RPG Codex Interview w/Mike Mearls

[TwoSix]

That is, they'll mess some things up and get some things right, but the things they get right will be solid enough to build on.

Unless, of course, they decide to scrap the solid base and rebuild a new base 4 years later.

But I'm not bitter.

Also, "like a MMO" is not an insult. MMOs have 100x the designers and they get paid 3x as much. They probably have some good ideas that can be updated, and there's no shame in trying to make a system that's easier to port into an electronic format. I've never heard anyone accuse 1e of selling out because of "Pool of Radiance."

 

[Campbell]

I agree that there's a big difference, but looking at 4e, I think its obvious that those influences weren't equal. Personally, I feel the influence of Euro games and Indie rpgs is so minimal as to be academic.

The real problem, I think, is that they took too much in the way of mechanics, without looking at adapting other material. I know I lose grognard points whenever I say it, but I think its more important for 5e to be able to handle Airbenders and Jedi than it is for it to handle hobbits and polearms.

Pretty much agree here.

They may or may not have done a terrible job, but I don't see how any of those points are problematic for a game where they intend the computer to do the accounting for you. To me, it looked like they were trying to leverage some of their design experience from Magic and use it for an rpg. I mean, really, the powers lists bear a stunning resemblance to a cardlist, as do the wordings of powers. Heck, didn't they even produce decks of the powers? Given that they intended the DM to still be scripting/running the adventure, the important thing would be to make sure everything fit the power structure in a way that could be implemented easily online. I think they succeeded in that. The constant condition toggling, tracking marks, triggered reactions, all would get easier if a computer is doing the accounting for you. The flavor or fluff, is just the graphics that happen on screen.

I think Magic had a stronger influence on 4e than any video game. Both games thrive on preselected discrete actions chosen from a wide pool of options using a consistent resource management paradigm. Both games involve a number of strategic decision points that have far reaching impact on how the encounter/match will play out. Interrupts, Key Words, Exception Based Design, and a rigorous action economy are all concepts directly lifted from Magic.

MMOs are quite different. Consistency of player action is favored over consistency of resources. Decision points are limited and there is very little in the way of real build choice. Generally, if you've seen one Arms Warrior you've seen all Arms Warriors. Player skill is primarily exercised in encounter knowledge, player reflexes, and mastery over managing divergent player resources particularly due to the advantage being able to vary group composition provides.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I know I lose grognard points whenever I say it, but I think its more important for 5e to be able to handle Airbenders and Jedi than it is for it to handle hobbits and polearms.

You don't think it's important to be able to do Game of Thrones and ninjas and samurai? I hardly think fantasy is lost as a genre.

If you're saying that the D&D system should be flexible enough to handle multiple genres, such that we can get a better version of d20 Modern/Future/Past, then that I agree with. The hobby as a whole is way too focused on fantasy.

 

[TwinBahamut]

You know, the Mearls quote stands out as strange to me for all kinds of reasons. The first D&D product to take inspiration from videogames was the 3E Tome of Battle, not 4E. It explicitly cites the videogame Soul Calibur as one of its inspirations on the first few pages of the book. Sure, the Tome of Battle was probably built from early 4E work, but Mearls' statement is still incorrect. Also, "making a MMO-capable version of D&D" seems like a pretty bizarre goal, considering that Dungeons & Dragons Online was released two years before 4E and was based on the 3.5 rules...

Also, of course, Mearls makes the insinuation that taking inspiration from videogames is a bad thing, and kind of implies that 4E is somehow MMO-like in of itself or is somehow inferior because of all of this. That kind of thinking just baffles me.

But, yeah, I think Magic: The Gathering is probably the biggest influence of 4E, which makes sense considering the designers work in the same building and probably talk and play games with each other all the time. Magic is also an incredibly successful and well-designed product, so it would have a lot of good lessons for D&D. The same could be said of most MMOs, as well, actually.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm a little surprised folks can look at the four-role structure of 4e and NOT see the MMO influence. Or the power-card structure of your character's abilities and NOT see them as well-suited for a digital environment. Or hear about how many people have trouble making characters without the DDI and believe that the DDI WASN'T part of the plan from the beginning.

