Lejends & Dragons

[Lunamancer]

Well said.

As far as game rules, I'll play anything but I'll only run certain games. I can always run LA off the cuff in an instant. I can do the same with anything from OD&D to OAD&D but LA is smoother and requires almost no reference for me (players may need to look up Activations but magic use is a slow point in "spell' driven systems).

I played D&D5e and enjoyed myself however I could never imagine trying to run it. I can't see never running ORE or Silhouette ever again though and that's partially because, for me, a system that combines one of them with LA may well be the one true system for me.

Check out this blog post of mine about that "one" RPG. http://furiouslyeclectic.com/node/30

"One"ism can get a bit tricky semantically. It's like when someone says something like, "Knowledge is an illusion; we can't know anything for certain." In response, I ask, "Are you certain of that?" Or if someone says, "There is no objective truth, everything is subjective and a matter of opinion," I'll ask, "Is that objectively true, or is that just your subjective opinion?" People understandably oppose "One-True-Way"isms in RPGs. But isn't absolute opposition to that itself a single path presumed superior to others?

I'm the kind of person who looks forward to trying new things. However, I don't have all the time and energy in the world to learn the more complex rule systems.

Don't get me wrong. I think complexity serves a purpose. I think it tends to generate loyalty among the fans who get a more in-depth, detailed system. And when there are so many RPGs to choose from, many of them free (virtually all free if you count pirated material), I think loyalty is essential to make the game system economically viable.

The barrier to entry is a pain.

I started playing RPGs at an extremely young age, and my first game was D&D. t's instructive to examine what that experience was like. D&D was easy to get into. We had hit tables, you rolled a d20 to hit, your weapon dictated which die to roll for damage. And a number of other things you might like to do--such as look for secret doors or traps--were spelled out in the rules and came down to a simple die roll. You could easily play it just like a board game, and it was very child- and newb-friendly. The barrier to entry was non-existent.

As I continued to play, over time, there were more things I wanted to try in the game that weren't directly covered by the rules. And I began imagining and wanting to play characters that didn't fit perfectly into one of the four classes. But remember. I was able to mix and match OD&D, AD&D, and AD&D 2nd Ed. There was multi-classing, secondary skills (these seem forgotten when people claim there were no non-class skills offered in 1st Ed core), non-weapon proficiencies, specialty priests, the various kits 2nd Ed offered, and so on.

To someone who had never played the game before, all this material must surely be overwhelming. But the beauty of D&D was that the game functioned just as well with or without all the add-ons. The other thing that makes D&D easy to learn on the front end is the idea of beginning at low levels and growing to higher levels. I'd say about 80-90% of the game is essentially "off limits" when you make your first character. As you level, more of the game becomes accessible in a gradual sort of way.

Compare that to 3E. I disliked the feat system and thought the redundancy of both skills and feats was just too much for a core that was already overly-complicated. Not only that, the "feat trees" made it such that you can't play effectively with blinders on regarding your 1st level character build. You have to look ahead to the greater options available at higher levels. But at the same time, you can't just play 3E out of the box and drop feats. The system won't function. It's fragile to tinkering.

In fact, this reminds me of a perfect analogy to computer games. I was just talking to my brother 2 days ago--I had been doing some de-cluttering and I came across my old disc of DOOM 2 hacks. Now look, Quake was a superior game in almost every way. But it still lived in DOOM's shadow. And that's because DOOM was so hackable a game, people were able to tinker and customize the thing. Graphics of monsters in DOOM were 2-D from 5 different angles. These were a lot more easily modified with the home computer technology available at the time than were 3-D renderings.

So I'm going to come out and admit, yes, I believe in a one-true-way. And that is a good system for long-term play (so this statement says nothing about all those indy games that are great for one-offs) ought to be resilient to tinkering. There may not be game police that show up at your door for playing wrong, but a system that falls apart when tinkered with is a pretty strong deterrent to tinkering.


Just for the sake of adding a little heat, I'll end with my main criticism of ORE. I'll say up-front that my gripe with it is not going to do as much to keep me from playing it as newer versions of D&D do. But I think it suffers from the exact characteristic of newer games in general. It's a victim of its own streamlining.

One thing I've seen tinkered with endlessly over my years of experience is initiative systems. Already, you have a problem when initiative is assumed in that one roll. But I think more than the specific mechanism itself, my beef is the declaration of actions prior to initiative. Yes, if you play OD&D and AD&D strictly by the rules, you had to pre-declare your actions before initiative was rolled. Thing is, I rarely ever came across any group that played that way. I tried to force myself to run a game that way a few times, but it never lasted long before I ditched the rule. I think it's just unnatural.

And more to the point, it locks you into one of the flaws of table-top gaming--a necessary evil of the medium, that for organization's sake, combat MUST be turn-based. (Yes, I know some systems claim they are not turn-based, they are pip-based, but all that's just a hi-res turn-based system.) I think this has a lot to do with why this is an area so heavily tinkered with. And because it's so heavily tinkered with, and everyone is out to "build a better mousetrap" it's tempting for designers to offer up a "solution" in their systems. I just think it's a bad move. I have my own solution. I like it better than any other I've seen. You might not. The system is best left flexible.