Mearls' "to-do list" for D&D 5e

[infected slut princess]

omg lol at at the latest Mearls fail article.
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx ... l/20130923

Here is his "to-do list":

The underlying math of the game. We’ll run stress tests on the numbers, monster abilities, and so on to make sure that everything shakes out as we expect. This work is important to making adventure and encounter design fast and easy. It also ensures that the classes play fair.

You will fail Mearls. You are an idiot. Even if you weren't a total math failure, we know that if your math is "right" it's because it "shakes out as [you] expect", the game will suck crusty scab-covered scrotums. Because what you expect is apparently a game where no one can do anything, all the PCs must suck dicks at everything so the DM can railroad plot-rape them, and Storm Giants cant even break down a fucking door.

For that reason, we should pray that you horribly screw up the math, then maybe Dragons won't have to worry about squads of children with slingshots.

An optional tactical combat system, with rules for using miniatures, rules for combat that operate like 3rd Edition or 4th Edition in that they remove DM adjudication of things like cover, and expanded, basic combat options to allow for forced movement, tanking, and so forth, as options any character can attempt. This optional system will look a bit like AD&D’s Player’s Option: Combat and Tactics book with key lessons learned from 4th Edition. Its goal is to present combat as a challenging puzzle that pits the players against the DM, capturing the best parts of 4th Edition.

LOL. "best parts of 4th edition." The best parts of 4th Edition are when you cover the books in gasoline and burn them.

How is this supposed to interact with the regular parts of the game? It's going to be a mess. What a joke. Balance nightmare inevitable.

An optional dramatic system that emphasizes D&D as a storytelling activity. This system treads ground that D&D hasn’t formally embraced in the past. It casts a gaming group as collaborative storytellers, with the DM managing the action and everyone contributing events, plots twists, and sudden, dramatic turns.

WTF IS THIS. SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

An optional system that cranks up character customization by allowing players to build their own subclasses. This system is really more of a set of guidelines that let you mix and match abilities pulled from subclasses within a class. You can approach it as a DM tool (“In my setting, the wizards of the Burning Isle combine illusion and necromancy”) or as a way for players to have more choice in building characters. We’re making this system optional because we know that some players want a lot of ways to customize their characters, but more customization invariably leads to broken combos. We can manage combinations and fairness at the subclass and feat level, but slicing things much finer than that goes beyond what we can reasonably expect to playtest.

Oh fuck no. You cannot be fucking serious. Note how he says "set of guidelines." Yeah, every fucking thing in 5e is a fucking set of guidelines.

But anyway, you really trust these idiots to come up with any kind of balanced guidelines for creating subclasses? Of course you don't. But of course, since it's just a "set of guidelines", Mearls will just say you are "doing it wrong" if you make unbalanced shit. Just like there was nothing wrong with Skill Challenges in 4e, your DM was just doing them wrong.

A campaign system that extends the action beyond the day-to-day adventures, focusing on what we’ve called downtime. This includes managing a domain, running a business, playing politics on a grand scale, and so on. Things like mass combat would naturally slot into this system.

Sounds desirable. In theory. However, there is a 100% guarantee the rules for these things will be mjostly terrible because Mearls.

[K]

Yeh, listening to design goals is often a frustrating experience because I can often see the grain of a good idea in the idea, but then I also see the huge pitfalls that they will inevitably fall into because they aren't talking about them.

For example, the 4e system of a unified powers advancement was not a bad design goal when I first heard about it, but it seems inevitable that they'd not realize that you have to work extra hard to make all of the powers not feel the same. Not realizing the basic idea of "flavor text adds to flavor and does not replace it" means that you are missing one of the many pieces needed to design a fun power schedule.

[Username17]

I like how they intend to work on the underlying math of the game after defining how all the monsters and player characters work. That's closing the barn door after the cows have left, gone to college, and had kids of their own.

The underlying math is the thing you do when you decide what stats you actually have. The thing you do before you even decide what things immunities can exist to, which in turn comes before you hand out those immunities to the monsters, which in turn comes before you decide what abilities player characters actually need at various levels in order to overcome the challenges that you have defined. Ugh.

Having made the entire game, Mike Mearls is now going to decide on what dice mechanic to use. That is a clown show.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Uhhhh... just wait a minute.

