My setting is live from the mid 90s. I've stayed in the same town, so hasn't had the same complications of his moves. We've got nearly 400 years of in campaign history. We've migrated through a lot of systems (currently PF2E). Its something I'm proud of, and its always pleasant when non RP nights end up with others talking of epic moments in our games from over the years.
Friends who've sadly past are immortalised through the deeds of their characters as well, obviously not to take anything from their RL activities but its nice to speak of those who've moved on from the real world, whose exist as NPCs
My campaign world covers about 2000 years. Most campaigns start towards the latter end of previous game’s longer lived characters’ lives but the exact setting usually isn’t made clear to the players up front. Sometimes it’s a prequel. No characters are immortal except one vampire, some zombies, and some gods but there’s some non linear temporal locations which occasionally feature. Most campaigns start with new characters who have little to no knowledge of the previous games characters and go through the process of meeting them and filling in what’s happened in the past few hundred years. Characters come and go, but CURSED ITEMS are eternal which is fun.
Most important is that everything is canon. Sometimes a campaign fizzles out. Still canon. The end of that adventure is free for the next DM to write out as they wish. Often these campaigns are considered to have had the party fail their quest.
Sorry i missed your second question. Plenty of characters are still alive. Characters retire into NPC formats, generally once they are lords and such. There is only so many apocalypses you can have to challenge high level characters. They can come on "screen" in other campaigns. They generally have their own faction that they operate off camera.
New characters sometimes opt to be sons of earlier characters of their own, or of other players characters. It works quite well.
I have had to add a magical plant, which when processed, slows the aging process. I felt a bit harsh killing retired characters, so the rich and powerful tend to not age too much. Some players are fine with their characters to die off, but thats there choice.
Lastly we sometimes dust off old characters to deal with major problems or just for mainly RP type sessions.
Interesting read. I think the longest game I played was maybe 20 sessions over a year (it ended in a wipe). There is a fine balance between "feeling of danger" and losing interest due to deaths of characters that you have got attached to.
It requires some investment to keep it up but it is really nice to meet ppl on a regular basis for other things than food or alcohol.
Interestingly it was the thing that steered me away from alcohol. Being a brit i think we're prone to that. But Sunday night has always been RP night for me. Whatever is happening in my life, thats 'my time' and of course the wife and friends too. What else we supposed to do with Sunday nights, everyone is home and just waiting until Monday morning work.
Hanging out with friends, eating a food delivery, telling jokes and story is peak fun in my opinion. Back in the 90s when this started that was my one night a week i weren't drinking so really helped me claw back from every night boozing. A net win on all fronts.
Plenty. Early days, from a GM perspective my mindset was the risk of death had to be genuine and meant victories we're more to enjoy.
Over the years I've relaxed a lot away from that. Its not often nowadays that players die. I don't run published adventures, and don't always keep things within the appropriate difficulty range. However i will always give opportunities to withdraw or escape if its something a little too tough.
Some systems are a lot more flexible on what each party can handle but things like PF2E the math behind the system is strong and you can easily gauge what they can't handle.
Not OP, but I can say that PF2e is complicated only in comparison to something like D&D5e. Compared to D&D3.5e (which is what PF forked from) it's more streamlined.
I think streamlined vs complexity is a topic that should be discussed here. Complexity isn't a bad thing- Street Fighter is more complex than Mario 1. But that doesn't mean it's bad, obviously. PF2e vs D&D5e are similar. Both are great games depending on what sort of complexity you're looking for, and that's personal taste. For me, 5e isn't complex enough.
Right. 5e is much easier to learn to play and DM but it also has less room for interesting things to emerge dynamically from events. 5e is arguably as fun to play but it is far less fun to watch, at least in my opinion.
Its a little crunchier. However from the GM perspective its a lot better to run. The math behind the system is real strong, which isn't something you get from RP systems. Its not like PF or 3.5 where there can be massive power differences between characters.
Combat is a lot more interesting, its not just roll d20's burning down the HP of whatever you fighting. I tend to find that 5e battles seem very same-ish.
As a GM, PF2e is quite easy and simple. There's great tables for DCs. It's pretty easy to determine what skill to roll. Calculating your roll is super simple. Scaling monsters is easy and simple. Creating encounters of any level is easy.
As a player, I think it has a higher learning curve because of the new action rules and the vast amount of actions one can do, but personally I think it's a good thing :)
I was obsessed with D&D in junior high and high school despite never actually playing for more than a few hours. I had binders full of NPC character sheets, a multiple continent world designed (which included, among other things, Middle Earth and Prydain plus many modules, both the letter-number'd ones and modules from Dragon magazine.
In college, there was a group who played in the dorm lounge and hearing them play, I ended up losing interest in the game. My imagination of how the world I'd designed would come out and the reality of a game just didn't conform to each other.
There are so many different ways to run games. It can be disheartening to see people play very energetically to what is essentially one's own point of least interest.
Maybe it's similar to seeing someone speed run a video game where you mainly go for the sensory thrill of taking it slow. And you feel some pressure to get "better" but it doesn't exactly sound fun. Maybe something like that, anyway...
Personally I like to house-rule away just about everything that bugs me about any given game, if I like the setting for example. (And I also appreciate games with optional rules like "here are some ideas for making this game more heroic and less depressing for your PCs")
For example I was using one system and realized the writer didn't care very much about how one weapon differed from another, except in terms of raw damage. So I found a way to take the game in the complete opposite direction and I called my rules framework PaG, for "Play as Gun." (As opposed to playing as a character)
Every rule that the original game used for creating baroque characterizations was applied across to weaponry, and then ammunition. I started getting into all kinds of crazy smart ammo and it was a lot of fun.
This got me thinking of the idea of Ammo As Character in which you could effectively write up your ammunition as an archetype and play it as a character in the game.
That world got really cool fast, IMO. And mostly just to me. But that own-world, own-prefs stuff is a huge part of TTRPG culture.
