Game vs Game System

[pemerton]

AD&D was not only easy to house rule, it pretty much required house ruling to run!

<snip>

3rd Edition promised to be a faster, more streamlined system. The problem was that almost every rule in 3rd edition references every other rule. While the intent seems to have been to make the game more "logical", the effect has been to make it a total system, much like Marxism; either you accept it all, or you don't accept it at all.

<snip>

4th Edition does seem like it is a complete package, of rules and implied setting wielded together into a singular entity.

To summarise: AD&D was not a game you could buy off the shelf and play. Being descended from wargames, it was aimed (at least initially and primarily) at those who were used to committing the sort of time and effort in rules mastery and rules modification that old-fashioned wargames and board games required.

3E was closer to a game you could just buy and play, except that it lacked a world in which to run one's PC once build. 4e will overcome this lack, plus support an introductory GMing style through the quite clever conceit of PoL. Everything else being equal, these increases in playability sound to me like improvements to the game.

By moving flavor and campaign setting into the Players Handbook, it looks to discourage DM creativity in favor of uniformity from game table to game table.

By moving flavour and campaign into the PHB, it looks to make the game more playable. And because the flavour and campaign is PoL, it will almost guarantee GM creativity, whilst facilitating the evolution of that creativity and discouraging canon-mongering.

If WOTC had chosen to emphasize the unique characteristics of tabletop RPGs, such as the creative factor, then there would be hope. However, they've chosen to make a game that looks like it will play like World of Warcraft, except without the convenience and graphics that make WOW fun.

I don't play WoW, although I've got a general idea of how WoW, EQ etc play. I don't get the sense that 4e will necessarily play in the same way: there is nothing about a PoL setting, for example, or about the character build or action resolution rules (as leaked so far), that suggests that the main focus of the game will be on well-defined raids and scavenging loot-drops. Nor is there anything that suggests that character development, and interacting with the campaign world's thematic elements, won't be an important part of the game (as Skeptic has said in a post above, high-exploration gamism).

For me, a more interesting comparison would be with T&T - one of the more successful of the old-school gamist RPGs. For example, the new rules for encounter design (add up XP values until you have the requisite total) in some ways resemble the T&T method of just bundling monsters together and adding up their monster ratings to determine total dice of damage. But whereas T&T was very light-hearted, 4e looks to be more serious in tone - PoL is rather sombre, for example.

Will the designers meet the challenge of combining complex mechanical gamism - which naturally draws the focus away from the gameworld and onto the rules - with a high degree of exploration of a sombre world - which can distract from the sort of competitve focus that D&D gamist play has historically tended to generate?

 

[The Little Raven]

Finally, if I'm running a game where such orders do exist, I want the freedom to make up my own names for them to fit the setting, not be obliged to use theirs.

Are you suggesting that a book saying "Golden Wyvern Adept" is preventing you from making up your own names? I don't see how an implied setting that is consistent (as opposed to 3e's implied setting that is inconsistent) impinges your "freedom" to do that in any way.

For the first time in 30 years, it looks like an edition of D&D is going to hinder that.

Could we get an explanation for this? I've never seen a single person that claims this actually provide a logical rationale for why this is the case. It always just comes down to the claim, with no evidence to support it.

I'm not sure they realised how much of the D&D market doesn't actually play in their published settings. Or perhaps they do and thought this would force us to adopt them.

Or they know how many new people are turned off by having to spend time worldbuilding before they can even start playing the game. Other games make it easy for you to sit down, roll up sone characters, and start having fun, but D&D has always made this more difficult for new players by requiring them to buy more supplements (adventures, settings, etc.).

 

[pemerton]

The best part about TTRPGs in general is that we can do anything with them we want. D&D doesn't need stated goals -- all it needs to do is provide enough tools, with as few restrictions as possible, to allow players and DMs to use it in whatever manner they deem most fun.

D&D has never had a singular play premise (well, maybe OD&D, but I wouldn't know). They have all run the gamut from dungeon crawling to sword and sorcery pulp adventure to high fantasy questing to planespanning cosmic wierdness.

I don't accept that you can do anything you want with D&D (be it Basic/Expert, BECMI, 1st ed, 2nd ed or 3rd ed - I'll pass on OD&D which I don't know very well).

Every rules system has made it possible for a mid-to-high level fighter to beat a lion or tiger in hand-to-hand combat. As this is a virtually superhuman feat, it follows that every edition of D&D mentioned above has made it impossible to use the rules to play a realism-based, grim-and-gritty game. Contrast this with RQ, or RM, which (in their skill and combat systems, if not their magic systems) virtually enforce such a playstyle.

Furthermore, every rules system has had very well-defined character improvement rules. In earlier editions it was primarily gold, with monsters adding a little extra XP. This meant the game strongly supported Conan-esque looting style play, but not (for example) LOTR-type questing. There was an interesting article in Dragon (around number 90-100) that tried to turn the monster XP rules into a more generic challenge-reward system, but even with such a rules change there was no overcoming the necessity of gold to earn all those thousands of XPs required.

3E, on the other hand, with its challenge-rating XP system, makes it clear that the premise of play is the overcoming of challenges by the PCs (primarily through combat, given that the only other sort of challenges with any rules support are hazards and traps, and they are handled pretty cursorily). As in T&T, money now becomes a reward that lets PCs acquire the gear they need to beat challenges, rather than a source of improvement (ie XP) in itself.

Even if we ignored all the other problems one would have using 3E for LOTR-type questing play, you would also have to tweak the reward/improvement system to support such a game - perhaps by ditching XP and level gain, letting PCs start at a (varied) range of levels, giving the lower level ones a starting pool of fate points to compensate for their weaker stats, and using fate points rather than XPs as the reward currency for achieving thematically appropriate goals.

