Quote from: TristramEvans;581329Hmm, the second reply to that post seems to disagree with the premise at length. I personally don't know the game well enough to judge as the intentions of the system don't line up with my style of roleplaying; I played in a Gammaworld game which used the 4e rules and it felt like a boardgame to me, very contrary to immersion. But what I hear from the people I know who do play it (one of my regular players has been DMing a 4e campaign weekly for about 2 years), it does provide a certain experience very well: "balance " between classes, specified roles for each player in a group, combat encounters tailored to a group's level, etc. All of which are anathemic to how I GM or the types of games I like to play/run, but for the audience that does want that...well, it's hard for me to understand how it's "bad design" to provide the exact experience that it promises.


(I tend to put balance in quotations because personally I think it's an illusion)

Read the entirety of the thread.

Quote from: MGuy;581331What you're saying seriously doesn't detract from what I've said at all. I am honestly losing what you're even trying to say. You keep saying that somehow someone can design something, have it do exactly what they want it to do, and it is still bad design. I defy you to give me an example of what you're suggesting.

an example would be if someone set out to make the most complex, convoluted, unintelligible game ever. A game that took a month for every round of combat. In fact, one designed to irritate the peple who play. One that simply could not under any circumstances, be any fun for anyone at all, and succeed in that goal, that would be an example of bad design even though it met the intentions of the designer. Under your metric of designer reaching goal = good design, this would be considered good design. The purpose of a game is to be played by people, its purpose isnt to meet design goals (though meeting design goals is an important part of getting there). So the measure of good design is how well the game pleases the people who play it. Even in your own example of the glove, you are acknowledging the need to please an audience (yourself). You might have missed everyone of your design goals, but the glove still ended up fitting perfectly, looking sharp and warding off the cold because you responded appropriately to your own feedback through trial and error. the point is it isnt enough simply to have design goals. The design goals themselves have to align with the audience and your execution must succeed in pleasing them.

Design goals and pleasing an audience are not the same thing. You may factor the audience into your design goals, but sell a million copies to 18-30 year olds isnt a design goal.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581324Folks, don't put too much stock into the opinions of someone who hasn't designed anything, let alone RPGs.  There's a fundamental lack of understanding on basic design principals going on, and until that gets admitted to (which probably won't), arguing is a moot point.

To be fair we are arguing a rather pedantic point at the moment. Mguy isnt discounting the value of designing towa an audience, he is just saying that doesn't have to be in the measure of good design. I am saying there is always an audience and its response is the measure of good design. In practice this disagreement might not produce very different results at the drawing board. I think where his point of view gets problematic is it can become an excuse for discounting audience feedback.

I have now seen the exact same off-topic going on fr several pages now, and neither of the seemingly opposing seems to really wanna budge.
Yes, seemingly.
Instead of trying to see and understand the other's viewpoint, you keep your own stalwart opinion, claiming you read and understand the other, yet you fail so massively.
All you involved (it is more than 2) has good points, but you seem to refuse to recognize or even try to understand what the other one(s) mean.

My opinion on the matter?
"Good Gamedesign" .... Yes, a completely worthless game can have great gamedesign, but it is still worthless!
It reminds me of a child's drawing, or toy, it is utterly worthless to most, and it may even become worthless to the child once it grown up, but to the child, the parents and perhaps even the siblings, it may be invaluable during a very long time.
... Why am i even writing this ....

Quote from: chaosvoyager;581323Setting IS System.

No.
Settings are:
Marvel, DC, Oddworld, World of Darkness(old), CoC, Rift, TORG, Resident Evil, WHFRP, L5R, Aberrant, Shadowrun ..... and all variants loosely based on those, more based on a genre than a distict, specific, world.

Systems are:
D20, BRP, GURPS, WW's Storytelling system(s), Tri-Stat, ... and so on.

//////////////
Now, back on topic?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581336an example would be if someone set out to make the most complex, convoluted, unintelligible game ever. A game that took a month for every round of combat. In fact, one designed to irritate the peple who play. One that simply could not under any circumstances, be any fun for anyone at all, and succeed in that goal, that would be an example of bad design even though it met the intentions of the designer. Under your metric of designer reaching goal = good design, this would be considered good design. The purpose of a game is to be played by people, its purpose isnt to meet design goals (though meeting design goals is an important part of getting there). So the measure of good design is how well the game pleases the people who play it. Even in your own example of the glove, you are acknowledging the need to please an audience (yourself). You might have missed everyone of your design goals, but the glove still ended up fitting perfectly, looking sharp and warding off the cold because you responded appropriately to your own feedback through trial and error. the point is it isnt enough simply to have design goals. The design goals themselves have to align with the audience and your execution must succeed in pleasing them.

