For reference, Monte’s thermostat analogy:

I was chatting with Mike Mearls about thermostats. Mike said that he wanted a book describing a thermostat to state, “The temperature is set at 70 degrees. If you want it warmer or cooler, here’s how you adjust the temperature.” I said that I would want the book to state, “You can set the temperature to anything you want, and here’s how. If you do nothing, the default setting is 70 degrees.”

Okay. So we weren’t actually talking about thermostats. Or rather, our discussion about thermostats was actually a metaphor for how to present information to a DM. The “temperature,” in this case, is rules implementation, and the adjustments represent the ability of the DM to alter things as he or she sees fit, based on the situation.

A thermostat is a pretty straightforward thing: you change the input, it changes the temperature. There’s not much technique to it. Likewise, temperature preference is pretty easy to determine and more or less set for most people. You know directly when you’re too cold or too hot and the process to fix that (by changing the thermostat) is simple and direct. You might have to iterate a bit (going from way to hot to a little too cool to just right) but it’s a simple one-variable process.

I don’t think that has much to do with a roleplaying game. On a small scale, sure: I can look at the Monster Manual, notice that goblins aren’t as tough as I think they should be, and bump up their HP. But on a larger scale, if I want my game to be grittier, how do I do that? Grittiness isn’t tied as directly to mechanic as HP, if I want grittier do I lower player HP? Increase monster damage? Change how I present the world? Organize threats differently?

It’s a complex multi-variable system, one where a simple dial turn doesn’t really map to what I want. If some designer has done all the work already maybe we can have a simple dial, but that’s only because someone did the work for me. If the game promises me dials I expect dials for everything I want to control, clearly labeled and easy to turn. Even when I turn such a complex knob, the results are complex and may be far reaching, nothing to simple as “too hot” or “too cold.”

Maybe a more productive analogy is a cookbook. Games are like recipes: they provide ingredients, steps, and techniques to produce an experience.

A strongly-themed game, one that helps create a specific type of experience, is like a typical recipe. It says to do these things to get a dish like this, but the cook executing the instructions still has a lot to do with the end product. (I know this from experience, I’ve tried Heston Blumenthal recipes.)

A game that doesn’t tell you what to do is like a recipe that’s just ingredients. It says “Gather 2 eggs, siracha, a pineapple, a pressure cooker, ground buffalo, truffle oil, gray salt, and garlic spears” and just stops right there.

Given that incomplete recipe an expert chef can come up with something amazing. You see it all the time on Top Chef. They understand those tastes and the techniques needed to combine them, they know how to get certain textures and prepare each part. It all comes together. This is like presenting a game that doesn’t tell you what to do to an experienced GM: they already know what they want to do and how to do it. They can take those ingredients and combine them with the skills they already possess.

Give that incomplete recipe an average chef, or one who’s not used to working with those flavors, and they’re at a disadvantage. They have to try to find a new taste profile to aim for or try to massage the ingredients into the type of dish they understand. You give a classically trained French chef a basket of Ethiopian ingredients and they’re going to be stretched no matter how great their souffles are. The obvious comparison: average GMs or GMs who just don’t run much D&D. You give them a basket of D&D ingredients and they’re going to struggle at best.

The worst case is handing those ingredients to a well-intentioned amateur chef. Since you didn’t give them any idea what to make with them you’re at the mercy of what they know how to do and what they imagine the final dish to be. They may just ignore some of the ingredients. They may make something inedible. They may use the ingredients in useless ways. They may make something passable when the ingredients could easily make something incredible. They may stumble upon something amazing. Except for the one-in-a-million excellent dish it’s going to be frustrating and a good reason to give up cooking. So this is the new D&D player trying to GM without the game telling them what game to play.

There are certainly lessons to be learned from failure, but if some of those can be taught instead it helps the skill develop. A new GM is going to stumble, of course, but a game can at least tell them “this is what this game supports, here’s the experience to create, here’s how.” Or “here’s the dish you’re going to make, here are the ingredients, here’s how to combine them.”

Of course cooking has an advantage here: it’s a common part of the human experience and someone has to do it. If you mess up a recipe you’ve got a higher tolerance for trying again. RPGs don’t have that advantage.

Another useful offshoot of the analogy is that it brings taste into the equation which is quite a good thing to mention with RPGs. A “good” recipe can be one that matches my taste, but it’s always one that’s consistent and clear. A “bad” recipe may be one that I just don’t like, but every incomplete recipe is always bad (because it’s not really a recipe).

While it’s easy to look at preset temperatures and say we don’t need them it’s a lot harder to look at recipes and say we can get by with just ingredients.

This week will, by necessity, be a little different. Normally I try to spend the majority of my post looking at how other games tackle the design issues Monte ponders, but this week is mostly a list of different things people liked in different editions of D&D. While there are plenty of indie games that have multiple version (especially if you include widely published playtests) none of them face quite the same fractured audience. For example: there are people I know of who prefer the alpha version of Geiger Counter to the gamma, but Jonathan Walton (the author) isn’t bothered by that fact. People have the game they want, they should play it.

Part of this difference is because for the most part indie games are designed for one play experience. If multiple games share a lineage of similar ideas but serve different agendas there’s no need to make a game that interests every player of every one of them. Each game is there to serve a purpose so it can have its own fans.

The best examples are Luke Crane’s games: Burning Wheel (Original, Revised, and Gold), Burning Empires, Mouse Guard, and Freemarket (with Jared Sorensen). There are some common ideas through all of these games. If they dealt with the same subject matter they could almost be considered editions of the same system. But they’re not editions at all because each game is adapted to the source material and the agenda of play. The lifepaths of Burning Wheel don’t make any sense in Freemarket, but remain largely untouched in Burning Empires. Burning Empires’ rules for technology are wonderful for sci-fi, but wouldn’t fit the style of play in Mouse Guard. There are many common ideas, even some shared mechanics, but each game exists to create a specific experience of play.

This wraps back around to Monte’s list of editions and what playstyles they served, and we get to my fundamental problem with it. Monte identifies (in, he admits, broad strokes) what agendas each edition served. His point is that there are many needs and desires to be taken into account when writing a catch-all edition of D&D, but he neglects the fact that the differences of system are what makes those editions different. It isn’t just that 2E players want a system that can present a bigger world, it’s that they want a system that is well suited for presenting a bigger world.

By system here I’m talking about the whole framework of play: procedural rules (what might be called “crunch”), context (what might be called “fluff”), presentation, expectations, social contract even. System is the entire thing that creates the play experience.  So yes, Monte is right, different editions served different needs, but that was specifically because they weren’t all the same game, the same system.

