Yeah. A demigod couldn’t provide the high level spells, but I remember it feeling like there was still an understanding that a high level cleric would get something for remaining loyal. After all, if you’re high enough level to cast 6th or 7th level spells and your demigod can’t provide those, you’re strongly incentivized to abandon them and join a stronger deity.
But because the demigod has less followers and less demands on their time, that means they can give the high level clerics more personal attention. Sure, you might not be able to cast that 7th level spell, but you might be able to get your god to actually come down and provide personal aid when you beseech them for something important enough. Because it’s kind of a symbiotic relationship. You as the cleric work hard to spread the deity’s worship and increase their status as they gain more worshipers, but the deity helps you as much as they reasonably can to do so. So while they can’t provide spells, they provide whatever boons and help they can, so that you as one of their high priests can do your job to make them more recognized, increase their divine ranking, and enable them to grant you spells.
I’d say it’s being powered by the residual divinity of the deity’s plane and, while the god is “dormant”, they still exist. The ability to grant low level divine spells is like breathing or heart beats; even in the divine coma it still happens but it’s still coming from the god.
A bigger question would be what happens is a god is destroyed utterly but I don’t think that happened canonically in AD&D until 2e with all the Forgotten Realms god war nonsense and even that’s just one setting.
Sometimes. Other times I think it waters things down. But religion has pretty much been a non-issue in the vast majority of D&D games I’ve either participated in or DMed so I can’t honestly say a cleric worshiping the concept of Good instead of a proper god like Lathander would have any significant impact on the game. It’s just a preference I have.
I will always give mad props to people like Gygax, Arneson, Greenwood, etc., etc. for their creation of D&D and how they shaped gaming in general. But I’m not exactly keen on running the game the same way they did. God knows I don’t find Gygaxian dungeons to be much fun.
I often listen to D&D horror stories on YouTube and sometimes I think “Well, the D.M. should have just put a stop to that.”
In this story, for example, one of the players (“Ross”) does the one thing that supposedly will just end the campaign and strand the party in the outer planes with no way to get back to the story.
My question is why did the D.M. allow the player to do it? Yeah, sure, player agency and all that, but there are limits. This player is just bored and stupid and no one else in the party wants him to do what he does, but the D.M. just says “Are you sure?” and when the player says “yep,” the D.M. throws up his hands and says, “Well, that’s the end of the campaign. You ruined it.”
I’m thinking, this is not a nightmare player problem. This is a D.M. problem.
It’s a problem that pops up when D&D is something you do with strangers or acquaintances rather than one of many activities you do with your core group of friends.
Ross, if he’s a real person, is an asshole. I would never play D&D with an asshole because D&D is something I do with friends. We don’t treat each other like shit, but we also have no problem giving each other shit for being dumb. Lacking a healthy social dynamic in a game based around collaborative storytelling is a recipe for disaster.
I used to do some gaming in a “gaming club” setting, but I stopped a long time ago. Life is too short to roll the dice (so to speak) on having a good time.
We did D&D Encounters at our local game store and we definitely met some assholes. Some people were just needlessly aggressive and combative. But that is also how we met our core friend group, including one of our best friends. Once we knew we had a good rapport, we moved it from the gaming store to our house. We were a motley crew – but it worked. I can in good conscience recommend things like Encounters (targeted toward new players) for people who need a group. Just, I guess, like dating, you have to sift through the assholes to find the gems.
Sure. As a kid growing up in Haifa, Israel I used to bump into him all the time.
My opinion on his character comes from how he screwed over Arneson and the other members of the D&D founding generation; from quotes like this one (anyone who endorses John Chivington has something seriously wrong with him); and from the general dickish tone of his essays in Dragon Magazine I remember reading when I was young. Maybe he was a nice guy in person, and we all definitely own him a huge debt of gratitude for what he helped to create, but his words and actions speak for themselves.
Right, orcs aren’t in any of the three categories of “always evil”, because they aren’t. Orcs have never, in any edition of the game, been listed as “always evil”. In 2nd edition and earlier, they were listed as “lawful evil” without any qualifier, but the 2nd edition monstrous compendium says of that spot in the statblock
That’s not exactly a sweeping absolute statement, there. Third edition and later added qualifiers, to be able to distinguish the likes of goblins and orcs from liches and demons, but while they called the latter “always evil” (which still explicitly has exceptions, just incredibly rare ones), they called the former “usually evil” or “often evil”.
As for divine casters following ideals (oaths, principles, whatever) instead of gods, I think that change was to appease members of real-world religions. Some folks (mostly American Christians, but that’s an awfully big segment of the market) objected to worshiping pagan deities, even as a matter of pretend in a game, and so they put in rules that say that you don’t need to worship pagan deities.
