(many thanks to the Joker for the handy quote) About a week ago, I ran a solo game for a friend of mine using the AD&D 2e rules after going back and forth between using AD&D 1e and 2e. Anyway.. while I was debating between editions and glancing between rulebooks something struck me. AD&D 1e materials (to include the DMG) included among their illustrations a few cartoons. Book 2 of the OD&D booklets did as well. AD&D 2e did away with all non serious illustrations (and frankly, the art was pretty unimpressive - but I digress). With 3.x, all the illos went for the "Look, I am a brooding antihero because my armor is all oversized and spiky, feel my angst" design asthetic. I can't comment on 4e since I refuse to even look upon it. The reason I bring this up is the earlier editions of the game took a middle of the road approach with tone. Not that they advocated running D&D / AD&D like Toon, but they weren't embarassed to throw some humor in the mix when it came to illustrations. While gaming humor has continued unabated (Knights of the Dinner Table and Order of the Stick are personal faves), it's kept away from rulebooks in its own little niche. My point? Somewhere around AD&D 2e gaming started to take itself seriously, perhaps because the first generation of young gamers was graduating from school. The "follow the storyline", "adventure plotted like a novel" adventure style became increasingly entrenched and along with this narrative-heavy play style came an "everything must be brooding and serious" artistic bias. With all the debate about "old school" versus "new school", storytelling versus sandbox adventure design, perhaps the question is simpler. Maybe it all boils down to "old schoolers" preferring a game that still had a sense of humor. Andy
I have to disagree with this. The basis of comedy and drama are the same. What makes them different is that comedy presents a gap between how one (or more) character(s) perceives the world in relation to everyone else in the story. Granted, there was a maturation in the audience as well as an increased sophistication in storytelling in RPGs, but that does not necessarily translate into an inherent gravitas in any given campaign. Where the emphasis needs to be directed may not be where it is going. Players should learn how to tell a story, but knowing how to structure a tale with a serious intent to stay true to the form or throughline is a different matter altogether.
The basis for comedy may be in the later versions (although we'll probably differ on what the comedy is about...) the OP is correct - 1974 OD&D and 1980s AD&D had a sense of whimsey and humor is that is lacking in the 2E and beyond core books. That does send a message.
Of course this is why some people really like the new version of Hackmaster, it has the sense of humor combined with a fairly serious rule set. I couldn't abide playing a game where some jokes aren't cracked around the table and there is a bit of humor involved.
Most of my campaigns, regardless of the genre, end up with a giant rock falling from the sky and killing everyone at least once. Sometimes it happens three or more times a game. In a sci-fi setting, I might change it up and make it a black hole that swallows the universe. I can't imagine the number of times the world has been sucked into a singularity or crushed under a universe-sized rock without anyone else realizing it. Mind you, these have at times been during extremely serious storylines.
Actually, I didn't mean the content of campaigns so much as the rules tone being adjusted to fit the perceived market. A small company or one controlled by the creator of a game will throw some humor in, if only sometimes for the heck of it. Once the suits take over, that sense of whimsy goes out the window. The focus groups want heavy, narrative storylines and brooding, epic tone (went the thinking, as time went on) so the suits only put serious stuff in the rules. In the case of TSR / AD&D, when the late 80's and 90's rolled around and everything turned into some campaign megaplot (as found in most of the TSR campaign worlds in the 90's) the humor and whimsy had to go out the window. The D&D / Mystara stuff were the last holdouts before they were buried (silly as some of that humor may have been). I guess what I was saying was that in retrospect the disappearance of random cartoons and humor bits in the rules was the symptom (ie. canary in the coal mine) that signalled the end of sandbox design and a light approach to gaming. What followed was the age of the overarching storyline and narrative railroading found in later TSR stuff. As always though, YMMV.
I honestly believe that can be recaptured. Part of the problem as I see it is the lack of teaching the basic elements of story in school as well as in RPG books.
I don't think it's all about story. If you look at the older books, they weren't telling a story as much as injecting humor and whimsy into the book. I don't get the sense that the older books took themselves quite so seriously as do the newer books. Everything is all sturm-und-drang with the over-muscled, over-hyped superheros. When a game is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, the human element is retained, and with it a sense of wonder and whimsy. When it's superheroes saving the world (again), it's way too serious and no humor is allowed. One could also talk about the faceless corporate attitude, but that's another thread.
To add to this, as I think it is a good topic, when did all the player races have to become... sexy? Female Halflings now look like miniaturized elves with curves that could kill (not to mention that they wear boots) and even the half-orc female art I've seen makes them look like Lyta from the WWE. Why can't we have ugly anymore? I won't even begin to tackle the elimination of gnomes as a player race...
