Over at “Discourse” and Dragons there is a “rant” about the new edition of D&D, which being inside the OSR echo-chamber is largely agreed to by its respondents, until a chap called Shazbot (from Points of Light) turns up and delivers, in comments, his own handy little rant about old school logic. I believe a good rant deserves credit (where I agree with it) so I’ve reproduced some parts of it here. I think Shazbot ought to turn this into a blog post, because some of its content really reminds me of the way the game was played back in the day.
- Why is it that old-schoolers are prone to filibustering and hyperbolic arguments?
“Ohhhh…4th Edition ruined the game forever…all of my previous gaming experiences have been retroactively sodomized. I now know exactly what it means to be a victim of genetic cleansing in Darfur. By proxy. Because of 4th Edition.”
That’s number 1 on my list of stupid old school arguments that I hate.
Number 2:
“It’s not roll-playing…it’s ROLE-playing.”
All because latter editions of the game have included things like fleshed out mechanics for social interactions and skill checks, like say, disabling a suspension bridge. Well hold on there, Crusty Withercock…neither term is actually correct. The term is “roleplaying GAME”. See, the “game” part implies a chance of success or failure which is impartially adjudicated through things like rules. So the first question this leads me to, is what exactly, is the practical…and I stress PRACTICAL…difference between a player rolling his/her diplomacy skill and the DM rolling on a reaction table behind the screen and adding reaction adjustments? Since both use game rules to determine outcome, both would be considered “roll-playing” by the aforementioned standards.
“Oh but Shazbot…our group eschews such rules and the DM simply decides how each interaction plays out.”
Super. Fantastic. But well, that’s not really a GAME then, is it? That’s a magical tea party wherein the DM arbitrarily decides if your efforts succeed or not…based on how his/her day went, or whatever. Hell, this was how just about everything worked in OD&D, because there were absolutely no rules for anything that wasn’t swinging a sword or casting a spell, so everything was either hand-waived or the DM pulled houserules out of his/her ass that inevitably changed week-by-week. OD&D, and you can’t get anymore old school than the old 1974 white box, you started at the entrance of the dungeon, and your character probably didn’t even have a NAME before 5th level…let alone a detailed and compelling backstory. Yeah…that’s role-playing right there. From there, things devolved into a battle of wits with an adversarial DM, laden with semantic booby-traps. “You said you were checking the floor and the chest for traps…not the chandelier…so now you’re crushed. Now get me another Blue Nehi.”
- Which brings me to number 3 on my list of stupid old-school arguments that I hate:
“Dwuh? Healing surges? Action points? Daily attacks for fighters??? Bu-bu-but…verisimilitude!”
Okay…tell me how much verisimilitude is in this regular old school occurrence:
“So your unnamed Halfling thief companion has just been crushed by a falling chandelier. Luckily another Halfling just happens to wander through the door.”
Bob: “What-Ho, fellow adventures! Having lost your companion a scant few moments ago…it seems that you are in need of another hand, similarly skilled in the larcenous arts as luck would have it!”
Party: “My! What a fortuitous bit of random happenstance! Why yes stranger, we would be privileged to include you into our merry band! Forsooth!”
A revolving door of interchangeable characters in what amounts to a dungeon fantasy vietnam who, by the end of the adventure, would have absolutely no personal stake in the quest? Uh yeah…verisimilitude.
Fine…let’s use another example. XP derived primarily through collecting treasure and not, in fact, overcoming challenging foes or completing quests. Please explain to me how picking up coins translates to casting more powerful spells. In any case, one wonders why adventurers would go adventuring at all, when the safest and most efficient road to god-like power is running a successful business. Also, wouldn’t wealthy merchants ALL be high level characters? Oh, I forgot…PC’s don’t follow the same rules as anyone else…because they’re “heroes”. We know they’re heroes, because PC’s do heroic things, like robbing tombs of their wealth and hiring commoners to run down corridors and set off traps for them.
See here’s the thing…roleplaying games aren’t meant to simulate reality…grandpa Gygax said that himself in the 1st edition DMG…no roleplaying games are meant to emulate fiction. Now tell me, in which Conan story did the Cimmerian get incinerated by haplessly stepping on the wrong floor-tile only to be immediately replaced by Conan the II. Regale me again with the story of Sir Percival resorting to cowardice and skullduggery to overcome an otherwise worthy foe. Tell me again about the time Merlin the Magician ran out his daily allotment of spells at a critical juncture. Sorry…but the only fantasy that old-school D&D emulates is old-school D&D. It’s become a genre in and of itself…and in my experience this sort of thing makes for terrible reading.
