Quote from: SettembriniWhy is AD&D 2nd the way it is? Why is 3.5 more like the RC than like AD&D 2nd?

Probably due to AD&D being a total mess. So, if you want to retool a game so it is good again, you search on the game's history and voilá!, you find this childless branch of the tree, named the RC, which is awesome! You want a new game that's still D&D, but has nothing to do with the AD&D 2e shit. Also, you're influenced by many other cool games that you have played or designed. And there you have it: 3.0

Making 3.5 more similar to AD&D would have been a big step backwards.

Quote from: SettembriniAnd I'm not saying that a designer lives in a vaccuum. But memory is elusive. Were Tweets D&D "houserules" really "houserules"? Or where they there in one of his boxes or stapled D&D books?

Well, I have no reasons to think that Tweet is mistaken or lying. If he says that they were houserules, I believe him. He gives credit where it is due.

Quote from: SettembriniBTW, it's hip to name Tweet but forget Monte Cook and Skip Williams. Sadly they didn't write any hipster game, so they are ignored by a certain crowd.

Nobody is ignoring them, AFAIK. And I thought that the hipstest game around was D&D. But Tweet is the best known designer of them, maybe due to the variety of his designs (this is totally conjecture, of course), that appeal a wider array of gamers.

Quote from: SettembriniTweet is genius and brough sanity to D&D through his greeatness of mind, then why don't the Tweet lovers love 3.x also?

Haha. Good question. Here's a funny pull quote:

"Here's a story, secondhand. It's GenCon '02, the year before I first went, at the Forge booth. Jonathan Tweet comes by. He's like, "hi, I'm Jonathan Tweet, I designed D&D3." The Forge folks are like, "the hell you are! You're Jonathan Tweet, you designed Over the Edge and Everway!"

Quote from: BalbinusNope.  Lots of games had them, but in this case the lead designer on 3e was the designer for Ars Magica.  It was the same person.

Once again, I refer you to the statement I quoted upthread wherein Tweet explicitly states that the resolution mechanic was already pretty much in place by the time he was added to the design team.

Quote from: BalbinusTraveller would not exist but for OD&D

Inaccurate.  Traveller would not exist in its present form.  The game was in manuscript form prior to the publication of D&D, but underwent a major rewrite after the gang in Bloomington got their hands on D&D.

The rest of this conversation is ass-tastic.  Of course prior editions of D&D are going to be the single biggest factor in a new edition.  Of course the designers will fall back to stuff they learned from previous design work they did and their own formative rpg play.  Of course Ron Edwards and RPG Pundit are going to overtstate their positions and then those positions will be further distorted in later discussion.  I just don't see where the actual argument is in this thread.

Quote from: jrientsOf course Ron Edwards and RPG Pundit are going to overtstate their positions and then those positions will be further distorted in later discussion.  I just don't see where the actual argument is in this thread.

Quoted for truth.

I say it again: this thread is bizarre.

Quote from: Abyssal MawHaha. Good question. Here's a funny pull quote:

"Here's a story, secondhand. It's GenCon '02, the year before I first went, at the Forge booth. Jonathan Tweet comes by. He's like, "hi, I'm Jonathan Tweet, I designed D&D3." The Forge folks are like, "the hell you are! You're Jonathan Tweet, you designed Over the Edge and Everway!"

An interesting article from the bits that I read, I liked the three rules for creating setting on the fly. I like the idea of creating setting on the fly, (and wish I was good enough with note taking to be able to make it work) particularly as I don't think I'd have a prayer of pulling off the Over the Edge setting materiel and doing it justice.  On the other hand I've read books with a good middle ground amount of setting details that worked well for me. (The Grey Citidel from Necromancer Games, perhaps the best adventure I've ever read)

Makes me with that Tweet was still working rpg's, though considering the turnover in that dept, perhaps he's better off working in mini's.

The thread is already dorked, but...

Quote from: BalbinusGurps is not a character centred superhero extravaganza.  It's no more or less character centred than say the Rules Cyclopedia, and it is far less suited to superheroics given that there is no real equivalent to the Immortals status you can get to in RC.

