Why do some people try and divorce games from what they are?

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thedungeondelver

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I remember reading a few years ago, and I can't recall if it was 3e's heyday or 4e's announcement, a post from someone (I've forgotten who it was, or where it was) but the poster seemed to take spiteful joy in what D&D had become or was becoming, summing up their feelings (and this is paraphrasing) thusly: "Frankly I'm glad D&D has changed so much. We don't do 'dungeons' and 'dragons' don't exist in my game." With a lot of asspats and "I've thrown out levels" and "I've done away with the magic system" and "we've never used alignments" and a lot more of "Yes to all of those!"

This is not edition warring, no matter how much you might think it is, because it embraces all systems, all genres. What is it with people who look at a game - any game - and say "Well, that trope has to go. That rule is out. I won't use that system. We're not setting it in the default world. Those aren't classes we're using/we are using classes and not point-build"...

I mean, there's enough RPGs out there that there are literally no itches left to scratch. None. Nada. Zero. Everyone gets a cookie they like. Want story-heavy horror? Try that one that uses the Jenga tower. Want pure old-school dungeon crawl goodness? I think that answer goes without saying. Anime? Check on all fronts - giant robot, magic girls, eastern fantasy...alien fantasy (e.g., no elves no hobbits), hey have you heard of Jorune? The list goes on and on.

So, why, then would someone point to a game, any game, and say "Fellows," (and I mean that in the most gender-neutral way) "we need that game. But not that game. No. We want the rulebooks, but just for the covers. Gut 'em. Dispose of them. Get rid of 'em altogether. Let's pare it down so the title of the game and any expectations about it are meaningless."

I get it that system tinkering is an intrinsic part of GMing (and playing in) any game, any setting, any campaign world. No, I totally get it. But if (for example), I take and say "I want to play Exalted" and the first thing I do is throw out the Charms system, then do away with the solar/lunar/earth/etc. exalts, then dispose of the storyteller system, ditch most of the game lore, and instead set it in the antebellum South...what, exactly, am I left with? Who am I pitching this as a good idea to? Why, then, did I not just play Aces & Eights?

There's something to the old rant Gary made about "Dungeons & Beavers".

I think in the case of D&D, it is literally in the case of a subset of gamers, the idea that they want the...and I hate to say this, prestige, the crowd-draw of saying "We're playing D&D!" but nothing else. Just those words. That seems to be what 4e fans wanted: no "baggage" of the old, only the name. Just scrape it off and keep it, but throw everything out (fortunately this seems to have passed by WotC, now). I'd never create the expectation at the table that we were going to play Eclipse Phase, but instead we'd use the Traveller rules, and also it is set in steampunk 1890.

Just...find a system and play what you like. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, and you don't have to reinvent it on top of a system you apparently didn't like in the first place. It just seems so contra-intuitive.
 
well, without answering the broader question just yet, when it comes to D&D specifically I think for a vast majority it by defacto "is roleplaying games." So they don't look at the wider hobby (through prejudice, ignorance, or just lack of exposure/awareness) and realize there are games out there to scratch whatever itch, they simply imagine the type of game/setting they want to run and then try to force D&D into that box.
 
I think in the case of D&D, it is literally in the case of a subset of gamers, the idea that they want the...and I hate to say this, prestige, the crowd-draw of saying "We're playing D&D!" but nothing else.

... when it comes to D&D specifically I think for a vast majority it by defacto "is roleplaying games." So they don't look at the wider hobby (through prejudice, ignorance, or just lack of exposure/awareness) and realize there are games out there to scratch whatever itch, they simply imagine the type of game/setting they want to run and then try to force D&D into that box.

When trying to put together a group of busy adults, the sales pitch is a big deal, and D&D has the strongest built-in sales pitch by far. I can only imagine Star Wars tabletop consistently rivaling it.

Thus, the temptation to awkwardly jam all your personal interests and themes into D&D so you have a solid group to play with, as opposed to running your ideal system/setting online for two intermittent strangers in Stockholm.

