D&D 5E Wondering Monster- Once Upon A Time

[Cadence]

My question to you is: If the purpose of a game's design is to trade turns for equal story telling, something I see as obviously not desired in earlier games, why have 100s (1000s?) of pages of world simulation rules? Shouldn't OD&D have been able to fit on a page? Is storytelling really why people went crazy over D&D in the 70s? Is it why they went crazy over Pacman?

The game clearly isn't designed for equal story telling is it? The DM is set-up to be different. But that doesn't mean it isn't about shared story telling. The 1e DMG says that the world should be modified as needed for the enjoyment of the players (ignoring die rolls, stealing treasure if you realize later you gave them too much, not having people die just because that's what happened in the game, random lightning bolts to control troublesome players, etc..)... and with experience, doing it on the fly is ok.

I don't see anything you quoted to convince me AD&D was designed so the DM could routinely break the rules on purpose.

He says multiple times that the DM should if it is needed to keep the campaign happily rolling along. If your world and encounter design is perfect (an impossible task?), then of course it wouldn't be needed.


Why have all the world animation rules? "In fact, what I have attempted is to cram everything vital to the game into this book, so that you will be as completely equipped as possible to face the ravenous packs of players lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce upon the unwary referee and devour him or her at the first opportunity." (1e DMG, pg. 9).

Why does having a list of the basic rules of how the shared world works contradict storytelling? Isn't it helpful so that every action doesn't bog down deciding what should happen or turn into a disagreement about what the effect is?

In the 1e DMG Gygax compares D&D to games with finite fixed rules (like Chess) and makes it clear that's not what D&D is.

What does why people went crazy over Pacman have to do with why they went crazy over D&D? The 70s had people going crazy over lots of things that were unrelated.

I started playing in 1981 in an older group in the midwest that had started playing when OD&D was being rolled out. As far as I could tell, none of them shared your view of the game or the reason for its popularity. It would be interesting to see how common the two views were among players in that first generation. (Anyone have some good quotes from the Strategic Review or early Dragon issues?)

I don't give much credence to anything in 2e and 1e has a number of design problems itself, not the least of which is Gygax actually suggesting players fudge die rolls as you aptly point out.

Regardless of their flaws, it seems strange to me that the written material in the core books of the first two editions of AD&D wouldn't be pretty definitive in terms of describing what AD&D is.

Or was OD&D relatively popular and refined enough that it should be more defining of the spirit of early D&D than, say, 1e and Moldvay/Cook?

 

[pemerton]

So I trust you will accept that if one runs a puzzle game going around online explaining precisely what the puzzle's design is isn't in the designer's best interest.

<snip>

All the specific questions you brought up, perhaps thinking they fall outside any rules design, are expressly addressed under the rules I use.

That's fine, but if the rules you use are not found in any published version of D&D, I'm not sure on what basis you claim that they are, or exhaust, what D&D is about. Or are truer to the aspirations of D&D than (say) Moldvay Basic.

The cleric system is the game system for the cleric classes to explore. It includes alignment, some of the ability score breakdowns, and all the rules covered outside the material realms (usually found under divine spells). It also includes all of the behavioral rules for intelligent creatures and the DMG has quite a bit about NPC personality, morale, and loyalty. Shared class rules address clerics in a way too and the DMG includes mass behavior of intelligent creatures, for instance: trade, economies, goods manufacture, services, alliances, government, and all the societal material only generally discussed, but where mechanics were not provided.

But nothing in those rules pulls out clerics as especially implicated, except for the alignment rules.

For instance, it is MUs, not clerics, who have the Friends and Charm Person spells, and the ESP spell.

And druids, not mainstream clerics, are the ones who have a min CHA and a Charm Person spell on their list.

And Gygax, in his discussion of playing the role for training purposes, emphasises clerics as providing support and remaining faithful to their deities - not as particularly addressing the "human" side of the gameworld.

If the purpose of a game's design is to trade turns for equal story telling, something I see as obviously not desired in earlier games, why have 100s (1000s?) of pages of world simulation rules?

Not all games are story telling. Obviously chess is not. But D&D is not the same as chess. For instance, it abandons some of the features of chess that make it a puzzle-solving game, such as fixed parameters for moves and for victory conditions.

It's no part of reasoning in chess to wonder how a bishop might deal with an enemy knight. (Attack him? Convert him?) It is obvious that this sort of reasoning is part of D&D.

Why the world simulation rules? Well first, D&D doesn't actually have many of these. It has world creation rules (ie the random map generation rules in the DMG), but has no rules for simulating weather, trade, political transformation, etc. (D&D has always been incredibly weak on the sociological front.) RuneQuest and Traveller both take this sort of world simulation a lot further than D&D did.

