D&D General On Grognardism...

[Neonchameleon]

Oh good lord. I said I didn’t need to tailor it around the ability of my players specifically because I wasn’t using a new school rule set. And my original statement which took on you on this bizarre tangent:

Guess what? I don't tailor things round the ability of my players and I actively prefer new school rule sets. So it's not the rule set that's the issue. It's the attitude of the GM.

“I’ll take that over having to gauge the constant impact of a plethora of various codified abilities and hard coded rules on my adventure design any day.”

There are two separate points (and I’ll be charitable to your misreading and say it was too ambiguously worded and open to misinterpretation)
point 1) I’ll take that over having to gauge the constant impact of a plethora of various codified abilities in reference to who I was replying to around abilities.
point 2) and hard coded rules on my adventure design any day.


is what I was trying to express.
You can continue claiming what my views on adventure design are for me if you wish, but my comments (particularly in the dungeon crawl thread) espouse a very different view. But please, carry on if it makes you happy.

Again. I play new school rule sets with exception based design - and I do not have to gauge this "constant impact". I embrace it.

You are only emphasising the point that you as a DM do not trust the players with too many codified abilities they can use. If I can trust the game designer I can trust the players. It's not about the codified abilities because some of us can trust them. It's about your attitude to the players having codified abilities.

You further emphasised that by your claim that I should know what all the feats and abilities in the game do. Why on earth would I want to?

And you said that my issue was trust because I don't want to clutter up my user interface by unnecessarily wedging a DM in there - and as a DM I want to get on with the game rather than being an admin assistant and general dogsbody.

As to your other points, I have no paranoia or trust issues. I was pointing out that that was a mark of new school thinking in reaction to old school approaches. Which you so eloquently demonstrated in the vocabulary used describing the DM in your first reply and continue to use in this one. In fact, I was making the opposite point, that the old school perspective relies on it.

The old school perspective in my experience relies on projection (the Old School Primer in particular being fairly risible). And the DM being the almost unquestioned god rather than trusting the players to take things and run with it. All the trust flows in old school play are from the player to the DM and none the other way round.

The new school perspective in some cases even calls the GM the MC - first among equals and trust flows both ways. (The in between rules heavy perspective has little trust either way and Monte Cook himself has called this out and asked "what have we done?").

If your idea of "New School" is the dominant paradigm from about 1985 to 2005 then I can see where your views come from. But that's not remotely new school.

Your need for the players to pitch in is also self defeating from your position. You need it because as a GM, you’re so busy mentally doing x,y,z. Which, with old school slimmer rules sets, is not as burdensome. which was exactly my point!

As has been pointed out old school rule sets are not light.

You've got one set of mechanics for attacking, another set for ability checks (with lifting bars and bending gates having their own percentile subystem), another set for saves (two if you count resurrection and system shock), another set for thief weapon proficiencies, and still another set for spellcasting. And that's before getting into e.g. surprise rules let alone start digging through the 1e DMG for ridiculous and fiddly rules like the helmet rules. Old school rule sets are (despite the claims of some of their adherents) pretty complex - and more complex than 4e or 5e to learn. The complexity of 4e is largely emergent based on what people do and how they interact and the choices they make.

And that's why old school DMs frequently have to do all the admin work rather than having everyone pitch in and freeing them up to do the parts only they can do. The rules are complex and fiddly compared to modern rules so it's a lot more of an overhead for the player to learn.

For that matter the core of 3.X is, thanks to being unified, a lot easier to learn than anything TSR put out as D&D (and I include the brown/white box here and probably the purple and red boxes). 3.X then decided that they'd take all the space freed up by not using a complex and arcane ruleset that did things backwards and make it equally heavy by throwing modifiers everywhere.

4e and 5e meanwhile both kept their cores simple and put extra complexity on the abilities of the characters (PC and NPC alike). But this is still relatively light because each player only needs to know what their character can do and you can even tailor the complexity of the character. And the X, Y, Z I'm doing is called working out what's going on in the world and DMing a collection of NPCs.

If I want a light game there is no D&D version even worth talking about. I reach for Fate, Fudge, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Risus, or a large number of other games. Modern RPGs are generally a lot lighter than anything old school.

You also jumped in my reply to looking at it from player accessibility.
Which is why I was talking about players not needing to know the rules. It’s my ability as DM to act as an interface to help. If a player is comfortable with the rules, great! With your players needing to pitch in and know their own stuff, this automatically drops accessibility. Which again, makes my point for me.

