Gaming Pornography: Will 4th Edition lead to a more Realistic and Useful Game?

[EricNoah]

I loathe spikey armor too, but i see why they did it; the concept appeals to the current younger generation that probably form the majority of their fans.

I thought it was intended to be a defense against grappling (grappler might not want to grapple you so much if you deal damage each round).

 

[Shadeydm]

I thought it was intended to be a defense against grappling (grappler might not want to grapple you so much if you deal damage each round).

I thought it was a way around not threatening adjacent squares when using a reach weapon.

 

[Nebulous]

I thought it was intended to be a defense against grappling (grappler might not want to grapple you so much if you deal damage each round).

Hadn't thought of that, and that's a valid in-game reason for spikey armor. And it might have had more validity if 3.x grappling wasn't such as pain in the butt. In our gaming group though, spiked armor has never come up. Hell, grappling is unfortunately usually avoided too if we can help it.

 

[(contact)]

I think it's natural that as we add more and more rules for more and more things that don't exist in the real world -- magic, monsters, etc. -- the game becomes increasingly self-referential and divorced from reality.

Well put.

When I look back to my early gaming years, most of the decisions we made in the game were grounded in the game world, not in the game rules -- Where do we set up camp? What kind of kit did we bring? Wait, we're running out of food? How do we find these Caves of Chaos? "Bree yark!" They're surrendering!

I would love to see the next version of D&D take more cues from real life exploration and military adventures, but I doubt it will.

See, I hear that, but I'm not entirely for it. Our early D&D games were that way as well, because that's what early D&D was about. Exploration, the dungeon as puzzle, traps that had to be outwitted rather than defeated through class abilities, etc. Over time, the game moved toward a tactical strategy game and away from strategic resource management game. This is a change that looking back, is much more fun for me.

Hearing about Gary Gygax running a game for the EnWorld mods, and the loooong stretches of nothing happening that were part and parcel of the old-school exploration model, I'm actually well pleased that those elements aren't as present.

For example, for nostalgia's sake, I was going to update The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun for my 3e group a couple of years back, and it was so crushingly dull, I let (coughinsistedcough) them just bypass the entire maze with a find the path. a.k.a. "find exciting part of the adventure."

Now, I know that there are players out there who love that kind of thing, but they don't play at my groups. There was some serious eye-glazing going on, and I realized now why we tend to hand-wave all the real-world referential exploration/adventure type of details.

Because we'd honestly rather play in a fantasy comic book complete with villain speeches, witty quips, moral predicaments and nasty fights raining down one after another in a patently unrealistic fashion.

I do think you can cover human themes in that kind of game in a tangental way-- motivations, decision points, politics, etc. In fact, you can ground the game in the game world through those big themes. "Why are there bandits here? Something fishy is going on, let's go investigate this remote outpost looking for answers (knowing, because it's D&D that wherever we roam, there will be a giant brawl with fireballs and flashing swords)."

Not always the stuff of Liberal Arts programs, but usually a good time. Where the rubber meets the road, my groups want to pack the most fun into the experience. We get our intellectual edification from other sources, like sports and reality television.

 

[shurai]

. . . SWSE . . .

Star Wars Saga Edition, right?

Anyway, I've thought about it some more and I want to suggest something alternative to the people on Jack7's side (of which I am one). There's a book, Everything Bad is Good for You, that suggests that some of the popular whipping-boys of the modern period with respect to the degeneration of culture are actually positive influences. The examples given, which I believe include D&D and video games, note that much of it can be seen as training for the kind of technical proficiency necessary for contemporary life.

I think this carries some weight. I remember doing my taxes this past year, and thinking to myself that there was something awfully familiar about it. The character sheet is a lot like a 1040 when it comes to it. Just look at them side by side some time. The increasingly crunchy rules corpus is probably becoming an increasingly good approximation of the US tax code. I think the kind of obsession over mechanical optimization that Jack7 detests is actually good practice for manipulating any of the other arbitrary, crufty, maze-like systems of rules in modern life.

This kind of thinking stretches different parts of the brain, for sure, than the bits associated with morality and metaphor: It is nothing but arid logic, assembled however intricately. Yet this is probably more relevant to my job than all that fuzzy liberal artsy stuff, even if I enjoy it: Like many gamers, I work with computers for my living. I'm painfully aware that I need to be better at dry computation and symbol manipulation.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

What else can I add to this discussion that hasn't already been said? Probably not much, if anything.

I remember my first real exposure to DnD. A friend and I found a boxed set and some books buried in one of the toy bins at summer camp. My first character was a Wolverine clone. His first battle was against a helicopter in a shopping mall. I was 7. As we got older our stories got more complex, more well-rounded, more adult, as stories and subjects and thoughts naturally do as one ages.

But I've never really forgotten that first character. For whatever reason, it's always stuck with me. It's kind of reminded me that this game really shouldn't be taken too seriously. Oh don't get me wrong; I've spent hours crafting characters, backgrounds, and worlds like many of you. But at the end of the day, it's little more then a personal creative outlet, a game.

When I want ethics and morals, I turn to philosophy and religion. If I want morality plays, well there's plenty of that in Shakespeare for me. Should I need to work on my logic... I've been prepping for the LSAT since April, so I know I get plenty of that. If I want to have fun, there are a number of things I like to do, but one of those is DnD.

So while my tastes have matured and my sense of story has grown, DnD and other RPGs will always remind me of Wolverine fighting a helicopter in a shopping mall: sometimes ridiculous, often over-the-top, but altogether fun.

 

[Jack7]

The Game's the Thing

I'm not against a lot of the things some of you guys are assuming I'm against, as some of you others have already figured out from what I've said.

