Old School : Tucker's Kobolds and Trained Jellies

[Andor]

So you think that wizards should spend MORE time swinging from chandeliers than throwing fireballs?

I believe there is an insufficiency of chandelier swinging, wine drinking, quip making, damsel rescuing wizards.

That's not a system issue however.

 

[JonWake]

So you think that wizards should spend MORE time swinging from chandeliers than throwing fireballs?

tl;dr version: YUP.

Nuanced Version: In earlier versions of D&D, the class abilities were only what made you exceptional. You didn't have a dozen fireballs, or an endless supply of killing words. If you were a wizard, you had to think very hard about when to spend their big strike, because once it was gone, that's it. You were expected to be improvising continuously. To a lot of us, the key feature of RPGs was the focus on improvising. With 4e (and it was more a step than a leap in that direction), every little action in combat was codified. You weren't a specialist at throwing sand in eyes because you took the 'throw sand in eyes', it was just a neat effect the designers thought up. But every single time you define a situational ability, you are putting more and more boxes around the characters. And when you put a system in place that makes any attempt to step out of those boxes harder than staying in, you're restricting improvisation.

 

[Odhanan]

Back in the old days, when we hewed our dice out of dinosaur bones and the rules were printed on clay tablets, there was a convention that where the rules did not contradict specifically, things worked just like they do in reality.

You can read it on the old Dragon magazine articles: About how fireballs should incinerate all the flammable treasure, and do you know how low the melting point of gold is? Kobolds using flaming barricades and murder holes. The party using a bell and some fireballs over the course of a week to use Pavlovian conditioning to train an ochre jelly that the bell meant it was time to run so they didn't have to fight the damn thing.

Now the pendulum drifted away from this idea over the years, to the point where in 4e it was pretty explicit that you could not "power stunt" your abilities in unexpected ways, nor need you fear a fireball destroying the 1,000 origami cranes that was the McGuffin.

Now the old school way could and did lead to problems. If you've ever watched a group of engineering students try to explain their plan for dealing with the orcs using a mobile seige tower to a Poly-sci major GM, you know what I mean.

What do you guys think, is it a good idea to bring back that sense of freedom/verisimilitude? The up-side is player and GM creativity, and the 'remember that time' stories. The down-side is having to listen to "But how was I supposed to know using burning hands in the middle of an ancient and dry rope bridge over a thousand foot chasm was a bad idea? You're a mean GM!"

Yes. I hope it comes back.

 

[Hussar]

tl;dr version: YUP.

Nuanced Version: In earlier versions of D&D, the class abilities were only what made you exceptional. You didn't have a dozen fireballs, or an endless supply of killing words. If you were a wizard, you had to think very hard about when to spend their big strike, because once it was gone, that's it. You were expected to be improvising continuously. To a lot of us, the key feature of RPGs was the focus on improvising. With 4e (and it was more a step than a leap in that direction), every little action in combat was codified. You weren't a specialist at throwing sand in eyes because you took the 'throw sand in eyes', it was just a neat effect the designers thought up. But every single time you define a situational ability, you are putting more and more boxes around the characters. And when you put a system in place that makes any attempt to step out of those boxes harder than staying in, you're restricting improvisation.

How old days are we talking about here. Even in 1e, by 5th level, your wizard had 7 (IIRC) spells per day, many of which had some seriously long durations. By 9th, you generally had enough magical gew gaws plus your own goodies that you could blast away all day long.

There's a reason improvisation gets restricted - most DM's suck at making rules. You want to throw sand in the eyes and blind a target in AD&D (1st or 2nd, makes no nevermind). Ok, fair enough. What do you roll? How long does the blindness last? Considering a blinded target is pretty much boned - massive AC penalities, massive attack penalties, assuming he can actually target anything in the first place - just how much of an effect should this have?

The answer will vary massively from table to table. With one table winding up pretty happy and the next table ... not so much. And then the arguments start because one guy read some article in some magazine about how sand should blind you just this much. And the table winds up screwing around for half an hour trying to figure out how to adjudicate throwing sand in someone's eyes.

Now, how much you want to bet anyone at that table ever tries that again?

The reason we don't see so much "out of the box" thinking has a lot less to do with the size of the box and a lot more to do with people being damn sick and tired of arguing minutia at the table.

 

[Incenjucar]

tl;dr version: YUP.

That all sounds like a very different game than any edition of D&D I've ever played outside of 1st level with bad rolls.

In the D&D I've played there are things like Fireballs and Swords.

I don't see what you want that can't be done via a slayer-like class, unless you want your clever ideas to do more damage than Melf's Minute Meteors.

 

[Incenjucar]

I believe there is an insufficiency of chandelier swinging, wine drinking, quip making, damsel rescuing wizards.

That's not a system issue however.

Maybe because Dexterity and Strength are their dump stats.

Though my invoker always keeps his wine bottle on hand.

 

[Hassassin]

Page 42 is all about the fiction first. The other 1,000 pages aren't.

Even page 42 isn't exactly fiction first, but starts from the gamist position of level appropriate damage or that the difficulty of an attempt determines how effective it can be. It is a lot better than anything else in there, though.

 

[ExploderWizard]

There's a reason improvisation gets restricted - most DM's suck at making rules.

I would say that due to codification creep and dependence on looking to someone else for all the answers that DMs have gotten progressively worse at making rules.

Use it or lose it.

 

[Hussar]

I would say that due to codification creep and dependence on looking to someone else for all the answers that DMs have gotten progressively worse at making rules.

Use it or lose it.

I seriously, seriously doubt it.

I don't know about your tables, but, my primary memory from 1e and 2e was the constant rows over DM's trying to invent rules on the fly. Whether they were too permissive, or, far more frequently, too restrictive, they were almost never very good.

"You want to swing from the chandelier and attack that guy across the room? Ok, make a Paralyzation save. Ok, make an attack at -4. Ok, you swing across and hit him for 3 points of damage, now make another Paralyzation save to land. Oh? You failed that one? Ok, you fall on your butt. Ten feet falling damage, you take 5 points of damage."

 

[ExploderWizard]

I seriously, seriously doubt it.

I don't know about your tables, but, my primary memory from 1e and 2e was the constant rows over DM's trying to invent rules on the fly. Whether they were too permissive, or, far more frequently, too restrictive, they were almost never very good.

"You want to swing from the chandelier and attack that guy across the room? Ok, make a Paralyzation save. Ok, make an attack at -4. Ok, you swing across and hit him for 3 points of damage, now make another Paralyzation save to land. Oh? You failed that one? Ok, you fall on your butt. Ten feet falling damage, you take 5 points of damage."

I'm sorry you had bad experiences but the same rules light systems that were in use for your bad experiences also produced some of the best DMs.

Jerks are gonna be jerks, its a fact of life. I had a few bad games myself but the good far outweighed the bad, at least for me. In any event I can connect terrible games to people much easier than to rulesets. I have had good times playing with rules that I'm not overly fond of and bad games playing with rules I really like.

Good times in an rpg will always come down to the people you share them with. A rules heavy system may help a fledgling DM learn how to walk, but not how to fly.