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

[MGibster]

While 5th edition is my favorite edition of the game, I find my interest in high fantasy is waning. I'm enjoying the Greyhawk campaign I'm running mainly because the players are engaged and having a good time. But I'm going to want to play something else once we're finished, and I'm not sure I want to run D&D at all any time soon.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh I totally get that. For me though, 5e is if I want a more heroic, story based game. Shadowdark is the more site-based, dungeon crawling game, with a focus on resources, traps and puzzles. I just look at the two games as different kinds of tools.

I've been interested in Shadowdark since I first heard about it shortly before the Kickstarter ended, but I wasn't in a position at the time to participate. I've since had an opportunity to get it, and to me it really hits those classic play vibes i appreciate. The problem is that my wife is much more interested in the modern style of play where a character's story is paramount, and bad luck isn't just going to kill her PC (a real possibility in Shadowdark). To her, that's what an RPG is. So I hit upon a solution recently: I asked her to not think if Shadowdark and similar games as RPGs as she understands them, but instead as a kind of boardgame, and your PC as a game piece you control. You can if you want give characterization to your game piece, but ultimately its no different from the character you control in Betrayal at House on the Hill (a game she loves), and those folks die all the time.

This isn't how I see classic RPGs, of course, but it will help here have fun with them I hope.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Some changes, yes, you can circle back. But others? No, you can't. Some changes are in fact irreversible.

I'm not suggesting you should roll back changes. I'm saying you should embrace them. We change through learning. I cannot go back to being the ignorant kid I was when I first started playing D&D. I can see behind the curtain now. The same game is not the same game to me. Which just means I need a new game that suits the person I am now.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I recognize this is a flavor distinction as much as a power one. It's all about the feel of a setting, not power level. Part of it is that the ubiquitous magic hurts my ability to suspend disbelief - a lot. I want magic to feel magical.

Magic in baseline D&D feels...productized.

I'd say that I want magic to feel magical too - but my mileage significantly varies when it comes to what makes magic feel magical.

Magic that's very common and even ubiquitous does feel magical to me. It gives me that "We're not in Kansas anymore!" sense of wonder. Rare magic doesn't; it can't be seen as magical if it isn't seen, and can't be felt as magical if it isn't felt.

Now what bugs me about D&D magic is how powerful the spells are. That's been a gripe of mine since forever (or at least since 1978 when I first started playing). "D&D doesn't have wizards; it has artillery pieces disguised as wizards."

That's why the next D&D game I run will almost certainly cap spells at 3rd level. And other things being equal I really prefer systems where spells and magic in general is even less powerful (but not less common). Where wizards are built more in terms of what the old Hero system would call "martial arts, usable at range."

An additional point is that I prefer magic to feel "alien." The classic science fiction definition of an alien being was "something that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man." I like to see magic that does things as well as mundane skills and tools, but not like mundane skills and tools.

An example would be food-preservation magic. I'd want spells and items that aren't just magic-powered refrigerator/freezers, but that instead preserve food just as well but in some other way. Magic smoke. Magic salt. Reversable food-to-wood transformations. Something more creative than magic cold effects.

 

[TiQuinn]

I've been interested in Shadowdark since I first heard about it shortly before the Kickstarter ended, but I wasn't in a position at the time to participate. I've since had an opportunity to get it, and to me it really hits those classic play vibes i appreciate. The problem is that my wife is much more interested in the modern style of play where a character's story is paramount, and bad luck isn't just going to kill her PC (a real possibility in Shadowdark). To her, that's what an RPG is. So I hit upon a solution recently: I asked her to not think if Shadowdark and similar games as RPGs as she understands them, but instead as a kind of boardgame, and your PC as a game piece you control. You can if you want give characterization to your game piece, but ultimately its no different from the character you control in Betrayal at House on the Hill (a game she loves), and those folks die all the time.

This isn't how I see classic RPGs, of course, but it will help here have fun with them I hope.

Kinda similar note: we were playing Mothership last week, and my PC got killed right at the start of a combat. I had my new PC rolled up in a couple of minutes and the GM had my new character into the encounter before it was even over.

