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Post by oakesspalding on Mar 14, 2018 20:45:10 GMT -6
My, aren't WE full of ourselves, little man. Well, if anything we're full of beer, as I earlier implied. I've learned a lot from you @gronanofsimmerya. I'm sincerely thankful for what you have done for the hobby, both back in the day, now, here and elsewhere. I mean that. But, no, I don't think that you or your comrades simply "made up sh*t" as you went along, or at least that's not the main story, or the most helpful way of putting it, etc. It it were, why should anyone care what you had to say, now?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 14, 2018 21:17:30 GMT -6
If you don't think that, you're simply wrong. The story of Sir Fang and the cleric, of the Rust Monster, of more things than I can count, were a spur of the moment.
Sorry that offends your delicate little dinkie, but it's true. If you don't believe me come to GaryCon and talk to Dave Wesley, Ross Maker, Dave Megarry, Mike Carr, Tim Kask, Jim Ward, Ernie Gygax, Luke Gygax, John Bobek, Jeff Perren, or any of a myriad of survivors from the old days.
We thought up something, gave a bit of thought as to how it might work, scribbled it down, and began playtesting.
Either Marc Miller or Jordan Weisman of TRAVELLER fame commented some time back on a TRAVELLER board that "You have spent far more time discussing this rule than we spent writing it."
We simply did not overanalyze, overthink, and overwrite every single stinking rule. Gary was working on four or five other games WHILE he was writing D&D.
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Post by oakesspalding on Mar 15, 2018 3:07:47 GMT -6
If you don't think that, you're simply wrong. The story of Sir Fang and the cleric, of the Rust Monster, of more things than I can count, were a spur of the moment. Sorry that offends your delicate little dinkie, but it's true. If you don't believe me come to GaryCon and talk to Dave Wesley, Ross Maker, Dave Megarry, Mike Carr, Tim Kask, Jim Ward, Ernie Gygax, Luke Gygax, John Bobek, Jeff Perren, or any of a myriad of survivors from the old days. We thought up something, gave a bit of thought as to how it might work, scribbled it down, and began playtesting. Either Marc Miller or Jordan Weisman of TRAVELLER fame commented some time back on a TRAVELLER board that "You have spent far more time discussing this rule than we spent writing it." We simply did not overanalyze, overthink, and overwrite every single stinking rule. Gary was working on four or five other games WHILE he was writing D&D. It's not so much that it "offends (my) delicately little dinkie," as that I simply find it annoying, for similar reasons to why I find annoying, "as long as you're having fun, that's the only thing that matters." "We just made stuff up" and "as long as you're having fun" are both obvious truisms. They're also, in a way, conversation stoppers or thought stoppers. Everyone has heard the stories of Sir Fang and the Rust Monster and all the rest, and no one would deny that in this as with other similar things, there was a lot of whim, sudden inspiration, random trial and error and so on. But there were also a lot of smart people, both designers and players, actually putting serious thought into how to design and play a better game. This is part of what game designers and their players do. As for "over-thinking" things, obviously one can overthink anything, and thus, "don't overthink things" is another truism. But what do you think Dave Arneson was actually teaching at Full Sail University? Or what do you think Gary Gygax was arguing in, say, Role Playing Mastery, or pontificating about in Up on a Soapbox? Were they just putting some silly intellectual spin on what was really just a bunch of guys messing around with toy figures in a sandbox on Saturday night? In any case, I think it's fun to think about, say, a particular rule - why it works, why it doesn't, why it was written the way it was, how to make it better and so on. I assume that's why many of us are here. As the story goes, that's how Tim Kask first met Gary Gygax. He simply called him up (Gygax was listed in the phone book in those days) with some questions about Chainmail, and they talked long into the night, in Kask's words, about rules - what worked, what didn't, why a rule didn't work, how it was or could be made better and so on. You make it sound like such a conversation wouldn't have been your cup of tea. Or maybe it was fine back in the day, but now it just amounts to over-analysis. Or maybe it's just fun to take a "kids these days" attitude. I do it, too.
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Post by Finarvyn on Mar 15, 2018 4:35:02 GMT -6
I think there may be a difference between pre-publication and post-publication. Certainly in the beginning there were no guidelines and for Dave Arneson every new thing required him to wing it, but in the early days post-publication (where I joined the party) we had these little booklets as a starting point and that created some degree of limitation. With no published rules I might have made everything up from scratch (if I had the idea of role-playing at all) but with published rules I had a starting point to work from.
