Was Gygax a good DM?

[kyoryu]

Letting PCs die for whatever reason is closer to the type 1 end of the scale, but not at the extreme end. The extreme end would be trying to kill the PCs by scattering easily missed death traps everywhere.

Oh, I get what you're saying. I just believe that there are some fundamental assumptions and goals that differ between "type 1" and "type 2", that cause those differences in attitudes about player death.

[kyoryu]

See, but that's a faulty premise right there. Having a backstory doesn't make you special. Heck, I give backstories to some of my NPCs, and y'know what? They're better characters for it, but that doesn't make them special. You can have an interesting backstory which isn't necessarily good game material, because "interesting story" and "interesting to play" are two different things.

Somewhere, y'all are equating "has a backstory" with "thinks he is the Chosen One."

Only at the extreme cases. But then again, I've seen very few character backstories that are "grew up with both parents. Got bored and went adventuring."

[1337 b4k4]

What if a player said "I search the room, keeping a look out for any sign of traps"? Would you still make them trigger every trap because they didn't list off everything they wanted to check individually?

The short answer is yes, the long answer is it depends. If the system allows for die roll trap checking, then I would likely allow the player a roll for each trap, with failure meaning they trip the trap.

But clearly you're misunderstanding my point, so let me try again. I have a room, that's 20' x 20', it has a bed, a dresser, a desk and a painting on the wall. Behind the painting is secret compartment with treasure, the compartment is trapped. The top drawer of the dresser also contains treasure and it too is trapped. The desk contains treasure, but is not trapped, and there is nothing in the bed.

What happens to you as a player when you say "I search the room" depends on what you expect to happen. If you expect me to repeat the room description, perhaps in greater detail, then no nothing happens to you. If you expect to find all 3 caches of treasure, then you have a chance of triggering each trap as well. That's only reasonable.

If, instead you say "I search the furniture in the room", you'll only find two treasure caches, and chance triggering one trap.

My point is that the wider you cast your net as a player, the more tricks and treats you will catch. If you want to avoid traps, you either need to be specific, or be careful. Is this really so unreasonable? To me, it seems no different than requiring you to tell me which weapon you use and monster you attack in battle. After all, you don't go into battles saying "I kill my enemies" so why would you think that searching for treasure should have a "Win" button?

Somewhere, y'all are equating "has a backstory" with "thinks he is the Chosen One."

When someone says that "Type I" fantasy means that backstory is a waste of time, I can only assume that they have some sort of "chosen one" backstory they've written or have in mind. Clearly you can have an interesting back story, but unless your already a hero / chosen one / Drizzt clone, then the most interesting part of your character's story is yet to come, and there's no need for you to have a massive backstory that would lead you to think you wasted your time when your character bites the dust.

At some point, this stops being the fault of the players, and starts to raise red flags about the guy running the module.

You'd be surprised what having only played in games where you character can't die no matter how stupid will do to your sense of danger. We all know the stories of blood thirsty players that kill all the King's retinue in the court, knowing that the DM won't have them killed for such insolence. Or heck, just look at some of the online reactions to the 40 kobold room in the playtest. People actually thought you were supposed to run that room as a straight combat, as if your players should go toe to toe with 40 kobolds on their home turf and expect to win.

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that much. I do have to assume we're missing a bit more to this story, but lets face it, players can definitely be stupid.

[willpell]

I have come to realize that I am essentially the Anti-Gygax; my roleplay paradigm assumes that the DM has a responsibility to give your character a game for his benefit, and thus I am exactly the opposite of the default "everything is trying to kill you and the DM is behind it all" paradigm which early D&D tended to encourage.

I make only a token effort to be realistic and almost none to be fair or consistent, but no way I'm ever going to say that the character you spent four hours building randomly died a lame and unavoidable death because of a die roll and an inflexible rule. I've been accused of "killing the excitement" of my games by hand-holding the players to such an extent, but I'm willing to risk such a consequence rather than engender resentment or crush a fragile spirit; I see the creation of roleplay magic as a roll of the dice, and consider Murphy's Law to be a permanent hex on all dice ever, so I make damn sure that the worst possible consequence is not terribly bad, and then I roll the dice a lot and hope for occasional nigh-miraculous success.

