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.

 

[billd91]

Hmmm... we may be working off different definitions of lazy. i do not tend to put "lazy" and "innovative" as antonyms of each other. One refers to effort, the other refers to imagination or making more radical changes - neither of which necessitates effort - just different goals.

Maybe they are, but they shouldn’t be. Lazy is loaded with negative connotations and everybody here should know that and realize that. If you want an antonym for innovative, use conventional.

 

[5ekyu]

I would have appreciated what Mearls said much better if he had just said it was about different preferences, rather than giving me two fallacies that show that either he was lying to me(no need for fallacies when you tell the truth) or that he didn't understand what he was doing when designing(designing a game based on a False Equivalence and Red Herring).



He was the one who said that the game design he chose was because of two things that didn't equate(player options and rules reliance), and two things unrelated to one another(power imbalance and a loose narrative playstyle). If true, it's scary that he's a designer, and if false he lied to me. I don't really appreciate either one of those.

At least if he had just said, "Hey, we're doing it this way because we want to do it this way." and left it at that, it would have been a more respectable answer. Instead, he's trying to pull the wool over the eyes of people by putting forth reasons that don't make sense, cloaked as why he's not doing things that many people want..

To me... i have the opposite take...

given the choice between someone saying "i did x because of a, b and c" and someone saying "i did x just because i wanted to"... then even if i think his "logic" of a b and c is flawed or his conclusions are bad or i just plain disagree with him on a b and c... i am happier that they gave me that info. its better IMO to have more info about how they arrived at their conclusion than to just have it represented as "and a choice was made here" magic step - remembering that old cartoon of the long equation with the step in the middle of " a miracle occurs".

he basically admits or shows his "biases" if you will and that is refreshing.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I can go to the 5e forum on this message board and almost be guaranteed to find a thread about perception or hiding. Look at the 4e threads that are or have recently been active on the old editions forum. They're not debating rules minutiae.

When many people played, 4e boards were full of that. And the rules were revised more than a few times between 3e and 3.5 and 4e and still left much to be desired.
Are 5e stealth rules perfect? No. Some things could be a bit more explicit. Especially the distinction between move silently and and hide. (One has advantage in bad light conditions the other of course not... although in a typical noisy surrounding it should. So yes 5e stealth rules need a few moee lines explaining those things and when the DM should apply advantage or disadvantage. But then those should be no hard rules but only guidelines a la "in following situations the DM might apply a/d if..."

 

[5ekyu]

Maybe they are, but they shouldn’t be. Lazy is loaded with negative connotations and everybody here should know that and realize that. If you want an antonym for innovative, use conventional.

tomato tomahto.. i tend to use derivative for opp innovative - esp in designs of new editions - because thats almost literally what it is referring to... deriving much of your "context and stuff" from a previous work."

However, some might view derivative as a negatively loaded word too. I tend to not get overly worried about that as much as accuracy.

My general problem with the word "lazy" when applied to design is that lazy carries a context of "not willing to do the work that was needed" as opposed to "chose to go with more efficient".

Way back in my youth... working at a store warehouse... it was spring and so the 50lb bags of feed came in.

There were two spots for them - one with a sign taped on it saying "use this one first."

One spot was empty (the use first tag there) the other had about 3 dozen 50lb sacks of feed.

boss said "ok we need to move these to this spot and then put the new ones off the conveyor onto that spot."

i asked "why not just put the new ones in that empty spot and move the taped on sign?"

boss got quite angry and called me "lazy" but had no excuse for why to do it his way beyond him being the boss.

lazy in my experience is used often in game design discussions when it boils down to "the did not want to do the work to implement it this way" when it more is seeming to me to be a case of "they did not want to go that way and if anything the extra workload only solidified that choices more."

 

[Umbran]

lazy in my experience is used often in game design discussions when it boils down to "the did not want to do the work to implement it this way"

Which, well... how many of us really know about what work they did or didn't do? We see results, not the work.

And, "It didn't end up the way I like it, so I will ascribe negative traits to them," is a common thing, but a pretty lousy thing to do. The Golden Rule should apply.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Interesting. I do like most of what he’s saying, but I also wish they would embrace the fact that a lot of players still have a strong desire for mechanical options. Focusing on narrative identity is great, and the goal of those specific mechanical advantages should be to express a character’s narrative identity rather than to break the game’s progression curve. But 5e still offers so little in terms of ways to mechanically differentiate a character. He paints mechanical options as if they’re at odds with the design philosophy he describes here, but I don’t think they are at all.

The issue with mechanical options being used to differentiate characters is that not all mechanical options are created equal with regard to power level. If they were then the complaint would be be that the options "don't really mean anything" because the the options are desired to produce power, not difference. If anything we can look to past editions and the popularity of cookie cutter builds that provide "optimal" outcomes for whatever niche of expertise the player desires. These optimal builds become standardized and soon the entire proposed reason for so many options is rendered null and void because choosing a set of options that is not optimized for performance is a losing proposition.

Character differentiation is something that needs to come from the player, not the mechanics.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

7
Given enough time, yes. But most groups don't play a single game for that many campaigns before switching to a different game, or changing editions.


The catch is human imagination is infinite. There's an infinite number of character concepts that could require options.
But the game DOES NOT need an infinite amount of content.

