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Post by badger2305 on Mar 30, 2008 13:28:09 GMT -6
These days, I feel like making things up myself is actually *less* work because I don't worry about fidelity to anyone else's details, or overcoming my players' preconceptions about how the world is supposed to be. ("No, no, that happened From the Ashes, we're playing folio Greyhawk.") (nods) - it's less work to do your own thing. I think Gary understood that on an intuitive as well as conscious level - why use somebody else's setting when you could make up your own? Keep in mind that Judges Guild floated the idea of prepackaged adventures as a potentially profitable idea to TSR - and Gary let them go ahead, starting off with the belief that few people would want to use one. Precisely. And with the sheer accretion of material for many published settings, keeping up with what's "right" or "current" becomes harder and harder. That's true of Greyhawk, Faerun, and I suppose Eberron. It's also true of two settings I am very fond of: Star Trek and Tekumel. By reverse implication, I suspect this also means that the inclusion of A/H's Outdoor Survival was seen as a stopgap measure - "use this if you have to" - rather than as a real recommendation for an actual setting (and hey, I could be wrong about this, but Outdoor Survival is about a generic a wilderness as anyone could get in 1974). But that also means that the rules were intended to provide some of the tools necessary for constructing your setting - but the bulk of it was left up to you. It's a very different way of thinking than the later mindset that provides us with Interesting Small Businesses of the Realms and That Island on the Map Which Actually Started as a Color Separation Error in Printing (now with 64 pages of description!) as levels of detail. Following through to its logical conclusion, this suggests that a "mega-dungeon" was not intended to exist without anything much outside of it (even though many games might have started that way, note that Greyhawk and Blackmoor did not, however). Rather, that was the side of the template specifically reserved on a conceptual level for the referee to fill in.
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 29, 2008 21:23:26 GMT -6
In D&D (whichever version) I've always used my own setting; that's just the way it goes. The only real problem I ever had was in trying to run Traveller. Again, I used my own setting; nobody could deal with it. They all expected it to be GDW's Third Imperium, and that that. (They also expected me to use books 4 and 5, whereas I didn't see the need for such complexity; especially since it only covered three of the six character types.) Traveller wasn't meant to have one specific background (that's obvious from the original three books, but not so much from the revised three books of 1980). But you're right, that's what's happened with the game since then. It's as if all D&D took place in Greyhawk, period. And if you created your own background, or map, or whatever, you were a heretic. I'm not sure where I'm going with this answer, but something in your post resonated so I felt I had to contribute. Thank you - I think part of what I am saying is that in both OD&D and Classic Traveller you are expected to add your own setting for the game. How does this work in each game? - In OD&D, there are specific rules for dungeon design and for wilderness adventure. The first is detailed far more than the second, and towns and cities are not dealt with much if at all. What this means is that these areas, far from being considered "unimportant" are in reality the very places where it is up to the referee to determine their own way of doing things. That's what makes the City-State of the Invincible Overlord so interesting - it's the first serious look at a "city as 'dungeon'" (and by 'dungeon' I mean as a designed setting for adventure).
- In Classic Traveller, the mapping of subsectors and Universal Planetary Profile gives you a general idea of what each planet is, but the interpretation of those numbers is left to the referee, within the context of the rules themselves. Beyond that, there's a lot of room for elements of science fiction outside of the rules themselves; it's probably worth noticing that Traveller is more "tightly engineered" than OD&D - coming three years later and benefiting as a result.
- In general, I would suggest that one element of "old school" games is this sense of "incompleteness" that I mentioned earlier. This is not to say that vital portions were completely left out, but rather that the "sketchy" nature of some rules sets is an intentional choice rather than omission.
Just some more thoughts on all of this....
