D&DNext: Playtest Review

[Seerow]

*and the majority of the audience are people who still hung around the WotC website and forums.

or jsut didn't get banned for trashing 4th and calling it the steaming pile of shit that it is right on the WotC forums.

WotC forums are actually really lenient. I've said some legitimately awful stuff there and never gotten a ban over a week long. I doubt there's a bunch of people who have been banned for hating on 4e and thus excluded from the playtest.

[Username17]

*and the majority of the audience are people who still hung around the WotC website and forums.

or jsut didn't get banned for trashing 4th and calling it the steaming pile of shit that it is right on the WotC forums.

WotC forums are actually really lenient. I've said some legitimately awful stuff there and never gotten a ban over a week long. I doubt there's a bunch of people who have been banned for hating on 4e and thus excluded from the playtest.

Well... I know that they banned me in the 3.5 days for being overly critical. That was the actual reason. They didn't even bother trying to find an example of me actually breaking any rules. I was simply "too controversial".

-Username17

[Seerow]

or jsut didn't get banned for trashing 4th and calling it the steaming pile of shit that it is right on the WotC forums.

WotC forums are actually really lenient. I've said some legitimately awful stuff there and never gotten a ban over a week long. I doubt there's a bunch of people who have been banned for hating on 4e and thus excluded from the playtest.

Well... I know that they banned me in the 3.5 days for being overly critical. That was the actual reason. They didn't even bother trying to find an example of me actually breaking any rules. I was simply "too controversial".

-Username17

Maybe policy has been loosened up since then?

I don't remember much of WotC back during 3.5 (I was active then, but I can't remember any details about moderation), but I know since the playtest started and I went back over there, I was never banned for more than a few days, and never saw even the most annoying and constantly negative posters get banned.

[Krusk]

Ive never gotten so much as a warning there, but its a very weird code of conduct in practice. Whats written is totally ignored.

In practice name calling or using any slur can get your post edited and thats about it. Having a lot of posts edited on a regular basis can get you a week long ban. I haven't heard of anyone getting actually banned for more than that since pre-gleemax.

What this leads to is people being super polite as they tell you to go fuck yourself. They also act as super polite trolls whenever anyone posts a thread that disagrees with the current groupthink, and you get really politely worded "even though you factually demonstrated i was wrong, I will still post in the thread and continue disagreeing with you" posts. Just obvious threadshitting.

[Cyberzombie]

What this leads to is people being super polite as they tell you to go fuck yourself. They also act as super polite trolls whenever anyone posts a thread that disagrees with the current groupthink, and you get really politely worded "even though you factually demonstrated i was wrong, I will still post in the thread and continue disagreeing with you" posts. Just obvious threadshitting.

People do that kind of behavior everywhere. It's rare on any message board to see anyone actually admit their opinion changed through a debate. By and large people walk in with some cause they're going to champion and do so. Whether you do it politely or by swearing at people, it's the same pattern of behavior.

[Krusk]

But at least else where they have the curtousey to stop posting in a thread. They generally just stop commenting at all, and pretend they didn't read it. At wotc it's not unusual to have the same point repeated for 2-3 pages until people trying to have a conversation have decided its too annoying to keep posting in the thread and just don't bother anymore.

It's like if we had a thread on how shitty pathfinder was and every 3rd post was some guy saying "yeah but at least they fixed everything that was wrong with 3.5. And the classes are balanced now."

you fill it with noobs who don't know to just ignore the troll regardless of his 6k post count and thread quickly dissolves into the same thing being proven 15 times and actual converSation of new points is impossible.

It's like talking while someone is blowing a fog horn constantly, only worse because people keep asking him to stop, and that only encourages him more.

[RobbyPants]

But at least else where they have the curtousey to stop posting in a thread. They generally just stop commenting at all, and pretend they didn't read it. At wotc it's not unusual to have the same point repeated for 2-3 pages until people trying to have a conversation have decided its too annoying to keep posting in the thread and just don't bother anymore.

God, I remember an argument like that at pre-Gleemax WotC, circa 2007. Someone was explaining the trick to advance Wizard casting with Ultimate Magus by tricking it using Practiced Spellcaster to boost the caster level of your spontaneous class. It worked because the text in the ability referenced "caster level" instead of "class level", which allowed you to gain a bunch of caster levels in a secondary class by only sacrificing one caster level on your main class.

Some asshole popped in there making stupid arguments on how this wouldn't work. I don't remember what his actual "arguments" were because they were based in a misunderstanding of the rules at best and complete non-sequiturs at worst. The jack hole wend on like this for about four pages, with half a dozen posters trying to explain this to him in different ways, then suddenly he shifted his position to make it sound like he agreed with what people had been saying all along, and shifted his argument to one of whether or not it should work this way.

Fucking ridiculous.

