d20 As Design

[Ozymandias]

Here is what I would consider the 'design' flaws of D20. Obviously these are opinion only.
(Alot of D20 design is just gamist design, which isn't really a flaw, even if I'm not that fond of it.)

1)Charachter creation involves way to many 'here is a huge number of choices, pick N' type things. Feats, spells, even gods to a degree.  

2)Advancement, and feats have the same problem.

3)To many special cases: It's better than it was, but there is still a bunch of 'this does x, except if y is around, ect'

My question about this though is, are all those things flaws? Or rather are they flaws if they were actually placed there to meet a design goal?

It took me a little while to dig this up, but take these quotes from Ryan Dancey June of 1999 posted to rec.games.frp.industry on a thread entitled "Market Forces and RPGs":

"It's been my experience that most people who play a D&D game more than a few times in a row eventually buy their own copy of the PHB.  Unlike a lot of other games, a D&D character is really an "index" into the rules system - the book and the character sheet work in concert.  I could play a game of Vampire or L5R and never reference the book during game play provided that I made sufficient notes to myself on how my skills worked.

I have a friend who makes character sheets to hold all the information he
needs so he doesn't have to use the books during play.  He has a 5th level
PC with a twenty eight paged character sheet."

Then in response to a reply about that being "bad design", we get the response:

It >IS< lousy game design.  But it's great >product< design. Sometimes the two stand at opposition.  In this case, I think the long term benefits of a lot of people owning (rather than borrowing or sharing) the core rules stands D&D in good stead.

This is just shortly before the release of 3e/d20 and I think goes a long towards explaining some of the design decisions that went into the system. Basically what's been said there is that all those complicated feats and spells which create rules exceptions, are there on purpose. They're there so that everyone who plays D&D almost has to have a copy of the Players Handbook in order to know what all the stuff on their character sheet actually does.

Now this is great for WotC, it helps them sell more D&D books and more D&D books selling helps keep all of our FLGS in business, but in terms of the design of the d20 system it does bring to light that even the developers recognized that there is a great are design flaws within the system, and this is something that another publisher who decides to utilize D20 SRD when designing their own game needs to be aware of.

[contracycle]

Naaah.  I think that gives them too much credit; its the very lack of change from prior incarnaitons of the system that make it a hodge-podge.  I don't think there was a conscious and deliberate analysis and redesign of the system at all.

[Mike Holmes]

Naaah.  I think that gives them too much credit; its the very lack of change from prior incarnaitons of the system that make it a hodge-podge.  I don't think there was a conscious and deliberate analysis and redesign of the system at all.

There was a very concerted analysis in the redesign effort. However, they decided early on in the design that there were certain things that made D&D what it is. And those were not subject to change. That is, before analysis began, they had decided to keep levels, classes, hit points, the "standard" races, and "fire and forget" magic (there may have been a few others). The though was that if any of that left that the game would no longer be recognizable as D&D. As such, this was a very conscious marketing choice.

That said, I think that they did about as good ajob as could be done withing that framework. Considering the constraints they were put under, the system that resulted is very well designed. The question is whether or not the constraints in question limited the effectiveness of the outcome. That's certainly debatable.

But I think they have a game that does what it's designed to do very well, overall. Ozy is right about it being a pretty good product (I just personally don't enjoy what it's designed for).

Mike

[Cassidy]

Naaah.  I think that gives them too much credit; its the very lack of change from prior incarnaitons of the system that make it a hodge-podge.  I don't think there was a conscious and deliberate analysis and redesign of the system at all.

Trying to second-guess WotC's design goals is a bit of a black art but I believe the lack of change you mention from prior D&D incarnations is one thing that is intentional. Take away the familiar "D&D"' elements we all know and love (or hate) and maybe it wouldn't BE D&D anymore.

If as a player you love poring over charts, prestige classes, dozens of skills, lots of spells and magic items, min/maxing stats, then with d20 you'll have a ball. There seems to be a rule for just about everything. It's hard to see how the inclusion of so many rules cannot be anything but a deliberate design goal.

My own feeling is that this is from a conscious desire to create a game that provides players with lots of choices and options that is as comprehensive as possible. It's like AD&D on steroids.

Personally I like rules that are intuitive rather than being spelled out in black and white. I don't find d20 a particularly intuitive system to play and it just doesn't fire my interest. In the games I have played in I have found the whole thing a bit stop and start as rules are constantly consulted. I accept that debating this rule or that is an enjoyable part of the whole gaming experience though in which case the more rules the better and D20 does that admirably.

