For the latter, I think morale is a cool concept that doesn't see a lot of action on a lot of the tables I see, despite being a variant rule.
What is something that was common in older RPGs that you are happy isn't common today? What's something you miss?
I miss the time before the internet when the default assumption was that there isn't a "right" way to play an RPG
I've been sitting here trying to write this same sentiment out for the last twenty minutes and I'm glad it's not a silly thing to type. It was kind of understood among my friend groups that every had their own games with their own house rules with their own style, and that you really just needed to figure out what you liked in a game through play.
I feel like the change towards more focused experiences has solidified play and rules into a "you have to play it correctly, as the designer intended" mentality which IMO removes some of the agency of a particular table.
Thankfully there are still games out there (and being put out) which don't rely on a particular play style and which respond well to house ruling, so I don't feel like the sentiment has been completely lost, and at the same time I also feel like the move towards more focused experiences has helped the "house rules" scene (for lack of a better term) by showing how to better tailor rules towards a particular idea.
Yeah on one hand it opened up some design space in that you could assume more consistent rules interpretations that I don't think people realize was really, really hard to do before the internet. I also don't think people acknowledge how much that was actively influencing design of the era either. It's a whole different ballgame when there's an author website/easily accessible errata page compared to having to contact a designer via snail mail for a rules clarification.
I think it feels like this bubbles to the top in community discussion because people want advice on running the game and rules interpretations, and the only common ground we all have between different tables playing the same system is that we're working out of the same rulebook. The base assumption that we're trying to play the same game is kind of the first step in anyone being able to offer advice on how to play, so discussion of that kind usually centers the stated and/or implicit design intentions of the game.
Like, if a stranger has a question about how best to handle a certain playbook in Monster of the Week, I can throw in my two cents because I can assume we're trying to get similar things out of the game. If they have the same question but tack on "and by the way my campaign is focused on political intrigue in an Arthurian fantasy setting" there's not a lot I can offer. They mostly hunt monsters in my campaign, bud.
Like, by all means, run your game how you wanna run it, have fun, but like if you bring your golf cart to the golf cart enthusiast club and try to get a discussion going on how to make it function as a boat, you'll probably get a mixed bag of responses and not a lot of help. The boat club probably won't know what to make of you either.
so discussion of that kind usually centers the stated and/or implicit design intentions of the game.
Ideally there's some sort of statement about that, but I think this is actually a dead end for a lot of older or more traditional games more interested in providing GMs with a set of tools for resolving situations than any particular narrow intent. For example, Call of Cthulhu's system is basically BRP, originally a generic fantasy system. Intention isn't so much defined by the mechanics but the fluff around it, including what the table brings to it. If there's intent, it's definitely for the latter to happen, and was often presented as the direct appeal of the genre of games.
There's people who think there is a "right" way to play an RPG? I'm just out here playing.
I've noticed that some of the louder PbtA fans can be very insistent that there is one right way to play PbtA games, probably because the games themselves explicitly say so. Of course, that leads to the inevitable problem that different people can interpret the rules differently, and everybody thinks that their interpretation is the correct one.
For example, here is a page of otherwise good PbtA advice that starts out by saying that a GM not following the rules is "cheating. Accidentally, but still cheating." =/
I'm pretty sure the total amount of "right" TTRPGs play styles is bigger than the total amount of tables playing TTRPGs.
Ask three players and you'll get five answers
There's definitely a lot of advice on things you should absolutely never do that can be completely bullshit.
For example, fudging die rolls. It can be absolutely devastating sometimes when you roll badly at the wrong time. Some people are absolute purists in this regard who will say "if you're going to fudge die rolls, you might as well throw away the rulebook and just play 'community theater'". Personally, I fall into the camp of the dice are part of the story, same as the storyteller and the actors. If the dice tell a story you don't want to hear, you're welcome to tell them to sit down and shut up. You shouldn't do it all the time, some of the best narrative beats have emerged from the dice saying something ridiculously improbable happens, but if the story they're telling sucks you're welcome to tell a different one.
Same with optimization. You have optimization purists who insist that nobody would function suboptimally in a deadly world. You have roleplay purists who think that even considering how two class features might interact instead of focusing solely on the narrative weight of the decisions. But the reality is probably more in the middle - they probably wouldn't have a bunch of random weapons or class features from obscure splatbooks, but your retired soldier probably would be strong and tough from a lifetime of military service, he probably would wear heavy armor and carry a sword and shield or polearm because that's how armies have historically operated.
I agree on dice rolls. I don't usually for most things, seeing as I usually run horror tabletop games like CoC and I like the tension of a bad roll causing horrible things to happen or bad consequences you might need to endure. It's thematic and fun. If someone rolls a 98 when they are cleaning their gun, that gun is obviously misfiring and could hurt them.
But sometimes the dice tell you something that would totally derail the plot, you need to intervene. That gun cleaning 98 failure roll, I would go "roll Luck" and see how well they did - and even then it would only be 1d10 damage to their hand or something unless they really unluckily rolled a 100 again, which is highly unlikely. Even THEN I would let them push, justify it as "it put you to Dying and disfigured you, but you aren't dead", or do something to navigate the consequences away.
I'm harsh but not cruel. I'll take players' Sanity at the drop of a hat, in fact my scenarios are NOTORIOUS for draining Sanity like a child devours an ice cream sundae on their birthday the second it's in front of them. But I give second chances and fair warning that if something they're doing is gonna get them murdered or permanently taken out, they should reconsider. One story I have is I had a character have a dream involving meeting Nyarlathotep, getting on the back of a Shantak in it, and being flown directly into Azathoth. Player did not after THREE TIMES warning them to jump off, in fact do the Randolph Carter move and jump off... and so they took 1d100 Sanity. They rolled an 89. That character woke up stark raving insane and fled into the desert howling where they died. Oh well, I tried to warn ya, roll up another character...
Sage Advice rules lawyering is big among the dnd fifth edition community.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I miss the time before the internet when the default assumption was that there isn't a "right" way to play an RPG, and homebrew was viewed more as part of the appeal as opposed to some sign of terrible design.
Fuck yeah!
If someone comes to me to say "you're not playing it right", that person is out of my circles, from now on.
If a game can't be homebrewed, it's not for me, I need to have control on both the setting and the system.
The way I've always put it is "I know my table far better than any designer could." A system that recognizes that is important to me.
Came here to echo similar sentiments. As a mid-30s millennial OSR hipster, one thing I've been really interested in lately is how different groups played TTRPGs from the 70s through the mid-late 80s when I was born.
I spend a lot far too much time in retro RPG groups all over the internet, reading books, watching interviews, and so on about this era, and the little "pocket cultures" of TTRPGs that emerged during this era never cease to fascinate me.
Learning about that era, and the diversity of those gaming styles (which could vary city to city, or table to table) has totally made me a better overall gamer and got me to expand my horizons about how games could be played.
But at the same time, I share your sentiments about how the online era has driven many to feel as though *there is* a universal right and wrong way to play, and I do have to push back against that mindset when I encounter it.
If you like that era's history I feel obligated to recommend The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson about the emergence of the TTRPG genre. Dude has a massive archive of zines from the era and did a real deep dive into how people were actually playing, which often didn't match a lot of the common assumptions you read in forums. The TLDR is that everything you see people arguing about today was also being argued about in the 70's lol.
Really great book. Rather clearly shows that many differences in play aren't generational but boil down to individual preference.
And it's hilarious to see the same discussions form the 70s repeated in this comment section.
I share your sentiments about how the online era has driven many to feel as though *there is* a universal right and wrong way to play
As someone who grew up playing in the era you're talking about, I hate to tell you that "you're playing it wrong" is as old as the game. You can even see it in action, in nearly every issue of early Dragon Magazines, where Gygax himself routinely hops up on a soapbox to tell people they're doing it wrong. He infamously tells the west coast players that whatever game they're playing with monster characters isn't D&D.
We only seem like we were less obnoxious because we left fewer records. I promise you, at every con we went to, there were guys fighting about how you should play. Shit, there were guys fighting over the pronunciation of paladin, because none of us had any idea how to pronounce the words we saw in the books.
Although to be fair, we fought about it less, just because we talked to each other about it less, because there was just so much less communication in general. That's the piece that modern people find hardest to understand. Our ability to communicate as a hobby community was very, very weak. You had one or two magazines and cons. Otherwise the only people you ever heard talk about the game were your local players and people on TV talking about how it was satanic.
