The Elegance of d20 and D&D

[Mishihari Lord]

IMO D&D isn't elegant. Morgan gave a bunch of good reasons, but for me I think of it more in terms of the mathematical definition - simple and powerful.

Does it make a difference? Yes and no. Elegant systems are much easier to learn, because they accomplish a wide variety of tasks very well with just a few simple rules (that's the definition). If you already have the PHB and DMG memorized, elegance doesn't make a bit of difference. That's why on a board like this you'll hear a lot of "Elegance? who cares?!" People who care enough about D&D to spend time on a message board are almost all going to be knowledgable about the rules. This also explains why many other games strive to be elegant: D&D has such a good thing going for it in terms of brand equity and network externalities that if someone is going to be lured into trying a different sytem, it had better be easy to learn. IMO it would be a very good thing for D&D rules to be more elegant. An easy to learn system combined with the power of the D&D brand could bring a lot of new people into the hobby.

After reading mearls' post, I stand corrected in that there are other advantages to elegant systems besides just in learning them. However, I still believe that ease of learning the system is the biggest advantage.

 

[SteveC]

Here's a suggestion for anyone who believes D20 is not an elegant system: talk about some systems that you think are eloquent and what makes them so.

As I wrote earlier, a lot of the systems you usually see described as elegant are basically action resolution mechanics with character description added in. The assumption of these games is that the GM will use the resolution to base all of his decisions on and use fiat for everything else. If that is your definition, I will have to disagree, but it remains a perfectly valid definition.

I'll give an example of what I consider to be an elegant rule system: Heroquest. Single die resolution for any task, free-form character descriptions, rules that scale from normal humans to superman.

Heroquest is, to my mind, an elegant system. And yet I still find that I don't like it very much, because the elegant mechanics just don't have any flavor, and playing the game seems to remind me very much like "dicing with death" from the old Talisman board game.

So the moral, to my mind, is that even though elegant has a very strong and positive real world connotation, it doesn't amount to bupkiss in the realm or RPGs.

Could D&D be redesigned in such a way as to make it more elegant and still keep it's flavor and options? To me, that's a much more interesting question, one which I would answer "yes" to.

Editted because I should not post late at night...

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I guess an eloquent system must be one that "speaks for itself..."

 

[Turjan]

I guess an eloquent system must be one that "speaks for itself..."

Perhaps, it's even talkative. Just don't try to get a word in between its blathering.

 

[Hussar]

But elegant == simple. It's a necessary, not a sufficient condition. For example, you can't get much simpler than hit points, but I wouldn't say they're elegant.

I sort of agree with this statement. Sure elegent should be simple. But, the question then becomes, how simple? Simple to learn? Simple enough to get the job done?

In other words, there is a goal of the rules. The rules are there to determine the outcomes of actions. Any rule must acheive that goal before any concept of elegance can even come into the picture.

Hit points are actually a pretty elegant answer IF all you need to know how much punishment a character can take before dying. It's entirely abstract.

However, if the goal is some sort of nod towards realism, then HP's are not getting the job done. A new system is needed such as a wounds/vitality system.

The complexity of a rule will always be dictated by the goal of those rules. Elegance will be measured on two scales - getting the job done and getting the job done better than any other means.

 

[jmucchiello]

For example, there are lots and lots of feats in D&D, but the concept of a feat (an exceptions based rule attached to a character) is elegant. If you play a wizard, you never need to understand how Cleave works. Even the DM doesn't need to understand it, unless a monster has it. Cleave is a wonderfully elegant feat, because it's so simple yet so powerful: Once per round if you drop an opponent, you make another attack. Those 12 words cover the entire sum of the feat, and it has an exciting, important impact on the game.

Except that feats are some of the most ineligent parts of the system. Yes, the idea of feats being exceptions to a rule sounds elegant. But feats also need to be balanced against one another and doing this is very hit or miss in the rules. This is because not all rules are equal and thus rules exceptions cannot be equal.

I feel like I'm talking in circles so let me get to a concrete example:

Improved Disarm: You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when you attempt to disarm an opponent, nor does the opponent have a chance to disarm you. You also gain a +4 bonus on the opposed attack roll you make to disarm your opponent.
Improved Grapple: You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when you make a touch attack to start a grapple. You also gain a +4 bonus on all grapple checks, regardless of whether you started the grapple.
Improved Sunder: When you strike at an object held or carried by an opponent (such as a weapon or shield), you do not provoke an attack of opportunity. You also gain a +4 bonus on any attack roll made to attack an object held or carried by another character.
Improved Trip: You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when you attempt to trip an opponent while you are unarmed. You also gain a +4 bonus on your Strength check to trip your opponent.

These four feats are extremely similar and yet the differ in unpredictable ways. All of them remove the chance for an attack of opportunity. But some improve a Strength check and some improve your attack roll. And one (disarm) changes the options available to your oppenent when you fail. I don't see how this can be called elegance. Every feat is an exception to the rules. By definition (which I admit I haven't done) elegance of rules involves a lack of exceptions.

