D&D General On Grognardism...

[JiffyPopTart]

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.

There are a lot of "You"s in your reply to my OP and I'm assuming those are addressed to the audience, not just me.

About a month ago I had a discussion about modern art with a friend of mine. She has a Masters degree in fine art, and I am a simpleton who claims that I could do some of that art myself with a blindfold on.

One point she made to me was that in something like minimalist art oftentimes the void of the canvas is an important aspect of the art as a whole. This seems to me to be what you are saying.

To try to restate your point, but in a less condescending way, are you saying that to you older editions were the pinnacle of design because the areas of the canvas devoid of rules complements the core rules that are there?

I think that concept is a valid one, and can't argue with it. I would add, however, that despite 5e having a skill system, I think it has many less rules governing the system than 1e does. Do you feel that 5e takes up more of the blank canvas with it's ruleset than 1e does?

 

[nedjer]

Kind of like the artwork at the time, there was plenty left to your groups' imagination and no legacy to prefill it. Rulings were made in the spirit of the rules rather than the rules because there often were no rules. After tortuous sessions with counter wargames it was straight to the fun compared to praying no one knocked the board with the stacks of counters all over it.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

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?

To put it as simply as possible....

"Lack of options and details".

Like you, I started in early 80's (81, to be exact) with the Erol Otis Basic Set 1 (the "Moldvay" version). Thinking about what "feeling" I get when picturing the character sheet, the rule book art, the smell, the feel and sound of the pages turning in my fingers, the amount of detail (or lack thereof) for monsters, magic items and spells....I can only distil it down to that: "Lack of options and details".

Anyway...long story short... B/X or early versions of the game had the DM and Players sitting there with a blank canvas, more or less, for each campaign. Want to play a desert bound dervish? Ok, Fighter; your Normal Sword is a scimitar, your Dagger is a jambiya, and you wear armour that looks like it's straight out of an Arabian Adventures movie from Hollywood. Same with every other class in the game. Your "Dervish" had the same capabilities as your buddies "Viking"...but you each looked different, used different names for things, and roleplayed it up. As the campaign progressed, as well as your PC's, the DM was inclined to actually develop an "Arabian" area and a "Norse" area. Maybe with some special goodies with actual mechanics to back them up. BUT...these were all very specific to individual home-games.

Now? Everything is expected to be codified. If someone sees "Scimitar" on a sheet, they expect it to be just like it says in the PHB. If someone see's "Rage" as a PC ability, they expect it to be just like it says under Barbarian in the PHB. That "blank canvas" is lost with new games.

Yes, you CAN create something new...maybe. There are just SOOOO many rules, spells, options, etc out there in "the wild" that someone, somewhere is going to point to your PC and say "Oh, so you got that from [insert book/site]"...even if you didn't. That "blank canvas" sense of wonder, newness, and unique pride of "Yeah, WE did this for OUR game..." is lost with new games/iterations.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Lyxen]

I am 57 and a lot of the people at our tables are from the same generation, but we also play with much younger people, in particular from our children generation (and in completely mixed groups), and I've even ran a game for my 5 years-old step-grandson, or for the 10-years old adopted daughter of some friends along with some adults.

While I'm still a huge fan of BECMI (and for example have translated the War Machine in every single edition of the game, we have a huge battle in Avernus coming up this Friday), and have probably my fondest memories in AD&D, I really welcomed the simplicity of 5e after the disasters of 3e and 4e, where it was so hard to induce new players to the game (all these little intricate rules, all this playing on a grid) and where combat took ages, all so technical (I loved 3e at the start, mind, the standardisation effort that went in there was amazing).

At least in 5e I can do what I had been doing for more than 20 years when 3e came out, running games with just some paper and dices, just sitting anywhere and describing fantastic adventures.