[Matthew]

I actually think that the best thing that can be said about Gygax is how irrelevant he is to the modern game.

Think about that for a moment. Really, really think about it. If the roleplaying community, hobby, and industry was virtually unchanged from the 70's, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

The hobby has come a long way since Gygax. There's real money in it these days, a wider audience, a broader and deeper variety of options. Other folks have stepped up to tweak the core idea of Gygax's D&D -- "Let's play pretend for grownups!" -- and adapted it to fit genres and playstyles which Gygax could never have imagined.

By all accounts, there was much more money in the hobby in the eighties than there is now, and probably a wider audience as well. It was the World of Warcraft of its time.

As far as the subject of this thread goes, sure he was a great Dungeon Master, depending on what you define as "great". Just like some people think Lord of the Rings is great and others cannot stand it, so it is with all subjective preferences.

[Dire Llama]

To make an analogy: old-school D&D is nethack, modern games are Baldur's Gate.

I was going to say something about 'one pixel off and you die' vs 'open-ended sandbox with awesome toys'. Your example was more succinct.

My roomate's dad used to game with the guy (as well as some other GMs of the era), and I can't run games for him because he checks his waterskin for traps every fifteen minutes. [...]
These are not the things anyone who's played with a sane GM does.

"Mimic" in it's various shapes is good, but I always thought "Rust Monster" was the best summary of the old school mind set: "Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."

(I think the progression from specific to general goes "Rust Monster", "Mimic", "DM".
In the game I played there was a cute gecko/lizard/aardvark thing that walks on air and eats the magic out of your items by touching them.)

I "blame the supposed DMs" because his actions also tend to come with horror stories.

For more fun, have you ever read Gygax's Up on a Soapbox articles, where he gleefully regales readers with tales about how he humiliated and emasculated players for enjoyment?

Would those be in Dragon?

"Old school" explains the continued existence of Talisman (whichever edition).
* "I move in ... this direction."
* "OK, you encounter a witch and she turns you into a toad."

Someone said something to the effect of 'Old school D&D is a completely different game with different goals.' That I agree with; old school D&D is about the players' ability to guess what's in the DM's head. And the DM is actively encouraged to throw as many curve balls (and curves on his curve balls) in order to stay one step ahead of them.
[...]
I'm failing to see the any evidence that this could be anyone's 'best game ever played.'

I can't expect to interact with the scene in front of me, either. Or go to the bathroom, for that matter. [...] Every breath of air my character takes is literally a gift from the DM, because he could just declare me dead without me even interacting at all.

There's a cartoon somewhere noting that in a city of 10,000 people, every day three of them are randomly transported to a to a different dimension. "Hey, that's what the table says, nothing to do with me. Yes, I did create the table, what of it?"

I actually think that the best thing that can be said about Gygax is how irrelevant he is to the modern game.

[...]

Sure, some folks miss his arbitrary, random, adversarial, and sometimes petty tyrant DMing, or the disposable characters and paranoid players that style produced. But those folks can still play that way! And now, folks who would have walked away at the sight of Gygaxian gaming can sit down and share the hobby and enjoy it.

[...]

To me, that's a positive thing. That is, whether he was a good DM or a bad DM, the best thing which can be said for him is that he created a hobby of such potential that, within a generation or two, his own contributions had been surpassed by those he inspired.

Pong, we salute you!

[1337 b4k4]

I make only a token effort to be realistic and almost none to be fair or consistent, but no way I'm ever going to say that the character you spent four hours building randomly died a lame and unavoidable death because of a die roll and an inflexible rule.

Well, yes, if it takes you 4 hours to build a character, then obviously the chance of character death has that much more cost. Personally, I try to avoid games where building a character is a multi hour affair, heck even a half an hour to me is a bit much if you've done it more than once.

[Tyndmyr]

So if Monk should be the only ones Grappling, why is it part of the standard combat rules? Power Attack isn't like that, nor is spellcasting or any other number of class features. Why are the Grapple rules in the combat chapter instead of a class feature? To make poor newbies think they are a good idea? A trap option?

A great many class features make you better at something anyone can do. Anyone can search for traps, but a rogue is going to be a LOT better at it than the wizard.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If all options like that were removed from the game, you'd have no poor choices left at all. A world of bubble wrap, where nothing you do can actually be harmful. That's not what I want from a game.

Everyone being able to grapple, but not everyone being good at it, is remarkably realistic, and adds a tactical choice as well. That's just fine.

[willpell]

As far as the subject of this thread goes, sure he was a great Dungeon Master, depending on what you define as "great". Just like some people think Lord of the Rings is great and others cannot stand it, so it is with all subjective preferences.

But there's a difference between your subjective preference for an artwork's content and the semi-objective quality of the artist's efforts in creating it (defining DMing as an art is slightly generous but I think most people on a forum like this would agree it's fair). I despised "Nine Princes in Amber" but I couldn't claim with a straight face that it isn't a well-written book; if I'd played in Gygax's campaign I might well have felt about him much as I did about Corwyn by the end of the novel, but I'm not going to pretend Zelazny didn't have serious chops as a writer, regardless of what he chose to write about. The question isn't "would you have fun playing in Gygax's campaign"; it's "did Gygax have the skills necessary to run a campaign which is of high quality in the abstract". He definitely had some of those skills, but I think some of the Charisma- or Wisdom-based ones could maybe have used a few more ranks.

[Tyndmyr]

Or heck, just look at some of the online reactions to the 40 kobold room in the playtest. People actually thought you were supposed to run that room as a straight combat, as if your players should go toe to toe with 40 kobolds on their home turf and expect to win.

*shrug* My players took that on as a fight. Stealthy recon revealed them, and they utilized the bottlenecks of the door and pit to limit the number engaged at once. They also made sure they were pretty fresh going in. It was a hard fight, but they did come out on top.

It's obviously a challenging fight, and can well be quite unwinnable if you stumble into it poorly. That doesn't make it terrible, though. Some of my players had never played before, and they didn't think to complain about it.

[valadil]

What if a player said "I search the room, keeping a look out for any sign of traps"? Would you still make them trigger every trap because they didn't list off everything they wanted to check individually?

Mind if I subvert the example a little? What do you do when a player tells you he rolls diplomacy at the guards? Personally, I make the player describe what he's saying to the guards and then let the diplomacy roll happen. So does every GM I've played with. Why should the search skill work any differently than the diplomacy skill?

To answer your question, I wouldn't immediately trigger the traps. I'd just ask the player for more detail. The only way I'd let "search the room" fly is if I was being lazy and didn't really care about the traps in the room. But if I'm trying to make a game where the players care about traps, I'm damn well going to populate the room with objects so the players can react to those objects.

[ThiagoMartell]

To make an analogy: old-school D&D is nethack, modern games are Baldur's Gate.

Baldur's Gate, that game with insta-kill traps? That game in which you can kill mostly anyone and if you kill certain people you simply can't advice? That game in which plenty of rules stuff (such as the requirements for other people wearing Keldorn's armor) are simply not stated? The game where your main character's backstory is revealed during the game?
The best RPG ever?
I don't think modern gaming is like Baldur's Gate at all. More like Dragon Age.

[Zombimode]

Baldur's Gate, that game with insta-kill traps? That game in which you can kill mostly anyone and if you kill certain people you simply can't advice? That game in which plenty of rules stuff (such as the requirements for other people wearing Keldorn's armor) are simply not stated? The game where your main character's backstory is revealed during the game?
The best RPG ever?
I don't think modern gaming is like Baldur's Gate at all. More like Dragon Age.

Yeah, citing Baldurs Gate as an example for modern gaming is fishy at best.
If anything Baldurs Gate shows that a simply dichotomy "old school - modern" is very inaccurate. Yes, there was a paradigm shift with BG - it was markedly different from say the Wizardy, Might&Magic and Ultima games. But the genre "evolved" (better: changed) continuously and there are maybe surprisingly almost no games that are "like" BG. When most people speak of "modern" games, they probably mean games starting with Oblivion (which marked a MAJOR paradigms shift in the developments of video games in general, not just RPGs, and its impacts lasts to this very day).

