playtesting feel

[ExploderWizard]

It's called nostalgia.

That fits in some instances but not all. Playing something because you remember playing it long ago is nostalgia. Continuing to play an older game because you had more fun with it last week than a newer game is not.

Different games provide a variety of play experiences and people just choose the ones that provide the experience that is most fun for them. The age of the game doesn't matter. Chess is still an engaging game and I don't think it remains popular by means of simple nostalgia.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Chess is still an engaging game and I don't think it remains popular by means of simple nostalgia.

Yes, there are televised events, it is obviously not boring to some (if D&D lasts as long as chess, well, that will be something).

I really want to check out that 3-D chess Frank Herbert was on about.

 

[WheresMyD20]

It's called nostalgia.

No. Nostalgia has little to do with it.

- In movies, the original is often times better than the remake.

- In music, a band's early albums are usually better and more influential than the later ones.

- In television, the seasons before "jumping the shark" are better then the ones after "jumping the shark".

In D&D, though, preference for the classic material always seems to be chalked up to nostalgia.

The nostalgia argument is just a lazy way of dismissing the older material without trying to understand what makes it great.

 

[Starbuck_II]

That fits in some instances but not all. Playing something because you remember playing it long ago is nostalgia. Continuing to play an older game because you had more fun with it last week than a newer game is not.

Different games provide a variety of play experiences and people just choose the ones that provide the experience that is most fun for them. The age of the game doesn't matter. Chess is still an engaging game and I don't think it remains popular by means of simple nostalgia.

Agreed, I loved Langrisser (Warsong) when I was a kid. Now I found a legal way to play Langrisser 2 the sequel (was never translated before). And I liked it more than the first, but i still have fond memories of the 1st.
Sadly, the other sequels are japanese only (I hate that Japan never sent them over to America), and they recently even released #5.

Luckily, D&D is translated to english. But I had issues that 2nd edition was 100% DM dependent. Some DMs made Fighters suck (get nothing special like weapon mastery). This was reason I liked 3rd edition, not everything was optional.

Hopefully, D&D Next will be more set in stone.

 

[Kzach]

No, chess is not boring at all. If you actually have a clue, how the game works, it can be pretty interesting....

So I'm clueless because I find chess boring?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

No you are clueless, because you said: "chess IS boring".

Not: "I find chess boring"

Calling a game boring per se seems strange when there are more people playing chess than RPGs...

 

[ForeverSlayer]

Ok, so the playtest is almost here, and they keep asking about 'Does it feel like D&D?" and I have until today been unsure what they ment.

I use to play ALOT of video games. I had an atari, a NES, and a Super NES. I would spend hours with many game, but bar none my favorite was The Legend of Zelda. To the point that my first day with a SUper NeS I had to have the newest zelda game, a link to the past.

Ok fast forward through collage and no games, and one of my friends got me back into PS2 with grand theft auto, but it wasn't like before. I would play less time a week then I use to play a day, and alot of it was with friends joking, not by myself.

fast forward again, and for my young nephew I now have a wii, and look at that there is a zelda game for it. SO I have tried and tried to get into this game. The graphics are better, the story is well more worked out, there is so much more you can do. The game handles better.

Yet I find that I down loaded the orginal zelda and play that instead. I just can't get into this new game. Infact I down loaded Castlvania, Supermario, and double dribble too. There are newer (Better) versions of these games, but the old NES ones I play much more then the newer ones.

I don't know what makes an 8bit clunky hard game better then a new age next generation game, but something holds me to it.

So then I think back to 2e D&D (My first real time playing) and I still remember there being some caster problems, and I really dont want to go back to Thac0, but I still kinda miss the feel of those games. I wonder if I am a bit of a closset gognard, since I went and bought a retroclone that isn't even out yet and now I wonder how do you cpture that feel.

what about everyone else, how do you explain feel of a game? Becuse I find I can not put it into words, and I feel that will hurt the playtest.

