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If this is your belief or what you see, I have an honest question: Is there any way to have a discussion on various aspects of an earlier edition of D&D without it being seen as an edition war?
That is an excellent question! In short, I believe the answer is, "Yes, if you stop trying to draw lines in the sand."
The question deserves a much more in-depth answer. I don't have the time this instant to do it justice. I hope you'll be patient with me as I find time in spare moments to write it up and post it a little later.
That is an excellent question! In short, I believe the answer is, "Yes, if you stop trying to draw lines in the sand."
Usually the phrase "draw a line in the sand" suggest the line drawer is establishing a "with me or against me" kind of demarkation (friend vs. foe). Is this how you mean it? If so, I'm interested to know where/how I've given the impression that I'm doing this. Me, personally, not someone who may post in a thread I start.
Surely you don't hold dungeondelver responsible for the Nazi reference in this thread?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Umbran
The question deserves a much more in-depth answer. I don't have the time this instant to do it justice. I hope you'll be patient with me as I find time in spare moments to write it up and post it a little later.
Sure. But if you have examples of me, personally, saying something that sounds edition-wary, please point it out.
I tend to go on and on about my favorite editions of D&D (raving, ranting, comparing, contrasting), but I rarely (if ever) comment on an edition I don't like or don't care about. So I don't see how I could be accused of making or propegating an edition war.
When I see a OD&D/1e/2e thread started by Bullgrit (or Quasqueton), I expect a sort of "mythbusters" question or observation. Perhaps that's the kind of line drawing that Umbran means: quantification of details that subsequently get argued about (or at least, the analysis of the details gets argued about).
__________________ "You want to play "Semantics and Lawyers"? Go ahead. We'll be busy kickin' ass and chewing Stygian Black Lotus- the best!" - Predavolk
Jason, you're a mind reader - I was just about to comment on the "mythbusters" style that some discussions engender and how that is probably what can make someone put on his conspiracy hat.
__________________ Words of wisdom from Gary Gygax:
From my perspective wanting less in the way of rules constraints comes from being a veteran Game Master who feels confident that more good material comes from imagination and player interaction with the environment than from textbook rules material.
more words of wisdom:
Rashness and foolhardiness are harbingers of death, as is timidity, in such adventure setting.
Those that complain about real challenges might be better off playing Candyland with their little sister
First and foremost, munchkinism arose as a contemporary of the OD&D game. Nothing in the rules of that or any other version of the game was needed to make it flourish.
There is no relationship between 3E and original D&D, or OAD&D for that matter. Different games, style, and spirit.
[E]xperience has taught me that everyone has their own gaming preferences, and it is not a matter of "good" or "bad" in all, save in light of one's own preferences.
When I see a OD&D/1e/2e thread started by Bullgrit (or Quasqueton), I expect a sort of "mythbusters" question or observation. Perhaps that's the kind of line drawing that Umbran means: quantification of details that subsequently get argued about (or at least, the analysis of the details gets argued about).
Adam: So Jamie, I head there is a movement in gaming called the Old School Renaissance.
Jamie: That's right Adam. It seems that the main community involved in playing various editions of this game called Dungeons & Dragons, are attempted to classify two classifications of gaming school of thought: new school and old school.
Adam: Right, well today, guess what we are going to do. Wrong again; we're going to encase a player's handbook from each edition in ballistics gel, and then we will fire an entire clip of .357 magnum ammunition.
Jamie: That may work, as I've heard heresay that the 1st edition Player's Handbook is unusually sturdy.
Adam: Exactly! Whichever book sustains the most damage, is obviously new school, while the books that sustain the least, must be old school. And then we will take a 1,000 count pile of the three original booklets and set it up the bomb with twenty pounds of C4.
Jamie: Twenty?
Adam: You're right, better make it one-hundred.
__________________ Supreme Mall Master, as well as Mall Moron
Usually the phrase "draw a line in the sand" suggest the line drawer is establishing a "with me or against me" kind of demarkation (friend vs. foe). Is this how you mean it?
To a large extent, yes.
Quote:
If so, I'm interested to know where/how I've given the impression that I'm doing this. Me, personally, not someone who may post in a thread I start.
You don't post in a vacuum. You post in the context of an entire community and its history. Terms and forms of discussion can become poisoned by prior abuse. If you recall, for a while we had to put a kibosh on pretty much all comparisons between 3e and 4e. We knew darned well that many folks wanted to have calm, civil discussions about the differences, but too many people had been rubbed too raw, and a cool-down was necessary.
The OS/NS thing isn't as bad as that, but you did ask why folks seemed to immediately take umbrage to your questioning. I see much the same dynamic here. Whether you intend it nor not, to the folks around and about it looks like more of the same old partisanship.
Quote:
Surely you don't hold dungeondelver responsible for the Nazi reference in this thread?