I think the difference is when Gygax said that everyone basically laughed in his face and he acknowledged the tendencies of the community by providing a whole chapter on homebrewing in the DMG, complete with figures of dice distributions. Half of Dragon Magazine was devoted to homebrewed approaches to DnD through most of its run. That was just the default assumption.
So while people still argue over the same things they always have, it feels like that default assumption has been flipped, in many ways because it allowed those disparate communities to form at least a consensus around some things and the means for designers to more easily clarify specific intentions outside of the original text. Min/maxers could solve things more quickly. It changed a lot.
As someone who grew up playing in the era you're talking about, I hate to tell you that "you're playing it wrong" is as old as the game.
I feel like this was more a reaction to the Corporat-isation of the game and the legal fight between Dave and Gary than anything inherent though.
Pre-AD&D, Hobbyist Gary stated in every possible interview that there was NO one true way; that it wasn't possible to play it wrong, that every campaign was a rulebook on its own.
Then AD&D Coke-fiend Corpo-Rat Gary started appearing in the late 70s/early 80s and that piece of shit was utterly insufferable and made statements like there was only one true way to play AD&D.
The only issue I will take with homebrew is when a GM homebrews things so half-hazardly or so against the structure of whatever game we're playing is I just wish we'd started with a different game and built from there instead of trying to renovate the system we're playing into something it isnt and the only consistent reference is a really unorganized set of notes and whatever the GM remembers.
This is mostly a rant against people trying to homebrew 5e into another game instead of just playing another game because somehow fighting against the rules the entire time is easier than just learning new ones.
TBF, if you've been doing this long enough you've encountered people actually asking money for efforts just as bad. The line between homebrew and a unique game has always been blurry, and as it turns out people like making their "own" games.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I miss the time before the internet when the default assumption was that there isn't a "right" way to play an RPG, and homebrew was viewed more as part of the appeal as opposed to some sign of terrible design.
Thank you for saying that and I do miss those times too. Back then in Polish internet not criticizing other ways of playing the game was the number one rule. Harshly enforced, with even prominent people getting banned for it from major forums and websites. I wish modern spaces, including subreddits, would do same nowadays.
For me the most important aspect of RPGs is their diversity. How every table is different. "Every playstyle is good and valid as long as everyone around the table is comfortable and having fun" is my mantra.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I miss the time before the internet when the default assumption was that there isn't a "right" way to play an RPG
That attitude was always there, and you're deluding yourself if you think the pre-internet days of the hobby were some halcyon bygone era where such things didn't take place.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I miss the time before the internet when the default assumption was that there isn't a "right" way to play an RPG, and homebrew was viewed more as part of the appeal as opposed to some sign of terrible design.
Yeah, the way online communities have pivoted from one end of "yeah you can totally play Star Wars in AD&D, just homebrew it!" to the other end of "if you have more than three houserules you clearly need to play a different game because either your game is terrible or it's not meant to do what you're doing" has me kind of flabbergasted sometimes, I admit!
The only thing about early RPGs that I miss is the sense of "newness" -- but that was specific to ME, not to the games. There's no way for someone to add that back.
The thing I'm glad isn't common today is systems that work completely differently in different places for no good reason. Hit roll? D20, do math. Finding secret doors? d6, fixed targets. Bending bars? Percentile dice, consult a table. Yuk.
Different systems can be useful to provide different probability curves. I think there’s a line to walk between a single mechanic for everything which can sometimes be dull and far too many mechanics.
Yes and those curves can give different feel. I don't find percentile vs d20 to be all that different, but add a dice pool subsystem in a d20 game or vice versa and I can see it creating a different "feel".
I find this especially relevant in games where combat is long and wholly separate from noncombat. If you're going to attack 10 times in one fight it doesn't matter the die is swingy because you'll still get an averaging effect over the course of the fight, but an all or nothing stealth roll I prefer to have some bell curve built in.
edit: I will say I am glad we don't often see d20 high, d20 subtracted from a number with the actual target being low, d20 low, d20 high but not too high, d100 high and d100 low all in the same game anymore (2e adnd). Those don't really give me a different feel.
I'm playing Stars Without Number right now. All the systems use different mechanics.
Attacks: d20
Skill Checks: 2d6
Initiative: d8
Saving Throws: d20, roll under over
I'm going to be a xWN apologist for a moment here:
- Attacks: d20 (roll high) - Kevin's reasoning is that combat is wild and unpredictable, therefore it uses a wild and unpredictable linear distribution.
- Skill Checks: 2d6 (roll high) - Here the idea is that skill use should be more predictable and your skill level should have a strong impact on your success rate. Using 2d6 gives a higher likelihood that you will roll in the middle of the range, and the small distribution means that stat and skill have a greater impact.
- Initiative: d8 (roll high) - I got nothing here. I always house-rule this.
- Saving Throws: d20 (roll high) - Once again, not a big fan of saving throws, but it's not roll low as the poster above stated.
Skill Checks: 2d6 (roll high) - Here the idea is that...
...he welded OSR with Traveller
d8 initiative is part OSR and part its not so annoying when the range of numbers you jot down isnt as large. Also makes initiative bonuses a much bigger deal.
I've started running xWN the past two years and yeah, I also homebrew initiative is a d20. Iirc it's because group initiative is the standard and a d8 has less chance for a random good roll to beat d8 + DEX mod. I prefer individual initiatives tho so the change makes sense
I'm playing Stars Without Number right now. All the systems use different mechanics.
That "retro" feeling is exactly why I avoid OSR games.
Hit roll? D20, do math. Finding secret doors? d6, fixed targets. Bending bars? Percentile dice, consult a table. Yuk.
My kids love that. 🤣
Play a thief? Percentile skills and d100. Play a wizard? List of spells and effects. Play a warrior? Weapon proficiencies all the way!
To them it gives each role a flavor. This will pass with age, now it's new and wonderfull and each player plays a game unique to them, still playing the same game!
You know, I can see the appeal - one of my biggest criticism of 4e was that every class had the exact same daily/encounter/at will framework.
I used to think that was important.
Now, having different mechanics doesn't bother me one bit.
Also, I've a grown a little tired of some of the impliminations of universal mechanics.
Yeah, 100% streamlining runs into problems at times. When the main mechanics do not suit the task at hand but are contorted to fit it.
I DO NOT miss THAC0.
that is all
It never went away. They just flipped subtraction into addition.
Whatever your minimum d20 result to hit AC 20 is, is what your THAC0 would have been.
Yes the flipped subtraction into addition. This is the point.
Humans are way faster at addition than subtraction, thats why boardgame design pretty much never uses subtraction.
Which is good, IMO. Addition makes more intuitive sense to folks.
The problem is that THAC0 progression was different for every class, making it harder to remember.
Base Attack Bonus was no different.
But that made it feel like a nice separation of the classes. The formulas were simple, the chart was available, and one doesn't level up all that often.
Yeah… fewer steps, though.
Not to grognard too hard, but I remember THAC0 being a big improvement over the tables that came before it where the to-hit numbers didn't actually match a mathematical formula unless they were rounding very oddly.
Fuck yes! THAC0 felt like a wonderful development at the time. Helped me retire the Combat Computer I'd gotten out of a Dragon magazine. (Which was, to be fair, far more convenient than the tables.)
Fair - AD&D 2e is the first edition I ever Played by the rules. (That was high school). Before that we just made character sheets on notebook paper and roles d6’s 1-3 missed, 4-5 hit, 6 crit. Then d6 for damage. Good times
The One Ring sneakily uses THAC0
I think it's mostly the acronym that I don't miss, moreso than the mechanic. Because To-Hit-Armor-Class-Zero is no more intuitive than some random string of letters
For me it was just a convoluted way to Make attack rolls.
The one thing that THAC0 had going for itself was being balanced.
The odds of the worst possible attack hitting the weakest possible defence were the same as for the best possible attack to hit the best possible defence, 50%.
When the attack system got flipped to addition in 3e, they could have kept the balance by capping AC to 30 and attack bonus to +20, but they didn't.
In French it was translated to TAC0 and it was delicious. I don’t see a significant difference with today’s AC.
Adding modifiers and Rolling over a number is more logical and “easier”
What am I happy isn't common? Randomized character creation (well at least outside of the OSR)
What do I miss? The default assumption being character immersion/advocacy rather than "telling a good story" even if it's at the cost of making your character suffer.
"Immersion" means a bunch of different things to different people, but I don't necessarily see the distinction here. Real people act against their own best interests all the time. Most people's behaviour is not strictly optimal.
