"This time will never be different"

[subplotkudzu]

 mnemex and I have been having a pleasant geek out discussing the pros and cons of 4E (most of which is spinning castles out of clouds since we haven't actually seen the rules yet) and I find that once again the problems with the latest edition oof D&D aren't so much with the core books as with the splatbooks. 

I mean, taken on it's face 2E was not that bad a system, especially for 1989. It was far from perfect, but it was a fine clean up of a sprawling legacy system. I happily ran it for 5 years with tweaks and mods, which is more than I can say for a lot of games. It's biggest error was that the designer listened to the players of the legacy system too much and kept things that should have been scrapped. It didn't start to break until after the 4th splatbook - complete fighter, wizard, cleric and rogue were all acceptable in their kits and advice (complete rogue really did have some good ideas for an all rogue campaign), but the drive for more newer better tougher broke the game system. If someone came to me saying that they were running a 2E corebook game with soome world specific kits I'd play in a heartbeat. In fact, I've done so - Rebecca's Spelljammer game started that way, and 40yearsagotodayran a very enjoyable 1 shot with the 2E rules well after 3E came out.  

3E was and is a fine system. It gutted the interior of D&D and rebuilt it so that the house looked the same from the outside, had the same rough layout but with better load bearing support, new wiring, new plumbing and so on. It's 90 to 95% of what I'd want from a game trying to do what D&D does. I've never played the game higher than 13th level, but when I did run 5 sessions of a 12-13th level campaign it worked just fine. Again, the system didn't break until the splatbooks with their ever widening array of prestige classes that fall prey to newer better tougher and, in so doing, broke the game system. But I'm still running 3E, and don't see myself changing.

In between these we had the execrable 2.5 and the unnecessary 3.5 (in which most of the "fixes" were just reversing the original teams design decisions - I want stat buff spells to be strategic, thank you, and it doesn't bother me that Hiram can wake up at dawn, cast Cat's Grace and have +4 Dex until midday. 40yat never thinks of casting the spell anyway....) 

To me it's clear that the problem isn't with the core engine, it's with the splatbooks. So any attempt to "Fix" problems in 4E will be undermined by the progression of splatbooks that make up the publisher's cash flow model. That led to mnemex's quote that titles this post. 

My main question, which I have posed in A&E before, is why do GMs let this happen? Just because there is an ever widening array of splatbooks, why do DMs let in prestige classes that will break the game? It's not impossible for a DM to just say 'no' when someone asks for something new that doesn't fit. It's also possible to build your own prestige classes specific to you game world - hell, it's preferable. 

My second question is more of a hope: does anyone think that WotC will have enough internal editing to make sure that their 4E splatbooks (and I know they can only control their own content) won't break the game? Or do we think that declaring the game broken after 10 years and promising to "fix" it with 5E is part of their strategy?

Comments

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. It requires a GM with the power/credibility within the gaming group to be able to say "No" to any/specific splats, though, and hold the line firm.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I clearly agree, but it's been so long since that has ever been an issue. I think in part because 2E didn't come out until I was nearly in college and able to meet and/or train a like minded group of gamers for whom this sort of credibility was a given. Not becaue the GMs were always figures of radiant authority, but becaue everyone was there to have fun and many were knowledgeable enough to spot a broken kit from a mile away. I'm jut boggled that there are groups of players for whom that sort of power struggle is an issue.

I suppose if I stretch back to 1E I can remember feeling I had to allow Barbarians and Cavaliers in my games becuase, broken as they were, they were in Unearthed Arcana. But that was a different, pre-splat era.

[mylescorcoran]

I think it's in part a question of game master's willpower. Some players will brings things to the table that they've found in this book or that book, and try to persuade the DM to let them use it. Sometims it's just easier to cave.

Solid world building and defining the campaign setting helps here. In Joe Blogg's Vaguely Remembered Realms, a grab bag of any and all core and prestige classes can creep in as there's no strong thematic restriction on such choices. In a well defined setting with player buy in there's less room for such cruft.

