Cargo Cultists

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Mar 04, 2015 4:00 am

It struck me today, again, that Mike Mearls and other industry game designers are all Cargo Cultists in terms of RPG design.

They write some progressions, attach some shiny new mechanical complications, write out some spells and feats and whatever else they're called in each system, add their profligate walls of flavour-text to get the book up to size, slap on the art, and then an RPG just happens! Somehow! Why isn't it working? What went wrong? Double the monster hit points! Why didn't that work? Extra dice! Why isn't it selling? It looks so much like an RPG!

Paizo too. White Wolf. All of them. That Shadowrun 5 thing where following the rules is a catastrophe, as it was in 4e D&D with the combat mechanics and also the non-combat mechanics, and the new Star Wars game with it's custom dice that do endless stupid things to the game, and it just goes on and on. d20 Star Wars changed the d20 mechanics such that the PCs would randomly die all the time to minor things, to try and make PCs impervious to minor things, and stuff like that is all over the place.

They obviously don't have the knowledge or skill to do the math and test the outcomes of their randomisation processes, nor are they interested in simulating it, nor will they read about it should someone do it for them. Certainly no intuition for it. The odds of building a functional RPG like that are very close to zero. Bounded accuracy works against everything 5e was supposed to be.

That's a Cargo Cult. It's got all the form and appearance but it doesn't actually work under the hood, and there's a tiny chunk of customers left who are just part of the problem by feeding their delusions. A search shows me this isn't exactly an original idea here, but it could be worth a thread anyway.

Are there any recent RPGs where the rules as a whole normally produce the outcomes they're supposed to produce? Or are they all just Cargo Cultists? Like GWB invading Iraq to turn it into the new Germany.

I suppose fairly trivial rule sets like Mouse Guard seem to work, in that case for their improvised indefinite problem-solver game of "keep talking until you roll a 4+", if everyone at least tries to play along.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Wed Mar 04, 2015 5:42 am

I guess that's what you may call a "flock of hacks."

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Wed Mar 04, 2015 5:20 pm

I'd say the most cult-like thing in RPGs is acting like you genuinely want feedback, getting feedback that hurts your pet notions and then "cognitive dissonance" kicks in and they double down and give you a triple helping of the food that you already told them tastes terrible.

You know how sometimes a cult will make a prediction and the rationalizing of why it didn't come true will make the cult even stronger? Cognitive dissonance. You know how a developer will get explicitly told by hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people that what he or she is doing is shit on toast minus the toast so they'll go, "Maybe I'm not implementing it well enough! Maybe I'm not giving them enough of the things they told me they don't like!"

Prime Example from here and other places...

Monster Manual IV was a debacle. It had like 30 pages taken up by bullshit polluted dragon eggs, every monster had like a 3 or 4 page writeup about ecology, economy, philosophy, a little map for a place it would live, a suggested encounter or FIVE. Monsters would have classes incorporated into them or actually be given class levels, which was more page bloat and creativity quashing nonsense that people explicitly said they did not want. Just worthless who-gives-a-shit page bloat.

Everybody told the guy who headed up Monster Manual IV, Dave Noonan, to give them 200 monsters in 250 pages and cut the bullshit.

RavenGM did a great review of MMV here...

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55020

So what did Noonan do? Everything he did in Monster Manual IV was brought into Monster Manual V. The most hated part of the IV, dragonspawn, was replicated in A THIRTY EFFING PAGE SECTION ON AN OBSCURE VARIETY OF MIND FLAYERS.

Monster Manual V is the perfect example of, "Quit lying to me, I know you love this as much as I do!" cultish cognitive dissonance.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Wed Mar 04, 2015 6:23 pm

That's because fans and players are cargo cultists and don't really think how their games work. Failures of game design are seen as failures of the players and not of the game.

There's no real concept of a game being a buggy piece of crap because this hobby started with a buggy piece of crap and spiraled out from there.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 12:36 am

Mask, I'd infer from your comment that players don't even want a functional game. They want the form and appearance of their precious ideal but don't even care if it works.

There's certainly some of that about in the dregs of the customer base, 5e was clearly written with that in mind, to chase those die-hards as customers. They believe so hard in that they're banking on it.

But I think there's a much bigger audience who do care, and thus do not play the worst examples of rule failures, and also tell all their friends not to play either. The two biggest sales hits for D&D (and thus RPGs in general) were

[*] B/X + AD&D PHB for 1st-10th level games. Tens of millions sold.
[*] 3.0 PHB/MM1/DMG for 1st-10th level games. Tens of millions sold.

