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Post by rickno7 on May 17, 2014 6:24:58 GMT -8
Going to get hypothetical here:
What if tomorrow WOTC went bankrupt and Hasbro decided that instead of selling the IP, they lock down the D&D name and toss away the key. Is the world better off with no D&D at the head(top 5) of the hobby? Would the hosts personally miss D&D if it was gone? Does age of the host play a factor in their thoughts on this question? I ask that because sometimes people that can remember a time without something(Personal computers for example) usually think we can do without much easier than people that literally can not remember a time without it. I think this could lead into a very strange discussion, in that even though 4th was a horrible system(to many people), is D&D not the leading edge of fantasy gaming? There are several different genre growing in popularity, many would say because people are tired of "aging" systems like 4th ed and Pathfinder. In the top 5, 4th Ed and Pathfinder are the only ones whose rules are 10+ years old. Is D&D not leading the hobby's evolution? Would FATE and Apocalypse World based games be as popular if it wasn't for the super crunchy, super rulesy D&D for them to contrast their style again? Did not GURPs and Rolemaster come into being as a rejection of D&D back in their day as well? Good or bad versions of D&D seem to me to inspire the industry in all ways, and even though it seems like the hosts have grown "past" D&D, at all age levels represented in the hosts, D&D still dominates the "why's" and "how's" of their gaming.
(if this topic is used in the podcast, feel free to chop up re-order those questions above into something much easier to read on air)
What inspired this question? Nintendo. My pals and I have not been huge fans of Nintendo for a very long time. I personally feel like the Wii damaged the video game hobby in ways we're still feeling. I do not get excited about newly announced Nintendo produced games because they're just not targeted toward me or aren't doing anything I haven't done a dozen times in the past 10 years(my opinion). But then when Nintendo's financials were shown to be getting pretty bad, suddenly my heart grew 3 sizes that day, and I decided I did not want to be in a world without Nintendo. I can't imagine my as-yet-to-exist children growing up without a Nintendo branded console on the TV.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on May 17, 2014 11:45:13 GMT -8
When the advocacy of blind system play died in D&D, the brand died as far as I am concerned. It was a dark day for the hobby empire as it became permeated by hordes of bickering munchins. Lots have been said about being too young to play AD&D 1e the “right” way, which is a regretful commentary, IMHO, on the current ideation within the hobby – both from the players and from the game designers. Such comments like we did not understand the rules, who could understand the rules , we just skipped [that], we never used that (intimating “we” were doing it wrong) tend to forget that really, in actual fact according to the rules, AD&D 1e could not be played wrong because the system was supposed to be unique to the table that played it to a large but not a complete extent.. (That was part of the successful branding of D&D as Everyman’s game.) The wrong way to play fell upon the players, as a collective, to fix and tailor to their fun. The system was never meant to stand apart form its players. GURPS was, in deed, an inspired reaction to unique systems by trying to be a comprehensive formulaic system for every man. I thought this quote was rather telling from the group on LinkedIn: “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons had a lot of crunch to it, but no-one used most of it, and so as D&D has progressed, one of the things that we've seen in a lot of relatively simple detail put into making characters different from one another in clearly defined mechanical ways. Some games are perfectly willing to allow certain things to be mechanically identical and then allow GMs to, on-the-fly, determine how they are actually different in the game world, while others are pretty adamant about making sure that any choice a player makes has a clear mechanical difference from any other choice they could make in that situation. That often leads to a rapidly-multiplying set of options, which drives up page counts, which makes books larger and more expensive. And when those rules are broken out into supplements, there is a loss of efficiency, which drives relative prices even higher.
”It also makes games more intimidating and opaque to newcomers. Intimidating because here you have a game with a rules set the size of a small novella, and it becomes clear that when experienced players are involved that there are right choices and wrong choices, and opaque because it's really hard to pick up what's going on by watching. I can't remember the last time I watched a role-playing game in progress, and said. "This particular game looks like fun." (What interested an ex-girlfriend of mine in the hobby was not watching other people play, but the fact that a game was made from a comic book she dearly loved, and so she was stoked about the chance to go and participate in that world.)
”I think that big, glossy, expensive books full of dense text don't scare people away as much as they don't invite them in.” Big glossy expensive tomes of rules do not advocate a blind system play, no matter what little bones get thrown to the GM. The nonverbal message is clear. That blind system play charm is gone from the comprehension of RPGs and its Millennials (Gen Y) player, like your example of a TV without a Nintendo console atop of it.
