What's Right With AD&D

[ralphmelton]

Willie posted an entry on this What's Wrong with AD&D, and I decided that I wanted to comment on it in my own journal.

The author has some very good points, but they're cluttered up with a lot of petty junk, so I think he fails to make his points well. And the mega-annoying Internet Explorer sound doesn't help at all.

There are two points that he makes that I consider to be really valid criticisms:
1. The D&D mechanics (particularly ballooning hit points, armor class, and saving throws) don't reflect reality very well, and therefore don't enhance players' imaginations very well.
2. D&D doesn't reflect its genre very well. I have ranted about this myself with criticisms like the mundane feel of monsters and magic in D&D, and the odd nature of advancement. A D&D game really doesn't feel much at all like fantasy fiction; it feels like D&D.

But do y'all remember the "Worse is Better" essay? That essay ended up arguing that the "worse" systems that superseded the "better" systems did so because they had other features that ended up being more valuable than the features of the "better" systems. And it's like that in D&D too.

Here are the features that make I think make D&D stronger than most other RPGs: (I mean 'stronger' in a commercial sense, but also from a point of view of appealing to me.)
1. D&D's popularity is itself an advantage. It's easier to find people who play D&D, and there is much more material produced for D&D. But this feature is less important to me personally than to the other two.
2. D&D provides a lot more support to new players than most other games. It's true that D&D makes it harder to play anything other than standard D&D, in a way that GURPS, for example, does not. But D&D makes it much easier to play a standard D&D game. Some particular things that help with that:
- monster levels make it much easier to guess at appropriate opposition for a party.
- random treasure tables actually do help.
- (I had more points to add here, but I've forgotten them--I may add them later.)
3. Most importantly, though, D&D provides a paradigm. I know what to do in a D&D adventure--you beat up the monsters and take their candy. By contrast, I've been fascinated by Victorian RPGs like Castle Falkenstein, but I don't know how to set up a Castle Falkenstein adventure--and this has kept me from running such games.

These were the reasons that I chose to use D&D for my first campaign, with the expectation that my next campaign might be something different, once I have a bit of experience. I think these reasons are pretty good reasons for a lot of people to start with D&D. These are the reasons D&D wins out.

Comments

[jeffholton.livejournal.com]

I'm so proud of myself.

I was a quarter of the way through your post before I realized that you WEREN'T talking about attention deficit disorder.

[cellio]

I enjoy playing D&D. Yur campaign is my first time in many many years, and there wasn't a steep (re-)learning curve. That's handy. I know it's not realistic, and sometimes that helps; I've been in games under other systems where we bogged down in the "practical details" of how something would work in combat or whatnot, and a steady diet of that just wasn't fun. We get into it at times in our games, but it doesn't dominate.

And, fundamentally, reality is going to be different in a world with the kind of magic that fantasy campaigns demand.

I also appreciate not having to track details such as locations of hits and how long ago each wound was inflicted (for healing purposes) and which skills I get to make experience checks for when this is over, and stuff like that. I think RuneQuest! was about as far as I would want to go in that direction, and even that got kind of silly with the skill checks. ("Caddy! My short sword, please; I've successfully used my long sword so it's time to try for another EP check.")

The article (well, collection of articles) to which you're responding was sufficiently disorganized and rambly that I didn't read very far.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

Let me tease apart two notions there...

I think it's possible to be realistic without being detailed. It's a matter of choosing good abstractions.

For an example of a bad abstraction: at least in older versions of D&D, a successful attack roll was explained as the effect of a succession of several attacks, only some of which might actually penetrate armor. On the other hand, the differences in hit points between different classes and between different levels has been explained as being an expenditure of luck and divine favor, not just actual wounds.

These abstractions lead to several fairly unintuitive results. Perhaps the most significant is that cure spells are apparently restoring luck and divine favor, and cure less actual damage as the recipient goes up in level. Also, as characters improve, they improve in their ability to soak up damage, and don't improve so much in their ability to avoid damage.

In GURPS, as a counterexample, hit points are relatively constant, and greater prowess gives a warrior a greater chance of avoiding an attack, instead of being able to take more hits as in D&D. That's a fairly simple change in abstractions that seems to produce results that satisfy me more, without being much more complicated.

(My own interpretation for D&D: hit points actually are more-or-less constant amounts of damage, but fighters are trained in the fortitude required to keep on fighting when they're 20% damaged, where mages and less-trained fighters wuss out and start dying when they're only 5% damaged. It's as sensible as anything else, and it means that a hit is really a hit.)

[beegle.livejournal.com]

A few things written too quickly:

The author of the "what's wrong" page feels very strongly that Internet Explorer is one of the worst things that's happened to the internet. See http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/virus.html for a bit more. I agree with his philosophy, but not with his approach.

I think that D&D's failure to reflect reality enhances plater imagination specifically because of that failure. It's easier to imagine something that makes sense than to imagine something that doesn't. It could happen that players just stop imagining if things get too ridiculous, though. Admittedly, D&D walks that line of absurdity sometimes.

As to genre, who says that it's fantasy fiction? At heart, D&D just seems like fantasy-inspired wargaming. If they made it much more, it'd affect the paradigm. You could argue that D&D isn't roleplaying any more than Risk is. The players play "Heroes" who have to beat up anything that gets in their way. No need to worry about motivation unless it affects what you beat up next. There's a lot to be said for that sort of simplicity. "If it moves, it's bad" is way less stressful than real life. In a way, the munchkins have it right: D&D is about kicking ass with a thin wrapper plot.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I agree that D&D is at its heart just fantasy-inspired wargaming. But I personally would like something that feels more like fantasy fiction.

I do believe D&D to be much nearer to roleplaying than Risk--even if the experience is a bit silly, it encourages players to personalize the experience.