D&D General D&D Evolutions You Like and Dislike [+]

[Lanefan]

As some one that didn't like the roles becoming so distinctly built into the tactics of the game, this is a literal interpretation that is strange to me.

Given that the opposite of "leader" is "follower", I don't see it as anything but the obvious interpretation: leaders lead and followers follow.

Problem is, not that many players want to play a follower.

 

[soviet]

Given that the opposite of "leader" is "follower", I don't see it as anything but the obvious interpretation: leaders lead and followers follow.

Problem is, not that many players want to play a follower.

Did the defenders never make attack rolls because they weren't strikers?

 

[payn]

Given that the opposite of "leader" is "follower", I don't see it as anything but the obvious interpretation: leaders lead and followers follow.

Problem is, not that many players want to play a follower.

Well, in a certain context that is true, but its not the context used in 4E.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I think nearly every time, in the wild, I've always seen people verbalize framing along the lines of 'weapon/strength/specialization bonuses total +4, I rolled a 12 (totaling 16) and my ThAC0 is 18, I hit a (18-16) 2 AC.'

Yes, IIRC that was exactly the way my junior high school AD&D groups did it. 2E made THAC0 more official, but we were already used to using it anyway. Players always had their PC’s THAC0 written on their character sheet, and all of the DMs owned some version of the official TSR DM screen, so in practice we rarely had to stop and consult the books.

Much of the contemporary discussion about the difficulties of using THAC0 and/or situational modifiers to d20 rolls confuses me, because in my experience of actual 1980s AD&D play even the most casual players and indifferent math students had no problem with those game mechanics once they got up to speed with playing the game. I don’t want to downplay anyone’s actual difficulties related to, say, different learning styles, because there was little awareness of those issues back then, and I am quite sure no one at TSR ever factored any of that into the writing of the rulebooks. But once we had settled on a standard method we no longer really needed to stop and think about it much at all because it just became second nature.

AD&D had relatively few situational modifiers anyway, and they were often so deeply buried in odd corners of the 1E or 2E DMGs that most DMs did not even know about them, let alone use them. I never played any games in the “D&D 3” family of rule sets (3.0, 3.5, PF1, etc), but I get the impression that there were tons of possible modifiers that added to the high crunch level of those games, and contributed to the desire to simplify everything with the advantage mechanic. I like advantage but I think it should complement a robust system of pluses and minuses applied to d20 rolls, not replace them altogether.

 

[Maxperson]

B/X is a very logical clean system open to possibility.

Whereas 1e was such a jumbled mess of contradiction, it forced possibility.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes. That.

Yep. If I walk outside the house, that's "a thing that happened." It doesn't have to be a completed series of things that happened. 1, 2 or 100 things are all a story.

 

[Maxperson]

4e was not afraid to slay some secret cows.

Yeah. I thought I'd hidden them well enough, but 4e made its perception check.

 

[Marc17]

For evolutions I like, I'm going to go back to the original D&D. It's not anything to do with the system. I'm sure there is plenty there but I don't think the system is what made it really special. Between the history books that were coming out, the Secrets of Blackmoor video, and read through of the 1E DMG, and just reading some of the old modules, I don't think the rules were the main evolution, although I'm sure they had some in them. The real evolution between the wargame to RPG was using the rules as a backdrop for the theater of the mind game of "What does you character do?". I think the Braunstein experience of such was the important part that was really being explored in the early games, but being wargamers, they could never allow things like combat to be resolved as such. Thus, the system existed to fall back on in such cases, and they certainly didn't have the experience of vocabulary to explain that let alone offer aid to running it.

 

[Minigiant]

Yeah. I thought I'd hidden them well enough, but 4e made its perception check.

4e had those special feats