Regardless of what kind of system one prefers, one innovation that is objectively a good thing is the meta-concept that a game should be able to explain what it's doing and how it's meant to be played without getting tongue-tied or assuming some vast body of unwritten knowledge on the part of its players.
*snip*
And honestly, this is why a lot of old-school gamers resented 3.x too! Because what it's about - careful statistical management and character optimization - is also totally different from what those oldschool dudes were getting from their D&D, and like me, they were confused why it wasn't working.
I can't believe you left out WoD! That was probably the first thing that grabbed me about World of Darkness games. I started with Mage right around the time Vampire Revised came out, and man the amount of "so this is what the mood is, these are the themes, this is how the baseline mechanics work, this is why we like that they do what they do, and this is why it's alright when stuff gets weird."
Like
I don't really know from 1st ed (although I've seen V:tM 1st ed and do own M:tAsc 1st ed), but the 2nd and 3rd editions did just a phenomenal job of introducing you to both WoD and the specific venue of that game.
The only thing I really think they could have flatly improved on was having the unified general character of nWoD.
Well, and tbh character generation could've probably been smoothed out a bit too, but again the chargen worked rather well in the context of the game itself.
Like, sure, go ahead and build your combat wombat. Oops, what's that, the ST put in a baddie that mind-controlled your character because you didn't put any points into mental defensive? Cool, so how are we supposed to beat your character again?
e: if you're curious, the answer to that question is
VtM 1ed was a reasonably good guide on "how not to introduce a game" because it was essentially a love letter to mediocre 80s vampire novels as I recall. Most people who've actually played the game did so with VtM 2nd which, yes, did a reasonably good job at establishing the setting, expectations, and options up front.
Its only major flaw was it resulted in very powerful vampires because it was like "we're writing about all of these cool options like lower generation and diablerie and stuff but THIS SHOULD NEVER BE USED IN A GAME" and of course that's exactly what no one did.
WoD has always been built around the premise that success lies in one stat: Willpower. Every edition of the game and every splat essentially hews to that model. Which is fine. Willpower being a strong stat in a word about existential terror seems legit. I've read but generally not played the latter-day Chronicles of Darkness stuff because, well, games may start but they rarely sustain.
not being facetious here. i think a lot of groups who struggle and stumble around could avoid a lot of grief if the people all sat down and said "yeah this is what I want out of this game" instead of playing the weird passive aggressive nerd social fuckery game where the GM has to figure out each player's style through their subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle actions in the game world in the hopes that they can cobble together something they'll enjoy
Yes. Multiple times. They know, and honestly I think they feel a little bad about it too, but they just... don't have any initiative. They're in a lot of ways low-engagement players - they are very much along for the ride, and just have fun with whatever plot I throw at them. Basically most of their actions take the form of them being unsure, waffling, and eventually me outlining three or four options for them in leading questions so they can pick one of them so we can get anything done. And I feel kind of like a controlling jerk.
I feel like 4E was an interesting baseline that could've developed into a really strong game, if they hadn't tried to sell it as D&D. If it had been a D&D Tactics spin-off they built while they worked on an actual sequel to 3E I think it could've been something fantastic.
4e was a strong game, straight up. Being the first D&D game to do what it was doing meant it made some goofs and there were some things that a second game in its mold could have course-corrected, but as it was it was a terrific engine that kept me going over multiple games per week for like five straight years? That's really good!
I realize you aren't saying this, exactly, so I'm not trying to light you up here, but I'm super not down with the suggestion that it wasn't D&D; I had my fill of that from sneering gamestore chodelords in 2008. You went into dungeons, you fought beholders and aboleths, you leapt over pit traps and dodged fireballs. You just did it with your skill at using your character resources and combat tactics instead of your skill at planning out your guy's build three months ago.
Strong agree with what you wrote, and I'll add that my take is that 5E does address a lot of these things. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of small and not immediately obvious pitfalls in 5E, but on the whole I think it's an improvement on 4E in the way that most players want to enjoy playing D&D. I kind of find it odd how much vitriol the system gets on this board and especially in its own thread.
I like the experience of 5E-in-play a lot. It does a lot of things I dig, like gradually adding complexity to your character over the first few levels but also making those levels go by really quickly, so you get a chance to learn your character's mechanics one piece at a time instead of getting all that shit dumped in your lap straight from the word go. On the one hand,
But I can't run it, becuase it backtracks on the biggest advantage of 4E to me, which is how GM-friendly 4e was. Encounter building in 4e just made sense - it was the one edition of D&D to do so - and monster statblocks were tight, digestible little nuggets that you could grab from the book in a hurry and throw into your game with minimal prep. It was a godsend. 5E monsters are back to being big lists of spells and spell-like effects that I have to turn to page 271 to reference and it's just siggggh. And it's frustrating because the only reason it works this way - the only reason it sends you scurrying for the spell list instead of just describing prismatic spray in terse, effects-based language - is to placate a 50-year-old man in Hoboken who has super strong opinions about how the new games are the worst even though he hasn't played any of them after AD&D1e Unearthed Arcana "ruined everything."
My biggest complaint about 5E not delivering on its meta-concept is that, aside from multiclassing, there's no real way to develop your character along a new route once character creation is finished. Let's say you're making Parn the Fighter; you start with his Folk-Hero background and... That's it. Unless you pick something like the Cavalier subclass to pick up a new skill at 3rd level there's no way to recreate a journey like Parn's from idealist yokel to experienced dungeoneer to savvy general. At least, not without sacrificing some personal power by taking a feat instead of a stat increase. And yeah I know that fighters have the most feat opportunities, but my point remains valid: you have to really plan out your D&D character's journey at level 1 instead of letting it happen organically from what they experience at the table.
