Very often - Monday's post is an obvious example - I will post an idea on the blog for a campaign I'd like to run or a book I'd like to write, and people will pop up in the comments to say something like: "Why use D&D for this? Wouldn't Troika!/Into the Odd/FUDGE/etc. be better, for reasons X, Y and Z?"
These suggestions are always well meant. But I'm now at the point in my life where I feel comfortable saying that I can't really imagine ever playing anything with a ruleset other than D&D of the B/X or BECMI "classic" variety (with Pendragon and Cyberpunk 2020 being possible exceptions).
Why is this? Partly, I have to admit, this is just because classic D&D is comfortable for me now - as comfortable as a well-worn pair of slippers I can potter about in before bedtime. I don't really have to think about it. Yes, I still have to look things up in the rules, but I know where to look, and I know the system well enough to be able to wing almost anything and be confident it won't go horribly wrong.
But I would also make the case that D&D in its classic form is just a fabulously good game - certainly much better than any of its competitors in the fantasy genre:
- It deals with advancement so much better. The rate at which PCs gain levels is at the Goldilocks "just right" point, so that it is not too easy and feels meaningful, but is not so rare as to be frustrating. More importantly - and the genius of this is very rarely if ever remarked upon - PC levels map perfectly onto monster HD and also dungeon levels, so it is easy for the DM to gauge levels of challenge, what needs to be on each dungeon level, how much treasure needs to be in it, and so on (PCs in level 1 of a dungeon will be roughly 1st level and the monsters in it will need to have roughly 1 HD, and there will need to be X number of gp-worth of treasure present to permit advancement to level 2 - and so on).
- Relatedly, D&D has a huge catalogue of monsters in its many bestiaries, and is simple enough that new monsters can easily be created by the DM. As PCs advance in level, it is always possible for it to be the case that there of are lots of monsters weaker than them, as strong as them, and more powerful than them, thus presenting a variety of challenges throughout the gameworld. Even as they get to 9th level or above, there are going to be monsters out there who they can aspire to some day strive against, monsters they can easily beat up, and monsters which present a decent challenge.
- Advancing by level in my experience is just more exciting and fun than the alternative, which many systems deploy, of the PCs getting XP and spending it to improve a stat or gain a particular ability. Going from level 3 to 4 is simply more satisfying and feels like an achievement.
- This is admittedly a subjective thing, but the level of crunch in classic D&D is, again, at the Goldilocks "just right" point. More detailed and running the game would become a chore. More abstract and events would feel weightless and inconsequential.
- XP for gold. More than with any other game - and, again, the genius of this is not remarked upon frequently enough - classic D&D has a reason to go adventuring built in. The PCs need gold and will go out in pursuit of it. They don't need to ride the DM's railroad, and the DM doesn't need to put vast amounts of time and energy into coming up with a "plot". You just wind the campaign up and watch it go.
- D&D doesn't break. It's like an ABBA song: even when Piers Brosnan or Stellan Skarsgard are singing one in a ropey jukebox musical, it still kind of works. D&D also has this quality. You can bash it around and mess with it and do it badly, and it will still be ok. I'm not sure any other roleplaying game really has this quality.
To this, I would add the d20. Much has been written on probability distributions etc, but the d20's hits that Goldilocks zone for me. Crits and fumbles are rare, but not so rare they never happen.
ReplyDeleteThere's plenty of space between 1 and 20, with modifiers, to add texture to a dungeon/adventure's challenges, without it becoming too arbitrary.
I don't mind dice pools, 3d6, d100 etc, but d20 is best.
Good point actually. This is one of the issues with Cyberpunk 2020. On 1d10 there are too many fumbles or critical successes.
DeleteThe only thing I'd probably add is the cooperative element forced by D&D's asymmetrical character design. Fighters, clerics, magic-users, and thieves all play very differently, all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and yet are all necessary for successful adventuring. No other RPG has this or replicates it quite as effectively.
ReplyDeleteI would agree - often, even in point-buy systems, people end up aping D&D classes by making their PC like a thief, cleric, fighter, etc.
DeleteD&D is a good game, and in the end that's the only thing that you'll need! D&D is strong enough to support nearly anything in the Heroic Adventures genre, and that's quite a feat!
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure I could live a long and fullfilling gaming life playing D&D, Warhammer RPG and a couple of games more for the rest of my days. If only...
