Quote from: Benoist;372864Look mate. I don't need you to coach me on how to formulate my ideas. Either you want to understand, or you don't.
That really is your problem, you know? Not mine.

The burden of communicating clearly is on the writer. If you don't care about being understood, why write anything here in the first place?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372865The burden of communicating clearly is on the writer.

At first, sure. Then, when the writer is confronted with misunderstandings, he may be asked to clarify (which Elliot did). He then explains what he meant (as I did), and it then falls on the other participants in the conversation to ask for more clarifications, or present their own points of view in response to the arguments.

See. If anything, right here, in this post I just quote here, you're the one who's engaging in pure rhetoric for the sake of it. You're also the one who keeps splitting terminological hairs instead of moving on with the conversation, keeps discussing the form, not the actual content. You want to be right, rhetorically - I get it.

So. Can we get passed the pissing contest and go on with the conversation, now?

When people get cranky about 2e, I just roll my eyes, and ignore 'em. :rolleyes: 1e and 2e both have advantages over the other, so for years, I happily ran a 1e/2e hybrid. 2e didn't have Assassins? Who gives a shit? Port 'em back in. Half-Orcs have disappeared? Whoop-dee-doo. Use 1e Half-Orcs then. It's easy as pie. Honestly, getting riled up about the differences between 1e and 2e is gaming purist fappery.

Oh, and Dragonlance rocks, so suck on that, grognards. Yes, that's an indirect razz at all the greybeards at K&K...

The clearest indication of swinery in 2e, and there are not too many  IN THE CORE RULES is the change of the sage rules. Now that´s ass-tastic. Bonus: the latecoming Sages & Specialist DOES NOT HAVE SAGES IN IT!!

Quote from: Benoist;372868At first, sure. Then, when the writer is confronted with misunderstandings, he may be asked to clarify (which Elliot did). He then explains what he meant (as I did), and it then falls on the other participants in the conversation to ask for more clarifications, or present their own points of view in response to the arguments.

See. If anything, right here, in this post I just quote here, you're the one who's engaging in pure rethoric for the sake of it. You're also the one who keeps splitting terminological hairs instead of moving on with the conversation, keeps discussing the form, not the actual content. You want to be right, rhetorically - I get it.

So. Can we get passed the pissing contest and go on with the conversation, now?

Sure.

IME, 2e is popular with people who want their D&D games to feel like fantasy novels, movies, comics and the like in being used to create games primarily about the relationships of PCs to NPCs within a context that forces them to associate with one another (some sort of plot or quest, usually).

For example: Every 2e setting I've read other than Planescape (Dark Sun, FR, Birthright, Ravenloft, Dragonlance) has named "big bads" who are intended to be recurring, major villains that can provide the context of forced association (they're trying to destroy the world, take over the kingdom, recover the orb of power, etc.) and act as nemeses.

I can't speak to AD&D 1e since I'm less familiar with it, but I'm given to understand that there were fewer big bads / nemeses of this sort in its published material.

I think this kind of nemesis is not the reason people like AD&D 2e, but indicative of the kind of games they were playing and wanted to play with it.

Why 2e and not 1e in this respect? I think it's because TSR's audience had changed from wargamers to people who enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi literature (not that the two don't overlap a bit) over the course of the 80's (I don't know why - someone else will have to explain that part). So they brought on staffers who would produce material more to the taste of that new audience, and began producing material more to the taste of that new audience. That had a snowball effect as new gamers were exposed to that kind of thing and came to see it as what D&D was, and what you did with it.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372853If you think those constitute "explanations", comrade, you're using a pretty low bar.

Sorry, "comrade", but you're just being cute. You know what Benoist is trying to say

Quoteif you want to make the point that people focus too much on having plots like in fantasy novels for their games, and that they ought to let PCs explore the world through their characters without the DM forcing them to follow his plot

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372873I think it's because TSR's audience had changed from wargamers to people who enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi literature (not that the two don't overlap a bit) over the course of the 80's (I don't know why - someone else will have to explain that part).

