In the older roll-under d100 systems, there was this one-to-one relationship between an ability score and the target number. The target number WAS your ability score, and if you raised your score, life got better.
Things flipped and became more dice-centric with d20 based games. Rolling high became the new thing, with the only exception being the older game Aftermath, a d20 roll-under system that worked a lot like the percentile systems. With the new d20 paradigm, rolling a natural 20 became the cool thing to do, and bang, that was it, you've made it in life.
Except when D&D 3 came along, and you had to confirm that crit.
Spoilsports.
It's funny the new versions of Car Wars followed GURPS and became a roll-under system too, because the math was easier than an open-ended roll. I still prefer GURPS as roll-under and Car Wars as roll-over though, there's no arguing with a 9+ to-hit on a heavy rocket and rolling double-sixes for a massive crit.
The original SBRPG was a 3d6 roll-over system.
For some things, I like roll-under and for others, roll-over. Percentile systems are classically roll-under, because the focus is different. I do not think all games have to be the same. One of the traps in being a game designer is taking your personal preferences and shoehorning them onto every other game you design or redesign.
A lot of D&D 3 came from the Magic the Gathering game. D&D 4's designers ported in some ideas from Iron Heroes and other games. D&D 5 borrows from yet others. It's not wrong to expand upon a good idea, but you need to weigh any addition against how it would fit within the original game.
One point being "healing surges" in D&D 4. D&D has classically been a game where a cleric can heal someone for X points of damage with the expenditure of a spell. In D&D 4, a cleric's healing ability used one of the target character's healing surges to heal them. If the target character was "all healed out" for the day, guess what, no heals for you. How does this make any sense with how clerics worked in the history of the game? It felt too alien, ported in from something else, and it wasn't how clerics felt their magic should work.
Porting in ideas doesn't always work or feel right within an established context. Nor does changing things too much to where things feel alien and strange given what came before. Just ask the Windows 8 team.
Can people "get" that they have to roll under a target number to succeed at an action? Yes. Does it feel good? Let me answer that with another question. How important is that feel-good of rolling high matter to your game, or does it just matter to you? Here's another thing to think about, rolling high invites open-ended dicing systems, because there are always larger positive and negative modifiers to throw around. Let's make our target number 913% and add +850% to the d100 roll!
With roll-under, you literally have 0% as your floor, and you do not want to go into negative numbers. You also get into this with d100, a 913% target number makes little sense other than being some obscenely high number you have to number-stack to reach. It means nothing percentage-wise. A 15% roll-under chance to-hit is simple, straightforward, and easily understood from anybody with a basic understanding of probability. A +10% chance to-hit modifier is also easily understandable.
Let's flip this around, and do this in a d20 roll-over system. Target number 21, and your modifier is a +3. What is your probability of success? Sure, rolling high is great now, but you have taken most people's understanding of odds and straightforward success and risk calculations out of the game. At least the average player's without some mental arithmetic. You get a further +2 to-hit, now what is your chance?
Hint: both examples are the same.
So as a game designer you ask yourself the question, do I want the "roll high" thrill, or do I want people to be immediately aware of their odds with roll-under? For certain types of games your answers will be different. For a hard-science sci-fi game, we may want percentage roll-under, because this game is supposed to be about science, odds, and the raw hard-probability chance of success. For a competitive game, like a PvP Car Wars game, roll-high is cool, since players around the table are now competing for the best and highest rolls.
If you choose roll-over, you are now opening yourself up to the unbalancing aspects of open-ended rolls. If you choose roll-under, your maximum ability scores and success chances are capped at or near 100%. There are trade offs to both approaches.
