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View Full Version : How much was D&D playtgested?



thirdkingdom
2012-03-27, 04:20 AM
So, here is something I don't understand. How much playtesting did Wizards do when they came up with 3.5 (for that matter, how much playtesting goes into the supplements, as well). They have to have played through each class into Epic levels, right . . . ? At least once? Also, were playtested characters made to the platonic idea of a character, where fluff matters more than crunch? How else would they have thought the monk was a good idea? Did they try and break the characters? Somehow I doubt it. Just some semi-serious questions that have been floating around in my head.

Thanks

erikun
2012-03-27, 05:01 AM
I don't think anyone has access to the actual work done with D&D3 back from 2000, although it seems quite likely that they were only playtested at low-to-medium levels. (1-8, possibly 1-15) Lower levels seem the most balanced, at least in the sense that certain classes don't completely break the game.

They quite likely did not test all the possibilities, or at least not much outside of ideal/intended situations. That is, they didn't have a Monk run around trying to fight multiple opponents, or test out a Wizard packing a full set of Web and Evard's Black Tentacles. A lot of stuff, especially spells, were apparently ported from AD&D to D&D3 while trying to maintain the same concept over how the spell interacted with the system.

Material in splatbooks probably had more or less playtesting, depending on the book. Expanded Psionics Handbook and Tome of Battle likely went through a bunch of playtesting. Tome of Magic looks a bit closer to a rough draft.


D&D4 obviously went through a good period of playtest, although I believe the designers admitted that they primarily focused on heroic tier (levels 1-10). As such, you see a lot of heroic abilities that are interesting and work out well, while stuff in the epic tier tends more toward blandness, limited options, and strange math.

valadil
2012-03-27, 05:16 AM
My understanding is that they playtested the traditional four role party and neglected to explore outside any class's role. Wizards should blast. Clerics should heal. If the cleric wants to hit things he should have played a fighter.

I have no one source for this understanding but Ive encountered it more than any other theory on WotC's play testing in the early 2000s.

kaomera
2012-03-27, 08:03 AM
3e's design process was actually supposed to have been pretty extensive - iirc WotC had said it had been in development for about three years. However, the starting point of that development was 2e. I'm sure that there was constant playtesting by multiple groups throughout that time period, but they really didn't have the luxury of finishing the game first and then playtesting that final product through a long-term campaign. On top of that, even a few dozen playtesters can't out-do the efforts of the entire D&D fan community... (Nor will anyone ever be able to account for every play-style in one product.)

On top of that, each new product after the core books had much, much less time available for playtesting. This is the point of errata and updates (like the 3.5 update): you let the players do some of the testing for you (not by preference or maybe even intent, but by necessity). And the way the game is played / the nature of the playerbase changes as time goes on as well - 3e was designed for 2e players, but you soon had 3e players playing it, with a somewhat different set of expectations...

milothethief
2012-03-27, 08:32 AM
3e's design process was actually supposed to have been pretty extensive - iirc WotC had said it had been in development for about three years. However, the starting point of that development was 2e. I'm sure that there was constant playtesting by multiple groups throughout that time period, but they really didn't have the luxury of finishing the game first and then playtesting that final product through a long-term campaign. On top of that, even a few dozen playtesters can't out-do the efforts of the entire D&D fan community... (Nor will anyone ever be able to account for every play-style in one product.)

On top of that, each new product after the core books had much, much less time available for playtesting. This is the point of errata and updates (like the 3.5 update): you let the players do some of the testing for you (not by preference or maybe even intent, but by necessity). And the way the game is played / the nature of the playerbase changes as time goes on as well - 3e was designed for 2e players, but you soon had 3e players playing it, with a somewhat different set of expectations...

I would say that is a very, very accurate depiction of what occurred. And let's not forget that AD&D 2E wasn't necessarily thoroughly play-tested either; many people would consider elements of second edition to be broken, but that would only be if they measured it in terms of third edition's emphasis on gameplay balance. The developers and the community have been working hand in hand for a while to create what D&D is today, which largely seems centered around this concept of balance. I would posit that this emphasis has not always been the case, nor has play-testing always been focused on that particular aspect.

Lifeson
2012-03-27, 09:04 AM
If memory serves, TSR went under because it didn't playtest any of its later products because the CEO thought that would be "playing on the job".

Not sure about 3rd though.

Particle_Man
2012-03-27, 09:39 AM
I think 3rd ed actually had more playtesting than any other rpg ever.

Lhurgyof
2012-03-27, 11:19 AM
Not sure; but there are some loopholes that they probably just couldn't see.

And I'm sure they didn't expect wizards to adventure as their astral projection planeshifted to the material plane while they sit in their cozy ropetrick. :smalltongue:

Stubbazubba
2012-03-27, 12:34 PM
Of course there's an important difference between playtesting and advertisement disguised as playtesting, which is what most huge, open playtests amount to. The amount of feedback from those is staggering, with reported problems contradicting each other anyway, so it's mostly a PR move, to look connected to and concerned about the player base while ratcheting up hype for the game.

Part of this problem is because people have very different expectations going into a playtest. Most people are just excited to play the game, they're not looking to push a class or a power or an ability to its limits, use it in unconventional ways, combine different things to form infinite loops, or, on the other hand, find trap options in feats or even entire classes (I'm looking at you, Monk). They're not looking for holes, which is the whole point of outside playtesting. What they ought to do is hire playtesters to do just that in a long-term campaign, have a couple of these going at once, and hope that you catch everything. This first round of playtesting should happen before you announce a release date. In your second or third round you can probably pin down a release date, which is also when you start getting the art and layout happening. The problem with this ideal approach is that corporate will sometimes mandate a premature deadline, which results in 4e re-writing a staggering proportion of its contents in errata.

TheEmerged
2012-03-27, 02:21 PM
I have said for some time that I would have to see physical evidence to believe 3.0 was tested beyond 7th-9th level, or that *any* part of 3.0's psychic combat rules was tested at all, at any level, in an actual play situation. (3.0 psionics was a mess in general, but the psychic combat rules were mockable). 3.5 I can't speak much of as I only played a one-shot under that version.

I'll be the first to acknowledge the boilerplate that thousands of players actively trying to break the rules can find more in one hour that thousands of testing hours. I've entirely too much experience with some of the systematic failures of in-house testing. Based on my own experience, I'd suspect the biggest flaw is that they were testing for success instead of testing for failure. At the risk of picking on psychic combat, for example, it's pretty clear nobody stopped to ask "When is spending energy on psychic combat a better move than using a level-equivalent power?"

eggs
2012-03-27, 03:09 PM
It's also worth noting that many of the balance issues of 3e are both exaggerated in internet discussions and subject to contradiction viewpoints.