Those games basically just work, 1-level Ranger dips and all. OD&D, most of AD&D, 2nd edition, Skills & Powers, 3.5, 4e, Pathfinder, Essentials, and 5e, none of them sold anything like as well, but they're all mechanically faulty in ways that directly spoil the experience. I agree that OD&D is a tragic mess of an origin, but it only sold a few thousand copies too, almost no one played it.

I imagine you could go through every RPG with multiple editions, and you'd find the best selling editions have rules which best support the stated goals of playing. I'm not well read enough to test that outside D&D, so opinions welcome.

--

But yes, the most hardcore fans are often cultists too, and that feeds the problem. True. 5th edition D&D totally encourages that type of fan. People crawling out of the woodwork to tell you that it's not the game's fault, it's the DM, for following the rules when they shouldn't have. Trippy stuff, but it's not going to sell well. "You're doing it wrong" scares off normal people by the thousands.

Stuff like Races of Eberron and 3e's MM V, they don't just have poor sales, they hurt sales forever afterward. Real customers get burnt and stop trusting the company, and I've already seen a few reports of that from 5e buyers. Telling everyone who'll listen that the game rules are bad, that they do not do what was promised. Not just here, even places where you get threads locked and posters banned for that.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:34 am

So what did Noonan do? Everything he did in Monster Manual IV was brought into Monster Manual V. The most hated part of the IV, dragonspawn, was replicated in A THIRTY EFFING PAGE SECTION ON AN OBSCURE VARIETY OF MIND FLAYERS.

[derail]I actually liked the Dragonspawn and Thoon entries. Though even I feel that they shouldn't be in a Monster Manual, and instead perhaps placed into an adventure path of some sort.[/derail]

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:41 am

Monster Manuals IV and V wanted to be Dragon Ecologies article compendiums; the problem is that they completely lacked any of the interest or utility of those, and instead ended up as bloated wastes of space.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 2:22 am

I could ask everybody at my campus gaming club if they know what a "tirbana" or a "rylkar" is and they'd guess it was some very obscure demon or devil or a subtype of outsider if they'd hazard a guess at all. They'd never know that they were monsters that got 1500 word entries in 3.5 Monster Manuals.

4E is basically Cargo Cult design. They put out 4 dry runs for 4E, Star Wars SAGA Edition, Tome of Battle, Magic of Incarnum and Tome of Magic and they chose to base the game off the two least popular versions of the dry run, Magic of Incarnum and Tome of Magic.

I have no idea why they abandoned many SAGA mechanics and completely pulled the plug on Orcus.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 4:00 pm

Uhmm what?
Magic of icarnum was supposed to be an entire product line in 3e, but was canned because it was so unpopular.

4e was in fact based on Tome of Battle.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 5:04 pm

ishy wrote:Uhmm what?
Magic of icarnum was supposed to be an entire product line in 3e, but was canned because it was so unpopular.

4e was in fact based on Tome of Battle.

This is factually wrong. Basically backward in fact. Tome of Battle was made out of an earlier draft of 4e that got scrapped for not having daily use limits. Mearls took chunks of that dtaft and did some very minimal conversion to 3e mechanics and shat it out as a throwaway.

It was only later, after Orcus had been scrapped and the 4e we actually saw was mostly finished that they noticed that the book of weeaboo fightan magic was really popular. They didn't expect it to be, for fucks sake the Crusader has abilities that come online at levels that Crusaders don't get new abilities. That is how few fucks they gave. Of course, when they announced retroactively that they had learned from ToB, their proof of that was to suggest calling an ability "order of the golden wyvern intiate" or something. Which means that even after looking directly at the customer response that liked badass fighters and no daily limits, they refused to admit they were wrong and figured people had to be loving the ToB ability names.

-Username17

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:11 pm

Since you're accusing WotC of lying, I'd love to see those facts.

Rich Baker wrote:For example, encounter powers were something we were already experimenting with in the tail end of 3rd Edition. Design work on Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords explored this space independently of the early design work on 4th Edition. I was the lead designer on that particular project, and I wasn't much of an MMO player at the time. I was just looking for ways to create "martial spells" that could be used without reference to a daily progression but couldn't be used at will. I realized that earlier editions of D&D had many class features you could use X times per day, and when X is somewhere between 2 and 5, it's something you should see about once per encounter. Our developers were examining similar ideas derived from cooldowns in CRPGS and MMOs around the same time; the notion of the encounter power as it came to be implemented in 4th Edition arose from a mix of both ideas.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 05, 2015 7:19 pm

ishy wrote:Since you're accusing WotC of lying, I'd love to see those facts.

