dd.stevenson
Super KY
Can I trouble you for a cite? I follow his blog pretty regular like and I've never come to the conclusion that he hates 4E.
D&D 5E L&L 3/11/2013 This Week in D&D
Can I trouble you for a cite? I follow his blog pretty regular like and I've never come to the conclusion that he hates 4E.
Pour
First Post
No problem. You may have to scroll back some, but if you check out his post history on RPGnet there are more than a few threads where he directly and indirectly bashes 4e design, style, art, classes, surges, settings, and I think one or two of the designers (before being hired). There's also an interview regarding his blog where he mentions his dislike of 4e is very colorful language. I also frequent several OSR boards, though I can hardly stomach the 4e hate and usually skip those entries, I did notice him as a commenter where he pretty much laughs at modern D&D and joins the chorus of haters.
I also followed his blog for about a year and a half, was intrigued by Vornheim, and blatantly stole from him when he offered that Maidenmother Crone idea (and subsequently he introduced me to the awesome band The Sword), but there's a lot I disagree with him on, enough to kind of transition me out of his blogosphere. More power to him, though. He's got a lot of cool ideas and he's a creative guy, but whenever someone dismisses something I like and play weekly as
, I can't help losing a little respect for them. And if you ever want to see some really wild but entertaining flame wars involving Zak and this other guy, check out the early stuff on Your Dungeon Is Suck blog with him in the comment section.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Your tendency to assume that your preferences represent the majority is getting tedious, Abdul. Mocking classic D&D dungeoncrawling is one thing, a lot of people who've been playing RPGs for a very long time and take the hobby too seriously do that, but you've got to stop implying that only a very few people are interested in this style of play. This is not true. The OSR is a significant part of the current D&D landscape. The classic D&D pdfs are dominating the RPGNow rankings, and IIRC one of the major stretch goals for the Pathfinder MMO was the tabletop release of a megadungeon (partly designed by Frank Mentzer no less). The OSR is hugely influential on the design of DDN. Two OSR bloggers that I am aware of are paid consultants for the design team (Zak S and RPGPundit). You need to update your perspective of the situation or you're going to be the grognard soon
First of all, I've never mocked any form of play. I've simply described it as a very specific and limited type of game with a narrow agenda. Given that you're talking to a guy who played OD&D when it was brand new with people one step removed from EGG and Co you will find it futile to lecture at me about what so-called "Old School" gaming is. As for the popularity of "the OSR" first of all if you put 5 self-described OSR people in a room together there will be a murder within 5 minutes as they're never going to agree on what OSR even is.
As for how many people are interested in that style of play. Here's what I know. Nobody that I know plays that way, nor has in many decades, except possibly as a sort of one-off nostalgia trip beer-n-pretzels thing (and even that hasn't happened). I'd face monumental indifference trying to get a game like that going and in fact while I could probably swing almost anything else, including a more open-ended 2e-style game, I doubt I could get a dungeon crawl going or sustain it for more than a session or two.
I could care less whom Mike Mearls has as consultants. He could have anyone over the age of 45 consult on dungeon crawls, it is irrelevant. Nor does 'paid consulting' mean much, lots of people buy me lunch and ask me questions about this or that topic, that doesn't mean I work for them.
Come back to me in an year and show me how OSR is a vital growing thing that is making big sales and continuing. Its a fad. There will always be some people that play that way, and more power to them! They're a small minority and will almost certainly continue to be so. I think there are legitimate reasons to look at simplifying RPGs, etc, but they have NOTHING to do with OSR. You can call me any kind of 'tard you want, it changes not a thing!
First of all, I've never mocked any form of play. I've simply described it as a very specific and limited type of game with a narrow agenda. Given that you're talking to a guy who played OD&D when it was brand new with people one step removed from EGG and Co you will find it futile to lecture at me about what so-called "Old School" gaming is. As for the popularity of "the OSR" first of all if you put 5 self-described OSR people in a room together there will be a murder within 5 minutes as they're never going to agree on what OSR even is.
As for how many people are interested in that style of play. Here's what I know. Nobody that I know plays that way, nor has in many decades, except possibly as a sort of one-off nostalgia trip beer-n-pretzels thing (and even that hasn't happened). I'd face monumental indifference trying to get a game like that going and in fact while I could probably swing almost anything else, including a more open-ended 2e-style game, I doubt I could get a dungeon crawl going or sustain it for more than a session or two.
I could care less whom Mike Mearls has as consultants. He could have anyone over the age of 45 consult on dungeon crawls, it is irrelevant. Nor does 'paid consulting' mean much, lots of people buy me lunch and ask me questions about this or that topic, that doesn't mean I work for them.
