I’m sorry that you chose to interpret my comments as being “dismissive”. They weren’t meant that way.
I was only speaking of my own limited experience, and that I personally found minis and battle mats quite helpful, especially in later editions. I’m lucky to have a DM with crates full of minis to use, so I can’t speak about the investment angle. Again, every DM and gaming group has their own style, and that’s great. That’s why I find animosity towards different styles of gaming strange.
I’m guessing you haven’t played D&D in awhile, and are just trying to stir up a hornet’s nest. yes?
The problem, for me, is that miniatures and plastic 3D maps constrain the imagination. It’s always that same goddamned stone wall, always the same red dragon. This isn’t a problem with the wargames that D&D originated from (cf Chainmail) but the AD&D I grew up with was roleplaying, not wargaming. I don’t mind that, say, ASL is not capturing my imagination with storytelling, the same way I don’t mind that chess pieces or go stones are not realistic representations. I like both types of game, but D&D has too often tried to have it both ways. Storytelling and imagination, PLUS you have to count how many hexes are between your guy and his target and account for anything that might be blocking his view or reach or whatever. They don’t mix well.
A system like Traveller managed this dualism much better; spaceflight/combat was mathematical and regimented, while everything else was freeform. Made sense, since math is inherently part of spaceflight, whereas personal interactions are more fluid. EDIT: Yes, I know that math describes everything, but it’s not the most appropriate language for everything. When you want to talk to the ogre, you shouldn’t need to check if you’re within the range of his hearing. You just fucking know.
Also, feats are nonsense bullshit.
That is all.
Okay, I lied, that was not all. When D&D really started going off the rails for me was when adventures included verbatim descriptions of exactly what the DM was supposed to be telling the player. Early adventures described the room and what was in it and left it up to the DM to do the narration; sometime in the late 80s that turned into “SAY THIS TO YOUR PLAYERS: You are in a maze of twisty passages…” etc.
One reason that I haven’t had a problem with your first point is that one of the players in my ongoing game is a sculptor and creates custom minis as needed.
As to the rest, that’s exactly why I’ve been digging the new Star Wars system that just came out. No math. No addition. No d20s. No hexes or grids. No feats. No force powers for the most part, and no Jedi for the most part. No magic powers. Just DM-driven action and storytelling.
Are you talking about the X-Wing Miniatures? I’ve been looking at that but it seems a little “buy this expansion set” focused.
heh. one year i bought my friend one of the new D&D books for his birthday and was seriously pissed to find that it basically contained most of the interesting stuff (overland travel, mass combat, etc.) that made AD&D “Advanced”, except that it was streamlined and much easier to read and play with minimal loss of verisimilitude.
in hindsight, that was pretty much a tacit admission from TSR that “Advanced” just meant “Gratuitously Complicated”. i suspect that there was some inter-office rivalry going on too. the AD&D settings were much cooler, but there’s no fundamental reason they couldn’t have been ported to D&D.
whenever you split a product into the “easy” version and the “hardcore” version, you’re just asking for trouble. this goes for RPGs, software, education, and pretty much anything.
I’m actually talking about the Edge of the Empire RPG. It gets a little confusing because it uses the same custom dice as X-Wing Miniatures, but is its own RPG system. X-Wing is a ton of fun, but is definitely an investment, especially if you start playing with capital ships.
AD&D certainly was, both editions. 3E when it came out was wonderful – it made sense, was relatively rules-light, threw out a lot of the baggage (like racial restrictions on multiclassing and the like). Sadly, WotC decided they needed to make more money, so they issued books of new rules until the system started to collapse under its own weight again. Then they realized they had to tidy up the resulting mess a bit, hence 3.5E.
For years I’ve played with simplified maps. I print out or scrawl the layout on squared paper, and use cardboard counters backed with Post-It Note adhesive to represent locations of things. The counter is often just the character’s initials and an arrow indicating direction they’re facing. This is enough to answer “Can X do Y?” questions, without getting in the way of the imagination. Plus it’s dirt cheap, since I have a laser printer.
