Difference From 10 Years Ago?

[DaveMage]

10 years ago was great to be a 3.x D&D player.

Today it's great to be a player of FRPGs in general because there are so many flavors available.

If a particular game isn't for you - no problem!

That's why 5E is likely to have the hardest time getting traction to the levels WotC likes. So many quality choices....

 

[Jester David]

With the announcement for next I expected the 3rd ed and 4th ed edition war to keep on going but OSR players seem to be coming out of the woodwork and it seems I was not the only 3.x player to go back to AD&D or retroclones either. Even on this site on any day you can see the various tags people use for whatever edition, clone or whatever they are playing. Was the fragmentation caused by 4E, 3.x still going via Pathfinder after 13 years, people getting sick of WoTC?

I think there's always been the disenfranchised players who stuck with BECMI, 1e, or 2e that just kept their head down and were quiet under the onslaught of the very popular 3e. It was a little harder to criticise 3e in its heyday when fans were at their most supportive.
Once 4e came along and the big split arose between 3e and 4e I think it became a little easier for grognards to voice their thoughts. The audience was split, it was not just them versus everyone.

The OSR movement helped. There have been retroclones for years but none are really published in stores. If you didn't go looking for them you might never find them. The grognard/OSR movement has been slowly building as the retroclones gained attention and word of mouth spread. With a community behind them, the grognards have an easier time speaking up.

I really think the 3e/4e split was bad. Arguably the worst of edition wars.
While the 1e/2e split was huge at the time, the relative compatibility of the two made it less egregious. And there was a lull in books after the core reprints and following expansions. In many ways, 2e was just adding already published optional rules into the core.
The edition wars after 3e were bad but I think the timing made it a little more acceptable, coming after 2e, which was a very well supported edition. There had been so much content, 2e felt done. Especially with three years between the final rulebooks and 3e.
4e came very shortly after 3.5e and when 3e books were still selling. There was still life in the edition.

Are numbers of D&D players contracting or just harder to find due to the sundering?

A bit of both.
3e really killed the competition. Many small publishers just opted to release 3rd Party Products and people who were thinking of getting their start in publishing decided to just start a 3PP rather than make their own game.
With the ending of 3e and greater difficulty in writing content for 4e we've seen more and more publishers doing their own games. People who would have been 3PP just starting their own product lines. We're really seeing the return of competition.

Although, I don't think it was ever this bad. There's a LOT of name RPGs out there.

Some of this is the people who built reputations as 3PP during 3e. Green Ronin and MWP.
Some of this is the result of WotC shedding staff. There are a number of people who don't want to work at WotC because of their policies or were let go. Especially because of the long playtest and public knowledge of the impending edition. WotC is producing far fewer books and needs less staff, so there were layoffs and they are no longer hiring the same number of freelancers. And now they're writing their own material.
Kickstarter has also made this renaissance of alternative game systems possible. Its far, far less of a financial risk for publishers as they can get the money first. And fans feel like they can directly support industry creative types.

So the total number of D&D players is potentially shrinking as they move to other games. And those that still play D&D are somewhat fragmented by edition of choice.

Although, really, most players have an edition they prefer to play. But they'll still play other games. I really dig Pathfinder but I have been involved in three 4th Edition campaigns because that's what the people I wanted to play with were playing.

 

[Ratskinner]

I really think the 3e/4e split was bad. Arguably the worst of edition wars.
While the 1e/2e split was huge at the time, the relative compatibility of the two made it less egregious. And there was a lull in books after the core reprints and following expansions. In many ways, 2e was just adding already published optional rules into the core.
The edition wars after 3e were bad but I think the timing made it a little more acceptable, coming after 2e, which was a very well supported edition. There had been so much content, 2e felt done. Especially with three years between the final rulebooks and 3e.
4e came very shortly after 3.5e and when 3e books were still selling. There was still life in the edition.

I think this sums up my opinion/experience fairly well. I've heard people poo-poo the 3e/4e edition war by claiming that an edition war happened at every transition. However, at least in my experience, I never saw anything "on the ground" that even remotely resembled the types of factionalization that happened after 4e came out. Even the folks I knew who didn't like 3e when it came out still weren't outraged at its very existence, and I don't know any of them that refused to play it.

 

[Andor]

3e really killed the competition. Many small publishers just opted to release 3rd Party Products and people who were thinking of getting their start in publishing decided to just start a 3PP rather than make their own game.
With the ending of 3e and greater difficulty in writing content for 4e we've seen more and more publishers doing their own games. People who would have been 3PP just starting their own product lines. We're really seeing the return of competition.

Although, I don't think it was ever this bad. There's a LOT of name RPGs out there.

