Thread by @ProfessorCirno

Ok enough politics lets talk more tabletop gaming dumbfuckery!!!!!

D&D IS BA- ok no it's not just that, but instead let's talk about about "old school" D&D and how it's actual heirs are found more in the indie games scene rather then both modern D&D and (most of) the OSR

"Old school" D&D is a lot of things, because it wasn't...I don't want to say it "wasn't written well" because *nothing* is made well in ANY hobby in it's formative years, and I'm trying to be generous. I'll instead say it was made scattershot.

See, the actual old white dudes who were making D&D largely had some weirdly specific ideas of what a game was, and then...didn't write those down. Instead, they just wrote rules to cover the shit they thought was needed to play the game their way (that they didn't teach)

The actual OD&D method of play involved...not a ton of "roleplaying" or "setting building," especially in the sense you'd think of now. Characters were pawns you controlled while playing a GAME. Setting was whatever immediate details made things fun and interesting.

This lead to a lot of weirdness. There's the classic story of a D&D group who goes to a con to play D&D and they all die within minutes, because they played it as a kinda weird storytelling game, and the con played it "proper," which was "as a roguelike."

But the actual original idea is this: If there is a plot, we haven't written it yet. The DM sets up a double dare-esque dungeon of traps and monsters and loot, and then STEPS THE FUCK BACK and lets the players just...make their way through it.

Originally there are very few rules. You have the Chainmail rules for combat (Chainmail being a fantasy based miniatures game that's the *real* origin of D&D, that's a different topic). You have a list of spells. You have vague ideas of attribute rolls. That's...kinda it.

No skills, no ability scores, and at least at first, not even a Thief class. You did things by just sorta describing what you were doing. The DM either rolled with it and you continued playing to see what would happen, or vaguely had you try to roll under an attribute.

Now, by AD&D 1e, some of that was already changing, and a big reason was *novels.* It turns out, adventures sell ok, but settings sell big. Books set IN settings sell REAL big. Forgotten Realms comes from this era. Greyhawk does too, but nobody cares about Greyhawk.

And here's the thing: I'm still not gonna say Forgotten Realms was like, *good*, but early FR exists to be a place to have adventures. And those novels? They're basically all just "HEY READ MY STORY ABOUT MY OWN ADVENTURING GROUP!" And that's good for the game!

There's still a basic idea where the point of the game is "the DM sets the stage, and then whatever fucking happens is what happens." You aren't writing stories. You aren't setting things up in advance. And adventures that DO, are mostly seen as poorly made.

There's other settings too. A lot of them are "What if D&D, in this other genre?" Ravenloft is "What if D&D in Castlevania?" based on the Hammer horror films. Mystara is "What if D&D, but in a more two fisted pulp action setting?" and is also good, MYSTARA FUCKING RULES.

...And then there's Dragonlance.

Dragonlance is bad.

Dragonlance does bad things to D&D.

Dragonlance introduces it's adventures alongside the novels, and the adventures take you THROUGH the novels. Which sounds fun, but...now there's a plot, written in advance.

AD&D eventually does a weird sideways shuffle and turns into AD&D2e, in part because new people were stealing D&D. Look, it happens a lot. And by 2e, the message was clear: Settings *sell*. Novels *sell*.

Stories sell.

Pre-made plots sell.

2e is THE edition for settings. Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer. These settings are all real good, and all come from 2e. But they all have a problem, and it's a problem that's infecting...well, MOST of tabletop gaming. And tha tproblem is metaplot.

The 90's ttg scene absolutely loved shitty metaplot that doesn't involve players. These are books that are fun to read on the shitter, and terrible to try and play. That's because nobody in the 90's had good taste. Don't argue, I was there, and also didn't have good taste.

The idea is that the setting is ALIVE, and as they make books, the setting changes, so it's cool and interactive! Except it's not interactive. These changes are happening no matter what the players do. You leave behind "Adventures with a planned story are bad."

Not only is the story planned, ALL of it is planned. You're just there to experience it. Vampire the Masquerade gets real popular, even though it's awful, because it's infamous for this. The "Storyteller" system? Hah; the GM is the storyteller. You're just there to listen.

D&D falls prey to this (and many other issues) hard. It's pumping out books at a nightmarish rate, and those settings are all going through their own kinda dumb metaplot advances that players rightfully kinda hate, because again, they no longer matter. And that sucks!

Here's my brief controversial statement: The game is the number one thing. It revolves around the players. That doesn't mean they everything *in-setting* revolves around them, but it means everything IN THE GAME should be seen through the lens of "what do the players do?"

