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Post by CreativeCowboy on Jul 27, 2012 8:09:43 GMT -8
Hi Stu,
I say Gygax actually covers those 4 tenant points, in the DMG, decades before Finch; although the "heroic not superheroic" is more left to GM judgment with the advice to start all player characters at 1st level for brand new players.
I believe that when a GM (player) has to point to a published rule to justify his or her ruling, the social dynamic is not optimized on trust foundation: the dog is on a leash rather than free roaming. I make the distinction between having players converse about a published rule, to grok it, versus a player (GM) pissing contest: "look it says so right here!"
The social dynamic is, to my mind, extremely important. It is not necessary for all the players to adjust to the one asshole in the group in what is essentially ...what? industry political correctness?
So while Finch makes a good many valid points in his definition, he and I may disagree about OSR being system agnostic. But I am not buying the myopia he is selling.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Jul 27, 2012 8:15:24 GMT -8
I wouldn't say that modern rpgs are like computer games though, that would be an unfair generalisation, the only one that tries to be one is D&D 4e. Hi. No. I am not saying anything about systems. Crunchy or not. My definition of a "tabletop video game" is when the play is restricted (by player over dependence, possibly encouraged by game rule book framing) to codified/published rules. This also diminishes the social aspect of play. It boils the game down to so many rolls, like a boardgame. This is a natural falacy I read imbedded into Finch's definition.
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Post by Stu Venable on Jul 27, 2012 8:17:39 GMT -8
Finch pretty much assumes dungeon crawls.
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Post by rickno7 on Jul 27, 2012 8:19:35 GMT -8
After you read Mr. Finch's book you will realize two things: 1. He blames other games for "ruining" roleplaying. 2. He mistakenly thinks that everything changed around the year 2000. I would also deduce that Mr. Finch didn't play anything BUT DnD until 2000, because if he did, he would know that: - Character skills showed up at least as early as 1977 with Traveller. - Edge case rules showed up in spades in GURPS in 1986, and existed in plenty of games before that. - Superpower games showed at least as early as 1981 with Champions. It is as if he got talked into trying something other than his tired-and-true DnD around 2000 and had an epiphany that "all these people are doing it wrong." All of that aside, his definition of OSR is a useful one, though his vision is a bit myopic. Thank you Stu. I've never liked Finch's take on things and you finally put it in a way I have not been able to. There's a lot of old school gamers that treat this primer as the gospel. Much of what he says just seems like rules to good gameplay, not some mystical way of playing exclusive to the late 70s. It IS great advice on gaming. I happen to think his blame is almost 100% misplaced. He got a diagnosis right, but his cause for the symptoms is rather petty.
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Post by Stu Venable on Jul 27, 2012 9:22:03 GMT -8
Yes. Gygax did indeed hit on many of these points as necessary assumptions for his game. I would say that other game designers began testing (or ignoring some of these assumptions) very early on, and in some cases with good reason.
Things like "Player Skill not Character Ability" should not be taken dogmatically, otherwise we'd all be playing ourselves. The socially awkward role player would never get to play the charismatic face-man if there wasn't some sort of rules structure to give his character a fair shot at doing what the player couldn't.
I would point out that Gygax was on record being a dungeon-crawl-loving, player-vs-gm kind of gamer. He spoke with derision about "play-actors."
He was NOT a role-player, though he (among others) invented the hobby.
I think he and his attitudes are among the reasons we find "GM vs Player" attitudes with many DMs (and players) playing DnD.
Finch is definitely a student of this style of play.
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Post by Kainguru on Jul 27, 2012 9:31:08 GMT -8
Hi Stu Creativecowboy Rickno7 et al, I totally agree that Mr Finch was very myopic . . . Assuming exclusively dungeon crawls as indicative of all 70's and 80's RPG's certainly equates an incredibly narrow range of experiences. My favourite AD&D 1ed Suppliment, at the time, was the Wilderness Survival Guide . . . as well as the plethora of outdoor adventure articles in the likes of White Dwarf and Dragon magazine. The problem I think Mr Finch had was in taking the term Dungeon as literal . . . when it was in fact a generic affectation much like 'paths' in Pathfinder; a quick flick through my ageing DMG shows this time and again where Gary Gygax references 'dungeons' as synomous with 'adventures' which could be either wilderness, city or underground (or a mixture of all three). In fact in the PHB he explicitly states that the city adventure is the hardest and most perilous for the careless adventurer (toss a fireball in the town square and see how far one can get . . . cause nothing's going to save you from the immediate retribution of that high level magic user who lives nearby and has pledged himself to the security of said town and townsfolk). I do agree with Rickno7 that taken in context, with a dash of common sense, much (not all) of Mr Finch's advice is very good advice. I'd argue that Mr Finch has any more or less authority than anyone else in defining OSR or the specifics of the OSR experience . . . The OSR movement predates Mr Finch's primer which makes it more a subjective observation of ongoing events rather than the authoritative magna carta he (Finch) wishes to presuppose. I think CC hit the nail on the head . . . It has a lot to do with the relationship between the players and the GM. Though kicking out arsehole players can sometimes not be an option when they're first and foremost a close personal friend . . . Then you just roll with it and, believe it or not, you can still have a good time (it just requires a little more effort from the GM to mediate that players actions - but it depends on what kind of arsehole you're confronted with). Cheers
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Post by Stu Venable on Jul 27, 2012 9:43:18 GMT -8
And since I'm on my high horse about Gygax...
