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It's important to keep in mind that AD&D was Of course in the long term, the AD&D-style design won out of the BECMI-style, but so it goes.
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Jan 20, 2015 11:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:From the DMG of AD&D: Yeah, my experience with the game only goes back as far 2E, so these snippets from the earlier editions is really interesting to me. I have this feeling that a lot of the problems we see today in grogs are because somewhere between AD&D 1 and 2 TSR pushed to ditch boards and miniatures. This essentially left a bunch of minis rules to try and describe more abstract concepts which they were really unsuited for. Fast forward a few decades and now D&D is viewed as a genetic fantasy role playing (and all the pomp that comes with that) with some optional minis stuff as opposed to a fantasy miniatures game with some optional other stuff tacked on. For some reason lots of people get really uncomfortable/indignant when these flaws are pointed out and the limitations of the minis rules are exposed.
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Jan 20, 2015 11:36
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ProfessorCirno posted:Here's the big secret: the early editions that grogs put on a pedestal, much like almost any revered past, never actually existed outside of their heads. Here's the other secret. There are three types of people left from the early days: 1: Social gamers. Who play to have fun with friends and don't care that much. 2: People who liked what was written. 3: People who fixed that nonsense - most of whom did it so long ago they've forgotten that it was ever there. The people who didn't like the way D&D was written simply walked away or played other games.
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Jan 20, 2015 13:19
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I have a bunch of old and less-old issues of Dragon I can mine, but the first thing that comes to mind actually got reprinted in the 3.5e Dragon Compendium hardcover: a rambling dozen-page explanation on why/how you should base your maps,on tesseracts. Because gently caress your players, that's why.
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Jan 20, 2015 14:29
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AmiYumi posted:I have a bunch of old and less-old issues of Dragon I can mine, but the first thing that comes to mind actually got reprinted in the 3.5e Dragon Compendium hardcover: a rambling dozen-page explanation on why/how you should base your maps,on tesseracts. Because gently caress your players, that's why. IIRC, the Dragon also published an adventure in Baba Yaga's hut that based its map on a tesseract.
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Jan 20, 2015 14:47
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Selachian posted:IIRC, the Dragon also published an adventure in Baba Yaga's hut that based its map on a tesseract. You might be confusing Dragon with Paizo's Pathfinder products, which use a tesseract as the inside of Baba Yaga's hut in the final adventure of Reign of Winter.
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Jan 20, 2015 15:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's computer-less MMORPGs, and they couldn't have people jumping from a normal server to one with 100x drop rates and the Warrior has Heroic Leap. I'm fascinated by this kind of play, because I started fairly recently and have only ever played with friends in a self-contained campaign. Was it expected, when AD&D was new, that players would carry their characters between campaigns with different DMs (and likely the same setting, barring Planescape/Spelljammer shenanigans)? I can just imagine someone showing up to a game with a wrinkled character sheet for their level 13 wizard with a ton of backstory based on actual play and it's kind of great, but great in that "I don't think I'd ever want that kind of play myself" way. I think I was always vaguely aware that some people played that way, but I've never really heard much about what it would be like. (Y'know, except for the first Community D&D episode where Neil talked about all the campaigns his character had been in.) Harrow fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 15:29
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Arivia posted:You might be confusing Dragon with Paizo's Pathfinder products, which use a tesseract as the inside of Baba Yaga's hut in the final adventure of Reign of Winter. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 15:29
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Harrow posted:I'm fascinated by this kind of play, because I started fairly recently and have only ever played with friends in a self-contained campaign. I don't have any personal experience with it myself, but my impression was that yes, you were supposed to be able to bring the same character to play across multiple DMs/tables. If we think of D&D as an offshoot of fantasy wargaming rules, then it makes sense: you can bring your Warhammer miniature army to play against different people and different terrains (subject to point limits) and it works and people do it all the time - RPGs are then just an army of one. I'm guessing that it just got so much trickier with D&D because the expectations were different: you weren't just banging painted mans together and going BOOM, you had to have a reason. IIRC Mike Mearls himself compared D&D modules like Keep on the Borderlands to MMO raids: it formed a shared experience; just as any two WoW players can look back on that time they killed Vaelastrasz to bind them to a larger community, so could D&D players think back and compare notes on how they found a way to beat the Cloudkill trap on room 34B or something.
