Should D&D (or any other RPG) actually attempt to be "All Things to All People"?

[Crazy Jerome]

Now, to my knowledge, the word "new" does not equate to the words "kid" nor "preteen", so I'm not sure why that would be brought up in the first place.

Analogy. X is to Y as A is to B. In context, you said 4E was good for one thing and 3E/PF were good for another. I went with the analogy, as a less charged version of why these kind of statements are not always well received.

That you guys continue to miss that this is an analogy, and not a claim that you said anything about kids or preteens, tends to confirm Pemerton's statement.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

That said, it should appeal on a generic level as long as one is OK with a VERY different system that emphasizes the cinematic, and eschews pre designed crunch (instead having the GM and players working together to make nearly everything up from whole cloth). Abstract in the extreme, and thus your average D&D player will hate HeroQuest...at least that was my experience. I however LOVE the system.

The best statement I have ever seen on generic systems was the poster that said many years ago that you can play any game you want with GURPS--as long as you want the game to run like GURPS.

I had already come to the conclusion that systems can be generic, but not universal. That is, you can have a generic mechanical framework that you can then flavor for a campaign in a particular genre and/or style. And if you know the system really well, you may do it well. But you can't have universal mechanics that themselves invoke "things" that will satisfy all people, because the things evoked are too tied to the mechanics.

The only way to get around that is to remove things from the system--until you finally hit total freeform where you have finally removed all mechanical evoking--and find that you also have no system left. Attempts at trying to have a universal system are really attempts to narrow the window looked at down to what the game author want to bother playing. For some people, it is possible to achieve a system sufficiently "universal" for their purposes.

 

[MichaelSomething]

The player and the character both have the same understanding of 3E spells and feats; their limitations exist in the game world. For instance, to cleave one orc in twain and hit the second with one axe stroke, the barbarian needs two orcs standing next to each other.

The player and the character have very different understandings of 4E powers; their limitations exist primarily within the game mechanics. For many martial exploits, the player needs to allocate daily and per-encounter uses of these flashy moves. He knows when the character can or cannot pull off moves, but the character has no reasonable way to explain how he knows he can or cannot perform his super-move now or later. The character also has no way to explain how he moves opponents around the game board, when the "fluff" description doesn't make sense, like pushing a stone golem around or taunting an ooze, or whatever.

Oh, you're one to those "disassociated mechanics" types
I don't want to start some 20 page thing so I'll withdraw from this topic...

 

[pemerton]

However, 3rd edition and earlier Champions was very easy to drift in ways that might be surprising.

<snip>

Drift Hero's disadvantages into explicitly character-defining mechanics, and you've got something very far from simulation.

I believe that some of the early GNS narrativism play was done with early Champions. It's easy to drift into exploring themes instead of exploring the world or the characters. Once you do that, you are within shouting distance of GNS narrativisim.

All this makes sense. Ron Edwards, in his various essays, talks about this sort of drifting of Champions - and using disadvantages, Hunted, etc as pre-cursors to kicks and bangs.

The reason Rolemaster can be drifted (in my experience) is that it's action resolution mechanics have many points of player intervention required, which permit metagame priorities to be injected into play (allocate bonuses from a pool to A, B and C, for example, in order to decide how you frame your action for this round).

The reason I feel BRP is so resistant to drifting is that it hasn't got the character build aspects you identify in Champions, nor the action resolution features my group discovered in Rolemaster. In that sense, it's very tightly designed!

Heroquest and FATE don't exactly come out as 'grim and gritty', and the former is certainly a generic system - the latter has been adapted to several genres, and I tend to think rather successfully.

Agreed. But this goes to my impossibility-of-all-things-to-all-people point. If you want to play HeroQuest fantasy, you won't get that experience by playing Runequest. And vice versa. Genre is only a modest part of what makes a game suitable for a particular desired play experience.

Abstract in the extreme, and thus your average D&D player will hate HeroQuest...at least that was my experience. I however LOVE the system.

I use HQ to inspire my 4e play, rather than just GMing HQ, precisely for this reason - me and my group like crunchy combat! But the ideas on encounter design and resolution in HQ are excellent - far better advice on running 4e than most of what is in the 4e rulebooks (but for the advice in HeroWars and HQ on how to run extended contests, for example, I don't think I would have been able to run skill challenges).

