When did We Stop Trusting Game Designers?

[Hussar]

I kinda sorta stumbled across an interesting observation in the past few days. I was reading (un)reason's excellent Let's Read the Entire Run thread and he mentioned this little tidbit from Dragon 66, it's in a letter from EGG:

Gary writes in to say that the reasons firearms are not found in Official AD&D Worlds is because the physics of the universe do not allow for gunpowder and similar explosives. Burning stuff simply burns, it doesn't exert outward pressure. (so steam power won't work either) Experiments on those lines will simply do sod-all. If you want blasting effects, you'll have to use magic. And that's final.

Later, in one of the "Where has the Magic Gone" Forked Threads, there is a lively discussion about what is said in the 2e DMG:

Originally Posted by Imaro View Post
Here's another excerpt from AD&D 2e I thought was interesting as far as this discussion goes...from the DMG...



Buying Magical Items

As player characters earn more money and begin facing greater dangers, some of them will begin wondering where they can buy magical items. Using 20th-century, real-world economics, they will figure there must be stores that buy and sell such goods. Naturally they will want to find and patronize such stores. However, no magical stores exist.
Before the DM goes rushing off to create magical item shops, consider the player characters and their behavior. Just how often do player characters sell those potions and scrolls they find? Cast in a sword +1? Unload a horn of blasting or a ring of free action?
More often than not, player characters save such items. Certainly they don't give away one-use items. One can never have too many potions of healing or scrolls with extra spells. Sooner or later the character might run out. Already have a sword +1? Maybe a henchman or hireling could use such a weapon (and develop a greater respect for his master). Give up the only horn of blasting the party has? Not very likely at all.
It is reasonable to assume that if the player characters aren't giving up their goods, neither are any non-player characters. And if adventurers aren't selling their finds, then there isn't enough trade in magical items to sustain such a business.
Even if the characters do occasionally sell a magical item, setting up a magic shop is not a good idea. Where is the sense of adventure in going into a store and buying a sword +1? Haggling over the price of a wand? Player characters should feel like adventurers, not merchants or greengrocers.
Consider this as well: If a wizard or priest can buy any item he needs, why should he waste time attempting to make the item himself? Magical item research is an important role-playing element in the game, and opening a magic emporium kills it. There is a far different sense of pride on the player's part when using a wand his character has made, or found after perilous adventure, as opposed to one he just bought.
Finally, buying and trading magic presumes a large number of magical items in the society. This lessens the DM's control over the whole business. Logically-minded players will point out the inconsistency of a well-stocked magic shop in a campaign otherwise sparse in such rewards.

Now, a thought hit me. What would happen if Mike Mearls had written either of these two bits in a recent Dragon magazine? There would be a mad rush of vitriol being spilled all over the forums. How dare he dictate my campaign world to me, would be the rallying cry.

Yet, EGG flat out dictates your world to you and no one raises an eyebrow. Zeb Cook does the same thing and is lauded by some for maintaining the mystery of magic items.

At what point did game designers go from "Guys who want to make my game better" to "Those bastards who are trying to ruin MY game!"?

Does it go all the way back to the launch of 3e? When so many people simply refused to accept 3e as a "viable" version of D&D? The buyout of WOTC by Hasbro? 3.5? The end of print Dungeon/Dragon? Announcement of 4e? When did we stop trusting the game designers?

Heck, in a recent thread I saw someone decrying the verbiage in WOTC design blogs. The "Cloudwatching" blog IIRC. To the point where they accused WOTC of editing the blog after the fact to make it look like they weren't being so negative. The truly weird thing to me was that people actually took this seriously. Some posters actually found it easier to believe that WOTC would, after the fact, go back and edit a blog post to remove any "incriminating" evidence rather than believe that some random anonymous person on the internet would over react.

I just find the whole thing endless facinating in a trainwreck, car accident on the side of the road sort of way.

So, I put it to you, when did "game designer" become synonymous with "something icky I scraped off my shoe"?

 

[Deset Gled]

People probably stopped trusting game designers around the time that games were designed by companies, not people. It's a bit of a different mindset to think about one guy writing a book describing what he does for fun, versus thinking that a corporation spent millions of dollars playtesting, editing, revising, studying focus groups, and writing a book.

 

[Set]

So, I put it to you, when did "game designer" become synonymous with "something icky I scraped off my shoe"?

I had house rules back in 1st edition, and, frankly, I don't know a lot of people who *didn't* have house rules back then.

Gary Gygax was a nice guy and all, from the time I met him, but I disagree strongly with many of his ideas, and I always have.

Other ideas I like. It has nothing to do with Gary being old, or dead, or a nice guy, it has to do with my rabid irrational dislike of Vancian magic (to pick one example of something he liked out of a hat).

If there had been an internet back in the late 70s, I imagine that there would have been thousands of D&D players poo-pooing Gary's ideas as vigorously and vehemently as these people who don't enthusiastically love every single contribution Mike Mearls has made to the game.

Since Rome, at least, every single generation has whined about how the current generation is ruder and more disrespectful than the one before it. The 'golden age' always seems to be in the viewers childhood, and every generation sets it for themselves.

