Complexity in Gaming and Game Design
This morning I woke up to a discussion of how having spell levels and characters levels is confusing (as the level of spell you can cast is not the same as your character level) and that ability scores can be replaced with their modifiers, as we don’t really use the scores, just the modifiers.
Honestly, takes like this make me die a little inside, they are so remarkably infantilizing, treating players like they will wilt at the slightest complication in the rules. It also represents an odd take on game design, and as usual a complete ignorance of what has come before.
As an educator and a ref who runs games for 10-12 year old kids, I can confidently report that players who do find the “level” thing confusing can be sorted out pretty easily, in essence, spell level is half of PC level, so a 10th level priest can cast 5th level spells. That’s not hard.
Over the last 3 years of running after school games, and that represents about 40 players and around 240 hours of table time each, this issue has come up precisely 0 times. EVERY 10-12 year old player has figured this out without any assistance. In 35+ years of gaming, this has come up a few times, and a 30 second conversation sorted it out just fine. Honestly, if this sort of thing keeps someone from wanting to play D&D then they might as well give it up now, as there are plenty of more confusing things in the game.
For real.
Tweets like these are just part of a larger process to discredit and take down the big dog in the room. That’s it. There is no improvement here. If I replace ability scores with modifiers the game isn’t in any way better than it was before (nor worse), it’s just different. It also represents a curiously min-max view of the game. So, for example, it assumes that ability scores only matter for modifiers. However, ability scores are important for a whole host of reasons:
There are mechanics in the game that use your scores rather than the modifiers (e.g. roll under checks, spells like phantasmal killer, rolling for the possibility of psionics, determining how much you can carry, opposed ability checks)
There are multiple modifiers for various ability scores, strength has to hit, to damage, BBLG, carrying capacity and open doors, connecting all of these to a single number helps to unify them, just listing all the modifiers has the potential for confusion
Refs can use ability scores to help with rules improvisation, LOTS of stuff in the game isn’t covered in the rules, ability scores are useful to improvise rulings
Ability scores can be used to help with creating new game mechanics and game design, just because the game doesn’t use them very much doesn’t mean they can’t be used
Ability scores aid with role playing whether they are high, low or in the middle, modifiers only matter for high scores or low scores
Ability scores are intuitive and easy to grasp, if you had a new player a group of modifiers (for mechanics they are unfamiliar with) they won't have a clue what that means. However if you tell a player that the max score in strength is 18 and their PC has a 16 strength, they get that immediately
Rolling ability scores (or using point buys to create them) is a fun and engaging part of the game.
The other thing that I find challenging about all of this is the idea that you have to remove anything complicated from the game (though I don’t think that using level differently for spells and PC levels is complicated) for people to enjoy it. That’s just ridiculous. It’s ridiculous as it assumes that “simpler is better”. Simpler is different, and “simple” and “complex” are on a spectrum, there is no objective superiority to a simpler system. Some people prefer simple, rules lite, that sort of thing, some people prefer crunch.
It’s ridiculous as it assumes that the best approach to something that has the potential to be confusing or complicated is to remove it from the game entirely. Arrrggghhh. You know, figuring out something even mildly complex is a great confidence builder for players. Sure, TOO complex is a problem, but is anyone seriously arguing that having levels be different for players and spells is somehow “too complex”? I hope not. So having these “low hanging fruit” complexities is actually a positive in a TTRPG.
Instead of seeing it this way, any sort of challenge is treated as “gatekeeping” to those who find it challenging. This is the source of the rot that has gutted our education system, if it’s too hard just avoid it, so people don’t feel left out.
WHY NOT JUST EXPLAIN IT?
It’s ridiculous as it represents the most obvious and odious form of cherry picking. On a daily basis I see independent games suggest complex and innovative new mechanics for TTRPGs, and if anyone objects, “You are just so used to D&D you can’t understand it”, or, “try other games, they may be challenging as you are used to D&D, but it will make you a better ref or player”. Or “get outside your comfort zone”.
