The Failure of Modern RPG Design

[saithorthepyro]

So a few months ago we had a thread started about what exactly is modern RPG design, which quickly got hijacked into Silva clone ver. 3.21 and turned into yet another discussion of PBTA and how modern design was favoring rules-lite systems who better 'emulated single genres'. Trying to restart and ignoring the stupidity of PBTA (To an extent, it actually serves as a good example of how this fails), lets talk about how Modern RPG Design has failed.

The consensus of the Den puts the last RPG that most can agree was well designed is probably DnD 3rd edition, back in 2003. Others might say Shadowrun 4th edition back in 2005. Either one seems to be the one with the majority consensus anyway, putting the mid-2000s as when actually good mechanical games were put out that most everyone could agree on. I personally like Pathfinder, Symbaroum, Eclipse Phase, and more recent games, but I doubt the majority of the Den would agree with me. As is since then most of the games produced have had serious mechanical problems, serious fluff problems, or a combination of both. As I'd say that modern RPG design is two new categories, both of which show how Modern RPG Design has failed to move forward.

The first category, the nostalgia gabs: These are your OSR crowd groups, Pathfinder second edition, and 5th edition, either Vampire, Shadowrun, or DnD. Games that mainly exist to grab players of previous editions or older games in the same style as their market. As is such they share the same flaws as their predecessors that they try to emulate. Vampire got burned a fair bit by focusing on the elements of VtM that not many people enjoyed, as well as embracing ninety edginess in a decade where that kind of edginess has long since fallen out of favor. OSR books suffer the same issues the books they try to emulate do, particularly anyone trying to emulate 2nd edition DnD, and very much exist as a vocal minority on the interwebs. Pathfinder 2nd edition weirdly is making a nostalgia grab for 4th edition players, and is already paying for that pre-release. 1st edition Pathfinder fans mostly seem to find the upcoming system exactly what the they never wanted. Shadowrun 5th edition mostly coasts along by keeping the same system but worse, but not worse enough to have majorly alienated the fanbase to an extent it's not profitable.

DnD 5th edition is the one outlier as the major hit of the past decade, but frankly that's more a miracle than any work by the DnD department. They lucked out in that their edition was release shortly before appearances of DnD in popular TV shows, con appearances, and podcasts. Stranger Things was perfectly suited to advertise, a nostalgic show for the eighties timed at the same time as an edition designed entirely around appealing to past players by trying to have a frankensteined appeal (at least in appearance) to players of all editions. I say it's this that has kept 5th edition alive, since otherwise it's a walking husk of a game with just enough loose skin covering bones to give the appearance of having flesh underneath.

Overall these games fail in terms of being Modern RPG Design not just because they are almost all poorly designed form a mechanical standpoint but also because they do next to nothing new, merely being rehashes of past products that do nothing to actually improve on what came before.

2nd category: Rules-lite. This is your PBTA. Your FATE. Again your 5E DnD (to a lesser extent). There's a host of others, most of which were Silva's list in the previous thread of examples of modern RPG design. I'll say off the bat that despite it's issues I like FATE. And Rules-lite games do have a place, they can be fun beers and pretzels games, they can be fun one-shots or games to play with people you are just bringing into the hobby and so on, with the exception of PbTA and definitely Apocalypse World itself. Their sin for Modern RPG design is the same as Nostalgia grabs. This isn't new. Munchausen exists. Munchausen has existed for a long time. I'm damn sure there are also more Rules-lite RPGs out there that aren't from after 2008 that are also equal to the modern ones if not better than them.

3rd category: MMORPGS on the tabletop. This category is small, 4e DnD, PF 2E and 13th Age although having never read it, I can't comment on 13th age. These are the games that try and shoehorn in MMO style abilities, world-building, and monsters into TTRPG's without understanding why they don't work on tabletop. Abilities and rules that have no fluff justification for why they work that way or even contradict the game fluff. Weird lingo that makes no sense used in the rules (AW is guilty of this as well). Lack of interesting abilities that tinker with the world around you. Lack of monsters interacting outside of combat. Lack of monster information that you can use. Lack of anything that differentiates a TTRPG from an MMO. Lack of combat that better fits a TTRPG than an MMO. This categories sins are simple, they miss the point of why people play MMO's on a computer, and actual TTRPG's on a tabletop.

