D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[Celebrim]

Overall, I think the raging success that all these games utterly failed to enjoy says a lot about the state of things at the time. Its hard to sell them short when you couldn't even buy them in a store. .

Yeah. Well, I'd be very surprised to find that of the major Indie or Indie inspired games out there, that there were more than 30 or 40 tables playing the game on at least a biweekly basis in the entire USA.

My Life with Master? You think there are more than 30 tables playing that?
Dogs in the Vineyard? Maybe 30 tables
Burning Wheel? Maybe 40 tables
All variaties of FATE combined? A couple 100 at most.
Dread?
Monsters and Other Childish Things?

We are talking about very small communities that aren't exactly taking the world by storm. I would love to be a player in a MLwM or DitV game with an experienced skillful GM, so that I could pick up some experience. Ditto Dread or Monsters and Other Childish Things. What do you think the chances of that are? There _might_ be one table in the city. There probably aren't more than a half-dozen tables in the state. Once you get into the essential trust issues such games call for, chances are it will never happen. And I know my current table isn't really capable of going there yet, nor am I entirely sure, much as I like these guys, on some of the trust issues involved. There are huges issues of compatibility of personality involved in playing those games not raised by traditional RPGs.

And another issue for me is I read something like MaOCT, and I get the sense that maybe only its creator can actually create the experience envisioned in the text. This isn't anything new. A lot of the talk around Tekumel I can remember was that it was a fantastic setting, but only Barker really new enough about it to understand it and make it come alive. Everyone else was just playing an Empire of the Petal Throne pastiche.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I'm not saying it's a universal experience for every single player, I'm saying that flexibility isn't one of 4e's high points. In much the same way that cleric balance isn't one of 3e high points, but not every group experienced an unbalanced cleric.

I would disagree with this statement. I think 4e is incredibly flexible in terms of what you can do with it and bend it into any number of shapes with minimal tweaking. I think that the default tone and advice (mostly DM side) are written in an inflexible manner, and I agree that facet is a weakness, but I mostly didn't read the DMG. I mean, why would I? I already know how to DM, I just needed/wanted the charts and the math.

If you need to somehow divine intent from something other than what was actually written on the page, you do not have a game that is designed to be flexible, you have a game you might be able to flex despite its written and stated explicit intents. That's fairly true of 4e, because D&D can only ever be so inflexible, but it's a mistake to attribute the trait of "flexibility" to the game, and assume that everyone who criticizes it for its inflexibilty does so just because they are bad actors with an axe to grind.

I disagree. Stating that it is inflexible because the advice says so does not make it any less so. The game *is* flexible, despite what the advice tells you. It has lots of things that can be dialed this way and that, but they are not explicitly labelled as dials, even if that is how they function.

The advice on how to play is inflexible, the default assumptions may even be somewhat inflexible, but in practice, the game is as flexible as you want to make it, and certainly as much as, if not more than, any other edition of the game that I've played (which, again, is all of them).

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

There is another way to make combat both short and interesting, though it's not very D&D. You make it lethal. In Shadowrun, when bullets start flying, everyone is engaged because you can never be sure who is going to be alive at the end of any given round. One or two round combats are very common.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"meta-game", at least as its used around here, doesn't really imply narrativism. Toon is the only one of those that I've ever played...and it was soo long ago that I can't really say I remember much about it mechanically, the descriptions I can dredge up don't paint it very narratively. Amber is one of those things that people keep telling me about, and how awesome it is...and yet fairly well failing to convince me. ::shrug:: Can't say I've ever heard of En Garde or know which Gangster game you might be referring to.

I'm just saying, there were games with narrative mechanics. Gangster! was VERY popular the time it came out, and was considered a rather cutting-edge game. The subject matter is niche enough that it clearly wasn't going to compete with D&D, but we played several campaigns with it, which was saying something in those days, there were lots of games to play. Anyway, it was a pretty successful game. Toon was also quite popular. En Garde you really have to go read about, and play, it is one of the seminal events in the history of RPGs and was very pioneering (though again, a more niche game than D&D by far, the fact that it is still actively played and in print says something). Pem and co also spotted even better examples, Over the Edge I haven't heard of, but Maelstrom Storytelling was a very innovative and relatively successful game.

Overall, I think the raging success that all these games utterly failed to enjoy says a lot about the state of things at the time. Its hard to sell them short when you couldn't even buy them in a store.

Meh, I bought them all in a game store . Still have most of them, and still play some of them now and then. Heck, even D&D, in OA, flirted with the concept itself.

