D&D 5E 5th Edition and The Rules

[Hussar]

Nod. Encounters did seem like a pretty good vehicle for new and casual players, to me (I've participated since the 2nd season, and seen a lot of new players try the game - and a surprising number kept playing Encounters and/or formed groups of their own).

The Adventurers Guild document and the DM materials for the HotDQ season of Encounters make it clear that there are more specific guidelines for character creation and optional rules in force than are presented in the PH. Feats, for instance, are in, messing with starting hps or level or magic items placed is out. This is a bit of a change for Encounters which always encouraged DMs to allow character options specifically from the latest offerings, but didn't make pronouncements about rules in force, and left DMs a 'rule of cool' sort of escape clause to modify the adventure as they saw fit for the good of the play experience at the individual table. Where I ran, this included not only opening the table to more character options, but changing the level of the adventure, entirely.

I can see the need for the changes, of course. The characters from Encounters are meant to be usable in other organized play programs, so they have to toe /some/ line to assure that no one shows up downstream with too many items, or a variant race or 20 more hps than they should have, or whatever. But it is ironic that I have less flexibility running encounters under 5e than I did under 4e.

A lot of that is the movement back to Living campaigns. In Living Greyhawk (and later Living FR and Living Eberron), you had a pretty lengthy shopping list of rules changes - spells that worked differently, for example - in order to make sure that all the tables were the same. I think in 4e Encounters, you weren't assumed to be able to go from convention to convention with the same character as much. It was more about the player playing at the local FLGS on a regular basis.

 

[77IM]

There are no rules: there are only guidelines.

1e and 2e had game mechanics that were too idiosyncratic to serve as good guidelines. It's hard to interpolate when every situation is handled differently and there's no strong core mechanic to fall back on.

3e and 4e had game mechanics that were rigidly defined, attempting to cover every situation and edge case. DMs were subtly discouraged from treating the rules as guidelines and making their own rulings.

I've played a lot of Savage Worlds, and I think of it as a system where the rules serve as great guidelines: the most common situations are covered by the rules, and edge cases are specifically left up to the GM, who can lean on a useful core mechanic to resolve most things. From reading, 5e feels similar, although I have yet to play it to find out.

(not trying to bash 1-4e; I enjoyed those games immensely, despite rules that weren't perfect)

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think the biggest problem that 3E hed with rules taking center stage was the rise of organized play. The core books themselves didn't do anything more to encourage rules over story telling, but by successfully introducing a new environment to play D&D in, via organized play, WotC opened up a can of worms that has yet to be fully dealt with.

Organized play is nothing new. The RPGA started in the TSR era, and before it, "tournaments" (that were not only organized play, but competative) were common. Conventions (existing wargaming, or new for D&D) started providing D&D games almost immediately.

My sense of the rise of RAW in the 3e community is that it had nothing to do with the presentation of the game - which acknowledged the realities of RPG rules with the explicit "Rule 0" and tried to make a virtue of it as Storyteller had done calling it "The Golden Rule" - and the content of the game. 3e was loaded with M:tG-style 'rewards for system mastery' (intentionally so, according to Monty Cook's 'Ivory Tower Roleplaying' article). The invitation to system mastery naturally meant that, once players had acquired some of those 'rewards,' the last thing they wanted was for some spoilsport DM to house-rule them away. Thus the insistence on RAW, not just in organized play (which often deviated from RAW specifically to minimize the disruption caused by overly optimized characters), but everywhere the game was played - and, thus, also the countervailing impetus to 'core only' or 'E6' or similar abuse-limiting campaign strategies of varying efficacy.

WotC never really did that with either Living Greyhawk or LFR (never tried Encounters, so I have no idea how well they separated it from the total 4E experience).

Can't really provide a clear contrast to LFR, since I never participated in it, but in Encounters the DM was left a sort of 'for the good of the game' escape clause to deviate from the guidelines. Often, at my FLGS, it was to let someone bring in a character not built just with the latest book being pushed, but it could also mean running a scenario at a different level if you got all-experienced players at your table, changing details of the scenario (more or fewer items, modding/deleting/adding an encounter or skill change or changing their order, etc), using your own personal rule tweaks, or whatever. Since Encounters characters almost never officially moved on to something else (there were a couple of seasons that continued a prior one, but that was it), there was no issue with them turning out 'wrong' (wrong level, wrong class/race/build, different/too many/not enough items, etc).

Now that Encounters feeds characters into other programs, you can't go starting PCs at a higher level, giving them more/cooler items, or letting them roll stats or anything that would impact things down the line.

