The "Old School Revival" - The Light Bulb Goes On

[Celebrim]

I think this can be accurate, but within limits.

The limitations of the English language and my necessary position within the debate make it difficult to introduce the full level of nuance I have on the topic into the debate. There is I think some give back and forth between culture and law. A particular culture is more likely to flourish under a set of particular laws, or may be more accurately, a set of laws tend to push toward certain cultures and away from others. But its not as hard of a shove as we usually think it is, and so to make that point stick as well as I can, I'm tending to ignore the in my opinion quite small effect law has on culture. So yes, there is a limit, and when you get closer to where I think it is then I'll be happy to admit it.

For example, a few years ago we played a 3.5 Eberron campaign where the PCs were all goblins. And it was a VERY different experience playing a character from that perspective--undersized, ugly, socially misunderstood, fighting for respect tooth and nail. Not that you can't play a character like that being an ugly gnome, or whatever, but the shared perspective of ALL OF US being goblins made for a much different type of experience.

One of the first complaints you hear when you break out of the culture will be some variation of 'that's against the rules'. I can just imagine someone going, "Well of course you have a different experience, because you added a new mechanical restriction to the game - 'Everyone has to play a goblin.' - and thats why the game was different." But I think you'd agree with me that it wasn't the mechanical difference of being a goblin (compared to some other race) that created most of what was different about the game.

If Savage Worlds feels different from D&D, or GURPS feels different from Cthulhu, it's partially player expectation and culture, but it's also because the mechanics interpret player's physical interactions (and their results) differently.

But the thing you have to consider is that there is a culture to game creation that determines alot of that as well. If I ran my house rules for D&D and I also bumped up the CR of all opponents by 4 or so, with no mechanical changes I could run a pretty straight up Call of Cthullu game with all the attendent changes to how players approached or felt they had to approach the game. All the sudden those 'Deep Ones' encountered at level 1 would go from fearsome foes greatly to be respected, to virtually unstoppable killing machines greatly to be avoided and quite capable of inspiring fear and horror. Now granted, this is facillitated partly by the fact that the Ravenloft Fear/Horror/Madness rules are incorporated in a standard way to my house rules, but the culture of the game created by simply changing the expected difficulty of a fight with a monster is huge.

And likewise GURPS can run Call of Cthullu pretty well as well just by changing the games culture and tropes to 'Call of Cthullu'. I don't know 'Savage Worlds', but I'd be willing to bet...

One of the things I like about new players is that they don't bring these preconceptions to the table, so that if I run D&D as a strict horror game no one feels like I'm doing badwrongfun because the game they have isn't the game they believe D&D is. Experienced players of course have played D&D (and probably one or more other systems) as a horror game, a high fantasy game, a low fantasy game, a gritty realism game, a superhero game, a melodramatic nar game, and a bit of everything else under the sun and so they are mainly just curious to find out what sort of game they are in before they relax and get into it.

Does that interpretive mechanism work the same way for every player, identically? Of course not, because everyone brings something different to the table, but I'm not totally comfortable assigning all experience to just a shared "group think." Rules systems are built to create a different experience.

This is certainly true, but you can't draw the inference that if a rules system is failing to provide a particular experience that the failure can be ammended by changing the rules. Nor can you be assured that if you are having a particular experience with a game that it is a result of the rules.

And to really make matters complex, I'm the sort of person who tends to treat portions of the text that I feel are related to creating a particular culture as mere guidelines for novices to be discarded or replaced as needed to create the particular game I want, and I don't feel like I'm changing 'the rules' (as for example in deciding that average EL should be EL+4, or your groups decision to all be goblins), where as some people reading the text will tend to treat that sort of thing as having every bit of importance as the mechanical resolution and will treat me (or whoever) as someone who is 'breaking the rules'.

 

[Votan]

The best system... at what?

I don't believe there is a single objective "best system". Finite rulesets simply don't allow for you to to everything well. Each game must pick its battles with respect to the genres they intend to portray, and what GM and player experiences the mechanics lead to. All games are compromises.

