A review at Ars Technica starts this way: “Dungeons & Dragons just celebrated its 42nd birthday…”. I said no, no way, this is a mistake, it can’t be — I started playing that game the year after it came out, in 1975, which was…41 years ago. Yikes.
I played regularly through college — we had a kind of loose gaming group who would get together every week or two for a long night of goofy fantasy role playing. I drifted away after graduation, though, for two reasons: I’d moved far away from old friends, and they kept tinkering with the game, adding new persnickety rules and turning it into an exercise in bookkeeping rather than storytelling.
The review explains, though, that the latest edition goes back to its roots, simplifying and streamlining the rules, which I think is a step in the right direction, even if I’ll probably never play it again (I now live even farther away from my old friends). I think it’s also cool that they’ve made the basic player’s rules available for free, even if they’re going to still stick the dedicated D&D gamer with an $85 bill for three books, the Player’s Handbook
So all I need is money, and time, and friends, and I could pretend to be 18 again. Now that’s real fantasy role-playing!
Pick up the Monster Manual, expense it, and prepare a lecture on Bugbear evolution for one of your classes.
I also had some nerd friends who played it constantly while in college. I never saw the appeal, but I was soon hooked on early computer games like Asteroids. Then it was first person shooters like Castle Wolfenstein.
$85 in America? You guys are lucky. Here in Canada the entire set of three is something like $180 last I looked.
That’s why I’ve been playing Pathfinder with a book I got at a second hand shop.
A friend of mine died last year. He had learned to play D&D as a teenager, from Dave Arneson back in 1978 or something. He’d kept the same game going for almost 40 years, with old characters becoming powerful NPCs, and cycling generations of new characters through his world as it evolved over decades. He willed all of his gaming notes to another friend, contained in a dozen overflowing binders and several milk crates.
I played Risk with my dorm-mates, then we got into contract bridge. One of them was purported to be a math genius–aced the SAT math section–so we thought he would be a fantastic bridge player. Not. He was terrible because he couldn’t understand that you needed to count the cards.
just between you and me… when I started playing D&D in late ’76, there were no formal books yet, just our DM with the first pamphlet version of Dungeons And Dragons. He gave each of us a photocopy of those little softcover booklets, for reference (if we promised to play nice) The DM built up his own set of matrices of THAC0 tables with tons of other details he created for the game. We of course had to sketch our journeys on notebook paper (graph paper disallowed).
ack, the secret bit:
when the AD&D books came out, trying to upgrade our rules to it, we were initially thwarted by the high cost ( ~$10 !!!!) so a few of us pitched in to collectively buy a single copy of the tome, which we then exploited the magic xerograph machine in the school mega library to run off our own personal copies. The secret was not just copyright violation (to which the xero machine had a boilerplate warning against) but our theft of the copy. The library had a fee-per-page posted on the xero, which we blithely ignored; or claimed the loophole, “free for class notes”.(as most “textbooks” were a stack of photocopies the professor would hand out coupons for, in the 1st class, which were basically galleyproofs of his book in the process of getting published)
I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has been met (*looking over shoulder*) so I guess it okay if you tell my secret.
as an aside:
Shannara Chronicles on MTV, recently, had one of the characters find a few colorful stones in the river she was following another character. Later, he sees she’s holding these stones and asks about them. She shows, saying “just some game some people play *shrug*”, revealing a several numbered polyhedral dice. “ahhhhh they must play D&D!!”I remark. (a fantasy show, based on a fantasy novel, referencing a game based on fantasy stories? how self-referential in a offhand way ;-)
Blatant plug* for a site I use and really like.
Roll20.net allows players from all over the world to meet and play a variety of games (pretty heavy rpg laden, but there are others). Having a schedule that precludes most meatspace opportunities, It has really helped reignite my love (and participation) of the games.
*is it a plug if you have no stake in it other than as a consumer?
I remember my good old days (for whatever worth that term has for a person under 30) of playing Vampire the Masquerade in the depths of my edgy teenage years. We ended all our character’s with a Gehenna scenario, but I still hope to get the gang back together again someday.
There is only one true game.
Everything else is stamp collecting.
I still have the three original rulebooks that I got for my 13th birthday, lovingly preserved. The thing that people forget, though, is that those first books weren’t just persnickety — they were practically unplayable. Whole swaths of the third book (how much it costs to build different sections of your castle) never got used by anybody that I knew of. Monsters had misspelled stats (percent liar) that were never even explained. Major mechanics seemed counterintuitive or made no sense (the more armor I wear, the lower my armor class goes?)
Which turned out to be all to the good. Since almost nobody played with the rules as written, it encouraged creativity and invention, and spawned generation after generation of other, more streamlined, better systems (Tunnels and Trolls, EPT, Chivalry and Sorcery, Fantasy Trip, GURPS, yadda yadda). If the original game had been more polished, it might not have spawned a whole industry.
I recently got back into tabletop roleplaying after basically stopping entirely after college. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember in my late 30s than it was in my teens and 20s. In part, because I am a different person now than I was then and what I think is important and how I look at life and what I think is important to a character.
I own all of the stuff they have for D&D 5th edition, which is thankfully only like seven books at this point, only three of which are really important, and I’m looking at starting up a new game with a coworker and his friends. It’ll be an interesting thing, as I’m not really plugged in to that community around here. Mostly because who I am as a gamer is different from that community as a whole…
I just never got introduced to it. Wrong friends, wrong family, but I never believed it was Satanic. I do remember seeing some of the students at one school using the entire dorm building as a dungeon, late at night.
I greatly enjoy the webcomic _Order of the Stick_ http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html
Roll20.net looks interesting. Maybe we should organize a Pharyngula team?
This coming weekend is this years incarnation of the oldest, continual, table-top gaming convention in the world. (That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.) It’s DunDraCon 40. You can check out everything (the program book is on line) at http://www.dundracon.com . So, yes, D&D, among many other RPGs is alive and well (based on pre-reg numbers, I’m expecting that attendance may top 1900.
Among the committee members is one of the original authors of both the “All the World’s Monsters” books as well as RuneQuest! plus the originator of a widely used convention for organizing combat rounds (“the Perrin convention”), Steve Perrin. Many years ago, Dave Arneson used to come to con occasionally.
So…if you want to play some D&D and don’t have a gaming group handy, come on out to San Ramon, CA and spend 4 days playing to your hearts content. If you’re missing needed supplies, you’ll be able to get them in the Dealer’s Room.
And to cover a couple of “hot button” items…we have an anti-harassment policy, and 6 of 13 owners of the corporation that runs the con are women, which goes to 9 of 20 for the whole Convention Committee.
@whheydt,
I thought I recognized your handle here. You and I were just having a discussion about upgrading my son’s registration from In-Tow last week. See you this weekend :)
Oh, and I would totally be up for a Pharyngula RPG team, PZ!
I’ll be running B/X D&D at the local geek bar tonight. Then, the first week of March, I’m going to Gary Con where it’s going to be pretty much “Old School” gaming, including my annual session playing “Empire of the Petal Throne.”
Depending on when you guys played, I’d totally be down for a Pharyngula RPG group.
As I write this my original 1st edition 3 book set (plus greyhawk and g,dg,&h) sits within reach, on my gear rack. Right next to my 1st edition copy of Traveller, playtesters’ copy of Squad Leader, and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. I can haz gamer cred?
Akira@#18:
Depending on when you guys played, I’d totally be down for a Pharyngula RPG group.
When I read that I immediately flashed to a scenario of a bunch of skeptics in a part with a cleric, successfully convincing the cleric that “turn undead” is BS. ..
By the way, if you like role-play-based comics and oglaf, “Rat Queens” is great and suitably weird. Not as weird as Oglaf but it’s funny as heck.
I’ve been a tabletop wargamer since I was nine, but pen and paper RPGs are something I’ve only been able to play over the last few years – the close of my twenties. I’ve owned a few RPG books, mainly tie-ins with my fantasy wargaming, but getting people to play never proved possible before. I agree that there is a whole different outlook on play among those of us for whom youth is fast becoming a fatuous pretense – the communal storytelling aspect takes precendence over the more mechanistic “I want to stomp around killing stuff” attitude (we have video games for that though!). We started with an obscure one though – Promethean the Created – because the World of Darkness storytelling games fit our needs better, and the opportunity to play as Frankenstein-inspired alchemical abominations against nature is too good to pass up. Though for some reason my players always end up getting beaten up by the police and having to break out of jail…
prepare a lecture on Bugbear evolution
Evolutionary psychologists have determined that having a pumpkin for a head has survival value! It has to do with attracting bees, and uh, quantum.
for some reason my players always end up getting beaten up by the police and having to break out of jail…
Tell them to stop selling loose cigarettes within the town walls. The guards pull serious aggro over that in some places.
My one an only brush with fame was meeting Gary Gygax while working for Game Designers’ Workshop in the mid-’90s. They struck a deal with him after the left TSR to produce a new RPG (Mythus and Dangerous Journeys) and after its release TSR sued GDW into oblivion. Suit was settled out of court, but GDW didn’t last much longer.
I loved working there and seeing all the artwork coming in for the new games. I was reminded of how good this stuff is when I was gifted a 5th edition Player’s Handbook from my nephew so I could join him and my other nephews for a gaming group.
I haven’t played D & D since 3rd edition was new, but I’ve been having a blast with my nephews…30 years later.
I will second Marcus Ranum’s endorsement of Rat Queens, that comic is hilarious. It’s also the only fantasy comic I know of where all the female characters (who survived their first battle) wear completely practical armor instead of chainmail bikinis.
As far as D&D goes, I played a lot of 3.5 Edition about a decade ago, but my group split up following the sudden, tragic death of the GM and it’s been basically impossible to find a stable RPG group that lasts more than a month or two in my town ever since. Gaming in general is freaking dead in this town: I actually drive all the way up to Portland (a six hour round trip) just to play a monthly game of BattleTech.
microraptor @ 25
I played a little BT back in my high school days, but when they introduced The Clans, things started to get really crazy. That said, I’m considering getting back in, going as far as painting up a couple of IS lances.
Hehehehe… Reminds me of the convos I’ve had surrounding “Protection from Evil”. Define “evil” in the context of a bunch of adventurers invading a goblin tribe’s home, killing the residents and looting their corpses. Good times.
I think a “Gaming With Pharyngulites” on Roll20 would be cool and would love to give it a try. I’m hesitant to offer to GM because I’ve never actually used Roll20 from that side of the “table” before. If anyone is interested in getting a game going* you can find me on Roll20 under the same nym I use here YOB – YeOldeBlacksmith.
*if enough people are interested, we can hash out edition wars, gms, schedules, etc over there.
PZ…
I think I have you beat, slightly. I bought one of the boxed sets of the first printing of the three-little-brown-books, Men and Magic, Monsters and Treasure and Wilderness Adventure. I still have them somewhere around the house.
I was going to mention Roll.20. I play with a small group Sat. nights about 2 or three times a month. Current campaign is using the new 5e rules. If I were to run a game, I’d use the core rules of Pathfinder, which is a slight modification of the 3.5 rules. BTW, you can usually get ebook versions of the rules a lot cheaper than the printed hardbacks. The core rules of Pathfinder go for $10 I think. That is the equivalent of the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. It even has a few monsters in it, but you really need the Pathfinder Beastiary. I really like the PDF because you can do a text search.
AD&D was my game, back in the mid-80s, source of some of my best childhood memories! It kept us out of trouble, too, up until the wee hours downing pop & chips rather than… other stuff.
Our DM was a sadistic SOB. Never let us have characters appropriately leveled for the module. We responded by cheating like hell on our d20 rolls. I was usually a ranger or druid. We took a couple of kicks at Descent into the Depths of the Earth and Tomb of Horrors – had our asses handed to us every time. Dwellers of the Forbidden city was good… Ravenloft was a departure but still fun… The group died out partway through Dragonlance – I had Tanis & Flint, Raistlin remained a NPC because our DM thought none of us players would do him justice. Sadly, sports, girls, etc took their toll.
A couple of us even invented our own games – I made up rules and painstakingly wrote up stats for a post-apocalyptic aircraft themed game. It never got off the ground, but I did play a WWF-based rpg a buddy made up. Good times!
I played D&D and various other RPGs for a couple of decades, but now haven’t played for over a decade (friends dispersed, dropped sprogs, dropped dead, etc). I can’t be arsed to try to put a new group together so I’ve settled for writing my own game system over the last two years. I’m doing it purely for the technical challenge of writing something that can accommodate those who like quick and easy play, those who like mathematical modelling, and those who prefer one of a couple of grades in between. I expect it’ll take me several more years to make it even halfway reasonable, and after that I’ll spend another year or so coding up a web site and/or an app to bring the bookkeeping into the modern era. Then, when I’m finally happy with it, I’ll chuck it all in the drawer with my old D&D manuals and scenario folders and go find something else to do instead.
I’ve been running a series of Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP) campaigns set in the Fourth Age using the Rolemaster system for 10 years; they’re a spinoff of a friend’s MERP campaign series that had been running for 13 years. So, yeah, our setting is as “rich in history” as we are. ;-)
I second Ye Olde Blacksmith’s endorsement of Roll20. My group does voicechat over TeamSpeak rather than video or whatever Roll20 has, but I don’t know if this is an indictment of Roll20’s system or just my guys prefer TeamSpeak for their own reasons.
(I don’t care either way.)
Two nice things about the arrangement:
1. While the DM and active character(s) are playing out their parts in voice chat, the other players can discuss strategies or kibbitz in Roll20’s typed chat. This leads to entertaining moments such as the DM, our magic user, and our bard negotiating in active role-play the release of the barbarian and monk from the local jail; while the barbarian and monk exchange ALL CAPS drunken singing and shouting in they typed chat. (Which also gets saved for posterity.)
2. The archivist of the team (me) can type a continuous log of the action while still gaming. Somehow this doesn’t work as well in-person. Perhaps because the group needs to be structured/organized to play online, whereas in person we tend to get more distracted. (They are different people for my groups, so it might just be the people.)
And yes, if a Pharyngula group starts, I would be quite interested!
@michaelvieths #1 – You laugh, but I remember the old Dungeon magazine back when issue numbers were only double digits. They would get actual biologists to write articles about how this or that monster might exist, given as few “let’s just pretend” points as possible. Fire breath, for example, was explained as tiny crystals of elemental sodium collected in a volatile, oil-like secretion. When expelled, the oil vaporizes, exposing the crystals to oxygen whereupon they ignite.
So your idea really is not all that far-fetched.
@Gregory in #34 – Yeah, I have some of those. I always enjoyed their expanded ‘Ecology of…’ articles.
And now I noticed that I typed ‘Bugbear’ instead of ‘Owlbear’, so it’s not as ridiculous as I was thinking. :) Order of the Stick had a diatribe on them that stuck in my head.
I would be really excited for a pharyngula RPG community. I’m an aspiring GM at the moment without a lot of experience, but at this point I haven’t seen anyone else volunteer? So hey, if no one else will do it I guess I could volunteer.
I’d be down for a Pharyngula gaming group.
I’d be down for a Pharyngula gaming group.
I’ve heard of Social Justice Warriors. Can I be a Social Justice Mage? I usually like to roll the spells and not get where all the nasty splatty is going on.
The Social Justice Warriors sounds like a great party name. Bonus experience to anyone who can work social justice themes into their character’s backstory without hitting a major trope.
How about a secular “cleric”? A Mage that uses arcane magic to mimic divine magic.
I suppose there wouldn’t be any atheists in a world that could demonstrate (with evidence) the existence of gods.
Unless….. A Mage that denies the existence of gods (cause he’s angry at them, of course) and travels about mimicking divine magic as a means to debunk/discredit clerics.
YOB@#40:
How about a secular “cleric”? A Mage that uses arcane magic to mimic divine magic.
OMG.. Now I wish wish wish there was a D&D game I was a regular part of. Because I think a slightly deluded cleric who thinks his homeopathic spells work… would be so fun to role-play. “Why did that guy throw a bottle of alcohol at that troll? Ooooo, messy!!! Can you resurrect him?” Can’t you picture him healing the party? “What did you get… hit with an arrow? Here, drink this tincture of bodkin 100C it will help you no end!”
Randall Jarret’s Sean O’Lochlainn is pretty close to that, with his “sympathetic magic” and “similarity magic” etc. Good books if you haven’t read them… It’s basically Sherlock Holmes in a world where magic sort of works.
The great thing about being a homeopathic mage is your ingredients are really cheap, and the more you stretch them out, the better they work!
I want both of those together. An atheist mage who derides the existence of gods and a cleric who thinks they’re a mage but the homeopathy they’re doing is actually divine magic. I think they might fight a bit.
I hadn’t played for a couple years and just got back into RPGs with Call of Cthulhu, one of the RPG greats right after king of the hill D&D. In fact the initial popularity of D&D helped fuel the rise of other RPGS like Call of Cthulhu, which in turn pushed the Cthulhu Mythos into the mainstream.
Re: drivenb4u @ #44….
Before Chaosium came out with Call of Chtulhu, their big–and quite popular–game was RuneQuest! My wife did the original typesetting for CoC and while doing so discovered that they had missed having a description for claustrophobia, so she added one and ran it by the company to see if they liked it. They did and it stayed in.
The games I really liked from Chaosium weren’t their RPGs (which were quite decent), but two “minigames” the produced, Stomp (elves trying to evade and bring down the giant hired to guard a garden, the giant being represented by a pair of sandals) and Panzer Pranks (WW2 as it was fought in the movies). In PP, if an American tank is knocked out, it turns into a Coke machine and all American units behind it move forward faster. One of the scenarios was the Polish Corridor, which featured the Polish Couch. (As you can see, neither of these games was meant to be taken seriously.
Just to make your gaming a little more…interesting…here’s a trick that was invented (strictly within the rules!) by Bill Keyes, who is the current Committee Chairman for DunDraCon.
It requires a supply of rubber balls. One Cleric and one Mage (both pretty low level). Each one casts a spell on the rubber balls. The Cleric casts “Clerical continual light” on them. The Mage casts “Magic Mouth”–condition: if you are within 10 feet of a monster; action: yell monster.
Go into the dungeon. Take out a rubber ball. Throw it down the corridor. Bounce, bounce, bounce, “Monster!”, bounce, bounce…. Now you know which door to start with. If it’s undead, just dump the whole bag.
here’s a trick that was invented (strictly within the rules!) by Bill Keyes
… old school D&D used to have a telekinesis spell. I used to ask GMs if how that worked – very carefully. “Can I move something out of line of sight if I know it’s there?” Because if they don’t answer exactly right you can use your telekinetic fingers to stir someone else’s frontal lobes – brains are fragile. “Can I use it to accelerate something?” That’s a good one. If a turn is 1 second and you can accelerate a 1gp mass 1 gp mass/sec you have a railgun that shoots goldpieces and best of all the missile is steerable. You can vaporise anything with that trick. And there are less fun ones like leaving huge things very carefully balanced and using telekinesis as a trigger for more complex actions.
I knew a high level mage who had amazingly high movement stats and basically couldn’t be caught. So occasionally he’d wander out and try to find trolls. His strategy was to try to polymorph a troll into a chicken. If it worked, great. If it didn’t – he’d beat it out of there. But when he got the pissed off squawking troll chicken his idea of fun was to take it back to town, wander into a tavern and, when they told him he couldn’t bring a chicken in he’d let it go and cast a dispell magic on his way out the door. It never occurred to us at the time to call this “trolling” but there you have it.
I third the recommendation of Rat Queens. It is funny, and one of the main characters is a cleric of a squid-like deity that she doesn’t really believe in.
The writer for that comic is Kurtis Wiebe, and he also hosts a couple of tabletop RPG’s on YouTube. One of these series is a D&D campaign with four women, titled “D20Babes”. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBiwNSyaVaD-o2SCavVrzlg
But I also want to strongly recommend Critical Role, a 5e D&D show starring several voice actors you may recognize from video games and anime. It has generated quite a following in the last year, and is an excellent example of keeping the role-playing in “role-playing game”. You can find it through the Geek and Sundry website: http://geekandsundry.com/shows/critical-role/ They stream live on Twitch on Thursday evenings Pacific Time.
And as if that was not enough, you can see some fine folks playing D&D through their computers at the Incomparable’s “Total Party Kill”. This is an example of Roll20 or a similar program allowing people in different cities to play together. The show is made by the same people who bring you the Incomparable’s geeky empire of audio content, and it is available as videos on YouTube or as podcasts on their own site. https://www.theincomparable.com/tpk/archive/
That ends my turn.
How would one construct a Social Justice Housecat?
@Marcus Ranum #47:
I remember dealing with this in 1981! The same went for poking eyes out and (later) popping corks out of potions of fiery burning.
In the game Palladium there’s a Witch character class who can gain a very nice Telekinesis ability very early on in the game (for all that the class has significant disadvantages, I do think this particular ability did unbalance the game). The first time I played it, my argument was that if my Witch character could lift the rule-given mass against gravity at 30 feet, then the inverse-square law meant that such-and-such a force could be applied to the same mass on the ground just one foot away (my character also managed to have a 60% skill in Mathematics*, for class reasons which made little sense, but…). Anyway, I took it to its logical conclusion and demonstrated that the shockwave would shatter her femurs by the time the mass had been accelerated vertically past her knees (by which time it was travelling at something well above Mach 1).
* Which also came in handy to describe the wonders of Flatland to fellow player-characters, and use proof by induction to extend this concept to an explanation of interdimensional interlopers. They only wanted to know where that damn demon had come from, but I got carried away…
@Mobius
Don’t forget the Pathfinder System Reference Document hosted at http://www.d20pfsrd.com/
Unlike Wizbro, Paizo doesn’t lock down the expansions to the rules. Thus the SRD includes all the classes, all the gear, all the spells, all the monsters, etc. About the only thing it is missing is the art.
I remember dealing with this in 1981
I was one of those annoying rules-lawyers everyone hated. There’s always one.
My favorite: insta-win in a third reich game, because you could drop parachute units within 2 hexes of a friendly unit. But if that friendly unit was a parachute unit, you could make a line of paratroopers right into Berlin in one turn. That one actually provoked an angry phone call to Avalon Hill game co for adjudication.
And then there was the time that I entered a Car Wars tournament with a car that was entirely armor with a small engine to power the laser turret, and no wheels to save weight. The victory conditions were “last car operating” not “last car moving” … I slew them all.
Hey, I was in high school. I stopped when I realized I was being a jerk. Isn’t it weird how some people realize they’re being jerks and the cognitive dissonance (“but I’m a great guy!”) is too much for them and they try to haul the entire internets around to redefine what “jerk” is so it’s not them? Wow, that’s damaging behavior. “Oh, wow, you’re right, I am ruining the game for you. I’m sorry; I’ll never do that again.” So hard.
@michaelvieths #35
Owlbears are one of those monsters that seem silly until one of the following two things happens:
You come across a well made drawing of one and realize that they are scarier looking than a ‘perfectly serviceable bear’.
You consider what it would be like to be hunted by a bear that can see in the dark and has incredible hearing.
Of course, the standard explanations generally involve an unknown wizard who wasn’t entirely sane and how he lucked out in getting a magical hybrid that was fertile.
@YOB – Ye Olde Blacksmith #40
You mean like the Razmiran Priest prestige class from Pathfinder, (“False Priest” in the SRD)? Also having Bards pretend to be Clerics has a fair amount of history by this point
I’m game for the Pharyngula Campaign! I want to play a social justice Warrior. I will smash trolls with my mighty weapon, Banhammer!
My credentials aren’t quite as good – I was only 3 in 1975, and I never really got into D&D until I was 10 – but I’ve been gaming once a week (more when I was a kid, but adults have to work sometimes) pretty much continuously since.
I fell WAY out of love with Dungeons and Dragons over the years, especially with 3rd edition (I’d say 4th, but honestly we only ever played that as a tactical miniatures game). So for what it’s worth – to THIS roleplayer, whose group well knew he had an “anything but D&D” preference for years, I think D&D5e (or “Next”, if they must) is some great stuff. There’s no need to be “good at D&D” anymore, it’s pretty tricky to create a useless character (and trivial to create a good one), and it is completely playable WITHOUT miniatures or a battle mat.
Sign me up for any Pharyngula related d20 stuff. If nobody else volunteers, I’ll even run it.
Man, y’all would not like to have me as a Storyteller/GM/whatever.
My answer to nonsense gameplay antics that are technically allowed by the rules is “No, not now, not ever. Stop that. If you have to use the phrase ‘technically-allowed’ to describe how it works, it doesn’t.”
5e is pretty amazing. Much less of the miniatures and nitpicking, and much more storytelling and exploration. Love it.
And for any D&D fans, I highly recommend the podcast “The Adventure Zone”. A very funny family, three brothers and their dad, play a sprawling D&D campaign. The first few episodes are shaky, as they find the rhythm of the game, but by episode 4, they’re firing on all cylinders.
“Do you say anything as you attack?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to say?”
“ABRACAFUCKYOU!”
That’s largely how my groups have worked. Though there’s the added rule of cool: If the GM likes it and thinks it’d be really cool/funny/amazing depending on the game style you have a chance. Not a good chance usually, but a chance. Peasant rail gun? no. Hurling a flaming dwarf paladin as a boarding weapon? You’ll need to roll really well for the throw, but go for it.
I did once attempt to hurl a halfling paladin through a burning boat to get out. He was the heaviest thing around. It didn’t work.
I have no complaints about creative artists trying to make money off their works. Do you?
And this is coming from me, a person that favors quite radical reductions in “author’s right” copyright.
…
I do that all the time, to the occasional chagrin of my friends! Lol. I’m currently playing a lawful good, stupid–good, superhero persona. It’s going swell. I’m having a blast. I have already spent a large portion of “party loot” trying to save (and successfully so) two NPCs from certain death who just tried to kill us, the party, a few sessions back.
Thanks to a friend long ago, I realized the best way to roleplay is not to be the superpowerful wizard that is prepared for everything. Instead, it’s often much more fun to play a character with real and severe handicaps and flaws, such as my class silver age superhero persona.
“For Justice and Tomorrow!”
~strikes a pose that would fit right in a cheesy anime with Bearsy Bearington, his faithful sidekick, played by another player~
…
Yes and no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faction_%28Planescape%29
In other words, this is the position that I have always said that I would adopt if I ever shown conclusive proof that the Christian god is real. Yes, the Christian god would exist, and it would be a very powerful creature, but if there’s nothing else that I learned from Stargate SG-1, the proper response to being shown an evil god is not to bow down and worship, but to try to blow it up. Nuke god!
…
IIRC, didn’t the game book more or less explicitly state that the Witch class was for the DM only and not for players?
@40
The Dwemer from the Elder Scrolls series were just that. According to the metaphysics of the setting, it’s possible for mortals to attain various states of godhood (one of which is coming to the realization that you are a character in an act of fiction).
With that in mind, they figured that if all the difference between them and the gods was the right frame of mind or ritual, the gods were really just super-powerful beings, not deities. “Like eh those guys are cool but we could do that too with science.”
It’s kind of like that “if there was actually a reproducible, observable mechanism where people become ghosts after death, ghosts would just be rolled in to the natural world and not be counted as supernatural” argument.
Vivec @ 60
I like the in-universe book which contains a story about a Dwemer researcher using a (possibly sleight of hand) trick to demonstrate that Azura was not omniscient. Also the “editor’s note” which comments that it’s probably the only genuine Dwemer story in the collection, while the others are reworked stories from other cultures. The textual layers are fun.
I was just talking with a friend a few days ago about the whole “if we had evidence of gods, they wouldn’t be gods anymore”. In the context of an RPG, I suppose it really matters what kind of world your game takes place in. In most of the game worlds I’ve ever come across, gods existed and were gods; in the classical sense i.e. Not omniscient/omnipotent. Using modern philosophies of science in a world that has magic seems kind of counter to the whole idea. I mean, 2+2=5 could happen cause *jazz hands* Magic! :)
(Speaking to fantasy not necessarily sci-if)
While I never really warmed to D&D in any incarnation (although 5th looks pretty good), I’ve been following the hobby off and on since I first picked up Metagaming’s Melee and Wizard in 19-mumble-mumble. It seems a lot of games are going “back to basics”: the Old School Renaissance which preceded and most likely inspired 5th edition D&D, Chaosium’s reprints of RuneQuest 2 and an eventual new edition based on it, and new life for the “old” World of Darkness after the
New World of DarknessChronicles of Darkness failed. Most indie RPGs now strip rules down to narrative elements and/or genre emulation, rather than the increasingly “realistic” rules of the past. Honestly, the older generation is too busy to fool with newer and more complicated rules, and the newest generations have computer RPGs and MMORPGs if they want only tactical combat.Also, due to the rise of computer games, the tabletop RPG “industry” is dwindling. Hasbro is spending far fewer resources on D&D 5 than it did on previous editions (notably the unpopular 4th), hoping fans will take up the slack under their slightly exploitative “Dungeon Masters Guild” marketplace. The aforementioned Chaosium is in dire financial straits (again), the Worlds of Darkness now have two different owners after changing hands multiple times, and RPG publishers have largely moved to electronic books, Print on Demand, and Kickstarters because just printing up a few thousand books and hoping they sell is just too risky. Reports of tabletop RPGs’ death are always greatly exaggerated, but the heyday of D&D (and others riding the whirlwind) are long gone.
Tabletop hobby games, on the other hand, are making a comeback, thanks in part to Wil Wheaton’s YouTube series TableTop. But that’s a story for a different time.
fmitchell@63 – I don’t know that tabletop RPGs have ever really been big sellers. In many cases you only really need one book (D&D is one of the few sticklers that still makes you buy 3); Hasbro always made a lot more money off Magic than they did from anything they acquired from TSR.
I’m also not really sure that “back to basics” is the right way to describe the current industry. D&D5e might be a greatly simplified system compared to 3rd edition, but it is also a fair bit simpler than the old “white box” was as well. There HAVE been improvements (unified task resolution mechanics being the most obvious if we’re sticking to D&D). I’m somewhat interested to see what Chaosium does with RuneQuest, but I don’t share the nostalgia that it was best in its 2nd edition; the 3rd edition rules (IMHO) are much better than the 2nd edition rules (3rd edition suffered from lack of and poorer quality supplements more than mechanics).
But even in its heyday tabletop RPGs were never more than a niche hobby. Whether they survive another generation is anybody’s guess.
Vivec@#56
My answer to nonsense gameplay antics that are technically allowed by the rules is “No, not now, not ever.
I can tell you haven’t GM’d for a rules lawyer. That’s not how it works. Usually, as you’re biting into a slice of pizza there’s a casual question, “just to clarify, is that spell power related to the size of the field?” Now, you know something’s up, because nobody asks for clarification that casually. So you’re trying to think of all the possible wrong answers and “I don’t know” doesn’t work. And a good game rules lawyer will have a setup that would make William Lane Craig weep tears of envy: it doesn’t matter if you say yes or no, if you accepted that the question is framed with a yes/no answer, they’ve got an exploit for either path.
To me it’s still essential role-play. You’re roleplaying a high-level Irritance Mage. Sure, Fire Mages are flashy, and Ice Mages have great crowd control – but if you want to make the GM weep, you need an Irritance Mage. One that has memorized the rule-books so they can act casually ignorant. If you’ve got an Irritance Mage with a ring of regeneration on there’s nothing you can do – it’s like arguing with a creationist – they have 10,000 arguments you can knock down and they just keep summoning more flocks of them from the pits of hell. Some Irritance Mages outgrow it, others grow up to be Vox Day.
Marcus Ranum @65:
Huh, I’ve always played with GMs who, when faced with a rules lawyer, will say, “Okay, I see what you’re saying and still: NO. I don’t care if it’s inconsistent or contradictory.”
And if the rules lawyer continues to the point of aggravation, the GM lightning bolts their character to death.
More fun is having the rules lawyer be the GM. My friend who fits this description is a very good GM and lets us get away with more things, but only if they’re fun and don’t break the game.
frog @66:
Yeah, that’s what I’ve done when I’ve GMed for such people. Optimizing your character is one thing, but digging through rulebooks with the intent of actually breaking the game and making your character overpowered and unstoppable? I don’t allow that for the simple reason of it making the game unfun for everyone at the table who isn’t you.
Most rules lawyering I’ve seen boiled down to just being exploits. There’s a difference between being creative with the rules and using an exploit. I always encourage out of the box thinking, especially if it’s role played well, but exploiting the fallible human created rule set to basically break the game is right out.
And I’m gonna say exploit again cause it’s a fun word.
Exploit.
Ok I’ll bite.
D&D is *terrible*.
90% of the manuals are unnecessarily contrived rules to solve problems with violence.
I needed 10 different tables to manage a 1ed game.
5% of the manuals are unnecessarily contrived rules to handwave away non-violent solutions, with the result that most GMs feel that if there’s no combat they are making it too easy on the players.
And what about the white-gray-black morality? Or the fact that you make points by killing things? No kill, no points.
Videogames are much better at that.
More recent RPGs are less rule heavy and instead use the rules to directly support the drama rather than the action, and completely opposite to what D&D does, nitpicking rules to break the game is explicitly frowned upon, while breaking the rules to add to the drama and theatrics is encouraged (am thinking about Exalted or Numenera or the other gazillion games out there).
D&D (last time I checked, 4th ed) is stuck to 30 years ago.
@Menyambal: Order of the Stick is one of the best webcomics around.
F.O.:
Ahem. RP points. Achievement points. Both were in the original.
Ahem. It was explicitly stated in the DMG that there were no rules as such, but rather guidelines — and the DM was encouraged to make it up to go with the flow.
@65
While I’ve never had to deal with particularly sophisticated rules-lawyers, I’ve had people try to use characters and exploits they found online.
My answer is still “No, that doesn’t work, I don’t care what the rules say. Storyteller’s fiat, suck it up or play somewhere else.”
Okay…while anecdotes are coming thick and fast… In one Villains &Vigilantes session, where the player party was being backed by the US government and we were being allowed to ask for stuff, which the GM would either grant or deny. One of the players said, “Can we have ….” and rattled off a string of letters and numbers. After a moment, the GM said, “okay. You can that.” Thus the party went of to complete their mission in possession of a jeep mounted 105mm recoilless rifle. (The GM didn’t realize what he’d allowed us to have until it was *described*, as opposed to being given the Army designation for the rig.)
I haven’t played D&D since First Ed. I have played a lot of Old World of Darkness, but I also discovered GURPS and point buy character creation. I much prefer it to the old roll 3d6 for stats. So, I can’t say that I’m that interested in a D&D campaign, but if anyone’s up for oWoD or GURPS, I’m in. Heck, I’d be interested in using the oWoD setting with GURPS mechanics. Translating ought to be easier than when the official conversions were done.
inquisitiveraven@73: SJG actually did Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage for GURPS. Then White Wolf got annoyed that they were more popular than their own books, and pulled the licence.
D&D has basically used point generation for ages though; I hate random character generation with the burning fire of a thousand flaming suns.
F.O. @69:
Well, D&D was derived from a tabletop combat game. Also, as far as group activities go, combat’s a pretty easy one to do. Everybody gets to contribute unless you’ve got someone who’s exponentially more powerful than the rest of the team (AKA a high-level spellcaster when compared to high-level non-spellcasters). Compare that to non-combat situations where it’s typically one character who’s talking, disarming the traps, with possible assistance from one or two other characters.
I used to play on occasion with a small group, always DM’d by my good friend Brian. He always called it Monty Hall because there was never any plan or base story line. The play and the story line just emerged out of the madness of a long (often very long) night which regularly would go well into the next day.
Those Monty Hall games were wild, with events driven solely by dice rolls. On the whole, I think that’s the way to do D&D. That and plenty of beer and snacks, and whatever else needs to just keep going.
Man, you guys would have hated my group. We were ALL rules lawyers. One upping each other and driving that week’s DM (we rotated) insane was half the fun. Technically allowed was the best kind of allowed!
5th Ed is a hell of a system; their discovery that being able to roll twice and take the best roll is worth about a +2 but feels so much more satisfying is the kind of rule that you’ll see everyone else swiping in ten years.
It feels like we’re in a good place for tabletop roleplaying – there’s a lot more diversity, and people are much more willing to build games that have a specific flavour to them you can’t get from D&D. The scourge of adding up dice and various bonuses seems to have given way to much more interesting ways to resolve things. My favourite mechanic comes from a game called Numenera – GMs are strongly encouraged to never put in obstacles that are only interesting if the players fail their roll. Instead, the GMs are allowed to screw over a player once or twice a session, in exchange for giving those players free XP. (GMs must ask, and the players are allowed to spend XP to avoid their dreadful fate.)
I have a feeling that we could get enough people to do several Pharygula campaigns. I’m already doing one online campaign, and have been playing around with the idea of starting my own. Would have to get up and running on using the Roll20 mapping system, but it looks like it isn’t all that different from the old MapTool system.
BTW, thanx Rick Pikul. I hadn’t seen that web page before on the Pathfinder rules. Handy. Also looks like they have similar pages for other rules systems like 5e.
@ Matt Cramp: The weirdest system of resolving things in a role playing game was on an episode of Tabletop. They used Jinga. Which meant that getting things done got more and more difficult until someone blew it. Then it would be easy again for a little while.
Mobius @79
That game was “Dread” and it is super fun!
Anyone interested in getting a game going
I set up a blank game on Roll20. There are no details since I’m not sure if it’ll actually happen, but figured I’d get the ball rolling. You can go here if you’d like to give it a try.
@John Morales: at best the original had a “yeah, give them some points for whatever” hidden around the pages, together with other gems such as “if a player doesn’t know how to solve a problem, have them roll Intelligence and have the charcater solve it”
Explicitly stated or not, breaking exploits were the norm.
@microraptor: Yes, D&D derived from tabletop combat game, but that was like 40 years ago, the basic premise didn’t change much, and by now there are much better way to simulate combat.
Unlike combat, “Disarming traps” involves a single roll on a single skill, there is no interest in making it more interesting.
What about social situations? All players can contribute, and yet they are, at best, handwaved away.
I think this is generally the sort of thing you can pin on a bad DM letting the players get away with zero-effort roleplaying. Imo skill rolls shouldn’t conclusively resolve a situation without further roleplaying. I’m personally really not a fan of strict rule-based “I roll x and if i succeed I do y” RPing, but that really depends on what context you’re playing (ie friendly game vs organized play)
For me, skill rolls just open the door for more roleplaying, not solve the problem. If the rogue makes their check to detect a trap, they don’t magically gain the ability to see through walls and doors. They get an indiana jones style intuition that “there’s probably a trap in this hallway, better watch where where I step”. Then they get to describe what they do. If it’s plausible, they successfully avoid the pressure plate under the carpet. If they just blunder forward, they activate the plate.
Dialogue is the same thing. If you want to try and seduce/blather/lie/charm your way out of this situation and pass your roll, you’d better be prepared to tell me what you say. If your attempt at seduction is “Hey sexy give me the key”, I don’t care what you rolled. That guardsman is going to tell you to eff off and draw his sword if you persist.
The thing about insisting that a player comes up with a plausible and effective explanation for how they achieve what their character does is that it kind of requires players to have the sorts of skills and familiarities that their characters would. You might very well want to play a charming and seductive rogue, but have the charm and seduction ability of a wet haddock yourself – I’m not sure it’s fair to penalise you for not being able to come up with the sizzling one-liners. Likewise, if your character is a skilled mechanic or engineer but you couldn’t tell one end of a screwdriver from the other then it’s a bit unfair expecting you to go into detail about how you are going to disarm that trap or fix that machine.
One thing that annoys me is when players try to “explain” to the GM how things are supposed to work. Especially when they try to bring in spurious “real world” knowledge. “No no, martial arts don’t work that way” or “no, that’s not how police procedures work” or “no, the human body can survive something like that no trouble”. You know what? I don’t care! Here and now in this game with me GMing, that’s how things work! Physics does whatever I say it does, no you can’t punch the gun out of someone’s hand while they’ve got it pointed at the back of your head, and if you don’t like it you can bugger off and do your own GMing.
cartomancer @ 83:
Exactly. It makes no more sense to penalize the player running the charismatic bard because they’re not very good at coming up with charming pick-up lines than it does to penalize the player running the wizard because they can’t cast magic spells in real life.
And for the record while I like D&D all right, my favorite tabletop RPG is Shadowrun.
I don’t know, I think it’s the sort of thing where there’s nuance.
