Legends & Lore: The Loyal Opposition

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

First off, I have to thank the repliers thus far for having an intelligent conversation free of edition warring and name calling. It's refreshing to have a nice back and forth without that kind of stuff going on.

I have to say I disagree with [MENTION=49017]Bluenose[/MENTION] with the assumption that listening to us would be confusing. I've seen so many good threads with regards to what the next version/edition of the game could incorporate and keep most of us happy with. It seems that we all generally agree on a few things:

1) We like streamlined combat, I don't think I've seen anyone say that they absolutely love grindy long combat in any edition.
2) Most of us love to role play and love story-telling, so we like ideas/settings/splat books that help incorporate that into the games we are playing.
3) Most agree that companies like WOTC should release books and pdfs because look at where we are now discussing things - Online - people like to have both (which is where I think Paizo is doing a great job with handling their products).
4)Open things up for more electronic support, making it easier for outside developers of apps, web pages, and software to help spread the word and get the gamers who have groups spread out all over the world together easier (i.e. incorporate people who developed maptools, hero labs, etc and get their ideas on how to create things we like and use).
5) Most agree that having the OGL is a good thing and helps move the products forward in the most popular direction based upon community support and ideas.
6) As [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] stated, having people who have a passion for the game actually develop it, you can get a lot of really good designers involved when you incorporate their ideas which are strongly supported by other members of the community.
7) Different is good, but keeping the basics the same is always a plus to most of us, we (a lot of us) still have that nostalgia about the older editions and feel that changing too drastically from what we have always loved isn't the best idea.
8) Hire people who actually read the forums from the various sites dedicated to gamers and actually talk to them replying to their concerns and ideas. I think that as long as things are civil, this would be a great way to keep things flowing in the right direction.

I know no one gaming system, edition, or version will ever be perfect, but I think with the help of the overall community and people who want to listen and are open to new ideas on how things could be improved would go a long ways to repairing the rift that is between the industry, gamers, and outside developers. I think it'd also go a long way to helping solve the edition warring that goes on if people are able to have these types of intelligent dialogue with the ones who are writing the rules.

P.S. I didn't mean to hijack this thread in any way, but to open up a small discussion on what people thought, so I apologize to the OP if this wasn't the type of discussion they wanted to happen in their thread.

 

[Mercurius]

Anyways, I still strongly disagree with the idea that we can do away with all skills and just have "Strength training" and "Wisdom training." I honestly wouldn't want to play in a system that didn't have an additional level of granularity added. Even under 2e, I always used NWPs, and I really enjoyed the additional proficiency rules that came under Skills & Powers.

A couple things. First, I don't think he's implying that they want to "do away with all skills." What he is saying is, as he states right in the beginning of the article, that a skill represents one of two things: ability to use a natural talent (e.g. climb) or a learned ability (e.g. detect magic). What he's doing is streamlining the system so that the former doesn't have an extra and unnecessary "filter" (e.g. athletics).

To put it another way, what is Athletics other than the trained capacity to use Strength? Strength is natural talent, Athletics is the ability to use Strength in a specific way (or ways).

I would imagine that the hypothetical 5E character sheet would be focused on the six ability scores, with their three components that Mearls mentions: the score itself ("natural talent"), the training rank ("ability to use") and modifier (gestalt of talent and training). Any "unique, learned" abilities would be in a separate category and may or may not be based on the natural talent of an ability score.

The second thing I wanted to respond to was your interest in another level of granularity. If you take this article on its own, I can see what you mean, but remember that he's been talking about the now infamous "complexity dial." The scheme he outlines here could simply be the lowest setting: you have your ability scores, your training rank, and the resulting modifier, and you might or might not have additional unique, learned skills. If you want greater granularity, you up the complexity dial and you differentiate out the training of a given ability score. For instance, maybe you are really good at climbing but not so good at swimming. So we could have two versions, one "basic" and one "advanced":

Basic:
Strength 16 (+3); Journeyman (+4); Modifier +7

Advanced:
Strength 16 (+3)
--Climb - Expert (+6); Mod +9
--Swim - Novice (0); Mod +3
--Jump - Journeyman (+4); Mod +7

Et cetera. Your training rank gives an extra bonus, perhaps 0 for Novice, +2 for Apprentice, +4 for Journeyman, +6 for Expert, +8 for Master, +10 for Grandmaster, or something like that. A Basic character has a flat training rank in a given ability score, while an Advanced character can further differentiate as much as the player likes, while still evening out as the same overall value. This, of course, facilitates min/maxing, but I don't see a way around that without taking away player modification, which is part and parcel to the D&D experience.

