[D&D] Editions, Metacosmology and Setting
Natespank:
Quote
His family still own the rights to his work and have forums at a place called garygygaxgames.com.
I couldn't find the website. Could you post a link? Thanks!
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: Caldis on February 16, 2011, 03:00:30 PM
That's a pretty cool set up for a game. I wonder though how much of it really had to do with the rules of D&D any edition? I mean you've added issues that concern each of these characters that are not mentioned in any D&D book, children? hidden tragic pasts? life as an ooze merchant? I dont see any mention of hit points or armor class or challenge ratings or even experience points. You've got a lot of cool play that sounds like it only barely touches on the rules of the game. It looks like the character issues are what is really driving the play, and that you may have loosely tied them to the cosmology of the game world/used setting info to give a feel of a real place/inspire ideas for opposition.
A friend of mine put it best when he said "If roleplaying games are movies, the mechanics are the special effects". People often seem to confound the mechanics of a game for the game. D&D isn't about armor class or saving throws. But certainly decisions you make about how you use the mechanics flavor the story greatly. The single biggest weakness to as-written D&D is hit point bloat. First level seems about right. You have about six to eight hitpoints, weapons deal anywhere from 1-8 hitpoints on average. So weapons effect flesh about how they should ie. they can kill you with a good hit but more often leave you reeling and badly wounded to be finished off with another good hit. As characters level up, this becomes less and less the case, until fights become multi-hour affairs of hacking away on each other like you're chopping wood. Now if the setting supports this kind of fighting (like maybe an Advent Children game or something) fine, but I get frustrated with how weird it feels. In our games we thing armor works much better as damage reduction, but the DR rules are right in the books so it's no big deal. The other big hallmark of third edition D&D is that it's swingy (in other words, with a 20 gauge die the difference between rolling a 2 and a 19 are enough to completely eclipse skill or ability at all but the highest levels--an untrained farmkid can keep up with a seasoned vetran a suprising amount of the time if the dice are on his side. That's the guts of what d20 adds to a setting, and as long as you cap hit-point bloat I like all of those things. It's a simple, powerful mechanic that churns out reasonable results without a lot of extra clunk that overly detailed systems end up with.
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: Natespank on February 16, 2011, 03:51:17 PM
I couldn't find the website. Could you post a link? Thanks!
Bad news squared, man. I got the address wrong, it's just http://gygaxgames.com/ but doesn't help since it seems they've shut it down pending "something good" which may or may not be coming. Shame too. That place was a goldmine.
Grimcleaver:
Quote from: Erik Weissengruber on February 16, 2011, 12:35:56 PM
To further your Actual Play discussion:
Can you recall any moments where the results of a roll or the outcome of a spell really made people around the table say "yeah, that's it, that is how we roll here in the Forgotten Realms"?
Any moments where a rule from the edition you were using made you stop and say "nuh unh, that just doesn't sound like the kind of things that happen in the Forgotten Realms"?
And character death: one time when a character bought it, did you say "suck it up, that's how you die -- FR style" or "wow, that was a really lame way for a Realms hero to go out"?
Hmm...wow. I guess I'll tackle number three first. Nobody bought it. Epic level. It's pretty impossible to kill people at this level using the rules as written. Plus I'd allowed some liberties to be taken on the player side with the rules (stacking abilities that don't stack, counting multiple enchantments and whatnot just to up the ante on whether or not I could still spin a good game out of it, even with all the excess of power drooling out) That said there was plenty of that on the NPC end. Thorin, in particular, could dish out (through some impressive rules tinkering) a blistering 300 points of damage a hit. What does that even look like on a scale where a normal warhammer maxes out at 10? People were just coming apart in gory spray, which combined with great cleave just made him look like Sauron. He even activated his boots of flying and one hit killed an enormous shadow worm that had just erupted from the catacombs beneath Candlekeep, like a huge fist rising out of a sandcastle. And at least one of the major villains ended up as one of the most anticlimatcic fights in the history of D&D. Ugrosh Stinking-sore, cancermage and favored of Yurtrus one moment, boom-splat gorestain the next. I guess that's a bit of number two also. As for your first question, I don't know that any of our great roleplay experiences in that game arose from the mechanics--not that none ever have in games, which are frequently full of great moments of mechacs painting awesome vistas--but one of the aspects of the challenge was taking the epic level rules (which are admittedly pretty wonky) and trying to tell a great story using the setting, cosmology, history and NPCs of D&D despite some pretty uncooperative mechanics. Our homebrew D&D rules make small but crucial changes to the rules that make things much more cinematic and real-feeling.
contracycle:
Quote from: Grimcleaver on February 17, 2011, 11:18:51 AM
A friend of mine put it best when he said "If roleplaying games are movies, the mechanics are the special effects". People often seem to confound the mechanics of a game for the game. D&D isn't about armor class or saving throws. But certainly decisions you make about how you use the mechanics flavor the story greatly.
Well, that's not the prevailing view here. Maybe if you find yourself having to work around the mechanics of D&D, you'd be better off playing something else, in which the rules are more significant and more "meaty".
As it happens I agree with all your criticisms of D&D, and they are precisely the reason I moved away from it a long time ago. But there is little point to staying with a set of rules you are, functionally, not using. And although rule-less play can work, it also has significant problems like unclear distributions of authority. System isn't just special effects; if you don't have system you don't really have a game.
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