Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

First of all, thanks [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] for collecting this. I generally avoid Twitter because, frankly, it's full of a$$holes.

That aside: this is an interesting way of looking at it, and underscores the difference in design philosophies between the WotC team and the Paizo team. There is a lot of room for both philosophies of design, and I don't think there is any reason for fans of one to be hostile to fans of the other, but those differences do matter. There are ways in which I like the prescriptive elements of 3.x era games (I like set skill difficulty lists, for example) but I tend to run by the seat of my pants and the effects of my beer, so a fast and loose and forgiving version like 5E really enables me running a game the way I like to.

 

[pemerton]

The only RPG I know that has rules for how quickly you can speak is Burning Wheel - (i) it's a pretty heavy system; (ii) it has rules for magic (especially prayer) that require the player to actually speak the words of supplication; and therefore (iii) has rules for how long, in combat turns, it takes you to get your stuff said.

Its rule is 6 to 8 syllables per "volley" - a volley is one to two seconds. So it allows the faithful to recite their prayers rather quickly!

 

[TwoSix]

The announcer does speak pretty slowly.

And yet there's never enough time to input the fatality.

 

[TwoSix]

Its rule is 6 to 8 syllables per "volley" - a volley is one to two seconds. So it allows the faithful to recite their prayers rather quickly!

As a (lapsed) Roman Catholic, I can confirm the necessity. That rosary isn't going to pray itself.

 

[Numidius]

If I'm understanding you right, that's very much my preferred approach to RPGing.

Here's an actual play report (first session of a 4e Dark Sun campaign) which is fairly representative.

I'm definitely going to have a look at that

 

[Numidius]

[MENTION=6972053]Numidius[/MENTION] - I found your long post interesting. If I've followed you properly, you're suggesting that 5e "solves" the issue of rules bloat/complexity by shifting to a very GM-driven game. To me, that seems fair, and consistent with how I generally see the game presented on these boards. (Of course that's generalising across a wide degree of individual variation.)

Thinking about action resolution, I believe there are two main ways to achieve a greater degree of symmetry at the table.

One is to go for relatively hard-coded "subjective" DCs, which then provide a reasonalby "knowable" framework for the players to exert themselves against. I look at 4e in this light; and a non-D&D system that I also think fits this description is Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic - though rather than a table/formula for level appropriate DCs like 4e has, it uses GM-side dice pools to generate the opposition.

Another is to go for "objective" DCs - which therefore give the GM a lot of latitude in establishing the DCs and, thereby, the "feel" of the setting (especially when, unlike 3E, GM discretion is prioritised more highly and there are fewer long lists of DCs-by-circumstance) - but to give the players (i) less reason to want to succeed all the time (eg "fail forward" techniques of resolution) and/or (ii) resources on their side that allow them to adjust upwards from their basic competence if the GM turns out to have set the DCs higher than the players hoped/planned for. Burning Wheel is a system I play and GM that has both (i) (by way of fail forward, and also because its advancement system means sometimes your PC needs to lose) and (ii).

4e also has (ii) (eg action points, healing surges, many boosting powers, etc), which combines with its use of "subjective", system-driven DCs to generate a very high degree of player capacity to respond to, engage and shape (not in meta-ways, but by rich and ambitious action declarations) the situations the GM frames the PCs into. I think for those who haven't played much 4e in accordance with this logic of the system, and whose conception of player-side RPGing comes from relatively sparse systems where the only high-octane player-side resources are spells and magic-items, it can be hard to convey the difference of play in 4e compared to those sparse systems, that results from all these player-side resources in combination with the system-driven DCs and creature builds.

Another two systems I'm currently GMing are Prince Valiant and Classic Traveller. The former has a few player-side meta-resources, but not many: players are mostly just rolling pools built from their PC stats and skills. And it uses "objective" DCs. So it relies on "fail forward"-type adjudication to encourage player-first rather than GM-driven play.

Classic Traveller also uses "objective" DCs, but - a bit like the way in which D&D spells are notionally ingame rather than meta but are able to play the role that meta resources play in other systems - the objective DCs in Classic Traveller generally happen to have a nice spread relative to the sorts of bonuses PCs have. And it also uses a lot of dice-driven stuff on the GM-side as well as the player side. This led me to make a post late last year about Classic Traveller as a very dice-driven game. (So "negatively symmetrical", neither player nor GM driven.)

Thanks for taking the time to read it.

I have some familiarity with BW, having read it and owning Gold ed, Magic Burner and another book, but never played it.
Cortex+ also, I ran a few of sessions of Marvel Heroic in the fantasy variant: found it very interesting by a GM perspective, not so my players, unfortunately.
We had an hex crawl with it that I actually enjoyed. If we had to continue, I was supposed to add a skill system of sort, bc my friends can't play happily without skills on their sheets, apparently
In this regard I found very insightful your many references and descriptions of 4e in this thread.

I also read your review of Prince Valiant.
Classic Traveller, we still have a copy somewhere, from that period long ago inbetween 80's & 90's when we may have played a bit of it.

