coyote6
Adventurer
I don't know that it's a 3e thing, per se, as I tended to use the rules for the games I played for the 12-15 years prior to 3e coming out. Note, however, that I wasn't playing AD&D; I was playing games with rules I liked (more than I liked AD&D, which I got tired of before 2e came out), and found easy to understand and use (and therefore didn't feel the need to ignore 'em).
(Though we did house rule things we didn't like, and I did make all kinds of stuff up as I went along. I GM'd quite a bit of GURPS & Champions where a lot of NPCs and foes ended up as a few rough notes ["12d6 EB, OCV 11"] or were entirely in my head ["Let's see, the ninjas are 13/13/10/12, with combat skills 14- or 15-"]. Is that fast and loose? I dunno.)
OTOH, I didn't do that much with D&D, though I would occasionally take a lower-level monster and mentally upgrade it to be a more interesting fight against the PCs when they hit double-digit levels. But D&D has a lot more pre-made monsters & NPCs that I can swipe & use, so that may have been a factor. Plus, creating NPCs let me get to experiment with different races & classes, which was kind of fun, given that I've GM'd more than I played (I think I've played half-a-dozen PCs in 3e, only one of them past level 6 or 7). So maybe there was some effect; not sure I can tell.
Anyways, I was on GURPSnet-L, a GURPS mailing list, back in the day, and there were quite a few simulation-minded folks there (though I think some of them never actually ran or played a campaign, they just thought & prepped a lot; it was more a mental toy than an RPG). Hero has its share of that kind of thing, too. Maybe D&D 3e brought a lot of simulation-minded people (back) to D&D, when they had been playing other games (or not gaming at all)?
I know that I tend to game with people who have styles similar to my own, or at least not radically different. Even at cons -- the games I choose to play appeal to people with similar tastes, which isn't terribly surprising. Similarly, IME, people with wildly different tastes tend not to stay in the same group (ex., the guy that joined a Champions game in, like '90 or so, and his style didn't fit with the group's -- he wanted to build uber-powergamer characters, kill supervillains, etc. -- so he didn't stick around).
But with the Internet, you end up communicating with essentially complete strangers, so everyone gets exposed to gamers with more styles (without having to deal with conflicts at the table, so you deal with more of 'em). Thus, it seems to me it's easy to get the perception (which could very well become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy) that the attitude towards the game has changed.
(Though we did house rule things we didn't like, and I did make all kinds of stuff up as I went along. I GM'd quite a bit of GURPS & Champions where a lot of NPCs and foes ended up as a few rough notes ["12d6 EB, OCV 11"] or were entirely in my head ["Let's see, the ninjas are 13/13/10/12, with combat skills 14- or 15-"]. Is that fast and loose? I dunno.)
OTOH, I didn't do that much with D&D, though I would occasionally take a lower-level monster and mentally upgrade it to be a more interesting fight against the PCs when they hit double-digit levels. But D&D has a lot more pre-made monsters & NPCs that I can swipe & use, so that may have been a factor. Plus, creating NPCs let me get to experiment with different races & classes, which was kind of fun, given that I've GM'd more than I played (I think I've played half-a-dozen PCs in 3e, only one of them past level 6 or 7). So maybe there was some effect; not sure I can tell.
Anyways, I was on GURPSnet-L, a GURPS mailing list, back in the day, and there were quite a few simulation-minded folks there (though I think some of them never actually ran or played a campaign, they just thought & prepped a lot; it was more a mental toy than an RPG). Hero has its share of that kind of thing, too. Maybe D&D 3e brought a lot of simulation-minded people (back) to D&D, when they had been playing other games (or not gaming at all)?
I know that I tend to game with people who have styles similar to my own, or at least not radically different. Even at cons -- the games I choose to play appeal to people with similar tastes, which isn't terribly surprising. Similarly, IME, people with wildly different tastes tend not to stay in the same group (ex., the guy that joined a Champions game in, like '90 or so, and his style didn't fit with the group's -- he wanted to build uber-powergamer characters, kill supervillains, etc. -- so he didn't stick around).
But with the Internet, you end up communicating with essentially complete strangers, so everyone gets exposed to gamers with more styles (without having to deal with conflicts at the table, so you deal with more of 'em). Thus, it seems to me it's easy to get the perception (which could very well become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy) that the attitude towards the game has changed.
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