I was involved with a few conventions back in the day. I got a chance to talk candidly to some TSR folks. One conversation that really stuck out to me was that RPGs and associated games at that time were a very regional phenomenon. He said they'd go to one region and a game would be considered a bad joke, then go to another region and it would dominate the tables. Their own sales figures supported regionalism hypotheses, as well. It was a time before the internet was here so that we could tell each other what to think, I guess. I'm very skeptical of drawing many broad conclusions about that era, other than what you draw by what came after or survived. Given the lack of sweeping changes between 1e and 2e which we've both noted, I suspect that 2e's adoption rates and sales would be locally variable depending on the availability of 1e material to prospective new players. Which makes it very hard to say anything globally.

Well, perhaps, I don't know. I lived in several places in the 70's and 80's. I don't recall observing VAST differences, but there were certainly regionalisms. WW games for instance did about squat here where I have been since '85. In fact people are barely right now messing around with some Changeling for the first time. We played a lot of games that were clearly more about story than mechanics though in the 90's. Toon, Paranoia, Gangster!, others I have probably forgotten. D&D would come up and get some play now and then, but after 1994 my last 2e campaign was done and that was just about the last any of us played heavily really right up until 4e. Maybe 2e was 'huge' other places. It existed here, but it wasn't played a lot.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

There is another way to make combat both short and interesting, though it's not very D&D. You make it lethal. In Shadowrun, when bullets start flying, everyone is engaged because you can never be sure who is going to be alive at the end of any given round. One or two round combats are very common.

Yeah, until you get Orks and Trolls with Body scores into the teens and dermal plating up the wazoo allocating all dice to defense. *Pow-pow* Dang! Shot him in the combat pool, again!

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Yeah, until you get Orks and Trolls with Body scores into the teens and dermal plating up the wazoo allocating all dice to defense. *Pow-pow* Dang! Shot him in the combat pool, again!

Well, yes. That's what explosives are for. But your point is made.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yeah, in our group we just banned everything past core 3, except the Complete Priest's Handbook and a couple other minor things. The rest was almost all clearly WAY out of balance with the core material and invited all sorts of rules issues with little practical gain. A lot of it was fun to read, but rules-wise it was mostly kinda crap. That wasn't a big deal though, we were used to 1e, and had similar feelings about UA, so we pretty much didn't feel a huge need for 100's of character options at that time (though in a way the lack of good ones was a fault).

I thoug pht the rules were fine for the system and didnt have the balance problem you encountered. i had this problem with the 3E complete books, but the 2E ones were quite tame in my experience. The kits were a pretty good fit over the class system and really brought in a lot of flavir. Mostly they gave bonus NWPs or situational bonuses. A handful introduced unbalanced mechanics, but on the whole I just didnt see any of the issues some people raise with them. They also came with special hindrances. Some of the optinional rules in the books could present issues depending on which ones you did and did not incorporate, but we ignored many of those anyways as they were optional. The bulk of the books were about flavor over mechanics anyways.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think there are some real modernizations and improvements that exist in 4e. Mike has talked about things like human factors and presentation aspects where they did a lot of market and product research. 4e also front-loads a lot of work on character gen and sets a standard in clarity of rules presentation, etc. I think those are very definite advances that have little to do with specifics of what the rules are or how the game plays. I'd assume those features will be present in DDN.

Again, I don't know what level of 1e compatibility 2e really HAD to have. All I know is it was too much for many people's tastes. The whole "Baatezu thing" just made us laugh and roll our eyes at the silliness of TSR. We all knew what to call devils and demons etc and it was all just a joke. In fact the funniest part of it was the whole anti-D&D craze was mostly an early 80's thing anyway. It was like TSR was reacting to some lunacy that most people had already forgotten. Maybe it was a big deal to someone somewhere, but it meant squat to us.

That is great. I am glad you had such a positive reaction to 4E and it fit your style. But not everyone agreed. I felt it was good design for what it was intended, but it also was not a good design for my preferences or style of play. I can sort of see the arguments about it being more modern and updated than 2E (because 2E did have a lot of clunk and confusion). But I dont think it is objectively better design than 3E by any stretch. It just addresses different concerns and problems than 3E (and if those are not concerns or problems one happens to have, or if you dont have them to the degree that the 4E designer assume, it doesnt stand out as good design). Now I am not trying to trash 4E at all. I do think it is a well designed game, but it does get a but tiring hearing form 4E fans how their taste equals good/modern design and ours equals "crap" or "poorly thought out" design. I think we really just want some very different things from the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah. Well, I'd be very surprised to find that of the major Indie or Indie inspired games out there, that there were more than 30 or 40 tables playing the game on at least a biweekly basis in the entire USA.

