The Podge Cast

So, if you’re like me and even somewhat active on social media, you’ve seen the announcements about the DNDNext. They haven’t come out and said that it’s 5th edition,specifically calling it “the next iteration of D&D” 1, but 5th ed is the logical, unspoken conclusion.

The announcement came as somewhat of a shock to the community – and not because WotC is working on a new edition. We’ve all expected the new release with the lifecycle of Dungeons and Dragons becoming shorter and shorter. OD&D was released in 1974, AD&D was released around 1977, AD&D 2E in 1989, Rules Cyclopedia 91, 3E in 2000, 3.5 in 2003, 4th edition in 2008 and Essentials in 2010. Or…

So, looking at it this way, you can see the A/B release schedule that D&D has been on since the beginning. A major “A” release is released with a minor, clarifying “B” releasing following after 2-3 years afterwards. Interestingly, the time between major or “A” releases is decreasing. This could be do to shorter release schedules in the digital age, which would imply that “B” releases are a function of community refinement, not publication schedules.

Sussing that out is research for another article.

No, the surprise was the awkward “open playtest” plan they’ve announced.

For that reason, we want your participation. The goals we have set for ourselves are by no means trivial or easy. By involving you in this process, we can build a set of D&D rules that incorporate the wants and desires of D&D gamers around the world. We want to create a flexible game, rich with options for players and DMs to embrace or reject as they see fit, a game that brings D&D fans together rather than serves as one more category to splinter us apart. 1

At first blush, this is exactly the type of sentiment I like to see in the gaming community: inclusion. But, as I thought about it, the more this approach really seems to fall apart, for two major reasons.

1.) Creative investment works both ways

Investment is a powerful tool. Arguably, Wizards of the Coast has the strongest product on the market because it has the largest user base invested in their product. In fact, if you look at the edition wars, the central tenant to each argument hotly debated on an internet forum is investment (which, for our purposes is practically equivalent to nostalgia).

Investment is a double-edged sword.

One of the biggest complaints when WotC released 4th Edition was that it “wasn’t D&D” or “changed the game into a minis game”. Long time gamers felt a sense of ‘betrayal’, since the changes to the game implied one of two things: either they’d been playing the game wrong all this time or the company that published the game didn’t care about their preferred game style.

Soliciting invested feedback in the development of DND Next fractures the community.

The Misconception: You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.

The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others. 3

By soliciting feedback in this manner, WotC has artificially created groups that are divided over issues. Given the “detail-oriented” nature of the geek community and how personally a lot of its members take rejection, how can this improve the development process of the game?

So, as gamers who have been exposed to this, we’re left with one of three possible outcomes on any community-input-driven scenario:

1.) We’ll get our way and be happy about it.
2.) We won’t get our way and we won’t be happy about it.
3.) It won’t be up for discussion and we’ll feel left out of a process we were supposed to be involved with.

Two of the three outcomes are negative experiences for the user, though option three requires some exploration. Is it reasonable to expect to be involved with all facets of the design of the product? Absolutely not. And setting the expectations of that with the release announcement would be a nice step in cutting away some of the problems that would arise with that situation.

2.) Committees don’t make decisions

Let’s take an example of a proposed change for D&D Next (which I’m going to start calling 5e, because the D&D Next name is really stupid). Let’s take one I saw from a discussion between @Boymonster and @SarahDarkMagic about races, racial bonuses and character creation a few days ago. The specifics of the issue concern racial bonuses being static and if those could change in the next edition to change the way that character creation creates the “best path” of choices down the line.

Okay, that’s pretty reasonable. D&D isn’t famed for having cool character decisions like that or flavor at that level nor is that something it really tries to tackle. But surely this change is minor enough that the benefit, cool character fluff attached to the character at creation and immediate investment in the character, offsets the potential issues that would arise. Right?

Well, maybe. If you remove tied stat bonuses to races then essentially all of the races are the same. Well crap, we can’t have that for two reasons: differences in races has been a staple of D&D since the beginning and you’ve just removed player choices by making the options indistinguishable from each other.

I realize that the fluff will make them different, but that is an oft-ignored portion of 4th edition. If you want to challenge me on that, perform a simple test. Take a 4E character you’ve been playing for a while. List me the names of all of their at-will powers. Can you get them all? How much of the flavor text can you give me? The more you can fill in without looking at your sheet, the more your characters fluff matters to you.

Okay, so we have racially indistinguishable characters now. How do we differentiate them a little bit to make everything not so samey? Race specific powers! Surely there’s the solution. Yes, elves get Elven Accuracy, which lets them reroll a failed roll. Yes.

But… well, we make the stat bonuses open across the board. So, does specific racial powers make sense anymore? I mean, Elven Accuracy is fine in the context of a bonus to dexterity – elves are SUPER accurate! But, if I’m taking the constitution bonus, what sense does rerolling a failed attack make? Well, it really doesn’t.

Okay, so, before we get too deep down the rabbit hole of that example, let’s stop right there since the point isn’t to make an argument either way (though, it really seems like I did). How do we decide if this is a change to put in the game? Vote? That’s horrible. There’s a reason that not everyone is a game designer and that reason is that some people are terrible at it. Also, since the community can never seem to disagree on just what exactly Dungeons and Dragons is anyway.

So… how does that work, exactly?

Conclusion

I understand what WotC is trying to do with the announcements. Paul brought up fantastic points in TPC 176 about the marketing aspect of the presentation: it creates the feeling that every gamer, no matter how small their gaming style niche is being fought for in the new edition. That if the game isn’t what you want out of it, that you should become more active and fight for what you want.