So, while my group was a "just make it up" bunch of guys, it wasn't totally like that. One guy in our group wanted a Rock Star character class, so we looked at Fighting Man and Magic-user and Cleric and said "what can I make up that works with what we have here" and this led to something like a MU's hit dice and saving throws along with a "spell list" of songs. We made up a class but clearly didn't just start from scratch, instead using the existing canon as a guideline.
That's the only problem with Gronan's mantra -- those who don't think it through probably interpret it as saying that the rules didn't matter and anything goes, but I suspect there was some attempt at internal consistency along the way. The big difference is that today's rulebooks try to anticipate every situation and make a rule for it in advance, which leads to absurd rulebook size and absurd amounts of effort in order to "master" the rules. OD&D isn't supposed to be like that, which is part of where I see the difference between OD&D and AD&D as a philosophy.
At least, that's how I see it.
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Post by derv on Mar 15, 2018 5:36:49 GMT -6
I'm glad oakesspalding is attempting to put this POV more succinctly then I have attempted to in the past. It seems like some of this board are reacting to such conversation by associating it with AD&D or later editions. It's an inaccurate assumption that people are attempting to create standardization through such conversation or that they are informed by newer editions. They are usually just creatively reasoning out things found in the text through a group discussion. I don't understand why this is so threatening. No one's forcing them to participate in the conversation if it doesn't agree with them. Wish I could devote a little more time to this.
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Post by oakesspalding on Mar 15, 2018 5:49:34 GMT -6
One guy in our group wanted a Rock Star character class, so we looked at Fighting Man and Magic-user and Cleric and said "what can I make up that works with what we have here" and this led to something like a MU's hit dice and saving throws along with a "spell list" of songs. That puts the bard class in a whole new light. Maybe there is hope for him, after all. The big difference is that today's rulebooks try to anticipate every situation and make a rule for it in advance, which leads to absurd rulebook size and absurd amounts of effort in order to "master" the rules. OD&D isn't supposed to be like that, which is part of where I see the difference between OD&D and AD&D as a philosophy. That's precisely right. Though there's a lot of that crunch (at least in regards to combat) in some of the early rivals such as Bushido and Chivalry and Sorcery, two games I've recently been re-reading (or at least trying to). I think that can work, obviously, if you're trying to create an immersive and "authentic" experience. Though even there, I doubt whether it's really possible to do it well, even in principle. At some point if you have seven charts, nine attack forms and twelve base percentages, modifiers and the like, it's hard to see how that could ever authentically model two guys trying to beat each other up. The problem with later editions of D&D is that they're giving all this detail up front to an audience that (I would argue) doesn't really want or need it. Perhaps they think they do - because how could more detail be bad? - but it's not really what makes the game fun. Bushido and Chivalry and Sorcery were written for an audience that to a large degree had "been there, done that" and wanted to try something different. No doubt, some stuck with it, and some went back. But the attempts were certainly interesting and useful, regardless. The irony is that, especially with 2.0, 3.5 and later, the extra complexity went hand-in-hand with a sort of dumbing-down of the style and tone. Twelve-year olds were now being talked to like nine-year olds - "YOU are a strong warrior on a quest for glory" - while being given pages of rules that only a Cal-Tech graduate student could completely comprehend. Perhaps I'm exaggerating slightly, but still.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 8:00:44 GMT -6
"Objective"
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 8:15:05 GMT -6
Have you guys ever created a game or procedure on the spur of the moment? Maybe a set of randomized tables that work together to produce pleasing or useful results? You didn't make stuff up at random; you made stuff up to fit the purpose of the game or procedure. But you still made it up. And then you tried out the procedure and tweaked it based on what worked and what didn't. When it was fine-tuned, you showed it to your friends, and maybe published it on the Internet. If you're lucky, it becomes a viral meme.
And then fifty years later some ninnies in the sub-etha insist on telling you that you didn't just make it up but were carefully applying systems science to achieve a grand design that is objectively better than anything that has been done since, so shut up about "making it up."
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 9:40:21 GMT -6
And then fifty years later some ninnies in the sub-etha insist on telling you that you didn't just make it up but were carefully applying systems science to achieve a grand design that is objectively better than anything that has been done since, so shut up about "making it up." This seems like an unnecessarily uncharitable reading to me. To an extent, I think Oakes and Gronan may be talking past one another.
