D&D General On Grognardism...

[Rob Kuntz]

@The-Magic-Sword The means justifies the end. Not every DM is as astute in tip-toeing around the system, nor do the vast majority in my view see it as necessary to do so. Bravo! It takes some measure of calm and sleight of hand to convince trusting people that you're a trustable a person too.

 

[House_Of_Dexter]

You don't need a set of rules to have DM Agency. This is where latter editions of the rules fail to note, in deference to a minority view that all DMs "might not be fair," that a DM has final agency; and where they misstep in that the players can exit the game, en masse, to show their disapproval. Negating DM agency creates a slew of problems just as you've noted. And do note that during the playtests of D&D and all of our play with 30+ players we never had a problem with DM agency because it is baked into the rules that the DM is an impartial and fair game master, just like judges in sporting events, chess tournaments, in directed play of children, etc.

This is where I just don't get it from the newer generation of DM's and Players. This DM vs. Players...yes in the early days, there were toxic DM's that pretty much embodied, us against them. Most of those campaigns didn't last long as the players were either killed or left. Then we had a shift where the rules were meant to almost protect the players and give them a say in what they could and couldn't do. We get the rise of the toxic rule lawyer player who is protected by the rules. Where RAW is more important than RAI or even plot device...

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is where I just don't get it from the newer generation of DM's and Players. This DM vs. Players...yes in the early days, there were toxic DM's that pretty much embodied, us against them. Most of those campaigns didn't last long as the players were either killed or left. Then we had a shift where the rules were meant to almost protect the players and give them a say in what they could and couldn't do. We get the rise of the toxic rule lawyer player who is protected by the rules. Where RAW is more important than RAI or even plot device...

I just have to say that if you think toxic GMs faded away over time, that's pleasantly optimistic. As long as there's the strong imbalance between the number of GMs and players in the hobby, problematic GMs are going to be able to coast on for a long time. They might not be as extreme in all cases as the kill-'em-off trends at the start of the hobby, but there's a lot of ways for GMs to make things unpleasant that aren't nearly that terminal.

And honestly, toxic players never needed player empowerment to be problematic. While there have always been more players than GMs, there have always been a number of reasons a GM will put up with a really problematic player for far longer than they should; an expectation that the GM should at least think before bypassing rules has not been necessary for that.

 

[House_Of_Dexter]

I just have to say that if you think toxic GMs faded away over time, that's pleasantly optimistic. As long as there's the strong imbalance between the number of GMs and players in the hobby, problematic GMs are going to be able to coast on for a long time. They might not be as extreme in all cases as the kill-'em-off trends at the start of the hobby, but there's a lot of ways for GMs to make things unpleasant that aren't nearly that terminal.

And honestly, toxic players never needed player empowerment to be problematic. While there have always been more players than GMs, there have always been a number of reasons a GM will put up with a really problematic player for far longer than they should; an expectation that the GM should at least think before bypassing rules has not been necessary for that.

I can see that they are still around...I just don't deal with them...including toxic players...It does help that I'm looked at as the male patriarch of our group and they do give me respect when I'm running. Though I'm fair game between sessions .

Heh, the kill 'em all was very popular in the early days...which I really don't understand...I ran into 2 DM's that killed off my character within the opening minutes of playing. The first when we just heading to town and a black dragon flew down and breathed on us, I think that campaign lasted all of 5 minutes.

 

[tetrasodium]

TLDR: The takeaway, is that the 'player empowerment' style doesn't necessarily preclude GM agency, it just shfits it to a role of adding things rather than removing them, and to a 'houserules, not rulings' approach that rewards 'GM-as-designer.'

