D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[Aldarc]

So you're saying its "anit-D&D" to have the view that RPG designers other than D&D designers have made innovations/discoveries in the space of RPG play and design?

There are no new innovations or discoveries in TTRPGs. All is as it was and will be as recounted in the holy scriptures of St. Jon Peterson: The Book of Game Wizards and The Book of the Elusive Shift.

 

[Campbell]

I've been in countless other threads where the notion of 'play to find out what happens' is always contrasted with D&D play - and always done so by speaking negatively of D&D. 'Mother May I' is the pejorative that most immediately comes to mind, but there's been others too. Heck, even when I suggest sandboxy D&D play is 'play to find out' that idea gets hard pushback too.

So IMO, the phrase 'play to find out' especially in the context of calling it a 'sad world' where such an idea is essentially not well known. That's an anti-D&D stance. The world knows D&D - if that concept was part of D&D then the world would also know it.

Apocalypse World's play to find out what happens and Monsterhearts keep the story feral are simply calls to action to avoid guiding play towards particular outcomes. It's in no way an indictment against D&D. It may be an indictment (or at least citing a preference) against GM storytelling, but GM storytelling and D&D are not synonymous. It's basically a fancy way of reminding both players and GMs not to railroad or nudge.

I do think a world where play that does not include GM storytelling is considered radical is a fairly sad one because the sorts of play I enjoy most are treated as second class, including the classical version of D&D.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Play to find out is an anti-railroad approach to play.

 

[pemerton]

IMO, you are anti-D&D. We could go through the evidence of all the other threads where you use pejorative terms to refer to D&D play, where you talk about D&D play as if it's derogatory or negative, but I have a feeling that won't be beneficial. It really baffles me how you are now trying to say you are pro-D&D.

Here is a bunch of actual-play links, of 4e D&D play:

Some tweaks to H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth
Time-travel with witches and spiders
An ancient temple
Combat-free session
Social-only session, and very pivotal for the campaign
More combat-free, with a moral twist
First dealing with Kas
Hobgoblins and Calastryx
Doppelgangers
Wizard reborn as invoker
Some downtime skill challenges
The underdark
Rescued by a duergar
The PCs “return the favour”
A purple worm
Entering Phaervorul (P2, scaled up)
Epic dreams
More adventures in Phaervorul
On the Barrens in the Abyss
In Mal Arundak
The Shrine of the Kuo-toa
The Soul Abattoir, and Torog
Into the Feywild
Frost giants
More frost giants
The Prince of Frost
Slaads
Githzerai
Confronting Lolth
Defeating Lolth
Sealing the Abyss
Defeating Orcus, then escaping through the Abyss
Arrival at the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen
Still fighting Kas and Jenna Osterneth
Inside the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen
Trying to hold off the end of the world by defeating the tarrasque

The last time I ran AD&D was earlier this year: a session of White Plume Mountain. When is the last time you ran AD&D?

The last time I unfolded a Greyhawk map was in a session a bit over a week ago. What about you?

Yesterday evening I adapted a couple of elements from the City of Greyhawk boxed set adventure card Shadows of Terror, for a Torchbearer scenario I was designing.

You seem to be equating a dislike of GM-decides resolution and GM-breadcrumbs scenarios with a dislike of D&D. But those things aren't the only ways to play D&D.

 

[FrogReaver]

Apocalypse World's play to find out what happens and Monsterhearts keep the story feral are simply calls to action to avoid guiding play towards particular outcomes. It's in no way an indictment against D&D. It may be an indictment (or at least citing a preference) against GM storytelling, but GM storytelling and D&D are not synonymous. It's basically a fancy way of reminding both players and GMs not to railroad.

Maybe. But IMO that's not how those terms have been used on this forum in any discussion I've been in where they have been brought up. They mean much more than that, IMO.

I do think a world where play that does not include GM storytelling is considered radical is a fairly sad one because the sorts of play I enjoy most are treated as second class, including the classical version of D&D.

I have sympathy there. I really do. Explaining a complicated system and where there are major differences, that's hard. It's no wonder the people you try to tell about it never seem to understand correctly, or take the wrong things away. Then there's also the case that quite a few people may just not like that kind of playstyle as much. So yea, it's going to tend to feel like your preferences are treated as 2nd class and I'm all for that not being the case, but it has to be done in a way where other people can keep and state their preferences as well.

 

[FrogReaver]

You seem to be equating a dislike of GM-decides resolution and GM-breadcrumbs scenarios with a dislike of D&D. But those things aren't the only ways to play D&D.

I don't think so. It's well established you like and played 4e. No issues there.

I'm not sure what GM-breadcrumbs means here. But IMO GM-decides resolution has been essential in all versions of D&D, including 4e which I also played and liked.

