Post originally by LarsDangly at 2003-05-19 10:44:04
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Thanks for drawing attention to this terrific game. I think most prejudices about it are based on the earliest versions, which were very clearly designed for campaigns centered around british knights. However, the fourth edition of this game is arguably the best single-volume fantasy role-playing game available, and the expansion modules are some of the highest quality around and broaden the game to include many new character and npc types. In its current incarnation, it is not only possible but quite satisfying to play almost any kind of character. Magic and clerical miracles have a distinctive flavor unlike other games and might be hard to adapt to a setting rich in flashy magic. However, it fits its setting well and is the easiest free-form spell system I have played.
Post originally by Joe Grendel at 2003-05-19 21:56:51
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"IMHO Dungeons and Dragons took this over the top in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and the idea of a realistic medieval world was lost."
Um, it was over the top long before AD&D hit the scene.
Just a peruse through Best of the Dragon volume 1 (articles from the Strategic Review and The Dragon from the years 1975 through 1978) turns up these beauties:
James Ward talking about how he spent 90,000 gp of his character's wealth to procure a poison that his magic-user could use without the DM saying it'd evaporated, the creatures were immune to it, what have you.
Gary Gygax recounting an encounter between a Nazi SS patrol (complete with a tank and two armored cars) versus a 12th level evil cleric and assorted minions, humanoid and undead. Played out with D&D rules.
Gygax's invention of the random solo dungeon.
Mentions of players learning to speak Wall and Mule so as to interrogate walls and reason with mules, respectively.
There was no magical golden age when D&D was "pure." It was always goofy fun, from the get go.
Post originally by The Old Geezer at 2003-05-20 06:10:02
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And we liked it that way.
Purely for the record, the Fantasy expansion to CHAINMAIL (original 2nd Ed., 1970) was there for 'house rules'. Most wargames back then, except for SPI and Avalon Hill, were house rules - you just got a couple hundred copies printed up.
And what became D&D started later, originally as a wargame-type campaign. There were good players and evil players, but as evil kept getting whomped and evil players kept defecting, it reached the point where only the referee, Dave Arneson, was left to play the evil critters.
Not that it really matters anymore, I just feel this tug to try to keep the history accurate.
And Pendragon is an awesome game. It's one of the four RPGs ever published that really grabbed and excited me from the beginning.
1) Original D&D
2) 1st Edition CHAMPIONS
3) 1st Edition Star Wars RPG by West End
4) Pendragon
Post originally by larsdangly at 2003-05-20 07:44:58
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It is good to hear from someone who has been in the hobby longer than me! I wish to chime in with your comment about the excellence of old goofy games like original D+D. The people who post at RPG.NET tend to be devoted to and knowledgeble about games, but many of them have a reflexive disdain for old D+D and the way it was played. They are missing out on something great about the way the hobby started-it was fun, funny and not terribly hung up on the purity of rules or settings. Games are often humorless and take themselves too seriously now.
Post originally by Jay Triplett at 2003-05-20 09:48:45
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At the time the first D&D booklet came out, there were no fantasy role playing games. It began as a fantasy supplement for Chainmail and was printed in the same format as chainmail. Chainmail was a historical, tabletop battlegame. In the book Role Playing Mastery, Gary Gygax explains the evolution of D&D out of Chainmail. It is clear to see that he was originally responding to fan letters for some magic and religion rules for a historical battle game that some players wanted to add fantasy elements to. These players had never heard of geletanous cubes or carrion crawlers. They weren't familiar with the Greyhawk fantasy setting. They were just looking for a way to incorporate some mythical elements into their tabletop battle games.
D&D began as a tabletop battlegame and evolved into a new kind of game...a fantasy roleplaying game. Because D&D was the ONLY roleplaying game at the time, people did whatever they wanted with it. It became a Universal Role Playing system by default. This is one of the reasons it was well liked. This does not mean that historical gamers did not use the game for historical role playing or for semi-historical roleplaying along the vein of Pendragon.
It is easy to see an attempt to strive for some historical accuracy in the latter boxed sets with rules for city design, medieval governments, tournaments, diplomacy, warring nations, and the ability for players to "move up" in rank from vassal knights to dukes, etc.
A lot depended upon which group you were playing with, I suppose. My group was running semi-fantasy campaings in medieval Europe, while some groups were playing versions of goofy fun, as you refer to it, in Greyhawk or other fantasy settings.
I think my point is being lost here. You can take a historical game and adapt it to a high level of fantasy fairly easily. The purpose of this review is to introduce Pendragon for its fantasy roleplaying possiblilities.
Whether by design or not, Gregg Stafford's Pendragon system has many elements similar to the old D&D game, although Gregg's system takes care of many of the problems and complaints against Basic D&D. It may or may not have been his attempt to improve on the D&D system. Whatever the case, he came up with a system that I would have liked to see D&D evolve into, and I know that I am not alone in this feeling.
