I'm fairly certain max HP at 1st level was part of the 3e core rules.
Yes it was, if memory serves.
Ilbranteloth said:
Some observations and thoughts.
Many of which are absolutely spot-on.
The game has shifted progressively toward player enablement for decades. In OD&D and AD&D, the game was presented as one where the the DM is in charge, and the players are coming to play in their game. The DM, especially before the publication of settings like Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Realms, was expected to design the setting, assuming there was one.
And determine the general story as well, where one existed.
At some point, TSR figured out that there were far more players that DMs. The majority of the books (monster manuals, etc.) and adventures were published for DMs, though. They could greatly increase sales if they started targeting the players. I see this as a dramatic shift in design and presentation of the game. Now, there were books of a great many options for the players, and despite them being "optional," they wanted to play them. They spent the money, they liked the ideas, and that seems reasonable enough.
Combine that with limited if any playtesting and the recipe for disaster is complete.
By 3e, instead of publishing player and DM books, they combined them altogether. So a new FR release, for example, contained setting information (primarily copied from the 2e sourcebooks), and new races, classes, feats, spells, and magic items. This pattern was very consistent (at least in the Forgotten Realms). This was an even bigger shift. Because now all of those options were canonical. The DM couldn't say as easily that "I don't like that race, and they are optional, they aren't part of the Realms." No, now they were officially part of the Realms, and limiting options was now seen as the DM taking something away.
Overall, this is perhaps the biggest shift...the loss - be it perceived or real - of a DM's authority to remove unwanted aspects from her game.
There have always been gamers that approach D&D as a game of rules and numbers to be optimized. Munchkinizers, min/maxers, optimizers, whatever you want to call them (often derivatively). This became a problem for many in 2e, simply because there was an enormous amount of power creep in the releases over the years. Things were often rushed, it seems that being a publisher took priority over game designers. So the quality of the game design suffered. All of these new rules provided lots of opportunity for optimizing, and even potentially "breaking" the game.
And let's face it, if someone really wants to break the game they can, in any edition. To me, not deliberately trying to break the game is just a matter of playing in good faith. Unfortunately, some players simply don't get this concept; leading to ever-tighter and ever-blander rules for the rest of us...though in fairness 5e has tried to backpedal on this a bit.
Another shift that happened was the introduction of the standard array as the default option for character creation.
I didn't think the array method was default-by-RAW in any edition...yet.
However, the introduction of it as first a trial-balloon option and then as a core option had the effects you note.
With that, every optimizer would know exactly what they are starting with. By studying the rules, you could map out "optimal" paths of abilities. I think this was the missing link for the introduction of the "character build."
Interesting and astute observation.
It sometimes seems that character build has become more important than character play in some circles.
Even more reason that standard-array will never be used here.
The fact is, these differing playstyles always existed. I'm sure my perception of how things evolved isn't the same as everybody elses.
It more or less matches my own in its general principle; and who cares about minor specifics.
But there are some key features that I think changed the landscape of D&D in a big way:
Player enablement is the big one for me. For many, it's not the DMs game anymore. The DM doesn't have the authority they used to have, for good and bad. Many, like me, still run the game that way. The setting, rules, and options for you to choose are in my domain.
This is a big one. Both as player and DM I still see it as the DM's game.
Over the years, game balance has been all over the place. When optimizers weren't a huge part of the gaming community and/or the rules had so few options that there was little to optimize, being unbalanced wasn't a big problem. Wizards were horrible at low levels, everybody knew that, and people who played wizards really wanted to play wizards. Perhaps it was because they knew they'd be the most powerful characters by the time they reached 7th level or above, but you really had to stick through a lot to get there.
Another aspect to this is the advent of the internet. Things that weren't cared much about before except at some isolated tables (such as various versions of imbalance) are now out there for everyone to see - and complain about.
