Troll Lord Games

Little background.

I never liked D&D. Like many of us, I started off with D&D and played it back in the day. But, early D&D kind of underwhelmed me after awhile because of all the limitations. So when 3.0 and 3.5 D&D came out I was really excited but after some time I got to feel that the game was turning into a power gamers wet dream. Then I found C&C and found my favorite version of D&D. Still I had people within my gaming group who liked 3.5 and later Pathfinder so I went along with it.

Then I went to Garycon and played nothing but old school style games for three days. Now ever since I came back I have no real desire to play Pathfinder or any new version of D&D. I simply find myself liking the older stuff instead because they are just more simple and easier to play.

Has anyone else gone full circle like this?

I was always happy with 1ed AD&D and never strayed from it. I thought there were a couple of things in 2ed AD&D that I thought were cool and incorporated it in. But, as for 3ed, I looked at all the mumbo-jumbo and it gave me a headache. So, I never walked into the abyss (j/k).

GaryCon is a gas! Just like being a teenager again!

If it ain't broke, why fix it?!
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Eulaliaaa!!! Give those rapscallions blood and vinegar, wot?!

Be sure to check out Jim's artwork for sale:
http://jimhollowayart.com/id5.html

Ah great story. Personally, I never really got into 3E although I played it quite a bit. I always liked Basic D&D much more. Playing copius amounts of 3E became a chore and the roleplaying in our gaming group really suffered because of 3E. Sure, we have has awesome games of newer D&D, but, in my heart I knew it never matched the characters of earlier editions. For the past few years, I have been playing older versions of D&D at cons and where ever possible. It took a few years for C&C to catch on with part of our gaming group and now I play that regularly. 3E is still played, and I enjoy the company and story of the game, but I much prefer Basic/RC and Castles & Crusades.

~O
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> Omote's Advanced C&C stuff <
Duke Omote Landwehr, Holy Order of the FPQ ~ Prince of the Castles & Crusades Society

I have always been more into the simple forms of D&D myself. I played 3rd Ed for awhile when it first came out and DMed it quite a bit also (minus all the prestige classes) until I found C&C. I think the big turn off came when WotC quickly found D&D 3.0 outdated and quickly came out with version 3.5. I knew then that the game was doomed. I went on to play ICE's old MERP as well as HARP, but again I drifted back to simple game, thus I am now quite happy with C&C.
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Lord Aladar

Warden of the Welk Wood

Baron of the Castles & Crusades Society

The Poster formerly known as Alwyn

Senior Gamer - Member of the Senior RPG Tour

"NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT - At least not in Yu Gi Oh"
http://www.cncsociety.org/

Aladar wrote:
I knew then that the game was doomed.

Well the best selling rpg since 2000 isn't exactly doomed.
Seriously, after acquiring the OD&D rules set, it is that one rules set that I'd love to take a stab at.
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That is SIR! to you!

Yeah, 3E sold very well for a "doomed" game, possibly the best sales D&D ever experienced. Far better than what 4E has been experiencing.

As for me when I started out I played back and forth between the Mentzer boxed sets and 1E. I then moved on in 1989 to 2E, 3E came out and I resisted it until late 2001 and jumped on. I like it quite a bit as a player, but as a DM it is far more of a job than a game, so when I learned of C&C I latched on like a drowning man latches on to a life raft. It soon reminded me of something I had said many times when defending why I stuck with 1E and 2E rather than trying systems like GURPS and Rolemaster, and somehow forgot when 3E came along, "Simpler is better."

I have now fully rediscovered the truth of that simple little sentence and have no intention to ever forget it again.

So I really hope to make Gary Con next March so I can fully immerse myself in the joy of that simple little sentence.
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The Ruby Lord, Earl of the Society

Next Con I am attending: http://www.neoncon.com/

My House Rules: http://www.freeyabb.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... llordgames

I started with AD&D in the late 70's in the summer prior to 6th grade. Schoool started with me an avid D&D junkie.

2e turned me off with THACO and the slow dismissial of EGG.

I got into Rolemaster, and MERP, along wioth many other games in my desire to find a game I could call home.

I always found myself reluctantly playing 2E just due to the power of number of folks willing to play.

I had quite a few years hiatus from gaming due to working in small forest towns and living the fire camp life.

Finding an office job with 9-5 normal human hours allowed me to get back into gaming with 3.x as ther current game. I quickly realized it felt more like fantasy chess than D&D when I could not stop people from staring at the battle mat and counting squares. When a problem arose they would stare and stare at the battlemat as if the answer lies there or on their stat sheets rather than in their imagination.