Of course, this is a perennial anxiety for me especially because I like to prep as much as possible in advance and so I worry about having people to share the final creation with at the end of the labor. D&D is always guaranteed to have an audience no matter when I finish and who's around at that moment. Can't say the same for Stars Without Number or Rogue Trader.
 
I don't even think D&D is really a dungeon-crawling game to me. Seems like anything after (and mostly including) 2nd ed has been designed more around a DragonLance style "Adventure Path" mode of gaming.

But yeah, in general it's the "Roleplaying = D&D" fallacy, combined with the fact that modern versions of D&D are a lot to learn, and people don't want to go through that curve *yet again*, and don't realize that most games are much, much easier.
 
I remember reading a few years ago, and I can't recall if it was 3e's heyday or 4e's announcement, a post from someone (I've forgotten who it was, or where it was) but the poster seemed to take spiteful joy in what D&D had become or was becoming, summing up their feelings (and this is paraphrasing) thusly: "Frankly I'm glad D&D has changed so much. We don't do 'dungeons' and 'dragons' don't exist in my game." With a lot of asspats and "I've thrown out levels" and "I've done away with the magic system" and "we've never used alignments" and a lot more of "Yes to all of those!"

This mindset made sense when D&D was the only game in town. The only satisfactory explanation I can find for the quandary you pose is that, for many people, D&D might as well be the only game in town.

Now, whether this is because these people lack in curiosity, or means, or a cadre of fellow gamers who will play something that doesn't say "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, I cannot say.

Incidentally this is exactly the sort of "innocence" (for the lack of a better term) that spurred the "fantasy heartbreakers" that led Ron Edwards to coin the term nearly 20 years ago —games that set out to do "D&D, but..." (no class/no levels/point-based magic/etc.), all too often without the author(s) realizing that there was absolutely nothing new about these designs, that hadn't been done before and better by other RPGs.
 
Another factor is that D&D is the "default" game, and so when somebody gets introduced to the hobby, it's almost certainly through D&D. So usually people that like what D&D does stay in the hobby, and people that don't, leave.

This means that most people in the hobby like, or at least at one point liked, D&D and what it does.
 
I get that D&D to RPGs is like the "Kleenex" to tissue papers, and that for someone less familiar with the diversity of games out there, D&D-isms might feel a bit stifling.

However I get annoyed when a game designer (usually from an at least mildly successful publishing company) makes the same gripe. Are they fucking blind?! There are SO many god damned RPGs out there for any type at all. GM-less? Check. Super specific Anime tropes? Check. Super politically correct non-violent ones? Check. Games about Misery Tourism? Check. etc...

Picking on D&D is so easy. It's instant, free clickbait.
 
I've been kinda sensing similar things about BRP of late.
It seems like there are a bunch of folks who are convinced that the system is 'old' and therefore must 'evolve' to keep up with the times. Mostly this seems to involve introducing element from other games they like, usually Fate or Savage Worlds... and losing some of the core elements that drew me to BRP in the first place (the way skill advancement works).
I always want to ask them why, if they love Aspects/Bennies/Ads-Disads that much, wouldn't it be prudent (and less work) to go play one of the games that already feature them?
Why makeover Call of Cthulhu into an action adventure game when there are already other systems that do that?
 
In a broader sense, I think the desire to tinker with rules sets is not only nigh-universal among gamers, but also an inherent aspect of the hobby and outright encouraged by D&D. From the moment D&D was published, house rules, alternate magic and combat systems, new classes, etc were prolific and ubiquitous. I don't think this is a bad thing, quite the opposite. But I think there may be a difference between this in general and the nature of some discussions on forums.
 
I don't know about divorcing D&D from its default assumptions, since it's a fairly broad game with myriad published settings and variants with many assumptions within, and that's just counting official material from TSR and Wizards of the Coast, without getting into homebrews, third-party material, and retro-clones/OSR materials. Even if you try to mention the whole medieval fantasy aspect, I remind you of things such as Masque of the Red Death, D20 Modern. D20 Future, the upcoming Starfinder, and the like.

