Mike Donais speaks - spells in D&D Miniatures

[MerricB]

Just found this on the Wizards boards. There are some dedicated (or scary) people at Wizards:

It is response to whether Raise Dead or Animate Dead might ever appear as spells in the miniatures game:

http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=382706
Mike Donais: When we were designing the game some of the team went through the entire PHB and wrote up what every spell would do in D&D miniatures. This was a monumental task but we have a spreadsheet now with possible interpretations of each spell. So we could do it but it has some problems as you can imagine. As is mentioned above the Lich Necromancer is a good way to simulate this without as many problems.

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Thought some of you might find that interesting.

Cheers!

 

[mearls]

Just found this on the Wizards boards. There are some dedicated (or scary) people at Wizards:

Are you kidding? Translating D&D spells into the minis game would be a lot of fun. I think that the exceptions based stuff - spells, monster special abilities, class abilities, feats - are the best parts of D&D design.

 

[MerricB]

Are you kidding? Translating D&D spells into the minis game would be a lot of fun. I think that the exceptions based stuff - spells, monster special abilities, class abilities, feats - are the best parts of D&D design.

I think you're right, O respected game designer.

It's more a comment on approach. I tend to wait until I need something before dealing with it; they've dealt with it before it is needed.

The great advantage of them having it done now is that it would probably be a lot more consistent than just doing it as needed - the issues that come up when a spell is really exceptional are dealt with early on, rather than needing a patch later on.

Incidentally, Mike, are you still writing the DDM articles for Dragon magazine? (And should we be looking forward to the new format that Erik's been hinting at?)

Cheers!

 

[mearls]

Incidentally, Mike, are you still writing the DDM articles for Dragon magazine? (And should we be looking forward to the new format that Erik's been hinting at?)

Unless there are more articles in the pipeline that I'm forgetting about, I think I'm done with it for now. Honestly, there are people out there who are far better equipped for the job than I am. They needed someone to fill the gap, and until they could find a real minis expert I handled it.

I really love the minis game, but with all the other work I have (Malhavoc, other stuff for Dragon and Dungeon) I could never do it justice. Plus, I haven't been able to play the game often enough. Aside from Origins and the Aberrations release tournament, I play maybe once a month. If I played it weekly with a group of people who were plugged into the game, I'd be far happier and far better equipped to do more in-depth design work on it.

It actually makes a lot of sense to tackle all the spells at once. That way, you can flag weird effects early on and quickly develop a baseline for new expansions. The worst thing you can have in a CMG or a CCG is to create a rule early on that ends up having lots of unforeseen consquences. The more ground you can cover early on, the less chance that something will surprise you and/or give you headaches in the future.