Edition Wars – Does the edition you play really have an impact on the game?

[Manbearcat]

Do you remember Animaniacs? "Good Idea, Bad Idea?" I find myself thinking about it, right now, for some reason.

Sure, as a GM, for instance, I could pick up System 1, and deliver a System 2 experience to my players - I won't say 'easily,' my 'prep' experience might be quite different & it depends on what experience the players want, but I could do so with confidence.
I wouldn't claim the reverse.

Very much so.

And consider the non-casual versus casual player. A player that expects to have a transparent understanding of how the coupling of their decision-points/PC archetype/build and the output of mechanical resolution drive the action (and an attendant emboldened of their doing said driving as a result) are going to have a different experience between the two. Contrast that with a casual player who just wants to be a passive participant; tour setting and/or ingest metaplot. Driving the action is daunting to them and system becomes tangential (perhaps even burdensome) to their play interests.

Consider the GMs that are running System 1 and System 2 above. They're going to very much prefer one of those two players (as we see some System 2 GMs often call the first of the two players depicted above all sorts of derogatory names!).

 

[aramis erak]

In a group (my Sunday game for ex) where everyone takes a turn as the DM how would that even work?
How would that work when I'm just a player in someone else's game? Like say the CoS game at the local shop.

Unless you've "drank the kool-aid" of Gygax...†

MEthod 1: "Troupe Style" - From Ars Magica 3E...
Each GM essentially runs a chapter of the game's story. Everyone has a pool of NPC's for shared use, and others marked "hands off", and writes the chapter-length adventure. It may link to stuff others have done, maybe not.
When John GM's, his character doesn't get played. When Fred GMs, his doesn't.
If there's some reason a particular person's character shouldn't play that adventure, they pick up one of the "friendly NPCs" that have been developed...

Method 2 - Alternating campaigns
Each player is running his own campaign. Each player has a character for each other player's game.
With four players, this means 4 campaigns, 4 characters per player, each played once a month.

Method 3 - One Scene at a time Cosmic Patrol, Valliant Universe
Best with a group all comfortable with the rules and sharing the understanding...
After one encounter, the next encounter is run by a different GM. Almost requires a script to work. Works really well if the script is good; you're playing to find out what happens, but there's a built in level of success guarantee in CP and VU. Marvel Heroic and other games with well scripted but undetailed adventures can do this as well.

Method 4 - Everyone has narrative authority — Fiasco, HOTBlooded, Blood & Honor, 7th Sea 2E...
The GM just plays the NPC's and maybe checks for encounters. There's no real story but what emerges from the collective responses to each other and the situation. This is full on storygame mode, by the way. Everyone's empowered to add NPC's, define motives, situations, and scenes. It works if everyone's good with it. It Flops horribly if people don't share the setting view, don't care about not offending others, or can't avoid making mary-sue/marty-stu characters.

Method 5 - Other
There are several other approaches which are hard for me to describe because I don't have experience with them.

 

[Lwaxy]

To me edition matters a lot.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

To me edition matters a lot.

Late retuning to this Raised Thread...but yeah, for me as well. Even within the D&D family, there are a few PCs I made in Basic, AD&D & 2nd that didn't translate well to 3.X. With 3.X, many PCs I tried to reboot in 4th I found the system barring my path...but eventually found other PC concepts 4th modeled better than any prior edition.

GURPS & HERO are both "toolbox" systems, but IME, GURPS does genres based in gritty quasi-realism better than HERO...and HERO trumps it in every other genre.

 

[aramis erak]

Rules matter a lot to me - both as player and as GM.

I want my players to be aware of the rules, but not argue the rules.

I want the rules to make my GM-tasks easier, and my player's experience more consistent.

A system, to me, to be complete, needs character creation, combat, healing, and character improvement, and a setting, plus whatever else the setting requires.

The GM tasks are

• Creating a compelling hook for the players to react to
• Running interesting conflicts, whether they be combat or not
• Helping create meaningful conflicts.
• creating a shared set of expectations amongst the players.
• Helping players understand what their characters can and cannot do

System affects all of those. It's not the sole aspect, but it's a major part.

 

[ccs]

Unless you've "drank the kool-aid" of Gygax...†

MEthod 1: "Troupe Style" - From Ars Magica 3E...
Each GM essentially runs a chapter of the game's story. Everyone has a pool of NPC's for shared use, and others marked "hands off", and writes the chapter-length adventure. It may link to stuff others have done, maybe not.
When John GM's, his character doesn't get played. When Fred GMs, his doesn't.
If there's some reason a particular person's character shouldn't play that adventure, they pick up one of the "friendly NPCs" that have been developed...

Method 2 - Alternating campaigns
Each player is running his own campaign. Each player has a character for each other player's game.
With four players, this means 4 campaigns, 4 characters per player, each played once a month.

Method 3 - One Scene at a time Cosmic Patrol, Valliant Universe
Best with a group all comfortable with the rules and sharing the understanding...
After one encounter, the next encounter is run by a different GM. Almost requires a script to work. Works really well if the script is good; you're playing to find out what happens, but there's a built in level of success guarantee in CP and VU. Marvel Heroic and other games with well scripted but undetailed adventures can do this as well.

