The things D&D taught MMORPG's (or, proving grognards wrong)

[OgreBattle]

So in discussions of pre 3e D&D (like OD&D and AD&D), grogs often complain about the vile influence of modern videogames having terribly twisted their childhood favorite into a numbers crunching grid measuring level appropriate dungeon raiding game and it's not the imagination in exercise and creativity they remember from their childhoods/younger adulthoods.

But I'm pretty sure they're very very wrong, and that all the videogamisms they decry are all things D&D invented in the 70's. I'm starting this thread to just gather all the videogamisms of D&D into one handy reference, and you guys know a lot more than I do so I'll need your help to flesh it out.



Dividing the world up into level appropriate challenges
Tons of modules come with a level range, so chances are you're going to be killing hill giants then level up to kill stone giants then level up to kill frost giants then level up to kill fire giants and then level up to kill cloud giants, like how RPGs tend to lay out the worldmap.


Grid based gaming
D&D has wargaming roots so I imagine before the grid there came measuring, right? Did Dave and Gary suggest using percise measurements? Did they suggest using grids?

Did TSR encourage the use of grids and the purchasing of miniatures? I'm looking for exact dates/products if possible but I've found stuff like this module that encourages you to use dungeon terrain and miniatures.



Tournament play to beat modules
I've heard of D&D tournament play in its formative years, but when was the first one, did Gary and Dave encourage this? How did these tournaments lay out rules for character creation, item aquisition and so on? I've read on TGD that people would migrate their characters and loot like they're joining an MMORPG public raid group.


Modules built to be Nintendo Hard
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/ ... rrors.html
This grognardia article talks about how D&D modules were made with the mindset of videogames (before videogames existed), in that you wanted to 'beat' the dungeon and if you failed you kept on trying at it until you won. Tomb of Horrors was made to be Nintendo Hard so players would get longevity out of the module, playing it over and over until they could beat it. Are there quotes from Dave n' Gary about their design philosophy?


Are there any other elements of D&D today that grognards decry as "videogamey" when they've been in D&D since the beginning?

[shadzar]

So in discussions of pre 3e D&D (like OD&D and AD&D), grogs often complain about the vile influence of modern videogames having terribly twisted their childhood favorite into a numbers crunching grid measuring level appropriate dungeon raiding game and it's not the imagination in exercise and creativity they remember from their childhoods/younger adulthoods.

who the hell do you people get this weird shit from anyway?

Must be some OSR idiots that just found BECMI (like Mike Mearls) and had never played it before and making all kinds of claims about "the feel" of the game rather than knowing the real complaints about video games.

1. competition rather than cooperation.

Yes, from the wargames D&D came from there was always competition, who gets the larger share of the gold, etc. but you still had to work together as a whole, rather than jsut gather up some raid-party for a one time thing and force walking med kits and the like.

2. aside from competition it is narcissism.

only one character matters, your own! it isnt about competing with the other players, because they don't even matter, they just exist to help you. (see Ultimate Warrior or whatever that started the single player mulch-character party that led to games like Suikoden). its all the ME ME ME.

3. level grinding for the sake of level grinding.

YOU MUST ADVANCE LEVELS FAST! this happens in video games as a problem of the coding where you must be level X to get to the next cutscene or plot point. this is not something D&D requires because you can inject anything you want between point A and point B.

Diablo was like original D&D in MANY ways, but it lacked anything but a gauntlet of monsters to fight. you went down levels and each level brought harder fights, and new items and... it was built off of D&D. the problem came when people tried to take video games into the wilderness and exploration part where the video games fail due to coding limitations. there is no DM to allow you to talk to the hill giants in Rathe Mountains, they are jsut mobs to kill. (see James Wyatt "the game is only about killing things and taking their stuff") it breeds bad players to think in this wrong manner. the video games are mostly about killing things and getting points for it, but how many really offer anything other than a knock-off of street fighter? your rank levels up, but you start the next game with the same character power you had when you played your first game. maybe you get a biscuit here or there, but you aren't able to develop the character in any way be it a game made from Wolfenstien and Quake style shooters, or the silly MMOs.

