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Post by merctime on May 2, 2015 18:58:36 GMT -5
I really believe that the OGL-empowerment is a two-edged sword. IMO it gave rise to vanity press and in large part imitation cycles, as we are not faced with game designers whose tensions are prescribed by "what is can become better" under Gygax's exhortation, above, "but that we know what you should do, which is exactly what we do." This is ego going unchecked for the most part when compared to the past OD&D quotes which point to making it your own. Exactly why I'm done with new rules sets, personally.
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Post by Robert the Black on May 4, 2015 15:28:52 GMT -5
Lull them into a false sense of security, before you show them how bizarre the game is going to get. I like this, best argument I have ever seen for btb play.
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Post by Robert the Black on May 4, 2015 15:34:41 GMT -5
Maybe "proper" was poor word selection. Perhaps "justifiable" would have been a better choice? Then again, anything can be made "justifiable" with enough contortion. All I meant was to group games that address those "value" criteria (i.e., available, enables publication of supporting material, teaches us something about the original). There may be further criteria, those were just the three that came to mind... Clones make sense for enabling publication, but for play it is always best to get your hands on the original text which is very easy to do, but very difficult and very expensive to do legally.
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:05:49 GMT -5
The Simulacra -Clones, Retro-Clones and what have you are really to a large extent just someones house rules. A realy valid point, and one that a lot of folks seem to forget. In some ways I regret that WotC let the genie out of the bottle with their SRD because even though it allowed for some of these simulacra rules to exist, it also diluted the fan base for true OD&D. Why pay big dollars to buy a reprint or an e-bay copy of the original if you can play a clone for a lot cheaper? I don't like the concept that OD&D might be "elitist" but the clones may or may not follow the spirit of the original, and once that spirit is changed then OD&D has changed. Folks nowadays expect a "complete" product and don't expect to "wing it" during play, but "wing it" is exactly what I've been doing for decades in my OD&D campaigns. That, to me, is part of the charm of OD&D. This is exactly why it is good that even the nerfed pdfs of OD&D available on Drive Thru RPG are important. You can print out your own OD&D, then with a little help from alternate sources "cough,cough" of OD&D you can edit them to restore the full original text. Hobbits, Ents, Balrogs and more. But I don't regret WotC letting the genie out of the bottle, but the time for the text of OD&D to be released to the public domain. For that to wait till January 1st 2070 is just too long. If you don't wing it you really cannot call yourself a player of TTRPGs. "Complete" products are dead, lifeless, imagination free products. The great thing about OD&D is that it leaves room for your imagination. The terrible thing about later and "modern" versions is that they tie but the DM and the players in handcuffs instead locked cages.
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:07:00 GMT -5
Despite this being a forum for house rulings, I think its appropriate to discuss the wisdom of ruling things "By-the-book" as much as possible. It really takes a load of your back, as the judge, to work inside the guidelines of the written rules. There are already endless situations which arise in play in which you will need to make rulings, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to exercise your creativity and judgement. If you want to make house rules from the get go, keep them simple, and not to much for new players too wrap their heads around. Sticking to the rules as written will give your players more confidence in your skill as a judge, since you won't look like you're just screwing around. Lull them into a false sense of security, before you show them how bizarre the game is going to get. While he has his point, you can easily place way too much weight on "By-the-book."
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:09:04 GMT -5
In regard to simulacra being sets of house rules and not OD&D... If you go back and read the comment its meaning was that simulacra were really not new games they were collections of each person's OD&D house rules. I was not saying they are not OD&D. On the other hand the more you "fix" them and try to make them "perfect and complete" the more you lose the charm of OD&D. A lot of the so-called faults of OD&D are what make it special and when you clean those things up the "special" may be gone. This!
