D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[Bluenose]

What I'm saying is, D&D itself had no differentiation from Chainmail until "something else" got applied to it. And that "something else" was something that applied, at least in some small way, an element of continuing story and narrative, where a character's capabilities and actions carried over from one session to another, and a role for someone to perform not just rules adjudication, but create the situational "framing" according to his or her imagination.

By some of your criteria, a wargame campaign where actions carry over for many sessions and where the players are attempting things that the rules don't cover (which is a common situation in campaign play in wargames, ime) would qualify as an RPG; and a one-off session of a game described as an RPG (Lady Blackbird, perhaps) would not.

In general, the only Forge-influenced games that had any level of success (and none can even hold a candle to even a single Pathfinder AP) are the ones that drift the furthest from being a pure storygame.

I'd like some evidence that any Pathfinder adventure path sold 10,000+ copies.

Runequest would be one clear example, yes: moreso than Traveller, I think - not to say that Traveller couldn't also be an example - because of its literary and mythological pretensions.

It's certainly plausible. Runequest isn't the sort of game where Narrative play in the Forge sense is a natural result (which makes Heroquesting in it's Gloranthan form rather awkward, and probably explains why the repeatedly promised Heroquest book for RQ2 never came out).

Me, I think playing or GM linear railroad campaigns can cause lasting damage to a player's creative ability in-play, or to a GM's ability to empower player protagonism. I really, really dislike the '90s RPG style of linear campaigns, watcher PCs, and endless Metaplot. None of that is relevant to pre-Dragonlance D&D.

I dislike many of the same things, at least in a D&D context. I don't agree that people who play that way necessarily stop being able to apply creative ability (they do that every time they resolve an encounter in a 'clever' fashion), though I do think that people who've always been "led" by the GM from plot point to plot point find it hard to adapt to being in a sandbox campaign. Though I'd note sandbox doesn't mean no metaplot. It's perfectly possible to have that, it's just that in a sandbox it's not something the PCs are expected to deal with or even notice.

 

[pemerton]

I really, really dislike the '90s RPG style of linear campaigns, watcher PCs, and endless Metaplot. None of that is relevant to pre-Dragonlance D&D.

Completely agree.

I think playing or GM linear railroad campaigns can cause lasting damage to a player's creative ability in-play, or to a GM's ability to empower player protagonism.

I haven't had enough experience to form a view on this. I've worked with refugees from these sorts of campaigns, as well as having bad experiences with them myself, but have tended to find those players welcome the opportunity to actually exercise some power over the game.

I've been running P2 since September.

<snip>

The biggest problem was that it has a nice "Fistfull of Dollars" setup with two opposing
evil sides, but if the PCs take advantage of that by recruiting drow, then the encounter balance breaks down.

<snip>

Things have gone better since the PCs reached Deadhold a couple sessions ago, they took the diplomatic approach and avoided most of the combat encounters, often the key to a good 4e experience.

I started it with the PCs just reaching epic, so levelled everything up.

With the "Fistfull of Dollars" aspect, my players were always going to oppose the Lolth priests - but they befriended the mad wizard (and had to talk him down once they came back from the Orcus pyramid to find him having summoned crazy fire elementals - something facilitated in our game by the fact that the sorcerer PC had earlier made him a gift of a vial of pure elemental fire) and recruited the fighters (who provided them with a minor action AoE burst via archery fire).

I dropped all the cruft encounters from the drow township - we started with the bridge and then the mindflayers, but after that it was only the Aybssal portals and the drow - and dropped Deadhold altogether. Some of its more interesting inhabitants got moved into the pyramid to beef that up a bit, but I had the portal in the nullspace lead directly into the pyramid.

Agreed on diplomacy: that was how my group ended up making it through D2.

 

[S'mon]

By some of your criteria, a wargame campaign where actions carry over for many sessions and where the players are attempting things that the rules don't cover (which is a common situation in campaign play in wargames, ime) would qualify as an RPG; and a one-off session of a game described as an RPG (Lady Blackbird, perhaps) would not.

I had the same thought. There are also Braunstein type one-off wargames that involve
roleplaying as an inherent part of play. There's nothing about Gamism that opposes
roleplaying, they're orthogonal concepts.

 

[dd.stevenson]

He thought that certain RPGs damage, seriously and permanently, the creative capacities of those who played them.

The link to that thread doesn't seem to be working for me now, but IIRC Edwards went to considerable trouble to explain that the "damage" could be reversed by playing other games.

I really, really dislike the '90s RPG style of linear campaigns, watcher PCs, and endless Metaplot.

Agreed. I even found Paizo's relatively well constructed APs less than pleasant to actually run--although the prep was sure a lot easier.