the problem is with the imagination there is a lack of it, because emulating video games where you do not need imagination because you have all the pretty pictures and EXPLOSIONS!!!!!!!!! means you only think about the fighting and nothing more because it takes forever to do cutscenes in a TTRPG, and most modern players don't have the attention spam to listen to the DM recite the boxed text that gives the information. they would rather see a cutscene with more pretty pictures.

video game influence on TTRPG have devolved TTRPGs back into miniature wargames and lost much of the roleplaying because people have been taught that, "traipsing through faerie rings and talking to the little people is not fun. (James Wyatt)"

the concept of grid comes form the fact that RPGs moved away from WH40k, not that 2nd edition didnt have hex overlays for maps and the like, but that you had those grids on maps, not for playing the game like DDM and other wargames. Doesnt Clix games play on a grid map instead of using an open field and ruler like Mage Knight starter out using with Rebellion and Lancers?

[codeGlaze]

If I remember correctly Arneson's Blackmoor was either the first or second set of 'modules' put together by Gygax specifically for tournament style play. Bring them out so people could test run DnD at conventions.

[shadzar]

If I remember correctly Arneson's Blackmoor was either the first or second set of 'modules' put together by Gygax specifically for tournament style play. Bring them out so people could test run DnD at conventions.

"dungeons" existed for Winter Fantasy/GenCon, etc... but Frank Mentzer was tasked to make a tournament environment for cons. RPGa was his baby. Until RPGA it was really jsut someone made an adventure and made copies and it wa ran. Will take scouring Dragon and TSR issues to find more info on the exacats.

Miniatures WERE promoted in Dragon, but not often in the books since Chainmail ceased to be the priority. Thins were still measrued in inches in 1st for grid format use, but 2nd removed the grid to your mind and jsut put things into the grids feet counting so you could better play without miniatures.

Battle SYSTEM was all about mass combat and miniatures in H1, and the 2nd version of it. consider it Chainmail 2.0 and 2.5 before WotC made Chainmail again to utter failure which would be 3.0 and Dreamblade the MtG version of Chainmail that also failed, prior to DDM existed.

TSR, Ral Partha, FASA, Grenedier, etc made miniatures for D&D, warhammer, and various other games and lead minis were still promoted as "good to have". hey they were trying to sell product!

not sure if anything prior to 2e had feet rather than grid inches for spells or anything else.

FR later came out with an entire 3d paper town with big grid square layout pursuant to the city level map scale.

the thing about minis is, some people liked them and other people had Monopoly, so Tanis might have been the thimble, Tas the shoe, Flint the racecar.. and any other game piece out there like a chess set was jsut as easily used as actual minis. the majority of people then AND now, do not care to paint minis to play and RPG.

Dave was ousted near 1977 from D&D, so there is likely no notes on anything form him beyond OD&D and Blackmoor supplement, but Gary just made shit up. none of the tournament modules even can be beat in a decent 4 hour time slot. more modern Gamesday adventures couldn't even be finished. they were jsut about filling page count with something that would last enough time for you to feel you got your money worth. Look at Earthshaker, Barrier Peaks, etc, to see how modules jsut had shit thrown in for people that wanted to play quick.

NO adventure was designed as a singular example of a style of play, jsut a product to sell to make more money for those that didn't have time to create their own Forgotten Realms type of depth.

if you want to find things from Gary on such matter, you should search through Dragonsfoot Q&A threads with him. There is an entire section devoting to him since his passing there and you might find things less often remembered.

now back to finding info on tournaments for you if it is held in the Dragon Archive. otherwise look for those big title adventures that belong to it like Ghost Tower of Inverness and the other C series from @1980. But i think you mean tournament for prior to then, which would mostly be OD&D with Chainmail and the other books it requires as a minis game in terms of tournaments. AD&D changed everything when they went to it to get rid of Dave.

