Interview with Mike Mearls

[rounser]

But I think generic games are not suited for a mass market. Without strong flavor, what's left on an RPG? You only have a basic rule system, and the players have to make up all the flavor on their own. But why would they do that?

Well, my Big Idea is to up the customisation and improvisation aspects of the game, to really pile on the worldbuilding creative self-actualisation thing that D&D is so good at, and people have been doing since it's inception....and to make the game really friendly to running on the fly. Cutting prep time is a must for competing with other media, though I don't know how.

What I mean is, an edition that takes the DM by the hand and says, "here's the Knight, now here's how to make Knightly Orders for your world", or "here's the wizard, and here's how to customise your own schools out of the spell list to suit your world." "Here's an elf. Here's how you can carve elven subraces out of this basic template for your elven kingdoms, and give them names."

This is a MUCH bigger hook than "here's something we named an eladrin. Here's our ideas for eladrin. Go play with the eladrin." If you stat, name, and decide on the flavour for a "jungle elf", perhaps taking example names from some lists and building solid balanced stats from some tables, then you're invested in the game, hook, line and sinker. They're not just anyone's elf....they're your Jungle Elves, complete with green skin, +2 to dex and wis, shuriken proficiency, leaf armour, and wacky background flavour, all because you made them that way. Ask any 13 year old, and they'd say that's pretty damn cool. Pretty tricky to balance, though. Hard enough to balance rules...balancing metarules, even moreso.

That sort of thing is a huge draw for the kind of people who are drawn to a game like D&D in the first place, IMO. It's a real headscratcher that there aren't already rules for making rules, like this, to a greater degree. Monster creation rules count, I guess.

Back that up with a system in the DMG that supports improvisation and on-the-fly gaming, and you have a game which is working to D&D's strengths. It came as a "duh" moment to me to work out that the game within the game which really attracts people to D&D is the chance to make a world of your own. The other pillar of D&D's power over people and other games is the possibility offered by playing with improvisation, which a computer cannot do.

So yeah, that'd be my dream edition - a D&D with rules keyed to improvisation and world construction. A D&D of customisation, and on-the-fly convenience. A solid generic baseline to depart from, and a whole heap of rules to customise that. A DMG which is all about helping you run a campaign with little or no prep - which takes the wandering monster table as the incredibly primitive ancestor of something incredibly useful and adaptable to running the game on the fly, and stats, traps, treasures and monsters keyed towards running the game that way. A hugely tall order, to be sure, but that's my Holy Grail for the game.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The question is, though, how many people do want to make up all their own flavor? You need to learn to walk before you can run.

World-Building can be awesome, but basically requiring it from the start can be overwhelming.

The 4E PoL (but also to some extend Greyhawk in 3E, or the Diamond THrone for Arcana Unearthed) sparked my imagination. I got setting elements, character ideas, story-lines. They evoke a certain feel in me that makes me want to create more.

I don't know if I could feel the same way with GURPS.

 

[rounser]

The question is, though, how many people do want to make up all their own flavor? You need to learn to walk before you can run.

That's what the baseline's for. I didn't say you still don't have a default, baseline implied setting. And if the improvisation aspect of the game was good enough, worldbuilding would be optional (you could improvise tonight's game without paying attention to setting).

 

[Goumindong]

That's what the baseline's for. I didn't say you still don't have a default, baseline implied setting. And if the improvisation aspect of the game was good enough, worldbuilding would be optional (you could improvise tonight's game without paying attention to setting).

That is the trick. You can always just strip the name and flavor from something and use something else. Part of the power sources and racial function is to give players are baseline of what they can expect. Everyone is already free to simply strip that away and make what they want with it.

So what difference does it make if you call it a knight or a paladin if all it takes to make it a Knight is to change the name to "Knight" and the power source to "personal"(or Ki).

In the end, it ends up being a nudge towards ideas and a basis for shared expectation(E.G. You expect dwarves to be "dwarfy" and not "7 dwarfy") which help push the game along.

Personally, I have always found that the further you stray from these shared expectations(aside: and they are always very archetypal, hinging on deep rooted fantasy expectations that have been building over the centuries from mythology and literature) the harder it is to bring people into a game.

 

[ScottS]

Re: DFE

The designers of 4e certainly considered it. A large chunk of that interview was on their decision to cut out rules that were only there to support verisimilitude and role-playing.

Besides this podcast, one other notable example of the 4e team talking about DFE ideas, is that rather annoying Heinsoo quote someone has sig'ed, concerning "picky and esoteric" rules, and older editions/gamers favoring "potentially slightly tedious [simulation] over having fun." I think it's pretty safe to say they're in the DFE design camp.

As to why that may be, again, if they were looking at wargaming at all, they probably thought that a DFE approach was a roadmap to better sales. A short history of the wargaming market over the past decade or so, would probably go something like: "The design-for-effect philosophy (as exemplified in 'card-driven games' like We the People, Paths of Glory, etc.) broke the hold of hex-and-counter, phone-book-sized-rulebook nerds over the hobby, and assured its continuance into the next generation (via revived sales)."

 

[HalWhitewyrm]

The interviewer really just needed a quick edit pass.

Nah, Clyde doesn't roll like that. I found it jarring when I first started listening to the show, but now I like it; it gives me a sense of veracity and of "being there" that is lacking in edited interviews (and mind you, I edit the interviews I do for my shows).

