Flipping the Table: Did Removing Miniatures Save D&D?

Dungeons & Dragons is doing better than ever, thanks to a wave of nostalgia-fueled shows like Stranger Things and the Old School Renaissance, the rise of actual play video streams, and a broader player base that includes women. The reasons for this vary, but one possibility is that D&D no longer requires miniatures. Did it ever?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

Wait, What?​

When Vivian Kane at TheMarySue interviewed lead rules designer for D&D, Jeremy Crawford, about the increased popularity of D&D, here’s what he had to say:

It’s a really simple thing, but in 5th, that decision to not require miniatures was huge. Us doing that suddenly basically unlocked everyone from the dining room table and, in many ways, made it possible for the boom in streaming that we’re seeing now.

In short, Crawford positioned miniatures as something of a barrier of entry to getting into playing D&D. But when exactly did miniatures become a requirement?

D&D Was a Miniatures Game First (or Was It?)​

Co-cocreator of D&D Gary Gygax labeled the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” Gygax was a wargamer himself, which used miniature games to wage tabletop battles. His target audience for D&D were these wargamers, and so use of miniatures – leveraging Chainmail, a supplement he created for miniature wargaming – was assumed. Miniature wargaming was more than a little daunting for a new player to join. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:

Whether fought on a sand table, a floor or a yard outdoors, miniature wargames eschewed boards and the resulting ease of quantifying movements between squares (or hexagons) in favor of irregular scale-model terrain and rulers to measure movement distance. Various sorts of toy soldiers— traditionally made of wood, lead or tin, but by the mid-twentieth century constructed from a variety of alloys and composites— peopled these diminutive landscapes, in various attitudes of assault and movement. While Avalon Hill sold everything you needed to play their board wargames in a handy box, miniature wargamers had the responsibility and the freedom to provide all of the components of a game: maps, game pieces and the system. Consider that even the most complicated boardgame is easily retrieved from a shelf or closet, its board unfolded and lain across a table top, its pieces sorted and arranged in a starting configuration, all within a span of some minutes— in a pinch the game could be stowed away in seconds. Not so for the miniature wargamer. Weeks might be spent in constructing the battleground alone, in which trees, manmade structures, gravel roads and so on are often selected for maximum verisimilitude. Researching a historical battle or period to determine the lay of the land, as well as the positions and equipment of the combatants, is a task which can exhaust any investment of time and energy. Determining how to model the effects of various weapons, or the relative movement rates of different vehicles, requires similar diligent investigations, especially to prevent an imbalanced and unfair game. Wargaming with miniatures consequently is not something undertaken lightly.

D&D offered human-scale combat, something that made the precision required for miniature wargaming much less of a barrier. Indeed, many of the monsters we know today were actually dollar store toys converted for that purpose. It’s clear that accurately representing fantasy on the battlefield was not a primary concern for Gygax. Peterson goes into further detail on that claim:

Despite the proclamation on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons that it is “playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures,” the role of miniature figures in Dungeons & Dragons is downplayed throughout the text. Even in the foreword, Gygax confesses that “in fact you will not even need miniature figures,” albeit he tacks onto this “although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.” These spectacular battles defer entirely to the Chainmail rules, and thus there is no further mention of miniatures in any of the three books of Dungeons & Dragons other than a reiteration of the assertion that their use is not required. The presence of the term “miniature figures” on the cover of the woodgrain box is, consequently, a tad misleading.

James Maliszewski states that this trend continued through Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Even so, it's worth noting that, despite the game's subtitle, miniature figures are not listed under D&D's "recommended equipment," while "Imagination" and "1 Patient Referee" are! Elsewhere, it is stated that "miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing." The rulebook goes on to state that "varied and brightly painted miniature figures" add "eye-appeal." The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though published five years later in 1979, evinces essentially the same attitude, saying "Miniature figures used to represent characters and monsters add color and life to the game. They also make the task of refereeing action, particularly combat, easier too!"

Gygax himself confirmed that miniatures weren’t required in a Q&A session on ENWorld:

I don't usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D. I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour. The GW folks use them a lot, but they are fighting set-piece battles as is usual with miniatures gaming. I don't believe that fantasy miniatures are good or bad for FRPGs in general. If the GM sets up gaming sessions based on their use, the resulting play is great from my standpoint. It is mainly a matter of having the painted figures and a big tabletop to play on.

So if the game didn’t actually require miniatures and Gygax didn’t use them, where did the idea of miniatures as a requirement happen? For that, we have to look to later editions.

Pleading the Fifth​

Jennifer Grouling Cover explains the complicated relationship gamers had with miniatures &D in The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games:

The lack of a visual element may make spatial immersion more difficult to achieve in D&D than in more visually oriented games; however, this type of immersion is still important to the game. Without the visual component to TRPGs, players may have difficulty picturing the exact setting that the DM lays out. Wizards of the Coast's market survey shows that in 2000, 56 percent of gaming groups used miniatures to solve this dilemma…Because D& D combat rules often offer suggestions as to what you can or cannot do at certain distances, these battle maps help players visualize the scene and decide on their actions…Even though some gamers may get more interested in the visual representation of space by painting and designing scenery such as miniature castles, these tools exist more for showing spatial relationships than for immersing players visually.

In essence, Third Edition rules that involved distances seemed to encourage grid-based combat and miniature use. But the rise of Fourth Edition formalized grid-based combat, which in turn required some sort of miniature representation. Joshua Aslan Smith summed it up on StackRPGExchange:

The whole of 4th edition ruleset by and large is devoted to the balance and intricacies of tactical, grid-based combat. There are exceptions, such as rules for skill challenges and other Role Play aspects of the game (vs. roll play). To both maximize the benefits of 4th edition and actually run it correctly you need to run combats on a grid of 1" squares. Every single player attack and ability is based around this precept.

