D&D Rubbish? Hmmm...

[ExploderWizard]

Just to get started... I don't think you needed anywhere near 1,000 pages to get started with BECMI.

128 pages total for both player and DM material to run campaigns from 1st to 14th level with the Moldvay basic & Cook/Marsh expert sets.

Players only needed about a third or less of this.

Enough to give you something to think about and expand upon with your imagination but not so much as to make your eyes glaze over.

With electronic media being very primitive compared to the immersive offerings we have today its easy to understand why it became so popular.

 

[RainOfSteel]

d4d6d8d10d12d20: Dungeons And Dragons Is Rubbish!

He forgot d100.

The rest is just another opinion.

 

[BenBrown]

That raises an interesting question. Where are the twelve year old gamers now? What happened to the avenues which introduced kids that age to the game back then?

The avenues that introduced people in the 1970s still exist, and consist pretty much entirely of "friends and relatives who play" and "books seen on the shelf of a store"

What doesn't exist is the huge media frenzy that built from about 1979 to 1982 in which D&D was more than a game, it was a fad.

D&D is no longer the in thing, and barring a miracle, it won't be again.

as a hobby for the non-sports crowd, D&D was nigh-unto unique in those days, oh, sure, there was chess and things like that, but video games were these huge bulky cabinets that you had to go somewhere to play and pay for. We had television, but not the plethora of channels available today. If you didn't live in a big city, you were likely to have no more than four channels (if that) that you could watch.

We read books, of course. But there just weren't all that many options for entertainment with friends that didn't involve stuff that we weren't good at and darned well knew it.

A game these days is no longer going to catch people just with the idea of controlling a character in a story. It is a legacy of D&D that that has become not just common, but nearly universal.

Tabletop roleplaying must now compete with its children, and they are a multitude.

 

[Imperialus]

Wait a second. How do you make something more realistic without making it more complicated that the D&D Armor Class set-up?

AC is the "simplest" I suppose but back in the 80's Palladium had a pretty good setup too where you rolled against 2 different armour classes. A roll of 10+ meant you "hit" but if you didn't exceed the value of the armour you simply hit the armour and damaged it instead. If you exceeded the value of the armour then it meant you hit something squishy.

If anything it was probably a simpler system than AD&D's where you relied on attack matrix's compared to a descending armour class. Lets not forget the weapons vs AC table either. And weapon vs size modifiers...

Palladium got silly after the mid 90's when RIFTS went off the deep end and is pretty much consigned to Joke territory now, but Palladium Fantasy was a pretty solid system for its time.

 

[Jhaelen]

A game these days is no longer going to catch people just with the idea of controlling a character in a story. It is a legacy of D&D that that has become not just common, but nearly universal.

Tabletop roleplaying must now compete with its children, and they are a multitude.

I guess that's pretty close to the truth. It takes some effort to get a child to play any kind of boardgame - not just rpgs - after it has been exposed to video games.

Still, it's worth introducing them to the concept, since it can be enjoyable in ways that video games cannot.

E.g. there's a regular column at a German video game website introducing great board games. Initially, the reactions in the forum were exactly as expected: "Who cares about board games if I can play <videogame> instead?" But eventually, the column attracted a following and is now quite popular. According to the posts the column managed to get several people to give board games a try again.
The main problem is that most didn't know many board games besides 'Monopoly' and 'Risk'.

Anyway, back tot he topic of rpgs:
I think it's always worth it having a great introductory product for rpgs. You cannot just rely on being taught to play by the veterans.

My first contact with rpgs was in 1984 with the release of DSA. A friend of mine had received it as a present and didn't have a clue what to do with it. So, together we tried to make sense of it and started playing.
A while later when we talked about it on the school bus, someone overheard our conversation and asked us if we'd be interested in trying to play 'AD&D'. The rest is history.

The original release of DSA wasn't actually a good introduction to RPGs. It pretty much assumed you already knew how an RPG worked! Later editions have been much better at explaining it, but they still have one problem: The rulebook is friggin' big and thus intimidating for a newbie.