FWIW, getting ideas from videogames isn't a bad thing. I draw more inspiration from Shigeru and Hironobu than I do from JRR and Fritz, myself. But a game should be designed for the medium it inhabits, and D&D doesn't inhabit a digital medium. Design lessons can be embraced, but they need to be adapted, not merely copypasta'd, and the pen and paper should always guide you more than the keyboard and monitor. I think 4e was smart to try some videogame ideas, though it might not've been smart to loose sight of the previous 30 years in the process....especially when your digital department has been a mess since before AOL.

I mean, the previous 30 years of design on D&D also had a lot of lessons to teach. I have to wonder if WotC's practice of firing senior staff had something of an effect on them loosing that thread.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I'm a little surprised folks can look at the four-role structure of 4e and NOT see the MMO influence.

Roles came into videogames from D&D, not the other way around.

Or the power-card structure of your character's abilities and NOT see them as well-suited for a digital environment.

Did you know that Magic the gathering is harder to program for than older editions of D&D are? It's complex interaction of interrupting actions, exception-based rules, and so on all make the various Magic Online projects rather challenging. This is part of why the Duels of the Planeswalkers online game is vastly simplified compared to normal Magic, and why many older Magic-inspired videogames don't even use the Magic rules. Of course, 4E takes many of these elements that make Magic hard to program for.

On the other hand, there is a long list of perfectly accurate AD&D and 3E videogames.

Or hear about how many people have trouble making characters without the DDI and believe that the DDI WASN'T part of the plan from the beginning.

The fact that tools are valuable doesn't change the fact that the play was created with tabletop in mind. Also, this argument could be leveled just as easily at 3E, considering character builders and virtual tabletops are just as essential to that game as they are to 4E. Master Tools was advertised in the 3E core rulebooks, after all...

FWIW, getting ideas from videogames isn't a bad thing. I draw more inspiration from Shigeru and Hironobu than I do from JRR and Fritz, myself. But a game should be designed for the medium it inhabits, and D&D doesn't inhabit a digital medium. Design lessons can be embraced, but they need to be adapted, not merely copypasta'd, and the pen and paper should always guide you more than the keyboard and monitor. I think 4e was smart to try some videogame ideas, though it might not've been smart to loose sight of the previous 30 years in the process....especially when your digital department has been a mess since before AOL.

I mean, the previous 30 years of design on D&D also had a lot of lessons to teach. I have to wonder if WotC's practice of firing senior staff had something of an effect on them loosing that thread.

4E is designed for the tabletop, rather than the digital medium. I mean, they explicitly removed many of the things from older editions that work better on computers than at the table. Stuff like the Bull's Strength spell, which modifies ability scores and forces heavy recalculation, is incredibly easy to do with a computer but a big pain at the table. Naturally, 4E removed all spells of that type. Similarly, 3E's complex monster creation rules require a fair amount of calculation that could easily be handled by a computer, while 4E changed those rules to avoid that and decrease that amount of calculation. Old school random generation of events from tables is perfectly ideal for computer play (just ask NetHack or Dwarf Fortress), but a giant time sink at a game table.

4E is less suited to online play than 1E is, honestly. If it was designed to be more suited to digital play, then it would have a lot more on-the-fly stat modification, rolling on large lists of tables, complex interactions between different values, and so on. Computers make computation much easier, so a game built for computers would require more computation, not less. You're a Final Fantasy fan, so you have to understand the difference between a typical Final Fantasy attack/damage formula and what 4E expects.

I hope I won't have to pull out my comparison between the way Fire Emblem and D&D works again...

 

[I'm A Banana]

Roles came into videogames from D&D, not the other way around.

Only for one very specific and narrow value of "D&D" that defines classes by their primary combat utility and stops. And at that, one that was never exactly built for that. Thieves weren't strikers, they were scouts. Wizards weren't controllers, they were problem-solvers. Fighters weren't defenders, they were combatants.