Let’s take a quick 4E/Basic comparison as an example. In Basic my character is simple with lots of emphasis on GM judgement calls. He’s a halfling which means he loves the comfort of home and gets some bonuses and restrictions. He’s fairly fragile but hard to hit, there’s not much to place him above the average halfling. In 4E my halfling also has a class (not a big deal) but he’s now a lithe boatman who’s a skilled adventurer. He can take a few hits before falling down.

The difference here isn’t just in what I see as a halfling (generic hobbits or something distinct), it’s in the game we play. In Basic I don’t know that this character will live long enough to get attached to. In 4E I invest more time in character creation than some Basic characters spend in play because I know my character is going to last. These aren’t just minor differences in approach, these are entirely different games. The rules that facilitate hapless halfling homebodies who might die right out of the gate (where we play to find out who survives) are different from the rules that facilitate canny halfling heroes (where we play to find out how they win, or what effect they have on the world).

The reasons those games served different needs was because they were different systems with different rules. Saying that one game can include them all is saying that the game has to be able to change in fundamental ways, to essentially be different games at different times.

I think that Monte and I just see rules differently. Actually, I know that, based on this paragraph:

So a rules system that allows people to play in the style that they like, rather than a style that a game designer or game company wants them to like, makes a lot more sense. As a designer myself, I know that it’s not my job to convince you to play D&D in a particular way. It’s my job to give you the tools you need to play the way you want and then get out of your way. And that’s what the new iteration of Dungeons & Dragons is meant to be about. There is no wrong way to play D&D.

The part that I find particularly interesting here is that the rules are described as “allowing” people to play in a style they like, and designers as “convincing” people. When phrased like that rules that support a specific type of play sound horrendous, of course. But I’d argue what both the designer and the rules are doing is best described as “helping,” not convincing or allowing.

A good set of rules comes from a designer who’s excited about a certain type of play and has insight into how to make that kind of play happen. The rules themselves help you have that kind of play experience. It’s not some ivory tower designer showing The One True Way, it’s a fellow gamer providing repeatable procedures for creating a certain type of game.

The designer that creates a system that encourages a certain type of play isn’t telling you that you have to like that kind of play. That kind of language makes it sound like, by designing Dungeon World, I’m saying “the only way to play a fantasy game is with fiction-first fast paced rules like this.” Of course that’s not what I’m saying at all, I’m saying “do you like fiction-oriented fantasy games that move quickly? Here are some rules that I’ve found create that kind of play.”

The only designer that will tell you that the way their game plays is the way you should play are the ones out to make money. If your playstyle doesn’t match what Adam and I designed Dungeon World for, we’re fine with that. There are other games out there, I’m sure you’ll have a great time with them. We designed a game to do something, to help you have a good time. If what it is designed to do isn’t a good time to you, this isn’t the game for you.

A game that just “allows” anything is, I’d argue, less valuable. If a game allows anything but encourages nothing then it’s up to you to craft the game that you want it to be. The fact that the vision of D&D Next Monte’s describing allows all those styles equally without encouraging any one makes it less valuable to me. Now to play it I have to do the tough work of figuring out how to make a game challenge-driven or story-oriented or whatever. It’s now my time instead of the designer’s time that goes into figuring out how to make a dungeon feel like a living place, or creating a sandbox world.

Personally, if I’m going to pay a designer for their work, I want them to tell me how to create a certain experience.

This is the trap that D&D Next seems to be falling into. It sounds like a game that relies entirely on the people playing to create the type of experience they want. The problem I see there is the “entirely,” not the “people.” I’d rather have a game that works with me, like a partner, to create a certain play style.

The reason I call this a trap is because it makes the game less repeatably fun. A game that just “allows” all sorts of play instead of reinforcing one style relies extensively on acquired gamer skill. It’s not a game that a new gamer can run well, it’s one that relies on years of developed skill. I have to not only know what I want but how to make it happen.

Of course for Wizards it may not be a trap. Their goal is to get as many people as possible to buy D&D, not necessarily to make a good game. I would argue that a good game would make more people play more D&D, but that’s beside the point. They’re playing to people who already know exactly what they want and how to do it, which seems like an odd choice. If I’m a hardcore 2nd Ed. Fan, why should I be excited about D&D Next? I already have my 2nd Ed with lots of material, why do I need a new system that approximates 2nd Ed but requires me to put in effort to get the 2nd Ed style? The only case that such a game might be appealing is if my entire gaming group has different favorite editions and refuses to play anything else. Then D&D Next could be a battleground where we hash out a system that has bits we like from our favorite editions, but we’re still doing a lot of work to get there. Might as well just write our own game.

The question comes down to: how much uniting is there really to do? If people have rules that serve the kind of game they want to play, why do they want new rules that can (with work on their part) serve the kind of game they want to play? Yelling matches over which edition are better suck; I’m not arguing for edition wars. It just seems like the only people who really benefit from the One Game To Rule Them All are the ones who sell the One Game To Rule Them All.

Maybe Part 2 will shed some light on how the D&D design team on making a game that can cater to those audiences without relying on superskilled DMs and endless customization.

As Monte points out, class has always been the defining bit of a character (even when the classes included Elf). The interesting thing about class is that it covers a lot of ground. Take the Cleric for example: it not only defines ability to withstand damage, ability to resist damage (saves), and ability to attack, but also a place in the world, a role in the party, and preference for non-fighting abilities (Sense Motive over Deception, for example).*

*Interpolation on Classes

This doesn’t quite belong in a footnote or separate post, so it goes here: I’m not sure classes are really strong archetypes. When you say “Wizard” a new player has a huge slush of pop-culture refuse to meld together to form a mental model. Are we talking Harry Potter, Rincewind, Dr. Strange, or Gandalf? None of those actually fit the “stand back and cast a spell” model, by the way. That’s why it’s important for the game to define, hopefully quickly and with style, what a class is about. Same goes for race: are dwarves Middle Earth, Snow White, Warhammer? Without a succinct easy to internalize concept of the class you’re relying on that huge slush of pop-culture refuse.

End Interpolation

ANYWAY, D&D characters are, in order of significance,  Class (inc. Level), Race, Ability Scores, and Customization. That’s Monte’s assessment, and it seems pretty solid. Customization might rank higher in some cases, say with the 4E Essentials classes where the choice of style changed the role significantly (Defender to Striker, for ex.). That’s not a huge difference though, two fighters have more in common than two dwarves, two elves have more in common than two characters with 16 Str, &etc.