[Lokathor]

Modules built to be Nintendo Hard
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/ ... rrors.html
This grognardia article talks about how D&D modules were made with the mindset of videogames (before videogames existed), in that you wanted to 'beat' the dungeon and if you failed you kept on trying at it until you won.

Tomb of Horrors was famously supposed to be the most Nintendo Hard module out of all of them. It was specifically written to kill off as many characters as possible while still being technically winnable. Most modules weren't so in-your-face brutal about killing you over and over. The ones that did kill you over and over anyway were as often from the designer being stupid as from any intentional super hardness.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

The Fallout games let you diplomance and ghost your way into a run with as few kills as possible. And it's not some thing where you're like "I have 18 Charisma, you can't make me fight, evil GM!" Zero/Low kill runs require a lot of attention to the situation.

Dark Souls can be beaten without grinding, and in fact the diminishing returns on grinding kick in fairly fast.

Dark Souls also leaves level-inappropriate areas fairly accessible, and if you can survive in them, you also get level-inappropriate gear

Ultima IV has an elaborate alignment system unique to the fictional world's Virtues. Conduct is something you're ever vigilant about, rather than simply wearing your alignment like a badge.

There's no 15-minute workday in a shmup (arcade side-scrolling shooter). You get 3 bombs. Sometimes enemies drop more, and with effective level design, they will. There is no resting to get them back though, either use them sparingly, or credit feed like a chump.

There's a lot of good design lessons in what's come out since D.N.D. Games like Diablo are often eschewed by the modern video gamer for the same reason they are by grognards.

[Antariuk]

This is an interesting topic, I hope some folks with oldschool experience can share a thought or two. I came too late into the hobby for any firsthand knowledge, and you can only browse so many bad-quality PDFs before you eyes start to glaze over.

[John Magnum]

Since when do modern gamers eschew Diablo? Or are you saying that Diablo 3 itself isn't "like Diablo" and what they're eschewing are the true spiritual successors?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Since when do modern gamers eschew Diablo? Or are you saying that Diablo 3 itself isn't "like Diablo" and what they're eschewing are the true spiritual successors?

It's a broad category that includes subsets that do, just as "Tabletop RPG player" covers 4rries, grognards, Paizo fainboys, Denizen charoppers, storygamers, and fans of odd products such as WoD, FFG/Privateer stuff, translated RPGs from Japan/Sweden/etc.

And I meant Diablo as a whole. Personally, I find it inferior in terms of depth compared to a game like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. And criticisms of the time DID look upon D3 unfavorably not just compared to D2, but, if the reviewer had access to a console as well as a gaming PC, to titles such as Dark Souls (no PC port at D3 launch) and Monster Hunter.

Damn, now that I'm thinking of MonHun, MTP crafting systems and poorly differentiated weapon types in RPGs are making me sad.

[OgreBattle]

Damn, now that I'm thinking of MonHun, MTP crafting systems and poorly differentiated weapon types in RPGs are making me sad.

MH is very much a real time reflex-skill based experience tho', it's from the company that made Street Fighter, it's harder to compare to tabletop. If you wanted a turn based tabletop RPG to feel like MH or any Capcom action title you'd need an action economy where your actions are consumed for offense but what you have left over can be used for defense.

So if you used the D&D action economy for MH it might look like...


Sword n Shield: swift action to use an item, immediate action to dodge/block
Dual Sword: Swift action for an extra attack or go berserk. Immediate action to roll, but turns into an attack (losing ability to roll away) once berserk

Greatsword: Swift action and full round action can be consumed for fat damage. Immediate to roll away or block.
Longsword: Swift action to make an extra attack as rider to standard action attack, immediate to roll away.

Lance n' Shield: swift to increase defenses even while you make standard action attacks, immediate to jab even if you take a full defense action. Can't roll.
Hammer: Swift action to add damage and stun rider to standard attack, move action to spin around, immediate to roll.

