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Nope not confrontational at the beginning. It gradually moved that way. I saw it creep in and that with the lowering of trust made adversaries of the GMs and the players. Also the fact society openly mocked honor and fairplay made it almost inevitable. Making the 'most popular roleplaying game' more like a video game shoved it hard away from spontinaety, cooperation, and trust. Sorry for the spelling on a mobile.
There's a nice post from the Grognardia blog about how (at least for him) D&D adventures were viewed in the 70's
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/retrospective-tomb-of-horrors.html"Of course, you have to remember why the module exists at all. The story goes that the diehard core of D&D fans regularly complained to TSR that the modules produced to date had been "too easy." Some people who don't remember those days might have a hard time understanding this, because of the shift that's occurred in the way gamers look at modules. Back then, a dungeon was something to be "beaten." Gamers looked at modules sort of like the way video game players look at new releases -- they wanted to get as many hours of gameplay out of them as possible. So Gary Gygax took this as a challenge to his design skills and the result was Tomb of Horrors."
Heck, they even ran tournaments where your individual characters could be slotted in like an MMORPG raid group to win loot that they can then use in other tournament dungeon raids. The DM was the guy who ran the monsters trying to kill you.
Considering that D&D predates videogames (obviously), it's more that videogames borrowed from D&D than modern D&D being 'too videogamey'. Stuff like the Tomb of Horrors only exist as a difficult mechanical challenge for high level characters to beat or die.
I removed AoOs (the Beginner Box combat rules don't use them either, just as an FYI), I'm told that invalidates quite a few character builds, but the people I play with don't go in for "character builds" anyway, so there's no harm done.
Here's an example of something like a 'trust issue' you mentioned. You have a wizard and a fighter, the wizard is squishy. There are some hobgoblins attacking them. As the DM do you just never have the hobgoblins walk past the fighter to stab the wizard?
Or you have a hobgoblin wizard standing behind a fully armored hobgoblin knight with a giant shield. What do you do if your PC says "I charge the hobgob wizard" What do you do as the DM, make a ruling?
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That's fair, I can see from the other threads that we have wildly different play styles, and that's ok. I'm guessing your group loves playing in your games as much as mine does my games. But yeah in my game, a PC that wanted to bull rush someone without the appropriate feats would incur the same penalty regardless of how good they role played it, and using abilities they don't have access to is off the table. Bull rush is a bad example because you CAN bull rush without feats, but attacking an ongoing spell to dispel it without spell sunder is not going to happen.
We do have different play styles; I find that rules systems that demand system mastery ALSO tend to accrue about a thousand to 1200 pages of new rules/feats/spells per year, and I get rules absorption fatigue.
Bull Rush is a pretty good example, because it, Improved Shield Bash, Improved Sunder, Improved Trip and Improved Disarm are all things that should be options to anyone who actually fights - not four feats worth of "feat tax" built off of Power Attack and Combat Expertise.
You're also assuming that "describing it" is "bypassing the challenge" - in my games, "describing it" is "show me how you're solving the problem."
It's pretty easy to return to AD&D, just remove feats and skills from the game. If your players want to do something, have them describe it and you just say yes or no or roll a d20 behind a screen for a sound effect and then say yes or no, based on how you feel about it.
That's all there is to it. The only wordy rules left with guaranteed effects are spells.
Becausein D&D, spells came before skills
Before there was a thief class for percentile dice sneaking there was the invisibility spell. Before there were rules for making people like you or scaring them based on what you say, there were spells for charming and scaring. Before there were rules for weather effects, there were rules for shooting storms out of your hands. And so on and so on.Just keep in mind that if you're going back to AD&D, it's only Wizards and Clerics who are able to dramatically shape the world without your approval*, everything else is a 'mundane' plan that you get to veto.
...and once your players have an idea of what they can and can't do based on your on-the-spot rulings, those rulings become house-rules and you wind up with a proto-skill system, which is pretty much what happened with D&D through the 70's onward.*Well the DM has absolute authority so you can always throw in arcane static or 'your god is not happy with you' to say "no" to casters too.
