D&D seems to be the portal game for a lot of people.

It's the gateway drug of RPGs.

I was thinking about an aspect of this today as I was preparing some stuff for my Saturday game with the kids.
My go-to system is BRP but I was thinking about the appeal that having a defined class has for a player... not so much the rigid niche-protection thing but the way it give the character a place in the game-world... an extra layer of identity beyond name/number... a purpose.
I was looking at my old Arduin books and falling again for all those exotic sounding character classes, 'Star Powered Mages' and 'Runeweavers'... also the wild spell lists with evocative names and colorful descriptions... and realizing I want more of that in my BRP games... but also that that sort of 'feel' has always lingered around D&D.

I guess what I mean is that I don't find any sort of mechanical specialness to D&D, but... maybe just because so many people play it and so much has been written for it... because it's the familiar baseline to expand out from... D&D seems to inspire so many cool ideas that thrive despite it's goofy (IMO) core system.
So, even though I don't play any form of it, I continue to draw inspiration out of the stuff that's written for it (including the clones).

Quote from: Melan;495390On to the main topic, I find D&D tends to be really good at giving even beginning players a structured form of play they can start with and follow. This matters a lot.

There are specific procedures for creating a character, exploring a dungeon, getting into combat, avoiding dangerous situations, buying equipment, whatever. On the GM's side, they tell you how to actually build a dungeon, other adventures, to an entire campaign world. And even if you are not a beginner anymore, these procedures serve you well, since they provide the mental framework for playing in or running a game, and they can be varied and combined to a considerable extent.

Although B/X, AD&D and 3e all did it differently, they had ready procedures laid out for players. In comparison, other games often tend to gloos over this, or suffocate players with a plethora of choices they cannot really handle when they start playing. "You can play any character you want and do anything you want to" is not a very good way to define the action of a roleplaying game. What is "any"? There are no navigation markers, or there are so many you get decision paralysis in another way. But if you distill it into a procedure like this:
...it suddenly becomes navigable. At every decision point (and these are laid out before you gradually, either via a formal procedure, or that clever bit of gaming technology, the character sheet), you are given a manageable number of possible picks, and they are distinct enough from each other that the choice can be made in a meaningful way.

The same stands for adventuring, another part of playing the game. Simple decisions can combine into really complex "plot" structures, but at their root, they are distinct. Actually, one of the reasons wilderness travel has usually been problematic in D&D in a way dungeoneering hasn't been, is that hex-crawling became forgotten - there were still hexes in products, people just didn't have a good idea about using them properly (teenage me included). You can't just move through complex territory easily, since distilling it to something you can navigate at a game table via verbal commands, or even describing it to players, can become insanely difficult. This is why a lot of wilderness adventures through time have defaulted to "as the characters travel down the road, they see..." - a string of encounters, maybe with a few detours. This is a structured form of adventure. But you could have hexes - and real exploration! - with the same amount of effort.

So to sum up, D&D breaks down the information of the game into navigable, structured chunks. A lot of games follow it intuitively, but often without understanding it (or even wanting to understand it). That's not to say this was all conscious on D&D's part. Maybe it helped that EGG was an insurance salesman and knew forms and bookkeeping (I have read this argument somewhere and it rings true). Maybe it came from wargaming.

And of course, D&D could get it wrong - 2e, for example, fell into the trap of giving you decision paralysis, not in character generation, but on the DMing side, by failing to provide new people procedural support. Of course, a splat-heavy 3e or 4e game could very well cause problems on the players' side - with the wealth of options and the builds they form into, D&D loses the virtues of its class system and becomes a complicated mess which is de facto point buy.

I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite post on theRPGsite.

No, seriously, I agree wholeheartedly with what you've said here and in your linked post.

Also, it reminds me a lot about what Frank Lantz (game designer and teacher at New York Uni.) said at the '06 Game Developer's Conference in regards to video-games (yes, the GDC is about video-games, but Lantz concentrates on game design as a broad discipline rather than a technical skill tied to a specific medium, and I feel like bits of the following are easily extrapolated to apply to other sorts of "simulations" other than virtual ones):

Quote from: Frank LantzWhy does the phrase 'the player will be able to go anywhere and do anything' sound like nails on a chalkboard to me? It's based on a very naive and unsophisticated understanding of how simulation, how representation works. You have a thing, a part of the world, and you have a simulation of that. There's a gap in between, the gap is made up by all the differences, the way that this is not this.. the immersive fallacy is this idea that computer simulation allows us to close this gap and makes these things identical. But this gap is an essential part of how this representation works, this gap is where the magic happens. Let's say a bear is attacking a friend of yours and is about to kill him. The word 'bear' will warn your friend. The word 'bear' would not be better if it had teeth and could kill you! The same thing is true of the bear mask that the tribal priest puts on, or the bears on the wall of the cave, and of the game 'Bear'. Statues wouldn't be better if they could move. Model airplanes would not be better if they were the same size as airplanes! By the same token, if you think about it, the incredible sense of freedom created by GTA is created by carefully limiting the actions of the player.

    (…)

    Even if you could by some magic create this impossible perfect simulation world, where would you be? You'd need to stick a game in there. You'd need to make chess out of the simulation rocks in your world. It's like going back to square one. I don't wanna play chess again. I wanna play a game that has the dense simulation and chess combined. This requires a light touch. This requires respect for the gap. The gap is part of your toolset.

I think that's part of the reason why a game like CoC rang so true with our group even though the system, IMO, isn't a big part of its charm (other than "getting out of the way"): the game provides clear textual instructions on what the game is about.  It combines a competent but relatively simple simulation-based system with the 'game' layered on top of it.