I always thought it was because a lot of the people coming into D&D during its heyday, not having the experience or knowledge necessary to "get" the roots of D&D, had to interpret these weird new games, and the only way to make sense of it was to associate it with something more mainstream (popular fantasy and scifi literature/films), which is an entirely different context from the wargaming roots.

I mean, hell, you even see those sorts of things happening pre-2e.  Greenwood intended FR to be a series of fantasy novels, and admitted that a large portion of his game-time was spent ignoring the rules, and instead developing plots and character relationships through freeform play.  A lot of the early Dragonlance novels were based on actual play reports from Hickman's AD&D 1e group, where they would replay the same fight/scenario again and again until just the right series of events occurred to create an interesting piece in a story. And all of this is ignoring Arneson's weird houserules for OD&D.

"Story" focused play is nearly as old as D&D itself, it's just a subset of people choosing to do something different with the tools given to them.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;372875Sorry, "comrade", but you're just being cute. You know what Benoist is trying to say

I am certainly capable of puzzling it out, but I dislike having to parse obfuscatory jargon to retrieve relatively simple points. I also think that the terminology packs in assumptions and positions that don't exist when the same statement is restated in plain language.

Quote from: Peregrin;372879I always thought it was because a lot of the people coming into D&D during its heyday, not having the experience or knowledge necessary to "get" the roots of D&D, had to interpret these weird new games, and the only way to make sense of it was to associate it with something more mainstream (popular fantasy and scifi literature/films), which is an entirely different context from the wargaming roots.

It's entirely possible as an explanation for why the audience changed.

QuoteI mean, hell, you even see those sorts of things happening pre-2e.  Greenwood intended FR to be a series of fantasy novels, and admitted that a large portion of his game-time was spent ignoring the rules, and instead developing plots and character relationships through freeform play.  A lot of the early Dragonlance novels were based on actual play reports from Hickman's AD&D 1e group, where they would replay the same fight/scenario again and again until just the right series of events occurred to create an interesting piece in a story. And all of this is ignoring Arneson's weird houserules for OD&D.

"Story" focused play is nearly as old as D&D itself, it's just a subset of people choosing to do something different with the tools given to them.

I don't doubt that. I've got no problem with people using D&D to do it, either.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;372873For example: Every 2e setting I've read other than Planescape (Dark Sun, FR, Birthright, Ravenloft, Dragonlance) has named "big bads" who are intended to be recurring, major villains that can provide the context of forced association (they're trying to destroy the world, take over the kingdom, recover the orb of power, etc.) and act as nemeses.

Just a minor point, wouldn't one be safe in assuming Planescape also has named BBEGs in the named Demons and Devils? I mean Demogorgon, Asmodeus, Orcus, etc. are pretty big, bad, and evil... and they have names.

Genre Emulation would be for example:

Taking a module written for standard high fantasy like B2: Keep on the Borderlands and rewriting it for two different settings.  One Howard's Hyperborea and the other Tolkien's Middle-Earth.  In each case, the setup of the Keep and the Caves would have different backgrounds, opponents, plots, encounters, etc.. all designed to change the feel of the module so it fits better into the genre of the original setting.

However, while I am making changes to accomodate different genres, I am still coming from the same perspection of Immersion.  I am trying to create a Sword and Sorcery world or Tolkienian Fantasy world and the changes I make are focused on emulating that genre, by making those worlds as realistic as possible when compared to the originals.

Fiction Emulation would be rewriting that module with more of a focus on literary devices: Plot, Protagonists, Antagonists, Drama.  Nothing wrong with this approach, in fact everything other then 100% randomized sandbox gaming needs to incorporate these to some degree.

