# Game design has "moved on"



## Morrus (Dec 2, 2013)

I see this phrase all the time: game design has moved on. Game design has progressed.  The 'technology' of game design has improved.

What does that mean to you? Is game design a science or an art? What elements are "improvements" to you?  Are any of these things merely fashions? Can flaws be features? Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?


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## Dannyalcatraz (Dec 2, 2013)

Put me down for "Art."


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## billd91 (Dec 2, 2013)

Going to agree with DannyA again. It's more art than science. That said, even art can makes technical progress as people develop sophisticated skills in game design and I think some technical progress has been made since D&D first appeared.


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## Scrivener of Doom (Dec 2, 2013)

Dannyalcatraz said:


> Put me down for "Art."




Agreed.

That said, I think there does need to be some sort of internally-consistent structure in place so that the question "Why?" can always be answered. Of course, that answer could simply be, "This worked out to be more fun in play," but at least it's not the 1E (or Mongoose) answer, "No idea. We were up against a deadline as always so we slapped this together at the last minute."

I'm sure there is some art-based analogy for that.


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## innerdude (Dec 2, 2013)

I might define the term "moving on" to more specifically mean, "Achieving a more accurate result of an abstracted simulation with fewer calculations / fewer variables / clearer results / more consistent application of existing mechanical principles." 

The "science" of game design is pretty straightforward, actually. Numbers can be manipulated in any way necessary to produce a "proper" range of results, based on inputs. 

The thing about an RPG is that we want as accurate a result as possible with as few inputs as possible. 

That's where the art comes in. The art is knowing what result you should expect based on inputs . . . and then defining the least intrusive, fewest-calculation way of achieving that result.

There's no question that there are ways to objectively rank rules "effectiveness." Different mechanics that represent the same basic outcome -- "Your character has taken damage" -- can be more or less effective based on desired result.

I think in most cases, when we prefer a newer system to an old one, it's because the changes to the system have improved the process for achieving the result. 

One of the strengths of the d20 system is that at its core, it is a very effective "shorthand" for simulating a wide variety of situations. A d% / roll under system is more granular for certain . . . but do we really care that someone with a skill rating of 77 is in fact 2% more likely to succeed at a task than someone with a 75 rating? In most "real world" situations that matter, that 2% chance is trivial.


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## delericho (Dec 2, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Is game design a science or an art?




Engineering.

If you treat game design purely as science, you'll end up with something soulless. If you treat game design purely as art, you'll probably end up with nothing at all. It requires both skills.


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## Yora (Dec 2, 2013)

What I can say with quite some certainty is that in all the games I've seen in the past 10 years, none of them had such convoluted and irregular math as AD&D. Looking back and comparing with more recent games, the whole THAC0 and saving throw design was really terribly designed.


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## Scrivener of Doom (Dec 2, 2013)

delericho said:


> Engineering.
> 
> If you treat game design purely as science, you'll end up with something soulless. If you treat game design purely as art, you'll probably end up with nothing at all. It requires both skills.




Good answer, possibly the best so far.



Yora said:


> What I can say with quite some certainty is that in  all the games I've seen in the past 10 years, none of them had such  convoluted and irregular math as AD&D. Looking back and comparing  with more recent games, the whole THAC0 and saving throw design was  really terribly designed.




And thieves. Who would think to design a class utterly incapable of doing what it was supposed to do?


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## Lwaxy (Dec 2, 2013)

To me it has moved on to ever more rules and regulations, away from common sense and creativity for the group. It has also moved away somewhat from the dungeon crawl and monster bashing stereotype to more roleplay focused encounters. Yes, the art definitely changed, although not always for the better - or for the worse, sometimes it just changed.


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## Jhaelen (Dec 2, 2013)

delericho said:


> If you treat game design purely as science, you'll end up with something soulless. If you treat game design purely as art, you'll probably end up with nothing at all. It requires both skills.



Yep, like all interesting things, it's both an art and a science. And RPG Design has definitely 'moved on' a lot since the olden' days of D&D. I really don't want to go back. Over time, many systems have introduced new, original ideas to the genre that have been picked up, integrated and evolved by others. These days, there's plenty of highly polished systems that expertly support particular game-styles with specialized mechanics. Who wants or needs a generic system when there's such a great selection of rpgs?


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## am181d (Dec 2, 2013)

Morrus said:


> I see this phrase all the time: game design has moved on. Game design has progressed.  The 'technology' of game design has improved.
> 
> What does that mean to you? Is game design a science or an art? What elements are "improvements" to you?  Are any of these things merely fashions? Can flaws be features? Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?




I think it's fair to say there's no one right way to design a game, but there are DEFINITELY wrong ways. Rules can simply be badly written, poorly constructed, too complex to be usable, contradictory, etc.


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## Umbran (Dec 2, 2013)

delericho said:


> Engineering.




Pretty much, yes.  Engineering creates the design for end-user products.  Science discovers the rules of reality upon which those designs are based.

That being said, I think the science of gaming has advanced.  RPGs aren't about just manipulating numbers, but is a crazy intersection of math and human behavior used to create a desirable play experience.  Over time, we've learned more about the math, the human behavior, and the range and nature of desirable play experiences than Gygax and Arneson knew back in the 1970s.  

The engineering of games has certainly worked to incorporate that new knowledge, and I daresay there are some old assumptions that have, over time, been demonstrated as inaccurate and discarded.  In that sense, yes, it think there are times when we can say that game design has "moved on".


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## Mallus (Dec 2, 2013)

Morrus said:


> What does that mean to you?



Not much, other than the person saying "design has moved on" is wrong. They're trying to couch heir personal preferences/tastes in terms of some kind of theory about the history of RPG design that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. RPG design itself isn't analogous to technology, so there's nowhere you can really go with that argument. 

I read statements of that kind as: "I like X and not Y". I accept them as true, I'm happy to read the reasons why a person likes X (and not Y), because it's interesting to see how different people react to and use different gaming techniques/mechanics/abstraction & resolution methodologies, but --so far-- I'm not convinced those reasons can ever add up to a demonstration game design is progressing to an objectively better state. 

On the whole, production values have gotten better thanks to technology, but the rules themselves? Nope.   



> Is game design a science or an art?



Art with a side of math. 



> What elements are "improvements" to you?



Transparency with regard to goals. For example, I really digging 13th Age right now, because it's very clear in what it tries to do. It has openly game-y bits combined with openly narrative bits and does a pretty good job at explaining why they're there. 



> Are any of these things merely fashions?



To an extent, yes. And that's not a bad thing. 



> Can flaws be features?



Absolutely. The classic example is a lack of social encounter rules. It's a serious flaw to some gamers. It's a feature to others. 



> Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?



I don't think support is a big issue. With the ease of finding fan-created materials/active fan communities for almost any given system online, I can't think of a truly unsupported system these days. 

I think the simple answer is: people's tastes change. And then change back. I've been running AD&D for the past 2.5 years now, after a 15-year hiatus. As DM, I'm _loving_ it. But 2 of my players miss the the more player-option rich systems we were playing beforehand. 

So at some point, I imagine we'll switch back.


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## billd91 (Dec 2, 2013)

Mallus said:


> I don't think support is a big issue. With the ease of finding fan-created materials/active fan communities for almost any given system online, I can't think of a truly unsupported system these days.
> 
> I think the simple answer is: people's tastes change. And then change back. I've been running AD&D for the past 2.5 years now, after a 15-year hiatus. As DM, I'm _loving_ it. But 2 of my players miss the the more player-option rich systems we were playing beforehand.
> 
> So at some point, I imagine we'll switch back.




I think publisher support actually is a major issue. Without support the game is out of print and, eventually, unavailable for first purchase at your typical outlet. Once you reach that point, the potential for the player pool to grow is significantly reduced. The game can no longer spread as easily via gamers browsing the game shelves - it must spread by contact, word of mouth, and sharing of materials. If that can't grow or even maintain the player pool as much as that + new sales, then you will see a shrinking pool of players. That pool may hang on a long time, but it will taper off - faster if the game was only of middling quality or niche appeal to begin with.


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## Janx (Dec 2, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Pretty much, yes.  Engineering creates the design for end-user products.  Science discovers the rules of reality upon which those designs are based.
> 
> That being said, I think the science of gaming has advanced.  RPGs aren't about just manipulating numbers, but is a crazy intersection of math and human behavior used to create a desirable play experience.  Over time, we've learned more about the math, the human behavior, and the range and nature of desirable play experiences than Gygax and Arneson knew back in the 1970s.
> 
> The engineering of games has certainly worked to incorporate that new knowledge, and I daresay there are some old assumptions that have, over time, been demonstrated as inaccurate and discarded.  In that sense, yes, it think there are times when we can say that game design has "moved on".




That's well put.

Back then, there was no such thing as a degree in Game Design.  Now there is.

While I suspect game designers had some inklings as to what made a good game, they did not have the principals as clearly defined as occurs nowadays.

Consider the 2E concept of THAC0 (actually I hear it evolved in the WSG or some other AD&D add-on book).  While we deride the concept of THAC0 now, consider how elegant it was back then.  Especially when you consider that though the math is identical in pre-THAC0 times, the original game made players use a table to perform the look-up.

Meaning, game design was so ill-presented, that they couldn't simplify the explanation down to a simple A minus B compared to a dice roll concept even though that is exactly what was occurring mechanically.

So part of the evolution of game design is identifying the functional components of the game mechanic and simplifying how it is presented.

I have no doubt, we could take the AD&D 1E rules and re-write them so it operates statistically and mechanically the same, but is presented in a far clearer way.


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## Scorpio616 (Dec 2, 2013)

Morrus said:


> What does that mean to you?



It merely means people are trying to sell new games, think people should embrace their ideas on game design or are trying to get more people playing the new games they like.


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## Man in the Funny Hat (Dec 2, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Pretty much, yes.  Engineering creates the design for end-user products.  Science discovers the rules of reality upon which those designs are based.
> 
> That being said, I think the science of gaming has advanced.  RPGs aren't about just manipulating numbers, but is a crazy intersection of math and human behavior used to create a desirable play experience.  Over time, we've learned more about the math, the human behavior, and the range and nature of desirable play experiences than Gygax and Arneson knew back in the 1970s.
> 
> The engineering of games has certainly worked to incorporate that new knowledge, and I daresay there are some old assumptions that have, over time, been demonstrated as inaccurate and discarded.  In that sense, yes, it think there are times when we can say that game design has "moved on".



Most defintely agree with all that.  I would only add that, IMO, some NEW assumptions have similarly, over time, been demonstrated as unneeded or unwanted.  There are missteps just as there are improvements, but the trend is generally onward and upward.


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## pedr (Dec 3, 2013)

Artistic application of science, rather than one or the other. Perhaps architecture! -Making something both functional and aesthetic from the extant technological building blocks.

I do believe game design evolves, both within game designs (see Mearls' column today discussing attacks of opportunity - something which sort of existed from early D&D and has been through various versions since, or Fate Core's refinement of the Fate actions) and across the game design community - development of new techniques for randomization, for instance, enable designers to create new games (to use Fate as an e.g. again, it's built on a set of dice and the development of an understanding of the way randomness interacts with the other elements of roleplay gaming to create something which was not creatable in 1974).

Not all invention is undoubtedly good in itself, but all invention enables future invention so the development of game approaches that an individual doesn't like, or experimentation with new design 'technology' is, overall, a good thing as it enables a better understanding of games as a whole, which can improve even games which choose to use older approaches.


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## Shemeska (Dec 3, 2013)

It's a crock.

It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".

I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.


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## Hussar (Dec 3, 2013)

Shemeska said:


> It's a crock.
> 
> It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".




But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion.  It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago.  There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.

And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music.  And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.  



> I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.




Where were you?  Good grief, 3e fans repeatedly stated this about earlier editions all the way back to 2000.  This isn't anything new at all.  You can go back into thread after thread after thread and see exactly this argument whenever comparisons between 3e and AD&D were made.  Heck, you see it in THIS thread when people talked about THAC0.


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## dd.stevenson (Dec 3, 2013)

Shemeska said:


> It's a crock.
> 
> It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".
> 
> I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.



Full agreement. "Game design has moved on" is just another way to be a dick on the internet.


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## Hussar (Dec 3, 2013)

A bit more on topic.  

I'd say that as time has gone on, we've become much more systematic in our approach to game design.  There's a lot less "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" approach to game design.  So, yes, I'd say that science has certainly become a much more common approach to game design than art.  

Look at how D&D has evolved.  The thief to the rogue.  D20 vs a host of disparate systems with tenuous connection.  On and on.  

There's a reason you get new editions of games and it's not simply "well, we want to sell more books".  I'm fairly confident in saying that 3e is better designed than AD&D in many measurable ways.


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## Shemeska (Dec 3, 2013)

Hussar said:


> But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion.  It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago.  There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.
> 
> And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music.  And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.




I think it's problematic to try to connect the aesthetics and talk of "advancement" in that to technology that can advance the creation of fashion (or game design) but has nothing to do with the design and aesthetics thereof. I'm certain that at some point, somewhere, someone may have claimed that rayon was the future of fashion. Anyone using natural fibers in fabric was clinging to the past and wasn't going with the future. Clearly wearing 100% rayon shirts didn't work out after people discovered that this one self-proclaimed "future" was apparently highly flammable. Similar situations happen with many many things that their supporters claim are the way of the future and woe be to those afraid of change. It's a role of the dice as to which things end up actually being appreciated and contributing to later generations of society, or products, or art, etc.

We can't assume that changes in aesthetics (or even technology associated with them) operate on a linear scale of advancement. Many "futures" be it fashion, ideologies, economic models, or RPGs ended up being abandoned dead-ends rather than "the future" despite all of them seeing themselves as such. We only know this with clarity in hindsight of course.




> Where were you?  Good grief, 3e fans repeatedly stated this about earlier editions all the way back to 2000.  This isn't anything new at all.  You can go back into thread after thread after thread and see exactly this argument whenever comparisons between 3e and AD&D were made.  Heck, you see it in THIS thread when people talked about THAC0.




I never played prior to 3e, and I really don't care much about rules when it comes to the aesthetics of an RPG, so (giving you the benefit of the doubt here as to the state of the internet in 2000) I didn't notice those arguments online once I started paying attention to things in 2002 or thereabouts.


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## Nagol (Dec 3, 2013)

Hussar said:


> But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion.  It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago.  There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.
> 
> And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music.  And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.
> <snip>




There have been no advances in materials science that affect the stuff we weave stories from.  There have been no mathematical insights, no breakthroughs in game theory, no new psychological models constructed that better reflect what/why/how humans enjoy playing RPGs.

What *has* happened is new designers have adopted different compromises that more appropriately match the experience they are looking for and better reflect the material they use for inspiration as opposed to the material used compared to the original designs.

Some of those changes sometimes include "clean math" like a universal mechanic or a more transparent function for calculating success.  Others revolve around genre emulation or expected conceits in play like PC being cut from different cloth than regular humans, or around getting game balance tighter, or more accurately reflecting in play the types of experiences the designers want to explore.  All of these things appeal to the audience in a way analogous to fashion or art style.  A Picasso painting is not objectively better than a Rembrandt --  but one touched Picasso's contemporary audience in ways the other did not.


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## Hussar (Dec 3, 2013)

The problem, N'raac, is that you're comparing apples to oranges.  Sure, Rembrandt isn't better than Picasso, but, since they don't actually share the same design space (other than being paintings), they cannot really be compared.  OTOH, if I tried to paint in Picasso's style, I'm pretty sure that everyone would say that his paintings are better than mine.  

Why?  Because he is far, far more technically accomplished than I am, for one.  There are other elements, for sure, but, technique is certainly something that we can use to judge.

Same goes for RPG's.  They are games.  As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are.  And games have math, like it or not.  If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules.  And, yes, I do say better.  A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.  



			
				Shemeska said:
			
		

> I never played prior to 3e, and I really don't care much about rules when it comes to the aesthetics of an RPG, so (giving you the benefit of the doubt here as to the state of the internet in 2000) I didn't notice those arguments online once I started paying attention to things in 2002 or thereabouts.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/newreply.php?p=6228117&noquote=1#ixzz2mNNpE9f2




Well, if you never played earlier editions, never paid any attention to the criticisms made the last time the editions changed (from AD&D to 3e) then why would you specifically call out the 4e changeover as a "new" time to see these criticisms and then paint it as an edition warrior calling for 4e players?


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## Shemeska (Dec 3, 2013)

Hussar said:


> The problem, N'raac, is that you're comparing apples to oranges.  Sure, Rembrandt isn't better than Picasso, but, since they don't actually share the same design space (other than being paintings), they cannot really be compared.  OTOH, if I tried to paint in Picasso's style, I'm pretty sure that everyone would say that his paintings are better than mine.
> 
> Why?  Because he is far, far more technically accomplished than I am, for one.  There are other elements, for sure, but, technique is certainly something that we can use to judge.
> 
> Same goes for RPG's.  They are games.  As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are.  And games have math, like it or not.  If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules.  And, yes, I do say better.  A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.




And so does art, and so does music. But yet those are apples to oranges, while comparing the rules of a preferred edition to those of a not-preferred edition are eminently ripe for direct comparison and judgement? Not so much. It's still judgement based on aesthetics, just framed as an issue of mathematics, and I reject that you can objectively declare one ruleset better than another unless you restrict yourself to a very narrow (and frankly arbitrary) basis of comparison.




> Well, if you never played earlier editions, never paid any attention to the criticisms made the last time the editions changed (from AD&D to 3e) then why would you specifically call out the 4e changeover as a "new" time to see these criticisms and then paint it as an edition warrior calling for 4e players?




I started playing with 3e. I have since then played 2e and 1e, and obsessed over the flavor content of both of those earlier editions (in a narrow spectrum perhaps). I'm not sure I see what you're getting at. All I said before was that I never noticed the notion of progress or advancement in game design before 4e supporters used it to compare their edition to 3e, and most recently some of the same group using that as an argument for rejecting 5e. That's what I've noticed. I'm not going to claim it's a perfect sampling of all opinions on the internet, or representative of the RPG community prior to 2008. But like it or not, that's what I've noticed.


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## Nagol (Dec 3, 2013)

Hussar said:


> The problem, N'raac, is that you're comparing apples to oranges.




I'm Nagol not N'raac.



> Sure, Rembrandt isn't better than Picasso, but, since they don't actually share the same design space (other than being paintings), they cannot really be compared.  OTOH, if I tried to paint in Picasso's style, I'm pretty sure that everyone would say that his paintings are better than mine.
> 
> Why?  Because he is far, far more technically accomplished than I am, for one.  There are other elements, for sure, but, technique is certainly something that we can use to judge.




Immaterial.  Both are painters who often did portraiture and are well regarded in terms of skill and ability.  Their styles are very different, but Rembrandt probably had access to sufficiently similar equipment to that used by Picasso to produce similar work had he chosen.  The differences exist because of style.



> Same goes for RPG's.  They are games.  As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are.  And games have math, like it or not.  If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules.  And, yes, I do say better.  A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.




That depends entirely on what you are trying to emulate at first level, doesn't it?  (BTW Open Locks starts at 25% to which you typically add Dex and Race modifiers; my favourite Thief had a 35% starting score in that ability -- it would have been higher except for his racial penalty).  It also depends on the environment the characters operate -- if the first character is facing locks that provide no bonus to the roll and the second character is facing DCs are in the 22+ range, the chances are functionally equal.


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## Ahnehnois (Dec 3, 2013)

Hussar said:


> Same goes for RPG's.  They are games.  As much as people want to pretend that they aren't, they still are.  And games have math, like it or not.



I don't see how this follows. Yes, an rpg is a game, but many games don't have math. Notably, the games than tabletop rpgs have the most in common with, such as children playing house or people of any age engaging in various forms of mock combat, don't have math. In fact, most games don't. Sports don't. Tag doesn't. Improv games don't. Make-believe is a game. Rpgs are a subtset of that.

One could certainly play an rpg that involved no math. As such, I'd argue that the math that does exist in D&D is not inherent or intrinsic to the game, and the math doesn't reflect the game, and changing the math doesn't fix the game.



> If it has math, then we can apply systematic changes to the math to create better rules.  And, yes, I do say better.  A 1st level thief with a 15% chance to open locks is not as good of a rule as a 1st level rogue with an Open Locks of +8.



Oddly enough, this is the perfect example of why. Yes, a thief with 15% lockpick is bad, but not for any mathematical reason. Mathematically, the character works fine. 15% is a perfectly valid number. However, the character's ineptitude is likely to bog down a game session and may not represent the underlying concept well enough. What level of aptitude is appropriate to dispense is a subjective decision.



> I'd say that as time has gone on, we've become much more systematic in our approach to game design. There's a lot less "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" approach to game design. So, yes, I'd say that science has certainly become a much more common approach to game design than art.



This analogy struck me because essentially the same thing happened in medicine; the pharmaceutical industry has moved away from testing folk remedies and randomly assaying exotic plants for useful compounds and towards targeted drug design, wherein computer modeling is used to shape a drug to match some molecular target and the result of the modeling is then synthesized in a lab.

Interestingly enough, even though this approach sounds really science-y, it has largely failed to produce useful drugs for humans, because we are too complicated for computer modeling to work to this extent.



> But, OTOH, you can certainly make arguments for advances in materials used in fashion. It's not like they had nylon 100 years ago. There are things you can do in fashion today that you absolutely could not do before.



I do think that even where progress is not objectively measurable, it as happened. Not in a straight line necessarily, in textiles or in game design, but I do agree that there is a general impetus towards things getting better.


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## Umbran (Dec 3, 2013)

Nagol said:


> There have been no advances in materials science that affect the stuff we weave stories from.  There have been no mathematical insights, no breakthroughs in game theory, no new psychological models constructed that better reflect what/why/how humans enjoy playing RPGs.




