But then you're clearly already on fairly the same page as they are, no?
I mean we keep talking about Session 0 and I keep advising people to do a good one, but the truth is I've never once been in a session 0, because back in the day, there wasn't any such thing, at least not that anyone called (first I've heard of it is the last 6 months or so, upon returning to D&D). Mostly with my friends and I, we rotated DMs, and in the cases when we didn't, such as my 2-year stint as a permanent GM for Champions, the GM must made up what he wanted and the players played in it, and we didn't generally have "the talk" before we started. We didn't need the talk because we were all sort of implicitly on just about the same page with things like character death frequency and so forth, so nobody (other than the one guy) got mad or made a fuss and we all mostly had fun.
For instance if we talk about character death and campaign lethality, we started in D&D basic and moved to AD&D and for the first 2 or so years, that's all we knew of RPGs. In those days, characters failed save-or-die pretty regularly, you didn't get too attached, and we did a lot more slashing and hacking than we did actual RPing of our characters. Talking in the character's voice? We didn't do much of that. And if it was in the dungeon, we killed it. Remember those "common rooms" in the old D&D modules with basically Orc or Goblin families, including children? Yeah we (often of good alignment) just wiped them out. They're "evil", so they die. Plus if you don't kill them you get less XP. They're in the dungeon, so they're meant to be killed. That was how we all played, and the DM expected it, and everyone was OK with it.
Until... we got Champions and we started playing superheroes. And in Champions you don't get XP per villain, but a small amount of XP for the whole adventure. You get XP for "completing the adventure" (1 for normal length, 2 if it's very long)... You get XP for being "the same power level" as those you fought (+1 if you were a lot weaker), you get XP for solving non-combat puzzles (+1), and you get XP for "playing in character concept" (+1). That's 4 XP for a long, even-match scenario with puzzle solving and good RPing. Only 1 of which comes from any sort of combat, and the rules say nothing about having to kill enemies. So with that as our basis, we stopped focusing so much on "did we kill everything in the room?" In fact most heroes have a "code against killing" or are "reluctant to kill" so playing "in concept" meant leaving everyone alive -- capture, not kill. Through Champions and its many mechanisms for RP, we learned to play out the dialogue of our characters and act in character, and not just go around killing and looting. Here again, the group of people who were perfectly happy being murder hobos, without a session 0, just as a whole gravitated toward more RP.
But this did not "stay" in Champions, as it were. Once we'd learned it there, we could not unsee it, as it were. When we went back to D&D, we started RPing our alignments more. Good characters would not be willing to clean out Common Rooms of families that weren't doing anything to anyone, even though it cost them XP. DMs would penalize people for acting against alignment. Characters argued with each other about goals. And although nothing existed in the DM Guide at the time about giving awards of XP for RPing, we did so, because we had learned to do it from Champions and we didn't want to play the old way anymore. Again, nobody really talked about this much -- we just did it. The first DM to go started it, and the rest of us followed suit. The first Paladin said, I'm not gunning down a room fool of little orclings, and the other players without prompting argued about it in character (before we talked about XP with each other OOC after resolving the scene, and the DM said not to worry about that, that in fact we would get XP as if we had cleaned out the room, for RPing well). it happened organically.
That works, if all the players are on the same page, and they come to everything organically. Like you, we were all generally happy most of the time -- I mean after all, as I described to my 10 year old nephew whom I just taught to play the game Dungeon and is now curious about D&D, once we started playing D&D, and RPGs like it, we literally never went back. Oh we had the occasional random game night when a DM wasn't quite ready for the next adventure. But if an adventure was ready and everyone could make it, we played the RPG of choice... because we loved them. This wouldn't have been the case unless everyone, both players and GM, was usually happy for the evening.
However, RPGs are different now and there are many more options and accepted ways to play than their used to be. And game groups are not always a bunch of high school kids who grew up playing other games together and going to class together and know each other well before even starting -- and who have been self-selected by the socialization process in school to all be "like each other" because that's how it often works at that age. Lacking that sort of group pre-configuration, session 0 may be necessary to ensure that everyone is on the same page about things like, can my character die just any random old time or is death rare in your campaign? And there are many acceptable ways to set this up, again, as long as everyone at the table is happy with it.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
But then you're clearly already on fairly the same page as they are, no?
I mean we keep talking about Session 0 and I keep advising people to do a good one, but the truth is I've never once been in a session 0, because back in the day, there wasn't any such thing, at least not that anyone called (first I've heard of it is the last 6 months or so, upon returning to D&D). Mostly with my friends and I, we rotated DMs, and in the cases when we didn't, such as my 2-year stint as a permanent GM for Champions, the GM must made up what he wanted and the players played in it, and we didn't generally have "the talk" before we started. We didn't need the talk because we were all sort of implicitly on just about the same page with things like character death frequency and so forth, so nobody (other than the one guy) got mad or made a fuss and we all mostly had fun.
For instance if we talk about character death and campaign lethality, we started in D&D basic and moved to AD&D and for the first 2 or so years, that's all we knew of RPGs. In those days, characters failed save-or-die pretty regularly, you didn't get too attached, and we did a lot more slashing and hacking than we did actual RPing of our characters. Talking in the character's voice? We didn't do much of that. And if it was in the dungeon, we killed it. Remember those "common rooms" in the old D&D modules with basically Orc or Goblin families, including children? Yeah we (often of good alignment) just wiped them out. They're "evil", so they die. Plus if you don't kill them you get less XP. They're in the dungeon, so they're meant to be killed. That was how we all played, and the DM expected it, and everyone was OK with it.
Until... we got Champions and we started playing superheroes. And in Champions you don't get XP per villain, but a small amount of XP for the whole adventure. You get XP for "completing the adventure" (1 for normal length, 2 if it's very long)... You get XP for being "the same power level" as those you fought (+1 if you were a lot weaker), you get XP for solving non-combat puzzles (+1), and you get XP for "playing in character concept" (+1). That's 4 XP for a long, even-match scenario with puzzle solving and good RPing. Only 1 of which comes from any sort of combat, and the rules say nothing about having to kill enemies. So with that as our basis, we stopped focusing so much on "did we kill everything in the room?" In fact most heroes have a "code against killing" or are "reluctant to kill" so playing "in concept" meant leaving everyone alive -- capture, not kill. Through Champions and its many mechanisms for RP, we learned to play out the dialogue of our characters and act in character, and not just go around killing and looting. Here again, the group of people who were perfectly happy being murder hobos, without a session 0, just as a whole gravitated toward more RP.
But this did not "stay" in Champions, as it were. Once we'd learned it there, we could not unsee it, as it were. When we went back to D&D, we started RPing our alignments more. Good characters would not be willing to clean out Common Rooms of families that weren't doing anything to anyone, even though it cost them XP. DMs would penalize people for acting against alignment. Characters argued with each other about goals. And although nothing existed in the DM Guide at the time about giving awards of XP for RPing, we did so, because we had learned to do it from Champions and we didn't want to play the old way anymore. Again, nobody really talked about this much -- we just did it. The first DM to go started it, and the rest of us followed suit. The first Paladin said, I'm not gunning down a room fool of little orclings, and the other players without prompting argued about it in character (before we talked about XP with each other OOC after resolving the scene, and the DM said not to worry about that, that in fact we would get XP as if we had cleaned out the room, for RPing well). it happened organically.
That works, if all the players are on the same page, and they come to everything organically. Like you, we were all generally happy most of the time -- I mean after all, as I described to my 10 year old nephew whom I just taught to play the game Dungeon and is now curious about D&D, once we started playing D&D, and RPGs like it, we literally never went back. Oh we had the occasional random game night when a DM wasn't quite ready for the next adventure. But if an adventure was ready and everyone could make it, we played the RPG of choice... because we loved them. This wouldn't have been the case unless everyone, both players and GM, was usually happy for the evening.
