The Role of the Wizard, or "How Come Billy Gets to Create a Demiplane?"

[Odhanan]

Your opinions are facts, are opinions are wrong. Got it.

You're welcome.

 

[Ariosto]

Well, off the top of my head, there'd be no Mutants and Masterminds or Spycraft, to name a couple, if 3e had come out from a different publisher.

I could ask "why not?", but instead I can only wonder,

Do you really miss the point?

There's no necessity for a different publisher. Guess what TSR published besides D&D?
Empire of the Petal Throne
Boot Hill
Metamorphosis Alpha
Top Secret
Gamma World
Gangbusters
Star Frontiers
Marvel Super Heroes
DragonQuest

Now, I happened to think it was pretty cool to be able to buy those games in addition to D&D, and in addition to each other. So did other people, and together we put more money in TSR's pockets than if there had been nothing but

... what?...

just book after book with TRACTICS on the cover?

<shrug> I'm just not seeing how that alternative type of situation is so much more appealing to some people.

But "change nothing and fire the players who want any change" is not the cut-and-dried optimal answer; it's only argued that way because people adhere to this hobby like unto a religion.

Is this really so hard for you to understand?

Go ahead and make a game for those who consider Vampire fatuous and boring rubbish and Mark Rein*Hagen a hack. That might be a splendid game.

But why call it Vampire?

<shrug> To me, that seems silly and self-defeating.

(Of course, I can't help but notice that you work for the competition, not for the owners of the D&D brand!)

 

[M.L. Martin]

I think it's just the opposite, that it has been a narrowing of the portfolio that is to blame. I suspect that you are following the fashion for saying things one knows very well are false because the cynicism gets celebrated as 'wit'.

Actually, I'm providing a somewhat exaggerated but fundamentally accurate view of the impression I've gotten of 'old school' from listening to a bunch of people online pontificate about it. I admit that I look upon that school with an unsympathetic and somewhat jaundiced eye.

In the old game (unlike in 4e!), a Paladin or Ranger could not be amoral.

And paladins, at least, seem to often have been regarded as a burden to the party or a trap for players.

Furthermore, the structure of the game was one of players choosing their courses of action rather than being shorn of the responsibility upon which morality depends.

Unfortunately, the idea of any moral or social consequences for such actions occasionally gets derided as 'railroading' or 'heavy-handedness.'

The 'breadth' I see in the prevailing sense of 'fantasy' is a wan and emaciated thing next to what informed old D&D. Anyone who cares to can look at the body of work Gygax produced, and at what came after him, and see where there is nurturing of the imagination. Nowadays, so much gets shuts down as "not proper fantasy" because it does not color inside the lines drawn by inbreeding between later commercial D&D and rigidly generic fictional pabulum.

I was thinking of the 2nd Edition days, when the game really seemed to be trying to reach beyond its origins. I do think 3rd Edition suffered from a tendency to wallow in 1E nostalgia and become an oroborous-like morass of self-referentiality.

 

[Ariosto]

M.L. Martin:
Have you got an identity crisis there?

First, you seemed to imply that you were representing the views of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, "the authors" who "misrepresented" the game by not describing it in what on closer examination are terms dripping with contempt.

Now, you claim to be representing the views of... weasel words?

Logic seems to have gone on holiday, and not just for you. Has someone spiked the D&D branded soda pop?

 

[Barastrondo]

Do you really miss the point?

There's no necessity for a different publisher.

If the implication of "more choices is good" was that "one game publisher would suffice to keep the entire roleplaying populace happy," I confess that I absolutely did miss that. It seems unintuitive to me.

Is this really so hard for you to understand?

No, it's just that I don't believe in the kind of absolute "all or nothing" language you're invoking. It's like asking if it's so hard for me to understand that the earth sits on a turtle's back -- understanding the premise is a long way from agreeing that it's true.

Real game design doesn't deal in absolutes like "you must change next to nothing or you must change everything." If you're making a Star Wars game, and you've discovered that Gungans and Ewoks aren't real popular, you don't assume that your audience hates everything about Star Wars aliens, and throw out Wookiees and Twi'leks and Rodians as well. You certainly don't throw out everything and make a Star Trek clone. You look at what they do like about Star Wars. And if, in the process, you find a lot of people rate Han Solo as their favorite character, you consider making smugglers a competitive mechanical choice side-by-side with Jedi.

Go ahead and make a game for those who consider Vampire fatuous and boring rubbish and Mark Rein*Hagen a hack. That might be a splendid game.

