D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[Paul Farquhar]

Right, because it is literally impossible to present such evidence. So you can probably stop asking for it.

You said yourself, groups were siloed. That makes it pretty much impossible that there was any uniformity in play style. In effect there were as many different playstyles as there were groups of players.

 

[Distracted DM]

You said yourself, groups were siloed. That makes it pretty much impossible that there was any uniformity in play style. In effect there were as many different playstyles as there were groups of players.

In fact, thanks to The Elusive Shift (which was incredibly well-researched), we know that there wasn't uniformity in playstyle.

edit: oh hey, Snarf did a review of The Elusive Shift.

But if I had to put it in the most simple terms- this book looks at the shift from war-games to roleplaying games, and whether that shift is decisive (albeit elusive) or doesn't exist (and illusive ... ahem). More importantly, it looks at the history of the communities that grew up around the early RPGs, and how these communities engaged in conversations about what RPGs were... and by conversations, I mean .... debates. Finally, we see that these debates continue to echo over and over again- I would say that looking at enworld, a good number of the conversations we are currently having about D&D and RPGs in general would not look out of place in Alarums & Excursions in the 1970s.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which can be made to work, as Chaosium has done. Their BRP system has fewer fiddly bits, though, so fewer points of friction.

A number of versions of it have some really hard breakpoints, though, and that can create problems of certain sorts.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I have yet to see any evidence, beyond some personal anecdotes, that there is a "big difference" in people's ability to recognise or reject unfun games today vs the bad old days. I reject the premise that GMs inflicting random, arbitrary death on PCs to exert dominance was ever taken generally as a given or the expected style of play.

I think you're confusing "inflicting random, arbitrary death to exert dominance" with "Were excessively hard and rigid in a way that could lead to pointless death because that's what they thought was the way they thought it should be." Some people might have used the latter to justify throwing their weight around too, but the problem reached well beyond those people, and that's what I'm talking about, and I do, indeed, think that was at one time considered the "expected style of play" at least in the OD&D sphere.

As teenagers, we were aware of such concepts, but were easily able to recognise the problems with such play. I don't think we were a bunch of prodigies, mature beyond our years, this is pretty basic stuff.

That you weren't prodigies didn't mean you weren't, to some degree, outliers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Proof of any playstyle pre-internet is impossible to assemble. Everyone was siloed at their own tables, even more than they are today. Two groups playing the same game miles apart could have had wildly different styles.

While to some degree this is true, if you did things like play at game clubs, conventions and other widely spaced groups, and communicated with other widely spaced groups, you could get a pretty good sense of the temperature of such things, even if "proof" is essentially impossible. I did all those things, so I'm pretty confident the things I'm talking about were widely spread.

No one really knows what was widespread, only what was claimed in published materials, especially widely circulated materials. Letters to Dragon are probably more indicative than a mimeographed zine circulated at a regional game convention, but even then, it's a data point, not proof.

While there were limited participants, things like Alarums and Excursions had participants scattered pretty widely across the country, including among clusters with pretty different game cultures. When you see some of the same things showing up in the MIT centered cluster, around Lake Geneva, around New York State, Texas and the West Coast SF fandom related groups, I'm going to need a good argument why you shouldn't draw a trend line. That isn't the same thing as "proof" of course.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't believe I've made any demands for proof -- I have simply stated that there is no proof and that, lacking it, I reject these particular claims about what was normal across the hobby. I don't want proof so much as I want people to stop making these types of claims.

Since I come by my opinion honestly, and with as much sampling as I think was possible at the time, I'd suggest your wants here are going to be unsatisfied at least regarding me.

 

[TiQuinn]

I want to believe you. I'm sure the silent majority of players are completely normal people having completely normal fun. But I'm of the opinion that a lot of the advice that floated though the community for a while was not made by or for those normal people. They were made by people who either had good intention but bad advice or were invested in the antagonism of early gaming to the point of poisoning the well. And I feel a lot of the so called advice DMs are given still come from that well.

In the enlightened year of 2025 on this very board you see people talking about players as if they are the enemy. They will stomp on your campaign with weird PC species and 10 page backstories. They will min/max the fun out of your game if you let them. The DM must treat them as if they are unruly children; a with firm limits and strict punishment for misbehaving. Even today, the discussion of the Games relationship with this players is discussed more like a parent and children rather than a facilitator amongst peers. That is an attitude that starts with Gygax and ran a game for his children and so naturally didn't see co-equality among the players.

But thankfully that attitude is changing. CR has mostly moved the role of DM as All Father towards party host. Much better voices are getting the amplifier they need. Antagonist DMs are not looked on as "the way it is".

Maybe more normal people will have overall better games now.

I just want to echo your sentiments here. I know that the groups that I’ve played with in the past 10 years were very different from some of the groups I played with back in the 80s and 90s. Not to say that it was all bad back then, and myself and my friends were in our teens back then, so naturally we’d flub things terribly, but I also encountered several DMs at stores and conventions that hewed the antagonistic DM mantra. What you just described was very recognizable to me - it permeated a lot of game tables, and it permeated a lot of TTRPG discourse. I’m glad that it’s largely changed today for the most part.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You said yourself, groups were siloed. That makes it pretty much impossible that there was any uniformity in play style. In effect there were as many different playstyles as there were groups of players.

"Groups" is doing some heavy lifting here, however. At least in some areas "groups" could include hundreds of people who's groups overlapped, and had influence on and from other groups they interacted with with some frequency. I could have pointed out a number of trends in a number of West Coast gaming groups and clubs, or those associated with other groups like LASFAFS who had developed a lot of overlapping tendencies (that in some cases were quite different from groups from other parts of the country) because of interactions.

This wasn't universal of course, but it means something pretty different than groups that only played with, say, a couple of individual groups and whatever they read in the Strategic Review.

(This could be particularly common with groups centered around colleges; the gaming group associated with CalState Fullerton probably had at least a hundred or so people in a dozen semi-separate groups, and it wasn't a particularly large college).

 

[haakon1]

What I reject is any claim that expects me to take it as a given that this was a thing that was normal and expected across the majority of the hobby in the past, and that it is only relatively recently that people have been able to understand it comes with problems and reject it.

I think there’s “presentism” there - one way to prove the present game is better is to diss the un-enlightened past, including straw man versions of the past.

As for “proof” of the existence or prevalence of pointy-hatted DM’s, IIRC, “The Elfish Gene”, a British gamers memoir, talks about something like it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think there’s “presentism” there - one way to prove the present game is better is to diss the un-enlightened past, including straw man versions of the past.

So, everyone who says this happened to them is lying, to help bolster the reputation of a multinational corporation?

Maybe we can just leave it at everyone had their own experiences, which don't necessarily represent anyone else's, and there's no obvious way to determine the larger truth of the matter.