Yeah, and if you're making those seemingly suboptimal choices in first person, immersed in the character, that's great! But when the game then hands you a currency and says "good job on doing something stupid to increase the fun of the story! You can now do better at some other thing later on!" it utterly ruins the immersion and the choice. The you/your character gestalt being shouldn't be making a choice you are aware is bad, you should think it's good because of your personal context.
The guy who gets drunk and misses a job interview did something seemingly stupid to an outsider observer, but to them, it was great, because they got to indulge in something they like and avoid potential pain, anxiety, etc.
I think there is some difficulty and nuance here because if you can't get yourself over the barrier between you and your character's inner life on your own, then there aren't really any game systems except giving meta currency for acting badly "in character" that can support and ease you into it. But that system utterly ruins everything for people who are over that boundary.
Well but that's a slightly different thing, isn't it? That's about giving rewards to players for doing stuff that (arguably) ideally they should be doing anyway without the rewards. I totally get the issue though.
I think it's in some ways a shame that we don't see games experimenting more with out of game rewards. Just, I dunno, give the player a gold star every time they roleplay well (I know there are plenty of issues with this too but...)
Yeah they shifted the goal post mid thread about games with built in flaw mechanics. Where it started about culture of what is immersive lol
Re your second point, are you saying that you miss immersion and immersion = letting your character suffer/lose, or that telling a good story = letting lose?
If the latter, I'll admit that I do tend to favor loss. In part that's because I suck at strategizing, and RP is my main contribution outside of being the guy who will play the cleric.
I mean that I miss immersion being the default assumption, and that the new assumption is that you will not be your character and that you should make them suffer and make bad choices in order to improve "the story."
Just to point out - this is not new. In fact, this play style is older than D&D!
“Having characters with lives of their own who find themselves in situations and then behave in character rather than simply acting in their own best interests, adds greatly to the enjoyment of the game”
Wargamer’s Newsletter 1973
To be clear, I don't think the style is new, I just thing the default assumption has changed. It's no longer a style, in newer games, it feels like the style, whereas before, games seemed to default to a different way.
I also am not sure this quote is actually counter to what I want. "Acting in their own best interest" is a complicated phrase, because people seemingly do that all the time in real life. But the reality is, they are getting something out of their seemingly bad choices, it's just that outside observers may not understand what that is and may not value it as highly.
So, my preference is that you immerse in the character, bleed into them, and make choices in first person. Sometimes, those choices will look bad to an outside observer, but you made them because that's what you'd do, not because it is more interesting. You're putting yourself through the events and consequences, not just pushing a pawn around to tell a story.
The thing is, you can't be rewarded with meta currency or anything for these seemingly bad choices, or that ruins the immersion. It's the game objectively telling you that you're wrong and dumb for doing that (which the game is endorsing and saying is a good thing because it's more interesting).
Yeah, I don't know how much my desire to put story first meshes with my desire to play old-school dungeons. I think it (my story obsession) follows from my earliest impulses to play the good-guy facilitator character -- paladin, cleric, etc. Never spent much time with MUs or thieves. In part, I think, because playing DnD I never found the mechanics of play very interesting .
What am I happy isn't common? Randomized character creation (well at least outside of the OSR)
Oh, no fuck that. Gimme random chargen anytime, everytime. Traveller career path, here I come.
Personally, I'm glad that immersion is no longer the default assumption, because I cannot meaningfully experience it. I rather have games that focus more on storytelling than immersion.
Everyone's preferences are their own and that's fine. But why can't you? Are you not interested or just unable?
As far as I can tell, I'm unable. I'm always explicitly aware of whatever medium I'm experiencing, be it TTRPGs, video games, movies, etc. I just plainly cannot lose myself in it, nor can I become someone else.
The best randomized character creation I've run into is the Without Number-systems, and only because the stat-mod table is curved so hard that what you roll really doesn't matter.
For perspective, you don't get a +1 mod until like 14, and +2 is at 18. Meanwhile, skills have levels, go up to +4, and skill checks are rolled on 2d6 with foci allowing you to roll 3d6 keep 2 highest for individual skills. So by weight your stats are worth about 1/3rd what your level is or less.
Combat? Same deal only 1d20 instead of 2/3d6. So...maybe 1/3rd or a little more?
Go ahead and roll all the stats. It really doesn't make too much of a difference in the long run.
For perspective, you don't get a +1 mod until like 14, and +2 is at 18.
D&D was like this, too, until 3rd edition.
D&D was like this, too, until 3rd edition.
Yeah, that's just B/X. XWN is B/X with Traveller skills welded onto it.
I will be glad to be alive for the death of the "What is a RPG?" section.
I do think that serves a purpose, but one that would be better served by a "what to expect from this game" section.
That section usually takes only half a page or less and you can skip it. I don't understand this sentiment.
people just want to be mad to be mad.
I just read it because reading is fun to me
I would like it gone not because I dislike it, but because it would mean ttRPGs became popular enough that we don't need an explanation!
Video games or movies don't need a "what is a videogame" after all
Why, though?
It helps people that don't know about RPGs understand what it is about.
Right. And when it dies, it will mean that most people do know.
There's no "What is this book?" section when you buy a novel.
What is a Novel?
You’ve all seen these symbols on white flat paper pages, the same symbols you’re looking at now. Well, novels are full of these same symbols, and you read them the same way you’re reading this sentence right now—with your eyes, but also with your imagination. The only difference is that while this section is explaining what a novel is, the actual novel allows you to experience fictional events in the lives of a character or characters. Some of these events may be scary or sad, but please remember that these are fictional characters and the events described did not happen, no matter how real they feel to you. If you are ever overwhelmed while reading a novel, it is perfectly fine to take a break, stretch your limbs and maybe get yourself a glass of water. Hydration is important while reading a novel. Also, remember to get proper sleep and hygiene. The book will remain even after you shut the cover, so you can pick it up again whenever you have a moment. Do not worry about the characters, their lives will wait until you return.
Actually, I changed my mind, every novel needs to open with this exact passage now.
I can't help but read this in the voice of Philomena Cunk
This is perfect. You win the internet for today.
There's no "What is this book?" section when you buy a novel.
Because it's in the "novels" section of the bookstore.
D&D is in the games section.
Starfleet Battles is also in the games section, but the two are different types of game.
I think it's important for games that end up in used bookstores and other places where the audience may legitimately not know what an RPG is
Yeah, I was going to omit it from my last RPG, but a former coworker found out about it and backed it on Kickstarter. He had no idea what he was getting into. That section was for him specifically.
Yeah fuck new players! Wait...
There's a more charitable reading: that newer games would explain how to play without claiming they're explaining how all RPGs work in that section. RPG design is diversifying. Boardgames explain how to play without explaining what boardgames are etc.
Honestly they should instead change it to what is roleplaying… that would be a more interesting first page. Then they can have how does your roleplaying use my game ?
I miss the 90's trend brought on by WoD for faction supplements. In WoD games every clan, tribe, order, faction, etc. got a book written from that factions perspective about the world and had some faction specific abilities. For a little while other games started doing it to for factions/classes, presumingly seeing the success of WoD.
They seem like such a easy win. The company gets a supplement that will sell for a while and players get a fun, immersive book for their character. They're the rare lore book that players actually want to own as well.
I do wonder if players now days would still want to buy and read lore books for a character though. The culture may have shifted away from that but I always loved it and wish it was more common now.
I do wonder if players now days would still want to buy and read lore books for a character though. The culture may have shifted away from that but I always loved it and wish it was more common now.
They died out because publishers realized it's not the smartest sells model. If you make sourcebook for just one clan/class than your potential audience is fraction of players. That's why expansion now try to have little bit for everyone.
That makes sense. It just seems to me that it could be the opposite. If you make it all one ok book with a little for everyone, probably just the GM will buy it. If you make one great book for each faction, players will buy them for their character's faction and when they play a new character they'll get that characters faction book as well. At least that's how it usually went for games back then. Where I would imagine the money from sales over time for single faction books would greatly exceed that of one book for all factions.
The other thing I would note is how much more invested player got in the world when they had those faction books. It would be hard to prove how that effects overall sales for the system but increasing enthusiasm of the customer base has to be worth a lot IMO.
Of course these are all just my musings with no evidence and I'll be the first to admit I am biased. :)
Unfortunately this business model really did cause the downfall of TSR in the late-90s and eventually led to the end of the original World of Darkness in the 2000s. It might be a little more viable in the PDF age, since you could release them digitally and avoid the overhead costs of printing; on the other hand, the PDF age is also the lore wiki age, so if you’re just trying to sell background info to players, it’s all going to make its way onto free wikis within a couple of weeks. Hard to make a living off of it.
I like them too, but I'm afraid it was thoroughly tested at this point. The other problem was shelf space. It was common for stores to had, for example, dozen sourcebooks for druid and nothing for thief. Book of Everything solves that too.
I don't know how well that'll work. I know Magic: The Gathering also was cranking out books for a while to help boost their sets and that also got canned because they weren't making money nor had any given impact on sales (it would be no problem if the product is a loss leader, driving focus to the product... But novels were, from what I remember, just a loss).
The closest we get for that now is pop culture tie-ins, kind of a reverse of that. Monte Cook games, for example, isn't making a SCP Foundation-esque sourcebook for the Cypher System and then also a producing novel in that universe, they're collaborating with existing The Magnus Archives /The Magnus Protocol podcast series. I'm sure if Onyx Path had released the newest Hunter splat a couple years earlier, there would have been some tie-ins with Supernatural, Grimm, or another of those supernatural detective shows.
I could see some form of additional marketing outside the "printed book" space. Maybe there's a limited digital series, Webtoon, ebook, or tie-ins with a video game in a related space. Like having a Panic at the Dojo character show up in the new Street Fighter game or an side adventure related to the new season of Amazon's Rings of Power that uses The One Ring 2e. If Traveler 2e 2022 Rules Update followed a collaboration with Andor. But all of that requires a certain amount of IP negotiation that is likely harder to do now that so many productions are umbrella'd under giant faceless corporations.
Example off the top of my head:
If Cyberpunk Red is a great example. If they had supplement books for each role (that expanded on in world information about the roles or things related to them, stories told first person from people in those roles, some gear specific to the roles, and maybe a new option or two for role abilities) my players would buy books for their roles so fast. They are desperate for that kind of content.
That's the thing - those are incredibly niche products. I found that as of 2021, Cyberpunk Red was the 11th most popular TTRPG, in between Stars without Number and Dungeon World (although I believe that was based off of Google searches not sales). Having them create and print a different piece of content for each of the roles (9, if the fandom site is to be believed) would be a logistical nightmare.
In the 80s and 90s, there was a way around this - magazines. Gamers could pay a tiny bit each month/year and get monthly or quarterly content for a distribution pipeline. This is how Paizo, eventually the publishers of the Pathfinder system, got into the biz - they printed the cleverly-named magazines Dungeon and Dragon, after WotC acquired TSR.
If there was such a regular publication now, this sort of content would be perfect for it. There'd be regular RPG content, and then each publication could have a specific focus on adding content for a game or two - fiction stories, playtesting stories, little releases of things like items or other derivatives. It'd bounce around a bit - you likely wouldn't get each role covered in succession, as it would go between games to keep the content diversified, but you might see all 9 over 2 years of content (unless they go the comics route and do limited releases focusing on a specific title).
There really isn't a single place for something like this, as far as I know. Dicebreaker.com comes to mind, but it's digital only and also includes news, card and board games... And if the comment numbers are any indication, it isn't particularly popular, even though the popular topics include M:tG, Disney's Lorcana, D&D 5e and Warhammer.
That's the thing though when WoD started doing this, they were pretty small and relatively unknown. Before long they were massive and made a ton of money. Their model was putting out as much content as possible because less books meant less things to sell, thus less revenue. They eventually collapsed under that model maybe but for a long time it really worked for them.
The books themselves were only about 70 pages, soft cover, with black and white art. On top of which they only put out a few each year. Back in the 90's people were paying like $15 for that small book and exceedingly happy with the purchase.
Like I said, I don't know if modern players would get into it but logistically it has worked before very well. Part of what made WoD so massive back then was putting out content GM's and players were excited about. The model of putting out less or slightly worse content in order to avoid risk might also be limiting system's popularity.
Part of the problem was that the MTG books I tried to read just weren't very good. Money grab products tend to suffer from that problem since good books (novels, RPG sourcebooks, art books, or whatever) take time and effort. If you want to pull people in, especially new customers, you need to sell something worth buying.
To be fair, I say this as someone who likes books but doesn't play MTG. Maybe the lore was enough to make up for the rough prose and plotting to someone who was already a fan.
One interesting example of tie-in books done well: WotC's D&D cookbooks are actually quite good. Each has a strong theme, a large mix of interesting dishes, great presentation, and clear instructions. They sucked in a couple of my friends who were only casually aware of the RPG to the point that they asked me to host a game night so they could try out the recipes. I wasn't going to argue with that idea.
It can work if the lore itself is a selling point of the game; it doesn't work if players don't usually care about the setting / are likely to be playing in their own homebrew setting.
So for DnD it's a tough one: you can make a book about elves but you can't really make a book about Chondathans. MtG has a similar issue inn that the lore of the setting is a fun little extra rather than something most of the customer base engages in.
But Paizo could probably pull off something like this for factions in Golarion.
I mean books work, if your playerbase likes your lore. 40k gets by with fiction set in universe as does D&D. Hell Battletech's novels are still doing great for the system even if they are primarily digital now. You are right though that it isnt so much that things must be in print as there should be relevant tie-ins to help players immerse in the game/setting. Now not every TTRPG should try to do this but if you have something where players want more info about the lore, provide it to them. Be that in podcasts, deep dive videos partnered with creators on YouTube, a video game, whatever. If you can sustain it without affecting your core product find out what your audience likes and engage with them using it.
Sometimes i miss asymmetric levelling, were the Theif needs 2500xp for lvl3 but the wizard needs the same 2500xp for lvl2, but then i think on it a bit and realise what i really dont miss (even if it is common still) is needing four digits of XP. Good gravy, why? Oh, an orc gives 30xp, and you need 1000xp for the next level? Explain how that's "better" than 3xp and a step of just 100.
There's a lot of "haha, big number go brrr" that doesn't serve any real need other than to see it and go "heehee, big number go brrr"
I'm not a fan. Is it bad? I dont think so. But Id sooner not bother than accrue the 105,000XP for lvl10 in pf1.[dont at me with the "fast levelling" of PF1, its still 71k]
Edit: several people have explained the fact that gold used to inform your XP gain, aside from the fact this is known, it doesnt change the "big numbier is big" point, nor does it interact with the example of PF1 which i chose deliberately, which does not have Gold for XP.
I remain baffled by the joy for big numbers. Some people seem to swear by it, I just can't agree: if you can scale it down... why wouldn't you?
Well there are some reasons:
You have bigger granularity. For example in D&D 4E a level 1 minion is worth 25 XP, a level 2 minion 31 XP and a level 3 minion 38XP and a level 4 Minion 44 XP. This follows a strict formula, which would be hard to follow with less granularity. (If the weakest monster only gives 1 XP, you cant make a monster giving 25% more XP or 50% more)
Big numbers can give the impression that you did more. "Wow I got 2000 XP for my levelup" sounds/feels like more than 20.
Because of how most RPGs scale (i.e. exponentially) the XP numbers need to become big, if you want to be able to fight vs different levels of monsters and being able to compare them. (unless you find a good way to simplify it like here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/1d6m4j7/simplifying_a_game_using_math_dd_4e_example/ but this might not be possible for each game.
Especially number 2 is something which really can make a difference. Yugioh and Digimon want to give you the impression that your monsters are really powerful, thats why they have 1000 attack and not 1.
I can agree with you that bigger numbers allow for more granularity, but I think my point remains: when you can scale it down, why wouldn't you? Sure, some people like the bigger oomph of bigger numbers, but personally, I don't get that.
Because bigger sells better. This is sometimes true to ridiculous amounts.
Best modern cases is game cases for nintendo switch in shops. They are WAY bigger than they need to be. The case for this is that people just pay more for a bigger box. (In the past this showed for some other products).
Same with boardgames. If you have a complex boardgame, you for sure need to pack it into a big box to get people to pay more, even if half the box is empty.
I always like magic the Gathering, but most Trading Cards game which have success use big numbers, and except magic, most games with smaller numbers did not have success.
Also sometimes bigger numbers are nicer to look at. For example people like 25/50/75/100 as numbers quite a bit.
I personally would also try to reduce numbers when possible, thats why I calcualted the table linked).
I wrote an entire manifesto about this. Small numbers increase legibility, which allows for better decision making and a sense of progress.