When the game has more options, there's more to optimize. Then balance becomes a bigger problem for most games. The late 2e/2.5e years were notoriously bad in terms of game balance. I think this is the time where optimizers really started to find their niche. Note that from a game design standpoint, designing an awesome set of game rules is much easier when playing to the optimization approach. Sure, you have to work hard to have lots of options and get them to balance. But the 3e designers did a great job of redesigning the 2.5e mess into a coherent and workable system. The problem they ran into was the same as 2e, though. Supplements, and the inevitable power creep that comes with it.
I think that happened largely because of optimization - new abilities had to compete (balance) with the best options of earlier releases. Which means that the less optimal ones became even less optimal. The rules had become the bigger part of the game.
The same thing happened in M:tG. A lot of cards that were great in 1996 are pretty hopeless now.
And the rules becoming the bigger (biggest?) part of the game comes as no surprise when the game is held by the same company responsible for M:tG - perhaps the rules-heaviest game that has ever existed.
The 4e rules proved you could write a well balanced set of rules that would scale, allow optimizers to do what they do, but not break the game. It is a beautifully designed set of rules. But for many (most?) it went too far. It lost touch with the RPG side. It was too crunchy for many who didn't want to optimize.
With the balance, however, came a previously-unseen degree of sameness, and in my view blandness. The idea behind it was laudable in some ways, the execution...well...
For me it felt too much like MtG. I wanted to show my then 7 year old daughter how to play, and went to sit down to make a character, and realized that it was going to take hours to accomplish that,
4e badly needed a very simple "starter" class, much like the 1e Fighter often was in its day, and just didn't have it.
Incidentally, I never could get into MtG. I'm not an optimizer. And I've found that you really have to be, because a large part of winning consistently is building a good deck. On the flip side, a friend of mine is a killer optimizer. It comes naturally. Within weeks of learning how to play MtG he would consistently win any draft he entered (until PAX - he wasn't that good yet...). He could not play D&D. Literally could not. He could not imagine playing a character that didn't exist. In combat he could select a spell, and that sort of thing. But anything outside of combat he could not do. At all. I've never seen anything like it.
I knew a guy like this: good M:tG player, but when he tried his hand at D&D (3e) it didn't go quite so well.
With players coming from video games, MtG, board games, it's very easy to do what I call "playing the rules." This also leads very easily into wanting to optimize to those rules. It makes perfect sense. How do you play almost any other game on the planet? You read the rules and follow them.
And, the rules will probably be the same every place you play the same game. Houseruling board games or card games happens, sure, but nowhere nearly as often as it does in RPGs; another big difference.
You know where you don't do that? Sports. In sports, the rules offer boundaries. Take baseball. You have to hit the ball. You have to swing, or you'll be out on strikes. The field has boundaries where the ball has to land. Other than that, you can hit the ball wherever you are capable of hitting the ball. You practice hitting, and might be a power hitter, but always hitting for the fences also tends to mean you miss a lot as well. Other players recognize they don't have the power (and aren't training for it), and are focused on connecting more frequently. Most fall somewhere in between. You can hit it left-handed, right-handed, and you don't even have to take a full swing.
The rules don't tell you what you can do, they tell you what you can't.
This might be the one place where I disagree with your analysis, at least for 3 editions out of 5.
In 1e, 2e and to a large degree 5e the rules mostly are there to tell you what can't be done. After that, anything goes...if something isn't covered by a rule a player is free to try it and the DM has to figure out what comes of it if anything. There weren't really any boundaries, and the rules were in many cases only guidelines anyway.
In 3e-4e there was much more of a sense of the rules telling you the limits of what could be done, and if the rules didn't cover it the default was it could not be done. Also, the rules were much more hard-and-fast; no guidelines here. I gather some people play 5e this way as well, though rulings-not-rules as a philosophy would seem to want to fight this.
Lan-"it might speak to my lack of optimization skills and-or desire that my favourite way to play M:tG is to grab some random cards, shuffle and shoot"-efan
