Mike Mearls comments on design

[ZombieRoboNinja]

You assume that I'm distinctly referring to you. There's a huge outcrying on the destruction of the Great Wheel, but that's just as much of spoon feeding setting-specific info into the mechanics and core books as anything else.


"Echoes throughout D&D magic" = planar system tied to magic system. You're arguing my point for me.

A Plane of Air makes just as much sense, and is echoed just as easily, by the Elemental Tempest.

These are really good points. I'm not at all choked up to be exchanging the Great Wheel cosmology with something less complex and rigid (although I'm not sure the 4e cosmology will necessarily be a huge improvement).

Tquirky, are you complaining about the inclusion of clerics and tanglefoot bags in THIRD edition? Dude, that battle's lost.

I mean, I feel your pain to some degree. I'd rather have a 3.5 warlock flavor than be tied to all the "spooky" interplanar deal-brokering that seems to be the core of the 4e warlock, not because the 4e version sounds "bad," but because the 3.5e version was open enough to allow me to play more character-types out of the box.

That said...

I honestly DO look to the core rulebooks for character/RP ideas sometimes. For example, the fluff we've gotten about the warlord really makes me want to play one, more than I've ever wanted to play, say, a bard. If WotC can pull it off (and that's an important "if"), I'd have no problem with them insinuating some cool ideas like wizardly traditions into the core rules, and just asking DMs who don't like it to excise it from their campaigns.

The key point is that the type of groups who are playing well-developed homebrew settings don't NEED hand-holding. They're perfectly capable of renaming abilities and overriding some fluffy rule elements without WotC's permission, just like basically every DM I've had has just gotten rid of mundane spell components. It's the newbies and the lazy who will benefit from having easily-adaptable fluff aspects embedded into the PHB, and as a religiously lazy player, I support this proposition.

 

[Tquirky]

Tquirky, are you complaining about the inclusion of clerics and tanglefoot bags in THIRD edition? Dude, that battle's lost.

No, I'm just saying that they ideally should be minimised in the core. That's all. 4E is piling them on by the look of it.

 

[The Little Raven]

Minimizing "D&Disms" in a game known as D&D seems somewhat... counterintuitive to me.

 

[Rechan]

The core should preferably keep the number of D&Disms in it to a minimum, because too many D&Disms alienate D&D from the generic fantasy worldbuilding which is it's core strength.

I thought D&D's core strength was D&D. If I want "Generic fantasy worldbuilding", I pick up HERO or GURPS.

Why should D&D be generic? When you're playing D&D it should feel like D&D.

Also: levels and spell levels, and dare I say, classes, are quite D&Disms.

 

[Tquirky]

Minimizing "D&Disms" in a game known as D&D seems somewhat... counterintuitive to me.

If you think in terms of semantics rather than meaning, I suppose it could.

 

[Fifth Element]

The core should preferably keep the number of D&Disms in it to a minimum, because too many D&Disms alienate D&D from the generic fantasy worldbuilding which is it's core strength.

How can you have too many D&Disms in D&D? Without D&Disms, the game is no longer D&D. Pretty much by definition.

On another note, the tone here is getting a bit nasty. I think we should do the mods a favour and calm down, as they have asked.

 

[Fifth Element]

If you think in terms of semantics rather than meaning, I suppose it could.

Your meaning is less than clear, I think.

 

[Tquirky]

I thought D&D's core strength was D&D. If I want "Generic fantasy worldbuilding", I pick up HERO or GURPS.

Why should D&D be generic?

It shouldn't - it has an implied setting that does a lot of the work for us. There's such a thing as implying too much, though, and so far most of what it's implied has had mythological resonance, which works in many worlds. It's shades of grey, but 4E seems to be reaching a tipping point.

 

[Fifth Element]

It shouldn't - it has an implied setting that does a lot of the work for us. There's such a thing as implying too much, though, and so far most of what it's implied has had mythological resonance, which works in many worlds. It's shades of grey, but 4E seems to be reaching a tipping point.

There's the rub. Who gets to say that it's too much? Why is eladrin "too D&D", when it could just be called a high elf? Why is a tielfing "too D&D", when you can just call it a cambion?

 

[I'm A Banana]

D&D is positively dripping with references to places, events, religions and concepts. If I wanted to run a properly medieval European game I'd have to cut about 90% of the PHB.

You're right.

However, I'm going to pull out a videogame reference for comparison: Kingdom Hearts.

For the uninformed, this is a videogame mashup of Squaresoft (the Final Fantasy poeple) and Disney (the animated empire people).

It is positively dripping with references to places, events, and concepts (and styles!) from both series. East meets west, fairie tales meets dungeonpunk, *space travel* meets *chip and dale*.

But while it drips with those archetypes, it manages to tell a story with them that is independnt of them, using them for it's own purposes and inventing new conceits where needed to make it hold together as a game itself.

Sure, it has the Genie from Aladdin, and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7, but it also subsumes them both beneath it's own mantle of the power of friendship and the dangers of tampering with human nature (a bit of Merry Shelly meets after school specials).

D&D was doing stuff like this before KH made it cool.

It combined monks and barbarians, Vancian magic and Cthonian miscreants from beyond dimensions, wargames with storytelling....

D&D has long been a fantastic hybrid of tastes, swirled together.

Which makes it *very* adaptable.

Kingdom Hearts can go from the land of Steamboat Willie to the depths of Tron to the Burtonesque weirdness of The Nightmare Before Christmas without skipping a beat, because it includes them all, and the central conceits of the game can bear a LOT of weight before collapsing.

At the same time, it can't be the game that gives you the experience of being in early animation, or a live-action computer movie, or a stop-motion holiday musical comedy exclusively. Because it contains all those things, they'll shoulder up against each other and beat each other around and generally get their chocolate in each other's peanut butter.

Similarly, D&D, because of it's polyglot nature, can ride a lot of tides. It can go from Weird Tales pulp jungles to, yes, Dungeonpunk pierced and be-tattooed heroes, to Anime-style "big guy with a big sword" to Fantasy Western to African Myth to Colonial Legends to Gothic Horror, and then go to something else next week. Likewise, it doesn't sit comfortably in one place for very long -- the more you try to make it fit Gothic Horror on a full-time basis, the more changes you need. But as part of the D&D salad, it makes the whole thing a little bit more interesting.

D&D has always lacked focus, and because of this it has vastly appealed to very different styles of gamers. This is a Good Thing.

My nervousness with 4e largely revolves around the central idea that, in trying to more tightly focus the rules, they've lost D&D's essential schizophrenia. This hits D&D right in it's junk, right in a VERY mighty strength for the game. The need for focus is real, but D&D has been unfocused and scatter shot for it's entire existence, and working against that is working against a real benefit of D&D (vs., say, WoW): that it can be what you imagine it to be, because it contains a little bit of everything.

Doing this story-wise means that things not relevant for Points of Light (though that might be relevant in my own game, or your game) are cut. This makes D&D less able to be whatever I imagine it to be. Now, if I imagine it to be something not Points-of-Light-esque, we have a problem.