The Guards at the Gate Quote

[TheAuldGrump]

If you look at the formatting of WotC adventures, they are pretty much presented as a line of encounters, sometimes without any real choice as to what order they occur in. (Pyramid of Shadows or the trek across the Abyss in the E modules, anyone?)

If it wasn't intentional, the 4e designers sure didn't think through a lot of the way they present the game and (especially) adventures.

I have a message board acquaintance that continually trumpets War of the Burning Sky as how a 4e Adventure Path should be written. And has very not-nice things to say about WotC adventures. I have told him that this is not new to 4e - WotC has had a hard time with adventures for a long time now.

You don't have to hate 4e to hate that quote, though it does add fuel to the fires of h4te.

I stopped h4ting after Pathfinder came out, I am now more worried that D&D might be sidelined.

How is the Essentials DM box in regards to not ticking off potential customers? I have not seen an open box, so I cannot make any comparison.

Neither can my friends...either out of respect for or fear of my wife.

Nar, they just have lousy aim, and don't want to risk hitting each other. Remember, there is no such thing as friendly fire in regards to custard pie wars.

The Auld Grump

 

[the Jester]

The attitude you describe is exactly what I think he was saying, too. I think you and I are in agreement with what he's saying. I don't happen to think that's bad advice, especially when trying to introduce D&D to new gamers, and that's still who I think the target audience was.

Well, like I said, the problem to me is that he seems to exclude certain values of "fun", which are values that my group really enjoys.

The Vampire example is interesting, because I'm totally okay with it as advice in WoD... probably because I don't have a 30+ year in playing a "not fun in this game" way. It helps set up a certain playstyle that runs through the WoD games. I'm okay with a game emphasizing a playstyle, but found 4e's dismissal of what I'd been doing for so long to be jarring and kind of condescending.

I only have KotS as I tend to game without modules. That hasn't always been true, and adventure modules from more than a few other editions were fairly similar, including classics like White Plume Mountain and, my favorite, Night Below.

KotS is interesting in that it has one of the most glaring examples of the "encounter over adventure" philosophy with the excavation site. I mean, it's supposed to be important, but the module basically says, "Well, the bad guys are doing this for some reason, but it doesn't really matter what happens here." There is never any effect from the encounter (unless you gussy it up a little in play). If the pcs kill the bad guys and prevent them from whatever mumble mumble, nothing happens. If they skip the encounter completely... nothing happens. And let's not even talk about the silly "skill challenge for the sake of having a skill challenge" with the undead guy.

 

[S'mon]

I'll ask this as a neutral question, do you think in that one sentence Wyatt was telling you to skip all roleplaying opportunities to get to the combat?

No, he was saying to skip exploratory play to get to the Encounter - which could be combat, a skill challenge, or a puzzle, AIR from the DMG.

 

[S'mon]

And the crap-talk violates board policy. Reported.

"GUARDS! GUARDS!!"

 

[El Mahdi]

I think that it is time that this thread get locked - all and sundry have been repeating themselves, getting louder, and redder in the face.

At this point the only things that are certain are that some folks were offended by Mr. Wyatt's words, both in the DMG and elsewhere, and other folks weren't.

The Auld Grump

I think you're probably right. I for one am out. It has been an informative thread though. And a lot of fun reading the captions to the guard illustration.


edit: (at least for now, anyways)

 

[Eridanis]

Everyone take a deep breath and calm down, please. No need to slide off the cliff into personal attacks.

 

[pemerton]

Anyway, there have been, and continue to be, lots of threads bemoaning Gygax's advice and writings in both the PHB and DMG.

Fair enough. I don't see many of them saying "And therefore, AD&D is dead to me!" or suggesting that, because of Gygax, whole generations of potential GMs and players have been killed off.

In any case, Gygax never actually engaged in one-true-wayism in the DMG the way Wyatt does. When he said "Don't do this" (such as issues around demi-human level limits) he told you why and what you were in for if you ignored his advice.

In the OP quote, Wyatt is taking a playstyle stance that I find wrong and offensive and not very D&D-like at all.

It helps that Gygax addresses the reader as a fellow adult, not as 'Mr Professional Games Designer' talking down to a not-so-bright 14 year old.

From the AD&D PHB, pp 107-9:

[W]hat follows are some basic guidelines as to how good players approach the game, and as continued success tends towards even more achievement, those who play well might actually become great. . .

et an objective for the adventure. . .

