D&D General Why Combat is a Fail State - Blog and Thoughts

[payn]

Methinks the poster doth protest too much.

My point is every time something is asserted about the OS movement that "fixes" the problems with modern D&D, you get about a half-dozen people who argue that's not really what the OS movement is about and they don't do it that way. The notion that combat is a fail state, a statement that OS players are making about themselves, has been met with "well, they don't actually mean it the way you're taking it". Or that people crow about how they don't use formulas like CR to create balanced encounters but then insist every encounter they have run has been fair regardless.

I'm not arguing that modern and OS games aren't different. I just think they are less different than the OS movement says they are. Especially those who are avoiding the sins of the past and avoiding gotchas, using appropriate challenges and telegraphing important info the PCs need. Guess what, modern D&D players have been doing that for a while too.

A general issue in many of these discussions is the fact folks are not willing to let figurative statements be figurative. Its not just this topic either, folks seem allergic to any kind of generalization. I get it, you dont want to make important decisions on good enough type data, but for conversation sake, its as good as its gonna get.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This still reads to me like a misunderstanding of how OSR type games are played (or at least how I play them).

I think this latter clause is pretty important here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fair. I would say that certain typical OSR even make a selling point about killing characters. Both DCC and its boosters tend to trumpet « the character funnel » and the fact that many PCs will die so don’t bother to get attached.

Yeah, this is the part of the OSR who consider some of the most tedious parts of the early D&D experience a virtue.

 

[TiQuinn]

Methinks the poster doth protest too much.

My point is every time something is asserted about the OS movement that "fixes" the problems with modern D&D, you get about a half-dozen people who argue that's not really what the OS movement is about and they don't do it that way. The notion that combat is a fail state, a statement that OS players are making about themselves, has been met with "well, they don't actually mean it the way you're taking it". Or that people crow about how they don't use formulas like CR to create balanced encounters but then insist every encounter they have run has been fair regardless.

I'm not arguing that modern and OS games aren't different. I just think they are less different than the OS movement says they are. Especially those who are avoiding the sins of the past and avoiding gotchas, using appropriate challenges and telegraphing important info the PCs need. Guess what, modern D&D players have been doing that for a while too.

I think what we're coming down to is that dungeon or adventure design has to match the expectations of the system and the genre that it's trying to emulate.

We're playing Mothership now, which is notionally considered part of the OSR. It's sci-fi horror, meant to emulate the kind of horror that you'd find in Alien. The PCs are overmatched by the monsters they're encountering, the environment is extremely hostile, and the "dungeon" itself can be an adversary in that the spaceship has entered a self-destruct countdown, or is derelict, falling apart, and actively dangerous, etc. The game is deadly, and it's expected that PCs will die either through bad luck of the roll or bad decisions, but that's also totally in keeping with the theme of the game, and character generation is incredibly quick - most of the adventures provide means for alternate characters to enter the game at any point so no player is ever out of the game for very long. My character died last night, and I had a new one ready before the fight that killed him was over. That's a wholly different game than 5e, or 13th Age or even Dungeon World (which is still pretty quick chargen) where the characters are competent heroes that aren't expected to die at any second.

And yet, the actually design of dungeon levels between the two are not that different, or if they are it's deliberately themed to the game and to be expected by the players. The challenges may be different, but in most modern games, and I'm meaning modern whether it's an OSR/NSR system like Mothership or Shadowdark, or it's a 5e-based game, there's an expectation that the information that the PCs have will be enough to be able to know what lies ahead, i.e. there's not really any "Gotchas" as there may have been in the past.

 

[Aldarc]

Methinks the poster doth protest too much.

Methinks that the pot is calling the kettle black.

I'm not arguing that modern and OS games aren't different. I just think they are less different than the OS movement says they are. Especially those who are avoiding the sins of the past and avoiding gotchas, using appropriate challenges and telegraphing important info the PCs need. Guess what, modern D&D players have been doing that for a while too.

I think that they are more different than you think; however, I think that fans of 5e D&D often desire to depict 5e D&D or modern D&D, if you will, as being able to do anything and everything as equally well as other games, including those found in the OSR scene. There are a few people here in this thread who have asserted that 5e D&D can do OSR or be played as OSR. And yet the OSR crowd that D&D 5e courted isn't playing their game. It attracted the people who were playing 3e D&D, Pathfinder 1e, 4e D&D, though it admittedly also attracted the people who liked 2e D&D.

Kelsey Dionne was writing for 5e D&D. Why didn't she continue making 5e D&D but using OSR principles? Why was she attracted to the OSR scene and games like B/X, Index Card RPG, and Dungeon Crawl Classics instead of just playing 5e D&D? Why did she just make her own game? Even people like Bob World Builder have gravitated towards OSR despite coming into the game with 5e D&D. I don't think that we should be dismissive of why people do genuinely feel that the OSR is different enough from 5e D&D to play OSR games over WotC D&D or PF.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A general issue in many of these discussions is the fact folks are not willing to let figurative statements be figurative. Its not just this topic either, folks seem allergic to any kind of generalization. I get it, you dont want to make important decisions on good enough type data, but for conversation sake, its as good as its gonna get.

Well, as a couple people in the middle of it have noted, "OSR" has fragmented so much that any statement made can easily be contradicted by someone else. Its honestly become a nearly useless label to tell you much about a given game or playstyle by now (and that's not actually helped by the people who will try to aggressively claim ownership for their own particular style and reject anyone else using it who's doing something different.)

 

[Aldarc]

Well, as a couple people in the middle of it have noted, "OSR" has fragmented so much that any statement made can easily be contradicted by someone else. Its honestly become a nearly useless label to tell you much about a given game or playstyle by now (and that's not actually helped by the people who will try to aggressively claim ownership for their own particular style and reject anyone else using it who's doing something different.)

Though that is also true for a community as large as 5e D&D. Ask five GMs how they would run something in 5e D&D and you will get fifty different answers.

 

[payn]

Well, as a couple people in the middle of it have noted, "OSR" has fragmented so much that any statement made can easily be contradicted by someone else. Its honestly become a nearly useless label to tell you much about a given game or playstyle by now (and that's not actually helped by the people who will try to aggressively claim ownership for their own particular style and reject anyone else using it who's doing something different.)

No, sorry, its the folks that wont let figurative be figurative that make it useless. While, I'll also say the aggressive single-minded owners are of no help either. There is a very common link between them in these discussions.

 

[TiQuinn]

Well, as a couple people in the middle of it have noted, "OSR" has fragmented so much that any statement made can easily be contradicted by someone else. Its honestly become a nearly useless label to tell you much about a given game or playstyle by now (and that's not actually helped by the people who will try to aggressively claim ownership for their own particular style and reject anyone else using it who's doing something different.)

Yep. There's a lot of different personalities in the mix that make the term OSR intractable.

Does it really mean 1970s level generation and random encounter tables that could mean you find a vampire on the first level? Does it really mean roll 3d6 straight for ability scores, and roll for HP at first level even if you get a character that will die immediately?
If your character dies, are you supposed to start off with a first level character again even if the rest of the party is 5th level?
Is the GM supposed to be a neutral arbiter, or a quasi-adversary of the PCs?

I think the answers to all of those have a great deal to do with the personality of the GM.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Yeah, this is the part of the OSR who consider some of the most tedious parts of the early D&D experience a virtue.

I wish I could like this more than once.