This meant players were looking at the table instead of each other, as per Crawford’s comment:

Part of that is possible because you can now play D&D and look at people’s faces. It’s people looking at each other, laughing together, storytelling together, and that’s really what we were striving for.

It wasn’t until Fifth Edition that “theater of the mind” play was reintroduced, where grids, miniatures, and terrain are unnecessary. This style of play never truly went away, but had the least emphasis and support in Fourth Edition.

Did the removal of miniatures as a requirement truly allow D&D to flourish online? Charlie Hall on Polygon explains that the ingredients for D&D to be fun to watch as well as to play have always been there:

Turns out, the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be extremely light and easy to play. Several Polygon staff have spent time with the system, and in our experience it's been a breeze to teach, even to newbies. That's because D&D's 5th edition is all about giving control back to the Dungeon Master. If you want to play a game of D&D that doesn't require a map, that is all theater of the mind, you can do that with Skype. Or with Curse. Or with Google Hangout. Or with Facetime. Basically, if you can hear the voice of another human being you can play D&D. You don't even need dice. That's because Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games that came after it, are all about storytelling. The rules are a fun way to arbitrate disputes, the maps and miniatures are awful pretty and the books are filled with amazing art and delicious lore. But Wizards of the Coast just wants you to play, that's why the latest version of the starter rules is available for free.

D&D’s always been about telling a good story. The difference is that now that our attention – and the camera or microphone – can be focused on each other instead of the table.

“What 5th edition has done the best,” according to game designer Kate Welch, “is that idea of it being the theatre of the mind and the imagination, and to put the emphasis on the story and the world that is being created by the players.” That’s the kind of “drama people want to see,” both in their own adventures and on their screens.

If the numbers are any indication, that makes D&D a lot more fun to watch.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Complete agreement, here. I used extensive variants for 1e, and at least some in 3e (though 3e had it's own challenges, due to the overwhelming complexity of the later system, and the sense of 'player entitlement' that enshrined RAW and dismissed house rules out of hand), while 4e, like you, I stuck to making/modding monsters and magic items. The main reason was that there was little impetuse to use-rule, add or mod anything on the player side, it was all prettymuch balanced/playable, and whatever a player wanted could probably be built 'off the shelf,' with a little re-skinning (players explicitly being allowed to re-skin everything on a power but it's keywords, for instance), so no DM intervention was required there. That and elaborating on Skill Challenges, of course.

Those aren't the only reasons to work with the game, though. I tended to find "RAW rules only!" to be much more common with 4E than 3E but of course maybe that was the folks I played with, though a lot of them I'd played with before. Lots of times I like tweaking to avail myself of a different feel as DM, often to shift something fairly substantially. I felt pretty much locked out of doing that in 4E.

5e got me back into the swing of running in an improvisational style, which I hadn't realized how much I'd missed after, really, giving up on DMing with 3.5, because it was just too much work, and 'phoning it in' with 4e, because it was, at the opposite extreme, almost /too/ easy. Heck, when I run 4e, now, I tend to run it more improv, and little prep, in spite of how easy the prep is, just because I can squeeze out that little extra bit of fun that way.

Yes, 5E felt much more inviting towards me making decisions as DM. I'm not claiming 5E is perfect. There are several things I don't like about it, but I'm probably one of those people who pretty much never likes RAW. (I teach and one thing I always tell students is that "Fair warning: I seem to come to hate every textbook ever written".) Given the Lawful Neutral DM Proofing that went on in 4E I just felt that I really couldn't ever do anything besides make up a few monsters and magic items.

And I said, no, not even "in function." Consider the actual function of a caster in the classic game. I'd "rather" characterize encounter & daily powers as limited-user abilities, rather than spells, because that's what they, in fact, were.

IMO that's a distinction without a difference. They're fire and forget abilities. I totally get that the other part of Vancian casting, namely spell preparation, wasn't part of what they're doing and I understand the difference of role in the party. "In function" meant for me "dailies" which worked like 1E fire and forget spells, something nobody but spellcasters ever really had before.

And, it's not a post-hoc rationalization. In genre, a hero will pull some cunning trick, make some heroic effort, invoke some magical power, or whatever - maybe once, at the climax of the story, maybe once before that as foreshadowing, maybe several times to establish his bonnefides as a mighty warrior, mage, or whatever - what he won't do is button-mash his best trick against every enemy, every time. There are many possible ways to model that in an RPG, and Vancian 'memorization' is perhaps among the very worst, but D&D went with it (and has been backing away from it ever since!), a combination of routine 'at wills,' establishing short-rest-recharge 'encoutners,' and dramatic 'dailies,' is arguably not among the worst.

I could certainly think of worse in terms of sheer burden (e.g., Exalted 2nd Edition) but I won't claim I liked At Wills/Encounters/Dailies once the bloom left the rose. Note: Opinion. The post hoc rationalization was the notion of "choosing when you're awesome" which is exactly what you described. As I said, IMO, it's pretty bleh, though I guess I'll tolerate it to some degree in the form of Action Surge in 5E... so I won't claim to be 100% consistent in my preferences. I don't like things that feel like cards in a CCG, which is exactly what Dailies felt like to me and they were all over the place in 4E. So ultimately it was the ubiquity of Daily powers and general sameness of the action structure for all classes that really bugged me, at least when it came to characters---the magic item system and utter lack of an economy was another issue; 5E hasn't really fixed that. 4E was really solidly built on the gamist and more narrative sides of things, but IMO pretty much just ignored the simulate/world building/secondary reality type feel that I rather like.

