The only question in game design that really matters is, “Why does a player care about this?” Yet, it’s something I rarely see designers bring up. Most RPGs never answer it.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
D&D 5 aims to make you care about your character as something that is your personal creation, and the ties between your creation and everyone else’s (DM or player).
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
Probably the biggest shift from 5 and both 3 and 4 – we stopped caring about consistency from table to table. That ran counter to what we saw as the fundamental strength of tabletop roleplay vs. MMOs.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
3 and 4 used a TCG design pattern and wanted you to care about your character as a bundle of mechanics that you designed and tested, much like a TCG player might have a favorite deck. It’s a change I haven’t seen many people talk about, but to me it defines the game.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
I don’t think a game ever needs to be explicit about this stuff. It would be like a novelist describing a thing as foreshadowing, or underlining every word that drives home a theme, but a designer needs to know it.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
In practical terms, it’s why having a strong, clear, compelling vision is important. That’s probably been the biggest thing I’ve learned in the past few years.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
I still see people play 5E in this mode. Especially in AL, which does try to impose some consistency from table to table. How would you address that, if at all? It’s tricky, because I think that the idea of organzied play for RPGs has to be reinvented from the ground up.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
This is an interesting thing to playtest. To watch silently waiting to see the thing you know is there but cannot speak about. It’s super cool when you can get it. The 5e process was crazy, because I genuinely did not think people would want the direction we went, and when they liked it I almost felt we were cheating. It’s like I will never trust our success, which I guess is healthy?
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
This is a bit I’m not so sure about. It’s always better to give DMs and players a open toolbox, but rely too much on DM input can lead to issues where a good DM is required to make a basic play experience fun (Favored Terrain, for instance). This is where the ranger falls apart – ideally, in this approach the mechanics for characters give everyone a toy they can use regardless of what the DM or other players do. It’s the most harmonious path.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
That’s easy. Chess and go offer a pure logic/intuition challenge, which their players enjoy. LoL offers … something, presumably, which I don’t pretend to know or understand, but its players clearly dig it. What D&D offers is the ultimate in bounded creativity. yeah, those games typically offer skill advancement through PVP tiering, seasonal rewards, and so on. The reward is the growth in skill and mastery you experience, both your own and with your teammates.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
I think you made recent efforts to address this with your UA regarding three pillar experience. http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-ThreePillarXP.pdf …
But as long as systems like these or milestone XP are alternatives and not the default, D&D will continue to be a game primarily about combat. Perhaps in a prescriptive game form, but with RPGs being descriptive the game is whatever the players make it about. The rules have at most a marginal impact on how people act.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 10, 2018
Plop the PHB, MM, and DMG in front of a new player and ask them how they are rewarded in game, and the answer they will come up with us combat. If they come to the game 100% new, they don't give that answer after reading the DMG text on awarding XP.
— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) September 11, 2018
