A Possible Way Forward for D&D (And a design pitch for WotC!)

[Balesir]

Well, it is all experience and opinon. In my opionin, it has not lost much of its meaning. There was never single way to play D&D (except when Gary was trying to build the RPGA or define for tournament). There was also never a real consensus as to what D&D is

In terms of mechanics, house rules were just as much a part as the rulebooks among the people I know or met. Hell, the designers, themselves, never seemed to play by the book or were always ignoring rules or making changes for their homebrew campaigns.

I agree. In the beginning, D&D was just selling an idea, in essence. There were some pretty cludgy rules wrapped around it, but basically what you got was a concept - a marvellous concept that gave you wings to fly with it.

Trouble is, I now have that concept. I've had access to it for so long, I pretty much have it pat, with a selection of ideas and concepts to sit around it and describe how it can work and what it can do. Selling me the concept again won't really fly.

Given the above, I disagree that a long list of house rules meant that they did not want to play D&D and were, necessarily, playing a different game. Outside of tournament play or organized play, the game was about making it your own and house rules were/are the way to do it. Much of what D&D is/was was determined by whom you played with. Of course, this is just my experience and those of yourself and others may differ.

Well, early D&D wasn't so much a game as it was a toolkit that you could build a game with. The term "D&D" has come to mean that vague, collection-of-ideas-around-fantasy-with-levels kind of a deal. As it stands, you could do almost anything with the basic D&D tropes and folks would still describe you as playing "D&D".

That doesn't mean you're all playing the same game, though. The result has been a lot of separate games - some of which almost work really well. Some people have dreamed of combining all the 'potential games' together and making "the ultimate game" that pleases everybody. But it's never going to happen - not because of any failing in the designers of games, but because different people actually want fundamentally different games. Set out to design three, or maybe four, different games that perfectly suit all roleplaying objectives, and you might have a winner.

That said, if one uses these seven things as the foundation for a new edition what more do you really need? And keeping it this basic and simple allows the game to handle all different types of play - hardcore dungeon crawl, sandbox exploration, thespian night, etc., etc. The only real issue is how to handle combat, and that's something each edition has tried and sort-of failed; flexibility to handle any group is what we're after. I'd say a simplified version of 1e is probably the most flexible as a base; then just give provision for DMs to add in minis rules, slide-shift effects, turn-based vs. free-form action resolution, and so forth.

A system that can "handle" each of those you might be able to squeeze. A system to be really good at them all will never happen, because the players' focus and aim in each case is different.

I have become convinced that the best idea is actually to have different systems for each. Decide which focus you want for this game, then pick a system to fit. I have been doing this (or trying to) for around 6 years, and it's working out well, so far.

A secondary issue is how important to make character build in the mechanical sense - my own preference would be to make it as basic as possible, with character development coming through roleplay rather than mechanics; but I know there's many who disagree with me on this. That said, if character building in any new edition is complex enough to support a char-ops system, I'm out.

Which means the system that suits you will destroy others' fun. That's not a criticism of the way you like to play, or of the way they like to play - it's just a fact. The answer is to have two systems; it's really, really simple. Having a festering pile of "options" from which you can build either system is just a lazy cop-out, given that the years of trial-and-error and RPG development thus far have already given me a library full of just that. The suppliers of RPG systems have got to, sometime, wake up to the fact that one system will not please everybody. Ever. If they really study and understand their market, though, three RPG systems just might.