Now other games such as World of Darkness (especially Vampire) work better when you divorce them from the default assumptions as the White Wolf games have great settings and concepts that are utterly ruined by the themes. Personal Horror is by its very nature pretentious and wangsty and generally not fun for non-Goth, non-Punk, and non-Emo gamers. So I can understand wanting to divorce World of Darkness from its default themes and so-called "default assumptions".
 
I think I'm being misunderstood. I get it that AD&D fits into many genres, and, broadly, tinkering with rules is encouraged and 100% OK. I just don't get folks who look at it like it's a sports car but they want a pickup truck, so they remove the body, dump the high performance engine, slap in a V8 diesel and a load bed and say they're still driving a sports car (and then get fucking smug about it like they've somehow "fixed" a "problem" with the game, but that's interpersonal drama best left out of the discussion...or is it?)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that approaching any RPG and saying you're immediately dissatisfied and setting about to gutting the game and putting things in that you prefer, rules-wise and setting wise that are utterly upside down to the original game is kind of a head-scratcher when there's plenty of RPGs out there that probably do exactly what is desired, with little to no work involved.

Pointing at any RPG and saying "It's broken, therefore I must fix it, and my fix will make it better than it was before" when what you think is broken is that it is 180' from what you want stem to stern...IDGI. That's not "broken", that's you just playing the wrong game. Basketball isn't broken because it's not played on grass with an oblong ball and two discrete "sides" of offense and defense - that's football! Saying "We're going to fix basketball by playing outside, on the grass, with an oblong ball that can be carried, thrown, handed off or kicked, and you can run in to other players, so everyone will wear pads and helmets...but it's basketball because I say so." <shakes head>
 
Lack of time or laziness to find an alternate system versus one they already know well. Being an adult with limited free time, I understand the appeal. However I also know perfectly well how much time is lost kludging a system into something it's really not.

Granted, I fall back on old standards because I need a new system in my life like I need a new disease. But yes, just a little searching around and adapting couldn't hurt. The "All Different But Name" thing just seems like frustrated game designer wank.
 
Now other games such as World of Darkness (especially Vampire) work better when you divorce them from the default assumptions as the White Wolf games have great settings and concepts that are utterly ruined by the themes. Personal Horror is by its very nature pretentious and wangsty and generally not fun for non-Goth, non-Punk, and non-Emo gamers. So I can understand wanting to divorce World of Darkness from its default themes and so-called "default assumptions".

Yeah I always wished that Vampire had been more "open" to other concepts. If a player wants to be a Louis (personal horror), let them. But if they want to be a Lestat (hedonist) or Claudia (sadist) why not? Some have argued that the Clans and Sabbat allow for that flexibility, I guess...

Basically I would have been a bigger Vampire player if the fluff and setting concepts were optional. If the game had been more of a toolkit to let a group of players customise their campaign without tons of house rules, I would've been more on board.

A nitpicky, silly aside: we had disciplines for all kinds of crazy bullshit but no flight? Or even slow hovering/wall climbing? WTF? Okay sure, you could do it with a combination of Potence and Protean claws or that one very specific speciality in Thaumaturgy, but, to me, those don't really count. I wanted something like this:

"Flight" discipline
1 dot: wall climb like Spider Man
2 dots: make huge jumps/leaps (up to a ceiling, from rooftop to rooftop etc...
3 dots: float/glide downwards (jump from any height!)
4 dots: float upwards (like in the Lost Boys or whatever)
5 dots: fly as fast as you can run

I wanna do a heartbreaker now (that no one would play, but it would be therapeutic for ME, LOL)
 
Wasn't Flight available for Gargoyles? (It was at least for the card game.) I'd probably dump those first two dots in your Flight and just port wholesale D&D's flight rankings (A through E). It'd be easier, and a trip down memory lane!
 
