darjr
I crit!
Lol. As it’s always been and always will be.
-
The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is LIVE! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023
- Thread starter Alzrius
- Start date
As an aside, this earlier version of Magic Missile kind of reminds me of AD&D Melf's Minute Meteors- do you suppose MMM came about from a player's desire to have the "old" MM available in the game?
I actually think B/X Magic Missile (er, depending on the interpretation, of course) would be a perfectly viable spell in 5e- you get X missiles per casting, can fire up to 2 of them off when cast (and up to two of them off as a bonus action on later turns) with say, a 1-minute duration, requiring attacks rolls vs. AC for d6+1 force damage each. Be an interesting variation on Spiritual Weapon.
Of course, it'd likely be forced to have concentration, making it pointless, backloaded damage, so maybe not.
I actually think B/X Magic Missile (er, depending on the interpretation, of course) would be a perfectly viable spell in 5e- you get X missiles per casting, can fire up to 2 of them off when cast (and up to two of them off as a bonus action on later turns) with say, a 1-minute duration, requiring attacks rolls vs. AC for d6+1 force damage each. Be an interesting variation on Spiritual Weapon.
Of course, it'd likely be forced to have concentration, making it pointless, backloaded damage, so maybe not.
Voadam
Legend
I always find it a bit astounding when people argue that RAW interpretation debates started with 3e.
Tony Vargas
Legend
True, it was just the shorthand RaW, that was new...
....that and the online consensus of what RaW said, that basically every DM needed to grapple with, of course. New to D&D, anyway.
Sum it up as RaW or Player Entitlement or System Mastery or CharOP - 3e was a tectonic shift in the D&D landscape.
Fortunately 5e stuffed the player entitlement djinni back in the bottle as best it could.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
LOL. Someone forgot to tell the players. Or somehow it was even worse in 3X. I honestly cannot imagine that. I’ve had 5E players rage quit because they took one (1) point of damage and players rage quit because the earth-shaping cantrip didn’t make them master earth benders.
I imagine that's about the time those people discovered the internet. I mean, not that debates didn't happen before the internet, but going from your weekly sparring session with Bob the Rules Lawyer to suddenly being in contact with hundreds of Bobs on a forum somewhere is a huge paradigm shift!
I actually imagine pre-3e rules debates to be much worse; it's my experience that no two groups were playing AD&D (for example) the same way; either because they didn't understand all the rules of the game, or they simply rejected them. I remember trying to join a new 2e group and having an interesting discussion with the party's Fighter that he did not, in fact, get extra attacks per melee with his off-hand weapon when two-weapon fighting, and even when I pointed out the rule in the rulebook, the DM simply said "well, we don't play it that way". Rob, you want hasted Fighters making 10 attacks per round? You do you, I guess.
Or another favorite of mine, how many people know that you gain potential bonuses on saving throws for wearing magic armor? It's right on page 102!
I'm not going to say that 3e rules were clearer than 2e's. But I will say that the internet certainly gave anyone going online a huge resource of people saying "hey, this is how the rules work" that 2e lacked.
In the murky days of AD&D (both versions), generally your main rules resource was the DM, who told you how the game worked. Suddenly, anyone could gain the benefit of knowing how the game worked, and the DM was no longer the trusted authority.
If you said "hey, I'm going to do this", and the DM said "no, it doesn't work that way", the player went from going "oh, darn" to "wait...it clearly says I can on page XX...what are you trying to pull here?"
Because the other thing the internet gave us was DM horror stories, lol. Now DM's everywhere were suspect, and their "God" status was questioned. So now you had to earn your player's trust and keep it.
I didn't see that as a bad thing at all (having endured some of those DM horror stories IRL, lol), but it did mean that a DM needed to have more in-depth knowledge of the rules to protect them from bad players than ever before (because PC horror stories are also a thing!).
In the murky days of AD&D (both versions), generally your main rules resource was the DM, who told you how the game worked. Suddenly, anyone could gain the benefit of knowing how the game worked, and the DM was no longer the trusted authority.
If you said "hey, I'm going to do this", and the DM said "no, it doesn't work that way", the player went from going "oh, darn" to "wait...it clearly says I can on page XX...what are you trying to pull here?"
