D&D 5E What is Quality?

[EzekielRaiden]

See the CR system of 4E and now PF2 really doesnt work for me. Its too predictable, too tightly wound. I prefer the more loose and ambiguous 3E/PF1/5E system. I can recognize its not a good quality design, but its one that I value. Which is the constant balance that designers face when creating products.

This is one of the sentiments I have never understood.

It is always possible to add more ambiguity. It is difficult, if not impossible, to remove baked-in ambiguity. Why is it better to cater to you, who can always add the ambiguity you desire, than it is to cater to those who want rigor and clarity? A clear picture can always be blurred. A blurred picture cannot be made clear again, that is kind of the point of blurring it.

 

[Mort]

I would in fact call this an objective decrease in quality, making the game more opaque, more involved to use, because a degree of "clunky" engagement, where you must carefully parse the whole text of (say) a particular spell in order to use it correctly, is in fact desirable to many existing players. It is less desirable to  new players, but 5e was always about targeting lapsed fans well enough to keep things going. New players were always a secondary concern. If it had been meant for new players specifically, I can guarantee the early levelling experience would have been quite a bit different.

So here's a question - just to muddy the waters

Is it really an "objective decrease in quality" if a large % of people are more satisfied and value it more than the previous way of writing?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Now this? You won't hear me argue about any of this.

4e aimed to be maximally transparent. I'm fairly sure Heinsoo and the other designers thought that if the rules were clear and clean, no muss no fuss, that they would be giving people what they wanted, rules that "fall away" or "get out of the way" because there would be no difficulty in seeing how they worked. As soon as you knew what a certain keyword meant, you would know what it meant everywhere. Learn the basic lingo, and everything else falls into place. This would free players and DMs to tell the stories they liked, unburdened by cumbersome verbiage that many of them would have ignored anyway.

This proved incorrect. Many players disliked the layout and presentation, seeing it as sterile and formulaic. Even though spells have always been formulaic, this made their formulaic nature seemingly too obvious. Despite flowery natural language being objectively more difficult to parse (consider the many complaints in ye olden dayse about how difficult it was to use 3e monster star locks), players valued the texture and implicit weight of that presentation, even if they never actually intended to use even a single sentence of it (whether due to not wanting that specific item/spell/etc., using a homebrew world where such details would be overridden, using house-rules that modified things too far, etc.)

I would in fact call this an objective decrease in quality, making the game more opaque, more involved to use, because a degree of "clunky" engagement, where you must carefully parse the whole text of (say) a particular spell in order to use it correctly, is in fact desirable to many existing players. It is less desirable to  new players, but 5e was always about targeting lapsed fans well enough to keep things going. New players were always a secondary concern. If it had been meant for new players specifically, I can guarantee the early levelling experience would have been quite a bit different.

It may have been decrease in quality of clarity, but probably increase in quality of evocativeness. And it turns out that the player base appreciates the latter more. This is really the issue with this 'quality' thing. People discount the quality of things that are not important to them.

 

[James Gasik]

Sounds quite reasonable to me. Just as how I have argued that one cannot reason from "X is popular, therefore every individual component of X is popular," there is the reverse problem: we may not know which specific components are vital to the experience and which are optional or even detrimental to it. This, unfortunately, leads many designers (not just in TTRPGs) to "play it safe," failing to critically examine their work because it's risky to make changes. You see this sort of thing a lot in video games. When a particular game becomes very popular, it can actually ossify not just itself but its whole genre. World of Warcraft is a good example here for its genre (MMORPGs), a hegemony and reluctance to change that has dealt the game some harsh lessons recently, but another is Master of Orion, a series that casts a long, long shadow over the space 4X genre and which even the MoO games themselves (specifically MoO3 and the recent remake) have struggled to step out of.

It is a difficult thing to address flaws in a system. There are reasons Paizo gave it a decade with the slightly tweaked 3.5e they were running, and "because our customers ask for it" isn't the only one.

Hence why I have tried to make a clear distinction between bad design (which, as I've said, more or less means design that has to be replaced because it just doesn't work as is) and weak design (which does still function, but falls significantly short of what it could achieve if iterated upon, revised, or augmented by some other thing). 5e has very little outright bad design (IMO, the only part of it that is truly bad is the CR system because it's got exactly the same problems as 3e's CR system had.) But it has a lot of weak design, whether in the form of trying to serve conflicting goals with a single structure simultaneously, or setting a very reasonable design goal and then falling quite a bit short. And I lay much of the blame for its weak design elements on the amount of wasted time and silly choices made during the playtest period.

I never understood why they couldn't improve on Master of Orion 2. Such an amazing game.

 

[James Gasik]

Now this? You won't hear me argue about any of this.

4e aimed to be maximally transparent. I'm fairly sure Heinsoo and the other designers thought that if the rules were clear and clean, no muss no fuss, that they would be giving people what they wanted, rules that "fall away" or "get out of the way" because there would be no difficulty in seeing how they worked. As soon as you knew what a certain keyword meant, you would know what it meant everywhere. Learn the basic lingo, and everything else falls into place. This would free players and DMs to tell the stories they liked, unburdened by cumbersome verbiage that many of them would have ignored anyway.

