So I'm trying to make sure I understand here; what exactly does "camp fire play" look like?

I agree that it certainly sounds like the kind of stuff that Germans would get up to...

RPGPundit

Quote from: Settembrini;603075Trouble is, the longing for that unique experience is evil. Just like the Wandervogel, nobody says Wandervogel people did not have fun. they did, and it was evil.

I think we've entered the realm of (the bad kind of) fantasy.

Quote from: RPGPundit;603722So I'm trying to make sure I understand here; what exactly does "camp fire play" look like?

I agree that it certainly sounds like the kind of stuff that Germans would get up to...

RPGPundit

I think it's best descriped as: Let's gather round the camp fire kids and let uncle GM tell a story. If you behave and listen dutifully to his endless culture and setting wank maybe he will let you participate a little. Just the usual crap really.

In addition to that, playing Midgard made you being part of an elite. TDE was regarded, at least among the Midgard crowd, as a kids game and D&D was just mindless monsterbashing. So Midgard was the only game around fit to be played by an adult.

I think it's best descriped as: Let's gather round the camp fire kids and let uncle GM tell a story. If you behave and listen dutifully to his endless culture and setting wank maybe he will let you participate a little. Just the usual crap really.

If you want to play this way, you can play TDE exactly the way you descriped. I personally dont play TDE by getting a story told, in which you can act a little bit and i dont play the "perfect world" game you describe.

I think your problem is, that you have a one sided  view on the game. Its a fantasy game, so if you want to play it like you want. I bet you can play every adventure game like that. But i highly doubt its intendet to be played that way.
For example (and yes i do examples to prove my point) have you ever played adventures like "the year of the Griffin" or "Nightmare without ending" its not very comon kids let the crazy uncle tell you a story. These adventures painting a very dark picture of the world, the first one is war scenario where you have to fight hunger and sickness aswell as your enemy.
Every fantasy game can be played like a kids game, thats why you call it fantasy!
TDE is not all camp fire and fairytales, but you can have camp fire and fairytales if you want.


In addition to that, playing Midgard made you being part of an elite.
What elite? Are you nuts.
You just playing the game you prefer and think that makes you better then others?

Oh yes "mature" grimdark and romanticism go together well, unveils the underlying nihilism & murderous/self-destructive hate quite nicely.

That said, and to rein in the "evil" remark just a little, I think the vanilla campfire-style is a benign kind of romanticism.
It is the baseline from which Wandervogel-style emotional goose-stepping and worse can evolve...but it is not bound do go that way. It is just the starting point. Alas, most DSA players willingly leave that behind...

Hm, I never encountered this "playing Midgard makes you elite" stance. I DM'd a Midgard camapign parallel to my AD&D campaign, I guess I knew the majority of Midgard players in Hannover, Germany, and I promoted that game heavily (simply by using it in teaching RPGs to beginners in my shop).

But then, I was part of the "northern Midgard crowd", and if it's true that there was a different vibe in the south then we didn't know it. Our bunch was a truly open-minded circle, with contacts to other cities (and campaigns that spanned as far). Most of them came from TDE and also played Ars Magica, Cyberpunk, WHFRP, and of course CoC.
(But it's true that the majority of them also belittled D&D, not for being a childish game but for the dungeon hackfest cliché...)

Maybe our circle was not part of the Midgard "elite" because we all were not the least bit interested in the official setting(s), Midgard, Magira, or Das Ewige Spiel, or the canon that was published in the official fanzine, Gildenbrief. Every GM had his own campaign world, and eventually most of them got together and created one common setting, Caedwyn (that they even published six adventure compilations for). My own participation in all that was very low, I just inspired the setting name.


No, the elite gamers (at least in my area) were the AD&D players (because they played The Original Game, and neither a German clone, nor the kiddified Mentzer Red Box), and RuneQuesters (because they played The Realistic Game, with skills instead of classes and levels); and later the Vampires (because they reveled in Personal Drama instead of mere action).

Quote from: Nebelherr;603980If you want to play this way, you can play TDE exactly the way you descriped. I personally dont play TDE by getting a story told, in which you can act a little bit and i dont play the "perfect world" game you describe. (...)
But i highly doubt its intendet to be played that way.

But then, you fell for the "D&D is all about dungeons" and "dungeons are boring affairs" cliché as well as many critics of TDE fall for the "TDE is all about getting a story told and be helpless" cliché.

There is a difference between the way products are written and the way they are played.

