Interesting. This has been on my mind for a looong time - that for the sake of balance, the game designers at Wizards are sacrificing imagination and the whimsical attitude that once permeated the game. I call it
slotted game design: the designers aim to mold gameplay into a highly standardised experience, where you encounter a given problem (the „slot”) and respond to it with an appropriate strategy (the „keycard”). This does not take into account the myriad ways a group of adventurers may respond to this same situation – it is a standard problem with a standard solution. The problems started when the Wizards designers, listening to the complaints of a few „fans”, identified unorthodox responses as a problem. Their solution was highly destructive to the game: removing „dangerous” free choice from the hands of both the player and the DM. It used to be, for example, that you would use the
command spell to give your opponents a simple order and they would fulfil it to the best of their ability. In 3.5, this was replaced with a set of five commands you can give the same opponents. In essence, all other choices have been stripped from the participants! To avoid a nitpicky debate, here is the text of the spell from the 3.0 and the 3.5 SRD:
3.0
3.5
Notice the wording - it is very specific but also very restrictive. It doesn’t allow for an interpretation. Five commands it is. What does this mean in practice? The change to the
command spell
punishes good players. Those who would invent new uses for a spell and use it effectively are prevented from doing so. The worst players - who would never know how to use this spell - are
rewarded by spelled-out options. This is
slotted game design in action and the outcome is increasing standardisation.
It is ironic that the same thing Gary Gygax was demonised for in the early 1980s is today held up by message board participants as the epitome of good design; even as infallible dogma. Gary could never have dreamed of succeeding in his attempt to make AD&D campaigns conform to a strict standard - and definitely not succeeding to this extent.
This begs the question: why does the Wizards of the Coast R&D team strive for so strict a balance and why does it intend to strip away out-of-box options from you? I call this phenomenon
the tyranny of fun. A ludicrous name for a ludicrous concept, but there you have it. The WotC designers are not bad people. I am sure, for example, that the folks working there don’t hate the game or anything, maybe they don’t even kick puppies on their way home. Maybe they help old ladies across the street. They
want you to have fun. Good, yes? Yes? No. The idea went wrong long ago and it shows no signs of getting better. When dealing with game philosophy, Wizards R&D doesn’t concentrate on thinking up stuff that makes playing fun anymore. That’s 1970s TSR thinking. Moreover, fun is inherently subjective and hard to quantify - all we can have is meaningless truisms like „the game is about killing critters and taking their stuff”, „getting loot and powering up”, „playing my character” or „sitting around and eating chips”. That’s not very helpful - it is all true, of course, but it doesn’t really tell you what to do to emphasise this in the game. So instead, they try to
removethings from the game which are
not fun. What isn’t fun? The things the fans complain about. But who complains? In short, the kind of people older rulebooks (and pardon my edition snobbery, but that’s just how I see it) warned us about. People whose characters got their swords destroyed by a rust monster and who threw a hissy fit over it. People whose characters died to a hold person spell and who wrote angry letters to Dragon magazine. People who didn’t have fun, whose entertainment was destroyed by this monster or that spell. Meet WotC’s focus groups, meet the people who are the target audience for future releases. The people 4e will be designed to accommodate.
Oh, I don’t have high hopes that these changes can be or will ever be „stopped”. ENWorld is ample proof of that. There comes a change like destroying the creative concept of the rust monster, and there is a chorus of approving posts praising this decision as if it was the second coming of Our Lord Sliced Bread. Because, after all, D&D before „it was evolved” was a horribly designed, bad, bad game people didn’t have fun with and which didn’t sell, right? Right? According to WotC R&D (heh, R&D... I wonder if EGG ever had an „R&D” department), people who didn’t like D&D before are the people D&D should be designed for in the future, because
that’s smart business. I am not making this up either.
There is, of course, the inevitable counter-reaction from reactionaries who don’t appreciate the changes and dare to suggest that hey, it was good the way it used to be, and there is no overwhelming need to „re-design it to be proper at last”. These rose-coloured glass-wearing fools even suggest that the design shouldn’t be used. Naive thinking. In fact, they will accomplish very little. The debate will flow back and forth for a while, and in the end, the sides will agree to meet halfway. And gee, you just conceded your position, dice-boy. You were suckered into accepting that gee, maybe they
are right. Maybe it really
was bad design and it were your pleasant experiences that were false.
The final response is always going to be to remove any edge, any colour, to remove randomness and introduce standardised fair play into the game which started out as highly arbitrary and whimsical - in short, fantastic and open to creative interpretation.
This response is the symptom of a design culture which would never be capable of designing a game like Dungeons &Dragons.
And that is a pity.
--Gabor „I am redesigning my dire weasel right now if you know what I mean, and I think you do” Lux
