09-25-2016, 08:47 PM
I don't really have a high opinion of most post-80's RPGs. Except for the Gygax ones. This has nothing to do with being a Gygax fan. The reason is, I constantly have the feeling that they're all just ripping off D&D. Except for Gygax, who specifically set out to not repeat his earlier efforts.
No matter what bizarre hippie nonsense a so-called "modern" RPG has, without fail, it is an identical match to that one odd D&D session I played back when I was a kid. And if I had no life, I bet I could even search through every issue of Dragon Magazine and find an article that shows it wasn't just me. Every so-called "original" idea in RPGs is something that was already done in D&D, and that's where the idea came from. It's just modern design wants to pervert it, by blowing it up under a magnifying glass and excluding most other elements. And then it loses its context, it loses all its power.
Oh, the people who claim to love such things, of course, love it, because it's spelling out explicitly what they were consciously setting out to do. I have my doubts as to how great it is at the gut level. And the endless list of "problems" posted to RPG message boards seems to confirm that, yeah, real fun is pretty hard to come by for those gamers who are plugged in to the "scene." It seems like it's the endless struggle, the striving for fun, and the hope to recapture the pure enjoyment they felt when they first were introduced to RPGs is what drives them.
Here's the key. What made RPGs so much damn fun when we were kids, or when we were first introduced to it, was the element of mystery. Not only did we not know what was behind the door, we didn't know what could possibly be behind that door, and we didn't even know what to roll to find out.
But the whole modern mindset of RPGs is to neatly codify everything into a set of rules. Whether its a rules-heavy game that accounts for every possible action, or a rules-lite game where you can do infinite different things, but they all come down to the same one die roll with 3-7 possible degrees of modifiers. And everything's gotta be on the same die roll. Whether it's a d20, a fistful of fudge dice, a One-Roll-Engine, etc. Everything must be shoe-horned into one core mechanic, that every player knows.
I observed the most common mental handicap of otherwise extremely intelligent people is the ability to deal with ambiguity or the unprecedented. RPGs used to swim in that stuff. Now it's been killed and replaced with an ungiving system. Like one you might use at work.
No matter what bizarre hippie nonsense a so-called "modern" RPG has, without fail, it is an identical match to that one odd D&D session I played back when I was a kid. And if I had no life, I bet I could even search through every issue of Dragon Magazine and find an article that shows it wasn't just me. Every so-called "original" idea in RPGs is something that was already done in D&D, and that's where the idea came from. It's just modern design wants to pervert it, by blowing it up under a magnifying glass and excluding most other elements. And then it loses its context, it loses all its power.
Oh, the people who claim to love such things, of course, love it, because it's spelling out explicitly what they were consciously setting out to do. I have my doubts as to how great it is at the gut level. And the endless list of "problems" posted to RPG message boards seems to confirm that, yeah, real fun is pretty hard to come by for those gamers who are plugged in to the "scene." It seems like it's the endless struggle, the striving for fun, and the hope to recapture the pure enjoyment they felt when they first were introduced to RPGs is what drives them.
Here's the key. What made RPGs so much damn fun when we were kids, or when we were first introduced to it, was the element of mystery. Not only did we not know what was behind the door, we didn't know what could possibly be behind that door, and we didn't even know what to roll to find out.
But the whole modern mindset of RPGs is to neatly codify everything into a set of rules. Whether its a rules-heavy game that accounts for every possible action, or a rules-lite game where you can do infinite different things, but they all come down to the same one die roll with 3-7 possible degrees of modifiers. And everything's gotta be on the same die roll. Whether it's a d20, a fistful of fudge dice, a One-Roll-Engine, etc. Everything must be shoe-horned into one core mechanic, that every player knows.
I observed the most common mental handicap of otherwise extremely intelligent people is the ability to deal with ambiguity or the unprecedented. RPGs used to swim in that stuff. Now it's been killed and replaced with an ungiving system. Like one you might use at work.