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Slashdot's Rob Rozeboom Interviews D&D Designer Mike Mearls (video)
Mike Mearls is the Senior Manager for the Dungeons and Dragons Design Team. He's been with D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast (a subsidiary of Hasbro) since 2005, Before that he was a free-lance game writer and designer. In this conversation with Slashdot editor Rob "samzenpus" Rozeboom, he talks about changes in the latest version of D&D and how the company interacts with players. (We'll have some more chat with Mike next week, different wizard time, same wizard channel, so stay tuned.)
if (DnD > 3.5) {DnD=='sucks'}
Silence is a state of mime.
So now that WoTC is owned by Hasbro, what do you think of the potential to leverage synergies through cross-marketing efforts to widen the demographic appeal of D&D?
First of all, thank you for doing this interview and releasing it for free for my enjoyment. However, I don't have audio on the computer I'm using right now, so I can't hear it. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I hate watching videos of things that can be communicated faster and more efficiently via text (like interviews). A transcription would be appreciated.
I am 11 you incencitive clod!
What are we 12?
No, nerds.
With the advent of 4th Edition, almost 10 years worth of direct effort from Wizards of the Coast (and almost 4 times as much effort from supplemental systems) was jettisoned in favor of an easier system that would allow for more quickly moving games. I was a very devoted fan of 4th edition (No reason to carry around a wheeled suitcase of rule books/supplements if you only need 1~2 that can go in a backpack. With the re-introduction/repackaging of nearly the same rules over and over again (Core books, Extra Handbooks, Monster Manuals, Essentials, Vaults, Compendiums) there were only 2 ways of keeping up with all the material. Become a professional D&D player with an entire bookcase dedicated to the rulebooks, or subscribe to the Insider where you could download the new rulesets.
My Question is this: After the merchandise bloat that occurred in 4th edition what plans does Wizards of the Coast have to combat the significant buy in to play at a decent level?
Yes, because games are something that only children do. Especially games that use a significant amount of math and copious amounts of (admittedly often too) complicated rules. Games that encourage out of the box thinking. Games where you can include complex scenarios - and be able to handle them in any way you choose, assuming you are alright with the consequences. Not limited to combat, games with older players often include politics, economics, religion, and other social issues.
I know you're just trolling, but there's far more to pen and paper RPGs than many people think.
I'd take a half-assed PnP RPG game over an incredible computer RPG any day. Why? Because the computer gives me a very limited set of choices and makes a lot of assumptions. If I want to do X, and it isn't coded into the game, then I can't even attempt to do X. Not so in PnP games.
Love sees no species.
If I wanted everything equal, fair, balanced, I'd play a video game or watch fox news.
Does the introduction of 4th edition and 5th edition in any way stop you from using older source books?
I'm still using 3.5, my books didn't suddenly disappear overnight when 4th was released.
Love sees no species.
Why was this even posted? Amateur Hour on Slashdot apparently.
We can't even hear the damned questions - just extended silence while Mearls listens to a question (apparently on the phone) that we can't hear..
It's not even a video, its an audio-cast with a static image embedded. And the whole damned thing cuts out mid-sentence at 10 mins.
I playtested D&D Next this last weekend, and enjoyed it a lot. It's nothing like 4e, whatsoever. The mechanics go back to 3e, but are even simpler. Skills are simpler, there was no need for a battlemat, and we enjoyed 6 combat encounters in under 3 hours, and plenty of roleplaying. I encourage all D&D fans to check it out, if they ever played AD&D, 3e, or 4e. AD&D players will find it more balanced, and bereft of THAC0 insanity. 3e players will like the skill simplification, and overall feel of the mechanics. 4e players will... be glad to get rid of 4e's powers, forced movement, positioning, Opportunity Attacks, and all other combat clutter.
Embeded video instead of transcript is fail. Using a flash player instead of HTML5, is even more fail. Seriously?
Slashdot -- news for nerd wanna-bes from 2005.
D&D was better before WoTC fucked it up, so we're going to reprint 2nd Edition as D&D Next and make a boat-load of money, since most long-term D&D fans bailed and switched to Paizo's Pathfinder.