Glitterdust's power, to grab an often-cited example, is blinding an enemy or two for a short period. If, for example, a Wizard casts Glitterdust to neuter the Big Scary Monster, then the Fighter and Rogue kill the Big But No-Longer Scary Monster, this is not necessarily something that can be interpreted as a demonstration of game imbalance - the Fighter and Rogue did, after all, kill the monster (even if it wasn't much of a threat when they did so). This holds for many of the Win Button spells such as Waves of Exhaustion, Fear, Confusion, Black Tentacles, etc. There are some cases (like the Holy Word line or SNA alongside a poorly-built non-magic melee) where this breaks down, but by and large, the balance isn't overtly awful - especially if the default is "Party v. Monster(s)" rather than "Caster v. Noncaster."

I think it's likely that the designers aren't lying about the degree of their playtesting. Restarting D&D was a huge endeavor worth a lot of money, made by a company that had built hugely successful strategic games for about a decade prior to 3.0's publication - it seems preposterous that they'd make such clear mistakes.

What seems more likely is that they did not approach the game with the same min-maxing goal that is typically the default in internet discussions. I think it's likely that they assumed a player would go into the game saying "I want to play a Cleric... what cool stuff can they do?" rather than "I want to play a Tank... what class can do that best?" (the prior works rather well in the system; the latter is where wholly superfluous Paladins and Fighters come from) - especially because the designers did not appear to share the now-popular "Classes are a refluffable metagame concept" assumption (see: story-based prerequisites, the Assassin's murderin' requirement, the opening paragraph on what classes are, discussion of typical characteristics of class members and their interactions, Holy Avenger mechanics, favored classes... actually, instead of pointing at specific instances, I'm just going to swing a hand toward the core rulebooks).

valadil
2012-03-27, 03:59 PM
I'll be the first to acknowledge the boilerplate that thousands of players actively trying to break the rules can find more in one hour that thousands of testing hours.

3rd ed is the first D&D where the players had the internet on their side. Before then, I could only get advice from people I'd played with. Now I can get notes from every other player in the world. Of course I'm at an advantage compared to my 2nd ed self. Before the net, I maybe had dozens of playtesters helping me instead of thousands. I can't really fault wizards for failing to predict that this would happen in 3rd.

milothethief
2012-03-27, 04:01 PM
"Classes are a refluffable metagame concept" assumption (see: story-based prerequisites, the Assassin's murderin' requirement, the opening paragraph on what classes are, discussion of typical characteristics of class members and their interactions, Holy Avenger mechanics, favored classes... actually, instead of pointing at specific instances, I'm just going to swing a hand toward the core rulebooks).

Thanks for bringing that up. Seems to me that there is so much more potential for story-based prerequisites than 3.x ever used, unfortunately. Perhaps the developers bowed to the voracious appetite of the stat-hounds...

tyckspoon
2012-03-27, 04:11 PM
They're not looking for holes, which is the whole point of outside playtesting. What they ought to do is hire playtesters to do just that in a long-term campaign, have a couple of these going at once, and hope that you catch everything.

'Long-term campaigns' are fine for testing if your goal is to determine if your game is/can be fun. If you're probing for specific balance issues, it's a very poor approach- players get invested in their character instead of thinking about the mechanics, DMs make adjustments to make the game better for the particular group, and generally that format leads testers to ignore or paper over systemic flaws, because the DM fixes them or the characters they test with never encounter that particular problem.

If you're testing specifically for mechanical soundness, you do one-shot adventures or even single encounter scenarios, and you do them with a particular test in mind. For instance, you might say 'I have a supposedly CR-appropriate Dragon here. All its feats are Toughness and its treasure is a +X Con item. Bring me the highest damage output you can and let's see how long it takes to cut through this giant bag of HP.' And then 'same dragon, only now he's attacking you. Build for defense and we'll see how many Full Attacks you can survive from it.' And then you do them both again, only you make all the players swap up roles/base classes so you get different perspectives on the builds. (No, this is not necessarily fun. Neither is doing QA testing on video games, and that's basically what you're trying to do here- you poke and prod the system until it breaks and shows you where the errors are, and then you decide if they're bad enough that they need fixing.)

Altair_the_Vexed
2012-03-27, 04:18 PM
If you're testing specifically for mechanical soundness, you do one-shot adventures or even single encounter scenarios, and you do them with a particular test in mind. For instance, you might say 'I have a supposedly CR-appropriate Dragon here. All its feats are Toughness and its treasure is a +X Con item. Bring me the highest damage output you can and let's see how long it takes to cut through this giant bag of HP.' And then 'same dragon, only now he's attacking you. Build for defense and we'll see how many Full Attacks you can survive from it.' And then you do them both again, only you make all the players swap up roles/base classes so you get different perspectives on the builds. (No, this is not necessarily fun. Neither is doing QA testing on video games, and that's basically what you're trying to do here- you poke and prod the system until it breaks and shows you where the errors are, and then you decide if they're bad enough that they need fixing.)
See, this is what me and my mates are doing with the systems we've hacked together from the d20 mechanics. Guess what? I worked in QA.

Eldan
2012-03-27, 06:15 PM
Another thing I noticed:
The DMG (might have been the 3E one) mentions that PrCs should give something up for the options they gain. Which, looking at the core PrCs in the DMG, most do. The Archmage gives up spell slots for special abilities.
Then, they just kind of forgot that, especially with caster classes in later splat books. They get all their spells, the same skills and base stats and abilities on top of that.

Ravens_cry
2012-03-27, 06:33 PM
They playtested.
You want to see stuff that really isn't playtested, check out the D&D wiki.
*shudder*
The horror, the horror.
Here's the thing though, D&D 3.X is combinational, there is literally no way to test all possible options against all possible options without taking more time than the universe has existed.
I also don't think they expected the Internet to bring people together to pool ideas and builds.
Broken builds that might have been worth a giggle at a table, or at most ruined one game, became 'standard' for the meta.

thirdkingdom
2012-03-27, 06:38 PM
Just noticed I failed with the title. Anyway, thanks for the input. I seem to remember 2e being more balanced, at least until the various handbooks came out . . . . There were powergamers even then, however. It just seems to me that the 3e designers never even sat down and did the math with even the core classes at high levels. I mean, you can pretty much look at the fighter or monk with core rules and figure out damage potentials . . .
no need to playtest to tell that.

Todd

EccentricCircle
2012-03-27, 07:18 PM
I believe that the 3.0/3.5 playtests are where the "Iconic Characters", Tordek, Lidda etc come from. I thought that i'd read it in the Enemies and Allies book where their stats at different levels are presented. But that section doesn't mention it after all. So I can't provide a reference for this.