I wanted something like this:

"Flight" discipline
1 dot: wall climb like Spider Man
2 dots: make huge jumps/leaps (up to a ceiling, from rooftop to rooftop etc...
3 dots: float/glide downwards (jump from any height!)
4 dots: float upwards (like in the Lost Boys or whatever)
5 dots: fly as fast as you can run

Why would Flight, at any level, infer any sort of wall crawling ability though? Couldn't you just have "levitate a few feet off the ground" as the first point?

I wanna do a heartbreaker now (that no one would play, but it would be therapeutic for ME, LOL)

Best reason to do a Heartbreaker. I have notebooks filled with ridiculous ideas for a game thats full Gonzo everything I loved as a kid mashed into one setting that would make TORG and Synnibar collectively blush.
 
Why would Flight, at any level, infer any sort of wall crawling ability though? Couldn't you just have "levitate a few feet off the ground" as the first point?
.

Yeah I'm not sure. I just wanted to capture a lesser gravity-defying act that also represents a trope from vampire films.

It's arguably inconsistent, but some of the other disciplines are a bit all over the place too, I guess.
 
1) Because tinkering with systems is fun.

2) Because I might not realize how much I'd need to change before I begin. But if I invest the time,
I'm definitely going to want to use the resulting ruleset.

3) Because I feel like it. There's never any need for another reason!

4) Something else.
Another factor is that D&D is the "default" game, and so when somebody gets introduced to the hobby, it's almost certainly through D&D. So usually people that like what D&D does stay in the hobby, and people that don't, leave.

This means that most people in the hobby like, or at least at one point liked, D&D and what it does.
I'm living proof that this is untrue.
 
Yup, I didn't notice the thread date:thumbsup:!
 
I agree in that a lot of the issues people have with D&D can be easily addressed by even other fantasy games like WFRP, RQ/Mythras or the many lighter OSR and indie games like Into the Odd or Swords without Master.

Unfortunately it is hard to get some people to try other games even when they're frustrated by the quirks of D&D.
 
I can't really wrap my head around the mindset of trying to remove dungeons or dragons (or levels, tbh) from your D&D. Now, I don't play a lot of D&D. I have. But these days, I prefer other systems. That having been said, when I play role-playing games, I like hackneyed cliches and tropes. I like dungeon crawls, evil wizards, savage, pig-faced Orcs, traps and treasures. Sure, I can appreciate other types of adventures, and I do. But I guess I'm just easily entertained. I feel fortunate that I still enjoy the things that Drew me into the hobby in the first place.

Same with comic books. I don't feel they need to make some grand statement. If they do, fine, as long as it's entertaining. But at the end of the day, I'm looking for dudes in silly costumes hitting each other.

So, yeah, I just turned 49. I still like my metal loud and dumb, my dungeons filled with dragons, my comics filled with fights, and my movies full of action and/or blood. Maybe I'm a simpleton (I'm admittedly not well-read or well-educated). But I know what I like. And I haven't let myself down yet.

Even though I don't play much D&D, when I do, my preferred jam is Labyrinth Lord with the Advanced Edition Companion. So, yeah, I think D&D is perfect for what it does. It's just that usually I in the mood to do something else.
 
I usually run games almost entirely as is. I tinker with adventures, but usually not rules. If I really hate a game's rules, I usually just won't play it. And I'm usually way too lazy to port stuff over. I say "usually", because there's always the rare exception.

I mean, obviously, there's always going to be the occasional house rule. But if that becomes too necessary, too often, I usually won't bother.
 
I have varied how many house rules I use. These days I try to minimize but the only game that's solidly in my "I'd run this game if folks asked me to" list is Burning Wheel. D&D I house rule, Traveller I house rule, RuneQuest I house rule. But all of those, I keep my house rules to a minimum these days (I have done more extensive house rules with all three in the past).

