Changes in good old roleplaying?

[Enpeze]

Sometimes after reading through many threads on this board or rpg.net I have the impression that roleplaying changed alot since its beginnings. Which changes?

-extreme influence of anime on many games. Best examples are the advent of Exalted or the new Cthulhu Tech.

-scripted/railroading approach to adventures - gone are the days where in a module you just could not predict the outcome and stories have been simple, chaotic and non-linear. Are the adventures "overdesigned?".

-refusal to let PCs die - even in old D&D (spit) you could die in the first levels very easily - and later too to some extent, because the evil enemies became tougher. I played D&D (spit) 2 decades ago for one or two years (you know I was young and needed the money....) and I remember that the modules have been a very bad dungeon crawling and our GM has been bad...yaddayadda...but death of PC was never a problem. If you died you died, basta. Roll up a new one. This approach was cool and was the aspect I liked alot (ok...I liked all these egg-nogg drinks at our GMs house too...).

What do you think? Do you know of other aspects which changed the way roleplaying games are played from 1985 till now?

[Shaira]

To be honest, personally I'd disagree with you on all three points you make, at least as far as my own gaming goes!

I particularly dislike the anime influence - I lived in Japan for a number of years and the manga influence was just too sickly sweet, prurient, and overdone to take seriously, and even now the sight of a picture with eyes twice the size of the mouth and a ">" sign for a nose brings me out in a rash...

I also like open-form adventures, and am happily still as lethal as I ever was with my GMing.

If there has been a notable trend in RPGing over the past (gulp) 30 years or so, it's been to incorporate far more of the narrativist approach within the rules of the RPG itself, rather than leaving this up to the individual GMs to "wing" on the fly. At the same time this has often gone hand in hand with a loosening up of the "rules-heavy" mindset, which has tended to take PC fate away from the dice and the scenario and put it more in the hands of the GM and players "creating the story" - I guess this is where your point of PCs dying less often come in: when playing HeroQuest, for example, I was frequently distressed that pretty much the only way to actually KILL a character (as opposed to really, really, really Defeat him) was for me to decide to do so. That can lead to a sense of arbitrariness which I for one as a GM am not particularly comfortable with - I still like to feel like I'm playing a game, with concrete rules with crunchy results rather than some freewheeling group huggy session of "Let's Pretend" - just IMHO of course, and I'm aware that others have a ball with the heavily narrative approach, which is great.

One other major change of course has been computer RPGs. Solo stuff like Neverwinter Nights or Morrowind, online stuff like... well, wow, where do I begin! - have blurred the lines somewhat between tabletop and computer play. One thing I haven't tried yet is the over-the-net RPGing with tools like Klooge, although I mean to at some point - that looks kind of cool.

I think also - dare I say it - RPGing has become a bit more mainstream. When I was a wee slip of a lass, practically nobody but nobody without milk bottle bottom specs or an overbite played RPGs (I had the specs), whereas now it's hard to work out who are the bikers, who the goth rockers, and who the RPGers. Which is nice. If a bit scary sometimes.

Good topic though, Enpeze - I'd be interested to hear everyone else's opinions, especially as the whole Exalted / Werewolf: the Anagram / Anime RPG genres seem to have efficiently passed me by. :-)

Sarah

[Atgxtg]

I'm with Sarah here. Point for points:

1)Anime Influence: We've had a handful of anime RPG, and if anything has had a exteme influe since the mid 80s, it isn't anime.

2)Scripted/Railroading of Adventures: Are you forgetting the A series, B series, etc? Most of the TSR stuff was heavily scripted, when PCs being lead around by the nose from point a to Point B and eventually into the next module. If anything games have gotten less structured.

3)Refusal to let PC die: I don't see that. I have seen several games that had been less lethal than, say RQ. Many with good reason, such as superhero RPGs, or games that are more realistic--fixed hit points and instant damage is easy to play but not very realistic. What I have also seen are RPGs that do not revolve around combat the way most RPGs did in the old days. A RPG can do other things besides fighting every ten minutes. I've also seen RPGs that make RQ look pretty tame, combat wise.