The fact that some rules were made in an off-the-cuff fashion doesn’t make them un-designed. A freeform, intuitive approach to design isn’t entirely haphazard. My understanding of the early D&D community is that a lot of them were wargamers; that background would have provided a fair amount of shared assumptions about mechanics. A group of D&D players also would have a shared sense of what their game was (and wasn’t) and what made it fun, which in turn would inform their attempts to expand the rules. All of this may have been unstated or unacknowledged, but it was surely there in the background informing their back-of-the-napkin scribblings. Gronan’s reference to playtesting is a tacit acknowledgment that sometimes these new rules didn’t work out or needed retooling—a conclusion that one can only draw if there are some sort of design standards (even if only implicit or inchoate ones) that a new rule could fail to satisfy. Those standards may have simply been thought of as, “Is this fun?” just as Gronan says. We don’t always analyze our own thought processes or examine why we think the things we think. I think that the so-called “over-thinking” and “over-analysis” referred to in this thread is in effect an attempt to explain Gronan’s “fun,” to answer the question “Why do we find this fun but not that?” or “What about this rule is conducive or detrimental to the kind of game we enjoy playing?”
A good example might be Melan’s article on dungeon design.
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Post by chicagowiz on Mar 15, 2018 9:54:35 GMT -6
A good example might be Melan’s article on dungeon design. Is that here on the board or on the InterW3bz?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 9:59:17 GMT -6
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 10:07:46 GMT -6
Melan's article on dungeon design doesn't reject the notion that they were just making things up; it illustrates what they made up. Go ahead and analyze the hell out of it, no problem. But don't go telling the guy who was there that what he says he was thinking isn't what he was thinking. The bit that goes after Gronan's "we just made shirt up" is, to project a quotation, "and if it didn't work we fixed it or got rid of it." He's said that too, in his own words. If you want to call that design, I have no problem with that. But they were still just making things up as they occurred to them, not slowly developing a grand structure according to a plan. On this site we sometimes have people believe they have received a glimpse of the grand structure, rather than just some stuff that was made haphazardly and play-tested. In this thread we are starting to get a whiff of the objective purity and rightness of the original D&D rules. Go back and review the prophet scene in Life of Brian. Follow the gourd!
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 10:18:26 GMT -6
"We just made stuff up" and "as long as you're having fun" are both obvious truisms. They're also, in a way, conversation stoppers or thought stoppers. Everyone has heard the stories of Sir Fang and the Rust Monster and all the rest, and no one would deny that in this as with other similar things, there was a lot of whim, sudden inspiration, random trial and error and so on. But there were also a lot of smart people, both designers and players, actually putting serious thought into how to design and play a better game. This is part of what game designers and their players do. As for "over-thinking" things, obviously one can overthink anything, and thus, "don't overthink things" is another truism. But what do you think Dave Arneson was actually teaching at Full Sail University? Or what do you think Gary Gygax was arguing in, say, Role Playing Mastery, or pontificating about in Up on a Soapbox? Were they just putting some silly intellectual spin on what was really just a bunch of guys messing around with toy figures in a sandbox on Saturday night? In any case, I think it's fun to think about, say, a particular rule - why it works, why it doesn't, why it was written the way it was, how to make it better and so on. I assume that's why many of us are here. As the story goes, that's how Tim Kask first met Gary Gygax. He simply called him up (Gygax was listed in the phone book in those days) with some questions about Chainmail, and they talked long into the night, in Kask's words, about rules - what worked, what didn't, why a rule didn't work, how it was or could be made better and so on. Talking about rules construction is different from talking about rules inspiration, and as you point out, not all rules came from the same root. My comments about Sir Fang came after a sixty-post discussion about how D&D clerics obviously came (or did not come) out of anthropological studies of magic vs. religion. It just didn't HAPPEN that way. I'm totally good with talking about what rules work or don't work, and why. OD&D is full of utterly brilliant rules design. But that's the mechanics of playtesting in my opinion, and it does NOT change the fact that Gary dug into a bag of plastic monsters, yanked one out, and said "Hey, it's a Rust Monster! When it hits you your armor rusts away."