You tailor your game design decisions based on the types of behavior and feelings you want to promote at the table. One size or dice does not fit all, and roll-under or over is really a per-game decision. Never accept game design zeitgeist, and you make the right decisions for your game based on math, feel, and user experience.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
TSR Box Games: RPG's iPad Apps
These are the games I miss. The classic TSR box games of the 1980's when you could make a roleplaying game about anything, toss a quick percentage system on it, and get playing right when you got home. Yes, often the first thing you did was have a shootout with space aliens, gangsters, mutants, secret agents, or cowboys - but that was the fun! It was the roleplaying equivalent of being able to run around the playground, point your fingers at each other and pretend they were space blasters, and go pew-pew-pew! They wersn't meant to be much more than quick character and combat simulators, and they were flavorful and fun in their own self-contained worlds.
We evolved out of these games, and into more generic systems like GURPS or Champions, after all, what good is a game that simulated just one world when you can have them all? The one game to rule them all syndrome hit, and we left these games behind. To me, it makes as much sense as forcing every game you play to use Monopoly rules, but the argument continues on today as a part of the "system mastery" marketing concept that says a roleplaying game has to be complicated so it takes up all your time and mental effort, and you don't have the time or energy to play anything else. We still have the "one game" thing with us today with d20 and its spin-offs.
We've given up simplicity to fill our shelves with roleplaying games that feel like their primary audience are book collectors. Why can't I buy a self-contained game, enjoy it for everything it is, and not have the thing expanded and super-sized until the point where only a new edition can save us by hitting the 'reset' button - only to have the same thing happen again? To me, these original box-set games are like classic editions of Risk or Parcheesi - self-contained worlds of fun in a single box with no need for a stack of "Monopoly expansion" boxes to pull out of the closet to have a complete game. These were worlds of adventure wrapped up in a single box full of promise and wonder.They were also excellent examples of focused and tight game design to fit everything in a 64 to 128 page book. Compared with today's games, these were incredible, tight, and focused designs that did a lot in a very tiny space. Think about this the next time you play a game that goes on for 64 pages or more of character design rules.
Sure you had to learn a new set of rules - but that was a part of the fun! They were not that complicated anyways, and you could roll some dice and be playing in 15 minutes if you were familiar with how one of them worked. The generic games that supposedly did "all this and more" were about a hundred times more complicated with all of their options and settings, so there was a beauty to a game designed to do one thing and that one thing well. With a generic game, you had to sift through skills, equipment, powers, optional magic systems, and equipment lists meant to cover every era in history. Generic games did not feel like these focused and specific settings anyways, so you were often using the generic game and these games to get the full experience - which defeated the point in the first place.
They were, in a way, the first "casual RPGs" like iPad apps and games are today. Small, tight, focused designs meant to provide a singular experience and tiny world for you to lose yourself in. They weren't a political statement about what generic game you put your beliefs in, nor were they one game to rule them all that covered everything. They were designed to be fun, simple, focused experiences meant to get you lost in a specific place for an evening, and let you play a cowboy, gangster, space adventurer, mutant survivor, or secret agent. Being an involved, complicated game with a lot of options ran against their nature, and in fact would have made them less fun - these were roleplaying's first "casual games" and they still stand out today as high-water marks for tight and focused game design. They weren't perfect, of course, but nothing has came close to these masterpieces since they went out of print.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
D&D 5: Rolling Over & Feels Good
There always was an interesting shift between d20 and d100 for skill and task resolution. With d20 it has always been roll-over, and rolling high was a satisfying thing. With d100 it has almost always been roll-under, and rolling low was the goal.
Roll-over proponents point to the fact that rolling high is inherently satisfying, and they have a point. There is a disconnect on the target numbers that tends to blow out the dice's natural range with roll over, or a disassociation with the target numbers where the number you are trying to beat goes down.
Let's say you are doing open-ended roll-over, where you add some number to your roll, and you have to beat an ever-increasing target number. This is the system in D&D 3, where AC or DC was the target, and some monsters had AC values in the 40's and above. Think about that, you need a +20 to-hit to be able to have a chance at hitting these monsters, and all of a sudden, your original promise of a system based on 1-20 target numbers fell by the wayside.
In these systems, AC is always 10+some number, since they are basing the entire system on a 50% chance to hit. D&D 5 continues the roll over system, but it constrains the numbers tightly so nothing can really leave the +10 to hit range, instead of D&D 3 and Pathfinder's +30 and beyond.