Hm, I have no experience of RC (only white box + supps and AD&D1e) but I remember several reactions to GURPS when it came out (including mine but not only mine) that might shed light on this.

Among these were (and are) the unified point-buy system that rolled in factors like social class, wealth, and relations with important NPCs. Those in turn led to rules that prevented those elements from changing "naturally" via roleplaying; instead you had to pay for them with character points gained in play. Actually, you could lose advantages and gain disadvantages without getting points. But there was no way to get rich through in-game action, unless you spent points.

Then there are the psychological disadvantages, perhaps the biggest bugaboo. Not only did they raise the specter of "policing" their use, but they'd only legitimately be worth the points if the GM included campaign elements that would engage them.

All of this tended to make GURPS more "character centric" than e.g., Runequest or Traveller which presented the world as an external object to be investigated, explored, and conquered by the player-character.

As for design heritage, I believe Champions was somewhat influenced by TFT's point-buy system, but the latter was limited to balancing abilities, skills, and spells. Advantages and Disadvantages were a Champions innovation; they were then borrowed back for a TFT variant that appeared in The Space Gamer and then used in GURPS. In short Champions was a clean break from the world-centric view, toward a character-centric approach. Although I suspect a lot of people (including me, when I was reading GURPS) didn't quite realize what the game was trying to do.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalHow does it put down D20 to suggest that D&D was influenced by Runequest?

The implicit suggestion is that anything "good" in D20 or what makes it popular was really just "stolen" out of other, supposedly better games.

Its the ultimate pathetically defiant act of stubborn unwillingness to admit that D&D is a good game and is liked on its own merits.

RPGPundit

Quote from: BalbinusThe D&D article was talking about D&D in the 1970s on the West Coast or wherever it was.  It was talking about how originally, not now and not even in the 1980s but originally, there was no such thing as D&D as each group played a different rules variant.  He then goes on to talk about how that evolved into the game we know now.

By all means critique the article, but at least critique it for what it says.  Ron Edwards didn't say there is no such game as DnD, a quick trip to the gamestore would have shown that as false, what he said was that at the time the game started there was no single identifiable game that was DnD but rather a constellation of homebrewed campaigns with much in common.

Even back then this is still nonsense.

Hell in the late 70s it was considered quite normal for people to take their 12th level fighter from Jim's campaign in Oakland, move to Witchita, and end up using the SAME 12th level fighter in Terry's campaign.

While there was more variation in the rules and interpretations of the rules could sometimes be a little odd back then, it bears remembering that this might have more to do with the fact that this was the very early years of RPGs.

D&D, besides being the most successful RPG of all times, was also the FIRST.
And Edwards will have a right to judge it the day he can create a garage "indie" game that ends up having as much success as the little "indie" game that Gygax and Arneson built.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditThe implicit suggestion is that anything "good" in D20 or what makes it popular was really just "stolen" out of other, supposedly better games.

Are you not an educated man? Do we look down upon philosophers for being influenced by earlier philosophers? Aren't you being just a teensy bit sensitive?

Quote from: BalbinusTwo other points.

One.  The Rules Cyclopedia although IMO the best iteration of DnD was a cul de sac.  It's long out of print and ADnD, IMO a vastly inferior ruleset, supplanted it.  The Cyclopedia is not a direct ancestor of anything, it died childless.

Two.  I can't say generally which games influenced 3e, I wasn't there, some think Runequest, many thought Rolemaster, maybe a bit of all of them who knows?  But I do know one game that influenced it, Ars Magica.  Where do you think the stat modifier rules came from?

Anyway, what of it?  It's hardly knocking a game to say that it drew on illustrious predecessors, and Runequest, Champions, Rolemaster, Ars Magica, whichever of them might have had an influence these are hardly titles to be ashamed of.

Except that its a lie. And except that what is being suggested is that earlier editions of D&D were crappy games that offered nothing good; and that it suggests that anything good about D20 actually comes from these other games.  Its suggesting that D&D is a concoction made from stealing good ideas from other somehow more worthy games, and that's all bullshit.