They don't need to pitch in. I want them to pitch in and they almost always learn to pitch in after the first couple of sessions. This is because modern RPGs are a lot easier to learn than old school RPGs because they use unified systems so you're not stuck wondering which dice to roll and whether you want to roll high or low.

And they want to pitch in themselves because they aren't lazy and like to be in control of their characters.

So thank you for your agreement in what I was saying there.

I’m also not sure what your intended outcome for your posts are??

Debunking the misinformation you are spreading from your description of modern systems as complex when compared to arcane older systems to your leap to it being about trust issues.

 

[Minigiant]

Which isn’t the same as the procedures I was talking about?

Not really. Old school used several different mechanics and rolls by default. Optional rules add more.

Many players can't even handle easy butt 5e as is.

 

[Jack Daniel]

4E narrowed the band of power levels considerably. There were a lot less 'world shattering powerful magic spells' and more 'slightly upgraded or degraded fireball'. The powers were very similar between classes, giving everything a generic and non-iconic feel. That makes it hard to have a high fantasy adventure with the feel of Lord of the Rings ... everything felt like a slow moving World of Warcraft. This is all hashed out over and over and over in a decade of threads.

That's a... weird definition of high fantasy. Characters in LotR don't have any world-shattering powerful magic spells. Gandalf is a lvl 3 MU or so, after all.

Okay, this always bugs the crap out of me, so let's clear this up once and for all:

High Fantasy: Fantasy that takes place entirely within a "secondary world" that bears little or no connection to Earth (so not Portal Fantasy), but where magic and magical creatures exist as part of that world's natural order. Raymond Feist and GRRM's novels are high fantasy: Midkemia and "Planetos" are not Earth, but magic exists in both.

Low Fantasy: A story that takes place in the "real" world, with a singular magical element intruding on otherwise ordinary life. "The Monkey's Paw" and The Indian in the Cupboard are quintessential examples.

High Fantasy and Low Fantasy are not the same as high-magic and low-magic. The Harry Potter universe is incredibly high-magic, but it's clearly Low Fantasy because the "wizarding world" exists within a mundane setting that's otherwise indistinguishable from our own Earth. (As a rule, the whole of Urban Fantasy is a sub-genre of Low Fantasy.)

The Lord of the Rings is neither Low Fantasy nor High Fantasy. It doesn't fit the definition of either category. Like Conan's Hyborean Age, Tolkien's Third Age of Middle-Earth is supposed to be a mythologized, romanticized period of Earth's past. Low Fantasy and High Fantasy have to do with the nature of the setting, not with the plot or the characters.

Now, as it happens, LotR and Conan are both Heroic Fantasy—which also has sub-genres. Where Conan is the quintessential Sword & Sorcery hero, LotR is likewise the trope-definer for Epic Fantasy. And this seems to be the genre that modern D&D is usually aimed at. High Fantasy, yes, trivially, because Abeir-Toril and Oerth and Mystara are other worlds. But concerning the nature of the heroics involved, high-magic Epic Fantasy is the perennial flavor of the day, and probably has been since trad gaming replaced the old school as the dominant form of RPG play way back in the 80s.

Yeah in my experience, warlocks are not even allowed in the game of the grognard DMs to even do that sidestory.

Seems accurate. If someone rolled up to my game-table and asked to play a warlock, I'm not sure what I could do other than point them at the magic-user class and say, "In this world, spell-casters have to memorize their spells out of books!" "Warlocks and sorcerers? That's just what 6th and 7th level magic-users call themselves!"

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It seems to me that the (fairly mild) OSR elements in 5e are part of its broad accessibility/appeal. I think Mearls & co could have consulted with other, quieter, OSR people and got equally good advice. But it doesn't seem like the design team got bad advice. And maybe they needed loud voices before they'd listen.

This is pretty hilarious. You think these two people, one of whom explicitly wants to exclude entire groups of people from RPGs (or only allow them to play on his terms), and sneers at the people who make up the bulk of 5E's players, gave "good advice"? I mean jeeeeeeesus mate. There's opinions and then there's Opinions(TM). And this is the latter.

If either of them is consulted for 6E, and that information gets out, that's going to actually, genuinely hurt 6E's sales. Does that relate to their behaviour more than their design? Sure, but they were already behaving that way in 2014, and both of them themselves make intentional links between their behaviour and their design. It's part of their "thing".