The second roll-over system puts an ever-decreasing target number in place and tries to constrain positive numbers. You saw this in AD&D and AD&D 2, where the best to-hit in the world you could get was a 2+ on a 1d20 roll, and again, the plus to-hit was strictly limited to magic item bonuses and ability scores.
D&D 3 introduced the concept of "level bonus" to to-hit to the d20 landscape, and this has really been with us for the last 15 years as an accepted norm of the system. D&D 4 enshrined this concept, with levels going up to 30 and to-hit bonuses going up to +12 or higher, with positive modifiers being up to +42 or higher.
With such high to-hit modifiers, the original 1-20 range of the die means nothing. There is little random chance, it's just if the designer or DM wants to make the encounter a challenge or not that is the question.
With higher levels, random chance is slowly taken out of the game.
D&D 5 tries to put the genie back in the bottle by limiting math, but this creates a system that has tenuous balance - later feats, combat moves, and items in expansion material could throw the system out of balance quickly - especially a book of high-level magic items with +3 or higher modifiers to-hit. Pretty soon, these will be highly sought-after, and soon enough, required for high-level builds because the designers are now balancing for +3 items.
There is an important game-design point hiding in here. In early editions of D&D, better to-hits were a way to increase a class' damage potential. You did not have any way to do more damage except a better to-hit. In later editions, this was also true, but class' also had built-in ways to do more damage through level-bonuses and special powers, so it meant less and it stacked upon that built-in power curve. In D&D 4, "basic attacks" sucked and were actually looked down upon as "what you did if you couldn't use a power." Yes, D&D 4 was a strange superhero game.
It is all an interesting experiment, and blowing out the d20 dice range is something D&D has been wrestling with ever since level-based increasing to-hit was introduced back in D&D 3. You can design a game where the to-hits are static and do not change, but level just brings increasing power to the table. Adding a "higher-level is a better to-hit" mechanic stacks upon that system, and once you put in a second variable like this, things become very difficult to balance.
You do need to ask yourself the serious question, what do better to-hits do in my game? Are they just for damage capability? Do they stack with other powers to increase their effect even more? Good balance comes from careful consideration.
A lot of game design is pure math, but we have been experiencing another area of "feels good" design in recent years that add powers and abilities on top of that math, which often leads to breakage of the system. "Feel good" designs come primarily from MMOs, where better and better abilities need to be given to players to keep them playing, and eventually nerfed naturally and 'expected' as players level past them, only to have another gee-whiz ability added later to keep the play-addiction cycle going.
There is actually a lot involved, which explains why MMOs constantly wrestle with balance and numbers, and D&D has been so tumultuous over the last three (four if you count D&D 3.5, and five if you count Pathfinder) editions when it came to the subject of balance, math, and keeping random chance meaningful in the game. It's not just the +to-hit, it's multi-attacks, spells, feats, powers, class abilities, and special level-added powers adding to the equation.
Roll-over proponents point to the fact that rolling high is inherently satisfying, and they have a point. There is a disconnect on the target numbers that tends to blow out the dice's natural range with roll over, or a disassociation with the target numbers where the number you are trying to beat goes down.
Let's say you are doing open-ended roll-over, where you add some number to your roll, and you have to beat an ever-increasing target number. This is the system in D&D 3, where AC or DC was the target, and some monsters had AC values in the 40's and above. Think about that, you need a +20 to-hit to be able to have a chance at hitting these monsters, and all of a sudden, your original promise of a system based on 1-20 target numbers fell by the wayside.
In these systems, AC is always 10+some number, since they are basing the entire system on a 50% chance to hit. D&D 5 continues the roll over system, but it constrains the numbers tightly so nothing can really leave the +10 to hit range, instead of D&D 3 and Pathfinder's +30 and beyond.
