Adept Press

I'm trying to articulate a very difficult concept and need some help.

First, that if you and I and a few other people wanted to "play D&D" in the sense of what the fiction contains, we could do it with a coin to flip and a few pieces of scratch paper. We'd map as much corridor as we could stand, I'd play my half-orc fighter and you'd play your elf (for some reason), we'd have all the paladin-thiefy iron-rations rat-fights kobold-fights run-from-the-beholder moments you could want; we'd wander through a village called Omelette meeting blacksmiths and slatterns until whenever we got tired of it and went back to the fighting. You know how to do it and I know how to do it, and I repeat, system has nothing to do with it because at this moment we are talking about nothing but raw Color.

Second, that if you and I wanted to major Gamist dungeon-fighting fun, challenging ourselves with strategic, tactical, and possibly some social game-theory dynamics, all soaked in derived but perhaps sharply ironic fantasy tropes, then there are some games out there which do this mighty fine - Tunnels & Trolls first among them both chronologically and design-wise, but certainly more than that. By which I mean we could get our ashes hauled in this fashion really, really, really well, successful and satisfying role-playing equal to none. ... But it wouldn't say "D&D" on the tin and it most especially wouldn't have that holiest of symbols on it, the triple-initial emblazon of "TSR." (I will provide links to my enjoyable T&T game discussions if anyone wants.)

Third, that at my count we have no less than eight identifiable rules texts with that game title on the tin and emblazoned with that holy symbol, very few of which merit the literal acknowledgment of being rules texts, but one of which (pick one), nevertheless, may be used as the primary text at our gaming table. In which case ... work with me here, using it, we could play a kickass game with possibly some necessary house-ruling and rules-drifting, to whatever extent we can get away with that and still feel like we're using "the" rules, with fictional content corresponding to a violent fantasy setting with much travel and bloodshed ... but without, I repeat, without that content resembling the Tolkien-Disney-Vance (not really)-God-knows-what-Greyhawk fantasy cemented into place in the early 1980s, and instead basically making up our own entirely original fantasy content, perhaps itself even blatantly derivative but from something else entirely. (I will provide links to my enjoyable D&D 3.0/3.5 game discussions if anyone wants; plus I plan to make public my very cool notes for D&D 4E, unless I get to play it soon in which case I'll just post about that.)

Help me say what I'm grappling with here. Why are none of the above "not good enough?" What the hell are people seeking?

And so you know, all of this is is preparatory to asking, why the fuck do Dungeon World and Torchbearer exist in the first place, and why is Indie Gamerdom Assembled spraying jizz all over them like Peter North if Peter North were Jackson Pollack?

Does it have to do with System?

Could people already have commitments to some kind of hazy expectations about Dungeoneering and are looking for various systemic incarnations? I like the fiction -- resolution -- fiction dynamics of the Apocalypse-fueled games. If I were jonesing for dungeoneering I might consider DW.

I also love me the BITs of the Burning games. I can feel the flow from commitment to a character's beliefs, gaining currency for putting them into action, watching the character grow and change.

But I don't get the appeal of merging the Society for Creative Anachronism with spelunking. Swords and sorcery I like. Swords are cool. Sorcery is cool. Weird monsters are cool. Adventure fantasy in the sense of exploring a dangerous and awesome weird world really appeals to me. But why can't I dig going underground?

Is there something to imagining negotiating a creepy and claustrophobic fictional space where something weirdly awesome has HAPPENED (a cult's temple, a wizard's seclusion) that is different from imagining a situation where weirdly awesome things are HAPPENING?

Do you maybe mean some specific people, or people in general? I'm asking because I started thinking of people I know who play D&D, and most of them are totally satisfied by one or more of the options you outline - they don't particularly need the official D&D brand on their game, if that's what you mean.

Perhaps the closest to that come the guys who need to feel that the rulebook is made by somebody smarter than them, but even those are quite happy playing e.g. LotFP or Pathfinder - it doesn't need to be the official D&D, as long as it's printed in a book to provide confidence.

If it's not the D&D brand you mean, but rather the specific fantasy fiction style, that might be closer to it - I certainly know people who've internalized the D&D tropes to such a degree that they're not entirely happy with a fantasy game if it doesn't have such basics as commoditized magic items, a wizard/cleric split and demihumans. I tend to treat this as a failure of imagination brought about by an insufficient reading hobby :D

Of course my sampling is somewhat peculiar: while I do know some of the most hardcore D&D gamers in Finland, the Finnish D&D culture in itself is nowhere near as orthodox as the American mothership.

As for Dungeon World and such, my answer is similar to the 4th edition one: it's a game that appeals on the basis of the genre of fantasy alone. As I've often said, DW makes perfect sense to play if you're really in love with D&D fantasy, don't like the D&D game, but do grog narrativist games like Apocalypse World. It is definitely, certainly not my thing, but that's got nothing much to do with the game's design, and everything to do with the fact that I'm not nearly enough of a fan of the genre to actually want to play a story game about it.

Based on the big response the game's gotten, it seems pretty obvious that there are a lot of roleplayers out there who do like D&D fantasy as a genre, even if they've grown past D&D and can't stomach playing it anymore. I suspect that a lot of that is due to nostalgia, but then why do people like literary genres anyway - it's probably nostalgia all the way down, ultimately. It's like, DW brings in all the people who realize that they like Apocalypse World game mechanics when they're applied to something familiar that they like; such application makes it clear to them how the mechanics latch to the fiction, when before they had to deal with both an unknown system and an unknown genre.

Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 03, 2013, 10:46:09 PM
I will provide links to my enjoyable T&T game discussions if anyone wants.)

Wants!

Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 03, 2013, 10:46:09 PM
Help me say what I'm grappling with here. Why are none of the above "not good enough?" What the hell are people seeking?

D&D is 'too big to fail' and 'constantly failing'.  By too big to fail I mean that excessive sunk costs by everyone: players, game designers, fantasy authors, and marketers make it inconceivable to simply abandon.  The "it" is alternatively any of the three big aspects you described the colour, the system, or the agenda.  And yet it consistently fails to fully deliver.  Everyone, from WoTC to Paizo to Luke Crane are interested in "repairing" at least one part of the behemoth.

Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 03, 2013, 10:46:09 PM
And so you know, all of this is is preparatory to asking, why the fuck do Dungeon World and Torchbearer exist in the first place, and why is Indie Gamerdom Assembled spraying jizz all over them like Peter North if Peter North were Jackson Pollack?