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Post by Forresst on May 18, 2014 0:36:29 GMT -8
It seems to me that the biggest thing that would go away if D&D suddenly disappeared would be any chance of brand recognition for any RPG in a non-enthusiast. I say this mostly because if I need to quickly explain what the hell I'm on about to someone who has NO idea what Traveller or Savage Worlds or Dungeon World or whatever is, I just say "It's D&D except (condition here)". Nobody ever comes back after that with "what's D&D?" Everyone knows what D&D is, and although that could be a good or bad thing depending on their context with the name, it's eponymous in a way that no other game is. I'm sure that eventually, a decade or two down the road, a different system would become that name of the hobby, but in all that time I feel like the market would shrink because it would get ten times harder to explain to a potential recruit just what the hell is going on.
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Post by Kainguru on May 18, 2014 1:15:02 GMT -8
It would be like so many things . . . there are enough 'products' floating out there to keep the brand 'alive'. Eventually the next dominant product would replace the brand as a universal identifier. I have 2 examples, using consoles, that demonstrate this: 1. The original X-Box has a die-hard fanbase, even with persons as young as 12. The machines are refurbished and resold and the games are recirculated by those same dealers. The youngling in my household is the only person who fires up this aging console . . . though for him the games are still 'fresh' (ie: not yet played to death). 2. Way back when Sega was synonymous with consoles, they even the sponsored the rebuild of the children's hospital I used to work at. 20 years later I don't think any child sitting on the 'Sega' ward would have a clue why it was named that or what it is supposed to 'mean' - because in that time 'PlayStation' and 'X-Box' have usurped that role and become the universal brands. More than likely that particular ward has had it's name changed due to the downsizing of Sega and in response to the cessation of free consoles it used to supply. If 'coke cola' disappeared would we all stop calling it's various copies 'coke' or 'cola'. The term D&D has out grown it's ownership as an IP . . . Aaron
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Post by ayslyn on May 18, 2014 4:41:39 GMT -8
In the top 5, 4th Ed and Pathfinder are the only ones whose rules are 10+ years old. Shadowrun was published in '89. By any of the criteria you could really be using to judge a top five, it grabs a slot. Rolemaster came into being as a supplement to D&D and Runequest that could (once Character Law was released) be played as it's own game.
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Post by HourEleven on May 18, 2014 6:51:24 GMT -8
The current set of rules for Shadowrun are absolutely nothing like the ones we used in 1990 (neither is the setting). It's been "updated" within an inch of its life.
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Post by ayslyn on May 18, 2014 9:06:39 GMT -8
And D&D hasn't?
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Post by Kainguru on May 18, 2014 9:57:41 GMT -8
The current set of rules for Shadowrun are absolutely nothing like the ones we used in 1990 (neither is the setting). It's been "updated" within an inch of its life. For the better? . . . personally I don't mind the updated mechanics since 2nd but have always rather been disapproving of the setting updates. 4th ed, to my mind, added details and made extrapolations from the original 'canon' that I basically wished they'd left as well alone: instead of a basic framework from which to 'hang a campaign' they only served to constrain and impose a direction . . . Aaron
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Post by ayslyn on May 18, 2014 20:56:36 GMT -8
I understand where they were going with the changes in 4e. Technology has come a long way since Shadowrun and Cyberpunk came out. We've got tiny little devices in our pockets that have more computing power than our top-of-the-line desktops did back then. Plus, everything went wireless. It made the suspension of disbelief hard for some people.
With 5e they've started to find that middle ground between keeping up with our wireless craze, and the old-school "plug a wire into my head" ascetic that the game came from.
And honestly, HourEleven is wrong. The current rules for Shadowrun aren't all that different from previous editions. In 4e they switched from target numbers to number of "hits". It's still a d6 dice pool.
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Post by HourEleven on May 18, 2014 23:14:40 GMT -8
If by, "it still has a d6 dice pool," you mean "it uses multiple d6s, but you don't have to keep track of both number of dice and variable target number; you don't get to divide up your combat pool tactically - selecting how many to reserve for soak while still having enough to aim that shot, etc.; no auto exploding 6s; completely different probabilities across the boards," then yeah it's kinda similar.
I'm not familiar with 5e, but I'm assuming they didn't do a huge rule rollback between 4 and 5. The jump from 3 to 4 was absurd changes across the board.
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Post by ayslyn on May 18, 2014 23:45:52 GMT -8
Codswallop.
The changes between 3 and 4 were not nearly as bad as you are trying to make them sound.
There was the change from TN to hits which made exploding dice obsolete.