Point taken; I suspect that you are correct that games need to compromise on a series of axes (which is likely why some well done system are not to everyone's taste). I should have said something more like "4E moves away from 3/3/5/Pathfinder (as an example) in making sacrifices on some features (like fully detailed monsters and a harmonized system for monsters and PCs) to make DM prep easier".

 

[Celebrim]

I should have said something more like "4E moves away from 3/3/5/Pathfinder (as an example) in making sacrifices on some features (like fully detailed monsters and a harmonized system for monsters and PCs) to make DM prep easier".

One of the reasons that 4e ran into a problem with me, is that I felt I had so much system mastery with 3e and I felt so little inspired by 4e's text, that the immediate result of the change for me would have been to make DM prep less easy. I actually set myself a conversion task to get a feel for the system, converting B2 from D&D to 4e. I couldn't get into it. It was too hard to do it right, and the results I was getting didn't seem like they'd be very inspiring to me in play. Part of that was that I had forever left adventures like B2 behind me. Part of that though was that it felt to me as if it was only adventures like B2 where 4e had something to offer I couldn't get from prior editions.

 

[Greg K]

There's rules.....for EV-ERY-DAMN-THING. I'm a working professional with a wife and a 2-year-old daughter, so needless to say I like my GM prep load to be "light." But I'm noticing that players who have high levels of 3.x rules mastery inevitably question GM hand-waving because they've had it ingrained into their minds that "D&D 3.x has an explanation for everything."

Even if it's not explicitly stated, my two biggest "rules crunch" players think that almost anything can be correlated tangentially to some other rule "that makes sense." It's created this mindset that nothing can be GM fiat, because it's somehow "not fair," or makes their character less effective than it should be.

Plus, even though our party is only fifth level, I can't imagine trying to GM this beast past level 12 (or maybe 14 at MAX). What a nightmare of rules, buffs, spells, resistances, plusses and minuses......and of course you can't "handwave" any of it, because the 3.x rules create the mind set that it shouldn't be handwaved.

Does this mean I don't still love Pathfinder? No, not at all, it just means that I think I have underestimated just how important it is to have a group that agrees on the basic premise that the rules are guidelines, not canon. My players are what I'd call "moderate" rules lawyers, but I'd NEVER play or GM 3.x with someone who went any farther. I'd go bat-crap crazy.

Well, if it was 3.0, I would show you passages in the DMG stating
1. You are in charge. You determine how the game will be played and the rules that are used.
2. If something does not work, you can change it
3. Good players will recognize 1 and 2.

You could then show #1 and #3 to your players, because it should have been in the PHB.

And, yeah, 3e is my favorite edition, but I would not want to run it above 12th level, but that has been true for previous editions (If I wanted to run 4e, I would stop at the start of paragon tier as I don't like Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies)

 

[Luce]

My two copper

Once again let me start with the standard disclaimer: The following are my observations based on my experience. You can happen to disagree and still both of us can be right.

