The Quality of Gaming Products Today

[Water Bob]

This could easily turn into a nasty opinon war, and I'm not looking for that. This is a serious question. I'm interested at the opinions of the gaming community as a whole.

My observation is that, in this age of anybody-can-produce-products-for-your-favorite-RPG, many gaming products are not well thought out and hardly playtested.

Back in the day, if a product game from the original publisher, you could probably bank on the quality being there. If the product came from a third party, then it was hit and miss whether the product was any good.

Of course, this is all very subjective.

Take the 3.x D&D game. That's a pretty well thought out and game tested game. Sure, you might have some problems with certain aspects of the game--maybe even a rule or two. But, on the whold the game feels "solid" and well designed.

I can't say that for a lot of third party material I've seen. Heck, even from a semi-big publisher like Mongoose. Many of you know I play the Conan RPG, and I think the Core Rules are fantastic--a great variation on standard 3.5 D&D.

But, if you look at some of the secondary books, it would blow your mind. For example, The Conan RPG Warrior's Companion, by Bryan Steele, has a pretty neat looking optional rule for using permanent damage in the game. I say it's "pretty neat", until you dig into it and see that one of the ways to use the Permanent Damage Chart is when a weapon scores maximum damage on damage dice. For example, a broadsword (in Conan) does 1d10 damage. A dagger does 1d4 damage. If, when using the broadsword, a 10 shows up on the damage die, then the Permanent Damage chart is consulted. Same thing if the dagger shows a 4 on its d4 damage throw.

I bet you've already caught what's wrong with that. A bigger, larger, more powerful weapon, the broadsword, has a chance at permanent damage 10% of the time a successful strike is made while the dagger will go to the chart over twice as often, 25% of the time the dagger hits.

Really? They didn't think about these rules when they were writing them? They didn't playtest them?





In my Cimmeria sourcebook, there are some sample Cimmerian NPCs. But, good luck using the rules trying to duplicate those exact same examples. You can't.

C'mon! This is basic!



Even today, I e-mailed one of the prolific writers of the Conan RPG to ask him a question about the Conan Rules on trapmaking out in the wilderness. There's a couple of pages devoted to it in one of the supplemental books, but it's not complete. I'm wondering if a paragraph or two got mistakenly chopped by the editor for length.

Well, when I e-mailed the guy (and I love a lot of his work), he told me that he couldn't remember what he did when he wrote that section of the book. It could have been anything--something tweaked from another d20 game.

Hmm...




And, I think that is the root of this perceived problem. Many game companies hire fans to write books for them. I've seen it happen with most of the Mongoose lines. I know it used to happen with some GURPS books. With Traveller 2300, the same thing.

Heck, I'm just as qualified to write many of these books as the original authors. It's like some of the publishing companies are just handing the writing duties over to GMs who've played RPGs for a long time, then edit and publish what's turned in.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't any good 3rd party supplements out there. Because, I know there is some good 3rd party stuff. I own some of it.

But, I hate it when I get a book and it just feels like another GM's rantings rather than a well-written sourcebook written by a professional game designer.

Does anybody understand what I'm saying?

Or, am I just ranting here?

 

[Ramen]

Generally the more rules you put into a game the more things you have that can can get overlooked or would interact in strange ways. I couldn't assume that play testers would be even be able to touch all the rules of a moderately complex game like D&D. That and final editing can mess certain aspects up through cutting word count or layout needs.

Of course simple systems are less susceptible to problems like that but some gamers don't prefer simple systems. The real test of system stability will never be play testing. It will always be actual play after the product gets into the hands of the gamers themselves. I guess the best you can hope for is that a more complex system is about 80% playable out of the box.

Its really been that way since the beginning. Looking back at my collection of games I can point out many many good games and systems but each has flaws. Add into that player preference in rule types it becomes even harder to build a system that won't generate complaints.

I think the best solution to problems like these is to do it the old fashioned way. Steal systems you like from other games and use them, Make something up, or go to a forum and ask how others would do it.

 

[trancejeremy]

I don't think this is anything new though.

Going back to 1e, the quality of Unearthed Arcana was pretty atrocious, all in all, and that was basically simply reprints of Dragon magazine articles.

2e's splatbooks were full of unbalanced stuff. So was 3e's, and poor editing, too. Remember that one prestige class (I think for a halfling) that didn't have a BAB? And I think that first WOTC insisted "Oh, we meant that"

I don't actually think the problem is with fan writers, I think the problem is that writers are often hired simply because they are writers, that is, they have a proven ability to write on a deadline, not out of ability. And that because of the deadline, there simply isn't enough time to properly playtest stuff.

 

[Argyle King]

To some extent I would agree. There are more than a few D&D 4E books I have which are quite simply just missing content. I can tell it is missing because one page will say to reference a certain page to find out how something works, so then I turn the page only to find that the content is not there. In some cases it was a simple typo, and the wrong page was given. In others, the material was nowhere to be found in the book.

I'm not sure if I feel it's a problem born of modern times. I think in the case of certain companies it may well be. However, I also own a "Heros Unlimited" book which completely lacks an index. While I suppose an index is not necessarily required in a rpg book, I sure miss having one when it comes time to look something up.