On the information stuff I wrote: I'd like sometimes, as a GM, to just sit down at beginning of the session, and let the players do the talk, giving away info on what is going to happen on their behalf and me react to them accordingly, as single PCs, or as chiefs of a faction of some kind, with decisional power in the setting on their own.

 

[Greg K]

And, just to add to that, you have Monte Cook, who was pretty instrumental in the design of 3e, who came from designing Rolemaster and Champions. I mean, you can pretty much draw a direct line from 3e to Rolemaster. And those priorities have really influenced how we have proceeded from there.

Hussar,
You, like many people, you are too quick to put the blame on Cook based upon him being the designer must public about discussing the game. The lead for 3.0 was Tweet not Cook. Prior to Tweet taking over as the lead, it was Peter Adkinson. As for 3.5, by the time of 3.5, Cook was gone given that he was running Malhavoc.

Furthermore, several elements of 3.0 can also be said to share similarities to Ars Magica which Tweet co- created. Both games have a basic resolution mechanic of (die roll + skill mod + other mod )vs DC . You have a long list of skills in both games. Also, Ars Magica Virtues can be seen seen as analogous to 3e Feats (Actually, now, I wish 3e had an equivalent to Ars Magica flaws).

 

[Lanefan]

Going back to topic, I'd argue that 3e premise/goal/intention was fair in this regard, but in practice failed because of the cardgame mindset; while 5e just missed the point of said premise, only streamlining the practice itself at the table, without recognizing the underlying desire of a more evenly spread agency at the table (that I like to define by the exchange of interactive&proactive information).
Now all the frame (the management) of the campaign, seems lifted from the players' side and loaded on the DM.
I'm not saying this is bad per se, I'm only noting the shift.

A few things to reply to here...

First: the shift, which you've quite correctly noticed, is somewhat of a return to the way things worked in 1e (and 0e and to some extent 2e) but doesn't go as far as those systems had it.

Second: whether shifting the management of the campaign (back) to the DM is a feature or a bug probably depends on how you want to play the game. Many players, myself included, are quite happy to let the DM worry about the setting and rules and so forth while we just role-play our characters within said setting - and to us it's a feature. But others want more control over the setting and story , or elements therein, and consider that control to be a part of player agency - so to them this would be a bug.

Does it make sense?

Sort of. I think 3e off-loaded a lot of mechanical stuff (far too much, IMO) from the DM to the players, and then 4e followed up by also off-loading - or at least providing a framework to facilitate the off-load of - some elements of setting design and fiction control via things like skill challenges. This holds appeal for some, though not for me.

 

[Hriston]

It does not mean direct opposition at all. It's entirely possible for two parties to encounter each other, roll initiative, and never intend to oppose each other at all.

I used to run encounters that way. As soon as the parties were within encounter distance of one another I’d ask for initiative just in case combat broke out. Then some of the good folks here introduced me to the idea of asking for initiative only once someone declares an action that requires resolution in combat. I find it works very well and think the combat rules were written with the intent that they be used only when combat is happening. In light of this, if at least one party is not attacking the other, I think it's premature for the DM to call for initiative.

I can prove this to be false. Both sides can in fact be surprised and get no actions. Two stealthy groups round a corner and everyone ends up surprised. Roll initiative and yet nobody has started any sort of attack whatsoever.

I wouldn't resolve that situation like that at all. The two parties are unaware of each other until they meet at the corner, so neither is attacking the other. There's no need at that point to start combat. After they meet, they can decide to parlay, retreat, or commence hostilities, and only in the event of hostilities is there any reason to roll initiative.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Part of the reason it's not done is the reason I mentioned upthread about how people want "official" products only:

Another reason many folks go "official only" or at least "WotC only" is that it helps broker peace at the table. In 3.X especially there was a lot of OP third party content (or even WotC published content) and more potentially broken combos. Even if the content wasn't broken it could be hard for the DM or other players to keep track of it all. "We're only using WotC-published material" just cuts all that short.

All these people who do this in their spare time (unless they have a TON of that...) who think they can produce better work...man, I don't know. Sounds like hubris to me, especially since WotC can bring more resources to bear on the idea than I can (playtesting, for example).

Maybe but in many cases a home designer isn't constrained the way the pros are. For example, the 2E designers were instructed to maintain as much backwards compatibility with 1E material. Thus there were aspects of the system they wanted to change---such as AC going down rather than up or evening out the stats and getting rid of percentile strength---but weren't allowed to by the business model. 5E clearly had a similar brief, insofar as there are things that weren't done that I suspect they'd have chosen to do but were afraid of provoking a backlash.

In other cases, designers make choices that they think will be simple for the median player but may have been done better other ways. IMO lots of mathematical mistakes that show up in games happen this way. 3.X's saving throw advancements was like that. I think the double proficiency bonus from Expertise in 5E is another example. It works OK at lower levels but it really starts to undermine bounded accuracy in higher levels.

 

[Hriston]

I allow speech as a free at-will action for short things like my earlier examples, in order to better replicate the fog of war where everyone's shouting at once. Poetry recitals and election speeches, however, are right out.

I don't have a problem with out-of-character conversation at the table. There can be any amount of that going on during an individual player's turn. But if a character needs to say something in the fiction during combat, the limit is six seconds of talking per round.