Imprinting: The end goal is fun, but there are many ways getting there. If you already have found a way (game) that works for you, Why look further?
Different spice: By that I mean each edition has its own peculiarities. Some like them some do not. I for example am quite found of 2ed due to something I like to call oscillating challenge. A group of 9 level character can be facing a group of gargoyles in one encounter and in another 25 level lich (Example taken from [FONT=Book Antiqua, Times New Roman, Times]Ex Keraptis Cum Amore, Dun 77)[/FONT]. While the later is definably harder then the former both present challenge due to limited resources. Due to their (more) limited number of spells, spellcasters did spend some battle not using spells saving them.
Clash of Assumptions: in 2nd PC were may be just slightly above average for their race at the beginning. Following editions started to slant that to being someone special, destined for greatness. 2nd ed DMG have a section about giving "hopeless" character a chance. Now I did not see any STR 9 fighters, but there were a few STR 12 ones. All perfectly playable. Dragon tried to bring a reminder of that during 3rd in an article "Strong as an owl, Wise as an ox" (I think I have the name right) but the core assumption was that PC attributes should be managed more closely. In other words, people who played Wisdom 8 fighters before 3rd would not be caught dead doing so later. seen through 2ed prospective 3rd and 4th ed normal character generation runs into power gaming, while actually just following the different tenants.
Setting worlds: Again the rule set has effect on the feel of a setting developed during its supported lifetime. Conversions can be made, but ether a lot of effort is needed to make it seem seamless or details are sacrificed. Dark Sun for example. Both versions are fine games, but the feeling is not same from reading the books.
"The wisdom of one generation is the common sense of the next": Things that have been found to be broken/disliked are already houseruled. Take energy drain, people I gamed with had were already doing the temporary bit, cast "restoration" to avoid loosing XP. Just one example.
Game evolution and its target audience. That has been covered on this forums many times before. So I try to be brief. IME during the 80 and 90, there was more time to game. 1st ed had competition mainly from the game-books (you know, Bloodsword, Fighting Fantasy, The way of the tiger). During second Internet and game consoles started to appear, but still were secondary in time consumption. During 3rd ed, people begun to spend prodigious amount of time online or on their consoles. Current handhelds are very portable, as well as net(local or global) capable. This had had some effects on the evolution of D&D. Older editions (1st and 2nd) tended to have slower advancement rate, one get to use the same abilities several adventures in a row before advancing. As anecdotal personal example I remember running RttToH (skipping the original tomb) for a group of 6 players, and none managed to get level up! Not even the thief!

To Celebrim:About the political analogy.
I have the fortune to be born before 1989 and grew up in a communist nation, which switched to democracy. And yet there were a lot of happy people before. In my experience it is not that a given governing approach is wrong. At the beginning sweeping changes are brought with the help of idealists and a lot of people get indoctrinated into the system, but not knowing anything else still can be happy (how can you miss something you never had, or knew existed?)[In parallel before edition change all the possibilities are not know by the masses. There does not exist a bases for comparison.] Eventually more and more people learn how to play the system leading to corruption, stagnation and other unpleasantness. The system start to collapse. [When at first edition is released, there are just a few books and clear cut rules. With time more and more material is introduced, sometimes introducing unintended consequences and combinations eventually leading to too many Pun-Puns. Cue edition reset. When 3rd came out some of the problems it was trying to fix problems, I was not aware of- that is they were not really problems I had encountered personally. Enough people must have had. or the change would not been made. Same with 4th. Just goes to show, that one usually experience a limited scope of the world wide gaming picture.]

 

[havard]

I think you make a great summary of the situation Luce!

A few comments:

Imprinting: The end goal is fun, but there are many ways getting there. If you already have found a way (game) that works for you, Why look further?
Different spice: By that I mean each edition has its own peculiarities. Some like them some do not. I for example am quite found of 2ed due to something I like to call oscillating challenge. A group of 9 level character can be facing a group of gargoyles in one encounter and in another 25 level lich (Example taken from [FONT=Book Antiqua, Times New Roman, Times]Ex Keraptis Cum Amore, Dun 77)[/FONT]. While the later is definably harder then the former both present challenge due to limited resources. Due to their (more) limited number of spells, spellcasters did spend some battle not using spells saving them.

Good points. Personally I like playing multiple editions to experience all the different "spices". I think the assumption that later editions are better is inherently wrong. On the one hand later editions do have the experience of the previous editions to build on, but the design goals for later editions might not be what all gamers want, especially if new editions are designed especially to attract new gamers (ie people who are not yet gamers). The good thing about the OSR is that people are re-examining the older editions to see what we might have missed of good ideas that were there from the beginning.

Setting worlds: Again the rule set has effect on the feel of a setting developed during its supported lifetime. Conversions can be made, but ether a lot of effort is needed to make it seem seamless or details are sacrificed. Dark Sun for example. Both versions are fine games, but the feeling is not same from reading the books.

This is very true. I am a setting guy more than a rules guy. I have been involved in alot of discussions trying to convert settings (Mystara in particular) to new editions. Flavour will change when you use a setting with an edition that it was not designed for. This is not neccessarily a bad thing of course, but still worth keeping in mind. I was a little disappointed by the way WotC has treated the old settings. One of the reasons why we set up the Piazza was to have a home for the old D&D settings, independent of which would be officially supported by new editions.


-Havard