 

[pemerton]

Dungeons and Dragons RPG - this would have been 3.5 or some variation thereof and a system built around new ideas for evolving the D&D RPG for players that liked the newer innovations, leaving much of the older edition stuff behind. I envision it evolving the way Pathfinder did.

Dungeons and Dragons: Skirmish/Dungeon Crawl - this would be basically what we see as 4th Edition, because lets face it, when it comes to combat, 4E handles this very very well.

Are you saying that combat in 4th Edition isn't good? Because from where I sit, I think it's one of the best designed systems for running combat to date.

Is the first passage quoted here intended to generate an implication that 3E/PF is an RPG, and that 4e is best suited to (or, perhaps, is at best) a tactical skirmish game?

If it was not intended to generate that implication, then I think it was very poorly written.

If it was intended to generate that implication - which is how I interpreted it - then I think my original response to it stands.

As for the question of whether or not 4e handles combat well - yes, I agree it does. But I also happen to think it is a better roleplaying vehicle, for my purposes, than is 3E. So do many other players of 4e. And whether or not one thinks it is better than 3E for one's purposes, or worse, what is the need to imply that it is not a roleplaying game?

In other words, your suite of options was missing this one:

Dungeons and Dragons - Indie Edition: 4e with some mechanical tidying up, and some significant rewriting of the guidelines, to make it clear how 4e is to be played as a crunch-heavy, player-driven game of heroic fantasy protagonism - something like Burning Wheel but less gritty, and with the thematic play handled less by mechanical bells and whistles and more by the way that GMs and players approach the design and resolution of encounters.​

If you had included that option, or some other option that takes seriously the approach and virtues of 4e as a RPG, then I wouldn't have responded as I did.

 

[Bluenose]

HeroQuest ( and I'm assuming you mean the revised HeroWars game by Issaries, and now somebody else, that was written by Robin Laws) was designed explicitly for Glorantha and has been that way for nearly 10 years. Only recently was it repackaged as a generic system in order to drum up some sales.

That said, it should appeal on a generic level as long as one is OK with a VERY different system that emphasizes the cinematic, and eschews pre designed crunch (instead having the GM and players working together to make nearly everything up from whole cloth). Abstract in the extreme, and thus your average D&D player will hate HeroQuest...at least that was my experience. I however LOVE the system.

Yes, Heroquest 2 is what I'm thinking of. I also have experience of the horror some D&D players have for the system. The playstyle is so different that it seems sometimes almost to paralyse players with options. But I'm playing a game in Glorantha and was running a game in the Mass effect universe last year, both enjoyably. It's one of my favourite games.

The best statement I have ever seen on generic systems was the poster that said many years ago that you can play any game you want with GURPS--as long as you want the game to run like GURPS.

I think that's true for any system, not just GURPS, unless you rewrite huge portions of it - which would seem like a waste of time in many cases. If you really want an extremely abstract system with player-defined abilities, rewriting D&D to provide it suggests an odd sense of priorities. It would seem better to use an existing system and spend time creating/adapting the setting material. That's what people interact with... the system defines how those interactions function.

 

[Pilgrim]

Is the first passage quoted here intended to generate an implication that 3E/PF is an RPG, and that 4e is best suited to (or, perhaps, is at best) a tactical skirmish game?

If it was not intended to generate that implication, then I think it was very poorly written.

If it was intended to generate that implication - which is how I interpreted it - then I think my original response to it stands.

I was implying that WotC shot itself in the foot when it tossed aside a game system that a LOT of people still enjoy playing. The way I see it, WotC could have had the best of both worlds, but holding on to both 3.5 and what we now know as 4E, while calling both of them D&D the RPG would have made little sense as it would have quickly confused players as to which game they should be playing.

WotC could have just as easily kept D&D 3.5 (as the RPG they already had) while taking the D&D Minis product line and making that their flag ship for the new combat system we see in 4E. Had they done so, they could have possibly reaped the rewards of both the 3.5 fans while at the same time drawing in more players who enjoy less of the RPG side of gaming through the combat system of 4E by playing just D&D Minis.

As for the question of whether or not 4e handles combat well - yes, I agree it does. But I also happen to think it is a better roleplaying vehicle, for my purposes, than is 3E. So do many other players of 4e. And whether or not one thinks it is better than 3E for one's purposes, or worse, what is the need to imply that it is not a roleplaying game?

