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

[Laurefindel]

Fans are conservative by default. That true in about all fandoms because it’s in a definition of a fan to love how something is now.

When you introduce changes, it is only logical that fans will be the ones noticing these changes first and resist it because it changes their relationship to the product as fans. This resistance can lead to protests and boycotts but more often than not, just nerd-fueled rage.

TL;DR: If you weren’t conservative to some degrees, you wouldn’t be a fan. Fans have different levels of tolerance to change but if you change something you loved, you might not love it anymore.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

The aesthetics can be distinguished from the rules. 3.5e is my personal edition preference and while I like the mechanics, I hate the aesthetics of the rulebooks. I've even ranted about those aesthetics back in the day.

 

[TiQuinn]

Gun to head, if I had to play a TSR edition of D&D, it would probably be 2e. I find the actual core rules easier to understand and use than 1e and with the right selection of supplements I can put most everything I would want back into 2e. That said, I don't think I could do it for long as the AD&Disms like level limits and race/class restrictions would chafe on me, but of all the older editions, it's the one I could tolerate the longest.

We threw out level limits and the restrictions from pretty much day one with no impact. That was very much a Gygaxian holdover.

 

[KYRON45]

Are you familiar with the way old-school D&D tended to require that you burn through half a dozen (or more!) characters before you finally got one that would survive long enough to stick around a bit? Well, whether or not you are, that was a thing, and it was partially there to emphasize how dangerous the world is. Running things precisely like that is a problem now for a lot of players, because many folks who want to play old-school games don't have the free time to spend multiple months just getting past a character's first or second adventure. But they also don't want to give up the lethality of the world; to merely skip over that process would drain away a significant portion of the fun for them.

Enter the character funnel adventure. Each player rolls up several characters, at least 2 but usually 3-4, sometimes more. The funnel adventure is, intentionally, brutally hard. It's fully intended that most characters won't survive. But when you do get to the other side--which should take no more than a couple sessions, perhaps three for a slow group or unusually long adventure--you have just completed what would have been a multi-month process of character-winnowing in a session to three.

The existence of these funnels does absolutely nothing to people who don't want to use them. There is nothing you lose of DCC by not playing through them. But their presence neatly solves an otherwise thorny design problem that wasn't really a concern 50 years ago, but is a concern now.

DCC funnels are one of my favorite examples of excellent game design, because I can with 100% honesty say they absolutely aren't for me. I don't like the lethality of early editions of D&D, which I find demoralizing and tedious. I have no interest in using funnels whatsoever, nor is this a design problem I would need to address. But I can see why the design problem really is a problem for the people who are looking for this kind of play-experience, and more importantly, I can see how this new technique is, objectively, a neat and tidy solution to a dilemma that looks hard to solve from first principles.

I love giving it as an example very specifically because it's great design that isn't for me. I have no emotional attachment to it. I would never benefit from its existence, nor would I be impoverished if it hadn't existed. But I know that it is good game design, an improvement in technique, even though that technique doesn't do anything for me, personally. I have no dog in this race, yet I can still see that the newcomer has learned a useful trick her forebears didn't have.

We never played that way.
So again I posit that one persons progress is not

Are you familiar with the way old-school D&D tended to require that you burn through half a dozen (or more!) characters before you finally got one that would survive long enough to stick around a bit? Well, whether or not you are, that was a thing, and it was partially there to emphasize how dangerous the world is. Running things precisely like that is a problem now for a lot of players, because many folks who want to play old-school games don't have the free time to spend multiple months just getting past a character's first or second adventure. But they also don't want to give up the lethality of the world; to merely skip over that process would drain away a significant portion of the fun for them.

Enter the character funnel adventure. Each player rolls up several characters, at least 2 but usually 3-4, sometimes more. The funnel adventure is, intentionally, brutally hard. It's fully intended that most characters won't survive. But when you do get to the other side--which should take no more than a couple sessions, perhaps three for a slow group or unusually long adventure--you have just completed what would have been a multi-month process of character-winnowing in a session to three.

The existence of these funnels does absolutely nothing to people who don't want to use them. There is nothing you lose of DCC by not playing through them. But their presence neatly solves an otherwise thorny design problem that wasn't really a concern 50 years ago, but is a concern now.