I see these takes CONSTANTLY. But suggest that it might be some work to explain an aspect of D&D and that’s a problem, the game needs to be changed, it’s badly designed! In short, the main reason to pick on this particular low hanging fruit is that it’s part of D&D. If people were really consistent about this sort of thing there are lots of mechanics in other games to go after.
Take a simple example, D&D uses pass fail mechanics, on off, win lose.
Other games use “fail forward” mechanics, with a span of different results, hard fail, soft fail, neutral, soft success, hard success, that sort of thing. CLEARLY a span of results is more complicated, and requires more of the group as you have to come up with a span of results (either the ref does, or the players and ref do together), rather than a simple pass/fail. So we should probably drop fail forward mechanics, as they will be challenging to new refs and players, and represent a form of gatekeeping.
I suspect this critique would not go over well if I posted it, but it’s no different.
People are just coming to town to take out the local gunslinger, they are attacking the big dog to gain Twitter points and drive follower count and likes. This has nothing to do with better game design, or making the experience better for players, it’s just noise.
And I dislike it as it leads new players and DMs to think that the complexity is there to keep people out, or that the game is so badly designed they should play someting else, or that if they use these mechanics and conventions they are somehow gatekeeping others out of the game.
To be 100% crystal clear, I have zero issue with replacing ability scores with modifiers (though I do think ability scores are used for more than people realize, but that could be worked out), nor do I have any problem with a system that harmonizes the use of the word “level”. These ideas are perfectly fine, and changing D&D to use them would be fine as well, other games handle these things differently and work swimmingly well. There is nothing wrong with dropping ability scores or harmonizing “level” as a term.
What I find distasteful is the implication that there is something WRONG with D&D for doing these things, or that it’s badly designed, and that not doing these things makes the game objectively better. That’s the game design fail in these takes. It is not better “game design” to have mods rather than ability scores, it’s not better ‘game design’ to have “level” mean the same thing for PCs and spells. It’s just a different way to do it, a different convention.
People are presenting their superficial preferences as virtuous game design principles, it’s just nonsense. Even having “vestigial” aspects of game design that are left over from previous iterations isn’t bad game design, its FLAVA! Not everything has to be useful, efficient or “make sense” in a game. There are days it seems like the dominant approach to game design seems to be to burn down everything that came before, as if newer games didn’t emerge from previous games, either as extensions or reactions to them.
It's the same sort of nonsense I see daily on Twitter where people suggest that games with a "rule zero" that allows refs to change or add rules on the fly are "badly designed". Ugh. They are differently designed, with different costs and benefits, that's all.
One day when I have the spoons and time I will blog about the impact progressivism and efficiency in the discourse, people have internalized progressivist, positivist thinking to such a degree that they see everything in that light, it's so deflating. These same people almost always criticize the idea of "progress" in modern, Western discourse, but they can't see it in their approach to game design.
This is good.
ReplyDeleteI do run a game in which we use only ability score modifiers and not scores, but it's a very peculiar kind of game: my once-a-year one-shot Halloween serial-killer game. For this I pre-generate a stack of modern normal humans. We play with a bunch of people many of whomo don't otherwise play RPGs. We only have about 15-30 minutes of setup time. I run the game in real-time, which means combat and other tense situations need to take up no more time in the game than they should in real life. After four real hours a timer goes off and the mansion/ship/dungeon/tower/whatever-the-players-are-trapped in explodes and they lose if they haven't gotten out before then.
We have one mechanism for resolving game conflicts: Roll 2d6. Add the relevant modifier for ability. 5 or less is a failure. 6-8 is success with a cost. 9+ is a success.
If you're wounded you draw from either the Wound or Bad Wound deck and it lowers one or more of your ability scores (which are just the modifiers, from -3 to +3). If any modifier reaches -4, you're out of action.
It works really well for my one-shot full of bad players, but I think it would be a terrible system for any sort of long-term game. Still, I could imagine an introductory sort of RPG using something like this and then transitioning players to a more complicated system.
