D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Umbran]

Considering the 50th year anniversary of the game, it smelled a lot more like an opportunity to me.

Given the 50th year anniversary, it was also a bit darned if you do, darned if you don't.

If they did something with core rules, folks would call it a money grab/treadmill. If they didn't, it'd have been called disrespectful of the history and anniversary.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Which sounds nice until the reality of pop culture kicks in, that people will follow the shiny newness wherever it leads them even if that ends up being off a cliff.

When we are talking about sitting around rolling dice, what pop culture change could POSSIBLY lead to players going off a cliff?

 

[TiQuinn]

Hard disagree on both accounts.

Having worked with refrigerators I know quite well that none of what you claimed about old fridges are true. Buying a new fridge will not save you any money at all, these things are made up by the companies selling you the products. Also I'm not sure what kind of features you want on your fridges, I'd like mine to keep food cold.

I’m not sure what refrigerators you worked with but nothing Hussar said there was wrong. Defrosting refrigerators was recommended occasionally as ice buildup would block the air circulation and cause parts to possibly fail. Freezers would just build and build a layer of frost til the inside looked like a Star Wars Hoth playset. If you didn’t defrost, and the power went out or the compressor gave out, you’d come home to a soaked floor (which we did one year when we went to our cabin that had an old Fridgidare from the 60s).

 

[Hussar]

These things combine to ensure that no edition will ever be "evergreen". Neither WotC nor TSR did enough rigorous playtesting to comprehensively identify the serious problems in whatever they produced--and their game design "goals" are sufficiently diffuse and/or incoherent to be easily "met" without truly doing the things the designers really wanted, just superficially seeming to.

Frankly, I'm not sure you could ever do enough "vigorous playtesting" to catch everything. Look at video games. Despite having MUCH deeper pockets and far more resources available, video games are constantly in need of patching after release. To the point where it's pretty much expected.

Game dev's for RPG's simply cannot possible foresee every single issue with a system. Particularly not with a system as incredibly complex as D&D. It just isn't possible. So, we get errata and periodic rules updates. Which, in my mind, is perfectly fair and understandable.

 

[Kromanjon]

I’m not sure what refrigerators you worked with but nothing Hussar said there was wrong. Defrosting refrigerators was recommended occasionally as ice buildup would block the air circulation and cause parts to possibly fail. Freezers would just build and build a layer of frost til the inside looked like a Star Wars Hoth playset. If you didn’t defrost, and the power went out or the compressor gave out, you’d come home to a soaked floor (which we did one year when we went to our cabin that had an old Fridgidare from the 60s).

Well frost free refrigerators has been a thing since at least the 50s. If yours wasn't, perhaps it was older or perhaps it needed to change the thermostat. Changing the thermostat on an old fridge is easy and not very costly while if this where to happen to a new system you would most likely need to change the circuit board at a cost close to a new fridge all together.

I've been living with a standard freezer for about sex years now (not frost free, older model) and i have had to defrost it twice during that time.

And to answer your question I worked with Electrolux, Husqvarna, and sometimes BOSCH.

 

[Remathilis]

riddle me…

why are OSR games mostly closer to Moldvay Basic than bells-and-whistles 2E?

Oooh ohhh I know, I know!

Because the OSR is obsessed with a specific period of D&D history (1977 - 1983) and the game play style Gary and his colleagues exposited before Hickman and Weiss polluted the game with narrative and storylines. 2nd edition is the redheaded stepchild: mechanically similar to the old editions (Basic and 1e) to be rejected by modernists but too Hickman influenced for the OS movement. Hence it's persona non grata and only loved for the settings it inspired (which get ported to the edition of choice) but never for the rules or tone.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don’t know what a funnel adventure is. Is having it an actual improvement over not having it…or…are there just people who like them vs. people who don’t?

