The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982

How many characters have died in such a time spann? Like is any of the original characters alive?

How do you feel about PF2E? I’ve heard it’s… complicated.

My campaign world covers about 2000 years. Most campaigns start towards the latter end of previous game’s longer lived characters’ lives but the exact setting usually isn’t made clear to the players up front. Sometimes it’s a prequel. No characters are immortal except one vampire, some zombies, and some gods but there’s some non linear temporal locations which occasionally feature. Most campaigns start with new characters who have little to no knowledge of the previous games characters and go through the process of meeting them and filling in what’s happened in the past few hundred years. Characters come and go, but CURSED ITEMS are eternal which is fun.

Most important is that everything is canon. Sometimes a campaign fizzles out. Still canon. The end of that adventure is free for the next DM to write out as they wish. Often these campaigns are considered to have had the party fail their quest.

There are so many different ways to run games. It can be disheartening to see people play very energetically to what is essentially one's own point of least interest.

Maybe it's similar to seeing someone speed run a video game where you mainly go for the sensory thrill of taking it slow. And you feel some pressure to get "better" but it doesn't exactly sound fun. Maybe something like that, anyway...

Personally I like to house-rule away just about everything that bugs me about any given game, if I like the setting for example. (And I also appreciate games with optional rules like "here are some ideas for making this game more heroic and less depressing for your PCs")

For example I was using one system and realized the writer didn't care very much about how one weapon differed from another, except in terms of raw damage. So I found a way to take the game in the complete opposite direction and I called my rules framework PaG, for "Play as Gun." (As opposed to playing as a character)

Every rule that the original game used for creating baroque characterizations was applied across to weaponry, and then ammunition. I started getting into all kinds of crazy smart ammo and it was a lot of fun.

This got me thinking of the idea of Ammo As Character in which you could effectively write up your ammunition as an archetype and play it as a character in the game.

That world got really cool fast, IMO. And mostly just to me. But that own-world, own-prefs stuff is a huge part of TTRPG culture.

I played back in the day. I was terrible, insisting on omnipotent characters and unable to accept misfortune.

If I were ever to return to play, I would aspire to have disposable characters die glorious deaths and weave an epic tragic tale instead.

My brother was much better than me. He was a Dungeon Master. Now he writes fantasy novels.

Dungeons and dragons groups lies somewhere on the spectrum between improvised theatre to strict rules boardgame. If you imagined it to be anything other than that you will be disappointed. But if you want one of those you can always find such a group, just note that most people are really bad at improvised theatre, so you need to find bad acting to be funny to enjoy it so you might not like it even if you like stories.

Before I went back to software development I found myself in some national task forces for enterprise architecture in the public sector, and as such got to do a lot of speeches on it at different conventions. For around the first year I literally had to do the presentation for myself. In the beginning I spent an entire day talking to the mirror, otherwise my presentation would be terrible. After a couple of years of it, I can now pull a presentation out my ass on the spot about basically any subject of which I have a solid foundation of knowledge.

I imagine game mastering to be a lot like that. Except when playing a game or D&D you also have a bunch of people participate in your presentation. I think you may have skipped the practice part a little too much, but I’d encourage you to get into to it as a player because it can be really fun with the right group.

I personally play AD&D with a bunch of other 35-40+ year olds, and the primary reason is to spend a few Saturdays each year drinking beer. Basically the reason for which I play blood bowl. The stories we go through are better than playing Baldurs Gate was though, largely thanks to our game master and the fact that nobody is too serious, and maybe because AD&D wasn’t designed to be as forgiving or “your character is now a God” as the modern systems. Anyway, we found our group through Facebook, and while there are two sets of “friends” in it half of it are solo players who joined us, so it’s certainly possible for you to find something if you look!

Looks like you were more into worldbuilding and maybe the bookkeeping/accounting. Those are their own kind of fun.

This was me except with Vampire: The Masquerade. I had binders full of characters, all of the clan novels and trilogies, and held a repository of V:tM lore knowledge in my head. Used to doodle shadow tentacles onto little characters I made in notebook margins. I would argue on forums about what clan characters would be that borrowed liberally from the game’s aesthetics and settings (Blade and Underworld being the most egregious)

This was when I was in middle and high school. I’m 34 now and I’ve still not played a single game lol.

You might have liked the white wolf games better. A bit more slack in world building and what happens :)

That was pretty much how I was. Played a little in middle school, but picked up an obsession with RPGs. I'd buy pretty much any RPG I could get my hands on and read through the rules, roll up characters, think about a campaign, but do nothing. Later this would translate into playing virtually every MMPORG that came out but only for the first few levels. At some point I realized I just liked understanding the systems, but didn't enjoy the games, particularly the social element. The upshot though was mastering all those rule systems prepared my brain for a career in programming. I now play around with programming languages the way I used to play around with MMPROGs and I enjoy digging around in cloud deployments the way I used to enjoy reading RPG lore.

