TheRPGSite

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 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures) (or blueprints (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=7027&page=2)), 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.

Quote from: StormBringer;581107Completely wrong.  It's only conditionally correct when applied to boardgames.  This sort of nonsense is what gave rise to the Forge.

No, he's right. That it gave rise to the forge doesn't make him less so, a correct theory can be put to good and bad use. Setting design goals and creating mechanics to emulate those is the right way to do it. I guess where the forge went wrong was when poor old Ron utterly failed to grasp what roleplaying was about and replaced mechanical design goals with his stunted social vision instead.

Quote from: The Traveller;581150No, he's right. That it gave rise to the forge doesn't make him less so, a correct theory can be put to good and bad use. Setting design goals and creating mechanics to emulate those is the right way to do it. I guess where the forge went wrong was when poor old Ron utterly failed to grasp what roleplaying was about and replaced mechanical design goals with his stunted social vision instead.

Design goals are great, but they do need to account for what the customers want. 4E met most of its design goals, but in doing so drove away a number of existing D&D players. You also have to account for why things that appear to detract from the "goal" of a game like D&D are deemed essential or fun by many players. For a game like D&D narrow design goals are a bad idea. For a game like "Draco-Warriors: The Optimized Weeabo Heartbreaker" you narrow design is okay because you are appealing to a specific demographic of the gaming community. "good design" in isolation from considerations like who actually plays the game is somewhat meaningless.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581157Design goals are great, but they do need to account for what the customers want. 4E met most of its design goals, but in doing so drove away a number of existing D&D players. You also have to account for why things that appear to detract from the "goal" of a game like D&D are deemed essential or fun by many players.

D&D didn't have a goal in its earlier iterations though, it was just "the game". It is unique in that it wasn't just first to market, it created the market from nothing.

In that regard I don't think releasing new versions was ever a good idea for D&D, its strength always lay in the vast amount of resources available, not the depth of its system. Commercial considerations played a far greater role, everything else took a back seat, making it a poor example of good design on many levels.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581157"good design" in isolation from considerations like who actually plays the game is somewhat meaningless.

No, its not, good design is good design. As has already been outlined, the success of a game in terms of sales quite often has little to do with the variables that make a game well designed. If you're aiming for a target market, those are your design goals. If you aren't that doesn't neccessarily mean your game is badly designed.

Quote from: The Traveller;581150No, he's right. That it gave rise to the forge doesn't make him less so, a correct theory can be put to good and bad use. Setting design goals and creating mechanics to emulate those is the right way to do it. I guess where the forge went wrong was when poor old Ron utterly failed to grasp what roleplaying was about and replaced mechanical design goals with his stunted social vision instead.

The major problem is "In a nutshell good  design is when you design for something to happen and it happens the way  you want it to."  Good design is when you make a (flexible) mechanic that increases enjoyment of the game.  If you can't tolerate the idea that people aren't going to play your game exactly they way you intended, perhaps RPG design isn't up your alley (third person 'you', of course).  I don't think Edwards' mis-step is entirely accidental; it seems to be the outcome of that kind of game design.  "Good design is easy to contemplate when your arguments aren't bogged  down by people who don't want the same thing you do" only means you should be writing a game for you and your friends exclusively; that was another modus operandi over at the Forge.  Write for that one tiny audience that has the exact tastes or preferences you do.

And of course...

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581157Design goals are great, but they do need to account for what the customers want. 4E met most of its design goals, but in doing so drove away a number of existing D&D players. You also have to account for why things that appear to detract from the "goal" of a game like D&D are deemed essential or fun by many players. For a game like D&D narrow design goals are a bad idea. For a game like "Draco-Warriors: The Optimized Weeabo Heartbreaker" you narrow design is okay because you are appealing to a specific demographic of the gaming community. "good design" in isolation from considerations like who actually plays the game is somewhat meaningless.

I fully agree, design goals should be the first step.  It should be "What do I want this game to do?", not "What mechanics will enforce my exact vision of how to play?".  Specific elements will follow from that overall design.  

"I want to emulate a low magic, semi-mythical fantasy world where humanoids are abundant, but true monsters are rare and powerful" naturally implies "No fireballs" (or whatever else).  Magic would be difficult to learn, and even harder to use.  High skill costs or xp/level for magic use, and high chances of disastrous miscasting.  Even divine magic would be unreliable, as the gods have abandoned the world to its fate millennia past.  All that flows from the low magic setting without having to address the crimes of previous shitty GMs in the rules.

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.)

Quote from: The Traveller;581059Surely that would be a mechanic too?

Nope. A mechanic is something you, the player, physically do: roll dice, add, subtract, push tokens around. A structural rule is something that governs how the fictional world works: who can use this or that tool, which spells affect this or that target.

There can be hybrid rules, like "a magic-user can prepare and cast a number of spells per day of each level, as listed on this table." This tells us that magic-users are able to cast spells, but it also tells us to keep track of spells cast as a resource.

Quote from: StormBringer;581162The major problem is "In a nutshell good  design is when you design for something to happen and it happens the way  you want it to."  Good design is when you make a (flexible) mechanic that increases enjoyment of the game.  If you can't tolerate the idea that people aren't going to play your game exactly they way you intended, perhaps RPG design isn't up your alley (third person 'you', of course).  I don't think Edwards' mis-step is entirely accidental; it seems to be the outcome of that kind of game design.  "Good design is easy to contemplate when your arguments aren't bogged  down by people who don't want the same thing you do" only means you should be writing a game for you and your friends exclusively; that was another modus operandi over at the Forge.  Write for that one tiny audience that has the exact tastes or preferences you do.

Again, this is a forge problem, not a theory problem. It was not possible for Ron to leap out of the fireplace like some ghastly slobbering father christmas to impose his will on any table, let alone every table. Call it a delusion if you will, but pointing to them is like pointing to Hiroshima and saying nuclear power is bad.

Mind you I agree that echo chambers are stupid, one of the reasons I like this place. My reading of the comment is that one should pursue one's own vision rather than try to pander to everyone's desires, which is the best way to avoid design by committee.

Quote from: StormBringer;581162I fully agree, design goals should be the first step.  It should be "What do I want this game to do?", not "What mechanics will enforce my exact vision of how to play?".  Specific elements will follow from that overall design.

The bone of contention here seems to be "enforce my exact vision". I agree with what you're saying, but I guess its up to MGuy to clarify what he means really.

Quote from: talysman;581163Nope. A mechanic is something you, the player, physically do: roll dice, add, subtract, push tokens around. A structural rule is something that governs how the fictional world works: who can use this or that tool, which spells affect this or that target.

There can be hybrid rules, like "a magic-user can prepare and cast a number of spells per day of each level, as listed on this table." This tells us that magic-users are able to cast spells, but it also tells us to keep track of spells cast as a resource.

Hrm. To me a mechanic is anything that defines or delineates what a player can or cannot do in a game world with their character. So saying "only magic users can use magic" is structural right up until you write it down as a solid rule, then it becomes a mechanic. Differing definitions I suppose.

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.

Perhaps it's just that "mechanically sound", "balance", and making less work for a DM aren't the things that define good RPG game design or an enjoyable game experience.

Quote from: The Traveller;581164Again, this is a forge problem, not a theory problem. It was not possible for Ron to leap out of the fireplace like some ghastly slobbering father christmas to impose his will on any table, let alone every table. Call it a delusion if you will, but pointing to them is like pointing to Hiroshima and saying nuclear power is bad.

Certainly.  I don't think game design/theory is a problem in and of itself.  Fairly often it takes the Forge path, however, because individual designers think they know how the game should be played and design for that.  The designer can't show up at your table, it's true, but heavy-handed design principles to insure no one can play it wrong can have much the same feel.

QuoteMind you I agree that echo chambers are stupid, one of the reasons I like this place. My reading of the comment is that one should pursue one's own vision rather than try to pander to everyone's desires, which is the best way to avoid design by committee.

Keep the vision foremost, but be ready to make some changes for your audience.  There are extreme examples of single vision and design by committee that serve as cautionary tales against too much adherence to one or the other.

QuoteThe bone of contention here seems to be "enforce my exact vision". I agree with what you're saying, but I guess its up to MGuy to clarify what he means really.

I use it as a broad example, so if MGuy meant something different, I withdraw my comments towards him specifically.  The sentiment is still more common than not, I think.

Quote from: StormBringer;581170The designer can't show up at your table, it's true, but heavy-handed design principles to insure no one can play it wrong can have much the same feel.

Why would anyone waste their time playing something they didn't enjoy, though? Even then designers can be as heavy handed as they want, and nothing will stop houseruling from taking place. I regularly strip out the rules of games and replace them with my own, I've some fairly serious Fading Suns surgery sitting on my hard drive, love that setting, can't deal with the rules. Or more likely the game will join the very tall stack of forgotten RPGs.

Quote from: StormBringer;581170Keep the vision foremost, but be ready to make some changes for your audience.

If you want to make sales a design goal, then yes, but not having sales as a design goal doesn't automatically imply bad design. It just means different aims. The guy that did Phoenix command didn't have playability as one of his goals, but from what I can tell, he achieved what he set out to. Its a different story when someone is ignorant of this and expects the whole world to fall in line with their vision of course, then you run into forgeism.

Quote from: The Traveller;581160No, its not, good design is good design. As has already been outlined, the success of a game in terms of sales quite often has little to do with the variables that make a game well designed. If you're aiming for a target market, those are your design goals. If you aren't that doesn't neccessarily mean your game is badly designed.

my point is if you are trying to build a game with broad appeal like D&D, then a narrow design goal is bad design (even if it is "good design" in isolation) because one of the key goals of such a game is broad appeal. I have nothing against theory or design goals (i have my own set of design principes i abide by in fact). But the danger of it is you can forget what you are making the game for in the first place: for peope to play it. So i think considering your target audience is always part of good design (even if the target audience is just you and your buddy steve). If there is a disconnect between your deign goal and the needs of your target audience, you have a potential problem (which is I think the big lesson of 4E: solid design goals, solidly executed, but not aligned with the needs or desires of their existing target audience).

I think what I am getting at is there are mechanical design goals (i.e. I want to make a game that offers up super fast, super deadly combats) and considerations about who will be playing the game in the first place. You have to weigh both because as you playtest, the two sometimes come into conflict and it is important to know why. For example I may make a game that is deadly and fast, but somethilng about my deadly and fast mechanic keeps irking the people who otherwise enjoy my game. Te mechanic itself is siund in principle and meets the stated design goal of being deadly and fast, there is just some other expectation among my deadly and fast audience that i am missing. Good design doesnt matter until it hits the road. It can be good design all day long in the workshop but if te people you want to play it, dont like it, there is a problem....and the fix may even be to add mechanics that go against your stated design goal because it turns out people find it more fun.

I will take a game that is fun to play any day over one that looks better on paper but doesn't excite me at the table. I think sometimes too much investment in some vague notion of "good design" can lead to the later. Good design exists, just not in a vacuum.

Quote from: The Traveller;581173Why would anyone waste their time playing something they didn't enjoy, though? Even then designers can be as heavy handed as they want, and nothing will stop houseruling from taking place. I regularly strip out the rules of games and replace them with my own, I've some fairly serious Fading Suns surgery sitting on my hard drive, love that setting, can't deal with the rules. Or more likely the game will join the very tall stack of forgotten RPGs.

Agreed on Fading Suns.  Awesome material, terrible rules.  :)

But the point of "...for something to happen and it happens the way  you want it to" is that the designer is going to have the perfect set of rules, and no one will need (want? dare?) to change anything about them.  If something needs to be changed, they have failed as a designer.  Obviously, that is pure nonsense, but that is where this comes from.  It goes back to what I said in another thread:  there has been a trend for a number of years to consider RPGs as games first and foremost, and games have rules which can be 'improved' or 'perfected'.  Of course people will houserule, no reasonable gamer expects a set of rules to be complete and infallible.  But for that kind of designer, it's a gallstone in the mind, a constant reminder that their rules weren't 'perfect'.

QuoteIf you want to make sales a design goal, then yes, but not having sales as a design goal doesn't automatically imply bad design. It just means different aims. The guy that did Phoenix command didn't have playability as one of his goals, but from what I can tell, he achieved what he set out to. Its a different story when someone is ignorant of this and expects the whole world to fall in line with their vision of course, then you run into forgeism.

I don't think 'sales' so much, just 'distribution'.  It's great if you want to make a set of rules for just your group and want to talk about it on the interwebz.  But if you want anyone outside that group to play it, then you really have to account for people with different tastes.  If you have an enthusiastic audience built up from playtests, beta documents, and word of mouth over your skill based game and how it implements various abilities, it's a bad time to have a 'vision change' and go to class/level. Or change the skill system from 10 ranks to 100 ranks.  Or whatever.

For instance, Lord Vreeg can do pretty much anything he wants with Celtricia, he already knows the group that will be playing it.  If he wants to expand beyond that group, I would assume he is savvy enough to understand there will be some changes that need to be made.  Even something simple, like making sure there are not unspoken assumptions in the rules descriptions.  All the way up to the more complex stuff, like 'no one wants to do integral calculus for hit determinations' (not actually part of Celtricia).

So, there is 'vision' and there is 'target fixation'.  Knowing the difference is not an easy task, and there are no bright lines to divide those, either.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581157Design goals are great, but they do need to account for what the customers want.

No Brendan bad. You're straying away from the point here. You're a designer (doesn't matter what you design) you have a goal (doesn't matter what that goal is) if your design helps you reach that goal your design was good. If what you did failed to reach the desired goal then it is bad. As far as RPGs it doesn't matter whether people "liked" it but rather if it produces the results you want in practice and avoids producing results you don't want.

Quote from: talysman;581163Nope. A mechanic is something you, the player, physically do: roll dice, add, subtract, push tokens around. A structural rule is something that governs how the fictional world works: who can use this or that tool, which spells affect this or that target.

If you redefine mechanic and "structural rule" as these things then game designers don't make mechanics they make"structural rules" because the game designer is never going to be the one doing your math, rolling your dice, or pushing your tokens around.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581167Perhaps it's just that "mechanically sound", "balance", and making less work for a DM aren't the things that define good RPG game design or an enjoyable game experience.

I think people are relating "good game design" to "enjoyable game experience". The first doesn't necessarily lead to the second nor does the latter necessarily suggest that the former is true.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581177I will take a game that is fun to play any day over one that looks better on paper but doesn't excite me at the table. I think sometimes too much investment in some vague notion of "good design" can lead to the later. Good design exists, just not in a vacuum.

The thing about design is you can have design goals all over the place. If I have a design goal that is "Appeal to people X" if I fail to do that then I need to redo my design because I've done it badly. "Good Design" doesn't necessarily lead to everybody having a good time it means you've designed something that reaches your target design goals. Worrying about reaching a broad audience is a design goal (a broad one) and it doesn't get you far because you need to ask yourself then "what kind of audience do you want to appeal to?" and then "what does that audience want?".

This is an interesting thread indeed ....
It has resulted in some thoughts for me:

Have i made my own games too simple, and for nothing, even?
No, since i have strived to make the games i wanted to play myself, with the simple but good rules i would have preferred when i used to buy several rpgs ...

But, what is the topic here, really?
It so often seem to refer to D&D, but i have yet to see comparisons between editions of Shadowrun or any of the Vampire variants.

The question is "Does good game design really matter?", but the answer to that seems to already have been given, as in "No" or rather "Far from as much as the game designers seem to think.".
But, looking closer, this seem to apply to D&D, that has a history to rely on, rather than skill, but how is it with other games that doesn't have as much history, not to mention any new rpgs?
You'd better look at those games too, and not just stare yourself blind on D&D, if you truly want the answer to that question.

Setting trumps system...but it helps to have a good system.

When I look at the success of Vampire, Shadowrun or Deadlands, I am seeing really engaging settings with functional systems (some with barely functional sub-systems), but players and GMs are so engaged with the world and characters that system issues are secondary.

But many people love GURPS and HERO which have no setting, so who knows?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581177(which is I think the big lesson of 4E: solid design goals, solidly executed, but not aligned with the needs or desires of their existing target audience).

Yes, but that just means they omitted to design towards one of their more important goals, incidentally one of the commonly accepted basic goals, which in this case was sales. I see what you're saying though, a part of the process is to refine your design with advice from others. I'm not really talking about some lone gunman designer labouring in secret in his hermitage-basement until the day he emerges moses-like with the system to end all systems.

We're splitting a fine line in definitions here, between desired sales and appealing to a niche, I guess by their nature these games have to appeal to at least two other people, but these are different yet related goals.