Saladman
2012-03-27, 07:26 PM
The 3.0 core rules were tested pretty extensively; we know this from hearing from the play-testers. The splatbooks likely were tested less. I remember 3.5 being originally billed as just a clean-up release with integrated errata, though they backed away from that claim as the books were released. But they clearly were drawing on player feedback from 3.0. I don't know how much whole-game play-testing they did with 3.5. It wasn't a new-from-whole-cloth rpg in the first place, so they may not have thought it was necessary.

I see the need for that kind of whole-game testing* only in relation to how many groups used an "everything ever published" approach instead of a core books + setting appropriate options approach to character building. Reading the first 3.0 DMG it looks to me like they expected most DMs to exercise more discretion in what options they allowed in most games. Looking at 4th edition, whatever else I think of it, I imagine they did learn their lesson there and determined to do better with 4E.

*Edit: I mean to say, I see the need for it after 3.0's play-testing had already been done and now they were fixing issues from an even wider base of actual play reports. Obviously I'm for testing brand new games.

wumpus
2012-03-27, 07:28 PM
1e (AD&D): Judging from the "editing" and various works in the "Best of the Dragon 1", my best guess is that the rules 1e drew from were pretty well playtested (and were probably in use in several employees ongoing games). Judging from the DMG's layout, I am convinced that the "editing" consisted of taking the base game, plus the coolest extra rules that fit (when the author is the CEO, who is going to edit?). I strongly doubt that extensive playtesting of the final cut was made.

2e: (most of my 2e experience is from Baldur's Gate). Probably playtested, but sufficiently derivative from 1e that the core didn't need all that much playtesting. This may have lead to poor practices when it was time to churn out splatbooks.

3e: Appears strongly playtested. Said to have issues due to playtesters using AD&D strategies in a 3.0 game, followed by players pooling knowledge over usenet and begetting batman (codzilla appears to be a design feature due to insufficient cleric players).

4e: Claims to be playtested, but some of the first errata happened after someone read the skilltest rules, and wrote an analysis of exactly what it said (penalties for coming up with an original plan was probably the worst of the lot).

dps
2012-03-27, 07:41 PM
'Long-term campaigns' are fine for testing if your goal is to determine if your game is/can be fun. If you're probing for specific balance issues, it's a very poor approach- players get invested in their character instead of thinking about the mechanics, DMs make adjustments to make the game better for the particular group, and generally that format leads testers to ignore or paper over systemic flaws, because the DM fixes them or the characters they test with never encounter that particular problem.

If you're testing specifically for mechanical soundness, you do one-shot adventures or even single encounter scenarios, and you do them with a particular test in mind. For instance, you might say 'I have a supposedly CR-appropriate Dragon here. All its feats are Toughness and its treasure is a +X Con item. Bring me the highest damage output you can and let's see how long it takes to cut through this giant bag of HP.' And then 'same dragon, only now he's attacking you. Build for defense and we'll see how many Full Attacks you can survive from it.' And then you do them both again, only you make all the players swap up roles/base classes so you get different perspectives on the builds. (No, this is not necessarily fun. Neither is doing QA testing on video games, and that's basically what you're trying to do here- you poke and prod the system until it breaks and shows you where the errors are, and then you decide if they're bad enough that they need fixing.)

This is a big problem in playtesting. "Playtesting" isn't just "playing the game and providing feedback". It's work, and it's not really much fun (for most people's idea of fun, anyway). I've been involved in playtesting board wargames, and it's not "play the Barbarossa campaign a couple of times and let us know about game balance and any rules problems", it's "play the opening turn of the Barbarossa campaign a couple of dozen times and let us know how the overrun rules work, then do that again, but using this different set of overrun rules". Outside playtesters get involved because they see it as a chance to play the game before anyone else, and they don't want to just narrowly test certain rules that way. As for paid testers, few game companies can really afford truly independent testers, so a lot of "playtesting" ends up being done by the designers and developers, and that's problematic because they "know" how the rules are "supposed" to work, so they don't see possibilities that they didn't think of in the first place, nor do they see that some rules are poorly worded and don't say what they think that they say.

bloodtide
2012-03-27, 07:51 PM
So, here is something I don't understand. How much playtesting did Wizards do when they came up with 3.5 (for that matter, how much playtesting goes into the supplements, as well). They have to have played through each class into Epic levels, right . . . ? At least once? Also, were playtested characters made to the platonic idea of a character, where fluff matters more than crunch? How else would they have thought the monk was a good idea? Did they try and break the characters? Somehow I doubt it. Just some semi-serious questions that have been floating around in my head.


D&D was playtested....sort of, but it depends on what you'd call 'playtesting'.

If you thinking that playtesting is several dozen groups of all types of different players and DMs that sat down and played the game for hundreds and hundreds of hours and explored and tried every possible thing in every possible way and context. It was nothing like that.....

It was a little more like: A couple people sat down and played a couple quick games.

And worst of all, D&D greatly surfers from Group-think. Almost everyone who saw the pre 3E rules, quite obviously, thought the exact same thing. There is simply no way to explain how all the 'mistakes' got into the rules. This can not be overstated enough: There is simply no way, no way at all, that the D&D rules could have been shown to any normal non-group-think player and not have that play point out at least a dozen things, mistakes or oversights.

But it gets worse! It's possible they really did play test everything and had dozens of people saying 'wait this does not work', and then the Powers-That-Be simply ignored it and said 'eh, ignore'em'.

Fatebreaker
2012-03-27, 07:55 PM
I remember hearing (sorry, no facts, just hearsay) how Gears of War 3 had 40,000 hours of playtesting. Forty. Thousand. Wow, huh?

Opening night, the community churned out over two million hours on XBox Live.

It's hard for a company to compete with that. It doesn't justify (or even excuse) some of the basic imbalances in 3.x, but it's worth remembering for some of the wackier combinations. I don't blame them for Pun-Pun. I do blame them for monks.

kaomera
2012-03-27, 08:21 PM
Just noticed I failed with the title. Anyway, thanks for the input. I seem to remember 2e being more balanced, at least until the various handbooks came out . . . . There were powergamers even then, however. It just seems to me that the 3e designers never even sat down and did the math with even the core classes at high levels. I mean, you can pretty much look at the fighter or monk with core rules and figure out damage potentials . . .
no need to playtest to tell that.
WotC's (and, earlier TSR's) goal was not to design a balanced rule-set, it was to sell books. 2e had plenty of balance issues, some of them pretty severs. Many of those involved bringing items etc. from one setting into another, and this represented TSR boxing itself in. They wanted to sell every book to every DM, but if you were running Dark Sun then Spelljammer material wasn't really relevant to you. This kind of issue, along with not adapting to the changing (shrinking) market quickly enough were what led to TSR's downfall.