As of the final public playtest, here's what Mike Mearls admits that their design team will need to hunker down on and fix:

[*] The underlying math for combat, monster abilities, soforth.
[*] A good, or rather any sort of tactical combat engine.
[*] The underlying class creation.
[*] Optional campaign minigames like mass combat, politics, and running a business.

... so, given that they're not going to release any more playtest documents, what have they accomplished so far other than giving Mike Mearls corporate welfare for a year?

EDIT: If Mike Mearls said that he had the math where he wanted to for the major modules, I could see him credibly claiming that the rest of the work on the game is just going to be adding optional subsystems that people might want. But the underlying math on the basic engine absolutely has to come first. If the underlying math doesn't work, then any other work you add to that is mechanically pointless.

For example, in Shadowrun 4E, Street Magic wasn't a waste of time. It ended up being baffling and disappointing in a lot of areas but I don't feel like it was pointless. But Unwired was automatically a waste of time; unless the game came with a brand new hacking system, I basically could not and did not care what else they put in the book as far as games go. The best they could hope for is that some of the ideas would've inspired future designers and/or the prose would've been interesting in its own right.

[infected slut princess]

Did you notice this:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, these systems are aimed at specific subsets of players. Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn’t aimed at giving us negative feedback.

[echoVanguard]

echo

[K]

Uhhhh... just wait a minute.

As of the final public playtest, here's what Mike Mearls admits that their design team will need to hunker down on and fix:

[*] The underlying math for combat, monster abilities, soforth.
[*] A good, or rather any sort of tactical combat engine.
[*] The underlying class creation.
[*] Optional campaign minigames like mass combat, politics, and running a business.

... so, given that they're not going to release any more playtest documents, what have they accomplished so far other than giving Mike Mearls corporate welfare for a year?

Yeh, it seems like the finishing touches for their game is "the whole damned system."

[K]

Did you notice this:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, these systems are aimed at specific subsets of players. Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn’t aimed at giving us negative feedback.

It's not just a cowardly dodge.

Mearls was clearly hoping to crowdsource the design of 5e. That's why there were so many barely functional "playtests".... he was presenting the outline and hoping that the community would write in the actual systems and subsystems so that he could take all the credit for all the design.

It might have even worked if the public playtest of Pathfinder hadn't burned out the design community and convinced them that working with an actual company who would steal all the credit was a suckers bet.

[Cyberzombie]

Did you notice this:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, these systems are aimed at specific subsets of players. Testing them in public would just result in a lot of people that the system isn’t aimed at giving us negative feedback.

Even though at the start of every survey, they ask people what their favorite edition is, so they can very easily filter 4E fans from everyone else if they want to test their 4E Combat module.

But this would require Mearls actually wrote a module to test, which he hasn't.

[ishy]

An optional tactical combat system, with rules for [. . . ] tanking, and so forth, as options any character can attempt.

Really wondering what they are thinking there.

[Lago PARANOIA]

@ishy: Yeah, really. When your optional subsystem is supposed to: "Remove DM adjudication of things like cover, and expanded, basic combat options to allow for forced movement, tanking, and so forth, as options any character can attempt", it makes me wonder what you expect your foundational combat engine to look like.

I mean, that kind of shit is so incredibly basic that even some board games are supposed to have it. If you don't have rules for cover or tanking, your combat engine can aspire to have combat shallow as an 8-bit jRPG.

[Tumbling Down]

The underlying math of the game. We’ll run stress tests on the numbers, monster abilities, and so on to make sure that everything shakes out as we expect. This work is important to making adventure and encounter design fast and easy. It also ensures that the classes play fair.

You will fail Mearls. You are an idiot. Even if you weren't a total math failure, we know that if your math is "right" it's because it "shakes out as [you] expect", the game will suck crusty scab-covered scrotums. Because what you expect is apparently a game where no one can do anything, all the PCs must suck dicks at everything so the DM can railroad plot-rape them, and Storm Giants cant even break down a fucking door.

For that reason, we should pray that you horribly screw up the math, then maybe Dragons won't have to worry about squads of children with slingshots.

There won't be any math. Remember his skill challenge bullshit article? Where he all-but-admitted that, since he failed over and over again to get the 4e math to produce any even vaguely desirable results, he was just gonna start with results he wanted and work backwards from there. Well, was that is, since actually, he didn't do that either and just said to have the whole thing resolve through the magic of DM arbitration.

