Why are we okay with violence in RPGs?

Flexor the Mighty! · Jun 19, 2019

They had the original Braunstein stuff at GaryCon and it seemed far more like LARP than anything else to me. LARP with props, which I think is just LARP.

Lanefan · Jun 20, 2019

Flexor the Mighty! said:
They had the original Braunstein stuff at GaryCon and it seemed far more like LARP than anything else to me. LARP with props, which I think is just LARP.

Pretty much - Braunstein is often cited as the first RPG but it's more accurate to say it's a more direct predecessor to LARPs than to TTRPGs; and it took Dave Arneson (who learned via Braunstein) to jump from the Braunstein stepping-stone to the tabletop.

Maxperson · Jun 20, 2019

Celebrim said:
This not at all my experience. ''Ease" or "difficulty" is entirely a matter of the DM. I can make a killer dungeon in any edition. I can run through a stack of photocopied character sheets in any edition. It's not particularly hard in any edition to make the game difficult. So I'm having a hard time understanding how you can judge which edition was easier.

It's really easy. I played 1e, 2e and 3e extensively with a variety of DM types. 3e was far easier across the board. I worried in most combats in AD&D. I worried in relatively few combats in 3e, and most of those were when facing things with CRs 2 or more higher than the party.

All you are really showing is that 3e was less arbitrary than 1e. As far as difficulty goes, there are a ton of things in 3e that are vastly more difficult than 1e. Monsters don't top out at effectively 'CR 10'. The rules include standardized methods for increasing the HD and difficult of foes through advancement, templates, and character levels. In 1e, after a party hit name level there were only a few things in the MM that even represented much of a threat to the party. Monsters now explicitly have strength, dexterity, and constitution. In 1e, a fighter would often have more hit points than anything he encountered. In 3e, you often encounter things with 2-3 times as many hit points as the party fighter. With strength scores, all monsters can hit like a truck, and not just a few high end monsters like giants. One of the ways that 3e is vastly harder than 1e, is that it was comparatively easy in 1e to buff AC to the point that monsters almost never hit you. They rarely had bonuses to hit, and they topped off at 16 HD on the standard chart. It was fairly easy to get to the point that pretty much every thing you encountered would need a 20 or nearly a 20 to hit. But in 3e, monsters have more HD, better THAC0, and almost always have additional bonuses to hit from high strength. And on top of that, monsters can critically hit you, turning fights that should be easy into suddenly nervy moments. Yes, more things get saving throws, but those saving throws don't have static DC's. A few things in 1e had -2 or -4 penalties to saves. In 3e, the save difficulties get ludicrously high so that even high level characters are rarely going to pass their saves. That one change alone in my experience made 3e much harder than 1e, because high level 1e characters could reliably pass saving throws with only a minimal amount of magical boosts. Plus 3e really stressed all sorts of new challenges. Swarms for example became a standardized thing and brought new terrors to the game.

Are you talking about epic levels in 3e? Because I played several campaigns to 16-20th level and saves were not all that hard to make.

Maxperson · Jun 20, 2019

jasper said:
oh! Oh! Mr. Kotter. What about kid players do they count. Or
from saltmarsh 1981
The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is the first installment in a series of three modules designed and developed in the United Kingdom, for beginning adventures with the AD&D rules. The adventure can be played by 5-10 characters of levels 1-3. This module contains large-scale maps, full background information, and detailed encounter descriptions for the players and DM....

Perhaps you missed the part where I mentioned that modules were different. You shouldn't look to them for what the base game expects.

Maxperson · Jun 20, 2019

Celebrim said:
1 Dragon = 3 PCs? Really? Is that how you think it has ever worked? Are dragons and PC's as standardized as coins?

3-5 depending on the PC mix and dragon, yes. You don't encounter half a dragon, and a dragon is an encounter for PCs of X level, depending on the age of the dragon. Given that 3 or more is the ideal number of players, you won't see encounters that are going to be auto death for 3 players. That's just not ideal.

Hussar · Jun 20, 2019

Maxperson said:
Perhaps you missed the part where I mentioned that modules were different. You shouldn't look to them for what the base game expects.

Why not?

It's not like AD&D had a "core rules" divide. The modules were just as "official rules" as anything else.

Now, if most modules were 2-3 PC's, then I might agree with your point. However, most of the modules were of the "6-9" characters variety. Dragonlance baselined with 8 characters.

And, I would point out that this is precisely what I was talking about - people's experiences with AD&D vary really wildly depending on whether you were a module junkie like me or not. Again, it also points to the schizophrenic nature of AD&D. If 2-3 players (plus a DM) was expected, why the need for a "caller"? The example of play in the DMG includes 5 PC's plus a thief NPC. I'm thinking that a DM plus 2 PC's was probably not the presumption of the game.

jasper · Jun 20, 2019

Maxperson said:
Perhaps you missed the part where I mentioned that modules were different. You shouldn't look to them for what the base game expects.

Yup Missed that. But you missing the part where ALOT of us use the modules as OFFFICAL WAY TO PLAY. It wasn't until I saw some of Gary's posts here mention lots of hirelings in a dungeon was one way to play.

Maxperson · Jun 20, 2019

Hussar said:
Why not?

It's not like AD&D had a "core rules" divide. The modules were just as "official rules" as anything else.

They were not rules at all. They were adventures.

And, I would point out that this is precisely what I was talking about - people's experiences with AD&D vary really wildly depending on whether you were a module junkie like me or not. Again, it also points to the schizophrenic nature of AD&D. If 2-3 players (plus a DM) was expected, why the need for a "caller"? The example of play in the DMG includes 5 PC's plus a thief NPC. I'm thinking that a DM plus 2 PC's was probably not the presumption of the game.

The game itself says it is, though. Iideal begins at 3 total players, so that number has to be part of the presumption or it is not ideal.

Maxperson · Jun 20, 2019

jasper said:
Yup Missed that. But you missing the part where ALOT of us use the modules as OFFFICAL WAY TO PLAY. It wasn't until I saw some of Gary's posts here mention lots of hirelings in a dungeon was one way to play.

I've always gone with the rules as the official way to play, but that's just me I guess. Three or more includes 6-9, but doesn't require it or make 6-9 the baseline. The baseline presumption of the game is that 3 is as ideal as 9 is. Modules are a different beast. Many of them were written for convention and/or tournament play, and I suspect others just followed that model. Perhaps they figured it was easier to tone down a module for 3 players, than it is to beef it up for 9.

Hussar · Jun 20, 2019

[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], you realize you have it backwards right? The tournaments came first THEN AD&D. AD&D was an attempt to codify what was happening at tournaments. That's why tournament play is actually mentioned more than a few times in the AD&D DMG.

Look, we get it. You played AD&D with 3 people. Great. Can you not understand that that wasn't typical of the time? Tournament tables were MUCH larger than that. Heck, my home game was anywhere from 6-13 players for many, many years. You'd think that if most of the games were only 3 players, then they'd market the modules for 3 players. Seems kind of strange to baseline the game at 3 players and then produce absolutely nothing for that baseline.