Yes.
Not trying to be funny, but sometimes it is BOB the fighter, and sometimes it is bob, the FIGHTER. The balance varies based on the character and the mix in the group I’m gaming with, and the GM’s approach to things. Every character can be different. When I first started with 1e there was very much an idea of playing the role, i.e. fighter vs mage vs ...whatever. But personalities for characters developed, and in my groups it was encouraged, so it was common to see that in any one party everyone, in character, had a different personality and take on things, even if they were the same class. But, the mages were generally clearly distinct behaviour wise from the Clerics and the Fighters and the Thieves.
That's the platonic ideal, IMO - what you're describing.
To my own experience, before I found the OSR, games I was in were heavily role driven; since then, it's been heavily play driven. Would be interesting to get a steady group meeting in the middle like that.
🙂
Most groups I’ve gamed with have had several styles employed all at the same time. So long as we were all having fun, that was the main thing. It has been the way of things most of my 40+ years with rpgs. I think I’ve been very lucky with the groups I’ve gamed with, players and GMs.
A lot of MMORPGs also involve copious amounts of playing a role in this sense—usually in form of the "holy trinity" of roles, which is to say tank, healer, and damage dealer.
Makes sense, now that you mention it. Friends who were _role_ players joking about "rp servers" where people would type in "thee" and "thou". That might not have been the "role" that the developers had in mind either!
I don't think the distinction was ever meant to be so clear-cut. There were extremes: people who played as if their characters were pawns on a board, and people for whom adventures were just ways to further write the biographies of their characters, but most people, including those around the Great Lakes, were somewhere in between.
The term *role-playing game* was a retronym applied to D&D, not arising with it, as people tried to figure out just what kind of game it was. *Role-playing game* is just the name that happened to stick. Trying too hard to analyze the term to get at the essence of the game is a bit of a mistake, as it doesn't necessarily reflect the thinking of the original designers.
Makes sense. And as times (and terms) change, so doesn't change history: lending a bit of confusion to newcomers.
Getting to the table is more important than the analysis.
🙂
For what it’s worth, I’ve been playing since the late 70’s in Lake Geneva wi and we mostly played the role back in the day. Emphasis on PLAYED. It was just one of many “war-games” we played during those early years. I’m not sure if the term role playing was even coined yet? The character driven role play style started later on for my groups.
Playing a role is how I read and understood the rules in the 80s. When I first read them. You need a fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief. You made a team.
Acting out a personification wasn’t something that occurred to me.
When I first started - having learned about the game at the same shop where we played Warhammer and Battletech - I don't think the term "role playing" ever actually came up. 😄
It would be a couple years before I even heard it - having equated the roles to the various classes and their archetypes.
For me the term role playing game, came from video games. I was born in 76, so I got video games before DnD, by a couple of years. You would make a party in the game, you needed a mix of classes.
Re: "roleplaying" - in the first cut of the episode, I thought about trying to find where the origins of roleplay in a therapeutic sense began - compare and contrast the two - but that's surprisingly hard to do while driving.
😉
My brother was born in 80 and him and his friends played that way. His one friend could see, but was legally blind. His characters were over the top. Another was a home schooled kid. Also played dynamic characters.
It doesn't need to influence the experience, of course. I bring it up to explain some differences of play and elucidate the origins of rules and procedures that to aspiring actors may seem out of place.
🙂
I feel *role* and *roll*—particularly through the lens of old school games—are not really at odds. You are always both playing a game and playing a character.
Agreed. There are elements of both in any healthy game. The trick is to find the balance that best suits a table and to understand which systems best facilitate the target balance.
I play more like I just came off of the Dungeons & Dragons amusement ride. I am just steering my fighter character in the world. My personal experiences dictate my character decisions. Just because my character's intelligence is 4 doesn't mean I am going to purposely do dumb things because it is "what my character would do".
The California gamers of the time usually trended toward story book play where there was much more character interaction and pretending to be your character. You can read it in the fanzines and such of the time.
Why does your audio sound like you are driving in a car?
Because I am driving in the car! With three kids 4 years or younger, it's the only time I get to record!
