The Gaming Den

Let me make a proposition; A good game is one that effectively replicates, and incentivizes replication of the canon it tries to recreate.

So a game called "Akshun Heroz!" could be called good if while playing it I am able to play out the fantasies I have incorporated from 20th century actions films. If it lets me bust through windows and have car chases and shoot someone even better after I say my one pithy line per day then it is good.

This system could be called shitty if I couldn't break through glass AND fire my gun in the same turn, chasing someone in a vehicle was less effective than just waiting till they got somewhere and then tracking them, or if shouting "Yippy kay yay" would have no possible effect on game mechanics. If a game doesn't let me do the things I've seen in their genre of fantasy, or worse lets me but has their mechanics directly tell me not to do them then I consider that game a failure full stop.

Now lets look at DnD. And lets take the most successful fucking version they have ever produced. Their Magnum Opus that is 3.E. The most noteworthy thing about 3.E DnD that occurs to you after looking at it in any detail is that the whole fucking thing is just some glorious accident. And you all already know these things to be true. 3.E is designed terribly top to bottom IN ANY WAY THE DESIGNERS INTENDED. So lets compare what they were trying to do to the results.

The Fighter is in my mind the single most iconic, fetishized class in the entire game. Front and center of almost every group shot in the TSR artbook, swinging his sword looking noble, and the fighter SUCKS THE HARDEST. This is clearly the class that the most importance was placed on and he is undoubtedly the worst. The game fetishizes melee in general and the melee classes SUCK THE HARDEST. That is what you are meant to DO in this game and it is undoubtedly the worst tactic. Even when we look at the better classes lets take a look at Wizard. What do you see in your mind when you think of a Wizard in battle? Lightning and shit? ME TOO. But blasting wizards, no doubt the most iconic wizarding archetype there is, SUCK THE HARDEST. When it comes to replicating canon you are screwed 9 ways from Sunday with DnD. If you try to play a class you want, or more importantly try to play a class the designers want the way the designers wanted you to play it you will be the worst thing there is. Essentially what I'm saying is the more design time a thing got the worse it was.

That's fucking important. It means that they failed at everything they thought was important by VIRTUE of thinking it was important and actually spending more time on it. And the things that are good are clearly terrible accidents. When you play a well built (and fun) DnD Wizard you don't look like anything in any Wizard canon ever. You're a ridiculous, hovering, stone skinned, contingent spelled, black tentacling, Hideous laughter inducing wierdo because THAT is what works and is fun. And not only is this interesting material by accident but appears in fact to be exactly the opposite of the game the designers intended to build.

Tl;dr: Even 3.E Dungeons and Dragons, WoTC's best product, failed outright at producing the things they cared about in direct relation to how much they cared about them and how much time they spent designing them. If they game were given unlimited design time to end up exactly like they wanted then the entire thing would have been terrible. It is only by freak chance that they produced anything worth playing and even that accidentally and against intention.

First off, for my 1000th post, I want to post an agreement with everything there. Secondly, I want to direct you to a spiel by Monte Cook about how such design was actually something they wanted. So while I agree with the final argument, I don't think it was as accidental as you make it sound.

(shrugs) In the end, the main measure of good game design is sales. No amount of marketing and inertia can save a product that actually visibly sucks, or is clearly inferior to available competitors, much less revive it. In some cases sales require decisions that are eventually detrimental to a (estimated as relatively small) subset of games, such as trying to keep the iconic image of the nonmagical fighter, even though this makes fighters suck at high levels. In some cases sales are boosted by decisions that actually are quite brilliant from gameplay standpoint, even though some people apparently are too dense to see it, such as making wizards throw save-or-sucks and lay down battlefield control spells instead of just turbonuking everything, like they did in ADnD and, to a lesser extent 3.0, which enabled wizards to synergize excellently with fighting classes (at least until they start to summon demon armies and do other shit that generally doesn't happen outside of optimization discussions - or, much more commonly, become powerful enough to spam actual save-or-loses).

deanruel87 wrote: You're a ridiculous, hovering, stone skinned, contingent spelled, black tentacling, Hideous laughter inducing wierdo

Think I just found what I want on my headstone!

