A Historical Look at the OSR

[squeen]

We that's BS. I for one am getting a lot out of your fresh eyes on a number of my favourite classic modules.

I imagine Prince was blowing some smoke my direction...and that's fine. My head is not so big that I didn't smile when I read that. I too am enjoying his recent reviews. There's always something new to learn from see how others do it---but at some point, to be constantly buying your adventures I think cuts against the grain of the hobby. There's a real joy in creation that (again that Raggi quote) makes it an active rather than a passive hobby. For me, that's a big part of the fun.

The landscape is just saturated with product---good and bad. Byrce's reviews helps you navigate, but there's still a sensory overload I needed to turn "off" because it was killing my own sense of creativity.

 

[The1True]

but there's still a sensory overload I needed to turn "off" because it was killing my own sense of creativity.

I'm getting there too. I picked up a broad cross-section of Bryce and Prince's 'Best-of' lists but it's started slowing down more and more; not because I'm disagreeing with the reviews, but yeah, saturation...

 

[PrinceofNothing]

Well that's BS. I for one am getting a lot out of your fresh eyes on a number of my favourite classic modules.

I snuck a conditional in there so Squeen wouldn't notice

 

[squeen]

A little lunch-time reading, from the Raggi "I hate fun" article that @Osrnoob linked

This is how I’ve come to interpret people when they use the word “fun” in relation to role-playing games. People wanting quick-fix, feel good entertainment exactly as they like it with as little effort as possible.

And I hate it.

Fun, in the context of RPG discussions, is like some Orwellian inversion of meaning (speaking of which, how big of an example of this is a certain internet forum's use of the word badwrongfun? It shuts down discussion and makes it clear that thinking that anything is important is foolish - no criticism or education allowed!). So much so, that I think that people who talk about "fun" in RPGs are destroying the hobby. Because fun ruins RPGs, much like it ruins everything else that requires time, imagination, and a fair bit of concentration.

Think about how often you see people on internet message boards talking about things which “get in the way of their fun.” What do they mean by that, really? Are they looking for the real satisfaction or the quick fix?

This is a particularly insightful read, talking about the “tyranny of fun” and how it cheapens role-playing games. It’s also why having an attitude of live and let live doesn’t work – those who demand everything easy and quickly will always outnumber those that don’t, and pretty soon a hobby that was custom-made for the studious and imaginative and thorough now belongs to an entirely different caste, while those of us that the hobby was created for are left on the fringes, told that we’re just not compatible with today’s gaming, and sometimes, even today’s life in general.

I think this articulates the "challenging" vs "fun" arguments DP and I used to get into here fairly well. It was the single central idea I hoped to impart to my kids over a decade ago when we started playing D&D---the personal revelation I once had in the 70's when I found my excellent DM---the value of an accomplishment is proportional to the difficulty in obtaining it. D&D, in particular, self-imploded (for me) solely as "light" entertainment/wish-fulfillment. That's not just the cliche of ye "Old-school Lethality" (which taken on its own is equally wrong)---it encompasses everything in the game.

It’s like these people don’t even know that “winning” in role-playing is done simply by enjoying the process of playing the game. Yeah, it’s more gratifying (dare I say “fun”) to succeed, but death and failure are hardcoded into the very essence of the game for a reason. It’s not the amusement park cheap thrill of simulated or illusionary danger… make a bad decision, rely on luck to get you by, and the danger smacks your character down.

But people out there have gotten the idea that if their precious imaginary equipment owned by their precious imaginary man is taken away from them, their fun has been sabotaged! And the game designers are listening.

Fight on!

 

[squeen]

...risk and challenge and failure are as much part of role-playing as prancing around like Errol Flynn… er, sorry, Legolas (sorry, wouldn’t want to make a reference that the average modern person wouldn’t know off the top of their head) or something. Shit out there is trying to KILL YOU and there are critters out there that will fuck you up but good if you’re unlucky or not careful.

A small aside...my players have accidentally-on-purpose-with-a-fireball thawed out a Beholder who about to unleash some serious hurt on their party next round unless a miracle occurs. When the magic-user user asked the ego inhabiting her staff what a Beholder does, it responded with a monosyllable: "Kills.".