It's pretty darn abstract, compared to creating separate sub-systems that, say, let a fencing master 'create openings' or condition opponents to pull off a finsihing move at one point in a given duel, or to let a mage 'gather power' while deflecting/absorbing an impetuous enemy's flashy attacks until he has enough to pull off some great working of arcane might, or let a devout knight stand against the brutal onslaught of a superhuman monster only to have his faith and perserverence rewarded with miraculous victory at the end. But, abstraction is a price worth paying for playabilty, in a game, IMHO. All editions of D&D do pay that same price, some just get better deals for it than others... Spin it all you want, what you just said was that 4e was a better game than 3e.

Right, this is exactly what I mean by "choosing when to be awesome" as a post hoc rationalization for the daily power. I agree they mirror genre, but only in a rude gamist sort of way. We'll have to agree to disagree---I don't think I'll ever get to the point of liking daily powers, especially for martial characters. I don't recall saying 4E was a badly designed game. Not liking the choices that were made isn't the same as not respecting that the choices were thought through for the most part. For example, I'm not one of those people who thinks that a musician or artist who works in a genre I don't like sucks. Quite often doing the things they do requires a lot of skill. There are a lot of things I did like about 4E, but many other choices they made I really didn't care for and felt very blocked as a DM to change them. Ultimately, what's a good deal is in the eye of the beholder.

Those are both pretty minor, really. ... Frankly, if an optimizer - whether abusing a Tier 1 caster or an outre build - is slow, it's his own darn fault. ;P

Long turns hurt everyone, not just the person taking the long turn. The burden of adding a bunch of damage dice was darn slow. I'd see people just grind doing that and rarely could seem to get them to do the things that would get them to speed up. Clearly it was a failure of basic arithmetic skills, but that made it no less real. This was something that 4E was actually pretty good about in many ways.

Sustain was the 4e equivalent of concentration, and did require an action - often a minor action, sometimes even standard.

Yep, and actually I rather like that as opposed to the way it works now. Losing your reaction, in particular, would be a nice tactical choice to have to make if you're concentrating.

Some builds could go that way, if you wanted to take them there. But, as with minor action attacks, it's not like a given concept forced you to play that given way.

Not that I was forced... the fact that other people would take them was a problem, IME often the people who really shouldn't take them. They just slowed things down A TON. This happened in 3E, too and can happen in 5E as well.

"some of the fantasy/action genre cadence of combat" - in genre, especially on the more pop-culture/action-movie side of the genre, it's very common for battles to go badly against the heroes, at first, then for them to come back and win. Cliche, prettymuch. If you're tired of that cliche, and like the idea of heroes beating down the baddies swiftly & decisively, most of the time (while still giving a sense that the baddies are deadly), you can cut monster hps & increase their damage proportionately (like I said, half/double was oft-suggested). It can be a delicate adjustment, since the other side of 'most of the time,' can end up TPK.

Yep, that's a risk I'm willing to take but I find myself skilled enough as a DM to be able to keep encounters tough without TPKing. Quite honestly I can't recall the last time I had one. Of course, I could and did do things like you describe and indeed tend to do exactly that in most games I run. Fortunately for me, I can 99.44% Ivory Soap pure claim I will never play or run 4E again.

It's more of the above, really, capturing the way combats actually go in genre (heroic, dramatic, come-from-behind, &c) vs how they go 'realistically' (nasty, short, & one-sided). As I tried to explain above, they're just moored to something else: to genre conventions, rather than D&D traditions (or worse yet, "realism"). And, yeah, he seems to have a flair for good mechanics like that - both functional as part of a game and evocative of the genre.

I don't mind genre feel of reversals, but rarely felt 4E combats actually achieved that---most of the time they were more like playing a CRPG on a laggy system, although the system ran better at lower levels. Given the propensity for lose a turn type abilities that were a big part of the whole genre reversals combined with long turns, there were times when I just felt I was waiting for an hour for my turn to come around again. Getting to roll a save to escape stun lock was like having someone give me one M&M... gee thanks.

 

[Jhaelen]

Yeah, 4E in particular had the heavy hand of the game designer. It had a very Lawful Neutral design philosophy IMO. I feel much more able to tweak or alter both 3E and 5E, but the intricacies and degree of pre-definition of 4E made me really reticent to do much of anything except make up a few monsters and items. Even then I felt that was quite difficult to do in a way I never felt in prior versions of the game. I really didn't feel much license to do so, either, like it really wasn't something the designers invited me to do. Yes there are spots they said "make this your own" but I never felt they actually meant it, kind of like an IT department that says "we're here to help you do your job" but you know based on all the restrictions they put on your computer that they don't actually mean it.

Actually, that's precisely the feeling that 3e gave me: A big part of this was that monsters and NPCs used the same rules as the PCs. Players suddenly wanted to know how and why a monster was able to do something. Everything was questioned and needed to be 'according to RAW'. In fact, I think, it was during 3e that I first encountered that acronym.

In contrast 4e had some highly polished rules and a very transparent design. The math was laid bare and for that reason it was easy to see how changing one aspect of the system would affect other parts. E.g. it didn't take me long to figure out that monsters needed a math fix. Others realized the same about the skill system: The DCs were off. But all in all, 4e was the system that needed the least amount if tinkering, imho. It was probably the first edition of D&D that worked well for me without using any house-rules.
By comparison, when we started playing Pathfinder we implemented three house rules right in the first session!

I also feel that 4e gave the DM an unprecedented level of freedom in other, less rule-related areas. Tweaking encounter design, healing rates, skill challenges and rate of advancement was very much possible and encouraged. With the release of the Dark Sun campaign setting even more tools became available: backgrounds, inherent bonuses to do away with must-have magic items, skill powers, rituals, etc.