Quote from: StormBringer;581188But the point of "...for something to happen and it happens the way  you want it to" is that the designer is going to have the perfect set of rules, and no one will need (want? dare?) to change anything about them.  If something needs to be changed, they have failed as a designer.  

Thats just onetruewayism though, the forge is indeed an excellent example of that.

On the other hand take for example the guy that did Phoenix Command. That isn't playable for me, its not even slightly fun. But I recognise it as a monumental design effort towards a vision which reached its goals, and I respect it, even admire it, for what it is. Its not sloppy, he put his best into it and it shows.

Now he had to know he was playing to a pretty small niche here, and isn't deluded about the fact since he isn't storming up and down the internet trying to denigrate other games in the name of his masterpiece. This would be an admittedly extreme example of good design that didn't trip over the problem you outline. These are seperate phenomena.

Quote from: MGuy;581204I think people are relating "good game design" to "enjoyable game experience". The first doesn't necessarily lead to the second nor does the latter necessarily suggest that the former is true.

I agree with this, but keep in mind that for some a game is impossible to categorise as well designed unless its an enjoyable playing experience. Which is itself a bit silly, I mean what's the cutoff point? Half the market enjoys it so its good design? A sixth of the market? A hundred people? Ten people? Whats enjoyable for some might be miserable for others. As such its too arbitrary to be a useful yardstick, which is why I'd downplay it in terms of defining good design.

Set your design goals, try to achieve those goals, if lots of people like it great. If not it doesn't mean the design was bad, unless you're specifically aiming for mass appeal with your design.

Quote from: Spinachcat;581238Setting trumps system...but it helps to have a good system.

When I look at the success of Vampire, Shadowrun or Deadlands, I am seeing really engaging settings with functional systems (some with barely functional sub-systems), but players and GMs are so engaged with the world and characters that system issues are secondary.

But many people love GURPS and HERO which have no setting, so who knows?

I think GURPS and HERO has "Setting trups System", too.
See, GURPS = You make your own setting, or use any setting you like, remember that GURPS has a multitude of supplements, as well.
... And isn't HERO supposed to emulate Superheroes and different Action-series and -movies?
Everyone into those genres knows what setting is intended if one say, for instance "Batman" or "X-Men", or similar.

Quote from: The Traveller;581245Thats just onetruewayism though, the forge is indeed an excellent example of that.

On the other hand take for example the guy that did Phoenix Command. That isn't playable for me, its not even slightly fun. But I recognise it as a monumental design effort towards a vision which reached its goals, and I respect it, even admire it, for what it is. Its not sloppy, he put his best into it and it shows.

Now he had to know he was playing to a pretty small niche here, and isn't deluded about the fact since he isn't storming up and down the internet trying to denigrate other games in the name of his masterpiece. This would be an admittedly extreme example of good design that didn't trip over the problem you outline. These are seperate phenomena.
////////////////
Set your design goals, try to achieve those goals, if lots of people like it great. If not it doesn't mean the design was bad, unless you're specifically aiming for mass appeal with your design.

For not seeming to like The Forge, you sure do seem to use similar language, not to mentioning getting a bit caught up in theory.
Ok, to you, you are just responding to someone else, but still.

I do agree with most of what you are saying, but it is ... (now i will obviously disprove my own point) ... hard to see why there would be a reason for a system that only attracts a very few ... but if that is the case, one could ask if there is any point with rpgs at all ...? (finished disproving my own point, will now make another.)
So, it seems i agree with you fully on that point as well, since i like rpgs, and that is reason enough for me.

However, during the time i was on The Forge, i only saw a few who were clearly into "onetruewayism" (and i myself was one of them), though, since there were several who pointed out other ways that might work as well, for one reason or another.
I like to think i learned at least a little humility there.
(I still think my system is the best when it comes to multi-genre and ease of play, though ;)  )

Quote from: The Traveller;581245On the other hand take for example the guy that did Phoenix Command. That isn't playable for me, its not even slightly fun. But I recognise it as a monumental design effort towards a vision which reached its goals, and I respect it, even admire it, for what it is. Its not sloppy, he put his best into it and it shows.

Now he had to know he was playing to a pretty small niche here, and isn't deluded about the fact since he isn't storming up and down the internet trying to denigrate other games in the name of his masterpiece. This would be an admittedly extreme example of good design that didn't trip over the problem you outline. These are seperate phenomena.

Minor point of detail on the PCCS:  When Barry Nakazono and David McKenzie created the system, they were working on making a computer based simulation game using US Government software that was designed to simulate the effects of damage to the human body.  They WERE engineers (Barry N is working for NASA's satellite program now) and the game was targeted at the simulation crowd, in fact, it's not really an RPG at its core, it's a tabletop minis game (which makes it even worse for how clunky it can be).  

They did a lot of successful marketing of it though, which is why they picked up licenses for Aliens, Lawnmower Man, Dracula, and (although they never published it) Predator 2.  However, in the early 90's the production companies weren't getting enough revenue out of the games and yanked their licenses, which tanked the company.  The reason the game system wasn't perpetuated was because there's some question as to who actually owns the rights (LEG ceased to be a company and the rights to the system reverted to the co-authors and somehow were also claimed by the movie company.  It's muddy) to the system.

I think that the amount of effort that they put into the movie licensing shows that they were trying to make a game that would hit a mass-market appeal, as opposed to just a small niche.  It failed, but that was likely due to having engineers working on the game system; they just didn't make it fully accessible enough for people who don't want to spend time using lookup charts for everything.

Quote from: MGuy;581204The thing about design is you can have design goals all over the place. If I have a design goal that is "Appeal to people X" if I fail to do that then I need to redo my design because I've done it badly. "Good Design" doesn't necessarily lead to everybody having a good time it means you've designed something that reaches your target design goals. Worrying about reaching a broad audience is a design goal (a broad one) and it doesn't get you far because you need to ask yourself then "what kind of audience do you want to appeal to?" and then "what does that audience want?".

You always have a target audience. If you don't, then why on earth are you designing a game? It may just be your own campaign group, but it is still a target audience. My point is your mechanical design goals can come into conflict with the feedback and wants of your target audience. When that happens, no matter how beautiful you feel your perfect mechanics are, good design re-evaulates. Sometimes this leads to mechanics that strain against your initial design goal (maybe you wanted gritty, but your hp system is too gritty for most people, even if they like gritty games).

Broad appeal is a legitimate design goal, but also one of the hardest. I dont make games like that, but D&D is such a game. When you appeal to a broad audience i think the last thing you want is hyper focused design (i.e. This game is going to be super realistic, or this game is going to be all about weeabo dragonborne, this game is going to have perfect class parity across the board, etc). It is like anything else, if you are writing for a broad audience for exampe you don't litter your writing with obscure references write in a style that might appeals to the new yorker crowd but not others. Knowing your audience is an important part of good writing, and it is an important part of good design.

Quote from: Catelf;581256For not seeming to like The Forge, you sure do seem to use similar language, not to mentioning getting a bit caught up in theory.

I've no experience with the forge, except for witnessing the damage they've caused. ;)

Quote from: Panzerkraken;581257I think that the amount of effort that they put into the movie licensing shows that they were trying to make a game that would hit a mass-market appeal, as opposed to just a small niche.  It failed, but that was likely due to having engineers working on the game system; they just didn't make it fully accessible enough for people who don't want to spend time using lookup charts for everything.

Well, clearly one of their design goals wasn't accessability. They tried to shoehorn mass market appeal in by acquiring popular licences, but it didn't work because it wasn't designed with that in mind, as you said. I just look at the rules and what they are trying to achieve rather than the real world history of the game.

If they were in fact trying to design it with mass appeal in mind, I'd have to mentally demote the game as far as good design goes.

"Good" is a very vague term. I think MGuy is technically correct -a system is a well-designed one if it does what its designer intended. Condemning a game thats perfect for a particular playing style that is, however, not your style is kind of being a jerk - not that I haven't done this at times (*cough* any 4E discussion I was involved in, for the first year or so after I joined).
 
Quite often, you don't always know what the designer intended exactly and can only assess something from your POV as to what's good/what's bad, of course. Occasionally the design goals themselves make no sense - Forge GNS theory may classify gamers as G, N or S and suggest a good game is one that strongly serves a particular paradigm, whereas most gamers muddle along in the middle somewhere.
 
Most of the time when people talk about "good" design however, they're not so much talking about reaching goals, as much as they're talking about implementation of the various current trends in best practice. Game balance, universal core mechanics, comprehensive character-building and to an extent tight rules for every situation seem to be the current trends, just as hyper-realism was the thing back in the 80s and story/personality focus was in around the 90s.
 
On D&D specifically: AD&D is a crazy hodge-podge of subsystems, but the system has been tinkered with over the years to function OK, whereas 3E and 4E look better engineered but were both total redesigns which meant new problems. 3E which on the surface looking prettier inherited now-useless chunks (e.g. ability scores as distinct from modifiers), failed to duplicate functions exactly due to streamlining (a universal mechanic giving too much bonus to HP, and not enough bonus to Open Doors; fighters getting one good save instead of five), added bits without realizing the full extent of what they were doing (Feats, Prestige Classes, monster ability scores, skills), or replaced a system that looked like it didn't work with a completely different system that really didn't work (multiclassing, ability boosting items), and nerfed a bunch of things that were problems in the older system that now weren't any more anyway (Weapon Specialization, elves, two-weapon fighting).

Quote from: Melan;580954Who 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 (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15126/roleplaying-games/game-structures) (or blueprints (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=7027&page=2)), 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.

Game structures and the like I consider mechanical. They're poorly understood mechanics, but still mechanics.

Not all mechanical discussion or tinkering revolves around balance. It'll be easy to forget that in light of recent discussion, but ease of use, new interesting decisions, and a higher number of possible outcomes all become goals for some new mechanics.

QuoteI 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.

On a session by session basis I think GM prep has a huge impact. But I'd hardly call the discussion on adventure design a quiet one. Especially here.

QuoteNaturally, 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.

As I said elsewhere, I see character building and open ended adventures as peanut butter and jelly. It's great to be able to both select the abilities that are useful in this campaign and select the challenges you feel you can handle.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581157Design goals are great, but they do need to account for what the customers want. 4E met most of its design goals, but in doing so drove away a number of existing D&D players. You also have to account for why things that appear to detract from the "goal" of a game like D&D are deemed essential or fun by many players. For a game like D&D narrow design goals are a bad idea. For a game like "Draco-Warriors: The Optimized Weeabo Heartbreaker" you narrow design is okay because you are appealing to a specific demographic of the gaming community. "good design" in isolation from considerations like who actually plays the game is somewhat meaningless.

Nobody said that no matter what your goals are, people will like a game if you've accomplished them. If I set out to make an unpleasant game and succeed, I may have designed well but set my goal poorly.

Quote from: StormBringer;581162The major problem is "In a nutshell good  design is when you design for something to happen and it happens the way  you want it to."  Good design is when you make a (flexible) mechanic that increases enjoyment of the game.  If you can't tolerate the idea that people aren't going to play your game exactly they way you intended, perhaps RPG design isn't up your alley (third person 'you', of course).  I don't think Edwards' mis-step is entirely accidental; it seems to be the outcome of that kind of game design.  "Good design is easy to contemplate when your arguments aren't bogged  down by people who don't want the same thing you do" only means you should be writing a game for you and your friends exclusively; that was another modus operandi over at the Forge.  Write for that one tiny audience that has the exact tastes or preferences you do.

Flexibility is a common deign goal, but if you're talking approach to the rules or likelihood of house-ruling, I half wonder if that isn't more of a formatting and advice thing anyway.

Quote from: beejazz;581263Nobody said that no matter what your goals are, people will like a game if you've accomplished them. If I set out to make an unpleasant game and succeed, I may have designed well but set my goal poorly.
y.

This is the problem with having "did the designer meet his design goals" as the only measure of good design. Setting and meeting design goals is very important, but designers ought to account for their target audience. good design isn't just about meeting design goals. Games are judged good or bad by the people who play them. Same as anything else. One can make a "designers game" meant to appeal to designers with particular principles or sensibilities in mind, but in that case you are still considering a target audience.

Good design=design goals achieved, ignores the fact that these games are meant to be played. It is only part of the equation.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581268This is the problem with having "did the designer meet his design goals" as the only measure of good design. Setting and meeting design goals is very important, but designers ought to account for their target audience.

That just means pleasing the audience is one of your criteria for good design. I don't agree as far as my own personal definition goes; where does that leave cutting edge design, new concepts, and so on that might not yet have an audience? Less so for mechanics since most of the possible broad strokes have been covered already, but certainly in terms of art, fluff, and premise, which have an infinite variety of options, and which are an intrinsic part of design.

Quote from: The Traveller;581277That just means pleasing the audience is one of your criteria for good design. I don't agree as far as my own personal definition goes; where does that leave cutting edge design, new concepts, and so on that might not yet have an audience? Less so for mechanics since most of the possible broad strokes have been covered already, but certainly in terms of art, fluff, and premise, which have an infinite variety of options, and which are an intrinsic part of design.

Cutting edge has an audience. There are gamers out there who look for innovative and new designs. Presumably though when you innovate it is to create something that will enhance gameplay for people. Innovation is part of the design process, it isnt the sole purpose of design though.

All i am saying is while meeting design goals is important it isnt the final measure of good design. The design goals themselves matter and it also matters if the game resonates with an audience. The point of games is to be played, a measure of design that doesn't consider that is problematic i think.

Just to throw my $0.02 in again.

I do software testing in real life.  Every day I run into examples where something was designed and/or coded based on the requirements (goal), yet still is a bad design.

For example, the line of business may set out a list of goals of what they want the software to do and what functionality it has.  The developers take those requirements and design the changes/adds around them.  Technically, it was designed exactly to the goal's specifications.  However, once you're in practical application (my job) pretty much always there are issues.  Either user functionality has been adversely affected in a way that's unacceptable, other things may have been broken or adversely affected because one requirement might not align with a pre-existing functionality, or the design may be completely inefficient and a more streamlined change needs to be made to coding,  etc.

It's dangerous thinking to assume that if you met your requirements, it's a good design.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581288Just to throw my $0.02 in again.

I do software testing in real life.  Every day I run into examples where something was designed and/or coded based on the requirements (goal), yet still is a bad design.

For example, the line of business may set out a list of goals of what they want the software to do and what functionality it has.  The developers take those requirements and design the changes/adds around them.  Technically, it was designed exactly to the goal's specifications.  However, once you're in practical application (my job) pretty much always there are issues.  Either user functionality has been adversely affected in a way that's unacceptable, other things may have been broken or adversely affected because one requirement might not align with a pre-existing functionality, or the design may be completely inefficient and a more streamlined change needs to be made to coding,  etc.

It's dangerous thinking to assume that if you met your requirements, it's a good design.

It is interesting to see how peoples' backgrounds shape their attitudes to design. Sacrosanct, how technical is the software testing you do ? (do simply use tge software as a regular user would or do you get into stuff like coding). I am curious if you have found the techniques/procedures you use to test software helpful when testing RPGs or boardgames.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581289It is interesting to see how peoples' backgrounds shape their attitudes to design. Sacrosanct, how technical is the software testing you do ? (do simply use tge software as a regular user would or do you get into stuff like coding). I am curious if you have found the techniques/procedures you use to test software helpful when testing RPGs or boardgames.

I do a little of both.  I don't actually do any of the coding, but I need to know how the coding works because when I'm in there as a user, from a user's perspective and something isn't working, I need to troubleshoot.

One thing about working in a job like I do is that I have to be bilingual.  What I mean by that is I have to be able to speak the language that the business users and managers use, and translate that into the language developers (code monkeys) use and vice versa.  I.e., when a developer starts doing SQL speak, I have to tell the business what that means in the context of how it will affect their user experience.

I also need to know how the users actually use the software.  If I just tested out the code the way it was designed, I'd miss a ton of potential problems.  Actually, most of my testing each release isn't around the actual changes, but around all the other functionality in regression testing to make sure something else wasn't broken.  Essentially my job is to try to break it, and predict all the different ways a user might do something.

The similarities to rpg testing are really only there for mechanics, and not for rpg design around things like setting, layout, art direction, etc.  When you build a set of mechanics, like character classes and skills, it would be very much in alignment with my real job to test out every single variation.  And just like my real job, occasionally you'll have a broken or unbalanced risk factor that might have to go through to production anyway if after doing risk assessment you figure that the % of that occurrence happening weighted against just how broken it is weighted against how much time and effort is needed to redo everything.