And yeah, 5E did get good advice - from the five extremely experienced game-designers there. Not from that pair of noobs. I very much doubt any perceived "OSR elements" in 5E come from those two - I think it was pre-determined by WotC when they decided to make 5E an apology edition/edition to try and get people back that they'd be having a fair bit of backwards-looking stuff and try to disguise some of the more modern design - which ironically lead to some of the worst compromises in 5E, like the underdeveloped, almost vestigial "Hit Dice" system.

 

[kenada]

Another thing i like about the older games (along with their lighter rules sets) is how they empower the GM and players with the lack of prescriptiveness.

In a way, 3e and newer editions are actually disempowering. By dropping the procedures we’re discussing in the dungeoncrawl thread, it took away tools the players can use to ensure their characters’ survival. Sure, you are guaranteed some bonus or mechanic, but that seems superficial compared to being given a higher chance of survival. Wouldn’t it be nice if DMs didn’t feel the need to fudge just to keep the story going?

A player doesn’t need a feat, or power or skill to do something (aside from thieves picking locks and treasure traps). They want to do something, they can negotiate with the GM.

Less charitable viewpoints will label this as constantly playing “mother may I?” But that misses the point. It’s part of the game structure and an older form of “yes and or yes but”.

“I want to swing my sword in a wild arc to try to hit all of these goblins around me..”
”you can, but theres a fair few and it may leave you exposed to some counter attacks?”
”sure, I’ll take that risk”

It’s the purest form of player/GM collaboration in story telling without constantly referencing rulebooks or worrying about invalidating other player’s abilities. If you codify a skill and feat allowing somebody to do something, you are implicitly saying those that do not take that option cannot do it.

Those that decry it as “mother may I?” amuse me as arbitrarily set DCs are pretty much the same thing. If you choose to do something that doesn’t have an explicit dc attached, it’s still down to GM Fiat as to what the DC is...

Dogs in the Vineyard calls this “say yes or roll the dice”. In Apocalypse World, one of your moves as a GM is to “tell them the possible consequences and ask”. There’s a surprising amount of overlap between old-school play and modern, narrative games. The problem with D&D is when people wanted to start doing things other than delving into dungeons for treasure, it abandoned its principles rather than adapt.

 

[Umbran]

Please for the love of god can we not turn this into yet another 4e was great/terrible thread?!

I sure hope folks agree with you there. Because one more pointless head-butting session is not a thing we need.

/sigh and this is the clash of new school mindset vs old school. A debate long held and misunderstood on both sides. For the old school mindset to work, you need three things 1) a DM with a fair hand in adjudicating, 2) players that are willing to collaborate and engage with the DM and world and 3) players with the ability to trust their DM.

And, on this I think you may have hit a major point, that is neither good nor bad, but may be a major divider.

Look at all that focus on the DM. This older game is not really about playing "Dungeons and Dragons", so much as it is about playing "John the DM's game". The rules of these older games were not the major determiner of how the game played - the DM was.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In a way, 3e and newer editions are actually disempowering. By dropping the procedures we’re discussing in the dungeoncrawl thread, it took away tools the players can use to ensure their characters’ survival. Sure, you are guaranteed some bonus or mechanic, but that seems superficial compared to being given a higher chance of survival. Wouldn’t it be nice if DMs didn’t feel the need to fudge just to keep the story going?

I think this is a lot more complex than you're making out, and ignores the DM as part of the equation.

In 2E and before, basically only casters can ever say what happens. Everyone else is playing "mother-may-I" with the DM. So the casters are empowered and the DM is even more empowered. If the DM wants you to live, and favours your "mother-may-I" requests, then you do great. If they DM doesn't feel that way, or is just incompetent or arbitrary, well, the casters still get a say, but no-one else does.

This is the key issue with codified abilities vs. not. Because there have always been codified abilities - just they used to only be spells (and magic items I guess also). That gradually changed every edition. And the power, even in 3E, did shift, every edition, a little more from the DM to the players overall.

As for "fudge to keep the story going", I think it's totally bizarre to assert that's a modern thing. I had to do that far more in 2E and 3E than 4E or 5E, and I almost never have to do that in modern, fail-forward-designed games - some of which is simply a change to how you write adventures/scenarios.

And it's misleading to claim procedures are taken away - that's only true if you want it to be. 4E and 5E outside combat are pretty fiction-first games. If someone says they're using a pole to activate the pressure-plate of the trap in 4E or 5E, the situation is no different to OD&D or 1E. It's bizarre to suggest otherwise. In later editions players have a choice - either describe their actions, or roll and let their character try it. That you think they're only allowed to do the latter is perplexing and wrong.

