TerribleSorcery
Should be playing D&D instead
My dreams can get pretty wild, man...
The state of Post-OSR content
- Thread starter Yora
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EOTB
So ... slow work day? Every day?
The effect on output is a key point. Criticism has its place; and that is usually rebutting those who are manipulative or showing flaws to those with the fortitude to prefer improvement to validation.
But there is the scathing critic, and there’s something about their criticism which reads as venting their overall misery and jealousy. It is a form of passive-aggressive dopamine harvesting.
And this sort of criticism and the joy found in doing the work rarely go hand in hand; nearly always they are themselves barren in whatever accomplishments they critique in others. It’s a self-reinforced loop of non-accomplishment, because the scathing critic does not want to be criticized. And so, sensing all those who would love an opportunity, and knowing no one of influence is likely to step up in rebuttal, nothing of positive value is ever offered.
But there is the scathing critic, and there’s something about their criticism which reads as venting their overall misery and jealousy. It is a form of passive-aggressive dopamine harvesting.
And this sort of criticism and the joy found in doing the work rarely go hand in hand; nearly always they are themselves barren in whatever accomplishments they critique in others. It’s a self-reinforced loop of non-accomplishment, because the scathing critic does not want to be criticized. And so, sensing all those who would love an opportunity, and knowing no one of influence is likely to step up in rebuttal, nothing of positive value is ever offered.
I-could-dance-like-that-if-I-wanted-to guys.
I don't think its primarily fear of being criticized, I think its the easy dopamine high itself. Writing something that makes you feel superior and smart and makes other people laugh or angry is pretty easy. Hell, even writing something that praises something else in a very insightful way is comparatively easy. Writing an adventure is, or at least should be, in my perfect world where all the trains run on time, hard work. But getting the recognition, happy messages, adding to this pasttime that we participate it, and just creating something, that is the good stuff.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
Yeah, it kind of scares the shit out of me even living next to the US. I have played out a few scenarios in my head, and what they might mean for Canada (not least because of our proximity to Russia), and they are not happy ones. I have idle thoughts about moving to New Zealand.
It is a really hard question. For individual games you don't really have to worry about it, unless you are playing in a public space or playing with strangers. But businesses do have to keep this in mind.
I mean, the early domain game was expressly colonial. You move into an area that you have deemed to be "uninhabited", and then kill or displace the inhabitants who are deemed to be subhuman and replace them with a population of (probably) your own race. I think the only way for a gaming company to do it properly today would be to ensure that the human(oid) cost of colonialism is baked into the implied setting. That more or less precludes using always-evil, subhuman intelligence humanoids, because killing or displacing subhumans perpetuates the narrative that colonialism was an entirely positive undertaking. So populations that would be subjected to conquest would have to be portrayed as intelligent and in some fashion sympathetic in order for the portrayal of colonialism to be accurate.
And this is probably a good place to point out the huge cultural divide between people living in countries, such as much of Europe, which were colonizers, and people living in countries that were colonized. I am not surprised to hear that colonial elements were largely absent from gaming culture in Hungary, I would have expected that. I don't think there are any dominant cultures in Europe that have experienced anything like colonialism since the expansion of the Roman Empire. Even the so-called colonial powers didn't really have an experience of colonialism, they only experienced imperialism. That is, they received the benefits of extracting resources from the colonies, but were rarely confronted with the human cost.
Take the trans-Atlantic slave trade, for example. If a slave is captured in Africa, and transported to America where he is sold, Africa experiences colonialism (in the various economic and realpolitik pressures causing African powers to capture each other's people and sell them to white slavers), and America experiences colonialism (in building an economy based upon slavery), which in both cases have a significant social impact. But for the European slavers and plantation owners this is merely a financial transaction. There may be a theoretical moral component, but it has no impact on the social order. Moreover, the slave traders had done a pretty effective job of marketing Blacks as subhuman (and therefor eligible to be enslaved under church law), so it is unlikely that most ordinary people lost much sleep over it.
