Roleplaying games are communal by nature. The “rules” we play by are often passed along more due to personal agreements and groupthink than actual “truths” underlying them. You often hear Tony and me talk about 1st and 2nd edition and say things like how crippling the critical hit and miss tables were … Only to realize there were no official critical hit and miss rules in those books, our playgroups just made them up! Or you hear that you can never play evil characters, but ask why and you find out the real issue was how one playgroup in one campaign went bad, and so no one’s willing to try playing evil again.
Myths like these are all over Dungeons & Dragons. We get playing, we get agreeing with each other, and ideas quickly evolve from opinions to facts to rules chiseled in stone by the weight of tradition. How many of these rules actually hold up on their own, and how many just need to be handled carefully for fun?
In our latest episode, we played MythBusters and took a look at how true the old saying “Never split the party” really is. Could it actually be more fun to split the party? How could DMs handle the difficulty of running multiple storylines at once? Etc.
Since then, we got together and talked about other myths we could try to bust in the same way (or, perhaps, a more methodical way … this last episode was pretty seat-of-the-pants). Here are four things we think are common RPG myths, and why they might not be true. How many of them do you believe? Do you still believe them after reading our take?
Myth 1: RPG Parties Need To Be Balanced To Be Successful
The idea is you need a well-rounded team to have good adventures, otherwise the party will run into problems they can’t overcome and die a quick, brutal and soul-crushing death. Without healing, trap-checking, tanking, utility, etc., you won’t have enough bases covered to have fun.
Is It True?
The system you’re running has a lot of influence on this, but we’ve certainly played in parties across a lot of systems that did not have all their bases covered. Either the DM can design adventures around the missing roles (traps are literally optional, healing potions can be plentiful, muscle can be hired at the local tavern, etc.) or the party can get creative and overcome those deficiencies themselves. Personally, I love when the party recognizes its shortcomings and figures out a plan to overcome them.
Myth 2: Encounters Need To Be Balanced for the Game To Be Fun
After all, encounters that aren’t balanced are either going to kill the party or be a cakewalk. Neither of those can be fun, can it?
Is It True?
This depends on your playgroup, but even the wimpiest group can enjoy the most over-powered encounter if the outcome doesn’t feel too punishing. And on the flip side, a lot of quick, easy encounters can be a lot of fun, so long as you occasionally throw in something tougher to challenge the party.
Whether or not the combats are fun has more to do with context. Every fight is easy for Super Man (except Doomsday). What’s interesting is the way his challenges are framed in the story. Killing a bad guy is easy. Convincing a bad guy to stop being bad is hard.
Likewise, a dragon encounter may be too difficult for a low-level party, but sneaking through its lair and living to tell the tale is pretty much the best part of The Hobbit.
Feeling over-powered and under-powered can both be their own kind of fun so long as the adventure is built to be fun around those imbalances. (This one might warrant more discussion in a podcast episode.)
Myth 3: Newer/Older Editions Are Better Editions
In theory, every new edition of any roleplaying game should further refine the mechanics, ruleset and world so it’s better than the ones that came before. So, shouldn’t you always play the latest version? Or the opposite could be true: Every new edition moves further and further from the Platonic perfection of the original vision, so don’t feed the beast by buying new stuff.
Is It True?
About half the people reading this probably just laughed their asses off because their favorite edition went out of print 20+ years ago. At the same time, new editions often do improve aspects of the game, make it more streamlined, improve organization, etc. The truth is, each edition of any game is a different game, and they’re usually designed to accomplish things previous editions didn’t do well enough. That means each edition is better at delivering a certain type of play experience, and it usually sacrifices some of what it used to do well to enable that.
In D&D, for example, I would argue the editions have moved away from detailed exploration of worlds and toward more character-focused play. They’ve also moved from very detail-oriented and equipment-focused character optimization to more general, accessible play. Those change the game. They don’t necessarily make it objectively better, but they make it better or worse for specific types of players.
The only important question is this: Which edition of which game system best supports the kind of game you want to play.
Myth 4: The Dice Decide the Game
We’ve all seen encounters swing on a critical or blown role. We let the dice fall where they may, and that determines how the story plays out, right?
Is It True?
It’s important to let the dice fall where they may and let the players enjoy or suffer the results of that roll and that encounter. But Sun Tzu said “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought,” and that goes double for your adventure and campaign. The campaign should never be ruined by a roll, good or bad. Always have a plan for how you’re going to keep things moving and fun no matter which way the dice fall.
What RPG Truths Do You Consider Myths?
This is just the start of a project we’re doing. We’ll dig deeper into more complicated myths as it grows, but we want to know: What are the biggest RPG myths you see? How are they myths? Do they contain a grain of truth? Tell us in the What’s Your Problem field at right or email us at 3wisedms@gmail.com.