FFG's Star Wars, the Storyteller system, and I'm sure loads of others are great in the respect that they allow easy horizontal growth. That being said, at least with Star Wars, I don't think there is enough mechanical incentive to. If I made a character into a really awesome hacker, there's no real reason for me to ever dip into combat skills and talents if I can continue to leverage my awesome 3 yellow 2 green 2 blue dice pool and funnel advantage to my bounty hunter murder-machine friend. I think most games recognize the non-combat party roles of Face, Tech Expert, Know-it-all, Driver, Shifty MFer, and players' natural inclinations to divide those roles amongst themselves. The thing though is that while most games and gamers are comfortable in letting the individual character shine during his or her moment in one of these roles, combat is not treated in the same way. If your system adds "Combat Guy" as a discrete role you choose instead of specializing in one of those non-combat roles ,and you still make the other characters participate in combat, then you force players to participate in something they're not good in, or you allow non-combat skills to work in combat. Which like you said earlier I too find mentally taxing.
I think this is one of those things where it's less that there's a right way to do it and more that each game needs to find the approach that fits it. D&D is about dungeon fighting, so 3e onward made everyone at least passable at combat, although different editions have done better or worse jobs at making the various classes consistently relevant in combat. Star Wars-style action-adventure carries a strong expectation of regular action so while it's possible to build a purely pacifist character, it's not super in keeping with the source material (C-3P0 is the only main character who never fights or defends himself). World of Darkness encourages you to make realistic-feeling characters and tries to make artists and car mechanics and nurses as relevant for character types as ex-cops and ex-special forces supermen, and it makes combat kind of scary and nasty specifically to dissuade people who aren't built for it from engaging in it; and, since it takes place in the modern real world and it's rare that all your characters are moving together as a group, fights don't have to involve the whole party - your lady can be facing off against the mobsters in the alleyway while my dude socializes at the fancy ball.
A lot of games don't really think this through in a holistic way, though, and that's a problem. I do think it's getting better as time goes by.
Jacobkosh on
+14
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I mean, if I'm gonna say that D&D4E isn't D&D it's because I think 4E has a coherent and focused design that precisely describes the type of game it is and how you're expected to play it. Which is very un-D&D.
I mean, if I'm gonna say that D&D4E isn't D&D it's because I think 4E has a coherent and focused design that precisely describes the type of game it is and how you're expected to play it. Which is very un-D&D.
I tell you what it is - it feels, to me, like the game that the D&D covers always promised but didn't really deliver:
Ah see for me, 4e is the opposite. It plays like DnD more than you think, but it's aesthetically very different IMO. It's not got that old school fantasy look at all, it's really cartoonish bright, dare I say Warcraft-y fantasy?
4e D&D was definitely different than it's predecessors. But: so was 3rd.
I have such a mixed relationship with 4th. I only got to play it via play by post, although one game lasted years. The books aren't necessarily great reads on their own (except the setting ones). But I'm more loathe to part with those books than I am most of my 3rd / 3.5 stuff. If I play OGL fantasy these days it is going to be Pathfinder. If I want a more traditional D&D, I'll go 5th. But if I ever get a group that wants a super tight hack and slash tactical game, 4th fits that perfectly.
0
MsAnthropyThe Lady of Pain Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the RhythmThe City of FlowersRegistered Userregular
Ah see for me, 4e is the opposite. It plays like DnD more than you think, but it's aesthetically very different IMO. It's not got that old school fantasy look at all, it's really cartoonish bright, dare I say Warcraft-y fantasy?
Yeah, the 4e releases feel like textbooks. I think the game would have gone over more smoothly with better graphic design.
I feel like 4E was an interesting baseline that could've developed into a really strong game, if they hadn't tried to sell it as D&D. If it had been a D&D Tactics spin-off they built while they worked on an actual sequel to 3E I think it could've been something fantastic.
4e was a strong game, straight up. Being the first D&D game to do what it was doing meant it made some goofs and there were some things that a second game in its mold could have course-corrected, but as it was it was a terrific engine that kept me going over multiple games per week for like five straight years? That's really good!
I realize you aren't saying this, exactly, so I'm not trying to light you up here, but I'm super not down with the suggestion that it wasn't D&D; I had my fill of that from sneering gamestore chodelords in 2008. You went into dungeons, you fought beholders and aboleths, you leapt over pit traps and dodged fireballs. You just did it with your skill at using your character resources and combat tactics instead of your skill at planning out your guy's build three months ago.
Strong agree with what you wrote, and I'll add that my take is that 5E does address a lot of these things. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of small and not immediately obvious pitfalls in 5E, but on the whole I think it's an improvement on 4E in the way that most players want to enjoy playing D&D. I kind of find it odd how much vitriol the system gets on this board and especially in its own thread.
I like the experience of 5E-in-play a lot. It does a lot of things I dig, like gradually adding complexity to your character over the first few levels but also making those levels go by really quickly, so you get a chance to learn your character's mechanics one piece at a time instead of getting all that shit dumped in your lap straight from the word go. On the one hand,
But I can't run it, becuase it backtracks on the biggest advantage of 4E to me, which is how GM-friendly 4e was. Encounter building in 4e just made sense - it was the one edition of D&D to do so - and monster statblocks were tight, digestible little nuggets that you could grab from the book in a hurry and throw into your game with minimal prep. It was a godsend. 5E monsters are back to being big lists of spells and spell-like effects that I have to turn to page 271 to reference and it's just siggggh. And it's frustrating because the only reason it works this way - the only reason it sends you scurrying for the spell list instead of just describing prismatic spray in terse, effects-based language - is to placate a 50-year-old man in Hoboken who has super strong opinions about how the new games are the worst even though he hasn't played any of them after AD&D1e Unearthed Arcana "ruined everything."
