An Examination of Differences between Editions

[S'mon]

Why did you think that that was what TSR intended? If they had intended those spells for NPCs (like S'mon also pointed out), they would've been in the DMG. Then again, magic items, most of which certainly were intended for PCs, were put into DMG :\

Well personally I think EGG showed a degree of favouritism towards the M-U class, and the high level spells were indeed used by his own PCs (eg Mordenkainen). If EGG had preferred Thieves the game might have looked quite different.

 

[Keldryn]

It's a game. The challenge for the players is to "score" as many experience points as possible. The challenge for the referee is to make this as hard as possible for the players, but keep them coming back for more. That's what "game balance" used to refer to. If players have so much stuff and power that they don't need to go adventuring, it's too easy, and the players will get bored.

Of course it's a game, and I never said it wasn't. Nor did I say that the player should have it easy and not have to go adventuring. I was specifically referring to much of the "old school" DM advice that often involved really cheap ways to cheat the players out of rewards that they had already earned. If the players worked hard to overcome a challenge and were rewarded with a powerful item, it's cheap and unfair DMing to arbitrarily take it away because you don't want them to have it anymore. A good game definitely involves difficult challenges for the PCs to overcome. But if virtually everything they do, no matter how mundane or trivial, is difficult, then the challenges start to become meaningless.

That's what wandering monsters are for. The more time you waste in the dungeon, the more times you're going to run into wandering monsters. And wandering monsters almost never have anything worthwhile, so you want to avoid them as much as possible.

"Wandering monsters" start to strain believability in short order if they are over-used. Unless it's a weird, magical dungeon, there are a finite number of inhabitants. And if a monster that lives on the other side of the dungeon shows up every time they spend 20 minutes searching a room, it starts to get ridiculous. And as you said, wandering monsters are essentially not worth the bother, so it wastes even more time. As adults who work full-time and have families, we don't get to play as often as we did in high school. If we get to play twice a month for 4-5 hours per session, then we're pretty lucky. I certainly don't want to waste a good chunk of that time on my players pedantically searching every inch of the dungeon, nor waste even more time playing out the irrelevant wandering monster encounters that result from it. I don't see anything clever about placing treasure in places where only extremely thorough and anal room-searching is going to locate it. Then it's just a matter of trial and error or brute force.

You prefer a game where the players can be careless?

I didn't say that. But there is a world of difference between "careless" and "ridiculously cautious bordering on extreme paranoia." And a lot of longtime players seem to fall into the latter category. It bores me to tears as a DM when the players suspect a potentially deadly trap at every turn and go through a very involved procedure to make sure it's safe to proceed.

That's player-empowerment. *shrug*

If it's player empowerment that a DM should have a justifiable reason for changing the rules, and that those changes should be well thought-out, then I'm all in favour of it. I don't get why "player empowerment" is treated like a four-letter word. It's the players' game as much as it is the DM's game -- and if the DM thinks it's mainly his game, then he should probably be writing fan-fiction instead of running a game. The DM is always in control of the pacing of the game and always has final say on any ruling or the results of any actions the PCs take. That being said, the players also are not passive simpletons, accepting whatever direction the DM decides the game will go. The players' decisions and the actions of their PCs is what drives the game forward and players should rightfully feel empowered.

And that is not the same thing as players telling the DM what they should be allowed to use in the game, telling the DM how he or she should run the game, or having an easy ride where they don't have to put any effort into the game and the DM rewards them based on the DMG "reward schedule."

Nonono. Those are two different things. A referee is not an arbiter of the rules. The rules are set down in a book; a referee is an arbiter of things not covered by the rules. This is a totally separate function from rules-alterer. In early D&D there were few rules you needed to alter to run things your own way. In d20 there are a whole bunch of rules you need to alter to make things work your way. Thus, the focus of the DM has changed over time from game-arbiter to rules-alterer and cruncher.

I wasn't saying those were identical roles, but this digression into semantics was a nice way of side-stepping my point that the DM's primary role in the game is to ensure that everyone involved is having a good time and that there are opportunities for every player to shine. All within reason, of course -- I'm not advocating caving in to players who whine about everything and I have no problems telling my players "no."

You're seeing a lack of rules and assuming it means there's nothing to do. The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide discusses in general terms what high-level adventuring in the planes of existence might be like.

