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.

 

[cbwjm]

One choice, made at character creation, that boils down to two skills and two tools/languages.


One choice, made at character creation. Has a decent mechanical impact, but does little to differentiate the way a character plays.


Great for fleshing out a character's personality, but has next to no mechanical impact. Also made at character creation.


Again, character creation only choices that are good for roleplaying but have absolutely no mechanical impact.


What I'm looking for is more ways to build characters to make them mechanically different from one another. In particular, more character building choices to make beyond 1st level. Currently, you make all character building decisions at character creation, with the exception of a Subclass at 2nd or 3rd level (if you didn't decide that ahead of time), and a Feat or ASI once every four levels (a few extra for Fighters and Rogues). That is very, very little to make one character actually behave differently than another.

So what other options would you like? I can think of some things you might like such as:

Smaller feats received more often.
Skill points.
Prestige classes/paragon classes/epic classes.

A lot of people say they want more mechanical choice but never really go on to expand on it to state what they would like to see. Mind you, some of the posts in this thread are really, really long or written multiple pages, so I may have very well missed them or simply don't recall them anymore.

 

[Lanefan]

The example above is a different side to metagaming.

There’s the metagame of making gamist decisions based on game information the character doesn’t know.
And there’s the ever so slightly different metagaming that occurs due to social contracts at the table. The thief not stealing from other players, the character not hogging the spotlight, setting up an ally for the win rather than “kill stealing”, helping someone kick some ass because they’ve had a bad day and need the stress relief, etc.

A thief stealing from other players is a problem. A thief stealing from other players' characters, however, is fair play; as is what happens to said thief if and when s/he gets caught.

Because, while one is (generally) discouraged, the other always has to be considered and is important. The people/player based metagame. Which, I think you just accidentally christened “the meatgame”.

Different strokes, I guess. I prefer when both the players and DM leave their real lives at the door, to whatever extent they can, and take the game session as a few hours without worrying about the 'meatgame' and just enjoy what's happening in the game itself.

 

[Lanefan]

TSR did this back in 2E. The rules of the core 2E game were fairly simple (although not always logical) and they kept the core game but but later came out with the Player's Option series (Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers, etc.) to appeal to people wanting more technical elements to the game which many other RPG at that time had incorporated into their systems.

And in so doing they a) overlaid those things on to a system that really wasn't set up to handle them and b) opened up a Pandora's Box of broken combinations and-or spell interactions through lack of foresight and-or full-stress playtesting.

In short, they broke their own system.

I fail to see why WOTC would not do the same thing now

Maybe they realize they've got something right now that's more or less working pretty well and don't want to risk breaking it?

and I don't think that tactical power gaming and narrative gaming are mutually exclusive traits. My group is composed of power gamers who love tactical combat. These same gamers also sit down and write very detailed backstories, etc for their PCs.

Cool - you're one of the lucky ones who has players that can and will do both.

Which leads to a question: would those players be able to bring the same characterization and character personality to the table if using a system that doesn't have fine-tuned mechanical representation for differences between characters of the same class e.g. 1e D&D?

 

[Lanefan]

They can be helpful for sure. I don't think they are needed, though. I also found that too many rules alter the way people think about the game. In 1e and 2e where there were fewer rules and the DMs had to create/change more, the thought was that they could make the game their own and pretty much everyone tinkered with the game. In 3e where rules were everywhere trying to cover as much as possible, the DMs I played with that weren't old school, looked a lot more to the books and tinkered much less with the game.

I largely agree with you, though I'll stand by saying that guidelines for hireling rates are handy enough to be worth including in the PH.

In fairness to 3e DMs, however, it must be noted that because it was more tightly designed than any of 0-1-2e it was also correspondingly harder to successfully kitbash; it wasn't as modular, thus a change here would be far more likely to have unexpected (and often undesired) knock-on effects there, there and there - some of which might not become apparent for ages.

I know this not just from what I've read in here but from having played in a long 3e campaign where the DM had done some significant kitbashing before it began. The knock-on effects eventually became overwhelming, and he switched to near-RAW 3.5 about 5 years in.

5e is a move back to making the game your own more than blindly following the rules.

Well, that's was promised in the playtest period anyway; and the small-scale rulings-not-rules seems to be working out. But inquiring minds want to know: how well does 5e handle a major kitbash? We've seen Mearls' reworked initiative system in writing but how well does it play, for example? Or, what would happen if one threw out 5e's cleric-turning-undead rules and replaced them with the 1e turn-undead table?

Lan-"so how many g.p. would it cost my character to hire someone to kitbash 5e"-efan

 

[Charlaquin]

So what other options would you like? I can think of some things you might like such as:

Smaller feats received more often.
Skill points.
Prestige classes/paragon classes/epic classes.

