14 ms·

The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982

444 points by gaws 5y ago

miiiiiike 5y ago
I grew up about an hour from Lake Geneva, D&D was everywhere when I was a kid. So I played, but I had no real context for it. I was more of a Star Trek/Heinlein kid, never had any interest in fantasy or made an attempt to read it. A few years ago I started to try to get into Fantasy. I read Vance, Howard's Conan stories [0], Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, Tolkien as an adult for the first time, and a bunch of other stuff referenced in the old DMG's Appendix N [1]. I like Smith's "evil as an aesthetic experience" vibe best but I wouldn't say that I'm a fantasy fan. Still, getting the S&S context has been neat. I recently moved back to my hometown from NYC because of the pandemic. Being back here and living in a forest again got me reading the old AD&D books. And, AD&D is just more interesting than the third edition we played in high school. When I talked to Gygax about 3rd edition he just kind of sneered and said "It's for powergamers." [2] Reading AD&D 21 years later, I see what he meant. AD&D has texture [3], it's bumpy, it's rough, it's great. But, beyond the mechanics, what's really grabbing me is that it hints at a style of play that I'd heard about from people who used to play with Gygax and his kids, but never experienced myself. The old D&D campaigns weren't epic, level 1-40, movie trilogies with a definite beginning middle and end like we think of them today. A D&D "campaign" was something a that could be played with a large number of players in a club. It was like the old military campaigns wargaming clubs used to organize. People in the campaign would have multiple characters of different classes and drop into or run individual games that exist in a shared time and place. Want to play, stop by. Someone can't make it, who else is available? Why does everyone meet in a tavern and then live together for the next forty levels? I'd rather play in a world that's populated with NPCs that used to be PCs. Reading these old stories and the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide for the first time really makes me want to run a shared world with a group of 10-20 people. [0]: No one tells you this but Conan stories are basically Lovecraft Mythos stories. But with Howard's version of the Mythos you can just punch the cosmic horrors until they crawl back down their mystery wells. [1]: https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n/ https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n... [2]: I met Dave Arneson too. I was digging through a bin of old miniatures at Gen Con in 2004. I turned to the old guy dressed as a wizard rummaging next to me and said something like "I really love these old miniatures." He said: "Me too" and we go to talking. About 10 minutes in I looked at his badge. He just smiled. [3]: Look at the AD&D version of the "Animal Friendship" spell and then compare it to the 5th edition version: Animal Friendship (AD&D): https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Animal_friendship https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Animal_friendship Animal Friendship (5th Edition): https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/animal-friendship https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/animal-friendship Ask yourself, do you want to play the game where animal companions "follow you about" while you teach them tricks over the course of a month or the game where "Animal Friendship" just means "Bear go away now."? And no, I don't care about "balance". That's what a DM is for.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  > No one tells you this but Conan stories are basically Lovecraft Mythos stories. Never thought of this, but it makes a certain sense. Now I want a Conan at the Mountains of Madness crossover book.
  - ScarletEmerald 5y ago
    I was recently catching up on Dark Horse's Conan the Avenger, and sure enough, Conan and his companions of circumstance end up facing a monstrous beast from the outer dark. Conan's plan? "Hit whatever attacks us, man or beast, repeatedly, until it dies."
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Conan is the best type of character to deal with terror-inducing beings like shoggoths or Cthulhu. His extremely uncomplicated conscience coupled with high intelligence makes him totally immune to fear that suppresses 'civilized' people.
    - miiiiiike 5y ago
      And did it work? It sounds like it would work. It probably worked.
- Biganon 5y ago
  As someone who's always lived next to the "original" (Swiss) Lake Geneva, I was confused as to why I'd never experienced this D&D enthusiasm you've mentioned
- Steko 5y ago
  The idea that AD&D didn’t have powergamers sounds like Gygax propaganda. This is the edition that put out a book of diety statblocks like it was another monster manual. Your linked Animal Friendship, allows 2xHD of companions so a L3 druid could have a Cave Bear. That’s as bad as it sounds. Every edition has many issues but imho 1e is pretty terrible by modern standards.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> I learned early that following Gary Gygax’s advice in the opening lines of the DMG was essential: the rules were only a rough guide; develop your own system. One has to wonder then why we already have 5 official versions of the rules, and counting.
- kibwen 5y ago
  Even if you're developing your own house rules based on an existing system, it's great to have a variety of systems all with fleshed-out rules to draw from. And while it's good to retain some similarity between versions for the sake of thematic continuity, it's good to make each version distinctly different to give people distinctly different jumping-off points for their own rulesets. This is why, unlike seemingly everybody on the internet, I never begrudged D&D 4E for being so different from 3.5; it served its role in having a distinct identity from its predecessors to appeal to different people and result in different variations.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    I've played the one session of D&D 4ed. so I can't really disparage it :) I get what you're saying but it's useful also to remember that D&D is a brand and a product and in fact one of the flagship products of a game publishing giant, so the motivation that directs the changes to the ruleset must be profit, first. Which is fine, I work for profit also. But what I don't see the point of is spending a ton of money buying in to every new D&D version, of which there are going to be at least another 5 before I'm dead, as far as I can tell, when I can just roll my own and play it for free with my friends. Anyway this creative aspect has always been part and parcel of the hobby, as evidenced by the -probably thousands- of TTRPG rulesets in existence.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  Rather than a flip "money," I will detail the cycle. 1) TSR (or WotC) puts out a new version of the rules, a set of core rulebooks, typically a Dungeon Masters Guide, a Monster Manual, and a Players Handbook. 2) Some additional content is pushed out, like a module or two. 3) Here is the danger part: Realizing that there are more Players than DMs, well, more money is to be made putting out content players want. Splatbooks of unlikely "prestige paths," or if you want to go old school, barbarian and cavalier and acrobat. Rather than having rules so flexible you could re-enact Conan the Barbarian or Sword and the Sorceror or Beastmaster, instead rules are carved out for an archetype of exactly that film or book. 4) The game unbalances due to new rules, and Pun-Pun the Kobold is born. 5) Players proceed to tear through every encounter with min-maxed ("munchkined") characters as per the hyper-optimized builds laid out in the splat books. 6) We must rebalance the game. 7) Go to Step 1. This is part of the problem, not the whole of it, but ... I would not say it is insignificant.
gedy 5y ago
Amazing timeframe! I first played D&D in 1983 for a couple years, then picked up again 2 years ago with my sons. It feels like the campaign has had so much happen in 2 years, can't imagine how rich a 40 year campaign would be.
_aavaa_ 5y ago
> A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982. > Players create their characters and if they die, they are out of The Game. There is no “reset” button that you can hit when you don’t like how things are proceeding or you die. > Players are allowed to take on the characters of their descendants. > And yes, players have had their characters die and they have been ejected from The Game. WILD Thank you for sharing!
- e12e 5y ago
