D&D 5E Changes in Interpretation

[Hussar]

Yup, the biggest competitor for D&D is.... D&D.

But, rolling back to the original point of this thread, I'm going to cross post quote something from another thread:

To be perfectly honest, I don't like free form mechanics. I like to build with in the confines of the rules when it comes to NPCs and monsters. I don't like to "just make it happen" unless it is with regards to fluff. Can I say Gunslingers exist in 4th edition? Sure I can but I don't like that. I want the mechanics for a Gunslinger to be present so I build off of that.

It's from the rather long http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-horizons-upcoming-edition-d-d/ thread.

I think this is precisely what I'm talking about. Before 3e, it was pretty much presumed that the DM was going to make stuff up like this. You didn't wait until the gunslinger class was released, you did it yourself.

Heck, back in 1e I DID do this myself. One of my players was a huge Steven King fan, and when The Dark Tower series started, begged me to play a gunslinger. Thus, a ranger class (this would be 2e by then - around 1990 or so) got guns. Done. We didn't even consider having to wait for TSR to get around to this.

But, I think that sort of approach has really changed with 3e. Now we want everything to be "official" because house rule and home brew have garnered such negative connotations. The idea that you just do it yourself has really fallen by the wayside for some groups. I think anyway.

 

[Emerikol]

Yup, the biggest competitor for D&D is.... D&D.

But, rolling back to the original point of this thread, I'm going to cross post quote something from another thread:



It's from the rather long New Horizons: The Upcoming Edition of D&D - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine thread.

I think this is precisely what I'm talking about. Before 3e, it was pretty much presumed that the DM was going to make stuff up like this. You didn't wait until the gunslinger class was released, you did it yourself.

Heck, back in 1e I DID do this myself. One of my players was a huge Steven King fan, and when The Dark Tower series started, begged me to play a gunslinger. Thus, a ranger class (this would be 2e by then - around 1990 or so) got guns. Done. We didn't even consider having to wait for TSR to get around to this.

But, I think that sort of approach has really changed with 3e. Now we want everything to be "official" because house rule and home brew have garnered such negative connotations. The idea that you just do it yourself has really fallen by the wayside for some groups. I think anyway.

I played all through those editions and I never felt this way about 3e. But I don't doubt a lot of people did. I've read enough posts that support your perspective. I've always been willing to houserule. I'm a pro-DM empowerment person but I like lots of options and a good skill system. I just think 3e tried to codify too many things.

 

[billd91]

By 2000, D&D had a new "3rd" Edition (even though Original D&D, BECMI, AD&D, and AD&D 2e were arguably each editions in their own right), and, like Fuzion and FUDGE, it had a core Open-Sytem behind it. d20 had the advantages of an open source system, /and/ the advantage of D&D name recognition. Other RPG companies fell all over themselves creating content for d20, particularly for D&D, rocketing D&D back to a position of titular as well as default (as the only mainstream-recognizable RPG) revenue leadership. 3e also made real changes to the system, 'modernizing' it to a degree. This set off a wave of rejection by old-school fans, but, in the face of the 3rd-party clamor to jump on the D&D name bandwagon it didn't amount to much, though, parodies of early D&D, like the semi-serious, respectful Hackmaster RPG and the irreverent Munchkin cardgame did meet with some success.

If there's a high-water mark for D&D other than it's 80s fad period, it's early 3e, when Open Source d20 was king of the new RPG hill and erstwhile competitors like WWGS faltered and clung to the bandwagon.

Then WotC was acquired by Hasbro, and all that savior-of-D&D goodwill and d20 euphoria started getting squandered. First, to flog extra revenue out of the line, they re-released a 3.5 version of all the core books, this time, /not/ as modest-priced loss-leaders. There was some loud dis-satisfaction with the move, but "3.5" received it's own SRD and was part of the OGL, so 3pps happily went with it, and hold-outs eventually had nothing much to look forward to but new 3.5 material. The 'oughts' remained D&D's decade, though, and it ended with the decade with a remarkable bit of hubris called the GSL...

One quibble I'd like to make. WotC was acquired by Hasbro in 1999, before the release of 3e. WotC continued to build up goodwill as the savior of D&D even after the acquisition. The leaders from WotC's independent days were still there. However, they didn't generally last much longer because Hasbro was in making cuts. In 2000, Employee #1 - Lisa Stevens was cut, in 2001 Adkison was out, in 2002 Dancey was gone as were some of the other creative talents who had been won over to the OGL. The OGL's days were certainly numbered at that point.

 

[billd91]

I think this is precisely what I'm talking about. Before 3e, it was pretty much presumed that the DM was going to make stuff up like this. You didn't wait until the gunslinger class was released, you did it yourself.

<snip>

But, I think that sort of approach has really changed with 3e. Now we want everything to be "official" because house rule and home brew have garnered such negative connotations. The idea that you just do it yourself has really fallen by the wayside for some groups. I think anyway.

The approach definitely changed. I don't know if it was really related to everybody wanting "official" rules any more than people wanted them back in the 1e/2e days. That tendency was already getting lampooned pretty hard in Knights of the Dinner Table a decade before 3e hit the shelves.

One thing different with the appearance of 3e was the stronger influence of Skip Williams. Check out this interview: GROGNARDIA: Interview: Skip Williams

As people may have surmised from being the Sage for years, Skip's a guy who likes to have the rules defined. They keep things from going wrong in DM/player disputes. They also offer some transparency to the player who can more rationally predict how his choice of actions will play out with less GM whim. That approach is a real and significant contrast with earlier designers like Gygax and Zeb Cook.

