D&D General I’m Trying to Love D&D Again—and I’ve Got Some Complaints. Young Grognard posting.

[Dire Bare]

Wow. We must not go to the same conventions because some degree of character introduction is very common in the convention games I go to - both organized play and with pre-gens.

Yeah . . . I don't go to a lot of cons, but I do go to cons . . .

 

[GrimCo]

Pronouns are not a distinctly USA thing.

You are right. They are anglophone thing. It's just about how other languages work. In romance and slavic languages, names themselves are gendered nouns, there are very few unisex names, so name dictates pronoun. Gender of the name defines rest of the sentence , if you have male name, grammar requires rest of the sentence to be in masculine form, same for female name making rest of the sentence in feminine form. You can't combine name of one gender with rest of the sentence in other, it's just wrong and sounds wrong. Using neuter form after name is considered both grammatically wrong and offensive since that form is not used for people, same for using neuter pronouns. And then, there are languages which have just one pronoun for all, like turkish or hungarian.

Because of how my language (slavic) is hard coded on morphological and grammatical level with gender, most non binary people i know just use gender of the name they have and trans people use name of their preferred gender.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

It sounds like you're not making a distinction between established groups and con games, the latter being the context that was put forward. Having run my fair share of games at conventions, people don't take breaks or engage in post-game wrap-ups; usually they arrive at the last minute, are eager to get going, and then have to duck out to make the next item on their schedule.

Not my experience at all. Last convention I went to (last weekend) the Pathfinder tables all introduced themselves as we were setting up and we'd regularly use player names for queries like "Hey Pat, do you have a cleric you can bring along" or "They're over at the dealer table" or any number of similar interactions.

I've played/run 100+ convention games and I think I'd be a bit weirded out if a table turned up, did not make any small talk and just pulled out characters and did not respond to a "Hello, I'm Graham, how's your day going". In my experience, the most involved players are quite chatty.

 

[Alzrius]

Wow. We must not go to the same conventions because some degree of character introduction is very common in the convention games I go to - both organized play and with pre-gens.

Having been doing this for over thirty years, your experience sounds extremely unusual, both for myself and for other people who play/run games that I keep in contact with (and I keep in contact with quite a few). "Character introduction" (outside of outlining the initial scenario when play starts) tends to be along the lines of who can fill a role as it becomes necessary, e.g. "I'll get the door; I've got lockpicks."

Not my experience at all. Last convention I went to (last weekend) the Pathfinder tables all introduced themselves as we were setting up and we'd regularly use player names for queries like "Hey Pat, do you have a cleric you can bring along" or "They're over at the dealer table" or any number of similar interactions.

In my experience, "setting up" doesn't involve the people actually playing the games, just the GMs running them. Most players are con-goers who tend to have packed schedules, and who are usually dealing with things like trying to squeeze in getting food, coordinating with friends and family, and various emergencies going on. They're much more interested in maximizing their game time, especially given that they knew going in that there were only so many hours given over to a scheduled game.

I've played/run 100+ convention games and I think I'd be a bit weirded out if a table turned up, did not make any small talk and just pulled out characters and did not respond to a "Hello, I'm Graham, how's your day going". In my experience, the most involved players are quite chatty.

"Small talk" is something that, in my experience, people who play games at conventions know tends to eat up a lot of time. Which isn't to say that they don't talk about things, but it's usually about the scenario that they're playing as they're playing it. Someone might make a joke or a meme reference, but the idea that you have a bunch of people sitting around the game table talking about their daily lives, current events, their favorite movies, music, or whatever else instead of playing is just...bizarre to think about.

Having done this for decades, I honestly can't remember the last time people showed up at one of my games and then decided to talk about stuff other than gaming the way you're describing.

 

[Lanefan]

In the UK the growing popularity of Warhammer in the 80s took away a lot of the battlegamers, leaving D&D dominated by storytellers.

Huh. I never knew this, and it helps explain why UK-written adventure modules from the time tend to be more story-focused (which can be a nuisance if the module's story doesn't agree with what's already in place in one's campaign).