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Jan 20, 2015 15:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's my impression that AD&D really was pushed to be played RAW as much as possible, and that the rules themselves covered as much ground as possible (culminating in AD&D 2E I suppose) because they were trying to run the 70s/80s version of Organized Play. It's almost like they're discouraging DM's from making on-the-spot rulings because you were supposed to be able to "plug-and-play" across multiple tables and know that what worked (or didn't work) with Jim the DM would also reach the same conclusion with Bob the DM. Edit: VVV Gygax and the other ground-floor TSR employees had a weird relationship with modules and campaign settings. Their reaction to the first premade adventure they saw (Palace of the Vampire Queen) was confusion as to why anybody would want someone else to create a setting or an adventure for them, instead of doing it themselves. They had originally planned to sell such exciting products as "Outdoor Geomorphs" and "Monster & Treasure Assortments," along with stuff that would've been taken over quickly by other vendors, like hex maps and graph paper. At some point, they figured out the value of modules and, later, campaign settings. From a business point of view, it was something they could sell. From a creative point of view, modules teach a lot about how the game is played. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 15:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't have any personal experience with it myself, but my impression was that yes, you were supposed to be able to bring the same character to play across multiple DMs/tables. If we think of D&D as an offshoot of fantasy wargaming rules, then it makes sense: you can bring your Warhammer miniature army to play against different people and different terrains (subject to point limits) and it works and people do it all the time - RPGs are then just an army of one. I'm guessing that it just got so much trickier with D&D because the expectations were different: you weren't just banging painted mans together and going BOOM, you had to have a reason. With that viewpoint, D&D modules suddenly make a lot more sense to me. I sort of came to DMing/GMing with the intention of building my own setting and adventures from the start, so I never really entertained the idea of running modules. I hadn't really thought of them as shared experiences before. Hypothetically, if every DM runs AD&D RAW and runs every module RAW, players at dozens of tables could be having very similar experiences playing AD&D. That's kind of cool, but, well, I'll be damned if I'm ever going to run another game of D&D RAW again (well, maybe 4e with the Inherent Bonuses variant).
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Jan 20, 2015 15:50
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They may have intended RAW franchise consistency for tournament play. However when I was twelve we weren't reading those directions imbedded in Dragon or going to conventions expecting it either. When we finally figured out how the hell AD&D weapon speed was supposed to worked, we added it to our game. I am not sure that even lasted one one session. AD&D was impossible to run as written.
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Jan 20, 2015 16:03
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Dragon Forum, issue 119, circa March 1987 posted:Has anybody out there noticed that there are no female strength limits in Oriental Adventures? I thought not. Unfortunately, we must understand that the whole purpose of the aforementioned book is to make adventuring possible in a specific culture, and that culture did not happen to be very egalitarian. Women were most definitely not encouraged to become great warriors in feudal Japan. Any full-blooded medieval Oriental male would feel a great loss of honor serving a woman! Female Oriental characters should not really be samurai or the like. Who would have trained them?If you happen to be running a serious campaign, female warriors just don’t fit into most cultures, especially an Oriental culture (in fantasy novels, yes, but not medieval China). This provoked several responses in later issues, although not nearly as many as the guy who claimed banded mail didn't exist or the guy who thought low-level magic-users were underpowered.
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Jan 20, 2015 16:20
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The world before Wikipedia seems like caveman days.
