The Rules: Who cares?

[mmadsen]

I do think that you can't really call 1e a rules light system. Basic/Expert? Sure, no problems there. But 1e? Really?

Since no one played 1E by the rules as written, I'm willing to call it a fairly rules-light system -- like Basic/Expert, but with more spells, more magic items, more monsters, etc.

More importantly, 1E had a very narrow scope of rules. Most of the game was spent "outside the rules" -- with the important exception of combat, which was still less formal than 3E or 4E combat.

In fact, my chief complaint with 1E was that the rules defied common sense -- unlike the DM's judgment.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

The whole thrust of having all these complex powers and chains of bonuses is that you're supposed to use the rules as written, use them all, and use them consistently without much intervention of judgement calls and on-the-fly rulings.

And yet Monte Cook is also one of the first people to say that he doesn't use all the rules in the book and generally does what feels right to him at the time. I consistently hear him say that the rules are there for the people that _want_ them and everyone else should just ignore them.

I think part of the problem you experience is that an awful lot of the talk that goes on about the game is mechanical stuff. The people that use their judgment? They're generally not running around on the boards asking technical questions.

In other words, by and large there's a big chunk of folks that just don't care and you hear very little from them.

Was 3E designed with system mastery in mind? Yup. Monte is totally up front about it.

WotC estimates that there's some 6 million people playing D&D. If you assume every single person on ENWorld and rpg.net is A) A unique account, and B) Actively playing D&D, you get a bit over 100k. That's a pretty small overall percentage. The reality is that there's a bunch of cross-over accounts, all kinds of people aren't actually playing _any_ rpg, a chunk of them playing (and not playing) hate D&D with a frothing hatred, and an awful lot of folks aren't posting on the internet to say how awesome their game is/was but to complain about this or that problem and try to figure out some specific solution, or to create something new within the ruleset.

So I think part of the reason you're seeing what you see is a matter of where you're hanging out.

It's a theory I've heard a number of times on the internet, but that's about it as far as I'm concerned.

IME, nothing has changed, with regards to 'rules first' play, rules lawyers, 'fast and loose', making it up as you go along, house ruling, DM adjudication, 'rule 0', and all the other terms that go here. It's absolutely down to the individuals involved, as it always has been. Again: IME, that is. From BD&D, through AD&D, many other systems altogether, 3e, and so on.

Yeah. The main thing that's changed over the years is the ease and speed of communication between the fans of rpgs. No longer is each gaming group relatively isolated and constantly reinventing the wheel or desperately searching Dragon magazine for ideas/suggestions to fix problems or create new bits. The casual rpg player may or may not bother popping online but all the hardcore people have places to hang out and strut their stuff; so they do.

 

[Hussar]

Because it's not a system in the first place! The many methods offered are not rules in the "you must do this" sense. They are simply available -- to people with Basic and Expert books, too. (Or do you find somewhere a "rule" prohibiting that?) The AD&D works are compilations of material from supplements and magazines. Take what you like and leave the rest; that is the old D&D way!

3E is much more systematic. Things are integrated from the foundation up. There is a beauty in that, in the smooth meshing of gears in a game "engine". It calls for more care, though, in removing or replacing parts, and even in bolting on additions.

That is enhanced by players' appreciation of the engineering. Players tend to have fairly comprehensive expectations of a game billed as 3E, relative to the scope of expectations of one billed as D&D or even Advanced D&D.

Since no one played 1E by the rules as written, I'm willing to call it a fairly rules-light system -- like Basic/Expert, but with more spells, more magic items, more monsters, etc.

More importantly, 1E had a very narrow scope of rules. Most of the game was spent "outside the rules" -- with the important exception of combat, which was still less formal than 3E or 4E combat.

In fact, my chief complaint with 1E was that the rules defied common sense -- unlike the DM's judgment.

I would point out that I did say the same thing. The game that people played at the table may well have been "rules light" but the game that was written wasn't. This was my only point.

Having been taking to task very, very many times on these boards for trying to say that "how I played" was any sort of common, I'm very reticent in trying to say that my playstyle was the way things were done back in the day.

One thought though - Ariosto, considering that EGG has publicly stated, in Dragon at the time, that if you were playing with rules other than what was in the 1e books, you weren't really playing D&D, how would you respond? Gygax made no bones of the fact that if you were using house rules, or ignoring the rules in AD&D, you were not playing the game. How would you respond to that?

 

[Ariosto]

I do recall that, once upon a time, Gary made some statements in The Dragon about people who would be "not playing Advanced D&D" -- but I do not think it was a blanket prohibition of house rules. I never much cared, as I was content to be playing D&D; an Official Advanced D&D® label didn't mean a thing, and how would someone get it, anyway? Non-DM players were not supposed to know what was in the DMG, and Gary wasn't among those with whom I played.