[Kloster]

Hello,

As I haven't played any recently published game, I can't have a clear idea about recent changes. For the 1975 to 2000, there has been a lot of gaming style changes:
- originally, heroic fantasy was almost the only roleplaying type available (not counting traveller and metamorphosis alpha). Since begining of the 80's, we have gobble of choice.
- originally, adventures were VERY linear (especially TSR ones, but T&T was not by much different in this approach) and we gradually had more choice in the adventures. I don't know if this is still the case.
- we always had a bunch of influences (SF, heroic fantasy, spy, supers,...) and styles (old style litterature, anime, movies, comics,...), so for me no change here.
- some games have been very lethal, some have not, depending on style (not counting heroes unlimited, superpowered games are not lethal, whatever the period. Most of the western games I have played are), the targeted audience and the author's tastes. For me, no changes here (but I don't play recent games). RQ or Bushido are deadly games and are dated 1978 (IIRC). Cyberpunk is deadly and is dated 1988.
- refusal to let pc die is for me a matter of preference of the GM (and, to a lesser extent, of the players) and has always been a debate.
- rules are on the average becoming lighter, less extensive (GURPS and Hero notwithstanding). I agree with Shaira this is driving responsibilities from the rules to the GM.

That's all for now.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Ken]

Hi guys thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

Enpeze,

Your first point about anime influence! I think that this is a subjective thing, it depends on the gaming community around you and what they are playing. I think that I've seen influence on table-top rpg'ing from anime, the playing of supernatural 'immortals', card gaming and computer/console rpgs over the past 20 years. My inference of what this has contributed to is a breed of 'munchkin' (if thats the right term) power-rule players whose interest is not the stories and situations that their characters find themselves in but the heroic stature of their character. It also seems to me that this dizzying height of 'herodom' is paramount and how you get there is secondary.

Your second point. I suppose that my fellow gamers and I, (some of whom I've gamed with for over 20 years), have always though about the narrative journey of the characters. When we saw a setting we wanted to explore the places that we loved and really got behind the idea that, its the backstory of the setting and the actions of a character within a narrative that defines the heroic NOT that you've got uber-stats to do what the hell you want ensuring success. This led us away fairly early on from power-gaming and table-top rpg as single figure war-gaming. I like the idea of scripted scenarios, (possibly because I dabble in a little screenwriting) but only when the script says 'this is what will happen if the Player Characters DONT intercede in the narrative. That is no excuse though for a GM not to have done his homework and for everyone together not to forge a new story from his scenarios/ideas.

I think that also while I enjoy a dungeon bash as much as the next man for a little bit of entertainment, serious role playing for me never included most of the d&d modules that I read through. (I loved 'The village of Hommlet'). To have these architectural oddities where decades if not hundreds of completely isolated monsters of differing types inhabit a similar space without ever opening the door on each other and having lots of treasure, well that never seemed like anything else other than power-gaming to me. (Bet you can't guess that RQ2 was the first RPG that I picked up luckily).

As for you're final point. Well thats a fair cop guv for me. I don't avoid death in games but I don't let the dice decide the fate of characters on their own. I think of it this way, for our group interactive story-telling is the objective. In stories, there is typically no need for death without some underlying narrative device. I appreciate that thats not the same in real life, that you can walk out of your door and be hit by a car for no reason, but our games are not real life they are stories.

Now the reason for a death in a game may be the player wants to retire a character, that there may be some need for one of the players to sacrifice for the greater good, that a player may send a character into confrontation without doing the proper preparation, (cites Cthulhu as a classic example) and so I have no problem with destroying those characters utterly. But there is a point to the death in question. Hell it maybe that I kill characters off at the beginning of a campaign just to let the players know that I will if i need to. I just don't like the dice doing it with no point. (Of course all confrontation within a narrative could be seen has having a point, but I'm guessing you know what I mean).

But finally I guess the reason that RPGs change is that the demographic of people that play them changes too, (as already mentioned) and it's important to remember (certainly in my opinion) that this is story/game/art and people play the way they want to. I wouldn't prescribe how someone else plays or gets enjoyment out of their games. So bring on the power-gamers and WoW players and rule-gamers and let them have their fun their way.

My only true lament for the longevity of our hobby is that there are some games that have fallen by the wayside and we no longer find in the shops. I would love to be able to go and buy a copy of Ringworld and have it sat on my shelf. Or direct new players to purchase RQ2, IMHO the most complete RPG for the small number of pages in which it was contained. Still I guess that's what Ebay is for

Thanks for the interesting topic.