  Yeah, I don't think I'd want to GM or play according to rules like: https://thegamednd.com/death/ https://thegamednd.com/death/ I mean, I get wanting players to invest, and character death to mean something - but kicking out a player after two, three years of weekly sessions because they're "out of characters"? I guess maybe they find time to meet those friends outside of the game too? Ed: Don't actually know if that's worse, or asking new first time players to never come back because they died first session...
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  There are some pretty deadly games out there. Dungeon Crawl Classics has its own special concept related to death for character-development purposes, known as the Funnel.
- cthalupa 5y ago
  This is sort of the standard for earlier editions of D&D, or games that aspire to follow some of the same themes (You might see modern RPGs in this vein referred to as OSR/Old School Renaissance). Historically, players would take on the role of adventurers rather than heroes, and most of the focus was on collecting as much treasure as you can (XP was awarded based on the gold value of treasure). If you played smart you could certainly keep a character alive, so the idea that older editions of D&D were wantonly fatal isn't really correct, but any time you left your character's fate up to the roll of the dice, you were taking a risk, so the smart play was to rig any such encounter in your favor as best you could. If you did manage to live, your characters would tend to retire, taking ownership of domains, running wizard's towers, etc. - you didn't generally go up ever escalating levels of cosmic threat. Rules and modules existed for that, but it wasn't the type of play people would generally engage in. Instead, your old characters would become NPCs in the game setting, and you'd roll up a new group of adventurers to keep the story going. 3E is probably when the focus shifted to be predominantly around more Big Damn Hero type storylines, and it's firmly cemented as the de facto standard in 5E, but I think the success of 5E shows that that's really what more people are interested in. Which is great! It's been huge for the hobby, and introduced a lot of people into other styles of RPG, including old-school D&D. Which is a long way to say if this style of play sounds appealing to you, you might want to check out modern OSR games (Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, Electric Bastionland, Troika!, Mothership) or retroclones (Old School Essentials is probably the biggest name here currently, and is based off of the Basic/Expert ruleset - my personal favorite)
lelandfe 5y ago
This must be the best DM in the world. How in the world one manages to keep track of 50 people playing multiple multi-hour sessions a week...
- eh9 5y ago
  It looked like he was mostly using binders. I’m a lot more interested in how he keeps up with the hundreds of sub-quests at any given time.
luan_l 5y ago
>The game Dammit - haven't lost it in a while.
- fennecfoxy 5y ago
  God damn it ;~;
- dhosek 5y ago
  Damn you. I just lost.
- pjerem 5y ago
  Damn I also lost it. I’ll take the downvotes with you.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  My first loss in years. Been 'playing' ~20 years, last time I lost was maybe 5 years ago. Oh well, restart the counter! Playing for life I guess, there's no way out.
  - Swannie 5y ago
    I just lost The Game. Dag-nam-it. Been playing for ~20 years too. Probably 4+ years for me too.
  - tenryuu 5y ago
    >"What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate."
    - felipemnoa 5y ago
      Fortunately dementia is quite the antidote to ideas.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  What does this mean?
jamal-kumar 5y ago
I found D&D to be really popular in the Canadian North lately, like people you'd never expect to be into it who aren't really a huge part of wider culture around fantasy games and stuff like that until around when Game of Thrones came out, super into the game because it's pretty much a great thing to do when you're stuck inside for most of the year. It's fun. I play maybe like once a year though I look forward to that all the time.
- simonh 5y ago
  The latest 5th edition deserves a lot of credit for this. They did a fantastic job. It’s easy to learn, easy to run and you can do a lot with it. I’ve been a tabletop RPG player since the early 80s and never really got on with D&D, but 5th edition is a lot of fun. It not my favourite game by far, but it deserves its success.
  - black_knight 5y ago
    Stranger Things and Critical Role also played a part in growing the player base, I think. At least in my current group Stranger Things helped motivate people to start playing.
    - stwr 5y ago
      Dungeons and Daddies should probably be in that list too! :)
    - henriquecm8 5y ago
      > Stranger Things and Critical Role I was taking to a friend about this, Stranger Things and Critical Role, bought a lot of new players to D&D, meanwhile WoTC isn't doing half as much, they could be doing an animated series, to explore the settings. They are making a live-action movie, it isn't the first, but this one has a bigger budget.
      - ryneandal 5y ago
        I really think an animated series with some of their more popular novelized campaigns and characters is the way to go to seek out mass appeal. I'd love if they followed Critical Role's lead and signed with a streaming service for an easy-to-pitch series like Drizzt's life or (my preference) the Companions of the Hall. Live action can be great, but often times fantasy settings can completely fail in how they're translated to the big screen (See: the WarCraft movie).
dhosek 5y ago
I was obsessed with D&D in junior high and high school despite never actually playing for more than a few hours. I had binders full of NPC character sheets, a multiple continent world designed (which included, among other things, Middle Earth and Prydain plus many modules, both the letter-number'd ones and modules from Dragon magazine. In college, there was a group who played in the dorm lounge and hearing them play, I ended up losing interest in the game. My imagination of how the world I'd designed would come out and the reality of a game just didn't conform to each other.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  There are so many different ways to run games. It can be disheartening to see people play very energetically to what is essentially one's own point of least interest. Maybe it's similar to seeing someone speed run a video game where you mainly go for the sensory thrill of taking it slow. And you feel some pressure to get "better" but it doesn't exactly sound fun. Maybe something like that, anyway... Personally I like to house-rule away just about everything that bugs me about any given game, if I like the setting for example. (And I also appreciate games with optional rules like "here are some ideas for making this game more heroic and less depressing for your PCs") For example I was using one system and realized the writer didn't care very much about how one weapon differed from another, except in terms of raw damage. So I found a way to take the game in the complete opposite direction and I called my rules framework PaG, for "Play as Gun." (As opposed to playing as a character) Every rule that the original game used for creating baroque characterizations was applied across to weaponry, and then ammunition. I started getting into all kinds of crazy smart ammo and it was a lot of fun. This got me thinking of the idea of Ammo As Character in which you could effectively write up your ammunition as an archetype and play it as a character in the game. That world got really cool fast, IMO. And mostly just to me. But that own-world, own-prefs stuff is a huge part of TTRPG culture.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Weapons functioning the same is mostly about playability. A player can learn their character class and then be set, if they find a new weapon they don't have to learn a new class. But if the complexity lies in the weapon it means that every time a characters weapon breaks or they have to use something new, their entire playstyle now changes and they have to learn new rules, that really slows things down and most players aren't that interested in reading about the rules of new things. Even the basic character rules in dnd are said to be too much for newbies. Having more complex weapon behavior like that works much better in computer games where players can just play without having to understand what things does.
siavosh 5y ago
Watched the video interview with him -- never thought of games as a purposeful mechanism to help keep friends together as they get older. Need to look into this.
User23 5y ago
I ran a pretty great, if I say so myself, AD&D campaign. I started with a campaign that was find the pieces to reforge the sword of ages to beat the big bad (I know right?) that eventually ended up with psionics and spelljamming. Obviously I’m nostalgic, but the AD&D 2e era was marvelous. It’s fun to look at those old notebooks. It reminds me of the charming MUDs of that era. There was a total focus on fun, with no concern about irrelevancies like “intellectual property.” That’s of course the spirit of D&D. Appendix N literally encouraged lifting ideas from published works. The hardest part was organizational. I had a half dozen enthusiastic players, but arranging a time where everyone could be there was a real challenge.