With 3e WotC tried to expand their customer base by selling more and more to players as well as DMs. Now, when issues came up in 2e where players did something broken, the standard line was ''Well, players will tend to do those things, maybe don't let them get away with it?'' This didn't work so well in 3e because WotC wanted players buying books - and the more books a given player bought the better; and if they were simply not going to be allowed to use the most powerful stuff in any given book, then why buy it?

At the start WotC was still going for ''Let's make something cool that people will want to buy!''; they did make a grab for balance, but frankly including more powerful or combo-able stuff in each book tended to help sales. So you had the customers voting with their wallets against play-balance. (Not to mention the fact that putting out books as rapidly as they did at the height of the 3.5 release schedule left less time for playtesting.)

However, the real killer imo is nostalgia. 3e and 4e are drowning in the stuff. There are tons of rules and concepts that exist in D&D solely because they were done that way in previous editions. And most of this stuff worked in previous editions, but with each new iteration the base assumptions have changed, such that you don't often make a better game by simply bringing those concepts forward without seriously re-examining them.

eggs
2012-03-27, 08:23 PM
I mean, you can pretty much look at the fighter or monk with core rules and figure out damage potentials . . .
no need to playtest to tell that.And that's incidentally one of the areas where those classes work appropriately.

The primary misjudgements on the designers part are more complex and somewhat less tangible - such as the tactical advantages of singlemindedly focusing fire on casters (from the DM's end) or of spouting mass debuffs over single-target party buffs (from the caster players' end); or like the somewhat hollow sense of achievement when your Fighter's main contribution was whacking a paralyzed and unresponsive Balor until it went "squish."

HunterOfJello
2012-03-27, 08:58 PM
There was at least 2-3 years of playtesting. How extensive that testing actually got or how intensive it was, is unknown. I think one problem with the game is that it likely wasn't tested in the same way that games and especially video games are tested today.

As mentioned above, one thing that many players often forget about while examining 3e concepts is that the game was based off of 2e and carried over many of the same concepts. That's the reason why you have things like multiclass penalties, lousy melee feats in the PHB, Monks, and Paladins. You can stare at the book wondering why there are all sorts of pieces in it that don't fit, but they do when taken in the proper context.

~

I'm sure that far more playtesting was done for 4e (though perhaps not as much for the higher levels). I'm also sure that a massive amount of playtesting and even beta testing will be done for 5e, whenever the hell that comes out.

Mike_G
2012-03-27, 09:28 PM
3.0 isn't broken until you try to break it, or you accidentally find the broken bits.

My gaming group was a bunch of old AD&D veterans, and we started playing 3.0 at 1st level, with blaster wizards, healer clerics, sword and board fighters etc. The game works fine when played that way. It starts to get funky in the late levels, but not all that bad, assuming you stick with an Old School playstyle.

We didn't try to min/max, didn't try to find the "win" buttons. We eventually figured some out. All the blasty spells are pretty much exactly the same damage as in AD&D, but everyone has more HP, so they aren't as good. Saves were easier to make in AD&D, since there was no way to pump the DC up all that high, so Save or Die was often Waste a Slot as the target saved. Better to have done half damage from a handful of d6s. Power Attack didn't exist in AD&D so the two handed sword wasn't that much better than a one handed sword and a shield, or that two weapons.

Once we played for a few years, got some characters to higher levels, and discovered that, holy crap, it does makes sense to ban Evocation (which we thought you'd have to be insane to do).

And, back in the day, there was no huge internet dedicated to optimization.

We were like Revolutionary War reenactors given assault rifles. We just naturally stood in lines and fired volleys, because that's How Things were Done. Only later on when those punk kids showed up in cammo and hid in the bushes with their CharOp Boards and their Reserve Feats and CODzillas did we realize we weren't playing the same game.

Fatebreaker
2012-03-27, 11:10 PM
3.0 isn't broken until you try to break it, or you accidentally find the broken bits.

The road isn't in disrepair unless you hit any of the potholes.

Mike_G
2012-03-28, 12:35 AM
The road isn't in disrepair unless you hit any of the potholes.


3e can only be understood in the context in which it was designed. The successor to AD&D. Seen in that light, the changes from 2e address the problem of AD&D (Byzantine multiclassing rules, class and level limits for races, different bonuses for different stats--most of which offered no bonus until 15 or 16-- that kind of thing.)

They didn't foresee things like Save or Die/Lose spells being overpowered, since the spell offered a Save, which had always been a big weakness. They never thought the Cleric, who nobody wanted to play in AD&D, would be overpowered. The Cleric was what we made the DM's girlfriend play, if he insisted on bringing her. Finding somebody who was willing to play a cleric was the greatest luck an AD&D player could get. Healing in combat made sense, since average damage and HP were lower, so a few d8s of healing actually mattered. Fighters had the best THACO, and were the only class who got any advantage of "exceptional strength" so they just were better at melee than anybody else. Monsters were weaker, overall, and didn't have actual stats (Str, Int and so on. They had AC, HP and damage, obviously) in the original MM so a Druid couldn't just make his own stats irrelevant by Wildshaping.He could gain things like Flight, but not just substitute a 25 Strength for his 8 Strength.

All the 3.0 balance issues came about because of things nobody ever did in AD&D, and weren't looking for. You can't be a better fighter than the Fighter. It's a lot harder to be a God Wizard. By adding more options, the 3.0 designers thought they were just expanding the ways you could play the old style game. They never realized that the old style would be rendered obsolete, or worse "unoptimized."

Fatebreaker
2012-03-28, 12:58 AM
3e can only be understood in the context in which it was designed. The successor to AD&D.

So we can only judge a system by how well it fixed the flaws of the previous system?

Sorry, dude, but I'm better than that. I'm going to judge systems based on their own merits and flaws.

0Megabyte
2012-03-28, 02:37 AM
So we can only judge a system by how well it fixed the flaws of the previous system?

You can only judge a system on what came before, yes. Otherwise, you'd do silly things like judging the values of your grandparents the way you'd judge the values of your peers. You can't. Times change, customs change, the context in which certain things came about no longer exists. Or at least, those things need to be taken into account if you want to judge something accurately.



Sorry, dude, but I'm better than that. I'm going to judge systems based on their own merits and flaws.

Hindsight's 20/20, mate. Besides, what makes you think that the things you currently value in a gaming system was something they cared about in the first place? It's hard to judge something on things it wasn't trying to do.

