What makes something good?
This is not a wholly subjective question, or a matter of taste. I am not asking with “Is this good?” whether or not I like it. I believe the simplest reduction of this evaluation comes down to two questions:
1. What is the intent?
2. How is that intent implemented?
Irrespective to taste, the clear alignment of intent and skillful execution is the prime marker of if something is “good”.
Enjoyment and quality are separate metrics in my experience. In discussing film, I often remark that I can see the bones of the story, the desire that the screenwriter or the director was trying to express, but I may complain of dialogue, or acting, or sound engineering and the balancing of spoken scenes contrasted with EXPLOSIONS?!. It’s schlock, a bad movie, but if it was breezy and I could shut off my brain… I might come away recommending it as “entertaining”. Tom Hardy clearly having fun being unhinged in otherwise not very good movies caused me to shallowly enjoy “Venom” and “Carnage”, for instance.
Likewise, I have seen flicks that were abstruse, but executed with such care of attention to be utterly gripping, such that I forget the time and 3 hours pass as 2 in my perception. This is something that may live rent-free in my head for years, with vivid scenery as clear as the day I watched it. “Mother!” (2017) featuring Jennifer Lawrence, was an incredible film I absolutely do not recommend; it is harrowing and emotionally exhausting.
As I introduce this lens of thinking, keep that distinction in mind.
How is intent understood?
Sussing out what the work is trying to do can be accomplished in several ways.
The first and simplest is understanding the paratext of the work, and any metatext within it.
- Paratext
- Supporting material associated with, but distinct from, the main body of work
- Metatext
- Commentary within a body of work about itself or other work
If we get lucky, we don’t have to dig too deep to find intent illuminated in para- and metatext. For example, the respective covers of 5e claims it is the “world’s greatest roleplaying game”, and on three respective book covers are to be found iconic monsters, and player characters battling them. This is paratext, as are the occasional FAQs answered by the lead designers on twitter. This leaves an open question of what 5e thinks an RPG is, but whatever that is, it’s the “world’s greatest”.
From 5e’s Players Handbook:
The Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery.
This is metatext: self-referential commentary in the body.
Most TTRPGs will tell us in the introduction not just what the game thinks it is about, but what the game thinks RPGs are. Alas that they don’t make the classic blunder of telling us what they think RPGs are in so many words, but I think it can be inferred that they labor under the belief that RPGs are about storytelling. From a taxonomic perspective, I disagree with this, but that’s secondary to the point here. The game claims it is about storytelling.
Other means
High level details about execution can further inform us a great deal about the intent of a game. Often, the stated or advertised intent of a game (or any work) can fall apart when examined in situ. The following are not hard and fast determinations of intent, but they are lenses through which to examine the game.
Page count
One of the easiest criticisms to aim at 5e is that, by volume, the game is actually about superheroic classes and magic. I’m not sure that’s an accurate assessment in whole, but it’s a pithy observation. The point is thus: in the PHB , the first roughly 160 pages are given to character creation, of which the single largest section (67 pages) is describing classes, and the next largest component is spellcasting, magic, and rules thereof, taking about 90 pages.
The reason for this is mechanical. Characters are primarily defined not by their personality traits, vices, or needs, but by their build of powers. Cool shit they can do.
This bit is a rant about execution: Classes define the cool shit they can do inline (for the most part), and a lot of them rely on magic, which -damn them- involves a bunch of weird stupid edge cases and explicitly or poorly explained interactions between spells and the world. This has been a subject of much consternation since 5e’s release nearly ten years ago, in which Crawford and friends discuss RAI vs RAW on the cesspit that is twitter…
That rant is important to put a pin in for later. The page count of the magic section is perhaps bloated because of all the wiggly little edge cases they variously accounted for, but those wiggly edge cases are a problem of execution.
Page count tells us that, for the Players, the game is about being a magical badass.
Editing decisions
The 5e DMG begins with its own introduction, again framing the DM as auteur and mastermind of a story. The first part of the book is where the single-most important resources should go. It is not, in this case. The DMG labors under the delusion that the single most important thing that DMs do is… worldbuild. Inexperienced DMs are led to believe likewise.
I’ll rant later, but the point here is that the order in which the DMG is delivered to its desperate readers is misleading. The important bits about making the game go are all shoved into the last quarter of the book.
This editing decision would tell us that, for the DM, the game is about crafting their perfect world.
Player/Character rewards
Games have rewards associated with them. (The aside about intrinsic, extrinsic, ‘winning’ vs ‘playing with’ and toys shall be elided here.) The clearest way to reward players in traditional RPGs like 5e is with Experience Points. XP, and sometimes other character rewards like money, are the main way that you establish to the players what they should be doing. Other means exist, particularly for games oriented around one-shot play or for games with a gentler power curve, but asking “what is XP awarded for?” is a pretty sure bet.
XP is awarded in 5e for one thing by default: combat. All monsters have XP associated with defeating them, and the DMG goes to great lengths to detail how you should set an XP budget for building combat encounters for adventures. This is the most detailed and well-explained bit of rules in the core books about handling XP. This is how the designers out-and-out intended for play to be rewarded, with somewhere between six and eight combat encounters per “adventuring day”.
Everyone on the internet promptly ignored that and went with milestone or story-based XP/leveling instead, which is only vaguely gestured at. (Partially because Challenge Rating is self-admittedly busted and struggles to actually create balanced encounters that players can defeat).
This lens on Player/Character rewards tells us that 5e is a combat-focused game. Of course, the scenes of PCs battling iconic monsters on the covers also tells us this.
Part II to follow
It is important to note, as I have explored in this part of the article, these are all tools, lenses, through which to read material. They are neither prescriptive nor final. One could just as easily read the PHB by its editing and layout decisions, or the DMG by its page count for certain topics. Ultimately it is a framework that I use, and a thought process I’ve received some very good feedback on.