themodelplumber 5y ago
It's cool to see this here, thanks for posting op. I was just deepening a solo campaign in Palladium Books' Recon [0] today and getting a space trucker team together in FrontierSpace [1]. Epics and long-form narratives are really important in TTRPG culture. While originally pretty overwhelming, I learned a lot by running long-form campaigns myself. I find that the session-level complexity is usually best when kept very low, compared to what people think. The scope of events is also kept low in terms of things like "what happened today". Personally I find that there's something about dialing the dopamine down (contrary to what people would expect) that helps the game feel easier for everybody to play in the long term. My kids allow me to GM a couple of ongoing long-term campaigns for them, one that went from dungeon crawl to space adventure within 2 sessions and continued into space opera territory, and another long-form high fantasy campaign that's been going for 4 years now. The former uses Supers! RED [2] and the latter is based on GURPS [3]. Both are kind of gear-and-pet-fests for them so it's part of our job together to manage all that. :-) (Including links in case others are interested in the publishing culture or games themselves) 0. https://www.palladiumbooks.com/modern/recon https://www.palladiumbooks.com/modern/recon 1. https://www.dwdstudios.com/frontierspace https://www.dwdstudios.com/frontierspace 2. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/130108/SUPERS-Revised-Edition https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/130108/SUPERS-Revised-E... 3. http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/
- MrJohz 5y ago
  What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story. Even in more traditional games, I feel like I also see that tendency in certain parts of the Old School Renaissance scene, which makes me wonder if it's got something to do with the plethora of different systems that are out now. If I'm only going to have time for one game a week, I might not want to end up stuck to one setting and one system, but rather try deadly space horror in Mothership, surreal British fantasy in Troika!, steampunk metropolis Victoriana in Electric Bastionland, etc. I'm intrigued to see if this sort of style, where one jumps from game to game relatively easily, but doesn't invest so much in a single character or world, will be as long lasting. I think the danger is that eventually you run out of new things (although that honestly seems hard at the rate that new games are being punished), but a lot of these games are fairly replayable, and my impression is that people keep on coming back to their favourites.
fermentation 5y ago
What happens when the characters reach max level? I’ve played campaigns that lasted a little over a year and once we reached 16th level or so, combat rounds in 5e became excruciatingly slow. I imagine it is very difficult for the DM to balance that, and even more so for them to provide the feeling of increasing power to folks who have been in the game for some time.
- cperciva 5y ago
  First Edition had guidelines for high level characters literally becoming gods. IIRC one of the paths involved being reincarnated (without memories of past lives) as a level 1 character in each of the different classes and needing to reach high level in each of them in turn -- no easy feat considering that the attributes which make for a great fighter will make for a lousy wizard, but of course becoming gods shouldn't be easy.
  - ScarletEmerald 5y ago
    That wasn't First Edition, it was the parallel Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, Immortals (aka BECMI) D&D line that had 36 levels and came out between about 1980 and wrapped up in the mid-90s. AD&D First Edition did have a few paragraphs on divine ascension, noting that it was "remotely possible" and removed the character from play. BECMI, in contrast, had multiple defined pathways to divinity/immortality, along with rules for playing immortal characters. Of the BECMI paths for immortality, the one you mentioned is the polymath. There are others. The epic hero quests after legendary artifacts of good and evil, accomplishes great deeds and leaves behind a successor. The paragon creates a unique artifact of power, recruits and train powerful minions, reshapes the landscape, and vanquishes any potential equals. The dynast founds a mighty empire and ensures it withstands the tests of time.
    - cperciva 5y ago
      Thanks for correcting my memory -- it's been a while!
jdkee 5y ago
AD&D was such a world creation myth to immerse oneself in. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. We fell out of it, my friends and I, in our twenties. But it has pulled us back in in our forties. Playing the original TSR modules with new characters. So much better than computer role playing games as the fun exists in the real tabletop experiences of people interacting with each other in meatspace. It demonstrates what has been lost in virtual space. Similarly to playing boardgames with real players around the table. Humans are social creatures who belong in close physical proximity with other people. To interact, to feel free to belong, to be humans. Technology is a poor replacement for this.
spc476 5y ago
A friend of mine has run a continuous D&D game since 1993: <http://www.dragonslayers-society.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php http://www.dragonslayers-society.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php>.
vjk800 5y ago
I really wanted to get into pen&paper RPGs when I was a teenager, but was too socially awkward to break into the only group of people I knew that played them. Can you believe that; too socially inept to have the nerdiest hobby ever? The D&D players were the cool kids compared to me.
- ragebol 5y ago
  And the group maybe too socially inept to see that and to comfort you out of the awkwardness :-)
- dkarl 5y ago
  I was similar, not that I wasn't invited, but I couldn't handle something where the point was entirely social. I wanted a game where I could know if I was good or not (and preferably be better than other people.) It also drove me crazy that we were playing a high fantasy game where we were fantasizing about having all kinds of great powers and doing amazing things but nobody was doing anything cool outside the game. Not that I was doing any better; I just liked to hate myself for it. I probably could have made some friends if I had gone back.
bythreads 5y ago
Some of my best games have been the ones without weapons, powers and shenannigans - Playing kids, playing people with delusions of grandeur, playing deaf/mute, playing madly in love etc. After years we just ditched the rules and only threw dice to keep things random.
reidrac 5y ago
The first thing I thought is "but, what D&D do they play?"; because D&D has changed over the years. Turns out the game started as the D&D of the time (AD&D), with more or less house rules; and then moved on with some "homebrew" rules that are still familiar to D&D players. I mostly tend to say I played D&D back in the day, but the truth is, I only played actual D&D on one short one-afternoon session. I played other games instead (LoTR Middle Earth, RuneQuest and Vampire), but D&D is what people mostly understand I guess.
RyanShook 5y ago
Mini doc on this guy: https://youtu.be/nJ-ehbVQYxI https://youtu.be/nJ-ehbVQYxI
sshagent 5y ago
My setting is live from the mid 90s. I've stayed in the same town, so hasn't had the same complications of his moves. We've got nearly 400 years of in campaign history. We've migrated through a lot of systems (currently PF2E). Its something I'm proud of, and its always pleasant when non RP nights end up with others talking of epic moments in our games from over the years. Friends who've sadly past are immortalised through the deeds of their characters as well, obviously not to take anything from their RL activities but its nice to speak of those who've moved on from the real world, whose exist as NPCs
- rightbyte 5y ago
  How many characters have died in such a time spann? Like is any of the original characters alive?
  - sshagent 5y ago
    Plenty. Early days, from a GM perspective my mindset was the risk of death had to be genuine and meant victories we're more to enjoy. Over the years I've relaxed a lot away from that. Its not often nowadays that players die. I don't run published adventures, and don't always keep things within the appropriate difficulty range. However i will always give opportunities to withdraw or escape if its something a little too tough. Some systems are a lot more flexible on what each party can handle but things like PF2E the math behind the system is strong and you can easily gauge what they can't handle.
