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

[Thomas Shey]

You are confused, that bolded bit is all that matters. The point is not if gold is needed by players for a specific thing. The point is that in every edition of d&d other than 5e the gm was able to influence player behavior by offering more or less gold for one thing over another because gold was needed for something. You are attempting to make a different point about why the players need the gold that is simply not relevant to the (in)ability to leverage the supply to influence player behavior

I believe I still get to make my point--which is gold, wasn't gold. It was experience. The GM can always play games with awarding advancement, in this game or any other.

 

[tetrasodium]

But that only goes as far as telling war stories. People wanted more sophisticated storytelling. They wanted reoccurring villains, twists and betrayals, foreshadowing and flashbacks. Stuff that makes most fiction engaging.

But that is a difference of expected experience. A lot of players I knew got into D&D because people say it allows them to play out a character in their own story, you be your own Conan or Aladdin or Gandalf. They wanted, and expected, the narrative tropes of fantasy fiction to be there. AD&D (and Basic) promises this, but the rules didn't really support it. AD&D storytelling works the same way your buddy tells you about his wild weekend in Mexico, it might be exciting, hilarious and even a bit suspenseful, but it's just an anecdote, a recap of events that transpired without past or future. There is no structure, no arching narrative, no connective tissue beyond "'these are the events that happened to these characters without greater rhyme or reason."

It's not surprising that a game which sold itself on the promise of exploring your own fiction attracted so many people who wanted it to resemble the fiction that inspired them. The idea that "the story is what the PC did in the game" is fine, but for more than a few players, it was unsatisfying. They wanted "Once Upon a Time...", Not "So this one time at band camp..."

" People wanted more sophisticated storytelling. They wanted reoccurring villains, twists and betrayals, foreshadowing and flashbacks. Stuff that makes most fiction engaging." I'm sorry if your games were unable to rise to that level while telling a story about the party & their place actions in the world.

Spoiler: snippets from a3.5 ECS

These ideas are not mutually exclusive: heroes might 1pick up multiple patrons and common enemies over the course of the campaign. Nothing prevents the party from working with both the Chamber and the Library Of Korranberg. for instance. Likewise. characters don't have to share the same background; the artificer and the warforged may have fought together during the war. but they could have joined up with the druid and the changeling afterward.
STYLES or PLAY
Eberron supports two styles of play—swashbuckling pulp adventure and dark intrigue. The ideal adventure weaves these elements together. combining action and high drama with mystery and betrayal. An adventure can focus on one genre over the other for a change ofpace. but the best campaigns use both of these. elements as the adventure progresses.

An adventure set entirely on the mean streets of Sharn may be darker in tone and more focused on intrigue and deception. but it can still include a few dramatic fight scenes when. for example. the heroes are caught between the changeling thieves and their shifter rivals. On the other hand. an expedition to Xen'drik to Find a fabled artifact has
more of an inherently pulp feel. though intrigue can be added with a few shady NPCs or some mystery surrounding the true motives of the party's patron.

...

RECURRING VILLAINS
Recurring villains play an important role in the swash buckling pulp tradition that drives an Eberon campaign. Eberron isn't simply about dungeon crawls and wandering monsters. Instead. the player characters are heroes Fighting to protect Khorvaire (or Small parts ofit. at least) from the nefarious schemes of Villainous masterminds. The Lords of Dust. the Dreaming Dark. the Blood oi'Vo]. and many other sinister conspiracies lurk in the shadows. and recurring villains help the players put a face to these organizations. See page 104 of the Dungeon Master Guidede for tips on how to integrate recurring villains into a campaign.

This continues for an entire chapter of this kind of stuff & has a great many less obvious hooks for it discussed throughout the content of the book itself. There were also great books like the complete villain & others

I believe I still get to make my point--which is gold, wasn't gold. It was experience. The GM can always play games with awarding advancement, in this game or any other.

Ok... that random factoid however is not in any way relevant to the fact that there was always a need for gold to fill some mechanical need... until 5e. Gold is something players can negotiate with NPCs & work to grow through things like investments, the same is not true of experience.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The Gygaxian play style didn't even survive AD&D. Moldvay/Cook didn't seem to acknowledge it, though the vestigial rules remain. Dragonlance certainly did a lot to encourage narrative/character driven play. 2e and BECMI were the nails in the coffin of this particular style, though it would take till 3e for the rules to catch up. It's no wonder that anyone who started playing after 1985 (and maybe even earlier) has no memory of this style of play and moved the rules to fit the narrative-focused PC centered style of play emphasized in Dragonlance and later in settings like Ravenloft, Planescape and Forgotten Realms.