I think you're conflating two things: being able to create a desired archetype, and have good game balance.

Blaster wizards are totally supported. The single largest category of spells in the game is blasting spells. However, they aren't as powerful as some other wizard types. Why?

The more time they spend designing something, the less likely it is to be extremely under-powered or over-powered. Taking the example of wizards again, there are a fuckton of over-powered spells, a fuckton of under-powered spells, and a fuckton of mediocre spells. Due to careful design, most of the blasting spells are mediocre. The under-powered spells get mostly ignored, and you end up with most non-blasting wizards being overpowered because they have the sense to pick only the best spells from the less-supported flavors.

To be fair, this isn't always the case. Some designers have specific agendas, like making sure that their shape changing druid character is more powerful than everyone else.

The true equalizer is ALCOHOL.

When you play with BOOZE it balances all classes into semi-retarded bumbling caricatures of the PCs by inherent nature of the drunken antics of their players. You don't care any more that you've rolled a critical failure on your longsword attack roll any more; you're too busy laughing.

I'm so sick of complaining or reading complaints about class imbalance, I'll just go off to my classless system and have a sob about how much it still sucks. I'm probably deluding myself that I can write anything RPG-worthy but god damn it I tried.
That's my story.

tl;dr: Fighters do suck. That was the whole point of D&D design. The class should be renamed Jester.

sigma999 wrote:The true equalizer is ALCOHOL.

I'm interested on your ideas and would like to sign your newsletter.

sigma999 wrote:tl;dr: Fighters do suck. That was the whole point of D&D design. The class should be renamed Jester.

I always interpreted this as nerd's revenge. The D&D designers clearly self inserted as magic users.

deanruel87 wrote: You're a ridiculous, hovering, stone skinned, contingent spelled, black tentacling, Hideous laughter inducing wierdo

While I'm not disagreeing with the rant in general, I don't think this is actually that "off brand" as a concept. In fantasy:
* Wizards that hover instead of walking - not unheard of, especially for powerful ones.
* Stoneskin - reasonably iconic, actually.
* Contingent Spelled - extremely iconic. I would say this is actually the most common type of "wizard defense", more so than straight-up force armor.
* Black Tentacles - For evil and/or unnatural wizards, this is totally the kind of thing they do.

So really, only the Hideous Laughter is an outlier, and even that's not totally unheard of.


Also, personally - while blaster Wizards should be supported, and not suck, they're not be-all and end-all of spellcasting. I get enough "all blasting all the time" out of CRPGs, because it's the simplest to handle. Give me more force-multipliers, weird snares, and subtle but potent stuff over yet another fire blast.

deanruel87 wrote:Let me make a proposition; A good game is one that effectively replicates, and incentivizes replication of the canon it tries to recreate.

What you're looking for is called genre emulation, and sadly genre emulation seems to be a natural enemy of trad-thinkers. DnD still a trad game.

nockermensch wrote:

sigma999 wrote:tl;dr: Fighters do suck. That was the whole point of D&D design. The class should be renamed Jester.

I always interpreted this as nerd's revenge. The D&D designers clearly self inserted as magic users.

By clearly you mean "put their PCs as Gary Sue NPCs in their campaign settings," right?

Oh thank God, finally a thread about how Fighters in D&D suck. This was a long time coming.

@Catharz: See I think what's noteworthy is the in my opinion the blasting spells ARE those least powerful ones. I don't think that a lot of design time has been put into them so they end up being average. They are not average. They are terrible, incredibly terrible. I would rather have water breathing than lightning bolt and water breathing is horrible.

@Ice9: This is largely a statement about the bad design of the DnD buff paradigm but the problem isn't that you're ONE of those things. That is emulating the genre. The problem is that you are ALL of them. Some wizards fly, some are on fire, some are made of stone and some vanish into gas when shot at. But they aren't ever -all of the above-. That's crazytown.

@Dogbert: What is a trad.

Trad = traditional.

@Catharz: See I think what's noteworthy is the in my opinion the blasting spells ARE those least powerful ones. I don't think that a lot of design time has been put into them so they end up being average. They are not average. They are terrible, incredibly terrible. I would rather have water breathing than lightning bolt and water breathing is horrible.

