D&D needs to grow up

[questing gm]

Anyone remembered the Book of Vile Darkness?

 

[GSHamster]

Jane Yolen wrote the following quote about fantasy novels, but I think it applies equally to D&D. D&D does not, in any way, shape or form, need to grow up.

"And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, have been excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer dare to use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:

Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth."

 

[Ranger REG]

Forgive me if this doesn't make a lot of sense. It's more of a stream of thought without a cogent or wellformed thesis.

What do I mean when I say D&D needs to grow up? I'm not talking about the rules. I'm referring to the artwork, fiction and the feel of the game.

The game needs to drop the teen mentality it's had for years and get serious. It needs to lose the veneer of Saturday morning cartoon and get some dirt underneath it's nails. It needs to ramp up the brutality that is "killing monsters" and facing horrors from another plane. It needs to go from a game for kids to a game for adults.

Life in any D&D setting should be nasty, brutish and short. The artwork, fiction and setting material should reflect that. Currently it's PG or PG-13 at best and that just doesn't cut it anymore. To steal a term used elsewhere, it needs to be "grittified" the way Battlestar Galactica has when compared to the original series for example.

Admittedly WotC has done that with the introduction of the "points of light" idea that has been much discussed and that's all well and good. I'm just not seeing it in the artwork or fiction anywhere. Sure there are nasty looking monsters and there is plenty of artwork showing "heroes" battling "evil". Yet I see no blood. I see no dead bodies. I see no poverty or misery. I see too many heroes winning the day and living far too long to fight another day.

I don't really know if I'm making much sense here so feel free to tear this post apart. I guess if I wanted to boil it down to it's essence I want D&D to have all the grit of A Game of Thrones but with all the magic and monsters that D&D allows. I know a large part of that is in the hands of the DM but it would be very helpful and evocative if the published materials also reflected something a little less adolescent and more in line with the existing audience.

Just a thought.

Meh. I doubt it was the artworks that attracted readers to A Song of Ice and Fire series.

As for growing up, that depends. It grew up when Elmore, Parkinson, and Caldwell, grace the many artworks for D&D followed by Stawicki and lately Wayne "WAR" Reynolds.

Me? I'm still a fan of Erol Ottus b/w ink artwork of 1e.

AFAIC, D&D shouldn't be as specific as A Game of Throne.

 

[Furry_Thing]

The Dark Ages line for the WoD, anyone? If you want medieval "grim and gritty" then it'll do you very well indeed. Magic, corpses, blood and guts, short and brutish lives, generally horrible conditions, monstrous monsters, etc.

No, I'm not just trying to pimp another game. The WoD is horror and it pretty much always has been (mention Hunter X and I'll slap ye), which lends itself very well to that sort of game. So if that's what you want, then you might as well look at a game that specializes in it. I don't think D&D would lend itself well to the kind of "grown up" game the OP seems to be talking about. It's simply not that "kind" of game. It doesn't have the attitude, the mood. Even the Book of Vile Darkness and Heroes of Horror didn't really do much for me in that sense. D&D is too cinematic, and it always has been. The PCs are Big Damn Heroes, which kind of takes away the impact that sort of thing would have, thus rendering it tacky and (yes) immature.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

Well, while I'm a huge fan of G.R.R. Martin's fantasy saga, and might buy the new Green Ronin game based on it, I do not want D&D to become any more "darker and edgier".

The most I could see myself pushing D&D in that direction would be to run a Sword and Sorcery style, all-martial, all-human game, heavily influenced by the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books... And even so, I would probably edit out most of the "wenching" aspect of that kind of setting, since the women in my gaming group will probably won't enjoy it.

I definitely wouldn't play on a crapsack world with a black and grey morality kind of game.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Perhaps its not so much that D&D needs to grow up, so much as remember that it's an adult. 1st Edition AD&D was an adult's game. Succubi and mermaids were naked, your character could get intestinal parasites, and if you went into a city you would encounter slovenly trulls and expensive doxies. Characters died all the time, and a player didn't plan out a "character build" because their PC wasn't necessarily going to see their next level. PCs weren't dripping with "kewl powerz", so players had to actually think their way of bad situations. It was a Swords and Sorcery game were your character advanced based mostly on how much treasure they could steal, and advanced slowly at that. It was after Gygax was forced out of TSR the company decided to make the game safe for the Mothers of America. The art simply reflects the kind of game that D&D has degenerated into since then.

Ah, sweet degeneration...

Put me down as not wanting this.

If the future of D&D is trying to be edgy, gritty, and otherwise IMO tasteless in a vain attempt to seem "mature", it's a future I don't want to be involved with. And if that makes it a game for the kids, I'll play with the kids.

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis.

- Psion, pushing 40.

And in an unprecedented instance, i totally agree with Psion.

 

[pemerton]

I think "gritty and grim," is more about narative complexity/maturity (i.e. the setting and scenarios the DM crafts) than about the rule set. D&D's default setting is not grim and gritty but there is nothing in the rules that prevents you from changing that.

I'm not entirely sure about that - hit points as the central combat mechanic, and the fact that the stakes are normally set by the GM rather than chosen by the players, are both mechanical features of D&D that make grim & gritty a bit harder than in some other systems.

Anyone remembered the Book of Vile Darkness?

Well, this had little moral sophistication and had no mechanics that force the players to set the stakes!

 

[pemerton]

Jane Yolen wrote the following quote about fantasy novels, but I think it applies equally to D&D. D&D does not, in any way, shape or form, need to grow up.

"And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, have been excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer dare to use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:

Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth."

If I had to name a single novel I've read that best grapples with these themes, I'd not suggest any fantasy novel, but rather "The Human Factor" by Graham Greene. In my view a masterpiece. His "The End of the Affair" might run a close second.

A game that could reproduce that sort of emotional intensity would definitely deserve to be called grim & gritty. Default D&D doesn't deliver it, because the GM predetermines the stakes, protecting the players from the need to choose.

 

[AtomicPope]

I'd like to point out that nudity is not adult. After all, I was breast fed. And based on embarrassing reports from aunts and uncles, I spend my first few years in the nude.

D&D has always been a curious mixture of the comic and the grotesque. Always teetering between serious and silly:
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
Castle Greyhawk

Read the various comic strips in 1e DMG. The same DMG that produced the most sinister, bone chilling artifacts and relics of any game to date. It's wildly inconsistent. Contains several areas which are blatant commentary explainations for bizarre gamist rules that only makes the rules worse. However, 1e is D&D.

 

[firesnakearies]

I'd like to point out that nudity is not adult. After all, I was breast fed. And based on embarrassing reports from aunts and uncles, I spend my first few years in the nude.

Lies! Everyone knows that babies burst forth from their mothers' veiled wombs securely swaddled in abayas! To even suggest that an innocent child would do something so morally reprehensible as being naked is grievously offensive, sir!