D&D General Kicking the tires vs. puncturing the tires; being effective vs. breaking the game

[Pedantic]

To what end result, though?

Is it your goal that the system be designed such that those five same-game tests produce very close to - or exactly - the same results on each play-through?

No, that's conflating variance with not actually doing design work. Can a level 5 party break a curse? How many rooms are they likely to handle in an average dungeon before death without resting? Is tunneling through walls an alpha strategy below level 6, and would tuning damage thresholds on stone change that?

I want those questions to be considered, so that the end user of the product doesn't need to.

Is it your goal that those endless monster fight simulations and data-filled spreadsheets lead to a system where said fights are 100% predictable, as in "here's the precise bell-curve of what'll happen when characters a-b-c-d take on monsters x-y-z"?

....if there's a bell-curve of results, by definition the fight can't be perfectly predictable? I think that's a pretty reasonable output in general though. How does a 4 person party do against an ettercap? 2 ettercaps? What if they're all rogues? Should the game have player advice indicating the all rogue party is a bad idea, or should the game strive to maintain similar levels of expected difficulty regardless of party composition? I want the game to have the answers to those questions in mind when it was designed, and provide them to me.

'Cause if so, I'll get off the bandwagon right now. I don't want combat to be predictable, nor adventures to come out the same every time they're played.

That's really beside the point. We can know all of those things, and still have variability in encounters. We can even make decisions like about say, how often PCs should die in encounters, and then use that to inform other parts of the design (like character creation). Knowing "a dragon is very likely to kill 4 PCs at level 3" is informative, not determinative. It may still be perfectly appropriate to use a dragon for the adventure or encounter structure you have planned.

Now here we agree, though I'd go a step further and suggest they actually propose some of what they expect to be common house rules as options, and discuss the design knock-ons on that basis.

Yes, definitely. Fantasy Craft did a little of this with its "campaign qualities" concept, but it wasn't particularly rigorous and could definitely have gone further. I do just want a list of optional rules with "to make the game harder/grittier, you might consider..." I want to know what a change will mean for the gameplay loop, what incentives will change for players, why that lever isn't tuned that way in the base design, and so on.

 

[Umbran]

I want hours of logged same game tests, I want to hear about iterations across 5 play groups monitored for monthly campaign play, I want game designers coding simulations of monster fights and likely town interactions and glumly staring at spreadsheets...

Outside of WotC, I don't expect the margins for RPG products would support the costs of such analysis.

Moreover, board games have the benefit of a limited play space. If I am playtesting Pioneers of Shmatan, I don't have to worry about play in any other game, or combined with any other game product. I can set the starting state, specify and limit player actions, and define win conditions and goals in Shmatan, while in an RPG one typically controls none of those things.

Moreover (and this is likely important) board games typically have a play duration of an hour or two, at which point you generally reset the entire game back to initial conditions. The RPG has to last for hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours with no reset available.

 

[Oofta]

My hot take, based on about half that experience: TTRPGs are often badly designed by the standards of other kinds of games, and the culture of play surrounding them has made this normative. When they break, it tends not to be because of the oft-discussed "absurd combinatorial" but because of simple iterated probability. Failure states are generally obvious, and don't require extensive play time at the table, so much as a solid math review.

The kinds of errors that crop up in TTRPGs simply wouldn't make it into a published board game, and we're very quick to jump to "this is a unique medium" to explain away why that happens. I'm certain there is a limit of design perfection that's possible, but I'm equally convinced we are not even close and not really trying. I want hours of logged same game tests, I want to hear about iterations across 5 play groups monitored for monthly campaign play, I want game designers coding simulations of monster fights and likely town interactions and glumly staring at spreadsheets, and, given the existing culture of play that so readily encourages tables to modify the rules, I want the second half of the DMG to be design notes on the impact of various likely to be considered house rules.

Yeah, if only they did something like an extensive playtest and survey in order to find out what people want out of the game. If only.

The differences between a TTRPG and a board game are massive, you can't really compare the two. Well, I guess you can because you just did, but I don't think it's a reasonable comparison. I can tell you that older editions of D&D were far more unbalanced than 5E. You can take an entirely different approach and have better balance. But having a game that can be easily tweaked and modified to suit the needs of the people playing the game is a strength, not a weakness.

There's simply too much table variation, too much freedom of choice to have a 100% mathematically solid game that works like D&D. I like my current group of players and have a lot of fun with them, but they are pretty terrible at strategy and taking advantage of their character's abilities. I have to constantly pull back on encounter design compared to what I could do with some of my older groups because I don't want to TPK them. But you know what? We still have fun and that's all that matters to me.

We have a game where I've seen between 3 and 8 players, balanced classes to fit the different roles and not, low number of magic items and high number of magic items that are exactly what the group wants. Throw in tactical acumen, DM capabilities to run monsters effectively, heck point buy versus very generous rolling for abilities that at least some groups use.

 

[Pedantic]

Outside of WotC, I don't expect the margins for RPG products would support the costs of such analysis.

Absolutely, that is a problem, which it's particularly frustrating to see the only company that has the resources to actually do it, not do it.

Moreover, board games have the benefit of a limited play space. If I am playtesting Pioneers of Shmatan, I don't have to worry about play in any other game, or combined with any other game product. I can set the starting state, specify and limit player actions, and define win conditions and goals in Shmatan, while in an RPG one typically controls none of those things.

Moreover (and this is likely important) board games typically have a play duration of an hour or two, at which point you generally reset the entire game back to initial conditions. The RPG has to last for hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours with no reset available.

I'd quibble about actions, but I would agree that a much broader board state and a moving target for game end/victory (or fictional equivalent) evaluation is definitional of what makes a TTRPG different from a board game. I don't think that makes the design question that different though, just bigger and broader.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My rant on this topic has become more unhinged as modern design has tended toward increased simplicity but not actually gotten any better, but this should be the selling point for class-based systems, and even in the case of wide open point buy, I think we've still got a lot of space for more effort to pay off better dividends.

Well, to be straight here, it actually wasn't easy to unbalance characters, per se, in OD&D. What usually happened there was that after Greyhawk at least, the difference between a well "rolled" character and a mediocre one was too striking to ignore, and accumulation of magic items.

Of course the price for that was that mechanically one fighter, barring those high stats, was virtually identical to the next.

Even in a class based system, the more meaningful choices in character gen and/or advancement you have, the more this sort of problem can creep in.

On the other hand, I do think games need to do a way better job of preparing GMs for their tolerances. How much of this tension in D&D comes down to not adequately telling DMs what kind of gameplay/encounter/adventure design is appropriate to dealing with the abilities PCs can marshal at various levels? Most of that discussion has focused on math, which is absurd; it doesn't matter how accuracy/defense scale when the players are deploying magic and planning to prevent encounters from happening at all. If that's the gameplay loop, then the GM should know that's the gameplay loop.

Yeah. To again reference a supers game, Mutants and Masterminds had perfectly fine balance on a simple math level. The problem was there were all kinds of things that could distort how that math worked in play, or make it outright moot (as an example an attack with the Perception Extra could easily be immensely overpowered if you were fighting opponents that had a high Defense and a low Toughness, theoretically a balanced tradeoff by the math).

I worry that in addition to a lack of design rigor, you have GMs holding an unreasonably low baseline for what player power should be, and ending up surprised and frustrating the game has given the PCs the ability to do things. Ideally, that should neither be surprising, nor unwanted.

Well, if the math failures in the 5e CR system are at all similar to the ones in D&D 3e, that's probably not helping here by setting expectations that won't survive contact with the field.

 

[Weiley31]

Why Puncture/Kick the tires when you can TOTALLY break the game and the DM by punching the tires.

 

[Pedantic]

Yeah, if only they did something like an extensive playtest and survey in order to find out what people want out of the game. If only.

That's marketing, or at best a starting point for design, not design.

The differences between a TTRPG and a board game are massive, you can't really compare the two. Well, I guess you can because you just did, but I don't think it's a reasonable comparison. I can tell you that older editions of D&D were far more unbalanced than 5E. You can take an entirely different approach and have better balance. But having a game that can be easily tweaked and modified to suit the needs of the people playing the game is a strength, not a weakness.

I in no way disagree here. I think TTRPGs should be modular in a way that other kinds of games aren't. Choosing not to do design work doesn't actually make your game more modular or easier to tweak, it just tells you what will happen if you do.

There's simply too much table variation, too much freedom of choice to have a 100% mathematically solid game that works like D&D. I like my current group of players and have a lot of fun with them, but they are pretty terrible at strategy and taking advantage of their character's abilities. I have to constantly pull back on encounter design compared to what I could do with some of my older groups because I don't want to TPK them. But you know what? We still have fun and that's all that matters to me.

I'm going to start sounding like @EzekielRaiden, and we have fundamental disagreements on design. There is no "100% mathematically solid" foundation in game design at all, and it's a false dichotomy to hold up "has variability and flexible parameters" against it. This isn't a binary, I'm asking for more of something, not that we do the opposite of what we're doing.

We have a game where I've seen between 3 and 8 players, balanced classes to fit the different roles and not, low number of magic items and high number of magic items that are exactly what the group wants. Throw in tactical acumen, DM capabilities to run monsters effectively, heck point buy versus very generous rolling for abilities that at least some groups use.

Those are all knowable inputs that produce measurable results on a scale that could be mapped. I'd like someone to do that, and tell me what they found, and even better, inform the base design with their findings until they like what that map looks like.

