I found this very interesting (and I very much agree with him), and I missed most of the reactions from the prior board so here it is again. Oh, and please obey the board rules with your responses and stay positive, respectful, and civil.
http://stuffershack.com/not-the-gold-standard/
Not The Gold Standard
Posted by Robert J. Schwalb on June 26, 2014
For this month, I was going to spill some ink about earning XP for finding treasure. I had nearly 2,000 words in place, all ready to go. Something else, however, had been stomping around in my little attic and making so much noise, I felt compelled to go upstairs to find out what it was. So here we go. The post that I did not intend to write.
Here’s a confession: I have a really weird relationship with D&D. It was my first RPG. It was the game that hooked me. It’s the game I prefer to play over any other. I’m happiest when I’m working with the other players to explore a dungeon, fighting monsters, finding treasure, and adding the XP to my character sheet. I love solving puzzles, mapping dungeons, and drawing upon my encyclopedic knowledge of the game and its lore. I love the classic experience. And it is in this world where I am most at home. So why then do I have all this frustration? Why can’t I be happy?
To get this right, we have to go back to the beginning. My first experience with D&D was with the adventure Rahasia. I had nothing else. So, instead of pressing my parents to get me the rules, I just made them up. I called it Passages. It was super easy. I think you rolled a d6 and if you rolled some number or higher, you killed the monster. You gained a level every time you moved onto a new map.
It wasn’t long after that my parents presented me with the red box. I still remember pulling off the thin plastic and removing the lid, finding the two booklets, some inexpensive dice, a crayon, and an ad for the RPGA. I looked through the player’s book and discovered, to my dismay, D&D was nothing like the game I had made. It looked complicated and had all sorts of strange rules. I was disappointed.
My friend Landon, however, was a big-time D&D guy. I remember seeing him run AD&D on the playground for some other kids. They had strange books, the Advanced ones, and I clearly remember them discussing Oriental Adventures and the cool stuff it contained. I was intrigued. I wanted to join them, to have the same experiences, to find out just how many flavors of dwarf there were. I want to play, too. Landon, I suppose, sensed my interest and invited me to spend the night at his house. We talked about comics quite a bit. Eventually we sat at his kitchen table and ended with my first D&D character, a fighter named Booger. I landed on the name Booger from my disdain for the entire enterprise. Character creation bored me to death. Later that night, when the lights were off, and I was drifting off to sleep on the floor, I had decided that D&D was not for me. I was, again, disappointed.
The next Friday, Landon invited me over again, this time to play. It was just me and Travis. Travis had his two characters, and I had Booger and a magic-user Landon had put together for me. I named the magic-user Pardu after Tom Hanks’s character from Monsters & Mazes. The game began. Within minutes, mere minutes, I was frantically erasing the name Booger from my character sheet and was scrawling Ator in its smudged place. I was hooked. From that day on, I went to Landon’s house or he went to mine. We swilled Mountain Dew and Sundrop. We devoured chili dogs and lasagna. And best of all, we had awesome adventures in a world of our imagination.
The takeaway from this charming anecdote is the manner in which I became hooked. I took one look at the rules and character creation (laughably simple now of course) and was ready to quit before I had even played a single session. But once I had dice in hand, once the story began, I never wanted to stop. The experience of playing, the genuine fear I felt for my character when we faced down the gnolls for the first time, the excitement I had when I found a +1 two-handed sword: all this had sparked my imagination and would eventually launch my career.
So with all that love, I’m left wondering what the problem is. In suspect it’s that for the last 15 years or so, the most important part of the game has not been playing but rather creating for it. Character creation used to be something you had to do before you could have the fun. The mechanics were the necessary evil, the gauntlet you had to run. In recent years, the fun has moved from the time you spent at the table to the time you spend thinking about the table. Sure, back in the old days, I made plenty of characters for games I played and games I wanted to play but never really did. It was just like doing math problems. They had solutions. You just had to roll the dice, make the choices, and plug the information into the sheet. But hasn’t been that way for a while.
