As much as we like to think it does?  The reason I ask is because two of the most popular versions of D&D were arguably the worst designed from a presentation and mechanical standpoint.

Let's be honest, 2e was much better presented and mechanically sound than 1e, yet 1e walks all over it as far as continued support and gamers.  And 4e was much better designed over 3e in terms of balance, presentation, and work the DM had to do.  And 4e is getting walked all over by 3e and the OGL.

I'm not trying to say bad design equals awesome game, but is it as important as we think it is, or is there something else that drives the success of a game?  Open support?  That explains 3e but not 1e.  Is it atmosphere?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;580942As much as we like to think it does?  The reason I ask is because two of the most popular versions of D&D were arguably the worst designed from a presentation and mechanical standpoint.

Let's be honest, 2e was much better presented and mechanically sound than 1e, yet 1e walks all over it as far as continued support and gamers.  And 4e was much better designed over 3e in terms of balance, presentation, and work the DM had to do.  And 4e is getting walked all over by 3e and the OGL.

I'm not trying to say bad design equals awesome game, but is it as important as we think it is, or is there something else that drives the success of a game?  Open support?  That explains 3e but not 1e.  Is it atmosphere?

Timing and luck. From the various anecdotes people tell, 1e was still very early on, and integrated neatly into the mishmash D&D sets people said they used at the time, while 2e was more presented as it's own thing, "2e stuff goes with 2e, and that's it".

Same with 3e, 2e had burnt itself and D&D out, and 3e was something very new; plus, it came pretty close to the LotR "Fantasy wave" of the early 00's.

Who knows. Maybe there is more to designing a game than number-crunching - compelling ways of fostering healthy group dynamics, setting interaction and content creation, that kind of stuff. Kinda far-fetched, isn't it.

Put simply, a lot of gamers fixate on mechanical stuff because they are number-obsessed people who equate design with mechanical optimalisation problems. Optimalisation is an important part of design, but only a part. There are a lot of soft factors which do not fit the narrow definition a lot of people are using. Game structures (or blueprints), for example, are a non-mechanical element of design. A game may have suboptimally designed mechanics but a clear presentation of useful game structures which make it very accessible and smooth in spite of mechanical weaknesses. A game may also have a generous amount of premade building blocks which can fit into those structures to facilitate easy and rewarding scenario-building. A game may also have interesting aesthetics.

I am finding that online rhetoric can be very picky about hard mechnics to the point of hysteria while neglecting soft design, while actually running an enjoyable game has more to do with setting up a good group dynamic, and mechanics only do a little part of the heavy lifting there.

Naturally, elements of design are not mutually exclusive, at least not within sensible limits. For some kinds of players, though, too tight mechanics may work against the open-ended nature of RPGs. This is a potential weakness of tightly integrated systems, as we discovered with 3.0.

That's an intersting take on that question, really ...
It reminds me about the computer/console game discussions when they started to find out the thing now commonly known as "playability" ...
Perhaps there is something similar in rpgs?

From another rpg-site, i did get the impression, though, that some GMs/DMs really like "broken" games, because they'll try to fix them.
But that isn't really true either, because the game must feel worthy of the "fixing".

So, what is it that D&D, Palladium, and several others have in common?
Descriptions of delightful, interesting, adventerous worlds ....

Is that the answer?
Ok, the ruls are better off with a good way of start playing, though, but it seems so often, that the promise of a good adventure(through background info and world description) outweighs several rule problems.
... But ... is this perhaps just true for known Titles?

Newcomers on the market seems like they have ... impossible odds against themselves, unless they get into a current opening, and/or manages to get a notable amount of ads (but not too many ...).

I think part of the problem is there is no meaningful metric for what constitutes 'Good Design'. Which leads to 90% of the conversation about design talking about stuff that is simply not important at the actual table.

Design for me falls into several categories.

Mechanical: this is how the players interact with the imaginary world via their characters and sometimes the dice.

Artistic: the art and layout. Also the fluff.

Readability: doesn't matter if you have the best system in the world, if you can't communicate your ideas they aren't much good to anyone.

Premise: your milieu, game world, antagonists, all that.

Meta stuff: This would be GM advice and roleplaying tips.

Mechanics usually tend to have a goal in mind, unless you're wheeling out yet another D&D clone. WW's Vampire for example toned down the combat rules to emphasise roleplaying, this was intentional. Phoenix Command went to the far end of the other extreme, attempting to model every possible interaction between the bullet and the human body.

