Mearls' Chicken or the Egg: Should Fluff Control Crunch, or the Other Way Around?

[howandwhy99]

It may seem like a cop out, but it really does work both ways.

Imagine a game where the action is about throwing a ball up in the air and catching it. Dull, simple, and repeated over and over and over and over... you get the idea. However, the rules meticulously cover seemingly endless amounts of detail in what at first glace appears like a "5 seconds and out" story. This is what happens when the depicted situation goes overboard in determining the rules generated for it.

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And the reverse can also go wrong. We have a tight knit game where all the rules are time tested and balanced, but the actions depicted are jarringly inappropriate to the rules. Imagine playing Chess where each of the pieces are soccer players. The game supposedly represents tabletop soccer, but there is no ball, no goals, no forwards, no goalkeeper. It plays just like Chess, we've simply decided to call the pieces by different names.

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To really hit the sweet spot pretty much any RPG wants to "keep it simple", but "allow the rules to represent and drive the action". It's a tough balance, but it can be done.

 

[Bluenose]

I would say that this would be true for UnNamed RPG A. But not for an edition of D&D. If you want to design without the baggage of being D&D, you should set out to design a different game and not try to call it D&D.

Dark Sun is D&D.
Forgotten Realms is D&D.
Greyhawk is D&D.
Eberron is D&D.
Ravenloft is D&D.
Dragonlance is D&D.
etc.

If those all feel the same, then your GM is doing something wrong. Yet they all "feel like D&D" to some people. So I'm pretty sure that the "feel of D&D" is so entirely subjective that designing to fit it would lead to a very vague game.

 

[Umbran]

If you want to design without the baggage of being D&D, you should set out to design a different game and not try to call it D&D.

I think "the feel of D&D" is a poorly specified design goal, with no solid criteria to determine if you've actually reached the goal. If you want to doom an effort to failure, by all means pick a goal that nobody can even state clearly.

EN World is loaded with D&D fans - people who love the game. And we cannot collectively tell you what the feel of D&D is. Ask a dozen gamers, you'll get 13 different answers. Ask the members of a single gaming group, and they won't all answer the same.

 

[Imaro]

Elements like shifty tell me how the monsters move and how to differentiate them in ways you just don't get in older monster manuals.

I'm curious... how does this work again? You see, since all we have is a name "goblin tactics" and an effect... shifts... which can be anything you want to describe it as... how does this help me as far as the in-game fluff of a goblin? How does "shifty" tell you anything except how it abstractly moves in combat? Anything outside of that and you're making it up yourself.

 

[rounser]

If those all feel the same, then your GM is doing something wrong. Yet they all "feel like D&D" to some people. So I'm pretty sure that the "feel of D&D" is so entirely subjective that designing to fit it would lead to a very vague game.

Ah, this misleading canard again. All of those settings use an implied setting of elves, dwarves, paladins etc as a base to modify or depart from. If you throw mul in the player's handbook like WOTC did dragonborn, you pollute D&D's ability to act as a worldbuilding baseline, because a thousand worlds might suit dwarves happily as a major feature played by PCs, but not something that smacks of a specific, niche world, like warforged or dragonborn. I know some of you have no nose for this, and don't care about such details, but others are more discerning.

 

[Imaro]

In 4e, the mechanics give emphasis to the fluff.

Take Shifty, which is a kobold thing. What does it say? That kobolds are shifty. Seems rather simplistic in form - and it is! - but when you examine it, it paints how the entire species fights. Kobolds are sneaky, devious little buggers who sneak around. They're slippery, hard to pin down. They're never just standing still, they're always moving around to stab you in the back.

Compare it to orcs who gain incredible bloodlust and grow enraged when they're taken to bloodied. That tells us that orcs are not skulky slippery buggers, they're far more straight forward - and put far more emphasis on brute strength over everything else.

The kobold mechanics emphasis this: Kobolds slip around in a fight, always looking for a new and better advantage. They fight dirty and unconventional. They're sneaky and devious.

The orc mechanics emphasis this: orcs will charge at you without any worry of their own health to better smash your face in, and grow more berserk and enraged as they take hits. They're blunt, straightforward, and smash-happy.

The problem is that their "shiftiness" isn't defined as anything in particular... Now it's all well and good that you interpret it the way you want... but "shiftiness" (shifting one square as a minor action) could just as easily be interpreted as innate speediness, a displacer like ability to appear in other places, short distance teleportation, a natural instinct for gaining tactical positioning... or anything else... I guess that's my problem with saying the mechanics in 4e can be used as information to extract fluff... they aren't tied to anything in particular.