Another factor is that slavery was a very different institution in ancient and classical Europe and the Mediterranean. For starters it was not really racialized. IRC, race isn't really discussed much in ancient and classical texts, and modern discussions about the race of various historical figures tend to be based largely on conjecture. In general, slaves were people who looked just like you, were culturally similar, and were either enemy non-citizens taken in battle, or your fellow citizens fallen on hard economic times.
So if your tropes respecting slavery come from ancient and classical literature without racial baggage, and your culture's involvement with slavery was limited to trading in, essentially, "capital assets", and no significant portion of the people who form your culture are the descendants of former slaves, then you are going to have a very different emotional response to media involving slavery than you will if your culture includes highly racialized tropes surrounding slavery, ongoing socio-economic, class based and race based social disruption with its roots in slavery, and a significant portion of the population who are descended either from slaves or from slave owners.
Slavery as an institution has deep emotional and cultural baggage in the Americas and other former colonies, and I don't expect Europeans to really identify with it. For similar reasons I don't expect Europeans to understand the baggage associated with displacing indigenous populations. I think most North Americans are aware on some level that the title to the land they live on is likely of dubious provenance. And the people whose ancestors had their land taken are often their neighbours, who are very aware of what they lost and why they lost it. And those ancestors are often not nameless, faceless people of the ancient past; their names and images are often known, often not so many generations distant, and their descendants still carry their names and stories.
Resolving the cognitive dissonance associated with Black slavery and the displacement of indigenous peoples is probably the largest factor differentiating modern North American culture from European culture. Squeen once said that the topic exhausted him, and I am not surprised, because there is no escaping it, there are reminders of it everywhere. If North American culture seems fraught to Europeans, that is why.
We are limited by our experiences, and it is very, very hard to relate to the experiences that are fundamentally different from our own. Largely because we tend to assume that our experiences are universal, and that our understanding of human nature and appropriate social interaction is fundamentally correct. That is, we don't know what we don't know. It is staggering how much of our "understanding" of human nature is culturally based, and often incorrect even within a culture; rape myths about when consent can be assumed and how women behave after being sexually assaulted are a well documented example of this.
So I have a lot of sympathy for a company like WotC on this topic. It is a US company dependent in large part on US sales, and the up and coming demographic is reacting to the baggage of US history in a particular way, and it needs to respond to that. I don't think it is doing that out of the goodness of its little corporate heart, I think it is a savvy business decision. Given the diversity of attitudes toward this topic, it would probably be foolish to try to appeal to everyone. It makes much more sense to try to appeal to the demographic that is actually buying their products, and likely to buy their products for years to come.
That said, it appears to be willing to take risks. Eberron, which is a WotC property, has expressly imperialist and colonial elements baked into the central part of the setting. For example in the Q'barra region the tension between the human and demihuman colonists and the indigenous lizardfolk, and the consequent disruption of the balance of power among the major lizardfolk nations, is the driving political force in the region. And to up the ante, some lizardfolk holy relics have significant economic value and are not readily distinguishable from items that are not holy relics and there are mechanical and setting barriers to communication with the lizardfolk (similar to the Darmok episode of STTNG) and the humans in the area can't tell the lizardfolk factions from each other and there are unscrupulous prospectors in the area who are spreading disinformation to demonize the lizardfolk because it benefits them commercially. And by default the players don't know any of this, they just know that sometimes the lizardfolk are friendly and sometimes they attack the settlements, and there is money to be made and ruins to plunder.
This is actually a good example of where you might want to use humanoids instead of humans, because the lizardfolk don't have any tropes associated with them that were previously used to demonize human races. They aren't dirty, they aren't lazy, they aren't stupid, they aren't bloodthirsty, they don't eat people, they don't enslave people, they don't rape "our" women, they are not the colour and do not have the features associated with any human race. They are alien without being portrayed as subhuman. Their actions are incomprehensible if you can't figure out how to communicate with them, but entirely sympathetic if you can.
