Quote from: nDervish;868707I think I would use a narrower term than "wargaming" here.  Back in junior high and high school, we played AD&D the way Gronan describes - don't bother with morale, XP-for-GP is stupid and unrealistic, etc.  But I did have a wargaming background.

It's just that it was an Avalon Hill wargaming background, centered mostly on Tactics 2, Blitzkrieg, Panzer Blitz/Panzer Leader, etc., none of which explicitly modeled morale.  I'm sure morale was a factor in their combat results tables, but they didn't distinguish between units being eliminated because everyone died and units being eliminated because their morale failed.  Being a teenage boy with no outside experience to suggest otherwise, I just assumed that the units were literally "destroyed", so fights to the death in D&D fit perfectly with that.

I never really had that view challenged until I was 17 or 18 and got introduced to Squad Leader, which is very heavily invested in modeling the effects of morale and leadership.

Interesting. Squad Leader and its design notes gave me a great enthusiasm for morale in games, but I was first playing Squad Leader about the same time I was first playing RPGs, when I was 10-11 years old. Our 5th grade teacher had the class playing an "explore the Louisiana Purchase" game, and I remember trying to tell him he should add morale rules, hehe. Squad Leader makes morale an explicit thing with several relevant and very important mechanics (morale and leadership can be more important than firepower, equipment, or numbers of men). However even Tactics II (a game where the units are entire divisions rather than squads, crews and leaders) and pretty much every operational wargame has morale effects in the forms of the rules for forced retreats and cutting off retreats (many combat results are retreats not eliminations, and if the unit can't retreat due to terrain/enemies, it surrenders), but yeah before you've thought about morale, that can be semi-imagined as all tactical necessity without thinking much about morale per se.

What also helps is to read accounts of what battle is really like. I was also reading All Quiet On The Western Front and The Red Badge Of Courage about that time, so it made sense.

And yet, I still didn't use explicit morale rules in RPGs. I would however consider the mindset of the people involved, and have people run away sometimes, though not nearly as much as would be realistic - there was a lot of bloodthirsty RPG action for years at our tables.

Quote from: nDervish;868707I think I would use a narrower term than "wargaming" here.

Fair point.

Squad Leader hit the scene around the same time D&D was really taking off. My impression was that the prior Big Thing was Diplomacy, which resolved "social encounters" simply by having players conduct conversations and make decisions based on their own assessments of their interests.

SPI's Sniper came out the year before D&D, Patrol the same year as D&D. "Panic" checks were a notable feature! It also had a "miniatures" touch with fold-up vehicle models. If memory serves, the way the grid was used made for oddly shaped buildings, but some guys adapted the board game rules for ROCO Minitanks or larger scale models.

Quote from: Omega;868595OD&Ds interaction rules are fairly prominent so would be hard to miss. But they are in the book used just for bribing monsters to join you. I believe it was Gronan who mentioned that they also used it for random demeanor and negotiation like it is used in BX.

As for "fights to death", morale checks are among the first things mentioned in the OD&D books (in the section on charisma and Loyalty). There just is not a set system, though the one in Chainmail -- I presume the BX-ish one, not the complex Post Melee Morale calculation -- is suggested as fitting.

The Reaction table from Vol. 1 appears again, slightly modified, in Vol. 3, specifically for general demeanor and negotiation. However, I think Gary just assumed folks would draw inferences for themselves rather than imagining that they could use the table only for the kind of case given as example!

The brief notes regarding Intelligence and Wisdom clearly invite wide open application.

Also, there are the Control rules for commanders and troops in the shipboard combat section.

One could use the will/ego test rule from the section on magic swords for other purposes.

Quote from: Bren;868628I submit that most of those people don't have a wargaming background or any relevant real world experience. I'd imagine that a few do and just don't care. But only a few.

I think the point is that they knew full well that it was there, and decided not to use it. Tactical-wargame experience or not seems to me little to the point, as this looks like people picking up Monopoly and immediately changing things.

If they then complain that the game design is unbalanced or whatever, the complaint is illegitimate because they are not actually playing the game design in the first place!

Quote from: Phillip;868800I think the point is that they knew full well that it was there, and decided not to use it.

I disagree with that point.

In part, I suppose, because it's hard for me to imagine reasons why a lot of people who understand moral would choose to eliminate it. It seems equivalent to ditching attack rolls. What you get either isn't a game or it is a game set in bizarro world.

Well, PanzerBlitz was not exactly a great simulation either -- but it was fun enough in its wacky way! I'm thinking it was probably more fun than the more sensible descendant Arab-Israeli Wars, though I haven't played either in a long time.

My bad, when I say "wargaming" I mean "miniatures wargaming" and I call SPI/AH and similar games "hex and chit wargames."

Because I got introduced to miniatures first.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;868828My bad, when I say "wargaming" I mean "miniatures wargaming" and I call SPI/AH and similar games "hex and chit wargames."

Because I got introduced to miniatures first.

Order of introduction was reversed for me.

Quote from: AsenRG;867842That kind of misunderstanding how medieval society actually works is almost starting to get on my nerves lately...

