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Post by dwayanu on Apr 9, 2009 5:20:17 GMT -6
The thread title comes from a post I made to a discussion here about how much a game can change and still be "OD&D". I figured that a module is a sort of "black box" into which the author puts concepts from his or her own game, and out of which the reader takes concepts to use in his or hers. If the OD&D books provide context enough for the communication without knowing what else the other party may be using, then the question is practically moot: as far anyone on either side knows, you're both playing the same game.
The loss of legal PDF sales of OD&D is a blow to efforts to share the game, putting a lot more weight on the retro-clones.
Jim LotFP recently raised again an issue that has been on my mind for some time:
I am not sure the difficulties are actually greater than in going from one TSR edition to another. However, I think they do stand out more prominently (even between the two versions of S&W). From the "black box" perspective, I agree that LL and OSRIC stand out as more faithful to their progenitors. Heck, for all my initial misgivings, I have come to see OSRIC as the true "third edition" of AD&D.
Ascending AC is one of the weirdnesses that seem to get in the way of easy recognition. That has to do with retro-clone trademark licensing, which in turn goes back to there being different trademarks referring in fact to different games. That they all (and, yes, even WotC's 4E) in turn refer back to a common heritage in OD&D is obscured.
I am personally not a big fan of the whole deal of stuffing modules with "stat blocks" that the OGL-derived enterprise is apparently meant to facilitate. However, if people are going to do that then I would rather see stuff that makes as much sense as possible purely in the old D&D "lingua franca." (I don't think any retro-clone uses the old treasure types, but that rarely if ever comes up in modules.)
That calls for backing off a bit from the importance one might be inclined to assign the innovative features of this or that rules set -- which is just what most of us did back in the day, when our house rules were not trademarked game systems.
I never actually used any of Dave Hargrave's modules, because they did not look very appealing to me. At one time, I used a lot of his Arduin rules. However, I would not expect others to have to grapple with Arduin-isms such as Mana Points or non-D&D spell names in reading a scenario I wrote up. Even less would I be inclined to lay on references to my home-brewed game systems.
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Post by RandallS on Apr 9, 2009 8:43:22 GMT -6
[rant]
I have to admit to "not getting it." OD&D was a toolkit and was played many different ways back in the mid-1970s. I'm not sure where the "rules-purism" I see among many grognards today comes from. It was a (very tiny) minority position in the 1970s, IMHO. I've gotten lectured in email on the evils of some of the "optional rules for m74 I put in Ancients Aurguries and my post on Body Points and Hit Points for S&W -- claiming that such optional rules are "too far" from OD&D. This despite the fact that I was using an earlier form of the BP/HP split as early as 1977 or so. I haven't published the "spell point" part of my BP/HP system because I'm not in the mood to deal with the fallout. Spell points are evil, you know, and make OD&D not OD&D even though adding some type of spell point system was a very early and relatively common house rule for OD&D. ::sigh::
The argument over ascending/descending AC strikes me as silly. I saw OD&D played with all sorts of modified to-hit tables: ascending, descending, percentage, attribute-based, playing card based(!!), etc. My favorite weird one was probably the one a friend used where hit points remaining were used instead of levels in the to-hit table (so the more "wounded/tired" a being was, the less accurately they hit).
I often feel like I've walked into some alternate timeline where OD&D was played very strictly by the book in the 1970s.
[/rant]
As for modules and different rules sets. OD&D, AD&D 1E, B/X, BEMCI, and AD&D 2E were advertised as separate systems, but everyone I knew back in the 70s and 80s could run a module written for any one of those games in which edition of D&D they were running at the time -- usually making whatever conversions needed on the fly while running the module. I don't think people playing retroclones today are any less capable.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 9, 2009 9:23:34 GMT -6
I, for one, would love to see your spell point system.
Just sayin'.
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Post by jimlotfp on Apr 9, 2009 10:00:19 GMT -6
The "rules" issue is not a play concern, but a publishing concern.
If something is published using the standard rules, then everyone is going to be able to take that and apply their own house rules as they normally do.
If something is published using variant rules, then some will be turned off right away if they don't like the variant rules, and even if they don't mind, there is still more work translating the variant (no longer house if they are published) rules into the local (purchasing) group's house rules.
The clones have just made it more difficult to publish using any "standard" rules. For just one example, which AC standard should be used? OSRIC's descending from 10, Labyrinth Lord's descending from 9, BFRPG's ascending from 11, or Sword & Wizardry's dual descending from 9 AND ascending from 10? It's more complicated than "back in the day."
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edsan
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
MUTANT LORD
Posts: 309
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Post by edsan on Apr 9, 2009 12:19:01 GMT -6
Perhaps the solution is creating a one-page cross-referencing document that helps the compatibility between the retro-clones?