So think it is possible to explore issues relating to colonization in D&D, even as a mainstream company. But you have to be very, very careful about how you do it.
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
OMG IT'S BRYCE!!!! <faints>
Someone picked a hobgoblin. Also these were teenagers, some still in high school. It ended after the first session.
I tried a campaign like this. The humans of the land had come over on ships and started a colony. As their colony was expanding they came more and more into conflict with the hobgoblin tribes to the north. I allowed hobgoblins as a playable race, but they would be slaves to the humans in party.
Someone picked a hobgoblin. Also these were teenagers, some still in high school. It ended after the first session.
Alright, this was an interesting experiment. We are now resuming normal operations. Have a great week everyone!
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Sorry to dredge this up, but I was painting new drywall that I had just finished putting up in my basement...and the minds wanders.
I accepted @PrinceofNothing 's statement at face-value and "a good point" when he originally made it. I considered it a perfect rebuttal. It explained what was occurring, and Malrex agreed it spoke to his motive.
But tonight it just hit me like a small revelation. No. That is actually the whole point.
There should be no need to select "hard mode" when the basic game is already challenging enough. To have reached a point where the player is self-selecting for more difficulty represents a failure state.
Don't you see? When the D&D engine is firing on all cylinders, this shouldn't happen. There is a DM involved---not just mindless computers.
Here is a similar point being made by @The Heretic :
The process of getting to 10th level should never become routine. It should be a wild, unique, seat-of-your-pants ride. The goal IS the journey. The level is irrelevant. Again, if it feels repetitive...then something has gone wrong. You are no longer riding the Knife's Edge of challenge-play.
Just some food for thought. If a masterpiece of a game is your goal, warning signs like these give you valuable information and shouldn't be ignored.
(ducks)
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Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
I have to disagree. The whole point of the conceit of a multilevel dungeon, with lower levels being more dangerous, and more rewarding, is that the players decide their own difficulty level. It isn't the only way to play, but it is a valid way to play, and it is one of the original ways to play.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
A great point, but to systemically and permanently handicap yourself at character creation seems odd to me---as if the mechanism you just mentioned (seeking/avoiding danger) is non-operational.
That's quite alright.
But I already elaborated on my motivation for this point in an earlier post.
Its not about the raw challenge alone. It's about the way the game is played that changes. The point was that sometimes altering the way you play a game gives you a greater understanding of and allows you to experience certain facets of it that you would not otherwise discover in the 'mainline' if you will.
This depends on what you mean by routine. I agree it should not be boring, but not routine? DnD is a game and like any game it has rules, optimum strategies, different approaches to success, recurring elements etc. As you play the game a lot you become familiar with the possibilities and certain mistakes are phased out, while other preparation becomes matter of fact. Setting guards while resting outdoors, bringing enough light sources, listening at doors, checking for traps, party formation, spell selection, all this becomes routine. The fun part of DnD is that as you progress up the levels you keep encountering new challenges and your abilities increase, (unpredictably), through your items, spells and abilities, which you must also learn to master. I absolutely have had sessions in my B/X game that are not major events, that do not require any new insights in how the game is played to overcome and that were risky but the chance of a TPK was almost zero. That's fine. If you play a megadungeon game you are guaranteed to have those sessions as the game progresses.
Consider my MU example. Is every game different? Yes. But that doens't mean its not more routine. I have played Rules Cyclopedia B/X and its progeny long enough to figure out what spells are excellent and versatile and which ones are secondary or of limited/situational use only. Sleep is an automatic yes, Vetriloquism is very conditional. Phantasmal Force is potentially excellent but requires quick thinking and relies on GM Ruling, Invisibility is almost always great etc. etc. I know to put my Wizard in the centre for the first few levels at the very least since otherwise he is going to get hammered and expire, I probably will take some daggers or oil for throwing and god help you if you start with Floating Disk, Shield and Detect Magic.