 

[Neonchameleon]

If that's what Edwards was about, then I would like to see quotes to that effect. Because everything I've read by the man--including the garbage linked by forge advocates in this thread--make it look like he has a serious problem with D&D.

If you're talking about the Brain Damage comment that wasn't linked by Forge advocates.

It's also ridiculous to claim FATE came out of The Forge. FATE is based on the Fudge engine, which is from well before The Forge even existed. It's popular, but only in the small pond of "indie games". And, it's firmly in the "RPG" camp of things rather than the "storygame" camp.

Forge 101: The forge was, as the name suggests, about making and publishing independent role playing games. It was about forging them - as in a Smith's Forge. That is why it was called The Forge and Indie-RPGs.com rather than e.g. "Roleplaying-Theory.com". As for Fate being popular in the small pond of indie-games, 20,000 sales of The Dresden Files isn't small change in anyone's book. As I mentioned, Fate is credibly the most popular current RPG that isn't a flavour of D&D. And that includes Numenera, 13th Age, and Exalted. (We've actual head to head data from the Fate Core, 13th Age, and Numenera kickstarters of course - Fate doubled the sales of the other two).

The gap between the RPG camp and the Storygame camp - indeed the idea that there is an actual gap - seems in my experience to be a claim of the RPGSite and its most influential member the RPGPundit (who makes Edwards seem polite and reasonable). Storygames are almost invariably one subset of role-playing games. (And Monsterhearts, which bills itself a Storygame is one of the purest role-playing games I know).

In general, the only Forge-influenced games that had any level of success (and none can even hold a candle to even a single Pathfinder AP)

Fiasco has passed the 10,000 sales mark. I don't know what Pathfinder APs are selling these days - but 10,000 sales isn't small change in the RPG market. (Hell, one WotC product was pegged back to a few hundred sales according to the 2012 State of the Mongoose).

are the ones that drift the furthest from being a pure storygame. The more storygame their games were, the less they sold. The more they drifted towards the D&D model, and away from the storygame model, the better they sold.

Fiasco is one of the games you can credibly call not an RPG. Yet, 10,000 sales. Your case is disproven by counterexample. Few games are breakouts. This much is agreed. But given that Fiasco's going strong your assertion is plainly false. (It might be harder to have a breakout game that is not like D&D - but it's definitely happened).

Ultimately the issue is that for both the indie RPG market and the OSR market alike you are only starting with a target sales number in three figures even if you sell to most of the community. (Adventurer Conqueror King made fewer than 250 sales on Kickstarter, Jason Morningstar's Durance under 650, and Far West - once the Kickstarter star - 720). You're only getting anywhere if you break out past the small community - and few games do that. The obvious market to break out to (as Dungeon World did) is D&D players.

All of Edwards' own games were failures, and the peak of his influence was about a decade ago in 2004. He's failed, and shut down, and now only his cadre of cult-like followers pretend he has power in the industry anymore.

As far as I know the only place that claims that Edwards currently has any power in the industry is the RPGSite. He said some interesting things from 1999 to 2004 and was full of enough energy to develop the Forge (IIRC he didn't even found it) - for the publication of role playing games. Those that claim he has been historically important on the other hand include the Diana Jones award committee.

I will however balk at the idea that "Fate comes from deep within the Forge". Fate is most definitely an evolution of Fudge, which existed well before the Forge, and most of its evolution seems to be from and through that community. The evolution of Fate from Fudge started with Fred Hicks & Rob Donaghue about 1999 and are related to Fred's Amber games. The first relevant discussion on the old Fudge mailing list with discussions about how to "solve" Fudge's problems with people wanting attributes to modify skills as they do in so many other games. The first published efforts towards Fate were in a small e-zine called Fudge Factor, the first articles were called "the Case for Aspects" published, IIRC in 2001. Forge language isn't really a part of that evolution, as far as I can tell (or remember). Evil Hat didn't join the Forge forums until after the first versions of Fate were published. Its fairly obvious from their archived forum posts that they were joining as part of an Indie Press thing, not in the interests of further developing Fate vis-a-vis Forge theory.

An Indie publisher setting themselves up through The Forge was the whole purpose of the Forge. Possibly "Deep within the Forge" was overstating the case - but it was certainly through the Forge using it for its intended purpose. Forge Theory was designed to help with new games - and point out why the games at the end of the 90s were not fit for purpose and we needed better games. If you look at The Forge Website, the top three forums are "Actual Play", "Game Development", and "Independent Publishing". Not "Forge Theory", "GNS", or anything of the sort. The sole purpose of the theory was to help with game development.