K.

[Ars Mysteriorum]

I would argue that the successful marketing of the d20 system and its increased popularity with computer and video game support has had a tremendous impact on how games are played. The d20 system catered to these new fans by focussing the system on combat (which any one who plays video games would be more interested in) and less on roleplaying (which Shaira's aforementioned overbite/milk-bottle-bottom spec [I have both afflictions] laden geek is more interested in).

This superficiality, as a result of marketing targeting such a wide audience, has led to a larger amount of RPG players that place more value in the question "How powerful do the rules say I am?" instead of the simple "What can I do in this situation?" or "What would my character do?"

Welcome to the Gamist era of RPG's. Ugh.

My parents found out I was playing RPG's as a kid and ripped them out of my hands. Why wouldn't they with the bad press that saturated the media at the time? Thus, in my sophomore year of college, having become bored with the limits and expense of video game RPG's (which I had only recently reclaimed) and having a pocket blasting with extra cash from my cushy on-campus internship as a marketing researcher, it dawned on me that I could re-enter the world of RPG's. I ran to the FLGS and purchased the gift set of the three core rulebooks for D&D 3.5.

I enjoyed them. For a time. I found combat to be cumbersome and over-detailed,and yet strangely under-detailed over time. So I purchased the New World of Darkness books. I still like them, but the main supplements (vampire, werewolf, mage), while having great ideas, really forced the idea of the universe upon the reader. In the Antagonists supplement it is even stated that zombies in large numbers are not to be a part of the World of Darkness' setting. While I can go ahead and do whatever I want, I find games which attempt to do that offensive. Metaplot without metaplot. Weird. And really difficult to GM.

Exalted was a stupid purchase on my part.

Looking for games that allowed for an immersive roleplaying experience, I purchased Nobilis. A little extreme, and I doubt I will ever run it, yet it remains a model for what I think of as the perfect game. I would most definitely play it with a HG who knew the "rules" (more like a feel) in a heartbeat.

So I purchased Unknown Armies. Wow. I have yet to run a game in it. It's so... dirty. But so incredibly beautiful at the same time. I honestly am still working on exactly how to run such a game and really push the system in a way that capture the player's imagination in a manner to do the wonderful ideas of John Tynes and Greg Stolze justice.

Over the Edge. More wow and a deeper understandind of how a game can be centered on characters and yet still be loosely controlled by the GM. Jonathan Tweet was a visionary. I have yet to play it.

Feng Shui. Cool. Very cool. A game that utilizes imagination to fuel its engine. Fun for fun's sake. It asks for fun and furious descriptions of actions in an over the top manner.

One gamer could only produce the phrase, "I hit him" despite encouragement and advise from the other players. I tried a few examples of nifty descriptions and he would just go with what I suggested uneditted. A perfect example of a product of the most extreme superficiality of today's RPG and video games.

Talislanta. WOW! So much setting, and yet so much freedom. Sechi's love for the world makes the reader love the world. He shows how vague detail can spark the mind. I ran it and my player, this time a very talented gamemaster I met while I lived in Japan, disliked how his magic was "too weak" and stubbornly pushed his magic into levels where Mishaps occured very often. This makes for a very un-fun game.

Call of Cthulhu. The masterwork. My first games as a kid were AD&D 2nd Edition. Here were the stats I was so familiar with, and yet applied in a way that was so different. The game is a beautiful narrative system that places the power of the story squarely in the GM's hands (the Idea, Knowledge, and Luck rolls are powerful tools) and the slow spiral into insanity as characters explore the apathetic universe is breathtaking and entrenching. It's very hard to find players for this game where I am. d20 is really the only game and few players like failing and dying. Thanks to the path of games I've read I now find failure to be just as interesting as epic success, if not more so.

My failures with Call of Cthulhu groups have been terrible. One player said he hated it because he didn't like failing. I looked at him oddly. What fun is a game where you can only win? This player was a fiercely competitive person and prone to sighing loudly when things did not go his way in-game and out-of-game. Another product of today's gaming.