Yes and no. Towards the end of 2nd edition D&D was starting to look like a dead property. TSR had folded or was in enough trouble to no longer be the 800lb Gorilla in the room.

This was the heydey of Rifts with Palladium books flying off the shelves. FASA was going strong with Shadowrun and Earthdawn. White Wolf was bringing the angst with the World of Darkness books which brought a much need influx of hot chicks into the gaming world. D&D felt like the game you played before growing up and moving on to more adult games. Even if you wanted a pure fantasy game there was GURPS with their excellent supplements and of course Ars Magica, at the time being put out by a little known company called.. what was it? Oh yeah. Wizards of the Coast. Then Peter Atkinson asked Richard Garfield if he could come up with a portable game people might keep in their pockets and play while standing in line at the airport. The result was Magic the Gathering and suddenly Wizards of the Coast was not the 300lb gorilla in the room, they were freaking Godzilla.

And they bought TSR and brought forth 3e and lo, It was good. Ryan Dancy's genius with the OSD meant that anyone who wanted to could play in WotCs pool and everybody did. To the extent that people would publish things under the d20 aegis in spite of having their own, sometimes quite good, systems that better suited the genre they were portraying. 5 rings and BESM spring to mind. And then they were bought by Hasbro and ... it was not so good, but not as bad as all that. As much flak as Hasbro gets they couldn't care less about D&D. WotC owned MtG and Pokemon which are a liscense to print money and that is all they truly wanted.

The 3e/4e split cracked open the d20 monolith and got the creative juices flowing again, so now we have a greater wealth of alternate systems than we have seen for some time. And it too, is good.

* Footnote: My little history lesson here goes back a lot more than 10 years.

 

[innerdude]

Here's the difference--

Just today, I found out that the woman who sits directly behind my desk at work plays D&D with her husband . . . the first question I had to ask?

"Oh really? Which edition?" (Turns out her husband is running 4e Essentials.)

Ten years ago, with very few exceptions, "Which edition?" would have been a superfluous question. Anyone "playing D&D" would almost certainly have been playing D&D 3e. In most cases it would have been erroneous to assume otherwise.

Between the 3e core rulebooks and the Neverwinter Nights video game, 3e simply was D&D.

Now when someone says "I play D&D," I assume NOTHING about what that means. It could mean 1e, a retroclone, 3e, Pathfinder, 4e, 4e Essentials, or they could be using the term as a generonym.

 

[Iosue]

And then they were bought by Hasbro and ... it was not so good, but not as bad as all that.

Just a note. Hasbro bought WotC before 3e and the OGL. The purchase was in Sept. 1999, and 3e came out in 2000.

 

[Mark CMG]

Here is what was being run at the EN World Chicago Gameday in Mid-2002 -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?15187-Chicago-Gameday-June-22nd-Aftermath-Thread!

Early 2003 -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?39002-Chicago-Gameday-Last-Comments-then-to-the-Archive!

Mid-2003 -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?49476-Chicago-Gameday-The-Aftermath!!!!

Early 2004 -

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?73486-Chicago-Gameday-The-Aftermath

 

[Ahnehnois]

To cross threads for a moment, the other thing that seems different-and perhaps this is just from my perspective-is ownership.

When I was a regular at the WotC community back in those days, it was assumed that anyone discussing anything on those forums was running their own game. There was a lot of great troubleshooting discussion, a lot of great ideas (of course, there was also plenty of chaff to separate that wheat from). Everyone ran their own setting. Everyone used extensive and individual houserules. In fact, that was the reason you were online in the first place. If you wanted to discuss FR, there was a special forum for that. If you wanted to discuss Dungeon magazine, there was a forum for that. Those forums were not high traffic, and it was assumed that if you were not posting there, you were running a game with an original plot in a homebrewed setting with ample houserules to meet your needs, and you wanted to discuss those things. That's the default. And that was when I was on WotC boards and meeting people at their store.

And the same in my personal experience. My own group tried something with a published adventure in a published setting once, and dropped it quickly, with prejudice. All of the dozens of people that I played with in those days held essentially the same opinion on the subject: that we're playing our game and that published material detracts from our ownership of it. Even slavish adherence to the rules detracts from our ownership of it. My current players are basically people that I taught to play (starting around ten years ago); I don't know if they're even familiar with the concept of a published adventure, and Forgotten Realms is just the place where Baldur's Gate 2 was set. If you're playing, say, the Dragon Age rpg, the setting of Ferrelden is implied. If you're playing D&D, that means homebrew; either putting in some work and creating material in advance, or improvising on the spot. That's what D&D is. It's the game where you make stuff up. And as a DM, your job is to create a game experience, and you're judged on how well you do that.

