A personal D&D experience [Archive] - Wizards Community

A personal D&D experience [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
jokotoko
01-06-05, 08:01 AM This is just a story of my personal experience with D&D. I’m not saying that the developments of D&D over the last years have been bad or anything else. It’s just my personal (and my groups) experience and opinion. Reading it just might help other D&D players to sidestep the pitfalls I have experienced.

I started playing AD&D some 12 years back during the 2e edition era. At that time I had read lots of fantasy books. A classmate invited my to a game with a lot of experienced players and I decided to join. I played an extremely stereotypical rogue with a cloak of invisibility that would activate when my character would put on the hood of the cloak (I had just seen the D&D cartoons). I’m pretty sure my stereotypical behavior must have annoyed the other players like hell. Nevertheless, I had a blast and since I was invited to every game since if figured so did the other players.
With hindsight I can say that the most important reason that I loved the game at that time was ignorance. Everything was new and when a monster was encountered I didn’t have a clue about its abilities and stats. Everything was one big adventure.

After a couple of years more experience as a player and a DM 3.0 came out. At first, our group only had two PHB’s, but we started playing nevertheless. Once again, we all loved the game. At this time we got some new players involved and we focused heavily on the role-playing part. We didn’t know about a lot of rules and just made them up on the fly. Most of the time, nobody was even interested in protesting, because the game was just so exiting and everyone wanted to move on. A good example is the fact when the DM sent some Orc slave drivers against us. They used whips. For some reason, none of us new that that were rules for whips and tripping in the PHB (no one read the book very far past the character creation at that time). However, the rules made up by the DM sounded reasonable (even though they sometimes were not) and we all had a blast.
After some time, I bought a lot of other books (due to an better financial situation) and started to read all of them. I also visited the D&D boards regularly and got to know more and more about D&D and the rules. However, as I got to know the rules better and better (and I do not claim to know them that well) the fun I had in playing D&D started to decrease. Especially after a couple of visits to the character-optimization boards, I started to focus more on the statistical aspects of D&D than on the role-playing part. All of a sudden I found myself planning characters from 1st till 20th level, including feats, magical items I though myself entitled to and so on. I came into contact with loopholes in the rules I had never thought about (Balor mining and such) and at a certain moment in time I noticed that I wasn’t playing a character anymore; I was playing a bunch of statistics. I wasn’t interested in the fight with legendary monsters; I was interested in the magical items in its loot. I started arguing with my fellow players about rules. I mostly won those arguments, because I know/knew the rules better than my fellow players. The point is however, that it started to ruin our gaming experience.
My interest in statistics got even larger when I got a lot of splat-books. I started combining classes, feats and PrCs to achieve the most powerful characters. As I was playing a wizard at the time, I started looking for killer spell-combos. I must have driven our DM mad at the time.

I discovered this problem after reading some of the discussions on these boards and decided to talk to my gaming group about it. Together we found some sort of a middle road. We use a lot of my rules-knowledge (not so hard since I’m the DM now), but keep focused on the amount of fun we have. Instead of focusing on the statistics of the game I am, bit-by-bit, getting more focused on character development again. Our gaming group now consists of a few, very non-optimal, multiclassed characters and I still have trouble not making my NPCs uber adventurers some times. We decided not to use a lot a splat-books anymore and to allow only one PrC per character. When I’m done DM’ing this game, I hope I can play a character again and focus on its character development instead of spending hours planning its next PrC to take or item to buy.

As mentioned earlier, I’m not saying that power-gamers, munchkins or whatever are wrong or that the type of game we play now is better or whatever. This is just my personal experience, and from these boards I derive that there are more people with similar feelings. For me, doing away with a lot of splat-books and focusing on the spirit of the game, rather than the Rules As Written, has helped me rediscovering the amazing amount of fun you can have with D&D. Do not let any kind of statistics or rules take the fun out of your game.

Happy gaming!
NehpetsTtocs
01-06-05, 08:10 AM Thinking back, I can sort of understand where you're coming from, at least with the newness of the game. When I first started playing DnD, aeons ago, I didn't know the rules very well and every new item and monster impressed the living heck out of me. That wore off, and I'm not sure that will ever come back.

What I don't lament about the game, is being able to plan my character's career. This wasn't so important in first or second edition, but when I played third edition for the very first time I died often. I kept playing "a kick down the door" style of play; the same way I played in earlier editions, and that didn't work. For my own part, character mapping, for lack of a better term, is what keeps me coming back to the game.

Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
KelanenPrinceofSwords
01-06-05, 08:49 AM I'd surmise that you will find your gaming experience the better for your having learned the "official" rules, as long as you are DM especially. But I definitely agree that the current editions encourage alot of focus on gaining levels and suped-up, uber-powerful, PC-wizard-made magic items. Character optimization is not a bad thing in itself; I think it's a great idea, because most D&D worlds can be lethal at times. It only becomes a problem when players ignore little unimportant details like plot, character development (in a role-playing sense, not "Now I can fire my +5 seeking ghost-touch flaming longbow in melee without provoking an AoO!"), and the adventure they supposedly are on.
Staver
01-06-05, 09:13 AM Good topic. I'd like to add my own 2cp to the mix here. Something that is working very well for me is what I call the "evolving backstory".

When I first created my current character, my backstory for him was maybe a paragraph. It's now over 5 pages long. Some of it is journal-style entries on adventures he's been on, but for this character I have been very careful to not do it in the style of "then we went 26 feet down the corridor, turned right and met a Red Dragon". The character has unresolved issues, such as considering changing his patron deity, and I have been working on telling a story of how his interactions with the gaming world are altering his perceptions of deities, etc. so changes he makes have a solid reason behind them.

The other thing I am doing in his backstory is rationalizing his min/maxing. For example, I decided in mapping out his next few levels that I wanted 5 ranks in Bluff for the Synergy bonus with Intimidate. In his backstory, I rationalized it as he would play poker with the other characters or NPC's and always lose. Someone took pity on him and began teaching him the "poker face", or how to Bluff. After the basics they went on to more advanced lessons, but eventually he will not only have his 5 ranks in Bluff, he will have a darn good reason for doing so!

To further reinforce that second point, if I cannot come up with any rational reason why my character would do something, such that I could backstory it, I do not do it, even if it would be advantageous from a min/max point of view.

Well, that ended up longer than I expected, sorry.

-Staver :D
Stuntman
01-06-05, 12:28 PM I was a min/maxer right from the start. My experience actually started with computer games, namely the Ultima series. I started with Ultima III which got me hooked and then played Ultima IV which I still consider to be the best game ever. My only issue was that the exact rules on attacking wasn't published to gamers. The programmers kept that secret. That frustrated me.

One day I was in a book store and saw the AD&D PH (1st Edition). I flipped through it and was happy to see rules associated with the stats of the characters. I got the DMG and MM shortly after and got some friends and started to play.

My first game which I DM'ed went like this:

DM: You are walking through a forest and...
DM rolls dice.
DM: you see a <insert monster rolled>.
A battle ensues.
Repeat above a couple of time.

We had a blast.

Since then as a player, I always min/maxed characters. I found that multiclassed characters were better than single classed characters. I found other ways to min/max in 1E and 2E when it came out in the 90's.

I didn't really discovered the role playing aspect of D&D until around 1995 when I had a DM that really emphasised it. I thought it was really cool that there can be such a rich story behind all of this hack and slash that I did. It took me a few years playing with this DM before I really started to adjust to this new style of play. Actually, it just hit me one day when we were playing. I just suddenly got into character in a particular scene when my character was talking to his mother. I felt like I just graduated into the role playing aspect of the game.

Still I'm a min/maxer. I look at my character concept and determine which skills, feats and other abilities to take over the next few levels. I still min/max, but I would do so within my character concept. Also, knowing the rules does help me design the character on paper better. If I want to do some things really well, and be mediocre on other things and just dabble at others, I can build a character whose stats resemble this. Also, I know that I can't make a character who is good at too many things. After all, there is some limits for balance reasons.

As for how fun I have, I do feel that I had way more fun later in my D&D career after learning the role playing aspect. I didn't feel that my knowledge of the rules were really a hindrance to my enjoyment of the game. I find that I can enjoy more aspects of the game. If I didn't discover the role playing aspect of D&D, my characters now would be way more min/maxed than they are now. Not taking into account the role playing side of things would enable me to have a more optimised character. However, I really feel that characters I make now are better and richer because they are not simply game pieces on a battle grid.

There are still opportunities for me to min/max without worrying about character depth. These opportunities exist in the computer D&D games I play like Temple of Elemental Evil. The characters I make in this environment are totally maxed out for obvious reasons. When playing PnP, my characters are less maxed, and have greater depth. However, they are maxed to fit my character concept.

With regard to knowing the rules, I felt that I had a lot of fun exploring the rules. When I didn't know all of the rules, the discovery of a new tactic was exciting. After I discovered them, it was more or less automatic to use these tactics. I got less enjoyment of the tactical aspect, but the advantage is that I didn't have to think about it as much. The game would go much faster for me and it would allow me to concentrate on the role playing aspect of the game which I still feel I can improve on. I am definitely not a top notch role player, but I try to do the best I can. Right now I enjoy the RP aspect a lot more when playing PnP style.

Playing a computer game, I don't care much about RP. I just try to kill as many things I can and collect as much treasure as I can. There is a time and place for each style of game that I like.
icote
01-06-05, 01:30 PM Knowledge of the rules and statistics can certainly be a problem, because as a player you start to rule out tactics/actions that aren't entirely efficient.

Why should I try to drop kick a troll out the window, when just taking my two attacks would be more efficient, or more likely to suceed.

The key is to let character be king and use that to determine your actions, instead of turning the game into a numbers crunch to determine the best possible action for your character.
jokotoko
01-07-05, 02:25 AM To add to my previous story. Things actually got worse when I started playing video games. When I played Baldurs Gate 1, nothing was wrong. However, a couple of years ago I bought NWN 1. I know, it was out a long time by then, but I tend to love older games plus my computer isn't really state of the art. I NWN you can observe all the rules and I started creating "uber" characters in NWN as well. It wasn't pretty and added to the "statistification" of my D&D experience.
Draco Strang
01-07-05, 11:00 AM I had sort of the same experience. I was 9 when I started playing, and every time the DM narrated a monster encounter, I almost peed myself with a mixture of fear, anticipation, and excitement. I had a blast. I remember getting my first +1/+1 longsword, and hell, I gave the thing a name.

Then I started DMing, using the 2nd edition black and red books (final revision, what I consider the best one of 2nd ed, even if it is a tick bloated). From there, the game did indeed become a lot of numbers and rolls to me.

Then 3rd edition came out, and I participated in "The Sunless Citadel" and I fell in love again, becoming that same 9 year old, but this time peeing myself everytime a goblin or kobold came in view.

Since then, I've managed to play in both powergamer campaigns that are very character/story oriented (sure we have great stats and uber statistics, but there are reasons for it and we make in game sacrifices for them) and non-optimized campaigns where the 11th level wizard only has 16 intelligence, fighting right next to the barbarian with a 13 constitution.

