Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9599409" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Uh...no, it is not presumptuous to say that Gygax's perspective is no more nor less "true" D&D than any other.Older approaches cannot be better in the abstract. (Nor can newer approaches be better in the abstract!) They just can't. That's like saying that cars are better in the abstract than planes. They aren't, because they're for different things. Likewise, older approaches and newer approaches to D&D-related stuff are for different things. You would have to first assert that the playstyle and design-goals of early editions were better than the playstyle and design-goals of later editions, which I'm absolutely confident you cannot do, not even in principle, let alone in practice.In the absence of that, all we can do is set a conditional: "if you are trying to pursue a Gygax-like style, then..." But most people today aren't trying to pursue that, because (if we're being frank) Gygax-like playstyles are not particularly popular. They have their diehard fans and absolutely, positively should not be neglected or spurned. But they also aren't for everyone, they aren't even for most people. These approaches deserve support, and we can critique whether that support achieves its design goals or not, but we cannot say that these approaches are better than other approaches.But we can also determine that newer approaches TO Gygax-like playstyles can, in fact, be better than Gygax's approach! That's doing the "if you're trying to do X, then Y is better" thing. Dungeon Crawl Classics, for example, introduced (IIRC? I think they were first) the concept of a "funnel" adventure to get started. One of the serious issues faced by consciously old-school play is that it can take weeks or months to get a PC that survives more than 2-3 sessions. A lot of gamers today simply do not have that kind of time to invest. But they still want to play, and they still want to have an experience like the experiences of yesteryear. Enter the character funnel: Each player plays several rapidly-generated, highly simple PCs through a brutally hard adventure. Most players will lose at least one character during the funnel, probably more; but that's fine, you have three or four or five or whatever. This teaches new players that characters are disposable, that losses are expected, that combat is swift and brutal and something to be avoided, that the only things that matter are things which explicitly occur within play itself, that "builds" and other considerations do not apply here, etc., etc. And it does so in a way that compresses weeks or months of play down into a 1-3 session burst of frenetic (and hopefully fun) adventure.Character funnels aren't for me. They're a design I have zero interest in playing. But I recognize them for what they are: a brilliant solution to a real and serious game-design conundrum, how to preserve as much of the classic game experience as possible while easing its most burdensome aspects that make it a tough sell for the gamers of 2012-and-beyond (that being when it first released.) Character funnels are objectively an improvement over the rigidly Gygax-like approach to play, because that's literally what they were designed to be.Let us not become the complacent mathematician who insists that you cannot improve upon Euclid. The Elements were an absolutely amazing achievement when they were set down, two and a half millennia ago. But modern mathematics is better. It couldn't exist without Euclid having done so much, so well, so durably--but absolutely none of that means Euclid's ways are better than ours today. Of course, that doesn't mean that we have nothing to learn from Euclid's approaches either--there's something to be said for the concreteness of his work--but without things like divorcing the concept of number from the concept of concrete distance, we could never have achieved calculus, and consequently, never have reached the stars.</blockquote>

Verification