In all my years as a player and now as a DM, I've never encountered a Beholder before. Should be fun.

 

[squeen]

Also this

Real choice in the manner of game play was lost, or at least obscured and made more difficult to achieve, all the while increasing the options for individual characters… That was a great trick, giving players the illusion of more choice and increasing the detail and complexity of the rules while slapping the handcuffs on the game itself. Brilliant. Fuckers.

Skills. Feats. Candy classes etc. all fall into this broad brush-stroke of Raggi's...to me that is (i.e. please don't climb up my keister! Just stating I interpret this as my tastes aligning with his on this subject. Although, again, I do not like LotFP.)

 

[Hemlock]

I wanted to discuss this as it alo... well I don't want to categorize, organize, seperate and stifle discussion.

Go!

I found this sentence striking and insightful: "But pretending we’re normal and just anyone can pick up this hobby and enjoy it, without making wholesale changes to it, is simply nonsense."

I have often wondered whether the ability to interact with an imaginary world using your imaginary body, making and evaluating plans using an imaginary physics, requires a cognitive faculty similar to that used for debugging computer programs. It is possible to run or play roleplaying games in an entirely reactive mode that's all about the people at the table, the dice, and the physical tokens on the table, but to actually put yourself in the shoes of a character in the world and ask, "What would this character be thinking? What plans would he immediately discard as bad ideas, and what plans would his experience tell him are worth trying?" requires either the ability to conceptualize a world that is there only speculatively, or a lengthy dialogue with a GM who has that ability and shares it with you via Q&A.

Without that ability to predict futures in a speculative world, all you can do is play reactively: do things, and see what happens, then do more things.

 

[Beoric]

I have often wondered whether the ability to interact with an imaginary world using your imaginary body, making and evaluating plans using an imaginary physics, requires a cognitive faculty similar to that used for debugging computer programs. It is possible to run or play roleplaying games in an entirely reactive mode that's all about the people at the table, the dice, and the physical tokens on the table, but to actually put yourself in the shoes of a character in the world and ask, "What would this character be thinking? What plans would he immediately discard as bad ideas, and what plans would his experience tell him are worth trying?" requires either the ability to conceptualize a world that is there only speculatively, or a lengthy dialogue with a GM who has that ability and shares it with you via Q&A.

Without that ability to predict futures in a speculative world, all you can do is play reactively: do things, and see what happens, then do more things.

I am but one data point, but I can play the way you suggest, while having pretty piss-poor debugging skills. I don't know that there are many people I have played with who can't play that way, and they are all very different from each other. As I have mentioned before, a majority of my core group growing up were at least superficially "normal," and certainly didn't fall into the usual D&D tropes surrounding nerds and geeks.

I think it is probably pretty tough if you have aphantasia, but otherwise I think the major impediment is the social anxiety associated with roleplaying in front of an audience, even if that audience is a group of kids you are playing with. Odds are, the first time you play you are going in without ever having observed the way people actually play RPGs in any meaningful way. The activity looks pretty arcane to the uninitiated; rules heavy games are, well, heavy with rules, and rules light games are heavy with conventions. You get a sheet that is supposed to represent your character with a bunch of statistics on it, which might make sense if you had time to study them and you at least knew what scale the numbers were on, but you don't. And then you are asked to make choices for your character, but it isn't multiple-choice it is short answer and you aren't sure you even understand the question.

It is really no wonder that, before it was mainstream, the game was popular with people who had no social capital to lose. It was a much bigger risk for people who did have social capital in junior high and high school, and whose biggest priority is not to embarrass themselves at any cost. D&D becoming mainstream just makes it safer to play by making it more familiar.

Honestly, WotC would probably do well to publish some genuine, high lethality funhouse dungeons that aren't meant to be taken seriously. They have pretty much saturated the earnest, long, heavily scripted campaign crowd that wants a game like Critical Role, and that kind of D&D is a shit-ton of work. A more casual game, with low expectations of survival and a high prospect of entertaining deaths, would appeal to a whole new crowd. Maybe with some rules for quicky generating replacement characters; you could publish a whole new splatbook with rules for XP=GP, fast CharGen and the dungeon procedures that are missing from the current rules (or the 5.5 rules, I guess).

