I played TTRPGs from about 1978 to 2000, and then stopped and started back again at the beginning of Covid, when my adult son wanted to get a game going. I played AD&D initially back in the day, then quickly moved to other games, normally being the DM, and did not really revisit D&D until I got back into the hobby a few years ago. Anyone else make a similar leap in editions? What have been the most surprising things you have had to get used to?
Almost the same trip for me. I started in '84 with B/X and moved to AD&D rather soon after. We stuck with that through 2E, 3E, 3.5, but we switched to 4E before hitting 5E. We took a few breaks as a group, but I've never stopped playing or running RPGs.
There are two big things to get used to. One is the rules and the other is the player expectations.
Some rules are better described, others weirdly opaque. Some rules are deceptively similar, others wildly new and different. Switching editions incrementally is harder to do, I think as they're usually more similar than different. But going AD&D to 4E to 5E was pretty smooth, all things considered. The power creep is absolutely staggering. In AD&D you had zero to hero; in 5E you have superhero to god. The game shifted from sword & sorcery to epic high fantasy.
What's absolutely mind boggling and basically impossible for me to get used to is the change in player expectations. I've been running 5E for the life of the edition, almost 10 years now, and players seem to want a whole lot of stuff that's simply alien to me and antithetical to how I run games. I don't know if this is a generational shift, growing influence of video games, huge surge in new players without any grasp of the institutional knowledge of the hobby, or something else entirely. But, in my experience, 5E players just want to win all the time, succeed at everything, not be challenged in any meaningful way, never lose a character, and for the entire game world to shift, morph, and change specifically to suit their desire for the ultimate in curated power fantasy. There's also a strong push for huge sweeping backstories for 1st-level characters with zero XP, an obsession with RAW, rejecting DIY, treating the referee as the enemy, and power gaming.
I've had players rage quit for: taking one point of damage, being told mold earth cantrip not making their character an earth-bending master, interrupting a long rest, using minor house rules, not being able to nova and long rest between every single fight, rolling stats, being asked to not read the module, being asked to not have the Monster Manual open at the table to check monster stat blocks, asked not to cheat, enforcing the rules when it hindered a character, not ignoring the rules when it would make a character more awesome, etc.