So yeah, if that article is even remotely representative of mike mearls' design process, and I think we can asume as much, the odds are pretty low that 5e will ever end up having something even vaguely approaching mathematical operations (not even good ones mind you, just any at all). Instead, when he says "This work is important to making adventure and encounter design fast and easy.", he really, really means the quick and dirty fast and easy part. Get ready to embrace the future of gaming.

As you walk through the forrest, you come to a clearing, in the clearing is an owlbear. To proceed, Flip a coin. Heads: fuck you. Tails: fuck you with a rake.

[shadzar]

echo

so in the interest of re-uniting all fans of D&D such that it makes adventures like that dragonsspear one for 3.5, 4th, DDN... it is saying D&D isnt for TSR-edition fans (but we want to unite you with all other D&D fans), so you have no say or right to complain about DDN?

i can see that as Mearls coup-de-grace for D&D the TTRPG. wont be long until he plays MC Derps-a-lot on the street corner for wine money right behind all the other edition heads for the DDN fiasco that turns out to be worse than the 4E fiasco.

[TiaC]

As you walk through the forrest, you come to a clearing, in the clearing is an owlbear. To proceed, Flip a coin. Heads: fuck you. Tails: fuck you with a rake.

I think the typos add that extra layer of authenticity to your impression of Mearls half-assing things.

[tussock]

I'm not busy next week, and I've almost read Pathfinder a couple times. Why don't I just ...

[*] Fix the math for it, you know, so Monks don't suck, and the whole LFQW thing. Easy as, now that we've got the "feel" of the thing set in stone.
[*] Fold all that 2nd edition combat & tactics jazz in there as well, in a way that accounts for everything that happened in 4th edition. No problem.
[*] Copy over some Forge games rules, for a laugh, without disturbing the other subjects here. How hard could that even be? They're like 5 pages each.
[*] Oooh, and a build-you-own class system. Though even I have to admit it'll be a shit sandwich.
[*] What the hell, it's a whole week, Politics, Armies, Taxes, Realm Morale, large-scale event generator, and why not an original wargame that makes sense compared to that self-build character math with micro-management and freeform outcomes thing that I start off with. Making popular wargames is a bit of a laugh. Sooo easy.

Still leaves the weekend free. Who's up for some Boggle(tm)?

It's as well they have their magical faerie powers, because that is going to take several miracles in rather short order just to produce anything comprehensible, let alone functional, let alone good.

Fucking hell, I thought just retrofitting the math on his little dungeon-bash game would be a serious-ass problem for them. Maybe they'd touch on the skill and exploration bits. All that though? Fuck. That can not end well.

[Guyr Adamantine]

An optional dramatic system that emphasizes D&D as a storytelling activity. This system treads ground that D&D hasn’t formally embraced in the past. It casts a gaming group as collaborative storytellers, with the DM managing the action and everyone contributing events, plots twists, and sudden, dramatic turns.

So many buzzwords, my brain hurts.

[Josh_Kablack]

A year and a half back when my new job and various other members' job and family commitments killed my primary RPG group, I was pretty bummed. But Mearls work on 5e has really helped me get over that, so I gotta give him some props.

[Corsair114]

I'm pretty new at this whole "Make your own RPG" thing... and I think I'm doing better than WotC. This is quite depressing.

[infected slut princess]

I just looked at a couple other forums and they seem to be fapping furiously to this Mearls article. They truly are clueless.

[Previn]

The math isn't unfixable. Hell, we've already nailed down the basics of how to fix the skill system, and the rest of it is just sitting down and actually running the numbers.

There's nothing really broken with what they're presenting, even if it's not really that good, especially with how far TTRPGs have advanced, and it's really easy to sell rules light rpgs based on users experiences because good DMs and players can have fun no matter the system and that's pretty easy to spin around into marketing.

I think it's going to get a bigger and more welcoming reception than 4e, but that it's going to find it's end of life much quicker than any previous edition of D&D did. It's focused on crazily narrow band of power, and it's still basically a combat game. There is nothing about 5e that's going to let you become powerful enough to actually influence the setting, and it doesn't have the handles for dealing with non-combat stuff besides skill checks.

I expect a 20th level rogue to be doing things that were impossible for a 1st level rogue to even contemplate, much less attempt. Instead, I hit things harder and am marginally better at doing the same mundane crap I was at 1st level. Heck, there is a good chance I'm dealing with the exact same DCs at 20th level as I was at 1st level.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think it's going to get a bigger and more welcoming reception than 4e,

Okay, what's this sentiment based on?