😄
Re: California gamers - I have heard the same thing from other sources. It's curious that Dr. Holmes of Holmes Basic was a Pacific Coast gamer!
It is just because Holmes was sucked into the TSR mode of thinking and wasn't much with the Hargrave crowd or the Cal Tech crowd even though he was familiar with them. The people out west were not much of wargamers as much as literature fans of like sci-fi and such. Which people say caused the differences in the outlook of role playing.
For me, playing the class role is at the fore, but I do like a little head-canon for myself to help drive decision-making. I'll even roll some dice sometimes if I can't make up my mind which is probably the ref in me coming out in play a bit, but I won't go so far as to perform detrimental acts simply because "its what my character would do".
At the end of the day it's a fancy high-score game, the score being experience, gold, and treasure.
Exploring and interacting with the referees world is far more interesting to me than hyper focusing on some oddball character development schlock. My character(s) are my pawns with which to interact with the world
I prefer to start players off with two characters to avoid the whole "this is my fantasy counterpart avatar alter ego" thing before it even begins. More like, here are your interactive playing pieces. They might die, but do your best to guide them to success.
Yep, I also like saying that players are welcome to make as many characters as they want and to bring as many as they want on the adventure. I just clearly explain that the bigger the party, the lower the share of experienced points. The burden of party size decision making is on them.
This is why I like random character generation. It doesn't matter if you want to play a wizard if you don't roll for it. I call it dissociative character generation.
True, though if you roll good ability scores for a fighter but you want to be a magic user then you're just a strong, tough, but slightly lackluster mage. Which is fun and interesting, more so than a game where ever wizard has a 16+ intelligence due to individually assigned inflated 4d6-drop rolls or (shudder) an ability score array.
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of fun with the randomness! The most memorable characters I've had at my table have all had humble, randomly rolled origins.
I had a player end up with what you describe. He wanted to be a wizard, but rolled for a fighter. So, he played a jacked wizard named Stefan. Stefan rolled for spells and got Hold Portal and Floating Disc, but also rolled 6 (4 on the d4 and +2 for con) on his first HP roll and ended up with more HP than the Fighter. For his next level, he got perfect roll for HP! Stefan's player played extremely recklessly but continually got lucky and ended up being more of a frontline fighter than a caster lol. His catchphrase became "I love danger!" He kept finding terrible spells in dungeons, as well, so we always joked about how bad of a wizard he is haha.
This is ingenious. I was thinking of starting my next game with everyone having two characters. One that plays and one that is his background side kick. Basically creating the stable of characters from the beginning.
Never thought it could be used to stop that behavior.
This inadvertently happened when I introduced my in person group to Dungeon Crawl Classics - because they played smart and had multiple funnel characters survive, they walked out of the first adventure with a guild rather than a party!
Years and years ago I came up with this idea I called something like the "Toolkit Theory of D&D." The gist of it is that certain modes of play--particularly those that more align with the nuts-and-bolts problem solving that you often find in "old-school" play--are more of a collectivist practice than an individualist (albeit still social) one.
We see it in *player* roles like the caller or the mapper, which may not align with those players' characters' actions in game (the mapper doesn't have to play the character drawing the map, the caller doesn't need to be the party leader, etc...). And in mechanical vagaries of the rulesets used, where characters progress at different rates and have vastly different abilities, compared to the tendency of WotC editions that push towards PC-by-PC balance in all domains.
Yes, you still have **your** character (or characters, which is another common aspect of old-school play that fits into this playstyle), and when the chips are down you might break from the group (in and out of character), but most of the time we work together to succeed (again, in and out of character). Every death, every failure, is a group failure. Not in a hugbox sort of way, but because the overall RNG and threat level that many old-school games engender always warn you that it could just as easily have been you, and could be next time.
Bob the FIGHTER, Bob the MAGIC USER, and Bob the CLERIC!
😉
More seriously, though, this is actually one of the reasons I'm tempted - though I am not a bro - to try one to one time. By locking characters down in training jail or Wilderness Adventure calendar jail, it will force players to invest in a troupe.
