Shardstone
Hero
I'm referring to you saying the game is a bad fit. That is a negative framing.
D&D General Do You D&D OSR?
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
No it doesn't.
Mark Hope
Hero
Yes it does:
"OSR games here includes just straight up playing TSR era D&D currently."
No, it isn't. You are taking it that way but there's nothing inherently negative about point out thatb5E is built for something different than OSR style play. That's like calling it "negative" to point out that the handle of a screwdriver isn't a very good hammer while you watch someone try and use it to pound down a nail.
That you can change 5E to do different things with varying degrees of effort depending on what those things are does not change that 5E was designed to do something else. You're a game designer. Surely you understand intent in design.
Includes. As in "also means."
Mark Hope
Hero
Umm yeah? That's a definition, which is why I voted as I did. It's not the only definition but it is one
Jack Daniel
dice-universe.blogspot.com
This assertion never fails to baffle me.
Let's suppose that a hypothetical GM decides to play game X. Moreover, let's grant the assumption that there exists, in some Platonic realm, this GM's ideal game I (ideal for whatever purpose the GM has in running X — a specific campaign, a go-to system, vibes and feels, it doesn't matter).
The GM's goal is to run whatever real game gets closest to I, from among all the possible games that can exist in the messy, mundane, sublunary realm of real, extant games and potentially real, extant games. The field of all possible, real games may be finite or may be (countably) infinite; but either way, I don't think it's controversial to state that it's vast. Regardless, we want lim(X) X→I, or as close to it as we can get from among all the entries on this vast list of real, possible games.
We don't need to know why our hypothetical GM chose game X. We don't have to assume competence; we don't have to assume that the GM knows the lay of the RPG landscape, or the state of the art, well enough to pick out X from among all published games A, B, C, … N such that X is already the closest possible game to ideal game I. Even though that would be a good assumption to make for any GM who cares about the medium enough to tinker, we don't need it. There can even be a priori reasons unrelated to game mechanics (marketing; nostalgia; whatever) for the GM to have chosen game X.
All we need to know is that the GM is aware that X isn't perfect, isn't suitably close enough to I to for their present needs, and so they decide to tinker. They don't particularly enjoy tinkering, but they do it anyway. They go through the grueling, laborious, hateful process of adding house rules Y₁, Y₂, … Yₙ to published game X, ultimately arriving at some new construction, modified home game X + Y₁ + Y₂ + … + Yₙ, that pretty much does the job. This game is as close to the ideal game I as our GM can get via tinkering with X.
Now, here's what I want to know. In what possible world is anyone ever justified in asserting, as a general principle, that there is always some unrelated but existing published game Z where I > Z > X + Y₁ + Y₂ + … + Yₙ? Because that would imply that X + ΣYᵢ must always approach some Z that someone else has already published. Are the reasons that people add house-rules to games (which can include, but are certainly not limited to, both patching system problems and constructively adding new mechanics that expand a system's range of possibilities) truly so universal? So predictable?
Put another way: in some online communities dedicated to discussing the whole breadth of TTRPGs — but most especially those that seethe with resentment at the overwhelming popularity of D&D — there is a truism that seems so widely believed that it might as well be dogmatic fact: "D&D is only good for D&D-style fantasy." Anyone who wants to modify D&D for any other purpose — low- or no-magic historical fantasy, let us say, or some very specific setting with a decidedly un-D&D-ish "feel" like Star Wars — is either committing heresy against the hobby, or they must simply and obviously be some kind of ignorant n00b who knows nothing of the existence of other games.
It never occurs to these people that imperfectly Star Warsy, Star Wars flavored D&D might itself be the goal. Why, oh why, would any poor, benighted fool ever want imperfectly Star Warsy, Star Wars flavored D&D when they could enjoy the bliss of a bespoke Star Wars RPG, something designed from the ground up to be the Star Warsiest Star Wars RPG that ever Star Warsed?
The assumption is that the base system (or the base system plus the house rules) is always a means to some other end rather than an end in and of itself. It's a startlingly poor assumption for how pervasive it is.
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Yup. I totally misread your comment. Lol. Sorry.Umm yeah? That's a definition, which is why I voted as I did. It's not the only definition but it is one
