Permerton and Neon, the examples you give reveal to me that you hold to stereotypes about my play that are not true. We love being our characters. We have backstories. There is a lot of depth and fiction to our work.
I don't think I've
ever doubted that. I've read too much MERP, too much Rolemaster (although that's more [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s game), too much GURPS, and have just bought Pendragon (
as it's the current Bundle of Holding). And I'm well aware of
Chivalry and Sorcery and Harn. In fact I'll say flat out that one of the best things about 80s gaming was the depth, attention, and love put into the settings and fiction. Much more so, in my opinion, than 90s metaplotty stuff - and that's one of the reasons I was buying GURPS rather than WoD in the 90s.
In fact I'll go so far as to say say that the 80s was the high point of RPG research and setting creation and no one is doing it remotely that well now (except arguably the people who've continued to build Harn).
On the other hand on this thread I've been dealing with Howandwhy99 who takes a very different approach. Things I say about Howandwhy99's very fringe playstyle are not intended to apply to everyone.
Perhaps it is the way the story is created that matters. In my style the group spends all their energy and effort trying to overcome the challenges in their path so that they can achieve their goal whatever that goal is. From a player thinking perspective, success is achieving the goal efficiently. If the DM does his job as DM though a great story will come out of that quest.
And I like that sort of story. But it is
far from the only sort of story I like. And, with all due respect, it takes
an absolute age to play. By the time we've finished a
Fiasco we'd still be on the first level of Caverns of Thracia - and that's if we've entered the caverns at all. (A fast game of Fiasco can be played in an hour including setup). It takes you what? Four to six sessions to reach level 2? In that time my Grey Ranks character will have had all the triumph and heartbreak of a child soldier in the Warsaw Occupation, seeing what they love turn to ash and either surviving or dying. And I can throw in a game of Montsegur as well. In Monsterhearts we can have told a complete coming of age story, with people growing and developing massively, learning to cope with the world in a not screwed up way. Or descending into a whole pile of screwup and possibly burning down the school and ruining their life and others.
The DM will build a world that makes it hard to succeed. It all comes down to how the players approach the game. The player viewpoint if you will.
And to the nature of the challenges the rules and DM produce. D&D's mechanics basically support an "ascending sawtooth" story ("Can I? Can I? I don't think I can? I might be able to? Yay!!!/[Death]", repeat with a slightly bigger threat) or chicken/addiction arcs ("Just a bit further for a bit more treasure...") with the next iteration being almost the same but slightly louder. You can do more with it, of course, but the rules don't actively help you and can get in the way (try a locked room mystery with the cleric able to
Speak with Dead and the wizard loaded down on divination spells?)
If we look at the
seven basic plots, D&D is fundamentally about "The Quest" or "Overcoming the monster". Neither of those plots are bad things. But Fiasco is targetted on "Tragedy", and can delve into "Comedy" and "Voyage and Return" (and occasionally "Rebirth"). Monsterhearts strongly supports all five D&D doesn't.
It's just possible that the game of Monsterhearts I'm currently running with seven PCs has all five of those running together plus Overcoming the Monster (with the Monster being one of the PCs), with each PC as the focus for their own story. That's tangled, interwoven storytelling of a sort I've never seen in D&D - especially not after a couple of sessions.
One big mistake people make is they read old stories and they interpret them in the light of our modern environment. Gygax would never have allowed PCs to create content on the fly while adventuring.
This, as I've pointed out, just isn't true and I have already provided a counter-example. He allowed the Balrog to invent The Balrog Times as a plausible lie, and the idea they used flash photography. Because it was fun.
Claiming Gygax would never have done something that someone who was there says he actually
did doesn't help your cause at all. And Arneson did not ask Major Wellesly if he could take a CIA badge with him into Braunstein. He just did it.
It is different. I'm not going to say the Forge invented the new way. I never said that. I think the new way arose in home games likely not super long after D&D was invented by people who had a bent to go that way.
A new way
did arise in home games not super long after D&D was invented. The new way was that you must stick to the pre-established rules and background rather than "we made up some
we thought would be fun". And this new way came to dominate the hobby. Because it's what the books said to do.
In time, those who where successful at running those kinds of games introduced the idea. I do not know exactly when but I doubt it was as late as the nineties.
The idea was introduced in Braunstein. The game that inspired D&D. By Arneson before Gygax even started to get involved with D&D.
I played D&D all through the 80's and read many dragon magazines and I can assure you that style of play was not on most people's minds.
Indeed it wasn't on most peoples' minds. It happened in Lake Geneva - but the game Gygax played was not the game he published. And people who followed the
published game (especially AD&D) were given dense books full of tables and rules saying the way things must be. And most people who wanted to make their own stuff up either stuck to oD&D, B/X, BECMI. or the Rules Cyclopaedia.
And that is too bad because some of them would have been happy with the new approach and would have stopped sabotaging the more traditional games with their whining and rules lawyering.
Rules lawyering is a consequence of detail heavy games that people haven't been careful when writing. (AD&D is very bad for this, so is the World of Darkness).
As for the rest, had D&D made more explicit its roots in the
Freeform LARP (even if that term hadn't been invented) that was Braunstein it would have made more people happy, yes.