The second roll-over system puts an ever-decreasing target number in place and tries to constrain positive numbers. You saw this in AD&D and AD&D 2, where the best to-hit in the world you could get was a 2+ on a 1d20 roll, and again, the plus to-hit was strictly limited to magic item bonuses and ability scores.
D&D 3 introduced the concept of "level bonus" to to-hit to the d20 landscape, and this has really been with us for the last 15 years as an accepted norm of the system. D&D 4 enshrined this concept, with levels going up to 30 and to-hit bonuses going up to +12 or higher, with positive modifiers being up to +42 or higher.
With such high to-hit modifiers, the original 1-20 range of the die means nothing. There is little random chance, it's just if the designer or DM wants to make the encounter a challenge or not that is the question.
With higher levels, random chance is slowly taken out of the game.
D&D 5 tries to put the genie back in the bottle by limiting math, but this creates a system that has tenuous balance - later feats, combat moves, and items in expansion material could throw the system out of balance quickly - especially a book of high-level magic items with +3 or higher modifiers to-hit. Pretty soon, these will be highly sought-after, and soon enough, required for high-level builds because the designers are now balancing for +3 items.
There is an important game-design point hiding in here. In early editions of D&D, better to-hits were a way to increase a class' damage potential. You did not have any way to do more damage except a better to-hit. In later editions, this was also true, but class' also had built-in ways to do more damage through level-bonuses and special powers, so it meant less and it stacked upon that built-in power curve. In D&D 4, "basic attacks" sucked and were actually looked down upon as "what you did if you couldn't use a power." Yes, D&D 4 was a strange superhero game.
It is all an interesting experiment, and blowing out the d20 dice range is something D&D has been wrestling with ever since level-based increasing to-hit was introduced back in D&D 3. You can design a game where the to-hits are static and do not change, but level just brings increasing power to the table. Adding a "higher-level is a better to-hit" mechanic stacks upon that system, and once you put in a second variable like this, things become very difficult to balance.
You do need to ask yourself the serious question, what do better to-hits do in my game? Are they just for damage capability? Do they stack with other powers to increase their effect even more? Good balance comes from careful consideration.
A lot of game design is pure math, but we have been experiencing another area of "feels good" design in recent years that add powers and abilities on top of that math, which often leads to breakage of the system. "Feel good" designs come primarily from MMOs, where better and better abilities need to be given to players to keep them playing, and eventually nerfed naturally and 'expected' as players level past them, only to have another gee-whiz ability added later to keep the play-addiction cycle going.
There is actually a lot involved, which explains why MMOs constantly wrestle with balance and numbers, and D&D has been so tumultuous over the last three (four if you count D&D 3.5, and five if you count Pathfinder) editions when it came to the subject of balance, math, and keeping random chance meaningful in the game. It's not just the +to-hit, it's multi-attacks, spells, feats, powers, class abilities, and special level-added powers adding to the equation.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
D&D 5: Moving Slow w/o the DMG
Our D&D 5 experience seems dead in the water without the Dungeon Master's Guide. I tried spicing some things up with monsters, but the game just does not feel complete without encounter design and magic items. It's strange, if feels more playable with just the Player's Handbook than it does with the PHB & MM combo.
I suppose part of it is monsters do not exist alone. Monsters are the challenge that guards the treasures of the dungeon - a traditional threat and reward relationship. There is also the encounter design thing, and the reward and advancement thing we are missing, so things seem incomplete.
With just the PHB, it feels easy to run just an intelligent PC race style 'no monsters' world. With the MM, we have a bunch of creatures that need better gear to battle, and we also need the rules on how to put together encounters and place rewards.
I am concerned about the magic item power of the DMG, since D&D 5's power curve is so tight, I am expecting magic items in this game to be severely limited in power and scope. While that may be a good thing for some, I would love to know the total power curve in this game before I start designing challenges and distributing rewards. We shall see how this pans out in another two months or so, and that is a long time to wait with players ready to play the full game now.