It's possible that 5e is even more open in that regard, but I don't know that edition well enough to be sure.

 

[Lanefan]

Actually, that's precisely the feeling that 3e gave me: A big part of this was that monsters and NPCs used the same rules as the PCs. Players suddenly wanted to know how and why a monster was able to do something. Everything was questioned and needed to be 'according to RAW'. In fact, I think, it was during 3e that I first encountered that acronym.

I found that with 3e as well, though I see a different source for the problem: PCs and NPCs and monsters all using the same rules is just fine. The problem is that the rules for monster design shouldn't be player-facing - the players have no business knowing what makes a monster tick under its hood.

IMO 3e made far too many rules player-facing, and 4e only made this worse. 5e seems to have backed off on it a bit, but not enough.

I also feel that 4e gave the DM an unprecedented level of freedom in other, less rule-related areas. Tweaking encounter design, healing rates, skill challenges and rate of advancement was very much possible and encouraged.

Most certainly not unprecedented. All of these things (except skill challenges, of course, as they didn't exist) and many others could be tweaked, kitbashed, or even redesigned from the ground up in 1e; while still leaving the game playable and often making it more so.

How do I know this? Because I've been doing just this to 1e for 'bout 35 years. It's a stunningly resilient system, in the main.

Lanefan

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Actually, that's precisely the feeling that 3e gave me: A big part of this was that monsters and NPCs used the same rules as the PCs. Players suddenly wanted to know how and why a monster was able to do something. Everything was questioned and needed to be 'according to RAW'. In fact, I think, it was during 3e that I first encountered that acronym.

I know people who had that experience in 3E regarding exactly the point you made, monster design.

In contrast 4e had some highly polished rules and a very transparent design. The math was laid bare and for that reason it was easy to see how changing one aspect of the system would affect other parts. E.g. it didn't take me long to figure out that monsters needed a math fix. Others realized the same about the skill system: The DCs were off. But all in all, 4e was the system that needed the least amount if tinkering, imho. <snip> I also feel that 4e gave the DM an unprecedented level of freedom in other, less rule-related areas. Tweaking encounter design, healing rates, skill challenges and rate of advancement was very much possible and encouraged. With the release of the Dark Sun campaign setting even more tools became available: backgrounds, inherent bonuses to do away with must-have magic items, skill powers, rituals, etc.

I can see your point but I really felt the opposite. Interesting how different people's experiences can be. I suspect a lot had to do with how happy with the underlying AW/E/D structure and general premises of 4E one was. At that point I can see it being very freeing feeling that the underlying stats and system was solid, but I always really chafed at it. While there were things I thought 4E did very well, I really disliked things like milestones, magic item daily powers, and Daily powers for martial characters. Obviously you and folks like Tony Vargas' mileage differed.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Those aren't the only reasons to work with the game, though. I tended to find "RAW rules only!" to be much more common with 4E than 3E

I found it ubiquitous and insistent with 3e, though the DM's defense was "Core Only!" With 4e it was mostly a non-issue, but that's because I ran 4e for a much larger proportion of new & casual players who weren't invested in the system being a certain way.

Yes, 5E felt much more inviting towards me making decisions as DM. I'm not claiming 5E is perfect. There are several things I don't like about it, but I'm probably one of those people who pretty much never likes RAW. Given the Lawful Neutral DM Proofing that went on in 4E I just felt that I really couldn't ever do anything besides make up a few monsters and magic items.

Nothing stops you from kitbashing any edition, but I find some things discouraging. For instance, in 3.5, the game was pretty well broken, so if I tinkered a bit, I was unlikely to break it worse, possibly make it better - but no 3.5 player was going to accept the 'better' version, because their build was for the standard version, so good luck /running/ that. ;( In 4e, the design was so transparent and balanced you could "see the strings" so if I went to tweek something I'd see, oh, this is going to screw up this, that, and the other.. oh, never mind.

But, in 5e, the game really does invite you to just do stuff. Every time a player declares an action, the game is like "uh, boss, whadda we do? Is the outcome uncertain?" You get used to that, to making rulings instead of always just following a rule algorithm (however good or awful), and your /players/ get used to it, so when you want to do something different, you just do, and they hardly notice, let alone complain. MM calls it Empowerment. We could as well call it "D&D."

They're fire and forget abilities.I totally get that the other part of Vancian casting, namely spell preparation, wasn't part of what they're doing and I understand the difference of role in the party. "In function" meant for me "dailies" which worked like 1E fire and forget spells, something nobody but spellcasters ever really had before.

"Fire & Forget" also references the old Vancian /Memorization/ mechanic. The classic game used n/day (often 3/day, for some reason), pervasively, for special abilities, for items, for terrain features, for oddball situational checks, it was really pretty arbitrary that way. 3e, did, in fact, give out 1/day stuff that wasn't spell casting, nor even supernatural. The rogue's defensive roll was 1/day. The Monk got Stunning Fist 1/day/level, and a Fighter that took Stunning Fist - it was a Fighter Bonus Feat, so virtually a class feature - got it 1/day. None of those had the (SU) tag.

The post hoc rationalization was the notion of "choosing when you're awesome" which is exactly what you described. As I said, IMO, it's pretty bleh, though I guess I'll tolerate it to some degree in the form of Action Surge in 5E... so I won't claim to be 100% consistent in my preferences. Right, this is exactly what I mean by "choosing when to be awesome" as a post hoc rationalization for the daily power. I agree they mirror genre, but only in a rude gamist sort of way. We'll have to agree to disagree---I don't think I'll ever get to the point of liking daily powers, especially for martial characters.

