A Grognard in My Own Time
Tani-ro:
I've realized something about my skepticism for D&D Next: it turns out I've become a curious flavor of grognard. A homebrew D&D4 grognard.
I love to crow about how Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons had the guts to pick something to excel at and run with it. I claim it succeeds as a game by leaving aside a bunch of cruft in favor of a fun, streamlined tactical skirmish engine with just enough context to keep it worthy of the "roleplaying" label. I still believe that on a sort of theoretical level, or at least by comparison with its unfocused predecessors. But to think honestly on it, the fun in D&D4's combat system, its design focus and reason for existence, is plenty unreliable. It's too easy to make a slow, grindy, uninteresting combat; optimal tactics are pretty well solved; the reward-to-challenge ratio gets more and more skewed in the players' favor as the levels march on. I've disengaged in boredom from enough play sessions to know these are not mere hypothetical problems.
Why, then, am I so fond of the system? Why do I find it so fun, in spite of its flaws? Why, out of all the games I could pick from for Tuesday nights, am I most excited about this, of all things? Well, as it turns out, what I play (or "run", in the traditional parlance) is pretty heavily modified from the off-the-shelf D&D4 chassis. There's various tweaks and freebies handed out to patch holes in the game math, there's a whole system for narrative input to counter DM fiat, there's additional reward systems, there's an experimental system for henchmen and followers, there's a campaign wiki. More often than not, the fond memories of game sessions relate in some way to these house rules and add-ons, more than to the moments supplied by the game as written.
And it's not like I can claim I've created some superior design from the raw material there. It's a hodgepodge of stuff I thought would be cool, from random inspiration, blogs and forums, and player suggestions. Each came from some individual thought about "oh, it'd be fun to do this," without any overall direction. It's totally Forge-incoherent, with reward systems driving play every which way: you're encouraged to fight monsters! and chatter in character about NPCs you like! and make up new setting elements and plot twists! Some of these things undermine each other, like plot-twist cards that can cut out the challenge of an encounter one way or another. And yet it seems to work, at least in the sense that we keep playing it and enjoying it and coming back to it.
Which is, in the end, very like what a lot of folks nostalgic about older editions talk about. The sort of fun driven by their own chaotic mess of house rules and on-the-fly creativity, even if you'd never figure out how they got there by reading (or perhaps even playing) the games in question. Everyone's favorite edition is the one they made up. So maybe my reluctance to move on to a new edition is as much about leaving behind the effort put into the building up of our beloved jumble, as it is about worry that they'll make crappy design decisions or forget what made 4e successful!
I've realized something about my skepticism for D&D Next: it turns out I've become a curious flavor of grognard. A homebrew D&D4 grognard.
I love to crow about how Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons had the guts to pick something to excel at and run with it. I claim it succeeds as a game by leaving aside a bunch of cruft in favor of a fun, streamlined tactical skirmish engine with just enough context to keep it worthy of the "roleplaying" label. I still believe that on a sort of theoretical level, or at least by comparison with its unfocused predecessors. But to think honestly on it, the fun in D&D4's combat system, its design focus and reason for existence, is plenty unreliable. It's too easy to make a slow, grindy, uninteresting combat; optimal tactics are pretty well solved; the reward-to-challenge ratio gets more and more skewed in the players' favor as the levels march on. I've disengaged in boredom from enough play sessions to know these are not mere hypothetical problems.
Why, then, am I so fond of the system? Why do I find it so fun, in spite of its flaws? Why, out of all the games I could pick from for Tuesday nights, am I most excited about this, of all things? Well, as it turns out, what I play (or "run", in the traditional parlance) is pretty heavily modified from the off-the-shelf D&D4 chassis. There's various tweaks and freebies handed out to patch holes in the game math, there's a whole system for narrative input to counter DM fiat, there's additional reward systems, there's an experimental system for henchmen and followers, there's a campaign wiki. More often than not, the fond memories of game sessions relate in some way to these house rules and add-ons, more than to the moments supplied by the game as written.
And it's not like I can claim I've created some superior design from the raw material there. It's a hodgepodge of stuff I thought would be cool, from random inspiration, blogs and forums, and player suggestions. Each came from some individual thought about "oh, it'd be fun to do this," without any overall direction. It's totally Forge-incoherent, with reward systems driving play every which way: you're encouraged to fight monsters! and chatter in character about NPCs you like! and make up new setting elements and plot twists! Some of these things undermine each other, like plot-twist cards that can cut out the challenge of an encounter one way or another. And yet it seems to work, at least in the sense that we keep playing it and enjoying it and coming back to it.
Which is, in the end, very like what a lot of folks nostalgic about older editions talk about. The sort of fun driven by their own chaotic mess of house rules and on-the-fly creativity, even if you'd never figure out how they got there by reading (or perhaps even playing) the games in question. Everyone's favorite edition is the one they made up. So maybe my reluctance to move on to a new edition is as much about leaving behind the effort put into the building up of our beloved jumble, as it is about worry that they'll make crappy design decisions or forget what made 4e successful!