There’s a handful of others around here that have played since the 80’s as well. The funny thing is that most of them disagree with you and your declarations of what D&D is, myself included. I have never, in over 40 years of TTRPG’s going all the way back to BECMI, played in a game like you describe as being the standard. It seems most others have not either, given the amount of support your posts receive.
There is easily enough anecdotal evidence in this thread alone to counter your version of D&D. You don’t get to declare what D&D was for anyone else, no matter how long you’ve been playing. You don’t get to declare that your version of D&D is the real version of D&D, no matter how long you’ve been playing. Most of all, you don’t get to act as if everyone who has been playing this game for longer than most agrees with you. Please do share your experiences but there is no need to, in thread after thread and post after post, tell others that they don’t know what D&D really is and that they are doing it wrong.
Note that I’m not telling you your version of D&D is incorrect or that you don’t know what you are doing, I am simply saying there is and always has been more than one way to play.
Yes there is a handful of people from the 80's here, most of them don't post at all, ever and the few that do typically send me private messages agreeing, but generally fear posting because of how intolerant this community and the moderators are of anyone who doesn't swallow revised version of D&D history.
There is a very long and well-established movement to re-write D&D history by the modern gaming community because they want to make sure that the legacy of their game is politically correct and agree's with their modern sensibilities. It's why Arneson who was a very nice man and gentle soul is prompted up as hero of D&D and Gygax is vilified because he was homophobic and thought women were a weaker sex. I get it, I actually think its kind of sweet, it's just simply not true.
Note that I’m not telling you your version of D&D is incorrect or that you don’t know what you are doing, I am simply saying there is and always has been more than one way to play.
For the record.. I never claimed at any point that there weren't alternative ways to play D&D, but D&D was founded on a playstyle. The combination of genre and game mechanics defines playstyle. You could alter those things and re-define it, but if you just used the game as written, you were playing a Dungeon Crawler Survivor game, because that is what it was designed to be.
With respect, the only person getting offended is you—and I get it, it is always frustrating to be proven dead wrong, but be too stubborn to admit it.
Your problem? You keep talking in absolutes. You keep saying nonsense like “the game was definitely about survival” when what you should be saying is “the game had rules for survival and could be about survival.” You keep ignoring that multiple people are saying “I’ve been playing since the 70s, and it was not a survival game” because it does not fit your narrative.
That is why it looks like you are gatekeeping. You literally are ignoring any “but my way to play also existed” comment and only accepting any playstyle that supports your own narrative. Combine that with your die hard defense of a man who wanted to gatekeep the game so only white male hardcore players would enjoy it? His same gatekeeping which almost killed the game due to his forcing useful talent out of TSR because they did not share his vision? Gygax might have been important in making the game, but the game exists today in spite of that racist, sexist man—not because of him.
I implore you to take a step back and read what others are saying, and maybe realise your view on the game’s history does not comport with everyone’s view. People have been playing this game in a myriad of different ways from the very beginning—and recognising there is no right or wrong or correct or official or historical way to play D&D is an important part of actually having a meaningful conversation, without the gatekeeping that plagues this community.
There’s a handful of others around here that have played since the 80’s as well. The funny thing is that most of them disagree with you and your declarations of what D&D is, myself included. I have never, in over 40 years of TTRPG’s going all the way back to BECMI, played in a game like you describe as being the standard. It seems most others have not either, given the amount of support your posts receive.
There is easily enough anecdotal evidence in this thread alone to counter your version of D&D. You don’t get to declare what D&D was for anyone else, no matter how long you’ve been playing. You don’t get to declare that your version of D&D is the real version of D&D, no matter how long you’ve been playing. Most of all, you don’t get to act as if everyone who has been playing this game for longer than most agrees with you. Please do share your experiences but there is no need to, in thread after thread and post after post, tell others that they don’t know what D&D really is and that they are doing it wrong.
Note that I’m not telling you your version of D&D is incorrect or that you don’t know what you are doing, I am simply saying there is and always has been more than one way to play.
Yes there is a handful of people from the 80's here, most of them don't post at all, ever and the few that do typically send me private messages agreeing, but generally fear posting because of how intolerant this community and the moderators are of anyone who doesn't swallow revised version of D&D history.
There is a very long and well-established movement to re-write D&D history by the modern gaming community because they want to make sure that the legacy of their game is politically correct and agree's with their modern sensibilities. It's why Arneson who was a very nice man and gentle soul is prompted up as hero of D&D and Gygax is vilified because he was homophobic and thought women were a weaker sex. I get it, I actually think its kind of sweet, it's just simply not true.
Note that I’m not telling you your version of D&D is incorrect or that you don’t know what you are doing, I am simply saying there is and always has been more than one way to play.
For the record.. I never claimed at any point that there weren't alternative ways to play D&D, but D&D was founded on a playstyle. The combination of genre and game mechanics defines playstyle. You could alter those things and re-define it, but if you just used the game as written, you were playing a Dungeon Crawler Survivor game, because that is what it was designed to be.
Please do stop telling me (and likely others) that my personal experience never happened or that I haven’t been playing D&D for decades. My game does not and never has resembled your game but it’s not because I’m on some crusade against Gary Gygax or have any particular affection for Dave Arneson. Specific concerns or issues regarding the foundation of the game and the founders themselves have never had much bearing on the way I play. The idea that I’m trying to rewrite history rather than tell you your experience is not the singular experience of D&D is utterly ridiculous. Get over yourself already.
Please do stop telling me (and likely others) that my personal experience never happened or that I haven’t been playing D&D for decades. My game does not and never has resembled your game but it’s not because I’m on some crusade against Gary Gygax or have any particular affection for Dave Arneson. Specific concerns or issues regarding the foundation of the game and the founders themselves have never had much bearing on the way I play. The idea that I’m trying to rewrite history rather than tell you your experience is not the singular experience of D&D is utterly ridiculous. Get over yourself already.
Can you quote where I said any of that at any point?
Please do stop telling me (and likely others) that my personal experience never happened or that I haven’t been playing D&D for decades. My game does not and never has resembled your game but it’s not because I’m on some crusade against Gary Gygax or have any particular affection for Dave Arneson. Specific concerns or issues regarding the foundation of the game and the founders themselves have never had much bearing on the way I play. The idea that I’m trying to rewrite history rather than tell you your experience is not the singular experience of D&D is utterly ridiculous. Get over yourself already.
Can you quote where I said any of that at any point?
Literally every single time you say things like "[t]he game was definitely about survival" you are doing exactly what Born_of_fire74 is saying you are doing. You are using language that presents your experience as if it were objective truth that everyone shared. When someone else responds "but that was not my truth, therefore your absolutist phrase is not correct" you double down with additional language stated in an absolutist way. That makes it look like you do not care about the others' experience; it makes it look like you are not bothering to acknowledge their experiences are just as valid as how you played; it makes it look like you are gatekeeping, trying to say that only your experiences and preferred way to play were the "correct and true" way of playing in the 70s.
If that is not your intent, then I highly suggest you read your posts because that is the message you are conveying, and you might want to work on your writing some.
Here is the reality that your posts keep missing: Other users on this thread have shown that "the game was definitely about survival" is a false statement, and their statements of "the game certainly had survival elements and survivalist players, but other types of playstyle, including my own, existed as well, and (just like today) there is no right or wrong way to play D&D" are far more truthful than the incorrect assertions you keep repeating ad nauseum.