In order to create the whimsy that can actually sustain a game, one needs to have a rudimentary knowledge of story. Part of the shift that has occurred is a direct result of a loss of understanding of how story works. The brooding sturm-und-drang style comes from the over-saturation of television programming. Networks, in order to compete with one another make extensive use of quick cuts and close-ups to make changing the channel a "risk" in losing the thread of narrative or imagery. One of the things lost in this style is the coherence of story. It's why most shows now are episodic and rarely have a throughline sustained across the life of the show, let alone a season. Some shows are starting to revive the practice of an arc, but they are still using the jittery quick cuts to keep an audience glued to the screen. Dramas are highly successful on television because of the heavy use of close-up shots that are meant to emphasize the character's emotional responses. Sadly, this is one of the reasons why "reality" TV is so popular. It's not just the proliferation of programming across multiple broadcast and cable networks, but also the "everyman" aspect due to the lack of trained actors in these shows. Who needs narrative when you got 2-second images and nobodies filling your airwaves? As to the sex factor in appearance of races in the newer games, that's a direct result of appealing to ego image. How many kids do you see watching programs nowadays that feature plain or ugly people? The glut of advertisement has amped up the image culture beyond what the US experienced during the early years of RPGs. While we still wanted our actresses to be as hot as can be, nobody cared if the hard-boiled detective was fat or wheelchair bound because he was still a man's man and had the chops to prove it. There is a bit of misogynist rhetoric in that, but in effect, that's what has led to some of the shift in the game's imagery. The more women become interested in the game, the more the female members of player character races have to bow to social pressures in order to retain that demographic. So, blame society and the sex drive if you have to, but they are a large part as to why things have changed. The fat, bearded, smelly guy living in his mom's basement is also a cause in the decline of new players. It's no longer cool to just be. You have to be what others want you to. I know this isn't something new, but the growing public consciousness on peer pressure can be seen with the numerous PSAs targeting this subject (e.g. the "Above the Influence" campaign).
I disagree, but I think we have a disagreement over what whimsy is. What do you think whimsy is? What do you see as whimsical?
Well, superheroes are a form of whimsy, so I'm not quite sure what you are fishing for in asking me to define something you yourself have yet to provide and why you disagree with me.
*laugh* So it's now "You go first"? OK, I'll bite. Dude, it's not personal, we're just having a friendly chat here. OK, I see whimsy much like the dictionary definition: # An odd or fanciful idea; a whim. # A quaint or fanciful quality There's no story needed to have folk art or whimsy. It's a quirk, a small thing that catches my eye and maybe puts me in that small kid space of just imagining. Yes, superheros are whimsy, but there's nothing lighthearted or humorous about them in how they're portrayed in the later versions, getting back to the OP. So again - how do you define whimsy?
I apologize if I came across as confrontational, that was not my intent. I was a bit taken aback by your question more than anything else. I have the same definition of whimsy as you. My interjection about the need for knowledge in rudimentary storytelling had less to do with a player's desire to throw in random fantastical elements that are there for no purpose than "because they can" then it does in the growing trend in RPGs to confuse a serious understanding of story with a serious story. I love dark and gritty fiction, but I can only take so much before I have to have something ludicrous enter the picture. It's one of the reasons I mentioned that at least once a week I would tell my players that a big rock falls and kills everyone. In addition to being a tension release, it's a way I break story so that the players are still interested in it, but don't get lost in the narrative. I guess I've been fortunate in that some of my MacGuffins have generated their own whimsy as my players scratch their head and try to understand how something as insignificant as experimental plastics are integral to a gritty space opera like Star*Drive. It often prompted them to spin crazier plots than I hinted at when I wrote them into the campaign.
This is indeirectly what I was originally referring to. If you thumb through the pages of the 3.x rulebooks, there is not much in the art and presentation to indicate that humor ever enters into gaming. By contrast, on page 11 of the AD&D 1e PHB you've got a cartoon of a fighter getting tripped by a banana dropped by a magic user's monkey (presumably a familiar) and getting zapped by the MU. On page 34 of the AD&D 1e DMG, there's a cartoon with some adventurers getting ready to enter a room where a bunch of ratmen worshipping a huge idol; the fighter and magic user are wearing Mickey Mouse ears and fake mouse noses, and the caption quotes the fighter telling the MU "This had better work!". When these little bits (some funnier than others) were sprinkled through the rules, I think it gave a new player or DM a better sense of the "dramatic range" of the RPG. Granted, gamers are more sophisticated these days, but if a new player reads the rules and the only presented activites are deadly serious combats and workd spanning quests, it will tend to skew game play that way. The presentation of the older rules sets was less sophisticated, but both depicted and I think encouraged a wider range of game play than the latest edition of the game. This may be due to the fragmenting of the RPG market into a thousand pieces with a one trick pony game for almost every possible genre and trope. That said, I find myself preferring the old bigger tent that the early rules presented. Anyway, just an observation.. good to see it made for some good discussion : ) Andy
