D&D General The Eternal Braid: Why D&D Continuing Dialogue With RPGs is its Success

[Krachek]

Actual edition assume the existence of multiple player’s interest
Acting
Exploring
Instigating
Fighting
Optimizing
Problem solving
Story telling

They also state of continuum of play style ranging from hack and slash to immersive story telling.

They also consider a multitude of flavor to fantasy
Heroic, Sword and sorcery, Epic, dark, intrigue, ….

DnD is currently a game that allow a multitude of genre, style, intensity and flavor. not being very good, but enough to allow fun and continuity.

is there other games that allow such versatile play?

 

[overgeeked]

is there other games that allow such versatile play?

Literally every single universal or generic system ever published from Lord of the Dice to Fate Condensed offers far, far more versatility of play.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Mainstream popularity. When Gygax shafted Arneson and screwed him out of royalties by making AD&D, he turned his back on the free Kriegsspiel ideals and went from an open system that could do anything to a closed system that was meant to be played a specific way and do a specific thing and do it exhaustively. This pivot turned the game from something you needed to engage with imaginatively and customize into something that you could just pick up and play (after slogging through the Old High Gygaxian). I don't mean that this dumbed down the game, but it did remove the need for that extra level of tinkering and creativity, paving the way for mainstream success. Helped in no small part by the early adopters and the various moral outrages.

My own random thoughts:

While that's decidedly what AD&D does from a text-in-book level, I'm not sure how much that translated into the gamer experience (and thus how much it played into D&D's dominance). Anecdotal I know, but there seems to be a lot of people online, plus my own gaming experience, suggesting that plenty of people took AD&D and ignored massive parts of the closed system part of it. Ignore rules, add house rules, port rules one prefers over from oD&D or BX, people seemed to have not trouble doing so. That's why I'm not sure if AD&D's removing the need for tinkering was all that influential (nor exactly why it would pave the way for mainstream success).

 

[overgeeked]

My own random thoughts:

While that's decidedly what AD&D does from a text-in-book level, I'm not sure how much that translated into the gamer experience (and thus how much it played into D&D's dominance). Anecdotal I know, but there seems to be a lot of people online, plus my own gaming experience, suggesting that plenty of people took AD&D and ignored massive parts of the closed system part of it. Ignore rules, add house rules, port rules one prefers over from oD&D or BX, people seemed to have not trouble doing so. That's why I'm not sure if AD&D's removing the need for tinkering was all that influential (nor exactly why it would pave the way for mainstream success).

Right. That’s my experience as well. We hacked the living hell out of AD&D and mixed in OD&D and B/X into our AD&D on the regular.

The difference I’m talking about is the need to build your own game with house rules from OD&D vs being able to play out of the box, ignore bits, or pare down the game if you wanted to. You couldn’t play OD&D out of the box if you wanted to, you had to make up rules. You can play AD&D out of the box, you don’t have to make up new rules. Easier to destroy than build and all that.

Gygax saying you shouldn’t or couldn’t hack AD&D was largely irrelevant to most people. It was largely backed into the community by then. DIY is where the hobby started, D&D was a DIG game, and by the time AD&D came out DIG was here to stay.

 

[Mannahnin]

Right. That’s my experience as well. We hacked the living hell out of AD&D and mixed in OD&D and B/X into our AD&D on the regular.

The difference I’m talking about is the need to build your own game with house rules from OD&D vs being able to play out of the box, ignore bits, or pare down the game if you wanted to. You couldn’t play OD&D out of the box if you wanted to, you had to make up rules. You can play AD&D out of the box, you don’t have to make up new rules. Easier to destroy than build and all that.

Kind of. It's almost impossible to, for example, play the 1E initiative rules by the book. In practice everyone hacked them down and only used a fraction of them.

http://knights-n-knaves.com/dmprata/ADDICT.pdf

 

[overgeeked]

Kind of. It's almost impossible to, for example, play the 1E initiative rules by the book. In practice everyone hacked them down and only used a fraction of them.

http://knights-n-knaves.com/dmprata/ADDICT.pdf

It’s 1978. You only have the MM and PHB for AD&D as those are the only two books on the market. How do you handle initiative?

Initiative in the PHB is: “The initiative check is typically made with 2 six-sided dice, 1d6 for the party, and another of a different size or color for the creatures encountered.”

That link really is a silly document. Note how most of those other sources came later. That’s not “out of the box” that’s at the end of the edition’s life cycle. Besides, most players only ever had the books. Not every issue of every magazine, and every adventure, etc.

After a few years of running initiative from the PHB, most groups just kept on using that.

 

[Mannahnin]

It’s 1978. You only have the MM and PHB for AD&D as those are the only two books on the market. How do you handle initiative?

Initiative in the PHB is: “The initiative check is typically made with 2 six-sided dice, 1d6 for the party, and another of a different size or color for the creatures encountered.”

That link really is a silly document. Note how most of those other sources came later. That’s not “out of the box” that’s at the end of the edition’s life cycle. Besides, most players only ever had the books. Not every issue of every magazine, and every adventure, etc.

After a few years of running initiative from the PHB, most groups just kept on using that.

That's a reasonable argument. Even without going to the extent of ADDICT, though, I've never encountered anyone running initiative by the full rules in the DMG, or even close to them.

The killer part of that is, I LIKE the core of those DMG rules. For a while I've wanted to clean them up and simplify them a little for general use. I wish that's what TSR had done in 2nd ed.

 

[Jaeger]

t’s 1978. You only have the MM and PHB for AD&D as those are the only two books on the market. How do you handle initiative?

Initiative in the PHB is: “The initiative check is typically made with 2 six-sided dice, 1d6 for the party, and another of a different size or color for the creatures encountered.”

That link really is a silly document. Note how most of those other sources came later. That’s not “out of the box” that’s at the end of the edition’s life cycle. Besides, most players only ever had the books. Not every issue of every magazine, and every adventure, etc.

After a few years of running initiative from the PHB, most groups just kept on using that.

People do tend to forget that AD&D came out over a 3 year period.

By the time the DMG hit, most active groups were already playing a PHB/MM + OD&D/Holmes kit bash.

I have never heard of anyone from that era buying the DMG, and then revising what they did at the table to be pure AD&D RAW.

The killer part of that is, I LIKE the core of those DMG rules. For a while I've wanted to clean them up and simplify them a little for general use. I wish that's what TSR had done in 2nd ed.

To be honest I think that many of the people behind 2e fell into the PHB/MM + OD&D/Holmes kit bash camp. And like subsequent new editions, when given the green light; they made an "upgrade" of the game they played.

 

[Mannahnin]

To be honest I think that many of the people behind 2e fell into the PHB/MM + OD&D/Holmes kit bash camp. And like subsequent new editions, when given the green light; they made an "upgrade" of the game they played.

But that's not what 2E does, right? 2E introduces a whole new system using d10s for initiative and individual speed factors based on weapon or action. That's definitely not in any prior edition of D&D, and I don't even remember seeing it as a variant in Dragon Magazine.

 

[overgeeked]

But that's not what 2E does, right? 2E introduces a whole new system using d10s for initiative and individual speed factors based on weapon or action. That's definitely not in any prior edition of D&D, and I don't even remember seeing it as a variant in Dragon Magazine.

Weapon speed is in the AD&D PHB, it’s called speed factor. They just switched to d10s instead of d6s. Spells have casting times. That’s speed factor based on action.