Fair enough.

Races and Classes wrote:First Development Team:October 2005 through February 2006
Team: Robert Gutschera (lead), Mike Donais, Rich Baker,Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo.
Mission: Determine whether the Orcus I design (as we named it) was headed in the right direction. Make recommendations for the next step.
Outcome:The first development team tore everything down and then rebuilt it. In the end, it recommended that we continue in the new direction Orcus I had established.This recommendation accompanied a rather difficult stunt accomplished in the middle of the development process: Baker, Donais, and Mearls translated current versions of the Orcus I mechanics into a last-minute revision of Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. It was a natural fit, since Rich Baker had already been treating the Book of Nine Swords as a “powers for fighters”project. The effort required to splice the mechanics into 3rd Edition were a bit extreme, but the experiment was worth it.

Second Orcus (Orcus II) Design Phase:February to March 2006
Team:Rob Heinsoo (lead), Bruce Cordell, James Wyatt.
Mission: Finish monsters and other areas that were weak in the first draft. Follow some new design directions suggested by the development team.
Outcome: After the design phase ended, several weeks of playtesting left most of us unconvinced with where we were going. The system wasn’t working the way we wanted it to work.

One Development Week: Mid-April 2006
Team: Robert Gutschera, Mike Donais, Rich Baker, MikeMearls, and Rob Heinsoo.
Mission:Recommend a way forward.
Outcome: In what I’d judge as the most productive week of the process to date, not that anyone would have guessed that beforehand, Mearls and Baker figured out what was going wrong with the design. We’d concentrated too much on the new approach without properly accounting for what 3.5 handled well. We’d provided player characters with constantly renewing powers, but hadn’t successfully parsed the necessary distinctions between powers that were always available and powers that had limited uses.

Baker and Mearls took a chunk of Orcus, made a half assed conversion into 3.5 mechanics, and shat that out as Tome of Battle. Then they convinced the rest of the team to scrap Orcus altogether. That is the timeline.

We discuss it in more detail Here.

-Username17

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 2:42 am

Bo9S, for reference, is August 2006, but with a design based off the Orcus 1 development team's work. Same deal for Star Wars Saga (May 2007, design based off Orcus 2), by the time it came out they had already long abandoned it.

It's the lead times, when you take an idea from late in the dev cycle of a different project, it takes a long time to get a book onto the shelf from scratch. So the internal development cycles for 4e were always about a complete loop ahead of their publishing cycles for those same ideas, they could never come close to working with public feedback on the current design iteration of 4e.

To some extent they just panicked. They threw away an entire year and two cycles of game design and development, instigated the AEDU PC design from scratch, and promised to get the lost dev time back by not writing any setting information at all into the books (Points of Light).

Then Bo9S came out and while some folk didn't like the flavour text, the mechanics were widely appreciated. So the 4e designers convinced themselves that what was really being appreciated was the naming conventions and standard-action activation, because that was all they'd kept.

Same for 3e's MM 5, that was the 4e MM design, already in progress. Orc with Club as a unique monster filling half a page or more. They had to stick with it, convince themselves it was what they customers really wanted, and then carefully not ask.

There's hints that they lowered PC damage outputs relative to the monsters dramatically by that point, and when final playtests found some of the monsters not actually dying any more they convinced themselves it was a selling point that the whole party was dead bar one PC who was spamming at-will reactive movement powers to stay alive while doing piddly damage. They "fixed" that by nerfing the movement powers to per-encounter.

Or when final 3e playtests showed high level NPC casters destroying the whole party in one round, they just convinced themselves that was an appropriate thing for the game to do and left it alone. LOL, it was a 9th level spell, it's supposed to be a bad experience.

As insomniac said, cognitive dissonance strikes again. Mike Mearls once wrote that the main thing he'd learnt from working on 4th edition is that "people don't like change". Because obviously his design work had all the form of proper game design and must therefore have produced a good game. He's such a nice guy, he writes so many words per day, his work surely must be functional.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 6:36 am

Tussock wrote:There's hints that they lowered PC damage outputs relative to the monsters dramatically by that point, and when final playtests found some of the monsters not actually dying any more they convinced themselves it was a selling point that the whole party was dead bar one PC who was spamming at-will reactive movement powers to stay alive while doing piddly damage. They "fixed" that by nerfing the movement powers to per-encounter.