What’s even better: both characters were very loose character types/tropes that you would expect from an Alien movie. They were distinct in my mind immediately. Neither one’s a hero because there’s not much point in that game to creating a “hero” character.

Shadowdark is the same way: I’m not rolling up Drizzt Do’Urden or Aragorn to play in a Shadowdark game. I’ll save that kind of character for 5e.

 

[Clint_L]

I feel like the subtitle of this thread should be “and also, kids these days don’t know what real music is.”

Things change. That’s good. We’re free to stick with what we like, embrace the change when we feel like it and, in the specific case of D&D, tinker as much as we want. That’s always been the RPG ethos, and thank goodness for it.

For me, 5e is the best version of D&D, but it sure ain’t perfect.

 

[Dire Bare]

Beyond just being wisdom for life as noted above, these things are incredibly relevant for one of the claimed design goals of 5e, and why it was always a flawed approach, because of another design goal.

Goal the first: "Make magic feel magical again." Goal the second: "Everything you loved about D&D."

Magic felt magical whenever any given person began learning D&D, because when you know nothing at all about a complex system, "magic"--in the colloquial sense of the term--is precisely what it looks like. If you showed a 13th century peasant a smartphone, they would likely have no way to characterize it other than "magic". If we (somehow) instantiated the ability to use and manfuacture smart phones in the 13th century, it would eventually become common knowledge (...if it weren't abjured for being devil-worship or the like), but for quite a long time it would be a supernatural tablet that glows with life and speaks with an impossible voice etc., etc.

When each of us was first learning D&D, that's exactly what we encountered. It was a system--we knew that, it's literally called a "system" on the front cover in most cases--but the "system" is a mystery to us, veiled behind the pages of a grimoire, so to speak. We become initiated into those mysteries by learning to play....but that very thing is what rips away the illusion of mystery. Once we have learned what the system is, what the system does, we can see it for exactly what it is: a systematic structure attempting to codify specific effects in specific ways.

But what this means is, you cannot possibly fulfill both goals. You cannot capture that experience of fantabulous wonderment if everything is required to work in familiar ways. Exactly as Umbran said, "Trying to recapture an RPG experience from your youth is like trying to recapture your first solo ride on a bicycle, or your first kiss. It cannot be done." But that's precisely what made magic magical when we were first learning the game. Everything was possible because ignorance shielded us from the harsh truth that it was always only one specific thing, and a pretty rote thing in most cases.

I railed against this all throughout the "D&D Next" playtest, and was roundly ignored, because the paradoxical promise of mystery-in-familiarity was a siren song to the folks to whom 5e was specifically targeted. It, like "modularity", promised everything folks ever wanted. Now, today, folks have (at least begun to) come to terms with the disappointing truth: those promises could never have been fulfilled.

Which is part of why focusing your design, not on airy-fairy awesome-sounding buzzword phrases (like "Make magic feel magical again"), but on the specific experiences you want players to have, is so incredibly important in game design. Airy-fairy promises can help a game coast, potentially for years. But when the honeymoon finally wears off--as it always will--the criticism will begin, and it's not going to be satisfied with buzzwords anymore.

D&D 5E does not intend to recreate the experience of playing earlier versions of D&D. It is not "chasing the dragon".

D&D 5E does rely heavily on nostalgia to evoke, to a degree, the FEEL of playing older versions of D&D. Nothing wrong with nostalgia, which is a different thing from "you can't go home again" or "chasing the dragon".

 

[Hatmatter]

So, this may feel like a strange thread, but I hope people will bear with me.

I have been playing and DM'ing "Dungeons & Dragons" since the early-80s, and I am feeling more and more like there is no place in the hobby where I truly "fit" anymore. I grew up with the mechanical simplicity of B/X D&D, starting with the 1980 B/X Boxed sets supplemented by an AD&D Monster Manual. We quickly abandoned "race as class" and cherry-picked rules from the hardcover books (I read them all, and still have my Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides, but that basic game continued. I had some enduring campaigns as 1st-Edition turned to 2nd, and I kept playing D&D, but I always longed for a better skill system; as the combination of "wing it" and Nonweapon Proficiencies never quite cut it for me.