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Post by llenlleawg on Mar 15, 2018 10:23:42 GMT -6
Stormcrow, I worry that your response here is exactly the kind of "talking past one another" that @dungeonmonkey was getting at. If we posit only two things, viz. (a) making things up and (b) a grand structure according to plan, then we have failed to grasp how things work in life, not just D&D. What dungeonmonkey wanted to remind us is that there's a world of difference between someone with a lot of experience in the kitchen just "making up" a recipe along the way and someone who has never cooked before trying to do so. The difference in the results is not happenstance. Similarly, things can exhibit a real and intelligible structure which, on analysis, shows us how and why they work, without the maker being consciously aware of any planning, but rather being habitually so, i.e. because of lots of experience at playing war games and so an intuitive familiarity with what kinds of systems work, a common (even if implicit) sense of what results would be fun at that table, etc. In short, nothing prevents the guy who was there as having accurately described his experience that it was "just made up" being compatible with the claim that there is an inner logic to this stuff, that it was the "just making up" of people who had internalized (again, even if unconsciously) the "logic" of the the game.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 10:34:20 GMT -6
In my experience, people have also asked my "why" a lot.
"WHY do Undead drain levels? That's dumb!"
Why? Because... we made up some... well, you know. We liked it.
"Why do you like it?"
I once told somebody asking "why" is like asking me why I like scrambled eggs. Their response was "you could say you like the texture, or the way you can blend other things in, or.. " for about a paragraph.
To which I replied, "I just don't think about my food that way."
I had a similar experience at GaryCon last weekend. A young woman spent several minutes talking about the goal of roleplaying "must be" to, essentially, realize Aristotelian catharsis. A young man, after several seconds of stunned silence, said "I just don't think of it in those terms."
Talking about how to write rules for undead is one thing. Asking me why I like a certain thing, or why I think Gary liked a certain thing, is another matter entirely.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 10:39:47 GMT -6
Melan's article on dungeon design doesn't reject the notion that they were just making things up; it illustrates what they made up. Go ahead and analyze the hell out of it, no problem. But don't go telling the guy who was there that what he says he was thinking isn't what he was thinking. The bit that goes after Gronan's "we just made nuts up" is, to project a quotation, "and if it didn't work we fixed it or got rid of it." He's said that too, in his own words. If you want to call that design, I have no problem with that. But they were still just making things up as they occurred to them, not slowly developing a grand structure according to a plan. On this site we sometimes have people believe they have received a glimpse of the grand structure, rather than just some stuff that was made haphazardly and play-tested. In this thread we are starting to get a whiff of the objective purity and rightness of the original D&D rules. Go back and review the prophet scene in Life of Brian. Follow the gourd! To clarify, my point in referencing Melan's article was to illustrate an instance (a good and productive one, I think) of analyzing what makes for "fun."
Could you please show me where I told "the guy who was there that what he says he was thinking isn't what he was thinking" or asserted that he was "slowly developing a grand structure according to a plan"? I don't think those views can be reasonably read into what I wrote.
With regard to structure though, I would say the game clearly has one. It may not have been consciously designed from the ground up to have the structure it does, but certainly the published versions of the game (which is how most of us received them) reflect some conscious thought about design. No one thinks that a monkey hitting keys at random over an infinite period of time would eventually produce the DMG after hammering out Shakespeare's complete works.
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Post by oakesspalding on Mar 15, 2018 10:50:46 GMT -6
"Objective" You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I have no idea what you think I mean. Snarky one-line posts often have that effect. But for the record, here's the idea: Hammers aren't objectively better than pillows (whatever that might even mean), But if you want to drive a nail into a piece of wood, a hammer is objectively better than a pillow. On the other hand, if you want something to comfortably lay your head on to help you sleep, a pillow is objectively better than a hammer. Chivalry & Sorcery is not objectively better than OD&D (getting a higher table in Platonic heaven or whatever). But if you want to simulate life in the middle-ages (while adding a few fantasy elements) regardless of rules complexity, Chivalry & Sorcery does an objectively better job at that than OD&D. On the other hand, if you want to simulate the fast-moving adventure of, say, a Conan story or Indiana Jones adventure, OD&D does, at least potentially, an objectively better job at that. OD&D is objectively better than 3e, 4e and 5e in encouraging meaningful player choice and thinking during the play of the game, on average and all things being equal. (That last clause is crucial of course). On the other hand, If you want a game that gives you a higher number of choices at the start of play (at the time of character creation), those three "new-school" options are objectively better than OD&D. Of course, whether those choices are particularly meaningful is another question.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 11:09:05 GMT -6
Maybe it's time to split this part of the thread from the earlier one? - You tell me, gentlemen.