I think GNS theory (however flawed it may be), the 1999 WotC Market Research, or the material presented in Section 2 of _Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering_ all count as psychological models that didn't exist when Gygax created the game.

Oh, and hey, look here!  Notable RPG game theories!  

Certainly there have been mathematical insights that had not been applied to games by Gygax - each innovative dice mechanic counts, for example.  As do discussions of "economies" or player and character resources.

And while it didn't provide any new mathematics to the academics, there was a time when nobody considered the tenets of mathematical game theory with respect to RPGs.  Now, at least some do.


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## Hussar (Dec 3, 2013)

I'm sorry, but the idea that there is no advancement in game design basically means that there can never be any improvement.  That every RPG ever made is the epitome of good design.

That's obviously not true.  We have learned things.  Thousands and thousands of hours of play have revealed that some things are better than others.  An initiative system that requires a dozen pages of explanation is a poorly designed system.  A mechanic which requires cube roots in order to calculate is a poorly designed mechanic (and, yes, I have actually seen that in a game).  

Now, obviously, mechanics have to be judged based on what that mechanic is trying to achieve, of course.


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## Nagol (Dec 3, 2013)

Umbran said:


> I think GNS theory (however flawed it may be), the 1999 WotC Market Research, or the material presented in Section 2 of _Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering_ all count as psychological models that didn't exist when Gygax created the game.
> 
> Oh, and hey, look here!  Notable RPG game theories!
> 
> ...




I view GNS as an attempt to articulate one version of a taxonomy that represents a single (then-advancing) style of play and distinguishing it from previous styles -- sort of like the "rules" around how post-modern art is distinguished from modern art or why Rembrandt was part of the Dutch Golden Age painting style versus Baroque.

Robin's Laws didn't talk about rule design so much as campaign/group dynamics from memory - it's been a very long time since I've pulled it out of storage so I may misremember.  

While the poll may have certainly pointed out aspects of the game(s) investigated the then-current audience enjoyed/did not enjoy, it represents a cross-section of current attitudes from the audience -- in effect categorising their styles of play in ways that depended on the assumptions of the survey creators.  In effect, it measured acknowledged participation through the lens of the author's style biases more than developing new objectively better criteria for game creation.

The variation of dice mechanics certainly counts as a stylistic change -- typically in an attempt to adjust what is emulated and how the emulation works is viewed by the players/characters, but they are not specific objective improvements in design.  Rolling for powers in _Villains&Vigilantes_ is different than buying them in _CHAMPIONS_, but neither is objectively better even though some players prefer one to the other.  Spending dice from a pool feels different than making three checks at penalties, but one is not better than the other save in context of the preferences of the audience and if one option fits the style attempted by the creators better.

Player/character economies extend back the 2nd gen era (very early '80s) -- _007 James Bond, CHAMPIONS_, et al. had player/character economies to one degree of another.  Adding action points to a game doesn't objectively improve it so much as change the player experience.  Some audiences appreciate the change; others are indifferent; still others dislike it.

Certainly more work has been done to articulate different styles.  What we have today is certainly a richer stylistic environment -- it is much more likely a dedicated searcher will find a game that speaks to their preferred style than in late '70s, but the games produced this decade don't seem to be objectively better than those made thirty years ago.  The assumptions have changed.  There are different cultural stressors and inspiration sources today.  Therefore game design has been altered to accommodate.  But those stressors and inspiration sources will continue to evolve.  Game design will as well so that new games continue to match current cultural attitudes.


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## Nagol (Dec 3, 2013)

Hussar said:


> I'm sorry, but the idea that there is no advancement in game design basically means that there can never be any improvement.  That every RPG ever made is the epitome of good design.
> 
> That's obviously not true.  We have learned things.  Thousands and thousands of hours of play have revealed that some things are better than others.  An initiative system that requires a dozen pages of explanation is a poorly designed system.  A mechanic which requires cube roots in order to calculate is a poorly designed mechanic (and, yes, I have actually seen that in a game).
> 
> Now, obviously, mechanics have to be judged based on what that mechanic is trying to achieve, of course.




I've seen a couple of systems with cube roots -- _Other Suns_ is one.  Although I thought the mechanic was poorly designed the cubic root wasn't what I objected to -- the drive system had a minimum mass but no minimum cost or power requirements so you could in effect have a gravity drive that weighed a half-ton and cost less than a soda drink and ran on AAA batteries.

A overly detailed mechanic is only a problem if the audience doesn't see the need for it.  If it fits the genre and game assumption then it becomes a good mechanic and a feature of the system other games are missing.  It could objectively poor in that it requires 12 pages of explanation because the writing isn't clear or if the mechanic does not fit with the genre assumptions for the game as laid out by the creators.  If the audience doesn't like it because it doesn't match their style, they may also consider it a flaw, but that is a subjective consideration.

As cultural stressors change and inspirational sources change, audience expectations change.  What becomes a better game subjectively is the one that best fits those expectations.


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## Michael Silverbane (Dec 3, 2013)

I think that one (possibly even the biggest) way in which game design has definitely improved in is organization.

Some of the earliest rpg books come off almost as stream of consciousness writings, with rules inserted into the text as they occurred to their creators. As those rules got reexamined, they got reorganized into a new order. Also, sometimes these rules got homogenized into a single "core mechanic."


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 4, 2013)

Hussar said:


> I'm sorry, but the idea that there is no advancement in game design basically means that there can never be any improvement.  That every RPG ever made is the epitome of good design.
> 
> That's obviously not true.  We have learned things.  Thousands and thousands of hours of play have revealed that some things are better than others.  An initiative system that requires a dozen pages of explanation is a poorly designed system.  A mechanic which requires cube roots in order to calculate is a poorly designed mechanic (and, yes, I have actually seen that in a game).
> 
> Now, obviously, mechanics have to be judged based on what that mechanic is trying to achieve, of course.





I think there are mechanics that do worse than others, and some that do better. And there are some fundamental truths, like you want your rules to be understandable. But a lot of times in these arguments "design has moved on" seems like a cudgel to impose what really boils down to taste or preference. If design has truly moved on, then bad mechanics will be rejected by the people who buy the games. We do not need a set of theories or guidelines asserting certain types of mechanics are now off limits because they are outdated. 

I would say its tiered. Broken math is broken math. If you have mechanics that dont do what they are supposed to, that is not good design (though it could still accidentally be a good game). So some mechanics can be judged as good or bad. But a lot of this stuff boils down to what people like (do you like intricate subsystems, unified mechanics, kots of granulatity, comprehensive mechanics, gritty mechanics, high octane mechanics, narratove mechanics, etc). I see this stuff as preference and most mechanics that get debated seem to fall in that zone. And then a lot of system, really is just fashion. There are trends in rpgs, like in music. This isn't necessarily advancement though. What matters ultimately I think, isnt whether a system measures up to some vague rubric of good design, but whether it measures up for the people who play it at the table. If your customers are happy, then you are probably doing things right

(excuse typos: ipad acting up)


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## Neonchameleon (Dec 4, 2013)

innerdude said:


> I might define the term "moving on" to more specifically mean, "Achieving a more accurate result of an abstracted simulation with fewer calculations / fewer variables / clearer results / more consistent application of existing mechanical principles."




Agreed.



delericho said:


> Engineering.




Agreed again



Lwaxy said:


> To me it has moved on to ever more rules and regulations, away from common sense and creativity for the group. It has also moved away somewhat from the dungeon crawl and monster bashing stereotype to more roleplay focused encounters. Yes, the art definitely changed, although not always for the better - or for the worse, sometimes it just changed.




And here your experience _really _doesn't match mine - at least not in the first part.  My rule of thumb on whether I'll GM or teach a system is that I won't GM or teach any system where I need to look something up in the rulebook in the course of play.  And I won't GM or teach any system you can't cram down onto two sides of A4 and the character sheets (bonus if character sheets are index card sized) if you are really trying. And NPCs can fit on an index card.  I can play such systems (I used to be and in many ways still am a GURPS fan) but I've enough to think about when running the games.  I think that's a pretty good indication of a simple system.

Games I know I can run in such a manner because I have done so:

Dread (2006)
Fate Core and FAE (2013)
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (2012)
Dungeon World (2011)
Monsterhearts (2011)
Leverage (2010)
Fiasco (2009)
Firefly (2014)

Games I consider on the borderline for such an attempt - either borderline for the two page rule or that I think I could run but haven't tried:

4e (2008)  (I must finish my trifold for it - it does offload a lot onto the character sheets, however)
Smallville (2009)
Apocalypse World (2010)
Dogs in the Vineyard (2004)
WFRP 3e (2010)
Serenity (2005)
Star Wars: Edge of Empire (2013)
Feng Shui (1996)
oD&D/Rules Cyclopaedia D&D (1974)
Marvel FASERIP (1986)

Games I own and have played that wouldn't even try to run without a rulebook handy because they have a lot of rules

GURPS (1986)
RIFTS (1990)
AD&D (1979)
D&D 3.X (2000)
Vampire: The Masquerade (1989) + family
Ars Magica (1987)
WFRP 1e (1985)
Traveller (1977)
Rolemaster (1980+) (Actually the rules of most editions aren't bad - it's just the tables).

Notice any patterns?  Just about anything coming with a pedigree traceable through the Forge tends to be simpler than anything dominant in the 80s or 90s.  And the OSR isn't quite as pro-simplicity and elegance, but definitely looks to "Rulings, not rules".  For the last ten years in my experience roleplaying has moved away from rules and minuatae and towards creativity.



Shemeska said:


> It's a crock.
> ...
> I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e




That just shows where you were looking to be honest.  The Forge was going from at least 1999 and Usenet had been making arguments long before that.  However most of the discussion on good rules was taking place away from D&D circles, normally by disgruntled White Wolf players (which is how The Forge started).  No one even bothered to critique AD&D's design (or bolt ons), and one of the impressive things about The Forge in the circles it emerged from was that it was slightly pro-D&D.  But the idea that game design and improvements are a crock is itself a giant steaming crock.  FATAL isn't just a bad game because of the subject matter.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 4, 2013)

Hussar said:


> And, like, say, music, one can certainly apply science principles to the creation of music.  And, again, there are a number of things one can do today that you simply could not do a hundred years ago.
> 0.




True some of the technology we use to perform and record music has advanced tremendously, but overall understanding of music theory, composition, etc has arguably declined in many respects as well. But I don't know one can say music has gotten better or worse. I love classical, but i also love folk, rock, metal and pop. They all have very different goals and aims, but it is all good music. There are more tools in the tool box today,  but there people are not throwing away their violins. There is still plenty of value in performing music written two hundred years ago.


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## Shemeska (Dec 4, 2013)

Neonchameleon said:


> That just shows where you were looking to be honest.  The Forge was going from at least 1999 and Usenet had been making arguments long before that.  However most of the discussion on good rules was taking place away from D&D circles, normally by disgruntled White Wolf players (which is how The Forge started).  No one even bothered to critique AD&D's design (or bolt ons), and one of the impressive things about The Forge in the circles it emerged from was that it was slightly pro-D&D.




And I stand corrected, because I wasn't in any of those place. So thank you


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## ThirdWizard (Dec 4, 2013)

The biggest advancements, I think, deal in game coherence and the ability of designers to reach the results that they're after. Not only results in math and other crunchy bits. But, I mean creating a game that actually plays in the method they're after at the table, and the ability to convey how the game will be best played through the rules to achieve that target gameplay.


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## Ratskinner (Dec 4, 2013)

EDIT: So [MENTION=12037]ThirdWizard[/MENTION] goes and writes a very concise version of my thoughts while I have this up and get distracted by the kids....




Morrus said:


> I see this phrase all the time: game design has moved on. Game design has progressed.  The 'technology' of game design has improved.
> 
> What does that mean to you?




Kinda subtle, but basically I think it comes down to "we can do X better now." Where I think that gets confusing is when people have different ideas about whether "X" is desirable or not. Also, those ideas do change with time. I know that there are  many things that I would have demanded out of any game in say...1992, that I've grown out of by now. 



Morrus said:


> Is game design a science or an art?




Yes....



Morrus said:


> What elements are "improvements" to you?




I think the biggest thing is the recognition that different goals of play are often served by different rules. So now, if we want a story-focused, character driven game we can produce that. Alternatively, if we want a very challenge-oriented game with fine-grained tactical options, we can do that as well. Previous generations of games and designers didn't have that advantage, and often produced...well, self-contradictory games. 

Pre-WotC D&D, at times, suffers greatly from its incoherence in this area, IMO. However, it also benefited from it, because it was hidden behind the incoherent editing and production values. Folks came to AD&D and BECMI and took from it what they wanted. In a broad sense, all the basic motivations for playing a tabletop rpg were _invented_ (or rather _first experienced_) by people playing one of those early versions of D&D. On the other hand, you might say that WotC D&D has suffered from its coherence. Whatever else you might say about them, 3e and 4e hit very hard on their design notes, which drove some folks away as much as it attracted others. 

 I think this kinda leaves D&D (or its designers) in a tough spot. While other games can pick and choose which goals to support, and what mechanics to even consider, they get to start "fresh" and with a "clean slate". No one cares if Savage World or FATE don't have a 5d6 _Fireball_ for a 5th level mage...or even if there are classes or levels at all in those games! But no matter what their play goals/styles, most people seem to want D&D to serve it, but also want to see all those sacred cows lying about the field. 



Morrus said:


> Are any of these things merely fashions?




....there _may be_ some amount of fashion to peoples tabletop preferences, but I think its primarily a matter of taste. I consider the continued strong participation in 3.PF to reflect the general preference for that type of system. I don't think "fashion" has moved many people from one style to another very often. Of course, people can evolve over time. However, I don't think that it seems to follow the sort of "tidal" shifts that fashion does.  



Morrus said:


> Can flaws be features?




ahhh...At a small scale, no. At a large scale, only rarely. (As in, I think the chaos of early D&D helped it a bit...but not much.)



Morrus said:


> Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?




Yes and yes, honestly. I recently got to play in an AD&D (1e) game that was as RAW as we could make it from the original books we had...and I know I'm committing sacrilege here...I was astounded, I mean utterly astounded at how horrible it was. Between the disorganization, contradiction, and incoherence of the rules, it was one of the worst TRPG experiences I've recently had. Comparing that to almost any modern game...I have difficulty imagining that many young persons would choose to learn and play AD&D over the modern game. (...and that's the game I cut my teeth on!) Also, when you consider that (until the recent reprints) those books weren't readily available to a newcomer to the hobby, I think you basically end up with a one-way street that leads to people playing the new games. Even my OSR-minded group uses Castles and Crusades as a starting point, rather than one of the previous editions.


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## Hussar (Dec 4, 2013)

Nagol said:
			
		

> ((And appologies for the mis attribution before.  My bad))Player/character economies extend back the 2nd gen era (very early '80s) -- 007 James Bond, CHAMPIONS, et al. had player/character economies to one degree of another. Adding action points to a game doesn't objectively improve it so much as change the player experience. Some audiences appreciate the change; others are indifferent; still others dislike it.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...gn-has-quot-moved-on-quot/page4#ixzz2mTdqLvjC




But, that's not what game design improvements really mean.  It's not that one game is better than another game.  That's too hard to argue.  Again, as you say, it's like trying to say that Picasso is better than Rembrandt.  

But, we can certainly look at elements and critique them from a much more systematic point of view.  For example, games with Action Points can be compared and critiqued on how those action points work, how are they awarded and what can the players actually do with them.  And, yes, Action Points, in various forms, have evolved over the years.  Sometimes we get action points like Bennies, that are awarded largely by DM Fiat, other times, they become a player resource and are replaced by an extended rest.

We can then look at how these different systems work in context and can generally judge whether or not these mechanics are successful within their respective systems and whether or not they might be a better fit with a different system.  

The points of saying that something is well designed or poorly designed isn't so much to say that X is good or bad, but, it's a much more specific criticism, generally based on what's actually in context with the game.  The Forest Oracle is a poorly designed adventure.  It really is.  We can objectively say that, yup, it's bad.

A game that requires cube roots might not be bad, depending on context, but, by and large, I'd say that any game that requires that level of math is probably trending into the "poorly designed" category.  At least for that element.


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## Mishihari Lord (Dec 4, 2013)

RPGs are changing in two ways as time moves on.  First there are changes in what the game is trying to do.  As an example, there was an emergence of games that try to promote stories in play.  Second there are changes in how the games try to accomplish those things.  The change from to-hit table to THAC0 is an example of this type of change.

With regard to the first, it's art.  There's no good argument to be made that one design goal is objectively better than another.  With GNS as an example, there's no way to say sim, narrativist, or gamist play is objectively superior to the others.  Their fashionability and popularity change with respect to each other over time, but again, that's like art.

With regard to the second, you could argue that design gets better over time, as long as you can agree on the criteria for "better."  With THAC0 ve 3E's system, for example, both are dead simple to use once you know them, but 3E is easier to learn for newbies so it is considered better by many people.  I don't care about how easy it is to learn so I see the change as more of a sideways move, neither an improvement nor a deterioration of design.

A significant difficulty in discussing whether one edition is better than another is that both changes in what the game is trying to do and in how it does it happen at the same time.  Player A might like AD&D better than 4E because it promotes exploration, and Player B might prefer the reverse because it has more elegant math.  Unless they're specific about whether their preferences are about what the games do or how they do it, they're going to have a hard time discussing anything.

In practical application "games have moved on" is usually just an attempt by a poster to dismiss and discredit an approach he doesn't care for without offering any substantive criticism.  As such I generally just ignore such posts.


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## Derren (Dec 4, 2013)

Neonchameleon said:


> Notice any patterns?




Yes, that "streamlining" for the mass market is sadly not limited to video games and movies.


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## Jhaelen (Dec 4, 2013)

Mishihari Lord said:


> Player A might like AD&D better than 4E because it promotes exploration



Now, I'm curious: How does AD&D promote exploration?


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## Balesir (Dec 4, 2013)

Jhaelen said:


> Now, I'm curious: How does AD&D promote exploration?



Through the art on the covers of the rulebooks.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 4, 2013)

Jhaelen said:


> Now, I'm curious: How does AD&D promote exploration?




I think there is a lot in AD&D for exploration and dungeon crawls (particular in the DMG). How it handles encounters, time increments, its advice, etc. But I dont think it was limited to that. Because D&D has been the go to game for so many people, focusing exclusively on aapect of play likethat would be a bad idea IMO. It needs to include. Exploration, but that isn't all it is going to be used for. I agree with monte cook, that there is something to be said for games and settings that allow for many different kinds of adventures rather than just one.


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## Bluenose (Dec 4, 2013)

Nagol said:


> What *has* happened is new designers have adopted different compromises that more appropriately match the experience they are looking for and better reflect the material they use for inspiration as opposed to the material used compared to the original designs.




I think there's a lot more games being made where the first consideration is the type of game they're intended to produce - sometimes, though not always, because of the setting that they're designed for. I do not think that many early RPGs took the same sort of care to make a game that does "what it says on the tin". Some seem to be define themselves as "D&D, but better!" or "Not D&D." It's perhaps also worth noting that a fair number of early RPGs were done by people who already designed games for a living - either tabletop or board wargames, usually. The influence shows. More recent designers are usually people who grew up with RPGs, and have both a better understanding of their strengths and pre-existing assumptions about them too. And often, lack knowledge of how other types of games resolve things they are trying to make work in their RPGs.


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## innerdude (Dec 5, 2013)

Hussar said:


> The points of saying that something is well designed or poorly designed isn't so much to say that X is good or bad, but, it's a much more specific criticism, generally based on what's actually in context with the game.  The Forest Oracle is a poorly designed adventure.  It really is.  We can objectively say that, yup, it's bad.
> 
> A game that requires cube roots might not be bad, depending on context, but, by and large, I'd say that any game that requires that level of math is probably trending into the "poorly designed" category.  At least for that element.




Good comment, and I think this is also very much tied into the concept of genre expectations. The Forest Oracle isn't merely "poorly designed" because of its numerous mathematical and contextual errors -- it's poorly designed because we have certain expectations about the genre and format an adventure is supposed to follow, and the general utility, usability, and production experience of that format.

This is a critical distinction in RPGs, because few people would realistically make the claim that AD&D 1e makes for a fantastic superheroes game rules-as-written.


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## Umbran (Dec 5, 2013)

Hussar said:


> But, that's not what game design improvements really mean.  It's not that one game is better than another game.  That's too hard to argue.  Again, as you say, it's like trying to say that Picasso is better than Rembrandt.




Yes - this applies to any engineering or design to a large degree.  We can say, pretty conclusively, that a 2013 Toyota Prius uses more advanced technology than a Model T Ford.  There's more advanced science behind the Prius, no question at all.

That does *not* say you must like the Prius more.  That's an aesthetic matter, and not one we get to argue with.


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## 3catcircus (Dec 6, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Yes - this applies to any engineering or design to a large degree.  We can say, pretty conclusively, that a 2013 Toyota Prius uses more advanced technology than a Model T Ford.  There's more advanced science behind the Prius, no question at all.
> 
> That does *not* say you must like the Prius more.  That's an aesthetic matter, and not one we get to argue with.




But more advanced does not inherently equal "better," aesthetics aside. You could also argue that a car built in the 1950s or 1960s is "better" than a 2013 car because when the 1950s/1960s car gets in a fender-bender with the 2013 car, it requires $20 worth of body work to knock out a dent (if the dent occurs at all) while the 2013 car needs $1000 worth of repairs to replace the bumper - even though you may find the styling of the 2013 car more aesthetically-pleasing.


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## Olgar Shiverstone (Dec 6, 2013)

"Better" or "worse" are very poor terms for RPG comparisons -- or for comparisons of any complex system, for that matter (and most RPGs are systems-of-systems, when it comes to it).  Better in what respect?