This proved incorrect. Many players disliked the layout and presentation, seeing it as sterile and formulaic. Even though spells have always been formulaic, this made their formulaic nature seemingly too obvious. Despite flowery natural language being objectively more difficult to parse (consider the many complaints in ye olden dayse about how difficult it was to use 3e monster star locks), players valued the texture and implicit weight of that presentation, even if they never actually intended to use even a single sentence of it (whether due to not wanting that specific item/spell/etc., using a homebrew world where such details would be overridden, using house-rules that modified things too far, etc.)

I would in fact call this an objective decrease in quality, making the game more opaque, more involved to use, because a degree of "clunky" engagement, where you must carefully parse the whole text of (say) a particular spell in order to use it correctly, is in fact desirable to many existing players. It is less desirable to  new players, but 5e was always about targeting lapsed fans well enough to keep things going. New players were always a secondary concern. If it had been meant for new players specifically, I can guarantee the early levelling experience would have been quite a bit different.

I must be weird, I loved the transparency. Even today, I try to be as transparent with my players about what's going on and how things work (such as monster abilities), because I feel if you have information, you can make informed decisions about what your character will do. If I make a houserule, I'll include a short dissertation about what the problem I'm trying to solve is. I tell people monster AC's and roll openly so they can figure out what the attack bonuses or save bonuses are if they want.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So here's a question - just to muddy the waters

Is it really an "objective decrease in quality" if a large % of people are more satisfied and value it more than the previous way of writing?

Yes. Because popularity does not equal quality. That's one of the core points of the thread.

Digital watches are superior to pure analog watches in most respects: cheaper, easier to use, easier to read, easier to make, almost always more accurate, etc. I still love mechanical watches, particularly pocketwatches which let you see parts of the movement artfully displayed. I find them beautiful, even mesmerizing. But if the point of the watch is to perform the function of accurately and unambiguously telling the time, reliably, with minimal maintenance or replacement cost, then digital watches are clearly superior to mechanical watches, full stop.

It may have been decrease in quality of clarity, but probably increase in quality of evocativeness. And it turns out that the player base appreciates the latter more. This is really the issue with this 'quality' thing. People discount the quality of things that are not important to them.

My point was more that "evocativeness" didn't HAVE to come at the cost of sacrificing a lot of clarity. 5e took the easy way out, going back to the old way of doing things. And we are now seeing that they're not entirely happy about that choice, what with things like the changes to monster stat blocks to make them more clear and utilitarian even if that might come at a slight cost to "evocativeness."

I never understood why they couldn't improve on Master of Orion 2. Such an amazing game.

Video game fans often demand the paradoxical mix of "change nothing so I get the exact same experience as before" and "add lots of new things so I feel my money was well spent, rather than just feeling like you sold me the same game twice."

 

[Mort]

I never understood why they couldn't improve on Master of Orion 2. Such an amazing game.

Loved that game.

Master of Orion 3, on the other hand, Is a barely playable mess!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I must be weird, I loved the transparency. Even today, I try to be as transparent with my players about what's going on and how things work (such as monster abilities), because I feel if you have information, you can make informed decisions about what your character will do. If I make a houserule, I'll include a short dissertation about what the problem I'm trying to solve is. I tell people monster AC's and roll openly so they can figure out what the attack bonuses or save bonuses are if they want.

Don't get me wrong, I love the transparency of systems like 4e and 13th Age. I am constantly infuriated by the assertion that the only choices are "transparent and dull" or "opaque and cool." You can have "evocative" rules that are also transparent! We did not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater! But few are willing to hear it—often specifically for the "well it's popular so it has to be the right approach...right?"

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Digital watches are superior to pure analog watches in most respects: cheaper, easier to use, easier to read, easier to make, almost always more accurate, etc. I still love mechanical watches, particularly pocketwatches which let you see parts of the movement artfully displayed. I find them beautiful, even mesmerizing. But if the point of the watch is to perform the function of accurately and unambiguously telling the time, reliably, with minimal maintenance or replacement cost, then digital watches are clearly superior to mechanical watches, full stop.

Aesthetic quality is a thing. And watches are basically jewellery, so it matter to a lot of people more than functionality. No one actually needs a watch these days anyway, as we all have clocks on our cell phones and computers that we are constantly staring anyway. I haven't worn a watch in decades, most people don't these days.

My point was more that "evocativeness" didn't HAVE to come at the cost of sacrificing a lot of clarity. 5e took the easy way out, going back to the old way of doing things. And we are now seeing that they're not entirely happy about that choice, what with things like the changes to monster stat blocks to make them more clear and utilitarian even if that might come at a slight cost to "evocativeness."

Yeah, perhaps. They certainly could have been clearer in places, I'm not disputing that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Aesthetic quality is a thing. And watches are basically jewellery, so it matter to a lot of people more than functionality. No one actually needs a watch these days anyway, as we all have clocks on our cell phones and computers that we are constantly staring anyway. I haven't worn a watch in decades, most people don't these days.

Okay.

Do you use an analog clock, or a digital one on your phone?