The most far-reaching bad descisions in RPG design?

[Talakeal]

I actually adhere to my own version of GNS theory...

For me gamist are the 'character sheet solitaire' guys and wargamers... stormwind or not, these guys focus more on numbers for fighting and fighting for numbers than anything else... Mathism as a priority. Optimizers and murderhobos... Gaming the system is almost 'more important' than playing the actual game. Gms who play escalation fu with the players in a death spiral of 'finding that sweet spot where the players both feel really powerful but still really challenged', which lasts until the players start to feel that the enemy's immunity to their attacks and the enemy's ability to target all of their weaknesses starts to feel contrived to a shark-jumping degree.

Narrativists are the setting and story types... the gms who must design entire worlds even when the players will never explore them or the player who cant make a character unless he knows what the mission or setting is before hand. Gms who value the setting or the story over player agency... Gm's that resist a player's attempt to make sweeping changes to their predesigned worlds and story arcs... Novelists posing as gms who get upset when the players dont play their role as expected. You must go down into the sewer or the game is over because thats what has to be done... or telling the player that only plays elves that your world has no elves... You know what your player likes but put something into your world design that precludes the very thing your player likes...

Simulationists/sandboxers... The plot (and sometimes even the setting) is created by the characters themselves. The gm's job is to simply play how the world reacts or is affected by the players' whims and desires. The adventure or challenge comes primarily from the consequences of the players choices. Games tend to fall apart only if the players themselves aren't imaginative enough to self motivate and are unsatisfied when the gm compensates by 'introducing a spanner in the works'. Or when the consequences of the players actions dig them a hole so deep its no longer fun to fight/figure their way out of.

Tricky part for me is that I have at least one of each of these at my current table... Makes it particularly challenging for them to all get on the same page...

Also the leveling problem. Another reason I still happily play the sdc palladium systems is that character generation gives you pretty much all of your abilities at first level, and leveling only makes them 'more powerful/successful'... some players hate gaining 15 levels without gaining any new abilities, but I'd way rather have all my variety of options up front than have a limited and sucky character with barely any options for months and months, only to let my neat tricks out of the bag just as the campaign is about to end... 17th level isnt when my campaigns should end... Its where my campaigns should really start to get going.

Its funny, this is almost exactly the opposite of how I normally here it being used. Going by this description I would probably be a narrativist, but using standard GNS theory that is my least favorite style of game. Still, kudos for redefining it in a manner that maps up to the most common forms of obnoxious player.

[Solaris]

Another bad decision: Dungeons.

(It may seem like I'm picking on D&D since almost everything famous and bad came from D&D; that's just because everything famous came from D&D.)

Because of dungeons, many people running RPGs of various kinds will consider dungeons to be "what an adventure is". Dungeons have an unfortunate tendency to take the story out of the adventure (oh, you found a dungeon. Now open doors, fight a monster, take treasure, rinse and repeat). I've know people who've been playing RPGs for nearly 30 years who still think dungeons are the epitome of RPG adventuring (though they might not know what the word "epitome" means). And the whole "return to the dungeon" (vomit, barf, barf, bleah) idea of 3.0 wasn't helping.

I've spend decades trying to keep adventures out of the boring old dungeons. I've constantly been trying to have innovative adventures and story structures. And people just want to return to the same old boring plot-less things? SMH

This sounds a lot like "Dungeons are badwrongfun" to me. While you may like games that aren't dungeon-crawls and have a lot of RP, other players may prefer something that doesn't require a lot of emotional investment.

If they prefer the kick-in-the-door style games, what's wrong with that? It's no less valid a way of enjoying pretending to be elves and wizards than deep-immersion roleplaying.

[VincentTakeda]

I will admit with 3.0 and its successors bringing back battlemats and battlemat mechanics, while it has 'revitalized the gaming community'... The way it has done that is by bringing back a lot of the gamists who gave up on the industry when it went from 1e to 2e. A lot of people found their particular gm's theater of the mind to be too different and/or too nebulous to enjoy. There apparently were a lot of 2e gm's that used their 'mastery of the no' to ill effect.

I agree that when you leave every rule to the gm's whim that such a system is bound to fail if you disagree with how that whim turns out, which is veeeeery easy to do if you are a gamist. Unmet expectations can become serious not-fun when its ad nauseum ad infinitum. When you leave a lot of how the game functions up to one man's definition of imaginationland, the game really only works well if his vision of imaginationland functions at least very similarly to the expectations of his players.