Come back to me in an year and show me how OSR is a vital growing thing that is making big sales and continuing. Its a fad. There will always be some people that play that way, and more power to them! They're a small minority and will almost certainly continue to be so. I think there are legitimate reasons to look at simplifying RPGs, etc, but they have NOTHING to do with OSR. You can call me any kind of 'tard you want, it changes not a thing!
Whenever I've run a 1e game, I had to turn players away. Where I used to live, people were always playing 1e and 2e games at the FLAGS, more than any other edition. But it doesn't matter. 5e is going to be influenced by OSR games. This doesn't mean that it's going to dominate the game, only that WOTC is trying to court those players. They have enough in house knowledge of 3e and 4e but lack the current knowledge of OSR games, which have evolved over time, just like any other game that's continually played. I have no idea how many people game using OSR frameworks, but it's enough to have drawn the notice of WOTC and that means it's more than a fad and probably a significant number, even if it's not an overwhelming number.
Libramarian
Adventurer
"Ohhhh, now we can dare to go to the 5th dungeon level!" is (light) mocking. But I'm not going to call you any kind of 'tard. I don't mind what you like and dislike and I'm not trying to put you in a box or take away your old school card. What I find annoying is when you try to inflate the value of your personal opinions by appealing to a majority that just isn't there. I don't know if you do that by habit or what, but you do it. D&D land is very pluralistic right now and a belief in constant progress through the editions is not widespread. Personally I don't mind this state of affairs and I think it's an interesting marketplace of ideas. The OSR has been around since before 4e launched, it's not going anywhere any time soon.First of all, I've never mocked any form of play. I've simply described it as a very specific and limited type of game with a narrow agenda. Given that you're talking to a guy who played OD&D when it was brand new with people one step removed from EGG and Co you will find it futile to lecture at me about what so-called "Old School" gaming is. As for the popularity of "the OSR" first of all if you put 5 self-described OSR people in a room together there will be a murder within 5 minutes as they're never going to agree on what OSR even is.
As for how many people are interested in that style of play. Here's what I know. Nobody that I know plays that way, nor has in many decades, except possibly as a sort of one-off nostalgia trip beer-n-pretzels thing (and even that hasn't happened). I'd face monumental indifference trying to get a game like that going and in fact while I could probably swing almost anything else, including a more open-ended 2e-style game, I doubt I could get a dungeon crawl going or sustain it for more than a session or two.
I could care less whom Mike Mearls has as consultants. He could have anyone over the age of 45 consult on dungeon crawls, it is irrelevant. Nor does 'paid consulting' mean much, lots of people buy me lunch and ask me questions about this or that topic, that doesn't mean I work for them.
Come back to me in an year and show me how OSR is a vital growing thing that is making big sales and continuing. Its a fad. There will always be some people that play that way, and more power to them! They're a small minority and will almost certainly continue to be so. I think there are legitimate reasons to look at simplifying RPGs, etc, but they have NOTHING to do with OSR. You can call me any kind of 'tard you want, it changes not a thing!
No idea, but I would think the fact that the actual design team all worked on 4e is pretty good representation there.
I'm also unsure where you got the impression that Zak hates 4e. I'm 100% sure he would disagree with that. He's said that he's played it and had a good time. However, he's very NOMA about OSR vs. 4e and has a tendency to talk with 4e fans like they're aliens from another planet. He's also advised, in what I thought was a howlingly patronizing way but maybe that's just me, non-OSR people to tell OSR people up front if they have Asperger's Syndrome so as to make discourse more constructive. He doesn't seem very aware of the fact that most people are not as creative as a professional artist with an MFA from Yale. I'm not sure to what degree that is affected. It's hard to tell because he's pretty hipster.
RPGPundit OTOH is a pretty vociferous 4e hater. He's a disassociated mechanics guy and refers to 2008 as the year in which the Forgotten Realms setting was discontinued. I have to say that I find that amusingly catty. He lives in Uruguay and is really into pipe-smoking. He signs off on his forum threads and blog posts by mentioning what kind of tobacco he is currently smoking.
I'd say they're both only average level of weirdness among OSR bloggers.
The person I really thought they'd get for a consultant was James M. from Grognardia, but he's in hiding right now after absconding with $40,000 from the Kickstarter for his Dwimmermount megadungeon that he hasn't completed.
Pour
First Post
I don't honestly want to spend more time digging up exact quotes or anything more on the Zak subject, but that's the impression I got of him anyway. As for James, heh, $48,756 to be exact- was burned myself. In any case, maybe you're right, maybe a few 4e design teamers is enough, I just don't feel very assured.
