Hey Veeky Forums what is the difference between older dms and players compared to the newer people that play Dnd...

Hey Veeky Forums what is the difference between older dms and players compared to the newer people that play Dnd? I keep hearing that Gary and older DMs were a lot more...brutal in their ways of dispatching players. Anyone have any stories of having played with an older DM/player? What were they like?

I think you're taking the wrong angle on it. Think more from the direction of how you started to play the game, and what you eventually ended up with.

Most people play their first games as effectively kids. Kids are mean and stupid and don't really know what they want out of the game. Where most people socialize regularly, for us, the game itself becomes a therapeutic experience for becoming a better player as well as a better person.

The Gygax school of GMing is a bit like what structuralism is to art. It's basically perfect, under the condition that your players are not retarded, eager to participate, and use all of their options, while also not being horrible human beings. It's a nice pipe dream, and you may pretend to be that serious about your game to get your players to treat threats seriously, but for regular people, a sphere of annihilation in the mouth of the statue is not fun. This unfortunately also leads to a bit of a slippery slope, where you eventually realize that having content prepared is intristically unfair to the players, and start winging everything, and that's not always so great.

There are lots of ways to GM. I guess my point is that while most people would call Gary a materialist GM that likes hard numbers, the truth of it is that you need naive idealism to lead your game like this and expect it to go well.

So in theory it is the best way to DM because it is like real life and teaches you life lessons, but most people cannot stomach it or are prepared for it and that it is a brutal and or hardcore method. On top of the fact that it won't work on most people unless they have grown up a bit. Am I in the ballpark area of understanding old DnD? I thought people just greyhawked everything.

I have not found age to be that significant. Over the years I've gamed with old, young, and in between. If you start off as a little shit, chances are you end up as a that guy, or that gm.

Greyhawking stuff can mean a bunch of things as long as you can realistically assess what the players will do when presented with options at large. It gives you a sandbox, that's never a bad thing, basically every GM does that in most games, with varying degrees of detail.

Rather, the difference is that a modern GM will tone down an for-the-session encounter once he realizes he made a horrible mistake statting, while ye GM of olde will know perfectly well what he was doing statting it, and when everyone dies, tells them they should have gathered information about the danger of the threat, its weaknesses, and so, before confronting it, or ran away, or something. It's meant well but it makes him look like an ass - but at the same time, it makes the modern GM feel like a pussy.

"Gygaxian" approaches to D&D are best represented by alternate titles for the DM in older material - "judge" or "referee".

D&D grew out of a wargaming tradition, with the idea that the DM is a third party arbitrator. The issue is of course is that in a wargame, a referee is usually a third party; in D&D the referee must also make decisions for the monsters.

Since the DM should be a "referee", it's very important that he has some sort of scenario prepared beforehand and isn't making the whole thing up as he goes along (and why full written modules tend to feature prominently in the D&D product catalogue). This allows the DM to be a third party "referee" arbitrating decisions made by the players as they navigate a pre-designed dungeon. Since the DM keeps last-minute improvisation to a minimum, and only improvises based on the existing scenario, the players cannot accuse him of being "unfair" (although they could accuse him of being a terrible scenario designer).

This also means refereeing in the old school style takes a tremendous amount of trust as well as similar expectations. Players and the DM need to be on the same page in understanding the the DM is attempting to make "fair" calls - neither favouring the players or the monsters - and DMs need to make sure they live up to the trust players have placed on them.

Any sign of favouritism - whether it be towards the players or the scenario - will poison this illusion of objectivity the DM is trying to maintain. If a DM makes a decision to softball something that should have killed a player in plain view, this could lead to players thinking that the DM should be "on their side". The reverse can happen - if the DM is very anti-player in his decisions, players might simply decide that the DM has it in for them and might decide to stop playing.

Maintaining this is a delicate balance and the less well you know people, the more difficult this is to pull off, since you don't have a good real-life relationship to help smooth out game disagreements.

The payoff of course for a Gygaxian DMing style is that if managed well, it creates emergent situations where things happen not because the GM and players made them up, but from the interaction of several rigorously enforced rules.

Situations like a fighter prevailing against an ogre on his last hit point, or a thief triggering an alarm and escaping an alerted goblin patrol feel more exciting when they are an emergent result of different dice rolls rather than a scripted choice.

As a teacher who runs an extra curricular tabletop group at my highschool, kids these days seem way more invested in their characters.

Can't even talk my kids into just rolling their characters because they don't want to even possibly risk the shadow of a chance of having a 3 in anything.

They also fucking lose their minds when / if their characters die, because they invest so much and put so much of themselves into it.

Might be because they're literally kids but when i played you grew attached to your character over sessions, inventing quirks or aspects and interactions over time, as the story unfolded, now it seems like most people have their characters 'story' already written and if some roadblock comes between them and being a level 17/2 ascended demigod wizard / sorcerer they will just lose all interest and sink the campaign / session for everyone else.

I don't really know how to confront that, following logic, if i'm too harsh they're liable to quit, but softballing them just isn't enjoyable.

younger players are typically taller, more likely to be hispanic too

Generally speaking this is where you stop playing D&D and switch to a story-game system. Or alternately, run D&D with more of a story-game emphasis.