The main overwhelming influences for D&D 3.0 are, in order:

AD&D 1st Edition (look at how the books are written, for fuck's sake, the whole style is an homage!)
The D&D Rules Cyclopedia and Gamma World 4th Edition
AD&D 2nd Edition
Original D&D.

And after that, the next biggest influence are the original ideas of Jonathan Tweet and Monte Cook.

Which means that when you get through all those, there's virtually nothing in D&D 3e that requires any other games to explain.

I know that some people would like to believe that D&D is a terrible game and that it doesn't deserve its popularity. But the fact is those people are wrong, and the ones who try to find excuses for why it is popular are also liars.

RPGPundit

Quote from: BalbinusThis feels to me like an emotional argument, you want DnD to be unsullied by outside influences.  Realistically though I don't see how that would really be possible or why it would be desirable.  The guys working on DnD weren't monks cloistered from all other games, influences went back and forth and always will.

Of course games are influenced by other games, both back and forth.

However, most of the games mentioned actually got THEIR ideas FROM D&D, in earlier versions.

D&D has inspired thousands of times more ideas in other games than the influence any other games may have had on D&D.

RPGPundit

D&D 3.x is simply not the same game as AD&D. Knocking AD&D is saying nothing about 3.x. Moreover, you really need a bit of perspective. I had fun with AD&D. Over time, certain features of it frustrated me and I moved to something else, and that's all right. There are people for whom Phoenix Command is an ideal, and that's all right too. Did you get ostracised by the other nerds at school or something?

You need to sit back, take a puff on your pipe and look at these things a bit more objectively. There's no way that a game designed thirty years after the first RPG could not be influenced by developments during that time.

Quote from: BalbinusNope.  Lots of games had them, but in this case the lead designer on 3e was the designer for Ars Magica.  It was the same person.

I mean, I guess it's possible they used chemicals to wash that knowledge from his brain, but it was pretty noticeable at the time that the AM guy got on board and the next edition had AM style stats.

What fucking "stats" are you even talking about Balbinus? The Bonus or Penalty based on Stat is somethign that has been in D&D since the very beginning. To claim that Jonathan Tweet brought it in from Ars Magica is to claim that Tweet is such a blinded fucking incompetent that he must never have cracked open a single fucking previous edition of D&D in his fucking life!

Its insane!

Dude, Tweet and Cook have both admitted that their direct and most overwhelming influence on D&D 3rd edition was previous editions of D&D. Get over it.

I mean fuck's sakes, Tweet designed Everway too; are you going to tell me next that this is where the "Gate" spell must have come from? I suppose that since Tweet designed Over the Edge, that must be where he got "edged weapons", right?

QuoteA few rules similarities prove nothing, by the same logic I could show that Runequest influenced 3e or Rolemaster or Palladium or a dozen things.

Good point. By the same logic utter fuckheads have been claiming that RQ or RM influenced D&D.
Whereas simple logic and the FACTS demonstrate that D&D is the direct influence on D&D.  

RPGPundit

Quote from: BalbinusSimple, the designer of 3e said it first and I took it from him.

Ars traces back to DnD, DnD then traces to Ars, the circle closes.  He also notes that he has seen the idea elsewhere and that feats are a commonplace.

Note, I'm not saying Ars isn't a product of DnD, it is.  I'm saying that DnD influenced Ars, Ars then influenced the new edition of DnD.  One game influences the next, there is no pure line of descent.

Interestingly, I hadn't noticed before the similarity between Feats and Virtues, though essentially Feats are just advantages which are of course also found in Gurps and are comparable to powers in Champions.

These are commonplaces of design.

Gee Balbinus, why don't you show us the original link to that quote so we can see it in context?

Note that EVEN in the selected piece you quoted, Tweet explicitly points out that the other designers ALREADY had the basic core mechanic determined, and that it happened to match what he had in mind from Ars magica.

RPGPundit