D&D General D&D Editions: Anybody Else Feel Like They Don't Fit In?

[Desdichado]

D&D magic is extremely specific and doesn't particularly resemble any other magic system (even Vance's).

Which is ironic, but I agree. I think it even less resembles Vance now than it did thirty or forty years ago though.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I have struggled to accept 5E as anything close to the D&D I have known and loved from decades past, but at best I can only grudgingly tolerate it. 4E was.. well I don't even know what it was, but I've decided it's not worth the effort to find out. 3E was good if not great, but as time wore on, so did its welcome. As the OP suggests it was just... too much muchness.

Ryan Dancey described it as having 4 divisions: gritty fantasy, heroic fantasy, wuxia, and superheroes, and I found that to be eminently true, and even largely had been true in Advanced D&D. Problem was, those should be FOUR DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT GAMES, not one game that always does them all. 3E got worse and worse for me as PC levels got higher, and after running just one campaign up to 20th level and then being given the travesty of 4E as the Next Big Thing in D&D, I gave up on 3E. I went back to 1E, but later found the E6 approach to 3E. It intentionally limits itself to that first division of Gritty Fantasy and just barely crosses into Heroic Fantasy, but ABSOLUTELY AVOIDS the crap of D&D becoming Wuxia and Superheroes. I really feel that E6 identified and solved the issues that I had with 3E.

That problem was overwhelmingly the higher level magic. It was just TOO MUCH. The vibe I wanted from D&D was at best the Heroic Fantasy, and the higher that spells and general magic got, the more that D&D FELL APART and became something I didn't want. And 1E/2E D&D suffered the same problems, just to a slightly lesser degree. I don't think it was anything like deliberate sabotage, but 3E designers failed to see that it WAS a problem in 1E/2E that should have been reduced/eliminated, and then just went and made it worse instead.

I blame WotC. They want to have only ONE SIZE FITS ALL - the one size that they want to sell. But I don't fit that anymore. My size is 1E, or maybe 2E, or 3E following E6 guidelines, but WotC doesn't want me or anyone else to have anything like that. They want to sell me 5E, but I don't FIT 5E's Unitard. I wear it if I have to, but it's not comfortable. Yet everybody else seems to like Unitard Gaming. When I ask if anyone wants to try on another size, or designer, their closets only seem to be WotC Unitards. The percentage of NON-5E ongoing gaming out there is insignificant compared to 5E.

Things will change, for better or worse (eventually), but what it means right now is that I don't have a game that fits ME.

 

[payn]

I have struggled to accept 5E as anything close to the D&D I have known and loved from decades past, but at best I can only grudgingly tolerate it. 4E was.. well I don't even know what it was, but I've decided it's not worth the effort to find out. 3E was good if not great, but as time wore on, so did its welcome. As the OP suggests it was just... too much muchness.

Ryan Dancey described it as having 4 divisions: gritty fantasy, heroic fantasy, wuxia, and superheroes, and I found that to be eminently true, and even largely had been true in Advanced D&D. Problem was, those should be FOUR DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT GAMES, not one game that always does them all. 3E got worse and worse for me as PC levels got higher, and after running just one campaign up to 20th level and then being given the travesty of 4E as the Next Big Thing in D&D, I gave up on 3E. I went back to 1E, but later found the E6 approach to 3E. It intentionally limits itself to that first division of Gritty Fantasy and just barely crosses into Heroic Fantasy, but ABSOLUTELY AVOIDS the crap of D&D becoming Wuxia and Superheroes. I really feel that E6 identified and solved the issues that I had with 3E.

That problem was overwhelmingly the higher level magic. It was just TOO MUCH. The vibe I wanted from D&D was at best the Heroic Fantasy, and the higher that spells and general magic got, the more that D&D FELL APART and became something I didn't want. And 1E/2E D&D suffered the same problems, just to a slightly lesser degree. I don't think it was anything like deliberate sabotage, but 3E designers failed to see that it WAS a problem in 1E/2E that should have been reduced/eliminated, and then just went and made it worse instead.

I blame WotC. They want to have only ONE SIZE FITS ALL - the one size that they want to sell. But I don't fit that anymore. My size is 1E, or maybe 2E, or 3E following E6 guidelines, but WotC doesn't want me or anyone else to have anything like that. They want to sell me 5E, but I don't FIT 5E's Unitard. I wear it if I have to, but it's not comfortable. Yet everybody else seems to like Unitard Gaming. When I ask if anyone wants to try on another size, or designer, their closets only seem to be WotC Unitards. The percentage of NON-5E ongoing gaming out there is insignificant compared to 5E.

Things will change, for better or worse (eventually), but what it means right now is that I don't have a game that fits ME.

Unitard riding up on ya?

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Unitard riding up on ya?

Just doesn't fit my inflated self-image.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which is ironic, but I agree. I think it even less resembles Vance now than it did thirty or forty years ago though.