To use the car example, the '60s car might be better than the '00s car in terms of post-collision repairability, but it would be neither as safe in a crash for the passengers nor as reliable.  What defines "better" over all, then?

For D&D, for example  ... if find B/X to be a "better" game from a simplicity choice and flexibility standpoint than 3E, but find 3E to be a better game from the standpoint of mechanical consistency.  Which one is "better" for your game table is an exercise best left to the reader.

That said, I'd say today's RPGs by and large are better engineered than those in the past, in terms of the development effort and process put into them.  That *doesn't* necessarily produce "better" games, though, since again "better" depends on what yardstick you use to measure.


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## Umbran (Dec 6, 2013)

3catcircus said:


> But more advanced does not inherently equal "better," aesthetics aside. You could also argue that a car built in the 1950s or 1960s is "better" than a 2013 car because when the 1950s/1960s car gets in a fender-bender with the 2013 car, it requires $20 worth of body work to knock out a dent (if the dent occurs at all) while the 2013 car needs $1000 worth of repairs to replace the bumper - even though you may find the styling of the 2013 car more aesthetically-pleasing.




Of course, there will be times when the new thing is not better.  Any time we say something is "better" we should elucidate - "Better at what, exactly?"

Yes, that old car required only $20 in body work.  But with all that mass, and that old engine design, exactly how much gas are you burning to make it go?  If the overall operational costs are large enough, the savings in the accident doesn't mean much.   Which is better - low repair bill after a minor accident, or low operating cost?

And, yes, it costs more to repair the 2013 car after an accident.  But, much of that is design for passenger safety - the car crumples so energy doesn't get transferred to the passengers.  How much does it cost to repair *you* after the accident?  Which is better - low car repair bill after an accident, or the car that saves you from injury?

So, I agree, we do have to be careful when we use terms like "better".


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## Hussar (Dec 6, 2013)

3catcircus said:


> But more advanced does not inherently equal "better," aesthetics aside. You could also argue that a car built in the 1950s or 1960s is "better" than a 2013 car because when the 1950s/1960s car gets in a fender-bender with the 2013 car, it requires $20 worth of body work to knock out a dent (if the dent occurs at all) while the 2013 car needs $1000 worth of repairs to replace the bumper - even though you may find the styling of the 2013 car more aesthetically-pleasing.




True, it's not inherently better.  But, by and large, most advancements are improvements.  Ones that are not, tend to fall by the wayside the next time around.  There's a certain level of evolutionary forces that get applied here.

Take the example of a 3e Rope Trick spell.  In the description of the spell, it mentions that bringing extra dimensional spaces into a rope trick can be "hazardous".  But, there is no actual definition of what that means.  Is it lethal?  Is it a minor bit of damage?  Who knows?  That's a bad  bit of game design right there.  If you are going to introduce some sort of consequence for doing something, you have to mechanically back that up.  Leaving things completely vague is poor game design.

And, that's something we generally don't see in games anymore.  You rarely see new games produced where the mechanics are completely silent or very vague on common character actions.  We have skills or proficiencies in the game for a reason.  It would be very unlikely to see a modern produced RPG come out where you have no mechanical guidelines whatsoever governing something as simple as how far a character can jump, for example.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 6, 2013)

Hussar said:


> True, it's not inherently better.  But, by and large, most advancements are improvements.  Ones that are not, tend to fall by the wayside the next time around.  There's a certain level of evolutionary forces that get applied here.




this is why i think cars are a bad analogy. That kind of tech, you have pretty clear improvements. But games are more like movies or music. Some of the underlying tech of the medium may advance, but most of the design evolution is in techniques, fashion, trends etc. Filmakers certainly have more tools in their toolbox now. But a lot of the differences (such as pacing or how much emphasis there is non dialogue over action) are style and trend issues. 



> Take the example of a 3e Rope Trick spell.  In the description of the spell, it mentions that bringing extra dimensional spaces into a rope trick can be "hazardous".  But, there is no actual definition of what that means.  Is it lethal?  Is it a minor bit of damage?  Who knows?  That's a bad  bit of game design right there.  If you are going to introduce some sort of consequence for doing something, you have to mechanically back that up.  Leaving things completely vague is poor game design.




this is where i think you'll find many people disagree. Sure there is an appetite for clarity on these individual points among some gamers, but the whole 'rulings over rules' trend you see is a response to too much of that in games. These days i know a lot of players and gms who prefer the vagueness here over having yet another rule to remember because of a minor point mentioned in a spell. Their attitude is just let the GM handle it. I dont think either approach is bad design. These ae just different approaches to design. Personally, i am fine in either camp myself. Both types of games are fun to me. But there is definitely something to be said for games that leave a lot of the details open to gm interpretation.


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## ThirdWizard (Dec 6, 2013)

Hussar said:


> Take the example of a 3e Rope Trick spell.  In the description of the spell, it mentions that bringing extra dimensional spaces into a rope trick can be "hazardous".  But, there is no actual definition of what that means.  Is it lethal?  Is it a minor bit of damage?  Who knows?  That's a bad  bit of game design right there.  If you are going to introduce some sort of consequence for doing something, you have to mechanically back that up.  Leaving things completely vague is poor game design.




I think you'll find one of the aspects of modern game design is a movement away from simulation and over-definition of things in a lot of circles. So, that would be seen as one of the better design decisions for 3e by some. Why would you want to have a defined consequence of this event when, for example, when it happens that defined event might not be interesting based on the current situation. Why constrain yourself to something that won't always be the desired outcome or that you won't be able to tailor to the current context? Thus, good design.


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## Janx (Dec 6, 2013)

ThirdWizard said:


> I think you'll find one of the aspects of modern game design is a movement away from simulation and over-definition of things in a lot of circles. So, that would be seen as one of the better design decisions for 3e by some. Why would you want to have a defined consequence of this event when, for example, when it happens that defined event might not be interesting based on the current situation. Why constrain yourself to something that won't always be the desired outcome or that you won't be able to tailor to the current context? Thus, good design.




Or its an example of 2 distinct preferences being at odds with this specific game design element.

Hussar seems to dislike mentioning "might be hazardous" in the spell description with absolutely no reference to backing it up mechanically.  When is it hazardous?  What's the % chance of it happening?  What happens if it does?

Whereas, ThirdWizard seems to like that nebulous declaration of "might be hazardous".  As a GM, he doesn't have to ever bring it up, but if he feels it might be valuable, he can invoke the hazardous effect.

As individuals, I don't think either person is wrong in the preference for the rule.

However, if the given game's design objective is to reduce DM fiat (as some people used to alleged 3e attempted to do), then the 3e Rope Trick may be guilty of breaking that objective.

The key to my point is that a game (or any other project) often has design goals or principles that are held internally to the designers.  So "make a good product" is an obvious publically shared goal.  What may (or may not) be shared is any specific patterns or principles that the product is supposed to adhere to that the general consumer may not be concerned with (us gamers talking about game design are not the general consumer).

I don't know what Monte has specifically disclosed about his design goals for 3e.  It seems obvious that he tried to make things mechanically consistent (ex 1d20+modifiers compared to a DC).  I don't know if he also desired to reduce DM Fiat, or reduce nebulous text that implies rules that don't exist.

So, outside of a specific game and it's declared design goals, neither one of you is wrong about the quality of that rule example.  Both ways are reasonable depending on your personal preference for design.

I could only arbitrarily decide which one of you is "right" for a specific game that the case was brought up for (3e) and its declared design goals (that I don't have on hand).

As this relates to game design "moving on", consider that early games did not commonly have declared design goals (beyond just like D&D but better).  The parlance of game design has matured, so now we can talk about what a game's design goals were and determine if the rules achieved those goals or worked against them.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 6, 2013)

Janx said:


> Or its an example of 2 distinct preferences being at odds with this specific game design element.
> 
> Hussar seems to dislike mentioning "might be hazardous" in the spell description with absolutely no reference to backing it up mechanically.  When is it hazardous?  What's the % chance of it happening?  What happens if it does?
> 
> ...




Cook was kind enough to let me interview him on our blog earlier in the year. He answered some questions about design and design trends (as well as 3E), that may be useful to the discussion (thiugh he didn't adress this specific point): 

http://thebedrockblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/an-interview-with-monte-cook-game.html


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## GreyLord (Dec 7, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> this is why i think cars are a bad analogy. That kind of tech, you have pretty clear improvements. But games are more like movies or music. Some of the underlying tech of the medium may advance, but most of the design evolution is in techniques, fashion, trends etc. Filmakers certainly have more tools in their toolbox now. But a lot of the differences (such as pacing or how much emphasis there is non dialogue over action) are style and trend issues.




I absolutely agree.  Unlike technology advances, which is where cars would be, RPGs are more in the artistic realm, which is what Music and Movies are.

Let's take a current Pop band...such as Robbie Williams.  Is Robbie Williams that much better than Mozart?  He's later, the music has evolved, but is Robbie Williams better, or is it simply that tastes have changed and the music produced also changed to fit those tastes?


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## steeldragons (Dec 7, 2013)

Mallus said:


> Not much, other than the person saying "design has moved on" is wrong. They're trying to couch heir personal preferences/tastes in terms of some kind of theory about the history of RPG design that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. RPG design itself isn't analogous to technology, so there's nowhere you can really go with that argument.
> 
> I read statements of that kind as: "I like X and not Y". I accept them as true, I'm happy to read the reasons why a person likes X (and not Y), because it's interesting to see how different people react to and use different gaming techniques/mechanics/abstraction & resolution methodologies, but --so far-- I'm not convinced those reasons can ever add up to a demonstration game design is progressing to an objectively better state.
> 
> ...




This. Practically to the letter. Thanks for saving me a lengthy post I would have had to think way too much about to get written! 



Shemeska said:


> It's a crock.




And this.



Shemeska said:


> It's like saying food tastes or fashion styles have "advanced". No, they haven't. They're just different now than a decade ago, and they'll be different in another decade in some way or form. But by no means is the fashion sensibility of today "better" than the fashions a decade ago. It isn't technology. There isn't a clearly measurable metric by which to measure "progress".
> 
> I never saw the term applied to RPGs till circa 2008 when it was being used as a defense of 4e versus 3e, because 3e was old and 4e was progressive game design whatever that means. I've seen it used more lately by folks bashing 5e online as "backsliding" or "going backwards" in terms of game design. It doesn't make sense there either if you ask me. It's just edition warring framed with a different coat of paint to justify as something other than personal taste.




Thanks, also, as something along these lines (probably citing both food and fashion, for that matter) woulda been part of a response from me as well.



dd.stevenson said:


> Full agreement. "Game design has moved on" is just another way to be a dick on the internet.




And, well, just for good measure...this too.


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## Hussar (Dec 7, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> I absolutely agree.  Unlike technology advances, which is where cars would be, RPGs are more in the artistic realm, which is what Music and Movies are.
> 
> Let's take a current Pop band...such as Robbie Williams.  Is Robbie Williams that much better than Mozart?  He's later, the music has evolved, but is Robbie Williams better, or is it simply that tastes have changed and the music produced also changed to fit those tastes?




But, that's the problem.  It's a nonsensical question.  The question that should be asked is, "Is this song by Robbie Williams a well written song, given what we have learned over the past thousand years or so of critical thinking analysing music and art?"  

Saying something is well or poorly designed does not automatically make it better or worse than anything else.  A Model T is a very well designed car.  Is it a good car today?  Well, no, but that's for lot so of reasons, but, that doesn't make it a poorly designed car.

A Pinto, OTOH, is a poorly designed car.  Exploding when rear ended is a pretty big design flaw.  

Going back to Rope Trick, I'd argue that a vague statement, "Might be hazardous" is pretty poor game design.  It's largely meaningless.  You have no guidance for what "hazardous" might mean.  Which basically means that you might as well leave it out - why add it in when all it does is cloud the issue?  Either define it, or leave it out.  Don't be coy.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

Hussar said:


> Going back to Rope Trick, I'd argue that a vague statement, "Might be hazardous" is pretty poor game design.  It's largely meaningless.  You have no guidance for what "hazardous" might mean.  Which basically means that you might as well leave it out - why add it in when all it does is cloud the issue?  Either define it, or leave it out.  Don't be coy.




It isn't meaningless. It is widely open to interpretation. This is a flaw or feature depending on your point of view. The fact that several people here have said they'd prefer it vague, shows there is an appetite for that kind if design. If I am making a game for those people (and there is a very big block of 'rulings over rules' type players out there) then rope trick as written would be good design. If I were majing a game for you, it would be a bad design choice. Goals and audience matter. You can create a rule like "never be vague" but it isn't a very useful rule to adhere to if lots of gamers want a degree of vagueness in the rules.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

Hussar said:


> But, that's the problem.  It's a nonsensical question.  The question that should be asked is, "Is this song by Robbie Williams a well written song, given what we have learned over the past thousand years or so of critical thinking analysing music and art?"




But musical conventions change. Modern pop music doesn't adhere to many of the structures, rules and conventions of Rennaissance or classical music. There are some rules of composition people adhere, but those can change dramatically over time. Just look at the difference in structure between jazz and baroque. And in music, breaking the rules is often quite okay. Roy Orbison didn't follow standard song structure from his time (not because he was intentionally flaunting convention, but becsuse he didn't have a handke on song structure). This led to some pretty memorable work. At the time, folks could have argued it was bad design, because that wasn't pop songs were supposed to be structured. Even the notes we use can change. Most western music had 12 tones, but arabic music has 24. For a while western composers experimented with 24 tones (and many still do). Scales and chord progressions also vary a lot by place and time. 

That said, there would be some really odd musical choices one could make that I think most folks wiuld agree are bad unless you had a good reason to do so (things like changing time signature ever single bar). But those genuinely bad things are extreme cases, and eve some of those can change.


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## Hussar (Dec 7, 2013)

"I like it" is not proof of good design.  Nor is "I don't like it", for that matter.  

Vague mechanics with no guidance as to how to interpret that vagueness is bad game design.  In rules light games, for example, you generally get one (or a small number) of baseline rules that would be applied in a variety of situations.  So, in a rules light system, hazardous would be a keyword that would link to a general rule that would be applied.  

What you don't have is this sort of trailing mechanic that doesn't actually lead anywhere.  What does "hazardous" mean in context?  Well, we have no idea.  I might say it's X or Y.  Thus, it's a poorly designed mechanic.

Rulings not rules does not mean that we should go back to poorly written rules that lead nowhere.  Rulings are based on sound principles, that are clearly defined by the system.  "Hazardous" can mean anything.  Does it mean that my character might get cancer 20 years down the line?  That I spontaneously explode?  What?  

A better example would be something like Jumping.  In D&D, it's a pretty common thing for a character to jump.  Jump over a pit, through a window, whatnot.  This is a pretty basic action.  Yet, for the first two (or more depending on how you count) editions (OD&D and AD&D 1e) you cannot actually answer that question.  There are no jump mechanics.  2e kinda tried, by having a jump proficiency, but, since there's no rules for jumping without that proficiency, we're still pretty much left in the dark.  3e steps up and with some pretty simple mechanics (skills, plus untrained skill rules) allows everyone playing to answer the question.

Right there, that's better design.  Other games handle it differently.  It might be, "You can jump whatever the DM feels is appropriate" but, at least it's handled.  There isn't a giant gaping hole in the mechanics.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

Hussar said:


> "I like it" is not proof of good design.  Nor is "I don't like it", for that matter.
> 
> Vague mechanics with no guidance as to how to interpret that vagueness is bad game design.  In rules light games, for example, you generally get one (or a small number) of baseline rules that would be applied in a variety of situations.  So, in a rules light system, hazardous would be a keyword that would link to a general rule that would be applied.
> 
> ...




But you are just saying you dont like vagueness and it is therefore bad designs. Others have shown why it can be useful. It allows for flexibility within the circumstances of the game. One way to designdrules light is to privide concrete principles that can be applied across the board consistently. Another is to leave things more in the hands of individual gm and group interpretation. That allows the dro play the game in a way they like (they might like that hazardous means characters die, while another group. Like it to mean something much less lethal). 

I think the 2E jump rules and 3E jump rules are a perfect example. 3E has clarity but its much more to remember. 2E worked better for me, because its more in the hands of the individual gm, with less stuff to remember or look up. Again, you can assert this is bad design all you want. That doesn't maje it si, when there are so many people who prefer this sort of vagueness.

now I am happy to play both types of games. 3E is great at what it does. But that isnt the only way to design a game. They both offer very different play experiences. But both are valid forms if design because they both meet needs that are out there.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

Hussar said:


> "I like it" is not proof of good design.  Nor is "I don't like it", for that matter.
> 
> .




One person liking it isnt. Many people liking it suggests your claim it is bad design may be shaky. Too many people use and prefer vague mechanics like this for you to be correct in my opinion.


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## Storminator (Dec 7, 2013)

There's a difference between "someone changed a rule" and "game design has moved on".

If literally no game designers use a certain rule that used to be prevalent, we can say game design has moved on. We aren't going to see descending AC with positive armor bonus that subtract again. Game design has moved on. Jenga towers have not replaced dice. Someone changed that rule.
PS


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

Hussar said:


> "I
> 
> What you don't have is this sort of trailing mechanic that doesn't actually lead anywhere.  What does "hazardous" mean in context?  Well, we have no idea.  I might say it's X or Y.  Thus, it's a poorly designed mechanic.
> 
> .




And this allowance for it being x or y depending on taste of group, GM interpretation, etc, to many, many people is a good thing not a bad thing. I am not saying doing it the other way is wrong. Certainly designers could be more explicit about what hazardous means if they wish, but there are perfectly good reasons for choosing to leave it vague.

this sort of thing has come up with my own design team on a current project. On some spell entries, we debated leaving some things deliberately vague. Not because we couldn't be bothered to provide a clear answer, but because any decision we made would potentially reduce enjoyment of the game by one of the three player types we had in mind from the outset. We realized it was better to allow, in some key instances, for the gm and players to interpret what an aspect of the spell meant. And in playtests we saw that this worked better for our ourposes thaan when we were explicit. It allowed all the GMs to fit the spell to their style of play. There was no direct analog to your rope trick example, but this sort of thify did come up. I do understand, a player who wants perfect clarity and consistency wont like that. That doesn't make it bad design, unless they were our target audience.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

Storminator said:


> There's a difference between "someone changed a rule" and "game design has moved on".
> 
> If literally no game designers use a certain rule that used to be prevalent, we can say game design has moved on. We aren't going to see descending AC with positive armor bonus that subtract again. Game design has moved on. Jenga towers have not replaced dice. Someone changed that rule.
> PS




I think what Morrus was asking though is if game design is more of a science where technologies would be genuinely obsolete or more like an art where techniques may simply fall from fashion. Granted that is an oversimplification, because even in an art it isn't always fashion, there are developments that allow artists greater freedom to express their idea. But generally, i would label it an art. Something like a jenga tower or Thac0, while there are good reasons for not using them, are not necessarily bad under the right circumstances. While i don't think we will see thac0 again, because it takes work to impoement during play, i do think we might see attack matrices come back (and thac0 is derived from that sustem). Jenga towers we've only seen once, and I can't say i am into dread, but lots of people still spakchighly of th system. I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes that core idea and uses it for something new (might not be a jenga tower, could be something else with the same sort of goal in mind).


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## Sunseeker (Dec 7, 2013)

Being a "science" or an "art" doesn't mean something can't progress in a generally upward direction.  While there are certainly different styles in art, that doesn't mean that there aren't arguably more skilled pieces within those styles.  Even art as a whole has generally improved in technical quality, skill and so on, there are techniques and methods that we never knew about 500 years ago that are used to create art.  There is science in art.  The idea that art is some kind of wishy-washy "do whatever you want" genre where anything goes because it's art and YOU CAN'T JUDGE ME!! is an obnoxious and totally false conception.

Even pure mathematics can be artistic, because a lot of art relies heavily on mathematics.  You may not see the math in a great painting as you would in a fractal, but that doesn't mean it's not there.  Our definition of "art" and "beauty" are tied to our mathematical perceptions(regardless of if you are aware of them).  "Art" and "science" are not a dichotomous pair.

Game design improves just as anything does, it "moves on" from what didn't work, what wasn't popular, and just changes over time, people try new things (see: cubism) and sometimes those things succeed in becoming considered "art" or not.  So yes, game design has "moved on" because change is inevitable.  

Whether or not game design has learned from it's mistakes is a better question.  Science and art, just as game design, does not always do that.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

@Morrus;







shidaku said:


> Being a "science" or an "art" doesn't mean something can't progress in a generally upward direction.  While there are certainly different styles in art, that doesn't mean that there aren't arguably more skilled pieces within those styles.  Even art as a whole has generally improved in technical quality, skill and so on, there are techniques and methods that we never knew about 500 years ago that are used to create art.  There is science in art.  The idea that art is some kind of wishy-washy "do whatever you want" genre where anything goes because it's art and YOU CAN'T JUDGE ME!! is an obnoxious and totally false conception.
> 
> Even pure mathematics can be artistic, because a lot of art relies heavily on mathematics.  You may not see the math in a great painting as you would in a fractal, but that doesn't mean it's not there.  Our definition of "art" and "beauty" are tied to our mathematical perceptions(regardless of if you are aware of them).  "Art" and "science" are not a dichotomous pair.
> 
> ...




but it isn't a steady trajectory in art the way it has been in science. Yes new techniques and methods develop and even new technologies emerge that make the medium more flexible. But one wbdn't drive an 80 year old car for anything other than novelty, one coul definitely listen to an 80 year old song for the pure pleasure of it.


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## Farscape (Dec 7, 2013)

Op: I don't think "game design" progresses or moves on per say. It changes yes, but what came before it isn't necessarily obsolete. There are some rules from previous editions of games that were better than some of the rules now. 