If you don't understand the goal the mechanics are trying to achieve, or do understand it but don't like it anyway, you probably won't enjoy the game. Not comprehending the former leads to raeg and pointlessly wasted lives on the intarwebs.

In my own system I've striven to achieve the right balance for me, which is closely modelling reality while still keeping the game eminently playable. Basically as rules lite as its possible to get while not losing any flavour, so suspension of disbelief is kept to a minimum, which in turn greatly enhances enjoyment of the fantastical events which may arise. The strange really is strange, its big fun.

If modelling reality or smooth gameplay aren't your bag, you won't like it. If you don't like roll high mechanics or have a burning desire for dice pools, you won't like it. Not much I can do about that, but it doesn't make the game poorly mechanically designed.

Games which are D&D clones or games like Eclipse Phase without a goal in mind are usually deemed by rule mechanics to be poorly designed. EP has superb artwork and middling fluff, a great initial premise which wasn't very well developed but had massive political appeal to a particularly vocal parish on the internet (the primary reason for its success I feel). The most common complaint about it is the awkward mechanics, and unusually not from rulesy types either.

These are examples of games which appeal to people who don't care about the mechanics. They may succeed despite themselves, but nonetheless.

The meta stuff as Melan rightly points out is often neglected or ignored entirely. Numerous well known game books offer excellent tidbits of advice here and there, but there doesn't seem to be one single authoritative source. This more than anywhere is an area the hobby can advance design wise I feel.

So basically yes, games can succeed despite themselves, and succeed for complex reasons which have little to do with the hobby, but that's still no excuse for sloppy work.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;580942As much as we like to think it does?  The reason I ask is because two of the most popular versions of D&D were arguably the worst designed from a presentation and mechanical standpoint.

Let's be honest, 2e was much better presented and mechanically sound than 1e, yet 1e walks all over it as far as continued support and gamers.  And 4e was much better designed over 3e in terms of balance, presentation, and work the DM had to do.  And 4e is getting walked all over by 3e and the OGL.

I'm not trying to say bad design equals awesome game, but is it as important as we think it is, or is there something else that drives the success of a game?  Open support?  That explains 3e but not 1e.  Is it atmosphere?

I think an important part of good design that often gets over looked in these discussion is giving your customers what they want. Often "good design" isheld up as an abstract ideal. I think onereason for 3Es success is offered solutions to things people had long regarded as problems (though they introduced soe new issues in the process). A lot of people disliked thac0 and attack matrices, for example (though certainly not everyone). But 4E addressed problems that were either very specific to 3E or were pet complaints if a small number of players.

I think a lot of what people see as good design is really more about trends. When i went back to 2E i felt it certainly had some issues (KO chart for example) but in a lot of ways it was better designed than 3E (even if its approach was dated and out of fashion). Right now having a different die mechanic for different parts of the game is cojsidered clunky, but it does have some major benefits. I think ability checks work much better in AD&D for example than they did in 3E, because trying to impose d20 rolls +x against a TN doesn't work as well as rolling under your stat (in my opinion). I also think the nwp roll is much better than the skill rolls in d20 (where you end up rolling against massive DCs with crazy modifiers). Initiative in a d10 with low rolls being better are easier for the GM (because you count just one to ten from lowest to highest). This is all opinion of course, lots of people will disagree with me. But there is a trade off when you streamline everything into a unified mechanic (i design with unified mechanics all the time and you definitely lose some control and flexibility because you have to use the core mechanic as a blueprint for everything).

Quote from: Melan;580954Put simply, a lot of gamers fixate on mechanical stuff because they are number-obsessed people who equate design with mechanical optimalisation problems. Optimalisation is an important part of design, but only a part. There are a lot of soft factors which do not fit the narrow definition a lot of people are using.

Do you think this is something specific to tabletop RPG gamers?  It seems that in video-games, and on the academic side of things, other aspects of design are stressed more often than pure mechanical design.  

Although video-games I guess may be because it's more of an experiential type thing, where aesthetics are always a part of the whole and there is more immediacy for the player.

No, I see it a lot in video gaming as well, except technology takes the place of mechanics. It is a very technology-centred hobby, even if parts of it are slowly getting better. But you still have a lot of games which invest several million dollars into getting tech (primarily visuals) right and then sort of phone in the rest.

For example, very few games have good sound desing, or use sound as a gameplay mechanic. There are very few games which are good at complex interaction, or use interaction differently than a few typical formulas. Story design also seems to be mostly stuck in linearity or simple branching structures, even if the big promise of electronic gaming would be the exploration of different techniques that were not simply slightly branching movie plots. Game development on the higher tiers is more formulaic and staid than Hollywood.

