Interview with Mike Mearls

[charlesatan]

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.

As far as 4E game design goes, I'll second this assessment. =)

 

[mhacdebhandia]

This. Listening to a podcast is intensely distracting to me. I either give all of my attention to it (which can be difficult since my eyes are otherwise disengaged and will likely seek stimulus) or have it run in the background and miss every other word. I'd like to listen to neat-o podcasts but I just can't figure out how to do so that works for me.

I burn all the podcasts I listen to onto CDs and listen to them in the car. It helps that I have an hour-long drive to and from work, and that my radio antenna was snapped off by a jerk a while back, of course, but I find it works well.

Of course, I find that I need my mind occupied by something while I drive, or else my attention starts to wander from the road out of sheer boredom. Before podcasts, I used to listen to talk radio (even the reactionary crap we get on the major stations in Sydney) for the same reason - unless it's music I know and like, I can't listen to music stations. So for me, it's either podcasts or music, and I prefer talk to music to keep my mind occupied (though music with smart lyrics I enjoy singing is also good).

 

[Baron Opal]

I just listened to the podcast. It was very informative to hear where Mike was coming from. If this had been available three months ago there would have been a lot less angst in the gamer world, I think. HalWhitewyrm is right on the money with his assessment.

I would have dearly appreciated, however, Clyde editing out the dead air a bit. While there wasn't a lot of it, it would have been nice to have been able to just skip over it.

 

[Clyde L. Rhoer]

Hey folks,

Thanks so much for listening to my show. I just wanted to address a few things.

On Magic the Gathering
My point in bringing up Magic the Gathering was to point at how 4E seems to be focused more on team creation, than individual creation. It was an allusion which to my ear is how Mike took it. You can still make your unique snowflake I think, but effectiveness is no longer bound up in the individual in 4E. In my mind this is good for a game that has always focused on the players as a team.

On transcripts
I haven't checked since early this year, but if memory serves the cheapest transcription service I could find would charge somewhere around $60 to $100 to transcribe this episode. I'm just a janitor, and have already sunk several grand in equipment, with more costs to come as I seek to improve on my hobby. Not to mention the careful saving i do to go to conventions... but I'd do that podcast or no podcast. I can't afford transcripts. I release my podcasts under a creative commons, share alike 3.0 license, so if any individual or group wants to foot the cost you are free to do so. Send me a link, so I can link to it. This might sound snarky, but it isn't. I use that license because I hoped people would find other uses for my stuff.

On my shoddy-ness
Folks complaining about my preparedness are absolutely right. I apologize, I've been sliding and frankly it's great to hear so many folks call me on it. I'll make sure to do it the old way in the future, where I have a clipboard with my reminders. To give you an idea where I was at.... If I sleep four hours per 24 hour period at a con I'm doing well. This interview was on Saturday I believe, and I hadn't had four hours sleep since Tuesday. I just finished my ashcan which I was bringing to the Ashcan Front booth, on Monday, which means I was lacking sleep the weekend before. I was about ready to experience the Mad City I think.

As an additional problem internet access at my hotel was $10 a day, so I had to spend $10 to pull up the questions I had got from Rob Donahue. So what I'm trying to say is I dropped the ball, but I'm just a game-fan, like you, so hopefully you'll cut me some slack.

On lack of editing
I don't edit the content from the point I choose to drop the listener in the conversation. This is an aesthetic and practical decision. The practical part is that editing this would add, based on previous experience, at least four hours, which would bring editing time up to 6 or 8 hours. This is in addition to the 8 hours I've put into planning the show, including email coming up with questions, etc.

The aesthetic side is even more important to me. I personally hate the cleanliness of our media, especially radio, and I'm not seeking to emulate that. I could edit to try to make myself sound smarter or better prepared, but I'm not interested in doing so. I want to hear real conversations, flaws and all. I want the equivalent to a punk show where the microphone might be giving feedback, but the show goes on because we've got a stage to dive off of, or invisible ninjas to fight, or a circle to run around in. Ugly, loud, but honest. I'm wanting to bring you a moment with all it's flaws, because I think that has more integrity. That's what I'm shooting for. It's cool if you disagree. I'll try to peek back in, I wanted to wait until the thread seemed to be winding down, as I wanted to see what people honestly thought. Thanks again.

