Games are different. Not just between distantly-related games like, say, curling and Dogs in the Vineyard, but also between closely-related games, like, say, AD&D (first edition) and D&D (fourth edition). Those differences are expressed in ways that become more and more specific the more and more similar the games get to each other.
We know this intuitively if not always explicitly. The Edition Wars are about more than sychophantic fanbois and neckbearded grognards, after all. There’s a very real difference in how these games play. The effect can be subtle and hard to notice up front, and there’s always divergent data-points, but somewhere between the bad actors and the outliers, we can say that even apparently minor rules changes, when aggregated, can create fairly dramatic outcomes in how happy someone is with a given game. 1e and 4e are very different games, with very different focuses and very different styles inherent in the rules as they are written.
This difference might seem fairly obvious us hardcore D&D dorks, but the fact is that 1e and 4e are, on the tin, the same game. Someone who only played D&D once in high school in 1984 who wants to play it with her kid today in 2013 will be facing something remarkably divergent from her original experience, if she were to pick up the most recent version of the game today. It might all be D&D, but the play is dramatically different…and yet in some ways, eerily similar.
This difference lies mostly in the rules of the games, as they were written. Despite the wide variety of playstyles and splinter groups and house rules, the actual rules of the game drive the experience of the game. AD&D1e and D&D4e are different experiences because of their different rule sets.
As evidence of this hypothesis, let us describe how the rules of classic D&D and modern D&D may lead to two very distinct kinds of game.
A TALE OF TWO TALES
With classic hex crawl-style exploration, a lot of the rolls are to determine what you find when you go exploring the un-mapped territory: rolls to avoid becoming lost, or to determine what is randomly encountered in a hex. With classical HP models, attrition was gradual and slow, lost over the period of days or weeks, showing a gradual weathering of the party over time. The conflict in this case was clearly with the environment, with nature, and creatures occurred only as part of that bigger conflict. The game mode might be considered “Survival:” last as long as you can against the ravages of a given obstacle. The obstacles themselves were the dungeons or the wilderness, and it was in moving through these regions where the central conflict of the game lied, according to the rules as they were written.
This is D&D in Hemmingway Mode, weathered and beaten and fighting against the raw forces of nature. This is D&D as The Old Man and the Sea. The rules evoke this feel via the things you must use and roll for: the challenges your party faces include getting lost, falling into traps, encountering wild beasts, vast chasms or deep pools of water that must be crossed or explored. But can you survive?
More modern editions, meanwhile, eschew the survivalist struggle against the elements for the action of the moment. By making healing more common (via wands or surges), by limiting most die rolls to combat (by turning the majority of character options into “attacks” or combat-centric “utility powers”), and by focusing everything on a more narrow time-band (such as focusing the game on the encounter), the game’s rules focused on more immediate conflicts, based in individual scenes rather than stretched out over a long period of time. The game mode might be considered “Action:” accomplish your goal, lay waste to those who stand in your way, and keep pressing forward.
This is D&D in Michael Bay Mode, all tight moments, adrenaline-pumping dare-devil risks, and explosions (lots of explosions!). This is D&D as The Rock. The rules evoke this feel via the things you must use and roll for: the challenges your party faces include fighting your enemies, getting to your next destination, overcoming the challenges there, and continuing to press onward until the next relief scene. But can you win against the opposition you face?
I KNOW THAT FEEL, BRO
Each of these rules helps support the given feel by leveraging player psychology to get the players to behave in a certain way and expect a certain outcome. If HP are slow to regenerate and spells are infrequent, loss aversion means that you’re going to be very cautious and do lots of pre-planning, moving methodically and slowly. If HP return after each fight, you will push yourself to the limit in each fight, un-concerned about what might await you around the next corner because you will be full up and ready to take it on.
So the question is: how do you leverage this in your own games? Ultimately, that’s what DMing is about: designing the game for your own table, customizing it for your own group. And the first rule of that is: "know your audience."
The different feels that games can give you are ultimately different emotional experiences that you have to what the rules do to you. A “Survival” game, for instance, hones in on our anxiety response: our trepidation about the future possibility of something unfortunate happening to us. It’s fun because it allows us to rehearse that emotion in a safe environment, where there’s nothing really bad that happens when the other shoe drops, but where you nonetheless get this burst of relief when it happens. Classic D&D games are often typified as over-cautious and reluctant – these are classic anxiety reactions, and it’s similar to the kind of fun that comes from going to a haunted house, or watching a tense thriller. Most episodes of Breaking Bad are this kind of fun: the panicked mind trying to control something that it fundamentally cannot.
Does your group like that show? Do they enjoy tense thrillers? Are they the kind of people that absolutely love awkward humor (a la Peep Show, perhaps). Then they may very well delight in a high-tension survival-style game of D&D.
Meanwhile, if your group tends more toward action comics, pulpy adventure novels, and heroic comic book action movies, they may be more prone to the kinds of fun generated in an “Action” game of D&D, fun that highlights our desire for novelty and our hedonic pleasures.
The categories aren’t mutually exclusive, and most groups lie somewhere in the middle, which is why absolutism is rarely a good idea. We kind of like the idea of Michael Bay directing The Old Man and the Sea, or Armageddon as told by Hemmingway. There are people who like both essentially equally (these people also probably don’t have much of an edition preference, even though they may recognize the differences). There are people who like neither, disliking both equally (these people probably aren’t huge fans of ANY particular version of D&D – maybe they prefer indie games or board games or somesuch).
The question I have for you this week is: does your current campaign run more like Breaking Bad, or more like, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Let me know what kind of emotional payoff you get from your game, down in the comments!