I think the hands-down best reason to play D&D is that you have a reasonable chance of going down to a boardgame shop or random Discord server or whatever and pulling together a group just by going "who wants to play some D&D", whereas if you want to play a game of Troika/GLOG/Beautiful Anomalies you have a possible pool of about six players within 100 miles and/or three degrees of separation.
ReplyDeleteThis is an important point. Another is that there are much lower start-up costs to a new gaming group or campaign if the game is going to be D&D. Everybody with any RPG experience knows what it is - no need for explanation or teething problems.
Deleteok, yeah, it's great at what it does specifically. go on adventures motivated by gold, fight monsters, get gold, become more powerful. love to see it, it's a tried-and-true formula and it works. games can also do... many other things? like, even the assumption of direct progression in power, while definitely satisfying, only works for an extremely limited range of stories. it's a great fucking game, don't get me wrong, but do you really want to take Changeling /Dawson's Creek/whatever and boil it down into "we're all good at fighting and we're motivated by XP" ??
ReplyDeleteis there ever room for a cowardly character in old-school D&D? 🤔
I've played cowardly PCs, and I've had players play them as well. Especially if you're the thief or magic-user, it pays to play cowardly. The goal is COLLECT TREASURE, not DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. Sneak, connive, steal, and play dirty. Works just as well, and sometimes better, than bust down the door and kick some ass style play.
DeleteOf course there's room for cowardly characters - that's largely the point, actually!
DeleteI've got nothing against wanting to play relationship-centred Dawson's Creek games, but I don't believe system really matters for that kind of game. It might as well be D&D.
I wonder how many people have made tweaks to D&D where different classes (and alignments?) get XP for doing particular things, in *addition* to gold? It seems like someone must have done this, but I can't think of an example. Clerics get XP for healing or converting people or finding holy artifacts or destroying unholy ones... wizards get extra XP for magic items, for libraries and books, for successfully casting spells.... fighters perhaps get XP for killing/defeating people rather than just monsters... I guess there's a few examples of this scattered among obscure AD&D sources, like barbarians getting XP for destroying magic items (IIRC?). I wonder if it could be made to work.
DeleteThe default in 2E was something like that. Everyone got XP for defeating monsters and collecting treasure, but clerics got extra XP for healing/supporting, fighters got extra XP for fighting, thieves got extra XP for treasure, and MUs got extra XP for spellcasting.
DeleteI tried that for several years and with various methods. It had little effect on player behavior, and the extra work didn't seem worth it. I have come back to the simple yet effective gp for xp, which promotes planning and exploration.
DeleteI ended up going with straight "gold=XP" for my D&D variant, Dungeon Babies, too. Of course, in Dungeon Babies you get XP by literally eating treasure. Babies put everything in their mouthes, after all.
DeleteAll good points. About the "crunch level" I especially agree. There's a lot of good writing & weird ideas in Troika and Into the Odd, but these games are so mechanically simple I don't feel any desire to play or run them (I've played ITO briefly). I need more 'rules mechanical toys' to be engaged in a RPG, and also, I think it's best if those rules-toys are built specifically to create a particular world/genre/story experience.
ReplyDeleteYep - there is enough to tinker with but not enough for it to be overwhelming. Not everyone will agree, but I think for the average gamer D&D has more or less exactly the right amount of crunch.
DeleteObviously my feeling on this is the polar opposite but I guess if it works for you and your group, that's all that really matters.
ReplyDeleteAlso for as much shit as it gets Vancian magic works wonderfully as a resource management system, as does the encumbrance rules (although I'd REALLY prefer a slot-based encumbrance system). The way that D&D feels concrete (instead of the kind of airiness you can get from a lot of rules light systems) while also being fast hits a good sweet spot with me.
ReplyDeleteOld school D&D initiative is also beautiful in that it gives you a bit of fog of way by having you reroll initiative each turn, this is a rule I like that I don't port into other versions of D&D as combat takes too long in those games as is, while old school D&D combat is blazing fast and having that fast combat allows you to have a more time-consuming initiative system or just get other stuff done.
Finally, for D&D I know it well enough to know what makes it break. D&D is never going to blindside me by suddenly spitting out weird results surprise me (and funky as some of its mechanics can be at times, I know that funkiness well enough to deal with it). That kind of knowledge takes a while to gain for other systems and makes me prefer D&D if there's not a compelling reason not to.