I'm not against Eberron, if it's what I think it is (after all every game has to have a mechanical method of expressing itself, a setting in which to take place, and one is potentially as good as the other, depending on how it is employed), nor against many of the other things about modern gaming. Nor am I against things changing or evolving, or being different. I like both Harry Potter and Tolkien, both Shakespeare and Frank Miller.

And I'm not for quoting Shakespeare as the end all and be all of gaming, I could have just as easily quoted Groucho Marx (I suspect it still would have not been understood). It's not the point that Shakespeare has to be quoted, merely that it is possible to do so. It is not the point that a Paladin has to be prefect, it is that he actually stand for something and be something other than a "gaming device." And that the player understand that the Paladin is not just a series of stats and powers.

What I am against is the very idea that the game exists as a separate reality, divorced from this reality and the real world, and that it is structured to function in that manner. As proof of my point I offer this observation, many of you seem unable to even imagine the idea of reality and the game co-existing. That they must be separate. That if I criticize the idea of lack of reality in gaming this is an invalid criticism because of course the game should be something utterly separate from reality in each and every respect. Your automatic and reflexive position is that they need not have anything to do with each other, you simply find the very concept of interdependence or even of "interactivity" hard to imagine.

You can easily imagine the imaginary, cannot understand the connection between the imaginary and the real.

The game was once, a Game of Industry.
It has become a Gaming Industry.

That is exactly what I mean by the fact that the modern versions of the game have engendered an atmosphere that is divorced from reality. So divorced that some of you can't even understand the point of what I'm saying.

If what I was saying were not true then you could easily understand what I mean, even if you disagreed, and some of your disagreements have been valid, or I can at least understand your points or how you might have on occasion misunderstood my particular expressions. But many of you keep arguing things I never even remotely implied.

I have no problems with the game per se, or most settings, per se.
I have no problem with high magic versus low magic per se.
Those aren't the points at all. Employment would determine the basic facility in each game in those cases.

But whereas I can easily grasp your point, that the game is not the same as reality (something I also stated early on because it is obviously true), some of you seem almost totally unable to grasp my point, which is that they should at least be related for the game to be of real value. Despite what I have plainly said some of you say in immediate response, it is a game, it cannot be reality. To which I say, I never said that, and you completely missed the point.

It is this obsession to create a game, a world, a setting, an atmosphere which exists for it's own sake (and all of the periphery accoutrements), which is related to nothing other than itself, that consumes time and resources and money and effort that produces no benefit other than within the orbit of itself. It has become pornographic, self-obsessed, sheltered, and inward-gazing, full of barren myths, pointless religions, unheroic god-powered supermen, and yet consumed with earth shattering supermagic which exists for no reason other than to say, "isn't that awesome dood." (Now if someone takes those imaginary things, big or small, and then creates or employs them in a useful way to some other effect, I not only have no problem with that idea, I encourage it, and I leave that wide open as to how it may be beneficial. I think it could potentially be beneficial in a whole host of ways.)

But I suspect that many of you reflexively failed to see my point precisely because the modern versions of the game (and perhaps to a degree this is always the case with such games, but I think the modern versions over-emphasize this point strongly) create a sort of either conscious or subconscious psychological mind-set of disconnection between game and reality which makes even the very idea of them co-existing mutually and beneficially so alien a concept that it is about the one and only thing you cannot imagine. In other words when all the world's a play of shadows it's hard to see anything other than the dark. The game has become a magic trick whose illusion is not meant the fool the audience, but the magician himself. The magician has become the performer so completely, that he can't even remember that his own illusion is unreal.

Now ask yourself why that is, and if you do finally get the point, if it might not be possible to at least try and imagine a more beneficial way.

 

[Reynard]

See, I hear that, but I'm not entirely for it. Our early D&D games were that way as well, because that's what early D&D was about. Exploration, the dungeon as puzzle, traps that had to be outwitted rather than defeated through class abilities, etc. Over time, the game moved toward a tactical strategy game and away from strategic resource management game.

For me, this si the root of the problem, and why I get frustrated with those people that adamantly deny that the game has changed over the decades and editions. I want a game that is as much about strategic exploration as it is about heroic battles and epic romances. The system does matter when it comes to such things -- particularly with D&D, because it has an extremely powerful "stay current" philosophy in its player base culture. I am lucky in that I have a group that shares many of the same tastes as I do and is willing to step into the way-back machine with me for a new 1E campaign. But I have another group -- which are actually closer friends -- and most of those want to play whatever the most current version is. We're already talking leveraging one member's status as an Ultimate Gamer finalist to get to be a 4e playtest group. I love playing with those guys and running for those guys, but 4e, by all evidence shown so far, will have finally stepped far enough away from the original design that I don't think I can run it.

 

[Terraism]

All right, I'll just get the snark out of the way: I suppose you also want those kids to get off your lawn? End of snark.

I'm just gonna stand up here, raise my hand, and say "darn straight! Back in my day..." And, erm... I'm 23.

So, yes, I do, to a point, empathize with the original poster - though not exactly with his tone, or the declaration of the current game as pornography. I, like him, prefer my games grittier, less fantastic, more grounded in at least a pseudo-historic base. It's fun for me - I'm just not going to claim something different is wrong. The only concerns I have with 4E are unrelated, inasmuch as I mourn what seems to be the passing of an era, and I feel a bit misled. I'll deal with 'em, though, and I'm as psyched as anyone about the rules-based changes - those look nifty!

edit: funny, but apparently innappropriate political joke removed. My bad.

nothing, I saw nothing

And, you know, this is off-topic and all, but props to you two. That was one of the classiest edit/counter-edits I've ever seen. I expect nothing less from Nifft, but still, things that well-done deserve some calling out for praise once in a while. Outsider, Nifft - thanks for being civil folk.

 

[Scribble]

mmmm two things I really like together in one thread.