"Oh, your bicycling sucks. How are you ever going to go to NASCAR with those skills?! You can't even turn at the proper speed!"

"But... I'm not going to NASCAR... I'm doing a mountain bike race..."

Endarire
2012-03-28, 04:20 AM
According to the testimonies of 3.x playtesters, data that went against expectations was found and largely ignored.

Also, balance for balance's sake isn't a good thing. Fun must come first. Speaking of which, I love the power of casters in 3.x because I see soloing the game as a challenge. Then again, I tend to take on similar challenges in games I love.

Redshiftblue
2012-03-28, 12:05 PM
We were like Revolutionary War reenactors given assault rifles. We just naturally stood in lines and fired volleys, because that's How Things were Done. Only later on when those punk kids showed up in cammo and hid in the bushes with their CharOp Boards and their Reserve Feats and CODzillas did we realize we weren't playing the same game.
This is perfect. It explains exactly what went 'wrong' with playtesting 3.X.
Some blame must fall on the designers for making spells(and feats/class features/etc) that simply ignored the traditional thought process, or circumvented it completely. Caster level increases, metamagic reductions, and so on.

cattoy
2012-03-28, 01:51 PM
3e can only be understood in the context in which it was designed. The successor to AD&D. Seen in that light, the changes from 2e address the problem of AD&D (Byzantine multiclassing rules, class and level limits for races, different bonuses for different stats--most of which offered no bonus until 15 or 16-- that kind of thing.)

Provided you live in a world where there exists one and only one RPG system, then yes.

If you actually paid attention to other game systems published by other companies, you could have seen several systemic problems with 3.x a mile away.

Stubbazubba
2012-03-28, 03:48 PM
You can only judge a system on what came before, yes. Otherwise, you'd do silly things like judging the values of your grandparents the way you'd judge the values of your peers. You can't. Times change, customs change, the context in which certain things came about no longer exists. Or at least, those things need to be taken into account if you want to judge something accurately.

No, this is not the same thing. 3e being better than 2e would be like applying your grandparent's values to your peers and celebrating how forward-thinking they are. You judge each generation on their own merits, given the context of the world they live/lived in. 3e must therefore be judged on its own, and not only as a successor to 2e. Successful video games, Apple, and a lot of other examples all had the nerve to make something new and internally consistent, which wasn't directed towards improving on the mistakes of former entries in the market. Guess what? Those things win huge amounts of market share and are extremely popular. You absolutely can judge a new product on its own merits. If all it's intended to do is fix the problematic systems of 2e, that's called errata, not a new edition.


Hindsight's 20/20, mate. Besides, what makes you think that the things you currently value in a gaming system was something they cared about in the first place? It's hard to judge something on things it wasn't trying to do.

"Oh, your bicycling sucks. How are you ever going to go to NASCAR with those skills?! You can't even turn at the proper speed!"

"But... I'm not going to NASCAR... I'm doing a mountain bike race..."

Again, your analogy in no way lines up with two TTRPGs in the same market. It's like saying "Oh, your 3e sucks. How are you ever going to play SimCity with that chargen?! There's not even rules to purchase land and buy buildings! And what kind of UI is this?!" 2e and 3e are not so different as you are implying here.

Ivory Tower game design, the idea that trap options should exist to reward players for knowing better than to play a Monk, was an ill-advised and reprehensible approach, it was Gygaxian DMing applied to design, and yes, Monte Cook has admitted that this was one of their design goals with 3.5. But the edition itself says it's supposed to let you play any cool character you imagine! That wasn't something it "wasn't trying to do," it's what it sold itself as. The Introduction to the 3.5e PHB encourages you to play a fighter, rogue, cleric, or wizard equally. But that completely breaks down by 7-9th level, before the halfway point of the game. The game has 20 levels, so therefore it should work through all those 20 levels. The game has 11 classes, so therefore 11 classes should work.

If it was just Monk being underpowered, or some Feats not working out so well, or a handful of Spells being too easily abused, then a simple errata would have been fine to fix it, like a video game which patches itself, albeit not nearly as easy to implement. But that's not what happened; the problems were far more widespread, the disparity in power between classes was far larger, the number of subsystems which completely fall apart with minimal effort (Diplomacy, for instance) was far more, and the number of Spells that marginalize a whole class was far higher, and no comprehensive errata was really forthcoming. The math was simply not run, and playtesting was devastatingly insufficient.

Even if it flawlessly fixed 100% of 2e's flaws, that fact would not outweigh it's flaws.

Mike_G
2012-03-28, 04:53 PM
Provided you live in a world where there exists one and only one RPG system, then yes.

If you actually paid attention to other game systems published by other companies, you could have seen several systemic problems with 3.x a mile away.

But they were designing the next generation of D&D. Not "a new RPG."

People expected classes, levels, elves, dwarves, fireballs, paladins, etc.

You can disagree, and point out the problems, but 3.0 is the way it is because it was intended as an upgrade for AD&D. Ask an engineer to upgrade a bow and arrow, and you'll get a compound bow. You will not get a machine gun. If you ask for a better projectile weapon, you might get a machine gun, but the Olde School Bow fanatics will complain that it's not a bow and arrow.

4e is very different from 3e, since it started from a new perspective, and many diehard D&D players rejected it not because it's a bad game, but because it "doesn't feel like D&D."

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-03-28, 07:14 PM
3.0 isn't broken until you try to break it, or you accidentally find the broken bits.

My gaming group was a bunch of old AD&D veterans, and we started playing 3.0 at 1st level, with blaster wizards, healer clerics, sword and board fighters etc. The game works fine when played that way. It starts to get funky in the late levels, but not all that bad, assuming you stick with an Old School playstyle.

We didn't try to min/max, didn't try to find the "win" buttons. We eventually figured some out. All the blasty spells are pretty much exactly the same damage as in AD&D, but everyone has more HP, so they aren't as good. Saves were easier to make in AD&D, since there was no way to pump the DC up all that high, so Save or Die was often Waste a Slot as the target saved. Better to have done half damage from a handful of d6s. Power Attack didn't exist in AD&D so the two handed sword wasn't that much better than a one handed sword and a shield, or that two weapons.

My group was similar in its initial approach to 3e, though we'd been optimizers in 2e (as much as the edition allowed, anyway) so we tried to make the best blasters, healers, sneakers, and stabbers we could when we first got our hands on it. And it turned out that even at high levels of optimization the standard blast/heal/sneak/smash party works very nicely in core when you're used to AD&D. Of course, within a campaign or two we figured out how 3e really worked, but our initial experiments bore out the idea that, yes, you can play 2e-style in 3e and it works just fine.