Surely the popularity of D&D is a testament that there are many people who just want to have fun without any genre restrictions and few restrictions regarding the reality that we live in. This review is primarily intended to address gamers who want a high degree of historical reality to their fantasy gaming. It involves a concept called suspension of disbelief. Even the names of characters in Gregg's system are different per culture to add to this suspension of disbelief. If one of the magicians in my party turns into a giant bunny rabbit to deliver a rabbit punch in the heat of a bar brawl, it ruins the fun for me...even though it is fun for him. It is funny for some players to have halfling characters that have gauntlets of giant strength so they can go around bullying larger characters. Although you could easily tweak the Pendragon rules to do such things, you would be trashing a lot of the care Greg has gone to make a historically realisitc game. I know it is hard for some players to understand, but historical and semi-historical fantasy gamers actually have fun playing role playing games, too.
Post originally by Shindorim at 2003-05-20 16:21:33
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<<Although you could easily tweak the Pendragon rules to do such things, you would be trashing a lot of the care Greg has gone to make a historically realisitc game. I know it is hard for some players to understand, but historical and semi-historical fantasy gamers actually have fun playing role playing games, too.>>
For starters, I want to thank you Jay for a great review. In a timely turn of fate, I read this, went to the game store, found a used copy for a nice price and picked it up.
What you're saying here has a lot of merit I think, but I might suggest that what you're proposing is a little intimidating. Games like Pendragon, CoC, Tekumel, what have you, that have well known or detailed sources and settings often carry the baggage of being "impossible games", along the lines of "Wow, it looks so cool, but I don't think I could ever do it justice". I think that this is an unfortunately pessimistic attitude. When one emphasizes the work that X designer has put into a game, and how grand that effort of verisimilitued is, I think a lot of gamers, for fear of failure and "not doing it right" never bother to try.
I haven't gotten through very much of the book yet but one thing that stands out for me is that Stafford seems to indicate that Pendragon is not exactly a historical sim. Its primary influence he sites as Mallory, a late medieval knight reflecting on the 6th century and applying his own values consciously and retroactively. The same holds true for his mention of T.H. White, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. There isn't really anything that can be pointed to in the cited source material as "the pure Arthur", and I think that it would be somewhat out of order to imply that potential players and GMs ought to go striving after some purity of re-enactment.
Believe me though, your point about the fun of genre consistency is well taken, and I don't mean to dump on you. The more extreme examples you provided are certainly valid points to raise. Why would "giant gauntleted halfling fancier guy" be playing Pendragon and not something more specifically engineered for a "wild and wahoo" play experience? I guess my point is that it may ultimately yield better results getting people to try the game if they didn't feel from the outset the weight of 14 centuries of distance and detail on their shoulders.
On dealing with the 1920's and unfamiliar cultures in CoC, the advice is to apply "friendly stereotypes", a theme which Stafford echoes in Pendragon, and to an even greater extent in Prince Valiant. Accuracy isn't the goal really, having fun is.
Once again thanks for the review and for introducing me to a really cool game. Cheers!
Shindorim
Jay Triplett wrote:
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At the time the first D&D booklet came out, there were no fantasy role playing games. It began as a fantasy supplement for Chainmail and was printed in the same format as chainmail. Chainmail was a historical, tabletop battlegame. In the book Role Playing Mastery, Gary Gygax explains the evolution of D&D out of Chainmail. It is clear to see that he was originally responding to fan letters for some magic and religion rules for a historical battle game that some players wanted to add fantasy elements to. These players had never heard of geletanous cubes or carrion crawlers. They weren't familiar with the Greyhawk fantasy setting. They were just looking for a way to incorporate some mythical elements into their tabletop battle games.
D&D began as a tabletop battlegame and evolved into a new kind of game...a fantasy roleplaying game. Because D&D was the ONLY roleplaying game at the time, people did whatever they wanted with it. It became a Universal Role Playing system by defau....
Post originally by Jay Triplett at 2003-05-20 16:53:10
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Very well, put, Shindorim.
In all fairness, let me say that I have played some wild D&D games and Bar Room Brawl one offs that were totally unrealistic... and very fun because of it. I also enjoyed Tunnels and Trolls and the Fighting Fantasy game systems which were basically designed for fun and humor. I played an Elvis Presley Dwarf with an electrified(magical)guitar that I could actually use as a weapon as well as for playing righteous rock in an old Dungeons and Dragons game. You are right. I would play something a little more geared toward that kind of play for a comical, beer and laughs one off. Murphy's World is excellent for this, although I don't think it is in print anymore. Tunnels and Trolls is good, too.
I hope I didn't give the impression that there is a right way to play Pendragon. This review is geared in the direction of semi-historical fantasy roleplaying, but it could be easily tweaked to allow for more fantastical roleplay or even humorous roleplay. Take your spells from the list in Tunnels and Trolls, with spell names such as "Take that you fiend," "Curse You," and "Whammy." Change personality traits such as Chaste/Lustful to Prude / Foxxy; or Trusting/Suspcious to Naive / Shrewd or make up Traits of your own like Dude/Dweeb. You can have a lot of fun with this game without changing the rules a lot. My whole point is that you DON'T HAVE to play the game like an Arthurian novel or even like Lord of the Rings. It is a very easy system to tweak without a lot of trouble.
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