I don't believe there is a one true answer to this question.


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## Sunseeker (Dec 7, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> but it isn't a steady trajectory in art the way it has been in science. Yes new techniques and methods develop and even new technologies emerge that make the medium more flexible. But one wbdn't drive an 80 year old car for anything other than novelty, one coul definitely listen to an 80 year old song for the pure pleasure of it.




One wouldn't drive an 80 year old car simply because it is unlikely to continue to work, maintaining an old vehicle is difficult.  But driving for "novelty" is driving pleasure.  People still drive their Model-T's, their Mustangs, their Thunderbirds for PLEASURE, they are simply more difficult to maintain than a song that has been digitized.  Enjoying the sound of a 1970's V8 roar to life is definitely pleasure.

But your comparison is flawed.  Your appreciation for mechanically poor or technically unskilled music has no bearing on it's quality, only your _perception_ of it's quality.  You can like bad music, bad cars, all you want.  That doesn't mean that we haven't gotten better at making music, just as we have with card, even music in the same genre.

If you think science ONLY improves, I'd like to remind you of the dark ages.


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## Farscape (Dec 7, 2013)

shidaku said:


> One wouldn't drive an 80 year old car simply because it is unlikely to continue to work, maintaining an old vehicle is difficult.  But driving for "novelty" is driving pleasure.  People still drive their Model-T's, their Mustangs, their Thunderbirds for PLEASURE, they are simply more difficult to maintain than a song that has been digitized.  Enjoying the sound of a 1970's V8 roar to life is definitely pleasure.
> 
> But your comparison is flawed.  Your appreciation for mechanically poor or technically unskilled music has no bearing on it's quality, only your _perception_ of it's quality.  You can like bad music, bad cars, all you want.  That doesn't mean that we haven't gotten better at making music, just as we have with card, even music in the same genre.
> 
> If you think science ONLY improves, I'd like to remind you of the dark ages.




Question?

How exactly do you make music better? In all fairness, people are going back to vinyl because the quality has been proven to be better. Ever tried using an EQ with digitized music? It sucks to be honest because there isn't much you can do to change it.


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## Sunseeker (Dec 7, 2013)

Farscape said:


> Question?
> 
> How exactly do you make music better? In all fairness, people are going back to vinyl because the quality has been proven to be better. Ever tried using an EQ with digitized music? It sucks to be honest because there isn't much you can do to change it.




Through greater skill and more accurate sound production.  

Nobody is going back to vinyl for the quality of the sound.  People are going back to vinyl for the novelty.  That little bit of scratch, that touch of fuzz, some people _enjoy_ that aspect of music, and so they are using old recording techniques in order to replicate that sound.

You are conflating quality with appreciation, they are not the same and doing so only reinforces this idea that science and art are somehow dichotomous subjects.


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## Farscape (Dec 7, 2013)

shidaku said:


> Through greater skill and more accurate sound production.
> 
> Nobody is going back to vinyl for the quality of the sound.  People are going back to vinyl for the novelty.  That little bit of scratch, that touch of fuzz, some people _enjoy_ that aspect of music, and so they are using old recording techniques in order to replicate that sound.
> 
> You are conflating quality with appreciation, they are not the same and doing so only reinforces this idea that science and art are somehow dichotomous subjects.




Actually I'm not. A friend of mine is a sound engineer and he has said that vinyl actually produces a better sound quality, a more warm and rich sound than digital.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

shidaku said:


> But your comparison is flawed.  Your appreciation for mechanically poor or technically unskilled music has no bearing on it's quality, only your _perception_ of it's quality.  You can like bad music, bad cars, all you want.  That doesn't mean that we haven't gotten better at making music, just as we have with card, even music in the same genre.
> 
> If you think science ONLY improves, I'd like to remind you of the dark ages.




My point is technology tends to advance steadily provided there is continuity. Music isn't tech. RPGs are not tech. I was comparing musical composition, not performance, to game design. Bach's cello suites are as good or better than pieces written for the instrument today. Bach isn't objectively worse than Bilky Joel or Sondheim simply because music has 'moved on'. A model T on the other hand is objectively worse than modern vehicles because it doesn't perform as well. That is why I am saying musical composition is a much better analogy than cars. While you have technique, convention and theory supporting music, it isn't the same kind of advancement you see in science . There are technical advance that make a different (new instruments for example) but again, we still perform classical music because much of what changes with music is related more to taste, trends and fashions. But you can still go back to old fashions and ideas in music and make use of them.


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## ThirdWizard (Dec 7, 2013)

Hussar said:


> "I like it" is not proof of good design.  Nor is "I don't like it", for that matter.
> 
> Vague mechanics with no guidance as to how to interpret that vagueness is bad game design.  In rules light games, for example, you generally get one (or a small number) of baseline rules that would be applied in a variety of situations.  So, in a rules light system, hazardous would be a keyword that would link to a general rule that would be applied.
> 
> ...




The answer is, of course, something interesting within the context of what is going on in the game.

The entire point of building vague mechanics is that events can be adapted to whatever is interesting in the current situation. Perhaps the "hazardous" definition doesn't work well in D&D, I can see that. After all, D&D has very well defined definitions of magic items and spells. However, that doesn't mean that vague rules are bad in all contexts.

For example, in Dungeon World a monster stat block looks something like this:

*Devourer* _Solitary, Large, Intelligent, Hoarder_
Smash (d10+3 damage) 16 HP 1 Armor
_Close, Reach, Forceful_
Most folk know that the undead feed on flesh. The warmth, blood and living tissue continue their unholy existence. This is true for most of the mindless dead, animated by black sorcery. Not so the devourer. When a particularly wicked person (often a manipulator of men, an apostate priest or the like) dies in a gruesome way, the dark powers of Dungeon World might bring them back to a kind of life. The devourer, however, does not feed on the flesh of men or elves. The devourer eats souls. It kills with a pleasure only the sentient can enjoy and in the moments of its victims’ expiry, draws breath like a drowning man and swallows a soul. What does it mean to have your soul eaten by such a creature? None dare ask for fear of finding out. Instinct: To feast on souls
• Devour or trap dying soul
• Bargain for a soul’s return

What does "Devour or trap dying soul" mean? Whatever the GM needs it to mean. How do you bargain for a soul's return? Does it mean the person is alive, or does that mean the soul merely goes to the afterlife? How do you bargain with an undead monster, anyway? The monster description even notes that nobody knows what happens when the monster eats your soul.

These are all design decisions. The design is to keep the mystery alive for the players. That sense of wonder everyone always wishes they had back. The vagueness of the design allows the DM to craft their game in a way that is internally consistent, exciting, and mysterious.


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## Sunseeker (Dec 7, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> My point is technology tends to advance steadily provided there is continuity. Music isn't tech. RPGs are not tech. I was comparing musical composition, not performance, to game design. Bach's cello suites are as good or better than pieces written for the instrument today. Bach isn't objectively worse than Bilky Joel or Sondheim simply because music has 'moved on'. A model T on the other hand is objectively worse than modern vehicles because it doesn't perform as well. That is why I am saying musical composition is a much better analogy than cars. While you have technique, convention and theory supporting music, it isn't the same kind of advancement you see in science . There are technical advance that make a different (new instruments for example) but again, we still perform classical music because much of what changes with music is related more to taste, trends and fashions. But you can still go back to old fashions and ideas in music and make use of them.




I feel like you're focusing too much on the example and missing the overall point.  And I'm really not sure making further statements which would inevitably use more examples would help illuminate things.

Art requires science, it is not some willy-nilly do whatever you want thing.  

The fact that their methods of advancement are differen't doesn't make them inherently separate entities.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 7, 2013)

shidaku said:


> I
> 
> Art requires science, it is not some willy-nilly do whatever you want thing.
> 
> .




I never said it was, but I think music and engineering are very different when it comes to advancements.  In music, poetry and other arts you have forms that evolve, but you can always freely visit older forms. I can still write a sonnet or opera, even though both music and poetry have evolved. There is more subjectivity in art than science. A lot of what we call advancements, are just trends or changes in taste. Same with game design. We do learn as we go but too often I think people just say ' outdated design' because they don't like something that still has a certain amount of popularity.

and while we are getting lost a bit in examples, I focus on it because it's relevant to what your arguing: that art advances like science. I think I am showing advancements in art are often about subjective sensibilities of the time. There are proper advances in that you can create new tools and options, but the old options still have relevance. That is less true for sciences. Especially when you focus on composition.


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## Farscape (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> I never said it was, but I think music and engineering are very different when it comes to advancements.  In music, poetry and other arts you have forms that evolve, but you can always freely visit older forms. I can still write a sonnet or opera, even though both music and poetry have evolved. There is more subjectivity in art than science. A lot of what we call advancements, are just trends or changes in taste. Same with game design. We do learn as we go but too often I think people just say ' outdated design' because they don't like something that still has a certain amount of popularity.
> 
> and while we are getting lost a bit in examples, I focus on it because it's relevant to what your arguing: that art advances like science. I think I am showing advancements in art are often about subjective sensibilities of the time. There are proper advances in that you can create new tools and options, but the old options still have relevance. That is less true for sciences. Especially when you focus on composition.




What Bedrock is trying to say, I think, is that the tools of art evolve (paint brush, paints, musical instruments etc) but not the brush stroke.


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## Umbran (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> ....one coul definitely listen to an 80 year old song for the pure pleasure of it.






shidaku said:


> Your appreciation for mechanically poor or technically unskilled music has no bearing on it's quality, only your _perception_ of it's quality.




No, shidaku, I think you're missing his point.  If I'm getting him correctly, let me try it this way:

Bach.  Brahms.  Beethoven.  Technically unskilled?

However much you get better sound reproduction, the old design of the music is still amazing.  

This is because, however much technology improves, good design and engineering have a human element to them.  No amount of new technology saves you from a design that fails on the human portion of the equation.  And you can do a lot with an old, outmoded design that just gets the human side of things *right*.


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## ExploderWizard (Dec 8, 2013)

Hussar said:


> I'd say that as time has gone on, we've become much more systematic in our approach to game design.  There's a lot less "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" approach to game design.




So you haven't been been following the 5E playtest then? 



Hussar said:


> I'm sorry, but the idea that there is no advancement in game design basically means that there can never be any improvement.  That every RPG ever made is the epitome of good design.




Unless there is measurement that matters more than how much fun one has playing something and the eagerness to play a given game again, then no there has been no objective advancement to game design. 



Jhaelen said:


> Now, I'm curious: How does AD&D promote exploration?




The rules of the game promote exploration. XP is rewarded largely for treasure. One must explore the environment to locate treasure. Combat (especially at low levels) is very lethal. Thus rather than fighting too much to acquire said treasure, perhaps exploring somewhere else where there is more to gain for less risk is a more winning strategy. Thus the risk vs reward mechanism pushes players to explore to keep looking for the less costly (if not free) lunch so to speak. 



Bedrockgames said:


> this is where i think you'll find many people disagree. Sure there is an appetite for clarity on these individual points among some gamers, but the whole 'rulings over rules' trend you see is a response to too much of that in games. These days i know a lot of players and gms who prefer the vagueness here over having yet another rule to remember because of a minor point mentioned in a spell. Their attitude is just let the GM handle it. I dont think either approach is bad design. These ae just different approaches to design. Personally, i am fine in either camp myself. Both types of games are fun to me. But there is definitely something to be said for games that leave a lot of the details open to gm interpretation.




Exactly. Nothing can be objectively better while under the subjective scrutiny of fun. 



Farscape said:


> What Bedrock is trying to say, I think, is that the tools of art evolve (paint brush, paints, musical instruments etc) but not the brush stroke.




This is very applicable here.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> No, shidaku, I think you're missing his point.  If I'm getting him correctly, let me try it this way:
> 
> Bach.  Brahms.  Beethoven.  Technically unskilled?
> 
> ...




I am saying that, and that gets at the point better than I did, but I am also saying that the technology surrounding music is more the instruments and recording devices. But music itself is about ideas and structures. That aspect of music is not analogous to tech but to trends or form in other artistic mediums and these are analogous to rpg mechanics. The tech surrounding RPGs are the books, PDFs and digital files. But rpg mechanics are closer to things like literary devices, musical scales, etc. I can take scales used by Bach and still use them today. No one would say 'music has moved on so stop playing Bach'. Being old doesn't make these things outmoded. So this is why I answered Morrus ' question by saying rpg design is more art or craft than science to me.


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## Umbran (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> That aspect of music is not analogous to tech but to trends or form in other artistic mediums and these are analogous to rpg mechanics.




Ah.  Well, I disagree with you somewhat on that point, but that's okay.

Mechanics are processes.  They are technology.  That's why you cannot copyright a mechanic, but you may be able to *patent* it, if it really is unique.  

Let us take fashion - fabric is fabric.  The pattern printed on it may be art, but the fabric itself usually contains little artistry to speak of. The artistry comes in how you cut, fold, arrange, and stitch various fabrics together.  And when lots of folks choose fabrics and cut, fold, and stitch to yield similar results, you have a trend or fashion in clothing.  In music, you have individual notes.  How they are arranged in the piece is where the art comes in.  When lots of folks use the same chord progressions, you get Blues.

So, the mechanics are not artistic.  How you stitch them together to mean things to a game, however, includes that artistry - and there can be trends in how we use the mechanics.  Each mechanic is a musical note - the design and fashion comes in how you arrange them.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Ah.  Well, I disagree with you somewhat on that point, but that's okay.
> 
> Mechanics are processes.  They are technology.  That's why you cannot copyright a mechanic, but you may be able to *patent* it, if it really is unique.
> 
> ...





I do see your point but I still find comparing game mechanics to auto technology does not work for me. I can still see someone using the 2E NWP system or something like it for example. Some might find the 3E skill system a imprivement, but I still prefer the 2E system in many respects (both because I like how the math tends to work more and I like that the NWPs are more open to interpretation than the 3E skills....I also prefer treating ettiquette as a knowledge over a social skill like diplomacy). I do realize I am in a minority on that opinion,but in time I think it is possible opinion could change. People might want a less deeply defined skill system that has less potential conflict with in character dialogue). 

I think pointing to notes as tech is interesting because those tend not to fall out of fashion. Middle C is still in use. But there is also a 24 tone system, instead of our 12 tone system. Neither one is seen as more advanced or better. They are just different. Arguably you have more options using 24 tones, but if yon haven't developed an ear for it, the notes can sound slightly out of key.


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## GreyLord (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> I do see your point but I still find comparing game mechanics to auto technology does not work for me. I can still see someone using the 2E NWP system or something like it for example. Some might find the 3E skill system a imprivement, but I still prefer the 2E system in many respects (both because I like how the math tends to work more and I like that the NWPs are more open to interpretation than the 3E skills....I also prefer treating ettiquette as a knowledge over a social skill like diplomacy). I do realize I am in a minority on that opinion,but in time I think it is possible opinion could change. People might want a less deeply defined skill system that has less potential conflict with in character dialogue).
> 
> I think pointing to notes as tech is interesting because those tend not to fall out of fashion. Middle C is still in use. But there is also a 24 tone system, instead of our 12 tone system. Neither one is seen as more advanced or better. They are just different. Arguably you have more options using 24 tones, but if yon haven't developed an ear for it, the notes can sound slightly out of key.




I agree with you, and you may be surprised but the BIGGEST RPG audience may also agree with you, they just don't speak English.

Whilst the West (well, primarily US, UK, Aus, and parts of Europe like Germany, but not all of Europe) seem to prefer the new RPGs post turn of the millennium that are based upon D20 (3.5, 4e, PF) in some portions of Europe, Eastern Eurasia, a lot of Asia itself (inclusive of Korea and Japan) seem to prefer RPG mechanics that STILL date to the 70s and basically don't buy these "advancements" because they do not consider them as such.

Their "advancements" have gone a different path with more inspirations from the percentile statistics of the late 70s and early 80s and the RPGs rooting from them rather than anything dealing with such things as number that arrive from nowhere and strange D20 dice and such.

It's their preference for a different style, aka...a different form of the art as you would.

There may be evolutions of style, but it is not necessarily advancments that are similar to tech advancements.

Another take would be art.  IS modern art that much more evolved and advanced than older art.  A majority of the art still produced is actually the OLDER style art from over a century ago.  The MODERN art and those who think all art should be in that style...kind of scoff at the uneducated crowds that prefer this old style art (so all of us who like the PF or other art in RPGs...we are all ignorant savages in that light).  Are we REALLY that far behind?

Or is it basically the same thing as RPGs in that, it doesn't matter if some art major things we are ignorant for not preferring this




Or is it that, just like the discussions in the art crowd (of which this conversation CLOSELY mirrors) are basically the same as what we are having and it truly is a measure of art and not technology.

In otherwords, depending on who you ascribe to, if you are a art major who favors the advancement of art...then just like you'd prefer something above as far more advanced and technical than the older art forms...you'd probably also see RPG's art form as also being technically related in advancments.

However, if you are one that prefers the current art in PF, or most other RPGs that deal with art forms dating back over a century (and sometimes over 2 or 3 centuries ago), than you'll probably be of the opinion that art is NOT a technological type of advancement, and neither are RPGs...but more affixed to trends and current enjoyment than what we specifically state would be the same as a scientific or technological advancement.

Beyond the obvious of considering all RPGs/art equal in the latter instance, is also recognizing that as the art evolves...that new forms and ideas are unlocked which create NEW (and perhaps equal) forms of enjoyment...which may or may not appeal to the current elites, non-elites, or others.

PS:  I should add, even the art posted above is ALSO almost a century old at this point...but the artforms used in most RPGs are even OLDER than that.

For a more recent look at something (well, still 40 years old at this point) the below link is available.

http://collection.corcoran.org/collection/work/yellow-red-triangle


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> Whilst the West (well, primarily US, UK, Aus, and parts of Europe like Germany, but not all of Europe) seem to prefer the new RPGs post turn of the millennium that are based upon D20 (3.5, 4e, PF) in some portions of Europe, Eastern Eurasia, a lot of Asia itself (inclusive of Korea and Japan) seem to prefer RPG mechanics that STILL date to the 70s and basically don't buy these "advancements" because they do not consider them as such.
> 
> Their "advancements" have gone a different path with more inspirations from the percentile statistics of the late 70s and early 80s and the RPGs rooting from them rather than anything dealing with such things as number that arrive from nowhere and strange D20 dice and such.




I am not familliar enough with gaming scenes in other places to know if this is true or not, but it is interesting to think about. Maybe some posters from these countries could weigh in. We have a lot of customes from Germany and Belgium. I occassoinally hear from them by email and they sometimes do online reviews of our games. In a few cases they've told me a bit about gaming in their area, and expectations did seem different than in the US. I didn't get enough of an impression to characterize them clearly, but did have a sense that there was a difference. I also communicated with a game store owner in Bangkok a while back because we wer thinking of doing a quickstarter in Thai for one of our games (we ran into some issues though trying to do the translation). I had asked what games were big there, to see if anything we did would have appeal, and while it wasn't 70s games, a lot of late 80s to 90s games were mentioned and not many recent games came up. So I believe old world of darkness was the top one.

EDIT: Actnally i tracked down my notes on the top games in Thailand, memory was a little iff. So ignore my above statement. Wasn't an official top seller list or anything though. Jhst his impression if what was being played most. These are what he said was most popular: 


White Wolf: World of Darkness
Paizo: Pathfinder
Cthulhu: both Chaoism and  Pelgrane versions
White Wolf: Psion
AEG: L5R


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Farscape said:


> What Bedrock is trying to say, I think, is that the tools of art evolve (paint brush, paints, musical instruments etc) but not the brush stroke.




Sort of. Dont know much about painting. I am not denying that new techniques emerge. Finger tapping is a newer guitar technique (doesn't work so well without amplification). But just because finger tapping exists, it doesn't mean other methods for achieving that fast sound are obsolete, and some guitarists avoid it entirely. Plectrums are a pn advancement over say fingerpicking. Finger picking is a bit more rare in certain styles of music but no one would say music has moved on so you shouldn't finger pick. In fact, there are some very good reasons to choose finger style over a pick. So increasing options or brush stroke techniques will occur. What brush strokes are favored may change with fashion and trends. I am not denying advances in understanding in the arts, but I am saying it isnt like car tech, where old tech becomes obsolete. Even though it is an old form , people still listen to and enjoy madrigals, and you will hear them today in certain styles of compositionn (movie soundtracks for example). And like Umran said, Bach, Mozart, Brahms,were all writing when there was less musical tech available, but their works not only remain relevant but tower over us today. People are not dismissive of these men, they respect them greatly (even composers and musicians who write for more modern genres appreciate them).


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

ExploderWizard said:


> Exactly. Nothing can be objectively better while under the subjective scrutiny of fun.




I think there is still room for judgment and evaluation, but like you say, the end use is what matters. So I take no issue with people arguing that a particular mechanic isn't good for a given goal or audience. What i take issue with is people saying things like "X is just bad design". That gives no real context or points of comparison. There may be a few cases where this is true across the board (a game system built around a core mechanic that requires players to pass gas is a bad idea in my opinion and i think few would disagree with that). I am simply saying context and audience matter. If people enjoy using the mechanic that is what matters. Now your audience might be designers or experienced RPG critics, so your measures are going to include things like how the gamed builds on existing mechanical knowledge, how streamlined the game is, how well it rests with current gaming trends. But that isnt because these things are objectively good desing, its because the audience you decided to write for will likely value those sorts of things. But if i sit down to make an OSR game, a beer and pretzels game, or a cinematic game, my measures for good design will change according to my audience.