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 29, 2008 9:42:33 GMT -6
I had something of a revelation when I was posting to the Citizens of the Imperium forums ( www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/). I realized that I've always thought of rules sets such as OD&D and Classic Traveller as frameworks that you make your own (and we've talked some about this elsewhere; frankly, that discussion helped me realize this). "House rules" and the like are a natural result of this way of thinking. So this idea of rules set as "toolbox and construction set" is pretty much implicit to OD&D, as we've been talking about it. I don't think this is quite the same as later rules sets such as GURPS, where there was an explicit attempt to cover all the bases (so to speak). Instead, there's a sense of incompleteness - "hey, we've left this open for you to dream up on your own" along with the more general "if you don't like something, change it." But then there's the issue of setting. One of the things I've noticed about both D&D and Traveller is how much the "official" settings influence how the rules are interpreted and later revised. And in a game where the setting is tightly woven into the rules, not using that setting is pretty closely related to not playing that game "right" or "correctly." If we buy into the idea that the rules are a framework and the setting for the game is something you bring to it, then it is only appropriate that you make up your own setting. OD&D is fairly explicit about this on a meta-level: you make up your own dungeon, and your own wilderness (if you like), and out of that you and your players make up your own story. But there are pressures for a stock setting to emerge, as in the case of Traveller. In the context of Traveller, I've rarely run a game set in the Third Imperium universe as published by GDW. The rather endless debates about "canon" always seemed "off" to me, until I realized that for many people, the "Third Imperium" is Traveller. But my first encounter with Traveller was three little black booklets and no house universe in place. So I took the mindset from Original D&D and applied it to (Classic) Traveller - make up your own setting, and go from there. It's exactly what I would've done with a D&D campaign (and have done, in the past). AS an example of this, in "Around the Campfire" I've been detailing the campaign I first played in with my friend Paul. I'm not sure where I am going with this idea, but here's a question: what have you done as far as setting is concerned? Not just dungeon design, but how have you imagined the context for adventure, and put that into your game? (This is tangentially related to what books have inspired you, if you think about it.)
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Post by badger2305 on Apr 1, 2008 18:51:59 GMT -6
I think what's interesting here is how much we're confusing setting with the game. In terms of setting, D&D is pretty wide open (as we've been debating on another thread). But in terms of game rules, D&D does have elements that are pretty much non-negotiable: - Classes. There need to be character classes.
- Levels of advancement, with experience points. How those are implemented is open, but the concept of starting off as a relatively untried novice, and then working towards becoming a hero - that's fixed.
- A combat system that is actually relatively abstract, rather than being a direct simulation (we'll leave that to RQ or RoleMaster).
- Monsters guarding treasure. Inasmuch as a LOT of fantasy suggests this concept, in D&D the rules directly connect the two. Risk and reward, paired up.
- The conceptual use of exploration as the focus of adventure.
I'm probably missing a bunch and then some. But this is a start (and matches with what some other folks have suggested).
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 31, 2008 9:18:18 GMT -6
That said, I do think there are some sine qua non elements, the loss of which immediately make a game "not D&D" anymore, because we're talking about bedrock mechanical/conceptual things, such as character classes, for example. Right. Another conceptual element would be the idea of experience leading to significant advancement and growth of ability. Traveller, for example, starts with the exact opposite premise: you must be experienced before you go adventuring.