Once the objective has been established, consier how well the party plaing will suit the needs which it has engendered. . . Is it well-balanced . . . ? Will it be necesssary to find mercenary non-player characters or hire men-at arms . . . ?

Assign formations for the group - 10' corridor, 20' corridor, door opening . . . The leader should keep a sketch or trailing map as the adventure gets underway, and another member of the expedition should keep a carefully drawn map as well. . .

Aovid unnecessary encounters. . . Do not be sidetracked . . . [A]lways stay with what was planned if at all possible . . .

Superior play makes the game more enjoyable for all participants . . . It allows more actual playing time. It makes play more interesting. . . If you believe that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a game worth playing, you will certainly find it doubly so if you play well.​

From the AD&D DMG, p 92:

Thoughtless placement of powerful magic items has ben the ruination of many a campaign . . . This is in part the fault of this writer . . . Had the [random treasure tables] been prefaced with an admonition to use care and logic in placement or random discovery of magic items, had the intent, meaning and spirit of the game been more fully explained, much of the give-away aspct of such campaigns would have willingly been squelched by the DMs. The said fact is, however, that this was not done, so many campaigns are little more than a joke . . . because of the foolishness of player characters with astronomically high levels of experience and no real playing skill. These god-like characters boast and strut about with retinues of ultra-powerful wservants and scores of mighty magic items, artifacts, relics adorning them as if they were Christmas trees decked out with tinsel and ornaments.​

How is Gygax not engaging, in these passage, in "one true way-ism"? - advocacy of operationally-oriented, exploration heavy gamism with very overt metagame in the preparation phase, with no recognition of other playstyles like full-fledged immersion (at the time, Chivalry and Sorcery and Runequest both aimed at this), more light-hearted gamism of the Tunnels and Trolls variety, etc.

I also don't feel any particular lack of condescension.

Gygax's advice is, of course, not terrible advice if you want to run a Gygaxian game of AD&D. Wyatt's advice, similarly, is not terrible advice if you want to run a situation-focused game of 4e. Neither strikes me as particularly offensive, although Gygax is ruder than Wyatt.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Considering that I have been going from his direct quote I find it interesting that you accuse me of reinterpreting, while you are somehow not reinterpreting when you say that he did not mean what he wrote.

I can't do it...but someone, somewhere, PLEASE, give the man xp for not just summing up the thread, but summing up the absurdity of the thread!

 

[pauljathome]

How is Gygax not engaging, in these passage, in "one true way-ism"? - t.

I am honestly not getting your point.

Are you assuming that those of us who are criticizing Wyatt are defending Gygax? I can speak only for myself when I assure you that the former does NOT imply the latter but I suspect that I am not alone in that opinion.

Or are you assuming that the state of the art when 4h edition came out is the same as when AD&D came out?

In 1980 odd D&D was very definitely still massively dominated by dungeon crawls. Compared to today there was comparatively little roleplaying, comparatively little urban or nature oriented adventures. Heck, most groups would never even find a town let alone a guard .

 

[pemerton]

My point is that there is nothing unusual about a DMG giving advice on how to GM the game to achieve a certain sort of play experience. And that the idea that Wyatt's advice in his DMG is "terrible advice", that will destroy generations of prospective GMs, is as silly as the idea that Gygax's advice was terrible advice with destructive consequences.

Gygax's advice won't have produced many White Wolf-style GMs. So what? It produced Gygaxian GMs, presumably, among those who followed it.

Wyatt's advice won't produce Gygaxian or White Wolf-style GMs, either. It will produce situation/encounter-oriented GMs among those who follow it. But so what? This is a perfectly reasonable way to run an RPG, and one to which 4e is particularly well suited as a system. Those players who love talking without purpose to gate guards will be deprived - as will those players who like 2nd ed era metaplot-driven railroads - but then, as I know from experience, plenty of players have been deprived of player-driven situation-focused play by GMs who took the advice of the 2nd-ed and White Wolf-era manuals, and plenty of players have been stuck in Gygaxian/Pulsipherian games when they really would have preferred something else.

Any time a GMing book gives advice on how to run the game, it has to choose one style over another. My point is that there is nothing particularly objectionable about Wyatt's choice of style, beyond the obvious point that some people prefer other styles.