Dunno, when I stated playing D&D was just one amongst many RPGs (I played a lot of Traveller, and a Games Workshop superhero RPG called Golden Heroes), and TSR was just one small business amongst many producing content for D&D.

Here (Canada) there wasn't much other than TSR and Judges' Guild; and JG kinda faded away as the 80s went on.

Other people have already mentioned this, but the people I play with are all from my friendship circle, just as they were back in the 80s. In modern parlance, we are all from the same "bubble". We have similar tastes, similar politics etc. I play D&D with my friends, and would never consider playing with random strangers. If I wouldn't choose to socialise with a person I don't want to play D&D with them.

Pretty much agree with this. I'll run for (or play with) someone who's a stranger to me provided that person is known to someone else in the crew who can vouch for them, and I've had decent success with this.

 

[Lanefan]

EDIT: To add, if by your estimation 1e and 4e focused on the G element, then 2e and 3e did not or to a lesser degree. Why did that change happen? Try explain the reason for the gradual decrease from G to g as you see it.

From 1e to 2e the difference was the rise of the story-telling campaign, where the "game" aspect was pushed back a bit in favour of the "roleplay" aspect. The Dragonlance module series was an outlier when it first came out in the mid 80s but by the end of the decade it had largely become the model for how to run campaigns, and 2e design reflected this in various ways.

3e to PF followed a similar track IMO. 3e at the start was very much about the "game" side - a deliberate, if hamfisted, attempt to recapture that 1e vibe where player skill (and in 3e's case, system mastery) were vital to success - and yet 8 years later Pathfinder made its living on long adventure-path campaigns that told stories first and used the game mostly to that end.

4e, for whatever reason, seemed to want to take player skill and system mastery out of the equation, which while leading to a more balanced game also led to a much less interesting game for those for whom player skill and-or system mastery mattered as an element of their play - i.e. the great majority of the players they were trying to bring forward from 3e.

5e seems to be the waffle edition: it can't make up its mind just what it wants to do or which direction it wants to go, which means it does everything a little bit well and a little bit badly at the same time.

 

[Lanefan]

In every convention game that I've ever run or been a part of, there's no expectation that the players are going to go around and introduce their characters, let alone themselves. That's because their characters are virtually always pregens, and quite often time is at a premium; expecting people to familiarize themselves with a character's backstory, to the point of introducing themselves, is very much atypical. No one expects those games to function as a meet-and-greet.

A quick whip-round where players tell the table their character's name, species, and class doesn't (or bloody well shouldn't!) take more than a couple of minutes total; and ideally everyone is taking notes of at least the other character names in the party. We don't need any backstory.

EDIT to add: at a con game, the only real-world name I probably need to know as a player is that of the DM. But even there, if the DM doesn't give a name then simply "DM" will do.

 

[soviet]

4e, for whatever reason, seemed to want to take player skill and system mastery out of the equation

Wait what?

4e was very rewarding of skillful play, and punishing of bad play. I would say more so than in 3e (where the mastery was in chargen).

I have never before felt that Gamist thrill of 'each decision matters' so strongly in an RPG. Some of our combats reminded me of tournament Magic: the Gathering.

 

[Mannahnin]

Wait what?

4e was very rewarding of skillful play, and punishing of bad play. I would say more so than in 3e (where the mastery was in chargen).

I have never before felt that Gamist thrill of 'each decision matters' so strongly in an RPG.

In Forge speak 4E is often referred to as more unashamedly Gamist in its design. It embraced the G hard. It did aim to reduce the importance and insane variance in power of 3E-era Character Optimization. It did aim to reduce the prevalence of "trap options", though wasn't entirely successful in that.

 

[BrokenTwin]

I would agree that 4E (compared to 3.x) had a greatly reduced emphasis on system mastery, in the sense that it was much harder to create a character that was completely broken (in either sense). For some players that's a positive, for others that's a negative. For me, it depends on what kind of game I'm looking to play at the moment.
In terms of tactical skill, 4E's use of (frequently moving) zones, forced movement and ongoing effects made the tactical floor and ceiling much higher.