I won?
That was... unexpected. Thank you so much if you voted for me, hope I can live up to your expectations, and if you didn't... well, I hope you can find something to enjoy about the series, and I really hope that Lantz and HotPanda end up sharing their thoughts on 40K6 and WFB8 down the line, 'cause their entries were pretty damn interesting if you ask me.
As before, there's a script after the cut, which should be more or less accurate but I reserve the right for it not to be. Especially not after I've had to film this something like six times just to work out a combination of mikes, cameras, computers and editing software that will actually produce something. What's gone wrong since last week? I don't know. This is why GAME OVER doesn't even have pictures half the time... grumble grumble sulk...
The Von Show this week is brought to you by the letter B.
As we set out on this voyage to explore strange new worlds by rolling funny-shaped dice in them, SinSynn asked a whole bunch of clever questions, and they went like this:
What makes a good roleplaying game?
Clearly, Dungeons and Dragons has gone through iterations both good and bad, but why were some good, some bad?
Is it a mechanics issue? Or changes to an established system that didn't work, or were disliked by the fanbase?
Okay. I'm going to answer the D&D-related questions in a roundabout way and hopefully work my way around to answering the big question by implication. See, I don't think there's actually been a bad iteration of D&D - well, maybe one, but that was very much a victim of circumstances. What there have been are editions which people haven't liked, which haven't suited What They Think Roleplaying Is About. People entrench over these things. They start saying things like "Wizards of the Coast took over D&D and made it into a load of old bollocks, only second edition AD&D is proper D&D and bollocks to anyone who says otherwise."
These people are edition warriors, and before I go any further in this, I would very much like to give a short message to any of them who might be watching.
PACK IT IN.
Seriously. Each of the various D&Ds is D&D in name only. They're very different animals, they cater to different styles of play and different assumptions about what makes an RPG worth playing. Speaking entirely personally, I find third edition to be somewhat uncomfortably bloated and frontloady and honestly I'd rather not play it, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lean out of my ivory tower of nerdrage and piss on it from a great height. Bollocks to that! It just means they're not for me.
See, people think all RPGs are the same. They're not.
Let me give you an object demonstration. This is an old-school roleplaying game. It's quite small and light, it runs to a mere... sixty-two pages, it cost a fiver and it is extraordinarily not-detailed. You have to make up enormous amounts of it as you go along and most of the rules boil down to 'how the GM wants it to work'. THIS, meanwhile, is a new-school roleplaying game. It's very detailed, it's got a presumably tested and consistent rule for everything, a greater variety of defined specialisations for characters and it's four hundred extremely hard-wearing and heavy pages.
Neither of these games is going to be the dog's bollocks for everyone. Some people like the encyclopaedic detail and clearly defined character abilities offered by the new-school, some people like the wide open vistas of possibility and you-can-do-anything-you-can-think-of-but-you-the-player-have-to-think-of-it-ness of the old school. The point is they're different. The point is that D&D has been around for ages, it's been different things at different times, it invented the dichotomy between the new and old schools, and it's always had the same name. That confuses people. They expect it to stay the same, when in truth it never has.
The first edition of Dungeons and Dragons is a mess. I've looked at some scans of the rulebooks and they spend half their time saying 'look it up in Chainmail' (the wargame rules set from which the game is derived) and the other half sending you from pillar to post trying to work out how to stab a dude. First, to me, is the Bad One - it's an early essay in the form that needed a good hard redrafting.
When it eventually got one, it split in two.
On the one hand, you have Basic Dungeons and Dragons. It's really simple, for low-level characters so archetypal that elf, dwarf and halfling are actually classes and it's assumed that all elves, dwarves and halflings are the same - and designed to be picked up and played by anyone who lays hands on the box.
On the other, you have Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It... isn't. There's more of everything. More classes. More weapons. More options, with race and class splitting off. More levels. More details. And it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, with more and more books of new monsters, new skills, new rules to govern new eventualities. More of everything, to the point where it was described as not even being the same game as Basic.
E. Gary Gygax, who wrote the advanced game, wanted an expansive game with rulings on any conceivable situation which might come up during play. J. Eric Holmes, the editor of the basic game, preferred a lighter tone with more room for personal improvisation. Here was born the essential difference of opinions which eventually leads to the oldschool-newschool binary opposition, if you're keeping up with that.
The second edition of Dungeons and Dragons is complicated, and I have not the time, patience or inclination to sort through the rafts of archaeological bollocks necessary to describe exactly what changed. There was rules bloat, people left and joined publisher TSR, there were efforts made to pull the bloat together into new and 'definitive' versions of the game which promptly bloated again. Towards the end second edition D&D was such a vast game that I'd argue nobody was playing it properly - but it was also a game that gave rise to some authentic phenomena, novels and computer games and novelties and all that sort of bollocks that has endured long after TSR has ceased to be. It was huge and complex and bewildering, but it was also huge and exciting and full of potential that people were actively developing all the time. It lasted for so long and was played by so many people that it pretty much defined What D&D Was.
All things come to an end, though. The Basic game fell off the radar as AD&D grew and grew and Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR in 2000. The first thing they did was drop the needless 'Advanced' and rebrand the game as simply Dungeons and Dragons. Third edition is the other definitive edition, the moment of acension for the new-school philosophy of rules and supplements for every eventuality. It introduces the idea of generic skill tables which members of every class use, a list of feats which customise your character and, if you pick the right ones and have the right stats, unlock new tactical options at particular levels, the universal and consistent 'roll a d20 for damn near everything' mechanic in which high numbers are always better. It introduces prestige classes, unlocks race-class combinations that had hitherto been prohibited, and it turned the game open-source.
And not everyone liked it. Some people have a problem with half-orc paladins, some people like that your armour is better the lower your armour class is, some people like that only thieves deal with traps, some people like being able to roll up a character and play it and not have to worry that your stats aren't quite high enough to qualify for this feat which means that option is shut off to you which means your character will be under-optimised bollocks by the time you've reached twelfth level.
Then it bloated, and then it was reissued in a definitive format, and then it bloated again... starting to see a pattern?
Anyway, back in '07 the fourth edition of D&D emerged. This one tears away from the races and classes of the previous editions and sets course for a different kind of fantasy; it introduces these sort of superpowers that characters can use per day, per encounter, or per turn; it allows everyone to heal themselves during combat and fully heal in a day's rest; it encourages players to collect new gear as they level up and DMs to ensure that the things they fight are level-appropriate; everything is measured in squares, suggesting that a grid or board is part of the game rather than a useful option...
... it's not the same game any more. And some people don't like it. Personally, I like Basic - rules light, rulings-heavy, characters are quick and easy to create and are personalised by how you play them rather than by how you build them. But me thinking that Basic's the dog's bollocks doesn't prove anything about any of the others being good or bad - it says more about me than it does about D&D. Never mind the bollocks. Find an edition you like, play on, and Godspeed.
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