Sure the rules heavy 3.x versions were designed to reduce the number of arguments about how a thing should work, but at the end of the day 3.x still lets gms choose the dc value of the skillcheck and still lets gms choose the difficulty of the encounters, and still lets the gm fiat anything that's poorly worded, and still lets the gm fiat anything that's not been written. Despite its efforts, theres a lot more places to disagree than to agree, so having a gm and players that are able to resolve their differences amicably is still a higher priority than what's printed.

Me personally I'll still vote 2e over its successors 10 times out of 10.

[goto124]

the game really only works well if his vision of imaginationland functions at least very similarly to the expectations of his players.

*clap* Nicely said,

[Yora]

I think Dungeon Crawling should not be considered bad design. Because it was there before roleplaying. Roleplaying grew out of dungeon crawling, which started as a special version of military tactical wargames.
You can decide to completely leave this style of playing behind, and there's lots of good reasons to do so, but you can't really blame the earliest GMs for using them as the default.

[Amphetryon]

Sure the rules heavy 3.x versions were designed to reduce the number of arguments about how a thing should work, but at the end of the day 3.x still lets gms choose the dc value of the skillcheck and still lets gms choose the difficulty of the encounters, and still lets the gm fiat anything that's poorly worded, and still lets the gm fiat anything that's not been written. Despite its efforts, theres a lot more places to disagree than to agree, so having a gm and players that are able to resolve their differences amicably is still a higher priority than what's printed.

Me personally I'll still vote 2e over its successors 10 times out of 10.

Having played 2e for many years, it was my experience that every complaint levied against 3.X in the above paragraph applied to 2e, as well, merely replacing 3.X's verbiage with that appropriate to the 2e system. If you find 2e to be more your cuppa, great, more power to you, and congratulations on having fun, but DM fiat and encounter design are hardly new functions of the 3.X system.

[mephnick]

Maybe I misread it, but I think he's more saying that pages of legalistic rules never stopped arguments, or prevented the DM from making DC's up on the spot anyway. Proponents of rules-heavy systems always argue that 3.5's strict rules prevented these things. After 20 years of playing I never noticed a difference between 2e, 3.5, 5e, etc in this capacity. People will always argue over rules or lack of rules and DM's will always make up DC's on the fly if they don't want to murder their own gaming session, so you might as well have more vague rules in the first place.

[VincentTakeda]

Precisely.

• A player who's expectations are unmet will always shake the boat...
• The more rules you have, the more expectations of how a rule should work occur...
• This in fact increases the odds that an unmet expectation happens...
• Doesnt matter if you then label it a houserule.
• In 2e you created something in the moment and it was supposed to be up to the table to decide if that adjucation seemed fair.
• In the moments where your table disagreed with you, you could either keep working on it until you found something that worked for your table or you were called a bad gm for summoning rule zero to your defense.
• In 3e you have way more of those decisions as printed material, some of them poorly written so as to be fungible as a course of verbiage, so fundamentally completely unhelpful...
• Your interpretation, when it doesn't match theirs, creates an even more fervent rift than before because they feel they have published words to back them up, and so do you for the same reasons...
• And heaven forbid something is written clearly enough to not be left up to interpretation, but you don't like how its written and houserule it... Prepare for war.
• In my experience, only PFS society play takes away the gm's ability to set DCs, or create random encounters where he chooses the CR of the encounters on his own. Or treasure values... The only freedom he has is in the embellishment and fluff. He almost might as well be a computer.

So a rules heavy system both increases the odds of a disagreement and at the same time increases the fervor and indignance of the opponents. Neither of those is particularly good 'for the hobby' if what that means is every table spends more time passionately disagreeing with each other.

I simply prefer a system that handles the basics and leaves the funk to my table, without giving anyone (player or gm) poorly written ammo for the gray areas. See what happened with rolling attributes. In becmi there was only one way... Roll 3d6. In order. Play them as they lie... A decade later we see 6 or 7 different methods for rolling attributes... 4d6 drop lowest, put them where you want them... Point buy... Many alternatives, none of them stamped in stone... They are simply suggestions for a few ways to handle it. A book purposefully written vaguely is tacitly saying 'figure out as a table how you'd like this to go'... It wants you to figure out how to make the game work well with your own personal group. Its giving you freedom to create your own game. Steer your own ship. Each ruling should be going where your players feel is where they want to go. Players know best what 'feels like fun' to them.

