D&D General Back to First Principles

[Yora]

The original idea was that it's up to the players if they want to spend more time exploring in areas with lesser threats where the rewards are smaller, or go ahead to blacker pastures where the monsters are meaner but have much greater rewards waiting for adventurers. And when the players encounter a threat, it is again up to them to decide if they want to charge in and be done with it, come up with some elaborate plan to tilt the scales in their favor, or rather back off and avoid engagement.
The GM wasn't supposed to decide what encounter the players would be facing, and how the encounters should play out. The GM was meant to be disinterested regarding the outcome of the players actions. How much that was practiced is written on another page, but it's how the rules are designed.

That's a completely different approach and very different game of the GM showing up with a story that has the scenes planned out and expects the players to figure out what they have to do to proceed to the next scene.

 

[Arilyn]

Does that have anything to do with the rules of the game though? I mean, it is more difficult to accidentally kill off a PC than in early editions, but the DM still has infinite dragons. We never particularly cared for a high body count in the day, unless I tried to run an elf I don't remember many of my PCs dying.

And the arguments today are pretty much the same as "back in the day," to do with level advancement, character death, magic items, story vs. dice randomness, etc. There were epic battles between Gygax and the California group, for example, who were flying up levels, gathering huge amounts of treasure, changing rules and waging epic battles on a regular basis.

So I'm not sure that new players are different or have different expectations. We just have more kinds of games and styles to choose from.

Having said all this, I did enjoy basic, but everyone wanted Advanced, which I don't like. It might be fun to dust it off. I fear that personally, it won't hold my attention long, however. I love my options.

 

[Lanefan]

It took years to get to level 10, if you ever got that far. I kind of like that slow advancement and there's nothing stopping you from doing it in any version of the game. But this is one of those areas I always seem to get outvoted, even when I DM.

The bolded, IME, runs rather hard aground in editions that have wealth-by-level as an integral part of their balancing mechanism*. The 3e game I was in was set to advance at a 1e-2e sort of pace, in order that the campaign/game would last longer; in the last-longer piece it was successful (it went for over ten years) but wealth-by-level went out the window pretty quickly, and this - plus our larger-than-designed-for party - meant the DM had no choice but to ignore the CR/EL system and make it all up on his own.

* - unless you want to be so stingy with treasure that all the fun gets drained away.

 

[Yora]

Well, technically, AD&D and B/X also have wealth by level. It's just level by wealth.

 

[Lanefan]

Does that have anything to do with the rules of the game though?

Yes it does, I think.

In 0e-1e by RAW you died at 0 h.p. and even if using the die-at--3 or -10 variant it took forever to recover if someone saved you, Resting was also a very slow way of recovering hit points even if you survived.

In 4e-5e you're merely down at 0 h.p., not dead until-unless you fail a series of rolls thereafter; cures get you fully functional right away, and by next morning you're at full pop ready to go in any case.

I mean, it is more difficult to accidentally kill off a PC than in early editions, but the DM still has infinite dragons. We never particularly cared for a high body count in the day, unless I tried to run an elf I don't remember many of my PCs dying.

Which (elves excepted) tells me either you're fairly lucky overall, or you had more lenient DMs, or you're just really good at keeping PCs alive, or some combination of these.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, I was talking about lethality/level but in my experience the game was no more lethal than it is now unless you had a killer DM. Even if the party cleric couldn't raise dead it was just a matter of going to the nearest town.

Another change: in 1e (and 2e?) revival wasn't guaranteed - you had to make your resurrection survival roll in order to return to life, and even if you did make it you'd come back permanently down a point of Con, which made that same roll incrementally more difficult next time around.

With 4e-5e, revival is guaranteed if attempted.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, technically, AD&D and B/X also have wealth by level. It's just level by wealth.

Perhaps by RAW, though I've never run or played in a game that gave xp for treasure.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Perhaps by RAW, though I've never run or played in a game that gave xp for treasure.

I find this interesting. In everything up to and including 2E, XP was given for treasure in every game I played in. IIRC, the standard was 1 XP / 5 gp recovered, but the ratio could go as high as 1:1 for extremely hard encounters/adventures.

 

[cbwjm]

I remember in 2e, I used story rewards, pretty sure I also included the class xp bonuses as well. Kept things ticking along at a decent pace.

 

[Lanefan]

I find this interesting. In everything up to and including 2E, XP was given for treasure in every game I played in. IIRC, the standard was 1 XP / 5 gp recovered, but the ratio could go as high as 1:1 for extremely hard encounters/adventures.

In the crew I run with, xp for treasure was dropped not long before I first started. End result: the campaigns lasted way longer without the characters getting to levels the game couldn't handle.

To replace a bit of the lost xp, and to cover off all the little trivial things a party does in the field (e.g. finding a safe campsite, picking a lock, casting useful utility spells, etc.) that technically earn a few xp each time but no-one ever wants to track, we give out a "dungeon bonus" at the end of each adventure. This is usually a rather arbitrary base number, modified downwards for PCs that for whatever reason missed bits of the adventure (usually counted by adventuring days) in ratio to what they missed.

Our advance rate is still maybe two levels a year for a PC that's consistently played; and as we cycle PCs and even whole parties in and out all the time the overall average goes up by less than a level a year.