No, it doesn't stop be from using older books, but it does stop the designers from creating new 3.5 matererial
my only consolation is that they're introducing these new versions during the worst global recession in a generation. i wonder how many less 4th edition books they sold as a direct result of the shittly economy.
Everything after 3.5 sucks and I will never use it. ever.
Everything after 1 sucks and I will never use it. Ever.
(Currently enjoying my OD&D campaign. Now get off my lawn.)
3.5 is saturated with too many rules and variants. WotC should focus on new sourcebooks and adventure modules. No new rules, classes, etc.
I have to say, I don't care for the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. My introduction to it included an iron-fisted GM who wanted people in each role and forced us to take on roles we didn't particularly care for. Being from the school where the GM works with what the players show up with, this just stuck in my craw.
I am enjoying the heck out of Pathfinder, though. The game can be played with two books, which lowers the barrier to entry. It's compatible with a system I was already familiar with and generally has a good level of shine and polish. Paizo has definitely grabbed the ball and run with it.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
The movie won't load. Oh no its a sound clip with a static image. What The .. Fuck? Is this the moment in history when all profesional and trustworthy news outlets degrade into 13 year olds' websites with embedded crap?
Anyhow, ive been listening and i am still wondering is this about the PC game (v1 i liked), or about the board/roleplay game (i dont like).
the problem is not good imagination, the problem is to hold the universe consistent enough over time as you make your own details. I found it much easier to buy 1 or 2 additional campaign ruleset and let my imagination run rampant. The core stay then consistent.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
AD&D 2nd edition's Planescape and Dark Sun campaigns are worth anyone's time. If you have never run a campaign in the Blood War or against against a Sorcerer-King on Athas, then you have had a very stunted experience playing RPGs.
3.5 is saturated with too many rules and variants. WotC should focus on new sourcebooks and adventure modules. No new rules, classes, etc.
That is the nature of anything that is constantly under development. You start out with a product... and a question, "But, how do I x?", then an update comes out to answer that question. But of course that makes the product just a little bit more complicated. One more rule to read and apply. One more part with another set of instructions. Whatever.
d&d rules, computer program, car, tax code, constitution, family... life. They all get more complicated
Then one day, you have a major version change, a new model, civil war, or mid-life crisis. You throw everything away, write a new book, then sit down with a hot cup of joe and say "aaaah, this is the life...", which is immediately followed by "But, how do I x?" So you pull out your notebook, and figure out a way to make it better: How to bake the perfect cookie to go with your coffee, how to pick up chicks, which language to switch to, which minority to blame and oppress, or what new prestige class to add.
"No new rules" simply means stagnation and irrelevancy or extinction... The Bible.
I liked the Open Game License of D&D 3.5e.
I did not like the Game System License of D&D 4e.
If D&D 5e goes back to the OGL, I'll check it out.
If it does not, then I'll stick with my Pathfinder subscriptions.
No solid evidence, but I would speculate that they actually sold more, since P&P games are a hobby with a highly favorable price-to-hours-of-enjoyment ratio.
The Bible has changed varies rules many times through its history. All of them based on superstitious nonsense and not actual fact.
The posters point was correct, 3.5 is saturated with too much new rules; and that's because the core 3.5 system is broken.
Just to be very clear: I'm not saying people must stop playing, or 'shouldn't play' 3.5.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
only 49.99 yup the borked the whole game allowing a lot a crap and it jsut keeps dumming it down more and more , until your dog also can buy a copy and play......
Quite the reverse. OD&D was nice because the game was easy to learn and allowed for quick resolution of most things (except wars; I ended up writing my first big program to handle War Machine rules and edited War Machine rules for use with 2nd Ed AD&D).
D&D 3, 3.5, 4, have been increasingly rules heavy, focusing on crunch with pictures instead of letting DMs rule minor stuff on the fly.
3.5 is broken ... but refactoring is better than rewriting when recognizing the code itself is important to the users.
