There are two sides of the bloat debate. 3 editions of D&D have been heavily bloated IMHO (2E, 3E, 4E). Some of that bloat was semi pointless others were pure gold. Without that bloat we would not have the various TSR settings such as Darksun, Planescape, Ravenloft etc. That bloat was a contributing factor to the demise of TSR and its buyout by WoTC.
1E is an interesting example IMHO. From 1977-84/85 IIRC there was only 1 hard cover book released per year. There were numerous adventures though and Dragon magazine where most of the new classes, spells etc were located. There was really only 1 book made for player options as such and that was Unearthed Arcana which drew on Dragon magazine content. The original UA compared to the 3.5 UA was more of a Players Handbook 2 though with new classes, races, spells, equipment and power creep. It had a little bit for everyone though. The 3.5 UA was mostly full of optional rules for the DM.
Most of the other splatbooks made for 1E were also aimed at the DM with the MM2, FF, MotP,Deities and Demigods, all making an appearance and which were updated in the 3E era. I think people tend to forget however that bloat is optional. In a way it is better to have options and not use them than not have the options in the 1st place. The AD&D splat books were explicitly clear in this, 4E took a different approach with the everything is core (ergo allowed), while 3E kind of lacked the explicit this is optional implication which was different from AD&D's take on it. Technically everything is optional of course but there was a very different tone of the extra options offered between the various editions of D&D. TSR era was very DM may I, 4E leaned more towards players having everything while 3E was roughly in the middle.
Generally I prefer some amount of options. It is not a hard requirement however so something like the BECMI Rules Cyclopedia is fine for example and I tend to regard that as one of the best D&D books ever printed. Generally I regard good bloat as something that adds something useful and interesting to the game while bad bloat is bloat for bloats sake.
Good Bloat IMHO
Decent PC options books (1E Unearthed Arcana, 2E Tome of Magic, 3E PHB2, Complete Arcane/Divine/Warrior)
Campaign Settings offering something a bit different (Darksun, Planescape, Ravenloft)
Books that expand the base game (Manual of the Planes, Psionics if done well)
Books offering new systems if done well (Wilderness Survival Guide, Dungeoners Survival Guide, 2E Players Option books used intelligently, 3E UA)
Bad Bloat IMHO
Very specialized PC option books (2E Complete Fighters/Wizards/Druid/Elf/Gnome/Dwarf) AKA The Complete Gnome Cobblers Handbook
Books offering stuff that should have been in the PHB (4E PHB2& PHB3)
Subsystems that do not play nice with the core rules (2E and 3E Psionics)
Additional PC option books based off other splat books doing something very similar (Complete Mage, Psion, Scoundrel, Martial/Arcane Power 2)
To many settings books (2E FR, Paizo’s Golarion)
Blatant power creep and to much of it (various 3E and 4E splats, some AD&D 1E and 2E options)
Metaplot Books that ruin the setting (TSR game worlds, Darksun, FR, Dragonlance being the main victims). Metaplot often destroys what attracted you to the world in the 1st place. Eberron and Golarion are good in this regard.
In the short term
From a players PoV I would like 3 splat books released.
Ultimate Magic/Tome of Magic type book
Ultimate Combat/Complete Warrior type book
Unearthed Arcana (more 1E than 3E say 75%/25%)
For the DM probably Psionics and a Monster Manual II.
Produced at the rate of 2-3 per year slowing down as the edition grows and they have updated things like Psionics, Manual of the Planes, UA etc.
For example if I were to play 3.5 again (unlikley have not played since 2010 or so) I would allow the Complete Arcane/Divine/Adventurer/Warrior, PHB2 and the Magic Item/Spell Compendium saying no to the broken stuff.
Pathfinder I allow the core book+ Ultimate Combat+Ultimate Magic
4E Core Books only (all I own)
2E Tome of Magic, Fighters/Wizard/Thief/Druid handbooks. Maybe limited stuff fomr the Players Option Books
1E PHB (probably no psionics) +some of UA.
I actually agree with the sentiment that any material published should expanded the game with colorful options that arent tacked on to the system, but work with in whats already established.
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I also would like to see a 1E like Unearthed Arcana. Provide a third archetype for classes with only two like the ranger and sorcerer. Add in some more backgrounds and magic items. Some very carefully chosen feats. Maybe some new factions not tied to FR. A race or two like the warforged. It might also include rules for mass warfare.
