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

[Fifth Element]

If hitpoints aren't meat and high HP count doesn't represent superhuman durability, why exactly can you swim in acid, somersault from skyscrappers and all that, and then just shrug off and get back to fight as if nothing happened? No amount of luck, stamina and will to live are gonna help with such feats.

Because D&D is, and always has been, incoherent with respect to the abstraction that it uses or does not use with respect to hit point, as the circumstance may be.

And it's not just hit points. In AD&D it was quite specific that an "attack roll" does not represent a single swing of a sword, but a series of thrusts and parries over the attack round, abstracted into a single die roll. But if you shoot an arrow, that die roll represents a single arrow.

D&D uses hit points to represent different things at the same time. The system is very abstract, and does not stand up to scrutiny. But its advantage is its simplicity.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Did all day cantrips start with PF and 4e?

That'd be the late 3.5 Warlock.

Late 3.5 was where a lot of the good design actually was born.

 

[Minigiant]

A game where characters never suffer wounds sounds even more super heroic to me than one where they all recover from wounds overnight.

HP always felt like 65-75% stamina to me.

 

[Vaalingrade]

HP always felt like 65-75% stamina to me.

This is ten percent luck. Twenty percent skill. Fifteen percent concentrated power of will. Five percent pleasure. Fifty percent pain.

One hundred percent reason to remember the name.

 

[tetrasodium]

It might be true in regards to the advantage of hp being simiplicity as opposed to some of the multi-pool systems you see from time to time with their own pros & cons, but that's been taken to a& maybe even beyond a munchkinized extreme where all the things viewed as PC facing cons of a HP system are also removed in 5e where hp mean nothing & losing them means even less. A player with X hitpoints can do this for 12 hours straight every day

• Lets say that X is 100hp just to use an easy number
• get hit for 199 hp& drop to zero
• get hit for 99 damage failing 2 death saves
• get healed for 1d4+1 hp with healing word
• get hit for 100hp& drop to zero
• get hit for 99 damage failing 2 death saves
• get 1 hp back with a 1hp lay on hands
• Get hit for 100hp
• repeat this going back from the start for the next sixteen hours

In the span of just the first couple rounds of the day before the coffee even finished brewing the player with 100hp has taken 500+ damage that was washed away with 1d4+2 points worth of healing. Not only that 16 hours later the player who had taken thousands of damage over 12 hours & maybe been healed a couple hundred hp in that time can take an 8 hour nap to recover his original 100hp while all of his allies do the same to recover all of their spell slots & abilities used to do all of that recovery. If they all decided to celebrate their victory by each drinking an entire cask of 190 proof everclear as a nightcap the resulting hangover will have more impact on them the next day than straining themselves so deeply the day before.

In fact the players can only keep up that breakneck pace for three+con mod days before suffering a level of exhaustion on day 3 6 etc unless they find time in that busy schedule of weapons testing & anatomy lessons to grab one meal. Since exhaustion 4 is half HP they should probably do this every two days to maximize their effectiveness

 

[Remathilis]

Because D&D is, and always has been, incoherent with respect to the abstraction that it uses or does not use with respect to hit point, as the circumstance may be.

And it's not just hit points. In AD&D it was quite specific that an "attack roll" does not represent a single swing of a sword, but a series of thrusts and parries over the attack round, abstracted into a single die roll. But if you shoot an arrow, that die roll represents a single arrow.

D&D uses hit points to represent different things at the same time. The system is very abstract, and does not stand up to scrutiny. But its advantage is its simplicity.

Attack rolls/AC/HP are all impossible to accurately separate and describe. A knight in full plate and a greatsword and a monk in robes with a staff can be perfectly matched if their attack rolls, damage, AC and HP numbers were all the same, despite the fact they aren't in fiction fighting remotely similarly. Attempting to discern why the monk isn't cleaved in twain by the knight or how the monk can even harm the knight at all is a pathway to madness: accept the numbers aren't real or be prepared to start work on your own fantasy heartbreaker.

 

[Minigiant]

That'd be the late 3.5 Warlock.