I'm going through this right now with my playtest/design packet on weapon creation for my Bleeding Sky RPG.  My charts might not allow you to completely replicate a certain weapon, but if that weapon is pretty rare and if including it meant I have to redo the system all over again when it works for 95% of weapons, is it really worth it?

Anyway, my point is that having something designed the way you wanted it designed doesn't mean it was designed well.  Sometimes, yes.  But it's a false sense of security.  It's not designed well until your target audience says it's designed well and it holds up under practical application, regardless if it hit the designers goals or not.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581268This is the problem with having "did the designer meet his design goals" as the only measure of good design. Setting and meeting design goals is very important, but designers ought to account for their target audience.

Brendan, if your design goal is "appeal to an audience" and you fail to do that then your design is bad. If your goal isn't necessarily to appeal to an audience then it doesn't matter whether people liked it. It is true that big name designers ought to appeal to an audience because they want to move product, but seriously your target audience can be as small as one person. When you hear someone state that they want to appeal to an audience the first thing they start to do after saying that is telling you about their intended goals that will help them reach that.

Example: In 4E they said they wanted to do away with clunky combat and stated that they streamlined everything from character to monster generation. However they failed to make combat less clunky because of the proliferation of interrupts, ongoing abilities that end at different parts of the turn, padded sumo, monsters having unique and many times odd abilities, etc etc. So while their goal is something that would appeal to many audiences they failed to deliver because their designs failed to do what they intended it to do.

I dont think 4Es failure was a failure to meet design goals, it was a failure to understand what their audience wanted. If clunky combat was 4Es only issue it wouldn't have split the base the way it did.

Like I said Mguy, you always have a target audience (even if it is one or two people). I dont see why a designer simply meeting his design goals should be what defines good design. You have to include tge judgment of its intended audience. You also have to consider the merit of the design goals themselves. I can decide to make a car that looks like a triangle, has a safe max speed of 20 miles an hour and flashes green lights. That doesn't make it a well designed vehicle (even though my design goals were met). I can say it is safe, but it totally misses the point of what the 'safe car' customer wants. Cars are meant to driven, games are meant to be played. How people judge their performance matters. That is why its critical to know your audience.

"Good game design" evidently means different things to different people.

When I read this thread and see definitions of "good game design" that amount to a strict design of the game's mechanical bits, and that I further read some thoughts that divorce the concept of "good game design" from the primary goal of a game, which is to provide a consistent entertainment value, or "fun", to the people that play it, I think to myself I have landed on the planet Mars, or some alternate dimension somewhere where words don't mean what they're supposed to mean anymore.

Good game design is about designing a game, i.e. creating some material, packaging it, laying out, shaping it into a desired form that enhances its characteristics, etc, in order to be played by some people who buy the game, and enjoy it at the end of the day.

So you set yourself a set of goals, in terms of what the shape of the game is, what the rules are, how they are explained and presented, what you keep in, and leave out, what is up to player agency, and what isn't, keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is to see this material played by a variety of people, or a specific subset of these people/customers, and package that experience accordingly.

In other words, it's not just about rules and mechanical this and that. Designing a game is about designing a play experience, which includes a lot of different dimensions in which the actual text of the rules play a part, certainly, but only a part. Things like the language being used, the art and tone thereof, the feel of the page or the covers of a book, whether you make it a book or a boxed set, whether you decide to add a board to your game or not, some cheat sheets or not, some dice or not, what components you'd include in that boxed set, how they would be used by your prospective players, etc... all these things are "game design" to me.

So "good game design" consists in creating a game where all the components thoroughly thought out play together to create a consistently fun experience for the people that use it. That's it.

Any talk of "good game design may lead to crappy play experiences because that's not the point of game design" is frankly mind boggling to me. It's a testimony to how far the twisting of words and theoretical wanking can go into la la land, as far as I'm concerned.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581294I dont think 4Es failure was a failure to meet design goals, it was a failure to understand what their audience wanted. If clunky combat was 4Es only issue it wouldn't have split the base the way it did.

Like I said Mguy, you always have a target audience (even if it is one or two people). I dont see why a designer simply meeting his design goals should be what defines good design. You have to include tge judgment of its intended audience. You also have to consider the merit of the design goals themselves. I can decide to make a car that looks like a triangle, has a safe max speed of 20 miles an hour and flashes green lights. That doesn't make it a well designed vehicle (even though my design goals were met). I can say it is safe, but it totally misses the point of what the 'safe car' customer wants. Cars are meant to driven, games are meant to be played. How people judge their performance matters. That is why its critical to know your audience.

Brendan, just because 4E has more design issues than one doesn't draw away from my point. You don't "have" to do anything for any particular audience. I could write a game just for myself. Whether other people like it or not is incidental to whether or not the design was well done. If your design goals on your triangle car were met and it works then you did well with your design. It doesn't matter whether other people liked it or not if impressing other people was not your design goal. You are now equating good design as having one design goal. This is not the case as you can aim your designs to do multiple things at once. That much should go without saying but I will elaborate. When you design a car you have more design goals than "make it safe". Compatibility, convenience, aesthetics, etc are all part of designing when it comes to motor vehicles. The fact that you successfully met "one" design goal doesn't mean that you met "all" design goals. However if you have a single design goal and you effectively meet it then your design was fine for that goal. The fact that your design doesn't meet other goals is fine if you don't care about those design goals. If I made a cyberpunk game it doesn't matter if it doesn't do well for high fantasy, modern, etc games because that's not what I was trying to design

I couldn't disagree with you more Mguy.

Quote from: MGuy;581311Brendan, just because 4E has more design issues than one doesn't draw away from my point.

You are missing the point about 4e, they met their deign goals. They were tring to make a balanced game where the different classes contribute and everybody had something cool to do in any combat. It was a response to the perceieved excesse sof 3E. I think ot is fair to say they met most, if not all, of their design goals for the product. They just didn't realize their design goals were not aligned with their audience.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581314You are missing the point about 4e, they met their deign goals. They were tring to make a balanced game where the different classes contribute and everybody had something cool to do in any combat. It was a response to the perceieved excesse sof 3E. I think ot is fair to say they met most, if not all, of their design goals for the product. They just didn't realize their design goals were not aligned with their audience.

Umm no. 4E didn't meet its design goals and you should feel really bad for thinking that it did. I'm willing to bet you can't name 2 design goals they actually met. They failed at, quite possibly, everything they set out to do.

Quote from: MGuy;581311. You are now equating good design as having one design goal. This is not the case as you can aim your designs to do multiple things at once. That much should go without saying but I will elaborate. When you design a car you have more design goals than "make it safe". Compatibility, convenience, aesthetics, etc are all part of designing when it comes to motor vehicles. The fact that you successfully met "one" design goal doesn't mean that you met "all" design goals. However if you have a single design goal and you effectively meet it then your design was fine for that goal. The fact that your design doesn't meet other goals is fine if you don't care about those design goals. If I made a cyberpunk game it doesn't matter if it doesn't do well for high fantasy, modern, etc games because that's not what I was trying to design

I am not equating good design with having a single goal, I am saying the purpose of games is to be played by people, a game whose design does not factor in the needs of its audience is designed badly. That audience could be small. You could be making a game for just your own group for example or a niche market. I am not saying it has to be a smash success or gain a large following. Bt if you make a rules light cyberpunk game, it ought to appeal to a rules light cyberpunk audience (or if you are trying to bring the joys of rules light cyber punk to rules heavy fantasy rpg fans, then you need to consider that audience as well). Any game should have several design goals. And those always need to be tested against your audience.

What you are arguing is like saying a poem or movie is well crafted as long as meets the intentions of the author. In order for a poem or movie to be good, people have to judge it to be good. If I say, I want to sit down and write a 1000 line poem about flowers and butterflies that uses simple language, that doesn't make it a well crafted poem just because I meet those goals. Part of being a good poet is having enough control over your medium that you can achieve what you set out to do, but that isn't all there is to good poetry.

Quote from: MGuy;581315Umm no. 4E didn't meet its design goals and you should feel really bad for thinking that it did. I'm willing to bet you can't name 2 design goals they actually met. They failed at, quite possibly, everything they set out to do.

First off, i am always happy to admit if I am wrong. I dont play 4E (i have played it and read the books but not very much) so it is fair that my analysis of it could be off. However, the idea that I should feel bad for thinking they met their goals, strikes me as bizarre and juvenile.

Second, just because the den has decided 4E didn't meet its goals, doesn't make it so. Even the game's harshest critics tend to agree it met most of its design goals (though I think there is a lot of confusion over what their design goals were and what the marketing was for the product).

They sought to make a balanced system, and I think by any reasonable measure they succeeded. They tried to make it easy to Gm, and everyone I know who GMs it says it is easy to run (The way they set up monsters, while not my cup of tea, is a good format if you want to make the GMing simple). They wanted to incorporate board game and video game design elements and they succeeded.

Also this just another derailment. 4E is just an example for the larger point that audience and play matter.

Quote from: MGuy;581315Umm no. 4E didn't meet its design goals and you should feel really bad for thinking that it did. I'm willing to bet you can't name 2 design goals they actually met. They failed at, quite possibly, everything they set out to do.

Could you elaborate on that? Because I have a lot of friends who play and enjoy 4E. So it obviously works quite well for a specific audience.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581319Could you elaborate on that? Because I have a lot of friends who play and enjoy 4E. So it obviously works quite well for a specific audience.

I believe he is talking about this: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=131706

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581316I am not equating good design with having a single goal, I am saying the purpose of games is to be played by people, a game whose design does not factor in the needs of its audience is designed badly.

What you are arguing is like saying a poem or movie is well crafted as long as meets the intentions of the author.

K you're really missing the point. It doesn't matter what your design goal is. If you are an artist and you're putting your stuff up for other people then one of your design goals will take the audience into consideration. If you are designing a game for other people than part of your design process is going to take into consideration what other people might do/think of it. None of what I said is divorced of other people unless none of your design goals are for other people.

Quote from: MGuy;581321K you're really missing the point. It doesn't matter what your design goal is. If you are an artist and you're putting your stuff up for other people then one of your design goals will take the audience into consideration. If you are designing a game for other people than part of your design process is going to take into consideration what other people might do/think of it. None of what I said is divorced of other people unless none of your design goals are for other people.

No, the issue is whether achieving design goals alone determines good design. You would argue a man who sets out to create an unfun, unplayable game, and does so has achieved good design, because your only metric for good design is whether the designer meets his design goals. I am saying judgment of the audience is more important than whether he met his design goals. Meeting design goals is important, i would argue it isnt. But even more important is knowing your audience and being able to make something they will enjoy. Meeting your design goals doesn't guarantee that. Good design includes setting and meeting design goals, knowing and listening to your audience, incorporating audience feedback into the design, etc. Htink about what you are arguing. You have set up a metric that says the worst game in the world is an example of good design, if the intent of the designer was to make the worst game ever. This shows he has control over his craft. It doesn't mean he executed good design.

Let me rephrase the question: Do good procedures in play really matter?

Yes.

The 'design' only exists to the extent it is implemented in play. Nothing else matters. If the game has 'bad' design you never implement, then it doesn't become a problem. If the game has 'good' design you never implement, then it creates a problem.

An RPG system is nothing more than a list of procedures that if followed lead to a specific kind of experience. And nobody is telling you you HAVE to follow them, but if you don't you're on your own.

Quote from: Spinachcat;581238Setting trumps system

Setting IS System.

Folks, don't put too much stock into the opinions of someone who hasn't designed anything, let alone RPGs.  There's a fundamental lack of understanding on basic design principals going on, and until that gets admitted to (which probably won't), arguing is a moot point.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581320I believe he is talking about this: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=131706

Hmm, the second reply to that post seems to disagree with the premise at length. I personally don't know the game well enough to judge as the intentions of the system don't line up with my style of roleplaying; I played in a Gammaworld game which used the 4e rules and it felt like a boardgame to me, very contrary to immersion. But what I hear from the people I know who do play it (one of my regular players has been DMing a 4e campaign weekly for about 2 years), it does provide a certain experience very well: "balance " between classes, specified roles for each player in a group, combat encounters tailored to a group's level, etc. All of which are anathemic to how I GM or the types of games I like to play/run, but for the audience that does want that...well, it's hard for me to understand how it's "bad design" to provide the exact experience that it promises.


(I tend to put balance in quotations because personally I think it's an illusion)

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581322No, the issue is whether achieving design goals alone determines good design. You would argue a man who sets out to create an unfun, unplayable game, and does so has achieved good design, because your only metric for good design is whether the designer meets his design goals. I am saying judgment of the audience is more important than whether he met his design goals. Meeting design goals is important, i would argue it isnt. But even more important is knowing your audience and being able to make something they will enjoy. Meeting your design goals doesn't guarantee that. Good design includes setting and meeting design goals, knowing and listening to your audience, incorporating audience feedback into the design, etc. Htink about what you are arguing. You have set up a metric that says the worst game in the world is an example of good design, if the intent of the designer was to make the worst game ever. This shows he has control over his craft. It doesn't mean he executed good design.

It doesn't matter if what you designed for someone else doesn't fit for people you didn't design it for. If I make a glove for myself it doesn't matter what other people I did not design the glove for don't think it works well for anybody else because I designed the thing for myself. If it works well for me and no one else then it is well designed (for me) because it does everything I designed it for (to satisfy me). If I want to design something for other people and I fail to design something that works for a good portion of those people than I have failed. If something is the "worst" designed thing in the world then that just means it didn't do what it was supposed to do.

What you're saying seriously doesn't detract from what I've said at all. I am honestly losing what you're even trying to say. You keep saying that somehow someone can design something, have it do exactly what they want it to do, and it is still bad design. I defy you to give me an example of what you're suggesting.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581329Hmm, the second reply to that post seems to disagree with the premise at length. I personally don't know the game well enough to judge as the intentions of the system don't line up with my style of roleplaying; I played in a Gammaworld game which used the 4e rules and it felt like a boardgame to me, very contrary to immersion. But what I hear from the people I know who do play it (one of my regular players has been DMing a 4e campaign weekly for about 2 years), it does provide a certain experience very well: "balance " between classes, specified roles for each player in a group, combat encounters tailored to a group's level, etc. All of which are anathemic to how I GM or the types of games I like to play/run, but for the audience that does want that...well, it's hard for me to understand how it's "bad design" to provide the exact experience that it promises.


(I tend to put balance in quotations because personally I think it's an illusion)

Read the entirety of the thread.

Quote from: MGuy;581331What you're saying seriously doesn't detract from what I've said at all. I am honestly losing what you're even trying to say. You keep saying that somehow someone can design something, have it do exactly what they want it to do, and it is still bad design. I defy you to give me an example of what you're suggesting.

an example would be if someone set out to make the most complex, convoluted, unintelligible game ever. A game that took a month for every round of combat. In fact, one designed to irritate the peple who play. One that simply could not under any circumstances, be any fun for anyone at all, and succeed in that goal, that would be an example of bad design even though it met the intentions of the designer. Under your metric of designer reaching goal = good design, this would be considered good design. The purpose of a game is to be played by people, its purpose isnt to meet design goals (though meeting design goals is an important part of getting there). So the measure of good design is how well the game pleases the people who play it. Even in your own example of the glove, you are acknowledging the need to please an audience (yourself). You might have missed everyone of your design goals, but the glove still ended up fitting perfectly, looking sharp and warding off the cold because you responded appropriately to your own feedback through trial and error. the point is it isnt enough simply to have design goals. The design goals themselves have to align with the audience and your execution must succeed in pleasing them.

Design goals and pleasing an audience are not the same thing. You may factor the audience into your design goals, but sell a million copies to 18-30 year olds isnt a design goal.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581324Folks, don't put too much stock into the opinions of someone who hasn't designed anything, let alone RPGs.  There's a fundamental lack of understanding on basic design principals going on, and until that gets admitted to (which probably won't), arguing is a moot point.

To be fair we are arguing a rather pedantic point at the moment. Mguy isnt discounting the value of designing towa an audience, he is just saying that doesn't have to be in the measure of good design. I am saying there is always an audience and its response is the measure of good design. In practice this disagreement might not produce very different results at the drawing board. I think where his point of view gets problematic is it can become an excuse for discounting audience feedback.

I have now seen the exact same off-topic going on fr several pages now, and neither of the seemingly opposing seems to really wanna budge.
Yes, seemingly.
Instead of trying to see and understand the other's viewpoint, you keep your own stalwart opinion, claiming you read and understand the other, yet you fail so massively.
All you involved (it is more than 2) has good points, but you seem to refuse to recognize or even try to understand what the other one(s) mean.

