Broken Base Lookback #5: Or...Wow...I got old too quickly...

[Desdichado]

Notably (and this really can't be repeated enough) this was not true of most early D&D players.

The huge boom in D&D's popularity? It came at a time when D&D was played around a model of variable adventuring parties delving into a dungeon each week. Somebody didn't show up? Guess they didn't go this time. Somebody new wants to try playing? Hop on board.

As RPG campaigns moved towards story arcs with tightly managed continuity, however, both of these things were less true: Now missing players were an issue. And letting new players try out the game was more problematic (because if they didn't get hooked, their absence would similarly disrupt continuity).

Depends on what you mean by early and the big boom. Sure, Gary played that way, and much of the OD&D mid-70s gaming worked that way. By the time D&D became a kind of mainstream phenomena in the early 80s--the days of AD&D books and BD&D boxed sets being available at your typical department store and all that, I don't think that was necessarily true anymore. By this time, the big influx of new players were not people who got interested in the game because they came out of a wargaming environment anymore. Many of these folks were fans of fantasy fiction first, and were attracted to D&D because of the obvious resemblances--and they demanded and played the game with a fantasy fiction paradigm from the get-go.

I'm a relatively early D&D player; came on board (more or less) in... I dunno, '81 or '82. We never played the way you describe, nor did anyone I know or witnessed, and it didn't even occur to me that the game could be played like that for years to come yet. And I think that my experience was pretty typical.

 

[Croesus]

I'm a relatively early D&D player; came on board (more or less) in... I dunno, '81 or '82. We never played the way you describe, nor did anyone I know or witnessed, and it didn't even occur to me that the game could be played like that for years to come yet. And I think that my experience was pretty typical.

Whereas I'm one of the players you refer to who started in the 70's with the white box, and RA's description of how we played is spot on. In fact, in many cases each player ran multiple characters because we rarely had enough players (sometimes just one).

Of course, that was possible because we really didn't actually roleplay a lot - some, but not like we do today. Characters tended to die quickly, and we only became attached to the characters who survived the low level gauntlet, which is also about the time they really began to feel like characters, rather than cannon fodder. I'm oversimplifying a bit, but I think RA's comment about how our expectations have changed does contribute significantly to how difficult it is to maintain a campaign.

Unfortunately, I don't have any real insights into how to fix that. I'm at an age where I want RP in my RPG, yet it's awfully hard to get everyone together on a regular basis.

 

[Rogue Agent]

I'm a relatively early D&D player; came on board (more or less) in... I dunno, '81 or '82. We never played the way you describe, nor did anyone I know or witnessed, and it didn't even occur to me that the game could be played like that for years to come yet. And I think that my experience was pretty typical.

'81 and '82 is when the shift starts, though, so that's unsurprising.

In fact, I'd argue that you can trace the shift in design methodology at TSR almost precisely to module B3: The original version of module B3 was an open-ended megadungeon and wilderness exploration that the DM was explicitly expected to flesh-out and expand. The revised version that actually got released eliminated most of the wilderness adventure, eliminated the entrances to deeper levels of the dungeon (that the DM was supposed to expand), and added a pre-canned plot.

The boom was over by '83.

In '84, the Dragonlance adventure path arrived and completed the transition from open gaming tables to preplotted campaigns.

Unfortunately, I don't have any real insights into how to fix that. I'm at an age where I want RP in my RPG, yet it's awfully hard to get everyone together on a regular basis.

Look at campaign structures where it's perfectly natural for characters to come and go. These can be quite varied.

A Star Trek campaign that primarily focuses on the landing party, for example. A Mission Impossible team that assembles a different crew for each op. And so forth.

If you think about it, it's actually the campaign structure of "6 guys who spend their every waking moment together" that's unrealistic. In real life, things shift around. So roleplaying in these environments isn't impossible (or even difficult).

What I think is more difficult is structuring the campaign so that session breaks always happen at points where it's logical for PCs to join or leave the group (for the team to reform and re-apply itself). Theoretically, one-shots should work. But I've found it's actually quite difficult to "get the timing right" on one-shots (so that they don't overrun the session time limit). Dungeon delving is great because you can naturally disengage and then re-engage with a default explanation ("we're beat up / have looted enough and it's time to head back to town").

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, but my point is that I think the cause of the shift was the changing customer base... that and customers starting to become authors and designers and bringing their tastes and preferences to the table. I doubt that TSR had any kind of strategic goal to switch from a game that focused more on the game to one that focused more on the roleplaying; I think it was just an inevitable thing that happened organically because the audience was going that way.

 

[Hussar]

I think Hobo makes a good point here. The shift was caused by game designers who were not playing in the same style as Gygax and co. The Wiess and Hickman crowd, Moldvay's stuff is also very different as well.

I mean, look at X1 Isle of Dread. Suddenly the whole mega-dungeon thing is gone. You need a consistent group of players and a consistent group of characters because you have no realistic way of replacing casualties beyond whatever you happened to bring on your ship.

I'd agree that about 1980-82 sees a big shift in how the game is presented. I don't think that's simply coincidental with the peak in the popularity of D&D. It's because of that peak that we see the shift.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I just think this Penny Arcade comic would strongly apply to this topic, and it has no swearing even!

