D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

Most fights I run have at least 1 character at 0 at some point, the last session I ran we had to cut off in middle of the session because of time constraints with 2 characters on the verge of being turned to stone and everyone else split up between enemies. Should be interesting to see what happens next. The fight was under the "medium" XP budget using the 2024 rules but I threw in some complications of a rescue and an unexpected attack from a gorgon. Fun times.

I regularly have to take it a little easy in order to not have a TPK because it wouldn't be fun for the players. Different groups can handle more or less but I've never had an issue running difficult combats.

Then it seems unlikely you would ever make the assertion you claimed.

 

[AlViking]

Then it seems unlikely you would ever make the assertion you claimed.

It was a joke. People would disagree that the game is easy so they would throw dice. In my experience it isn't difficult to threaten characters on a regular basis, it just more likely to be intentional than in TSR days.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, just to be clear here.

It's the megacorporation's fault that the GM isn't able to persuade their players to consider a campaign they're offering. The GM has absolutely zero responsibility for getting their players on board for a campaign--that responsibility falls exclusively at the megacorporation's feet.

I just want to be absolutely clear that that's the position I'm supposed to accept here.

I don't recall speaking in absolutes. I think it's a spectrum, and both the GM and the megacorp bear responsibility for getting the game everyone wants. Its not all on the megacorp, but their influence on the industry and the community does matter and is felt.

 

[The Firebird]

So, just to be clear here.

It's the megacorporation's fault that the GM isn't able to persuade their players to consider a campaign they're offering. The GM has absolutely zero responsibility for getting their players on board for a campaign--that responsibility falls exclusively at the megacorporation's feet.

I just want to be absolutely clear that that's the position I'm supposed to accept here.

That's not what the text of the post says.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't recall speaking in absolutes.

You said I wasn't allowed to blame the GM--and provided the megacorp as the only other possibility.

I think it's a spectrum, and both the GM and the megacorp bear responsibility for getting the game everyone wants. Its not all on the megacorp, but their influence on the industry and the community does matter and is felt.

Okay.

I think by far the lion's share belongs to the GM. And, in particular, selling the group on a difficult campaign/system is on the GM--because this is, I cannot stress enough, a game. It is a fun pastime. Of course the thing people are going to expect to do is some casual fun for a few hours, a leisure time activity taking up time they could spend on literally anything else instead.

Further, what you spoke of was "starting small and giving ground".

How on Earth is brutal, 50%+ death rate games, even remotely possibly parse-able as "starting small"????

 

[Micah Sweet]

You said I wasn't allowed to blame the GM--and provided the megacorp as the only other possibility.


Okay.

I think by far the lion's share belongs to the GM. And, in particular, selling the group on a difficult campaign/system is on the GM--because this is, I cannot stress enough, a game. It is a fun pastime. Of course the thing people are going to expect to do is some casual fun for a few hours, a leisure time activity taking up time they could spend on literally anything else instead.

Further, what you spoke of was "starting small and giving ground".

How on Earth is brutal, 50%+ death rate games, even remotely possibly parse-able as "starting small"????

Small as in power level for the PCs. Modern D&D, for example, starts pretty big on that scale, and every new version gets bigger.

And RPGS are of course supposed to be fun. But how casual it is can really vary. Is being part of a sports league fun? I hope so if you're part of it, but I'm not sure how casual the experience is.

I also think you are exaggerating lethality. I recently played in a Shadowdark game, which is known (and IMO rather proud of) its high level of potential lethality. We played by the rules, and had several close calls, but no one died. Just an anecdote, but that's all any of us legitimately have.

 

[Remathilis]

If D&D 6e turns out to be a full-on OSR-style system I'd bet the farm that a huge number of players would quickly become OSR-style.

You know, following the new shiny and all that.

Yes, because all D&D players overwhelmingly accepted 4e with loving arms and didn't move to Pathfinder in reaction to it.

How big of a farm am I getting?

 

[Remathilis]

Weapon proficiencies (as opposed to specialization) were a thing in 1e. A fighter started with four and gained another one at 4th, 7th, 10th, etc. level. A cleric started with three and gained one at 5th, 10th, 15th etc. level. Using a non-proficient weapon carried a to-hit penalty that varied by class.

This was the edition nitpicking I was avoiding with Ezo. Basic D&D did not have a weapon or nonweapon proficiency system except as an optional rule in the Cyclopedia. 1e had WP, and later optional NWP. 2e had the same. All of those editions have very similar structures to the fighter, cleric, magic -user and thief. So clearly, each class was not designed taking proficiencies into account as those elements were added LATER. Thus, they are irrelevant to this discussion unless you are arguing a BX character is inferior because BX has no proficiency system.

You're also, I think, vastly discounting the value of that improved math, even if the player didn't necessarily see all of it.

Every class gets hit points. Every class Thac0 improves. Every class saves improve. The numbers vary, but the concept remains. It's not like the fighter gets more HD than the thief or cleric (in fact, if you roll HP, you're not guaranteed to have more HP than the thief or cleric). Again, the fighter's numbers improved. So did everyone else's.

There's IMO a good argument to be made that barbarian as a class has never worked in any edition and should probably be scrapped outright.