- And finally…number 4 on my list of stupid old school arguments that I hate:
“WotC D&D is too videogamey/anime/superheroic/durple”
Because apparently any fighter not wearing a buckskin mini-skirt and a horned helmet is obviously ported straight from a Final Fantasy game. Someone here has said that D&D should have remained a classic game that has never seen a revision…like Monopoly. Bull. Shit. Even if Gygax should have been the final authority on all things D&D, he himself revised OD&D into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The original White Box wasn’t a game as much as it was a proof of concept. An experiment.. D&D has gone through a series of revisions over the years because D&D has NEEDED to go through a series of revisions over the years. Anyone who can honestly say that the mechanics haven’t improved over the years, is probably going to write a silly rebuttal, log out, smear poop on their face, put on a bicycle helmet, and promptly ride the short bus to school.
Over the years, game mechanics have evolved to become more efficient, intuitive and user-friendly…like technology, Even though you may not like the aesthetic direction that newer versions of D&D has taken, as in actually becoming a game centered around adventuring and telling heroic stories, instead of a random menagerie of cheap death traps…you cannot reasonably argue that the actual game portion doesn’t function better with each iteration. And you know what? D&D still has a long way to go before it reaches a sublime state of mechanical nirvana. But it’s slowly crawling there.
Stupid old-schooler argument number 5: And now we come around full circle…back to hyperbolic filibustering…
“WotC has destroyed the SOUL of D&D”
Yeah…no it didn’t. The soul of D&D isn’t in anyone edition. It isn’t in the rules…it isn’t in the art. The soul of D&D is still where it belongs…in the players. Maybe you don’t like what the players are doing these days…whatever. You’ve got your own game…now it’s their turn. Because if you honestly believe that a GAME like D&D is more about some bullshit, imagined ideology that you’ve applied only in retrospect, than it is about actually having fun…then your head is stuck so far up you’re own ass, you’ll be eating your lunch a second time.
Compromise and Conceit 
October 3, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Eh, I tend to agree the new iteration is for the money and to force out the stubborn old guard. My major issues with the new system is its terribly slow for combat from what I’ve seen and have been told. It plays like a mini wargame now, and their constant revisionism of everything has a totally different feel from edition to edition based off of whats “in” for the art style, races and classes. (Which, I like the new style and races but it’s oddball for me to see the old guard pushed out, particulary with the old dieties.)
Daily attacks for melee types? Eh. I guess if we’re playing DBZ it’s in. I have mixed feelings on the entire setup since the large amounts of moves were incorpated in from the new age of MMO’s so the warriors had something to do and didn’t fall asleep because you couldn’t do cool stuff like swing from chandeliers or break formations on a comp.
It’ll be interesting to see how everything goes, I just wish it was a bit more streamlined.
October 3, 2010 at 6:34 pm
As a rant, I’m only giving it 2 throbbing forehead veins out of 5. It didn’t make me laugh out loud at the sheet vitriol of the post, which is really required to have anything more than a bland “I disagree!” post.
To address his actual point, I’d have to say that the biggest reason I dislike D&D 4th edition is the large change in focus from prior editions. 1st and 2nd ed differ in all sorts of ways, but they tell the same stories. 3rd ed added things like diplomacy as a skill, but it doesn’t attract the dislike that 4th ed does. 4th ed is basically a totally different game, and while it isn’t bad it just isn’t a game I really want to play except to the extent I can make it like earlier versions of D&D.
I agree with him that D&D only really allows for D&D stories to be told using it, but those stories are as valid as any other he may care to mention. On the other hand I can’t tell the same stories with 4th ed as I can up to 3rd ed as the mechanics don’t lend themselves to it. A pre-4th ed game has things like mages conserving spells in case they had trouble getting out of the dungeon and fighters guarding the cleric because he really was critical to their survival. In 4th ed the mage knows he can blast from sun-up to sundown and the fighter just needs to make sure a “leader” survives – a warlord may be as good as a priest from the point of view of accessing his healing surges. So a totally different story gets told.