On the other end of the spectrum, I personally feel that the majority of the GURPS 4th Edition books I've purchased since playing the game are well made and put together very well. They are not always perfect; Low-Tech had an issue in which you could not see what the note was for a double shield (which I believe says you can use the shield with hook techniques,) but my overall opinion is that the books (and pdfs too) are put together very well.

If we're speaking rules, I'll again have to go back to my Heroes Unlimited book. While I've had a lot of fun with the game, I'm still not entirely sure how some of the rules are intended to work. I'm not even saying that they are bad rules; I just have a hard time picking up on what the designer's intent was behind some of them.

Pre-errata D&D 4E orb wizards had some fairly obvious problems which came to light during the first few sessions I played the game. With saves being based on a flat d20 roll without modifiers, giving someone an ability to stack penalties (yes, you can get bonuses, but they are often typed and don't stack) on someone's save becomes game breaking. It's been modified to work differently since then, but I often asked myself if I felt the class had been tested a lot prior to the release of the game. A lot of the game is very well made, but the parts which aren't were often pretty obvious early on.

I'm undecided on if I feel it's a sign of the times or if product quality simply varies among companies. In my head, I lean toward the idea that some companies have pushed things out the door they wouldn't have before because they know people will buy pretty much whatever they stamp their name on, but I caution myself against making a blanket statement about. I'm unsure if the idea I have is right or if it's simply my perception.

To end on a high note, I recently started playing Pathfinder, and I feel the Beginner's Box was pretty good. Most of the adventures seem to be well written as well. A few of 3.5's problems still lurk around the corner, but that's to be somewhat expected from a game which is so heavily based on it.

 

[Water Bob]

I'm not just talking about rushed-to-print splat books. It seems to me that the quality has dropped. More often, in the past, I'd buy a book and be tickled pink. Too often today, I see some supplemental book, and it seems nothing more than GM Home Brew material.

I think, in the past, it was the employees of the publishers, who knew the game (generic game) more than intimately, writing the supplements for the game. Today, it seems, more and more, it's just Joe Blow GM who only thinks he knows the game system as well as the game's designers.

There seems to be a lot of outsourcing and niche markets for independents. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Sometimes it's not.

Maybe what I'm seeing is the shear growth in volumn of books available, now with the internet and pdf publishing. Every game has good and bad supplements. When the output grows, it stands to reason that the "bad" portion of books grow also.

 

[Yora]

When I compare more recent releases to older ones, quality seems to have dramatically improved. I don't know that many older games, but most times I take a look at supposed beloved classics, I am always wondering how anyone could ever have thought that it was good.

 

[Hal G]

As a former developer and now writer, in any game at any time things get missed or screwed up. You send in an errata sheet and editor does not see it, you rename a chart and it goes in wrong section at layout, if we made sure there were no errors and each tweak got a long, multiple group playtest you would never see that book.

Now saying that and screwing up myself, it gets you (the reader) as angry as it gets me, or buying a bad set of books makes me irritated as well (looking at you 3.0 splatbooks /spit)

We do the best we can, we have deadlines and we try and hit them, so I think over time books have not gotten better or worse, the community is better, stronger and able to go over books with a fine tooth comb and discuss it so others can go "ahhhhhhh", where back in the day you would simply look at your fellow games and state this book makes no sense, it will not be used and move on.

 

[Morrus]

I'm guessing from your example that by "back in the day" you mean a few years ago, rather than 20 years ago?

I haven't seen the product in question, but definitely during the "d20 glut" there were hundreds and hundreds of third-party products, and anyone with access to a copy of MS Word was releasing stuff. Some of that was very good, some of it was very bad.

These days it seems - at least to me - that quality has improved. Not just the writing itself, but also production values. Some of those small third party start-ups are now producing amazing stuff; and some (look at Paizo, Green Ronin) are producing top-tier quality games and have carved out their own direction.

 

[pauljathome]

My observation is that, in this age of anybody-can-produce-products-for-your-favorite-RPG, many gaming products are not well thought out and hardly playtested.
?

I'm surprised that nobody else has yet done this.

Sturgeon's Law : "ninety percent of everything is crap".

On a slightly more serious note there have been quality problems as far back as RPGs exist (most definitely including the original white box set). Some of them are pretty much unavoidable in what is a tiny hobby niche market where the vast majority of authors are in it for the love of the hobby and most publishers are operating on a shoestring budget.

I think that the worst problems were in the 3.0 days with the massive glut of product. While there were some definite gems there was a LOT of crap being published and getting through the distribution chain. I'm seeing a lot less of that now.

 

[S'mon]

I think there's a lot more crud on the market post-2000 than pre-2000. In general, as printing & publishing has got easier, the proportion of drek has tended to increase. OTOH, a lot of good stuff is distributed for free now.

My only real experience of quality decline was a campaign I ran a few years ago, I started with TSR Basic adventures from ca 1980-3 like Rahasia and Horror on the Hill, then went on to Goodman DCC adventures from ca 2003-5 at higher levels. I soon noticed that the TSR adventures had a huge amount of effort put into their 32 pages, whereas the Goodman ones seemed thrown together in an afternoon and often didn't bother with stuff as basic as room descriptions. OTOH in inflation-adjusted dollars the TSR adventures originally cost around 3 times as much.