Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Editorials
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1954
1. A cacophony of voices will never solve a hard problem.
Whenever you need to make a big, difficult decision about your game design and turn to the public for help, you will get a huge number of responses. They will all be passionate, many will be well-argued, and they will split evenly between all of the possible decisions.
Think about it. If a decision is difficult (and making a game like D&D involves LOTS of tough decisions), it's difficult because there is no clear answer. You could go either way. And people giving you feedback will totally go in any imaginable direction.
The real artistry in game design comes from making all of the possible decisions in a way that they all build towards one unified goal. You want all the decisions to add up to more than the sum of their parts. Some people are really good at doing this. We call them Game Designers.
Next, we head over to Critical-Hits for a more elaborate piece called "Where D&D is Heading; or, How the Internet Changed a Game":
The goals of the new design team are simply expressed but will be incredibly difficult to fulfill: bring all of the best parts of previous editions into a new iteration that players with different desires can play together. Cynics scoff at this as an impossible task, and they might right. That's OK. I think that it is a goal worth pursuing, even if the final results fall short of it. You cannot even approach the goal if you don't try.
The first step in meeting that goal is recognizing the evolution of the game. I know that many of the members of the design team have been playing older editions of the game to remind themselves, with first-hand experience, what those games were like. I have not had the chance to play the games, but I have gone through my old books (conveniently timed thanks to some house remodeling) to refresh my memory about what the rules of the game once were, and how my groups used those rules.
Rather than a point-by-point, edition-by-edition rundown of where the game has been, I must summarize. I owe my sanity that. The next months and years that the new iteration will be in design will see enough evaluation of older games to keep one busy reading. Some very smart people have already started.
What I will try to look at are what I see as the general trends rather than specific rules. (Some of these trends I have brought up in past articles in different contexts, so if I repeat myself much I apologize. Just consider it practice for when I will start embarrassing my family. More than I already do.) AD&D (sometimes called First Edition) was a mess of a rules set, in terms of mechanics of a game and yet it was probably the most fun I've ever had gaming. I'm sure some of this is nostalgia, but not all of it is. I'm sure some of this is the newness of the game and the genre, but not all of it is. Looking back at that edition from the perspective of a designer and through the lens of countless RPGs, the game just excelled at getting to the stories. It might be because the game (borrowed) from so many great works of fiction that you couldn't help be in a story as you played. Part of it had to be because there were so few choices that a character could make in terms of game elements that all of the decisions were made in the game.
And then Howling Tower expands upon the previous piece:
D&D Next has set itself two noteworthy goals. The first is to offer something to fans of every D&D edition and get them all to sit down at the same table in one big Dungeons & Dragons inn. The second is to harness the power of fandom and the internet to help build that inn, through public playtesting and open feedback.
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The next iteration of D&D has given itself the goal of reuniting as many players as possible in the town inn, regardless of whether their currently preferred edition is 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st, original, B/X, Pathfinder, or one of the many old-school retro-clones. D&D Next is not going to appeal to everyone, and plenty of people will stick with whichever previous version they know and love. But wouldn't it be grand if those who don't come to the reunion would at least adopt a live-and-let-live attitude toward those who do and refrain from actively seeking to burn down the inn?