I also think that if FR is going to be the default for a while a campaign setting book is needed. It doesn't have to have lots of new rules in it. Mostly backgrounds would be the best choice I'd think and maybe some iconic magic items.
This reads very much as "good bloat = stuff I want to use; bad bloat = stuff I don't want to use but someone else might."
In my opinion, bloat is bloat. Too much bloat is bad, whether the group wants to use it - in which case the badness manifests in the form of a stack of books being referenced to get the game up and running with the stuff the group wants to use - or the gorup doesn't want to use it - in which case the badness manifests in the form of books sitting on a shelf, both in the not being used sense and the not making the developer any money sense.
The only solution to bloat is to not release much - since no matter which content in particular we talk about, someone wants it and somebody else doesn't (For example, Zard labels the 2E psionics book as bad bloat, but it is one of the only books outside the core three I actually ever get use out of since it actually adds something to the game, rather than just re-hashing and empowering things already present).
The kind of suplement books i realy enjoyed where the 3.5 sandstorm, Stormwrack and frostburn books.
They where a recource for both players and Dm's and ofered rules and class options for all PHB classes focused around a theme.
These books realy opend up new kinds of campaign world you could create.
Also they had options for all classes so if there was any power creep al classes creeped at about the same rate.
With the complest X books clases that already had a book for their class tended to spice out in power compared to classes still waiting for their book.
I just wanted to bring attention to this one example of bad bloat, because if anything it should be considered "good bloat" by your definition.
Zardnaar wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
sandvirm wrote:
joeburgos wrote:
Agreed. New content is not automatically bloat, but when a rules system gets bloated, it’s always bad (look at 2e, 3e, and 4e at the end, or Pathfinder right now). After a certain point, there’s just no coming back from it.
Also, the word bloat is starting to look weird to me.
Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat.
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
To my understanding, what would be good is having books that open up new ways of playing – new types of campaigns: campaign settings, genre settings, etc. Ways to morph the game into a different feel while still being built around the core options.
Bloat arises when everything is core, or there are so many options that it takes sifting through. If you only have a core set of rules, and it have modules for you to enter into ("Ok, we're playing Dark Sun, so use the Core Rulebooks and the Dark Sun book and the Elemental Evil Player's Companion, but don't use the Rage of Demons Player's Companion), and these are clearly defined to fit the genre of play, then it's not bloat. One must be heavily selective, and this is only really possible if there's not a lot to select from.
If they just added Camapaign Setting books or Genre setting books (Stormwrack, Frostburn, Sandstorm, Modern or Gamma World conversions, etc), then we'd be good.
Diffan wrote:
Diffan wrote:
Bloat is subjective. Period. One person's pointless fluff is the cornerstone of another person's character or campaign. What matters is how many people are actually interested enough to be customers. And that's a question of demographics and marketing. Here's what is known just through actual market research:
- "Core books" have the highest profit margins because they can be printed in the largest volume and most of their production costs are actually in fixed capital. That means the more books that they sell the better the return on their investment, until their fixed costs essentially become neglibible.
- Expanded game materials have lower profits and slimmer margins as they run in smaller volume and benefit less from economies of scale. Their is also greater volitility and decay in the demand for any given expansion. This means that expanded materials have high variance in how popular they are and their sales decline sharply soon after release.
- Both core books and expanded materials benefit from network externality. The perceived value of the product is greatly influenced by its saturation and use by the consumer base. That means that the material is more useful to you if you know someone who is already playing with it.
- The probable customer of any expanded material is almost perfectly correlated with ownership of the core books. (no duh, I know.) That means that the number of people who own a D&D supplement but no PHB, DMG, or MM is extremely small compared to the rest of the consumer base. The opposite is not true. (There really are a lot of people who only own the core books.)
- Releases of expanded materials have a low-lag cross-correlation with both core book sales and other expanded materials. In fact, releases of expanded materials also have a slightly weaker low-lag autocorrelation with RPG products in general. Here is where some interpretation is necessary, but not much. Either new releases just happen to come out when people are more likely to buy any RPG product, or the release of new materials drives interest and investment in a game, and the hobby in general. While releases are timed using seasonal data, market analysts for hobby gaming rationally assume the later scenario has greater explainatory power.
These are pretty much the relevant sctructural facts of the industry, (with the notable exception of the trend away from physical books and towards digital production and distribution.) Trying to debate them is pointless, so I won't bother with you if you try.
