depends on the degree to which you think d20 games are alike - lumpers will say "It's all fruit, now leave off, you stupid git," while splitters will say that while the underlying mechanic is the same, playing M&M is quite a different experience from playing D&D.

I would definitely count myself in the latter group based on my playing experience: I chose to run a two 'Modern' (but definitely not four-color heroics) games using M&M rather than d20 Modern specifically because of differences between the two systems - the differences were the deciding factor for me, not the similarities.

Someone who picks up Blue Rose, or Conan RPG, is playing a different game than D&D, often consciously so, despite the underlying mechanic. I don't think plums and prunes captures this relationship.

(I tried for five minutes to come up with something funny about prunes, and I just couldn't do it - I'm tired this morning... )

That's the rub though - you chose between D20 Modern and Mutants and Masterminds, and other Modern RPGs (like GURPs, for instance) never entered into the mix. Both of your choices have a lot more in common with Core D20 (and with eachother) than they have differences. Are they different? Sure they are! But they're still in that range of difference between grapes and raisins or even between red grapes and green ones. Hell, Blue Rose is pretty much Mutants and Masterminds taken halfway back to D&D/Core D20, True20 is the same with a little bit of D20 Modern thrown in, and Conan is just D&D going back to its roots.

Now, if you start comparing D&D to Shadowrun or WEG's D6 (or whatever), I think we might have a good basis for discussion. Those entirely games (GURPs, Shadowrun, whatever) might be a wholly different fruit - or not fruit at all.

 

[The Shaman]

The Universe? Lumper.

The Shaman? Splitter.

Isn't diversity a wonderful thing?

 

[The_Universe]

The Universe? Lumper.

The Shaman? Splitter.

Isn't diversity a wonderful thing?

Sure it is...but I think we're imagining more diversity than there is, here.

 

[John Morrow]

If this is true, where will the next level of innovation in gaming come from? Must everyone drink the Kool-Aid to have something to contribute to gaming?

Ryan Dancey said, "So we've seen a move towards games that are mechanically distinct, and a move towards consolidating a lot of "genre" options (without a rational for mechanical distinctiveness) into D20. That's exactly what I thought would happen, and I think that trend will only continue. Now, when a publisher thinks about releasing an RPG, they have to explain why they're not using D20, and if they can't make the case, they don't get sales."

In other words, innovation is fine so long as it's really an innovation and not simply D&D with a few things changed. If all you want to do is write a setting or genre book, there is no reason to create a whole new system just to support it because plenty of those afterthought systems are either half-baked or don't improve on what's already out there. Did Talislanta, Sovereign Stone, or even Paladium really need an entirely new system or could they have accomplished the same thing with d20 or with d20 with some tweaks (in fact, some of them have come out with d20 versions)? That's the sort of thing Ryan Dancey wants to see less off. If you want to publish your fantasy setting for D&D or want to publish your special rules for fixing D&D, now you can do so legally without selling a whole new system that looks like D&D with the serial numbers filed off. But if you want to do something completely different, there is still room for that.