Except, not post-hoc, if I understand how you're using the term, more ground-up. The intent of the design was to let everyone be awesome, you can't be awesome all the time, so... gamist contruct: 1/day. And I don't see how 'gamist' is bad, in itself - it's just a Forge epiphet for remembering, 'oh, yeah, we're designing a game, maybe we should try to make it not suck,' which has never gone over well in the sense of moving books. The adoption of Vanican was done for playability, it was, itself, a gamist construct, and one entirely at odd with genre. It's only tollerated because of long familiarity - and the excessive advantages of playing a Tier 1 Vancian caster, of course.

---the magic item system and utter lack of an economy was another issue; 5E hasn't really fixed that.

5e's fixed magic items in a precipitous way: by largely eliminating them from the calculus of the game's design. They're back to being wildcards the DM can throw in to mix things up if he wants. In a sense it's also fixed the economy, since gold no longer smoothly/fungibly translates into power through the codified make/buy of 3.x/4e. The economy is now whatever it is in your setting, that could be hard-luck 11th level mercenaries fighting for a handful of silver and a week's rations, or 1st level nobles with retinues setting up a pavilion for them every night.

I don't recall saying 4E was a badly designed game. Not liking the choices that were made isn't the same as not respecting that the choices were thought through for the most part.

Really, a lot of what you've been saying has just been very inside-out ways of saying it was a very well-designed game, indeed.

Long turns hurt everyone, not just the person taking the long turn. The burden of adding a bunch of damage dice was darn slow. I'd see people just grind doing that and rarely could seem to get them to do the things that would get them to speed up. Clearly it was a failure of basic arithmetic skills, but that made it no less real. This was something that 4E was actually pretty good about in many ways.

Nod. What I mean by "his own fault" was not 'he should suffer for it' (because, as you point out, everyone else is, too), but that he should try to improve. What 4e did that made rounds and combats seem to take so much longer was to move decisions into combat, from pre-combat strategizing, and to give everyone more 'agency' in that combat. Instead of some players taking seconds on their turn, and one 15 minutes (and one or two bending the DM's ear for an hour before combat even began), you have everyone getting their turns done in a minute or few. The guy used to taking 15 minute turns feels cheated, and everyone notices it takes longer for their turn to come up, and the combat goes more rounds, too, because the combats are bigger & more involved, and can't be ended by a Nova.

Yep, and actually I rather like that as opposed to the way it works now. Losing your reaction, in particular, would be a nice tactical choice to have to make if you're concentrating. Not that I was forced... the fact that other people would take them was a problem, IME often the people who really shouldn't take them. They just slowed things down A TON. This happened in 3E, too and can happen in 5E as well.

Nod. There's a lot of customization in 3e, as there was in 4e, and that should let players take a character concept they want to play, and tailor it to play well with their style. But, some folks just don't realize what they're good at...

I don't mind genre feel of reversals, but rarely felt 4E combats actually achieved that-

It was a little on-the-nose, with it, really. I mean, you could try to 'abuse' 4e the way you might have 3e or 1e, and set up a 'Nova' with the intent of winning a combat in round 1. But monsters were tough, had big bad tricks of their own, and might get meaner when bloodied, so it often backfired: you'd burn down a standard monster or bloody a solo, and then the monster hits you with its best stuff, you're hosed, and it's whittling eachother down with at-wills for the rest of the combat (of course, depending on the monsters and the tactics, it could also work). If you were more circumspect the first round, saw how the monster worked, and deployed a good set of tactics against it, you'd get beaten pretty hard, at first, need a Second Wind or help from a Leader, but pull out the victory in the end.
The 'tactics' side of 4e were compartively deep, but only compared to D&D, which has tended for a long time, to be dominated by a more 'right spell for the job' rock/paper/scissors/lizard/Spock kind of dynamic. You pull out fire for the troll, you don't hit the shambling mound with lightning, you cast move earth on the clay golem, take a mace to the skeletons, etc, etc, etc...
...it builds up 'player skill' and creates an impression of a world where these things are facts of life. You half expect there to be idioms like "you look like a troll in a burning house' or 'who put the potion of super-heroism in your gruel?'

, although the system ran better at lower levels. Given the propensity for lose a turn type abilities that were a big part of the whole genre reversals combined with long turns, there were times when I just felt I was waiting for an hour for my turn to come around again. Getting to roll a save to escape stun lock was like having someone give me one M&M... gee thanks.

Monsters that stunned you for any length of time were quite rare at heroic (daze or slow or imobilize, OTOH, all over the place), but sure, it's bad to sit out part of a fight because you keep failing your save every round. It's probably about the worst way you could handle such things in D&D - except for all the others. It's not as bad as missing one saving throw, up-front, and sitting out the whole fight (or dropping dead instantly), for instance, or, for that matter, just having no option that can make an impact the whole time.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I found it ubiquitous and insistent with 3e, though the DM's defense was "Core Only!" With 4e it was mostly a non-issue, but that's because I ran 4e for a much larger proportion of new & casual players who weren't invested in the system being a certain way.

I got much less BS hacking 3.5; nobody would tolerate it in 4 and I felt it was largely impossible.

"Fire & Forget" also references the old Vancian /Memorization/ mechanic. The classic game used n/day (often 3/day, for some reason), pervasively, for special abilities, for items, for terrain features, for oddball situational checks, it was really pretty arbitrary that way. 3e, did, in fact, give out 1/day stuff that wasn't spell casting, nor even supernatural. The rogue's defensive roll was 1/day. The Monk got Stunning Fist 1/day/level, and a Fighter that took Stunning Fist - it was a Fighter Bonus Feat, so virtually a class feature - got it 1/day. None of those had the (SU) tag.