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## Umbran (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> I can still see someone using the 2E NWP system or something like it for example. Some might find the 3E skill system a imprivement, but I still prefer the 2E system in many respects (both because I like how the math tends to work more and I like that the NWPs are more open to interpretation than the 3E skills....I also prefer treating ettiquette as a knowledge over a social skill like diplomacy). I do realize I am in a minority on that opinion,but in time I think it is possible opinion could change. People might want a less deeply defined skill system that has less potential conflict with in character dialogue).




And perhaps some of us haven't managed to get this single point across - more advanced technology does not necessarily translate into a better consumer product.  

As a more basic example - splitting wood for a fireplace.  The best tool for the job is a good old fashioned ax, the design of which hasn't changed much in centuries.  Oh, they make hydraulic-advantage and powered wood splitters, but these gizmos only serve those who have become too infirm to work an ax, or who need to split wood on a massive scale.  The typical homeowner still uses an ax, despite advances in technology.

Or, to be perhaps a bit more clear - more advanced technology does not necessarily translate into what *you* would find to be a better consumer product.

I'll use myself as an example here, with cell phones.  Modern smartphones are undeniably technologically superior to feature phones.  But, my own use of phones was shaped by years of not having one.  I, personally, just don't find a need for a smartphone, so I still have a feature phone.  But, the rest of the world has largely moved on, and decent feature phones are getting harder and harder to come by.  In another decade, it'll be nigh impossible for me to get a feature phone, and I'll have to get a smartphone whether I like it or not.

This latter is not just "fashion".  The market is unlikely to move backwards towards feature phones, because whatever my own needs or wants may be, for the vast majority of people, the technology provides more of what they want.  *I* am the one stuck in fashion, not the rest of the world.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> And perhaps some of us haven't managed to get this single point across - more advanced technology does not necessarily translate into a better consumer product.
> 
> As a more basic example - splitting wood for a fireplace.  The best tool for the job is a good old fashioned ax, the design of which hasn't changed much in centuries.  Oh, they make hydraulic-advantage and powered wood splitters, but these gizmos only serve those who have become too infirm to work an ax, or who need to split wood on a massive scale.  The typical homeowner still uses an ax, despite advances in technology.




Yes. I think the analogy itself has distracted from the more fundamental point, which is the "moving on" aspect of the OP. Whether we call them tech, techniques or art, these earlier components can still have use. They don't necessarily dissappear because they're old, and even things that fade for a while can come back when people have use for them. I think there is a danger in dismissing gaming concepts just because we are in a different place now. And while it isn't for everybody, i think the OSR does show earlier forms of player are not only viable but contain things we may have forgotten or lost. On reason to go back and read the white box or 1E is to answer the question, did we throw the baby out with the bath water. I see a lot of people discovering things about gaming they hadn't experienced before when they do this. I am not an old school purist by any stretch. I play a lot of modern games. I don't think we should be affraid to go back to the basics every once in a while. And the interesting thing is, a lot of tg. Revisiting of older games is inspiring new and modern ones, not just retroclones. It seems like just when you were starting to hear a lot of folks say design had moved on, there was a renewed interest in earlier mechanics and approaches to play. So I see the advancement of game design more like how music advances. New styles often emerge, that are really fusion of prior styles. Heavy Metal was a new style of music in the 70s and 80s, but if you really examined it, it was largely a combination of other things like rock, blues and baroque, among other things. Some of that new stuff was made because musicians went back to bach and Mozart for ideas. Or they checked out old blues records for inspiration. So you might have a game that takes some of the sensibilities of Savage Worlds, but combines it with aspects of chainmail and the white boxed set. At the same time, people exposed to it might check out chainmail and find there are forgotten mechanics they really like.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> And perhaps some of us haven't managed to get this single point across - more advanced technology does not necessarily translate into a better consumer product.




Plus clearly the Enterprise-A is the best one.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> This latter is not just "fashion".  The market is unlikely to move backwards towards feature phones, because whatever my own needs or wants may be, for the vast majority of people, the technology provides more of what they want.  *I* am the one stuck in fashion, not the rest of the world.




Sure. I am not saying it i all just fashion. But much of what people mistake for advances in game design, really is just trend and fashion. If it were like cell phones, which are an undeniable advance that i htink we all agree wont be reversed any time soon, you wouldn't have so many people playing AD&D 1E again. These are not just a few die hard fans refusing to buy cell phones. They are not just the flks who didn't transition from 1E to 2E and 2E to 3E. Many of them are poeple who "moved on" to 3E but went back as retroclones and old school gaming gained traction. There were enough of them, that wotc of the coast not only re-issued the first edition core books, they released some of the old modules in hard cover as well. And some people have taken these older systems, cleaned them up a bit and released them as new games that actually doing well. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is pretty popular for example.


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## Umbran (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> There were enough of them, that wotc of the coast not only re-issued the first edition core books, they released some of the old modules in hard cover as well. And some people have taken these older systems, cleaned them up a bit and released them as new games that actually doing well.




Ooh, careful there....  I don't think the numbers support you there.

You agree with me on smartphones.  But, check it out - in the US, 56% of adults have smartphones.  

But, according to Morrus' "Hot Games" page, which takes a pretty broad sampling,_ less than 5%_ of D&D discussion is about the OSR and those old games.  

Sure, WotC reissued the old core books.  But I think that was to fuel nostalgia, and to show the range of thought in the company.  I don't think there's call to say there are enough OSR folks themselves to have made them a real business driver.

If we look at cell phones, and say, at 56% penetration, that really, the new tech is in, and the old tech is out, when we look at OSR, which is quite clearly way, way down the list of games people are playing, should we not say the same thing?


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Ooh, careful there....  I don't think the numbers support you there.
> 
> You agree with me on smartphones.  But, check it out - in the US, 56% of adults have smartphones.
> 
> ...




I would be very, very surprised if that 5% number is correct. I don't know what measures morrus used, but i just see too much OSR online and in regular gaming to believe it would be as low as five percent. I dont have data to support this though. But that number seems far too low to be accurate.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> I would be very, very surprised if that 5% number is correct. I don't know what measures morrus used, but i just see too much OSR online and in regular gaming to believe it would be as low as five percent. I dont have data to support this.




You do have data; it just doesn't say what you think it should, so you casually dismissed it as worthless. Confirmation bias is a powerful, powerful thing! 

Yes, there IS lots of OSR online.  But there's also CRAPLOADS of other stuff online, too, in vast, vast, endless quantities.  The amount of modern D&D stuff is staggering; as is the amount of Pathfinder stuff, FATE stuff and all sorts of other games.  Just because it's not where you're looking doesn't mean it's not there in quantities which you might find amazing.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> You do have data; it just doesn't say what you think it should, so you casually dismissed it as incorrect. Confirmation bias is a powerful, powerful thing!




Yes, I am being a bit dismissive of the data offered. But only because it does not match my overal experience. I just see too much OSR discussion to conclude it is such an insubtantial part of the market. I am not saying your data is wrong. I am sure you measured online discussions and five percent is what you got. I just suspect that may not reflect the reality of what is going on. If you had multiple studies showing this again and again, i would be a lot less dismissive. But one online analysis alone isn't enough to convince me what I am seeing on the ground isn't reflected more broadly in the community,


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> Yes, I am being a bit dismissive of the data offered. But only because it does not match my overal experience.




There's a saying which contains the words "anecdote" and "data"... how does that go again? 



> If you had multiple studies showing this again and again, i would be a  lot less dismissive. But one online analysis alone isn't enough to  convince me what I am seeing on the ground isn't reflected more broadly  in the community,




It measures it constantly in real-time, every day. It's not a one-time analysis, it's a continual tracking of over 1000 sites and nearly a third of a million forum members.  You can use it to see historical data.  It takes a broader view - by an order of magnitude - than any human could.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

By the way, i am in no way saying, that OSR is as popular as pathfinder or even int he same ballpark. I just am a little suspicious of that five percent numeber based not only on the volume of osr discussions I have seen on forums and blogs, but also what I see locally. I don't know the details of how the analysis was done, but i would think it would be harder to measure than say pathfinder, because most discussions of old school material use a variety of terms and labels.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> By the way, i am in no way saying, that OSR is as popular as pathfinder or even int he same ballpark. I just am a little suspicious of that five percent numeber based not only on the volume of osr discussions I have seen on forums and blogs, but also what I see locally. I don't know the details of how the analysis was done, but i would think it would be harder to measure than say pathfinder, because most discussions of old school material use a variety of terms and labels.




OK, fair enough.  What's the correct percentage of overall online RPG dicussion which is OSR?

You have a good point there, and a terrible one. 

"What I see locally" is a terrible point (I don't see Americans locally, but I'm pretty sure they exist) or Ford Mustangs (but I'm pretty sure they exist, too). Even "what I see on the blogs I read" is a terrible point, for obvious reasons.

The difficulty accommodating different terms and labels is absolutely a relevant point.  I continually add new ones to the OSR category, but you're right - I can never be 100% accurate.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> There's a saying which contains the words "anecdote" and "data"... how does that go again?




Yes, but again this is just one analysis by one person. I am not doubting your abilities to do online research. I am just saying that particular point of data is so out of sync from what I see that i would really need to see more to conclude it reflects that OSR is that small a part of the market. For example, you may well have found only five percent, but when reprints come out of rpgnow they tend to do pretty wel upon release. Our own OSR game did considerably better than our others, and i even see emergin OSR discussions in unexpected places like story-games.com. 



> It measures it constantly in real-time, every day. It's not a one-time analysis, it's a continual tracking of over 1000 sites and nearly a third of a million forum members.  You can use it to see historical data.  It takes a broader view - by an order of magnitude - than any human could.




Fair enough. But what key terms does it use to seperate osr D&D from regular d&d. Does it include all rpg forums and all rpg blogs? Again, i am sure you did a good job with it. But it is just one source of information for me.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> "What I see locally" is a terrible point (I don't see Americans locally, but I'm pretty sure they exist) or Ford Mustangs (but I'm pretty sure they exist, too). Even "what I see on the blogs I read" is a terrible point, for obvious reasons.
> 
> The difficulty accommodating different terms and labels is absolutely a relevant point.  I continually add new ones to the OSR category, but you're right - I can never be 100% accurate.




I dont think it is a terrible point. You also have to go by what you see in your own gaming community. It doesnt give you a big picture view, but it sometimes catches things that you miss online. For blogs and forums, keep in mind, i am not saying I see it on a few blogs that i happen to read regularly. I routinely go on forums and skim through threads to see what is being discussed. Regularly look at rpg blogs and google search rpgs to see what is going on. It isn't scientific, but it is done with an aim of getting a sense of what things are on peoples' minds in gaming. In the course of that, i come across a lot of osR material.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> Yes, but again this is just one analysis by one person. I am not doubting your abilities to do online research. I am just saying that particular point of data is so out of sync from what I see that i would really need to see more to conclude it reflects that OSR is that small a part of the market. For example, you may well have found only five percent, but when reprints come out of rpgnow they tend to do pretty wel upon release. Our own OSR game did considerably better than our others, and i even see emergin OSR discussions in unexpected places like story-games.com.
> 
> Fair enough. But what key terms does it use to seperate osr D&D from regular d&d. Does it include all rpg forums and all rpg blogs? Again, i am sure you did a good job with it. But it is just one source of information for me.




OK, have you even looked at the hot games page?  I'm getting the sense you haven't.  It's not what I think you seem to think it is.  It's certainly not me reading stuff and reporting on what I think I saw.  It's a system which tracks forum threads from 300K people plus over 1000 website and blogs.

Now, there are valid criticisms that could be leveled at that approach, for sure. "That's not what I see in the blogs I read" isn't one, though.

And why on earth would you think that 5% is a small portion of the market?  That's a _fantastic_ figure! That's more than some really big games out there. It's not D&D big, but it's big.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> It doesnt give you a big picture view




Yep, that's what I keep trying to say!  



> I routinely go on forums and skim through threads to see what is being discussed. Regularly look at rpg blogs and google search rpgs to see what is going on. It isn't scientific, but it is done with an aim of getting a sense of what things are on peoples' minds in gaming. In the course of that, i come across a lot of osR material.




Sure fair enough!  It's reasonable to put your data sources up against those on the page!  Could you provide the figures?   And what percentage does this lead you to conclude is the correct percentage for OSR discussion?

And again, I ask - in what sense do you feel that 5% of RPG discussion is not "a lot"?  That IS a lot. It's a whole lot.  It's a metric crapload.  Any system would be ecstatic to get 5% of the market (though this isn't market, it's discussion).

Is it just that "5%" doesn't _sound_ like a lot to you?  I assure you it is.  You say you see a lot of OSR stuff; that page agrees that there is a lot of OSR stuff. I'm wondering if the issue here is a lack of perception on just how big 5% is?  That you think it sounds like a small number, when in fact it's a wonderful chunk of the total?


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> The difficulty accommodating different terms and labels is absolutely a relevant point.  I continually add new ones to the OSR category, but you're right - I can never be 100% accurate.




I understand. When your analysis came out, it made a big splash among OSR gamers. I was actually not at all diamissive of it when it came out. Because for my purposes, I want an accurate picture of what is going on, and even if i have a sense that the five percent feels a bit low, it is a data point and it is astarting place at least. But since it came out, i still feel that five percent number doesnt match what I see. I think plenty of folks in the osr movement over estimate the size of the revival, but i just sense it is bigger than five percent. 

Again i don't know what terms you use. But my question would be whether you include the names of all the various retroclones, but also other games that are regarded as osr. There are a lot of individual games that make up OSR.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Sure fair enough!  It's reasonable to put your data sources up against those on the page!  Could you provide the figures?   And what percentage does this lead you to conclude is the correct percentage for OSR discussion?




I don't have numbers or figures. I am not claiming to have done a mathmatical analysis. I just regularly look at rpgnow, skim through thread titles on message boards and see on what is going on in the rpg blogosphere (the rpg blog alliance for example). And i am saying my sense is five percent feels off. Again it is just a sense. But it is enough of a sense that it would take more data to convince me the osR market is as small as five percent.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

> the rpg blog alliance for example




Yes, the RPG Blog Alliance is one of the many sources counted and compiled continually. 



Bedrockgames said:


> But it is enough of a sense that it would take more data to convince me the osR market is as small as five percent.




Ah, we're just repeating ourselves here.  5% isn't small, it's big; like I keep saying. But I'm going to leave it there.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> OK, have you even looked at the hot games page?  I'm getting the sense you haven't.  It's not what I think you seem to think it is.  It's certainly not me reading stuff and reporting on what I think I saw.  It's a system which tracks forum threads from 300K people plus over 1000 website and blogs.
> 
> Now, there are valid criticisms that could be leveled at that approach, for sure. "That's not what I see in the blogs I read" isn't one, though.




i looked at it when it first came out, when it made the splash i referenced. Would be happy to take another look. Like I said, i wasnt  a critic of it when it came out. The five percent number is the only one i was a bit skeptical of. 



> And why on earth would you think that 5% is a small portion of the market?  That's a _fantastic_ figure! That's more than some really big games out there. It's not D&D big, but it's big.




Now this is a point i hadnt considered. Five percent of the market is still significant.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Ah, we're just repeating ourselves here.  5% isn't small, it's big; like I keep saying. But I'm going to leave it there.




Fair enough. That is a valid point.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> Now this is a point i hadnt considered. Five percent of the market is still significant.




It's not just significant, it's major league. There are very few games which command 5% of the online discussion.  That's more than a lot of games which I'll bet you consider to be "big".

Remember - if everyone had 5%, there would be only 20 games.  There are hundreds and hundreds of games which effectively register "0".  Even 1% is pretty cool- that means one in every 100 people online is talking about your game.  Think about that for a second, and what that means for 5%!

5% is 1 in 20 people.  1 in 20 people are talking about OSR stuff.  That ain't small, that's massive!

(Actually, I'm going to add that to the page, because I get a lot of people complaining about small numbers which are actually big ones).


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> It's not just significant, it's major league. There are very few games which command 5% of the online discussion.  That's more than a lot of games which I'll bet you consider to be "big".
> 
> Remember - if everyone had 5%, there would be only 20 games.  There are hundreds and hundreds of games which effectively register "0".  Even 1% is pretty cool- that means one in every 100 people online is talking about your game.  Think about that for a second, and what that means for 5%!
> 
> 5% is 1 in 20 people.  1 in 20 people are talking about OSR stuff.  That ain't small, that's massive!




Those are some very good points. I have to admit I wasn't thinking clearly about what five percent actually means here.


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## Warunsun (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Plus clearly the Enterprise-A is the best one.



Most of my life I have felt the same way. However, lately, sometimes I think the original one with it sleek and clean look is a touch bit better looking. One must not dismiss the power of nostalgia. It helps that I can watch _Trek_ today in high definition on better TVs than the old black & white 13 inch I had when I watched it as a child in re-runs. The point is the power of nostalgia affects everyone's views including on games.


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Warunsun said:


> Most of my life I have felt the same way. However, lately, sometimes I think the original one with it sleek and clean look is a touch bit better looking. One must not dismiss the power of nostalgia. It helps that I can watch _Trek_ today in high definition on better TVs than the old black & white 13 inch I had when I watched it as a child in re-runs. The point is the power of nostalgia affects everyone's views including on games.




The new one is prettier, but it looks small to me. It comes across more like the size of Serenity; maybe a little larger.  I'm not sure why, but I tend to feel that if I didn't already know that the Enterprise is a big ship, I wouldn't come to that conclusion from the Abrahms movies.


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## Warunsun (Dec 8, 2013)

Morrus said:


> I'm not sure why, but I tend to feel that if I didn't already know that the Enterprise is a big ship, I wouldn't come to that conclusion from the Abrahms movies.



The funny thing is that the _Enterprise_ in the re-imagined movie series is actually three times bigger. That _Enterprise_ is 725 meters long (bigger than even the _Enterprise-D_).


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## Morrus (Dec 8, 2013)

Warunsun said:


> The funny thing is that the _Enterprise_ in the re-imagined movie series is actually three times bigger. That _Enterprise_ is 725 meters long (bigger than even the _Enterprise-D_).




And yet it feels smaller! I can't pin down why, though.


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## Lwaxy (Dec 8, 2013)

I don't even watch the new pseudo-Star Trek. I just hate reboots of any kind for any reason, but that's going off topic 

I am not of the opinion that the older rules were all the better. It was just that it was standard and even expected to change stuff and make things up on the fly (going from D&D-like games here). Nowadays, too many players and GMs intend to stick with the rules so religiously it is hard to do something off the beaten path at times, and even if it is easy enough to agree on some changes are necessary, to get people to agree which ones, if you aren't the sole GM, is a big hassle at times. Premise has moved from "rules are guidelines" to "rules are rules."

Yeah there are "easier" systems out there, which doesn't help if you can't find a group for them or you don't have the time and want to learn something altogether new which can also do what D&D/PF can do.


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## GreyLord (Dec 8, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Ooh, careful there....  I don't think the numbers support you there.
> 
> You agree with me on smartphones.  But, check it out - in the US, 56% of adults have smartphones.
> 
> ...




I'm going to point out something that isn't very easy, and hopefully will not be taken the wrong way, however ENworld's reputation is not really a hidden secret to anyone who is an Old School Gamer.

ANY survey from ENworld in regards to OS or OSR folks is unreliable.  ENworld has the reputation of being the most hostile forum to anyone who plays a form of D&D prior to 3e.  ENworld has chased off most of this audience and they go to just about any other forum than ENworld at this point.  ENworld has banned, criticized, and put down the older editions to the point that hardly any of that audience comes to ENworld.  Any numbers in regards to that audience from ENworld are unreliable as a result.  It would be like asking how many atheist topics are popping up on the Anglican forums.  I'm not saying the information is absolutely flawed in the survey information, as it may be drawn from many different sites...but I'd say unreliable as Enworld has shown a distinct bias against the old gamers.  As such, most Old school gamers have nothing to do with ENworld, and I would be highly surprised if Enworld has knowledge of most of their hangouts/forums/blogs and sites.  There are over 1000 of such sites...possibly several thousand...and I don't think Enworld has even touched on even a small percentage of them.

THAT SAID...I agree with the statements that OSR is incredibly small.  IT IS MY OPINION that even that 5% is HIGHER than the market penetration of the OSR movement.  I've heard several times that the amount made from most of the OSR folks isn't really enough for a good business design and that they do it more out of love rather than financial reasons.  There are some that are successful, but my thoughts are that the OSR folks are far smaller than even the percentage stated above, and that the amount of threads and such created by it make far more noise than the number of folks that are it's audience.  IN MY OPINION...once again.

NOW that is specifically for OSR.  With OSG (Old school gaming) that audience is potentially massive.  Even WotC never had those numbers.  If I recall right, Dragon had over 150K subscribers with TSR.  WotC I think had around 30-60K?  That estimate of 25 million lapsed players, may be accurate.  There are a HUGE number of them.  However...getting them to play D&D now...I don't know if that's going to happen.  

Many of them played D&D when it was cool to play D&D.  We're talking the jocks and everyone else playing in the US.  Furthermore, it was something they did when they were far younger.  Its' sort of like that He-man or Pokémon fads that went around.  Is it really possible to resurrect that nostalgia...maybe...with the right advertising campaign and right people...but I haven't seen that from WotC yet.

The closest that ever came was 3e.  I'd put that success more in line with the A-Team movie rather than the Transformer's movies that came out.  Interesting, but Magic overshadows D&D basically.

However, I still put D&D as an art rather than a technology.  This conversation mirrors art conversations in regards to Modern art and post 19th century art vs. are prior to that amongst art savants.  The way this conversation mirrors those types of conversation (well, except in art...it appears that while on the forums you might only get 5% who prefer art forms prior to the 20th century art...in the general populace a great majority prefer something older than modern art...then...maybe no so off...the great majority of people prefer monopoly over D20 games).


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## Morrus (Dec 9, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> I  ENworld has banned, criticized, and put down the older editions to the point that hardly any of that audience comes to ENworld.




