D&D General Un-Fun D&D: A Thought Experiment

[Remathilis]

A lot of people claim things about D&D in that period that are--at best--regionalisms. Very little of that applied consistently to the D&D games I played extensively from late 1975 until mid 1978. And I didn't play with just one group.

I find a lot of it is a certain level of revisionism. That is, D&D doesn't actually fit into the clean eras we ascribe to it in hindsight. I don't think many people played the strict hyper-challenging style OS proports to be emulating. I think a style closer to the mix of AD&D difficulty and Hickman-style narrative play was far more common.

I started playing in the 90s. I read Dragon from that era, and hung around game shops and college gaming clubs up to the early aughts. I also was active on this board then, and I recall the types of conversations that were had between players and DMs. And while differences in play did exist, homebrewed systems existed, and people refusing to move to the next edition all existed, the lines were no so clear and the camps divided as they are now. In that way, I feel the internet and a lot of game-theory websites polarized D&D players into the camps we have now.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find a lot of it is a certain level of revisionism. That is, D&D doesn't actually fit into the clean eras we ascribe to it in hindsight. I don't think many people played the strict hyper-challenging style OS proports to be emulating. I think a style closer to the mix of AD&D difficulty and Hickman-style narrative play was far more common.

I started playing in the 90s. I read Dragon from that era, and hung around game shops and college gaming clubs up to the early aughts. I also was active on this board then, and I recall the types of conversations that were had between players and DMs. And while differences in play did exist, homebrewed systems existed, and people refusing to move to the next edition all existed, the lines were no so clear and the camps divided as they are now. In that way, I feel the internet and a lot of game-theory websites polarized D&D players into the camps we have now.

Well, honestly, a lot of it seems to me like older players who want to claim that the game has changed radically from what it started as (which, you can make some argument about mechanically) and They Were Betrayed. And that works a whole lot better if you can claim early D&D was a bigger monoculture than it ever was once it escaped Lake Geneva.

 

[MichaelSomething]

AD&D following every rule in the book.
High level 3E with hardcore power gamers.
4E run by an OSR DM.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

This one is interesting to me, because I definitely prefer games where the complexities of PCs are not foisted on NPCs. I really hate having to build adversaries with full chargen, and I do not care one whit if monsters and NPCs have abilities that the PCs can never gain. Don't even make me flip a page to find out what that feat or edge or whatever does: just tell me what it does or leave it out of the statblock.

so the message after i actually clarified what i meant - it's not really about how pcs and npcs are built, it's about how the system functions. i don't really care if pcs and npcs are built the same (i actually prefer if they're not - building pcs takes a while, i don't need that level of depth in even a bbeg), but i WOULD like to be able to tell what cr or monster level a pc of any given class and level is without having to spend 10 minutes dissecting the monster values chart.

 

[Bagpuss]

Not too long ago, I began a idle thought experiment on what D&D would look like if it was played in a way that is polar opposite to what my personal playstyle is. In a way An Anti-Remathilis D&D. What that game would look and play like.

I put two caveats: It had to still be D&D (That is, the rules would still use classes, species, spells, magic, etc). It would be too easy to design a game that doesn't even resemble D&D using this. Second, while it wasn't fun for me, it still had to be fun for someone. In theory, my trash would be another's treasure to avoid absolute torture. I'm sure some people will love this, but to me this is my own personal Hell.

This is what I came up with.

* The DM is Ruthlessly Neutral: The DM is expected to be an absolute neutral arbiter of the game. Dice rolls are expected to be adhered to regardless of outcome. There is no fudging, no reducing the monster's hit points, to targeting stronger allies to avoid kicking weak ones when down. The DM is fair, but plays to win.
* The Game is Procedurally Generated. That is, the game expects much of the DMs work to be done via table generation and after-the-fact justification. Random Encounters, Treasure, adventure design, etc is expected to be done via random generation to limit DM influencing outcomes for either themselves or the players.
* Characters are randomly generated: Every mechanical aspect of a character is randomly generated: Ability scores, race, class, gear, HP, etc. Good luck on these rolls will give you advantages over those who roll badly. There is no re-rolls, no "hopeless character" rules, no offsetting bad rolls.
* Characters are not balanced: Some options (races, classes, etc) are superior to others. If you roll and get lucky enough to have access to the superior option, you are just that much farther ahead. The Paladin is superior to the fighter, balanced stringent requirements to access and play that character. Quadratic Wizards and Linear Fighters are a feature, not bug. Trap options abound.
* The World is Not Fair: Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and other cruelties exist, and the PCs are not immune to them. An orc going into a human village should expect a mob and not a warm welcome. Clerics of the wrong faith best leave quickly.
* Limits on meta-currency. Options like Heroic Inspiration, Action Points, Luck points, or even getting Advantage on a roll is ALWAYS in the hands of the DM and never automatically granted the player by class or feature.
* Life is Not Fair, Death Even Less So: One-Hit Kills, Save or Die, Energy Drain, and worse fates befall adventurers routinely. TPKs are a very real possibility.
* Crits: Critical Hits can lead to permanent injuries, amputations, or even death. Critical fumbles can lead to broken equipment, destroyed treasure, or errant swings at allies.
* Death is a Fail State: Resurrection magic is rare and difficult. Death means starting over. From level 1.
* The World is Dying: The world is not a fun or enjoyable place. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. People scramble to get what they can in a world overrun by deadly monsters, disease, famine, and disasters. Crime is an unfortunate reality, prejudice a common mindset. Hope is in short supply.
* Play Hard, Play Smart, Play to Survive: All of this leads to a game where the deck is stacked against the players and the DM is bound by neutrality to enforce that. Life is cheap, characters are disposable, and lucky rolls are as valuable as tactical play or creative thinking. No one is owed a happy ending. The only thing the world owes you is death from starvation, unless you can make something better with luck, skill and power.

That is my Anti-Fun D&D. A game so antithetical to my play style I couldn't stand one minute of it.

Would anyone want to play this type of D&D? What your anti-fun D&D be?

Wow that sounds like a fun game. Lets compare it to mine.

The DM fudges routinely: Especially to avoid characters death in combat.

Characters are balanced: So much so that choices don't really matter, want to play a halfing fighter, sure you can be as strong as a Goliath, just given yourself a Strength modifier rather than the normal racial dex one.

The World is sunshine and rainbows: Racism, xenophobia aren't reasons to go to war. People judge everyone as individuals based on their deeds, if you want to play and orc don't worry all the NPCs will ignore the fact the neighbouring orc nation has been raiding their lands for years.

No lasting injuries: A good nights sleep will cure anything short of death, and death well we have a spell for that but don't worry about that as the DM will have fudged it anyway. Remember nothing can have any consequences.

The world is stable: there are no disasters or impending doom you need to worry about, in fact your character doesn't really need to adventure at all.

I'd be leaving the table after session zero.

 

[Lanefan]

I have a pet fantasy heartbreaker project I like to idly work on in my free time, and one of the design principles I try to stick to when it comes to the character creation is “choose your own level of randomization.” Everywhere that you get to choose details like race, class, ability scores, I say “roll on or choose an option from table X.”

I do a limited version of the same thing for char-gen in my game: for various character elements such as height, weight, languages known, etc. you can choose from within a relatively basic range or roll in hopes of getting something more exotic; but if you roll then the roll is binding no matter the result.

Examples: for Human (male) weight you can choose anything between about 140 lb and 220 lb or use a complicated formula that includes some random rolling and that can give results from about 95 lb to a long-tail bell curve that can get into the 300s.

For languages known beyond your native tongue you can, for each one, choose from a short list of basics or roll on a great big chart-plus-subcharts if you want to try for something unusual or exotic. Same goes for secondary skill/past profession - you can always choose to have been a common sailor but you'd have to roll (at long odds!) if you've got hopes of having been a ship's captain.

I don't allow choice of age because in my game, as per original 1e, age has direct effects on some character stats.

 

[BruceWright]

Mine:

Nobody prepares anything
nobody knows how their build works
People stare at their sheet for minutes at a time during their turn
People roll and then "shop" their sheet scouring every little thing to see what they can add. Then forget what numbers they're adding and need to read it again.
People show up late, scramble all their things, ask to bum a pencil, forgot they should have levelled up, ask to bum a PHB

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Mine:

Nobody prepares anything
nobody knows how their build works
People stare at their sheet for minutes at a time during their turn
People roll and then "shop" their sheet scouring every little thing to see what they can add. Then forget what numbers they're adding and need to read it again.
People show up late, scramble all their things, ask to bum a pencil, forgot they should have levelled up, ask to bum a PHB

i got a cpap machine to fix my sleeping recently and it's really been making me feel less tired in my day-to-day life.

it took me 10 seconds to read this and i feel like before i got it again. i hate you so much. stop being right.

