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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pamphylian" data-source="post: 9883202" data-attributes="member: 7053769">Yeah, it's interesting to think about the relationship of ttrpg design with video games over time. There are some substitutes like you mentioned, some of the crunchiest aspects being easier on computers (maybe computer strategy games captured some of the market for the more wargamey/domain play aspects of the hobby, to the hobby's detriment imo). It's also my understanding (2nd/3rd hand, I wasn't there) that not necessarily the rules but the play culture in some older editions could be more "grindy", but the faster feedback loops of Diablo, MMORPGs, etc. absorbed a lot of that. But there is also a lot of imitation and accommodation - for the magic items I mentioned, the 5e versions are much more video gamey and video game adaptable - accounting for all the effects of the 1e Staff of Withering in a video game is a lot harder (maybe even impossible for some of the more concrete in world effects) vs the more abstract 5e version, which you could write in a game in a couple lines of code.  My "rpg journey" has been CRPGs -> 5e -> exploring older editions and other games, so I've always been drawn to the aspects of ttrpg play that video games can't really do well. The open endedness of creative problem solving and goal creation, the ability to explore a world with fractal detail where you can zoom in on anything, the collaborative world building, gameworld-reshaping consequences to actions, long term persistent campaigns that engage many game modes, the social aspects of faction conflict and emergent narrative. I think a lot of these things benefit immensely from a robust simulationist background in the rules, even if computers could handle parts of that more easily. Not necessarily in a "rule for everything" sense, but in the sense of robust subsystems and procedures to fall back on, and elegant interfaces to the concrete elements of the game world so that when possible, players can think in game world terms rather than system terms. There's a reason why I think that in terms of video games, strategy games often offer a better "rpg" experience than crpgs - I rarely play the latter these days, except to revisit old favorites with exceptional world building (Morrowind, my beloved...).The reduction of items with both immense powers and big drawbacks is a pretty confounding evolution to me. Both from a gameplay perspective (what is more fun than figuring out how to maximize the rewards and minimize the drawbacks of a weapon, or creatively turn a bane into a boon? What's funnier than a hilariously cursed item? The texture of games is that of risk and reward tradeoffs) and from a verisimilitude perspective (fiction, myth and even history are full of such things). There's a reason I mentioned the Chime of Hunger - what a delightful curse. The 5e DMG still has Major Boons and Detriments you can roll for artifacts, that is great, but the spirit of most of the magic items listed are much more pure boon than in 1e. You see it in other parts of the game too, even just from 5e to 5.5e, with the removal of the self-fireball from the Wild Magic Surge Table. In my opinion, it is almost always better (more interesting, more fun, more life like) to balance great reward and power with great risk, rather than simply diluting both risk and reward to give only items with muted, carefully delineated, numerical-only effects. Maybe you need those for video games for programming sanity, but with ttrpgs, we can imitate the weird, far reaching, and world reshaping magic of myth - why sell the medium short?</blockquote>

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