The Stakes of Classifying Games as Rules Lite, Medium, or Heavy?

[Thomas Shey]

I find this very hard to believe. 4e, for its issues, is often touted as a very well designed game.

Exceptions test rules. 4e is particular well designed, because, in part, it goes in really knowing what it is. Most games are not nearly as good at that. As an example, the first set of Storyteller games had serious problems with that, because what they were trying to do and what they incentivized were significantly different things.

Unfortunately, its also designed for an audience significantly more specific than history suggests it was theoretically aimed at. That means for all its design virtues, it was badly flawed in contextual overall design.

You can, of course, argue that a design can't be all things to all people, but at least trying to do that is a much bigger issue for D&D than virtually any other game.

I know it's all the rage to paint DM's in this glowing light that they know how to design games for their groups. IME, it is very, very much not true. Virtually every single time I've experienced or read about DM's having mechanical issues at the table, it's almost universally a problem of their own making.

I've seen any number of problems created by GMs simply trying to use rules as written and discovering their were serious problems with the rules, with how well they meshed with the players involved, or both.

 

[Neonchameleon]

4e banged out what, a couple hundred page hardcover every month for 4 years. Something on that order.

It didn't feel like as much of a deluge for several reasons however:

• It was an actually slower release cycle than 3.0 or 3.5
• The DM side material was more DM side than in 3.X where almost everything had a few prestige classes and some feats and spells
• There weren't 20 Forgotten Realms books and 15 Eberron books (all with prestige classes and feats) and the players never got to go dumpster diving through the monster lists (which is how we got Pun-Pun)
• Because the players only got a limited number of options (and only one prestige class) there was less of a worry about everything interacting with everything else.

Which meant that the number of books that added rules elements was far lower. Now fluff is a different story and 4e's fluff and worldbuilding are IMO the strongest they've ever been.

Never minding Dungeon and Dragon Magazine as well. 4e had an insane release schedule. Granted, not as insane as 2e, but, certainly not far behind 3e. There were 43 hardcover 4e releases in around 5 years. That's not exactly significantly slower than 3e. And, well, the fact that there was substantial errata pretty much shows that the books were not being properly playtested before they got shoved out the door.

They weren't being playtested enough - but the errata was mostly polishing and there were no fundamental breakpoints fixed. More playtesting was needed, agreed. But it was mostly things above or below the curve rather than gamebreaking

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think there's an emormous amount of evidence that many if not most game designs are compromised on all kinds of levels, the commonest being designers thinking they understand the player and player group behaviors better, or at least most broadly than they do. A big part of this comes from insufficiently broad playtesting, or people convincing themselves that the parts of playtester feedback they don't like are outliers.

Many designs are compromised on all kinds of levels - but this doesn't mysteriously and miraculously give DMs who frequently have very little background in game design the ability to do things better than professionals can. Some can because they can judge their table - but your average game designer is a better game designer than your average GM.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Bluntly, and I know this will come out as insulting to game designers but its functionally true: the number of games that get really well tested is vanishingly small; its especially notable that the amount of blindtesting done by anyone is very small.

One of the big secrets to D&D's longevity is that it was in practice playtested more extensively and by more people than any other tabletop RPG I can think of. And, vitally, those players were wargamers who were trying to break the system rather than roleplayers trying to make it succeed. There are things I can say about how clunky D&D was - but the foundational playtesting of oD&D was better than any other RPG I'm aware of.

 

[Campbell]

I think there's an emormous amount of evidence that many if not most game designs are compromised on all kinds of levels, the commonest being designers thinking they understand the player and player group behaviors better, or at least most broadly than they do. A big part of this comes from insufficiently broad playtesting, or people convincing themselves that the parts of playtester feedback they don't like are outliers.

I think we have a strong difference of opinion here. I do not view it as the job of game designers to design to the way people are already playing. It's their job to design a compelling game. Not to conform to existing expectations. They may wish to if they want mainstream success, but it is absolutely not essential.

I mean we do not lay this sort of criticism on board game designers.

 

[Staffan]

I think you meant to write 2e and 3e there. I think 2e had an actively faster book tsunami than 3e - and 4e's was significantly slower than either (but still too fast) and also got substantial errata.

I think it depends on how you count. 2e definitely had more titles per year than 3e. But a lot of those were tiny adventures or relatively short sourcebooks, while 3e books were meatier and almost always hardbacks, so it's possible that 3e had more pages per year.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I mean we do not lay this sort of criticism on board game designers.

No. We just throw out boardgames that don't function as written. Sometimes physically. The standard of board game design is IME far higher than RPG design.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I think it depends on how you count. 2e definitely had more titles per year than 3e. But a lot of those were tiny adventures or relatively short sourcebooks, while 3e books were meatier and almost always hardbacks, so it's possible that 3e had more pages per year.

A big part of that is perception. The Complete Priest's Handbook looks a lot smaller than Complete Champion as one's floppy and one's hardback. But the Comlete series were all 128 page softcover Complete Champion was a 160 page hardcover. And the earlier 3.0 Defender's of the Faith was a 96 page softcover.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Being poorly designed =/= not fun. Lots of poorly designed things have fans. Having people play it does not make it well designed.

cue anything ever designed by Kevin Siembieda... lol. Pure rules chaos, basically. Often pretty much unworkable as-written. Very old-school 'this is just my notes on how I did it' basically.

 

[Staffan]

A big part of that is perception. The Complete Priest's Handbook looks a lot smaller than Complete Champion as one's floppy and one's hardback. But the Comlete series were all 128 page softcover Complete Champion was a 160 page hardcover. And the earlier 3.0 Defender's of the Faith was a 96 page softcover.

Sure, but you also had things like the Player's Secrets of ________ series for Birthright, which was a 32-pager on a particular country in the Birthright setting, and lots of 64-page sourcebooks all over the place. Those books add up.