Edit: also, in the whole BG series there are only two unconditional death traps. One is Spellhold, and one in Durlags Tower. There were, of course, traps that killed the character because of doing "enough" damage, or due to failed save.
I'm not aware of any plot-stopping kills (or plot-stopping anything for that matter). Do you have something specific in mind?
Maybe there is something that I can still learn about this game, after all

[valadil]

Edit: also, in the whole BG series there are only two unconditional death traps. One is Spellhold, and one in Durlags Tower. There were, of course, traps that killed the character because of doing "enough" damage, or due to failed save.

BG is a different beast. You can reload your game. Gygax didn't come with reset button.

Nethack/Angband was a better comparison because unless you were cheating death was permanent.

[Zombimode]

BG is a different beast. You can reload your game. Gygax didn't come with reset button.

Nethack/Angband was a better comparison because unless you were cheating death was permanent.

Of course. But in a PnP campaign the world keeps going after the death of a character. In both BG and Nethack the world stops if the (main) character dies.
Video games just make a bad comparison to PnP games.

[kyoryu]

I have come to realize that I am essentially the Anti-Gygax; my roleplay paradigm assumes that the DM has a responsibility to give your character a game for his benefit, and thus I am exactly the opposite of the default "everything is trying to kill you and the DM is behind it all" paradigm which early D&D tended to encourage.

A good old-school DM didn't actually do that. When it came to running the game, a good old-school DM has to be rigorously neutral. Now, in terms of planning the dungeons or whatever there's a certain amount of antagonism simply due to the fact that a cakewalk dungeon isn't much fun.

But in terms of actual play? Let the dice fall where they may. The two biggest reasons I've heard for fudging dice in that thread were "keep the players alive" and "keep my BBEG alive to make it a climactic fight". Both of those show the fundamental nature of modern gameplay - heading towards a predisposed conclusion.

If there's anything that really highlights the difference, that's it. Old-school games didn't have a predetermined conclusion - what happened, happened. "Party death" was no more predetermined than "party success".

I make only a token effort to be realistic and almost none to be fair or consistent, but no way I'm ever going to say that the character you spent four hours building randomly died a lame and unavoidable death because of a die roll and an inflexible rule. I've been accused of "killing the excitement" of my games by hand-holding the players to such an extent, but I'm willing to risk such a consequence rather than engender resentment or crush a fragile spirit; I see the creation of roleplay magic as a roll of the dice, and consider Murphy's Law to be a permanent hex on all dice ever, so I make damn sure that the worst possible consequence is not terribly bad, and then I roll the dice a lot and hope for occasional nigh-miraculous success.

Then you should play a system that is built on those assumptions. That's not a slight in the least, by the way. I completely understand the type of game you're going for, and it's certainly a valid one. It ain't old-school D&D, and I'd argue that even newer editions (with the possible exception of 4e) carry enough baggage from the earlier editions that it's hard to play that style of game in them, even though they support it somewhat better than the early editions.

I'd also argue that in old-school games, deaths aren't the result of random rolls. They're the result of player decisions.

I don't think modern gaming is like Baldur's Gate at all. More like Dragon Age.

That may be more fair, but as others have pointed out, even BG had save points which make a pretty huge difference.

[Drolyt]

Now, almost everyone that has played a role playing game has either heard horror story's or been in one, fact. And after listening to a podcast where some people started talking about dungeons and dragons with one of the people saying they had been told that Gygax was a terrible DM who would kill players in the most unfair ways possible. So, was Gygax really a bad DM?

Kill players in unfair ways? Yes, I think that is probably true, since there is a style of roleplaying that is very lethal and requires you to hit the reset button often, and it was more popular back then, as evidenced by some of the insane old adventures they've published. I'm not sure if that would make him a bad DM though, if that was the game everyone wanted to play. To be honest I'm not sure how he could have been a bad DM, if his players weren't having fun the game would never have gotten off the ground.

[Fatebreaker]

Only at the extreme cases. But then again, I've seen very few character backstories that are "grew up with both parents. Got bored and went adventuring."