The first step away from that is to games that prioritize those differently, or remove one concept entirely. Shadow of Yesterday, for example, has no concept of class per se, but species plays some important roles. There are no abilities blocked off by “class” but many species abilities that define what the species is and does.

So in TSoY race > class, but that’s only a partial picture. The thing that most defines a character in TSoY is not how they get things done, but why they do it. Note that “why” is never really addressed by D&D classes to any significant way. There’s usually something in the “flavor” text (how I hate that word) but it’s not presented so that every play encounters it. TSoY has one of my favorite bits of gaming tech, Keys. A Key is a way of earning XP that’s a) per character and b) entirely in the players’ hands. Instead of the GM awarding XP as they see fit the player takes XP for playing to their Keys, as specified by the Key. Of course usually the entire table is involved in judging what really counts for a Key, but the responsibility is fundamentally shifted.

That’s the most important part of a TSoY character. My character might grow from defeating monsters while yours grows from dealing with their sordid past. The most important part of the character isn’t how but why. (Inline footnote: Keys would be a wonderful modular XP system for D&D Next. Choose from a set of Keys about slaying stuff for treasure or a set of keys about gaining power, &etc.)

That said, a TSoY character still looks pretty similar to a D&D character in many ways. They have (more or less, with different names) Abilities, Skills, Feats, and so on. Keys are just added to the list and moved to the most important spot.

Going a step further, some games get rid of any significant difference in numerical strength. Systems like this, like Dust Devils and Dogs in the Vineyard, give everyone similar amounts of ability and leaves it to the players to allocate those abilities to make the characters different.

This ties back to Monte’s comments about roles in an interesting way. Typical D&D classes sort into roles in pretty dramatic ways: only this class can use these weapons and armor, only this class can heal, and so on. Dogs characters have no such role specified or enforced, but the characters still diverge in interesting ways.

The gaming tech is quite simple: based on your character’s background in Dogs in the Vineyard you get to allocate different numbers to Stats, Skills, and Relationships (terminology adapted for clarity and comparison, the book uses different terms). There’s a list of Stats, but Skills and Relationships are left to the player. Instead of choosing from Stealth, Knowledge, &etc. you write down ways your character gets things done and assign weight to them. I had a character who’s smile was one of his strongest abilities, it was just hard to be made at such a winning smile. Of course that was no use in a gun fight, but that’s life. The point is that, without any forced roles, every character comes out entirely different. Different enough that the ways they play off of each other is one of the draws of the game.

That’s not to say such open ended choices always work. In part Dogs characters work because they’re already constrained, you know you’re a religious lawman of sorts, riding into town and dealing with their sins. That framework is what allows such wide choices, since you already know what your character does.

But characters can be simpler still. In Primetime Adventures a character is most importantly an Issue. Each character’s issue is their ongoing plot (since PTA is a game of TV drama). Maybe your issue is your mistrusting father and mine is my debts that need to be paid. Beyond that each character is minimal, they specify a few things that define what they do well, but they’re not nearly as important as Issues.

This is character stripped of nearly everything Monte talks about: no class, race, abilities. A tiny bit of customization. And it still works.

You can go further too. In Fiasco you don’t have a character sheet or anything mechanical that makes your character different from any other. Instead your character is entirely defined by their place in the web of connections and plots created during setup. Fiasco characters, despite having no intrinsic abilities, only a place in the world, are still some of the most memorable I’ve played.

That’s a drive-by tour of stripping characters down from their core. Of course class, level, and the rest are genius, but they’re not the only genius. All of these games create engaging characters. But maybe they’re not the right characters for D&D, Fiasco is a considerably different game.

So let’s wrap back around to something more D&D-like: Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel arrives at a similar place to D&D, much like TSoY does: a character with many ways to do things and a few defining characteristics that answer why. The interesting bit is that BW does this without any concept of class and without relying on open-ended point buy.

The first bit of BW character is lifepaths. Each lifepath describes what your character did for a portion of their life and grant you certain skills and traits. So if you want a character with magic you’d better find a way into one of the magic lifepaths. Each lifepath has requirements and others that it easily leads to and is as standard for BW what at first looks like needless complexity actually ties into the core of the game. Each path, for example, includes the number of years it requires, which you add to get your character’s starting age. That doesn’t seem important until it starts to factor into your stats. Jumping from unrelated lifepaths takes more years, meaning your stats change. Hope it was worth it.

This is, in a way, like class. Except that it’s entirely more concrete. You know how your character got the skills they have. The lifepaths are also broken down by race, making each race different in key ways.

The other key bit of making a BW character is questions. Several stats and abilities give you questions to answer about your character, each answer modifies your stat. Take Faith, the “divine magic” stat: your starting Faith is based on the answers to three questions. These questions mean that, to play a high Faith character, they have to feel certain ways. It’s a stat that’s both descriptive and prescriptive.

Finally BW has Beliefs, which I’ve mentioned before. They fill a similar role to keys: per-player XP conditions that help define why you play.

One last note on BW has to do with advancement. BW has no levels, you never gain a lifepath after character creation. Instead you advance the skills you use and to advance you have to roll the skill a certain number of times (pass or fail) against difficulties that are easy, hard, or extreme. This leads to the same joy of new abilities that Monte mentions, but it ties that to interesting play. Players will actively seek out tough situations to become stronger. That’s like a giftwrapped present to the GM.

Hopefully these examples show that Class > Race > Abilities > Customization isn’t the only way of ordering, or even the only set of ways to define a character. D&D certainly has some obligation to keep some of these concepts around but that doesn’t mean they can’t twist a little. What if class and race helped answer the why not just the how? What if customization was key, but tied to simply presented choices? Hopefully these are the questions the D&D design crew is considering.

First off, read the mini-post that goes with the poll, it’ll only take a second. In particular, note the last sentence of the first paragraph, sic: “We all know them and are familiar with them, and to some degree we expect to see them in flavor text describing these aspects of the game.”

There are two words there that just bog me down: “flavor text.”

Here’s the thing that many games (examples in a bit) show: there is no such thing as flavor text in an RPG. The game is entirely in your imagination, and the text influences your imagination, so the entire text is the game.

Let’s take an example from a D&D book, one of the later d20 expansions that I think is particularly cool: the Tome of Magic. Here’s an excerpt from one of the classes, the Binder, in the “Playing a Binder” section (p. 12):

“After all, your activities and powers seem foreign and frightening to many people, and various religious sects consider contacting a vestige a sacrilege.”

