Re: What difficultly level do you play one?

On Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:19:42 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Here I'll weigh in.
>
But kids' marketing sucked. Look at the D&D cartoon series. You meet both
Tiamat and Lloth in the first season. Tiamat shows up in the first
episode! The way it was marketed to children affected a generation of
players. Those players only sometimes matured out of that sort of game.

That marketing is a very interesting point I hadn't considered,
although I wouldn't entirely blame it on kids. But TSR (and, really,
any marketing agency worth its salt) wanted to focus on the exciting
bits of their products: in D&D's case, the big battles, the horrific
monsters, the glittering loot. They aren't what actually make the game
fun (IMHO, YMMV, OTLAMA) but they're eye-catching. It's the sizzle to
the steak. You see mighty-hewed barbarians slicing through a dragon's
neck and being rewarded chests of gold and jewels and think, "Hey,
what's that all about? That looks interesting!" You pick up the books
and play.

Hopefully you play with a group that understands there's MORE to the
game but d10 damage, 15HD monsters and Treasure Type C. If so, you're
likely to come across with a far different impression than those who
play the 'rules-as-(poorly)-written' and engage with the storytelling,
the role-playing, the puzzle-solving, the politicking, the character
interactions and the group world-creation.

But just as likely you're to follow the game exactly and only as the
rulebooks and modules specify. And why not? That's what pretty much
EVERY OTHER game on the market expected. You weren't really supposed
to be adding new rules or interpretations to Monopoly or chess. The
rules were fixed in those games, so why expect D&D to be different? If
it wasn't stated that the monsters WOULDN'T patiently wait in their
assigned dungeon rooms or that they might not always be instantly
ready for battle, why should players expect otherwise? Especially if
the marketing suggested otherwise.

And who are most likely to focus on the obvious, least likely to
question the authority of the books, and most likely to miss the
barely mentioned subtext?

The point is, the adults who played the game in the 70s were aware, but
the Stranger Things crowd of the 80s was busy facing Demogorgon for no
particular reason. And they didn't, obviously, run in the same social
circles (I did, see below). That demogorgon crowd grew up, replaced the
MENSA crowd, and are as responsible for the collapse of the game, and
almost TSR, in the late 80s early 90s as Gygax was. Gygax catches too
much of the blame for this generation of stunted players and their effect
on the game.

That's right; kids! Those poor stupid kids who played the game, loved
it when they were young and simple, but couldn't figure out why the
game lacked longevity as they aged, and then (assuming they didn't
give up on the hobby entirely) figured it must be the rules and
migrated to some new system which was more 'sophisticated'.

For Tomb of Horrors my understanding is that it was a Gygax 'special'
designed for tournament play and to really tax the players brains.

Tomb of Horrors is a grudge module. Gygax said so himself. There is
nothing ironic or brain challenging about it at all. It is simply unfair.
He just wanted to hand smug manchildren their asses at a convention. It
should never have been published, except that it is the seminal puzzle
dungeon, which is one of my favorite kinds of adventures.

Yup, that's what I've heard about it too.
E.g., a reaction against people who played the game 'stupidly',
expecting the usual static dungeon-crawl. "This is what you like,
izzit? This is what you've done to my creation, hmmm? Well, lets take
it to an extreme and see how much you like it then!"

      (not his actual words but that's the undertone
       of the adventure. ;-)


Of course

     (and look, here I am finally making it on topic again!
      And you all said it couldn't be done! :-)

it didn't help when D&D started getting ported to computers. Because
early computers were GREAT with the number crunching, but were pretty
poor with the story and characters. Computer RPGs /still/ struggle
with making a game where the combat isn't the most dominant feature.
Our beloved 8-bits were far inferior machines; they hadn't a chance in
capturing what made table-top gaming such a fascinating hobby. So
those early RPGs - most of which were either licensed D&D games or
very closely based upon it- were little more than brain-dead combat
simulators and loot collectors. Which in turn reinforced the idea that
was all that D&D really was.


I mean, do you remember what a radical concept it felt in "Ultima IV"
was when it was announced that the goal of the game was /NOT/ to
murder your way through the world?* For a lot of players, that was the
first time they even considered there could be more to the genre!





* even though, in the end, it pretty much still was ;)