My opinion on the matter?
"Good Gamedesign" .... Yes, a completely worthless game can have great gamedesign, but it is still worthless!
It reminds me of a child's drawing, or toy, it is utterly worthless to most, and it may even become worthless to the child once it grown up, but to the child, the parents and perhaps even the siblings, it may be invaluable during a very long time.
... Why am i even writing this ....

Quote from: chaosvoyager;581323Setting IS System.

No.
Settings are:
Marvel, DC, Oddworld, World of Darkness(old), CoC, Rift, TORG, Resident Evil, WHFRP, L5R, Aberrant, Shadowrun ..... and all variants loosely based on those, more based on a genre than a distict, specific, world.

Systems are:
D20, BRP, GURPS, WW's Storytelling system(s), Tri-Stat, ... and so on.

//////////////
Now, back on topic?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581336an example would be if someone set out to make the most complex, convoluted, unintelligible game ever. A game that took a month for every round of combat. In fact, one designed to irritate the peple who play. One that simply could not under any circumstances, be any fun for anyone at all, and succeed in that goal, that would be an example of bad design even though it met the intentions of the designer. Under your metric of designer reaching goal = good design, this would be considered good design. The purpose of a game is to be played by people, its purpose isnt to meet design goals (though meeting design goals is an important part of getting there). So the measure of good design is how well the game pleases the people who play it. Even in your own example of the glove, you are acknowledging the need to please an audience (yourself). You might have missed everyone of your design goals, but the glove still ended up fitting perfectly, looking sharp and warding off the cold because you responded appropriately to your own feedback through trial and error. the point is it isnt enough simply to have design goals. The design goals themselves have to align with the audience and your execution must succeed in pleasing them.

Design goals and pleasing an audience are not the same thing. You may factor the audience into your design goals, but sell a million copies to 18-30 year olds isnt a design goal.

If you purposefully want to make a bad game then if you manage to make that bad game (something everyone agrees is really bad) would people not point at it and say that it is a prime (good) example of how to make a bad game?

Quote from: MGuy;581333Read the entirety of the thread.

lol, I'm trying, but without context or any greater experience alot of it sounds like arguments about vcr programming instructions to me. I don't have enough knowledge to discern between opinions, simple clashes in playstyles, or genuine criticism. And even genuine criticism, in regards to crunchier RPG systems, can simply come down to no game is capable of predicting and accounting for every event and its possible to "break" any game system if one doesn't account for DM's ability to use common sense, judgement, and discernment based on individual situations.

Now, one of the main reasons that 4e doesn't appeal to me is because the system doesn't support DM judgement in the same way, say 1e D&D (or WH3E for a more contemporary comparison) does. I assume the intention here was to make the first-time or novice DM's job "easier", though I'm of the perhaps elitist opinion that GM/DMing is a talent and not something everyone is capable of doing equally well. But I can't say I fault a game for catering to a new audience, though I wonder how a person will ever learn to be a good GM if they switch to a system that doesn't have all those crutches.

But I also tend to not go in for the "badwrongfun" opinion on games I don't like and assume that if it's providing a satisfying and fun experience for someone than the game's design is just fine, it just is aimed at a target audience I don't belong to.

So I'm reading this thread, and alot of the nitpicking I'm seeing is either Greek to me (I have no idea wth a "daily" or "at will" is), or is obviously coming from people who have very different expectations from a game than I can empathize with or comprehend (like the debate regarding the respective resale value of magic items in 3.5 vs 4e, which makes it seem to me like I'm reading a thread about World of Warcraft).

Quote from: TristramEvans;581345So I'm reading this thread, and alot of the nitpicking I'm seeing is either Greek to me (I have no idea wth a "daily" or "at will" is), or is obviously coming from people who have very different expectations from a game than I can empathize with or comprehend (like the debate regarding the respective resale value of magic items in 3.5 vs 4e, which makes it seem to me like I'm reading a thread about World of Warcraft).

M'k. Well Brendan touted it as reaching its design goals. Now first I will state that none of what I am about to say is about whether or not you can have "fun" with 4e.

4E promised balanced classes. It doesn't deliver. A number of classes are far and away better than other classes. When 4E first came out I played a paladin and was basically out done in both usefulness and utility by the Ranger, Warden, and Rogue. There have been a bunch of changes to it (going as far as essentials) that have been made so what the current look of the game is is foreign to me but at least at the beginning they failed at what they were supposed to do right out of the gate.

4E promised to have an all inclusive out of combat game that made it so that no one had to sit out of the action when not in combat. 4E failed at several iterations of Skill Challenges. I played through two iterations and both punished the team for having someone who did not spam their highest skill roll for everything. So either you use the fact that skills are fairly open to convince the GM that you can use your high Knowledge: History bonus to allow you to help repair your ship or you only help make the team fail. Again it has been through several iterations so I don't know how the current skill challenges work.

4E promised to make combats less clunky and more interesting. It does not. Combats (when I played again) were long, boring, grindfests. Where they got rid of the fighter saying "I attack it!" every round you instead have "I use [insert At Will Ability]" every round. Certain monsters had mountains of HP and could take upwards of an hour to beat. And that is after it becomes apparent hat it will never be able to kill you and you're just grinding it down until critical existence failure.

4E promised to be the solution to 3e's problems. It didn't "solve" any of 3e's actual problems with the possible exception of reducing a wizard's power level to that of the fighters (though I would contest that most people who played 3rd didn't want to all be fighters).

Lastly a bunch of what 4E did has nothing to do with what actually were problems in 3E and served to make the game like an MMO. Unfortunately you can't do MMO on table top. The math was wrong, people can't process the math that is there as fast and as effortlessly as you play an actual MMO, the GM is not likely to run the game like an MMO would be run (and almost as soon as he doesn't a lot of shit breaks down fast).

Need I go on?

Quote from: MGuy;581343If you purposefully want to make a bad game then if you manage to make that bad game (something everyone agrees is really bad) would people not point at it and say that it is a prime (good) example of how to make a bad game?

You are reaching. Do you really want to assert this would be good design?

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.

First, you seem to be asking two different questions: One about presentation and another one about game design. I'm going to focus on the game design one.

QuoteAnd 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.

You're assuming that "balance" and "work the DM had to do" are the only aspects of game design that players value.

But that's not actually true. Flipping a coin is a perfectly balanced game, but it's not much fun and people don't play it for entertainment.

So if we boil your question down to: "Is balance the most important aspect of roleplaying game design?" I think the answer -- after a brief perusal of the most popular games in the history of the industry -- is pretty self-evidently, "No. It's not."

And that's even before we acknowledge that there are many types of balance (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2500/roleplaying-games/the-many-types-of-balance) and that a lot of theoretical discussions about balance in an RPG are fundamentally bullshit (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2434/roleplaying-games/on-the-importance-of-spherical-cows).

Quote from: Justin Alexander;581355First, you seem to be asking two different questions: One about presentation and another one about game design. I'm going to focus on the game design one.

What?  How a game is laid out and presented in the books is part of game design.

QuoteYou're assuming that "balance" and "work the DM had to do" are the only aspects of game design that players value.

No I'm not.   Those were just examples.  So I'm afraid that the rest of your post is based on a false interpretation you have, and isn't really relevant to my original post.

Being honest the more I think about it the more I see Brendan's point, not about D&D or related crap, but in that each part of the design as outlined on page one can be informed by what you're trying to achieve, which in turn can be informed by who you expect to want to play the game. Not neccessarily, but its something to consider.

However I will add one caveat - by playing to the crowd you risk losing creative options that could have really blown that same crowd away completely, because you're trying to appease rather than extend. New stuff doesn't have an audience, or at minimum has much less of one, as hip and young as our hobby is. Its a multifaceted question with one element feeding into another, but I'd be very wary of sitting down and trying to design something to mainly intended to appeal.

That way lies boilerplate.

A blanket golden rule to consider your audience first is not the way to go.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581357What?  How a game is laid out and presented in the books is part of game design.

In the same way box cover art is a part of videogame design, I guess.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581361In the same way box cover art is a part of videogame design, I guess.

Uh, no.  When you play a video game, you probably never look at the cover again.  When you play an RPG, you're constantly using the book to reference things.  It's part of your actual gaming experience.  How that book is laid out and presented is a pretty important part of design.

It's unfortunate that this needs to be pointed out.

Quote from: The Traveller;581358However I will add one caveat - by playing to the crowd you risk losing creative options that could have really blown that same crowd away completely, because you're trying to appease rather than extend. New stuff doesn't have an audience, or at minimum has much less of one, as hip and young as our hobby is. Its a multifaceted question with one element feeding into another, but I'd be very wary of sitting down and trying to design something to mainly intended to appeal.

 audience first is not the way to go.

But here you are still considering your audience. You just said it yourself, you are creating a clever new mechanic to wow them.  I am not just saying you should ask what your customers want and simply feed it back to them. Sometimes you need to come up with new things you think your audience will react favorably to. To do this you have to understand your audience. You can anticipate what they will find useful or create a solution for a problem they havent verbalized. But you do need to consider the audience as you are building these things. and yes being creative is important.

I've read this thread and I'm going to say something that will probably be unpopular. Good design does not matter to most players because:

First, what makes "good RPG design" is subjective. Yes, there are a number of people and groups who claim to have a (or THE) "theory of good RPG design" and often will loudly proclaim their theory and (sometimes) even denounce games or designs who they don't think are following it. However, these various theories don't seem to agree on much and often seem to just be promoting whatever fads are current in RPG design.

Second, theory is great, but what actually matters to the average GM and player is how much fun they have playing a game, how hard it is to learn/GM, and how much support material is published for the rules. There has been no little or no attempt to prove that closely adhering to a game design theory actually results in games most average players think are better and more fun to play. Despite what many designers think, a game that most people don't play because they find it unfun, too complex/too simple, unsupported, etc. is a bad game no matter how well it adheres to a some design theory.

Quote from: The Traveller;581358.


A blanket golden rule to consider your audience first is not the way to go.

Keep in mind, we are only talking about the measure of good design. We are not listing procedural steps all designers should follow. I think desigers need to begin with what comes most naturally to them. Some might begin by thinking about their audience, some might begin by thinking about what kind of game they want to make, some might begin by thinking up a cool core mechanic. I dont think there is a best way to design. My only point is that i dont think designer meeting design goals automatically equals goid design.

Personally i start by asking myself what i do well and how i can apply that to a concept i want to work on. Then i establish design goals and as it takes shape i consider who this game would appeal to. For me it is very important to get feedback along the way from players who come from my target audience. But it isnt step one.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581362Uh, no.  When you play a video game, you probably never look at the cover again.  When you play an RPG, you're constantly using the book to reference things.  

Hmm, not the games I play. In fact, having to look something up in a book during play is one indicator for me that the game isn't to my taste, like any barrier that rules create between playing a role.

But even taking such into consideration, there's still a marked distinction between a system and the presentation of a system. I suppose they can both be grouped under the title "game design", but I suspect that when most people use the term they are reffering to system design specifically, which is distinct and has nothing to do with the presentation of the rules.

I disagree, for two primary reasons.  One, I've frequently heard complaints of bad game design when the book is laid out horribly.  Secondly, I've never heard of a game designer who didn't consider layout and presentation part of game design.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581364But here you are still considering your audience. You just said it yourself, you are creating a clever new mechanic to wow them.

This is what I meant by it being a complex question, it becomes a chicken and egg situation if you consider it for long enough. Are you creating something new in spite of or because of your audience? How would anyone know one way or the other? Maybe audiences feel they had a role to play in the creation of something new, perhaps the feedback is inspirational, or maybe its the drive to escape the expectations, all of the above can be true and simultaneously as well, this is a bottomless rabbit hole.

I've already laid out what I feel are the basic criteria to consider in good design, I agree that audience requirements can be a factor, but it influences each part of the criteria I mentioned if that is the case, rather than being an independent element in and of itself.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581361In the same way box cover art is a part of videogame design, I guess.

Actually, not at all, because the box the actual CD you put in your computer to play the video game has an infinitesimal impact on the actual experience playing the game on the computer, whereas the way a tabletop role playing game is packaged, layed out, whether the book lies flat on the table or can be annotated or not because the pages are glossy and whatnot, the art it features, including the covers of the books the players will be constantly looking at on the table while playing the game in their imagination, how it is written using what type of language and grammar, bullet points or full sentences, examples or no examples, explicit game structures or not, etc has a TREMENDOUS impact on the way people will react to it, read it, prep the game with it, and actually play it afterwards. These elements of form, ergonomics, impact on the imagination and so on are certainly part of actual game design, or should be, in any case.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581349You are reaching. Do you really want to assert this would be good design?

Not reaching that is just how it is. If your design goal is to make shit then if you accomplish that you did a good job at making shit. I'd say you were reaching considering it is your idea to posit that someone wants to intentionally making shit as the counter to my assertion.

Quote from: The Traveller;581371This is what I meant by it being a complex question, it becomes a chicken and egg situation if you consider it for long enough. Are you creating something new in spite of or because of your audience? How would anyone know one way or the other? Maybe audiences feel they had a role to play in the creation of something new, perhaps the feedback is inspirational, or maybe its the drive to escape the expectations, all of the above can be true and simultaneously as well, this is a bottomless rabbit hole.

I've already laid out what I feel are the basic criteria to consider in good design, I agree that audience requirements can be a factor, but it influences each part of the criteria I mentioned if that is the case, rather than being an independent element in and of itself.

Pretty much this. As I stated earlier "How do I appeal to group X" is too broad to base actual design on so you start there and ask yourself other questions and design your game around that.

There's an easy way to do this.

MGuy, what are you design requirements for a pair of gloves?  It's important to detail all of your goals.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581370I disagree, for two primary reasons.  One, I've frequently heard complaints of bad game design when the book is laid out horribly.  

I've heard complainst of bad game design because people didn't like a certain playable race, or because they thought the author was a tool on some forum, or because the game wasn't some othergame the critic liked. I don't think any of those have to do with the merits of a system, myself.

QuoteSecondly, I've never heard of a game designer who didn  't consider layout and presentation part of game design.

Gary Gygax?

Quote from: MGuy;581375Not reaching that is just how it is. If your design goal is to make shit then if you accomplish that you did a good job at making shit. I'd say you were reaching considering it is your idea to posit that someone wants to intentionally making shit as the counter to my assertion.

If you dont see the problem with this, I really don't know what to say here. You are trying to establish a measure for if something is good design. But you have created one that will evaluate bad design as good.

The question isn't did you do a good job of achieving your design goals but did you execute good design.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581383I've heard complainst of bad game design because people didn't like a certain playable race, or because they thought the author was a tool on some forum, or because the game wasn't some othergame the critic liked. I don't think any of those have to do with the merits of a system, myself.

I've heard plenty of people complain about how spells were organized, or why in the world would you have setting way at the end, or why have races or classes after the equipment section, or the wording and clarity was horrible.  Hell, surely you have been aware of all the complaints people have about how the AD&D1e manuals are laid out.

QuoteGary Gygax?

Did Gary ever say that he didn't consider layout design or graphic design not part of a game's design?

That would seem awfully strange.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581387Did Gary ever say that he didn't consider layout design or graphic design not part of a game's design?

That would seem awfully strange.

That would seem to be the only explanation for every edition of D&D prior to the 80s.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581378There's an easy way to do this.

MGuy, what are you design requirements for a pair of gloves?  It's important to detail all of your goals.

Are we talking oven mitts, fingerless gloves for popstar wanabees, or were you planning on handling liquid nitrogen with them? Either way you're going to have to prioritize lookin' cool, insulation and flexibility. And cost, since the All Purpose Superglove is possible, but is going to be expensive - and is still going to be more useless than something specialized e.g. you hadn't realized someone would be trying to handle radioactive substances with it.

Quote from: Catelf;581341I have now seen the exact same off-topic going on fr several pages now,

There is a user control panel where you can set your posts per page number to something that is not insanely low.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581390That would seem to be the only explanation for every edition of D&D prior to the 80s.

Sure. All these creatures illos in the MM, the first page or so of the DMG that shows an actual bell curve graph along with the text discussing dice and probabilities, the maps in the modules that were part of the cover you could use independantly from the booklet of text, the dice and crayons in the boxes, or the format of the supplements of OD&D you could neatly put *gasp* in the box of the original game... none of these things were thought through at all. They appeared and/or happened by pure coincidence.

Look. I'm all for a jab once in a while, but that's some pretty dumb comment you just made, you gotta admit.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;581395Are we talking oven mitts, fingerless gloves for popstar wanabees, or were you planning on handling liquid nitrogen with them? Either way you're going to have to prioritize lookin' cool, insulation and flexibility. And cost, since the All Purpose Superglove is possible, but is going to be expensive - and is still going to be more useless than something specialized e.g. you hadn't realized someone would be trying to handle radioactive substances with it.

