D&D General On Grognardism...

[Sacrosanct]

Not that one is better than the other, just they give me different feels....

Exactly. D&D is a recreational past time. One edition isn't better than another edition any more than football is better than basketball, or oreo cookie ice cream is better than raspberry sorbet. They are just different, and I for one am glad we have all the options available to us

 

[RealAlHazred]

I've been playing since 1984. My first actual play was AD&D 1E at school, but the first game I owned and read was the Call of Cthulhu 2E box set. The group I played AD&D with let me into their home group, where we mostly played Champions 3. I currently get the most mileage out of D&D 5E, although I still play with a group that uses Hero System 6E for any game (the last several campaigns were Hârn Hero, Traveller Hero, Battletech Hero, and a homebrew Fantasy Hero game).

I like all of those games. I'm quite willing and eager to adapt my GMing style to the desired playstyle of the group. I've run Hero Wars/Hero Quest 1E, FATE games, Monster of the Week, and Pathfinder, which are all varying levels of crunchy. I don't care what the publisher puts in the books -- the rules are going to change as soon as the book hits the table. Some groups want intense, serious tactical play; others want interactive story games; still others crave interesting descriptions and action-packed challenges. If I'm not comfortable meeting the players' needs, I'll happily bow out and ask somebody else to run; maybe I'll even get to play and see how somebody else does it. My wife is running her first game ever, and it's a Blades in the Dark game over Discord, and I'm trying very hard to provide input only when asked; I don't want her to run it the way I would, I want to see what she does. Play to see what happens.

Anyway, I'm old, and thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I don't see how anyone could actually enjoy watching or playing this. Or at least I know I can't. This is essentially a "solved" game at this point-- player experience have rendered the base game practically moot. And if you now have to change things so dramatically in order to create ANY sense of surprise anymore... at some point I just have to ask whether or not it's worth it? Maybe it's just time to move on from this and come up with a different type of game."

This is how I feel about Basic and AD&D dungeon-crawling.

Remarkable. That's pretty close to how I feel about D&D campaigns featuring a group of plucky, unlikely, aspiring heroes who band together to experience personal character growth and thwart a BBEG.

I guess you can blithely ignore the potentially infinite variability of anything if you've done it long enough to grow bored with the basic premise.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I guess you can blithely ignore the potentially infinite variability of anything if you've done it long enough to grow bored with the basic premise.

The potentially infinite variability only shows up if you have someone capable of providing it. Until then... I either have to pretend like I don't already know all the "rules" of basic dungeon crawling while doing it, or just not play them. I choose the latter.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So this brings me to the grognards of Enworld. I am always baffled at the sheet amount of words in support of RPG gaming having peaked sometime in the late 70s, with no system since that time being in overall comparison sake "better" for them.

Is this really a thing though? I mean I have a few people on ignore, but most grogs here, on ENworld, seem appreciative of 5E, and don't seem to indicate things peaked in OD&D or 1E or whenever.

I'm the last person anyone would accuse of being a grognard, but I do not think that's really true. I do not see a general trend of D&D design improving over time. I think 5e is a decent game and definitely a huge improvement over 3e and basically a side grade vis a vis 4e. I basically consider 3e and 2e downgrades over their predecessor. I think the B/X branch is probably the best designed iteration from either TSR or Wizards.

This is an interesting perspective to me.

I'd definitely agree that 5E is a sidegrade from 4E. They're both basically what I wanted from 3E. 5E is more like what I expected from 3E before I heard anything about the mechanics. 4E was more like what I hoped for.

Re: downgrades, it's impossible for me to agree that 2E was a downgrade from 1E, but I could definitely see it as a sidegrade. Overall I would agree 3E was a downgrade from 2E. The design was, de facto, worse for the kind of gameplay we enjoyed. Now, we're provided-for now, with Dungeon World, 5E, countless quasi-OSR games and so on, but 3E nearly killed D&D for my group.

The only edition of D&D I really like design-wise, weirdly enough, is RC D&D, which we barely played compared to other editions, but it nails a lot of what is best about D&D, design-wise. I kind of wish instead of 5E WotC had just resurrected RC D&D.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I guess I’m a neo grognard? I enjoy old school and new school games (Currently playing pf2, AD&D2e and OSE)
Never had d&d growing up as a kid in the 90’s (too poor to buy myself and no one else interested in my immediate family to buy it). But the occasional curious glances at my cousin’s books, images from fantasy games at the time (beefcake art, warrior women with impossibly feathered hair) left an impression of what d&d was to me.

When I grew older, and went to university, I thought I’d check out this d&d stuff. Ended up buying a couple of 4e books, I found them a little dry and puzzled, was this what d&d is? Lurked in this very site during the height of the edition wars and saw a name, Pathfinder, crop up over and over. I checked it out. Yes, to me, this was it, a sense of wonder and mystery and magic, it’s here.

I ran some games for friends, joined PFS to play, but struggled with the idea of all these complex moving parts and rules checks. I felt suffocated, unsure of the “correct“ decisions to make (especially as the crb as published kinda expected you to move from 3.5 where things were perhaps explained more). Things also felt off.

I looked into 1e when the reprints came and bounced off. How the hell do you play this? How do I balance an encounter? What’s the right level of treasure to give without wbl? Fool that I was...

It mattered not, for 5e was just around the corner, a return to an older style of play, a promised modular system. I played it, I enjoyed it, but something was still missing, a yearning from my childhood fantasies, for me, a lack of sense of peril, excitement, adventure.