Because the other thing the internet gave us was DM horror stories, lol. Now DM's everywhere were suspect, and their "God" status was questioned. So now you had to earn your player's trust and keep it.
I didn't see that as a bad thing at all (having endured some of those DM horror stories IRL, lol), but it did mean that a DM needed to have more in-depth knowledge of the rules to protect them from bad players than ever before (because PC horror stories are also a thing!).
Voadam
Legend
The free online SRD absolutely made it easier to access and reference the rules and made it easier to discuss the actual RAW.
That is not my experience in the Pre-2000 AD&D/Basic era.
The main resource was the core books which were generally accessible to everybody in my experience, either from owning them or the one who owned them lending them out to their friends in the group so they could make characters and learn the rules and soak up the atmosphere from the pictures.
I found that in the groups that I played in, the amount of effort an individual player put into actually reading and digesting the totality of the rules in the books tended to be sharply limited. Even DM's would be daunted by this task.
I started DMing without a total understanding of the rules, in fact, and my players ran rings around me until I devoted time and effort to them. AD&D rules are dense to a degree that most people don't really seem to grasp. Once I did devote that time, I became known as "the rules guy" (much to my annoyance) as rather than look things up themselves, people were generally happy to use me as a resource rather than look things up themselves.
And even then, there were rules I was mistaken about, and thought I "knew" for decades! It took me awhile, but I eventually noticed a trend among most players- many players want to play the game, they don't want to read about how to play it.
Some people learn by doing, which is fair, but many find that reading rules is a chore, and not fun. This may be related to why video game companies stopped printing rulebooks at a certain point, I can't say.
I used to, for example, be a prolific creator of house rules, creating long lists of alterations and hacks to games- but it was upon hitting upon the realization that most players aren't big on reading rules to begin with that I drastically scaled back on this- if they aren't keen on reading the actual rules, lol, how can I expect them to keep up with six pages of house rules?
, I only started playing 5e in 2017, several years after the game came out, when I learned that my FLGS (the now sadly-defunct Grapple Games) was running Adventurer's League games on Wednesday and Sundays. (Having felt disappointed after taking an active part in the Next playtest and finding very little of the things I liked from that playtest in the new PHB, I had continued to play Pathfinder 1e).
Anyways, a friend of mine was involved in the AL games and I was suffering from PF burnout, so I made a character and joined. I quickly noted that despite having much more experience than myself at playing 5e, there were several rules not being obeyed.
I asked if this was just common house rules, and was told "no, we play by the books here". "Well, in that case, how is the Cleric casting spells with a weapon and a shield equipped?"
"A Cleric can use a shield as a spellcasting focus." "Yeah, but that only helps if the spell has both Somatic and Material components, see?"
"...oh. That's weird."
"Also, how did the Cleric cast Spirit Guardians and Healing Word in the same turn?"
"Uh, because one is a bonus action cast?"
"Yeah, but right here, it says you can't cast a leveled spell as a bonus action and another leveled spell in the same turn."
"....huh."
And so on, lol. This is nothing against these people; these are easily missed rules and it's sometimes difficult to understand why they exist in the first place (and I know a lot of games simply ignore them- in my current game, nobody asks the Cleric to put their hammer down to cast spells!).
Anyways, a friend of mine was involved in the AL games and I was suffering from PF burnout, so I made a character and joined. I quickly noted that despite having much more experience than myself at playing 5e, there were several rules not being obeyed.
I asked if this was just common house rules, and was told "no, we play by the books here". "Well, in that case, how is the Cleric casting spells with a weapon and a shield equipped?"
"A Cleric can use a shield as a spellcasting focus." "Yeah, but that only helps if the spell has both Somatic and Material components, see?"
"...oh. That's weird."
"Also, how did the Cleric cast Spirit Guardians and Healing Word in the same turn?"
"Uh, because one is a bonus action cast?"
"Yeah, but right here, it says you can't cast a leveled spell as a bonus action and another leveled spell in the same turn."
"....huh."
And so on, lol. This is nothing against these people; these are easily missed rules and it's sometimes difficult to understand why they exist in the first place (and I know a lot of games simply ignore them- in my current game, nobody asks the Cleric to put their hammer down to cast spells!).
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
FTFY