From what 3.0 playtest reports I remember, that's what WotC was trying to do, too. They didn't care about other RPGs, they didn't care about balance, they didn't care about testing what 3e could actually do. The entire point was to make sure that you could recreate the AD&D experience with 3e because they were trying to get all the AD&D players to switch over. That's why they ignored reports saying "uh, guys, blasting is worse than control now," because who would make a non-blaster anyway? That's why they copy-pasted many mechanics without substantial changes (or without any at all, in the case of many spells). That's why they couldn't care less what GURPS or White Wolf were doing--GURPS/WW players weren't their target audience, AD&D players were.

Talakeal
2012-03-28, 10:23 PM
Once you are at the play testing stage I am not sure how much you can actually do to fix some of the major issues. Tweak numbers, clarify easily exploited rules, add or remove a spell or class feature here or there, change the CR on a monster, etc. These are all things you can easily do in play testing.

Rebalance the core mechanics to abolish the linear fighter quadratic wizard problem, not so much.

This is especially problematic late in the playtesting process. If a major error is discovered near the end of production you not only have to redo the concept and the writing, but also the editing, layout, and technical aspects of the rulebook production.

As an aside, how long do you think public beta testing should last before it becomes a detriment to the game rather than an advantage? I have a 600 page game written, and it is ready to start a play test anytime, but do to real life commitments and the difficulty of finding artists I probably won't be ready to publish for at least a year and a half, and was wondering how soon you think I should start a public play test?

kaomera
2012-03-28, 10:43 PM
While I certainly think that 3e could be played in a balanced manner, quite a lot of new players got their first D&D experience with 3e, so they were not going to have any prior experience to fall back on. In 1e and 2e the burden of play-balance generally sat with the DM, and this continued with 3e at least in theory. However, 3e also made it a lot easier for players to argue against the DM, and I think in may ways the general responsibility for maintaining balance should have been split between the players and DM. However, while there has always been quite a bit of good DMing advice, there has rarely been much in the way of advice to players about making the game as a whole better...

I'm interested in where the idea that 3e was meant to provide significant mechanical balancing comes from. I'm not saying that wasn't the intention, I just don't remember exactly seeing much of such a claim. I know that the 3.5 changeover was supposed to address at least some balance issues, but beyond that there isn't much that I can recall, personally.

I think that the 3e monk and fighter were both problematic, to say the least. The real issue, to me, seems to lie in not addressing the roles of characters (perhaps not in the way that 4e does, but in some fashion). The monk has always kind of had this problem, in that it's a cool concept from a fluff perspective, but that fluff doesn't really lend itself to mechanics that are both good and unique. And I think that simply taking a working class model and slapping the fluff of a monk down over the top would have contradicted the design goals of 3e (and probably wouldn't have made many players that happy, anyway).

The fighter is more specifically a 3e issue. (I am making some assumptions about 2e here that could possibly be wrong, as I didn't play a lot of 2e). The fighter was essential to 1e, to the extent that more difficult modules tended to specifically call out the need for extra fighters in the party. But all of the mechanical quirks that made fighters so significant tended to be ironed out of 3e - PCs were generally more survivable, no more hordes of under-level opponents for the fighting-men to wail on with their full level number of attacks, no more higher-level threats they would need to ''tank'' if the party was even to escape (and if there were then 3e's higher damage would take them down faster anyway), etc. All of this was done for good reasons, but the overall impact on class balance was, I think, overlooked.

I have to say that I really think that 3e's balance issues and the level of playtesting it received were probably not as well-connected as some might think. 3e had to be ''breakable'' to some extent in order to make optimization worthwhile, and players like optimization (and it's therefore a good way to sell more books). I really don't even think that core 3e was all that bad. I think that part of what happened may have been that WotC saw (or perhaps only assumed) that the players who were complaining the most about 3e's balance were the same who were spending the most effort to push the rules beyond what they had expected. At that point it seems somewhat pointless to spend a lot more energy on creating a better balance, especially if they're still buying the books...

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-03-28, 11:33 PM
As an aside, how long do you think beta testing should last before it becomes a detriment to the game rather than an advantage? I have a 600 page game written, and it is ready to start a play test anytime, but do to real life commitments and the difficulty of finding artists I probably won't be ready to publish for at least a year and a half, and was wondering how soon you think I should start a public play test?

Game playtesting involves creating characters, running tests, creating more characters, running more tests, running monsters against monsters against characters against characters, and more. With the massive combinatorial scope of most modern games (particularly your 600-page one) you should try to take advantage of as much beta testing as you can.

Important to note, though, is that you shouldn't fall into a rut. Long beta testing can be bad if you focus too much on one issue or keep tweaking endlessly. As long as you keep things varied and know when enough is enough for testing a particular widget, you should be fine.


I'm interested in where the idea that 3e was meant to provide significant mechanical balancing comes from. I'm not saying that wasn't the intention, I just don't remember exactly seeing much of such a claim. I know that the 3.5 changeover was supposed to address at least some balance issues, but beyond that there isn't much that I can recall, personally.

The focus wasn't on balance, but the streamlining and standardizing of 2e was supposed to bring balance with it by association. Mostly, by the time the Players Option line (essentially 2.5e) came around, anything would have been more balanced as far as most players were concerned. :smallwink:


The fighter is more specifically a 3e issue. (I am making some assumptions about 2e here that could possibly be wrong, as I didn't play a lot of 2e). The fighter was essential to 1e, to the extent that more difficult modules tended to specifically call out the need for extra fighters in the party. But all of the mechanical quirks that made fighters so significant tended to be ironed out of 3e - PCs were generally more survivable, no more hordes of under-level opponents for the fighting-men to wail on with their full level number of attacks, no more higher-level threats they would need to ''tank'' if the party was even to escape (and if there were then 3e's higher damage would take them down faster anyway), etc. All of this was done for good reasons, but the overall impact on class balance was, I think, overlooked.

Indeed. Most of the numbers and spells of 2e carried right over into 3e; it's the fact that monsters got Con scores and Concentration appeared and initiative changed and everyone got iterative attacks and everything else that changed in the base system, rather than in the classes themselves, that screwed over the fighter and boosted the wizard.

Talakeal
2012-03-28, 11:44 PM
Game playtesting involves creating characters, running tests, creating more characters, running more tests, running monsters against monsters against characters against characters, and more. With the massive combinatorial scope of most modern games (particularly your 600-page one) you should try to take advantage of as much beta testing as you can.

Important to note, though, is that you shouldn't fall into a rut. Long beta testing can be bad if you focus too much on one issue or keep tweaking endlessly. As long as you keep things varied and know when enough is enough for testing a particular widget, you should be fine.