Same with the druid, bard, ranger, paladin, etc. I mean, what's a paladin but a fighter/cleric, a bard but a fighter/thief/druid? (Or thief/mage, depending on the edition).

The character still changes, but those changes are much more driven by magic items and effects (and are thus far less predictable, which is IMO a feature not a bug) rather than by intrinsic class features.

Magic items are under the the pervue of the DM, and last I checked you are not guaranteed magic items in TSR D&D. I might go major periods of time without getting a usable magic item.

If it's additive multiclassing like the WotC editions use, yes. But 2e-style multiclassing doesn't hit this problem.

Yes, I was comparing how you can't use AD&D style classes with 3e style multiclassing. Thank you for catching up.

Then the wrong lesson was learned. Pity.

The two lessons they could have learned was to ditch additive multiclassing OR make classes more attractive to stay in. WotC and Paizo learned the latter and you can clearly see how both have suffered dearly for it. /S.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Small as in power level for the PCs. Modern D&D, for example, starts pretty big on that scale, and every new version gets bigger.

And RPGS are of course supposed to be fun. But how casual it is can really vary. Is being part of a sports league fun? I hope so if you're part of it, but I'm not sure how casual the experience is.

I also think you are exaggerating lethality. I recently played in a Shadowdark game, which is known (and IMO rather proud of) its high level of potential lethality. We played by the rules, and had several close calls, but no one died. Just an anecdote, but that's all any of us legitimately have.

I was very directly given an example in another thread happening right now, of a near-50% lethality rate on a group's second adventure. This was portrayed as tame. From a person who has--very specifically--made the argument that this should be the default, and that anyone, such as me, who might not enjoy that isn't really any loss if they stop playing.

I'm not exaggerating anything.

 

[James Gasik]

I wasn't intending to say that TSR-era was more creative than modern D&D. But the sample size of new ideas if not actually larger (my giant folder of TSR-era books as well as Dragon & Dungeon on .pdf dwarfs my WotC folders seems to indicate this, but I'm not looking to fight about it, lol) certainly feels that way.

And yes, not all of these products line up with each other very well, due to a good percentage of it being written by freelancers, with dubious editing or playtesting (if any). It's simply that there was a larger sample size- a firehose instead of a trickle.

And while I prefer that, I won't say it's better- I had to pick and choose what supplemental material to use, naturally. But having more to choose from was nice. It's a business model that probably isn't sustainable (arguments about whether it was sustainable for TSR will likely never end, after all), but I'm happy to have all of it. Even those wacky green books that very dubiously claimed to allow one to play D&D in different "historical" eras (I mean, the Vikings book has playable mythological Trolls and rune magic, for example), I'm still happy to own, as a potential resource.

It was a different time, and it sure felt like a lot of innovation was going on. But then again, so did the 3.5/4e era, where the game's developers were seeing that some older things weren't working as advertised, and felt it was time to try new ideas.

I still remember the hubbub about the Tome of Battle. Prior to it's release, many, many, many people were complaining online demanding that fixes be made to the "martial-caster divide" (quite real in the 3.x era) and encounter balance. Then ToB comes out, and quite a few people, rather than seeing it as just such a patch, responded with "we wanted it fixed, but not that way!". Little did anyone know that ToB was more than a crazy experiment, but an omen of the future (along with things like wackier and denser Magic of Incarnum or the barely functional Tome of Magic)!

The mistake WotC seems to keep making is that theyreally have no idea how people are actually playing their game. It's not something you can get from a mere survey, that's for sure. Because there's as many different ways to play as stars in the sky.

This isn't to say that D&D should be a universal system. I've bounced off of so many of those it's not funny. As much as we all would love for WotC to pick a lane, D&D has such a big history that there's no way that would make people happy.

I mean, the version of D&D I'd love to see is one where the PHB has the barest bones of rules, and the DMG was full of ways to expand and tweak the game in whatever direction it's players want. But having seen games built that way, I know why you can't do that either- players will look through their book and see nothing to get them excited to play the game. Nothing to hype about, very little to spark creativity or make them say "woah, I want to play that!"

People gripe about seeing more gonzo and powerful options in PHB's, but that's the stuff that really sells players on a game, in my experience. Like when I first bought FASA's Earthdawn. It didn't take long before the art and the layout really sold me on this exotic world. And the feeling I got when one of my friends first saw an Obsidiman and said "wait, I can play that?!". I really felt like I got my money's worth.

Unfortunately, that approach has a big problem. What's exciting for the player might be a massive PITA for a DM to run for. In my own games, I go out of my way to try and facilitate my players fun, but this often comes at a high cost to my sanity (and what's left of my hair)! "@LK@JT()U!!! This encounter is supposed to be really hard and they just cakewalked right through it!!!!"

(but in all fairness, nearly as often, "@(I(%@U$$~!! This encounter was supposed to be average difficulty and it took way too long and now the PC's are out of resources!")

But then I calm down and recall trying desperately not to murder 1st-level PC's in my 2e games and realize this isn't a new problem (until I finally realized starting at 2nd or even 3rd level was a far better idea). It's just the way D&D is.

Well that, or maybe I just suck as a DM. Someone should tell my players!