I think limiting a game to just what's in the core books is a good solution, but it does throw away a lot of interesting things, and the question of balance between the core classes in the original 3.0 may put some people off.

I don't expect WotC to be that careful about not breaking the game. It's too easy to add stuff and it gets increasingly difficult to balance everything as the edifice of interactions grows and grows.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I think limiting a game to just what's in the core books is a good solution, but it does throw away a lot of interesting things, and the question of balance between the core classes in the original 3.0 may put some people off.

Of course, I never hesitated to tweak the corebook for specific settings (which is why the Emirikolian Sorcerer is better than the standard one). I also add my own prestige classes with interesting things stolen and put it. It's the adding things wholesale - "being easier to cave" that astounds me. Maybe I just take GMing too seriously.

I think it's also that my games are short and focused. Emirikol has had 12 Sessions. Russia and Arabia combined have had 16. It makes it easier to keep the line when everyone is on their first character in each setting... no wait, I stand corrected, Kriz1818 is on her second in Arabia, but I built them both and they're pretty basic. But still, that's 15 PCs all told with only 2 prestige classes, both just starting.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Do they have a model for making money that isn't dependent on the steady release of supplement after supplement of "power up" options?

I've heard, both with previous D&D avatars and with classic World of Darkness, that there was a strong cultural expectation among the players that if you bought a newly released supplement, and thought something in it was cool, you had a right to add it to your character, whether or not the GM had planned for it in their campaign, or had bought the supplement, or was even aware that the thing existed. How much do you think that's true? How much of an uphill struggle is it for GMs to resist this expectation?

And again, if there is such a culture, is it just something that happened among players, or is it an expectation that the publishers had invited or encouraged? They could, on the other hand, combat it, by saying explicitly, "these are new options that DMs/storytellers may choose to include in their campaigns; if you want to use something in this for your character, please ask for approval before taking it." Has any supplement for D&D said this?

As an amateur economist, I think of this sort of thing in terms of "rent-seeking", the process through which (a) governments offer economic advantages that are gained not by doing something productive but by acquiring a special legal position such as an exclusive right to sell some product in a region, (b) businesses start actively trying to encourage the creation of such special relationships with government, and (c) the whole entrepreneurial culture shifts away from production to the pursuit of legal privilege. It seems to be very hard to reverse rent-seeking; it's always easier for the people who profit from a given privilege to lobby for its extension than for the public who pay for their profit to lobby for its removal, because the enterpreneurs are small and organized and the public is large and diffuse. And it's even harder when the entire society is permeated with rent-seeking, because when nearly everybody has some special entitlement, nearly everybody sees the loss of entitlements as an immediate threat and fails to see the gain from a more productive economy. There seem to be analogies to the shape of a gaming culture.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

You have several interesting thoughts, but I'm pulling one out for tonight.

Do they have a model for making money that isn't dependent on the steady release of supplement after supplement of "power up" options?

I sometimes wonder if any game company does. The profit model for the industry is either the constant creation of new supplments to a perrennial game or the constant development new games. No one rests on a evergreen except perhaps SJG with GURPS, and even they suffered from Power Up options in the lat edition. They're advantage is that their supplement releases are broader into genres rather than deeper into a genre/setting/power structure. But I'm sure they also sell less.

The other option - constantly creating new games - isn't as bad but it leads to either under-supported games or ones that are out of print.

I suppose it's the very small profit margin combined with all the production work being up front that drives that as a game model. After all, if Chad wants to keep writing games for fun that means more supplements, as all his production work for Zorcerer of Zo or Dead Inside is done.

I sometimes wonder if Habro wouldn't be happier if D&D really were an evergreen, like Scrabble. All the design work is done, just keep printing and shipping new core books to book stores and making a reliable profit. That would at least fit other parts of their model, even though it wouldn't gross near a much money a the release of a new edition or constant array of splatbooks.