It seems the fun for many is in putting the different pieces together to create something new. Clever play now occurs in isolation. The player earns the greatest reward not from having a good idea at the table or thinking to look behind the wardrobe and finding a magic item, but from the discovery of a winning combination of mechanics, the perfect marriage of two spells, skill and feat, class feature and widget. The pleasure comes from realizing the broken combination and from putting the mechanical abomination into play. No delight is sweeter than that which is experienced by watching the expressions of those who must bear witness to your creative horror. Does it matter that the loophole makes the game unplayable? Does it matter that such shenanigans immediately put the beleaguered Dungeon Master on the defensive, to the point that he or she flails because the game no longer seems to work? Not at all. Why? Because the game wants you to break it. It begs for you to dig in and explore the options. The endless parade of new mechanics demand you to pick them up, peer at them in the light, and plug them in. It’s a game made for the tinkerers. Oh, you just want to play? Well, you’ll need these ten books, this character generation tool, and on and on and on.
The prize for being the best player goes not to the creative mind, the cunning tactician, the burgeoning actor, but to the best mathematician. Perhaps this was the way it was doomed to go. The seeds were there all along. The mechanical-minded played spellcasters—who dominated—while the rest plodded along with fighters. As the game evolved, it was no longer sufficient for the fighter to become more accurate or to attack more often: the fighter had to do things beyond swing a sword or loose an arrow from a bow. The game needed rules for every situation, for every scenario, and with each new rule came a new exploit, a new opportunity to bend the game into something terrifying.
This has turned rant-ish and for that I apologize. I do not believe there is a right way or a wrong way to play this game. I know a great many people love to tinker, to build, and create. They see the character sheet as a blank screen, eager for new code, a canvas craving the brush. And that’s cool. But for me, I don’t want that experience anymore. I crave lighter fare. I want the thrill of discovery. The excitement that arises at the table. The hilarity of defeat and the thrill of success.
So here we are, at the dawn of the next edition, an edition I, in some part, helped to create. When I was brought onto the team, it was with the understanding that I would fly the 4th Edition flag, a game I had worked hard to support through the countless articles and supplements throughout the life of that game. Looking back, I find it strange since I have all but divorced myself from the 4th Edition rules, largely for the reasons I outline above. While I enjoy 4E, it scratched a different itch for me than the one D&D had for many years. As I worked on 5th Edition, I shed my 3rd Edition and 4th Edition influences. I abandoned conceptions and beliefs about design that I had held as truths for years until I returned to my roots, to a place where the most important part of D&D is not what’s in the book but what happens at the table. And so, I look forward to the coming months, to see what I hope will become a return to the glory days of D&D to a style of play both familiar and new. I believe this game preserves just enough of the customization elements that defined the 3rd and 4th Editions to be recognizable to newer members of the audience, while having reclaimed the heart of the game from the earliest editions and put it back where it belongs. It should be an exciting future and one that I am proud to have helped create.
The blog post feels weird to me because it seems to take the track that optimization and creating builds is how people have fun playing D&D in recent years. While this may be true for some players, I don't think there's any accuracy at all in painting it as an across-the-board characterization of recent editions. Additionally, while I appreciate hyperbole for the sake of making a point no edition has ever required ten books to play it or required a character building tool.
Nothing wrong with having different opinions, but I fail to see what this has to do with the topic. The topic was about 5e, and some motivations for 5e. You posted a topic about 4e, and why people like that. Which is fine...go make a thread on that, in the appropriate forum.
Mistwell wrote:
I got an "everyone who has been playing the last two editions has been doing it WRONG!" vibe from the article. That, and the typical "true roleplayer" making thinly veiled attacks against char op people from atop his lofty perch.
seti wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
The_Jester wrote:
These days, we tend to spend an entire night handling character creation. This has pretty much been the case since 3E. It wasn't ever the case for any of our groups in 2E, even starting beyond 1st level. When playing Savage Worlds, we tend to be capable of getting characters put together in around an hour or so.
