Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 1433435" data-attributes="member: 2629">Video games have been around for a long time. I remember playing Pool of Radiance back in the late 80s. It didn't change how I role played. It wasn't until the internet became a regular part of my life that I began to see my approach to the game change.Back in the days of 1E and early 2E, people had only the books and Dragon magazine (White Dwarf, Dungeon, etc ...) to use as aides in designing a game and running a character. The limits of their tactics were bound by their mind and the things in those books. If you wanted to figure out how to optimize an attack strategy, you had to do all the work yourself.Now, we have the internet. Somebody comes up with an issue and starts discussing it on a message board. Then, someone else takes the work of the first person, analyses it and adds their own $0.02. Then another person adds their perspective and analysis. Soon, you have a 200 post long thread discussing the optimized use of power attack that has been read by thousands of players. Those players take that knowledge back to their games and spread it amongst all their friends. One of them returns to the internet to discuss the use of power attack in a particular scenario and the cycle begins again, but in a narrower area of the general rule.This has resulted in an optimization of tactics in the game by players and DMs. In the old days, many players did not consider the benefits of interacting their abilities with the abilities of other PCs. Now, these discussions flood message boards on a daily basis. As people have begun to discuss the optimization of the game, they tend to pull back from the game and see it as a collection of rules instead of as a game as a whole. Think back to the earliest board games you ever played. Candyland. Chutes and Ladders. Hungry, Hungry Hippys. Those games had rules, but we approached the games as a whole entity instead of thinking about how to maximize our chances of winning by analyzing each rule in isolation. That was how I approached D&D when I was learning to play it in the early 80s at the age of 7. Not as a subset of rules that could be optimized, but as a framework for fun. In other words, the game has changed because we've been given too much info on how to optimize the game. If you want to return to the days of old when the game was less like a computer game and more like a storytelling session, I suggest either:1.) Finding players that have no idea of how to use the internet (I think there are 6 left in the US), or2.) Use a new rule system - but don't let your players buy or look at the rule books or touch their character sheets! Instead, just help them through character construction and hold all the paper yourself. Just tell them to roll a die when they need to and verbally explain what they need to know. If they can't hold the rules to min/max them, they'll approach the game from a more of a storytelling perspective.</blockquote>

Verification