No, I'm not. In my experience (and virtually everyone I know), campaigns very rarely lasted long enough to get to those higher levels, in no small part due to the fact that the game was not really designed for high-level play and advancement slowed to a crawl after about 10th level. Of course my personal experience is not necessarily representative of the population at large, but it certainly seems that the majority of campaigns tended to end before advancing to the higher levels. 3e was partially designed with the goal of allowing a campaign of "average length" -- which is about a year according to WoTC's pre-3e research -- to experience the full range of advancement from levels 1 to 20 and all of the higher-level goodies that come with it. The research may or may not be accurate, but it certainly seems to fit my own experience.

The D&D Companion, Masters, and Immortals sets should be viewed as just one way to do these things. And they're just frameworks at that. If you've ever read the Immortals rules, you know that they're very, very open to interpretation. Literally anything can happen in them!

It really sounds like you're implying that I haven't read the Immortals rules.

I had owned and read through all five D&D sets of that era before I'd ever even owned an AD&D book. Never actually played the Immortals rules as legitimately advancing from a 1st-level mortal all the way through one of the paths to immortality set out in the Masters rules, but we created some Immortal PCs just for the fun of it. And yes, it is a very different take on very high-level play than AD&D and D&D 3e. One thing that I did really like about those D&D Sets 3 to 5 was that they placed a higher emphasis on not just doing pretty much the same thing as levels 1-14 but with more hit points and more magic. Founding domains, running kingdoms, leading large-scale wars, and achieving true immortality were all much loftier goals for powerful heroes. It was a pretty loose framework, but I've pretty much always retained some elements of it in my AD&D games.

 

[molonel]

I had owned and read through all five D&D sets of that era before I'd ever even owned an AD&D book. Never actually played the Immortals rules as legitimately advancing from a 1st-level mortal all the way through one of the paths to immortality set out in the Masters rules, but we created some Immortal PCs just for the fun of it. And yes, it is a very different take on very high-level play than AD&D and D&D 3e. One thing that I did really like about those D&D Sets 3 to 5 was that they placed a higher emphasis on not just doing pretty much the same thing as levels 1-14 but with more hit points and more magic. Founding domains, running kingdoms, leading large-scale wars, and achieving true immortality were all much loftier goals for powerful heroes. It was a pretty loose framework, but I've pretty much always retained some elements of it in my AD&D games.

The 3rd Edition epic level rules and the bare attempt they made at immortal rules in Deities & Demigods are among the worst rules sets in 3rd Edition D&D, in my opinion. The guys over at Dice Freaks have been able to salvage something from them, but not much.

The immortals rules were a much better attempt.

 

[Keldryn]

But, yes, you did see a lot more puzzle stuff in earlier editions. I'm not sure if that's more a sign of the time or the edition though. We had lots of puzzles because that's what the modules had. Over time, even in 2e, you see a whole lot less of the puzzle stuff in modules. It crops up here and there and still does, but, I think it has more to do with changes in adventure design than in edition.

I attribute that to a trend towards game worlds being constructed as simulated, coherent worlds rather than as simply a location to run the game. The types of puzzles found in many of those old dungeons don't make much sense when you start thinking about who would place them there and why they would do it. The Gods Testing Mortals and Insane Wizards Just Being Crazy explanations get old after a while. The amount of effort involved in creating such traps and puzzles would generally not be worth it to most sane individuals, and if a DM is stressing logical dungeon ecologies and game-world economics that actually make sense, then crazy puzzles and traps are not likely to coexist well with that take on world- and adventure- building.

 

[Keldryn]

Whether or not it is strongly stated enough is certainly open to debate. However, it is clearly more strongly stated in earlier editions (especially 1e) than it is in 3.X.

I also contest the idea that "Ask your DM before you do anything" appears time after time in book after book -- it appears, from the quotes you've made, one time per book at best, and often with no special emphasis.

If I say "You must X" once per book without special emphasis, and I say "You should be able to Y" several hundred times, I would argue that the average reader will go away with the message that "You should be able to Y" rather than "You must X", and will perhaps come to the conclusion that "You should be able to Y" takes precedence over "You must X".

This may not be the case, but it is certainly more a thing to examine than a thing to dismiss. IMHO, at least.