Does the introduction of 4th edition and 5th edition in any way stop you from using older source books?
I'm still using 3.5, my books didn't suddenly disappear overnight when 4th was released.
Well, it does inhibit your ability to legally acquire said source books.
If I wanted to watch a video, I'd go to yahoo. they are useless. Give me text anyday.
If I want to do X, and it isn't coded into the game, then I can't even attempt to do X. Not so in PnP games.
That depends on how flexible your DM is. "No, you can't throw your sword. It's not listed as a hurled missile weapon. If you forgot to buy a dagger or throwing axe, that's your fault."
"... okay, roll a d20."
And there's nothing wrong with saying, "I wasn't expecting that, let's take a five minute break while I puzzle it out."
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
For those commenting that there is too much art and fluff, too many books to buy, etc. that's the whole point. Hasbro wants to design a game that will sell the maximum number of books. OD&D could be played with just a few dollars invested by one person, the DM. That's just the model that Hasbro does NOT want to emulate.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Sure, kid. I'll be sure to let my DM know how stunted his campaign is.
I love your constructive criticism
Sorry, that was sarcasm and I forgot the tags
Earlier D&D editions were hardly great - IMO, all editions had serious problems. I just started playing 4 and actually quite like it so far, but haven't played it enough to really judge it. It does, however, have a more epic feel where you start and you seem reasonably competent rather than building up from very weak characters with no power to a godlike beings. My group is more roleplayers, so really we don't get into dungeons all that often - it is more about working toward some goal (often political - for instance, we spent 4 years of realtime and about 20 in gametime usurping a kingdom by building up a false champion).
3.0/3.5 if you didn't design your leveling from the beginning for your specialty class, you were screwed. You have to point bash, and that takes the fun out of feats - your character is basically fully designed from the start or worthless later on and also makes feats practically worthless - you may as well give 3 choices and then fix the rest based on those choices and not bother printing the rest.
1.0-2.0 you could role crappy and have 11 hit points at 11th level. Most 11th level monsters would kill you in 1 hit. Don't laugh - I made it to level 5 and had 5 HP on a wizard once (game ended, but I spent a lot of time bleeding to death in that one), and level 8 and had 10HP on a thief. Thief died in a claw-claw-bite after a spectacular backstab on a Troll that left it with 1HP - it turned around (ignoring the half ogre fighter in front of it) and claw did 12HP, claw did 11HP, bite did critical 34HP (we were playing -10HP to death and DM decided troll ripped both arms off and then bit off my head... and was chewing it when the half ogre clobbered it for 20 more damage "killing" it). My replacement character was given max hits but was one level below the rest of the party (this was the DM's "death penalty").
Low level D&D wizards sucked. Not as much as the Rolemaster elementalist with first level spell "boil water", but cast one magic missile and have to sleep 8 hours really sucks (and that is about all I got rolling 3D6 and not playing with a point bash DM that let me roll 4D6-1die for stats where I may have additional spells). When the DM gives extra experience for combat you can't participate in because you are out of spells, it sucks even more. Then they make the experience curve worse for Wizards.
In first and second edition, multiclassing was cool early on, especially if you were working around the wizard's cast a spell and need to sleep 8 hours, but made the midgame difficult (late game was sometimes OK, especially if one class was wizard and got 4th and 5th level wizard spells). Human changing class had less of an impact later on, especially if they just put in 3 levels or so to get some beneficial thief skills and switched to something else.
In first and second edition you could have an unplayable starting character. The worst I ever rolled had 4 threes and a max stat of 6 (my D6s are cursed, I'm pretty sure). I rolled a character not much better than that in Call of Cthulhu (max stats were 8 and 9, most were between 3 and 6) and not only was he playable, he got the nickname deadeye after the GM penalized him for being drunk (it was by prescription) and then rolling 1s and 2s on percentile dice for critical hits in several sessions.
Personally I didn't like halflings or to some extent dwarves in most of the released versions (not sure about 4.0 because I rolled my race randomly and it wasn't dwarf or halfling). Dwarves were pretty much pigeon-holed into being fighters or clerics, but halflings were worse, being pretty much useless as anything but thief.
