Why the Modern D&D variants will not attract new players

[Hussar]

Beginning of the End - there is a fair bit of space between limiting the DM's role within the ruleset and eliminating it altogether.

I totally agree that eliminating the DM is a very bad idea.

OTOH, if you take the route, as 4e has done, of giving the players (including the DM) a ruleset that covers most of the expected actions that you're going to commonly run across, and then advise DM's to create content that fits within that ruleset and uses that ruleset, you gain some degree of standardization across tables.

In other words, if (and that's a big if) a given DM does what he's advised to do, the game designers can be fairly sure that everyone at the table will have a good time. Maybe not a fantastic time, maybe not the time of their life, but, a good time.

If, however, you give DM's a system like Mentzer Basic, which did not cover many common actions - no skills, no task resolution outside of combat, very, very limited scope (basically low level dungeon crawl) - the games success depends very heavily on the individual DM.

Now, you and I stuck with it. But how many people didn't? How many people's first and possibly last experience with RPG's was very bad to the point where they dropped it entirely? Sure, great DM's bring in new players. But, do they bring in enough new players to replace those driven away by bad experiences?

I have no idea.

But, at a guess, I would say that 4e is attempting to ameliorate the experience so that people will stick around long enough to buy a couple of books, rather than trying it once and never looking at it again.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Essentially, (sorry) I'm for fattening the goose rather than killing it.

Ah, so what you're saying is, when it comes to D&D, pate de foie gras is preferable to coup de grace.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I don't think you are really hearing me.

You don't get friends or spouses of friends to start playing by showing the stacks of rule books, and you don't need to read through 800+ pages of rules to get started with a game. Frankly, I prefer to sit down to a new RPG without knowing any of the rules and without touching a rule book. Reading the rules probably will get in the way of my enjoyment of the game.

I disagree. To me not knowing the basic rules is akin to not understanding the rules of physics in the world. But I'm at one end of the spectrum here.

This is the way I play an RPG:

1) I make a proposition.
2) I interface with the rules under the guidance of the DM.
3) I recieve information back from the DM about the outcome of my proposition.
4) Go to step #1.

Add in
1b) I make my own estimates about whether the proposition is valid influenced by both the world as we've seen it and the rules of the game.

All irrelevant. You don't start playing an RPG by buying the books. You start playing an RPG with a GM says, "Would you like to play?"

And you don't even make new GMs by selling books. You make new GMs by players going, "You know; I think I want to GM.", or in some cases by, "Well, our GM moved to Indiana/joined the military/got married. Who wants to GM?"

And you encourage people to say "I want to GM" by making a system that's nice to GM - low prep time, easy to make evocative, minimal chance of being utterly derailed or a serious arms race.

See. Exactly my point. You are arguing here against what you just said. You have a rules light system - a handbook that doesn't cover most of the situations that come up except with vague and difficult to apply references

That's not a rules light system. That's an incomplete and poorly designed rules-heavy system masquerading as rules light. A rules light system is something like Dread where the rules go as follows:

1 Is what's being tried remotely plausible. If no, stop. If it involves god-moding, ask them to rephrase.
2: Is what's being tried challenging? If no, they succeed.
3: Name a difficulty in number of blocks needed for them to do what they are trying. Tell them to pull that many blocks. If they succeed, they succeed. If they bottle, they bottle. If they knock the tower over they die.

Neither vague nor difficult to apply other than working out how many blocks for a given action. And covers almost every situation that might come up.

- and so when you actually have to use the rules, you find that you spend most of the time making up new rules that there after become 'common law rules' which determine how similar future situations will be resolved.

You seem to be working under the assumption that D&D was a rules light system. That it never was. The approach was always rules heavy and inelegant.

This is one of the several reasons why rules light systems are never highly successful in the RPG market place.

That they take more conceptual work and that you can't do very much in terms of expansions being two more. I have Dread. I can't see how they can sell me a second book. So it's not worth a big company marketing them.

This ends up creating an inflexible system that is complex only where the designer cared to be complex, and ignores or oversimplifies where someone else might care to have complexity, and in short which is good for only one sort of game without massive effort from a GM to make it work.

