Competence, Balance, and Sales

[SphereOfFeetMan]

Hello. I have some thoughts on an issue concerning WotC, and I was hoping some other people could lend some of their insight. On occasion, I have considered how competent some game designers are while reading new WotC D&D material. This in itself is not revelatory, nor uncommon to many of you I am sure.

I am sure that a lot of the new material that finds its way over to insane builds on the CO board are the result of such things as gamer ingenuity, and difficult to predict from a game designer’s point of view (relatively).

That said, however, there are some nigh inexcusable game elements introduced that make me question not only the designers competency, but also their intent.

Put more explicitly, my main question is this: Is the publishing of stupefyingly broken material purely the result of incompetence, or is it purposely put in to sell books, and to the detriment of the game?

Of course we all have different definitions of what is balanced or what is not, and the following examples might not push your “Goddamn it, that’s Broken” button*. If not, then think of some others. I’m sure you can.

A secondary question. If we assume the aforementioned statement to be true, are there some prototypical, or book-defining broken elements introduced to ‘sell the book’?

Some examples:
Complete Divine: Divine Metamagic (Persistent, mostly)
Complete Adventurer: Wraithstrike
Libris Mortis: Nightsticks
Phb 2: Arcane Thesis (The most literal and powerful reading)
Frostburn: Shivering Touch

So, for a more specific example, let us examine Wraithstrike. It has become the ‘must have’ for “gishes.” In fact, it has been a sort of mini-revolution in the power level of fighter mages, and a must have. Therefore Complete Adventurer is a must have book.

So what do people think? I have listed a few options below for people to rally their thoughts around:

1) Pure Incompetence
2) A combination of incompetence and purposely broken material meant to ‘sell the book’
3) No intentional broken material meant to ‘sell the book’, simply an evolution of where the game is going

If Wraithstrike or the like* doesn’t do it for you, consider something that does. For me, the strongest reaction I can remember was upon reading the 3.5 version of Shapechange for the first time. Although interestingly, in that case, I quite distinctly remember the author defending the change in earnest. So maybe I am just seeing more than is there.

Thoughts?

[User3]

First, I’m not about to ascribe any bad faith efforts to WotC. They are in the business of making books, and I’m willing to just believe that they’d like to make the best books possible.

That being said, 3.0 revolutionized the game for one simple reason: it was aggressively playtested. Any flaws in 3.0 come from the fact that it was only playetested in the lower levels (where most guys like to play, or end up playing because campaigns tend to end for a variety of reasons). I mean, we all know why Planar Binding sucks (not many playtesters made it to 9th level).

Its much the same with all of the books of 3.X, and most especially with the recent run of books. Playtesting in your home campaign is fine, but you don’t know if a feat, class feature, spells, etc, can be broken unless enough monkeys type on typerwriters.

I mean, the game was never designed to go past 8th level. Why else you we need crazy hook-up classes to play a fighter/wizard or a cleric/thief or any of the other things people want?

But I have high hopes for 4.0, because the current design philosophy seems to be: make people pay to be playtesters. Tome of Magic and Tome of Battle are both examples of relatively recent ideas in magic and battle effects, and they seem to exist purely for playtesting purposes.

Will this mean a better DnD? Probably not. Too many current designers don’t listen to feedback, and they tend to have a low opinion of their fellow gamers. Most likely, they’ll throw things against the wall and people will still play DnD, regardless of its flaw as bad DnD is like bad pizza….even when its bad its still pretty good, otherwise why do people wax poetic on the merits of the Tomb of Horrors or other deathtrap dungeons of their youth?

[User3]

So you're saying D&D is sex?

[Digestor]

1171348756[/unixtime]]So you're saying D&D is sex?

A new level of nerdiness has been achieved, hahaha. Two things that are usually construed as polar opposites... the same! Truly, tis the win.rar.

I don't believe the "crappy" books are sold simply for profit and stupidity - I'm sure they honestly are trying to make everyone happy... and failing miserably at it, due to the very nature of making everyone happy (uhh it's not possible).

[Username17]

The 3.5 shapechange revision is an interesting example, as it represents to my knowledge the fastest reporting of a discovered infinite power loop - a record setting negative ten months.

See, discussions about whether shapechange should grant Supernatural abilities abounded on the official WotC discussion board long before the 3.5 books were put together. And the general consensus was that they shouldn't. Because I personally had the last word: I created and named Phoenix Duplication. See, in 3rd edition, all the problematic abilities in the game were relegated to the (Su) tag because those were uncopiable. It was actually an ellegant if simplistic approach. Because hey, if you could copy a Phoenix's (Su) stuff, you'd have an infinite self-duplicating power when combined with magic jar.

So I'm somewhat leary of ascribing pure motivations to the current crop of authors. I have proof that Ed Stark personally was advised of the risks of allowing shapechange to copy (Su) abilities and he did it anyway on the grounds that his 18th level Druid wasn't good enough. Really. He was told about the problem a year before 3.5 hit the galley proofs, he played a high level druid, and he personally rewrote that spell with the stated goal of improving the power of the druid class.

So I know that egos and base power mongering are pushing some of these descisions. I've fvcking watched it happening. But it isn't always done that way.

Magic of Incarnum was basically a straight up focus group pitch. It's an honest attempt to fix the magic item problems with wealth-by-level. It's just not even remotely ready for prime time because it's a fvcking focus group pitch rather than a playtested game. Having magic items bound to chakra and using up soul points to get their power directly ties magic item power to character level - it's a way to ration peoples' magic items without trying to Scrooge people for coppers when they can create majestic tapestries with a wave of the hand.

