D&D General Does D&D (and RPGs in general) Need Edition Resets?

[Lanefan]

I agree that D&D, 1e and 2e are largely compatible, I don't think that through evolution they would ever turn into e.g. 4e however.

Benefits all round?

More seriously: we've no real way of knowing what 0-1-2e would have evolved into, nor of knowing how other things would have gone, had TSR not spent the 1990s shooting themselves in every foot they could find.

By late 2e they were throwing all kinds of things at the wall to see if anything stuck well enough to bail them out financially. Had TSR survived then who knows, some of those experiments (which really were evolution in action) might have become part of the core. That they'd have done a 3e isn't in question; but I think it would have been much closer to late-era 2e than the real 3e we got.

For that you need a redesign and break compatibility. The same is true with 5e, 2e does not get us there while maintaining compatibility.

There's also the possibility that, had things gone incrementally since 1995, the game would have remained split; with BECMI/RC going one way and AD&D going another. The AD&D side would perhaps have been the more experimental, and for all we know it might have vaguely got to something similar to 5e (though with descending AC and other 2e-isms still in place); while the RC side would have been the more conservative and probably grittier version.

To make big steps in any direction, you need to sacrifice compatibility. Some of these steps may turn out to be missteps, but if you learn from them and course correct, you still move forward. I'd rather see D&D continue to do that than stagnate.

That's just it: what you call 'moving forward' others - like me - might see as stepping off a cliff. Stagnation is just a derisive term for staying where you are, which can be by far the best option if where you are is the best place you can be.

 

[Lanefan]

agreed, that would be a failure, not sure the publisher disagrees either, because they will need to keep selling you something, and in that case it won't be new monsters / classes / adventures / etc. for that game, and I am not sure they can sell another new system to the same audience as easily again either.

Sure they can. They'll be aware there's lots of people abandoning the initial system and just need to be ready with The Bright New Shiny when that occurs.

Probably, if anyone who tries it sticks with it, then the failure is one of marketing more than design.

Could be, or that the game is so specialized it just doesn't appeal to most.

On the other hand if 80% bounce off but you have 20% that love it, that to me is still a design failure.

Depends why they bounce off, but yes, I see your point.

I am not sure I want permanence, I'd rather see more changes to 2024 than what we are getting. That might end up being the reason why I do not get the books.

I'm one of those who only ever wants to buy any given thing once.

 

[Minigiant]

Bloat's a difficult issue to perceive if you're in from the start and buy each release as it comes out without really noticing how many books you're accumulating.

Bloat is a huge issue if you're coming in new six years later and are faced with a wall of books to buy.

When you're a player and the Fighter is in one book, the Bard is in another book, the Monk is in a third book and the Artificer is in a fourth book.

And the Swashbuckler hasn't come out yet.

Of if you're a DM and your campaign is about Dragons, Giants, Aberrations, and Fey but they are in different books

 

[mamba]

Benefits all round?

More seriously: we've no real way of knowing what 0-1-2e would have evolved into, nor of knowing how other things would have gone, had TSR not spent the 1990s shooting themselves in every foot they could find.

agreed, we do not know how things would have gone, but I feel pretty confident in saying we would not have gotten 3e, 4e or 5e unless at some point TSR broke compatibility with 1e/2e.

By late 2e they were throwing all kinds of things at the wall to see if anything stuck well enough to bail them out financially. Had TSR survived then who knows, some of those experiments (which really were evolution in action) might have become part of the core. That they'd have done a 3e isn't in question; but I think it would have been much closer to late-era 2e than the real 3e we got.

I am not sure any of it would have stuck, with graphs like these, the problem is not just TSR shooting themselves in the foot

That's just it: what you call 'moving forward' others - like me - might see as stepping off a cliff. Stagnation is just a derisive term for staying where you are, which can be by far the best option if where you are is the best place you can be.

How do you know that it is the best place you can be? I understand that changes always feel better to some while not to others, and certainly 3e to 4e to 5e is not a straight path of continual forward momentum either. That is where course correction comes in, and these days polling the player base to find out beforehand and avoid stepping off a cliff altogether.

If you prefer 1e and consider it the best place for you, then you can stick with 1e. Not sure you need much more material for it than what is available either. I'd rather see them trying out new things. As I said, if I do not get the 2024 books, it is because they did not change enough, not because they changed too much.

 

[mamba]

Sure they can. They'll be aware there's lots of people abandoning the initial system and just need to be ready with The Bright New Shiny when that occurs.

if I bounce off your system within a year, I am not interested in your shiny new system you are trying to sell me. I'd rather try a different system from another company. Maybe that is just me though.