Looking at d20 system design from the angle of WotC's presumed desire to create a marketable product that will make them money I think d20 is fantastic.

One goal of WotC would surely be to maximize that initial purchase from a consumer.

The 3 core D&D d20 books cost around £25 each here in the UK. They are big fat buggers with 250-300 pages each. £75, thats quite a lot.

Of course if a design goal was to produce a more intuitive system less rules-laden system then you wouldn't need so books. They probably wouldn't be quite as big and they would probably cost less too.

In addition another goal of WotC would presumably be a need to continue making money from players after their initial purchases.

d20 design is fairly open-ended and can encompasses additional rules supplements beyond the 3 core books. If you want to play a cleric then you can buy an additional supplement that adds a layer of complexity to the system design.

At the end of the day d20 is a product and WotC as company want to ship as much product as is possible and the d20 game design facilitates the production or more product and more rules supplements.

Design = Rules. Rules = Books. Books = money.

Makes perfect sense to me.

If the d20 design were simpler then I would probably be more enamoured to the system itself and would maybe even consider running a d20 game. As it is I'm unlikely to spend any more than the £25 I've spent on the players handbook. The system design is just too complex and comprehensive for my needs.

[Ozymandias]

Naaah.  I think that gives them too much credit; its the very lack of change from prior incarnaitons of the system that make it a hodge-podge.  I don't think there was a conscious and deliberate analysis and redesign of the system at all.

Well, first let me say that wasn't really my point. What I was focusing on was the fact that D&D3e was developed less in terms of how it was to be played as a game than how it would be recieved as as a product. (This isn't to say they completely say they ignored the play aspect, but when game design conflicted with product design, product design won.)

In terms of there being a deliberate redesign, there have been numerous comments by the developers of 3e of much bigger changes that were considered and ultimately discarded b/c it was felt that if certain things changed that the game would cease to be D&D and that their customer base wouldn't migrate to the new version. So while, in the end, the system is something of a "hodge-podge" it's a deliberate one not an accidental one.

One small example would be that intially they'd wanted to give the feats more colorful names (ie: Sunder = Property Damage, Precise Shot = Got Your Back Charlie, Spring Attack = Sucks To Be You) but ultimately went with the blander ones as they felt more like generic D&D. Again, this is a small example but pretty representative of the mentality behind producing the game. They weren't out to create the most innovative RPG they could, rather they were out to create most innovative version of D&D they could. There's important differences between those two design goals.

[contracycle]

Well, thats quite a set of responses.  But I feel they rather give me my point; I find it telling that the response is "but then it wouldn't be D&D".  I know, but I thought that was the pitch, that this was D20 not D&D.  So thus it could also be Nyambe.  But it isn't, its still D&D with a new logo.  What we have here is a universal system of the "you can have any colour you like as long as its black" variety.

[M. J. Young]

Here is what I would consider the 'design' flaws of D20. Obviously these are opinion only.
(Alot of D20 design is just gamist design, which isn't really a flaw, even if I'm not that fond of it.)

1)Charachter creation involves way to many 'here is a huge number of choices, pick N' type things. Feats, spells, even gods to a degree.  

2)Advancement, and feats have the same problem.

3)To many special cases: It's better than it was, but there is still a bunch of 'this does x, except if y is around, ect'

Somehow this didn't register the first time I read it; it wasn't until    Ozymandias replied that I realized what it said.

I think you're confusing design flaw with targeting problem; that is, what you cite isn't a problem with the game; it's a feature of the game that is a positive and working feature which you don't like.

Perhaps the revelation that this is so lies in your statement that these are only your opinion. A design flaw wouldn't be merely opinion; it would be something about the system that didn't work as it was intended, not something that didn't appeal to you when it worked right.

Complex character creation has been a feature since OAD&D (at least). I've got a near two hundred page web site containing only the data needed to create a character for OAD&D (from races and classes and ability scores to psionics and starting spells and deities to equipment). The trend today is toward streamlined character creation. Part of that may be because it demos better and is more likely to work in a one-shot game. D&D has always been a campaign game; games played at cons don't include character generation (you play one of the provided characters, usually). Having a well-fleshed character is better for a campaign system, and thus the complex character creation model is a better choice for a long-term game.

