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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Jan 8, 2022 12:41:22 GMT -5
Heh! You may have guessed that I don't think much of that writing team. Also from things PD has said, his dungeons seem to be infinite, but not a source of frustration to him since there is no grafted on plot and they are intended to be explored from generation to generation by characters and their descendants. As I remember the books, they were consistent as if they had been plotted from the start. The writing didn't collapse halfway through from success. But regardless of quality, kind of interesting to see that Hickman was so irritated by his own megadungeon. As you say, he could have done any one or many of infinitely many things with it. It sounds as if freedom for him turned into monotony. Strange to see how fsr back it goes. Of course, people can do whatever they want. But it is a shame (as has been said many times) that catering to and encouraging this kind of helplessness became the main product to sell. it sounds to me like Hickman's imagination failed him, he forgot that he was the Ref and had the power to change things on the fly and correct whatever he perceived as a problem. IMO imposing a plot on any part of your game is a mistake. Plots are defined by the players actions and arise from their decisions and interests, this is the old school way. You do not have to write a plot and try to force the players to participate, that is the new school way and story gaming.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Jan 8, 2022 12:49:57 GMT -5
I wondered that I had never seen this blog before, but it had 9 posts in 2017, then did not post again until 11 posts in 2020 and 10 in 2021. With no G+ there is no one place to see posts shared anymore. Google+ was awesome to me! I thought it was a great tool for social media and fit my tastes perfectly. I so wish it was still around. The number one thing I loved about G+ was that everyone was there and that my blog posts were shared there automatically. Now people are scattered all over the place and I have to manually share my blog posts, and that is very time consuming. It would be great if I (not asking for volunteers and not trying to shame anyone for not doing it) had a dozen people who would share my blog posts on a dozen different platforms every time I posted. That would achieve what happened automatically with G+. So I agree, I miss G+. Even though we probably have a broader reach now, still miss it.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Jan 8, 2022 12:53:46 GMT -5
And now a little bit of commentary on the blog post... [2] - "...it's clear that rules alone do not determine what is old school..."[2] - This quote nails it as far as I'm concerned. There is no ONE TRUE WAY about OSR. It's about how you play instead of what you play. Was it Necromancer Games that had the tagline of "3rd edition rules, 1st edition feel" or something similar? You can play just about any rpg in an old school style. You just have to change the focus of the game and learn when to hand-wave details and go with the flow. This first post has definitely caught my eye and I will continue reading. While I largely agree with this, IMO OD&D makes this effortless and some rule sets make it a lot of work and a huge amount of the rules have to be ignored. If you have rules lawyers in the game they are going to balk at that and so IMO it is easier to use a rule set that does not have any or little of the stuff you intend to ignore.
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Post by The Semi-Retired Gamer on Jan 8, 2022 13:03:14 GMT -5
And now a little bit of commentary on the blog post... [2] - "...it's clear that rules alone do not determine what is old school..."[2] - This quote nails it as far as I'm concerned. There is no ONE TRUE WAY about OSR. It's about how you play instead of what you play. Was it Necromancer Games that had the tagline of "3rd edition rules, 1st edition feel" or something similar? You can play just about any rpg in an old school style. You just have to change the focus of the game and learn when to hand-wave details and go with the flow. This first post has definitely caught my eye and I will continue reading. While I largely agree with this, IMO OD&D makes this effortless and some rule sets make it a lot of work and a huge amount of the rules have to be ignored. If you have rules lawyers in the game they are going to balk at that and so IMO it is easier to use a rule set that does not have any or little of the stuff you intend to ignore. True. You bring up a good point. Some groups can use any rules, but some groups always have "that guy" so it's easier to use a rule set that doesn't need a bunch of rules removed.
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Post by The Semi-Retired Gamer on Jan 8, 2022 13:03:58 GMT -5
Google+ was awesome to me! I thought it was a great tool for social media and fit my tastes perfectly. I so wish it was still around. The number one thing I loved about G+ was that everyone was there and that my blog posts were shared there automatically. Now people are scattered all over the place and I have to manually share my blog posts, and that is very time consuming. It would be great if I (not asking for volunteers and not trying to shame anyone for not doing it) had a dozen people who would share my blog posts on a dozen different platforms every time I posted. That would achieve what happened automatically with G+. So I agree, I miss G+. Even though we probably have a broader reach now, still miss it. Agreed. It was pretty much effortless.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Jan 8, 2022 13:09:10 GMT -5
While I largely agree with this, IMO OD&D makes this effortless and some rule sets make it a lot of work and a huge amount of the rules have to be ignored. If you have rules lawyers in the game they are going to balk at that and so IMO it is easier to use a rule set that does not have any or little of the stuff you intend to ignore. True. You bring up a good point. Some groups can use any rules, but some groups always have "that guy" so it's easier to use a rule set that doesn't need a bunch of rules removed. "That guy" is the source of most problems at the table. I fortunately have never had one, I have only heard about them. Well, I may have had a few, but one they thought better of disrupting the game and two just never came back. So I suppose there are some perks of being tall and big and some people think intimidating and others think teddy bear.