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AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Hehe. Maybe it is light playful ribbing, sure. OTOH like I say, I was there pretty early. I GET where many of the OSR people are coming from. I think the more thoughtful ones are perfectly cogent and I have no problem with them. OTOH I think that the majority of RPGers (as pretty clearly evidenced by sales figures and interest at cons, etc.) have gone on to more varied and sophisticated forms of gaming. I think the big problem is really trying to divide up the gaming public into some sort of "OSR people" that are over in one corner and some other group that is in the other corner. It isn't like that. I think there is a much more nuanced picture out there. I think the SAME PEOPLE in different times and places largely enjoy various types of games.
I can easily run a Basic D&D game for some 10 yr olds that haven't ever played an RPG before. They will easily understand the goals and concepts. Its a very nailed down sort of format with simple rules, and they will enjoy and benefit from player-oriented challenge. I think a bit newer cleaner set of rules wouldn't hurt for that though, and maybe DDN 'basic' mode will be perfect for that. Great! Got nothing against it.
OTOH when I play with my groups of long-time RPGers, who are all quite creative folks who have lots of fun making up stories and inventing new settings and etc, and are quite willing and even eager to play with more rules, then something like 4e or maybe eventually some option-rich version of DDN sounds like the thing. Maybe now and then some of those people will also enjoy a one-shot dungeon crawl for old time's sake too.
I don't personally know the sorts of people who seem to want to play just old school DCs. I'm sure they exist, I see they have forums and etc online, and certainly someone buys all those OSR books (or a few of them at least). Still, I don't meet them IRL, and I barely see them at cons. I think the number of such people for whom only the purest of old-fashioned rules will due and for whom nothing else is acceptable is VERY small. I think it is one of the smallest niches out there.
None of that precludes many people from finding reprints of old 1e books and whatnot -that they can't buy originals of or wouldn't spend the money for- fascinating. If I had no 1e books I'd have probably bought a copy myself, or at least thought about it. I don't think that means there's necessarily a vast pent-up demand for the majority of D&Ders to run out and recreate the playing of the 1970's all over again. I think it means there are curious people and people that want to try different things, want to sometimes run older styles of game, just want to read the books and own them, etc.
The notion that WotC should focus its attention on that market with its flagship game to the point of risking losing its existing customers, who have after all floated the product for almost 20 years now, seems odd to me. I think its fine to have rules that allow for those people to use DDN to play some different styles of game, but the primary focus should be on 4e players, 3.x players, PF players, and new people joining the hobby.
All I would say is that all these OSR personalities seem like quite eccentric and extreme characters to me. They seem NOTHING like the ordinary (well, fairly ordinary) people that I play RPGs with on a weekly basis. I don't play with people who obsess about their pipe-smoking, are ultra-hipsters that are dismissive of other opinions, or who run off with their ill-gotten Kickstarter gains. If that's the crowd WotC wants to consult with on their new game, that's their business, but it doesn't sound like those people are representative of anything except how batty the human race can be. Maybe they're perfectly nice people and all, I don't know them or pay any attention to them or what they write, but in the very few instances where someone like that sat down at my table they were definitely not on the same wavelength with the rest of the people there. That can be interesting, but it hardly makes me think that D&D should be tailored for them as opposed to my friends, who are 2 state govt works, an IT consultant, an engineer, another programmer, and 2 librarians currently. In the past I've had machinists, teachers, kids, college students, etc etc etc in games. They were all pretty ordinary folks. I think mostly D&D should be written for them.
Libramarian
Adventurer
I dodged that bullet thankfully. From what I have heard from people who've seen the draft it seems to be an interesting formal example of the megadungeon, but the content is missing the creative/gonzo spark that the original megadungeons actually had when all of the standard D&D monsters/tropes were new and original. If you want to capture the feel of the original dungeons, you have to go more gonzo than you think, because the content should be as new and unfamiliar now as it was then--so goes the argument. I'm sympathetic to it but I'm still not sure where my preferences are on the vanilla--gonzo spectrum--certainly pretty far away from dungeon "naturalism", but I still like things to have a theme of some sort and make sense together, and I'm also into representing/rediscovering old tropes to give them new life instead of just throwing them out.
That's my hope for DDN basic as well. Although I don't necessarily associate basic mode with less sophistication. I'm less inclined to look at is as "dumbed down" but rather minimalist and focused, and in that sense more sophisticated, or sophisticated in a different way. Like haiku. It's interesting to me to think about what sort of emotional terrain you can actually canvas just doing a basic dungeon-crawl. It's larger than you would think. I like the idea of seeing what can be done with a very limited form. That appeals to me, restriction fosters creativity. Regarding one-true-wayist OSR people, yes they are annoying. I can see how it would be annoying for someone who actually was playing OD&D in the 70s to be lectured on what it was like back then, I get that. I think they take the hobby too seriously, just as people who trash dungeon-crawls and consider themselves to be above that take it too seriously. It's fine to have specific tastes of course but it's usually pretty easy to tell when there's an elitist element to it.