What this all boils down to is that traditionally game companies have produced expansions to their games as a means of reinforcing demand for their most profitable product: the core books. However, there is always a risk that they misjudge the demand, over-produce any given expansion, and lose money on it. An expansion that nobody buys doesn't actually ruin the gameplay, but it doesn't help sell the core books and it basically kills most of the budget for future products. For most small companies working on thin margins a single miscalculation can kill not only the RPG line, but the entire company.
You might think WotC doesn't have this problem because they sell their corebooks on a volume that is quite ideal. Their fixed costs vs. sales should mean their margins are amazing, no? However, they get their funding from Hasbro, and Hasbro has investers that want to get richer. The problem is not that D&D has to compete with other RPG's, it's that D&D has to compete with other Hasbro brands like Scrabble, Monopoly, and Trivial Pursuit. Publically traded corporations don't chase every penny of profit they can from a brand so much as chase only the most efficient pennies they know about across all of their brands. WotC has to demonstrate to Hasbro that the money they spend on D&D wouldn't bring a better return or growth if invested in a different brand or subsidiary.
And in that vein, D&D is doing great, but only by spending as little as possible on the D&D tabletop RPG while repurposing its staff and budget into marketing and branding management for the D&D video games, toys, and eventually movies. This could mean they sell less D&D core books over time, but if your licensing agreements prove more lucrative and all you really care about is the amount of money that the name Dungeons & Dragons brings in, so what? Of course, if you're one of the few game designers who's still on the staff you're not going to spin it like it's a bad thing. After all, people are always complaining about bloat, so might as well treat this like it's a desired change.
It seems to me that this thread and a bunch of others (mostly started by the same person) all have the same theme.
Good bloat: stuff I want.
Bad bloat: stuff I don't want.
Lack of options: I only play the most numerically superior class, so I will soon be bored by "lack of options" unless they release ever more numerically superior options.
Lack of campaign options: unless they release exactly the adventure path I want or release so many campaigns that only the most hardcore gamer with a ton of time on their hands can use, there is a lack of campaign options.
With the bad bloat, lack of options and lack of campaign options, 5E is a failure.
sandvirm wrote:
Diffan wrote:
Too many options can be a bad thing, even if they are good options. If you had 50,000 spells, even if they were all good, would that be a good thing? I would say no. There is no practical way to look through 50,000 spells to see which ones you would want. It would be difficult to try to remember what all of those 50,000 spells did, or even just what the spells did that all of your current players have because no two are probably the same.
We already have so many options for races, subraces, classes, subclasses, and backgrounds that there are probably thousands of combinations. Add feats and other choices for each subclass (fighting styles, spell choices, etc.) and the number of different combinations becomes impossible for the human mind to fully understand. (Do you really understand how much a hundred thousand of something is, let alone a million?) If you add too many options people will get frustrated just trying to make characters. They will get bogged down in game play when someone tries to do an action and then someone realizes there is a rule for that somewhere. (Was the cold exposure rules in the ranger book or the northern book or viking book or...)
A special note on feats as they are especially dangerous. If you add a feat that lets you do something, that now means you can't do it without the feat. Feats should only improve on what you can already do, they should not limit an action to only those that have the feat. Honestly I am very happy they made all feats optional. The game plays fine (better IMHO) without them.
No. Just keep it simple. You don't need special cold rules or desert rules or elf options or weapon options or cultural weapons or blah, blah, blah. All of that is covered with what we have and some imagination on how the rules apply to new situations.
sandvirm wrote:
Diffan wrote:
Diffan wrote:
Totally agree. And sadly true about 4e. When I was running 4e, there came to be a huge power difference between the people that were playing using just the PHB and a few books, versus the people that were using the online character generator tool, which gave them access to everything.
LordTwig wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Diffan wrote:
I see bloat as this:
This book contains a new class. It comes with its own mini game, racial bonus, equipment, spells etc to make it work. So in pathfinder it is grit, ki, panache, eidolon evolutions, arcana pool and many many others.
Three volumes of the Priest''s Spell Compendium. Four volumes of the Wizard's Spell Compendium. Four volumes of the Encyclopedia Magica. Good or bad bloat?
Bluenose wrote:
So you considered them "good" bloat when they came out. But in hindsight, they are actually "bad" bloat. And you don't see the irony in having this opinion WRT your OP?
Anyone who thinks there's such a think as good bloat should just smile while they tell their girlfriend that she looks "bloated," and see how that one works out! 