With the announcement of 4th Edition D&D, I sold all of my d20 books, very, very finished with a system I had already grown to strongly dislike. I purchased Warhammer. Warhammer is a direct descendant of BRP. Fate points provide a compromise for d20 players fearing death and it's ease of play and deep setting instill the desire to really play a character. Combat is simplistic, but requires enthusiasm and imagination in order to make it shine. I like that.

I have also seen Warhammer's semi-narrative gameplay fail miserably in the hands of the new generation of gamers. It's not pretty to see. I actually began arguing with a player when he refused to write a character history for Warhammer and saw it as unimportant. As his argument continued it became clear he was actually just lazy. I only asked for some cursory details to help involve his past in the plot and told him a detailed history would be appreciated. His response was that it was the sole responsibility of the GM to place characters into situations, inventing the necessary reasoning, and move them to the next point. Which was odd that I was being told how to run the game, seeing how I was the GM. The nail in the coffin was when he concluded that attempting to "warp" a character's history into the plot was generic and boring.

Ugh. This kind of controlling, yet strangely controlled, gamer seems to be a product of the new kind of gaming.

One could say my follies were my fault, not including the interests of my player more directly. However, a GM plays the game too. Having character's succeed despite dice makes me wonder why we have dice at all. Having to invent everything for characters is a burden that, for me, creates more stress than fun. I feel like I don't have the right to make assumptions of another character because it demeans the concept of roleplaying.

Wow. This turned into a rant.

I would like to add that I've had very good experiences with other d20 gamers. One friend I had tried Feng Shui, loved it, and bought the game as soon as he could. We recently ran Warhammer and he had yet another similar reaction. Obviously the statements I have made don't apply to most gamers. I would say that it applies to a slight majority however... but I could be jaded.

Anyways... yeah.

Sorry for the rant, but it felt good!

I'm really looking forward to tearing into BRP and using this wonderful narrative system to create an original setting. I'm going to be moving away from my middle-of-nowhere midwestern suburb-with-no-city to a place near Boston in the near future. Perhaps there I can find more like-minded gamers.

Quick question to Shaira: Which region of Japan did you live in? I spent two years in Niigata Prefecture and wasn't so deeply immersed in the anime culture.

[Hedgehobbit]

The primary change that I've seen is a move away from the game being about challenging the players to being about challenging the characters.

When D&D was new, there was a definate sense that playing the game required a "skill" of the players. That good players could succeed where poor players would fail, regardless of the characters they were using. Tomb Of Horrors was designed to demonstrate this very fact. This is one of the reason that early D&D seems so random and hodge podge with oodles of monsters who exists for no reason than to screw characters over: rust monster, gelatinous cubes, lurker above etc. While this stuff seems silly and random to modern eyes, they existed simply to provide a series of different challenges for the players to overcome. Heck, back in those days we didn't bother naming our characters; they were simply an extension of ourselves. That's another reason why you don't see rules about spotting things or diplomacy in those games. The DM ruled based on how the players acted rather than on the skill of the character.

Naturally, as players got more experienced some began to look for more variety is the abilities of their characters which lead to AD&D's over abundance of classes as well as skill based games like RQ, Bushido etc. I think that the narativist element is an outgrowth of this as the seperation between the abilities of the players and their characters grew eventually leading to games such as Pendragon where the character is no longer 100% under the control of the player.

I see this change having an impact of PC death as well. When the game is focused on challenging the player, the survival of a PC is the hallmark of successful play. Since your character is just an entension of yourself, rolling up a new character just means your a little less powerful the next time you play; its no different from taking hit point damage in a sense since you haven't really lost anything because your ability is your own personal game-playing skill. The move toward focusing the game on the character's abilities means that you lose all that you have gained which is significantly more of a loss. Hence the gradual reluctance to have PCs die.

Of course, all this began well before 1985

[Shaira]

Originally Posted by Ars Mysteriorum

Quick question to Shaira: Which region of Japan did you live in? I spent two years in Niigata Prefecture and wasn't so deeply immersed in the anime culture.