That DM vs Player approach to the game has very likely turned away countless potential role-players over the decades.
I have several friends who tried the game in the 1970s and 1980s and were immediately turned off because their characters died because they did something the DM deemed "stupid," but would seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to try.
I'm not saying that playing that type of dungeon-crawling, traps-on-every-door type of game isn't fun sometimes. It is, but I don't think it's conducive to newcomers.
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Post by Kainguru on Jul 27, 2012 9:47:58 GMT -8
Yes. Gygax did indeed hit on many of these points as necessary assumptions for his game. I would say that other game designers began testing (or ignoring some of these assumptions) very early on, and in some cases with good reason. Things like "Player Skill not Character Ability" should not be taken dogmatically, otherwise we'd all be playing ourselves. The socially awkward role player would never get to play the charismatic face-man if there wasn't some sort of rules structure to give his character a fair shot at doing what the player couldn't. I would point out that Gygax was on record being a dungeon-crawl-loving, player-vs-gm kind of gamer. He spoke with derision about "play-actors." He was NOT a role-player, though he (among others) invented the hobby. I think he and his attitudes are among the reasons we find "GM vs Player" attitudes with many DMs (and players) playing DnD. Finch is definitely a student of this style of play. Then you get his change in style once he was kicked out of TSR . . . Mythus aka Dangerous Journeys from GDW was a huge departure from the AD&D principles. LedJendary (not misspelt) was yet another reverse in the other direction and concentrated very much on character as character and 'role' play. There is an interesting transcript online of a long interview/discussion with GG just before he died . . . Unfortunately much of what was said in that interview contradicts what your above statement Stu . . . Though it is truer of Robert Kuntz's stated preference in play. Kuntz (pronounced like you think . . . Hur hur) and GG had a falling out over the publishing of GreyHawk Ruins/Castle through Troll Lords . . . GG wanted to (and did) rework it to blend better with new RPG sensibilities while RK believed that it should have been released unaltered from the original notes. I had a brief online discussion with GG about GreyHawk city and poor public perception of gamers literally weeks before he died. I went on holiday to Bucharest . . . Limited internet access and came back to find out he'd passed away . . . From the other discussions he was having with others on the forum I got the general impression that he was in favour of immersion and 'role' playing. Maybe age mellowed him, maybe he grew with the hobby as we have . . . I certainly not the same type of gamer I was when I was 14 and nor would I wish to be . . .
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Post by Kainguru on Jul 27, 2012 9:52:28 GMT -8
I have several friends who tried the game in the 1970s and 1980s and were immediately turned off because their characters died because they did something the DM deemed "stupid," but would seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to try. Totally agree, but then we've all been that Douche DM at least once or twice . . . Especially when we started. There were no guidelines or examples and the whole using the rules to punish peers was more a symptom of spotty faced hormone driven adolescent irrational rivalry than anything to do with the game - that kinda shit was happening on the cricket pitch, the tennis court, the chess club, the rugby field . . . That was high school and why we all hated it until we left . . . (well I hated it . . . And for about a good five years after I left . . . I mean university was much more fun: sex and drugs and rock and roll . . . )
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Post by jazzisblues on Jul 27, 2012 10:10:00 GMT -8
Not sure why because I'm a pretty competitive person, but I always wanted the pc's to win. I never felt it necessary as a gm to beat the pc's down. Dont' get me wrong, I've done a lot of stupid crap as a gm but oddly not that one.