That is, ostensibly, “flavor text.” There’s no mechanic to it per se. But phrase it a different way and it becomes clearly a rule:

Sacrilege: Those closely attuned to the divine will always react to signs of a vestige (usually that means badly).

The only change here is in the imperative. The first is text that’s easy to forget and buried at the end of one of the less-read sections of a class (just guessing here, but I usually skim them). The second is a class feature, which can be presented much like the standard combat abilities. The only difference between them is the phrasing and how they’re presented: the first is “flavor” only because the text presents it that way, it’s just as much a part of the class and playing the game as HP or AC.

There are plenty of examples of this: the Cleric class writeup often (though not in 4E, I checked) says something about Clerics acting on behalf of their larger religion, or Wizards being the product of masters and colleges, or Gnomes hating Kobolds. These aren’t just “flavor” they’re part of playing the game. The fact that gnome guards will attack kobolds on sight might make for a tense situation when the unlucky adventurer has been polymorphed into a kobold but needs to see the Gnome King. A Wizard’s tie to a tradition of magic gives them ties to a place, a person, and so on. Clerics have an expectation of support and an obligation to serve. All of these are what makes an RPG and RPG.

The root of “flavor text” is Magic, where some cards feature non-gameplay text meant to entertain. In Magic the term is wholly apt: the flavor text by definition has no effect on gameplay. It shouldn’t require further explanation to say RPGs aren’t Magic.

When talking about “flavor” it’s worth noting that flavor is the game. Without flavor, an RPG is a small scale miniatures thing. So breaking off a key piece and calling it “flavor” rather than “what the game is” seems counterproductive.

A few notes on the specific examples Monte offers, just since I’ve dealt with similar design issues:

Giving a racial favored weapon bonus is mildly problematic. Consider the possible “dwarves get +1 damage with axes” rule. In this case, any player making a dwarf either has to use an axe or give up a worthwhile bonus. Setting aside the issue of encouraging breaking the mold to create memorable characters, this just makes all dwarves hidebound to use an axe. Any dwarf who uses something else must have a low INT.

There’s an easy fix: instead of offering a permanent bonus, make starting with an axe easier. After all, your dwarf probably spent years in a dwarven hold using one. If instead of a permanent bonus all dwarves start with a masterwork axe for free each player has flexibility. There’s also tons of hooks for interesting play: a dwarf who starts off without his axe has a surplus of money, who wants it? A dwarf who gives up the axe after finding a magic sword is giving up his heritage; how do other dwarfs look at him when he returns to the hold?

The whole hatred-ability/favored enemy kind of thing is also somewhat problematic in play as well. If I make my character who is, for whatever reason, especially powerful against Kobolds then I’m at the mercy of the circumstances as to if I get to use my cool abilities or not. The Ranger is typically another source of this: I get all these abilities for fighting Orcs (or whatever) then either get to show off dramatically (v. Orcs) or sit around starting longingly at the cool abilities I could be using (v. anything else).

One way around this is to make the ability more nuanced then a combat bonus. +1 to hit or damage or whatever makes my character sub-optimal except when the enemies I’m fighting (which are beyond my control) happen to be the right type. Instead maybe I get a special ability where I always notice signs of my favored enemy. Now I’ll never be caught unawares by orcs, since I’ll have picked up something about them, but I also won’t be missing powerful bonuses by fighting the wrong thing.

Another option is to make the bonus less direct. Say Kobolds are known for their traps. Maybe as a Gnome I get a bonus vs. simple traps. This accurately reflects that Gnomes are used to Kobold tricks, but is also broad enough to not limit my character’s effectiveness to a certain enemy.

Those specific examples aside, let’s just stop talking about “flavor” v. “rules” or “fluff” v. “crunch.” Anything that colors the world we present while we play is part of the game, no matter if it involves math or prose. There are ways to present the non-math parts of the game more directly and effectively, but that doesn’t change the underlying concept. The fiction is the game.

The difference between a modular system and a customizable system is the interface. With a modular system you can swap out two similar modules without changing anything else in the system because they present the same interface. A customizable system is any system where it’s easy to see where to modify to change it to meet your needs. All modular systems are customizable, but not vice versa.

Let’s use a concrete example: we want to use Mutants and Mastermind-ish combat with D&D 3.5. This is an awesome idea, Mutants and Masterminds has some pretty sweet stuff for combat. Unfortunately Mutants and Masterminds requires a damage saving throw which is nowhere in the D&D classes, so we have to make it up. There are guidelines we can use—maybe something related to fortitude modified by HP—but it’s up for us to figure out. That’s not a modular system: to swap out to damage saves we had to make changes elsewhere in the system.

Even if Mutants and Masterminds had provided a conversion from D&D classes to damage saves it still wouldn’t be modular. One side of the system (in this case, the Mutants and Masterminds combat rules) needs to have inside knowledge of the other system to make it work. If the conversion from D&D to Mutants and Masterminds relies on Fortitude save as a base but I’m using a set of alternate classes that have Old School saves (like v. Poison, v. Magic) I stil have work to do.

That’s why I’d classify d20 as customizable but not modular. A modular design is one where each module can act with limited knowledge of another.

A modular approach would be one where there’s a defined pattern to what character classes must have to be part of the modular system and that information is general enough to be consumed by other systems. Maybe each class has an all-purpose HP stat, where HP can be consumed in different ways by different subsystems. Instead of HP being a specific stat used by a specific subsystem, HP is now a general number which indicates endurance to damage and can be used by any number of subsystems.

The key difference here is that each subsystem is designed with what it consumes and creates explicitly decided as part of the system design.

The reason d20 isn’t modular is because there aren’t clear lines between the subsystems. What one designer thinks of as part of the class system another designer thinks is part of the combat system. That’s exactly what’s going on the in example above: one designer thinks they can change the saves without modifying anything else, but another designer relies on those saves in a different way.

A truly modular system would be one where the class subsystem says “HP is a measure of how much damage you can take” but no more than that. It can’t say that you lose HP as you take damage because taking damage is part of the combat subsystem, which may be entirely different. Some combat systems might use HP as a number you decrease as you take damage, some might use it as a save you make, some might make it the point at which you switch to a different mode of play (there’s no death).

The advantage here isn’t that it makes any one example work better, it’s that it makes designers better able to work together. Any module that adheres to the module interfaces can be swapped in or out seamlessly.

