D&D General Why TSR-era D&D Will Always Be D&D

[Mort]

I think a big part of D&D's success is the support, which includes adventures. Having adventures around means it's fairly easy to get going playing the game, and they also provide examples of how to do things. As a counter-example, I've been eyeing Trinity Continuum: Aeon lately, but the breadth of the setting and the lack of adventure support has kept me from taking the leap.

And I think a big part of what makes adventure publishing possible, or at least relatively easy, is the class/level system. If you look at a more skill-based system like the aforementioned Aeon, it's really hard to determine what sort of difficulty is appropriate. You could use XP as a gauge, but XP can be spent in so many different ways that the power level of two different 30 XP characters can vary wildly. But in D&D, you can be pretty sure what a 5th level party is capable of, so it's... well, maybe not easy, but doable to write an adventure for a random party of 5th level characters.

D&D has more pre-made adventures for DMs to use/crib/be inspired by than any other game (at least that I'm aware of) by many orders of magnitude.

Most games have an intro adventure in the book and that's it the GM is expected to come up with the rest. Some have a book or two of adventures - and again that's about it.

D&D has multiple adventures at almost all levels (sure the lower and mid levels are much better represented but even higher level ones are not uncommon).

This was certainly the case from early TSR era and has continued to today.

This wide availability of adventures combined with/thanks to the level system is one of the "secret sauces" to decades of success. And yeah it's from early TSR, but it has worked - why would WoTC change that!

 

[Umbran]

So is 5th edition hampered from being a better game because it keeps holding on to old mechanic because the developers want to still call it Dungeons & Dragons?

I see no substantive difference between asking this, and asking if Van Gogh art would have been better if he'd switched to sculpture.

There is no objective measure here. So it is possible that they could have published something you, personally, liked better, but that assessment would not generalize or extend beyond you.

Continuing the tradition from half a century ago is in conflict with the kind of game that the current target audience wants to play, resulting in a flawed product.

All products are flawed. Perfection is not definable outside of mathematics.

 

[Hex08]

Continuing the tradition from half a century ago is in conflict with the kind of game that the current target audience wants to play, resulting in a flawed product.

I would have to dispute that continuing a tradition that is a half a century old is in conflict with what the audience wants to play since 5E is the best selling version of D&D ever and the most popular RPG ever created. Obviously, the target audience wants to play it.

 

[Staffan]

This point is spot on. D&D predates computer/console games and MMOs but many of them use a system very close to D&D's levels and they do it because it works and players like doing it. Leveling your character, gaining new powers or abilities, getting more hit point, etc is something player's enjoy. The sense of accomplishment and progression is important. Even those games that do it differently have some kind of progression system to feed into that sense of accomplishment.

Another thing about levels is that they let you enforce a spread of abilities. In a completely point-based system, you could put all your points into one thing and get super-good at that one thing at the expense of other things. If you use levels, you can easily say that leveling up gives you a bit from menu A, a bit from menu B, and a bit from menu C.

 

[lingual]

I love Catra!

 

[delericho]

Kinda a Ship of Theseus situation, under a long enough timeline. Mechanical refinement and drift inevitably mean that some future version of the game will have no mechanical connection to yea olde Chainmail.

I tend to think of it more like a familial resemblance - I am now the age my grandfather was 50 years ago, and while we're very different people living in very different times, there is also a fairly clear thread as some things have been passed down the generations.

5e owes clear debts to the editions that have gone before, while also not being the same as any of them. Things have been added, removed, and changed along the way. 6e, whenever it comes, will owe different debts to a slightly wider set of old editions. But all of them are D&D, in the same way that my grandfather and I are both members of the same family.

 

[Mannahnin]

Y'see, I don't think that was the primary loop in the TSR era. IMO, in OD&D-BECMI/RC, and in AD&D (2e this might have been muted, but I'm pretty sure it was still in the DMG, if a little more buried) the primary loop was -- move (rest every 6th turn), decide if searching for traps, explore, if meet enemies, make reaction roll, if hostility event, check morale, fight, moral, fight, morale, etc. Or it was the wilderness travel loop. Combat indeed followed the loop still used, but at least in theory that wasn't the primary one for the game.

Or more fundamentally...

1. DM Describes Situation
2. Players Ask Questions
3. DM Provides More Info
4. Players Act
5. DM Resolves Action
return to DM Describes Situation.

But isn't most of the TSR Era D&D just name only?

Most of the mechanics, design goals, and fluff has shifted always from those of the TSR days. Score, races, classes, levels, AC , saving throws, etc in 5e all work differently and run on completely different design philosophy from the pre-2000 days.

A lot of it, but not purely so. Clerics and Rogues/Thieves for example. Clerics in particular as a spellcasting armored undead hunter/healer are so unique a creation of D&D. Or character levels and spell levels.

But yeah, there's a lot of truth to this too. How ability scores function/what they do has changed a lot. How saving throws work has changed a lot. How combat works mechanically has changed remarkably little- mostly a lot of hit point inflation. But the fundamental math of attack vs. AC is nearly identical. Experience Points are there, but how they're handed out has changed a lot since 1E (arguably the big change there was in 2E).

 

[Mercurius]

So is 5th edition hampered from being a better game because it keeps holding on to old mechanic because the developers want to still call it Dungeons & Dragons?