Nephilim was written as a mystical conspiracy drama with Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in mind - but (as French RPG magazine editors told me once) was played as a super hero game. (Same for VTM and WtA...)

Gary Gygax is often cited as not having adhered to his own rules. (Same for Kevin Siembieda...)

What does a TDE player see when he looks at a D&D module and sees only a dungeon map and a handful of monster stats?
What does a D&D player see when he reads the infamous "Auf ein Wort" advice and boxed texts from TDE modules?

How much of all that gets used as written at the game table?

How many AD&D groups left the dungeon behind for high level political scheming, or merchant campaigns?
How many TDE groups strayed off the sacred metaplot and play in their own version of Aventuria where major Mary Sue NPCs were killed long ago, where major wars were fought with different results than in the novels and sourcebooks?

AD&D's Dragonlance, D&D's Forgotten Realms and TDE's Aventuria are not that far from another. They all suffer from too much canon.
(And PF's Golarion doesn't seem to be too far behind...)

The German RPG crowd sounds complicated.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;604074But then, you fell for the "D&D is all about dungeons" and "dungeons are boring affairs" cliché as well as many critics of TDE fall for the "TDE is all about getting a story told and be helpless" cliché.

Like i said, i played D&D 3.5. My group was consisting of gamers from Hannover patched together through a forum. And as a matter of fact for the first year we played just dungeons. After that i made my own campaign and there one Dungeon in it, in a big campaign.

I belief you can play the game differently, but i personally prefer the game mechanisms of TDE. Thats why i oppose the accusations that it is a bad game, because in my opinion its not.

QuoteOh yes "mature" grimdark and romanticism go together well, unveils the underlying nihilism & murderous/self-destructive hate quite nicely.

Ok, seriously, what the fuck? Its a game, not Scientology!

QuoteThe German RPG crowd sounds complicated.

Its not just the RPG crows that is complicated...

The vibe I got from some Belgian DSA players matches Settembrini's description/typification quite well. On numerous occasions I've seen claims that only the prefab scenarios were good enough, that making up your own stuff would result in the GM being unconvincing and "less professional"... :idunno: same for players choosing not to follow the prescribed railroad.

Sett and Dirk made the important points already, so let me sum up my TDE/DSA
experience by telling an experience i made at a local con:

I joined some acquaintance of mine who claimed he'd run a "fan module i found on the internet, on a fan page. It is really good!"

Turns out i'm not the only player, but one of 9(!) around the table.

As soon as the game begins the other players out themselves as run-of-the-mill DSA fans, so i kinda kept quiet about the usual things (railroaded start with gear stripped, deus ex machina, railways to the one and only way the adventure will be solved, etc.) pulled off in official, pre-published modules.
 
The adventure was basically us players stumbling around in a supposedly spooky and creepy mansion, that was haunted by a Mary Sue Ghost. We couldn't leave the house (autolocked doors, barred windows, etc.) and whenever we entered a room the "Meister"(literally: "Master", that's what the GM is called in TDE/DSA) would read a cutscene description to us, without the possibility to break the routine or intervene before the description ended, even going as far as telling the players how their character feels in that certain situation and what he thinks of it. Literally. I asked the GM at one time if i could just hand him the character sheet and my dice to ease his job. He didn't get the joke. I just roll along on the railshooter-like scenes and practice the inner facepalm. The rest of the players don't question any of this contrived and really stilted stuff, even when some characters try to split and get auto-offed by the Mary Sue Ghost in another room in the mansion because they actually tried to fight it on their own terms. Mind you, they didn't get to roll even once. Next there's a really visibly constructed puzzle for the group to solve, and this is where the module falls apart: I come up with an unorthodox yet common sense way to break/solve the challenge set before us and state what my character does, then the Master shakes his head with displayed sadness and just outright says

"I'm sorry, you can't do that."  

"Pardon!?!? Why can't my character do that?"

"It's not in the module."

At first i assumed he was joking, so i started to laugh.

His blank stare indicates to me that he is not.

I look in the direction of the other players.
"Hey guys, i'm free to let my character do that. Right!?!?"

They give me the same blank stare as the Master, then they shrug indifferently.  

None of them fucking speaks up. NONE.

I facepalm and sigh loudly, pack my stuff and get away from the table, shaking my head.