I only played 4E twice, but I seem to recall creating a character was a relatively quick process. Pathfinder feels like it takes an eternity, and I'm generally pretty quick about throwing a character together. There's so many options (most of which are available on the SRD) to consider there, though, so it's not surprising.
It really depends on what you're going for. 3.5 can be super fast if you're not trying to make a build. If you are, you might spend hours figuring out what your character looks like at 20th just so you don't mess up the whole progression right at level one. Choosing a Human can make all the difference.
In 4e, it can take awhile because some classes have more decision points than they used to (fighter), with 2 or more at-wills, up to 3 encounter powers, etc but you generally don't have to worry about messing up a build since later feats and PPs don't have strict requirements.
I am sure this is off topic for the 5e boards.
Shasarak wrote:
Brimleydower wrote:
Generally, if a mod deletes something, reposting it isn't the wisest decision.
seti wrote:
LFK wrote:
Diffan wrote:
XunValDorl_of_HouseKilsek wrote:
seti wrote:
DSZ wrote:
Jenks wrote:
We’ve removed content from this thread because of a violation of the Code of Conduct.
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seti wrote:
Brimleydower wrote:
ORC_Cricket wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
LFK wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
As the game evolved, it was no longer sufficient for the fighter to become more accurate or to attack more often: the fighter had to do things beyond swing a sword or loose an arrow from a bow.
FallingIcicle wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
LFK wrote:
Apparently, what I got out of this was a LOT different from what most of you got out of it. 
FallingIcicle wrote:
Rob Schwalb posted about it on Facebook;
Plaguescarred wrote:
Gnarl wrote:
Paraxis wrote:
Gnarl wrote:
I agree with the general drift of Schwalb's sentiment. For me the problem is not with character creation however, but with the system and mechanics. I suspect schwalb's concern over character creation is really routed in the system.
But it's a valuable reflection of D&D through the years and I'm glad it was said.
I don't feel sorry for him at all. He got paid to do what we all do for free.
I disagree with him on what I percieved as 4e bashing (maybe... I'm not even sure anymore...Char Op was always in the game, so was having fun playing no matter what edition); but I do not hate him or anything. Heck, I've never even met the guy.
Optimization and/or Power Gaming and/or Munchkins and/or broken rules are the inevitable result of publishing hundreds of game supplements. If you created a core set of books, playtested the death out of them to make sure that all the options were fun and balanced and easy to use, and then stopped, then it wouldn't happen. If WotC of any of the 5E designers do not want D&D to be about optimization, then they should not publish new classes/subclasses/feats/spells/etc.
Consider baseball. It already has a big quantatative numbers focus about which players to use and how to use them, but outside of some fairly basic coaching decisions (when to rotate pitchers, when to bench an injured players, etc) these decisions are largely limited to once a year. Now imagine what would happen if every month teams could draft or release new players and umpires gained access to new optional rules which they could implement if they thought it made the game more fun. Baseball would become consumed with the optimization process that has consumed D&D.
If you want people to play a game, give them rules, then let them play. If you want people to spend all their time optimizing the rules, then keep releasing more rules.
This thread and others like it on enworld is clear evidence about how sensitive and overwrought any discussion of design gets when it touches on the sacred game that we'll leave unnamed.
I think there is no conflict when someone says I think X and Y are the best way for me to have fun. If you are having fun with A and B then thats okay but it's not what I enjoy. I do not believe and it's a very poor trend in fact that you have to put "in my opinion" in front of everything. In fact it's poor English.
Each of us has a perspective. Games are not objectively measurable for their worth and effectiveness. They are only subjectively measurable as to how the work for me. I will admit that there is no game of D&D ever created nor any clone including even 13th Age which I'm not a fan of that is not better for me than playing 4e. I am also smart enough to realize that many people like 4e. There is no conflict in those two statements. There is also no conflict in saying that for me 4e does not represent the sort of play I came to love in the past.