However, RPGs are different now and there are many more options and accepted ways to play than their used to be. And game groups are not always a bunch of high school kids who grew up playing other games together and going to class together and know each other well before even starting -- and who have been self-selected by the socialization process in school to all be "like each other" because that's how it often works at that age. Lacking that sort of group pre-configuration, session 0 may be necessary to ensure that everyone is on the same page about things like, can my character die just any random old time or is death rare in your campaign? And there are many acceptable ways to set this up, again, as long as everyone at the table is happy with it.
session 0
is “character creation time”
do you not have the DM present to verify rolled stats when creating a character?
does the DM not ask for backstories?
does the DM know nothing of your chars at all and have to take your word for it?
”session 0” may be a term you aren’t familiar with in the games you’ve had/played. But the establishment of the world you’re in, the expectations, rules, etc. all happens before your characters even “appear in the world”.
Session 0 in today's terms is usually meant as a session in which expectations are discussed, and things like this. We did not do this -- we just assumed we all had the same expectations, and since we did everything together from going to class to playing outside to RPGs, this assumption was (mostly) correct.
do you not have the DM present to verify rolled stats when creating a character?
A) D&D is the only RPG we played back then that required us to roll stats. Nobody rolls Stats in Champions, which we played far more often than we played D&D. You have to clear your build with the GM but this was usually done ahead of time on a one-on-one basis. If it was a new Champions player an experienced player would sit with that person and help. If it was experienced people we just gave the house rules, like, max active points per power, max pts of Disadvantages you could buy, banned powers, etc. And since we rotated GMs, this was decided by committee ahead of time and then was in force the entire 4 years of high school (with minor tweaks as we learned things or new supplements came out).
B) We trusted each other. Nobody made people sit there and roll stats. And yes, when we were really young (12, 13) some of us (including me) fudged. But even then I didn't cheat by doing things like just giving myself an 18. I would roll the dice and if they absolutely sucked, I would pretend it didn't happen and re-roll. And also, now that I think about it, we allowed re-rolls of anything below a 9 anyway. Roll enough that way and you don't have to cheat for a viable character. By the time we were in 10th grade or so, that kind of nonsense (mild cheating) stopped. We had house rules for all RPGs and we all followed them. I'm not aware of any blatant case of anyone cheating with character creation.
does the DM not ask for backstories?
Sure but we wrote them up on our own and handed them to him. Again we were high school friends. We talked to each other every day. I remember borrowing my mother's typewriter and making up a family tree for several of my characters... the "wizarding" family that had a Magic-user, an illusionist, and a druid in it (all siblings). After typing this up I brought it into school and showed it to all my friends. So it's not like, if I started playing that druid, that the DM didn't already know his family tree. I'd shown it to them last month. Also, again, we played RPGs by committee. Until college, nobody permanent DMed. We took turns. So there was nobody to "approve" a background. You just made it up and unless the entire group found some reason to object (and I don't recall this ever happening), that was it. DMs did not tailor adventures in D&D to PCs... we just used the TSR modules and tweaked them a little (but mostly used them as-is, which is why there were so many deaths).
In Champions background mattered more, but still -- because of rotating GMs, nobody really bothered to do scenarios revolving around one PC. The one guy who did, used his PC as an NPC and ran us through an adventure about his character, which everyone but him thought was incredibly boring. We learned from that not to do it for our own characters, but since we were rotating GMs, it was not practical to do things that would permanently affect someone else's character (he's going to be GM next and can just undo it if he doesn't like it, for instance).
does the DM know nothing of your chars at all and have to take your word for it?
No nothing? Nope. But take our word for it? Until that one "FINE LET HIM DIE!" guy was caught cheating with Endurance and one of the other players and I started not trusting him, yes, we took each other's word for it, 100% of the time. Nobody ever questioned whether I was properly tracking Equinox's STUN or Aaron's hit points. Nobody questioned if I said my saving throw vs. poison was 14. The DM did not double-check me and look it up -- he assumed I had written it properly on my character sheet because I had no reason not to. I distinctly remember playing D&D one-on-one with my best friend over the phone, with him DMing and me playing and having the character sheets (playing 6 characters at once) arrayed before me. (And getting yelled at after 2 hours by my mother for hogging the phone, back in the days before call waiting.) I rolled every single roll without him seeing what I did. I could have cheated. He would not have known.
But again... the thing with rotating DMs is, when you've all been a DM, you've all seen that other side of the screen. To a certain degree, he was DMing over the phone with a fellow DM who happened to be in the player position. In other words, he was DMing for someone who he had trusted a few weeks earlier to have those same characters' lives in his hands as DM and to roll behind the screen. So if he was going to trust me to DM these characters a couple of weeks ago, why wouldn't he trust me to play them now? So yeah, we took each other's word for things. I have a hard time picturing wanting to play with people whose honesty I could not trust.
”session 0” may be a term you aren’t familiar with in the games you’ve had/played. But the establishment of the world you’re in, the expectations, rules, etc. all happens before your characters even “appear in the world”.
Before it yes. In a special dedicated session where we all get together for 3 hours of an evening and work all that stuff out beforehand and don't really actually play during that session? I don't recall doing that. We did have group sessions when training multiple players how to play one of the RPGs (usually, again, Champions). I remember when I and another guy split up and helped 2 other people. We had wildly different ways of doing the teaching -- he just helped the guy make up a character, and they were done while I was still explaining how combat phases work. LOL... But we did not have a session that is much like what people mean today with session 0.
And I don't think we ever, once, had a time when the DM and players sat down and talked about expectations for things like "how much RP will there be" or "how lethal is this campaign." Again, these things were implicitly understood by the fact that we had all been in the same gym class all week, same English class all week, walked home from school together every afternoon, and knew each other's tastes already. And we all kind of had the same vision of D&D, because we all learned it and taught each other together at once.
These things will not be true of people who first start playing as adults, and thus an actual session 0 is more important. I'd do it now, at the start of any campaign... but we didn't really do it then.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I notice that there's a couple of missing options on this poll, which are basically:
Character fails in a way that has bad consequences but is not immediate death.
Character dies heroically (for example, managed to rescue the child...but the character didn't make it)
In general I consider making radical consequences depend on a single die roll problematic, though that's probably something you'd have to decide before rolling (it's the kind of thing 4e would have done with a skill challenge, though 5e doesn't have that mechanic by default).
I advise not killing players for making a bad role when they try to do something heroic. For one, it discourages them from trying to be heroes and I like my players to feel like they can do heroic things. If instant-death is an option on a single d20 roll, then they will remember that and act fearfully, which is boring for everyone. Secondly, unless the player was doing something stupid (e.g. declared they are jumping into the lava) then it's bad for the story. Thirdly, it feels like a punishment for trying to do something cool.
I use a house rule called Fate. Players start the game with 1 Fate point, and can gain them through particularly spectacular, or brave decisions. They are incredibly rarely acquired - by level 4 only one player out of 5 has gained a new Fate point (and he chose to confront a young black dragon that they had accidentally encountered - which I hadn't intended - and chose to sacrifice himself, lucked out on a Command spell and made it fly off). Using a Fate point allows a player to change any single D20 roll that affects their character into a 20, or a 1, after which it is spent. Fate helps players to go for heroic moves without worrying they'll randomly fall off something and die, and it has always worked well for me.
I understand that it's a philosophy thing that D&D supports (aka, the concept of never killing characters), but strictly speaking D&D or perhaps better to say Wizards of the Coast, is a game and company that does the politically correct thing by being all inclusive.
I find the use of Politically Correct here to be curious. Generally the term "PC" in American Culture grew out of disdain from having to acknowledge that "White Straight Male" is not the only way the world exists. In fact talking about it being "Inclusive" as though that's a bad thing often is used as code for "My White Male Straight Character is no longer the default hero and this upsets me". A game shows people of color, multiple genders featured, or has "main characters" in same sex relationships, and some population will get up in arms about how their game is "Ruined" by all this "PC Inclusive crap". It's embarrassing to me as a fellow gamer because I like to think that those of us out there in Fantasy and Sci Fi are the ones leading progressive charges towards greater social equality.
