runequester
Swordsman
- Joined
- 29 Apr 2018
- Messages
- 474
Greetings gang and my apologies for writing in English. You are welcome to respond in Swedish or English as you prefer.
I have always had a lot of fondness for the venerable Drakar och Demoner, growing up with the Danish version of the rules (corresponding to the 1987 version of the rules + Expert) and generally sticking with BRP-type games much of the time, including a 1 year-long game of Hjältarnas Tid (with a bit of translation work on my part since I was running it for my American friends) recently.
Of course all things "retro" are cool again (see the OSR and the revival releases of the last half decade of everything from the Bloodsword game books to Lone Wolf to Dragon Warriors) so I think it is worth examining DoD in the same light those games receive. A lot of talk on Swedish forums like this one tend to focus on the playstyle in terms of the adventures and like the OSR folks, it tends to pick out the really cool and unique stuff, while ignoring the stuff that kinda sucked. That's not a bad thing: After all, there is no point in revisiting the garbage when we can pick and choose now that we understand better what makes for a good campaign.
I think often the rules themselves get overlooked or even dismissed a bit. There seems to be an unstated assumption that DoD was actually kind of shit and that we should be lucky to have moved on. I'm not sure if some of that is just the general Scandinavian feeling that something can't be cool unless it's in English (certainly the case in Denmark) and it has always puzzled me a little because DoD holds up very well next to something like OpenQuest (which is quite popular) and certainly compared to many OSR games that are flooding the market.
More importantly, the experience I’ve had running DoD for American folks (with no prior exposure to the game) have almost universally been positive and the game has been very well received. So clearly, there is a bit of a grey area to discuss.
So I wanted to dig into a few considerations that I think affect how we look at old games, as well as maybe just sparking some discussion.
All of this isn’t to say that games like HT or Symbaroum cannot be improvements on the sort of mechanical structure DoD had or that DoD didn’t have its flaws. That’s for the reader to decide, we loved our time with HT for sure.
I think when we talk about old RPG’s there are a few factors that tend to color the discussion:
First:
Often we conflate the bad campaigns we played with the rules and assume that because our games sucked back then, the rules were bad. Thing is, most of us started gaming when we were children or teenagers and we ran the sort of campaigns teenagers run: Complete garbage
Bad GM’s, unfair rules decisions, players who just wanted to kill (or fuck) everything they met, cheaters and power gamers, you know the drill.
Today, looking back at 30+ years of experience as gamers, we are able to create the sort of campaigns we always wanted to: Deep characters that interact in a living, responsive setting with cool and fun adventures to go on. And since we’re now playing D&D5 (or whatever) we tend to mentally assume this means D&D5 is the cause for the campaigns being so good, when in reality giving those books to a bunch of teenagers produces the same sort of dysfunctional garbage we all had to sit through. A look at the rpghorrorstories sub on Reddit should be ample evidence for this.
Second:
We all remember the really broken thing about a game because it’s usually something that grinds our gears when we play, and so when we switch to another game that solves that particular problem (or just handles it better) we tend to assume that the new game is better overall even if it has other problems that are as frustrating (or more so).
Of course this may be true for a particular person, but I think it tends to overlook other factors.
To use an example, D&D lacks the “ping pong” problem of old school BRP combat (where many blows are ineffective) but swaps that for problems such as caster supremacy, hit point grinding and the fact that many character builds are simply not viable mechanically.
Is that “better’? Well, it might be for a specific player because the problems of D&D may in fact be things you enjoy, but obviously by focusing on only specific concerns, we are missing out on the advantages we had as well.
Third:
Of course over the years playstyles also simply change. Games on the market today have different choices than the games of the 80’s.
Games today tend towards the more heroic and dramatic (D&D5, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, 13th Age) and / or tend to put higher emphasis on being mechanically intricate or high concept.
The game design spirit of the 80s BRP era was heavily driven by the assumption that games should simulate a world to some extent (a style that has almost entirely disappeared outside of games like Harnmaster), that the rules should be a fairly solid framework but should NOT try to account for every possible situation and that characters should be defined by their skills, not a list of bespoke special abilities.