In reality, there’s no way that this will really bring us all back into the fold. In the best case scenario, WotC already has the game developed and will solicit feedback on minor points only, so that the community impact on the game is minimal at most. In the worst case scenario, they open up too much of the core mechanic of the game, lose the momentum they gained with the 4e release and the new crop of gamers and create an indecipherable mess of a game that’s unplayable until the “B” release fixes a lot of the problems.

So, now that the initial marketing breeze is over, here’s what you can look for:

1.) Edition Wars – yep, these aren’t going away
2.) Arguments about aspects of D&D you don’t care about
3.) Arguments about changing the core game of Dungeons and Dragons – “Can we make this a character driven story?”, “I need political intrigue in my game”
4.) Every subset of D&D player – OSRPGs, Power Gamers, Story Gamers and Minis Players all arguing about mechanics they will largely have no impact on
5.) People making stupid jokes about what is going in the next version of D&D

So, glad to be looking forward to that.

And give me my God damned Virtual Table already. Seriously.

1 http://wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120109
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Edition_history
3 http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/

I’m not a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. If you think about them, they’re basically statements that say “I’m doing X wrong, so I’m going to do Y to fix that” which is fine, but I think that’s a narrow view of looking at the year and a waste of the “starting fresh” vibe that the new year offers.

So instead, I’m putting for 2012 Goals. These aren’t things I plan on doing better, these are things I plan on doing in 2012. I came up with 15, in no particular order, with varying time frames on them.

So, let’s see what we’re doing in 2012.

1.) Do not miss a week of releasing The Podge Cast.
2.) Get my masters.
3.) Redefine my job.
4.) Put out at least 12 blog posts (one a month).
5.) Drop to 200 lbs.
6.) Pay off all non-long-term debt.
7.) Get my novel to 50,000 words.
8.) Design, write, and playtest a game.
9.) Publish Spooky Outhouse Productions’ next product.
10.) Earn 4 new certifications.
11.) Finish the Iron Tyrants minis.
12.) Learn to play my guitar.
13.) Ride another marathon.
14.) Go to the Poconos.
15.) Plan and execute the Gencon Social.

Let’s get this going.

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from Richard Ashley over at Dragon’s Bay asking about membership to RPG Podcasts, which I now operate (in case you hadn’t heard).

After a bit of talking, Richard turned the conversation to an interview about the history and transition of the site. So, if you’re at all interested in that bit of gaming podcasting history, the interview is an interesting read.

He also talks about a “Hot Pods” segment that he’s going to start, taking the most popular shows on RPG Podcasts for the week and listing them off Top 40 style.

You can read the full interview here.

If you’ve listened to the show at all, it’s no secret that Luke has pulled me into the mystical cube-world of Minecraft. Lately, I’ve been trying to look at my life more objectively and deconstruct the elements of things and understand the relationships between them and me. I’ve also been wanting to write more blog posts, which this seems to be a quaint intersection of all three of these things.

The elevator pitch of Minecraft didn’t (and still doesn’t) hook me. I can clearly remember an excited, lispy Luke telling me about it after he’d been sucked in. “You can build anything. And destroy everything. It’s like a giant playground.”

That description still doesn’t hook me, honestly. But, to jump on the bandwagon (and to satisfy that nagging curiosity) I bought and started playing. It didn’t take long for it to happen – the game clicked for me. It had sunk its roots into me and wasn’t letting go.

The mechanic of its attraction eluded me for the longest time, though. At first glance, the obvious culprit to finger for attraction is the ability to infinitely customize your space. That’s a cool element to the game, but not an attractor for me.

I have a utilitarian disdain for art and personalization. My desktop at work and home is the default Windows 7 theme. My car/desk/office is mostly unadorned with knick-knacks and other symbols of a living room. Even the structures I build inside the game are utilitarian: rough stone, no color with doors.

Ruling out that as a motivator eliminated my primary suspect. It forced me to dig deeper. What is it about this game that other games don’t offer? Something that I get in smaller doses that this game provides in spades?

Construction. In many games, you construct things: a narrative, a character, an item or something along those lines. Construction by itself isn’t the reward mechanic that these games rely on. Progress indicators are a clear indication that yes you are creating something and look at what progress you’ve made on it.

Some common indicators of progress:

• The experience progress bar in most MMOs (World of Warcraft’s is probably the most iconic)
• The construction of a rare item, usually from some equally rare materials
• A percentage complete when on the save menu (Symphony of the Night, I’m looking at you)

But, there are also some other common, less obvious indicators of progress on these things:

• Your character sheet, with skills/abilities that advance (with experience or without)
• The plot – do a little work, get a little story as a progress reward
• Scale – As the scale of what you do increases (from street gang conflict to saving the world) you can see a visible progress in the power level of your game

In Minecraft none of these things exist. You could make the argument that item creation exists. As any Minecraft player will tell you, creating most items in the game doesn’t instill a sense of progress, but one of loss of resources.

No, the progress reward cycle produced by Minecraft comes from the construction itself. Buildings, monuments and the like. With every block placed in their construction, you have an instant, visible indicator of your progress and you get an incredible sense of just what else needs to be done to finish the job.

Even mining through the earth is a subtle indicator of progress – the run back through mineshafts that continually grow longer forces you to recognize the ‘accomplishment’ of having dug that far through the earth.

So what lesson is learned from this? Simple: progress is a motivator.

On July 2nd, 1776, the second continental congress voted to declare the independence of the American colonies from the kingdom of Great Britain. Two days later, the congress approved the declaration of independence. A few years after that, David, Joe, Luke, and Matt started the PodgeCast, an exercise in our liberties.

Happy Independence Day to all our American listeners.