Design goals and pleasing an audience are not the same thing. You may factor the audience into your design goals, but sell a million copies to 18-30 year olds isnt a design goal.

If you purposefully want to make a bad game then if you manage to make that bad game (something everyone agrees is really bad) would people not point at it and say that it is a prime (good) example of how to make a bad game?

Quote from: MGuy;581333Read the entirety of the thread.

lol, I'm trying, but without context or any greater experience alot of it sounds like arguments about vcr programming instructions to me. I don't have enough knowledge to discern between opinions, simple clashes in playstyles, or genuine criticism. And even genuine criticism, in regards to crunchier RPG systems, can simply come down to no game is capable of predicting and accounting for every event and its possible to "break" any game system if one doesn't account for DM's ability to use common sense, judgement, and discernment based on individual situations.

Now, one of the main reasons that 4e doesn't appeal to me is because the system doesn't support DM judgement in the same way, say 1e D&D (or WH3E for a more contemporary comparison) does. I assume the intention here was to make the first-time or novice DM's job "easier", though I'm of the perhaps elitist opinion that GM/DMing is a talent and not something everyone is capable of doing equally well. But I can't say I fault a game for catering to a new audience, though I wonder how a person will ever learn to be a good GM if they switch to a system that doesn't have all those crutches.

But I also tend to not go in for the "badwrongfun" opinion on games I don't like and assume that if it's providing a satisfying and fun experience for someone than the game's design is just fine, it just is aimed at a target audience I don't belong to.

So I'm reading this thread, and alot of the nitpicking I'm seeing is either Greek to me (I have no idea wth a "daily" or "at will" is), or is obviously coming from people who have very different expectations from a game than I can empathize with or comprehend (like the debate regarding the respective resale value of magic items in 3.5 vs 4e, which makes it seem to me like I'm reading a thread about World of Warcraft).

Quote from: TristramEvans;581345So I'm reading this thread, and alot of the nitpicking I'm seeing is either Greek to me (I have no idea wth a "daily" or "at will" is), or is obviously coming from people who have very different expectations from a game than I can empathize with or comprehend (like the debate regarding the respective resale value of magic items in 3.5 vs 4e, which makes it seem to me like I'm reading a thread about World of Warcraft).

M'k. Well Brendan touted it as reaching its design goals. Now first I will state that none of what I am about to say is about whether or not you can have "fun" with 4e.

4E promised balanced classes. It doesn't deliver. A number of classes are far and away better than other classes. When 4E first came out I played a paladin and was basically out done in both usefulness and utility by the Ranger, Warden, and Rogue. There have been a bunch of changes to it (going as far as essentials) that have been made so what the current look of the game is is foreign to me but at least at the beginning they failed at what they were supposed to do right out of the gate.

4E promised to have an all inclusive out of combat game that made it so that no one had to sit out of the action when not in combat. 4E failed at several iterations of Skill Challenges. I played through two iterations and both punished the team for having someone who did not spam their highest skill roll for everything. So either you use the fact that skills are fairly open to convince the GM that you can use your high Knowledge: History bonus to allow you to help repair your ship or you only help make the team fail. Again it has been through several iterations so I don't know how the current skill challenges work.

4E promised to make combats less clunky and more interesting. It does not. Combats (when I played again) were long, boring, grindfests. Where they got rid of the fighter saying "I attack it!" every round you instead have "I use [insert At Will Ability]" every round. Certain monsters had mountains of HP and could take upwards of an hour to beat. And that is after it becomes apparent hat it will never be able to kill you and you're just grinding it down until critical existence failure.

4E promised to be the solution to 3e's problems. It didn't "solve" any of 3e's actual problems with the possible exception of reducing a wizard's power level to that of the fighters (though I would contest that most people who played 3rd didn't want to all be fighters).

Lastly a bunch of what 4E did has nothing to do with what actually were problems in 3E and served to make the game like an MMO. Unfortunately you can't do MMO on table top. The math was wrong, people can't process the math that is there as fast and as effortlessly as you play an actual MMO, the GM is not likely to run the game like an MMO would be run (and almost as soon as he doesn't a lot of shit breaks down fast).

