Difference From 10 Years Ago?

[pac71]

Aye. What? ...the shoes! Follow the Gourd!

 

[Roland55]

D&D is not and never really has been a monlithic system. Even when it was only Chainmail as soon as you has two tables you had two sets of house rules.

The OSR started, to my recollection, with 4e. Yes some people had ALWAYS been playing BECMI or 1e or 2e, but the end of 3e made it clear that it might be time to try something else, and 4e was just not everybodys cup of tea. So a lot of people, disenchanted with what was supposed to be the way 'forward', looked back instead. The numbers grew.

And with some time and distance the spectre of badwrongfun faded and people could realize my imaginary murder puppet is not better than your imaginary murder puppet.

However gamers like conflict. That's why we have imaginary murder puppets. We like argueing, we like finding flaws in other peoples arguments, just like we like finding flaws in the NPCs plans and ruining their day.

So yes, we like to discuss what's best, but this at least is a civil board, that's why it's still around.

And just for some perspective, last night my college gaming club met and a new girl was saying how much she loves old school D&D. She meant 3.5. When I laughed I had to explain that I had dice that were coloured with the crayon that came included in the red box for that very purpose.

3.5. Old School.

Thank you for the laugh. Today, I needed it badly.

Perhaps, this weekend, I'll pull out a murder puppet or two and play some genuine Old School D&D.

 

[Roland55]

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.

I may have mentioned elsewhere that I am ... not young.

But last week, my middle daughter was passing through the lunchroom at her corporate offices. The IT folks were gathered in a corner chatting. As she passed by, they grew a bit quieter but she heard them mumbling about a D&D game they were holding on weekends.

Naturally, being my daughter, she immediately asked: "Which edition?"

Stunned silence. Many blank faces, vacant stares.

Finally, one young man (perhaps 25) ventured to say: "Pathfinder."

So, being my daughter, she said: "You know, that's not actually D&D. I suppose you could informally call it 3.75."

Several more moments of silence. Then, every one of them began talking at once. About D&D.

30 minutes later, my daughter finally made it back to her desk. Seems she'll be DMing a session of 2E this very weekend. (I'm trying to convince her to go for OD&D, eventually.)

Now my lovely young daughter has the best IT service in her company.

It's a funny old world, innit?

 

[S'mon]

Yep - explains quite a bit of the suckitude that happened before, too.

Is Forge Theory more like Fire - play with it and you might get burned - or more of a Third Rail, certain death to campaigns & groups? My experience was more the latter, but there may have been other stuff contributing at the time (crazy German chicks oi vey!)

 

[pemerton]

Is Forge Theory more like Fire - play with it and you might get burned - or more of a Third Rail, certain death to campaigns & groups?

In my case, it did what it promised to - helped me understand what was going on in my (then current) game, and what sorts of changes of approach (both mechanical and GMing) might give me a game closer to what I wanted.

A big part of the mechanical part was seeing very clearly, with actual worked examples, that process simulation can be an important part of RPG mechanics but isn't exhaustive of what they might do and be.

On the GMing front, it was understanding the difference between setting-as-play-independent-world and setting-as-situation. And learning how to use the latter.

 

[Balesir]

Is Forge Theory more like Fire - play with it and you might get burned - or more of a Third Rail, certain death to campaigns & groups? My experience was more the latter, but there may have been other stuff contributing at the time (crazy German chicks oi vey!)

In my case neither, but I think it depends very much how you approach the whole thing.

After reading the Forge stuff I hardly changed my game-time behaviour at all, at first. I just started to look at my playing experiences and consider more deeply what I was finding engaging about them, and why. When I came to GM, one outcome was that I selected some games to try that I probably would not have otherwise (or maybe I would - I was feeling a bit dissatisfied with the games I was playing at the time). Perhaps the most important, though, was that I started to think hard about what it was I expected the players to be actually doing in the game. If they were intended to just be there as tourists in a plot and setting that I presented to them, I considered that unsatisfactory. Ironically, I don't any longer consider this to be (necessarily) the case - but if it's happening, it had better darned well be intentional, not happening out of a lazy assumption that "this is what roleplaying is".

I have found that some folks seem to think of Forge theory as some sort of "weapon", and this can be quite damaging. This applies to both "pros" and "antis"; they seem to think it's something either that they can use to prove they are "right" or that threatens their own particular outlook on gaming. I take the view that if my own opinions don't get challenged from time to time they aren't worth holding, but some folk seem very protective of theirs. I would dismiss it as "diff'rent strokes" if I didn't perceive it as so damaging.