TLDR: Modern RPG Design, by and large, has failed to advance the hobby beyond the year 2005. There are individual games that do better than most, and do make small individual advances, but the majority do not.

[jt]

I don't think the conditions exist for a better RPG to rise to prominence right now.

Let's say that someone dropped a significantly better-designed RPG on drivethrurpg yesterday. How would you find out?

Word of mouth? PBTA has been the new hotness according to word of mouth. Heck, the worst RPG I've ever read (Cthulhutech) was a constant topic on the RPG boards I was reading for months when it came out.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Let's say that someone dropped a significantly better-designed RPG on drivethrurpg yesterday. How would you find out?

Ideally, just because the design is good doesn't mean the marketing is bad.

[saithorthepyro]

I think jt's point is one that is going to be a major factor. Today's market is flooded with lots of smaller RPGs that it's a struggle for non-established names to get the recognition they could rightly deserve. It's an issue that Steam suffers on a larger scale, but the video game market has the advantage that it's a lot easier to identify the really incompetently made ones. And given the market, I'd say just because the design is good doesn't mean the market will recognize it as a good game.

[Dean]

I personally like Pathfinder, Symbaroum, Eclipse Phase, and more recent games, but I doubt the majority of the Den would agree with me.

I don't think it's that people would argue what you should like and enjoy, it's what systems are structurally good. I've enjoyed Pathfinder games over the last 8 years or whatever but Pathfinder is still a very lazy copy paste of another system. Laziness more than anything appears to be the bane of modern game design. It's a field that has a customer base that is almost entirely uneducated about the products they buy because they emotionally invest in the product before, during, and after using it. If someone buys a car and it's a shitty car they remember to not buy Chevy's in the future. If some lazy asshole puts out a shitty Apoc World hack that's just 80 pages of fluff for 30 dollars the person who bought it will defend it. Because anyone telling them it's not good is attacking a book they read and a thing they do with their friends. As a result the field is chock full of garbage self important fanboys like Zac S who think their 90 page book about the Snake Empire of Znzshnul is worth anything to fucking anyone. It's market chock full of lazy garbage mostly because the leaders of the market have exclusively produced lazy garbage for over a decade now and the last thing they made that wasn't overtly lazy garbage was 4th edition and that was so bad it crashed the entire TTRPG market for years.

There are only 2 ways out of the current state of the ttrpg market.
1) Some big dog like D&D or Shadowrun gets a change in ownership and an entire new team is put together to design it under someone's vision. If that team puts out a strong modern product we would all gravitate to playing a lot more Shadowrun over the next 10 years (or whatever it was). Basically Vampire had a shot at this, where if the Free League had really put together a strong product and the slow word of mouth was that Vampire was back and it was really really good that would draw players to those banners and could show there was a financial incentive to making a quality product. This could direct other companies to make other quality products instead of the current model where you try to write as few rules as possible, get as many patreon backers, and if possible get fans to pay you to write stuff in their own book.

2) Some obscure genius makes a surprisingly great product which over the course of the next 10 years gains slow momentum to become the next product we're all aware of. If Koumei got so inspired by some idea that she spent the next few years working tirelessly at the next big thing, sold her car to self publish, then started touring cons with it and just slowly building positive word of mouth that's the sort of thing that would do it....slowly. Someone somewhere doing exactly what Gygax and Arneson did, putting everything into their idea and having the right mix of talent and drive to push a thing slowly into the public consciousness over a decade. It would not surprise me in any way if the game we were all playing in 2030 was something that does not exist today and certainly did not exist in the 80's. The field is old enough that it may need fresh blood to reinvent itself and survive as anything more notable than an obscure game store hobby like miniature building or flying remote controlled planes.

[Ancient History]

I won't even agree to the idea that 3rd edition D&D was well-designed. But it was better designed, mechanically, than AD&D and Exalted, and it had actual design principles that you could quickly grasp and were encouraged to churn out content for.

3rd edition basically got people thinking about game design in a way that they had not done so. It was still extremely flawed, especially at the higher levels (anything past 6th, usually) and as the game bloated out with more classes, feats, spells, and alternate systems than could be managed.

