DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
Ah, there's that famed Prince creative verbosity. My mind feels so much sharper when pressed against the whetstone of such thought-provoking commentary.
2e - why you think it sucks, and why you're right
- Thread starter The Heretic
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Pseudoephedrine
Should be playing D&D instead
I'll admit I tend to run high magic games, especially ones in which the technological and social formations are comparable to the early modern period. The ubiquity of magic in such a setting isn't really a problem, since one simply thematises that capitalist early modernity appropriate to the period is acting on magical practitioners and beings as fulsomely as it is on everything else. I think the problem tends to come from deploying magic as essentially consumer technology with a fully developed retail infrastructure in pseudo-medieval trappings. One of the great challenges of early modern capitalism was to construct and link market systems with one another, and the various peculiar intermediary forms and formations allow one to have something like a market for magic items but in ways that are considerably more interesting and evocative than just wandering into Ye Olde Radioshack to pick up Ye Olde Magic Cellphone.
The1True
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Interesting. Examples?
DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
The trick is not the showing how magic can recreate our world; The trick is in the adapting of an entire world to the very existence of magic in a plausible, sensible, quasi-realistic way.
Keeping magic tucked away into the corners of the Earth is not exactly what I'd call realism in a scenario where a level-0 farmhand can cast magic missile if he ever just decides to start an adventuring career.
It's the same creativity employed if I asked you to write a story on how different the world would be if horses had never existed. You have to change the whole world, not just the streetlights.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Making a consistent world is a task, no doubt.
With regards to this, I think we want to remember that most folks are level-0....adventurers are still nobodies at level-1, but are just a bit special because of their training. A magic-user has been taken under the wing of a mage, trained for years to learn magic, giving an expensive spellbook of his/her own (VERY expensive...something like 5-10 years of farm-hand wages), and sent off into the world. Likewise, clerics are of a very small minority that have been gifted by the gods to perform miracles. Fighters least-unique at level-1---are still probably the most dangerous (they CAN survive a sword attack...most peasants don't).
Don't sweep this under the table. That's one of the first steps in not screwing your game up.
It is part of what makes 2e suck (Prince's excellent return to the thread topic), that this gets forgotten. PC abilities are normalized, as is Magic (reliable and ubiquitous like technology). So now that you've decided the once-special is now common-place, you're left with two options:
a) hand wave it, and start looking for EVEN MORE easily obtained "skills" to keep your PC/campaign interesting (ability inflation)
b) think through what that does to society/civilization --- and try to (re)build a whole stable game/world (as you suggest)
If you choose (a), you get suck-y 2e.
If you choose (b) then, like Late 1980's/1990's comic books who went through this identical deconstructionist phase ("What if superheroes really existed in our world?"...oooh...shock!...awe!...death-spiral into nasty edge-lord crap), you have your work cut out for you...but then you're moving away (out of boredom?) from the known and into the unknown---something that's not really D&D, but your own thing.
(As an aside, once the MCU and CGI made $uperhero$ work on-$creen, it was inevitable the next-phase deconstructionists would also arrive: e.g. The Boys, Umbrella Academy, etc.---spoiler alert: superheroes with tons of mental/emotional problems doesn't end well. Kinda ruins the whole genre. i.e. bad romance novels or sick psycho-drama.)
To my mind, everything you are suggesting has been tried. Your logic seems solid, but the place it ultimately takes you is not one I care to visit (again). I'm sure that you think: "It's different for me. I'm not an idiot. I'll pull it off. Any concern you raise, I'll instantly think of a solution..and that's what I'll claim I'd do." --- well, maybe...new things happen.
But what I find a more reliable foundation on which to build is look back over 40 years of D&D, and learn from the mistakes, and also what has been proven to work. Make good notes of each, ask others for suggestion based on their experiences...and then use knowledge-gained to improve your game, seeing what works for you. Don't just sit there self-content thinking you've got the Perfect Table Experience (sing it! "Ain't nobody gonna' tell me nothin'...Can't tell me nothin'..."). EOTB (and others) have opened my eyes repeatedly to game-balancing elements that were not obvious to me originally. Cause and effect. Balance matters (...and we are such stupid, short-sighted animals).