Like, if they’re disarming a trap or it’s a Sci-Fi game, I’m not going to make them detail exactly how they reprogrammed their robot. That’s not really adding anything to the RP, and it’d be impossible to succeed.
But if it’s a dialogue scene or something, I’m not interested in playing a game where they go “yeah I rolled a 10 and i needed a 6 to succeed on my charm roll so the dialogue is over.” I’m not a stickler, but if you can’t come up with anything better than “ugh hi barkeep give me your best room for half-off please” for an attempt at bargaining, you’re just not trying.
If they don’t want to actually roleplay, they’re welcome to learn to DM and run it how they like, or play a tabletop wargame where they can roll dice and not worry about collaborative storytelling.
GarySturgess@74: I actually have copies of all four of the GURPS WoD books that were actually published; that’s what I meant by “official conversions.” Those were written for GURPS 3e. I’m talking about translating to 4e which made some of the stuff from those conversions more generic and reworked other stuff to better fit the GURPS playing style.
Of course we could also try out stuff like Dungeon Fantasy or Monster Hunters which are GURPS source books for particular genres.
inquisitiveraven@86: Ah, of course, I misread you. Apologies. I am missing the 2nd Vampire one myself, but I have the other three.
I’m a huge GURPS fan but one of my Saturday night gang hates it, so it doesn’t come out to play very often. I’ve yet to read any GURPS book that I didn’t like though.
Vivec @85
Some players just can’t do better, though. What am I supposed to do, say “sorry, but you as a player just aren’t good enough to roleplay your character so I’m going to actively penalize you the whole game?” How is that fun or encouraging of the players to try something they’re not good at once in a while? If someone can come up with a really good idea then I’ll give them a bonus, but unless they come up with something amazingly stupid I’m not going to penalize them (and unless they’ve done something to seriously annoy me I’ll probably give them a warning that they might want to reconsider). Also, the thing about dialog heavy sections is that they frequently end up with one player talking while three players check Pharyngula for new posts on their iPhones. The game should be giving everyone a chance to interact, not shining a spotlight on one character.
Oh, and skills rarely make sense to begin with- I mean, my 17th level wizard is capable of turning an entire castle into gravel by herself, but somehow she’s less intimidating that the smelly second level orc in a loincloth who’s got a sharp rock tied to a stick? How does that make sense?
Maybe not play a character based around that, then?
If you were playing a game where having to act out the character was part of the rules in the big rule book, you wouldn’t complain that you have to act out the character. When I DM, that’s one of the rules, and they’re welcome to learn to DM if they want to play “Roll dice get victory” for an hour.
I’m not saying it’s particularly dialog heavy compared to any other campaign. But if you’re going to try to get an edge in a situation through speech, be prepared to talk. Otherwise, you only have yourself to blame when the attempt at haggling falls through and the shopkeeper overcharges you.
Hence my distaste for primary rules driven RP. If your wizard has a reputation of mass murder and destruction, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to throw your weight around and intimidate people – as long as you’re prepared to put the time into say more than “I attempt to intimidate the orc – rolls dice -“
That would be a “yes,” then.
Sorry, but I just don’t agree with the idea that a person should be shoeboxed into what type of character they’re allowed to play. The primary purpose of playing an RPG is to have fun, and limiting a player’s options because they’re not as good at role playing as you are just doesn’t fit with that.
I mean, when you’ve got someone playing a Bard in your game, do you force them to actually sing? Do you force the person playing the fighter to demonstrate swordsmanship ability? Do you prevent someone from playing a cleric because they have the wisdom of your average lawn ornament (or because they’re an atheist)?
If a person is willing to at least try role playing, I see no reason to penalize them for not being very good at it.
No? That falls under the “I’m not going to make them explain how they reprogram the robot” part from earlier, because it doesn’t really add anything to the Roleplaying. Now, if they’re using their bardly charisma to try and BS their way out of a situation, that’s a different matter. And if they want to actually detail how they perform their song, I’ll probably give them an XP reward for good roleplaying.
See above. I’m referring specifically to RP situations that are glossed over by skill checks. “I hit them with my sword” is about as much RP that you’re going to wring out of an attack. That being said, if they do detail exactly how they attack the enemy, I’ll give them an XP reward for good roleplaying.
Okay either you really missed my point or you’re attacking a weird strawman of my point of view. My point isn’t “be literally as charming/as good as fighting/as intelligent as your character or you can’t play”, my point is that successful skill rolls shouldn’t let players speed through campaigns with zero roleplaying.
If you’re a techpriest and you want to fix a machine, even something as small as “I use a tool from my belt and start to assess the damage” would be fine. It’s better than “Let me roll. Passed it. Machine’s fixed.”
Right, I agree. I’m not saying you have to be an oscar winning actor or a genius fantasy writer. I’m saying you have to put more effort into RPing than “-Rolls dice- I charm him successfully.”
Plenty of games have this sort of thing codified in the official rules too. The old Warhammer Fantasy RPG would only give players certain information or allow certain actions if they did things the right way.
You couldn’t just roll charisma and intimidate information out of a guy. It’d have something like “the barkeep is an aging veteran and will laugh off any attempts to intimidate him without explicitly threatening his daughter”, or have evil spirits that will twist anything but well thought out wishes against you, monkey’s paw style.
Except that nobody said that. Your previous posts indicated that you actively penalize players for failing to meet an arbitrary standard.
Ugh, I hate it when writers do things like that. Either the GM bludgeons you in the face with the cluebat over what the correct answer is or you’re forced to play a guessing game.
Well, said barkeeper did have a dialogue tree that would reveal said information if you talked to him.
Regardless, we just have different tastes in games. I think any game where you can just shrug and say “I rolled my d20 successfully so the dialogue is over” is horrifically boring, but different strokes for different folks.
That’s not actually how I usually game. But I’m autistic and have issues with coming up with speeches on the fly, and I’ve had issues with GMs who hold it against me.
To be honest, it’s been fun having this conversation: I’ve been entirely too long without a dedicated group where I could get into an argument about the rules like that. Thanks.