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

[Hussar]

I always love the whole "Naw, 3e didn't have unlimited healing". It makes me giggle.

Never minding that clerics had their healing abilities massively increased, paladins became a commonly played class, rangers got healing at what, 3rd, 4th level, AND the party could make their own healing wands for a feat that the wizard got for free.

Good grief, did you ever see a group actually heal naturally in 3e? Ever?

Then again, the 3e change was mostly based on how 2e was being played where, sure, it wasn't overnight healing, but, it was as fast as the cleric could cast Cure spells. Meaning that the natural healing rules were 99% ignored anyway.

This "change" is more just a reflection of how the game was actually being played.

 

[Hussar]

Yep. It's busted. But it is what it is. Either we get on with fixing it or we waste time complaining about it.

The system isn't hostile to house rules or changes. It's infinitely more forgiving to house rules than 4E was. The system doesn't fight buffed monsters. It breaks nothing. It only makes the combats more challenging for the PCs. 5E is nowhere near as finely tuned as 4E. 5E is not a finely wound Swiss watch, you can monkey with the gears and springs without destroying it. Besides, however hostile the system itself might be...it's not...at all...but assuming it is...which it isn't...it's far less hostile than the players when faced with a nerf.

Now, now, no need for bashing 4e here. 4e was INCREDIBLY easy to house rule because all the rules were so in the open. You knew exactly what was going on. And, the fact that the rules for creating a new monster fit on a business card meant that you could create entirely bespoke monsters at the drop of a hat.

Never minding how simple it was to change so many facets of the game. I would argue that 3e was far less open to house ruling since so many of the rule interactions weren't made explicit and there were so many knock on effects.

But, sorry, this is veering in to edition war territory so, I'll stop now.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The DM can react, but many DMs are tired of being vilified by their players if there's a playstyle mismatch. You need to hash this stuff out in an extensive session 0, particularly if the group has not gamed together before. If that means it's going to a long discussion, so be it.

I don't disagree with your conclusion, but that player "vilifiication" is as much that players are done dealing with GMs who think they know what's good for the players and they'll take what the GM offers and like it. At best an awful lot of people seem all too in favor of "take it or leave it" and some seem to suggest outright bait and switch.

The fact players are unwilling to deal with some of the nonsense they had to put up with for decades if they wanted to play does not seem a flaw in modern players.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Except the part where you deny an assertion drive-by style without logical back-up. You can have the opinion that people are just using "superhero" as a dumb buzzword, but that's all it is. Superheroism means different things to different people, and there's no way you can know those using it are not sincere.

Their sincerity is irrelevant; the associations with that word are still overblown at best. If you choose to use a word with a bunch of semantic loading, you don't get to be soggy when people take it as given and roll their eyes at you.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This was always the really weird schizophrenia of 1e. Sure, if you look at the Greyhawk setting books - the old boxed sets or even earlier - the setting looked really grim. But then you played the modules. You were definitely the heroes here. Fighting slavers, flighting giants, fighting drow. You were never just plain old dirt farmers - that's Warhammer fantasy. By 5th or 6th level, you were walking around with a kingdom's worth of equipment, and probably had enough coin to buy a small country.

If anything, 3e drastically reduced PC wealth from the 1e and 2e days.

Even from the OD&D level.

As I've noted before, OD&D wasn't very damn good at gritty fantasy out of the box as written. Someone could do gritty fantasy with it, but you had to ignore much of the magic, not use any of the magic item generating tables as-was, and probably ignore most of the monsters to do it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I always love the whole "Naw, 3e didn't have unlimited healing". It makes me giggle.

Never minding that clerics had their healing abilities massively increased, paladins became a commonly played class, rangers got healing at what, 3rd, 4th level, AND the party could make their own healing wands for a feat that the wizard got for free.

Good grief, did you ever see a group actually heal naturally in 3e? Ever?

Then again, the 3e change was mostly based on how 2e was being played where, sure, it wasn't overnight healing, but, it was as fast as the cleric could cast Cure spells. Meaning that the natural healing rules were 99% ignored anyway.

This "change" is more just a reflection of how the game was actually being played.

I don't recall anyone every use the natural healing rules to any great extent even in OD&D. It might have taken longer than in modern games (because it was the "prep all heal spells, heal everyone, wait until the next day, rinse, repeat" process rather than the cheap Cure wands and other solutions, but it was still almost impossible to have a group take longer than 2-4 days tops to be up to speed, and that was in an extreme case).

 

[Minigiant]

This was always the really weird schizophrenia of 1e. Sure, if you look at the Greyhawk setting books - the old boxed sets or even earlier - the setting looked really grim. But then you played the modules. You were definitely the heroes here. Fighting slavers, flighting giants, fighting drow. You were never just plain old dirt farmers - that's Warhammer fantasy. By 5th or 6th level, you were walking around with a kingdom's worth of equipment, and probably had enough coin to buy a small country.

If anything, 3e drastically reduced PC wealth from the 1e and 2e days.

0e and 1e was very2 sided in that regard. At level 1,it was very grim or very bleak (but rarely both). This mkes low level PCs very not heroeic unless they risk being one of the many dead who tried before them. However if they luck into enough successes, they hit a point where the mechanics work against the obstacles as the PCs have enugh levels, gold, and magic items to tilt the scales hard without risking themselves that much.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What do you demand I say to the same old 'OMG, how DARE anime and video games 'influence' D&D by existing tangentially to it in the nerdspace' weird one-sided rivalry people keep trying to play as a trump card against things they don't like because they assume a shared antipathy will bypass reality?

If you're going to deny someone 's assertion, there's only so far you can get with a one word response.

 

[Fifth Element]

5E is nowhere near as finely tuned as 4E.

4E is nowhere near as finely tuned as so many people claim it is.

When I ran 4E, I found the battles were starting to run long as we got up in levels, so at some point I started halving the monsters' hp and doubling their damage. No one at the table even noticed the change, but fights got substantially less draggy.

 

[Fifth Element]

If you're going to deny someone 's assertion, there's only so far you can get with a one word response.

To be fair, if someone has merely made an assertion, it's not up to someone else to show that it's false. It's up to the person making the assertion to show that it's true.