This kind of thing works very well in software design, it’s a key point in object-oriented programming in particular. That’s where my definition of “interface” comes from, more or less. The idea is that pieces of the program can declare what common uses they are good for, therefore allowing them to be used anywhere you need a thing that does that. You might have one storage scheme that uses one huge file and one that uses a database, but they can present the same interface so you can swap between them. They both say they’re good for storing things, they support that interface, so you can use them both interchangeably for that use.

I’m not entirely sure this is practical in a game. I can’t think of a game that’s modular in that sense and scale that currently exists. There are lots of base systems that are customizable (d20, FATE, &etc.), and some even have semi-modular components. Semi-modular would be something like d20 feats: you can make your own feats easily and they just fall into the feat space. But they’re not truly modular because they can (and often do) depend on outside systems. Some feats immediately become useless once you don’t have a grid for combat, for example. It’s not that there can’t be feats that only function when another module is in place, it’s that they should be clearly modularized too.

So maybe this is something that the D&D Next design team has tackled. From their character descriptions it sounds like it, at least to a degree. Monte has mentioned one person playing a character with just a few things written down while another has a full set of feats and powers, presumably this means that there are modules that take the core character definition and use it as input to a more specific system, say feats or whatever. I’ll be interested to see how this works out for the D&D design team, it;s a big problem but they seem to have some good plans of attack.

There biggest question on my mind: Is D&D all about one thing (fantasy adventure, say) or is it many things to many people (character drama, guided story, etc.)?

Option #1: The Adaptable Fantasy Adventure Game

This is the option where WotC comes up with a core of what D&D is about and makes a game that’s about that with modular systems to add detail as needed. They key bit is that WotC makes this a game about one clear thing, not just a collection of subsystems that you do whatever with.

In a lot of ways this looks like Burning Wheel, which is understandable. Burning Wheel is a very successful game in a number of ways (financially, design-wise) so it’s a solid starting point. Just like Burning Wheel is about fighting for what you believe, D&D would have some core statement of what it’s about that fuels the most basic rules and then subsystems that add detail to various areas. The GM’s role too would be clearly stated in a way that serves what the game is about.

Of course defining what D&D is involves a lot of work. Is D&D about how the heroes overcome challenges, or if  the heroes can overcome challenges? Are D&D characters the focus of the action, or interchangeable participants? Any answer to these excludes some people who only want (or think they want) games of type T.

In some ways this is a stealth 4E. The common wisdom is that 4E is a failure because it only serves one style of play. This approach to D&D Next would be testing that: is it really that D&D has to be more than fantasy adventure, or does it just have to be able to approach that fantasy adventure in many ways?

Option #2: Multiple Games In One

I already went on at length about this one. The basic gist is: give just enough core similarity to make several different games effectively one “game.” Make everything modular, including the basics of what the game is about. Let each group choose from a few preset options, easily tweak those a bit, or completely build their own to their playstyle.

The interface design problem is tough to say the least. The complexity also has to be easily swept under the rug at times, so that not every group has to go through the process of building a game. This is the most complex approach I can see, a real daunting design problem.

It’s also the most rewarding. WotC gets to make the D&D that serves both the people who want a game about how the heroes succeed and those that play to find out if  the heroes succeed and those who don’t play to find out anything at all. Of course those are really different games, but by sharing some core mechanics and a common interface so detail can be added on, they get to call it one game for marketing purposes.

Option #3: The Everything Game

More and more this is the game that the comments made by the designers sound like. This is the game where D&D still doesn’t really tell you what kind of games it supports, but it includes subsystems that appear to support all kinds of play.

This is the system where there’s, say, a modular subsystem for debates. This gives the appearance of a game that can do a courtly lords kind of game, where the player characters weigh their beliefs and convictions with the cost that pursuing them will incur. The problem is, if the core elements of the game (and the GM’s toolkit) are all about test-your-mettle challenges, it isn’t really set up for that game, no matter how much detail it can give to social situations.

On the front of making the game that makes money, this may be the best bet. It keeps the 3E-style do-anything attitude, but gives a modular rules detail that lets people customize their game to be as heavy or light in various areas as they want. They can advertise it as “D&D for everybody” but not actually go through the trouble of really serving the market for character-driven roleplayers or whatever.

This falls down in the same way some previous editions—most notably 3E—have, but the fall is softened by endless mechanics that give the appearance of the game you want. If you really want a game where you find out if you can build and play a character well enough to save the world it gives you lots of meaty subsystems that allow for complex characters with serious synergy, but the basic structure of the game never changes. In particular the GM’s toolkit doesn’t include anything about how to effectively run a challenge-based game.

One thing 4E did well was to make a game that effectively served one agenda, they just didn’t do a good job of communicating that agenda. 3E had endless forum threads for “How do you do Game of Thrones with 3E?” or “How do you do Harry Potter with 3?”, a problem which 4E largely avoided. These threads are usually fruitless because doing Game of Thrones or Harry Potter requires some fundamentally different approaches, not just a good (modular?) subsystem for learning spells or rallying armies. 3E gave the appearance of doing anything by effectively doing nothing, and that’s a tempting path for D&D Next.

Monty Hall Problem

Those are, at the highest level, the approaches I see: one solid game with modular subsystems that support it, many games under one name, or one aimless game with modular subsystems to give the appearance of serving different agendas. So we’re left with three doors. Two of those doors (options 1 and 2) seem strong to me, but they may challenge audience conceptions a little. The last door is an easy approach that has money potential in the short run, but isn’t actually going to serve many gamers.

The difference between these three approaches is that 1 and 2 acknowledge that rules matter: that they communicate insight and aid play. Option 3 on the other hand says that rules have no effect on the game actually created, that they’re just personal preference.

Coming back around to this week’s Legends and Lore, Monte says:

imagine a game where one player has a simple character sheet that has just a few things noted on it, and the player next to him has all sorts of skills, feats, and special abilities. And yet they can still play the game together and everything remains relatively balanced. Your 1E-loving friend can play in your 3E-style game and not have to deal with all the options he or she doesn’t want or need.

That either supposes some fundamental similarity between 1E and 3E that I don’t see, or implies that the rules don’t really matter. If the difference between a 3E and 4E player is really just in preference for presentation and level of mechanical crunch, why are those games different?

This kind of design presupposes that 3E’s skill system or 4E’s powers were chosen entirely as a matter of taste, and not even taste in how the game’s actual agenda. If 1E and 3E characters can really play the same game, why allow both? What purpose does the extra weight of a 3E character serve?

