Mike Mearls comments on design

[kennew142]

No, that doesn't come with enough implied setting.

I like D&D's implied setting, but I want it to stay like a comfy sofa, table and chairs - usable, comfortable, but also somewhat in the background - and solid fantasy tropes like elves and dwarves deliver on that. Not like an elephant in the living room, blocking out the other furniture I want to put in there, just because someone at WOTC really likes elephants (or dragonmen, or whatever). It does have the odd D&Dism in the core, but a little ungraceful design which is there for purely gamist reasons (i.e. cleric) is not an invitation to open the gates to a lot of it.

And you try to make me sound like I'm an isolated outsider, when the surveys suggest that for once I'm in the majority. Do you really, truly think that D&D would be anywhere near as popular as it is if it shut out homebrews? A strongly flavoured implied setting will by definition do that. Sure, some will have no problem and just incorporate the kitchen sink into their setting, while the rest of us will be left bailing out material we don't want or need.

I've always had to bail out material that didn't fit my home game. Gnomes, out! Halflings, out! That's part of running a homebrew campaign IMNSHO.

For the first time since 1980 I may have fewer things in the PHB that I don't have to write out of my games. So far it is only halflings this time around. Although the less they resemble hobbits, the more likely I am to leave them in.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

And you try to make me sound like I'm an isolated outsider, when the surveys suggest that for once I'm in the majority.

Please tell me that you're not referring to any surveys on ENWorld or any other gaming site. Those surveys are worse than worthless. They're misleading. They are a self-selecting sample of a minority of board dwellers who just happen to feel strongly enough about whatever the survey is about to actually take part in it. Depending what site you go to, you could get a survey that shows that most of the voters want to be fire engines.

Those surveys mean squat; I wish people would stop referring to them.

 

[Zaruthustran]

A strongly flavoured implied setting will by definition do that. Sure, some will have no problem and just incorporate the kitchen sink into their setting, while the rest of us will be left bailing out material we don't want or need.

I guess I don't understand how POL is a strong setting. From what I've read, and from what Mearls said, POL is deliberately vague. *Anything* could be out there in the darkness... including light! It's all up to the DM, and the players.

Compare to, say, Krynn. Or good grief, the Forgotten Realms where every square inch is mapped out, and advanced nations have huge standing armies and assembly lines for magic items. The default D&D setting sounds a lot like the setting from Keep on the Borderlands and In Search of the Unknown: menacing, full of old ruins and dungeons, and as undefined as possible.

Are you talking about the Tieflings, Dragonborn, Elves, Dwarves, and other races? The available classes? D&D is still very much a game made of packaged selections--it's not point buy, like GURPS--so those elements have to be in there. Obviously you can cut out anything you don't like. My last 3E campaign didn't have any elves, or the Fly & Teleport spells. Easy as pie. I don't see how 4E will be more difficult to customize. If anything, the vague POL setting makes it easier to tweak. Don't like Dragonborn, and their ancient empire? Cut the race entirely (make the old empire a Human one), or make Dragonborn extinct. Keep the ruins and dungeons (PCs need places to adventure).

-z

 

[Zaruthustran]

Please tell me that you're not referring to any surveys on ENWorld or any other gaming site. Those surveys are worse than worthless. They're misleading. They are a self-selecting sample of a minority of board dwellers who just happen to feel strongly enough about whatever the survey is about to actually take part in it. Depending what site you go to, you could get a survey that shows that most of the voters want to be fire engines.

Those surveys mean squat; I wish people would stop referring to them.

You, sir, have been quoted for truth.

 

[rounser]

I guess I don't understand how POL is a strong setting.

I think you misunderstand: The implied setting is not just POL (although that's part of it), it's dragonborn, "warlords", and whatever else they deign to put in the core (the real core of PHB1, not the "core sells better, so everything is core" core which is going to be everything under the sun by the look of it). Unless you specifically exclude it.

I think POL is a great idea; it seems just be putting into words what has always been the D&D default, more or less - the odd town, village or city and wilderness in between full of roaming monsters. This has long been implied by wandering monster tables for the great outdoors, so it's not really much new, just spelled out.