For the record, for those reading, "EN World", being *me*, has not done this. I have not banned, criticized or put down any older editions. GreyLord is not telling the truth here.   I adore older editions (I think I was one of the first ever OSRIC customers; and - at the opposite end of the timescale - I just spent an hour chatting to Sarah Newton about _Monsters & Magic _and bought a copy directly from her at Dragonmeet).    Though why I feel the need to supply any "credentials" to you is beyond me.

Though I am curious as to why that page so frequently generates aggressive accusations of dishonesty and lies from OSR fans. I get them about once a week (usually on G+), and it largely feels like organized bullying.  I'm not sure what the common denominator is; I'm tempted to just remove OSR games from the list for an easier life (well, hide them from public view; I'm personally still interested in the stats; but if they bother folks, I can keep them to myself).   It's just some games, guys.  It's just some games.  It's. Just. Some. Games.  It's not evaluating the moral worth of your sexuality or religion or anything. It's just people talking about some games. If you're upset or angry because of some game stats, please look elsewhere for the cause.  I assure you, it can't be possibly those stats.  Not even if the stats were wildly inaccurate, it still couldn't be those stats.



> There are over 1000 of such sites...




Yes.  I'm sure there are.  That's why the system measures over a thousand sites.  The stats have very little to do with EN World.


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## GreyLord (Dec 9, 2013)

Morrus said:


> For the record, for those reading, "EN World", being *me*, has not done this. I have not banned, criticized or put down any older editions. GreyLord is not telling the truth here.   I adore older editions (I think I was one of the first ever OSRIC customers; and - at the opposite end of the timescale - I just spent an hour chatting to Sarah Newton about _Monsters & Magic _and bought a copy directly from her at Dragonmeet).    Though why I feel the need to supply any "credentials" to you is beyond me.
> 
> Though I am curious as to why that page so frequently generates aggressive accusations of dishonesty and lies from OSR fans. I get them about once a week (usually on G+), and it largely feels like organized bullying.  I'm not sure what the common denominator is; I'm tempted to just remove OSR games from the list for an easier life (well, hide them from public view; I'm personally still interested in the stats; but if they bother folks, I can keep them to myself).   It's just some games, guys.  It's just some games.  It's. Just. Some. Games.  It's not evaluating the moral worth of your sexuality or religion or anything. It's just people talking about some games. If you're upset or angry because of some game stats, please look elsewhere for the cause.  I assure you, it can't be possibly those stats.  Not even if the stats were wildly inaccurate, it still couldn't be those stats.
> 
> ...




I am not accusing YOU specifically, Morrus.  I apologize if you took it that way.

I AM interested in some of those stats, truth to tell.

My point was NOT to accuse, but to express my OWN personal opinion.


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## Morrus (Dec 9, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> I am not accusing YOU specifically, Morrus.  I apologize if you took it that way.




Who were you accusing, then? This is just my daily news blog with a messageboard attached, and a couple of generous volunteers who offer their spare time to help moderate the forum.  There's nobody to accuse except me.


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## GreyLord (Dec 9, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Who were you accusing, then? This is just my daily news blog with a messageboard attached, and a couple of generous volunteers who offer their spare time to help moderate the forum.  There's nobody to accuse except me.




I'm sorry you are taking this as an accusation.  I'm simply stating an observation on my part.  If you are getting others stating hostility towards older editions, perhaps you should analyze what's actually going on in regards to them and what's happening if they bring on certain inclinations.  There has been a rather hostile atmosphere on these forums against Old style gamers in the past.  This idea has driven away many.  This opinion (whether it is correct at the present or not) still resides towards ENworld due to this.

I apologize once again, my post was NOT to derail this topic into devolving into Enworld's atmosphere towards a certain segment of gamers.  Instead it was to point out that I may entirely trust the results of that article in regards to the OSR movement and why.  However, I can see that this is a great distraction to some, I apologize as that was not my intent, and was only one paragraph of several.

My real intent is more relavant to the topic.  I propose we drop this line of discussion in this topic so that it can get back on track in regards to whether RPG design has moved on, or what exactly it means in regards to technology and/or art.  I apologize to all if that paragraph I posted has derailed what was an interesting and unique conversation and hopefully the topic can return to that.


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## Morrus (Dec 9, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> I'm sorry you are taking this as an accusation.  I'm simply stating an observation on my part.




Claiming I have "banned, criticized, and put down the older editions" is not an accusation, merely an observation?

Am I being trolled?



> Instead it was to point out that I may entirely trust the results of that article in regards to the OSR movement and why.




What article?


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## Hussar (Dec 9, 2013)

Bedrockgames said:


> I think there is still room for judgment and evaluation, but like you say, the end use is what matters. So I take no issue with people arguing that a particular mechanic isn't good for a given goal or audience. What i take issue with is people saying things like "X is just bad design". That gives no real context or points of comparison. There may be a few cases where this is true across the board (a game system built around a core mechanic that requires players to pass gas is a bad idea in my opinion and i think few would disagree with that). I am simply saying context and audience matter. If people enjoy using the mechanic that is what matters. Now your audience might be designers or experienced RPG critics, so your measures are going to include things like how the gamed builds on existing mechanical knowledge, how streamlined the game is, how well it rests with current gaming trends. But that isnt because these things are objectively good desing, its because the audience you decided to write for will likely value those sorts of things. But if i sit down to make an OSR game, a beer and pretzels game, or a cinematic game, my measures for good design will change according to my audience.




Swimming upthread, but, this I agree with completely.  You always have to place design within context.


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## Umbran (Dec 9, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> ENworld has banned, criticized, and put down the older editions to the point that hardly any of that audience comes to ENworld.




I can't speak to the responses of individual users.  But, no game is above criticism.  I'm sure, at some time or other, someone here has posted a put-down on any game you'd care to name.  I daresay 3e and 4e have taken their lumps here in the edition wars, so I question the perception that the OSR has taken it any worse.

But banning?  Factually incorrect.  Never happened.  We have never banned discussion of the older editions.  This isn't a matter of opinion, but of historical fact.

We may have banned individuals who took their defense or championing of a game too far, but that's a quite different statement.  And we've certainly banned overzealous champions of 3e and 4e, too.  So again, I don't see that the Old School is somehow special in that way.


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## MJS (Dec 9, 2013)

I don't think " moved on" is the right phrase. Not when core reprints are selling, PF is big, and OSR games are popular. 
RPG design, always in flux, will always develop, and will I think always have OD&D as its base, and actively played. 

I think it is all a natural, organic cycle. You now have everything from original D&D with no minis(which is how it was playtested) to a wargame version. The rules have not moved on, they have diversified.


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## Dungeoneer (Dec 9, 2013)

Morrus said:


> I see this phrase all the time: game design has moved on. Game design has progressed.  The 'technology' of game design has improved.
> 
> What does that mean to you? Is game design a science or an art? What elements are "improvements" to you?  Are any of these things merely fashions? Can flaws be features? Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?



There are some people arguing that because game design is an art (and let's grant that point) that it does not advance. But it's not true that art does not advance. Art does advance, just not in the same way technology does. And game design has advanced in a couple of important ways.

The first way game design has advanced is that *there are more techniques for game design available today*. Basically, a game designer in 2014 will have more tools in their toolbox than a game designer in 1974 did. That's not to say that the 1974 designer couldn't make a great game with the tools they had available, but the 2014 designer has more to work with. Obviously these 'tools' are all the techniques, innovations, theories and ideas of 40 years of game design. If the 1974 designer wanted to build a skill system they would have had to create one from scratch. The 2014 designer has dozens of examples of skill systems to draw from. They can choose the one that fits their needs the best or modify something to suit. 

The 2014 designer isn't necessarily 'better' than the 1974 designer. In fact they might be worse in absolute terms. But their knowledge of 40 years of game design gives them an edge over the 1974 designer. 

A tool is an agnostic thing. It's neither good nor bad. All the best techniques in the world won't help a bad game designer make a good game. But people have come up with some very effective design 'tools' in the last forty years that a good designer can absolutely use to their advantage. Of course, they need to have a clear design goal to do so.

The second way game design has advanced is that *there are more design goals available today*. Not only has the toolbox expanded, what you can do with the tools is much more open. There are more 'types' of games. There are examples of games that are therapeutic and political and things like that. Not even on the radar in 1974. But arguably even a less radical goal like 'storytelling' might not occur to a 1974 designer. 

A designer in 2014 will have more types of games that are acceptable that they could design than a designer in 1974. And they will have more techniques, game theory and salient examples to design their game. 

I call that progress. I don't think it in any way invalidates a game made in 1974. A fun, well-designed game is a fun, well-designed game in any time. But a modern game may be able to appeal to people in a way an older game couldn't because it has different goals. It may be able to differentiate itself from the old game by achieving similar goals with new techniques. It may even incorporate the older game wholesale and add new stuff on top of it. 

I take issue with the term 'moved on' because as long as modern games are using the same building blocks as older games they certainly have not 'moved on'. But I definitely think design can _progress_.

And let's be honest: for many people, the design features of forty years ago will feel old and tired and newer design innovations will look shiny and sexy. Fashion definitely plays a roll in what people are interested in playing. But just because that's true doesn't mean there can't be progress in game design.


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## GreyLord (Dec 9, 2013)

Good Post Dungeoneer.  I'd agree with all the points you made from what I understand you said.


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## dshoales (Dec 9, 2013)

Dungeoneer said:


> … A tool is an agnostic thing. It's neither good nor bad. All the best techniques in the world won't help a bad game designer make a good game. But people have come up with some very effective design 'tools' in the last forty years that a good designer can absolutely use to their advantage. Of course, they need to have a clear design goal to do so.
> 
> The second way game design has advanced is that *there are more design goals available today*. Not only has the toolbox expanded, what you can do with the tools is much more open. There are more 'types' of games. There are examples of games that are therapeutic and political and things like that. Not even on the radar in 1974. But arguably even a less radical goal like 'storytelling' might not occur to a 1974 designer.




I agree for the most part. The 1974 artist had less technical tools available, but seemed to be more creative with the lack of resources they had. I find the current plethora of artist to be extremely all over the place as far as quality goes. I would arguer though that storytelling was one of the main goals of artists back then. Perhaps all of the design goals that we separate and list individually, were simply rolled into the overarching goal of storytelling back then.


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## Hussar (Dec 10, 2013)

dshoales said:


> I agree for the most part. The 1974 artist had less technical tools available, but seemed to be more creative with the lack of resources they had. I find the current plethora of artist to be extremely all over the place as far as quality goes. I would arguer though that storytelling was one of the main goals of artists back then. Perhaps all of the design goals that we separate and list individually, were simply rolled into the overarching goal of storytelling back then.




I'd argue that goes very much against the professed goals of the designers back then.  Story is what emerges after play is done.  It's anecdotes about what happened in the game.  It isn't until the early 80's, at least for D&D, that you see Story as the primary driver for a campaign.  Compare two contemporary (at least roughly) module series - Against the Giants, Drow and Queen of the Demonweb Pits (the classic GDQ series) and the Dragonlance series of modules.  

Very, very different approaches to the game.  And it's not really surprising that you see GDQ and Temple of Elemental Evil come out first, and then the Dragonlance series coming later.  Tastes definitely shifted there.  Storytelling, at least as a primary motivator of gaming, wasn't a design goal in OD&D and not really for much of 1e D&D.


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## dd.stevenson (Dec 10, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> ENworld has the reputation of being the most hostile forum to anyone who plays a form of D&D prior to 3e.



Leaving aside the accusations of bias (which I disagree with and do not support) it's hard to ignore that there's a huge communication gap between ENWorld and the OSR blogosphere. I often find ENWorlders painfully unaware of things (and ways of doing things) that are common knowledge to OSR followers. And vice versa.

Which is a shame: online TTRPG geekdom is not a huge community to begin with, and I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors by partitioning ourselves into semi-hostile camps.


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## Morrus (Dec 10, 2013)

dd.stevenson said:


> Leaving aside the accusations of bias (which I disagree with and do not support) it's hard to ignore that there's a huge communication gap between ENWorld and the OSR blogosphere. I often find ENWorlders painfully unaware of things (and ways of doing things) that are common knowledge to OSR followers. And vice versa.




Folks dividing into groups of common interests is OK.  It's when people start portraying that as hostility and getting all tribal and angry at each other over it that's the problem.  In the long run, I think it's important to step back and remember we're just talking about playing some games we like.  That's all.  It's not supposed to make us angry.


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## dd.stevenson (Dec 10, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Folks dividing into groups of common interests is OK.  It's when people start portraying that as hostility and getting all tribal and angry at each other over it that's the problem.  In the long run, I think it's important to step back and remember we're just talking about playing some games we like.  That's all.  It's not supposed to make us angry.



I don't believe you can have one without inviting the other.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Dec 10, 2013)

RPG Design as a form of Engineering works well for me.

We can build cars. Engineering has moved on from certain techniques and moved to others.

Engineering can't give us an answer whether we want to build a fast car or a fuel-efficient car or a motorbike or a bridge. But it has certainly moved on - while we could try to fuel a car with a steam engine, we won't do so, because we have developed something better now. (Though if for some reason we wanted to, Engineering might be able to build better steam engines then the first existing ones, even though those were quite possibly build by some extremely smart and gifted people.)

Game Design can't tell us whether whether we want a sci-fi game, a fantasy game, a game with strong narrative elements, a game focused on simulation of properties. But it could tell us how we might best do it and what approaches are unlikely not work.


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## Morrus (Dec 10, 2013)

dd.stevenson said:


> I don't believe you can have one without inviting the other.




Sure you can.  But not on the internet, probably.  Intranets make anger monkeys.


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## Neonchameleon (Dec 10, 2013)

ENWorld is, and always has been a D&D 3.X centric site.  It was originally, if I am not mistaken, a news aggregator for D&D 3.0 and developed from there.  As such fans of old school games have often avoided the site set up for TETSNBN (as a certain old school site calls D&D 3.X). And there has in my experience always been an inherent bias towards D&D 3.X on ENWorld simply by the nature of the community.

On the other hand, although I have differences with the moderation standards here (I believe that consistent lying after this has been pointed out (anyone can be mistaken) is far more inimical to discussion than being directly discourteous, whereas the standard here is about how you say things far more than what you say) I've seen no evidence of a conscious bias to 3.X.  Merely that D&D 3.X is what ENWorld was set up for and what it defaults to as the popular opinion.  It is biassed towards 3.X in my experience, but unintentionally so - with objectivity being impossible.


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## Morrus (Dec 10, 2013)

Neonchameleon said:


> ENWorld is, and always has been a D&D 3.X centric site




Actually, it tends to be "the current D&D edition centric".  3.x hasn't been the most commonly discussed D&D edition here for over 5 years - a long time ago; it was 4E for a long time, now it's Next.  I'm sure if 6E ever comes about, it'll be 6E-centric.  Folks like to keep up with the new stuff; which is cool - it's a news site, after all.  The 3.x fans - largely - switched to Pathfinder and are all on that official site.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 10, 2013)

Morrus said:


> Sure you can.  But not on the internet, probably.  Intranets make anger monkeys.




Most forums I can think of center ariund a particular edition, style if play or game. That is just human nature (my impression of En World is that the popular games here 3E-Pathfinder-4E). I post in a few forums and there is always a little culture shock when you jump from one to another, because you are accustomed to certain assumptions being the norm, and then you go to a place with different assumptions. Ideally you'd have more mixed forums, but I have noticed even on forums that strive for variety, people stake out different regions of the board. 

I don't think it's bad that people disagree. Sometimes the negativity andhostility can be too much. I think we'd all be better off if we made thing less personal and emotional. But this is a hobby people are passionate about. People are going to speak strongly in favor of what they like and argue against the thing they don't. 

For me what works best is seeing that as an opportunity to explore ideas and topics, while not allowing myself to let what someone on the internet thinks affect what works for me at my table. If I encounter stuff that works for me, I use it, but I don't adopt stuff that doesn't work for me, even if someone makes a good theoretical argument online for why it should work for me. I feel like people invest too much in their ability to debate. We are not all great debaters, its possible to win an argument and be wrong, or lose an argument and be right. So folks shouldn't take it so hard when we get into these discussions and another poster challenges their position effectively. If you talk about games online, you will lose arguments. You will lose them badly, be painted into corners and occassionally make a fool of yourself defending awkward positions you were pinned to by a better debater.


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## Morrus (Dec 10, 2013)

While that's true, I think it's also important to remember that it's actually only a loud minority which points at, accuses the motives of, or acts hostile to others. That vast swathe of people are happily sharing their house rules or playing in PbP games, or being excited about some new product.


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## Mishihari Lord (Dec 10, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> ENworld has the reputation of being the most hostile forum to anyone who plays a form of D&D prior to 3e.




Gotta say that I really, really haven't seen this and I've been here almost since the first iteration of the forums started.  I prefer 2E and I'm not shy about saying so, and I've never caught any flack for it.  AFAICT this is about the friendliest place on the web to talk about RPGs.


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## billd91 (Dec 10, 2013)

Mishihari Lord said:


> Gotta say that I really, really haven't seen this and I've been here almost since the first iteration of the forums started.  I prefer 2E and I'm not shy about saying so, and I've never caught any flack for it.  AFAICT this is about the friendliest place on the web to talk about RPGs.




I don't see a lot of hostility against editions of AD&D either. Never really have, other than the standard jabs at Gygax, over-powered wizards, over-powered multiclassing, and "bad" RPG design that have always been rife in the RPG community.

That said, I think the place is more hostile than it has been in the past and the 4e-fan/4e-critic divide is probably the main source of the tension. It spills onto a lot of topics, even ones that are originally edition neutral and about general RPG play.


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## Teataine (Dec 10, 2013)

I'm very much late to the party here, but RPGs being closer to art than science (a view that I'd subscribe to), doesn't preclude them from "moving on". Art has moved on. Art, graphic design, music, sculpture...these are all different now than from what they were like in the 70's, the 30's, the 19th century, 13th century or in ancient Rome.

Sure, some works of art are "timeless". Some games can be timeless, too. Some scientific discoveries are timeless as well.

The Illiad is timeless. Doesn't change the fact that literature has moved on and if you tried to (re)write the Illiad today, it wouldn't be a masterpiece. People wouldn't really care for it, not in the same sense. There's a very funny Borghes story about that.

The fact that Basic D&D is still good and popular and played today, doesn't mean that we don't need new games or that all games should try to ape it. 

Otherwise games would have never moved on from chess. And while chess is pretty much timeless, wouldn't that also be super boring?


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## MJS (Dec 10, 2013)

Teataine said:


> Otherwise games would have never moved on from chess. And while chess is pretty much timeless, wouldn't that also be super boring?



 only when it tries to be an RPG *ducks*

Gygax was, of course, also known for his chess variants. Here is what we have: the basic RPG, D&D, was playtested and really meant to be a mini-less game. Being designed by wargamers, who thought they had to fit into that niche, they wrote it to accomodate minis use. This we know fairly well thanks to old TSR folks. 
    So, the RPG, from inception, had these two poles to it: the mini-less rules light RPG and the olive branch to the wargame crowd. We now have Hybrids that cover most of this ground, and this is good. The analogy to engineering is weak IMO, I think each different game is more like what happens when you bend a branch sideways: each node *thinks* its the main one and grows accordingly.


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## Balesir (Dec 11, 2013)

MJS said:


> Here is what we have: the basic RPG, D&D, was playtested and really meant to be a mini-less game.



Do you have a source/reference for this? I can't see how it would have worked, given that the combat system for the original D&D was the original "Chainmail" wargame rules with its fantasy supplement. The wargames rules were, well, a wargame - they used figures/miniatures. Until a whole new combat system was developed, how did they play "mini-less"?


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## Janx (Dec 11, 2013)

Balesir said:


> Do you have a source/reference for this? I can't see how it would have worked, given that the combat system for the original D&D was the original "Chainmail" wargame rules with its fantasy supplement. The wargames rules were, well, a wargame - they used figures/miniatures. Until a whole new combat system was developed, how did they play "mini-less"?




Indeed.  I got the impression from the fact that distances in spell descriptions etc were in inches, that they were specifically referring to expected miniature use in the rules.


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## steeldragons (Dec 11, 2013)

Janx said:


> Indeed.  I got the impression from the fact that distances in spell descriptions etc were in inches, that they were specifically referring to expected miniature use in the rules.




As was movement. But, I think [and this is complete conjecture from someone reading them in the early 80's] it was more a hold over from the original series...which were written with wargamers in mind...so folks picking it up would know what things meant. It was well established in the manuals that inches were meant to be 10's of feet. If you were using miniatures, you had an "inches" to work with...but it was never presented in such a way as you were _expected _to be using miniatures. Never once, since I began, was it ever implied that you would/should use mini's. They were, kinda, extra lil' toys that you could get and play with. I had plenty [of miniatures]...never actually used them in an rpg session. Had/got/wanted them to play with on my non-rpg time! lol.

Hey, I was, like...8-12 y.o...

Don't judge me!


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## Janx (Dec 11, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> As was movement. But, I think [and this is complete conjecture from someone reading them in the early 80's] it was more a hold over from the original series...which were written with wargamers in mind...so folks picking it up would know what things meant. It was well established in the manuals that inches were meant to be 10's of feet. If you were using miniatures, you had an "inches" to work with...but it was never presented in such a way as you were _expected _to be using miniatures. Never once, since I began, was it ever implied that you would/should use mini's. They were, kinda, extra lil' toys that you could get and play with. I had plenty [of miniatures]...never actually used them in an rpg session. Had/got/wanted them to play with on my non-rpg time! lol.
> 
> Hey, I was, like...8-12 y.o...
> 
> Don't judge me!




I won't.  It's more to the point that rules talking in terms of Minis shows more intent to incorporate minis than a rules that don't talk at all in miniatures.