 

[Hemlock]

I am but one data point, but I can play the way you suggest, while having pretty SNIP poor debugging skills. I don't know that there are many people I have played with who can't play that way, and they are all very different from each other. As I have mentioned before, a majority of my core group growing up were at least superficially "normal," and certainly didn't fall into the usual D&D tropes surrounding nerds and geeks.

That's a useful datum, but there are lots of ways to be bad at something. Simple lack of experience is an obvious one; discomfort with arithmetic could do it too. It's Bayesian evidence against my theory that similar faculties are needed for both, but without the ability to examine you and the specific ways in which you're bad at debugging, it's fairly weak evidence. Let's say it nudges my subjective confidence in my theory down from 65%ish to 63%ish.

For my own part I've noticed that the same people who don't do well when I try to teach them programming also struggle with planning in roleplaying (as opposed to reactive, "do something and see what happens" roleplaying). That's why my initial prior is pretty high. But my sample size is also small.

I think it is probably pretty tough if you have aphantasia, but otherwise I think the major impediment is the social anxiety associated with roleplaying in front of an audience, even if that audience is a group of kids you are playing with.

I've never seen anyone have any problem with that part, even kids who hate being spotlighted in real life. They may not want to act out a character and "do the voices" but there's no performance anxiety about whether to e.g. accept the giant's invitation to come inside the house and have a cup of hot chocolate. If anything there's a relative absence of fear, compared to those who think a few steps ahead about escape routes or poisoning the giant.

Odds are, the first time you play you are going in without ever having observed the way people actually play RPGs in any meaningful way. The activity looks pretty arcane to the uninitiated; rules heavy games are, well, heavy with rules, and rules light games are heavy with conventions. You get a sheet that is supposed to represent your character with a bunch of statistics on it, which might make sense if you had time to study them and you at least knew what scale the numbers were on, but you don't. And then you are asked to make choices for your character, but it isn't multiple-choice it is short answer and you aren't sure you even understand the question.

I sort of agree: I find that rules-light games don't have this problem, but I also hate running games that are rules-light enough that people who can't handle rules can enjoy them. (Basically the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure level.) It's exhausting because all the burden falls on the GM, or at least that's what it feels like to me. I enjoy rules-heavier games (at least to the extent of AD&D, Shadowrun, or DFRPG, instead of one-page RPGs), and your observations are valid for those types of games. Trying to find better on-ramps for teaching those types of games gradually is an ongoing concern for me.

It's one reason pregens are important IMO. It lets new players skip over the chargen minigame and get right into playing the game. Since reading The Elusive Shift I've also been pondering the idea of not asking for any dice rolls or explaining any game mechanics to someone the first session or two, asking them to just trust me as GM to resolve things realistically, and explaining the rules only if the player comes back several times, which coincides with the point at which the character should be starting to see patterns in the gameworld (like "orcs tend to parry low, maybe because their leg armor is weak").

Honestly, WotC would probably do well to publish some genuine, high lethality funhouse dungeons that aren't meant to be taken seriously. They have pretty much saturated the earnest, long, heavily scripted campaign crowd that wants a game like Critical Role, and that kind of D&D is a ...-ton of work. A more casual game, with low expectations of survival and a high prospect of entertaining deaths, would appeal to a whole new crowd. Maybe with some rules for quicky generating replacement characters; you could publish a whole new splatbook with rules for XP=GP, fast CharGen and the dungeon procedures that are missing from the current rules (or the 5.5 rules, I guess).

I think WotC tried this with Dungeons of the Mad Mage, although I wasn't impressed with the product. And maybe you're thinking of much higher lethality than Mad Mage, which... actually could be a lot of fun if you combine it with high XP and decent treasure, even if certain quarters would deride it as a "hack and slash" game. I don't think WotC is capable of writing this sort of game well, but I think you're right, it would sell well if done well[1]. After all, people did seem to like the YouTube videos they did before Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes where people took control of big monsters like demon lords and made them fight each other.

