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

SableWyvern said:

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.

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Again, even if that is someone’s lived experience? Like, that’s just not gonna happen.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

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

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Power scaling isn’t broken either.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

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.

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I don't think it's done to ''bolster wotc's reputation ". A lot of the claims about that style happened at least sometimes>so that style was common to the point of being normal and thirsty just accepted seems to be done while pushing for wotc to continue designing so heavily against it that gameplay problems some consider desirable wind up being baked into the system

SableWyvern said:

Essentially, I agree that we don't and can't know, which is why I push back against people who claim that their personal experience is truth that is indicative of what was standard and widespread across the entire hobby. Even your letters to Dragon represent a tiny subset of the hobby, and were most likely selected at least in part because it was expected they would generate more discussion.


Because I didn't experience it. Because no one has presented any real evidence that it was the case. Because, as I mentioned, it seemed self-evident to us as teenagers that it wasn't a great way to play and I am assuming that if we could see this, many other people could as well.

I'm definitely not saying it didn't happen -- I'm sure it did, and I'm sure it still does. 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.

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Are you familiar with the section of the (IIRC) 1e DMG where it specifically instructs the GM to behave in a passive-aggressive manner to browbeat players into choosing the correct racial options (meaning, humans, or "demi-humans" on sufferance, e.g. elf/dwarf/halfling with level limits)?

Because if you aren't, here it is. I have included the full page (page 21 of the AD&D 1e DMG).

If you would like searchable/selectable text, you can read it here on this webpage, which should be identical in content. (If it is not, I apologize for linking a crappy source.) I got the snip of this page because I wanted there to be no doubt that it is what the text actually said. And boy, what a doozy it is! "The less intelligent players who demand to play monster characters regardless of obvious consequences will soon remove themselves from play in any event, for their own ineptness will serve to have players or monsters or traps finish them off."

For additional information, consider the following, which comes from page 110 of the same text:

The text here openly and explicitly calls for behavior that is, at the very least, passive-aggressive and mean-spirited. It advises that you control players, not by having an adult conversation with them, but by playing favorites, dropping random punishments out of nowhere, and punishing the entire group solely to get at one player, while explicitly calling out that you are doing it because of that one player.

Given this context? Even if it wasn't universal, AD&D openly supported passive-aggressive GMing. It explicitly instructed GMs to do things like "points of damage from 'blue bolts from the heavens' striking the offender's head" or "the permanent loss of a point of charisma (appropriately) from the character belonging to the offender." The attitude presented is quite clearly one of absolute self-assurance, that anyone who thinks anything other than the author's thoughts is an idiot ("The less intelligent players"), a jerk ("This is done principally because the player sees the desired monster character as superior to his or her peers"), or merely going through a phase which they'll wise up from ("The truly experimental-type player might be allowed to play such a monster character for a time so as to satisfy curiosity, and then it can be moved to non-player status").

So--no. It wasn't universal. I'm sure there were plenty of people who complained about it and saw it as distasteful, inappropriate, or unacceptable. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to realize that passive-aggressive GMing, encouraging antagonism between players to coerce them to your views, and enacting petty vengeance against players who dared step out of line, are all bad GMing techniques. But those are techniques the books themselves told people to use. Is that not evidence enough that such techniques would, in fact, be used?

EzekielRaiden said:

But those are techniques the books themselves told people to use. Is that not evidence enough that such techniques would, in fact, be used?

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no one thinks they were not used at all, the question is how widespread they were. I started playing with 1e and I never took to that advice, if anything it made Gary look like a jerk as far as I was concerned. Still do not have a high opinion of him as a person

mamba said:

no one thinks they were not used at all, the question is how widespread they were. I started playing with 1e and I never took to that advice, if anything it made Gary look like a jerk as far as I was concerned. Still do not have a high opinion of him as a person

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And yet Gary is taken as The Word when it comes to how D&D should be played. The OSR started as "D&D as Gary intended". We had a whole blow up last summer about a book suggesting he was a little bit sexist and how what tarnished the legacy of Gygax. So I am not surprised that his flawed ideas on how to handle player interaction remains a strong but not majority viewpoint. Hell, that page about monsters as PCs @EzekielRaiden posted could be an Enworld discussion today if you replace monsters with "weird races". Which is ironic since he did mention baby Balors as a PC option once.

Folks bragging about being a killer DM (whether they actually were or not) felt a lot more common throughout my gaming experience of the 80s and 90s than post 2000.

mamba said:

no one thinks they were not used at all, the question is how widespread they were. I started playing with 1e and I never took to that advice, if anything it made Gary look like a jerk as far as I was concerned. Still do not have a high opinion of him as a person

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Sure, that's perfectly reasonable. It's not exactly my interpretation, but I'm not crazy far from that either.

But my point was that the books themselves advocated it--quite hard, in multiple places. At least two that I know of, possibly more.

I would expect that things the books tell people to do, do in fact get done a lot. Absolutely not ALL the time--but by that same token, I would expect it to be fairly common because...I mean it's what the book literally tells you to do! There's no way it was the most common experience--if it were I don't think D&D would have survived!--but it doesn't have to be the majority to still be a horrendously toxic issue. Put it at say, a fifth, a quarter, perhaps a third at absolute most. That'd still be an ENORMOUS chunk of the player base getting the nasty end of the Viking Hat.

Or, to use a video game that has dealt with similar issues: Per Riot Games' own statistics, less than ten percent of all League of Legends players ever get a single infraction, and more than half of those (IIRC a supermajority? it's been a hot minute) never get a second infraction. Despite this fact, League of Legends had (and sorta still has) a reputation for an absolutely rancid community, overwhelmingly toxic and hostile, to the point that it was legitimately hurting the game's ability to grow. Remember, that's a community where they were actively trying to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior as effectively as they could.

When the books advocate crappy behavior, yes, I'm going to expect that at least a meaningful slice of the people being told to do that will, in fact, actually do that. I've seen exactly that attitude here on ENWorld from one particular poster. This was long ago and got infracted as warranted, so I won't name names; time served and all that. I simply mention it because it shows that some folks really did buy in wholesale on Gygax's words here.

mamba said:

no one thinks they were not used at all, the question is how widespread they were. I started playing with 1e and I never took to that advice, if anything it made Gary look like a jerk as far as I was concerned. Still do not have a high opinion of him as a person

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The folks harping about books covering that kinda tomb of horrors stuff as if that were the entirety of the game in the past are awfully silent about all of the core book pages devoted to topics we would class under terms like sandbox living world character development and so on too

Remathilis said:

And yet Gary is taken as The Word when it comes to how D&D should be played. The OSR started as "D&D as Gary intended".

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is it? to me it is about being less powerful characters, less hard rules and more actual descriptions of what you do vs rolling against a DC, not about the DM being adversarial

Remathilis said:

We had a whole blow up last summer about a book suggesting he was a little bit sexist and how what tarnished the legacy of Gygax.

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yeah, some grognards were upset, by and large that was a tempest in a teapot however. Basically no one noticed and many of the few that did, did not care (see e.g. this forum for that)