That's all stuff for him to list out.  I'm curious to see what his goals are for a pair of gloves, and see that if all of those goals are met, are they a good design as per his logic.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581385If you dont see the problem with this, I really don't know what to say here. You are trying to establish a measure for if something is good design. But you have created one that will evaluate bad design as good.

The question isn't did you do a good job of achieving your design goals but did you execute good design.

Again, that is you reaching. You're the one who posits that at some point someone is going to intentionally write up a game that serves no other purpose than to be bad. That sounds ridiculous because it is, but keep in mind that you are the one who brought it up. If you think it is ridiculous to even fathom perhaps you can come up with an example that supports your point but isn't absolutely ridiculous.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;581395Are we talking oven mitts, fingerless gloves for popstar wanabees, or were you planning on handling liquid nitrogen with them? Either way you're going to have to prioritize lookin' cool, insulation and flexibility. And cost, since the All Purpose Superglove is possible, but is going to be expensive - and is still going to be more useless than something specialized e.g. you hadn't realized someone would be trying to handle radioactive substances with it.

Hahaha no. Don't let Sacro bait you.

Quote from: MGuy;581411Again, that is you reaching. You're the one who posits that at some point someone is going to intentionally write up a game that serves no other purpose than to be bad. That sounds ridiculous because it is, but keep in mind that you are the one who brought it up. If you think it is ridiculous to even fathom perhaps you can come up with an example that supports your point but isn't absolutely ridiculous.

I brought it up because you set designer intent as measure of good design. I was just pointing out that under that measure, a designer who deliberately designs a bad game is engaged in good design.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581414I brought it up because you set designer intent as measure of good design. I was just pointing out that under that measure, a designer who deliberately designs a bad game is engaged in good design.

Yes. If the person who sets to make a bad game successfully makes a bad game then his design was good for making bad games and anyone else who wants to make a bad game can follow those designs and also make bad games. If you set your goal to making a bad game and you successfully do it then what exactly is the problem?

Quote from: MGuy;581421Yes. If the person who sets to make a bad game successfully makes a bad game then his design was good for making bad games and anyone else who wants to make a bad game can follow those designs and also make bad games. If you set your goal to making a bad game and you successfully do it then what exactly is the problem?

:popcorn:

This is awesome, like watching a game design version of Ubu Roi.

Quote from: Benoist;581424:popcorn:

This is awesome, like watching a game design version of Ubu Roi.

.... Been looking at those two smilies for ... a while, and agrees, this argument is a show now, and i almost expect a cop coming in and arresting them both for being "silly" ....
At least the argument's bodycount is down to 2, one on each side, since the other ones either has seen both sides of the point, or decided to vary the argumentation in a better way.

Technically, it doesn't even matter if any "side" is correct, the answer to the main question is still "Not as much as some may think".

As pointed out:
A more complete, effective, and working game can still be completely ignored by people that only play D&D, simply because D&D holds potentially as much nostalgia as Monopoly by now.
Not many D&D-players care if the game is broken, they used to play it, so they continue playing it.
In the US, no Rpg can even hope to compare to D&D.

No, the question may be more valid if one compares "all the other" games:
Does good game design really matter when comparing ...
* CoC, Trail of Cthulhu, and any other horrorgame?
* Different editions of Shadowrun?
* HERO, Heroes Unlimited, and Aberrant?

.... and so on.

Not many attempts at answering that has been done yet. ... at least not in this thread.

This is a very odd thread, or at least that's how it has devolved.

Should a design that allowed you to meet all your design goals be considered a good design?  Well...it should be considered a successful design at least.  

However, does that mean that a different design could have met those goals better, more efficiently, with less cost, etc?  Well...yeah.

If I want to exterminate human beings from a distance, will a throwing knife do?  Yeah, but a sniper rifle will do better, and an ICBM will do it on a mass scale.  But I can't enter your average nightclub with a sniper rifle or an ICBM.

Thus, conditions enter the equation.

Now add in the fun factor that when we're talking about game design, a certain level of it is totally subjective.  For some people, Barbarians of Lemuria is the best design for Conan gaming.  For others, Hero.  For yet others, RQ6.

Some aspects of game design are objective.  In order to successfully model firearms reality, a .22 bullet should be able to kill in one shot, but it should be rare, while a .50 caliber machine gun bullet should be survivable, but it should be rare and probably not without serious injury.   The subjective part comes in because there are a thousand ways I could do that and no matter which way I went, some would love it and others hate it.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581268This is the problem with having "did the designer meet his design goals" as the only measure of good design. Setting and meeting design goals is very important, but designers ought to account for their target audience. good design isn't just about meeting design goals. Games are judged good or bad by the people who play them. Same as anything else. One can make a "designers game" meant to appeal to designers with particular principles or sensibilities in mind, but in that case you are still considering a target audience.

Good design=design goals achieved, ignores the fact that these games are meant to be played. It is only part of the equation.

Design is the process. The game is the product.

If I were an engineer and made a weapon to destroy the Earth, it wouldn't be a failure of engineering, even though I made an awful thing. If I were a graphic designer and made a really slick website for the KKK, it wouldn't be bad web design. If I pointed myself towards the edge of a cliff and ran, the problems I'd have wouldn't be a failure of my ability to run. Likewise with game design, you can set an unworthy goal and still strive for it well.

A good game is a fun game for many people. Good design is the process of making a game for a specific set of goals.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581288Just to throw my $0.02 in again.

I do software testing in real life.  Every day I run into examples where something was designed and/or coded based on the requirements (goal), yet still is a bad design.

For example, the line of business may set out a list of goals of what they want the software to do and what functionality it has.  The developers take those requirements and design the changes/adds around them.  Technically, it was designed exactly to the goal's specifications.  However, once you're in practical application (my job) pretty much always there are issues.  Either user functionality has been adversely affected in a way that's unacceptable, other things may have been broken or adversely affected because one requirement might not align with a pre-existing functionality, or the design may be completely inefficient and a more streamlined change needs to be made to coding,  etc.

It's dangerous thinking to assume that if you met your requirements, it's a good design.

If it clarifies things any, I consider processes outside rules design part of a larger process of development. Getting feedback, directing iteration, changing goals to suit the audience, etc. aren't things I would classify under rules design, any more than I'd expect the market research that generates a company's graphic design needs to be handled by that company's graphic designers. Though graphic designers and market researchers do work together towards a common goal, they still have different jobs.

Quote from: Catelf;581447No, the question may be more valid if one compares "all the other" games:
Does good game design really matter when comparing ...
* CoC, Trail of Cthulhu, and any other horrorgame?
* Different editions of Shadowrun?
* HERO, Heroes Unlimited, and Aberrant?
 
.... and so on.
 
Not many attempts at answering that has been done yet. ... at least not in this thread.

Trail of Cthulhu is...an interesting case. I hate this system violently because of its whole "spend skill points on rolls and then they're gone" mechanic, which just makes no sense to me whatever. Compared to CoC its proponents consider one of its major innovations that you can find clues automatically and so avoid scenarios grinding to a halt, but it has been argued this is something better addressed by better scenario design. Managed to convince the GM who wanted to run this to run Realms of Cthulhu (Savage Worlds) instead.
 
Different editions of Shadowrun may be arguable as to which of these is better designed, if any. I'm only familiar with 1st and (very marginally) 4th, but it seemed that 4th has just crazy dice pool sizes, whatever other improvements were there...not crazy about the character generation either, though I might be able to handle it for a long-term game.
 
Out of HERO, Heroes Unlimited, and Aberrant, Aberrant is I think the best-designed game in many respects since its basically the revised Storyteller system with universal game mechanic, levels of achievement and so on, but it does suffer from a number of crippling limitations e.g. everyone has to be a mutant, a bad setting (or at least, I didn't like it) and characters that vary between vapourizing if you look at them funny and being nigh indestructible.
Heroes Unlimited is also completely unbalanced and has the standard Palladium system, but at least you can built what you like (not just mutants). HERO probably beats Palladium in terms of design goodness, but fairly fiddly and min/maxable - of the three I'd probably pick Heroes Unlimited as the one I'd most enjoy playing...

Quote from: beejazz;581454Design is the process. The game is the product.

If I were an engineer and made a weapon to destroy the Earth, it wouldn't be a failure of engineering, even though I made an awful thing. If I were a graphic designer and made a really slick website for the KKK, it wouldn't be bad web design. If I pointed myself towards the edge of a cliff and ran, the problems I'd have wouldn't be a failure of my ability to run. Likewise with game design, you can set an unworthy goal and still strive for it well.

A good game is a fun game for many people. Good design is the process of making a game for a specific set of goals.
.

I dont know that parsing over these details is going to get us very far as we are getting into very pedantic points, but just to respond to this. the issue is people cant agree what constitutes good design. One measure proposed was good design = meeting design goals. In both your above examples, meeting design goals isnt the sole criteria for success. Both those items have inherent purposes that demand certain design goals over others. If you set out to make a giant death ray of the earth, and your design goals have nothing to do with earthly destruction...then that is bad design. Meeting design goals matters, but it also matters what those design goals are. I think good design goals haveto consider the purpose and function of the thing you are designing. The purpose of a game is to be played by people. So i just dont see how you can seperate that from your measure of good design. If my design goals produce a game that no one wants to play, i am just not seeing how we can call that good design. You have succesfully met your design goals. But should we call that an example of good design? It seems that designer meetsdesign goals very important when evauating design. I absolutely dont dispute that. I just question if it makes sense as the sole measure of good design.

I do agree with others that this thread has gotten a bit weird, and I am at least partly responsible for it going down that course, so i will leave this as my final point on the design goal part of the debate (and i am starting to repeat myself which isnever a good sign :))

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;581461Trail of Cthulhu is...an interesting case. I hate this system violently because of its whole "spend skill points on rolls and then they're gone" mechanic, which just makes no sense to me whatever. Compared to CoC its proponents consider one of its major innovations that you can find clues automatically and so avoid scenarios grinding to a halt, but it has been argued this is something better addressed by better scenario design. Managed to convince the GM who wanted to run this to run Realms of Cthulhu (Savage Worlds) instead.
 
Different editions of Shadowrun may be arguable as to which of these is better designed, if any. I'm only familiar with 1st and (very marginally) 4th, but it seemed that 4th has just crazy dice pool sizes, whatever other improvements were there...not crazy about the character generation either, though I might be able to handle it for a long-term game.
 
Out of HERO, Heroes Unlimited, and Aberrant, Aberrant is I think the best-designed game in many respects since its basically the revised Storyteller system with universal game mechanic, levels of achievement and so on, but it does suffer from a number of crippling limitations e.g. everyone has to be a mutant, a bad setting (or at least, I didn't like it) and characters that vary between vapourizing if you look at them funny and being nigh indestructible.
Heroes Unlimited is also completely unbalanced and has the standard Palladium system, but at least you can built what you like (not just mutants). HERO probably beats Palladium in terms of design goodness, but fairly fiddly and min/maxable - of the three I'd probably pick Heroes Unlimited as the one I'd most enjoy playing...

Hm, i think i'd not like Trail of Cthulhu for the same reason ... and i agree it would be better solved with some better planning.

SR seems to be a bit of a mess, and i recently looked at a thread on preferred SR editions ... seems most there preferred 2e.

Back on subject, though:
You seem to think that Aberrant is best designed all in all, yet it fails, and so does HERO, despite that too seeming better than Heroes Unlimited.
.... That can mean a few things:
* You are used to Heroes Unlimited, so that its flaws are more easy to overlook for you.
* Options/Visible Choises trump good design.
* Setting trump good design (again).
* Heroes unlimited is, despite its flaws, better designed.
* Good game design doesn't matter as much as some may think.

Which one(s) of these would you agree on?

.... Personally, i'd rather tweak Aberrant than play HU.

Quote from: Catelf;581469Back on subject, though:
You seem to think that Aberrant is best designed all in all, yet it fails, and so does HERO, despite that too seeming better than Heroes Unlimited.
.... That can mean a few things:
* You are used to Heroes Unlimited, so that its flaws are more easy to overlook for you.
* Options/Visible Choises trump good design.
* Setting trump good design (again).
* Heroes unlimited is, despite its flaws, better designed.
* Good game design doesn't matter as much as some may think.
 
Which one(s) of these would you agree on?
 
.... Personally, i'd rather tweak Aberrant than play HU.

Can't fault you for that. I played a whole campaign of Aberrant many years ago; have played a reasonable amount of Palladium back in high school mainly (only 2 sessions of true Heroes Unlimited, however) and have never played HERO.
HERO is I think better designed objectively, but just doesn't suit my preferences- over my preferred complexity threshold. I picked up 6E fairly recently just since it was a gaping flaw in my RPG education but I found it a hard read.
 
Palladium does have a number of little features and things I appreciate, despite being a mess aesthetically speaking (e.g. various subsystems, large swathes of things not covered by rules) and I guess part of it is that I would have enough mastery of the system/own enough supplements to work around many of the holes. So partly that, although the options are also part of it.

Quote from: beejazz;581454If it clarifies things any, I consider processes outside rules design part of a larger process of development. Getting feedback, directing iteration, changing goals to suit the audience, etc. aren't things I would classify under rules design, any more than I'd expect the market research that generates a company's graphic design needs to be handled by that company's graphic designers. Though graphic designers and market researchers do work together towards a common goal, they still have different jobs.

This is true of what we call the pilot phase, where it goes out to a limited group of users.  But my role is included in the design process because the process isn't finalized until they get my sign off, and I'm included in working with the other two groups around redesign.

It would be like if I was part of alpha D&D playtesting before it was released to everyone else, and had an equal say in what rules should be implemented and which should be changed or removed.

Quote from: MGuy;581413Hahaha no. Don't let Sacro bait you.

How is that baiting?  You said you could design a glove, and you said that if it meets your goals, it's a good design.

So I'm asking you, tell me what your goals are for designing a glove.  If you have any conviction in your arguments, I'm sure this is a pretty easy thing to do.  I mean, we're talking about a glove here, not a car.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;580942As much as we like to think it does?

Game mechanics are aesthetics of play, and nothing - absolutely nothing - more. A well designed system that conforms to one's own personal antithetical preferences is going to be more pleasing on that level.

That's not to say it's not important - aesthetics are, in fact, quite important in pleasure-based activities, after all an aesthetically unpleasant meal is going to be immensely unsatisfying even if perfectly nutritious - but they don't have anywhere near the importance they're ascribed as having.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581466I dont know that parsing over these details is going to get us very far as we are getting into very pedantic points, but just to respond to this. the issue is people cant agree what constitutes good design.

And this is a good example: you can't pin down "good game design" since "good game design" is a question of aesthetics, and aesthetics are subjective.

And this is why there will never be a consensus on any given edition of a game, or any particular game's suitability for any given genre, because there's no objective measure to hold up to an RPG system and say "this system is a good system".

It's very much a "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" (and not the D&D kind) situation.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581473How is that baiting?  You said you could design a glove, and you said that if it meets your goals, it's a good design.

So I'm asking you, tell me what your goals are for designing a glove.  If you have any conviction in your arguments, I'm sure this is a pretty easy thing to do.  I mean, we're talking about a glove here, not a car.

It is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.  Picking nits out of other arguments is far safer than constructing your own argument.  Even when the whole Denner crew was active, they weren't about to risk presenting their own arguments.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;581466If you set out to make a giant death ray of the earth, and your design goals have nothing to do with earthly destruction...then that is bad design.

If you set goals unrelated to destroying earth, you aren't going to make a doomsday weapon. You're going to make something else. A hair dryer maybe.

Closest thing I have to an area of expertise right now is art, and in some cases you really do have to separate the process from the product when thinking about it.

Fun and popularity are each fuzzy in their relation to their product (fun is hugely subjective, where popularity can be swayed pretty heavily by things like distribution and price) but are also pretty far divorced from the actual process. No process will guarantee a fun game, or we'd have a hell of a lot fewer duds on that front. Same goes for popularity.

Now, if we're judging a game, it's almost pointless to judge the process by which it was designed because there's really no way to know. We can only judge the product against its purpose as defined by ourselves.

QuoteI do agree with others that this thread has gotten a bit weird, and I am at least partly responsible for it going down that course, so i will leave this as my final point on the design goal part of the debate (and i am starting to repeat myself which isnever a good sign :))

It's funny. I expected an argument over the value of balance or something. Then things got all about semantics.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581472This is true of what we call the pilot phase, where it goes out to a limited group of users.  But my role is included in the design process because the process isn't finalized until they get my sign off, and I'm included in working with the other two groups around redesign.