The whole idea that game designers are different in any way from the average game player just needs to die. You are already designing games, and your work as a game designer isn’t fundamentally different from your work as a gamer.

There’s a certain temptation to set game designers apart, phrasing the divide between designer and gamer as alike to that between an author and reader. In fact it’s more like a composer and a performer.

Composition is just performance codified and transmitted, like game design is play codified and transmitted. The moment a performer becomes a composer is when they write down a performance so others can do the same. They haven’t really done anything different except learn to communicate how to perform, instead of just the performance itself. We can draw the artificial performer/composer-player/designer line based on having actually codified and transmitted the idea, but it’s a technicality at best.

When you sit down to play and you try to create a certain experience at the table, as a GM or a player, you’re designing a game. Sometimes that game is indistinguishable from the one transmitted in the rules, like a performance that doesn’t embellish the score. Sometimes the game is actually something entirely different than the rules ostensibly being used, like an improvisation based on a familiar tune.

Setting design is game design. Adventure design is game design. Coming up with a plot hook for the game tonight is game design. Making a cool encounter is game design. Figuring out how to present the cool encounter from a book is game design.

That isn’t to say that every game designer is good at it. The game designer is passing on insight, just like the composer, and the quality of that insight plus the ability to communicate it is what makes a great designer or a forgettable one. Making an NPC that everyone loves is certainly game design, but it’s probably not worth codifying and transmitting. The process for making an NPC that everyone loves, though, might be more useful. It’s the difference of insight between “this one works” and “here’s how to make your own that works.”

Thinking of the designer as just another player sharing something with you creates a better atmosphere of play. It’s easier to take the rules as written as a shared insight from a fellow gamer, not a declaration of how games shall be. We’re all in this together, let’s not have any pedestals or us v. them.

Credit to: me, Adam Koebel, Ryan Macklin

First off, what this is not: this is not designing my own version of D&D (though I am doing that). This is taking a stab at designing the game that fits the goals WotC has stated and the approaches they’ve made public. Let’s call those our Axioms and Theorems (axioms being the goals WotC has, theorems being the elements of design we already know from those goals).

Axioms and Theorems

1. D&D as a brand must grow
2. There are growth opportunities within the tabletop RPG market
1. From 1 & 2 it follows that a new tabletop RPG edition of D&D is important.
3. D&D is many things to many people (not just in minutiae, but in what the game is about)
4. Each previous edition of D&D has catered to a different audience
1. From 2, 3, & 4 it follows that a new version of D&D could succeed by bringing back in lapsed customers
5. D&D must be one game (or at least one tabletop RPG)
1. From 4.1 & 5, the one true D&D must also cater to people with very different tastes
2. From 5.1 it follows that D&D should be a modular game that can be what each group wants it to be

This is at a high level what we know from WotC’s current statements. Before I start wildly designing from them, let’s look at a few ways to axioms could be different (this is the non-euclidean geometry section, essentially).

Axiom 2 is weak at the least. While there are plenty of people hating on 4E, I don’t know how much that effected sales, at least of the core books. Are those growth opportunities really big enough to be compatible with Axiom 1?

2. To grow the tabletop RPG market we need flagship games of a different type

This doesn’t make a difference to any of the theorems, interestingly enough. Of course this hasn’t been their public statement, but it seems like a valid tack: if D&D could do more, would more people buy it? It actually subsumes part of axiom 3, in that it assumes there are other audiences than the current tabletop audience that can be reached by the right game.

Since this isn’t truly rigorous logic I’ve allowed myself some jumps here, but I’m not entirely sure 5.2 follows from 5.1. Couldn’t there be a new game that still caters to all people with different tastes, a non-modular one? To strengthen 5.2 I’ll introduce Axiom 6, which is entirely supposition on my part, and for which there are two candidates:

6. Different types of play are better served by different rules (i.e. rules matter)

6. More systems mean more opportunities for additional content

Both of these suggest why a modular system instead of one monolithic system. Which one is true for WotC (or if they’re even needed for 5.2) depends on your opinion of the company and the designers. Both may even have been used to different audiences. I’m a rules matter person, so I choose to think of this as a nod to the fact that GM, rules, and players are all responsible for the game produced.

The Design

Enough of that. Given those design goals, how would I make D&D? (I’m so glad you asked…)

First I’d look at what modules need to be able to do (i.e. what bits need to be completely changeable from group to group):

• Some modules need to make small adjustments to specific areas, like lethality
• Some modules need to add detail to certain types of play, like social situations or kingdom management
• Some modules need to define setting-related stuff, like which races and classes are playable
• Some modules need to set the playstyle, like action-adventure test-your-mettle, or character-driven story
• Some modules need to define advancement

Given that list I can look at what doesn’t need to be modular and make that the “core game.” There’s not much left except for the very bones of a system for how to resolve an action or event, so that’ll be our “core.” (Note that to my mind just a resolution system doesn’t make a game, but that’s just semantics. The fact that everyone’s rolling the same dice in vaguely the same way may be enough for the marketing angle of “one game.”)

The actual details here don’t matter much, but I’ll throw them out anyway. The core game is:

Your character is six stats, each of which has a modifier associated with it. When the GM tells you to test your abilities they will tell you what number you need to roll, then you roll a d20 and add whatever modifier the GM says applies. If you meet or beat the target number you succeed, the GM will tell you how. Otherwise you fail, the GM will tell you how.

This is a ridiculously simple core, and one that says nothing about the actual important parts of play: when are your abilities tested? What does failure mean?

So far we have the most boring dice rolls ever (I refuse to even call it a game). This is the most I can see in common across the vast playstyles of D&D, mostly because something along these lines is common to the majority of RPGs. Look past the exact dice and modifiers, and remember that we don’t have the real meat yet, and this is 1st Edition to Primetime Adventures and everything in between.

Now the modules. The first and most important module would be the playstyle one. Of course playstyle is a term that probably wouldn’t fly with a broad audience, so I might call it the Focus, Adventure, or Advancement module.

Each playstyle module contains:

• rules for what earns rewards (but not how to spend them)
• rules for the GM’s basic responsibilities
• rules for what success and failure mean

For example, the Sandbox playstyle sets rewards based on gaining knowledge about the world and the events going on, and sets the GM’s basic responsibilities as creating a living world and presenting it authentically. The Challenge playstyle sets rewards for beating enemies, the tougher the better, and gives the GM the responsibility to create challenging encounters that may not be winnable.

