Has the patient gotten any better ever since Dr. Cook made his diagnosis?
3.0 being an Ivory Tower is a bit of a myth that Cook built up to try and sell his friends "D&D for Dummies" book. While the Player's Handbook was light on direct advice, all the other books gave ample explanations on how to do everything from build characters to run the game.And, while it is true that some options were made weaker than others, that's something that is really just a part of game design. It's impossible to make two mechanically distinct options perfectly balanced in all circumstances, and the challenge of design is figuring out how to get things relatively close and then figure out whether and where to err towards it being stronger or weaker.Tome and Blood actually explained this in its advice on how to make new spells. The process they went about was establishing various capstone spells for each level, like Invisibility for level 2 or Fireball for level 3, as iconic spells that they wanted players to frequently choose because they helped establish the overall tone and feel of the game. Any new spell would be measured against these capstones, and if a spell was gauged to be stronger than Invisibility but weaker than Fireball, it would be put as a level 3 spell. In a tightly controlled game with players limited in what they could do, it may make sense to have tried to further refine the options to get them as close to being as balanced as possible, but we're talking about a game where Fireball seems like the strongest 3rd level spell up until your DM keeps throwing fire resistant enemies down (with fire being the most resisted element so that could just be a case of bad luck).There's lot of reasons why designers could want to discourage players and err on making some options weaker than others. The most obvious (and one even Cook points at) is the Toughness feat, which is an incredibly boring, passive feat that doesn't lead to any interesting interactions, and largely only exists because the absence of a feat that added HP would be noticed.
>>98493394>diagnosed as patient zero I mean, they're still incredibly contagious so I suppose.
>Timmy cardsI have never heard this expression before.
>>98493477Not knowing much about MtG is mostly a good thing.
>>98493394>writes in a style to filter midwits>gets filtered>>98493405I disagree. Explaining a process methodically is far from explaining the intended use or expected value of an ingame choice, which is the core of the ivory tower concept. And yes perfect balance in all things is impossible, but D&D DOES just have outright superior options made above the standard of their equivalents. The longsword being a dice larger and versatile. Fireball being two dice better than most other damage spells at its level. Its not that other features are balanced around these "capstones" as standard because its obvious that all the other spells/weapons/whatever are tuned to a standard one degree below the "correct" choice. Speaking of, fireball is not balanced around resistance. For one, lightning bolt is right there with the same damage profile if you need to bypass that, and even more so, elemental adept lets you ignore resistances alltogether. Its a virtually mandatory feat because fireball is a mandatory spell, and vice versa
>>98493477Cook didn't make up the term, but he did misuse it. Nothing about Timmy cards requires them to be low-power.
>>98493547>writes in a style to filter midwits>gets filteredNot even remotely what happened. They simply just didn't explain shit and made options that, in their minds, had extremely niche edge case uses, but put them alongside all other options. Rather than falling for it, most people wondered "why the fuck is this even in the book?" and that became a running problem with nearly every 3.5 book that came out. Loads of pure fucking trash feats, classes, prestige classes, spells, and more, just wasting page space and thus wasting the money of customers who bought them. And right alongside that garbage, were the occasional options that were just absurdly better than anything that had come before it.Cook rationalized that people would just naturally come to realize what was good and what was bad in various situations, and he was right, but what he ended up creating instead of a fun game with interesting options that could be exploited, he gave us a system that is 70% worthless retarded trash, 20% serviceable and sane game design, and 10% broken build-tism bullshit.
>>98493477In Magic, a Timmy card is basically a card that would have high instant appeal to children, but might not be necessarily all that strong. Big creatures with scary abilities are classic examples of Timmy cards. Timmy only sees a 10/10 indestructible monster, he doesn't care that it needs 10 mana and he likely won't be able to cast it before the game is over. If you gave a kid a choice between something like a Black Lotus and a Shivan Dragon, many kids would look at the Black Lotus and think an instant extra 3 mana for one turn is boring compared to a 5/5 flying dragon that can remove a quarter of your opponent's life in one hit. The former though is considered one of the strongest cards in the game while the latter is pretty mediocre. A Timmy likes cards that do big things, instead of boring cards that might net him better tempo or card advantage.Cook is wrong about Timmy cards and what their purpose is though, He's wrong about a lot of stuff in that ad. Magic, being a form of accessible legalized gambling, never really cared much about rewarding people for mastering the game so much as making them chase after more powerful cards deliberately made rarer in order to reward a Pay-to-Win mindset. And, many Timmy cards are strong, even though they also happen to be giant dragons of vampire dinousaurs or whatever.
>>98493572In his words>i wrote this in a way that was intentionally hard to understand, and thought that was a good ideaBut then i read something based on my work and i struggled to understand it, and now that its happening to me i dont like difficult writing any more
>>98493394Ivory Tower game design has its advantage. For one thing, skill expression becomes a lot more obvious when someone brings in an actually decent build. Secondly, if you obsess over balance and 'logic' too much you end up with PF where their endless attempts to errata and hotfix their own shitty ruleset just makes things worse in the long run, creating a perpetual motion machine of their own incompetence. Much like modern 40k.
>>98493547>I disagree. Explaining a process methodically is far from explaining the intended use or expected value of an ingame choice,They do explain the intended use or expected value though. That's what the Sword and Fist, Tome and Blood, Song and Silence, etc. books were about, guiding the players in creating characters and explaining the various options more in depth. They couldn't have all that information in the Player's Handbook because the PH was already a lengthy book and it was going to be the one that player's referenced most often. Instead of making players flip through a thousand-plus page monstrosity, they kept only the basics in the PH and all the expanded, more focused guides in the following books. >its obvious that all the other spells/weapons/whatever are tuned to a standard one degree below the "correct" choice. They often have gimmicky other powers that might lead to unexpected synergies. It's basically playing it safe, in case a spell that deals less damage than a Fireball but also slows everyone's movement by five feet ends up being combined with some other abilities and creates a situation where the enemies are unable to do anything.>Speaking of, fireball is not balanced around resistance. For one, lightning bolt is right there with the same damage profileLightning bolt is considerably harder to use to damage as many creatures as Fireball, and the balance is the less creatures resist Lightning Bolt.> elemental adept lets you ignore resistances alltogether.As an option, at the expense of others. And, it's not mandatory, largely because being a blasty wizard tends to be one of the weaker types. Fireball is appealing because it's simple, direct, and powerful, but it's often actually outclassed by spells like Fly or Counterspell or Major Image, which can often "solve" a battle in a fashion other than reducing all the enemy's HP to zero.
>>98493651What he thought he was doing and what actually happened are at odds with each other. He thought he was making something that would gradually evoke a sense of system mastery as players repeatedly hammered their own dicks trying out every combo of every character option until they achieved enlightenment and realized which ones were worth taking in high specific niche situations. What he created as a monument to shitty design and antagonistic autism.
>>98493726No, what he was doing was trying to make a case for why people should buy his friend's D&D for Dummies book, a pretty worthless and unnecessary book that really only gave advice that the books already had given.His whole thing about rewarding system mastery is kinda like a guy explaining to you that if you want to pick up chicks you need to know how to deliver cool and suave lines, before he tries to get you to buy his friend's "Pick-up Lines for Total Retards" book.
