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.

 

[Numidius]

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.

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.

Seems legit. Thanks for the clarification.
(Now I MUST take a deeper look at 4e...)

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

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.

Interesting. I'll let people monologue a bit longer than is strictly correct, kind of like dramatic time, but I get annoyed if people start spending tons of time planning in between turns. A bit, OK, but not tons.

 

[Hussar]

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).

I was more referencing the idea of a "rule for everything". Which is very much a Rolemaster thing. Not that there were no other influences.

 

[billd91]

I was more referencing the idea of a "rule for everything". Which is very much a Rolemaster thing. Not that there were no other influences.

I think, more importantly, it was also very much a Skip Williams thing. For some reason, everyone forgets he's the third major designer in the triumvirate. And he was the one talking about making sure the players could make meaningful choices by putting all of the rules in their hands in the interviews.

 

[Greg K]

I think, more importantly, it was also very much a Skip Williams thing. For some reason, everyone forgets he's the third major designer in the triumvirate. And he was the one talking about making sure the players could make meaningful choices by putting all of the rules in their hands in the interviews.

I was just starting to reply to Hussar that Skip was a likely influence given that he admits in an interview to pushing Gygax for more rules codification back between OE and 1E in order to empower players.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I think, more importantly, it was also very much a Skip Williams thing. For some reason, everyone forgets he's the third major designer in the triumvirate. And he was the one talking about making sure the players could make meaningful choices by putting all of the rules in their hands in the interviews.

As I recall he had written Sage Advice for a long time so I can get where he's coming from on that score. Of course, too much codification often just overwhelms everyone and ultimately it disempowers players. I remember more than once hearing "if you want to do that, make a feat for it."

One thing that seems to always happen---and it might be inevitable---is going overboard fixing the perceived flaws of the previous edition. 1E/2E having inconsistent rules and a lot of interpretation left to the DM? 3E to the rescue! 3.X having too many rules, not a lot of options for some character types, and a lot of game balance problems? 4E to the rescue! 4E falling into a game design uncanny valley that's too far away from the way the game used to feel, prescribing too many things for the DM, and having grindy combat? 5E to the rescue! I wonder what's going to happen when 6E rolls around?

 

[R_Chance]

As I recall he had written Sage Advice for a long time so I can get where he's coming from on that score. Of course, too much codification often just overwhelms everyone and ultimately it disempowers players. I remember more than once hearing "if you want to do that, make a feat for it."

One thing that seems to always happen---and it might be inevitable---is going overboard fixing the perceived flaws of the previous edition. 1E/2E having inconsistent rules and a lot of interpretation left to the DM? 3E to the rescue! 3.X having too many rules, not a lot of options for some character types, and a lot of game balance problems? 4E to the rescue! 4E falling into a game design uncanny valley that's too far away from the way the game used to feel, prescribing too many things for the DM, and having grindy combat? 5E to the rescue! I wonder what's going to happen when 6E rolls around?

It's a cyclical thing. It'll be back to more rules for everything and empowering players

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

It's a cyclical thing. It'll be back to more rules for everything and empowering players

When I was in grad school one of the professors had a poster on his door that said "We Recycle" and had three prominent theoretical positions mapped to the green recycling triangle, which captured that dynamic very well.

In many ways I hope not too much. IMO 5E isn't perfect. There are some areas that don't quite work as they should---saving throw and skill math being most notable---and a few other areas that are kind of OP, but for the most part it's pretty good.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I was more referencing the idea of a "rule for everything". Which is very much a Rolemaster thing. Not that there were no other influences.

3.X definitely had a lot of Rolemaster influence, but one thing they missed was that RM had diminishing returns baked into the system as I recall. (It's been a while.) So initial advances in skills gave a +5%, then it dropped to +3%, and I think it went down even farther.

5E would benefit from this more in the skill system, especially if they made more use of lower DCs and multiple successes needed to complete a task, in effect making skills work more like hit points. They implemented bounded accuracy fairly well for combat, but not so much for skills and saves.

 

[pemerton]

I have some familiarity with BW, having read it and owning Gold ed, Magic Burner and another book, but never played it.

I think it's worth trying. It's very heavy rules-wise (heavier than 5e, I would say) and players have to engage the mechanics to make it work - they can't be "carried" by the GM like they can in 5e or even Rolemaster.

And I find it a pretty demanding game, both as player and GM. But it produces some pretty intense FRPGing.

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

We played some MHRP (here's a session report - a post about a more recent session seems to have been lost in an ENworld crash) but I'm the only in my group who's a big comics person, so that game is currently unresolved (with Wolverine trapped on a power-cancelling slab in Dr Doom's secret sub-level in the Latverian embassy in Washington DC, where there is reason to think Mariko Yashida is being held prisoner). We've also played a Fantasy Hack version (obilgatory link to report of first session) which has proved popular with the gang. Compared to 4e, the system is very free-flowing, and compared to BW it's light in its demands (both cognitive and emotional) on the players.

Our approach hasn't been hex-crawl so much as hijinks. Because PC advancement is about milestones, which often depend on intraparty interactions or player responses to situation, there's less pressure on me as GM to come up with thematically engaging stuff: like a comic, it's more about just presenting opposition and then seeing how the players express their PCs as they engage with it and trigger their milestones and rack up their XP (I've found advancement to be fairly rapid - we've now got quite a few d12 abilities on the table).

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.

Thanks on both counts.

Prince Valiant is a game I've read quite a bit about over the years. And I'm a big fan of LotR/Arthurian-style romantic anti-modernist fantasy. So when the chance to pick it up via Kickstarter came along I did. We've played 3 sessions so far, and it's fun: light in overall theme, but with moments of drama when the opposed rolls for jousts or other fights are made.

In the lead-up to 4e I was following the development repotts from WotC, and participating in discussion on these boards. My group was just finishing up a long Rolemaster campaign, and with a couple of group members having moved overseas we merged with another group (who had one member overlapping with our group, and whose other members were also long-time friends of mine) and started a 4e game. That game ran steadily for 7 or so years, and is at 30th level, but about a session or two from its resolution - around 2 years ago one of the guys started a serious building/renovation project, and so can't make many sessions, and we have an undertanding that we're not going to play the 4e game unless everyone can be there, given how close it is to its climax.

I had high expectations for 4e based on the previews and pre-release discussion, and from my point of view it more than delivered. For me, it showed how all the Gygaxian "unrealisms" that systems like RM, RQ, Traveller etc repudiate (ever-growing hit points; level-based saving throws; and the like) could be combined with the fiddly PC-build of 3E to create a game of character-driven gonzo fantasy heroics with this really engaging tactical combat subsystem embedded as a coherent vehicle for that and not just an afterthought or a separate mini-game.

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.

I mucked around a bit with this in the early-to-mid 80s but never really worked out what to do with it. I can't remember what prompted me to revisit it a bit over a year ago, but I'm glad that I did: as I've said in the threads I've started about it, it holds up really well and delivers a distinctive play experience: not really character driven like 4e or BW, not as light as Cortex+ Heroic or Prinve Valiant, but interesting setting supporting intriguing situations, and all these robust subsystems for finding out what happens.

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.

Of the systems I've posted about, I reckon both BW and Classic Traveller could support this: in BW using Wises and Circles as the mechanics to support giving effect to the players' declarations about what is going to happen; in Traveller using the robust content generation like patron encounters and the like to let the players drive it with you just reacting and generating the worlds etc to support it as needed.