By the end of the 90's, the age of metaplot was *done*. Players hated that the setting kept changing as they tried to get used to it, they hated that their own in-game actions didn't matter, and they hated that it wasn't much of a game anymore.

...The next edition didn't help.

3e gets off to a fucking weird start. Let's be blunt: every dumbfuck complaint made about 4e "insulting the past edition" a) didn't happen, and b) actually wait, it did happen, but it's what 3e did to 2e. 3e HATED 2e. It bad mouthed it nonstop.

3e's big advertisement was "BACK TO THE DUNGEON!" No more metaplot, no more big setting bullshit, just back to good ol' fashioned Dungeons and Dragons, and the raiding of both.

It doesn't last very long, though.

See AD&D had a lot of weird mechanical problems, but it was also - in it's own incredible bizarre way - balanced, sorta, mostly.

3e isn't.

3e isn't *at all.*

It becomes apparent once the game gets played outside of WotC that some classes are just way fucking better.

Now nerds and fans are rational people and accepted this hahahaha no they justified it in the dumbest ways they could, ever time. See, it couldn't be BAD, or WRONG, so the balance had to be on purpose. And the reason that was invented was: it just makes sense.

(it doesn't)

OF COURSE fighters are just worse then clerics at fighting. OF COURSE wizards can do anything they want with ease. It just makes sense.

3e's lasting ethos isn't "back to the dungeon." It's "no see it's SIMULATING A WORLD so uh *furious jerk off sounds*"

Let's for a moment remember that this is a game, and that the setting and world and rules are literally made by people, and so nothing just "makes sense" because you can change the rules whenever you want. Wizards are more powerful if you make them more powerful. That's it.

But I'm still sticking to the theme here so: D&D has been through some weird shit by now. In 2e, the DM didn't just set the stage, they wrote the entire goddamn play, and you as a player just read a script. 3e pretends to get rid of that, but mostly doesn't.

If 2e was the age of settings, 3e is the age of "splats." Despite being a phrase that was actually born from White Wolf, a "splatbook" ends up defined as a book that's made mostly of player facing new mechanical material. And god, does 3e love introducing books of bullshit.

But that ethos I mentioned permeates a lot of things, so 3e turns into an extremely weird game where the DM is trying not to railroad the players, but then kinda does it anyways, because that's the only way to try to balance things out and give a satisfying gaming feel.

There's a lot of focus on "you have to balance things out by acting out what would happen in game, by metagaming furiously," which, well, sounds contradictory because it is. Everything becomes super artificial and bizarre.

I'm actually gonna skip over the end of 3e, all of 4e, and the start of 5e, because...not a lot of that changes. Instead, I'm going to talk about the indie scene that starts to grow in that time period.

During that 3e era, three things happened. First, the D20 bubble (that's another different topic). Followed by that bursting, which nearly *takes out the whole goddamn hobby*. And then, after things start to recover, you hit a weird indie semi-golden age, kinda.

See, the issue with that forced weird justification for 3e is that it doesn't leave a lot of room for talking about actual game MECHANICS. Everything is lumped into "the rules exist as physics and that's the ONLY WAY TO PLAY EVER!" And fuck that. And other people say fuck that.

Now I'll openly admit - I was never a member of the Forge, a set of forums for the growing indie community, but I do know a bit of what comes out of there, and it's a lot of weirdly *focused* games. Trying to ape D&D was already done in the D20 bubble, and then EVERYONE DIED.

So instead, in the margins of the community, there's now a lot of discussion about "why do mechanics exist?" "What is the purpose of a game's rules?" "What should a game TRY TO DO?" This is all running completely contrary to what was, at the time, contemporary D&D thought!

D&D thought at the time was "the rules exist to establish a specific setting that the players metagame through." If you're wondering "how do you decide what rules to MAKE though" guess what, you're about to be attacked and hated on the mid-2000s internet by D&D fans.

But the indie scene IS asking these questions, which leads to some weirdly focused games. Games like Maid RPG from Japan become weirdly popular in part because they fit that idea of "ok but *why do games exist?*" Well, to be a cute maid, obviously.

And that's the end of my thread, secretly a big advertisement for @nekoewen's Maid RPG!

@nekoewen ...Ok, it's not. But that's a thing! There's others, too. Life With Master is a game about being Igor from Frankenstein and that's...it. There's no greater metaplot. No grand adventure. Just exploring that conceptual space.

@nekoewen One of the other big ideas that comes out of the *non*-D&D space in this time is the idea of "ok, but do mechanics exist in-game, or are the player and character separate things?" D&D fans hate this idea and call it "dissociative mechanics" because they're fucking idiots

@nekoewen They're *fucking idiots*

@nekoewen Some of you may remember at the start of this thread that roleplaying...wasn't actually a thing in OD&D. You controlled your character as you would a pawn, making your way through the dungeon to get sweet loot, and not really caring about who they were as a "character."