At this point, with core+module, this is more or less an actual game. The broad categories of  ”GM responsibilities” and “success and failure” are actually huge deals. They fill in some of the key pieces from the core. In particular the GM’s responsibilities and the meaning of success and failure should establish what counts as a “test of abilities.”

The interesting bit here is that if groups were actually willing to do this kind of pick-and-choose playstyle they’ve basically been given a way to talk about creative agenda without sounding like navel-gazing theory snobs. If it could gain traction with actual players that’d be kinda cool.

At this point the group, the GM, the setting designer, or whoever is making the calls on which modules to use has said what the game’s about, now they need to choose what the players do (or at least what’s important for them to do).

This is where the detail modules come in. The detail modules would have sub-systems the give mechanical detail to certain situations while still allowing the call on which of those situations matter to be made by the playstyle module.

For example, the combat detail module describes combat a lot like modern D&D: attacks, HP, etc. The decision of when a combat matters is still down to the playstyle. The playstyle might establish that it’s only a test of ability if the character’s beliefs are on the line, which isn’t overidden by the detail module. Instead, if a test of ability would represent a combat, you use the combat detail system.

Anything not covered by a detail system is covered by the core game (+ playstyle). If we don’t use the combat detail module and our characters end up testing their ability in a fight, we just make one roll, success or failure, as the core game describes.

With core + playstyle + detail we now know what the game’s about and what the characters do. The next module choice describes the types of characters and the world around them: the setting module.

Setting modules define classic stuff like class and race, how many of each a character gets, etc. Of course how those are actually represented depends on the detail modules in place. The core of each character, as described in the core game, would need to be just stats. Based on the detail modules in play, different parts of the classes come into play, but the way they come into play still must be general.

As an example, let’s use arcane magic. In a game where there’s no arcane magic there should be no classes that primarily grant arcane magic and classes that grant arcane magic as a secondary ability should ignore it. If arcane magic exists but isn’t using a detail module, then it’s just like a stat: some modifier used when testing an ability. If there is a detail module that detail module has to describe how to translate that arcane magic stat into the right level of detail. Maybe for each point of arcane magic you know one spell castable once per day, or something like that.

Of course there can be different detail modules that use that some information. One detail module for arcane magic is vancian, another is skill-based (so your arcane magic stat turns into a set of points to spend on more specific skills), etc.

With core + playstyle + detail + setting we have enough to start playing, but how characters grow is down to the advancement module.

The advancement module takes the rewards allocated by the playstyle module and turns them into concrete additions to the characters. Of course the advancement module can’t know what detail or setting modules are in use, so it has to be generic. The advancement module would have to hand over information to the character in a standardized form: levels, new abilities, and advancing abilities.

Levels set a power cap in terms of what any individual ability can do. In the core game setting modules this means a cap to modifier, which can filter out into detail modules in different ways (no 2nd level spells until you’re level X, for example). New abilities are how many new abilities you can unlock, advancing abilities is how much you can increase any ability you currently have. There might even be catch-all for other bonuses, call them boons. This would account for feats and such.

The idea being that the advancement module you choose sets what advancing a character means. Does it mean a dramatic increase in power? Or is it a slow broadening of ability? Or do you just pick up specific new tricks?

Core + playstyle + detail + setting + advancement is everything D&D usually has. The last type of module, modifiers, are like the optional rules that get scattered through most editions of D&D.

Modifiers tie to one or more specific modules and just tweak them a bit. Combat modifiers might make certain combat detail modules more lethal. Magic modifiers might change up the schools of magic. Modifiers allow the design of two modules that are mostly the same, but with a few differences, without rewriting the whole thing. Instead of grid-based combat and deadly grid-based combat being two entirely different modules one is just a modifier to the other.

That’s it. Every group chooses 1 playstyle module, 0+ detail modules, 1+ setting modules, 1 advancement module, and 0+ modifier modules, and they’ve effectively made their own D&D, but under the umbrella of The One True D&D. No more edition wars, we’re all buying the same product. We may war over modules (“Grid-based non-deadly combat? Why?”) but at least we’re all still buying WotC products.

The Products

What would a product look like in this modular world?

Each product would need to be heavily themed. Since what mechanics get used is down to which systems are used you can’t sell people a book based on the fact that all the rules will be useful for their game, you have to sell it based on the interest in the theme of the book.

So, a Martial Power style book might have:

• A new combat detail system
• Modifiers for certain classes (or types of classes) based on martial options
• An advancement system that prioritizes combat prowess
• Modifiers for deadlier or more lenient combat
• One or more settings, where a setting is a list of what modules to use together for a certain game
• For example, a mercenary setting, made up of the challenge playstyle, combat-ready setting modules (fighty-y classes), details for combat and negotiation, modifier for deadly combat, etc.

The book really has to appeal based on “ooh, I want to play that, no matter the rule” than “oh, this has a useful rules update.” It might lead to the option of smaller books, since a setting could easily be established using a specific combination of existing modules with maybe some custom modifiers.

WotC could then open up the system, much like 3E, but with a clearer back-and-forth. The modular system gives other companies a clearer way to position their books as complimentary to WotC’s, and even an entirely new game would still be providing more modules that are then part of the overall ecosystem.

3E OGL products could only go so far before they’re not compatible with D&D and that line wasn’t always clear. The system wasn’t modularized so an alternate skill system would entirely break the skill-based magic of another book. So long as each designer abides by the division of modules inconsistencies can at least cleanly be recognized (“oh, this setting module requires this detail module” for example).

Mutants and Masterminds is an example here. In the 3E ecosystem M&M’s contribution was mostly to mindshare: I know I was excited by the idea of playing superheroes with a system I already “knew.” The problem being that in truth M&M shares only a few concepts with d20 at the lowest level (d20+something vs. DC, a few others) so none of that cool content is really part of the larger ecosystem; Mutants and Masterminds didn’t give anything back to the overall design except for the marketing power of  ”d20 can do superheroes!”

With a modular system M&M could be a larger part of the design. Powers as ranked skills would be a detail module that converts the basic ranks defined by setting (class) modules into specific powers. The book would also contain playstyles for supers, setting modules for supers, and so on. It might even have other detail modules that depend on the powers detail module. Now all those have greater compatibility with the world at large: I can choose to describe my fantasy adventurer’s abilities using superpowers, or use a superhero playstyle with my wild west rough riders.

Adventures would be largely presented in the fiction. Most modern adventures devote huge swaths to stats and encounters which would now be largely dependent on the modules in play. Instead adventures would be mostly about the in-game situations. Specific modules can only be leveraged within an adventure if the adventure says clearly that it depends on them.