[1] I think part of "doing it well" must include simple rules for character stables. Something along the lines of "make six characters, and whenever one goes up a level they all go up a level; play one character at a time; when one dies, the next one shows up at the start of the next dungeon level; when you run out, another player may donate a backup PC to you, otherwise you're eliminated from the game." Not complex, but showing people how you're expected to approach the game.

 

[squeen]

It's one reason pregens are important IMO. It lets new players skip over the chargen minigame and get right into playing the game. Since reading The Elusive Shift I've also been pondering the idea of not asking for any dice rolls or explaining any game mechanics to someone the first session or two, asking them to just trust me as GM to resolve things realistically, and explaining the rules only if the player comes back several times, which coincides with the point at which the character should be starting to see patterns in the gameworld (like "orcs tend to parry low, maybe because their leg armor is weak").

This is how we used to play. We rolled dice to create the character, bought our stuff, and kept track of HP & gold. We didn't roll dice after that. We were informed when we had leveled up, but didn't know XP.

All the attack roles and saving throws we done by the DM. Even though we all had the AD&D books, we didn't know the specifics of how our DM had tweaked the rules...or specifics of monster stats. We figured our the rules of engagement as they evolved. We were tactical and strategic, but the mechanics remained veil beyond our out-of-game (general D&D) knowledge-base.

I repeated this model with my kids as players. They knew nothing about D&D, but slowly sussed out the mechanics as time progressed. They had access to the PHB only. Eventually, I started letting them roll more and more, but I (as DM) judged the result as success or fail based on mechanics knowledge I never fully revealed. You knew your sword was magic because t glowed, but not that it was +1 (or -1).

There are those here who will cry FOUL because they wish to know risk/probabilities before making an informed decision, but I think that if the mechanics remain somewhat veiled, your imagination inflates the level-of-detail to some extent and the imagined world grows in stature.

OD&D/AD&D(1e) character creation is so quick and easy...pregens are kind of irrelevant.

I get that players want more knowledge. Players always want more...period. But older players also complain that the game gets stale. Isn't it at least worth considering that full-transparency might be a partial cause? More unknowns just may cure those blues.

 

[Hemlock]

There are those here who will cry FOUL because they wish to know risk/probabilities before making an informed decision, but I think that if the mechanics remain somewhat veiled, your imagination inflates the level-of-detail to some extent and the imagined world grows in stature.

OD&D/AD&D(1e) character creation is so quick and easy...pregens are kind of irrelevant.

There is certainly a point at which it makes sense for characters to know more than the DM can tell them without using either math or rules, and at that point it's just easier to tell them the rules. Dumb-but-real example: if a D&D 5E player is fighting an enemy swordsman in a castle hallway, and he wants to slowly back away down the hallway (towards his buddies and safety), they probably deserve to know that a fighting retreat in 5E is dangerous and lets you enemy get free attacks against you. Slightly-less-dumb example: a 5E player who's read enough military literature to understand the value of the high ground deserves to know whether a fighting retreat towards higher ground (e.g. through a doorway leading to stairs going up) is worth taking an extra attack (or giving up a round of attacking in order to Disengage). The answer of course is that no, in 5E higher ground is worthless--but in a system like DFRPG where it means something, it makes sense for the players to know in a general sense how much that high ground is worth, because the character certainly knows what maneuvers become easier or harder when you're on high ground relative to your opponent. The rules serve as a proxy for a tedious digression into the biomechanics of sword/axe-fighting, which the GM probably doesn't even know in the first place.

I agree that AD&D character creation is quick and easy, but I still see value in pregens, because (1) it lets you avoid presenting new players with decisions that they don't understand yet, like choosing to play a wizard vs. a thief or how much rope to buy; (2) it lets you frame certain scenes a little bit harder.

It's one thing to say "Your name is Wreck-it Ralph and you're a muscular criminal working for a wannabe master thief named Vezzini who mistreats you and insults your intelligence; one day you are coming back from a shakedown when you spot police constables surrounding the hideout. Listening, you hear Vezzini's panicked-sounding voice coming from inside, and then thumping sounds like someone is being beat up. A few minutes later you see Vezzini being marched off to jail. You are now unemployed. It's just sinking in that you have no place to go and no one to turn to when you notice a TREASURE-HUNTERS WANTED: ALL EXPENSES PAID flyer nailed to the wall near you. You've seen these before but never paid attention. This one says there's a meeting at a certain address nearby at 6pm tonight. What do you want to know or do now?"