What are they for? Good question. Different people seem to do different things with them. Some use them to establish challenges. Others to create material for world exploration. Others as inspiration for imaginative creation. I've never met a group who treats them as puzzles to be solved (ie I've never met a group who regard the goal of D&D play as being to recreate the tables in Appendices A through C of the DMG). I have met groups who play the game esssentially as a wargame, and use these rules as battlefield creation rules.

Is storytelling really why people went crazy over D&D in the 70s?

I suspect it's part of it. After all, that's what D&D adds to a wargame. (Whereas the need to master the algorithms that underlie action resolution is something that it has in common with a wargame.)

 

[howandwhy99]

[MENTION=6701124]Cadence[/MENTION], Let me be a little clearer. D&D was obviously not designed for the -Players- to engage in equal storytelling (or even storytelling at all). Yes, there's plenty of bad GMing advice in the seminal works of the game, but that's not all there is. Those portions aren't the game definitive text just as someone suggesting cheating in Chess doesn't make the advice the definitive play for that game. Also, advice on how to ignore the rules of a game doesn't necessarily mean gameplay is irrelevant and the game's "true" purpose is storytelling. Those early books weren't written for a 2013 audience, but a 1970s wargaming one. Certain assumptions about games are needed to better understand them. To do this we need to drop the popular RPG Theory presumptions of today, which are only a decade or so old even as their purveyors attempt rewrite the hobby's history as the only way it was ever understood. My previous questions still apply, but yeah, I get you don't see their relevance. That's okay. Don't take any of what I'm saying as an affront to your own happy playing of the game.

 

[howandwhy99]

That's fine, but if the rules you use are not found in any published version of D&D, I'm not sure on what basis you claim that they are, or exhaust, what D&D is about. Or are truer to the aspirations of D&D than (say) Moldvay Basic.

It's always been up to every DM to fill out the rest of the "rules" behind the screen. That's not what makes the work D&D anyways, though Gary wanted AD&D's particular version to be the official version for tournament play.

I'm suggesting D&D is about game play rather than storytelling regardless of poor advice in the books. In the same way WWE has been very successful in using the sport of wrestling for theatrical performances, telling of fictional stories, the practices that ignore the rules or change the game objective aren't indicative of what the game is actually about. They are both using the material for a non-game purpose. That's great, but it isn't what wrestling or D&D is about, or as you say the true aspiration. I'm not arguing what's a "truer" practice. They're both fun.

But nothing in those rules pulls out clerics as especially implicated, except for the alignment rules.
SNIP

First, not all clerics are designed to be supportive. But also, it isn't about what material I use in my game to cover cover player actions that is important. It's that these areas of play can be covered by game mechanics and there is precedence for doing so even 30 years ago. I'd like to see that again (to drag us back on topic).

Not all games are story telling. Obviously chess is not. But D&D is not the same as chess. For instance, it abandons some of the features of chess that make it a puzzle-solving game, such as fixed parameters for moves and for victory conditions.

D&D has always been an open game rather than a closed one. In that they are closer to situational puzzles than a single riddle. It has a ton of fixed parameters for moves. Because increased mastery/personal prowess, basically gaming ability, is the goal, victory conditions are properly left out. If the Rubik's Cube simply gets harder level by level, when does it reach "the hardest level"? Sure, 10th was closest to the end game, but abilities and XP charts still logarithmically increased. Play could feasibly continue forever, but pragmatically game length becomes an issue. Not to mention support material running thin.

It's no part of reasoning in chess to wonder how a bishop might deal with an enemy knight. (Attack him? Convert him?) It is obvious that this sort of reasoning is part of D&D.

Again, as with situational puzzles the code is hidden behind the screen. It's up to the players to attempt anything they can imagine to learn more about it and gain proficiency within it all the while, on the edges, increases its design. It's a very different kind of game, if you don't have any experience with it, but inductive reasoning is strongly supported. It's why you want a simulation game hidden behind a screen in the first place.

I've never met a group who treats them as puzzles to be solved (ie I've never met a group who regard the goal of D&D play as being to recreate the tables in Appendices A through C of the DMG). I have met groups who play the game essentially as a wargame, and use these rules as battlefield creation rules.

The DMG Appendix is an example for world generation. As the first fleshed out example it's pretty impressive in just what was dreamed up to include, but there are lots of issues that arise if run by the book. Look at DungeonRobber, if you want to play something similar online. The appendix version isn't horrible, better stuff can be made. And the online version doesn't include most of the rules from the AD&D game anyways. It's much more limited. But it is a game that focuses on game play (say, Olympic style wrestling matches) rather than storytelling (WWE theatre) as its goal. I'm saying D&D began as a game to be understood as a game and not storytelling, even though the game worlds included simulations of all kinds of narrative worlds. Computer games aren't all that different.

I suspect it's part of it. After all, that's what D&D adds to a wargame. (Whereas the need to master the algorithms that underlie action resolution is something that it has in common with a wargame.)

