When you're designing an RPG, you need to understand what "good design" really means, and it all starts with one fundamental truth.
#dnd       #ttrpg   #osr   

Definitely agree that playability should be the priority. I also think people dismiss D&D at their own peril in design because even though I don't play it as much as I used to, one that that is instantly clear to me the moment I run another campaign (and it can be any edition from first to third for me) is on the GM it is clear what you need to do to prep and plan for a session. It is also a system that has legs. You can start a campaign on a whim and it will blossom it just has the right mixture of gameable content. My experience when I go back to it is always "Oh yeah, this is why D&D works". Not every system needs to do what D&D does but that lesson of playability is crucial

"D&D is bad game design"

This is like saying basic Poker is bad game design because you prefer Texas Hold'Em; just another typical horseshit postmodern argument. Hegel really fucked up Western thought in just about every significant aspect.

EDIT: The Vampire example given at the end is interesting...I agree that the system isn't very good, but as a game it still somehow works specifically due to a combination of factors. There's more to the forest than simply the trees.

I hate to be blunt, but OSR is barely played more than Forge games relative to D&D. Realistically, the OSR crowd is vocal and buys a lot of RPGs (more than they play, as with most indie RPGs) but D&D's dominance is from marketing and familiarity, not quality. So I deny the argument that more players equals quality. That is kinda true, but it's also kinda untrue when you're comparing an indie studio of three people in their spare time to WotC spending a half million dollars for ads. Actual play is not a perfect yardstick when the market is this distorted.

I have made my opinion clear that I think D&D is obsolete. This applies much more to the WotC era products than the oldest editions (well, beyond THAC0, anyways) because WotC has always designed D&D as a quagmire of noob-trap abilities. It's much easier to take a not-so-overbuilt TSR edition of D&D and streamline it into a modern OSR game than it is to work with newer WotC editions of D&D, which tend to be both overbuilt and irreducibly complex. The TSR editions are also objectively obsolete, but they are easy to modernize, and most GMs can do it almost unconsciously. The WotC editions of D&D are somewhat easier to make content for, but practically impossible to modernize.

The Forge made many mistakes. I think the ideas were interesting, but also flawed. You have to take them with a significant pinch of salt. And as the Forge grew, creative envy also grew and it suffered internal sabotage. I have personal experiences from my time moderating Reddits r/RPGDesign which suggests to me that someone in the industry is intentionally sabotaging the homebrew community. My experiences and my speculations as to who and why are probably best saved for another time. But the real issue is that the Forge went into "Winter" precisely as Smartphones went mainstream and just before streaming became popular, both changed average table chemistry significantly. This means that the supermajority of Forge games did not age well at all, and suffer even worse irreducible complexity problems than WotC D&D. Fiasco is brilliant, but you can't alter the games and make anything other than Fiasco, so no one homebrews Fiasco variants.

Your comments about min-maxing...irritate me. This is an infuriatingly common perspective and I absolutely despise it. In all other games, people who put effort into reading and internalizing the rules and understanding the nuances of the game are the most valuable players. Only in RPGs are these players considered problem-players, and one of the key reasons why is that WotC D&D is filled with noob-trap abilities which sound cool, but which are objectively inferior and the min-maxing player knows that. This more than any other reason is why I think D&D's core paradigm is flawed; it drives groups apart rather than bringing players together.

Classless and point-buy are better than class-based, but also significantly harder to design. A lot of D&D's design decisions (and games which roughly copy the formula) are about avoiding design decisions which make the game difficult to design more than engineering a good player experience. I think it's fair to say that to make a game which is significantly different from D&D which has any chance of being successful, you must have more game design experience than Gygax did sometime in the 1980s because that's when a lot of the tropes D&D is designed with were established.

At the end of the day, I think you massively oversimplify what makes D&D successful. It was the first RPG. It was a fantasy RPG in a market which loved fantasy. It's usually been backed by a major company with a significant marketing budget. It's hard to imagine D&D failing in this circumstance. 5E literally marketed itself on the nostalgia of older editions of D&D, and I kinda expect that most 5E PHB and Splatbooks were never actually used, they were just collectibles because D&D is a cultural artifact. It's also worth noting that homebrew designers and OSR GMs tend to run tighter ships than pick up group D&D tables, and such PUG groups have major problems with player attention spans and distracted play. D&D is not actually particularly good in this environment, but people play it because it's familiar and comfortable.