Please do stop telling me (and likely others) that my personal experience never happened or that I haven’t been playing D&D for decades. My game does not and never has resembled your game but it’s not because I’m on some crusade against Gary Gygax or have any particular affection for Dave Arneson. Specific concerns or issues regarding the foundation of the game and the founders themselves have never had much bearing on the way I play. The idea that I’m trying to rewrite history rather than tell you your experience is not the singular experience of D&D is utterly ridiculous. Get over yourself already.
Can you quote where I said any of that at any point?
No, that would be a waste of my time but I will leave this here:
”Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.”
Literally every single time you say things like "[t]he game was definitely about survival" you are doing exactly what Born_of_fire74 is saying you are doing. You are using language that presents your experience as if it were objective truth that everyone shared.
It's the difference between reading what I wrote and determining what you think I meant. I wrote exactly what I meant, you don't need to analyze some alternative intent. It also helps to actually use the quote in context as I wrote it, rather than cutting out the parts that reinforce what what you think I meant or what you choose to believe. You're doing both things here, which notably are actually against the trolling policy.
First. What I actually wrote
The game was definitely about survival, in fact B/X has rules called Wilderness Survival and Dungeon Survival rules, actual, explicit rules that define how you run survival as a game mechanic round by round. There were also guides released called Wildnerness Survival and Dungeon Survival guides that gave you the basic assets and instructed you on how to run such games. I understand that the game was more than just survival, but at the forefront of the game was the basic game loop. You gather a party. Equip yourself. Seek out the location you believe to have treasure and go there to retrieve it. Every part of the game was designed around this core premise from wandering monsters to 1 gold = 1 XP. I get that the game evolved, but to claim that this was not the origin of the game is an outrageous lie and re-visionist history.
The context here isn't what I thought the game was about, or how I experienced the game... its very specifically about how the game was designed which I supported with actual mechanics and content that enforced that design. This isn't about my experience or your experience, its about game designed. The game was designed very specifically, very intentionally for dungeon survival.. aka dungeon crawl. That is what the mechanics support, its the play style for which the game was designed.
Your making it sound like it was my preference, my experience or some sort of objective way "everyone" played the game. At no time did I ever say any such thing. This has nothing to do with my experience or your experience, what we did or didn't do in our games. Its about what the game was designed for. The context of which was to discuss the evolution of the game, namely after I pointed out that many of the designs that supported this specific style of play in old school D&D are actually still present in modern D&D. My question was ... why?
No one actually tried to answer that question, it immediately became some sort of assumption that I was instructing people about how the game was played "by everyone" and anyone who disagrees is lying or something. Which is ridiculous, I never said anything of the sort.
Literally every single time you say things like "[t]he game was definitely about survival" you are doing exactly what Born_of_fire74 is saying you are doing. You are using language that presents your experience as if it were objective truth that everyone shared.
It's the difference between reading what I wrote and determining what you think I meant. I wrote exactly what I meant, you don't need to analyze some alternative intent. It also helps to actually use the quote in content as I wrote it, rather than cutting out the parts that reinforce what what you think I meant. You're doing both things here.
First. What I actually wrote
The game was definitely about survival, in fact B/X has rules called Wilderness Survival and Dungeon Survival rules, actual, explicit rules that define how you run survival as a game mechanic round by round. There were also guides released called Wildnerness Survival and Dungeon Survival guides that gave you the basic assets and instructed you on how to run such games. I understand that the game was more than just survival, but at the forefront of the game was the basic game loop. You gather a party. Equip yourself. Seek out the location you believe to have treasure and go there to retrieve it. Every part of the game was designed around this core premise from wandering monsters to 1 gold = 1 XP. I get that the game evolved, but to claim that this was not the origin of the game is an outrageous lie and re-visionist history.
The context here isn't what I thought the game was about, or how I experienced the game... its very specifically about how the game was designed which I supported with actual mechanics and content that enforced that design. This isn't about my experience or your experience, its about game designed. The game was designed very specifically, very intentionally for dungeon survival.. aka dungeon crawl. That is what the mechanics support, its the play style for which the game was designed.
Your making it sound like it was my preference, my experience or some sort of objective way "everyone" played the game. At no time did I ever say any such thing. This has nothing to do with my experience or your experience, what we did or didn't do in our games. Its about what the game was designed for. The context of which was to discuss the evolution of the game, namely after I pointed out that many of the designs that supported this specific style of play in old school D&D are actually still present in modern D&D. My question was ... why?
No one actually tried to answer that question, it immediately became some sort of assumption that I was instructing people about how the game was played "by everyone" and anyone who disagrees is lying or something. Which is ridiculous, I never said anything of the sort.
Now I fully admit I no longer own any of my boxed sets. I also haven’t looked at any of the myriad of books on my shelves for the editions between those and 5e in several years, easily something like ten. That said, I am certain there were more rules in every edition, especially BECMI, than those that explained dungeon and wilderness survival. I know for a fact there was at least some content in all of them regarding role play and how to pretend to be another person out on adventures in a make believe world. Because that’s the game I played, at the time, from the rules I read in those published books.
In AD&D, the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide were two of what thirty or so handbooks? Yet you want to state that 1st ed was the survival game by definition. How about if I told you I owned both of those Survival Guides but never used more than a paragraph or two out of each the entire years I played that edition? Prolly more than a few charts but, I mean, there’s prolly at least fifty charts in each so still a mere fraction.
The point is, you had your takeaway and I had mine. Not once have I ever said you played some unintended bastardization of the rules but that is all you ever say about anyone who doesn’t share your specific view of the game.
OP wants to know if D&D will ever stop being a thing. The codified rules may change over time, much to some peoples’ dismay, but the fact is that people have been having fun roleplaying since the advent of language and civilization, long before a handful of dudes wrote down some rules in the 70’s. OP might as well be asking if theatre sports such as improv will ever stop being a thing. Hell no and there’s not really a wrong way to do it either.
ow I fully admit I no longer own any of my boxed sets. I also haven’t looked at any of the myriad of books on my shelves for the editions between those and 5e in several years, easily something like ten. That said, I am certain there were more rules in every edition, especially BECMI, than those that explained dungeon and wilderness survival. I know for a fact there was at least some content in all of them regarding role play and how to pretend to be another person out on adventures in a make believe world. Because that’s the game I played, at the time, from the rules I read in those published books.
Sorry to disappoint, but the word "story" didn't even appear in a D&D book until the Moldvey Basic edition of the game and even that was just in the preface. There were no instructions about role-playing, what it was, how it worked or anything of the sort there was nothing about writing stories or plots and I'm not saying that as some sort of jab or to make point as I don't actually care, but this premise that D&D was some sort of improv theatre from the begining as a design, sorry... it never existed. In fact, it wasn't until 2nd edition AD&D anything of the sort was ever addressed. Again, I'm not saying people didn't play it as you describe, I'm just saying as a game design, it was a very mechanical game defined for a very specific style of play.
You had rules for Dungeon Survival that defined, round by round how you execute dungeons. You had the similar rules for Wilderness and sea adventures. Instructions about when to roll for wandering monsters and how often, what charts to use. There were chapters on the function of food, water and light (torches), details about travel distances. Later hex adventures and exploration, then later still how to manage kingdomes. Each one of these things where treated in the same way combat rounds were treated. As Written D&D was basically an adventure board game.