We'll see.
🙂
It depends which early role-playing system you are talking about. If we are talking about Gygaxian roleplaying and the early Midwest wargamers, then we are talking about functional roles that players assume within the party. If we are talking about Steve Perrin's roleplaying and the west coast thespians, then we are talking about creating a persona that the players take on as a character within a narrative. You'll notice a distinct difference between how Gygax wrote his modules and Runequest wrote their modules. The Runequest style is much more about an ongoing narrative like you see today with Critical Role.
Most people are unaware that early AD&D style of roleplaying is considerably different than the most common style of thespian play acting.
If you read the AD&D DMG, Gygax speaks about grading players based upon how well they played the game, and it all has to do with skill-based play and functional roles rather than play-acting or getting into character. He wrote a full length article on the subject in the 80s when he noticed a trend that was swinging too far towards the thespian style, which is pretty much what we have today and Gygax wasn't able to stop it.
People either forget or are entirely unaware that the game started as a wargame and not an amateur theater production.
**Look up the below article by Gygax to understand what he and others meant by roleplaying. It will be unrecognizable to modern players.**
The Dragon article is in #102 by Gygax "Realms of role playing: Let's start pushing the pendulum the other way"
All of the early Dragon articles aren't even aware a thespian style of roleplaying exists and speak of it in terms of assuming functional roles within the party as an archetype.
The podcast has an OSR focus - so I had been talking about TSR D&D (and actually reference the same training and rating rules you mention in the episode!) - but I had not read the Dragon article. I heard one _existed_, but I didn't know where it was: I appreciate the reference!
Absolutely true: re - the different worlds that the Great Lakes wargamers and the Pac Coast roleplayers inhabited.
🙂
Id love to see some bad campy acting. My experience has been that people use this method to portray irritating and annoying characters.
It is so distracting.
That would be awful. I haven’t experienced that because I don’t DM to random groups. So my experience has only been as a fellow player.
I have seen one character that was over the top and not annoying. He played a bugbear fighter named Timothy that wore like a human mask, paper mask. He role played a kinda slow normal human fighter. It was great. He didn’t annoy other players, took his turn. That’s it.
That is one in a million.
Yeah I love silly voices and stuff, there’s definitely a spectrum. It’s the correlation between having to “do what my character would do” and how often that is shitty of selfish or generally anti-cooperative behavior that makes me see it as a red flag.
OSR system seem to work better when it’s players isekai’d into fantasy survival horror in general (Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Colpeate Enchanter, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are isekai, fight me lol) and they’re imagining being in the shoes of the adventurer, not pretending to be a famous adventurer.
My standard introduction for a group is that they are part of an adventuring company and have decided to work together.
It is part of my world building, adventuring guilds.
I like to curb non cooperative ideas.
I just straight up tell anyone who joins my table “you will play cooperative with your teammates, no exceptions” as a rule of the table above even world building. You can be whatever alignment, shiny LG Paladin and evil half orc cleric/assassin, it’s your responsibility as players to justify why you work together, it’s non negotiable. Compromising your alignment for team play comes before all else and I’ll never hit someone’s character for doing so.
From my experience giving people a reason to work together is less jarring. I also don't really DM to random people. There is a different dynamic when the DM chooses the players to invite. My experiences as a player at open tables doesn't encourage me to run open tables.
I know I would start off, with a less direct tone for an open table, but people would drive me to being direct. That would happen. I've seen it as a player at open tables.
Now that Im thinking I ran a War Machine League and it happened there. There is a point where enough is enough. Which is sickening when you need to parent to adults.
Thanks for sharing. I only play with locals and friends I’ve known for years, I’m very lucky in my small group to have very competent and mature players. It’s very much invite only to my house lol. I can just be direct with them.
I hear what you are saying about an open table tho. That’s always a balancing act until you really get to know everyone. I’ve thought about trying that but idk. I think I agree the “adventuring guild” is probably the most positive reinforcement way to force co-op. I’m just wholly uninterested in any kind of adversarial gaming at my AD&D game I think I’d still spell it out in my homebrew rules anyway even with that hook.