 

[ScottS]

Frankly, the less DFE things are, the harder i have "visualizing" things, since i end up spending so much time working through more and more arcane rules which don't have an end result.

Yes and no. For Fireball, "I roll to hit your Reflex, X damage if I hit and 0.5X damage if I miss" is clearly more DFE and better than trying to model the explosive shock wave, thermal effects, etc., if all you care about is the bad guy taking damage. 4e Grapple beats 3e Grapple in the "Concise Mechanic for Grabbing and Holding a Guy" contest. Let's assume that simpler is in fact better in both these cases.

But consider the following counterexamples:

There are at least 3 different ways they do 'poisoning' in the 4e MM:
A) attack vs AC, hit does damage and allows secondary attack vs Fort, which then applies the poison effect
B) attack vs AC, damage + poison effect on a hit
C) attack vs Fort, damage + poison effect on a hit
If I go pure DFE in my rules design, I shouldn't ever use option A to describe being poisoned, because it's the most 'sim' and you have to make two rolls where one would do. However, A gets used rather a lot in the MM. Even worse, there's no 4e 'game physics' or any other explanation as to why A, B, and C all show up in the book. Is there a specific effect the 4e guys were trying to design for, when something spits poison at me and it's just a Fort attack, but something biting me and injecting poison is AC followed by Fort? Spitting is a 'touch attack' and biting is a 'regular attack', so it's probably a holdover/legacy distinction from 3e, but if this is 4e then why are we simming even that much?

Same story with falling down. If I set off a pit trap, it makes an attack vs my Reflex, and a hit knocks me in. If a rogue tries to judo-throw me off a cliff with Flying Foe... I make a saving throw to not fall. Why does my Reflex defense help me in the former case but not the latter? They're equally simple fall-avoidance rules, so DFE doesn't tell me why I'm using two different types of rolls. Is the intended effect supposed to be that rogues have an easier-than-normal time of making me fall if my Reflex is high, but a harder-than-normal time if it's low? If the only effect I care about is "you fall and take damage if you don't catch yourself", why am I not either rolling Reflex attacks in both cases, or saving throws in both cases?

I'm also using these examples in reference to a related issue from the podcast. Mearls mentioned something about the 4e-doesn't-do-simulation concept leading to the end of 'canonical' rules for describing game situations (don't remember what the exact context/question was). My immediate thought was about rules drift: if you avoid simulation in your design, then you can't use simulation considerations to tell you whether a proposed rule for something 'works better' than another. So as different people work on your system, you may end up with multiple resolution mechanics for one 'effect' and no clear way to pick between them (as seen above, DFE doesn't necessarily help you at this point). Long-term result, your system starts to unravel.

 

[Spatula]

The proliferation of different ways to resolve the same situation was a problem in 2e, and one that 3e tried to specifically address. I think 4e is better off than 2e was, in that there's a common resolution mechanic that everything is based on. Whereas in 2e you might get mixtures of % rolls, ability checks, 1 in X chances, each with their own specific situational modifiers.

But if it does get out of hand, well, that's a good excuse for publishing a new edition!

 

[Nom]

As for Clyde's interview of Mike Mearls, this was, and I don’t think I exaggerate, the most important interview on 4e out there, period. ...

Not trying to be picky, but this is, for me at least, old news. I can't provide precise references, but in the stuff I've been reading and watching it's been abundantly clear for at least 6 months, and maybe a lot longer, than D&D 4E was about "game" and "imagination", and everything that implies from a design and priority viewpoint.

But you're right in identifying it as a fundamental break between 3E and 4E. 4E is quite deliberately not about representing the gameworld; it's about resolving events with respect to its own framework and whatever story the players may choose to layer on top of that. Any representational mapping between the mechanics and the gameworld is at the discretion of the players, though the rules do provide flavouring to get the process started.

As such, the D&D 4E mechanical ruleset is more like a very broad version of Monopoly or Settlers of Catan than it is a wargame simulation. And this is a natural and deliberate result given the design philosophies.

But the other trick is that D&D 4E has two independent but parallel "rulesets". There's the raw mechanics, and there's the story-game. Unlike Monopoly or Settlers of Catan, D&D encourages you to leap off from the basic mechanics and invest the gameplay with your own personality and story. This is indeed true of all editions. But 4E differs from immediately prior editions by providing rules to calibrate the events in the story-world, rather than rules to evaluate them. In that sense, it harks back to very early (mechanics-lite) editions of the game and then takes a different development path. Not in remaining mechanics-lite, but by retaining and enforcing a distinction between the resolution mechanic and the activity the mechanic is resolving.

2E -> 3E: can't we just model everything using one fundamental system?
3E -> 4E: let's just use the resolution engine and leave the description up to the players.

 

[Baron Opal]

As for Clyde's interview of Mike Mearls, this was, and I don’t think I exaggerate, the most important interview on 4e out there, period. Especially for those who instinctively did not like 4e, Mike’s explanation of the design philosophy behind it, his elaboration of the way the game was built up and how it’s meant to work, sheds a ton of light that was simply not made clear at any previous point.

I usually disregard audio files, podcasts, &c. out of hand for reasons Mouseferatu mentions above. But given what Dan said, I think I'll check this one out.