  - sshagent 5y ago
    Sorry i missed your second question. Plenty of characters are still alive. Characters retire into NPC formats, generally once they are lords and such. There is only so many apocalypses you can have to challenge high level characters. They can come on "screen" in other campaigns. They generally have their own faction that they operate off camera. New characters sometimes opt to be sons of earlier characters of their own, or of other players characters. It works quite well. I have had to add a magical plant, which when processed, slows the aging process. I felt a bit harsh killing retired characters, so the rich and powerful tend to not age too much. Some players are fine with their characters to die off, but thats there choice. Lastly we sometimes dust off old characters to deal with major problems or just for mainly RP type sessions.
madrox 5y ago
As a forever DM, I'm impressed by this guy's fortitude. Coming up with an interesting session can take a good deal of time. In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is. Of course, modules can help a ton, and there's a lot of tools available these days to procedurally generate the hard parts. Still, many of those didn't exist until recently, for the most part. This guy had to have spent countless hours on his own building out this world. It's an inspiration, really.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is In my experience, you can run an entire session on basically nothing. Half the time I make things up on the spot (and keep track of them so they’ll still be the same when players return), but most of the time the players make the story. It’s especially helpful when they’re discussing what they’re thinking the reason for something is between themselves, because one of those is pretty much always a good one (even if they settle on a different explanation afterwards xD).
  - madrox 5y ago
    While I agree on story, encounters, dungeons, and puzzles are harder on the fly. You can procedurally generate a dungeon these days and there’s lots of encounter generators now, but wasn’t always so easy.
JabavuAdams 5y ago
I love that this exists, and that there are people just relatively quietly making these things happen. Contrast this to how we as developer feel pressure to monetize, or to grow, or to something short term. It's a bit of a shock to me that this is the first time I've heard of this. This sensation always makes me wonder "What else like this is out there" ... in other pursuits, other fields? People just toiling away and gradually producing something extraordinary.
fho 5y ago
I recently achieved two milestones that I am somewhat proud of: (a) finishing a role-playing campaign, to be fair that was in LancerRPG that by default has a 12 level skill ceiling after which it does not make sense to play anymore. (b) finishing a legacy game, Charterstone that is. Again that has a manageable 12 game limit. Still, there are so many people that have not finished Gloomhaven or whose RPG campaign has come to nothing after some years. So finishing both feels like a small achievement :-)
brolumir 5y ago
Great story, but I wonder about the logistics of effectively DM'ing 25 players. I'm assuming not everyone plays in the same session? Otherwise - how do you handle battles with a party of 25 PCs?
oneoff786 5y ago
A question for people who play more traditional dnd. The original content seemed to be a lot less… narrative? That is, resting in the open wild you might be encouraged to roll for a random encounter and do a fight that has no particular meaning. That always struck me as a lot of tedium. Combat is pretty slow and older versions’ combat was more involved if anything. Was that boring?
- lupire 5y ago
  It was before computer games were well developed, so much of what is a computer game today was done manually. See also "war gaming".
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    I don’t follow what this is saying. TTRPGs are still manual. Maybe you have a spreadsheet or an online tool to facilitate but it doesn’t change that much. More so I don’t see how this relates to my question
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
      No, it makes sense to me (and I'm by no means a grognard!). As far as I understand it, D&D evolved from earlier board-wargames and it was essentially a sort of free-form wargame with rules for fantasy skirmishes with a theme cribbed off its authors' favourite Sword and Sorcery fiction (which was not, famously, Lord of the Rings, but more Jack Vance's Dying Earth). If I understand correctly, the original D&D had rules for Combat and then for things that weren't directly Combat, but were still about fighting battles, like attracting or hiring henchmen, building a stronghold, controlling a territory and ultimately fighting battles with large armies. Importantly, D&D predates Computer RPGs so all this wargmaing had to be managed by hand, and the rules involved a significant amount of crunch- what you call "a lot of tedium". But then Computer RPGs (CRPGs) started to appear, invariably influenced by D&D, or other CRPGs influenced by D&D. So if you enjoyed crunchy, wargame-y, combat-oriented gaming, and didn't particularly need "narrative", then CRPGs were now your friend, and you didn't need to play D&D for that. For instance, I remember spending weeks and months playing Neverwinter Nights, which was pretty much just 3d ed. D&D with an automated GM. That's how I understand OP's comment. And I kind of agree. Interestingly, there seems to be a return to the original D&D mode of play with the "OSR" (Old School R... something) genre, that is discussed everywhere in this thread. Perhaps because OSR's rallying cry is "rulings, not rules" and maybe after a couple of generations of games with detailed mechanics designed to promote "narrative", players who just wanted to play a game without too many restrictions got bored with all the rules and wanted to go back to just telling the DM what they want to do, and then rolling the dice to see what happens. Which is the one thing that CRPGs can still. not. do. Incidentally, one of the earliest RPGs of the 1980's was Call of Cthulhu which was very much designed to be "not about combat", but about experiencing a horror story, in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos universe. There has been a clear split between games that are, on some level "about telling a story", or "about roleplaying" (so "narrative"), and games that are about killing monsters and nicking their stuff (so "Combat"), since the very early days of the hobby. But, you know there's nothing stopping you from running a narrative-driven game in the D&D world, if that's more your thing (Ron Edward's "System Matters" nonwithstanding). Or, conversely, you can pick up a ruleset designed to "tell a story" and run it like a classic hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. To paraphrase the old joke about Fortran programmers, "The determined Real D&D Player can run a D&D session with any ruleset" [1]. ________________ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856747
e_i_pi_2 5y ago
Just saw this interesting video[1] from Wired yesterday - "Inside the 40 Year-Long Dungeons & Dragons Game", funny timing because this seems to be about the same game! [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ-ehbVQYxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ-ehbVQYxI
markus_zhang 5y ago
I'm more into a computer DnD and figured out that just playing games such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights are good enough. I'm not a social person and role play even before closest friends feels weird.
- ryneandal 5y ago
  I was much the same until I started discussing the idea with close friends who had similar interests. If you have an interest it, you could always try a one-shot[1] adventure and test the waters. I have pretty awful social anxiety, but I find that getting into character and being with close friends (whether physically or remotely) allows me to ease into the social setting and have a ton of fun. Also note that role-playing is NOT required! If you and/or your friends prefer to just discuss the game and setting in the third person akin to talking about video games, go for it. Don't force yourself to do so if there is no interest, but certainly at least give it a try if you have any sort of interest, there's nothing to lose and love for a new hobby to gain! 1: https://blackcitadelrpg.com/one-shots-dnd-5e/ https://blackcitadelrpg.com/one-shots-dnd-5e/
AlwaysRock 5y ago
This is pretty cool. I would like to play more D&D. Every group I've been apart of has fizzled after a few sessions. But hopefully someday I'll be able to join a group that lasts for a while.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