Penny Arcade - Dotage

 

[Rogue Agent]

Yeah, but my point is that I think the cause of the shift was the changing customer base...

Probably.

But wargames suffered a similar problem: As their original customers became veterans, the products and games they wanted assumed a form which actually made it more and more difficult to attract new players to the hobby. It was natural for the veteran players to want what they wanted. It was natural for the wargame publishers to make what their customers wanted.

And it was, thus, perfectly natural for the wargame market to atrophy and then die.

RPGs have had a gentler decline. (Largely because WotC saved D&D when they acquired TSR whereas TSR put a bullet in the brain of the wargame market when they acquired SPI.) But it's the same problem: Veteran gamers wanted more "story" in their games. TSR satisfied that desire with linear adventures supporting small groups willing to make long-term commitments.

Nothing wrong with any of that, per se. But the inevitable result is an atrophying of the market.

I doubt that TSR had any kind of strategic goal to switch from a game that focused more on the game to one that focused more on the roleplaying;

I think the claim that the only way to support roleplaying is through linear story arcs requiring long-term, regular commitments from small groups isn't true.

What is true is that from 1980 until the late '90s, those interested in "story first" only had one method for achieving that: Preplotted arcs. And those preplotted arcs carried with them the small, long-term group dynamics.

But that's begun to change in the last decade. Story games have broken a lot of ground in finding ways to achieve that "story first" feel without using preplotted arcs. Unfortunately, most of those story games are also completely impenetrable to newbies without veteran players to guide them and often require the same long-term group commitments in different ways.

I think the interesting question is whether or not you can find ways of structuring campaigns which are:

(a) Open tables (allowing flexible scheduling and making it easier to invite new players so that the game spreads virally);

(b) Comprehensible and manageable for new GMs (in the same way that dungeon crawls are something new GMs can very easily comprehend and run without any prior experience);

(c) Not disruptive of continuity (in the sense that you don't have to pretend to ignore that characters are teleporting in and out for no rational reason)

(d) Capable of still supporting strong "story first" inclinations

That, to my eye, is a magic bullet. And I'm not pretending I actually have that solution.

 

[Desdichado]

But wargames suffered a similar problem: As their original customers became veterans, the products and games they wanted assumed a form which actually made it more and more difficult to attract new players to the hobby. It was natural for the veteran players to want what they wanted. It was natural for the wargame publishers to make what their customers wanted.

And it was, thus, perfectly natural for the wargame market to atrophy and then die.

RPGs have had a gentler decline. (Largely because WotC saved D&D when they acquired TSR whereas TSR put a bullet in the brain of the wargame market when they acquired SPI.) But it's the same problem: Veteran gamers wanted more "story" in their games. TSR satisfied that desire with linear adventures supporting small groups willing to make long-term commitments.

Nothing wrong with any of that, per se. But the inevitable result is an atrophying of the market.

But I think this is wrong. You're right in pointing out that it was easier to integrate new players into the game, but not in implying that the game itself is easier to pick up and understand. And I also firmly believe that there was a huge influx in the market that came with those tastes hard-coded already--simply put, they wouldn't have been very interested in adopting the very gamist, all we do is explore the dungeon type games that were more common in the 70s, and which was the paradigm Gygax played by and no doubt assumed. In other words, the hobby doesn't grow, or even sustain itself just based on the ease of integrating new players into any particular game if it's not a game that they're interested in being integrated into, or playing longterm.

Of course, you could disagree with me that that's what players want--I only point this out because I'm the kind of player who would never have become a gamer under that older paradigm. I might have tried it, but I wouldn't have been captivated enough by it to become a customer. For that matter, almost everyone I've gamed with in my entire career is more or less the same. Yeah, I know, that's just my anecdote and somebody else could have had the exact opposite experience.

I think the claim that the only way to support roleplaying is through linear story arcs requiring long-term, regular commitments from small groups isn't true.

I think it isn't true also. But I also believe you set up a little bit of a false dichotomy below, which I'll get to in a moment. There's more than one way to run a "story first" feel game, and it's not a dichotomy between preplotted "adventure paths" and completely plotless dungeoncrawls. There's a much more diverse suite of options for how to run a game.

What is true is that from 1980 until the late '90s, those interested in "story first" only had one method for achieving that: Preplotted arcs. And those preplotted arcs carried with them the small, long-term group dynamics.

Actually, no, that isn't true. Preplotting is not at all a condition of a "story first" paradigm. Granted, many actual games end up working out that way. But they don't have to. It's not the only method to achieve the "story first" feel, either now or in the 80s and 90s either one.

But that's begun to change in the last decade. Story games have broken a lot of ground in finding ways to achieve that "story first" feel without using preplotted arcs. Unfortunately, most of those story games are also completely impenetrable to newbies without veteran players to guide them and often require the same long-term group commitments in different ways.