I suppose part of it is monsters do not exist alone. Monsters are the challenge that guards the treasures of the dungeon - a traditional threat and reward relationship. There is also the encounter design thing, and the reward and advancement thing we are missing, so things seem incomplete.
With just the PHB, it feels easy to run just an intelligent PC race style 'no monsters' world. With the MM, we have a bunch of creatures that need better gear to battle, and we also need the rules on how to put together encounters and place rewards.
I am concerned about the magic item power of the DMG, since D&D 5's power curve is so tight, I am expecting magic items in this game to be severely limited in power and scope. While that may be a good thing for some, I would love to know the total power curve in this game before I start designing challenges and distributing rewards. We shall see how this pans out in another two months or so, and that is a long time to wait with players ready to play the full game now.
Monday, October 6, 2014
"It's What the Cool Kids Play"
Let's go back in the day, when red-box Basic D&D was considered the simpler game for kids, and every teenager that wanted to be 'cool' played AD&D and had Rubik's Cube stickers stuck on their shirts. AD&D was more complex, it had more to it, it was arcane, it had so many rules, but it was cool because it was a lot more difficult to understand and required good players to invest in the game to do well.
Let's fast-forward to today, when D&D 5 is the simple game intended for casual players, and there is a group out there who like Pathfinder because it fills that AD&D role again. Pathfinder has Hero Lab, and you can literally spend an entire afternoon fiddling and playing with numbers designing the perfect character. Pathfinder keeps the Magic the Gathering vibe of card-like character design, and it has a strong D&D influenced focus on maps and tactical play. Pathfinder is today's AD&D as D&D 5's is to the old D&D Basic Set.
But are the cool kids playing it?
Nah, the cool kids are playing computer games. They are often playing them on Youtube and becoming social media stars.
It's not 1980. The Atari 2600 was an easy device to compete against in the theater of the mind, and pen-and-paper games could be anything and attract an audience. Today, a lot of people have moved on, and let's face it, electronic gaming is easy, it's on-demand fun. What don't computer games have?
One thing that pen-and-paper games do very well is this thing I have a scientific name for called, "tricking the bastard." When the DM is sitting there all smug with deathtrap in hand, it is so satisfying to be the play who figures it out and "tricks the bastard." Because let's face it, the dungeon master is the bastard who could get the entire killed at a whim, and figuring things out when his finger is on the doom-switch is just so gratifying.
In computer games, this is called "exploiting the system." It is not as satisfying, but it is the same gratification and pleasure at finding a way to cheat the system, rocket ahead, and beat the computer game because no one has tested or thought of what you are doing yet. In a sense, the bastard here is the programmer and QA team, and you just beat them at their own game.
Roleplaying games have institutionalized "tricking the bastard" - especially old-school games. The closer you get to modern designs, the more wargaming and figure battle you get, because somebody somewhere on a whiteboard said, "these games need figures to buy!" With figures comes balanced play, rules revisions, and the like. You won't find many board games that allow one player to say, "All the other Monopoly pieces fell into a pit and are dead. Game over."
No, that is the power a DM needs to be the bastard, and why it is so fun tricking him into letting you win. The DM needs to be able to separate The Bastard out from himself, Sports Referee, Shakespeare Guy, and Uncle Moneybags, but that is another article on being a good DM.
Part of what makes pen-and-paper games so difficult to sell is partly this reason. There are two types of people that say no to pen-and-paper because of this, people who don't like someone having that much control over them, and people who don't buy the whole concept of a dungeon master in the first place. A computer is so much more impartial and fair, right? I I do something, some person is not going to take away what I did because they are messing with me - it has to be that way because the rules say so, right?
Computers are so much more fair. Right?
If you only knew the business and programmer stuff that went behind the games you play. I would rather trust a DM, at least there's someone you can understand the motivations of directly, To their face. And you don't have a marketer, someone from corporate, or some addiction specialist programming a system to make the game more desirable for you to stay logged into. Or a programmer rushed for a deadline and he doesn't really care what he puts in there. Or a system that keeps people apart intentionally (World of Warcraft and other MMOs).
