D&D General Back to First Principles

[JiffyPopTart]

I do think this metaphor misses the mark. The only thing old cars have over new cars is that they're theoretically easier to repair yourself. In every other regard- speed, performance, safety, comfort, (etc.) newer cars are really just better.

I think some old games are bad designs, but some are good designs that simply do different things than newer games. I get good but different play experiences from 5E or B/X, for example. Both are excellent games with different virtues.

From a game design perspective it is a big improvement to standardize your system so that you always roll a D20 and higher is always better.

So big a difference that I maintain 5e is a simpler game than BECMI.

 

[Jack Daniel]

RPGs, like cars, have advanced and become more polished

Nah. RPGs don't advance cumulatively: they aren't a technology, and you'd be hard-pressed to liken their design to a science. Their changes over time are more like fashion trends—evolution, but not necessarily advancement.

 

[DND_Reborn]

From a game design perspective it is a big improvement to standardize your system so that you always roll a D20 and higher is always better.

So big a difference that I maintain 5e is a simpler game than BECMI.

I agree the mechanic is much simpler, but when you consider all the character options, it a way it is much more complex. The focus is much more on character features/options than on the adventure IME. shrug

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I agree the mechanic is much simpler, but when you consider all the character options, it a way it is much more complex. The focus is much more on character features/options than on the adventure IME. shrug

I don't feel 5e character options are any more complex than Basic wizard/clerics learning all their spells. It's just that Basic has non spellcasters with little to zero options which are much much easier (some would say boring) than the 5e/spellcasters are.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Nah. RPGs don't advance cumulatively: they aren't a technology, and you'd be hard-pressed to liken their design to a science. Their changes over time are more like fashion trends—evolution, but not necessarily advancement.

This might be a semantics issue, but I think modern game design has lots of what I would call advancements over 80s design.

One obvious one is the realization that looking things up on tables isn't ideal. THAC0 came along.

Another is the idea that bigger is always better. It's a clearer game design when a low=fail and high=success

Similarly using predefined conditions, damage types, and keywords in a game all create a better system of rules.

This is from a technical writing point of view. It is entirely possible to have a poorly designed game that adhered to all of these principles, but they are improvents in how games are created.

 

[Mannahnin]

This might be a semantics issue, but I think modern game design has lots of what I would call advancements over 80s design.

One obvious one is the realization that looking things up on tables isn't ideal. THAC0 came along.

Another is the idea that bigger is always better. It's a clearer game design when a low=fail and high=success

Similarly using predefined conditions, damage types, and keywords in a game all create a better system of rules.

This is from a technical writing point of view. It is entirely possible to have a poorly designed game that adhered to all of these principles, but they are improvents in how games are created.

Predefined conditions, damage types and keywords have their virtues, but it's a bit of a continuum. The optimum number of such conditions kind of depends on your audience. While playing 3.x I liked that we had standard conditions for the first time which were easy to look up, but some of my fellow players lamented that there were too many to memorize. If you have to look them up frequently, you lose some of the benefits of standardization. Or, for another interesting example, take Grappling. 3.x had a very workable, clear, fiction-emulating system. Definitely the most mechanically robust and the one that "made the most sense" of any edition. Sadly, it was long and detailed enough that virtually no one had it memorized, and it would often prompt groans from other players when it was invoked. It also was subject to some nasty corner-case manipulation to make it arguably overpowered. Is that rule better or worse than, for example, the 5E grappling rules? I think that's mostly a matter of opinion.

Roll high = always good is, I would opine, a minor simplification. It's also an easy house rule to make to TSR-era D&D, and one I commonly use with B/X. Likewise THAC0 was a minor house rule for simplification.

Overall I agree that there are definitely some improved best practices in terms of how rules are presented to make them clearer, easier to understand, and to memorize or reference. Hence the popularity of OSE in presenting the rules of B/X in a clearer fashion.

 

[Oofta]

I do think this metaphor misses the mark. The only thing old cars have over new cars is that they're theoretically easier to repair yourself. In every other regard- speed, performance, safety, comfort, (etc.) newer cars are really just better.

I think some old games are bad designs, but some are good designs that simply do different things than newer games. I get good but different play experiences from 5E or B/X, for example. Both are excellent games with different virtues.

The car did what it needed to do. Got me from A to B. Had a lot of storage capacity for a car it's size. It was cheap to buy and maintain. For the target consumer it was a decent option.

Of course no analogy will ever be perfect. But I liked the car back in the day. A lot of things people say about it are misleading or simply untrue. Just like older editions of D&D.

But somehow a simple analogy has turned into me attacking older systems. I'm not. I do think current design is more consistent and polished, there were some weird fiddly bits in older editions we just ignored or cheered when they went away (see @Sabathius42's post).

But going back to the car analogy for people that know how to do it properly you can stop more quickly without ABS brakes. When I took a driving course where they disabled the ABS the instructors were quite impressed with how well I did. Better for many or even most people does not mean better for all people.

