playtesting feel

[GMforPowergamers]

Ok, so the playtest is almost here, and they keep asking about 'Does it feel like D&D?" and I have until today been unsure what they ment.

I use to play ALOT of video games. I had an atari, a NES, and a Super NES. I would spend hours with many game, but bar none my favorite was The Legend of Zelda. To the point that my first day with a SUper NeS I had to have the newest zelda game, a link to the past.

Ok fast forward through collage and no games, and one of my friends got me back into PS2 with grand theft auto, but it wasn't like before. I would play less time a week then I use to play a day, and alot of it was with friends joking, not by myself.

fast forward again, and for my young nephew I now have a wii, and look at that there is a zelda game for it. SO I have tried and tried to get into this game. The graphics are better, the story is well more worked out, there is so much more you can do. The game handles better.

Yet I find that I down loaded the orginal zelda and play that instead. I just can't get into this new game. Infact I down loaded Castlvania, Supermario, and double dribble too. There are newer (Better) versions of these games, but the old NES ones I play much more then the newer ones.

I don't know what makes an 8bit clunky hard game better then a new age next generation game, but something holds me to it.

So then I think back to 2e D&D (My first real time playing) and I still remember there being some caster problems, and I really dont want to go back to Thac0, but I still kinda miss the feel of those games. I wonder if I am a bit of a closset gognard, since I went and bought a retroclone that isn't even out yet and now I wonder how do you cpture that feel.

what about everyone else, how do you explain feel of a game? Becuse I find I can not put it into words, and I feel that will hurt the playtest.

 

[Kzach]

It's called nostalgia.

 

[soulcatcher78]

It's called nostalgia.

Remembering the best parts of something isn't limited to games (girlfriends, jobs, neighborhoods, etc). The feeling you get when you first experience something is hard to recapture (but we spend a lot of money and time trying to do so). The older you get, the more likely you are to indulge yourself in things that had a positive impact on your past.

New just makes something shinier, not better.

 

[billd91]

what about everyone else, how do you explain feel of a game? Becuse I find I can not put it into words, and I feel that will hurt the playtest.

One thing you could do is think back and try to distill out the elements of the older games that you liked better - that made it a better experience than the experience you've had with later versions. WotC has been working on this since the start of the 5 project, both in blog/article posts and with the designers trotting out older editions to play.

We did that on Thursday. Our current game (Torg) GM was out so we played some 2e. It felt pretty good. We got characters generated and played out a couple of encounters in just 2 hours and this is with enough of a break to eat gyros too.

 

[Kzach]

New just makes something shinier, not better.

Living in the past just makes you bitter, not sweeter.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Living in the past just makes you bitter, not sweeter.

But he is right: there are games that are just shinier, but not better. When you compare them, there are a lot of things that some older games really do better than some newer games.
Monopoly is still played today. Risk too... (even if i don´t like them anymore)

Some games were just simple and brilliant. And when you look at modern game design, many games are going back to simpler design. Games with books of rules are going out of fashion. And I hope, 5e will go the same route. Simplicity. And add complexity to taste. Not the opposite.

ADnD with its many subsystems had one strenght: they were mostly optional. I expect 5e to have a simple and strong core. And I want complexity of 3rd edition and strategic encounters of 5e. But I don´t want to be forced. And frome everything the designers say, it seems as if they are aiming for this exact goal.

A session without a single die rolled was once (in the 3rd edition area) the best i could imagine. I can´t do it in 4e, which makes me sad... and this is where the feel of D&D is not as it should be. I can´t tell a cooperative story without rolling too many dice.

 

[ren1999]

I'm going to tell you why I think those D&D games were so great. The designers took all the existing D&D rules of the time and put them all together. Then they started asking questions.

This character needs armor, where will he get it?
This character is leveling-up. Boring, oh! He could get training in the town!
This character will die and too many characters die all the time so nobody can win this game. Oh! Bandage the character within 1 round. Stack a bunch of healing potions in treasures everywhere.

When the designers play this game fast by themselves, they can make their own decisions about the flow of the game. At a table, everyone democratically decides and awaits a GM veto or not.

So this creates a fast pace and enjoyable game flow. You have just one guy deciding how the adventure is played out. There is nothing illogical about the rules. All the rules are the same for every monster or character. That is what the next edition needs. It needs some fun tradeoffs and limits. It needs character balancing. Blah, blah, blah.

My Dungeons & Dragons Hybrid Game for Firefox and Chrome kira3696.tripod.com/CombatTracker.rar

 

[Stalker0]

Some games were just simple and brilliant.

This is very true. The most successful games of all times often have a consistent theme....emergent difficulty.

Chess is a great example. The rules of chess are pretty simple, you can teach someone to play in probably 10 minutes. But the game is so incredibly complex in play that modern AI designers look to it as a way to challenge themselves.

 

[MichaelSomething]

what about everyone else, how do you explain feel of a game? Becuse I find I can not put it into words, and I feel that will hurt the playtest.

This is actually a very important question. When it comes to RPGs (and games in general), I get the impression many people can't explain why they like something in concrete terms. Of course, I'm one of them. We don't go into great detail and we lack the vocabulary to describe things, and there are things we wouldn't even think to describe!

 

[fjw70]

On a side note at first I thought the thread tile was

Playtesting Fee!