So what's next for Mike Mearls?

[ishy]

Rich also created stuff for it's not outside.
Traps and such IIRC.
He also used to post things on nifty.

But just looking at the 'caster fights' in the comic, I don't want Rich to be working on a D&D edition at all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But just looking at the 'caster fights' in the comic, I don't want Rich to be working on a D&D edition at all.

I wouldn't judge his game design skills by... those. I think that silliness is caused more by trying to reconcile the reality of D&D as she is played with the needs of the plot.

I mentioned this in another thread but I think that the biggest boat anchor on the quality of Order of the Stick (aside from the ridiculously slow schedule) are the original characters. The strip was set up ten years ago as a satirical gag-a-day on D&D. Thus your party consisting of a smart-but-vanilla fighter and a ranger that couldn't track and a dumbass bard and a close-quarters unmagical ranged rogue and a wizard that banned both conjuration and necromancy was fine and even helpful for this premise.

The problems really started when the strip moved to action-adventure dramedy and Rich Burlew (understandably, if feebly) didn't want to retool the characters to fit the needs of higher-level D&D. I don't think the problems really started until the Azure City siege arc and that was so far in the future from the genesis of the strip that I don't think it's fair to hold the author's feet to the fire for this.

Moreover, keep in mind that probably only about 20% of the Order of the Stick readers are even aware that there are fundamental problems with characters like Roy, Belkar, Haley, and Elan and only a minority of those people think that those problems are irreconcilable given enough plot armor and DM pity.

Like it or not, very few people like it when the author just comes out and admits that one or more members of the original adventuring party in action-adventure fiction is obsolete and useless and that you were going to boot them off. Now normally Rich Burlew could just give the Order of the Stick crew a badass upgrade but he's constrained by the D&D paradigm. When it's more plausible to reveal that Sokka and Suki were Water and Earthbenders all along (and quickly scale them in power to match the rest of the Gaang) than it is to give Roy some fucking useful abilities you see the fix that he's in.

[Chamomile]

Order of the Stick's discussions of rules is inversely proportional to how seriously it takes itself. Partly this is because back when it was a gag-a-day strip, the gag would often be about some inherent absurdity of the rules, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's also because Rich is unable to discuss mechanics extensively without revealing that his characters are horribly under-optimized, which is bad for any non-comedic purposes.

[Voss]

Well considering that the latest storyline has the fighter holding a rope for the entire thing, I'm willing to take that as at least some awareness of problems and willingness to poke them a bit.

That doesn't really translate to any ability for game design, however.

[Kaelik]

Speaking of which, does anyone have an opinion as to Burlew's diplomacy rules? They are available on GitP somewhere. I thought they were better than 3.5 at least.

It still casts Diplomacy as a fight, where your ability to convince someone to be your slave for no reason is the real ability of Diplomacy. It adds in an ad hoc factor for favorability that ranges from -10 to +10, but that isn't very granular, the difference between you giving me one GP and me giving you one GP is 2GP, but it is also 10 points apart on the RNG in this system. If you are even capable of convincing someone to do something slightly favorable to you you basically auto succeed at convincing them to succeed on something slightly favorable to them, so the real work is in MTP bullshitting the MC to give you the 10 point swing in success.

Then end result, instead of making them have an attitude that does X for you makes them agree to a proposal.

There is no enforcement mechanism whatsoever defined, so maybe they want to carry through and maybe they betray you tomorrow and that is all MTP.

What counts as a proposal is completely undefined as well. So if you are willing to take a -10 penalty because you broke the RNG several levels ago you can just offer every person you meet the proposal that they become your slaves forever.

No really, the DC 15+Character Level+Wis mod+10 for permanent slavery, so when you are a really high level character it is expected for you to just walk into town and make slaves of the merchants and then have them give you all their stuff, because why not you can crush that DC what DC 33 check.

