The Biggest Mistake in RPG Design 

First and Only Rule of Game Design: Rip off what you like with anything you come across

I don't think this is wrong, but I do think the case is overstated. Barring circumstances that don't exist in the current RPG market, it is true that popularity means there is something of value in a product - there is a quality floor that a game has to be above in order to be played, and something like D&D clearly meets it from the number of players it has. But there are very few areas where being the most popular or widely used correlates with being the best - the most successful movies and well known movie franchises are not the best movies, and often aren't many people's favorite movies either. The songs played on the radio aren't most people's favorite songs, and the biggest restaurant chains don't have the best food. This is true for games too - everyone's played Monopoly but it's no one's favorite game. It's not because people think the most popular things are better, it's because they think they're fine, and will spend some money on them alongside their preferred option - it's just that people have different preferences, and products that do one thing very well can be successful in a niche but still be less used than products that do broader ranges of things less well. There's a reason we have the term "lowest common denominator," and it doesn't refer to quality. We also need to disaggregate between good game design and good business decisions. If all we mean by good game design is how successful the game is, then the argument would just be "the most successful game is the most successful" and no one saying D&D is bad design thinks it hasn't made a lot of money. They often mean that particular things aren't fun for them or their group. If someone wants to sell a game then they should consider ways to be successful, but that's not the same as focusing on making the best game you can. Additionally, you won't get far by making a game trying to do the same thing as D&D, because that puts you in direct competition with the biggest name in the business, and people need a big reason to switch to a new system - being as good or a little bit better isn't going to beat D&D's head start. Like with Vampire, as you mentioned in the video, it's often going to be more successful to make a good product that fills a new niche than an equally good product in a niche that's already filled. A game system that is just good enough being put out by a group with more name recognition and resources that is established in the industry will consistently outsell a better game system that has none of those advantages. Even still, it's a big mistake to discount the choices made by people with experience creating successful products if you want to make the same kind of thing. In any field, people with experience will have learned lessons about what works and doesn't work that you can't know when starting out. If you ignore what they've learned you will make beginner mistakes. Anyone creating an RPG will have things to learn from D&D.

In my last campaign, during session 0, I let the players roll up their stats. One of the players was rolling a fairly solid character (highest was about 15-16, lowest at about 7-8 or so). Regardless, she was bitching and moaning because she spent the previous months playing D&D Online, and by that point was just so used to having 15 as a dump stat. She ended up leaving the campaign before it had even started, and nothing of value was lost.

With 1st and 2nd edition D&D I think the thing that made it work was the players. Players were generally flexible and DMs would design or use their own rules when things were broken or no fun. For instance magic-users or wizards were simply no fun to play at low levels so many of the DMs I played with used a spell point system instead of the book system for memorized spells. The only RAW / "Rules As Written" game I ever played in was when we were first learning and since then the system was evolved and changed to suit us. The systems that were arguably bad were ones like GURPS that tried to do everything or have a "rule for everything" and where the players would insist on playing RAW even when that wasn't much fun for the rest of the group. The best systems I played were ones like Paranoia which was purpose designed for one type of play and nothing else because all the mechanics could be fine tuned to just that.

I agree with what you’re saying, but there are 5 editions of D&D. These are essentially 5 different games. While they carry over design elements one to the next, they are very different. The mass appeal is not the game design alone, it’s a cross between simple design principles, brand recognition, and thematic appeal. A lot of good systems are either A) too difficult at first glance. B) a carbon copy of dnd C) Not enough thematic and aesthetic appeal. To the credit of your argument, I honestly believe the only way to truly make a good selling game is to nail Aesthetic, Marketing (tiktok or some crap), and having a more in-depth complex system that does not FEEL hard. You have to basically keep the good, replace the bad, have a unique identity, and have some kind of platform to spread the word and advertise it in a sexy way. Overall good video, I agree that good design is sellable, but as someone who works everyday with managers who are the equivalent of a professional paper weight, I would propose the idea that the best product (or in my case employee) is not necessarily the one that people buy. Like I said, I agree with your premise on it not being BAD game design, but it’s success in the modern day (5e) is not popping off as a result of good game design. It’s good enough that people will continue to play it, but previous designs were objectively more well crafted (GM perspective)

😂 how can anyone claim to hate D&D mechanics when Gary even put in a table for what type of prostitute you could meet?

Pessimistic take: You and your friends all want to play different games, but each one of you would rather play D&D then the crap your friends want to play. D&D isn't great because it's good, it's great because it is at least ok to everyone.