What Benoist was getting to I think is that if you start with a priority of Fiction Emulation then right there from the start you are prioritizing:

Literary elements > world-building

Now, does that equal story-gaming?  No.  However, once you start that way, taking the literary emulation further eventually does lead to:

Story > Immersion aka. Narrativism or Story-Gaming


Can you do both Genre and Fiction emulation thus getting the feel of both a Sword and Sorcery world and a Conan story without becoming a Storygame?  Sure, Barbarians of Lemuria is a good example of that.

Quote from: Sigmund;372890Just a minor point, wouldn't one be safe in assuming Planescape also has named BBEGs in the named Demons and Devils? I mean Demogorgon, Asmodeus, Orcus, etc. are pretty big, bad, and evil... and they have names.

I never found them focused on as prominently as say Szass Tam or Fzoul Chembryl in FR, the Sorceror Kings in Dark Sun, or Kitiara and Arakis in Dragonlance. But yes, they definitely have the potential to be nemeses. I only have Hellbound, the Planeswalker's Handbook and the Monstrous Compendium for PS though, so they may have done stuff in some of the Planes of... as well.

Although I'm going at things from the other side, a lot of what Benoist says makes sense to me. Basically the division is whether you want:

A. To have the characters live in the sort of world that's described in fantasy literature.

or

B. To have the character do the sort of things that the heroes of fantasy literature are described as doing.

The two aren't as easy to combine as it seems. In most fantasy literature the characters are insanely lucky and survive "certain death" over and over (just look at all of the good luck on top of the massive amounts of skill it took for Conan to get out of the various scrapes that he got into) and there is coincidence by the bucketload.

If you take A at face value (trying to have your game represent what it's like to live in a fantasy world) then the PCs won't have the advantage of the bucketloads of luck and coincidence that most fantasy protagonists have as well as all of the sorts of things that happen in fantasy literature because it serves the purpose of the story rather than being what is most "realistic" or "likely" in that situation.

If order to get B (characters doing the sorts of things that fantasy heroes do) you need to have something more than just rules that manage fantasy world physics. You need some way of taking those rules and making the PCs have the same sort of non-random luck as fantasy literature heroes have and some way of generating all of the various (unrealistic/unlikely) coincidences that drive fantasy literature. The only way to do this is by having the DM fudge things left and right or by introducing metagame mechanics.

So there's basically a few different ways of trying to manage the competing demands of A and B.

I. Telling B to fuck off and focusing on A. The most important thing you want here is Immersion. (Old School)

II. Having rules built for A (even if the text says differently) and then have the GM fudge things left and right in order to make the actual game play look more like B. The most important thing here is the Story. (Middle School, 2ed, most WW games etc.)

III. Telling A to fuck off and focusing on B. The most important thing here is Fictional Emulation. (Indie)

IV. Not really giving a fuck rules-wise about A or B really and just wanting lots of cool fights. The GM can still inject a lot of A and B into the game, but the rules themselves don't do it. The most important thing here is Game Balance (4ed etc.)

The basic mentality put forward by 2ed is the most II-ish of the edition of D&D and this worked well as a compromise for all of the different sorts of game styles for a while, but a lot of the people who want B more than A eventually gave up on D&D altogether and went on to WW games or Indie games (Edward's infamous comment about "brain damage" is that II is a really dumb way of trying to get B and we should try III instead if we want B). With the people who want B not really playing D&D anymore, the people who wanted more A don't have any reason to compromise and could happily go back to older playstyles.

In any case I like both Old School and Indie stuff but I really really hate the sort of gameplay that 2ed and WW seem to focus on (railroaded epic plot in a can).

In a lot of ways 2ed style gameplay is unpopular since it goes strongly against both Old School and Indie ideas so it doesn't have any strong fanbase left.

Quote from: Peregrin;372879I always thought it was because a lot of the people coming into D&D during its heyday, not having the experience or knowledge necessary to "get" the roots of D&D, had to interpret these weird new games, and the only way to make sense of it was to associate it with something more mainstream (popular fantasy and scifi literature/films), which is an entirely different context from the wargaming roots.