It would be like if I was part of alpha D&D playtesting before it was released to everyone else, and had an equal say in what rules should be implemented and which should be changed or removed.

When it gets to iteration things get fuzzier, and market research and design can become more closely linked in some phases. I just like clearer terms in discussions. Playtesting is playtesting. Rules design is rules design. Layout is layout. And so on.

___________________

To get back to the original topic, good rule design is trumped by:

Good core concepts (dungeon crawling will never die no matter how many mechanical facelifts it gets)
Good formatting and writing (an easy to use book gets used)
Distribution and price (an accessible game gets found and played)
Fads and luck (sadly difficult to replicate)

Just off the top of my head.

But really just because other things are more important doesn't mean the rules aren't important. Like so many other factors, if the rules are good enough they may just be a neutral factor, but if you fuck them up bad enough you can make an unusable or unfun game.

Quote from: beejazz;581494It's funny. I expected an argument over the value of balance or something. Then things got all about semantics.



.

True, and when things get overly semantic, I think that is usually an indication people (myself included) are simply digging in their heels and trying to "win" the debate rather than have a real discussion. It also usually means people have lost site of the original point.

Actually I haven't been trying to "win" the debate over whether good design really "matters" because I feel this is people once again talking about "fun" and "enjoyment" which can occur no matter what the actual thing you're doing is. It is pointless to debate over something as highly subjective as either of those things. I was responding to an assertion that there is no objective measure of "good design" which is something I reject because if what you design does everything you want and avoids what you don't want then your design was good (at least good enough to accomplish whatever it is you set out to do).

This is great! It explains perfectly why my games don't sell more - they are just far too well designed! I don't have to bother putting a solid system together any more! I can just shovel a bunch of crap together and sell it and make a mint! Pure awesome! :D

-clash

Quote from: MGuy;581504I was responding to an assertion that there is no objective measure of "good design" which is something I reject because if what you design does everything you want and avoids what you don't want then your design was good (at least good enough to accomplish whatever it is you set out to do).

And this is false.  Since you refuse to describe your design goals for your glove, I suggest you read this site:

http://www.goodexperience.com/tib/archives/product_design/

You will find several products that were built according to how they were designed and met all of their design goals.  By your logic, they are well-designed.  Obviously they are not.

Quote from: flyingmice;581507This is great! It explains perfectly why my games don't sell more - they are just far too well designed! I don't have to bother putting a solid system together any more! I can just shovel a bunch of crap together and sell it and make a mint! Pure awesome! :D

-clash

Your games are pretty damn good from what little I've seen actually. Like I said upthread though, distribution matters. I only know your games exist 'cause I'm here. Outside here and the Pundit's blog, I haven't even run into a reference to them.

If some of your games were on all kinds of store shelves, or you had lots of advertising in all the right places? I think it would have a bigger impact on your sales than your system. But if you gave that kind of support to a totally crap system the thing would still develop a bad reputation and eventually sink.

IME that's the influence of system on success: it doesn't matter if your system just works or if it's a masterpiece, but if it's actually bad it can be a dealbreaker.

Quote from: flyingmice;581507This is great! It explains perfectly why my games don't sell more - they are just far too well designed! I don't have to bother putting a solid system together any more! I can just shovel a bunch of crap together and sell it and make a mint! Pure awesome! :D

-clash

Nah, it's just The Man tryin' to hold you back.  If everyone knew about Better Mousetrap Games, the rest of the industry would be out of business!  :)

Quote from: beejazz;581510IME that's the influence of system on success: it doesn't matter if your system just works or if it's a masterpiece, but if it's actually bad it can be a dealbreaker.

There's a rather interesting thought:  what is the minimum level of design people will accept?  And is there a point where 'even better' doesn't actually matter anymore?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581509And this is false.  Since you refuse to describe your design goals for your glove, I suggest you read this site:

http://www.goodexperience.com/tib/archives/product_design/

You will find several products that were built according to how they were designed and met all of their design goals.  By your logic, they are well-designed.  Obviously they are not.

The AC controls were meant to be visible. They weren't.

The message was meant to communicate something. It didn't.

Is a typo really based on a design goal? Anyway, the joke was meant to be funny. It wasn't.

In general, I'm pretty sure these things were actually supposed to function. As in: that was the goal.

The examples really don't illustrate your point at all.

Quote from: StormBringer;581512There's a rather interesting thought:  what is the minimum level of design people will accept?

The internet says RIFTS. I really wouldn't know except that I'm willing to put up with a lot from 3x. It's mostly stuff I didn't notice when I started that was easy to fix when I noticed it. Does that seem like a good rule of thumb for tolerable problems?

QuoteAnd is there a point where 'even better' doesn't actually matter anymore?

Better than okay but before really good...

...it's hard to quantify this stuff in any meaningful way, unfortunately.

To answer the original question: yes, good game design actually matters if what you are after is to provide a consistent reward in terms of entertainment value to your customers. What good game design does is make sure that all the moving parts of a game work together towards some specific result or results, i.e. intents on the part of the designer.

Game design is all about creating by design such subjective experiences as "fun" on the part of the user. It's something of a dichotomy, but just as much of a dichotomy as trying to understand psychological behaviors and what the triggers to these behaviors are to then derive some general understanding of the workings of the mind would be to the psychologist. I actually think that the inherent opposition there is between the goals of a game designer who tries to create a consistent game experience and the nature of role playing games which implies that the actual users actually tweak and change the product to suit their own needs, thus themselves taking part in the realization of the actual, final product, which is the game play experience itself, plays into that apparent contradiction in ways that are productive for the health of the hobby in general.

So designing a role playing game experience in particular, whether we are talking of an actual base/core game, or modules and supplements, is something of a balancing act for the game designer who needs to understand how his stuff might get used by people other than him/herself (hence research, playtesting blah blah) to create a product that maximizes its entertainment value at varying game tables, and at the same time needs to incorporate that chaotic, human element into the design itself so that it lets its users come to "own" and play the product on their own terms, and no one else's.

It's fascinating, to me.

Quote from: beejazz;581513The AC controls were meant to be visible. They weren't.

No, they were designed to function with a blue led light.  And it met that design because they worked as they were designed.  You're making an assumption that they had a design goal of, "Brightly visible in all light conditions and contrasts well against any reflections that may occur."  Obviously they did not have that goal, otherwise it wouldn't have passed user acceptance testing.  

QuoteThe message was meant to communicate something. It didn't.

It did, just horribly.

QuoteIn general, I'm pretty sure these things were actually supposed to function. As in: that was the goal.

"Work well" is never a design goal.  It's way too vague.  Design goals are a list of very specific requirements.  It's Quality Control 101 to eliminate any vague goals or requirements.  And "Work well" is about as vague as you can get.  Sure, you want it to work well, but the design goals and requirements should tell you exactly how that is going to be accomplished.

QuoteThe examples really don't illustrate your point at all.

They illustrate my point perfectly.  That is, you can have a list of design goals, and you can meet all of those goals, but that doesn't mean you have a well designed product because you forgot to account for various scenarios that may impact design.

Quote from: flyingmice;581507This is great! It explains perfectly why my games don't sell more - they are just far too well designed! I don't have to bother putting a solid system together any more! I can just shovel a bunch of crap together and sell it and make a mint! Pure awesome! :D

-clash

Actually, if you want to sell your product then one of your design goals would be to appeal to the audience you want to sell it to. If it does not that means you have not reached one of your design goals which means you need to improve. It also could be your lack of arketing as I've never heard of your games.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;581518No, they were designed to function with a blue led light.  And it met that design because they worked as they were designed.  You're making an assumption that they had a design goal of, "Brightly visible in all light conditions and contrasts well against any reflections that may occur."  Obviously they did not have that goal, otherwise it wouldn't have passed user acceptance testing.  

So you think they decided on "blue LED" before "should be visible?"

Quote"Work well" is never a design goal.  It's way too vague.  Design goals are a list of very specific requirements.  It's Quality Control 101 to eliminate any vague goals or requirements.  And "Work well" is about as vague as you can get.  Sure, you want it to work well, but the design goals and requirements should tell you exactly how that is going to be accomplished.

I was talking about multiple things simultaneously. Unless they all had the same design goals I was pretty much going to have to get vague.

And one of those items actually does not work. At all. Based on that screen. There's no way in hell you're going to convince me the clock/calendar was actually supposed to look like that. It wasn't.

QuoteThey illustrate my point perfectly.  That is, you can have a list of design goals, and you can meet all of those goals, but that doesn't mean you have a well designed product because you forgot to account for various scenarios that may impact design.

Clock calendar broke. Clock calendar (presumably) wasn't made to break. Doesn't demonstrate your point. Likewise for most of the examples.

Quote from: beejazz;581521So you think they decided on "blue LED" before "should be visible?"

Again, "should be visible" is vague.  It most likely passed all of that.  "Should be visible in all levels of light and reflection" probably wasn't included, otherwise it would have passed.  It met it's design goals, but obviously those goals weren't inclusive enough.

QuoteAnd one of those items actually does not work. At all. Based on that screen. There's no way in hell you're going to convince me the clock/calendar was actually supposed to look like that. It wasn't.


Clock calendar broke. Clock calendar (presumably) wasn't made to break. Doesn't demonstrate your point. Likewise for most of the examples.

One example of a broken item does not discount the other items.  Most of them were clear examples of something working as it was designed.  My whole point is that "met our requirements" does not equal "well designed".  I would think it should be obvious by now.  If the requirements are bad, or faulty, or missing, you end up with a bad design.  Ergo, you can meet all of your goals and requirements, and still end up with a shitty design.

I do this for a living.  I know what I'm talking about.

Quote from: beejazz;581513The examples really don't illustrate your point at all.

Don't know why you're even responding to Sacro seriously. That link is a good way to sum up how far Sacro has to reach in order to make a point.

I'm fairly sure one of the design goals of having AC controls was to have the options be consistently visible. They were only visible half the time. Design goal not reached.

You want cell phones to be user friendly. JAR files and counter intuitive messaging make that design goal not reached.

Eye mask was meant to be humorous. Humor is hard to do sometimes. The joke was probably meant to say that the sleeping person needs caffeine to operate and thus the message on the eye mask. The person not getting is going to happen with something like humor. I'd say the actual major design flaw of this one is that it looks ugly but hey, beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that.

Toaster, again, supposed to be user friendly. The counter intuitive toast canceling mechanism falls short of that design goal.

Seriously I can go down the list forever and point out flaws in the designs. Something having design flaws does, in no way, counter my point like at fucking all.

What are you design goals for you glove MGuy?


It appears that you have no idea about the design process.  But how about you actually back up your assertion?  An ad hominem isnt' usually considered "backing up your point" by the way.

What are you design goals for your glove?  It's a very simple item.  Shouldn't be hard.

Oh, and this?  

Quote from: MGuy;581523I'm fairly sure one of the design goals of having AC controls was to have the options be consistently visible. They were only visible half the time. Design goal not reached.
.

Isn't true.  I'm not shocked that you would get things wrong at this point.  It was not "not visible half the time".  It was not easily visible in bright light against the reflections of the chrome.  That's a significant difference.

Quote from: beejazz;581514The internet says RIFTS.

:rotfl:

QuoteI really wouldn't know except that I'm willing to put up with a lot from 3x. It's mostly stuff I didn't notice when I started that was easy to fix when I noticed it. Does that seem like a good rule of thumb for tolerable problems?

Sounds like a good place to start, anyway.  Reasonably, then, there is some limit to problems that eventually crop up even in an initially 'good' product.

QuoteBetter than okay but before really good...

...it's hard to quantify this stuff in any meaningful way, unfortunately.

Definitely in general terms.  I think the best that can be done is to assess each 'product' individually with perhaps a general set of guidelines.  "If takes more than X , the product has a problem in usability (for me)".

Like movie, game, or music reviews, it is probably more important to articulate why than to point out where.

Guys, get your humor hats on! I was joking! If I gave a fuck about selling a shit tons of games, would I be writing crap like In Harm's Way: Pigboats and Tools of Ignorance? Not on your life! Thanks for the kind words, though! :D

-clash

Game design matters a lot.

However, as Zak S notes, game design doesn't end with the guy who wrote it (http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2012/09/this-should-be-like-introduction-to.html).

Quote from: StormBringer;581525Definitely in general terms.  I think the best that can be done is to assess each 'product' individually with perhaps a general set of guidelines.  "If takes more than X , the product has a problem in usability (for me)".

Like movie, game, or music reviews, it is probably more important to articulate why than to point out where.

As much as I like having clear terms and pointing out the distinctions between similar things... you get into discussions of overall quality you're gonna (usually) have to be pretty damn vague.

Games are expected to do a lot, be fast, be playable fresh out the book with no prep but still open to tinkering and a million other things depending on who's using them. Reviews are useful the more they get into specifics because one person's bug is another's feature. Analysis of design is tricky as hell because you don't (necessarily) know what the design goals were or what compromises had to be made. You end up discussing balance pre-3 for example, when dissimilar character power was probably a deliberate feature of the game.

It's probably why I've gotten to be such a stickler for clarity. It's not enough to say the game is slow; it helps to know if it's too-many-rounds slow or too-many-rolls slow, you know?

Quote from: beejazz;581602As much as I like having clear terms and pointing out the distinctions between similar things... you get into discussions of overall quality you're gonna (usually) have to be pretty damn vague.

Games are expected to do a lot, be fast, be playable fresh out the book with no prep but still open to tinkering and a million other things depending on who's using them. Reviews are useful the more they get into specifics because one person's bug is another's feature. Analysis of design is tricky as hell because you don't (necessarily) know what the design goals were or what compromises had to be made. You end up discussing balance pre-3 for example, when dissimilar character power was probably a deliberate feature of the game.

It's probably why I've gotten to be such a stickler for clarity. It's not enough to say the game is slow; it helps to know if it's too-many-rounds slow or too-many-rolls slow, you know?

I agree with all of this especially the bold part.

Quote from: MGuy;581605I agree with all of this especially the bold part.

I think the part you bolded about not knowing what compromises were made is especially important.

Quote from: beejazz;581602As much as I like having clear terms and pointing out the distinctions between similar things... you get into discussions of overall quality you're gonna (usually) have to be pretty damn vague.

Agreed.  As entertaining as it was, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance didn't exactly make identifying 'quality' a simpler task.  This is where discussing design in broad terms of what it does accomplish, somewhat regardless of what it set out to do, is likely the better path.

QuoteGames are expected to do a lot, be fast, be playable fresh out the book with no prep but still open to tinkering and a million other things depending on who's using them. Reviews are useful the more they get into specifics because one person's bug is another's feature. Analysis of design is tricky as hell because you don't (necessarily) know what the design goals were or what compromises had to be made. You end up discussing balance pre-3 for example, when dissimilar character power was probably a deliberate feature of the game.

And they are expected to do all those things more or less simultaneously.  Judging each individual part is hard enough, judging how well they interact is exponentially moreso.

QuoteIt's probably why I've gotten to be such a stickler for clarity. It's not enough to say the game is slow; it helps to know if it's too-many-rounds slow or too-many-rolls slow, you know?

Absolutely.  Handle time is one of those rare things you can actually have some specifics about.

Quote from: Benoist;581402Sure. All these creatures illos in the MM, the first page or so of the DMG that shows an actual bell curve graph along with the text discussing dice and probabilities, the maps in the modules that were part of the cover you could use independantly from the booklet of text, the dice and crayons in the boxes, or the format of the supplements of OD&D you could neatly put *gasp* in the box of the original game... none of these things were thought through at all. They appeared and/or happened by pure coincidence.

Look. I'm all for a jab once in a while, but that's some pretty dumb comment you just made, you gotta admit.

(shrug), it was pithy, and like all pithy comments it's a 95% sarcastic house of cards that won't stand up to detailed analysis, but, as John Cleese once said, the best humour is either extremely smart or exceptionally stupid.

Quote from: Catelf;581447No, the question may be more valid if one compares "all the other" games:
Does good game design really matter when comparing ...

It matter sonly insofar as the game assists and encourages rather than detracts or makes it more difficult for a GM to run games that create the "feel" of a certain genre. But because this is so personal, there can't be a definitive "winner" or ultimately superior system, but that doesn't mean there isn't identifiably badly designed systems.

Not to ruffle Pundit's feathers, but let me make an analogy to art to clarify what I'm proposing.

