Grognardling: Mike Mearls Interview at Kobold Quarterly

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Mike Mearls Interview at Kobold Quarterly

Over at Kobold Quarterly, there's an interview with Mike Mearls. He specifically addresses some of the questions I've seen floating around the OSR blogs and it's just generally an interesting interview.

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Words of Wisdom from the OSR

When we encountered a trap or a puzzle, we had to work them out for ourselves; we couldn't just "make a Spot check at DC 15" to find what we needed. The longer I am involved in old school gaming, the more convinced I am that that is the crux of the difference between older games and newer ones…[R]olling dice should never be a substitute for individual cleverness and creative thinking. -James Malezewski

OD&D is not and never has been about who is most powerful; it is about teamwork and having fun by overcoming obstacles together. -David Bowman

The point isn't to make role-playing some sort of masochistic experience where it's all suffering and death and pain and failure. The point is, if all these things are real and present dangers, then success means more. -James Edward Raggi IV

OSR cliche: "We don't explore characters, we explore dungeons". Not exactly. I think the idea is more: what thing do you use as rocket fuel until the campaign gets into orbit and goes where it wants to go? I use a dungeon to get there. Freak monsters and puzzle traps are the selling point--but once the campaign gets into orbit it goes where it goes. Different gamers may all end up in the same kind of campaigns but they were sold on getting into that rocket ship for the same reason. -Zak Smith

Referees/DMs/Labyrinth Lords (or whatever you want to call them) are indeed the final arbiter of the rules and have the final word on what happens inside their world; however, each and every one of us who run an RPG have made the choice to cede that control to our players by the very nature of playing the game. If we wanted total control, we would write short stories, novellas and novels, not play RPGs. The dice are the mechanism by which we cede that control – they are the means by which player choices are validated every time they choose to do something dangerous. -FrDave

Enforcing the written rules is a small part of being a good DM. In my experience the players will respect that you want to keep the game moving as long as they are convinced that you are not an adversarial DM. I can smile while giving my players all sorts of bad news. And they don't blink when I run roughshod over their notions of how D&D works. How can I get away with this? Because they trust that I'm there to have a good time with them, not against them. Show that you will call things down the middle, but will give them every chance when you're in a grey area. Let them use and abuse the tricks on their character sheets and the crazy plans they come up with. Then when you kill them they'll understand that it wasn't anything personal. -Jeff Rients