This sounds like a discussion about the difference between successful sales design and successful game design. D&D has lots of sub-systems and it seems like 90% of them are ignored by 90% of groups, and the crunch has a way of derailing games such that most campaigns don't go into very high character levels. Not to say there isn't psychological appeal in those things, the complications, the over-bearing processes, the huge amount of little rules you can learn to gain an advantage may keep people engaged even if on the surface these things don't seem objectively good, they may be part of the success. But much like Warhammer 40K is the top selling miniatures game with every new edition, and yet every new edition still sucks, it's entirely possible the game's success comes almost exclusively from it's market position, name recognition, and community of existing players. And the system's only contribution to the success is that it's extant and when customers buy D&D books there aren't just blank pages on the inside. If one wanted to recreate a D&D style success, I'd say spend 10% of your resources making a ruleset that's about 200% overdesigned and overlong, 50% on cool art, and 40% on advertising that suggests your game is already a gigantic success.

If "Stranger Things" took place 5 years later, those kids would be playing 'Rifts'

A lot of this is based on popularity. D&D has been the big name for decades. It was designed for dungeon delving and slowly acquired advancements. And yeah i have played with point systems for abilities for a long time (instead of randomly generated scores). Mainly for fairness to the other players. And we made it easy to gain better scores as time goes on. The player characters were given enough points for slightly above average people.

Stats are really hard in modern D&D because each two changes the modifier for everything. Getting an extra hit point per level is a big deal, and that breakpoint was less common and less disruptive in older versions. In OSR games like Sine Nomine the attributes as printed make a lot of sense. In 3.X 4e you can solve it by just giving generous stats so the players have the pluses they think they need, which isn't great but is still ok. In 5ed if you try to be generous then you run into the feat budget, which tends to favor builds that can get a lot of use out of feats, etc.

"All power flow according to the whims of the great magnet. What a fool I was to try to resist it."

You're so right, Pundit. We should apply this logic to other areas of life too. The best-selling restaurant on Earth is McDonald's. Therefore, they make good food, and it's bad recipe design to not make food like them. The best selling music genre on Earth is pop music. Heavy metal, therefore, is bad music design. The Democrat party is the most popular political party in the United States, so any alternative to them is naive, and bad politics. And T-Series is the most popular RU-vid channel. Therefore, T-Series is an example of the standard of good RU-vid channel design. None of these started out as the first major thing; they rose to it over time because they are the best.

In my experience, most of those super-hobbled characters were either discarded before play or immediately suicided by their players.

Three rules of TTRPG game design: 1) steal. Steal everything. 2) make the game YOU want to play. If you want to play it, someone else will too. 3) D&D is not a holy grail, but still respect your elders.

I have actually seen people claim, in all apparent seriousness, that no one actually likes D&D and that people only buy and play it because of marketing. This was a pretty common claim over at The Big Purple. They seem to think that marketing is some sort of magic mind control that can get people to buy and play a game they don't like for decades over multiple editions. This idea is beyond asinine. You might be able to get people to try your game with marketing. They won't stay with it long term if it isn't giving them something they want.

Pundit, you're making the exact same mistake with Vampire: The Masquerade as everyone complaining that D&D mechanics are terrible.

nope, this completely ignores the fact that hasbro and wotc consistently monopolize the ttrpg industry so dnd ends up being the only thing most people know when they are going to have their first ttrpg experiences and then they tie the good memories of those first experiences to the dnd brand and not to ttrpgs in general, so they simply don't give other systems a chance (at maximum, they'll give a chance to systems somehow linked to dnd) and this creates this environment where even if I want to play another system, it would alway be way harder to find people that I enjoy playing with to play it with me (and yeah, noobs in the hobbie will have fun playing dnd in the first place not because dnd is particularly well designed but because, even if poorly designed, an ttrpg is fun because the concept of what a ttrpg is per se is fun in itself, specially when you are playing with friends)

People like rules. They'd rather have more than less. People NEED structure, and the less a person has to come up with themselves, the better. Now those rules have to make sense, and they need to be reasonably balanced, and that's not everybody--but it's most. People love imagination, but somebody else's is almost always better. Again--for most.

Personally I don't think earlier versions of DnD are badly designed. I think BECMI/B/X is actually quite elegant and tightly designed. Hence why a lot of OSR stuff uses it as a base. But I do think when you look at later editions of DnD you start to see bad design decisions creep in for the sake of marketing and developer agendas (not necessarily political ones) like in 3e when the designers thought every last action needed to be represented mechanically with dice rolls, or 4E desperately wanting to be a video game way more than a TTRPG. Even WotC themselves acknowledged this with the creation of 5E which was "meant" to be inspired by the simplicity of B/X but got bloated due to Wizards desire to sell huge amounts of splatbooks. But the core root of the issue is that WotC did not and still don't understand the core design of TTRPGs. And that is the root cause of bad game design.

Bravo, Well Done On Exceeding 7000 Subscribers!

I am and old school gamer and I am running a Lion & Dragon game for some teenagers and they are loving it. #LnD

It's marketing, not game design. But the older editions were far better from the design perspective. Simpler games make for better games, since human's have a finite (and quite small) working memory.