When 3e dropped, I loved it at first, but the longer I played, the more something became clear to me. Dungeons & Dragons had become more "over-the-top fantastical" than I liked. Cook and Tweet basically had turned the default setting of Dungeons & Dragons into a high-magic Monty Haul campaign. The magic system still grated and the constant embrace of making characters MORE magical was taking it further from the kind of fantasy stories I want to tell.

I grew up on Arthurian legends, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan, and a bunch of other "Sword & Sorcery" stuff. I didn't want my fantasy game to let me play the medieval equivalent of the X-Men, where every character has magical powers. I've thought about going back to the OSR, but the truth is that I want a game that has more rules guidance than those games offer. I just don't want one where every character can teleport, cast spells, and all of the other high-magic shenanigans that D&D embraces from the get-go.

The 5.24e embrace of this flavor has me turned off more than anything else. But I don't see a home for myself. Part of me wants to go backwards, but OSR type games are usually either too lethal (or grim-dark), too enamored of outdated game mechanics (OSE), or they're overly enamored with tables and whacky subsystems (looking at you DCC). I want there to be more fun combat options, but I don't want a lot of fiddly rules that will slow the game down. I see promise in something like DCC's "Mighty Deeds of Arms," or DMScotty's "Luck Dice" (or Professor DM's "Deathbringer Dice") or whatever you want to call them. I see some fun sub-systems in DC20, but I also see it getting way too fiddly.

Shadowdark speaks to my tastes a little (I love "roll to cast"), but I'd have to houserule some additions and alterations to it to really get the game I want. There's some other heavily house-ruled versions of OSR or "simplified 5e" that work for me, but they aren't there. But while I love the d20 resolution mechanic, I may need to walk away from a D&D that is becoming increasingly fantastical. And I don't know where to go.

Sorry for the wall of text, but is anybody else in this boat?

I do not tend to enjoy a fictional world that is glutted with magic, so I am with you.

Because I am fortunate enough to have my own group of players that meet at my home (and therefore not subject to expectations from players who expect this or that), I simply created a relatively low magic setting and it is no problem. It is set in Renaissance Europe, using the 2nd edition Historical Reference volume A Mighty Fortress, which easily converts to D&D 2024. I disallow most fantastic races, but I am able to permit most classes that people want to play. Magic is derived from proximity to the Feywild and some features are less powerful when access to the Feywild is remote. However, the players also can go into the Feywild and then it is bonkers magic, so we all get a taste of that too, which can be fun. If someone wants to play a particular race, we can usually work it in by having them originate from the Feywild, but I do not always permit it because if they are not able to disguise themselves, it would be too constantly distracting for them to operate in Europe.

I find that D&D 2024 works great with this setup. The only other house rule I instigated is that natural healing after a long rest is a maximum of one hit die roll plus the player's Constitution modifier. This makes is longer to heal without magic, which is scarce, and tends to increase the stakes of any conflict. Easy peasy.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've been interested in Shadowdark since I first heard about it shortly before the Kickstarter ended, but I wasn't in a position at the time to participate. I've since had an opportunity to get it, and to me it really hits those classic play vibes i appreciate. The problem is that my wife is much more interested in the modern style of play where a character's story is paramount, and bad luck isn't just going to kill her PC (a real possibility in Shadowdark). To her, that's what an RPG is. So I hit upon a solution recently: I asked her to not think if Shadowdark and similar games as RPGs as she understands them, but instead as a kind of boardgame, and your PC as a game piece you control. You can if you want give characterization to your game piece, but ultimately its no different from the character you control in Betrayal at House on the Hill (a game she loves), and those folks die all the time.

This isn't how I see classic RPGs, of course, but it will help here have fun with them I hope.

Not like token play was exactly unknown in the Bad Old Days, so...

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not like token play was exactly unknown in the Bad Old Days, so...

True, and clearly I'm making use of that here. Even so, I still prefer to portray my character logically and with personality in such games, even if I can't be sure of their survival or the completion of some theoretical character arc. I recently completed a short campaign where my PC wanted nothing so much as to conquer the world and gain tremendous power in the doing. In the end, I came very close but was foiled by the delayed consequences of my own actions earlier in the campaign. One of the best games in which I ever participated.