The nice thing about this approach is that you could play characters of different complexity in the same game, which is an aspect of the complexity dial approach that would be relatively new and even unique to "5E," as far as I know.

It seems that we all generally agree on a few things:...

I think you'll find broad agreement about those points, yes. But I don't see Mearls saying anything contrary to those points, at least not yet! If anything, he seems to be looking for feedback from the community through polls and comments.

That said, there is only so much catering to the community that is possible or desirable, whether because of time or because when you open the dialogue it is very hard to close it without coming off as a douche .

But let's see how this unfolds before we write it off.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Part of my job is nailing down software requirements with users--most of whom have very little understanding of what goes into software. But the ones with little understanding are often easier to converse with than the ones who know more. Really, easy is the stuff on the ends--the people that know nothing and the people that know pretty much everything relevant to their problem. The closer you get to the middle, the tougher it gets.

I suspect that game designers relationship with the community is like that. Moreover, most of are pretty square in the middle between knowing nothing and a lot. We play games; we tinker with games; we might even write our own. And of course there are industry people participating here that do more than that. But even these guys are often agenda-driven by their own preferences--much like the in-house software guru that is going to insist that the project go with his, um, "esoteric" relational database ideas. Sometimes he might even be right. He does have a lot of hard-won knowledge of a particular problem space. But most of the time, there is something major wrong with his idea, even while it contains a key insight. And most of the time, those users have embedded their legitimate and necessary requirements in a bunch of ... much less legitimate and necessary stuff. I hope you appreciate my restraint, here.

Point being, it is hard work to ferret out the useful stuff from the rest, even when you sit around the table with a select group of people for hours at a time. And in fairness to us, there really isn't much we can do to change this either, even if we were so inclined. All we can do is honestly state our case and let the people reading it do with it what they will.

 

[Agamon]

I wonder if these R&D guys in the industry even keep a finger on the pulse of the fans who buy their stuff. They seem to be detached from what the RPG Community really wants to see changed, added, or removed from the rules/genres/settings.

Legends & Lore Poll Results: 08/16/2011
Last week's proposal is a good or bad idea...

•Good: 65.6%
•Neither – it has its strengths but it also has drawbacks: 25.8%
•Bad: 8.6%

Poll Time

Is this week's proposal a good or bad idea?
Good.
Bad.
Neither – it has its strengths but it also has drawbacks

Yeah, not at all.

Skills is what's on his mind right now. I'm sure he'll do some brainstorming on other areas of the game in coming weeks, no worries.

 

[Agamon]

I know no one gaming system, edition, or version will ever be perfect, but I think with the help of the overall community and people who want to listen and are open to new ideas on how things could be improved would go a long ways to repairing the rift that is between the industry, gamers, and outside developers. I think it'd also go a long way to helping solve the edition warring that goes on if people are able to have these types of intelligent dialogue with the ones who are writing the rules.

P.S. I didn't mean to hijack this thread in any way, but to open up a small discussion on what people thought, so I apologize to the OP if this wasn't the type of discussion they wanted to happen in their thread.

Your points are all seem valid. Many of those appear to be a general consensus, perhaps. But yeah, I think a lot of that is beyond the scope of these articles. This is a lot like a brainstorming session and seeing what readers think of the ideas he has floating around. Hopefully the actual R&D devs (of which Mearls is not anymore) are listening to the fans.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This article seems more confused...I am not quite sure Mearls formed a cogent proposal, here.

I do not like "you must be this tall to ride" mechanics. They are kind of annoyingly exclusionary and binary.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

My favorite approach to skills in D&D in AD&D's "secondary skill" system (which, to be clear, is not non-weapon proficiencies).

 

[Anselyn]

I do not like "you must be this tall to ride" mechanics. They are kind of annoyingly exclusionary and binary.

Like you must have a level in Cleric to cast Cleric spells?

We're lucky that RQ solved these sorts of problems long ago ...

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

We're lucky that RQ solved these sorts of problems long ago ...

Just so.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Like you must have a level in Cleric to cast Cleric spells?

Actually....yeah.

I get that classes are a really useful and fun bit of design, but there's different levels of possible restriction, here, that are negotiable, even within a class framework.

I really don't think it should break the game too hard to get a thief to learn cure light wounds at some point, even if they're never as good at it as the cleric is.

I also don't think it's a problem for Mr Heavy Armor to be able to swim like a porpoise on occasion, even if it's a rare one.