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Jan 20, 2015 16:35
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Arivia posted:You might be confusing Dragon with Paizo's Pathfinder products, which use a tesseract as the inside of Baba Yaga's hut in the final adventure of Reign of Winter. No. I actually took the 30 seconds to look it up this time, and the original tesseract-based "Dancing Hut" adventure was in Dragon #83. I actually tried to run it back in the day; the players didn't even bother trying to figure out the tesseract and just started picking doors at random and going "Oh, we're in this room again."
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Jan 20, 2015 17:12
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drunkencarp posted:This provoked several responses in later issues, although not nearly as many as the guy who claimed banded mail didn't exist or the guy who thought low-level magic-users were underpowered. I thought the argument was that splint mail and banded mail didn't exist in Medieval Western Europe, and were based on Oakeshott's misinterpretation of medieval illustrations. Studded leather armor didn't exist either. Basically, chain mail was drawn in a lot of different ways, as was brigandine armor. I mean, banded armor existed as lorica segmenta, scale mail existed as lorica squamata, and splint mail (or lamellar) was used by a lot of near eastern cultures, but none of them were used in the high middle ages/early renaissance that D&D pretends to be. Basically, everything wrong about weapons and armor in D&D can be traced back to the fact Gary Gygax relied heavily on one very dated source.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:22
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moths posted:The world before Wikipedia seems like caveman days. quote:An onna-bugeisha (女武芸者?) was a type of female warrior belonging to the Japanese upper class. Many wives, widows, daughters, and rebels answered the call of duty by engaging in battle, commonly alongside samurai men. They were members of the bushi (samurai) class in feudal Japan and were trained in the use of weapons to protect their household, family, and honour in times of war. They also represented a divergence from the traditional 'housewife' role of the Japanese woman. They are sometimes referred to as female samurai. Significant icons such as Empress Jingu, Tomoe Gozen, Nakano Takeko, and Hōjō Masako are famous examples of onna bugeisha.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:23
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Y'all's commitment to refuting 28-year-old grog is super commendable.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:42
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drunkencarp posted:Y'all's commitment to refuting 28-year-old grog is super commendable.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:48
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Harrow posted:Was it expected, when AD&D was new, that players would carry their characters between campaigns with different DMs (and likely the same setting, barring Planescape/Spelljammer shenanigans)? It's also why the "Monty Haul" DM was so despised. In a modern self-contained campaign it doesn't matter if a DM gives out lots of magic items or accelerates leveling. Getting uptight about that sounds like "they didn't earn their fun" bullshit, right? But if characters are portable between tables, suddenly you can have someone from a MH group drop in on a table playing RAW and totally blow out the power curve.
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Jan 20, 2015 17:53
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drunkencarp posted:Y'all's commitment to refuting 28-year-old grog is super commendable. A) People who whine about historical versimilitude being wrong about history is always hilarious. B) This is a nerd forum. We correct people when they are wrong. Doesn't matter if they're dead or fictional or Lord Gygax himself.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:08
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Pretty much what Bendigeidfran said: I found it funny that someone claiming historical veracity can be so wrong about history. Although to be fair, anyone that goes 'LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT JAPANESE HONOUR CULTURE' usually knows gently caress-all about actual historical Japan.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:20
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Harrow posted:With that viewpoint, D&D modules suddenly make a lot more sense to me. I sort of came to DMing/GMing with the intention of building my own setting and adventures from the start, so I never really entertained the idea of running modules. I really like modules for me B/X games, but I pretty much just use them for low-effort variety. I have one megadungeon that I use as the core of my setting, and then whenever the players want to spend a few weeks doing something else I usually break out a few modules and see what they're interested in. It's still a custom world, but most early modules are really just locations you can plop into your game wherever. Eventually modules got more and more prefabbed story-based, which made them both way more railroady/bad and also hard to insert into a pre-existing world, but most early AD&D modules are pretty flexible.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:31
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Tekopo posted:Pretty much what Bendigeidfran said: I found it funny that someone claiming historical veracity can be so wrong about history. Although to be fair, anyone that goes 'LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT JAPANESE HONOUR CULTURE' usually knows gently caress-all about actual historical Japan. Brother, have you heard the good news about Kaidan: A Japanese Ghost Story?