Besides AC and HD for classes and monsters what else is there? Someone with access to all the systems would have to begin by noting down the major differences between them.
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busman
Level 6 Magician
Playing OD&D, once again. Since 2008!
Posts: 448
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Post by busman on Apr 9, 2009 12:30:11 GMT -6
The "rules" issue is not a play concern, but a publishing concern. Bingo. Despite what we all may have house ruled back in the day, when a new module or piece of "official" publication came out, it adhered to the ruleset of the time. This board is chock full of house rules. Every discussion turns into a series of how various people house rule that particular item, or people adopting some new house rule from someone else. And I love it. |
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Post by ragnorakk on Apr 9, 2009 12:56:00 GMT -6
edsan - you beat me to it! in fact I posted a comment on LotFP blog about this.
Right - issue isn't about which system should be standard because it's the better/best one,
it's just about compatability between them.
Personally I think that one page of "Clone-Conversion-Notes" would suffice - all of the
differences are known and the methods of converting between them are formulaic
and established. So when someone decides to publish a module for S&W, there's a page
that explains how to adapt to LL/OSRIC/etc. Same for any of them, just one different
entry (no need for "LL -> LL").
Of course, if these games wanted to come to some agreement about a unified-system, it's
now or never - or, less dramatically at least, it will never become any easier to do as more
material is made.
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Post by Finarvyn on Apr 9, 2009 12:58:28 GMT -6
RandallS, I’m EXALT-ing you for your rant.
I doubt that anyone who was actually playing OD&D during the 1970’s would truly subscribe to “rules purism” since, as you pointed out, the rulebooks were designed to be more guidelines than the letter of the law. The true rules lawyer didn’t come about until Gary’s attempt at standardization in the AD&D rules, and this is where the true divergence of philosophy began.
To me, the issue is that not all can be called OD&D, and so there must be some difference between one game and another. Why isn’t T&T the same as OD&D? Why isn’t Runequest the same game? Can I play T&T and call it OD&D?
These sorts of questions are what begin the discussion, I believe, of what “makes” OD&D. Certainly a home rules set could use critical hits, feats, skills, and so on and be a lot of fun. The question in my mind becomes “at what point has this game become something else?” And being something else isn’t a bad thing, but is just a thing.
For example, if you abandon levels and go entirely to skills then you get something more like BRP or RQ and something less like OD&D. I see levels as a feature of the “actual” OD&D rules set. In the same way, rolling certain types of dice might be “more OD&D” while others are “less OD&D”; the OD&D rules have never featured percentile dice for combat and moving to that model makes it “less OD&D.”
On the other hand, I’ve played the game with spell points and ascending AC for years and never felt like it was “less OD&D” for the experience, so perhaps it ultimately comes down to preference. If I don’t like a rule, it makes the game “less OD&D” but if I like a rule it’s okay.
At no point would I ever tell a person not to use a particular rule in their game. House rules are what make gaming so neat, and allow us all to be game designers in some fashion. Some rules I like, others I don’t. I just think that some types of variant makes the end result “less OD&D” than other types.
Just one guy's opinion. :-)
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Post by RandallS on Apr 9, 2009 14:19:11 GMT -6
The clones have just made it more difficult to publish using any "standard" rules. For just one example, which AC standard should be used? OSRIC's descending from 10, Labyrinth Lord's descending from 9, BFRPG's ascending from 11, or Sword & Wizardry's dual descending from 9 AND ascending from 10? It's more complicated than "back in the day." All that is needed is a one-two page document describing basic conversions that publishers could include in each module (if they so desired). OGL limitations, however, prevent referring to other games by name. This is a great restriction to protect WOTC from everyone saying "compatible with D&D3" in huge letters, but sort of silly for old school game clones. To start the ball rolling, I'm going to include a "trademark license" in the next minor revision of Microlite74 explicitly giving permission to refer to Microlite74 by name in documents devoted to providing information on how to convert adventures, campaign settings and other modules between gamesystems. If other clone and clone-like games publishers will do the same, this roadblock will go away. |
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Post by dwayanu on Apr 9, 2009 18:35:06 GMT -6
I think the proper place for "conversion notes" is in your own rules book.
Again, I'm not talking about conformity in play. I'm talking about publishers remembering what supposedly was the game they set out to assist by creating and promoting their own games. If Retro-clone Brand A is really more important, then I fear the result shall be not growth but fracturing of the community.
That's just what Wizbro has accomplished. Its different "editions" are such practically different games that there's a language barrier between fans of one and fans of another.
The firm seems to me pretty much to have written off all but an incestuous and shrinking population. Even we "old-schoolers" are just outliers of that same demographic of folks tuned in to the Internet culture of self-defined "gamers".
I see only an uphill battle in trying to avoid extinction by confining ourselves to that environment. It's as if Arneson and Gygax had decided to limit D&D to war-game "grognards".
