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

jdrakeh said:

Your definition of "adversarial" is extremely narrow. From the Oxford Dictionary:

Adversarial: Involving or characterized by conflict or opposition.

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An Adversarial game of D&D is a very specific thing, and if everyone is on board with it it’s a perfectly fine way to play.

A storytelling game is also a specific thing, which if everyone is on board with it is a perfectly fine way to play.

Paul Farquhar said:

An Adversarial game of D&D is a very specific thing, and if everyone is on board with it it’s a perfectly fine way to play.

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Are you sure you're not RPG Pundit, because you're posting like RPG Pundit.

Did I call it or what???

MichaelSomething said:

Did I call it or what???

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Or what

Paul Farquhar said:

There were people giving that advice, at least by the early 1980s.

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Can you name any of them, or tell us where the average gamer was supposed to find that advice?

The 1980s, pre-internet, was not exactly a golden age for information discovery. If someone gave that information in a mimeographed fanzine, it got seen by like, three people.

Umbran said:

Can you name any of them, or tell us where the average gamer was supposed to find that advice?

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Memory isn’t that good, but there was stuff in White Dwarf, along with non-D&D RPGs, such as Traveller (and Travellers’ Journal). Bunch of other RPGs with suggestions about how to run the game I read at the time as well (Ghostbusters FTW!) The RPG community wasn’t all about D&D back then.

Paul Farquhar said:

Again, that is not what an adversarial game is. The DM tries to kill the PCs. They don't care about plot or NPCs. See The Temple of Elemental Evil. It's just a big dungeon full of evil things to kill and treasure to loot. It doesn't have much of a plot to speak of.

That's just a GM who wants to run a storytelling game with the wrong group of players.

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I think you are trying to redefine what is being discussed.

Adversarial is not a play style. You are describing old school dungeon hack where the DM is taking on the primary role of challenging the players, but within the boundaries of fairness. The DM gives the players no favor, but isn't trying to win either. He is creating difficult challenges and letting the chips fall where they may.

@jdrakeh is describing a DM who is trying to show superiority over his players. There is no neutral rules arbiter element to his play, he is looking to use the rules and his role as authority as tools to "beating" the other players. And a lot of old RPGs used language that could be considered as supporting this style of play even if they didn't mean it. Stuff like a DM having to watch the power level of players to keep game balance gets bent into "ban anything that gives a player an edge".

And unfortunately, the community is built on decades of toxic people using GM as final arbiter to justify their toxicity.

Umbran said:

Can you name any of them, or tell us where the average gamer was supposed to find that advice?

The 1980s, pre-internet, was not exactly a golden age for information discovery. If someone gave that information in a mimeographed fanzine, it got seen by like, three people.

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Is this 1980 Tracy Hickman module close enough?


I'm not exactly digging for a word for word comparison but those 4 points in paragraph 4 look very much like the Hickman Manifesto that kicked everything off wrt that kind story development in d&d under the Hickman Revolution.

tetrasodium said:

Is this 1980 Tracy Hickman module close enough?

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In that I have never heard of "Nightventure", and probably few here have.
And the very first line calls it an "off-the-path approach" to RPGs.

I think it makes my point for me, yes. Thank you.

Umbran said:

In that I have never heard of "Nightventure", and probably few here have.
And the very first line calls it an "off-the-path approach" to RPGs.

I think it makes my point for me, yes. Thank you.

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Posting from my phone and the link didn't go through on the "this" as intended. You might be more familiar with the obscure module it evolved into a couple years later in 83 after he was hired by tsr to bring those ideas into d&d itself. I'll toss on a couple Christmas commute friendly videos on it to boot