Weapons functioning the same is mostly about playability. A player can learn their character class and then be set, if they find a new weapon they don't have to learn a new class. But if the complexity lies in the weapon it means that every time a characters weapon breaks or they have to use something new, their entire playstyle now changes and they have to learn new rules, that really slows things down and most players aren't that interested in reading about the rules of new things. Even the basic character rules in dnd are said to be too much for newbies.
Having more complex weapon behavior like that works much better in computer games where players can just play without having to understand what things does.
There are roleplaying systems that do embrace the complexity (and well beyond CPRG).
Here's an "attack table" for one specific weapon in Rolemaster: you roll a 1-100, add and subtract a whole lot of offensive and defensive bonuses and end up with a result like "15DK" -- 15 hit points of damage and a severity D critical hit on the K (Crushing) table. The broadsword can give both Crushing and Slashing criticals. That again has 20 random outcomes such as "Strike lower level; tear tendons. Foe is at -25%. +3 hits. Foe is stunned and unable to parry next round"
Rolemaster is probably my favorite system, to this day. Had a devil of a time finding anyone to play it with though. Somewhere around here I have a couple boxes full of ICE Rolemaster books. I like the complexity, and the ability to run either a low power or a high power game.
I still think ShadowWorld (the main Rolemaster campaign setting) is the most detailed and well put together setting I've ever seen.
I found that FantasyGrounds virtual table top platform supports Rolemaster, automating much of the table lookup and rolls (no more sticky notes marking pages with certain tables). I haven't tried it myself, but have read good things. Virtual table top platforms (FantasyGrounds, DNDBeyond, etc.) are an interesting market to examine the history of, from inception to the success they currently enjoy.
I know some people like those hyper crunchy systems but they're just not for me. It always feels like they're better suited for the backend system for a computer rpg where all the tables and math can be simplified away.
I agree, if you have to consult 50 charts and formulas to calculate damage in a single round of combat that's going to slow the game down too much. No need to go full computer rpg though, I could see a DM pulling out a laptop and writing some scripts to handle some of the math while keeping the rest of the game tabletop though.
That could ease some of the burden yeah but you still have to know the tables pretty well to be able to predict and plan what your combat is going to look like.
Yeah, that strikes me as much too complex. I like the games where you get something like ‘3 damage points, pick any effects you want (optionally limited per weapon type) or just pure damage’
Today D&D 5e is made for powerful fantasy heroes that rarely die and earn XP by killing things. If you aren't aware there is a whole movement called "osr" which put more emphasis on finding treasure in very dangerous situations. There is even a game called Dungeon Crawl Classic that suggest doing a "funnel" to create new characters: each player starts with 3/4 weak characters. At the end of the dungeon you pick your official character among the survivor.
Osr authors have produced many wonderful books. Definitely worth checking out. So games like OSE are carbon copies of older games. Other like knave try to modernise and streamline things while keeping the spirit.
It's a bit complicated what OSR is about and to be honest I'm very confused about it.
There seem to be two categories of OSR games, as far as I can tell.
One is a category of games that are more or less faithful reproductions of some pre-3.0 edition of D&D rules, without any setting information. This is possible apparently because of an (untested?) understanding that rules cannot be copyrighted.
Most of those games are free downloads. Just the ones I have on my drive:
OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation)
Dark Dungeon (2nd ed. D&D?)
Labyrinth Lord (1st ed)
Old School Essentials
Swords and Wizzardry
Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland (1st ed. BX)
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Lightmaster
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Some or all of those games are referred to as "retro-clones".
As far as I've read up, DCC and Lightmaster seem to be the ones that depart the farthest from the original rulesets.
The other category is a category of rules-light, low-effort games that are often no more than a commentary on D&D and TT-RPGs in general, sometimes in zine format.
I don't want to give too many examples of those because my description probably sounds disparaging enough, but see this link for some such games (or "games"):
And I'm probably missing a few categories of OSR games. For instance, The Black Hack, Rogue, Troika and Into the Electric Bastionland seem to be OSR, but I haven't had the chance to read them and figure out what they're about. Anycase, the OSR movement seems to have started around the time of this essay:
If anyone understands what OSR is, or means, better than I do, please help because I'm just confused. I don't even know what the comonly accepted definition of the "OSR" acronym is supposed to be (or if one exists even).
To speak to Troika just a bit as someone who read the rule book and played like one session:
A lot of the Troika book is character profiles/archetypes/etc. if you tell someone this is a wild game, make up your craziest character, they will probably not be as “out there” as the provided archetypes. You roll 2d6, and get a refined alien cannibal (well, not exactly a cannibal, I guess, someone who wants to eat other characters) or a character that has become “enlightened” (chemically, surgically? I can’t remember) to the point they have very little thought. So anyway, between wacky characters and wacky skills, that’s what in the troika book. Some simple rules, No setting aside from a one session adventure, but flavorful skills and character ideas.
Thanks! I kind of got that sort of vibe from descriptions of Troika I found online, but I looked for a quickstart and couldn't locate it, so I wasn't sure.
What I don't understand is what common elements Troika and Electric Bastionland, for example, share with Dungeon Crawl Classics or Old School Essentials. They seem to me like completely different kinds of game, in tone, mood, rules, and everything else besides.
Not that this is a bad thing, I just get confused about what's OSR and a bit frustrated that it seems a bit cliquey in the end. Like you gotta be an insider to get it and if you don't get it then you don't need it explained.
I think the troika connection to OSR is somewhat tenuous, but the game system is inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series of “interactive” novels that were popular in the UK in the 80s. But I think it is essentially a cliquey thing. It is general approach or attitude, plus just who is friends with a game designer that makes something OSR. It’s a scene.
It's not just a kookie idea they've come up with though it's coming from Baker v Selden and the Copyright Act of 1976 which says:
> In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work
The core rules have no copyright protection and it's "untested?" because the language of the law and the interpretation of it is pretty clear and consistent.
There's a trend for the latter category to be renamed Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (see https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2500148/ancient-roleplaying... for a writeup). Kriegsspiel is a Prussian term for refereed war games, developed to enable better training for their army; the original free kriegsspiel movement arose because the rules felt too constrained.
These are not really all satires, although I like that post about satirical games a lot.
The Quick Primer is about as good a general definition of OSR as you're going to get.
That's pretty much it, they're for the most part strongly D&D flavoured RPGs with relatively simple mechanics. They're in many ways more inspired by pre-AD&D editions of the game and partly a reaction to the complication of the game and move away towards general skill mechanics in 3rd Edition. The designers of the 5th edition of D&D consciously took on board some of the attitude and game design culture of OSR.
The principle of having disposable characters is something I like about the new Alien RPG. It definitely helps that the adventures / campaigns are well-written.
> Damnation Kane: Irish pirate captain, born in 1650 to an English Puritan and an Irish druidess. Through means mystical and mysterious, somehow Damnation finds himself, with his ship The Grace of Ireland and his crew of scalawags, in strange seas. His ship damaged by battle and by storm's fury, Captain Kane and his men seek a safe harbor; in the process they make dangerous new enemies, and tensions among the crew worsen. Because they do not know where they are, nor how they came to be there. Is it Hell? An undiscovered country? The land of the Fae? No: it is Florida. In the year 2011.
The novel isn't D&D swords and sorcery, but my second favorite scene is fantasy-like, where Kane's druidess mother casts an elaborate spell in a desperate attempt to contact him across the sea and centuries. (My favorite scene is where the pirates invade a Home Depot, and the guy with no thumbs swinging chains attacks a table saw...)
D&D definitely played a role in developing his narrative talents. Amazing game.
Sounds interesting. Time shenanigans is one of the bingo square prompts this year on /r/fantasy, so I wanted to check this one. Any reason why Kindle edition is not available?
> Time shenanigans is one of the bingo square prompts this year on /r/fantasy
Oho?
The full title is "The Adventures of Damnation Kane Book I: Out of Place and Out of Time".
Here's a teaser (the story is mostly told from the perspective of Kane as a ship's log):
> But that thing that I saw when we came in sight of the shore! I thought it was a part of the land: the White Cliffs of Dover on the shore of the New World. Until it moved. Until it blew smoke from its back, like the spume of a whale, and sounded a horn that could have drowned out Gabriel’s trumpet, and then it sailed across the bay before us. Against the wind. Against the tide.
> It was a hundred feet high, two hundred. Pure white, shining like the clouds in a summer sky. It would have stretched from one end of the village where my mother raised me to the other, and beyond. It was smoking – there was fire on it – fire, the curse of ships, the terror of all sailors. And it sailed through the waves, without sail, without oars.
> I looked through my glass and I saw the faces of the men and women aboard. I saw children. They smiled.
> I looked at its bow and I saw written there in letters as tall as a man, “GRAND PRINCESS.”
Before I went back to software development I found myself in some national task forces for enterprise architecture in the public sector, and as such got to do a lot of speeches on it at different conventions. For around the first year I literally had to do the presentation for myself. In the beginning I spent an entire day talking to the mirror, otherwise my presentation would be terrible. After a couple of years of it, I can now pull a presentation out my ass on the spot about basically any subject of which I have a solid foundation of knowledge.
I imagine game mastering to be a lot like that. Except when playing a game or D&D you also have a bunch of people participate in your presentation. I think you may have skipped the practice part a little too much, but I’d encourage you to get into to it as a player because it can be really fun with the right group.
I personally play AD&D with a bunch of other 35-40+ year olds, and the primary reason is to spend a few Saturdays each year drinking beer. Basically the reason for which I play blood bowl. The stories we go through are better than playing Baldurs Gate was though, largely thanks to our game master and the fact that nobody is too serious, and maybe because AD&D wasn’t designed to be as forgiving or “your character is now a God” as the modern systems. Anyway, we found our group through Facebook, and while there are two sets of “friends” in it half of it are solo players who joined us, so it’s certainly possible for you to find something if you look!
I've always thought there was an opportunity for professional dungeon masters. If you live in a large city, or think you can pull it off in Zoom, I am sure there is a market for a very curated and polished experience for players. I'd imagine there are hundreds of people out there that are really really good at this, just as there are really good speakers, narrators, and voice actors.
I started lecturing at the university at the same time as I picked up D&D again. I think both activities helped each other out. But I felt a bit like a living circus, pulling elaborate acts out of my head almost every day.
Dungeons and dragons groups lies somewhere on the spectrum between improvised theatre to strict rules boardgame. If you imagined it to be anything other than that you will be disappointed. But if you want one of those you can always find such a group, just note that most people are really bad at improvised theatre, so you need to find bad acting to be funny to enjoy it so you might not like it even if you like stories.
> somewhere on the spectrum between improvised theatre to strict rules boardgame.
And players can range from mildly disinterested in combat to tryhard min-maxers. Similar vein, but finding a group with the same overall style is helpful both from a balance and a fun perspective.
That was pretty much how I was. Played a little in middle school, but picked up an obsession with RPGs. I'd buy pretty much any RPG I could get my hands on and read through the rules, roll up characters, think about a campaign, but do nothing. Later this would translate into playing virtually every MMPORG that came out but only for the first few levels. At some point I realized I just liked understanding the systems, but didn't enjoy the games, particularly the social element. The upshot though was mastering all those rule systems prepared my brain for a career in programming. I now play around with programming languages the way I used to play around with MMPROGs and I enjoy digging around in cloud deployments the way I used to enjoy reading RPG lore.
This was me except with Vampire: The Masquerade. I had binders full of characters, all of the clan novels and trilogies, and held a repository of V:tM lore knowledge in my head. Used to doodle shadow tentacles onto little characters I made in notebook margins. I would argue on forums about what clan characters would be that borrowed liberally from the game’s aesthetics and settings (Blade and Underworld being the most egregious)
This was when I was in middle and high school. I’m 34 now and I’ve still not played a single game lol.
Having played the game (and the other White Wolf games), I think you maximized the possible enjoyment there. I really didn't care for the 'game' part of it, but the world building was amazing!
In junior high I was absolutely obsessed with character creation for some reason. I just built characters all the time to the point that I was creating my own classes too.
I have no idea why. Just a weird phase I experienced.
I really wanted to get into pen&paper RPGs when I was a teenager, but was too socially awkward to break into the only group of people I knew that played them. Can you believe that; too socially inept to have the nerdiest hobby ever? The D&D players were the cool kids compared to me.
I was similar, not that I wasn't invited, but I couldn't handle something where the point was entirely social. I wanted a game where I could know if I was good or not (and preferably be better than other people.) It also drove me crazy that we were playing a high fantasy game where we were fantasizing about having all kinds of great powers and doing amazing things but nobody was doing anything cool outside the game. Not that I was doing any better; I just liked to hate myself for it. I probably could have made some friends if I had gone back.
As a forever DM, I'm impressed by this guy's fortitude. Coming up with an interesting session can take a good deal of time. In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is. Of course, modules can help a ton, and there's a lot of tools available these days to procedurally generate the hard parts. Still, many of those didn't exist until recently, for the most part. This guy had to have spent countless hours on his own building out this world. It's an inspiration, really.
> In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is
In my experience, you can run an entire session on basically nothing. Half the time I make things up on the spot (and keep track of them so they’ll still be the same when players return), but most of the time the players make the story.
It’s especially helpful when they’re discussing what they’re thinking the reason for something is between themselves, because one of those is pretty much always a good one (even if they settle on a different explanation afterwards xD).
While I agree on story, encounters, dungeons, and puzzles are harder on the fly. You can procedurally generate a dungeon these days and there’s lots of encounter generators now, but wasn’t always so easy.
It's cool to see this here, thanks for posting op. I was just deepening a solo campaign in Palladium Books' Recon [0] today and getting a space trucker team together in FrontierSpace [1].
Epics and long-form narratives are really important in TTRPG culture. While originally pretty overwhelming, I learned a lot by running long-form campaigns myself. I find that the session-level complexity is usually best when kept very low, compared to what people think. The scope of events is also kept low in terms of things like "what happened today".
Personally I find that there's something about dialing the dopamine down (contrary to what people would expect) that helps the game feel easier for everybody to play in the long term.
My kids allow me to GM a couple of ongoing long-term campaigns for them, one that went from dungeon crawl to space adventure within 2 sessions and continued into space opera territory, and another long-form high fantasy campaign that's been going for 4 years now. The former uses Supers! RED [2] and the latter is based on GURPS [3]. Both are kind of gear-and-pet-fests for them so it's part of our job together to manage all that. :-)
(Including links in case others are interested in the publishing culture or games themselves)
What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story.
Even in more traditional games, I feel like I also see that tendency in certain parts of the Old School Renaissance scene, which makes me wonder if it's got something to do with the plethora of different systems that are out now. If I'm only going to have time for one game a week, I might not want to end up stuck to one setting and one system, but rather try deadly space horror in Mothership, surreal British fantasy in Troika!, steampunk metropolis Victoriana in Electric Bastionland, etc.
I'm intrigued to see if this sort of style, where one jumps from game to game relatively easily, but doesn't invest so much in a single character or world, will be as long lasting. I think the danger is that eventually you run out of new things (although that honestly seems hard at the rate that new games are being punished), but a lot of these games are fairly replayable, and my impression is that people keep on coming back to their favourites.
Funny, I noticed that too, it's a bit strange to me TBH, also with e.g. Itch becoming this neo-idea-topia just chock full of PDFs. (The charity bundles are an absolute travesty of making really cool stuff look like shovel-ware in some ways, too.)
It makes less sense to me as someone with a lot of TTRPG baggage, like back when I was a kid there was going to be a campaign to justify the character one wanted to become. But I do love to see the energy that goes into the newer games.
Socially I guess I can also see why it may help to switch things up for a lot of reasons. Maybe treating TTRPG night more like a mutable board game night allows some groups to keep on going. Or maybe we're really on the verge of some new industry discoveries that could explode into gaming we couldn't imagine before, without this new world of different gaming perspectives.
Back in the days, my students gaming group organised "one-shot" weekends. One session, 4hrs or so, story finished. Repeat 4 times, weekend done.
It was great fun and a great way to get exposure to new (to us) systems. I can't imagine the wacky hijinks of Toon in another way now. Or starting a session of Munchausen at 2 in the morning - with a whisky, because, you know, Munchausen. There was also serious stuff: Star Wars d6, of course the Empire knew about the trench run and had taken precautions! So while Han & Luke were freeing Leia, we were out to sabotage those countermeasures. I even got Kenobi's light saber out of it.
Highly recommended to those who can afford a while weekend like that.
The big-name ones are Wanderhome, Troika, and Blades in the Dark all of which are fantastic full featured systems that outside of the bundle go for a decent bit.
Pigsmoke and Damn the Man Save the Music are smaller but also very good.
>> Or maybe we're really on the verge of some new industry discoveries that could explode into gaming we couldn't imagine before, without this new world of different gaming perspectives.
You mean like what happenned to wargames back in the day, when D&D came out? Nobody makes or plays those anymore, far as I can tell (and from what I gather, the majority were solo-played anyway, which sounds a little sad).
This might be a little morbid, but I often wonder what Gygax and Arneson, and the other people involved in early D&D, thought about the genre they had started up, as they went to their graves. "I left something worthwhile behind", or "Why are all those people messing up my game"?
>> What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story.
That's right, but I wonder whether this is more of an effort to find and occupy a niche in a market where D&D still sucks all the air out of the room. D&D and some other big-name games like Pathfinder, or Vampire I think. I'm not even sure anymore.
> A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
> Players create their characters and if they die, they are out of The Game. There is no “reset” button that you can hit when you don’t like how things are proceeding or you die.
> Players are allowed to take on the characters of their descendants.
> And yes, players have had their characters die and they have been ejected from The Game.
This is sort of the standard for earlier editions of D&D, or games that aspire to follow some of the same themes (You might see modern RPGs in this vein referred to as OSR/Old School Renaissance). Historically, players would take on the role of adventurers rather than heroes, and most of the focus was on collecting as much treasure as you can (XP was awarded based on the gold value of treasure).
If you played smart you could certainly keep a character alive, so the idea that older editions of D&D were wantonly fatal isn't really correct, but any time you left your character's fate up to the roll of the dice, you were taking a risk, so the smart play was to rig any such encounter in your favor as best you could. If you did manage to live, your characters would tend to retire, taking ownership of domains, running wizard's towers, etc. - you didn't generally go up ever escalating levels of cosmic threat. Rules and modules existed for that, but it wasn't the type of play people would generally engage in. Instead, your old characters would become NPCs in the game setting, and you'd roll up a new group of adventurers to keep the story going.
3E is probably when the focus shifted to be predominantly around more Big Damn Hero type storylines, and it's firmly cemented as the de facto standard in 5E, but I think the success of 5E shows that that's really what more people are interested in. Which is great! It's been huge for the hobby, and introduced a lot of people into other styles of RPG, including old-school D&D.
Which is a long way to say if this style of play sounds appealing to you, you might want to check out modern OSR games (Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, Electric Bastionland, Troika!, Mothership) or retroclones (Old School Essentials is probably the biggest name here currently, and is based off of the Basic/Expert ruleset - my personal favorite)
The part I was more surprised by was not the character death. My group has played both 3.5, PF, and 5, and the DM has been more then happy to let us suffer the consequences or poor/stupid choices.
It was more so the aspect of “you run out of characters, you the player can no longer play with us”.
I thought "Players are allowed to take on the characters of their descendants." meant that the group member could stay in the game, just under a new character?
I find modern players tend to want to be neither of those things. They’re not adventurers or heroes. They’re just some dudes with their own characterization that somehow get looped into a quest and just sort of become very powerful by accident. Self awareness of how ridiculous the typical TTRPG power scaling is makes this pretty common imo.
A random dude, can / should canonically go from level 1 to a pretty high level over the course of an in game month if they’re busy doing things. At which point they’re basically a superhero relative to your average level 0 commoner peasant. Power gains are linear, but it’s a very steep climb.
I mean, I get wanting players to invest, and character death to mean something - but kicking out a player after two, three years of weekly sessions because they're "out of characters"? I guess maybe they find time to meet those friends outside of the game too?
Ed: Don't actually know if that's worse, or asking new first time players to never come back because they died first session...
I found D&D to be really popular in the Canadian North lately, like people you'd never expect to be into it who aren't really a huge part of wider culture around fantasy games and stuff like that until around when Game of Thrones came out, super into the game because it's pretty much a great thing to do when you're stuck inside for most of the year.
It's fun. I play maybe like once a year though I look forward to that all the time.
The latest 5th edition deserves a lot of credit for this. They did a fantastic job. It’s easy to learn, easy to run and you can do a lot with it. I’ve been a tabletop RPG player since the early 80s and never really got on with D&D, but 5th edition is a lot of fun. It not my favourite game by far, but it deserves its success.
Stranger Things and Critical Role also played a part in growing the player base, I think. At least in my current group Stranger Things helped motivate people to start playing.
I was taking to a friend about this, Stranger Things and Critical Role, bought a lot of new players to D&D, meanwhile WoTC isn't doing half as much, they could be doing an animated series, to explore the settings.
They are making a live-action movie, it isn't the first, but this one has a bigger budget.
I really think an animated series with some of their more popular novelized campaigns and characters is the way to go to seek out mass appeal. I'd love if they followed Critical Role's lead and signed with a streaming service for an easy-to-pitch series like Drizzt's life or (my preference) the Companions of the Hall.
Live action can be great, but often times fantasy settings can completely fail in how they're translated to the big screen (See: the WarCraft movie).
CRPG video games are also having a bit of a renaissance right now.
Between Obsidian (Pillars of Eternity), Larian (Divinity Original Sin, Baldurs Gate 3), and Owlcat (Pathfinder WOTR) it's a good time to be a CRPG fan and the genre seems quite popular.
AD&D was such a world creation myth to immerse oneself in. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. We fell out of it, my friends and I, in our twenties. But it has pulled us back in in our forties. Playing the original TSR modules with new characters. So much better than computer role playing games as the fun exists in the real tabletop experiences of people interacting with each other in meatspace. It demonstrates what has been lost in virtual space. Similarly to playing boardgames with real players around the table.
Humans are social creatures who belong in close physical proximity with other people. To interact, to feel free to belong, to be humans. Technology is a poor replacement for this.
I'm more into a computer DnD and figured out that just playing games such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights are good enough. I'm not a social person and role play even before closest friends feels weird.
I was much the same until I started discussing the idea with close friends who had similar interests.
If you have an interest it, you could always try a one-shot[1] adventure and test the waters.
I have pretty awful social anxiety, but I find that getting into character and being with close friends (whether physically or remotely) allows me to ease into the social setting and have a ton of fun.
Also note that role-playing is NOT required! If you and/or your friends prefer to just discuss the game and setting in the third person akin to talking about video games, go for it.
Don't force yourself to do so if there is no interest, but certainly at least give it a try if you have any sort of interest, there's nothing to lose and love for a new hobby to gain!
Watched the video interview with him -- never thought of games as a purposeful mechanism to help keep friends together as they get older. Need to look into this.
I recently achieved two milestones that I am somewhat proud of: (a) finishing a role-playing campaign, to be fair that was in LancerRPG that by default has a 12 level skill ceiling after which it does not make sense to play anymore. (b) finishing a legacy game, Charterstone that is. Again that has a manageable 12 game limit.
Still, there are so many people that have not finished Gloomhaven or whose RPG campaign has come to nothing after some years. So finishing both feels like a small achievement :-)
I love that this exists, and that there are people just relatively quietly making these things happen. Contrast this to how we as developer feel pressure to monetize, or to grow, or to something short term.
It's a bit of a shock to me that this is the first time I've heard of this. This sensation always makes me wonder "What else like this is out there" ... in other pursuits, other fields? People just toiling away and gradually producing something extraordinary.
Amazing timeframe! I first played D&D in 1983 for a couple years, then picked up again 2 years ago with my sons. It feels like the campaign has had so much happen in 2 years, can't imagine how rich a 40 year campaign would be.
I ran a pretty great, if I say so myself, AD&D campaign. I started with a campaign that was find the pieces to reforge the sword of ages to beat the big bad (I know right?) that eventually ended up with psionics and spelljamming. Obviously I’m nostalgic, but the AD&D 2e era was marvelous. It’s fun to look at those old notebooks.
It reminds me of the charming MUDs of that era. There was a total focus on fun, with no concern about irrelevancies like “intellectual property.” That’s of course the spirit of D&D. Appendix N literally encouraged lifting ideas from published works.
The hardest part was organizational. I had a half dozen enthusiastic players, but arranging a time where everyone could be there was a real challenge.
>> I learned early that following Gary Gygax’s advice in the opening lines of the DMG was essential: the rules were only a rough guide; develop your own system.
One has to wonder then why we already have 5 official versions of the rules, and counting.
Rather than a flip "money," I will detail the cycle.
1) TSR (or WotC) puts out a new version of the rules, a set of core rulebooks, typically a Dungeon Masters Guide, a Monster Manual, and a Players Handbook.
2) Some additional content is pushed out, like a module or two.
3) Here is the danger part: Realizing that there are more Players than DMs, well, more money is to be made putting out content players want. Splatbooks of unlikely "prestige paths," or if you want to go old school, barbarian and cavalier and acrobat. Rather than having rules so flexible you could re-enact Conan the Barbarian or Sword and the Sorceror or Beastmaster, instead rules are carved out for an archetype of exactly that film or book.
4) The game unbalances due to new rules, and Pun-Pun the Kobold is born.
5) Players proceed to tear through every encounter with min-maxed ("munchkined") characters as per the hyper-optimized builds laid out in the splat books.
6) We must rebalance the game.
7) Go to Step 1.
This is part of the problem, not the whole of it, but ... I would not say it is insignificant.
#3 is more complex than I let on. It needs a few things to remedy it:
A) A focus on creating material for the DM, and most especially pre-built playable areas. A decent-sized city would cover an entire book, for example, as it would have several maps, scores of encounter areas, and just as many, if not more, fleshed-out NPCs with their own goals, as well as areas "just outside of town" to be worked with. Or take the Dungeon Dozen, but make it 1) serious, 2) strictly fantasy, 3) two hundred entries long.
B) An allowance for players to craft their characters, but not along the rails TSR or WotC or some d20 affiliate has made. Referring back to my example, Conan (the movie Conan) wasn't a "barbarian" class, he was a lot of fighter, with a little thief, a guy whose CON exceeded his STR, and he should be buildable by taking a little from this or that, some out of this skill tree, a feat or two here and there ... this eliminates the need for splat books.
One thing I don't get is why people keep buying new material. It doesn't make financial sense to me. Suppose you're a 4th ed. DM and have bought a bunch of supplements, and so have your players. Then 5th ed. comes around. Now you're supposed to throw all your books, and investment in them, in money to buy them and time to read them, and understand them, and make scenarios and campaigns and characters and whatever, in the bin and start fresh? Why?
I got the same question about Magic: the Gathering, which I play a lot, and Warhammer (which I mainly collected to paint the minis, though I played also). Why would you buy a new edition of a game every few years?
The answer I think is- you wouldn't. Which is to say, all those new editions are sold mainly to new players, who have no investment in the old editions and no attachement to their style of play or whatever.
Which in turn is to say that making a new edition of a big, expensive game like D&D every few years is takig a big, juicy dump on the players who bought the earlier edition, probably betting on the fact that they now have jobs and kids and no time for gaming.
So I understand there would be a pushback on that, and that's partly how I understand the OSR scene/ genre/ movement, whatever. My personal choice is to make my own games, and play them the way I want to play, and not care about D&D, past, present or future. It's free and creatively fulfilling (making your own game) so what's not to like?
Even if you're developing your own house rules based on an existing system, it's great to have a variety of systems all with fleshed-out rules to draw from. And while it's good to retain some similarity between versions for the sake of thematic continuity, it's good to make each version distinctly different to give people distinctly different jumping-off points for their own rulesets. This is why, unlike seemingly everybody on the internet, I never begrudged D&D 4E for being so different from 3.5; it served its role in having a distinct identity from its predecessors to appeal to different people and result in different variations.
I've played the one session of D&D 4ed. so I can't really disparage it :)
I get what you're saying but it's useful also to remember that D&D is a brand and a product and in fact one of the flagship products of a game publishing giant, so the motivation that directs the changes to the ruleset must be profit, first.
Which is fine, I work for profit also. But what I don't see the point of is spending a ton of money buying in to every new D&D version, of which there are going to be at least another 5 before I'm dead, as far as I can tell, when I can just roll my own and play it for free with my friends.
Anyway this creative aspect has always been part and parcel of the hobby, as evidenced by the -probably thousands- of TTRPG rulesets in existence.
The first thing I thought is "but, what D&D do they play?"; because D&D has changed over the years.
Turns out the game started as the D&D of the time (AD&D), with more or less house rules; and then moved on with some "homebrew" rules that are still familiar to D&D players.
I mostly tend to say I played D&D back in the day, but the truth is, I only played actual D&D on one short one-afternoon session. I played other games instead (LoTR Middle Earth, RuneQuest and Vampire), but D&D is what people mostly understand I guess.
A question for people who play more traditional dnd. The original content seemed to be a lot less… narrative? That is, resting in the open wild you might be encouraged to roll for a random encounter and do a fight that has no particular meaning.
That always struck me as a lot of tedium. Combat is pretty slow and older versions’ combat was more involved if anything. Was that boring?
Different strokes. A lot of old school gaming resembles modern adventure video games. There is an overall narrative arc, but then there are fairly random encounters along the way.
I agree that a purely mechanically-generated game would be tedious, it's all about balance. But I don't know... ever since "Critical Role" came out, it feels like the dominant strain of role-playing games is people trying to be theatre majors, or produce something worthy of a live-play podcast. I find that likewise out of sync with what I'm looking for in a game.
I just want a classic dungeon-crawl, with limited "acting" ability required. And therefore limited code of conduct debates, because the creepy theatre major wants to act out his rape fantasies while the super progressive theatre major wants a race and gender studies class. Like, huh? Dude, I just want to join a gang of murder-hobos, so we can kill some goblins and take some gold.
I don’t follow what this is saying. TTRPGs are still manual. Maybe you have a spreadsheet or an online tool to facilitate but it doesn’t change that much.
More so I don’t see how this relates to my question
No, it makes sense to me (and I'm by no means a grognard!). As far as I understand it, D&D evolved from earlier board-wargames and it was essentially a sort of free-form wargame with rules for fantasy skirmishes with a theme cribbed off its authors' favourite Sword and Sorcery fiction (which was not, famously, Lord of the Rings, but more Jack Vance's Dying Earth).
If I understand correctly, the original D&D had rules for Combat and then for things that weren't directly Combat, but were still about fighting battles, like attracting or hiring henchmen, building a stronghold, controlling a territory and ultimately fighting battles with large armies.
Importantly, D&D predates Computer RPGs so all this wargmaing had to be managed by hand, and the rules involved a significant amount of crunch- what you call "a lot of tedium".
But then Computer RPGs (CRPGs) started to appear, invariably influenced by D&D, or other CRPGs influenced by D&D. So if you enjoyed crunchy, wargame-y, combat-oriented gaming, and didn't particularly need "narrative", then CRPGs were now your friend, and you didn't need to play D&D for that. For instance, I remember spending weeks and months playing Neverwinter Nights, which was pretty much just 3d ed. D&D with an automated GM.
That's how I understand OP's comment. And I kind of agree.
Interestingly, there seems to be a return to the original D&D mode of play with the "OSR" (Old School R... something) genre, that is discussed everywhere in this thread. Perhaps because OSR's rallying cry is "rulings, not rules" and maybe after a couple of generations of games with detailed mechanics designed to promote "narrative", players who just wanted to play a game without too many restrictions got bored with all the rules and wanted to go back to just telling the DM what they want to do, and then rolling the dice to see what happens. Which is the one thing that CRPGs can still. not. do.
Incidentally, one of the earliest RPGs of the 1980's was Call of Cthulhu which was very much designed to be "not about combat", but about experiencing a horror story, in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos universe. There has been a clear split between games that are, on some level "about telling a story", or "about roleplaying" (so "narrative"), and games that are about killing monsters and nicking their stuff (so "Combat"), since the very early days of the hobby.
But, you know there's nothing stopping you from running a narrative-driven game in the D&D world, if that's more your thing (Ron Edward's "System Matters" nonwithstanding). Or, conversely, you can pick up a ruleset designed to "tell a story" and run it like a classic hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. To paraphrase the old joke about Fortran programmers, "The determined Real D&D Player can run a D&D session with any ruleset" [1].
That does make sense. But I suppose what I’m asking is that at a more abstract level, encounters can be analyzed at the very beginning. Some are hard. Some are easy. Playing the easy encounters is pretty boring in my opinion. This is balanced in a lot of TTRPGs somewhat by making resource conservation a thing so maybe you can’t just use your big powers to blow up some simple goblins. But I have always found it very difficult to get people interested in following this curve. Nobody wants to spend 30 minutes on a goblin encounter.
I think I see what you mean. You're talking about balance, yes? If so, I think it's easy to do balance wrong and hard to do it right, and there's a lot of people trying at the same time, in any game: the game designer, the GM, the players even, at some level. So there's lots of moving parts to combine and it doesn't always work.
To be honest, I don't have a good answer to that. I've read (but not played) games that had special rules for "mooks" or "mobs". For example, Wushu, a game of cinematic Kung-Fu action, was like that, because I guess it's very in the spirit of the setting. I've played computer games that throw hordes of enemies at you, also. Invariably there's a progression from mooks, to mini-bosses, to bosses to big bads. Then there's games like Call of Cthulhu (CoC) were there are no goblins and even the weakest enemies can drive your character insane (well, ish. I think Ghouls are relatively safe...).
I have no clue what's the right way to achieve balance. It seems to me that the only way to avoid what you describe is to have no weakling enemies and make every encounter a matter of life-and-death, with a substantial risk for at least one character to die (like CoC). But not for a Total Party Kill probably.
I kind of have Nethack in mind, here, and other roguelikes (I think a lot about them lately). In Nethack you fight some weak enemies at first, like slime molds, but you can at least eat them, so they're a resource. Then as you progress down the dungeon, the chance of dying increases very steeply. And then your character dies. And the next one. And the next one too. And the one after that. So there's no boring encounters, but I personally want to throw the keyboard after a while and I end up savescumming because I just want to get a bit deeper in the dungeon and see what's there.
Balance yeah. Specifically when a fight is going to be easy and everyone knows they will win, but running the battle will take a half hour because it’s pretty involved. And nobody has any particular investment in that battle because it’s some dumbass random goblins that attacked you in the night because… they’re stupid.
The wonderful thing about Dnd, especially old dnd was that fun superceded the rules. If you are fighting goblins and it's boring, then that's the groups fault for not making it exciting in some way.
(The goblins realize they're going to lose and start fleeing, they ambush in an interesting way, they are a distraction for something else, one of them has a bomb, the party has to fight them in their underwear using camping gear as weapons, etc etc etc)
or you do something else to preserve the fun such as simplifying the encounter
(You easily crush the puny goblins while only losing (1d6 health), After seeing the might of the wizards powerful spell the goblins start bowing down before him, you quickly make a game to see who can knock a goblin the farthest and the rest run off, etc etc etc)
The thing that I love like crazy about dnd is that you don't have to do anything that you don't wish to. Anything that is boring, annoying, frustrating, etc can be easily discussed in the group and house ruled away. The only limits and annoyances are the ones that you have chosen to allow to continue.
I believe this would depend on your DM. I've been playing since the mid-90s (not sure if that's far back enough for you! :) ), and we rarely rolled for random encounters like that.
In general the DM has a lot of say over the rules and their interpretation. A good DM will make a huge difference.
What happens when the characters reach max level? I’ve played campaigns that lasted a little over a year and once we reached 16th level or so, combat rounds in 5e became excruciatingly slow. I imagine it is very difficult for the DM to balance that, and even more so for them to provide the feeling of increasing power to folks who have been in the game for some time.
First Edition had guidelines for high level characters literally becoming gods. IIRC one of the paths involved being reincarnated (without memories of past lives) as a level 1 character in each of the different classes and needing to reach high level in each of them in turn -- no easy feat considering that the attributes which make for a great fighter will make for a lousy wizard, but of course becoming gods shouldn't be easy.
That wasn't First Edition, it was the parallel Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, Immortals (aka BECMI) D&D line that had 36 levels and came out between about 1980 and wrapped up in the mid-90s. AD&D First Edition did have a few paragraphs on divine ascension, noting that it was "remotely possible" and removed the character from play. BECMI, in contrast, had multiple defined pathways to divinity/immortality, along with rules for playing immortal characters.
Of the BECMI paths for immortality, the one you mentioned is the polymath. There are others. The epic hero quests after legendary artifacts of good and evil, accomplishes great deeds and leaves behind a successor. The paragon creates a unique artifact of power, recruits and train powerful minions, reshapes the landscape, and vanquishes any potential equals. The dynast founds a mighty empire and ensures it withstands the tests of time.
Just saw this interesting video[1] from Wired yesterday - "Inside the 40 Year-Long Dungeons & Dragons Game", funny timing because this seems to be about the same game!
I grew up about an hour from Lake Geneva, D&D was everywhere when I was a kid. So I played, but I had no real context for it. I was more of a Star Trek/Heinlein kid, never had any interest in fantasy or made an attempt to read it.
A few years ago I started to try to get into Fantasy. I read Vance, Howard's Conan stories [0], Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, Tolkien as an adult for the first time, and a bunch of other stuff referenced in the old DMG's Appendix N [1]. I like Smith's "evil as an aesthetic experience" vibe best but I wouldn't say that I'm a fantasy fan. Still, getting the S&S context has been neat.
I recently moved back to my hometown from NYC because of the pandemic. Being back here and living in a forest again got me reading the old AD&D books. And, AD&D is just more interesting than the third edition we played in high school. When I talked to Gygax about 3rd edition he just kind of sneered and said "It's for powergamers." [2]
Reading AD&D 21 years later, I see what he meant. AD&D has texture [3], it's bumpy, it's rough, it's great. But, beyond the mechanics, what's really grabbing me is that it hints at a style of play that I'd heard about from people who used to play with Gygax and his kids, but never experienced myself. The old D&D campaigns weren't epic, level 1-40, movie trilogies with a definite beginning middle and end like we think of them today. A D&D "campaign" was something a that could be played with a large number of players in a club. It was like the old military campaigns wargaming clubs used to organize. People in the campaign would have multiple characters of different classes and drop into or run individual games that exist in a shared time and place. Want to play, stop by. Someone can't make it, who else is available? Why does everyone meet in a tavern and then live together for the next forty levels? I'd rather play in a world that's populated with NPCs that used to be PCs.
Reading these old stories and the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide for the first time really makes me want to run a shared world with a group of 10-20 people.
[0]: No one tells you this but Conan stories are basically Lovecraft Mythos stories. But with Howard's version of the Mythos you can just punch the cosmic horrors until they crawl back down their mystery wells.
[2]: I met Dave Arneson too. I was digging through a bin of old miniatures at Gen Con in 2004. I turned to the old guy dressed as a wizard rummaging next to me and said something like "I really love these old miniatures." He said: "Me too" and we go to talking. About 10 minutes in I looked at his badge. He just smiled.
[3]: Look at the AD&D version of the "Animal Friendship" spell and then compare it to the 5th edition version:
Ask yourself, do you want to play the game where animal companions "follow you about" while you teach them tricks over the course of a month or the game where "Animal Friendship" just means "Bear go away now."? And no, I don't care about "balance".
That's what a DM is for.
I was recently catching up on Dark Horse's Conan the Avenger, and sure enough, Conan and his companions of circumstance end up facing a monstrous beast from the outer dark. Conan's plan?
"Hit whatever attacks us, man or beast, repeatedly, until it dies."
Conan is the best type of character to deal with terror-inducing beings like shoggoths or Cthulhu. His extremely uncomplicated conscience coupled with high intelligence makes him totally immune to fear that suppresses 'civilized' people.
As someone who's always lived next to the "original" (Swiss) Lake Geneva, I was confused as to why I'd never experienced this D&D enthusiasm you've mentioned
The idea that AD&D didn’t have powergamers sounds like Gygax propaganda. This is the edition that put out a book of diety statblocks like it was another monster manual. Your linked Animal Friendship, allows 2xHD of companions so a L3 druid could have a Cave Bear. That’s as bad as it sounds.
Every edition has many issues but imho 1e is pretty terrible by modern standards.
He didn't say AD&D didn't have powergamers, he said that 3rd was FOR powergamers.
On Animal Friendship, see my comment about balance: Who cares. The bear is taught three tricks and kinda hangs around, the druid doesn't get to control it. How many "friends" would you take a bullet for?
Still a problem? Get rid of the bear and see if the player wants to skip leveling their druid for three weeks and play a different character while their druid trains a new one. Time passes in real-time when not playing in AD&D and the bear will wander off after three days if the druid leaves before it's fully trained. If the druid wants to try taking a half-trained bear along on a hike, make it more trouble than it's worth. Playing AF like this is really fun.
Every edition has issues but AD&D is pretty fun by modern standards.
Great story, but I wonder about the logistics of effectively DM'ing 25 players. I'm assuming not everyone plays in the same session? Otherwise - how do you handle battles with a party of 25 PCs?
This is pretty cool. I would like to play more D&D. Every group I've been apart of has fizzled after a few sessions. But hopefully someday I'll be able to join a group that lasts for a while.
My first loss in years. Been 'playing' ~20 years, last time I lost was maybe 5 years ago. Oh well, restart the counter! Playing for life I guess, there's no way out.
>"What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate."