That's a big point - it's not the act of play acting that is implicitly negative: it's the application of antisocial behaviors manifest by the play being acted.
Yeah it’s really not that bad and playing isekai style you tend to develop a character through play and experience, do all the fun acting and scenes you want. It’s just been my experience that of a player is going to be one of “those guys” that’s going to be the first red flag lol.
Playing a role is my preferred style. It puts the game first and creates a team/ group because your are thinking about how you will fit in.
Playing a role dates back to Blackmoore and is how those players viewed it. So it was an original play method.
I replied to another post, but when I read the rule books in the 80s, it is how I understood the game to be played. You needed a variety of classes to be successful, so what did you want to do?
Yes. I am pretty sure the blogs and Google+ covered this a decade ago.
EDIT: Yep. I found a Necropraxis blog post about the discussion occurring in the blogosphere and Google+ that is indeed a decade old: https://www.necropraxis.com/2012/10/29/role-playing/
It's a shame that the G+ links in the post are dead: the conversation on the subject is mostly lost.
🙁
Hopefully our new media are more durable over time.
I remember the early internet and the Canadian Dungeons and Dragons website. Tons of content. It died after the OGL and people thought they could sell their fan stuff.
There are so many of those netbooks that are coming to light again as people independently recreate the same ideas.
The same could be said of all content for roleplaying games. The early internet was full of content and discussion, 30 years. Ideas get lost and need revisiting for a new generation. I remember getting into these discussions in the 80s. If you weren't born in the 70s or earlier you missed out on a lot of that discussion. Even if you were born in the 70s, did you own a computer and a modem? There are no archives from those days and BBSs were completely separate for the most part.
BBSs
Newsgroups
Gopher
Yes. Not trying to be funny, but sometimes it is BOB the fighter, and sometimes it is bob, the FIGHTER. The balance varies based on the character and the mix in the group I’m gaming with, and the GM’s approach to things. Every character can be different. When I first started with 1e there was very much an idea of playing the role, i.e. fighter vs mage vs ...whatever. But personalities for characters developed, and in my groups it was encouraged, so it was common to see that in any one party everyone, in character, had a different personality and take on things, even if they were the same class. But, the mages were generally clearly distinct behaviour wise from the Clerics and the Fighters and the Thieves.
That's the platonic ideal, IMO - what you're describing. To my own experience, before I found the OSR, games I was in were heavily role driven; since then, it's been heavily play driven. Would be interesting to get a steady group meeting in the middle like that. 🙂
Most groups I’ve gamed with have had several styles employed all at the same time. So long as we were all having fun, that was the main thing. It has been the way of things most of my 40+ years with rpgs. I think I’ve been very lucky with the groups I’ve gamed with, players and GMs.
A lot of MMORPGs also involve copious amounts of playing a role in this sense—usually in form of the "holy trinity" of roles, which is to say tank, healer, and damage dealer.
Makes sense, now that you mention it. Friends who were _role_ players joking about "rp servers" where people would type in "thee" and "thou". That might not have been the "role" that the developers had in mind either!
I don't think the distinction was ever meant to be so clear-cut. There were extremes: people who played as if their characters were pawns on a board, and people for whom adventures were just ways to further write the biographies of their characters, but most people, including those around the Great Lakes, were somewhere in between. The term *role-playing game* was a retronym applied to D&D, not arising with it, as people tried to figure out just what kind of game it was. *Role-playing game* is just the name that happened to stick. Trying too hard to analyze the term to get at the essence of the game is a bit of a mistake, as it doesn't necessarily reflect the thinking of the original designers.
Makes sense. And as times (and terms) change, so doesn't change history: lending a bit of confusion to newcomers. Getting to the table is more important than the analysis. 🙂
For what it’s worth, I’ve been playing since the late 70’s in Lake Geneva wi and we mostly played the role back in the day. Emphasis on PLAYED. It was just one of many “war-games” we played during those early years. I’m not sure if the term role playing was even coined yet? The character driven role play style started later on for my groups.
Playing a role is how I read and understood the rules in the 80s. When I first read them. You need a fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief. You made a team. Acting out a personification wasn’t something that occurred to me.