**I suggest FATE as a good system that's more narratively driven with less fiddly parts than Pathfinder, check it out.
one other rule to implement if doing this as per AD&D. There is no concentration skill. IF the caster gets hit before they cast their spell...they lose the spell.
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Since no one else has mentioned it, perhaps Matthew Finch's Quick Primer for Old School Gaming can contribute some common vocabulary to this discussion.
Also, participants might enjoy many past similar discussions at the Story Games Forum.
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... I think the magic was the antics and ingenuity were left in the hands of the players in the old school style, whereas the new school GM's do most of that stuff now....
That's maybe what I'm feeling with the advent of the "D&D minis" style of adventuring. There's not a need to "invent" a means to an end if you can find a rule for it. Reading the post about a teacher wanting to use Pathfinder in a school setting made me wonder if the students are going to expand their creative and critical thinking or merely become more skilled at flipping to the correct rule.
All in all, I leaning towards the view that, having been a DM & GM for many years, players are now encouraged to spend more time searching for the rule (building a superior character, the unbeatable trip tactic, and so on) than immersing in the world. My theory, perhaps flawed, is if we reduce those rules, reduce the mechanical incentive, the focus returns to the game world and not the game mechanic. Maybe it's as simple as trying a "core only" game to wean players off a rules-laden system.
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I removed AoOs (the Beginner Box combat rules don't use them either, just as an FYI), I'm told that invalidates quite a few character builds, but the people I play with don't go in for "character builds" anyway, so there's no harm done.Here's an example of something like a 'trust issue' you mentioned. You have a wizard and a fighter, the wizard is squishy. There are some hobgoblins attacking them. As the DM do you just never have the hobgoblins walk past the fighter to stab the wizard?
Or you have a hobgoblin wizard standing behind a fully armored hobgoblin knight with a giant shield. What do you do if your PC says "I charge the hobgob wizard" What do you do as the DM, make a ruling?
I've toyed with a few options. Just letting people move past, forcing movement to stop when it enters a square adjacent to an enemy, and currently thinking about the "bump-to-initiative when someone enters an adjacent square" thing I mentioned earlier. Kurt-ryder's idea of allowing high initiative people to choose to go later looks like another possibility. Sometimes I'll go mapless and just assume every opponent is "aggroed" by the last person to physically hit them (allowing casters to go relatively unnoticed by the opposition, while the PCs get to pick and choose targets.) Another thing I'm considering is a Blood Bowl-style check to move if there's an enemy in an adjacent square. Preferably anything that makes combat rounds flow easier with the least amount of interruptions and exceptions.
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It's the RPG equivalent of Legos... you're just putting your blocks together in a slightly different pattern, but you're still playing with the blocks you're given.
This is how Paizo disappoints me most.
In my childhood, a RPG "setting book" contained some maps, tables of interesting rumors and small encounters that the GM could use strategically or randomly, some fairly deep NPC personalities that perhaps had stat blocks, and a bunch of large encounters that often centered around something wondrous not in any of the rules.
(Many of the latter were justified as being relics of ancient civilizations. A construction crew discovered giant indestructible doors through a collapsed room in the basement of the city library. A mountain-sized golem is slowly approaching from the north. Evil cultists will complete a ritual in four days that will turn everyone in the city evil. Etc. Because the problem was creative instead of rule-based its solution would clearly also need to be creative instead of rule-based.)
But Paizo "setting books" are visually stunning collections of maps and rules. Pages of feats and traits and archetypes and monsters that are all new rules!
Although I am disappointed, I do recognize there is more money to be made from selling to today's kids rules instead of setting.
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Now get off my lawn!!!!
Harsh, stereotypical, and untrue (or, at least, incomplete)...
The standard "kids these days are lazy and don't apply themselves" argument? Uh, huh... Sure... The same things your parents said about your generation (and their parents said about them, etc.).