Again, I'm saying anything about how people used D&D or what experiences they had, I have no idea what people where doing in their games, but if the discussion is about game design, these are objective facts. If you chose to ignore those rules and doing something different with the game, that I'm sure happened all the time.
The point is, you had your takeaway and I had mine. Not once have I ever said you played some unintended bastardization of the rules but that is all you ever say about anyone who doesn’t share your specific view of the game.
I challenge you to quote where at any point I said or suggested any such thing. That is just a complete, blatant lie!
ow I fully admit I no longer own any of my boxed sets. I also haven’t looked at any of the myriad of books on my shelves for the editions between those and 5e in several years, easily something like ten. That said, I am certain there were more rules in every edition, especially BECMI, than those that explained dungeon and wilderness survival. I know for a fact there was at least some content in all of them regarding role play and how to pretend to be another person out on adventures in a make believe world. Because that’s the game I played, at the time, from the rules I read in those published books.
Sorry to disappoint, but the word "story" didn't even appear in a D&D book until the Moldvey Basic edition of the game and even that was just in the preface. There were no instructions about role-playing, what it was, how it worked or anything of the sort there was nothing about writing stories or plots and I'm not saying that as some sort of jab or to make point as I don't actually care, but this premise that D&D was some sort of improv theatre from the begining as a design, sorry... it never existed. In fact, it wasn't until 2nd edition AD&D anything of the sort was ever addressed. Again, I'm not saying people didn't play it as you describe, I'm just saying as a game design, it was a very mechanical game defined for a very specific style of play.
You had rules for Dungeon Survival that defined, round by round how you execute dungeons. You had the similar rules for Wilderness and sea adventures. Instructions about when to roll for wandering monsters and how often, what charts to use. There were chapters on the function of food, water and light (torches), details about travel distances. Later hex adventures and exploration, then later still how to manage kingdomes. Each one of these things where treated in the same way combat rounds were treated. As Written D&D was basically an adventure board game.
Again, I'm saying anything about how people used D&D or what experiences they had, I have no idea what people where doing in their games, but if the discussion is about game design, these are objective facts. If you chose to ignore those rules and doing something different with the game, that I'm sure happened all the time.
The point is, you had your takeaway and I had mine. Not once have I ever said you played some unintended bastardization of the rules but that is all you ever say about anyone who doesn’t share your specific view of the game.
I challenge you to quote where at any point I said or suggested any such thing. That is just a complete, blatant lie!
You’ve done it in the paragraph above. It’s clearly there to for all to see. Telling me that, somehow, when I was playing BECMI because it was cool to pretend to be a different person adventuring in a make believe world, that there were no description of any such thing in the rules. What are statistics if not to help you imagine what type of person you’ve playing, whether they are weak or strong, or sickly or hardy etc.? What are races other than humans for if not to pretend to be other than human? And those are just a few examples of the tons of rules that are guides for roleplaying. It’s ludicrous to claim there were no rules on role play from the very start. It’s a ROLE PLAYING game. It’s kind of sad you seem to think there needs to be instructions on how to make a story or roleplay a character for a clever person to use the game for those purposes.
Again, you have your takeaway, which at no point have I tried to tell you is all in your imagination, and I have mine.
What these people are doing is to try to ignore how the game was designed and what style of play is supported by those rules, versus the rules they are ignoring to play a style of the game not supported by the rules. Using just one example, as soon as items have a weight assigned to them, and rules are codified about how much weight a PC can carry before encumbered, the game is automatically intended to be about survival and hex/dungeon crawling.
Now, people can choose to ignore those rules and then say they are playing the game. No one can stop them.
That's setting the net extremely wide, too wide. Just because they've set a limit on what you can carry, that doesn't mean it's about survival or hex crawling or dungeon crawling. Elder Scrolls is none of those things (except maybe dungeon crawling, to an extent) at heart, despite having encumbrance. 5e has weight and encumbrance, yet explicitly says that the portable weight "is high enough that most characters don’t usually have to worry about it" - in other words, they're specifically trying to get away from the feeling of scant resources and trying to survive in a wilderness etc.
What makes a game survivalist or not is not whether it has encumbrance or weight. It's how much of a focus the rules focus on it, all the mechanics point back to the survivalist aspect. 5e is not survivalist at it's core. Sure, you can turn it that way, usually with House Rules, but at it's core, it's really not. Were the original D&D games survivalist? I don't know, but merely having encumbrance in them doesn't mean they were.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Arneson did complete D&D core rules. Role Playing, as a whole structure within the game, belongs within his credit.
Sorry but, you can't just re-write history. Arneson never finished anything in his entire career, let alone any core rules to D&D. This is a well-documented fact, cleaning up after Arneson was a full-time job at TSR. He was a parasite that sponged off his friend's success because he "had some ideas" and later sued them because they wouldn't share the money from a successful business they created without him. This revision of Arneson's contribution to D&D was born when modern gamers realized that the creator of their hobby had different politics than they do. That is all that happened. Yes, the game you love was created by a guy who was famous for blowing money on strippers and cocaine... deal with it. Its not a big deal, it was the 70's and 80's.
Nor is it proper to say that D&D exists exclusively because of Gygax: factually, it is both a falsehood and an embellishment. D&D exists because of a dozen people, although Gygax was the one who got the credit for it and definitely the one who popularized it. It is akin to describing Henry Ford as being responsible exclusively for Cars.
True, none of those people were Dave Arneson. Cook, Moldvey and Mentzer to name a few, yeah definitely. These guys created, wrote, produced and published...aka made actual contributions. They put in the work, they definitely deserve credit.
Secondarily, the point wasn't that early editions were not brutal, the point is that early editions were not a survival game. Shifting the goal posts like this is a strawman argument when it was explicitly noted about "survival" as a basis. Survival is quite different from brutality -- but, even then, Arneson's games (and note that he had over a decade with the company before being forced out -- lazy or not, he was still forced out, in part because he challenged the assertion that it was all about Gary very publicly, especially given that at the time Gygax was literally claiming he invented D&D alone) were not survival, Gygax's games were not survival, The other seven games were not survival.
This too is revising history. Gary Gygax wasn't claiming he invented D&D, he was claiming ownership of D&D as a product for which he got sued. He saw it as his game because he put in the actual work to get it completed, to get it published, to ensure that the game was an actual product, that D&D was a successful business. Compare that to Arnerson contribution, a few notes based on a homebrew in his basement. Ideas are not a contribution, you want to get paid, you have to produce something.
The game was definitely about survival, in fact B/X has rules called Wilderness Survival and Dungeon Survival rules, actual, explicit rules that define how you run survival as a game mechanic round by round. There were also guides released called Wildnerness Survival and Dungeon Survival guides that gave you the basic assets and instructed you on how to run such games. I understand that the game was more than just survival, but at the forefront of the game was the basic game loop. You gather a party. Equip yourself. Seek out the location you believe to have treasure and go there to retrieve it. Every part of the game was designed around this core premise from wandering monsters to 1 gold = 1 XP. I get that the game evolved, but to claim that this was not the origin of the game is an outrageous lie and re-visionist history.