Campfire tales was hardly new. D&D kept the popular aspect of wargames, but moved the hard core number crunching behind the screen. Players could still feel the game responding, but didn't need to mentally calculate every last factor. That is what D&D added to wargames. The retention of game play with the opening up of addressing the game in whatever way could be imagined by each player and capably communicated to the DM. Utterly empty space with the group of players (no DM role) having to create everything themselves as the actual point of play isn't what D&D added to wargames IMO nor what the game's objective was.

Pong as theater is abysmal, but it was played for hours - addictive like puzzles and games can be. And honestly, it's not that great of a game. I suggest Pacman & D&D were extraordinarily popular for just what makes computer games popular and addictive today: pattern recognition game play. I don't think anyone argues that the true inspiration for Angry Birds is its storytelling.

(Is story an aspect of games? Sure, but there are plenty of aspects that don't attempt to redefine games as "actually" themselves. Think politics, economics, education, religion, all sorts of stuff. Perhaps we might treat games as games rather than the attempt to diminish them into the philosophies of narrative universalism not popular since the 80s, but so in vogue in our hobby at the moment.)

 

[Ratskinner]

The first sentence is contentious. Gygaxian D&D may not be concerned with stories or storytelling (though it is certainly interested in the tropes from certain stories - what else is Appendix N for?). What about Hickman and post-Hickman D&D? 4e D&D? Anyone playing B/X D&D and motivated to try and emulate the story in the foreword about freeing the land from the dragon tyrant?

I almost hate to say it, but I don't think D&D has ever really been good at being a story game, even when it tried (2e & 4e, I'm lookin' at you). I believe its hamstrung in this regard by its wargame roots and the legacy mechanics/stances of Gygaxian play. Which isn't to say it doesn't happen, or that people don't approach D&D that way. Heaven knows I've done it, and for a long time, folks didn't have many other options. However, if you're looking for an efficient, elegant, story-generating game I don't think D&D is it. Honestly, I'm not sure anymore that I would want it to be. With games like Fiasco and Gumshoe kicking around (not to mention other more experimental Indie games), I'm increasingly inclined to let D&D do what D&D does best.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For me, the central question is, what is the most useful? I think these legends have their place, and they're good...but here we get to the whole "there shouldn't just be One Orc" kind of thing.

Okay, this story for dryads works, and it can represent some dryads. But it doesn't need to be The D&D Dryad (TM) anymore than the old fantasy biology approach needs to be The D&D Dryad (TM).

Modularity is your friend, here. Pick one version of the critter, and put that in as one specific way the critter might be, but don't use it as the defining way that the critter IS. Drop the "almost certainly" codswallop and drop the attempt to over-dictate, and we can perhaps talk like reasonable people who don't need to get our undies in a bunch about what other people do with D&D dryads.

The dryad story is an adventure-in-a-monster-entry: Free The Trapped Fey Spirit. It's a cool idea, and it begs for an entire roster of supporting game elements: sprites that guard the grove, and Heartwood that the PC's can use perhaps as a magic weapon or shield, and the possibility of uniting her with her One True Love, taking a cutting or a sapling and bringing it to the shores of Arborea where his soul rests, happy together eternally without needing to go back to the Fey Courts.

All good stuff, if it's included right there with the Dryad monster entry, that sounds cool and useful. It's a seed (heh) for making good couple of weeks of gaming, and that's great adventure-focused design.

But lets not assume that it is The Best Way To Use Dryads, or The Right Way To Use Dryads or the Only Way D&D Should Let You Use Dryads. Lets go for the more generic tree-spirit when that's required, too. That can have its own adventure seeds embedded in the monster entry, too. Give me an hour, I could probably whip up some mildly overwrought narrative about that kind of critter, as well.

And, hell, toss in the 4e-style Angry Shrubbery dryad when that's appropriate, too (vengeful druids!).

The problem isn't really the existence of these little stories. It's the perception that these little stories will be definitive that's disconcerting, because if it's definitive, then the creature becomes largely useless for other purposes.

I like the adventure-in-a-monster-entry as one option among many. I'd even like to see a few monster entries done up in this style. It just needs to be absolutely frickin' clear that this isn't an attempt to define what the Dryad IS for a decade of D&D. This is one way a dryad can be -- an option, not an assumption.

 

[pemerton]

I almost hate to say it, but I don't think D&D has ever really been good at being a story game

You shock me!

I'm increasingly inclined to let D&D do what D&D does best.

But what is that? I'm far from sure that it's the sort of "puzzle unravelling" that Howandwhy99 is describing.

 

[Cadence]

Yes, there's plenty of bad GMing advice in the seminal works of the game, but that's not all there is. Those portions aren't the game definitive text just as someone suggesting cheating in Chess doesn't make the advice the definitive play for that game.