What you are seeing through your nostalgia-tinted lenses is that "back in the day" ('70s and '80s, mostly), RPGs in general (and AD&D in particular) were a lot less "mainstream." While there were certainly a bunch of "casual gamers" who "played by rote" (the "basic dungeon crawl" was pretty much the standard experience, after all), the ones that stuck with it were usually the dedicated people willing to spend time, effort, and money in "mastering the game."
Proficiency tends to go through stages, however. First, you need to learn the basics of the system; this is actually easier to accomplish in d20 systems because of the unified design (fewer unique systems kludged together for different aspects). Second, you explore the various options available; this was easier with 1st Ed AD&D since your "options" were so constrained (basically ability scores (often randomly generated), race, class(es), weapon proficiencies, and possibly spells; additional rules from Unearthed Arcana, Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, and Wilderness Survival Guide could expand the options slightly). Third, you go through the "homage" or "reskinning" phase, where you (shamelessly) borrow from published/player-created content and either "file the serial numbers off" or create "expansions"/"new versions" based on that material. Finally, you get to the "toolkit" stage, where you become comfortable enough with the system to pick and choose which parts (tools) to use for a given task (character, encounter, adventure, campaign, setting).
What you are complaining about is that the Internet gives those in the first two or three stages (who, as a normal consequence, have always outnumbered those in the last stage) a larger voice than they "used to have." Getting to the "toolkit" stage takes, as mentioned, significant investments in time, effort, and money; but that makes it no different than any other activity. Not everyone has the passion to make that investment, just like not everyone trains to run marathons (even if they run regularly and even enjoy it).
Oh, and I'm one of those "grognards" (at least by today's standards) myself. Got my start with AD&D and BECMI D&D in the early '80s. I also see a lot of young people as part of my job (active duty military), so your anecdotal viewpoint is not anything close to universal.
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The standard "kids these days are lazy and don't apply themselves" argument? Uh, huh... Sure... The same things your parents said about your generation (and their parents said about them, etc.).
No.
Eirikrautha wrote about the cost of information, memorization, how synthesis of background knowledge is part of creativity, and the preference for rearranging what is in front of you rather than innovating.
Your entire post mentions none of those four topics. You wrote a "straw man" reply.
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The standard "kids these days are lazy and don't apply themselves" argument? Uh, huh... Sure... The same things your parents said about your generation (and their parents said about them, etc.).No.
Eirikrautha wrote about the cost of information, memorization, how synthesis of background knowledge is part of creativity, and the preference for rearranging what is in front of you rather than innovating.
Your entire post mentions none of those four topics. You wrote a "straw man" reply.
You obviously skipped my entire paragraph about the four stages of proficiency. He's complaining that "todays kids" haven't (yet) attained the level of mastery that he spent years developing; his is the straw-man argument ("all kids" vs. "some specific kids").
This is how Paizo disappoints me most.
In my childhood, a RPG "setting book" contained some maps, tables of interesting rumors and small encounters that the GM could use strategically or randomly, some fairly deep NPC personalities that perhaps had stat blocks, and a bunch of large encounters that often centered around something wondrous not in any of the rules.
(Many of the latter were justified as being relics of ancient civilizations. A construction crew discovered giant indestructible doors through a collapsed room in the basement of the city library. A mountain-sized golem is slowly approaching from the north. Evil cultists will complete a ritual in four days that will turn everyone in the city evil. Etc. Because the problem was creative instead of rule-based its solution would clearly also need to be creative instead of rule-based.)
But Paizo "setting books" are visually stunning collections of maps and rules. Pages of feats and traits and archetypes and monsters that are all new rules!
Although I am disappointed, I do recognize there is more money to be made from selling to today's kids rules instead of setting.
I disagree. Have you looked in the books from the Campaign Setting line? They're about 90% non-rules information on the setting. People, places, cultures, plot hooks. I'll admit the Player Companion line is more rules-heavy, because that's its function: give players shiny rules bits to play with. But there's a lot of good non-rules stuff in the books. I think you're just seeing the wrong ones.