1.0-2.0 and maybe 3/3.5 low level wizards/sorcerers suck and you spend most of your time doing nothing (I never played a wizard/sorcerer in 3/3.5, and again didn't play either much, as I was in a long running Rolemaster game and our group fell apart shortly after that due to life happening and we're jus
This is slashdot, since when was anybody on here worried about legally acquiring anything?
21st Century Renaissance Man
Oh, I agree. Worst case scenario, it should be treated as a non-proficient weapon maybe with extra penalties for being unbalanced, but in OD&D, there is no such thing (fighters are proficient in all weapons). If your DM is a rules-lawyer, you're SOL.
Ah, 4th edition. You tried so hard, and you largely succeeded. You gave healers something to do other than cast heal spells every turn, and a day of dungeoneering was able to continue past the first battle instead of everyone going, "The cleric's used up his spells - we're going back to base!"
You gave defensive builds a place in the world without making them boring. You took away a wizard's level 1 crossbow and gave him all the fireballs he wanted. You gave every class something to do other than basic melee attacks. You made characters interesting right from level 1 instead of forcing people to pray for an interesting character 10 levels down the road.
You took away multiclassing, and there was a gnashing of munchkin teeth, but you gave us arcane swordsmen and holy assassins and psychic healers. You broke up the age-old racial tradition of just elves, humans, and dwarves by sticking tieflings, dragonborn, goliaths, and devas into the main books. You got rid of prestige classes, those wonky things that forced people into specific build types, and instead gave us multiple builds for the base of a class and paragon paths for later on. Your flavor was more focused on the character than on the class min/maxing.
But, in your certain rush to fix everything that was wrong with D&D, you forgot the feel. You felt that you could discard the very makeup of the game and craft something new from scratch. Despite the interesting things that happened to a new character, your demand for balance forced you to keep everyone the same beyond level 1. While many people rallied behind you, you split the community as the players who had been in the game for years threw up their hands in disgust and went to a fork of your previous system, preferring an imperfect system that felt more like something from their youth and less like those infernal MMORPGs.
I've seen the playtest, and at first glance it looks like something that tries to bring the two groups together. But the PnP RPG faces a diminished audience from the outset, what with kids all distracted by their new-fangled machine, and the audience that you drove away has come to call you a heretic and isn't bound to return even if you pander to them again. Godspeed to you, Wizards, but I fear there's not much more you can do.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Most useless video on /. .. still pictures for what, audio would be sufficient . . .
I'd impose a -4 penalty due to it being improvised, but allow the attack (with AoO, if applicable) with the sword's damage + STR bonus if it hits.
There's a "Throw Anything" feat if they wanted to be able to throw anything.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
FYI, if anyone's looking for the new location of the old (A)D&D game world forums (Mystara/Planescape/DarkSun/SpellJammer/etc): http://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/index.php
One trick I learned from one of the original few D&D-ers: when a player tries anyhting oddball, just "OK, roll a d20". Only a small range of results will ever made you figure out what the rule was; usually the result will be obvious from the die roll without haveing to think about a rule.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
3.5 is saturated with too much new rules
and that's because the core 3.5 system is broken.
zzzzzzzzzz
You just have to be more creative. For instance:
Not as much as the Rolemaster elementalist with first level spell "boil water",
If that was me?
Boil your waterskin, throw it in your opponent's face.
Boil your opponent's saliva.
Boil your opponent's urine.
Boil the sweat inside your opponent's armor.
Boil the aqueous jelly in your opponent's eyes.
Shitty starting spells and low hitpoints only sucks if you don't consider it a challenge.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
I think 1.0-2.0 Wizards were expected to fight in melee, and as it became pointless for them to engage in it, their spells would start taking over, although this mostly only true if you were able to get enough combat spells learned for each level. I would have preferred that 3.0 was more about fixing the issues of the earlier edition (and hopefully not shoe horn in fixes like max HP at first level) and less about the power character building mechanic. When people started telling me I needed to take a level in ranger so I could fight two handed, I knew it was no longer a game I was interested in.
