Quote from: jibbajibba;645737Lets put things in perspective MBs Heroquest game is an RPG defintely.

You talk in character, you play a role you can play the same character in different ways definitely an RPG.

Second Wizards get so much stick. Lets not mince words they saved D&D. D&D was dead 2e had become skills and powers and doom. the game was goign nowhere the company were close to bankrupcy. Peter Adkinson loves games, loved RPGs. He had literally stumbled on the golden goose with Magic and because of that found himself in the position to save a thing he loved.
Wizards bought TSR and D&D. Then they got to work on 3e and because they loved D&D they created the OGL.
Its obvious from here that these guys werejust like most of us on here. They basically published their own heartbreaker. Something most of us would do if we just won the lottery that was MtG.
3e created a silver age. The number of gamers boomed and the number of games boomed. I never liked 3e and wasn't interested in any of the OGL spin off stuff but it woudl daft to deny that it envigourated the market hugely and caused a second blush in the hobby.
Because of Magic and more so the Pokemon card game Hasbro were interested. They offered $325 million for the company and so Peter Adkinson eventually sold and retired so he could play games and chillax all day.  Someone offered $300 million for a company you started in your basement would you take it ....
Why give Wizards so much shit? You can see that the OGL was a corporate gaff but one made I think deliberately to ensure that D&D woudl carry on for ever and be owned by the players. 4e might have tried to close that stable long after the horse had bolted, by all means bitch that Hasbro acted like a multinational corporation trying to potect it's IP but please give Wizards their due they were far better custodians of D&D than TSR were even if their version stank next to 2e

This sounds more as a fairy tale than business history and analysis. One cannot neglect the business strength of the IP if considered the novels and the Baldur's Gate series. One can also not neglect that most initial MtG players were hobby players and Wotc did itself a great favor to control a brand with so much awareness in its target market.

Then what happens? They suddenly pull a 3.5 reboot and violently burst the bubble of the ultra-bloated D20 tabletop market that they intentionally tried to make it a reality first place by issuing the OGL.

After that enter the facepalm business project of 4e that they put in practice (and its marketing campaign towards fans included) and you can see that those suspect of Wotc regarding the handling of D&D having lots of things to say.

Quote from: jibbajibba;645737Its obvious from here that these guys werejust like most of us on here. They basically published their own heartbreaker. Something most of us would do if we just won the lottery that was MtG.

Fuck, yeah. If I suddenly became a multi-millionaire, I'd buy my gaming obsession (Torg, I may have mentioned it once or twice) and revamp and republish that mother.

In a heartbeat.

Quote from: Benoist;645729Wow. :jaw-dropping:

When you find yourself compared to Lorraine Williams, and are called actually "worse" as far as D&D's legacy is concerned, you know something's gone horribly wrong.

That is the thing that kills me about how D&D has progressed over time under Hasbro. Nobody has learned from the past.

Lorraine Williams hated gamers, but she was smart enough to realise that gamers were who was spending money on their products so she kept her scorn and derision internal to the TSR offices and did not try to alienate the customer base like WotC/Hasbro has done with the 4E marketting campaign. So while Lorraine kept floating merily along putting out some good product and making money, WotC/Hasbro is sitting on a lost market shares debacle from self-inflicted wounds.

I still think the D&D 4e marketing campaign was actually inspired by the Dominos adds where they talk about how bad their pizzas used to be.  It was considered massively innovative and successful at the time.

I do think game designers come to resent the flak they get from gamers though.  But I don't think they're dumb enough to come out and shout at people.  Well, okay excluding a few anecdotes about Lou Zochi

Quote from: David Johansen;645804I still think the D&D 4e marketing campaign was actually inspired by the Dominos adds where they talk about how bad their pizzas used to be.  It was considered massively innovative and successful at the time.

4e: 2008

Domino's "our pizza sucks" ads: 2010-2011

Fair point.  I'm frequently shocked to find that things I remember being recent are more than ten years in the past.

Either way it was a disasterous campaign for D&D and generated a lot of ill will before the new edition even came out.

Quote from: jeff37923;645673Because I am ever thankful for the d20 SRD and OGL which spawned its Killer Baby, Pathfinder/3.x.

