Geriatric Grumbling

[Drifter Bob]

Geez d00d, hasn't your head recovered from that explodiation yet?

I'm sorry, would you care to translate that into English?

DB

 

[hong]

I'm sorry, would you care to translate that into English?

DB

Smirk. Obviously not.

 

[diaglo]

i don't see a choice in the poll for me.

i'm an old fogey. and my hat of d02 knows no limit.

i'd like to see D&D return to what it should be.

Original D&D(1974) is the only true game. All the other editions are just poor imitations of the real thing.

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

i don't see a choice in the poll for me.

i'm an old fogey. and my hat of d02 knows no limit.

You have a d02 Hat? presumably it's lens shaped with the 1 on one side and the 2 on the other!

I too am an old fogey, the last set od DnD rules I bought was ADnD.

My option? When you'r tired of DnD/D20 look for other games (there are a lot of excellent frpg's out there with many, varied, interesting rules systems, and most of them appear to be cheaper & easier to run than DnD.

GOM

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

It's funny...games like D&D, which on the surface seem intended for a less-mature audience, have systems which are more complicated than games aimed at an older and/or more mature demographic, such as Vampire. I would rather use the White Wolf system to introduce a new player to the idea of roleplaying than D&D (a situation I currently find myself in). And yet, if that same player was younger in age, I would prefer the more complicated system that lacked all of the mature themes one would find in a game like Vampire.

Wow. We've seen very different games of Vampire. It's possible, however unlikely, that the designers of Vampire were aiming at a mature audience. In my experience, they seem to have hit a "mature" audience, i.e. a group primarily composed of angsty adolescents who are looking for a way to parley their roleplaying game into a RL sexual escapade. YMMV, of course. And I have seen one group of Vampire players that seemed interested in something other than having an excuse to be freaky in public, but they were the exception rather than the rule.

This trend of simpler rules for more mature games tells me that the people in the industry think that once we get to a certain age, we realize just how irrelevant most of the rules are and start focusing on what is really important: the story. Then again, I know plenty of people who are in their 40s that are perfectly happy with hack-and-slash. To each his own, I guess.

Have you ever seen what happens when a power-gamer gets into a game of Mage? Major bad mojo. The ruleset is so sparse and vague that it's incredibly open to abuse. Maybe you play with a group of hard-core storytellers who don't do so, but that makes you the exception in terms of gamer demographics, as far as I can tell.

Most of the people I play with are just there to have fun, but I've got one who gets really into her character's personality and one who seems to derive the most pleasure from optimizing his character. D&D's robust ruleset, while certainly breakable, provides enough balance to keep all the characters in the game.

And really, 3.x is not that complex. 9 times out of 10 when you want to do some unusual combat action the difference is +/- 2 or 4 to the usual modifiers on an attack roll. This is hardly baroque.

 

[Ourph]

Once again, you are missing my point, or we are talking past each other. Fafhred and Gray mouser did constantly deal with real life issues like being broke, or being hungry, or being on the lam, or getting religion, or falling in love, whatever. Of course it's there when it's important to the story. I don't advocate a game where you pay bills all day, but introducing some of these mundane elements can make a game seem more internally consistent and immersive, and can also bring in all kinds of plot hooks.

I guess I consider those "real life issues" to fall under the same heading as their romantic involvements, i.e. "window dressing" or "reasons to do stupid heroic stuff" but not really the focus of the story. We may be more in agreement about that than I assumed at first.

To me, all of those "real life issues" are things that, in an RPG, should be covered in the first 10 minutes of the game when the GM reads the two paragraph intro text to the players. Something along the lines of: "You have arrived in Smirksville without a copper to your name. Your horse died on the road. Your armor rusted from the constant rain. Your sword broke while you were trying to use it as a can opener. However, luckily for you, the town of Smirksville is beset by a problem. The incompetent local wizard miscast a summoning spell, and there's now a horde of demonic rats inhabiting the sewers and plaguing (literally) the town. The townspeople would be eternally grateful (and might even feed you) if you'd go down into the sewers and kill a hundred or so."

The point is, I don't want to spend game time roleplaying through the horse dying, the armor rusting, or the sword breaking, I just want it to be there as a good reason to go do the fun stuff.

 

[Ourph]

I disagree...I think more rules = more ease of play, and nothing negative is assumed about it. This codified set of rules allows me to allow everyone to use their imagination to it's fullest extent without having to be near-omniscient and mirco-managing all their options. I can be reasonably confident, with this ruleset, that if someone has a good idea, I can implement it in a way that will be fun for everyone. And if they don't have a good idea, they can still choose an option that's fun for everyone.