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 31, 2008 8:53:40 GMT -6
However, once you start replacing major mechanical systems/concepts without prior examples in OD&D or its supplements, I feel you're straying too far to call what you're playing " D&D" except in the most positivist sense. If I'm not mistaken, what we're engaging in here is somewhere in-between the Slippery Slope argument and what we used to call the Argument of the Beard: "how many hairs are necessary to make a 'beard'?" (and thus suggesting that there is no difference between being clean-shaven and having a beard) Put another way: how many changes constitute something other than D&D? If you argue that any changes make it not D&D, then you've fallen for the slippery slope fallacy (so to speak) - and we know that's not really true, anyway (I'll come back to that). If you argue that you can change everything and still be D&D, you've grown into the argument of the beard fallacy. But there's a point where we go from playing D&D to playing something else, so we ought not turn "playing D&D" into a meaningless phrase. Playing D&D also contains a logical paradox that can't be easily resolved, namely that playing "by the book" is not considered to be playing the game appropriately. This logically means that there is no single standard of "appropriate play" - we must instead appeal to a kind of meta-play (which is why I suggest that personal intent is important). In fact, for every individual rule in the game, it is possible to suggest a variant of some kind that does not change the game from D&D. But a sufficient aggregation of rules changes eventually constitutes a different game. Let's take an example: Runequest. To get to RQ from D&D, you need to change a bunch of things; add a POW characteristic, base magic off of that, completely swap out the religious system from a fuzzy Christian-inspired one to a polytheistic cult system, change allowed PC races, and come out with an entirely different combat system, add a skill system, and rewrite the experience system. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that at some point, there was the intention of writing a different game, but RQ's writers started off playing D&D. Nobody would suggest that playing RQ is the same as playing D&D, but when did the changes cross over from the old game to the new one? That's less clear. So I would suggest that it's not just quantity of changes, and not just quality of those changes. It's a combination of both. In keeping with the magical nature of gaming, I'd suggest that it is a matter of intent, as well. If you intend to play "D&D" insofar as D&D is symbolic of a certain kind of game, that matters. (Case in point: a friend of mine right now is running an Exalted game, but commented wryly that a player in that game was "playing D&D" ) On a practical level, I would suggest there are broad categories of D&D game play that might help describe what's going on: - "Playing D&D" - this is game play that involves relatively few house rules (but remember that some house rules are not only possible but are to be expected). The idea here is to play within the spirit (not the letter) of the game rules.
- "Playing a D&D variant" - this is game play that is clearly based on D&D but may involve significant changes to the rules. One example of this would be Empire of the Petal Throne; the rules changes themselves are actually rather minor, but the emphasis on setting creates a variant form of the game. Another would be Arduin, where setting is lightly sketched out, but the rules variations go for miles.
- "Playing a different game" - at some point, a game moves from being D&D to being something else. Some of this involves specific rules differences, and some of it involves envisioning a different game entirely (and we're back to intent).
Since the boundaries between these difference categories are not easily defined, any attempt to come up with specific "game elements" must be couched in an argument of meta-play; rather than mechanical elements that cannot be touched, the items mentioned are symbolic of what makes the game "D&D" as we collectively understand it. So it isn't a matter of this piece or that piece, but the various premises that create a particular kind of whole (which suggests that we're dangerously close to syllogistic fallacies, but we're stuck with it). There, that's clear, right?
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 22, 2008 20:14:39 GMT -6
One of the first things that happened after D&D came out was that people started to change it to fit their own ideas. Spell point systems, "klutz" rolls, intricate combat systems, magic tables with d1000 distributions - you name it, people came up with it. What appeared in The Strategic Review and The Dragon was the tip of the iceberg: there were tons of things discussed in fanzines, A&E and The Wild Hunt. To be sure, some of it was crud, but remember Sturgeon's Law.
How much can you change OD&D? Judging by the historical record, a WHOLE LOT. The sad part about it is that we see so little of what people actually did to make it their own game - there's been 30 years of attempts to standardize that have gotten in the way.
To answer this question a different way - I think it remains D&D until such a point as you decide it's a different game. Don't let anybody tell you anything different (in my humble opinion).
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 18, 2008 16:37:15 GMT -6
I agree. Nothing against demi-humans, but the game is meant to be "humanocentric". I've written a bit of a reply to this here: odd74.proboards76.com/index.cgi?board=philosophy&action=display&thread=1194224592&page=3#1205846942For me (and this is just me), the game is as human-centric as you, the referee, want it to be. That is to say, the virtue of OD&D in that you can get under the hood and tinker supersedes any of the particular starting assumptions - if you want to change things, go ahead. This would include the "human-centric" aspect of the game. That having been said, I would agree that the game starts off as human-centric; feel free to do that, or do something else, if you want.