Quote from: Fheredin on May 22, 2023, 02:19:03 PM
Classless and point-buy are better than class-based

Your entire argument is null and void with this simple statement. You cannot make normative statements like this, in absolute terms, over matters of taste. Some people like vanilla, some like chocolate; which is better? Point-buy is not "better" than random rolls except in specific instances of implementation, when it achieves the design goal; I think that's what Pundit was pointing out in his analysis. If your goal is to design a point-buy, classless game, then something like GURPS or HERO or whatever does a much better job of achieving that goal vs. something like D&D. But if your goal is to make a dungeon-delving game with characters created at random who fit into definitive, rigid paradigms, those games are terrible and D&D is thus a better game of that type.

Also: "D&D is obsolete"

Is chess obsolete? What constitutes obsolescence? Is it merely age? Advancement does not make a thing obsolete unless it totally replaces that thing. There are many who argued that the radio was obsolete as soon as television came onto the scene, when in fact radio merely took on a different role and remained a viable medium of expression. TV cannot replace radio; it provides a different experience. "Modern" rpgs cannot make D&D obsolete, they merely provide a different gaming experience, and some people prefer D&D to whatever the current thing is, for whatever reason.

"At the end of the day, I think you massively oversimplify what makes D&D successful." - The Model T was the first real production automobile, and yet it was surpassed and replaced almost as soon as something better was available. Your argument is based on what is seemingly your own predisposition to hate D&D, for whatever reason.

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Quote from: Brad on May 22, 2023, 03:01:56 PM
The Model T was the first real production automobile, and yet it was surpassed and replaced almost as soon as something better was available.

Your entire argument is null and void with this simple statement. You cannot make normative statements like this, in absolute terms, over matters of taste. Some people like vanilla, some like chocolate; which is better?

I don't like classless at all, but I don't think it's inherently bad or good design.  I don't like the idea that characters aren't immediately taggable by game handles, and I don't like that there cease to be understandable mechanical differences between them.  Of the fully classless systems I've seen, the only one that doesn't actively anger me is Savage Worlds, and they've done a lot of work to allow for class-like things if you want them.

You can easily make the case that classless is more realistic, and that it's possible to balance after all (even though I'd definitely say it's much harder, especially for the end user, the DM).  So it's not like it's bad design, it's just something I never want in practice.

By contrast, point buy is only ok if you assume that the stats don't matter.  Video games usually make this assumption (and the rare exceptions use stat values as different valid ways to play- stats used for replay value is actually really cool in a game).  If stats are just +3 to hit and damage, or +4 to a target number, then point buy is strictly better, no doubt, and you can hammer in exactly what the budget is, and build single and multiple attribute dependent classes around that.

But that's not what stats are really right?  If you have an Int of 3, you're fucking retarded.  Right?  That's what that means?  Perhaps profoundly retarded.  In 3.X that was the minimum for language, in 5ed there are many animals, not just dolphins, smarter than that.  An Int of 8 is a tiny bit below average and an Int of 12 is a tiny bit above average.  This will affect how you play your character some.  Similarly, dumping Cha and Wis both to 8 or something is supposed to have roleplay effects.  And since the game rewards you much more for having your prime attribute to whatever that game's softcap is than it punishes you for dumping most stats (in 5e, strength, intelligence, and charisma are solid dump stats, because the saving throws tied to them are so rare that you can't factor them in [and the one time you get an intellect devourer or whatever you needed way more than a +2], and because you can CHOOSE to not be a pack mule, or the party face).
Which means that a "properly built" character has roleplay restrictions that are difficult to get around- a problem that rolling for stats avoids, especially in like, AD&D, or whatever.

I do think that point buy, which I do prefer, encourages in many people a min/max mindset which then snowballs into other problems Just my experience.