D&D is the most successful RPG not because of its design but because it came first, and for most people all rpgs are D&D, they have the brand recognition and the history. Your group have played D&D for years, decades and persuading them to play something else is hard work. That said, I think a better way to understand good design might be to look at the top 5 or 10 RPGs. That would include Call of Cuthulu, World of Darkness, Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Star Wars, Warhammer, Savage Worlds, Masks (or some PBTA game), Shadowrun. Now we are looking at games that don't use classes, don't use Vancian magic, don't randomize stats and so on. This doesn't disprove your main point, that it is a mistake to discount the things you dislike in D&D as bad design because clearly others do like those things but I think it gives a better picture of what makes a good RPG.

This is an excellent video. Kudos. I'm commenting purely because I think you deserve engagement.

I just wanna make board games that inject pain and suffering in a good way.

Among the long list of settings and scenarios that the D&D game mechanics supposedly didn't work for was anything related to the superhero genre. Now, the most common complaint is that 5e is bad for D&D because it has become the most successful superhero game. Nothing is perfect, but there is no setting or scenario where D&D as a game doesn't work to run the game. The people complaining about the design of D&D are bad gamers, bad designers, and bad DMs. There does seem to be an inverse relationship between creative ability and the tendency to vocalize and promote one's opinion, present company excluded as always. Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach make long commentaries on the flaws of successful rpg systems

D&D has some good design in it, of course, but it's a game that is so generalist that doesn't do any of it's parts in the best way, because it can't if they want it to have a huge audience. Everyone has mild fun with it, but not the most fun they can have, and the huge community is a positive of the design, socialization for a bunch of weird nerds is really an important thing, having a common language is good. People will select the best memories and tell the best tales, because that's how the brain works, but most of it is convoluted and slow, and not much happens. Also, you can't leave out the fact that it was the first RPG, and historical contingency has very much to do with it's popularity. It's a billionaire endeavor, there is much marketing behind it. It's a good game to unite many kinds of rpg players, tho. A PbtA player and a Pathfinder player will be able to express themselves and their playstyle in the same table. Not in the best, optimized way, but will be able to play together. And that's a good thing. It's awesome for people starting rpgs to understand their playstyle, and migrate to the communities that are most interesting to them. Or not. And also play with people that don't want to do the same kind of thing they want to do. The problem is to insist that it is the only good game because of commodity fetishism (which is rampant in D&D, with so many books, and minis, and maps, and...), or to defend that it's design remains stagnant because of the 'good old bigoted days'. D&D needs to react to the critique caused by the design of other, bolder designed games, so that the art keeps progressing. It's complicated, tho. In terms of game design, it seems to be getting to a limit on it's development. There isn't anything fundamentally new in what Wizard's is releasing recently. Just adjustments to old stuff.

At some level we should be rejecting the premise that D&D is actually one game. Gygax and Arneson assembled it by taking the subsystems from the wargaming rules they liked, whose success had already been proven in that market. It's a fusion.

Hearing the points made at 19:55 is such a breath of fresh air for me. I couldn't agree more.

ive been making my own osr to combine most of 0d&d with adnd bx and becmi. while using the chainmail rules and updating it with some modern concepts. ive noticed is a good a balence between ideas makes for a fun game. for one example there is the two ideas of the game being run by rigid rules and roiling dice and the other idea of you must describe your actions with barely any rolls made. both have there benefits but both definitely have major cons. having a player say they check the desk for the dm to ask the player to make a roll and since they failed the roll they don't see the big red button that says "push me for secret entrance" even tho the player detail searched the right object in the room. while the describe every action can become like a text adventure where you are poking every inch of the room with a stick for the answer, for it to be some crazy obscure set of actions no one would think to ever describe. i found having a simple rigid set of rules as a foundation while having the players who describe there action hold superior. so if a player enters a room sees a chest, do i see traps ... no well i still act cautious, turns out it was a trap they avoided it. or they search the room make bad rolls they see anything. well i check behind the painting.. they see a big red button. or they say that they search book shelf. they find a book that is a lever ... no rolls needed. reward the players for being smart, they found the thing they don't need to roll. or a cleric cant climb walls but they use there steel spikes anchoring them in the wall and fastening rope to slowly climb the wall with tools and gear, climbing out of a pit trap. sure a thief can climb walls with no gear and bare handed but if the players describe how they do something they should be allowed to do it.

I remember the Vampire RPG coming out and they called their system "Storyteller" but that was just marketing. It had nothing in common with what we now call story games, storyteller games, or narrativist games. It was just an RPG with serious mechanical weaknesses in the 1E I played alongside thematic strengths and an intriguing concept that hit at exactly the right time to sell well.

D&D, in terms of design, is just a decades long example of Chesterton's Fence.

The argument that D&D must be well designed because its popular and many people play it and its 50 years old.... are all logical fallacies. I'm a third into this video and there's no sign of what "good design" means. Good design means it came out in the 70's and was basically the only product? 50 years is a long time D&D isn't the same over the whole period. So is it all good design? Which editions? Were some better designed than others? What is even the metric for describing better design? Popularity isn't design. How did that even make it on the list?