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 18, 2008 7:11:33 GMT -6
One feature of Classic D&D that annoys many people is the "race as class" element of the game. If you're interested in breaking out of that and having say an Elven Thief then OD&D is a good option (especially if you want something easier than AD&D). Just houserule it !! If you're the kind of person who wants to buy a car right off the lot without doing a lot of work on it yourself then stick with Classic. However, if you're like the folks here and you like to get under the hood and tinker a bit then you can't do better than OD&D. Hope that helps. Have an Exalt for that, Vlad. You've captured exactly how I feel about this, and I started with OD&D back in '75.
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 28, 2008 16:40:44 GMT -6
That is awesome. I have this idea of running a OD&D game that uses the Outdoor Survival map as its wilderness map, but now that I've seen this version, I think I'll use it instead. I was just thinking that same thing myself. Hmmm!
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 27, 2008 8:18:53 GMT -6
To me this suggests that the best way to employ the supplements is to cherry pick them for good stuff. I can't imagine running D&D without Beholders, so I take them gleefully from Greyhawk. But just because I'm snagging Beholders doesn't mean that I'm using the Thief class or variable weapon damage. And so, in a sense, the sum total of my cherry picking and my own personal house rules and rulings represents my own "supplement", whether I publish it somehow (I'd like to) or not. Right on. Exactly. That's what we did back in the day, and holds true today. It's what I do, as well.
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 30, 2008 13:17:18 GMT -6
Anyway, I just wanted to investigate what I thought was an incredible idea (i. e., that AD&D was Schick's). It turns out to be completely wrong. AD&D is Gary's baby. I think the truth is, in fact, somewhat more muddled than this, though. Gary said on several occasions that AD&D as written included many mechanical elements that did not originate with him, but that he included at the insistence of others. I distinctly recall his saying that weapon speed factors were Schick's idea. I can dig up the quote if you'd like. That said, there's no question in my mind that, as OD&D grew in popularity, Gary saw a need, both from a financial and an "administrative" perspective, to codify and regularize the game. I think it's without question true that AD&D was, in conception, a Gygax creation, but there are many mechanical elements in it, as there were in supplementary OD&D that were either not to Gary's liking or did not originate with him. ...and it is also the case that the distinction between "AD&D" and "OD&D" was one of the issues raised in the lawsuit between Dave Arneson and TSR. (It's a fact that it was an issue - but which one of the reasons already mentioned was the originating point for AD&D as a distinct game is unclear, but all of the reasons have some validity for explaining what happened.)
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 17, 2008 14:26:04 GMT -6
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 16, 2008 9:55:04 GMT -6
I also think there's a regional and time component to all of this; I noticed awhile ago that "referee" and "judge" are terms used by gamers who started quite some time ago, while GM and DM came later. "Judge" also seems to have a regional side to it; I rarely heard it used in the Twin Cities, but it seemed more common further east, e.g. "Judges Guild". It's probably more complex than this, but I've used what term gamers use as a rough rule of thumb for when they started gaming.
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 15, 2008 16:31:16 GMT -6
I've always used "referee" because that's what I learned back in 1975. I've occasionally used "gamemaster" since then, but "judge" never quite sounded right, and "dungeonmaster" sounded far too much like whips and chains (YMMV).
Which term do you use? What does it say about your gaming style, and maybe when you started gaming?
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 13, 2008 13:15:06 GMT -6
My OD&D need not resemble anybody else's. This is where it differs from AD&D and Gary's excellent introductory statements in the 1e DMG: OD&D is not a baseline of common assumptions that allow cross-campaign play. OD&D is a toolkit which you can use to make your own fantasy role playing game. Yes, yes, and yes. Exactly. That's what I recall from 1975 through 1977 - that sense of being able to change the rules to fit the game you wanted to play. It meant that every time you started in a new game, it was a new game - get ready to toss assumptions overboard! It made everything challenging and interesting. Some campaigns weren't to everyone's taste, and some were just great, but it was all D&D. Unless and until the referee decided it was something else, D&D it was - and we didn't kvetch about it. Oh, sure there were rules disputes and strong opinions - but that was typical for wargamers and others who came in with D&D. But the underlying principle of "the referee gets to decide what sort of game they want to run" was taken as a given.