My biggest complaint about 5E not delivering on its meta-concept is that, aside from multiclassing, there's no real way to develop your character along a new route once character creation is finished. Let's say you're making Parn the Fighter; you start with his Folk-Hero background and... That's it. Unless you pick something like the Cavalier subclass to pick up a new skill at 3rd level there's no way to recreate a journey like Parn's from idealist yokel to experienced dungeoneer to savvy general. At least, not without sacrificing some personal power by taking a feat instead of a stat increase. And yeah I know that fighters have the most feat opportunities, but my point remains valid: you have to really plan out your D&D character's journey at level 1 instead of letting it happen organically from what they experience at the table.
FFG's Star Wars, the Storyteller system, and I'm sure loads of others are great in the respect that they allow easy horizontal growth. That being said, at least with Star Wars, I don't think there is enough mechanical incentive to. If I made a character into a really awesome hacker, there's no real reason for me to ever dip into combat skills and talents if I can continue to leverage my awesome 3 yellow 2 green 2 blue dice pool and funnel advantage to my bounty hunter murder-machine friend. I think most games recognize the non-combat party roles of Face, Tech Expert, Know-it-all, Driver, Shifty MFer, and players' natural inclinations to divide those roles amongst themselves. The thing though is that while most games and gamers are comfortable in letting the individual character shine during his or her moment in one of these roles, combat is not treated in the same way. If your system adds "Combat Guy" as a discrete role you choose instead of specializing in one of those non-combat roles ,and you still make the other characters participate in combat, then you force players to participate in something they're not good in, or you allow non-combat skills to work in combat. Which like you said earlier I too find mentally taxing.
I think this is one of those things where it's less that there's a right way to do it and more that each game needs to find the approach that fits it. D&D is about dungeon fighting, so 3e onward made everyone at least passable at combat, although different editions have done better or worse jobs at making the various classes consistently relevant in combat. Star Wars-style action-adventure carries a strong expectation of regular action so while it's possible to build a purely pacifist character, it's not super in keeping with the source material (C-3P0 is the only main character who never fights or defends himself). World of Darkness encourages you to make realistic-feeling characters and tries to make artists and car mechanics and nurses as relevant for character types as ex-cops and ex-special forces supermen, and it makes combat kind of scary and nasty specifically to dissuade people who aren't built for it from engaging in it; and, since it takes place in the modern real world and it's rare that all your characters are moving together as a group, fights don't have to involve the whole party - your lady can be facing off against the mobsters in the alleyway while my dude socializes at the fancy ball.
A lot of games don't really think this through in a holistic way, though, and that's a problem. I do think it's getting better as time goes by.
Agreed. 5e on the players side is pretty solid, though I still miss the clarity of exciting explicit roles and having a few (but not that many) more options for development would’ve been nice.
Everything on the DM side is more complicated though. Why is it that addition is too hard to ask of players, but encounters require multipliers for including more than one creature? Why do we want to keep player options limited to make combat easier for them, but half of the monster abilities are locked away in the spells section of an entirely different book? Why does the CR system average defense and offense together when that can easily result in creatures that are either just threat less hit point bags or glass cannons that can one shot PCs? Wait, you mean that system was used to build the existing monsters? Now I have to study every single one of those I might want to use ahead of time to make sure something stupid isn’t in there? Sigh.
I'm not saying that some games are "objectively" bad I'm just saying I wouldn't want to live next door to, work with, or let my hypothetical children marry a Pathfinder Person
I'm the opposite. 4E was a plug and play thing for DMs. I need a fight? Ok, what difficulty? That gives me X points to play with. Then spend points on monsters and traps, bam! Combat. The rest was normal role-playing that you see already.
I'm not saying that some games are "objectively" bad I'm just saying I wouldn't want to live next door to, work with, or let my hypothetical children marry a Pathfinder Person
Is that so wrong
I know this is a joke, but there's a group I used to play with that I haven't talked to since I noped out of a Pathfinder have with them two years ago.
I'm the opposite. 4E was a plug and play thing for DMs. I need a fight? Ok, what difficulty? That gives me X points to play with. Then spend points on monsters and traps, bam! Combat. The rest was normal role-playing that you see already.
Same for me. Especially with the old monster builder and/or masterplan. I could slap down some dungeon tiles and spin up a fight in 5-10 minutes. I would only spend a ton of time if I was building a ‘boss fight’ with like multiple levels to the map or something.
Though, to be fair, 5e is probably great if you do random encounters and like the ‘let the dice determine’ approach. I just find I have to fight the system since I generally don’t run combat unless it in someway rerpresents a turning point in the narrative we are constructing or is being used to illustrate some other aspect of or conflict in the setting. Plus, I find 5 PCs versus 1-2 monsters fights incredibly dull to run.
I actively like Pathfinder. I've had fun games with friends. I tried Pathfinder Society twice and it was awful. Not every player, mind you. Some I'd be fine playing with again. But the others, noooope.
+1
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I'm not saying that some games are "objectively" bad I'm just saying I wouldn't want to live next door to, work with, or let my hypothetical children marry a Pathfinder Person
Is that so wrong
I know this is a joke, but there's a group I used to play with that I haven't talked to since I noped out of a Pathfinder have with them two years ago.