And hey, if you happen to be a Binder 1/Marshal 1/Bard 1 Half Elf you can roll that 1d20+25 as a single standard action to see if your CR 3 enemy with a character level + Wisdom mod of less than 10 is your slave forever. Hint, that will be the case more often then 50% of the time. Also it works on groups too, so just fucking take over the entire army of goblins in one round.

In summary, like every single Diplomacy rule ever, it sucks and your game would be actively better if you used MTP instead.

[Josh_Kablack]

Burlew's big flaw is that since apparently regular webcomic updates are difficult for him to maintain without any other day job, the strain of having to deal with a whole edition and design team would likely snap him in half. And honestly He's also only about half and half on mechanics.

But where Rich shines like a freakin' supernova is in marketing, self-promotion and brand awareness. If WotC decided to put him in charge it would tell me that they were actually getting serious about the brand instead of slowing leaving it to die. It would be sort of like getting James Cameron to direct the next D&D movie....that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be good, but it means that they are making a real effort and people will notice.

[nockermensch]

Well considering that the latest storyline has the fighter holding a rope for the entire thing, I'm willing to take that as at least some awareness of problems and willingness to poke them a bit.

I think this whole "fighter" thing has really gotten in the way of you discovering your true destiny as a wharf.

He's totally aware of it.

[Cyberzombie]

What I find really interesting is how closely Mearls' statement defending Schwalb matches Monte Cook's statement defending shitmuffin. Mearls doesn't literally use the word "asshole" but it's clear that the people they aren't writing for are the same.

It doesn't, not really. Schwalb is directly advocating rules-lite gameplay. He is against powergaming in general and wants to go back to just rolling dice and the DM telling you what happens. His very first complaint with D&D was that it was too complicated.

Monte's main point is that problem players can't be fixed with rules. Monte doesn't have big problems with complexity or powergaming. He's the guy who made articles about rewarding system mastery back in the 3E days. He's certainly not a rules minimalist like Schwalb is.

Ironically, Monte would probably consider Mearls an asshole player he doesn't want to write rules for, after the whole MC Killzalot thing.

[Username17]

The fact that Monte unironically advocated the creation of complexity for its own sake more than a dozen years ago is neither here nor there. What he has been doing lately (since he started working on 5e) has been Numenera, which is a rules lite navel gazer.

But again and still, the "main point" of Monte's offensive tirade was that people who cared about rules he didn't care about are "assholes" and that he does not want to design rules for them anymore. The second part of course was the claim that while he was working on 5e, that was a design principle, and he wasn't sure if it was still being followed. This is eerily similar both in content and wording to Mearls' statement that no one he talks to wants to design rules for the kinds of people that where annoyed at Schwalb.

The 5e design team is and always has been made up of people who hate D&D fans and don't want to write rules for people who care about the rules of D&D.

-Username17

[Voss]

What I find really interesting is how closely Mearls' statement defending Schwalb matches Monte Cook's statement defending shitmuffin. Mearls doesn't literally use the word "asshole" but it's clear that the people they aren't writing for are the same.

It doesn't, not really. Schwalb is directly advocating rules-lite gameplay. He is against powergaming in general and wants to go back to just rolling dice and the DM telling you what happens. His very first complaint with D&D was that it was too complicated.

Monte's main point is that problem players can't be fixed with rules. Monte doesn't have big problems with complexity or powergaming. He's the guy who made articles about rewarding system mastery back in the 3E days. He's certainly not a rules minimalist like Schwalb is.

Schwalb wasn't a minimalist until sometime last year while working on 5e. He was an active advocate of piling useless shit on top of one another all through 4e (because thats what 4e is), and was involved in either the Binder or Truenamer, which actively involves finding gems in massive piles of non-functional bullshit.

Now he's suddenly reverting to his childhood trauma with difficult math as a way of appealing to nostalgia, but that literally made up zero percent of his actual work as a game designer for over a decade.