Honestly, that style was only intermittently played in the OD&D day in my experience. It was more noticable than later, but even early on people were fighting against the system to play, oh, I dunno, fantasy heroes instead of fantasy caper characters or mercenaries in fantasy Vietnam.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But that only goes as far as telling war stories. People wanted more sophisticated storytelling. They wanted reoccurring villains, twists and betrayals, foreshadowing and flashbacks. Stuff that makes most fiction engaging.

But that is a difference of expected experience. A lot of players I knew got into D&D because people say it allows them to play out a character in their own story, you be your own Conan or Aladdin or Gandalf. They wanted, and expected, the narrative tropes of fantasy fiction to be there. AD&D (and Basic) promises this, but the rules didn't really support it. AD&D storytelling works the same way your buddy tells you about his wild weekend in Mexico, it might be exciting, hilarious and even a bit suspenseful, but it's just an anecdote, a recap of events that transpired without past or future. There is no structure, no arching narrative, no connective tissue beyond "'these are the events that happened to these characters without greater rhyme or reason."

It's not surprising that a game which sold itself on the promise of exploring your own fiction attracted so many people who wanted it to resemble the fiction that inspired them. The idea that "the story is what the PC did in the game" is fine, but for more than a few players, it was unsatisfying. They wanted "Once Upon a Time...", Not "So this one time at band camp..."

I've noted before that a game that went out of its way to tell you you'd have the adventures like various well known fictional fantasy characters that are mentioned--and then people are surprised people wanted to play people like those guys instead of the minimalist, die-if-looked-at-wrong characters OD&D and AD&D could produce.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ok... that random factoid however is not in any way relevant to the fact that there was always a need for gold to fill some mechanical need... until 5e. Gold is something players can negotiate with NPCs & work to grow through things like investments, the same is not true of experience.

Experience is not a mechanical need in any meaningful way. Its just a counter for how to award experience, but no one cared about it for itself; it was just a way to tell how you got experience, and that can be done any number of ways, all of which is every much as within the GM's control.

(Of course its true of experience. You act like GMs cannot decide to give extra experience for doing a task an NPC gives them. It just doesn't directly connect with money, but so what?)

 

[tetrasodium]

Experience is not a mechanical need in any meaningful way. Its just a counter for how to award experience, but no one cared about it for itself; it was just a way to tell how you got experience, and that can be done any number of ways, all of which is every much as within the GM's control.

(Of course its true of experience. You act like GMs cannot decide to give extra experience for doing a task an NPC gives them. It just doesn't directly connect with money, but so what?)

We were talking about gold always having a mechanical need until 5e. Experience is something that split from gold during/after 1e to allow gold to have more nuanced economic functions such as the involvement it had with magic items in 2e 3.x & 4e... (maybe even the d&dNext testrulesets) until 5e.

 

[Remathilis]

" People wanted more sophisticated storytelling. They wanted reoccurring villains, twists and betrayals, foreshadowing and flashbacks. Stuff that makes most fiction engaging." I'm sorry if your games were unable to rise to that level while telling a story about the party & their place actions in the world.

This continues for an entire chapter of this kind of stuff & has a great many less obvious hooks for it discussed throughout the content of the book itself. There were also great books like the complete villain & others

Not sure what you're trying to prove by quote the Eberron Campaign Setting. Eberron was designed by WotC in 2004. Its decades removed from "old school" style. It's as modern as D&D can get. Those quotes are a perfect example of what the game is NOW than anything you can quote in Gygax's DMG. Even most of 2e's advice was for a DM to create a narrative that the PCs should follow to its conclusion rather than drop the PCs in a spot and let the story be the adventures and misadventures of what the PCs did that night. The DM was responsible for more than just creating a zone and letting the PCs muck around in it, they became the ones who crafted interesting plots and molding it to the PCs that the player's create.

So if you were trying to prove me wrong with Eberron, you actually proved me right. GG.

 

[Hussar]

As far as gold goes, the pendulum swings back and forth.