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Post by badger2305 on Jan 2, 2008 20:58:00 GMT -6
(3) No member of the party should take the life of a sentient creature unless there is no other option. This applies especially for characters carrying MORGANTI and similar weapons. I’ve seen too many good people die because some d**n fool “hero” with a powerful weapon decided to take offense at some offhand remark. Morganti weapons? Ah, yes, better than Stormbringer and Mournblade. It was always exciting when people would bring one of these out - and most of us lesser folk would try to simply not get killed in the ensuing fighting.
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 20, 2007 14:07:48 GMT -6
Looking back at my high school and college D&D campaigns, I realize that I removed this critical element of player choice of risk vs. reward. By chosing a module for 6th-8th level characters for my group of 7thish level PCs, I am making that choice of risk for the players. When I ran a college friend's homebrew that also had level gain, I again removed this player choice since I always strived to give the players challenging encounters. Yes. Exactly. I recall quite distinctly when a referee of my acquaintance started re-stocking his dungeon very sparingly and lightly, after we'd been through about five or six levels (which seemed to be most of it). We quickly gathered the impression that we had worked through the dungeon (though some of us were convinced there were side or sub-levels yet to be explored). The reason why he did this was to get us to explore some of the wilderness - and to find the next dungeon he had created, which he was more interested in running. As a ref, if you always match things to where the characters are at, you are setting up guide rails of a sort for the players. If you let them decide what they want to take on, they might find it's easy or they might bloody their noses. But letting them decide can be more challenging and rewarding for them, than expecting to have that done for them.
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 20, 2007 13:44:50 GMT -6
It has been the discussion of mega-dungeons which has convinced me that D&D without a mega-dungeon (where the deeper you go, the more challenging the encounters and the bigger the treasures) is not living up to it's full potential. But it does not have to be that way. Nope. Not at all. You could, for example, make a side level that's much easier or much tougher. Or you could make a level that is quite tough, with levels beneath it that are easier, but harder to get to. While the "lower=tougher" school is a starting point, you can create pretty much whatever you want. If you don't select the "lower=tougher" method, you need to replace it with some other paradigm so your players will be able to make reasonable choices. A bit of an illustrative aside: I recall quite distinctly when a ref introduced the dungeon that went UP. We entered it through a door at the bottom of a steep mountainside, and found out that all the stairways went up. Threw everybody for a loop because we were all firmly in the "lower=tougher=more treasure" mindset. But here, the bottom level was relatively easy, but as we went up, things got more difficult - but did not necessarily stay that way. We treated pretty much every level as if it were moderately tough, until we had some sense of what was there. A far more challenging, yet rewarding, adventure, precisely because there was some mystery to what we were finding. And none of this is to say that "lower=tougher" is somehow wrong. I'm just pointing out that there's more than one way of doing this, and the beauty of OD&D is that you can try them all out, if you want to.
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 20, 2007 12:57:20 GMT -6
Dude. With all due respect, you are WAY overstating my point. I'm not arguing for lockstep equivalences. I have plenty of "too tough for the party" and "very easy for the party" encounters throughout my dungeon, for just the reasons you mention--I think my posting on this topic over the last few years establishes that nicely. Please accept my sincere apologies. Did not mean to offend, at all. But I must admit, I'm a relative newcomer to some of these discussions, so I'm not aware of many of your prior posts. My ignorance in this regard is my bane. I can go along with that quite easily. I probably should have asked, "what do YOU mean by 'rough' parity?" as that phrase is not immediately clear to me - I've seen it mean many different things to many different refs. Of course. But at the same time, that scale and gradient is going to vary from ref to ref. I've been in campaigns where getting double digits in gold was rare and we were gloriously happy. I've also been in games where there was treasure and magic practically hanging off the walls. Both were fun, but not at all the same game.