A lot of people say they want more mechanical choice but never really go on to expand on it to state what they would like to see. Mind you, some of the posts in this thread are really, really long or written multiple pages, so I may have very well missed them or simply don't recall them anymore.

Smaller Feats received more often would be a good option. Skill points... I wouldn’t mind them, but they’re not the kind of thing I’m looking for. They only give a small numerical bonus, which is the least interesting kind of mechanical differentiation. Prestige classes or 4e style paragon/epic classes would be fine, but such things tend, like 5e subclasses, to be a single choice made only once. Not exactly the expansion of character variety I’m looking for, though neither would it be an unwelcome bit of player choice.

Ideally, I’d like something along the lines of 4e’s Powers, or Pathdinder’s variant Class Features (or Class Feats in PF2). What I want is for not every Fighter (or every Champion) to get the exact same abilities at the exact same levels as every other Fighter (or every other Champion.) I want a choice of what new ability I gain when I level up, not just one choice of what set of abilities I will get over the course of my character’s career, or a handful of choices of what numbers I want to be higher. I want different options for what I can use my action to do than every other character of the same class and subclass has. I want customization in a mechanical sense, not only in a roleplaying sense.

It’s all well and good to describe my attacks differently than Tommy describes his, but if we’re ultimately still rolling the same d20 to see if we can roll the same d8, with maybe slightly different modifiers, then I’m not really doing anything different. I’ve been accused in this thread of playing the same characters over and over with different mechanics, but to me if I don’t have different mechanics, I’m playing the same characters over and over with different descriptions. You need both. D&D is both roleplaying and game, and the false dichotomy that seems to exist between them in public perception only serves to harm a hobby that by definition is supposed to be both. Let me come up with fun and interesting characters to imagine myself as, and then give me the tools I need to express those characters through the game’s rules! Having either without the other just feels hollow to me.

 

[pemerton]

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

Unless its 4e, I think.

 

[pemerton]

This idea that D&D is a story game only or a Mechanical Game only is frankly against reality. It must have both to function. They are both equally important no matter which one you start with.

The idea that D&D is a "story game" or a "narrative first" game is one I find hard to credit. I mean, I'm sure there're are groups out there doing that, because the world is a diverse and varied place, but it's not how the rules present the game and it's not the sort of thing the game supports. (Pure sim games like RQ and RM are better for "story" or "narrative" gaming than D&D, because they tend not to have all the fiddly minutiae of PC building that get in the way with D&D. 4e is something of an exception because most of the PC build elements - powers - can also be used, via p 42 and related improv guidelines, to play the sort of role that descriptors play in more standard narratively-oriented games.)

 

[pemerton]

An utterance is verbal. A thought is telepathic. You cannot make a telepathic utterance.

ut·ter·ance
ˈədərəns/
noun

• a spoken word, statement, or vocal sound.
• the action of saying or expressing something aloud.
• an uninterrupted chain of spoken or written language.

And yet leading philosophers of the interpretation of written language (I'm thinking especially of written law) use the notion of utterance meaning to explain the meaning of a statutory or constitutional provision.

It's almost as if language, especially in technical or semi-technical contexts where audiences are already aleter for nuance, is flexible and capable of being adapted and repurposed without engendering more than (at worst) minor confusion until the usage is made clear!

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] Great post

Thanks!

I’ll get into more tomorrow when I can dig into something that long

I'm gradually working through the thread, 70-odd posts from the end with a good number of those replies to me. So if you've already posted more I'll get to it in due course.

attacking an enemy is exactly the same as making one of several checks to get through a series of locks/parts of a complex lock to get into a vault. The only narrative change is that you’ve worn down the enemy more, or gotten closer to busting the vault.

If the lock has hit points (or something similar), so that each success has no particular narrative meaning, I agree. But I don't think that's a standard resolution method in 5e. (And it's not how 4e skill challenges work, either - it's clear in the 4e DMG and made clearer in the DMG2 that each check in the skill challenge produces a change in the fictional which affects the fictional positioning of subsequent checks - which in combat is like movement, and some condition imposition, but not like hp loss.)

 

[pemerton]

To kill a King typically requires an army. Armies are expensive... war is a continuation of economics by other means.

To an extent. But in a mediaeval-type economy it's a continuation of the household economy of the warleader but not really of rhe economy in total, because there is not the administrative capacity to mobilise the whole economy. The US Civl War and then most strikingly WWI mark turning points in this respect.

But anyway, that's a bit of a tangent to the main direction of the thrust.