But again. My comment was not on dismissing people's preferences. If you like anchovies on your pizza go for it. I was just saying that to me the title of the thread is misleading: if you want to play an older version of the game because it's a better game for you, go for it. You don't have to justify it because there's nothing wrong with wanting to play an older version.

You don't need to make the title of a thread a suggestive question. I think you can achieve the same goals (slow advancement, simple rules, the changing game, war and domain management, and slim monster stat blocks and intelligent swords) without going back to an older edition. I think the OP should just have stated what they wanted to do. When people point out alternatives, don't complain about the alternatives given when what you really want to say is that you want to play version X.

 

[Mannahnin]

I really want to run a BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia campaign.

Sure, part of it is simple nostalgia (it's the edition I started with some 35 years ago) but it is also the desire to return to First Principles.

I was paging through my copy of the Rules Cyclopedia (Aaron Allston's second greatest rpg work after Strikeforce) and I was really grabbed by the core elements: slow advancement, simple rules, the changing game, war and domain management, and slim monster stat blocks. Plus intelligent swords.

I might quibble a bit with Slow Advancement. When my friends and I were first playing D&D & AD&D in the 80s and 90s we did pretty slow advancement, and it can be good, but can be taken a bit far. Once 2E came out most of us were pretty invested in the idea that Gold for XP was silly, but we had to replace it with ad-hoc story and quest awards, because gods know AD&D had far too little xp from monsters for advancement just by combat.

More recently when I've been playing OSE, OD&D and B/X online in OSR circles, we've been happy with XP for gold, and folks have usually supplemented it as well, with Carousing ala Jeff Rients, or higher monster XP like in the 1974 set. Or both! This has definitely resulted in a faster pace of advancement than I remember from my AD&D days.

You mention elsewhere in the thread that Allston suggests an average pace of one level every 5 adventures. For "adventures" are you reading that as "sessions" or "entire modules" or something in between? In the Five Torches Deep / B/X mashup game I've been running for the last year and a half, I've been aiming somewhere near Moldvay's suggestion of 3-4 adventures per level, reading that as "sessions". That average definitely slows down a bit past 4th or 5th level, but I think the original idea WAS that those first two or three levels would go by relatively quickly. That you wouldn't be struggling at first level for a couple of months of real time before gaining some durability for the fighters and clerics, and a few spells for the casters.

 

[Reynard]

One obvious one is the realization that looking things up on tables isn't ideal. THAC0 came along.

Tables are better in that they allow a lot more nuance in results because the hard part -- the complex math -- is done for you and all you have to do is provide an input and then you get an output. Of course the 2E THAC0 tables weren't complex because the math they did was trivial, but other tables, from thief abilities to saving throws to monster attack matrices, potentially embedded a lot of information into them. Other games of the era made great use of tables, too.

A simple system like 5E with a linear progression and few input variables is easy to handle in play and there is certainly a lot to be said for that, but I don't think reducing complexity necessarily qualifies as an objection or obvious "advancement" in the art form. it is good for a particular purpose but not for other purposes.

As an aside, I keep waiting to see the first real VTT game that allows the kind of deep math behind computer RPGs, but maintains the single click to get it done. I am sure there are folks out there that would really enjoy the kind of loot math that happens in video games at their VTT and I am surprised no one has tried to provide it yet. As the most recent generation start looking farther afield than 5E we might see it, or perhaps the resurgence of popularity of more complex systems in general.

 

[overgeeked]

I really don't understand why when a person says they want to play/run an older version of the game, other folks can't help themselves from trying to convince that person to play some modern game instead. And often people suggest DW, bafflingly.

Might be because you posted this:

In my perfect game, there wouldn't be any mechanical character advancement at all -- just set competence level and then get to exploring. And "advancement" would come from gear or simple PLAYER experience in the game world/adventure zone/megadungeon/whatever. But I recognize that is a very unpopular opinion.

Which happens to be exactly how the bolded game works...

• Index Card RPG: a lite hack of 5e that became it’s own thing with no levels and item-based progression

Get thee to Index Card RPG, stat.

So you want to play an older game that works exactly how you want it to, but since precisely zero older games work that way...you can either go with a modern game that's designed to work exactly how you want it to or fiddle with and house rule an older game to work how you want it to. I don't know about you, but in nearly 40 years of doing this I've learned that players seem to be far more interested in modern games than older games, and far more interested in sticking as close to RAW as possible than pages and pages of house rules. You're already dealing with a tiny sliver of potential players going with an older game. The further you get from RAW the more that potential number shrinks.

Old-School Essentials is, as mentioned, a formatting clean up of B/X. So if you're interested in playing B/X but want a new book that's well made and not a stapled booklet printed 40 years ago, go with OSE. There's also gobs of wonderfully weird and wild adventures and supplements for OSE...which work just as well with B/X as they're the same game with a modern printing, editing, and organization.