Certainly not. I blame the one who made the comment. It was an example of what has rubbed people raw.
Now, let me see if I can address your earlier question in another post...
Adam: So Jamie, I head there is a movement in gaming called the Old School Renaissance.
Jamie: That's right Adam. It seems that the main community involved in playing various editions of this game called Dungeons & Dragons, are attempted to classify two classifications of gaming school of thought: new school and old school.
Adam: Right, well today, guess what we are going to do. Wrong again; we're going to encase a player's handbook from each edition in ballistics gel, and then we will fire an entire clip of .357 magnum ammunition.
Jamie: That may work, as I've heard heresay that the 1st edition Player's Handbook is unusually sturdy.
Adam: Exactly! Whichever book sustains the most damage, is obviously new school, while the books that sustain the least, must be old school. And then we will take a 1,000 count pile of the three original booklets and set it up the bomb with twenty pounds of C4.
Jamie: Twenty?
Adam: You're right, better make it one-hundred.
This is when I switch channels and watch R. Lee Ermey on MAIL CALL demonstrate a WWII flame-thrower on a pile of rare DDMs...
Parenthetically, photostat copies of the manuscript rules were made, and when the commercial game was published, fans not willing or financially unable to expend the princely sum of $10 for the product did likewise, copying the material on school (mainly college/university) machines. We were well aware of this, and many gamers who had spent their hard-earned money to buy the game were more irate than we were. In all, though, the 'pirate' material was more helpful that not. Many new fans were made by DMs who were using such copies to run their games. - Gary Gygax
If this is your belief or what you see, I have an honest question: Is there any way to have a discussion on various aspects of an earlier edition of D&D without it being seen as an edition war?
Okay, let me see if I can address this...
First off, as I noted earlier - all posts are made in the context of the boards and their history. That history as an effect upon perceptions. In drawing distinctions based on time, you're implicitly (for some folks explicitly) drawing distinctions based upon editions. There has been so much edition warring here recently, that anything that looks like the duck is going to be seen as the duck right quick. You can't really blame anyone for that now. You are going to have to live with it.
Thus, the way to discuss the various aspects of the earlier editions is, in fact, to not worry so much about it having been part of an earlier edition.
You can say, "I like gaming where the GM isn't worried so much about logical consistency or ecology, and is more interested in putting interesting tactical combinations in the dungeon" without setting off any edition-war based alarms, because the discussion isn't about editions. It is about adventure design. What edition or year the adventure design was done in is irrelevant to the discussion. I can do that kind of adventure design in any edition!
The same applies for each of the various things people try to put under the NS/OS umbrellas - adventure design, GM/Player interaction style, mechanical structure, and roleplaying style. Ultimately, the age of the element is not nearly so important as the element itself, right?
If you must classify, don't classify based on time, but instead based on what you're doing in the game. You can have classes of adventure design, and mechanical structure, that you can then mix and match. Go for classification based on structure and intended function, rather than history, and you are unlikely to set off the same alarms.
On a personal note - so many people have 'fessed up to using so many supposedly "new school" elements back in the 1970s that the historical classification seems outright false, to me - that is the basis of my "false dichotomy" statements.
You can have classes of adventure design, and mechanical structure, that you can then mix and match. Go for classification based on structure and intended function, rather than history, and you are unlikely to set off the same alarms. ... so many people have 'fessed up to using so many supposedly "new school" elements back in the 1970s that the historical classification seems outright false ...
Yep, the "old" and "new" may relate chronologically to trends in popularity, but the tendencies of the "schools" have been around since early days.
Rules-heaviness on one hand, and heavy dependence on referee rulings on the other, are preferences best dealt with in choice of rules-set. People with strong preferences gravitate toward what they prefer.
Other preferences have clustered around those, but the associations are not necessarily as they have always been. Some in D&D today seem to me just the reverse of those I see in other reaches of the RPG field. A lot of "play style" choices are about as practically feasible regardless of choice of rules-set (although there are also some practical synergies) -- but some styles may be more popular among players using some sets.
It's in the field of techniques related to those that there's a lot of room for productive discourse. If someone happens to want to run an old-style ("mega-") dungeon, or an old-style ("sandbox") campaign, then the advice of people with actual experience at doing so may be helpful. Some aspects have been dealt with only obscurely in all but the first rule-books, and a lot of practical lore has been worked out since 1974.
Many "old-school" people are themselves no longer spring chickens. Even in such a "frivolous" pursuit as D&D -- or the blues, or fencing, or animation, or what have you -- there are people interested in handing down old things, and people interested in receiving them both to enjoy and to pass on to the next generation.
At the same time, "the new school" is no more monolithic than the old. Developments since D&D first fired imaginations have not been on a single track toward "perfection of the form". The initial explosion of game forms has produced not just branches but threads interweaving in their growth.