Advancement is similarly an important feature of a campaign system. One of the problems that frustrated us as players in early Gamma World games was precisely that we felt we were never getting any better at anything. We collected gadgets, but we didn't improve--after four years of play, we had no better chance in a fight than we had when we started. Advancement gives the player the feeling that the character is growing and learning from his experiences, and that one day he will be as good as those heroes who are the legends of the world, if he can survive so long. If you want to design a game for one-shots, don't include advancement. Every MUD and MUSH and MMORPG of which I am aware contains an advancement system, because it gives the players goals toward which to strive and a real sense of improvement through play. They come back (and believe me, they come back--I've five teenage boys enamored with them) because they are building characters who will eventually be the heroes, thanks to advancement.

Special cases are always a problem in RPG's. There are several ways to handle them, but they cannot be eliminated. The problem arises because of the interactions of uncounted smaller components. Consider Pinochle. The rules are fairly simple. Cards are numbered A, 10, K, Q, J, 9, and there are two of each in each of four suits. One suit will be named as trump following the auction. Once a card is led, players must in turn play a card following suit if they can. If they cannot follow suit, they must play trump. If they cannot play trump, they must discard another card. If no trump was played (or trump was led), the trick is taken by the player who played the highest card in the suit. If someone played trump, the trump takes it. If more than one trump was played, the highest trump takes it. Ah, but what if the highest card played is matched? That is, what if two players have played the ten of trumps? Who takes the trick? The answer requires a special rule (which happens to be that the first one played takes the trick). The special rule is required because the possibility of an unresolvable situation arises under the general rules.

So with RPG's you often have the possibility that a situation could arise which cannot be resolved under the regular rules. If you're using a house system, the referee (who wrote the rules anyway) creates a new rule at that moment--which, depending on the strictures of play, may or may not become precedent for any future occasion of that sort. If you've got a cleverly simplified game mechanic system, there will be at least one (possibly more than one) catch basket for resolving these things (such as Multiverser's General Effects Roll). But if you're designing a game that might be played in competition play (as D&D has been in the past), you need to know that there will be consistent treatment of all such uncertainties. Hence you need rules to cover what happens when the never-can-miss attack is countered by the never-can-hit-me dodge, or the fireball strikes the wall of ice. Yes, complexity of rules can slow a game; and many referees in running such games will take the position that if they don't know where the rule is it doesn't exist and they can make their own judgment. But for consistency across many games, you need the special case rules.

I find it telling that the response is "but then it wouldn't be D&D". I know, but I thought that was the pitch, that this was D20 not D&D....its still D&D with a new logo. What we have here is a universal system of the "you can have any colour you like as long as its black" variety.

Difficult point that. The fact is that D&D3E is still D&D; and that the D20 game engine is being touted as adaptable to a wide variety of other settings/milieus/genres. I suppose there's a degree to which this thread is about that--can it be adapted as such? I don't see much reason why it couldn't be as adaptable as GURPS; there are a lot of things I don't like about GURPS (but I'm not fluent in the game). I'm not very fond of D&D3E, but then I've got a lot of time and effort invested in the old game, and don't find the new one at all compatible with it. Converting my old campaigns over to the new system would be a Nightmare I do not wish to have, and I am too old to start building a new world from scratch. Hey, I thought that 2E was to jarring a change in rules when it came out, and never made the change to that; I still have vestiges of Basic D&D in my game world that have never been converted to the advanced rules. I don't have the feeling that this game is still D&D; it's an entirely different game set in a similar world. But then I suppose for players (I have always been a Dungeon Master and never played) it must seem like the same game.

--M. J. Young

[xiombarg]

Well said, M.J. I don't have much to add, other than to note what I've said before: all those choices (Feats, etc.) is a very functional Gamist design. It's also, as others have pointed out, good marketing, but I submit that even outside of the marketing issues, that it's a functional and good design, in the sense if gives people a lot of tactical options, and ways of changing a charcter's effectiveness. In fact, I submit that if Feats weren't special little bite-sized rules exceptions, they'd be boring...

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Take away the familiar "D&D"' elements we all know and love (or hate) and maybe it wouldn't BE D&D anymore.

This strikes me as interesting and might say more about d20 as a design. WHile I can agree with the wisdom of keeping certain elements of the game or else it would not BE D&D anymore (and for the record, if I ever wide up a part of a group that acquires the rights to D&D and is set to write and put out a new edition, I personally hope that NO ONE in the room has this bit of wisdom) But these constraints that they worked within to make a cleaner, faster D&D,...are they conducive to a decent set of so-called "universal" game rules? Even with the proviso of major changes possible to said system?

[Cassidy]

Going back to initial post xiombarg wrote, and picking up on the skill system in d20...

While D&D 3E may be all about going back to the dungeon and killing things, the fact of the matter is the skill system supports doing other things, and it supports it very, very well.