I don't understand why this core gameplay loop that was the primary way D&D was played in the 80's and well into the 90's bothers people today? Why does this legacy offend people so much that they have to nagging urge to re-write history? It was a thing... it was fun and the game evolved to be something different today. People still play this way today quite a bit more than I think 5e players realize. We have entire RPG's designed to allow players to re-live this classic method of play from Shadow Dark, Five Torches Deep and Forbidden Lands just to name a few. I honestly don't get why this offends people.
A) I don't have to rewrite history. Arneson completed the rules. He didn't complete the game. You should know better after the last time lol. But also, he created the core concept of the game. Nor is my stuff drawn from later sources -- for the most part, I've ignored reporting after about 90, because, well, I had already met most of them. Regardless, Arneson & Gygax are still credited with the initial rules -- rules that Gygax organized and typed up, but that Arneson still wrote out *at Gary's request*. And as an old B/X player, you already know that neither Gygax nor Arneson wrote it -- that was all a further development of what they did for the OG by Homes. Arneson's completed geomorphs and initial module were replaced by Carr's, and then when Carr's was more popular than B1, they replaced it with B2. Was Gary a bag of *****? Yeah. Does it matter in this context? No. Does it matter in other contexts? Sometimes.
B) Thank you for acknowledging the falsehood and exaggeration. I could care less if your appreciation of Arneson or Gygax is greater or lesser -- it is the importance of credit and recognition that I seek. Also, note that Cook (who is perhaps my favorite developer) came along later.
C) Factually speaking, Gygax spent from roughly 77 to 81 claiming that he invented D&D. He did not. It was, from all contemporary reports, this that resulted in the lawsuit. I am not certain why there is a strong dislike of Arneson -- he did, after all, create the game -- and even more interestingly I haven't determined why it is that you think stating factual points about Gygax is somehow lessening his personal contributions, which I already noted are are essential. Both men deserve equal credit -- and neither needs to be raised up as any sort of outstanding paragon. Arneson only escapes significant examination (of adventures and concepts that are drawn from the sources I noted previously: ERB, REH, HR Haggard, Verne) because he is publicly downplayed in order to shift focus back to the known issues of a political independent who, like most folks in his cultural space, disliked Reagan, held ideas promulgated by racist organizations, embraced misogyny, and was grateful he had managed to avoid having to serve in Vietnam. Big ****in whoop.
The publication of books about the effects of environmental and systems mechanics titled survival does not make the game a game about survival -- and the Wilderness Survival Guide wasn't released until 1986, after Gygax has been removed (he was essentially barred in late '85, and formally removed in second quarter '86). The same with Niles' Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, and its infamous Proficiency error, although it came out before WSG. Pardon the corrections to the Names as well -- it was not Dungeon Survival Guide. DSG dealt with the underdark, and both were expansions and development around Proficiency systems -- their names came from the traditional style of Survival guides common to earlier eras, not because the books are about the game being a game of survival.
So while some may have thought you nailed it, they are just as forgetful or ignorant as I have come to expect.
D) That hollow assertion handled, I have to handle a couple others: Even your loop example is not a survival example. It is an adventure example. Survival is, again, a very specific thing. So, no, it is not revisionism nor is it inaccurate or improper. Indeed, it suggests to me that you have not played a survival game, which strikes me as odd and unlikely, but it also tells me you aren't familiar with wargaming, which is not so. But also, you missed the whole point : the original argument was that D&D is, wholly, a survival game. Even you acknowledge that it isn't, wasn't, and is unlikely to ever be such.
E) The "gameplay loop" as you describe it was not, in fact, how the main games were played. That is, Gygax didn't do that. Arneson absolutely didn't do that. Carr didn't do that. Etc. I sure as hell didn't even do that -- I just built gargantuan dungeons until about 82, when I started introducing worldscape and globe spanning stuff in the vein of great explorers. I am not saying that those didn't happen, but they weren't the only kind of games that were played, and never the biggest part of them (certainly not in Arneson's or Gygax's games).
I shudder these days to think of how primitive, ignorant, and uninformed my creations were compared to my knowledge base today (derived from 30 years professionally, which I love to point out was inspired by D&D), but the basics came down to my "open" games being huge dungeons and my group games being complex adventures for the sole, expedient reason that if you are going to have strangers come into a game, then a deep dungeon was the easiest because there was always going to be a large group of folks who never came back that surrounded a small core group of returning players.
It was the end of the 70's and the early 80's. Rules were the last thing anyone gave a rat's ass about unless they benefited them -- in the game and beyond. Do not discount the greater cultural status when talking about any of this -- it always has a feedback cycle.
Also, it isn't the loop you describe that upsets people. It is the argument that early D&D (74 to 83) was a game about killing characters, that death was an enormous problem, and that it was final, you dead, roll a new character. That was, certainly, true at some tables, and in competition play it was the norm, but that wasn't how it was played by anyone involved with the game's development outside of competition play. That's what people get upset -- and even more so when that argument happens because someone is attempting to gatekeep how the game is played today.
Because the argument is not only fallacious and dishonest, but patently so given not only the extensive history of folks who played in their games, but within the game rules itself -- yes, if you reached 0, you were dead; until someone touches you with a rod of resurrection or casts Raise Dead or Reincarnation (the two spells were in the original game, resurrection came later) any of dozens of other things.that were put into the OG rules on purpose because, as I pointed out above, the designers were firm in believing that a dead PC is a lost player.
The problem is that nostalgia is a powerful tool that is often used to make things seem less bad than they really were in "the old days". D&D is a game that constantly evolves.
F) You state:
There were no instructions about role-playing, what it was, how it worked or anything of the sort there was nothing about writing stories or plots and I'm not saying that as some sort of jab or to make point as I don't actually care, but this premise that D&D was some sort of improv theatre from the beginning as a design, sorry... it never existed.
This is incorrect.
For one, it was Tom Moldvay, and he did the revision in late 1980 for 1981 publication. That was the second version.
for another: While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. That is from Men & Magic, from the White box, 1974.
For another, D&D is a game of imagination and the term Role-playing hadn't been coined yet -- they essentially presumed folks would understand that just as with wargaming you are pretending to be the commanders of different units, here you are pretending to be the Fighting Man, Magic User, or Cleric that were the only three options -- so roleplaying, which was the core conceit here, was introduced in the original game. While you can argue that there were not instructions on how to role play, by doing so you ignore the fundamental thing that made D&D different from any other kind of miniatures game (and it was, initially considered a miniatures game): you role play, or pretend to be, these characters. As I previously said, this was new, original, and unheard of. And most important to that is that there was, factuall, some general advice included in all early editions about role playing:
Alignment.
That is the whole purpose of alignment -- to give folks an idea of how to pretend to be this in a different way, a new way. Of course, there were only 3 alignments to start with, and it was determined by race for most beings, but meh.
But also because that improv theatre style is literally what the entire game is about, and how it started out (in the C&C Society, explicitly, in the Twin Cities) -- as an improve game whre Arenson would conure these incredible imaginary things and the intrepid members of the C&C Society would go forth and adventure.
So you are wholly wrong on all parts there.
Also of note but unrelated is that Goblins had better armor than a Beautiful Witch or Amazon (not sure that Wizards will ever release a topless amazon image).
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
All of that said, my little memory trip reminded me of something fascinating in relation to why the evolution of the game will continue, specifically in relation to archetypes.