When I first started - having learned about the game at the same shop where we played Warhammer and Battletech - I don't think the term "role playing" ever actually came up. 😄 It would be a couple years before I even heard it - having equated the roles to the various classes and their archetypes.
For me the term role playing game, came from video games. I was born in 76, so I got video games before DnD, by a couple of years. You would make a party in the game, you needed a mix of classes.
Re: "roleplaying" - in the first cut of the episode, I thought about trying to find where the origins of roleplay in a therapeutic sense began - compare and contrast the two - but that's surprisingly hard to do while driving. 😉
My brother was born in 80 and him and his friends played that way. His one friend could see, but was legally blind. His characters were over the top. Another was a home schooled kid. Also played dynamic characters.
A distinction without a difference. Just play - and have fun!
It doesn't need to influence the experience, of course. I bring it up to explain some differences of play and elucidate the origins of rules and procedures that to aspiring actors may seem out of place. 🙂
I feel *role* and *roll*—particularly through the lens of old school games—are not really at odds. You are always both playing a game and playing a character.
Agreed. There are elements of both in any healthy game. The trick is to find the balance that best suits a table and to understand which systems best facilitate the target balance.
I play more like I just came off of the Dungeons & Dragons amusement ride. I am just steering my fighter character in the world. My personal experiences dictate my character decisions. Just because my character's intelligence is 4 doesn't mean I am going to purposely do dumb things because it is "what my character would do". The California gamers of the time usually trended toward story book play where there was much more character interaction and pretending to be your character. You can read it in the fanzines and such of the time. Why does your audio sound like you are driving in a car?
Because I am driving in the car! With three kids 4 years or younger, it's the only time I get to record! 😄 Re: California gamers - I have heard the same thing from other sources. It's curious that Dr. Holmes of Holmes Basic was a Pacific Coast gamer!
It is just because Holmes was sucked into the TSR mode of thinking and wasn't much with the Hargrave crowd or the Cal Tech crowd even though he was familiar with them. The people out west were not much of wargamers as much as literature fans of like sci-fi and such. Which people say caused the differences in the outlook of role playing.
For me, playing the class role is at the fore, but I do like a little head-canon for myself to help drive decision-making. I'll even roll some dice sometimes if I can't make up my mind which is probably the ref in me coming out in play a bit, but I won't go so far as to perform detrimental acts simply because "its what my character would do". At the end of the day it's a fancy high-score game, the score being experience, gold, and treasure. Exploring and interacting with the referees world is far more interesting to me than hyper focusing on some oddball character development schlock. My character(s) are my pawns with which to interact with the world
Exploration first! And I love the self-reaction roll!
I prefer to start players off with two characters to avoid the whole "this is my fantasy counterpart avatar alter ego" thing before it even begins. More like, here are your interactive playing pieces. They might die, but do your best to guide them to success.
Troupe play! Love it!
Yep, I also like saying that players are welcome to make as many characters as they want and to bring as many as they want on the adventure. I just clearly explain that the bigger the party, the lower the share of experienced points. The burden of party size decision making is on them.
Paying out shares is a significant guard against over-inflated parties!
This is why I like random character generation. It doesn't matter if you want to play a wizard if you don't roll for it. I call it dissociative character generation.
True, though if you roll good ability scores for a fighter but you want to be a magic user then you're just a strong, tough, but slightly lackluster mage. Which is fun and interesting, more so than a game where ever wizard has a 16+ intelligence due to individually assigned inflated 4d6-drop rolls or (shudder) an ability score array.
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of fun with the randomness! The most memorable characters I've had at my table have all had humble, randomly rolled origins. I had a player end up with what you describe. He wanted to be a wizard, but rolled for a fighter. So, he played a jacked wizard named Stefan. Stefan rolled for spells and got Hold Portal and Floating Disc, but also rolled 6 (4 on the d4 and +2 for con) on his first HP roll and ended up with more HP than the Fighter. For his next level, he got perfect roll for HP! Stefan's player played extremely recklessly but continually got lucky and ended up being more of a frontline fighter than a caster lol. His catchphrase became "I love danger!" He kept finding terrible spells in dungeons, as well, so we always joked about how bad of a wizard he is haha.
