Quote:
Originally Posted by
SiuiS
I found this, and came to post it. It's rather appropriate, I think.
I agree that D&D as it is now, as it has been for about 12 years, is pretty weird when viewed objectively though.
I read the dungeon world rules and they excited me! But the classes, the crunch for player end, didn't. Huge turn off! I actually want the overlapping, nested circles of 3.5 and even late 1/2e character design choices. I am in the position that a really good fantasy system is not restrictive or granular enough for me. D&D is fun
because it sucks at its job. RAW has become the law of the west because succeeding, achieving in such a ruleset is, well, like playing dark sun. The deck is stacked against you, so success is more meaningful.
Don't get me wrong - I love my retro challenge-gaming. Dwarf Fortress, '90s games, and all that. I can very much agree with the sentiment that as a player, a game can recommend itself by its difficulty, especially if that difficulty produces interesting emergent gameplay. I don't think D&D's does that, but 'interesting' is subjective. I don't even think difficulty recommends itself in an RPG, because I find that it interferes with the RP part, but that's very subjective too.
What I do dispute is that difficulty should be considered positive from a developer's perspective. Emergent qualities, be they gameplay or narrative, certainly should, and can certainly override the importance of difficulty - but difficulty should not be pursued for its own sake. If you could theoretically achieve the exact same results with less difficulty or fewer rules, you should. "Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Regarding the link, I don't disagree with the logic, but I do disagree with the conclusion. Any RPG, after all, is just a set of tools we combine with our imaginations to collectively produce narratives. I also don't disagree that any gaming group can and should adapt whatever "officially" exists to their own purposes, as no two groups are completely alike. But you don't need an incomplete set of tools to make your own. If you're willing to houserule when RAW is insufficient to play, what's stopping you from houseruling when it is? I cannot accept the idea incompleteness is a virtue that should be sought, and the idea of selling an unplayable game under the guise of a complete one strikes me extremely unethical.
I hate to say it, and I apologize for the harshness, but "it's supposed to suck" sounds to me like a lame excuse brought out by grognards to justify their affection for things that have been surpassed even in their niche. There's nothing wrong with nostalgia; we shouldn't be afraid to admit to it, and we shouldn't need things to be superior because we like them. It's enough to say "it may be poorly designed, but I like it", not "I like it, therefore it is not poorly designed."
I realize that I assume in those statement that it truly is poorly designed, and that I myself am not saying "I dislike it, therefore it must be poorly designed". I hope that I have demonstrated real concerns, and not just malice or partisanship.
As a note, I want to add that design quality aside, D&D is still hugely important to the history of the medium. That's just not enough to make me want to play it.