That said if a company wants to sell more of a product by structuring it to appeal to a wider audience, well isn't that what a company should try to do? I mean there is NOTHING wrong with saying "hey, we have fun playing this way". It just means that "Fun" is a funny thing and it varies wildly from person to person. I also consider building and flying rockets in Kerbal Space Program to be fun. My physics students, when they heard it took me 12 hours of "work" to get a space station up and into stable orbit, called it a "waste of time".
We can sit here and argue about it until we are blue in the face, but it is not a fact based discussion because the reality is that, not matter what you or I say "D&D is or isn't" is both wrong and right at the same time. There is nothing you can say about what D&D is or isn't and be wrong, since its by the rules it is everything.
So where we end up is advice on how to run D&D well, what makes for a good game and while we can have opinions about that, we can't be wrong. What I can tell the OP is that by removing character death from the game your game will suck, that is my opinion based on 30 years of playing and running role-playing games.
I disagree that there is no "wrong".
If you and your players are not having fun, then you are doing it "wrong". If you get up at the end of the session and think "I wish I'd just gone to the pub", then you did it "wrong". If your players get up and say "F this, it's my last session with you guys" then you (collectively) did something wrong. Maybe it's not on you as DM. Maybe it is. Maybe this could have been hashed out before the first session by defining goals and expectations. If you were in my game it's likely that we wouldn't mesh and you'd not have fun because I'm not hard core enough. That's fine. If you were to say "I don't care that you've got a back story, I rolled a 10 on this random monster table so you guys have to face 10 of these CR2 monsters; good luck," I don't think I would have fun. It is what it is.
What I can tell the OP is that by removing character death from the game your game will suck,
Repeated for emphasis: No one, not even me, has advocated that.
But again, with my years of gaming, making death ~meaningful~ is the key to making the game engaging and fun. Pointless death is just that: Pointless. Being reminded that the world often hits us with Pointless Deaths is painful. It's not dramatic, it's not exciting, it's not suspenseful. It's just pointless. Now these are my opinions and those of my players. But I play RPG's to get away from the real world. I want to talk about stories that exist outside of our realities. I want them to be fictions where the heroes have chances to be heroic, and villains can be evil. And I want myself and my players to enjoy suspense, drama and excitement.
And like the advice in the DM's guide, my 30 years leads me to use death as a plot point more than a random event outcome.
I don't need to win every game, or have my character never die. In the last 2 weeks I've played and lost 3 games of Arkham Horror 3rd Ed and I'm anxious for a 4th shot at it. But that's a game where that's what makes it exciting. It's not losing I worry about.
We can sit here and argue about it until we are blue in the face, but it is not a fact based discussion because the reality is that, not matter what you or I say "D&D is or isn't" is both wrong and right at the same time. There is nothing you can say about what D&D is or isn't and be wrong, since its by the rules it is everything.
There's still things you write that I disagree with, but at least it seems that we are at least agreeing that we are both playing the same game according to the rules. Yes we apparently interprets and uses them differently, but we are both playing D&D.
And if we go back to OP:
I cannot remember anyone who's said death should never happen in a D&D game. What quite a few of us have said is that we also have other consequences. I stand by my first answer to the OP: I would have given the bard the choice - either you or the kid is going to die. I can do that because I know my player would have made that into a major turning point for his character. If he chose to live, he would change is role. He would regret, he would never forget how he lost his courage when it matters most. To me those moments are what you really remember about a character and the story.
Well the concept of political correctness stems from an over correction to please a small minority and its why I use it as it applies to D&D.
Actually, no.
The "concept" comes from the idea that the actions of those in power were exclusionary or offensive to others and therefore should be amended to include and show respect to them. It's not about pleasing a small minority nearly as much as it's about recognizing that everyone should be respected as people. But that's a debate we can continue in another forum. You've posited your definition, I've done mine, we can move on.
So if it sounds like I have of a bit of a chip on my shoulder, its because I do and rightfully so. The inclusion is for everyone, except for the old dogs who started the whole thing, they are very much excluded by D&D.
And here's where you are 100% fundamentally wrong.
There is nothing in 5th edition DND rules as written stopping you from running a hard core, old school game just like you did with ADnD. Nothing. There are rules for fall damage. There are rules for how far you can run on a turn. There are rules for move actions over various terrain and cover. You can even go so far as to say "at our table we're not going to use death saves" and the rules ~support~ your choice to do that.
So if you want to run 5th edition "old gamer style", you do that! And everyone else in this thread has said, repeatedly and at great length, you SHOULD do that if it's ~What ~Works ~For ~You ~And ~Your ~Players!
Furthermore, no one has come into your house and stolen away your old ADND rule books. I wager that you could probably even find some on Ebay for not too terribly much if you needed to add to them or replace them. Plus it's 2020... scan one and reprint it within your game group. They're so out of print there's no way that WotC is going to knock on your door and demand you hand them over. You are 100% free to literally play old school DnD. No one has taken that from you. No one is going to stand and put a gun to your head and say you MUST play a game that is more inclusive to different styles of players. If you want a game that I, or Godrick or Bio won't want to play, you don't have to! Just play your way for you and your group and have fun!
It's a game we play for fun. You don't like that more casual people, more "story driven people" play a game and call it DnD? Fine, don't like it. But maybe the official forums for 5th edition isn't the place to air that. I'm sure there are corners of the internet that are better suited to those discussions so you don't have all of the "soft gamers" getting in the way with our experiences as to what is or is not fun in an RPG or in DnD 5th Ed.
When D&D was first designed they didn’t have the benefit of 40 years of the hobby, of the internet, of mass scale play tests, of hundreds of genres and thousands of other systems. They were wholly inventing what made sense to them from their own experience. And it’s amazing, revolutionary, worthy of all the praise, but it was the start... not the end of role playing game design. There are many rules from those protean sourcebooks that have benefited with iteration. Many ideas that have been systemically improved in other products, but d&d keep to retain it’s DNA. This doesn’t mean that each time they iterate they improve with each and every change (4e was an interesting but ultimately a failure), but iteration is vital so as to fail forward to find the fun for everyone at the table.
5e has been their most successful version.
wotc is a business. They care about sales, reach and engagement. Niche products that don’t sell don’t interest anyone in business. Taking the game back to its 1e roots just wont sell as much as a product as refined as 5e. How do I know? The play test. How else? Other products have stepped in to represent that old style of gaming (DCC). Wotc are not driven by a social agenda for sales. They are not being inclusive to be cynically inclusive for sales. They are driven by a social agenda because they’re a diverse bunch of creators, writers and artists working on a product that didn’t reflect the world they saw around them. This is design as it has always been; representative of the world around them. Depending on where you live in the world, and when... you can see that reflected in the material; from traced ink drawings from marvel comics by a student in the 70s with half naked chain mail bikinis to the digital art today.
of course, we can all happily agree to disagree on the above. I think it’s important to highlight that not all old timers agree, and neither do all new timers. It’s highly subjective. Thanks for sharing your point of view.
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Rule for drama. Roll for memories. If there isn't a meaningful failure condition, do not roll. Ever. (Perception checks, I'm .... clunk, roll, roll, roll, stop... 14, looking at you... maybe?)
And here's where you are 100% fundamentally wrong.
There is nothing in 5th edition DND rules as written stopping you from running a hard core, old school game just like you did with ADnD. Nothing. There are rules for fall damage. There are rules for how far you can run on a turn. There are rules for move actions over various terrain and cover. You can even go so far as to say "at our table we're not going to use death saves" and the rules ~support~ your choice to do that.
So if you want to run 5th edition "old gamer style", you do that! And everyone else in this thread has said, repeatedly and at great length, you SHOULD do that if it's ~What ~Works ~For ~You ~And ~Your ~Players!
Furthermore, no one has come into your house and stolen away your old ADND rule books. I wager that you could probably even find some on Ebay for not too terribly much if you needed to add to them or replace them. Plus it's 2020... scan one and reprint it within your game group. They're so out of print there's no way that WotC is going to knock on your door and demand you hand them over. You are 100% free to literally play old school DnD. No one has taken that from you. No one is going to stand and put a gun to your head and say you MUST play a game that is more inclusive to different styles of players. If you want a game that I, or Godrick or Bio won't want to play, you don't have to! Just play your way for you and your group and have fun!