D&D was a good game because it could be played in a variety of different ways, which is essential for a successful TTRPG. You could play it "wrong," by some peoples' standards and still have a good game. Min/Max'ing is "wrong," but the rules are right there for it.

I like the AD&D 1E magic system although I think it could have been explained better It’s all about the physical environment and timing which gives spell casters options as it pertains to the enemy Pg 65 DMG is about weaponless and below average intelligence creatures while the ruling on pg 66 is for weapon wielding creatures This causes the spell caster to have to gauge their enemy during combat I also like the AC adjustments too

I've heard you say ICONS is your favorite superhero RPG system. I'd love to see a video about your thoughts on the game, highlights of your campaign, that kind of thing!

I think that arguing that dnd has been played for 50+ years because it’s “good game design” is straight up incorrect. Dnd has more financial backing than any other rpg and it’s been pushed to the forefront of the market by essentially advertising itself as the only rpg that EXISTS. You ask any person off the street what ttrpgs they know about and 99% of them either aren’t going to know what they are OR they’ll only know about dungeons and dragons. People haven’t been playing dnd for decades because it’s a well designed game, they’re playing it because it’s literally the only one that they know about.

Just received my physical copies of Cults of Chaos, Star Adventurer, and the Gonzo Fantasy Companion! So good! Can't wait to use them soon.

You bring up the randomness part of OS and that might be something players you’ve encountered preferred. However in like 6-7 years of gaming I’ve never seen a group roll for stats. Either point buy or standard array. In fact I’ve seen the opinion that rolling for things like stats actually kill the entire motivation for players. Playing a terrible character in comparison to your friends isn’t seen as a challenge it’s seen as a misfortune. To an extent I agree that randomness helps some people but I’ve seen newer generation of players (myself included) rail against randomness. We already roll for everything in this game character creation should at least be consistent

D&D is well designed for playability and onboarding. It is so successful mainly for those two key points. One game can't do everything to great effect. Every game has some weak points to it. D&D is no exception. Players who want more crunch instead choose Pathfinder. But Pathfinder lacks in onboarding and to some extent playability too.

I have listened twice and I think good game design could be codified. Here is my attempt at bullet points. 1 playability 2 accessibility 3 style 4 vision 5 relatability 6 interpretability

i think a key component pundit is missing about game mechanics is that they need to be fun. fun mechanics lead to a fun game system. it almost doesn't matter how clunky and unwieldy or polished and streamlined game you have; if the mechanics that make up that game are not fun to use; then people simply won't play it. DnD has historically had a really fun system which makes the game itself really fun. That's the primary reason we all keep going back to it. Now different strokes are certainly for different folks, and if you find a particular system unfun, then you'll have to find a system that is fun to you. that doesn't nessasarrily make a system bad (although there are certainly bad systems out there); it simply means that you don't like that particular system.

Idk. . . D&D has mass appeal, like Marvel movies, because it's a heroic power-fantasy. Just because something is successful or mainstream doesn't mean it's necessarily "good" or "quality". McDonalds is very successful, but it's not good. D&D is a jack of all trades, master of none system. It doesn't do anything "well", but they're simple and abstract systems that let people create heroes to play out power-fantasies. I also think the mass appeal has to do with Hasbro's acquisition of WoTC. There was a lot of money put behind having D&D and MtG be successful, and they're currently trying to find any way possible to get more money from the consumers. It's just a hard market to find success in, I think.

1. There is no good or bad design systems objectively speaking (there are better written, or at least complete rules, but thats another matter), there are rules which are better at simulating what they want. Just like cars, no system is a universal vehicle. Some are better at one, others at another thing. Hasbro hubris was that they pushed D&D as The Game, one size to to rule them all, and in this regard it fails miserably, but it's doctrinal issue, not a comment on basic design itself. Up until 3.edition D&D wasn't really "designed"-it grew organically by adding various stuff along the way, 3.edition was the first one that was properly designed. And it was mediocre design, no better or worse then dozen other game systems out there at the time. Fourth edition was very successful from a design standpoint, it was well rounded, sleek, it was good at what it was trying to simulate. It just failed miserably because what it was trying to achieve was so disconnected with fundamental understanding of what vast majority of players wanted from TTRPG experience (same thing happened with Warhammer 3. edition), but again it was conceptual, not design blunder. Fifth edition was fine in what it wanted to achieve, but again, nothing fundamentally groundbreaking (which was the whole point). 2. Commercial success of some system is not a measure of a good mechanical design. 4e DnD is a good case point. I don't know a single person who ever took to playing some TTRPG system just, or primarily because of it's game design. Various other considerations are much more important, different ones for different people of course, but in my experience even when folks declare love of particular mechanics, it is usually because it is one of the handful (or the only one) they actually encountered. This is a case with many of the newer DnD crowd. They simply have no reference system. Commercial success comes from various other factors, like marketing and distribution, which naturally favor corporations like Hasbro over small time and self publishers, irrespective of a mechanical merits. Curiously, while you use DnD commercial success as a proof of fundamentally good game design, you denigrate White Wolf, although it achieved resounding commercial success itself, being a second largest publisher back in the nineties, giving Hasbro run for it's money, and is still around to this day in a form that is less different to it's original than 5e DnD is to it's original ones. Considering that it's a smaller venture than Hasbro, it's obviously doing something right, and while as I stated don't think that 90% of the people care all that much about the mechanics, by your measurement it is a bad game, which millions of players would find surprising to hear. Also, "Looking up to DnD when designing your own games" in itself is a terrible advice. DnD does what it does, for arguments sake lets say it does it well, but other games that are not DnD are different cases. Elements of DnD game design might fit well into certain games-say your own Arrows of Indra, while they might be just godawful-again say your own Invisible College. The whole point of game design is to have a vision of what do you want to achieve, and then articulating a mechanical way to do so. This is how engineering works. One size does not fits all, and system mechanics are but a tool, not an end in itself.

