The End of the Gaming Renaissance

[ferratus]

We were still getting those awful "JEM" blue spot illos in our core rulebooks at the time. If a D&D book looked any good at all, it's because they accidentally got a good artist to work on it.

I think I must be the only one who prefers those old black and white or even blue illustrations to the modern interior illustrations. I recognize the modern ones as being more technically proficient, and the talent pool drawn upon is considerably greater in the modern era. However, the understated interior illustrations of 2e just seemed more like I was reading an old book filled with old folklore.

It could be nostalgia clouding my judgment though.

 

[Galloglaich]

My favorite games were old ones like Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer FRPG 1st Edition, Paranoia, Traveller, and AD&D simply because it was so broken you had to customize it and it left room to actually role play a little. I also had fun exploring a lot of other games I didn't end up liking a lot but enjoyed playing with when they first came out like Boot Hill, Gamma World, Twilight 2000, Morreau Project, Rolemaster, Harn etc.

I think I missed the White Wolf stuff due to my age, I was turned off by 2E and after some initial excitement, ended up a little bored by 3E but I really liked the whole D20 OGL thing, bubble or no... the chance of customizing the system was very exciting to me and I liked a lot of the OGL stuff I got. I also really liked some of the small indy press games which came out in the last few years like Dying Earth RPG, Shadowrun, The Riddle of Steel, Ars Magica, and Burning Wheel... now 4E has come along and almost ruined RPGs for me. I just try not to think about it.

I prefer having tangible books I can open up and physically leaf through, but PDF's seem to be alive and well to me. I buy them and use them as a resource in my gaming, and just to read for amusement, I'm selling a couple of my own with my own little company, and they are doing quite well. My first PDF came out almost a year ago and it's still selling, despite what people told me would happen. I'm even starting to have a little fan base now, mostly in Europe.

The big change for me is that the kind of gaming I was into though is really being eclipsed by the new 4E / WOW type RPG as a competetive boardgame paradigm. Maybe that is a kind of return to the roots of RPGs with chainmail etc. I still love RPG's, I think role playing games are one of the most fun ways you can spend an evening with your friends. But I prefer a more immersive, role playing oriented feel, and I notice the people I used to play RPG's with have moved away from the genre as a whole because of how it's changed, and most of the people I know who still game regularly are increasingly of a certain real specific demographic and mindset I can't really relate to.

The rules now seem to have all these assumptions of how you are supposed to approach playing an RPG built into a lot of mainstream games that I see available at outlets like Borders Bookstore. I think the idea of what an RPG IS has been much more narrowly defined than it used to be, despite all the near infinity of options out there.

I used to get excited when I would have a chance to check out the RPG section of a place like that, now I rarely see anything interesting. I think what I liked about the older systems was that they were either more 'generic' in terms of how you could play them, because they were so loose, or they were tighter and a little more immersive in terms of feel and setting. I don't see that as much any more but maybe I'm just not spending enough time in my FNGS.

G.

 

[Galloglaich]

I think a lot of Vampire's initial popularity was a result of male players of 1st Edition who were into heavy metal, felt that 2nd edition had lost the "evil" edge they wanted from a game, and had Goth girlfriends who were into vampires. Those Goth girls were a major part of the playership, perhaps even the actual majority. And they played because it was a chance to be a vampire, not because they had any interest in other RPGs. D&D (or any other RPG for that matter) can never capture those players.

The fact that the Vampire books had edgy vampire art and fiction in them were a real draw. A lot of AD&D players never actually owned the game, but Vampire players wanted to own the books. Nobody that I know of bought Vampire for its game mechanics. They were interested in the subject matter and presentation.

I had a kind of similar experience in high school except my friends were mostly punk rockers, some heavy metal kids too, and our girlfriends were a mix of punks, goths, etc... but there was a shift after high school into games with a more role playing and dramatic orientation, and this is what kept the girls into it. I think the guys liked the horror movie aspect of the games we played, the girls liked the drama. I've always had girls in my gaming groups and a broad mix of types of people, I think you really need that for the game to remain fun. Not too many hard core gamers, at least some people who have never played before or only played a little.

Vampire wasn't around when I got out of high school but we made up our own game systems, and ripped settings off of various pop-culture themes, especially films. Mad Max and the Road Warrior were a big influence, Clockwork Orange, Return of the Living Dead, the Thing, Re-Animator, the Howling, Blade Runner, Alien, The Terminator etc., also the Spaghetti Westerns and some of the Samurai movies like Yojimbo, Sanjuro, the Seven Samurai etc.

Of the games in production then, I think Call of Cthulhu was real fun to explore for us which had all the elements everyone liked, danger and horror for the guys, drama and mystery for the girls. We never did the live action thing but had some great nights around the table with a couple bottles of wine. I miss those games we had a lot of fun back then...

G.

 

[Erik Mona]

Ravenloft: Summer 1990
Vampire: The Masquerade: Summer 1991
Dark Sun: Summer/Fall 1991

Planescape was 1994, but otherwise, it seems to have been an industry trend rather than TSR trying to play catch-up with White Wolf.

Interesting. I should have checked that before I posted.

I do think the Ravenloft boxed set was obviously art directed.

Vampire still had extremely interesting art, but I stand corrected on the timeline.

--Erik

 

[SSquirrel]

The amusing thing is I was hitting wikipedia and gathering the dates, then I read a bit past Erik's post and found this Dark Sun was Oct 91 according to wikipedia. Seems kinda odd these days, skipping GenCon for the big release.

