D&D General On Grognardism...

[Minigiant]

Just to throw another log into the fire:

There's a tendency to try and put games into "old school" and "new school" categories, but I don't think that works. You really need at least three groupings: old school (for DnD, this is mostly associated with OD&D to 2e), silver age (3e and 4e) and modern (5e).

But even that's not a great classification, because people were using 2e rules to play a lot of very different games.

I'd go with 5 groups, seperating the original wargamers and 3e and 4e preferrers.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I'd go with 5 groups, seperating the original wargamers and 3e and 4e preferrers.

There was an article posted last week about different "cultures" of gaming. It claimed there were six, although I wasn't convinced it's more than five.

Six Cultures of Play

A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.

retiredadventurer.blogspot.com

Trying to reduce it to two is going to end up putting a lot of dissimilar players in the same buckets.

 

[jasper]

sigh. So forgotten, they don't even remember when we were born. Of course.

Hey I suppose to be Generation Y. But people these days can't handle us.

 

[Eubani]

I'm not going to have an edition war, though you seem to want to have one, and frankly need to chill a bit, but this is a common misunderstanding of 4E, in that, that wasn't all you could do. This isn't up for debate. If necessary, I can quote page numbers. Do I need to quote page numbers? 4E explicitly allowed players to take actions which were not the codified abilities their characters possessed. It did this to such an extent, that it even had an optional table to help DMs to assess how much damage (ST or AOE) and what other effects such stuff might have in combat.

Now, let's both be real - some people totally ignored that. I've read actual plays where nobody did anything except use their abilities in a totally wargame-y way. I've seen the same for other editions, of course, including 5E. Was it more prevalent in 4E? Maybe. It was certainly more obvious when it happened. But it didn't have to be that way. Ironically, outside of the codified abilities, it was actually closer to the "mother may I" of 2E than 3E was - because if you wanted to do X stunt, it was pretty much up to the DM how hard it was - the rules were a lot less fixed on it in 3E. So it disempowered the players in a sense we've been discussing, but made the system more flexible than 3E RAW allowed for.

But you're arguing that people couldn't do other stuff, and as such it was bad for certain kinds of fantasy. That's factually wrong. It's not just "an opinion". It's factually wrong. Again do I need to quote page numbers? Because honestly I am going to be pretty annoyed if I do and I don't get an actual apology from you for making me do it (because my 4E stuff is packed away and hard to reach). Or are you going to accept this fact (which I suspect, if you actually played 4E, you know).

(Also really annoyed with WotC for not releasing the 4E stuff on PDF back when I would have paid for it, because otherwise this would be easy to show.)

DMG Page 42 Has the answer to life, the universe and everything as well as a section aptly named "Actions the Rules Don't Cover".

 

[Ancalagon]

No gen Xers are "in their 30s", man. Not a single one. Sorry to make you feel old. The youngest possible definition of Gen X is 1980 births. That's people who are 40-41 today.

More realistically, Gen X ends somewhere in the 1970s and the Xennial (aka Generation Catalano or The Oregon Trail Generation) micro-generation/cross-over generation, which is different from Gen X culturally is there instead (typically regarded as like 1976-1984 or thereabouts - you can shift it around a little).

Millennial starts as early as 1981, or as late as about 1985, depending on who you ask (the latter figure will be for people who use Xennial broadly). The bulk of 5E players are in that and younger generations.

You may be amused to learn that in the Francosphere, this micro generation is named "la generation Albator" (albator being the French version of Captain Harlock). We saw a lot of early France-Japan anime...

 

[Ancalagon]

It's "more accessible" as long as you don't actually want to engage with the world in my experience. In the real world I may not be able to solve the equations for a thrown ball (at least not when you take air resistance and my rust into account) - but when someone throws a ball I can be reasonably confident where it will land and in other ways have an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of the world. And there are literally dozens of examples I could come up with like this.

snip

As for "gauging the impact of a plethora of hard coded abilities on my adventure", firstly it's not my adventure. I'm not the one going on it. If it's anyone's adventure it's the players'. And secondly if the players catch me off guard good for them. They've done something cool. I prefer to let them have their genuine victories rather than spoon feeding them to them by their only using pre-approved abilities in pre-approved ways.