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:12:43 GMT -5
I can't agree with the general assumption that the clones "are really to a large extent just someones house rules." Perilous. I definitely do agree with you that house rules are more the icing on top of a much larger body of work, the rules as written, that facilitates them. But I can't see clearly how (or if?) the second statement is meant to support the first? It seems more to contradict it. Anyway, there is at least one clone I know of which is doesn't represent the author's house rules, and I would assume the same is true for at least some of the other clones too. My own experience aside, it's well known that not even the original authors played the rules exactly as written, so why would we assume that the clone authors are doing what even the original authors did not? I think we need to acknowledge that the game "as played" is (as much today as it was forty years ago) a moving target; a continually evolving, experimental mix of rules that change as circumstances require. As a couple of posts here have said here, it's really hard to stick exactly to the rules as written, and even with absolute discipline there are gaps in most of the retro rules that necessarily require the referee to be flexible. Just another 2 cp I agree that clones for the most part are house ruled copies of OD&D. That we played it differently is also well known, but that's the difference between what we did and what clones extol for rules inclusion. They are incorporated into the game as published whereas we made these optional for those rules we decided to add to the supplements (and these were not all of that we were using, for instance, if one refers to those occurring in supplement #1) Now anyone can throw out rules, and we recognized that from the beginning. The reason being is that we knew that each DM and their groups would develop different slants just as the MMSA and LGTSA members did, so why rule everything to death up front? The more calcified the game is up front the less house rulings will occur and the tendency then becomes to "play it by the book" which then leads to creative stagnation rather than the opposite. So I see clones as "the way I'd have published the game." Literally, as they are charging dollars for this, remember, and not just posting an add-on on a forum or in a magazine article for inspection and discussion. A good example here. IMO robkuntz gets it and waysoftheearth misses the point. There are two types of clones, those that are house ruled OD&D and those that are house ruled something else.
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:19:32 GMT -5
A lot of what you say, W.O.E., is spot on. The temptation to "do it my way as written," of course, flies in the face of EGG's point, "Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" I really believe that the OGL-empowerment is a two-edged sword. IMO it gave rise to vanity press and in large part imitation cycles, as we are not faced with game designers whose tensions are prescribed by "what is can become better" under Gygax's exhortation, above, "but that we know what you should do, which is exactly what we do." This is ego going unchecked for the most part when compared to the past OD&D quotes which point to making it your own. A simple restatement of the rules would have sufficed; but I have now long lost count of the iterations out there, which exceed TSR's own by at least two-fold at a guess... Here robkuntz makes the excellent point that a simple restatement of the rules would have sufficed and that has (and never will be) not been done by TSR or WotC. The nearest to it was the reorganization by greyharp and Il Male (not sure I have that right), but IIRC it left a little to be desired. IMO a restatement should pick up a little stuff from Chainmail and a little from Swords & Spells to make a good rewrite.
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:26:53 GMT -5
In the end, I think the justifiable purpose of the clones is threefold: 1) A workaround for the general unavailability of OD&D at "reasonable" pricing, 2) As a legal platform for publishing material in support of the original game (via support for its near-clone), and 3) As a research journey for the author/editor, who would otherwise never need to fathom what's down all those tunnels, or even that half those tunnels were there at all. Insofar as brief restatements of the rules go, I think Paul Gorman's 2011 Torch and Sword does an enviable job in only 67 pages of large, readable text (plus appendices). The next step of my own journey will be toward a similar grace and brevity I've never seen Torch & Sword, so since the link still works, I will have to take a look.
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Post by Morose on Mar 10, 2023 19:36:55 GMT -5
I agree that would be fantastic (and PDFs over every print too!), but ultimately this would only dissolve one of the three good reasons for clones: availability. There would still (IMHO) be value in clones for the purpose of i) legal, fan-produced, supporting material, and ii) in the research journey required to create a proper clone A "proper" clone? This I gotta hear... Maybe "proper" was poor word selection. Perhaps "justifiable" would have been a better choice? Then again, anything can be made "justifiable" with enough contortion. All I meant was to group games that address those "value" criteria (i.e., available, enables publication of supporting material, teaches us something about the original). There may be further criteria, those were just the three that came to mind... I think what we need is a the complete text pre-deletions and a little added info from other sources, such as spell duration from Swords & Spells.
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