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.

 

[Sadras]

So am I missing?

Sadras: Yes. A what.

Fergurg: What?

Sadras: What.

Fergurg: What am I missing?!!

Sadras: Exactly.

 

[MNblockhead]

I think more relevant is that Classic D&D explicitly answers the question by requiring PCs to pay through the nose to train for leveling up. That affects more PCs that the option of building and running a stronghold.

This is something I've thought of putting into my campaign. In my current campaign (Curse of Strahd), I handwave downtime. In my previous campaign, once they had a ship an crew, they would have to have enough gold to keep the ship in, uh, ship shape and keep the crew morale high. But eventually, I hand-waved that. Most players are not interested in Dungeons & Dragons & Accounting. But the rules do provide some clear lifestyle costs and it should be too hard to come up with training costs.

 

[Satyrn]

Sadras:

Yes. A what.

Fergurg: What?

Sadras: What.

Fergurg: What am I missing?!!

Sadras: Exactly.

What's on second!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I get how a reality works. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that in D&D, the rule is as long as you have noticed a threat, you cannot be surprised. Everything alive or undead is a threat, even plants. As it is written, you could not be sucker punched in 5e, which due to the afore mentioned reality, seems hokey. Except that a lot of D&D goes against reality, so you telling me that "It's plain, colloquial, language." doesn't change anything in how it is written, or what it might really mean.

It's very clear, Max. It just isn't written in technical language. That's a good thing.

Firstly, it does match reality, because people just aren't walking around afraid of plants, and even if they were, that doesn't mean that they're aware that a specific plant is a threat, any more than I'd be aware that a guy walking past me is a threat, just because I've been attacked completely at random by a guy walking past me on the street before. He can still sucker punch me, because knowing that people are potentially dangerous doesn't mean I'm away that a specific person is about to attack me.

It doesn't say that you have to be unaware that a potential threat might exist, it says you have to be unaware of the threat. A person isn't a threat just because they have the potential to attack you. You have to be aware that they're about to do so. There is no reason to make that any more clear than it is, wasting page space that is put to good use in the book as is.

I called it a non-rule rule, so clearly I said it was a rule. I said it was a non-rule rule, because it quite literally could have been not written without change to how things are done. They really should have just taken that out and saved the page space for something useful.

Meaningless quibbling about wording aside,
Someone else already explained that you're wrong about what the rules actually do without the clause in question.
It's a rule. Not a "non-rule rule", but simply a rule.

A system that is very spelled out doesn't have all the holes and ambiguity that 5e has. You can't escape a few, but 5e has tons.

Arbitrary to the point of the nonsensical. I could say that about any system that has more an alternative available with more spelled out rules. I could just as easily, using precisely the same reasoning, say that no game but GURPS has very spelled out rules.

Let's take a bit of the second page of the combat section.

Other activities on your turn.

"You can communicate however you are able, through brief utterances and gestures, as you take your turn."

This one contradicts itself within the same sentence. You can communicate however you are able, except only with brief utterances and gestures, not however you are able. What is a brief utterance, anyway? One word? Two words? Five words? A sentence? The whole 6 seconds? Clearly not the entire 6 seconds, because you can say a whole lot in 6 seconds, which wouldn't be a "brief utterance." Except why not the entire 6 seconds? That's the length of you turn and unless you are casting a spell, it seems like you should be able to talk that long.

There isn't a contradiction there, you're just questing after confusion.

Reactions. Entire threads have been devoted to trying to pin that one down.

Most of which have resulted from people refusing to read the rules, or trying to twist wording to mean something obviously not intended. A thing that is well known a cost of very spelled out rules systems.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Well, this thread blew up in the last few days, and sadly I'm disappointed some of the same nasty comments are being made. So a couple things:

If you think 5e is lazy design, then I'm certain you've never actually designed an RPG before. I've seen comments how 5e was just 2.5 with a few things changed. That shows a gross ignorance on the actual difference between 2e and 5e, as well as what is included in a design process

Calling a game lazy based not on a technical aspect (bad grammar, formatting, etc), but based on your personal preferences very much IS a personal attack on the people who made it. Lazy has a very specific definition, and it's targeting the behavior of a person rather than the actual work on any objective measure.