Obviously experiences and viewpoints differ, and some players find it easier to think outside the box than others. Here's an example from a game I ran about a year ago that illustrates my point:

Two players (1/2 orc fighter and human barbarian) were exploring a cave system in bandit country. The rest of their party was several chambers back examining a strange door and the two were checking along their backtrail to make sure no one was following the party. They ran into a small group of human bandits. The bandits won initiative and the bandit leader stepped forward and demanded to know why "Gorlak" had sent them. The PCs knew "Gorlak" was the leader of a band of humanoid mercenaries working for the local lord (this encounter clued the party in that he was a traitor). On their initiative, the players said they were attacking. I pointed out that the bandit leader looked as if he were ready to talk and didn't show any signs of being hostile and asked if they were sure they wanted to engage in combat right away. The players answers was "Neither of us has any ranks in Bluff, so it won't do any good to try to lie to him."

Now, one of these players ran a bard in another campaign and came up with some of the most creative lies, stories and diplomatic speeches I've ever heard, so it wasn't lack of ability on the part of the players that was preventing them from coming up with a better strategy than "ATTACK!". It was the fact that they had already made up their minds that the rules said they had almost no chance of success if they attempted to lie their way out of the situation, so they weren't even going to try.

The PCs attacked, and the bandits (with their superior numbers) killed both characters.

When I told the players after the battle that if they had come up with a reasonable lie, I wouldn't even have called for a Bluff check, I would have just allowed it to succeed they were a little perplexed and annoyed. One suggested that I should have announced something like that as a "house rule" before we started playing.

Like I said, I'm sure some players find it easier to "think outside the box" and be creative in spite of what the rules tell them is likely to succeed or not succeed. Playing consistently with a good DM who cares more about rewarding good, creative play rather than adhering slavishly to the rules helps a lot. But it doesn't take many sessions of playing with a DM whose philosophy is "rules, numbers and dice first; creativity and smart thinking second" to put an otherwise good player in the same mindset. At least, that has been my experience.

 

[Ourph]

I happen to be one of those who disagree. Remember, Rule Zero is your friend. If you and your group think that the rules, for whatever reason, doesn't serve your game properly, then modify or ditch whatever it is that isn't working out for you and work out something else as an alternate. Find another game or setting if need be. Just find or do something that works for you and your group.

While this is obviously good advice, the whole point of the thread is "Would you like to see a more mature D&D, either as the only choice or as a separate choice". As easy as you make it sound "modify(ing) or ditch(ing) whatever it is that isn't working" isn't really that simple for a lot of people.

If I were to go through and modify or ditch everything in 3e that doesn't work for me, I'd basically be rewriting the entire game (ditch feats, ditch skills, ditch or change most of the combat options, drastically alter most of the classes, etc.). That's a lot of work. It also makes 99% of the supplements for D&D/D20 on the market absolutely useless for me except as a source of ideas/inspiration.

Fortunately, I have a game that's perfect for my tastes in B/X D&D. Unfortunately (both for me and for the RPG publishing community) I have a lot of money I'd LIKE to spend on RPG stuff, but nothing to spend it on that would be particularly useful to me. So it would be very nice to see an in print game that catered to a taste for low rules overhead, high adventure gaming.

Again, whether you want to call such a game "mature" or not is up to you.

 

[hikingnola]

Spoke like a zealous atheist.

To quote myself: "Black and White are also shades of grey." IME, games that remove black and white are usually less "mature" and more "wrongheaded." Vampire, In Nomine, Demon:The Fallen, and a slew of other "grey" games had absolute good and evil extant.

In fact, the most "mature" games are probably those that take out "forces of grey" and let black and white make grey the right way--by blending.

At the risk of interjecting, in his original post "derelictjay" said nothing at all about "removing" black and white - or even attempting to do that. How would that make something more mature or realistic anyway?

He suggested, and I think it's a good one, that more gray is needed - not less black-and-white. I've sat in many games that are so focused on BIG, WORLD-SAVING issues (i.e. black-vs-white, good-vs-evil) that the "little gray everyday" stuff doesn't appear at all.

And yet that type of stuff makes up 99.9% of our everyday existence.

 

[RFisher]

I have seen frequent arguments on this and other forums, as to how DnD has changed since 'the old days', whether the new generations of players and the influence of CRPG's and card games have 'dumbed down' DnD or not. Whether the changes within each subsequent generation of rules have perhaps unwittingly tended to support this trend, and encouraged "roll playing" and munchkinism at the expense of actual old-school role playing, leading to a decrease in the sophistication of plot in favor of better balanced rules.

I currently find myself preferring classic D&D (specifically the Moldvay Basic & Cook Expert sets) to d20 D&D. I think the things that make it better apply equally to younger & older gamers. Indeed, this edition was intentionally designed to be accessible to younger players & parent friendly, but it didn't go so far as to make it something that could only appeal to kids.

(I think others may disagree with me on that final point.)