Well, that is what DMing is.

No it's not... it's a piece of DMing for some but it is not DMing. In fact I would say when DMing a commercial setting it shouldn't be necessary unless you want to change things.

 

[Pentius]

Ah, this misleading canard again. All of those settings use an implied setting of elves, dwarves, paladins etc as a base to modify or depart from. If you throw mul in the player's handbook like WOTC did dragonborn, you pollute D&D's ability to act as a worldbuilding baseline, because a thousand worlds might suit dwarves happily as a major feature played by PCs, but not something that smacks of a specific, niche world, like warforged or dragonborn. I know some of you have no nose for this, and don't care about such details, but others are more discerning.

It's not about having no nose for things, or not caring about details. It's that what you view as the baseline, the important elements, is not the same as everyone else's. You see dragonborn in the PHB and think, "Sigh, that was best in a niche-world." but at the same time, someone out there saw it and thought, "Finally! I've been pushing for a humanoid dragon as a main PC race since DragonLance!"

If I were to be handed the reigns for development of 5e, told only that I had to make something that "felt like D&D, to me" the end result would probably not "feel like D&D" to you, and vice versa.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Why can't we have both? In creating my own things sometimes I start with a cool mechanically ability and create something around that. Other times I start with an idea with no idea how the rules will handle it and that's how it gets created.

I'd tend to agree with this. "Which came first?" isn't really the meaningful analogy here. Start with a chicken and have it lay an egg? Sure. Start with an egg and have it hatch into a chicken? Sure.

But what you've got emerging now are games where you've got a chicken that doesn't actually lay eggs or eggs that never hatch.

Where you choose to start the mechanics-to-world-to-mechanics cycle isn't really all that relevant to me. It's when that cycle gets disrupted entirely with "mechanics" being placed in one box and "world" carefully segregated off in a different box that I feel something has fundamentally shifted in how the game is played.

 

[Bluenose]

Ah, this misleading canard again. All of those settings use an implied setting of elves, dwarves, paladins etc as a base to modify or depart from. If you throw mul in the player's handbook like WOTC did dragonborn, you pollute D&D's ability to act as a worldbuilding baseline, because a thousand worlds might suit dwarves happily as a major feature played by PCs, but not something that smacks of a specific, niche world, like warforged or dragonborn. I know some of you have no nose for this, and don't care about such details, but others are more discerning.

Well, no. They aren't an implied part of all settings, nor an implied part of all the sources that influenced the original game. Elves are quite common, dwarves less so; paladins are pretty rare. I'm not even sure why you consider them particularly useful as a baseline. It's not as if adventuring wizards are a staple of fantasy settings, or clerics.

Although, let me check my 4e PHB. Elves, yes; dwarves, yes, paladins, yes. Sounds look you'd consider it a good base to modify or depart from.

 

[Imaro]

First off, you really like ellipses.

Uhm...ok.

Secondly, it's not short distance teleportation because it's not a teleportation ability. It's not a displacer like ability to just "appear" in other places because, er, that's not how the ability works. I suppose you could see it as innate speediness or masterful tactical genius, except the ability is called "Shifty," which is an actual word that means things. I feel like you are really stretching here and trying to find a fault.

So it's not a displacer like ability because you decided it wasn't, and all the other examples just don't count...because it's called "shifty" which in 4e is just moving 5' and not provoking an OA (nothing about how or why that movement occurs) and really they could all fit... the point is that nothing in the actual mechanics of the power speak to this being about sneakiness or decption that is your interpretation of the mechanic and probably based on your vision of kobolds...

I also feel as if you think that, unless an ability outright explains precisely what it is, why it is, how it is, etc, etc, then you feel it's Not Fluffy. In other words, if fluff isn't used to describe fluff, it doesn't count. I overwhelmingly disagree - fluff can be implied and supplied by the mechanics.

Those mechanics don't imply anything...except that a kobold can shift without using as much of their action economy as most other creatures. Question, since almost every creature can shift, are they being sneaky and deceptive when they do the same thing the kobold did...only with more of their action economy being used up? Why or why not and please anything but... "because it's how I interpret it.".

And yet this thread tells us that very few people play setting exactly as presented.

And honestly, if I wanted a game where the DM never runs on the fly or makes up things or changes stuff as we go, I'd play a computer game.

Acutally I would expect that since this is a site that has a larger share of hardcore gamers (and especially DM's) on it. However I wouldn't mistake that for everyone or even most people. And last but not least we aren't discussing your preferences, because they're your prefrences and you have every right to them... but they have nothing to do with what is or isn't required to DM.