What does well designed mean?

[JVisgaitis]

This is a pretty subjective question, but here's the criteria we use when designing products:

1. Is the product applicable for a wide audience and is it easy to use without doing a lot of prep work? (Granted a focused product isn't poorly designed, but I said its subjective and these are my guidelines... )

2. Are the mechanics solid and do they conform well to the existing ruleset? (Unbalanced play kills a product for novice DMs and Players, so this is really important to me).

3. Does the product have kick @$$ art? (Again, bad art doesn't necessarily mean a bad product, but I prefer to have good art and if I don't, I'd rather art that doesn't distract me from reading the book.)

4. Most importantly, is it fun? (A sourcebook with a wide audience, solid mechanics, and great art doesn't mean anything if it isn't fun.)

 

[ThirdWizard]

ThirdWizard, that was exactly the point I was making - from subjective data we can learn objective truths.

Dismissing subjective opinions was Faraer's deal, not mine.

I meant to be responding to Faraer, not you. Sorry about that.

 

[Hussar]

The OP needs to explain his goal in trying to determine the quality of design of an adventure. Because there can be a wide variety of goals here, we are getting a wide range of answers that perhaps do not fit the question based on his original assumptions.

That would be me.

I agree 100%. Whether or not something is well designed is going to depend very heavily on the goals of the designer. In the KotB discussion, I judged KotB based on my own view of what a good design should be, which I stated back in the first post. However, jmucchiello, you are entirely right.

The goals of the product should be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not it is well designed. I suppose, in addition to that, those goals should be explicit to anyone who looks at that product. If it is well designed, the goal of that design should be obvious to anyone. Judged in that light, KotB succeeds admirably - designed as an introductory module and a guideline for new DM's to create their own adventures - it fufills that goal rather well.

Thanks. That was rather eye-opening. Execution and design are not necessarily the same thing. Although both need to be good in order for the product to be good IMO. The best designed adventure in the world would be crap if the execution is terrible.

Could good execution save poor design?

 

[jmucchiello]

The best designed adventure in the world would be crap if the execution is terrible.

Could good execution save poor design?

I don't know about the first sentence. If you turned it into a question similar to the second sentence, I'd say maybe. Well-designed poorly executed products would be of the kind where you can mine it for good ideas but would never use it "as is". OTOH, a poor design, well executed would probably have the feel of good "eye candy". You know it isn't good, but handouts and production values make you want to run it anyway. And a good DM could add to such a poor design such that he gets value out of the execution.

But in both cases, there is work for the DM above and beyond what he should need to do to make use of the end product.

 

[buzz]

to me, well designed means people enjoy using it...

2. In play, it noticeably improves the experience. We're having more fun because of the product's presence.

It'd be nice, though, if there was a way to discern quality before actually putting the product to use. Unfortunately, it's a (possibly inherent) stumbling block with RPG products that you only really grok them after putting them to work. Granted, I suppose this is true of a lot of "tools".

The (imperfect) analogy that leaps to my mind is guitar. I've been playing for about twenty years now, and I can pretty quickly assess craftsmanship. I may not be able to tell 100% how a particular guitar's tonal quality will work in different venues or in a band context, but I can pick the thing up, play it for a few minutes, and tell whether it's worth buying in general.

The problem is that act of "test driving" the guitar is pretty much the same as its intended use. Whether I'm practicing or playing with a band, I will be fretting and picking strings.

With an RPG product, the equivalent "test drive" is literally gathering players and playing a game with it. Otherwise, all I can do is read it and assess it based on my gaming experience. It's entirely possible that I'll like or dislike it in theory, for whatever reason, but thoroughly enjoy—or hate—it in actual play.

Tangent: I've made a point of late to playtest events I run for Gamedays. I am constantly surprised how often my expectations go out the window once the "rubber meets the road," as it were, not to mention how different groups of players will react to the same event.

So, how does one identify—in the design process or as a consumer of the end product—what will be enjoyed and will improve the play experience?

 

[buzz]

OTOH, a poor design, well executed would probably have the feel of good "eye candy". You know it isn't good, but handouts and production values make you want to run it anyway. And a good DM could add to such a poor design such that he gets value out of the execution.

But in both cases, there is work for the DM above and beyond what he should need to do to make use of the end product.

Yep. IMO, this would not be a good product.

I think that gamers are generally so used to folding, spindling, and dodgering RPG products in the process of using them that the bar for design tends to be set very low. E.g., I read a review recently where the product was given a pretty decent score, despite the fact that the reviewer, within the review, listed a whole set of tweaks he felt he'd have to implement in order to make the game something he would want to play. I questioned him about this, and the disconnect was kind of interesting; putting this sort of work into a product he paid money for was just a no-brainer, as far as he was concerned.

Lately, I've been finding that whole attitude (one I've shared, too) just nuts.

 

[Faraer]

Dismissing subjective opinions was Faraer's deal, not mine.

I love subjective opinions, I just think it muddies discourse to frame them as objective 'good design'.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I love subjective opinions, I just think it muddies discourse to frame them as objective 'good design'.

I'll give you an example. I can read a poem and tell you if, by contemporary standards, it is a good poem or not. This has nothing at all to do with whether I like the poem or not. Nothing at all! While most people would read the poem subjectively and say whether it is good or note based on whether or not they liked it, I don't care about such things. I can tell you whether it is objectively good or not.

The same should be true of modules. There could easily be some kind of academic scale on which to measure them, regardless of whether or not it looks fun or not and regardless of whether you or I would enjoy it or not.

 

[buzz]

The same should be true of modules. There could easily be some kind of academic scale on which to measure them, regardless of whether or not it looks fun or not and regardless of whether you or I would enjoy it or not.

There's enough math in D&D that I think you could do some objective analysis. E.g., examining the ELs and comparing the treasure to the wealth-by-level guidelines. You could probably also gauge whether certain classes will have ease/difficulty with the encounters (i.e., are any classes not going to be able to "strut their stuff"), and whether the encounters are sequenced in such a way that there's too much/too little tax on the party's resources.

And there's always obvious stuff, like getting numbers wrong, or rules being ignored. The Game Mechanics' d20 design seminar at GenCon last year gave an exmaple of a module that listed some ridiculous Spot DC needed to perceive some NPC, which, of course, is bogus; Spot is an opposed check in a situation like this.

 

[Faraer]

I think artistic orthodoxies like the one you refer to are similarly not objective, don't represent the views of more than a few academics, and are usually poisonous to discussion and artistic creation. What use do you think an analysis of a work disconnected from the experience of it has?