My favourite game system (champions) uses point buy. However I prefer rolling stats whenever possible

I do think that several aspects of DnD are badly designed. Classes, levels, alignments, gold for advancement, using squares for tactical movement, random character generation, armor class, Vancian magic are a few. That doesn't mean they make the game unplayable but they make it a poor game for playing roles and characters. Many of the things that players like more in later editions are borrowed begin other systems that are better for playing roles and characters. I would say that Call of Cthulu is an example of better design. Despite it being mechanic's heavy, the Hero System is also a better toolkit system. Both of these are better for playing roles and characters. But DnD is fine as a game in that players can enjoy playing it for hours. DnD was largely successful in using marketing followed by good cashflow to produce large product lines. "I like this system so it's better" is not much of an argument for good design.

This was one of the topics i was asking about during your last live stream but i don't think i worded it the best when i asked how you took cool ideas and made them technically work in gaming. Unfortunately im not as eloquent with my words as you but I've always been extremely interested in this aspect of artist like yourselves creative process.

Making things overly complicated and "Realistic" or "Fair" is also a trap. I tell a lot of less experienced designers that what they think is more realistic or more fair doesn't mean that it is more fun. Remember : We design games, and the goal of a game is to be fun. It can be both fun and realistic, and fun and fair or all three of them, but a game being fun does not hinge on being either of those things.

I believe GNS theory is accurate and useful. I think people miss the fact that Dnd works just fine with the theory and that it defines types of players not how to build a game.

Spot on. I don’t understand how someone can onbjevtivly say 5e (or 3e:3.5) are bad game design. Then the same people wonder why their gaming products don’t sell.,,

D&D is popular because of the Satanic Panic! I preferred Palladium Fantasy because it had skills when i got int AD&D and Palladium Fantasy in 82!

Super realistic Chivalry ans Sorcory

I remember those heady days at The Forge. I loved sone of the ideas coming out of it, but then I noticed that people were stopping at the idea instead of incorporating them into actual games. They made the classic academic mistake of thinking that theory was reality (much like modern cultural Marxists). They believed that games were ideas. They failed to see how game rules should advance those ideas, so they started dispensing with rules.

Imo, 5e is fully over-designed. And hey, just saying, but popularity and sales are not the criteria for good game theory or design. Your argument has a very basic logical fallacy. I'm neither an apologist nor particularly a detractor from D&D. It was first, and therefore it's most likely the most flawed. As a really solid rule of thumb, the first anything always has a big mistake, usually many. TSR's mistakes and missteps were legendary, and Wizards and Hasbro make them anew, because they don't really understand non-corporate thinking and creativity. D&D lost its soul some time ago, which makes it a failed RPG, imo. But there is lots there to mine for future use and compelling reasons to use much of it. But D&D went the way of over-design way, way back and is not so slowly suffocating itself. Your notion that it is good is largely based on its popular reputation, not any reasoning. I can list a lot of reasons, and a lot of reasons against, but you just said your preference, based on feelings, not an opinion, based in reason. Personally, I think good RPG design takes the lunkhead factor out of things. Nobody should have an advantage because they understand the rules better. That's a different kind of game, not an RPG. That's perennially been a problem with RPGs, the elitist factor. A good RPG should be as crunchy or as accessible as anyone could need, simultaneously. D&D has never been that, and personally I think D&D was always best played with people who brought their own imaginations and didn't need everything spelled out and explained all the time. Especially people who only needed the core rules and didn't buy into all the corporate gigaws, modules, figures, and special whatever to play. That's always been how the publishing houses took advantage of enthusiasm and noobs, getting them to spend money for things that detract from the openness of the environment. You have to pay people to set limits and give you rulesets? That's the fun part of gaming. But mostly people aren't really able to play D&D without those sorts of crutches, to feel invested and engaged. Immersive play is the goal, not posturing with stuff in this world -- that's also a different game. D&D is actually a bit too much for most people, asks too much, imo. Good game design eliminates the lunkhead factor and asks no more of the players than to use their imaginations. What's the line about general game design? It should be simple enough to fully describe the basics in a few sentances, but allow for a nearly infinite variety of play. And it's basic to game theory on the table top, the battlefield, or negotiations. D&D is NOT good game design -- it's elitist and never gets out of the way, and has fallen prey to both rules lawyering and gatekeeping by the publishers. Although for quite a while, it was the best RPG in the World. But that doesn't make it objectively good, only subjectively preferred by many, and for lots of reasons that have little to do with game theory and design.