 

[El Mahdi]

...So, I put it to you, when did "game designer" become synonymous with "something icky I scraped off my shoe"?

The minute we had instant, anonymous means of expressing our thoughts in a very easy, immediately gratifying way without a need for self censoring. You know, message boards.

You still had angry letters even back in the old days, but I'd imagine that most of the things said on boards, if they had been in a letter, would never see print in Dragon or Dungeon.

Also, it takes more time and effort to write a letter, as opposed to an instant, stream of thought, forum post. Maybe in the end that's something for all of us to think about. If we waited and thought a bit about something before we posted, would we really have the proliferation of angry, unfounded rants that we see on forums? Probably not.

Also, the idea that gamers in general are more knowledgable now about game mechanics, world/campaign design, and different systems than they were in earlier days of RPG's. Sure, there were other games out there, but I would think most people played the king of RPG's, D&D, rather than more obscure games they only really knew about from some tiny black & white advertisement in Dragon Magazine. Now that people understand what they like more, and why, they are more ready to criticize that which they don't like. Couple that with the ease with which we can do that now, and it seems a natural progression, even though it may not actually be progress.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The examples provided are an attempt to prove what exactly? The FR boxed set from 1E shows that "official" worlds can and do have the possibility for firearms. Perhaps Gary was not a fan of using this kind of tecnnology at the time the article was written but that doesn't mean DM's didn't use the stuff anyway, or if they did that it meant that they didn't trust Gary as a game designer.

The reasoning for the treatment of magical items in the quoted 2E text is simply the feeling that the authors of 2E wanted for thier magic system. This is strictly a guideline for default assumptions and may be changed, just as some players changed 3E back to a similar style when it wasn't the default assumption.

I don't see anything here that has to do with trust or a lack thereof. An opinion on a given subject is just that. "Game designer" hasn't become an icky term for me at least. Perhaps the perception of greater respect for designers in the past comes from the fact that real time discussion of thier opinions was far less common in the pre-internet era.

If Mike had written either of these things back in the 80's I don't think there would be much difference, and if Zeb wrote that piece and posted it somewhere like ENWorld then you would see a lot of dicussion about it.

 

[Storm Raven]

Yet, EGG flat out dictates your world to you and no one raises an eyebrow. Zeb Cook does the same thing and is lauded by some for maintaining the mystery of magic items.

Well, no. Many people thought that EGG's pronouncements concerning magic items were downright stupid, and said so. Look at the letters column and forum from p;d Dragon issues of the 1980s and you will find several talking about Dms who have magic items shops, or players and DMs think the attitude that magic items would never be sold is just silly. Zeb got the same criticism, for much the same reasons.

Not that either way of running a game is wrong, but the "official" way of "no magic items for sale, ever" was never thought of as something to truly take seriously.

At what point did game designers go from "Guys who want to make my game better" to "Those bastards who are trying to ruin MY game!"?

About five minutes after the first gamer bought a wargame. This predates RPGs by quite a bit: every gamer thinks (some rightly) that they can make the game better, and that the game designer must have been drunk when he wrote one or another rule they dislike.

 

[xechnao]

Easy.
Wotc does not design a game. They are handling a market of support of a certain product-trend: D&D. EGG holds a special position regarding this trend: he is considered his creator. If he was in charge and people did not agree with him D&D would simply lose brand name value or power. Ironically this can't happen to the same effect while someone other handles it because he is considered in no different position than anyone else. D&D brand value becomes one with its own history -the object's history.

 

[PaulofCthulhu]

The minute we had instant, anonymous means of expressing our thoughts in a very easy, immediately gratifying way without a need for self censoring. You know, message boards.

... Maybe in the end that's something for all of us to think about. If we waited and thought a bit about something before we posted, would we really have the proliferation of angry, unfounded rants that we see on forums? Probably not.

Seth Godin has some interesting thoughts on that. Essentially, he believes people should post with their real names and stand by their words for just the kind of reasons described above.

I know some people on Yoggie have requested their username changed to their real names. It can be easy to see that people would attach more weight to posts attributed to real names than pseudonyms.

 

[Fifth Element]

This is strictly a guideline for default assumptions and may be changed, just as some players changed 3E back to a similar style when it wasn't the default assumption.

This is rather the point. These same types of guidelines, printed in the 4E DMG, bring ire and vitriol from the message boards.

I blame the message boards: attitudes haven't changed, just the ability to communicate the attitudes quickly and without consequence.

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Rude Person

 

[Mallus]

I can't say I ever trusted game designers. I bought gaming products, used the stuff I liked, discarded or changed what I didn't, then added my own material which was sometimes better, frequently worse, but nevertheless was like the pearl of great price because I made it up.

Also, had the Dragon magazine Letters column been as efficient a tool for the dissemination of vitriol and bats*hit commentary as the Internet, you would have seen this decades ago. This is a paradigm shift in communication technology, not attitudes.

P.S. Gunpowder, or something similar, always explodified in my D&D homebrews.

P.P.S. We always had some form of magic shop, too.