I played 3E with a rotating group of prolly about a dozen players, and with the exception of one I would cross a street to avoid them.
If the game is written as simulationist, saying you can choose not to run it that way is akin to saying that you can play soccer on a baseball field. Sure, you can do that, but you're not using the thing for what it specifically told you it was for, and everyone needs to be on the same page.
"You can just do a different thing" is a pointless statement in this sort of a discussion. Of course I could just do a different thing, I've been doing a different thing for years. Dozens of them, in fact! None of that fixes the default assumptions coded into the 3rd edition rules about how the game was supposed to work, which were explicitly simulationist and constricting for DMs.
Running the game vs running the simulation is a big distinction, because it assumes two very different sets of player-facing duties on the part if the DM. It's the difference between prioritizing the overall experience and prioritizing the proper execution of the rules as presented in the books. 3rd presented a unique conflict in this regard, since there were SO MANY rules about how things in the general environment worked and the we're used to essentially simulate game physics in how they defined the shared play expectations within the game. If you wanted, as a DM to do something that didn't fit into that framework, you either had to find a way to make it fit our handwave it, with the latter option being strongly discouraged via subtext and never really even presented as a reasonable option by the books.
I guess the main point that you I'm trying to get you guys to address is that 3e isn't any MORE simulationist than 2e was. They both were largely monster killing simulators, it's just that 3e was better at it, with more options, better handling of edge cases, and fairer rules. There's not some philosophical difference here like there would be with D&D versus Apocalypse World or something. 2e was just a shitty simulator. That doesn't mean that philosophically it's not a simulator.
All the things you're saying about some big tonal shift in 3e forcing DM's to do some kind of maintenance work instead of running the game however they want, I still can't see any evidence that it exists at all. I still don't even know what you mean by environmental rules and game physics - can you give some examples of what you mean?
You're trying to make it sound like DMing 2e is like being a director of this easygoing narrative movie, and 3e is like performing maintenance work on a boiler, whereas in my experience that's not true at all.
I hesitate to paint with too broad a brush, but there is definitely a subsection of the Pathfinder community that is part of that community for reasons that exactly align with why I wouldn't want to hang out with them, and they're pretty proud of that fact.
Every turnover of game edition engenders bitter holdouts, but the legitimization that Pathfinder provided made some of the 3.X stans particularly unbearable in their self-righteousness.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
+9
KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
The rules don’t support it, but since he is a latent psyker I’m going to allow the bard to roll trade (performance) to get bonuses on command’s inspire use (meaning he fights a -20 already). Also music magic is my favorite thing. It’s why I can’t wait to introduce the rock and roll slaaneshii sorceror.
If the game is written as simulationist, saying you can choose not to run it that way is akin to saying that you can play soccer on a baseball field. Sure, you can do that, but you're not using the thing for what it specifically told you it was for, and everyone needs to be on the same page.
"You can just do a different thing" is a pointless statement in this sort of a discussion. Of course I could just do a different thing, I've been doing a different thing for years. Dozens of them, in fact! None of that fixes the default assumptions coded into the 3rd edition rules about how the game was supposed to work, which were explicitly simulationist and constricting for DMs.
Running the game vs running the simulation is a big distinction, because it assumes two very different sets of player-facing duties on the part if the DM. It's the difference between prioritizing the overall experience and prioritizing the proper execution of the rules as presented in the books. 3rd presented a unique conflict in this regard, since there were SO MANY rules about how things in the general environment worked and the we're used to essentially simulate game physics in how they defined the shared play expectations within the game. If you wanted, as a DM to do something that didn't fit into that framework, you either had to find a way to make it fit our handwave it, with the latter option being strongly discouraged via subtext and never really even presented as a reasonable option by the books.
I guess the main point that you I'm trying to get you guys to address is that 3e isn't any MORE simulationist than 2e was. They both were largely monster killing simulators, it's just that 3e was better at it, with more options, better handling of edge cases, and fairer rules. There's not some philosophical difference here like there would be with D&D versus Apocalypse World or something. 2e was just a shitty simulator. That doesn't mean that philosophically it's not a simulator.
All the things you're saying about some big tonal shift in 3e forcing DM's to do some kind of maintenance work instead of running the game however they want, I still can't see any evidence that it exists at all. I still don't even know what you mean by environmental rules and game physics - can you give some examples of what you mean?
You're trying to make it sound like DMing 2e is like being a director of this easygoing narrative movie, and 3e is like performing maintenance work on a boiler, whereas in my experience that's not true at all.
The designers of the newest edition built so much reliance on rules right into the game, to make it easier to play. As one of those designers, I occasionally think to myself, “What have we wrought?” Then I remember that we intended these rules to be tools to help people create their own game material. To demystify the craft of game designer – to look behind the curtain.
...
This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves – players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones. …I no longer think this is entirely a good idea.
...
At the very least, we should have called the table “Estimating Magic Item Gold Piece Values” rather than “Calculating Magic Item Gold Piece Values.” … Do not – I repeat – do not allow players to look at that table and see what they can make for X amount of gold.
...
The original design intention behind [prestige classes] was to allow DMs to create campaign-specific, exclusive roles and positions as classes. … Too many prestige classes are designed like 2nd Edition kits: player-driven PC-creation tools for character customization. That’s okay sometimes, but it really overlooks the main reason that prestige classes were invented.
Those are just some choice quotes from Monte Cook, not an individual known for public introspection, lamenting the degree to which 3E took control from the DM and put it into provided tables of DCs or directly into the hands of players.
