D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?

[Hussar]

Wrong. I did it in 1ed.
Players: We would like to hire a cleric.
Me: Roll stats for 3 characters. Yep, got only one cleric (with a nice 13 wisdom). Want to hire him?
Players: Great! We hire him.
And that cleric is still remembered as one the best NPC they ever had. He could not cast high level spells. But he became their friend.

A wild assumption of which you only have gut feeling. With what our friend usually say, I would tend to bet the other way. These average must be really close to the normal average. But it is just my opinion here.

Heh. One npc in forty years of gaming doesn’t really change my point.

The statement was npcs were generated same as pcs. Unless you did that for every single npc you ever made for DnD, then that statement is not true.

 

[Hussar]

It's in the rules, in 1st, 2nd and 3rd ed. You can't speak for the community in general as far as whether or not those rules were followed, and neither can I.

You’ve already been shown the quotations from the rules that show you are wrong. 3e npcs used either standard or elite arrays. 1e npcs were assigned stats.

If you were rolling npc stats you were not following the rules of those games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In 1e, NPCs were rolled differently from PCS. I posted the relevant rules from the 1e DMG earlier.

Ok. I just didn't see slightly different rolling methods as changing the question. You're welcome to see it differently. In any case, I was referring to them being written up like a PC as opposed to a monster statblock.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You’ve already been shown the quotations from the rules that show you are wrong. 3e npcs used either standard or elite arrays. 1e npcs were assigned stats.

If you were rolling npc stats you were not following the rules of those games.

Again, PC-style write-ups as opposed to monster statblocks.

 

[Minigiant]

Yeah, but it was often pretty irritating even back then. As I've commented, it wasn't a trivial reason people hopped out of D&D over the years back in the day. It just took a while because for the first few years, most of the alternatives (DragonQuest, C&S, RuneQuest) also had random character generation to one degree or another.

Again the problem the random ability scores. It was the unbalanced distribution of ability scores and character types.

For example, afriend of mine wants to DM a 1e game with a lot of house rules. The biggest ones are There is a warrior and a caster class for every Primary ability score. Ability scores outside of your Prime didn't do much.

Warriors:

• STR: Any Fighter
• DEX: Elf Duelist, Halfling Daggerer
• CON: Dwarf Defender, Half Orc Berserker
• INT: Gnome Breeecher
• WIS: Human Ranger, Human Monk
• CHA: Human Paladin

Mages:

• STR: Dwarf Forge Priest
• DEX: Elf Bladesinger
• CON: I forgot
• INT: Any Wizard
• WIS: Any Cleric,
• CHA: Human Sorcerer, Human Druid, Gnome Warlock, Halfling Minstrel

This way no matter what you rolled, you could be a warrior or caster. Also every warrior had a ranged attack based on their prime.

A mix of the Old and New.

 

[Hussar]

Again, PC-style write-ups as opposed to monster statblocks.

That’s not even true. Npcs in modules frequently lacked six stats.

For sure example the bozak priest in DL1 is apparently a level 4 MU judging from his spell list but is given no stats in the star block nor an actual level.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Again the problem the random ability scores. It was the unbalanced distribution of ability scores and character types.

I don't really think so. Some times basic conceptual issues were involve; if your concept was a smart character or specifically about a ranger, the fact there are other vaguely related types you can play is no concilation.

 

[Lanefan]

On the point about stats being more important.

This is so untrue.

In earlier DnD you simply never saw a character that didn’t have at least one 18. Every fighter had 18 percentile strength because there was no point in playing a fighter otherwise.

You must have played a different "earlier D&D" than we did (and still are). Even with a fairly generous roll-up system, starting with an 18 is pretty uncommon. Starting with a 16 is much more common. (I say "starting with" as we use the UA Cavalier's percentile-increment system for all classes, meaning stats can and do very slowly increase with level; the game occasionally provides other means of increasing stats as well e.,g. Decks of Many Things or those very expensive Tomes that take weeks to read)

Let’s not forget that we could be rolling 9d6 for our main stat after Unearthed Arcana came out.

If one's DM/table adopted that crazy UA rolling system, which I've never seen used in the wild in my life.

 

[Hussar]

And I’ve never seen a 1e fighter that didn’t have an 18 Strength. Funny how the plural of anecdote isn’t data.

 

[Lanefan]

I doubt seriously they were seen as less powerful per capita by the designers; they had lower experience requirements (which made up for the fact they didn't benefit from their high attributes in that regard), and while they had more limited spell lists, the phrase the AD&D1 PHB had for that spell list was "different and highly effective"; that's not a term you use if you think the class is overall inferior.

Unless you realize it is ineffective and are trying to sell it.

Truth be told, Illusionists can really rock if the DM is willing to allow illusions to be useful and if the opposition are mostly low-Int easy-to-fool humanoids e.g. Orcs, Ogres, etc. Flip side: Illusionists (particularly pre-UA) are nigh-useless if the opposition are mostly undead, oozes, constructs, or other things on whom illusions have little or no effect.

The fact the playing public didn't agree with them (presumably Gygax) doesn't change that designer perspective, and thus the minimum setting.

Perhaps.