I have considered going back to B/X and the equivalent, but not only are the systems less logical and streamlined, and less supported online, but there are two things that I really like in 5e, skills out of the box and the fact that beginning characters have more than a sword swing or a single spell in a day. Without making it too complex, it still incites players to be a bit creative, especially beginners.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Dave [Arneson] and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the "rules" found in DandD. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, DandD will have become staid and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don't believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another. DandD is supposed to offer a challenge to the imagination and to do so in many ways. Perhaps the most important is in regard to what the probabilities of a given situation are. If players know what all of the monster parameters are, what can be expected in a given situation, exactly what will happen to them if they perform thus and so, most of the charm of the game is gone. Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do not know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive". -- Gary Gygax, Alarums & Excursions #2, 1975

I desire variance in interpretation and, as long as I am editor of the TSR line and its magazine, I will do my utmost to see that there is as little trend towards standardization as possible. Each campaign should be a "variant", and there is no "official interpretation" from me or anyone else. If a game of "Dungeons and Beavers" suits a group, all I say is more power to them, for every fine referee runs his own variant of DandD anyway.-- ibid.

“They [the rules] provide a framework around which you build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity…” -- Gary Gygax. Introduction to OD&D, January, 1974.

"New details can be added and old "laws" altered so as to provide continually new and different situations." -- ibid.

 

[Willie the Duck]

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.

It doesn't help that they actually included a 'you and yours rollplay, me and mine roleplay' line, which I thought was considered a hackneyed self-congratulatory canard back in the early 90s. There are a few valid points buried in the dross, but it is not a good look.

Dave [Arneson] and I disagree on how to handle any number of things, and both of our campaigns differ from the "rules" found in DandD. If the time ever comes when all aspects of fantasy are covered and the vast majority of its players agree on how the game should be played, DandD will have become staid and boring indeed. Sorry, but I don't believe that there is anything desirable in having various campaigns playing similarly to one another. DandD is supposed to offer a challenge to the imagination and to do so in many ways. Perhaps the most important is in regard to what the probabilities of a given situation are. If players know what all of the monster parameters are, what can be expected in a given situation, exactly what will happen to them if they perform thus and so, most of the charm of the game is gone. Frankly, the reason I enjoy playing in Dave Arneson's campaign is that I do not know his treatments of monsters and suchlike, so I must keep thinking and reasoning in order to "survive". -- Gary Gygax, Alarums & Excursions #2, 1975

I desire variance in interpretation and, as long as I am editor of the TSR line and its magazine, I will do my utmost to see that there is as little trend towards standardization as possible. Each campaign should be a "variant", and there is no "official interpretation" from me or anyone else. If a game of "Dungeons and Beavers" suits a group, all I say is more power to them, for every fine referee runs his own variant of DandD anyway.-- ibid.

“They [the rules] provide a framework around which you build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity…” -- Gary Gygax. Introduction to OD&D, January, 1974.

"New details can be added and old "laws" altered so as to provide continually new and different situations." -- ibid.

Good stuff. I wish more of us had consistently seen that side of him.

 

[Azzy]

While I'm still a huge fan of BECMI (and for example have translated the War Machine in every single edition of the game, we have a huge battle in Avernus coming up this Friday),

I hate (not really) to derail this thread, but do you mind sharing tha. I've been meaning to convert it to 5e myself for a while, but I've got too many projects on my plate.

 

[Lyxen]

I hate (not really) to derail this thread, but do you mind sharing tha. I've been meaning to convert it to 5e myself for a while, but I've got too many projects on my plate.

I have created a new thread here.

 

[Stormonu]

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.

I was mostly being facetious with my original post. When WotC makes content for D&D, I just don't want them to cut me out. That was how I felt during the 4E era - I felt the game was being designed to discard not only everything that came before, but everyone as well. I am very glad that 5E swung the completely opposite direction and feels like it was designed to be inclusive, even though a lot of the 4E "under the hood" design was carried over. I would like them to continue down the path that brought us 5E in the first place and not discount any particular group who plays now because we don't carry the economic weight of others.