These days many get interested in playing tabletop rpgs because they enjoyed playing computer rpgs or mmorpgs. But as I mentioned above about board games in general it's tricky to get them to 'adopt' it if the presentation isn't convincing and intuitive.

If it seems too much effort to learn the game, they quickly lose interest.

 

[pemerton]

As a kid, the first RPG I owned was the classic Traveller black box. It was intriguing - "Mayday, mayday, this is Free Trader Beowulf . . . " - but I couldn't make head or tail of how it was meant to be played.

A couple of years later I was given the Moldvay Basic set. It explained clearly how to play the game - both to the player, and the GM. And it had concise and serviceable action resolution rules for the sort of action the game envisaged.

Once I started playing D&D, I was able to make sense of Traveller. But the contrast between the two rulebooks could hardly be more marked.

I couldn't imagine anyone today picking up the 4e rulebooks and learning how to play from scratch.

The latest edition of BW seems to have improved quite a bit in this area, though I haven't got it yet. (Burning Wheel is very good in that you are told quite firmly to stick to the first 70 pages before you do anything else, and this is important and good advice. It's bad in that the editorial comments are embedded in the text, including that first 70 pages. Supposedly, they are removed or toned down in the new edition.)

I've got the revised edition rulebooks for BW. Compared to 4e, they do a great job of explaining how the game is to be played. But I couldn't imagine trying to learn to play from them if I wasn't already familiar with RPGs.

EDIT for clarity: I gather you are saying that there is now a 3rd edition of BW.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I guess that's pretty close to the truth. It takes some effort to get a child to play any kind of boardgame - not just rpgs - after it has been exposed to video games.

Still, it's worth introducing them to the concept, since it can be enjoyable in ways that video games cannot.

E.g. there's a regular column at a German video game website introducing great board games. Initially, the reactions in the forum were exactly as expected: "Who cares about board games if I can play <videogame> instead?" But eventually, the column attracted a following and is now quite popular. According to the posts the column managed to get several people to give board games a try again.
The main problem is that most didn't know many board games besides 'Monopoly' and 'Risk'.

My eleven year old could care less about Monopoly or Risk, barely tolerates Clue, but loves Settlers of Cataan and Agricola. Remembering how I was at that age, I understand. I think kids that are prone to like roleplaying games of any complexity are also going to be not that enamored of relatively simple board games.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I couldn't imagine anyone today picking up the 4e rulebooks and learning how to play from scratch.

I've got the revised edition rulebooks for BW. Compared to 4e, they do a great job of explaining how the game is to be played. But I couldn't imagine trying to learn to play from them if I wasn't already familiar with RPGs.

EDIT for clarity: I gather you are saying that there is now a 3rd edition of BW.

BW Gold was just released. It's basically revised, with a handful of rule tweaks that have proved useful, but mainly an edition geared towards better organization and understanding (ala Mouse Guard). At least, that's the way I understand it.

I can easily imagine learning how to play from both 4E and BW-R. It wouldn't be any more difficult than how I learned with a hodge-podge of Basic/Expert and AD&D 1st ed. No doubt borrowing RuneQuest and Powers and Perils and Arms Law from friends helped me grasp some of the possibilities in the D&D I owned, too.

Picking up a single game and really grasping the full flower of how it can be played, though? Don't think many games meet that standard all by themselves.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

That raises an interesting question. Where are the twelve year old gamers now? What happened to the avenues which introduced kids that age to the game back then?

There will be exceptions, but in contrast to the 70s and 80s, I think many current young RPG gamers are actually introduced by their parents.

We can argue it all we want, but the 'default' fantasy game for a curious 11 year old today is going to have content delivered from a screen and by a processor, and not from the mouth and by the mind of a DM.

 

[darkseraphim]

Snarky guy! In my opinion, if you're not willing to meet a game halfway on its mechanics because you're not in love with the game's spirit, you're better off finding another game. I'm glad he found something he seems to like (I think?).

My general statement to people who don't "get" the long-term affection people have for D&D is always the same: "It was magic. Because it *was* magic, it *is* magic. I guess you had to be there."

In the specific case of this thread, I would add a modified quote from Harry Potter: "You will never understand D&D, and I feel sorry for you."