Golden age fallacy? But you can never walk through the same river twice on your way back up the fountain of youth to the age of innocence ... thingie?  So like we have a generation of gamers who remember the awe and magic of their first dungeon crawl,  (Much of that awe was probably even then a recognition of the potential of the hobby rather than true delight in the actual play being experienced. Was true for me, anyways., but who have also gazed into the Forge and embraced the ... okay I'm just starting to repeat what Eero said. As usual I just agree with him. I'm shutting up now.

Tunnels & Trolls threads, in order: [Tunnels & Trolls] Killed me a player-character (spit) (http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=6272.0), [Tunnels & Trolls] Second level characters (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=6355), [Tunnels & Trolls] Half-elves are poncy nancy-boys (http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=7104.0), and [Tunnels & Trolls] Gamism ain't for the faint of heart (http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=7863.0).

I thought I'd clarify my three categories a little better now that I've re-read my post.

1. The "dungeon-delving" fictional situation with embedded specific visual elements and character-relationships is itself not connected to System.

2. A specific Gamist agenda expressed in both (i) dungeon motifs and (ii) hard-firing System support is itself not connected to TSR or D&D branding.

3. TSR or D&D branding (and whatever System is supported by any given rules text) is itself not connected to a given fictional setting and to strict dungeon motifs.

Best, Ron

Why are none of the above "not good enough?"

I think you've outlined, both in this forum and throughout the last 14 years, why they're not good enough.

What the hell are people seeking?

I hate to reduce it down too much, but perhaps they're seeking a good time.  In an age of personalized everything, is it weird to expect personalized dungeon games?

"1. The "dungeon-delving" fictional situation "

I look at the images of the Grindhouse edition of LotFP, like the Gorgon who petrifies prey with sex. Or the grotesque death cult shrine I concocted for my LotFP game: a hideous agglomeration of bones liquified into a slick, shiny plaster. The players walk through the landscape of statues in states of sexual abandon or jellied bonespew. They themselves are not entangled in such horrors. The are uncovering a disturbing past and trying to make their way through it.

Looking back over the fantasizing I did over Holmes' D&D set and the Player's Handbook and the DMG I found myself wanting to put myself into the fantastical landscapes the depicted characters were inhabiting, or to succeed where they were getting waxed.

There were early reading experiences that were congruent with my discovery of D&D. Like reading the Mines of Moria passages from LotR, or the underground expeditions in at the Mountains of Madness, or the Fafhrd/Mouser story where the two end up working for rival warlords in some underground domain, or the Tombs of Atuan by LeGuin. That narrative trajectory of entry into a hidden zone where secrets are buried and then making it through to the other side after having revealed secrets that others weren't brave enough to face: there is a family resemblance between all of these dungeon delving activities.

This is reflective musing. I could indulge in Jungian archetypes or hunt for Freudian symbols. But I think there is a straightforward genealogy of this fantastical imagery, drawing as it does on Gothic fiction tropes of graves and sinister castles and death traps. A genealogy that includes the illustrations of Dore, the stories of Walpole, the gloomy romanticism of Byron, 19th c. decadents, Poe, Conan Doyle, Lovecraft,and the weird fiction authors and illustrators who were getting reprinted or cited in fandom/underground culture of the 1960s. Lieber, Howard, and Lovecraft are all aware of the graveyard romanticism of the decadents. And don't forget the many cheesy dungeons showing up in gorgeous black and white on the many late-night creature feature shows broadcast by every little UHF station across North America.

This pile of semiotic goop gets some kind of catalyst or leavening circa 1970.

The wikipedia entry for Arneson talks about the role of the "dungeon" concept in Arneson's Blackmoor game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Arneson

An investigation of the aesthetics of the underground Braunstein might help explain the persistence of the dungeon trope. The cognate trope -- the wilderness adventure where you track your resources -- seems to have been pushed out of the meme pool.

Erik: The hunt for System: basically armed with #1 but looking for #2, or rather, wanted to do it with System X.  Which I suppose is fine in terms of raw hacking, but I'm squinting to find the value added.

For BW in particular, I'm baffled. Straight-up no-frills BW does Tolkien-RP better than just about anything. Using it to do faux-Tolkien seems retrograde to me.

For AW, I'm not baffled so much as repelled – without any sort of values-based reward system in place, AW is nothing more than a 2d6 resolution roll and a little shared-input feel-goodery. Here I not only don't see value added, I see value diminished. Again, not because "dungeon crawling is bad," but because the engine seems grossly misaligned.

Quote... merging the Society for Creative Anachronism with spelunking.

That's fantastic, I'm stealing it for later use, for sure. But amusement aside, there are some good underground/indoors models to consider from the literature: the goblin tunnels under the Misty Mountains and the Mines of Moria, of course; also the lost city of Xuchotl from "Red Nails" and the equally fucked-up society of "The Lords of Quarmall."

(Ha! I wrote the above before reading your second post! We're on the same wavelength. And yes, The Tombs of Atuan, seriously.)

Eero: specific people, namely those who've designed and played some pretty innovative games, who, if they'd wanted any one of the criteria named above, or any combination, could have had it with no effort whatsoever at any time in the past ten years, now so excited because OMG you can do Dungeon World. As if they couldn't have done it without Dungeon World! Granted, they seem least interested in the imprimature of "official D&D," but the Baker Mystique or the Crane Crew apparently seem to be playing the same role.

I'm suspicious about whether the "dungeon crawl" is being granted legitimacy in their minds by getting enfolded in one of the above-named brands, or whether the idea is to provide said brand with legitimacy by showing that it can do dungeon-crawling, i.e., "real role-playing," after all.

Quote... I certainly know people who've internalized the D&D tropes to such a degree that they're not entirely happy with a fantasy game if it doesn't have such basics as commoditized magic items, a wizard/cleric split and demihumans.

Yes, a little bit like that. But the post-Forge, Story Games crowd? Nostalgia ... maybe, except that few of these people were even born during, much less before, the early days of D&D. If they're going to be nostalgic for something, it ought to be more like 2nd edition, right? (Or maybe I'm too simplistic about such things.)

Joshua, this is awesome too:

QuoteD&D is 'too big to fail' and 'constantly failing'. ... Everyone, from WoTC to Paizo to Luke Crane are interested in "repairing" at least one part of the behemoth.

Your Golden Age fallacy actually sounds more like what my mostly-inaudible inner mutterings are on about than Eero's nostalgia. I'm starting to get a better idea now – OK, modify what you said such that the "early experiences" were themselves not actual experiences – I do not credit the claims that "Back when I first played role-playing was sooooo awesome," which now that I think of it reek of the Geek Social Hierarchy more than credible reporting. So the Golden Age fallacy is especially fallacious because their actual experiences were themselves no more than a promise of such a Golden Age. That meshes in my mind with Moreno's spot-on observation that today people are maundering about Ye Olde Paradisical Days of D&D which those of us who were actually there are quite sure did not happen.