Curious,
JiB
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Post by Kainguru on Jul 27, 2012 10:42:40 GMT -8
Not sure why because I'm a pretty competitive person, but I always wanted the pc's to win. I never felt it necessary as a gm to beat the pc's down. Dont' get me wrong, I've done a lot of stupid crap as a gm but oddly not that one. Curious, JiB As I've said in other posts if my past players knew how many times I'd fudged in their favour . . . they knew I fudged but not half as much as I actually did: two can play the game of 'set up the die roll you want near the screen, just out of DM view, and pretend to roll (yep they cheated, I knew all along)' . . . the difference was in the die rolls I had set up, they were low for when I needed that fudge in their favour. Best of all they never knew that . . . I wanted tension not a TPK and I imagine that if they'd have known the truth they'd have never spent so much time trying to shore up their bets by cheating (not every player did mind you). (I just hope those players are not lurking on this forum . . . because after 20+ years of keeping mum the secret is out . . . One of them is in South Africa at the moment so what are odds??? . . . Patto is that you there? . . . )
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Jul 27, 2012 14:00:28 GMT -8
It's midnight here and my eyes are closing... so I am off to bed. BUT I have to say: Yes. Gygax did indeed hit on many of these points as necessary assumptions for his game. I would say that other game designers began testing (or ignoring some of these assumptions) very early on, and in some cases with good reason. Different games emphasize different thematic engrossments, so there is good reason for different games and systems that reflect these achievements and innovations, sometimes building upon what was before and sometimes creating new from whole cloth. This testing makes each game different though not necessarily or objectively betters by comparison. I know players who have borrowed concepts from one game to adapt them into another. However, in the context of this discussion, building “better games” through tighter rules with the specific purpose to edge out douche players quickly slides down the old logical fallacy of rule doctrines being able to ban douche from games. This fallacy is correlated to the rationale that if those players would just understand The Rules, they would be set free from being a douche - like girlfriends trying to reason with abusive boyfriends. This did not work out with Old Testament Rules making The Chosen more acceptable to God or with the laxer Rules in the case of the New Testament making Christians more Christian. The same thing does not work for RPGs dogma either. Simply, some people do not play well with others. Sometimes the best action to save the relationship in a marriage is divorce. Rather than damn the garden, it is just better to expel the sinner from Eden. Things like "Player Skill not Character Ability" should not be taken dogmatically, otherwise we'd all be playing ourselves. The socially awkward role player would never get to play the charismatic face-man if there wasn't some sort of rules structure to give his character a fair shot at doing what the player couldn't. I have a hard time understanding this. Do we not agree it is the GM’s role to encourage and facilitate the player agency without taking it away, Stu? Creating a fun game without crossing a line that says the player has only the illusion of agency? Do we not create an interactive world richer and/or poorer due to the player’s participation? Or is it just about fair, fudged or skewed dice mechanics? Well, obviously not; and you are not saying that. All that game goodness or badness resides within the GM to unlock with the players. So what is the argument you are advancing here, Stu? Or is it the adversarial GM thing? I have an answer for that: do not play with assholes. It is an AD&D rule/suggestion. AD&D 1e has reaction rolls and modifiers, which can be modified as the GM sees fit according to the published guidelines. The reactions apply to every thing meeting the party: monster, hireling, and NPCs. Not every monster encounter ends in a fight. Of course, I lean on exactly Player Skill over Character Ability to sell my game to people who use it as a tool to increase their social circle. I want none of this passive-aggressive bullshit of “just playing my character.” Let that inhabit the convention games and the one-shots among an established group of friends who give each other noogies and wedgies. I say people wear masks at my table. They can pretend to be any one they wish, and be good at it, but, whatever their role, their performance is mediated by who they are actually – and the observer of that player sees the real person behind the mask through the interpretation of an assumed role itself. And when the spotlight shines on the persona assumed and not on the person, you really get to see the person act freely inside the role. Consider the Character overcoming their deficit as a reflection of player fantasy wish fulfillment. Don’t we wish we all had that agency to accomplish things? That is what it means at my table when the shy player who stutters role-plays the social performance of the face man and succeeds. Or, should the message be: simply roll the dice above this target number because you and we both know you’re too inept at this; I am too indifferent/tired to work with you; and the players are too apathetic to applaud the process of your effort? Is there really a system that actually defends against a table of such douchey losers? In my game, sometimes dice are (rolled but) not involved in determining outcome because I have decided the modifiers are so high to the player’s advantage if they just do it. This does not mean I hand wave the player back into his or her comfort zone. It does means I have the task to encourage and facilitate them. What kind of heartless bastards I would play with who would laugh at someone coming out of their comfort zone doing improv at my table? Would I really want to play with such a table of assholes? DM Fiat = Bennie. I would point out that Gygax was on record being a dungeon-crawl-loving, player-vs-gm kind of gamer. He spoke with derision about "play-actors." He was NOT a role-player, though he (among others) invented the hobby. I have to counter that statement. His problem with the modern direction of RPGs, for which he was very vocal on online PRG boards, was the death of role-playing