It's another thing to ask a new player to create a new character from scratch (which probably entails asking them questions about their tastes in literature or movies) and onboard the resulting newly-created pirate or pixie or whatever to an adventure in a timely manner. It can be done, but it takes more time than jumping right into the "what do you do now?" part. (A half hour longer? an hour? I'd guesstimate that a decent pregen will always save you at least half an hour of onboarding time.)

P.S. Note to self: make up a TREASURE-HUNTERS WANTED flyer to go with the pregen. It's a golden opportunity to slip players some knowledge of the conventions of the game and gameworld. "Treasure to be shared equally between survivors of the expedition with one extra share for the owner of the map; any magical items will be assessed by a third party at their fair sale price, and redeemable by party members in lieu of monetary treasure." "No kender allowed!" "Horses and treasure-wagons will be provided, plus all the rope and rations you need." "Resurrection insurance will be available via the Blue Temple at the subsidized price of $200 apiece, payable in advance, instead of the normal $1000. A good faith effort will be made by survivors to bring any bodies back for resurrection, but the nature of the expedition is such that no guarantees can be made. JOIN AT YOUR OWN RISK."

 

[Beoric]

That's a useful datum, but there are lots of ways to be bad at something. Simple lack of experience is an obvious one; discomfort with arithmetic could do it too. It's Bayesian evidence against my theory that similar faculties are needed for both, but without the ability to examine you and the specific ways in which you're bad at debugging, it's fairly weak evidence. Let's say it nudges my subjective confidence in my theory down from 65%ish to 63%ish.

For my own part I've noticed that the same people who don't do well when I try to teach them programming also struggle with planning in roleplaying (as opposed to reactive, "do something and see what happens" roleplaying). That's why my initial prior is pretty high. But my sample size is also small.

Pretty comfortable with arithmetic, probably not much experience. Basic in high school, a semester or two of Pascal in university, writing very simple macros in MapTools. Once anything gets remotely complicated I have trouble predicting the results, which makes it quite hard to identify errors.

A lot of the people I played with are not technically inclined, for instance our most dedicated players would have included people who grew up to be a salesperson, a manager in the hospitality industry, a financial services rep and a construction worker. My job is also not technical in nature.

I've never seen anyone have any problem with that part, even kids who hate being spotlighted in real life. They may not want to act out a character and "do the voices" but there's no performance anxiety about whether to e.g. accept the giant's invitation to come inside the house and have a cup of hot chocolate. If anything there's a relative absence of fear, compared to those who think a few steps ahead about escape routes or poisoning the giant.

Sure, but those are people who agreed to show up to the game in the first place. And the kid who dones't like being spotligthed in RL could find in liberating; I would actually expect that kid to be more open to it than the popular kid who is used to be in the spotlight and wants to stay there.

My main group group was unusual in that the social convener got hooked at a young age, and he was popular enough that he made it ok for others in that group to play. But I went to a different school, and when I roped one of the popular crowd into my game, they tended to be the jokey disruptors in the party.

It's one reason pregens are important IMO. It lets new players skip over the chargen minigame and get right into playing the game.

Yeah, pregens are good for starting, but a faster system for generating new characters helps continue that type of game after the pregens run out, and help players to attain system mastery. Plus I would hope it would bleed into some of the other games, and maybe those players could learn the joy of playing the character that fate and the dice have given you.

I think WotC tried this with Dungeons of the Mad Mage, although I wasn't impressed with the product. And maybe you're thinking of much higher lethality than Mad Mage, which... actually could be a lot of fun if you combine it with high XP and decent treasure, even if certain quarters would deride it as a "hack and slash" game. I don't think WotC is capable of writing this sort of game well, but I think you're right, it would sell well if done well[1]. After all, people did seem to like the YouTube videos they did before Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes where people took control of big monsters like demon lords and made them fight each other.