Personal, at the table experience is obviously highly subjective. But part of what they were trying to do with 3E, and they were happy to tell you this publicly.
Looking back on 3E, it seems really clunky and picky. We were trying to make the system more rational than what had come before, and we may have overshot it. 4E did a good job of bringing the game mechanics back to the service of game play.
Note that Tweet isn't really a fan of 4E. He went so far as to publish another game to have something to play that wasn't 4E D&D.
Third edition was a fundamental shift toward treating the game like a simulation of an imagined reality rather than focusing on the adventures being had therein. This in turn had a huge impact on the role of the DM. I'm struggling to see this as a controversial point, to be honest.
In effect 3rd was way more simulationist because it had actual rules for things.
2nd and before probably wanted to be simulationist but in practice mostly ended up working via a mix of tradition, fiat, and arcane subsystems.
2E also had no reasonable way to really ensure that everyone was playing with the same basic set of rules, and provided a ton of optional subsystems that were to be traded in and out without much regard for anything but the experience at the table. 3rd was built to provide a much more standardized experience, and they accomplished this by frontloading a ton of the rules and subsystems in the PHB and DMG and never acting like any of them were optional.
In effect 3rd was way more simulationist because it had actual rules for things.
2nd and before probably wanted to be simulationist but in practice mostly ended up working via a mix of tradition, fiat, and arcane subsystems.
2E also had no reasonable way to really ensure that everyone was playing with the same basic set of rules, and provided a ton of optional subsystems that were to be traded in and out without much regard for anything but the experience at the table. 3rd was built to provide a much more standardized experience, and they accomplished this by frontloading a ton of the rules and subsystems in the PHB and DMG and never acting like any of them were optional.
Supposedly the Complete Handbook series were all completely done via freelancers. I can totally see that being true because they are all over the fucking place in regards to...well everything in them.
In effect 3rd was way more simulationist because it had actual rules for things.
2nd and before probably wanted to be simulationist but in practice mostly ended up working via a mix of tradition, fiat, and arcane subsystems.
2E also had no reasonable way to really ensure that everyone was playing with the same basic set of rules, and provided a ton of optional subsystems that were to be traded in and out without much regard for anything but the experience at the table. 3rd was built to provide a much more standardized experience, and they accomplished this by frontloading a ton of the rules and subsystems in the PHB and DMG and never acting like any of them were optional.
Supposedly the Complete Handbook series were all completely done via freelancers. I can totally see that being true because they are all over the fucking place in regards to...well everything in them.
Yeah, those varied from essentially fluff manuals to dense tomes of kits and gear that usually hid something completely broken.
I actively like Pathfinder. I've had fun games with friends. I tried Pathfinder Society twice and it was awful. Not every player, mind you. Some I'd be fine playing with again. But the others, noooope.
I recognize that organized play fills a need but for any game I've tried it, it always kind of feels like the soup kitchen of roleplaying to me. I'm glad I have enough regular real groups to keep me busy.
+9
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
@That DND Podcast guys -> Is the Dresden Files game ever going to go up where we can listen to it?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
In effect 3rd was way more simulationist because it had actual rules for things.
2nd and before probably wanted to be simulationist but in practice mostly ended up working via a mix of tradition, fiat, and arcane subsystems.
Nobody is saying D&D wasn't simulationist before 3.X.
Everyone who has actually played both should be aware that 3.X attempted to and ultimately did accomplish far more simulation than earlier D&D did on both fronts.
Because there was an entire rules system specifically for everything at the end of all the bloat. That is substantively more than was ever accomplished for previous D&D editions. As pointed out, repeatedly, by grognards when discussing why new D&D was terrible.
4e actually stepped back a bit on simulationism. The rules for role-playing weren't rules, just a "if you disagree on something roll dice" commentary.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
0
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Oldschool D&D, 3E, and 4E, are all kind of situated at different points on the GNS triangle and each kind of represents a break from what came before.
Old D&D was - and grognards will never really admit this, but it's true - gamist. It was wargames + rules for naming your little pewter mans. The system, inasmuch as it had a point, was geared toward resource management. It had tables for like, what time of day is it, what's the weather like, but these were ad hoc - they were meant as aids to a flustered GM looking for help coming up with material on the fly, they weren't meant to represent physical realities of the world.
3E broke from that by being like "actually someone with 5 ranks in Athletics is an Olympic-class long-jumper" (this is a real thing that the rules actually said) and "here on Table A.X find how many elves you can expect to meet in a town or city of a certain size" (another real actual thing from the rules). Spells were defined in terms of cubic meters of earth turned to mud, or air filled with a fireball spell, or whatever. It was built on creating this feeling that the world was a living, mechanistic place that could, if you wanted, be programmed into a computer and keep running between game sessions.
4E dialed the world interactions back to pre-3E, GM-fiat levels - if you want to jump, roll Athletics, but it makes no claims as to what your score "means" - but added in really systematized, formalized combat. It was also gamist, but in a completely different way from oldschool D&D - it was a squad tactics game rather than a resource management game.
5E is kind of trying to square the circle a bit - it wants to be modular, in a way where Cheeto Crustlord, Sally Spreadsheet, and Battlemat Brad can all theoretically get something out of it. I think in practice its combat feels kind of midway between 3E and 4E while its world-sim is midway between oldschool and 3E.
I actively like Pathfinder. I've had fun games with friends. I tried Pathfinder Society twice and it was awful. Not every player, mind you. Some I'd be fine playing with again. But the others, noooope.
I recognize that organized play fills a need but for any game I've tried it, it always kind of feels like the soup kitchen of roleplaying to me. I'm glad I have enough regular real groups to keep me busy.
