"Our Favorite Edition is 2nd Edition..."
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 8:27 am
Oh hi.
First up. No real names are given in this story to protect the somewhat innocent.
Second up if you are one of the unnamed people mentioned in this story... good lord what on earth are you doing hanging around in THIS place?
Third up, go ahead and skip past this to the second post if you want to get to the really exciting story time, this post is all just boring rambling background fill in.
Anyway I am almost always looking to expand my social circles, and often do so through gaming.
But living where I do most RPG groups are... somewhat fractured, backward, eccentric and isolated. The last ten or fifteen years of advancement in RPG rules and culture have... largely passed them by.
As chance would happen I found myself agreeing to GM for a small D&D group of casual acquaintances on the understanding that at some point I would, good god, possibly get a chance to play as an actual player rather than as GM for a change.
However certain, ah, key individuals in the group were fond of saying how much they "preferred 2nd Edition" which I have come to learn is code for, well, I think you guys know the sort of thing I am talking about...
In The Beginning
And so I ran a game for these guys, their preferred session timing and length was no ideal, but we ran for maybe six? Sessions.
My preferred rules set was 3.5 edition with a smattering of Tome stuff, and heavy use of Races of War in particular and a whole great wedge of my own expansions on that material (to fill in some of the more vast unfilled gaps it left). A far from ideal rules set but a nicer one than core 3.5 and one which I have any amount of digital and printed material for that I share with my various gaming groups.
I make a big deal of being up front and open about the rules changes (and the things that remain unchanged). Documents are always available and I am always keen to explain the function of any rule, house ruled or otherwise. I even have some sheets summarizing what rules are different from the WOTC published material.
Things seemed to go quite well. There were some minor issues. Primarily in that one guy (and his son, who is really either too young or not assertive enough to really engage in the game) seemed to somewhat struggle to grasp the basic function of their characters (which were both knights, I don't know how many times I tried to get them to actually challenge opponents).
But lurking on the boundary of the game that one guy's strangely anti-social wife was um-ing and ah-ing about joining the game.
Yay! A revolution!
So suddenly we are switching out GMs. That-one-guy is gonna run a game for a while. Why? Because his wife has been made sufficiently keen to play by sitting on the sidelines of my games, but... somehow wanted to play a more "old school" style of game, you know, more like 2nd Ed... (and we all know where this is going at that point). And anyway she wanted to continue their old campaign with her old character in their old setting with her husband her old GM...
The rules set of choice now is described as being "Very very core 3.5".
At first I found myself thinking "hm, this is a man daunted by my long and official up front printed list of house rules, little does he know everyone uses quite a lot of house rules..."
But still, "Bonus!" says I to myself. I got into this to play and I am not so fussy I would turn down a nice core rules game. I mean yeah he WILL use SOME house rules, everyone does whether they know it or not. And it's not nearly as nice as if he say adopted wholesale my personal preferred house rules set. But you know, close enough and all...
Little did I realize at the time that possibly one of the reasons that That-one-guy was perhaps somewhat daunted by the rules I was using was because, apparently, he doesn't actually seem altogether familiar with the actual core rules, indeed, it increasingly seems he actually thought a lot of the unchanged rules I was using were in fact house rules of some form...
But how was I to know? He had said some things that had led me to believe otherwise, his favorite character type was wizard, he said he liked using the item creation rules, he constantly went on about how he felt that "heroic characters should have heroic abilities!"
And so the real adventure begins...
First up. No real names are given in this story to protect the somewhat innocent.
Second up if you are one of the unnamed people mentioned in this story... good lord what on earth are you doing hanging around in THIS place?
Third up, go ahead and skip past this to the second post if you want to get to the really exciting story time, this post is all just boring rambling background fill in.
Anyway I am almost always looking to expand my social circles, and often do so through gaming.
But living where I do most RPG groups are... somewhat fractured, backward, eccentric and isolated. The last ten or fifteen years of advancement in RPG rules and culture have... largely passed them by.
As chance would happen I found myself agreeing to GM for a small D&D group of casual acquaintances on the understanding that at some point I would, good god, possibly get a chance to play as an actual player rather than as GM for a change.
However certain, ah, key individuals in the group were fond of saying how much they "preferred 2nd Edition" which I have come to learn is code for, well, I think you guys know the sort of thing I am talking about...
In The Beginning
And so I ran a game for these guys, their preferred session timing and length was no ideal, but we ran for maybe six? Sessions.
My preferred rules set was 3.5 edition with a smattering of Tome stuff, and heavy use of Races of War in particular and a whole great wedge of my own expansions on that material (to fill in some of the more vast unfilled gaps it left). A far from ideal rules set but a nicer one than core 3.5 and one which I have any amount of digital and printed material for that I share with my various gaming groups.
I make a big deal of being up front and open about the rules changes (and the things that remain unchanged). Documents are always available and I am always keen to explain the function of any rule, house ruled or otherwise. I even have some sheets summarizing what rules are different from the WOTC published material.
Things seemed to go quite well. There were some minor issues. Primarily in that one guy (and his son, who is really either too young or not assertive enough to really engage in the game) seemed to somewhat struggle to grasp the basic function of their characters (which were both knights, I don't know how many times I tried to get them to actually challenge opponents).
But lurking on the boundary of the game that one guy's strangely anti-social wife was um-ing and ah-ing about joining the game.
Yay! A revolution!
So suddenly we are switching out GMs. That-one-guy is gonna run a game for a while. Why? Because his wife has been made sufficiently keen to play by sitting on the sidelines of my games, but... somehow wanted to play a more "old school" style of game, you know, more like 2nd Ed... (and we all know where this is going at that point). And anyway she wanted to continue their old campaign with her old character in their old setting with her husband her old GM...
The rules set of choice now is described as being "Very very core 3.5".
At first I found myself thinking "hm, this is a man daunted by my long and official up front printed list of house rules, little does he know everyone uses quite a lot of house rules..."
But still, "Bonus!" says I to myself. I got into this to play and I am not so fussy I would turn down a nice core rules game. I mean yeah he WILL use SOME house rules, everyone does whether they know it or not. And it's not nearly as nice as if he say adopted wholesale my personal preferred house rules set. But you know, close enough and all...
Little did I realize at the time that possibly one of the reasons that That-one-guy was perhaps somewhat daunted by the rules I was using was because, apparently, he doesn't actually seem altogether familiar with the actual core rules, indeed, it increasingly seems he actually thought a lot of the unchanged rules I was using were in fact house rules of some form...
But how was I to know? He had said some things that had led me to believe otherwise, his favorite character type was wizard, he said he liked using the item creation rules, he constantly went on about how he felt that "heroic characters should have heroic abilities!"
And so the real adventure begins...