And everyone can use an immediate action to expend their next turn's full round action to do a desperate dive, so you'll need your friends to cover you after that. Positioning and monster facing would also be important.
You also have 2 stamina points that can be used for a swift, immediate, move or standard action. If you use it you can get it back by spending a round not using a standard, full, or swift/immediate action (you can move). If you have 0 stamina points you are dazed (I think that's the condition that restricts you to moving OR attacking).

[shadzar]

This is an interesting topic, I hope some folks with oldschool experience can share a thought or two. I came too late into the hobby for any firsthand knowledge, and you can only browse so many bad-quality PDFs before you eyes start to glaze over.

you will get 2 sides to the coin and not both are really useful. This was something that TSR never learned fully and WotC doesn't understand at all.

1. you have the home game. this is where all the action really takes place and the money is spent as msot people have a home to play in, either theirs or someone elses.

2. you have the convention scene. this is just a small group, even considered FLGS as part today since some people just use them as a meeting place and dont play the formal "events". WotC only designs for these things as they think people only play in places where other people are around to see you play to spur purchase of the product by those spectators.

when looking at what actually happened in the past, you need to look at those two groups and individual things and never mix them, even if some players crossed the lines, because at cons they did it the con way, and at home they still did it the home way. so make sure anything presented has context to understand which way they are talking about.

[talozin]

So in discussions of pre 3e D&D (like OD&D and AD&D), grogs often complain about the vile influence of modern videogames having terribly twisted their childhood favorite into a numbers crunching grid measuring level appropriate dungeon raiding game and it's not the imagination in exercise and creativity they remember from their childhoods/younger adulthoods.

Are you just strawmanning here, or do people actually complain about the things in your examples? It's okay with me either way, but ... people who complain that using grids is not like the D&D they grew up with either are not actually "grognards", have very short memories, or perhaps are functionally retarded. Complaining that video games don't allow magic tea party (which, let's face it, was and still is a big component of RPGs) would at least make more sense.

Dividing the world up into level appropriate challenges

It's actually even worse than that. Early D&D already had a primitive form of challenge rating, called (of course) "level", ranging from 1 to 10. Orcs were level I monsters, minotaurs were level V, beholders were level X. A very common style of play in the '70s and early '80s was just to have one enormous dungeon where the deeper down you went the more dangerous the monsters got (modulo the occasional "out of depth" critter). That's pretty much a description of Castle Greyhawk, the archetypal D&D dungeon, in a nutshell. And it's also a pretty good description of "Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord", a paleolithic computer game.

Grid based gaming

White Box D&D seriously lists graph paper as one of the recommended pieces of equipment for play. AD&D specifically makes use of both graph (for small scale/indoor) and hex (for wilderness) grids.

Tournament play to beat modules

To the best of my knowledge the first "official" D&D tournament happened in '76. Gygax personally wrote a substantial number of the early tournament modules, so it's not like he was discouraging it. But they weren't really like MMORPGs in the modern sense -- characters were pre-generated and handed out for the purposes of the tournament, both to make sure no particular group or person had an advantage, and to allow writing in challenges while making sure the group had some way of solving them. Characters migrated between individual campaigns, not between campaigns and tournaments.

Modules built to be Nintendo Hard

Using Tomb of Horrors as an example of typical D&D module design is like using Mick Jagger as an example of a typical musician. A lot of early modules were strictly tactical challenges -- Keep on the Borderlands is a giant canyon filled with a bunch of different monster lairs of varying size and strength and it's up to you to figure out what order to take them down in. Tournament modules are more like ... Infocom games with a combat system, maybe, would be a good comparison.

[Mistborn]

Are you just strawmanning here, or do people actually complain about the things in your examples? It's okay with me either way, but ... people who complain that using grids is not like the D&D they grew up with either are not actually "grognards", have very short memories, or perhaps are functionally retarded. Complaining that video games don't allow magic tea party (which, let's face it, was and still is a big component of RPGs) would at least make more sense.