Aren't PBtA and Blades in the Dark games pretty popular? So they're good too?

I do personally prefer playability.  If the ony way your game works is when it's embedded into a VTT I'm not sure that's well designed

Quote from: Hixanthrope on May 22, 2023, 03:20:23 PM
Your entire argument is null and void with this simple statement. You cannot make normative statements like this, in absolute terms, over matters of taste. Some people like vanilla, some like chocolate; which is better?

Nope, there is a demonstrative "better" in all the capabilities of cars that came after the Model T. Better handling, better fuel economy, better range and drive-ability, etc. All the "better" parts of games after D&D are purely subjective and entirely rooted in taste. Try again.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on May 22, 2023, 03:42:06 PM
Aren't PBtA and Blades in the Dark games pretty popular?

On reddit ? Sure, nobody plays anything else.
In the real world ? Probably all of PbtA combined reaches about 10% of D&D's player base.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on May 22, 2023, 03:42:06 PM
So they're good too?

Only if you're a fly.

Quote from: Brad on May 22, 2023, 03:01:56 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on May 22, 2023, 02:19:03 PM
Classless and point-buy are better than class-based

Also: "D&D is obsolete"

Is chess obsolete?

I'm glad you asked because this is precisely why the Forge's goal of abstract design theory was a good idea.

Chess is objectively obsolete because of a phenomenon called "first player advantage." In turn based games with symmetrical rules (like Chess) the first player to move has a tempo advantage which means that White will win the majority of games, especially at competitive high level play. Garry Kasparov (famous for playing against Deep Blue) is quoted as saying he would try to win as White and draw as Black. As a result, chess tournaments must make players play each player twice--once on each side of the table--and the total number of games comes out to be even, so there's a good chance of the tournament coming to a draw even if none of the games within it are draws or stalemates.

This is very obviously a design fault in the game which event coordinators and players are trying to work around. Modern games tend to understand first player advantage and include mechanisms to counterbalance first player advantage...at least assuming the game designer has studied some formal game design.

For example, consider Magic: The Gathering.

In Magic: The Gathering, players draw 7 cards ad assuming this is a two-player game and no one mulligans, the first player to act skips their draw-step. This means that the tempo advantage gained by acting first is at least partially counterbalanced by the second player holding a one card advantage. Richard Garfield baked in an asymmetry between the two players to make the game less unbalanced because he understood first player advantage. I think he underdid it--really, to undo first player advantage in a game like MTG, you need the player on the draw to draw two cards, but that would make for a wonky first turn.

I would argue that Magic: The Gathering is another example of an obsolete game because of the Mulligan. Opening hands must have good spell/land mixes to work, and by tournament rules, each time you Mulligan you draw one fewer cards, so you can wind up mulliganing down to 3-4 cards, which probably isn't a competitive hand, and have to resign a game purely because of RNG. The solution is pretty easy (split lands and spells into separate libraries) but that would break a lot of existing Mill and card discard cards, so sunk cost forces WotC to stay the course with an obsolete game.

Note that obsolete does not mean unplayable. An obsolete game is potentially just as enjoyable as it ever was, but it also has a flaw which people have mulled over, articulated in abstraction, and found at least one solution. Game design is an iterative process, not just individually for single games, but also as an industry-wide collective.  Players who have seen better often reluctantly return to obsolete games because they know they will now experience the flaws much more clearly. It's that ratchet of progress that players do not want to go backwards when they have seen better which defines game obsolescence.

Quote from: Fheredin on May 22, 2023, 02:19:03 PM
I hate to be blunt, but OSR is barely played more than Forge games relative to D&D. Realistically, the OSR crowd is vocal and buys a lot of RPGs (more than they play, as with most indie RPGs) but D&D's dominance is from marketing and familiarity, not quality. So I deny the argument that more players equals quality. *snipped for brevity*

I tend to agree with a lot of these points (though, I don't have a strong opinion on the Forge, which I kinda missed except for a few tidbits I gleaned while it was still going on, and people complaining about it later), and tend to think that Pundit's defense of D&D mostly amounts to treating the Bandwagon Fallacy like it's not a fallacy. That being said I think that there's some merits to D&D and that it would be next to impossible to achieve D&D's level of success on pure first mover and name recognition alone.