Some people on the other hand really really don't enjoy playing a game on nebulous terms... Either because they disagree with the gm a LOT, or they don't want to ever have to stop the game to sort out an unprinted rule. A PFS society player for example would hate this freedom because they hate unmet expectations. If every rule adjucation is stamped in stone, no surprises. No unmet expectations.

If, however, I disagree with PFS's choices on how a rule is adjucated, i'm not free to change it and still be a part of society play. I thus PREFER to play non society games because my group gets a greater and more satisfying variety of gaming experiences working stuff out between ourselves.

Richard Bach said 'you don't want answers. You want questions. Questions are like diamonds... They will be different every time you look at them depending on where you are and what time it is and what angle you look at them and what angle you hold them.' If all you have is an answer, sometimes that answer doesnt work in the moment... But if in each moment you instead have the question... "how would this work best in this particular moment at this particular table with these particular people..." the answer may be different, but it will be a better answer for that table for those poeple for that moment every single time.

Even for PFS society play. PFS society players simply answer the question 'how would this work best' the same way every time... The way some dude 3000 miles away who isn't at our table says it does. It might eliminate the possibility of disagreements at the table completely, which is seen as 'great for the hobby'... But its 'nice' like the 'Giver' or 'Pleasantville'... It has no soul. Something is missing. A diamond doesnt always sparkle just in black and white. Its the 'south park christmas play, by Phillip Glass' where all the kids are spinning around droning in monotone 'happy happy happy happy we are very happy'... Remember that time when all of our gaming experiences were exactly the same as everyone else's? Man that was awesome!

I'm not happy with that answer personally. Moment to moment I find that diamond to be pretty inadequate for my purposes, at my table, with my people. Everything might run more smoothly, but at the expense of improvisational awesome from moment to moment. You've 'neutered gaming'... Removed, dare I say it... the sense of 'adventure' from an 'adventure game'. Some people are only comfortable in a world of black and white and gray. I just don't choose to play in pleasantville personally...

Gaming is a big enough hobby for both types though and I do think that rules heavy systems are an important. mmmm.. stage in a gamer's development... But to me they're kind of the kiddie pool of gaming. Sure you're getting wet, but I don't quite call it 'swimming'. You can safely develop some good swimming skills there though. Learn to hold your breath and how long you can... and bravely get your head under the water. Learn to come up for air when you need it... You're learning what rules do, and when we need them why do we need them... Do they accomplish what we set them out to accomplish and do they create other unforseen problems at the same time? You start to learn the 'nature' of rules... That's a valuable thing...

The opposition would say that the less rules you have the more you're playing a game of calvinball or imaginationland, which is what kids do... And I wouldnt disagree with them... When I play... I want to play like a kid does. It doesnt always 'make sense'... But I enjoy it more. HISHE and Cinema Sins do show us how the movies 'don't make sense'... And they're funny for pointing out the difference between the movie we got and the movie that would make sense... But I'd argue 10 times out of 10 that the movie we got is a better movie than the one that made sense.

Real life and satisfying gaming to me are rarely so sensible and safe and absolute. I think thats a good lesson that gaming can teach a player. Richard Bach also said 'In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It's not always an easy sacrifice.'

[Yora]

The rules of D&D 3rd edition are not written for roleplaying. It's something that is assumed to happen at the side, while the rules themselves are optimized for their utility as a (competitive) tactical wargame.
For a very long time I was of the oppinion that the while idea of rules for roleplaying is nonsense to begin with, and that the rules should only cover combat. But the last couple of years I've seen quite a number of games that are build on rather different frameworks and have actual incentives built into the rules that steer players to complex social interactions and "getting into character" in combat. For example, in the game I am currently learning, players get additional XP for playing naked and can get huge bonuses to some dice rolls by cursing the gods for having put them in such a hopeless situation. There is no rule for what happens in exchange for getting this bonus, it just says that the GM should take a note and think how the gods will get their revenge for this insult later, on a scale appropriate to the transgression. It's not fluff, but a definite mechanical rule.
D&D 3rd edition does not concern itself with such things. It is written as a system for highly complex combat where everyone is exactly on the same ground and success or failure depends entirely on logical, tactical use of the rules the game gives you.

That's not an invalid design for a tabletop game, but when done to the brand of the quasi-monopolist (as far as outside perception goes), the effect was rather unfortunate. Same thing with 4th edition. By all evidence, it's not a bad game, but it does something very specific quite unlike many other games.
But fortunately it seems the time where there was one RPG to rule them all are over, with D&D now a much smaller brand than it was in 2nd and 3rd edtion.