But having said that, I’m not a big fan of maps. I prefer the approach of PARANOIA with its Dramatic Tactical System, where things like location and physics are decided based on what’s best for the story. So I steered clear of 4E. (I also wasn’t a fan of the licensing clampdown.)
So, I’m undecided about 5E. Part of me thinks the best thing would be to carry on with D20 and Pathfinder, but I’m also curious to read through the rulebooks some time and give them fair consideration.
I didn’t claim they would be simple as FATE which basically boils everything down to skills and feats and lets you assign them to a very limited resource pool that expands slowly, or Dungeon World which lets every class make a hand full of choices to build a fantasy character. What I’m saying is 5e has been trimmed down from 4e (which has a 350 page PHB, but it’s all crunch) or pathfinder (600 pages for its core rulebook).
I agree it’s vastly overpriced by WotC (it’ll be $150 for the PHB, DMG, and MM), but it has struck a decent balance between character options, fluff, and crunch.
Let’s remember that 1st Edition came out about the same time as Traveller, Runequest, and other early 1st-generation skill-based games.
Admittedly, 1st-generation skill-based games made it hard to create the character you wanted to play or the character you needed for this part of the adventure. I suppose class-based games may have had the advantage, if the character fits within the available classes.
2nd Edition came out about the same time as Star Wars, and other early second-generation skill-based games, which solved those problems.
Now I’ve heard that class-based games help with the tendency, in certain skill-based games, for everyone to take the same essential skills. So something like 3rd Edition and Pathfinder would be an important alternative to those skill-based games, if they decided on a consistent approach, and if they only required the one core book and a setting or self-contained adventure, and if they had published that at the time of 2nd edition.
Jesus Christ. Who pays $150 for tabletop RPG books? Man, I thought Dresden Files was bad.
It’s only available in hardcover, and on amazon it’s much less (but still a crazy $96).
Big, full-color, glossy hardcovers are not cheap. $50 is about average for art books and such in that general format. There’s three core books, in the tradition maintained since 1E AD&D. So…there you are.
(Mind you, I’ve never met any serious gamer who’s spent as little as $150 on RPGs. It’s a cheap hobby compared to some, but it does add up.)
How much for the ebook? Oh wait…
Free on Pirate Bay, if history is any indication. Maybe they’ll actually wise up and start doing proper ebooks this edition.
Amazon has the PHB marked down to $30 as the moment, actually. Not sure how long that’ll last. They’re probably losing money on it.
Please don’t take me for a fanboy. I know something about how the RPG and printing industries work. Margins are razor-thin all around, especially given how small the audience is. $50 for a hardback is not gouging, it’s avoiding bankruptcy.
Very much this. DMs like to be mobile and agile. They like technology. They like to have their reference tools on hand. A context-searchable ebook version of the 5e books would be wildly popular; just about every DM I know uses crappy scanned Pirate Bay PDFs of the 4e books, even when they have their whole 4e library as hardbacks. I can only assume that WotC is pushing the physical books before going the ebook route.
I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable to charge $30-$50 per book, it depends, but I think it is unreasonable to charge $90-$150 for the required starting books.
I have to wonder why they can’t fit everything important into one book, or into one core book and one setting book.
Maybe they can cut things down to six archetypal classes, allow perform and bardic abilities from any class, allow customization of any class, and allow custom classes [probably slightly weaker] when needed.
Only if people buy it. Of course, they’re banking on the next 12 supplements to sell you as well.
Yes, it’s true that companies that sell products depend on people buying their products to succeed.
I get that you don’t like D&D. That’s fine. There’s lots of absolutely lovely indie games out there, as you’ve noted. But an awful lot of gamers do like D&D, and they do want and expect a core book set consisting of three glossy full-color hardcovers, and WotC isn’t pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes by giving them what they want.
And you know, D&D is still bringing more people into the hobby than any other single game. Some of those people go on to play Dogs in the Vineyard, or My Life with Master, or Nobilis. D&D and the other glossy, popular supplement machines are not the barrier standing between Vincent Baker and global superstardom; they’re the foundation that holds up the rest of the industry.