My experiences with the D&D to White Wolf changeover were like this. In 1991 we put together a new gaming group to play the new edition of D&D. A few of us were new to each other, but we had a web of friends that tied us all together. We started playing D&D, but we were also seeing new products like RIFTS in stores and being amazed by it, as well as seeing games like Vampire advertised. I don't think we actually bought Vampire until the 2nd ed books dropped in '92, but it definitely became something we played as well. We didn't drop 2E completely, but there were many things about Vampire that just struck us as a plain better way to do things.

By the time I got to college in 94, I was the guy in my group of friends who knew Mage and Vampire inside and out, but I was also still a big fan of D&D. D&D was great, but at the same time, compared to games like Mage, Vampire and RIFTS (and getting introduced to Call of Cthulhu, SLA Industries and the d6 Star Wars), I had better things to do with my time. In college we would do a quick pickup game here and there. That was about it. We had 2 or 3 different White Wolf games going (one crossover game, one pure mage..maybe another), a CoC game, a SLA game, Star Wars.... Why play D&D and have people fighting to be the horribly broken Bladesinger when we could play Star Wars and have people fighting to be the horribly broken Jedi

The White Wolf games were our own world, but darker. Mysterious elements working behind the scenes played well into popular conspiracy theories as well as that fantasy desire for something different. The movie and music recommendations were great. I already owned some of them, I searched many of the others out. I hadn't bought a RPG before that gave me as many good ideas for setting a mood before. Those movies and music certainly did too. Songs like "Cracked" (Jesus and Mary Chain), "Inside the Termite Mound" (Killing Joke), anything by Joy Division.

One of my STs in college had me as his assistant. I helped him with rules questions (esp the Mage ones), helped him brainstorm some occasional ideas and sat around with him for hours making mix tapes. We would make a 90 or 120 mnute tape for a specific session, put it in an auto-reverse tape deck and turn it on quietly. Turn up key songs for key moments, but generally just let it help infect everyone with its mood. We might have the theme from Rob Roy on the same tape with Batdance, some Dead Kennedys, KMFDM and Messiah, but it all flowed together and generated the desired effect.

This was the kind of thing that Vampire made me want to do that D&D never did. If anyone even bothered with music for a D&D game it was typically any random fantasy or medieval setting movie...maybe the John Williams Star Wars scores. Especially the Imperial March for battle music

 

[Galloglaich]

Somebody upthread mentioned that D&D had lost it's edge, I think it was worse than that, the whole thing had become 'nerfed'. DnD jumped the shark. It went from open ended mystery evocative of the hard edged fantasy novels of Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft etc., and turned into a self-parodied homogenized caricature of the fantasy genre that actually committed the crime of making Magical things and this vital font of ancient legends, history and folklore... mundane. Werewolves far from being scary, had become routine yawners, same for every other mythological beast. The lightning bolts of Zeus and the invisibility of Alladins Lamp had become blasé, not even minor plot devices but commonplace trivialities.

The idea of players empowerment rose to the point that they not only could, but had to challenge the DM over every little issue... it became a treadmill to ersatz wealth and power accumulation and the stale joy of bookkeeping all the easily won cartoon "glory". That is not the kind of game I want to play, and it's definitely not the kind of game I could ever get my girlfriend to play.

Not that there weren't some people who always played this way from the beginning, not that the earliest incarnation of DnD rules didn't have this built into them to a large extent, but at some point the game just sealed the exit routes that let you escape this. I don't think you can with 4E.

G.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I do think the Ravenloft boxed set was obviously art directed.

Given that it won an Origins Award for Graphic Presentation (tied with one of the early SHADOWRUN supplements, IIRC), I wouldn't be surprised if that was a lot of it.

 

[Guest 85555]

I think what has changed isn't the ability of people to deconstruct rules (for as long as I can remember that has been around), but people's expectations and tastes (just like with music or any other medium).

Here is my take on the history. And it is just that, my take. I don't pretend to have done any reserach here. Just basing it on my experience. Up into the early 90s, people didn't seem as concerned with systems with unified mechanic. Many of the games were super engineered, with charts and different rules for different situations. The idea appeared to be to create a mechanic that worked for each situation. This is a fine approach, but it makes the game less intuitive (and maybe a little clunky). Now the preference seems to be for a streamlined system that revolves around a single principle or small set of principles. So rules for each situation normally have to be derived in some way from the core mechanic. This makes for a highly intuitive game, but can lead to some issues with realism or balance (also sometimes the mechanic feels forced).

I would also just point out, it looks like we have more small publishers and games than we ever had in the 80s or 90s. Maybe I just wasn't in the right circles at the time. But if anything, now feels like a more exciting time to be a gamer. Every day a new game is released.

 

[Guest 85555]

Although the first Vampire book(s) look amateurish by today's standards, it had VERY solid art direction and simply _looked_ better than the 2e AD&D stuff being published at the time.
--Erik

While I never became a huge vampire player, when it first came out, I do remember being struck by the general look and by the writing. It was pretty clear to me at the time that I was viewing something quite different form other games I played before that point. In fairness, and as a huge Ravenloft fan, I think TSR was putting out some nice stuff at the time as well. I can't remember the dates, but the Van Richten guides with the interior art by Stephen Fabian had a real good look. At the time I was more of an AD&D guy, but Vampire was cool for its time.

 

[Jhaelen]

Nobody that I know of bought Vampire for its game mechanics. They were interested in the subject matter and presentation.

Well, I bought Vampire because I was a big fan of Ars Magica and had heard that House Tremere had made a reappearance in Vampire.

I never liked Vampire very much. I preferred Mage, Wraith and even Werewolf. Changeling, I didn't like, but I do like the nWoD Changeling. Still, I bought lots of WoD books just because I enjoyed reading them. The Changing Breed books for Werewolf were a major influence for my 3E D&D campaign. The background material was simply awesome. I've never seen the likes for D&D.