It's a game we play for fun. You don't like that more casual people, more "story driven people" play a game and call it DnD? Fine, don't like it. But maybe the official forums for 5th edition isn't the place to air that. I'm sure there are corners of the internet that are better suited to those discussions so you don't have all of the "soft gamers" getting in the way with our experiences as to what is or is not fun in an RPG or in DnD 5th Ed.
While I agree with this stance, I think you're beating your head against the tree to no effect.
There are those of the "old guard" - and certain individuals on this forum - who need to be right. It isn't enough that they are able to build the game the way they want to run it - they want everyone to go back to the "way it used to be", when "real D&D" existed. They want to "correct" the "problems" that 5E has introduced and "ruined" the game. They want to lead people back to "real" D&D. They're out here urging new DMs to convert to their style of gaming, because they want to reclaim the "glory days" of TTRPGs.
They have completely missed the fact that the hobby ( and, to be honest, the world at large ) has diversified, and changed. They haven't been excluded or marginalized, their right to create the kind of game they want to run hasn't been taken away, but they are no longer the onlyfocus - and they can't stand that.
It's amusing, because for certain individuals on the forums, I can almost write their reaction posts to some topics for them. I know what they're going to say ahead of time. It's become a bit of a game seeing if I can pick out standard phrases and claims.
Personally, I think it is constructive to say that: In my experience, if you do A, you get effects B & C in your game, and you end with a game which looks like this. That's helpful, and I think that is what people are fishing for when they ask for opinions on how other people would have handled a situation, or how they approach a facet of the game. Then people can decide if the game they want to see at their table includes B & C, or whether they want to run that kind of game. Maybe yes, maybe no - they get to choose for themselves the kind of game they want.
But for elements of the "old guard" who can't accept not being the dominant style of play anymore, that's not acceptable.
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While I agree with this stance, I think you're beating your head against the tree to no effect.
Eh... I'm always playing for the guys in the stands, not the guys on the field. It's the same reason I'll always respond when my racist aunt posts a false meme on Facebook. I know I'll never change her; she rejects everything that's not in line with her view of the world. But I know her friends are paying attention; my friends are paying attention. I'm making the case to be sure it's being made.
I'm assuming there are a lot of newer DM's reading these posts and it's for them that I want to help create a dialogue not so much on HOW to play, but how to FIND OUT what kind of game their group WANTS to play. In the end, be it Tactical Combat RPG or Story Driven Intrigue RPG, it's a big tent to play in.
Then again, picking at an injury makes it worse. Sometimes it's better to slap a band-aid over something and ignore it until it goes away on its own accord.
If your opponent is in it for the attention, or to find a soapbox, giving it to them might not be the optimal strategy.
You can describe and advocate alternative approaches for "the stands" without engaging the opposition. Engaging the opposition is acceptable - even fruitful - when the opposition is being rational, intelligent, and thoughtfully engaging your points. You can learn a lot that way. When they're being knee-jerk reactionaries ... not so much, and engaging them in fruitless "who can shout loudest" contests just saps your energy.
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I don't think anyone on this thread and several others has disagreed more thoroughly with BigLizard about things, but I'm going to defend BL a little bit here, because I think some of this is accurate but some is unfair.
There are those of the "old guard" - and certain individuals on this forum - who need to be right. It isn't enough that they are able to build the game the way they want to run it - they want everyone to go back to the "way it used to be", when "real D&D" existed. They want to "correct" the "problems" that 5E has introduced and "ruined" the game. They want to lead people back to "real" D&D. They're out here urging new DMs to convert to their style of gaming, because they want to reclaim the "glory days" of TTRPGs.
They have completely missed the fact that the hobby ( and, to be honest, the world at large ) has diversified, and changed. They haven't been excluded or marginalized, their right to create the kind of game they want to run hasn't been taken away, but they are no longer the onlyfocus - and they can't stand that.
To be fair, I don't think this is all of what's going on here.
It's quite clear, based on the writings, that BigLiz and some other people here do want to go back to AD&D, which as others have said, raises the question of why don't they just do that? However, if you read other threads about players not taking the game seriously, and DMs asking "how do I get them to take my game more seriously and stop screwing around?" or "how do I get them to respect that there are consequences?", you will see that this discussion is part of a larger context.
The question of whether to let the dice decide that a character dies, "save vs. poison or die" is really about whether there are "hardcore" consequences in your campaign or not -- the sort of consequences that, unless you ignored the rules, one could not avoid in AD&D. And Liz's point has been, if people played with the consequences, the players would take the game seriously. If you could die from a poison needle on a failed roll, you wouldn't forget to check for traps (or else, like me, you'd never forget after the first time a character died from carelessness). If you had to probe every 10' square of every hallway with a 10' pole to make sure there was no pit trap, you'd take pit traps seriously, and mapping and walking down hallways seriously. If you had to listen at every door to hear bad guys and if failing to do so meant you had to roll for surprise, and a "1" on 1d6 (1/6th of the time) meant you could do nothing while the enemy pounded on you for a whole round, you'd learn to listen at doors. So, not to put words in someone else's forum post, but I think part of the "old school" philosophy here is addressing an issue that has cropped up multiple times in this forum, which is how does a DM get the players to take the game more seriously? And at least one answer to that seems to be, "Go old school on their rear-ends and they will take it seriously." And maybe that's true.
So, although I do think that some of these old school folks think that their way is the "one true way," I think they believe that because they think it will make players take the game more seriously and thus solve the issues that many DMs have been posting about on this forum.
Personally, I think it is constructive to say that: In my experience, if you do A, you get effects B & C in your game, and you end with a game which looks like this. That's helpful, and I think that is what people are fishing for when they ask for opinions on how other people would have handled a situation, or how they approach a facet of the game. But for elements of the "old guard" who can't accept not being the dominant style of play anymore, that's not acceptable.
But I think that is what the old guard folks are saying. That if you do A (with "A" being "play the AD&D way") you will get effects B and C (with "B" being "your players will take the game, and you, more seriously," and "C" being, "In the long run you will have a better game and have more fun.").
I don't necessarily agree with them but I think it is unfair to paint the old school folks as all being about "play my way because it's the right way" -- I mean yes, they seem to think that, but there are some fairly solid reasons behind it. I don't agree with those reasons but I can see the logic.
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Thanks @BioWizard. You said a lot of what I thought.
I have mostly disagreed with @BigLizard, but still - it doesn't mean his arguments hasn't made me think. I have reconsidered and thought about when I ask for rolls, what stakes I put. How and when I use different methods to influence the situation I've put my players in. Thanks to all of you for contributing to that :-)
Although there are a few posts I completely disagree with, I can understand the thought behind most of them. I must say that all in all, I think this discussion has been thorough. People has been invested, and although we have sometimes been completely at odds, the tone has actually stayed quite polite.
This is a tricky line here - because I think you're both right and wrong.
I think it is unfair to categorize all "AD&D Old School" as being in this camp. I think it's inaccurate to say that none of them are. People vary. Once you start referencing "The Old School Folks" as a block, you lose any semblance of accuracy because you are throwing the Baby out with the bathwater.
I agree that if someone is saying is advocating a particular approach, believing it to have a certain result, I can somewhat respect that ( whether or not I fully respect that depends on whether they've actually tried it, or tried something different and noticed a dimunation of that effect - or whether they are just spouting unexamined prejudice as if it were dogma ). Perhaps some of the AD&D crowd think that way. Like you, I might not agree with that, but I can respect that, and that it works for them.
These people I can engage with. Like I said when the opposition is being rational, intelligent, and thoughtfully engaging your points, you can learn a lot, and perhaps even modify and improve your own position and your table.
But the "one true wayers" cause me a considerable amount of eyestrain from all the rolling.
And, I actually agree that there needs to be a consistent set of plausible behaviors of the game world - or it's not really a game, it's a bunch of people sitting around engaged in creating collaborative fiction. There's nothing wrong with that - I'm sure it's an enjoyable activity - but it can be argued that's no longer a structured game.