Even writing software, you don't start with a perfect series of formulas, you literally have to make it, test it, and iterate. I don't especially like dnd 3.5e onward, I feel like it actually has too much 'computer gamey' aspects to it, tries to codify too much, and results in frustrating the things that tabletop does really well.

So, random rolling of stats is simulationist while point buy is gamist?

One of my favorite parts of the game, at least a wargame or an RPG, is learning new rules all the time if it’s too concise and too easy to learn, I’m going to lose interest

I enjoy your videos but you do tend to badly straw man the Forge people every time you mention them. Allow me to play Devil's advocate. A lot of games arose from that which were very successful by indie standards and even broke out a bit. You got the "Powered by the Apocalypse" based games from various publishers, including some games that sold well like Dungeon World. They are far from the worst selling games ever. They also used GNS theory as a new concept they developed and it had the virtue of inventing languages to enable extremely useful discussions. The original architect of this said he wished he had called simulationism (the S in GNS) "emulation." It is now too confused with realism. Toon is a highly simulationist RPG, as is Feng Shui, and neither of them is remotely realistic. It actually segues with the emulation you advocate for in your own design thoughts. Next, I recall D&D 3E coming out and the d20 system causing a massive glut choking out everything. I saw 3E had its merits but I did not feel it was one game to rule them all and great for everything. Quite the opposite, I am a worldbuilding GM and I have always found D&D makes that very hard. At the time, there was no OSR and modular D&D toolbox. 3E fans often took the attitude of Sauron and his minions with one ring to rule them all under one rigid master. I love worldbuilding and having a sandbox with plot threads so players can engage in immersive play and create emergent story through improv GMing. I found FATE killed that for me but D&D had too. True story games give the players shared authorship over the environment their characters inhabit and very old school immersive stuff does not. But I found in D&D I could only play D&D and the farther I got from the Forgotten Realms, the more it created work for me. I think the Forge community could be pretty toxic in parts but it just reminds me of your video (something about how D&D is not toxic just its community). My one interaction with Ron Edwards, inventor of GNS was unpleasant in my opinion, but he created a thriving community and launched a lot at a time when the atmosphere was stifling and creativity was extremely restricted. I do not feel the games that came out of that were any more likely to be crappy than the games I recall coming out from 1974 to 1999. They were not all for one offs or short lived games at all and since D&D campaigns reputedly last only several sessions anyway, you could now say the same of RPGs in general. You are a D&D chauvinist (in the old meaning of that term) and as much of a D&D purist as elements of the Forge were for their stuff. I played hundreds of hours of AD&D1E after starting on Moldvay in 1982. It was mechanically poor from being cobbled together from gradual expansion and reinvention. AD&D2E was a huge mechanical improvement, albeit one tat felt bland and lost the essence of what was there. D&D3E was a radical redesign. D&D reminds me of Microsoft Windows and being stuck building on increasingly old and leaky computer code. The Forge was like Linux. I also think it is a mistake to conflate "good" and "popular." If you want to call something good you need to have clearly defined goals. I think the Forge games tended to have extremely defined goals and often met them. I think D&D does still want to be "the game" a bit and it is not that. I think the Forge contributed a lot and you should not be so quick to conflate "you do not like it" with "bad." As a game designer with multiple bestsellers on DriveThru, although not to your level, I think fostering massive brainstorming is always wonderful.

The current edition d&d has such a burdened system, it interrupts the flow of role playing. It is mostly a detailed, highly crunchy tabletop miniatures rules system with RPG added in. A good RPG system should be detailed enough to function (well-made core rules) and let the story/RPG part of the game play out.

An Excellent Interesting Video! Wonderfully Accurate & Nuanced!

Dude, what made D&D the most popular American rpg has nothing at all to do with it's game design and everything to do with it's name recognition. The game didn't become successful until 1979 and it wasn't because of it's game. It took a news media blast about a missing kid and some stupid investigators that jumped to the conclusion that this kid disappeared because he played this mysterious and weird game called D&D. Do your actual research into it's history. You also fail to consider that ever since D&D, here in America, is ALWAYS the first rpg pushed onto new roleplayers coming into the hobby. It's the first pushed by store clerks, by other gamers, and so on. It's why today that here in the Americas the term D&D is synonymous with TRPG to a lot of people. And there is a huge tribalism affect as well. People are socially orientated and very tribalistic. There is a tribalism with a lot of people to stick with the game that's socially perceived to be THE GAME TO PLAY. To be part of the crowd. Even amongst all the nerdy weirdos that play RPGs this exists and D&D, here in America, is that game. The very last thing that has made D&D popular is it's game design. IF the game was "that good" then there wouldn't have been so many other, new RPGs made. The response by game designers in the 70s and 80s were responses by people who started playing D&D and felt like they had to house rule the shit out of it that they made new RPGs out of all the flaws they saw in D&D. Popularity Does Not Equate to Good Game Design. There are many other reasons why something becomes popular. All of this was a long, drawn out video of you trying to justify why the OSR is the 'Almighty Be All, End Alll this is the best designed ever kind of game' to make games with.

