{"id":30510,"date":"2016-02-02T02:16:59","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T07:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=30510"},"modified":"2016-02-02T02:29:47","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T07:29:47","slug":"rutskarns-rpg-system-hoedown-part-2-the-latter-dragons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=30510","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn’s RPG System Hoedown, Part 2: The Latter Dragons"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I wrote the first entry <\/a>in my series explaining RPG systems to newbies, I wrote–and deleted–several paragraphs on why I recommended Dungeons and Dragons<\/em> at all. The reason it got cut was that it felt like a needlessly confrontational introduction; this series is to educate new players, not carry a spear in the endless nerd faction blood war between old ones. But now that I’m underway, let me take a moment explain to any prospective gamers–if not imaginary grognards <\/a>with opinions two degrees east of my own–why I’m pushing D&D <\/em>for my first two posts of recommendations when I rarely choose to run it myself.<\/p>\n

Sure–there’s things I don’t like about D&D<\/em>. And as a full disclosure, that’s not exactly an unpopular opinion among people who’ve been gaming as long as I have. A common complaint is that it’s outdated, married to 1970s sacred cows that have since been replaced with newer, sexier cows with lower carbon footprints. I’ll be honest and say that several of the editions I’m recommending, I don’t like playing at all. At least, not anymore.<\/p>\n

But when you get right down to it, D&D <\/em>just isn’t like the games I replace it with. It’s not a schlocky parody riff\/jazz solo on the tropes of standard roleplaying games like Sacred Barbecue. <\/em>It’s not a re-examination of dungeon crawling storytelling using tightly reinvented mechanics like Dungeon World <\/em>or Dungeon Crawl Classics<\/em>. All of those are games made because somebody got sick of D&D<\/em>, but they got sick of it because they’d played it–their work is derivative, and it only functions because it operates from the same recognizable and approachable foundation. What D&D <\/em>is–what it needs to be–is a solid, earnest, classic <\/strong>game. It’s a firm base of objective rules with a straightforward, literal, and legible mechanic used to tell entry-level fantasy stories. It’s a medium-crust delivery pepperoni pizza. It’s a great start. You won’t hate it. Odds are you’ll have an excellent time, you’ll find one part you like more than the rest, you’ll branch out, and then four years later you’ll be writing forum posts about what’s wrong with D&D <\/em>like the rest of us.<\/p>\n

There’s another and simpler reason: Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>is lavishly produced to be an introductory game. Almost every RPG allocates some space to teaching first-timers what they’re doing, but it’s so often a perfunctory and lazy effort: generally speaking the rulebook’s either a tight sixty-page .pdf that can’t dedicate more than a couple to tutorials or it assumes anyone who can find it by word of mouth and pick it up won’t need more than a refresher. Grab any edition of D&D<\/em>, on the other hand, <\/em>and you’ll find an entire chapter–often several chapters–dedicated to explaining how things work in the sort of exhaustive mind-numbing detail you only get when you’ve got interns to abuse.<\/p>\n

Now, where were we? Oh, right.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition<\/strong><\/p>\n

So to recap the lessons of the last post: 2nd Edition is designed to evoke<\/strong> classic fantasy. 3rd Edition is designed to expand<\/strong> classic fantasy. Now we’ve come to 4th Edition, which does something that might come off a little bizarre and redundant: 4th edition is designed to gamify <\/strong>classic fantasy. I know; it’s a roleplaying game. What the hell does gamify mean in this context?<\/p>\n

Simple: it means making roleplaying like other <\/em>games. Non-roleplaying games. And considering how roleplaying games got to be like roleplaying games in the first place, that’s not so much a deviation as a throwback.<\/p>\n

It’s a well-known but often overlooked fact that early editions of Dungeons and Dragons<\/em> were inspired by (actually evolved directly from) contemporary wargames. Like those early wargames, the point of a combat in D&D <\/em>was not just to provide a good strategic challenge and kill an evening rolling dice–the point was to make you feel like a commander in a real battle. The mechanics were built to reinforce the idea that the little people fighting on the table obey the same rules and logic as real-world human beings; that the game had rules and dice at all was an unfortunate condition, an obligation made as entertaining as possible but only there to reinforce the idea that what was going on was real<\/em>. That’s who the game was made for, that’s what the game was made to feel like.<\/p>\n

