NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4613621" data-attributes="member: 77019">This is indeed a problem with DnD, I think less so in the early days because nobody played by the rules 100% (since they didn't work 100%) I think most people played by the rules maybe 20-50% just to pick an arbitrary figure, probably evenly split between those who just didn't bother with the various dead-ends and fudged through them, with those who made up house rules. This was loads of fun but also kind of isolated gamers into thousands of little cliques because everybody played the game differently, so it didn't travel all that well from one group to another. I think one of the best early games to merge historical AND literary sources very successfully was Call of Cthulhu. They essentially just made a simplified and abstracted rule set which was to a large extent in the background (secondary to the story) and used the historical material especially to reinforce the story by putting the emphasis for the realistic environment the players were playing in, which really helped with the verisimilitude (and made the fantasy / horror elements stand out all the more starkly). The only limit of Call of Cthulhu was that it was for that specific sub-genre. One of the things we've really lost with DnD which used to be THE generalist RPG is the broad base of different ways you could play the game, as the various loose ends in the rules were tied up with an effort to balance the game, much of the flexibility went away. You used to be able to play high or low-fantasy, a lot or a little detail, very cartoonish / comic book esque or fairly realistic, with or without house rules etc.. Eventually a very specific high-fantasy / high-magic / level climb wealth power accumulation type of play has become enforced. Leading some would say toward WoW the boardgame... I think the key to making an RPG dovetail well with historical / folklore , IMO, is to have a fairly common sense basis for the underlying rules system. It must be internally consistent yes, but at a level of abstraction suffiiciently simple to allow for fast paced play, yet sufficiently realistic for players preconceptions of reality, physics etc. to fit naturally with the game, so that the rules themselves are not a distraction. Unfortunately we don't have many games around which achieve this. A friend of mine called me after reading the post on Elves in the History / Mythology thread, and he was telling me how much fun he had 20 years ago when he played his first ever Ranger character.  The new class had just come out in Dragon magazine, and he picked Freyja as his patron diety from Dieties and Demigods and did a lot of research to create this great backstory for his character that became part of the game he was playing.  He had so much fun he still remembers it fondly two decades since he played an RPG.  Now days of course all a ranger means is specailist two-wepaon tank or expert missile fighter for picking off "mobs" of nearly identical monster automatons... and who is him or herself almost identical to every other ranger in the game.  I really don't understand how we got to that point. I'd personally like to see DnD open up again and return to it's roots as the 'general' FRPG which was sort of the gateway to all different kinds of ways to play the game... G.</blockquote>

Verification