Magic-Users. The original Magic-User class was meant to incorporate anyone who used magic that wasn't a Cleric. That was an extremely broad archetype -- witches, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, and such. Granted, that was 1974, but that is what all of those classes would be considered back then -- and generally speaking, would be sub-classes of magic user.
The Fighting-Man was meant to be pretty much everything else -- barbarians, Cavaliers, the rest. All sub-classes - all sub-archetypes -- of The Fighting Man.
Cleric was every kind of priest imaginable, including Druids.
Those were the original Archetypes. People who fought, people who used magic, and people who served the Spirits/gods, powers that be.
The upcoming revision will 48 classes. Oh, sorry, 48 sub-classes. That's 16 times the number of archetypes, and we already know they could have come up with tons more.
That's 50 years of change. Of Evolution. I won't be around for most of the next 50, but I am willing to bet it will be even more interesting...
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Guys - the thread is about a hypothetical endstate for 5e. Let's let the ghosts of Gygax, Arneson, and other such bygone personages rest. Whatever you may think of them and their legacies, they have no influence on D&D's development or future anymore.
Speaking personally - I think the current chassis for the game is as good as it's ever been. It's possible they do a big overhaul into a true 6e if one of the new competitors, like Daggerheart or MCDM or PF2.5, really takes off - but I don't see that happening. 5e's chassis is robust enough such that it can emulate nearly every adventure or concept from D&D's past, and popular enough to continue pulling newcomers to the hobby (especially after Baldur's Gate 3 just had yet another zeitgeist explosion.) I expect "5.5e" aka the 2024 books to continue for another 10 years, and then either there will be a huge shift in the hobby that D&D decides to chase, or we'll have another sub-version of 5e in a decade's time that will be compatible with 2014 in broad strokes.
What makes a game survivalist or not is not whether it has encumbrance or weight. It's how much of a focus the rules focus on it, all the mechanics point back to the survivalist aspect. 5e is not survivalist at it's core. Sure, you can turn it that way, usually with House Rules, but at it's core, it's really not. Were the original D&D games survivalist? I don't know, but merely having encumbrance in them doesn't mean they were.
There were certainly rules for light sources, travel time, food consumption, etc. But then, 5e has all those as well. I'm not going to compare between the two, and only partly because my 1e and BX books are in another state, but I just gave the 5e rules for all that stuff a quick look, and I suspect they're at least as detailed as the 1e rules were. (I'd bet on more so, because we now have skills, and exhaustion, and light-level gradiations.)
Are they less prominent now? Probably. Light sources certainly are, because the old-school dungeon crawl is much less a thing now. As for all the mechanics of food and travel, those have always been highly variably used, based on scenario. "Dungeon below the town" was a very common adventure model, and, with the need to retreat to heal up and recharge fairly often, you could easily never really worry about food. In all my early play, I'm pretty sure I never tracked a ration. With 5e's faster recovery mechanics, prolonged expeditions requiring tracking of food and similar resources are a lot more viable. (Holing up in a cleared part of the dungeon for eight hours is much easier than doing it for a week.)
And, of course, for those who don't want to worry about all that, the game has, since the beginning (or at least the basic/advanced split, which is where I came in), provided easy low-level resources to let you never have to worry about all the resource tracking. Don't wanna track torches/oil? Light was first level, and Continuous Light second. Creating food and water was a low-mid-level cleric spell, and everyone had a cleric. (In my current game, the PCs were taking a long expedition away from civilization, and I was starting to talk them through their resource needs, and part-way through, I interrupted myself to say "never mind, you have a cleric". So much for my plans to possibly make them have to hunt up food.)
Guys - the thread is about a hypothetical endstate for 5e. Let's let the ghosts of Gygax, Arneson, and other such bygone personages rest. Whatever you may think of them and their legacies, they have no influence on D&D's development or future anymore.
Speaking personally - I think the current chassis for the game is as good as it's ever been. It's possible they do a big overhaul into a true 6e if one of the new competitors, like Daggerheart or MCDM or PF2.5, really takes off - but I don't see that happening. 5e's chassis is robust enough such that it can emulate nearly every adventure or concept from D&D's past, and popular enough to continue pulling newcomers to the hobby (especially after Baldur's Gate 3 just had yet another zeitgeist explosion.) I expect "5.5e" aka the 2024 books to continue for another 10 years, and then either there will be a huge shift in the hobby that D&D decides to chase, or we'll have another sub-version of 5e in a decade's time that will be compatible with 2014 in broad strokes.
Agreed, though much of it is based in the citation of them for a starting phase as the beginning of a line towards the end state.
The conflict existed long before 2e, and had folks discussing much the same stuff — 40 years, and there are still folks having them.
I agree that the underlying chassis is strong enough, though I am loathe to determine if there will or will not be a significant enough innovation that will force a change in the next ten years.
I suspect much of it will be far more incremental, and that the next generation (that is, the next team it is handed to) will be the ones who seek to shift things. I do not think that the current “architects” will have a full decade in them — and they have guided the game for a very long time.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Speaking personally - I think the current chassis for the game is as good as it's ever been.
I'm a firm believer that 4e was a better system than 5. I'm aware that's a minority opinion, but I'm still right. :) Its problem was that it cut off too many of the ways that people play D&D.
It's possible they do a big overhaul into a true 6e if one of the new competitors, like Daggerheart or MCDM or PF2.5, really takes off - but I don't see that happening. 5e's chassis is robust enough such that it can emulate nearly every adventure or concept from D&D's past, and popular enough to continue pulling newcomers to the hobby (especially after Baldur's Gate 3 just had yet another zeitgeist explosion.) I expect "5.5e" aka the 2024 books to continue for another 10 years, and then either there will be a huge shift in the hobby that D&D decides to chase, or we'll have another sub-version of 5e in a decade's time that will be compatible with 2014 in broad strokes.
We'll probably not see a new edition until the pendulum swings the other way, and 5e's growth slows and player attrition starts to outpace it. It'll happen eventually.
When it does they'll go back to the drawing board, keeping the core D&D ideas (we're never going to see the end of classes), and the best ideas from 5e. (Advantage is probably going to be a fixture for the next edition or two.) Stir in the most interesting ideas from the less-meta side of the indie design pool, and/or return to the well of 4e for the interesting stuff there that's not too tied to the tactical combat model. (If you asked me to design a new edition of D&D today, the character progression might well look like a combination of the multi-level path choices of 4e, mixed with the level-up power-choices from the DIE RPG) Add some new ideas, and there'll be a new D&D. There'll be some who stay with 5e, and it may never hit the cultural moment that 5e did, but it'll do well, and the money people will be happy.
I am very happy with 5e, and don't think I will be buying any of the new rule books after Tasha's. I did pickup Phandelver and Below, was very happy with it both on DDB, and a physical copy. I am a big fan of Phandelver. I like all of the maps they added to the original starter set adventure. I also picked up the Lairs of Etharis and look forward to running it after the holidays. That said I will be looking at the new adventures slated to be out soon, and I just about have everything I really want that is out currently. I might buy a few more books here when they go on sale again. If they keep putting out adventures like the last couple I bought I will keep buying them as long as they work with the 2014 rules which I hope is quite some time.
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CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Speaking personally - I think the current chassis for the game is as good as it's ever been.
I'm a firm believer that 4e was a better system than 5. I'm aware that's a minority opinion, but I'm still right. :) Its problem was that it cut off too many of the ways that people play D&D.
