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

[Lanefan]

Another thought does occur though. You mention the idea of a dwarven druid being a problem in your setting. But, the thing is, in D&D, there are half a dozen druid archetypes that fit dwarves without any problems. Circle of Fire Druid, for example, is a fire worshipping druid - perfect for a forge priest. But, since your campaign was created over a decade ago, everything in the campaign is based on what D&D looked like then and not now.

My campaign is based on what D&D looked like about 30-35 years ago, and any future campaign I run likely always will be.

I think this goes a long way towards explaining differences. To me, a campaign based on D&D as D&D looked ten, twenty or thirty years ago isn't something I'm even remotely interested in playing. There's too much new stuff that I want to try. So, campaigns and campaign settings are disposable to me. If you run a completely new setting every two years, then your setting will much more easily incorporate any new developments that have appeared in the game.

If I ran a new setting every two years I'd be doing nothing but build settings; the last two settings I've built have taken about (1) a year and (2) about a year-and-a-half of work. With (1) I did some of the work ahead of time and some of it after play began (I wasn't expecting to resume DMing so soon after my previous game ended but got talked into it); with (2) I did almost all the work ahead of time.

The game adds artificers? No problem. Next campaign will have artificers if someone wants to play one. Players no longer assume a human dominated setting and want to play what would once have been really weird races but are now pretty common in the game? No problems. This next setting will have space for anything you want to play.

And if that's how you roll then more power to ya!

Me, I'd rather hew a lot closer to Tolkein if possible. Sure if a new class holds interest I might adopt it (or, more likely, design my own version), but I'm not in the least interested in having what seems like every species in the setting be PC-playable.

Of course, all of this is predicated on the idea that campaigns and campaign settings are collaborative efforts. I talked about the dwarf druid having a bespoke spell list. To me, I'd just hand that off to the player with the admonition of choosing stuff that that player thinks looks about right. IME, players will always be far, far more concerned about balance that I will ever be. If something turns out to be a problem, we'll deal with that then. Otherwise? Go for it. Impress me. Show me what you can do.

Works so much better and it's so much easier on me as a DM.

Then again, I come from a gaming tradition where we always rotated DM's. It wasn't until much, much later that I became the only DM for the group. So, the idea of D&D as collaboration has always been part of my experience. That's how I started playing. So game worlds were always a collaborative effort based around consensus. Bob adds something, Dave adds something else. I add a third thing and then Bob changes what Dave added and so on and so forth.

I guess my experience with different DMs is that each one has always had their own setting(s) with rare if any overlap. Our settings are often connected in that occasionally characters or even entire parties from one will end up in the other for a while, but the settings themselves remain disparate and under control of just one DM. Whcih means, if a character or party jumps settings that character/party is suddenly playing under a different DM.

About the only thing we sort-of try to co-ordinate is universal time; such that if, say, character A jumps from my world to someone else's, spends X-amount of time there, and then jumps back, I know how long in my-world time it was gone for.

The very top down approach a lot of people advocate for was not how I learned to game. And, when I met that kind of table, I very much found it not to my taste. I'm currently on full time DM duty because no one else is stepping up. The second someone volunteers, I'm out of the DM chair so fast my pants catch on fire.

I've hit that point in the past now and then. Fortunately, right now I'm happy to keep going with my current game/setting as long as anyone's willing to play in it, as it still has more than enough "legs" to keep it going for quite some time.

 

[Hussar]

Heh. Hewing close to Tolkien is really not a consideration for me at this point. My next campaign will be set on a living world where dungeons are sentient cancers and the only settlement rests on the back of a giant six legged lizard.

 

[Lanefan]

Heh. Hewing close to Tolkien is really not a consideration for me at this point. My next campaign will be set on a living world where dungeons are sentient cancers and the only settlement rests on the back of a giant six legged lizard.

How many xp is that giant lizard worth?

