Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 7022336" data-attributes="member: 6688937">I must say my experiences with OSR play (and my increasingly vague memories of the early 80's) don't indicate any great difference at all. Does it matter if the GM "pulls the number from his butt" during play, days earlier when writing the adventure, or if he gets it from a published adventure designer who pulled it from his butt? I don't feel my experience changes much one way or the other. Is it somehow less of a railroad if the adventure starts at the entrance of a well-defined dungeon? My experiences with "sandbox" GMs (even back in the day) lead me to perceive that "playstyle" as existing mostly in the DM's self-conception of his creative process, not in play from the player's perspective. At best, it is a difference in scale, not character, IMO.I tend to think of the trend you seem to be noting mostly as one related to the marketing and audience perception of rpgs, not really any profound change in design. I believe players became enamored of the idea that they were "creating a story together" or whatever else you might find in the introduction section of those game. Heck, for that matter, efforts like the Forge were a response to the disappointment players felt when these games routinely failed to deliver on that promise.   Now, that being said, I do feel that system matters, but the traditional rpg structure doesn't usually vary in structure enough to stop the kind of effects you seem to be alluding to here. At best, it tweaks the experience one way or another. (Which can be very effective at evoking settings, etc.)  My experiences with every edition of D&D (to get back to the original topic) have been relatively similar, with 4e being the outlier (I found the detail/intensity of the tactical game distracting). I have played and ran an (apparently) very wide variety of other rpgs with wildly different structure, so my sense in this regard may be colored by those comparisons. To really "break" the general habit of rpgs (which even my beloved Fate falls very close to) seems to require breaking that basic structure.</blockquote>

Verification