It's social interaction, something our corporate-ized society pushes us away from because they want an electronic layer between us because the variables are easier to control. Why would you ever want a company controlling your free speech? Oh, yeah, that Facebook thing, I hear that's really popular.
Computers are a lot less fair than a living, breathing person you trust.
It's what us cool kids know.
Let's fast-forward to today, when D&D 5 is the simple game intended for casual players, and there is a group out there who like Pathfinder because it fills that AD&D role again. Pathfinder has Hero Lab, and you can literally spend an entire afternoon fiddling and playing with numbers designing the perfect character. Pathfinder keeps the Magic the Gathering vibe of card-like character design, and it has a strong D&D influenced focus on maps and tactical play. Pathfinder is today's AD&D as D&D 5's is to the old D&D Basic Set.
But are the cool kids playing it?
Nah, the cool kids are playing computer games. They are often playing them on Youtube and becoming social media stars.
It's not 1980. The Atari 2600 was an easy device to compete against in the theater of the mind, and pen-and-paper games could be anything and attract an audience. Today, a lot of people have moved on, and let's face it, electronic gaming is easy, it's on-demand fun. What don't computer games have?
One thing that pen-and-paper games do very well is this thing I have a scientific name for called, "tricking the bastard." When the DM is sitting there all smug with deathtrap in hand, it is so satisfying to be the play who figures it out and "tricks the bastard." Because let's face it, the dungeon master is the bastard who could get the entire killed at a whim, and figuring things out when his finger is on the doom-switch is just so gratifying.
In computer games, this is called "exploiting the system." It is not as satisfying, but it is the same gratification and pleasure at finding a way to cheat the system, rocket ahead, and beat the computer game because no one has tested or thought of what you are doing yet. In a sense, the bastard here is the programmer and QA team, and you just beat them at their own game.
Roleplaying games have institutionalized "tricking the bastard" - especially old-school games. The closer you get to modern designs, the more wargaming and figure battle you get, because somebody somewhere on a whiteboard said, "these games need figures to buy!" With figures comes balanced play, rules revisions, and the like. You won't find many board games that allow one player to say, "All the other Monopoly pieces fell into a pit and are dead. Game over."
No, that is the power a DM needs to be the bastard, and why it is so fun tricking him into letting you win. The DM needs to be able to separate The Bastard out from himself, Sports Referee, Shakespeare Guy, and Uncle Moneybags, but that is another article on being a good DM.
Part of what makes pen-and-paper games so difficult to sell is partly this reason. There are two types of people that say no to pen-and-paper because of this, people who don't like someone having that much control over them, and people who don't buy the whole concept of a dungeon master in the first place. A computer is so much more impartial and fair, right? I I do something, some person is not going to take away what I did because they are messing with me - it has to be that way because the rules say so, right?
Computers are so much more fair. Right?
If you only knew the business and programmer stuff that went behind the games you play. I would rather trust a DM, at least there's someone you can understand the motivations of directly, To their face. And you don't have a marketer, someone from corporate, or some addiction specialist programming a system to make the game more desirable for you to stay logged into. Or a programmer rushed for a deadline and he doesn't really care what he puts in there. Or a system that keeps people apart intentionally (World of Warcraft and other MMOs).
It's social interaction, something our corporate-ized society pushes us away from because they want an electronic layer between us because the variables are easier to control. Why would you ever want a company controlling your free speech? Oh, yeah, that Facebook thing, I hear that's really popular.
Computers are a lot less fair than a living, breathing person you trust.
It's what us cool kids know.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
D&D 4: The "Windows 8" RPG
Windows 8 was not a great moment for our friends at Microsoft. There are a lot of reasons the OS failed to catch on, but one of the bigger reasons was that it changed too much of the familiar desktop paradigms for user interaction.
It happens with roleplaying games as well.