You seem to be working under the assumption that versatility automatically makes a system good.

Ok, now we are beginning to get on the same wavelength. Yes, this is how people learn the game. In particular, this is how GMs learn the game and some of this sinks by osmosis into the rest of the players at the table. In other words, once you resolve a problem in one way, the players remember that, "In a similar situation in the past you had me roll a D20, add my dex bonus, and I succeeded with a 16. So that is 'the rule'."

*eyeroll*

The situation is similar. It would be d20+dex. But the situation isn't the same. 16 need not be a success this time.

 

[Celebrim]

I disagree. To me not knowing the basic rules is akin to not understanding the rules of physics in the world. But I'm at one end of the spectrum here.

You don't know the physics of the real world, but you manage pretty well. And even if you do have a Ph.D. in physics, then most people don't and they manage just fine.

You don't have to know the physics - or more precisely the math - behind outcome resolution to have a sense of the world. You don't need to know the rules. If you do need to know the rules, it betrays a fundamental distrust of the system and/or the DM, because the only reason to know the rules is to try to wring out every last bit of advantage out of them, or to exploit or avoid their edge cases.

But none of that is IMO essential to enjoying an RPG, and to a certain extent it just gets in the way.

And you encourage people to say "I want to GM" by making a system that's nice to GM - low prep time, easy to make evocative, minimal chance of being utterly derailed or a serious arms race.

Maybe. I suspect that those things are more essential to making people enjoy GMing. What grabs peoples interest in GMing initially has more to do with the text of the game inspiring their imaginations. It wouldn't matter if prep time was low, the rules were coupled to the setting in fascinating ways, the game was inherently well balanced, and the fortune mechanic inherently cinematic and evocative if the rules didn't inspire imagination or show the GM what the game looked like in play.

And it wouldn't be hard to come up with examples of games that seem like they should work but utterly fail in the end because its not at all clear to the would be GM how to play the game afterall no matter how clear the rules are.

That's not a rules light system. That's an incomplete and poorly designed rules-heavy system masquerading as rules light.

Ok, here I'm just going to have to note your condescension and how misplaced it is. There are many things you can accuse me of with good cause, but if you are of the belief that I don't know RPG rules and how to judge them or to craft them then you are just simply quite wrong. I know what a rules light system is and how they work, and from your example, I dare say I've considered the problem more seriously than you are at the moment.

A rules light system is something like Dread where the rules go as follows:

1 Is what's being tried remotely plausible. If no, stop. If it involves god-moding, ask them to rephrase.
2: Is what's being tried challenging? If no, they succeed.
3: Name a difficulty in number of blocks needed for them to do what they are trying. Tell them to pull that many blocks. If they succeed, they succeed. If they bottle, they bottle. If they knock the tower over they die.

Neither vague nor difficult to apply other than working out how many blocks for a given action. And covers almost every situation that might come up.

Quite right. And this is exactly my point.

Moreover, you have completely failed to notice a problem that you might have noticed had you actually spent more time listening to me rather than getting grumpy about what I was saying. You are caught up entirely in the notion of a pass/fail fortune mechanic, and you've failed to consider that at the game table, a very large percentage of player propositions aren't of the pass/fail type and don't have 'yes/no' answers. Converting analytic analog propositions into simple binary ones requires a bit of rules alchemy, and that process of 'working out how many blocks for a given action' is far more of an art form than you seem to realize.

A game like Dread is built for an evening's entertainment, and for that, I'm perfectly happy to use (and probably prefer to use) a rules light system because the rules holes don't have time to become deep enough to fall into or even stumble over that much. The game is over too quickly. The same is not true of a game that continues continiously for 400 hours or more of play.

You seem to be working under the assumption that D&D was a rules light system. That it never was. The approach was always rules heavy and inelegant.

What would we ever do without très chic D&D bashing. I don't believe that I said that D&D was a rules light system (at least, not in the ordinary sense of the term). In fact, I think I said that it was the most rules heavy system of all time; though I made it quite clear as well that whether it is due such an honor depends greatly on how we define 'rules heavy'.

