D&D 5: Ranger Revamp

It's time to fire 150,000 play-testers, or at least just the group that played rangers (so roughly about 12,500 playtesters by my math). So D&D 5's ranger class is getting a Pathfinder Unchained rogue style class revamp in the upcoming Unearthed Arcana book, according to this article over on the main D&D site. Part of me sits here and wonders how something this basic was missed, I mean, this playtest group was three times as large as Pathfinder's, right? Does nobody play rangers? How did this happen?

I hear the voice of one of my old bosses echoing through my head. If we let something like this slip and ship there would be hell to pay.

But really, when you are in the realm of quality testing, the larger you get the worse your feedback gets. You cannot throw three times the people at a problem and think you are getting a three times better test; it is actually quite the opposite, as smaller groups tend to produce better-thought out designs. There is a point in quality assurance where you have so many voices nothing gets heard, and you spend most of your time sorting through feedback instead of designing and improving. Too many cooks is a real problem in quality assurance and playtesting.

But a D&D 5 ranger revamp? Part of me feels, "and so it begins." Because you know once the UA ranger revamp is done, it will be another class that is seen as the 'problem.' This will continue until my shelf is filled with more D&D 5 books (or web supplement fixes) than Pathfinder, with book after book introducing 'fixes' and then creating more problems with power creep or relative power changes. Until, that is, calls for a simplified and streamlined D&D 6 start being heard.

What about fighters? What about rogues? There are complaints about those as well. We need a new Martial Guide to fix those!

MMOs as Tabletop Games

Stop it. No. Bad game designers. I hate the MMO-ification of pen and paper games, because frankly, MMOs do this better. I log in, all the changes (hate them or not) are auto-downloaded in a patch, and the world goes on. My shelf isn't littered with the mistakes of a version 1.0 game. I bought into Shadowrun 4.0 heavily, and I am hesitant about buying 5.0 because it's fixed now. Get it right the first time, especially if you print a book.

I can sympathize with the game designers, because you can never get things right on the first version. It makes me think that all games should be a PDF exclusive for the first year or two, and then print a book later after all the bugs have been worked out. This may be the answer I would like the best. I could support a model like that, because it feels honest to how game development works nowadays.

Admittedly, Pathfinder has a lot of books, but the base classes went through a couple versions of D&D 3 before they ended up how they are today. Where Pathfinder stumbles is typically in the new classes, those are version 1.0 designs that need fixes, but the basic book's set (except for the rogue, but I know players who like the non-Unchained rogue better) were tested across 15 years of design and feedback and are pretty solid. If I am going to play a game where the D&D power curve has been balanced and perfected, I will play the foil-covered D&D 3.5 books or the basic book of Pathfinder.

Paid Beta Tests

I don't need or want to buy in to another beta test, because my old games work and I own them. There is a point where I stop admiring 'new and shiny' and put more value in 'what works.' You see this 'flight to quality' in cars, computers, tablets, and many other things. Some big new thing will drop on the market. It is cool and all the rage. But, it has problems. They promise in version two they will work those out! If you are an Apple fan you know what I am talking about. So you either live with something that has issues, or go back to a slightly older model that 'just works' the way it was designed. Or you are an 'early adopter' and suffer through a paid beta.

We Can Do Better

But this whole MMO-style class re-balancing is a part of where I think the entire pen-and-paper industry has just went so wrong. We are better than MMOs. We do everything they don't and can't do. We don't need to sit here and worry about class roles, power curves, class balancing, and DPS. It feels asinine, like we could do better than this, and the entire 'story based' and 'shared roleplaying' experience part of our hobby is enslaved to the power gamers and the number crunchers.

I just get this feeling, as game designers we can do better than this. If your game design model is MMO, then don't ship printed books. Make your game subscription based, design characters electronically, and store character sheets in the cloud. Auto-update and fix my designs if you patch. D&D 4 went this way, but they made the mistake of printing books. It is kind of ironic that the printed books will outlive the electronic errata and character designer, but that is how they designed that game. If you are going to follow the MMO model, then you can do better than shipping books that are full of errors and you will errata out of existence later.

Let Storytelling Rule?

Or better yet, don't chase the MMO model at all. Let pen-and-paper games be pen-and-paper games, and stop trying to live up to the fantasy that pen-and-paper roleplaying is just an MMO played on the tabletop. Design games where story comes first, and de-emphasize the entire 'character build' culture. Put the story first, and take the power curve out of the game. Basic Fantasy provides a fantasy gaming experience without a steep power curve, mind you, the curve still exists, but it isn't as dramatic where a dragon has hundreds or thousands of hit points.

It feels like a viscous circle where D&D started the roleplaying ball rolling, videogames copied D&D, and now D&D is copying videogames. It feels like an invisible power curve controls everything behind the scenes and it is constantly being tweaked and refined, with our books being left by the wayside.

It is frustrating. Part of me wishes they would have fixed D&D 4. Another part of me just wishes they would have settled on a cleaned-up but unchanged AD&D 2nd Edition and said "this is the game we love." Why we need to keep reinventing the wheel in terms of fantasy gaming is beyond me.