True, but they weren't really core things that identified the character. And monks to me always felt more supernatural. But I don't think there's anywhere else to go with this. Suffice it to say that in general, I'm not a fan of daily powers if there's another way that's not super painful to make being cool limited so that people don't just button mash it. For instance, make the cool fighter thing situational.

Except, not post-hoc, if I understand how you're using the term, more ground-up.

Rationalizations are almost always post-hoc. That is, the thing has been decided, in this case to fit the general turn structure and play logic, and the reason is made up afterwards. The reason's not even in the rulebook, those were things I heard people say and probably said myself, too.

The intent of the design was to let everyone be awesome, you can't be awesome all the time, so... gamist contruct: 1/day. And I don't see how 'gamist' is bad, in itself - it's just a Forge epiphet for remembering, 'oh, yeah, we're designing a game, maybe we should try to make it not suck,' which has never gone over well in the sense of moving books. The adoption of Vanican was done for playability, it was, itself, a gamist construct, and one entirely at odd with genre. It's only tollerated because of long familiarity - and the excessive advantages of playing a Tier 1 Vancian caster, of course.

The adoption of Vancian magic was done in no small part because EGG was a Jack Vance nut!

To me a highly gamist structure is one that doesn't have an in-world rationale. To some degree those are inevitable, of course, but a highly gamist game like 4E is one where "getting the rules to work and ensuring game balance above all else" is the primary driving concern.

Really, a lot of what you've been saying has just been very inside-out ways of saying it <4E> was a very well-designed game, indeed.

It was well-designed but not IMO good for what I wanted. That is to say, many of the choices they made were well-thought out choices I felt boxed me in. They zigged hard where I would have liked to have the option to zag. Without going through a lot of pain and just as often fight with players, I didn't think I could actually do any of those changes. I've DMed for 30 years and can categorically say I disliked DMing 4E the most by far given how in the way I felt it was for me. I recognize that other folks felt that it was very liberating due to the inherent balance of it (for the most part).

This wouldn't really matter if there was a way to play other games, but at the time it was all nearly anyone I knew wanted to play.

Nod. What I mean by "his own fault" was not 'he should suffer for it' (because, as you point out, everyone else is, too), but that he should try to improve. What 4e did that made rounds and combats seem to take so much longer was to move decisions into combat, from pre-combat strategizing, and to give everyone more 'agency' in that combat. Instead of some players taking seconds on their turn, and one 15 minutes (and one or two bending the DM's ear for an hour before combat even began), you have everyone getting their turns done in a minute or few. The guy used to taking 15 minute turns feels cheated, and everyone notices it takes longer for their turn to come up, and the combat goes more rounds, too, because the combats are bigger & more involved, and can't be ended by a Nova.

That's not how I tended to see it happen. The constant decision loop---I recognize you dislike this comparison but I really felt every round was like looking through a card hand trying to figure out which card to play, and please don't try to tell me that's not what it felt like to me---meant every player had to decide what to do. Some were really, really slow at it or obsessed with setting up the optimal combo (which just as often failed or got busted by someone else).

It was a little on-the-nose, with it, really. I mean, you could try to 'abuse' 4e the way you might have 3e or 1e, and set up a 'Nova' with the intent of winning a combat in round 1. But monsters were tough, had big bad tricks of their own, and might get meaner when bloodied, so it often backfired: you'd burn down a standard monster or bloody a solo, and then the monster hits you with its best stuff, you're hosed, and it's whittling eachother down with at-wills for the rest of the combat (of course, depending on the monsters and the tactics, it could also work). If you were more circumspect the first round, saw how the monster worked, and deployed a good set of tactics against it, you'd get beaten pretty hard, at first, need a Second Wind or help from a Leader, but pull out the victory in the end.

I didn't see all the abuses of 3E that others are talking about but of course we all see a small, narrow window of the folks we play with and in general I played with people who were good enough DMs to avoid that. I didn't need WotC to help me out by making combat DM proofed into a particular genre cliche.

Monsters that stunned you for any length of time were quite rare at heroic (daze or slow or imobilize, OTOH, all over the place), but sure, it's bad to sit out part of a fight because you keep failing your save every round. It's probably about the worst way you could handle such things in D&D - except for all the others. It's not as bad as missing one saving throw, up-front, and sitting out the whole fight (or dropping dead instantly), for instance, or, for that matter, just having no option that can make an impact the whole time.

I agree that they did let you out of stun jail which was different than, say, prior editions where it was very hard to get out at all. Usually I replaced any "save or die" with damage to allow some chance of survival. Stuns weren't bad if they weren't combined with long turns. IME 4E had both long turns and stuns. Daze was also nasty, though better. There were characters that were essentially devastated by that, whereas others were much less bothered. Of course, that's a weakness of that particular class type, but it fed on long turns because the long turn classes (e.g., barbarians and avengers) were precisely the ones that could substantially ignore dazing.

Near the end of 4E, were I to run it again, I said to myself I'd outright ban barbarians and avengers just due to their turn length, and in retrospect would probably ban any pre-Essentials character just for good measure. Of course, I have no intention of ever playing or running it again so that's not an issue.

All that said, they did have some good ideas!

 

[Tony Vargas]

I got much less BS hacking 3.5; nobody would tolerate it in 4 and I felt it was largely impossible.

Mildly different impressions, then. I'm sure we can agree that 5e & it's community is /far/ more amenable to DM 'hacking'/modding/variants/house-rules/fiat/etc than any prior WotC ed.

True, but they weren't really core things that identified the character. And monks to me always felt more supernatural.