Troy: by "good enough," what I mean is, given any one of those three things I identified, or any desired combination of them, there is literally no need on this earth to retool, e.g., Burning Wheel, to mimic the tropes thereof. That's why "a good time" isn't enough; the desired good time is already sitting in front of our noses.

Best, Ron

QuoteTroy: by "good enough," what I mean is, given any one of those three things I identified, or any desired combination of them, there is literally no need on this earth to retool, e.g., Burning Wheel, to mimic the tropes thereof. That's why "a good time" isn't enough; the desired good time is already sitting in front of our noses.

That's all true, but perhaps people are looking for a new type of good time.  They've had good times with TROS or BW or PTA doing the D&D Cartoon.  They have those memories of playing those games a certain way and when trying to use those games to do this other thing (dungeon crawl-gamisty-story game mashup) they are looking for something new that doesn't have the baggage BW or whatever else has.  They know that BW is supposed to be played a certain way, and to them it doesn't mesh with the half-remembered dungeon crawls of old.  So, they create and/or buy new games that gives them a fresh start to make new memories and new good times.

Ron - Your 1) is, to my experience and thinking, pretty easy to grasp: while there is no *real* connection between that Color and (a particular) System, we look(ed) to the system to validate our Color choices. My way-back examples are trying to play a Tolkienesque Ranger or a Vance-ish illusion magician before there were (easily available, generally consistent) rules for 'em. We did it, because the pull for such was strong, but it felt better when there were rules clearly designed to support that choice (even if it turned out to deliver less than we'd hoped). I suspect similar pulls exist from later fictional sources, with the added complication (as you so often point out) that the fictional sources (novels, computer games, and more) became circularly referenced with D&D play. If you stop looking for that validation from (a particular) System, and hold your own decision about how to add desired and subtract undesirable Color from play as sufficient, then there's no "not good enough." You trust yourself, your own System-as-you-do-it, and stop caring if it matches System-as-textually-delivered. I equate this with the RAW(rules/read-as-written)-obsession readily apparent in many d20 (esp. Paizo Pathfinder) discussion forums. Even though I consider my days of obsessing over making my system equivalent to TSR/WotC/whatever system long past, I still take satisfaction if the Color I want is validated right there in the "official" sources.

I think this validation issue can carry-over into your next two areas, taking on new details, but maybe that's too easy. I do think the need for "D&D/TSR" in your #2 is maybe more about a need for familiar touchstones: some variably-minimal overlap with Armor Class, d20's, classes/skills with particular names/ranges, and etc. I blame this somewhat on the pervasive use of D&D-ish systems in computer games over the years, because a LOT of the younger (22-34, say) folks I've played with in the last decade (making 'em 32-44 now? I called that 'young'? um...) came to the game via that route. With these familiar touchstones, "knowing" how you're doing in Step On Up terms is easier to grasp. Whether that "easier" is a good thing for the CA or even actually a real factor in the CA is not so clear to me, but I do think it is sought after. So again, abandon that desire for mechanical/textual touchstones (maybe by looking instead to Social Contract/CA directly?), and "not good enough" disappears again.

#3 is about how easily possible it is to AVOID getting pulled into particular gameworld motifs? And yet people still look for "something better" to keep that from happening, rather than just saying "look, this isn't Greyhawk, alright?" The thing I'd point at here is that for a certain kind of thinking, things like Eero's "commoditized magic items" are an inevitable and necessary outcome of the system as presented, and so the only solution is to alter the system. I've personally found this to be the hardest "not good enough" to get people to let go of. Just saying "things don't work that way in this world" is often met with "butbutbut the system requires magic/monsters/leveling/etc. work THIS way!" Luckily, if people are OK with letting go of the "not good enoughs" in the other cases, this can usually be handled with a reminder that we're not really using "the system". Which is not to say that the "butbutbut"s don't show up from time to time, just that there is a context available to avoid dwelling on 'em.

So - people will take joy (even North-Pollack joy) when what they want from System (validation of a particular Color, functional Gamism within that Color, and creative freedom regarding that Color?) is provided by a particular game, even if those same things were available to them already. Either because they didn't/couldn't see that, and/or because social/market factors kept them from doing so.

Well, that's longer than I'd wanted. Hope it's useful.

PS Reading what was posted while I was typing - comparing/contrasting that rich, fictional "the dungeon" with it's D&Dish instantiation in computer games (from Wumpus/Zork/Ultima through WoW) would be quite interesting. And I suspect that "new good time" is fine in some cases, but that there's a lot of "BETTER good time" involved. I think Ron's comments and my post can be seen as confronting the "why BETTER?" question as well, and that a lot more than just "because it's new" is at least sometimes involved.

Hey Ron,

I don't know if I can give you straight up answer but I can tell you this: My favorite incarnations of D&D are 3 and 4 with their every more focusing on grad-based tactical encounters.  I think I prefer 3 in terms of flexibility but 4 is a bit more streamlined.  However, running those games the way I want is a lot of work.  I lament not having the time to basically do Video Game Level Design and lovingly hand craft environments and populating them with cleverly constructed encounters.  I just don't have the time, creative energy or commitment to tactical detailing to really play those games the way I would want.

So what's the alternative?  I could go back to Red Box/Blue Box. That's fairly simple right?  I can draw maps and just wrote Trolls! in the margin and that should be enough, right?  Well... not quite.  That game is super stressful because I have to adjudicate so much all by myself.  Unlike 3e/4e where I feel like most the fun is moving from straight-up tactical fight to straight-up tactical fight, I feel like most of B/X D&D is about avoiding having to roll that d20.  So you spike shut doors and find off-brand ways to use spells and block off corridors with walls of burning oil and lay down fresh rations to lead the creature to the pit trap... and so on.

Which leaves me where?  Making a fuck ton of decisions with no back up.  Is this creature strong enough batter down the spiked door?  Can sticks-to-snakes work that way?  Just how afraid is this creature of fire and what happens if it chooses to charge forward anyway?  Is the creature hungry enough to follow the rations?  Does is like this KIND of rations?  Does it actually fall in the pit?  Doing all that is EXHAUSTING.

So, Dungeon World.  All of the above?  Defy Danger move.  Or if not that, then good potential Hard Moves for other botched rolls.  Oh, rolled a six on your Defend move?  Yeah, remember that troll behind that spiked shut door right behind you?  Yeah, it just splintered wide open!  See?  No stressful decisions.  Just follow the bouncing snowball of moves.