DaVinci, Picasso, Goya, Rembrandt are all without question regarded as Masters. They are the pinnacle of art and only an uneducated philistine would claim that, say, "Picasso isn't all that great. Alex Ross's stuff is way better". But ther eis no objective comparison between them. One can't say Davinci was better than Michaelangelo (well, lots have said stuff like this , they simply have no means of objectively proving it without resporting to elevating personal taste to a worthwhile consideration). How could one even compare the works of a Pre-Raphaelite to an Impressionist?

Below this unquestioned tier of masters, there are the various famous artists throughout history, everyone from Waterhouse to Warhol, Lichtenstien to Albrecht Durer, Andrew Wyth to Brian Froud, hell, Julie Bell to Frank Frazetta. All different styles, all "speaking, to a different audience, all talented but in no way comparable on any kind of scale.

Then there are the primitives. People who have not learned the basics, have no formal artistic education, haven't quite mastered any form or devoted study to any school. Primitive and crude artists are recognized as sub-par to the "artist artists" of the middle category, and don't even bear mention in the same breath as a master, but some of their works can still have a great deal of value, especially when creativity is strong enough to overcome the artists limitations in skill, if not talent. Erol Otus falls favourably in this category, as do a lot of comic book artists, and the majority of RPG art.

But as myriad and ephemerous as those three tiers are, there is still a fourth category. There is still objectively bad art. No skill, no creativity, no talent.
This is The Liefeld category.

I think game system can be evaluated in the same way, at least metaphorically (I should probably state now that I don't believe roleplaying is art, even if I believe a gamebook can be a work of art, though this has little bearing on whether it's a good game).

Quote* CoC, Trail of Cthulhu, and any other horrorgame?

CoC is second tier, classic, a solid system that does its job, has been revised and playtested to what is (now for certain) it's final form, and has provided thousands of roleplayers with years and years of good gaming.

Trail of Cthulhu joins Chill, Dread, Nephilim,  Litle Fears, and a host of other third-tier horror RPGs. They work just fine for their small audiences, they don't have a broad appeal but there's nothing broken about them, and each one caters to a specific taste that's "pushed a button" for some small segment of the roleplaying "community".

I don't know any crappy horror RPGs, but god knows they certainly exist.

Quote* Different editions of Shadowrun?

All I can say to this is that with third edition onwards, it doesn't matter what they did to the system, it felt to me like they gave up on the game's soul. After 2e, nothing else "felt" like Shadowrun, not the world presented in first and second edition. Some people may like the new Shadowrun better, the same way some people prefer d20 to AD&D. But for me, the heart of the game was gutted and lost.

Quote* HERO, Heroes Unlimited, and Aberrant?

All third tier games, certainly. Of them only Hero comes close to having the robust staying power of the classic MSH (FASERIP) or DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes systems that are still played and beloved decades after going oop and being "replaced" by new games. But Hero gave up its genre to be a "universal system" ( a pipe dream if ever there was one in this hobby), so I don't think it really bears comparison with other superhero games.

But oh man, there have been some godawful supers RPGs. Heroes & Heroines, which is probably now only remembered because they managed to get the lisence for a supplement based on the now-classic The Maxx series by Sam Kieth. That was bad design. That, like Fantasy Wargamming, was a Liefeld of an RPG.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581792It matter sonly insofar as the game assists and encourages rather than detracts or makes it more difficult for a GM to run games that create the "feel" of a certain genre. But because this is so personal, there can't be a definitive "winner" or ultimately superior system, but that doesn't mean there isn't identifiably badly designed systems.

Not to ruffle Pundit's feathers, but let me make an analogy to art to clarify what I'm proposing.

However, you forget a couple of important things here:
* Do you know the difference between one of "The Masters" and one of their diciples?
The difference can be so totally miniscule that people have to use x-ray and other means to find any notable difference at all!
And yet, if they find that it wasn't "he Master", but a diciple, it isn't deemed as the same "great art" as "The Master".
I find this sentiment towards "The Masters" to be utter rubbish, and it shows that "Tha Masters" are only dubbed thus due to "having been first" ...
Much like D&D, it was "first" and is utterly revered for that.
It doesn't matter that there are others that could be said as having been better, or just a bit earlier, somehow, they haven't gotten as well known.
* As far as i see it, "cubism" and Warhol only had one purpose, namely to change the view on "art".
As far as art goes, i consider most of Warhol's work, especially the most known ones, as rubbish. ... And the same goes for any cubistic work.
* To me, a drawing by Frank Miller is far more valuable than a drawing(not a painting) by most of the "Masters" you defined.
I consider comics a work of art if well done, and more valuable than possibly any painting by "the masters".

Ok, the last two seems, or is, highly subjective.
However, that "The Masters" ar worty of those titles, is also highly subjective, nothing else, since several of their diciples might even have become better, but weren't treated as such.

But i agree, rpg's can be compared to art:
"Masters" has a great standing, despite them having no other validity than seeming to be "first", and any flaws there are, people seem to think "those flaws are supposed to be there".
I also admit that there are really good systems, and bad ones, but some people has gotten so used to flaws, that they either ignore them, work around them, or think they're a good part of the system.

Quote from: Catelf;581866However, you forget a couple of important things here:
* Do you know the difference between one of "The Masters" and one of their diciples?
The difference can be so totally miniscule that people have to use x-ray and other means to find any notable difference at all!
And yet, if they find that it wasn't "he Master", but a diciple, it isn't deemed as the same "great art" as "The Master".
I find this sentiment towards "The Masters" to be utter rubbish, and it shows that "Tha Masters" are only dubbed thus due to "having been first" ...
Much like D&D, it was "first" and is utterly revered for that.
It doesn't matter that there are others that could be said as having been better, or just a bit earlier, somehow, they haven't gotten as well known.

The love for the masters has more to do with process than product honestly. Art was treated as technology almost back then, in that you had to learn everything from your master before giving kind of a push to what the medium could do to become a master yourself. Any shmuck can copy an existing technique (in the apprenticeship system) but fewer people were able to actually push the envelope.

If you draw and paint a lot you kind of know how much harder it is to learn things from studies than it is to learn things from people who already know. It's why we learn systems of perspective and color theory from books, rather than using trial and error. It's insanely more efficient.

Any asshole can make a Tesla coil today, but there's a reason the thing's got Tesla's name on it.

Quote* As far as i see it, "cubism" and Warhol only had one purpose, namely to change the view on "art".
As far as art goes, i consider most of Warhol's work, especially the most known ones, as rubbish. ... And the same goes for any cubistic work.

Cubism developed useful systems for selectively creating and annihilating space and form. Cubism itself may look pretentious, but the ideas it worked out have been pretty useful to comic artists and non-representational artists alike (I'm talking graphic designers as well as painters here).

I'm not enough of a fan of Warhol to really defend him.

___________________________________

Now, the analogy ain't great 'cause RPGs aren't high art. There's a pretty limited utility to reinventing the wheel here, unlike in art, which is a pretty damn broad field both in terms of what it looks like and in terms of what it's for.

Quote from: Dr EvilIt got weird, didn't it?

:) I think taking the art metaphor too literally is going to somehow cause the thread to implode.
 
I think there's a continuum of good design/bad design, whether you want to chunk it into 4 categories (Master, Good, OK, Liefeld), rate it from * to *****, 1-10, or whatever. As with art (and I think this is Catelf's point) its difficult to get objective opinions on what is the best. Also as with comparing artists and disciples, you can say that RPG A) was great for its time - if it pioneered something - whereas RPG B) can have the same mechanics 10 years later and that's much less of an achievement, even though there's no difference practically speaking when you play it.
 
People do have all sorts of personal opinions as to what's good/what's not that will make it difficult to agree on what's a good design, however you chunk it - there's no system so retarded that someone won't defend it as being a good game.
 
Another observation: Every game design is a collection of choices - which dice to roll, how many stats, how many HPs; on the more abstract level a balance between realism/playability, flexibility/balance, etc. - every choice will have both positive and negative implications. Consequently, even completely random blundering should manage to produce a game with some redeeming features - its not just that people are stupid, they all have different priorities and so on.
 
Viewing each design as a set of choices also lets you see what the 'upper limits' on how good a design can be; to do anything extraordinary requires the designer to figure out a way to simultaneously meet goals that are normally in conflict - to build systems that are more elegant. For instance, to get simple mechanics that generate realistic results with the minimum of extra steps, exceptions and die rolls would be difficult, since these are contradictory. A good design might do both - with difficulty - and I think would be objectively better in the sense that the designer has surmounted greater hurdles to get there, but its still probably not quite as good as the specialized realism design to the the realism nut, or the simple game for the guy who just wants a quick game with few rules and doesn't care about exactitudes.

Quote from: Catelf;581866However, you forget a couple of important things here:
* Do you know the difference between one of "The Masters" and one of their diciples?
The difference can be so totally miniscule that people have to use x-ray and other means to find any notable difference at all!
And yet, if they find that it wasn't "he Master", but a diciple, it isn't deemed as the same "great art" as "The Master".

Yes, because copying is easier than creating from scratch. On a much lesser scale take an example such as Greg Land, who is infamous for lightboxing pictures. Now , undeniably it requires a great amount fo skill to even trace and alter a photo in the way he does, but it lacks the creative impulse behind it.

QuoteI find this sentiment towards "The Masters" to be utter rubbish, and it shows that "Tha Masters" are only dubbed thus due to "having been first" ...

Creating something is more important than reproducing another person's creation , yes, but its by far not the sole reason that such artists are held in such esteem. I feel like we're gravitating pretty far away from an RPG analogy, though.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581989I feel like we're gravitating pretty far away from an RPG analogy, though.

Yup.

First, Art =/= Design. Art IS subjective. Design is a combination of Form and Function, both Subjective AND Objective.

Second, you should design for what people DO, not what they WANT. It's a critical distinction often lost when setting design goals.

Finally, good layout is almost certainly part of good game design. It's an analog to the game controller on a console, or better yet the menu system, which was(is?) so bad on the XBox 360 that someone wrote an Indie game which satirized it by making getting through the menu system part of the game. So bad design can become good design (and part of play) by changing intents, which is often what players of 'badly' designed games do.

Quote from: Catelf;581341No.
Settings are:
Marvel, DC, Oddworld, World of Darkness(old), CoC, Rift, TORG, Resident Evil, WHFRP, L5R, Aberrant, Shadowrun ..... and all variants loosely based on those, more based on a genre than a distict, specific, world.

And each of those settings has completely different set of cause and effect.

You are not going to get the same results in Marvel as you will in WHFRP, and while taking on a hoard of Stormtroopers is the right thing to do in Star Wars, it's probably not a wise choice of action in Shadowrun. And I find it especially ironic that you mention TORG because it explicitly used setting to define system.

A setting is itself a set of rules which often have a bigger (though preferably synergistic) impact on the procedures followed in play than the actual mechanics. Ignoring that is the path to D&D4.

Quote from: Doctor Jest;581474Game mechanics are aesthetics of play, and nothing - absolutely nothing - more.

Game mechanics (procedures in play) are NOT simply aesthetics. The procedures of Truth or Dare, or a Ouija Board, produce a specific result across multiple play groups consistently. Now whether the results are aesthetically pleasing is an entirely different matter.

Again Design =/= Art. Design achieves a result beyond Interpretation or Appreciation.

Quote from: TristramEvans;581989Yes, because copying is easier than creating from scratch.

And what says the "Masters" didn't have someone they copied as well?

Quote from: chaosvoyager;582003First, Art =/= Design. Art IS subjective. Design is a combination of Form and Function, both Subjective AND Objective.

Second, you should design for what people DO, not what they WANT. It's a critical distinction often lost when setting design goals.
/////////////////
And each of those settings has completely different set of cause and effect.

You are not going to get the same results in Marvel as you will in WHFRP, and while taking on a hoard of Stormtroopers is the right thing to do in Star Wars, it's probably not a wise choice of action in Shadowrun. And I find it especially ironic that you mention TORG because it explicitly used setting to define system.

A setting is itself a set of rules which often have a bigger (though preferably synergistic) impact on the procedures followed in play than the actual mechanics. Ignoring that is the path to D&D4.

First, i find the bolded part interesting.
I currently doesn't agree or disagree, i just find it interesting.

Second, if you would face a horde of Stormtroopers with the same gear as a regular runner in Shadowrun, it would still not be adviceable to take them on.
Or if it would, then the same stormtroopers would, if transported to Shadowrun, really be uncaracteristically bad at aiming and fighting ...
You confuse the settings with the games, and the games includes the rules you refer to.
With TORG, you do have a point, though, but not as big as you think, since there, the rules, and the actions in the game, may affect the setting, and it clearly affects the genres within the setting.
And yes, each setting affects the rules in each area, but it do not affect the system itself.
But those facts do not mean that the system and the setting is the same thing.
They are both parts of the Game, though.

However, i see a risk that you will misunderstand me, and therefor disagree, so i might not say more on that issue, to avoid another "bad design can still be well done"-argumentation that was in this thread for ... at least 7 pages, i think.

Ok, certain settings requires certain rules to be included or the setting will not be correct enough, but those rules can still be massively different.
Some settings are enforced by specific wording, while others are not.
... But, Some people are more used to some systems, so it may be easier for them to play with systems similar to the one they know, even if the system in case are flawed.
This part, what system is preferred, is what is subjective.

Quote from: Catelf;582039And what says the "Masters" didn't have someone they copied as well?

ooo...and what if they were aliens? And what if the moon was made of cheese? And what if that entire era of our past was programmed into our heads by the matrix?

Reductio ad absurdum is lots of fun.

Quote from: chaosvoyager;582003First, Art =/= Design. Art IS subjective. Design is a combination of Form and Function, both Subjective AND Objective.

My point was that art is not subjective (and it isn't, despite what people with no art education often insist online). There is a certain degree of subjectiveness, as with game design, but one can easily take a painting by Pino and compare it to an illustration by Erol Otus, for example, and one is very objectivelly a superior work of art. Most people are unaware of the standards by which a piece of "good" art is judged however, and lack the training to identify such measures in a piece of art, hence the commonly-expressed myth "all art is subjective".

However, this is only true within degrees, as I outlined. A "first tier" piece of artwork is better than a second or third tier, but within the broad range of the tiers themselves opinion is subjective. Who could say if Jim Lee is a better artist than Art Adams, or Alan Lee is a better artist than Brian Froud?

The point of my comparison is that RPG design can be viewed in exactly the same manner...there's identifiable tiers of game design...some systems simply are broken, some don't support the genre they were supposedly designed for, some are just a mess made with no awareness of how the experience of actually using the system during a game. Other games meet all these standards and more, but simply appeal to one group's specific playstyle or aesthetic taste. There's no objective superiority between, say, GURPs or Hero, it all comes down to taste. But there is an objective superiority between, say, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying and Fantasy Wargamming, or even AD&D 2e and The Imagine RPG.

I don't personally hold D&d to any level of reverance as the "first" (published) RPG, and there was no comparions to D&D and an artistic masterpiece. The original white box (or brown box for those with really long memories) D&D is actually a notably inferior game to later editions.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;581881:) I think taking the art metaphor too literally is going to somehow cause the thread to implode.

Point taken. I'll try and not derail the thread with a discussion of the apprenticeship system.

Quote from: Catelf;582039And what says the "Masters" didn't have someone they copied as well?

But... but... but.... goddamnit!
 

QuoteI think there's a continuum of good design/bad design, whether you want to chunk it into 4 categories (Master, Good, OK, Liefeld), rate it from * to *****, 1-10, or whatever. As with art (and I think this is Catelf's point) its difficult to get objective opinions on what is the best. Also as with comparing artists and disciples, you can say that RPG A) was great for its time - if it pioneered something - whereas RPG B) can have the same mechanics 10 years later and that's much less of an achievement, even though there's no difference practically speaking when you play it.

Here I'm sort of with you, but again I'll note that it's important to separate the process from the product from the guy that made it. Innovation is good design (the process) but at the same time a less innovative game may have a better product by standing on the shoulders of giants and just cleaning up the little flaws that became apparent in the aftermath.

I don't necessarily buy into tiers in art, because different art serves different purposes. The best graphic design, the best illustration, the best representative painting, etc. can't be compared to each other. Likewise, Fudge and HERO probably shouldn't be compared.
 

QuoteViewing each design as a set of choices also lets you see what the 'upper limits' on how good a design can be; to do anything extraordinary requires the designer to figure out a way to simultaneously meet goals that are normally in conflict - to build systems that are more elegant. For instance, to get simple mechanics that generate realistic results with the minimum of extra steps, exceptions and die rolls would be difficult, since these are contradictory. A good design might do both - with difficulty - and I think would be objectively better in the sense that the designer has surmounted greater hurdles to get there, but its still probably not quite as good as the specialized realism design to the the realism nut, or the simple game for the guy who just wants a quick game with few rules and doesn't care about exactitudes.

