D&D 5E Merwin said it better than Schwalb

[tomBitonti]

The issue is not extreme gearhead breaking the game via scouring through books and creating formulas.

The issue is when very very basic power gaming is used and you find obvious choices and broken mechanics.

When you see two weapons with identical stats except one is 1d10 and one is 1d12?
One in the chapter on spells you see two spells when casted together make you stronger that their group warrior with only a duration limit. Then realize the XYZ increases that duration.

It is one thing to say "I want to be a flail user", it is another to make that weapon obviously worse than others to the point anyone who reads the book can see.

The issue is not so much the difference between 1d10 and 1d12 (which is miniscule).

The difference would be between Spiked Chain and other weapons.

Or between stacking Keen and Improved Critical on a Scythe.

Or the many feats which grant +2/+2 to a couple of skills to just about everything else.

Hard not to put the blame on the 3E design philosophy, which specifically made the game reward system expertise but also placed some of the areas of expertise in character design. I think something went wrong there, and we are better off with a different design focus. But, as others have said, we are better off with more well designed rules.

Thx!

TomB

 

[smerwin29]

Hey all,

Thanks for the great discussion. Just to be clear, I don't hate optimizers. I would consider myself one. I love crunchy rules this week, and I will love very streamlined narrative-based rules the next. I love playing with powergamers, and I love playing with storytellers, and I especially love playing with people who do both extremely well. If you love spending 12 hours of character building for every 1 hour at the play table, rock on!

My main point was that, at its heart, D&D is a social game that can be played in many different ways. If one person brings a character to the table who can just press the auto-win button and the other 5 players want to feel like heroes with their "optimized but not crazily so" characters, they are not going to enjoy the game. I could have just as easily said if one player spends 160 minutes of a three-hour play session talking to the barkeep while the other 5 players want to dungeon-crawl, pushing plastic, and roll dice, that "talker" needs to reassess what he is doing.

When I wrote that article, I was not thinking about what I prefer. I was thinking in the long-term, large-scale scope of the future of D&D. I personally think it will grow best with a mixed approach that uses all the elements of D&D, including combat and rules crunch, to let the players and the DM tell a story together. I have seen what an overly stringent focus on rules AT THE TABLE can do to new players, or even invested players, during public-play sessions of D&D. I fear that if we don't think of what other players and the DM want when we are at the table, we may lose an important part of the player base at the expense of short-term individual gratification.

Anyway, I appreciate everyone's thoughts on the matter. I will probably post a follow-up article next week.

And by the way, I'm not old. I'm 37. ;-)

 

[Incenjucar]

All the more reason for rules to be designed with great care and precision, so that people can optimize in the most extreme fashion without being able to actually break the game and ruin the experience.

 

[BryonD]

All the more reason for rules to be designed with great care and precision, so that people can optimize in the most extreme fashion without being able to actually break the game and ruin the experience.

This sounds good in theory, but it fails in practice.
I think that by the time you layer all the care on precision on the system the cure ends up being worse than the disease.
Making cars incapable of driving on the wrong side of the street isn't better than expecting drivers to not drive on the wrong side of the street.

Providing solid rules that happen to retain some ways to derail the game can end up being a far better experience in the hands of players who realize that it is not fun to derail the game.
Offer suggestions and guidance to that end and then let people do what they want.

 

[Hussar]

I'd say a bit of column A and a bit of column B. Yes you can go too far and people stop being able to distinguish options because they look too much the same on paper. Otoh you can quite easily not go far enough and wind up over incentivizing certain options.

There is a healthy middle here.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Aside from his vague "I like rules-light!" opinion, Shawn's main commentary seems reliant on equating any kind of meaningful optimization with "breaking the game", and as such, seems build entirely on sand, given that as has been discussed at length, those are two entirely different things. It's not even hyperbole to call the former, the latter, it's an outright category error.

 

[pemerton]

D&D had more story and imagination elements in the early days than hard rules.

Is this based on experience, or inference from the testimony of others?

I don't know if you've ever read the play reports for the original Giants or Tomb of Horrors tournaments. To my mind, they don't suggest that the game had "more story and imagination elements" - at least not for any very meaningful sense of "story" or "imagination".

Here are some excerpts from the ToH Origins report in Alarums & Excursions no 4 (Sep '75):

Finally we entered the central entrance, and headed down the 20' wide passage. The walls were plastered and covered with murals. 40' down there was a picture of two dogheaded beings holding a coffer- which stuck out of the wall. . . . Our elves reported no secret doors or traps. Ten more feet and out #2 and #3 fighters fell into a trap . . . At this point I ordered a Locate Traps spell used- a bit late- and we avoided two more pits on the way down to the end of the corridor- 60'. Still plastered walls, still the elves detected no hollow spaces or hidden doors. What a time to pick defective elves!

At the end of the passageway there was a devil mouth- with an open, black mouth. Things shoved in did not return. On the left there was a door with a blue haze covering it. anything that went partway in came back, Things that went in all the way did not. Paul, a F7 and the only other useful person on the expedition to this point volunteered to investigate the door. He went through and the Dmaster took him outside. In a bit, I decided it was time to charge through all together. . . .

We found ourselves inside a 10' square, 30' high room, without doors and possessed of 3 levers. At this point I announced that we were all driving spikes into the walls and standing on them. Various conditions of levers were tried. All three down resulted in the floor opening for a stimulating view of a 100' drop. At this point the Dmaster told that the levers had started in the neutral position. all three were put up, the ceiling opened and we climbed up and into a 3' high and wide crawlway. . . .

We got out along the crawlway. The room was plastered, the elves detected nothing and I had not yet grasped that a 1/2" of plaster was elf proof. Gygax's elves have to see secret doors, reasonable but not what I am accustomed to. . . .

Someone else had a brilliant thought- what's behind the plaster? We broke some and found a door. . . .

Now through a maze of 10' square rooms with walls that pivoted vertically, horizontally, slid up, down, and sideways. Each direction had to be individually specified. The party agreed and our 18 (80%) fighter started making holes in the wall instead. This git up to another 20' corridor . . . which got us to a chapel. Blue altar-which our Paladin warned us not to touch (26 point lightning bolt as it turned red, so I learned from another party later) . . .​

Here are some excerpts from the Oct 1978 number of Dragon, reporting on the winning team in the Giants tournament at Origins:

We gained entry through the east side entrance, which turned out to be the kennel. After casting a silence 15’ radius spell, the dire wolves inside were quickly dispatched. We then searched a major portion of the upper level and killed four or five giants in the process . . .

We made a brief and fruitless entrance into the lower level . . .

We returned to the upstairs and charmed a hill giant into pointing out which giant at the feast going on in the Great Hall was the chief. We surrounded this room from two sides and sent the charmed giant into the Hall with the order to point out the chief by kissing him on the cheek. This was also to be the signal for our two groups to attack. Two fireballs, a javelin of lightning, a confusion spell, and a good deal of slashing and hacking later, the giants were wiped out to a man and the Steading was aflame . . .

As the second ettin fell in the south, the east hall [of the Fire Giants] became a bloodbath leaving only one giant as survivor after another six melee rounds. As the 12th level MU charmed this last battered survivor, we fell back and regrouped. After making sure of our charm by having him be affectionate to our dwarf, we demanded that he take us to King Snurre. With our 14th level fighter carrying our thief, we followed the giant as he set off down the south corridor. We turned east and entered into a large chamber to be greeted by a ballista bolt which felled our charmed giant guide. We were then doused with water and flour, thus making us momentarily visible. Our thief quickly tossed up another pinch of disappearance dust and we all “hastily” dispersed as boulders began to crash into our former positions. While the 12th level MU stood back in a corner against the wall and began to conjure up an elemental, the rest of the party split, with the ranger and the 9th level MU attacking the giants manning the ballista and the rest rushing the six fire giants in front of the King. . . .

While the MU continued to blast with his cold wand and the thief moved across the ceiling, the elemental began crushing the hell hounds. The next round the 12th level cleric dropped his giant and shouted “Rush the king!” The giantesses moved to block our way, but, being both invisible and hasted we easily avoided their awkward blows. As the thief dropped on the king, the elf, dwarf, cleric, and fighter all also struck and King Snurre feel dead. The thief then cut his head off and placed it in his bag of holding while the others turned and killed the queen. As more fire giants began entering the room, a previously unnoticed group of gnolls rushed to attack. The round was called as plans were being hastily made for escape. . . .​

Some of this looks like fun stuff - the Giants moreso than ToH, in my personal opinion - but I wouldn't say it is dripping with story, nor with imagination except in the sense that some of the tactics are clever.

Rules do have their place.

<snip>

The catch being, as the rules really took over this made the story harder. Because, as a DM, you needed to know the rules to work around them. If you didn't know the rules you could be blindsided by the players.

<snip>

I have the most fun when I have more command of the rules than the players. Because I have more control.

Frankly this sounds like badly designed rules - for instance, PC build rules that put no limits on the degree of action-resolution oomph a given player can bring to bear in a single "move". D&D's traditional device for limiting this in combat is hit points - and its interesting to see how important hit points, rather than save-or-suck, are in the Giants report. That is a module and an episode of play that draws on D&D's strengths.

A "rules lite" game obviously doesn't provide that "rules" appeal. But the "math works" 4E approach also divorces the story distinctions from the mechanical nuance.

This is a mischaracterisation of 4e, at least as I see most players of that game describe it on these boards. The mechanical nuance is what generates story distinctions. In the Giants game, what made that MU with elemental and cold wand a potent wielder of magic wasn't some mere flavour text on a character sheet, but the fact that the player of that character could effectively engage the ingame situation by casting spells and using a wand. 4e is much like that - "show, don't tell". And as a player (or as a GM, for that matter, once the PCs are in the frame) you show by engaging the action resolution mechanics.

there were the cases of RAW coming into play to smack down the DM's ideas

Yet a system that doesn't permit this - 4e, which does not require the GM's ideas to adhere to or be generated by application of PC-build or action resolution rules - is widely decried for this very feature. And the most popular current FRPG - Pathfinder - seems to be based around the idea that the GM's ideas are subordinate to the PC-build and action resolution rules, even when the GM is not building a PC nor resolving a player's action declaration for his/her PC.

D&D is equal parts story and rules, that the story and the narrative has equal impact over whether or not you're "playing D&D". When the story gets pushed aside and the narrative takes a back seat you lose an essential part of the experience.

This seems unobjectionable. But if you're talking about your own experience, why is your post framed so much in the second- and third-person, as if diagnosing the problems that others are suffering from? This was a feature of the blog posts referenced in the OP too.

 

[Umbran]

But the "math works" 4E approach also divorces the story distinctions from the mechanical nuance. You can define any narrative you can imagine, but at the table the resolution is going to be within that same math works zone.

I know I already responded to the post here, but I wanted to go back and address this bit.

Frankly, I don't see the complaint.

We speak of "rules engines" for a reason. Like any engine, it is tuned to operate on a given energy source, and to perform within some fairly specific parameters. It goes from zero to some effective maximum speed, it has a specific range in which it is most efficient, provides only a certain amount of power for any setting of the transmission, and so on. No engine is infinitely malleable - what is under the hood of my Saturn is not ever going to run a Mack truck. Thus, the second sentence above is rather like saying, "I can pretend that I'm on a race track all I want, but really, I'm still only driving a Smart Car." Well, geeze, why did you expect that the engine would perform as other than what it is? Is it not a *feature* that the thing performs (and does so pretty well) within its designed parameters, but doesn't step out of them? Like you'd expect your hedge trimmer to suddenly be able to drive your motorcycle?

It seems to me that the same is true for any rule system - define what narrative you imagine, but, if you use the rules, the table resolution will be the same as with the game's standard narrative. The only way you get the table resolution to be different is by injecting GM intervention in resolution. 4e is no different form every other game, before or since, in that regard.

Now, you may argue that 4e is rather resistant to that GM intervention, and probably have a fair point - just like on modern cars with computer-controlled engines, they are not forgiving of tinkering by weekend-duffers. But, "The thing only does what it is designed to do!" isn't exactly a knock against the design of anything - be it a chair, a car, or a game system.

 

[Uchawi]

The rules and how they interact at the table are very important as it help define everyone's experience, and the experience itself is important to maintain the players interest. If either starts failing, then players stop coming back. Granted a new player that has never experienced the game may be more forgiving of the rules, but to try to recapture that experience for anyone that has played games is folly by ignoring the problems that were present throughout the history of the game. New players become experienced players and therefore experience the same problems with rules over time. Whatever you gain on the front end for keeping things simple or avoiding known problems is lost on the back end when the player has experience. That is why we have multiple editions. It is an endless cycle.

 

[BryonD]

This is a mischaracterisation of 4e, at least as I see most players of that game describe it on these boards. The mechanical nuance is what generates story distinctions. In the Giants game, what made that MU with elemental and cold wand a potent wielder of magic wasn't some mere flavour text on a character sheet, but the fact that the player of that character could effectively engage the ingame situation by casting spells and using a wand. 4e is much like that - "show, don't tell". And as a player (or as a GM, for that matter, once the PCs are in the frame) you show by engaging the action resolution mechanics.

You and I discussed this numerous times back when it was relevant. I accept that the perspective of me and many other players out there. But that doesn't change anything.

Even in your answer here "elemental and cold wand" remains flavor text. The action resolution mechanics are all too frequently the same over and over. Yes, there are exceptions, lots of exceptions, but not nearly enough exceptions.

4E fans brag that the mechanical resolution for every situation, no matter how narratively diverse, can be found on a single page.

You see it as a mischaracterization on my part, but that is because you don't see what else there can be.