At risk of AOLing...

Quote from: John Morrow;385952I have two boxes worth of D&D 3.5 material from when I ran and played 3.5 an few years ago, much of it the official WotC material.  I don't own a single D&D 4e product, not even the core rulebooks, precisely because of this and similar criticisms.  

I want a system to have mechanics that represent things in the game world.  I want it to be a sort of "physics engine".  Dissociated mechanics are worthless to me.  Worse than worthless, actually, because using them detracts from the experience for me.  



For me, it's much simpler than that.  They moved the style of the game from something I liked and could enjoy to something I don't like and want nothing to do with.  The shift to dissociated mechanics creates a hostile environment for certain styles of play.

Well put; I am in total agreement.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;385864I wish folks would get over the fact that games aren't novels and appreciate games for what makes fun in a game.

So do I.

Quote from: John Morrow;385952I want a system to have mechanics that represent things in the game world.  I want it to be a sort of "physics engine".

Same here.

I am deeply conflicted about getting rid of polygonal dice. On the one hand, having unified mechanics and consistent die rolling makes the game run much faster and smoother, on the other hand FLGSs make a good chunk of their money on dice sets. With Amazon running around being a virtual non-profit book subsidy, actual game stores get a lot more of their cash flow from physical peripherals like dice than I am comfortable with. If every game went to a simple 3d6 curve for everything, that might actually kill the hobby stores. And then, the hobby itself could die.

d8s are kind of stupid, but they seriously are an anchor that keeps our past and our culture from slipping away entirely.

In other news: 4e D&D books are simply too verbose. Each of the core books, the three basic Core Books, are more than two hundred thousand words. For fuck's sake, Moby Dick is 187k! Before adding a single supplement or bonus core book (of which there are now dozens and several respectively), the basic game is roughly equivalent to reading one of the classics of over-long prose four times straight. It's damn near a thousand pages (if it was written out on novel pages instead of coffee table pages, it would be almost three thousand), and that's way too much for a game that is supposed to play fast and loose. It's way too much for any game. To put that in perspective: the basic core books of 4e D&D were half the length of the combined volumes of In Search of Lost Time, and when you include expansions, the works of D&D had exceeded that benchmark within a year of publication.

D&D needs to be cut down to a length that a young gamer could actually be expected to read before playing the game or finishing highschool and moving out of the house.

-Frank

Quote from: ftD&D needs to be cut down to a length that a young gamer could actually be expected to read before playing the game or finishing highschool and moving out of the house.

D&D, in any generation, needs to be cut down to a basic game of under a 100pages, and expanded game with advanced rules that add to the basic game seemlessley without contradcition, and optional rulesets from there.

Get them hooked with a good, sound, simple, immersive setting-physics engine...then give them room to grow and add onto the fun.

If you're going to houserule, then everyone should have the last say on what the houserules are. This would solve a lot of problematic houserules which are actually DM fetishes.

That's a nice idea, but the whole point of the DM (or GM, for 4e) is that he's a master (mister?) of the game.

You can't have a bunch of players new to the system voting on what houserule makes sense. Ok, I guess you can, but, again, that defeats the purpose. There needs to be some trust that the master is not a jerk, is all.

Quote from: Doom;386246That's a nice idea, but the whole point of the DM (or GM, for 4e) is that he's a master (mister?) of the game.

You can't have a bunch of players new to the system voting on what houserule makes sense. Ok, I guess you can, but, again, that defeats the purpose. There needs to be some trust that the master is not a jerk, is all.

You are talking to the wrong person for that.  GMs are the entirety of what is wrong with RPGs.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;386244If you're going to houserule, then everyone should have the last say on what the houserules are. This would solve a lot of problematic houserules which are actually DM fetishes.

My players DO have a say.

All of the exits are clearly marked.

Quote from: Shazbot79;386258My players DO have a say.

All of the exits are clearly marked.

HA! I LOL'd.

I listen to the players' feedback and try to find out what works and what doesn't work with them. In that sense they have a significant input on house rules, if any. I'm still the one who's got the last word in any case, as GM.

If a player has a strong objection about some house rule, he's free to run the game himself. He can also not play the game at all.

Quote from: Shazbot79;386258My players DO have a say.

All of the exits are clearly marked.

Follow the overhead signs or the lights in the floor to the exit nearest to your seat.

Sorry, folks. GMs alone having the final say in what house rules are going to be used is retarded. The group should have the final say. It avoids the infliction of one person's stupidity on everyone else. This is no different than a player playing Killfuck Soulshitter in Holy Lands.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;386403Sorry, folks. GMs alone having the final say in what house rules are going to be used is retarded. The group should have the final say. It avoids the infliction of one person's stupidity on everyone else. This is no different than a player playing Killfuck Soulshitter in Holy Lands.

Show us on the doll where the Bad Evil DM touched your PC.

Design by committee is retarded. Always was, and shall remain.

Creatively speaking, lack of focus can affect the quality of a work if one or two people don't help guide things along.

When taking mechanics into account, I don't see the same problem.  Engineering/logic based tasks are usually done better in groups, and I see more of a need for consensus when it comes to the tools you use to interact with the world.  Less so when you're dealing with what color the flowers should be, and where to place the shrubberies.

It's good to have one person to help keep things focus, but that usually occurs naturally due to our social programming, even if the game doesn't have a hard-coded Rule 0.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;386403Sorry, folks. GMs alone having the final say in what house rules are going to be used is retarded. The group should have the final say.

They do have the final say. If they don't want to play in my campaign with my house rules and my rule zero (that the RAW are merely suggestions and guidelines for the GM), then they can find a different GM and a different campaign. I'm not going to run with rules I don't like, think waste too much time, or do not fit my world or the campaign being run in it. I'm up front about it and expect players who cannot put up with it to have to good sense to not play.

As far as design by committee goes:

Fiction, especially fantasy fiction, is usually pretty non-interactive. That is, unless you're using the same characters or locations - and often even if you are - two people writing stories simply makes the fiction accumulate twice as fast. Like the folk process where you set multiple bards to writing poems about Hercules, and you end up with a large body of work about Hercules. Set one person to write about Gnolls and another to write about Ogres, and you'll be done in half the time.

Mechanics require a large amount of oversight to not suck. They are the interaction point of a lot of forces, and are simply far too complicated to be left to one person. You need a committee working on it.

Now, mechanical design by committee can be disastrous - as is the case when several people design mechanical subsystems on their own and then try to shoehorn them in together. That usually doesn't work. But that doesn't mean that lone wolf writing a 250,000 word rulebook is a good idea. When I was writing up aWoD, I did pretty much all of the writing. But I still relied upon other people for advice, to check things, to proofread, and to playtest. Even though it was "mostly me" - it still relied heavily upon committee input. It has to.

Indeed, one of the advantages of open source design is that your "committee" is very much larger. You can't let anything fester along until consensus happens, because it never will - but you'll find and neutralize a lot more game glitches that way.

-Frank