Good point about Vancian magic. In general D&D achieves the near-impossible in making logistics an interesting element of the game in its own right.
DeleteYeah, a lot of magic system in other games are either a lot more complicated than Vancian magic (5e magic isn't too bad, but even people who have only played 5e CONSTANTLY get spells known and spell slots mixed up) or really abstract.
DeleteMy favorite bits of D&D magic are the really finnicky spells that force players to MacGyver their way to victory. My favorite statement about what Vancian magic should be is: "Okay, I can talk to spiders, fly for as long as I can hold an ice cube in my mouth, curse people to be unable to see dogs, and read the mind of anyone who's holding a fork. I want to get Joe Smith removed from his position on the Board of Directors of ACME Corp. within two weeks. Hmm..." (quote from "Random Nerd" on an ancient thread on rpg.net).
It's always interesting to hear what people like about D&D. Your first bullet point about rates of advancement surprised me, though, because one of the biggest discrepancies between tables and their various playstyles from the beginning has been in rates of advancement. D&D players have had raging fights about this very issue. Methinks the Goldilocks feeling is due to the comfort you have with the system due to years of familiarity and your own accustomed usage. The same goes to some extent for other points. It's like when someone points out the "superiority" of one's native language to other languages one does not know so well.
ReplyDeleteWell yes, but believe it or not I have played a lot of other games - some of them, a lot! None of them get close to the satisfaction of going up a level in D&D.
DeleteI remember in one of our early games there was a combat which took up most of the session, mainly because hardly anyone ever managed to hit anything, and afterwards you said "that would have been a lot quicker if we'd been playing Into The Odd". Wondering whether you've played any/much ItO, an what your take on it is? I barely knew of it at the time, we played that game, but I've since become increasingly enamoured of it (and its many derivatives, especially Weird North, Cairn and Electric Bastionland) to the extent that I'm now converting adventures and entire systems to be ItO compatible, and I'm doing feel like I ever need another system (though I'm sure I'll try other ones out for fun from time-to-time).
ReplyDeleteOne thing I hadn't really considered though is the advancement system - you're right that D&D seems to be in something of a sweet spot WRT the frequency and effect of levelling up.
Into The Odd is I good, I think, for one-shots and short campaigns, but not for a real long-term one.
DeleteAlso, I just don't really think I like the combat system, although I do understand the argument for it.
I can see that may be the case with campaigns. Do you think that's because of the fairly limited advancement paths? Although... could "advancement" via riches & artefacts provide an equivalent?
DeleteThe ItO hack I'm mostly playing is Weird North, which has a Corruption mechanic which acts as an automatic time-limiter anyway, as characters have a tendency to devolve into a clump of bubbling demons before they are able to amass too much power. Although playing in your campaign has taught me that frequent character death is no bar to a long and enjoyable campaign (YMMV though if members of your party keep devolving into dangerous bubbling demons at the most inopportune moments).
Either way, I can see what you say being true, though I'd love to test the theory for myself.
I've yet to make up my mind re: combat. (And I'm probably not the best person to judge, having experienced it pretty exclusively as GM). I don't know so much how it feels to players, but to me it has meant that we get a hell of a lot more done per game (many's the session of D&D I've played which has been entirely or almost entirely combat; something which is just impossible in ItO).
There is certainly an initial feel of "something missing" with the lack of the To Hit roll, but probably only because I'm used to systems with that roll. I'm not sure how much To Hit actually adds to the simulation, or indeed what it's really there for. I'm put in mind of computer programs I used to write to try and create emergent behaviour. My instinct was always to try and throw in a few more random factors, in the hope that "randomness multiplied by randomness is more random than randomness on its own", whereas in practice that's a dead end, and some of the most fascinating "artificial life" behaviour comes from the simplest algorithms (Conway's "Life", or the use of Separation/Alignment/Cohesion to simulate flocking behaviour).
5e seems to go even further down the same road as my failed A-Life experiments: "lets throw in loads, and loads, and loads of complicating factors, and that will make it feel more interesting and realistic". I'm not sure that it does, though it certainly feels more complicated, Perhaps a single die roll is enough. I dunno.
Plays nicely so far though.