It's only within the last few years and only on ENW that I see the term "module" used to describe something in D&D rather than a part of the Apollo spacecraft, or people talking about "OP" as a venue for playing D&D, rather than the original poster in the thread. People use proper nouns referring to old D&D material as if the reader is expected to understand the reference. And more recently, I see claims that it's actually common or even normal for a DM not to create his own game. All of which is just weird.

I don't know what the reason is. Maybe it's just because I gradually went from WotC to ENW, and this is an older and different crowd. Maybe it's a generational or regional thing. Maybe it's because WotC cancelling the magazines drove a bunch of angry Dungeon fans out of the woodwork. Maybe it's just because some people like arguing. If someone is actually out there buying Paizo's "adventure paths" (what does those two words together even mean?) and using them to run a game, I don't begrudge them that, but I don't understand it at all, and I wonder why that same person did not, as far as I can tell, exist ten years ago.

All of which is part of a larger philosophical shift, in my opinion. Instead of giving examples of what you do in your own game, people seem to have moved towards discussing a "standard" game experience, ceding some of that sense of ownership of one's own game in the process. Maybe it's a 4e thing or even a 3e thing or a WotC thing in general. I mean, trying to design a "balanced" game around the assumption of four characters of equal level covering the four basic classes fighting thirteen and a third battles against opponents with an EL equal to the part level, all while adhering to the RAW in every way, is absurd. No one (virtually) does that. It would be like making public policy around the assumption that everyone is a middle-class white suburban family with 2.5 kids. They aren't. There isn't even such thing as half a kid.

All of which is why I think the level of discourse has dropped. Don't get me wrong, ENW is still notable for its overall stability and civility. But I've read at different times that "everyone's D&D game is basically the same" (it isn't), or that "houserules aren't normal" (they're the norm) or that because I don't play the game in the "standard" way that my opinions on it are invalid (they aren't). The inability of some people (and companies) to acknowledge diversity in the D&D gaming world plays into a lot of other negative things and has, to me, been a change for the worse over the last decade.

 

[Li Shenron]

Interesting points [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION].

In my personal case (as a DM) I can say that 10 years ago I was indeed playing "my own game" in terms of setting and adventures. I did run a few published adventures, and several of those short online WotC freebies, and I even bought some campaign setting books (Forgotten Realms, Manual of the Planes, OA/Rokugan), but in general I was just using the material in the context of a homebrew, most of which was always made up stuff. I never actually bought any of those published adventures, just borrowed them from other DM friends.

Not so much from rules point of view tho... in that case, I always kept house rules at a minimum. I was largely playing the game by the 3.0 books, and tried to resist changing stuff as much as possible, mostly because I wanted to convince myself that it wasn't really needed. However I do not count character material restrictions e.g. (dis)allowing something for the purpose of setting the tone of the fantasy world as really changing the game.

OTOH as a player, I played in games heavily house ruled in every possible way. Other DMs really liked changing all sort of stuff, and often I've participated in that.

What has changed for me after 10 years, is simply that I have different life restrictions now, and I do not see myself spending evenings studying rules and planning adventures. I would still be interested in being a DM, and I had a few nights with friends playtesting 5e, but now I can see myself much more likely to buy published adventures than 10 years ago. Ideally, I would like to play D&D with a schedule resembling how you watch movies... just like sometimes you call a couple of friends and rent a movie for 5e and watch it, without need to "prepare" for it, I would today like to pass by the FLGS, grab an adventure for ~10e, and call friends over to play it in a night (or three), without the need to spend more than max 1 evening reading it by myself.

What has changed in the overall scene, I can't say for sure. I've been completely away from even thinking about RPG since 4e came out until 5e was announced, so I've left off when the edition war was starting, and came back when most discussions became about the upcoming edition. I have noticed like [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] says, that there is more visibility to individual editions. Ten years ago it seemed to me that there were two sides: on one side, old-school fans gravitating towards smaller dedicated forums and websites or generally not being very active on the main WotC and ENW forums, and these people seemed to me like they disapproved 3e but didn't look at it like something that damaged their own older-edition game, and on the other side a 3e crowd who was only concerned about what new stuff could come out of their edition, without seeing old-school gamers as a threat. The arrival of 4e caused a very different edition war... Anyway nowadays there is not only more people interested in retroclones/older editions, but IMHO there is much more people who tend to see (almost) all editions as good opportunities to play the same D&D game from different perspectives, or varying the playstyle.

 

[pemerton]

When I was a regular at the WotC community back in those days, it was assumed that anyone discussing anything on those forums was running their own game.

<snip>

My own group tried something with a published adventure in a published setting once, and dropped it quickly, with prejudice. All of the dozens of people that I played with in those days held essentially the same opinion on the subject: that we're playing our game and that published material detracts from our ownership of it.

