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

[Thomas Shey]

So those players can give all their so boring/just numbers items to the players who want them and get on with their busybody lives.

In a world where every magic item is useful to every character, perhaps so, but that's often not the case.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I wonder if I'm mixing "excited as a player to see a +1 item" and "excited as a player to have this character who can really use one see a +1 item". I would believe many I'm classing as the later aren't the former.

Maybe. Or maybe I'm just cynical that a single +1, barring its "damage things that can't otherwise be damaged" is going to feel pretty invisible to people most of the time.

(This is actually a place where depending on the specifics of how magic items that boost damage work with other parts of the damage system matters; I absolutely care about my damage boosting weapon runes in PF2e even though they aren't "interesting" in a certain sense, because they're impact is so strong. In D&D3e the benefit of single +1 was pretty much lost in the noise of all the other damage benefits you got from various things).

 

[Cadence]

Maybe. Or maybe I'm just cynical that a single +1, barring its "damage things that can't otherwise be damaged" is going to feel pretty invisible to people most of the time.

And yet a single +1 bonus from an ASI apparently made a lot of folks on here avoid playing some race/class combinations.

It would be interesting to (get paid to) analyze actual play and follow up with interviews to see what parts of the game mechanics and what situations make a +1 really important and which ones make it a whole lot of nothing. (Somewhat akin to studying how folks rate risky activities on a bunch of things other than the actual risk).

 

[Lanefan]

But as the poster below this indicates, for many people its not so fine; its boring. Its just numbers.

Hey, if I'm a Fighter whose job is to hit things and hurt things and there's a +X weapon that'll make me better at what I do?

Gimme.

 

[Lanefan]

Numbers low. Fail lots. Get hit constantly. Dice clearly in charge.

Fail lots? The hit rate in 5e is better than it's ever been, largely due to lower monster ACs.

The tradeoff is that yes, you also get hit more as the PCs' AC is correspondingly lower. This would be a problem if PCs didn't have many hit points, but they (usually) do, thus combat becomes a less-swingy and more-predictable war of attrition than in older editions.

As for the dice being in charge, there's things you can do to mitigate that (in any edition, not just 5e) the most important of which is not to engage in combat unless you have to. Once you're in combat then of course it's a game of luck, but even there you've got all kinds of options to swing the odds further in your favour: good tactics, clever use of terrain, teamwork, focus-fire, and so on.

 

[tetrasodium]

How the heck does the game math of 5e make any character feel constantly incompetent?

I wonder the same modern d&d is built to practically ensure competence to the untrained & borders on mastery for the trained before magic items

 

[Micah Sweet]

Numbers low. Fail lots. Get hit constantly. Dice clearly in charge.

So, really bad dice luck? Because the odds are very much in your favor in 5e right from the beginning.

 

[Baron Opal II]

But throughout most of the history of the game, that described a +3 sword, too. Its still not sexy.

Ah, don't limit yourself. You have a sword that has such a high bonus it can cut anything.

A stableboy has a decent change to kill a squire or seriously wound a knight. It is a blade that a demonlord or archangel could fear. It is the quintessential tool of harm. What might it cut beyond gross matter?

 

[Lanefan]

Ah, don't limit yourself. You have a sword that has such a high bonus it can cut anything.

A stableboy has a decent change to kill a squire or seriously wound a knight. It is a blade that a demonlord or archangel could fear. It is the quintessential tool of harm. What might it cut beyond gross matter?

The national debt?
Scenes that run too long?
Off, the pub patron who's had one too many?
One's losses?

Yeah, that's one badass sword!

 

[overgeeked]

I wonder the same modern d&d is built to practically ensure competence to the untrained & borders on mastery for the trained before magic items

I think it might be a shifting baseline thing. Back in the day a +1 modifier to a stat was a big deal because it was rare. Now a character is considered incompetent if they have anything less than a +4 modifier to a stat, and the proper bonus is +5 in the stat, trained for the prof bonus, plus expertise.

That's certainly one shift in D&D over the years. Players have gone from a "sure, let's see what happens" mentality, to a "don't even try unless your bonuses are maxed out" mentality. You see this a lot when people complain about a non-socially optimized character even trying to talk to an NPC.