I should have been more clear, I meant a public play test available to anyone in the form of a free trial version of the rules available in .pdf form. I have been play testing with my own gaming group for several years now as well as running demos at school or gaming stores, but I am at the point where I need a larger audience to spot the issues that we can't.

What I am afraid of, however, is releasing a trial version and then taking so long to get a full version out that whatever excitement the game has generated has already died down.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-03-29, 12:18 AM
I should have been more clear, I meant a public play test available to anyone in the form of a free trial version of the rules available in .pdf form. I have been play testing with my own gaming group for several years now as well as running demos at school or gaming stores, but I am at the point where I need a larger audience to spot the issues that we can't.

What I am afraid of, however, is releasing a trial version and then taking so long to get a full version out that whatever excitement the game has generated has already died down.

I see. Well, a public beta is different from a controlled beta in that the feedback isn't going to be as reliable--not that it won't be useful, but that people might not get back to you quickly (or ever) and you can't often talk to them in person--but you should hopefully get a lot more volume in a lot shorter time.

Now, keeping in mind that I have experience with software beta testing more than PnP testing, I'd suggest three cycles of testing. In the first cycle, fix all the minor bugs that people tell you about, the typos and such, just to get them all out of the way; that way, you can provide ongoing updates and show playtesters that you're actively taking their feedback into account. (This isn't necessarily the most efficient first step, but (A) proving that you're listening to feedback is very important for getting more of it and (B) it's easier than jumping straight into rewrites.) The second cycle is when you should address any major problems people find (subsystem redesign, large balance issues, etc.) because you should have found them by now and this gives you more time to work on them through the third cycle. In the third cycle, you can iron out kinks with any problems fixed in cycle 2, and with all the data gathered in the first two cycles you should be able to find the subtler problems and fix those. In software parlance, you should do patch releases, then a major release, then a minor release, as opposed to the usual major/minor/patch cycle.

Depending on the amount and frequency of feedback, each cycle could be anywhere from a month for the first quick fix cycle to three months for the last cycle to let people go through some longer campaigns. If publicity/enthusiasm is a major concern for you, I'd keep the whole thing down to six months or so at max, either 1-2-3 or 2-2-2 depending on how things work out; kernel updates on a 3-month stable/3-month unstable cycle seem to work out for software, so 6 months should be long enough to be useful but not too long to wear out its welcome.

Take this with a grain of salt, hold harmless and indemnify, etc. etc. etc.

kaomera
2012-03-29, 08:08 AM
One of the first things I noticed about 3e, balance-wise, was that the design seemed to equate skills to feats to spell levels. Skills and feats I think was a hold-over from NWPs. Now, personally, I was not a fan of the 1e Unearthed Arcana, and I kind of drifted away from D&D in the 2e era. So my expectations of the fighter was that she should be one of the main ''skill-monkeys'' of the party. True, the thief had extra capabilities when it came to thief-stuff that no-one else could match, but anyone could effectively find and/or remove traps if they looked in the right place and were paying attention. And the fighter's survivability and the expectation of Conan-like athletic prowess often put them were the action was, even in non-combat situations.

NWPs were ''balanced'' against against weapon proficiencies and specialization. And while specialization was a big deal in 1e I think that was more because there was now a bonus were there had previously been none than a real significant impact on play. And, personally, I looked at the fact that a hero in a book or movie could expect to grab any random weapon (or even an object not intended as a weapon) and use it with deadly efficiency, and felt that weapon proficiencies were a bit pointless. So the overall effect was while I overall felt that 3e characters could not develop enough of their skills, the fighter was simply terrible in that respect.

(And I should point out that in play I've found that skill / NWP systems have a tendency to limit what PCs can do far more than they give them new options / capabilities.)

Comparing feats (gained one every two levels as a fighter; that's beyond the feats that every character got, of course) to spell levels seemed even more suspect. Wizards and such got new spell slots nearly every level, and those who needed to actually learn spells could count on getting new options every level, often (given the 3e treasure system as it was usually applied in my experience) multiple new options. So you're not comparing spells to feats but access to a whole new level of spells... I think one consideration under which this makes a bit more sense is the idea that feats are generally always available, whereas spells are a daily resource. In 1e, at least, the idea of a 5-minute day was kind of laughable (although I'd certainly think that clever players might pull it off occasionally with enough work), and I'm not exactly sure why / how it became such a standard of 3e. But I can remember a group I ran early in 3e being righteously indignant that after blowing a hole in the wall of an (evil) Duke's estate and then retreating back to their rooms at the inn to recoup spells before venturing inside, were tracked down and surrounded by the Duke's men...

Particle_Man
2012-03-29, 10:09 AM
I can remember a group I ran early in 3e being righteously indignant that after blowing a hole in the wall of an (evil) Duke's estate and then retreating back to their rooms at the inn to recoup spells before venturing inside, were tracked down and surrounded by the Duke's men...

That is beautiful. :smallcool:

Tiktakkat
2012-03-29, 11:20 AM
3.0 isn't broken until you try to break it, or you accidentally find the broken bits.

Yes it is.
And you are supposed to both try to break it and to find the "broken bits" - both elements were deliberately designed into the game with the concept of "system mastery" that was proclaimed by the designers when the system was released.
That people did so well at it is not their fault, and that the system was both so easy to break and had so many broken bits is very much the fault of the designers.


We didn't try to min/max, didn't try to find the "win" buttons.

Then according to that principle of system mastery you were doing it "wrong".
Of course the whole concept of "doing it wrong" is yet another flaw in the D20 system, albeit one severely aggravated from the D&D and AD&D systems.


3e can only be understood in the context in which it was designed. The successor to AD&D. Seen in that light, the changes from 2e address the problem of AD&D (Byzantine multiclassing rules, class and level limits for races, different bonuses for different stats--most of which offered no bonus until 15 or 16-- that kind of thing.)

Then be sure to consider it a successor system to AD&D and not a new edition of AD&D. WOTC did not want to consider it a new system, merely a cleaned up system, and in that context it had some severe issues, particularly in the areas it wanted to clean up. For example:

The multi-classing rules of AD&D were not particularly Byzantine. You either had to be a demi-human, split your xp, get lower hit points, and generally lag 1 level behind everyone else in both of your levels, or you had to be a human and dual class (not multi-class), have very high ability scores, give up about a level of advancement, and not use your old class abilities until your new class level was higher. That is not all that complex, and despite the level lag worked fairly well.
To "fix" that, D20 gave us multi-classing that was near useless without ultra-optimized builds and purpose built prestige classes, and most of those didn't appear until a swarm of splat books were released. That was such an "improvement" it was one of the main things thrown out with the Adventure system,

Class and level limits seem a bit peculiar at first glance, but then you get all the ranting and raving about "balance", and are quickly revealed as just that, with the extra starting abilities of the various demi-human races balanced by not being able to advance as far as humans in most classes.
D20 "fixed" that by removing the limits and throwing what were supposed to be balancing factors at humans. The concept was extended to more and more races, where the ever popular level adjustment soon made an appearance, later being modified with racial levels, which combined to impose a modest level limit anyway. Further, the racial ability adjustments imposed a major push towards certain race and class combinations anyway. And then of course the desire to get around all of those limits led to creating more and more subraces to subvert those rules, things like the Strongheart Halfling. In the end the same thing as in AD&D was imposed but a bunch of system flavor was lost in the process.

