Quote from: Marleycat;539764Old school to be is the attitude of if it's not there make it up, if you don't like it change it.

I'm pretty sure you're completely wrong about this. The attitude you describe is endemic to the hobby, nearly everybody evinces it. You can't poke gamers in our rotund bellies without us puking up a dozen house rules all over the gaming table, inundating the pizza and some poor bastard's character sheet.

House rules. It's who we are.

Also, the proliferation of rules-light indie games, like Insylum or ...in Spaaace! would indicate otherwise. (Also Forgite half-games, like DitV. Pox on the hobby most may be, still they are not "tell me everything" systems.) In addition FATE depends heavily on GM interpretations (though not all its derivatives do).

The hobby (once it moved beyond just and solely and only D&D) has always been split between rules-heavy and rules-light games. High-crunch (or comprehensive) rules sets are not a new phenomenon, nor is such indicative of "modern" design.

IMHO. YMMV.

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;539789I'm pretty sure you're completely wrong about this. The attitude you describe is endemic to the hobby, nearly everybody evinces it. You can't poke gamers in our rotund bellies without us puking up a dozen house rules all over the gaming table, inundating the pizza and some poor bastard's character sheet.

House rules. It's who we are.

Also, the proliferation of rules-light indie games, like Insylum or ...in Spaaace! would indicate otherwise. (Also Forgite half-games, like DitV. Pox on the hobby most may be, still they are not "tell me everything" systems.) In addition FATE depends heavily on GM interpretations (though not all its derivatives do).

The hobby (once it moved beyond just and solely and only D&D) has always been split between rules-heavy and rules-light games. High-crunch (or comprehensive) rules sets are not a new phenomenon, nor is such indicative of "modern" design.

IMHO. YMMV.

Talking the overall picture you may be right but for Dnd I respectively disagree.

Quote from: Marleycat;539795Talking the overall picture you may be right but for Dnd I respectively disagree.

It depends on what time period you're talking about. The three boxes were very sparse, so far as rules go, but AD&D had a great many rules, covering a great many situations. Including "percentage chance to catch a disease in a swamp" in the DMG. That seems fairly comprehensive to me.

("Optional." Maybe. But they were there.)

The less-rules-heavy version was just D&D: B/X, BECMI, or Rules Cyclopedia. 5-Colors D&D remained fairly rules-light in the Basic and Expert sets, but each boxed set added another layer of rules, making the game more complex. (Then there was the "monster PC" D&D rules in a book whose name I cannot recall, which were fairly complicated.)

So, if "modern" begins with the publication of the AD&D DMG, then sure. But if we're talking the last couple of editions...

3e does require more player investment in the rules than earlier editions (as opposed to the DM investment of AD&D), especially with the Fighter class, but 3e is also 12 years old, not what I'd consider "modern".

And I don't know from 4e. Maybe your statements fully and fairly describe that edition. I can't say.

So, once again I must disagree. Nothing personal, though. Right? :cool:

Quote from: Daddy Warpig;539807It depends on what time period you're talking about. The three boxes were very sparse, so far as rules go, but AD&D had a great many rules, covering a great many situations. Including "percentage chance to catch a disease in a swamp" in the DMG. That seems fairly comprehensive to me.

("Optional." Maybe. But they were there.)

The less-rules-heavy version was just D&D: B/X, BECMI, or Rules Cyclopedia. 5-Colors D&D remained fairly rules-light in the Basic and Expert sets, but each boxed set added another layer of rules, making the game more complex. (Then there was the "monster PC" D&D rules in a book whose name I cannot recall, which were fairly complicated.)

So, if "modern" begins with the publication of the AD&D DMG, then sure. But if we're talking the last couple of editions...

3e does require more player investment in the rules than earlier editions (as opposed to the DM investment of AD&D), especially with the Fighter class, but 3e is also 12 years old, not what I'd consider "modern".

And I don't know from 4e. Maybe your statements fully and fairly describe that edition. I can't say.

So, once again I must disagree. Nothing personal, though. Right? :cool:

Not even because you respect my opinion and I see the value and possibly that you may right without insulting my intelligence or myself, we're all good.  

I think what I'm trying to say is that in my personal experience the Cult of RAW seems to infect what I consider modern design far more than old school.  YMMV.

And from this mindset evolved into the movement of "player entitlement" vs. "The GM is God" which to me is at the root of old vs. modern design.

Quote from: Marleycat;539810I think what I'm trying to say is that in my personal experience the Cult of RAW seems to infect what I consider modern design far more than old school.  YMMV.

I think the cult of RAW (such as it exists) is less a symptom of new editions and more a symptom of certain player types being more common in a currently supported game. New gamers come to new games and aren't sure how to play. Some gamers show up to organized play and see the same few issues over and over again. And on top of that tinkerers of all kind see more interest in either fixing or exploiting a game with current support and a larger player base.

People who are still playing older editions are people who were happy enough with them to use them for everything, and will bend these now-comfortable games this way or that depending on the needs of the campaign. But while there's a correlation between old school games and disregard for RAW, I think the root cause is a difference in player bases.

The cult of raw is what we used to just call rules lawyering. These kinds of players have been around since I started. But I do think there was either an uptick in their numbers or they just became harder to ignore, with 3e. I think its simply a matter of 3e having so many moving parts that it is a rules lawyers dream in a way. It seems like the same thing kind of happened with optimization. We had min/maxers before too, but there was onoy so much juice you could squeeze out of 1e, 2e or basic (and loopholes when they were recognized were plugged by the GM). With 3E its like people stopped seeing broken parts of the game as loop holes (they were just fair game).