The OP sounds like he wants to play D&D using Legend, whereas he should be playing to the strengths of Legend.

I agree that D&D gives a default playmode which is easily picked up.
I disagree that D&D's way of doing monsters, spells and magic items is better than the Runequest/BRP family of games. In Runequest, you start from imagining a Dark Age/Iron/Bronze Age world, then add magic and mystery. The fantastic elements grow organically. In D&D, you flip through the MM and add some stuff which looks cool. It works but it's like painting in primary colors compared to a Turner.

RQ is atavistic, playing D&D is always playing D&D. I also think that many are unable to think beyond a D&D lens because they played it first and longest. It's a shame.

Quote from: jhkim;4953961) I think it's no surprise that D&D has the largest collections of spells, monsters, and items.

Wrong. Rifts & the Palladium 'megaverse' system has more.

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;495486I agree that D&D gives a default playmode which is easily picked up.
I disagree that D&D's way of doing monsters, spells and magic items is better than the Runequest/BRP family of games. In Runequest, you start from imagining a Dark Age/Iron/Bronze Age world, then add magic and mystery. The fantastic elements grow organically. In D&D, you flip through the MM and add some stuff which looks cool. It works but it's like painting in primary colors compared to a Turner.

Isn't this more of an issue with setting design than mechanics or game design?  I know Peudo here has done some really cool things with Swords & Wizardry.

QuoteRQ is atavistic, playing D&D is always playing D&D. I also think that many are unable to think beyond a D&D lens because they played it first and longest. It's a shame.

The particulars of D&D may be relatively clunky compared to something like BRP, but what's more important in game design are the fundamentals, the big idea that holds everything together, which D&D has down-pat.  I haven't played RQ, so I can't comment on it as a whole, but I have played several versions of D&D, and conceptually they all hold together pretty well.

Inb4 I'm responding to a troll.

Depends on what version of D&D you're talking about, anything 3.5 and later? Nah, lots of games do many things better than the current version of D&D...

Quote from: Peregrin;495490Isn't this more of an issue with setting design than mechanics or game design?  I know Peudo here has done some really cool things with Swords & Wizardry.

Thanks mate!

My secret is that I design my D&D settings like they were Runequest settings, and my Runequest settings like they were D&D ones.

A lot of games have trouble with the "where do I go and what do I do when I get there" problem, which D&D never really has - even if its default is kill-things-and-take-their-stuff.

I think that a very, very large part of what D&D does better than everything else is the clear focus and the incremental reward scheme.  Classes and levels, basically.

Looking at GURPS, Rolemaster, Palladium, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I can only think of one thing.

D&D's wargame roots make it handle big fights faster.  And any edition past second has messed up the system's sole virtue past redemption.

Anyhow, Legend / d100 / Runequest is a different beast entirely.  The whole point of the system is having more flexible monsters and spells so you don't need so many of  them.  That's why the monsters are created as characters and the spells are pretty generic and effects specific.

Also, Melan's pretty much right. D&D is one of the few RPGs that still teaches people how to pick up the game without any experience and start playing. Most others assume you come to them with a fairly large base of knowledge and rigid tastes about playstyles. In particular the AD&D 1e DMG is spectacular, as it lays out the assumptions of the game for your explicit consideration, then teaches you how to build all the tools you might want to run a game in line with its playstyle (maps, random encounter tables, lists of treasure, random traps to roll).

Call of Cthulhu is the only other game I can think of that really does this, though the kinds of games it teaches you to run are very different.

Quote from: Melan;495380Speaking of Legend, a guy from our group played a session of it last weekend. Apparently, combat is really-really complex and really-really slow - they were experienced BRP players, yet it took them almost an hour (or what felt like an hour) to go through a three-round combat sequence. Eeek.

I initially was very wary of the MRQII (Legend) combat system, but I ended up loving it.  It helped enormously that my GM was very familiar with the system (indeed, about as familiar as one can be, given that he co-authored it!).

I'm not sure I'd want to GM MRQII/Legend combat.  OpenQuest and CoC are closer to my preferred level of 'crunch' for GM'ing.  But maybe I'll be more keen as I gain (more) experience with the system.  Hell, I once ran Rolemaster!

Quote from: Melan;495390On to the main topic, I find D&D tends to be really good at giving even beginning players a structured form of play they can start with and follow...

...[Great Points]...

Quote from: tzunder;495397I have played d100 games like Legend in preference to D&D for many many years. It is fine that you don't like Legend, but I am happy to engage in a productive comparison...

...[Great Points]...

I agree with what both Melan and Tzunder have said in this thread.

Speaking generally, I think that D&D-style games and d100 games have different strengths and weaknesses.  No single style of game has to do everything well.  My expectations for a d100 fantasy game are somewhat different than they are for a D&D-style game (grittier, more dangerous combat, less powerful magic, rarer monsters, etc).

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;495486The OP sounds like he wants to play D&D using Legend, whereas he should be playing to the strengths of Legend.

I agree that D&D gives a default playmode which is easily picked up.
I disagree that D&D's way of doing monsters, spells and magic items is better than the Runequest/BRP family of games. In Runequest, you start from imagining a Dark Age/Iron/Bronze Age world, then add magic and mystery. The fantastic elements grow organically. In D&D, you flip through the MM and add some stuff which looks cool. It works but it's like painting in primary colors compared to a Turner.

RQ is atavistic, playing D&D is always playing D&D. I also think that many are unable to think beyond a D&D lens because they played it first and longest. It's a shame.

I find it strangely gratifying that a poster with the moniker "Killfuck Soulshitter" (a name that I vaguely recall from RPGnet) is defending RQ over D&D. :cool:

Welcome to the RPGsite, by the way.