It was still objectively not a great game. Essentially nothing was done to the setting, even though Earthdawn had been out for ages. A lot of the basics vis a vis dungeon crawling and Vancian spellcasting were just assumed out of some kind of cultural osmosis. The first version of 3.0 had a lot of weird hangovers from AD&D, like fucking apprentice-levels and shit.

3e got better, and it got worse. It was an important step in game development, not because it was good, but because it was good enough, and because it encouraged people to write their own shit.

[saithorthepyro]

Perhaps maybe objectively good design was a bad way to describe them, but my general point is that we haven't had a game that has really pushed forward actual game design or even reached the level of things like 3e DnD or SR 4e. And I don't see that changing in the current environment because the big boys are stuck in complacency or being replaced by people who want to further go in a worse direction, and because the market is too over-saturated for a meaningful impact. Dean's Ten-year product could happen, or it could never break out of obscurity from being buried under OSR, PBTA, and rules-lite retroclones.

Also, in a somewhat off-topic rant, why the hell is Pathfinder 2nd edition trying to emulate goddamn 4e? Are they trying to repeat their initial success with the 4e crowd....over half a decade after 5e came out....for an audience several magnitudes smaller?

[Orca]

Paizo would never have produced Pathfinder if the D&D 4e licence was workable for them. It's pretty clear that the people at the top in Paizo were happy enough with D&D 4e as a game, and that their new game replicates some of those design decisions (not that many though; there are new faults!) just follows on from that.

D&D 3e's biggest innovation? The OGL. Wizards brought on board small publishers who didn't want the work of making their own game but wanted to publish setting books or adventures. Pathfinders' version of that brought some with them, but they suffered from the lack of the D&D name (which clearly matters) and their own excessive complexity. PF2 will do the same but having offended their own conservative player base with the change & not produced an especially good game as far as I can tell, and still lacking the D&D name I'll be surprised if I see it do as well as PF1 did.[/i]

[tussock]

3.0 D&D was good simply because it was focused on a specific thing that the players of the time wanted to play, and ran a serious playtest for a couple of years as they fiddled with things to get it working. It's the later changes to things that were clunky, they were still fixing problems and a few of the last fixes didn't work terribly well.

But the original 1999 marketing was "Back to the Dungeon". It was for low-mid level play in a very dungeon-bash focused game engine, with exactly the changes that the players were happy for them to make. Multiple large surveys of their 1000+ playtesters and the wider AD&D market, controlled and blind rather than bloody web votes with comments attached.

It was iterative design, they changed a few things each time in response to specific problems, but they understood which things they could not change without a riot, and they got that very right, for the time.

--

Nothing has done that since. 4e was trying to turn their 3e Miniatures game into a full RPG, only without the roleplaying bit, just the fights. But then they binned the actual fight mechanics changes that players said were needed and kept the stuff almost no one was wanting because the last-minute complete re-write of power schedules had to be extremely simple to get it finished. That was focused, but not on what people actually wanted. It certainly wasn't iterative, they just kept binning complete designs and starting over, at least twice. Obviously they didn't playtest it because the rules are horrible.

5th edition D&D, like, the "playtest" was just random shit thrown at a wall each time, and very little of any of it is in the final product. Almost everything they were promising that people said they wanted, just never happened, they never really tried beyond the initial promises. The questions their web-polling asked had nothing to do with the rules that turned up in the next playtest, actually finding the changes wasn't all that easy. There was nothing like a vision of what you were intended to do with the game, other than please, please call it "D&D" again, please make it "feel right". At doing what? Who knows, even the playtest adventure itself was extremely open-ended and undirected, which is cool for real play, but fucking playtesters need to grind out the same stuff so you get real data from it!

--

3e's got problems with extending it, but you can run great low-mid level dungeon bashes. It's fun. 4e was a horrible, horrible grind to play by the rules, right from the start, and that never changed, if anything it got worse as you levelled up. 5e, who the fuck knows, the fans tell me it's great because the rules don't get in the way of whatever the fuck it is they're doing with their evenings.