[Solaris]

...players get additional XP for playing naked...

I really, really want you to mean characters.

[mephnick]

The rules of D&D 3rd edition are not written for roleplaying...
D&D 3rd edition does not concern itself with such things. .

For a system that doesn't concern itself with role-playing it sure tried its hardest to destroy it.

Nope, you can't spread a rumor..you don't have Rumormonger. Sorry, bud.

[Segev]

D&D 3e fell into a trap of the "air-breathing mermaid."

Spoiler: What is the Air-Breathing Mermaid fallacy?

Show

Suppose you have a game wherein the main point is to play merfolk. It's built around adventures undersea and interactions with the mysterious world above the waves, and has powers and abilities that let your mermaids have different capabilities related to the aquatic environment and the mer-society and talents for combat and other such things.

It's successful enough that the writers decide to create additional books, with more rules to cover more situations and expand the abilities of the PCs and NPCs and the setting.

In the second or third expansion, a new merit/feat/power/trait is introduced: "Air-breathing."

Prior to this rule's existence, there was nothing that spoke one way or another about the mechanics for whether mermaids can breathe air or not. There were fluff stories about interacting with surface-dwellers, with no mention of difficulty breathing, but there also weren't any real powers that required you to be on the surface.

With the introduction of this new "air-breathing" option, characters must expend resources on it, or they cannot breathe the air. It is introduced as if it is solving a problem or adding a new capability, but in reality, it's created the problem it purports to solve by retro-actively stripping anybody who hasn't paid for it of the ability to do what it lets you do.

D&D 3e had a number of feats and such which gave you explicit power to do something which would likely have been handled by assigning a skill and DC before it was introduced.

This is a trap for developers, not a mean trick they play on purpose: they see something cool they want characters to do, and so they invent a mechanic to allow it...without really stopping to see if it could already be done without adding a new "thing" to the game.

That said, it doesn't destroy roleplaying. It just starts making things more expensive if you pay attention to those splat books. I know one DM who house rules a number of things that he thinks anybody should be able to do as perks that you just get.

[Solaris]

d20 Modern does that, too. Double Tap and Burst Fire are both feats - and yet, they're something I've done in my professional capacity with little to no training beyond "Point the weapon at the target and pull the trigger a couple of times really fast" or "Point the weapon at the target, brace, and hold down the trigger for 3-5 seconds".
I've house-ruled 'em in that double-tapping and burst-firing are just things people can do with firearms at the normal penalties you'd take with the feats, and the feats remove the attack roll penalties for doing them.

[Ceiling_Squid]

d20 Modern does that, too. Double Tap and Burst Fire are both feats - and yet, they're something I've done in my professional capacity with little to no training beyond "Point the weapon at the target and pull the trigger a couple of times really fast" or "Point the weapon at the target, brace, and hold down the trigger for 3-5 seconds".
I've house-ruled 'em in that double-tapping and burst-firing are just things people can do with firearms at the normal penalties you'd take with the feats, and the feats remove the attack roll penalties for doing them.

That's a fair compromise.

I find it annoying that designers seemed to forget the actual meaning of the word "feat" when coming up with these mechanics.

If an act isn't exceptional in courage, strength, or skill, it cannot be accurately be called a feat. It's a matter of basic dictionary definition.

Remembering that fact would cut out so many crap "feats" that really ought to be possible for ordinary people without spending limited character advancement resources to attain.

[VincentTakeda]

But I already combined my tripping skill with my tripping feat to qualify for the prestige class of master tripper. With enough dedication and focus I managed to beat tarrasque, master yoda, legolas, thor, and pun pun at the same time using nothing but trips!!!!

I based him on that engineer from the Nx-01... His name is Trip Tripper... Tripping is his middle name. He has since modeled the universe in his own image which I call Trippyverse.

It was trippy.

If I didnt have access to that tripping feat I wouldnt have nearly as powerful of tripping feet.

[johnbragg]

That's a fair compromise.

I find it annoying that designers seemed to forget the actual meaning of the word "feat" when coming up with these mechanics.

If an act isn't exceptional in courage, strength, or skill, it cannot be accurately be called a feat. It's a matter of basic dictionary definition.

Remembering that fact would cut out so many crap "feats" that really ought to be possible for ordinary people without spending limited character advancement resources to attain.

"Exceptional" is a word with a lot of wiggle room. How uncommon does a skill or ability have to be to be a "feat"?