The aforementioned 'Duke' is the opposite extreme.  The issue is that everyone assume ransoming was the only way those types of situations, like some sort of genteel fantasy land and anyone who thinks otherwise is a delusional wannabe murder hobo.

People are stupid, and crooks are stupider.  That's pretty much been the only constant in all of history.  First off, the Bandits would be morons for wanting to negotiate a price for the Ducal whelp, simply because they could get tracked back to their hideout, or worse, the guy(s) they sent to collect the ransom took it, split it and took off never to be seen again.  And unlike in modern times, tracking someone is more difficult, cuz they don't have GPS or able to track a cellphone.  Criminals are not known for their sense of honour after all.

So that nixes that plan.  More than likely, the Duke WILL assume his child is dead, rightly or wrongly, and send a retaliatory force, simply because we still do it now.  If they rescue the kid?  Sweet!  If not, then sympathies on their loss, but at least the bandits are dead and scattered.

This, of course, is assuming they found the bandit camp in the first place, which may be a trick in itself.

Ransoming was a thing that Nobles did among each other, due to social rules.  No one else got to 'benefit' from that.

Quote from: Phillip;868800I think the point is that they knew full well that it was there, and decided not to use it. Tactical-wargame experience or not seems to me little to the point, as this looks like people picking up Monopoly and immediately changing things.

This actually matches my experience exactly. When I was younger, first into playing, the fun was mainly in combat. And besides, outside of combat, there really wasn't as much structure to the game. So if we rolled a wandering monster and it was regular people or good-aligned monsters, we ignored it and rolled again. Reaction table was only for human-like NPCs that we were "supposed" to parley with. And because it always botched, we always ruined the DM's storyline.

And morale? Well, when we were dungeon crawling, a lot of rooms didn't have second exits. And players rarely took prisoners. It seemed a pointless rule to us. Of course, as we matured, our tastes changed. But we had already learned to play D&D a certain way. We already had certain expectations of what it meant to sit down and play D&D.

QuoteIf they then complain that the game design is unbalanced or whatever, the complaint is illegitimate because they are not actually playing the game design in the first place!

I think I first made that argument 20 years ago, almost to the day, on usenet. This led to my introduction of gamers circular logic.

I'm not having fun when I'm playing D&D.
You can't tell me I'm playing wrong.
The only wrong way to play is not having fun.
So we house-ruled it to make it better.
But I'm not having fun playing D&D.

If you watch very closely, you'll still see it today. People invoke subjectivity as a defense against being told they're playing wrong while clearly expressing dissatisfaction with their gaming experience.

Quote from: Lunamancer;868850I think I first made that argument 20 years ago, almost to the day, on usenet. This led to my introduction of gamers circular logic.

I'm not having fun when I'm playing D&D.
You can't tell me I'm playing wrong.
The only wrong way to play is not having fun.
So we house-ruled it to make it better.
But I'm not having fun playing D&D.

If you watch very closely, you'll still see it today. People invoke subjectivity as a defense against being told they're playing wrong while clearly expressing dissatisfaction with their gaming experience.

Sadly, that's a fallacy.  Because if you don't understand the subsystem, or don't think it'd fit, there's no evidence using would make the game more fun.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;868890Sadly, that's a fallacy.  Because if you don't understand the subsystem, or don't think it'd fit, there's no evidence using would make the game more fun.

D&D is pretty irrelevant. You can't state you're not having fun playing such-and-such, and then deflect criticism of how you're playing by citing subjectivity.

If you're not having fun, then you ARE playing wrong. And if you're playing wrong, then criticisms are valid because you do need to change at least some of what you're doing.

And if what you're doing is different from the rules as written, well playing by the rules as written is the most ready made solution available to you. There's no guarantee that's going to work for you. But you haven't given the RPG itself a fair or honest try if you're not open to at least trying to use rules you've been ignoring to make your experience more fun. It's at least worth a try.

This becomes especially when there is a clear relationship between the complaint and the rules being ignored. For example, in the case of 1e, when people gripe that it's all murdergrind while ignoring, 1) A roll at the beginning of an encounter that vastly cuts down the amount of combat, 2) A roll during combat that vastly cuts down on the amount of fighting to the death, 3) The xp for gold rule which provides an incentive to avoid combat when possible.

That doesn't mean implementing those rules will automatically make the whole thing fun. But if it's still not fun, odds are it will be for a different reason than murdergrind. Maybe too much roleplay, frustration with enemies that flee before you get to kill them, and everything becomes a big lootfest.

Quote from: Lunamancer;868920D&D is pretty irrelevant. You can't state you're not having fun playing such-and-such, and then deflect criticism of how you're playing by citing subjectivity. ...

D&D - Making the impossible possible for 30 years... :teehee:

Quote from: Lunamancer;868920D&D is pretty irrelevant. You can't state you're not having fun playing such-and-such, and then deflect criticism of how you're playing by citing subjectivity.

I remember you.  You're the Bad Wrong Fun guy.  Right.  Moving on.