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Jan 20, 2015 18:42
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Bendigeidfran posted:A) People who whine about historical versimilitude being wrong about history is always hilarious. B) This is a nerd forum. We correct people when they are wrong. Doesn't matter if they're dead or fictional or Lord Gygax himself. Tekopo posted:Pretty much what Bendigeidfran said: I found it funny that someone claiming historical veracity can be so wrong about history. Although to be fair, anyone that goes 'LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT JAPANESE HONOUR CULTURE' usually knows gently caress-all about actual historical Japan. But... but... Gygax-sama!?  Halloween Jack posted:Edit: VVV Gygax and the other ground-floor TSR employees had a weird relationship with modules and campaign settings. Their reaction to the first premade adventure they saw (Palace of the Vampire Queen) was confusion as to why anybody would want someone else to create a setting or an adventure for them, instead of doing it themselves. They had originally planned to sell such exciting products as "Outdoor Geomorphs" and "Monster & Treasure Assortments," along with stuff that would've been taken over quickly by other vendors, like hex maps and graph paper. For exciting products, see Gygax's passioned plea for people to use metric in the RPG that forces you to calculate the human population based upon growth over time and pre- and post-BeetleBorg apocalypse! http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons-and-dragons/cyborg-gygax-1987/10/ http://www.somethingawful.com/dungeons-and-dragons/cyborg-gygax-1987/3/ This whole talk about nerds who go 'LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HONORABURU JAPANESE CULTURE, GAIJIN-SAMA' does remind me of a truism. Most people who indulge in a hobby or a topical area are just really interested in that and are pretty OK about their enthusiasm for it. Then along comes Cat-Piss Man to ruin it for everyone, because he's the guy everyone thinks about when they hear that you like [insert hobby here]. Because your clear objective was to [insert CPM objective here] just like him, instead of [insert something reasonable].
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Jan 20, 2015 19:35
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LuiCypher posted:This whole talk about nerds who go 'LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HONORABURU JAPANESE CULTURE, GAIJIN-SAMA' does remind me of a truism. Most people who indulge in a hobby or a topical area are just really interested in that and are pretty OK about their enthusiasm for it.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:39
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Halloween Jack posted:The majority of people in Kaidan are xenophobic, perhaps even racist. The government of the empire, like Japan, enforced a closed state for much of its history. Outsiders aren't welcome and citizens are not allowed to leave. Like Japan, the people of Kaidan label those not from Kaidan as 'gaijin' which is a derogatory word for outsider or barbarian. There is even a small port, the only port where outsiders are allowed to land called Gaijinoshima - which is kind of a conjunction of Gaijin no Shima, which means island of the outsiders. The borders of Kaidan have only recently opened to outsiders, the island village of Gaijinoshima was given its name just recently with the allowance of the first 'gaijin' merchant ships, a few years before the start of the adventure timeline. What the gently caress is this and why are these horrible people in my hobby? Edit: I didn't believe it and I had to look it up. Link here: http://www.ritepublishing.com/images/Kaidan_The_Preview_PFRPG.pdf LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 19:42
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LuiCypher posted:What the gently caress is this and why are these horrible people in my hobby? For those not in on the gag: the creator of Kaidan was a former poster on RPG.net and was known for using the slimmest possible excuses for mentioning his game in thread after thread after thread.
