I would say in the 0e-1e days D&D forged its own path, then starting with 2e's response to the Satanic panic it started becoming a follower rather than a leader.
Wasn't original D&D a mashup of LotR, Dying Earth, and Conan?
I would say in the 0e-1e days D&D forged its own path, then starting with 2e's response to the Satanic panic it started becoming a follower rather than a leader.
They literally shoot at the monster in the Dunwich Horror don’t they? And Cthulhu is rammed with a ship. I think people underestimate how much Lovecraft had people successfully fight monsters in his stories.Of course I still maintain that as a solution to cultists and bottom-end monsters, there's no reason they shouldn't be a viable solution in the genre per se; the reasons they aren't in the books are more an issue of the kind of characters involved, and the decisions whether you want that sort of narrowness of character choice is a separate issue from general mechanics.
Yeah, I don't think that 3e D&D is influenced all that much by Diablo. IMO, Diablo is just the scapegoat for disliked changes because it was in the mind's eye of the public, so it gets the lion's share of blame for a much larger market trend. In contrast, the beloved video games Baldur's Gate and Planescape were explicitly influenced by Diablo. There we are told by the game developers that the only reason that the turn-based D&D became Real Time With Pause is because of how massive Diablo 2 was at the time. But people weren't upset that the games were RTWP rather than turn-based; instead, they were happy that it was RTWP. A number of people even got mad that Planescape spirtual successor games like Torment: Tides of Numenera or the Baldur's Gate 3 sequel are turn-based instead of RTWP. I personally think that turn-based makes it more D&D like, but many still want them to be RTWP because that's how the first games were.So then, should D&D try to follow the then-hot pop culture item or instead try to forge its own path and maybe become the hot culture item other things follow? I ask this because hot culture items don't always stay hot. (that, and I blame M:tG far more for 3e's direction than I do Diablo)
I would say in the 0e-1e days D&D forged its own path, then starting with 2e's response to the Satanic panic it started becoming a follower rather than a leader.
IMHO, the grand irony for me is that 4e is not really much like MMORPGs at all; instead, it is more like D&D-inspired JRPGs: e.g., Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Chrono Trigger, etc. And lo and behold, 4e has become an explicit inspiration for JRPG-influenced TTRPGs - e.g., Fabula Ultima, Icon, Beacon, Gubat Banwa - rather than any WoW-like TTRPGs.I think there's kind of a loop when it comes to video games and table top RPGS. It's fairly clear that video games like pedit5 were influenced by D&D and were quite popular on mainframes located on college campuses. But at some point I think pen and paper RPGS have been influenced by video games. I happen to think 4th edition D&D was highly influenced by MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. And I don't mean that as an insult.
Someone should make a thread to discuss that kind of thing.If you write a rules set that benefits (in a game sense) those who play counter-genre, in and of itself that's a design error.
I started playing World of Warcraft in September/October 2008, and was immediately struck by how the combat mechanics resembled the recently released D&D. In 4th edition, character roles were Striker (DPS), Defender (Tank), Leader (Healer), and Controller (tasks relegated to various classes rather than just one in WoW). When I played a Defender in 4th edition, my primary job was to take aggro from opponents just liket it was in WoW leaving it to the Strikers to do the bulk of the damage.IMHO, the grand irony for me is that 4e is not really much like MMORPGs at all; instead, it is more like D&D-inspired JRPGs: e.g., Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Chrono Trigger, etc. And lo and behold, 4e has become an explicit inspiration for JRPG-influenced TTRPGs - e.g., Fabula Ultima, Icon, Beacon, Gubat Banwa - rather than any WoW-like TTRPGs.
The most fundamental question in re intent was brought up in my English Methods class: Does authorial intent really matter at all?Does it count if the designers expected one result, but the actual mechanics they wrote encourages a different one? That's all too common.
Wraith works quite well in mixed party games of non-munchkins. WoD has a large munchkin quotient in the fanbase...Wraith was in some ways the most impressive rule book I've ever read to this day. And it was at the same time, a game I recognized as unplayable as written and therefore probably a failure as a game. Reading Wraith was when I formulated my ideas about examples of play and processes of play being as important or more important than the rules. The game Wraith was describing was effectively only playable as a single player game - one PC and one Storyteller. It wasn't inherently social. It wasn't clear what any two ghosts would want with each other or even if they would see each other. If the PC's really worked hard they could have created ghosts whose lives had been connected in some way, but the text did hard push players in that direction.
And on top of that it was totally alien. It required a fantastic imagination to realize the seeming intention, because the characters it was describing were actually dead and static and past the apparent end of their story arcs. And on top of that they were probably insane. Which is all good for describing a world of undead, but again doesn't make it likely you'll find a group that can play it.
Funny, but Dread. Alien, and a few other games do just fine ensuring players are popcorn for the bigbads...The problem with Call of Cthulhu is that, in the fiction it's based on, protagonists are generally hapless witnesses or survivors of brushes with things beyond the pale- if they survive.