[1] I think part of "doing it well" must include simple rules for character stables. Something along the lines of "make six characters, and whenever one goes up a level they all go up a level; play one character at a time; when one dies, the next one shows up at the start of the next dungeon level; when you run out, another player may donate a backup PC to you, otherwise you're eliminated from the game." Not complex, but showing people how you're expected to approach the game.

I'm not familiar with Dungeons of the Mad Mage, so I can't comment. If it was me I would make a product where death was common enough that it was normalized, so that the chances are better than not that you wouldn't be finishing the module with the same character that you started with. I would also want lots of opportunities for those deaths to be entertaining. It is a lot less likely that you will be upset over the death of a character if you are laughing about it. So some advice to the DM to narrate these deaths as less tragic and more over the top would be helpful.

Honestly, I would probably release a Hommlet conversion - but not the normal, milquetoast conversations, something as lethal as the original - with better support for playing in the village (yes, squeen I already know what you are going to say). That partially solves the "character stables" issue, since there are a number of replacement characters in the village. And I might make the parties bigger, with DMs helping to turn the supporting characters at first ("I'm sorry your fighter died, here, take over this NPC.") with the option for more experienced players to run a main character and their dogsbody.

But I entirely agree that WotC is not up to this task. It was clear to me from their treatment of some elements they brought back onto 5e (I can't remember which, it has been a while since I looked at it) that they don't understand the actual function of a lot of those elements, other than "MOAR fights! Randomness is fun!"

Like, if you want to have random encounters as a semi-realistic timer, you need to slow down movement. The way I do that is to slow it way down if characters are using a 10' pole to check for pits and/or mapping (I don't think a modern crowd would tolerate player-mapping, but there are alternatives) and/or checking for secret doors as they go along. Proceed at an ordinary 3e/4e/5e pace and you will move too quickly to trigger a random encounter, but you will miss stuff, get lost, and fall into traps (which need to be upgraded to account for higher 5e HP). Move at a 1e pace and you are safer but risk random encounters. These sorts of basic math changes between editions never seem to be taken into account.

For XP, to simulate level progression from older editions, and give first level replacement characters a chance to catch up, I double XP awarded to characters below average party level, and halve it for characters above average party level.

 

[Hemlock]

Pretty comfortable with arithmetic, probably not much experience. Basic in high school, a semester or two of Pascal in university, writing very simple macros in MapTools. Once anything gets remotely complicated I have trouble predicting the results, which makes it quite hard to identify errors.

I hate to say it, Beoric, but the fact that you got through multiple semesters of Pascal and are able to write macros on your own in MapTools makes you good at programming by my standards, not bad. I am thinking more of the people who try but can't grok the concept of functions, for example, much less recursion. My confidence in my theory just went up from 63% to 67%ish.

I owe you a response to the rest of your post about pregens, WotC adventures, Hommlet's utility as a source of backup characters, etc. But I'll have to post that as a followup because my phone battery is low and your post deserves a thoughtful response.

 

[Beoric]

I hate to say it, Beoric, but the fact that you got through multiple semesters of Pascal and are able to write macros on your own in MapTools makes you good at programming by my standards, not bad. I am thinking more of the people who try but can't grok the concept of functions, for example, much less recursion. My confidence in my theory just went up from 63% to 67%ish.

One, maybe two semesters, I don't think I did that well, and I can't remember a lick of it. My MapTools macros are pretty simple, and I have a lot of trouble grokking the syntax. It takes me forever to do anything.

My brother, who can code in his sleep, hasn't played the game in 40 years and never played it seriously. As far as I know my nephew, who is in robotics, was never interested in playing. OTOH, of all the people in my old gaming group who were serious about playing, only one showed any interest/aptitude for programming. At least one of them is entirely inept with computers.

I expect that @squeen has programming skills, but maybe some of the others around here will weigh in; I'm curious now.

 

[squeen]

Honestly, I would probably release a Hommlet conversion - but not the normal, milquetoast conversations, something as lethal as the original - with better support for playing in the village (yes, squeen I already know what you are going to say).