Thats when I consiously went looking for something else and found C&C.

Since then 4e has come out and I have resigned myself to never playing "official" D&D ever again. I even looked at another "classic" game suystem with a large fan following only to be faced with marketing gimmicks, doodads, and a farther deviance from rpgs than even 4e has taken. The disgruntled fan base of that game system and the abomidable state of D&D has forced me to enter the arena.

As time passed I found myself becoming a reluctant game designer myself. First it was to just have a house game I could enjoy.

As time passed and my investement grew I realized I am in this all balls or nothing. As I saw others making their own attempts at design, I realized I am not alone in my own sentiment. As I read your post and the responces I know there is a need for games of the imagination even today in a glutted market and depressed economy.

Maybe even more so as the trends of current game systems seems to leave the old gamer behind.

Yes, I find myself wanting less rules and more imagination.
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'Nosce te Ipsum' -Delphic Maxim

'Follow your bliss.' -Joseph Campbell

I cannot say I have ever gone full circle in my roleplaying as I have long enjoyed various games for various reasons, at different points in my life. Sometimes, it was the calculating factors and direct control, like in Champions, or the free-form silliness of something like Teenagers From Outer Space. What I do know is that no game holds my interest for too long before I am off on wanting to play something else... sucks, really.
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Serl's Corner

serleran wrote:
I cannot say I have ever gone full circle in my roleplaying as I have long enjoyed various games for various reasons, at different points in my life. Sometimes, it was the calculating factors and direct control, like in Champions, or the free-form silliness of something like Teenagers From Outer Space. What I do know is that no game holds my interest for too long before I am off on wanting to play something else... sucks, really.

Yet you are obviously not a "flavor of the month" or "gotta collect them all" type of gamer so it must be something...

Maybe we need to quit being spoon fed the next product and need more interactive involvement?

I am playing with the idea of a fan driven universe.

The ultimate direction driven by the fans.

I figure this can be a wag the dog antithesis to current trends..
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'Nosce te Ipsum' -Delphic Maxim

'Follow your bliss.' -Joseph Campbell

old school gamer wrote:
Has anyone else gone full circle like this?

Sort of, yes.

I started gaming with AD&D First Ed. I played it for some time, until I was offered a box of Das Schwarze Auge (L'Oeil Noir in France) and started running games on my own. I went on with Mentzer Basic and Expert D&D, and then changed focus for basic role playing, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Call of Cthulhu, a lot of French games like In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas, Nephilim and a crapload of others (among which AD&D2). I then spent about ten years running World of Darkness games, until I burnt out on gaming.

3rd ed D&D made me come back to gaming. I was totally into the d20 boom, played and ran tons of different d20 games, among which the most memorable were to me Arcana Evolved and Iron Heroes. But then, I started to get tired of the focus on game mechanics for their own sake, limiting "game balance" to "rules balance", all the discussions about this or that being "underpowered" or "overpowered", the "builds", etc etc. Slowly but surely, I drifted back towards older editions of the game. First C&C, then farther, to full on AD&D and OD&D, just before 4e was announced.

Now, I sort of made my peace with the whole deal. I run OD&D, would run pretty much any version of D&D if asked, with each iteration being destined in my mind to a precise kind of game play and specific campaign set-ups. I like Pathfinder enough, and would run it for instance if I wanted a complex, finely tuned game system to represent any fancy in a mechanical way in the game world.

I even made my peace with 4e this summer, sort of, and look forward to Essentials. I will give it a chance. If it makes a few steps back from the full-on 2008 Heinsoo/Collins 4e D&D, towards a little bit more traditional game play, then I'll run it as a tactical game with role playing thrown in for good measure (or in other words, since each iteration of the game has a specific purpose, I wouldn't run the same game I run with AD&D with Pathfinder or 4e Essentials). We'll see about that.
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Building: The Tower of St. Makhab - The Medival Eurth

old school gamer wrote:
Has anyone else gone full circle like this?

Yes and no, I guess.

I started out in the mid-eighties after getting the Mentzer Basic set for Christmas. I liked it enough to get some of the 1E AD&D hardcovers that my local comic store carried and played that for a couple years. When the 2E Players Handbook came out, I immediately picked it up, and was pretty happy with it (although there were differences, I hadn't played AD&D long enough to really get 'embedded', so in my mind the differences weren't that tragic and the game was pretty largely back-compatible with a little work) I played 2E for about 5 years, through the Players Option days, and those were some of the best times of my life... and then I moved away from my friends and co-players and only played very occasionally.

