An everchanging gaming language?

[Jester David]

Right, but while 3e specified the mechanics, the language remained the same and was interchangeable from one edition to the next. A suit of +1 armor cuts across editions and a 3e player telling a BECMI player that his fighter found a +1 Undead Bane Longsword would be easily understood.

That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm discussing the actual typing of the bonus. How 3e uses the narrative source (morale, circumstances, a profane source) to limit stacking of bonuses (while 4e uses the source, feat bonus, power bonus, item bonus). Which can cause confusion when the cleric tries to cass bless while the bard is using Inspire Courage.

And, really, the ease of understanding the change in language does not mean the language has not changed. "Opportunity Attack" isn't that much less clear than "Attack of Opportunity" once you know what people are talking about. My 4e players (who never really played earlier editions) never really struggled when I asked for a "Knowledge (arcana) check".

I don't know if you are just arguing semantics between weapon type and damage type, but the B was bludgeoning, the P was piercing, and the S was slashing. Which were all damage type indicators. This mattered in AD&D, though not in Basic. Different weapon types would harm different things but not others. Likewise, fire was always more effective against some things than others; ditto with cold. This was nothing new to 3e, though 3e most certainly codified it more clearly. But the language and the concepts did not really change much.

This whole thread is about semantics.
In earlier editions, a shortsword was a piercing weapon that did damage. But in 3e it was a weapon that did piercing damage. There is a language change.

 

[Wicht]

This whole thread is about semantics.
In earlier editions, a shortsword was a piercing weapon that did damage. But in 3e it was a weapon that did piercing damage. There is a language change.

I was not necessarily meaning for the thread to be about semantics. I am more interested in perceived problems of actual communication. The example of "herioc," illustrates to me an actual area of communicative difficulty. I would be surprised if "piercing damage" ever did the same.

And I still think your example about weapon types wrong. While 3e used the jargon "piercing damage," I have always understood piercing weapons to do piercing damage. The nuance is lost on me, I am afraid.

From the Monster Manual, on Skeletons and damage, "Skeletons suffer only one-half damage from sharp and/or edged weapons (such as spears, daggers, swords). Blunt weapons such as clubs, maces, flails, etc. score normal damage. Fire scores normal damage. Sleep, charm, hold and cold-based spells do not affect skeletons."

Many of the codified terms of 3e were merely reflections of what was already understood. I am pretty sure that I used "bludgeoning damage" as a term long before 3e, and I doubt I was alone. Likewise, while 3e codified bonus types, I was talking about magical "bonuses" before that: the game merely codified speech already in use; it didn't actually change the terms in significant ways from my point of view.

 

[Savage Wombat]

The term "toon" however burns me with a passion of fire and hatred. They are a character. A PC if you need a short hand. "Toon" is just a term for something you play-and-toss, often with no connection, no personality, or do so just to see if you're build works. Toon reminds me of those munchkin gamers who don't create characters, that create statistical aberrations.

And then name them things like "xx_DethStrike_xx". My Guild Wars characters have always had real names.

Anyway-

I agree that a lot of the game rules terminology has changed ("Thac0" and "BAB") but I think the changes around the rules are more relevant to this discussion. I've gotten very annoyed at the people on the Order of the Stick forum who insist on talking about "Tiers" as if it were something actually part of the game mechanics. These people are so obsessed with the CharOp view of the game that they think it should apply to a webcomic. I've played D&D from AD&D to present and had to go dig to figure out what the "Tier" people were referring to - and I was appalled.

I expect to learn new rules terminology when I switch D&D editions. I don't like having to learn new jargon whose only source is other gamers I've never met.

 

[steeldragons]

When did anyone ever talk about "Vancian magic" before 3e?

I recall talking about "memorized spells", "fire n' forget", even sometimes "prepared spells" for the day. The "sorcerer" class (which in itself is another example worthy of mention in this thread) came along and offered "spontaneous casting." Suddenly "wizards" (unnecessary name change/didn't/never/still don't like) were "vancian casters."

Sorcerer is a separate class. Like the Warlock example listed at the beginning of this thread. No...Sorcerer is any MU of a certain level (I think it was 7th, but don't quote me).

Magic-user: BX/BECMI and 1e; Mage in 2e; Wizard and Sorcerer as separate things in 3; Wizard, Sorcerer and Warlock as separate things in 4e. I know wizardly-specialists existed in 3e, but were they actual specializations or separate classes or PRs?

There's one! "Class." There's a class which originally included "race", then race and class were separate...and there were classes and SUB-classes, then you added Kits to your classes to come up with different sub-classes of the classes you knew, then came the Prestige Classes...which mandated the understanding that there are separate "base" classes...and I understand there are now "Essentials" classes that are not the same as 4e classes...And in 5e the terms base and sub-classes are starting to mean certain, different, getting confusing kinda things.