I can say that this was true for me.  My interest in D&D came in 1982*, when I was 10, after playing an extemporaneous session of BD&D on my cousin's patio one afternoon that a friend of his ran.  

From there I picked up the Moldvay BD&D set from either K-Mart or Magic Mart, and either proceeded to find other people at school who knew the game or else recruited friends of mine to play, my memory is pretty foggy on that sequence.

None of us had any notion of what wargaming was, much less that this D&D game was part of such tradition.  Instead, we all somehow puzzled out ways to do what we wanted with the game, and the primary sources for us were pop culture:  comics such as Conan the Barbarian, but also titles like The Micronauts; Saturday morning cartoons (Thundarr; Tarzan and the Super 7); assorted live-action shows such as Star Trek, and PBS re-broadcasts of Doctor Who; the usual fantasy and SF movies; and whatever genre fiction we'd read at that point.

At some point, I had figured out that there was a small hobby shop in the area and bought some of my gaming material there, but it wasn't a place where I ever went to play games due to it being about 15 miles from where I lived and not really doing much driving at that age.

It wasn't until I was in college that I met anyone who was /had been involved in wargaming, and even among the older gamers that I played with, it didn't seem to have been something they held onto once they were into RPGs.  




* This is actually something of a guess, as I don't recall precisely the year.  Given that I bought the Moldvay D&D basic set and not the Mentzer, I would assume that it was before '83 at any rate, or else my area was just lagging far behind the times, which is a strong possibility.)

First of all Daztur, that was a very interesting and well-reasoned, though-provoking response, so thanks.

I appreciate that when making high level distinctions one has to make generalisations, so I'll try not to nitpick, however there are some conclusions you draw I'm not sure I entirely agree with.  

You draw the distinction between two types of games/gamers.

A. To have the characters live in the sort of world that's described in fantasy literature.

B. To have the character do the sort of things that the heroes of fantasy literature are described as doing.


I think the split is correct but not necessarily the definition. Specifically I don't think the description of 'A' is quite accurate. It is implicit in most roleplaying games that you are playing adventurers of some description. In D&D you don't normally stay home and keep working the farm. The classes and abilities the rules cover are all modelled on the heroes of fantasy literature. So it's not really just about living in a fantasy world, it's living like a fantasy hero in a fantasy world.

But I agree there is a difference and I think this down to the importance given to dramatic structure.

Type B games want to have a dramatic structure. As you say typically heroes that beat the odds, the tempo of the adventure will tend to increases in intensity, the stakes escalate leading to a big climax.  

Type A game is more like an MMO. The world does not revolve around the characters, you choose your own destiny, make your own way and if you do well you will be rewarded if you do poorly you will suck.  

Also I'm not entirely sure I agree with the Type A = immersion = Old School assertion. Of course immersion a tricky term, we seem to debate exactly what we mean by it on this forum at least once a week. That said a lot of A Type adventures (for instance published dungeons), don't really portray a fantasy world in any sort of logical or naturalistic way - quite often they are deliberately jarring, with challenges that rely on OOC knowledge or aimed at the player's skills to solve rather the character's. That for me is not immersive. Or it may be immersive in the way that a FPS game is immersive (it draws you into the game) but it's not immersive in sense of getting into the mind of your character.


I suspect, and I stress merely suspect, a lot of players would ideally want both A and B but have been put off B by too many bad experiences. For while it is fairly easy to run a decent Type A game, Type B games not so much. I'm sure we've all been in hellish games in which the player characters are no more passengers on the GM's personal fantasy ride. But I do think it is possible to combine both A and B, that is to say games which respect the players freedom to make meaningful choices and yet will (with a little gentle nudging by the GM) gravitate towards dramatic situations that reflect the fiction. Pendragon scenarios seemed particularly good at this.