This "good kind of bloat" we're trying to define? It's called "crunch" by the people who enjoy it.
LordTwig wrote:
sandvirm wrote:
Hitdice wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
Arithezoo wrote:
The difference between good "bloat" and bad "bloat" is how much of it can be stacked and combined.
Monsters? Impossible to have too many. The DM decides which to use and uses them and they don't at all interact with any other monster options for the most part.... I mean, it is entirely possible for two monsters to have abilities that combine and stack in a way to make them ultra-broken, but it isn't like this game is about DM's throwing packs of monsters at each other-- so long as the DM is more invested in the characters than their monsters, then it doesn't matter.
If you have 100 different race options, so long as they all get about the same amount of "stuff"-- that's not an issue. Now, it can be if the designers insist that every single race have their own gimmicky power or ability and thus accidentally create one whose gimmick increases the abilities of a class across the board far more than any other-- but so long as you are more or less seeing the same sorts of abilities that have very little gameplay impact and those abilities that have gameplay impact do so in a way that isn't particularly swingy for any class (or they kind of all have those same sorts of abilities-- such as all having equal attribute increases) it doesn't matter.
Every character can only have one race. Period. And races are often chosen because their asthetics are pleasing.
Classes? Kind of the same thing as races. So long as you don't have a class that is so generally good at everything, or even just the things that happen most often in the game, that there is no more reason to play another class, its probably not too much of an issue. Ideally, as much as possibly should be put into subclasses instead of full classes, but-- nonetheless-- every character is going to only ever have one.
Backgrounds? Again, until you get a background that just plain out-does another in all ways, you aren't going to have an issue. But it is pretty clear what benefits backgrounds grant you anyway at this point so that's why it is the #1 thing that the game encourages you to make custom ones.
Weapon Options? Honestly, I think there should just be a balanced weapon creation mechanic, but some existing weapons are already not well balanced. As long as you don't get any weapons that are exactly like existing ones plus having extra bonuses or are just outright better in all ways (again, already failed) then no matter how many weapons exist in the game, it doesn't matter. Every character is only going to be using 1 and they are generally chosen because of asthetic.
Feats? HERE is where you quickly run into problems. We saw it with 3.0, 3.5 and Pathfinder. Once a list of feats starts getting large, you end up with feats that are just out-and-out superior to other feats, offering all the same benefits in addition to extra ones. Feats are abilities that can start stacking and multiplying, and once multiple feats can start applying to the same action you run into serious issues real quick. That is where you are going to get, for instance, the person who can now take a chain and pretty much hit and pin down everything in 200' while doing a bit of damage every turn, but enough that it eventually adds up. Feats need to be carefully monitored.
Settings? You can NEVER have enough settings. Particularly if each setting is packaged with some unique mechanics and ideas that can be ported over into other settings. Ideally, every group that sits down to play this game should be making their own setting, so the more books there are that give people a chance to generate ideas about just where you can go with the game, the better.
Adventures? Look, as long as they have half-decent ideas in them, the more there are the better off you are.
In fact, in 5E, other than Feats I hardly see a way to bloat the system to being unusable.
Now, how they are packaged?... Okay, I can see the gripe there. Who wants to wait months and months through every single other race and class getting specialized, dedicated books in order to get ahold of the ones they want.
Things I'd like as a DM:
Another book of monsters. This time, with more focus on mid level and higher level challenges.
A setting book, preferrably Greyhawk.
Things I'd like as a Player & DM:
Psionics
Things I do not need, probably ever:
A book of additional martial options (just say NO to Ultimate Combat)
A book of additional spellcaster options (just say NO to Ultimate Magic)
Mistwell wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
Shasarak wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
Orethalion wrote:
Mistwell wrote:
Agree with everyone who is saying that Zardnaar is mis-using the words. He should have just said, "They should release new rules I like, and not ones that I don't like." And settings & adventures are not bloat, ever: they are just "content".
My hope is that they would:
1) Make everything optional.
2) To assure that, avoid power creep. 'Cause it's not really optional if it increases power.
3) Revive Dragon, print any new ideas there first, and test for a year before putting it into official books.
4) Re-release classic AD&D modules for 5e.
1. Everything is already optional. From every part of the PHB to each UA article released.
2. Power creep affects only those looking for more power. You can, easily I might add, play in games where each character isn't optimized out the waah-zoo and still enjoy the game.
Diffan wrote:
Hebitsuikaza wrote:
Hebitsuikaza wrote: