those of you who don’t play table top games can leave now. I’d like this to be a private conversation. Ok, are they gone yet? Good. Come here, I want to tell you something.
Look, I see what you’re doing. Claiming that 4th Ed is more rules based. That old skool gaming was more free form, relied on miniatures less, whatever. The truth of the matter is, you’re lying to yourself. Plain and simple. Especially those of you who pine for older versions of Dungeons and Dragons. Pretty much all versions of AD&D are complex. They have rules for almost every action, any instance, any thought. The main difference is where the rules have shifted.
In 4th ed, these rules lie on the character sheet. And are character-centric. Same with 3rd ed. In 2nd and 1st ed, it lay in the DM’s guide, and are no longer character centric but generic. The “semmingly” less complex games were actually only less complex for characters. For DM’s, they were a mass of charts, tables and lists. Esp if you played old skool old skool gaming, with some of the classic scenarios, like Temple of Elemental Evil.
All versions of D&D (other than plain and simple D&D, which is barely fun. I mean- ok, I can play a race or a class, but not both? Why no elf warrior? That makes no sense, thankyouverymuch) are rules heavy. Not rules light. In the 90′s there was an interesting development. This was a movement towards gaming as a storytelling platform, versus gaming as a rules platform.
Games like GURPS, Vampire, Cyberpunk, etc focused more on story based gaming versus rules based games. They had far less charts, far less rules, far less of everything. And, even if a book did have a chart of some sort, the math that the chart was based on could easily be held in your head. Cyberpunk, for example, was based entirely on 10 sided dies and multiples of 10. So, if you wanted to make a skill check, it was easy to figure it out. Roll the dice, add, bingo. And, everything MESHED. That was a huge break for 3.0 and 4.0 D&D- the rules meshed. No longer did you do something different for each action. Like a lot of the games in the 90′s, rules became streamlined.
Things got better. Period. D&D ate up some of this streamlining, it ate up some of these ideas of character first gaming. That’s why a majority of skills exist on the character sheet. The game’s system is based on character creation. Albeit not as interesting or complex as GURPS, it still echoed this move away from gaming as rules dictated towards the player and into the player’s character being the basis for the rules.
So please, don’t tell me how great it was back in the day. I’ve been playing for a long time. Each game has its benefits and its drawbacks. But don’t create some sort of false sense of nostalgia for a time that wasn’t. All forms of D&D are rules heavy, monster bashing dungeon crawls. For a brief shining moment 2nd was almost something better, but then it fell under its own weight, abused by munchkins who leveraged the more character based mechanics for super heroes.
Thank you. Now, the rest of you who left- feel free to move along. Nothing to see here.
I agree. I have a soft-spot for 2nd edition only because it was my D&D starting point and happens to be the span of time with the fondest gaming memories. However, I have had good times in 3rd edition as well. There have always been rules; they only shift and morph, but never go away. We need these rules–otherwise–we might as well sit around a campfire and make up loose stories about warriors, wizards, and dungeon treasure. Just stories, without purpose or clear direction: the rules turn narrative into adventure.
2nd Edition, I think, is still my favourite. Always will be.
I don’t hear any complaints about the amount of rules being any more or less heavy. the irritation I hear about is the direction those rules took. You basically enforce the roles within the group that each character class can take, you place more detail on movement and what position you have in combat….essentially it is nominally a rpg, but it is slowly becoming a table top miniatures combat game(and as a player of those as well I can say this with some authority.) trouble is currently the designers don’t have the cajones to call it a wargame or a boardgame
I’ve been playing since 1978. I have to disagree to some extent. The rules might not have been much more complex in 3rd edition, but the *emphasis* on the rules blossomed dramatically. Really, lots of people (including your’s truly, and friends) were creating house rules for all sorts of stuff to make their campaigns a bit more interesting, with unofficial charts, subsystems, etc being cribbed from other games (I mean, the crit hit chart for Arduin Grimoire was and is utterly brilliant, if incredibly complex). TSR saw an opportunity to make money, hence “The (fill in class/race/whatever) Handbook”. It became ridiculous. I think that it essentially robbed people of their imagination, or people bought their imagination from TSR, rather than the old skool way of taking long, painstaking hours to draw up dungeons by hand, carving out new house rules, and having their characters crawl up levels. So, maybe you’re right, maybe the rules didn’t become more complex, but the marketplace definitely did.
Now I prefer Castles & Crusades. It’s a seriously fast D20 system, stripped down to the essentials. It’s good stuff.
Oh, and Lake Geneva, where it all began (unless you count Austin, TX with Steve Jackson games and all) is about 40 minutes from my house. Nice town. I could see how D&D arose there. The people from Illinois are like hordes of gnolls invading from the southern plains . . .
Adam (noted as A above)-
I’ve known people that play 2nd ed like you said- like a miniatures game. Hell, if you bought the expanded Monster Manual series (with three hole punched sides for a three ring binder) you even got breath attack and radius magic “cut outs” for overlaying onto a minis battlefield to see who took what damage.
AD&D and D&D started out as a minis game, and never *really truly* lost that aspect.
Forrest:
I had a brief period where I created a house rule for everything. And another period where I created my own games and rules system. I think that the true problem with 3.0 and up is not that they stole imagination by removing house rules, but they stole imagination by making the D20 system OGL.
Basically, they did what GURPS set out to do and didn’t, which is create a universal gaming system. The problem is, that forced a lot of people to not design their own rules, their own games, and instead just borrowed the D20 system and fitted their own ideas into it.
The problem is that stagnation occurred. In the 80′s and 90′s we saw a lot of games pushing things, breaking the mold, challenging the basic concepts of RPG’ing. Leveling up was thrown out the window, character based game came to the forefront. Storytelling and roleplaying became more important than rules and dungeon crawling.
All this was due to third party games creating their own rules and concepts. When you take that away, you don’t get progress. And I think that’s what the Open Gaming License did. It created stagnation by not encouraging development or challenge.