CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
I reject the insinuation that Tolkien characters aren't awesome.
I mean, look at this awesomeness:
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D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
I mean, look at this awesomeness:
Helldritch
Hero
More players automatically means that there are more of all the types. Good and bad ones.
Ho but they have. Unless a DM put them artificially back, they no longer work.
Gold? Not needed. No magic shop, no kingdom/barony/temple/guild to build.
Magic Items? Not needed either. They are optional from the get go.
Experience? Miles stones are there my friend. And many players will try to force a mile stone in the throat of a DM. (Hey we have to level up now. It has been a while...)
Special Powers? Not needed any more as all power a PC needs are built-in the class and class level advancement.
To please a god? Hey gods are no longer needed RAW. Just pray to a philosophy. Healing is overnight anyways and Bards and Druids and Even some Warlock (Not counting paladins and rangers) can heal... Ho and the Artificer can heal too...
A good story that I build? Hey! Players' agency is there and this is the very subject we are discussing... And Railroad is so badly viewed that a young DM trying it will get roasted.
So what is truly left? Tell me because I fail to see where, as a DM with the non optional stuff in the PHB and DMG I can nudge the PC in the direction I wish them to go without going full railroad. (This is for the sake of argument, I have no problems at all as I have reintroduced most of the above myself). If I were a non experienced DM I would be hard pressed to nudge the players in the direction I would like.
And I am familiar with a lot of other system too. Some have their own tools to bring players into the line the DM wants and some don't have any. Survival alone is often the key. At the same time, D&D has a tradition of using the above examples to "encourage" players to act in certain ways or to choose some possibilities over the others. 5ed did removed these to "emulate" other RPG but did not provided other tools that these other games had to incentivize players into certain desired behaviors.
Here is an example: The merchant offers you 100 gold to guard him up to Waterdeep. For 3rd level characters, this would have been good in other editions. But in 5ed, why would the characters care? The first orog they'll see will wear a nice plate mail that can be sold for a lot more. And where there's an orog, there's bound to be some more. Unless you give outrageous rewards, the players are not incentivized to act on gold anymore. And even then, at a certain point, when the players have all the gold they need, what will you use to push them toward the story you want if they have their own agenda that goes against what you had in mind? All the tools I mentioned earlier are no longer there or do not have the impact they did in earlier editions. Especially gold, magical items and experience.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
How has D&D changed over the years? The Hickman Revolution replaced the “game” in RPG with “story.”
If it happened nearly 40 years ago, by the end of the first decade of the game's life, I don't think it can be classified as the deviation!
I don't see anything different here from what was mainstream in the 90s among AD&D 2nd ed players that I knew: treasure for flavour as much as, or more than, power; opaque GM-controlled levelling systems; player-side resources flowing mostly from PC build (back then it was spell casting).
And controversies around railroading (including by declaration of what would "please a god") were as well-known then as now. I was able to recruit players who were refugees from railroading A&D GMs.
I, and everyone I know, would have regarded this as lame in 1990. For a 3rd level AD&D PC, 100 gp is not much more than spare change. For 4e, trying to use treasure as a railroading tool is directly at odds with the general thrust of the game. I can't comment on what this might have been like in 3E, but to me it still seems to fall quite short of compelling.
Helldritch
Hero
And again you forget that we are not talking about you, or I. We are talking about young and/or inexperienced players and DMs that are discovering the game. What is old and lame for you and I is fun and exciting for them. But only if there is something to do with the rewards.
Old DMs like you and I do not need the tools to do our job, we are way past these artifices. But beginners, especially the DMs do need them but they got removed. Yes I reintroduced them for my pleasure but not as blunt tools.
What you fail to do is to put yourself in the shoes of the beginners. You judge by the lens of your experience and thus, are unable to see that these tools are useful for those they are intended for. I mean, we all use our experience in our views of the game. But here, we have to think beyond ourselves. That you do not need something does not mean that others don't. We have to think about the old grognards as much as we have to think about the young teenager or the middle age that is trying D&D for the first time in his/her life.
As for the to please a god. A god giving a quest is a classic trope used in legends, literatures and mythos. You may not have gods or have downgraded their importance in your campaign world. But it is not so in every other campaign run by other DMs. In many campaign worlds, the gods are very much important and pleasing your patron deity (or the one of your cleric) is a good thing to do.
Hussar
Legend
Good grief. How bad are the players in your area?
Every single thing you talk about here I have seen, over the years, but, I have not seen any increase in it at all.
Magic Shop? That was a 3e thing. Never existed at any other time. Gold was completely unnecessary in 2e. I've never seen so much as a whisper that players are pushing for milestone advancement either directly or in any thread I've ever seen on En World or Reddit.
Where are you finding these players? Because, from where I'm standing, the only common denominator in your stories is you.
But, yeah, I gotta say, 100 gp for 3rd level character? What are you on about? Per PC? Per day? Maybe. In AD&D, by 3rd level, your character likely already has thousands of GP - since xp=GP and most of your XP comes from gold. In 3e, by 3rd level, you're supposed to be worth 2700 gp. So, judging from your story, I'm kinda of the opinion that maybe the problems you are seeing are largely of your own making?
Vaalingrade
Legend
1) Characters are awesome, but the races are basically 'extra-powerful human, beard human, archery human, and short human.
2) You included orcs, which would make many 'traditional' DMs vomit a river of blood over someone playing. Due to them being awesome.
Thomas Shey
Legend
See, but I never saw those as effecting this behavior much in the first place. Players that were problematic would just work their way around them. The only one I ever saw have any consistent impact was experience, because it was the only one that wasn't intrinsically brittle. And nothing I see in the 5e rules reduces the ability to control that.
Carrot and stick methods can have some impact on people who are doing a mild drift into behavior you don't want, but ones that are already deciding you're unreasonable? Not in any meaningful sense. I'll accept it might work some times somewhere, but enough to be a reliable tool? Afraid I can't go there.
And again, none of this has been different in games where most of that simply don't exist, in either direction. That's one reason I often think heavily D&D-centric people have a very parochial view of how to manage player problems.
They could have done the same damn thing with experience in the old days. In fact I saw people try to do it. If you can't resist that pressure, why would I assume you could resist it on any of the other carrots you mentioned?
This is going to sound snarky, and I really don't mean it that way, but--
Talking to people. Honestly, if talking to players about the behavior you want can't get it done, most other stuff won't either; it'll just teach them to end run you every opportunity they get. The same people who will respond positively to carrots can usually be negotiated with in other ways. The ones that can't be negotiated with will decide that they're in an adversarial role to you and no nudging will help.
You've got an argument regarding "survival" in some cases, but that's a brute force tool at best, and many of them have nothing much beyond experience itself or in-setting problems.
But are the rewards outrageous? If the prices land such that you're correct about that plate armor, it doesn't seem so to me.
(And remember, I'm still far from sold you can't use levelling as a lever if that's really what you want. As I've noted before, gold only had any impact in OD&D to the degree it also was experience; most characters otherwise had damn-all to do with it. Magic items? Maybe, but that was going to be a hard balance to keep, and would require you to thoroughly ignore the extent treasure tables to do it with any consistency, since over time PCs would be drowning in basic magic items. Anything that was going to really impress them was going to probably cause you problems down the line).
Thomas Shey
Legend
And as I've noted before, was happening piecemeal before that. If your definition of "game" begins and ends at the kind of thing OD&D was avowedly designed for, that was already diverging away in places as early as the late 70's.
(Of course my biggest complaint was that it wasn't "gamey" enough at the start; when most of the tools you could use were at the discretion of the GM, it might fit some people's definition of "game" but it didn't fit mine.)
