NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8715961" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Gary did say that, yes, though I personally disagree even with the sentiment. It is clear from the way people behave that we do, in fact, need rules. Some (as demonstrated by conversations about some...disruptive player behaviors in one of the "no-death" threads) need rules because without rules they not only can but will ride roughshod over campaign premise, decorum, respect, and the internal logic of the world. Others need them because they wish to actually make use of them. I'm sure there are other reasons as well. Point being, rules ended up being a lot more important to the game overall than Gygax believed--because if he were right even just in spirit, there would have been no interest in 5e.And, yes, gamers come to the table with different values and interests. My major issue nowadays is that people act as though balance makes ease-of-use and variety impossible, that they are literal antitheses and never the twain shall meet. That is a pernicious and infuriating bit of received wisdom with no grounding beyond anecdote and lack of familiarity, but it is held up as gospel and used to browbeat anyone trying to actually have a productive conversation about making games that can have both.You can have a rich, mechanically diverse, flexible game that is also transparent in its design and quite well-balanced. 13th Age is exactly that sort of thing.Indeed. As I am fond of saying, "you can have fun with it, or worse, "it's playable," are not standards of quality, but rather the absolute rock bottom conditions a game must meet to be worthy of being called "a game." A thing which claims to be "a game" but which is literally impossible to enjoy and which literally cannot be played even in principle is a dangerous weapon of psychological warfare, not a game.Personally, I see this as a good thing, in that it puts selective pressure onto designers to actually design their games. It forces designers to say, "we can't just toss out some random whatever and trust that it will hold." People can, and will, find dominant strategies and degenerate outcomes. If you leave perverse incentives in your game, people in general will follow where those incentives lead. That's the main reason why you have so many DMs upset about "whack-a-mole" healing, for example: that is a perverse incentive encoded into the rules.This means design must, in fact, actually improve. We cannot rest on our laurels. We must learn from both good design in other games and media, and poor design from all sources (including D&D itself.) Playtesting can no longer just be a marketing gimmick to ensure exposure of your game. You can't just handwave the math anymore. Having an actual stats person (and, ideally, also a survey person) on the team for a big-budget game like D&D is, I hope, going to change from a luxury to a necessity, as the mathematical structure and survey data collection become vital to successful work.</blockquote>

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