Just like Monte, there is a sudden break between the complex game design that he used to do, with the completely minimalist stuff he now advocates. Hell, thats true for Mearls as well. Iron Heroes was a massive fucking hot mess of complexity. Failed complexity, true, but the feat chains and token pools were a massive sprawl of power accumulating complexity (or failure).

It really seems that the surviving clique of designers that didn't jump ship for Paizo or elsewhere are deathly afraid of anything complex now, but it wasn't true for any of them prior to the last year or two.

Ironically, Monte would probably consider Mearls an asshole player he doesn't want to write rules for, after the whole MC Killzalot thing.

I don't know why you think so. Killzalot had zero to do with rules, and is actually the kind of bullshit character concept for the lulz that Numenera specifically encourages. Mechanically, Killzalot was a completely by the book fighter with no options- Mearls actually points out that he made zero choices and just defaulted to ability upgrades rather than feats. Its a fighter that wears plate and crits more often, because that is what the default fighter does.

[zeruslord]

Rich Burlew actually has some fairly decent mechanical stuff on GitP - there's a fairly reasonable polymorph fix and some fighter feats that are a mix of fairly bullshit (add one to max dex and remove a point of armor check penalty for a specific armor type) and reasonably useful but would be somewhere between the +1 and +11 BaB abilities on a tome feat (when mounted on your personal favorite steed, you both roll initiative and take the better one, you can share shield bonuses with your mount, spring attack combined with charge, cumulative damage bonuses as you drop enemies within a round). I'm not sure whether to compliment him on having some fighter feats to go out beyond the end of the PHB feat chains by 2004 or be mad that they are still in a context where it's considered OK for Whirlwind Attack to have dodge, mobility, and combat expertise as prereqs

[tussock]

Looking back at Mearls on the net over the years, I clearly could have seen it coming, if only I'd thought to stalk him.

It is hilarious that everyone who's talked with him over the years seems to want to chip in that "he's a great guy". Good listener, you see, agrees with everyone, good at finding the mood of a place and fitting in. Also, the internet is forever, motherfuckers.

When I ran an AD&D game in college after not touching the game for about 4 years, all I had was the 2nd edition PHB, 1st edition DMG and the module "Against the Cult of the Reptile God." When I very first started playing D&D, all I had was the '78 basic book.

No wonder the man doesn't like rules, the rules he learned to DM with didn't go together!

Hmm, some Alternity, some Silhouette.. Also into GW minis games in '97. A little defending 2e AD&D to the hilt in 1998 (meh, not much better around I guess). Here's the one I was after.

The issues with the fighter are far beyond the scope of a single post.
I've been pretty busy with work (hence the lack of posts), but the issues faced by the fighter run pretty deep into the system.

In essence, fighters are shackled to a system of abilities (feats) that's supposed to serve as a set of customizations/toys that you can use to make your character unique and fun. It's usually bad to force a sub-system to take on two, radically different burdens.

That's the "fighters need spells" period. The wierd thing is, the game they made with Fighter spells in turn made all spells equally useless for everyone. It's like, if you give something to a Fighter, it ends up crap. Or rather, "ordinary". "Mundane". I've had the discussion somewhere about how at-will stuff always feels crap unless it works particularly well. Back to Mike, I'm just reading my ancient self too and it's triggering.

P.S.: No Mike, the problem with 3.5 Fighters is that they mostly can't even kill the fucking monsters, which is the only job they're allow to even try. "Fighter" needs to be able to win fights. If they need buffs, that shit needs to be cheap for the casters.

We are never going to make D&D more complicated than it needs to be.
Roleplaying is not some sacred hobby that requires a minimum mental or creative requirement. There are few enough outlets for creativity in the world that I'd never stoop to make D&D less accessible.

The core of D&D is roleplay and the DM as creator/judge/actor/storyteller. Those two tools are the advantage that we have over every other form of game out there. They are awesome advantages, powerful enough to keep D&D going for over 30 years. We'd be insanely stupid to get rid of them or de-emphasize them.