Note 1: The hardest thing in Dungeon World to adjudicate is a 7-9 on Defy Danger for reasons very similar to my complaints above.

Note 2: The local crew here in SoCal agrees with you that the XP system in Dungeon World is not very good.  We actually have an alternate XP system that rewards based on heroic actions.  You highlight categories of actions (much like individual stats in AW) and you get XP when you do anything in that category.  But admittedly that's because we play Dungeon World in a very action oriented, crazy stunt kind of way.

So Dungeon World is way low stress for the GM.  But it's also fairly low stress for the player.  What if you want a more dangerous game?  What if you want those wandering monsters and encumbrance and bad planning leads to worse situations of B/X.  Well then Torchbearer.

So Torchbearer leaves in all the player facing stresses without creating all that work for the GM?  I don't know DOES a spellbook, a latern, a wand of magic missiles and a pair of iron shackles all fit into a large sack?  Wait how many rounds/turns has it been based on how many feet you've traveled?  What exactly does your 30' radius torch illuminate?  Torchbearer keeps those elements of play but again alleviates the GM/players from having to make all kinds of exhausting decisions.

So that's what it's about for me.  It's about putting helper tools in place to do some of the heavy lifting on the dungeoneering experience.  It's about saying I want my dungeon exploration game to look and feel like X, Y and Z and NOT having to bring that to the table on sheer creative/social will power alone.  The game helps you by putting in tools that keep play focused on those specific things and doing some of the heavy lifting in making decisions ABOUT those things.

Jesse

When my group decided to play Dungeon World it was because we wanted to see what all the fuss was about with the AW mechanics, but our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction ranged from disinterest to active dislike so we didn't want to play AW itself. DW was the first AW hack that claimed to be playable by people who weren't already familiar with how to play AW, so we got it and played it. From my POV the interesting stuff about the AW system isn't the die mechanic, it's the move-triggering mechanic (which serves an anti-murk group-synching function) and the GMing procedures (which make it feel more like a game role to me rather than a weird black box of social expectations to "bring the fun"). If this thread is leading to a conversation about why people like Dungeon World then the Step-on-Up/Gamism stuff seems like a weird direction to me, because I don't think many DW enthusiasts see that in the game -- I don't think I'd characterize my experiences of the game that way.

My interest in Torchbearer is similarly system-based. I had a ton of fun playing Mouse Guard and all of the system evolutions between the games seem like they'll be improvements (I haven't gotten a chance to actually play yet), although I'll probably miss the fun episodic situation-generation step from MG.

For both games I get a minor hit of vicarious nostalgia -- I've never actually played any editions of D&D, but I did read the Basic D&D rules as a kid, and had my older brothers' vague accounts of their play to inspire my imagination (at the time I was almost certainly the "annoying little brother" from their POV and therefore didn't get any first-hand experience), plus whatever I pick up through osmosis from the internet RPG culture. When I got into the RPGing hobby as an adult after drifting over from computer RPGs I never bothered with D&D due to all of the weird "conventional wisdom" like fudging and illusionist techniques that seemed really lame to me, especially since there were other good games from the indie movement that didn't have that stuff. Maybe there are good D&D games hiding under all the cruft of D&D culture, but since I have no vested interest in it I don't really feel any desire to do the game design archaeology to find it. For me, the fantasy "color" in these games isn't a huge draw, but it's a nonobjectionable delivery mechanism for the stuff I do care about.

Doing theatre history is more than about reading plays and tracking the changes in style and imagery (Color). We look at the play practices of the participants, especially their relationship to authority figures (authors, directors, designers), and their physical interaction in space. The history of games could be studied the same way. It is not just about the Color being elicited by the prompts of a DM/director or author, but the arrangements for communicating, exchanging, and building on that colour.

Play-Practices within A Dungeon-Mastered Dungeon
- We have players controlling single avatars often represented by kitbashed minis

- There will utilization of common popular amusements like word or logic puzzles, but one important play element will be a riff on the paperback books of mazes used to occupy kids in the car or at the cottage: these are part of the bricolage.

- War games were structured physically by players facing off against each other, singly or in teams, across a playboard representing open terrain or constricted built environments(Traveler had associated wargames that allowed you to do strategic and tactical spaceship engagements AND tense firefights in enclosed spaces, D&D did not have anything like Trillion Credit Squadron or Snapshot).

- The "fantasy Braunstein" changes the relationship of participants: we have players controlling avatars around a single player -- the DM -- who controls a number of monster avatars, often built from kitbashed toys. They are gathered around a representation of the maze of which the DM has perfect information (in the form of a complete map) and to which they are committed (a good DM will follow wandering monster tables and/or stick to prepped locations -- no douchebaggy throwing in an extra squad of monsters just 'cause the players are advancing too fast). The representation the players see could be the map they themselves are drawing. But what drew me in as a kid -- from newspaper articles, from seeing the counselors at my summer camp killing time, from seeing expos and the Canadian National Exposition -- was the grouping of players around battle board, with one player doling out the monsters and the fictional landscape, like the director of a good monster movie or a Ray Harryhausen epic, or the author of a cool adventure story. The GM took a slice from the maze and put it out on the table, using anything from drawing with marker, to using Legos and building blocks, to full wargamer terrain. And players moved their avatars around that. We are not talking the full obsessiveness of wargamers but even the loosest games had people moving THINGS around a concrete representation. When I walk around cons now I see folk with all sorts of new toys and cool printout character icons from Pathfinder or whatever. But that arrangement of bodies -- 4-9 folks around a representation with which they are interacting, and behind a screen the DM offers them portions of the finite fantastical space they have presented, with all of its active inhabitants -- that play arrangement persists.

- The 4-9 players are interacting with the fictional space that really only exists fully in the imagination of the DM. This territory is represented by a schematic map, lists of monsters, visual inspiration that might be sketched but is more likely to be richly described, but each of those representations only represents a slice of the fictional space that the DM is sharing and the players are exploring. And this isn't spelunking simulation -- there must be monsters to fight. No lovers to lay with because were are ripping off color from sword and sorcery and its fandom, but we are not enacting sword and sorcery stories. It is about slaying and risking being slain, fantasizing about many ways to slay and being slain.

You have all given me a great deal to think about, and I greatly appreciate it. I'm not sure I can deliver a wrapped-in-brilliance conclusion soon, if ever, but more and more, I can see that gamerdom does indeed hold a gold standard in its collective mind that is somehow associated with the variables I'm talking about, indeed in goalpost-shifting ways among them.

One quick minor point: Jesse, Tunnels & Trolls does the kind of stuff you're talking about incredibly well. My call would be 5th edition from 1979, but any of them, really.

Best, Ron

Attempting my post again (two parter, to see if the forum will let me post):

I'll give this a shot - warning, the second part is maybe 'out there' (prolly the first part too): The reason it's not enough is that there is no 'push back'. There's no interaction with someone else (just your (probably) harmoginised group). It's a bit like not just having sex with a sex doll, but a sex doll you made yourself. It's hardly getting it on with anyone else, is it? And that's not enough because you are not actually engaging any kinda outside author (to keep up the sex analogy, there is no tall, dark stranger involved...no stranger at all, just Mrs Palmer)

Okay, the second part - it's not just about engaging this outside author - everyones been pumped up so much about being in control and it's your imagination in charge utterly, sh!t (essentially another impossible thing before breakfast, where the advertising is YOUR imagination is in COMPLETE control - and yet you USE a document which is someone elses imagination - how can 'COMPLETE' work out?)...to the point where they both want an outside force dictating things, but they don't want that outside force controlling things - they don't want it dictating things ('rules should get out of the way!').
(breaking this into a third part in an attempt to post)

test /

(sorry to break up my post - it appears the word 'd-o-m-i-n-a-t-r-i-x' is causeing my post to not post! What, did the forum software become both sentient and prudish all of a sudden? I'm thinking some sort of banned words software got partially activated after the forum was last repaired)

So what you end up with is a d-o-m-i-n-a-t-r-i-x structure, where ostensibly mistress is utterly in charge - but f'n not really because the guy pays her and basically tells her what to do. It's as if she's in charge of the guy, but really she's the guys robot. It gives the illusion of interacting with another being, but without the icky sticky of having to actually interact with another being (who would if they were involved, like, think in not exactly the same way as this guy/group! Shock horror!) and enables all those 'oh, our imagination is so in charge!' slogans, but without (obviously) drifting into the wibbly wobbly colour land of not interacting with anyone else except those in the group. The very heart of 'the rules get out of the way!' sort of thought.

But there's alot of variables so this may have absolutely nothing to do with what is being talked about. But it was fun to write out!

Just to put a cap on the whole dungeon-Proust trail I have been following.

It wasn't until I ran Dungeons on Demand at Hammercon (in Hamilton) and Fan Expo (in Toronto) that I got the dungeoneering experience I had sought for.

The D&D I played '79-85 was pretty desultory. Running the Village of Hommlet and Keep on the Borderlands. A series of mildly diverting evening D&D sessions at the North York Public Library, a weird "you wake up on a beach with no armour and weapons" game. Playing Avalon Hill war-games like Titan or fantastical war-games like Divine Right provided more satisfaction. Stabs and Boot Hill and Star Frontiers were similarly disappointing. It wasn't until I ran the Bushido module Valley of the Mists that I got a taste of satisfying story-arc play.

Finally, at the age of 42 I had functional dungeoneering. LotFP allowed me to run a dungeon the way that I had imagined D&D would have done. A fantastical extra-dimensional adventure using HeroQuest allowed me to do all of the Steve Ditko/1960's Spider Man show/Leiber surreal adventuring that I fancied could accompany the dungeoneering of  D&D. And running a dungeon with modified Burning Wheel allowed me to introduce a long-arcing roleplaying element that was reminiscent of Tolkien.

So DW and Torchbearer don't really tempt me. I can do dungeons with a quick-running D&D clone, go colour-spray crazy with HeroQuest dungeons, and story-now/long campaign arc fantasy with Burning Wheel.

So, I don't read the forum for a couple of days, and when I see this thread, it's too late, Joshua Bearden has already said what I wanted to say. But he will not rob me of the chance to rant again against D&D! I have always something more to add!

Building from his post: we have a lots of people who have invested a lot of money, time, pride, self-identity, community, etc to play that game. So, right there is the reason because the three things you list have to be there: because it has to be THAT game.

If that game had a point, a core theme, something solid around which everything else circle, it could be changed in the little details: you could make variants, in all the three things you list. But being a misshapen mass of sticky bits, you can't change anything: it would not be recognizable anymore. It's a parallel of the way some group, after arriving to a sort of "unstable state of being able to play at all", are afraid to change anything (from the seating order to the number of the players), afraid that any change could ruin everything.  The same thing exist with all the rest: rules, setting, and most of all, the "magic TSR sign" on the cover.

"No change in rules? But if every edition change a lot of rules!". Well, yes, but (1) al lot of people don't change, they stay with the same set of rules. I am told my old group still play AD&D2, because that is "the real D&D" (for most of them is the one they started playing with, so it's "true", the other aren't), and (2) people who go for the "upgraded" edition, and don't run away horrified by the heresies they find there...  they swear, afterwards, that they ALWAYS played like in the new edition, and there is no difference (or, other times, they say that the new edition is a "return to the core of D&D", whatever that is)

The problem is that the CONCEPT of a roleplaying game, to be able to BE a knight, a mage, someone who has fantasy adventures in a fantasy world is so mind-blowing awesome, that at the beginning, you don't even realize how it works (and here is when the cancer at the heart of D&D, the "secret rules for the GM", hits with its poison). So, when you realize it DOESN'T work...  you search for that initial, awesome experience.

You search ignorance. The "system" is evil. Let's keep away from the system, it's the GM job, players should not even touch it. Players should not even know it.
You search conformity: everything MUST stay the same, to return to the initial awesome state. No matter if you can't return to it even if everything were the same, because now you see the reality behind the courtain: it can't be the same, it's not awesome, that DM must have done some error, he was not following the "official" setting, it's his fault.
You search VALIDATION, so you play the game that everyone play, the one "real", not an "imitation".
You search for something "REAL": if everything is at the GM's whim, what is real? The book is real, the setting described in the books is "real", it's the same for everyone, so everything "official", with the TSR magic mark, is "real".

There are variations, not every group is "searching for the garden of Eden" in the same way, but the core of it is the same: people searching for a mythological "pure D&D" that never existed. Because they have spent already too much, in time and in money and in other costs, to let it go. And the reality of gaming for most people was well described by someone in 2001 with "My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated."

OK, nothing of this is new, we said this and more a lot of times. So, why even people who played BETTER games search for this poisonous Garden of Eden? Why even people WHO NEVER PLAYED D&D are doing it?

Who known, maybe for someone is a kind of challenge, to be able to "fix" D&D, and they don't realize that they can't, that everything they could design will never be enough because in any case "it isn't true D&D", because they never played in these groups. T&T wan not enough, it wasn't D&D, and, be assured, at the end Dungeon World will not be enough, it isn't "real" D&D, so it isn't "real" at all.

