4 ms·

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 enc

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
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      That does make sense. But I suppose what I’m asking is that at a more abstract level, encounters can be analyzed at the very beginning. Some are hard. Some are easy. Playing the easy encounters is pretty boring in my opinion. This is balanced in a lot of TTRPGs somewhat by making resource conservation a thing so maybe you can’t just use your big powers to blow up some simple goblins. But I have always found it very difficult to get people interested in following this curve. Nobody wants to spend 30 minutes on a goblin encounter.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
        I think I see what you mean. You're talking about balance, yes? If so, I think it's easy to do balance wrong and hard to do it right, and there's a lot of people trying at the same time, in any game: the game designer, the GM, the players even, at some level. So there's lots of moving parts to combine and it doesn't always work. To be honest, I don't have a good answer to that. I've read (but not played) games that had special rules for "mooks" or "mobs". For example, Wushu, a game of cinematic Kung-Fu action, was like that, because I guess it's very in the spirit of the setting. I've played computer games that throw hordes of enemies at you, also. Invariably there's a progression from mooks, to mini-bosses, to bosses to big bads. Then there's games like Call of Cthulhu (CoC) were there are no goblins and even the weakest enemies can drive your character insane (well, ish. I think Ghouls are relatively safe...). I have no clue what's the right way to achieve balance. It seems to me that the only way to avoid what you describe is to have no weakling enemies and make every encounter a matter of life-and-death, with a substantial risk for at least one character to die (like CoC). But not for a Total Party Kill probably. I kind of have Nethack in mind, here, and other roguelikes (I think a lot about them lately). In Nethack you fight some weak enemies at first, like slime molds, but you can at least eat them, so they're a resource. Then as you progress down the dungeon, the chance of dying increases very steeply. And then your character dies. And the next one. And the next one too. And the one after that. So there's no boring encounters, but I personally want to throw the keyboard after a while and I end up savescumming because I just want to get a bit deeper in the dungeon and see what's there.
        5y ago
cl42 5y ago
I believe this would depend on your DM. I've been playing since the mid-90s (not sure if that's far back enough for you! :) ), and we rarely rolled for random encounters like that. In general the DM has a lot of say over the rules and their interpretation. A good DM will make a huge difference.
StevePerkins 5y ago
Different strokes. A lot of old school gaming resembles modern adventure video games. There is an overall narrative arc, but then there are fairly random encounters along the way. I agree that a purely mechanically-generated game would be tedious, it's all about balance. But I don't know... ever since "Critical Role" came out, it feels like the dominant strain of role-playing games is people trying to be theatre majors, or produce something worthy of a live-play podcast. I find that likewise out of sync with what I'm looking for in a game. I just want a classic dungeon-crawl, with limited "acting" ability required. And therefore limited code of conduct debates, because the creepy theatre major wants to act out his rape fantasies while the super progressive theatre major wants a race and gender studies class. Like, huh? Dude, I just want to join a gang of murder-hobos, so we can kill some goblins and take some gold.

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
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    That does make sense. But I suppose what I’m asking is that at a more abstract level, encounters can be analyzed at the very beginning. Some are hard. Some are easy. Playing the easy encounters is pretty boring in my opinion. This is balanced in a lot of TTRPGs somewhat by making resource conservation a thing so maybe you can’t just use your big powers to blow up some simple goblins. But I have always found it very difficult to get people interested in following this curve. Nobody wants to spend 30 minutes on a goblin encounter.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
      I think I see what you mean. You're talking about balance, yes? If so, I think it's easy to do balance wrong and hard to do it right, and there's a lot of people trying at the same time, in any game: the game designer, the GM, the players even, at some level. So there's lots of moving parts to combine and it doesn't always work. To be honest, I don't have a good answer to that. I've read (but not played) games that had special rules for "mooks" or "mobs". For example, Wushu, a game of cinematic Kung-Fu action, was like that, because I guess it's very in the spirit of the setting. I've played computer games that throw hordes of enemies at you, also. Invariably there's a progression from mooks, to mini-bosses, to bosses to big bads. Then there's games like Call of Cthulhu (CoC) were there are no goblins and even the weakest enemies can drive your character insane (well, ish. I think Ghouls are relatively safe...). I have no clue what's the right way to achieve balance. It seems to me that the only way to avoid what you describe is to have no weakling enemies and make every encounter a matter of life-and-death, with a substantial risk for at least one character to die (like CoC). But not for a Total Party Kill probably. I kind of have Nethack in mind, here, and other roguelikes (I think a lot about them lately). In Nethack you fight some weak enemies at first, like slime molds, but you can at least eat them, so they're a resource. Then as you progress down the dungeon, the chance of dying increases very steeply. And then your character dies. And the next one. And the next one too. And the one after that. So there's no boring encounters, but I personally want to throw the keyboard after a while and I end up savescumming because I just want to get a bit deeper in the dungeon and see what's there.
      - 5y ago

cl42 5y ago

I believe this would depend on your DM. I've been playing since the mid-90s (not sure if that's far back enough for you! :) ), and we rarely rolled for random encounters like that. In general the DM has a lot of say over the rules and their interpretation. A good DM will make a huge difference.

StevePerkins 5y ago

Different strokes. A lot of old school gaming resembles modern adventure video games. There is an overall narrative arc, but then there are fairly random encounters along the way. I agree that a purely mechanically-generated game would be tedious, it's all about balance. But I don't know... ever since "Critical Role" came out, it feels like the dominant strain of role-playing games is people trying to be theatre majors, or produce something worthy of a live-play podcast. I find that likewise out of sync with what I'm looking for in a game. I just want a classic dungeon-crawl, with limited "acting" ability required. And therefore limited code of conduct debates, because the creepy theatre major wants to act out his rape fantasies while the super progressive theatre major wants a race and gender studies class. Like, huh? Dude, I just want to join a gang of murder-hobos, so we can kill some goblins and take some gold.