However, I disagree that you need to make your Players listen at every door, and tap every 10' square with a pole, or kill them, to make them pay attention. Player choices which are insignificant, meaningless, and repetitive, are pointless to include in your game.
It's not an either/or. It's not Old School or Chaos, as much as some of the AD&D crowd might want you to believe that. It's totally possible to have a well structured, consistent, flowing, and well behaved 5e game.
Falling back to what you believe always worked ( although humans have horrible self-serving, self-editing, idealized memories ), rather than trying to find new ways to make things work under the new system is just lazy.
In the larger discussion, I don't believe you can make your Players take your game more seriously, or behave as if there are consequences - simply because people approach the table with different attitudes and different goals. The guy who has a high pressure job and wants to kick back, drink beer, kick in doors, kill monsters, and get loot; the 12 year old who wants to just run around in gonzo style and do ludicrous things; the Critter who wants to play Character-centric style; the tactical wargamer who wants an endless supply of combat - none of these are wrong. None of these need to be "educated". You don't have Players doing it wrong, and the GM needs to correct them, or teach them a lesson.
What you have is a disconnect between what the Player wants, and what the GM wants. The GM wants a serious narrative, and the Players want to "kill monsters and get loot"? The GM wants to run a hardcore tactical game, and is tearing their hair out because the Players just sit around talking all the time? That's just a table mismatch. No one needs to be corrected, or punished. The game doesn't need to revert to AD&D. You just need to shuffle the group so that all the participants are on the same page.
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Hey, I am an old schooler too. D&D basic and then AD&D taught me RPGs.
I found that I preferred, and largely switched over to, Champions after 1983 or so... but AD&D is still where I got my start, and I still think some of the features of AD&D that no longer exist, were good, and I miss them. And a few of them might enhance play.
I'm just not as willing to tell other people they're doing it "wrong." Except that I strongly believe if you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. But that's much more abstract and holds true across all games, not only RPGs. (Why play a game if it's not fun?)
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I think it is unfair to categorize all "AD&D Old School" as being in this camp. I think it's inaccurate to say that none of them are. People vary. Once you start referencing "The Old School Folks" as a block, you lose any semblance of accuracy because you are throwing the Baby out with the bathwater.
As I said, I am old school also. I mostly used that euphemism to avoid seeming like I was trying to call out just one person. I was trying to be polite.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'm not sure what makes one "old school". I would not classify myself as such - even though I started D&D with the Red Box/Blue Box in grade school in 1978, transitioning to the AD&D black books in University in the mid 1980s ( with side jaunts in Traveller, Shadowrun, and a brief stint with The Morrow Project ). I'm also on record with the opinion that time served is of zero value; all that matters is how capable of running a game now, you are.
I would agree that any edition - AD&D included - contains double fistfulls of techniques, mechanics, and design philosophies. None of those tools is good or bad. They're just tools which either contribute to the results you want, or not.
Know that kind of game you want, match yourself with Players which want the same thing, and use the tools which contribute to that desired end. That's my approach, and if someone wants advice, I'll give it to them, but I'm aware that they might not want the same outcomes I do. That's OK.
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...with side jaunts in Traveller, Shadowrun, and a brief stint with The Morrow Project ).
Aaah.... 1e shadowrun. the lovely halcyon memories. :) I had one player, George, die 6 times in the same campaign - he was a meme before memes. Each death more ridiculous than the last, one of the most unlucky dice rollers I've ever met. I did the completely idiotic thing and swapped 400 progs (issues) (all in sequence, no missing issues) of 2000AD comic books for a full suite of SR books (they really did splat books well). I was entranced by the world building, and I remember absolutely loving their totally innovative damage system, although we immediately house ruled grenades to make them actually deadly.
I read the current rules are terrible... shrug, but its fine, there's more than enough good to engage with (tales from the loop, symbaroum, mouseguard, mutant year zero, and good ol' 5e d&d). Thanks for the memberries. ;)
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Rule for drama. Roll for memories. If there isn't a meaningful failure condition, do not roll. Ever. (Perception checks, I'm .... clunk, roll, roll, roll, stop... 14, looking at you... maybe?)
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But then you're clearly already on fairly the same page as they are, no?
I mean we keep talking about Session 0 and I keep advising people to do a good one, but the truth is I've never once been in a session 0, because back in the day, there wasn't any such thing, at least not that anyone called (first I've heard of it is the last 6 months or so, upon returning to D&D). Mostly with my friends and I, we rotated DMs, and in the cases when we didn't, such as my 2-year stint as a permanent GM for Champions, the GM must made up what he wanted and the players played in it, and we didn't generally have "the talk" before we started. We didn't need the talk because we were all sort of implicitly on just about the same page with things like character death frequency and so forth, so nobody (other than the one guy) got mad or made a fuss and we all mostly had fun.
For instance if we talk about character death and campaign lethality, we started in D&D basic and moved to AD&D and for the first 2 or so years, that's all we knew of RPGs. In those days, characters failed save-or-die pretty regularly, you didn't get too attached, and we did a lot more slashing and hacking than we did actual RPing of our characters. Talking in the character's voice? We didn't do much of that. And if it was in the dungeon, we killed it. Remember those "common rooms" in the old D&D modules with basically Orc or Goblin families, including children? Yeah we (often of good alignment) just wiped them out. They're "evil", so they die. Plus if you don't kill them you get less XP. They're in the dungeon, so they're meant to be killed. That was how we all played, and the DM expected it, and everyone was OK with it.
Until... we got Champions and we started playing superheroes. And in Champions you don't get XP per villain, but a small amount of XP for the whole adventure. You get XP for "completing the adventure" (1 for normal length, 2 if it's very long)... You get XP for being "the same power level" as those you fought (+1 if you were a lot weaker), you get XP for solving non-combat puzzles (+1), and you get XP for "playing in character concept" (+1). That's 4 XP for a long, even-match scenario with puzzle solving and good RPing. Only 1 of which comes from any sort of combat, and the rules say nothing about having to kill enemies. So with that as our basis, we stopped focusing so much on "did we kill everything in the room?" In fact most heroes have a "code against killing" or are "reluctant to kill" so playing "in concept" meant leaving everyone alive -- capture, not kill. Through Champions and its many mechanisms for RP, we learned to play out the dialogue of our characters and act in character, and not just go around killing and looting. Here again, the group of people who were perfectly happy being murder hobos, without a session 0, just as a whole gravitated toward more RP.
But this did not "stay" in Champions, as it were. Once we'd learned it there, we could not unsee it, as it were. When we went back to D&D, we started RPing our alignments more. Good characters would not be willing to clean out Common Rooms of families that weren't doing anything to anyone, even though it cost them XP. DMs would penalize people for acting against alignment. Characters argued with each other about goals. And although nothing existed in the DM Guide at the time about giving awards of XP for RPing, we did so, because we had learned to do it from Champions and we didn't want to play the old way anymore. Again, nobody really talked about this much -- we just did it. The first DM to go started it, and the rest of us followed suit. The first Paladin said, I'm not gunning down a room fool of little orclings, and the other players without prompting argued about it in character (before we talked about XP with each other OOC after resolving the scene, and the DM said not to worry about that, that in fact we would get XP as if we had cleaned out the room, for RPing well). it happened organically.
That works, if all the players are on the same page, and they come to everything organically. Like you, we were all generally happy most of the time -- I mean after all, as I described to my 10 year old nephew whom I just taught to play the game Dungeon and is now curious about D&D, once we started playing D&D, and RPGs like it, we literally never went back. Oh we had the occasional random game night when a DM wasn't quite ready for the next adventure. But if an adventure was ready and everyone could make it, we played the RPG of choice... because we loved them. This wouldn't have been the case unless everyone, both players and GM, was usually happy for the evening.