A soup kitchen RPG volunteer group sounds like an AMAZING idea... volunteer GMs manning various GM screens, various murder-hobos lining up to get their dice, handing out little pamphlets of related literature...
We could operate out of a local church or something!
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Oldschool D&D, 3E, and 4E, are all kind of situated at different points on the GNS triangle and each kind of represents a break from what came before.
Old D&D was - and grognards will never really admit this, but it's true - gamist. It was wargames + rules for naming your little pewter mans. The system, inasmuch as it had a point, was geared toward resource management. It had tables for like, what time of day is it, what's the weather like, but these were ad hoc - they were meant as aids to a flustered GM looking for help coming up with material on the fly, they weren't meant to represent physical realities of the world.
This for sure. A huge part of the GM's role was to act as a referee in the style of an old school wargame. They weren't there just to manage monsters and understand the rules, but to take the characters decisions (which, much like in a modern narrative game, were made based on what they wanted to do rather than what rule system that wanted to execute) and interpret them with the loose framework the rules gave them, plus what they understood about the situation, to give the player a difficulty and the potential results.
I actively like Pathfinder. I've had fun games with friends. I tried Pathfinder Society twice and it was awful. Not every player, mind you. Some I'd be fine playing with again. But the others, noooope.
I recognize that organized play fills a need but for any game I've tried it, it always kind of feels like the soup kitchen of roleplaying to me. I'm glad I have enough regular real groups to keep me busy.
This is very true and like any soup kitchen line you'll find folks there who are great and folks there who are fucking crazy. Really it is weighted towards the former but the later just completely skews the perception.
Like, the first PFS game I did was fine. We only had 3 players (plus GM), I had an iffy feeling about the GM but, yeah, it was fine.
The second game had 4 players, including the first game's GM (who played a gunslinger in a red duster named Vash), the "head" of the local PFS, who kept handing me candy and dice and made me a little uncomfortable, a terrible GM who fit most of the stereotyped grooming standards, and I felt crowded at what was a very large table. It made me realize I would just rather play with mostly people I know.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I actively like Pathfinder. I've had fun games with friends. I tried Pathfinder Society twice and it was awful. Not every player, mind you. Some I'd be fine playing with again. But the others, noooope.
I recognize that organized play fills a need but for any game I've tried it, it always kind of feels like the soup kitchen of roleplaying to me. I'm glad I have enough regular real groups to keep me busy.
A soup kitchen RPG volunteer group sounds like an AMAZING idea... volunteer GMs manning various GM screens, various murder-hobos lining up to get their dice, handing out little pamphlets of related literature...
We could operate out of a local church or something!
MrAnthropy and I used to play in the local public library, which in the winter months is a warm refuge for the city's homeless. They'd wander in and out of the big conference room where the groups played. Most were kind of bemused and just tried to get some sleep in the high-backed reading chairs. Some tried to make awkward conversation about what the aliens were telling them today or whatever, or tried to grift a few bucks with a story. A couple were creepy and had to be ejected, like one grodelord who stood leering over a female player laughing this really gross, phlegmy laugh, like if Beavis and Butthead had spent a few decades doing chaw.
But one time this gray-haired old black guy gets really excited. "Oh, man! Dungeons and Dragons! I used to play that! I had me a talking sword!" And he proceeded to excitedly tell us the story of his guy from like, thirty years ago. I could only make out about every fifth word, but it was enough to tell that he knew his shit.
Posts
I can't believe you left out WoD! That was probably the first thing that grabbed me about World of Darkness games. I started with Mage right around the time Vampire Revised came out, and man the amount of "so this is what the mood is, these are the themes, this is how the baseline mechanics work, this is why we like that they do what they do, and this is why it's alright when stuff gets weird."
Like
I don't really know from 1st ed (although I've seen V:tM 1st ed and do own M:tAsc 1st ed), but the 2nd and 3rd editions did just a phenomenal job of introducing you to both WoD and the specific venue of that game.
The only thing I really think they could have flatly improved on was having the unified general character of nWoD.
Well, and tbh character generation could've probably been smoothed out a bit too, but again the chargen worked rather well in the context of the game itself.
e: if you're curious, the answer to that question is
Its only major flaw was it resulted in very powerful vampires because it was like "we're writing about all of these cool options like lower generation and diablerie and stuff but THIS SHOULD NEVER BE USED IN A GAME" and of course that's exactly what no one did.
WoD has always been built around the premise that success lies in one stat: Willpower. Every edition of the game and every splat essentially hews to that model. Which is fine. Willpower being a strong stat in a word about existential terror seems legit. I've read but generally not played the latter-day Chronicles of Darkness stuff because, well, games may start but they rarely sustain.
Yes. Multiple times. They know, and honestly I think they feel a little bad about it too, but they just... don't have any initiative. They're in a lot of ways low-engagement players - they are very much along for the ride, and just have fun with whatever plot I throw at them. Basically most of their actions take the form of them being unsure, waffling, and eventually me outlining three or four options for them in leading questions so they can pick one of them so we can get anything done. And I feel kind of like a controlling jerk.
4e was a strong game, straight up. Being the first D&D game to do what it was doing meant it made some goofs and there were some things that a second game in its mold could have course-corrected, but as it was it was a terrific engine that kept me going over multiple games per week for like five straight years? That's really good!