If the system was truly that crap it'd have been replaced by a better system by now, no matter how "first" it was or how recognized it is. Some parts of it must be serviceable for it to survive as the world's top RPG almost undisputed (barring a few brief instances) for this long, even if they're only barely serviceable. Otherwise people wouldn't have persistently put up with it for long enough for it to become a recognizable name to begin with.

I'm also firmly on the camp that "min-maxing"—to the degree that that is arguably a "bad" thing—is 100% on the system and not the player. If someone else making an optimized character really bothers you that much there's either something wrong with you, or the system must be so broken it needs to be fixed. And no, the "problem" player adjusting their build decisions to fit someone else's undefined and completely subjective and arbitrary opinion about what is or is not acceptable as a character build isn't a solution.

But old D&D gets around this by making everyone pick a boilerplate class, and leaving the power disparities to some classes being more powerful than others (often at different levels) and players getting lucky during character creation when they're rolling stats. Which is apparently much fairer and far preferable than characters being stronger on the merits of their build. Cuz some players rolling unbelievably bad during character creation and others getting ridiculously high scores is "realistic", but some characters being stronger cuz they picked the right abilities is unfair and a reflection on the player as a human being rather than the people envious of them or the game system.

I also agree that something like point-buy and freeform/classless is objectively better than class based, at least, as far as character customization is concerned. Once you throw customization into the mix character classes just become a hurtle that gets in the way and complicate things more that just building everything a la carte. Though, I'm not sure I agree that it's necessarily harder to design, specially compared to modern class-based games with stuff like skills, "feats" and a bunch of class abilities as you go up in levels. I think something like WEG Star Wars d6 and similar skill-based games are far simpler at their core than modern D&D.

Quote from: Brad on May 22, 2023, 03:01:56 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on May 22, 2023, 02:19:03 PM
Classless and point-buy are better than class-based

Your entire argument is null and void with this simple statement. You cannot make normative statements like this, in absolute terms, over matters of taste. Some people like vanilla, some like chocolate; which is better? Point-buy is not "better" than random rolls except in specific instances of implementation, when it achieves the design goal; I think that's what Pundit was pointing out in his analysis. If your goal is to design a point-buy, classless game, then something like GURPS or HERO or whatever does a much better job of achieving that goal vs. something like D&D. But if your goal is to make a dungeon-delving game with characters created at random who fit into definitive, rigid paradigms, those games are terrible and D&D is thus a better game of that type.

Split away because this is a less important reply.

Classless is a bit of a misnomer because you can actually build a class-system inside a classless system. This is typically called a Career or Life Path or something like that, but fundamentally this is just building a mini-class system inside a classless game. You can also design a classless system to be optimized for speed, to be optimized for character immersion, to emphasize character customization options, or all of the above with multiple character creation paths, because point-buy means multiple character creation paths can be balanced against each other (although that's a bit of a rare feature.)

A class-based system is intended to be babies learning to doodle by shading within the lines. Yes, most of them offer multiclassing, but that basically makes a class-based game into a classless one through the most Byzantine method possible. It makes far more sense to start classless and build a class system within it which players can opt into or out of.

The one redeeming feature of class-based games is book girth. People at a bookstore instinctively equate spinal thiccness with quality, so having a fat-boy chonky spine makes your book look more impressive on a shelf.

Yep, Chesterton's Fence all over again. 

If someone understands why, for example, that rolling against AC, with armor making you harder to hit, works (to a certain extent), then it becomes a lot easier to understand where it doesn't work quite as well, and then what the implications are for related rules.   You could just as easily say the same thing starting from, say, RQ or GURPS, which don't have AC, but instead have armor as damage reduction. That approach also works (to a certain extent), and also has limitations, and implications. 

Chesterton's Fence never said you couldn't tear it down.  It only said that the statement, "This fence serves no purpose.  We should tear it down." should be answered with, "Go away until you understand the purpose of the fence.  Then we may allow you to tear it down."