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 20, 2007 10:41:39 GMT -6
There should be a rough parity between the toughness of an encounter--be it monster, trap, or puzzle/riddle--and the level of the dungeon on which it's found; similarly, there should be some parity between the toughness of an encounter and the treasure found as a result of overcoming it. Otherwise, it's unnecessarily difficult for players to make intelligent decisions about how to weigh risk vs. reward. That is all. I could not disagree more. The purpose of occasionally very easy or very difficult encounters can sometimes be to teach the players something - that life is uncertain, and they might not always be able to predict things. Or that there's value in just running the f*** away, instead of getting killed. Or that good things do happen, just because of chance. If you keep things in a lockstep level of risk=level of reward, why you might as well use Challenge Ratings and play D&D 3.14159Ed. Philosophically, there's value in retaining some randomness in this sort of thing. I agree that you can't have everything random (this leads to mature red dragons in 10' x 10' rooms and other madness), but there's nothing wrong with mixing things up from time to time.
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 20, 2007 10:36:23 GMT -6
My own feeling is this: game balance is a chimera -- almost impossible to find even if you look very hard and almost certainly monstrous if made the guiding principle behind either a game design or game play. That said, game balance is something that many players seek out and hold up as an ideal. They desperately want to see the game as balanced and they want to feel as if they have an equal chance at success to any other player. And I think it's very important for the referee to both be aware of this want, however chimerical, and make an effort to take it into account in ways that neither do violence to the game or campaign nor simply dismiss the player's wish out of hand. Game balance is thus a "noble lie" referees must tell their players as part of the social contract between them. Players can smell arbitrariness, high-handedness, and favoritism from miles away. That's why it's vital IMO to strive for the appearance of balance in a game, even if the gross number-crunching would reveal it to be an illusion. I do not advocate balance of this kind or see it as serving anyone's long term interests. However, I am simply not willing to say that the eternal quest for balance is somehow unreasonable or the first steps on the road to perdition. The very fact that even OD&D evolved to take these concerns into account suggests to me otherwise. Have another exalt for this. Well said!
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Post by badger2305 on Feb 12, 2008 8:59:05 GMT -6
One type takes D&D's meta-setting constraints as foundational, indeed as the pillars upon which all D&D games are built. The other type takes those same constraints as intrusive boundaries that stand in the way of their playing the kind of game they want. (snip) In the past, I understood why the second type stuck with D&D: there were very (FEW) alternatives. If you wanted fantasy gaming, you had D&D and not much else. Nowadays? This isn't the case -- far from it! Even way back when, there were other options and yet these players still stuck with D&D. I've frankly never understood this. If the kind of fantasy you like is not the kind of fantasy D&D emulates and encourages, why beat your head against a brick wall and try to "fix" it? I'm not sure which category I fit in, James. :) The reason why I tinker with the rules, to the point of doing something not unlike Labryrinth Lords or similar, is because that's what we did, back oh-so-long-ago. Like a number of backyard mechanics all the way up to custom auto design engineers, taking the original framework and transforming it into something that was cool is part of the fun. Starting from scratch, or using an entirely different engine - these are both different creative endeavors of invention. "Fixing it" is part of getting under the hood, and really getting your hands dirty working on things. Listening to the dealership tell you that you should never take your car anywhere except to an approved mechanic was for wusses. And being told that this might "mess up your car" was simply so much propaganda to keep you buying the brand label, when you knew you could do better on your own. If, in the end, you decided to get that J79 powerplant from that wrecked F-16 and see if it would fit in the back of your VW, well, eventually you might decide you needed an entirely different car. But you wouldn't KNOW that unless you tried fixing the original in the first place. :):):)
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 29, 2007 20:48:00 GMT -6
Okay, so Neutral might not be an alignment, but you get the gist of what I was trying to say. The paladin has an alignment requirement but I don't think any other class does, so the paladin has the "alignment dictates actions" rather than "actions dictate alignment" problem. Ya know, I'm really not into dualistic constructions of practically anything, so the "Law vs. Chaos" dynamic doesn't work for me. Now add in Neutrality as another force, and life starts to get interesting. And paladins' behavior is dictated more by the strictures of their deity than by any larger force, or so I would think.