Most of that timeline is about right, but this part is wrong.they were talking about level bonus to W in the Paladin preview of early 2008. The final release was less than half a year away and during that time they were not only giving characters more damage bonuses but allowing encounter and daily powers to multiply those bonuses. That 7W ultimate fighter attack did over 100 more damage just from the level bonus in February than it did in June.

The truth is that the big damage nerf was done right at the end and wasn't really compensated for at all. The Paragon and Epic monsters weren't tested after the last minute math change and the resulting padded sumo of high level 4e was for some reason surprising to the people making the game.

The thing that's really interesting about all of that is that after forcing Heinsoo out, they bragged about having cut damage down to the unplayable slowness that it became.

Chris Sims wrote:Powers evolved from Heinsoo crazy (6d12? Really?) to the versions you see today. The early mandate was to push limits on design.

Yes, doing 39 whole damage with an attack was "crazy" so they put a stop to it. Not realizing that it might be a bit of a problem if characters weren't doing damage like that and a Thunderblast Cyclone from the Monster manual had 382 hit points.

-Username17

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:12 am

tussock wrote:Mask, I'd infer from your comment that players don't even want a functional game. They want the form and appearance of their precious ideal but don't even care if it works.

Just ask Paizo.

Their demographic doesn't want a solid, balanced game. They want to be told their game is "solid and balanced" even if it's not (I'd dare say, especially when it's not).

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:15 pm

The thing is, most gamers don't know what balance is, since there are so many balance points and so much mind caulk that unless you really look hard at the game, you're going to want to accept what the designers say. They designed it, so they know, right?

It has been proven time and time again this isn't true, but people still think it.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:26 pm

How much time if any does mid to high level play get in playtesting? If 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder and any sort of game under similar system kind of goes to pot when 5th and 6th level spells come online (arguably sooner), why are developers comfortable with that?

"Pfft, what kind of game makes it to Level 12 anyways?"

Kind of like the "cargo cult" way FrankTrollman explained 4E battle playtests.

Everybody played a character and ticked down how much damage they did.
There are monster with 1 HP that are around to die to anything. Everything else has hundreds, to thousands, of HP. 3.5 Edition CR 7 Bullete: 93 HP.
CR 9 (CR 6 in a 30 Level System)
204 with the ability to heal 51 HP!

So you tick down if you did damage and applied a rider and that was a "success" and you just sort of ignored that CR 6 level monsters had 255 functional HP or more.

"Look at this functional game! Everybody is having so much 'success!' "

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:36 pm

This thread kind of makes me want to play a cleric character from a primitive island tribe that was contacted by wizards and developed a cargo cult around them, creating a clerical tradition where the primary domains are Spell and Magic, and a lot of the priests have Reserve feats.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:51 pm

Save that idea for Return to the Crypts of Chaos, Prak.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:16 pm

I'm already writing up the culture for my blog.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:31 pm

This brings up a point I was talking about with Frank: individually, a lot of the microsteps leading up to 4e weren't bad and either had some potential or addressed real issues - it was just that trying to hamfistedly cram them into 3.5, and the way they fucked up the fluff and the mechanics, and then the complete abandonment of sanity in 4e that made them bullshit.

For example, Magic of Incarnum wasn't a terrible idea at essence - tying magic items to a fixed number of chakras instead of a weird number of slots which you could manipulate could have been good, if worked in from the beginning of the game. Likewise, the basic concept between "class that automatically gives you magic items that level up with you" and crap like Soulknife that automagically gives you a magic weapon(s) that level up with you are pretty solid, but the execution was uniformly terribad because they were afraid of anybody getting anything nice. Same with Weapons of Legacy, that was basically an Earthdawn threaded item hack, but done so poorly and never adopted into the game at large so it just became one more floating subsystem.

Reserve feats answered a real desire among players for more low-level minor magical abilities (particularly themed ones) as characters gained in levels - basically the same thing that the Shadowcaster from Tome of Magic clearly wanted to be, but reserve feats were too damn expensive and Shadowcaster was gimped into oblivion. (Same-same with Binder and Divine Mind, I suppose, but I like to think those are more along the lines of looking at the versatility of the Psion and saying "We've gone too far in the wrong direction.")

FrankTrollman wrote:In general, if you took 3e and then made a new edition out of it after having taken all of the guiding principles of 4e and inverting them, you might be on to something. Everything they thought was important was shit and everything they thought they had to destroy was good.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:51 pm

Frank in the Magic of Blue (He Needed The Money!) review basically says that tying slots to magical abilities that get more potent as you level up is obviously a good idea as it keeps Magical Christmas Tree at bay and is thematically appropriate. It already has ties to genuinely popular religion and fits the genre well. Think of most of the cultural heroes and heroes that the game is based on. What kind of Amulet of Natural Armor did Gimli have? Even people like Odysseus and Achilles had two or three pieces of magical gear, tops. Some guys like Beowulf were at their absolute best when they were bare-handed.