You do have a point... I think the main problem people have with this is that AD&D is not all that good for character customization, which is a very big deal to a lot of people. I would guess that if it felt like you could meaningfully build a really broad array on concepts in AD&D, a lot more people would probably play it.You know what game I find ideal for capturing the essence of AD&D?
AD&D
The two problems I tend to find are:
1) Finding other people that want to play it. On the other hand, I can yell "Pathfinder" and have to turn people away.
2) Converting Paizo APs (which I love) to run with another system. Simpler to just run them with Pathfinder, and knock PF into shape with large heavy objects until it works the way I want it to (and recently I've started thinking using the Beginner Box combat rules solves most of my problems)
Yes, I see this fairly often. Some DM will want to start a no magic E 6 campaign, and when I say, why not play Iron Heroes instead, as it's designed for super low magic, they say " well, I can only get players for Pathfinder".
Not realizing that once you have no magic e6, you're not really playing PF, anyway.
Have you looked in the books from the Campaign Setting line? They're about 90% non-rules information on the setting.
Ah. Thanks much for the correction.
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What you are seeing through your nostalgia-tinted lenses is that "back in the day" ('70s and '80s, mostly), RPGs in general (and AD&D in particular) were a lot less "mainstream."
Disagree. In the 80s, AD&D was HUGE. Pathfinder has not ever, and will not ever, even begin to compare.
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4. Restore some Core concepts. Make those golems immune to all magic (not everything has a "trump"). Put some (not all) traps in that can only be uncovered by player action, not a generic "perception" check. Don't be afraid to ban something that the group has found to "bend or break" the game.
About the traps, see The Art of Ruling from the Alexandrian blog:
1. Passive observation of the world is automatically triggered.
2. Player expertise activates character expertise.
3. Player expertise can trump character expertise.
This is generally a concept I like and i think you can apply if across the board. Players need to initiate some game mechanics, and player ingenuity can trump or enhance simple skill roll results. But on the other hand you can play a charismatic bluffer or diplomat even if you as a player are not so outgoing and can't act it out so well.
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Disagree. In the 80s, AD&D was HUGE. Pathfinder has not ever, and will not ever, even begin to compare.Not really, tabletop gaming was a niche hobby in the 80's and it is a niche hobby now. AD&D may well have sold millions of copies but in comparison to the toy market it is tiny. TSR was a small fish on the overall kids toy market just as WotC nowadays is a tiny part of the Hasbro family. Paizo barely rates as a blip in an overall commercial sense. What has changed is that much of the language of gaming has entered common knowledge and that is largely due to video games which are an enormous market in comparison.
D&D had a regular cartoon. You couldn't go a month without seeing a mainstream media article on the subject. And the media was much smaller. It was gigantic. Wotc puffery not withstanding I am willing to bet an honest assessment would show more core players as a percentage of the pop in the 80s and early 90s. Mmorpgs console games etc have gutted tabletop gaming.
It's pretty easy to return to AD&D, just remove feats and skills from the game. If your players want to do something, have them describe it and you just say yes or no or roll a d20 behind a screen for a sound effect and then say yes or no, based on how you feel about it.
That's all there is to it. The only wordy rules left with guaranteed effects are spells.
Becausein D&D, spells came before skills
Before there was a thief class for percentile dice sneaking there was the invisibility spell.
Well, almost. Skills were around, at least with the Thief class back in OD&D days, long before AD&D. And non-weapon proficiencies were in AD&D and in the end, so were Skills are we know them today, almost, along with proto-feats. This was "Skills & Powers".
So, few want to bring back that OD&D feel, they wanted AD&D, and skills, at least to some extent were part of it.
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D&D had a regular cartoon. You couldn't go a month without seeing a mainstream media article on the subject. And the media was much smaller. It was gigantic. Wotc puffery not withstanding I am willing to bet an honest assessment would show more core players as a percentage of the pop in the 80s and early 90s. Mmorpgs console games etc have gutted tabletop gaming.Disagree. In the 80s, AD&D was HUGE. Pathfinder has not ever, and will not ever, even begin to compare.Not really, tabletop gaming was a niche hobby in the 80's and it is a niche hobby now. AD&D may well have sold millions of copies but in comparison to the toy market it is tiny. TSR was a small fish on the overall kids toy market just as WotC nowadays is a tiny part of the Hasbro family. Paizo barely rates as a blip in an overall commercial sense. What has changed is that much of the language of gaming has entered common knowledge and that is largely due to video games which are an enormous market in comparison.