As I have recounted elsewhere, when I experimented with a "narrative game system" design back in the '80s, I knew of no other examples. My initial excitement took a cold shower when play-testers averred that the concept would be too hard for many gamers to "get". When I saw it growing a few years later, it seemed to be significantly an "anti-D&D" phenomenon. Today, it is a well-established part of the D&D scene, not only among hobbyists but at the commercial level shaping development of the "official" game.
I happen to think it best addressed as a new form, as distinct from RPGs as they are from war-games. Because of that lack of personal interest, I have not kept up with efforts rooted in the RPG legacy. That does not mean there's nothing to learn from them, though -- and people versed in such experiments figure among "new school" D&Ders.
There are two reasons people want to hash this out. Not everybody is at it for both reasons, but the reasons are not mutually exclusive either.
1) Some folks feel there's actually an effective genre difference, and analysis of such can be enlightening.
2) It is an edition war with the serial numbers filed off - yet another way to divide gamers into "Them" and "Us".
I'd say there's three: 3)Some people are interested in the history of the game and how it developed.
That's my angle in these discussions at any rate; I'm curious about the game's past, and I like to draw upon the stuff from the past as well as current stuff as I feel it enriches my games.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Philotomy Jurament
When I see a OD&D/1e/2e thread started by Bullgrit (or Quasqueton), I expect a sort of "mythbusters" question or observation. Perhaps that's the kind of line drawing that Umbran means: quantification of details that subsequently get argued about (or at least, the analysis of the details gets argued about).
Quas and Bull generally have been pretty good at trying to make objective comparisons between older and newer editions of the game. And from what I've read, some of the arguments start coming in when the mythbusting shows some of the claims about the older games aren't based so much on the RAW but rather house ruling peple used back in the day.
__________________ "Y'know, I think my favorite thing about being a hero of destiny is that it gives you all kinds of narrative justification to just slay any ol' jerk who gets in your way." -- 8-bit Theater
"i did not serve with napolean in his artillery. but i did play wargames with him and his men." -- diaglo
A lot of stuff that originally was just empirical, in the sense of "this is what seems to work in our trials", seems only in recent years to have come in for much theoretical scrutinizing as to why it works. Why should a campaign dungeon have in the neighborhood of 60% "empty" space?
It's the people coming to it with fresh eyes, the people to whom it looks odd enough to notice and prod and probe rather than simply taking as received wisdom or dismissing out of hand, who seem to me to have contributed most to that enterprise.
One of the benefits of defining vintage gaming is that, for guys like me who never really did it before but are interested in it now, we can get advice on how to run a vintage game from people who know what they're doing.
So: thanks! Ariosto, Raven Crowking, Exploder Wizard, Melan, and others; you guys have helped my game out a lot.
__________________ "If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
-- Ernest Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms" Burning Empires:Boldaq Keep on the Shadowfell
A lot of stuff that originally was just empirical, in the sense of "this is what seems to work in our trials", seems only in recent years to have come in for much theoretical scrutinizing as to why it works. Why should a campaign dungeon have in the neighborhood of 60% "empty" space?
It's the people coming to it with fresh eyes, the people to whom it looks odd enough to notice and prod and probe rather than simply taking as received wisdom or dismissing out of hand, who seem to me to have contributed most to that enterprise.
Maybe it's because of WotC actually using the math to figure out game balance in recent years. Some people hate their approach to balance, but I have no problem with it, because it gives useful advice to fledgling DMs as to how much treasure should be given out, what kind of encounters will challenge a party without wiping them out and so on.
So some people go back analyze the old rule sets and see how much stuff is relatively balanced. Gary seemed to have an idea of how long things should take, he felt a year to 18 months for name level was about right. I think he and a few other had a good feel for how long things should take, how much treasure should be given out, but some of those conclusions seem to have been reached by trial and error. Also, some of those assumptions broke down as the game progressed through 2e and the rules changed. I've said befeore the one of the biggest things that affected the way the game worked was the de-emphasis on gaining XP for treasure that happened during 2e which probably resulted in slower level gain overall.
__________________ "Y'know, I think my favorite thing about being a hero of destiny is that it gives you all kinds of narrative justification to just slay any ol' jerk who gets in your way." -- 8-bit Theater
"i did not serve with napolean in his artillery. but i did play wargames with him and his men." -- diaglo
Actually, the example of encounter density and many other things besides have been excellently analyzed by old hands. I may have misrepresented the situation a bit, although the raising of questions by newcomers certainly has elicited many well-put explanations by the experienced and thoughtful.
So, "recent" and "most" may be misleading. Those fresh eyes do find insights, though, and the work of people picking up the original set (and the precursor Chainmail) for the first time has especially impressed me.
When I saw it growing a few years later, it seemed to be significantly an "anti-D&D" phenomenon. Today, it is a well-established part of the D&D scene, not only among hobbyists but at the commercial level shaping development of the "official" game.
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