Tbf, I immensely enjoyed the first two editions of apocalypse world. had Stat block options instead of random rolls or point buy, used 2 6 sided die for all stuff. But a lot of your arguments make sense, since it and games like it seem to only be geared toward short sessions if not one shots. Longest game I ever played was 3 months.

"5 minutes to run a second of gun combat" Aces & Eights feels called out.

Aren't PBtA games relatively popular? That means they are well designed? Same with Blades in the Dark.

Overall a good video but I disagree with a lot of what you've said here. I agree that DnD is a well designed game in every edition. But it's sales success is not what proves that. That's a testament to being first, name recognition, being in Barnes and Noble and such, and, most importantly, marketing. Also, a huge disagree from me that RPGs designed for one-shots arent real RPGs. Most of my favorite RPGs are made for one shots. Often those games are the easiest to role-play with because theyre so rules-light. "Dread" is just improv and jenga and it aids roleplaying more than any other system I've played.

The biggest mistake in RPG design is using D&D mechanics for any and every game/setting.

Are you bribing Meatball to make her appear in your videos? Lol

I am now a formal member of the Shitlord Army

Pundit “Just because it’s popular doesn’t make it good”. Pundit then proceeds to say d&d is good because it’s popular. 🤦‍♂️ Level based d20 systems are poorly designed. That’s simply a fact. The game falls apart and slows to a grind after about level 10 because of excessive character options and HP bloat. Combat gets slower and less suspenseful the longer the game runs. That’s bad design. No system is perfect but to claim d&d is the best model is ridiculous. For a dungeon crawl game regarding ease of play, better character options, and more immersive suspenseful sessions The Fantasy Trip is superior to d&d in every way. It never became popular like d&d but a superior system by far. Call of Cthulhu (d100) is a better system for mystery and suspense. Vampire (or any WW d10 game) is a better system for social intrigue and gothic suspense. Mage (d10) is a better magic system. Zweihander (d100) is a better gritty dark fantasy system. Exalted (d10) is a better high fantasy anime style system. Traveller (2d6) is far superior to ANY sci-fi themed d20 game out there. My point is, Pundit please stop claiming your preferred system to games for is objectively the best. It’s truly not. Out of all the systems I’ve played over the last 30 years, d&d ranks one of the most generic and worst for long term campaigns. Even among d20 games- DCC is superior to 5e. D&d only remains the 800 ibs gorilla because folks don’t often try new systems in this rather niche hobby.

You set the standard of what is good rpg and then goes and completely ignore it. VtM was a very success game and a lot of people played, including other games using the storytelling system. A pretty big special pleading when people can't criticize DnD for bad design only because it is popular, but VtM (which by the way, at the time was much more played than DnD, which was almost dead), no. VtM is bad design, even though it was popular. As for homebrewing, that is no evidence that the RAW are bad. Tweaking the rules to your liking is part of the fun. Here is the criteria for good design: Of all the people that actually played the game, how many had fun with it. That is the real criteria. It is really difficult to asses that in a absolute sense. The greatest asset of DnD these days is the community. It has very little to do with the game. Most dnd players these days started playing with 5th ed and know nothing about alternatives. Critical role and Stranger things have more to do with its popularity than anything else.

I would never say that D&D, or D20 is bad design. But for me, who has played every iteration of it in the past, I think it is the most mind-numbingly BORING system ever. Over the years I have come across other systems that i personally think are much more fun. But I still wouldn't say that it is bad design. That is why I refer to it as the "oatmeal" system. Because just like a bowl of oatmeal, people have to tweak the hell out of it in order for it to not be boring as hell. But hey, if some folks are having fun with it, more power to you.

@Kas' mate how did the combat in Aces & Eights go - was that a dig against it in this vlog? I look at that on my shelf and just really want to run it but wondered how the shot-clock worked. I say all of this because I really liked the Hackmaster 5e alot but found the combat not quite so great and I really didn't the alignment aligned Clerics so much - which has put me off A&E. what you do how are the systems.

My most memorable moments with random stat rolling is the in group fights and bitterness that came about. Okay, I'm being hyperbolic here, but I have to disagree with you on random stat generation. I've had more grief with that over point buy. I think this is where we should also add that some things work better with some groups over others and welcome to why this hobby, over any other hobby, relies on decentralization. One of my favorite games is Ars Magica, and while it has plenty of its own limitations, there's enough creativity to allow for people to specialize how they like without stepping on each other's toes. Though, that game goes the extra mile with troupe play, but I'd submit that you don't even need troupe play to make Ars Magica a fun enough system so long as your adventuring is done in short bursts. With troupe play, you can have longer adventures and get more out of it.