Take D&D 4 for instance, it changed the paradigm for D&D so much that there was a backlash against it. A lot of people liked it, but the hardcore types said "not D&D" and moved on to Pathfinder or old-school OGR games. D&D 4 had a number of great innovations, but it changed what the game was to a lot of people and they did not like it.
D&D 5 is a lot like the upcoming Windows 10 in that regard, it keeps some of the previous version's innovations, but goes back to the familiar user paradigms of the 'classic OS'.
Now, DarkgarX and I liked D&D 4, it was a fun system for "battle chess" like combats with a D&D flavor. One could say that D&D 4 was the best version of D&D Miniatures ever made, and it actually combined both games into one RPG. It did change a lot, but the changes were focused on tabletop play and balance. It's like Windows 8 forcing the tablet paradigm on everybody, some people did not like it, so they felt things had changed too much.
To be honest, we still don't like Windows 8.
The lesson here is that you can change things, but you can't change people's perceptions of how the game is played. If D&D were introduce a system where a character is built only out of collectible cards, yes for some players it would be a revolution, but for the majority of us it would be so radically different it wouldn't feel like D&D at all.
You heard this with both Windows 8 and D&D 4 - "if it were a new OS or game I could accept it, but calling it Windows/D&D does not feel right to me."
"Does not feel right to me."
Think about that line. When you get systems engineers involved in a project, UI engineers, and other technical types, they are all too happy to blow away everything and start fresh. The old was the problem, and what we need is fresh thinking! Everyone wants to start with a clean slate, even designers. You could develop the easiest, most intuitive system or game in the world, and then relabel it as something else, and instantly you've lost it all. All those innovations are wasted, because now what people are going to do is compare you to the old way of doing things.
I knew how to do this in the old system! Too much has changed! I'm not changing from what works! I've invested too much in my old software or books, I'm not buying new stuff.
It's familiar, and while yes, things need to change, things also need to be familiar and focus on improving rather than replacing. Designers can't be 'tone deaf' to the current user base, and any new version of the game has to feel like the old one in play and focus. You can make improvements, streamline, and improve - you just can't rip out so much the game feels like a different experience.
D&D 5 does do some major changes, and it especially breaks away from D&D 3's complexity curve. Players may feel like they don't have many options under the new system. There is a danger here that D&D 3 and Pathfinder have gotten so entrenched in the "idea" of what people know D&D as that something different than it will still be seen as not D&D. From most of what I heard, the OGR crowd is a little more receptive of the changes to D&D 5 than the D&D 4 players are - we still miss our "D&D battle chess" game and nothing will replace it.
We feel Wizards majorly screwed D&D 4 up too with D&D Essentials, which was the D&D 5 preview anyways in spirit with the art and focus on thematic builds, The original game for D&D 4, the first three unpatched books, those still are the definitive version of the game for us.
Don't get me started on D&D 4's "floating strike zone" when it came to monster balance, another article, and another day.
D&D 5 is also more roleplaying focused, although I feel the changes they made in that area feel forced and limiting for player fun, so I am not using them in my games and sticking with the basic rules. I need to make a FAQ on the way we play and share that, and then wait for the community licence Wizards promised and publish that as a third-party mod to the rules.
But yes, it's a lesson on being too revolutionary but taking the safe route and calling your revolution "the next great new version of what you loved or hated!" Either people disliked your previous version and will start out with a negative view of you, or people used to the old ways will feel things changed too much for their liking. If you make major changes, they always have to be for the better and build upon what works. Most importantly, things have to feel the same for people, so they can drop in their previous experiences and be right at home.
It happens with roleplaying games as well.
Take D&D 4 for instance, it changed the paradigm for D&D so much that there was a backlash against it. A lot of people liked it, but the hardcore types said "not D&D" and moved on to Pathfinder or old-school OGR games. D&D 4 had a number of great innovations, but it changed what the game was to a lot of people and they did not like it.
D&D 5 is a lot like the upcoming Windows 10 in that regard, it keeps some of the previous version's innovations, but goes back to the familiar user paradigms of the 'classic OS'.