Then tell me, because I have no idea! Nevertheless, I do get a dopamine hit every time you mention me in a post.

I expect that @squeen has programming skills, but maybe some of the others around here will weigh in; I'm curious now.

I've been on computers long enough to remember when Bordland's Turbo Pascal was a hot new product. In 1980 my parents bought me an Apple ][ compatible "Franklin Ace 1000" (which existed for about a two years until Apple sued them into non-existance) which, at $2000, I thought was outrageously expensive and owning it made me feel guilty for asking for one. It supported upper AND lower case!

The next summer, my middle-school friend's Dad built him an IBM-PC compatible from a Heath-kit. It was cool and had Hack (later renamed Rogue) on it! While we played on his PC, his 80-something grandmother (affectionately called "Ga ga"...and she was) would walk by from her connecting apartment into the main house. My friend would inform her (multiple times) what my name was, and then tell her I invented Turbo Pascal (not true). She would nod and say "Oh? That's nice.".

All the players in our old D&D group were nerds. That was back when young Jobs & Gates were on the cover of Time Magazine under the caption "Revenge of the Nerds". Nerds were supposed to be smart in school. Computers were difficult to understand (for most adults) --- the two were frequently heavily correlated.

But, like today's youth, USING a computer (or phone-appliance) is a far cry from programming. Most kids back then, at the birth of the personal computer era, learned to use computers mainly to play video games...and, a bit later, to word process too. A much smaller number bothered to learn to program them. It was similar to today where 99.9% of the phone-appliance users today have no more an idea how to write an iOS or Android app than they have to build a dish washer. The math and reasoning skills needed to operate either is about on par.

C is God's programming language. I've already used it this morning.

Programming on the Apple ][ was most easily done in Applesoft BASIC. It was written by Microsoft. Microsoft Word and Excel also first appeared (around a decade later) on the Mac. Cutting & pasting between them using the "clipboard" seemed like a technological revolution bordering on black magic!

-----------

@Hemlock: No offense intended, but when you talk about setting up a scenario by "placing" your players into it...that's pretty much a foreign concept to how I've always played. A heavier hand than I'm accustomed to from the DM.

 

[Hemlock]

*snip amusing anecdotes*
@Hemlock: No offense intended, but when you talk about setting up a scenario by "placing" your players into it...that's pretty much a foreign concept to how I've always played. A heavier hand than I'm accustomed to from the DM.

No offense taken. We've discussed before how the different amounts of time spent playing affects our game styles. For you I think it's a weekly tradition. For me it's like, "Hey, do you want to play Ascent of the Leviathan next weekend? It's a pirate adventure." (I should have said "it's about exploring the innards of a gigantic dead jellyfish.") I don't play RPGs as often or as intensely as you do and that affects the game parameters. It's analagous to... wargaming scenarios, I guess. "Do you want to play Omaha Beach on D-Day?" as opposed to "Do you want to play World War II?"

(If Omaha Beach turns into an overland campaign through western France towards Berlin... That happens sometimes with some players, but I tend to become anxious to bring things to resolution/closure. I would rather have repeated adventures with the same characters, with closure in between, than one long never-ending adventure.)

 

[Beoric]

Then tell me, because I have no idea! Nevertheless, I do get a dopamine hit every time you mention me in a post.

Hommlet is the Word of God, there is no need to provide "better support for playing in the village," you have blasphemed against the words of the prophet Gygax, etc., etc.

 

[robertsconley]

I have often wondered whether the ability to interact with an imaginary world using your imaginary body, making and evaluating plans using an imaginary physics, requires a cognitive faculty similar to that used for debugging computer programs. It is possible to run or play roleplaying games in an entirely reactive mode that's all about the people at the table, the dice, and the physical tokens on the table,

I found participating in places that write stories about alternate history to be useful. The best ones make a single point of departure and the author is adept at making everything that follows a plausible outcome of that PoD. Learn how to do that well is but a hop and a skill from looking at the circumstances after the PCs do something and figuring out what the NPCs do next.

I often have a timeline in mind of how the setting would unfold if the PCs didnt' exist. The PCs doing what they do causes Points of Departures to occur and I use the same skill I would use in crafting a alternates history to figure out what would happen as a result. Luckily most of the time the scope of the change is narrow so it is manageable for something done as a hobby.

