Mature Gaming- Are we too rules oriented?

[Desdichado]

Josh,

I love d20 and do not mind the rules. I am just an advocate of not adding more rules to quantify every situation.

Eventually we will have die rolls to see if you love your kid, or a will save to see if you cheat on your wife, rather than letting a character RP it.

And people will still say, "it helps less social people do things that they could not do in real life."

Isn't the point of DnD to do things that you cannot do in real life?

Dave

Yes, but as I said, the presence of such rules isn't bad if you a) ignore them, or b) don't even get them in the first place. Just because something's been printed doesn't mean you have to use it. And for some players, quantifying that via rules may be just the thing they needed for their game.

 

[Faraer]

Ditch the 'mature' label, it's a near-meaningless affirmative and it's a needlessly monoptic rather than pluralist approach.

There's a long tradition of RPG companies selling roolz options as a substitute for creating and playing an interesting character. The subtext is the lie that because players aren't professional writers or actors they can't be expected to create good characters, so get feats and prestige classes to fill that hole.

The need to sell to players and not just DMs, and the need to sell bits to people using diverse campaign worlds are bound to tend toward shallow, homogenized material.

The stuff that sells well in the short term caters to existing roleplayers who buy a lot of books at the expense of potential new players who would love roleplaying but are turned off by huge rulebooks and micromanaged rulesets.

 

[Norfleet]

I'm always puzzled by the word "mature". I mean, I am 44 years old and people tell me that I am "mature" and "immature" at the oddest times, even relating to my love of rpgs.

You're only young once, but you're never too old to be immature. When you get older, and perhaps you're even there, you'll look back and realize just how much fun being immature was.

 

[Wombat]

See, I play it because with familiarity, the rules become increasingly transparent. Also, because d20 is flexible and you can make an assumption about what the rule should be and 95% of the time, you'll be right.

I could say exactly the same thing for Over the Edge and Nobilis, but I take your point.

 

[Desdichado]

Ditch the 'mature' label, it's a near-meaningless affirmative and it's a needlessly monoptic rather than pluralist approach.

There's a long tradition of RPG companies selling roolz options as a substitute for creating and playing an interesting character. The subtext is the lie that because players aren't professional writers or actors they can't be expected to create good characters, so get feats and prestige classes to fill that hole.

The need to sell to players and not just DMs, and the need to sell bits to people using diverse campaign worlds are bound to tend toward shallow, homogenized material.

The stuff that sells well in the short term caters to existing roleplayers who buy a lot of books at the expense of potential new players who would love roleplaying but are turned off by huge rulebooks and micromanaged rulesets.

I don't know where to begin. Well, I take that back, I'll begin by saying that monoptic isn't in any dictionary I have relatively easy access to -- so it's a really technical term or a really archaic term. What does that mean?

Second, there's no need for the veiled insult in what players can come up with. A lot of times it's nice to have rules such as feats or prestige classes that present options for character concepts that I wouldn't think of otherwise. That's the value of communal creativity -- it tends to be much more diverse than what any single person can produce as output on their own. It's neither a lie (often, anyway) that players can't come up with these concepts on their own, nor is it a bad thing that they can't.

Third, it's hardly true that everything in print is shallow or homogenized. Sure, some of it is, but not really anything that's under discussion in this thread, I don't think.

Fourth, the fact that this is all presented as option material that you pick up in seperate non-essential books invalidates (in my opinion) your claim that the presence of all these rules scares away potential gamers.

 

[Faraer]

Monoptic -- single eye, single view. Along the same lines as 'synoptic' as in the Synoptic Gospels.

Who did I insult? I don't think it's controversial to say that discrete options are often used in place of nuance. Prestige classes are, apart from anything else, inefficient ways to present ideas: a few are consistently creative, but most are (in my view) a paragraph of concept with more or less spurious special-case rules attached. I strongly suspect most people are much more potentially creative than they give themselves credit for.

It's just a tendency to shallowness and homogenization, because more in-depth material is less accessible to those who don't already know the basics or the other parts of the jigsaw puzzle.

The core D&D books are also rules-heavy, and those and the jargon-ridden insular nature of RPG supplements, and d20 products especially, combine to help self-limit roleplaying.

 

[Desdichado]

1) OK, thanks.

2) I don't think you insulted anyone specifically, but a common habit generally. I dunno, maybe not. I'd say you're often right in terms of a lot of the prestige classes in print, either way. A lot of the special rules they have are indeed spurious.

3) That's a predictable shallowness, though. Lots of publishers go out of their way to avoid it, by the same token, because it's so predictable.

4) True, but that's a different problem altogether, I think. Then again, rules lite games don't seem to sell better than D&D, so I'm not sure if "the real world" bears out your idea here.

 

[Harlock]

1) OK, thanks.

2) I don't think you insulted anyone specifically, but a common habit generally. I dunno, maybe not. I'd say you're often right in terms of a lot of the prestige classes in print, either way. A lot of the special rules they have are indeed spurious.

3) That's a predictable shallowness, though. Lots of publishers go out of their way to avoid it, by the same token, because it's so predictable.

4) True, but that's a different problem altogether, I think. Then again, rules lite games don't seem to sell better than D&D, so I'm not sure if "the real world" bears out your idea here.

A rare sextuple post. Can I say sextuple? This is the "mature" thread after all...

I almost posted a wink but would also have posted a graon icon if we had one. Bad puns are quite fun.

 

[Zappo]

Cool, a six-post!

Whatever "mature" means, and I don't think I've seen or thought of a decent definition so far, I don't think it has much relation to the crunch vs. fluff diatribe.

Like BelenUmeria said in his first post, rules don't make a game mature. How could they? Matureness is a matter of the group's style, and the game rules are subordinate to that.

However... by the same token, rules don't make a game immature. Since no gaming group will change its style just to follow the rules, the greatest effect any ruleset can have is simply getting discarded (and possibly bashed on internet forums).

So, there's no point in wondering whether this or that book will make my game more or less mature; whatever it is, it won't have any effect on that. A "mature" player can play "maturely" most PrC, feat or whatever, and when confronted with the rare PrC, feat or whatever that can't be played according to the style he desires, he'll simply not use it.

If he's really "mature", he will also refrain from posting "XXX sucks, is eviiil, and will bring about Armageddon" threads five minutes after that.

 

[Desdichado]

D'oh! And I was checking the thread in another window to try and avoid multiple postings!