Exactly how much that bled through to the buying public is anybody's guess. It might be that Skip's rise coincided with a broader rise in that sort of demand from D&D because he was a good fit for it.

 

[Ratskinner]

Some of it is substance, though. "Creativity and flexibility" are in direct conflict with "balance", ....

Perhaps in D&D. There are other ways of doing it that are extremely balanced and flexible, but wouldn't count as D&D for most people.

 

[Hussar]

Bill91- you might have a point there. I do think that the mishmash of rules that 2e became had a big impact on how players view the rules. 2e had SO MUCH material for it that two 2e tables could be playing and yet sharing virtually no material, other than some really, really basic stuff. I mean, if you had a Spelljammer campaign sitting next to a dungeon bashing Greyhawk campaign, could you really say that the two groups were playing the same game?

Add in the binder full of house rules which was often the standard back then, and I think it might be pretty easy to say that those two groups were playing significantly different games.

I think that the push in 3e to standardize rules made people very reliant on those rules. And, being honest, the rules were generally very, very good. They made sense and were often (not always certainly, but often) pretty easy to use at the table. Much of the criticism of 3e, again IMO, is somewhat corner case stuff.

I think 4e went even a few steps further down this route of standardization. I've often said that 4e is the RPGA edition and I really do believe that. They wanted organized play, either through RPGA or online, to be the baseline. To achieve that, you need to standardize play to a much larger degree. Thus the very strong voice of 4e coupled to mechanics that don't leave a whole lot to interpretation. Plus, the removal of mechanics (like illusions and polymorph, for example) which do require a lot of DM intervention. Again, just like RPGA play which had largely removed these effects already.

Sorry, just kind of meandering through thoughts here.

 

[Ratskinner]

See, this is where I kind of get bogged down.

Mechanically, 4e is far closer to 3e than 3e is to, say, Basic/Expert D&D. It's actually probably closer, purely mechanically, than 3e is to 2e.

I always find this kind of hard to judge, because there's really no objective way to quantify the differences in mechanics. i.e. is the difference between NWPs and Skills more or less than the difference between Vancian and AEDU casters? By how much? because I have to add up a zillion of these for each edition change in order to compare the changes...

I think what ends up happening is that people overvalue the changes they feel are negative and undervalue the changes that they feel are positive. People....go figure.

I think one of the biggest differences though is in the voice of the books. 3e core books were as "voiceless" as possible. They presumed that you already knew how to run a game and generally handed you lots of intricate detail, but, very little advice. 4e presumed you didn't know how to run a game and, like 1e, had a very strong voice on how to run a successful game.

I think that strong voice is primarily what makes people grind their teeth.

Maybe. Although, I always kind of expect that voice in D&D, since its the "gateway drug" of rpgs. (...or used to be...do kids start with WoW and then move to tabletop nowadays?)

 

[Ratskinner]

I think this is precisely what I'm talking about. Before 3e, it was pretty much presumed that the DM was going to make stuff up like this. You didn't wait until the gunslinger class was released, you did it yourself.

Heck, back in 1e I DID do this myself. One of my players was a huge Steven King fan, and when The Dark Tower series started, begged me to play a gunslinger. Thus, a ranger class (this would be 2e by then - around 1990 or so) got guns. Done. We didn't even consider having to wait for TSR to get around to this.

But, I think that sort of approach has really changed with 3e. Now we want everything to be "official" because house rule and home brew have garnered such negative connotations. The idea that you just do it yourself has really fallen by the wayside for some groups. I think anyway.

Personally, I think its just a matter of the "completeness" of the modern rules sets. Back in the day, you regularly ran into corner cases and wonky situations where subsystems A and B didn't match up. The DM had to make all sorts of house rules just to make sense of the game (even if they were just small ones about how a particular spell worked). Additionally, the systems were very mathematically "sloppy" and/or "forgiving" and putting in a new class or something was very unlikely to "break" the game any more than it already was. Combined, this lead to DMs feeling very free to make all sorts of modifications. By the time 3e was written, a great many of those holes in the rules were patched up "officially" and the system reworked to create fewer of them.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

But, I think that sort of approach has really changed with 3e. Now we want everything to be "official" because house rule and home brew have garnered such negative connotations. The idea that you just do it yourself has really fallen by the wayside for some groups. I think anyway.

I tend to agree. On another board a guy that gamed with Gary, Dave and MAR Barker always said, when asked how they played back then, says "We made some <stuff> up that we thought we be fun"

When customers who bought the rules wanted them to make settings for D&D the response from Gary and Dave was "Why do they want us to do all the fun stuff"

That do it yourself attitude is something that I think should be at the core of D&D (RPGs in general really). 5E and it's more vague rules in some places and the push to DM empowerment (which some say is lazy design), is, I think, trying to hard code into the system that attitude and approach.

That is one of the best things about Next for me. The return, at least somewhat, of that attitude.

Personally I'd love to see that each table plays D&D just a little bit different from every other table playing D&D. No two are exactly alike. Have a formal system for cons and / or organized play - but make it clear that those rules are the "house rules" for the table for those events - it isn't how everyone should play.

<Original word replaced for Eric's Grandma>

 

[Tony Vargas]

Not sure if what you said disagreed with what I said.

Just another perspective on the same events. I focused a bit more on the trends in the hobby, you a bit more on the business side.