We get together to have fun. I hope that the people I’m playing with are also having fun. If they are not, I’d like to know about it, so that we can figure out how we can all have fun. Shouldn’t a well designed game actually be dependent on the excitement and engagement of the players, rather than just asking a bar minimum from them so that it doesn’t disrupt the play of others?

The point of my story is less to say “Wow, D&D supports disinterested players!” than it is to say, “Huh, I am surprised to realize that some players being disinterested didn’t impact everyone else’s fun.” It’s not that I’m suggesting that malaise is a valid mode of play or something — it’s that you can bring different stuff to the table and the game still works, even to the extreme of “different stuff” being “I only care when we roll some dice.” And that’s because the core actions of the game scale well with high and low levels of engagement.

Perhaps we are disagreeing on the definition of “works,” though; maybe “doesn’t break” is better, in that you don’t actively disrupt everyone else’s fun. Awhile ago I wrote about a Leverage game that didn’t work out for my group, and the biggest thing I noticed there is that the terms of the game really want you to be coming up with Assets and Flashbacks on the fly and involving the other team members/players. When this doesn’t happen for even one person, other people stop having fun.

I contrast this with the average failure mode of D&D, which is just that you are inattentive until your turn comes up in combat, without adversely impacting my enthusiasm for spouting witty in-combat lines. Sure, this is non-optimal, but it doesn’t stop me from doing what I find enjoyable in the game.

And is “sitting around, disinterested, waiting to roll dice when needed” really a mode of play? Doesn’t every game pretty much support that (“pick actions, roll dice, track resources” describes almost all games), in as much as it can be considered a mode needing support?

I think what Monte lays out is unrealistic, if not genuinely unobtainable. Bruce’s assessment above is spot on. Even in the 3e and 4e I’ve played, different levels of engagement resulted in players with differing ability to impact the game’s fiction. The minute that happens, the game breaks.

Thanks!

To wit, I disbelieve.

I must admit that I am less skeptical, but a lot of this is from my software development background suggesting to me how they might make it work. Conceptually, I think, you make a core, boring game that is correctly balanced; then, it’s a matter of making everything talk to it.

As you point out, getting the subsystems to perform differently yet not be boring is probably a non-trivial task. But I suspect that since the power level of D&D characters is pretty staid by comparison to the more gonzo characters in extensible point-buy systems, this is an achievable goal at low character levels — but still hard!

Don’t we have that now?

We do on the small scale. But for example, I’ve learned over the years that over 50% of my gaming group much prefers at-the-table play over away-from-the-table play, which means that I can’t expect them to do things like level up, read rules, and so on, if it’s not at the session itself.

Yet, they still want to feel like they own their characters. If the 5E design team can figure out a way for the detail-heavy people to be excited, and for the at-the-table people to be excited, that would be a pretty significant benefit, at least for me.

I find that so much of what makes games work is individual-group social contract that I tend to give the side-eye to games designed for long-term play that just assume social contract will work.

I totally agree and sympathize with this, but I must admit that one thing that D&D has always done well, I think, is to establish a common social contract that (mostly) allows players to traverse from one group to another.

This certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to the optimal play experience, but it’s nice for me to establish the D&D social contract as a baseline when I’m trying to recruit new players for other games.

I’ll hazard a guess that for some of the meh players, “pick some actions” *was* the interesting stuff.

If one person can create and manage their character in thirty minutes, and another can spend hours customizing, then all of a sudden the accessibility of the game increases dramatically.

Don’t we have that now? Presumably the GM is invested enough to be familiar with the char-gen system to help even a new guy make a serviceable party member in that time?

I am not going to be saying a lot about the new edition of D&D, because I hate frittering away energy on hypotheticals that never work out anyway. But I do want to say a little bit about the stuff Monte and Mike are saying about modular, scaling sorts of options.

To wit, I disbelieve.

Or, perhaps, I’m open to being convinced, but I am very deeply skeptical. There are a bunch of games that offer optional levels of detail and depth, and they all share some features. When you add detail, you have to crank up the total number of points/building resources in use, because there’s more to cover. And characters built in greater detail aren’t just their low-rez cousins zoomed in. They’re different, having different mixes of weaknesses and gaps as well as strengths.

GURPS provides a good demonstration, since with their bang skills approach (with skills like Science!) they actually do have quite a good low-rez alternative to their usual level of detail. Short form: you can’t mix and match well. Bang-skill characters perform differently, and running for them requires modifying a bunch of NPC stuff too.

Big Eyes, Small Mouth demonstrates the same thing on an even starker scale. The original Tri-Stat level of detail, or lack thereof, simply doesn’t work the same way as the versions with options.

If they were talking about building D&D with the idea of options to be set at the start of a campaign, or even to be adjusted between sessions, I’d believe it. But widely varying detail in play, and it doesn’t end up just hosing someone at one end or the other? I’ll need a lot of persuading on that one, and in particular, seeing it work in the hands of DMs who aren’t part of the game design team.

I can feel the hurt and the turbulence and the lostness, but more than that, it reads like a travelogue to a very foreign place that I know only from those odd World Book Encyclopedia entries, like Croatia or Mongolia, printed in glorious TechniColor, but with the layers ever so slightly off, so it gives you the same headache as 3D movies.

I can smell and hear the places you describe, and then there’s that lovely meta-layer of describing the dungeons you imagined while in the dungeons you inhabited. So very cool.