That, at least, is a backstory. It's not a great backstory, but it is one. Which is more than I can say for "levels one to five are your backstory."

When someone says that "Type I" fantasy means that backstory is a waste of time, I can only assume that they have some sort of "chosen one" backstory they've written or have in mind. Clearly you can have an interesting back story, but unless your already a hero / chosen one / Drizzt clone, then the most interesting part of your character's story is yet to come, and there's no need for you to have a massive backstory that would lead you to think you wasted your time when your character bites the dust.

Why would you assume that "I have a backstory!" means "I believe I'm the Chosen One!"

Why wold you assume that death means "you wasted your time" on a backstory?

Why would you assume that the possibility of interesting things to come somehow invalidates the choices and events which led you to find yourself in front of a dungeon, ready to slay some dragons?

Why would you assume any of this?

You'd be surprised what having only played in games where you character can't die no matter how stupid will do to your sense of danger. We all know the stories of blood thirsty players that kill all the King's retinue in the court, knowing that the DM won't have them killed for such insolence. Or heck, just look at some of the online reactions to the 40 kobold room in the playtest. People actually thought you were supposed to run that room as a straight combat, as if your players should go toe to toe with 40 kobolds on their home turf and expect to win.

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that much. I do have to assume we're missing a bit more to this story, but lets face it, players can definitely be stupid.

"Players are stupid" can be true. But when either out of nine parties die to the same trap in the same way, we move from "players are stupid" territory to "the common denominator here is this specific DM" territory.

At some point, the consistency of play should tell you that something about how the DM ran the scene was at fault here.

By all accounts, there was much more money in the hobby in the eighties than there is now, and probably a wider audience as well. It was the World of Warcraft of its time.

More money and a wider audience in the 80's?

I'm not really sure why you'd imagine that.

It used to be, you had to go to specialty stores to get roleplaying games. Now, you can waltz into a Barnes & Noble and find a whole section devoted to them. D&D gets a lot of space, but they're not the only ones. The whole social stigma bit has dropped off dramatically. Game designers are able to reach folks who would have shrugged off Gygaxian D&D, and show them a very different sort of game which actually appeals to them.

On the industry side, D&D had some knockoffs, but there's not a lot of successful, older roleplaying games. Today we have White Wolf, AEG, Fantasy Flight, all sorts of big names who publish big games. Even Shadowrun barely qualifies as "the 80's," since it was first published in '89. And the smaller studies and indie publishers are in a much better place in terms of being able to reach their target market/demographic. Companies like Privateer Press, who sell a tabletop wargame, can dip into the roleplaying market, too! Hell, the band Abney Park even published a roleplaying game ("Airship Pirates").

Y'know what makes World of Warcraft really impressive? It has nothing to do with the quality of the game (or lack thereof). It has everything to do with how World of Warcraft really cracked the divide between "people who play MMOs" and "people who don't play MMOs." EverQuest, Ultima Online, however good or bad those games were, they had a limited audience. World of Warcraft went mainstream in a big way.

Gygaxian D&D? Not World of Warcraft. Not by a longshot.

Pong, we salute you!

Hail, Pong!

[willpell]

You'd be surprised what having only played in games where you character can't die no matter how stupid will do to your sense of danger. We all know the stories of blood thirsty players that kill all the King's retinue in the court, knowing that the DM won't have them killed for such insolence.

Those players are clearly not thinking through all the things worse than being killed which can happen to them. The DM doesn't want to have the campaign end, but he'd love to have the players volunteer to run the Five Years in the Prison of Gratuitous Beatings after the king's retinue finishes cleaning their clocks. And say that if you roleplay through the scenario you'll eventually earn freedom and rewards, but if you don't then you're out of the game, or at least get stuck with a weaker character. There's all sorts of ways you can correct the players' behavior.

[kyoryu]

That, at least, is a backstory. It's not a great backstory, but it is one. Which is more than I can say for "levels one to five are your backstory."

Sure, it's a backstory. I think we know what "backstory" means, and Arneson quip aside, we understand what it means.

This was an example to contrast the typical "Chosen One" backstory.

Perhaps even Chosen One is a bad term - but at least it's generally, IN MY EXPERIENCE, "Look how unique and special I am!"