However, RPGs are different now and there are many more options and accepted ways to play than their used to be. And game groups are not always a bunch of high school kids who grew up playing other games together and going to class together and know each other well before even starting -- and who have been self-selected by the socialization process in school to all be "like each other" because that's how it often works at that age. Lacking that sort of group pre-configuration, session 0 may be necessary to ensure that everyone is on the same page about things like, can my character die just any random old time or is death rare in your campaign? And there are many acceptable ways to set this up, again, as long as everyone at the table is happy with it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
session 0
is “character creation time”
do you not have the DM present to verify rolled stats when creating a character?
does the DM not ask for backstories?
does the DM know nothing of your chars at all and have to take your word for it?
”session 0” may be a term you aren’t familiar with in the games you’ve had/played. But the establishment of the world you’re in, the expectations, rules, etc. all happens before your characters even “appear in the world”.
some DMs do it better than others. Obviously.
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Session 0 in today's terms is usually meant as a session in which expectations are discussed, and things like this. We did not do this -- we just assumed we all had the same expectations, and since we did everything together from going to class to playing outside to RPGs, this assumption was (mostly) correct.
A) D&D is the only RPG we played back then that required us to roll stats. Nobody rolls Stats in Champions, which we played far more often than we played D&D. You have to clear your build with the GM but this was usually done ahead of time on a one-on-one basis. If it was a new Champions player an experienced player would sit with that person and help. If it was experienced people we just gave the house rules, like, max active points per power, max pts of Disadvantages you could buy, banned powers, etc. And since we rotated GMs, this was decided by committee ahead of time and then was in force the entire 4 years of high school (with minor tweaks as we learned things or new supplements came out).
B) We trusted each other. Nobody made people sit there and roll stats. And yes, when we were really young (12, 13) some of us (including me) fudged. But even then I didn't cheat by doing things like just giving myself an 18. I would roll the dice and if they absolutely sucked, I would pretend it didn't happen and re-roll. And also, now that I think about it, we allowed re-rolls of anything below a 9 anyway. Roll enough that way and you don't have to cheat for a viable character. By the time we were in 10th grade or so, that kind of nonsense (mild cheating) stopped. We had house rules for all RPGs and we all followed them. I'm not aware of any blatant case of anyone cheating with character creation.
Sure but we wrote them up on our own and handed them to him. Again we were high school friends. We talked to each other every day. I remember borrowing my mother's typewriter and making up a family tree for several of my characters... the "wizarding" family that had a Magic-user, an illusionist, and a druid in it (all siblings). After typing this up I brought it into school and showed it to all my friends. So it's not like, if I started playing that druid, that the DM didn't already know his family tree. I'd shown it to them last month. Also, again, we played RPGs by committee. Until college, nobody permanent DMed. We took turns. So there was nobody to "approve" a background. You just made it up and unless the entire group found some reason to object (and I don't recall this ever happening), that was it. DMs did not tailor adventures in D&D to PCs... we just used the TSR modules and tweaked them a little (but mostly used them as-is, which is why there were so many deaths).
In Champions background mattered more, but still -- because of rotating GMs, nobody really bothered to do scenarios revolving around one PC. The one guy who did, used his PC as an NPC and ran us through an adventure about his character, which everyone but him thought was incredibly boring. We learned from that not to do it for our own characters, but since we were rotating GMs, it was not practical to do things that would permanently affect someone else's character (he's going to be GM next and can just undo it if he doesn't like it, for instance).
No nothing? Nope. But take our word for it? Until that one "FINE LET HIM DIE!" guy was caught cheating with Endurance and one of the other players and I started not trusting him, yes, we took each other's word for it, 100% of the time. Nobody ever questioned whether I was properly tracking Equinox's STUN or Aaron's hit points. Nobody questioned if I said my saving throw vs. poison was 14. The DM did not double-check me and look it up -- he assumed I had written it properly on my character sheet because I had no reason not to. I distinctly remember playing D&D one-on-one with my best friend over the phone, with him DMing and me playing and having the character sheets (playing 6 characters at once) arrayed before me. (And getting yelled at after 2 hours by my mother for hogging the phone, back in the days before call waiting.) I rolled every single roll without him seeing what I did. I could have cheated. He would not have known.
But again... the thing with rotating DMs is, when you've all been a DM, you've all seen that other side of the screen. To a certain degree, he was DMing over the phone with a fellow DM who happened to be in the player position. In other words, he was DMing for someone who he had trusted a few weeks earlier to have those same characters' lives in his hands as DM and to roll behind the screen. So if he was going to trust me to DM these characters a couple of weeks ago, why wouldn't he trust me to play them now? So yeah, we took each other's word for things. I have a hard time picturing wanting to play with people whose honesty I could not trust.
Before it yes. In a special dedicated session where we all get together for 3 hours of an evening and work all that stuff out beforehand and don't really actually play during that session? I don't recall doing that. We did have group sessions when training multiple players how to play one of the RPGs (usually, again, Champions). I remember when I and another guy split up and helped 2 other people. We had wildly different ways of doing the teaching -- he just helped the guy make up a character, and they were done while I was still explaining how combat phases work. LOL... But we did not have a session that is much like what people mean today with session 0.
And I don't think we ever, once, had a time when the DM and players sat down and talked about expectations for things like "how much RP will there be" or "how lethal is this campaign." Again, these things were implicitly understood by the fact that we had all been in the same gym class all week, same English class all week, walked home from school together every afternoon, and knew each other's tastes already. And we all kind of had the same vision of D&D, because we all learned it and taught each other together at once.
These things will not be true of people who first start playing as adults, and thus an actual session 0 is more important. I'd do it now, at the start of any campaign... but we didn't really do it then.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I notice that there's a couple of missing options on this poll, which are basically:
In general I consider making radical consequences depend on a single die roll problematic, though that's probably something you'd have to decide before rolling (it's the kind of thing 4e would have done with a skill challenge, though 5e doesn't have that mechanic by default).
This my favorite social experiment on this site
Bardic Inspiration is just someone believing in you, and I believe in you
I advise not killing players for making a bad role when they try to do something heroic. For one, it discourages them from trying to be heroes and I like my players to feel like they can do heroic things. If instant-death is an option on a single d20 roll, then they will remember that and act fearfully, which is boring for everyone. Secondly, unless the player was doing something stupid (e.g. declared they are jumping into the lava) then it's bad for the story. Thirdly, it feels like a punishment for trying to do something cool.
I use a house rule called Fate. Players start the game with 1 Fate point, and can gain them through particularly spectacular, or brave decisions. They are incredibly rarely acquired - by level 4 only one player out of 5 has gained a new Fate point (and he chose to confront a young black dragon that they had accidentally encountered - which I hadn't intended - and chose to sacrifice himself, lucked out on a Command spell and made it fly off). Using a Fate point allows a player to change any single D20 roll that affects their character into a 20, or a 1, after which it is spent. Fate helps players to go for heroic moves without worrying they'll randomly fall off something and die, and it has always worked well for me.
I find the use of Politically Correct here to be curious. Generally the term "PC" in American Culture grew out of disdain from having to acknowledge that "White Straight Male" is not the only way the world exists. In fact talking about it being "Inclusive" as though that's a bad thing often is used as code for "My White Male Straight Character is no longer the default hero and this upsets me". A game shows people of color, multiple genders featured, or has "main characters" in same sex relationships, and some population will get up in arms about how their game is "Ruined" by all this "PC Inclusive crap". It's embarrassing to me as a fellow gamer because I like to think that those of us out there in Fantasy and Sci Fi are the ones leading progressive charges towards greater social equality.
That said if a company wants to sell more of a product by structuring it to appeal to a wider audience, well isn't that what a company should try to do? I mean there is NOTHING wrong with saying "hey, we have fun playing this way". It just means that "Fun" is a funny thing and it varies wildly from person to person. I also consider building and flying rockets in Kerbal Space Program to be fun. My physics students, when they heard it took me 12 hours of "work" to get a space station up and into stable orbit, called it a "waste of time".
I disagree that there is no "wrong".