Method 4 - Everyone has narrative authority — Fiasco, HOTBlooded, Blood & Honor, 7th Sea 2E...
The GM just plays the NPC's and maybe checks for encounters. There's no real story but what emerges from the collective responses to each other and the situation. This is full on storygame mode, by the way. Everyone's empowered to add NPC's, define motives, situations, and scenes. It works if everyone's good with it. It Flops horribly if people don't share the setting view, don't care about not offending others, or can't avoid making mary-sue/marty-stu characters.

Method 5 - Other
There are several other approaches which are hard for me to describe because I don't have experience with them.

You completely missed my question. Try again.

The person I was responding to was making the dumb ass assertion that players should not know the Monster Manual.
I want to know they envision that working for those of us who DM. I don't know about others, but I don't magically forget the details when I get to play on the the side of the screen.... And neither does anyone else I know.
Consider:
Wed - I play a 5e warlock in the local shops CoS game.
Fri - I DM a 5e campaign .
Sunday - I play in a 5 person group where each of us takes a turn DMing. 95% of what we play is D&D of various editions. We ALL know the content of the MMs that apply to editions we play.

So, as a PLAYER (not a character), how am I supposed to not know the MM?

 

[JediSoth]

Edition has mattered a great deal in my game. My group is composed of a range of players: some have kids, some don't, some are tactical rules nerds, some want RP, and at least one has medication-induced memory issues.

Over the last several years, we've played basic D&D (BECMI/Rule Cyclopedia), 4th ed., Pathfinder, and now 5th edition. All but one of us has played AD&D (either 1st or 2nd ed., or both).*

We had a lot of fun with BECMI/RC, but the players more into the fiddle bits of the rules found it a bit restricting, though not in a deal-breaking way. The more casual players enjoyed it quite a bit, especially with the character sheets that charted THAC0 so they wouldn't have to do the calculations on the fly. VERDICT: Would play/run again.

4th edition was our least favorite as a group. The players who loved tactical rules loved it. My memory-issue gamer dislike how much stuff there was to track with the various abilities. Everyone else, including me, as the GM, were very "meh" on it. VERDICT: Might play for a one-shot, but would not play/run again.

Pathfinder started with a solid concept and a lot of fun (all goblin PCs playing pirates in Skull & Shackles). By about 5th-6th level, almost everyone was starting to get bogged down in stats (and the memory-issue player needed constant help). Our rules tactician loved it, of course. I found game prep, when I strayed from the adventure path or pre-written modules, to be more work than I had time for (I ran into the same problem with 3.X once my life got busy with family obligations and writing). VERDICT: Would play again on a limited basis, but not run. By the way, goblin PCs totally break any stealth-based portions of the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path.

Most of us were skeptical of 5th edition when we started, but it soon became just about everyone's preferred system. It hit the right mix of complex & simple that my group needed. The memory-issue player still gets caught a bit during combat, but not to the extreme she did with 4E & Pathfinder. After a Hoard of the Dragon Queen TPK, they all wanted to return to 5E, rather than another fantasy system. VERDICT: Would play/run again--still am running it, actually.

I've found when the player have issues with the mechanics (for whatever reason), they don't enjoy the game as much. They might still enjoy playing in the group, but the game itself becomes the lesser of the activities that night. I've even observed, when a game has "rules for everything," that some players get too bogged down in what's on the character sheet and forget that there are RP options not tied to a stat or skill (like talking instead of attacking). It doesn't happen all the time, but I have seen people react that way. I think my group is going to get many more years of enjoyment out of 5E (whereas I couldn't end the 4E campaign soon enough and we were almost all burned out by the time we hung up the Pathfinder game).

*As an aside, my Doctor StrangeRoll blog started as a way to compare the various editions using classic adventures as a baseline. Now it's just my general gaming blog

 

[Erekose]

You completely missed my question. Try again.

The person I was responding to was making the dumb ass assertion that players should not know the Monster Manual.
I want to know they envision that working for those of us who DM. I don't know about others, but I don't magically forget the details when I get to play on the the side of the screen.... And neither does anyone else I know.
Consider:
Wed - I play a 5e warlock in the local shops CoS game.
Fri - I DM a 5e campaign .
Sunday - I play in a 5 person group where each of us takes a turn DMing. 95% of what we play is D&D of various editions. We ALL know the content of the MMs that apply to editions we play.

So, as a PLAYER (not a character), how am I supposed to not know the MM?

It's a good point . . . but would you then as a player would you then challenge your DM if your knowledge of the MM didn't apply in their game? i.e. if they'd varied the monster sufficiently to make your out of character knowledge useless? Or subverted what you knew (but your character shouldn't have known)?

Just curious!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Players can know the MM as encyclopedially as they care to...as long as their PCs don't act on knowledge they shouldn't have.

 

[JediSoth]

Players can know the MM as encyclopedially as they care to...as long as their PCs don't act on knowledge they shouldn't have.

It's not like you can stop a player from buying a Monster Manual and reading it on their own time, anyway. I would walk from any GM who tried to tell me what I could and could not spend my own money on and what I could and couldn't read when I'm not actually at the game with him/her. It's common courtesy to NOT spoil yourself for a game you're playing in, but having the wherewithal to outright FORBID someone from doing that? Madness.