Evolution of Rules, is it really a good thing or not?

[Tequila Sunrise]

What, you don't drive a black Model T Ford?

Luckily I go to school in a big city, so I don't have to drive anything!

I'm so modern I'm pre-industrial.

 

[Morrus]

Admittedly, I'm not familiar with the facts of how D&D went from private property to company property. At the risk of derailing the thread, is there somewhere I can get them?

I don't know if that info is there specifically, but here's the best place to start looking:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showwiki.php?title=From-TSR-to-WotC:-A-History-of-D-and-D

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Thanks, Morrus.

It looks like Gary got involved with the wrong kind of suits, and lost D&D as part of the end of the stick he got. I'm sure we all would have liked it to happen differently, perhaps as part of his last will and testament, but I think D&D becoming company property was inevitable, if it wasn't to fade into obscurity.

 

[Umbran]

but I think D&D becoming company property was inevitable, if it wasn't to fade into obscurity.

That's probably the fate of pretty much all valuable IP.

Say there's a wonderful book. The author's daughter inherits the rights when her mother dies. But, the daughter is, say, a dancer, not another author, or a media producer. What's she going to do with such rights? They're not something she can use, except to make money, so she's apt to sell them. And *whoomp*, the thing is now in corporate hands.

 

[Umbran]

These are objective criteria?

Several of them are, if not outright objective, are probably statistically so - "consistency" is probably reasonably objective.

That doesn't sound like a very good marker of a modern game to me.

Well, what defines "modern"? Is a "modern" game a specific style of game (like "modern art"), or is a "modern game" simply one that is done recently (like "modern technology")? We should be clear about which we mean.

I expect most folks are speaking in the "modern technology" sense. As in, a computer today is better than a computer from the 1970s, and they bundle the various improvements in it being "modern technology". Now, you, individually, may find specific aspects in which you feel modern computers aren't better. And you, specifically, may feel you need to list all the individual improvements instead of lumping them together under one banner.

But, much as you may protest, the MacBook Air is still better than a Commodore 64, due to being modern designs and modern tech. Go ahead an try to argue otherwise

You might instead do well to protest that, the designation of "modern" does not really apply to 5e as compared to 4e, that 4e isn't old enough fr there to have been sizable gains in "technology" that guarantees a better game. You'll still be stuck with folks saying that, really, game writers/designers have learned a great deal since Gygax's time, and his designs are now "old tech", but you can't have everything.

Faster and easier to learn - isn't that a measure of complexity not modernity?

Depends on what you call "complexity" as well as "modernity". In a mathematical sense, whether you use rising AC or descending AC does not increase the system's complexity, but in terms of human cognition and use in play, it makes a difference. You can present a simple system in a way that is easy to comprehend, and a way which is difficult to comprehend.

And, there's a pretty good argument that 1e, and many other games from the same era, qualify as baroque in design and/or presentation, and recent stuff is less so.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Is evolution of rules a good thing?

I need to split that question in half.

Is innovation of rules a good thing? Absolutely! Dread (to pick one example) is innovative - and no version of D&D matches it at what Dread does. (Dread would be pretty sucky for D&D as well).

Is throwing away old rulesets a good thing? Only occasionally. B/X and the Rules Compendium very definitely still stand up as good rules. Rifts on the other hand I'd rather run or play in another system. Almost any other system.

Innovation is not automatically better. Innovation just means you are trying to do something new. However that new thing will normally do something better than the old thing - and other things worse. But innovation allows you more options, and no game company I'm aware of has a squad of specially trained ninjas that will break into your house and steal your books. Having more options as to what to play is both a good thing for getting a game together and a good thing within the game as it gives you more sources of inspiration. Just don't think that it means you have to throw your old rulebooks out.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

"This new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff was", or is it "new, improved, better than before!" ?

There are many biases driving both ways, but the mention of the Beatles brings up one that hasn't been explicitly brought up in this thread -- survival bias. This is basically the fact that bad stuff gets forgotten about. RPGs are a relatively new phenomenon -- it's much easier to see in things with a much older history, like plays, books, opera and so on. Opera is an excellent example -- if you go to random modern opera, it will probably not be as good as a random old opera. The reason, obvious if you think about it, is that no-one revives old, bad operas; they die out. Whereas new operas we have to find out if they are good or not.

Same for RPGs. In this thread most people are contrasting *all* modern games with *one* older game -- D&D. Why D&D? Because it's the one that has survived; it might be the best of the old ones! If we look at the next tier of older games -- Traveler, RQ, Tunnels and Trolls -- it becomes harder to say they are close to random modern games. And that's still looking at top tier games. From a full decade.

For a fair comparison, we'd have to look at maybe the top 5 games invented in the 1980s with the top 5 games invented in the 2010s. But we have no idea what they will be. We might guess a couple, but what we're currently doing is looking at comparing a selection of *random quality* modern games with the *best quality* old games.

In other words, it is perfectly possible to state "Of all the games I've played, the older ones tend to have better rules than the modern ones" and "Modern games have better rules than old games", without contradicting yourself. It's basically because you have never been forced to play a whole host of bad, bad games from the 80s ...

 

[Neonchameleon]

"This new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff was", or is it "new, improved, better than before!" ?

There are many biases driving both ways, but the mention of the Beatles brings up one that hasn't been explicitly brought up in this thread -- survival bias. This is basically the fact that bad stuff gets forgotten about. RPGs are a relatively new phenomenon -- it's much easier to see in things with a much older history, like plays, books, opera and so on. Opera is an excellent example -- if you go to random modern opera, it will probably not be as good as a random old opera. The reason, obvious if you think about it, is that no-one revives old, bad operas; they die out. Whereas new operas we have to find out if they are good or not.

Same for RPGs. In this thread most people are contrasting *all* modern games with *one* older game -- D&D. Why D&D? Because it's the one that has survived; it might be the best of the old ones! If we look at the next tier of older games -- Traveler, RQ, Tunnels and Trolls -- it becomes harder to say they are close to random modern games. And that's still looking at top tier games. From a full decade.

For a fair comparison, we'd have to look at maybe the top 5 games invented in the 1980s with the top 5 games invented in the 2010s. But we have no idea what they will be. We might guess a couple, but what we're currently doing is looking at comparing a selection of *random quality* modern games with the *best quality* old games.

In other words, it is perfectly possible to state "Of all the games I've played, the older ones tend to have better rules than the modern ones" and "Modern games have better rules than old games", without contradicting yourself. It's basically because you have never been forced to play a whole host of bad, bad games from the 80s ...

I only disagree with you in one way; D&D has emphatically not remained the same since 1974. In fact I'd go so far as to declare each edition with the possible exception of 3.5 a different game that focussed on
1: Different things than the previous edition did when it was written
2: What the previous edition was actually focussing on when the new one was in development.

For instance 1e was the complicated game of dungeon crawling with lots of rules. 2e on the other hand was written as a game that was both largely compatible with 1e but with all the guidance and some of the rules pointing to something more akin to the Dragonlance Saga. If you read the 1e and 2e DMG it is very clear that they are very much not the same game. And generally people moved away from and towards games for a reason. D&D just gets to say it's remained unchanged because it shares a handful of names for things that are used in very different ways.