Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Fracturing

Chasing around for information about milestones, I came across this post from DM David.  I withhold my endorsement ... but the post highlights an element in the game's present design that deserves examination.

I cannot appreciate that the writer felt the need to dredge up graceless player opinions to support the clear, scientifically established presence of what dopamine is and how it works.  This has been pointedly established in the games industry since Farmville and Candy Crush.  Is this still in doubt?  I cannot understand why D&D writers will not go directly to scientific sources for evidence.  This clumsily made argument takes up three quarters of the post.

The breakthrough in the piece isn't exploited (though perhaps it might be elsewhere on the blog; I'm not a regular reader:
... adventure writers hate fitting XP in their designs. Organized play campaigns typically required designers to write their adventures around combat encounters that net a specific number of XP.  Some authors met their XP quotas by adding bandit encounters until ambushed by thugs became a cliché of awkward design. Adventure paths pose an even bigger challenge.
"Designers have to jam in the 'correct' number of combat encounters to make sure the PCs level up at the right pace," writes D&D head Mike Mearls. "Adventure design thus becomes a process of matching up the right flow of XP to the correct tempo of the plot." Designers who wanted fewer fights could add XP awards for accomplishing story goals, but these awards lead to the same outcome as just telling players to level up. Just telling players to take a level skips the math and planning.

While the post linked above from DM David comes from January 2020, the quote comes from 2014.  The original page is gone, but you can see more of the post on Tower of Zenopus, five months after the final playtest packet was released for 5e, and more than four months before 5e's basic rules were released for play.  Zenopus makes many of the arguments that DM David's quotables make, and does it better.

Mearls in the longer quote from Zenopus says, "... a much better approach is to allow designers to present both options ..."

I'd like to know: are both options being presented right now?  Are the adventure writers creating milestone versions AND x.p. versions of their stuff?  I would imagine that if they are, they would hate that much more.  I confess I don't know the answer.  I don't buy modules.  I don't even steal them, though that would be easy.

I tend to believe that Mearls is paying lip-service to an established front being disregarded by the first part of the quote, in favor of the company seeking an easier way to do things While supposedly servicing those players who prefer role-play to combat.  I can't imagine any tech company, anywhere, arguing that they are going to give less options on a device because the coders find it much easier to write programs for, say, text recognition rather than sound recognition.  Nor can I imagine users of devices willingly surrendering features because, while we used to make them, we don't now because it is just too hard.

We do give up features, all the time; mostly because there aren't enough users to make the feature worth pursuing.  Is this what Mearls was saying about those using X.P. in 2014?

That would be strange, because the company hadn't released milestones yet.   Right?

There isn't a sentence in Mearls' quote that I couldn't write a post about.  Progressively, in making published adventures, they had ceased to recognize that the game's rewards were inherent in the system these adventures were being written for; but by 2014, Mearls is talking about how "we," the game's designers, felt it was their responsibility to decide, for us, how best to implement rewards.  He makes it sound like he defaulted to experience points because that was the publishing suite's choice, Not because those were the rules.  He describes writing something that the game doesn't actually need, "pre-made adventures," as "troublesome," as though that shouldn't go with the territory.  Writing this post is troublesome.  Making my dinner is troublesome.  Writing my own adventures for my own game is troublesome.  How in the hell does a publisher expect that something being made for a complex game like D&D shouldn't be troublesome, and how does its troublesomeness justify making an ad hoc change for a minority of writers who are unhappy with it?

This is one small corner of thousands of community-fracturing choices that were made by the company, and are still being made by the company, creating problems for me and millions of other D&D players who can't simply find a new player to run in their campaigns.  Every experienced player I enter into my campaign becomes a "troublesome" hodgepodge of necessary clarifications, negotiations, detailing, training, lines in the sand and potential argumentative blow-outs because the company could not agree on the game's fundamentals.

I asked this on twitter the other day:  how many decades can a company have its head up its ass before its clients decide to look away?

I got likes.

9 comments:

  1. "Every experienced player I enter into my campaign becomes a 'troublesome' hodgepodge of necessary clarifications, negotiations, detailing, training, lines in the sand and potential argumentative blow-outs because the company could not agree on the game's fundamentals."

    I blame DMs, too. You said the other day that the company has been selling us a bill of bullshit goods for decades. YES, undoubtedly. But who buys those bullshit goods, and why do they keep buying them?

    Some guesses:

    (A) People who don't take D&D that seriously and will buy whatever as long as it strings their campaign out another couple sessions.
    (B) People who treat the official rules as ineffable wisdom, as gospel, instead of as a starting point for developing their own game.

    What is it that causes people not to work purely from their own imagination (or real research) once they've gotten through a few splatbooks? Do they not realize how little is on offer? Maybe people still buy these things for the same reason people still read shitty 10-part fantasy series: they just don't know anything else. Getting the latest splat is all the "game design" they can conceive of.

    I started with 3.5, and back then I pored over shitloads of splatbooks. As a noob DM, I thought they were the beginning and end of what ought to be put into the game -- but I borrowed those books, or I downloaded pirate PDFs, because even then I could tell they weren't worth the sticker price. And I was always, nearly from the beginning, a zealous defender of the "judicial precedent" aspect of DMing, where rules and rulings accumulated and were built upon, because otherwise what the hell was the point of making rulings? That attitude led to making my own rules documents, remixes of official materials, lists of clarifications and rulings -- and all that eventually snowballed into not needing the books because I'd reinvented enough of the game in my own style [and later in yours ;P] to run without them.