The fact that 4th ed is set in the same settings as the earlier eds is a slap in the face to me. I’ve told my stories in Forgotten Realms and invested part of my imagination there. To hear that Khelban Blackstaff always uses the same 15 or so abilities/spells in combat because that’s all the abilities/spells a mage gets is as irritating to me as reading fanfiction where Buck Rogers flys in on a jetpack to rescue Conan from an uzi wielding Sephiroth. [1]
[1] Sure, you’re welcome to like that story, but liking it, or especially writing it, makes you a horrible person with terrible taste. 😛
October 4, 2010 at 10:13 am
Grey, I don’t believe for a moment that any company ever decides to force out their old guard, whatever that pretentious chap at mobunited has to say; and I think there are very few things on this earth that are done purely for money, and RPG games definitely ain’t one of them. When I played D&D 4e one game had really smooth combats and one didn’t, one was like a mini wargame and one wasn’t, so I don’t really have an opinion on combat length or, in fact, any part of the game. However, my official position to date is that it was boring and I wouldn’t be continuing (which I didn’t – I wrote a blog post on this way back when but I can’t be bothered finding it because it’s only about 3 sentences saying what I just said in more detail). But then, yesterday I was watching a Pathfinder battle and thinking that my inclination towards D&D in any of its flavours has been waning for years, so maybe I’m not a good judge.
I too think that the daily melee attack idea is a bit weird, and have read other critiques of the same thing. Can I recommend the WFRP 3rd edition resource management system? That way you can have combat actions that have varying recharge times, and depending on your luck with certain actions other actions may recharge faster or slower. It’s simple and effective and it universalizes resource management for spells and melee attacks.
Paul, I’ll grant you it didn’t have the seething rage of other rants – especially the one about the game that shall not be named – and actually I wasn’t that interested in his defense of 4e D&D. I was, however, amused by his descriptions of 1e situations I’ve been in, and his point about how one-sided the complaints about D&D are. He also made some nice points about the origins of the game, which I think some of the people attacking 4e for being a “mini wargame” like to forget.
I wish the people who complain about 4e would put their complaint as succinctly and reasonably as your 3rd paragraph. Instead we get all this crap about “it’s not role-playing” and “it’s just a tactical miniatures game” blah blah. I particularly hate having people tell other people that they’re not role-playing because of the system they’re using rather than because they aren’t role-playing.
Playing around with the Japanese games I’ve seen recently, and WFRP 3rd ed, has made me think that there is a lot to be said for diversifying game design ideas beyond the limitations of the D&D/Rolemaster models. There is an excellent review of modern war-gaming here[1] that makes the point that modern game designers can learn a lot from board and card games, and I would add probably computer games too. I think the 4e crew were trying to do this; certainly WFRP 3rd ed is from a card-gaming company, and I think the Japanese game world doesn’t separate into card gamers, computer gamers and RPG-ers as fanatically as in the West[2], so they incorporate ideas from all of them in their games. These extra ideas can add to the role-playing as well as the roll-playing aspect of modern gaming, and I think it would be nice if more people accepted how the game’s heritage has changed in the last 30 years.
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fn1: by a libertarian, apparently, so you can’t tell me I never agreed with anything that libertardia came up with!
fn2: I had a player who called Magic the Gathering “Tragic: The Blathering.” An excellent piss-take of what seems to be an excellent game.
October 4, 2010 at 7:09 pm
I think he has a bit of a point even though its really made to generate traffic, being controversial is one of the key rules after all. Plus look at some of the core of rulemongering made within D&D, of course changing that over is going make any old guard pull their hair out.
I agree that card games have some very good uses for record keeping, to the point where I’m actually considering redoing a good portion of my project to make use of them, at least in a mana “tap” style method. As for computers, I think the thing that is to be learned from computers is that since we can’t crunch numbers as fast as them, that we shouldn’t attempt to emulate in that regard of complexity. We also shouldn’t attempt to emulate one of their glaring weaknesses- a forced moveset. A suggested moveset might not entirely be bad for the uncreative however.
October 4, 2010 at 7:35 pm
I don’t think he did it to generate traffic – it’s a series of comments on someone else’s blog.
With computer games I was thinking of the concept of cool-down (which I think the 4e rules are trying to emulate), some of the systematization of party roles (which has always existed but not been seen clearly in that light) and ideas about regeneration of mana/health rather than leaving it to healing. I don’t think all those ideas are good but some are. I think cooldown is a good idea, but hard to implement in a non-computerized setting.
October 5, 2010 at 11:25 am
“He also made some nice points about the origins of the game, which I think some of the people attacking 4e for being a “mini wargame” like to forget.”
The two sides of this part of the debate may be hitting the same point from different angles. For a grongard the combat is adjudicated by rules but social interactions are covered by inter-gaming group discussions without rules. That means that the DM plays the king and decides when the king has been convinced. They may use a random roll to determine if the king is kindly disposed towards the party or not, but the social contract in the group tends to govern when the DM has to concede the party has “won” the discussion. [1] That means that though it’s based on a wargame it really is moving away from its roots in most of the stuff that actually makes the game up (assuming you’re not just moving into the next dungeon room and killing the goblins there).
