D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[Ruin Explorer]

One of the big shifts here is genre, so it makes sense that Champions helps lead the way. As a superhero genre game, death is (and should be) pretty rare or you’re not following the genre conventions.

Yeah I think Champions/HERO doesn't really get enough credit for how profoundly it influenced the genre. Reading accounts of people playing RPGs in the mid '80s, at university clubs and so on, including some from people who went on to be quite influential designers (though I struggle to remember who, and most of these accounts are long gone as places like Angelfire shut down or became unsearchable), Champions/HERO came up over and over and over again. And the campaigns people describe sound more or less exactly the same as campaigns people would run now, full of character drama, elaborate RP and exciting combat rather than the procedural dungeon crawling, TPKs, Monty Hauling and/or adversarial DMing, and brutal ambushes of most (but not all) descriptions of D&D from the same era.

People talk about the whole "OC" thing with Neotrad, and act like it was some sort of post-internet thing, formed free-form RP on IRC and the like, and there's some truth in that, but if you look back at that stuff, people making up their own heroes in Champions, or for that matter, their own characters in Toon (1984) were essentially creating "OCs" in exactly the same way.

I'd even argue this was already appearing in the early 80s.

Seems likely, yeah.

I will say thought that at my first high school, which I went to from 10-16, there was a distinct "generation gap" between the two groups of guys who played AD&D who were 2-4 years older than us, and the three groups who were about of an age with me (including my one), who also played AD&D. It was very clear that the older people were treating AD&D what we'd now perhaps see as a much more videogame-like way, where they had a DM who was trying to kill their PCs, but they were also getting really powerful magic items really easily, gaining boatloads of XP, and not roleplaying their characters at all except in a very teenage boy wish-fulfilment kind of way. But my cousin from Canada who taught me AD&D already taught me how to play it in a more modern way, more like Neotrad, in 1989 - and I know she'd played other RPGs than AD&D as well. And the other groups my age also generally had a more "heroic fantasy" attitude, a more positive attitude to RP, and so on. One guy my age I played with was taught by his older brother and initially had very "adversarial DMing is the only way to DM", and generally played in a very old-skool no RP, lots of meta, way. He did change over time though.

So I think I think it took a while to filter through.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You are splitting the hairs a bit too fine now to avoid recognizing your error. Design is inextricably linked to lethality in play, especially given how far 5e turned the dial towards virtually guaranteed survival. When you unlink the influence design has on shaping the structure & boundaries of gameplay & table specifics, why does it matter how a player might feel If you want to unlink the two how can it at all matter if someone gets upset over a dead PC in a fairly extreme corner case hypothetical game ? I don't expect an answer on that because at this point you've made clear in 285 that you thought the discussion you jumped into was quite a bit more limited in scope than it was, you took a stray comment and unknowingly tried to sever it from the wider context of the discussion where it came up.

I'm not splitting anything. You've made up an argument for someone to have with you, and now you're upset because no-one actually said that, or if someone further back in the thread did, they're no longer responding to you so you want me to argue in their stead.

I don't even disagree with the rest of your post, just the weird and silly claims about what my position is, which are simply false.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah I think Champions/HERO doesn't really get enough credit for how profoundly it influenced the genre. Reading accounts of people playing RPGs in the mid '80s

I looked at Champions at that time (White Dwarf magazine did a couple of adventures for the system). I felt it was a bit complex and serious for the Superhero genre. But then I was never really a comics superhero fan. Did play Games Workshop’s Golden Heroes a bit. Publish an adventure called Queen Victoria and the Holy Grail and I’m in!

There were a lot of not-D&D games around at the time, and most of those focused on less-lethal* and more story based gaming than D&D. Most sadly forgotten now.

*CoC excepted

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm with Ruin Explorer on this one

As I understand it, neither you nor Ruin Explorer where there.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I felt it was a bit complex and serious for the Superhero genre.

Oh it definitely was/is, it's almost more like a squad-combat game, but it extremely popular, because one thing it was good at was letting you build a "fully functional" custom superhero to your specs (not the whims of the dice), and for whatever reason, a lot of 1980s Champions campaigns seemed very "modern" in how they played out - i.e. more Critical Role and less adversarial Tomb of Elemental Evil or whatever.

There were a lot of not-D&D games around at the time, and most of those focused on less-lethal* and more story based gaming than D&D. Most sadly forgotten now.

Yeah I'm definitely aware that they were around - I just think they were less long-term influential - but perhaps further evidence of the general trend away from procedural dungeon crawling and towards RP and characters. I'm trying to think of the names of some too!

I only heard bad things about Golden Heroes sadly - people reeeeeaaaaallly hated the 100% RNG-based character generation. I think that vs. the points-based system of Champions was probably a big selling point for the latter.

As I understand it, neither you nor Ruin Explorer where there.

This is true - but none of what people say is characteristic of early D&D as opposed to slightly later D&D is mirrored in 5E. That's not to say the D&D you, personally, were playing wasn't more 5E-like. It may have been. People like my older cousin had to get that play-style from somewhere.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I only heard bad things about Golden Heroes sadly - people reeeeeaaaaallly hated the 100% RNG-based character generation

I loved that! But the main thing was you had to come up with an origin story that explained your character’s random list of superpowers, and you couldn’t keep any you didn’t explain. So narrative was tied to character creation. It allowed you to have PCs with very different power levels, like Superman and Batman fighting side by side.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This is true - but none of what people say is characteristic of early D&D as opposed to slightly later D&D is mirrored in 5E. That's not to say the D&D you, personally, were playing wasn't more 5E-like. It may have been. People like my older cousin had to get that play-style from somewhere

I wasn’t there in the 70s. AD&D was extremely deadly at low level, but by the 80s people had started skipping low level, with Dark Sun and Dragonlance showing the way. The longest AD&D campaign I ran started at level 9!

Other RPGs I remember playing in the 80s: Runequest, Traveller, Gamma World, Ghostbusters RPG, Doctor Who RPG, CoC,Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Boot Hill (which was far more deadly than D&D ever was).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

but by the 80s people had started skipping low level

Interesting, I can believe it. 2E seemed to work drastically better from about L3/4 onwards.

Dark Sun

1991 but yeah.

 

[Remathilis]

So how many short, location based modules has Matt written by chance? I'd like to see what he considers to be a good product that he is advocating for.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Interesting, I can believe it. 2E seemed to work drastically better from about L3/4 onwards

If you look at the published adventures, a great many of them were for mid/high level.

1991 but yeah.

Eek.