If one really wanted to do hardcore tactical dungeon crawling, 4e is probably the system for it, and all this discourse and my recent poking at VTTs are kind of making me want to break out the 4e books and run a "No world. Only dungeon." game. I'm sure the urge will pass long before I actually do anything about it; I'm just amused.
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Yes there is a handful of people from the 80's here, most of them don't post at all, ever and the few that do typically send me private messages agreeing, but generally fear posting because of how intolerant this community and the moderators are of anyone who doesn't swallow revised version of D&D history.
There is a very long and well-established movement to re-write D&D history by the modern gaming community because they want to make sure that the legacy of their game is politically correct and agree's with their modern sensibilities. It's why Arneson who was a very nice man and gentle soul is prompted up as hero of D&D and Gygax is vilified because he was homophobic and thought women were a weaker sex. I get it, I actually think its kind of sweet, it's just simply not true.
For the record.. I never claimed at any point that there weren't alternative ways to play D&D, but D&D was founded on a playstyle. The combination of genre and game mechanics defines playstyle. You could alter those things and re-define it, but if you just used the game as written, you were playing a Dungeon Crawler Survivor game, because that is what it was designed to be.
With respect, the only person getting offended is you—and I get it, it is always frustrating to be proven dead wrong, but be too stubborn to admit it.
Your problem? You keep talking in absolutes. You keep saying nonsense like “the game was definitely about survival” when what you should be saying is “the game had rules for survival and could be about survival.” You keep ignoring that multiple people are saying “I’ve been playing since the 70s, and it was not a survival game” because it does not fit your narrative.
That is why it looks like you are gatekeeping. You literally are ignoring any “but my way to play also existed” comment and only accepting any playstyle that supports your own narrative. Combine that with your die hard defense of a man who wanted to gatekeep the game so only white male hardcore players would enjoy it? His same gatekeeping which almost killed the game due to his forcing useful talent out of TSR because they did not share his vision? Gygax might have been important in making the game, but the game exists today in spite of that racist, sexist man—not because of him.
I implore you to take a step back and read what others are saying, and maybe realise your view on the game’s history does not comport with everyone’s view. People have been playing this game in a myriad of different ways from the very beginning—and recognising there is no right or wrong or correct or official or historical way to play D&D is an important part of actually having a meaningful conversation, without the gatekeeping that plagues this community.
Please do stop telling me (and likely others) that my personal experience never happened or that I haven’t been playing D&D for decades. My game does not and never has resembled your game but it’s not because I’m on some crusade against Gary Gygax or have any particular affection for Dave Arneson. Specific concerns or issues regarding the foundation of the game and the founders themselves have never had much bearing on the way I play. The idea that I’m trying to rewrite history rather than tell you your experience is not the singular experience of D&D is utterly ridiculous. Get over yourself already.
Can you quote where I said any of that at any point?
Literally every single time you say things like "[t]he game was definitely about survival" you are doing exactly what Born_of_fire74 is saying you are doing. You are using language that presents your experience as if it were objective truth that everyone shared. When someone else responds "but that was not my truth, therefore your absolutist phrase is not correct" you double down with additional language stated in an absolutist way. That makes it look like you do not care about the others' experience; it makes it look like you are not bothering to acknowledge their experiences are just as valid as how you played; it makes it look like you are gatekeeping, trying to say that only your experiences and preferred way to play were the "correct and true" way of playing in the 70s.
If that is not your intent, then I highly suggest you read your posts because that is the message you are conveying, and you might want to work on your writing some.
Here is the reality that your posts keep missing: Other users on this thread have shown that "the game was definitely about survival" is a false statement, and their statements of "the game certainly had survival elements and survivalist players, but other types of playstyle, including my own, existed as well, and (just like today) there is no right or wrong way to play D&D" are far more truthful than the incorrect assertions you keep repeating ad nauseum.
No, that would be a waste of my time but I will leave this here:
”Sealioning refers to the disingenuous action by a commenter of making an ostensible effort to engage in sincere and serious civil debate, usually by asking persistent questions of the other commenter. These questions are phrased in a way that may come off as an effort to learn and engage with the subject at hand, but are really intended to erode the goodwill of the person to whom they are replying, to get them to appear impatient or to lash out, and therefore come off as unreasonable.”
Stop trolling.
It's the difference between reading what I wrote and determining what you think I meant. I wrote exactly what I meant, you don't need to analyze some alternative intent. It also helps to actually use the quote in context as I wrote it, rather than cutting out the parts that reinforce what what you think I meant or what you choose to believe. You're doing both things here, which notably are actually against the trolling policy.
First. What I actually wrote
The context here isn't what I thought the game was about, or how I experienced the game... its very specifically about how the game was designed which I supported with actual mechanics and content that enforced that design. This isn't about my experience or your experience, its about game designed. The game was designed very specifically, very intentionally for dungeon survival.. aka dungeon crawl. That is what the mechanics support, its the play style for which the game was designed.
Your making it sound like it was my preference, my experience or some sort of objective way "everyone" played the game. At no time did I ever say any such thing. This has nothing to do with my experience or your experience, what we did or didn't do in our games. Its about what the game was designed for. The context of which was to discuss the evolution of the game, namely after I pointed out that many of the designs that supported this specific style of play in old school D&D are actually still present in modern D&D. My question was ... why?
No one actually tried to answer that question, it immediately became some sort of assumption that I was instructing people about how the game was played "by everyone" and anyone who disagrees is lying or something. Which is ridiculous, I never said anything of the sort.
Now I fully admit I no longer own any of my boxed sets. I also haven’t looked at any of the myriad of books on my shelves for the editions between those and 5e in several years, easily something like ten. That said, I am certain there were more rules in every edition, especially BECMI, than those that explained dungeon and wilderness survival. I know for a fact there was at least some content in all of them regarding role play and how to pretend to be another person out on adventures in a make believe world. Because that’s the game I played, at the time, from the rules I read in those published books.
In AD&D, the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide were two of what thirty or so handbooks? Yet you want to state that 1st ed was the survival game by definition. How about if I told you I owned both of those Survival Guides but never used more than a paragraph or two out of each the entire years I played that edition? Prolly more than a few charts but, I mean, there’s prolly at least fifty charts in each so still a mere fraction.
The point is, you had your takeaway and I had mine. Not once have I ever said you played some unintended bastardization of the rules but that is all you ever say about anyone who doesn’t share your specific view of the game.
OP wants to know if D&D will ever stop being a thing. The codified rules may change over time, much to some peoples’ dismay, but the fact is that people have been having fun roleplaying since the advent of language and civilization, long before a handful of dudes wrote down some rules in the 70’s. OP might as well be asking if theatre sports such as improv will ever stop being a thing. Hell no and there’s not really a wrong way to do it either.
Sorry to disappoint, but the word "story" didn't even appear in a D&D book until the Moldvey Basic edition of the game and even that was just in the preface. There were no instructions about role-playing, what it was, how it worked or anything of the sort there was nothing about writing stories or plots and I'm not saying that as some sort of jab or to make point as I don't actually care, but this premise that D&D was some sort of improv theatre from the begining as a design, sorry... it never existed. In fact, it wasn't until 2nd edition AD&D anything of the sort was ever addressed. Again, I'm not saying people didn't play it as you describe, I'm just saying as a game design, it was a very mechanical game defined for a very specific style of play.
