Hating It For A While: D&D and the Follies of Youth

When I was 14, I hated D&D. Classes were constraining, levels artificial, the whole (3rd edition) shebang too precariously complex to tinker with. I much preferred GURPS. Nevermind that I'd never been able to run a decent game with GURPS -- it was systemized, flexible, realistic, everything D&D wasn't. So what if it took four hours to build a decent robot?* You couldn't build robots at all in D&D. There weren't any rules for it!

I got over it. Classes, I realized, were actually pretty neat. They gave you a quick way to define your character and make sure everyone in the group has something to do. Levels, too, make a pretty nifty character advancement package. It's more fun to get a couple of things all at once, but only occasionally, than to spend a point here and a point there every session or so. And so what if there are no "rules" for robots? That never stopped me in my first campaign. Just throw something together than feels right and go with it. (That last point, I'll admit, has taken me a little longer to get to.)

A couple years after the madness, and I'm talking to this who's just joined the RPG club at school. He's going on about how great Exalted is, and how much D&D sucks, and I'm thinking, "Man, that guy sure sounds like me back in the day." He was talking about social mechanics and starting out as a nobody and how boring fighters are, but still, same general idea. He'd come across this new, shiny, amazing game, and suddenly he realizes that, hey, D&D's not the only way to do things. And for some reason, what inevitably follows is "this new, shiny way is much better!"

But it's still missing the point. You start out as a nobody nothing in D&D (or at least, pre-4e versions thereof) so that you have to pick you battles, think carefully, and make getting to the next couple levels really mean something. There are no social mechanics in D&D because you play that stuff out. Fighters are there for the people who really just don't want to wrestle with a bunch of mechanical doo-dads, whether because they're new to the game or just don't enjoy it.

A lot of people go through this phase. Some people stick in it, and spend their whole gaming career ranting about how D&D is killing their favorite game. Others move on, realizing that D&D just isn't for them but that other people aren't idiots for liking it. And some of us embrace it again, no longer victims of our youthful folly. There's something about D&D -- a mix of slightly archaic design and overwhelming popularity -- that makes it very hate-able. At least for a little while.

*To be fair, 4th edition is a lot better about that. You just throw on a couple of advantage packages and you're good to go. But I still can't excuse the absolute horror that was GURPS Robots, known in my group as "the reason we got into an argument about the volume of a human." And the worst part is, I thought this was fun. It was, I guess, but not as fun as playing the dang game.

(Written for this month's blog carnival, on Transitions & Transformations in RPGs.)

Did 4e D&D Kill Exalted?

Hey, two games I shouldn't be talking about in just one post! Warning: Baseless speculation ahead.

Exalted's obviously not dead, or even really dying. People still play it, people still talk about it. (It occurs to me that the only people I personally knew who played it don't anymore, but they're not playing anything; graduation broke the group up and then business. So anyway.) But it doesn't dominate RPG.net like I hear it used to, and there's been a bit of talk about why that is that suggests at least some people have stopped playing it.

If that's true, there are a lot of reasons for it, from the somewhat unwieldy system to the inevitable loss of the new and shiny factor. But it occurs to me that the drop off in net activity, and theoretical corresponding play activity, happened in about the same time frame as the rise of 4th Edition D&D. Which, when I was playing it, struck me as remarkably similar to Exalted in some ways.

There's the obvious mechanical similarities between charms and powers, for one--though charms are a much broader animal than powers, the combat ones at least still have the same "bite-sized tactical awesome" vibe. And there's the general "this is a game about epic heroes, built on top of a crunchy tactical combat system" goal.

I don't know how far to credit all that "Exalted is broken!" stuff on RPG.net, since the people I know who played it got on just fine, but from what I know from experience that 4e's base system is very tight, and I hear the 4e supplements are about as clean as could be expected. It does, at the very least, have a higher rate of book production than Exalted, which could appeal to some sectors. And it's also got a much greater general fanbase, which if 4e is a factor in this hypothetical drop off at all is probably the main reason. I can easily imagine people giving 4e a shot because it covers a lot of the same ground as Exalted and they figure they could get a group together a lot more easily.

Right. So. I'll stop writing about games I don't play now, I promise.