That's not to say you can't innovate. But as someone who struggles daily with the bleeding edge of engineering, let me tell you---the improvements you can make are usually tiny, and you don't know for a long time if they are actually better vs. just different. Edison's rule of 99 failures to one success (IF you are exceptionally good at what you do). But if you don't bother to really understand what others have learned before you and become proficient at applying it, then you are going to look like a cocky little fool and almost certainly fail big.
Those who don't learn the lessons of history,...
10 out of 10 points for Style, but...
etc.
When Gygax and friends were ousted from TSR, they were the folks with the most play/rules-creation experience. It seems pretty clear their replacements (who where attracted to a nerd-hobby by the smell of money), had no concept of how all the piece went together. No history with what had worked/was-broken with OD&D. Balance LOST...and the game immediately started going off the rails: hence this thread.
History hath pronounced it's judgement: 2e doth suck-eth.
(...and excessive normalized/quantified/categorized/standardized magic was part of the reason why)
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The1True
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
I disagree with so much of the above.
I think 2e didn't suck. The addition of skills and proficiencies was fun and made for super-heroic characters. THACO, though still fundamentally flawed, at least somewhat simplified 1e's retarded to-hit system. And the 2.5 books were awesome for those of us who enjoyed tricking out their character builds. I level a 'j'accuse' and suggest that many who hated this were control-freak DM's afraid to relinquish a modicum of agency to their players.
THE PROBLEM with 2e was the shitty turn in entertainment value that the adventures modules took. I was going to say 'quality', but that wouldn't be true; at that point TSR had the money to produce a highly polished product. But I'm looking through these books on my shelf and I can see the padding of words. Pages long backstory and NPC descriptions. Boring dungeon layouts with few meaningful choices and a concentration on monster verisimilitude and trap/trick mechanics rather than fun. The PC's couldn't write their own story because there was a plot running through everything and god help a young DM if one of the players got smart/creative and derailed the whole thing. I remember being brutally heavy handed getting my players back on the tracks so they could score the super-deluxe, end-state read-aloud.
Like DP keeps saying (in just about every thread here) it's not the rules edition, but what you do with them. We had a blast with 2e; mostly converting classic modules, but also tooling around magic-heavy Planescape and Spelljammer. TSR just took a turn for the worse with its adventure writing (and never really got better...I can probably count on one hand the official 3e adventures that were good, I've erased the memory of 4e from my mind and given all the reworks of 5e modules I keep seeing online I'm guessing things still aren't going well.) Obviously, whatever their doing is selling to fresh generations though, so they're not going back to that old style of writing. That's why we're all here. Looking for our fix.
I think 2e didn't suck. The addition of skills and proficiencies was fun and made for super-heroic characters. THACO, though still fundamentally flawed, at least somewhat simplified 1e's retarded to-hit system. And the 2.5 books were awesome for those of us who enjoyed tricking out their character builds. I level a 'j'accuse' and suggest that many who hated this were control-freak DM's afraid to relinquish a modicum of agency to their players.
THE PROBLEM with 2e was the shitty turn in entertainment value that the adventures modules took. I was going to say 'quality', but that wouldn't be true; at that point TSR had the money to produce a highly polished product. But I'm looking through these books on my shelf and I can see the padding of words. Pages long backstory and NPC descriptions. Boring dungeon layouts with few meaningful choices and a concentration on monster verisimilitude and trap/trick mechanics rather than fun. The PC's couldn't write their own story because there was a plot running through everything and god help a young DM if one of the players got smart/creative and derailed the whole thing. I remember being brutally heavy handed getting my players back on the tracks so they could score the super-deluxe, end-state read-aloud.