My Life with Master? You think there are more than 30 tables playing that?
Dogs in the Vineyard? Maybe 30 tables
Burning Wheel? Maybe 40 tables
All variaties of FATE combined? A couple 100 at most.
Dread?
Monsters and Other Childish Things?

We are talking about very small communities that aren't exactly taking the world by storm. I would love to be a player in a MLwM or DitV game with an experienced skillful GM, so that I could pick up some experience. Ditto Dread or Monsters and Other Childish Things. What do you think the chances of that are? There _might_ be one table in the city. There probably aren't more than a half-dozen tables in the state. Once you get into the essential trust issues such games call for, chances are it will never happen. And I know my current table isn't really capable of going there yet, nor am I entirely sure, much as I like these guys, on some of the trust issues involved. There are huges issues of compatibility of personality involved in playing those games not raised by traditional RPGs.

And another issue for me is I read something like MaOCT, and I get the sense that maybe only its creator can actually create the experience envisioned in the text. This isn't anything new. A lot of the talk around Tekumel I can remember was that it was a fantastic setting, but only Barker really new enough about it to understand it and make it come alive. Everyone else was just playing an Empire of the Petal Throne pastiche.

Uhhhhh, you guys have some seriously skewed view of the gaming community out there. Mouse Guard is a VERY popular game, using BW as its core. MHRP? Gumshoe/Trail of Cthulhu/Dresden Files? I have no idea where you guys live that people aren't playing these sorts of games like mad, but around here you can't shake a stick and not hit some group playing some sort of narrativist game. OTOH, yeah, there are D&D groups here and there, but it isn't exactly a booming game. I see that out of the 30 or so groups Enworld lists in my area only ONE shows playing 4e, a couple more play PF, and 3-4 more play 3.5. There's as much BW in its various incarnations as that.

I run PACE (a simple diceless descriptor based system, very simple) games all the time as one-off homebrews. Once people have 'gotten it' (and I like PACE because the fact that it is diceless and uses chits pulls people that are RPGers out of their preconceptions) it works great and anyone can run it. In fact it generally runs best when you draft someone completely new to RPGs to run the game. Being all a 'free descriptor' exercise driven by plot points system mastery or anything more than a willingness to make stuff up and rule a bit on the fly isn't needed.

There are of course plenty of people that don't like any particular style of gaming, but IMHO narrative type games are neither harder to run, harder to find people playing, nor inherently less popular than basic simulationist games like D&D. I think the difference is that games like D&D have existed and been established as default choices in the most common genre forever. They arrived first, are very general in their rules structures, and have lots of support. Narrative type games inherently tend to focus on narrower niches and are hardly likely to displace games like D&D that have been around for 40 years. I suspect that if such games had arrived on the scene first things might be rather different, with the most well-established games including plot coupons, scene-oriented play, descriptors, etc.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Uhhhhh, you guys have some seriously skewed view of the gaming community out there. Mouse Guard is a VERY popular game, using BW as its core. MHRP? Gumshoe/Trail of Cthulhu/Dresden Files? I have no idea where you guys live that people aren't playing these sorts of games like mad, but around here you can't shake a stick and not hit some group playing some sort of narrativist game. OTOH, yeah, there are D&D groups here and there, but it isn't exactly a booming game. I see that out of the 30 or so groups Enworld lists in my area only ONE shows playing 4e, a couple more play PF, and 3-4 more play 3.5. There's as much BW in its various incarnations as that. .

This may be a regional thing. There are groups into narrativist games here but they are not nearly as mainstream as D&D, pathfinder and games like them. Even among narrativist groups it is mostly games that are ess indie like Gumshoe (which you mentioned) and Marvel that get play here (i rarely ear of people playing games the other poster mentioned). If you wlk into a game store, it is pretty much all D20, pathfinder and some 4E. In fact, i usually go for savage worlds and non-D&D games, but had to start up a 3.5 game to get the amount of play I wanted in a month (because it is so much easier to recruit for that than anything else). I do think there is a strong indie game/narrativist movement, but I also do think it isnt mainstream. I tried running games like gumshoe, and people in my groups (who are pretty open minded) simply couldnt get into the mechanics. Those are interesting games, but they are simply not for everyone.