Mercurius
Legend
First, an illustrative anecdote. I work at a private high school that tends to oscillate back and forth on the same issues, year after year, decade after decade, with various issues disappearing and then re-emerging months or years later, with not real change or evolution, like a vicious cycle that we can't break out of. The problem is that for a few years the general tenor is at one extreme and then people freak out and the approach goes all the way to the other extreme, ad nauseum. There is little in-between, little integration or dialectical synthesis.
We could extend this analogy to politics or just about any arena; e.g. binging and purging, feast or famine, and so on. The obvious question being: Can we integrate the best of both polarities and eliminate the limitations? Can we throw the bathwater out and keep the baby?
There is a meme in the D&D community that, while not being extremely influential (yet), seems to be growing in perfidy. This meme is the idea that D&D would be better off without optimization of any kind, even without leveling, scaling, advancement, or +3 swords of kewlness. I am left scratching my head at this, remembering the joy of starting a character at 1st level, customizing options, advancing him or her, becoming more powerful, finding new magic items, and so on. In other words, a major aspect of D&D's unique brand of fun (for me, but presumably for many others) is developing a character from 1st level on up, from a rusty short sword bought at market for 10 GP to a +5 vorpal fullblade pulled from the heart of a long dead demon lord's petrified corpse floating in the Astral Sea.
I hesitate to write this post considering I'm not a big fan of systems mastery and feel that it is one of the prongs in the fork that led to the demise of 3.5. I've never liked the fact (in 3.5, but to some degree in all iterations of D&D) that the more time you spend reading rulebooks, the better your character plays. This is one of the reasons I was never drawn to play Magic: The Gathering--it quickly became clear to me that the more money you spent, the big edge you had because the better your deck could become. Some degree of this is OK and even desirable; there should be some reward for studying, knowing and loving the game, but it can get out of hand. In 3.5 it was front-loaded in character building and development; in 4E it is more focused around tactics (so, at least, 4E has turned the emphasis slightly away from what cool stuff you can do and have, to how you use your cool stuff and abilities).
One design goal that I hope Mike Mearls and Monte Cook hold close to their hearts as they go forward with "whatever it is that they're doing" (ahem), is to optimize the essential qualities of D&D as a felt experience. What I mean by that is to make D&D always feel like D&D, to accent and enhance the "D&Dness" of the game. This is, of course, rather subjective, but I think we can say with some degree of confidence that races, classes, hit points, armor class, fireballs, beholders, and vorpal swords feel like D&D. And yes, levels, advancements, bonused magic items, and character optimization also feel like D&D (to me!). In other words, if we have to choose between "what makes sense/is the cutting edge of game design" and "what feels like D&D" I think we have to go with the latter.
(An example of where the designers of 4E seemed to lose sight of this is with the whole power system; don't get me wrong, I like powers and power sources taken on their own, as an RPG rules sub-system; but for D&D? Something was lost, namely the "feeling-difference" between classes, the idiosyncratic spell lists, and perhaps most of all, the in-built encouragement to improvise actions).
To put it another way, we shouldn't try to take D&D too far away from its roots. Develop and improve it, yes, give the option to play various styles of game play that aren't "classic D&D." But let's not change the core game into something else; let's not make it a storyteller-style game, an indie game, a game more conducive to exploring the subtleties of interpersonal communication than killing dragons and taking their loot or in exploring dark caverns and lost ruins, in gaining glory and power. When we start whittling away at idiosyncratic D&Disms, whether in an attempt to make it more "realistic" (e.g. replacing Hit Points with Armor Protection and Wounds) or to make it more "egalitarian" (e.g. getting rid of optimization and bonuses altogether), we lose something vital to the game, to its legacy.
We could extend this analogy to politics or just about any arena; e.g. binging and purging, feast or famine, and so on. The obvious question being: Can we integrate the best of both polarities and eliminate the limitations? Can we throw the bathwater out and keep the baby?
There is a meme in the D&D community that, while not being extremely influential (yet), seems to be growing in perfidy. This meme is the idea that D&D would be better off without optimization of any kind, even without leveling, scaling, advancement, or +3 swords of kewlness. I am left scratching my head at this, remembering the joy of starting a character at 1st level, customizing options, advancing him or her, becoming more powerful, finding new magic items, and so on. In other words, a major aspect of D&D's unique brand of fun (for me, but presumably for many others) is developing a character from 1st level on up, from a rusty short sword bought at market for 10 GP to a +5 vorpal fullblade pulled from the heart of a long dead demon lord's petrified corpse floating in the Astral Sea.
I hesitate to write this post considering I'm not a big fan of systems mastery and feel that it is one of the prongs in the fork that led to the demise of 3.5. I've never liked the fact (in 3.5, but to some degree in all iterations of D&D) that the more time you spend reading rulebooks, the better your character plays. This is one of the reasons I was never drawn to play Magic: The Gathering--it quickly became clear to me that the more money you spent, the big edge you had because the better your deck could become. Some degree of this is OK and even desirable; there should be some reward for studying, knowing and loving the game, but it can get out of hand. In 3.5 it was front-loaded in character building and development; in 4E it is more focused around tactics (so, at least, 4E has turned the emphasis slightly away from what cool stuff you can do and have, to how you use your cool stuff and abilities).
One design goal that I hope Mike Mearls and Monte Cook hold close to their hearts as they go forward with "whatever it is that they're doing" (ahem), is to optimize the essential qualities of D&D as a felt experience. What I mean by that is to make D&D always feel like D&D, to accent and enhance the "D&Dness" of the game. This is, of course, rather subjective, but I think we can say with some degree of confidence that races, classes, hit points, armor class, fireballs, beholders, and vorpal swords feel like D&D. And yes, levels, advancements, bonused magic items, and character optimization also feel like D&D (to me!). In other words, if we have to choose between "what makes sense/is the cutting edge of game design" and "what feels like D&D" I think we have to go with the latter.
(An example of where the designers of 4E seemed to lose sight of this is with the whole power system; don't get me wrong, I like powers and power sources taken on their own, as an RPG rules sub-system; but for D&D? Something was lost, namely the "feeling-difference" between classes, the idiosyncratic spell lists, and perhaps most of all, the in-built encouragement to improvise actions).
To put it another way, we shouldn't try to take D&D too far away from its roots. Develop and improve it, yes, give the option to play various styles of game play that aren't "classic D&D." But let's not change the core game into something else; let's not make it a storyteller-style game, an indie game, a game more conducive to exploring the subtleties of interpersonal communication than killing dragons and taking their loot or in exploring dark caverns and lost ruins, in gaining glory and power. When we start whittling away at idiosyncratic D&Disms, whether in an attempt to make it more "realistic" (e.g. replacing Hit Points with Armor Protection and Wounds) or to make it more "egalitarian" (e.g. getting rid of optimization and bonuses altogether), we lose something vital to the game, to its legacy.
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