I realize you aren't saying this, exactly, so I'm not trying to light you up here, but I'm super not down with the suggestion that it wasn't D&D; I had my fill of that from sneering gamestore chodelords in 2008. You went into dungeons, you fought beholders and aboleths, you leapt over pit traps and dodged fireballs. You just did it with your skill at using your character resources and combat tactics instead of your skill at planning out your guy's build three months ago.
I like the experience of 5E-in-play a lot. It does a lot of things I dig, like gradually adding complexity to your character over the first few levels but also making those levels go by really quickly, so you get a chance to learn your character's mechanics one piece at a time instead of getting all that shit dumped in your lap straight from the word go. On the one hand,
But I can't run it, becuase it backtracks on the biggest advantage of 4E to me, which is how GM-friendly 4e was. Encounter building in 4e just made sense - it was the one edition of D&D to do so - and monster statblocks were tight, digestible little nuggets that you could grab from the book in a hurry and throw into your game with minimal prep. It was a godsend. 5E monsters are back to being big lists of spells and spell-like effects that I have to turn to page 271 to reference and it's just siggggh. And it's frustrating because the only reason it works this way - the only reason it sends you scurrying for the spell list instead of just describing prismatic spray in terse, effects-based language - is to placate a 50-year-old man in Hoboken who has super strong opinions about how the new games are the worst even though he hasn't played any of them after AD&D1e Unearthed Arcana "ruined everything."
I think this is one of those things where it's less that there's a right way to do it and more that each game needs to find the approach that fits it. D&D is about dungeon fighting, so 3e onward made everyone at least passable at combat, although different editions have done better or worse jobs at making the various classes consistently relevant in combat. Star Wars-style action-adventure carries a strong expectation of regular action so while it's possible to build a purely pacifist character, it's not super in keeping with the source material (C-3P0 is the only main character who never fights or defends himself). World of Darkness encourages you to make realistic-feeling characters and tries to make artists and car mechanics and nurses as relevant for character types as ex-cops and ex-special forces supermen, and it makes combat kind of scary and nasty specifically to dissuade people who aren't built for it from engaging in it; and, since it takes place in the modern real world and it's rare that all your characters are moving together as a group, fights don't have to involve the whole party - your lady can be facing off against the mobsters in the alleyway while my dude socializes at the fancy ball.
A lot of games don't really think this through in a holistic way, though, and that's a problem. I do think it's getting better as time goes by.
I tell you what it is - it feels, to me, like the game that the D&D covers always promised but didn't really deliver:
I have such a mixed relationship with 4th. I only got to play it via play by post, although one game lasted years. The books aren't necessarily great reads on their own (except the setting ones). But I'm more loathe to part with those books than I am most of my 3rd / 3.5 stuff. If I play OGL fantasy these days it is going to be Pathfinder. If I want a more traditional D&D, I'll go 5th. But if I ever get a group that wants a super tight hack and slash tactical game, 4th fits that perfectly.
Yeah, the 4e releases feel like textbooks. I think the game would have gone over more smoothly with better graphic design.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
Agreed. 5e on the players side is pretty solid, though I still miss the clarity of exciting explicit roles and having a few (but not that many) more options for development would’ve been nice.
Everything on the DM side is more complicated though. Why is it that addition is too hard to ask of players, but encounters require multipliers for including more than one creature? Why do we want to keep player options limited to make combat easier for them, but half of the monster abilities are locked away in the spells section of an entirely different book? Why does the CR system average defense and offense together when that can easily result in creatures that are either just threat less hit point bags or glass cannons that can one shot PCs? Wait, you mean that system was used to build the existing monsters? Now I have to study every single one of those I might want to use ahead of time to make sure something stupid isn’t in there? Sigh.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
Is that so wrong
I'm the opposite. 4E was a plug and play thing for DMs. I need a fight? Ok, what difficulty? That gives me X points to play with. Then spend points on monsters and traps, bam! Combat. The rest was normal role-playing that you see already.
I know this is a joke, but there's a group I used to play with that I haven't talked to since I noped out of a Pathfinder have with them two years ago.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Same for me. Especially with the old monster builder and/or masterplan. I could slap down some dungeon tiles and spin up a fight in 5-10 minutes. I would only spend a ton of time if I was building a ‘boss fight’ with like multiple levels to the map or something.
Though, to be fair, 5e is probably great if you do random encounters and like the ‘let the dice determine’ approach. I just find I have to fight the system since I generally don’t run combat unless it in someway rerpresents a turning point in the narrative we are constructing or is being used to illustrate some other aspect of or conflict in the setting. Plus, I find 5 PCs versus 1-2 monsters fights incredibly dull to run.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
I played 3E with a rotating group of prolly about a dozen players, and with the exception of one I would cross a street to avoid them.
There could be any number of reasons why these people are asshats. Not just that they're having fun wrong.
I guess the main point that you I'm trying to get you guys to address is that 3e isn't any MORE simulationist than 2e was. They both were largely monster killing simulators, it's just that 3e was better at it, with more options, better handling of edge cases, and fairer rules. There's not some philosophical difference here like there would be with D&D versus Apocalypse World or something. 2e was just a shitty simulator. That doesn't mean that philosophically it's not a simulator.
All the things you're saying about some big tonal shift in 3e forcing DM's to do some kind of maintenance work instead of running the game however they want, I still can't see any evidence that it exists at all. I still don't even know what you mean by environmental rules and game physics - can you give some examples of what you mean?
You're trying to make it sound like DMing 2e is like being a director of this easygoing narrative movie, and 3e is like performing maintenance work on a boiler, whereas in my experience that's not true at all.