If you've ever been to theRPGsite (aka grognard central) you'll notice that they complain about how 3e/4e "required grids and minis. Now it would be no supprise if those complaints are revisionist history and they are full of shit, but regardless that is a thing that they complain about.

[talozin]

If you've ever been to theRPGsite (aka grognard central) you'll notice that they complain about how 3e/4e "required grids and minis. Now it would be no supprise if those complaints are revisionist history and they are full of shit, but regardless that is a thing that they complain about.

3.0 requiring miniatures would be a non-revisionist complaint; early D&D did not require them.

Complaining about grids is either revisionist or extremely tendentious. Yes, technically the game only measured movement, ranges, spell areas, and so forth in inch increments rather than in squares, and you did not actually require a piece of graph paper to play; you could measure shit out with a tape measure like Warhammer 40K if you felt like it. But published modules were almost entirely grid based, the random dungeon generation system in the DMG was heavily grid based, grids and hexes were a part of the game even if you might choose to ignore them.

Some people may not have played with the kind of precise measurements that the game actually includes. I mean, I had a pretty well-off childhood, so I could actually just buy 1" square graph paper and use it to reproduce parts of the dungeon map when combat broke out. But I also played in quite a few groups where actually laying out a battle map was not something anyone ever did, and the GM just kind of eyeballed who you could attack or who your spells could reach based on what the module said and whatever he pulled out of his ass. And if that was the only way you ever played, I can imagine you might be somewhat put out by the idea that now you must use a grid and miniatures. But I suspect that this is more shorthand for a dislike of the franchise's movement back toward its tabletop wargaming roots than it is a complaint about grids and miniatures qua grids and miniatures, since it's not like there was anything actually keeping you from playing 3.0 without either.

Edit: I should say, "any more than AD&D kept you from playing without either." Yes, if you played 3.0 without a grid there would be some stuff you had to pull out of your ass, but this was true in 1980 and it didn't keep people from doing it.

[shadzar]

3.0 requiring miniatures would be a non-revisionist complaint; early D&D did not require them.

just to clarify, this deals with AoE or AoA, or something like that right, where it was like C&T and needed to know exact positioning as opposed to say free attacks from fleeing melee in 2nd where you get whacked by each melee opponent for moving away from them once.

not sure the exact rule on the flee whacking in 1st, so it might have been there too, just in inches rather than feet.

[Ravengm]

D&D has wargaming roots so I imagine before the grid there came measuring, right? Did Dave and Gary suggest using percise measurements?

In my copy of the AD&D PHB, most spells have a unit of measurement in inches, which I assume is for use on tabletop miniatures. Looking through a list of spells here seems to confirm that.

[Neurosis]

Re: the measuring/grid thing, here is my understanding of that.

OD&D: ??? (Would love some unbiased history lesson type info.)
AD&D: ??? (Would love some unbiased history lesson type info.)
3.X: Game design strongly linked to the idea of a game mat with five foot squares and miniatures, but remains theoretically somewhat playable without such visualization aids...although in tactical combats, arguments about positioning are gonna happen without a mat.
4E: Flat-out tells you that you're going to have to use a grid and minis.

[shadzar]

OD&D says on the cover for use with minis.

AD&D was built using the OD&D rules.

2nd edition dropped the need for minis because unlike Gary, everyone that wanted to play didnt have a shitload of wargames they played before to have a bunch of minis

just read the actual books for a change.

Rate of fire is based on the turn (for table-top miniatures) or the melee round. Ranges are: S = Short, M = Medium, L = long.

[tussock]

1st edition does talk about not using a grid or miniatures, and is playable without one in much the same way that 3e is, but everything in the game is set up in inches to make it easy when you use a grid or other measures. Much detail is given on minis and their facing and so on, appropriate base sizes, the lot. Your basic character and monster movement is 12", and range is all inches too.