If you and your players are not having fun, then you are doing it "wrong". If you get up at the end of the session and think "I wish I'd just gone to the pub", then you did it "wrong". If your players get up and say "F this, it's my last session with you guys" then you (collectively) did something wrong. Maybe it's not on you as DM. Maybe it is. Maybe this could have been hashed out before the first session by defining goals and expectations. If you were in my game it's likely that we wouldn't mesh and you'd not have fun because I'm not hard core enough. That's fine. If you were to say "I don't care that you've got a back story, I rolled a 10 on this random monster table so you guys have to face 10 of these CR2 monsters; good luck," I don't think I would have fun. It is what it is.
Repeated for emphasis: No one, not even me, has advocated that.
But again, with my years of gaming, making death ~meaningful~ is the key to making the game engaging and fun. Pointless death is just that: Pointless. Being reminded that the world often hits us with Pointless Deaths is painful. It's not dramatic, it's not exciting, it's not suspenseful. It's just pointless. Now these are my opinions and those of my players. But I play RPG's to get away from the real world. I want to talk about stories that exist outside of our realities. I want them to be fictions where the heroes have chances to be heroic, and villains can be evil. And I want myself and my players to enjoy suspense, drama and excitement.
And like the advice in the DM's guide, my 30 years leads me to use death as a plot point more than a random event outcome.
I don't need to win every game, or have my character never die. In the last 2 weeks I've played and lost 3 games of Arkham Horror 3rd Ed and I'm anxious for a 4th shot at it. But that's a game where that's what makes it exciting. It's not losing I worry about.
It's not having fun that scares me.
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There's still things you write that I disagree with, but at least it seems that we are at least agreeing that we are both playing the same game according to the rules. Yes we apparently interprets and uses them differently, but we are both playing D&D.
And if we go back to OP:
I cannot remember anyone who's said death should never happen in a D&D game. What quite a few of us have said is that we also have other consequences. I stand by my first answer to the OP: I would have given the bard the choice - either you or the kid is going to die. I can do that because I know my player would have made that into a major turning point for his character. If he chose to live, he would change is role. He would regret, he would never forget how he lost his courage when it matters most. To me those moments are what you really remember about a character and the story.
Ludo ergo sum!
Actually, no.
The "concept" comes from the idea that the actions of those in power were exclusionary or offensive to others and therefore should be amended to include and show respect to them. It's not about pleasing a small minority nearly as much as it's about recognizing that everyone should be respected as people. But that's a debate we can continue in another forum. You've posited your definition, I've done mine, we can move on.
And here's where you are 100% fundamentally wrong.
There is nothing in 5th edition DND rules as written stopping you from running a hard core, old school game just like you did with ADnD. Nothing. There are rules for fall damage. There are rules for how far you can run on a turn. There are rules for move actions over various terrain and cover. You can even go so far as to say "at our table we're not going to use death saves" and the rules ~support~ your choice to do that.
So if you want to run 5th edition "old gamer style", you do that! And everyone else in this thread has said, repeatedly and at great length, you SHOULD do that if it's ~What ~Works ~For ~You ~And ~Your ~Players!
Furthermore, no one has come into your house and stolen away your old ADND rule books. I wager that you could probably even find some on Ebay for not too terribly much if you needed to add to them or replace them. Plus it's 2020... scan one and reprint it within your game group. They're so out of print there's no way that WotC is going to knock on your door and demand you hand them over. You are 100% free to literally play old school DnD. No one has taken that from you. No one is going to stand and put a gun to your head and say you MUST play a game that is more inclusive to different styles of players. If you want a game that I, or Godrick or Bio won't want to play, you don't have to! Just play your way for you and your group and have fun!
It's a game we play for fun. You don't like that more casual people, more "story driven people" play a game and call it DnD? Fine, don't like it. But maybe the official forums for 5th edition isn't the place to air that. I'm sure there are corners of the internet that are better suited to those discussions so you don't have all of the "soft gamers" getting in the way with our experiences as to what is or is not fun in an RPG or in DnD 5th Ed.
"Teller of tales, dreamer of dreams"
Tips, Tricks, Maps: Lantern Noir Presents
**Streams hosted at at twitch.tv/LaternNoir
When D&D was first designed they didn’t have the benefit of 40 years of the hobby, of the internet, of mass scale play tests, of hundreds of genres and thousands of other systems. They were wholly inventing what made sense to them from their own experience. And it’s amazing, revolutionary, worthy of all the praise, but it was the start... not the end of role playing game design. There are many rules from those protean sourcebooks that have benefited with iteration. Many ideas that have been systemically improved in other products, but d&d keep to retain it’s DNA. This doesn’t mean that each time they iterate they improve with each and every change (4e was an interesting but ultimately a failure), but iteration is vital so as to fail forward to find the fun for everyone at the table.
5e has been their most successful version.
wotc is a business. They care about sales, reach and engagement. Niche products that don’t sell don’t interest anyone in business. Taking the game back to its 1e roots just wont sell as much as a product as refined as 5e. How do I know? The play test. How else? Other products have stepped in to represent that old style of gaming (DCC). Wotc are not driven by a social agenda for sales. They are not being inclusive to be cynically inclusive for sales. They are driven by a social agenda because they’re a diverse bunch of creators, writers and artists working on a product that didn’t reflect the world they saw around them. This is design as it has always been; representative of the world around them. Depending on where you live in the world, and when... you can see that reflected in the material; from traced ink drawings from marvel comics by a student in the 70s with half naked chain mail bikinis to the digital art today.
of course, we can all happily agree to disagree on the above. I think it’s important to highlight that not all old timers agree, and neither do all new timers. It’s highly subjective. Thanks for sharing your point of view.
Rule for drama. Roll for memories.
If there isn't a meaningful failure condition, do not roll. Ever. (Perception checks, I'm .... clunk, roll, roll, roll, stop... 14, looking at you... maybe?)
While I agree with this stance, I think you're beating your head against the tree to no effect.
There are those of the "old guard" - and certain individuals on this forum - who need to be right. It isn't enough that they are able to build the game the way they want to run it - they want everyone to go back to the "way it used to be", when "real D&D" existed. They want to "correct" the "problems" that 5E has introduced and "ruined" the game. They want to lead people back to "real" D&D. They're out here urging new DMs to convert to their style of gaming, because they want to reclaim the "glory days" of TTRPGs.
They have completely missed the fact that the hobby ( and, to be honest, the world at large ) has diversified, and changed. They haven't been excluded or marginalized, their right to create the kind of game they want to run hasn't been taken away, but they are no longer the only focus - and they can't stand that.
It's amusing, because for certain individuals on the forums, I can almost write their reaction posts to some topics for them. I know what they're going to say ahead of time. It's become a bit of a game seeing if I can pick out standard phrases and claims.
Personally, I think it is constructive to say that: In my experience, if you do A, you get effects B & C in your game, and you end with a game which looks like this. That's helpful, and I think that is what people are fishing for when they ask for opinions on how other people would have handled a situation, or how they approach a facet of the game. Then people can decide if the game they want to see at their table includes B & C, or whether they want to run that kind of game. Maybe yes, maybe no - they get to choose for themselves the kind of game they want.
But for elements of the "old guard" who can't accept not being the dominant style of play anymore, that's not acceptable.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Eh... I'm always playing for the guys in the stands, not the guys on the field. It's the same reason I'll always respond when my racist aunt posts a false meme on Facebook. I know I'll never change her; she rejects everything that's not in line with her view of the world. But I know her friends are paying attention; my friends are paying attention. I'm making the case to be sure it's being made.
I'm assuming there are a lot of newer DM's reading these posts and it's for them that I want to help create a dialogue not so much on HOW to play, but how to FIND OUT what kind of game their group WANTS to play. In the end, be it Tactical Combat RPG or Story Driven Intrigue RPG, it's a big tent to play in.
"Teller of tales, dreamer of dreams"
Tips, Tricks, Maps: Lantern Noir Presents
**Streams hosted at at twitch.tv/LaternNoir
I can respect that :)
Then again, picking at an injury makes it worse. Sometimes it's better to slap a band-aid over something and ignore it until it goes away on its own accord.
