Saturday Q&A (oct 21)

Hutchins in Florida writes:

I am interested in your take on the new generation of players.  I have seen several people on your site, and others, comment on how a lot of younger players want to start the game with a powerful hero, with access to lots of cool spells and/or equipment.  I have seen the same thing myself.  They don't find it fun to start with a weak character.

I think my generation (x generation) got started on AD&D rules back in the 80's, and so we are used to starting with relatively weak characters. In fact, I remember as a teen making characters based upon our real life scores as best as we could calculate (i.e. str 9, dex 10, etc) and having a go with that.  It was great fun. The joy of developing a simple peasant into a great fighter/wizard/etc., is so rewarding.  That concept doesn't seem to appeal to a lot of the younger generation.

Do you think there is something intrinsically different about the youngest generation that makes them yearn to start with highly developed, indestructible, super hero characters?  Or do you think I am misremembering my youth?  Or do you have other thoughts or observations about this?

Answer: I don't think there's anything odd or intrinsic about people who are taught to play a very different activity from that which existed in the '80s. We only know what we're taught.

You well know that the ground work for present-day players wanting good spells and items was first laid in those early books and magazine articles written in the 1980s.  I've made the argument for ages  that if you're in business, and you want that business to succeed, you don't say "no" to your customers. D&D never properly freed itself from the manufacturer.  When players back then weren't getting what they wanted, they sought other games or they carped and moaned in letters to editors that finally pushed the manufacturer into making "more stuff" an official policy.  And now here we are.  Why shouldn't the present generation want highly developed, indestructible, super hero characters?  The "rules" they read say this is how the game is played.

I'll remind you also that early D&D was a game that appealed to a very small number of players. My high school had 2100 students; there were less than 20 regular D&D players that came round to the cafeteria every Friday after school, when we'd get out of our last class at 2:20 pm and could use the gigantic cafeteria until 10 p.m., because there was always some sports event in the adjacent gymnasium. Usually, though, our games broke up at 6 because we were in our mid-teens and were expected home for dinner.

My point is that it was a select group. Our interest in RPGs grew from fascinations we had in wargames, fantasy and science fiction books, slashing and hacking and stealing treasure, and what not.  RPGs didn't appeal to more people because they were work to run and work to play, work to design and work to prepare.  D&D wasn't "popular" on any level.  It's what nerds played ... because we could do math and we read history and books about fighting and equipment, because that's what interested us.

Those things still interest young people. The internet is full of that. The core group that today writes their own video games, draws their own maps, designs their own adventures and enjoys head-to-head games where characters get slaughtered are still here, still with us, still playing every weekend and very like in the exact same way we did in the 1980s.

The difference is, when we played in that cafeteria in 1980 and '81, there wasn't some other hundred people playing a shouty dinky kids game with everyone talking in funny voices while pretending to be superheroes.  If there had been such people, we'd have despised them.  We'd have called them "tourists." We'd have discussed what these people were like in class and what grades they were getting, and we'd know they weren't ready to play a game in which death, math, problem solving and intuition were dire necessities.  We'd have tolerated them, sure ... but there'd be no question that they weren't playing OUR game.

These young people today that you speak of, that can't understand the simple pleasure of turning something humble into something great, were around then, and they're around now. Back then, as I remember, they were obsessed with school sports, bad television, concerts, talking on the phone, driving, dodging trains and whatever else they could do to fight back the incessant pounding BOREDOM that was the world before the internet happened. They were easy to avoid, especially as I remember they weren't ahead of me in line buying Magic The Gathering Cards and some garbage splatbook at the dark, dismal, badly stocked game stores I would visit sometimes, when I still believed someone would write something in a book that would make me want to buy it.

But now the game stores are huge and well-lit and full of absolute idiots, while the players like us, Hutchins, avoid them like the plague.  And a plague they are, gabbing about their silly version of the game on Reddit and social media, where they create groups to talk about the most pandering garbage imaginable.

The D&D players that are young and just like us, Hutchins, won't be found on Reddit. They don't watch Youtube videos about D&D. They don't buy company books. They don't go to company-sponsored game events.  Instead, they sit at home, on their computers, working on their worlds, running their quiet games every weekend, their back firmly turned to the "game culture" internet, which offers only vapid things.  But the young players in those games love them, just as we loved ours, and for the same reasons. And just like us in the 1980s, they have no one with which they can talk about it.

Chris C. writes:

I was wondering if you had a list of hexes and their contents in a table. That could be used as a "data model" for checking inconsistencies.  From your other posts, I know you've done DBA stuff. It's probably crossed your mind.  How would you reconcile them?  Or maybe they could overlap as boundaries of a sort.

Answer:  Having tried many times to build hex content into a simple table, I decided that a more thorough, complex formula was needed.  Mostly, this came about from a desire to fold the hex contents into the map-making itself, and progressively into the infrastructure-generation process I've developed.  The short answer is that you can find "hex contents" on three pages on the wiki:

• https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Bread_(symbol)
• https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Coin_(symbol)
• https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Hammer_(symbol)

These pages are incomplete regarding the descriptions of the contents named, but the existing presence of such things are there.  It's a forever-task I've undertaken to finish any complete rendering of the material.  Nonetheless, any reader can do their own work to expand on what's named there.

 _____

Thank you for your contributions.

If anyone wishes to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.