Doing it wrong Part 1: Taking the dragon out of the dungeon

[Stormonu]

There was a big change in D&D - I'd say it was with DragonLance.

You weren't running a stable of nameless characters anymore that was a one-column block of pre-generated stats*. The Dragonlance characters had history. There was an epic story. D&D was changing. It wasn't just playing to dungeon-of-the-week. It was trying to tell the gaming community you could tell stories - epic stories on par with the Lord of the Rings and other novels/movies/folktales with this game.

Look at how 2E focused on the campaign world - the characters, such as in Forgotten Realms. Look at the modules and DMing advice from early 2E - there was a palatable disdain for the dungeons of old - of hex-crawling and dungeon-delving. Story was king.

3E toned down the importance of story (relative to 2E) and tried to tell us that dungeon-delving was still good, solid fun. Yet characters were still important - one only needs to look at the thousands of options to customize your character to see that. 4E continued to build on that, and still stressed "character as king".

The game is no longer about throwing half a dozen characters at an adventure and seeing who survives to tackle the next "obstacle". But there is nothing wrong with this. It doesn't mean that D&D has "lost its way". It only means that those who play it have found their way - and how they want to play the game.

* As far as the designers went. There's always have been someone on the customer side whose played D&D as story-driven from the beginning.

 

[Sunseeker]

So, your issue is more with the lethality levels of the game over time, you're using "Dragons" as the proverbial "teeth" of the beast and without those teeth the game becomes less appealing.

More than the fact that games change, people change, and with it, the gaming market. 15 years ago MMOs wherein "death" meant your character was gone forever, or people looted your corpse of all the awesome gear you've acquired was quite acceptable, but then even within gaming, even MMOs were a niche market, just as 30 years ago TTRPGs were. Because of the small population compared to the number of games available, more games were able to say "here's our game, here's how it runs, love it or leave it." But now, with massive gaming populations, the players have the power to determine what the game is like, not just with their voices but with their purchasing power.

The proverbial tables have turned.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think I understand the OP concerns, but to me it's just a matter of gaming style.

An "old-school" high-lethality dungeon crawl is a very different game compared to a story arc with death immunity for the PC. There are ruleset that work better with the first and ruleset that work better with the second, but more or less I believe you can use almost every edition to play both styles, or something in between.

Personally I am a bit more concerned about the Dragon (i.e. combat) taking nowadays a large dominance in the game over the Dungeon (i.e. exploration). But that's not because of the current rules, but rather because of gaming groups tastes.

 

[pemerton]

I think you're confusing "telling a story" with "roleplaying game".

<snip>

To many of us, "telling the story" is what you do after the game is over, in describing how the game turned out. The setup, the actual play of the game- those aren't "telling a story" to me. Those are "playing a game."

And for yet others of us, "playing the game" is (collectively) generating a story - using the basic technique of "GM frames a thematically-laden situation and the players engage it via their thematically-invested PCs".

The first version of D&D I used to play in this fashion was Oriental Adventures (mid-80s version). Not ideal for it, but not hopeless either.

There was a big change in D&D - I'd say it was with DragonLance.

You weren't running a stable of nameless characters anymore that was a one-column block of pre-generated stats*. The Dragonlance characters had history. There was an epic story.

<snip>

* As far as the designers went. There's always have been someone on the customer side whose played D&D as story-driven from the beginning.

I think your footnote is probably right.

For me, the big challenge is finding a way to run an "epic story" game where the story is not predetermined by the GM (I'm not interested in railroading) but will be reliably generated by play. This is partly about player attitudes, but mechanics also matter. I think AD&D's mechanics had some serious limitations in this respect, although (as I said above) weren't completely hopeless for it. The design of many post-Dragonlance modules, on the other hand, I won't try and defend!

It's not to say that you can't create the grand, sweeping epics, and advetures that you want to play with DnD. But the core rules and conceits of DnD, which haven't changed much through the years, don't lend themselves to this style of game.

<snip>

Early editions pretty much left this up to the DM, with mixed results obviously. Some DMs were great at this, they could make up stuff on the fly and everyone had fun. A lot of people however couldn't and so wanted "official" rules for all the corner cases they came up against (fairly difficult when you can do pretty much anything) but that hasn't stopped designers from trying. So we have ended up with an ever expanding set of "core" rules to help make our fish fly. And I think in the end they have been largely successful.