Fortunately, there is a lot of ground-level innovation nowadys; mainly in games which are relatively cheap to produce. Lots of good platformers, for example, which I never would have guessed. These games may also find innovation a necessity because they don't have the resources for the really expensive technologies. Of course, this field has a lot of bullshit that only pretends to be innovation; "arty" games that are carbon copies of each other, or have nothing to show beyond an interesting aesthetic, that's very typical.

But yeah, design myopia is very much alive in computer gaming.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;580977I think an important part of good design that often gets over looked in these discussion is giving your customers what they want. Often "good design" isheld up as an abstract ideal. I think onereason for 3Es success is offered solutions to things people had long regarded as problems (though they introduced soe new issues in the process). A lot of people disliked thac0 and attack matrices, for example (though certainly not everyone). But 4E addressed problems that were either very specific to 3E or were pet complaints if a small number of players.
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I think this is a very good point.

Quote from: jadrax;580965I think part of the problem is there is no meaningful metric for what constitutes 'Good Design'. Which leads to 90% of the conversation about design talking about stuff that is simply not important at the actual table.

This is where you'd be wrong. Good design is easy to contemplate when your arguments aren't bogged down by people who don't want the same thing you do. In a nutshell good design is when you design for something to happen and it happens the way you want it to.

Let's say that in a hypothetical game you want players to always be adventuring all the time. You specifically (for whatever reason) do not want as much intrigue, social events, etc to be happening at the table. For whatever crazy reason you want the game to focus on adventuring while leaving the rest up to someone else or just handwaving it completely. You can recognize good game design when you craft your rules in such a fashion that most people play the game this way. If your design allowed you to meet your design goal then congrats, you did a good job at game design. If it doesn't work out and instead your game promotes something else or even the exact opposite then that would be bad game design.

That's pretty much it. If you design your game to do a thing and it does it ell (or at least promotes the kind of play you want it to) then you did a good job. If it does not then you did a bad job.

I've long held the belief that game design is the worst thing that ever happened to RPGs.

Quote from: Melan;580954I am finding that online rhetoric can be very picky about hard mechnics to the point of hysteria while neglecting soft design, while actually running an enjoyable game has more to do with setting up a good group dynamic, and mechanics only do a little part of the heavy lifting there.

What you call "soft design", I've been calling structural rules, in contrast to mechanics. (I'm leaving aside other design elements like layout or aesthetics of the content, since I don't see these as *game* design, more like "product design.")

I see mechanics as being pretty unimportant, really. The heavy lifting is done by the structural rules, most of which are conditionals (if you are a magic-user, you can prepare and cast spells.)

And really, as long as the structural rules don't contradict each other, it doesn't matter game-wise what a particular structural rule *is*. It's all a matter of taste.

Quote from: talysman;581035The heavy lifting is done by the structural rules, most of which are conditionals (if you are a magic-user, you can prepare and cast spells.)

Surely that would be a mechanic too?

Let's look at this from a logical standpoint...

Ha!  Just kidding.

I think the early games had a lot of do-it-yourself ethic built in, but as the editions wore on, those elements were neglected or consciously removed.  So, the focus became more on the 'game' part and less on the 'role-playing' part.  I am sure this was partly due to RPGA and other sanctioned events, but mostly because of the 'a game needs rules' mentality.  The more it looked like a mainstream game, the more the mainstream would accept it, right?

But of course, that removed many of the elements that made the experience unique.  2e was definitely streamlined, but it was also more codified; perhaps the early signs of needing something on your character sheet to attempt it.  There were uncounted expansions and splats, but those cut into the individual table's imagination space with varying degrees of severity.  3.x continued the trend, which led to endless bickering online about how a mechanic or rule 'should' be used.  4e was... well it was 4e.  

All these versions have some good ideas.  The trend seems to be, intentional or not, to squeeze out the creativity part that made the rpg experience something unusual.  The more the players have to kit-bash, generally the more engaged they will be with the game.  I think this holds true for a number of different games, not just AD&D.

Quote from: MGuy;581034This is where you'd be wrong. Good design is easy to contemplate when your arguments aren't bogged down by people who don't want the same thing you do. In a nutshell good design is when you design for something to happen and it happens the way you want it to.

Completely wrong.  It's only conditionally correct when applied to boardgames.  This sort of nonsense is what gave rise to the Forge.