 

[Oofta]

That's marketing, or at best a starting point for design, not design.

They're listening to feedback and deciding whether or not to implement features based on feedback. I think it's kind of insulting to the people at WOTC to say they aren't doing their best to design the best game they can that still fits D&D paradigms.

I in no way disagree here. I think TTRPGs should be modular in a way that other kinds of games aren't. Choosing not to do design work doesn't actually make your game more modular or easier to tweak, it just tells you what will happen if you do.

I'm going to start sounding like @EzekielRaiden, and we have fundamental disagreements on design. There is no "100% mathematically solid" foundation in game design at all, and it's a false dichotomy to hold up "has variability and flexible parameters" against it. This isn't a binary, I'm asking for more of something, not that we do the opposite of what we're doing.

I'm pretty happy with the current system. It's not perfect, but it works for me. Who's right? How do you judge? It's all subjective. About all WOTC can do is have a massive survey, throwing out possible fixes and asking for feedback on what works and what doesn't. They also do a lot of playtesting internally and with select groups.

Those are all knowable inputs that produce measurable results on a scale that could be mapped. I'd like someone to do that, and tell me what they found, and even better, inform the base design with their findings until they like what that map looks like.

They do give some advice in the DMG with optional rules, I've been saying for a while now they should talk about it more for new DMs. My encounter calculations are pretty accurate but I've been a DM for a long time. Hints and suggestions for newbies would be a good idea, but there are limits to what can be done. But every interaction of factors would increase making a formula that would actually work exponentially more difficult.

There are a ton of blogs and streams out there for people that want to be DM. People have far, far more guidance than we did growing up when we were introduced to the game yet we still somehow figured it out. Things can always be improved, but I'm also pragmatic on how much can be done.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They're listening to feedback and deciding whether or not to implement features based on feedback. I think it's kind of insulting to the people at WOTC to say they aren't doing their best to design the best game they can that still fits D&D paradigms.

Just because it's marketing rather than proper design doesn't mean it's insincere.

But the process you describe is marketing. Especially with the objectively terrible survey design they use. All throughout the Next playtest, they had "surveys" that were little more than push polls. Often because they didn't (and don't) know any better; they have no statisticians and no social scientists on staff who could tell them what they've done wrong. I've gone through what I can of the educations of the various people who write D&D. Almost nobody has any STEM training at all, and their humanities training is in areas that don't collect survey data (e.g. journalism, arts, or in one case, theology). They literally just don't know how good survey design is done, and they don't have the math knowledge to perform rigorous statistical analysis on that data nor on the structure of the game. These are legitimate scientific disciplines that require training and experience to do well; it is not anyone's fault for not having that education, but it is their fault for not seeking out the expertise of people who do have that education.

I'm pretty happy with the current system. It's not perfect, but it works for me. Who's right? How do you judge? It's all subjective. About all WOTC can do is have a massive survey, throwing out possible fixes and asking for feedback on what works and what doesn't. They also do a lot of playtesting internally and with select groups.

Well, having an actual statistician and an actual sociologist as consultants to help them gather truly useful data and analyze it productively would be a huge help.

They do give some advice in the DMG with optional rules, I've been saying for a while now they should talk about it more for new DMs. My encounter calculations are pretty accurate but I've been a DM for a long time. Hints and suggestions for newbies would be a good idea, but there are limits to what can be done. But every interaction of factors would increase making a formula that would actually work exponentially more difficult.

You make it sound like good encounter building rules are impossible. This is simply untrue. Beyond 4e, 13A provides both a similarly reliable framework and superior ability to extend it into tougher stuff with its "Nastier Specials" options.

There are a ton of blogs and streams out there for people that want to be DM. People have far, far more guidance than we did growing up when we were introduced to the game yet we still somehow figured it out. Things can always be improved, but I'm also pragmatic on how much can be done.

If you think even a plurality of this content spewed forth on the Internet is actually good advice, I have a really sweet deal on some lunar real estate that you cannot afford to miss.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd quibble about actions, but I would agree that a much broader board state and a moving target for game end/victory (or fictional equivalent) evaluation is definitional of what makes a TTRPG different from a board game. I don't think that makes the design question that different though, just bigger and broader.

Bigger and broader to an unmanageable extent, I think, which is why they have to round off some edges.

I mean, they've kind of done it with Magic: the Gathering - probably over 10,000 different cards now and very few faulty or broken interactions, and those that do arise are sharply nipped in the bud - but that game is buttoned down so tightly as to be nearly absurd. I mean, have you read the tournament rules and card rulings for that thing?

There's no way I'd ever want to see D&D - or any RPG, for that matter - buttoned down anywhere near as tight as M:tG, largely because RPGs are at their hearts games of creativity and there just ain't no way there can be a tight rule to cover anything and everything a player or a DM can dream up.