Once you're a correctly built Wiz Whatever/Incantatrix 10 and have Arcane Thesis, blasting can be horrifyingly effective. "Quickened Twin Empowered Maximized Split Ray Fuck You."

It's actually even better than save-or-die in places because a) nothing is flat-out immune to DAMAGE even if things are immune to death, domination, etcetera and b) they don't even get a fucking save.

Most of the time, it's pretty bad, though, but when popularly cheesed it's horrifying.

deanruel87 wrote:@Dogbert: What is a trad.

Trad= Short for "traditional." Games which espouse most of the old (or at least more conventional) ways: let the dice fall where they may, no rules to guide roleplay, no metagame currencies, the GM does all the work, etc.

Schwarzkopf wrote:Oh thank God, finally a thread about how Fighters in D&D suck. This was a long time coming.

That was hilarious, thank you.

It's actually even better than save-or-die in places because a) nothing is flat-out immune to DAMAGE even if things are immune to death, domination, etcetera and b) they don't even get a fucking save.

Many creatures are immune to all sorts of damage. Hell, we have a monster that's immune to all damage bu bludgeoning.

deanruel87 wrote:Tl;dr: Even 3.E Dungeons and Dragons, WoTC's best product, failed outright at producing the things they cared about in direct relation to how much they cared about them and how much time they spent designing them. If they game were given unlimited design time to end up exactly like they wanted then the entire thing would have been terrible. It is only by freak chance that they produced anything worth playing and even that accidentally and against intention.

the problem is they always tried to make EVERYMAN'S game. they never understood where exactly D&D was coming from or going, or its limits.

not being able to understand its limits prevents them from being able to expand them, like it prevents many from being able to play. ERGO: fighters are weak and wizard rule....

even the books that had many wizards running aorund they were protected with plot-proctection so it worked because the single author was able to make the world and stories work...

the game follows more closely where wizards arent everywhere doing everything. Merlin didnt have hoards of other wizards to fight off, only Morgana.

Gandalf had Sauruman...

this is where the party came in to balance the sides of the game.. PC vs everything else.

you can run with all wizards or no magic game, and it will work.. when you push to far over the fulcrum you lose the balance and cant really stay where you are unless you fall to one side or the other.

3rd took a problem that doesnt really exist, and tried to fix it.

the problem really is people understanding that D&D never was made to have each class equal in power to the next.

Gary had 9 players, 3 casters and the rest melee..i think. that allowed for his games and stories to have more than what most people play at for opponents. a 5 person party cant have 3 wizards and expect the other 2 to work with that party.. you have already stepped to far over the fulcrum to where it is going to fall to one side.. the PARTY isnt balanced.

it would have been MUCH better if 2nd further explained the game instead of jsut fixing Gary's organization..or rather lack thereof and cleaning some confusing or ambiguous thigns where Gary had no copy-editor or any sort of team to check continuity of the "rules".

for example: alignment...

people still screw up because:
1. Gary made it look like more than a DM tool (Prestihe classes form WotC same problem)

2. Gary tried to define the two axis as 3^2 and 9 fixed combinations.

so few can grasp alignment now because of that fellowship of the 9... they cannot see beyond those simple 2 number lines, and just use them as separate conditions.

WotC has NEVER made a good game, they only take existing game (Richard Garfield's MtG) and add some sort of gimmick to it and hope the gimmick catches on and lasts until the next gimmick comes along.

3rd trapped people into more finite lists or what they CAN do than Gary's crazy list for everything...like feats. and Feats wont go away, because people cannot see that they dont need something spelled out saying "Your character CAN build fires"..they need some sort of "fire-building" NWP or feat or some other shit.

fear of "bad DMs" and "MTP"...when the whole game is nothing but MTP and DM fiat and its form of game is all it can ever be. D&D will never be Monopoly.

first WotC would have to understand D&D before they could make it, and in over 12 years they have still failed to understand it.. they still just want to sell a name rather than a product they even know anything about.