That's the 'main line.' But sometimes people are curious what a system does or how a system plays if you don't do take the recommended options. What if we all took Magic Users? What if I play a Magical Girl class? What if I take a suboptimal fighter? What does the game look like?
The critical difference is that games become HOT SHIT when the occasional sideline becomes so common it becomes the default form of play. That's why Occasional Paladin/New Class --> Awesome. Fifteen different candy classes that render the fighter obsolete --> 3e Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
I don't even know what all these crazy words are coming out of your head...but you had me at Magical Girl class.
I recently watched the classic spaghetti western "Once Upon a Time in the West" it follows a similar pattern of that genre --- a long build-up of tension that culminates in the big showdown at the end. The guns were out for only maybe 5-minutes of the movie...but you were constantly expecting them to be drawn. So yeah. In a long campaign, there are routine moments, silly moments, awkward moments, lulls, etc...and then the plunge of the roller-coaster (guns blazing). That's as it should be. The variation in the level of action is necessary for climatic moments. No argument there.
However, I think you know that's orthogonal to the point.
This is closer (except that paladins are never awesome). I am also quite pleased you have adopted the candy-class terminology.
There is no hard and fast rule of when things have gone a bit stagnant. I'm just suggestion there may be some warning signs that we (as DMs) need to step up our game. Having players searching for new thrills at roll up could be one of them. The more exotic/bizarre/self-defeating/one-hand-tied-behind-my-back the more alarming I would think. However, players seeking ADVANTAGE at roll-up is normal and to be expected (i.e. candy classes/races). The former is very difficult to correct, the latter quite simple.
I think we sort of agree, and I would also take it as a warning sign, but the question then becomes; is it automatically a detrimental process to play an uplifted Toucan if the GM does not in fact step up his game? If we have experienced his games under all intensities, or if our knowledge of D&D reaches the point where we are capable of anticipating and effectively dealing with a large percentage of the threats the conventional game has for us? Do we demand the game be elevated, making it perhaps too hard for normies, or do we say, okay, I'll go easy on you GM? This is a luxury problem but it does exist. Grognards or nutcase reviewers like Bryce (man I would love to play with Bryce sometime) are so much more familiar with the game and the process of game-mastering that it becomes possible to anticipate a lot of threats and complications, simply because one is used to thinking in terms of adventure design, adventures, GMs etc. etc.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WESTI don't even know what all these crazy words are coming out of your head...but you had me at Magical Girl class.
I recently watched the classic spaghetti western "Once Upon a Time in the West" it follows a similar pattern of that genre --- a long build-up of tension that culminates in the big showdown at the end. The guns were out for only maybe 5-minutes of the movie...but you were constantly expecting them to be drawn. So yeah. In a long campaign, there are routine moments, silly moments, awkward moments, lulls, etc...and then the plunge of the roller-coaster (guns blazing). That's as it should be. The variation in the level of action is necessary for climatic moments. No argument there.
However, I think you know that's orthogonal to the point.
This is closer (except that paladins are never awesome). I am also quite pleased you have adopted the candy-class terminology.
There is no hard and fast rule of when things have gone a bit stagnant. I'm just suggestion there may be some warning signs that we (as DMs) need to step up our game. Having players searching for new thrills at roll up could be one of them. The more exotic/bizarre/self-defeating/one-hand-tied-behind-my-back the more alarming I would think. However, players seeking ADVANTAGE at roll-up is normal and to be expected (i.e. candy classes/races). The former is very difficult to correct, the latter quite simple.
THAT WOMAN IS SO HOT
STRAIGHT FIRE
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
The crazy thing is that a girl in an illustration I'm currently working on for Footprint#25 seems to have her (Claudia Cardinale's) face. The time-travel aspect is that I drew it (without photo reference of any sort) before I ever saw her in the movie. Strange indeed.