I'm not sure what you mean by "story game" and based on the last comment there, I'm not sure I have any idea what an example of such a "story game" might be. For the record, I run D&D games, and my houserules are to get the tone and setting I want, not the play experience in terms of "story first" or anything else. And I've been running games the same way since the 80s--although in the mid-80s I tired of D&D and played other games, like Top Secret, Call of Cthulhu, MERP, and later Werewolf and Alternity a bit, and even some homebrew systems and esoteric games like The Window. And I certainly believe my games have a "story first" feel. And they definately are not pre-plotted arcs. I rarely have the foggiest idea what the next session is going to entail, although I do usually have a vague plan at least for the session I'm in the middle of running while I run.

(a) Open tables (allowing flexible scheduling and making it easier to invite new players so that the game spreads virally);

I will admit that this is something my games don't handle all that well without starting to feel silly. And I rarely am on the lookout for new gamers at my table. And my ideal number of players is much smaller than those gigantic Gygaxian dungeoncrawls used to do.

(b) Comprehensible and manageable for new GMs (in the same way that dungeon crawls are something new GMs can very easily comprehend and run without any prior experience);

Is that really true? It seems to me that a lot of other scenarios would make "more sense" to new GMs. After all, how much are they exposed to the concept of the dungeoncrawl in the source material that they're probably used to before running? Plus, dungeoncrawls are actually mechanically fairly challenging--you have to know how to run all kinds of different monsters. You have to deal with all kinds of traps and challenges and puzzles. You need to be well organized and juggle a lot of information during the session.

I think a lot of other scenarios would be much more intuitive as well as less mechanically challenging (i.e., therefore easier for new GMs to comprehend and run without any prior experience) than dungeoncrawling.

(c) Not disruptive of continuity (in the sense that you don't have to pretend to ignore that characters are teleporting in and out for no rational reason)

Certainly a challenge! Probably the best way would be to focus on the session as a discrete unit of play. The "story first" feel perhaps better meets this goal not by emulating fantasy novels nearly so much as it emulates fantasy short stories, or focuses on the session as if it were an episode of an ensemble cast TV show, with a fair bit of conclusive finality of sorts to the end of each session. A much more episodic approach, I guess

(d) Capable of still supporting strong "story first" inclinations

Of course, the question is, do gamers who prefer the "story first" style want episodic play, or are they actively searching for long-term type games--more The Lord of the Rings rather than a fantasy version of The A-Team or Hawaii 5-O. I think here is where we get to the real dichotomy. The hobby could grow easier if people didn't have story first preferences, and could come and go into the hobby easier. But people do have the story first preferences in large numbers, and the hobby can't grow if it doesn't appeal to the preferences of potential players. There's been little support or discussion officially, or in print, or anywhere else, on how to run the game that focuses on this issue; how to run the game for different tastes, how to maintain group cohesion, etc. It's a little too "meta" for most GMing advice chapters in most games I've read, but I think it's something that deserves some attention. I believe publishers presume that most gamers either play the way that they play, or that they optimize around their own preferences. I believe that a lot of gamers actually play suboptimal games because they don't know any better and it never occured to them that there might be another way of doing things.

 

[Umbran]

Unfortunately, most of those story games are also completely impenetrable to newbies without veteran players to guide them and often require the same long-term group commitments in different ways.

No argument about the commitments...

But, I'll argue that D&D, and RPGs in general, were already impenetrable to newbies back in the 1970s, and have been ever since. I think the period in which people picked up books and played without veteran guidance was very short, in the very beginning, and since that time the majority of players have been brought in by veterans, not by the books on the shelves.

The very concept of pretending to be an elf, and following rules but not being able to "win", and in fact not even competing with the other players, are cognitive barriers to mass market folks whose basic experience of games is in cards, monopoly, and such. I think only recently, with a generation that's grown up with the concept of computer RPGs, has that situation changed.

(d) Capable of still supporting strong "story first" inclinations

I don't think the same game needs to be able to support both. "Being all things to all people" is a tall order, and perhaps too high an expectation.

 

[rogueattorney]

Hm. A thought that maybe hasn't been considered....

D&D had a major heyday in the 1980s, with lots (millions?) of teens playing, right? Those teens then went off and had lives.

A kid who was 12 in 1982 went to college in 1988, and things started getting busy. He (or she, though at the time the hobby was pretty male-dominated, I'm led to believe) got married after college (after 1992). Today, that kid is 40+, and has kids of his or her own.

But, in a few more years, that kid will be 50. The kid's kids will be off on their own. He'll still have a career, but will have fewer day-to-day commitments...

Anyone thinking ahead to how to get those older folks back into the market? I'm not talking about a retroclone - retroclones are the same game you played back when you were a teen. Accept for a moment that 30+ years and raising children and a career later, the kid's a changed person who will want different things.

Anyone thinking of a game to appeal to that older, changed person? You wont' get all of them, of course. But,if there were so many of them, maybe it is worth it. And there'll be a constant flow of old lapsed gamers who have time falling back into their hands...

For what it's worth, the gamer you describe in your post fits the guys who created OSRIC to an absolute tee. They came back to gaming in their mid-30s, found modern games wanting, and went back to what they liked when they were kids.

EDIT: The thing is, I find that retro-clone players like playing the games they played as kids, but tend to play them very differently.