D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[Maxperson]

(correctly vague stuff about lycanthropy)

By the way, per the Expert Rules? Cure Disease is a third level spell that will cure lycanthropy. Third level spells are available to clerics at Level 6. It doesn't require any special components or rituals. So why do we suddenly need to go to an 11th Level or greater cleric to get it healed, after doing some vague service or paying some vague price?

Because it doesn't just take a 3rd level spell, but also a cleric of sufficient power casting that third level spell.

How is the DM supposed to explain this?

Like I just did.

What if a party with a 6th level cleric gets someone infected with lycanthropy?

Nothing happens, because they are too weak to get the Cure Disease to work.

Do they still have to go to an 11th level cleric and jump through unspecified hoops?

Yes.

Edit: I forgot the most important question of all. What happens when a 6th level cleric casts Cure Disease on a lycanthrope the party encounters in a dungeon?

Nothing.

A lot of what you pointed out was vague and unhelpful, especially referencing someone to a book that they may not have. The above, though, was pretty easy to understand.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I wasn't suggesting that they needed to include boat fighting rules in the base game (maybe in Spelljammer, though?).

I think you've hit upon an important question, though, which is: what is the core experience that 5e is supposed to support?

It isn’t. That’s the thing people keep missing. 5e is built to support whatever you want it to under the umbrella of “heroic fantasy adventure”. It’s a broad game, not a focused one. That’s the point.

Your remark about pacing is a red flag for me, because I always think of that sort of thing as something railroads do. How can players have agency if procedural advice for the DM amounts to 'go with whatever works for the story you want to tell?'. The DMG does actually have a few remarks that seem to encourage railroading.

I think, respectfully, that’s a you thing. Pacing is just scene framing and determining when scenes end and keeping the game moving. It has nothing at all to do with railroading.

It could be that the core experience of 5e, as written, is 'buy an adventure and get on the railroad.' I'm being a bit uncharitable, but only a bit.

Extremely. Not “only a bit.”

Obviously, we as players and DMs can do other things with it, but that's when the procedural gaps start to become annoying, and we need to invent stuff or import it from other games/editions.

For you, sure. I’d encourage you to, if you otherwise like 5e, to add to it to bring it closer to what you want, but that doesn’t mean that whatever you add was missing.

Also, I want to note that other games (Apocalypse World is a well-known example) are able to cover a wide variety of situations without having lots of rules.

Okay. I didn’t think we were discussing “rules heavy” vs “rules light” in this particular talk. I mean, GURPS goes the other direction and also runs just fine covering a wide swathe of game situations. 5e is between the two extremes and I don’t think that fact is irrelevant to its success.

I wouldn't use AW to run a dungeon-crawl, but then, it doesn't sell itself as a game that can run one.

Okay.

 

[Imaro]

As far as what the rules tell us? They don't. Run the game that works for you. I don't see why that's a problem, I don't want a tightly constrained game that assumes I'm always going to be running a dungeon crawl, playing politics with dark forces, fighting against the inevitable slide into insanity, running a heist or any number of other relatively narrowly focused styles that many games enforce. I want to be able to bounce from one style to the next during the same campaign, sometimes in the same session.

The core experience of 5E (and most versions D&D) is to have flexibility to do a wide variety of things. That has weaknesses of course but it's what make the game worth sticking with over the decades for me.

Just this...this right here. I think this is why D&D continues to be the most popular ttrpg. Agon is a great game when I want to play larger than life semi-divine heroes without formal magic who compete on various islands while trying to sail home after a great war they participated in has ended... but how often am I and everyone in my group going to be in the mood to play something as specific as that? What is its value proposition concerning replay ability vs. something like D&D. What is the investment (learning new ruiles, learning new play procedures, possibly buying a new book or pdf) for the amount of playtime it will see vs. something like D&D?

I agree with you here and think that it would probably hurt D&D immensely to become a more narrow, more procedural and less flexible dungeon crawling rpg. I think D&D has carved a pretty unique niche out for itself in that it is generic (in the sense of no hard defined setting and providing a general resolution procedure) enough for most people to do their own thing with it in the realm of fantasy by applying a little elbow grease... while having enough specificity (in the sense of a soft/vague default setting and/or published settings along with more specific procedures that are easily ignored) for people to latch onto if they want so they aren't completely lost on what to do. I honestly think their formula is pure gold at this point.

 

[MGibster]

Oh, editions absolutely matter. I'd be a huge hypocrite if I said otherwise. I just don't see the "too many house rules makes it a new game, and that's bad" implication I saw upthread as valid.