But I suspect that, for at least some of them, it's a kind of "disease" they got by playing, talking, living in the "gamers" environment outside of the Forge. An environment where every single indie games it's not really "real", it's not something that you can play more than for a laugh, because... it's not D&D. So you can get this concept of D&D as the "real thing" even if you never played it (or if you played just a little, or you played your little variant thinking you are playing the "real" one.

OK, but... why searching for the Eden, when you have better games?

Well...
Because "My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated."
Indie games are no exception, at large, for this.

First, being "indie" is not a mark of quality: there are a lot of indie games around that are simply crap. And the indie games culture is not able to tell them apart, because people are so invested in playing every new game on the horizon, that most games are played once or twice, with a lot of errors, so (1) many games are played badly, not following the real rules, (2) even if you follow the rules, maybe the games was not playtested enough, maybe it was an alpha draft that the author considered "good enough" (especially if he is giving it away for free) or maybe it's simply crap

So, even if you play indie games... chances are that many of you gaming sessions are simply bad, of "not good enough", not good enough for your expectation. That are increased because...

Second: your expectations are increased. If you ever played a really, really good campaign with some good game... what once was "a very good session" for you is not fun enough anymore (I confess that I am a walking clinic case of this: playing better games simply increased my expectations, making my better games much, much better that before... but my percentage of "less good than the usual" games is still the same, obviously: 50%, as for everybody else. But when I experience a session that is in the lower 50%, I am not satisfied and bore all the players afterwards with discussions about what went wrong, even if that same session would have been incredibly good with my standards of 10 years ago)
But why this should prompt someone to go back instead of going on? I mean, if I can't make a game work, I pester the author with questions and doubts (as Ron and some other game writer very well know this), and if I don't get answer of I can't make it work anyway, I want to play another game that SOLVES the problem I had with it, I don't want to return to D&D!
But that is because I don't believe in Eden anymore: if someone believes in Eden... well, it get BETTER WITH THEIR EXPECTATIONS! Observe as, now, finally, after all the forge games, that D&D of old has even become coherent! It's fiction-first! It even had a little of jeepform in it! It was really a very good game, that mythic D&D that nobody ever really played...
No "real" game can do that. The Pool didn't became better by itself when DitV or Spione were published. The Mythical D&D did.

Third: this is, I fear, the principal reasons for most people (not designers, they are usually described by the first two points). For most people, I think, the problem is that they are simply playing some variants of they old games.
In the same way people said that they played "D&D" because they playing with a TSR book on the table, even if they really played "the GM decide what will happen", now people say that they play DitV or Apocalypse World.. because they are playing with that book on the table, but they still are playing some variants of "the GM decide what will happen"
I see it in a lot of threads in a lot of forums, or in talking to people, or even by playing with strangers at conventions or in other occasions: sometimes I talk to people who say that they played DOZENS of indie games.. and I discover that they don't grasp what a conflict is. The play in a "now my pawn is going here, let's decide what will happen" way, the pre-narrate every situation, or the GM try to "trick" them to made them do what he want... I see thread after thread of people who play DitV with the King of Life that act like a NPC, or with the Dogs that are "always right" and play like Warhammer 40.000 inquisitors...

I think that one of the success of the Forge is that it was able to raise the standard of design. But its bigger failure was it mostly ignored the standard of play.  That it fostered a culture of people (who then migrated for the most part to storygames) that don't really play differently than before, but that BELIEVE that they do, or say so, and most of their enjoyment comes not from the games themselves but from "being in the smart people club".

These people would dream of the Lost Eden exactly as someone who played only D&D, because they are in the same situation: they are not playing really enjoyable games, they simply say (or believe) they do.

If we want to leave that poisonous myth really behind, it's not good enough to create good games: we should teach people how to play them, too. Even if that means saying sometimes "you are playing it wrong"., Even if it means losing sales, or making people go away. Because if the play experience is not changed... what's the point?

QuoteThe Pool didn't became better by itself when DitV or Spione were published. The Mythical D&D did.

If I understand you right, that's a wry observation, Moreno! Very sharp! :)

Quote from: Moreno R. on November 06, 2013, 03:36:47 AM
If we want to leave that poisonous myth really behind, it's not good enough to create good games: we should teach people how to play them, too. Even if that means saying sometimes "you are playing it wrong"., Even if it means losing sales, or making people go away. Because if the play experience is not changed... what's the point?

Yes! Now that "System Does Matter" has been established, it is time to go play and try to lock in our gains.  I sincerely hope you'll start a thread here or discussion in a venue of your choosing to build on your comments here. "Better play" is a movement I need and desperately want to join. 

I'm with the "Better Play" movement with bells on! I've been saying since I decided to rewrote TSoY in 2007 that it is a worthwhile endeavour to write a book on how to play Chess instead of writing a new Chess. Also, as I'm sure everybody's sick of hearing, I'm of the mind that the useful thing to do with D&D is to teach people how to play it, rather than try to "fix" it.

Eero (and all) - On teaching people to play it instead of fixing it: I'm pretty sure that Vincent thinks of many ApocWorld elements that way, that he'd just taken some things (fronts?) many people had already figured out (with D&D or whatever) and made them a little more codified and accessible. Most of my own play in the last decade has either been pretty happy with what we already figured out, or looking for something REALLY different, so that characterization actually made me unenthusiastic about DungeonWorld. I guess that's why I share the "I can (at least nowadays) already do that" take, although as I tried to cover earlier, I can see why some people would love the "better" way to do it that (for them) *World represents.

And because it happened to be the very next thing I read on the internet: http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/18975/talk-to-me-about-osr#Item_41

What's interesting is the number of answers that talks about the dungeon as if it was "true". As if the player skill you use to avoid a difficult situation was a "real" tactical sense...  and not a "real" capacity to "convince the GM".

This is an example from my very first AD&D session, from the time when I had no idea about "how the DM do it" and everything was awesome: I played a 1st level magic-user, in a dungeon full of monster to save a prisoner (for the reward the father of the prisoner would pay to save his son, to be exact). The party was attacked by a pack of zombies and we got separated when the fighters didn't stop them from reaching me (they were at the first session too). I had already used my only spell (imagine the nostalgia, a game where you can use only one spell in a 4-hour session and you are shit at doing everything else. Really, who could want anything more?) and had 2 HP in total, armor class "no armor, no shield, cloth robe", for a grand total of "if some of them attack you, you are dead, period". So I simply run away, back to the previous room where we had killed a bunch of zero-level goons, with half of the the zombies following me and the other half fighting the fighters.
What I did was to hid with the other corpses in the room, the zombies didn't notice me, and continued along the tunnel.
At the time, I was rather proud of my quick-thinking and the way I had solved the situation. In OSR-terms, I had used my brain, my tactical sense, avoiding combat and "winning" by stealth. A great gamist move...