5e's options are generally pretty limited, as you say. But how many combinations could be played?
There's 40 in the PHB (without getting into races or feats), 7 non-reprinted in SCAG, and 31 in XGtE. For 78 different options. And that's not considering variable sub-options like champion fighter being a swashbuckler or archer or great-weapon fighter or tank. In the content we have now, there is enough for 19 completely different adventuring parties of four. That's 19 different campaigns where no subclass is repeated.
Even if you play weekly, it would take you close to a year to play a level 1 to 20 campaign. But if you played really long sessions and maybe finished a little earlier, you might knock out a campaign in, oh, 9 months. Those 19 different campaigns would still cover fourteen years. We have over a DECADE of content on our shelves right now. But... somehow we need more?

We don't need annual class content, let alone the bi-monthly class supplements of 3e and 4e. No one goes through content that fast.

First of all, I didn’t say we need more. Please stick to what I’ve said when replying to me. I’m not particularly interested in answering for other people. I personally see the phb as too limited to really satisfy the needs of my group, but the only thing missing right now is stuff that is favorite material for my group, like playable gnolls, and worthwhile orcs and kobolds. We’re fairly resigned to homebrew on those specific examples, unfortunately.

Again, how many campaigns a single group can get through in a span of time doesn’t matter nearly as much as you want it to, because the preference for more options isn’t about that. What you’re missing, again, is that a given player isn’t generally interested in all of the classes, or all types of concepts, and as [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] pointed out, more choices is about crafting a character, not so just about replayability.

But even in the realm of replayability, a dozen classes isn’t really a dozen choices per player, because most players aren’t interested in concepts found within all dozen classes. And there are broad concepts that 5e is light on still, so while I’m cool with what is out, and new stuff is mostly gravy (other than very specific stuff from previous editions, like Eberron races, artificers, etc) it’s entirely understandable why some folks aren’t satisfied with the current options.

But, moving back to the actual issue at hand, it’s not that there aren’t enough options, as such, for many players. For many players, it is that a given character only has so many decision points, and choosing “assassin” or “Beast Master” locks you into a progression all the way to level 20, with very little choice other than feats, of which there aren’t that many.

What the game needs, is for every class to have an alternate progression that accesses more decision points, and/or subclasses that increase decision points per level tier.

 

[happyhermit]

...
I just dislike the foundation of the "Rulings not Rules" approach, which leads to a very non-transparent game. Its lazy design.

You dislike it, that doesn't make it lazy. It's one of the reasons I and many others started playing current D&D (again for many of us) so I really don't appreciate you saying to me; "Well then, you like lazy design." because I don't.

Talk to any writer, board game designer, ttrpg designer, etc. and ask them if it's harder to create more material or take things out and you will find most agree that cutting things is hard. In the context of ttrpgs, it's actually really, really, easy to make rules for things, many of us have been doing it since we were kids. It's much harder to condense those rules down to a coherent system that meets specific design goals. During the design process they cut tons of rules ie; the entire set of "exploration" rules not because they were lazy but because they wanted to make a system that would work as well as possible for most people. It happened to be massively successful, and not because most people like "lazy" design work.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The issue with mechanical options being used to differentiate characters is that not all mechanical options are created equal with regard to power level. If they were then the complaint would be be that the options "don't really mean anything" because the the options are desired to produce power, not difference. If anything we can look to past editions and the popularity of cookie cutter builds that provide "optimal" outcomes for whatever niche of expertise the player desires. These optimal builds become standardized and soon the entire proposed reason for so many options is rendered null and void because choosing a set of options that is not optimized for performance is a losing proposition.

Character differentiation is something that needs to come from the player, not the mechanics.

Maybe you played with very different people than I did, but I almost never saw any of the CharOp builds in actual games. Once or twice, in 20 years of gaming, and even then it wasn’t really the internet crafted build, but just some element of it on a well rounded build.

Most folks want mechanical distinction, not just power.

 

[Parmandur]

First of all, I didn’t say we need more. Please stick to what I’ve said when replying to me. I’m not particularly interested in answering for other people. I personally see the phb as too limited to really satisfy the needs of my group, but the only thing missing right now is stuff that is favorite material for my group, like playable gnolls, and worthwhile orcs and kobolds. We’re fairly resigned to homebrew on those specific examples, unfortunately.

Again, how many campaigns a single group can get through in a span of time doesn’t matter nearly as much as you want it to, because the preference for more options isn’t about that. What you’re missing, again, is that a given player isn’t generally interested in all of the classes, or all types of concepts, and as [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] pointed out, more choices is about crafting a character, not so just about replayability.

But even in the realm of replayability, a dozen classes isn’t really a dozen choices per player, because most players aren’t interested in concepts found within all dozen classes. And there are broad concepts that 5e is light on still, so while I’m cool with what is out, and new stuff is mostly gravy (other than very specific stuff from previous editions, like Eberron races, artificers, etc) it’s entirely understandable why some folks aren’t satisfied with the current options.

But, moving back to the actual issue at hand, it’s not that there aren’t enough options, as such, for many players. For many players, it is that a given character only has so many decision points, and choosing “assassin” or “Beast Master” locks you into a progression all the way to level 20, with very little choice other than feats, of which there aren’t that many.

What the game needs, is for every class to have an alternate progression that accesses more decision points, and/or subclasses that increase decision points per level tier.

"The game" needs nothing: gamers may.or may not want certain features. Where there is sufficient demand that doesn't alienate others, we may see it. Alternative Class features are something they are floating to test interest right now, so we'll see.