While there is a recognizable "skill" system in d20, which is presumably there to "support other things" it has never been a relavent part of the D&D 3E games I've played.

After playing D&D 3E, (3 seperate campaigns now, about 30+ sessions) I cannot in all honesty say that I have seen the skill system add anything significant to the game.

The games of D&D 3E I've played are about killing things, combat and magic, that's the way our GM runs things. Admittedly there may be interludes in play where scenes and events develop that may require the use of non combat/magic skills but they have been infrequent. The game as it has been presented to me as a player is a fantasy combat game.

That may be selling D&D short and not realising the full potential of the system. However when you have a seperate Monster Manual, detailed lists of Magic Spells and large portions of the rules that focus on Combat then it is difficult to see D&D in any other way.

If d20 had come up with an great new combat system that no-one had ever seen before then I would be excited.

or...

If d20 had introduced a new innovative way of handling magic and spells then that could have been something great.

If d20 lacks anything for me it is innovation. There is nothing innovative or new about the design that gets me excited enough to want to explore the game with a view to running it.

Dungeon Bashing? Yeah, I like a good dungeon bash once in a while.

Someone directed me to Fungeon a while back (I can't remember who). As a game designed to emulate the good old hack-and-slash dungeon crawl it reads very well. Never played it yet but I would certainly consider it.

In a way it is probably closer to the spirit of D&D than 3E D&D itself.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Interestingly, in the 3e game I play over summers, there's a low-combat bias and the skill system takes a large part in the action, as does the ability to create really 'tasty', cheap magic items.

Yet we're very obviously playing a D&D game - we sell our loot to bizarrely rich armourers (ex-adventurers, more often than not), people hire us to slay stuff, we troupe across the countryside astride our noble (stolen) steeds, all that good stuff.

So, it's interesting that 3e can produce both your style of crunchy dungeon hack play and our style of social travelogue play, both of which are staples of the D&D tradition.

[Pramas]

Naaah.  I think that gives them too much credit; its the very lack of change from prior incarnaitons of the system that make it a hodge-podge.  I don't think there was a conscious and deliberate analysis and redesign of the system at all.

You'd be wrong then. There was a great deal of conscious and deliberate analysis. I was working in Roleplaying R&D at Wizards at the time and saw the process first hand. One of the first things the design team did was analyze D&D and then make a listed of "sacred cows" (ie things it was felt could not be changed and still have the game be D&D). After that list was hashed, the redesign began in earnest.

One of the most interesting parts of the process for me as a game designer was the periodic round table discussions we'd have about the current iteration of the new rules. You don't often get 30 game designers and editors/developers, representing a very wide array of opinions and experience, in one room to argue about game design. While the three members of the design team did the real heavy lifting, everyone in R&D was involved critiquing, playtesting, and offering feedbackand suggestions.

You might not like the new D&D rules, but to intimate that they were just thrown together does a disservice to the game designers involved.

[contracycle]

You'd be wrong then. There was a great deal of conscious and deliberate analysis.

Fair enough, then.  They thought about it long and hard and came to the dumbest possible solution.  Bravo.

On this basis, the whole d20 project must be seen of the light of a cynical marketing exercise intended to provide the illusion of a redesigned system to sell yet one more iteration of the same product to the same fanbase it always had... and to use the spurious OGL to persuade other games to be "D&D-ified".  Frankly, I suspect that if the ambition from tyhe get go had been posed as "lets expand the hobby by writing D&D versions of Rokugan/etc." I doubt anyone would have been persuaded; critical opinion about D&D is so vigorously entrenched that such a strategy could at best appeal to a limited segment of all roleplayers and would be highly unlikely to make the mainstream break.  But by positing it as a d20 strategy to do such, it IMPLIED that the system was sufficienctly robust to at the very least be considered for such a monumental cross-genre role.

Which it frankly is not.  Now I concede that GURPS is also a universal system of the "any colour you like as long as its black" type, but what it does NOT do is hard-code certain genre assumptions, like the endless controversy about hit-points, into the core, "universal" mechanics.  There is default sim baseline from which adaptation to other settings is relatively easily done.  It simply doesn't suffer from the problems with snipers and falling of cliffs which are inherent to D&D-style hit points.

AS A DESIGN, D&D is too limited to be any sort of universal system.  To market it as such on the basis of a brand change borders on fraud.  To date, we have seen a broad range of d20 products but I suspect that there will very shortly be a massive glut; established D&D players will have found their new world to play in, and its unlikely that the known limitations of D&D will be overcome such that it becomes a gateway product for hitherto unengaged players.  Players of other systems will find a D&D sourcebook of very limited utility.  Who, then, is going to buy the print runs of Nyambe or what have you?  I'm now really curious as to what the print run volumes of the world sets are like by comparison to those of the core rules...