@nekoewen Oops I guess old school D&D isn't real D&D because of it's "dissociative mechanics" you *fucking idiots*.

@nekoewen ...Anyways.

This thought leads to some new ideas of gameplay. Games like FATE popularize the idea of mechanics that the "character" doesn't in any way know about, but the player does. It also popularizes mechanics wherein the player hurts their character, but for meta reasons.

@nekoewen So in FATE, the idea goes like this - FATE points allow you to reroll stuff or add to rolls, but the way you get it is by having your aspects used *against* you. In other words, you the player intentionally weaken your character NOW for a future reward.

@nekoewen In D&D space this is unheard of! The big idea in D&D space is that the player and character are literally the same. You can't ever hurt your character like that! And that's building off of decades old (bad) mechanics.

@nekoewen In time, 3e turns to 4e, which is a very fun game and discards a lot of 3e's baggage about trying to "stimulate the world" or whatever, and fans hate it because D&D fans are obsessive idiots. Whatever. 4e is fun, but it...it doesn't actually add a lot to gaming as a space.

@nekoewen I mean, I like 4e A LOT, it's very fun for fantasy adventure romps, but it's also, truly at heart, "what if 3e D&D wasn't fucking stupid?" It's very good at that! But it's still lead by the idea of the GM building absolutely everything and you just kinda running through it.

@nekoewen This is also when the OSR starts, and it's...ok. I shit talk the OSR a lot. Because it absolutely deserves it. But to be clear, the initial idea of "old school D&D still has good ideas worth exploring," that's a thought with a lot of merit.

@nekoewen But the OSR gets hung up on 3e. It does. It falls into the exact same problems. It's just trading "my wizard is a god and the GM determines everything" for "Uh, I roll UNDER your AC, and also the GM determines everything."

@nekoewen It's still caught up in the idea that so very much of the game has to be preplanned to hell and back, still caught up on the 2e/3e idea that the setting matters a lot and the GM has to make everything work organically in that setting and god, it's just so much needless work.

@nekoewen What I'm saying is: The OSR ends up not exploring those old school D&D ideas. It just longs for the aesthetics.

Know what DOES though?

That indie scene.

@nekoewen Think back to the most basic and core idea of old school D&D:

The DM sets the stage, and then everyone just fucking sees what happens.

@nekoewen THIS, more then anything else, I'm arguing, becomes the core of the ttg indie scene as it chugs out of that 3e shit heap era. The main difference is that the indie scene presents a new thought next to it:

The DM is also a player!

@nekoewen What does the indie scene start to make? It makes games WITH NO DM!

Now it's not "the DM sets the stage, everyone sees what wild-ass shit goes down." Now it's "the stage is pre-set, now everyone TRULY sees what wild-ass shit goes down."

@nekoewen Ok brief break while I figure out how to untag someone because twitter is actually the fucking worst.

Sorry Ewen! I spammed you by accident, I promise!

I hate this fucking website, it's the worst!

@nekoewen Apparently I literally cannot do that. What a well designed social space. Sorry, will try to continue but will make it brief.

@nekoewen When you look at games like Powered by the Apocalypse, there's a greater push to both the idea that the GM is an active player in of themselves, and also that players should have a much bigger role in creating the game space.

@nekoewen Now clearly that runs against the dungeon crawl aspect of D&D, but I hold it absolutely is carrying the torch of "Let's just see what the fuck happens!" Take Monster Hearts, which I'm chosing maybe because a recent podcast did a thing - NOTHING is set in stone.

@nekoewen Also, these games present an even greater variability to the dice. Where in D&D the response became "fudge the dice" which by the way is a major sign you're playing a really bad game, the PbtA response is "just roll with it."

@nekoewen And think back to how OD&D did things. "I want to do a thing." "Ok, describe it. I'll say yes, maybe, or have you roll." That's PbtA! You never "roll <stat>," you just fucking talk out what's happening and only when a move is triggered to you judicate through that.

@nekoewen D&D is still in thrall by the idea of the DM doing all the work not only to set the stage but also to write the script, and I'm sorry, but the rise of podcasts has only made this WORSE (lmao spelling). It's where you got the weird clash in how Critical Role played MonsterHearts.

@nekoewen So there you go. The indie scene has embraced "let's just see what happens and where this goes" to the fullest extent (see also: GM-less games!). D&D has done everything it can to bury it.