THIS is what TDE/DSA is to me. Some mono-culture of a fanbase (the other guys at the table started "RPGs" with DSA/TDE and never bothered to play anything else, i dared asking them before we started to play) pretending to play a game that's in fact a shittily scripted shitty impro theater with bad writing and clunky combat resolution.

I think you must have inadvertently ended up in a session of a LARP about zombie roleplayers.

QuoteTHIS is what TDE/DSA is to me.

Exactly, this is what TDE/DSA is for you.
The scene you described sounded horrible, really. I played with such GM's myself. One GM just read the entire adventure and you had some spots to react. I didnt finished the adventure because in my opinion this is really crapy Gamemastering.

This might be TDE/DSA for you, but it is not TDE/DSA for everyone. If the GM sucks the game he leads doesnt matter. I can understand your disapointment about you first TDE experience, but if the GM would had offered Midgard, i bet you would hat that game for the same reason.

GMing like this seems all too common in the DSA gamer culture, though, moreso than with other games. Not saying that everybody plays like this or that you can't play any other way, but it seems to be the default.

Quote from: Nebelherr;604651Exactly, this is what TDE/DSA is for you.
The scene you described sounded horrible, really. I played with such GM's myself. One GM just read the entire adventure and you had some spots to react. I didnt finished the adventure because in my opinion this is really crapy Gamemastering.

This might be TDE/DSA for you, but it is not TDE/DSA for everyone. If the GM sucks the game he leads doesnt matter. I can understand your disapointment about you first TDE experience, but if the GM would had offered Midgard, i bet you would hat that game for the same reason.

No. This is the impression of DSA/TDE i got after a long time of play experience, for about the 16 years i know the system and its fanbase. Seriously.
What i'm describing is rather the norm instead of exception, so please shut your fanboy mouth,  pretty please!

p.s.: Dein Englisch ist superbeschissen, und das trotz der äusserst einfachen Syntax deiner Sätze!

Quote from: Phantom Black;604542Sett and Dirk made the important points already, so let me sum up my TDE/DSA
experience by telling an experience i made at a local con:

I joined some acquaintance of mine who claimed he'd run a "fan module i found on the internet, on a fan page. It is really good!"

Turns out i'm not the only player, but one of 9(!) around the table.

As soon as the game begins the other players out themselves as run-of-the-mill DSA fans, so i kinda kept quiet about the usual things (railroaded start with gear stripped, deus ex machina, railways to the one and only way the adventure will be solved, etc.) pulled off in official, pre-published modules.
 
The adventure was basically us players stumbling around in a supposedly spooky and creepy mansion, that was haunted by a Mary Sue Ghost. We couldn't leave the house (autolocked doors, barred windows, etc.) and whenever we entered a room the "Meister"(literally: "Master", that's what the GM is called in TDE/DSA) would read a cutscene description to us, without the possibility to break the routine or intervene before the description ended, even going as far as telling the players how their character feels in that certain situation and what he thinks of it. Literally. I asked the GM at one time if i could just hand him the character sheet and my dice to ease his job. He didn't get the joke. I just roll along on the railshooter-like scenes and practice the inner facepalm. The rest of the players don't question any of this contrived and really stilted stuff, even when some characters try to split and get auto-offed by the Mary Sue Ghost in another room in the mansion because they actually tried to fight it on their own terms. Mind you, they didn't get to roll even once. Next there's a really visibly constructed puzzle for the group to solve, and this is where the module falls apart: I come up with an unorthodox yet common sense way to break/solve the challenge set before us and state what my character does, then the Master shakes his head with displayed sadness and just outright says

"I'm sorry, you can't do that."  

"Pardon!?!? Why can't my character do that?"

"It's not in the module."

At first i assumed he was joking, so i started to laugh.

His blank stare indicates to me that he is not.

I look in the direction of the other players.
"Hey guys, i'm free to let my character do that. Right!?!?"

They give me the same blank stare as the Master, then they shrug indifferently.  

None of them fucking speaks up. NONE.

I facepalm and sigh loudly, pack my stuff and get away from the table, shaking my head.

THIS is what TDE/DSA is to me. Some mono-culture of a fanbase (the other guys at the table started "RPGs" with DSA/TDE and never bothered to play anything else, i dared asking them before we started to play) pretending to play a game that's in fact a shittily scripted shitty impro theater with bad writing and clunky combat resolution.

Jesus fucking christ.  Its like an entire country decided to run a WW-style game and didn't realize that all that hype about it being a "storytelling game" was just bullshit.

RPGPundit