My example was to give an example of a non-unique and special snowflake backstory.

My point remains - there's a fundamental shift between "what's interesting about your character is what they do" and "what's interesting about your character is what they were before they started adventuring." Old-school games are very much the former.

Why would you assume that "I have a backstory!" means "I believe I'm the Chosen One!"

Because the vast majority of backstories that we've seen are exactly that, or at least "Look What A Special and Unique Snowflake I Am!"

This may not apply to you and your group - based on your dislike of 3.x, I'm guessing it applies to you at least less than most. So I'm not accusing you of holding this stance, simply explaining the reaction.

Why wold you assume that death means "you wasted your time" on a backstory?

Because we've heard that argument time and time again on these boards?

Why would you assume that the possibility of interesting things to come somehow invalidates the choices and events which led you to find yourself in front of a dungeon, ready to slay some dragons?

It doesn't. The point here is emphasis.

3.x and some other games have a huge emphasis on character building, and actual during hte game play is a secondary concern - a big part of the exercise is building a character that can survive, and then validating that by having them curbstomp everything.

Why would you assume any of this?

Because we've seen examples of it, time and time again?

It used to be, you had to go to specialty stores to get roleplaying games. Now, you can waltz into a Barnes & Noble and find a whole section devoted to them. D&D gets a lot of space, but they're not the only ones. The whole social stigma bit has dropped off dramatically. Game designers are able to reach folks who would have shrugged off Gygaxian D&D, and show them a very different sort of game which actually appeals to them.

I got my Moldvay Basic Set at Walgreen's. My 1e DMG came from Sears, I believe.

[Tyndmyr]

To be honest I'm not sure how he could have been a bad DM, if his players weren't having fun the game would never have gotten off the ground.

While I'm not against your conclusion, this is not a reasonable way to get there.

I've known many a bad DM to have players. Some would give excuses like "he's the only one that'll do it". Some had never played under anyone else. Yet, this person had a reputation as a terrible DM, and engaged in habits like "someone has to die every session. If nobody dies in a night, I pick one randomly at the end". He's still running a game.

Getting players is dead easy. Having them is not a guarantee of being a quality DM.

[1337 b4k4]

It's obviously a challenging fight, and can well be quite unwinnable if you stumble into it poorly. That doesn't make it terrible, though. Some of my players had never played before, and they didn't think to complain about it.

I wasn't saying it was terrible. Just that sometimes players come to the table with vastly different expectations, and there appears to be a contingent of players out there who honestly thought the 40 kobold room was meant to be played as a straight, everyone in the same room wall to wall fight. Even your players didn't do that, as you said, they used bottle necks and the pit trap some rooms back to manage and control the battle. Players that come from games where the DM never throws an encounter at them that they can't win, likely wouldn't even think twice about charging head long into the 40 kobold room.

BG is a different beast. You can reload your game. Gygax didn't come with reset button.

Sure he did. By the time your character was high level enough to have represented considerable time investment, there were raise dead spells.

Why would you assume that "I have a backstory!" means "I believe I'm the Chosen One!"

Because as kyoryu says, in my experience, that's what most people are talking about when they talk about their carefully crafted back stories as a reason for why they don't want their character to die.

Why wold you assume that death means "you wasted your time" on a backstory?

Because that very statement is what started this tangent on back stories. To whit: "So, it's a game that trains you to be paranoid about every little thing, where you can die at any moment, and where backstories are considered a waste of time because your character is inevitably going to die."

Why would you assume that the possibility of interesting things to come somehow invalidates the choices and events which led you to find yourself in front of a dungeon, ready to slay some dragons?

It doesn't, until you as a player are more invested in preserving your character's back story, than writing your character's future.

At some point, the consistency of play should tell you that something about how the DM ran the scene was at fault here.

So what part of the described scene can you envision as being the DM's fault here? Seriously, come up with a description of a trap wherein the lead party member disappears into darkness and is never heard from again, and yet the rest of the party reasonably thinks it's OK to just press on as if nothing is wrong. I seriously can't imagine. The only possible scenario I can imagine is that Gygax said "The lead player disappears" and nothing more, and every thing the party sent into that area that wasn't human didn't trigger the trap. Even then, as soon as the next person disappeared, no reasonable person should have kept trying to push forward. I seriously can't think of any possible DM failure that should lead to this. I can certainly think of player failure though, especially when it appears that the party that was successful merely needed a stick and some careful prodding.