[NineInchNall]

So Mearls & Co. can't do math, but why is it that people don't seem willing to call them on it?

This is sort of related to the whole "Elennsar, plz lurn 2 stats" discussion, but why do so many people who play RPGs subscribe to the position that no meaningful mathematical analysis of a game system can be done? I mean, it's a patently absurd position, yet we've all had to deal with it since the dawn of time.

What I want is to know how this mindset became so prevalent. Is it just people's general innumeracy? Or does it stem from people's not wanting there to be a "correct" answer in RPGs, because that would mean they might actually be bad at them?

[shadzar]

inability to do math i would say, thus everyone so fearful of THACO because Zeb put the DM formula into the 2E PHB rather than arranging it for the player known info.

also Welcome to The Den, because here people do call Mearls etc on not being able to do math, thus the WBL doesnt work, ECL/LA/etc doesnt add up, treasure parcels dont add up, etc....

[NineInchNall]

I was referring to people on other forums, shad.

[name_here]

Most people are outright terrible at probability and statistics, so they don't want to do them.

[Voss]

I blame white wolf, and the grand holy crusade that 'real roleplaying' never involved numbers, but only getting in touch with your 'inner dark' and the mandatory involvement of some sort of 'counter-culture,' usually involving some form of sexual fetish. Membership in drama clubs was, surprisingly, not required, but encouraged.

In the eyes of a WW fanatic, only engineers do math, and they make the game not fun, with requirements of believability and reasonableness, as well, as math and sanity.

[Krusk]

My genuine theory has always been based on a few facts.
1 - that RPGs are nerdy.
2 - People expect nerds to be smart.
3 - Many RPG nerds are just as dumb, if not moreso than the jocks who picked on them in high school.
4 - the public doesn't make the connection that people who play RPGs aren't automatically smart.

RPG nerds get upset anytime anything shatters their reality. Forcing them to actually do some math in a game does this easily. Therefor, anyone who attempts to "Run the math" is automatically bad, because the nerds are quickly revealed to be "not smart" and thus "not nerdy". The people who get mad base their entire self worth on "being nerdy" and compete to see who is nerdiest in any chance they get.

[PhoneLobster]

I think it is a simpler matter than challenging the nerdy=smart delusion (though that is I think a real thing).

People hold opinions for bad reasons, they don't like seeing their opinions being refuted by something objective and provable like math.

So some guy thinks that Monks are awesome because he played and awesome monk. He does not want to hear that his GM fudged it or he got lucky. (Hell just wander back a few months here and we have a certain dope claiming he was so awesome at 3.x D&D that his characters never ever died and that everyone else was being coddled by their GMs).

By telling them they were wrong and that Monks objectively suck or that you can't play repeated games of vanilla 3.x without a high character attrition rate at low levels you are telling them that they are either freakish statistical outliers, or more likely, someone fudged the numbers and cheated/deceived them. Them declaring that "math has nothing to do with RPGs!" is how they reconcile with math telling them things they don't want to hear.

It's a lot like how Religious people don't like being challenged by real proof and so declare that proof has no part to play in matters of faith. Basically the reason they make the declaration is because they want it to be true.

[Sashi]

It still doesn't explain why game designers can't seem to do the math in secret in the background.

[fectin]

Because math is hard, and has a lot less to do with whether a game sells well than all the other things WoTC is screwing up?

Honestly, "Mearls can't do math" is like complaining that Pol Pot had terrible personal hygiene: whether or not it's true, there are some bigger issues he can address first.

[name_here]

The short of it is that games can sell quite well without doing the math, and doing all of the math for a game can actually be quite difficult. So they don't, because it's easier to just tell everyone who does math that they're playing the game wrong.

[shadzar]

It still doesn't explain why game designers can't seem to do the math in secret in the background.

that is because video killed the radio star CCGs killed the TTRPG, and being the biggest CCG company the biggest RPG would follow design principle and jsut fudge the math like mana costs for MtG cards. nobody cards that it takes like 8 mana for a shivan dragon, but only 4 mana can kill all creatures with a wrath of god. the math doesnt work, but nobody cares.

also a game designer is the highest level of DM, so the modern world doesnt like the DM hiding things and "do[ing] the math in secret in the background". how many times have i suggested on here people play the game with jsut an equipment list, and character name and play by the DM. everyone of modern gamers are so anti-DM and have no trust for the DM that there can be NO secrets from the players in the world of "transparency".

well with that, people are finally seeing that the math just doesnt work like they think it would because showing all the math was what was done with 4th, and everything was flat and boring in it. just a pile of number with no character at all.