Suffice to say, without going much into detail, I think that people expressing pessimism about the hobby are woefully misguided:
We have the OGL, we have POD, we have heroic fantasy being represented in state-of-the-art movies and entertainment, and we have a gamer culture that is thriving independently from the content providers. If anything, I think we are in the middle of a Golden Age, and one that is bound to continue. That nobody will always get ALL that he wants, and that new people will usually bring new ways, that, my fortune cookie says, is just the way of the world.
To give you an idea in WHAT a great place the community is, right now: There was GARYcon, last weekend. And people came together watching a movie about DAVE. - What shall I say, of all the things I worry about, the state of our community is really none.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:10:04 GMT -6
Could you please show me where I told "the guy who was there that what he says he was thinking isn't what he was thinking" or asserted that he was "slowly developing a grand structure according to a plan"? I don't think those views can be reasonably read into what I wrote. I didn't say YOU did these things. I'm talking about a common theme on this forum of people imputing greater realities underlying the game than were built into it. Brian is just trying to remain unnoticed by the guards, but his listeners believe he is telling them the One True Way (and can't agree on what it is). He was just making stuff up, but he had a purpose, and adjusted his made-up stuff according to the reactions of the crowd and the guards. But there was no higher truth or grand scheme behind his words. How many times do I have to say that "making things up" doesn't imply "at random" or "without review"? This particular straw man is getting silly. The game was designed. It was designed by making stuff up as you thought of it and tweaking it until it worked. That's called "making it up." It was not designed by creating a blueprint and adding pieces that conformed to that blueprint until the whole was completed.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:16:22 GMT -6
I have no idea what you think I mean. Snarky one-line posts often have that effect. Your audience is more likely to completely read those than snarky essays of ten postulates that your opinion is objectively correct. Your listed ideas do not demonstrate objectiveness.
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:31:05 GMT -6
Stormcrow , I worry that your response here is exactly the kind of "talking past one another" that @dungeonmonkey was getting at. If we posit only two things, viz. (a) making things up and (b) a grand structure according to plan, then we have failed to grasp how things work in life, not just D&D. What dungeonmonkey wanted to remind us is that there's a world of difference between someone with a lot of experience in the kitchen just "making up" a recipe along the way and someone who has never cooked before trying to do so. Since I never said that "making things up" is done by someone who has never done so before, or is done at random, or is done without considering whether the end result is good, this is a straw man argument. I think people around here just don't get it when Gronan says "made things up" (or variations thereof). They're imagining "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning! Have some spells! The first spells that come to mind! Have whatever you want! LALALA!" instead of "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning. Have some spells out of Dracula and Christianity. What? The cleric is too weak? Okay, let's try bumping up the number of spells you get..." (That may itself be a straw man argument, but it's what I'm hearing.) Seriously. They just made it up as they went along. They tweaked it when it didn't work right. It evolved organically. When the book says "roll one die to determine if you find such-and-such," it says that because it seemed good when they thought of it, and it seemed to work when they tried it. Not because there's an overarching system of when to roll this or that. I'm sorry I sound frustrated. It's just that besides the guy who was there telling you that's how it happened, it also defies Occam's Razor to assume all this unconscious, higher-level intention behind everything.
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Post by chicagowiz on Mar 15, 2018 11:39:38 GMT -6
Annnnnnd... this is where I tap out. We've gone from talking about why this forum is an awesome place, despite the haters to a round and round about how to talk about how OD&D was created/designed and how that is/isn't part of the current way of thinking in RPGs. Can we get back to the first part? 'Cause I want to affirm to Fin/mods that I think this is a great place to talk about OD&D... and can we take the last part to the OD&D Study board - which is here: odd74.proboards.com/board/84/od-study
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 11:43:57 GMT -6
Suffice to say, without going much into detail, I think that people expressing pessimism about the hobby are woefully misguided: We have the OGL, we have POD, we have heroic fantasy being represented in state-of-the-art movies and entertainment, and we have a gamer culture that is thriving independently from the content providers. If anything, I think we are in the middle of a Golden Age, and one that is bound to continue. That nobody will always get ALL that he wants, and that new people will usually bring new ways, that, my fortune cookie says, is just the way of the world. I think this is correct. There is so much choice out there, there's no good reason you can't find exactly what you want (if, for some reason, you're unwilling to do it yourself). I never thought we'd see the day when the owner of D&D would make every frickin' edition of D&D available simultaneously, let alone that they then compete with legal near-copies of each of them. If modules are your thing, there's no end of them. You have your pick of preconfigured settings. As far as product choice, what's not to like? The only problem we have is that we wall ourselves off into camps. I only play OD&D. I only play Mentzer D&D, but not the Immortals set; that's for stooges. I only play games that have a certain number of E's. I only play Holmes, and I'm angry that I don't have my own PDF, and that there was never anything official for me beyond level 3. I only play D&D in the Arnesonian fashion, because Gygax stole the credit for D&D from him. We have only ourselves to blame if we find our walled-off communities getting smaller and smaller. The solution is to drop the walls and stop worrying so much about editions and credit and minutia. REF: You guys wanna play D&D? PLAYER: Sure! What edition? REF: Never you mind. Roll three dice for each of the following abilities... . . . PLAYER: What are my chances of finding a trap in that wall? REF: They are what they are. You wanna search for traps or not?