RJS did say that he enjoyed playing 4e. For him it didn't press the same buttons that 1e/2e pressed. Neither did 3e. So he yearns to have that 1e/2e experience nowadays. For whatever reason. I think I'm in the same boat with him. I do like 3e and enjoyed playing it. At this point in life though, I yearn for more 1e/2e than 3e. And I'm talking playstyle more than exact mechanics.
People change and opinions change. We can't expect every dev to love every edition of D&D or it's focus. I do find it interesting that the entire original development team is gone. Monte, Bruce, and Robert.
seti wrote:
Person_Man wrote:
GhostStepper wrote:
It is about the number of option points not just options available.
In 5e there is
- Race
- Sub race
- Class
- Sub class
- Multi-class (this is more than likely the biggest red flag)
- Class options like fighting style or favored enemy
- Feats or Ability Increases (this option happens less often than older editions)
- Spells
There are also option points in skill choice and backgrounds but these will little effect on optimization I think.
Even within the core books there will be ways to customize/optimize your character, some of the worst offenders in the past couple editions could be done with just the core books.
However simple or complex the rules are (or become), believing that players won't optimize in D&D is urinating in the wind. The game incentivizes it by design, always has and probably always will. The game is based around mechanics used to resolve conflict when characters get into charged situations in pursuit of gold, XP, and inspiration points. Players will, by and large, naturally build characters that are good at doing those things and make decisions during play accordingly. This is true of any game and it's true in D&D. Embrace it rather than fight it, I say, both as a player and DM. There is no tradeoff between optimization and "roleplaying." If your personal priorities are different than what the game supports by design, you're left with changing your priorities, changing the game via house rules, or finding a game that suits your priorities better.
cranebump wrote:
iserith wrote:
DSZ wrote:
iserith wrote:
iserith wrote:
It is also personality type, I remember optimizing in 1e. It was harder without the collective of other people sharing ideas on the internet, but the day I figured out how much damage a dart specialist could do with a good strength at low levels, I was so happy with myself. I was younger then so I am sure there are way more optimized things you could do, especialy with magic but most of our campaigns ended just when the spellcasters started to come into good spells, so it was usualy just a damage output comparison between me and my friends.
So optimization has always been there, just got easier over the years.
Gnarl wrote:
Paraxis wrote:
A one sentence rephrasing of RJS's entire post.
The recent editions of D&D emphasized some things I don't value as much and got away from things I do value more. 5e will perhaps make me happier.
That is the entire gist of his post. You don't have to drop into legal mode every time someone criticizes an edition. And if some aspect of play declined in that edition then the rules were likely a factor in influencing that decline even if in theory you could still do it.
At this point, on the forums, ANY critique of either 3e or 4e is now labelled "edition warring".
An honest review that includes negatives would be edition warring. A complaint that you don't like a certain mechanic is throwing down the gauntlet. Comparing two editions even obliquely is a call to battle.
Robert J Schwab posted something on his own personal blog as an individual. The purest essence of free speach. He lamented that some element of the game had been burried, and had a valid point. He saw a barrier to entry that was as much a design problem as THAC0.
But, because he DARED to do so in a way that was not completely flattering to the most recent two editions then he's suddenly edition warring. Oh it's fine to point out the bad design and problems in 1e and 2e, but don't you even think about doing that to 3e and 4e.
People are allowed to not like an edition! People are allowed to be critical of elements of the game they do not like!
Yes, because we cannot control ourselves on these boards and not pick fights, pointing out how "we never had that problem", we have a somewhat tenious agreement to avoid discussing and critiquing past editions as it's edition warring (which we ourselves break every single chance we get). But that doesn't apply off these boards. People can feel free to say what they want on their blogs and podcasts and in person.
iserith wrote:
Gnarl wrote:
The_Jester wrote:
Hey all. While I love Rob, and I thought blog was a great read, it's inspriing exactly the kind of conversation I don't want in these forums. Comparing editions like most people are doing in their replies always leads to some edition wars here, and people touting which edition they think is best, often to the detriment of whatever edition someone else in the conversation might love. With that in mind I'm going to close this thread.
Please, in the future, refrain having conversations that compare one edition to the other in these forums. Thanks much and have fun!