 

[Imaro]

Here's an interesting post excerpt from the Evil Hat website by Rob Donoghue (co-creator of FATE) concerning indie rpg's being equated with the Forge and his feelings on the Forge.... Since he clearly draws a distinction between himself and "members of the Forge" I'm starting to believe that Fate isn't a Forge game. I have found similar comments by Fred Hick's concerning Fate and how it doesn't fit into Edward's GNS model.


Indie == A particular design ethos
By this what’s really meant is, of course, games out of the Forge (an RPG community with a heavy emphasis on certain RPG theories and small press publication). Now, this absolutely fails in the face of it – there is no one I know of from the forge who would accept such a definition, and they would be the first to point to indie games which are not from forge members or which do not subscribe to the theories popular in The Forge. Despite that, this is an incredibly common definition because it seems like the obvious one. The Forge is the loudest voice of ‘indie’ design and many of the current crop of games that are thought of as indie are from forge members.
I’d be ok avoiding this definition just because it’s wrong, but the problem is that this definition is actually actively bad. By equating a type of game with a group of people, that means that every game is painted with the brush of people’s past interaction with that group, and in the case of the Forge, there are a lot of horror stories. This is not intended as a sleight to the Forge – it’s a vibrant community with a lot of great people, but I’ll be the first to admit that it has taken me actually meeting many of these people face to face to gain the the ability to view it with some equanimity. The bottom line is that this definition is most useful to perpetuate existing bad feelings, so it deserves to be pitched with great enthusiasm.

 

[dd.stevenson]

If you're talking about the Brain Damage comment that wasn't linked by Forge advocates.

It was.

All that makes sense to me. I wasn't meaning to imply that Fate is a Forge game. I meant to imply that, from the point of view of The Forge, the biggest ever success of an indie-style game wouldn't be seen by them as a sign that their endeavour failed.

The brain damage comments were aimed at Storyteller games - White Wolf-style and also Legend of the Five Rings. Here is the key phrase: "early-to-mid 1990s role-playing procedures concerning so-called "storytelling" were like - Vampire leading the pack, as well as a number of other offspring of a particular application of Champions."

The only way that D&D is caught by those comments is to the extent that 2nd ed AD&D had picked up storyteller play. There was certainly no suggestion that playing White Plume Mountain or its ilk would cause brain damage!

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't think it's unreasonable to read the first of these and expect comparable mechanical effectiveness across different classes - the choice of class is presented as one of role and approach, not power and effectiveness.

The second extract is similar in its emphasis on class differentiation, but is more ambivalent about class power because of its reference to different classes improving at different rates - although the precise import of this is unclear. (As a new player I would definitely be inclined to ask: which class improves quickest, because I want that one! I might then be disappointed to be stuck with a thief, which I think is a hard class for a new D&D player to play effectively.)

While the quotes were appreciated, I don't read anything in either that would suggest to me as a player that I should be upset if my character is more or less powerful than one of the others. It seemed to me that both entries were really agnostic on that point, as am I.

 

[Hussar]

While the quotes were appreciated, I don't read anything in either that would suggest to me as a player that I should be upset if my character is more or less powerful than one of the others. It seemed to me that both entries were really agnostic on that point, as am I.

And that's perfectly fair. Not caring whether your character is more powerful or not is perfectly valid.

But, why do you get to tell everyone else that your point of view is the only one that matters? If someone does care if their character is stronger or weaker, why do they have to sit down and shut up simply because you don't care? What makes your point of view so much better?

It would seem to me, that since you don't care if your character is more or less powerful, then you shouldn't care about balance at all. Thus, a balanced system would be just as agreeable to you as an unbalanced one. So, why not let us have our balanced systems and we're both happy?

Or, are you only content when your play style is the only one considered valid and every one else can go hang?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Me, I think playing or GM linear railroad campaigns can cause lasting damage to a player's creative ability in-play, or to a GM's ability to empower player protagonism. I really, really dislike the '90s RPG style of linear campaigns, watcher PCs, and endless Metaplot. None of that is relevant to pre-Dragonlance D&D.

See, even though i dislike railroading, i think this is a pretty extreme (and frankly somewhat silly)thing to say. Not only that, but it really demands some kind of proof other than "I think". I lived through the 90s, played in such games, railroaded even myself, and it didn't cause a bit of lasting damage. Like any other thing in gaming, changing styles takes time, but that isn't indicative of damage, it is just about learning new methods for prep and running games. I just don't think our decisions anout how we play D&D (be it sandbox, story, railroad or whatever) have permanent effects on our minds so profound they can be described as doing "lasting damage." And this is why i think the essay is toxic. It is no longer a disagreement over playstyle, but becomes a debate about what playstyles are healthy and which ones are harmful.