Just like they've gutted board gaming and war gaming. The experience they can offer is easier to set up, more focused on the individual player, and cheaper than a TTRPG. It doesn't help that the TTRPG industry has been relatively slow to adapt to advances in and the spread of the internet technology. That neither Paizo nor WoTC have an in-house virtual table program, character building program, dice roller application, or similar programs( that I'm aware of), stuns me.
That Paizo ties errata to when the next hard copy edition of a book comes out, when they have their own, free, online pathfinder reference database baffles me.
So I've been looking for ways to mitigate that.Two solutions I've been playing with should I GM again are this.
A) run a E6 (or more likely E8) game. If you're not familiar with this variant, it's D&D/pathfinder played the same as always but players stop leveling once they hit a level cap the GM determines- level 6 typically though the GM could set it higher (I prefer 8). Advancement there after is only by a feat. So it stops rule bloat to a certain extent. You advance to level 8 or so, then every so many xp's the PCs earn feats.
Bah. E6 would be going in the opposite way from AD&D. AD&D had VERY powerful characters (I have one demi-god and two Immortal heroes, for example). Sure, D20 has 'rule bloat" but E6 does nothing to trim RULES, it trims PC power, and allows the DM to run a game without thinking too much.
Right the point was it had a cartoon, several print magazines, news articles good or bad that indicated people were interested. Whether it was kids buying the product and magazines with a much bigger proportion of their disposible income or parents concerned about what their kids were doing it was the thing. It was the 'it' happening.
Now it's just another hobby and most of the kids that were playing d&d are now playing ghost ops or halo or surfingporn.
It's not bigger now. Even with the OSR it's fading. When d&d puts out another weekly cartoon I'll consider it to be growing.
one other rule to implement if doing this as per AD&D. There is no concentration skill. IF the caster gets hit before they cast their spell...they lose the spell.
No. WHILE they are casting a spell. Spells took 1-10 segments(except the one that took rounds or minutes). (Usually, one segment per level, but there were many exceptions). So, everyone rolled Init.
My Wizard rolled a 5, and has a 3 segment spell. He starts in 5, it goes off in 8. (actually, they counted down, but lets not confuse things). Your warrior had to get an init between 5 and 8 and hit the wizard during that period- if he hits the wizard before or after, no problem.
I also think the internet makes you "dumber." .
I disagree. What it does it makes things easier. For example, take the Blood Money spell or the orc bloodline. Many builds nowadays will include one of the other (if you're building a blaster mage). But those are in obscure modules, and I'll bet 99% of those who have either of those do not own or even have read that module.
Bah. E6 would be going in the opposite way from AD&D. AD&D had VERY powerful characters (I have one demi-god and two Immortal heroes, for example). Sure, D20 has 'rule bloat" but E6 does nothing to trim RULES, it trims PC power, and allows the DM to run a game without thinking too much.
So I've been looking for ways to mitigate that.Two solutions I've been playing with should I GM again are this.
A) run a E6 (or more likely E8) game. If you're not familiar with this variant, it's D&D/pathfinder played the same as always but players stop leveling once they hit a level cap the GM determines- level 6 typically though the GM could set it higher (I prefer 8). Advancement there after is only by a feat. So it stops rule bloat to a certain extent. You advance to level 8 or so, then every so many xp's the PCs earn feats.
An 18 ability score was special, though. It doesn't mean anything any more. I never liked the power up that came with 3E, the routine ability score increases. It's possible to go too far in lifting restrictions.
