D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Faolyn]

Who gives a royal fig about the art?

Lots of people. I do.

Now, I don't need the art to be full-color digital art, but it needs to be of decent quality.

The game isn't played by flipping through the monster manual for pictures... Egad, that's petty.

Art is inspirational. If something in the game has "meh" art, then people will often not care about it. An art style can turn people away. There's been plenty of people on this very forum who have decided that the newer D&D books have "Disney art" and therefore the game itself is made for little kids. There's certain AD&D artists I couldn't (and still can't) stand and hesitated to buy books that featured their art on the cover. And things in the game that were illustrated by them, like various monsters, were equally unpleasant to me and less likely to be used.

Couple of background comments:
I came to the game in the eighties, exposed to a heavy homebrew of 1e with 2e infusions. The game (RAW) has changed a lot.
I dunno how many of you folks read "order of the stick," cartoon but the very first panel [1 New Edition - Giant in the Playground Games] pokes fun at the challenges of implementing a complete system change.

When I came back to ttrpgs after the better chunk of 30 years, I was staggered at the scope of the changes. The game I knew (and the concepts I had remembered) were totally different. Staggeringly different.

It's like enjoying soccer in the 80s and the coming back to see the game has now changed to Rugby Sevens or something.

The reason for this is that OSR/WOTC is a commercial enterprise, and somewhere along the lines the philosophy shifted from "we can make money designing really good supplements (Oriental Adventures) or modules" to "let's run this like a car company, and as soon as we roll out this year's model, we're going to work hard to make it obsolete by designing a totally new model with the same name but entirely different parts."

THAT is why people are "conservative." They're tired of the needless rule changes, upgrades and silliness. OSR/WOTC lost the plot. They made too many changes in the name of the all-holy buck, and consumers/fans/players are smart enough to see all of that for what it is.

Or they made changes that were actually good, but you didn't like. Producing products that appeal to more people is a good business model, yes, but also just good in general--assuming you don't want D&D to be a niche hobby only a tiny number of people play.

And, of course, taste is very subjective. I read the original Oriental Adventures book, not too long after it was published (early 90s, definitely back in the TSR days), and felt it was really not good at all. It certainly made me not want to play in that setting. And TSR famously produced so many lines just to make money that it competed with itself, so game = money is hardly a situation unique to WotC.

And in my view, as a grognard, the whole combat mechanic turned into something too complicated. The simple one-action-per-round mechanic of the older versions lends to faster resolution. Heck, I saw some video online - one of the more popular feeds, I might add - where the DM was noting how a major conflict took four freaking hours to resolve. FOUR HOURS? I've seen (and DMed) mass battlefield encounters in half the time....

Modern D&D has become about the combat. Look at all the videos about how to create broken min/max characters and builds. It stopped being about the story, and that's why old farts like me are going "nope, nuh-uh." I want a palette to create a story, not an IKEA desk that takes forever to build.

You do know that those videos are made and watched by only a tiny minority of players, right? And that there's always been minmaxers out there--the term originated with AD&D, after all. Literally the most over-powered character I ever had was from a 2e game because the DM allowed kits and let us check for wild talent psionics as per the Complete Psionics Handbook. I wasn't even trying to make an OP character--I just had a neat idea, picked a kit that supported it, got lucky with my psionics roll, and ended up with multiple attacks per round and a hefty attack and damage bonus. This was for a bard.

The only difference between then and now is that back then, people were pretty much only able to talk about these things on Usenet or forums and listservs, and they almost never spread beyond that.

You may not like the new systems as much, but I say good riddance to unnecessary sub-systems that were created ad hoc and never tested against any other system.

 

[Faolyn]

Our D&D party stole an electrically-powered zeppelin from a tech-advanced steampunk-like society we're largely at war with and this is exactly what happened: we figured out how to fly it soon enough but everything else about it we had to learn from the very thick and fine-printed operators' manual we found on board, written in a language none of us could read.

It took us a couple of months to fly the airship halfway around the world to our home base; during that time a couple of PC mages - after casting Comprehend Language more times than they care to think about - were able to both understand the manual and translate it into Common and (Elvish? I forget) so that more of us could read it.

So hell, yeah, I'm going to start reading it!

(several months later)

You have finally finished reading the manual and now know how it all works. Now you get to field all the questions your party has!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is a difference between "the traditional GM must have everything determined" and "the traditional GM can limit choices in character creation based on the world they have created".

That difference has been almost totally ignored in this thread.

Particularly when people are so keen on "absolute power". And yes, I put quotes on that for a reason. It is not an extreme thing I have ascribed to others. It is something I tried desperately to get people to step back from.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You portray this as though it's a ridiculous bit of nonsense. Not exactly the "everyone's tastes are valid" perspective you were laying claim to previously; this is characterizing the "other side" in an inherently negative light, whether you intend it or not. It's not "changing the world to accommodate"--it's recognizing that there is value in having a "beyond-the-horizon" from which novelty, whatever the reason for its inclusion, could arise.


Whereas to me it tells me "you are a mere spectator in this world", and thus affords almost no agency whatsoever.

How much of a spectator are we in the real world? I don't need reality-altering powers to have player agency.

 

[Micah Sweet]

(several months later)

You have finally finished reading the manual and now know how it all works. Now you get to field all the questions your party has!

Yay! Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

 

[Micah Sweet]

No.

It is that someone who nails down that much of their world is taking meaningful agency away from their players by turning the world into something so heavily fixed, the players are merely pushing around the preconfigured elements.

As said above, there is genuine value--to both player and GM--in having a "beyond-the-horizon", a "not-fully-known", from which things may arise as more is learned.

It wasn't until the post-Renaissance that folks had more than an incredibly loose idea of what Europe, Africa, and Asia looked like overall. "Hɪᴄ ꜱᴠɴᴛ ᴅʀᴀᴄᴏɴᴇꜱ" only appeared on a single (disputed) map, but more common variants (e.g. ʜɪᴄ ꜱᴠɴᴛ ʟᴇᴏɴᴇꜱ) existed too. The Romans sincerely believed there were dog-headed humans only a relatively short ways outside their explored territory, for example.

You answered "no", and then proceeded to explain to me, "but actually yes".

 

[The Firebird]

That difference has been almost totally ignored in this thread.

Particularly when people are so keen on "absolute power". And yes, I put quotes on that for a reason. It is not an extreme thing I have ascribed to others. It is something I tried desperately to get people to step back from.

I have not read the defenses of absolute power to mean that the DM must have everything determined in advance. Just that they can.

 

[Faolyn]

Yay! Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

Nope. The player can now make up the specifics (within the confines of any established limitations, of course).

 

[bloodtide]

It is that someone who nails down that much of their world is taking meaningful agency away from their players by turning the world into something so heavily fixed, the players are merely pushing around the preconfigured elements.

Well, if a GM just says "oh there are trees and whatever you players want to make up on a whim" it won't even be a setting, much less of a game.

As said above, there is genuine value--to both player and GM--in having a "beyond-the-horizon", a "not-fully-known", from which things may arise as more is learned.

There is no value in a Clueless DM. In fact this ruins most games. If the players say "hey what is in the Dark Forest" and the GM is like "I don't know", that game will go nowhere fast.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I'd also be fine with that. The character's family, a small village, some minor cultural elements, seem all good to me, because they don't affect anything major about the world.

Okay. I've seen some pretty extreme positions about that sort thing before, so I wasn't going to assume you weren't more of the same.