The different bonuses for different abilities also appears peculiar at first glance until once again considers it as a balancing factor for the various classes that the ability scores were tied to - the "prime requisite" concept.
Standardizing the bonuses certainly cleared up any presumed "confusion", but it also removed the limiting progressions of the bonuses, opening up an entire series of difficulties involving stacking bonuses and achieving excessive bonuses that appears in D20.

Then there are things like eliminating system shock without realizing that it was a functional limiting factor on using the haste spell (not to mention the agining from using it), altering how the blessed book works without remembering how much adding spells costs and how that would affect wealth by level guidelines, changing the shield spell to be like a shield while forgetting they had eliminated facing, and dozens of other minor things that quickly add up.
Somehow they forgot that when using an exception based rule system that when you change a core rule you have to check every single exception that was derived from it for synergistic effects.

Overall the D20 record for "fixing" things from AD&D is rather weak, but that is what happens when you create a new system rather than just try to clean up an existing system.

Also related to this is that WOTC has, ever since they came out with the D20 system, relied on severe backwards negative advertising to promote its new game systems.
AD&D "sucked", but D20 would save it!
D20 "sucked", but Adventure was awesome!
Adventure "sucked", but Next is perfect!
(Though they are now also trying out "Adventure was "perfect!", but we need to replace it and change a whole bunch of things for Next anyway!" I think Inigo has to have a talk with them about words and their meanings.)
So add to the context that the system they replaced AD&D with had to be replaced, and that replacement system also had to be replaced.
If even they think their replacement was so inferior why exactly should I consider it to be particularly good? Indeed, how can I dismiss the views of the designers regarding the inferiority of their own product?!


All the 3.0 balance issues came about because of things nobody ever did in AD&D, and weren't looking for. You can't be a better fighter than the Fighter. It's a lot harder to be a God Wizard. By adding more options, the 3.0 designers thought they were just expanding the ways you could play the old style game. They never realized that the old style would be rendered obsolete, or worse "unoptimized."

Worse than that.
They never realized that the AD&D system actually was balanced, and in a quest to create what they perceived as a "perfectly" balanced system they created a severely unbalanced and unstable system.
Then they repeated it with the Adventure system.
And from what they are posting they are determined to repeat it yet again with the Next system.


But they were designing the next generation of D&D. Not "a new RPG."

See above regarding treating it as a successor system.
Ultimately, they very much did create a new RPG, and simply used the D&D brand name for marketing it.


In 1e, at least, the idea of a 5-minute day was kind of laughable (although I'd certainly think that clever players might pull it off occasionally with enough work), and I'm not exactly sure why / how it became such a standard of 3e. But I can remember a group I ran early in 3e being righteously indignant that after blowing a hole in the wall of an (evil) Duke's estate and then retreating back to their rooms at the inn to recoup spells before venturing inside, were tracked down and surrounded by the Duke's men...

That's another of my favorite points regarding "game balance".

In AD&D, a 1st level wizard had one spell, and would be expected to stick with the party through 10-20 encounters, "somehow" managing to be relevant by throwing darts, or perhaps flaming oil, or even directing the party's pack of dogs (for those into AD&D style min/maxing).
Meanwhile in D20, a 1st level wizard has two first level spells and 3 zero level spells (which could have a significant combat impact despite design intention claims) for four encounters. That is 5-10 times the number of 1st level spells! That continues as you go up levels, made worse with various optimizations of ability score and spell slot availability.
And then they are "surprised" that wizards, and clerics and druids along the way, are massively better than other classes even at low levels.

Yes, they did realize how bad it was and try to correct it in the Adventure system - by changing every action to a "power", and relying on flavor text and variations in special bonuses and range to create class distinctions.
Of course they also noted that people should feel free to change the flavor text as they desired to improve the play experience, which makes both the quality of their flavor text and the effectiveness of using flavor text in such a manner highly suspect.

PairO'Dice Lost
2012-03-29, 11:39 AM
Yes it is.
And you are supposed to both try to break it and to find the "broken bits" - both elements were deliberately designed into the game with the concept of "system mastery" that was proclaimed by the designers when the system was released.
That people did so well at it is not their fault, and that the system was both so easy to break and had so many broken bits is very much the fault of the designers.



Then according to that principle of system mastery you were doing it "wrong".

I assume by the references to system mastery you're referring to the Ivory Tower Game Design (http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?mc_los_142) article. Tell me, what is more likely: that the WotC devs cunningly constructed a breakable system which rewarded system mastery and kept releasing tidbits that had secret synergy with other elements to break the game more, all the while releasing propaganda telling n00bs that their monk was just as strong as a wizard...or that the devs weren't malicious, they just thought that the finer aspects of their finely-crafted game would be obvious to gamers and didn't provide any guidance on them for the entire edition...or that the article is complete bull**** made up after the fact to justify their complete and utter incompetence in attempting to balance the system?

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Particle_Man
2012-03-29, 12:20 PM
Also related to this is that WOTC has, ever since they came out with the D20 system, relied on severe backwards negative advertising to promote its new game systems.
AD&D "sucked", but D20 would save it!
D20 "sucked", but Adventure was awesome!
Adventure "sucked", but Next is perfect!

You will be very happy with the core 3 1st ed AD&D books come out again. Hell, I might get them. My old books are still fairly sturdy but it doesn't hurt to have spares. :smallcool:

I must have missed a memo. So 4th edition is called Adventure and 5th edition will be called Next?

ken-do-nim
2012-03-29, 12:25 PM
If memory serves, TSR went under because it didn't playtest any of its later products because the CEO thought that would be "playing on the job".

Not sure about 3rd though.

TSR went down for more reasons than that though. For another reason, they used to put out deluxe box sets that cost them to make more than they sold them for. Then there was that Dragon Dice debacle.

Particle_Man
2012-03-29, 02:10 PM
I wonder what Lorraine Williams is up to these days?