444 points by gaws 5y ago

I grew up about an hour from Lake Geneva, D&D was everywhere when I was a kid. So I played, but I had no real context for it. I was more of a Star Trek/Heinlein kid, never had any interest in fantasy or made an attempt to read it. A few years ago I started to try to get into Fantasy. I read Vance, Howard's Conan stories [0], Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, Tolkien as an adult for the first time, and a bunch of other stuff referenced in the old DMG's Appendix N [1]. I like Smith's "evil as an aesthetic experience" vibe best but I wouldn't say that I'm a fantasy fan. Still, getting the S&S context has been neat. I recently moved back to my hometown from NYC because of the pandemic. Being back here and living in a forest again got me reading the old AD&D books. And, AD&D is just more interesting than the third edition we played in high school. When I talked to Gygax about 3rd edition he just kind of sneered and said "It's for powergamers." [2] Reading AD&D 21 years later, I see what he meant. AD&D has texture [3], it's bumpy, it's rough, it's great. But, beyond the mechanics, what's really grabbing me is that it hints at a style of play that I'd heard about from people who used to play with Gygax and his kids, but never experienced myself. The old D&D campaigns weren't epic, level 1-40, movie trilogies with a definite beginning middle and end like we think of them today. A D&D "campaign" was something a that could be played with a large number of players in a club. It was like the old military campaigns wargaming clubs used to organize. People in the campaign would have multiple characters of different classes and drop into or run individual games that exist in a shared time and place. Want to play, stop by. Someone can't make it, who else is available? Why does everyone meet in a tavern and then live together for the next forty levels? I'd rather play in a world that's populated with NPCs that used to be PCs. Reading these old stories and the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide for the first time really makes me want to run a shared world with a group of 10-20 people. [0]: No one tells you this but Conan stories are basically Lovecraft Mythos stories. But with Howard's version of the Mythos you can just punch the cosmic horrors until they crawl back down their mystery wells. [1]: https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n/ https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n... [2]: I met Dave Arneson too. I was digging through a bin of old miniatures at Gen Con in 2004. I turned to the old guy dressed as a wizard rummaging next to me and said something like "I really love these old miniatures." He said: "Me too" and we go to talking. About 10 minutes in I looked at his badge. He just smiled. [3]: Look at the AD&D version of the "Animal Friendship" spell and then compare it to the 5th edition version: Animal Friendship (AD&D): https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Animal_friendship https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Animal_friendship Animal Friendship (5th Edition): https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/animal-friendship https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/animal-friendship Ask yourself, do you want to play the game where animal companions "follow you about" while you teach them tricks over the course of a month or the game where "Animal Friendship" just means "Bear go away now."? And no, I don't care about "balance". That's what a DM is for.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
> No one tells you this but Conan stories are basically Lovecraft Mythos stories. Never thought of this, but it makes a certain sense. Now I want a Conan at the Mountains of Madness crossover book.
- ScarletEmerald 5y ago
  I was recently catching up on Dark Horse's Conan the Avenger, and sure enough, Conan and his companions of circumstance end up facing a monstrous beast from the outer dark. Conan's plan? "Hit whatever attacks us, man or beast, repeatedly, until it dies."
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Conan is the best type of character to deal with terror-inducing beings like shoggoths or Cthulhu. His extremely uncomplicated conscience coupled with high intelligence makes him totally immune to fear that suppresses 'civilized' people.
  - miiiiiike 5y ago
    And did it work? It sounds like it would work. It probably worked.
Biganon 5y ago
As someone who's always lived next to the "original" (Swiss) Lake Geneva, I was confused as to why I'd never experienced this D&D enthusiasm you've mentioned
Steko 5y ago
The idea that AD&D didn’t have powergamers sounds like Gygax propaganda. This is the edition that put out a book of diety statblocks like it was another monster manual. Your linked Animal Friendship, allows 2xHD of companions so a L3 druid could have a Cave Bear. That’s as bad as it sounds. Every edition has many issues but imho 1e is pretty terrible by modern standards.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> I learned early that following Gary Gygax’s advice in the opening lines of the DMG was essential: the rules were only a rough guide; develop your own system. One has to wonder then why we already have 5 official versions of the rules, and counting.

kibwen 5y ago
Even if you're developing your own house rules based on an existing system, it's great to have a variety of systems all with fleshed-out rules to draw from. And while it's good to retain some similarity between versions for the sake of thematic continuity, it's good to make each version distinctly different to give people distinctly different jumping-off points for their own rulesets. This is why, unlike seemingly everybody on the internet, I never begrudged D&D 4E for being so different from 3.5; it served its role in having a distinct identity from its predecessors to appeal to different people and result in different variations.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  I've played the one session of D&D 4ed. so I can't really disparage it :) I get what you're saying but it's useful also to remember that D&D is a brand and a product and in fact one of the flagship products of a game publishing giant, so the motivation that directs the changes to the ruleset must be profit, first. Which is fine, I work for profit also. But what I don't see the point of is spending a ton of money buying in to every new D&D version, of which there are going to be at least another 5 before I'm dead, as far as I can tell, when I can just roll my own and play it for free with my friends. Anyway this creative aspect has always been part and parcel of the hobby, as evidenced by the -probably thousands- of TTRPG rulesets in existence.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Rather than a flip "money," I will detail the cycle. 1) TSR (or WotC) puts out a new version of the rules, a set of core rulebooks, typically a Dungeon Masters Guide, a Monster Manual, and a Players Handbook. 2) Some additional content is pushed out, like a module or two. 3) Here is the danger part: Realizing that there are more Players than DMs, well, more money is to be made putting out content players want. Splatbooks of unlikely "prestige paths," or if you want to go old school, barbarian and cavalier and acrobat. Rather than having rules so flexible you could re-enact Conan the Barbarian or Sword and the Sorceror or Beastmaster, instead rules are carved out for an archetype of exactly that film or book. 4) The game unbalances due to new rules, and Pun-Pun the Kobold is born. 5) Players proceed to tear through every encounter with min-maxed ("munchkined") characters as per the hyper-optimized builds laid out in the splat books. 6) We must rebalance the game. 7) Go to Step 1. This is part of the problem, not the whole of it, but ... I would not say it is insignificant.

gedy 5y ago

Amazing timeframe! I first played D&D in 1983 for a couple years, then picked up again 2 years ago with my sons. It feels like the campaign has had so much happen in 2 years, can't imagine how rich a 40 year campaign would be.