By contrast 3rd and 4th edition have rules on interpersonal discussions, such as diplomacy rolls. This fulfils the same space as the freeform discussion that happened under old rules. But in this model the “combat rules” approach (of having a dice based mechanic making the decision) is adopted. I can understand the grongards concern because it does impinge on playing your character. For example, in 3rd ed sticking a sword through my PCs head kills them – I’m OK with this result as I have lots of chances to avoid it due to the hp mechanism making one shot kills difficult and even when my character dies you haven’t controlled how I played them, you’ve just killed them. By contrast a sufficiently high diplomacy check can convince your character of anything, even to commit suicide. Using these rules doesn’t just kill my character, it controls how I play them. I.e. when you roll to convince my character to kill himself it’s not you who says “he kills himself” it’s me who says “I kill myself”. In this approach you’re not just influencing my character by putting a sword through them, your influencing me which I have a much more hostile reaction to. Even lesser results such as “I let the thief go” or “I hit on the waitress” is intruding on my personal space in an un-negotiated way, in contrast to the negotiations that would apply if the rules were not there.
Given there are rules there to do this, only a social contract prevents it from being abused and in my experience social conventions are weaker when people can appeal to authority against those conventions (i.e. say “But the rules let me do it”).
Effectively neither side is forgetting the roots of the game as a wargame, but the earlier edition rules are actually truer to its evolution away from a wargame than the later editions are.
[1] And the social convention in groups I’ve played in tends towards having an “antagonistic” DM who “wants to kill the party” from their playing style (i.e. not playing the monsters as chumps) but is really on the parties side (i.e. wants everyone to have fun). The unspoken rules result in the a situation where when the worst debater in the group attempts to convince a king they are set a lower bar than when the best debater attempts the same thing.
October 5, 2010 at 4:27 pm
I agree Paul, but I’m pretty sure that early invocations of the game came with a strict rule against using charm / domination effects on another player, and this is certainly the rule I remember carrying forward from those days.
The fact that later rules enable you to charm someone with a skill check into killing themselves is not unique to the later rules; in the early rules dominate monster and charm person could be used by one player against another, and weren’t only because the GM employed a strict non-rule of not allowing it. In fact I played in an early campaign where a fellow player would use sleep and forget on me, then kill and mutilate prostitutes and leave evidence of the crime on me, so that when I woke in the morning I thought I had done it in a fit of evil rage (my character was CG, so it was intended to unsettle me). In my games I would never allow this kind of behaviour – whether by skill check or by spell – and it’s not a problem of the later games.
The social contract was inherent in both games, but in the former game you lacked a mechanism for resolving diplomacy checks that didn’t depend on GM caprice.
In fact, charm / dominate spells in the hands of monsters are a continual challenge for GMs and an affront to the concept of role-playing, as is the madness mechanic used in early horror games (I’m lookin’ at you, CoC), and various poisons in RM etc. Possession is another classic example of a way for a capricious GM to completely remove your ability to role-play. The example you give of suicide-diplomacy gives you a saving throw, just as you would get against a dominate spell, since the GM will assign a DC, and the player will have developed their skill in this or not. It’s no different mechanically to if the PC attacked you with a sword, or cast a Hold Person spell on you.
In short if there is any role-play-killing mechanic in a game that is shared by monsters and players, then there is a social contract between players not to use it on each other. As far as I know there is no game that includes magic and doesn’t have at least one such role-play-killing mechanic. I don’t see that extending this mechanic to skills changes the fundamental problem, it just moves it beyond the domain of Wizards and Clerics.
After all, how fucked is it if your party cleric casts a Quest on you to procure him a child sacrifice/plaything?
October 6, 2010 at 10:56 am
“The example you give of suicide-diplomacy gives you a saving throw, just as you would get against a dominate spell, since the GM will assign a DC, and the player will have developed their skill in this or not.”
Actually, it gives the other player a roll to affect me or not. If they’ve already hit me with a “Don’t kill me” and “Don’t run away” diplomacy (which both have much lower DCs) then I can’t even stop them as they take repeated swings against me. By comparison dominate allows a saving throw.
“It’s no different mechanically to if the PC attacked you with a sword, or cast a Hold Person spell on you.”
Hmm, I disagree. There is a significant difference between killing my character and telling me how to play them. Mental and social effects are in the second category, a sword is in the first.
Yeah, your CG character example is pretty stuffed up as would be the Quest one. Rules like this are why I prefer a social contract as a defence against dickheads. My theory is the social contract is stronger in the absence of frequent social combat rules, but it may be that I’m just older now.