In junior high I was absolutely obsessed with character creation for some reason. I just built characters all the time to the point that I was creating my own classes too.

I have no idea why. Just a weird phase I experienced.

Sounds like you want to DM rather than play. Build that world! Get some friends together who might have an interest.

And the group maybe too socially inept to see that and to comfort you out of the awkwardness :-)

I was similar, not that I wasn't invited, but I couldn't handle something where the point was entirely social. I wanted a game where I could know if I was good or not (and preferably be better than other people.) It also drove me crazy that we were playing a high fantasy game where we were fantasizing about having all kinds of great powers and doing amazing things but nobody was doing anything cool outside the game. Not that I was doing any better; I just liked to hate myself for it. I probably could have made some friends if I had gone back.

> In my experience, the amount of prep time you need is at least half of what the length of the session is

In my experience, you can run an entire session on basically nothing. Half the time I make things up on the spot (and keep track of them so they’ll still be the same when players return), but most of the time the players make the story.

It’s especially helpful when they’re discussing what they’re thinking the reason for something is between themselves, because one of those is pretty much always a good one (even if they settle on a different explanation afterwards xD).

What's interesting is that long-form narratives seem to less popular in newer systems (and particularly outside the traditional D&D camp), which tend to aim instead for a reasonably short, self-contained arc in maybe half a dozen or so sessions. Particularly with the PbtA/FitD genre that's come out of Apocalypse World and its derivatives, there's a lot of emphasis on telling the one story that the system makes sense for, and then moving on to another story.

Even in more traditional games, I feel like I also see that tendency in certain parts of the Old School Renaissance scene, which makes me wonder if it's got something to do with the plethora of different systems that are out now. If I'm only going to have time for one game a week, I might not want to end up stuck to one setting and one system, but rather try deadly space horror in Mothership, surreal British fantasy in Troika!, steampunk metropolis Victoriana in Electric Bastionland, etc.

I'm intrigued to see if this sort of style, where one jumps from game to game relatively easily, but doesn't invest so much in a single character or world, will be as long lasting. I think the danger is that eventually you run out of new things (although that honestly seems hard at the rate that new games are being punished), but a lot of these games are fairly replayable, and my impression is that people keep on coming back to their favourites.

There are some pretty deadly games out there.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has its own special concept related to death for character-development purposes, known as the Funnel.

This is sort of the standard for earlier editions of D&D, or games that aspire to follow some of the same themes (You might see modern RPGs in this vein referred to as OSR/Old School Renaissance). Historically, players would take on the role of adventurers rather than heroes, and most of the focus was on collecting as much treasure as you can (XP was awarded based on the gold value of treasure).

If you played smart you could certainly keep a character alive, so the idea that older editions of D&D were wantonly fatal isn't really correct, but any time you left your character's fate up to the roll of the dice, you were taking a risk, so the smart play was to rig any such encounter in your favor as best you could. If you did manage to live, your characters would tend to retire, taking ownership of domains, running wizard's towers, etc. - you didn't generally go up ever escalating levels of cosmic threat. Rules and modules existed for that, but it wasn't the type of play people would generally engage in. Instead, your old characters would become NPCs in the game setting, and you'd roll up a new group of adventurers to keep the story going.

3E is probably when the focus shifted to be predominantly around more Big Damn Hero type storylines, and it's firmly cemented as the de facto standard in 5E, but I think the success of 5E shows that that's really what more people are interested in. Which is great! It's been huge for the hobby, and introduced a lot of people into other styles of RPG, including old-school D&D.

Which is a long way to say if this style of play sounds appealing to you, you might want to check out modern OSR games (Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, Electric Bastionland, Troika!, Mothership) or retroclones (Old School Essentials is probably the biggest name here currently, and is based off of the Basic/Expert ruleset - my personal favorite)

Yeah, I don't think I'd want to GM or play according to rules like:

https://thegamednd.com/death/

I mean, I get wanting players to invest, and character death to mean something - but kicking out a player after two, three years of weekly sessions because they're "out of characters"? I guess maybe they find time to meet those friends outside of the game too?

Ed: Don't actually know if that's worse, or asking new first time players to never come back because they died first session...

The latest 5th edition deserves a lot of credit for this. They did a fantastic job. It’s easy to learn, easy to run and you can do a lot with it. I’ve been a tabletop RPG player since the early 80s and never really got on with D&D, but 5th edition is a lot of fun. It not my favourite game by far, but it deserves its success.