Like DP keeps saying (in just about every thread here) it's not the rules edition, but what you do with them. We had a blast with 2e; mostly converting classic modules, but also tooling around magic-heavy Planescape and Spelljammer. TSR just took a turn for the worse with its adventure writing (and never really got better...I can probably count on one hand the official 3e adventures that were good, I've erased the memory of 4e from my mind and given all the reworks of 5e modules I keep seeing online I'm guessing things still aren't going well.) Obviously, whatever their doing is selling to fresh generations though, so they're not going back to that old style of writing. That's why we're all here. Looking for our fix.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
So you like 90's comics, eh? (kidding)
No comment. To my way of thinking, you just shot yourself in the foot there, Hoss.
Looking up something in a table may be slow, but "retarded"? Really? Do you like knowing the value of sine and cosine? How do you think your calculator does it? (BTW: I personally use THAC0 in my stat blocks---by attack type---because I like the quick math and am not too worried about +/-5% inaccuracy on most to-hit rolls. I also like S&W's single Saving Throw type for similar reasons of efficiency.)
(cough)
This is also DP's 5e argument. Why do you think this keeps being the case (post 1e)?
My contention is the game-system balance was lost and broke adventure design.
Your is that they just lost the ability to write/edit for 30 years.
Which one is more likely?
[ And I do apologize for my bluntness, I assumed everyone accepted the thread premise as true (except @Malrex who likes to trick out his character like a hot-rod and dislikes DMing). So, if you like 2e, and have good memories of playing it, that's great. Carry on. ]
DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
See this is the entire subjectivity of the debate I'm talking about: nowhere in the rules is this codified, and this is not the universal axiom of everyone's game world.
Session-0 of a new campaign isn't spent having the Magic-User undergo years of apprenticeship while the Fighting Man works his way up the ranks of the armed forces. The book says "you're a Magic-User, so you can do this. He's a Fighting Man, so he can do that." That's it, the details of the "how" are left to the DM to fit into the way his world works as best he can.
Consider this: lets say hypothetically that God exists in the real world; it's made obvious because there are people who talk directly to God, and God grants them powers to do miracles - all of this is proven by science, and everyone accepts and understands the existence and impact of God. Clerics, people who have for whatever reason been chosen to connect with God, become massively important people - they can make miracles happen. What happens to our reality in that situation?
What if your local priest had the power to mend a broken leg simply by asking God - would hospitals still need to exist? What if priests could create food and water on command - would there still be starving people in the world? What if anyone, with just the right amount of practice, could also learn to speak to God and cast miracles - wouldn't there be a shit-load of people with those abilities? Society would be completely different, in every possible way. Architecture, medicine, technology, biology... almost every field would be impacted. We would not recognize that world because divine magic would be standing-in for a lot of what we do with technology today.
And that's just on the assumption that divine magic were the only magic. Imagine now if you didn't need to talk to God to create miracles - you just had to read a bunch of books and practice your Abracadabra skills. Imagine a world where the magic of Hogwarts were made public knowledge and that magic could be learned by muggles - you bet your ass we'd see kids playing with magic butterflies on street corners, and guy threatening to blow up a convenience store with a fireball if the teller didn't hand over the cash.
Naturally this lessens the "wonder" of miracles, if any person who put in as much effort as getting a PhD could perform them. Does it rob the entire world of wonder? No... but miracles are less wonderous, sure. Less wonderous, but exactly as common as you'd realistically expect them to be.
That's the expected reality of things. People exploit that which exists in their world to their benefit; they always have and always will. Magic would be no different. I don't agree with the old "sphere of annihilation in the toilet" weirdness, that seems excessive. But if someone enchanted a toilet bowl to never need cleaning (which would be a mere cantrip in terms of magical power), you'd bet your ass you could find one at a Home Depot. Why would it be so wrong to reflect that kind of plausible reality in your game world?
DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
If you read Bryce's reviews (which I automatically assume you do), note how many of his gripes with products were based on choices by the author vs. how many are gripes about the system. Almost all of his problems are with bad author choices to make text too long, or to use the wrong font, or to put in terrible encounters, or to have boring maps. I have a hard time finding any where the obvious flaw of the product is a result of a flawed system.