On part 1: I totally get what you mean and ... oh if could only be true. We are playing a "hexcrawl" - kingmaker, a Pathfinder adventure path. Started level 1, level 8 now (I play an alchemist). There are a lot of wilderness stuff and...

... our GM has no idea how being in the wild works. I'm not an "experienced woodsman" but I grew up in a rural area, I did the boys scouts, I know the basics. As did most (all?) the other players. So what was going on, and our expectations of what wilderness is, clashed frequently. So much so that the wilderness exploration has been reduced to a single survival roll that our ranger almost always makes. That and with the party made up of - surprise surprise, 4/6 members "good at wilderness", it was just tedious rolling.

As far as the players surprising you, yes I love it when that happens as a GM

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You may be amused to learn that in the Francosphere, this micro generation is named "la generation Albator" (albator being the French version of Captain Harlock). We saw a lot of early France-Japan anime...

I love this! I never saw Captain Harlock at the time but the style/vibe is completely amazing. The big one that me and my similar-age friends all remember in the UK is Ulysses 3131, which I imagine you also saw as it was French-Japanese made. I can still hum the theme tune.

 

[Zardnaar]

Great thread everyone. Munching the popcorn.

By popcorn I mean water. With hops in it. And carbonation. It's beer I'm having a meh IPA.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There was an article posted last week about different "cultures" of gaming. It claimed there were six, although I wasn't convinced it's more than five.

Six Cultures of Play

A blog about roleplaying games and theory focused on Mythras, Dungeons and Dragons, and OSR games.

retiredadventurer.blogspot.com

Trying to reduce it to two is going to end up putting a lot of dissimilar players in the same buckets.

I feel like that article is a bit weird given that I started playing in 1989, and my main group all the way back has basically been what he calls "Neo-trad" and claims came out of 3E organised play. It's like, I'm pretty sure that fun-centric model which makes the players more important than the "trad" model he describes has existed since at least the late '80s, because I was taught to play that way by an older cousin in 1989, and she didn't seem to indicate it was novel. Also a lot of RPG material from the early '90s seemed to support that general approach.

I mean, I definitely recognise Trad vs. what they're calling OC/Neo-trad, it was a conflict back in the 1990s, but it largely seemed to be an age-based division, like if someone was older than me, they were increasingly likely to be trad, and younger, increasingly likely to be neo-trad. I've almost never come across anyone playing something that genuinely matches his definition of Classic and I'm not sure I entirely buy his separation of OSR and Classic - I mean I get the point he's trying to make, but some of the stuff he's attributing to OSR is certainly how people represented the games they ran/played in the 1990s. I'm not sure "Story Games" is really a separate thing either, I think it's closely related to Neo-trad. Nordic Larp I can't really comment on.

As an aside, the most interesting thing I found out about from that article was Warlock/CalTech-style D&D, which I had only a vague idea even existed, and then I looked into and which gave Thieves codified abilities all the way back in 1976, and frankly, their design of Thieves appears to have been more advanced than anything we saw from official D&D all the way until 4E with 2008, 32 years later (arguably 3E but it seems closer to the 4E/5E approach)! They also apparently had codified abilities for Fighters and so on. And a spell-point system for magic. Talk about ahead of their time! Unfortunately a lot of it wasn't very well-recorded.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I feel like that article is a bit weird

Yeah. The author also seems to think "story driven" is a modern innovation. I was playing Traveller as early as 1982, and that is inherently story driven rather than "map driven". The classic Traveller adventure Twilight's Peak is famous for being the only one with anything resembling a dungeon in it.