You had rules for Dungeon Survival that defined, round by round how you execute dungeons. You had the similar rules for Wilderness and sea adventures. Instructions about when to roll for wandering monsters and how often, what charts to use. There were chapters on the function of food, water and light (torches), details about travel distances. Later hex adventures and exploration, then later still how to manage kingdomes. Each one of these things where treated in the same way combat rounds were treated. As Written D&D was basically an adventure board game.
Again, I'm saying anything about how people used D&D or what experiences they had, I have no idea what people where doing in their games, but if the discussion is about game design, these are objective facts. If you chose to ignore those rules and doing something different with the game, that I'm sure happened all the time.
I challenge you to quote where at any point I said or suggested any such thing. That is just a complete, blatant lie!
You’ve done it in the paragraph above. It’s clearly there to for all to see. Telling me that, somehow, when I was playing BECMI because it was cool to pretend to be a different person adventuring in a make believe world, that there were no description of any such thing in the rules. What are statistics if not to help you imagine what type of person you’ve playing, whether they are weak or strong, or sickly or hardy etc.? What are races other than humans for if not to pretend to be other than human? And those are just a few examples of the tons of rules that are guides for roleplaying. It’s ludicrous to claim there were no rules on role play from the very start. It’s a ROLE PLAYING game. It’s kind of sad you seem to think there needs to be instructions on how to make a story or roleplay a character for a clever person to use the game for those purposes.
Again, you have your takeaway, which at no point have I tried to tell you is all in your imagination, and I have mine.
That's setting the net extremely wide, too wide. Just because they've set a limit on what you can carry, that doesn't mean it's about survival or hex crawling or dungeon crawling. Elder Scrolls is none of those things (except maybe dungeon crawling, to an extent) at heart, despite having encumbrance. 5e has weight and encumbrance, yet explicitly says that the portable weight "is high enough that most characters don’t usually have to worry about it" - in other words, they're specifically trying to get away from the feeling of scant resources and trying to survive in a wilderness etc.
What makes a game survivalist or not is not whether it has encumbrance or weight. It's how much of a focus the rules focus on it, all the mechanics point back to the survivalist aspect. 5e is not survivalist at it's core. Sure, you can turn it that way, usually with House Rules, but at it's core, it's really not. Were the original D&D games survivalist? I don't know, but merely having encumbrance in them doesn't mean they were.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
A) I don't have to rewrite history. Arneson completed the rules. He didn't complete the game. You should know better after the last time lol. But also, he created the core concept of the game. Nor is my stuff drawn from later sources -- for the most part, I've ignored reporting after about 90, because, well, I had already met most of them. Regardless, Arneson & Gygax are still credited with the initial rules -- rules that Gygax organized and typed up, but that Arneson still wrote out *at Gary's request*. And as an old B/X player, you already know that neither Gygax nor Arneson wrote it -- that was all a further development of what they did for the OG by Homes. Arneson's completed geomorphs and initial module were replaced by Carr's, and then when Carr's was more popular than B1, they replaced it with B2. Was Gary a bag of *****? Yeah. Does it matter in this context? No. Does it matter in other contexts? Sometimes.
B) Thank you for acknowledging the falsehood and exaggeration. I could care less if your appreciation of Arneson or Gygax is greater or lesser -- it is the importance of credit and recognition that I seek. Also, note that Cook (who is perhaps my favorite developer) came along later.
C) Factually speaking, Gygax spent from roughly 77 to 81 claiming that he invented D&D. He did not. It was, from all contemporary reports, this that resulted in the lawsuit. I am not certain why there is a strong dislike of Arneson -- he did, after all, create the game -- and even more interestingly I haven't determined why it is that you think stating factual points about Gygax is somehow lessening his personal contributions, which I already noted are are essential. Both men deserve equal credit -- and neither needs to be raised up as any sort of outstanding paragon. Arneson only escapes significant examination (of adventures and concepts that are drawn from the sources I noted previously: ERB, REH, HR Haggard, Verne) because he is publicly downplayed in order to shift focus back to the known issues of a political independent who, like most folks in his cultural space, disliked Reagan, held ideas promulgated by racist organizations, embraced misogyny, and was grateful he had managed to avoid having to serve in Vietnam. Big ****in whoop.
The publication of books about the effects of environmental and systems mechanics titled survival does not make the game a game about survival -- and the Wilderness Survival Guide wasn't released until 1986, after Gygax has been removed (he was essentially barred in late '85, and formally removed in second quarter '86). The same with Niles' Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, and its infamous Proficiency error, although it came out before WSG. Pardon the corrections to the Names as well -- it was not Dungeon Survival Guide. DSG dealt with the underdark, and both were expansions and development around Proficiency systems -- their names came from the traditional style of Survival guides common to earlier eras, not because the books are about the game being a game of survival.
So while some may have thought you nailed it, they are just as forgetful or ignorant as I have come to expect.
D) That hollow assertion handled, I have to handle a couple others: Even your loop example is not a survival example. It is an adventure example. Survival is, again, a very specific thing. So, no, it is not revisionism nor is it inaccurate or improper. Indeed, it suggests to me that you have not played a survival game, which strikes me as odd and unlikely, but it also tells me you aren't familiar with wargaming, which is not so. But also, you missed the whole point : the original argument was that D&D is, wholly, a survival game. Even you acknowledge that it isn't, wasn't, and is unlikely to ever be such.
E) The "gameplay loop" as you describe it was not, in fact, how the main games were played. That is, Gygax didn't do that. Arneson absolutely didn't do that. Carr didn't do that. Etc. I sure as hell didn't even do that -- I just built gargantuan dungeons until about 82, when I started introducing worldscape and globe spanning stuff in the vein of great explorers. I am not saying that those didn't happen, but they weren't the only kind of games that were played, and never the biggest part of them (certainly not in Arneson's or Gygax's games).
I shudder these days to think of how primitive, ignorant, and uninformed my creations were compared to my knowledge base today (derived from 30 years professionally, which I love to point out was inspired by D&D), but the basics came down to my "open" games being huge dungeons and my group games being complex adventures for the sole, expedient reason that if you are going to have strangers come into a game, then a deep dungeon was the easiest because there was always going to be a large group of folks who never came back that surrounded a small core group of returning players.
It was the end of the 70's and the early 80's. Rules were the last thing anyone gave a rat's ass about unless they benefited them -- in the game and beyond. Do not discount the greater cultural status when talking about any of this -- it always has a feedback cycle.
Also, it isn't the loop you describe that upsets people. It is the argument that early D&D (74 to 83) was a game about killing characters, that death was an enormous problem, and that it was final, you dead, roll a new character. That was, certainly, true at some tables, and in competition play it was the norm, but that wasn't how it was played by anyone involved with the game's development outside of competition play. That's what people get upset -- and even more so when that argument happens because someone is attempting to gatekeep how the game is played today.
Because the argument is not only fallacious and dishonest, but patently so given not only the extensive history of folks who played in their games, but within the game rules itself -- yes, if you reached 0, you were dead; until someone touches you with a rod of resurrection or casts Raise Dead or Reincarnation (the two spells were in the original game, resurrection came later) any of dozens of other things.that were put into the OG rules on purpose because, as I pointed out above, the designers were firm in believing that a dead PC is a lost player.