Once again I never said, though you're inferring, 3.5 is a better RPG than 4th.

And, like I stated previously, you can take the opinion that 4E is a better game for RPing that 3.5 if you like, but RP has always been disassociated from the rules and mechanics, so the argument is null. There again, if you want to argue that RP is associated with the rules and mechanics and that 4E does it better than 3.5 or PF, then I'd suggest starting another thread, since that has been the rub of many players who despise 4E and made the claim that it isn't a good RPG due to the fact that it is designed like an MMO video game, is a combat centered game, is designed with RP as an after thought, so on and so forth.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

The implication that 4E is a tactical skirmish game more than a RPG, which you DO imply when you say they should have kept 3E as D&D and released 4E as an expansion of DDM, is a variation of the 4E isn't D&D meme which is basically the heart of the Edition War. The statement that 4E isn't D&D is both hostile and condescending, and it merely being somebody's opinion doesn't make it any less hostile or condescending. The opinion and statement represent a refusal to accept the validity of other people embracing a D&D that doesn't fit your definition of D&D.

 

[Neonchameleon]

One of these days I'll be able to give pmerton experience points again...

WotC could have just as easily kept D&D 3.5 (as the RPG they already had) while taking the D&D Minis product line and making that their flag ship for the new combat system we see in 4E.

Alternatively they could have turned pre-4e D&D back into the skirmish minatures game it was hacked out of and produced 4e as an RPG from the ground up. Which is almost what they did - except that separating DDM from D&D rules too much would be a bad plan.

Had they done so, they could have possibly reaped the rewards of both the 3.5 fans while at the same time drawing in more players who enjoy less of the RPG side of gaming through the combat system of 4E by playing just D&D Minis.

And they would have lost most of the indy crossover market they picked up (like pmerton or myself). The market that finds 4e both incredibly evocative and the only edition of D&D ever that does anything approaching a good job of playing the way sword and sorcery fiction reads. The market that likes the ease of DMing and the flexibility that going for a narrative rather than sim game and building in balance from the ground up grants. And that likes the lack of crippling problems in the worldbuilding that e.g. Lyres of Building or half the spell lists create.

Once again I never said, though you're inferring, 3.5 is a better RPG than 4th.

You're just suggesting that it would have been better to release it as a minis game and not as an RPG. Right.

And, like I stated previously, you can take the opinion that 4E is a better game for RPing that 3.5 if you like, but RP has always been disassociated from the rules and mechanics, so the argument is null.

I'm afraid that that flat out demonstrates ignorance of the Indy game market. Even early mainstream games like GURPS had attempts to tie the RP to the character mechanics with systems such as mental disadvantages - and White Wolf had things like its humanity system. And popular Indy games such as Spirit of the Century, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Dread (to take three I know personally) tie the mechanics to the roleplaying at least as much as they do to the simulation of the world.

There again, if you want to argue that RP is associated with the rules and mechanics and that 4E does it better than 3.5 or PF, then I'd suggest starting another thread, since that has been the rub of many players who despise 4E and made the claim that it isn't a good RPG due to the fact that it is designed like an MMO video game, is a combat centered game, is designed with RP as an after thought, so on and so forth.

90s White Wolf players called. They want their attacks on an extension to a hack of a tabletop skirmish wargame back. Those that aren't crippling themselves laughing seeing those who RP using a system that is ultimately based on skirmish wargame rules attack a game for being designed supposedly with RP as an afterthought.

Edit: [MENTION=59096]thecasualoblivion[/MENTION], it's not the "4e isn't D&D" meme. It's the "4e isn't an RPG" meme. Or "Hur hur. 4e is WoW" meme. I don't argue with people who say it's not D&D - I have a lot of sympathy with that view.

 

[TwoSix]

And, like I stated previously, you can take the opinion that 4E is a better game for RPing that 3.5 if you like, but RP has always been disassociated from the rules and mechanics, so the argument is null. There again, if you want to argue that RP is associated with the rules and mechanics and that 4E does it better than 3.5 or PF, then I'd suggest starting another thread, since that has been the rub of many players who despise 4E and made the claim that it isn't a good RPG due to the fact that it is designed like an MMO video game, is a combat centered game, is designed with RP as an after thought, so on and so forth.

You must be new in town.

We just had that thread last month, and it went on for about 1,000 posts.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/308488-defense-theory-dissociated-mechanics.html