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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7665142" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's not. But what counts as an instance of breaking from tradition is hotly contested.In their time the impressionists were hugely controversial. Now they're the stuff of chocolate boxes and wall calendars. Perceptions of their relationship to the tradition of European visual arts obviously have changed.One complicating factor - not the only one - is that those who participate in a tradition are not always best-placed to see what is essential to it, and what counts as holding to it or breaking with it. For instance, Edmund Burke thought that popular representative democracy would be a break from the traditions of English parliamentary government; most people now would think that it is in fact a part of that tradition, and forget how relatively late in British history were the Reform Acts, the "people's budget" of 1911, the enfranchisement of women.Marx said that, just as if you want to know what a person is really like, it's no good just to ask that person for his/her opinion of him-/herself, likewise for a historical period: you can't learn what a society is like just by reading its own self-descriptions. The same might be said for traditions.Only bad history, or apology masquerading as history. Naturally any historian is circumscribed by limitations - of location (in time and place), of translation (depending on the place and period being studied), or failures of anthropological imagination. But good history tries its best to recognise and correct for such limitations, and to come to the past on its own terms.Part of that involves understanding practices and beliefs for what they actually were, rather than projecting onto them a teleology that makes things as they turned out to be the true (if concealed) driver of all those earlier choices and decisions.Without the numbers there is no point.For instance, how far is Gygax's AD&D from OD&D? If by OD&D you mean "OD&D with all the supplements" then the answer is - not very far at all.How far is 2nd ed AD&D from Gygax's AD&D? If you look at the PC build mechanics and the basic action resolution mechanics, they're pretty close. If you look at the instructional text, the XP system  and the GM-side mechanics, they're light-years apart. Read (or re-read) Gygax's instructions, in the closing pages of his PHB prior to the Appendices, on how players should prepare for a session. And then read the corresponding text in his DMG about how a GM should be attempting to cultivate and reward "skilled play". Those ideas and that advice appear nowhere in the 2nd ed AD&D rulebooks, and anyone who started playing from those books would receive not a hint that this is the sort of game that those mechanics were invented to play.Here is just the simplest of examples to make the point: Gygax's AD&D takes it for granted that players will want high ability scores for their PCs, and will use Wishes to obtain them, and explains how to handle this; whereas the 2nd ed PHB, on p 18, tells prospective players that "if you take an interest in the character and role-play him well, then even a character with the lowest possible scores can present a fun, challenging, and all-around exciting time." You could hardly find an expression of the ideals of roleplaying further from that which infuses Gygax's rulebooks.What is going on with the OSR? A fairly wide range of things, is my sense of it. But one of those things is people forming the view that AD&D 2nd ed is a break with tradition. A rejection of the sort of play that it promoted (which did not come from nowhere - it was emerging at least by the early-to-mid-80s in published modules and the pages of Dragon Magazine, and as a non-official playstyle may have gone back to before games like RQ and Traveller, which can be seen as potentially promoting it in their own way). A return to Gygaxian, "skilled", play, based especially around dungeoneering.Whose numbers are right? Yours, which puts Gygax's AD&D at 3 and 2nd ed at 4? Or these OSR-ers, which puts the gap between those systems at some arbitrarily large multiple of the gap between Gygax's AD&D and OD&D?These are competing views of the tradition.You are, in effect, asking me whether I - as a fan of 4e - agree that 4e breaks with the tradition of D&D to an unprecedented extent relative to earlier variants of the game. As I have said in other threads, I don't agree with that. I think it does some things that are new for D&D, and I mentioned some of them upthread: the downplaying of exploration of a GM's pre-built world, and the corresponding emphasis on a particular style of player-driven play (the "indie-fication" of D&D) are the most obvious ones.But there are many features of 4e that I believe draw upon and reinforce elements of the D&D tradition:* To start with a small point, 4e's use of "squares" harks back to, and serves the same function as, "inches" in Gygax's AD&D, namely, expressing tactical distances in scale terms for resolution purposes (but with an acknowledgement that most contemporary players will be using grids rather than sand tables and tape measures), with a simple translation to "real" distances provided; * More substantively, the healing system, including the presence of inspirational healing, draws upon and reinforces Gygax's conception of hit points and saving throws, as stated in his AD&D rulebooks; * 4e's generalisation of "looseness of fit" between mechanics and fiction also draws upon this traditional conception of hit points and saving throws, as well as the narrative fluidity that Gygax explains in his essay (in his DMG) on the 1 minute combat round; * Building on the above point, 4e integrates the "granularity of focus" that was novel to 3E (6 second combat rounds, precise positioning in melee, manoeuvres, sophisticated action economy, etc) with the fictional "looseness" of Gygaxian melee, thereby reconciling two superficially conflicting strands in the D&D tradition; * 4e performs another act of integration also: in AD&D melee is "sticky" by default, and wizards who get sucked into that vortex will probably die while fighters rule the roost; in 3E melee is non-sticky by default (due to the movement component of the action economy in combination with very generous 5' step rules); 4e builds on the basic mechanical framework of 3E, but by changing the 5' step rules plus giving fighters a whole lot of abilities to make them sticky (powerful OAs, marking and mark punishment, forced movement of enemies, slowing and immobilising enemies, etc) it re-establishes a dynamic for melee in which fighters are at the centre of a vortex that they control, and that can suck others in but from which those others can't escape - hence melee in 4e is, in its overall story tone and tropes, much closer to my memory of the classic D&D tradition than is 3E; * As I've explained upthread in my last post to [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION], I think that 4e does an incredible job of making the traditional D&D story structure (start with kobolds, finish with Orcus) a part of the game, with the PCs integrated into that story both mechanically and fictionally at every stage; * And I could give other examples, too, of where I think 4e preserves or reinforces D&D tradition, but I think you get the gist.There are things, in my view, that 4e does not do particularly well. I don't think it is an especially good system, for instance, for engaging with the inner lives of the PCs. It is about drama expressed and encountered outwardly (in the fantasy world) rather than inwardly. But this is another respect in which 4e cleaves to the D&D tradition rather than departs from it. (5e's Inspiration rules may be the biggest departure from this tradition that we've yet seen.)Of course I remember this. Not being an expert on 3E, I tend to leave such discussions to others. I do note that these issues of difference are (not surprisingly) contested. I also note that 3E is not the be-all and end-all of the D&D tradition.Who are you speaking for, here? I mean, besides yourself and your own experiences?I can tell you, that the feeling I get when I play 4e is like the feeling I used to get GMing Oriental Adventures back in the mid-to-late-80s, only the rules are better suited for what I'm trying to do - partially on their own terms, and partially because of the connections they establish between PCs and the shared fiction.I can tell you that, when I read Worlds & Monsters, my feeling was that these designers had finally identified the heart of D&D, and were describing a world set-up and story structure ("points of light" against a mythic backdrop) that would make it work.You are inviting me to substitute your experiences and conception of the tradition for my own. With respect, I decline.</blockquote>

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