D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[S'mon]

I don't think any competent DM will take the players input and 'run' the world in a direction that will make it less-and-less fun just because "well, that set of choices, unbeknownst to you leads to inevitable disaster which you cannot avoid"

I've certainly had campaigns where player choices spiralled into inevitable disaster. Usually they
stayed fun, though. 4e in fact is IME a very good game for emotionally satisfying
'tragic' narratives, where the choices of the protagonists play out towards disaster.
My '4e Wilderlands game which started out as wilderness sandbox and ended as a sort of morality play on the Yugoslav Civil War was one of my favourite ever campaigns - and the tragic finale was satisfying because it was the natural emergent result of free player choice. The story would have been a completely different
one given different player choices - rather than a mutual cycle of revenge spiralling into atrocity and disaster it
could have been a Star Trekky optimistic vision of old enemies overcoming their prejudices, say. But fun either way.

 

[S'mon]

I would venture to say that no one plays D&D because they actually wanted a hodge-podge of LotR and Dying Earth filled with ludicrous system artifacts, before they ever took the game off the shelf.

You play D&D because you thought you were going to get an experience something like that of taking in a fantasy story, but more participatory, or because a friend says 'you gotta try this game,' or because you can't find anyone willing to run/play some other game that you've been wanting to try, but you can always pop into an FLGS and play Encounters.

No one *really* wants to play D&D? Err.

No, I love D&D for itself, always have. Loved Fighting Fantasy (my first RPG), too, which also has a Tolkien Meets Dying Earth vibe. I didn't get into D&D through wanting to emulate Tolkien or any of the other reasons you described; I was 10 or 11 and I played the 'Warlock of Firetop Mountain' Fighting Fantasy
gamebook (set in a Gygaxian dungeon in a Gygaxian world), and fell in love.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I stopped playing D&D in that sort of style in the mid-80s (with my purchase and then GMing of Oriental Adventures).

So I may not have noticed the contrast so markedly.

For me, the end of that style of D&D came with Temple of Elemental Evil, a product that I am happy to disparage at the drop of a hat. As written, it is levels of essentially mindless grind through a randomly-generated (it was in parts) elemental evil-flavoured dungeon that generally forgot to add that elemental evil flavour in favour of a steady progression of encounters with humanoid creatures of ever-increasing hit dice. To be fair though, it was never actually finished before it was published... which also shows TSR's contempt for its customer base.

(There is a piece of Gygaxian prose in the interminable boxed text within the adventure that describes the threat that elemental evil poses. I read that thinking that it was describing some of the essential flavour of the adventure that was to follow. Um, it did not. Bait and switch.... Thankfully, Rich Baker is an infinitely better adventure designer than EGG - and he also finishes his products - so Princes of the Apocalypse makes sure elemental evil is actually front and centre.)

That changed everything for us. From then on, everything was basically homebrew and much more character-drive and dungeons became smaller. That was good preparation for 3.xE and even better preparation for 4E.

 

[S'mon]

I stopped playing D&D in that sort of style in the mid-80s (with my purchase and then GMing of Oriental Adventures).

So I may not have noticed the contrast so markedly.

Yeah, you seem to think of the heart of traditional "D&D" in more simulationist terms than I do - I see that as the 2e AD&D 'drifted' style that's prone to Illusionism. For me D&D is the early '80s Gamist style, (especially the British approach seen in White Dwarf, TSR-UK, and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks) not Simulationist (so not Oriental Adventures, and certainly not '100 Bushels of Rye') - but with
some Sim underpinnings to create a robust framework for the game, rather than the completely gonzo
Gamist mid-'70s Arneson style.

 

[S'mon]

Sure! But that means we're back to overt GM framing, "say yes" and "fail forward" styles of adjudication (at least in general spirit), the sort of protagonistic contrivances that 2nd ed players tend to be sceptical of (see [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] in this thread), etc.

Yes. I didn't really realise I was doing this (this was many years before I heard of Dramatist play) but
I remember how when I'd let other GMs run adventures in the PBEM it would tend to go very very badly,
and I think now this was because they were approaching it with more of the 2e AD&D or White Wolf type mindset you describe (this was ca 1996, so unsurprising - but I was out of the gaming mainstream at that time).

Players always seemed to fail and there was a lot of player/GM conflict. We would try to address it by
discussing the mechanics ("You made that NPC too tough!" "You should have given the dirt-to-the-face
trick a chance to succeed") or world-sim ("The PCs had set up and pulled off a perfect ambush on the NPCs -
the NPCs shouldn't have just been able to butcher them like that") but I think now it was a style thing
the way
you describe - these GMs were used to the idea of a pre-set path and were punishing deviation.

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, you seem to think of the heart of traditional "D&D" in more simulationist terms than I do

I'm not sure about more "sim" - as I'll elaborate below, the appeal for me of OA isn't primarily its sim elements.

I do agree that "classic" D&D was the sort of dungeoneering gamism that you describe - and I knew it's UK version before encountering its American version, similarly via White Dwarf, FF, etc. But I never played much of that. (Some, but not heaps.)

For me, personally, the heart of D&D was Moldvay Basic, and not so much the death-grind reality but the heroic promise (freeing the land from the Dragon Tyrant). OA was probably the first D&D book that came close to delivering - many design flaws when held up to educated scrutiny, but a core commitment to making the PCs genuine protagonists situated in a world where something other than loot and XP is at stake!