It's important to note even in D&D's heyday this sort of Gygaxian DMing was Gygax's ideal, but it's not clear how many, if any, actually stuck to these tenets aside from the original Lake Geneva crew (and maybe Arneson's Twin Cities campaign). Certainly some groups that have kept the B/X and AD&D torch burning all these years still have that GMing style, but D&D was rapidly adopted by kids in the age bracket you're talking about, with the same sort of high investment in their characters and desire for heroic fantasy plots.

It's very clear from the start of the D&D fad there were many players that weren't really interested in D&D as a dungeon-crawler wargame but D&D as a method to re-enact their favourite fantasy literature like Lord of the Rings - the success of TSR's Dragonlance multimedia line is a testament to that.

If anything, your high schoolers sound like the "typical" RPG audience which D&D was not originally designed for but kicked off the entire boom.

That is, they're relatively normal kids who enjoy character-focused stories, not older 30+ armchair general wargamers who are accustomed to trading (fictional) human lives to achieve military objectives. "Old school" D&D was and still is niche; D&D's success came from the fact a very different fanbase that the one Gygax was aiming for adopted it as their own.

Honestly, I don't think you are going to get any buy-in for a Gygaxian style game from these high schoolers and I don't think it's healthy either to try and force those expectations on them, at least if you want things to remain an amicable game. D&D in the modern day has definitely morphed a lot from it's origins and "going back to the roots" should only be attempted if your players are actually down for it.

>Maintaining this is a delicate balance and the less well you know people, the more difficult this is to pull off, since you don't have a good real-life relationship to help smooth out game disagreements.

This is pretty much spot-on the reason why people can't stand Gygaxian DM style. You see it especially nowadays with strange pickup style of roleplaying because people don't have the time or means to have a steady group. You're lucky if you're playing with friends over an extended period of time.

Hey OP here. Thank you for all of this wisdom. I am trying to become more Gygaxian as I am still a fairly newer DM. I think character focused stuff is awesome and I understand as to why high schoolers would get angry that their character is killed off. But I feel like I would like to point out that sometimes the world including the fantasy world may not give two shits about your epic vision for your character. If you came ill prepared your magic backstory isn't going to save you. I have heard that older DMs were a lot more ruthless I kind of see now that they were usually just trying to point out how dangerous the fantasy world really was and be a fair judge.

Yes but don't forget that the reason you're playing is for your players's enjoyment
If they want to play out the power fantasy let them
Unless they screw up massively that is

Weirdly enough, my players actual prefer that style. They think it is more fair.

When you design the world, behave as the players' friend. Make it a world they'll be interested in exploring and experiencing.

When you plan the encounters, behave as the players' enemy. Don't tailor the encounter to their strengths, but instead act with as much knowledge and preparation as their foes have available.

When you run the session, behave as the impartial mediator. It's not your job to help or hinder the players or their enemies, but rather to arbitrate and pass judgment.

Keep in mind DMing in the Gygaxian model is not the only way to go.

The term "story-games" usually refer to various different systems designed to facilitate what many creators felt was the "real objective" of RPGs - collectively generating some sort of narrative. In a story-game style, the DM/GM (if there is one), generally functions as a narrator and scenario-setter. This is difficult of course to manage in D&D since the game does not have explicit rules about "narrative control" and this sort of thing needs to happen mostly by tacit consent.

Thus, many story-games tend to be heavier on rules about what and when players and/or the GM can contribute. Instead of say, having rules for opening doors, attacking monsters, or discrete specific character actions, a story-game tends to focus on rules about how much a player can say or do, and how much the DM/GM can say or do in response.

These aren't the only possible ways for how a DM functions in a game, but they do represent two major ones. I suspect that many groups aren't so much one or the other but tend to work out their own sort of unique arrangements over time. Since RPGs are an essentially social experience the actual rules as written in the book may not actually describe the reality of how certain groups play a system.

>The Gygax school of GMing is a bit like what structuralism is to art.
Literary theorists get out. Next you're probably going to start unironically praising Foucault and Derrida's ideas.

Yeah, i realize at the end of the day i'm there for their enjoyment, and outside of grognarding out on Veeky Forums i don't begrudge them too much.

But i just can't comprehend deriving enjoyment from "challenges" with little to no threat, lest the player freak out when they lose. Losing a character to some bog lurker or ancient puzzle dungeon makes coming back with another character and killing / solving it all the more rewarding.

>he doesn't like Foucault or Derrida
Nigga, you high? That shit's on point when you're discussing post-modernity, particularly in the context of social media and the current news cycle. Is it limited? Of course, but that's why you take post-structuralist philosophy combined with a dash of political theory and then laugh you way to the bank as your Gramscian amelioration slowly creates the desired ideological shift using cultural capital.

I bet you're one of those Hegelians.

I can understand almost enough Derrida to throw down over that statement.
Almost.

>he didn't also mention my main man Foucault
user, you were almost my nigga, but now I'm not so sure we ever were.

In short: RPGing requires not only consent at the table about genre, power level, etc. but the difficulty of challenge that the GM presents to the players.

A dIfficult task to accomplish in its own right.

Of course, the greater the challenge, the bigger the reward. But on the flip side, the more the failures. And every individual player has his own preference regarding this.

you're playing for everyone's enjoyment, including the GM's. that's why consensus goes a long way.

when your players expect a heroic fantasy campaign in which their characters get to level up from level 1 all the way to level 20, the GM needs to be their friend or it won't happen. it all depends on maanaging expectations and challenge level.