A key thing to learn is to let go that anything is "ought to be". To make it work well, the changes have to be plausible in light of what has been established and what the PC did or did not do. It doesn't always have to be the most probable consequence, but it has to be plausible. And like anything it is a skill that one can learn and practice to get better at. It not particularly hard but there is a learning curve.

but to actually put yourself in the shoes of a character in the world and ask, "What would this character be thinking? What plans would he immediately discard as bad ideas, and what plans would his experience tell him are worth trying?" requires either the ability to conceptualize a world that is there only speculatively, or a lengthy dialogue with a GM who has that ability and shares it with you via Q&A.

In my early 20s I made a friend who was big into movies and how they were made. This was pre-internet so a lot of what he pointed out was very enlightening. While I still kick back and enjoy shows and films there a part of me looking at what the characters are doing and why.

I also played boffer LARPs and ran LARP events for nearly 15 years. While not particularly realistic as far as the action went, it had to be as a safe as any sport, as far how people would act in a fantasy mileau there was a lot of useful insights I gain. One of which that in a world of adventuring parties a lot of it would look like gang warfare. The LARP I was part allowed PvP combat, and throughout the years I was involved there was a lot of in-game animosity that flared up into major conflicts that started as petty bullshit and sometime not so petty situations.

Like when two team are adventuring together, Team A's member goes down, dies, and loses their gear. And Team B felt it was Team A fault not helping properly.

Anyway, like extrapolating consequences being able to look out another character's eye is a skill with a learning curve. You need to be aware of how people behave and for what reasons whether it for something more grounded or something that is fantastic where movitations and behavior are more over the top than life.

For both of these, my goto question is "What would I see unfold if I was witnessing the action" and go from there.

 

[robertsconley]

I've never seen anyone have any problem with that part, even kids who hate being spotlighted in real life. They may not want to act out a character and "do the voices" but there's no performance anxiety about whether to e.g. accept the giant's invitation to come inside the house and have a cup of hot chocolate. If anything there's a relative absence of fear, compared to those who think a few steps ahead about escape routes or poisoning the giant.

By 1990, I learned that running a sandbox campaigns works fine with folks who want to do nothing more than roleplay a version of themselves with the abilities (and sometimes knowledge) of the character they play. The only hard and fast rule I found to make what I do work is that the player still needs to first person roleplay. They don't have to do funny voices or come up with a personae. But rather than go "I walk to a shopkeeper and ask him to buy a longsword". I encourage them to say "I walk up to a shopkeeper." and then look at me as if I am the shopkeeper and go "Do you have a longsword for sale?"

I got a bunch of techniques to get a player engaged with first person roleplaying. Most of the rely on the fact that if you, the referee, look the player in the eye and say "Well good sir, I had this longsword for 150 silver pennies. Would you like to buy it?" Most of folks immediately respond in the first person. And then when they see you are not requiring them be actors beyond that. They get more comfortable with the approach.

The reason I put importance on this is that people who treat their characters as pieces on a game board tend not to have fun with the sandbox campaigns I run. Many, but not always, they will try to apply game logic to a situation and it doesn't end well because I run things as if the place really existed with its own "life". Emphasizing first-person roleplaying, more often than not get the players to look at their circumstances as if they are there and they act accordingly. Doesn't mean mayhem doesn't happen, it does. But does this mean it generally makes sense why the player doing what they doing and that it is furthering some goal they have. Which means when it is resolved they have a sense of accomplishment in achieving whatever goal they have in end.

 

[squeen]

I am with Robert there. I having an NPC speak in first person causes a (sometimes only momentary) game-shift that slows things down and engages with the environment---as oppose to becoming so single-minded on the tactical & strategic play in (meta) game-terms.

While not always appropriate, it's an in-game equivalent to pausing to smell the flowers (or treating a retail employee like a person instead of an appliance).

Also, I agree that there is serious between-game work that needs to be done to move the world forward incorporating the consequences of the previous session. You have to be content with constantly ditching old plans and reinventing.