Given that any idiot can figure out that if my PC can move 60 feet per round, and I count one square as 5 feet, that's 12 squares I can move on the battlemat.  So they didn't HAVE to talk in terms of moving on a battlemat (or equivalent).  But they did.  Which shows more intent to incorporate minis than to explicitly exclude them.

Sadly, Gary's dead.  Can't ask him now.  I doubt he intended to FORCE miniature use onto people.  But it was fairly clearly part of the mindset to use them by nature of blatant accomodations to them.  Heck, when I started, reading the AD&D rules and seeing stuff measured in inches was "WTF" until I realized they were talking about on a grid or battlemat or some such.


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## Akillion (Dec 11, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> As was movement. But, I think [and this is complete conjecture from someone reading them in the early 80's] it was more a hold over from the original series...which were written with wargamers in mind...so folks picking it up would know what things meant. It was well established in the manuals that inches were meant to be 10's of feet. If you were using miniatures, you had an "inches" to work with...but it was never presented in such a way as you were _expected _to be using miniatures. Never once, since I began, was it ever implied that you would/should use mini's. They were, kinda, extra lil' toys that you could get and play with. I had plenty [of miniatures]...never actually used them in an rpg session. Had/got/wanted them to play with on my non-rpg time! lol.
> 
> Hey, I was, like...8-12 y.o...
> 
> Don't judge me!




I started with the old white box, my friend's older brother had a copy, and while we owned minis we never really used them in our games.


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## steeldragons (Dec 11, 2013)

Janx said:


> I won't.  It's more to the point that rules talking in terms of Minis shows more intent to incorporate minis than a rules that don't talk at all in miniatures.
> 
> Given that any idiot can figure out that if my PC can move 60 feet per round, and I count one square as 5 feet, that's 12 squares I can move on the battlemat.  So they didn't HAVE to talk in terms of moving on a battlemat (or equivalent).  But they did.  Which shows more intent to incorporate minis than to explicitly exclude them.
> 
> Sadly, Gary's dead.  Can't ask him now.  I doubt he intended to FORCE miniature use onto people.  But it was fairly clearly part of the mindset to use them by nature of blatant accomodations to them.  Heck, when I started, reading the AD&D rules and seeing stuff measured in inches was "WTF" until I realized they were talking about on a grid or battlemat or some such.




This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game. 

Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.


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## Janx (Dec 11, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.
> 
> Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.




I came in at the 2e era with a 1e PH (try figuring out D&D with a 1e PH and 2e DMG...) when I ran into the inches puzzle.

From what I experienced, the 5' square was an artifact of the all the maps being on 1/4" graph paper set to a scale of 1 square equals 5'.  And that was present on pretty much all interior maps as hexes were used for exterior overland maps.

from a wargames perspective, playing a green field was likely pretty common, and measuring distance/movement in inches was likely.  But I gathered a dungeon crawl was likely run off the 1/4" graph paper, with maybe buttons or small markers used to denote position (a very tiny battlemat).

Some time along the was (pre 3e) Chessex and others came out with the wet erase battlemat.

I didn't play in the 1e era, so I can't say what life was actually like back then.

It's hard to express the concept that D&D appeared to be more inclusive/accomodating/expecting some miniature usage than rejecting of it.  It's not binary, and obviously groups varied in what they actually did.

It was certainly less grid oriented than 3e (which further hoped you'd buy a battlemat).  But it also wasn't completely opposed to it.  It wasn't designed in a way that Gary would be shocked that you used miniatures to play it.


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## billd91 (Dec 11, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.
> 
> Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.




No, they weren't geared for a 5' square... they were a 3 1/3' square (so you could get 3 across in a 10' corridor). Seriously. 

AD&D may have used some wargame terminology and its roots were showing, but I would submit that using those terms and maintaining compatibility with miniatures is a far cry from expecting or intending for the game to be used with them. Had they intended to do so, they'd have been mentioned on more than 3 or so pages in the DMG. By the time AD&D rolled around, I think Gygax had a pretty clear understanding that the game had liberated itself from the sand table and was probably going to be played in many more venues than would support the space needed for minis and a laid out board.


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## Balesir (Dec 11, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.



OD&D certainly didn't have 5' squares - they came in as a requirement with 3.5 IIRC (or maybe 3E), but they had kinda been around for a while before that in the "Dungeon Floor Plans" that started with AD&D, I think. OD&D *did* have 10' squares, though, on the maps - each 1/4" square on the map was generally considered to be 10 feet (or 1" in the "dungeon ground scale").

OD&D up to 3.x was certainly not expected mandatorily to be run using miniatures and a grid, but some sort of map and markers - whether miniature figurines or simply chits - have been used in most D&D games that I remember, starting with a cave with a dragon in and a huge "adventuring" party of mixed level characters fighting it on a map on a classroom desk somewhere around 1975/76 (i.e. my first ever encounter with D&D in any shape or form).

My first experience of routinely running without miniatures or markers at all came with (I think) Traveller in 1979 or 1980. After that it became increasingly common - games of Daredevils and Call of Cthulhu spring to mind, mostly because no suitable figures were (yet) available, I think.

The manner of using the figures changed, though, it has to be said. Early on, they were really used as an expression of what your character looked like, and they were used to show approximate spatial relationships - no precise grid or movement phasing system being in use. I found this to work OK, but it occasionally caused frustration and intense, blazing rows because one person's interpretation of whether a specific move was feasible or not differed drastically from another person's. With no movement phasing, whether you could move to cut off the orc from getting to the Magic User was a matter of opinion - and, if the DM didn't share yours you were SOL. I remember once being told my archer character couldn't target an enemy because he couldn't get his left (bow) arm around a wall without falling off the walkway he was stood on; I pointed out that the character was left-handed (because we had rules for that back then) and was told "well, you're left handed but taught to shoot a bow the "normal" way... Remind me what those handedness rules were for, again??


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## Jhaelen (Dec 12, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes.



I'm not sure what kind of 'fact' you are talking about. Before hexes, there was tabletop wargaming and it didn't have squares of hexes, it relied on using measuring tape. And that's precisely the background Gary Gygax had, so he naturally expected that other players would have it, too.

I'm not an expert by any means, but from what I've heard, for Gary D&D was simply an extension of small-scale, squad-based wargaming. Dave Arneson was the one injecting a healthy dose of roleplaying to turn it into what we think of today, when we talk about RPGs.

Back when we played AD&D 1e and BECMI D&D, we quickly turned to using graph paper and tokens or minis to represent combat situations, because without any kind of representation, combat encounters quickly turned into heated arguments.


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## Scrivener of Doom (Dec 12, 2013)

Janx said:


> (snip) Sadly, Gary's dead.  Can't ask him now.  I doubt he intended to FORCE miniature use onto people.  But it was fairly clearly part of the mindset to use them by nature of blatant accomodations to them.  Heck, when I started, reading the AD&D rules and seeing stuff measured in inches was "WTF" until I realized they were talking about on a grid or battlemat or some such.




You could ask Old Geezer over at RPG.net. He played in Gary and Dave's games for a couple of years and was there for a lot of the things that we still puzzle over nearly 40 years later.

He's also planning to release a book next year talking about those days. The title is quite interesting - _We Might Up Some Stuff We Thought Would Be Fun_ (the word is not _Stuff_, of course) - but it sounds like it could be easily subtitled something like _So, You Want To Understand OD&D?_



steeldragons said:


> This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.
> 
> Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.




I think the first use of the 5' squares in a D&D sense was in _2.5E Skills & Powers: Combat & Tactics_. At least, that's where I first noticed it and I remembered thinking about how to adapt my traditional 10' square maps to this new regime (short answer: I never played 2.5E  ).


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## GreyLord (Dec 12, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> This is a great supposition based from today's standards. The fact is, there was no such thing as a "grid" or a "battlemat"...There were hexes. I remember those...and the graph paper we were encouraged to map on...but I am [fairly close to 100%] sure no one, no creature, no spell effect, traps, no thing was thought of in terms of a 5' square. Nada. My understanding is that was something brought in by 4e [could be wrong, maybe it was 3e, I don't actually know]. But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.
> 
> Anywho, there's that. I agree, Gary [I doubt] thought that anyone would be forced to use minis.




It was 3e that started this entire square deal. (they may have been introduce by a book in 2.5, but 3e was what made it standard). Older gamers used hexes or inches.  

What are inches?  

They are a unit of measurement.  You can utilize them by using a tape measure.  Warhammer and other tabletop wargamers use them regularly.  Just for any who were still wondering.

THE FOLLOWING IS MY OPINION.

In my opinion, Gary was pushing his game system, Chainmail, onto D&D.  D&D originally was utilizing Arneson's system.  However OD&D had chainmail as it's primary combat system as Gary was the one who was basically publishing it.  Arenson's rules were alternate rules.  

Of course everyone ended up using the alternate rules, so within a few months time, those were the primary rules...and everything else is history in regards to that dang AC and roll to hit!


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## MJS (Dec 12, 2013)

Balesir said:


> Do you have a source/reference for this? I can't see how it would have worked, given that the combat system for the original D&D was the original "Chainmail" wargame rules with its fantasy supplement. The wargames rules were, well, a wargame - they used figures/miniatures. Until a whole new combat system was developed, how did they play "mini-less"?



I naturally can't find the page now. Late night reading. It was Rob Kuntz stating they used the "alternative" combat system from the get-go, and no minis, for playtesting, and the Chainmail references were woo the wargaming crowd.

From what I've read over the last few years though, this seems a nearly unanimous aspect og Gary's games as well as the others. Such references can be found in q&A's and interviews. 

I think the general claim is quite true - early D&D is mostly no minis, theater of the mind.

if I do find that particular DK quote I'll post it -


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## Neonchameleon (Dec 12, 2013)

MJS said:


> I naturally can't find the page now. Late night reading. It was Rob Kuntz stating they used the "alternative" combat system from the get-go, and no minis, for playtesting, and the Chainmail references were woo the wargaming crowd.
> 
> From what I've read over the last few years though, this seems a nearly unanimous aspect og Gary's games as well as the others. Such references can be found in q&A's and interviews.
> 
> ...




That depends _which_ early D&D.  Gygax's games were played without letting the players know the rules for a _long_ time (at least if what I remember of Mike Mornard's stories is correct).  On the other hand D&D _as published _was a hacked tabletop wargame and everyone in any group not taught directly by Gygax would have access to the rules.  With wargame measurements in inches and implied minatures.

Or in short:
D&D as played by Gygax: Theatre of the mind
D&D as published by Gygax: Minis


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## MJS (Dec 13, 2013)

Neonchameleon said:


> That depends _which_ early D&D.  Gygax's games were played without letting the players know the rules for a _long_ time (at least if what I remember of Mike Mornard's stories is correct).  On the other hand D&D _as published _was a hacked tabletop wargame and everyone in any group not taught directly by Gygax would have access to the rules.  With wargame measurements in inches and implied minatures.
> 
> Or in short:
> D&D as played by Gygax: Theatre of the mind
> D&D as published by Gygax: Minis



   Not the one I was looking for, but here is an interesting discussion with Rob Kuntz 

http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2011/08/no-borders-or-limits-conversation-with.html


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## Dungeoneer (Dec 13, 2013)

I have never played OD&D (heck, I wasn't alive for much of it) but the topic interests me and I've read quite a bit about it. It seems to me that characterizing a 'correct' way which most groups played in is basically impossible. The rules were a jumbled mess with important pieces left out. Even the designers didn't strictly agree on the rules, as Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax seem to have run substantially different games with their own groups. So to say that people did or didn't play with miniatures is well nigh impossible. 

It's hard to believe that since D&D is directly descended from a miniatures wargame that it didn't involve miniatures at some point. However their use may have fallen off quite quickly.


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## MJS (Dec 13, 2013)

Balesir said:


> Do you have a source/reference for this? I can't see how it would have worked, given that the combat system for the original D&D was the original "Chainmail" wargame rules with its fantasy supplement. The wargames rules were, well, a wargame - they used figures/miniatures. Until a whole new combat system was developed, how did they play "mini-less"?



Managed to find it

Rob Kuntz:
_Yeah. Mere verbal positioning by EGG, which I skipped in the matter as such. He wanted to draw in Wargamers and not alienate any who were primed to transition from Chainmail to an obviously different system; same as noting that the rules were useable with miniatures and promoted as such, even though we never used any ourselves in the playtests (these occur in other LG games of D&D, much later thought). _
http://odd74.proboards.com/thread/4176

They* used the "alternate" combat on d20 from the getgo, which Rob says was "always the intended system".  Arneson's Blackmoor group, prior to this, I think used 2d6 w Chainmail.
* Lake Geneva early TSR peoples


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## Balesir (Dec 13, 2013)

MJS said:


> Managed to find it



Thanks for the link! Led me into a fascinating trail of blog posts and discussions.

In general my view would be that Rob was inspired by the totality of what roleplaying games could be and wanted to swallow the whole lot through D&D. Whether such a vast vision could have succeeded in the market we'll maybe never know, but I think the narrower focus selected for the TSR line post-1977 probably had the clearest potential as a business. In a sense, his dream came true in the myriad of games and systems and worlds we now have available - as much toolkit as anyone might wish for, and more coming every day! Not all truly original, of course, but that's the world, for you...

One thing I do find odd is that he speaks of RPGs exclusively as a business of the GM being the "creative" and administering to the players. That is a model that I have become gradually disenchanted with, and moving away from it seems to me to be one of the truly original developments in roleplaying in recent years.

Finally - he really did inherit a writing style from Gary, didn't he!


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## Ratskinner (Dec 13, 2013)

GreyLord said:


> ENworld has the reputation of being the most hostile forum to anyone who plays a form of D&D prior to 3e.  ENworld has chased off most of this audience and they go to just about any other forum than ENworld at this point.  ENworld has banned, criticized, and put down the older editions to the point that hardly any of that audience comes to ENworld.






Mishihari Lord said:


> Gotta say that I really, really haven't seen this and I've been here almost since the first iteration of the forums started.  I prefer 2E and I'm not shy about saying so, and I've never caught any flack for it.  AFAICT this is about the friendliest place on the web to talk about RPGs.






billd91 said:


> I don't see a lot of hostility against editions  of AD&D either. Never really have, other than the standard jabs at  Gygax, over-powered wizards, over-powered multiclassing, and "bad" RPG  design that have always been rife in the RPG community.




I agree with Mishihari and billd91 here. I joined an OSR group a a few years ago and briefly flirted with the OSR online community...but, man. There's just no comparison. IME, they are extremely and openly hostile to anything "new" or even vaguely critical of the old. The almost religious zealotry and dogmatism about what constitutes "true" D&D, and indeed role-playing itself, is quite off-putting, to me. 2e Is my favorite D&D as well, I'm playing in an Old School group, and I feel more welcome and respected here than on any of the OSR sites I visited. (Heck, this site is better that WotC's forums, IMO.) So, kudos to Eric and all the mods for putting together and maintaining such a nice community.


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## Janx (Dec 13, 2013)

Ratskinner said:


> I agree with Mishihari and billd91 here. I joined an OSR group a a few years ago and briefly flirted with the OSR online community...but, man. There's just no comparison. IME, they are extremely and openly hostile to anything "new" or even vaguely critical of the old. The almost religious zealotry and dogmatism about what constitutes "true" D&D, and indeed role-playing itself, is quite off-putting, to me. 2e Is my favorite D&D as well, I'm playing in an Old School group, and I feel more welcome and respected here than on any of the OSR sites I visited. (Heck, this site is better that WotC's forums, IMO.) So, kudos to Eric and all the mods for putting together and maintaining such a nice community.




wow.  not sure how we switched from game design -> miniatures -> EN World hates Pre3e.

Since we live here, I reckon we can't see if we're meanies.

Burt considering Gary Gygax himself came here and would post and answer questions, I reckon EN World wasn't so hostile to pre-3e that the pre-3e man himself wouldn't come here.

Now it's certainly likely that each edition has its zealots on this forum.  And those zealots over-defend their position, which may make things seem hostile.  Any zealot who leaves EN World for a purer pasture is going to be surounded by like minds, and thus think the old forum was a land of hatred.  Never realizing they were part of the problem.

I think most of us can handle talking cross-edition and forgive a bit of bias as we read somebody else's words.  I like 3e.  I started in 2e with a 1e PH due to shipping error.  I didn't like the writing in 1e because it made it harder to get started.  My view on 1e doesn't invalidate any of the fun everybody else had with it, and there was a lot of useful material in those 1e books.


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## SkidAce (Dec 13, 2013)

I believe he said he was *more *welcome here, not the enword hates anything.


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## Umbran (Dec 13, 2013)

Yeah, Janx, I think you got him wrong.  He's saying EN World is *better* for him than OSR sites, not worse.


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## Janx (Dec 13, 2013)

Umbran said:


> Yeah, Janx, I think you got him wrong.  He's saying EN World is *better* for him than OSR sites, not worse.




yeah, I quoted the wrong guy.  I'm getting sisdexlic in my old age. I meant to quote the guy prior quoting greylord and the "EN is hostile to pre-3e" part.


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## Iosue (Dec 13, 2013)

steeldragons said:


> But in BECM or 1e terms, 5' square wasn't part of the game. Wasn't part of the consciousness playing the game.




Moldvay Basic, p. B61.


> PLAYING SURFACE: Combats are easy to keep track of when large sheets of graph paper, covered with plexiglass or transparent adhesive plastic (contact paper), are used to put the figures on.  The best sheets for this use have 1" squares, and the scale of 1" = 5' should be used when moving the figures.  With water-based markers or grease pencils, an entire room or battle can be drawn in just a few seconds.  When the battle is over, the board may be wiped off, leaving it ready for the next combat.  Dominoes or plastic building blocks can also be used to outline walls and corridors.  When using figures, the DM should make sure that a solid table top is used, so the figures won't fall over when the table is bumped."




That's Moldvay, in 1981, describing combats run on a grid and battlemat with 5 feet to the inch.

I've never understood the whole debate, though.  TSR-D&D was not _meant_ to played with minis and battlemat.  It was not _meant_ to be played theater of the mind.  It was a game invented by gamers -- that is, people who gathered regularly to play a wide variety of games, including miniature wargames -- and targeted at gamers, no few of which would have access to and interest in using miniatures during their games.  Whatever floated your boat.  Play purely pen and paper -- the game supported that.  Use miniatures only for marching order and general reference -- the game supported that.  Use minis on open space with tape measures -- the game supported that.  Use minis and a grid with facing rules -- the game supported that.  I mean, Arneson used miniatures, and Gygax did not.  It doesn't get much more basic than that.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 13, 2013)

i started gaming in 86-87 and was pretty young at that time so my persepctive has always been a little muddled. But my impression growing up when miniatures were widely available through ral partha and similar companies, is miniatures were used sometimes, but often quite differenlty than they came to be used in 3E and 4E (where things were a bit more standardized). I knew guys who used roll out hex maps or grids for sure (scaling varied considerably though) but most of my groups used miniatures simply for basic position, keeping track of who was still alive and who was dead, marching order, etc. It wasn't until about 97 or so that i connected with a group who religiously used the mat to track every step and piece on the board. 

In terms of what Gygax and company intended, I don't know and will leave that to people who were there at the time or have looked into it deeply. My sense from the early books is it was quite mixed and didn't necessarily match how we might approach miniatures today (just read the white box and chainmail, and that was certainly a very different approach to the game than I expected to see).


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## MJS (Dec 13, 2013)

Balesir said:


> Thanks for the link! Led me into a fascinating trail of blog posts and discussions.
> 
> In general my view would be that Rob was inspired by the totality of what roleplaying games could be and wanted to swallow the whole lot through D&D. Whether such a vast vision could have succeeded in the market we'll maybe never know, but I think the narrower focus selected for the TSR line post-1977 probably had the clearest potential as a business. In a sense, his dream came true in the myriad of games and systems and worlds we now have available - as much toolkit as anyone might wish for, and more coming every day! Not all truly original, of course, but that's the world, for you...
> 
> ...



 Somewhat yes, after all he was very close to the Gygaxes growing up. 
    Your last point is one I'm not sure about. To me, DMing is all about creativity, improvising, and design. I don't catch a vein of "administering" to players from Robs writing. (i'm not sure what that statement implies) What I get is - the RPG is a creative art and game, and running modules is in opposition to the original philosophy. 
  One thing I don't see, and that Rob might not know or be able to gauge, is how many of us old DMs purchased, and love, modules, but never ran them as such. I have a pile of the things, which have served as inspiration , even partial templates, but I have never run one. I suspect this is fairly common.


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## Umbran (Dec 13, 2013)

Iosue said:


> Play purely pen and paper -- the game supported that.  Use miniatures only for marching order and general reference -- the game supported that.  Use minis on open space with tape measures -- the game supported that.  Use minis and a grid with facing rules -- the game supported that.




I think we also tend to get muddled in our definitions.  To me, there's a difference between "can be easily used with/without" and "supported".

For instance, at one workplace, I could call the IT shop, and get support for configuring Outlook for my e-mail - the IT folks actively helped, and made instructions readily available.  Thunderbird was usable, but not supported - if I had a question about Thunderbird, I had to figure it out for myself, but nobody had an issue if I did so.  Some other e-mail clients were actively prohibited - they would not work, and that was on purpose.


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## Balesir (Dec 13, 2013)

MJS said:


> Your last point is one I'm not sure about. To me, DMing is all about creativity, improvising, and design. I don't catch a vein of "administering" to players from Robs writing. (i'm not sure what that statement implies) What I get is - the RPG is a creative art and game, and running modules is in opposition to the original philosophy.