I think that in 4th Edition, every single page of every single rulebook and supplement should say ASK YOUR DM FOR APPROVAL BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING AS HE OR SHE HAS THE FINAL WORD ON EVERYTHING IN THE GAME. In all-caps, bolded, 30-point font.

That would put an end to this debate. Or maybe not.

That is the default assumption of the game, it states it in the DMG, it states it at the beginning of the PHB, and none of the optional books state, suggest, or imply that all of the contents should be allowed in every game. It doesn't need to be repeated over and over.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I just wanted to say that I like this thread a lot, and plan to bookmark it. Well, I like the non-confrontational discussion parts of this thread anyway.

 

[MerricB]

If I may ask: how much of the game in each edition relies on judgement calls from the DM?

From my experiences, we didn't do all that much in AD&D that wasn't covered by the rules. (Diplomacy tended to be a bit more freeform, but otherwise...)

Cheers!

 

[Reynard]

One thing that I did really like about those D&D Sets 3 to 5 was that they placed a higher emphasis on not just doing pretty much the same thing as levels 1-14 but with more hit points and more magic. Founding domains, running kingdoms, leading large-scale wars, and achieving true immortality were all much loftier goals for powerful heroes. It was a pretty loose framework, but I've pretty much always retained some elements of it in my AD&D games.

I would *kill* for updated versions of both the domain rules and warmachine. i mean, even Conan -- the hack and slashiest of all D&D's inspirational material-- went to war and ruled nations between prying the gems out of giant statues.

 

[Reynard]

If I may ask: how much of the game in each edition relies on judgement calls from the DM?

From my experiences, we didn't do all that much in AD&D that wasn't covered by the rules. (Diplomacy tended to be a bit more freeform, but otherwise...)

Cheers!

I remember a lot more "make a dex check" style sitautions in B/X D&D and 1E. i played the former for quite some time, and only played the latter for about 6 months before 2nd edition appeared, which we promptly switched to and fell in love with proficiencies and such.

I will say, though, that both B/X D&D and 2E were extremely easy to modify to fit a certain theme, mood or milieu, in large part because there were not so many options. It probably isn't true, but it seems true that if you are going to play a low magic, gritty, sword and sorcery D&D game you have to change a whole bunch of rules and create a whole bunch of mechanics -- feats, PrCs, etc... -- to do so. The glut of d20 settings with their own special rules in the early days of 3E seems to confirm this perception, if not the actuality.

3.5 has become pretty coprehensive, though, and one could likely take the Core books plus Unearthed Arcana and get a passable game in any fantasy subgenre. Throw in the Completes and one or two more specific books -- heroes of horror, etc... -- and pair everything down to a limited number of options and you could probably do any setting you wanted with whatever flavor you were going for. The thing is, though, that when i was running 2E back in the day, I didn't need any extra stuff to do that. It seemed easier with that rules set to say, "You guys are all airship pirates in a world of floating islands with aerial monsters and races as stand ins for sea going type stuff. Oh, and the Sailing proficiency* is "airsailing."

Like I said, it might be all perception. That 2E had so many, widely varied settings with relatively few rules related material for those settings (except FR -- why do you hate me, Faiths and Pantheons?) yet tons of products. With 3E, you can't open to a random page in, say, and Eberron book without finding a new rule/mechanical bit of some sort. It may not be a necessity; maybe it just sells.

*Tangent: Why the hell isn't there a Sailing skill in 3.5? i mean, they've got appraise when it could just as easily be covered by pretty much any profession or craft skill, but no skill for being able to make a boat go where you want it to go other than Profession: Sailor? i don't get it.

 

[Lanefan]

I think that in 4th Edition, every single page of every single rulebook and supplement should say ASK YOUR DM FOR APPROVAL BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING AS HE OR SHE HAS THE FINAL WORD ON EVERYTHING IN THE GAME. In all-caps, bolded, 30-point font.

Better perhaps if the supplements just said on the outside cover: "YOUR PURCHASE OF THIS PRODUCT DOES NOT IMPLY OR GUARANTEE YOUR DM WILL ALLOW ITS USE IN HIS/HER GAME"; this has been true since 1e and remains so today, despite some players' best attempts...

Lanefan