Oh, absolutely. Likely because fundamentally everyone has recognized it was a weird and kind of annoying model for a long time (during the period I walked away I referred to it as having "all the glamour of a guy with a varied collection of hand grenades" but I was pretty snarky about D&D in general back then), but tradition weighed in too much to completely rework it, so they iterated at the edges.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That problem was overwhelmingly the higher level magic. It was just TOO MUCH. The vibe I wanted from D&D was at best the Heroic Fantasy, and the higher that spells and general magic got, the more that D&D FELL APART and became something I didn't want. And 1E/2E D&D suffered the same problems, just to a slightly lesser degree. I don't think it was anything like deliberate sabotage, but 3E designers failed to see that it WAS a problem in 1E/2E that should have been reduced/eliminated, and then just went and made it worse instead.

I'd suggest its less "didn't realize it" than thought "not what the majority of users want." I mean, seriously, there were already other fantasy games with less potent magic in it, so reducing its heft would have seemed counterproductive.

 

[Desdichado]

Until I finally gave up and went into rules light alternatives, E6 was my solution to the genre confusion and outright brokenness of higher level D&d too. Now I'd probably do something even more simple: just slow leveling down and never get very high level anyway before ending the campaign and starting another one.

But the tone seems to have changed. I'm not super familiar with 4e or 5e, but from what I've seen of them, they appear to be even more whimsical and magical at all levels of play. (This was also starting to be a noticeable problem in the 3.x era.) I'm sure I could houserule it into playability, mostly by cutting most of the races and classes, but why bother when there are easier approaches? As for finding a game, I started up with a group of mostly non-gamers, so they didn't have any other frame of reference other than what I told them this game was going to be like anyway.

 

[ezo]

I have struggled to accept 5E as anything close to the D&D I have known and loved from decades past, but at best I can only grudgingly tolerate it. 4E was.. well I don't even know what it was, but I've decided it's not worth the effort to find out. 3E was good if not great, but as time wore on, so did its welcome. As the OP suggests it was just... too much muchness.

Ryan Dancey described it as having 4 divisions: gritty fantasy, heroic fantasy, wuxia, and superheroes, and I found that to be eminently true, and even largely had been true in Advanced D&D. Problem was, those should be FOUR DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT GAMES, not one game that always does them all. 3E got worse and worse for me as PC levels got higher, and after running just one campaign up to 20th level and then being given the travesty of 4E as the Next Big Thing in D&D, I gave up on 3E. I went back to 1E, but later found the E6 approach to 3E. It intentionally limits itself to that first division of Gritty Fantasy and just barely crosses into Heroic Fantasy, but ABSOLUTELY AVOIDS the crap of D&D becoming Wuxia and Superheroes. I really feel that E6 identified and solved the issues that I had with 3E.

That problem was overwhelmingly the higher level magic. It was just TOO MUCH. The vibe I wanted from D&D was at best the Heroic Fantasy, and the higher that spells and general magic got, the more that D&D FELL APART and became something I didn't want. And 1E/2E D&D suffered the same problems, just to a slightly lesser degree. I don't think it was anything like deliberate sabotage, but 3E designers failed to see that it WAS a problem in 1E/2E that should have been reduced/eliminated, and then just went and made it worse instead.

I blame WotC. They want to have only ONE SIZE FITS ALL - the one size that they want to sell. But I don't fit that anymore. My size is 1E, or maybe 2E, or 3E following E6 guidelines, but WotC doesn't want me or anyone else to have anything like that. They want to sell me 5E, but I don't FIT 5E's Unitard. I wear it if I have to, but it's not comfortable. Yet everybody else seems to like Unitard Gaming. When I ask if anyone wants to try on another size, or designer, their closets only seem to be WotC Unitards. The percentage of NON-5E ongoing gaming out there is insignificant compared to 5E.

Things will change, for better or worse (eventually), but what it means right now is that I don't have a game that fits ME.

So that is what I've been wearing all this time!?!

In all seriousness, I feel pretty much the same (although I am not wearing a unitard in the process...).

 

[GMMichael]

I started up with a group of mostly non-gamers, so they didn't have any other frame of reference other than what I told them this game was going to be like anyway.

Frame of reference. Kinda weird when the only game within that frame is D&D. I just thought I'd wander in, like Donny...

 

[Desdichado]

Frame of reference. Kinda weird when the only game within that frame is D&D. I just thought I'd wander in, like Donny...

?? I told them it was a D&D game because that's what they were interested in trying. I also told them that it would be a unique and unusual one, but since only one of them was a gamer really, the rest didn't have any frame of reference to how different it really was.

Of course, my frame of reference is the broadest of the bunch. But I didn't pitch them a game of Top Secret S. I. or d20 Modern or Werewolf or Vampire or Star Frontiers or Call of Cthulhu or Dread or any number of the other games that I'm familiar with or own.

My point for Hat was that if you can't find gamers who will give your tastes the time of day, you can always create new ones. It's not actually that hard to find people who have an interest in trying out the hobby but don't know where to start.