I’ve been pretty happy with it. An old girlfriend asked me to DM a game for her, her husband and her son – as they just didn’t quite know what to do as a DM. I was actually a little teary at the invitation! I was a little nerdy for her tastes way back then, but I do confess just a hint of validation in this!
So I bought the 5e PH and got my son to play as well. I have been pretty happy with it. I’m still trying to put to memory some of the basic stuff like baseline saving throws, but I’ll have that squared away pretty soon. A simple, role-playing heavy approach.
We had a great session where the PCs are off in Kobold country, as the kobolds just led a successful raid (with the aid of some giants) against the King’s Mint in our fair city of Bridgemeadow. Great fun to see an 11 year old playing a thief think of cool ways to use his skills but he keeps forgetting to check for traps. My son is fully in the spirit of his druid, thinking of all sorts of underground creatures to summon to his will.
That is not true. What I said was that I don’t understand the animosity towards the need for minis (or cheap substitutes for them) when they’re extremely useful. I play lots of different games, some with them and some without. I know gamers love drama, but let’s not invent it where it doesn’t exist.
Every change since AD&D 2nd edition has been a mistake. I think TSR^WWotC^WHasbro should split the systems like TSR did in the 80s. Have D&D for the novices and AD&D for experienced players. It makes me sad that since D&D 3rd edition was published there has been nothing created that even remotely compares to the intensity of an AD&D 2nd edition Planescape or Dark Sun campaign. Everything has been dumbed down. Heck, they even stopped the Blood War (by ‘losing’ the Abyss)! FFS!
TL;DR: You can pry away THAC0 from my dead, cold hands (assuming I’m not resurrected).
You said playing without minis or maps was “incredibly frustrating,” without qualifier, and that you were “baffled” by people who play that way. I’m not sure how else to interpret that.
I suspect he’s driving trollies. Nobody actually thinks that maintaining D&D and AD&D as separate, incompatible systems with their own restricted settings was a good idea. Science has yet to determine why the fuck it happened, but I’m thinking aliens.
I do think AD&D 2nd edition was the high point for experienced gamers. And I also feel that the changes were implemented to dumb down the rules (which is why I think there should be separate D&D and AD&D).
Good grief. Thanks for the insult. I expect to receive random insults all the time, but not on a Boing Boing D&D thread.
They don’t have to be completely incompatible. D&D 3rd edition and AD&D 3rd edition could have modified each others rules so that it would be possible for a character to be moved between settings. It happens all the time anyways. When you move your characters and settings to a new edition you have to use translation tables. Just keep that understood during the design to make it easier to move characters. This way the kids and novices can graduate to play the actual game.
[In respose to bzishi above] Or you could organize it with a one-book set of core rules that should work through 5th or 10th level, depending, and another couple books for add-on rules.
I am amazed at the number of separate rulebooks Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons seem to use.
I know Savage Worlds is playable out of one book, or two if needed, although the power difference between major characters/Wild Cards and minor characters drives me nuts.
I know Basic Roleplaying would be playable out of one book, if it were better-organized, and if the low magic rules included suggestions on who gets to use low magic in various setting styles, and if the example non-player-characters were consistent with the rules for creating player-characters.
But people aren’t discussing those editions as the high points. You’re right though, I believe it has been about 25 since second edition came out.
I was gently mocking the idea that the pinnacle of tabletop role-playing games was attained by Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s. There has been decades of people playing, thinking, making new games, etc. since then. There are a bunch of common trends towards streamlined, narrative focused play instead of tables and tables and tables with combat that takes four hours being the focus of play (plus lead figurines!). Some rather smart folks have designed all kinds of interesting games, with rules focused on encouraging certain play styles, role playing and storytelling in ways that D&D, frankly, only did in spite of the rules or when people ignored half of the books. How many Dungeon Masters actually used the entirety of the contents of their Dungeon Master’s Guides versus 30% and ignoring the rest?
Of course, of course. The complaints about the size DMG could apply to any RPG. The rules are made expansive so that you have a lot of options, even though you will use a small fraction of them. What I do feel happened is that WotC/Hasbro decided that they would shrink down the options and make a more streamlines experience. Unfortunately with this, while most DMs won’t use all the options available, they also won’t necessarily always use the common options. And by cutting down everything but the common options, it made the game less creative. And the new edition turnover rate is making it harder still.
Now, I know you can always say, “just play with the older rules, you don’t have to upgrade every time.” And this is true, but the new adventures, monster guides, etc, will always be released for the new edition. Hasbro is in the business to sell books. And there are two ways to do this: new editions every 5 years where most players update their libraries (with occasional adventures and rule supplements to sell to DMs) or new editions every 10 years where most players update their libraries and lots of adventures and rule supplements to sell to DMs. It doesn’t surprise me that they’ve taken the first route (it sells more books), but I do think the second route allows an edition a lot more time to be fleshed out and it gives players and DMs a lot more benefit from learning complicated, but fun rules. With 5th edition coming along, I’m feeling reboot fatigue. More new rules to learn instead of practicing the old tried and true rules. What WotC/Hasbro is doing is not fair to players.
Well, that might be true except people don’t do that, in my experience, with any of the current crop of games. People use all of the rules as written. The point is that the rule books aren’t written with hundreds of pages of rules that people don’t need, want, or use…
Spot on! As kids my friends and I had miniatures. We painted them carefully, a very tedious task. We even played a bit of Warhammer, but found it even more tedious than the painting. Car Wars was kind of fun. Never once did we use miniatures for real roleplaying. We hardly ever even used dice. We spent hours and hours poring over the books of many RPGs (Ghostbusters, anyone? GURPS? Space Master?) and studying the rules. When it came time to play, we just talked and laughed and fought and laughed and had a great time imagining.
You mean like all 9 alignments? Obviously this was too complex for 4th edition. I’m sure no gamer would use more than the 5 that they gave you. And if you want to be a bard or sorcerer, buy the next book. Nobody plays these classes, so they can just be left out of the core (and given that the PDF for 5th edition above doesn’t list a bard or a paladin, I have to wonder if they are in the core). Oh, and did I mention that nobody ever plays with the astral, ethereal, and outer planes. It wouldn’t hurt to just make them all one plane. You know, just hundreds of pages nobody uses.
Here’s my point: D&D is cumbersome and full of baggage of 40 years of history and complexity. People have never played it as written because it is too complex and most folks don’t want to memorize giant books of rules and tables to simply play an adventure with friends. The state of the art for tabletop RPGs has moved on but D&D hasn’t really adjusted to it. Hell, fourth edition was basically the love child of World of Warcraft and third edition D&D.
Sure, there are old school folks (usually actually…old…at this point) who want all of this crap but most of us don’t. I’m 43, I game roughly four or more evenings for 3-5 hours each time during the month and no one in the groups that I play with wants to learn giant new game systems with unnecessary levels of complexity. Why bother when you can just pick up FATE or one of the more recent crop of story focused systems and be playing in an hour out of a single book that costs half or one fourth what getting D&D books costs? On top of that, they aren’t filled with useless tables and lists of minutiae, expecting people to simply go with a narrative within a framework as established and to not munchkin everything.
I just spent the evening playing a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” style game as a one off with friends. We discussed the rules for 30 minutes, played for 2 1/2 hours, found and killed the monster in our high school and were done for the night.
I think things like D&D are dinosaur and do more to damage the future of tabletop RPGs than they ever do to help. Kill it with fire.