Point buy for attributes only leads to munchkin minmaxing. Total point buy systems where you have to balance attributes with skills and abilities is better since you can't super awesome attributes AND high skills and abilities. And you get better made characters since most total point buy systems allow for individual attribute, skill, and ability advancement rather that everything being tied to class and level.

Vampire masquerade is awesome. The d10 system is extremely good and versatile. Combat is slow but it works well for modern and fantasy. Mage had one of the best magic systems. It’s objectively better of a system than d20. The d10 system can do more and is simpler than d20 level based system could ever dream of.

since you brought it up, i'd like to hear your thoughts on Mork Borg. i didn't see much wrong with it except for that it might be irredeemably nihilistic (which i agree makes it hard to play), but that seems fixable. if it's possible to do meaningful good, a player can still be a hero.

Popularity equals great game design? If this is true, it makes me sad.

A DnD Is a great desing for dungeon crawling. DnD 5e Is a great game for the Advengers dungeon crawling.

Billions of flies day shit.

I appreciate your enthusiasm on this. Compellingly cantankerous. It reminds me of people saying GRRM was the anti-Tolkien. Not at all. He was at least 90% Tolkien.

I think this video mistakes brand with design. If 6th edition threw out all of the rules and suddenly was using a d100 system, it would still be the most played RPG. As long as the brand is strong, the system doesn't have to have good design, just "good enough" to not be bad. Most sold milkshake in the world right now is a crappy purple one. Why? The idea, not the taste.

It's not about playable games, it's about going up against D&D's MASSIVE marketing budgets! D&D does have horrible game mechanics because it's old and outdated. It only has six ability stats when you really need nine. It uses a swingy d20, which means your hero will miss a lot. It has inflating hit points as a game balance compensator. Alignments are useless. Armor doesn't absorb damage, which is stupid. Classes are too restrictive. Created characters have as much background depth as an empty box. Spells are limited and unbalanced. Massive budgeting, hiring the best fantasy artists, and massive third-party support has literally carried D&D's crappy rule system over the years. And NOW the rules are being totally rewritten and shaped by woke fanatics! I no longer want to support a game company that has accused me of being a non-inclusive racist! D&D's golden years are over. D&D is now a system and a company that I hate! In this video, you are grossly underestimating the "raw power" of money and marketing.

Is it great designor was it at the right time with the right amount of social rejection and every other game is terrible with marketing?

I usually need time to play with my friends.

D&D has to be good because its the been the most played ttrpg... Monopoly is the most played board game and basically everyone agrees its not a very good board game. Its the most played because it has the most brand recognition

This is great, thanks for making this. Game development as craft rather than pure theory makes a ton of sense. I've spent an enormous amount of time playing VtM and VtR, and largely agree that the mechanics are really bad. The 1-5 rating does not work in practice. The second edition of the unfairly maligned Vampire: The Requiem is a *vast* improvement over previous iterations of the game, but the core mechanic still doesn't match the expectations set through the material.

1 roll = rolemaster

Playable isn’t synonymous with popular. D&D (d20 level based - all forms) is poorly designed (levels, dice mechanics, magic system, HP bloat, slow moving mechanics, initiative, etc). It has objectively poor playability which is why there are SO many videos on how to fix it. I cover this in one of my videos (TTRPGs: stop this nonsense). Check out my game (objectively better than anything D&d related) Xenoplicity on drivethrurpg.

Youre right ....and Im angry about it.

Well said. Anyone who thinks D&D isn't good (or great) game design, isn't likely able to make a good game.

Good video. I like your explanation about randomness increasing the sense of realism. Excellent point.

Hi Pundit. Do you have any thoughts on the Into the Odd family of games? (ItO, Mausritter, Cairn, etc)

Have you ever checked out The Mutant Epoch from Outland Arts. I think you might finded it rather interesting.

So, I honestly listened all the way through the video, and the only thing I am walking away with is that DnD is good game design. That good game design strikes a playable compromise between simple playability and crunchy rules. Is that it?

Do you have a podcast?

Yeah, if players want immersion, they need to stop playing "mother may I" games like they mostly do. Zero roleplay.

What are you're though of savage worlds systems it kind the systems that got me into table top during 2014 back in the day so i tend to have bais twords it.

Fun ratio Starwars D6

Hey Pundit. When you brought up VTM in the end were you possibly confusing it with the tabletop RPG Vampire world of darkness? Or were you actually talking about VTM which is the LARP version of the game? Of course I could be misinformed as I haven't been keeping track of the two games since the late 90's, but that was how it use to be anyhow. Maybe they both fall under VTM umbrella now? I'm sorry if I am mistaken