 

[jasper]

Heh. Hewing close to Tolkien is really not a consideration for me at this point. My next campaign will be set on a living world where dungeons are sentient c....

I assume you mean sentient Creatures. And after some adult and tween versions of that in books. Um not thanks.

 

[pemerton]

To me, a campaign based on D&D as D&D looked ten, twenty or thirty years ago isn't something I'm even remotely interested in playing. There's too much new stuff that I want to try. So, campaigns and campaign settings are disposable to me.

I don't think this particular variable has much explanatory relevance in the current conversation.

I'll explain why.

I ran my first game set in the WoG in the mid-80s. (I think 1984 or 1985.) I used the same setting from the late 80s until the late 90s. I've used it again, for FRPGing, for the last 5+ years.

The systems I've used have been AD&D, Rolemaster, Burning Wheel and Torchbearer. Compared to your (Hussar's) desiderata, it's always looked fairly traditional: Dwarves with axes, Elven rangers and spell-users, no Dwarven MUs, Dwarven pagan cleric types focus on earth and not trees, etc.

That hasn't been any sort of barrier to player participation in establishing background/setting stuff relevant to their PCs.

Just a few examples:

* When I started a campaign in 1990 I wanted to set it around the City of GH, using the boxed set for that. One of the players wanted an apprentice, bumpkin-ish, goat-herding mage PC (influenced a bit by Ged in Wizard of Earthsea). I read out the description of the Village of Five Oaks from the setting book, and the player elaborated on that, on his PC's backstory, on his mentor who lived in a great hollow tree and was in hiding from his rivals elsewhere (which ended up being Nyrond, but I don't know if we established that at the time), etc.​

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* Playing Burning Wheel around 2016 or so, the PCs were stuck in the Bright Desert. One of the players said "Everyone knows that ancient Suel nomads are as thick as thieves in the Bright Desert; I want to Circles some up!" The check failed, and so the nomads who arrived on the scene were no friends of the PC! As GM, I tied the enmity back into the player-authored PC backstory, which involved the PC having trained with his brother in an isolated tower in the hills just north of the desert.​

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* Starting a Torchbearer campaign a month or two ago, I had specified that we would be starting in the Bandit Kingdoms, and pulled out my map. One of the players looked down the option of home settlements and decided his PC was from a Forgotten Temple Complex. We plonked said temple complex down in the Theocracy of the Pale, near the borders with Tenh and the Bandit Kingdoms. The player established a few NPCs there, as part of the relationships aspect of PC building, linking them into the backstory another player was establishing for a Wizard's Tower PC hometown which was also easily placed on the map.​

I've never found traditional D&D, or established settings, to be any sort of barrier to collaborative development of the fiction. If Gygax (or Ed Greenwood, or Salvatore, or REH, or Leiber, or whomever) needs a new NPC or settlement or hitherto-neglected god to make their story work, they just write it in! Nothing stops players of FRPGs doing the same.

 

[Hussar]

I assume you mean sentient Creatures. And after some adult and tween versions of that in books. Um not thanks.

No. I meant cancers. The dungeons spontaneously generate as cancers upon the body of the World Goddess. The adventures centre around ripping out the hearts of these cancers and feeding the hearts to the Village to destroy the cancers.

The inhabitants of the Village are the dungeon born who are freed when a dungeon is destroyed.

Which means that the sky is the limit for pc races.

 

[Lanefan]

No. I meant cancers. The dungeons spontaneously generate as cancers upon the body of the World Goddess. The adventures centre around ripping out the hearts of these cancers and feeding the hearts to the Village to destroy the cancers.

The inhabitants of the Village are the dungeon born who are freed when a dungeon is destroyed.

Hmmm - I have to say, I've certainly heard worse ideas for a campaign premise; and the sky is also the limit for how long this could run if so desired. All you'd really need to do to keep this going for ages would be slow down the level-advance rate of the PCs.

