Has D&D become too...D&Dish?

[Nightfall]

Send in the Sacred Fallacy!

*second voice at a distance* Send in the Sacred Fallacy!

*third voice further in the distance* Send in the Sacred Fallacy!

*fourth voice way off in the distance* Send in the Sacred Fallacy!

*pause*

Uhm sacred fallacy is dead. But then so is Nitcheche so there.

 

[Hussar]

the reasons for D&D being the way it is serve story, genre convention and gameplay as much as (if not moreso) than logic.

See, to me, DnD has nothing to do with serving genre convention or story. Then again, I don't game to make up stories. Either as a DM or as a player. To me, any story that comes out of the game after play is a bonus, but is certainly not the goal of any game. The goal of a game is to play the game, not to expound on my personal abilities (or lack thereof) to write or create a story.

In other words, to me, the players combined with the DM create the story. If the genre conventions are conflicting with the rules of the game, then one of them has to give way. I never game with the mindset that I am trying to recreate a particular story. I game to explore the aspects of a particular character thrust into a particular situation. Genre convention is meaningless to me.

In other words, I couldn't care less how Tolkein, Howard, or R. L. Stein would play the game. I only care how I play. If the setting completely ignores aspects of the rules in the service of some sort of genre convention, then, well, I want no part of that. The point of the game is to service the game.

Again, as I said before, if you don't want your players to do certain things, change the rules so they can't. Don't leave the rules as is and then whine when the players don't follow along. Complaining that DnD is high magic while allowing all character classes is pointless. The second you have a wizard and a cleric in the party, your game is high magic. Every encounter will feature magic.

If you want to get around that, then you have to change the RAW. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Thieves World, Conan, and other systems do EXACTLY that. That's the point. In order to recreate those genres, you MUST change the RAW.

However, if you play RAW, don't expect the game to emulate any single genre. That's silly. RAW is meant to encompass many genres; so many that it is more or less genre neutral. Or, rather, DnD has become a separate genre unto itself, distinct from most literary genre.

While I completely agree that there needs to be suspension of disbelief, my mind shouldn't be forced to be so open that it falls out my left ear. Six year olds should not be able to poke holes in the setting within the first ten minutes. Granted, everyone has a different tollerance for this sort of thing so YMMV and all that. However, I find the idea of completely ignoring what I see as very, very simple concepts and sweeping them under the carpet as almost insulting. Yes, be willing to swallow some of the lies in the setting - that's cool. But, don't expect me to see the setting and never question any elements ever.

 

[Nightfall]

Uhm Scarred Lands?

 

[Hussar]

Well, apart from some of the mechanics issues I have with SL, let's face it, SL is not attempting to emulate any genre. The various places are inspired by this or that, but, there is certainly no sense that I should be emulating Tolkein or Leiber or any other author when playing SL.

Not that you can't take inspiration from those authors. That's not true. But, to try to emulate them with SL would be very, very difficult.

SL is a high octane setting. PC's and opponents are high powered - heck, just sitting back and praying can garner anyone a +3 bonus at any time. I love the setting, but, it's a good example of where setting has left genre far behind.

 

[shilsen]

I mean, what would Conan do?

"Conan, what is best in life?"
"Continual light streetlamps, magic carpet postal services, and water-elemental powered plumbing."
"Erm....nevermind."

What would Conan do? Probably get his head blown off by the first flying, greater invisible wizard he ran into. D&D doesn't do Conan very well (which is why a specific, very individual, version of the rules had to be created to run Conanesque games), or vice versa. Why? Because the genre conventions of REH's Conan stories aren't the same as D&D's.

As a number of people have pointed out, D&D is effectively a genre on its own and has its own set of genre conventions, many (if not most) of which don't really fit with the kind of genre conventions you seem to have in mind. Lots of people are running games where they do explore the repercussions of the D&D rules and its inherent conventions (and settings, like Eberron, are being written to facilitate such exploration), and to claim that's either impossible or will create huge problems is a little shortsighted, IMNSHO. Saying it simply doesn't suit your tastes, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable. We all game in different ways, and while D&D has trouble catering to every taste, it does cater to a very wide variety.

 

[Guero Caballero]

D&D, whether you love it or not, is it's own unique brand of fantasy and is really only really suited to running "D&D" worlds.

How true.

 

[rounser]

I think that you guys take a lot for granted about D&D's implied setting (everyone does, to the point of throwing tomatoes at it whilst ignoring all the work it does for them), and are into metagaming that I don't dig...but hey, bad wrong fun and all that.

 

[Psion]

Well, apart from some of the mechanics issues I have with SL, let's face it, SL is not attempting to emulate any genre. The various places are inspired by this or that, but, there is certainly no sense that I should be emulating Tolkein or Leiber or any other author when playing SL.

Not that you can't take inspiration from those authors. That's not true. But, to try to emulate them with SL would be very, very difficult.

I think contemplating the exercise is ridiculous. Scarred Lands is a setting; what you emulate when you play scarred lands is... er, Scarred Lands. Scarred Lands has as much a right to exist as its own literary entity as Howard's Hyborea. It doesn't NEED to emulate anything any more than Tolkein NEEDS to emulate Leiber or vice versa. They are contemporaries and share inflluences, but they are their own entity.

Same goes for many D&D worlds, essentially. If you take the metasetting as is, it does carry with it certain assumptions. But you don't have to use the metasetting it its entirety and house ruling and tweaking D&D is an entirely normal function. There's a lot of latitude in what some might call a "D&D world".

 

[SSquirrel]

I give you the Superman paradox: You, Mr. Kent, have the powers of Superman. You can choose to retain those powers for yourself, doing what good you can when you can do it, or you can choose to share those powers with everyone. In other words, one Superman who decides how those powers are used (you) or a world of Supermen where anyone can use those powers how they wish. What do you choose?

Nice try, but Superman can't share his powers even if he wanted to. Letting people who have the money for them have access to magic items or having cities with magic streetlights does not a superman make.

 

[SSquirrel]

Your sense of human nature and my sense of human nature are obviously very different.

Those wizards making your houses presumably worked hard to be able to cast those spells. Who organizes them, and who pays them? Likewise the clerics. Does their religion make them the soupkitchen of the world, or do they demand something for their good services? What happens to the people who make their living off the land? With these clerics feeding everyone, don't the farmers discover that they're making less money? Or none? Even though it might be better for everyone in the long term, it would be worse for a lot of people in the short term, and there would be an uprising.

To be even more cynical, wouldn't curing everyone of Devil Rot prevent me from making even more money selling palliatives? And, if my primary belief is that we should eschew the things of material existence and concentrate on worship and the afterlife (as the Roman Catholic Church taught in the Middle Ages, and still teaches to a degree), what would my motive be to improve the things of this world?

What you are suggesting, in effect, is that people with power will share that power for money, as opposed to using that power to extort money.

Actually you were talking about how, with technology now, we could use it to end all sorts of things and asked me to explain the difference. I never said these things would all happen for free. I said it was POSSIBLE to do X Y and Z with magic, which requires less actual work than the planning and actual labor of the modern world.

No I know that the reason everything isn't cured with magic or whatever is that people have their own agendas. However, all technology is not horded for the future. Telephones, cars, computers etc were all developed and produced and changed society as we know it. WHy couldn't the same happen with magic technology?

Obviously if you don't like that kind of thing you're not going to do it, but I think a lot of people read that Dragon article I mentioned and thought it was cool or already had ideas of that.