I think we will do better to reach out to potential gamers in the wider society, and that our chances are better the more we can present the kind of appeal that D&D itself presented in its heyday.
Part of that, I think, was that it was so easy not to know that the Blackmoor supplement, Moldvay Basic, Mentzer Companion and Fiend Folio were all "supposed to be" different games, much less to worry about which line a module was supposedly for.
I don't really care much about the AC 10-7 (versus 9-6) discrepancy between AD&D and Original/Basic, because the Monster Manual ignored it (in effect giving some critters a "+1" when used with AD&D rules).
I think someone using S&W should be able to deal with "save versus X" references; if not, then that's something to address in the next edition.
I have mentioned before my concern about the changes to spell names in S&W White Box.
Basically, I think that almost anything that can be done with fidelity has (at least in the "black box" context) been so done in one retro-clone or another.
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Post by RandallS on Apr 9, 2009 18:49:38 GMT -6
I think the proper place for "conversion notes" is in your own rules book. In an ideal world, that would indeed be best. The problem with that is you have to come out with a new edition every time someone publishes a new old school game or makes a revision to their game that changes the conversion process in some manner. Authors aren't going to what to do this (especially if fancy third-party layout is involved). Players aren't going to want to keep buying and/or printing new editions, etc. It would make more sense for conversion notes to be a separate, easy to update document that any publisher can reprint or refer people to. |
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Post by dwayanu on Apr 9, 2009 19:38:15 GMT -6
RandallS, you have that backwards!
It is the module publisher who would need new editions to keep up with the proliferation of mutually incompatible retro-clones.
If instead we stick with the common language of D&D, then a "Rosetta stone" is needed only for translation between that and a particular variant.
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Post by RandallS on Apr 9, 2009 20:50:17 GMT -6
It is the module publisher who would need new editions to keep up with the proliferation of mutually incompatible retro-clones. Why? The module publisher just refers people to the current version of the "Conversion Document" on his web site for updates. He can print the current at publication one in the module if he wishes, of course. Game publishers could do this as well. Everyone stays up to date without the need for new editions. |
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Post by dwayanu on Apr 10, 2009 3:52:36 GMT -6
Well, you're coming from quite a different hierarchy of values. If we disagree as to ends, then it is natural that we should disagree as to means.
It's a good thing that we didn't need a "conversion document" on the Web to use D&D modules (or Dragon magazine) back in the 1980s -- considering that the Web had not yet been built!
We hard-core "gamers" yakking on Internet forums might just take it for granted that playing traditional D&D means dealing with details from half a dozen different games, but I don't think that's so appealing to (relatively) normal people.
As I pointed out above, those relatively normal people are part of the community I hope that we might build.
There are gamers who think 4E "pwns" because it's so much like an MMORPG. Then there are gamers who think it "sucks" and 3E "rules". Then there are the rest of us, including "indie" gamers who wish that D&D had gone the way of plaid bell bottomed pants.
That looks to me like pretty slim pickings.
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jjarvis
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 278
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Post by jjarvis on Apr 10, 2009 5:52:08 GMT -6
Some modules/supplements did have conversion notes in the back of the book in the good old days.
But we really don't need any sort of uniform "Black Box", many of the game systems are FREE. If you can't figure it out, go get the rules and read what they say.
Last year my group played B2, Temple of Elemental Evil, some ancient judgesguild stuff, a rune quest scenario, rappan athuak and more (OD&D, D&D, AD&D, 2nd AD&D, C&C, RQ,3E, 3.5E) all using the BFRPG rule set. I did a quick note run to makes sure spells were in line with the rules I was using, otherwise I didn't worry too much and it was all fun.
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Post by dwayanu on Apr 10, 2009 6:00:55 GMT -6
Is that really the "new normal," then? Even in the somewhat eccentric population of potential D&Ders?
I don't think so. I suspect that's geek-think talking, the same weird point of view that brought the game to the straits it's in.
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jjarvis
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 278
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Post by jjarvis on Apr 10, 2009 6:50:30 GMT -6
I think it's the "old normal" . Bringing lots of different games together and playing them at your table is old-school.