I do think it's disingenuous to call your game D&D (or Traveller or RuneQuest) if you have made too many changes. But how many changes counts as too many? RPGs are unique among most games as relying on rulings where not every GM or playgroup will make the same ruling for the same situation. That's part of the magic of RPGs, because you can make those rulings while retaining consistency to the game, you can handle any situation in the game.

In college, I got hooked on a game a bunch of folks were playing. It was sort of D&D, and when I first encountered it, it was called Christiansen D&D because no one had a good name for it (Mark Christiansen was the original GM, designer if you will). Eventually he let on that he preferred people call it Cold Iron. Now clearly it derived from D&D (the same 6 stats rolled on 3d6 - well actually 3d6 + 1d6 of potential improvement, fighters, magic users, and clerics, fire ball spells - well that spell is single target...). But it also clearly borrowed from RuneQuest and TFT and maybe some other early games I haven't realized. At least when I first encountered it, the D&D was qualified so you wouldn't expect the same rules necessarily.

And yea, pre-3.0 D&D (and it's various modern clones and adaptations) are great for running a certain kind of game, and now have a solid position in my repertoire (where they had at one time been banished).
 
A couple months ago someone on FB had asked what are the 10 things we'd change about D&D5th. I said I'd only change 8 things.
For some reason, many people recommended me to just try a other game, and Mythras was mentioned more than once:devil:.
 
I've been guilty of this before. In my case, it was finding what I thought was the One True Generic System, and then trying desperately to force it to play like everything else I've ever played. After a while, I had the realization that maybe it was okay to play more than one system ...
 
It really depends on what they dislike about the game. If you're basically rewriting everything and claiming to be still using D&D, yeah, you gone done messed up. But if you like the core of the game (Whatever that means to you), and it's just some peripheral parts you want to tweak, the line is fuzzy, and as long as your table is getting something out of the work you've put in - even if you're just doing it for your own entertainment - then it's all good.

It's also possible that a particular trope just isn't relevant or interesting any more when a later edition comes out, in which case... why keep it around? Shadowrun 4, for example, and it's move away from hard-wired network connections to wireless; it would feel weird for a cyberpunk game set in the future to have worse technology than the readers had, so... abandon it and move on.
 
It's also possible that a particular trope just isn't relevant or interesting any more when a later edition comes out, in which case... why keep it around? Shadowrun 4, for example, and it's move away from hard-wired network connections to wireless; it would feel weird for a cyberpunk game set in the future to have worse technology than the readers had, so... abandon it and move on.
I dunno, sometimes those things are just part of the flavor of the game... like the huge computers in Traveller. I've seen people fret over those and try to give plausible reasons... or come up with 'fixes'... but it's not really broke in a game aimed at 50s/60s/70s scifi. Same thing with having a tizzy about any sort of anti-grav vehicles.
Any current extrapolation of the future is likely just as full of errors and I really don't want to play scifi games with people who insist on them being 'accurate'.
 
I've been guilty of this before. In my case, it was finding what I thought was the One True Generic System, and then trying desperately to force it to play like everything else I've ever played. After a while, I had the realization that maybe it was okay to play more than one system ...

which system was it?
 
I dunno, sometimes those things are just part of the flavor of the game... like the huge computers in Traveller. I've seen people fret over those and try to give plausible reasons... or come up with 'fixes'... but it's not really broke in a game aimed at 50s/60s/70s scifi. Same thing with having a tizzy about any sort of anti-grav vehicles.
Any current extrapolation of the future is likely just as full of errors and I really don't want to play scifi games with people who insist on them being 'accurate'.
Yeah, it all depends on the feel you want your game to have. If you're intending to evoke the spirit of retro sci-fi, yeah, you go back to those tropes because in the right place they're really good. But if you want your game to feel like the future of now then you might need to lose them.

Or you might find a set of tropes which get to the same result, but fit better with the rest of your system; for example, 40k's Orks going from a barbarian culture that likes to fight, to a species literally designed to be a galactic immune system.
 