There’s a surprising amount of overlap between old-school play and modern, narrative games.

Definitely agree. But the big difference is that games like Apocalypse World give all the players equal amounts of codified power, and have a design which gives players in general vastly more power than they did in old-school play.

The problem with D&D is when people wanted to start doing things other than delving into dungeons for treasure, it abandoned its principles rather than adapt.

This is illogical, because it assumes that D&D was even aware that it had "principles" at the time the change started, and there's absolutely no evidence to support the idea that any of the designers were remotely thinking in those terms.

 

[transmission89]

Guess what? I don't tailor things round the ability of my players and I actively prefer new school rule sets. So it's not the rule set that's the issue. It's the attitude of the GM.

Again. I play new school rule sets with exception based design - and I do not have to gauge this "constant impact". I embrace it.

You are only emphasising the point that you as a DM do not trust the players with too many codified abilities they can use. If I can trust the game designer I can trust the players. It's not about the codified abilities because some of us can trust them. It's about your attitude to the players having codified abilities.

You further emphasised that by your claim that I should know what all the feats and abilities in the game do. Why on earth would I want to?

And you said that my issue was trust because I don't want to clutter up my user interface by unnecessarily wedging a DM in there - and as a DM I want to get on with the game rather than being an admin assistant and general dogsbody.

The old school perspective in my experience relies on projection (the Old School Primer in particular being fairly risible). And the DM being the almost unquestioned god rather than trusting the players to take things and run with it. All the trust flows in old school play are from the player to the DM and none the other way round.

The new school perspective in some cases even calls the GM the MC - first among equals and trust flows both ways. (The in between rules heavy perspective has little trust either way and Monte Cook himself has called this out and asked "what have we done?").

If your idea of "New School" is the dominant paradigm from about 1985 to 2005 then I can see where your views come from. But that's not remotely new school.

As has been pointed out old school rule sets are not light.

You've got one set of mechanics for attacking, another set for ability checks (with lifting bars and bending gates having their own percentile subystem), another set for saves (two if you count resurrection and system shock), another set for thief weapon proficiencies, and still another set for spellcasting. And that's before getting into e.g. surprise rules let alone start digging through the 1e DMG for ridiculous and fiddly rules like the helmet rules. Old school rule sets are (despite the claims of some of their adherents) pretty complex - and more complex than 4e or 5e to learn. The complexity of 4e is largely emergent based on what people do and how they interact and the choices they make.

And that's why old school DMs frequently have to do all the admin work rather than having everyone pitch in and freeing them up to do the parts only they can do. The rules are complex and fiddly compared to modern rules so it's a lot more of an overhead for the player to learn.

For that matter the core of 3.X is, thanks to being unified, a lot easier to learn than anything TSR put out as D&D (and I include the brown/white box here and probably the purple and red boxes). 3.X then decided that they'd take all the space freed up by not using a complex and arcane ruleset that did things backwards and make it equally heavy by throwing modifiers everywhere.

4e and 5e meanwhile both kept their cores simple and put extra complexity on the abilities of the characters (PC and NPC alike). But this is still relatively light because each player only needs to know what their character can do and you can even tailor the complexity of the character. And the X, Y, Z I'm doing is called working out what's going on in the world and DMing a collection of NPCs.

If I want a light game there is no D&D version even worth talking about. I reach for Fate, Fudge, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Risus, or a large number of other games. Modern RPGs are generally a lot lighter than anything old school.

They don't need to pitch in. I want them to pitch in and they almost always learn to pitch in after the first couple of sessions. This is because modern RPGs are a lot easier to learn than old school RPGs because they use unified systems so you're not stuck wondering which dice to roll and whether you want to roll high or low.

And they want to pitch in themselves because they aren't lazy and like to be in control of their characters.

Debunking the misinformation you are spreading from your description of modern systems as complex when compared to arcane older systems to your leap to it being about trust issues.

Its amazing that someone who quotes so much doesn’t actually read what’s there.
Asserting your subjective views over the validity of my subjective views is hardly debunking anything.


I never said I don’t trust players to have codified abilities. I said I dislike that they disempower players in my opinion.



Again, in a thread where the point is to discuss why we still play older rules sets, I fail to see what you want as an intended out come.

If you enjoy your new school gaming, go for it. You should be free to enjoy what you want and feel confident in your decision.

