Miniatures and Madness - Legends and Lore by Mike Mearls

[JoeGKushner]

Well that would be a rather silly design goal considering DMs are the ones who spend all the money =p

How does that work for Magic the Gathering? I've heard several times that they are trying to make D&D resemble Magic more than a online game and with the Fortune Cards out and Mike talking about GM versus rule design?

Oh yeah. Wave goodbye to the screen ladies and gentlemen.

 

[Dausuul]

I'm thinking that Mearls can only really say this now that the DDM have been canceled. It may even be that this is the first sign that WotC is (hopefully!) moving back to a "minis optional" approach. If they aren't going to produce their own minis, they almost have to.

I was thinking much the same. Not quite the same, because Mike Mearls has always been up front about his enjoyment of old-school play; if his public announcements were driven by WotC's design and marketing priorities, he certainly would have kept his mouth shut about running a monthly AD&D game! So I don't think he's suddenly had some kind of gag order taken off.

I do, however, agree that this may indicate the start of a move away from miniatures-dependence. That dependence was a feature as long as DDM was a big money-maker for WotC. Now that DDM has been canceled, the feature has become a bug, adding another barrier to entry to a game that has too many already. I think that unless that poll shows a very strong preference for minis, we will see a trend away from the battlemat in official D&D products over the next few years. Eliminating minis-dependence from 4E is a pretty tall order, but they'll do what they can to reduce it, and when the time comes for 5E they will eliminate it.

It's funny. I have a ridiculous miniatures collection--close to 2,000 at last count. (It got to the point where I made a spreadsheet just to keep track of them all.) I've dabbled in metal miniature painting and modding, and had a lot of fun with it. I love my minis. And yet, I'd be happy to see them become optional, even deprecated. In my experience, when the battlemat comes out, the game slows to a crawl and immersion is replaced with number-crunching and square-counting.

 

[JoeGKushner]

A bug?

Counters will take care of that 'bug' and be cheaper for most people and do the same job.l

Heck, the VTT will take care of that bug and be incorporated into the system. Maybe with a seperate tier if you want it to say other than the monsters name and status. For example, black circle with words Goblin Minion versus an actual illustration of Goblin Minion with maybe a symbol denoting that it's a minion.

 

[The Shaman]

I think he has this crazy notion that we're going to combine the sets and fight both the Dragon AND the Vampire.

AT THE SAME TIME.

"You must spread some Experience Points around . . . "

 

[Azgulor]

I was thinking much the same. Not quite the same, because Mike Mearls has always been up front about his enjoyment of old-school play; if his public announcements were driven by WotC's design and marketing priorities, he certainly would have kept his mouth shut about running a monthly AD&D game! So I don't think he's suddenly had some kind of gag order taken off.

I do, however, agree that this may indicate the start of a move away from miniatures-dependence. That dependence was a feature as long as DDM was a big money-maker for WotC. Now that DDM has been canceled, the feature has become a bug, adding another barrier to entry to a game that has too many already. I think that unless that poll shows a very strong preference for minis, we will see a trend away from the battlemat in official D&D products over the next few years.

Honestly, I think this is more a case of either softening-the-blow/justifying the cancellation of the miniatures line or a precursor to a push for the VTT, or both. From what I know or have read of Mearls, while I'm sure he's a good corp-citizen, I don't get the impression he'd shy from saying "I prefer miniatures to be optional".

All he'd have to say to meet a pro-miniature company/game stance and his personal preference is "Personally, I like for miniatures to be optional. However, our customers have clearly shown that the majority of players prefer to play with miniatures and we've built the game to support that."

 

[The Shaman]

. . . Mike Mearls has always been up front about his enjoyment of old-school play . . .

Judging from his design essays and his comments on this board, I'm not sure if Mike Mearls would actually recognize old-school play if it looked him in the eye and made him save versus petrification.

 

[Phaezen]

Judging from his design essays and his comments on this board, I'm not sure if Mike Mearls would actually recognize old-school play if it looked him in the eye and made him save versus petrification.

Given that he DMs a AD&D 1st ed game on a weekly basis, I am fairly sure he could.

 

[TerraDave]

Line of Sight predates D&D and the edge of a character sheet or side of a pencil works in a pinch to act as a line.

Its a reference to 4E fidly cover rules, which involve multiple lines and looking for multiple blockages.

And I had that player who insisted on doing this everytime...and would be snarky about it. He was a good player, and it was too bad when he stopped playing, but I don't miss that!.

 

[Mark CMG]

Its a reference to 4E fidly cover rules, which involve multiple lines and looking for multiple blockages.

And I had that player who insisted on doing this everytime...and would be snarky about it. He was a good player, and it was too bad when he stopped playing, but I don't miss that!.

In many old school wargames, as you and others may know, the rule was usually center to center of the hex, which can get a bit fiddly too. That might be why any part of the square to any part of the square becomes a more appealing rubric, in an effort to make things less fiddly.

 

[Mark CMG]

Well that would be a rather silly design goal considering DMs are the ones who spend all the money =p

Unless a primary design goal is to allow any four people who show up in a real or vitual space to be able to jump into a game together regardless of whether or not one of them has special or extensive knowledge (enough to run the game for others). If RPGs could adopt that ability from boardgames and card games, then RPGs suddenly become imminently more playable, in some eyes, which might be attractive as a design goal to a company with play promotion as a high priority. So, too, if a company is looking to leverage an online RPG play experience, and cast that experience as more typical or mainstream, then certainly the manufacture and selling of miniatures would become a much lower priority. The Kush might have half of the top two priorites of future RPG design pegged with his above assertion, though I would stipulate that without a push toward virtual/online gaming, some of the other transitions being observed make less sense.