History of Roleplaying

[ysabetwordsmith]

 ... had its ups and downs.

I agree with most of these points.

However, I disagree vehemently on the uneven leveling.  Character classes and races are so homogenized now, the differences are mostly window dressing.  That's a serious problem for player retention over the long haul.  I like to see classes and races with very different strengths and weaknesses. 

The whole point to playing a mage was that it required very different skills over time -- first you had to concentrate on staying alive, but later on, you could pretty much kill everything in sight with a flick of your fingers, which was awesome, but you really had to pay attention to spell use strategy. 

I loved the first introduction of Eberron with its Warforged, who being magical constructs, had a beautiful cost-benefit balance: they couldn't heal naturally, but they also couldn't bleed out if injured.  If your character was disabled, it could lie there all day until someone got around to repairing it.  That had a huge impact on play, making it very different from playing all the biological races.  But it was taken out in later editions as "imbalanced."  I think people just didn't have the imagination to capitalize on its potential, and that hamstrings a lot of the really great stuff that a game could do.

I quibble with the point about miniatures.  Lead may be toxic, but it molds great and then stays where you put it.  Plastic miniatures can be beautiful if well made, but often they suck, and they really don't stay put well.  The industry has not yet made a really good replacement for lead. 

On the other hoof, boardgames often include wooden elements now, and some of those are terrific.  Wood is heavy enough to stay put if the figures are a little bigger than lead miniatures used to be, you can jigsaw very nice designs, it takes paint well, and is renewable.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Normal people are boring.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I agree.

[heron61]

I entirely agree with you about Warforged. I think D&D 5e is an awesome system, and is the first version of D&D I've seen in quite a long time that is simple enough that my first thought isn't looking for what fiddly rules I'll need to cut before I an the people I game with are willing to play it. OTOH, wrt different species there is too much similarity.

OTOH, playing a Wizard or a Sorcerer is different from earlier editions, but from my PoV it's better. The progression is different - it's no longer going from helpless mook with 1 spell/day to minor godling, it's now far more okay character to minor godling. Between cantrips being at will, 1D6 rather than 1D4 hit points, and somewhat more spells at lower level, casters are now far more likely to survive at low levels and also far more likely to be useful (the at will use of cantrips is deeply awesome for making them useful), but at low level a wizard or sorcerer is still notably less powerful than any of the fighting classes, and at high level, they're still the most powerful characters around. So, from my PoV, those changes mean that no one has to play a sucky characters at levels 1-3 (which was vividly true with playing arcane casters in AD&D 1e, 2e, and D&D 3 & 3.5).

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>I entirely agree with you about Warforged.<<

:D

>> I think D&D 5e is an awesome system, and is the first version of D&D I've seen in quite a long time that is simple enough that my first thought isn't looking for what fiddly rules I'll need to cut before I an the people I game with are willing to play it. OTOH, wrt different species there is too much similarity.<<

I haven't seen as much of 5e as 3, and 4 was an utter disaster. There were some lovely character improvements in 3 and up, but the rules got too complicated for my tastes.

Me, I want an elegant engine that helps me figure out what's happening, but doesn't bog down play by making me look up the rules all the time. My favorite is Atomic Sock Monkey's PDQ.

>> OTOH, playing a Wizard or a Sorcerer is different from earlier editions, but from my PoV it's better. The progression is different - it's no longer going from helpless mook with 1 spell/day to minor godling, it's now far more okay character to minor godling. <<

One of the things I liked about it, though, was how the weakness of the mages required the characters to work together more. They had to be careful.

>> Between cantrips being at will, 1D6 rather than 1D4 hit points, <<

I agree that the hit point improvement is good, and I heartily approve the modern rule that everyone gets maximum hit points at first level.

>> and somewhat more spells at lower level, casters are now far more likely to survive at low levels and also far more likely to be useful (the at will use of cantrips is deeply awesome for making them useful), <<

Potentially interesting.

>> but at low level a wizard or sorcerer is still notably less powerful than any of the fighting classes, and at high level, they're still the most powerful characters around. So, from my PoV, those changes mean that no one has to play a sucky characters at levels 1-3 (which was vividly true with playing arcane casters in AD&D 1e, 2e, and D&D 3 & 3.5).<<

Fair enough. Though my best campaign, everyone's character had one very low and one very high stat, because we thought it would be interesting, which it was.

I encourage you to check out our discussion of disaster/response games.

Stat hacking

[ng_moonmoth]

Cue this. Lyrics and a performance available there.

[thewayne]

We used cardboard heroes for playing Champions, glued them to pennies. Worked just fine.

Go you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Now that's a clever hack.

Re: Go you!

[thewayne]

We were doing that in the early '80s, it was a simple and obvious and crazy inexpensive solution: pennies and Elmer's glue.  On occasion they'd need to be reglued.  We used shirt boxes for storage.

[fayanora]

On a wee bit of a tangent, but have you heard of Ehdrigor? It's a really cool D&D style game that teaches a lot about how many in the First Nations view the world.