Pre-Covid, I played and ran a lot of Adventurer’s League which is the 5e “Sanctioned Play” style D&D event. It’s specifically designed for drop-in/drop-out play where you can just show up, play a 2-3 hour self-contained game and come back next time you’re able. In the years I did it, we were fortunate not to have too many assholes and the guy running it was pretty competent at assigning tables or pulling aside regulars to say “Hey, can you play Jim’s table tonight? I want to move this guy away from Sarah’s table…” I think most of the problematic players quickly realized that they weren’t going to get what they wanted and dropped out. I don’t know if he ever point-blank told someone they weren’t welcome back but he was good at showing them the door while giving them a chance to straighten up. Reading some “I tried to play at my local comic/game store…” horror stories, I don’t know if we were more blessed with good management, a lack of true dipshits/creeps/assholes coming in the door or some of both.
I also found my regular campaigns via Adventurer’s League and felt like it was a good way to network in a situation where you had more people wanting campaigns than active campaigns (and not enough wanting to DM to raise supply). It was also good for just a night of “beer & pretzels” D&D though where people weren’t taking shit too seriously and you knew you’d be rolling initiative at some point and progression was pretty fast so you could try new character concepts and see them realized rather than stagnating for six months at level four. I did feel bad when a new player would show up with their six pages of backstory because Adventurer’s League just wasn’t that kind of game; no one had time to explore your tragic past when we had three hours to wrap this up.
Ironically, I’d say it has just as much an appeal to atheists. Players who might hesitate to play a religious character, even one who believes in a made-up religion that has objective proof of its existence in its made-up world, would be fine playing a character whose powers came from his principles and convictions.
In this particular case, Ross is the D.M.'s friend and roommate. They seem to have a poor relationship. And it may be because Ross is a difficult person. But he also just seems kind of clueless when it comes to D&D, rather than an actual asshole. In these Ross stories, it seems to me that it’s the D.M. who isn’t doing es job.
I used to play a lot in the RPGA (WotC’s forerunner to Adventurer’s League for “organized play”), as well as in the Pathfinder Society (Paizo’s equivalent). For the better part of 20 years, I played at a ton of conventions and game stores through those organized play campaigns.
And, like you, I made a lot of friends that way, some of whom I went on to playing with in home campaigns, but I also met a fair number of people with whom I’d never willingly choose to share a gaming table again. Some of the problem players were uber power-gamers who dominated their sessions, as well as disengaged people who seemed to be just taking up space at the table, and flat-out jerks. The problematic players were definitely in the minority, but having to deal with getting one at your table was kind of the “cost of entry” for being able to play.
One of the things about organized play is, as you note, it’s not usually the place for deep role-playing or character development. There’s not time to do so, and most of the players are going to be focused on getting through the mission, and getting their XP and GP.
When I tried to get back into a campaign again a few years ago I tried to do this sort of play and honestly it wasn’t for me for exactly this reason. I gather this was the style of play favored in super old school D&D but for me the game has always been about a party going from killing kobolds to saving the world in an epic campaign (and growing from a bunch of mismifts to a well oiled machine along the way).
To be fair, organized play campaigns often do have story arcs which span across some of their adventures, and some do have very interesting, even epic, storylines. But, often, the individual adventures do amount to “three fights and a bag of gold.”
But, in practice, you usually don’t need to play the adventures in any particular order (other than having a character which meets the level requirement for any particular adventure), and if you’re playing with random groupings of other players every time, you definitely lose the feeling of “we’re a group of adventurers which is gaining experience together” – it can absolutely become “random assortment of murderhobos.”
My best experiences in organized play games were when I was playing regularly with several other players – we had characters who knew each other, and we were able to at least get a bit of that home campaign feel that way.
Player agency is a big part of it. As a DM, I’m often afraid of preventing a PC from doing something they reasonably might do because agency is important. But I need to learn how to call a time out and explain to them that their actions will do irrevocable harm to the campaign.
A few years ago I was running a campaign where the PCs were teenage mutant ninja animals and their master was Raphael. It was set a few decades in the future where mutant animals were more common but they were treated as property. But there were many humans who were sympathetic, there was pending legislation to recognize mutant rights, and of course an evil corporation bent on keeping mutants under their thumbs. A few adventures in, and the PCs are participating in an underground fight club to rescue some mutants when the NYPD shows up to shut it down. Two of the PCs just straight up killed six cops turning public sentiment against them. With the campaign in shambles after that, I ended it prematurely by having the PCs retreat to another dimension.
Looking back I should have said, “Hey, you want to go non-lethal with this? If you start murdering cops you’re going to end up harming a lot of mutants.”