Could be, or that the game is so specialized it just doesn't appeal to most.

that is a design failure to me, unless you knew that beforehand and were ok with it, i.e. still got enough customers despite this

I'm one of those who only ever wants to buy any given thing once.

Then you should continue to play 1e and whatever happens with 5e should not be important to you

 

[Staffan]

No, they're really not, not if a classless system is already full-featured. I can put together a new archetype package in Hero in 20 minutes and be pretty sure it'll work, because I'm using nothing but components already available for use in the system. Same to a lesser degree in GURPS.

Its only a problem in systems where you have to invent new components out of whole cloth in the first place. If a system already has the tools to make a Beastmaster, then the Beastmaster Archetype is just pre-constructing it for them and making sure all those components are already in place.

The problem is that in a point-based game like GURPS, options need to be individually balanced with one another and costed accordingly. In a more restricted class-based game, you can balance whole packages against one another.

Take Pathfinder 2e. Each class is fairly strictly siloed off from every other class. There's a lot of wiggle room within each class, but the walls between classes is fairly strong. You can use multiclassing rules to trade in optional class features for some features of another class, but those are limited for the sake of balance. That's because mixing class features between classes would lead to overpowered synergies.

For example, most martial classes have some mechanic for inflicting additional damage. Barbarians have Rage, Rogues have Sneak Attack, and Fighters have an overall better attack bonus (at least with their weapons of choice). Both barbarians and rogues deal more damage per hit than fighters, but fighters hit more often, so they overall deal about the same amount of damage. But if a barbarian or rogue could access the fighter's improved weapon proficiency, they'd both hit more often and deal more damage per hit – so that bit is out of bounds for multi-classing. Less martially inclined classes can multi-class as fighters in order to get a broader weapon proficiency, but not better. And while multi-classing into barbarian or rogue gives you some rage/sneak attack benefits, those are much lesser than those a full member of the class can get. In a more free-form system, you'd need to account for characters who both have high accuracy and high damage, and likely the optimal path would be to get a bit of both.

And that's just in the narrow context of hittin'n'hurtin'. If you move into more esoteric things, GURPS at least tends to vastly overvalue abilities that rarely see any use. For example, Catfall is a 10-point advantage in GURPS, reducing falling distance by 5 yards before calculating damage and allowing a roll to halve the remainder. Same thing with breathing water, another 10-point advantage (though it's not obvious in the system: it's the "Doesn't breathe" 20-point advantage with the -50% modifier for only working in oxygenated water). Both of those are basically "ribbons" in D&D – things thrown in for free for some color, but not expected to move the needle balance-wise.

 

[mamba]

The problem is that in a point-based game like GURPS, options need to be individually balanced with one another and costed accordingly. In a more restricted class-based game, you can balance whole packages against one another.

agreed, I'd rather see them more siloed off and not have multiclassing at all.

And that's just in the narrow context of hittin'n'hurtin'. If you move into more esoteric things, GURPS at least tends to vastly overvalue abilities that rarely see any use. For example, Catfall is a 10-point advantage in GURPS, reducing falling distance by 5 yards before calculating damage and allowing a roll to halve the remainder. Same thing with breathing water, another 10-point advantage (though it's not obvious in the system: it's the "Doesn't breathe" 20-point advantage with the -50% modifier for only working in oxygenated water).

I read somewhere that the points something costs in GURPS is not just a function of power, but also of intended rarity. Your examples seem to confirm this.

 

[Staffan]

I am not sure any of it would have stuck, with graphs like these, the problem is not just TSR shooting themselves in the foot

Those all seem like perfectly reasonable sales graphs to me. When a thing gets published, it sells a lot in a short time, because people have been waiting for it and there's a pent-up demand. After that, sales either peter out entirely or settle down to a more steady pace. Looking at the 2e PHB for example, it seems to have sold about 300k in its first year, and then settled at about 100k per year until 1995 (the OG 2e PHB drops off in 1995 but that's because people buy the revised version instead). They drop fairly sharply in 1996 and 1997, but that's when TSR's financial troubles came to a head.

Similarly with the Forgotten Realms things. Original box sells well in its first year, and then has steady sales through 1992. Forgotten Realms Adventures is not a stand-alone setting book, but more of an update to the setting explaining how it works with the new rules, as well as providing specialty priests for the main gods. Again, sells well when published and then settles down – although doing so significantly faster, but still having sales just below those of the 1e box set. The sales of both basically disappear in 1993 when the revised box is published – now this has a significantly smaller initial bump, but I believe that's because quite a few people already had the grey box and FRA, and didn't see the need to upgrade. It's still a bump over the steady sales of the grey box, and it seems to settle down at a similar steady level as well.