Now, DarkgarX and I liked D&D 4, it was a fun system for "battle chess" like combats with a D&D flavor. One could say that D&D 4 was the best version of D&D Miniatures ever made, and it actually combined both games into one RPG. It did change a lot, but the changes were focused on tabletop play and balance. It's like Windows 8 forcing the tablet paradigm on everybody, some people did not like it, so they felt things had changed too much.
To be honest, we still don't like Windows 8.
The lesson here is that you can change things, but you can't change people's perceptions of how the game is played. If D&D were introduce a system where a character is built only out of collectible cards, yes for some players it would be a revolution, but for the majority of us it would be so radically different it wouldn't feel like D&D at all.
You heard this with both Windows 8 and D&D 4 - "if it were a new OS or game I could accept it, but calling it Windows/D&D does not feel right to me."
"Does not feel right to me."
Think about that line. When you get systems engineers involved in a project, UI engineers, and other technical types, they are all too happy to blow away everything and start fresh. The old was the problem, and what we need is fresh thinking! Everyone wants to start with a clean slate, even designers. You could develop the easiest, most intuitive system or game in the world, and then relabel it as something else, and instantly you've lost it all. All those innovations are wasted, because now what people are going to do is compare you to the old way of doing things.
I knew how to do this in the old system! Too much has changed! I'm not changing from what works! I've invested too much in my old software or books, I'm not buying new stuff.
It's familiar, and while yes, things need to change, things also need to be familiar and focus on improving rather than replacing. Designers can't be 'tone deaf' to the current user base, and any new version of the game has to feel like the old one in play and focus. You can make improvements, streamline, and improve - you just can't rip out so much the game feels like a different experience.
D&D 5 does do some major changes, and it especially breaks away from D&D 3's complexity curve. Players may feel like they don't have many options under the new system. There is a danger here that D&D 3 and Pathfinder have gotten so entrenched in the "idea" of what people know D&D as that something different than it will still be seen as not D&D. From most of what I heard, the OGR crowd is a little more receptive of the changes to D&D 5 than the D&D 4 players are - we still miss our "D&D battle chess" game and nothing will replace it.
We feel Wizards majorly screwed D&D 4 up too with D&D Essentials, which was the D&D 5 preview anyways in spirit with the art and focus on thematic builds, The original game for D&D 4, the first three unpatched books, those still are the definitive version of the game for us.
Don't get me started on D&D 4's "floating strike zone" when it came to monster balance, another article, and another day.
D&D 5 is also more roleplaying focused, although I feel the changes they made in that area feel forced and limiting for player fun, so I am not using them in my games and sticking with the basic rules. I need to make a FAQ on the way we play and share that, and then wait for the community licence Wizards promised and publish that as a third-party mod to the rules.
But yes, it's a lesson on being too revolutionary but taking the safe route and calling your revolution "the next great new version of what you loved or hated!" Either people disliked your previous version and will start out with a negative view of you, or people used to the old ways will feel things changed too much for their liking. If you make major changes, they always have to be for the better and build upon what works. Most importantly, things have to feel the same for people, so they can drop in their previous experiences and be right at home.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Fun With D&D 5 Magic: Silent Image
Goblins: "Greeah!"
Mage: "Run!"
Fighter: "Run?"
Mage: "Just run! Down to the corner, here, let's wait for them out of sight."
Fighter: "Care to tell me-"
Mage: "Silent image, right there on the wall where the hallway turns, now it looks like a straight hallway. And there we are, running right down it, isn't it cool? Now be quiet."
Fighter: "I have no idea-"
Goblins: *run into the wall at full speed*
Mage: "Run!"
Fighter: "Run?"
Mage: "Just run! Down to the corner, here, let's wait for them out of sight."
Fighter: "Care to tell me-"
Mage: "Silent image, right there on the wall where the hallway turns, now it looks like a straight hallway. And there we are, running right down it, isn't it cool? Now be quiet."
Fighter: "I have no idea-"
Goblins: *run into the wall at full speed*
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