Well, I wouldn't say I was immersed in anime culture at all - I generally avoided it like the plague! I lived in western Tokyo (Setagaya-ku) for about 5 years in the early nineties, working as a translator and interpreter. As you'll doubtless know from your time in Niigata, manga are everywhere in Japan - porno manga on the metro, kiddy manga on the TV first thing in the morning till last thing at night, loud and blaring and generally badly drawn and animated, blockbuster manga of "working in an office" to buy on your way to work, etc, etc. I think ultimately I found the entire manga "art" "style" (I use both words advisedly) to be very limiting - it was very hard finding something, either line art or animation, which didn't look like everything else. Admittedly it's one of Japan's "great contributions" to pop culture (along with the French), but it doesn't turn me on at all.

I found the same trend an absolute killer in Japanese RPG world as well. Most of the Japanese RPGers I met were otaku - teenage boys locked in their rooms which make Fear of Girls look like a feminist tract . I don't want to game with a load of Sailor Moon fans...

I remember several times buying one of the Japanese RPG mags - it had some stuff on Glorantha in it - and being terrified by the manga-effect on Dragon Pass. Suddenly my land of herodom and Truly Great Adventures had turned into an episode of Buffy...

Ahem. Seem to have gone off on one rather, there. Apologies Don't get me wrong - so much of Japan was marvellous, some of the subculture life there makes Cyberpunk roleplaying look dated. It's just the manga thing. Ack. Splutter. Cough.

Cheers!

Sarah

[Ars Mysteriorum]

On the most part, I agree. Anime has had a TERRIBLE impact on gaming. It's one reason I refuse to talk about Exalted.

However, I have a few guilty pleasures in anime. The Hellsing OVA, what with its neo-nazis, vatican agents, vampires (monstrous, not charming goth-bait) and large (yet realistic) guns scratches many itches for me. Cowboy Bebop is a magnificent Film Noir-ish production. It has an interesting setting that manages to be both distant and approachable. Full Metal Alchemist also has my attentions due to the fact that I'll be studying alchemy in graduate school and it actually has some fairly faithful references to written history... but Fullmetal Alchemist is most definitely not my favorite due to its fluff factor which is formulaic and smacks of the worst parts of Japanese culture.

Those are really the only exceptions to my complicit agreement. Dragon Ball Z is the Dark Lord Lucifer in video format, warn the young members of your family.

[Zane]

Anime influence -- I think this really depends on the games you're playing. If you're playing Robotech, Dragonball Z, or some such game then of course their are influences. Personally I don't see them in the stuff I purchase, but then for the past several years my purchases have been largely limited to CoC or Pulp, with the d20 Modern and base D&D 3.5 books thrown in during an attempt to play D20.

Scripted/Railroaded adventures -- Really can't comment on this, I don't run someone else's adventures, I run ones that I create myself, and I tend to allow very free-form play. This is an interesting question as I'm actually getting ready to give my players a poll which will help to decide what our next campaign looks like, and one of the questions is if they want it to be more linear.

Refusal to let PC's die -- I played AD&D 1st Ed. in the early 90's, and I've played a little D20 D&D, in the AD&D I didn't really fear for my characters life, in the D20 game I did. I GM'd a game years ago, where the PC's were basically undefinable, and nothing I could throw at them challenged them. In the CoC campaign I'm currently running, I've had to pull punches on several occasions as killing the players would hurt the story I'm trying to craft, at the same time, there has been player death, and I will only pull the punches so much.

I can see a couple changes, one is a maturing of the rules. Let's be serious, RPG's are still a fairly young hobby, they've only been around for a little over 30 years. On the downside, I think one of the curses of both D20 and the times we live in is an emphasis on glitz over substance. Does every RPG book need to be hardback, on glossy paper and full colour? Personally "Basic Roleplaying" seems like a breath of fresh air if they keep the layout so clean and simple. Another problem I see are that the days of being able to get into RPG's cheaply. The basic entrance fee tends to be $40-150, this no doubt hurts on getting some people interested in the hobby. When you look at games such as CoC, Traveller, or "Empire of the Petal Throne" one thing you'll notice is that 40 now seems to be "young". The general aging of the RPG population has definitely had an effect.

Aging -- When I was 18 I thought nothing of getting together weekly and playing Champions. I'm now 40, have 3 kids, a job and other interests, all of which keep me quite busy. I still love to play RPG's, though now I typically only GM them. Our group has anywhere from 1 week to 1 year between sessions, as such the rules need to be simple enough that I can remember them without having to restudy, and having them bog down gameplay.