--

Like, design is a skill, and recently the designers of RPGs do not seem to have it. At all. When you design a car, it's gotta do car stuff, and there's lots you can't change because that stuff makes the car stuff happen. You just fix the problems your customers and their mechanics tell you about and put a shiny new cover on it. Don't fucking redesign the shape of the wheels, and don't fucking leave them off.

[Ignimortis]

3e's got problems with extending it, but you can run great low-mid level dungeon bashes. It's fun. 4e was a horrible, horrible grind to play by the rules, right from the start, and that never changed, if anything it got worse as you levelled up. 5e, who the fuck knows, the fans tell me it's great because the rules don't get in the way of whatever the fuck it is they're doing with their evenings.

If you consider high levels of 3.5 a mistake, then I'd say that even 3e mistakes are great. I simply adore the fact that 3.5 has mechanical tiers of play which aren't strictly enforced but still work. A level 15 Fighter (well, not the PHB one, because they're a shit class 1-20) can wreck an army of low-level soldiers. Very few games let you do this inside the same game which had you start as a shit-eating peasant in soggy leathers and a club with a nail in it.

3.5 as a base, the d20 system, is actually very well-suited to do shit that Exalted purports itself to be, if you make a few minor corrections and give martial characters actual powers beyond "I hit good". It's almost certainly less work than most other games that present themselves as high-power would take to make them good/interesting.

[obexpe]

5E has made it abundantly clear to any competitors that name recognition is what sells games. For industry-minded folk that just want to build a brand, that means either holding on for dear life to a recognizable license (i.e. Shadowrun/Vampire) or designing a game entirely around "D&D but (X)".

That these kind of games actually sell means that the process will just keep going. Profit-driven games will naturally be bad because they're built in this aformentioned reactionary manner. Indie RPG writers who want to provide an alternative will be forced to grovel for pennies while never getting anywhere near the recognition of (considerably worse) licensed games. Pretty much no one wants to make a career out of that. Overwhelmingly, when I talk to people who are (or were) employed in the RPG scene (be they freelancers, indie writers, or employees at Catalyst) they are brimming with pessimism for the future of TRPGs. This kind of societal despair doesn't just go away once someone releases a great game. It's only going to go away if the current scene becomes such an apparent problem that almost no one wants to stomach it anymore.

If that great unrest ever happens (and I doubt it will) I don't think most of us will even be alive to see it. TRPGs are (and have been) nothing but a novelty for most people. You're not going to get a rate of advancement that video games or movies have because most people don't even see TRPGS as a medium.

[Thaluikhain]

Eh, myself I sorta suspect that the next big thing in gaming will be big due to something totally unrelated to the game as such. If, say, the next Hunger Games had a spin-off RPG that came out as the franchise's popularity peaked.

Or, alternatively, if Kendall Jenner married a RPG creator and Kris Jenner decided to heavily promote it.

[jt]

When we talk about RPG design we're usually talking about game mechanics, character creation systems, dice, and so forth. And while I care about these things, I think they're pretty low down on the list of stuff that actually matters.

D&D 5E works because it tells you how to make a character, plops everyone down at a table, and then promptly runs out of rules and forces you to start making shit up. D&D 4E failed because it has coherent rules that you can easily follow, and the process of following them isn't fun. From our usual understanding of what design is - the game described in the rulebook - 5E fails before it even gets started, and it's not like 4E can be worse than making shit up, because you can make shit up in a 4E game too. But if we view the game as the activity people engage in as a result of reading the rulebook, it's clear that 5E leads to loosely described dungeon crawls and 4E leads to the world's slowest game of Fire Emblem, and one of these is more fun than the other.

Every D&D basically works no matter how bad it is because dungeons are so compelling. Pokemon Tabletop Adventures is a tire fire that still generates long-running campaigns because "go on a Pokemon adventure" is so solid. Again this sort of basic structure of what the players do in a session is outside of what we usually talk about with design. Though in this case it really should be part of even that narrow idea of design because the structure determines the challenges which determine what the characters use the rules for which determines what the rules actually mean.

I think there's a lot of room to innovate in the parts of the game outside of the table. We're still in a mode of someone wanting to play a TTRPG so much that they convince a bunch of friends to learn the rules, everyone makes characters, you all schedule time together and play, and then you need to schedule time with the exact same people again. The West Marches campaign style fixes a lot of this and is more accessible than ever with modern technology (it's so easy now to create a forum where your characters spend their downtime). There must be other new modes of play that aren't kicking it oldschool. And if we view the game as the activity that people engage in as a result of reading the rulebook, there's a lot more room to fiddle with this out of game stuff. You might even have actual rules for stuff that doesn't happen at a table.