10%? So basically anyone who chooses to focus or train at it? (Endurance feat)
1%? Those who choose to focus and train, and some innate ability? (Most of the +2/+2 skill feats)
.01%? (Lars Andersen, Exotic Weapon Proficiency: Real Life Archery?)

[Ceiling_Squid]

"Exceptional" is a word with a lot of wiggle room. How uncommon does a skill or ability have to be to be a "feat"?

10%? So basically anyone who chooses to focus or train at it? (Endurance feat)
1%? Those who choose to focus and train, and some innate ability? (Most of the +2/+2 skill feats)
.01%? (Lars Andersen, Exotic Weapon Proficiency: Real Life Archery?)

Honestly? Probably only the last example listed there.

The others are better rolled into other aspects of character levelling, which involve numerical advancement or general fitness improving with experience and practice. Seeing as both feats only add bonus numbers to existing abilities, rather than giving you an interesting new trick or way of using them.

Feats are so limited in number, one should get a seriously cool ability or impressive personal quality for each one. Obviously, there can still be chains of stuff, but the scale needs to be different. Some pre-reqs right now are pretty unremarkable things, or even garbage in terms of usefulness.

You've also touched on another hated design flaw in my book - purely numerical feats. BORING. Not worth being called a "feat" of any sort, and they often fall into "feat tax" territory, as far as system math is concerned.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

This sounds a lot like "Dungeons are badwrongfun" to me. While you may like games that aren't dungeon-crawls and have a lot of RP, other players may prefer something that doesn't require a lot of emotional investment.

If they prefer the kick-in-the-door style games, what's wrong with that? It's no less valid a way of enjoying pretending to be elves and wizards than deep-immersion roleplaying.

Yeah, I don't think it's a bad design decision.

That said, the far-reaching consequences of it have been largely negative in the larger RPG sector, because they've really limited people's conceptions of what an RPG's main activities should look like. Dungeon-crawling forms the vast bulk of a lot of gameplay, in part because some players never knew anything else.

[Almarck]

Yeah, I don't think it's a bad design decision.

That said, the far-reaching consequences of it have been largely negative in the larger RPG sector, because they've really limited people's conceptions of what an RPG's main activities should look like. Dungeon-crawling forms the vast bulk of a lot of gameplay, in part because some players never knew anything else.

Are we talking "dungeons" as in nondescript crypts that hold loot in them, have lots of traps, and are crammed with monsters for no apparent reason or are we using dungeons as any particular setup format for designing a scenario for players to interact in? Specifically, tight corridors locales, not limited to but including underground caverns, congested urbanscapes, fortresses and more? Whether they possess loot or monsters and other challenges or rewards is not is unimportant.

I'm kinda confused by the term "dungeon" because I see people use the term for a bunch of things that are not "literal" dungeons and I would like to know what people are talking about in the context of this discussion?

[BRC]

Yeah, I don't think it's a bad design decision.

That said, the far-reaching consequences of it have been largely negative in the larger RPG sector, because they've really limited people's conceptions of what an RPG's main activities should look like. Dungeon-crawling forms the vast bulk of a lot of gameplay, in part because some players never knew anything else.

Part of it might just be what you can write hard-and-fast mechanics for.
Dungeon Crawls are full of things you can stat out. That hallway has a trap that will deal 5d8 Damage unless you spot it with a DC 19 spot, and disable it with a DC 20 Disable Device. That room contains an Ogre with 58 HP. If the Guards sound the alarm, 12 Orcs will arrive in 3d4 rounds.
You can fill books with traps and monsters and obstacles, all hard-and-fast things that the DMs can chain together to form a Dungeon. Explaining things like Traps and Ambushes lets you provide a universal set of mechanics that DMs and players alike can grasp and apply.

Roleplaying is a different matter. Yeah, you can write a guide with some advice, maybe a random-generator table or two, but you can't really write RULES for that thing. What is the DC for "Convince the Duke to grant a pardon to his Wife's lover." What's the modifier if the Lover has since raised an army in rebellion against the Duke? What if they need the support of the Rebels? Is there a table for how to handle the conversation depending on how well the Rebels are doing?

The best Roleplaying advice has very little to do with numbers, and a lot to do with worldbuilding, acting, improv, creativity, and player engagement. But its hard to put that in a book. Not when you could fill up a page with different types of spike traps.

Dungeon-Crawling is high-density straightforward Mechanics. You can hand a mediocre DM a dungeon map, tell them "Everything in here wants to kill the PCs and vice versa", and let things roll.