The one thing I have seen with 5E at least so far is that the rules are presented more clearly and consistently.

Than 1e? sure. 3e? I suppose you could make a case, but I've already seen people on the WotC boards get into RAW debates and come up with bizarre interpretations (honestly, willful misinterpretations, IMHO).

In the end, though, the main lesson for 3rd edition still holds true, and that is how people approach the game has as much impact on how it is played as how many rules do or don't get formally written down or how those rules are formatted do.

Closed on an excellent point.

 

[rastus_burne]

There are no rules: there are only guidelines.

I wholeheartedly agree. In any edition the players/DM should do as they see fit, to create the game they wish to play.

1e and 2e had game mechanics that were too idiosyncratic to serve as good guidelines. It's hard to interpolate when every situation is handled differently and there's no strong core mechanic to fall back on.

1e is idiosyncratic for sure. And there is no 'central' mechanic that dealt with every situation, but there is a clear set of rules (guidelines) that the DM/players can use. The beauty of AD&D in my opinion is its customisability. You can literally do anything you want with it. Same goes for 2e, but it lost some of the quirkiness that 1e had, albeit with an almost identical rule set, just more clearly presented.

3e and 4e had game mechanics that were rigidly defined, attempting to cover every situation and edge case. DMs were subtly discouraged from treating the rules as guidelines and making their own rulings.

I've played a lot of Savage Worlds, and I think of it as a system where the rules serve as great guidelines: the most common situations are covered by the rules, and edge cases are specifically left up to the GM, who can lean on a useful core mechanic to resolve most things. From reading, 5e feels similar, although I have yet to play it to find out.

(not trying to bash 1-4e; I enjoyed those games immensely, despite rules that weren't perfect)

I think that's true. I haven't played a lot of organised play - I'm running a 5e campaign at the moment, and it's literally my first time playing with people outside my 13-year gaming group. 5e is certainly more outwardly flexible than 3e/4e. With my home group, we house rule so much anyway, that the pedantic rules-lawyering that some talk about from 3e/4e doesn't really apply. I guess in sum what I'm trying to say is that any rule-set should be moulded to fit the style of the group. The whole traditional premise of D&D is creative freedom and adventure, so anything that aids that, is being true to the spirit of the game.

 

[Hussar]

and it's literally my first time playing with people outside my 13-year gaming group.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?358178-5th-Edition-and-The-Rules/page6#ixzz3AhBVMlhD

I think that, right there, probably has the largest effect on how you see systems. More than anything else. If you've had a stable group for that long, the vast majority of issues that 3e was meant to fix, have already been fixed in that particular group. They'd almost have to be for the group to stay together for so long. It's not that earlier editions were easier or harder to modify, it's that you've spent so much time with the same group that the modifications that you've arrived at seem so intuitive and obvious.

The thing is, the vast majority of groups are nowhere near that stable. One or two year half lives for most groups is the benchmark I've heard bandied about. Which means that a lot of gamers, in the same time that you spent with one group, have hopped five to ten different groups. Which is why you see 3e with very clear rules and the push for RAW that you see. It just makes changing groups so much easier.

 

[rastus_burne]

I think that, right there, probably has the largest effect on how you see systems. More than anything else. If you've had a stable group for that long, the vast majority of issues that 3e was meant to fix, have already been fixed in that particular group. They'd almost have to be for the group to stay together for so long. It's not that earlier editions were easier or harder to modify, it's that you've spent so much time with the same group that the modifications that you've arrived at seem so intuitive and obvious.

The thing is, the vast majority of groups are nowhere near that stable. One or two year half lives for most groups is the benchmark I've heard bandied about. Which means that a lot of gamers, in the same time that you spent with one group, have hopped five to ten different groups. Which is why you see 3e with very clear rules and the push for RAW that you see. It just makes changing groups so much easier.

Yeah, and to be clear, the 5e group that I'm DMing is not my long-term group. It is held at a local gaming store with people I had never met until three weeks ago. We have played AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, Star Wars D20 and Wheel of Time in my long-term group.

I think you're correct. When we started playing 3e in 2001, we were teenagers (14 or 15). Naturally we did not understand all the rules (or had not read them properly). We winged a lot of stuff. That ultimately created a culture of changing stuff as we saw fit. If we had learned to play in a different environment, our approach to the rules would likely be different.

My experience of 5e has thus been an extension of that approach. When DMing I do not feel bound by the 'rules', so to speak. Arbitration and rulings are second nature, perhaps giving me an exaggerated perception of the rules' flexibility.