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

[outsider]

What next? Can I suggest:

4E is the rap music of RPGs?

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

 

[Nifft]

nothing, I saw nothing

 

[EricNoah]

I think there are people who equate D&D with Medieval Western Europe, and the more it strays from that vision the less "realistic" it seems to them. But that's only one way to play and D&D's best when it can work in all sorts of settings.

 

[SHARK]

I think there are people who equate D&D with Medieval Western Europe, and the more it strays from that vision the less "realistic" it seems to them. But that's only one way to play and D&D's best when it can work in all sorts of settings.

Greetings!

Good post, Eric!

The OP's line of reasoning made me think along the same lines. Indeed, like Jack, I very much enjoy the Western-European mytholgies that are central inspiration to 1E AD&D.

However, I also enjoy mythology and history and inspiration from Chinese, Indian, and African mytholgies, for example. I think part of the philosophical dissonance that Jack laments is reflected by several salient facts:

(1) There have been many more game designers involved with the different editions--from 2E all the way through 3.5E, and now 4E, who are obviously *different* from the design team and developers of 1E AD&D. These different developers have read and been influenced by different sources of literature and inspiration than the team from 1E AD&D.

(2) Through the various editions of D&D, there has been different levels of integration of different mythologies and inspiration than from 1E AD&D, which arguably also *began* with 1E AD&D "Oriental Adevntures".

(3) As the generations of developers change with the different generations of inspiration--from Japanese, to Chinese, as well as different mediums and conduits--from card games to video games, as well as film, and different sources of literature--the game assumptions and parameters change from this influence.

I'm not so sure you could divorce the game ramifications *from* the different influences. In that respect, to do so, to roll back the clock so to speak to the time and mind-set that Jack describes, sure. But to do so, you would have to rip out all of the anime history since then; all of the film history since then (think of how our conceptions of vampires have been changed by Vampire the Masquerade, Anne Rice Novels, and all the different vampire movies in the last 15 years; same thing for werewolves! for example); various films and books dealing with Japan, China, or India; a vast offering of cartoons; and various generations of video games that have all contributed different visuals, mechanics, and themes; Movies from Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, Gladiator, Braveheart, Rob Roy, Kingdom of Heaven; Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon; Martial Arts films, etc, etc.

It seems like there has been a broader, expanding cultural and mythological influence since 1E AD&D, and the various editions reflect those changes in influence, as well as execution.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[fuindordm]

I actually agree with a lot of what Jack7 said. Let me try to rephrase what I understand him to be saying:

1. Any game which consumes a significant fraction of your life should add some value to your life other than "gosh, this is cool fun".

2. D&D has a long history of doing so, encouraging its players to educate themselves with real historical source material. There are plenty of other well-known advantages to RP, of course, but I take it the OP particularly enjoys this one.

3. A less obvious element of "realism" in the game is exercizing our intellectual and moral capacity. The game is more enjoyable when power is not gained for its own sake, but when
the PCs have humanist goals and gain power to attain those goals.

4. Later editions moved away from history, literature and humanism--and more and more towards the overtly fantastic. 3e is a mechanically intricate game which emphasizes the adventures of rather inhuman and unrealistic characters who advance in power for no discernable reason.

Comment: I think 1e did emphasize points 2 and 3 pretty well, and that 3rd ed. has definitely moved away from them to some extent. The literary focus of 3e seems to be along the lines of "lets find a way to enable any fantastic PC imaginable, and as many ways as possible of making them stronger!"

I agree wholeheartedly with point 2. I think point 3 is very group-dependent, however. I disagree with the OP on this point; this style of game is just as possible with 3e as with 1e. I agree, however, that 3e de-emphasizes the idea of PCs with long-term, humanist goals.

I very much doubt that 4e will return to a literary/historical/realistic style--the designers have admitted that they're handing out more power, and that the point of the revision is to improve the 'fun' factor by streamlining the mechanics and elilminating dead time. I think it will be a vast improvement over 3e, and the ideas proposed seem to address many of my complaints with the current edition.

However, 4e nonwithstanding, my next campaign is going to be AD&D-based for reasons similar to the OP's. After running in Eberron for a while (a setting I adore, precisely for its humanist elements), I find myself hankering for a campaign with a more historical atmosphere.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post.

 

[Numion]

2. D&D has a long history of doing so, encouraging its players to educate themselves with real historical source material. There are plenty of other well-known advantages to RP, of course, but I take it the OP particularly enjoys this one.

If this was a factor in whether an RPG was RPG PORNZOR or not, it would automatically mean that any scifi rpg would be rpg porn. I don't believe that - more complicated issues of humanity can be explored in wholly non-historical (fantastic?) surroundings, and this is a very common theme in modern scifi.

 

[fuindordm]

If this was a factor in whether an RPG was RPG PORNZOR or not, it would automatically mean that any scifi rpg would be rpg porn. I don't believe that - more complicated issues of humanity can be explored in wholly non-historical (fantastic?) surroundings, and this is a very common theme in modern scifi.

I totally agree--it's really point 3 (humanist character goals) that keeps any RPG or novel out of the 'porn' category, not point 2 (historical/literary grounding).

Although SF has a role analogous to point 2: that of preparing us for the moral choices we may have to face as new technologies become available. For one excellent recent example, see David Brin's "Kiln People" (not that the technology is feasible).

Ben

 

[mhacdebhandia]

2. D&D has a long history of doing so, encouraging its players to educate themselves with real historical source material. There are plenty of other well-known advantages to RP, of course, but I take it the OP particularly enjoys this one.

I don't believe this should be a limit to which the game adheres, however, because doing so reduces its appeal to the players who aren't interested in playing a D&D game set in a thinly-disguised version of 14th-century Germany.

Which is, let's be honest now, the vast majority of players. If you stripped D&D back to its strict medievalist-with-a-dash-of-magic roots, you would have a game with a very small market share. There are such games out there already, after all, and they're nowhere near touching the heroic fantasy adventure juggernaut that is D&D.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Plus, you know what, I'll say it: the fact that I might play a fighter carrying a longsword and wearing mail armour does not mean that I have the slightest bit of interest in playing in a world which actually reflects medieval history.

I really like learning about medieval history. Most of my history credits at university - it was one of my majors - consisted of medieval history. It is not, however, something I have any interest in incorporating into my D&D campaigns, except strictly on my own terms (for instance, when I want to use the early-medieval "king of a people, not a country" model of rulership in a setting).

I really like settings like Eberron, Planescape, Ravenloft (which reached all the way up to the Victorian era, in some domains), and so on. I don't care if the world is entirely unlike medieval Europe, because it's not even remotely relevant to my games.

 

[Fifth Element]

As for why people think he's a troll, one of the reasons would be the obviously loaded and potentially quite insulting term he chose. "Gaming Pornography". That's equivalent to me saying something like "My gaming group and I have come up with a term to describe the uneccessary and elitist focus on minute details of realism in old school D&D. We call it Intellectual Masturbation". Another reason would be the "like a bad video game" line he used that seems to be so popular in 4th edition discussions. Which is really no different than the "like a bad wargame" line used by people when they are trolling the old school D&D players. Another reason would be that he's saying he's too smart to waste his time with modern D&D, thus implying he's smarter than those that do play it.

Well said. One can't simply ignore the tone of the OP and "address the issues", so to speak. While there may be a point buried in all the inflammatory piffle, it gets lost in all the...well, inflammatory piffle.