I'm a big fan of huge numbers for XP and it has nothing to do with ease and everything to do with fun. I find those numbers fun. I love handing out 7,845 XP to players after using a calculator to add up all the treasure, combat, and story awards, then dividing by the number of players, but actually they hired a guy this time who gets half a share of XP so now we're adjusting by that...
That's fun for me. What's also fun is saying "Awesome, that wraps up an arc, everyone take a major milestone" in my weekly Fate game. They're both fun for different reasons.
In older editions, characters gained XP equal to the amount of gold they recovered in dungeons. The late game numbers are large to reflect the ridiculous worth of the items high level characters were expected to find.
Yeah I think people forget that fighting monsters was not an efficient way to gain XP, given it was very dangerous and paid out very little. The real trick was getting the treasure back to town with as little fighting as possible.
Plus, why fight the kobolds if you could work out a deal with them that results in them piling the treasure at the entrance of the dungeon for you in exchange for dealing with the orc band on level 4?
Not defending AD&D XP gains and targets, as I also don't like "large numbers for the sake of large numbers", but it's about dealing with minimum and maximum rewards.
Kobolds were the weakest enemies, set at 7 XP each, so everything went up.
IMHO, setting kobolds as "1" would have helped with removing one digit from the XP targets, but that's me.
The problem here is, how much XP gave the 2nd weakest enemies? If the answer is 10, then you cant really give the same precision if you start with 1 XP, you cant give 50% more you can only double it.
It doesn't create issues, and you only round up the first 3 HD thresholds.
Taking AD&D 2nd Edition, for example:
| Hit Dice or Level | Old XP | New XP |
|---|---|---|
| Less than 1-1 | 7 | 1 |
| 1-1 to 1 | 15 | 2 |
| 1+1 to 2 | 35 | 4 |
| 2+1 to 3 | 65 | 7 |
| 3+1 to 4 | 120 | 12 |
| 4+1 to 5 | 175 | 18 |
| 5+1 to 6 | 270 | 27 |
| 6+1 to 7 | 420 | 42 |
| 7+1 to 8 | 650 | 65 |
| 8+1 to 9 | 975 | 98 |
| 9+1 to 10+ | 1400 | 140 |
| 11+ to 12+ | 2000 | 200 |
| 13+ | 2000 + 1000/extra HD | 200 + 100/HD |
I miss morale, I miss detailed encumbrance, I miss random character generation.
I like to see which lot I'm cast, in my character life, and see what I can make of it.
Worlds without Number has all that jazz if you're interested.
I miss morale, I miss detailed encumbrance, I miss random character generation.
Dude, Traveller Mgt2e with the Companion's supplement has got all that?
Real happy with the removal of casual racism, like naming a supplement after a slur.
Was a huge problem back in the day, especially all of the casual mystical Orientalism you would get for supplements. Ironically on the same note it sometimes feels like groups are so eager to remove racism that they accidentally act racist looking for it (Ex. Orcs are an analogy for Black people which is just a whole can of racist worms)
I think the issue with orcs and other “savage” races is moreso how their characterization in relation to the “civilized” races carries a lot of parallels with how European imperialists would view any non-European culture. To me, there’s no coincidence that “good” kingdoms in fantasy settings hew closer to European cultures.
I’m Indigenous (Native American) and there’s a loooot of overlap between how 19th-20th century art depicted our cultures, and how fantasy depicts orcs, goblins, and the like. Even the handwave that they were made by “evil” gods parallels the idea of Terra Nullius.
I remember a while ago someone posted an alternative read of Keep on the Borderland, pointing out that's its basic setup is basically an extremely colonialist cowboys v Indians situation, right down to the way it encourages you to use the disparate monster "tribes" against eachother to wipe them all out. They didn't even go on to say that this ruined the module, just that it was an undeniably present aspect of it and that there may be something interest there if you knowingly play into it and explore the potential amorality of the human faction.
Anyway of course most of the comments were just getting mad that anyone could possibly make any parallels to real-world racism out of a module about being in a military outpost on the frontier tasked with wiping out the native sapient population.
(Ex. Orcs are an analogy for Black people which is just a whole can of racist worms)
I think the problem people have with orcs isn't that they think they're an analogy, because they're not - the problem people have is that orcs are often presented thusly - a fundamentally evil race of rapists and pillagers who don't create, only destroy and loot, live in tribal societies, and worship barbaric gods in hideous blood rituals. And they're all dressed up in warpaint and headdresses, and have shamans and witch-doctors. In other words, they read like they jumped out of a 19th century adventure novel. It's like the goblins (specifically those in Harry Potter, the idea that goblins as a whole reflect anti-Semetic tropes really isn't true) - a race of greedy, hook-nosed characters who run the banking system. I have no reason to believe that was done intentionally, and most of the people talking about orcs don't think that either, but the way they're presented is reflective of real-world groups who are harmed by those stereotypes. You rarely see someone complaining about the 40k orks or LotR orcs, because 40k orks are a race of mad scientist fungi, and LotR orcs are representative of industrialisation, and neither fit the top part.
Of course, there's a massive debate over how much this actually matters - my personal opinion is not very much - but I see this complaint mischaracterised a lot.
To me the orcs read as an unfortunate coincidence wherein Volo’s guide to monsters they seem very viking inspired (the one eyed god, afterlife of endless war and gouging own eyes out for magic)
Yeah there's definitely a lot of reinterpretations of them nowadays, which is always cool - I'm a big fan of an orcish culture in Pathfinder, where they're still very warlike and brutal, but because they've spent centuries battling a demonic incursion.
I miss that general sense of wonder - almost naivete - opening up older games, like we were discovering it at the same time the creators were. Doesn’t have the same feel like the slick, packaged mainstream products of today. Reading through early Dragon magazines and you get the sense the whole industry was like this.
I also miss boxed sets - really GOOD boxed sets.
Callers and mappers in the D&D idiom. The map minigame is kind of fun, but does slow things down. The loss of a caller, a "chief" player who tells the DM what the party is doing on exploration turns, though is 100% win.
Really that structure was mainly used for absurdly large tables. A caller is useful when you have like 10+ players. But I also argue that games at that player count are a mistake to begin with.
10+ players in 5e would be impossible. 10 Players in B/X is arguably still a bit much but viable.
I would have assumed mapping to be the most boring thing imaginable but I recently played the NES Zelda game blind and you spend the majority of the game mapping and I actually found it really enjoyable! I kept a few pieces of paper taped together and a pencil on hand and just drew maps as I went. Most of the game is just spent exploring and making maps of the world and the dungeons as you try to hunt down Triforce pieces. What I think is interesting is that a lot of times you make “progress” in the game by just going in a random direction and mapping everything you see until you die.
Bar wenches is my answer to both, really.
And doxies, strumpets and slovenly trulls!
Are you describing my players?
Technically you can still put them in if you want.
There are many things in old RPGs that I'm happy aren't common today. The first places definitely go to:
- GM chapters telling GMs to hide rules from players, unilaterally ignore rules, fudge dice and straight out lie to players
- Complex and unbalanced systems, coupled with stigmatizing players who engaged with the systems and used the power it gave them.
- Strong focus on immersion, thinking and talking in character. Which, coupled with player biases, resulted in PCs that behaved not at all like real people. And which, coupled with communication that is limited by the medium anyway, led to a lot of misunderstanding and frustration.
There is only one system, and one system only, that I'm okay with a GM section telling the GM to hide the rules and be a jerk - Paranoia. It's kind of the charm and humor of the game, after all. But outside of that, that mentality has no place in the hobby.
Death being something you actually had to worry about.
And I'm not talking about resurrection magic. I mean actually dying in the first place.
Back in 2nd edition you died at zero hp. Not after 3 failed death saves. Not at -10 hp.
At zero. And you didn't really have that many HP to begin with. At 10th level a fighter would maybe have 60-75 hp and a fireball could still hit you for 35 of them. A wizard? Wizards were made out of tissue paper. You'd have 35-45 HP. 50 if you were particularly beefy.
Characters died a lot, and if you went down it was a big deal.
5e introduced shitty dying mechanics that enable pogo-healing which is the single worst thing I've ever seen in a TTRPG. I wish they would get rid of it, and I'm completely flabbergasted it was even allowed in the first place since there's no way they didn't find it during the OG 5e playtests.
Second edition DnD -10 was an optional rule as "hovering at deaths door" in either the phb or dmg
So optional that I can't recall playing in a group that didn't do it. Even in official convention games.
5e introduced shitty dying mechanics that enable pogo-healing which is the single worst thing I've ever seen in a TTRPG. I wish they would get rid of it, and I'm completely flabbergasted it was even allowed in the first place since there's no way they didn't find it during the OG 5e playtests.
But this is a deliberate choice to enable groups to play without a healbot. It's not an error. Similarly, we have 40 years of players fudging to avoid character death in D&D. It's literally the single most common house rule. Your taste for high lethality is a minority one, so unsurprisingly WotC, who want to sell the maximum number of copies of their game, went for the majority preference, which is low lethality.
I'm not even necessarily a fan of high lethality (okay...so...I absolutely am...but...) I just want there to be a point where you have fucked up enough that you can't get back up with a 1st level healing word spell. Where someone must deal with the fact that you are dying, but not dead yet, that does not involve fandangling you standing up to try and drop the boss with your greatsword like you had full HP.
But that means that another PC needs to help you, probably by using their whole turn. Which is precisely what the designers wanted to avoid.
At some point, that's what needs to happen because comrades-in-arms carrying one another to safety is an important part of gaming, IMO. It's important because at that point you can no longer run away without leaving your injured behind. It's the only thing that makes "running away" a true option without any kind of real complication.
If you lose that strata of "are we fucked yet?", you lose the ability to accurately assess how much "fight" you have left in you, IMO. You have to start meta-gaming and doing things like "how many spell slots do you have left? How many of them can be used to help win the fight vs. heal? How many self-heals do you still have? How many hit dice can you trigger in-combat?"
Meanwhile, "Bob is down and can't get back up unless we take a short rest or spend some expensive reagents on a special healing spell we may or may not have access to at the moment." paints a MUCH clearer picture, much faster and without going into anywhere near as much meta-bullshittery.
Like, we could even add a new strata of damage to the game and have "death saves" get replaced with "injury saves" where if you fail 3 or get hit by an attack and get pushed over 3 failures you roll on an injury table and accrue some kind of "long-term injury" that takes actual time to heal.
We could put either some kind of "wound currency" or saves on the more serious injuries that then trigger statuses like immobilization and/or unconsciousness and/or death saves.
Which is precisely what the designers wanted to avoid.
They were wrong to avoid it. It was a bad decision on their part.
They were wrong to avoid it. It was a bad decision on their part.
Okay, first off, them taking a design decision that agrees with majority preferences when they're trying to sell the most copies of the game possible isn't "wrong". It just means that you don't like it. Luckily there are hundreds of other games that do things more according to your preferences that you can play instead.
Moving on.
Like, we could even add a new strata of damage to the game and have "death saves" get replaced with "injury saves" where if you fail 3 or get hit by an attack and get pushed over 3 failures you roll on an injury table and accrue some kind of "long-term injury" that takes actual time to heal.
Yes, we could. And what would be the effect of that? It either means more characters suffer ongoing injuries (a minority preference - most players hate their characters being semi-permanently nerfed), more characters outright die (a minority preference - I can give you chapter and verse on this one if you want me to bore you to death, but most people do not like their characters dying), or the other PCs have to spend time that they would otherwise use doing cool stuff to prevent these injuries (most players don't want to play a healbot).
Meanwhile, "Bob is down and can't get back up unless we take a short rest or spend some expensive reagents on a special healing spell we may or may not have access to at the moment." paints a MUCH clearer picture, much faster and without going into anywhere near as much meta-bullshittery.
So really the issue is that players struggle to assess threat levels in D&D 5e. Which is true, but in a sense irrelevant. 5e is set up so that the PCs get in lots of fights that they basically always win. They don't need to assess the threat levels except maybe in extremis if they're wildly unlucky, and having to make a bunch of death saves should be a pretty clear signal to the players that they're in trouble.
Basically it sounds like 5e isn't designed to be the kind of game you'd like to play. It's not designed for my preferences either, but that doesn't make all of its design decisions bad.
Okay, first off, them taking a design decision that agrees with majority preferences when they're trying to sell the most copies of the game possible isn't "wrong". It just means that you don't like it.
It's wrong in that it objectively makes the game more difficult to DM, and I already explained why in a previous post. There are many ways they could have gone and made combat more heroic and less deadly, and they went with something simple that just stacks yet more work and responsibility on the DM's head.
I'm all for simplicity, but it can't just make DMing harder and call it good. That is an abject failure of game design for a TTRPG, because the DM needs the exact opposite.
And what would be the effect of that? It either means more characters suffer ongoing injuries (a minority preference - most players hate their characters being semi-permanently nerfed)
The game would be better for it. A lot better.
I mean, the very idea that "you want to go into battle and swing your sword around, but you don't want to suffer literally any repercussions for your choices unless it's 'I win!'" is so stupid it should be discarded.
Game design isn't a democracy. Sometimes the majority don't have it right. Know what a product gets called when it tries to cater to the majority, and sacrifices its own sense of vision while doing so?
"Watered down". D&D gets watered down when you do this kind of stuff.
Luckily there are hundreds of other games that do things more according to your preferences that you can play instead.
And this new edition is the result of an opportunity the devs took to gather feedback from anyone who wanted to submit it. I can and will go play other games that cater more to me, but it is also my right, and my responsibility, to share my feedback when I do so. Especially when the company responsible for me seeking out their competition is trying to get me to spend $150 on their next round of products.
...because if they want me to buy their shit, it needs to be something I want to buy. I don't owe them my money. They have to earn it.
You see how telling me to "get out" and "go away" is self defeating?
most players don't want to play a healbot PCs have to spend time that they would otherwise use doing cool stuff [dealing with injury]
Success means nothing if failure was never a risk. We're already playing a game that doesn't have any meaningful long-term consequences (it's a game...that's the point), which means that you must be able to fail. Everything you describe just keeps suggesting more and more than failure should be removed from the game.
Death is difficult.
No healing required.
Combat isn't dangerous...because not healing is required and death is difficult...
Failure is therefore rare.
Why bother?
So really the issue is that players struggle to assess threat levels in D&D 5e. Which is true, but in a sense irrelevant.
Yes, and absolutely not.
Players struggle to assess threat levels in 5e because there are no tools given because of things like pogo-death. You're either down and dying, or you're functioning at 100%. There is no in-between, and death isn't sticky unless the enemy is willing to focus you down which paints the DM automatically as an asshole (in a passtime rife with people that have social anxiety problems).
See a problem here? A disconnection? Something self-defeating?
Better death rules would make a big difference.
A better HP system that didn't put 100% of your performance on that one last point would make a big difference.
This is one of the big places that 4th edition got things right! And 5e went the opposite direction for no good reason whatsoever! (seriously, I didn't realize how good of a mechanic healing surges were until we didn't have them anymore.)
They don't need to assess the threat levels except maybe in extremis if they're wildly unlucky, and having to make a bunch of death saves should be a pretty clear signal to the players that they're in trouble.
Except that they're not in that much trouble? They are always one heal away from 100% function. Sure, the DM can go, "Sheelob is tired of your bullshit and kills you." but 5e does not support, "this ring is so heavy, sam!" moments.
Instead you get shit like this:
Frodo: "The ring is so heavy, Sam! It weighs me down, pulls me down by my neck so that I cannot put one foot in front of the other anymore..."
Sam: "Level 1 Healing Word!"
Frodo: "Omae wa mou shindeiru...Tenshi no tsubasa no oritatama reta kōtetsu no hane: Shi no sen no kirikizu!!!!! [executes epic final attack]"
Shelob: "WTF? [dies...]
Frodo: "Oh...Sam...this ring...it's so heavy!"
Sam: "...I didn't notice."
Basically it sounds like 5e isn't designed to be the kind of game you'd like to play. It's not designed for my preferences either, but that doesn't make all of its design decisions bad.
I disagree. I think we can objectively say that parts of the system are garbage without being terribly biased.
Disagreeing on what, exactly, should be done to make things better? Sure! I'll contribute to those kinds of discussions until the cows come home! They're fun!
But the idea that the game is somehow perfect and "just not made for us" is bullshit. If they're making the game for everyone, but just not for me...that's the stupid idea.
And complaining that they could do better isn't bad either. Nor is wishing that they would do better. It's one of the ways you eventually get something better. I can, actually, enjoy other games while still waiting for D&D to fix their shit. I want to give them my money. But if they don't make a game that I want to buy, they're not getting it.
I've been playing D&D for over 30 years. I've been a WotC customer since I was 11! I want to give them my money!
I don't really care if dying is a real risk or not, but I want losing to be something that can actually happen.
I've played RPGs since the 90s and I don't remember ever losing a fight, other than in some one-shot games. I think this is because there's rarely any other way a combat can end but PCs winning or PCs dying, and the GM wants to avoid the latter.
I'm fine with dying more, but I'm also fine with other ways to lose.
Real battles between two sides are hardly ever fought until the other side is completely dead and I'd like to see combat rules written with this assumption except in the very rare situations where a fight to the very end makes sense. This would necessitate at least good rules for players retreating from a dangerous situation, and rules for enemies deciding retreating is in their best interests.
I like the house rule from some supplements in which being downed gives you a level of exhaustion.
I mean, it seems to me like character death as a serious, commonplace risk wasn't a design goal for 5e. Like it's not that they didn't notice that you could spend an encounter repeatedly dropping then leaping back up, it's that they noticed and were fine with that being part of the play pattern for 5e D&D.
And you didn't really have that many HP to begin with. At 10th level a fighter would maybe have 60-75 hp and a fireball could still hit you for 35 of them.
It was a bit more extreme at low level, especially in Basic D&D. There was the occasional fighter with exactly one HP, and should they survive to level 2, manage to get a second hit point. It was also rather non-scaling, I recall some rules saying that hit points are only recovered at 1 hp/day of rest, meaning it's going to take a while at higher levels.
And jumping directly from that to 4e means I noticed characters not getting downed at a high rate. Felt like things could actually get done without losing most of the party.
5e introduced shitty dying mechanics that enable pogo-healing which is the single worst thing I've ever seen in a TTRPG. I wish they would get rid of it, and I'm completely flabbergasted it was even allowed in the first place since there's no way they didn't find it during the OG 5e playtests.
They would have noticed it in 4e, it was slightly easier to use a minor action to heal someone who got downed, and they were back into the fight. But more importantly, 4e also had the unkillable revenant build which abused the negative hit point range.
I'm glad most games have moved away from piles and piles of skills. I remember playing All Flesh Must Be Eaten which has more than 70 skills. Even going from D&D 3.5 (~30 skills) to 4e (~14) felt streamlined, but I absolutely love how 13th Age handles it, where you get points in a background (E.g. Dancer) and add that to relevant rolls.
This is a really good point! I still like skills (since that does not need or at least less interpretation), but the 13th age streamline is great on its own.
I would just hope people would become better in making skills/attributes equally valuable.
You should see Night's Black Agents.
To be fair, NBA Abilities do double duty as Stat and Skill which makes the system fairly tidy.
I do get a laugh out of looking through the Burning Wheel skill list though and finding gems such as "Rude Carpentry."
I think the sexism. Alot of the charts and subsystems I usually like
Do not miss: The first version of Palladium's eponymous TTRPG had an individual progression table for every skill. I wasn't allowed to play D&D back in the early '90s (because Satanic Panic) but I get the impression those early editions often had unnecessary tables for things.
I do miss living close to a FLGS. But that's just me being stuck in a shitty exurb.
The rpg supplements as serialized narrative from the 90's, damn but I hated that. When core books would hide world info from the GM with the promise that it would be a totally cool surprise in some future product.
Or tell you not to kill off a character so they could use them later.
Modern RPGs seem to emphasize the idea of the RPG as a "stage" or "cinematic". I think this is good to a certain extent, and RPGs before this tend to be simulationist for no reason or to do it poorly. On the other hand, I miss games being simulationist.
GM advice that either assumes an adversarial relationship, or treats a (secret) railroad as the "right way to GM".
Ah the John Wick school of GMing. No thats not a joke about the movie character John Wick I mean the actual writer/designer John Wick who advises a bunch of terrible gotcha things to pull against your players. Very interesting guy and cool designer but terrible source of GM advice.
He can't be as bad as James Raggi
I'm very happy we're over the SUPER COMPLEX era: hero system, rolemaster, 3e, etc. some of them are still around: exalted, shadowrun, GURPS. but I feel like new games aren't going for 500 pages of rules anymore, and that's good, ttrpgs don't need to be so big.
As someone on the other end of the spectrum (love, LOVE crunch) - I wish there was more of a balance. Not enough variety in terms of complexity in the scene. Makes me sad to see a cool concept and have it be another PbtA or even less mechanically complex RPG.
There seems to be (imo) a misconception that mechanics get in the way of roleplaying, whereas to me they are more akin to an actors lines in a script.
True, I also find it hard to find new games which have a good amount of complexity.
For me stuff like "the dark eye" is too much, but I would like to see more in the line of Beacon (or D&D 4E)
While I appreciate PbtA games (although I'm more for the FitD side - I like having just a bit more crunch, after all), I do agree that we need more medium crunch systems. And not games that folks claim are medium crunch but aren't really (looking at you 5e), but legit aim to be in the middle of the light/crunchy range.
Savage Worlds remains my best example of what a good medium crunch game is.
That said, I do find the recentish trend of hybrid games, where there's a big chunk (like combat) that's crunchy and complex, but another portion that is very light and simple because it doesn't need to be that complex (Lancer and ICON are prime examples of this). I don't think it's the best solution to the problem, but it's a very interesting approach and one that I can appreciate (and not just because Lancer has some of the coolest mechs out there).
If you ever get tired of super-light and super-narrative games, you might join us at r/CrunchyRPGs! We'll happily discuss critical hit tables or how far a longbow can really shoot.
I think it is more of a wave than a trend in one direction. After some years of simpler games big complicated games will feel new, MORE! EXCITING! STUFF!
Yeah, simple rules work until they get noticably inadequate, which for some players will happen after enough play, at which point you need more developed rules.
And for experienced players who care and know more developed systems, a simple system tends to be unsatisfying.
I miss unique subsystems. I know that they were awful for balance, extra work to run, and generally a problem from a game design perspective, but I miss that feeling of new things being truly unique and different. In particular, I’m thinking about the various types of magic in Deadlands Classic and DnD 3.5 with stuff like psionics and incarnum.
I feel that Burning Wheel still proudly has that aspect. In Burning Wheel every type of sorcery(All species get their own unique magic system except for humans and Roden who get access to what is comparable to how Wizards are) has a warning that one sorcery type is already enough to have and you definitely should not kitchen sink them.
That's what a lot of RPG's should do. Subsystems are not meant to be always included in play. They should be modular and be added and removed for whatever the campaign needs. Once more people realise that we can have subsystems again lol.
I miss morale, encounter numbers, and treasure tables. Having these adds a new dimension to monsters and makes life easier as a GM.
I don’t miss the d4 as a PC class hit die. Makes magic users and thieves way more fragile than need be. Moving every thing up a die step is a good move.
I miss the time when no computer was involved in rpg.
I miss that many older games (70s and 80s) were built as standalone products where you got the book or box and then you played to find out. No written modules or official canon etc. Just the core and nothing more.
What I don’t miss: Can I find this book/module at my local bookstore? (If not, it doesn’t exist in the 80s) What I do miss: The pure number of freely available hours I had to play with my friends who also had plenty of time to play multiple days per week.
Oh, man. That reminds me. I think I was maybe eleven in the early '80s when some guy at a con told me about a third-party spellbook called The Spellcaster's Bible. I combed the game stores, book stores, con flea markets and so on for decades to find that thing. Finally found a copy -- reasonably priced, to my amazement -- about thirty years later.
I'd started to believe it was apocryphal.
Well, you could definitely die a lot easier in most of older RPGs. Hell, you used to be able to die in character creation for Travaller.
You can still die in Chargen in Traveller, though the Mongoose 2nd edition makes it optional - you can take the death, or just a serious medical problem, like losing a limb.
I am a little tired of how every game has to be “safe”.
If I’m playing a modern day horror game with Lovecraftian nightmares and cosmic existential horror, I expect to be out of my comfort zone dammit! Please treat adults like adults.
If the people I’m playing with behave like dicks I’m old enough to know how to deal with it without you writing a chapter on it.
The intent of those sections about safety isn't so much so for veterans of the hobby, and those with the social skills and self-awareness on how to handle those situations. It's for the newbies who didn't know they might tread face-first into narratives that can make life for a fellow player miserable (who either didn't have the emotional strength to make mention that could happen or didn't know it could in the first place).
