playtesting feel

[Kzach]

This is very true. The most successful games of all times often have a consistent theme....emergent difficulty.

Chess is a great example. The rules of chess are pretty simple, you can teach someone to play in probably 10 minutes. But the game is so incredibly complex in play that modern AI designers look to it as a way to challenge themselves.

Chess is also incredibly boring.

I think that anyone who is trying to recapture a past gaming experience should try one very simple thing: play the game with the edition you think made it so special.

When you discover that it wasn't the edition itself that made the game special, but the people, the newness of the experience, your age, your surroundings, etc. then get back to me.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I think that anyone who is trying to recapture a past gaming experience should try one very simple thing: play the game with the edition you think made it so special.

When you discover that it wasn't the edition itself that made the game special, but the people, the newness of the experience, your age, your surroundings, etc. then get back to me.

Good point.

I stopped playing 3.5 a few years before 4th came out. I tried 4E - wonderfully designed game, but it was completely worthless for my gaming goals (I play solo - it wasn't to hard to bash together a couple of houserules to let 2 characters play through a published module, but I could never do that in 4E).

I play HERO as my primary game, and D&D as my second.

After the announcement of 5E I started looking at D&D again. Playing 3.5 with basically the same few houserules I did before. I love it as much as I ever did. This is after a break of 9 or so years.. I think.

But I am a very self aware gamer. I've spend many posts doing gamestyle discussions on RPGnet, and really profiled myself to what I like. I also play HERO and when I was making my Fantasy Hero setting, I really analysed exactly what I liked about different games, so I could adapt that feel into my FH. So I can look at a game design and think "This rules leads to this kind of play, that is likely broken, this other thing over here.. it is just what I want"

So I'm not surprised that going back to a game I liked was something that worked for me.

I am looking forward to D&DN just to see what the designers are going to do for it.

 

[The Shadow]

Chess is also incredibly boring.

Well, as to that, opinions differ of course...

I think that anyone who is trying to recapture a past gaming experience should try one very simple thing: play the game with the edition you think made it so special.

When you discover that it wasn't the edition itself that made the game special, but the people, the newness of the experience, your age, your surroundings, etc. then get back to me.

The effect of nostalgia is definitely real. However, I don't think it's the whole of the equation.

Neither do the designers of Next. They went back and played all the old editions, recall, and found they gave very different play experiences. Some of which they wanted to revive.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Neither do the designers of Next. They went back and played all the old editions, recall, and found they gave very different play experiences. Some of which they wanted to revive.

This really interested me, did they write or post about their experiences with this?

For the last few months I have been perusing all the PHBs from all editions, BECMI, and seeing what I can come up with.

 

[The Shadow]

This really interested me, did they write or post about their experiences with this?

Some, though not in any great detail. Check out past L&L's, there's some discussion of it there.

 

[amerigoV]

It's called nostalgia.

I cannot speak for the OP, but that simply is not always the case. Savage Worlds won out over switching to 4e for my group. As both a player and GM, it captures much of which I enjoyed about 1e and gaming in general with a completely different (and IMO, vastly superior) mechanics.

Last year at Origins I played a ton of Savage Worlds then played a short romp through the old Moathouse (2e rules, but none of the kits). It was fun as a one-shot, but no way would I go back to that Calvin-ball-esque ruleset.

Big picture, its not nostalgia that I have recaptured, it is FUN that I recaptured. So it can be done.

 

[howandwhy99]

what about everyone else, how do you explain feel of a game?

In music they pay people stupid amounts of money to tell others what some particular songs or sounds feel like when listened too. It's dumb. It works soooo much better to just listen to a snippet. However, I must admit I don't mind a insightful commentary and/or overview either.

D&D is hard to explain and easy to show. You've played the game. Play the playtest and say what works and what doesn't as best you can. My advice is to be specific and use what happened as direct examples.

 

[Raith5]

Nostalgia will be important to get many people to try the game but it wont be enough to make them keep playing.

It will feel like D&D to me if there are clerics, trolls and dragons et al. But to me D&D is more about coke, chips and bad jokes than a certain style of mechanics.

So the game has to enable people to get together and work together to overcome challenges, to get the sense of character advancement and/or progression of a common story. So the system has to enable group collaboration where teamwork rules and everyone gets a chance to contribute more than anything.

 

[Steely_Dan]

As another poster said, I thought the thread title was "playtesting fee!", but I do have RP, so...but I did think for a minute "...here we go..."

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Chess is also incredibly boring.

I think that anyone who is trying to recapture a past gaming experience should try one very simple thing: play the game with the edition you think made it so special.

When you discover that it wasn't the edition itself that made the game special, but the people, the newness of the experience, your age, your surroundings, etc. then get back to me.

No, chess is not boring at all. If you actually have a clue, how the game works, it can be pretty interesting....

Not everyone needs very complicated rules to have an experience. Simple rules often make much better games. As you don´t need to look them up all the time, so that the game drags out endlessly. Instead, you can play chess games with 1 min time for each person or 2 hours per person per 40 moves.

So chess can be fast paced or very very strategic and tactical. Show me a different game that can be played at those different paces.

So please: simple rules.