Spooky. Then of course, he's in charge of skill challenges, and we get the endless run of "it's not broken because the DM can fix it by hiding the mechanics from the players". Which I mistakenly took as him just not being able to write rules very well, when it was actually him not wanting players to have access to the rules in the first place.

Maybe that's why 4e skill challenges never worked. It was always run "at the offices" with the DM being a creator/judge/actor/storyteller and just handing out results that seemed appropriate as the players rolled dice for no reason at all. Math? LOL.


Oh, wait, I did stalk Mike for a while. By which I mean I read his columns for a while when they started on 5e.

D&D is the moments in the game, the interplay within a gaming group, the memories formed that last forever. It's intensely personal. It's your experience as a group, the stories that you and your friends share to this day. No specific rule, no random opinion, no game concept from an R&D designer, no change to the game's mechanics can alter that.

That's fucking nihilism, that is. Knew it was bullshit at the time, but I see what the man really feels now. Rules of the game aren't even real because all you have is memories. Fucking Nihilists.

Rather than copy any more, I have an old rant series about his Legends & Lore columns there from before I stopped caring. Some may find humour in it if time allows.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... G_nMYsm04U

Copy and paste works, link not clickable. Don't understand url tags.

---

What's next for Mike Mearls? He'll be busy convincing his bosses that he's a great guy by listening intently and agreeing with what they have to say. He'll be reminding them that "the rules being broken is the whole point, that makes you roleplay and trust the DM to fix everything and make it work! That's what D&D is!"

Fucking nihilists. Especially the ones that have superb self-promotion talents. Apparently, you want to design D&D, just churn out some deliberately unfinished crap, so you can spend your time agreeing with everyone about how broken it is and congratulate them on their brilliant house rules and fixes. Then, when the bosses come calling, be an active listener, agree with the problems they're seeing and applaud their solutions. Players don't like our rules? No problems, no rules needed! D&D is all happiness and nostalgia and DM wankery. That's what you're selling. 30 years of a game with no rules, because Mike Mearls didn't have the proper rules in college, and he loved it, because he could make everyone happy.


Guess what, Mike. The rubber just hit the road. You're fucked, son. Ain't no one gunna like you now.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Fucking nihilists.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Guess what, Mike. The rubber just hit the road. You're fucked, son. Ain't no one gunna like you now.

I don't think anyone outside of this forum has actually noticed or objected to "but the DM can magically fix anything," splattered all over the 5e rules.

What I am seeing is people questioning why this edition is in any way an improvement from their game of choice.

[infected slut princess]

At one time, Mearls was actually not as much of a retard if you can believe it.

http://mearls.livejournal.com/80639.html

I always thought that the "miniatures take away from the roleplaying" argument was a bit of a cop out. I've never noticed any link between having figures on the table and people's willingness to roleplay.

As far as an issue of trust, it's more an issue of power. Trust is only a byproduct of an inequity of power. If someone doesn't have power over you, you don't have to worry about trusting them. There isn't anything they can do to you, so why worry about them?

So, what does this have to do with D&D? A lot.

In D&D, the DM has more power over the flow and implementation of play than the players. However, the players have the rules to keep the DM in line. So, if the DM throws Tiamat at a 1st level party, the players can call out the DM for throwing a CR 20+ monster at them. After all, the rules explicitly say that's wrong.

More importantly, the players can use the rules to stake control over different aspects of the game. One of the aspects of D&D that makes it so interesting is finding advantages and combinations that are more powerful than the sum of their parts. When a player puts together a character, he's constructing a spread of talents that he hopes proves fun to play.

We can define fun in a lot of ways, but I think for most D&D players fun is "having a positive, noticeable impact on the flow of play." This usually means a PC who kicks a lot of butt in whatever area he chooses to focus on, be it roleplay or combat.