And say that if you roleplay through the scenario you'll eventually earn freedom and rewards, but if you don't then you're out of the game, or at least get stuck with a weaker character. There's all sorts of ways you can correct the players' behavior.

What's the mechanical difference between killing a character and telling them "If you don't play this scene right, you're out of the game?"

I've known many a bad DM to have players. Some would give excuses like "he's the only one that'll do it". Some had never played under anyone else. Yet, this person had a reputation as a terrible DM, and engaged in habits like "someone has to die every session. If nobody dies in a night, I pick one randomly at the end". He's still running a game.

I've said it before, this blows my mind. People don't invite back the guy that eats all the food and throws a tantrum every time he misses, so why in the world do players keep going back to the crappy DM. Either straighten out your DM or get a new one.

[Tyndmyr]

I've said it before, this blows my mind. People don't invite back the guy that eats all the food and throws a tantrum every time he misses, so why in the world do players keep going back to the crappy DM. Either straighten out your DM or get a new one.

I used to have this attitude too. And yeah, it works for me. Jumping ship is definitely a tactic I advocate.

However, there's one big problem with this...DMs are in shorter supply than players are. There are a *lot* of players who want to find a game, but not a ton of DM. So, you've got a power imbalance toward the DM. If you doubt this...go into the pbp section, and post a "looking for players" thread and a "looking for DM" thread, and see which one fills first.

I would fix this by encouraging more people to DM, but a lot of people just don't or won't.

[Gamgee]

I disagree with valadil; the 70's were not that long ago.

The man made his children cry when they played. That should be a red flag. The stuff he wrote for the game were almost creepy about the players being utterly powerless against the DM whenever there was a disagreement. Given the impression I've got from the modules he created, where characters just died when they tried something, the rules he wrote, where players had no say in what happened to them, and the games he ran, where his will was all that mattered, to the point of his own children in tears, he seemed like an unmitigated egomaniac, and used DMing as a power fantasy. I'd call that a bad DM in the 70's as much as the same traits made bad kings in bygone centuries, the ones that people revolted against. His games were all about him having fun with imaginary power, not the group having fun accomplishing anything.

Maybe he was very descriptive and such, but all that means to me is that he should have been an author, not an actuary-turned-game-designer. My gut tells me his books wouldn't have sold well, since there was actually competition there, as opposed to RPGs, a conveniently empty market.

Ahhhh, comma spam. Sanctity of life, mind, and faith is now gone.

[Augmental]

Because as kyoryu says, in my experience, that's what most people are talking about when they talk about their carefully crafted back stories as a reason for why they don't want their character to die.

Or maybe they don't want their character to die because they put effort into giving their character a past, a description, depth...

[kyoryu]

Or maybe they don't want their character to die because they put effort into giving their character a past, a description, depth...

And thus begins the slide from old-school to modern gaming. You're now basically saying that your character should be immune to death for a certain length of time, or unless certain conditions are met, due to investment made before the first game even happens.

And you know what? That's fine for a narrative-style game, which old-school D&D definitely wasn't. And narrative games are fine. And old-school games are fine. They each do certain things very well.

[Wardog]

BG is a different beast. You can reload your game. Gygax didn't come with reset button.

Nethack/Angband was a better comparison because unless you were cheating death was permanent.

I remember on the old BG forums, there were a fair few people who considered reloading to be cheating.

And I don't mean in a macho-boast sense, "Oh, I always play 'iron man' style. If I die, I start over. Anything else feels like cheating". This was (as far as I can tell) a genuine assumption that restarting when you died was the expected way to play, and anyone who saved before a big fight and reloaded if they lost was "doing it wrong".

And they were nothing in comparison to the people who criticised anyone who min/maxed their characters' stats.

[Augmental]

And thus begins the slide from old-school to modern gaming. You're now basically saying that your character should be immune to death for a certain length of time, or unless certain conditions are met, due to investment made before the first game even happens.