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 28, 2007 20:09:13 GMT -6
I seem to be in Doc and raithe's camp - I've been doing some pondering about alignment (slowly trying to lay the foundations for a campaign, you see), and the Lax vs. Chaos thing seems to me to be an expression of 'natural law': the tendency either against or toward entropy. Good vs. Evil, however, is a purely human invention, and the lines of which acts are good and which evil are not always clear. (snip) On another level, I wonder if we could take a page from Tekumel, where the deities were divided into two camps: "Stability" and "Change." On the "human" level, I could easily envision temples in every city for deities of "Stability", "Balance", or "Change"; but away from the eyes of men, the nature of those three forces takes a rather darker turn (from our limited point of view, at least). I *used* to want a more complex alignment scale, or have none at all, but this discussion has changed my thinking. I'm more inclined now to simply use Law, Neutrality, and Chaos, and let "good" and "evil" be a matter of social and cultural construction. It keeps the clarity for the purposes of a theme in a campaign without getting bogged down in a kind of liturgical parsing that you get with the L/G and N/E and C/N, etc. system, which interferes with a player-character's free will. 'Sides, it keeps things simple for the explanation of why the dungeon is there. ;D
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 12, 2007 14:55:59 GMT -6
My take is that alignment in OD&D is just that: which power are you aligned with? It has nothing to do with good vs. evil. It instead could be seen to reflect civilization and order vs. barbarism and discord. Both Law and Chaos can be "good" at base levels, but as you get further and further to the fringe, it becomes dangerous. With too much Law, you have tyranny, oppression, and paranoia. With too much Chaos, you have anarchy, decadence, and wanton slaughter. True neutrality reflects a person who strives for individuality and follows his own beliefs, willing to take actions that may be seen as Lawful at times and Chaotic at others, but are always guided by his internal compass of right and wrong. While tacking on "good" and "evil" to the alignment table relieves the feeling of ambiguity, it takes something away from the role-playing opportunities of interpreting a character in shades of grey rather than black and white. Remember, what one civilization calls "good," another might call "evil." It doesn't mean that one is any less moral or honest than the other, merely that the cultures have different values and outlooks. Doc I like that. Makes things much easier. Thank you.
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 18, 2008 16:41:51 GMT -6
I suspect there's something to this, although exactly how much is an open question. I do know that other aspects of OD&D derive ultimately from elements of wargaming "balance," so it's certainly possible that demihuman level limits are another example of it. All I can say is that I did ask Gygax about this question on a couple of occasions and, each time, he responded that he felt that demihumans should be a marginal option and should never overshadow Men, either mechanically or within a setting. As with many things Gygax said in his later life, he may have been conflating his current beliefs with his past ones, but there's no way to know for sure. I have no doubt that Gary had this as an intention at some point. And I rather expect that Dave did, as well. But the point I'm trying to make is that I think this resulted from a wargaming perspective, rather than as a fantasy worldview perspective, and the latter got retconned into explaining how the rules were written. And maybe I'm not giving Gary enough due in what he wanted the game to be - I'm just not convinced it's as coherent a perspective as some people have suggested.