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Post by oakesspalding on Mar 15, 2018 12:03:28 GMT -6
The solution is to drop the walls and stop worrying so much about editions and credit and minutia. REF: You guys wanna play D&D? PLAYER: Sure! What edition? REF: Never you mind. Roll three dice for each of the following abilities... With respect, I find that kind of down-home obscurantism almost as annoying as gronan's haunting fear that some people somewhere may be enjoying themselves writing multi-paragraph analyses of Oriental Adventures. How about this: REF: You guys wanna play D&D? PLAYER: Sure! What edition? REF: Never you mind. Roll three dice for each of the following abilities... PLAYER: Okay. here goes. REF: Ha ha! Tricked you! It's 4e and now you're going to spend the next four hours of your life simulating a melee with eight kobolds...
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 12:09:51 GMT -6
You can write whatever you like.
Just don't expect anybody to take it seriously.
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Post by llenlleawg on Mar 15, 2018 12:13:52 GMT -6
Stormcrow, I didn't present a straw man argument against you for the very reason that I'm not arguing against you! You're response to me shows where the communication has broken down. Mike/Gronan has given here and elsewhere an example of what bothers him, viz. theorized narrative about how things happened, narratives he knows simply to be false. No one here, at least in this thread, denies that. It's this passage you wrote that shows part of the unnecessary confusion: I think people around here just don't get it when Gronan says "made things up" (or variations thereof). They're imagining "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning! Have some spells! The first spells that come to mind! Have whatever you want! LALALA!" instead of "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning. Have some spells out of Dracula and Christianity. What? The cleric is too weak? Okay, let's try bumping up the number of spells you get..." The second half, which again no one here disputes, is not helpfully called "just making sh*t up", or at least calling it that is open to the very result of "people around here not getting it". The phrase in one sense intends "there was no grand plan or theory-crafting", and that's right. But, as you acknowledge, "no grand plan" =/= "without an underlying sense of what would work in the first place". That entails, however, that it's not merely pedantry to analyze the logic of something, which logic came from the minds of the creators, without having to assert that this logic was consciously sought after. re: Ockham's razor, I actually insist that in this case not positing the higher-order intentions violates reason, for the simple fact that a lot of people just make things up, and what they make up is terrible/unworkable/etc. What the original players of D&D just made up made for a good game, a very good game. They may not have, as Gronan notes, thought about it that way, but something accounts for the difference, and surely the difference is most easily accounted for by experience with war games, shared expectations of game play, etc., none of which need ever have been conscious. However, at the end of this, I'm not meaning to argue or dispute. I'm rather meaning to say that I understand both Gronan's (and yours, and others') annoyance at (false and silly) stories of a master design to explain the features of D&D, and I also understand the annoyance of those here who resent being told that their analysis of the logic of the game (and why it should have come about that way) is mere pedantry simply because it was not a conscious design. Both of these positions are compatible and compossible. Pax?