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Post by apeloverage on Apr 10, 2009 7:10:07 GMT -6
The clones have just made it more difficult to publish using any "standard" rules. For just one example, which AC standard should be used? OSRIC's descending from 10, Labyrinth Lord's descending from 9, BFRPG's ascending from 11, or Sword & Wizardry's dual descending from 9 AND ascending from 10? It's more complicated than "back in the day." You could say "equivalent to chainmail" or similar. |
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Post by jimlotfp on Apr 10, 2009 7:21:51 GMT -6
The clones have just made it more difficult to publish using any "standard" rules. For just one example, which AC standard should be used? OSRIC's descending from 10, Labyrinth Lord's descending from 9, BFRPG's ascending from 11, or Sword & Wizardry's dual descending from 9 AND ascending from 10? It's more complicated than "back in the day." You could say "equivalent to chainmail" or similar. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. It's making statblocks look ugly though.  |
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Post by badger2305 on Apr 10, 2009 7:57:45 GMT -6
[rant]I have to admit to "not getting it." OD&D was a toolkit and was played many different ways back in the mid-1970s. I'm not sure where the "rules-purism" I see among many grognards today comes from. It was a (very tiny) minority position in the 1970s, IMHO. I've gotten lectured in email on the evils of some of the "optional rules for m74 I put in Ancients Aurguries and my post on Body Points and Hit Points for S&W -- claiming that such optional rules are "too far" from OD&D. This despite the fact that I was using an earlier form of the BP/HP split as early as 1977 or so. Body points and Hit points? Roger Musson wrote about this idea back in 1978 or so in White Dwarf - Gary took him to task for being 'too far from D&D' but that kind of thinking was seen as overly restrictive when Gary made his comment. Yup. Precisely. Early issues of Alarums & Excursions had spell point systems galore. Yep, yep, and yep. The idea that somehow you aren't playing D&D "the right way" if you modify it is...silly. You are playing D&D the way you want to, and THAT is "the right way." I agree completely. There is a real need to reject conformity for conformity's sake. |
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Post by ragnorakk on Apr 10, 2009 12:35:00 GMT -6
One thing that I think might be getting lost in the melee here is that
a common conversion document made publicly available can be
fetched by the module-writer or module-publisher or by the end-user.
It would be a cinch to edit and tack on to a PDF or whatever.
I'm very used to mashing game-systems together, converting stat-blocks
to fit the current one, etc...but when I was 13? 10? It took a while...
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Post by machfront on Apr 10, 2009 13:07:05 GMT -6
Back when I was 12 I didn't care. When I was in my teens I didn't care. In my, say, mid-20's, I did... and it was a real pain. Now, in my mid-30s, I'm back to not giving a rat's patookus, and I'm much happier for it.
Personally, I think this is a solution in search of a problem.
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Post by dwayanu on Apr 10, 2009 14:59:54 GMT -6
WOW. So, the "lingua franca" of OD&D is now irrelevant? (Which leaves the game relevant how?)
Or is the publishing issue repeatedly getting conflated with conformity in play? What I find really funny on that count is that the use of common D&D terminology was just a naturally convenient choice in the old days. It's the retro-cloners who are imposing legalese.
I'm increasingly inclined to call the imposition too much bother for me. Screw licenses! If I want to publish a D&D module, then I'll write it as just that.
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Post by snorri on Apr 10, 2009 15:30:29 GMT -6
Most words (armor class, hit points, allsmots all monster names,...) are either non-copyrightable or common ground of both rpgs and videogames. Wit the use of non-copyright names likes "Orignal editin" or "1974 rules", I guess the real need for a licence could be discussed. I undesrtand editors prefers to protect themselves - after all, the ogl doesn't impose too much, but it still allows a wide place to avoid it.
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Post by dwayanu on Apr 10, 2009 15:35:14 GMT -6
Heck, how about this:
Tusk riders (3): HP 12, 13, 14; POW 11; move 8; armor 2; spear 40%, 1d10+1
Spells: Healing 2, Demoralize
RuneQuest: Rejecting conformity since 1978.
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Post by Finarvyn on Apr 10, 2009 17:00:07 GMT -6
I think someone using S&W should be able to deal with "save versus X" references; if not, then that's something to address in the next edition. I have mentioned before my concern about the changes to spell names in S&W White Box. Dwayanu, the spell name issue is being discussed and I think we are planning to get WB back "on track" with this, assuming that Mythmere has no problems with it. Verhaden has expressed limited time but a willingness to undergo a re-format in order to make it happen. |
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busman
Level 6 Magician
Playing OD&D, once again. Since 2008!
Posts: 448
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Post by busman on Apr 11, 2009 0:34:49 GMT -6
I'm with you Dwaynu. While I really appreciate the efforts of S&W and the people who put all the time in to bring it together, it's just a reference for me, not a system that I'll hang my gaming on. There's only so much covering your ass that I can take before it's really something else. The language of the game is an important part of the game as much as vancian magic or class based play or anything else. If we're going to have a core ruleset from which to hang our continued efforts, it's got to be as close as it can be on all of those things, or it's something new. Otherwise, as you say, we might as well just publish a dungeon or magic item or the like for OD&D and be done with it.
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Post by badger2305 on Apr 11, 2009 10:40:23 GMT -6
Or is the publishing issue repeatedly getting conflated with conformity in play? I think you've hit it on the head with this. It is an important issue to publishers, but not so much so for players - if anything, it's the reverse. |
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