D&D General The Beautiful Mess of 5e

[Charlaquin]

I consider roleplaying games to be an "ecology". A robust game engine is like building a successful self-sustaining biodome.

And by that you mean they’re… what, impossible to create?

 

[Yaarel]

And by that you mean they’re… what, impossible to create?

Well, planet Earth is a biodome albeit not a minimalist one.

 

[Horwath]

This is the issue with D&D, and likely any game that strives to be the 'kleenex' of RPGs.

There is no possible way to 'balance' the game around

1. True Casuals.
2. Total RPG Theatre Kids who dont care at all about being effective.
3. Min-Max, Multiclass Dipping, Rules Lawyer Power Gamers.

Now, those may not all be at the same table, but if the game allows for all 3 to exist, and more besides, no way can it possibly be 'balanced' for all 3.

Instead, it all falls on the DM to balance the table, and encounters, but then Wizards doesnt even give you the rules for monster creation...oops.

you work around number 3 only.

Those are ones who break the game.
if you handle 3rd crowd, other 2 fall in automatically.

 

[Chaltab]

• Fascinating to hear the comparison between M:TG's "strategy" and D&D's "lack of strategy." Mearls thinks this is a mistake, and posits that for fighting monsters, your strategy should be winning the action economy by focus-firing down monsters, and thus an AOE spell like Fireball doesn't help you that much. "Hypnotic Pattern is way worse than Fireball." This is another thing that might be worth blowing up into a whole thread, because I'm not 100% sure I'm on board with his strategy proposition...or if I am, I'm not sure that his proposed strategy is actually what we want (vs. just being what we wound up with).

I hope it didn't take him all 10 years to figure that one out.... Or rather, 25 if you count 3E having a similar meta with different numbers.

I agree that they aren’t games, but I don’t think they’re activities either. RPGs are game creation engines. You can use those engines to create games, or to create non-game activities, but on their own they’re not either.

I don't think I know what this means.

 

[Charlaquin]

Well, planet Earth is a biodome albeit not a minimalist one.

It’s also the only known functional self-sustaining one in the universe.

 

[Charlaquin]

II don't think I know what this means.

Well, there’s no one universally accepted definition of a game, but most people who study game design generally agree on a few common features of games. Most commonly agreed upon are a goal or objective, a structure, rules or restrictions, and an uncertain outcome. Also very common to definitions is a lack of real-world relevance (as such relevance might make it more akin to a test), and sometimes a specific requirement that it be engaged in for the purpose of recreation or entertainment.

What Mike Mearls is getting at by saying RPGs are activities rather than games, is that they typically lack a built-in goal. Most RPG rulebooks acknowledge this in their “how to play” sections, pointing out that unlike a typical game, the RPG in question doesn’t have an objective, other than something more nebulous like “to have fun” or “to create an engaging story,” or something along those lines. That isn’t really a goal in the sense that people looking to define “game” are talking about. So it might be more accurate to describe them as “collaborative storytelling activities” or something like that.

Where I differ is that I don’t think of RPGs as complete activities on their own. You don’t really play RPGs by themselves like you play board games. You play scenarios, such as adventures or campaigns. Sometimes these scenarios are created by a specific participant such as a Game Master, while other times you generate the scenario collaboratively as you’re playing through it. But, that’s what I mean when I say they are game creation engines. They provide the structure and rules, while the scenario, whether designated by a module, invented by one or more players, or generated procedurally, provides the objective. The randomized elements within the rules insure an uncertain outcome.

Granted, you don’t need a specific objective to play an RPG. You absolutely can just play with a nebulous goal like “having fun” or “creating an engaging story.” In that case, you are creating and playing an activity rather than a game. Or you can create a scenario with a more explicit goal like “slay the dragon” and create a game. But either way, the RPG is not the game or activity per se; it is the engine for creating the game or activity.

As an analogy, you wouldn’t call a deck of playing cards a game. Poker is a game. Old Maid is a game. Solitaire is a game. The cards are the engine, on which many, many games have been built and can be run. You could also use playing cards to create some kind of non-game activity. Building a house of cards has a goal but no actual rules. You could use them for fortune telling, which often has something that could be construed as rules, but no real goal, beyond a nebulous “predict the future.” In any of these cases, the cards aren’t the game or the activity, they’re the engine. I think RPGs are like playing cards in that way.