And what is or is not a "sub-class" seems to be a bone of some contention for many. That, somehow, as opposed to it being just some class that thematically fits in with/beneath the umbrella of a broader "base class", a "sub-class" is immediately seen as somehow inferior and that to somehow not disrespect the class, it has to be its "own" class versus a "sub class"...which to me simply reads as nonsense. Something being a "sub class" in no way diminishes the kind of character you want to have.

 

[Wicht]

When did anyone ever talk about "Vancian magic" before 3e?

I don't remember when I first heard it, but I am pretty sure I remember hearing the term Vancian before 3e.

I can see, addressing your other points, the confusion that can arise around class specific names (and believe I commented on it already to some extent). This is not anything new with 3e or 4e though (cf. Cavalier, Assassin and Acrobat).

I am actually of two minds about the named levels of yore. On the one hand I remember it nostalgically. On the other hand, I think the game is actually better off without it as a whole. More options (descriptively as well as mechanically) appeals to me more than less. But the act of naming a class specifically, (or even a level specifically) rather than generically, does tend to lead to a certain level of potential confusion.

 

[Iosue]

I think a lot of this goes to play-style and harkens back to a point made above that sometimes the changes in vocabulary is not so much new terms as new ways of thinking. I hardly ever think in terms of builds, and I never consider caster-imbalance, though I have played 3e since its release and have kept in the d20 system with Pathfinder. Though I understand the terms being used, I have trouble relating to the thinking behind them when I read/hear them. And I say this as someone that does freelance writing for the system. I strive to keep abreast of the concerns of people so that I can keep it in mind when writing, but I have a hard time taking it seriously as legitimate concerns because it is so foreign to my actual gaming style. Like you, such conversations pull me out of a certain comfort zone. So I am not sure this is edition specific language, so much as game style specific language.

To clarify, by no means did I intend to suggest that these language changes are purely due to edition. Edition plays a part, the emergent game play of that edition plays a part, outside influences, age, all this plays a part.

Again some of this is playstyle specific, not edition specific. I still make my players "roll up" their characters.

And that's cool, but tangential to my point. Regardless of what we ourselves do, the online gaming community and indeed the games themselves are operating with different paradigms, and attendant differing lexicon.

Quibble - in Pathfinder, a round is still a matter of seconds (though 6 not 10). And initiative can be used interchangeably in a number of ways, so that it is still common to ask, "who has initiative," and refer to "initiative order." That may be a game-group specific difference not an edition specific manner of speech.

This is very edition specific if you're going from BECMI to WotC-D&D. Perhaps less so if going from 2e to 3e. BECMI uses "side initiative", which means there's no initiative order as conceived in WotC D&D. Order of actions is determined by where that action falls on the combat sequence and initiative only determines which side gets to complete their sequence first. Hence, the term "initiative". Even if you're using individual initiative, all that means is that each pair of combatants roll individually. And initiative is re-rolled every round, because it determines who gets to initiate action on that round.

In WotC-D&D you roll once, determine the order of action, and then keep that order for the entire encounter (barring delayed and interrupting actions). So it's the same word, the idea is more or less the same (roll dice to see who goes first), but what a WotC-D&D-only person imagined when they heard the word and what I imagined when I heard the word (before I started playing 4e) is quite different. They have "initiative order". They have "high initiative" and "low initiative". In BECMI you either have initiative, or you don't.

I still buy modules. And still use wandering monsters when appropriate.

Yes, as do I. But, again, the point is communication with the community-at-large. My point is that I have to code-switch when talking on a forum such as this.

Attack of opportunity, Fort save, BAB, skills, skill points, skill check, feats, stat boost, caster level, concentration check, hardness, damage reduction, conditions, grapple, 5-foot step, standard action, move action, swift action, touch AC, flat-footed, full attack, slashing damage, space/ reach, DC, item slots, Prestige Class, bonuses (sacred bonus, circumstance bonus, armour bonus, deflection bonus, etc).

Nice list.

Right, but while 3e specified the mechanics, the language remained the same and was interchangeable from one edition to the next. A suit of +1 armor cuts across editions and a 3e player telling a BECMI player that his fighter found a +1 Undead Bane Longsword would be easily understood.

But telling the BECMI player that he will get a +1 enhancement bonus to his BAB from his Undead Bane Longsword would at least cause pause. It's simply not the way a BECMI player would talk about D&D.