at the hands of a set of pre-determined statistics. He gave the metaphor of Cowboys and Indians child’s play when describing the hobby. He did not describe RPGs as slightly different from the miniature warfare he knew or, as others have described it to me, as a ( competitive) game of Monopoly with people pretending to be shoes, horsemen, irons and Bankers. Gary’s favourite game scenario in AD&D, the game that others DM’d for him when he played, was political. He liked the intrigue – perhaps because he sucked at it in real life. *cough*Lorraine*cough*Dave*cough* This is not to mention the many AD&D modules that were not dungeon crawls, perhaps a marketing decision in keeping with his observation in the DMG that outdoor adventures were the most challenging games to pull off. I think he and his attitudes are among the reasons we find "GM vs Player" attitudes with many DMs (and players) playing DnD. I think this is informed more by prejudicial bias than actuality, Stu. I still like you but I definitely do not agree with you here. More likely that this adversarial player attitude is from the underlying message of the +1 rulebooks themselves that caution their rules provide an approriate balance for proper gaming (thus saving the players from inherently "bad" DMs) rather than from a man who has not been a part of the D&D management for the last 27 years. Further, this was not the attitude of the man I knew or the man with whom others reported playing. Finch is definitely a student of this style of play. Yes, certainly. But Finch is myopic compared to the author of the AD&D 1e DMG for the width and breadth of gaming advice it encompasses.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Jul 27, 2012 14:25:43 GMT -8
That DM vs Player approach to the game has very likely turned away countless potential role-players over the decades. I'm not saying that playing that type of dungeon-crawling, traps-on-every-door type of game isn't fun sometimes. It is, but I don't think it's conducive to newcomers. Being an inveterate consensus taker in public relations, I like to conclude tonight with the positive. I definitely agree with you in the above quotes. I have my own 2-year collection of horror stories from the gamers vs. new-to-the-hobby clash of titans I have experienced here. The problem in our case was not the DM frustrating new players with character deaths but with gamers killing the spirit of the new players - amounting to the same result of turning away potential role players.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 27, 2012 15:09:43 GMT -8
(nb: on a personal level and for the record I hate anti immigration sentiments and cultural elitism - its irrational, counter productive and antithetical to humanity's positive social development . . . I just hate Drizzt clones that's all (and dragonborn, and war forged, but especially dragonborn - I think I'd die of apoplexy if I encountered a player dragonborn Drizzt clone) ) Great idea, though I think you'd hate my D&D group. We haven't a single classic D&D race. I'm a changing, our mage is Eladrin (who hates elves), our cleric is Dragonborn, we've also got a Warforged. We never planned it, but we all seemed to have decided that the new races were far more interesting to us all and the old ones were bogged down with far to many cliches. Also when our DM had us face Drow it was in a massive forest high up in the trees where an elven town was built. We found the best way to deal with drow was to have the dragonborne bullrush them and toss them from the tree tops. We sent many a Drizzt clone out for flying lessons during that arc.
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Post by Kainguru on Jul 27, 2012 15:14:42 GMT -8
Creativecowboy, your description of Gary Gygax certainly correlates with my experience and the impression left of the gentleman's approach and mindset across the various forums he participated in before his untimely death. Stu, I have to also side with Creativecowboy with respect to some of your assumptions about GG . . . especially advice in the DMG. There is at least one episode in your backlog where you all offer advice on handling a troublesome player then bag GG in the DMG for his advice . . . When I looked it up it was pretty much the same advice as you yourselves had given ie: if it's not fun playing with that group/person then don't play with them. Time is fickle and memory constructed rather than recalled . . . Yes the DMG is badly laid out but there were few precedents back then. What is true is that if you dig through it (and GG was/is no more or less wordy than many other game system authors . . . The only one that ever got straight to the point was DragonQuest because it used SPI's law article format to reference rules) a lot of the 'wisdom if the ages' frequently spoken on the podcast can be found echoed in the very pages you dismiss. That's not a criticism just an observation . . . Stork frequently references various passages without realising it. That's just a function of the human condition . . . Once knowledge is internalised its origin is frequently forgotten. For example I love The Watchmen . . . Saw the movie, hugely impressed but I had my criticisms . . . Until I got home dug out my old graphic novel read it (yet again) and discovered many of my criticisms were wrong - my recall was at fault not Mr Snyders research . . . That's time for you and the DMG is an old book by anyone's standards. The appendix was full of aides to help the beginning DM paint a scene and colour his/her descriptions to help immerse the players in the world. Including just frivolous information to make things interesting . . . eg traditional mystic properties of various herbs and gems, no rules just descriptions to use as one saw fit. PS: HP's are quite clearly explained and rationalised and if you were in a position to literally put a sword into someone's chest unhindered in 1st ed : you're dead or at least on the critical list . . . The rule is in there just not very well referenced. The one about an 8th level character surviving a fall of any height a) bollocks b) an urban myth c) a result of a later corrected printing error and d) people simply not reading the rule as written properly ( falling damage was cumulative AND exponential . . . Like the Chinese fable of the single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board which is doubled for each square plus the total of all the grains for all the squares)
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