Without miniatures, you short circuit a lot of the possibilities for combat-focused mastery for a player. You turn a lot of abilities and spells into "mother may I"* abilities - the DM decides when a player can use the feat, not the rules. That's a subtle but important difference. The player's feats only come into play if the DM wants them to. The player's choices are less important, because the DM can now arbitrarily put them into play or yank them out. That's the basis of the power divide between players and DMs, right there.

So why is there a natural tendency to link miniatures with games that feature no roleplaying? I think there's two factors at work. For players, combat is one part of the game. If you aren't very good at tactics, pushing those miniatures around a grid takes away from the parts of the game that you do like. I think that it's human nature to prefer to say "Miniatures take away from roleplaying, let's not use them" rather than "I'm not good at tactical combat, let's not use minis."

For DMs, things are a bit different. IME, there's a natural tendency for DMs to houserule the game to weaken the game's leveling effect WRT DM and player power. That's a post for a completely different thread, but it's one of those things that you really have to watch out for as a designer. I think this tendency is an artifact of 1st and 2nd edition, and I'm very curious to see what the culture of the game is like in 10 years.

So, in the end the question isn't "Do you trust the DM?" The question is, "Why doesn't the the DM trust the players?" If we're taking power away from the players and giving it to the DM, why are we doing this? What purpose does it serve?

Now, the two cases I outlined above don't apply to everyone, but they are the most common ones IME. In any case, I hope it provides some theoretical framework for why miniatures are a part of D&D. I think that D&D 3e is so popular precisely because it is the one commercial game that seeks to bridge the power gap between the DM and the players.**

*A "mother may I" ability in D&D is a PC talent that works only if the DM allows it to. The ranger's favored enemy is the best example - the ranger can only use it if the DM puts monsters into the adventure that qualify as the ranger's favored enemy. IMNSHO, mother may I abilities are bad for the game. Turning undead is an exception, since you can take feats to do different stuff with it. Generally, these abilities are bad because they exacerbate the power divide between players and DMs.

**Oddly enough, a lot of indie RPGs' defining trait is their move to level the power difference between players and DMs. In many ways, indie games have more in common with D&D than any other game on the market. Just don't tell that to the people writing indie

This article is from 2005 and obviously in the last several years Mike Mearls abandoned this philosophy for fapping to Mother May I has a FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF 5E.

I HATE YOU MIKE MEARLS

[Sakuya Izayoi]

That's... eerie. That seems like the sort of manifesto a person here would write. He even uses the term "Mother May I" as a pejorative in the same manner.

The only explanation I can come from is that it all ties into his fellatio skills. How he's kept his job in such an axe-friendly corporate environment. It's not enough to fellate people's tools. You also have to parrot their ideas. So in 2005, when the wind was blowing that direction, those were the ideas he espoused. And now, desperate for "fresh" ideas, he turns to the RPG blogging scene, where people like Pundit and Shitmuffin are the most prolific voices, even if the reason they're famous is because they classify entire groups of people as being lower than pigs.

[infected slut princess]

Mearls' level 1 feat was "Awesome Blow."

[Cyberzombie]

That's... eerie. That seems like the sort of manifesto a person here would write. He even uses the term "Mother May I" as a pejorative in the same manner.

The only explanation I can come from is that it all ties into his fellatio skills. How he's kept his job in such an axe-friendly corporate environment. It's not enough to fellate people's tools. You also have to parrot their ideas. So in 2005, when the wind was blowing that direction, those were the ideas he espoused. And now, desperate for "fresh" ideas, he turns to the RPG blogging scene, where people like Pundit and Shitmuffin are the most prolific voices, even if the reason they're famous is because they classify entire groups of people as being lower than pigs.

This. Mearls is great at keeping his job and will say whatever he thinks is popular at the time. The only constant is that he's a total slacker who produces unfinished rules.