Now again, anyone might prefer one or the other, that’s really not the question. But it is worth noting that an old game will often seem “outdated” simply because it does not accomplish something that it never set out to do in the same way that we might prefer dogs to cats (if you are a monster ) but it’s not the fault of the cat that it is bad at being a dog.
Fourth:
When a game has known problems or short-falls, it is common for us to focus on them because nerds like to discuss rules and try to come up with solutions. So it is easy for us to over-estimate the extent of the actual problem since we’ve talked about it so much.
I would argue that many of the problems with DoD do tend to be over-stated in conversation. After all, people played the game for years just fine: Ping Pong is a problem but many attacks cannot be parried, monsters cannot parry and most characters have very limited parries.
Spell casting being difficult is a problem, but a starting character can still get a few decent spells fairly easily.
Advancement is slow, but characters almost always improve a little bit every session and the training rules support the use of down-time between adventures.
Those are just examples of course, but the point is that many of the problems with any game can tend to get overstated. To use D&D as a problem, caster supremacy is a problem.. but its usually not such a big problem that it breaks the game and it is helped by a GM who understates encounter pacing (for example).
Tldr -
Often, we tend to judge old games on criteria that are not accurate and I wanted to take a moment to evaluate that a little bit. In turn, this will help us more accurately articulate what things could be improved in the game design and what things can be tailored to newer styles (HT again being probably the most clear-eyed example of this, done by people who clearly loved BRP but had very clear ideas about what they wanted to be different).
In conclusion, I’d throw out a couple of personal opinions, hot takes if you will: Three that I would wager are pretty well supported and the fourth which is purely personal.
A: For the time (mid-to-late 80s) the DoD rules, particularly with Expert as an option, compared very favorably to other gaming options on the market at the time in Sweden or in English markets (if they’d been able to read it).
B: DoD compares on decent, and often equal terms to other BRP systems, both at the time and today.
C: DoD was a superior option to D&D at the time.
D: Purely personally I would still take DoD 87 / Expert over D&D5.
Obviously you may fiercely disagree but I hope you found it interesting at least
I have always had a lot of fondness for the venerable Drakar och Demoner, growing up with the Danish version of the rules (corresponding to the 1987 version of the rules + Expert) and generally sticking with BRP-type games much of the time, including a 1 year-long game of Hjältarnas Tid (with a bit of translation work on my part since I was running it for my American friends) recently.
Of course all things "retro" are cool again (see the OSR and the revival releases of the last half decade of everything from the Bloodsword game books to Lone Wolf to Dragon Warriors) so I think it is worth examining DoD in the same light those games receive. A lot of talk on Swedish forums like this one tend to focus on the playstyle in terms of the adventures and like the OSR folks, it tends to pick out the really cool and unique stuff, while ignoring the stuff that kinda sucked. That's not a bad thing: After all, there is no point in revisiting the garbage when we can pick and choose now that we understand better what makes for a good campaign.
I think often the rules themselves get overlooked or even dismissed a bit. There seems to be an unstated assumption that DoD was actually kind of shit and that we should be lucky to have moved on. I'm not sure if some of that is just the general Scandinavian feeling that something can't be cool unless it's in English (certainly the case in Denmark) and it has always puzzled me a little because DoD holds up very well next to something like OpenQuest (which is quite popular) and certainly compared to many OSR games that are flooding the market.
More importantly, the experience I’ve had running DoD for American folks (with no prior exposure to the game) have almost universally been positive and the game has been very well received. So clearly, there is a bit of a grey area to discuss.
So I wanted to dig into a few considerations that I think affect how we look at old games, as well as maybe just sparking some discussion.
All of this isn’t to say that games like HT or Symbaroum cannot be improvements on the sort of mechanical structure DoD had or that DoD didn’t have its flaws. That’s for the reader to decide, we loved our time with HT for sure.