Late 3.5 was where a lot of the good design actually was born.

It was the time when D&D game design caught with board and video game design and designed for function and not simple wants.

When numbers stopped being chosen arbitrarily or matter of a fact.and mechanics were made with both function and narrative in mind.

 

[Mournblade94]

Right. And that’s part of the problem. It should be up to the dice, not the DM. The DM cannot be both neutral and decide the outcome. Otherwise it’s inevitably adversarial. The DM should decide if an action is possible, the relevant DCs if a roll is required, or if it’s impossible…all based on the fiction of the world. But not the outcome, unless it’s a foregone conclusion or a logical consequence. I don’t view the DM as a storyteller. I view the DM as running the world the PCs interact with.

YES! This is definitely a way D&D has changed over the decades. My DM style is always GAME master not STORY teller. I usually summarize dialogue, I have maybe three voices I can use for NPC's and thats only to convey mood.

My players talk in game all the time with each other. With my NPC's its usually a summarized conversation on each part. Main line of dialogue then description. Except I play with a broadway actor... hes always trying to get me to act out parts. I like to rule and then let the fiction unfold from player action and dice.

I noticed now, the storytelling is the focus. Yes I've had a player leave because I am not talking in full dialogue or putting cool story before rules. Ultimatley Im playing a game.

I think the biggest change in D&D is how the story telling is moving front and game elements are becoming secondary.

 

[Mournblade94]

Yeah, I'm done with this. 3d6 in order wasn't the way characters were generated in 1e. If you did it that way, more power to you but that certainly wasn't presumed. Hell, my fighter got 9d6 to generate his strength. Never minding my +3 to hit and damage and multiple attacks at 1st level. Oh, right, we're not allowed to talk about Unearthed Arcana...

Note that any 18 percentile strength starts at +3 to damage and only goes up from there.

Again, the odds of someone playing a fighter type that didn't have percentile strength was something that rarely happened. You had six tries to get an 18, and most characters, as in almost all of them, managed it every time surprisingly enough.

The point being, a 1e party could easily be dropping two, three ogres per round, even by very low levels.

But, yeah, I've been around this argument too many times to bother with it again. It's so pointless because everyone's table was so incredibly different back then that virtually no generalizations could be made. Heck, the fact that you're pointing to 3d6 in order, a rolling method that wasn't the main rolling method in the edition, as somehow "proof" of your point means that this is largely pointless.

I remember a few tournaments where you had to roll 3d6 in order but otherwise no one did, Ofcourse we had more time to play there so occasionally we did side games with 3d6 in order and racial level limits just to play it that way. That was not our norm though,

 

[tetrasodium]

YES! This is definitely a way D&D has changed over the decades. My DM style is always GAME master not STORY teller. I usually summarize dialogue, I have maybe three voices I can use for NPC's and thats only to convey mood.

My players talk in game all the time with each other. With my NPC's its usually a summarized conversation on each part. Main line of dialogue then description. Except I play with a broadway actor... hes always trying to get me to act out parts. I like to rule and then let the fiction unfold from player action and dice.

I noticed now, the storytelling is the focus. Yes I've had a player leave because I am not talking in full dialogue or putting cool story before rules. Ultimatley Im playing a game.

I think the biggest change in D&D is how the story telling is moving front and game elements are becoming secondary.

I tend to do the same & occasionally get a player who wants to hash out every npc interaction in some kind of bizarre real time turn based one liner back & forth, but as a mere human I can't do that and run the game in d&d. I can kinda do it in fate where I can say "no bob your xxx aspect is going to make that tough/downright implausible that you'd say that" or whatever. Inevitably in d&d it winds up being a game of chess from a mary sue wasting table time for all of the other players who is going to get exactly what they want or just have their PC throw up their hands & walk. it's rare that the players have any sort of stake or standing to risk in a discussionso it generally it just winds up trying to play the GM by looking for a zinger to win or forcing a GM to relent because they want the game to move on rather than monopolizing the game time engaging in a pointless discussion with bob.