Every turnover of game edition engenders bitter holdouts, but the legitimization that Pathfinder provided made some of the 3.X stans particularly unbearable in their self-righteousness.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
3rd Edition is absolutely more simulationist. This was a stated goal in its design, in fact. I really don't know what to say if we can't agree on that point.
Those are just some choice quotes from Monte Cook, not an individual known for public introspection, lamenting the degree to which 3E took control from the DM and put it into provided tables of DCs or directly into the hands of players.
Personal, at the table experience is obviously highly subjective. But part of what they were trying to do with 3E, and they were happy to tell you this publicly.
Here's Jonathan Tweet, another designer on 3E, talking about their design decisions and where they went wrong in places;
Note that Tweet isn't really a fan of 4E. He went so far as to publish another game to have something to play that wasn't 4E D&D.
Third edition was a fundamental shift toward treating the game like a simulation of an imagined reality rather than focusing on the adventures being had therein. This in turn had a huge impact on the role of the DM. I'm struggling to see this as a controversial point, to be honest.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
2nd and before probably wanted to be simulationist but in practice mostly ended up working via a mix of tradition, fiat, and arcane subsystems.
2E also had no reasonable way to really ensure that everyone was playing with the same basic set of rules, and provided a ton of optional subsystems that were to be traded in and out without much regard for anything but the experience at the table. 3rd was built to provide a much more standardized experience, and they accomplished this by frontloading a ton of the rules and subsystems in the PHB and DMG and never acting like any of them were optional.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Supposedly the Complete Handbook series were all completely done via freelancers. I can totally see that being true because they are all over the fucking place in regards to...well everything in them.
5e is basically 2e feel but modern play and that's basically as good as you get for me. I don't really think there's much about 5e I'd change.
Yeah, those varied from essentially fluff manuals to dense tomes of kits and gear that usually hid something completely broken.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I recognize that organized play fills a need but for any game I've tried it, it always kind of feels like the soup kitchen of roleplaying to me. I'm glad I have enough regular real groups to keep me busy.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Everyone who has actually played both should be aware that 3.X attempted to and ultimately did accomplish far more simulation than earlier D&D did on both fronts.
Because there was an entire rules system specifically for everything at the end of all the bloat. That is substantively more than was ever accomplished for previous D&D editions. As pointed out, repeatedly, by grognards when discussing why new D&D was terrible.
4e actually stepped back a bit on simulationism. The rules for role-playing weren't rules, just a "if you disagree on something roll dice" commentary.
Yes, but I think there's still a fair bit of Star to go up first.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
If we publish it, that just gives [REDACTED] the mindshare to break back into this reality.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Old D&D was - and grognards will never really admit this, but it's true - gamist. It was wargames + rules for naming your little pewter mans. The system, inasmuch as it had a point, was geared toward resource management. It had tables for like, what time of day is it, what's the weather like, but these were ad hoc - they were meant as aids to a flustered GM looking for help coming up with material on the fly, they weren't meant to represent physical realities of the world.
3E broke from that by being like "actually someone with 5 ranks in Athletics is an Olympic-class long-jumper" (this is a real thing that the rules actually said) and "here on Table A.X find how many elves you can expect to meet in a town or city of a certain size" (another real actual thing from the rules). Spells were defined in terms of cubic meters of earth turned to mud, or air filled with a fireball spell, or whatever. It was built on creating this feeling that the world was a living, mechanistic place that could, if you wanted, be programmed into a computer and keep running between game sessions.
4E dialed the world interactions back to pre-3E, GM-fiat levels - if you want to jump, roll Athletics, but it makes no claims as to what your score "means" - but added in really systematized, formalized combat. It was also gamist, but in a completely different way from oldschool D&D - it was a squad tactics game rather than a resource management game.
5E is kind of trying to square the circle a bit - it wants to be modular, in a way where Cheeto Crustlord, Sally Spreadsheet, and Battlemat Brad can all theoretically get something out of it. I think in practice its combat feels kind of midway between 3E and 4E while its world-sim is midway between oldschool and 3E.
We could operate out of a local church or something!
This for sure. A huge part of the GM's role was to act as a referee in the style of an old school wargame. They weren't there just to manage monsters and understand the rules, but to take the characters decisions (which, much like in a modern narrative game, were made based on what they wanted to do rather than what rule system that wanted to execute) and interpret them with the loose framework the rules gave them, plus what they understood about the situation, to give the player a difficulty and the potential results.
This is very true and like any soup kitchen line you'll find folks there who are great and folks there who are fucking crazy. Really it is weighted towards the former but the later just completely skews the perception.
The second game had 4 players, including the first game's GM (who played a gunslinger in a red duster named Vash), the "head" of the local PFS, who kept handing me candy and dice and made me a little uncomfortable, a terrible GM who fit most of the stereotyped grooming standards, and I felt crowded at what was a very large table. It made me realize I would just rather play with mostly people I know.
MrAnthropy and I used to play in the local public library, which in the winter months is a warm refuge for the city's homeless. They'd wander in and out of the big conference room where the groups played. Most were kind of bemused and just tried to get some sleep in the high-backed reading chairs. Some tried to make awkward conversation about what the aliens were telling them today or whatever, or tried to grift a few bucks with a story. A couple were creepy and had to be ejected, like one grodelord who stood leering over a female player laughing this really gross, phlegmy laugh, like if Beavis and Butthead had spent a few decades doing chaw.
But one time this gray-haired old black guy gets really excited. "Oh, man! Dungeons and Dragons! I used to play that! I had me a talking sword!" And he proceeded to excitedly tell us the story of his guy from like, thirty years ago. I could only make out about every fifth word, but it was enough to tell that he knew his shit.