The early D&D combat system was a port of their Chainmail miniatures rules, {which the miniatures gamers I knew disliked, preferring WRG 4th or 5 edition}. Actually, by the way, that would be exactly my argument, that the rules were too abstract to do a good job of dealing with single or small group combat if the audience was SCA fighters. Also, they had a simple rule - a hero fighter counted as 2, 3, or 4 men ... fine in the Chainmail context, but it got absurd when you ended up with single fighters worth 12 men or 15 men. Hit points worked fine for a couple of levels, but when you got individual fighters with hit points equal to a dragon, it began to feel absurd, not mythical.
Incidentally, how to deal with one player whose gaming tastes are different from those of the rest of the group is a can of worms. It did not arise in my game, because everyone other than me thought my rules were clearly preferable to Hero Wars {which did not mean they liked my rules, but they were even more critical of Hero Wars}. I think this situation usually sorts itself out by the odd player out joining another group, but sometimes he is well enough liked and adds enough value that granting him a "heckler's veto" is warranted. After all, if a group has only one GM, and he hates a game, it is unlikely to be run now matter how much the other players may like it:-). That's an extreme case, but it gives you an idea of what I am talking about.
I think, by the way, that fans of story telling games generally are seen as elitist, because they claim to be uninterested in things that those of us who started in D&D or World of Warcraft were trained to care about. But this is very subjective and not very useful. Many people play D&D and like it; many fewer play HQ and like it. Even fewer, {I know of 6, in one gaming group, though the the couple of hundred downloads at BRP Central suggest there are probably others}, play my Fire and Sword rules and like it. The fact that I, as the author of another set of rules, am not wildly enthusiastic about HQ does not prove much. So I'll shut up, and let the HQ players deal with their own issues.
Ray,
Grimmund <grimmund_at_...> wrote: On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 3:25 PM, Raymond Turney
<raymond_turney_at_...> wrote:
> since one of the main issues the other designers of RQ had
> with D&D was that D&D was such a wretched simulation of SCA combat that they
> had trouble suspending disbelief in D&D long enough to enjoy the game.
I was under the impression that the early D&D combat system was a port from their tabletop miniature gaming rules, which were set up for unit combat with provisions for the occasional individual hero type 'special unit'. The D&D combat was a largely abstract system, not really a combat simulation.
Or am I reading that too closely, and you are saying that the D&D system was *so* abstract that it was distracting to people who had concrete experience with SCA combat, because it permitted things that they found unbelievable, based on their own armored combat experiences?
Grimmund
--
"Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Therefore: Knowledge corrupts."
---------------------------------
Powered by hypermail