It'll be interesting to see if they can nut out some logic as to why the local cave full of trolls just plain doesn't raze the local village to the ground within half an hour, though. I've toyed with the idea of rings of dolmens or standing stones with antipathy vs monsters on them, maintained by the local druids, but concluded that that was overthinking things.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

I agree with Zara.

 

[Fifth Element]

Please tell me that you're not referring to any surveys on ENWorld or any other gaming site. Those surveys are worse than worthless. They're misleading. They are a self-selecting sample of a minority of board dwellers who just happen to feel strongly enough about whatever the survey is about to actually take part in it. Depending what site you go to, you could get a survey that shows that most of the voters want to be fire engines.

QFMFT. Sig'ed, even.

 

[BryonD]

My last 3E campaign didn't have any elves, or the Fly & Teleport spells. Easy as pie. I don't see how 4E will be more difficult to customize. If anything, the vague POL setting makes it easier to tweak.

Most certainly true.

Customization will be very easy.

And with GWA it will be something like this:

DM: I've removed Elves.
Player: OK
DM: I've removed Fly.
Player: OK
DM: I've removed Teleport.
Player: OK
DM: Fireball is called Jack's Flaming Revenge.
Player: OK
DM: Golden Wyvern Adept is called Spell Tactics.
Player: What was that again? Was that the one that gives you a +2 to overcome spell resistance if you move first?
DM: No, no, that was Purple River Sage, though in my game it is called Spell Placement.
Player: ohh.. I thought the River thing was the one that gave you +3 to hit when you jump.
DM: No, that was... Ah crap, Let's play GURPS.

Exaggeration? Yeah. But there is a fundamental difference between communicating changes built on a simple descriptive system and communicating changes in a system that requires memorization of random nomenclature. Renaming or removing GWA will be no harder than renaming or removing elves. Which is to say it will be trivially easy. Expecting a group of casual players to keep up with changes around GWA will be significantly harder than expecting them to keep up with "no elves". If they kept elves in 4E but instead of elves they called them Hoos Hoos, you could tell a player that you have removed Hoos Hoos and it wouldn't be unreasonable for a casual player to say, "ok, thats fine. As long as I can play an Elf I don't care."

 

[IanB]

I like everything - everything! - he says in his response, but for one thing: I just can't get past the "golden wyvern" type stuff working its way into so many subsystems. If it was just in the "description" paragraph of the wizard class description or whatever, fine, but my players are *never* going to remember when I tell them "OK guys, in my game "Golden Wyvern" is actually "<something actually appropriate to my setting>", they're just going to keep calling it Golden Wyvern until I crack and change my game to match their fluff.

That = annoying. Otherwise, great stuff.

 

[Hussar]

*snip*

It goes from "Sim Fantasy Worlds" to "Sim This Quirky Specific Fantasy World" moreso than it already is. (I mean, admittedly we have clerics and other, more minor core D&Disms already, but they're adding a whole lot of fuel to the fire this time around with a bunch of new classes and races made core. Warlock fits, it has a strong archetype, whereas Warlord appears to be a bunch of abilities strapped to a misnomer, in search of an archetype.)

See, there's the difference. You're calling it minor core D&Disms. I say that D&D is loaded with D&Disms. The races are NOT mythologically based, they're D&D creations based on Tolkien. They might have a very tenous link back to myth, but, sieved through so many reinterpretations that they are purely D&D.

And you try to make me sound like I'm an isolated outsider, when the surveys suggest that for once I'm in the majority. Do you really, truly think that D&D would be anywhere near as popular as it is if it shut out homebrews? A strongly flavoured implied setting will by definition do that. Sure, some will have no problem and just incorporate the kitchen sink into their setting, while the rest of us will be left bailing out material we don't want or need.

You are making the mistake that homebrewers are all world builders and I think that's completely false. I think the majority of homebrewers are patchwork DM's. They use whatever they can steal from whatever source and only create when forced to. The true world builders are actually in a very, very small minority.

This also fits perfectly with the polling. The huge popularity of articles from Dragon like the Core Beliefs articles. If homebrew DM's were world builders, then these articles would be largely useless - they wouldn't fit. But, these are some of the most popular articles Dragon had done in years. Because they fit best with the patchwork DM's.