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Post by hengest on Jan 9, 2022 13:04:04 GMT -5
True. You bring up a good point. Some groups can use any rules, but some groups always have "that guy" so it's easier to use a rule set that doesn't need a bunch of rules removed. "That guy" is the source of most problems at the table. I fortunately have never had one, I have only heard about them. Well, I may have had a few, but one they thought better of disrupting the game and two just never came back. So I suppose there are some perks of being tall and big and some people think intimidating and others think teddy bear. Having a big guy around who behaves well is a great deterrent to troublemakers. I don't think of myself as particularly big or strong, but once an older lady was complaining to me that the lock was broken on the front door to the building. I asked if she thought someone could open it without the key. She said, "Guy like you? Put your shoulder into it for a second, no problem." I had no idea why she thought I was some kind of huge man until later, I realized that she was probably 4'9" or so and that, at just under 6 feet, to her I was just another of the many giants that walk the earth. The other side of the story is that once I went to a friend's house and someone I didn't know opened the door. I was shocked to have to look up so much at another human. I later learned he is 6'9". So for someone like me, it goes both ways.
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Post by El Borak on Jan 10, 2022 0:11:38 GMT -5
I wondered that I had never seen this blog before, but it had 9 posts in 2017, then did not post again until 11 posts in 2020 and 10 in 2021. With no G+ there is no one place to see posts shared anymore. Google+ was awesome to me! I thought it was a great tool for social media and fit my tastes perfectly. I so wish it was still around. Google+ was a good thing, in spite of a somewhat user unfriendly interface. Scroll three columns and it did not take long to see if anything interesting was going on.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Jan 10, 2022 13:40:07 GMT -5
"That guy" is the source of most problems at the table. I fortunately have never had one, I have only heard about them. Well, I may have had a few, but one they thought better of disrupting the game and two just never came back. So I suppose there are some perks of being tall and big and some people think intimidating and others think teddy bear. Having a big guy around who behaves well is a great deterrent to troublemakers. I don't think of myself as particularly big or strong, but once an older lady was complaining to me that the lock was broken on the front door to the building. I asked if she thought someone could open it without the key. She said, "Guy like you? Put your shoulder into it for a second, no problem." I had no idea why she thought I was some kind of huge man until later, I realized that she was probably 4'9" or so and that, at just under 6 feet, to her I was just another of the many giants that walk the earth. The other side of the story is that once I went to a friend's house and someone I didn't know opened the door. I was shocked to have to look up so much at another human. I later learned he is 6'9". So for someone like me, it goes both ways. I am 6'3" and I had a roommate that was 7', it was so odd because 40 years ago it was rare for me to medt someone taller than me, but these days there are a lot more tall people than there was even 40 years ago and, of course, I have shrunk in height over the years so I am a little shorter these days. I met Rik Smits who played for the Indiana Pacers once, he was 7'4" I guess that is how someone around 5' or less feels around me. (Although we both weighed 250# at the time and I could not understand how he would weigh that little and be that tall.) Also funny is that I don't think of myself as being all that big, since all the men in my family are my height +/- 2 inches.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:10:35 GMT -5
He says: I do not accept either of these as a definition of the OSR and in fact what I think the OSR started out meaning in the beginning was only partially "Old School" and now the OSR has departed greatly from the "Old School" as some parts of it are mostly or even completely "New School" given all the things that are now claimed to be part of the OSR. As such it has become to a large extent a meaningless term. IMO it is not "Old School" if it is not compatible with OD&D with no more than minimal on the fly adjustments.
While I describe this forum as OSR friendly, some OSR games would not remotely be compatible with OD&D without massive changes.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:21:46 GMT -5
He claims this was D&D in its beginning:I don't really think this is all that accurate. It may have defined the game at some tables, but by no means all. We had adventures that took place in town, in the wilderness and in dungeons. When we left town to journey into the wilderness and perhaps into a dungeon, it might be as much as 6 months or more before we made it back to town. Supplies were designed to be supplemented with hunting and fishing to meet your food requirements, during the trip.
As you went deeper into dungeons they got tougher, but the wilderness was what it was. From day one in the wilderness you might meet things that you could not handle more often than not in the beginning. Roleplaying was pretty big, at least for us, and each character had a distinct personality. For all the blather about all fighting-men, magic-users and clerics being the same, we did not find it so. No two of any class were the same. If all of the fighting men (etc) in your group are all the same, then that is not a problem or limitation of the game, it is a failure of imagination on the part of the players. I do not remember any tight gameplay loop at all. Exploration was huge, going up in levels was fun, but incidental to the exploration part of the game.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:29:21 GMT -5
He says:I think this part is just ridiculous. Bitd, no one asked "what's my character's motivation?" at all and for one simple reason, it would never occurred to anyone that their character did not have a motivation, that was a given. Had anyone voiced such a thing bitd the whole room would have laughed at them. We started with a referee and 12 players. If you had went around the room and asked each what their characters motivation was you would have gotten a quick, immediate answer and everyone would have been different. Some wanted to explore, some wanted to accumulate wealth and power, some wanted to search out new spells, some wanted specific magic items, etc, etc, etc. There were as many motivations as there were people. When a character died the replacement character had a different motivation than the previous one.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:35:44 GMT -5
He says: Our default assumption was that we were explorers and adventures. Think the early ships that went out from Europe to explore the world or the Lewis & Clark expedition. I cannot think of anyone bitd, but what would have been insulted to have been called a graverobber. No one thought of themselves that way. I cannot think of a single time bitd where we robbed a tomb or a burial mound, that would have been considered beyond the pale in our gaming group.