Quote from: beejazz;540033I think the cult of RAW (such as it exists) is less a symptom of new editions and more a symptom of certain player types being more common in a currently supported game. New gamers come to new games and aren't sure how to play. Some gamers show up to organized play and see the same few issues over and over again. And on top of that tinkerers of all kind see more interest in either fixing or exploiting a game with current support and a larger player base.

People who are still playing older editions are people who were happy enough with them to use them for everything, and will bend these now-comfortable games this way or that depending on the needs of the campaign. But while there's a correlation between old school games and disregard for RAW, I think the root cause is a difference in player bases.

It's definitely part of it also Brendan kinda covers another big part of it.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;540035The cult of raw is what we used to just call rules lawyering. These kinds of players have been around since I started. But I do think there was either an uptick in their numbers or they just became harder to ignore, with 3e.

I think the 3e player base stopped considering rules lawyers and min-maxers as "annoying." Many -- if not most -- pre-3e campaigns tended to consider at least extreme rules lawyers and min-maxers as annoying and undesirable players. WOTC-era D&D campaigns seemed much more likely to welcome such players (or even consider them excellent examples). Tossing them from campaigns would have stopped many 3e problems in their tracks.

Quote from: RandallS;540069I think the 3e player base stopped considering rules lawyers and min-maxers as "annoying." Many -- if not most -- pre-3e campaigns tended to consider at least extreme rules lawyers and min-maxers as annoying and undesirable players. WOTC-era D&D campaigns seemed much more likely to welcome such players (or even consider them excellent examples). Tossing them from campaigns would have stopped many 3e problems in their tracks.

Yeah but do the 3E rules say you can do that?

Quote from: RandallS;540069I think the 3e player base stopped considering rules lawyers and min-maxers as "annoying."

Not in my experience. YMMV.

Rules lawyering has always been a problem. "Barracks room lawyers" is a direct quote from the AD&D DMG.

They were a problem in Shadowrun, WoD, and every other crunchy game. They were a problem in the past, far past, recent past, present, and future. They are not distinctly "modern". IMHO.

(And 12 years ago isn't "modern" to me anyways. )

And I've seen nothing that makes me think this kind of obnoxious behavior suddenly became the norm, or acceptable, with the release of the PHB circa 2000. Again, YMMV, but it wasn't the case with those I was familiar with (friends, people I met in college, the local gaming club, people on Internet boards).

On rules lawyering & 3E, I find the following interesting but I'll just dump this here for people to argue over...

http://grognardia.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/interview-skip-williams.html

relevant bits:

Quote from: Grognardia5. Of the principal designers of Third Edition, you're the only one who had a direct connection to the earliest days of the hobby. Do you feel your longstanding, personal connection to those days informed your work on 3e and, if so, how?

Quote from: Skip WilliamsMostly what I brought to the design effort from those days was a sharp sense of how things can go wrong. Whenever we came to a place in the rules where I knew DMs and players were going to clash, I'd tell a "campaign from hell" story, in which a character (mine or someone else's) was in peril and the DM made the most illogical and completely off the wall ruling you could imagine. I tied to be very careful that all the loose boards in the system were well nailed down. Of course, people still found ways to pry them loose again.

Quote from: Grognardia6. For many years, you acted as "the Sage," providing official answers to questions about the rules of D&D in the pages of Dragon, a role you continue to assume for Kobold Quarterly. I remember Gary once complaining that, in the early days, fans of D&D would call him at his home to ask him rules questions and he was baffled as to why anyone needed him to come up with answers, a feeling many early TSR staffers apparently shared. Do you see any contradiction between the desire of many fans for official answers to their questions and the belief of many early designers that players should come up with their own answers?

Quote from: Skip WilliamsIt's a huge contradiction. The early designers were wrong. It comes down to this: If you want to be in control of your character, you have to have some idea how anything you might try is going to come out. and you can't know that unless you have some idea of how the rules are going to handle the situation. If the GM is making capricious decisions about what happens in the game, you're always shooting in the dark and you have no real control over your character at all. Think of how hard it would be to, say, learn to ride a bicycle if the laws of physics were constantly in flux. The game just works better if the DM and players have similar expectations about how the rules handle things.

Skip Williams was a rules lawyer and a whiny player in the early days.

It carried through in 3e's design.

Quote from: Benoist;540105Skip Williams was a rules lawyer and a whiny player in the early days.

It carried through in 3e's design.

"Sure, rules lawyer PC's are a problem, as are DM's who make arbitrary and capricious decisions. Both can be problematic, the solution is..."

That position I can respect. Yours? Is half ad hominem attack, half inability to acknowledge a valid point (much less suggest a solution).

The valid point being... Both players and GM's can be problematic. Players as rules lawyers, DM's as inscrutable and capricious referees. (And in many other ways as well.)

Like Drohem. His DM decided to take away a level for behavior that had never, in the entire campaign, been mentioned as being Evil. (See the Magical Compulsion thread.)

That is the definition of unpredictable consequences. When players have no idea what the rules are, the game becomes difficult to play. (In Drohem's case, it killed the campaign.)

You may not like William's solution, but the problem is real.

You could have addressed that. Instead, you imputed that the problem is always with the players, not the GM.

Is that what you really think? If so, why not have the guts to say so? If not, why not address the issue?

Why not say something substantive, instead of making a personal attack?

Why not use the freedom afforded us here to say something worthwhile?

Quote from: Benoist;540105Skip Williams was a rules lawyer and a whiny player in the early days.

It carried through in 3e's design.

The impression I got from reading the blurbs is that he definitely believed there was an adversarial relationship between players and DM's.  I haven't read the full link though.