_aavaa_ 5y ago

> A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982. > Players create their characters and if they die, they are out of The Game. There is no “reset” button that you can hit when you don’t like how things are proceeding or you die. > Players are allowed to take on the characters of their descendants. > And yes, players have had their characters die and they have been ejected from The Game. WILD Thank you for sharing!

e12e 5y ago
Yeah, I don't think I'd want to GM or play according to rules like: https://thegamednd.com/death/ https://thegamednd.com/death/ I mean, I get wanting players to invest, and character death to mean something - but kicking out a player after two, three years of weekly sessions because they're "out of characters"? I guess maybe they find time to meet those friends outside of the game too? Ed: Don't actually know if that's worse, or asking new first time players to never come back because they died first session...
themodelplumber 5y ago
There are some pretty deadly games out there. Dungeon Crawl Classics has its own special concept related to death for character-development purposes, known as the Funnel.
cthalupa 5y ago
This is sort of the standard for earlier editions of D&D, or games that aspire to follow some of the same themes (You might see modern RPGs in this vein referred to as OSR/Old School Renaissance). Historically, players would take on the role of adventurers rather than heroes, and most of the focus was on collecting as much treasure as you can (XP was awarded based on the gold value of treasure). If you played smart you could certainly keep a character alive, so the idea that older editions of D&D were wantonly fatal isn't really correct, but any time you left your character's fate up to the roll of the dice, you were taking a risk, so the smart play was to rig any such encounter in your favor as best you could. If you did manage to live, your characters would tend to retire, taking ownership of domains, running wizard's towers, etc. - you didn't generally go up ever escalating levels of cosmic threat. Rules and modules existed for that, but it wasn't the type of play people would generally engage in. Instead, your old characters would become NPCs in the game setting, and you'd roll up a new group of adventurers to keep the story going. 3E is probably when the focus shifted to be predominantly around more Big Damn Hero type storylines, and it's firmly cemented as the de facto standard in 5E, but I think the success of 5E shows that that's really what more people are interested in. Which is great! It's been huge for the hobby, and introduced a lot of people into other styles of RPG, including old-school D&D. Which is a long way to say if this style of play sounds appealing to you, you might want to check out modern OSR games (Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, Electric Bastionland, Troika!, Mothership) or retroclones (Old School Essentials is probably the biggest name here currently, and is based off of the Basic/Expert ruleset - my personal favorite)

lelandfe 5y ago

This must be the best DM in the world. How in the world one manages to keep track of 50 people playing multiple multi-hour sessions a week...

eh9 5y ago
It looked like he was mostly using binders. I’m a lot more interested in how he keeps up with the hundreds of sub-quests at any given time.

luan_l 5y ago

>The game Dammit - haven't lost it in a while.

fennecfoxy 5y ago
God damn it ;~;
dhosek 5y ago
Damn you. I just lost.
pjerem 5y ago
Damn I also lost it. I’ll take the downvotes with you.
cryptoz 5y ago
My first loss in years. Been 'playing' ~20 years, last time I lost was maybe 5 years ago. Oh well, restart the counter! Playing for life I guess, there's no way out.
- Swannie 5y ago
  I just lost The Game. Dag-nam-it. Been playing for ~20 years too. Probably 4+ years for me too.
- tenryuu 5y ago
  >"What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate."
  - felipemnoa 5y ago
    Fortunately dementia is quite the antidote to ideas.
Grustaf 5y ago
What does this mean?

jamal-kumar 5y ago

I found D&D to be really popular in the Canadian North lately, like people you'd never expect to be into it who aren't really a huge part of wider culture around fantasy games and stuff like that until around when Game of Thrones came out, super into the game because it's pretty much a great thing to do when you're stuck inside for most of the year. It's fun. I play maybe like once a year though I look forward to that all the time.

simonh 5y ago
The latest 5th edition deserves a lot of credit for this. They did a fantastic job. It’s easy to learn, easy to run and you can do a lot with it. I’ve been a tabletop RPG player since the early 80s and never really got on with D&D, but 5th edition is a lot of fun. It not my favourite game by far, but it deserves its success.
- black_knight 5y ago
  Stranger Things and Critical Role also played a part in growing the player base, I think. At least in my current group Stranger Things helped motivate people to start playing.
  - stwr 5y ago
    Dungeons and Daddies should probably be in that list too! :)
  - henriquecm8 5y ago
    > Stranger Things and Critical Role I was taking to a friend about this, Stranger Things and Critical Role, bought a lot of new players to D&D, meanwhile WoTC isn't doing half as much, they could be doing an animated series, to explore the settings. They are making a live-action movie, it isn't the first, but this one has a bigger budget.
    - ryneandal 5y ago
      I really think an animated series with some of their more popular novelized campaigns and characters is the way to go to seek out mass appeal. I'd love if they followed Critical Role's lead and signed with a streaming service for an easy-to-pitch series like Drizzt's life or (my preference) the Companions of the Hall. Live action can be great, but often times fantasy settings can completely fail in how they're translated to the big screen (See: the WarCraft movie).

dhosek 5y ago

I was obsessed with D&D in junior high and high school despite never actually playing for more than a few hours. I had binders full of NPC character sheets, a multiple continent world designed (which included, among other things, Middle Earth and Prydain plus many modules, both the letter-number'd ones and modules from Dragon magazine. In college, there was a group who played in the dorm lounge and hearing them play, I ended up losing interest in the game. My imagination of how the world I'd designed would come out and the reality of a game just didn't conform to each other.

themodelplumber 5y ago
There are so many different ways to run games. It can be disheartening to see people play very energetically to what is essentially one's own point of least interest. Maybe it's similar to seeing someone speed run a video game where you mainly go for the sensory thrill of taking it slow. And you feel some pressure to get "better" but it doesn't exactly sound fun. Maybe something like that, anyway... Personally I like to house-rule away just about everything that bugs me about any given game, if I like the setting for example. (And I also appreciate games with optional rules like "here are some ideas for making this game more heroic and less depressing for your PCs") For example I was using one system and realized the writer didn't care very much about how one weapon differed from another, except in terms of raw damage. So I found a way to take the game in the complete opposite direction and I called my rules framework PaG, for "Play as Gun." (As opposed to playing as a character) Every rule that the original game used for creating baroque characterizations was applied across to weaponry, and then ammunition. I started getting into all kinds of crazy smart ammo and it was a lot of fun. This got me thinking of the idea of Ammo As Character in which you could effectively write up your ammunition as an archetype and play it as a character in the game. That world got really cool fast, IMO. And mostly just to me. But that own-world, own-prefs stuff is a huge part of TTRPG culture.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Weapons functioning the same is mostly about playability. A player can learn their character class and then be set, if they find a new weapon they don't have to learn a new class. But if the complexity lies in the weapon it means that every time a characters weapon breaks or they have to use something new, their entire playstyle now changes and they have to learn new rules, that really slows things down and most players aren't that interested in reading about the rules of new things. Even the basic character rules in dnd are said to be too much for newbies. Having more complex weapon behavior like that works much better in computer games where players can just play without having to understand what things does.

siavosh 5y ago

Watched the video interview with him -- never thought of games as a purposeful mechanism to help keep friends together as they get older. Need to look into this.