[NineInchNall]

Don't agree. Better analogy would be someone who doesn't care about the line-up and pre-match banter.

Hmm... I think the draft might be an even better comparison.

It has nothing to do with the actual game itself, not really. But people can get as into the draft as they do the game itself, because they understand the implications the draft has on how the game winds up being played.

But the important thing is that character creation is part of the game - as much a part of the game as combat, despite happening at a different time. The draft isn't part of the game of football per se; it's part of the NFL. Pre-match banter, while part of human interaction, isn't part of the game per se.

With that in mind, let's improve the following.

I personally hate creating pathfinder characters, while I still can have a lot of fun playing the game (even though it is slightly worse than 3.x).

"I personally hate creating pathfinder characters, while I still can have a lot of fun playing the rest of the game (even though it is slightly worse than 3.x)."

[Voss]

That's... eerie. That seems like the sort of manifesto a person here would write. He even uses the term "Mother May I" as a pejorative in the same manner.

The only explanation I can come from is that it all ties into his fellatio skills. How he's kept his job in such an axe-friendly corporate environment. It's not enough to fellate people's tools. You also have to parrot their ideas. So in 2005, when the wind was blowing that direction, those were the ideas he espoused. And now, desperate for "fresh" ideas, he turns to the RPG blogging scene, where people like Pundit and Shitmuffin are the most prolific voices, even if the reason they're famous is because they classify entire groups of people as being lower than pigs.

This isn't that surprising. Remember, this is 'Monte Cook presents Iron Heroes' by Mike Mearls that we're talking about. After shilling for Monte, he was pre-approved for a job at Wizards HQ. And this was all 3e (and Monte's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved) time, so complexity was the party line. Then 4e happened and it wasn't, so he took up the new banner and everyone who liked 3e was a horrible person. (Cue exodus of the complexity faithful to Paizo). And now the sins of 4e and 3e are the new Unforgivables, and the only conceptual space is to wank to childhood nostalgia, because they've eliminated everything else from the system.

[CapnTthePirateG]

and the only conceptual space is to wank to childhood nostalgia, because they've eliminated everything else from the system.

Which is hilarious, because I grew up on 3.5, most of the people I played with grew up on 3.5, and I don't have any nostalgia for 2e and can recognize it as a terrible system.

[Dean]

So what we're discovering, which makes a lot of sense, is that Mike Mearls is an extremely competent Yes-man. He is capable of altering his entire worldview on a dime to whatever the person who is most likely to get him a new job believes.

[PhoneLobster]

Which is hilarious, because I grew up on 3.5, most of the people I played with grew up on 3.5, and I don't have any nostalgia for 2e and can recognize it as a terrible system.

I grew up and got into D&D at exactly the right time for me to theoretically experience maximum nostalgia for 2E in particular.

2E was so bad that I do not for a second experience that nostalgia, and never did. I jumped ship from it long before 3E was a thing, and when 3E came out immediately recognized it as a significant step forward and embraced it eagerly, even though the timing of 3E's release for me directly correlated to a time in my life when I was significantly more likely to be jaded and critical of RPG rules, it took 4E for me to ultimately give up on official D&D.

Anyway, even aside from the thing where there are just flat out MORE players out there with good memories of 3.x than there are with good memories of 2E and prior... I think they over estimate the good memories the minority might have of 2E and prior...

Maybe the plan is in fact to rely on the majority of the market NOT having experienced the bad old days, and being inundated with the nostalgia of the deranged few "our favorite edition" fan boys as their only source.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

It's funny that 4rries are getting thrown under the bus, since they're the demographic that has no where else to go. Nostalgic people can play games they already own, 4rries can play, uh.... Warlords of Draenor? Descent?

[CapnTthePirateG]

It's funny they're trying to piss off teh evil min/maxing powergamers because those are the people who buy splats. And are pig-fucking assholes.

Still can't tell whether or not 5e is gonna catch on or will falter to resounding meh.