Pseudoephedrine
Should be playing D&D instead
I do think there's a place (albeit a small one) for routine in the game. Routine tends to encourage the PCs to feel a high level of agency, and is therefore a useful complement to set off situations in which their agency is much lower. The contrast feels sharper if one wobbles between routine and exception rather than just deploying a string of exceptional situations or a constantly iterated routine.
I think one critical element to deploying routine effectively is to make it substantially different from low agency situations - fewer dice rolls with more chance for the PCs to load on beneficial modifiers, clear choices and priorities, strong incorporation of player knowledge and skill, and any given iteration of the loop should be relatively quick. This treatment tends to help provide "breathing room" in between the mad scramble of combat or a trap suddenly activating or something else going badly wrong.
I think one critical element to deploying routine effectively is to make it substantially different from low agency situations - fewer dice rolls with more chance for the PCs to load on beneficial modifiers, clear choices and priorities, strong incorporation of player knowledge and skill, and any given iteration of the loop should be relatively quick. This treatment tends to help provide "breathing room" in between the mad scramble of combat or a trap suddenly activating or something else going badly wrong.
I think it occurs more often in campaigns with a lot of dungeoneering or hex-crawling, where there is a finite set of rules manipulation that will generally produce optimum results. Looting the room, checking the chest for traps, setting a watch, using a ten foot pole if uncertain etc. etc. These are behaviors that improve survival rates in 9 out of 10 situations and can be repeated relatively unchanged. Equipment purchasing is another one that is fairly routine but few things gives people, like you say, as much agency and ability to affect the game.
In city or espionage games or in games where the world is a stage, managed by a director, you can have it composed entirely of chase scenes, exciting action, heartrending betrayals and fiendish traps, but there is a sort of long term viability to an emergent, internally consistent world that cannot be matched. Sometimes that means crossing 40 miles of terrain with only random encounters (although the GM is an idiot if he cannot spin something good out of random encounter tables).
EOTB
So ... slow work day? Every day?
Every game has fixed and variable elements. The military goes to great lengths to optimize what it can reasonably expect to control (standard operating procedures, logistics, etc.) because it knows it must win in an environment over which it has little control (the battlefield) and wants to stack that random deck to the greatest extent.
Likewise in D&D a practiced player quickly learns the SOPs that stop newb punishment. About 10% of the "game" mostly disappears as soon as green players become vets because that part of the game is meant to turn greens into vets, and its purpose is served absent some special monster or spell defeating SOPs - which are exceptions.
But those are the fixed elements. After that, the variable elements are what keep people coming back for weeks - the difference between a board game you play every once in a while and a hobby. The variable element of adventures and order of effects beyond the first should be just as thrilling whether the math is scaled for low levels or high. Yes, that ZOMIGAHD element of meteor swarms and 88 damage HARD red dragon breath will break the sound barrier of "wonderment", but the day-to-day adventuring should be compelling even without the special effects.
Likewise in D&D a practiced player quickly learns the SOPs that stop newb punishment. About 10% of the "game" mostly disappears as soon as green players become vets because that part of the game is meant to turn greens into vets, and its purpose is served absent some special monster or spell defeating SOPs - which are exceptions.
But those are the fixed elements. After that, the variable elements are what keep people coming back for weeks - the difference between a board game you play every once in a while and a hobby. The variable element of adventures and order of effects beyond the first should be just as thrilling whether the math is scaled for low levels or high. Yes, that ZOMIGAHD element of meteor swarms and 88 damage HARD red dragon breath will break the sound barrier of "wonderment", but the day-to-day adventuring should be compelling even without the special effects.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Agreed all around. Mom and apple pie. Calm/storm/calm/storm/etc. is required.
However, the trip from 1st to 10th level should never be routine. Sitting in town forever at 0th-level doing nothing is on the player's menu. But if and when adventuring into the Unknown still feels like operating in your comfort zone...then 'oops!', time to re-calibrate. The environment, once poked, needs to "come at" the players and always be capable of overwhelming them if mishandled. (Assuming, of course, you are playing challenge-D&D and not one of the later varieties that is expressly after some other form of entertainment).