User23 5y ago

I ran a pretty great, if I say so myself, AD&D campaign. I started with a campaign that was find the pieces to reforge the sword of ages to beat the big bad (I know right?) that eventually ended up with psionics and spelljamming. Obviously I’m nostalgic, but the AD&D 2e era was marvelous. It’s fun to look at those old notebooks. It reminds me of the charming MUDs of that era. There was a total focus on fun, with no concern about irrelevancies like “intellectual property.” That’s of course the spirit of D&D. Appendix N literally encouraged lifting ideas from published works. The hardest part was organizational. I had a half dozen enthusiastic players, but arranging a time where everyone could be there was a real challenge.

themodelplumber 5y ago

It's cool to see this here, thanks for posting op. I was just deepening a solo campaign in Palladium Books' Recon [0] today and getting a space trucker team together in FrontierSpace [1]. Epics and long-form narratives are really important in TTRPG culture. While originally pretty overwhelming, I learned a lot by running long-form campaigns myself. I find that the session-level complexity is usually best when kept very low, compared to what people think. The scope of events is also kept low in terms of things like "what happened today". Personally I find that there's something about dialing the dopamine down (contrary to what people would expect) that helps the game feel easier for everybody to play in the long term. My kids allow me to GM a couple of ongoing long-term campaigns for them, one that went from dungeon crawl to space adventure within 2 sessions and continued into space opera territory, and another long-form high fantasy campaign that's been going for 4 years now. The former uses Supers! RED [2] and the latter is based on GURPS [3]. Both are kind of gear-and-pet-fests for them so it's part of our job together to manage all that. :-) (Including links in case others are interested in the publishing culture or games themselves) 0. https://www.palladiumbooks.com/modern/recon https://www.palladiumbooks.com/modern/recon 1. https://www.dwdstudios.com/frontierspace https://www.dwdstudios.com/frontierspace 2. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/130108/SUPERS-Revised-Edition https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/130108/SUPERS-Revised-E... 3. http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/

MrJohz 5y ago
What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story. Even in more traditional games, I feel like I also see that tendency in certain parts of the Old School Renaissance scene, which makes me wonder if it's got something to do with the plethora of different systems that are out now. If I'm only going to have time for one game a week, I might not want to end up stuck to one setting and one system, but rather try deadly space horror in Mothership, surreal British fantasy in Troika!, steampunk metropolis Victoriana in Electric Bastionland, etc. I'm intrigued to see if this sort of style, where one jumps from game to game relatively easily, but doesn't invest so much in a single character or world, will be as long lasting. I think the danger is that eventually you run out of new things (although that honestly seems hard at the rate that new games are being punished), but a lot of these games are fairly replayable, and my impression is that people keep on coming back to their favourites.

fermentation 5y ago

What happens when the characters reach max level? I’ve played campaigns that lasted a little over a year and once we reached 16th level or so, combat rounds in 5e became excruciatingly slow. I imagine it is very difficult for the DM to balance that, and even more so for them to provide the feeling of increasing power to folks who have been in the game for some time.

cperciva 5y ago
First Edition had guidelines for high level characters literally becoming gods. IIRC one of the paths involved being reincarnated (without memories of past lives) as a level 1 character in each of the different classes and needing to reach high level in each of them in turn -- no easy feat considering that the attributes which make for a great fighter will make for a lousy wizard, but of course becoming gods shouldn't be easy.
- ScarletEmerald 5y ago
  That wasn't First Edition, it was the parallel Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, Immortals (aka BECMI) D&D line that had 36 levels and came out between about 1980 and wrapped up in the mid-90s. AD&D First Edition did have a few paragraphs on divine ascension, noting that it was "remotely possible" and removed the character from play. BECMI, in contrast, had multiple defined pathways to divinity/immortality, along with rules for playing immortal characters. Of the BECMI paths for immortality, the one you mentioned is the polymath. There are others. The epic hero quests after legendary artifacts of good and evil, accomplishes great deeds and leaves behind a successor. The paragon creates a unique artifact of power, recruits and train powerful minions, reshapes the landscape, and vanquishes any potential equals. The dynast founds a mighty empire and ensures it withstands the tests of time.
  - cperciva 5y ago
    Thanks for correcting my memory -- it's been a while!

jdkee 5y ago

AD&D was such a world creation myth to immerse oneself in. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms. We fell out of it, my friends and I, in our twenties. But it has pulled us back in in our forties. Playing the original TSR modules with new characters. So much better than computer role playing games as the fun exists in the real tabletop experiences of people interacting with each other in meatspace. It demonstrates what has been lost in virtual space. Similarly to playing boardgames with real players around the table. Humans are social creatures who belong in close physical proximity with other people. To interact, to feel free to belong, to be humans. Technology is a poor replacement for this.

spc476 5y ago

A friend of mine has run a continuous D&D game since 1993: <http://www.dragonslayers-society.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php http://www.dragonslayers-society.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php>.

vjk800 5y ago

I really wanted to get into pen&paper RPGs when I was a teenager, but was too socially awkward to break into the only group of people I knew that played them. Can you believe that; too socially inept to have the nerdiest hobby ever? The D&D players were the cool kids compared to me.

ragebol 5y ago
And the group maybe too socially inept to see that and to comfort you out of the awkwardness :-)
dkarl 5y ago
I was similar, not that I wasn't invited, but I couldn't handle something where the point was entirely social. I wanted a game where I could know if I was good or not (and preferably be better than other people.) It also drove me crazy that we were playing a high fantasy game where we were fantasizing about having all kinds of great powers and doing amazing things but nobody was doing anything cool outside the game. Not that I was doing any better; I just liked to hate myself for it. I probably could have made some friends if I had gone back.

bythreads 5y ago

Some of my best games have been the ones without weapons, powers and shenannigans - Playing kids, playing people with delusions of grandeur, playing deaf/mute, playing madly in love etc. After years we just ditched the rules and only threw dice to keep things random.

reidrac 5y ago

The first thing I thought is "but, what D&D do they play?"; because D&D has changed over the years. Turns out the game started as the D&D of the time (AD&D), with more or less house rules; and then moved on with some "homebrew" rules that are still familiar to D&D players. I mostly tend to say I played D&D back in the day, but the truth is, I only played actual D&D on one short one-afternoon session. I played other games instead (LoTR Middle Earth, RuneQuest and Vampire), but D&D is what people mostly understand I guess.

RyanShook 5y ago

Mini doc on this guy: https://youtu.be/nJ-ehbVQYxI https://youtu.be/nJ-ehbVQYxI

sshagent 5y ago

My setting is live from the mid 90s. I've stayed in the same town, so hasn't had the same complications of his moves. We've got nearly 400 years of in campaign history. We've migrated through a lot of systems (currently PF2E). Its something I'm proud of, and its always pleasant when non RP nights end up with others talking of epic moments in our games from over the years. Friends who've sadly past are immortalised through the deeds of their characters as well, obviously not to take anything from their RL activities but its nice to speak of those who've moved on from the real world, whose exist as NPCs

rightbyte 5y ago
How many characters have died in such a time spann? Like is any of the original characters alive?
- sshagent 5y ago
  Plenty. Early days, from a GM perspective my mindset was the risk of death had to be genuine and meant victories we're more to enjoy. Over the years I've relaxed a lot away from that. Its not often nowadays that players die. I don't run published adventures, and don't always keep things within the appropriate difficulty range. However i will always give opportunities to withdraw or escape if its something a little too tough. Some systems are a lot more flexible on what each party can handle but things like PF2E the math behind the system is strong and you can easily gauge what they can't handle.
- sshagent 5y ago
  Sorry i missed your second question. Plenty of characters are still alive. Characters retire into NPC formats, generally once they are lords and such. There is only so many apocalypses you can have to challenge high level characters. They can come on "screen" in other campaigns. They generally have their own faction that they operate off camera. New characters sometimes opt to be sons of earlier characters of their own, or of other players characters. It works quite well. I have had to add a magical plant, which when processed, slows the aging process. I felt a bit harsh killing retired characters, so the rich and powerful tend to not age too much. Some players are fine with their characters to die off, but thats there choice. Lastly we sometimes dust off old characters to deal with major problems or just for mainly RP type sessions.