But that was the game's rule book by the co-creator of the game saying how it should be done in his view.... not just "someone suggesting cheating."

This game is unlike chess in that the rules are not cut and dried. In many places they are guidelines and suggested methods only. This is part of the attraction of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and it is integral to the game. ... While it is drawn by the referee upon the outlines of the three books which comprise Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the players add the color and details, so the campaign must ultimately please all participants. It is their unique world. ... You, the reader, as a member of the campaign community, do not belong if the game seems wrong in any major aspect. Withdraw and begin your own campaign...

Or was OD&D relatively popular and refined enough that it should be more defining of the spirit of early D&D than, say, 1e and Moldvay/Cook? Did the 1st generation of players substantially change their view of the idea of the game with the advent of AD&D? Or was AD&D meant to capture what those players were already doing?

Also, advice on how to ignore the rules of a game doesn't necessarily mean gameplay is irrelevant and the game's "true" purpose is storytelling.

I haven't meant to imply that game play wasn't important or that storytelling was even the larger goal of the two. But I think the DMG makes it clear it is a part. I'm claiming that both the writings of Gygax in the DMG and my memories of how one group from the first generation of players approached things had both the rules side and the fudging-storytelling side as being important for the game. I'm even good with the game play being noticeably more important than the storytelling aspect in the early versions.

Those early books weren't written for a 2013 audience, but a 1970s wargaming one. Certain assumptions about games are needed to better understand them. To do this we need to drop the popular RPG Theory presumptions of today, which are only a decade or so old even as their purveyors attempt rewrite the hobby's history as the only way it was ever understood.

That seems reasonable to me. But doesn't explain why neither Gygax in his writing nor the first generation players I knew personally seemed to treat the game solely the way you describe (without the sandbox, do it on the fly, change what you had written down, incorporate player ideas) when it seemed to make things work better. Certainly by 1981 the younger group in my own age range that I played with was pretty cooperative in its world building and resolution, did lots of things unplanned on the fly, and would have thought the storytelling idea described a big part of what we were playing (if anyone had described it to us in those words). We treated the D&D rules very differently than those of (the rigid) Star Fleet Battles a few years down the road.

Don't take any of what I'm saying as an affront to your own happy playing of the game.

I'm fine with not being true to D&D's true roots... it just seems that you were presenting how you've always viewed it and claiming it should be definitive (because all games would have been viewed in the same way at the time - in spite of any recollections or writings to the contrary?)

I'm suggesting D&D is about game play rather than storytelling regardless of poor advice in the books.
<snip>
I'm saying D&D began as a game to be understood as a game and not storytelling, even though the game worlds included simulations of all kinds of narrative worlds.
<snip>
Utterly empty space with the group of players (no DM role) having to create everything themselves as the actual point of play isn't what D&D added to wargames IMO nor what the game's objective was.

I don't understand why it needs to be so binary. Why does the game need to be about only one of game play or storytelling? Why does a game where storytelling is an important part need to be pure storytelling? Why couldn't people have conceived it as something between the pure rules driven game and the pure storytelling in the beginning?


I'm a handful of years too late to the scene to know how it was viewed originally... so I think it would be interesting to get the views of a variety of others who started in the mid 70s and to go through the old Strategic Review and Dragon issues from back then to see the range of views at the beginning.

 

[Cadence]

But what is that? I'm far from sure that it's the sort of "puzzle unravelling" that Howandwhy99 is describing.

A social platform for arguing about the quality, necessity, and interpretation of various rules and for encouraging the development of new rules, all under the guise of a game falling somewhere on the tactical-simulation to storytelling scale?

 

[DEFCON 1]

I've had almost 40 years of monster books that have given me almost the exact same concepts, ecology and definitions for all of these monsters each and every time. I know this stuff already. The last thing I need is for another monster book to rehash the exact same material for the eighth time.

Anyone who says that the 5E monster manual shouldn't include new concepts for old monsters and want it to just have "true" D&D monster ecology information so they can run them as they see fit... what on earth are you paying for? New stats? You want to spend $35 for just stats? If that's true... then buy the book for the stats, and ignore all the 5E descriptions. Go ahead and just use the monster descriptions from any previous monster manuals you own that you think "got it right" and just ignore the descriptions in the 5E book. The 4E book, or 3.5 book, or 3.0 book, or 2E book or AD&D book or Rules Cyclopedia book or whatever.

But speaking personally... why on earth would I want to buy a book that HAD NOTHING DIFFERENT in it from any previous monster manual (except for new stats)? That is a waste of time, money, and space. These story hooks? They're NEW. At the very least, they give me something I haven't had in any previous monster manual. Thus... even if I don't use them as-is, they're useful for ideas. And that's a good thing. Don't strip this stuff out of this new book just because some players don't want to just ignore it and instead want it to not exist at all.