Bill S on the G4TV interview talking about 4th as two basketball teams for PCs and enemies...shows they lost it all and have no idea what the game is about.

WotC sadly just doesnt understand games well enough to make them, and their current overlords only understand fads with short term high profit..them move to the next fad.

Schwarzkopf wrote:Oh thank God, finally a thread about how Fighters in D&D suck. This was a long time coming.

The suckage of D&D fighters is a multi-layered problem that hits gamers in vulnerable areas and demands an intellectual response in a way that less controversial issues like alignment and -4 strength do not.

deanruel87 wrote:Let me make a proposition; A good game is one that effectively replicates, and incentivizes replication of the canon it tries to recreate.

I will make the following argument. By your definition, AD&D (Gygax's Edition) was a "Good Game." It really created a canon and did it well. It was only later that people realized that the canon sucked so they changed the game. Eventually no one knew wha the canon was anymore, it was all things to all people and thus could never work.

And what was the "canon" of Gygax? It's in the name. Find and explore massively huge Dungeons and get killed by massively huge Dragons. It was a good game, assuming all you ever wanted to do was to find and explore massively huge dungeons.

Mister_Sinister wrote:Secondly, I want to direct you to a spiel by Monte Cook about how such design was actually something they wanted. So while I agree with the final argument, I don't think it was as accidental as you make it sound.

Wow, that blog is almost offensive. Its an abdication of any responsibility to provide solid physical/metaphysical rules for a game. And then a nice 'Go Fuck Yourself' for not playing it as 'well' as Monte can play it.

Taishan wrote:

Mister_Sinister wrote:Secondly, I want to direct you to a spiel by Monte Cook about how such design was actually something they wanted. So while I agree with the final argument, I don't think it was as accidental as you make it sound.

Wow, that blog is almost offensive. Its an abdication of any responsibility to provide solid physical/metaphysical rules for a game. And then a nice 'Go Fuck Yourself' for not playing it as 'well' as Monte can play it.

Welcome to how Monte sees design work. Also, welcome to how WotC design anything ever.

Monte Cook, you're really making me feel like an asshole for sticking up for you all of those times.

deanruel87 wrote:@Catharz: See I think what's noteworthy is the in my opinion the blasting spells ARE those least powerful ones. I don't think that a lot of design time has been put into them so they end up being average. They are not average. They are terrible, incredibly terrible. I would rather have water breathing than lightning bolt and water breathing is horrible.

Magic mouth, spectral hand, phantom trap, hold portal, whispering wind, gentle repose, illusory script, tenser's transformation, Mordenkainen's faithful hound, secret chest, passwall, ...

Hey, you can use illusory script. Just write something on a hat, and cast illusory script on your hat so when people look at it they have to go fuck off.

Spectral hand is moderately useful.

The rest are shit, although special mention needs to go out to Tenser's transformation as being laughably bad and straight up worse than polymorph which is 2 levels lower.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Hey, you can use illusory script. Just write something on a hat, and cast illusory script on your hat so when people look at it they have to go fuck off.

Spectral hand is moderately useful.

The rest are shit, although special mention needs to go out to Tenser's transformation as being laughably bad and straight up worse than polymorph which is 2 levels lower.

Even though those shitty spells are occasionally useful, they're still far worse than fireball. Put them to the sorcerer test.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Monte Cook, you're really making me feel like an asshole for sticking up for you all of those times.

If you really stood up for Monte Cook, you wouldn't be grinding your gears these last few years trying to churn out your own take on this hobby, and would have been one of Cook's gladhands reading his blog and lapping up his drivel, or spreading it on forums.

Don't get down on yourself, Monte Cook did some good things; but that doesn't mean that he ever had a sense of how to make good things. Liking someone for their visible moments of glory, and then realizing they're not so great afterwards, and reforming your opinion of them is not a big deal.

I mean, TGD seriously wanted 4e and Pathfinder to be about as good as 3.5/3.X or possibly approach the Tomes. Look what happened as we kept paying attention to what was going on. TGD, for the most part, realized things wer going to be not good, so we don't like 4e or PF. Despite what we initially wanted and thought about those products.