Miniatures and Madness - Legends and Lore by Mike Mearls

[darjr]

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.

I don't understand how you came to that conclusion using this article. Especially given that his stated preference requires a GM.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I don't understand how you came to that conclusion using this article. Especially given that his stated preference requires a GM.

Here's just my opinion.

In one hand, hold Mike's stated preferences.

In the other, hold WoTC profit goals.

If it's a Venn diagram, perhaps there is some overlap.

In my opinion, only my opinion, DDI going online, the cancellation of the miniatures, the heavy, extremely heavy on Dungeon 'adventurers' on combat, point to trying to 'fix' the GM problem one baby step at a time.

The boardgames also make a nice way to test the water without freaking out the old guard. And they're nice in and of themselves mind you.

 

[Dausuul]

A bug?

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

I'm skeptical. I mean, certainly they are cheaper and perform the same function. But I don't think they can be a major profit center the way DDM was; I'm not aware of anybody lusting to build a giant counter collection. And if they're not a profit center, what's the point? You're just adding one more thing for people to go out and buy before they can play the game; or, if you include counters in the core set the way they did with the DM's Kit, you're increasing manufacturing and shipping costs.

I see counters mainly as a stopgap, to cope with the fact that 4E is massively mini-dependent but there's no longer an "official" source for the minis you need to play. WotC can probably turn a small profit selling them. But I would be very surprised if 5E were built for counters the way 4E was built for DDM.

 

[Dausuul]

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.

Ask ten gamers what "old-school" means and you'll get eleven answers. Mearls started playing in 1981, says he likes the old TSR editions of D&D, and runs an AD&D game. That's old-school enough for me.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I would. The GM is what separates D&D from an extremely slow, extremely low-res version of WoW.

You know that quote about D&D being 10 minutes of action packed into four hours? The GM is what makes that not true.

These facts are well appreciated inside the walls at WotC.

Fair enough, which is why I said 'if they could make it work.' Call my opinion an overreaction against the tendency towards the trends Mearls identified in the article, along with the increasing production and marketing of material for/to players as opposed to DMs, and a perceived shift of gravity from 'the DM' to 'the RAW'.

 

[delericho]

The DM is the difference between D&D being a boardgame and it being a role-playing game. Remove the DM, and I'm just not interested. (I have no problem with them doing D&D boardgames, but as an addition, not a replacement.)

As for Mearls' question: as I said in the other thread on this topic, I prefer minis to be strictly optional. My preferences at the moment lean towards not using them, but my opinion has changed in the past.

I wouldn't play, much less run, 4e without minis. It just loses too much. 3.5e also loses a fair amount without minis, but not quite so much - I do run it without minis. 3.0e was even less minis-reliant. (I can't speak as to Pathfinder.)

I will not buy any 5th Edition that is as minis-reliant as 4e, or even 3.5e. I would play such a system, but won't run it.

As regards the change in the cover rule: 3.5e made two changes. The move from five different levels of cover to just two was a big improvement. However, the "imaginary lines" rules are absolutely horrible - on a par with the grapple rules, IMO. In fact, I never used them, always preferring a handwave. Of course, using a handwave negates any point of having a definitive rule!

(Incidentally, I did a side-by-side comparison of the 3.5e and 4e rules for cover and line of sight, and the "imaginary lines" rules are the same. Awful rules, in both cases.)

 

[Mercurius]

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.

Agreed.

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.

Good point about miniatures-dependence becoming a bug. I mean, if A) you are no longer producing something that your product relies upon to play, then you've got a problem, and B) counters aren't lucrative enough to off-set the problems that miniatures/counter-dependence causes.

The point being, it makes financial sense to make D&D miniatures-independent if WotC is no longer going to be producing miniatures.

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.

I agree completely. I don't own any DDM plastic miniatures, but I have a few hundred metal figures--mainly Reaper and Rackham Confrontation, and a few other odds and ends mixed in (Enigma, Red Box, Warhammer, Ral Partha, etc). While I do use miniatures and battemats, I enjoy the little metal toys mainly as a separate, albeit thematically related, hobby. I rarely have the time these days, but I enjoy assembling and painting them and have played with the idea of getting into dioramas but again, miniatures are not at the top of my "creativity/fun/hobby queue" in terms of time priority.

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.

I love the smell of Old School Snobbery in the morning!

 

[darjr]

Wasn't the monster vault, among other things, a counters product? By shear weight alone it's the majority of the product, isn't it? I don't know if it made money but I'd bet that it did.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Wasn't the monster vault, among other things, a counters product? By shear weight alone it's the majority of the product, isn't it? I don't know if it made money but I'd bet that it did.

And supposedly the next monster boxed set has... counters.

And if WoTC decides to use, you know, ten minutes of time, when doing adventurers for Dungeon, since they probably already have the illustrations, they could throw in a sheet of... counters. Hell, maybe even full scale maps to go with 'em. Some real 'innovation' for you $$.

 

[The Shaman]

Ask ten gamers what "old-school" means and you'll get eleven answers.

And in my experience you'll find that eight or nine of those gamers will agree with the others, even if they all stated different things.

Consensus - it's what's for dinner!

Mearls started playing in 1981, says he likes the old TSR editions of D&D, and runs an AD&D game. That's old-school enough for me.

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

Knowing the rules to an old-school game is not the same as understanding why those rules are what they are and how they're intended to work together; judging from many of the things Mr Mearls wrote over the years, and an exchange I had with him directly on these boards, I've found that he's woefully ill-informed.

I love the smell of Old School Snobbery in the morning!

I can't imagine how hard it must be to have one's icons crticized on an intreweb message board.

Really. I can't imagine it.