The problem with "adding things" is that there needs to be room baked into the system to do that. Take feats & magic items as an example, both are pretty much the defacto default expectation but because the bar on PC ability is pegged so high WotC just throws up their hands and says "feats and magic items are optional" to dismiss all of the resulting problems from actually using them & we are still talking about a houserule wotc keeps devoting significant pagespace in book after book. WotC can't easily make simple changes to the 5e core that make room for them for the same reason it's not easy for a gm to add things outside an narrow band of allowed additions. Since you mentioned it, I tried hero points from the dmg early on and liked it better than inspiration but there's still too much missing that would be very difficult to meaningfully homebrew in without carving flesh off the plsyrtd just to add some ofit back in the new elements like tactical stuff and lethality mitigating tools that force everyone to work so a team striving to exhibit some level of skill beyond charging in and wackamole healing word through everything until "we need to take s short rest... nor mot moving from this spot dont care itlf its not safe cause no fight will ever last an hour

I just have to say that if you think toxic GMs faded away over time, that's pleasantly optimistic. As long as there's the strong imbalance between the number of GMs and players in the hobby, problematic GMs are going to be able to coast on for a long time. They might not be as extreme in all cases as the kill-'em-off trends at the start of the hobby, but there's a lot of ways for GMs to make things unpleasant that aren't nearly that terminal.

And honestly, toxic players never needed player empowerment to be problematic. While there have always been more players than GMs, there have always been a number of reasons a GM will put up with a really problematic player for far longer than they should; an expectation that the GM should at least think before bypassing rules has not been necessary for that.

They may still exist, I'm sure they do, but witc has turned up the level of suspicion to hair trigger levels with do many system elements designed towards trying to force them into line &such s high bar that z gm needs to look like they are gearing upone to some degree right out of the gate before they can carve out room for new stuff. After that if bob does or whatever its because Alice was a mean killer hm not because he charged into ten orcs with three hp while ignoring all of Alice's attempts to paint how bad of an idea Bob's character knows charging it he orc fortress gate with no plan was

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

The problem with "adding things" is that there needs to be room baked into the system to do that. Take feats & magic items as an example, both are pretty much the defacto default expectation but because the bar on PC ability is pegged so high WotC just throws up their hands and says "feats and magic items are optional" to dismiss all of the resulting problems from actually using them & we are still talking about a houserule wotc keeps devoting significant pagespace in book after book. WotC can't easily make simple changes to the 5e core that make room for them for the same reason it's not easy for a gm to add things outside an narrow band of allowed additions. Since you mentioned it, I tried hero points from the dmg early on and liked it better than inspiration but there's still too much missing that would be very difficult to meaningfully homebrew in without carving flesh off the plsyrtd just to add some ofit back in the new elements like tactical stuff and lethality mitigating tools that force everyone to work so a team striving to exhibit some level of skill beyond charging in and wackamole healing word through everything until "we need to take s short rest... nor mot moving from this spot dont care itlf its not safe cause no fight will ever last an hour


They may still exist, I'm sure they do, but witc has turned up the level of suspicion to hair trigger levels with do many system elements designed towards trying to force them into line &such s high bar that z gm needs to look like they are gearing upone to some degree right out of the gate before they can carve out room for new stuff. After that if bob does or whatever its because Alice was a mean killer hm not because he charged into ten orcs with three hp while ignoring all of Alice's attempts to paint how bad of an idea Bob's character knows charging it he orc fortress gate with no plan was

So to clarify, I'm not talking about Hero Points from 5e, I played 5e for a long time, but got really sick of it. I play Pathfinder 2e, which at least in my experience, does not have these problems. Feats and magic items are baked in (though there are explicit variant rules to hack the magic items back to optional) multiclassing is baked in, the game is very well balanced, and designed in a way that offers diminishing returns from trying to pour all your resources into one thing, so you don't have to 'shave power away' to add it back in, for the most part, and despite the actual volume of rulebook material available, there's plenty of room to modify the game, and well made tools for doing so.

It also has a lot of the stuff I might've otherwise tried to painstakingly homebrew into 5e, right out of the box.

 

[Ifurita'sFan]

Over 50 and I literally spend over a thousand a year on my gaming hobby and have brought handfuls of players into the game. WotC can ignore me at their peril.