Has it?  I find it very strange how people here a so quick to defend and/or prop up icv2 and their supposed expertise in these matters.

Quote from: jeff37923;645673Actually, back then when TSR did it, they did not kill off their RPG and use its bones for a profit margin. They kept the RPG alive. Significant difference there when comparing TSR to WotC/Hasbro.

Come to think of it, back then TSR may have been led by a total bitch who loathed gamers - but she wasn't stupid enough to alienate most of her customer base like 4E has.

Um I was talking about product that came out almost a decade before Williams was in charge.

Let's see how well Mearls' magnum opus does.

Quote from: Sommerjon;645819Let's see how well Mearls' magnum opus does.

It looks like it is doing OK, as a boardgame. The vote has already been called and counted by WotC/Hasbro as far as being a role-playing game, they have decided that it was a failure.

Didn't know they were turning D&DN into a boardgame.


Never quite understood the thought process behind the "once a miniature touches the surface it is no longer a rpg it is automatically a boardgame"

It's number 2 on my list.

Quote from: Sommerjon;645825It's number 2 on my list.

Number 1 being?

#1 Worst thing to happen to RPGs, the internet.
#2 Worst thing to happen to RPGs, gamer opinions.

Customers having opinion on the product?

Preposterous entitlement. Jeeves, fetch my cloak, I shall be dining at the club tonite.


edit: Since I love all this whining about Internet being boo boo, let me reiterate: For customers everywhere, Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Because while you may need to read some white noise while you do, it has none the less liberated us from the tyranny of the so - called "critics", and their whorish morality, allowing us to garner opinions of our fellow customers, and a large database of such, not just our friends and acquaintances.

Quote from: Rincewind1;645844Customers having opinion on the product?

Preposterous entitlement. Jeeves, fetch my cloak, I shall be dining with milady tonite.

Customers can have all the opinions they want.

Producers (or anyone really) just shouldn't put much stock in them.

Creators shouldn't put much stock in them but I'm not so sure about producers.  If multimillion dollar corporations just don't have that luxury then any games company that aspires to be more than a hobby don't either.

That being said, the greatest volume seldom comes from the largest segment of the customer base.  The largest segment is generally silent and quite possibly unaware of the producer on more than a vague level.  When most people open a can of Campbels Tomato Soup they want to find Campbels Tomato soup in the can.  They aren't overly concerned about the marketing decisions that lead to that result.

Quote from: BenoistIt'd be nice if you took your head out of your ass-cheeks and realized that nobody's talking about whether combat had a big part to play in the D&D game from the start or not: it did, and it does.

The contention is whether combat was THE focus of the game throughout its iterations, and THIS is flat-out wrong. And I know that from playing the game personally, from reading through OD&D and AD&D thoroughly, from talking to people like Rob Kuntz, Luke and Ernie Gygax and what their games, game-mastered or played, felt like, and everything tells me that the idea bandied about ever since Mike Mearls started talking about D&D being about "killing things and taking their stuff" on his livejournal is total bullshit.

Quote from: Haffrung;645180But you didn't play a whole lot of D&D back in the day, did you Benoist? Like so many of the OSR jihadists, you've learned about True Old School ways from forums. But why in fuck should how Rob Kuntz, or Frank Mentzer, or Gary Gygax himself played matter, except as a historical curiosity?

The way D&D was played once it was out in the wild by 1978 is what old-school D&D was, not what a bunch of forum wanks parsing the Scrolls of Olde Lake Geneva claim. I played in a thriving local city scene from 1978 to 1986. I saw how 10, 15 different groups played. Lunch-time school groups. Neighbours. Conventions. And while playstyles certainly varied, the norm was very different from what the forum revisionists claim.

Yes, there were often monsters that you had to run away from. But you killed most monsters on sight. Yes, there was a lot of exploration and puzzle-solving. But at the end of the day, you tried to clear out a dungeon level because that was the only way to be sure you got all the loot. This notion that D&D was primarily about sneaking in to get the golden crown and sneaking out again is bullshit. It may have been the way some groups played sometimes. It certainly wasn't the norm at the table, or even the norm for published adventures. Get your hands on one of the old DM's Adventure logs. A table to fill in the list of PCs and their stats on one page, and a table to fill in the monsters, their treasure, and XP on the facing page. And the example has a full page of kills.

