Abed In Community Proved Something About DnD

Abed In Community Proved Something About DnD

Wanted to share this article becaus it gets at an interesting point about ttrpgs in general, and dungeons and dragons specifically.

That's certainly a take. I think it's wrong, but it's a take. Ignoring the system to make it work with your setting/genre doesn't mean it works. When people say that horror doesn't work in D&D, they mean that the GAME SYSTEM doesn't work for horror, because it's designed for the players to feel awesome and powerful. And I don't think "the DM knows the rules, the players are just playing make-believe" is a common playstyle. If you're doing that, why are you using a TTRPG system.

Finally, shifting the burden of proof to the refuters is a logical fallacy and greatly lowers the credibility of this article, as does the writing style (was it written by a child? Feels like it).

I would just like to point out that this writer comes across as incredibly arrogant and incredibly stupid. 
As Maruntoryx said earlier, the idea of playing DnD where only the DM knows the system and the players are having a gay old time frolicking through their imaginations unburdened by rules means that the group is not playing DnD. And I would love to see a game where that doesn't lead to the DM being overwhelmed. How would such a game even work? The wizard PC says "I want to do 'insert awesome thing definitely not covered by the rules'" and then the DM scrounges through the rulebooks for 5 minutes before coming up with something kind of similar? 
IF THE PLAYERS DO NOT KNOW WHAT SYSTEM IS BEING PLAYED, THEY ARE NOT PLAYING A SYSTEM. (In my humble opinion.)

And DnD cannot run horror (well). I do not care how much (or little) the players know about the system. If a Barbarian can still shrug of mortal blows, a Cleric can still bring people back to life in seconds, and a Wizard can still nuke a room with Fireball, then a horror atmosphere is almost impossible to sustain.

And yes, saying "I don't need to prove my points, you have to because I'm soo smart and you're soo stupid" like the author does is a phenomenal way for me to immediately doubt every word that was said.

1) Gentle reminder that anyone can write anything on Medium so articles there shouldn't be considered any more legitimate or inherently insightful than linking, say, a random reddit post or youtube comment. (And this was well BEFORE the advent of widely available GenAI.)

2) One of the cornerstones of horror is disempowerment (i.e. feeling helpless or outmatched in a direct fight), which is indeed an easy theme to evoke when your players have no objective measurement of the capabilities of their characters or the challenges they're faced with. That's not a benchmark for how well-suited D&D as a system is to that genre however, rather it's the opposite; feeling incapable or endangered is easier to elicit the more vague or clandestine you make those capabilities, not harder.

Ah yes, Medium...

There is ZERO control over who gets to write there. It's not as bad as Substack, but it's baaaad.

While I am ALWAYS for rejecting the rigidity of lore...I also know that a game must have rules.

But as for horror....I also reject the idea that DND is not suited for horror, because "horror" is not a template that must be done by the books. What I will concede is that DND games THAT USE XP are less suited to horror, because those games are less about the theme about high scores to purchase power.

I generally agree with the above posters, and think this article is pretty bad. And while I agree the system is more flexible than it sometimes gets credit for, the idea in the essay that it can be bent into any shape and still work well is just wrong. It might still work, but the amount of homebrew patches you’d need to create would probably mean you are better off playing another game system. It’s kind of a Ship of Theseus situation, where at some point it stops being D&D and becomes something new.

But I do want to note about not knowing rules that back in the 1e days, ol’ Gary urged DMs not to tell players the rules. They were to, somehow, be forbidden from purchasing the DMG, and only the DM should know how the game works. 
I don’t know of anyone who intentionally played that way, though a lot of groups ended up playing that way because usually only 1-2 people actually bothered to read the books. 
But I guess my point is, the idea of players not knowing the rules is as old as the game itself. We don’t play that way any longer, and with good reason, but the idea is not new. 

The burden on proof is on the person making the claim.  Anyone using "prove me wrong" is pretty much admitting that they don't actually have evidence to support their claim and is instead resting on the difficulty anyone arguing against them has proving a negative.

Quote from Xalthu >>

But I do want to note about not knowing rules that back in the 1e days, ol’ Gary urged DMs not to tell players the rules. They were to, somehow, be forbidden from purchasing the DMG, and only the DM should know how the game works. 
I don’t know of anyone who intentionally played that way, though a lot of groups ended up playing that way because usually only 1-2 people actually bothered to read the books. 
But I guess my point is, the idea of players not knowing the rules is as old as the game itself. We don’t play that way any longer, and with good reason, but the idea is not new. 

 This was lampooned in the classic game Paranoia, where the rules themselves are highly classified, and so a player displaying knowledge of them is committing treason. (Though I'd never noticed that about 1e, so I'd always assumed that Paranoia's use of it was sui generis until it was mentioned on these forums.)

Which works in a black comedy game where you're constantly being jerked around by people with more authority than you. (But not Friend Computer. The Computer loves you, and would never do such a thing. All those information restrictions are for your own good. Trust The Computer.)

But to return more to the thread topic, I think some modes of horror can work in D&D. Not so much "there is a monster that will kill you", but psychological horror could work, for instance. Setups where, no matter what you stab in the face, you cannot fix this, actually seem tailor-made for D&D. You create horror by undermining the power fantasy.

Nonetheless, D&D would not be my go-to system for horror, though I've used horror elements in my current D&D game. (Though, ultimately, they did (sort of) fix it. Just not by stabbing things in the face.)

It's important to remember that can doesn't mean should. Also it's equally important to remember that fiction takes liberties with reality.

Abed wasn't able to run a fun game of D&D where only he knew the rules and everyone else just described stuff and used their imagination because that approach works or has merit. He was able to do that because that's what the plot necessitated in order for it to work as entertainment. Using a fictional portrayal of people playing D&D in an atypical way as some kind of benchmark shows a somewhat dire lack of media literacy.