Specialization vs compromise (even innovative compromise) as an indicator of quality seems off to me. I think that's more determining which category a game falls under before you can even decide on it's weight class or whatever.

Quote from: beejazz;582056Here I'm sort of with you, but again I'll note that it's important to separate the process from the product from the guy that made it. Innovation is good design (the process) but at the same time a less innovative game may have a better product by standing on the shoulders of giants and just cleaning up the little flaws that became apparent in the aftermath.

I think in many ways, the latter product incrementally moving things forward is often better than a quantum leap.  Which isn't to say the massive leap is bad, but I think a lot of bad design comes out of aiming for that as a goal, instead of a solid game that can be later improved upon.

QuoteI don't necessarily buy into tiers in art, because different art serves different purposes. The best graphic design, the best illustration, the best representative painting, etc. can't be compared to each other. Likewise, Fudge and HERO probably shouldn't be compared.

Absolutely.  The best that can be done is to ascertain if those games do what they do well as objectively as possible.  I don't care for Fudge, but as I understand it, sessions rarely get bogged down with rules discussions or huge detailed combat set pieces.  The action or story just keeps on keepin' on at a pace the group is comfortable with.  HERO, on the other hand, will always deliver information as precisely as possible.  It may take a bit longer to resolve combat, but it guarantees you won the old fashioned way.
 

QuoteSpecialization vs compromise (even innovative compromise) as an indicator of quality seems off to me. I think that's more determining which category a game falls under before you can even decide on it's weight class or whatever.

Expanding on the previous paragraph, common wisdom says that d20 is great for fantasy and D&D stuff, but other genres?  Not so much.  Likewise, I don't think Traveller would be a very good sword & sorcery engine.

I would guess that is at least part of the reason TSR didn't have one game to rule them all in the Elder Days.  What works for Gamma World doesn't necessarily work for Star Frontiers, and neither would be particularly well served with the MSH or D&D rules, even though Gamma World was very similar to D&D

There is a risk that this thread already has reached a deadend ... but then it continued.
Why do it keep going?
Because some thinks that it exist some "superior" game system, or at least systems that is better than others.
I'm one of them, but i'm massively biased towards the system that i have made myself ...
So in a way, i agree with TristramEvans, but i also severely disagree with him on what is and should be defined as "superior".


The idea that D20 works good for Fantasy but nothing else is a notion that i find simply ignorant.
Just because there haven't been done any good Horror, Sci-fi, Modern or such in D20 do not mean that it isn't possible!
... And this comes from me, who really prefer WW's Storytelling System and my own!
Heck, i even think Palladium's system could work for a lot of genres better if it just got enough of the wonky bits removed, replaced, or better yet, streamlined. ... And i severely dislike any "levelling system" in rpgs.

Quote from: beejazz;582056Here I'm sort of with you, but again I'll note that it's important to separate the process from the product from the guy that made it. Innovation is good design (the process) but at the same time a less innovative game may have a better product by standing on the shoulders of giants and just cleaning up the little flaws that became apparent in the aftermath.
 
I don't necessarily buy into tiers in art, because different art serves different purposes. The best graphic design, the best illustration, the best representative painting, etc. can't be compared to each other. Likewise, Fudge and HERO probably shouldn't be compared.

I don't see why they shouldn't be compared. They've very different things, of course, so you can only compare them using certain frames of reference. Asking "which is faster" or "which is more detailed" in a comparison between FUDGE and HERO is going to unfairly pick which is better, but you might still be able to judge them by which is better engineered - what skill went into building the mechanics and how advanced the design is in general.
 
This may be a different definition of "design" to what some of the other people in the thread are using - I'm looking not at if a thing does its job but how amazing it is. i.e. by way of example - using this definition a space shuttle that works 95% of the time is "better designed" than a glove that works 100% of the time, since although the glove meets its design objectives better, those objectives were much easier to reach).
 

QuoteSpecialization vs compromise (even innovative compromise) as an indicator of quality seems off to me. I think that's more determining which category a game falls under before you can even decide on it's weight class or whatever.

A compromise type design is not necessarily better if its not that good at anything (though it might be popular, since everyone may be able to handle it). I just think that the system that does more things well is an example of a system that would show good design work, since its harder to build. Also - this thread has been fairly good, but usually people argue about what systems suck because they all have different priorities as to what makes a system good (speed, realism, flexibility, whatever).

Quote from: Catelf;582095There is a risk that this thread already has reached a deadend ... but then it continued.
Why do it keep going?

Because we are friends, colleagues and fellow travellers here.  We like talking to (or sometimes at) each other.

QuoteThe idea that D20 works good for Fantasy but nothing else is a notion that i find simply ignorant.
Just because there haven't been done any good Horror, Sci-fi, Modern or such in D20 do not mean that it isn't possible!

Of course it is still possible.  It's also possible that I am the heir to the Russian Czars.  Popper's objections aside, a body of evidence really can point to a reasonable conclusion.  If there haven't been any 'good' d20 Horror, Sci-Fi or Modern games, the likely culprit is the system itself and not a dearth of people trying.

Quote from: StormBringer;582127Popper's objections aside, a body of evidence really can point to a reasonable conclusion.  If there haven't been any 'good' d20 Horror, Sci-Fi or Modern games, the likely culprit is the system itself and not a dearth of people trying.

There is also another culprit that i consider far more probable:
The makers of D20 Modern, Horror, and Sci-fi.

See, if someone sees that there already is a game like that or similar, then there is no reason to do one yourself, since that part of the "market" is currently occupied.
Then, when it is proven that the makers of those games just had been rushing them out, more or less, and the players gone to other games with other systems, the game developers, as well as others, draws the false conclusion that the system itself did not work, and looks towards other systems, not trying to Do a better job themselves, at it.

If you look at it practically, there is really no sensible reason as to why D20 would work for Fantasy and nothing else.
If you still disagree, give me one example on how D20 would mess up Modern, Horror and Sci-fi, one for each preferably, please.

Quote from: Catelf;582133There is also another culprit that i consider far more probable:
The makers of D20 Modern, Horror, and Sci-fi.

You can consider that more probable all you want.

QuoteSee, if someone sees that there already is a game like that or similar, then there is no reason to do one yourself, since that part of the "market" is currently occupied.
Then, when it is proven that the makers of those games just had been rushing them out, more or less, and the players gone to other games with other systems, the game developers, as well as others, draws the false conclusion that the system itself did not work, and looks towards other systems, not trying to Do a better job themselves, at it.

Clearly, you are not familiar with game designers.

QuoteIf you look at it practically, there is really no sensible reason as to why D20 would work for Fantasy and nothing else.
If you still disagree, give me one example on how D20 would mess up Modern, Horror and Sci-fi, one for each preferably, please.

I will give you three:  d20 Modern, d20 Cthulhu, and d20 Future.  None of these were written by light-weights or fly-by-night companies, and none of them are exactly flying off the shelves.  And I highly doubt people decided they sucked ahead of time; they got pretty good reviews all around.

Quote from: Catelf;582095So in a way, i agree with TristramEvans, but i also severely disagree with him on what is and should be defined as "superior".

I don't know that I mentioned any games I thought were superior , except in relation to games that are markedly awful.

I don't really have an opinion on the d20 system, other than it's not something I personally ever wanted to use. I just don't like the arbitrariness of the rules/levels stuff, and feats make me go flaccid. But that's all personal taste, I'm not going to claim d20 isn't a solid, workable system that many people enjoyed.

OTOH, I think there was ALOT of crap produced for the d20 system.

Quote from: StormBringer;582189You can consider that more probable all you want.

Clearly, you are not familiar with game designers.

I will give you three:  d20 Modern, d20 Cthulhu, and d20 Future.  None of these were written by light-weights or fly-by-night companies, and none of them are exactly flying off the shelves.  And I highly doubt people decided they sucked ahead of time; they got pretty good reviews all around.

Clearly, you consider me lightweight, and you may consider that all you want.
You did manage to misunderstand what i asked for.
But before i rephrase my question: It has already been concluded that setting trumps system earlier in this thread, and neither D20 Modern or D20 Future seems to have very much of notable settings ... i may be wrong, i do not own any of them ...
Also, why play D20 Cthulhu, if you already have CoC?

Now to my rephrasing:
Give me one example on how D20, in its system itself*, would mess up Modern, Horror and Sci-fi, one for each preferably, please.
(* How would the D20 Rules mess up the attempts to make horror sci-fi, or anything such?)

Ok, you may continue to think that i don't know much, and you are partially correct, but i have looked through several rpgs in my attempt to make my own, and i know several variants of systems even if i don't know their makers.
(I own most of those i have looked through, too, but that is not very important, or it shouldn't be.)
My reasoning may be simple, but it is still my reasoning:
Tri-stat, Basic Roleplay, and Storytelling System can all be used for several very different genres and settings, so why would D20 be exluded from it?
I have at least one game that is D20 or a variant of it, and i find no hindances in the rules as to that it cannot be used for sci-fi or horror.

Quote from: TristramEvans;582225I don't know that I mentioned any games I thought were superior , except in relation to games that are markedly awful.

.... Who was it that started the comparison to "The Masters" in art, then?

Quote from: Catelf;582230.... Who was it that started the comparison to "The Masters" in art, then?

I didn't name any game as a comparison to a master. I think the hobby needs a few hundred years before any such claim could be made. We're still in the stone age, if we're going to stretch this metaphor razor-thin. Actually, I don't think the metaphor extends as far as "masters", because RPGs are not art. The point was obviously about degrees of objective and subjective criticism, not claiming that a Davinci of RPGs exists.

Quote from: StormBringer;582083I think in many ways, the latter product incrementally moving things forward is often better than a quantum leap.  Which isn't to say the massive leap is bad, but I think a lot of bad design comes out of aiming for that as a goal, instead of a solid game that can be later improved upon.

Defining any part of the process or implementation as the goal itself bothers me a bit. Innovation is a sign of a good process, but setting innovation as the goal for the product seems wrong to me.

QuoteExpanding on the previous paragraph, common wisdom says that d20 is great for fantasy and D&D stuff, but other genres?  Not so much.  Likewise, I don't think Traveller would be a very good sword & sorcery engine.

D20 is a weird tangent to get on because what makes D20 D20 is an open question. Hew close to the 3e model and it's terrible for supers. But Mutants and Masterminds changed a bit more and managed to do okay for itself.

QuoteI would guess that is at least part of the reason TSR didn't have one game to rule them all in the Elder Days.  What works for Gamma World doesn't necessarily work for Star Frontiers, and neither would be particularly well served with the MSH or D&D rules, even though Gamma World was very similar to D&D

If I had a game company I might repurpose chunks at a time rather than whole games. There's something to be said for not reinventing the wheel, especially in terms of efficiency. Otherwise I agree that some aspects need drastic change depending on genre.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;582105I don't see why they shouldn't be compared. They've very different things, of course, so you can only compare them using certain frames of reference. Asking "which is faster" or "which is more detailed" in a comparison between FUDGE and HERO is going to unfairly pick which is better, but you might still be able to judge them by which is better engineered - what skill went into building the mechanics and how advanced the design is in general.

I was going along with the whole tiers discussion and overall quality thing. Individual qualities can normally be compared just fine, with exceptions.
 

QuoteThis may be a different definition of "design" to what some of the other people in the thread are using - I'm looking not at if a thing does its job but how amazing it is. i.e. by way of example - using this definition a space shuttle that works 95% of the time is "better designed" than a glove that works 100% of the time, since although the glove meets its design objectives better, those objectives were much easier to reach).

Again, design for me is just the process. A spaceship and the process it took to get there are more impressive than a glove, but if your hands are cold and you've got a twenty in your pocket which are you looking for?

This is why I think (subjective) fun and (sometimes based on external factors like price) popularity are poor measures of the design process, even if for some purposes they can be good measurements for the final product.
 

QuoteA compromise type design is not necessarily better if its not that good at anything (though it might be popular, since everyone may be able to handle it). I just think that the system that does more things well is an example of a system that would show good design work, since its harder to build. Also - this thread has been fairly good, but usually people argue about what systems suck because they all have different priorities as to what makes a system good (speed, realism, flexibility, whatever).

Compromise doesn't have to not be good at anything. If we see realism and speed as at odds, a game that does 100/0 or 0/100 would appeal to a niche audience only. Huge crippling factor for a multiplayer game. It's entirely possible that a 30/30 might succeed by just being "good enough" for way more people, and that's before we get into possibly really efficient procedures that can bring it up to 80/80. I think the 80/80 will typically both be better designed and bring a bigger audiences (isolating for everything else, since system probably has a small impact on purchases compared with other factors). Mostly because I think the 0/100's 0 will become a problem more than the difference between 80 and 100 will.

Quote from: TristramEvans;582237I didn't name any game as a comparison to a master. I think the hobby needs a few hundred years before any such claim could be made. We're still in the stone age, if we're going to stretch this metaphor razor-thin. Actually, I don't think the metaphor extends as far as "masters", because RPGs are not art. The point was obviously about degrees of objective and subjective criticism, not claiming that a Davinci of RPGs exists.

Fuck it; I'll talk about the apprenticeship system.

The masters were masters because they first mastered the styles and techniques of their masters (so yes, they were copying someone), and then they developed their own. Somewhere down the line, people started painting better than Giotto, but he still gets credit for a lot of the theory behind composition all the way up until today. Kind of like how Darwin gets credit for evolution even though he didn't know as much about it back then as we do today.

There really won't be any masters of RPG design. Probably ever. Almost all designers so far were self-taught AFAIK.

Quote from: beejazz;582257Fuck it; I'll talk about the apprenticeship system.

The masters were masters because they first mastered the styles and techniques of their masters (so yes, they were copying someone), and then they developed their own. Somewhere down the line, people started painting better than Giotto, but he still gets credit for a lot of the theory behind composition all the way up until today. Kind of like how Darwin gets credit for evolution even though he didn't know as much about it back then as we do today.

There really won't be any masters of RPG design. Probably ever. Almost all designers so far were self-taught AFAIK.

Huh, when you said you were going to talk about the apprenticeship system, I thought you meant as it applies to artists, and how many of the works considered done by, say , "Michaelangelo", were actually painted by his team of apprentices under his direction. But you seem to be confusing the general term "master" with the vocational degree "master" (it really falls apart when one starts considering self-taught masters like Van Gogh), and your analogy to Darwin is simply baffling. In short, I have no idea what you're trying to say, other than I don't think it has anything to do with what I said.

Quote from: TristramEvans;582261Huh, when you said you were going to talk about the apprenticeship system, I thought you meant as it applies to artists, and how many of the works considered done by, say , "Michaelangelo", were actually painted by his team of apprentices under his direction. But you seem to be confusing the general term "master" with the vocational degree "master" (it really falls apart when one starts considering self-taught masters like Van Gogh), and your analogy to Darwin is simply baffling. In short, I have no idea what you're trying to say, other than I don't think it has anything to do with what I said.

I was maybe confusing a few points. I'm in a couple of places at the moment so sorry about that.

Earlier someone (catelf I think) asked if the masters copied from someone. They did. That's how they got to be masters. And their apprentices copied and worked for them hoping to attain a similar level of advancement. It wasn't addressed to you in particular. It was at that dumb "who says they didn't copy anyone?" comment.

In general, the purpose of the system was to expand what knowledge existed and was available. Later artists could produce better work, but that was kind of the point. Science works on a different model for a similar reason. I mentioned (long long ago) that art was treated almost similarly to technology, in that professional artists weren't just tasked with making art but with developing new processes for making art (which would sometimes be jealously guarded and sometimes shared for the benefit of all).

The concept of a "master" isn't a great fit for RPGs because literally everything is informal. There is no system in place for training designers to some minimum degree of competency. There are very few records of the processes designers used to arrive at the products they made. There is very little useful critical discourse about the final products. Proficiency is possible, but mastery seems very unlikely to happen, if we're talking about "masters" in this context.

In short, I was agreeing that we're a long way off from having masters.

The fundamental problem with sweeping aesthetic judgements is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The desire for something notably different from Game X might more helpfully be treated as presenting a new design problem, with explicitly stated goals, than approached with subjective and vague notions of "better".

It may also be more helpful to talk about "goodness" in the process.

I have in mind, for instance, blind-testing a prototype as close as possible to what one expects the finished product to be. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes.