D&D General What does D&D look like without Death on the Table?

[Umbran]

D&D was not originally created to emulate the plots of novels, movies, and TV shows.

So what? Stasis is death.

Really. So what? The original creators were visionary, but still only knew a fraction of what RPGs would be about, in the end. Our understanding of games and their design, and just the world around us, has changed, moved on. The game should too, if we want it to thrive.

 

[Haffrung]

It wasn't? Weird that Gygax included that expansive Appendix N, then...

Appendix N in the DMG came out five years after D&D was first published. And the books cited were mainly inspiration for settings, monsters, spells, etc., not for stories. Can you name some stories that involve a band of wizards, warriors, and hired porters making repeated expeditions into a vast underground labyrinth to recover loot?

D&D became a game that many people use to emulate fantasy fiction*. It didn’t start that way, and many people still do not treat it that way.

* The first published adventure that looks anything like a heroic fantasy novel is Dragons of Despair, published in 1984, 10 years into the game’s life.

 

[Haffrung]

So what? Stasis is death.

Really. So what? The original creators were visionary, but still only knew a fraction of what RPGs would be about, in the end. Our understanding of games and their design, and just the world around us, has changed, moved on. The game should too, if we want it to thrive.

You’re the one who claimed heroic fiction spawned D&D. Presumably to give a heroic story-driven approach to play legitimacy. If the original approach of D&D is irrelevant, why did you bring it up?

 

[Neonchameleon]

So, for me: high death rates → low character investment; low death rates → high character investment.

Two key words in there "For me". I can make the case in both directions. Worrying about death is part of roleplaying although death being a routine occurrence does I agree take away time to empathise.

Contrived.

For me, the best part of D&D is how the story writes itself. Week in and week out, I have no idea what we're going to script next. If I remove the threat of death, I'm not letting the story unfold. Some of the most memorable stories I've ever had came from character deaths, even group deaths. [snip]
Absolutely none of this would occur if I, the DM, had decided in advance to fudge rolls because I needed the PCs to survive, perhaps to fulfill a prophecy I wrote in advance or whatever railroad design you want to imagine. It is no different if the players were collaborating on this effort to fudge away anything lethal so you could make the story you intended to make.

That, to me, would be the ultimate insult to the game: to predetermine how it should turn out.

The thing here is that when I turn up to a D&D session I know pretty much from hour to hour how it's going to turn out because all the rolls and challenges presented by the system are measured on a pass/fail scale. The truly interesting moments are when things are neither and twist - and D&D is for me not very good at producing those moments. It's something I do in defiance of the system.

That said I'm with you on fudging.

Fair enough, but what D&D originally brought to the table was an open ended game with a DM so you could do anything you wanted to try even if the rules didn't cover it. The industry is slowly strangling that Idea by trying to make money and create a rule book for everything, and by creating a new system every decade or so to force the sell of new books. How many people would play monopoly if they had relearn the rules every 10 years? D&D was always for people that wanted something beside a board game with a rule for every situation. Look at pathfinder it's become so tactical that many groups just ditch roleplaying entirely and play a board game where they kill stuff, because the tactical game is the entire focus of the system. I'd argue that's why it's not growing much. It doesn't offer as much as other systems because of that focus.

I think the biggest threat to the Roleplaying industry right now is the idea that the DM is just a moderator of the rules instead of the architect and ultimate master of the game. The first is pointless because a video game can do it. The second gives you ultimate flexibilty to do anything you want. But the first generates more books to sell because then you need a rule for everything.

A system with a rule for everything is just a computer game in a book without the cool graphics.

You're twelve years out of date here. The system that tried to have a rule for everything was D&D 3.X (3.0/3.5/Pathfinder) after 2e had given it a try with the plethora of Non Weapon Proficiencies, kits, and massive splat-bloat. And some people liked it, others didn't. 5e doesn't do that - and neither did 4e (the two skill systems are very similar other than the +1/2 level scaling of 4e). Even Monte Cook realises that constraining the DM as much as 3.X did is a mistake.

no Gygax started gaming as a wargamer. He and Jeff Perren came up with the Chainmail system. He realized he wanted more than a board game. Then he created D&D and left the chainmail elements in there so he wouldn't lose the few hardcore followers he had. Almost nobody played the game with those chainmail style rules. In fact most games were totally in the theatre of the mind till the fighting started and even when we used miniatures it was just to help us visualize things. We didn't have battle maps , we just made it up as we went along and when the dragon showed up we put our miniatures on the table as markers for where we were.

Gygax wasn't the designer of D&D. He was the developer. Arneson was the designer - and Gygax literally published D&D as fantasy wargaming rules.

 

[Umbran]

You’re the one who claimed heroic fiction spawned D&D. Presumably to give a heroic story-driven approach to play legitimacy. If the original approach of D&D is irrelevant, why did you bring it up?

Given the Appendix of fictional inspirations, I believe my statement is accurate. There's a step from Chainmail into D&D where wargame took a backseat to fantasy story.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

D&D became a game that many (not all) people used to emulate fantasy fiction. It didn’t start that way, and many people still do not treat it that way.

Hmmm. I'm not 100% sure I agree that early gaming was not intended to emulate fiction. Certainly some campaigns were, but I don't think it's even the most common default. Let's look at a quotes about the very first published adventure:

“Dave approached me to invent an evil character that would be different from the norm in this world ... My inspiration eventually was from an old episode of the original Star Trek television series. In it, Captain Kirk found a planet of Nazi’s and found the earthling, an historian, who founded it in the hope eliminating it’s excesses and organizing this society for the betterment of all in the name of efficiency. I told Dave Arneson and he was delighted.”

Friends of Dave seem pretty convinced that Temple of the Frog was strongly influenced by Lovecraft's fiction. And the amount of time travel / crashed spaceships / ray guns / teleport chambers in early D&D module speaks strongly to me that the authors were interested in taking contemporary sci-fi fiction and using it in D&D.

Temple of the Frog feels strongly like an episode of Flash Gordon to me; much more so than a tactical dungeon crawl.

 

[Reynard]

* The first published adventure that looks anything like a heroic fantasy novel is Dragons of Despair, published in 1984, 10 years into the game’s life.

That is an exceedingly narrow definition of what constitutes "fantasy fiction."

 

[Haffrung]

You can use fiction, TV etc. as inspiration for elements besides story. To turn things back to the OP, if D&D had originally been intended as a vehicle for protagonists to tell epic and heroic stories without death on the table, the designers utterly failed to support that approach mechanically.

 

[Reynard]

You can use fiction, TV etc. as inspiration for elements besides story. To turn things back to the OP, if D&D had originally been intended as a vehicle for protagonists to tell epic and heroic stories without death on the table, the designers utterly failed to support that approach mechanically.

Hence why I asked what it WOULD look like if that were the case. It's obvious that all versions of D&D has at least leveraged PC death as a threat, regardless of their focus on "story." The question is how does removing that threat impact play, both in concrete mechanical ways and more slippery tone and narrative ways.

 

[Haffrung]

That is an exceedingly narrow definition of what constitutes "fantasy fiction."

So give me some examples of fantasy novels that match the way D&D was played when 75 per cent of play was in the dungeon, lethality was extremely high, and XP was awarded for gold recovered from the dungeon.