Mike Mearls Games
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Odyssey Design Pillars
🕑 Added 2025-01-10 14:00:13 +0000 UTCA good game starts with a good vision. If you don't know where you're going, you can never figure out if you are making progress. In game design, this leads to constant redesign, bloated projects, random changes in direction, and projects that run way over schedule and budget.
I've worked on a LOT of games over the year, and every failed project shares the same basic trait: the project never had a clear, compelling vision. No one knew what success looked like.
Since I'm working on this project solo, I don't have to worry about creating a lot of documentation for the work. However, I do need a good, solid set of design pillars to help guide me. When it comes time to make a decision on how to develop something, I need to have a clear vision I can use to guide my thinking.
I hope that these pillars help you understand where I am going with Odyssey. I have to admit that these concept reflect what I want. That's the benefit of self-publishing!
Streamlined 5e
Last year at Gary Con, I had the opportunity to DM every edition of D&D as part of the Ragnarök tournament. It was a amazing experience, but it also showed me that 5e is my favorite version of the game. However, it has its flaws. With over 10 years of experience running and playing it, I've grown frustrated with how far it has veered from its original design goals.
It's funny looking back at something I wrote in 2012. The original article is probably the clearest expression of what I, personally, want from a TTRPG. The 5e design moved in that direction, but didn't necessarily hit those goals square on. Running D&D 5.5, I feel that the game has moved even further from those goals. Combat moves even slower, and the rules are even fiddlier than before. That's great if you wanted the game to move closer to D&D 3.5, but it's not what I want.
Streamlined is a vague word. Specifically, I want to feel that the game rules help move the game faster and let us get more done, rather than slow things down. Here are some specifics:
The core rules must speed up the game by being simple and clear.
Reduce bloated math by focusing on the mechanical sweet spot and keeping the numbers easy enough to handle.
Lean on the DM to resolve corner cases and keep the game moving, rather than adding more layers of rules and exceptions.
Remember that people can always go back to 5.5 if they want complexity and rules for everything.
Avoid fiddly computations, wandering modifiers, and strange edge cases.
Don’t worry about world sim – starvation, food, etc., create procedures that DMs can tap into, relegate specifics to adventures.
Use procedures to organize the action and avoid dead time and voids, moments where the game stalls out because no one (not even the DM) is sure how to move forward.
Give DMs access to proactive tools to bump out of dead spots
Interesting Characters
Magic: the Gathering is one of my favorite games of all time. I find it wild that the typical Magic deck is less complex than a 5e character, yet offers vastly more interesting game play. Each card in a Magic deck counts. There's no space for pointless space fillers.
I want character classes, races, and backgrounds that feel similar. Everything should feel important and interesting. Streamlining the game requires offering characters that have fewer abilities, but those abilities should all feel impactful and distinct.
Give classes a distinct mechanical trick within the bounds above, focus on the unique thing a class can do.
Make races and backgrounds feel consequential by moving some weight to them from classes.
Give only consequential features, avoid clutter with stuff that exists only to fill out an advancement table.
Strip as much of the power budget out of the core system or features shared between classes as possible. For instance, removing stat modifier for damage gives us a bigger budget for class features.
Fun Content Design
I want creating new content for the game to be fun and easy. TTRPGs are so enjoyable because they allow us to express ourselves. For DMs, I think a lot of that ties to homebrewing and creating new content.
I want to have robust development tools so that creating creatures is fun, with designers spending their time thinking up new abilities and stories rather than wasting time doing stat block math. The same applies to things like creating new classes or subclasses. I want that process to feel accessible to everyone.
Straightforward math for building encounters that scales with the number of players and their level.
A dev environment that focuses on the creative part of creating homebrew content, rather that forcing designers to spend time wrestling with fiddly rules, overly complex math, and finicky rule templates.
I hope this is helpful in giving everyone a sense of what I want to build here. If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments.
Comments
Michael Lee
As a playtester for 5E, I'm really happy to see this project moving forward. My heart sank when Monte Cook left the project. I didn't know the details, but that was my dead-canary-in-the-coal-mine moment. And I watched as the game grew more complex and unwieldy. Don't get me wrong, I still played the heck out of it, but it failed to achieve it's vision. And for a while in playtest, it was on track for that vision. In retrospect, I think it was somewhat unavoidable with a larger development team. Anyway, no hate on 5E, great system. But really glad you're going back because I think there is a real gem at the heart of early 5E that was obscured by external competing requirements.
Crimson
I am really looking forward to this Mike. What makes this really stand out from all the other 5e clones out there is YOU. I know your portfolio, have enjoyed your work immensely and have no doubt that this will provide a very satisfying experience. Im not expecting you to reinvent the wheel, but I do trust that you will provide a very solid, well thought out, playtested, and most of all FUN experience. Wishing you all the best on this.