In short: D&D is no more generic as a fantasy RPG engine than is RQ, RM, Pendragon, T&T or TRoS. Which is to say, not that generic at all.

The more specific a playstyle a game's system is geared toward, the more specific a setting or milieu it is wrapped up in, the less useful it is to a larger number of users.

There is no real reason to think this is true. If a large number of users want a certain sort of play, then what will be most useful to them is a game that supports that play style. An RPG which aims at the (in my view, unattainable) goal of utter genericness is likely to be sufficiently incoherent that many people will not find it fun to play at all. There is some evidence, at least, that AD&D 2nd ed suffered from this problem.

For the reasons Skeptic has given above, I think that the increasing recognition by the 3E and 4e designers of the reality of D&D - that its rules primarily support and are primarily used for gamist play - has been a good thing, not a bad one. I would think it can only strengthen the appeal of the game by making it easier to play and get fun from playing.

 

[jdrakeh]

Ok, try this.

I should clarify -- I'm talking about a unifying thematic premise. And I agree with Reynard that no such thing exists in D&D (or, for example, GURPS). I did not mean "premise" in the literal sense of a simple argument from which a conclusion is drawn. Any written work will, of course, will contain individual statements of that nature.

 

[pemerton]

I should clarify -- I'm talking about a unifying thematic premise.

So are those who say that D&D (in all its editions) has had one.

I think Simon Marks list is not too bad - though I don't agree that one can change the reward system as easily as he implies.

Just to re-iterate one point from my previous post - no editions of D&D (except OD&D? I don't know it well enough to say one way or another) permits grim-and-gritty play of the sort that (subject to their magic rules) is the only sort of play that RQ and RM support.

 

[jdrakeh]

Whoops! Double-post!

 

[jdrakeh]

So are those who say that D&D (in all its editions) has had one.

Okay, then why does Simon list a bunch of individual arguments that don't add up to one whole?

Just to re-iterate one point from my previous post - no editions of D&D (except OD&D? I don't know it well enough to say one way or another) permits grim-and-gritty play of the sort that (subject to their magic rules) is the only sort of play that RQ and RM support.

Failure to facilitate one thing does not necessitate the existence of another. That's a common logical fallacy. That is, if D&D fails to do grim and gritty this alone does not mean that it has a unifying thematic premise of. . . er. . . not grim and gritty (and, incidentally, by the RAW grim and gritty play is absolutely supported by several editions of D&D).

Likewise, neither RM or RQ support solely grim and gritty play (in fact, referring to either as "grim and gritty" will likely get a laugh out of people who have actually played them). Both do and are fully capable of supporting high heroics. To say otherwise is wholly innacurate.

 

[FireLance]

If I might draw an analogy between D&D and Lego (or the interconnected building block system of your choice):

Older versions of D&D were more like the generic building block sets: it gave you the blocks but didn't tell you what to do with them, so you were pretty much left to yourself to play with them and construct whatever you want.

4e appears to be more like the themed sets: the blocks come with instructions that allow you to put them together in a particular way to get say, a house, or a spaceship, or a lion, or whatever. It doesn't mean that you have to use the blocks as suggested (e.g. you can use the lion set and still make something that looks vaguely like a house), but they work best when you do. If you don't, you'll have to leave some specialized blocks unused, or twist them around to their closest approximations in what you wanted to build.

Now, it seems to me that WotC is taking the perspective that themed sets with instructions will sell better than generic sets, if only because beginning players will be turned off or intimidated by a large pile of blocks and no suggestions on how to use them, and people like me, who grew up on both generic Lego sets and older versions of D&D, will be using the basic blocks to build whatever they want, anyway.

And now, I have the urge to end this post with: But ze blocks are still ze same! ZEE BLOCKS ARE STEEL ZEE SAME!!!

 

[Henry]

I think Simon Marks list is not too bad - though I don't agree that one can change the reward system as easily as he implies.

Just to re-iterate one point from my previous post - no editions of D&D (except OD&D? I don't know it well enough to say one way or another) permits grim-and-gritty play of the sort that (subject to their magic rules) is the only sort of play that RQ and RM support.

I have to disagree here; grim-gritty in the RQ style is very doable in 1E and 2E, especiallly with a few minor rules changes, and also since the cleric and magic-user spell lists are in the control of the DM moreso in those editions than newer ones.

also, questing was supported quite well in 1E and 2E, also, as long as the questing was tied to monsters fought during the quest. However, the training rules from 1E were not very supportive of questing, I'll admit, since using them required lots of gold -- but then, the training rules were meant to relieve characters of some of those hoards of gold and valuables found during adventuring, so they weren't strictly necessary.

That said, there WAS a central premise, once which doesn't have to exist currently -- the original premise was that you find monsters, kill them, and take their stuff. Now, a group of PCs could spend their entire time embroiled in intrigues in a city, never touch a weapon for ten sessions, and make it to 6th level! (Wouldn't want to be a game I played in, but that's just me. ) And you could make the bards, beguilers, and mages necessary to do this very thing, without a fighter in sight. In 4E, I'm curious to see how they'll solve this playstyle, because a character who isn't using their combat-related powers sound like they're going to be wasting half their abilities.

 

[Reynard]

For me, 4e changes some of the premises (I guess) but almost all the ones I've mentioned? They are kept.

That's because you selected your list of "premises" (which are actually conventions of the D&D meta-genre, but I won't argue semantics with you) to coincide with your assertion that 4E will still do D&D fine. But if you throw back ina number of D&D conventions -- vancian magic, save-or-die mechanics, insidious "one roll" traps -- you find that 4E is in fact changing a great number of D&D's basic conventions that have worked and kept D&D on top of the industry for 30 years.