D&D 5E Mearls interview

[Gorgoroth]

Totally.

But there's no shortage of retro-clones and D&D-like games. Anyone can make a D&D-esque game. But only D&D can provide everything else.

The biggest problem with those variants is finding a steady group to play them with. There's a critical mass you need to make a system viable. 3.5 / PF / 4.0 are all viable due to the numbers of people still playing them. But although I had a harder time finding DDN Encounters sessions, I did find one, and I think it will destroy the other editions. It's not perfect, but it's loads faster to play and pick up than 4e or PF, you can do so much more than 4e with even the limited spells you have (.e.g. my ranger can move some distance, attack a couple times with a maneuver and maybe even a swift heal), then jump over the table and tumble down the exit in one round. In 4e that would have required me several magic items, some multiclass feats, a daily, an encounter power, and an action point. This game feels more cinematic and also plays faster too. I think it will win.

Only competition would be PF 2.0, but is there any news on that? If so, could you post a link? I'm curious. After D&D Encounters moved up to D&D Next and the 4e support goes down, it will only be a short while before most people jump on board. It's in a very early state but is already much more playable and feels like a proper D&D experience to me. It even has difficulty / survivatiliby dials. We were playing on the dials way high (max hit die every level), which I would have rather not had, but anyway. If I were DMing, I'd much rather build something quick n dirty with DDN then flesh out the world as it gets released, than build something entirely in another system. There are still major bugs to solve but it's got the name, it's got the feel, it's got the flavor, it's got the ability to run tons of encounters in a couple hours with a lot of people at the table, each not taking 10 minutes for their turn. I mean, it was our first game and we did I think 5 battles and tons of RP in under three hours. Had a lot of fun, and looking forward to playing it every week.

 

[pemerton]

Vancian magic is easier to balance against the fighter than most of the magic systems you find in fiction, particularly if you want magic to be able to do grand things.

This interview has been discussed on the "Going the wrong way for everyone thread". Over on that thread I made the same point as [MENTION=56051]Raith5[/MENTION].

In particular, the tying of power to an ingame unit of time ("the day") does no balancing work at all until we work out (i) whether or not that ingame unit of time is a resource, and (ii) who has control over how much of it is available, when a day finishes and a new day begins, etc.

Not since Gygax's quirky treatment of time in his DMG - which I could never make sense of until [MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION] on these boards pointed out that Gygax was running games every evening, and on that basis was correlating ingame time, real time, and the availability of a given player's PC for an expedition - has D&D made time a meaningful resource. And with spells like Rope Trick, Teleport etc it has a tendency to put control over time into the hands of the very players on whom it's meant to operate as a balancing factor, namely, the magic-users.

With a system like that, the only way to achieve balance is via huge amounts of GM force in respect of pacing, "living breathing worlds where the bad guys never stop for breath and always adopt Rope Trick mitigation strategies", etc (the standard stuff that comes up in discussions of the 5MWD). No doubt a game can be run in that fashion, but it badly narrows the viable play space for the system.

At the barest minimum, the system should at least be designed so the fighter recovers hit points (his/her Vancian resource) on the same schedule that the magic-user recovers spells.

 

[Li Shenron]

This is an interesting interview. While I agree with much of this I was struck dumb(er) when he claimed that vancian magic "a pretty solid way to try to strike a balance" between a wizard and fighter types. I am not hardcore against Vancian or daily magic, but does it really balance the types of characters?

It depends on what you mean by balance!

There are several gamers, and I am one of them, who consider average balance on a long term the important thing, while others probably most consider instantaneous balance on a short term what really matters. The first means that different characters can take the spotlight at different times, the second that they are in the spotlight all the time. Vancian magic relates to balancing characters on the long term (one day, or longer).

A common misconception is that since short-term balance implies long-term balance, the first is always better. I found that not to be true for me in practice.

 

[pemerton]

the impression I got is that he doesn't believe that the rules should get in the way of the story. If that's what he meant, I agree.

I agree too, but I still think I'm looking for a different game from the one Mearls is delivering (and maybe from the one you're looking for).

The rules serve the story. Too much rules structure and I feel the story is determined by the rules.