As far as more being on the group and not the system as a whole, that is by design and exactly the way OD&D was supposed to be and IMO all an RPG should be, a framework on which each group builds, no more and no less.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:41:19 GMT -5
He says: I will say two things here: 1. When you introduce plots, your introduce railroads, I don't want no stinking railroad mixed into my D&D! 2. If you have to convince someone who had "showed up to play D&D that they should bother playing D&D" then they should not be there. It is always my assumption that you are there to play whatever game I invited you to play. Cards, board game, RPG, pickup sticks etc. If you have to be talked into playing, then get out, come back when your head is in the right place.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:46:22 GMT -5
IMO the death of Old School gaming was the moment that people decided that players needed help figuring out their motivation, that they needed a railroad all plotted out for them from which they could not deviate. Old School is when players explore a world and as they pursue their interests in this living world they create their own plots through play. The referee is not their to lead the players around by the nose, the referee is there to provide a living world for the players to interact with and to facilitate that ongoing interaction. Old School is an open ended sandbox where every decision the players make, matters.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 13:55:33 GMT -5
He says: See I disagree with the as laid out beforehand part. I don't believe any encounter should be laid out beforehand. I was never on board with that.
However, absolutely it was IMO a violation of the trust between the referee and the players if you adjusted the environment to better accommodate the players (i.e. make things easier for them) or the perceived "needs of the story" (i.e. the railroad). Let's be clear the moment that you depart from this principle that no "story" exists except that story that is created through the actual play and is talked about later. Any "story" that exists before the game starts should consist only of what happened in previous game sessions, i.e. the history of the game world. Most people when they talk about "story", they mean they are talking about scripts and plots and things that the players must do and specific paths they must follow, and that is the way of the railroad and the death of open ended gaming where player decisions matter and where player freedom ends.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 14:06:23 GMT -5
He says:
Old School D&D is challenging because it is not based on crafting adventures, it is based on referees created open ended sandbox world for the players to explore, those sandboxes grow to have a never ending supply of "hooks" which are things that the players learn of going on in the world and they can choose from a multitude of "hooks" or they can say, "what's over that next hill." It is the referees job to improvise from beginning to end of each game session.
I would hesitate to call anyone a player if they need to have "their adventures and motivations served up on platters." Those people need to go read fairy tales, mythology, fantasy, and lots of history and go experience life and once they are fully alive, then come back and join us at the game table.
If you can be "easily be bored to tears if handed an adventure almost entirely determined by their actions," then you have my deepest sympathy for the socially and emotionally impoverished life you have lived up to now.
As for this "not armed with an understanding of what is expected of them," I can only repeat, this is what my game is about (brief thumbnail sketch) and wonder what you don't understand.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 14:14:16 GMT -5
In a footnote he says and I have bolded the relevant parts of it: The "alternate interpretations" is a feature and it absolutely not a flaw! If you are not tinkering and modifying the game to suit your style, you have my deepest sympathy, as you have not yet understood the first few pages of OD&D in Volume I Men & Magic.
Those that abandoned the open site exploration style of play are people I do not want to game with.
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Post by The Perilous Dreamer on Feb 20, 2022 14:18:06 GMT -5
Old School, I mean true Old School open ended sandbox gaming is not the One True Way to play, you can play anyway you want.
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Post by Vladimir, The Dark Prince on Feb 20, 2022 22:54:34 GMT -5
He says: If you can be "easily be bored to tears if handed an adventure almost entirely determined by their actions," then you have my deepest sympathy for the socially and emotionally impoverished life you have lived up to now. Wow, how is getting to make decisions something that is boring?
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Post by hengest on Feb 21, 2022 12:07:35 GMT -5
He says: If you can be "easily be bored to tears if handed an adventure almost entirely determined by their actions," then you have my deepest sympathy for the socially and emotionally impoverished life you have lived up to now. Wow, how is getting to make decisions something that is boring? Some people seem to use "boring" to mean "not actively stimulated by outside forces." To me, that state is called "resting" or "thinking." But I suppose if that's what you mean by "boring," then each instance of having / getting to make a choice is going to bore you.
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Post by Vladimir, The Dark Prince on Feb 21, 2022 13:02:40 GMT -5
Wow, how is getting to make decisions something that is boring? Some people seem to use "boring" to mean "not actively stimulated by outside forces." To me, that state is called "resting" or "thinking." But I suppose if that's what you mean by "boring," then each instance of having / getting to make a choice is going to bore you. Ah, but thinking is out of vogue these days and to those who cannot think, all life is boring between momentary hits of pleasure.
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