Yes, I got the modules run counter to creativity bit - and I partly agree - but I got the strong impression that the "creative" one was supposed to be the DM. The players were there to experience the DM's genius - to have the "adventure" administered to them. That may be an overstatement of the message, but it's one I got quite strongly; the "creatives" are the DMs - players are consumers, not creators.



MJS said:


> One thing I don't see, and that Rob might not know or be able to gauge, is how many of us old DMs purchased, and love, modules, but never ran them as such. I have a pile of the things, which have served as inspiration , even partial templates, but I have never run one. I suspect this is fairly common.



I have run modules, when pressed for time or otherwise engaged, but I have certainly bought a lot more just for ideas, inspiration and to read as a sort of story. If I'm running a module, things seldom work out as per the original outline assumptions, anyway!


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## MJS (Dec 14, 2013)

Balesir said:


> Yes, I got the modules run counter to creativity bit - and I partly agree - but I got the strong impression that the "creative" one was supposed to be the DM. The players were there to experience the DM's genius - to have the "adventure" administered to them. That may be an overstatement of the message, but it's one I got quite strongly; the "creatives" are the DMs - players are consumers, not creators.
> 
> 
> I have run modules, when pressed for time or otherwise engaged, but I have certainly bought a lot more just for ideas, inspiration and to read as a sort of story. If I'm running a module, things seldom work out as per the original outline assumptions, anyway!



  Well. I am a genius DM, so I don't know what to say here. The players are there to experience my genius, and I theirs. D&D players have to be highly creative, or they die. DMs are players. And so on. But whomever is running should be rspected as  fellow mad genius.

    I do fantasize running Lost Caverns of Tsojconth at a convention one day. That and Horror on the Hill I purchased new back in the day. Or maybe an LA module if I can grok the system enough to convert to OD&D or 3E. I love modules, speaking of which, I have to finish some work on one for tomorrow...


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 14, 2013)

MJS said:


> I do fantasize running Lost Caverns of Tsojconth at a convention one day....




My fantasy is to one day pronounce "Tsojconth" correctly.


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## Dungeoneer (Dec 19, 2013)

Incidentally, for those upholding chess as a game that can't be improved, David Sirlin has announced Chess 2: The Sequel*.

* Presumably the designer is being SLIGHTLY tongue-in-cheek, but it's still a fun idea.


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## howandwhy99 (Dec 20, 2013)

Morrus said:


> I see this phrase all the time: game design has moved on. Game design has progressed.  The 'technology' of game design has improved.



Where are you seeing this? Who is saying this? IME, people who claim "X has moved on" are seeking to remove all things X prior to current ideas. Like if everyone followed one political viewpoint or one philosophy. It ends up being a weakening of the world of ideas. Which is what is happening now in game design. 



> What does that mean to you? Is game design a science or an art? What elements are "improvements" to you?  Are any of these things merely fashions? Can flaws be features? Is the reason older games get played less simply because they are less supported, or because they are not as good?



Game and puzzle design is creating a pattern for players to solve, perhaps competitively, but not necessarily so. Saying games have "moved on" is likely Pomo narrative absolutism whitewashing terminology to control people's thoughts and actions and calling deranged any who do not wholly accept this "only" understanding. ...Otherwise, these are provocative questions on your own site to bring up. 

Personally, game play is a science. Game design is an art. Improvements to design are about cleaning up errors on the one hand and coming up with breakthroughs on the other. Breakthrough ideas which bring something before unseen into the mix. All of them are fashions and none of them. Calling a feature a flaw means a critic is calling part of a game's design poor. Players claiming they also see it as a flaw, but prefer it that way is...  Actually, that's probably not any player, but a hostile hater, not fan, telling you "players of this game like unfun, badwronggames" or something similarly derogatory of the game's fans. Like how its fashionable to belittle people (or maybe just feel ashamed for those) who earnestly enjoy Monopoly.

Older games that are good spawn many copycats, this happened to RPGs too. The older designs are played I would say, but there is a myth of "the new is better". So "new and improved" versions of games come out and supplant sales of older games, which might even be taken off the market. In some ways new versions can be good for old products, old Disney movies are ubiquitous, but potentially bad in other ways, "Everyone knows D&D is about telling shared stories!"


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## Piratecat (Dec 20, 2013)

I think game design has absolutely changed over the years, as has our expectations from a game. As part of writing TimeWatch, I was looking back at the fantastic old game Time Master, published in the '80s or early '90s by Pacesetter. The ideas are incredibly fun. The mechanics are a convoluted, confusing mess. It's a good reminder that rules design has evolved. 

Same with Boot Hill, or Metamorphosis Alpha, or early Gamma World, or 1e Paranoia. Heck, 1e Call of Cthulhu was notable in part because the d100 system was so intuitive, but even it no longer supports some of the things we expect from rules systems nowadays.


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## Janx (Dec 20, 2013)

howandwhy99 said:


> Where are you seeing this? Who is saying this? IME, people who claim "X has moved on" are seeking to remove all things X prior to current ideas. Like if everyone followed one political viewpoint or one philosophy. It ends up being a weakening of the world of ideas. Which is what is happening now in game design.




It might be that SOME people saying it have that motive.

But in equal measure, we'd have to be sticking our head in the sand to not see that the way games are written and designed is not the same.  Old RPG rules were often convolutedly written.  It is entirely possible to rewrite the mechanic/rules to get the exact same result (look-up tables vs THAC0 vs d20 combat).  It's the exact same mechanic and statistical outcome, just rephrased  differently.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 20, 2013)

Piratecat said:


> I think game design has absolutely changed over the years, as has our expectations from a game. As part of writing TimeWatch, I was looking back at the fantastic old game Time Master, published in the '80s or early '90s by Pacesetter. The ideas are incredibly fun. The mechanics are a convoluted, confusing mess. It's a good reminder that rules design has evolved.
> 
> Same with Boot Hill, or Metamorphosis Alpha, or early Gamma World, or 1e Paranoia. Heck, 1e Call of Cthulhu was notable in part because the d100 system was so intuitive, but even it no longer supports some of the things we expect from rules systems nowadays.




I think it is true on the whole, games tend to be more orderly and streamlined than they were when i first started playing, and that is generally a good thing. But i guess where i have trouble with the whole "design has moved on" thing is i rarely see it applied to those issues and it is often just used to reflectche tastes and preferences of a single pocket of the gaming community. Gaming styles are incredibly balkanized these days, but I often get the impression that the individual camps believe they are t the forefront of the hobby. I think this is where so much of the anger and rage come from in things like the edition wars. Saying design has moved on, often isnt much different from saying rpg are only X or Y. At least when I see it used (it usually just seems another way of saying "don't do that").


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## Piratecat (Dec 20, 2013)

I draw a real distinction between "the state of the art has advanced" and "this game is different." The former should apply more-or-less globally to games, whether you like them or not.

- There's currently an emphasis on fast character generation or ready-to-play characters (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, D&D Next (at least partially), Feng Shui)
- Clunky game mechanics are generally jettisoned for ones that are intuitive (negative ACs)
- Books are better arranged and laid out, hopefully with indices
- Dice mechanics tend towards the fast and elegant

For instance, I love Shadowrun despite its system, which seems dated to me. Characters are really complex, and my elven PR guy rolls 23 d6 (plucking out the 5s and 6s) every time he uses a particular skill. I don't think we'll see a lot of new games using that system. I don't kid myself into thinking I'm the arbiter of taste, though, just because I find it awkward. 

I wonder if this is what helped make 4e feel ponderous to me (despite the fact that I run two 4e campaigns, both of which I love.) As more and more other games skewed towards lighter, faster and more streamlined mechanics, 4e piled on complexity and detail. Maybe it tried to lead, and not everyone wanted to follow.


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## Bedrockgames (Dec 20, 2013)

I think you lay out reasonable things here. I might quibble with one and four thoughon the grounds that those introduce very real design trade offs and (in the case of one) there are still games doing quite well on the market that indicate things havent wholly moved in that direction. For example, fast and easy character creation can reduce the complexity and depth of characters in the game. I myself have a preference for rules light fast games with deeper character creation rules. So more investment on the front end.


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## howandwhy99 (Dec 20, 2013)

Janx said:


> It is entirely possible to rewrite the mechanic/rules to get the exact same result (look-up tables vs THAC0 vs d20 combat).  It's the exact same mechanic and statistical outcome, just rephrased  differently.



I agree it is entirely possible to express the same rule in different ways. But 1e To-Hit tables, 2e THAC0, and the d20 universal roll are really very different game mechanics and not statistically the same at all. 

1st, 1e used d20 rolls to compare to a To-Hit table. It balanced the die results based on two sliding modifier scales and a curvilinear outcome relationship derived from cumulative odds on linear result die. Pretty radical stuff. Plus, it never left that 20 outcome span allowing an infinite quantity of results to be expressed on the one die.

2nd, THAC0 was a whole rewrite of the To-Hit system that dropped sliding scales and included 5 instances of 20 before increasing the results possible to beyond 20. All just to keep the modifiers from 1e, which it didn't account for, from breaking the game. This strange beast lost most of the strength and flexibility of the previous design for an attempt at simpler notation.

3rd, d20 universal is simply a floating 20 number variable result span that modifiers actually shift up and down the natural number line. A line where an arbitrary DC was set, which forced the DM to become a player. This design actually removes any hope of success for lower level PCs and failure for higher ones. It needed "always succeeds or fails" funky results to artificially keep characters playable, but only served to slow down the game. Not to mention the d20 was no longer just used for game elements benefiting from large variables like attacks and saves, but "skills" and plenty of other rolls which should never have used a 20 point spread. Initiative anyone? Boy, did that get tedious quick.


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## Janx (Dec 20, 2013)

howandwhy99 said:


> I agree it is entirely possible to express the same rule in different ways. But 1e To-Hit tables, 2e THAC0, and the d20 universal roll are really very different game mechanics and not statistically the same at all.
> 
> 1st, 1e used d20 rolls to compare to a To-Hit table. It balanced the die results based on two sliding modifier scales and a curvilinear outcome relationship derived from cumulative odds on linear result die. Pretty radical stuff. Plus, it never left that 20 outcome span allowing an infinite quantity of results to be expressed on the one die.
> 
> ...




Per my read and understanding of my 1e, 2e, 3e combat rules, the AC system remains equivalent per armor type (allowing that 3e the number goes up instead of down).

The fighter's # remains consistently tied to improving by one point per level.

As such, 1st level fighter vs AC 5 has the same odds in all 3 systems.  It holds true at level 5 and so on.

This is the same mechanic, expressed differently, and potentially better in subsequent editions.

The fact that 3e uses that mechanic for everything else, is a different matter.

One could say that assuming my observation of sameness is true, that D&D hasn't "moved on" with regards to attack resolution.

But I do believe it has improved with clarifying how to explain and present the basic attack resolution (looking stuff up on tables that can be represented just as easily with basic math is a design point that the industry has "moved on" from).


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## Umbran (Dec 20, 2013)

howandwhy99 said:


> 3rd, d20 universal is simply a floating 20 number variable result span that modifiers actually shift up and down the natural number line. A line where an arbitrary DC was set, which forced the DM to become a player. This design actually removes any hope of success for lower level PCs and failure for higher ones. It needed "always succeeds or fails" funky results to artificially keep characters playable, but only served to slow down the game. Not to mention the d20 was no longer just used for game elements benefiting from large variables like attacks and saves, but "skills" and plenty of other rolls which should never have used a 20 point spread. Initiative anyone? Boy, did that get tedious quick.




I don't know if it was intentional, but that comes off with enough spin on that that we can hear it whir!

If we are comparing apples-to-apples: for to-hit, all the systems set a DC, via an armor class.  It was not generally arbitrarily assigned by the GM.

If we are comparing apples-to-apples: for skills, the DC for a 3e sill check was arbitrary, but guided - the rules do give flat numbers for many tasks.  But in prior editions, with less-well-developed skill systems, the entire *mechanic* for resolution of a tasks was arbitrarily assigned, making the GM no less a player.

And... as if a 1 in 20 chance of success keeps the character playable?  I don't buy it, sorry.


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## billd91 (Dec 20, 2013)

Umbran said:


> And... as if a 1 in 20 chance of success keeps the character playable?  I don't buy it, sorry.




Considering the auto-succeed rule and auto-fail rules on saves and attacks stems right from 1e, it's clear that they weren't injected just to enable any playability in 3e.

That said, the bounded ranges in 1e/2e, for saves in particular, was removed in 3e in favor of the open end. I consider the 1e/2e method generally better. That said, aside from that boundary, the attacking systems are so very close in effect that the BAB system is very much a user-friendlier version of the THAC0 system. And the THAC0 system is really just a minor variation on the 1e combat tables. These are *not* radically different.


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## Janx (Dec 20, 2013)

billd91 said:


> Considering the auto-succeed rule and auto-fail rules on saves and attacks stems right from 1e, it's clear that they weren't injected just to enable any playability in 3e.
> 
> That said, the bounded ranges in 1e/2e, for saves in particular, was removed in 3e in favor of the open end. I consider the 1e/2e method generally better. That said, aside from that boundary, the attacking systems are so very close in effect that the BAB system is very much a user-friendlier version of the THAC0 system. And the THAC0 system is really just a minor variation on the 1e combat tables. These are *not* radically different.




It may also be that the more open-ended nature of 3e's attack roll resolution is an artifact of re-arranging where the 3 values go.

In 1e/2e the PC had an Attack Value (descending in nature).  A fighter had 21 - level as his attack value.  In 3e, to make big numbers mean better, it was simply Level.

In 1e/2e the PC had an AC (5 for chainmail if I recall).  In 3e, as part of the inversion to make big numbers be good, it was 10 +5, so AC 15.

The last variable was the die roll.

So in 1e/2e it was AV - AC < d20 means success

In 3e, it was AV + d20 >= AC means success

Since 1e/2e started with 2 values having fixed maximums (THAC0 20 and AC 10), that kind of locked in things.

Once those variables were inverted, the upper bounds became unlimited, though the mathematical behavior remains intrinsically the same when using the basic game stats for armor and THAC0/BAB, the expression was clearer for most folks (a subject claim, I know).

So in my view, D&D did and did not change it's mechanical design for combat.  the basic stats remain the same (BAB progression runs at the same rates per class as THAC0 progression did as did AC).

The inversion can be initially viewed as a minor tweak to make the math easier to absorb and make consistent (big is good). But it clearly had side effects like removing an upper bounds for really good ACs or really good Attack Values.


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## howandwhy99 (Dec 20, 2013)

Janx said:


> Per my read and understanding of my 1e, 2e, 3e combat rules, the AC system remains equivalent per armor type (allowing that 3e the number goes up instead of down).



Honestly, I wasn't looking to raise another topic. Needless to say I really just disagree with you. For simplicity sake, perhaps we can at least agree on an easily discerned difference between all three? An average unarmed adult human actively defending in 1e has an AC of 9, in 2e an AC of 10, and in 3e an AC of 11 (inverted to 10).


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## Janx (Dec 20, 2013)

howandwhy99 said:


> Honestly, I wasn't looking to raise another topic. Needless to say I really just disagree with you. For simplicity sake, perhaps we can at least agree on an easily discerned difference between all three? An average unarmed adult human actively defending in 1e has an AC of 9, in 2e an AC of 10, and in 3e an AC of 11 (inverted to 10).




This sounds awfully quibbly.  Per my understanding (and only played 1e for a very very short time as we were really starting 2e with a 1e PH) they all got AC10 (+0 bonus).  Padded was +1, Leather was +2, Studded Leather was +3.

My assumption is that an unarmed human adult is expected to be actively defending in all cases barring an impairment.  So in both 1e, 2e and 3e he has AC10.   I could be wrong that there's no bonus, but I'd note then that both 1e and 3e would then give a +1 advantage, making them equal in treatment (1e AC9 = 3e AC11)

Heck, I remember in 2e there was an actual penalty for being unarmed (or bonus to the attacker, as really it don't matter that much what side of the equation you apply it).

So they all got the same ACs for what armor and Dex bonus they had in all editions.  Situational modiers appear to be different (I call BS that Gary would give any +1 bonus to AC for an unarmed person defending themselves, but I don't know 1e well enough to swear that in court).


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## Balesir (Dec 20, 2013)

howandwhy99 said:


> Honestly, I wasn't looking to raise another topic. Needless to say I really just disagree with you. For simplicity sake, perhaps we can at least agree on an easily discerned difference between all three? An average unarmed adult human actively defending in 1e has an AC of 9, in 2e an AC of 10, and in 3e an AC of 11 (inverted to 10).



I think you are remembering OD&D, not 1e AD&D. With the coming of AD&D the AC of an unarmoured human went to 10. In OD&D it was 9.


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## howandwhy99 (Dec 21, 2013)

I'm confused a bit about what you wrote, but I'll try and work it out. It's early.







Janx said:


> This sounds awfully quibbly.  Per my understanding (and only played 1e for a very very short time as we were really starting 2e with a 1e PH) they all got AC10 (+0 bonus).  Padded was +1, Leather was +2, Studded Leather was +3.
> 
> My assumption is that an unarmed human adult is expected to be actively defending in all cases barring an impairment.  So in both 1e, 2e and 3e he has AC10.   I could be wrong that there's no bonus, but I'd note then that both 1e and 3e would then give a +1 advantage, making them equal in treatment (1e AC9 = 3e AC11)



  [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is right about OD&D and AC 9, I just use that system so much I forgot 1e made the change too. 

AC 9 is an armor class, human wearing clothes (or not) in OD&D. It's not the armor, but the band of defense 9.999(repeating) to 9.0 the armor rests somewhere within. 2e increased the boundaries of the mechanic beyond 20, beyond the variance in the actual die roll, and used 1e's "humans as above are AC 10" as default. Still, even if that doesn't matter to you results 10 down to 1 span 50% of that d20 roll for a greater chance to hit than in OD&D. 3e's base AC 10 is actually converted to 11 in the old system. So that game begins with 55% odds of hitting on its d20 attack roll. 



> Heck, I remember in 2e there was an actual penalty for being unarmed (or bonus to the attacker, as really it don't matter that much what side of the equation you apply it).



Actually, much of D&D was built on the valuations of increasing modifiers to the target number or the roll inherent in its constant variation. So it very much mattered what side you applied adjustments to. But that's getting away from the simpler point: that even the base To-Hit number is different among these three.



> So they all got the same ACs for what armor and Dex bonus they had in all editions.  Situational modifiers appear to be different (I call BS that Gary would give any +1 bonus to AC for an unarmed person defending themselves, but I don't know 1e well enough to swear that in court).



A 2e human with a 1 point penalty for being unarmed would apply the point to the attacker's roll. Their AC doesn't change from 10, but odds have shifted in their opponent's favor. Those odds are not the same as if we worsened their AC to 11. Or what I believe you are saying is 9 so it can be just like OD&D, which would actually be an improvement. I'm not clear on what you were meaning here.


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## Janx (Dec 22, 2013)

howandwhy99 said:


> I'm confused a bit about what you wrote, but I'll try and work it out. It's early.  [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is right about OD&D and AC 9, I just use that system so much I forgot 1e made the change too.
> 
> AC 9 is an armor class, human wearing clothes (or not) in OD&D. It's not the armor, but the band of defense 9.999(repeating) to 9.0 the armor rests somewhere within. 2e increased the boundaries of the mechanic beyond 20, beyond the variance in the actual die roll, and used 1e's "humans as above are AC 10" as default. Still, even if that doesn't matter to you results 10 down to 1 span 50% of that d20 roll for a greater chance to hit than in OD&D. 3e's base AC 10 is actually converted to 11 in the old system. So that game begins with 55% odds of hitting on its d20 attack roll.
> 
> ...




I am equally confused as to your confusion.  A bonus to you is a penalty to me.  It's algebra.  You add on one side of the equation, subtract on the other.

So if I say there's a -2 penalty for being unarmed, regardless of whether there's a minus sign or not, I can figure out whether it needs to be added or subtracted to the appropriate component.

And the effect is the same mathematically, providing I do it right.  So I can make your AC worse, or make the attacker's side better by 2.


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## howandwhy99 (Dec 22, 2013)

Janx said:


> I am equally confused as to your confusion.  A bonus to you is a penalty to me.  It's algebra.  You add on one side of the equation, subtract on the other.
> 
> So if I say there's a -2 penalty for being unarmed, regardless of whether there's a minus sign or not, I can figure out whether it needs to be added or subtracted to the appropriate component.
> 
> And the effect is the same mathematically, providing I do it right.  So I can make your AC worse, or make the attacker's side better by 2.



I didn't think we would get into valuing modifiers within the variance of a d20 roll. That's more difficult to explain. I was hoping we could just agree on little stuff like base AC is different. Do you at least agree with the 45%, 50%, 55%?

For the rest, basically we are doing trig not algebra. The valuation of modifiers to a roll or to a target number are measured in relation to the starting odds, not percentage points. There's a big difference. I think the D&D Next designers know this is part of why they are using what they call "bounded accuracy". 

I haven't looked at that design for awhile, but OD&D puts the whole infinite number of outcomes within the 20-point spread of the randomizing die. It is also bounded in its way, but doesn't shift it from there like D&D Next which has target numbers higher than 20. 

Now 3e uses the infinite natural number line as its base and then moves the dice's 20-point set up and down it, as well as the target number. AC or attack mod, either could be infinite. But to be meaningful they needed to be within the 20 point variance of the die roll. Further benefits/penalties don't affect the odds. 1 always hits, 20 always misses. Unfortunately this design coupled with a large number of stacking modifiers allowed optimizers to hit that 5% plateau frequently. 

Now OD&D has its faults too. Sometimes you could be change your odds, but not significantly enough to reach the next 5 percentage point plateau. The die was rolled the same with the same odds as if you didn't have that extra bit. But it wasn't a total drawback. You knew, maybe next time you find a way to build on your previous strategy and catch another face of that die to mean success for you.


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