<snip>

Sure enough, anybody can use the rules any way they want. I just feel they're not getting all they can out of the experience.

For me a big part of the RPG experience is joint participant creation of the shared fiction; and by "joint" I don't mean token - "I got to play an elf rather than a dwarf" - but rich and genuine - "I got to choose what matters to my PC and what s/he will strive for in the gameworld, and to shape whether or not s/he achieves that". RPGing that doesn't involve that is, for me, resulting in particpants not getting all that they might out of the experience.

The function of the rules, then, is to mediate and channel that joint creation of the shared fiction. As a result, the rules will always determine, in some part, the story - the most prosaic examples come from classic D&D, where the rules determine that the story will never be about a dwarven mage, or an armoured mage (unless elven or half-elven) or a sword-wielding cleric.

The test of the rules, for me, is therefore not whether they (partly) determine the fiction. It's whether they allow the fiction I'm interested in to emerge (for me, when RPGing, that's almost exclusively fantasy), and whether they let it emerge by the process I want (namely, genuine, rich joint creation by all the participants in the game).

No doubt others want different sorts of play experiences, produced in different sorts of ways, and hence want different sorts of rules! And that's before we get onto what are for me secondary considerations, but nevertheless important, and perhaps primary considerations for others: things like search-and-handling time, mathematical crunchiness, ease of memorisation, etc.

 

[Warbringer]

"I love sitting in the sun with a good book."

This concerned me... Mike, you live in freaking Seattle (like me), and under that premise, that is not a lot of reading time

 

[Raith5]

It depends on what you mean by balance!

There are several gamers, and I am one of them, who consider average balance on a long term the important thing, while others probably most consider instantaneous balance on a short term what really matters. The first means that different characters can take the spotlight at different times, the second that they are in the spotlight all the time. Vancian magic relates to balancing characters on the long term (one day, or longer).

A common misconception is that since short-term balance implies long-term balance, the first is always better. I found that not to be true for me in practice.

I was thinking in terms of being a strange way to attempt to draw balance because there are some many variables required for this to balance out different timings of power. A long dungeon crawl really dampens wizards while a climatic one encounter climatic fight overwhelming inflated the power of the wizard, etc

Your divide between average balance and instantaneous balance (which I really like BTW) points to the problem of who gets to make the call on the time period. This is has been a reoccurring issue at my table for every edition except 4th ed (in the main part). So my response to Mearls was really? We have been complaining about this for years. So I see it as an annoying reoccurring flaw rather than a feature.

 

[Li Shenron]

So I see it as an annoying reoccurring flaw rather than a feature.

Yes but other gaming groups see "fixes" as a flaw rather than a solution, if they see a feature where you see a flaw.

They know that different gaming groups have different expectations about this, in fact they were talking since the beginning of the 5e playtest about how different spellcasting rules can bring huge changes to the game. They will try to design different spellcastings so that each group can choose the one that makes the game work like they want. There is no single spellcasting framework that can rule them all.

 

[Raith5]

Yes but other gaming groups see "fixes" as a flaw rather than a solution, if they see a feature where you see a flaw.

True but surely there needs to be some exploration of other more variable options. For me the biggest problem is the disjuncture between different refresh rates between martial and magical PCs - but I guess giving daily slots to fighters might not be that popular these days! I could live with fighters getting limited amounts of stamina to do more powerful attacks which are expressed as daily slots in the same way wizards limited mana are represented in vancian magic...

I dont mind encounter type of refreshing but I could live with some form of recharge mechanism for dailies. I could easy see a spectrum of options: no recharging, recharging only with a constitution check or the like after a short rest, and some automatic recharge mechanism after a short rest.

There are some key areas like hp and healing where there will need to be a variety of options in DDN. I think the refresh rates is another area where there needs to be a spectrum of choices to enable groups to keep system flaws out of their game.

 

[Obryn]

I want the rules to be good enough that I want to use the rules. It's why I pick some systems over others.

I want the rules to be fun in and of themselves. Savage Worlds does this job very well. I've been told WFRP3 does, too, but I have sadly not played it. 4e does as well, with its collection of doodads.

I don't think Next needs to go this far, but it could go further. Spending expertise dice is a good example, imo.

-O