D&D General Matt Colville: "50 years later we're still arguing about what D&D even is!"

[Remathilis]

It wasn't for want of trying on my part lol. The writing was on the wall though. I did end up going back to 2E after trying 4E

I moved steadily through the editions, but even I took a long detour after 4e (briefly back to 2e, then to Basic Fantasy RPG, before settling on Pathfinder).

For what it was worth, the one player just got tired of converting his houseruled races and classes from 2e to 3e and then PF to 5e until he could no longer avoid the pressure. He still played those games, but he wouldn't DM them until much later. The other was absolutely stuck in his ways and was convinced we were trying to trick him into DMing 3e because it was a powergamer's fantasy. It took him actually playing a 3.5 game with a different group to come around and realize what he was missing and buy the books and switch his game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I moved steadily through the editions, but even I took a long detour after 4e (briefly back to 2e, then to Basic Fantasy RPG, before settling on Pathfinder).

For what it was worth, the one player just got tired of converting his houseruled races and classes from 2e to 3e and then PF to 5e until he could no longer avoid the pressure. He still played those games, but he wouldn't DM them until much later. The other was absolutely stuck in his ways and was convinced we were trying to trick him into DMing 3e because it was a powergamer's fantasy. It took him actually playing a 3.5 game with a different group to come around and realize what he was missing and buy the books and switch his game.

5E almost got me back in the edition cycle (I was impressed with the core mechanics and it honestly felt a little more in line with why I liked AD&D editions, but also had some the changes I thought 3E did a good job with). I even picked up books like Curse of Strahd. In the end, I stuck with 2E because I still found I liked it better, and because I ran Ravenloft (and using 2E meant I could run any of the material in the mountain of old TSR era Ravenloft)

 

[el-remmen]

I think that for Colville, the details of what people are arguing about is not as important as the fact that debating gameplay approach and style and interpretation of rules continues and those disagreements are broadly about the same kinds of things. What struck me about his video and the excerpts from zines in The Elusive Shift, is not that these people disagreed, but that they were so certain their own way (which was as "made up" as any other approach) was the best and only way to move forward.

Personally, I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to mostly either introduce people to D&D or happen upon folks with similar enough approaches for the first 17 years of TTRPGs. While I'd meet a handful of people with very different approaches, it was easy to dismiss them as "Monty Haul" or "Power Gamers" and an outlier from the "real" or "right" way to play.

It was not until I joined these very forums back when Noah was in charge (so like 25 years ago), that I realized that the general agreement I projected onto a hobby community I had actually interacted with very little until that point, was exactly that, a projection of my own preferences and customs. And to be honest, it took quite a while for me to accept that there wasn't. . . well, I never thought there was ONE true way, but I thought there were like three.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Huh, I'd never thought of the DM (or referee / umpire, this is directly inherited from wargames) being conceived in the early days as a teacher making up problems for Prussian officers in training students to solve, hence the Gygaxian adversarial DM style.

And the benign version was "the problem is hard or deliberately misleading, but for the purpose of making the student better", while the less benign version was "the problem is hard or impossible to solve, and the student doesn't learn anything, so the teacher is bad".

I find this fascinating. To be clear, I don't want it anywhere near me, it's the opposite of my jam (it's a bloody roleplaying game, not homework), but I do understand it, and it's very interesting, and it explains SO MUCH about oldschool DM, err... arrogance.

This definitely explains a lot. Even if it wasn't common after Gygax let D&D loose on the world, far away from Lake Geneva, it explains how the culture-of-play could still grow up around that adversarial DMing without it being intended as power-tripping.

Of course, anyone who's attended public school has had or known of one of Those Teachers who seem to be power-tripping, so even "it's meant for teaching!" isn't a total panacea.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I moved steadily through the editions, but even I took a long detour after 4e (briefly back to 2e, then to Basic Fantasy RPG, before settling on Pathfinder).

For what it was worth, the one player just got tired of converting his houseruled races and classes from 2e to 3e and then PF to 5e until he could no longer avoid the pressure. He still played those games, but he wouldn't DM them until much later. The other was absolutely stuck in his ways and was convinced we were trying to trick him into DMing 3e because it was a powergamer's fantasy. It took him actually playing a 3.5 game with a different group to come around and realize what he was missing and buy the books and switch his game.

I find that the second person here is a much, much more common occurrence than a lot of gamers realize. It happened to me too (though 3e->4e rather than 2e->3e), and I've known plenty of others who went through something similar.

There's a big reticence to step outside of one's area of expertise in the TTRPG space. First games all too often become only games, and that's a recipe for a lot of people to be getting less out of their gaming time than they could've. It's just very unfortunate.

 

[niklinna]

I find that the second person here is a much, much more common occurrence than a lot of gamers realize. It happened to me too (though 3e->4e rather than 2e->3e), and I've known plenty of others who went through something similar.

There's a big reticence to step outside of one's area of expertise in the TTRPG space. First games all too often become only games, and that's a recipe for a lot of people to be getting less out of their gaming time than they could've. It's just very unfortunate.

I got over the sunk cost fallacy with D&D long, long ago.

 

[Voadam]

I started in '81 or so and had the fantastic Moldvay Basic set to learn from in addition to playing in other people's games when I started DMing 1e around the time of 1e Unearthed Arcana ('85?).

It was mostly this site that showed me how differently people could interpret old school styles based off the same rules books. I would focus on the DM roleplaying monsters and NPCs and encounters how it felt naturally while running a module and making judgment calls on what felt right, others focused on reaction rolls and encumbrance tables and random encounter rolls and dungeon procedures and strict time keeping which I did not. So the way we approached 3e with old school style was very different when talking about such.

 

[Staffan]

I find that the second person here is a much, much more common occurrence than a lot of gamers realize. It happened to me too (though 3e->4e rather than 2e->3e), and I've known plenty of others who went through something similar.

There's a big reticence to step outside of one's area of expertise in the TTRPG space. First games all too often become only games, and that's a recipe for a lot of people to be getting less out of their gaming time than they could've. It's just very unfortunate.

On the other tentacle, we have folks like me who see a new game with a cool element and go "Ooh, shiny!" and buy it and never get around to actually running it.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

I echo something that Colville said in the video.

For me, as soon as you play or DM a few different tables with different people, it becomes incredibly obvious that most people play the game very differently. As he says, some universals have been mostly settled. I've never DMed for players that expected me to do all the rolls, but some were surprised that I was making them roll their own Perception rolls, stuff like that.

I'm also mostly a forever GM (which I love), and the handful of times that I played, I noticed how incredibly different the dynamic, the focus and the game were from my own.

Anyone saying something like "this is the way people used to play" gets a raised eyebrow from me.

 

[Nightfly]

This is a terrific video, even by Matt's standards. Well worth the watch. (or listen - I had it on headphones while I was cleaning. Even better!)

I'm actually old enough to remember when some people thought players should not know the rules, but I'd forgotten. That viewpoint got so soundly defeated that I think I can be forgiven for not recalling it was even a debate. But indeed it was!