As the Advanced books were aimed at those already familiar with D&D, columns in The Dragon were (if indeed they attempted such) perhaps too little, too late for such an utter reversal of policy. The place to put such an overturning would have been the books themselves, and all I have found therein is advice with such nuance as seems never to be appreciated in a certain quarter.

Ask the man twice about anything in "by the books" AD&D, and you were likely to get three different answers. The single most consistent answer was (as phrased in the DMG), "It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important."

 

[Ariosto]

For practical examples of the sort of variation to which objections were raised even before the "Advanced" era, one need look no further than WotC's "editions". Those change so much of the fundamental "vocabulary" and "grammar" as to pass utterly beyond the realm of dialects of the common language of D&D. The first one is almost as closely related as, say, The Palladium Fantasy Role Playing Game. The more recent is about as foreign as Tunnels & Trolls.

 

[Remathilis]

There is a fine line between "too many rules" and "not enough to make a good decision".

I've made the point about 4e's "rules as physics" approach before to others; why do you need 3-4 paragraphs of lava rules when "If you fall into lava, you die" sums it up much easier?

YET

Having detailed rules like that does allow DMs to abjuncate rule-oddities and corner cases better. For example, in 2e (in the dark days before DDMs) our party was fighting some orcs. One player, Bob, decided to engage the orcs far to our east to draw some out (being mostly squishy mages and thieves). One mage, standing farther back, declares on his initiative, he is "fireballing away from Bob."

Everyone had a different idea of what this statement meant. The Player thought the orcs were pincered and he was fireballing the center. The other players (Bob included) assumed he meant away from Bob but BEHIND the orcs to create a fireball-backdraft and scatter the orc rearguard. The DM, however, took it to mean everyone-who-was-not Bob was in the blast radius and we (all PCs but the mage and Bob) all got to make saves vs. spell, declaring the PC mage dead as a doornail if any of us survived the 7d6 fire blast.

A battlemat and mini's would have made such a critical misunderstanding impossible. A dozen pennies on a kitchen table might have made things clearer.

DM fiat only works well when the DM and the PCs are on the same page. Otherwise, you end up with terrible miscommunication and fireballed PCs. In the OPs example, perhaps the PCs believed they could gain surprise or unsettle said polearm weilder. Perhaps the PCs themselves have spears and people breakout the books to compare the lengh of a longspear vs. a bec-de-corbin. Perhaps the polearm weilders drop their polearms on impact (in round 1) and ready their short-sword, meaning the other side has no reason to gain initiative the second round.

The initiative system (even the broken, clunky one in AD&D) avoids such miscommunication by simply creating a arbitary system to handle all the nuiances. It wasn't perfect, but it could create moments where a crazed halfling with a dagger manages to slide past a polearm weilder before the latter can dig in an prepare his weapon.

So both too many and too few can be bad for game, IMHO.

 

[Hussar]

For practical examples of the sort of variation to which objections were raised even before the "Advanced" era, one need look no further than WotC's "editions". Those change so much of the fundamental "vocabulary" and "grammar" as to pass utterly beyond the realm of dialects of the common language of D&D. The first one is almost as closely related as, say, The Palladium Fantasy Role Playing Game. The more recent is about as foreign as Tunnels & Trolls.

Ahhh, there it is. Sweet, sweet music. 3e and 4e aren't really D&D. Say it like it is.

Although, you do have your comparisons a bit wrong. 3e is closer to Rolemaster, not Palladium Fantasy, which is actually almost a carbon copy of 1e D&D and 4e is far closer to something like Savage Worlds than something written thirty years ago.

But, it's good to know that, regardless of the fact that the conversation has NOTHING to do with later editions, there are those who just cannot resist the chance for a cheap edition war shot.

Two thumbs up.

 

[La Bete]

Although, you do have your comparisons a bit wrong. 3e is closer to Rolemaster, not Palladium Fantasy

Which is unsurprising, given the author they have in common - but that's neither here nor there.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is interesting to me. I have heard a lot in the past few years about the alleged plague of horrible DMs necessitating a bondage of heavy rules-books for the sake of freeing the huddled masses of oppressed players from tyranny.

The thing is, that if you trust your DM, you are willing to put up with a lot that you wouldn't otherwise. Also, if the players have a similar mindset, you run into less misunderstanding.

