D&D 5E Characters are not their statistics and abilities

[Sacrosanct]

Classic cultural uniformity dogma - assimilate or move away (or live separate and distinct). Not exactly warm and fuzzy or inclusive.

At some point you need to realize that you're part of a larger group, and not super special and your desires don't trump everyone else's. Congratulations. Sorry you feel sad because D&D moved on past your favorite edition. Now you know what everyone else feels like. My favorite edition was 1/2e. But you don't see me making demands and/or accusing people of being exclusionary just because D&D moved on to 3e and then 4e. Nope, I kept playing the version I liked.

I swear, my eyes were rolling so hard in the back of my head when they announced 5e and all the 4e fans acted all hurt and betrayed like they were the only people to have their favorite edition stop. Hello! Fans of OD&D, AD&D, and 3e all went through the exact same thing. To quote Drew Carey: "There's a support group for people like you. It's called 'everyone'."

 

[Sacrosanct]

You know we're talking about a game, right? One that has several versions that appeal to different people's tastes? You can just choose the one that suits you best. Perhaps I lack empathy, but I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who already has what he or she needs.

It's almost like it's not good enough to keep playing the game you like, but you have to be front and center as the most important.

 

[iserith]

It's almost like it's not good enough to keep playing the game you like, but you have to be front and center as the most important.

Maybe there is a perception that not "endorsing" a particular playstyle is the same as judging said playstyle as "wrong?" I don't know.

 

[JonnyP71]

But the early games quickly began employing TOTM, and while I don't think there are statistics on it, it was by far the predominant way of playing that I saw and that I was familiar with.

I started playing in 1983 and played until 1992 - and TOTM was the ONLY playstyle I ever saw. I saw miniatures mentioned in rulebooks but they were very much optional, and nobody I knew used them for anything more than to look nice when depicting a marching order!

I've been in 3 groups since coming back to the hobby in 2012, and none of them play using grids. The 1st time ever saw the game played with a grid was in a youtube video around 2014, and the only game I've played using a grid was at a convention this year - and even then nobody was very precise about counting squares, it was used more for visualisation of distances.

 

[iserith]

I started playing in 1983 and played until 1992 - and TOTM was the ONLY playstyle I ever saw. I saw miniatures mentioned in rulebooks but they were very much optional, and nobody I knew used them for anything more than to look nice when depicting a marching order!

I've been in 3 groups since coming back to the hobby in 2012, and none of them play using grids. The 1st time ever saw the game played with a grid was in a youtube video around 2014, and the only game I've played using a grid was at a convention this year - and even then nobody was very precise about counting squares, it was used more for visualisation of distances.

For my part, I started playing in the late 80s with AD&D 2e. We used the grid and minis back then and continued to do so for every edition that followed. Every group I joined that played D&D 3.Xe onward used minis and grid as well.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, it's an RPG. You are your character, and you make decisions from their perspective. That's pretty much the definition of role-playing.

Not really. While I get what you're saying, and I agree that much of roleplaying involves making decisions from your character's perspective, there is also a division between player and character, and there are some decisions that the player makes for the game that aren't from the character's perspective. Most of them would be at character creation...such as what stat to put into Constitution.

Characters can't see the numbers, but they can observe the in-game realities which those numbers reflect. It's objectively true that, for a given fighting style (that relies on strength rather than finesse), the longsword is more effective - it creates larger wounds, or more blunt trauma, or whatever it is which is the in-game reality corresponding to HP loss - and this truth would be borne out through millennia of empirical evidence.

I don't know if that's how it would be viewed. Most likely, a character's choice of weapon would take into consideration all manner of factors that have no mechanical value, or perhaps little used mechanical value, within the game. So I would never use "objectively true" in that regard. There would be so many different reasons for a choice of weapon that attributing it solely to the apparent damage done in isolation seems far from the kind of decision a character would make.

I'm not much of a rules-as-physics person - certainly not like @Saelorn! - but on this issue I'm pretty sympathetic to Saelorn's perspective.

If the PC has the same bonus to hit with a longsword as a scimitar, why choose the weaker weapon?

There are games where the answer is: because I'm better trained with a scimitar! But 5e doesn't have that level of granularity for fighter training.

What makes the scimitar weaker than a longsword? In what way is it weaker? And why would a character place importance on that factor more so than on any other factor that may play into the decision?

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

To complete the trilogy: I started back with AD&D too, and I have used both minis & grid and theater of the mind style in every edition since (because the two methods are with their pros and cons, so I use them based on whether the pros outweigh the cons for the encounter on an encounter-by-encounter basis - right tool for the job, and all that).

I've also had other DMs over the years that used both methods (though not many - I seem to always end up becoming the primary DM of any group I build or join in short order, even though it's never been my idea).

 

[Shasarak]

And yes, the power gaming version was just 1 edition among 7, but it existed for 10% of D and D's history - and plenty of people (although not a majority) liked it, or at least liked elements of it.

If you think that there was only 1 power gaming version of DnD then chances are that you have only played 1 version of DnD.

 

[Shasarak]

To complete the trilogy: I started back with AD&D too, and I have used both minis & grid and theater of the mind style in every edition since (because the two methods are with their pros and cons, so I use them based on whether the pros outweigh the cons for the encounter on an encounter-by-encounter basis - right tool for the job, and all that).