I feel Hackmaster actually did a good job in making a more playable 1.0-2.0 game, but it could grind to a halt if you GM got heavy handed with the rules (part of the parody aspect of it) especially when you added the supplements which were not as well produced or thought out.
I think most supplements are overall a detriment to these games. If I play, I want to stick to the core rules and the creations of the GM.
Whilst I don't have my dusty Rolemaster books in front of me, I'm quite certain you couldn't do anything remotely combat effective with Boil Water. Of your "creative ideas", the only one that would be allowed by the rules would be boiling the water, then throwing it at someone. However, it would probably be more effective to just attack with your weapon instead.
And saying that getting shafted by bad stat rolls is a "challenge" is just a cop out.
It's not E Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson, so he's not really D&D designer is he ?
Great comment. I have to agree with 100% of everything, with bonus points for mentioning Rolemaster (ICE in the hizzay!). I haven't played 3x rules, except via NWN, so I can't comment much on that.
I would add to that I've always been disappointed in 1st and 2nd edition rules handling of attacks per round. I was a let down that non-fighter characters (monks excluded), were limited to one attack per round -- granted that fighters get a max 2/1. Nonetheless, those character basically got one shot to do something, and if things didn't line up just right (you're a thief who *isn't* attacking from behind, etc), you were screwed.
Also, some supplements provided skills -- crafting, mountaineering, if I recall correctly -- but the characters were otherwise pretty 1-dimensional. 2nd edition assassin class was awful -- 1/2 level skill progression in thief abilities. C'mon, really?
Sounds like your problem was the DM, not the actual rules. Most DMs allow rerolls of '1' on a HP roll. Most DMs also use one of the alternative stat rolling systems rather than forcing you to live with the exact three die that you rolled for a particular stat.
That's exactly a rule problem, and not a DM problem. You can't hold a DM responsible for cleaving to the rules.
Worst case scenario [...is...] if your DM is a rules-lawyer, you're SOL.
If your DM is a rules-lawyer, then the primary point of the game is lost. Your DM needs to be a story teller, a scene builder and a plot guide. If you only play the game for the rules, I'd suggest accounting.
Ok I really need to check out slashcode. The captchas are somehow tied to threads, even if I don't know how they do it. :wenches:
There's also nothing wrong with thinking "hmm... so they rolled 'X' ->
where 'X' is low: There's no way the players will beleive that worked. "You hurl your sword and the villain deflects it with 'y'.
where 'X' is reasonably high enough or compensated by character ability: This makes the story more awesome, "Your sword sails true and pierces the villain [player roll damage]. They scream in pain and rage and hurl their forces at you. 'DestROY THEM!"
Taking 5 minutes to figure out the rules can be honest, but also honestly boring. If the player's desperate enough to throw their sword, then you have achieved tension/excitement and shouldn't hit pause.
Guess what? You can be extremely creative in well-designed systems that don't arbitrarily handicap characters at random.
Initially I read PnP as referring to the Avalon Hill RPG Powers and Perils
Having played (A)D&D since first edition D&D 4 was such an abomination that my group downloaded it and deleted it.
Pathfinder is decent, but currently playing Mongoose RuneQuest II
The worst I ever rolled had 4 threes and a max stat of 6 (my D6s are cursed, I'm pretty sure)
Play GURPS. :)
Superglue on one end of rope, toss to ceiling. Super glue along inside of arm. Super glue other hand to end of rope. Dots of super glue on toes of boots.
Swoop down and grab (with glue ready arm) the guy we needed to save. Continue on swing up to ceiling (I was given push to help move faster), toes glued to ceiling. Guy we needed to rescue away from bad guys, his arms pinned to his side by my super glued arm.
Now what asks the gm. I grin, and say I get the superglue solvent out of my pocket. How? Ummm....
Try something like that on a PC RPG.
I've had lots of great gaming experiences, with many different editions of the rules. In my experience, the really good GM's learned to adjust how things worked in their games, one way or another, to compensate for the quirks of, or problems with, the official rules.