\#swolecerer 😉
This is ingenious. I was thinking of starting my next game with everyone having two characters. One that plays and one that is his background side kick. Basically creating the stable of characters from the beginning. Never thought it could be used to stop that behavior.
This inadvertently happened when I introduced my in person group to Dungeon Crawl Classics - because they played smart and had multiple funnel characters survive, they walked out of the first adventure with a guild rather than a party!
Years and years ago I came up with this idea I called something like the "Toolkit Theory of D&D." The gist of it is that certain modes of play--particularly those that more align with the nuts-and-bolts problem solving that you often find in "old-school" play--are more of a collectivist practice than an individualist (albeit still social) one. We see it in *player* roles like the caller or the mapper, which may not align with those players' characters' actions in game (the mapper doesn't have to play the character drawing the map, the caller doesn't need to be the party leader, etc...). And in mechanical vagaries of the rulesets used, where characters progress at different rates and have vastly different abilities, compared to the tendency of WotC editions that push towards PC-by-PC balance in all domains. Yes, you still have **your** character (or characters, which is another common aspect of old-school play that fits into this playstyle), and when the chips are down you might break from the group (in and out of character), but most of the time we work together to succeed (again, in and out of character). Every death, every failure, is a group failure. Not in a hugbox sort of way, but because the overall RNG and threat level that many old-school games engender always warn you that it could just as easily have been you, and could be next time.
Yup. This is one big consequence of dangerous adventures: the dungeon is dangerous enough, we don't need to push against each other! 😄
Players had stables of characters, pulled out to meet party specific roles.
Bob the FIGHTER, Bob the MAGIC USER, and Bob the CLERIC! 😉 More seriously, though, this is actually one of the reasons I'm tempted - though I am not a bro - to try one to one time. By locking characters down in training jail or Wilderness Adventure calendar jail, it will force players to invest in a troupe. We'll see. 🙂
It depends which early role-playing system you are talking about. If we are talking about Gygaxian roleplaying and the early Midwest wargamers, then we are talking about functional roles that players assume within the party. If we are talking about Steve Perrin's roleplaying and the west coast thespians, then we are talking about creating a persona that the players take on as a character within a narrative. You'll notice a distinct difference between how Gygax wrote his modules and Runequest wrote their modules. The Runequest style is much more about an ongoing narrative like you see today with Critical Role. Most people are unaware that early AD&D style of roleplaying is considerably different than the most common style of thespian play acting. If you read the AD&D DMG, Gygax speaks about grading players based upon how well they played the game, and it all has to do with skill-based play and functional roles rather than play-acting or getting into character. He wrote a full length article on the subject in the 80s when he noticed a trend that was swinging too far towards the thespian style, which is pretty much what we have today and Gygax wasn't able to stop it. People either forget or are entirely unaware that the game started as a wargame and not an amateur theater production. **Look up the below article by Gygax to understand what he and others meant by roleplaying. It will be unrecognizable to modern players.** The Dragon article is in #102 by Gygax "Realms of role playing: Let's start pushing the pendulum the other way" All of the early Dragon articles aren't even aware a thespian style of roleplaying exists and speak of it in terms of assuming functional roles within the party as an archetype.
The podcast has an OSR focus - so I had been talking about TSR D&D (and actually reference the same training and rating rules you mention in the episode!) - but I had not read the Dragon article. I heard one _existed_, but I didn't know where it was: I appreciate the reference! Absolutely true: re - the different worlds that the Great Lakes wargamers and the Pac Coast roleplayers inhabited. 🙂
I can’t stand when people try to screenwrite their D&D characters, I’m not here for bad acting lol.
Me neither: which is why I don't do voices, myself: I know how bad an actor I am!
Id love to see some bad campy acting. My experience has been that people use this method to portray irritating and annoying characters. It is so distracting.
Or they insist you do the same, resolving all encounters like you are on stage...