The view that D&D always had the 4e roles is overly simplistic and reductionist when actual play experience and the design of the games is taken into account.

Did you know that Magic the gathering is harder to program for than older editions of D&D are?

Cool story, bro.

4e's definitions and effects-based powers made things super easy in comparison to games based on earlier editions which have always been limited in comparison to what is possible away from a monitor. Definition is better than ambiguity when you're coding, but it's not necessarily better than ambiguity at the table.

The fact that tools are valuable doesn't change the fact that the play was created with tabletop in mind. Also, this argument could be leveled just as easily at 3E, considering character builders and virtual tabletops are just as essential to that game as they are to 4E. Master Tools was advertised in the 3E core rulebooks, after all...

It's not a zero-sum kind of thing, necessarily. But software has a much easier time parsing a powers card with its defined fields than it does parsing 3e's ambiguous paragraphs.

4E is designed for the tabletop, rather than the digital medium.

No offense, but I trust the words of actual designers much more than I trust the words of some dude on the message boards. So when you say something that directly contradicts them, I'm afraid I'll have to defer to them.

Again, it's smart to draw from videogames. What's not smart is to allow that to trump things like flexibility and hackability and ambiguity and open-endedness that leverage the strengths of the tabletop medium.

 

[TerraDave]

So, you all know that 3.0 was desinged to be MMORGable, right? Its why it came with a CD, and why the rules were so much tighter and more comprehensive, to reduce DM discretion.

This was the plan...until WotC went to Hasbro, which then spun off its video game rights, causing Peter Adkinson to quite the company. And the remains of the original plan was ETools.

You can even go out to the interwebs and check for your self.

Or just trust me.

 

[ComradeGnull]

I'm also depressed that Mearls seems to imply that looking otuside a small niche hobby is a bad thing.

I didn't read his statements that way- what I took away from it is that it takes a couple iterations to figure out the right way to integrate some of the ideas from the MMO world into a tabletop game. Which doesn't cut off the possibility of looking to MMOs and other video games for D&D Next- it just means that the design team thinks that a different way of including those influences would be a better way to preserve continuity with older editions while adding some new ideas to the game.

The thrust of the argument seemed to be 'we learned a lot about how video games and tabletop games do and don't work together in 4e', but fans of 4e seem to be reading it in despair as Mearls admitting '4e was a mistake because video games'. I liked 4e, but I don't have any problems admitting that it borrowed ideas from Magic & MMOs, and that it wasn't necessarily the acme of D&D.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I'm a little surprised folks can look at the four-role structure of 4e and NOT see the MMO influence. Or the power-card structure of your character's abilities and NOT see them as well-suited for a digital environment.

Personally, I saw the "power card" structure of 4e as well-suited for a card environment, like the one that made WOTC rich in the first place, and hey look! They actually did print up cards for 4e.

Anyway, I think 4e took some good and even necessary steps in modernizing the design of D&D. 3e pretty clearly had a LOT carried over from the TSR days, for legacy appeal or just because WOTC really didn't have the time and resources to reinvent 100 pages of wizard/cleric spells on top of a bunch of new feats and skills. 4e was a definitive answer to the question: what happens when you try to build D&D from the ground up with a top-notch design team? Unlike the 70s, we now have a multi-billion-dollar industry out there centered around creating fun and addictive gameplay mechanics; it would be ludicrous to think a few creative guys 30 years ago nailed it down so perfectly we shouldn't look to the games industry for improvements.

But Mearls is also right that keeping tabletop gaming alive means highlighting the benefits of tabletop OVER video games. If I want to play a game with friends on my computer, Blizzard has got me covered; I'm playing D&D because I want to get my eyes off a monitor for a while, and because I want to focus on the free-form narrative elements that a video game can't do.

Ideally, 5e will combine these concerns: it'll be a smoothly-designed game that is simple to learn, compelling to play, and free enough that my imagination (rather than a spreadsheet) is always at the forefront of my playing.