[TheCountAlucard]

Lars Andersen, Exotic Weapon Proficiency: Real Life Archery?

Not this again.

How's this for a bad idea? The notion of "if it has stats, the PCs will kill it, so leave anything important unstatted."

(Caine and the Lady of Pain OTP)

[Sith_Happens]

For my contribution to the thread, I submit Critical Fumbles as one of the worst far-reaching bad decisions in RPG design. To my knowledge, they started off as house rules in a Dragon Magazine article and have spread throughout games like an infectious plague. While they remain house rules in D&D, they're particularly baneful in their common applications in 3.XE because of how they punish warrior-types for getting better at combat.

ALL OF MY THIS. Fumble rules, especially the bad houserule kind, are the bane of my existence. Matter of fact, I recently found out that my old D&D group from a few years ago gives still me crap behind my back for the time the Ranger slid off the high ledge I'd Greased... due to his rolling a natural 1 on an attack. Because that was totally my fault and not the DM's.

I'd be more impressed if the way they did this wasn't taking it wholesale from Fudge, and then reducing the extent to which it did this.

You realize Fate is explicitly a derivative of Fudge, right?

As to Magic: The Gathering being an "ideal" way to design RPGs...3e D&D was trying to be that. Where and why it failed to be as precise - if, in fact, it did - is a much longer discussion probably for a different thread, but 3e's rules crunchiness and strange rules interactions, as well as the "the RAW are god, even if they act counterintuitively" playstyle it encouraged all stem from that. 3e D&D tried to spell out the rules with no ambiguity. It didn't always succeed.

Perhaps they could have done it perfectly if they'd had the M:tG editing staff on the job? I don't know. But the style of rules design from M:tG is very evident in 3e D&D and its direct descendents.

The part that kills me is that they could have.

Dead-ends are not a problem if you can trace back and choose another road. I see the troubles with dead-ends being intimately tied with the thought of the GM as a storyteller, and more generally, the idea that games progress linearly like stories. I don't see it as a primarily mechanical problem, but rather a scenario design problem, and most of the mechanical solutions (like dealing half damage on a miss) do jack squat to fix the core problems, which are lack of choice and player iniative.

I'd say it's both. Having more possible outcomes to a given action than "entirely succeed" and "entirely fail" necessarily implies that are multiple ways the PCs might end up going about trying to accomplish a given goal, which then need to be accounted for in the design of the scenario. Binary outcomes, on the other hand, can easily end up reinforcing the idea of "You must do [X] to proceed."

Either way, Realism
In my opinion when your game has vampires and dragons and magic, you don't need to add in annoying stuff just for the sake of "that's how it'd work in real life". Games shouldn't have stuff in them that lowers the fun of it's participants.

EVEN-MORE-THAN-ALL OF MY THIS. I just have no idea how anyone ever got into their heads the idea that a swordsman can possibly compete with a magician without doing anything "unrealistic" when magic is by definition unrealistic, yet that very idea has been so thoroughly ingrained in so many people's minds so as to be an albatross around the neck of what seems like at least half the industry.

Also the "Disassociated mechanics" lobby scream blue murder every time someone tries.

Oooh, is there a particular game that pioneered that concept or did it come from somewhere else? Because it is simultaneously the most idiotic and most pretentious idea I've ever witnessed anywhere within the RPG community.

The failure to adequately playtest and quality control D&D 3.0.
...
The consequences cascaded past its own edition.

And almost certainly to many other games entirely. Sure, realistically the main reason so many poorly balanced and/or generally cludgy RPGs get released even today is because those companies can't afford to playtest rigorously even if they wanted to, but I'll be damned if there isn't also a strong component of "Well if D&D can get away with it then so can we."

Maybe I misread it, but I think he's more saying that pages of legalistic rules never stopped arguments, or prevented the DM from making DC's up on the spot anyway. Proponents of rules-heavy systems always argue that 3.5's strict rules prevented these things. After 20 years of playing I never noticed a difference between 2e, 3.5, 5e, etc in this capacity. People will always argue over rules or lack of rules and DM's will always make up DC's on the fly if they don't want to murder their own gaming session, so you might as well have more vague rules in the first place.

The problem is that 3.5 has badly written strict rules. See again: MTG, which, while people of course still argue about, the difference is that those arguments can always be definitively settled.

[Cikomyr]

I don't seek "realism" in my games. I seek verisimilitude. I just want the world to be aware of its own... "natural" laws, and is shaped accordingly.