All of the bullshit in MoI is simply because it's a first draft. I have no reason to believe that power mines were deliberately placed into it - which is more than I can say for the 3.5 PHB (somethingI know was separately and deliberately sabotaged by Andy Collins and Edward Stark).

eyeball deep in muddy water
-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Did you just make a Tool reference?

[RandomCasualty]

1171345842[/unixtime]]

Its much the same with all of the books of 3.X, and most especially with the recent run of books. Playtesting in your home campaign is fine, but you don’t know if a feat, class feature, spells, etc, can be broken unless enough monkeys type on typerwriters.

That I disagree with. People don't need to playtest wraithstrike to know it's going to be crazy overpowered. You should be able to spot shivering touch as a broken spell without the slightest thought.

Experienced DMs do that all the time when deciding what to allow in their games. Now, I don't think it's too much to ask that the guys who write the books have about as much knowledge as your average experienced DM. That would stop a lot of the crazy crap from getting produced.

The test is easy.. you hand them a bunch of abilities, some of them balanced, some ridiculously broken and some ridiculously underpowered. If people can't figure out that the dread pirate sucks or that wraithstrike is broken, they shouldn't be writing books for D&D.

Now you're still going to get some crazy combos when two books interact, but at the very least, a book can be balanced with itself.

[User3]

1171357037[/unixtime]]
All of the bullshit in MoI is simply because it's a first draft. I have no reason to believe that power mines were deliberately placed into it - which is more than I can say for the 3.5 PHB (somethingI know was separately and deliberately sabotaged by Andy Collins and Edward Stark).

I'd be interested in hearing what else they did to sabotage 3.5. If for no other reason than to have areas I know need attention.

-Squirrelloid

[Zherog]

So as somebody who has done a little bit of work on the "inside*" I'm going to add two things.

WotC's Process

So, WotC decides to write a book. Typically, it's about 12-15 months from publication when they give the idea to their writers (they call them designers). Most of the writers are freelancers - hired to write a specific project - rather than WotC employees. From what I've gathered, a writer has anywhere from about 30 days to 3 months to produce their work.

When the designer is done with it, the work gets passed on to a "developer." This person is a WotC employee. Their job is to read through what the designers wrote, make tweaks where they see problems, request revisions from the writer, and smooth over any edges where two designers worked on the same chapter, so it sounds like it's written by one "voice."

After the developer finishes, he/she passes the book on to the editors. Many (if not most) of these folks are also freelancers. They edit for two things. First, they do the obvious stuff - spelling, bitching about passive voice, and so on. They're also supposed to edit game content, though. For example, an editor is expected to know the difference between incorporal and ethereal, and is also expected to make the changes in the document when he/she believes it's being used incorrectly. When all the editors are done, the work is passed on to the managing editor, who reads it to make sure things make sense and all that jazz.

There's a lot of touch points in the process. Sometimes, a writer writes some really stupid shit - I know, I've done it. Sometimes, a writer comes up with a super-awesome idea, and by the time the developer and editor finish with it, it's really stupid shit. I know that, too - I've had that happen.

Basically, there's times the writers fuck up. There's other times, though, where the writer gets the blame, but it's really somebody else's mistake. A good place to see both of these in action is the first chapter of Complete Mage. Kolja (the dude who wrote that section) has admitted that some of the mistakes are his. He's also on record as saying some things that should be obvious advice (like Persistent Spell) was removed at some point in the process.

WotC's Design Methodology

When you write something for WotC, with few exceptions you're only supposed to consider material from the core books as you write things. If you're writing for a campaign setting (FR or Eberron), you also need to keep the campaign setting book in mind. Lately, WotC has started making more references to non-core material in their books - but that's a relatively recent trend.

So what's this mean? Well, we can use night sticks as an example. When the designer is writing material for Libris Mortis, he/she is only supposed to consider core material. In that context, Divine Metamagic (Persistent Spell) doesn't exist. As far as I know, night sticks really aren't broken unless they're being used to fuel your persistent buffs.

Now, of course that doesn't mean a designer should completely forget those other things exist. It would be nice if the designer/developer/editor who worked on night sticks said, "Hey! These things work mighty nice with Divine Metamagic from Complete Divine. Maybe we should add a line to limit its use to actual turning attempts." And, taking the first point into consideration, it's possible the designer did just that, but the developer or editor removed it.

***

So, with all that said...

I don't think WotC writes material with the folks on this board as their target audience. They write more for the folks who think a fighter 11 is perfectly fine; the people who see no problems multiclassing a primary caster because it makes a cool concept in their mind; the people who never realize the power behind wild shape, and instead turn into bats and wolves and that sort of stuff. That's their target audience, and those people rarely uncover infinite loops and power problems.

I don't think WotC puts the game breaking stuff in there on purpose.



* Just so there's no misrepresentation of things... my credits to date all exist with Paizo in Dragon Magazine. Paizo uses the same process as WotC for developing their articles (with the added step that WotC has to "bless" everything). In addition, I've sat in discussions with WotC about their process, and I'm on their freelancer list - just waiting for an assignment. In addition, I've done work for other companies that I can't talk about, but they run things through a similar design/develop/edit process.

[bitnine]

You just wait. Come 2008 WotC will have fully rode the trend and their new supplements will just be registrations to view and edit different sections of a D&D wiki.