D&D General On Grognardism...

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah. The author also seems to think "story driven" is a modern innovation. I was playing Traveller as early as 1982, and that is inherently story driven rather than "map driven". The classic Traveller adventure Twilight's Peak is famous for being the only one with anything resembling a dungeon in it.

Yeah it seems like he realizes non-D&D RPGs exist, because he mentions Story Games/Nordic Larp, but the whole thing is utterly D&D-centric, which I think misrepresents the history/evolution of RPGs, because most areas of innovation tend to happen outside D&D, then feed back into D&D.

 

[Democratus]

Yeah. The author also seems to think "story driven" is a modern innovation. I was playing Traveller as early as 1982, and that is inherently story driven rather than "map driven". The classic Traveller adventure Twilight's Peak is famous for being the only one with anything resembling a dungeon in it.

That's bizarre. We saw Traveller as entirely map driven, seeing that there were so many rules for generating maps.

We treated it as a hex crawl where you tried to work out being a tramp trader (moving goods) and occaisonally got into "adventures" (stolen from various published modules).

I think the takeaway here is that anyone who talks about "what gaming was like" at any time is limited by their own experiences. Nobody was taking global surveys - so it's anecdotes all the way down.

 

[nevin]

There is more and more reason to clash.

People know more precisely what that like for their games : optimizing, role play, sand box, gritty realism, low magic, high magic, and so on.

People have played many editions, 1, 2, 3.5, 4, 5 and many other games. The more you have play the more chance you got the know what you like and how to get it.

Does this make people more grognard? I don’t think so. People are more quick to dismantle any new edition, supplement or wonderful idea. The grognard effect may rise when poster don’t realize they talk about opposite aspects of the game when challenging a new topic.

It's not just games. This is what the internet has done to everything.

 

[nevin]

That's bizarre. We saw Traveller as entirely map driven, seeing that there were so many rules for generating maps.

We treated it as a hex crawl where you tried to work out being a tramp trader (moving goods) and occaisonally got into "adventures" (stolen from various published modules).

I think the takeaway here is that anyone who talks about "what gaming was like" at any time is limited by their own experiences. Nobody was taking global surveys - so it's anecdotes all the way down.

I don't understand how you could see traveller as map driven. Having played a couple of versions.

 

[S'mon]

I don't understand how you could see traveller as map driven. Having played a couple of versions.

Isn't this how you play Traveller?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Isn't this how you play Traveller?

I wouldn't know. Last time I tried to play Traveller the party didn't survive character creation.

 

[billd91]

I don't understand how you could see traveller as map driven. Having played a couple of versions.

Oh, I totally get it. There's a lot of procedure about generating maps and if you got your hands on the Spinward Marches or Solomani Rim supplements, you probably poured over those looking for trade routes that would be lucrative.

 

[Campbell]

I don't think it is quite as rare as you say. In fact, I think it is quite common but takes a different form than grognardism so doesn't correlate in an easily definable (or nameable) way. But you can look to countless discussions here and elsewhere where older or more traditional ways of doing things are considered in a negative light because they don't meet certain, newer standards.

Both, I think, commit a similar error, but it looks quite different.

Most of the criticism I see of mainstream or traditional modes of play is a lot more directed at something like the playstyles of something like Critical Role and what Matt Colville espouses than it is at Moldvay or Traveller. Speaking as someone who has been at times a critical voice when it comes to things like the prevalence of GM storytelling and spotlight balancing on this board I'm quite fond of both the classic game and many OSR games.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I feel like that article is a bit weird given that I started playing in 1989, and my main group all the way back has basically been what he calls "Neo-trad" and claims came out of 3E organised play. It's like, I'm pretty sure that fun-centric model which makes the players more important than the "trad" model he describes has existed since at least the late '80s, because I was taught to play that way by an older cousin in 1989, and she didn't seem to indicate it was novel. Also a lot of RPG material from the early '90s seemed to support that general approach.

I mean, I definitely recognise Trad vs. what they're calling OC/Neo-trad, it was a conflict back in the 1990s, but it largely seemed to be an age-based division, like if someone was older than me, they were increasingly likely to be trad, and younger, increasingly likely to be neo-trad. I've almost never come across anyone playing something that genuinely matches his definition of Classic and I'm not sure I entirely buy his separation of OSR and Classic - I mean I get the point he's trying to make, but some of the stuff he's attributing to OSR is certainly how people represented the games they ran/played in the 1990s. I'm not sure "Story Games" is really a separate thing either, I think it's closely related to Neo-trad. Nordic Larp I can't really comment on.

As an aside, the most interesting thing I found out about from that article was Warlock/CalTech-style D&D, which I had only a vague idea even existed, and then I looked into and which gave Thieves codified abilities all the way back in 1976, and frankly, their design of Thieves appears to have been more advanced than anything we saw from official D&D all the way until 4E with 2008, 32 years later (arguably 3E but it seems closer to the 4E/5E approach)! They also apparently had codified abilities for Fighters and so on. And a spell-point system for magic. Talk about ahead of their time! Unfortunately a lot of it wasn't very well-recorded.

One of my disagreements is that I don't think neo-traditional is a new culture. It's a part of traditional culture that's becoming more noticeable is all.

It's just something you see in so many other storytelling communities (ie every fanfiction community): new writers tend to make overpowered characters and just sort of warp the world around them. More experienced writers do this less. DnD has the added wrinkle of working best when everyone treats their pc as part of an ensemble cast, but not every dnd player knows this.

There are other critiques I've read (mostly on the reddit post about it), most of which are coming from the fact that the writer is an OSR guy so often misrepresents (not maliciously) the other groups.

 

[Ancalagon]

I love this! I never saw Captain Harlock at the time but the style/vibe is completely amazing. The big one that me and my similar-age friends all remember in the UK is Ulysses 3131, which I imagine you also saw as it was French-Japanese made. I can still hum the theme tune.

Oh yes! Ulysse 31, Astro (we got it 5 years before Astroboy), Goldorak, the splendid Les Mysterieuses Cites D'or, Belle et Sebastien, Il etait une foit l'histoire (which convinced me as a young child we were about to explode) etc etc...