In fact, I challenge you, squeen, to find and link a Bryce review where he shits on an adventure because of a problem inherent to its system and not to the author. Otherwise, you aren't demonstrating that there's a problem with a system - you're demonstrating a personal bias against a system which is not objectively a problem for everyone else using it.
EDIT: As a related side note, go to the 10FP blog and browse through "The Worst EVAR" tags (there are 7 entries) and the "Do Not By Ever" tags (7 entries also), noting which system the entry uses. If a bad system causes bad adventures, then retro-clones are the worst perpetrator.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
(sigh) It's only common if you make it common. And if you make it common, then...consequences.
And yes, the cost of a spell book and the like is in the 1e DMG.
OD&D clerics don't actually get spells until 2nd level.
Walking around your world --- how many of these class of characters do you include? What's the average level?
Keep it low: one result.
Inflate it: another.
That's your design choice.
And yes, the cost of a spell book and the like is in the 1e DMG.
OD&D clerics don't actually get spells until 2nd level.
Walking around your world --- how many of these class of characters do you include? What's the average level?
Keep it low: one result.
Inflate it: another.
That's your design choice.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
probably. Let's not go there again. All that matters is if you are personally satisfied with what you are using.
DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
If you're a module/adventure designer and have to cater to the largest possible audience playing the game, do you cater to A) the fringe people who play retro systems and treat magic as a supreme rarity, or B) the other 95% of players who use modern systems and who think that magic would be realistically commonplace?
You can't fault writers for knowing their audience. You can fault critics for not understanding that their experience does not match that of the target audience.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
OK. Peace. Adventure Designers chasing markets are not my concern. My beliefs are impractical. Granted.
Now try this one on for size, and follow through on all the world-altering consequences:
You can't be just learn how to be a cleric/magic-user/druid --- you have to have "the gift" first.
The fraction of a sparse world population with the abilities 0.05% (1 in 2000).
The result: OD&D
Now try this one on for size, and follow through on all the world-altering consequences:
You can't be just learn how to be a cleric/magic-user/druid --- you have to have "the gift" first.
The fraction of a sparse world population with the abilities 0.05% (1 in 2000).
The result: OD&D
The1True
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
Dude. Really?
They started writing that Dragonlance garbage in 1e. It sold like hotcakes. They never EVER looked back. so Yes, the latter is more likely.
There was a loosey goosey innocence to the early adventure supplements. Usually at the expense of realism. The company grew up and figured out that the people spending money were in it for the pictures and the entertaining read more than the actual utility of the product.
And come on. THACO is utterly cognitively atypical. Half the rip-off homebrew old school reboots out there do away with it for the ascending AC model. There's a reason for that.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Fair point. The market economy destroyed D&D quality.
(Dragonlance = 2e? 1e ended with EGG's departure.)
Guilty.
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DangerousPuhson
Should be playing D&D instead
A 1:2000 ratio is still pretty common. For comparative purposes, modern doctors come in at a ratio of 1:1800 among the general population, yet we don't get amazed by the sight of a stethoscope. And yet anyone can "just learn" to be a doctor if they have "the gift" of being smart enough and working hard enough - I imagine more people would be if being a doctor meant you also get magical fucking powers!
You go wash your mouth with soap. Dark Sun was the tits.
What about Faery Markets or Leiber's Bazaar of the Bizarre or wandering magic item forging golems or the treatment of Hell or other outer spheres as essentially an economy that runs on souls and grants supernatural boons in return? It's a pretty interesting observation actually, focusing on the interaction between the supernatural market and the mundane one.
I think you need something like that in a setting that still assumes most magical items are 'trapped' or 'locked' in ancient ruins constructed in earlier days. If there is clear and upward momentum in magical ability then dungeon crawling as a source of magical items stops making sense. There is a sort of assumed Fallen Age in standard D&D that must also be considered.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
Adjust ratio as required...