I just need to say AMEN with regards to the video games. I have been playing video games since the Atari 2600 and Intellivision and I have to say that I enjoy the old games better than the new ones. I have all the old emulators such as the NES, SNES, Genesis, Intellivision and even the MAME arcade emulator where I play the Old Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom, Shadow over Mystara and the old Gauntlet arcade games which remain my favorite.

Awesome graphics and sound do not always make a great game. I feel the same about my RPGs as well.

PS: If you like NES games then download this: Immortal

 

[kevtar]

Every time WotC mentioned defining the "essence" of D&D and trying to determine what things "feel like D&D," I've thought about an approach to qualitative research called "Phenomenology." In this approach, the researcher describes the meaning for several individuals of their lived experiences of a concept or phenomenon - or in this case, playing D&D. The purpose is to reduce individual experiences with the phenomenon to a description of the "universal essence" or the "very nature of" the phenomenon.

This is accomplished through a couple of phenomenological approaches and is heavily dependent upon a particular philosophical approach to consciousness and "lived experiences." I've been tinkering around with the idea of conducting an informal phenomenological analysis of D&D players and their experiences of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Since there seems to be a lot of discussion about what the "essence" of D&D is, it seems that we might be able to learn a lot from a study like this.

Would anyone be interested in reading or participating in something like that?

 

[MichaelSomething]

As The Angry Video Game Nerd (note: his videos are very NSFW!) knows, there's a lot of old, bad games. However, thanks to the ravages of time, most of them sink into the abyss of the past, leaving only the gems of the past to be enjoyed today.

 

[Neonchameleon]

But he is right: there are games that are just shinier, but not better. When you compare them, there are a lot of things that some older games really do better than some newer games.
Monopoly is still played today. Risk too... (even if i don´t like them anymore)

Ask any fan of boardgames about Monopoly and the answer is likely to be unprintable. It's a bad game - the game second most likely to end friendships (after Diplomacy) and a game with fifteen minutes of actual gameplay in a three hour game.

Some games were just simple and brilliant.

I can get as far as Go and Cleudo in this category. And arguably Chess+Variants and Poker. Oh, and Diiplomacy.

And when you look at modern game design, many games are going back to simpler design. Games with books of rules are going out of fashion. And I hope, 5e will go the same route. Simplicity. And add complexity to taste. Not the opposite.

I couldn't disagree more here. Complex games are seriously in fashion. Total War makes Advanced Squad Leader look simple. People just give the heavy lifting to computers to do these days, meaning that Fantasy Flight Games is, I think, the only company making american-style boardgames on a large scale at present.

A session without a single die rolled was once (in the 3rd edition area) the best i could imagine. I can´t do it in 4e, which makes me sad... and this is where the feel of D&D is not as it should be. I can´t tell a cooperative story without rolling too many dice.

Really? I've done it in 4e enough times. Most recent being three sessions ago.

No. Nostalgia has little to do with it.

- In movies, the original is often times better than the remake.

- In music, a band's early albums are usually better and more influential than the later ones.

- In television, the seasons before "jumping the shark" are better then the ones after "jumping the shark".

In D&D, though, preference for the classic material always seems to be chalked up to nostalgia.

The nostalgia argument is just a lazy way of dismissing the older material without trying to understand what makes it great.

The problem is that you're working with seriously selected samples.

- In movies, bad ones aren't (that) often remade. Remakes tend to come out as average movies - about what the same team not remaking a movie would do.

- In music, if an average band breaks through it's normally on the back of their best couple of albums so those are always remembered - regression to the mean. Also once they've made it they stop thinking they have to work so hard.

- In television, shows which start out mediocre simply die. Only shows which started well and then fall to mediocre get to jump the shark.

Fawlty Towers stopped at twelve episodes because that was where the writers thought they were running out of jokes. If they'd done more they couldn't have maintained the quality so we have twelve first class episodes and the series never jumped the shark. Likewise The Office (UK original), Extras, Dinner Ladies, The Young Ones, and more UK comedy