Sorry, but I find it hilarious that this "discussion" kept on going and going and going
over the holiday season because certain posters kept insisting on their bad-faith notion that math / system was ever an
explicit marketing point rather than an implicit one.
Again, look at the
actual cover of the books and the back blurbs. You won't find "Math works" there. If you want to insist that it was a "guerrilla" campaign, that's up to you -again just realize that WotC would have been
incredibly stupid to use "Math Works" as an actual marketing talking point in any kind of campaign.
Here's the actual reality from an actual marketing professional (Yes, I work in marketing).
"Math Works" is a bad copy point because it doesn't tell the customer about the
benefits he will be receiving from the product. It's instead the
enablers to those unspecified benefits. A few posters here have picked up on this, which is why they realized (correctly) that "Math" is in fact an interchangeable concept with "systems" or "rules".
Indeed, just imagine if we apply this sort of thinking to another product line - say a restaurant. Would you really trust a restaurant that loudly proclaims "Our Meat is Cooked!" as an advertising point? The answer is
no, because "The Meat is Cooked" is a basic requirement that should be fulfilled for the restaurant to deliver its core benefit (making you enjoy a good meal). Indeed, bannering "The Meat is Cooked" will only make people question if your restaurant is competent enough to cook meat properly!
Instead most successful restaurants show pictures of the food they are serving. Or they describe how good the food tastes when you're eating it (e.g. "best-tasting chicken"). Because again humans are incredibly visual-driven creatures and they are motivated with how a product benefits them and not how the product is made to work.
But hey, sure, let's completely deny these realities of the human condition and pretend I am lying or have the mind of a child. All the other tabletop gaming genres - Miniatures, Wargames, and Boardgames - are only making huge amounts of money because they actually understand that "Math" is a bullshit advertising point and it's themes and concepts that sell. Heck, 7th Sea only raised over a million dollars based on concepts apparently suited for 2 year olds.
Or maybe some people here are just too damn insecure and can't stand real success, or worse have simply forgotten
why games are fun to begin with. Frankly the first time I played the original 7th Sea I was skeptical because of all the gloom and doom here about its "math", but once play started it was clear that being able to play as PIRATES easily trumped all that.
Indeed, trying to argue with people that a game's math is broken isn't remotely related to fun; and many would probably consider such an argument obnoxious and would just turn off people from the idea of buying a game based on an arbitrary evaluation of its "math". It's not what the players are buying to begin with.
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Oh, and as for the back-and-forth about D20 die rolling - what you're all missing about 3rd edition is that it "worked" primarily because the resolution was much more
transparent compared to the older THAC0 system. It's easy to figure out success chances when every +1 is basically a 5% increase in success.
In many other ways the math / rules were broken, but because of the transparency it was relatively easy to incorporate adjustments based on the preferences of the group.
Which again points to how people should pay more attention to how people actually choose, buy, and play RPGs. It is not just about the math. Indeed, it need not be so obsessively fine-tuned like Magic.
Finally, I would note that it's extremely telling that dice-rolling it still seen here as purely as a
conflict-resolution system; when game design in a broader sense has come to recognize that dice-rolling - particularly in a co-op environment (which RPGs are) - are also
tension-builders.
You want moments in a game where everyone is standing on their feet and hoping for a specific die roll, because that's what makes a gaming session memorable and enjoyable. By contrast you're all still stuck trying to argue how degrees of success should work; when these are inherently subjective things to begin with and should be dependent on the campaign's tone and the player preferences (e.g. a Dark-Souls type of game will have very punishing failures that can escalate the lower you roll whereas a RomCom RPG will be very forgiving).
By contrast games of Risk still exist because the game - for good or ill - can convey so much emotion even with a few die rolls. Will one player be able to completely wipe out another this turn? Is one player rolling particularly fiercely because he's angry that he was betrayed by an "ally"? Risk is one of the most archaic games out there but watching a game play out and taking note of the emotions on the table will teach people way more about what makes a game tick than arguing among yourselves about what a +5 success threshold means.