Are you familiar with the way old-school D&D tended to require that you burn through half a dozen (or more!) characters before you finally got one that would survive long enough to stick around a bit? Well, whether or not you are, that was a thing, and it was partially there to emphasize how dangerous the world is. Running things precisely like that is a problem now for a lot of players, because many folks who want to play old-school games don't have the free time to spend multiple months just getting past a character's first or second adventure. But they also don't want to give up the lethality of the world; to merely skip over that process would drain away a significant portion of the fun for them.

Enter the character funnel adventure. Each player rolls up several characters, at least 2 but usually 3-4, sometimes more. The funnel adventure is, intentionally, brutally hard. It's fully intended that most characters won't survive. But when you do get to the other side--which should take no more than a couple sessions, perhaps three for a slow group or unusually long adventure--you have just completed what would have been a multi-month process of character-winnowing in a session to three.

The existence of these funnels does absolutely nothing to people who don't want to use them. There is nothing you lose of DCC by not playing through them. But their presence neatly solves an otherwise thorny design problem that wasn't really a concern 50 years ago, but is a concern now.

DCC funnels are one of my favorite examples of excellent game design, because I can with 100% honesty say they absolutely aren't for me. I don't like the lethality of early editions of D&D, which I find demoralizing and tedious. I have no interest in using funnels whatsoever, nor is this a design problem I would need to address. But I can see why the design problem really is a problem for the people who are looking for this kind of play-experience, and more importantly, I can see how this new technique is, objectively, a neat and tidy solution to a dilemma that looks hard to solve from first principles.

I love giving it as an example very specifically because it's great design that isn't for me. I have no emotional attachment to it. I would never benefit from its existence, nor would I be impoverished if it hadn't existed. But I know that it is good game design, an improvement in technique, even though that technique doesn't do anything for me, personally. I have no dog in this race, yet I can still see that the newcomer has learned a useful trick her forebears didn't have.

 

[FrozenNorth]

(And before anyone objects: If you stop with the free money in Free Parking house rule, and auction off any properties the person landing on it doesn't want to buy -- as per RAW -- it's actually a pretty quick and breezy game.)

We’ve never played with the Free Parking houserule and we’ve always auctioned off properties when someone lands on them and it is STILL not a « quick and breezy game ».

 

[Remathilis]

When we are talking about sitting around rolling dice, what pop culture change could POSSIBLY lead to players going off a cliff?

Doncha know? People will get ideas in their heads like they can be anthropomorphic cat people or dwarves can use magic.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Frankly, I'm not sure you could ever do enough "vigorous playtesting" to catch everything. Look at video games. Despite having MUCH deeper pockets and far more resources available, video games are constantly in need of patching after release. To the point where it's pretty much expected.

Game dev's for RPG's simply cannot possible foresee every single issue with a system. Particularly not with a system as incredibly complex as D&D. It just isn't possible. So, we get errata and periodic rules updates. Which, in my mind, is perfectly fair and understandable.

Well, I don't expect perfection, and said as much: WotC simply didn't do enough playtesting to even identify things like "Spells of 4th+ are stupidly OP" or "Monks look awesome on paper but actually suck a lot to play". Relatively minor issues, like in 4e where there was a Ranger power that, if you stacked enough crit-boosters, could become functionally infinite damage; that's a small thing that can be fixed in errata and most folks won't care that much.

But the hatred of errata really did hobble WotC when it came to 5e. Remember when they were playtesting Storm Sorcerer stuff, and people (quite validly) complained that this would devalue the existing Sorcerer subclasses, because Storm was going to get bonus spells that (say) Dragon and Chaos didn't have? The obvious solution there was to errata past Sorcerers to match. It wouldn't be a huge change, something that could've been integrated into new printings of the PHB with relatively little fuss.

What did WotC do instead? They basically straight-up said "ah, we hear you loud and clear, we'll take those unfair bonus spells away from Storm and everything will be fine!!!" The player hatred of errata prevented them from fixing issues with Sorcerer, Ranger, and others. That was one (of several) reasons why 5.5e had to happen; the 50th anniversary was simply a convenient time alignment.