In 1e, gold was VERY important since that was the primary way to gain XP. To the point where probably somwhere in the neighbourhood of 75% of your character's XP was from gold and and another 10-15% from magic items. Your "kill" xp was basically just icing on the top.

2e got rid of gold for xp and then gave the party nothing to do with gold. You couldn't buy magic items - at least that was pretty strongly argued against in the system and there as pretty much nothing to spend gold on. So, DM's simply stopped awarding much treasure. There just wasn't any point after a few thousand gp. There is a STARK difference in the treasure you get from a 2e module and a 1e module. Not so much in the magic item department, but gp? Yeah, there just wasn't any use for it in most campaigns.

3e swung it back the other way. A primary element of your character was the wealth by level table. This was a HUGE design element - basically everything in the game centered around that from class design to encounter design.

4e then swung it back the other way. There really wasn't a whole lot of point of money - you weren't supposed to buy magic items again by and large and because magic item bonuses were tied to level, you could drop the whole thing out the window and use inherent bonuses. Gold was largely pointless.

5e has then pretty much doubled down on that. Gold has virtually nothing to do with your character. You don't buy magic items. Gold is largely superfluous unless you use a lot of down time activities.

I mean, my players just recently brought it to my attention that we're playing a 7th level campaign (Candlekeep Mysteries) and the six PC party has a less than 10000 gp total. And considerably less. In 1e, every single PC would have that much coin or more.

 

[Remathilis]

Reaaaaaalllllyyyyyyyy?
What about Star Trek. It is about a ship, The Enterprise. Be it the crew of Kirk, Picard, Archer, Pike or whatever will be next... Voyager? DS9? How about the Lord of the Ring? People like to hear about heroes' journey and tribulation. Yes, sometime a Conan, a Druss can be fun to read, Drizzt too! But having a cast of varying characters is very important.

And if you focus only on one player? What happens to the others? They are the sidekicks? Do they count for nothing?
RPGs are about the Group's Story. Together, the players build the legend of their group! Together! It is the DM's job to make sure that all players have a chance to shine in the course of the campaigns, adventures and stories.

And contrary to what you are claiming. Stories have been part of D&D since the beginning! It is the story of the group, not the individuals. Sure, sometimes you will focus on one character or the other, but this will be dictated by the story and the events. Not because you like that player better than the others. You do not need specific rules to create stories from an RPG. Stories naturally emerge without even trying. Some of the recap of games of my players are true novels. But these are focussing on the group not the individuals. Yes, sometimes the individual will take a lot of place at certain point of the story/campaign/adventure but that focus will change, jump from player to player.

I fail to see where I mentioned any ONE SPECIFIC PC was more important than any others. D&D is an ensemble cast. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, etc all were important, even if Kirk was kinda the "most important" in a way. But in Star Trek, sometimes a certain cast member got a story that revolved around them uniquely. It resolved and the next week they might focus on a different character or a group plot. D&D works just fine under this scenario. One week we might explore Bob's dwarf's backstrory, next game we're on a quest to get Sue a fabled magic item she wants.

If you think I'm implying any player should have focus at the expense of another, you are SORELY mistaken.

 

[Remathilis]

See, I always liked "this one time at band camp". I was raised on 1e for playstyle, and engaged with 2e mainly through reading about the awesome campaign settings. I never got hung up on any character (I enjoyed them while they were there but always had plenty of character ideas), so if they died it was never a big deal. It actually makes it difficult for me to understand being strongly attached to one character, which is probably why modern D&D's heavy push towards character longevity baffles me. It doesn't take that long to make a PC in 5e.

I've had my fair share of PC deaths, but I found that I cared more when I saw the same PC through a campaign from inception to ending. It mattered more to me. I often found that replacement PCs that came in later in a campaign had weak ties to everything; they weren't there when the bad guy betrayed the party, or when they all escaped the King's dungeon and were wanted by the law. They kinda just showed up and said "Oh, Evil Wizard Guy is evil? I guess we should stop them." and that was the attachment they had to the campaign.

That said, I don't necessarily think "this one time at band camp" is a wrong way to play, but for me it's unsatisfying. If all my character is was just a collection of anecdotes, it feels thin. I want him to be a hero or a protagonist, to matter to the story and not be instantly replaceable with Elf#762.