I think you are seriously overstating how niche this is--we're not talking about speed factors or other old school minutia, we're talking about the general playstyle of story-light sandbox dungeon hack & slash. Most newbies who have experience with videogames will know what this is--it's Diablo and the Elder Scrolls games, compared to 4e's videogame analogue of a tactical JRPG. Pathfinder's new Thornkeep megadungeon seems to be self-consciously "old school", at least to an extent. I don't know if they've done products like that in the past or not. Also D&D is definitely not WotC's flagship game (MtG), and I think soon to not even be the flagship expression of the D&D brand. I think (hope!) we may be entering an era where the D&D boardgames/videogames/novels will keep the boat afloat and basically sponsor the RPG to be as weird and inexpensive as it is appropriate for it to be. That would be great. I think D&D is one of those things that's just not very profitable outside of a fad situation and trying to squeeze blood from the stone makes things worse. Keep a high quality, low splat, accessible, low pagecount game in print, to add legitimacy to the other D&D brand offerings, and if you win the lottery and the RPG becomes a fad again, bonus.
They're weird for sure, but it's odd that they would be both too regressive and too out there, isn't it? Maybe not, there are sort of two sides--the dust worshippers/traditionalists and the indie/experimental types. The first side can at times be regressive, and the latter too avant garde. However, I think the cream skimmed off the top of both sides would be a great contribution to the 5e development process--a little more respect for older editions (e.g. really try not to use the same word to mean something different from what it meant in an earlier edition), and a little more experimentation in terms of semi-random adventure design and fluff/story (e.g. Vornheim, Tome of Adventure Design).
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, when I say "less sophisticated" I don't mean that disparagingly either. I'm not sure I'd quite equate dungeon crawl with the strictures of haiku, but yeah limits and structure are one way to focus creativity. I make functional pottery, it has to work, no abstract sculpture. Its a discipline that forces you to express things in more subtle ways. OTOH I don't think there's anything subtle about dungeon crawls, they're just a format for play which can enhance enjoyment by making the conventions of the game more clear, bringing it down a bit from "anything goes" and invoking a whole set of table conventions and expectations which allow the game to run smoothly and easily without a lot of negotiation. And yeah, I'm sure you can do subtle and clever things in a dungeon.
I don't know. I think that the majority of people are happy with "story-light sandbox dungeon hack & slash" but they're not generally the thought leaders or long-term players. My experience is people START there but a year or two of dungeon crawls and you're ready to move on. I think there are a lot of people who are now nostalgic for their first D&D game, and they've forgotten how all that hack & slash got thin after a while and needed some meaty exploration, plot, narrative, and developed mood and setting to stay interesting.
MtG is irrelevent. The point is D&D is the INDUSTRY flag-ship RPG, and WotC's flagship (and really only) RPG product. I think that the game needs to remain vital and fresh if it is going to continue to pull all those other products along with it. A stale game that is designed to be barely more than a parlor game isn't going to cut it. The gaming community around it will die eventually and move on to games that do give that kind of depth and offer new and fresh material. You can't sit still or you will die, and if the game dies then the rest is like a hollow tree, it will just rot away and shed limbs until nothing is left.
Yeah, I dunno. Vornheim doesn't do that much for me. I think Zak is just one of those people that annoyingly is so into his hip thing that everything else needs to be dissed. It smacks of a deep insecurity or something, I dunno. I mean I could have fun for an evening or two with some people wandering around doing random Vornheim chart lookups, but it is going to get old fast. If that is the only sort of thing that D&D is supposed to be doing and the rules aren't supposed to help support any other type of play except 'crawls' of whatever sort its a dead game to a lot of us. Again, I think there real picture is subtler than trads vs indies. There are good elements of D&D, keeping them is fine. If there's no reason to change how something works or what it means, great, don't. OTOH experimentation and change are what keep something living and vital. I think that's where the majority of people are if they think about it. I think it is only really a question of where exactly you draw your lines. 4e was bold, but it is still IMHO D&D. I think they did what needed to be done and it should be built on. Its fine to consolidate on that now, and narrow the gap between 4e and other editions, but that's not what DDN is. If all it is is 'trad service' then it will fail, even if most people don't care about anything but dungeon crawling the game will still die simply because it is stagnant. Creativity leaves stagnant things behind, and creativity is the real magic of D&D.
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