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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5915181" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't think it is as clear-cut as that. It is pretty hard to argue for instance that game designers in 2012 don't have a MUCH richer toolbox than the designers of 1975 did. We know a LOT more about what works, what doesn't work, why and how different game designs do certain things in more generally pleasing ways than others and work better or worse for specific types of game. We know a lot more about the range of possible RPG designs and where the limitations are in the whole genre. There's a LOT of 'tech' and industry knowledge that has evolved over 30+ years of people experimenting. Nobody can ever say one game or one mechanic is objectively better or worse than another, but it is quite possible in this day and age to be far more thoughtful and systematic about your game designs. The 70's stuff was basically throwing things against a wall to see what stuck. The 80's saw people sorting out the basic concepts and learning to apply them. The 90's saw development of a lot of those concepts, and now we're sort of in a period of consolidation and refinement. Of course this is only a very loose outline. There's a lot of each process still going on and they can't really be segregated chronologically very well, but you get the idea.I think the best take-home point here is that someone today designing 5e has a LOT more options and potentially a lot more insight into the why's and wherefore's of using those options than Gygax did in 1977 writing AD&D. While it is tempting to try to just reproduce Gygax's formula in a bit cleaned up form that's leaving a LOT of potential that he couldn't have even realized existed back then on the cutting room floor. If a new game is going to be meaningfully new and worthy of a place in the market and on people's shelves and tables then it really is going to be pretty hard to do that while saying "new is just a fad" and trying to ignore 30 years of RPG evolution. A successful 5e IMHO is going to have to take those 30 years into account and really should leverage all that 'tech'. How the game plays and feels is an aesthetic choice, but aesthetics isn't created or improved simply by ignoring possibilities that didn't exist in the past.As for D&D having 'lost something'. Well, that's a hard thing to say. I run into people who seem to be getting out of 4e what I got out of OD&D back in the day. I'm not sure the divide is all that large. However WE have changed. I know from experience that I will never quite recapture the simple wonder of OD&D, even if I play that system now today. I can have fun with it, and now and then that magic is there, but it is also there just as much in my 4e games. OTOH I can get things out of either of those systems today that I couldn't even have imagined back in the old days. I've changed. We've all changed. Just making a system based closely on say OD&D isn't going to all of a sudden bring back the feel of being 12 and playing in a tent with a Coleman lantern in the middle of the woods. OTOH I don't think it is incorrect to consider modern RPGs (at least some of them) possibly overthought. I think there's an art to artlessness and it would be well for game designers to learn to practice that. I am however not at all convinced that artlessness has to be mechanical. In fact I'd prefer it not to be. I think it is more something that has its real impact in terms of tone, style, background (settings and whatnot, lore, etc) than in mechanical subsystems. I do think there is a challenge here though, which is to carefully design your system in a way that makes it agile and avoids too many restrictions. 4e kind of DID get part of that right, but missed a bunch on other parts. IMHO a 5e follow-on of 4e could really hit a good spot there. I think people are overthinking their game criticism as much as anyone is overthinking the games themselves, both tend to happen nowadays.</blockquote>

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