The growing Community also brought growing pains. Calls for changes and tweaks that has begun to distort it from “not my” d&d. Changes to AL as suddenly xp has become difficult, instead there are milestones, treasure points and it’s all about the character arc etc. Calls to change this that and the other to morph it to our preferences. All power to them, just not the game I enjoy. If it’s not to your tastes, why pick up a game and change it to those? why not just play a game that already supports that?

Incidentally, I find calls against reactions to this as “gate keeping“ dismissive. Both sides seem to talk past one another and resort to insults. Gate keeping is not allowing people to play, because they don’t meet your criteria. It’s not expressing valid concern that new entrants want to change everything to be a different game, changing what the base game is. Again, if you want to customise it at the table, go for it, fill your boots, I’m a live and let live guy. I have no real stake in it, this paragraph beyond the first sentence is more a musing rather than declaration of opinion or call to arms and I don’t wish to de rail the thread.

So I tried again. i read the mentzer basic pdf, everything started slotting into place.
Reading the 2e reprints proved more accessible, they provided a lens to better understand 1e for me.

Suddenly, I felt free. I had structure to run my games without being over burdened. Monsters were manageable, my mental processing could be devoted to adventure rather than mechanics.

For me, the older games give a sense of wonder, liberation, mystery and adventure at the table in a way the newer games don’t. Not that one is better than the other, just they give me different feels....

I think I can tell you why both builds and character arcs are a lot more desired.

simple all adventure-based content is technically dm focused as are monsters and settings.
the old adventure is both hard to tech(we can teach a player how to use pc but how to make interesting adventures seem more difficult somehow)

player technically have the least things to manage but also the least content made directly for them, you get classes which tend to be in the phb and races also in that book.

build is the pc desire for the ability to do cool things or make a cool concept.

character arcs are simply the desire for an interesting rp experience not dissimilar to the frill of the adventure but closer to the player control side of things.

I am now uncertain of what to do with this knowlege.

 

[transmission89]

I think I can tell you why both builds and character arcs are a lot more desired.

simple all adventure-based content is technically dm focused as are monsters and settings.
the old adventure is both hard to tech(we can teach a player how to use pc but how to make interesting adventures seem more difficult somehow)

player technically have the least things to manage but also the least content made directly for them, you get classes which tend to be in the phb and races also in that book.

build is the pc desire for the ability to do cool things or make a cool concept.

character arcs are simply the desire for an interesting rp experience not dissimilar to the frill of the adventure but closer to the player control side of things.

I am now uncertain of what to do with this knowlege.

Like I said, I’m already aware of this. I personally don’t agree with the concept of this being an exclusive domain of modern games. Nor do I personally like the way modern d&d tries to do this.

It’s just not what I want from my d&d game, hence a return to a more classic approach.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Like I said, I’m already aware of this. I personally don’t agree with the concept of this being an exclusive domain of modern games. Nor do I personally like the way modern d&d tries to do this.

It’s just not what I want from my d&d game, hence a return to a more classic approach.

question do you want others to potentially agree with you on this opinion?

 

[David Howery]

not sure I'd call myself a grognard. I did start playing 1E way back in 1980.... but.... I fell out of gaming completely around 1990; life and work moved me around too much to stay in a group. I did read the rule books for 3E, really didn't care for that edition, and stopped following the game. Missed out on 4E completely, have no idea how it works. After hanging out on some forums and hearing so much about 5E, I got the rulebooks and checked it out. It's well organized and laid out, but again, I didn't like it much better than 3E, seeming to be a bit much over on the munchkin side of things.
But...
people like 5E. Lots of people. So kudos to WOTC for designing an edition that is bringing a lot of new blood into WOTC. Even if 5E isn't the D&D I remember fondly way back in those early days, it's a game these new people will remember fondly when they're old and grey like me...

 

[tetrasodium]

I think that it's an oversimplification to liken the old morale rules to just a table that left gm's shackled to a rule or that the 5e dmg "equivalent" somehow makes it easier by stripping it down so far. The 5e dmg273 has about a quarter of a page dedicated to morale. By contrast the 2e ad&d dmg stretches the section about morale checks & advice on using it across page 97, 98, & 99.

I have to wonder however, like a couple of people, if while for GMs like me or you or many of the people on these boards, just choosing is what makes sense and is easiest, but for a new or inexperienced GM having a roll to fall back on if you are not sure or just not used to "thinking like a xvart" (or whatever) would be a great thing.

This thread has made me really think about game assumptions. I think one of those assumptions (it is one I made for a long time) is that all DMs learn to do it by watching other people do it - which is both a fantastic tradition and potentially a very limiting factor.

Edit to Add: I confused this with the "Lost Art of Dungeon-Crawling" thread! But my comment still applies.

In the older editions (at least 2e & 3x for sure) there was a ton of page space dedicated to helping fledgling GM chicks grow their flight feathers to understand rules so they could comfortably use them to make their game soar in fun & exciting ways with their players. The morale rules are a pretty stark example of one area that actually survived into 5e that show how extreme the differences were. youtube channels like mat coleville's mcdm, cody's taking20's, how to be a great gm & so on offer some help to bridge the gap to a degree, but that only goes so far & is far from a replacement. An experienced gm mentioning the insight & advice that accompanies a rule that was meant to be extensible is a very different & often desirable worm to give that newbie gm chick than "here are five 15-30 minute videos of people giving advice that might be tangentially useful" with very different time investments. Plus only one of them can be skimmed at the table to help now.