Bits of them doubtless did, but FWIW, 3.x declined to tag Stunning Fist as such, no (SU) - maybe because they /did/ make it a fighter bonus feat. So we can't say D&D has never dropped the 'daily' on a non-caster ability. It's a matter of scale & effect. A fighter taking Stunning Fist wasn't suddenly the equal of a mage.

I'm not a fan of daily powers if there's another way that's not super painful to make being cool limited so that people don't just button mash it. For instance, make the cool fighter thing situational.

I can't say I was ever a big fan of n/day limitations, myself, even, or especialy, in the form of Vancian magic. Early on, I did appreciate it, however ironically, on what I guess today would be a 'gamist' level - there was a challenge to picking the right spells and using them at the right time. That challenge diminshed rapidly in later eds, when you could make/buy bushels of scrolls, or cast spontaneously, or, now in 5e, prep spells /and/ cast them spontaneously (if the 3.5 Wizard could've done that, it'd've cracked the mythical Tier 0).

It's as much or more the 'except for magic' than the 'daily sux' part that I disagree with on a philsophical level, I guess.

Rationalizations are almost always post-hoc. That is, the thing has been decided, in this case to fit the general turn structure and play logic, and the reason is made up afterwards. The reason's not even in the rulebook, those were things I heard people say and probably said myself, too.

Ok, it was not a post-hoc rationalization, but a design goal, how 'bout that?
Seriously, though, the idea of 'choose when to be awesome' is implicit in a limited use/higher-power ability. Casters had been doing it for decades, so nobody cared, but the fighter gets to do it? Casus Belli for an edition war.

I think that just cycles back around to familiarity and expectations. Even those of us who don't care for n/day limitations (which, ironically, is both of us), got used to Vanican.

The adoption of Vancian magic was done in no small part because EGG was a Jack Vance nut!

Not the worst reason. Vance was one of the greats of Science Fiction, The Dying Earth was actually very inflluencial in the genre, MZB's Darkover, and Wolfe's Urth both owe a huge debt to Dying Earth... of course, neither of them used Vancian /magic/.

To me a highly gamist structure is one that doesn't have an in-world rationale. To some degree those are inevitable, of course, but a highly gamist game like 4E is one where "getting the rules to work and ensuring game balance above all else" is the primary driving concern.

Not a valid definition, IMHO. You're defining a goal: game that works, essentially, by what you fear it will have to give up to get there, rather than by what it will have to do to get there.
For instance, right in the old DMG, EGG said that the 'relatively short spoken spell' of Vance's Dying Earth was chosen to make the magic-user playable as a PC, as opposed to the long rituals & elaborate materials that were more typical of magickal traditions & folklore. It was a gamist reason. Yet, now, it's enshrined as an 'in-world rationale' (that, I guess, is a post-hoc rationalization). And, remember, the Vancian 'memorization' has long since been dropped in favor of another post-hoc rationalization, 'preparation.'

We see that a lot with discussions of complexity, too. You'll see folks going "the game needed a simple fighter for old-school fans, the game needs a complex fighter for those who liked the 4e version." No, the virtue of the 4e fighter was never that it was complex (it really /wasn't/ in the more complex half of a continuum of all D&D classes ever, because, well, casters), it's that it was part of a balanced game. The 3.5 fighter, was more complex to build, but simpler to run than the 2e fighter, it was a better, more elegant, more customizeable design, but the 2e fighter buzzed out huge DPR with multiple attacks & specialization, a broken design in a broken system can be good. A good design in a broken system can be pathetic.

It was well-designed but not IMO good for what I wanted. That is to say, many of the choices they made were well-thought out choices I felt boxed me in. They zigged hard where I would have liked to have the option to zag. Without going through a lot of pain and just as often fight with players, I didn't think I could actually do any of those changes. I've DMed for 30 years and can categorically say I disliked DMing 4E the most by far given how in the way I felt it was for me. I recognize that other folks felt that it was very liberating due to the inherent balance of it (for the most part).

Liberating is not the word I'd use: Easy. DMing 4e was just straight-up easy. I saw brand-new players transition from playing to running in a fraction of the time it had seemed to take in prior eds.

This wouldn't really matter if there was a way to play other games, but at the time it was all nearly anyone I knew wanted to play.

One reason for the vehemence of the edition war, I think, is the dominant position of D&D. It's easier to find a current-ed D&D game than anything else, by, like orders of magnitude. I could play 5e four nights a week around here, no problem. If you want to play Night's Dark Agents, you'll have to know somebody who knows somebody who might be able to get you in next year...

That's not how I tended to see it happen. The constant decision loop meant every player had to decide what to do.

Yep, I know it sounds crazy, but in a game where the primary activity of the player is making decisions for his charcter, a well-balanced game will give every player similar opportunities to make decisions...

Some were really, really slow at it or obsessed with setting up the optimal combo (which just as often failed or got busted by someone else).

...and some players are just annoying. ;|

I didn't see all the abuses of 3E that others are talking about but of course we all see a small, narrow window of the folks we play with and in general I played with people who were good enough DMs to avoid that. I didn't need WotC to help me out by making combat DM proofed into a particular genre cliche.

I missed the transition from problem players to DM-proofing. Balance /does/ help with certain types of player problems, and it makes the DM's job easier, rather than making the game immune from him doing his job.

I agree that they did let you out of stun jail which was different than, say, prior editions where it was very hard to get out at all. Usually I replaced any "save or die" with damage to allow some chance of survival. Stuns weren't bad if they weren't combined with long turns.

It seems like Stun (save ends) with long turns is still better than held or paralyzed or whatever for 1min/caster level or 3d6 10-min 1e 'turns' or, yeah, now that you mention it, dead.