I mean, original D&D writing was college level, but it still attracted the young crowd (I was 10 when I first got into the game). As long as they write the game for those who are actually playing (now) and those who will continue to play, and not for some mythical group of those they could never appease, they should do fine.

 

[Ifurita'sFan]

There are a lot of "You"s in your reply to my OP and I'm assuming those are addressed to the audience, not just me.

Precisely. It's meant in a more metaphorical way.

About a month ago I had a discussion about modern art with a friend of mine. She has a Masters degree in fine art, and I am a simpleton who claims that I could do some of that art myself with a blindfold on.

One point she made to me was that in something like minimalist art oftentimes the void of the canvas is an important aspect of the art as a whole. This seems to me to be what you are saying.

To try to restate your point, but in a less condescending way, are you saying that to you older editions were the pinnacle of design because the areas of the canvas devoid of rules complements the core rules that are there?

In part, yes.

I was trying to emphasize that it's not what is executed in the rules, but where the design of the game chooses NOT to lay down rules. Rules are frequently the death of imagination imo, and when there are gaps, you are encouraged to fill them in with imagination

If you deliberately avoid creating rules for something, that is a design decision just like creating a rule is. (Some might argue that failing to include a rule is an accidental gap, I tend to point to the fact that in 1e they had optional rules for all sorts of things, from detecting invisibility to aerial manuverabilty, that could be taken to ridiculous levels of scrutiny, and ask "If they went this far, do you really think they simply forgot?)

To me, the genius and the feel of the older edition is about what they consciously chose to stay silent on, and that silence is what makes it better. They could have created rules like "If you want to tell if an npc is lying to you, roll a d20 and roll below your wisdom stat and use such and such a modifier, or consult table 51p and roll percentile dice and modify as listed in subsection c. " endlessly, but they did not. They knew that by staying silent, they made it ambiguous and forced you to tread those grounds yourself. How do you tell if the DM's npc is lying to you? Maybe by investigating them? Maybe by charisma? Wisdom? Intelligence? A combination of all or none of these things? Who knows. That right there makes you speculate and invent, and use your imagination. And to me that's the name of the game here.

And for anyone that disagrees with my silence point, I counter with this.

The world's most elegant woman, Coco Chanel, was said to have advised the following when dressing with accessories: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” Meaning that by consciously removing that one accessory, you didn't look "made up" you looked fresh and like you were not deliberately trying to pull of a certain fashion look and that you looked disarmingly unprepared, you broke the rules just a little bit, you just "were" as you were, chic. You didn't need to be prepared for every eventuality.

Likewise, Hitchcock, perhaps one of the greatest directors of all time didn't show us the murder in the shower in Psycho, why? Because he deliberately didn't. He was conspicuously silent on that murder visually. He let us fill in the blanks ourselves, because it forced us to use our imagination with what scared us the most out of all the possible bad results.

Artists use negative space to evoke and force the observer to engage and create in their own head. Negative space, or in this case, negative rules, do the same thing.

The old adage of "less is more" was true then and it's true now. Sure there are a lot of specific rules in AD&D, but most of them are "use them or not" type of rules. You can choose to ignore them at ease and it even encourages you to, Gary said that these are guidelines. Not so with later versions. Imagine for example if you cut out feats from 3.x and up. How do you think that your players would respond?

I think a well designed game knows when to talk and give guidelines, and when to stay conspicuously silent and let the DM and his players figure out how THEY are going to rule on things.

I think that concept is a valid one, and can't argue with it. I would add, however, that despite 5e having a skill system, I think it has many less rules governing the system than 1e does. Do you feel that 5e takes up more of the blank canvas with it's ruleset than 1e does?

First off, on this, would you be open to discussing that point more? Maybe on another thread if you like, so as not to derail this fine discussion. I'm really curious about your feelings there because I tend to find that 1e is (in my opinion) actually fairly rules lite save having a much more structured combat round. Surprisingly too, I find that 1e combat is a lot faster than 5e especially in particularly large melees.