I don't know if you are just arguing semantics between weapon type and damage type, but the B was bludgeoning, the P was piercing, and the S was slashing. Which were all damage type indicators. This mattered in AD&D, though not in Basic. Different weapon types would harm different things but not others. Likewise, fire was always more effective against some things than others; ditto with cold. This was nothing new to 3e, though 3e most certainly codified it more clearly. But the language and the concepts did not really change much.

A 2e player knows that his longsword is a slashing weapon, and thus will have certain bonuses or penalties on different foes. A 3e player knows that his longsword will do slashing damage, which some foes are susceptible to and others not. It's a subtle distinction, but there are a lot of these subtle differences that undermine the sense that we're all playing the same game.

 

[steeldragons]

I certainly think the process has been a gradual one, and if you've been involved in the game constantly through the years, you might not notice it. Late 2e's Combat & Tactics and Skills & Powers flowed more or less naturally into 3e, and late 3e's Book of Nine Swords flowed more or less naturally into 4e. When I look at the rules for 3e, I see something that recognizably TSR-era, as well as something recognizably 4e. So let me stress that I by no means think of 3e or 4e as "not D&D", despite feeling unfamiliar with the new terminology. It's been 25 years since I started playing, so of course the game is going to change and evolve, and I hold no resentment for the folks who first got into the game with WotC-D&D. Unless, of course, they start putting down the D&D of my era as "out-dated", "poor designed", and so on. Nor am I at all unaware of the differences between the D&D I grew up with in the 80s and 90s and the D&D of the 70s.

That said, here's where I see differences.

First of all, any talk of charop immediately throws me out of my D&D language comfort zone. Particularly with 3e (but that's only because I'm familiar with 4e). When a conversation turns to builds, or 3e caster imbalance, I quickly lose the whole thread of the conversation. As mentioned earlier in the thread, talk of tiers, dipping, gishes, multiple ability-score dependencies, and so on, is simply not something I ever associated with D&D back when I played from 1987 to 1998.

But the differences also go more fundamental. We didn't "build" or "optimize" characters, we "rolled them up". In my day, we talked about "to-hit matrices" and later "THAC0". Now they talk about BAB (if 3e/PF) and Base Attack Roll Modifiers (if 4e). So I say "to-hit roll", but now people say "attack roll". Saves, of course, are a big one. When I think of saving throws and D&D, I think of vs. Death Ray, vs. Polymorph, vs. Dragon Breath, etc. Nowadays, save means Fortitude, Reflex, and Will. Or those are Non-Armor Defenses, which is another term I never associated with D&D.

When I played, a "turn" in D&D was 10 minutes of in-game time, during which PCs moved at a certain rate and a turn sequence was followed, and a "round" was 10 seconds of in-game time, during which PCs moved at a separate rate, and a combat sequence was followed. Now a "turn" means the actions each player respectively takes in a round, and a "round" means going through the full initiative order. On a related note, in my day "initiative" referred to being able to go first in a battle. Now it refers to the order of the individual participants.

We used to talk about "wandering monsters", but those are pretty much gone from the game. The "core four" to me are "cleric, fighter, magic-user, thief". Now it's "cleric, fighter, wizard, rogue". If I said, "My character is a Warlock," it meant, "My character is a 6th-level magic-user." Now it means, "My character invokes an eldritch blast through a pact with a supernatural being," and if you change that, people get upset. We used to buy "modules". Now people buy "Adventure Paths" and "splatbooks".

3rd and 4th talk about Standard Actions, Swift/Minor Actions, Move Actions, and Free Actions. People talk about DCs and CRs. Their characters take Feats. They make Spot and Perception checks (and note that I'm not saying those didn't exist in TSR-D&D; I'm talking about language). They make Attacks of Opportunity/Opportunity Attacks and either suffer or impose a host of conditions that I can never really remember off the top of my head. Sure, 4e has its powers and new mechanics like Healing Surges, but from my POV 3e has its Iterative Attacks, Level Adjustment/Effective Character Level, and a host of special abilities. Many of those special abilities existed in one form or another in TSR-D&D, but the way 3e presented them changed the conversation.

Both with 3e and 4e, WotC attempted to expand their base by appealing to gamers who were not, at that point, interested in playing D&D. For 3e, this meant going highly simulationist, rules-as-physics, with all sorts of ways to customize characters. 4e brought in a higher level of balance through mathematical precision, and features reminiscent of indie-games that gave players more narrative control. And while these moves may have been somewhat tangential to my interests in D&D, how can I blame them? So more folks, who were at best indifferent to TSR-D&D and at worst actually disliked it, joined the D&D family. And as far as I'm concerned, welcome to them! I've had many an interesting conversation with folks with playstyles and expectations wildly different from mine. But they've also had an effect on the conversation.

