Happy New Year
You all made some good points, and some valid criticisms.
And I'm not saying the original game was perfect.
Nothing ever is.
I'm saying it was far more useful than 3rd Edition.
I, and my buddies, did a lot of modification to the game, both to the first edition, and to the game over time to make it more useful.
I'm merely saying it was a lot easier to do that when the emphasis was on the player, and what he/she could and did do, than on the character, the magic, and the imposed rules artificiality of the latter eras. It wasn't impossible to play the 3rd Edition in a better and more useful way, my friends did it (after a while I just gave up on it cause it needed so much modification, and so I stopped using many of the 3rd Edition rules, but that's me).
It used to be that your foes were whatever was out there in this theoretical world. If you were first level characters and happened on the lair of an ancient dragon, well you have a ancient dragon to deal with. 3rd edition made it so that most encounters were balanced against your group - which meant if you happened on a dragon, the DM was more likely to make it a dragon with a challenge rating appropriate to your character levels with an encounter level appropriate to your character levels and so it was a baby dragon. 4th edition, from what I can tell, will make it worse. Now, it will be 1 baby dragon for each of your characters in your group, and one baby dragon will be a "striker" to match your party's "striker" character, and another baby dragon will be a "defender" to balance out your party's "defender", and one might not be a baby dragon but a slippery surface as a challenge to balance against the movement abilities of your group, etc..
It used to be that your resources were limited. If you ran out of healing in the middle of the dungeon or out in the wilderness, you had to get creative and work your way out or invent a way to be safe. 4th edition however gives all characters per-encounter abilities, including apparently things like healing and attacks and defense and such. Which means you're never going to be "stuck" in the middle of nowhere with just your wits to go on - you will always have a magical doo-dad power to fall back on.
We definitely won't be playing in that fashion. Real world dangers never come in neat packets of quanta specifically designed for your best and most efficient dispatch. And we never play the game that way either. Real fun, as well as real problem solving, comes from encountering and conquering things you either didn't think you could possible beat, or from encountering things that double whoop your a** real good and proper so that you have to run away, limp away, or just barely escape, so as to regroup and face in a much more clever or prepared fashion. My players often retreat, or change tactics midstream because they are getting face and kidney stomped, and that makes for a stronger, better, more capable, and adaptable set of individuals, and for a more fluid, realistic and dangerous fight. (Within the parameters of a game scenario of course. No game scenario, no wargame, no training exercise, no simulation is ever really like a really, real fight, but there are ways to make it much more realistic just as there are ways to make it much more unrealistic. If given the choice then, I go for realism because it is both much more fun, and much more useful. So I won't be baby boo-booing em with one nanny per night out, or a cute cuddly panda bear giggle goblin, when instead they can be facing somebody intent on slitting throats and tearing out elbows and entrails. They get in a fight, then it'll be a real fight, and that means it won't be a fair fight. And I don't want my players fighting fair either, and they know far better than that. You fight to kill and to win, not Queensbury for the stubble stakes and a rousing "atta-boy."
As for the building of Renaissance character types, people who have a wider range of abilities than just a particular vocational concentration, I have no real objection to that, depending on how it is played, than I do people in real life being Renaissance individuals (having personal capacities and knowledge of art, science, religion, and broad abilities in wide spectrums). As a matter of fact I encourage it in my players (in their real life) and in my games. We've been doing that for a long time and often call it Vocational Bleedover, or Cross Training, or some related term depending on how it is handled and what it involves. And we've developed character types who are Jack of All Trade guys and dolls, usually called Vadders in this context, who often adventure alone or take on solitary missions, such as being infiltrators, spies, scouts, recon operatives, and so forth. Such individuals must have a wide range of skills and capabilities because if cornered, or if they are operating in a dangerous situation, or are captured then they must be able to extract themselves by their own efforts, they have no party members, no allies (other than the ones they make along the way, in the course of their mission), and no Deus Ex Machina to save or rescue them. Vadders are lone operatives meaning they must have Renaissance capabilities in order to function properly. Talking skills, negotiating skills, spying skills, fighting skills (if necessary, but in the real world and in most of my games you definitely wanna avoid a fight if you can do that, or if you can kill the other guy before he ever knows the fight has started), thinking skills, bribing skills, detective and investigative skills, etc. Vadder characters are not the regular party characters, though I often let or encourage the party characters to develop Vadding skills in case they ever wanna operate alone, or need to (such as the rest of the party is down and they have to mount a lone Search and Rescue operation, or have to run recon).
As for a party never running out of capabilities, I'll have to think about that one as far as context.
I cant imagine that I couldn't exhaust their capabilities if I really wanted to through a connected series of conjunctive dangers; NPCs, traps, ambushes, monsters, etc. People gotta sleep, and rest, and eat, and they simply lose the ability to concentrate after long periods of struggle and exertion. A ten minute fire-fight, and yeah you're spun up good and tight for an hour afterwards, but five to ten hours later, especially if you keep anticipating another ambush or another encounter, and folks are just plain exhausted. It's not hard to simulate that in-game. So I imagine it can be controlled easily enough.
Besides, as I said I will no doubt end up carving out a lot of useless and unrealistic crap as far as the rules go.
But as long as the emphasis is on the players, and not on the general artificiality, then I imagine it's going down the right road.
Frankly, I'm rather skeptical. While I suppose it is possible in theory that D&D could be used as a way to develop problem-solving skills that could be applicable in the real world, I think it would require a great deal of experience on the part of the DM to separate the solutions that will actually work in the real world from those that only seem plausible. When the DM and players are a just a group of 13 or 14 year olds, I suspect that "creative" attempts to solve problems simply boil down to the players trying to convince that DM that the crazy plan du jour will actually work in the simulation of reality that they are playing in.
