Thread by @rdonoghue

Great talk with the Little Dude about where Tarrasques come from, and once I explained that half the fun is that you get to decide for your game, he had TONS of ideas.

Was a great illustration of how what you leave out *is* a genuinely powerful and important design element.

In giving me a lot of useful information, but leaving the origin as intentionally vague, the design created a fruitful opportunity.

Good design!

If, in contrast, the design had omitted some of it's stats, or had not given it abilities to make it's play effectiveness match its story, that would have been a clear miss. It would have been crappy design.

I hold this up to illustrate that leaving things out is ABSOLUTELY a powerfully part of design. Hell, it might be the MOST powerful part.

But the *act* of leaving things out is not automatically design, much less good design. Sometimes, it's just a miss.

And there are a TON of reasons to leave things out which aren't particularly design oriented, the most obvious being that you can't fit EVERYTHING into anything, so SOMETHING must go. A lot of that cutting is based on convenience and snap decisions in the moment.

And like any such process, it can lead to mistakes. It can also lead to controversy, because something you dropped is almost certainly important to someone else, and getting into the weeds of that can get very whattaboutistic very fast.

Trying to fix that process is a losing bet because things will always be too big and complicated for it to be perfect. Stuff will leak. The solution lies in how you deal with the mistakes that get through.

This is why a lot of design is iterative, with multiple eyes looking at these things. Each pass is a chance to spot a problem and fix it. Again, it's never perfect, but it can definitely be done more or less well.

And I have HUGE respect for those who put in the time To do it well, while also recognizing that there's a curve of diminishing returns to it. Each iteration costs money, and at some point you need to be done.

That is not a problem, unless the expectation is perfection.

But the kicker is that you don't get to just skip the whole process and say "oh, yeah, those aren't mistakes, they're an opportunity for you to change it! It's DESIGN!"

That's a glorified "I meant to do that."

I dunno. This is all weighing on me a bit for fairly non-abstract reasons.

The indie crowd - as I know it - loves D&D. It's not universal, of course, but there is just a TON of D&D enthusiasm and always has been.

There's a reason the really shitbrain fights were with the World of Darkness, not D&D.

A big part of this is, I think, that people who are really invested in there being lots of games out there have no reason to view D&D as a "default", but rather come to it expecting D&D.

That maybe sounds like a tautology, but it's not. For many people, even those who have played other games, D&D is still more or less synonymous with RPGs, and other games are trying to emulate "D&D, but with Laser Kittens" or the like, rather than all these things being RPGs.

I don't say that as criticism. D&D has HUGE gravity, and it's hard to NOT think in those terms, for at least a while. Top Secret was both totally D&D with Spies at the same time that it was totally not that.

But the indie crowd I travel in has, by necessity, rounded the corner whereby D&D is just one game among many. It's size has meaning, yes, but like any game it's trying to deliver an experience, and it's REALLY FREAKING GOOD at delivering the D&D experience. We appreciate that!

So there's a lot of love of the game. But at the same time, it's small node on a big company which is in turn just a small node on a bigger company. So as a BUSINESS and an INFLUENCER it has a ton of power, and it's hard not to be leery of that.

WOTC's size is such that even a small boneheaded move can do a LOT of damage. That's unfair, but it's the problem.

But the thing is, WOTC is also full of people, and historically there have been a lot of pretty awesome people in there. Enough so that when something bone-headed happened, I could say "Yes, that sucks, but I trust they're working on it."

This was hard sometimes. When they decided to promote Zak despite warnings? Hard. When it turned out Mike, who I like and trusted, was forwarding abused folks warnings to their abuser? VERY hard. But there were other people, and they were working really hard to make it good.

The problem I'm facing in the current round of stuff, is that some of the statements I'm seeing are coming from the people who are the actual people I am thinking of when I say "This is bullshit, but there are good people working to fix it."

Looking to myself, I *do* trust them, and I am well aware that there is a lot of fog of war going on. Some of the statements I've seen may have context I missed or are just mistakes made in the context of emotional or practical stuff.

I don't *actually* think that WOTC has gone full tribal. Or rather, I deliberately choose not to think it.

But, man, I admit I'm hoping for something that makes it less hard to do so.