So to me, all that stuff ties into my definition of elegance. As a designer and developer, my goal is to translate as many seconds of gaming as possible into fun seconds. I think of D&D as a machine that you feed your free time into. Some percentage of that free time becomes fun. I want that percentage to hit 100.

This does not translate well with your assertion that complexity away from the game is okay. If leveling up is a chore that must be done away from the gaming table, that is free time I must spend slogging away at inelegant subsystems. This must reduce fun overall. As long as complexity and inelegance are permitted in any section of the rules, you will never reach 100%.

Elegance and fun are probably orthogonal. In my own post above (which I see has been sigged. Cool, my first sigging I think), I point out that people do not oogle elegant game designs while experiencing them. So, it is not a crime for D&D to have inelegant parts and it is not necessarily that inelegance that inhibits fun. Calling D&D's inelegant bad is rediculous. The OP encountered someone using its inelegance as an indictment against the system and I say 30 years of people coming back to it again and again regardless of its pulchritude (or lack thereof) is a pretty good reason to ignore such an indictment.

 

[mearls]

But elegant == simple. It's a necessary, not a sufficient condition. For example, you can't get much simpler than hit points, but I wouldn't say they're elegant.

Elegant does not mean simple. A wristwatch is an elegant device, yet it is far from simple.

A computer program can be elegant, though it consists of millions of lines of code.

Interface and mechanics are two very different things. The interface for a system can be simple and easy to use, but the mechanics, methods, and devices behind it can be incredibly complicated.

 

[Wik]

My nomination for "elegant" system is the d6 system (no surprise there). Everything runs off the same mechanic, so that an attack roll is the same as a skill check is the same as taking damage is the same as casting a spell is the same as causing damage. There are rules for making extra actions in your turn, which allow for more skilled characters to perform more actions in a round, while also allowing lower-powered characters a chance to be action heroes. While the game has a few confusions (the damage code vs. Strength check for damage resolution requires a table to be referenced, which I don't like, and there are two seperate systems for improving your die rolls), I would say that the game is both simple to learn and surprisingly complex.

 

[Wik]

Oh, and I don't see the big problem with D&D feats. I think mearls is pretty much onto the number, here - you don't need to know what they do until you have one. And being able to break the rule in one way or another thanks to your feats is a cool feature... I like it. However, I don't like how D&D has made certain feats almost necessary to take (trying being a fighter without Power attack, for example). I'm also not a big fan of what feats can lead into - power builds like you wouldn't believe.

But then, I've adopted the d6 strategy for things like this: if you take abilities that mix too well and seem cheap and unbalanced, the GM has the final authority to prevent you from taking them, and getting nothing in return. So, if you take a Flaw that gives you a -2 penalty to your strength for damage purposes, and then take a feat that allows you to use your dex bonus for weapon damage, I say "Hey, you keep the flaw, but instead of that feat, you get NOTHING, buddy".

It works, and it keeps the group a lot more honest. But I'm rambling.

 

[mearls]

Elegance and fun are probably orthogonal. In my own post above (which I see has been sigged. Cool, my first sigging I think), I point out that people do not oogle elegant game designs while experiencing them.

I completely disagree with this. The best games have mechanics that make you stop and think, "Damn, that's a cool rule."

Last night, I played a card game called Coloretto for the first time. There were at least three moments where players noticed a strategy or move that nobody had picked up yet, and each time they used it everyone at the table had a better understanding of and appreciation for the rules.

Every time that a D&D player gets to use Cleave, he's happy that he has those rules. Every time someone makes an attack against impossible odds and rolls that 20, they're exulting in the cool possibilities inherent in the rules. The most elegant rules are those that are so compelling that we forget they're rules and assume they're just cool parts of the game.

As for feats, the structure of feats is very elegant. That doesn't mean that every specific feat is elegant. I don't think that anyone understood how many feats there would be in the game. At the end of the first year of 3.0, there were maybe 150 official feats in all of the supplements. There wasn't a sense that feats had to be simple.

I think that's changing. I think that in today's environment, feats need to be shorter, simpler, and easier to use. I agree that those feats are difficult to use and learn, but I think the solution is to build a better design model for feats.

Imagine this world:

Improved Disarm I: You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when attempting to disarm a foe.
Improved Disarm II: When you attempt to disarm a foe, your opponent does not have the chance to disarm you.
Improved Disarm III: You gain a +4 bonus on all disarm attempts.

IMO, that's a much more elegant structure. Each rule is its own thing, allowing you to vary the pattern between different attack types more easily. You don't hit three exceptions to your attack unless you spend lots of feats for it. Disarm only becomes complex, or at least wordier, if you want to spend a lot of your PC's "complexity budget" on disarming people.

Best of all, feats II and III have reasonable BAB requirements, beginners can ease slowly into the rules.

Elegance doesn't have anything to do with exceptions-based mechanics. Magic is an incredibly elegant game, and it's entirely built on exceptions. If anything, exceptions make a game much easier to learn. A DM or player need only learn the exceptions that apply to the monsters he runs or the character he builds.