About 5 years ago I connected with another group of friends who played 3.5 and asked me to join them. I picked up a slipcase of the core books, and relished the chance to play my favorite game again. But even though I liked those guys a lot (and still play with them) and was thankful for the experience, I could tell there was something that just... didn't feel completely right about the experience, the more weeks that passed. All the things I used to roleplay out-- bluffing, storytelling, diplomacy, problem solving and the like-- were all handled with nothing more than die rolls. Character creation was replaced with skill and feat building, and took a ridiculous long time. Rule Zero was replaced with the Rules Compendium. Battles had more options, but combats lasted forever.

At first I thought it was our GM's style of game. He prefered combats to role-playing and in-depth character background, and there was nothing wrong with that. It just felt more like a MMO-- all flash and combat and bad textspeek and no substance. So when WOTC said they were going to 4E (which sounded even more like a game based on combat and naught else), and Paizo announced Pathfinder, I chose PFRPG. But the more I learned, and the more I tried GMing the style of game I like to run (heavy character interaction and roleplay, challenges and villains based on character backstory), the more the 3E-style game seemed to confound me.

Last year, at Gen Con, the Trolls sold me on C&C, and since I've gotten it, and started GMing it, I've been happier with our games than I have been in years. C&C is simple. Easy to adapt and houserule. Role-playing-centric. Just like the games I loved way back when. I guess you could say I came full circle, although I've never really made my way back completely to where I started. Even though my friend GM's a game based on the old Mentzer set I started learning how to RP from, I actually prefer my new 'old' game of C&C to any of them.

I may be a little off topic there. Forgive an old guy for reminiscing.
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- "Sorry, I just happen to prefer games where the GM is an actual arbitrator and not the wall to roll dice off to decide what happens."

You know the only odd thing about this whole story is that I still like Hero System and I am actually thinking of running a 6th ed game in the near future. However that game, although crunchy seems to have a different crunch to it. Also I have been GMing the game(although I can't anyone to run it), for so long that I can handle it without any real trouble.

Still I like C&C as my favorite version of D&D.

Never went 'full circle' as I never saw the need or had the desire to

go further than 1st Edition AD&D -- until C&C which (to me) is what

1st Ed. was really striving for.

2nd Ed. I only played (using my 1st Ed. characters) because it was

the only game group I had -- and suffered the continual rules-lawyering,

"I'm a specialist-X with blah-blah-blah", and far too much arguing over

the 'fantasy accounting game' that 2nd Edition was.

3rd Ed. I looked at in a game store and that was enough of that, no thanks.

4th Edition I read about on the different RPG websites and it sounds a

real horror story to me.

The upside is that I found out about C&C on those websites and, in that

sense, have come 'full circle'. Enough rules to play and referee, not so

many tweaky bits to kill the fun.

That's funny...never ran into any of the issues folks keep coming up with re: 2nd ed., even using the skills & powers. Of course, the kits and such we never used...just the cool stuff like customizing races and things.

I don't know that I've come circle with anything...every edition (starting with OD&D) I've played has been a bit different (okay...with 3e a LOT different) than the one before...then I found C&C and diverted from the 4th ed train wreck.
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The obvious will always trip you up FAR more than the obscure.

Baron Grignak Hammerhand of the Pacifica Provinces-

High Warden of the Castles & Crusades Society

old school gamer wrote:
You know the only odd thing about this whole story is that I still like Hero System and I am actually thinking of running a 6th ed game in the near future. However that game, although crunchy seems to have a different crunch to it. Also I have been GMing the game(although I can't anyone to run it), for so long that I can handle it without any real trouble.

Still I like C&C as my favorite version of D&D.

I too play both C&C and Hero. Character creation in Hero can be overwhelming but once we are playing we hardly look at a book. I like the system. But for something different I am starting a new C&C campaign. I can already tell that my prep time as a GM will be less. Compared to my foray into 3.0 it will be a whole lot less.

Morgan

I ran a rather involved Champions/Hero game that went on for about 2 years. When I discovered C&C I had just ended the previous game and found that even though I like Hero I found that running C&C was so relaxing.

Sir Ironside wrote:
Well the best selling rpg since 2000 isn't exactly doomed.
Seriously, after acquiring the OD&D rules set, it is that one rules set that I'd love to take a stab at.

I meant that WotC would doom it, and they did with 4th Ed.
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Lord Aladar

Warden of the Welk Wood

Baron of the Castles & Crusades Society

The Poster formerly known as Alwyn

Senior Gamer - Member of the Senior RPG Tour

"NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT - At least not in Yu Gi Oh"
http://www.cncsociety.org/