Personally, I believe the more the players see the experience through a lens of game-mechanics, the more calm and in control they feel. Among other contributors, I think this is a pitfall/side-effect of skill-systems. They can inadvertently flip the safety on by further abstracting the action---turning it solely into a numbers game where the odds are known in advance. Sure, the mechanics should exist in some malleable form for the DM, but the players should always be left wondering which factors are in precisely in-play. I know that's a controversial stance, and I respect your disagreement while holding firm to my belief.
Also, I agree that playing different classes and races does add a different spice to the game, but I think that if you are rummaging in the class-dumpster for something to create challenge, then there's a problem. Maybe it's with an inept DM, as in Prince's example. Maybe you aren't using all the rules and have accidentally unbalanced the game into Easy Mode. Maybe your chosen edition is gimped with training wheels. Whatever the cause, you might want to investigate.
Anyway, that's the point I was originally trying to make in response to the examples Malrex tossed at me. This notion actually has nothing to do with Candy Classes which do exactly the opposite---seek intrinsic advantages to circumvent challenge.
<steps down from soapbox>
However, the trip from 1st to 10th level should never be routine. Sitting in town forever at 0th-level doing nothing is on the player's menu. But if and when adventuring into the Unknown still feels like operating in your comfort zone...then 'oops!', time to re-calibrate. The environment, once poked, needs to "come at" the players and always be capable of overwhelming them if mishandled. (Assuming, of course, you are playing challenge-D&D and not one of the later varieties that is expressly after some other form of entertainment).
Personally, I believe the more the players see the experience through a lens of game-mechanics, the more calm and in control they feel. Among other contributors, I think this is a pitfall/side-effect of skill-systems. They can inadvertently flip the safety on by further abstracting the action---turning it solely into a numbers game where the odds are known in advance. Sure, the mechanics should exist in some malleable form for the DM, but the players should always be left wondering which factors are in precisely in-play. I know that's a controversial stance, and I respect your disagreement while holding firm to my belief.
Also, I agree that playing different classes and races does add a different spice to the game, but I think that if you are rummaging in the class-dumpster for something to create challenge, then there's a problem. Maybe it's with an inept DM, as in Prince's example. Maybe you aren't using all the rules and have accidentally unbalanced the game into Easy Mode. Maybe your chosen edition is gimped with training wheels. Whatever the cause, you might want to investigate.
Anyway, that's the point I was originally trying to make in response to the examples Malrex tossed at me. This notion actually has nothing to do with Candy Classes which do exactly the opposite---seek intrinsic advantages to circumvent challenge.
<steps down from soapbox>
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The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
Did you confuse me with Malrex? I'm the one that came up with the 10th level fighter example.. Thanks for the compliment. Poor Malrex.
It's funny that you were fixated on the specifics of my example, since I tried to construct it to fit the audience*. In actuality, I was thinking more of...
A game where you die all the time and re-roll from among the 7 character classes from B/X would get considerably routine.
Play a magic-user. Sleep. No other spell comes close. Carbon copies of each other.
Cleric? Mace, good armor, and cure light wounds (if playing LL or 1e).
Fighter. Longbow and Longsword. Or Two Handed Sword.
Thief. Why bother.
The players have little control over their characters in older editions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it could get boring fast. Maybe you want something a little different, but not broken.
Anyway, the original candy class was the cleric, duh. Spell caster with full choice of armor, decent weapons, and good hp. Overpowered monstrosity. There's so much sugar in there your teeth will fall out and you'll end up with diabetes.
But yes, with newer editions you do have power creep and you can have people who try to find broken character class combinations. Seen that first hand.
* So as to prevent further edition wars. Oops. This post probably added more oxygen to the fire.