The problem is that nostalgia is a powerful tool that is often used to make things seem less bad than they really were in "the old days". D&D is a game that constantly evolves.
F) You state:
This is incorrect.
For one, it was Tom Moldvay, and he did the revision in late 1980 for 1981 publication. That was the second version.
for another: While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. That is from Men & Magic, from the White box, 1974.
For another, D&D is a game of imagination and the term Role-playing hadn't been coined yet -- they essentially presumed folks would understand that just as with wargaming you are pretending to be the commanders of different units, here you are pretending to be the Fighting Man, Magic User, or Cleric that were the only three options -- so roleplaying, which was the core conceit here, was introduced in the original game. While you can argue that there were not instructions on how to role play, by doing so you ignore the fundamental thing that made D&D different from any other kind of miniatures game (and it was, initially considered a miniatures game): you role play, or pretend to be, these characters. As I previously said, this was new, original, and unheard of. And most important to that is that there was, factuall, some general advice included in all early editions about role playing:
Alignment.
That is the whole purpose of alignment -- to give folks an idea of how to pretend to be this in a different way, a new way. Of course, there were only 3 alignments to start with, and it was determined by race for most beings, but meh.
But also because that improv theatre style is literally what the entire game is about, and how it started out (in the C&C Society, explicitly, in the Twin Cities) -- as an improve game whre Arenson would conure these incredible imaginary things and the intrepid members of the C&C Society would go forth and adventure.
So you are wholly wrong on all parts there.
Also of note but unrelated is that Goblins had better armor than a Beautiful Witch or Amazon (not sure that Wizards will ever release a topless amazon image).
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
All of that said, my little memory trip reminded me of something fascinating in relation to why the evolution of the game will continue, specifically in relation to archetypes.
Magic-Users. The original Magic-User class was meant to incorporate anyone who used magic that wasn't a Cleric. That was an extremely broad archetype -- witches, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, and such. Granted, that was 1974, but that is what all of those classes would be considered back then -- and generally speaking, would be sub-classes of magic user.
The Fighting-Man was meant to be pretty much everything else -- barbarians, Cavaliers, the rest. All sub-classes - all sub-archetypes -- of The Fighting Man.
Cleric was every kind of priest imaginable, including Druids.
Those were the original Archetypes. People who fought, people who used magic, and people who served the Spirits/gods, powers that be.
The upcoming revision will 48 classes. Oh, sorry, 48 sub-classes. That's 16 times the number of archetypes, and we already know they could have come up with tons more.
That's 50 years of change. Of Evolution. I won't be around for most of the next 50, but I am willing to bet it will be even more interesting...
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
This is turning into a Gygax debate that should probably be it's own thread?
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Guys - the thread is about a hypothetical endstate for 5e. Let's let the ghosts of Gygax, Arneson, and other such bygone personages rest. Whatever you may think of them and their legacies, they have no influence on D&D's development or future anymore.
Speaking personally - I think the current chassis for the game is as good as it's ever been. It's possible they do a big overhaul into a true 6e if one of the new competitors, like Daggerheart or MCDM or PF2.5, really takes off - but I don't see that happening. 5e's chassis is robust enough such that it can emulate nearly every adventure or concept from D&D's past, and popular enough to continue pulling newcomers to the hobby (especially after Baldur's Gate 3 just had yet another zeitgeist explosion.) I expect "5.5e" aka the 2024 books to continue for another 10 years, and then either there will be a huge shift in the hobby that D&D decides to chase, or we'll have another sub-version of 5e in a decade's time that will be compatible with 2014 in broad strokes.
There were certainly rules for light sources, travel time, food consumption, etc. But then, 5e has all those as well. I'm not going to compare between the two, and only partly because my 1e and BX books are in another state, but I just gave the 5e rules for all that stuff a quick look, and I suspect they're at least as detailed as the 1e rules were. (I'd bet on more so, because we now have skills, and exhaustion, and light-level gradiations.)
Are they less prominent now? Probably. Light sources certainly are, because the old-school dungeon crawl is much less a thing now. As for all the mechanics of food and travel, those have always been highly variably used, based on scenario. "Dungeon below the town" was a very common adventure model, and, with the need to retreat to heal up and recharge fairly often, you could easily never really worry about food. In all my early play, I'm pretty sure I never tracked a ration. With 5e's faster recovery mechanics, prolonged expeditions requiring tracking of food and similar resources are a lot more viable. (Holing up in a cleared part of the dungeon for eight hours is much easier than doing it for a week.)
And, of course, for those who don't want to worry about all that, the game has, since the beginning (or at least the basic/advanced split, which is where I came in), provided easy low-level resources to let you never have to worry about all the resource tracking. Don't wanna track torches/oil? Light was first level, and Continuous Light second. Creating food and water was a low-mid-level cleric spell, and everyone had a cleric. (In my current game, the PCs were taking a long expedition away from civilization, and I was starting to talk them through their resource needs, and part-way through, I interrupted myself to say "never mind, you have a cleric". So much for my plans to possibly make them have to hunt up food.)
Agreed, though much of it is based in the citation of them for a starting phase as the beginning of a line towards the end state.
The conflict existed long before 2e, and had folks discussing much the same stuff — 40 years, and there are still folks having them.
I agree that the underlying chassis is strong enough, though I am loathe to determine if there will or will not be a significant enough innovation that will force a change in the next ten years.
I suspect much of it will be far more incremental, and that the next generation (that is, the next team it is handed to) will be the ones who seek to shift things. I do not think that the current “architects” will have a full decade in them — and they have guided the game for a very long time.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I'm a firm believer that 4e was a better system than 5. I'm aware that's a minority opinion, but I'm still right. :) Its problem was that it cut off too many of the ways that people play D&D.
We'll probably not see a new edition until the pendulum swings the other way, and 5e's growth slows and player attrition starts to outpace it. It'll happen eventually.
When it does they'll go back to the drawing board, keeping the core D&D ideas (we're never going to see the end of classes), and the best ideas from 5e. (Advantage is probably going to be a fixture for the next edition or two.) Stir in the most interesting ideas from the less-meta side of the indie design pool, and/or return to the well of 4e for the interesting stuff there that's not too tied to the tactical combat model. (If you asked me to design a new edition of D&D today, the character progression might well look like a combination of the multi-level path choices of 4e, mixed with the level-up power-choices from the DIE RPG) Add some new ideas, and there'll be a new D&D. There'll be some who stay with 5e, and it may never hit the cultural moment that 5e did, but it'll do well, and the money people will be happy.
I am very happy with 5e, and don't think I will be buying any of the new rule books after Tasha's. I did pickup Phandelver and Below, was very happy with it both on DDB, and a physical copy. I am a big fan of Phandelver. I like all of the maps they added to the original starter set adventure. I also picked up the Lairs of Etharis and look forward to running it after the holidays. That said I will be looking at the new adventures slated to be out soon, and I just about have everything I really want that is out currently. I might buy a few more books here when they go on sale again. If they keep putting out adventures like the last couple I bought I will keep buying them as long as they work with the 2014 rules which I hope is quite some time.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
If one really wanted to do hardcore tactical dungeon crawling, 4e is probably the system for it, and all this discourse and my recent poking at VTTs are kind of making me want to break out the 4e books and run a "No world. Only dungeon." game. I'm sure the urge will pass long before I actually do anything about it; I'm just amused.