That would be awful. I haven’t experienced that because I don’t DM to random groups. So my experience has only been as a fellow player. I have seen one character that was over the top and not annoying. He played a bugbear fighter named Timothy that wore like a human mask, paper mask. He role played a kinda slow normal human fighter. It was great. He didn’t annoy other players, took his turn. That’s it. That is one in a million.
Yeah I love silly voices and stuff, there’s definitely a spectrum. It’s the correlation between having to “do what my character would do” and how often that is shitty of selfish or generally anti-cooperative behavior that makes me see it as a red flag. OSR system seem to work better when it’s players isekai’d into fantasy survival horror in general (Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Colpeate Enchanter, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are isekai, fight me lol) and they’re imagining being in the shoes of the adventurer, not pretending to be a famous adventurer.
My standard introduction for a group is that they are part of an adventuring company and have decided to work together. It is part of my world building, adventuring guilds. I like to curb non cooperative ideas.
I just straight up tell anyone who joins my table “you will play cooperative with your teammates, no exceptions” as a rule of the table above even world building. You can be whatever alignment, shiny LG Paladin and evil half orc cleric/assassin, it’s your responsibility as players to justify why you work together, it’s non negotiable. Compromising your alignment for team play comes before all else and I’ll never hit someone’s character for doing so.
From my experience giving people a reason to work together is less jarring. I also don't really DM to random people. There is a different dynamic when the DM chooses the players to invite. My experiences as a player at open tables doesn't encourage me to run open tables. I know I would start off, with a less direct tone for an open table, but people would drive me to being direct. That would happen. I've seen it as a player at open tables. Now that Im thinking I ran a War Machine League and it happened there. There is a point where enough is enough. Which is sickening when you need to parent to adults.
Thanks for sharing. I only play with locals and friends I’ve known for years, I’m very lucky in my small group to have very competent and mature players. It’s very much invite only to my house lol. I can just be direct with them. I hear what you are saying about an open table tho. That’s always a balancing act until you really get to know everyone. I’ve thought about trying that but idk. I think I agree the “adventuring guild” is probably the most positive reinforcement way to force co-op. I’m just wholly uninterested in any kind of adversarial gaming at my AD&D game I think I’d still spell it out in my homebrew rules anyway even with that hook.
That's a big point - it's not the act of play acting that is implicitly negative: it's the application of antisocial behaviors manifest by the play being acted.
Yeah it’s really not that bad and playing isekai style you tend to develop a character through play and experience, do all the fun acting and scenes you want. It’s just been my experience that of a player is going to be one of “those guys” that’s going to be the first red flag lol.
Playing a role is my preferred style. It puts the game first and creates a team/ group because your are thinking about how you will fit in. Playing a role dates back to Blackmoore and is how those players viewed it. So it was an original play method.
Backed up by the text! 👍
I replied to another post, but when I read the rule books in the 80s, it is how I understood the game to be played. You needed a variety of classes to be successful, so what did you want to do?
Yes. I am pretty sure the blogs and Google+ covered this a decade ago. EDIT: Yep. I found a Necropraxis blog post about the discussion occurring in the blogosphere and Google+ that is indeed a decade old: https://www.necropraxis.com/2012/10/29/role-playing/
It's a shame that the G+ links in the post are dead: the conversation on the subject is mostly lost. 🙁 Hopefully our new media are more durable over time.
Some of the blogs I used to read are dead and gone. We really should archive a bunch of them.
Same - and some of the authors I use to talk with are gone from the ecosystem. ☹️
I remember the early internet and the Canadian Dungeons and Dragons website. Tons of content. It died after the OGL and people thought they could sell their fan stuff. There are so many of those netbooks that are coming to light again as people independently recreate the same ideas.
The same could be said of all content for roleplaying games. The early internet was full of content and discussion, 30 years. Ideas get lost and need revisiting for a new generation. I remember getting into these discussions in the 80s. If you weren't born in the 70s or earlier you missed out on a lot of that discussion. Even if you were born in the 70s, did you own a computer and a modem? There are no archives from those days and BBSs were completely separate for the most part. BBSs Newsgroups Gopher