And as for 'inelegant', I quite agree, but I don't think this is nearly so damning of a charge as you seem to think it is. Many things which are very functional are 'inelegant', and a great many things which are elegant are not particularly functional. So, this depends very much on whether you think true elegance is a matter of artistic form, or whether you think its a matter of functionality. I prefer the latter, and I find - after playing many many systems and reading many many more over nearly 30 years - that D&D is an intensely functional and gameable system, and I'm rather embarassed now to think how much like you I sounded 20 years ago when I was a teen aged DM that thought I knew everything.

That they take more conceptual work and that you can't do very much in terms of expansions being two more. I have Dread. I can't see how they can sell me a second book. So it's not worth a big company marketing them.

Well, at least we are in agreement on this point.

You seem to be working under the assumption that versatility automatically makes a system good.

Not at all. I'm working under several assumptions loosely or tightly held, but none of them are that. I'm working under the assumption that versitility is a desirable trait. I'm working under the assumption that its a trait in an RPG that has considerably more economic value to the publisher than virtually any other trait, making it sort of the opposite in this way of 'rules light' and 'elegant'. And I'm working under the assumption that its a trait that tends to make a game popular, because more people will tend to fit their game to that game than they would otherwise. In this way, being versatile has been alot better for D&D than being 'elegant' would have been.

Of course, you might discern by this point that I consider that to be a sign of more true elegance than the traits proposed by many of the artsy fartsy theories about what makes a game elegant. I'll have more respect for such theories when they manage to make as gameable of a game, and when their proponents understand better why D&D works and don't stupidly (as I once did in my ignorance) blame its success merely on being first.

*eyeroll*

The situation is similar. It would be d20+dex. But the situation isn't the same. 16 need not be a success this time.

For provoking an eyeroll, you sure manage to not do much to contridict me here. If the sitaution isn't the same (and indeed, isn't exactly the same), then yes the number need not be '16' this time, but far from contridicting me this is exactly my point. Already we see how quickly some fuller grasp of the system and how to interface with it intuitively reaches the player even though they know nothing yet of the rules under the hood that are used to produce those numbers.

 

[Dausuul]

many things which are very functional are 'inelegant', and a great many things which are elegant are not particularly functional.

Daleks have no concept of elegance.

 

[Celebrim]

I totally agree that eliminating the DM is a very bad idea.

But do you really totally agree with that?

It seems to me that you probably do, but that you haven't fully considered the implications of totally agree with that.

OTOH, if you take the route, as 4e has done, of giving the players (including the DM) a ruleset that covers most of the expected actions that you're going to commonly run across, and then advise DM's to create content that fits within that ruleset and uses that ruleset, you gain some degree of standardization across tables.

In other words, if (and that's a big if) a given DM does what he's advised to do, the game designers can be fairly sure that everyone at the table will have a good time. Maybe not a fantastic time, maybe not the time of their life, but, a good time.

If I had one theme I wanted to emphasize in all my contributions to this thread, it is that this is wrong. It's precisely this attitude towards rules design and games design that ends up heading in the wrong direction. The logic underneath this is something like, "Ok, maybe we can't entirely elimenate the DM, but we can mitigate the DM sufficiently by providing elegant rules that the minimally required role of the GM will simply be mechanical. If the rules are elegant enough and capture the intention of the designer sufficiently, then the car will simply drive itself provided the GM turns the crank and pedals." This is entirely wrong because it imagines that running an RPG is mostly something of a science, when in fact an RPG is mostly an artform and its qualities are mostly aethetic regardless of how much math and numbers are involved in resolving its in game propositions. You can no more have an enjoyable RPG session by providing elegant rules, than you can insure an enjoyable novel by providing concise advice and a mechanical structure to the writer.

Much of the problem I have with 4e - or more precisely, much of the problems I have with the 4e design process and its criticism of 3e - is it consistantly failed to see the problems which annoyed the designers as problems of game management and game design, and instead consistantly say them as mechanical problems that were solvable with rules design. This is something like finding a dysfunctional culture and thinking that what it mostly needs is more laws and regulations. It misses the point entirely. So it attempted to fix problems that really couldn't be fixed with rules alone (like 'how do you design a trap', 'how do you pace the game cinematically', or 'how do you make skills matter'?), and ended up leaving in the problems more or less intact while trading one set of rules artifacts for another.