(Sorry, I can't get this to keep my spacing... I'm unsure of why but have spent too much time on it. Edit2: Strange this site loses my carriage returns when I use Linux, and Firefox but not OS X, and Safari.)

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Thanks for chiming in, Clyde!

I really like reading design diaries and designers talking about the "philosophy" behind what they created (or want to create), so I welcome your podcasts (even with the flaws mentioned in the thread). I am looking forward to see, err hear more of it.

 

[Samuel Leming]

It was very informative to hear where Mike was coming from. If this had been available three months ago there would have been a lot less angst in the gamer world, I think. HalWhitewyrm is right on the money with his assessment.

Yeah, that would have been quite neighborly of them, but they wouldn't have sold as many core rulebooks if any of the designers had been this explicit before the launch.

I would certainly have canceled my preorder if I had heard this interview back then.

Well, anyway, it was a good interview and a great window into what the designers were considering.

Sam

 

[lutecius]

yes that explains a lot, and it's consistent with M.Mearls' previous references to board games.

I didn't buy the books because i had the chance to read them beforehand but clarifying these design goals earlier would have spared us endless threads with comments like "oh, i don't see a change, dnd has always been that gamist /abstract"...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

yes that explains a lot, and it's consistent with M.Mearls' previous references to board games.

I didn't buy the books because i had the chance to read them beforehand but clarifying these design goals earlier would have spared us endless threads with comments like "oh, i don't see a change, dnd has always been that gamist /abstract"...

Sure? If people don't agree with the design goals, they might also disagree with the observations of Mike.

What's interesting about these discussion is how different people perceived the D&D ruleset. I would never have expected "simulationist" gamers (if I had known this term already before the entire discussions came up) to see D&D belonging into that category, or being good at it. But I didn't begin my adventuring role-playing career with D&D and its hit points, levels and vancian magic. I started with Shadowrun, with the injury/damage system distinguishing between penetration and damage, nonlethal and lethal damage boxes, degrading explosions, recoil and stuff like that.
Getting over the entire level/hp system was a small feat in and on itself for me. (Though the vancian system proved to bother me most, for a variety of reason - and none of them was the fact that vancian spells itself are more interesting and varied then the stuff I knew from Shadowun).

 

[Samuel Leming]

I would never have expected "simulationist" gamers (if I had known this term already before the entire discussions came up) to see D&D belonging into that category, or being good at it.

D&D is the original game of that category. Until the late nineties there were simply no other categories.

One problem is that the term "simulationist" enters our vocabulary by way of GNS theory and that theory defines simulationism in a very non-intuitive way. Instead of using it to always mean some kind of adherence to reality, they used it to refer to players who only played RPGs with the goal of some kind of role playing. Players who wanted mainly to do thing in addition to or instead of role playing were Gamists or Narrativists depending on what those additional goals were. They would have been better off using 'Roleplayist' instead of 'Simulationist', but that would have gone against their goal of claiming that Narrativism is legitimately role playing.

Anyway, using the term 'simulationist' has become a good way to NOT get one's point across because it's so likely that someone will have a differing definition from yours.

Getting back to the point, all those weird quantum rules from OD&D and AD&D were used as abstractions(abstractions do not automatically make a system gamist) to resolve actions and keep things moving. They weren't put in there specifically to support players 'gaming the system' like what we see in 4e.

But I didn't begin my adventuring role-playing career with D&D and its hit points, levels and vancian magic. I started with Shadowrun, with the injury/damage system distinguishing between penetration and damage, nonlethal and lethal damage boxes, degrading explosions, recoil and stuff like that.

Almost every subsequent RPG coming out soon after D&D was an attempt at better support for role playing by introducing more verisimilitude, usually through rules. Champions, Role Master, Gurps, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu... The only exception that quickly comes to mind is Palladium and that's more of a copy cat situation. D&D was sold as the original role playing game, and almost everything that followed, until recently, were attempts at improving upon different aspects of that.

Sam

 

[Fenes]

Shadowrun (which I started roleplaying with) is an abstract system, same as D&D. I don't really see wound levels ("So, a 5 cm cut to the hand is a light wound, meaning 1 box of damage. And I am dead at 10 boxes, meaning, 10 such cuts to the hand or arm?") as that more realistic (or "logical", or "simulationist" for some) than hit points. Both require a suspension of disbelief. And the less said about the relation between Shadowrun's firearm rules and the real world the better.