Sure, the execution had terrible flavor and was ridiculously confusing and demolished by The Committee of Nerfage, but its still a good idea.

Good Idea, OMGWTFBBQ execution sums up Tome of Magic and Magic of Incarnum to a T. Truenaming is such an appropriate form of magic that Dungeons and Dragons has been kicking it around for 30 years. It isn't that the idea is bad, it is that the execution was half-baked, weak and functionally broken. Not Overpowered Broken, but "literally-doesn't-even-work!" broken.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 11:47 am

Mask_De_H wrote:There's no real concept of a game being a buggy piece of crap because this hobby started with a buggy piece of crap and spiraled out from there.

Well put. What other alternative do tabletop RPG designers have to creating games basically similar to D&D or Vampire? Maybe they'd be better off investing their efforts into building a time machine to travel back to 1983 instead.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:19 pm

Players aren't all idiots though, eh. Like everyone in 3.0 D&D grabbed Haste boots and dipped all the useful 1st level abilities from various classes and spammed out the empowered stat buffs and Greater Magic Weapon (to compensate for the tightly limited movement, bullshit item prices, and use up the superfluous low-level spell slots with their weak DCs). The Spikes spell made wood weapons suddenly very popular.

Not everyone dumpster-dived Polymorph, not everyone got to the levels that Reach Spell and Harm killed all the boss monsters on round 1. But people totally use the effective rules and fucking well throw dice at people who try to grapple things in 3e, and at some point most of them give up playing anything but casters, and usually play a Cleric or a Wizard, no matter how much they tell themselves it's about the story potential.

No one gave a shit about the flavour of the Bladesinger in the AD&D2 Elf Book, they played it because it gave you bonuses for being an Elf Fighter-Mage, which was already a good deal. But they made sure to reprint it for 3e, where Elf Fighter-Mage was a bad idea and Bladesinger made it worse.

No one cared that they didn't get anything out of Turn Undead in 3.0, it didn't work so you didn't use it, problem solved. When the Divine Metamagic stuff turned up people totally just used that though. Kill monsters easier at no cost? Deal, every time.

--

What I'm saying is most players totally notice which rules are good and which are not, and when the rules really suck people just don't fucking play at all. Even if the company calls it D&D, or Shadowrun, or World of Darkness, or Paranoia.

I've read people talking about how Pathfinder fixed casters and then admit to playing a Cleric, a Druid, a Wizard, and a Fighter-Archer who got a bonus artifact party; and teleport-killing everything all the time while loaded up with immunity to everything all day. With the poor fucking DM resorting to crazy cheese that ends up dropping the Fighter all the time.

Yes, Pathfinder did not do what it promised, but most people playing it can and do just play full casters and not need to care that all the other ones can't keep up. No one wanted to play 4e by comparison, because there were zero options which worked. Or a handful did, but the company nerfed them almost immediately.

I don't think current designers understand any of that though. They're dead-set confused that people all wanted to be Dungeon-Crashers instead of Weapon Specialists, when weapon specialisation in AD&D was so popular, and no one much liked the push powers in 4e. It's a mystery to them, why everyone liked Stoneskin in 2nd edition, but Black Tentacles in 3rd edition. So strange, maybe put a bunch of of creepy tentacle stuff in the books? Then no one liked that for some reason.

D&D's always been a monster-killing game that you can tell stories about, more narrowly so since 3e. Bo9S was popular because you could help kill some monsters with it in a way that made a sort of a story. D&D 4e failed because no one could kill some of the monsters, and others that you could were sad stories of constant resurrection in the face of overwhelming suck.

A few 5e players are noting how fucking hard it is to kill anything at all, how nothing they can find works, but the game doesn't really let you die so eventually you win anyway. And all the designers have got is how they're pretty sure they got the feel of it right, before they changed all the numbers to make it play more like their 4e baby.

--

Mearls thinks people like his advantage dice for the "feel" of them, rather than the effective +5 to hit, motherfucker, it surprised him in a game where you just miss too much otherwise. Players use the rules, they notice what works, and they won't keep playing if nothing does, and they'll tell everyone who listens to not play it either.

K · Post by K » Sun Mar 08, 2015 12:55 am

The RPG scene is like the punk scene. A lot of real shit is accepted because it's the best out there.