I think that this is a matter of people hoping and wishing for things to support their personal view of reality vs actual factual reality.
Forty Percent of Dungeons & Dragons Players Are 25 or Younger states that 40% of players are 25 and under. Conversely that means that 60% of players are 26 and older, and that means that most of them grew up on 2e ad&d or 3.x So those are the versions they are most familiar with. They also point out that only 11% of players are 40+ but that all depends on the question asked. I suspect it was "Do you currently actively play D&D" to which most people 40 and up are too GD busy with work, home, a family, kids, and similar to play D&D except maybe to dm for their kids. I know for a fact that I fall into that demographic. But I suspect that given the income disparity, that while younger players like to throw "shade on the grogs" that WotC knows full well who helps pay the bills. Grogs have kids and they've also got the money to be able to afford to pay for the hobby. And frankly, how many of the new current generation are here because of things like Critical Role, Stranger things, and similar. D&D when we played it, it wasn't cool it was just fun. Now it's cool, so we have a lot of people chasing a fad, and you can be sure that a lot of them will likely exit the hobby when the cool wears off a little.

 

[Ifurita'sFan]

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.

I don't really have a question, but more of an invitation for discussion. If you think RPG design peaked in the late 70s, what about that design speaks to you so strongly?

I do have a lot of nostalgia for that Basic rulebook I had in the early 80s, but having played the game compared to a modem design my admiration for that system is entirely based on the nostalgia it represents. Descending AC, wizards with one spell a day and 4hp, puzzles mixing real world knowledge with character problem solving and "beating the adventure" versus "telling a good story" all are things I avoid in 2021.

I went through the first 10 pages or responses and you know what I found. Not one person who actually addressed this fine posters honest and sincere question; "what about that design speaks to you so strongly?" Not one.

Instead what did I see? Page after page of people singing the "praises" of 5e and 4e (forth edition is perhaps the singular WORST edition there is. There I said it to your face. It's horrible. It took the heart right out of the game by taking away even the trappings of injury from the game. A single night's rest makes everything better... just like a crappy CRPG. Go to an inn, rest a single night, and its all better. What a joke of a system.)

So I'm going to answer it. It might take a while, so buckle up.

Doyle wrote for Sherlock Holmes. “You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

That right there is why.

For all the plentiful rules of later editions 3.x and later. For all the simplifications, for all the "untangling" of things and the changing of AC from a downward to an upward number. For all the pretty art in the new books. It lacks silence. Silence is the fecund earth in which our hobby grows, it's imagination.

Earlier versions are silent... on what your limits are, on how to tell you HOW to play the game. They give guidelines, they encourage you, and give you hints they're like the hand of your father hovering next to you after he'd taken the training wheels off your bike. The hand that is there to catch you if you need it, but which trusts you to learn to "fly" on your own.

In new editions you have to roll for intimidate, or investigate, or any of a number of things that in 1e or 2e you just DID. That you role played, not Roll played. In those older editions the rules were silent about how you'd intimidate that guard, or how you searched for treasure, so instead you sat at the table with your friends and you spun stories of how you did those things. You had to talk to the guard and the DM, being a fair minded adjudicator, asked himself, did their friend do enough to pull it off. You didn't have a roll tell you if some NPC lied to them, you relied on the DM's acting skills to carry it off and you became canny to it. You ROLE PLAYED. Sure AC might have been a little bass ackwards... but who gave a flip? That's easy to fix, flip the numbers around, it's 15 minutes of work and done. Tell me, does a table of numbers make that big a deal to you? Honestly? Are you going to claim for an instant that changing a mechanic from down to up made THAT big of an improvement? If so, you're a bald faced liar and you're being knowingly and deliberately obtuse.

So in short, why does the older version speak to me more than the new versions? Look at the prices that A copy of all 4 of the Wilderlands series are going for today. upwards of 900$ with maps in garbage shape, for that new cost 25$ total maybe. Go to a used book store and try to find an original DMG with the efreet cover and look at the price, if you find it for less than $200 you're lucky. People are cottoning in that pretty graphics don't matter. D&D is a game of the imagination, not pretty dice. And the earlier versions captured the essence of D&D better, by being silent when they needed to be. That silence is a quite invaluable companion to gamers, because it gives them more freedom and helps them confidently come up with their own ways of playing "let's pretend" where they don't need rules or dice rolls for everything.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I went through the first 10 pages or responses and you know what I found. Not one person who actually addressed this fine posters honest and sincere question; "what about that design speaks to you so strongly?" Not one.

