How Weird Should D&D Be?

[Dannyalcatraz]

[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION], have you ever read Elfquest? It's very cool and umm, SPOILER ALERT, your idea sort of relates to it.

All the comics are online (for free!) here.

Yeah!

I bought my first one at a Mom & Pop bookstore near my house in Manhattan, Kansas back in 1977-8. Because I had all the comics, game books, modules and Dragon Magazines they had in stock, and they didn't have any sci-fi or fantasy novels I wanted, I was just wandering the store, waiting for my parents to finish when I saw the 3rd issue and bought it.

By the next time I went back, I was looking for back-issues and new stuff.

Good series.

 

[avin]

Should be limited only by DM imagination and players feeling comfortable playing that.

 

[Mallus]

True, though I hope as a default players can't play beholders or giant lynxes, or buy portable holes.

Sure.

Besides that, most of that is peripheral to the majority of the game. A character could adventure their whole life and never encounter most of those, compared to a magic sword, or an elemental, or an orc, or a goblin. I'd keep these kinds of things on the fringes, as they were for most of D&D's history.

I'd argue the kind of things I mentioned --excluding artifacts like the Machine of Lum the Mad and the Apparatus of Kwalish-- weren't peripheral at all. They were the kinds of things that helped define D&D-style fantasy. I should note the majority of campaigns I've seen featured portable holes and run-ins with D&D's classic, protected-IP monsters --were your actual play experiences significantly different?

A character might never encounter such things, if that character never made it past 3rd level, or they never went on published adventures (or homebrew adventures that mined the classic modules for material). If they did, odds are they encounter some, if not a great deal of, D&D traditional weirdness.

You certainly can run D&D in a more pure Tolkien or Howard-esque mode, or even as historical fiction, if that's your preference, but that's not the tone set by the game's published materials, not even if you limit yourself to the core books (in any edition).

 

[DogBackward]

Really? Which books established this baseline?

I started with AD&D, Greyhawk, and the classic tournament modules. They were plenty weird (and fairly high-powered).

All of these settings start with the same baseline: medieval europe, and then they add in the fantasy bits. I shouldn't have to remove things from an established setting in order to run my game, since there will be far more people not running in a given setting that people who are. Again, in order to make a truly modular system, you have to find the most basic, simplified version as your baseline. No established setting is appropriate to use as a baseline for a modular game.

 

[Sunseeker]

Remain?

You should have wrote, "I feel D&D should try something new and focus on the purely fantasy segment of the hobby".

The amount of D&D that goes outside the "fantasy segment" is fairly minimal.

 

[Greg K]

Sure.


I'd argue the kind of things I mentioned --excluding artifacts like the Machine of Lum the Mad and the Apparatus of Kwalish-- weren't peripheral at all. They were the kinds of things that helped define D&D-style fantasy. I should note the majority of campaigns I've seen featured portable holes and run-ins with D&D's classic, protected-IP monsters --were your actual play experiences significantly different?.

Yes, mine was significantly different.

Beholders? Only faced them in a computer game.
Displacer Beasts? only in one of the Gold Box SSI computer games
Blink Dogs? If I encountered them, it was in the same computer game as the Displacer Beast
Drow? only in the D-series of modules and Q1 and that was the only time back in 1e.
Carrion Crawler? Not since switching from Holmes to 1e
Gauth? Never
Githzerai? Never
Githyanki? Never
Kuo Toa? Only in the D series back in 1e
Mimic? a couple of times early in 1e
Mindflayers? Never
Morkoth? Nope
Otyugh? only in a computer game
Owlbears? Never
Roper? Never
Rust Monsters? Never
Shrieker? back in Holmes or early 1e.
Slaad? never
Umber Hulk? once in a module
Yuan Ti? never
Cloaker, Ear Seeker, Lurker Above, Piercers, Rot Grub? Nope

Of the above, the only things that interest me are the Yuan Ti and, maybe, the Beholder, Carrion Crawler if they are used very sparingly.

As for spaceships, only once when we went through S3 back in 1e and I thought it was lame back then.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I like the weirdness dialed way down for the overall setting. The weirder things get the less I identify with a character in the setting and the less well my intuition works with regard to how the world works. Examples of this include threads on this site which discussed how traditional castles wouldn't work at all in a D&D setting, and the effects of a few first level spells on a world's economy (it utterly transforms it)

That said I have no trouble it all with really weird individual elements. I.e., one flying carpet in the world is cool. A world where everyone has a flying carpet doesn't appeal.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Beholders? Only faced them in a computer game.
Displacer Beasts? only in one of the Gold Box SSI computer games
Blink Dogs? If I encountered them, it was in the same computer game as the Displacer Beast
Drow? only in the D-series of modules and Q1 and that was the only time back in 1e.
Carrion Crawler? Not since switching from Holmes to 1e
Gauth? Never
Githzerai? Never
Githyanki? Never
Kuo Toa? Only in the D series back in 1e
Mimic? a couple of times early in 1e
Mindflayers? Never
Morkoth? Nope
Otyugh? only in a computer game
Owlbears? Never
Roper? Never
Rust Monsters? Never
Shrieker? back in Holmes or early 1e.
Slaad? never
Umber Hulk? once in a module
Yuan Ti? never
Cloaker, Ear Seeker, Lurker Above, Piercers, Rot Grub? Nope

In all honesty, in 30+ years in D&D, I've only encountered about 2/3rds of that list, and many of those were only encountered rarely, or once.

...but the rest were still part of the world.

 

[boredgremlin]

How weird should the default presentation of D&D be? Should it entice players to traditional fantasy or beyond it? It seems like something the game originally embraced at its inception with OD&D's robots, Temple of the Frog, and the suggestion that players could play pretty much anything. However over time it shucked a lot of this, by the time you get to the 2e core a lot of the weirdness had been expunged, we didn't even have monks anymore. The new editions seem keen on adding some of the stranger things back in, but very recalcitrant about anything overtly science fiction.

What say you all?

[edit: I was going to add a poll, but was evidently too slow. 1 to 5. 1 being practically historical. 5 being robots on dragons, lightsabre wielding Jedi liches, and Illithids with sixshooters. Just to kind of give a range to things.]

I'd say a 2. 3e forgotten realms without lantan is about as weird as i would like. Its not a huge concern though as long as its in the 2-4 range.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Erol Otus should get to illustrate at least one adventure module.