D&D General Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Magic Missile: Why Gygax Still Matters to Me

[Micah Sweet]

What did I say that mentioned anything about money? I'm talking about the games people actually play to any degree that it's actually plausible to find a table to join.


THERE ISN'T ANYTHING THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY PLAY.

As I've said to you. At least half a dozen times now.

I would go somewhere else if there were anywhere else to go.

You have explained your situation, and I really am sorry. But there are no other choices. Complaining that WotC doesn't make what you want accomplishes nothing. The real problem is that you want to be a player, not a DM. I feel you; there are several games I'll probably never get to play or DM, because my people aren't interested in them.

You have to either find a game that works for you (and keep looking for a table), or make it yourself (and accept that you will experience it as a DM).

Unless this is just a lament. If it's a lament I take it all back; you do you.

And aren't you in a game with @Hussar ?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, certainly. Had it been unfashionable in the Victorian era, there's a chance it would have simply died out entirely, or become an American-specific tradition.


Okay. What would you then do, having accepted that Pendragon is out of the question, if you were also deeply dissatisfied with the state of the games you could actually play?

Leave the hobby as an active player and stick to reading material I enjoyed? That's how I stuck with D&D in the first place back in the 2e days. My interest was maintained by Dragon magazine and whatever books I could afford.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So it isn't and never was actually a toolkit? That whole thing was a lie all along?

It was a better toolkit in the TSR days IMO. 3e, 4e and 5e all push setting into the corebooks pretty hard (4e especially IMO). The best modern D&D-adjacent game that acts as a good toolkit is Level Up as far as I'm concerned. Very few assumptions of setting there.

 

[RuinousPowers]

Started running D&D in 84 and I never had any interest in who the authors were. I was as surprised, years later, to find people idolized Gygax as I was to discover people were emotionally connected to Morgan Blackhand and other fluff characters mentioned in the Cyberpunk rulebook.

Also, if infravision is only 60 or 90 feet, how could anyone appreciate or even see the ceiling features of the Vault if its hundreds of feet away?

 

[Bedrockgames]

It was a better toolkit in the TSR days IMO. 3e, 4e and 5e all push setting into the corebooks pretty hard (4e especially IMO). The best modern D&D-adjacent game that acts as a good toolkit is Level Up as far as I'm concerned. Very few assumptions of setting there.

2E even had the green books for specific historical campaigns. Those could easily have been expanded into all types of history. Plus they had a variety of campaign settings

 

[MGibster]

Okay. What would you then do, having accepted that Pendragon is out of the question, if you were also deeply dissatisfied with the state of the games you could actually play?

Back in the late 1990s I slowly started to pivot away from AD&D 2nd edition because I simply got tired of playing it. I came back a few years later with 3rd edition, beat a very hasty retreat with 3.5, and I didn't return to D&D proper until 5th edition in 2014. Even though 5th edition is my favorite version of the game, I've only run a handful of campaigns and I've been slowly drifting away due to a combination of shifting interests on my part and the changes I've seen in D&D. If I ever get to the point where I'm simply dissatisfied with the games I could actually play then I would just give up gaming. I'm not getting any younger, and I definitely see a future where I'm no longer playing TTRPGs.

 

[MGibster]

So it isn't and never was actually a toolkit? That whole thing was a lie all along?

I figured that out sometime around 1990-1991 when I tried running a Wheel of Time style campaign and found it just wasn't possible. You can certainly do a lot with D&D, see Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, etc., etc., but all of those games always felt like D&D to me. D&D is a toolkit in the sense that you can create your own setting or run it the way you want, but it's always going to be D&D, so it's somewhat limited in what you can actually do with it. Trying to build something outside the parameters of its limited toolset will lead to frustration.

 

[MGibster]

Started running D&D in 84 and I never had any interest in who the authors were. I was as surprised, years later, to find people idolized Gygax as I was to discover people were emotionally connected to Morgan Blackhand and other fluff characters mentioned in the Cyberpunk rulebook.

I ended up purchasing most of the Cyberpunk 2020 books via a Humble Bundle sale a few years ago. I was struck by just how few 2020 books were produced compared to what I had thought. Compared to AD&D 2nd edition especially. I never had any particularly connection to the NPCs from 2020, not Blackhand, not Smasher, and certainly not Silverhand.

I will say that Mike Pondsmith is another creator for whom I have a great deal of affection for. I'm not a fan of Cyberpunk Red, but he did a fantastic job with the original 2020 and it still gives me the warm fuzzies to this day.

 

[RuinousPowers]

I ended up purchasing most of the Cyberpunk 2020 books via a Humble Bundle sale a few years ago. I was struck by just how few 2020 books were produced compared to what I had thought. Compared to AD&D 2nd edition especially. I never had any particularly connection to the NPCs from 2020, not Blackhand, not Smasher, and certainly not Silverhand.

I will say that Mike Pondsmith is another creator for whom I have a great deal of affection for. I'm not a fan of Cyberpunk Red, but he did a fantastic job with the original 2020 and it still gives me the warm fuzzies to this day.

I have fallen out with 2020's system, but not before I got several years of fun out of it.

 

[Alzrius]

So it isn't and never was actually a toolkit? That whole thing was a lie all along?

As I saw it, the "toolkit" idea was about altering/replacing various aspects of the rules, because the rules were the "how things work" of the game world, and changing those changed the nature of the campaign that you were playing. It's why Ravenloft had rules for evil actions causing corruption of the self, whereas Birthright had rules for the divine right of kings.

In that regard, the question then (to me) became one of figuring out what kind of game you wanted to run, and so what tools (i.e. alternate rules) you needed. That, in turn, leads to figuring out if those rules already exist somewhere (are they optional rules in the Core Rulebooks? Or is there a third-party product with them? Or do you need to make them up yourself?), and what you'll be replacing and/or figuring out how extant rules interact with them. And of course, then you need to bring everyone else in your group up to speed with the changes.

Now, it's entirely possible to find that you want so many changes that at some point, you're better off with another game that (hopefully) is (much) closer to what you want right out of the proverbial box. After all, you can turn your refrigerator into a car if you work on it long enough, hard enough, but it's probably easier to just buy a car.