And as for Greyhawk sales... yeah, there's a reason they stopped making Greyhawk. While one may argue the artistic merits of Greyhawk vs Forgotten Realms, it makes no sense to support two near-identical pseudo-medieval fantasy settings at the same time, and Forgotten Realms was clearly the more commercially successful of the two.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem is that in a point-based game like GURPS, options need to be individually balanced with one another and costed accordingly. In a more restricted class-based game, you can balance whole packages against one another.

In theory. In practice, nothing suggests to me that in class systems you just end up with a lot of exception based design that doesn't reveal its problems until much later, and the more things you have to do to cover desired concepts, the more that will be true. With a build system you can do more of it from the start. Can some interlocking pieces end up working badly together, or the individual piece not work as well as it could? Sure. But I'm not sold that isn't true with bits of class design, too, and the price of avoiding it is usually stupidly rigid classes that end up covering only a very limited subset of apparently viable concepts. That's a cure far worse than the disease.

Take Pathfinder 2e. Each class is fairly strictly siloed off from every other class. There's a lot of wiggle room within each class, but the walls between classes is fairly strong. You can use multiclassing rules to trade in optional class features for some features of another class, but those are limited for the sake of balance. That's because mixing class features between classes would lead to overpowered synergies.

And (remembering I'm as fond of PF2e as any game in the D&D-sphere) it means you have an ongoing stream of new classes to cover the ground, providing a bunch of new opportunities to have broken (either in being too good or too bad) bits within each class. Again, doesn't seem a net improvement to me.

For example, most martial classes have some mechanic for inflicting additional damage. Barbarians have Rage, Rogues have Sneak Attack, and Fighters have an overall better attack bonus (at least with their weapons of choice). Both barbarians and rogues deal more damage per hit than fighters, but fighters hit more often, so they overall deal about the same amount of damage. But if a barbarian or rogue could access the fighter's improved weapon proficiency, they'd both hit more often and deal more damage per hit – so that bit is out of bounds for multi-classing. Less martially inclined classes can multi-class as fighters in order to get a broader weapon proficiency, but not better. And while multi-classing into barbarian or rogue gives you some rage/sneak attack benefits, those are much lesser than those a full member of the class can get. In a more free-form system, you'd need to account for characters who both have high accuracy and high damage, and likely the optimal path would be to get a bit of both.

But you kind of don't. You can simply have a capping system and then not care how people get there. Its not that hard (some people don't like it, but like the people who are unhappy you can't just bake a cake playing PF2e like you could in PF1e or D&D3e, I have trouble having too much sympathy there).

And that's just in the narrow context of hittin'n'hurtin'. If you move into more esoteric things, GURPS at least tends to vastly overvalue abilities that rarely see any use. For example, Catfall is a 10-point advantage in GURPS, reducing falling distance by 5 yards before calculating damage and allowing a roll to halve the remainder. Same thing with breathing water, another 10-point advantage (though it's not obvious in the system: it's the "Doesn't breathe" 20-point advantage with the -50% modifier for only working in oxygenated water). Both of those are basically "ribbons" in D&D – things thrown in for free for some color, but not expected to move the needle balance-wise.

That's partly because GURPS has always had a tendency to overvalue things that are very valuable in selective situations, rather than just saying "If you campaign is going to be 90% over mountains or water, adjust these costs". Its one of two failure states you can see in games in general here once they get all outside of ones with a very narrow use-plan (the other being not addressing that when something is relatively cheap but will be similarly valuable in certain campaigns). That doesn't become less of a problem when you've baked that into a class or made it a spell.

 

[Minigiant]

In theory. In practice, nothing suggests to me that in class systems you just end up with a lot of exception based design that doesn't reveal its problems until much later, and the more things you have to do to cover desired concepts, the more that will be true. With a build system you can do more of it from the start. Can some interlocking pieces end up working badly together, or the individual piece not work as well as it could? Sure. But I'm not sold that isn't true with bits of class design, too, and the price of avoiding it is usually stupidly rigid classes that end up covering only a very limited subset of apparently viable concepts. That's a cure far worse than the disease.

The issue is that the design teams of game tend to be very conservative in view and tend to miss things or under/value things,

This can be dangerous in the wide and strong tropes of D&D. How do you balance Rage, Action Surge, Smite, and Favored Enemy individually outside the package.

Classless games IMHO are better for generic low power setting like some generic Cyberpunk or Urban Fantasy world or definedworldwith strict IP restraints like ALTA, Warhammer, or Dresden Files.

It's precisely why an incremental RPG would struggle. The stuff the initial designers didn't put emphasis on can strain the system.

For Example: 5e's Thrown Weapons and Unarmed Strikes.

The designers clearly didn't expect warriors to punch things or throw weapons.

The incremental fix was a Feat Tax in a game with "optional" feats
The reset fix is changing the rules for object interaction or giving everyone 1 feat.