I mean, there's enough RPGs out there that there are literally no itches left to scratch. None. Nada. Zero.

I realize this thread is a multi-year necro, but I disagree with this entirely. After at least 20 years of collecting and playing as many systems I can get my hands on, and can say quite confidently that there isn't a single game system out there that does precisely what I want in a game. There are a goodly number of them, however, that provide a good enough basis to either play straight, or to use as a basis for tuning the game to do what I want. I suspect that people who go about doing what the OP described are in a similar position.

The thought process would go something like, "I like what I see here, but I don't need <X>, <Y> or <Z>. They're just unnecessary. And <A> and <B> need to go altogether as they'd run counter to what we're trying to achieve..."

Or something like that.
 
‘Baggage' is something of a two way issue. It can lead to a lot of reactionary conservatism in gaming, but it also taps into some longstanding tropes of what makes a game appealing in the first place, which are sometimes difficult to establish why.

Take D&D4E throwing out ‘Vancian’ magic, for example. While the system of establishing powers became more balanced and simpler to run, it also lost something in translation so to speak. Indeed, its one thing that hasn’t ever quite returned in 5E - the notion that Wizards had to plan ahead by selecting certain spells, collect particular components, and maybe store magical charges in items when they developed the proficiency to do so. It created a certain thoughtful mindset about how to play a Wizard character. Now, with spontaneous casting, you just blast ahead non-specifically till your slots are used up.

The same is true in all game developments however. There is often a nuance to baggage that is difficult to explain.I have pointed out to lots of Classic Traveller fans about how Mongoose Traveller has refined and standardized how skills and other subsystems work in the modern game, but there is still a certain je ne sais pas that feels missing to some guys who grew up on it. Similarly, for myself, the uncoupling of Luck from the Power characteristic in Call of Cthulhu 7E just felt wrong to me. By the same token, however, the Order of Hermes’ speciality Sphere in Mage: the Ascension still makes no sense either - but still remains.

I guess a lot of this fuels the ongoing conflict between OSR and Indie/Narrative movements in the hobby. Its also ever-present in edition wars. But it is all still baggage, at its most basic.
 
I always say if I sign up to play D&D I gotta take all the tropes that come with it, otherwise why play D&D?Just so I can bitch about how it doesn't do X, Y, and Z in a way that I like? I know it happens as I have been at tables where it did, but I invariably end up asking the dude* why are you even playing if you don't like this game?

I play everything pretty much as written. I say "pretty much" because lots of times I can't be bothered to look up a specific rule so I just make what I think is a reasonable judgment at the moment.

* it's always a dude
 
I do find that some fans of generic systems are reluctant to accept they can't do everything.

GURPS, Savage Worlds and PBTA all have this element in their fanbase. They're all pretty versatile, but there are genres they won't handle well.
 
I do find that some fans of generic systems are reluctant to accept they can't do everything.

GURPS, Savage Worlds and PBTA all have this element in their fanbase. They're all pretty versatile, but there are genres they won't handle well.

My consistent experience with PBTA advocates at this point has been that they're all quite sure you can can make the system do whatever you want and it's incredibly versatile and all the rulesets talk about custom actions and whathaveyou, but when you actually float the possibility of changing a rule in a given set they get upset that you'd dare undermine the themes of the game as written. Apparently it's only versatile up to the point a product has been published, and then it's inviolate.
 
Part of the problem is that not all the itches have been scratched... I'm still waiting for that perfect game, and that perfect system. Some are closer then others of course! :smile:

I'm a lazy b'stard. So, I actually don't like tinkering with systems. But I often feel I have to.

But I think if you're dismantling a system, so much so, that it's nearly unrecognizable, and you throw out the entire world as well. Then you may as well either pick a system, that you and your players like then bolt on your own world. Or just, create your own game! As many do.

The thing of playing D&D for the 'prestige' I never understood. I mean, there are so many cool games out there, why limit yourself to one? :sad:
 
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