 

[pemerton]

Yes. I didn't really realise I was doing this (this was many years before I heard of Dramatist play)

Likewise - I stumbled into a scene-framing style of play long before I'd ever read Ron Edwards or Luke Crane!

In retrospect, it explains things I'd noticed, like that when I tried to follow Lewis Pulsipher's advice my game sucked rather than went well - because I wasn't a good gamist GM and my players weren't looking for that experience either. And it explained why my game seemed to be going well even though I was ignoring the timeline and other world-building I'd dutifully done - it turns out that stuff isn't really necessary for scene-framing-type play!

What I do enjoy in sim (or sim-ish) systems is the depth of PC development. I've enjoyed this about Burning Wheel (it's reminiscent of Rolemaster), and while I like 4e's more broad-brush, four-colour style I have enjoyed going back to something more nuanced.

 

[S'mon]

Thankfully, Rich Baker is an infinitely better adventure designer than EGG - and he also finishes his products...

Some of Gygax's 8-16 page adventures are still regarded as classics - justly in my opinion - stuff like Keep on the Borderlands, Hommlet, the three Against the Giants, and the Drow-series adventures (but mostly the second - Erinhei-Cinlu). I'd put him up there with Moldvay (Lost City, Isle of Dread, Castle Amber) in terms of skilled
adventure design.

BUT I realise now that Gygax's view of a megadungeon is that the GM makes it himself, gradually, in the course of play, and in response to player input (something he should have emphasised far more in his DMing advice). So a 'published Gygaxian megadungeon' is a contradiction in terms - and results in the low-value stuff you describe. I think Gygax did not have a very high opinion of people who thought they needed
published material to run a campaign, and in the mid '80s he was willing to exploit them for cash when he needed it, with unfortunate results.

 

[S'mon]

For me, personally, the heart of D&D was Moldvay Basic, and not so much the death-grind reality but the heroic promise (freeing the land from the Dragon Tyrant). OA was probably the first D&D book that came close to delivering - many design flaws when held up to educated scrutiny, but a core commitment to making the PCs genuine protagonists situated in a world where something other than loot and XP is at stake!

So the heart of D&D for you is that misleading paragraph at the start of Moldvay Basic, that became
the (equally misleading) iconic cover painting for Mentzer Basic.
Not the other 63 pages of rules & stats.

I guess I think of it more 'Warlock of Firetop Mountain' and 'Forest of Doom' - essentially picaresque, lots of random PC death in an uncaring and brutal universe - completely un-Tolkien but a lot like
'The Dying Earth'. The Moldvay retro-clones, notably Labyrinth Lord, are a lot more brutally honest about this aspect of the game, which is one reason that the Lordless Lands LL campaign I played in (GM'd by a librarian to the House of Lords) worked so well - it had an incredibly English sense of dark humour in the
Fighting Fantasy/White Dwarf/TSR-UK style.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) For me, personally, the heart of D&D was Moldvay Basic, and not so much the death-grind reality but the heroic promise (freeing the land from the Dragon Tyrant). (snip)

That heroic promise phrase rings true with me, and particularly because I see it as a counterpoint to Gygaxian impotence.

Gygaxian impotence is everywhere in AD&D: one minute rounds where you basically could move, draw a weapon, or attack - but never all three according to most DMs - despite the rounds being a minute long; thieves who could nothing other climb walls with any certainty until they were level 10 or so; weapon choices that amounted to longsword, two-handed sword, bows, or irrelevance; level limits; interminable, pointless delves etc.... Yeah, give me heroic promise instead.

Some of Gygax's 8-16 page adventures are still regarded as classics - justly in my opinion - stuff like Keep on the Borderlands, Hommlet, the three Against the Giants, and the Drow-series adventures (but mostly the second - Erinhei-Cinlu). I'd put him up there with Moldvay (Lost City, Isle of Dread, Castle Amber) in terms of skilled adventure design.

BUT I realise now that Gygax's view of a megadungeon is that the GM makes it himself, gradually, in the course of play, and in response to player input (something he should have emphasised far more in his DMing advice). So a 'published Gygaxian megadungeon' is a contradiction in terms - and results in the low-value stuff you describe. I think Gygax did not have a very high opinion of people who thought they needed published material to run a campaign, and in the mid '80s he was willing to exploit them for cash when he needed it, with unfortunate results.

Frankly, I agree when it comes to those earlier adventures - especially D3 (it was the third, BTW) and Erelhei-Cinlu - but EGG was not a good designer by any objective measure as his later products even more clearly revealed. However, he clearly was a great DM. Sadly, he didn't do a good job of getting that down in writing and he never had an editor with the authority to challenge him to do a better design job.

I do, however, rate him as the entrepreneur who got D&D to market and created this hobby directly and created the computer gaming industry indirectly. That's a pretty good legacy!

As for his low opinion of people, as you termed it, I recalled him as the author of those "one true way" Dragon editorials of the 80s and assumed he was just an egotistical, pompous ass. I was so very pleasantly surprised when Col_Pladoh turned out to be a delight to interact with here on these boards. It really is a shame he's not still around.