Both of these styles can be, and are, fun to me and the groups I play in.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
jokotoko 01-06-05, 08:01 AM	This is just a story of my personal experience with D&D. I’m not saying that the developments of D&D over the last years have been bad or anything else. It’s just my personal (and my groups) experience and opinion. Reading it just might help other D&D players to sidestep the pitfalls I have experienced. I started playing AD&D some 12 years back during the 2e edition era. At that time I had read lots of fantasy books. A classmate invited my to a game with a lot of experienced players and I decided to join. I played an extremely stereotypical rogue with a cloak of invisibility that would activate when my character would put on the hood of the cloak (I had just seen the D&D cartoons). I’m pretty sure my stereotypical behavior must have annoyed the other players like hell. Nevertheless, I had a blast and since I was invited to every game since if figured so did the other players. With hindsight I can say that the most important reason that I loved the game at that time was ignorance. Everything was new and when a monster was encountered I didn’t have a clue about its abilities and stats. Everything was one big adventure. After a couple of years more experience as a player and a DM 3.0 came out. At first, our group only had two PHB’s, but we started playing nevertheless. Once again, we all loved the game. At this time we got some new players involved and we focused heavily on the role-playing part. We didn’t know about a lot of rules and just made them up on the fly. Most of the time, nobody was even interested in protesting, because the game was just so exiting and everyone wanted to move on. A good example is the fact when the DM sent some Orc slave drivers against us. They used whips. For some reason, none of us new that that were rules for whips and tripping in the PHB (no one read the book very far past the character creation at that time). However, the rules made up by the DM sounded reasonable (even though they sometimes were not) and we all had a blast. After some time, I bought a lot of other books (due to an better financial situation) and started to read all of them. I also visited the D&D boards regularly and got to know more and more about D&D and the rules. However, as I got to know the rules better and better (and I do not claim to know them that well) the fun I had in playing D&D started to decrease. Especially after a couple of visits to the character-optimization boards, I started to focus more on the statistical aspects of D&D than on the role-playing part. All of a sudden I found myself planning characters from 1st till 20th level, including feats, magical items I though myself entitled to and so on. I came into contact with loopholes in the rules I had never thought about (Balor mining and such) and at a certain moment in time I noticed that I wasn’t playing a character anymore; I was playing a bunch of statistics. I wasn’t interested in the fight with legendary monsters; I was interested in the magical items in its loot. I started arguing with my fellow players about rules. I mostly won those arguments, because I know/knew the rules better than my fellow players. The point is however, that it started to ruin our gaming experience. My interest in statistics got even larger when I got a lot of splat-books. I started combining classes, feats and PrCs to achieve the most powerful characters. As I was playing a wizard at the time, I started looking for killer spell-combos. I must have driven our DM mad at the time. I discovered this problem after reading some of the discussions on these boards and decided to talk to my gaming group about it. Together we found some sort of a middle road. We use a lot of my rules-knowledge (not so hard since I’m the DM now), but keep focused on the amount of fun we have. Instead of focusing on the statistics of the game I am, bit-by-bit, getting more focused on character development again. Our gaming group now consists of a few, very non-optimal, multiclassed characters and I still have trouble not making my NPCs uber adventurers some times. We decided not to use a lot a splat-books anymore and to allow only one PrC per character. When I’m done DM’ing this game, I hope I can play a character again and focus on its character development instead of spending hours planning its next PrC to take or item to buy. As mentioned earlier, I’m not saying that power-gamers, munchkins or whatever are wrong or that the type of game we play now is better or whatever. This is just my personal experience, and from these boards I derive that there are more people with similar feelings. For me, doing away with a lot of splat-books and focusing on the spirit of the game, rather than the Rules As Written, has helped me rediscovering the amazing amount of fun you can have with D&D. Do not let any kind of statistics or rules take the fun out of your game. Happy gaming!
NehpetsTtocs 01-06-05, 08:10 AM	Thinking back, I can sort of understand where you're coming from, at least with the newness of the game. When I first started playing DnD, aeons ago, I didn't know the rules very well and every new item and monster impressed the living heck out of me. That wore off, and I'm not sure that will ever come back. What I don't lament about the game, is being able to plan my character's career. This wasn't so important in first or second edition, but when I played third edition for the very first time I died often. I kept playing "a kick down the door" style of play; the same way I played in earlier editions, and that didn't work. For my own part, character mapping, for lack of a better term, is what keeps me coming back to the game. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
KelanenPrinceofSwords 01-06-05, 08:49 AM	I'd surmise that you will find your gaming experience the better for your having learned the "official" rules, as long as you are DM especially. But I definitely agree that the current editions encourage alot of focus on gaining levels and suped-up, uber-powerful, PC-wizard-made magic items. Character optimization is not a bad thing in itself; I think it's a great idea, because most D&D worlds can be lethal at times. It only becomes a problem when players ignore little unimportant details like plot, character development (in a role-playing sense, not "Now I can fire my +5 seeking ghost-touch flaming longbow in melee without provoking an AoO!"), and the adventure they supposedly are on.