Not that 4e is a 'bad' system. I don't want to turn this into a narrow system bashing session. But in the context of the original topic, I keep trying to point out that the system doesn't really matter that much and certainly not as much as some here think it does and not for the reasons that they think it does. Modern D&D variants (by which I primarily mean 4e) are unlikely to attract new players because they attract less strongly existing GMs than say 3e did (though they do attract some and for good reasons, don't get me wrong), and they do little to actually inspire new GMs. They generally seem to think that system matters, but in this context what really matters is the GM.

I'd be alot more sanguine about WotC's abiity to attract new players if I had any hope they could write a book that was less dry than a cookbook and more interesting to read than a dictionary. But I can tell by who they've chosen to retain in their employment that they just don't get it. (Note, I'm not knocking cookbook writers or lexicographers; both are useful.) At least, in their favor, Paizo seems to get it better than WotC does.

 

[Celebrim]

Daleks have no concept of elegance.

On the contrary, in the sense that its being bandied around by some I could name in the RPG theory and rules community, Daleks have a very high degree of elegance.

1) All Daleks are of the same consistant design. Once you've encountered one Dalek, you can pretty much grasp the essentials of every Dalek in every situation.
2) All Daleks manipulate everything through the same very small set of universal tools. Indeed, their unverisal plunger tool that they grasp things with is the very height of elegance in manipulative tools.
3) The Dalek form is the very model of simplicity with few moving parts.

It is however not particularly functional, as for example, it seems to have never considered stairs, nor for that matter do I think that universal plunger tool has quite the range of utility as an awkward looking set of thumbs and fingers - to say nothing of two actual hands that are inelegantly not of the same shape (in the human case, one is the mirror image of the other; horrors!).

 

[Wicht]

Actually I find the hand quite elegant: form and function together in a well designed package of versatility. Beauty, however, is always in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Hussar]

Well said Celebrim.

Heh, I obviously disagree, but then, that's fair enough. I think system very much does matter. I think that systems that put so much emphasis on the person running the game to constantly have to devise rulings for actions that are reasonably expectable within the context of the game are poorly designed. How far can my character jump? Well, if Bob runs the game, then I can jump this far. If Dave is running it, I can jump that far.

No thanks. I played that long enough and have no interest in that kind of game again.

Then again, I have never drawn inspiration particularly from the mechanics. The mechanics, to me, are simply a tool that I use for exploring the particular story that me and the group want to explore. Whether that's a very free form sandboxy style or heavy plotsy style, doesn't matter. The mechanics are a tool, nothing more.

In the same way that I have never been inspired by looking at a hammer or a paintbrush, I've never found rule mechanics much of an inspiration. Typically, it goes the other way around. The GM has a cool (in his mind at least) idea and then goes to the rules to see how to best implement it.

Obviously tastes differ. For me, given the choice between a 1e DMG and a 4e DMG, I'd take the 4e DMG hands down every time. Function over form every single time. But, that's just my taste.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Good DMs sell D&D. The best DMs aren't casual players. They are dedicated players, they are "hard core" gamers.

[. . .]

So I think WotC should rethink their marketing strategy. D&D will never have mass appeal like other games.

[. . .]

The hardcore niche is the niche that does the most work expanding the player base. I've seen loads of casual players come and go, and for the most part they have lousy retention. But the dedicated players just keep coming back for more, and they bring friends.

Chrono, you are absolutely right that WotC would be foolish not to develop and exploit the excellent resource that is the dedicated D&D DM. These guys do more to get players in that a million ads.

But isn't that what they're doing with Encounters? Every Encounters DM is a local volunteer; the vast majority are likely dedicated players. WotC's doing a great job for herding new players into the arms of these evangelists through Encounters.

I think you're wrong, though about abandoning new players. Where do the long-term, dedicated players come from? I was a newbie once, and I'm sure you were too. Yeah, a lot of them might try it and move on, but some portion of new players go on to become long-term players, and just the sort of dedicated, hard-core gamers we need to bring new generations into the game.