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah, most of my RPG design knowledge comes from the Den, which is ironically why gempunks misses a bunch of elements that would actually convince denners to read it.

[K]

3e's got problems with extending it, but you can run great low-mid level dungeon bashes. It's fun. 4e was a horrible, horrible grind to play by the rules, right from the start, and that never changed, if anything it got worse as you levelled up. 5e, who the fuck knows, the fans tell me it's great because the rules don't get in the way of whatever the fuck it is they're doing with their evenings.

If you consider high levels of 3.5 a mistake, then I'd say that even 3e mistakes are great. I simply adore the fact that 3.5 has mechanical tiers of play which aren't strictly enforced but still work. A level 15 Fighter (well, not the PHB one, because they're a shit class 1-20) can wreck an army of low-level soldiers. Very few games let you do this inside the same game which had you start as a shit-eating peasant in soggy leathers and a club with a nail in it.

3.5 as a base, the d20 system, is actually very well-suited to do shit that Exalted purports itself to be, if you make a few minor corrections and give martial characters actual powers beyond "I hit good". It's almost certainly less work than most other games that present themselves as high-power would take to make them good/interesting.

3.X high-level play can be considered a failure because it produced a less interesting high-level play experience than 2e.

People seem to forget that in 2e, a 15th level Fighter probably had seven or more magic swords, some of which did shit like cutting the heads off dragons if you critted on one of your five attacks. People had so many magic rings in possession that one ring per hand had to be enforced, and even the Fighter probably was casting enough spells off items to be solving some portion of the party's problems with magic.

The fact that 3.X overall was a better and easier game to play and run is why it so quickly took over from 2e.

[WiserOdin032402]

And yet I haven't seen many products from the OSR movement that actually want to re-create the high level experience. In fact, I haven't seen any products that really have a 'high level' in mind. It's all level 6 forever, as far as the eye can see.

[Trill]

From the things I've seen with OSR it seems far more focussed on low-level adventures. Stuff where you aren't much different from the townsfolk around you, constantly at danger from anything in the wildness.

not necessarily inept, but definitely at ground level

[Ignimortis]

3.X high-level play can be considered a failure because it produced a less interesting high-level play experience than 2e.

People seem to forget that in 2e, a 15th level Fighter probably had seven or more magic swords, some of which did shit like cutting the heads off dragons if you critted on one of your five attacks. People had so many magic rings in possession that one ring per hand had to be enforced, and even the Fighter probably was casting enough spells off items to be solving some portion of the party's problems with magic.

The fact that 3.X overall was a better and easier game to play and run is why it so quickly took over from 2e.

Late 3.5 was better at higher levels than early 3.5, because by then some classes cropped up that fixed most of the mistakes made when designing PHB classes. A party of, say, Beguiler, Warmage, Warblade, Binder and Favored Soul is much better at not being shit without each other, but also not being capable to do everything themselves, so it promotes both teamplay and spotlights.

A lot of 3.5 critique actually builds on the inverse to what makes it good IMO, as well - people want to keep throwing orcs at their players, and 3.5 doesn't do that well, because at some point a regular MM ork can't hit your character other than on a nat20.

And like other posters noted, OSR is usually focused on low-levels and being grounded as fuck, instead of "what's WBL supposed to mean" and autokilling 10 0HD creatures at level 10 per turn.

[OgreBattle]

From the things I've seen with OSR it seems far more focussed on low-level adventures. Stuff where you aren't much different from the townsfolk around you, constantly at danger from anything in the wildness.

not necessarily inept, but definitely at ground level

It feels weird for that sort of game to use hit points when that’s the mechanic for being tougher than a bear and fatal cat attacks

I think all the hard work of designing a non electronic game went into the board game boom

[Pedantic]

I think all the hard work of designing a non electronic game went into the board game boom

True, and more insidiously, board game consumers don't generally consider RPG design a related field. I am endlessly frustrated when all of my board gaming friends abruptly lose all critical faculties and apparently, ability to do basic math, when told the game is a TTRPG.