I was much the same until I started discussing the idea with close friends who had similar interests.

If you have an interest it, you could always try a one-shot[1] adventure and test the waters.

I have pretty awful social anxiety, but I find that getting into character and being with close friends (whether physically or remotely) allows me to ease into the social setting and have a ton of fun.

Also note that role-playing is NOT required! If you and/or your friends prefer to just discuss the game and setting in the third person akin to talking about video games, go for it.

Don't force yourself to do so if there is no interest, but certainly at least give it a try if you have any sort of interest, there's nothing to lose and love for a new hobby to gain!

1: https://blackcitadelrpg.com/one-shots-dnd-5e/

It looked like he was mostly using binders. I’m a lot more interested in how he keeps up with the hundreds of sub-quests at any given time.

Even if you're developing your own house rules based on an existing system, it's great to have a variety of systems all with fleshed-out rules to draw from. And while it's good to retain some similarity between versions for the sake of thematic continuity, it's good to make each version distinctly different to give people distinctly different jumping-off points for their own rulesets. This is why, unlike seemingly everybody on the internet, I never begrudged D&D 4E for being so different from 3.5; it served its role in having a distinct identity from its predecessors to appeal to different people and result in different variations.

Rather than a flip "money," I will detail the cycle.

1) TSR (or WotC) puts out a new version of the rules, a set of core rulebooks, typically a Dungeon Masters Guide, a Monster Manual, and a Players Handbook.

2) Some additional content is pushed out, like a module or two.

3) Here is the danger part: Realizing that there are more Players than DMs, well, more money is to be made putting out content players want. Splatbooks of unlikely "prestige paths," or if you want to go old school, barbarian and cavalier and acrobat. Rather than having rules so flexible you could re-enact Conan the Barbarian or Sword and the Sorceror or Beastmaster, instead rules are carved out for an archetype of exactly that film or book.

4) The game unbalances due to new rules, and Pun-Pun the Kobold is born.

5) Players proceed to tear through every encounter with min-maxed ("munchkined") characters as per the hyper-optimized builds laid out in the splat books.

6) We must rebalance the game.

7) Go to Step 1.

This is part of the problem, not the whole of it, but ... I would not say it is insignificant.

It was before computer games were well developed, so much of what is a computer game today was done manually. See also "war gaming".

I believe this would depend on your DM. I've been playing since the mid-90s (not sure if that's far back enough for you! :) ), and we rarely rolled for random encounters like that.

In general the DM has a lot of say over the rules and their interpretation. A good DM will make a huge difference.

Different strokes. A lot of old school gaming resembles modern adventure video games. There is an overall narrative arc, but then there are fairly random encounters along the way.

I agree that a purely mechanically-generated game would be tedious, it's all about balance. But I don't know... ever since "Critical Role" came out, it feels like the dominant strain of role-playing games is people trying to be theatre majors, or produce something worthy of a live-play podcast. I find that likewise out of sync with what I'm looking for in a game.

I just want a classic dungeon-crawl, with limited "acting" ability required. And therefore limited code of conduct debates, because the creepy theatre major wants to act out his rape fantasies while the super progressive theatre major wants a race and gender studies class. Like, huh? Dude, I just want to join a gang of murder-hobos, so we can kill some goblins and take some gold.

First Edition had guidelines for high level characters literally becoming gods. IIRC one of the paths involved being reincarnated (without memories of past lives) as a level 1 character in each of the different classes and needing to reach high level in each of them in turn -- no easy feat considering that the attributes which make for a great fighter will make for a lousy wizard, but of course becoming gods shouldn't be easy.

> No one tells you this but Conan stories are basically Lovecraft Mythos stories.

Never thought of this, but it makes a certain sense. Now I want a Conan at the Mountains of Madness crossover book.

As someone who's always lived next to the "original" (Swiss) Lake Geneva, I was confused as to why I'd never experienced this D&D enthusiasm you've mentioned

The idea that AD&D didn’t have powergamers sounds like Gygax propaganda. This is the edition that put out a book of diety statblocks like it was another monster manual. Your linked Animal Friendship, allows 2xHD of companions so a L3 druid could have a Cave Bear. That’s as bad as it sounds.

Every edition has many issues but imho 1e is pretty terrible by modern standards.

Damn you. I just lost.

Damn I also lost it. I’ll take the downvotes with you.

My first loss in years. Been 'playing' ~20 years, last time I lost was maybe 5 years ago. Oh well, restart the counter! Playing for life I guess, there's no way out.

What does this mean?

I lost The Game reading the title. Dammit.

Wow, same. Haven't lost since the 2009 Time poll.

I didn’t, until I saw your comment…

I just lost the game.

God damn it ;~;