<snip>

If you're playing D&D, that means homebrew; either putting in some work and creating material in advance, or improvising on the spot. That's what D&D is. It's the game where you make stuff up. And as a DM, your job is to create a game experience, and you're judged on how well you do that.

It's only within the last few years and only on ENW that I see the term "module" used to describe something in D&D rather than a part of the Apollo spacecraft

<snip>

If someone is actually out there buying Paizo's "adventure paths" (what does those two words together even mean?) and using them to run a game, I don't begrudge them that, but I don't understand it at all, and I wonder why that same person did not, as far as I can tell, exist ten years ago.

For as long as I can remember, Dragon Magazine had adds for setting/story material in it (eg bucketloads of MERP adds back in the 80s), and the racks of FLGSs were full of story material for sale - modules, setting-based games (eg L5R). Back in the 80s ICE was one of the biggest RPG companies after TSR, selling MERP. Another big company was Chaosium, selling Gloranthan material for RQ, and of course CoC.

And D&D players would compare notes on classic modules like the D-series, Keep on the Borderlands, etc.

When I was at university in the early through mid-90s, people played games set in FR, or used modules, or played Vampire games with the story elements taken from the White Wolf sourcebooks. I ran a Rolemaster campaign using a mix of Greyhawk material, ShadowWorld material (an RM campaign world) and my own material. For 10-ish years from the late 90s I ran a Rolemaster campaign using a mix of TSR Oriental Adventures material (both pre-and post-FRisation of Kara Tur), Bushido materials, 3E D&D material, and my own stuff.

Your experience, and your description of it, is wildly different from mine, and different from what I saw on Usenet back in 2000, or messageboards in the years after that (RPGnet, WotC, ENworld), where the idea of paying RPG companies for story elements has been pretty well understood as unexceptional, and even typical.

As to the issue of "ownership" - I don't agree. If I decide to run a game with elves, dwarves etc - an idea borrowed from Tolkien - and/or with knights and castles - an idea borrowed from fairytales and romances - am I forfeting ownership by looking to a game designer to give me mechanical models of elves, dwarves, knights, etc? Or if I read a module - say, Bastion of Broken Souls for 3E - and see some interesting ideas in it - say, a Night Hag dream traveller oracle, or an angel who is a living gate for a pocket plane where a god has been exiled - am I forfeiting ownership by incorporating those ideas into my game? When I used those ideas I had to mechanically translate them from 3E to RM; and I also had to ignore some silly advice from the module writer around framing and NPC motivations and possible actions - but I don't generally buy modules for those sorts of details - I am looking for cool ideas, and for nice maps and locations.

Instead of giving examples of what you do in your own game, people seem to have moved towards discussing a "standard" game experience,

<snip>

Maybe it's a 4e thing or even a 3e thing or a WotC thing in general.

I see plenty of 4e people talking about what they do in their own games - me, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=305]Storminator[/MENTION], [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], [MENTION=59411]Pour[/MENTION], [MENTION=21556]Jester[/MENTION] and others (though some have left the boards due to being fed up with edition-warrior dogpiling).

But different games foster different sorts of techniques, and so different sorts of discussions about them. In a system in which mechanics are conceived of as gameworld physics engines (RM, RQ, most of 3E, good chunks of AD&D's action resolution mechanics) then discussions of techniques naturally drift towards new physics models (falling damage used to be a popular one; hit points and wounding is another perennial; two weapon fighting seems to come up quite a bit too).

In a system in which mechanics are in the first instance conceived of as metagame - ie for resolving a scene or a conflict of narrational authority - then once someone has chosen a system (be it 4e, or HeroWars/Quest, or whatever) then there's probably going to be less discussin of varying the basic mechanic - you'd just change games for that - and more discussion of framing and resolution of conflicts within those mechanics. Among 4e players, this comes out in discussions of how to frame combat encounters, how to use different monsters for different sorts of mechanical or thematic effects, how to frame and narrate skill challenges, etc (I'm thinking of discussions around things like the gorge as a response to the failed riding check, or the rainstorm as a response to the dwarven fighter's failed Diplomacy check when meeting the mayor outdoors). Those conversations have died down a bit since the separate 4e board was shut down, but they still happen.

They may not be conversations that you are personally interested in, given they are relevant for categories of RPGs that (as far as I can tell) you don't play (with the exception of MHRP? In which case discussions about 4e techniques for framing and resolution would be highly applicable). But they are happening.

The inability of some people (and companies) to acknowledge diversity in the D&D gaming world plays into a lot of other negative things and has, to me, been a change for the worse over the last decade.

Probably unsurprisingly, I have my own views on the attitude of ENworld posters to diversity of play and techniques in RPGing.