By the way, I hate the fact that it's literally more dangerous to swing a sword at someone (by having the chance of rolling a 1 and having it injure yourself) than it is to shape the laws of reality to conjure an explosive mass of fire (there ain't much likelihood of failing to cast Fireball spells, now, aren't there?)

Probably also why I loved WFRP. but then again, I'm starting to realize I'm just a fanboy.

[SimonMoon6]

EVEN-MORE-THAN-ALL OF MY THIS. I just have no idea how anyone ever got into their heads the idea that a swordsman can possibly compete with a magician without doing anything "unrealistic" when magic is by definition unrealistic, yet that very idea has been so thoroughly ingrained in so many people's minds so as to be an albatross around the neck of what seems like at least half the industry.

The problem is that people have read stories about "Arthur and Merlin" or "Aragon and Gandalf (and those other guys)", and in each of these stories, the fighter guys are usually the Heroes (with a capital "H") and the wizard guy just sits around not doing anything, maybe occasionally giving the fighter guy some wise advice or giving him the magic he needs to beat the enemy. And the fighter guys get to be the equal (or superior) to the magic guys without doing anything beyond the mundane. So, that's ingrained as a sort of trope, that ordinary fightin' guys are the equal of or superior to magical awesome dudes.

And that's fine if you design a world where wizards can't really do anything, where magic is either mostly useless or it's time-consuming and impractical.

But D&D doesn't do that. And it fails to recognize that it doesn't do that. It likes the idea that someday you can be a Dr. Strange, a Dr. Fate, or even a The Spectre. And obviously, if somebody else wants to play Robin the Boy Wonder (with a sword), that's not going to work out so well.

[Yora]

Killing a mage with a sword would be quite easy. If the mage is vulnerable. That's the problem with D&D, there's just way too much protective magic, spells do too much damage, and starting with 3rd edition spellcasters have it way to easy to get their spells cast while someone is swining a sword at them.
There are plenty of rpgs where it really takes only someone with a sword to get close enough to a mage and the mage is done for.

[Cikomyr]

Killing a mage with a sword would be quite easy. If the mage is vulnerable. That's the problem with D&D, there's just way too much protective magic, spells do too much damage, and starting with 3rd edition spellcasters have it way to easy to get their spells cast while someone is swining a sword at them.
There are plenty of rpgs where it really takes only someone with a sword to get close enough to a mage and the mage is done for.

Magic is too reliable in DnD.

Compare a mage to an artificier in any other game. Basically: the guy who can blow **** up damn good. If I struct the artificier in the process of setting up his grenade, or firing his rocket-launcher, it would blow up in his face (and probably me along with him if I am not careful).

In DnD? It fizzles out of thin air. Magic in DnD has more safety features included in it than most modern weaponry.


I'd like, for example, for a fighter who has Knowledge (Arcana) to be able to

1- Understand what spell the wizard is casting
2- Understand what each part of the casting is doing
3- Disrupt at the opportune moment to make the wizard losing control of its magic

I remember in the trilogy of the Moonshae islands, a cleric tried to cast a summoning spell, but he was interrupted by the trilogy's pet trickster dragon. At first he cursed that his spell was lost, but then he realized that the trickster only interrupted the part of the spell where the cleric would gain control over the elemental.

something like that. Make spellcasting a riskier endeavor, so it doesn't end up as the universal panacea.

[Knaight]

You realize Fate is explicitly a derivative of Fudge, right?

Yes. I also realize that it acknowledges that less and less with every pass of the rules (they even dropped the term "Fudge die" recently), and because of that routinely gets credit for innovation when all it did was take the innovation already in Fudge. Aspects are one thing, that's actually on Fate. Stunts are at least partially on Fate, though they were one of a bunch of gift systems that were in development in the Fudge community and obviously draw from others. The rest? Pretty much all Fudge.

[neonchameleon]

Yes. I also realize that it acknowledges that less and less with every pass of the rules (they even dropped the term "Fudge die" recently), and because of that routinely gets credit for innovation when all it did was take the innovation already in Fudge. Aspects are one thing, that's actually on Fate. Stunts are at least partially on Fate, though they were one of a bunch of gift systems that were in development in the Fudge community and obviously draw from others. The rest? Pretty much all Fudge.