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Post by badger2305 on Mar 18, 2008 7:29:02 GMT -6
That said, I am also convinced that humanocentrism is one of the key tenets of what makes D&D the game that it is. While I would opt for demihuman class and level restrictions in my own campaigns, the class as race approach is simply a different solution to the same problem, namely how to promote humanocentric fantasy without simply disallowing the playing of demihumans. I think they're both equally valid, with the race as class, I think, being the "stronger" of the two in terms of promoting humanocentrism, since it not only reduces the power of demihuman PCs (which the other approach does as well) but also reduces demihuman PCs to a narrower range of archetypes, which further limits their attractiveness in game play. I finally figured out why I was having so much trouble with this retconning of demi-human class limits. Let me see if I can explain: Maybe I'm just reading something similar to what you've been suggesting, but from a different starting point. I started playing miniatures before playing D&D, and I spotted level limits as an element of the rules from a miniatures perspective a long time ago (but never really thought about it). Now that we've been examining it, I've picked up on something different in this discussion. Although you, Evreaux, Foster, et. al., have described OD&D as focused on humans and less so on demi-humans, I think a good chunk of that has less to do with a coherent fantasy worldview in the rules and a heckuva lot more to do with a wargamer's mindset about keeping units in balance with one another. Put another way, I think it has less to do with the setting, and a lot more to do with the miniatures rules for "fantastic medieval wargame campaigns" (or so it seems to me). If you have humans, which as a kind of unit have no particular special abilities, and demi-humans, which can act as two different kinds of unit AND have special abilities past that, then you need some sort of balancing factor, such as level limits, to keep them from mopping up other units on the battlefield. If you mix in the experience of Sir Fang - the vampire as player-character in Blackmoor, which led to the creation of the cleric class (according to Michael Mornard), then you begin to see how this might have worked. Not so much about a coherent view of fantasy (which I would suggest isn't there), but a coherent view of wargaming. I'm sure that having humans as the default was an original assumption of the game. And I'm also sure that demi-humans were seen as "options" past that. But I think you all might be reading a much more coherent "deeper" zeitgeist into the rules than might have really been there. Just a caution (and as usual, I might be wrong).
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 10, 2007 9:31:14 GMT -6
More interacting parts = more emphasis on character build. It's interesting you should say that. Now, maybe this is a post for a new thread, but one of the things I've come to realize is that (in my experience anyway), the notion of a "character build" is a very modern consideration. That's not to say there weren't always players who did "crunch the numbers" and try to create the most probabilistically ideal character they could; there certainly were. However, they were a minority of a minority back in the day and (again, in my experience) most D&D players typically chose their character class/race for considerations having more to do with roleplaying or general interest than creating the "best" character. I'd go far as to say that the concerns you have -- and I think they're valid ones -- are at least partially an artifact of our changing perception of RPG mechanics and partially a result of the hobby's changing perception of the role of the GM. As gaming has become more about player "empowerment," both mechanically and thematically, it's made it hard to look back on earlier games where these concepts don't exist and view them "naively." The appeal of OD&D (to me anyway) is not just in playing according to earlier iterations of the D&D rules but in re-capturing the gaming world "before the Fall," back when the social contract between players and DM was still in force and game mechanics were aids to play rather than "impartial" arbiters of what does and does not happen in a game. Anyway, I've rambled enough and I apologize for that. My only point is that, while I fully understand the appeal of race as class, I don't see it as essential to "OD&D-ness" and indeed think that at least some of its appeal is a reaction to the results its abandonment ultimately created rather than the inherent qualities of the concept itself. Sorry, I have a hard time shutting up. No, no, you're right on here. Keep preaching it. Amen! I really like "re-capturing the gaming world "before the Fall," back when the social contract between players and DM was still in force and game mechanics were aids to play" - absolutely. Yes. That metaphor works for me on a very deep level. Thank you. (and have an Exalt, too)
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Post by badger2305 on Dec 10, 2007 9:10:01 GMT -6
This discussion is fascinating.
I quite distinctly recall from the earliest days of gaming that a common house rule among my gaming friends was to eliminate the restrictions on races for certain classes. It wasn't consistent - some simply left it open to races to take any class, while others made it possible for demi-humans to advance in levels, but but take double the experience of humans to do so.
And most of my gaming friends were about one orbit out from the Blackmoor players, and another was a player in Greyhawk. I guess I've never really felt like restrictions on race and class were necessary to my OD&D. I might rethink that a little, but race as class will always seem weird to me.
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