"Fun." Not fun, but "fun." We can no longer have fun.
...[W]hy does the Wizards of the Coast R&D team strive for so strict a balance and why does it intend to strip away out-of-box options from you? I call this phenomenon the tyranny of fun. A ludicrous name for a ludicrous concept, but there you have it. The WotC designers are not bad people. I am sure, for example, that the folks working there don’t hate the game or anything, maybe they don’t even kick puppies on their way home. Maybe they help old ladies across the street. They want you to have fun. Good, yes? Yes? No. The idea went wrong long ago and it shows no signs of getting better. When dealing with game philosophy, Wizards R&D doesn’t concentrate on thinking up stuff that makes playing fun anymore. That’s 1970s TSR thinking. Moreover, fun is inherently subjective and hard to quantify - all we can have is meaningless truisms like „the game is about killing critters and taking their stuff”, „getting loot and powering up”, „playing my character” or „sitting around and eating chips”. That’s not very helpful - it is all true, of course, but it doesn’t really tell you what to do to emphasise this in the game. So instead, they try to remove things from the game which are not fun. What isn’t fun? The things the fans complain about. But who complains? In short, the kind of people older rulebooks (and pardon my edition snobbery, but that’s just how I see it) warned us about. People whose characters got their swords destroyed by a rust monster and who threw a hissy fit over it. People whose characters died to a hold person spell and who wrote angry letters to Dragon magazine. People who didn’t have fun, whose entertainment was destroyed by this monster or that spell. Meet WotC’s focus groups, meet the people who are the target audience for future releases. The people 4e will be designed to accommodate.
Oh, I don’t have high hopes that these changes can be or will ever be „stopped”. ENWorld is ample proof of that. There comes a change like destroying the creative concept behind the rust monster, and there is a chorus of approving posts praising this decision as if it was the second coming of Our Lord Sliced Bread. Because, after all, D&D before „it was evolved” was a horribly designed, bad, bad game people didn’t have fun with and which didn’t sell, right? Right? According to WotC R&D (heh, R&D... I wonder if EGG ever had an „R&D” department), people who didn’t like D&D before are the people D&D should be designed for in the future, because that’s smart business. I am not making this up either.
There is, of course, the inevitable counter-reaction from reactionaries who don’t appreciate the changes and dare to suggest that hey, it was good the way it used to be, and there is no overwhelming need to „re-design it to be proper at last”. These rose-coloured glass-wearing fools even suggest that the design shouldn’t be used. Naive thinking. In fact, they will accomplish very little. The debate will flow back and forth for a while, and in the end, the sides will agree to meet halfway. And gee, you just conceded your position, dice-boy. You were suckered into accepting that maybe they are right. Maybe it really was bad design all along and it were your pleasant experiences that were false.
The final response is always going to be to remove any edge, any colour, to remove randomness and introduce standardised fair play into the game which started out as highly arbitrary and whimsical - in short, fantastic and open to creative interpretation.
This response is the symptom of a design culture which would never be capable of designing a game like Dungeons &Dragons.
And that is a pity.
...To me, the point of RPGs is that they are active entertainment - you get to create things yourself, you get to excercise your common sense and judgement, and you get to share these two things with your friends to get something else you may not have even thought of. Very few things come close (although I have taken up level editing for the Thief2 computer game in the last year, which is stimulating in a different kind of way - more like LEGO than D&D). The third aspect is socialisation - someone on RPGNet once called RPGs hospitality games; games where you invite people into your own home in an age of decreasing face to face communication. That's also a good point.
I worry that new D&D, and in fact the new common face of gaming is undermining these progressive features of roleplaying games. In-play options are reduced by rule codification and the standardisation of "fair play" (instead granting the illusion of choice through character customisation - I argue that this is far less substantial than it is considered). Common sense is being attacked as "neither common nor sensible"; instead, designers and the game culture suggests yet more regulations over play by people who know best. This is the tyranny of fun part, and also the part where resentment/distrust of GMs and GMing comes up most regularly. There is a sort of assumption that GMs are not suited to create source material, even adventures for their players; that they are in dire need of Official Game Designer Wisdom, to be had for $29.90 in slick, glossy volumes (and you'd better be prepared to buy five or six of these to really begin playing). Finally, the process and environment of roleplaying itself has been attacked through citing extreme negative examples, portraying it as an inherently dysfunctional hobby.