Yes. Yes, it is. Continuing the tradition from half a century ago is in conflict with the kind of game that the current target audience wants to play, resulting in a flawed product.

At the risk of getting into the murky waters of discussing 4E, that's kind of what they did already - and it didn't work, at least economically and in terms of reception by the public. But in terms of game design? I had my criticisms of 4E, but I do think in some ways it was the "best" designed version of D&D (My main criticism is that combat ended up grindy and rather formulaic, but I don't see how a further revision couldn't have shifted that a bit).

4E still had all the trappings of D&D, but it really tried to take a different approach and create its own, distinct approach. It was bold, at least relative to the history of D&D; where 3E was a rather successful attempt to play catch-up and streamline D&D from the old, anachronistic TSR chassis, 4E was an attempt to bring it forward into the fold of innovative game design. I mean, we know that they were trying to appeal to video gamers, but it also tried to push the game forward into new waters. For many it was just too much, and the line was cancelled after four years.

Now, a game doesn't have to be cutting edge in terms of game design to be a success, so I would say this idea of "hampered" seems too saddled with the idea of game design innovation, rather than game design as accomplishing its primary goal: which is to produce a fun game experience. In that regard, 5E is a wild success. For those with an eye for innovation, it feels rather staid. If I remember correctly, the initial reception back in 5E was that everyone felt like it was a "grade B" game - everyone (among long-time fans) liked it, but few absolutely loved it.

That said, let's imagine an alternate history. Dial back to 2008 and 4E never came out - WotC squeezes out another half-decade of 3.5, and then declares a new edition in 2012-13. Then, in 2014, 4E comes out. Now let's assume that the same cultural forces were at work: you had minor celebrities on board, and the zeitgeist is just right for Zennials to fall in love with the game. Certainly, you'd have the same old-timers jumping ship, but would that have stopped the rising tide that we see now? Maybe, maybe not. But my point being, maybe 4E would have worked just fine for the current player base - and thus perhaps more so than it did back in 2008, when the player base was mostly folks who had started with 3E or before and for whom 4E felt too different from the D&D they knew and loved.

 

[Mannahnin]

4E still had all the trappings of D&D, but it really tried to take a different approach and create its own, distinct approach. It was bold, at least relative to the history of D&D; where 3E was a rather successful attempt to play catch-up and streamline D&D from the old, anachronistic TSR chassis,

Leaving aside 4E for the moment (I agree that it was the most ambitious attempt to break away from TSR legacy design), 3E had the unified mechanic of "D20 plus modifiers against a DC, roll high", but "streamline" otherwise seems a bit off to me.

Character and monster design was at its all-time highest* for complexity and detail. Skills and feats and the combat system had massive amounts of new rules*. Spells and magic were much cleaned up from AD&D, but at least as detailed.

I do think it mostly built onto AD&D rather than trying to break away from it. Comparisons of spell verbiage, for example, between 1E and 3E show a remarkable amount of overlap. And perhaps that's more what you're getting at. 3E was faithful to AD&D in many ways despite switching to the D20 core mechanic and adding a skill system, feats and so forth.

(* I recognize that some of this was prefigured in the Skills & Powers and Combat & Tactics expansions in late 2E, but to the best of my knowledge most of that was never widely adopted, and none of it was part of the core rules).

 

[GMforPowergamers]

At the risk of getting into the murky waters of discussing 4E, that's kind of what they did already - and it didn't work, at least economically and in terms of reception by the public.

wrong

4e outsold 3e

4e only didn't hit a made up number that WotC wanted it to (not only higher then 3e 2e or 1e but substantially) and they saw that for the first time a competitor didn't have a new system (like WW in 90's) but was basically holding out an older edition as competition (something no edition before 4 delt with) they saw they could raise there profits (hey it is what it is and we all need to eat) by selling the forward progress of 4e out for nostalgia and it worked (although the new edition of PF pushing more away from 3.5 helped 5e too)

But in terms of game design? I had my criticisms of 4E, but I do think in some ways it was the "best" designed version of D&D (My main criticism is that combat ended up grindy and rather formulaic, but I don't see how a further revision couldn't have shifted that a bit).

100% agree 4e was a start not an end. If 5e had improved on 4e I think we would be in a better place going into 2024 (IMO) however we may not have pulled back 3.5 fans, and as such even with growth would not be as big as it is.

That said, let's imagine an alternate history. Dial back to 2008 and 4E never came out - WotC squeezes out another half-decade of 3.5, and then declares a new edition in 2012-13. Then, in 2014, 4E comes out. Now let's assume that the same cultural forces were at work: you had minor celebrities on board, and the zeitgeist is just right for Zennials to fall in love with the game. Certainly, you'd have the same old-timers jumping ship, but would that have stopped the rising tide that we see now? Maybe, maybe not. But my point being, maybe 4E would have worked just fine for the current player base - and thus perhaps more so than it did back in 2008, when the player base was mostly folks who had started with 3E or before and for whom 4E felt too different from the D&D they knew and loved.

I honestly think that it all comes down to Piazo. if PF never was 4e would have exploded. Now I can blame wotc twice for this (They made the OGL... then they didn't include it)