DCC funnels are one of my favorite examples of excellent game design, because I can with 100% honesty say they absolutely aren't for me. I don't like the lethality of early editions of D&D, which I find demoralizing and tedious. I have no interest in using funnels whatsoever, nor is this a design problem I would need to address. But I can see why the design problem really is a problem for the people who are looking for this kind of play-experience, and more importantly, I can see how this new technique is, objectively, a neat and tidy solution to a dilemma that looks hard to solve from first principles.

I love giving it as an example very specifically because it's great design that isn't for me. I have no emotional attachment to it. I would never benefit from its existence, nor would I be impoverished if it hadn't existed. But I know that it is good game design, an improvement in technique, even though that technique doesn't do anything for me, personally. I have no dog in this race, yet I can still see that the newcomer has learned a useful trick her forebears didn't have.

I have never shown up to a game (even in 1e) with more than one character. I've never played this way and it sounds horrible to me. My not liking it means its not progressing anything for me.
Which leads me back to my original point.
Change happens, but its contribution to "progress" with regards to games we play seems to me to be subjective.
I would ask what makes this funnel thing good game design, but that's probably a conversation for another space.

 

[Kromanjon]

Which again, underscores his point.

Does it?

Things improve over time. I haven’t had to change a thermostat in a new refrigerator that I’ve owned…ever. My refrigerator is much larger than one my parents had back in their cabin.

Most thermostats never broke down. The fact that some did doesn't prove anything. A lot of circuit boards fail as well, but not all of course. They are however more sensitive and when they break they cause more trouble than some ice build up.

But where this comparison breaks down is that TTRPGs are not going to break from lack of use or overuse.

Yeah. This was actually never a comparison with ttrpgs. This was just a rebutal when someone claimed that no one ever makes something new willfully worse. I could have use mobile phones as a example but refrigerators was closer in my mind as I have worked with them and I know for a fact this to be true. They use cheaper components with a higher chance of failure and shorter life spans to sell more products.

An interesting thought exercise would be to ponder how one could translate this process to ttrpgs. Many have stated again and again that WotC is a corporation and that it's going to corporate. So if they want to keep us buying more and more books at a faster rate, and they want to spend less and less money doing it, how will they do this? What is the ttrpg version of planned obsolescence?

 

[Remathilis]

We threw out level limits and the restrictions from pretty much day one with no impact. That was very much a Gygaxian holdover.

Yeah, 2e has a lot of those, which puts it very much in the OS rules, NS style area, which unfortunately yucks too many yums for both modern players and OSR players.

 

[rhythmsoundmotion]

I think it’s perfectly valid to be a fan of TSR Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons, or Hasbro Dungeons & Dragons. Each era encompassed different corporate and design goals. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses.
It’s okay to disagree with the corporate and design goals. I think it becomes exhausting when someone ignores the different goals and attacks everything as “idiotic “, “delusional “, “lazy”… etc. (My understanding of the original post in the thread.)

 

[TiQuinn]

This was actually never a comparison with ttrpgs. This was just a rebutal when someone claimed that no one ever makes something new willfully worse

That’s just proof two people can read a post and come away with two vastly different conclusions.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

We never played that way.
So again I posit that one persons progress is not

I have never shown up to a game (even in 1e) with more than one character. I've never played this way and it sounds horrible to me. My not liking it means its not progressing anything for me.
Which leads me back to my original point.
Change happens, but its contribution to "progress" with regards to games we play seems to me to be subjective.
I would ask what makes this funnel thing good game design, but that's probably a conversation for another space.

How are you harmed by their existence? How does their presence, in any way at all, affect YOUR play?

Nobody forces you to run funnels. They're an option. Every group can choose to use them or not use them, and literally nothing is lost.

You keep making this out to be some kind of zero-sum game. It isn't. Your point hinges on the presumption that in order for something to be added, it must, 100% always, take away something from someone else. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

 

[TiQuinn]

Yeah, 2e has a lot of those, which puts it very much in the OS rules, NS style area, which unfortunately yucks too many yums for both modern players and OSR players.

Which is just so crazy to me because as much as people get spun up over backwards compatibility, I think 2e remains the only edition that really had backwards compatibility baked in because TSR management was so adamant that it had to work seamlessly with 1e material - probably the last time executives for the D&D game were ever that deeply concerned about that issue ever again. I think we played nearly every 1e adventure, as well as several Basic adventures, with 2e over 10 years and it was pretty easy to use with the 2e rules.