[Username17]

Many of the larger concerns actually do have math geeks on hand. They just aren't listened to. Or perhaps, their pronouncements are not understood. Recall that WotC had Gutschera on staff and he made the framework that Mike Mearls ultimately had badly ported to 3.5 as Tome of Battle after he decided that a game system with no "daily spell slots" was somehow "not D&D". White Wolf got Torben Morgensen to tell them how their dice mechanics worked for nWoD, and then promptly ignored all that and proceeded to write the rest of the nWoD with only a few takeaways about dice pool sizes from the whole process. And not to toot my own horn, but I was seriously working on Shadowrun and I fucking told them why and how Blood Spirits were an infinite power loop and how that was "bad" and they fucking printed it anyway.

The fact is that "artistic" types do not understand that when the math geek tells you that you can't do something, you actually can't do it. And so the math guys come out and give various analyses and instructions, and then all that shit gets ignored because a bunch of prima donna assholes would rather listen to their gut than bother listening to some poindexter hamper their artistic vision with their "knowledge" and "sense".

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Because math is hard, and has a lot less to do with whether a game sells well than all the other things WoTC is screwing up?

Honestly, "Mearls can't do math" is like complaining that Pol Pot had terrible personal hygiene: whether or not it's true, there are some bigger issues he can address first.

Math is one of the biggest, if not the biggest issue when making a roleplaying game. Math is the core of the game. The engine it runs on. Without math working you have no game, but a collection of hooks and ideas.

[shadzar]

^an RPG really is just a difference engine at heart.

Many of the larger concerns actually do have math geeks on hand. They just aren't listened to. Or perhaps, their pronouncements are not understood. Recall that WotC had Gutschera on staff and he made the framework that Mike Mearls ultimately had badly ported to 3.5 as Tome of Battle after he decided that a game system with no "daily spell slots" was somehow "not D&D". White Wolf got Torben Morgensen to tell them how their dice mechanics worked for nWoD, and then promptly ignored all that and proceeded to write the rest of the nWoD with only a few takeaways about dice pool sizes from the whole process. And not to toot my own horn, but I was seriously working on Shadowrun and I fucking told them why and how Blood Spirits were an infinite power loop and how that was "bad" and they fucking printed it anyway.

The fact is that "artistic" types do not understand that when the math geek tells you that you can't do something, you actually can't do it. And so the math guys come out and give various analyses and instructions, and then all that shit gets ignored because a bunch of prima donna assholes would rather listen to their gut than bother listening to some poindexter hamper their artistic vision with their "knowledge" and "sense".

-Username17

well (A)(O)D&D had Arenson and Gygax, and while many people don't like the attack matrix or THAC0, you ahve to see that it works and is stable, and thus why Warhammer still uses tables to this day for its combat. though the unfair armies at many points break the fact that the MATH works, jsut the variables are fucked. the simple range of 21 or 12 depending on edition for AC meant it was hard to get too far outside of the math and screw it up. sure it got unbalanced with blaot, but at the core it worked.

how about one of your evaluations of the combat math in relation to the AC range in (A) or (O)D&D? is the BaB system as stable or just more "intuitive"?

and not all people are either left or right brained, there are plenty of artistic types that know math, yet the companies dont hire them longterm as they are too nerdy for even the gamer geeks to understand.

[Username17]

how about one of your evaluations of the combat math in relation to the AC range in (A) or (O)D&D? is the BaB system as stable or just more "intuitive"?

Uh... it's literally exactly the same system, just with easier inputs for both the player and the DM. I mean literally exactly the same from a math standpoint. There is no advantage at all to using OD&D, AD&D, or 2nd edition AD&D's to-hit system over 3e's. 3rd edition is mathematically identical, but puts all the player math on the player side of the table and all the DM math on the DM side of the table and allows for faster resolution. That's seriously the only difference.

It preserves 100% of the functionality and 100% of the stability and is faster and easier to use. It's simply superior. There are things you can dis 3e for, and I do, but going from THAC0 to BAB is an unmitigated improvement. There is non-hyperbolically no downside at all to that change in 3e.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

THAC0 to BAB is actually my go-to example for things which unambiguously represent a positive evolution of design, a recent innovation where even if you are making a retroclone specifically to recapture old design philosophies warts and all, you should still probably keep it.

[Ghremdal]

Shame they did not convert ability checks in the same way...that is a evolution downgrade.

[Voss]

well (A)(O)D&D had Arenson and Gygax, and while many people don't like the attack matrix or THAC0, you ahve to see that it works and is stable, and thus why Warhammer still uses tables to this day for its combat. though the unfair armies at many points break the fact that the MATH works, jsut the variables are fucked.

Warhammer uses tables for visual presentation, that is all. The 'math' is really simple: ranged attacks hit on 7 - BS, melee attacks hit on 4+, 3+ if attacker WS > defender WS, and 5+ if defender WS is more than 2x attacker WS. It is just easier to show people that in a nicely formatted table than explain it, even though it breaks down into really simple categories of defender's weapon skill is 'less', 'equal to double', and 'greater than double.'