Mike Mearls comments on design
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![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
CaptainChaos
First Post
I'm not sure what's more sad, the fact that Mike says things that are completely obvious and people are ready to annoint his feet or that WotC is just figuring out that their core books need to help newbies learn how to play the game.
CaptainChaos said:
Part of it is the fun of hearing someone from WOTC say the completely obvious things that, in spite of being completely obvious, certain persons seem resolutely unable to grasp.
No disagreement on the newbies thing. The game has needed to be more accessible to new players for some time.
ruleslawyer
Registered User
Except that mike says things that are "completely obvious" and people disagree. I don't, but the fact is that there are competing viewpoints here, especially regarding the idea of there being hard-and-fast rules to cover non-combat situations. A lot of folks on these boards seem to think that 1e's "let the DM make it up" approach is the right way to go when it comes to using non-combat skills or adjudicating non-combat scenarios. Thus the objection to Mike's statement that likelihood of success and rewards for success should be framed by the rules rather than by DMs following "soft" designers' advice.
ruleslawyer said:
Some matters are issues of competing view points. Not all of them though. Even comments which might hint at legitimate stylistic differences can be couched in the language of irrationality.
Regarding your comments on the 1e style "DM fiat" manner of resolving out of combat situations, that's fine for people to prefer. However, if someone tells me that 4e "discourages creativity" by having rules for social encounters and non combat skills instead of using DM fiat, and that they are sticking with 3e because of this, I can declare them to be objectively cracked. 3e already has rules for those things.
Its like telling me that you hate the 2008 Ford trucks because they're not unicycles, so you're going to keep driving your Chevrolet pickup.
JohnSnow
Hero
Cadfan said:
Yes....but keep in mind, someone might also say the following:
"I'm not going to buy a 2008 Ford truck because they don't make a hybrid, so I'm just going to keep driving my 1994 Toyota pickup until someone makes a hybrid pickup."
And that doesn't sound nearly as ridiculous. Sometimes, people's negative reaction to 4e is based on: "WotC isn't solving my big problem with 3e, so I'm just going to keep playing 3e since I already understand all of its quirks." Which is exactly analogous to refusing to buy a new truck because it lacks the feature that would make you interested enough to buy it even if said feature isn't one your current vehicle has.
If 4e is solving one (or many!) of your big issues with 3e, you're likely to embrace it. If it's not, you're likely to be put off by the changes to things that seemed fine to you. For example, if you hated Vancian spellcasting and the 5-minute work day, 4e looks awfully nice. But if that never bothered you, or worse if you enjoyed it, changing it certainly isn't a selling point. Unfortunately, since everyone has different issues, this is an unavoidable aspect of designing a new edition. Inevitably, someone will dislike some of what you changed and think you should have changed something else that you left alone.
WotC has to design for the majority of their market. However, many people assume that the way they play is the way most gamers play (or if they don't, the way they ought to). If WotC seems to be doing something that runs counter to the way they play, their immediate reaction is more often "WotC must be out of touch with their market" rather than "I must be playing D&D in a different way than most people do."
As an aside, a little more of the latter thought process and less of the former would go a long way toward fostering a more civil tone on the boards.
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The_Furious_Puffin
First Post
Doug McCrae said:
Word. People who accuse me of selective reading then haven't actually read it ftl. Also, there are numerous ways in D&D of making an encounter grind to a halt for 10 rounds while you fire off diplomacy, like, wall of thorns. Or standing further away and getting your diplomat on via telepathy. It's not like my players fight lolth, they fight giants.
Now of course no-one (including me) actually runs diplomacy like it is written (maybe they do, but they can have fun with that), and we all move along with life, but the problem always has been that I'm paying for a book of rules, as opposed to some suggestions, some of which I'm going to ignore because they are stupid.
Edit: That all said I hope they are making some good decisions, some looks right, and they do seem to have (finally) decided to give fighters cool things. I'm not sure abotu the multiclassing stuff.
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Hussar
Legend
CaptainChaos said:
Why should WOTC be any different than anyone else? Since Basic D&D, has ANY version of D&D been written with newbies in mind? AD&D certainly wasn't. We just expected players and DM's to stumble around in the dark and hoped that they'd figure things out on their own.
Oldahan, I really think that you are off base here. Mearls is stating that the DMG will be written with someone who has no RPG experience in mind. Which means that it has to be playstyle neutral. 2e tried to dictate playstyle and got vilified for it. 3e is almost entirely silent on the issue of playstyle beyond a couple of pages in the DMG. It looks to me like they're trying to find a middle ground here to empower DM's and players. In other words, they want to go the Robin Laws path and recognize different playstyles without judging them but also give advice as to how to accommodate groups containing different styles.
SteveC
Doing the best imitation of myself
I think you're missing the point: I'm a fan of Mike Mearls because of his game design skills and not because he writes something that had never occurred to me. As a result, I tend to agree with what he writes about the game in general. While what he wrote may seem obvious to you, it has also generated controversy where people have disagreed with it.CaptainChaos said:
As far as "WotC just figuring out that their core books need to help newbies learn how to play the game," this is hardly something new. Each edition of the DMG has had advice on how to GM based on what was the prevailing wisdom of the time. It's nothing that Gygax didn't think about, and the 3X team understood it as well. The fact that the 4E DMG will also address this is nothing new, but it does point to the fact that some things have not changed from edition to edition.
--Steve
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