An 18 ability score was special, though. It doesn't mean anything any more. I never liked the power up that came with 3E, the routine ability score increases. It's possible to go too far in lifting restrictions.Bah. E6 would be going in the opposite way from AD&D. AD&D had VERY powerful characters (I have one demi-god and two Immortal heroes, for example). Sure, D20 has 'rule bloat" but E6 does nothing to trim RULES, it trims PC power, and allows the DM to run a game without thinking too much.
So I've been looking for ways to mitigate that.Two solutions I've been playing with should I GM again are this.
A) run a E6 (or more likely E8) game. If you're not familiar with this variant, it's D&D/pathfinder played the same as always but players stop leveling once they hit a level cap the GM determines- level 6 typically though the GM could set it higher (I prefer 8). Advancement there after is only by a feat. So it stops rule bloat to a certain extent. You advance to level 8 or so, then every so many xp's the PCs earn feats.
True, but a 19 was SUPER special, while today it is "Pretty strong". And, I had a number of PCs with AD&D gauntlets of Ogre power of Girdles of Gt Str. GoOP would give you about a 22 str in PF, and some of those Girdles could give you about a 30. We had lots of ability score increases, from magic pools, wishes, tomes and such.
That might be how you played it but I have a hard time saying whether or not that it actually how things were meant to be run from the books. This is not a dig at you but rather a reflection that the initiative and surprise rules in 1e AD&D were largely incomprehensible gibberish. Admittedly when I was reading them I was about 12 but even when I go back and read them now they make no damn sense and I read badly written gibberish for a living.No. WHILE they are casting a spell. Spells took 1-10 segments(except the one that took rounds or minutes). (Usually, one segment per level, but there were many exceptions). So, everyone rolled Init.
My Wizard rolled a 5, and has a 3 segment spell. He starts in 5, it goes off in 8. (actually, they counted down, but lets not confuse things). Your warrior had to get an init between 5 and 8 and hit the wizard during that period- if he hits the wizard before or after, no problem.
Well, you make a point about the rules, but I think that perhaps we can concede I know what I am talking about with this Old School stuff?
True, but a 19 was SUPER special, while today it is "Pretty strong". And, I had a number of PCs with AD&D gauntlets of Ogre power of Girdles of Gt Str. GoOP would give you about a 22 str in PF, and some of those Girdles could give you about a 30. We had lots of ability score increases, from magic pools, wishes, tomes and such.An 18 ability score was special, though. It doesn't mean anything any more. I never liked the power up that came with 3E, the routine ability score increases. It's possible to go too far in lifting restrictions.Bah. E6 would be going in the opposite way from AD&D. AD&D had VERY powerful characters (I have one demi-god and two Immortal heroes, for example). Sure, D20 has 'rule bloat" but E6 does nothing to trim RULES, it trims PC power, and allows the DM to run a game without thinking too much.
So I've been looking for ways to mitigate that.Two solutions I've been playing with should I GM again are this.
A) run a E6 (or more likely E8) game. If you're not familiar with this variant, it's D&D/pathfinder played the same as always but players stop leveling once they hit a level cap the GM determines- level 6 typically though the GM could set it higher (I prefer 8). Advancement there after is only by a feat. So it stops rule bloat to a certain extent. You advance to level 8 or so, then every so many xp's the PCs earn feats.
Yeah but you had to quest for that stuff... not just get it as a matter of course because you went up a level.
Well, you make a point about the rules, but I think that perhaps we can concede I know what I am talking about with this Old School stuff?I accept that you had played a long time, as have I, but I have a hard time believing anyone played 1e initiative by the book as the book makes no damn sense. Seriously, 1e initiative is one of those hot topic issues like non human level limits, the existence of thieves and energy drain likely to provoke hundred page argument threads over at somewhere like Dragonsfoot. It is the Old School Kryptonite, much like Rogues, Paladin Alignment or Caster//Martial disparity over here.
actually the martial/caster, Paladin, and rogue arguments are as old as the hobby.
Yeah but you had to quest for that stuff... not just get it as a matter of course because you went up a level.