Also:

The math isn't unfixable. Hell, we've already nailed down the basics of how to fix the skill system, and the rest of it is just sitting down and actually running the numbers.

There is nothing about 5e that's going to let you become powerful enough to actually influence the setting, and it doesn't have the handles for dealing with non-combat stuff besides skill checks.

While these statements don't contradict each other, the latter failure makes the first design goal pretty much useless for a class-and-level game with significant advancement.

No one gives a shit how good the math is if it doesn't lead to anything good or interesting. What's the common rejoinder to 4Erries baying that the math in 4E D&D just works? Not: 'the math isn't balanced, stop flogging that discredited talking point' but 'so fucking what, you can't do anything cool in the game regardless'.

[Previn]

I think it's going to get a bigger and more welcoming reception than 4e,

Okay, what's this sentiment based on?

What makes you think it's not? People seriously think 4e is a good game, and that it was the best thing to ever happen to D&D. 5e is trying to swim in the rules light pool and that means that people will forgive a heck of a lot more. Look at how well slapping the D&D name on 4e made an objectively bad game sell.

Seriously:

I just looked at a couple other forums and they seem to be fapping furiously to this Mearls article. They truly are clueless.

While these statements don't contradict each other, the latter failure makes the first design goal pretty much useless for a class-and-level game with significant advancement.

I'm not aware that they promised significant advancement. It was a feature of 3.x, and 2e, but it wasn't really a part of 4e and I don't think it was ever really a part of 5e either since nothing about 5e ever pointed in that direction.

What makes you think that when things like 4e, and Rifts still make profit, that 5e is going to be a huge failure? It looks like it's going to be about as as good mechanically as your average indy 'old school' D&D clone, but it's going to have the D&D name on it, and a huge published pushing it. If they are pandering and they do that well enough they sell a meh game to a lot of people which they see as a success.

I'm just not seeing 5e as a bad enough game that the masses will care about it's short comings until they've been playing it for a while.

[tussock]

I just looked at a couple other forums and they seem to be fapping furiously to this Mearls article. They truly are clueless.

If you took it at face value, it's a pretty incredible thing to be delivering in under a year's time. If I thought it was possible I'd fap along with them. Mmm, super-D&D for everyone, what a pretty idea.

[infected slut princess]

Wow, haha, I just looked at that article again, and realized I missed the most hilarious part of this article:

The editors and a team of designers will finalize work on the core game. This work consists of squashing bugs, simplifying things, and incorporating the final round of public feedback. The game’s foundation will be set in stone, as will the core options for the classes.

Meanwhile, a second design team will tackle a number of outstanding topics. These include the following elements.

- ...underlying math of the game...
- ...tactical combat system...
- ...dramatic system...
- ...system that cranks up character customization ... really more of a set of guidelines...
- ...campaign system... managing a domain, running a business, playing politics... mass combat...

Ok. I am blown away. Let me see if I understand what's happening here:

They don't even really HAVE much of a game. But the editors and some designers are going to work on that, the "core game." Meanwhile, a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TEAM is going to be working on systems that, for D&D, should maybe sorta be part of the "core game" in the first place.

And one of those systems that the completely different design team will be working on is THE UNDERLYING MATH OF THE GAME.

WHAT[/i]

[Voss]

Sigh. Every time I even begin to suspect they could pull a functioning product out, Mearls opens his damn mouth.

With a lot of work, they could have gotten the 'final playtest' documents to congeal into something playable... if they focused on it (and especially the math) completely. Treating the math as an outside factor for a B-list dev team to solve independent of the actual game is beyond baffling, however. There is no universe where this is rational and sensible.

As for the rest of it, it seems pretty easy:

-rehash the D&D miniatures rules.

-rehash 2nd edition 'player's option' and kit bullshit (I've a feeling that the 'subclasses' he is referring to is just the paths, schools and whatnot that kick in at level 3 and give whatever bonuses every couple levels). So you get some tangentially related bullshit to flesh out the options.

-'downtime' bullshit will almost certainly be the crap from the 3.5 DMG2, especially the business rules. Expect it to be awful. And maybe domain management will crib from the old Birthright shit.

- the storytelling system will be a book full of fluff and nonsense that will barely sell and the people who do like it will take it far too seriously. There is no way that is going to be good.