Nowadays I find the Forge stuff a useful perspective. It helps me identify bits of rules that don't mesh well with what I'm trying to achieve, and it helps me diagnose why things aren't working the way I thought they would. It's not a panacaea, by any means, but I find it to be one of a very few really thoughful contributions on what makes roleplaying games "tick" under the bonnet (or 'hood', for you Americans ).

 

[pemerton]

I have found that some folks seem to think of Forge theory as some sort of "weapon"

<snip>

I take the view that if my own opinions don't get challenged from time to time they aren't worth holding, but some folk seem very protective of theirs. I would dismiss it as "diff'rent strokes" if I didn't perceive it as so damaging.

I've noticed this "weapon" attitude too, but personally don't really relate to it. (Maybe that's because of my professional background - I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher, so am used to reading analyses of things that I don't necessarily agree with.)

When I first read The Forge articles I was GMing Rolemaster, and The Forge captured much better than any design book both the purist-for-system simulation rationale of Rolemaster, but also - in its discussion of metagame-leveragable mechanics - explained to me why I much preferred RM to RQ despite their common simulationist goals.

I take it for granted that most of the actual Forge personalities would regard my 4e game as pretty low brow, if not outright puerile and derivative. But given that I'm not playing with them, that's not my problem! What's relevant for me is that they introduced me to mechanics and other techniques that I can use, even if I'm using them in pursuit of aesthetic goals that the Forge-ites themselves wouldn't care for.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I take it for granted that most of the actual Forge personalities would regard my 4e game as pretty low brow, if not outright puerile and derivative. But given that I'm not playing with them, that's not my problem! What's relevant for me is that they introduced me to mechanics and other techniques that I can use, even if I'm using them in pursuit of aesthetic goals that the Forge-ites themselves wouldn't care for.

And I've found your analysis and examples to have made forge-thought much more relatable to me than the original articles and discussions.

 

[Herschel]

Well, the grognard factor is one thing, but AFAIK, it was one way. There was never any really harsh judgement directed at the old games, never an assertion that they were "broken" or anything. Just old games that naturally needed some revision. If anyone has an article of a new-schooler bashing 2e/AD&D from ten years ago, that I'd like to see.

You were obviously not frequenting the same establishments I was. The 1E/2E split hit my later college game group and it was very tense for a while. We finally got to the point of using handwaving/houseruling to just use whatever from whichever. At the FLGS is was also tense, but people were a lot more vocal and up-front with the bulletin board postings.

With 3E, it got worse. I had moved a few times and still vistied friend in the previous cities and went to the game stores also. The actual animosity amonst groups was big face-to-face. While it's only the occasional troll or two these days, yeah, it was entire groups and frequent then.

The internet is simply a lot bigger these days, with more people using it so we see "more" people's discourse, especially if we were with fairly insular groups back then. . There was data presented on another board that the entire number of internet users IN THE WORLD (business, government and everything) when 3E came out is about 2/3 of the Facebook users today.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Ten years ago was actually a very interesting time in RPGs - but few realised it at the time. Wizards of the Coast were in the middle of kneecaping the d20 glut by bringing out 3.5 (I think the only survivor of the early D20 games was Mutants and Masterminds? And that because it was pretty different to D&D). And as well as the d20 glut being at the end of its existance, White Wolf was a waning force with the WoD coming to the end of its lifespan and about to blow its own foot off with the deep in development nWoD, to be released in 2004. And just to show how the old order was rapidly fading, World of Warcraft was going to be released in late 2004 - and the best sandbox RPG ever, Eve Online, was released in late 2003. So 2003 really does mark the end of an era. Out with the old...

... and in with the new. The Forge was just graduating from a talking shop to doing something actually useful; that was the year Evil Hat brought out FATE - a system that in terms of players is in the league of the World of Darkness these days (compare the kickstarters - Werewolf: 2000, Fate: 10,000). Dogs in the Vineyard (the aforementioned Vincent Baker's first big game) and Primetime Adventures were deep in playtest (they came out in 2004). Castles and Crusades, marking the opening of the OSR was being developed (it was released at Gencon 2004)

It looked as if little was going on on the surface - there was that weird Forge over there, objecting to a game system that was running out of steam and about to blow its own foot off. (Yes, the Forge was objecting to Storyteller not D&D - people forget that). Wizards had just made a cash-grab by re-releasing a slightly incompatable version of D&D and most people were playing version 3.25.

And yes, the tabletop RPG community is a lot smaller than it was then - google trends shows this clearly. People have decamped to MMOs (and both WoW and Eve Online are strongly influenced by D&D and provide many of the fun parts).