As far as editions are concerned, I find 4e far and away the best edition for GMing "story now" D&D. (This is both on the mechanics side and the story side.)

I personally don't think that an ever-increasing pile of corner-case rules is very helpful for GMing grand, sweeping epics. A grand, sweeping epic doesn't particularly need rules to distinguish between being stabbed by a spear and being stabbed by a sword, or between slipping on ice and slipping on mud. On the other hand, in my view at least, it does need rules that will support (i) the players being able to have an affect on the storyline other than via combat, and (ii) the players being able to take the story in directions different from what the GM may have anticipated. The history of RPG design shows that these things aren't as easy as they might seem at first blush!

 

[delericho]

Remove the story, and D&D becomes nothing more than Diablo. Or, indeed, those D&D boardgames.

Now that's fine, if that's what you want to play. And, indeed, those D&D boardgames are good boardgames.

But if that's all D&D is, then I'm not interested. If I can get a better role-playing experience from "Neverwinter Nights" or "Dragon Age", something has gone wrong.

(Besides, even Gygax pretty quickly moved beyond the dungeon. It seems likely that the game started there just because that was the easiest place to design for at the start, but that in time the limitations of that form became apparent. That's not to say there's anything wrong with a good old-fashioned dungeon-crawl. Merely that it's probably a mistake for that to be all that the game does.)

 

[Li Shenron]

Remove the story, and D&D becomes nothing more than Diablo. Or, indeed, those D&D boardgames.

I disagree. That's what happens if you remove both the interaction and the exploration phase, and play only a series of combat (note that Diablo HAS a story to unfold, but it has no interaction because you cannot affect it, and it definitely has no exploration).

I suppose there might be also a boardgame based on exploration, but IMHO the traditional way of running exploration in D&D and other RPG is much more based on description & imagination compared to the typical gameplay of a boardgame.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm not sure where things changed. I will hazard a guess that at some point the players got attatched to their characters.

I date it to 1984 and the Dragonlance Saga for the rules changing and having to hack in the Obscure Death Rule to get the sort of adventure they wanted.

I want to say that this doesn't mean DnD, as originally created anyway, is bad or anything I just think that we are going about it a little sideways. I think Gygax in essence made a very good fish ( in that it swims well, breathes underwater just fine and the like). The problem being is that for the last few decades the majority of players have been under the impression that they have a bird and are thus disappointed when they toss the poor thing out a window and lament that it doesn't fly that far.

Honestly, 4e flies but isn't terribly good at swimming. People are aware of this and have been doing things about it.

 

[pemerton]

Honestly, 4e flies but isn't terribly good at swimming. People are aware of this and have been doing things about it.

That's a little cryptic for me at the moment - of the various things being done (by 4e players, by WotC, etc) which ones did you have in mind?

 

[gamerprinter]

I think what Meatboy means, is that player options have taken over, thus the player is first the story, second, when back in 1e days, it was the other way around. In 1e days, from my experience, a character drawn up at 1st level almost never made it to 9th or 18th. Before you'd ever have a character lucky enough to survive to high levels, you left a trail of dead PCs behind you. Since 3x, and depth of character creation, expansion, the game is less deadly and has more become a game most PCs surviving to whatever level the campaign goes.

Is one better than the other? They are certainly different. I can say, I had fun playing every edition I've ever played, and though there are similarities to the editions - it's really a different game than what it started from.

 

[Starfox]

The bottom line is that Gygax and Arneson were tactical gamers and buffs for fantasy and historic medeival military action. They had a strong simulationist streak, and thought of heroes in battlefield terms. Thus the importance of armor, the emphasis on the difference between different types of equipment and weapons, and the wear and tear of hit points. Many of the base assumptions of RPGs of all stripes still reflect this. Had they been something else, the game would have been very different and appealed to different people.

Designers with more background in another period might have put less emphasis on armor and weapons, and more on tactics and formation.

Designers with more heroic fiction background might not have included hp and spell attrition and less focus on tactics, making a game more centered around dueling heroes and the drama surrounding them.

Designers with less of a combat bias might have made something much closer to theater than wargaming.

Many of these concepts are now in other RPGs. But the original DnD is still a very firm root for all kinds of RPGs - and that includes computer games. So the heritage of Gygax and Arneson and their basement has a profound effect on popular culture today.