[WotC's recent insanity] I think I've Figured It Out

[Erik Mona]

Now there is an element of tactics in a lot of these...but WoW's "aggro juggling" and Pokemon's "rock-paper-scissors-BFG" are streets ahead of 4e's tactical minis combat...

Wow. Way to use Pierce's slang from Community there. If I'd missed it, I would probably be streets behind.

--Erik

 

[mattcolville]

...and there are games out there which allow you to do that.

Yes and for the majority of it's history, D&D was one of them.

D&D 4E can do it

No it can't. YOU can do it, but the game isn't aware that there is any ambition besides "more levels."

but that not being a main focus of D&D is not a flaw.

"Main focus" is something you invented. I feel as though the *absence* of even the *awareness* that there is, or could be, or should be, a thing called "ambition," meaning the desire of the players, some players, to interact with a world outside the encounter and have an impact on it, is a flaw.

Because without that, all you've got is Descent or Warhammer Quest or the Castle Ravenloft boardgame.

 

[Stormonu]

<"I know I'm sick of many of the fans">


On it.


RC

Should I be expecting ninjas in the mail soon?

 

[Ariosto]

TaiChara tells the truth, Mercurius, about what's going on. Kids (and other people, too) are grooving on the collaborative, socially mediated construction of story-telling games.

It's "the other" direction of development from MUD, not the one that gets you EverQuest and World of Warcraft.

This is an old problem in the FRP business. The latter may well turn out to have thrived on a "generation" that in the long run is not the rule but the exception.

The first generation did their own thing and made it up as they went along. (I could say "we", as that's the scene to which I was introduced and the ethos that still seems natural to me.)

Besides there not being another option if they were to play the games that had yet to be created, they saw making them as part of the fun.

Gary Gygax was glad to let Judges Guild have a license to produce supplements because he didn't think there would be much of a market for them. After all -- to the minds of the early fantasy gamers -- making up that stuff was part of the fun. It would be like paying someone else to go eat the candy one had bought for oneself!

He also was not at first (or later) a pusher of conformity. In fact, he wrote a letter to the prominent APA Alarums & Excursions in which he said that conformity would never be TSR's policy so long as he had a say.

Well, as it turned out there was a big market for "have us do more of your imagining for you", and for "conformity in major systems" (and increasingly 'minor' details as well).

Even after the publication of the first four volumes of AD&D, he wrote in The Dragon against the idea that D&Ders should be subject to an endless flood of supplements and revisions demanding purchase to "keep current". He admitted that purely as a business man he relished the prospect -- but also that the pecuniary was not the sum, or even the first, of his values.

He was a game maker (and, more broadly, entertainment producer) by personal vocation, not as a convenience in the "higher" calling of pure capitalism. He was never likely to give it up for commodities or real estate or electronics or software or soda pop.

Now we've had such a scheme for long enough to exert quite a bit of selection pressure on who is into the game and who is not.

That a good portion of those who are not into it happen to be doing their own thing and making it up as they go does not dismay me!

 

[mattcolville]

Killing monsters hasn't seriously been "an unsolved problem" in game design since the Pharaohs ruled Egypt, or some time prior. The Fantasy Supplements for Chainmail and WRG (4th?) were just popular rules sets -- not groundbreaking discoveries in mathematics or something.

As for D&D, what's next is up to you.

It has been since 1974!

Ahh...no it hasn't. In 1974 the assumption was that your character would become a Lord, which could mean any number of things, but he'd be a character with power and influence *outside* the encounter. The game expected this and there were rules for attracting followers, building strongholds.

That wasn't something the players invented outside the rules, as you're suggesting, it was in the rules.

Now it's not. I'm saying the DevTeam have sufficiently provided us with a fun game, more options for character creation and combat than any player could exhaust in an lifetime of play, and it's time for them to go cover the rest of the ground the game used to cover.

And do it better, frankly.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Should I be expecting ninjas in the mail soon?

Robot dinosaur pirate ninjas.

 

[BryonD]

Ahh...no it hasn't. In 1974 the assumption was that your character would become a Lord, which could mean any number of things, but he'd be a character with power and influence *outside* the encounter. The game expected this and there were rules for attracting followers, building strongholds.

That wasn't something the players invented outside the rules, as you're suggesting, it was in the rules.

What portion of players paid the slightest attention to that rule?
I'm certain there were more than a few, including yourself. But I played in numerous groups back in the day and, without exception, encumbrance got more attention than the by the book presumptions for lordship and the like. (And encumbrance was pretty well ignored)

 

[mattcolville]

@mattcolville
@CharlesRyan

"Yuletide Salutations!

Gaining lots of treasure is something I always favored. To keep it moving I encouraged players to have their PCs hire many retainers, troops, build a castle, etc.

Christmas cheer,
Gary"
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=125997&page=148

To each his own, but that aspect has always been one thing thats fascinated me, although I've not often advanced to the point at which I had the funds to actually do so, many of my characters had something of the aim in addition to their other personal goals.

Chas says that none of his characters have ever had any ambition, and that's fine. I know players who stopped playing D&D when Warhammer Quest came out, and never went back, because a game like that offered 100% of what they went to D&D for.

But WotC shouldn't assume that, otherwise they'd stop making D&D and just crank out variants of the Castle Ravenloft boardgame.

The fact that WotC *apparently* sees no features in D&D outside of Fighting Encounters is alarming to me. Because it, more than anything, makes me think eventually they'll just decide "screw it, let's make everything a board game."

Back in the 1970s, it was safe to assume that attracting followers (which presumed there was some benefit to doing so, something for those followers to *do*) and building a keep (ditto) were safe things for a typically motivated player.

The game assumed that wars were being fought somewhere and that when it was time for a war to be fought in your game, you'd use whatever wargame you liked. That was something outside the Encounter to engage with. We don't have that anymore.

But now we could have LOTS of motivations outside of those, motivations with *real* design behind them. Forget what they did back in the 1970s, let's do all that and more and do it better.

 

[Ariosto]

That wasn't something the players invented outside the rules, as you're suggesting

I have written no such thing.

 

[mattcolville]

What portion of players paid the slightest attention to that rule?
I'm certain there were more than a few, including yourself. But I played in numerous groups back in the day and, without exception, encumbrance got more attention than the by the book presumptions for lordship and the like. (And encumbrance was pretty well ignored)

Let's imagine I knew the answer to that. Do you think it would be relevant to the issue? If someone says "there were never rules for that," responding to the fact that there WERE by saying "well, we always ignored them," is moving the goalposts, I think we can agree.