90% of the safety tools isn't to safeguard against dickish players and GMs - it's to help folks avoid accidental emotional issues. The last thing any of us want during a game session is for a player to have an emotional breakdown because something unrelated somehow reminded them of their past trauma, not only because it sucks for that to happen, but it also tends to bring a game to a painfully screeching halt. After all, you can still be a grown-ass adult and still have trauma and emotional issues and everything.
I started in 1983 and have played everything you can think of. I honestly think most of the design patterns I didn't like are alive and well, and I bet I could find a post right now on Reddit about some new game they are making that is using those same mechanics.
What do I miss? Full immersion. When you are managing your action economy, attacks of opportunity, adding numbers, and trying to remember if you got all the right modifiers, your brain is playing a game. Your character's brain is thinking about staying alive. I feel you should be able to role play your character without knowing the mechanics.
Don't ask me for a check. Tell me what your character is doing! Role play the character, not the mechanics. If I feel there should be suspense in that choice, then you may need to roll a check.
I think one thing I'm glad isn't as common is simply that there are variations to the systems that are out there. It isn't dominated by d20 or DnD alone anymore.
However, I find failing forward mechanics to be asinine, and rules light to just be a fool's errand. Bring back the sense of both story and immersion in that story, stop separating them. Cognitive dissonance should be encouraged occasionally.
Also, I miss that being a member of a race meant giving a character a set of predispositions that also affected how they viewed the world, how they fit in society at large, and how their own societies viewed other societies. I always thought it lent a measure of unity to have stark differences amongst the characters, paradoxically.
Before anything, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who only really started playing ttrpgs 15 years back.
I think more recent TTRPGs trend away from pointlessly confusing extra math when quicker and more intuitive equivalents exist—THAC0 is a main culprit here, but a lot of extra complicated math gets streamlined in general as you get through editions of essentially everything.
I do however miss some of the freeform nature of things—many modern games feel a lot less openly friendly to improvisation. Sometimes I like the idea of not having rules for things and constructing my own or otherwise playing it as a LARP, and that feels like it still happens everywhere because of course it does, but games are embarrassed to state it as an intended outcome thanks to concerns over alienating less socially adroit players. (Which does kinda stink, but I feel like there should be an explicit space for games which want these things in the same way there are games that want tactical acumen or math knowledge or worldbuilding imagination or...)
games are embarrassed to state it as an intended outcome thanks to concerns over alienating less socially adroit players.
Yes, I think this is a bit of an issue. As you say, there's a ton of games that assume you are going to be a good combat tactician, but if you expect people in a social game, which all RPGs are, to use their social skills in creating a good experience, a significant fraction of the RPG community will complain about how this would exclude their friend with no social skills. I do get this concern, but the fact that this is always the complaint, and never that systems in which character generation requires adding and subtracting an enormous number of different variables in order to make a viable build are alienating to players who have poor maths skills, kind of smacks of special pleading tbh. With the poor tactical skills, poor maths skills etc. games it's always "git gud, scrub".
I never personally experienced it, which is why I am really happy that the stigma around Roleplaying and D&D isn't really a thing anymore outside of some isolated instances.
It may just be my specific table I learned tRPG from, but my older siblings and their friends were ALL REALLY INTO White Wolf. Even the players read up on lore across gamelines they would throw terms like "antidiluvian" and "nephandi" around without misunderstanding the specific point being made. They BOUGHT IN to the hobby is what I am getting at, and that's not a given for just any player. I really wish I wasn't in my early-teens back then since I didn't appreciate the character side of the hobby until much later - I've never found a table so good since then.
What I miss is simulation.
The primary focus of RPG mechanics used to be on simulating the game world; the idea was that you were trying to actually live in the Other Place and the rules were a conduit for that.
It's good that we have a greater diversity in creative goals now (and those are being supported by games). But I wish true simulationism hadn't gone MIA along the way.
I'm glad to not see metaplot in things as much.
First edition Forgotten Realms setting book had simple pronunciation guide besides the NPC name. Really underutilized feature.
I miss simulationism, I'm not talking about lots of numbers and charts but the base principle that you're not making a game or a story but representing a world. Modern games seem to have stratified along a combat-as-a-game and story-as-a-game axiom. I like narrative flavour in my simulation games but I've found that the modern (last 20 years or so) "Narrative" games lose a lot because of their focus on story as the root cause of all things.
*pulls on old man pants and eyes a good cloud to yell at*
I don't miss the standard assumption/advice that the GM is the enemy or only out to get the PCs with some "gotcha!".
I do miss the time before 'Character Balance' was fetishized into being the purest ideal of game design. A 3rd Level Fighter was tougher than a 3rd Level Thief. They just were. Low-level Wizards sucked. But a high-level wizard was more powerful than a dozen high level fighters. I loved the debate of "Do I want to be the badass now or a supreme badass later" and how the most powerful character in a party changed as they rose in levels. At first it was your warrior, then the cleric, then the sucky wizard blows past them all. Character balance was a long-game spread out over their full careers. Now it's treated like a 7th level character is perfectly balanced with all other 7th level characters.
I'm sort of glad that RPGs have gotten better at managing ideas so that every other page isn't a bunch of charts and roll-tables.
I kind of miss the art-section of a book where there'd be half-a-dozen pages of just glossy color illustrations for the game without any mechanics or storytelling.
I'm currently running B/X, so the stuff common in older games is mostly what I have.
I think any game with random encounters needs both morale and encounter rolls, and as a system it's easy to hack into almost any game.
Don't miss: Ivory Tower Design
Do miss: Simulationism (= "rules as physics")
I'm more a fan of minimalism in characters, and uniqueness of characters being defined in play rather than beforehand. Most modern games have players come up with a distinct concept that exists throughout the game, rather than building a basic character with some minor distinguishing characteristics, who are then later distinguished through their actions.
Like in D&D and Pathfinder, you can start out as "guy with a magic sword" if you have a sword and a few spells you can cast on your sword. In classic D&D, if you wanted to be the magic sword guy, you needed to find a magic sword.
I think this concept is well reflected in videogames like Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. Fallout New Vegas has a lot of unique perks, but the majority of them are unlocked just by leveling up and picking them. Fallout 3, on the other hand, has fairly boring perks but you can get a lot of really cool and unique perks by doing certain sidequests.
It's a matter of preference, but I generally prefer the Fallout 3 approach to the Fallout New Vegas approach.
I miss box sets as standard. With dice.
Tables for dice resolution
It's still around a lot but using D&D stats. It makes me think the designers aren't very creative in actually thinking about
Even more annoying to really stretch their uses in awkward ways that often don't make sense instead of just building a good foundation of stats that actually describe what the characters are and do.
I'm happy to get away from the sexism and racism, at least the intentional variety. I miss random character generation.
I miss the skills table, putting your points into knowledge history or whatever.
In lots of older modules, there's save-or-die traps and such. Just "make this roll or you die". No finesse, no foreshadowing of danger. You pulled on this door? Say goodbye to your character.
there's also lots of weird "funny" sexism. I was reading through an old "The Dark Eye" adventure recently and the big twist at the end was that the princess you've set out to save is ugly.
that's the joke. she uggo. please laugh now.
I'm glad we don't have mixed resolution mechanics. I like both roll-over and roll-under, but it's weird when they both coexist in the same game.
On the other hand, i wish we could get rid of these modern calvinball pamphlets sold as RPGs. Where's my 450 pages tome chock full of *stuff*? I d100 want tables, not these dinky 1d4 ones. Bestiaries with half a page of unique abilities and item calogues with multiple materials and ammo per item. I want to get lost into the 25 different types of daggers and picking and choosing enchantments to apply to them.
I'm glad that most modern games don't have the ridiculous (and unnecessary) rules complexity of some of the rpgs from the late 70s and early 80s. There were games with hit location charts that had numerous locations that then broke down broken bones, blood loss, and concussion. Your pancreas has three hit points, by the way. There was a game where you determined your character's height by rolling 20d6, taking the square root of the result, and multiplying that by 21.5. I sure don't stuff like that.
I'm happy we're in an era where we're not creating a subsystem/chart for everything. I don't mind a little crunch, but there can definitely be too much.
It might be an unpopular opinion, but I miss the time before the internet when the default assumption was that there isn't a "right" way to play an RPG, and homebrew was viewed more as part of the appeal as opposed to some sign of terrible design. Customization for specific tables has always been part of the appeal for the genre to me and a big advantage in comparison to other types of games, and I feel like turning away from those things has been ignoring some of the advantages of the medium in comparison to say boardgames.