Since it's hard to sell people on a game where they play victims and their reward is to be the Final Girl in a slasher film, since most of the things you encounter are basically indestructible to normal things like punches to the head, knives, axes, or even chainsaws, of course people are going to make like Ash Williams!
An adventure that would drive the characters insane at the mechanics based rate is sufficiently unrealistic that it will, at best, make modern players laugh... keep in mind that (in the better school districts) we're teaching some elements of quantum physics and radioastronomy/astrometrics in grades 6 & up... so kids are often actually aware that our perceived reality isn't inherently sensible outside the scale in which we operate. They know that Science says "There's something out there generating gravitic interactions but without being otherwise detectible," and "there is a fundamental randomness to the universe at a VERY fundamental level which means everything's subject to random influences." Basically, we're driving them toward either mental disorder, desensitization, or retreat to religion. Sometimes more than one.You are not going to start freaking out and screaming like Luke in the gas refinery: "No, that's not true!!! That can't be possible!!!" I very much feel HPL would have. We live in the universe post all of these revelations about how weird the universe is and we just shrug. But a really good HPL adventure somehow would undermine our confidence in reality just as much as early 20th century science destroyed HPL's belief in the worth of mankind so that even if the investigators kill the monster, it doesn't matter, because it's the existence of the monster that is problematic in the first place.
However, that problem goes way outside the topic at hand.
Not of need; in at least a few (HōL comes to min, as does KAMB, Ninja Burger, and the original edition of Og) they're deconstructions. Intentionally reinforcing anti-genre play for its value as humor...If you write a rules set that benefits (in a game sense) those who play counter-genre, in and of itself that's a design error.
Rules should reinforce genre, not encourage you to play against it. The degree of severity varies, and some early designs just didn't have this as a concept, but in a modern game, blaming the players because they're playing the game you wrote is off.
The most fundamental question in re intent was brought up in my English Methods class: Does authorial intent really matter at all?
The general consensus was "Only if they're good authors. Bad ones or mediocre ones fail to enshrine their intent in the text." (Keep in mind, we were all masters candidates between halfway and 3/4 of the way through our programs. Almost all of us with bachelor of arts degrees.)
Really, the meaning of the text is, at the end of the day, it's meaning as absorbed by the reader, rather than its author's intent.
I actually miss things like this. 4E was weird where you could hurt fire elementals with fire and trip snakes. Though, I do get it that running into a golem is one thing, and delving a golem factory is another....I remember an encounter with a golem (I think), where my Wizard was essentially useless because the creature was effectively immune to anything I could throw at it. That kind of thing didn't happen in 4th edition.
I have no interest in rehashing this debate, but as someone who played 4e extensively and WoW since the beta that my experiences regarding the "similarity" between the two games differ from your take here. I'm not sure that anything that I say to the contrary will dissuade you of that either.I started playing World of Warcraft in September/October 2008, and was immediately struck by how the combat mechanics resembled the recently released D&D. In 4th edition, character roles were Striker (DPS), Defender (Tank), Leader (Healer), and Controller (tasks relegated to various classes rather than just one in WoW). When I played a Defender in 4th edition, my primary job was to take aggro from opponents just liket it was in WoW leaving it to the Strikers to do the bulk of the damage.
In WoW, I assigned my Warrior's abilities to certain keyboards. The = button was used for charge, 4 was Thunderstrike, 6 was Taunt, 2 was Devastate, etc., etc. They each had a cooldown limiting the amount of times I could use them. Some of them were effectively once per encounter abilities, most refreshed every "round," and still others took so long to refresh that they might as well have been dailies (10 minutes is a long time in an MMORPGS).
D&D 4th edition is very much like an MMORPG and I think that's deliberate. Everquest was released in 1999 and World of Warcraft in 2004, and I think it was viwed as pretty stiff competition for D&D. I know my gaming club lost a lot of regular players for a while to games like Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest. One of the nice things about 4th edition is that every class was useful in almost every encounter. In 3rd edition, I remember an encounter with a golem (I think), where my Wizard was essentially useless because the creature was effectively immune to anything I could throw at it. That kind of thing didn't happen in 4th edition.
D&D has always been focused around fighters, clerics, rogues/thieves, and wizards. The main systemic difference role-wise was that the designers recognized that you need to fill these roles, and making sure that other classes could do so as well, instead of falling in between the roles and breaking the Ron Swanson rule by half-assing two things. As part of this system change, Defender classes were given the ability to manage "aggro", albeit via punisher mechanics ("You're free to do X, but I'll hurt you if you do") instead of aggro lists like in WoW.I started playing World of Warcraft in September/October 2008, and was immediately struck by how the combat mechanics resembled the recently released D&D. In 4th edition, character roles were Striker (DPS), Defender (Tank), Leader (Healer), and Controller (tasks relegated to various classes rather than just one in WoW). When I played a Defender in 4th edition, my primary job was to take aggro from opponents just liket it was in WoW leaving it to the Strikers to do the bulk of the damage.