Need I go on?

Quote from: MGuy;581343If you purposefully want to make a bad game then if you manage to make that bad game (something everyone agrees is really bad) would people not point at it and say that it is a prime (good) example of how to make a bad game?

You are reaching. Do you really want to assert this would be good design?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;580942As much as we like to think it does?  The reason I ask is because two of the most popular versions of D&D were arguably the worst designed from a presentation and mechanical standpoint.

First, you seem to be asking two different questions: One about presentation and another one about game design. I'm going to focus on the game design one.

QuoteAnd 4e was much better designed over 3e in terms of balance, presentation, and work the DM had to do.  And 4e is getting walked all over by 3e and the OGL.

You're assuming that "balance" and "work the DM had to do" are the only aspects of game design that players value.

But that's not actually true. Flipping a coin is a perfectly balanced game, but it's not much fun and people don't play it for entertainment.

So if we boil your question down to: "Is balance the most important aspect of roleplaying game design?" I think the answer -- after a brief perusal of the most popular games in the history of the industry -- is pretty self-evidently, "No. It's not."

And that's even before we acknowledge that there are many types of balance and that a lot of theoretical discussions about balance in an RPG are fundamentally bullshit.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;581355First, you seem to be asking two different questions: One about presentation and another one about game design. I'm going to focus on the game design one.

What?  How a game is laid out and presented in the books is part of game design.

QuoteYou're assuming that "balance" and "work the DM had to do" are the only aspects of game design that players value.

No I'm not.   Those were just examples.  So I'm afraid that the rest of your post is based on a false interpretation you have, and isn't really relevant to my original post.

Being honest the more I think about it the more I see Brendan's point, not about D&D or related crap, but in that each part of the design as outlined on page one can be informed by what you're trying to achieve, which in turn can be informed by who you expect to want to play the game. Not neccessarily, but its something to consider.

However I will add one caveat - by playing to the crowd you risk losing creative options that could have really blown that same crowd away completely, because you're trying to appease rather than extend. New stuff doesn't have an audience, or at minimum has much less of one, as hip and young as our hobby is. Its a multifaceted question with one element feeding into another, but I'd be very wary of sitting down and trying to design something to mainly intended to appeal.

That way lies boilerplate.

A blanket golden rule to consider your audience first is not the way to go.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581357What?  How a game is laid out and presented in the books is part of game design.

In the same way box cover art is a part of videogame design, I guess.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581361In the same way box cover art is a part of videogame design, I guess.

Uh, no.  When you play a video game, you probably never look at the cover again.  When you play an RPG, you're constantly using the book to reference things.  It's part of your actual gaming experience.  How that book is laid out and presented is a pretty important part of design.

It's unfortunate that this needs to be pointed out.

Quote from: The Traveller;581358However I will add one caveat - by playing to the crowd you risk losing creative options that could have really blown that same crowd away completely, because you're trying to appease rather than extend. New stuff doesn't have an audience, or at minimum has much less of one, as hip and young as our hobby is. Its a multifaceted question with one element feeding into another, but I'd be very wary of sitting down and trying to design something to mainly intended to appeal.

 audience first is not the way to go.

But here you are still considering your audience. You just said it yourself, you are creating a clever new mechanic to wow them.  I am not just saying you should ask what your customers want and simply feed it back to them. Sometimes you need to come up with new things you think your audience will react favorably to. To do this you have to understand your audience. You can anticipate what they will find useful or create a solution for a problem they havent verbalized. But you do need to consider the audience as you are building these things. and yes being creative is important.

I've read this thread and I'm going to say something that will probably be unpopular. Good design does not matter to most players because:

First, what makes "good RPG design" is subjective. Yes, there are a number of people and groups who claim to have a (or THE) "theory of good RPG design" and often will loudly proclaim their theory and (sometimes) even denounce games or designs who they don't think are following it. However, these various theories don't seem to agree on much and often seem to just be promoting whatever fads are current in RPG design.

Second, theory is great, but what actually matters to the average GM and player is how much fun they have playing a game, how hard it is to learn/GM, and how much support material is published for the rules. There has been no little or no attempt to prove that closely adhering to a game design theory actually results in games most average players think are better and more fun to play. Despite what many designers think, a game that most people don't play because they find it unfun, too complex/too simple, unsupported, etc. is a bad game no matter how well it adheres to a some design theory.