It doesn't work that way. Games are made up of individual elements, which people are capable of examining on an individual basis. That's why we have controversies like this: because people may like 80% of a given game edition but would like to see 20% changed. Or 90/10. Now, if part of someone's 20% that they'd like to see changed is something you really like, sure, you disagree. But assuming that they would be happier with another game when they like 80-90% of this one is almost certainly a failure to understand what they like about a game.

Again, think of Star Wars. If somebody says they'd like to see some stories about non-Jedi for a change, it's silly to tell them to go find another sci-fi universe to follow. Star Wars is big enough, and full of so much stuff, that someone can find lots of things to like about Star Wars and still dislike some elements. D&D is the exact same way.

(Of course, I can't help but notice that you work for the competition, not for the owners of the D&D brand!)

Ha, that would be an interesting conspiracy theory! "He's agreeing that people might not care for older wizard/fighter power dynamics, guys! He must be trying to sabotage WotC!"

No, actually, I like 4e quite a bit. And B/X, which I started with, and the Rules Compendium, and 1e, and I had a lot of fun with 2e, and 3e ultimately wasn't for me but it certainly provided some good gaming (and a Scarred Lands supplement I'm personally very proud of). I wish WotC success in their endeavors, and actually I've been pointing out how game designers can make decisions like "let's make the fighter and wizard more even at every tier of play" based on what they hear from people playing the game.

There's not actually as much vitriol in the industry as you might think. We have friends at other companies. We like playing other companies' games. I passed on a Swords & Wizardry one-shot tonight because the wife was feeling ill. I do enjoy the concept of sabotaging rivals with supportive forum posts, though. It suits the industry sense of humor.

Logic seems to have gone on holiday, and not just for you. Has someone spiked the D&D branded soda pop?

Out of respect, Ariosto? Seriously, man, it's not worth dropping the debate to that level. We're all just talking about games that we like to play.

 

[Sorrowdusk]

Far too much, generally speaking. Antagonistic (and occasionally friendly) spellcasters can and have done things in 3e campaigns I played ranging from placing the party under magical compulsions to achieve their goals to sending them involuntarily to locations ranging from "the other end of the dungeon" up to "a world on a completely different plane".

And when you do finally turn the tables and start hunting them down, they're slippery beggars, always ready with a quick exit, whether it's Gaseous Form or Teleport or Plane Shift or just dying and waking up in a Clone half a continent away. I remember in the mid-teens game we played, it got so frustrating that we were buying up wands of Dimensional Anchor and firing off Forcecages and Walls of Stone first thing in combat, just to try and nail them down.

And if you do manage to finish one off, you'd better be supernaturally thorough about it, or some other spellcaster will wander by and Raise or Resurrect or Animate them the moment your back's turned.

So what was the point of Lichdom, seeing as you gain all the weaknesses of undead?

Isnt there some way to be immortal but "alive". And on an unrelated side note, it may be older edition-but wasnt it written somewhere that Liches cant bodily leave the plane? (at at least do so and leave there soul/phylactery behind)

 

[Ariosto]

Real game design doesn't deal in absolutes like "you must change next to nothing or you must change everything."

You and your rhetorical fellow travelers do, though.

Why are you so fixated on this notion that the only options are either:
(A) publish one radical reaction against Dungeons & Dragons (or just the latest "D&D") after another, label each one "D&D", and then discard it in a few years; or
(B) never publish any other RPGs?

Your huffing and puffing is not about game design. It's about taking a name made great by someone else's game design! So is mine, only my opinion differs.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Here is what you can do with Time Stop!

Here is how a wizard can be 3 times as effective as the rest of their team with the right planning!

 

[Leatherhead]

Actually, I think fighters are a bigger problem for game design than wizards are.
No, really. I should type up my ideas on "The Tyranny of the Sword" sometime when I can put them in order.

 

[Bluenose]

The 'breadth' I see in the prevailing sense of 'fantasy' is a wan and emaciated thing next to what informed old D&D. Anyone who cares to can look at the body of work Gygax produced, and at what came after him, and see where there is nurturing of the imagination. Nowadays, so much gets shuts down as "not proper fantasy" because it does not color inside the lines drawn by inbreeding between later commercial D&D and rigidly generic fictional pabulum.

Do you really believe that? Seriously? As far as I can see, Gygax's 'vision' encompassed a bit more than the kitchen-sink pseudo-European fantasy setting, but it's a stretch to include something like Eberron or Dark Sun or Nyambe or a host of fiction settings as part of it. Fantasy is a much wider genre now than it was in the 1970s. Now, in places (the Sword and Sorcery pool, for example) there's not as much of it, but a claim that fantasy is narrower than it used to be isn't plausible.