That, gentlemen, is the Axis of Stupid we are facing.
Coincidentally, there is a way out, although maybe only for a part of the hobby if the industry will not follow - and that means much smaller communities than you have now. Simply Do It Yourself. Enjoy creating stuff, or playing and running things you or your online or offline friends made and shared. Be selective with your friends and don't be a dick yourself. In short, examine and practice the principles our hobby was founded upon, and all will be well. Discard the (natural) urge for Officiality, don't become a passive gamer.
An absolutely brilliant critique of the design philosophy that drives WotC. Both well-written and incisive, it cuts right to the heart of this newest edition's problems.With 4e out and some time having passed, it's time to look back at my previous posts exploring the question whether the sort of fun - and fair play - championed in current game design is actually having a negative effect on the hobby. It appears to me that my worries, which predate 4e's announcement by quite a lot of time, have proven to be well founded, and 4th edition is very much an embodiment of the Tyranny of Fun philosophy.
Having read even more ENWorld since it has come back up, I can say with confidence that the effects are already prominent. 4th edition is strongly in support of the folks previous editions and gaming practice referred to as 'bad players', and their perspectives are currently dominant in gaming discourse. They are the people who couldn't deal with characters getting killed, complained because the game wasn't perfectly "balanced" (the solution? Uniformisation and sameness!), and got into nitpicky arguments over rules because they had neither the common sense nor shared trust to resolve situations amicably and avoid abusing the rules. These types now have an ideological support for their dickery - the dogma that common sense is in fact not possible or even desirable. A typical stance, I might add, for people who don't have any...
In the design philosophy of Wizards of the Coast, the Tyranny of Fun has been fully canonised. What started out as stupid experiments in game design and a few odd decisions became the driving philosophy behind the new edition. "Fun" as "continuous positive reinforcement" and something that comes purely from combat encounters is emphasised over everything else. While positive reinforcement and combat are of course important sources of fun, 4e neglects to emphasise others. The result is, predictably, a vulgar simplification of what roleplaying games can offer us, a lightweight but ultimately unsatisfactory form of feelgood passive entertainment. The sense of entitlement that comes with this simplification is a particularly poisonous aspect of the Tyranny of Fun, and goes back to the first point - encouraging bad players. It will of course not be impossible to run 4e in a less "gimme" style, but DMs who attempt it can be expected to face stronger opposition and disapproval; 4e's spirit is very much against playing a genuinely challenging campaign, since those are - of course - not fun in the canonical sense.
Finally, there is the matter of the fetishisation of "game design"; that is, how officially appointed game designers are touted - and gradually being accepted! - as the infallible arbiters of what is good and bad fun. I find this a very suspicious development in roleplaying. In a participatory hobby, where the roles of consumers and creators have been strongly blurred (and this blurriness was a core contributor to what made the games so addictive, so different from anything else - RPGs are a form of active mental/social entertainment which are otherwise very rare), we are seeing movement towards a stronger separation between the two. Officially designed and meticulously balanced fun is contrasted with the straw men of "bad DMing", supposedly so epidemic that very few people can "enjoy" games properly. It is suggested that only a qualified elite who "really" understand games can save us from the effects of horrible, horrible game design and our own supposed dysfunctions. Instead of fostering individual creativity, this philosophy casts suspicion and disapproval on it; "house rules", the elementary tools of customisation, are treated with derision and contempt. The message is clear: "you are incompetent, stupid and you need our help (that will be $39.9, please)". Gary Gygax tried this crap at his worst, and fortunately, people just pointed and laughed. Can the Wizards designers do what Gary could not? So far, it seems to me they are winning.
All in all, what we are seeing is the emergence of a philosophy that denies and stifles excellence while encouraging mediocrity and poor play. Attempting to "protect" gamers from their own mistakes will not result in better games - it will limit self-expression, the freedom of creativity and hinder the natural and easy learning process most of us have gone through. It will subtly, although of course not completely, shift roleplaying games towards more passive and consumption-oriented forms of entertainment. The roleplaying hobby will be poorer for it, and it can also be expected to experience slow and continuous shrinkage as it becomes apparent to people that passive and consumption-oriented forms of entertainment offer much better alternatives than sitting around a table and rolling polyhedral dice.