[contracycle]

To forestall some objections, I am going to return to Xiombargs initial question:

In particular, I want to talk about its impact on game design overall and whether or not it's a good thing for us indie people.

Absolutely nil.  Considering that every game designer, just about, must be familiar with D&D by now, the present re-hash of the elderly rules will have absolutely zero effect on the state of the art of design thinking.  If the only innovation in the new design is the skill system, then this is a belated concession to a better idea that itself has been in print for at least two decades, I reckon.  I see it as a bad thing for indie gaming on the basis that store owners are us much susceptible to hype as anyone else and if they displace innovative games with old style mutton dressed up as lamb, I fear the hobby overall is likely to suffer.

[Valamir]

Damn Gareth.  I thought I was cynical.  I don't suppose that your personal distaste for capitalistic marketing tactics is coloring your opinion in this matter at all...

To say 3e is not a redesign is 100%.  It is one of the most thoroughly complete redesigns any RPG has ever gone through.  It is the THIRD EDITION of an existing game.  It is not and was never intended to be a new game.  3E is more greatly changed from 2E than 2E was from 1E.  One could even say that there are more differences between 3E and 2E than there were between AD&D and OD&D.

As far as the "dumbest possible solution" I have to say that is one of the most assinine statements I've heard you make in a long time.  You usually make at least an attempt to seperate objective analysis from personal opinion.  Here you are just saying "I don't like D&D even though lots of other people do.  WotC designed D&D for those people and not for me.  WotC was dumb".  This is utter nonsense.  

As for it not being universal.  Well have a general distaste for generic core mechanics that are applied to other settings anyway.  But d20 has as much to offer folks who want a universal core mechanic as GURPS.  It caters to a different set of game priorities than GURPS but it is equally as "Generic Universal" just with a different focus.  

As for aspects of the game being "hard coded in".  You seem to forget 2 amazingly crucial facts.

1) ALOT of people like those hard coded items you dismiss out of hand.  That you hate them, and I'm pretty indifferent to them is entirely beside the point.  

2) They AREN'T.  I suggest you pick up a copy of Mutants and Masterminds to see what creative innovative talented game designers can do with the basic d20 mechanics.  Gone are classes, gone is damage rolled on strange polyhedrons, gone is rollind 3d6 for stats, gone are hitpoints.  M&M successfully overturns many of the WotC Sacred Cows in a way that is still essentially d20.  It doesn't use the d20 logo but it does use the OGL which you so frequently blast.

Also "innovative" is not a a synonym for "original" or "unique".  A game doesn't have to be either of those to earn the title innovative.  Taking the same old same old and applying it in a new way is innovative.  Taking an old product and repackaging it for a new audience is innovative.

But wait...they didn't repackage it for a new audience they gave it to the same old audience right?  Oh contraire.  That old audience IS the new audience.  Sure most of the "new" 3E mechanics were late 80s early 90s inventions.  You can see those basic ideas in numerous other RPGs from the era.  But they never penetrated that closed market of D&D players.  You know...that dark dingy world of gamers who never had and never would play any other game other than AD&D in their entire lives except to try it once and proclaim it sucks.  The vast majority of gamers by absolute numbers as the number of PHB sales alone should prove.  

What 3E did was it took an old product...late 80s early 90s roleplaying and introduced it to an audience that had entirely missed it the first time around.  I know long time AD&D players who marvel at how wonderfully innovative 3E is...because they never played Cyperpunk, or Ars Magica, or White Wolf, or any of the other games we take for granted.  Its all new to them.  Getting the old school D&Ders to advance an entire decade in their gaming technology is innovative in itself.  Maybe in another decade someone will do D&D4E and bring them into the 21st century.


So basically, on every single point you made in your last several posts you are 100% empiracally WRONG.  And I don't mean wrong in the "in my opinion you're wrong" sense.  I mean you are wrong in the "you don't have your facts straight and are ranting out you ass about something you don't know much about" sense.

Are there alot of design monkeys out there cloning mundane D&D applications.  Yup.  Does that mean D&D is the great gaming satan and a truely talanted game designer can't do anything with it.  Nope.

M&M is a FANTASTIC supers game.  Its the first game that let me create several of the character types that typically gave me problems without making any concessions and without spending 3 days with caluculator trying to get Champions to do it.  Plug and Play superpowers...that work.  Its a gem of a game, and its core is d20.