CRKrueger said:
I can kind of see the argument that compared to OD&D, Basic took the first slippery step on the road to damnation, and with AD&D Gary became the mad conductor on the Rules Train and Unearthed Arcana was when he screamed “This Rules Train Has No Brakes!”. 3e in that context just seems the natural end result.
See AlsoBlackmoor Combat and Arnesons System | Original D&D DiscussionWebCam - Arnesen's Rocky Point ResortOne Bad Ass 328 Skater with Arnesons!Anybody check out Arnesen's new WEBCAM and website???As someone who started with Moldvay as a 14 year old, not a college-age wargamer who played with the inventors of the game, I doubt I would have done much with OD&D.
At the same time, I made up sh*t I thought would be fun, felt free to toss out rules (and just chuckled when Corporate Gary contradicted GM Gary) and came up with my own NPCs, towns, cities, campaigns, and worlds.
The B/X boxed sets were great tools for creativity. The model for play, with the wilderness rules in the Expert Set, is a lot more interesting than what was presented in most modules of the time.
I think that the simplicity of presentation of the maps is also a benefit, not a drawback. They used simple and easy-to-draw icons. When I looked at the maps in the B/X sets (an in The Keep on the Borderlands), I immediately starting making my own, and to my eye, they were just as good as the ones in the book. I'm not entirely opposed to fancy maps by any means, but I think having simple maps is essential in the core book that the GM learns from.
[/quote]I really don’t think people take into account how much the design and corporate culture of MtG affected D&D.[/quote]
Sure D&D went crazy with options in the 2.5 days, but the concepts of systems mastery, of the designer being the ultimate authority on the rules, PC build culture, that’s all pure MtG.[/quote]
I agree with some, but not all of that. MtG certainly gave PC build culture a boost, but "albino dwarf syndrome" was already a joke in GURPS circles in the '80s. As for the designer being the ultimate authority, that's on Gygax. I read his column in Dragon on people playing his game wrong before I owned the AD&D books, so that unfortunately was my first impression of the guy.
I agree with you completely on the system mastery element though. The thing that the designers of 3.0 forgot is that you can play a game of Magic in half and hour, then go sit in the corner for fifteen minutes and tweak your deck before going back and playing another game. When you build a PC, you are expected to play that character for a couple of years, so if you realize that you made a "mistake", it hangs over you for a long time.
The constant release of new feats and prestige classes was terrible too. With M:tG expansions, as I mentioned above, you can shuffle new cards into your deck easily. With D&D 3.0, I had players constantly riddled with buyer's remorse after every supplement or issue of Dragon because there was some new feat or prestige class that they wished they had gone for.
At least with the build culture around GURPS, you were generally just dealing with the Advantages and Disadvantages from the core and whatever setting book you were using. The players weren't constantly be taunted with new selections that they couldn't have every month.
robertsconley said:
To the point where it turned into a unreasonable bias against any commercial RPG project (which is just about everything in the industry).
My feeling is that location-based modules were fine, but that they dropped the ball by never providing very much in the way of hex crawls to complement them. I only got into Judge's Guild products during the OSR, and they would have been enormously helpful to me as models during my early gaming days. They struck a good balance between providing an area to play while leaving plenty of room for the PCs to make their own adventures. They provided a template for play that I never really got from TSR.
The only setting set I ever owned for D&D at the time was The World of Greyhawk and it was too high-level to actually provide me with anything to use at the table, giving summaries of nations rather than locations. That was my first genuinely disappointing RPG purchase, as I didn't see much of anything in it that I could use.
I don't really buy the idea that D&D would have been better off with no supplements. Plenty of gamers are never going to create their own stuff from scratch, and that is fine. Without modules, D&D would have been much smaller, and with fewer people playing, many people who did do creative things in RPGs would never have been exposed to it.
I expect supplements allowed RPGs to be exposed to more RPG creators than it stifled creative people from doing their own thing. Even as complete RPG novice, I can remember the scorn I felt reading that Gygax column about people not playing his game right, and almost all the dungeons I ran back in the day were my own hand-drawn ones. I think The Lost City was the only published one I ran, and that one cleverly forces you to make the second half.
We live in a golden age of people making their own creative gaming stuff, both free and paid and putting it online. With all these people making things, I don't see that published products have really stifled creativity much.