madrox 5y ago

As a forever DM, I'm impressed by this guy's fortitude. Coming up with an interesting session can take a good deal of time. In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is. Of course, modules can help a ton, and there's a lot of tools available these days to procedurally generate the hard parts. Still, many of those didn't exist until recently, for the most part. This guy had to have spent countless hours on his own building out this world. It's an inspiration, really.

Aeolun 5y ago
> In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is In my experience, you can run an entire session on basically nothing. Half the time I make things up on the spot (and keep track of them so they’ll still be the same when players return), but most of the time the players make the story. It’s especially helpful when they’re discussing what they’re thinking the reason for something is between themselves, because one of those is pretty much always a good one (even if they settle on a different explanation afterwards xD).
- madrox 5y ago
  While I agree on story, encounters, dungeons, and puzzles are harder on the fly. You can procedurally generate a dungeon these days and there’s lots of encounter generators now, but wasn’t always so easy.

JabavuAdams 5y ago

I love that this exists, and that there are people just relatively quietly making these things happen. Contrast this to how we as developer feel pressure to monetize, or to grow, or to something short term. It's a bit of a shock to me that this is the first time I've heard of this. This sensation always makes me wonder "What else like this is out there" ... in other pursuits, other fields? People just toiling away and gradually producing something extraordinary.

fho 5y ago

I recently achieved two milestones that I am somewhat proud of: (a) finishing a role-playing campaign, to be fair that was in LancerRPG that by default has a 12 level skill ceiling after which it does not make sense to play anymore. (b) finishing a legacy game, Charterstone that is. Again that has a manageable 12 game limit. Still, there are so many people that have not finished Gloomhaven or whose RPG campaign has come to nothing after some years. So finishing both feels like a small achievement :-)

brolumir 5y ago

Great story, but I wonder about the logistics of effectively DM'ing 25 players. I'm assuming not everyone plays in the same session? Otherwise - how do you handle battles with a party of 25 PCs?

oneoff786 5y ago

A question for people who play more traditional dnd. The original content seemed to be a lot less… narrative? That is, resting in the open wild you might be encouraged to roll for a random encounter and do a fight that has no particular meaning. That always struck me as a lot of tedium. Combat is pretty slow and older versions’ combat was more involved if anything. Was that boring?

lupire 5y ago
It was before computer games were well developed, so much of what is a computer game today was done manually. See also "war gaming".
- oneoff786 5y ago
  I don’t follow what this is saying. TTRPGs are still manual. Maybe you have a spreadsheet or an online tool to facilitate but it doesn’t change that much. More so I don’t see how this relates to my question
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    No, it makes sense to me (and I'm by no means a grognard!). As far as I understand it, D&D evolved from earlier board-wargames and it was essentially a sort of free-form wargame with rules for fantasy skirmishes with a theme cribbed off its authors' favourite Sword and Sorcery fiction (which was not, famously, Lord of the Rings, but more Jack Vance's Dying Earth). If I understand correctly, the original D&D had rules for Combat and then for things that weren't directly Combat, but were still about fighting battles, like attracting or hiring henchmen, building a stronghold, controlling a territory and ultimately fighting battles with large armies. Importantly, D&D predates Computer RPGs so all this wargmaing had to be managed by hand, and the rules involved a significant amount of crunch- what you call "a lot of tedium". But then Computer RPGs (CRPGs) started to appear, invariably influenced by D&D, or other CRPGs influenced by D&D. So if you enjoyed crunchy, wargame-y, combat-oriented gaming, and didn't particularly need "narrative", then CRPGs were now your friend, and you didn't need to play D&D for that. For instance, I remember spending weeks and months playing Neverwinter Nights, which was pretty much just 3d ed. D&D with an automated GM. That's how I understand OP's comment. And I kind of agree. Interestingly, there seems to be a return to the original D&D mode of play with the "OSR" (Old School R... something) genre, that is discussed everywhere in this thread. Perhaps because OSR's rallying cry is "rulings, not rules" and maybe after a couple of generations of games with detailed mechanics designed to promote "narrative", players who just wanted to play a game without too many restrictions got bored with all the rules and wanted to go back to just telling the DM what they want to do, and then rolling the dice to see what happens. Which is the one thing that CRPGs can still. not. do. Incidentally, one of the earliest RPGs of the 1980's was Call of Cthulhu which was very much designed to be "not about combat", but about experiencing a horror story, in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos universe. There has been a clear split between games that are, on some level "about telling a story", or "about roleplaying" (so "narrative"), and games that are about killing monsters and nicking their stuff (so "Combat"), since the very early days of the hobby. But, you know there's nothing stopping you from running a narrative-driven game in the D&D world, if that's more your thing (Ron Edward's "System Matters" nonwithstanding). Or, conversely, you can pick up a ruleset designed to "tell a story" and run it like a classic hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. To paraphrase the old joke about Fortran programmers, "The determined Real D&D Player can run a D&D session with any ruleset" [1]. ________________ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856747

e_i_pi_2 5y ago

Just saw this interesting video[1] from Wired yesterday - "Inside the 40 Year-Long Dungeons & Dragons Game", funny timing because this seems to be about the same game! [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ-ehbVQYxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ-ehbVQYxI

markus_zhang 5y ago

I'm more into a computer DnD and figured out that just playing games such as Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights are good enough. I'm not a social person and role play even before closest friends feels weird.

ryneandal 5y ago
I was much the same until I started discussing the idea with close friends who had similar interests. If you have an interest it, you could always try a one-shot[1] adventure and test the waters. I have pretty awful social anxiety, but I find that getting into character and being with close friends (whether physically or remotely) allows me to ease into the social setting and have a ton of fun. Also note that role-playing is NOT required! If you and/or your friends prefer to just discuss the game and setting in the third person akin to talking about video games, go for it. Don't force yourself to do so if there is no interest, but certainly at least give it a try if you have any sort of interest, there's nothing to lose and love for a new hobby to gain! 1: https://blackcitadelrpg.com/one-shots-dnd-5e/ https://blackcitadelrpg.com/one-shots-dnd-5e/

AlwaysRock 5y ago

This is pretty cool. I would like to play more D&D. Every group I've been apart of has fizzled after a few sessions. But hopefully someday I'll be able to join a group that lasts for a while.

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