...or no?

Let's look at the situation.

Who decided that the zombie had no "sense live people" sense so that they did not notice me?
Who decided that I had the time to hid between the corpses before they did show up? (I didn't ask, I simply stated what I was doing... with enough sureness that I think the GM didn't even think about that)
Who decided that the zombie weren't interested in eating the corpses?
Who decided that I was so calm to stand still and not betray myself with noises or movements?
Who decided, in fact, that I had "saved myself without having to roll"...  without rolling to see if I was quick enough, then if I was calm enough, and then if the zombies were stupid/blind enough?
The exact same DM could have made me roll three times. In the same situation, with my same actions, with the same exact "fiction first"... first. 
With my stats, I had very few chances to win all three rolls, my character would be probably slain. So what could have happened at the table? I say my "great idea" to the GM, thinking that it's an intelligent idea. The GM make me rolls three times. My character die, and I am not happy. The DM want me happy. All he want is a show of cunning, ANY IDEA could have save me, because he would have changed the way the zombie think, act, their quickness, their senses, to "reward" a player who think, or to "punish" a player that has an idea he doesn't think is intelligent.

There is no room, there are no zombies, I am not really running. I am telling lies (my definition of role-playing games is "people who lie to each other and play at believing all the lies they say") to the DM. if he likes my lies, his "world" is ruled by heaven-sent luck, and any idea, no matter how risky, works. If he don't like my lies... well, Murphis' Rule...rules!)

In all this, the "fiction", the room, the zombies, the corpses, are the least-real things of all. The attention span of the GM is more real than them. The happiness or sadness of the GM at the moment is more real than them. What he did eat before and what he is drinking now is more real than them. If I smile and pass him the beer, the zombie changes, their step is more slow, if I am unsure, if I say it like "ehm... I don't know... I...  run? Maybe they will not follow me..." the GM could reply "no, they follow you and they reach you, what is your Armor Class?", but if I say it like "Ah! I am too fast for these shambling half-rotted corpses! I quickly dart between them and run in the corridor, they will never catch me before I reach the other room", the GM will agree. Because I have said it in a a way that if he doesn't, he would look stupid, or it could seems that he is not neutral regarding my character.

When I played, I was very sure of my actions. I was of the idea that "a bad plan is better that no plan", so I was always in action, always with a plan. The GMs, accustomed to a group of apathetic couch potatoes, was mesmerized and all my ideas were "good". In that way I won at the time a "best player" award at a regional convention, simply by taking the lead and having the party follow MY ideas!

Then, I started to play GM-only for years, and yes, I was sure, I was a impartial God. I didn't have favorites, I objectively would judge if an idea would work, or not. Right?
I don't know, all I know is that when I started to play again with other GM...  the game world became really, really absurd. Maybe the problem is that the new GMs had a more strong idea of "the way the story should go", maybe they simply did know me better and they feared me having too much "my way" with their game world, or maybe simply they had to separate themselves, as "new GMs", from my shadow, and they could not always agree with me. But, really... the world stopped having sense. I could not out-run a goblin with the legs of a 6-years old. Fireballs stopped melting metal, so I could not use them anymore to do that. Any idea was answered by a "no, it's impossible to jump over a two-meter-wide hole in the ground" or a "roll for it: one roll to jump, one roll to avoid falling and hurting yourself if you reach the other side, one roll to see if you get dizzy from fatigue and fall back into the hole, one roll to see if you pull a muscle..."

I have never, ever, found another world by another GM that did make full sense, after these years as the only GM. Even if they are not absurd universes like the ones of the other GMs in the group, even if they are much more logical... I prod, I jump, i try everything, I still play in that way, and I expect the universe to act the way MY perfectly impartial universe did. But they never do.

Because these universe simply doesn't exist, and what I am really exploring, mapping, judging, is the GM brain, his bias, his knowledge of things and his ignorance of others, the way he get convinced, what make him stubborn and unreasonable. That is "real".

When you use you "tactic", your "strategy", to avod fighting the zombies..  you are doing nothing of the sort. What you are using is your voice, your acting, the influence and knowledge you have over the GM, to "push it" to change (or model) the world the way you want.

THIS is what I liked about games like the Pool, Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, Trollbabe, etc: these games acknowledge this! They are not built about a "myth" where everybody at the table try to avoid looking at the elephant in the middle and they all act like they are being "good tacticians" and not simply good speakers. They are games for THINKING people, for people who understand what really happen at the table, how role-playing games really works!

And when I angle to get more dice in Dogs in the Vineyard, I am REALLY using strategy. I don't need to convince the GM, I only need to use a good strategy in the sequence of rolls. THAT was, after all these years, the first time in a decade I had really had the feeling that my "strategy" MATTERED!  (by the way, this is the principal reason I don't like the bonus dice mechanism in Sorcerer: you still get them by convincing people, the GM or the group, to give them to you).  And for the first time in decades, I could finally interact with the GM with sincerity, without having always the thought of "tricking" him in my favor)

There is gamism in D&D, yeas, but it's not the gamism of Chess, or the gamism of a wargame: it's the gamism of being able to fool, swindle, lie, act, persuade: it's a seller/marketer game, not a tactician's game.

Quote from: Moreno R. on November 07, 2013, 09:13:57 PMThe GMs, accustomed to a group of apathetic couch potatoes, was mesmerized and all my ideas were "good". In that way I won at the time a "best player" award at a regional convention, simply by taking the lead and having the party follow MY ideas!

It sure sounds like this GM was at a table of players who were not bought in and not having a good time and you are using that table to paint all of D&D with one brush.

A technique or problem to watch out for and be wary of because it could render all strategic decisions into marketing ploys meant to impress the GM? Sure.

Proof positive that all D&D is a big mess about appeasing a patriarchal DM? Not so much.

Judd, it's you that are painting my observations around that single table...

The passivity of that table (that, if you have read the thread with my old gaming history, it's the "older" group of people who played together D&D from the '70s) has no weight in my observations. I used them to illustrate why it was so EASY at that table, and then I used another table, years later, as an example of a situation where, with other players, another GM, the exact same things became impossible. Metal stopped melting, chasm that I (someone who practice no sport) could be able to jump easily in real life become "insurmountable" for my character, etc.

They are simply examples. Use them to understand what I am saying, not as "proof" of anything.