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Jan 20, 2015 20:58
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ocrumsprug posted:They may have intended RAW franchise consistency for tournament play. However when I was twelve we weren't reading those directions imbedded in Dragon or going to conventions expecting it either. I used it all. You need to be prepared to slow down and look stuff up, and then it kind of works. Weapon speed doesn't really come up often as it's more of a thing during surprise rounds and ties. Strike priority, weapon vs. AC and a couple of other things make AD&D a completely different game that's significantly grittier. For instance, bows kind of suck until you use the rules that say they always go first and last each round, when they help you mow down opponents charging into melee. The game is generally designed for a totally different mentality, where you take time to consult the book and have a chat about how it works and how you want it to work. It *is* clunky and teenage me would never have touched it, but the output is interesting.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:16
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MalcolmSheppard posted:I used it all. You need to be prepared to slow down and look stuff up, and then it kind of works. Weapon speed doesn't really come up often as it's more of a thing during surprise rounds and ties. Strike priority, weapon vs. AC and a couple of other things make AD&D a completely different game that's significantly grittier. For instance, bows kind of suck until you use the rules that say they always go first and last each round, when they help you mow down opponents charging into melee. The game is generally designed for a totally different mentality, where you take time to consult the book and have a chat about how it works and how you want it to work. It *is* clunky and teenage me would never have touched it, but the output is interesting.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:34
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A read-through of AD&D to attempt to suss out the "design intent" or practical effect of every rule would be an interesting project.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:A read-through of AD&D to attempt to suss out the "design intent" or practical effect of every rule would be an interesting project.
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Jan 20, 2015 22:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:A read-through of AD&D to attempt to suss out the "design intent" or practical effect of every rule would be an interesting project. I would read an analysis of this. Probably not the book itself. That prose is just too much. I did my "dense, overwritten prose" time in grad school. (I'd say it's the reason I left academia, but academia is actually the reason I left academia.)
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Jan 20, 2015 22:10
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You guys are missing the funniest part of that grog. It's the end, where he goes "maybe female characters would be ok if you weren't running a serious campaign like some kind of fantasy novel." It's the most basic expression of sexism grog. I can handle dragons and wizards, but female characters, whoh there buddy.
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Jan 20, 2015 22:15
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It's even better than that. He's basically saying that the rules for Oriental Adventures, which is full of ninja magic and yokai in the magical land of Kara-Tur, are totally appropriate for a serious campaign set in like 15th-century Ming China. Racism and sexism are old hat for grogs. This dude intends to use D&D to simulate actual history. Imagine the possibilities! Druids turn back Caesar's invasion of Gaul with a swarm of 10,000 flying bears. Warring States-era Japan is unified by a man who leaps over Mt. Fuji and convinces everyone that he is the
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Jan 20, 2015 23:15
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Bendigeidfran posted:This dude intends to use D&D to simulate actual history. Edit: A reminder: quote:When I have someone run in my world for the first time, in the usual way I would describe what they see: it might, for instance, go like this: Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 23:28
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The mustard man, with his painstakingly elaborate grognards-idea-of-medieval-europe-but-with-orcs-and-no-gays-version of D&D, always struck me as the ur-grog. To hell with Tarnowski and Zak and Frank and all the others, here's a guy who's so deeply entrenched in his vision of the game he doesn't even need players at the table. If anything, players with their pesky "ideas" and "wants" are errors that need to be corrected, since they do not match up to what he has build his version of D&D to be. It is some sort of fantastical sci-fi construct, an Asimov robot broken by the Three Rules in a way that both mystifies and horrifies.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:36
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Also if the party has a fighter he can hang around in shops til he hears about mustard prices, then go fight the mustard.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:42
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What's wrong with that last quote? You could just end up trying to role play an honest shopkeeper, in the example given. Every session would start just like you'd open up a shop, sweep and restock, all the niceties. Earn a little money, maybe climb the social ladder instead of being a murder hobo. I've played Econ simulator and model UN with RPG's before. Or keep it in the smaller scale if it's supposed to be "realistic". The Sims is like the most popular RPG and that's all you do in there. Chill la Chill fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 00:04
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As usual, the problem with grog is not necessarily the idea (a low fantasy game about being mustard merchants could be fun if that's your thing) but with the assumption that that is the only realistic and acceptable way to play.
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