If your opponent is in it for the attention, or to find a soapbox, giving it to them might not be the optimal strategy.
You can describe and advocate alternative approaches for "the stands" without engaging the opposition. Engaging the opposition is acceptable - even fruitful - when the opposition is being rational, intelligent, and thoughtfully engaging your points. You can learn a lot that way. When they're being knee-jerk reactionaries ... not so much, and engaging them in fruitless "who can shout loudest" contests just saps your energy.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
To be fair, I don't think this is all of what's going on here.
It's quite clear, based on the writings, that BigLiz and some other people here do want to go back to AD&D, which as others have said, raises the question of why don't they just do that? However, if you read other threads about players not taking the game seriously, and DMs asking "how do I get them to take my game more seriously and stop screwing around?" or "how do I get them to respect that there are consequences?", you will see that this discussion is part of a larger context.
The question of whether to let the dice decide that a character dies, "save vs. poison or die" is really about whether there are "hardcore" consequences in your campaign or not -- the sort of consequences that, unless you ignored the rules, one could not avoid in AD&D. And Liz's point has been, if people played with the consequences, the players would take the game seriously. If you could die from a poison needle on a failed roll, you wouldn't forget to check for traps (or else, like me, you'd never forget after the first time a character died from carelessness). If you had to probe every 10' square of every hallway with a 10' pole to make sure there was no pit trap, you'd take pit traps seriously, and mapping and walking down hallways seriously. If you had to listen at every door to hear bad guys and if failing to do so meant you had to roll for surprise, and a "1" on 1d6 (1/6th of the time) meant you could do nothing while the enemy pounded on you for a whole round, you'd learn to listen at doors. So, not to put words in someone else's forum post, but I think part of the "old school" philosophy here is addressing an issue that has cropped up multiple times in this forum, which is how does a DM get the players to take the game more seriously? And at least one answer to that seems to be, "Go old school on their rear-ends and they will take it seriously." And maybe that's true.
So, although I do think that some of these old school folks think that their way is the "one true way," I think they believe that because they think it will make players take the game more seriously and thus solve the issues that many DMs have been posting about on this forum.
But I think that is what the old guard folks are saying. That if you do A (with "A" being "play the AD&D way") you will get effects B and C (with "B" being "your players will take the game, and you, more seriously," and "C" being, "In the long run you will have a better game and have more fun.").
I don't necessarily agree with them but I think it is unfair to paint the old school folks as all being about "play my way because it's the right way" -- I mean yes, they seem to think that, but there are some fairly solid reasons behind it. I don't agree with those reasons but I can see the logic.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks @BioWizard. You said a lot of what I thought.
I have mostly disagreed with @BigLizard, but still - it doesn't mean his arguments hasn't made me think. I have reconsidered and thought about when I ask for rolls, what stakes I put. How and when I use different methods to influence the situation I've put my players in. Thanks to all of you for contributing to that :-)
Although there are a few posts I completely disagree with, I can understand the thought behind most of them. I must say that all in all, I think this discussion has been thorough. People has been invested, and although we have sometimes been completely at odds, the tone has actually stayed quite polite.
Ludo ergo sum!
@BioWizard
This is a tricky line here - because I think you're both right and wrong.
I think it is unfair to categorize all "AD&D Old School" as being in this camp. I think it's inaccurate to say that none of them are. People vary. Once you start referencing "The Old School Folks" as a block, you lose any semblance of accuracy because you are throwing the Baby out with the bathwater.
I agree that if someone is saying is advocating a particular approach, believing it to have a certain result, I can somewhat respect that ( whether or not I fully respect that depends on whether they've actually tried it, or tried something different and noticed a dimunation of that effect - or whether they are just spouting unexamined prejudice as if it were dogma ). Perhaps some of the AD&D crowd think that way. Like you, I might not agree with that, but I can respect that, and that it works for them.
These people I can engage with. Like I said when the opposition is being rational, intelligent, and thoughtfully engaging your points, you can learn a lot, and perhaps even modify and improve your own position and your table.
But the "one true wayers" cause me a considerable amount of eyestrain from all the rolling.
And, I actually agree that there needs to be a consistent set of plausible behaviors of the game world - or it's not really a game, it's a bunch of people sitting around engaged in creating collaborative fiction. There's nothing wrong with that - I'm sure it's an enjoyable activity - but it can be argued that's no longer a structured game.
However, I disagree that you need to make your Players listen at every door, and tap every 10' square with a pole, or kill them, to make them pay attention. Player choices which are insignificant, meaningless, and repetitive, are pointless to include in your game.
It's not an either/or. It's not Old School or Chaos, as much as some of the AD&D crowd might want you to believe that. It's totally possible to have a well structured, consistent, flowing, and well behaved 5e game.
Falling back to what you believe always worked ( although humans have horrible self-serving, self-editing, idealized memories ), rather than trying to find new ways to make things work under the new system is just lazy.
In the larger discussion, I don't believe you can make your Players take your game more seriously, or behave as if there are consequences - simply because people approach the table with different attitudes and different goals. The guy who has a high pressure job and wants to kick back, drink beer, kick in doors, kill monsters, and get loot; the 12 year old who wants to just run around in gonzo style and do ludicrous things; the Critter who wants to play Character-centric style; the tactical wargamer who wants an endless supply of combat - none of these are wrong. None of these need to be "educated". You don't have Players doing it wrong, and the GM needs to correct them, or teach them a lesson.
What you have is a disconnect between what the Player wants, and what the GM wants. The GM wants a serious narrative, and the Players want to "kill monsters and get loot"? The GM wants to run a hardcore tactical game, and is tearing their hair out because the Players just sit around talking all the time? That's just a table mismatch. No one needs to be corrected, or punished. The game doesn't need to revert to AD&D. You just need to shuffle the group so that all the participants are on the same page.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Hey, I am an old schooler too. D&D basic and then AD&D taught me RPGs.
I found that I preferred, and largely switched over to, Champions after 1983 or so... but AD&D is still where I got my start, and I still think some of the features of AD&D that no longer exist, were good, and I miss them. And a few of them might enhance play.
I'm just not as willing to tell other people they're doing it "wrong." Except that I strongly believe if you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. But that's much more abstract and holds true across all games, not only RPGs. (Why play a game if it's not fun?)
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
As I said, I am old school also. I mostly used that euphemism to avoid seeming like I was trying to call out just one person. I was trying to be polite.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'm not sure what makes one "old school". I would not classify myself as such - even though I started D&D with the Red Box/Blue Box in grade school in 1978, transitioning to the AD&D black books in University in the mid 1980s ( with side jaunts in Traveller, Shadowrun, and a brief stint with The Morrow Project ). I'm also on record with the opinion that time served is of zero value; all that matters is how capable of running a game now, you are.
I would agree that any edition - AD&D included - contains double fistfulls of techniques, mechanics, and design philosophies. None of those tools is good or bad. They're just tools which either contribute to the results you want, or not.
Know that kind of game you want, match yourself with Players which want the same thing, and use the tools which contribute to that desired end. That's my approach, and if someone wants advice, I'll give it to them, but I'm aware that they might not want the same outcomes I do. That's OK.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Aaah.... 1e shadowrun. the lovely halcyon memories. :) I had one player, George, die 6 times in the same campaign - he was a meme before memes. Each death more ridiculous than the last, one of the most unlucky dice rollers I've ever met. I did the completely idiotic thing and swapped 400 progs (issues) (all in sequence, no missing issues) of 2000AD comic books for a full suite of SR books (they really did splat books well). I was entranced by the world building, and I remember absolutely loving their totally innovative damage system, although we immediately house ruled grenades to make them actually deadly.
I read the current rules are terrible... shrug, but its fine, there's more than enough good to engage with (tales from the loop, symbaroum, mouseguard, mutant year zero, and good ol' 5e d&d). Thanks for the memberries. ;)
Rule for drama. Roll for memories.
If there isn't a meaningful failure condition, do not roll. Ever. (Perception checks, I'm .... clunk, roll, roll, roll, stop... 14, looking at you... maybe?)