Let's pretend that we are musicians for a moment. Everyone wants to play guitar. How many people really learn? That's what is going on here. WotC put out its newest Learn to Play Guitar book, and now forums are full of people rocking out E G A chord progressions, and then they find out about the Power Chord, and wonder why everyone can't skip the work of learning guitar and just do that instead.
ReplyDeleteThis customer base always existed. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. Industries depend on the kids who buy an instrument and throw it in the back of their closet after a week. TSR, GW, Ral Partha all used to be very straightforward about that. The guys playing venues rarely crossed paths with the open mic crowd, much less the kids doing air guitar in their basement. Add the Internet to the mix, and air guitar is the vocal majority. Because, playing guitar is hard. Playing Dungeons & Dragons should be complicated. But, marketing has realized that air guitarists never really wanted to play to begin with. It is enough now to identify with a brand, and that is MUCH more lucrative to sell. Think of all of the Monster energy drink bumper stickers and branded merchandise, and that's a fucking soda pop. Consumers like that aren't just going to buy a couple of books and quit. If they identify with the brand then they will buy the books, branded dice, action figures, MtG crossover cards, and on and on and on. Does it matter if they learn to play or grow as people? Hell no, Hasbro will change the game to fit their needs.
The only mistake that Hasbro made with 4th edition was that Van Halen roadies didn't show up to set the stage for the air guitarists. They fixed that with 5th by making an even simpler game that promised a Van Halen concert as a ploy to get free labor from the roadies. It was never about fixing the game. 5th exists as it is because for a brief moment D&D had been perilously close to not being THE game, and then the crowd would have bought Pathfinder brand dice and action figures instead. Once you are popular, all that matters is staying popular. That's as true for corporate America as it was back in high school.
The sort of people who keep putting these "critiques" of D&D forward are EXACTLY the same idiots who came up with 4E and were responsible for knocking D&D off its pedestal for the first time ever.
ReplyDeleteNot even the best efforts of companies like Chaosium, White Wolf or GDW managed to wreck D&D harder than these geniuses that insisted, and keep insisting, that D&D is "wrong".
5E is unfortunately still plagued by some of the worst pieces of 4E, and I can't really enjoy it that much for it.
This idea that less (and/or simpler) rules make for objectively better games is insidious and it comes from different places:
ReplyDeleteFirst, there's the younger D&D players whose attention span has been stunted by growing up under information overload. This was illustrated to me by a tweet that went viral (of course it did) which said the DMG should just be one page that reads "just make shit up".
It doesn't help that quite a few of these younger players are being taught D&D as a sort of improvised theater and collaborative storytelling kind of game, often by official (or WotC-sanctioned) sources. Rules and random determinations get in the way of established narratives, therefore rules are bad.
They ought to be playing different games that cater to their expectations but alas, WotC would rather keep telling people they can put a square peg in a round hole, cutting the corners of the proverbial peg if necessary. As DonkeyTeeth put it, when it comes to lifestyle brands, the product itself is really secondary.
But then, there's the old-schoolers who will laud retroclones and other OSR-inspired games that are rules light, throwing adjectives as "elegant" for good measure. A friend of mine defended this way of thinking to me by arguing that one could distill the core elements of the D&D experience to just a few certain rules and not lose much (or anything) by throwing the rest out. I vehemently disagree with that and I believe that once the novelty wears off, rules light systems simply don't lend themselves to long-lasting (and meaningful, I dare say) campaigns.
I call the whole notion insidious because it's been insinuating itself into the gaming zeitgeist for a couple of decades now. Look no further than the sales pitch of 3E (there's WotC again!). They made a great job of convincing players that consolidating most mechanics under the "roll a d20 against a set number" rule was the best thing to ever happen to D&D. Why have all these subsystems when you can have one rule governing everything? It's just *better*. Nevermind that in order to accommodate for all the situations the game covers we're going to have to set a buttload of modifiers and exceptions and tables of DCs that are going to amount to just as many rules as there were before.
I had things to say about ability score modifiers supposedly making ability scores obsolete, but this wall of text seems big enough as it is.
(First time commenter, by the way. Hello!)