I'm always a fan of people playing the game how they want so I wouldn't call it bad. Just different. If I invite someone to participate in a D&D campaign, they have a reasonable expectation that we're going to mostly be on the same page as far as the rules are concerned. This is just a personal preference. I've never seen someone modify D&D so much that I didn't recognized what it was, but I've seen them do that with other games and it made me question why we were even playing the original game.

 

[gorice]

It isn’t. That’s the thing people keep missing. 5e is built to support whatever you want it to under the umbrella of “heroic fantasy adventure”. It’s a broad game, not a focused one. That’s the point.

I don't think you can call failing to support any playstyle 'supporting every playstyle'. That's the whole contention of this pile of pages.

Also, 5e in particular sabotages a lot of playstyles, like wilderness adventuring, with the abundant magic and other abilities characters have access to. This thread is full of examples.

I think, respectfully, that’s a you thing. Pacing is just scene framing and determining when scenes end and keeping the game moving. It has nothing at all to do with railroading.

Maybe? I can only speak from experience, and from what I see in published adventures.

Okay. I didn’t think we were discussing “rules heavy” vs “rules light” in this particular talk. I mean, GURPS goes the other direction and also runs just fine covering a wide swathe of game situations. 5e is between the two extremes and I don’t think that fact is irrelevant to its success.

That's the thing, though: GURPS and AW are both more 'complete' than 5e. It's not between two extremes, it just doesn't work.

 

[Campbell]

Just not seeing it. The actual play reports and streams I see of D&D all exist in a fairly narrow band of play, certainly no less narrow than any other game apart from stuff like My Life With Master or Clay That Walks.

My own experiences of trying to stretch the game beyond the style advocated by AD&D Second Edition have not gone well at all. Mechanics getting in the way, players looking to me for what they should do, etc.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Just not seeing it. The actual play reports and streams I see of D&D all exist in a fairly narrow band of play, certainly no less narrow than any other game apart from stuff like My Life With Master or Clay That Walks.

My own experiences of trying to stretch the game beyond the style advocated by AD&D Second Edition have not gone well at all. Mechanics getting in the way, players looking to me for what they should do, etc.

Watch Dimension20?

 

[Maxperson]

I agree 100%. No edition is perfect, but if someone needs to create tons of house rules at what point does it become a different game?

After the first rule change. But it's also the same game. That's the glorious nature of D&D. It's deliberately mutable and actually instructs the DM to mutate it if he feels that it should change in some way.

I have about a dozen house rules right now. Some of them are working like I want, and some are not. When I start my next campaign the ones that aren't working like I want will be dropped. Others that I've thought of because situations came up during game play this campaign will be added. My game is constantly evolving. Even with a dozen house rules it's still D&D and always will be, because 99.9% of it remains the same as everyone else's D&D.

I always tried to avoid changing stuff just so everyone playing knows what to expect, or if a new player joins our group they know what to expect.

The players know what to expect. They should expect a game that is mostly the same, but has some changes per the 5e instruction to ask the DM if there are any changes.

 

[Campbell]

Watch Dimension20?

It doesn't feel all that different from Critical Role to me. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of diversity inside the D&D space, just that it's not more diverse in play than other games. The way I look at is D&D is the roleplaying equivalent of serialized police procedurals. Homicide - Life on the Street* is fairly different in feel to something like Law and Order or NCIS. Police procedurals are also different by orders of magnitude compared to crime shows like Breaking Bad, The Ozarks and Sons of Anarchy that also show plenty of diversity. Police procedurals are more popular because people generally like the conceits of police procedurals more, not because they are more diverse in their offerings.

* Best TV show ever made.

 

[Iosue]

Because it doesn't just take a 3rd level spell, but also a cleric of sufficient power casting that third level spell.

Like I just did.

Nothing happens, because they are too weak to get the Cure Disease to work.

Yes.

Nothing.

A lot of what you pointed out was vague and unhelpful, especially referencing someone to a book that they may not have. The above, though, was pretty easy to understand.

None of what you wrote is in the rules. A DM could certainly rule that way, but as far as the Expert Rules are concerned, Cure Disease cures lycanthropy full stop.

But that's all beside the point. The point is that B/X is particularly clear when it comes to procedures involving exploration, but is otherwise filled with these kinds of fuzzy areas where the DM is expected to fill in the specifics. Which, IMO, is fine. Good, even. It doesn't make B/X less complete, or in any way unplayable. And the same goes for 5e, which covers a lot more than B/X.