I came into the thread late, so that was the biggest reason I didn't answer it.

The other was, bluntly, because I think a number of people who call themselves grognards do the hobby no service whatsoever with their attitudes. And since I've been playing since 1975 I think I have the right to that opinion.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I went through the first 10 pages or responses and you know what I found. Not one person who actually addressed this fine posters honest and sincere question; "what about that design speaks to you so strongly?" Not one.

Instead what did I see? Page after page of people singing the "praises" of 5e and 4e (forth edition is perhaps the singular WORST edition there is. There I said it to your face. It's horrible. It took the heart right out of the game by taking away even the trappings of injury from the game. A single night's rest makes everything better... just like a crappy CRPG. Go to an inn, rest a single night, and its all better. What a joke of a system.)

So I'm going to answer it. It might take a while, so buckle up.

Doyle wrote for Sherlock Holmes. “You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

That right there is why.

For all the plentiful rules of later editions 3.x and later. For all the simplifications, for all the "untangling" of things and the changing of AC from a downward to an upward number. For all the pretty art in the new books. It lacks silence. Silence is the fecund earth in which our hobby grows, it's imagination.

Earlier versions are silent... on what your limits are, on how to tell you HOW to play the game. They give guidelines, they encourage you, and give you hints they're like the hand of your father hovering next to you after he'd taken the training wheels off your bike. The hand that is there to catch you if you need it, but which trusts you to learn to "fly" on your own.

In new editions you have to roll for intimidate, or investigate, or any of a number of things that in 1e or 2e you just DID. That you role played, not Roll played. In those older editions the rules were silent about how you'd intimidate that guard, or how you searched for treasure, so instead you sat at the table with your friends and you spun stories of how you did those things. You had to talk to the guard and the DM, being a fair minded adjudicator, asked himself, did their friend do enough to pull it off. You didn't have a roll tell you if some NPC lied to them, you relied on the DM's acting skills to carry it off and you became canny to it. You ROLE PLAYED. Sure AC might have been a little bass ackwards... but who gave a flip? That's easy to fix, flip the numbers around, it's 15 minutes of work and done. Tell me, does a table of numbers make that big a deal to you? Honestly? Are you going to claim for an instant that changing a mechanic from down to up made THAT big of an improvement? If so, you're a bald faced liar and you're being knowingly and deliberately obtuse.

So in short, why does the older version speak to me more than the new versions? Look at the prices that A copy of all 4 of the Wilderlands series are going for today. upwards of 900$ with maps in garbage shape, for that new cost 25$ total maybe. Go to a used book store and try to find an original DMG with the efreet cover and look at the price, if you find it for less than $200 you're lucky. People are cottoning in that pretty graphics don't matter. D&D is a game of the imagination, not pretty dice. And the earlier versions captured the essence of D&D better, by being silent when they needed to be. That silence is a quite invaluable companion to gamers, because it gives them more freedom and helps them confidently come up with their own ways of playing "let's pretend" where they don't need rules or dice rolls for everything.

I'm on my phone, so I won't split apart your posts point by point. I'll just say that your posts are rife with pure speculation with nothing really concrete to back up your assumptions, and you're flat out incorrect. On the very first page I laid out in detail what aspects of the design I liked.

As far as the whole roll play vs role play diatribe, that's not accurate as well. You seem to be forgetting how ability roll under checks existed in 1e from the early 80s on. And even today, when a skill like persuasion exists, many still just role play it out. It's a preference thing.

So honestly, your posts read to me as just someone who can't be bothered to actually read the discussion but is looking for an excuse to disparage editions and players without much basis on accuracy--old men yelling at clouds. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how your posts read.