[K]

And yet I haven't seen many products from the OSR movement that actually want to re-create the high level experience. In fact, I haven't seen any products that really have a 'high level' in mind. It's all level 6 forever, as far as the eye can see.

The first problem is that high-level play was something that required a lot of imagination and cleverness to make fun because the rules did a hamfisted job of properly defining the problem of players interacting with the high-level environment* and the second problem is that the Old School movement is a bunch of hacks with no imagination or design skills who are aping the games of their betters.

I mean, I've read and even bought a few 2e clones, but aside from some more interesting art, none are an improvement to 2e.

*Bad high-level play was shit like dungeons where none of your dungeon-bypassing spells like teleport or passwall worked. Essentially, negating high-level abilities instead of accounting for them.

[WiserOdin032402]

I've seen some rank bullshit from a very recent 5e inspired OSR. I forget the name, but they added a luck stat equal to 10 + 1/2 your level, with your level maxing out at 12. This governs all of your saving throws, your random encounter rolls, and the game's 'revolutionary' retreat mechanic.

Every time you have to make a luck roll, be it a saving throw or something else, your luck score goes down by 1, and only recovers 1 point per long rest. And this 'retreat' mechanic was made so that 'The Game Master doesn't have to worry about how powerful an encounter is'. Except if you get enough fireballs thrown at you you'll run into something stupid powerful that basically oneshots you. In order to retreat from an encounter it has to be your turn and you have to roll under your luck stat on a d20

[Iduno]

Every time you have to make a luck roll, be it a saving throw or something else, your luck score goes down by 1, and only recovers 1 point per long rest. And this 'retreat' mechanic was made so that 'The Game Master doesn't have to worry about how powerful an encounter is'. Except if you get enough fireballs thrown at you you'll run into something stupid powerful that basically oneshots you. In order to retreat from an encounter it has to be your turn and you have to roll under your luck stat on a d20

That sounds a lot like they added the "goes down by 1 when you use it" after getting the rest to work, then never went back to check if making a change affected literally anything at all.

Sadly, I've seen the same (although less often) in engineering. Who does actual math without checking if the result is within a factor of 10 of being correct?

[OgreBattle]

And yet I haven't seen many products from the OSR movement that actually want to re-create the high level experience. In fact, I haven't seen any products that really have a 'high level' in mind. It's all level 6 forever, as far as the eye can see.

The first problem is that high-level play was something that required a lot of imagination and cleverness to make fun because the rules did a hamfisted job of properly defining the problem of players interacting with the high-level environment* and the second problem is that the Old School movement is a bunch of hacks with no imagination or design skills who are aping the games of their betters.

I mean, I've read and even bought a few 2e clones, but aside from some more interesting art, none are an improvement to 2e.

*Bad high-level play was shit like dungeons where none of your dungeon-bypassing spells like teleport or passwall worked. Essentially, negating high-level abilities instead of accounting for them.

So what exactly would be an improvement on 2e that's not "play 3.X"

[MGuy]

I've run and been in, very few high level games in my years being a GM and so I can't say what the whole of the hobby is like but I'm the only GM I know who has successfully run a game that went to high level to completion. Even friends of mine I personally introduced to the hobby and have helped into the GM seat, seem to fear or have a strong distaste for running games post level 12. I never played in public games often enough to dig through enough adventures to witness high level play in organized games but I've heard that it is often times very restrictive when it comes to allowing players creative agency to overcome challenges.

I say all of that to say I can believe that low level play iterated over the course of 20 levels is probably the most popular because people who have been into the hobby for a long time might not have any experience with interacting with a complex high level, in concept, game for most of not all their time in the game. 4e was the introduction point for a lot of people and we designed from the get go to disallow power use outside of combat for the most part and enforce dungeon delving to the end. 5th seems to follow suit but with less rules and not made to be explicitly an mmo on paper. I don't think that there is a huge section of the hobby who are really pining for the kind of high level play say someone like Lago was on about some years ago. Making new realities and populating them with new lifeforms through the use of the spell system doesn't seem to have a huge following while I think Fighter is still the most popular class people take up in the hobby.