The problem with, say, Heroquest, is that a reasonably intelligent person can not play it at length without discovering naturally the absolute perfect beat-the-game strategy to tackle any room.
It’s impossible to avoid this even without trying to.
Only open one door at a time.
That’s it. That’s the sercret. Open a door, deal with the next room, fully prepare and explore, open another door, repeat.
Once you realize this, it removes most of the enjoyment automatically. You can not but realize it.
Well there is a distinction between “good” and “bad” low art. There are plenty of brainless action movies that are terrible because the action is terrible. I think we need to be more clear with all of our media about what we expect out of it. In my own life I’m tired to discussing horror movies with normal people because your average movie watcher seems to take a horror movie as a challenge and just shittalks anything not full of jumpscares because it wasn’t “scary”
I honest to god do not understand how DnD is considered a mechanically bad game, especially 5E. I LOVE 5E. I have never ever felt I was having fun in spite of the system.
My gripes are entirely 3.5 based, ive heard 5 is much better as a game but i dont really care to go back to it at this point
5E is basically 3.5 but everything bad about it fixed and massively streamlined. Even and a DnD devotee I recognize that 3.X was highly flawed.
Every edition of D&D is pretty much a reaction to that which came before it. Gonna ramble a bit.
Chainmail was a smaller skirmish game as a reaction to bigger fantasy wargames.
OD&D takes that a step further and into the personal, helped by the likes of Dave Arneson and Braunstein.
AD&D was a reaction to the lack of rules for things, the desire for more system complexity, etc.
Basic was two different attempts at making a game new players and kids could latch onto because AD&D was too complicated.
Second edition was quite a long period and itself had phases with different reactions. Like Dragonlance tried to make D&D “the novel” game happen. Trying to capture all the audiences with all the rules thinned the product line. Also idiosyncratic rules systems and a glut of competing products.
Third edition was created as a reaction to TSR’s failure in several ways. Have a rule for everything, but at least standardize the system somewhat. To deal with the rules glut and competing products they had the OGL which opened the door to thousands of products all being written to work with the same system. Two major failures were that the degree of ‘having rules for everything’ and things being incredibly customizable while balance was largely an afterthought (and with the magic item economy of sorts they had) meant no homogeneous experience, and the 3rd party products could just as easily turn someone off the hobby or onto a different variant splintering the market. Also you couldn’t really build a consistent computer game or platform cleanly with all this stuff sooo…
4e as a reaction to 3e was vastly streamlined, technically balanced, could get extremely tactically interesting… but traded off a lot of the things people who were not big on the miniatures based combat, the slog of same-ness between encounters and characters, etc. Also they were really hoping to take off with a virtual table-top and a subscription based model.
5e attempts to compromise a lot of that which came before. It definitely doesn’t have the options 3e/3.5 did. It isn’t quite as perfectly balanced as 4e is. It does sort of continue the trend towards attempting to eliminate the “variable” of the GM, but not the worst game about that. It’s not trying to sell the virtual table-top and subscriptions, but they also have a much much smaller staff and output rate. 3rd party stuff is possible, but not quite so ubiquitous. They do have a… “format” for pick up games, though it’s far from perfect, and if it’s not your kinda thing it’s probably best to avoid it. But it’s massively popular at the moment, the brand is big, twitch and services like roll20 kinda sorta let people interact with the hobby in new ways.
I think it’s inevitable that the 6e or whatever they choose to call it will be a reaction to those new mediums. I’m not sure how exactly they go about that, or if it’ll be any good, but I think it’s inevitable. Some kind of re-write to make it all more portable, probably some way to make it more bite-size. The adventure design in 5e for example seems to be balanced around a many-encounter day, but I think intentionally curbing the system towards adventure-league or one or two hour sessions is going to happen. Something someone can play a short youtube video about, or pick up and play different parts with different groups as necessary.
Part of it is also the maturation of the ttrpg market. Back in ye olde 80s DnD was the ttrpg but now, while still being a niche market, you’ve got thousands of options, even the big players like Shadowrun and WoD offering different genres and play experiences. People who aren’t super interested in tactical miniatures have a lot more options and people really into tactical miniatures will probably graduate to WH40k. Pathfinder probably doesnt help things either.
Pathfinder is just 3.5 on steroids right? Tuned for the people that consider the DM an opponent to beat by thwarting everything they did with insane character builds that pull from twenty splat books?