The 1st edition Dungeons use a 10' grid, and suggest you ignore that and use 3'4" grids for deciding facing limits. Because you can, by the rules, fit 3 minis in a square (or 2, or sometimes 5, depending on your weapon choice and ranks), but you can't fit them on the table that way.

Outdoors, it uses 10-yard range squares (because all ranges and speeds change to yards, so it's the same number of squares but the terrain and buildings are smaller), but you still stick with 3'4" width squares to determine facing and area effects (which are still in feet).



2nd edition obviously cleaned that up, and in doing so changed to ... well, it's not terribly clear, but everything's in feet at least. Your basic movement changes to 120', and you can take, like, 1/3 of that in a round, sometimes, depending. The dungeon maps use 10' squares and otherwise you just count off range vs movement from the encounter distance equations. There's kinda 5' squares under the hood. The '96 revision gave us the mini-scale 5' squares on everything that are the standard since, though smaller and larger critters took up funny numbers of squares IIRC.



OD&D literally assumes you'll use Chainmail for combat. Which is to say, a sandbox table with miniatures on the 25mm man-to-man scale, with rulers and so on. The ranges and movement rates are so large right through to 2008 because EGG and all the wargaming clubs D&D got played at for a start had really big sand tables.

[OgreBattle]

Are there any photos around of Gary & Dave's minis and wargaming table?

[AndreiChekov]

Another thing that came from DnD first is having a character that gains levels.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Most MMORPGs could do with removing leveling completely. They're clearly only using it force more mileage out of repetitive content, rather than the risk/reward approach of something like D&D, Dark Souls, or Dungeon Crawl SS. Heck, Star Wars TOR doesn't even have any pretenses: the questing system keeps you from getting to planets you're too far below the level required.

Seems like traditional games have picked up the "missing the point of levels" too. 4e is 30 levels of fighting Skyrim bandits, and post-D&Ds like 13th Age and Numenera are 10 levels of progression that don't matter because you start the game as a protagonist with a backstory.

[OgreBattle]

Most MMORPGs could do with removing leveling completely. They're clearly only using it force more mileage out of repetitive content, rather than the risk/reward approach of something like D&D, Dark Souls, or Dungeon Crawl SS. Heck, Star Wars TOR doesn't even have any pretenses: the questing system keeps you from getting to planets you're too far below the level required.

Seems like traditional games have picked up the "missing the point of levels" too. 4e is 30 levels of fighting Skyrim bandits, and post-D&Ds like 13th Age and Numenera are 10 levels of progression that don't matter because you start the game as a protagonist with a backstory.

That's basically what Guild Wars does.

[ishy]

- Edit: OD&D:

In the underworld all distances are in feet, so wherever distances are given in inches convert them to tens of feet.

In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.
[ . . . ]
The use of paper, pencil and map boards are standard. Miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing; similarly, unit counters can be employed — with or without figures — although by themselves the bits of cardboard lack the eye-appeal of the varied and brightly painted miniature figures.

Another thing that came from DnD first is having a character that gains levels.

Levels were implemented in Blackmoor because the players in Arneson's campaign wanted to become better at killing stuff like in their previous games.

[Cyberzombie]

Most MMORPGs could do with removing leveling completely. They're clearly only using it force more mileage out of repetitive content, rather than the risk/reward approach of something like D&D, Dark Souls, or Dungeon Crawl SS. Heck, Star Wars TOR doesn't even have any pretenses: the questing system keeps you from getting to planets you're too far below the level required.

Seems like traditional games have picked up the "missing the point of levels" too. 4e is 30 levels of fighting Skyrim bandits, and post-D&Ds like 13th Age and Numenera are 10 levels of progression that don't matter because you start the game as a protagonist with a backstory.

Levels are used in video games to create the illusion of advancement, because people like the idea they're building to something. Incremental awards is a big part of making the game psychologically addicting. Also, forcing people to grind creates re-playability in MMOs so it helps designers provide less content.