 

[Hussar]

I don't think this particular variable has much explanatory relevance in the current conversation.

/snip
I've never found traditional D&D, or established settings, to be any sort of barrier to collaborative development of the fiction. If Gygax (or Ed Greenwood, or Salvatore, or REH, or Leiber, or whomever) needs a new NPC or settlement or hitherto-neglected god to make their story work, they just write it in! Nothing stops players of FRPGs doing the same.

Kinda sorta. If the DM is insisting on a specific view of those established settings, and that view is grounded in a particular time frame, then collaboration is limited by that. Thus we get people insisting that you can't have Dragonborn in Greyhawk, for example. Greyhawk didn't have dragonborn when it was created, therefore there are no dragonborn in Greyhawk.

Or, as Lanefan's example goes - druids are animal loving tree huggers - the original view of druids and certainly a clear archetype. But, in the ensuing years, there have been many different versions of druids - elemental focused druids that don't really care about living stuff is a good example. Now, if your idea of a druid has to be an AD&D version of druid only, then collaboration is going to be problematic.

I'd say that established settings can be all sorts of barriers to collaborative development. Hell, look at the massive reaction to 4e's version of Forgotten Realms. The whole point of the reaction was that they were changing canon. Or, look at all the lore arguments you see on the boards. Endlessly. The reaction that you cannot add X to the setting or take X away from the setting because it contradicts some established setting lore.

I think I pretty strongly disagree with you here @pemerton. Established settings have long been an enormous barrier to collaborative development.

 

[Hussar]

Hmmm - I have to say, I've certainly heard worse ideas for a campaign premise; and the sky is also the limit for how long this could run if so desired. All you'd really need to do to keep this going for ages would be slow down the level-advance rate of the PCs.

True. So long as that sky is about 2 years. Because by that time, I'll be tired of this setting and ready to move on to something new.

 

[pemerton]

I think I pretty strongly disagree with you here @pemerton. Established settings have long been an enormous barrier to collaborative development.

It's time to argue!

If the DM is insisting on a specific view of those established settings, and that view is grounded in a particular time frame, then collaboration is limited by that. Thus we get people insisting that you can't have Dragonborn in Greyhawk, for example. Greyhawk didn't have dragonborn when it was created, therefore there are no dragonborn in Greyhawk.

<snip>

I'd say that established settings can be all sorts of barriers to collaborative development. Hell, look at the massive reaction to 4e's version of Forgotten Realms. The whole point of the reaction was that they were changing canon. Or, look at all the lore arguments you see on the boards. Endlessly. The reaction that you cannot add X to the setting or take X away from the setting because it contradicts some established setting lore.

I'm going to repost a bit of my earlier post, because I'm going to double down on it, in explaining why I disagree with your core claim, but not (what I take to be) your supporting claims:

I've never found traditional D&D, or established settings, to be any sort of barrier to collaborative development of the fiction. If Gygax (or Ed Greenwood, or Salvatore, or REH, or Leiber, or whomever) needs a new NPC or settlement or hitherto-neglected god to make their story work, they just write it in! Nothing stops players of FRPGs doing the same.

To me, the issue you are pointing doesn't seem to be one of a setting being "traditional", or "established". The Hyborian Age is both traditional and established, and REH wrote whatever he needed into it. Middle Earth is traditional and established, and that didn't stop JRRT writing in versions of King Arthur and Robin Hood as the same character; and he was still playing with the setting, writing in new stuff or rewriting his backstory, until the end.

The issue you're pointing to, in my view, is what Ron Edwards called "karaoke RPGing": ie insisting that the only fiction permitted is stuff that someone else has already written. That will get in the way of authorship, by players or (presumably) GMs.

When I play FRPGs set in GH, and have players introduce new Forgotten Temple Complexes or new histories of the wizards' towers in the Abor-Alz, it works despite GH being an old and established setting. Because none of us object to writing in new content! Just like any genre author does when they need to.