The thing about this statement is that once you remove aspects and stunts (oh, and approaches, stress, and consequences, invokes and compels) from Fate, what's left? Weird dice and the Ladder - and that's about it. That is all. And the idea of the ladder wasn't original to Fudge either - that came from Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) if not earlier, and was tweaked and had its levels renamed by Fudge and in turn tweaked and had its levels renamed by Fate. Fudge gets less and less acknowledgement because there is less and less of it left in Fate. To the point that, since Fate Core, about all that's left of Fudge in Fate is the dice (not even the pass/fail mechanic is unchanged with Spin).

They give less and less attention to Fudge because there's less and less of Fudge left in Fate with each passing edition.

ALL OF MY THIS. Fumble rules, especially the bad houserule kind, are the bane of my existence. Matter of fact, I recently found out that my old D&D group from a few years ago gives still me crap behind my back for the time the Ranger slid off the high ledge I'd Greased... due to his rolling a natural 1 on an attack. Because that was totally my fault and not the DM's.

There is precisely one game I know that does good critical fumbles. D&D 4e using the Dark Sun Weapon Breakage rules. In Dark Sun when you roll a 1 you may then choose to reroll the dice. If you do not reroll it's just a miss. If you hit on the reroll you hit - and if you roll badly enough your weapon breaks.

EVEN-MORE-THAN-ALL OF MY THIS. I just have no idea how anyone ever got into their heads the idea that a swordsman can possibly compete with a magician without doing anything "unrealistic" when magic is by definition unrealistic, yet that very idea has been so thoroughly ingrained in so many people's minds so as to be an albatross around the neck of what seems like at least half the industry.

Oh, quite easily. The problem is that D&D warriors aren't wielding swords but nerfbats. If the fighter was even slightly realistic, every hit with a sword should be Save or Die. And not all magic systems allow magic to be cast in a single combat round.

Oooh, is there a particular game that pioneered that concept or did it come from somewhere else? Because it is simultaneously the most idiotic and most pretentious idea I've ever witnessed anywhere within the RPG community.

I've never been able to trace it back any further than an early assault by an anti-4e edition warrior explaining that he couldn't understand why an Infernal Battle Captain picking out an enemy for everyone to dogpile should have a mechanical effect and use standardised terms.

I think your detection of my negative bias towards gamists and narrativists is accurate.

I essentially run like crazypants from any gm that's addicted to 'world building' or 'running modules' anymore. Its only my rewrite of the definition of GNS that lumps a simulationist into a group of folks who 'simply run the world reacting to the players, which defacto makes the players the engine of plot'. I'll admit my bias goes a bit overboard, but in my experience a gm that spends days nights weekends and holidays building cool stories and cool settings usually isnt the kinda guy who's ok with people running around with free will and mucking their stuff up in unexpected ways.

That's what makes them narrativists.

This is true only because you use your own idiosyncratic definition of narrativist that stands in direct contradiction to Ron Edwards' - and by doing so just confuses everyone further (it's not as if the terms don't cause arguments in the first place).

Narrativism is about "Story Now". Not "The story I am going to write out when I can pull together a group to run through it"; that is the literal opposite of now. Story now is about emergent story. Story being created in the game.

I know the group you are talking about. I refer to them as Storytellers because it's an accurate description of what they want to do.

[oxybe]

The problem is that people have read stories about "Arthur and Merlin" or "Aragon and Gandalf (and those other guys)", and in each of these stories, the fighter guys are usually the Heroes (with a capital "H") and the wizard guy just sits around not doing anything, maybe occasionally giving the fighter guy some wise advice or giving him the magic he needs to beat the enemy. And the fighter guys get to be the equal (or superior) to the magic guys without doing anything beyond the mundane. So, that's ingrained as a sort of trope, that ordinary fightin' guys are the equal of or superior to magical awesome dudes.

And that's fine if you design a world where wizards can't really do anything, where magic is either mostly useless or it's time-consuming and impractical.

But D&D doesn't do that. And it fails to recognize that it doesn't do that. It likes the idea that someday you can be a Dr. Strange, a Dr. Fate, or even a The Spectre. And obviously, if somebody else wants to play Robin the Boy Wonder (with a sword), that's not going to work out so well.

The problem is that wizards used to be forces of nature personified while the mundane hero is relatable. In modern times the wizard is relatable while the mundane hero is a romanticized ideal. I talk about this here. fair warning: it gets rambly.

[D+1]

Only thing I can think of to fit the OP is the decision to deliberately base the game on rules mastery - to assume that the FUN of the game was going to lie first and foremost in "building" a mechanically better character than the other players.