 

[FrogReaver]

Here is a bunch of actual-play links, of 4e D&D play:

...

The last time I ran AD&D was earlier this year: a session of White Plume Mountain. When is the last time you ran AD&D?

Never - AD&D was long before I got into D&D

The last time I unfolded a Greyhawk map was in a session a bit over a week ago. What about you?

Never - we generally make our own worlds

If I may offer a more nuanced perspective:
You like the very particular way or handful of ways you have found of playing D&D. That's great! It even speaks to D&D's flexibility . However, you also dislike how 95%+ of other people play D&D. You greatly criticize those more common playstyles.

So maybe saying anti-D&D isn't most accurate. Maybe we should say you are anti-strong-majority-D&D or something like that. Or maybe pro-pemerton version D&D. Do you feel any of that is a better description?

 

[pemerton]

Never - AD&D was long before I got into D&D

Yet you seem to consider yourself pro-D&D. Even though you've never gone back and drunk from the well.

Never - we generally make our own worlds

You seem to consider yourself pro-D&D, even though a huge chunk - probably the majority - of the D&D-themed material published by TSR and WotC deals with worlds invented by their authors.

If I may offer a more nuanced perspective:
You like the very particular way or handful of ways you have found of playing D&D. That's great! It even speaks to D&D's flexibility . However, you also dislike how 95%+ of other people play D&D. You greatly criticize those more common playstyles.

So maybe saying anti-D&D isn't most accurate. Maybe we should say you are anti-strong-majority-D&D or something like that. Or maybe pro-pemerton version D&D. Do you feel any of that is a better description?

So you are pro-D&D - though you've never played AD&D and don't use published settings - while I'm pro-pemerton-D&D, which is some baroque thing that involves AD&D, B2 Keep on the Borderlands, the World of Greyhawk, and almost the whole of 4th edition.

Perhaps we could say you're pro-FrogReaver D&D?

It's not mysterious what I dislike: railroaded adventures (including the "three clue rule" and "node-based design"); GM decides; setting tourism; filler combats; failure offscreen (based on the GM imagining stuff on their own, and then bringing the results of that imagining back into play so as to defeat player goals for their PCs). Basically the suite of tools that I saw become predominant from the mid-80s on, and that AD&D 2nd ed tended to promote.

The use of those tools is not unique to D&D. Disliking them is not an attitude towards D&D. I don't like them in Rolemaster or RQ play either.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree, although I also quibble. The rules should support the themes, and the more strongly they do then the more system matters. (Cyberpunk, Horror, &c.)

Honestly, its hard enough to deliberately design a game for multiple functions; retrofitting a game originally done for one purpose into another is fraught, and IMO rarely works as well as people will claim it does. That's even true of games with a certain degree of broad design (usually because of overreach in trying to use it beyond varieties of game where its basic design can clearly be extended.

(To be clear, you can adapt most systems to most purposes, but you have to do that--adapt. And few designs actually do the heavy lifting to get there).

Design philosophy - What do you mean by this? I see your example, but I don't have that book to reference. Is it something like "this is the kind of game we want, that's why these rules are here and these other ones from the other game aren't"? Having a collection of rules that point towards a certain theme can certainly reinforce a feel or playstyle. "This is your Quantum score, the more you have the more super you are but the more mutated you may become", from Aberrant could be an example of this. There isn't anything in D&D really that has a kind of "push your luck" attribute.

One of the commonest places you'll see this sort of failure is an attempt to adapt other games to handle superheroes. To do this properly you usually need to do something more than just create a super-powers module.

 

[gorice]

Now, if the innkeep was expecting a punch to the face, I might have everyone roll initiative right away. Ultimately, it's a DM call, not a player one, to roll initiative IMO.

That's how most people probably play, and it makes sense, given that we tend to give DMs authority over this stuff. But...

The DM decides if it's initiative or just an intimidation check. The PCs don't know if the bartender, a werewolf or an Ancient dragon that will start laughing and start making demands of the PCs. Or, as you mentioned the DM waves combat.

The DM describes, players say what they do, DM decides what happens. Rinse and repeat.

Right, but: 'DM decides' doesn't effect everything. At least, if we were playing out the fight, and the DM said 'you missed' after I rolled a nat 20 against the innkeep, I'd be annoyed. So, there are situations where we tend to assume the rules do apply, and others where we assume it is the GM's job to decide. The rules don't really say anything about that.

Does 'DM decides' mean that the DM decides what's going on in the fiction and apply the (singular) appropriate rule; that they decide what's going on in the ficiton, and apply the rule they prefer; that they decide and apply any or no rule; or something else?