Go to a nerd gathering back in the day, in the lean years of the nerddom, and you’d find a few tables of people playing D&D <\/em>and a few tables of people in full regalia playing fiddly Napoleonic wargames translated in pencil from the original Croatian.<\/p>\n

Now pretend it’s the new millenium. You’re a developer tasked with updating Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>for that brave new frontier, the modern less-fringe-than-previous nerdling. So you go to a new-school tabletop convention and see a couple tables of D&D<\/em>, the same couple dudes in epaulets swapping the same cannonades from 1975…and about a hundred tables of all types of people playing the kind of slick creative board games that were just beginning to undergo a massive renaissance. Now think about where you’d go for inspiration.<\/p>\n

The effect on the game’s combat mechanics, arguably the most important part of any edition’s ruleset, cannot be overstated. Prior editions had a general list of actions you could take in a combat round. There was the occasional unique and idiosyncratic special move–often a class would have either none in particular or one that totally defined them, like the Rogue’s sneak attack or the Barbarian’s rage. Spellcasters had spells, which were cast the same way in combats as out of them. Most of the game’s moves could be attempted or at least learned by a character of any class at all. The goal was to retain a certain austerity and universality that lent combat its grounded and relatively plausible edge; that goal was left behind by 4th Edition immediately.<\/p>\n

4th Edition set out to provide every kind of character a large list of unique JRPG-techniques so that almost every action in combat is either a physical movement or a special ability. Every character in the game has abilities that can be used at will, abilities that can be used once a combat, abilities that can be used one per day. Oddly (at least to the aforementioned grognard), this includes theoretically nonmagical characters like Rogues and Fighters. It doesn’t make any particular narrative sense that ostensibly mudane abilities like stabbing really hard or stabbing someone really fast can only be used “once per day” or “once per combat,” or that they occasionally accomplish seemingly magical ends, but that concern isn’t part of the game’s design principles. The point isn’t to create verisimilitude, whatever that truly means for a fantasy monster-killing simulator, so much as to create interesting and approachable strategic options.<\/p>\n

How you felt about that paragraph tells you whether or not you want to try 4E. The introduction of powers is the largest meaningful change to the game by far<\/em>. There are some refinements good and bad to the outskirts of the system–some neat stuff with stat checks, some baffling stuff with how it approaches ethics and morality, some iffy and limiting recommendations for handling skill checks that you don’t need to pay attention to–but nothing besides combat approaches a selling or splitting point. It’s all about the board-game-style tactics and how that appeals to you personally.<\/p>\n

One note: in my experience, combat takes longer in 4th Edition than in any other. There’s a lot of rules-mediated options available in a given turn, so be prepared to wait for yours.<\/p>\n

5th Edition<\/strong><\/p>\n

I put 5E on this list somewhat tentatively. 2nd Edition vs. Pathfinder<\/em> vs. 4E is a vicious knock-down duel of the fates, a contention that will never be resolved as long as torrents flow and dice roll.<\/p>\n

5th edition is, uh, it’s fine. Pretty good. But the only boat it rocks is the one it already rocked last time, the U.S.S. Superpowercombat<\/em>, and it’s rocking it right back to where it started from.<\/p>\n

All the stuff I just said about 4th Edition? Ignore that, because this game does–it picks up from 3rd Edition like nothing else ever happened. Actually, I’d say it goes back even further: it retreats, in a pleasing way, to the fuzziness of 2nd Edition that lets a few mechanics stand alone and doesn’t try to simulate every possible circumstance. The result is–pretty good. It’s not weird or new enough to inspire much of a rabid fanbase that I’ve detected, but it’s solid and safe.<\/p>\n

You can find the basic rules you need to get started here<\/a>–which is nice.<\/p>\n

It’s not totally free and huge like Pathfinder<\/em>, but it’ll serve for a while until you need to buy some rulebooks, which will be in print and readily available. If you hear about a sponsored game day or convention game it’s going to be 5th Edition. So let me put it this way: if you’re looking for someone else to start you off, 5th Edition is a perfectly good game and probably the easiest to find a group or event for, depending on where you are.<\/p>\n

So that’s my breakdown of D&D editions for new players. Next time–finally–I’ll talk about some other nice options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I wrote the first entry in my series explaining RPG systems to newbies, I wrote–and deleted–several paragraphs on why I recommended Dungeons and Dragons at all. The reason it got cut was that it felt like a needlessly confrontational introduction; this series is to educate new players, not carry a spear in the endless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}