Staver 01-06-05, 09:13 AM	Good topic. I'd like to add my own 2cp to the mix here. Something that is working very well for me is what I call the "evolving backstory". When I first created my current character, my backstory for him was maybe a paragraph. It's now over 5 pages long. Some of it is journal-style entries on adventures he's been on, but for this character I have been very careful to not do it in the style of "then we went 26 feet down the corridor, turned right and met a Red Dragon". The character has unresolved issues, such as considering changing his patron deity, and I have been working on telling a story of how his interactions with the gaming world are altering his perceptions of deities, etc. so changes he makes have a solid reason behind them. The other thing I am doing in his backstory is rationalizing his min/maxing. For example, I decided in mapping out his next few levels that I wanted 5 ranks in Bluff for the Synergy bonus with Intimidate. In his backstory, I rationalized it as he would play poker with the other characters or NPC's and always lose. Someone took pity on him and began teaching him the "poker face", or how to Bluff. After the basics they went on to more advanced lessons, but eventually he will not only have his 5 ranks in Bluff, he will have a darn good reason for doing so! To further reinforce that second point, if I cannot come up with any rational reason why my character would do something, such that I could backstory it, I do not do it, even if it would be advantageous from a min/max point of view. Well, that ended up longer than I expected, sorry. -Staver :D
Stuntman 01-06-05, 12:28 PM	I was a min/maxer right from the start. My experience actually started with computer games, namely the Ultima series. I started with Ultima III which got me hooked and then played Ultima IV which I still consider to be the best game ever. My only issue was that the exact rules on attacking wasn't published to gamers. The programmers kept that secret. That frustrated me. One day I was in a book store and saw the AD&D PH (1st Edition). I flipped through it and was happy to see rules associated with the stats of the characters. I got the DMG and MM shortly after and got some friends and started to play. My first game which I DM'ed went like this: DM: You are walking through a forest and... DM rolls dice. DM: you see a <insert monster rolled>. A battle ensues. Repeat above a couple of time. We had a blast. Since then as a player, I always min/maxed characters. I found that multiclassed characters were better than single classed characters. I found other ways to min/max in 1E and 2E when it came out in the 90's. I didn't really discovered the role playing aspect of D&D until around 1995 when I had a DM that really emphasised it. I thought it was really cool that there can be such a rich story behind all of this hack and slash that I did. It took me a few years playing with this DM before I really started to adjust to this new style of play. Actually, it just hit me one day when we were playing. I just suddenly got into character in a particular scene when my character was talking to his mother. I felt like I just graduated into the role playing aspect of the game. Still I'm a min/maxer. I look at my character concept and determine which skills, feats and other abilities to take over the next few levels. I still min/max, but I would do so within my character concept. Also, knowing the rules does help me design the character on paper better. If I want to do some things really well, and be mediocre on other things and just dabble at others, I can build a character whose stats resemble this. Also, I know that I can't make a character who is good at too many things. After all, there is some limits for balance reasons. As for how fun I have, I do feel that I had way more fun later in my D&D career after learning the role playing aspect. I didn't feel that my knowledge of the rules were really a hindrance to my enjoyment of the game. I find that I can enjoy more aspects of the game. If I didn't discover the role playing aspect of D&D, my characters now would be way more min/maxed than they are now. Not taking into account the role playing side of things would enable me to have a more optimised character. However, I really feel that characters I make now are better and richer because they are not simply game pieces on a battle grid. There are still opportunities for me to min/max without worrying about character depth. These opportunities exist in the computer D&D games I play like Temple of Elemental Evil. The characters I make in this environment are totally maxed out for obvious reasons. When playing PnP, my characters are less maxed, and have greater depth. However, they are maxed to fit my character concept. With regard to knowing the rules, I felt that I had a lot of fun exploring the rules. When I didn't know all of the rules, the discovery of a new tactic was exciting. After I discovered them, it was more or less automatic to use these tactics. I got less enjoyment of the tactical aspect, but the advantage is that I didn't have to think about it as much. The game would go much faster for me and it would allow me to concentrate on the role playing aspect of the game which I still feel I can improve on. I am definitely not a top notch role player, but I try to do the best I can. Right now I enjoy the RP aspect a lot more when playing PnP style. Playing a computer game, I don't care much about RP. I just try to kill as many things I can and collect as much treasure as I can. There is a time and place for each style of game that I like.
icote 01-06-05, 01:30 PM	Knowledge of the rules and statistics can certainly be a problem, because as a player you start to rule out tactics/actions that aren't entirely efficient. Why should I try to drop kick a troll out the window, when just taking my two attacks would be more efficient, or more likely to suceed. The key is to let character be king and use that to determine your actions, instead of turning the game into a numbers crunch to determine the best possible action for your character.
jokotoko 01-07-05, 02:25 AM	To add to my previous story. Things actually got worse when I started playing video games. When I played Baldurs Gate 1, nothing was wrong. However, a couple of years ago I bought NWN 1. I know, it was out a long time by then, but I tend to love older games plus my computer isn't really state of the art. I NWN you can observe all the rules and I started creating "uber" characters in NWN as well. It wasn't pretty and added to the "statistification" of my D&D experience.
Draco Strang 01-07-05, 11:00 AM	I had sort of the same experience. I was 9 when I started playing, and every time the DM narrated a monster encounter, I almost peed myself with a mixture of fear, anticipation, and excitement. I had a blast. I remember getting my first +1/+1 longsword, and hell, I gave the thing a name. Then I started DMing, using the 2nd edition black and red books (final revision, what I consider the best one of 2nd ed, even if it is a tick bloated). From there, the game did indeed become a lot of numbers and rolls to me. Then 3rd edition came out, and I participated in "The Sunless Citadel" and I fell in love again, becoming that same 9 year old, but this time peeing myself everytime a goblin or kobold came in view. Since then, I've managed to play in both powergamer campaigns that are very character/story oriented (sure we have great stats and uber statistics, but there are reasons for it and we make in game sacrifices for them) and non-optimized campaigns where the 11th level wizard only has 16 intelligence, fighting right next to the barbarian with a 13 constitution. Both of these styles can be, and are, fun to me and the groups I play in.