 

[Lanefan]

As for my take on the OP:

Not too long ago, I began a idle thought experiment on what D&D would look like if it was played in a way that is polar opposite to what my personal playstyle is. In a way An Anti-Remathilis D&D. What that game would look and play like.

This is what I came up with.

I've taken the liberty of rearranging these into categories: things that I see as essential in order to have fun, and things I'm neutral on or take a more nuanced approach.

Things that are IMO essential:

* The DM is Ruthlessly Neutral: The DM is expected to be an absolute neutral arbiter of the game. Dice rolls are expected to be adhered to regardless of outcome. There is no fudging, no reducing the monster's hit points, to targeting stronger allies to avoid kicking weak ones when down. The DM is fair, but plays to win.
* The World is Not Fair: Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and other cruelties exist, and the PCs are not immune to them. An orc going into a human village should expect a mob and not a warm welcome. Clerics of the wrong faith best leave quickly.
* Limits on meta-currency. Options like Heroic Inspiration, Action Points, Luck points, or even getting Advantage on a roll is ALWAYS in the hands of the DM and never automatically granted the player by class or feature.
* Life is Not Fair, Death Even Less So: One-Hit Kills, Save or Die, Energy Drain, and worse fates befall adventurers routinely. TPKs are a very real possibility.
* Crits: Critical Hits can lead to permanent injuries, amputations, or even death. Critical fumbles can lead to broken equipment, destroyed treasure, or errant swings at allies.
* Play Hard, Play Smart, Play to Survive: All of this leads to a game where the deck is stacked against the players and the DM is bound by neutrality to enforce that. Life is cheap, characters are disposable, and lucky rolls are as valuable as tactical play or creative thinking. No one is owed a happy ending. The only thing the world owes you is death from starvation, unless you can make something better with luck, skill and power.

For me, "limits on meta-currency" just means eliminating it altogether.

Otherwise, yes, for the most part I want the setting to be a nasty place and the DM to present that nasty place in as impartial a manner as practicality allows.

Things I'm neutral on, or which I prefer a mitigated version:

* The Game is Procedurally Generated. That is, the game expects much of the DMs work to be done via table generation and after-the-fact justification. Random Encounters, Treasure, adventure design, etc is expected to be done via random generation to limit DM influencing outcomes for either themselves or the players.
* Characters are randomly generated: Every mechanical aspect of a character is randomly generated: Ability scores, race, class, gear, HP, etc. Good luck on these rolls will give you advantages over those who roll badly. There is no re-rolls, no "hopeless character" rules, no offsetting bad rolls.
* Characters are not balanced: Some options (races, classes, etc) are superior to others. If you roll and get lucky enough to have access to the superior option, you are just that much farther ahead. The Paladin is superior to the fighter, balanced stringent requirements to access and play that character. Quadratic Wizards and Linear Fighters are a feature, not bug. Trap options abound.
* Death is a Fail State: Resurrection magic is rare and difficult. Death means starting over. From level 1.
* The World is Dying: The world is not a fun or enjoyable place. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. People scramble to get what they can in a world overrun by deadly monsters, disease, famine, and disasters. Crime is an unfortunate reality, prejudice a common mindset. Hope is in short supply.

There's something to be said for lesser or partial versions of these but as written they go too far.

Procedural generation is great for things like treasure and minor random encounters but not for whole adventures or campaigns.

Randomization in char-gen is good to a point and in a few ways essential. I'm fine with giving choice of species, choice of classes from those which you roll well enough to meet the requirements, and choice of some minor elements. Anything that might give undue advantage or disadvantage in ongoing play, however, has to and must be rolled for.

Characters are not balanced is fine provided the game's math is forgiving enough to accept such. I want and expect, for example, variable character levels within the same party once things get going. That said, I prefer it if-when the imbalances cancel out over time, where say a character that shines in one adventure might be much less useful in the next.