Pathfinder was created because Wizards of the Coast didn’t want to include 4e in the OGL so suddenly all third party publishers were cut off from being able to ride the wave into the new edition. Pathfinder basically tried to crib as close as possible to 3.5 at first just to “allow” the market to continue to support a published in-print game. It was quite a mexican standoff moment at first, because Paizo (which used to be like the closest to official 3rd party since they published the magazines) wanted to just move right along in step with Wizards but Wizards didn’t want to have an open system.
Over the years though Pathfinder became kinda not just “continue your 3.5 games” and more its own thing. They had a more successful “Pathfinder Society” than anything Wizards was doing at first. It also had a pretty big power creep and glut factor. My last campaign in it was Kingmaker, which was pretty fun, but we were at the point we used software to build characters because there were just too many options and concerns.
So… kinda yes to insane splatbooks and insane character builds existing, but it didn’t necessarily start that way, and as far as DM as the opponent goes that’s still going to be a group thing not necessarily a system thing.
They also made something called Starfinder for a sci-fi fix.
And they’re onto Pathfinder 2 (beta?) now… which I havn’t checked out. Obviously a reset of splatbooks, more streamlined (at first) are guarantees.
Oh and 5e has an open license of sorts, but it’s a little different than 3e. You can make and sell content for the system for one, with some different legal things I guess I haven’t dug into. But in addition you can even publish in their gaming worlds… on their marketplace… if you are willing to take on additional licensing limitations of some sort. That said, I barely see these products, and they’re definitely not filling the shelves of my lgs. I have like… two or three 3rd party products, and I’ve not used a single one in a game.
Super minor edit: I do recall 4e eventually had a license, it just came too little too late. I did buy some module immediately, and it wasn’t the best.
Reminder that Torchbearer has a license whereby you can create content for it.
A lot of 3.5’s flaws can be traced back to the fact that Monte Cook intentionally put a lot of dead ends and super, super bad choices in the game to “trap” low-skill players, and felt very strongly in the idea of system mastery as the point of playing.
This explains literally everything about why Numenera is a shitshow system with a cool setting.
As soon as I saw Cook’s name on it, I dismissed it, and I’m glad to know I was right to.
To be honest it was worth buying the book for the art and setting stuff, and now its being ported to 5E with a full hardcover edition so you can actually play it.
I have like… three good one-off books by Monte.
One was during the 3.5 to 4e transition where he published essentially a minor sequel to Unearthed Arcana, that 3e/3.5 book of variant options for the game. It had a red cover, I think my copy is #8 and signed. Much like UA, it was full of neat incomplete and not necessarily balanced ideas, but I’m still glad to have it for the likes of cribbing ideas.
Another was basically just a book of alternative planes. Mostly fluff, minor setting mechanics, etc. I also crib from that regularly.
And Ptolus was thematically cool. I always have loved a sort of Tower of Druaga setting or an urban fantasy thing.
I don’t think I can say anything good for balance, but once again… just neat ideas.
Reading his mechanical stuff, I always got the feeling that Cook was a great idea guy who needs a lot of direction or else he goes a thousand directions with everything and it ends up a weird ivory tower mess.
At least he’s (From what I’ve heard at least) a nice guy (not a Nice Guy, but a genuinely nice human being).
At 5:03 in this, you can see almost all of the back of Hamilton’s steering wheel:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xsWaxYlCbac&t=303
He turns it back and forth a couple times, so you get a look at a lot of it. Maybe the secret part is how it connects to the… what is it called, steering shaft?
Basically, yeah? It depends on the setup, but usually the Steering shaft is a little further down, the wheel connects to the Steering column which connects to the steering shaft, which acts on the Rack. But, it IS a shaft, and it is used for steering, so you’re not TOO far off.
Company of Heroes 1 & 2 (RTS) both spawn players in a base area that has static defenses that cannot be bypassed until mid game tech tier. There are faction which eschew the spawn area safety by being able to move HQs forward and deploy them with a risk reward balance of you are closer to the objective for reinforcing, but also hey someone could more easily blow up your HQ.
COH 1& 2 are also very map focused. You have an income floor for the 3 resources in the game, but to raise it and also to generally win the match you need to capture control points that represent area of control on the map. Once held they add to your per minute income number and special control points called Victory Points which give zero income, are in the middle of hard to hold areas and tick a victory score (If I remember right in COH 1 it ticks down from 1k or 750 or 500 and if it hits zero you lose, whereas in COH 2 it ticks up and first to 1k wins). You can win a match by Victory score or by a base elimination
There’s a StarTrek RTS from like… the 90s which has it so every building built has pretty string guns on it. Guns that are trivial and ignorable to a late game army but devastating to your startrek equivalent zerglings.
It’s a thought