I remember when my friend told me that we should get miniatures for our characters. Then I found out how much they cost - I could essentially choose to buy 1 mini or a DnD book. So needless to say that most of my gaming is TotM.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I take it you didn't think it was good advice, to tell some 2e fans who expressed a dislike of 3e when it came out, that it was okay to keep playing their preferred edition...

It was excellent advice at the time, since D&D had yet to espouse a wildly inclusive kumbaya vision for itself. Since WotC opened the book on 5e with that vision from the moment it was announced, indeed, the idea of being more inclusive of multiple editions' playstyles was a justification for rolling rev again so soon.

So if you prefer D&D 3.Xe or D&D 4e because they lend themselves to your style of play and you still have your books, why not just play those games?

Because they're not the current edition and...

...you just like to adopt the latest & greatest...

...you want to actively support the success of D&D, and promoting an out-of-print edition is at cross purposes to that (cf edition war)...

...you want D&D to be as good as possible, and that means supporting the style you feel is 'best...'

...you primarily participate in organized play and that's 5e AL, now...

...being told to go play a non-current edition or non-D&D game, when you're a devoted fan of D&D makes you feel excluded...

Umm ... what? Having played extensively during that time, I believe you are badly mistaken. Yes, the inches were in there because D&D evolved from tabletop wargaming (Gygax, Arneson, evolution from Chainmail to the Fantasy Game to D&D etc.).

Not just inches, there were rules for using grids or hex maps, minis, the whole 9 yards, even in AD&D. The original game labeled itself a wargame and called out the use of minis right on the cover.

But the early games quickly began employing TOTM, and while I don't think there are statistics on it, it was by far the predominant way of playing that I saw and that I was familiar with.

I feel like there was a real split between the new 'kids' who entered the hobby with D&D in the 80s, and the older set who started with wargaming, like you, I have no stats to back it up, but it felt like a sort of 'generation gap.' Whether minis got used or not, in my extensive experience back then depended on the DM. If the DM was a long-time wargamer and had a bunch of minis, minis definitely got used when he ran D&D. If he was a new player who hadn't wargamed or built up a collection of minis, he probably didn't. Though, even without minis, it could be helpful to use /something/ for positions. My oldest groups would lay down pencils for dungeon walls and dice for characters & monsters, for instance. But we hardly knew what we were doing back then.

The shift didn't happen until 3.5e (and, as noted, 4e was the first to make it really essential).

That wasn't a shift, it was a return. And, it /really/ started with 2e C&T. So you're looking at a brief period between 1e with it's lingering wargaminess and 2e C&T when you might make a case for D&D leaning more towards TotM.

Sure, when 3e came out, there were grognards reacting against it being 'grid based,' and, in the edition war, the same complaint was lodged against 4e, even by 3.5 fans, but it was always a spurious complaint.

At some point you need to realize that you're part of a larger group, and not super special and your desires don't trump everyone else's.

Yes, you do.

Congratulations. Sorry you feel sad because D&D moved on past your favorite edition. Now you know what everyone else feels like. My favorite edition was 1/2e. But you don't see me making demands and/or accusing people of being exclusionary just because D&D moved on to 3e and then 4e.

Actually we saw you do exactly that. You were an active h4ter throughout the edition war, for instance.

Nope, I kept playing the version I liked.

But you're playing 5e now, because it supports the 1e/2e styles you likes, as it's supposed to support /all/ styles.

I swear, my eyes were rolling so hard in the back of my head when they announced 5e and all the 4e fans acted all hurt and betrayed like they were the only people to have their favorite edition stop. Hello! Fans of OD&D, AD&D, and 3e all went through the exact same thing.

And made a much, much bigger stink about it, with a lot less provocation.

But there was another difference: Every prior edition tried to make the game better in some way, so if you were 'left behind,' well, it was at least in the cause of advancing the game, however bad or good an idea that turned out to be.

5e is the first edition that has as a major goal evoking past editions and being 'for' fans of all those past editions.

If you felt left out or passed over by 2e or 3.5 or 4e or even 1e AD&D (and some folks did, and gravitated to Arduin Griomoire, for instance), well, that was too bad, the game was moving "forward."

If you loved 2e or 3e or 4e or 0e or any other 'e' of D&D, though, 5e is supposed to have something for you. It very clearly has fans of 2e covered, and distinctively 3e stuff appears as options. Fans of the more spartan early/basic game can strip 5e down to the basic pdf. But there's still bits of 1e (psionics, 1st-level MCing), 3e (Sorcerer & Fighter builds, PrCs, rewards for system mastery) and 4e (martial options, skill challenges, class & encounter balance) that are absent or under-supported, and other bits that are missing for now, but at least seem to be 'in the pipeline.'

And, really, that's being charitable. While a DM who wants to can bang 5e into a more classic or more modern shape with varying degrees of effort, the 'player empowerment' of 3e & 4e is not really on the table the way it was in the eras of RAW and Balance, respectively. If it had to be judged right now on it's ability to deliver on the promise of inclusiveness, it has failed.

Fortunately, there's no reason to think it should be judged on the state it's in after only 2 supplements with even a bit of player-facing crunch.