True, and it depended highly on your DM. Most of us played with several DM's however, so sooner or later your PC would luck out and get that +2 to a stat. Or , maybe a +6 to Str with a -6 to dex.
Now it's just another hobby and most of the kids that were playing d&d are now playing ghost ops or halo or surfingporn.It's not bigger now. Even with the OSR it's fading. When d&d puts out another weekly cartoon I'll consider it to be growing.
Well, Pathfinder now has audio dramas... :)
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK at least RPGs are seen as far more mainstream than they were back in the 80s and 90s. You couldn't walk into the typical high-street bookstore and pick up D&D back then. I saw the end of 2e finding its way onto the shelves, and by the time 3e hit I was seeing dedicated RPG displays in "normal" bookstores and not having to hunt for dusty little hobby stores any longer.
Even Games Workshop, for all the negative things I tend to say about them, have put the idea of playing in these strange magical worlds into the high street with their own store chain (again, not sure how it is in the US, but over in the UK you can't go into a decent-sized town or city without finding one.)
Our hobby is certainly seen as far more mainstream over here than it once was (along with the associated ones such as wargaming.) Perhaps it's different from country to country, though.
actually the martial/caster, Paladin, and rogue arguments are as old as the hobby.Well, you make a point about the rules, but I think that perhaps we can concede I know what I am talking about with this Old School stuff?I accept that you had played a long time, as have I, but I have a hard time believing anyone played 1e initiative by the book as the book makes no damn sense. Seriously, 1e initiative is one of those hot topic issues like non human level limits, the existence of thieves and energy drain likely to provoke hundred page argument threads over at somewhere like Dragonsfoot. It is the Old School Kryptonite, much like Rogues, Paladin Alignment or Caster//Martial disparity over here.
Well, I don;t know about argument,s but yes, back in OD&D wizards completely ruled at very high levels. of course, a 1st level wizard sucked. And it really helped that a Thief with his cheap eps advancement could easily be two levels higher than the wizard.
To me, AD&D init makes perfect sense, even more that D20. But to each his own.
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The AD&D player had a very limited set of abilities and unlike Pathfinder, there wasn't always a rule of A trumps B, B trumps C (e.g. spells that would bypass spell immunity). Like the lunar exercise, sometimes you had to take an unconventional, creative approach. Now I'm not saying players can't or won't today, but a continued slew of rules may be a disincentive to pure creativity. In the above spoiler, there's a preset "trump" mechanically in place. One doesn't have to get creative, one just has to know which rule to apply. Note, I'm not talking about pure combat mechanics. The game isn't all about combat, and I grasp combat is about mechanics and math, always has been, not where I'm headed.
A system composed of too many rules stifles the need for creativity. You simply apply X ability to Y situation. Problem solved. And that's my personal observation. In AD&D, I saw players try all sorts of imaginative, crazy things, like leaping off a 20' ledge onto a dragon's back hoping it would count as a backstab since they couldn't get behind the dragon. I see far far less in Pathfinder, with some of the exact same players.
I don't think this is an iron rule, but it is an influence on players that I've noticed as well. Because there are so many powers that explicitly solve certain problems, players tend to stop thinking about how to solve those problems and focus on obtaining those powers.
I've noticed this in Vampire as well: Tremere vampires have lots of different rituals to do little things. "There's a ritual for that" is the old "there's an app for that." But if you think about it, half those things could've been done with a nonmagical science lab as well. Science abilities are also much cheaper than magical abilities. But the capabilities of science aren't spelled out in exhaustive detail in the rulebook. (As if you could.) So the possibility often doesn't even really occur to players.
Or maybe they've had a bad experience with a GM once, who made doing that hard, for one reason or another. And if you've "learned" that creativity is unreliable, you come to rely on powers that explicitly tell you just how hard it's going to be. Then you can assess beforehand if it's even worth trying.
I think it's really important with new players, not to "burn" them on this. If they want to try something creative, it's very important to work with them to show them that what they want is possible, and how the rules provide a framework.