Daze was also nasty, though better. There were characters that were essentially devastated by that, whereas others were much less bothered. Of course, that's a weakness of that particular class type, but it fed on long turns because the long turn classes (e.g., barbarians and avengers) were precisely the ones that could substantially ignore dazing.

I can't say I've seen barbarians & avengers taking excessively long turns - often, it's a particular player, regardless of what they play. I guess it's what those players were playing in your group at the time?

 

[pemerton]

That's on them for letting rules trump common sense and reality.

To be fair (a) don't 5e fire spells usually mention they can start fires (typically they did in the classic game) and (b) 5e's all about Rulings Not Rules, so if you're not ruling whether a fire spell (or lightning spell, for that matter) sets something on fire, you're just "not doin' it right."

Here are two links to relevant posts/threads. It's about post 100 onwards in the second of those that you can see eg people saying that it would be a house rule for a Burning Hands spell to have a chance of setting fire to a scroll that an enemy wizard is holding.

But in any event, if it's a "facepalm" moment or "not doing it right" in 5e to ajudicate fireball in that fashion, it must follow that all those during the 4e era who attacked that edition because (eg) its fireballs don't set things alight (depsite haveing the fire keyword, which - per the PHB p 55 - indicates "[e]xplosive bursts, fiery rays, or simple ignition") were wrong too.

 

[pemerton]

4E in particular had the heavy hand of the game designer.

The 4e description of the Fireball spell is very close to the Moldvay Basic one.

Your point? It was called Basic for a reason the book had a page limit.

My point is that I don't think it can be true both that "4e had the heavy hand of the game designer" and "the description of the Fireball spell is very close to the Moldvay basic one." The latter is true; hence the former, it seems to me, must be false.

Another way to put it: I don't think the hand of the game designer becomes "heavier" because insstead of describing fireball as a 20' R burst of fire that does damage to creatures within it, the game describes it as an Area burst 3 that targets creatures.

I tended to ignore a lot of the "fireball physics" parts except to note that fireball didn't generate blast effects, filled space, and would often require an item saving throw to determine if it got fried. I'm sure the gold melting part was due to the fact that "treasure = XP" in 1E. But yeah, a number of spells in 1E had excess detail whereas there were others that lacked clear detail.

To me, this makes the contrast in terms of the "heavy hand of the game designer" harder to follow.

Not quite sure what you mean by karaoke, though.

The result of someone else's play experience - eg a ruling that Gygax or some other earlier GM made while playing the game - is being presented as input for someone else's play. So instead of playing your own game like Gygax et al did, the rulebook invites you to sing along with thepoay they already engaged in.

giving some guidelines, as 1e does, is never a bad thing.

Here's the text of the AD&D fireball spell; I've bolded the bits that olveraps with 4e and Basic D&D:

A fireball is an explosive burst of flame, which detonates with a low roar, and delivers damage proportionate to the level of the magic-user who cast it, i.e. 1 six-sided die (d6) for each level of experience of the spell caster.[/b] Exception: Magic fireball wands deliver 6 die fireballs (6d6), magic staves with this capability deliver 8 die fireballs, and scroll spells of this type deliver a fireball of from 5 to 10 dice (d6 + 4) of damage. The burst of the fireball does not expend a considerable amount of pressure, and the burst will generally conform to the shape of the area in which it occurs, thus covering an area equal to its normal spherical volume. [The area which is covered by the fireball is a total volume of roughly 33,000 cubic feet (or yards)]. Besides causing damage to creatures, the fireball ignites all combustible materials within its burst radius, and the heat of the fireballwill melt soft metals such as gold, copper, silver, etc. Items exposed to the spell's effects must be rolled for to determine if they are affected. Items with a creature which makes its saving throw are considered as unaffected. The magic-user points his or her finger and speaks the range (distance and height) at which the fireball is to burst. A streak flashes from the pointing digit and, unless it impacts upon a material body prior to attaining the prescribed range, flowers into the fireball. If creatures fail their saving throws, they all take full hit point damage frqm the blast. Those who make saving throws manage to dodge, fall flat or roll aside, taking 1/2 the full hit point damage - each and every one within the blast area. The material component of this spell is a tiny ball composed of bat guano and sulphur.​

There's a lot of text there that, in my view, manifests the "heavy hand of the game designer". What does it add to the game to have a rule that the fireball detonates with a low roar? What causes the roar if there's no pressure? Why does this spell have its verbal and somatic components specified, when very few others do?

I don't see how 4e can in any way be conisdefred more presecriptive than that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't think the hand of the game designer becomes "heavier" because insstead of describing fireball as a 20' R burst of fire that does damage to creatures within it, the game describes it as an Area burst 3 that targets creatures.

Jay & I touched on this. In a new edition of a game in which the fireball had always had a 20' radius and long, prescriptive, description of how it's cast, looks & sounds, then all those elements are already acustomed, so only what changes can set off dicordant bells. So simplifying and condensing 8 column-inches down to 1 or 2, and leaving many of those elements of appearance/sound/etc up to the player, beause it's so different, is liable to be held to a much higher standard, because the whole thing is parsed as an unknown, a 'threat' of sorts, even.

There's a lot of text there that, in my view, manifests the "heavy hand of the game designer". What does it add to the game to have a rule that the fireball detonates with a low roar? What causes the roar if there's no pressure? Why does this spell have its verbal and somatic components specified, when very few others do?

I don't see how 4e can in any way be conisdefred more presecriptive than that.

I think 'heavy hand of the designer' may also be another angle on the "seeing the wires" dysphoria people experienced.

Remember the post a while back about Mike Mearls playing 1e with Luke Gygax? The sense of mystery and foreboding from the system being as dark and murky, as treacherous and menacing, as the dungeon, itself?

It's like, /not/ that.