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Post by ffilz on Mar 15, 2018 12:17:29 GMT -6
The solution is to drop the walls and stop worrying so much about editions and credit and minutia. REF: You guys wanna play D&D? PLAYER: Sure! What edition? REF: Never you mind. Roll three dice for each of the following abilities... With respect, I find that kind of down-home obscurantism almost as annoying as gronan's haunting fear that some people somewhere may be enjoying themselves writing multi-paragraph analyses of Oriental Adventures. How about this: REF: You guys wanna play D&D? PLAYER: Sure! What edition? REF: Never you mind. Roll three dice for each of the following abilities... PLAYER: Okay. here goes. REF: Ha ha! Tricked you! It's 4e and now you're going to spend the next four hours of your life simulating a melee with eight kobolds... I definitely agree that the GM should offer some reasonable description of what he is going to run, enough for a player to make an informed decision. Of course there are so many variables in play that a player may still end up not liking the game. And some of those variables may not even be the game, you may be totally down with the GMs rule set and play style and groove with all the players, but you just can't stand the fact that the GM's home is painted hot pink... And I actually don't have a problem that some folks only want to play certain rule sets. If you're open to various forms of online play, there's enough people in the world you can probably find a play group. And if certain discussion forums focus on certain parts of the hobby, that's fine too. Again, there's lots of us. Now what I totally disagree with is anyone who thinks they can dump on someone else's fun. As long as no one is being harmed or abused, who cares what some other group does? Frank
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Mar 15, 2018 12:50:52 GMT -6
Stormcrow, I didn't present a straw man argument against you for the very reason that I'm not arguing against you! You're response to me shows where the communication has broken down. Mike/Gronan has given here and elsewhere an example of what bothers him, viz. theorized narrative about how things happened, narratives he knows simply to be false. No one here, at least in this thread, denies that. It's this passage you wrote that shows part of the unnecessary confusion: I think people around here just don't get it when Gronan says "made things up" (or variations thereof). They're imagining "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning! Have some spells! The first spells that come to mind! Have whatever you want! LALALA!" instead of "You want to play a monster-hunter? Here, have some turning. Have some spells out of Dracula and Christianity. What? The cleric is too weak? Okay, let's try bumping up the number of spells you get..." The second half, which again no one here disputes, is not helpfully called "just making sh*t up", or at least calling it that is open to the very result of "people around here not getting it". The phrase in one sense intends "there was no grand plan or theory-crafting", and that's right. But, as you acknowledge, "no grand plan" =/= "without an underlying sense of what would work in the first place". That entails, however, that it's not merely pedantry to analyze the logic of something, which logic came from the minds of the creators, without having to assert that this logic was consciously sought after. re: Ockham's razor, I actually insist that in this case not positing the higher-order intentions violates reason, for the simple fact that a lot of people just make things up, and what they make up is terrible/unworkable/etc. What the original players of D&D just made up made for a good game, a very good game. They may not have, as Gronan notes, thought about it that way, but something accounts for the difference, and surely the difference is most easily accounted for by experience with war games, shared expectations of game play, etc., none of which need ever have been conscious. However, at the end of this, I'm not meaning to argue or dispute. I'm rather meaning to say that I understand both Gronan's (and yours, and others') annoyance at (false and silly) stories of a master design to explain the features of D&D, and I also understand the annoyance of those here who resent being told that their analysis of the logic of the game (and why it should have come about that way) is mere pedantry simply because it was not a conscious design. Both of these positions are compatible and compossible. Pax? This is a really good post. You are correct; I am NOT going to accede to a false narrative of origination. On the other hand, go look at the "jousting" thread in CHAINMAIL. Actual rules for actual medieval and renaissance tournaments exist and have survived, and Gary used them as the basis for the CHAINMAIL jousting system, and I say so. And Gary designed LOT of games before D&D. This experience gives one an instinctive feel for how games work. Instead of trying to invent a fictional spew about how Gary was thinking, one would be much better off discussing how the rule affects play. Then assume Gary intended that. cf. "hit points."
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muddy
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 158
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Post by muddy on Mar 15, 2018 12:58:06 GMT -6
Aristotelian catharsis? Occam's razor?
What's next? Buriden's Ass? The Ring of Gyges? a Turing machine?
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Post by Stormcrow on Mar 15, 2018 13:02:45 GMT -6
I also understand the annoyance of those here who resent being told that their analysis of the logic of the game (and why it should have come about that way) is mere pedantry simply because it was not a conscious design. Except no one is telling anyone that. I've said many times: Analysis? Fine! Good! Fun! Knock yourself out! I'll do it too! Learn the origins and reasons for given decisions? Interesting! Tell me more! But denying the repeated insistence of the creators that it was a ground-up design instead of a top-down design? Foolishness! Analysis of the game is not pedantry—or if it is, I'm guilty of it too—and no one is complaining of anyone being pedantic. The problem is basing the analysis on the false assumption that because there must be a greater design behind it all, we can stretch anything we find in the text to fit that perceived greater design. Starting with a false assumption, you reach false conclusions.
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