    [part 1/2]

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  2. [part 2/2]

    You of all people don't have to be told that other DMs aren't doing anything fucking like that. I have nothing in common with any of the D&D people I meet outside of your blog and its comments section. I've met DMs who slap themselves on the back for writing a couple thousand words rehashing someone's published "rules-lite" game with a different setting like it's some kind of achievement, instead of just ... yet another pointless rework of the same five ideas, in which people can take on the role of a 100% player-chosen, superheroic Kewl Guy character and roll dice for actions described at an obscenely abstract level of detail -- which would be fine if any part of the gameplay was ever more detailed. But, no: instead of making the game more detailed, more able to afford challenge, over time, they just declare the campaign finished and start playing a totally different, equally shallow game...

    Pardon the meandering rant. I just have so much trouble understanding people who claim to enjoy that which we enjoy, despite their partaking in something completely different.

    Would the world be so different if TSR/WOTC sold amazing, wonderful game rules, and promoted the training of DMs as an art form, instead of hawking pig puke and running Adventure League? Well, when I put it like that, sure. If "D&D" meant something different, if DMs embraced the need to rise above their own level, if the game's maintainers treated it like an adult recreation instead of a child's pastime ... that'd be great.

    But even if all that were true, I think DMs would still need so much time to get good at their craft that, in this hypothetical world, we'd also see people going off and making "easier" games. Games which could be run, or played in, without "wasting time" on the "boring" stuff.

    [Am I making sense, man? I wrote everything up to "Would the world" before starting to feel I missed your point, so I tried to loop back.]

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  3. You're making perfect sense. And I agree. The fury that you're feeling, that this post stirred up, that Mearls self-aggrandizing grovelling justification provoked, is the same fury I have had through literally thousands of posts.

    Why were the people put in charge of this game so completely indifferent to the nature of this game? And yes, why are the people who claim to love this game so complicit in the destruction of this game?

    But, you and I, Maxwell, we do best when we stay calm. Take a breath. I started to do that in 2016 and for four years now I have been trying to calm down. I'm still mad ... but I try to write it better.

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  4. "... adventure writers hate fitting XP in their designs. Organized play campaigns typically required designers to write their adventures around combat encounters that net a specific number of XP."

    Have they considered...not writing adventures or organized play campaigns?

    "Doc, I eat junk food all day, never exercise, and I feel like shit. Who could have predicted this?"

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  5. I'm starting to think the reason why our world and ideologies are so polarized these days has something to do with an inability to refrain from speaking our minds. Once upon a time there was this idea of the "strong, silent type" dude which, I always figured, was some sort of deep-thought person who limited frivolous chattiness in preference of serious action (or, at worst, carried the difficulty of expressing himself and his emotions). Now, I'm beginning to think it's just a matter of a particular headspace that realizes: You can't argue with stupid. That should be a goddamn proverb, if it isn't already.

    I am a person that constantly wants to "argue with stupid;" I just can't keep my mouth shut when I read the nonsense I find people writing in both blogs and comments. And it's not like I want to say anything coherent or put forth some sort of well-reasoned argument. I mean, I've tried that in the past to no avail. Now I find myself just wanting to yell "stupid, stupid, stupid!" Which, of course, accomplishes nothing.

    This is why I can't stand watching CNN or listen to NPR when they're covering the U.S. president. I have the same reaction and it's goddamn pointless.

    Thank you for bringing to my attention that the stupid continues in the industry and the 5E community. I will continue to move backward through time for my gaming enjoyment and leave the rational, reasoned arguments to you.

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  6. The fractured nature seems inevitable due to the nearly inscrutable methods of entering the hobby.  Imagine if music had all the same barriers to entry:

    Perhaps one hears about music as a thing that exists, and they become excited about it.  They search for examples, but they are difficult to find.  Instead, they find many instruction manuals with relatively clear instructions describing how to compose music and how to create an instrument, but little else.  Reading these instructions without context is nearly impossible.

    Perhaps one has the chance to join in a band who will ignore their lack of experience.  The new player knows not how to play an instrument nor how to read the music, but they do their best.  The other members play down to their level and try to teach them.  Once the session ends, the new player spends their own time searching for ways to hone their skills in private so that the next time they play they will be better able to participate.  They can learn to read the music alone, but alas, they are told that without a band director, they cannot practice playing.

    Perhaps one reads the manuals and decides to become a composer/director.  With little to no exposure to other songs, they begin creating their own.  They pore over several different manuals describing how to compose/direct a song in this or that genre, but each one ends with "you won't know how this song actually sounds until you play it yourself, and even then, you'll have to make it your own."  And, yet again, there is no clear way to practice directing outside of the actual event.

    What we end up with is many shared instructions, shared compositions, and shared instruments, but few shared songs.  No one knows how others play.

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  7. I appreciate that Tyler, but this is the company's fault; not the fault of people not being able to find games.

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  8. JB, those rational, reasonable arguments work a little better with you each year.

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  9. I used to have mild tolerance for milestone awards from my experience with whitewolf games or alternity and others where xp equated directly to skills. The awarding was was still arbitrary, but playing with milestones in a level based game, DnD, has completely turned me against it. I have a post in need of completion that I wrote a few weeks ago about the subject. It basically boils down to a lack of a sense of accomplishment , leveling way to fast compared to what we actually did (because I know the xp values I would have given as a DM), and no sense of progression or knowledge of how close I am to leveling. Milestone awards are completely incompatible with level based games like DnD.

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