Quote from: BenoistNow you might have played with DMs that made it all about combat and construed "hack and slash" as just kicking a door, rolling to hit and getting the treasure for whoever was left standing, but that's not what hack and slash actually is, that's not how the game was played originally, and that's certainly not how the game books of OD&D and AD&D formulated it either, if you cared to re-read them and got over your own bloody bias.

Quote from: HaffrungI went through the Dark Tower with a first level party. How's that for fantasy fucking Vietnam? We had to hunt down and kill every giant rat in the place in order to level up and start hunting down every goblin in the place, and then make ourselves useful to Avakris and his ambitions, all the while avoiding Vredni, Eater of the dead. But that certainly wasn't the norm. My DM had a reputation as a killer DM, and even for him this was an extreme case.

I get that some people have always played D&D that way. What gets on my nerves is claiming it's the way most people played, or (worse) claiming it's the way the game was meant to played. Once D&D was out in the wild, it was everyone's game. It's sad that a lot of younger players who weren't around then have to go by second-hand accounts to learn about old-school D&D. The problem is that a very particular mode of play has been evangelized by a small clique of forum posters and bloggers who, out of incendiary hatred of WotC and its fans, employ revisionism to foster a model of old-school D&D as different as humanly possible from modern D&D.

Haffrung, I agree with you 100%, and have become so fucking tired of the continual historical revisionism of the "Gygaxian jihadists" and company. This is what D&D is, in no particular order:

(1.) Combat
(2.) Exploration
(3.) Roleplaying
(4.) Social Interaction

Quote from: Daddy WarpigThe play style you advocate was not taught.

Quote from: BenoistIt is. Read your PH, DMG and MM.

Quote from: Daddy WarpigThere's a difference between teaching and stating. Here's stating:

"The introductory notes to the ODE explain that /ˈlɪt(ə)l/ means that the second syllable can be a syllabic /l/ or /əl/. It would be a very odd language that permitted a syllable to end in [tl] with a non-syllabic [l]. Actually, to my ears /lɪtəl/ sounds like what a 4-year-old would say, but no doubt someone here will swear they've always used it!"

Teaching requires something more. Period.

And if the vast majority of your audience didn't get it — it's your fucking fault.

The onus is on the writer. Period.

It could have been done better.

(And all this "it was really there, people just didn't take the time to plumb the books and really understand them" is crazy. OS D&D is trumpeted at "5 minutes to create" and "5-15 minute combats!" Fast playing is a selling point. Well, guys, if fast play is a selling point, telling people they need to read and grok 3 manuals to understand the very basics of play is insane. There should have been 1 or two paragraphs, right up front, that stated it clearly, and in basic English. (Or French. Depending.) )

(Last point — complaining about people not getting it misses the point. People didn't get it. So either teach it, or write a new clone that does. Bitching about how they should have gotten it back in 1979 is worse than useless. If you love it, teach it.)

Quote from: BenoistIt's there.

Quote from: Daddy WarpigI'll conceded the point. It doesn't matter.

The distinction between "it isn't there" and "it is there, but it's so deeply buried most people never got the idea" isn't one worth fighting over.

Why? Because the evidence is that the games didn't teach the play style. The vast majority of players didn't play that way, so it might as well have been missing.

I agree with this too. It doesn't really matter what Gygax and Kuntz did in their home games. What matters is if the written text properly communicates to the reader what the stated purpose of the game is. For all its strengths, 1e failed at that. But Heaven help you if you tell a Gygaxian that.

Quote from: Daddy WarpigSo, instead of preaching the virtues of 4 classes, weapon/armor modifier tables, and what the fuck ever, Old Schoolers should probably be teaching people how to play the game in the old school way. Not the moments of zen, that shit fucking sucked (because it was all about mechanics, and wrong to boot), but how to outthink a dungeon.

It's not the system, stupid. It's the play style.

So stop banging on about how awesome the system is and teach the playstyle.

That's my two cents.

This part I don't agree with. There was not a monolithic "old school style" of play. Seriously, there wasn't. If we went back in time over 30 years ago, and visited 10 different gaming groups, we'd likely see 10 completely different gaming styles. And you know what? That's ok...