I reckon that depends on how bright and creative your thirteen or fourteen year olds are, granted. But you know you don't always have to be right either. You learn as much from your failures, as you do from your successes,
if you live through them. And that 13 year old is gonna keep playing, and over time learning (not just from the game but from things he does and studies in the real world), and so eventually capabilities will improve cumulatively.
For instance in the game every time you "level up" you might get improved skill scores. And that's fine and dandy game wise. But in our games when a player does the right thing in the right way or develops some plan or operation or invention which functions to help a situation then his skills go up. We tie real world knowledge, capabilities, and experience to in-game capabilities. Once again the point is to improve the player, not just the character. That is to say, ayah, I started out a kid playing too, as I started out a kid doing things in real life too, and I certainly had my days of screw ups and scattered out clusterfarts, but in time, I got better. A lot better. And at a lot of different things. So today you might play the fool and the soft-cap, but be willing to learn from that and in time and with experience you ain't that way no more. Not necessarily anywho.
Now your point is well taken, and everybody starts from somewhere as I said, and lots of mistakes will be made along the way. However those mistakes will accrue to experience with any particular situation and will over time also lead to better and more adaptive and successful capabilities. If the players and DM keep trying to improve, to devise better problem solving capabilities, and better real world capabilities, then these can be better exploited over time to game situations. And to real situations.
Now, I do think that playing D&D does develop skills and abilities that are useful in the real world: math skills, vocabulary, speech and persuasion skills (mostly from trying to convince the DM that the crazy plan du jour will actually work ), teamwork, decision-making, creative thinking and imagination, perseverance, etc. However, I don't think that any of these are unique to, or emphasized significantly more in, any particular edition.
I think the 3rd Edition did an excellent job of addressing the issue of personal skills and individual capabilities, I just think it went about it in the entirely wrong way.
Jack, I hope that 4e pushes towards challenging the players, but honestly, I am an old-school gamer that started playin' and dmin' in 1980. And I'll tell ya, while you have a point about the challenge shifting from the player to the character, a good dm can always keep the player challenged too. You just have to use twisted plots that no skill check will unravel, and Machiavellian intrigue, and puzzles and riddles. It can be done; I think, anyway, that I have been doing it for years.
But, again, I too hope that 4e leans a little more in the direction of challenging the players, as well as the characters.
I'm with you on this one cowboy. You're shootin buckshot, both barrels.
In 4E, they are simplifying it by giving us artificially-flavored apple candy because they think that what we liked was the sugar rather than the apples.
It is simplifying and stripping down what was in 3E, but rather than taking it back to the basics they are just giving us straight sugar.
Regardless of the truth of this for the next edition, you made me laugh with the way you said it.
Qualify and Quantify - that is the mantra for the 3rd edition. In some ways you took the player out of the game by finding a value for every skill and feat and option under the sun... the dice ruled and the player was along for the ride... or the math.
Then again, in basic and first editions... the dice ruled... and what wasn't covered by dice was covered by ingenuity... both player and DM... for good or ill.
That's an extremely astute set of observations.
We role played more than relied on dice, but one of the problems with the later rewrites and reformulations of the game is that everything was baby-spoon fed you. The game designers didn't just write a rules set, they tried to create everything in the game for you.
The game designer just creates the rules by which the game will function. The game is created by the DM and the players. If you cover every possible contingency for the player and the DM then you've created a live action video game which is very limited in actual capability, it is in effect programmed. If you role play and problem solve then the emphasis is not on the pre-roamed rules set, but on the role play and the problem solving. For example if I wrote a wargame or training exercise I want that exercise to function is such a way that the rules get out of the way of the person being trained. If the rules prevent the player from concentrating upon his mission assignment and what he is supposed to be learning, and instead he has to spend all his time and energy focused on the rules, then both the training exercise and the mission are de facto failures. Game theory should be like that. The rules should express game reality so that they are instinctive and intuitive, not encumbering and restrictive. So the emphasis should always be on two separate but interrelated things; 1. The person being trained or the player, to use another term, and 2. the Mission, or the adventure/scenario/objective, if you like. The milieu and the game should just support realistic and favorable structures to achieve those ends. The game does not exist for itself, it exists for the players and their ultimate and on-going objectives.
Now I suspect that I'll have to cut out a lot of 4th to make it more useful in that sense, but, I hope at least that the emphasis will return to the player, to role play, to problem solving, because when you have those things it is easy for the game to be both enjoyable and useful.
Real life problems, which if you make the effort to conquer them, become very gratifying and often very profitable (in a whole lotta ways) to solve, and exactly the same can be said for game problems. If you solve enough problems in the right ways then suddenly it begins to dawn upon you, "hey, what if I took 'X' in the game and applied the same basic techniques (given the proper modifications for real world circumstances) to solve 'A' in real life?" It ain't rocket science and it is extremely easy to do, just by a slight shift of focus and intention.
Properly played you can learn a while host of mental, psychological, social, and even scientific (such as basic engineering principles) and other skills in game by the practice of problem solving. Now it's a lot easier to do that with a good DM because you have to be handed good problems which are difficult to resolve, and may even require multi-faceted and multi-segmented resolution types, but are still crackable.
But players can play to problem solve, they can play to role play, and they can play to train and to gain personal, not just character experience. And with a little work and adaptation they can apply the same basic techniques and capabilities they master in game to the real world. And vice versa I might add.
But that's a discussion for another day I reckon.
I've enjoyed it and
HAPPY NEW YEAR folks
I don't really mind, but my assertion was that D&D expressing game terms (amount of movement, ranges, areas of effects) in terms related to miniatures has an ancient and venerable history.