Really, I think the PF skill system is a decent framework for comparing all the weird things people might tray that it doesn't cover. Because it's hard (impossible, probably) for a skill system to exhaustively cover everything people will try. But comparing to existing skill uses can provide guidance on difficulties, success measures etc.
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As for reasons GMs might be difficult about creativity, they include the following;
- Using science and technology is inherently unbalanced. UNBALANCED! The whole point of technology is for humans to get stuff done that isn't possible normally, or to make things easier. So someone using technology is going to end up better off than someone not using it. The whole goal of technology is to move balance from its old resting point. Note that this is only a problem if you obsess about balance between party members; if the PCs think as a team enjoying joint triumphs, I don't think this is so problematic.
- Importing modern technology and scientific ideas into PF is indeed fishy. If a player tried to apply modern chemistry to make bombs in PF, I'd resist as a GM, and instead grab alchemy rules. It's easy to say no to chemistry, because PF seems to have "fire" as an element. As well as water/cold and earth/acid. It's a bit harder to draw a line when a player tries to use Engineering. I don't exactly want players to use OOC knowledge of how history turned out, to kickstart the industrial era early. But if they want to defend a castle with Home Alone shenanigans, that's wonderful. Even if they're going to "commit anachronisms" to make it happen.
- The GM might have a different solution planned out, which player creativity is going to circumvent. I think this is often a matter of GM insecurity/inexperience or just a rigid style; it's related to railroading. The GM might feel threatened by the "takeover", or just worry that the rest of his cool plot won't work out, and he really wanted to share his cool creation. Wanting to share your cool ideas doesn't make you a bad guy, but the result is unfortunate.
My argument is simple: More rules (driven by a culture in some people from the last few generations who are more comfortable being handed options and choices rather than being left in a creative vacuum) have led to less creative space for roleplaying. This has led to a very different RPG experience than in the past. And it's not going back.
I'm sorta with you there. I agree that's been the case with D&D, and the knock-on effect in Pathfinder.
There's still other RPGs that are rules-light out there, and have just as much creative space as we had in AD&D and BECMI D&D, and I'm not just talking the retro-clones (I'll drag in my favorite example here, Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space by Cubicle 7)
I know there's a feeling in some at Paizo (and I'm sure there's also some there that feel exactly the opposite) that Pathfinder inherited too much of a rules-heavy system from 3e and it sometimes ends up being too restrictive on creativity. Whether that means we may see changes in the future, I dunno. I suspect that eventual decision, if it ever comes about, will be more customer-led from whatever figures they have on player numbers and styles than down to the preferences of anyone there though - and I'm tempted to go with your analysis of the current audience meaning there'll not be any real change.
I think encouraging improv allowing the rules some flexibility and ruthless pruning could bring that feeling and playstyle.
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We do have different play styles; I find that rules systems that demand system mastery ALSO tend to accrue about a thousand to 1200 pages of new rules/feats/spells per year, and I get rules absorption fatigue.
Bull Rush is a pretty good example, because it, Improved Shield Bash, Improved Sunder, Improved Trip and Improved Disarm are all things that should be options to anyone who actually fights - not four feats worth of "feat tax" built off of Power Attack and Combat Expertise.
You're also assuming that "describing it" is "bypassing the challenge" - in my games, "describing it" is "show me how you're solving the problem."
You can bull rush anyone without the feats. Obviously that's risky. You can take the feats, that's the easy way out. But there ARE quite a few creative ways to do it without.
* Guy is flat-footed during surprise round.
* Summon a monster that "eats" the AoO
* Have the tough PC first do someting else that triggers the AoO. Most enemies don't have Combat Reflexes.
* Blind the enemy.
* Disarm the enemy.
* Trust in AC
* Be invisible
* Convince the NPC that he doesn't want to use his AoO on you because he wants to continue threatening the wizard with it
* Get the monster to waste his AoO on an illusion
* Convince the monster you're an illusion
The feat is the easy way out.
(That said, I think the feat chains regarding maneuvers could do with a bit of shortening, because more access to maneuvers without preparation also boosts creative combat.)