That means that an adventure that doesn’t say “requires one of these detail modules” has to assume that all combat can and will be resolved with the core system (i.e. one dice roll). That’s a challenge to designers certainly, but I think it’s a good one. Adventure design really has to be about what the adventure means within the world, not about what rules it invokes.

Of course most adventures would only work well with certain playstyles. This makes playstyles the least-extensible point, which is probably just as it should be. There are many ways to pursue the same creative agenda (which playstyle basically is) while focusing on different details, but only so many entirely different playstyles will gain enough traction to make sense to a company like WotC.

The Links Between Modules

How modules work together is important, something that I’ve slightly glossed over. If you’re a software person, this may all seem like a flashback to a design class (if you had one) or spec review. Sorry.

As I’ve mentioned above each module links with other modules of other types in certain ways. The playstyle module has to describe rewards, which the advancement module has to be able to consume. In fact the rewards produced by any playstyle module need to be consumable by any  advancement module.

Of course there can be declared incompatibilities, or declared synergies. Maybe each advancement module has a “best with” section listing other modules it works well with, to guide the GM. Maybe there are even some edge case combinations that just flat don’t work (the more of these there are, the less the system is modular).

The entire design, being modular, comes down to the designers’ ability to smartly design the interfaces between modules. In my design above I went into some detail on the interface between advancement and setting: each class element of the setting has to be able to consume the output of any advancement, which means the output of advancement has to be standardized. I did this with Level, new ability, increased ability, and boon, but there are any number of workable solutions.

How interfaces are defined becomes the most important part of the design.

Versioning interfaces is a software problem as well, but I think with D&D there’s a way around it: series of modules.

What it’d actually be is a way of marking which “version” of an interface the module supports. Maybe advancement modules don’t start with a good way of communicating feat-style advancement to a class (and classes don’t have feat-like improvements), but later WotC wants to add that. They simply start a new series (S series, let’s call them) where all the classes have feat-like advancement options and all the advancement modules describe how to gain feats. They could even update the old A series basic advancement options with modifiers to make them S-compatible. Now each module can mark compatibility within a series, or with everything but a certain series. It’s not perfect, but it does allow the kind of versioning that’s needed.

Using the Mutants and Masterminds example, M&M would have some modules that fit existing interfaces and then maybe have some that depend on those. For example, a powers detail module that does M&M-style powers, then detail and modifier modules that do superpowered chase scenes or adapt the core combat module for powers.

I also love the idea that, in D&D Next, “series of modules” would be completely relevant but completely different from the old adventures. Nice nod to the past.

The Last Edition

This entire system of versioned interfaces means that nothing ever really has to be abandoned. Instead of a dramatic shift to a new edition, publishers can define a new set of interfaces and slowly shift support to them.

Example time: we have our A series playstyles, the 2 or 3 from the core book. WotC eventually decides that playstyles need to also set difficulties, which had been part of detail modules. This changes the interface between playstyle and detail modules, which means a new series, let’s call it B series. Instead of doing a whole-hog edition swap they can start with this new B series in a large expansion book, self-contained. Then some later small expansions support both A and B series to some degree. Finally B series becomes the default, integrated into a new printing of the core, and A series doesn’t get much if any new support.

This is more or less what WotC does with Magic to great effect. Instead of saying that this new edition of Magic entirely supplants the old one, they maintain official “formats” that include only selected sets but casual play usually includes whatever sets and editions the players care to bring.

Similarly each setting could be defined by a set of modules which can slowly change over time, maybe with the evolution of the setting, or with a focus on different areas. Forgotten Realms: Wild Areas uses the A series and focuses on combat. Forgotten Realms: Lords and Ladies uses B series and focuses on intrigue.

Since series are not games (again this is kind of a trick of semantics) there’s no edition wars or all-together stop of support. Each series would (hopefully) not completely redefine every interface so even though A and B series playstyles and details are incompatible, their setting and advancement aren’t. This way groups can slowly migrate as they see fit and get long term support in some areas (but not all). My A series game can make use of selected parts of B-series books, and of course by buying B-series books I’m acumulating B-series content, so eventually shifting over to being a B-series group is fairly painless.

Complexity

Of course as presented here this seems wildly complex, but hopefully part of that is because I’m presenting this to you as a game designer, no as a potential player. (We’re all game designers, of course, but more on that in a later post.) The way this is presented in a core book would be much simpler. Instead of this huge number of combinations there would be different levels of brew-your-own.

At the top are 3 or 4 ready-to-play combinations reflecting broad kinds of D&D play. These are presented as canonical game styles, and are heavily encouraged. None of the 3E-style “the first thing to do is completely customize this game.” Instead these core combinations are what are assumed by most adventures, and most adventures support all of them.

Below that are the recommended combinations. Instead of all the choices being made for you, most of the choices are made for you. They might even be presented as variants of the ready-to-play combinations. “To customize the Exploration play-set, you can choose from these options.” This is for the group that wants something just a bit different, or the group that feels like it’s not play without customization.

Finally there’s the free-for-all, choose whatever modules you like. This is presented as an advanced option, with the statement that you should play one of the pre-configs first to see what you like. There’s no guarantee that they’ll have any real synergy, but they will at least work on the basic level of handing off the right information between modules.

Enough Already

That’s my vision of D&D next based on the comments made: a modular “game” where the modules can actually swap out huge swaths of what the game is about, what the players do, and so on.

This is radically different from 3E where, sure, you could swap out a fair bit of how things work (details), all of the fiction (setting), and there were plenty of house rules (modifiers). First off 3E had no standard way of separating these concepts: a new class might be entirely dependent on the existing combat system, but not make that clear. 3E also had no clear way of swapping out what the game was about. It was certainly possible, but it required massive rewrites, taking d20 basically down to the core mechanic.

It’s not the simplest of ideas. In fact it’s a pretty complex systems design problem. But it’s a way of both saying “this one game is for everyone” and giving everyone a different game. I’m interested to see if my ideas are anywhere close to what WotC’s doing.

Not that this is the one true way, but if WotC hasn’t bought in to some of my proposed axioms, up top there, they may be saying that this is one game for everyone but not actually making a game that does that. It could be like GURPS: a system that claims universality but only supports one mode of play. With a different choice of axiom 6 the entire modular system could be about choosing between miniature combat and  zone combat and freeform combat, not about actually changing what the game can do.