I simply don't need any "proof" to tell you that the dungeon doesn't exist, the zombies don't exist, and the success or failure of environment-based tactics in a environment that gets decided at why by a GM, BY THE RULES, is not tactic at all. It's persuasion.

But if you still believe that the Dungeon is real, and that the GM is not deciding your success or failure by whim, that he REALLY is looking at the real dungeon in his mind, fixed, unchangeable (so that every decision he makes in the course of the adventure it's not really a decision, it's an observation), you simply can do some experiments.
- Insult the GM at the same time you are declaring what you do. I should not make any difference, right?
- Don't describe what you do. You description don't change the environment in any way, right?
- try to play the exact same dungeon with different GM. Seeing that nothing in the dungeon change at whim based on the way you act, the two dungeon should be exactly identical, to the most minute detail, right? And the same exact tactics should work exactly in the same manner, with every GM in the world, right?

OK, sorry, I was enjoying a little bit of sarcasm on you in the paragraph above. Sorry, but the usual fable that only "bad GM" do humane things in D&D, and all the other 99.999% of GMs (that nobody ever encountered) are perfect beings for whom psychology and logic don't apply, become really tiresome after the 500th time you hear it...

And, anyway, in the very part you just quoted, I explained that using these exact same techniques I won a regional tournament, with the votes of three OTHER GMs... (all the judges). Are all these only exceptions, and these "objective" GM that I have never meet in thirty years of gaming, should be the norm?

Thing of beauty, Moreno, your post is a thing of beauty! It's like you're punching confirmation bias right in the face! You got away from the zombies...but instead of treating the 'solution' you found as if it was THE solution, you actually questioned the validity of your solution. A path that few, as the confirmation bias studies have shown, are inclined to take.

QuoteAnd when I angle to get more dice in Dogs in the Vineyard, I am REALLY using strategy. I don't need to convince the GM, I only need to use a good strategy in the sequence of rolls.

I have no idea how you get more dice. What are the rules on that?

Quote- Insult the GM at the same time you are declaring what you do. I should not make any difference, right?

Heh, good one! I'm going to remember that for another day!

Quotetry to play the exact same dungeon with different GM. Seeing that nothing in the dungeon change at whim based on the way you act, the two dungeon should be exactly identical, to the most minute detail, right?

Yep, good question!

I like your description of the gamism involved being one that revolves around persuasion. The critical issue is that it's hard to tell when the GM simply wants to agree with you - in which case there is no freakin' difficulty to play (it's like rolling a D20 that's covered in 20's). You can't lose - and for gamism, that's utterly worthless.

It is indeed why I hate letting play revolve utterly upon persuasion. Why gameplay where gameplay hinges on whether the GM will ask you to roll or auto pass you is...well, it's incredibly vulnerable to a GM just wanted to be persuaded by you.

That's why I favour having either a random element still be present (with persuasion only being able to give a bonus and not be the sole determinant) or direct player skill check (I once had the check of throwing a RL dice into a RL bowl to do something. Being good at persuading the GM wont help you pass that!). This way if the GM does want to be persuaded by the player, atleast the player is still facing the risk of bad luck in his rolls, or poor personal skill. Never let all of play just hinge on GM determination.

And I predict you'll have a hell of an uphill battle getting your argument across, because over the years I've had a hell of a time trying to! However your presenting it as a persuasion skill is a really good way of putting it, so maybe you'll do better than I have in the way you put it!? Anyway, it was really nice to read your post - I could feel a few tiny knots of tension in me release with a sighing feeling of 'see, I'm not the only one!'. You deserve beer (or your beverage of choice)!

I started a new thread (http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=228.0) about this last topic, because it seems worthwhile to address. As you might imagine, I have a thing or two to say about the characterization that all D&D play is about ass-kissing the DM ;)

So something happened with the link I posted (maybe because the thread went to two pages? Dunno - thought I tested it several times). It was supposed to go directly to this line, from Jesse, on page 1: "There's a serious grain of truth in the idea that AW finally taught me how to play the games that frustrated me as a kid." That's what I was trying to reference here, a confirmation that some people have found "modern" tools that let them solve old problems, and link that to what Ron was saying about "but you could already solve that problem." I think he's right, but - people gain insights in different ways. For some, the insight on how to play, and how to play better, happened in DungeonWorld (or whatever). Maybe it's that simple.

A word of caution: unlike every other RPG, D&D discussions contain lurking menaces. One of them is "rally to the defense." Please bear in mind that nothing anyone can say can possibly hurt the game, as if it were somehow both omnipresent at every discussion of it and terribly vulnerable to whatever might be said in those discussions. When this behavior appears, it is another example of the ur-D&D phenomenon at work.

Judd and Eero, this may apply to you especially, but it should be understood as a potential issue for everyone.

Sorry for the oblique reference: here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75TiGaIqnyY

To continue on this thread, rather than some of the other threads relevant to D&D or your 4E Game.

What does your playing table look like, Ron. Do you have a barebones sketch, graphpaper, wipeable vinyl sheet, a full on pile of toys? Do you lurk behind a GM screen? What kind of play pieces and tangibles do you dole out when you run your dungeons? Secret rolls? Those were all practices I was immersed in back in '79-'80.

Hi Erik,

Your questions are confusing me a little because I am not currently DMing a D&D game. I am preparing notes for a 4E game, which as it happens seems to be attracting players quickly, and I'm playing in a game at a local store, which ends next week, or rather the official scenario does.

When I DMed the game I mentioned in the first post (the 3.0/3.5 one), we used dice, character sheets, my notes and map sheets, and scraps of paper all over the place. There was no screen, no battlemap or any other representation of positioning. I rolled openly, and in the final session which had a dungeon-like setup, I put out the whole map and said, "you're there and you can see up to here." Overall, it looked a lot more like playing Sorcerer than most referenced images of playing D&D, which are a lot like you described in the earlier post.

(editing these in:)
[D&D 3.0/3.5] The kid two houses down (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19311.0)
[D&D 3.0/3.5] Skill combat and blood drinking (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19690.0)
[D&D 3.0/3.5] Spells and swords: fight! (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19889.0)
[D&D 3.0/3.5] Undead, real dead (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20177.0)
[D&D 3.0/3.5] At long last, a dungeon (http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=20257.0) - this last one is probably most relevant to your questions and includes a link to the dungeon map I used

I hope to get the 4E game up and running in a week or two, and then I'll answer about it probably in the current "psychedelic et cetera" thread.

Sorry for the confusion. I should have written:

"What kind of play materials have you used for recent explorations of the D&D phylum, and what kind do you think will play a role in your upcoming game?"