And you know what? That's fine for a narrative-style game, which old-school D&D definitely wasn't. And narrative games are fine. And old-school games are fine. They each do certain things very well.

Exactly. Old-school D&D was great at inciting a DM vs. Players mindset and discouraging players from putting fluff on their character sheets, while 3.5 has a wide variety of character options and encourages players to have characters with depth. Or, from a different point of view, old-school D&D was a challenging and exciting game which encouraged players to use ingenuity and creativity to solve the challenges the DM laid out, while 3.5 is a broken and unbalanced mess where most mundane classes are all but useless. Both points of view are valid, I just hold the former.

[kyoryu]

Exactly. Old-school D&D was great at inciting a DM vs. Players mindset and discouraging players from putting fluff on their character sheets, while 3.5 has a wide variety of character options and encourages players to have characters with depth. Or, from a different point of view, old-school D&D was a challenging and exciting game which encouraged players to use ingenuity and creativity to solve the challenges the DM laid out, while 3.5 is a broken and unbalanced mess where most mundane classes are all but useless. Both points of view are valid, I just hold the former.

Eh, I think that's even a bit of a misconception.

old-school wasn't really player vs. DM, when done right. It was player vs. world, with DM as arbiter. And it didn't discourage "fluff", as is evidenced by the number of people that did exactly that. Characterization was just more defined by what happened to the character and how they reacted rather than character creation.

And even your "strawman" version of 3.5 has a lot of truth in it - mundane classes generally *are* regarded as worthless (Tier 5, Tier 4 at best), and the unbalanced nature of the system is often touted as a strength of the system, especially in comparison to 4e. (Which makes sense, given the emphasis on the character creation subgame in 3.x - that subgame is less important when there are fewer imbalances to take advantage of).

I'm not sure that either game really encourages characters to have depth - 3.x certainly encourages optimization, but that's not the same as depth.

And at any rate, it's not a matter of "this style good, this style bad!" so much as it is a slide from a gamist/simulationist view to more of a narrative view. (yeah, GNS is a crock, I'm using it as shorthand). There's value in both styles of gameplay, one doesn't have to be bad for the other to be good.

------

I think my version of your statement would go like:

Old-school games are primarily about the during-game interaction. As such, they place less emphasis on character generation or even character backstory.

Old-school games also place a high emphasis on earning rewards, rather than simply going through a predetermined path. For the rewards to feel earned, a significant and distinct possibility of failure must exist, often in the form of death, but also in the form of negative experiences for the characters.

With the lack of emphasis on character generation, a greater emphasis is placed on player skill during the actual game. As such, player choices during gameplay matter far more than character skills and statistics.

Old-school games typically have less of an overall "plot", as players are expected to make pivotal decisions during gameplay. As such, player decision-making is shifted towards their decisions during actual gameplay, as this can and will effect the long-term direction of the game.

Modern games typically focus more on creating an ongoing narrative, and their gameplay typically matches this. As the story is often more-or-less set, a higher emphasis is placed on character creation.

The systems in many of these games reflect this with some amount of imbalance in character creation, allowing for player skill at the character creation subgame to have a higher impact on gameplay, at the cost of the impact of player decisions *during* the game. The ability to be successful during an encounter will be more determined by the character stats, and as such, player skill *during* the game is a secondary consideration.

The strong narrative approach frequently means that players will have less agency in terms of the long-term direction of the game, and as such more control and meaning is given to character generation and even advancement.

The overall result is a game that focuses more on being told a story, and continual character advancement. Given this approach, higher levels of backstory are often more common, as they are one of the areas of the game the players can directly impact.

-----------------

[Jay R]

And because we enjoyed it, and bought it, and kept coming back for more, you get to play your game today.

Are you serious? Are you gonna make an argument - or even an observation - or just try and guilt me into silence?

No guilt attempted at all. Just a straightforward observation and argument of applied logic. If the game had been as terrible as some here are claiming, then it would not have survived and grown. Since we observe that it did, indeed, survive and grow, we conclude that it wasn't as terrible as some here are claiming.