Death should be a loss condition, I think, and have permanent or near-permanent lasting effects after revival. I've no problem with revival magic being available at a cost. Starting over from 1st level has never been my thing, instead new characters come in a bit below the average of the party they're joining.

Written differently, the last one there could be any "points of light" setting; where other than a few possibly-failing bastions of civilization the world is dying, overrun with monsters and other hazards. The obvious game-play advantage to such a setting, of course, is that adventurers never lack for things to do.

===========

It occurs to me that several of the OP's points could be perhaps summed up as a lower tolerance for luck and randomness as the determiner of significant outcomes. This is probably where we differ on a root level, as I've always seen D&D as first and foremost a game of luck - almost a Roguelike, if you will - with player skill simply a means of shifting the odds in your favour to whatever extent the situation allows.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

• The only avialable races (and the game insists of calling them races and nothing else) are Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Haflings, with the latter three serving as their own separate classes.
• There is no multiclassing or customization of the class.
• Pretty much everything that doesn't look like a most white-bread human is characterized as inherently, onthologically and objectively evil, even the newborn babies are born desiring murder, and entire species are characterized as inherently incapable of cooperation, craft, art, culture or even deeper thought. Despite that, they will be shown forming armies, tribes, kingdoms as well as having shamans and gods, wearing "tribal" and "exotic" jelwery they clearly made and using weapons they also made themselves.
• The only avialable meele class is Fighting Man. It's sword & Board fighter who attacks once per turn, you are penalized for trying to do anything but attack. You cannot have too high intelligence to play this class. Women characters are banned from playing this.
• The only casting options are Priest and Wizard, who are naughty word broken and only balancing for it is they are hard to survive early levels and every time they fail magic roll they risk tpk. You cannot have too high strength to play this class. Women characters are banned from playing this.
• Women characters can only be Rogues or Elves. Women characters also have their Strength and Intelligence scores halved.
• The game has ALL THE KIDS OF MISOGYNY AND RACISM YOU'D EXPECT, including SA, sexual slavery, regular slavery and women being treated as property. The setting has a lot of very young girls being married off to adult men with entire paragraphs defending it as "historical acurracy".
• Starter set has a quest where princess runs away from arranged marriage with her maid/lover, the party has to drag her back and murder the maid for "corrupting" her or are labeled oathbreakers.
• In fact every quest always finds a way to force PCs into a railroad where they have to carry quest to the letter with no wiggle room or are gonna be cursed or labeled oathbreakers/criminals/traitors
• There is 30+ skills but each class can only advance no more than five to where they always have no less than 60% chance to fail in 3 of them, and 50% in two.
• Only meta currency is DM being given a freedom to impose at will penalties and bonuses to ensure the roll succeeds or fails. The game encourages doing it for every little minutia, multiple penalties for every roll.
• Attack rolls require you to calculate percentage of 20 for every attack.
• Every adventure is written with PCs as either captivated audience of THE STORY or with a 'gotcha!" they could never see or avoid.
• Gaining pretty much anything is aligment locked and aligment is strict and inflexible.
• The game focuses only on comabt and dungeon crawling, there are mechanics to punish roleplay or levity.
• The setting is an incoherent ripoff of edgiest parts of Witcher, Warhammer Fantasy, Dark Sun and Ravenloft, and yet takes itself as serious as if it was written by Dostoyevsky himself.
• All encounters are randomized and procedually generated. You can easily run into 2-5 liches in a city at level 1.
• DM is required to play one of CANON CHARACTERS as a DMNP that is stronger and better than the party and always saves them out of trouble.
• PCs must serve a "good" kingdom of white people who are all tinily-veield Christians, every nonwhite nation is potrayed as inherently evil and antagonistic, only step above monsters.
• The pcs msut owrship generic fantasy pantheon that is blatantly Christian, or be labeled apostates.
• There are rules for owning slaves and torture, none is seen as an evil act by the game unless monsters and non-white people do it.
• Rampant homophobia and transphobia built both in the setting and the rules.
• Half of the rules are an excuse for writer's rant about his libertarian views.
• Pretty much every bad part of worldbuilding I listed is enforced by rules so hard it is impossible to divorce the game from the setting.
• All weapons work the same aside different damage die.

I think this is the kind of game I would nto touch with a ten foot pole with dynamite strapped to it.