I think when we talk about old RPG’s there are a few factors that tend to color the discussion:
First:
Often we conflate the bad campaigns we played with the rules and assume that because our games sucked back then, the rules were bad. Thing is, most of us started gaming when we were children or teenagers and we ran the sort of campaigns teenagers run: Complete garbage
Bad GM’s, unfair rules decisions, players who just wanted to kill (or fuck) everything they met, cheaters and power gamers, you know the drill.Today, looking back at 30+ years of experience as gamers, we are able to create the sort of campaigns we always wanted to: Deep characters that interact in a living, responsive setting with cool and fun adventures to go on. And since we’re now playing D&D5 (or whatever) we tend to mentally assume this means D&D5 is the cause for the campaigns being so good, when in reality giving those books to a bunch of teenagers produces the same sort of dysfunctional garbage we all had to sit through. A look at the rpghorrorstories sub on Reddit should be ample evidence for this.
Second:
We all remember the really broken thing about a game because it’s usually something that grinds our gears when we play, and so when we switch to another game that solves that particular problem (or just handles it better) we tend to assume that the new game is better overall even if it has other problems that are as frustrating (or more so).
Of course this may be true for a particular person, but I think it tends to overlook other factors.
To use an example, D&D lacks the “ping pong” problem of old school BRP combat (where many blows are ineffective) but swaps that for problems such as caster supremacy, hit point grinding and the fact that many character builds are simply not viable mechanically.
Is that “better’? Well, it might be for a specific player because the problems of D&D may in fact be things you enjoy, but obviously by focusing on only specific concerns, we are missing out on the advantages we had as well.
Third:
Of course over the years playstyles also simply change. Games on the market today have different choices than the games of the 80’s.
Games today tend towards the more heroic and dramatic (D&D5, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, 13th Age) and / or tend to put higher emphasis on being mechanically intricate or high concept.
The game design spirit of the 80s BRP era was heavily driven by the assumption that games should simulate a world to some extent (a style that has almost entirely disappeared outside of games like Harnmaster), that the rules should be a fairly solid framework but should NOT try to account for every possible situation and that characters should be defined by their skills, not a list of bespoke special abilities.
Now again, anyone might prefer one or the other, that’s really not the question. But it is worth noting that an old game will often seem “outdated” simply because it does not accomplish something that it never set out to do in the same way that we might prefer dogs to cats (if you are a monster
) but it’s not the fault of the cat that it is bad at being a dog.Fourth:
When a game has known problems or short-falls, it is common for us to focus on them because nerds like to discuss rules and try to come up with solutions. So it is easy for us to over-estimate the extent of the actual problem since we’ve talked about it so much.
I would argue that many of the problems with DoD do tend to be over-stated in conversation. After all, people played the game for years just fine: Ping Pong is a problem but many attacks cannot be parried, monsters cannot parry and most characters have very limited parries.
Spell casting being difficult is a problem, but a starting character can still get a few decent spells fairly easily.
Advancement is slow, but characters almost always improve a little bit every session and the training rules support the use of down-time between adventures.
Those are just examples of course, but the point is that many of the problems with any game can tend to get overstated. To use D&D as a problem, caster supremacy is a problem.. but its usually not such a big problem that it breaks the game and it is helped by a GM who understates encounter pacing (for example).
Tldr -
Often, we tend to judge old games on criteria that are not accurate and I wanted to take a moment to evaluate that a little bit. In turn, this will help us more accurately articulate what things could be improved in the game design and what things can be tailored to newer styles (HT again being probably the most clear-eyed example of this, done by people who clearly loved BRP but had very clear ideas about what they wanted to be different).
In conclusion, I’d throw out a couple of personal opinions, hot takes if you will: Three that I would wager are pretty well supported and the fourth which is purely personal.
A: For the time (mid-to-late 80s) the DoD rules, particularly with Expert as an option, compared very favorably to other gaming options on the market at the time in Sweden or in English markets (if they’d been able to read it).
B: DoD compares on decent, and often equal terms to other BRP systems, both at the time and today.
C: DoD was a superior option to D&D at the time.
D: Purely personally I would still take DoD 87 / Expert over D&D5.
Obviously you may fiercely disagree but I hope you found it interesting at least