Criticism from an official source (review, critic, etc) and criticism from some random person on the internet is not the same, and shouldn't be treated as the same. So no, random person doesn't have the right for the design team to listen to them when they complain about the game. That's a huge sense of entitlement from said person complaining. None of us are that special. Want to have game companies listen to you? Become an official reviewer.

 

[Satyrn]

Criticism from an official source (review, critic, etc) and criticism from some random person on the internet is not the same, and shouldn't be treated as the same. So no, random person doesn't have the right for the design team to listen to them when they complain about the game. That's a huge sense of entitlement from said person complaining. None of us are that special. Want to have game companies listen to you? Become an official reviewer.

This implies that creators pay attention to reviewers.

I have no idea how sincere he actually was, but Harlan Ellison reportedly told Isaac Asimov that, when reading a review of his own work, he'd set it aside the instant he detected any negativity. It sounds like the smart thing to me.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This implies that creators pay attention to reviewers.

I have no idea how sincere he actually was, but Harlan Ellison reportedly told Isaac Asimov that, when reading a review of his own work, he'd set it aside the instant he detected any negativity. It sounds like the smart thing to me.

As a creator myself, I can tell you that most creators do pay attention to official reviews almost all of the time. A lot more than a random person on the internet. Coincidence you would bring up Asimov, because one of my favorite quotes of his is also relevant to this discussion:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

 

[Eric V]

Um, wow.

I mean, the chapter on combat is pretty nittanoid and detailed, and in general is pretty thorough.

That's not even considering the chapter on spells, which is really not "coffee-table book" in nature.

Huh? I have a perfectly well established career with 0 desire to switch into the low pay and massive uncertainty of RPG design. That doesn't mean I can't make suggestions about how to make the game books better/clearer and more useful in play.

It's weird to believe that one has to actually take up game design in order to be able to critique it.

 

[Eric V]

I don't agree. I'm an academic: part of my job is refereeing submissions to journals, advise publishers on book manuscripts, etc. And others have the job of doing that for my work.

If an argument in a piece I'm sent to referee is bad, or doesn't cite existing literature that it should, or is unclear, or has some other flaw, I will say so. I have a variety of critical vocabulary for doing so ("lazy" isn't normally part of it because I'm generally being asked to referee based on technical qualities, not literary merit). I'm not casting aspersions on someone by (eg, as I have done) saying that their submission about a criminal law matter is confused about some fundamental aspects of Australian criminal law. And when I submitted something and was told by a negative referee that my theory of the adjudication of the constitutionality of statutes added nothing to the existing understanding I didn't agree, but I didn't think the referee was calling me a silly, bad, lazy, or otherwise flawed, inadequate or less-than-worthy person.

Of course not. Apparently, the rules are different when talking about game design though...

 

[Eric V]

I still don't like that word being used in that way. It apparently accuses the creators of not wanting to do a lot of work when in reality they went out of their way to please the audience who is longing for a piece traditional work.

Again, without saying anything about the designers as people (because we simply don't have access to that), let me ask this: In your own life, in an effort to please people, has that always entailed a lot of work? Or have people's wishes sometimes been so easy to fulfill that it wasn't a lot of effort at all, even if you had originally braced yourself to work a lot.

IOW, does pleasing the greatest number of people necessarily mean more work than not? Or is it possible that accomplishing the former may not require as much work as coming up with something improved?

2e, 3e, and 4e didn't just give me what I wanted...their innovations gave me something I never knew I wanted. And so, despite their flaws, I really appreciate them as systems, even if I don't play them anymore. The game was evolving...but 5e really does feel like a step back (to be popular, and it worked!), hence the "greatest hits" feel.

Not saying Mearls and all are not motivated or innovative (Iron Heroes seems to show signs of both), but it wasn't brought to the 5e table as much as I would have expected.