The design paradigm of a disperse system that encourages DMs to add their own innovations and make their own case-by-case judgments is now called "lazy design". Game interaction through Player-DM give-and-take is now called "mother-may-I". The primary thrust of 5e design is, "We want you to be able to adjust the game to play however you want, be that grim and gritty or horror or high fantasy." In the 80s this was taken as a matter of course. Now this has been called "incoherent". All the D&D books I read in the 80s, from B/X to BECMI to AD&D advised to use fudging as a tool. This is now a vehemently reviled strategy. We talk about "sandbox" and "railroads". Again, I'm not saying that such differences and debates didn't exist back in the day, but the language has changed, and with that change I do think battle lines have become a little more defined.

And let it not be thought that I'm saying all the change has been for the bad. Back in the day you heard the terms "roleplaying vs. rollplaying", "munchkins", "min/maxers", "Monty Haul", and with the attendant smug superiority. Those terms have generally fallen out of use and out of favor. You hear them from time to time, but it's no longer the mainstream to put down the playstyles those terms contemptuously referred to. New terms, like "badwrongfun" and "One-True-Wayism" have come up, and I think for the better.

I must spread some around...Someone wanna helpa 'dragon out?

But wanted to just say this is an outstanding post/analysis.

 

[Iosue]

When did anyone ever talk about "Vancian magic" before 3e?

I recall talking about "memorized spells", "fire n' forget", even sometimes "prepared spells" for the day. The "sorcerer" class (which in itself is another example worthy of mention in this thread) came along and offered "spontaneous casting." Suddenly "wizards" (unnecessary name change/didn't/never/still don't like) were "vancian casters."

Yup. This is a big one, because there's been a lexical shift that really plagued me in discussion all last year.

To me, "Vancian" or "D&D" magic is "spells memorized/prepared, and then lost when cast, until prepared again." Along with this are images of magic-users losing their spells easily, being very weak early on, but fairly powerful at much higher levels.

These days, a lot of folks use "Vancian magic" to mean, "spells memorized/prepared, and then lost when cast, until prepared again." Along with this are images of casters using metamagic feats to create super powerful characters that end encounters by themselves.

The 5e team says, "We're bringing back Vancian magic," and I think of B/X and say, "Okay, that can work." 4e folks think of 3e and go "NOOOOOOOoooooooo!!!!!"

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

"spells memorized/prepared, and then lost when cast, until prepared again"

For me, that is the alpha and omega of Vancian magic- the rest is all game design stuff that can be changed as needed.

 

[Wicht]

And that's cool, but tangential to my point. Regardless of what we ourselves do, the online gaming community and indeed the games themselves are operating with different paradigms, and attendant differing lexicon.
[snip]
Yes, as do I. But, again, the point is communication with the community-at-large. My point is that I have to code-switch when talking on a forum such as this.

But telling the BECMI player that he will get a +1 enhancement bonus to his BAB from his Undead Bane Longsword would at least cause pause. It's simply not the way a BECMI player would talk about D&D.

I think my point is that its not really the way your typical Pathfinder player (which crowd I am now in) would talk about it either. There is a subset of players who I guess do, but that's why I don't think some of this is edition specific. If I was explaining or arguing the rules, yes (at least sometimes), or if I am in an actual design discussion related to writing; but generally, in just talking about the game, the internal mechanics rarely raise their head in my conversations about 3e or Pathfinder. I never tell players they find a sword with a +1 enhancement bonus. I generally just say that its a +1 sword.

A 2e player knows that his longsword is a slashing weapon, and thus will have certain bonuses or penalties on different foes. A 3e player knows that his longsword will do slashing damage, which some foes are susceptible to and others not. It's a subtle distinction, but there are a lot of these subtle differences that undermine the sense that we're all playing the same game.

Its such a subtle distinction that I am not sure its much more than a semantic distinction. Like I said, I was using the terms that way pre-3e. So that particular example doesn't do it for me.

In WotC-D&D you roll once, determine the order of action, and then keep that order for the entire encounter (barring delayed and interrupting actions). So it's the same word, the idea is more or less the same (roll dice to see who goes first), but what a WotC-D&D-only person imagined when they heard the word and what I imagined when I heard the word (before I started playing 4e) is quite different. They have "initiative order". They have "high initiative" and "low initiative". In BECMI you either have initiative, or you don't.

You know, I appreciate this reminder. My first game was Basic (circa 1983) , but I soon graduated to a Basic/Advanced hybrid which mixed and matched the rules and modules according to whatever was available. I don't actually remember how we handled initiative, though I seem to recollect that we determined it once and then just went back and forth. Again, 3e, for me, simply codified a lot of things that were already in use in my games via house-rules (such as 4d6 drop the lowest for stats).