There were still tactical decisions to be made with your die pool. And new tactical choices as to how you defend yourself.
Essence and how it worked stayed the same. As did Magic. As did Adepts, Initiations, and a bunch of other things.
All in all, 3e to 4e for Shadowrun was a MUCH smaller change than 3e to 4e D&D.
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Post by Arcona on May 19, 2014 1:07:44 GMT -8
If D&D disappeared tomorrow noone would notice... I dont care for all the doom and gloom malarkey about D&D having died a long time ago and such bullshit but at the same time the hobby has grown. Old kooks can keep trying to harrow us about how doomed we all are because we abandoned the one true word of God just cause of a sentence in a 30 year old book but they are unfortunately as blind as the system they say they loved. I am really happy in this modern day and age... because the fact that D&D as an IP could die tomorrow and the hobby would go on is the real marvel here. In the 80s if D&D died, the RPG world would be devastated. Nowadays with Pathfinder, Warhammer 40k RPGs, Warhammer Fantasy RPGs, World of Darkness, Apocalypse World, GURPS and the million other flavors of indie, hippie and alternative role playing games the hobby is diverse, beautiful and EXPANDING. It is out of the closet and it is on its way up as evident from the HUGE amounts of money that is dropped by hundreds of thousands of fans on kickstarter projects! RPGs are here, they can even be queer and people have to deal with it! And to close by answering the question, I have never (in my entire gaming life of 21 years out of a total of 35 ) said to someone 'what are rpgs? errr.... you know D&D right?'. There are so many more correct and ideal ways to explain the hobby! I recently got the wife of a guy I wanted to recruit for a game to say "oh! that sounds cool... can I play along with David?" from the description alone... and the words dungeon or dragon did not even appear in my mind
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Post by HourEleven on May 19, 2014 6:04:39 GMT -8
Comparing edition jumps: yeah, the DnD jump was a series of huge mechanical changes, the shadow run jump was a million small detail changes to unify every aspect. GMing 1-3rd shadow run was (like most games at the time) a process of exceptions. Every situation had specific fiddly little modifiers that applied exclusively to it. A brand new GM would have a much much much easier time stepping into 4th because every page doesn't have an "except when..." on it (dodge is a tn 4, but damage resist is tn weapon power minus armor). GMing the two feels completely different because the details are completely different (the difference between shifting the tn down one on a 4 dice pool roll, or adding 2 dice to the roll are mathematically drastically different - and 3rd edition GMs had that option). Things like Contested rolls that don't use the opponents stat for target numbers are much smoother, or reducing the types of tests to the usual three, adding Qualities, adding edge; all things a GM would expect to see in a system today. The fact they didn't have to burn it to the ground and start over is just a testament to how far ahead of its time it was, but under the hood the details make it feel very different (probably less so for players than GMs). Were I to learn today I would much rather learn on 4th, but 2nd will always be the edition that really captures the feeling of shadow run for me.
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Post by guitarspider on May 19, 2014 8:57:29 GMT -8
It seems to me that the biggest thing that would go away if D&D suddenly disappeared would be any chance of brand recognition for any RPG in a non-enthusiast. I say this mostly because if I need to quickly explain what the hell I'm on about to someone who has NO idea what Traveller or Savage Worlds or Dungeon World or whatever is, I just say "It's D&D except (condition here)". Nobody ever comes back after that with "what's D&D?" Everyone knows what D&D is, and although that could be a good or bad thing depending on their context with the name, it's eponymous in a way that no other game is. I'm sure that eventually, a decade or two down the road, a different system would become that name of the hobby, but in all that time I feel like the market would shrink because it would get ten times harder to explain to a potential recruit just what the hell is going on. You know, maybe that would be good. I mean why are we explaining games like AW, which play nothing like D&D, with "it's like D&D?" Isn't that just plain lazy and adds to the perception of the hobby being one thing which it most defitintely isn't anymore?
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Post by HourEleven on May 19, 2014 9:12:15 GMT -8
I mean why are we explaining games like AW, which play nothing like D&D, with "it's like D&D?" Isn't that just plain lazy and adds to the perception of the hobby being one thing which it most defitintely isn't anymore? That reminds me of when I was doing some IT at my mother's office and she says things like "I'll make a xerox of it" when in actuality she will put it on the ultra amazing high speed (cannon) scanner that will spit out a duplicate over the network to the (brother) color laser printer. It's about as different as you can get from the grainy black and white facsimile "xeroxing" connotes. But all the other people in her office say the same thing and understand what they mean.
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