However, the people I played with all had differing opinions on what was "common sense". For example:

-The DM feels that someone can jump at most 5 feet with a running start without special training. This is "common sense" and the idea that any of the PCs could jump over a 20 ft pit is incomprehensible. Meanwhile, one player knows that the world record in the Long Jump is 29 feet and his character has 19 strength, which is higher than any human in existence(in 1e/2e) so it is "common sense" that he should be able to make a 20 ft jump with no problem at all, since it is well below his maximum jump distance. The rules are silent on exactly how far you can jump.

-The DM feels that the advantage you have due to having a polearm is complete. You should always go first when wielding one. A player feels that he has seen fast and nimble characters in movies roll underneath long reach weapons and punch people without the polearm wielders getting in an attack at all and just being so fast that other people didn't get a chance to react. It make no sense to him at all that he shouldn't at least get a chance to go first.

-A house catches on fire. There are people trapped inside. No one in the group(DM and players both) have no real world experience with burning buildings. Their only reference is movies where fire moves at the speed of plot. The DM is imagining a scene from a movie where a house burned down and collapsed in about a minute from the time it caught on fire. One of the players is imagining a scene in a movie where people were inside a burning building waiting for a rescue for 3 hours. The rules don't say how quickly fire burns down a house.

-The DM feels that there is no way to kill a creature who is 30 feet tall with a dagger. He refuses to allow daggers to do damage but Greatswords and Spears can do damage normally. A player has the idea that his character is a badass who wields daggers to extremely deadly effect. He can stick them deep into leg muscles enough to cripple even a 30 ft tall creature and can likely cut a vein that will cause a giant to bleed to death no problem.

and so on, and so on....

Now, imagine you are the player in this game and ALL of the above situations happen to you in the same session. And an equal number of issues come up every session you play in.

This doesn't mean that the DM is suddenly completely incompetent or evil or something. In fact, it's likely that people on this board will agree with the DM in some of these situations and the player in others.

Still, from the point of view of the player, the DM is an idiot. He keeps making OBVIOUSLY wrong rulings(from his point of view) with no common sense at all. He feels picked on because the DMs rulings are always preventing him from doing what he wants to do.

In our group each of those situations would(and has) caused an argument that lasted a good 20-30 minutes each time. The most heated of them escalated into an entire session of arguing a DM ruling that players felt strongly against.

On the other hand, with a stong ruleset, all of these problems are averted at once. If the rules say exactly how far you can jump, how initiative works, how fast fire spreads, and how damage from weapons works...AND discourages changing the rules based on "common sense" then both players get a chance to agree to the social contract that says: "Regardless of our own personal beliefs on what makes sense, we agree to use the rules instead."

In which case, the above session is easily resolved:

-You want to jump? Make a jump check? You get over 20? You make it.

-Roll for initiative. We'll act in the order it says

-It takes 10 minutes for the house to burn down based on the rules written here. That's about how long you have to rescue the people inside.

-According to the rules, all weapons do damage to all creatures. Make and attack roll and roll for damage.

Also, before some people point out that 1e had rules for initiative and 3e or 4e has no rules for how fast fire burns down a house. I am aware. I'm arguing generically about less rules vs more rules not about a specific edition.

 

[Ariosto]

3e is closer to Rolemaster

One could assess it in different ways. I find 3E write-ups closer to old D&D convention than RM ones. Anyway, YOU brought up the concept of a standard by which "you weren't really playing D&D", suggesting a very narrow one. Historically, in-game procedures have varied widely and that has been widely accepted; The Dragon was a great source of variants. It is, as a practical matter, more troublesome to change things so that game elements cannot be communicated without someone else having to learn your house rules. When talk or writing about your campaign must be either misleading or simply incomprehensible otherwise, it's time to say, "Oh, that's not D&D; it's my game of Fantastic Adventure" (or whatever). In fact, that is how a lot of new games evolved.

In the early years of the hobby and industry, TSR had a commercial interest in distinguishing such differences. If (e.g.) RuneQuest were marketed as D&D, and it somehow became so impolitic to correct the usage that TSR lost control of its trademark, then the firm stood to lose business. There was for a while a real danger of "D&D" becoming a generic term for RPGs. Now, the trademark owner itself has chosen to undermine the term's former common referent.

When TSR acquired SPI's Dragonquest, it could have changed the name to D&D. It would then have been as accurate for people playing that game to say, "We're playing D&D" as it is for people today playing the game from Issaries to say, "We're playing Hero Quest". That's where the trademark is currently lodged -- but people expecting the completely different Milton Bradley game are in for confusion and surprise. Years ago, a restaurant chain had a contest awarding trips to Paris, Rome, etc.. The catch was that the destinations were all towns in Oregon.

The situation simply is, and the practical consequences naturally follow. Your opinion or mine as to how nifty Game X or Game Y is does not change that.