For example, one way to deal with the problem of low dice rolls is to award bonus hit points every so often to characters that get a lot of combat experience. After all, learned combat survivability is really what the hit point concept is supposed to represent, at least for player characters, so this fits logically within "game reality". Soldiers that survive their first few combats have a far higher likelihood of surviving future combats than first timers, so this matches well with reality.
Balancing the races poses another problem when using the written rules. One option there is to give human characters some bonuses to make up for the racial abilities they are not getting from their race. For example, human players might be allowed some unique special ability, the ability to use a few extra spells, a special starting item, or some bonuses to their initial stats to compensate for the demi-human advantages of infravision or the ability to cast spells while wearing armor.
In my experience, the kinds of people that I want to play with are pretty understanding of this sort of thing: the players with demi-human characters know they've got some extra advantages and don't mind the GM adjusting things to provide a little game balance (especially for the starting characters). As long as the adjustment doesn't distort "game reality" too much it tends to go over well with good players. Good players are not concerned with having their characters be "better" than the characters played by their friends: they are interested in having fun with their friends.
Once the GM starts doing this sort of thing, of course, there is no reason to level cap demi-humans (the level-cap system does distort "game reality", as it is perceived as purely arbitrary by players). There is also no reason to prevent humans from multi-classing, something that many game masters were allowing long before the 3rd edition came out and made it official (or, for that matter, the Lankhmar rules).
Incidentally, awarding bonuses to weaker characters, classes, or races became a lot easier once the 3rd edition came out, as the creative GM can now use bonus skills and feats in addition to the more traditional bonuses, a point that often gets overlooked by those that criticize the "complexity" of the 3/3.5/Pathfinder systems.
There is a challenge here: the GM must carefully manage these adjustments without unbalancing the game or penalizing the players that build their characters in a more traditional manner. A little wisdom is required, and sometimes this means a willingness to learn from one's mistakes. Most GM's change the rules that affect character building and advancement more than they change the combat rules.
In a number of cases, I've played in pretty rules-intensive games that were still really fun, because problems with the rules were addressed in reasonable ways while still allowing the intricate and interesting combat that rules-intensive games permit (something the "story gamers" don't get to experience).
In my experience, the really good GMs could make these kinds of changes to their game without significantly altering the fundamental nature of the game. I've seen it happen lots of times, in games that lasted a long time and were a lot of fun to play in.
So it's not really a question of what rules you use, or what system you play, having a good RPG experience is about how you play and who you play with.
The unfortunate thing is that there is large pool of GM experience improving these games out in the world, but it rarely seems to get tapped when newer versions of the game rules are being written by the "professional" game writers.
Ah, AD&D was so long ago...
We eventually settled on an alternate rule for HP, too, called the Dirty Harry system. Rather than simply allow re-rolling on a 1, you could repeatedly re-roll to try to get a higher value, always taking the value of the final roll, where the final roll is determined by either: a roll is less than or equal to the prior roll; the player decides to stop rolling. So, you get to ask yourself "Do you feel lucky, punk?". If your initial HP roll is a 1, you have nothing to lose by re-rolling. If your initial roll is the max (e.g. 8 for a Druid), you'd be a fool to re-roll. Of course, if you have cursed dice, you could still end up with 1 HP per level.
Also, for HP we would use a scaled d12 in place of d4 and d6 because it's too easy for well-practiced players to game those dice to get the roll they want.
We always thought that HP should be accrued more like typical department store sales clerk pay - base + commission. So, maybe a Fighter should get 1d6+4 per level instead of 1d10, and so on. But we could never agree to go that far beyond the stated AD&D rules.
Crap, I'm old.
- T
No, it doesn't stop be from using older books, but it does stop the designers from creating new 3.5 matererial
Somebody should remind you: In a role playing game, you can, and probably should, be making your own content. I swear, lazy role-playing fucks will insist that D&D 6 not only does all the DMing for you, but plays the characters as well. Stop being so helpless and create something!