The fact that you’ve come onto a thread specifically about why we still play older games to vehemently defend the new school games just comes across as a lack of confidence in their ability to validate themselves and stand on their own merits without you wading in and loudly proclaiming their virtues. But you do you

 

[transmission89]

I think this is a lot more complex than you're making out, and ignores the DM as part of the equation.

In 2E and before, basically only casters can ever say what happens. Everyone else is playing "mother-may-I" with the DM. So the casters are empowered and the DM is even more empowered. If the DM wants you to live, and favours your "mother-may-I" requests, then you do great. If they DM doesn't feel that way, or is just incompetent or arbitrary, well, the casters still get a say, but no-one else does.

This is the key issue with codified abilities vs. not. Because there have always been codified abilities - just they used to only be spells (and magic items I guess also). That gradually changed every edition. And the power, even in 3E, did shift, every edition, a little more from the DM to the players overall.

As for "fudge to keep the story going", I think it's totally bizarre to assert that's a modern thing. I had to do that far more in 2E and 3E than 4E or 5E, and I almost never have to do that in modern, fail-forward-designed games - some of which is simply a change to how you write adventures/scenarios.

And it's misleading to claim procedures are taken away - that's only true if you want it to be. 4E and 5E outside combat are pretty fiction-first games. If someone says they're using a pole to activate the pressure-plate of the trap in 4E or 5E, the situation is no different to OD&D or 1E. It's bizarre to suggest otherwise. In later editions players have a choice - either describe their actions, or roll and let their character try it. That you think they're only allowed to do the latter is perplexing and wrong.

Definitely agree. But the big difference is that games like Apocalypse World give all the players equal amounts of codified power, and have a design which gives players in general vastly more power than they did in old-school play.

This is illogical, because it assumes that D&D was even aware that it had "principles" at the time the change started, and there's absolutely no evidence to support the idea that any of the designers were remotely thinking in those terms.

This proves my point spectacularly about what I was saying about the mind set. Even used my quoted phrase! Beautiful! Thank you

Though I do agree it’s more nuanced than that as you said, but I was just painting a broader over view

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Look at all that focus on the DM. This older game is not really about playing "Dungeons and Dragons", so much as it is about playing "John the DM's game". The rules of these older games were not the major determiner of how the game played - the DM was.

Exactly - and this is an under-acknowledged point.

It's really weird, because like, twenty years ago, no-one would fail to note that, nor failed to note that many DMs were in fact adversarial, rather than fair-handed.

But here we have a bunch of people acting as if every table back in the day was run by some totally fair DM who absolutely was a "fan of the characters" (a distinctly new-school notion), and that any deviation from that was weird - when in fact that was pretty rare to see. I mean, of the DMs I played with from 1989 to 1999, only me, my brother, and one specific friend could remotely been have described that way. And I played with quite a few DMs in that period.

This proves my point spectacularly about what I was saying about the mind set. Even used my quoted phrase! Beautiful! Thank you

Fair enough - I've been avoiding getting between you guys lol.

I mean to me it looked like you were saying modern editions disempower players due to codified abilities, but I think I can pretty much objectively illustrate that is not overall sweep of things (though individual mechanics sometimes do!), because D&D and indeed all the RPGs I can off-hand think of have retained the ability for players to describe what their characters are doing, and to use dice only when randomization is needed. If players were FORCED to roll by new-school games, then there would be a starker divide.

I think the real biggest issue with old-school stuff for me was the double-standard, where casters were empowered, and everyone else had to, Blanche DuBois-stylez, "rely on the kindness of strangers" (or rather the DM).

It's notable that in a lot of more modern OSR-based design, non-caster classes do actually tend to have waaaaaaaay more codified abilities than they did "back in the day" (even than in 2E), and casters tend to have fewer spells, with narrower applications and more drawbacks, to prevent this double-standard being such an issue. Thinking of Worlds Without Number for example, esp. the "advanced" classes. The rules in general there tend to empower players more and the DM less than actual games did back in the day, and I think that's a good thing.

But certainly, let's be clear - I feel like the circle has been mended almost. Like, in 2E, I loved that players could narrate what they wanted to do, and I could use simple rules for it, but as a player, I hated, loathed, abhorred dealing with DMs who didn't want to play that way, which was, in my experience, the slight majority of DMs (not the very first one I played with, thankfully). And now a lot of modern games manage to have a situation where it's still very much about a player saying what they want to do, and applying simple rules, but it's much more consistent, and the players are much empowered, and the DM is much more clearly delineated in their role, and much more clearly directed to be a fan of the characters, not there to ruin their day or whatever.