Thac0 the Barbarian
Explorer
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to play in the Red Box gameday experience at my FLGS. I was quite excited, as this was the first time I had played D&D in the past ten years or so. I played regularly for a decade prior to this (predominantly the reviled, unfairly so in my estimation, 2nd Ed) I had a great time at the game day, so I don't want you to think that this is going to degenerate into a "what's wrong with 4th edition post", but there were some broad changes in the experience from those bygone days that I thought were interesting, so I thought I'd bring them up. A lot of these changes may not be as evident to players who started with 3rd edition and onward, so I thought it might be intersting to discuss.
1) Everyone is a rules lawyer now- Since the bygone days combat has become substantially more tactical. This change produces a lot of fun and is true to the genre's war games roots. However, since combat was always been the most rules heavy part of the game, it has produced a huge amount of verbage on the subject. These boards, and the game table, are filled with endless debate on the exact wording of rules, and more importantly, how the inevitable laxness of the rules can be expoloited.
Whenever I encounter these discussion, I think back to the day's of junior high when MtG first came out. I remember endless discussion of the ways that combinations of cards could be used to bend or break the rules as written and the inevitable errata that resulted I think this style of games playing is the true legacy of collectable card games, rather the presence or abscence of collectable cards for random effects which have been discussed lately
2) With great options, comes great responsibillity- This continues as an offshoot of point 1 above, but I think underlines another important fact. Namely, that due to the proliferation of rules, as well as features such as feets, weapon properties and the like, character creation has become both vastly more complicated and, in a way, grade-able. Part of me looks fondly on the day when the thought of personalizing a character was having a theif use a hand ax rather than daggers, just because. Now due to the way that features interact there is a vast amount of personalization, but because so much that manifests as advantages or disadvantages during the game, it becomes an activity in itself. Just as many magic afficianados can spend an afternoon building decks, it seems that players can spend an afternoon just builidng varrious characters,an activity that I felt was much less common "back in the day".
3) (and final) "Better" and "Worse" players- The final point I want to make is derrived from the other two, namely that the combination or rules mastery and build mastery leads to a phenomenon of system mastery, resulting in more effective characters at the table. Not to sound like a luditie, but at one time, build mastery essentially ment luck during your initial attribute roles. As a result, although a party was always happy to have a character with 18 (77) strength (another throwback
) there was never an element of judgement attirbutted to a less productive player bringing a sub-optimal build or playing tactically "wrong" This is exacerbated by the standardization of challenges, where we know where a typical party should fall on the power curve. This was much less apparent when an encounter was whatever the DM pulled from the Monsterous Compendium. Similarly, we didn't have to spend our time discussing useless monsters because, in existential sense, such monsters simply just were, rather than being a substandard example of a level 8 monster, which no DM should ever use, from a book that is totally obsolete .
All in all I had a great time with the game day, despite a TPK on the final encounter. I hope to continue playing though the encounters series. I think that the current incarnation of the game has a lot of merit, and, in the end, the enjoyability of a game is a manifestation of the stories you use it to tell rather than the rules that you use. But, as read through the threads regarding the edition wars, pathfinder and 4th edition, it occurs to me that to a prior player these symptoms seem to share many more similarities than they do differences.
1) Everyone is a rules lawyer now- Since the bygone days combat has become substantially more tactical. This change produces a lot of fun and is true to the genre's war games roots. However, since combat was always been the most rules heavy part of the game, it has produced a huge amount of verbage on the subject. These boards, and the game table, are filled with endless debate on the exact wording of rules, and more importantly, how the inevitable laxness of the rules can be expoloited.
Whenever I encounter these discussion, I think back to the day's of junior high when MtG first came out. I remember endless discussion of the ways that combinations of cards could be used to bend or break the rules as written and the inevitable errata that resulted I think this style of games playing is the true legacy of collectable card games, rather the presence or abscence of collectable cards for random effects which have been discussed lately
2) With great options, comes great responsibillity- This continues as an offshoot of point 1 above, but I think underlines another important fact. Namely, that due to the proliferation of rules, as well as features such as feets, weapon properties and the like, character creation has become both vastly more complicated and, in a way, grade-able. Part of me looks fondly on the day when the thought of personalizing a character was having a theif use a hand ax rather than daggers, just because. Now due to the way that features interact there is a vast amount of personalization, but because so much that manifests as advantages or disadvantages during the game, it becomes an activity in itself. Just as many magic afficianados can spend an afternoon building decks, it seems that players can spend an afternoon just builidng varrious characters,an activity that I felt was much less common "back in the day".
3) (and final) "Better" and "Worse" players- The final point I want to make is derrived from the other two, namely that the combination or rules mastery and build mastery leads to a phenomenon of system mastery, resulting in more effective characters at the table. Not to sound like a luditie, but at one time, build mastery essentially ment luck during your initial attribute roles. As a result, although a party was always happy to have a character with 18 (77) strength (another throwback
) there was never an element of judgement attirbutted to a less productive player bringing a sub-optimal build or playing tactically "wrong" This is exacerbated by the standardization of challenges, where we know where a typical party should fall on the power curve. This was much less apparent when an encounter was whatever the DM pulled from the Monsterous Compendium. Similarly, we didn't have to spend our time discussing useless monsters because, in existential sense, such monsters simply just were, rather than being a substandard example of a level 8 monster, which no DM should ever use, from a book that is totally obsolete .All in all I had a great time with the game day, despite a TPK on the final encounter. I hope to continue playing though the encounters series. I think that the current incarnation of the game has a lot of merit, and, in the end, the enjoyability of a game is a manifestation of the stories you use it to tell rather than the rules that you use. But, as read through the threads regarding the edition wars, pathfinder and 4th edition, it occurs to me that to a prior player these symptoms seem to share many more similarities than they do differences.
