D&D General Does D&D (and RPGs in general) Need Edition Resets?

[Parmandur]

You mean the 1e players, all the variations of 1e players and the spinoff versions of first edition that collectively have more players than 1e had in it's hey day? thank you for making my point. A lot of these game's are still being played, or they wouldn't have done a kickstarter. We like to pretend those games have all faded away but they've taken root and still have what used to be called healthy ecosystems. There are lot's of games still played ,and all of those rules have been out there for download or sale which is how they knew the demand was there to make a lot of money.

Yeah, given how big OSR stuff and juat straight up playing older D&D is on Roll20 and so on...if TSR had never split the party, it does seem plausible that they would have done fine.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you are a developer yes. If you are a player I'd argue they'll leave once they feel "SHACKLED" or they'll just modernize thier table rules like we do with old versions of RPG's , monopoly etc. Once the developer is out of the loop, the players are generally better off with a stable product that they can just set down and play without worrying about the last patch or rules update. That's fine in a video game where it get's done in the background. It's very traumatic in an RPG where people just want to go to thier favorite game world and play the game they know.

Conversely, I would absolutely feel shackled if we had been stuck with 3e (not even 3.5, just 3e) for the past 20+ years. I wouldn't have the knowledge to fix the numerous, crippling problems the system has, and the vast majority of "homebrew" for it is, as anyone who has perused dandwiki knows, so very piquant that calling it "rotten garbage" is a hurtful and unwarranted insult toward rotten garbage.

You mean the 1e players, all the variations of 1e players and the spinoff versions of first edition that collectively have more players than 1e had in it's hey day? thank you for making my point. A lot of these game's are still being played, or they wouldn't have done a kickstarter. We like to pretend those games have all faded away but they've taken root and still have what used to be called healthy ecosystems. There are lot's of games still played ,and all of those rules have been out there for download or sale which is how they knew the demand was there to make a lot of money.

By this standard, 4e D&D has "a healthy ecosystem." I assume this is not a claim you are actually interested in making. Of course, I am open to correction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is no reason that we shouldn't still have the quasi-elemental planes.

The regular elemental planes were already a mistake. The only way to make them adventure-capable is to remove that which actually makes them distinct and exciting. To adventure in the Plane of Fire, you have to either have it stop being, y'know, completely inhospitable nothing, or you have to make the complete inhospitability of the place irrelevant to the party.

And if it exists but you literally never go there and only ever hear about it second-hand (at best), what exactly is the point of having it, other than to satisfy that "mmm, symmetry..." reflex in the human soul, to tick a box in order that all the boxes be ticked?

Don't get me wrong--I love me some good symmetry. But worldbuilding parsimony shouldn't be ignored. Indeed, when possible, it should be embraced.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The regular elemental planes were already a mistake. The only way to make them adventure-capable is to remove that which actually makes them distinct and exciting. To adventure in the Plane of Fire, you have to either have it stop being, y'know, completely inhospitable nothing, or you have to make the complete inhospitability of the place irrelevant to the party.

And if it exists but you literally never go there and only ever hear about it second-hand (at best), what exactly is the point of having it, other than to satisfy that "mmm, symmetry..." reflex in the human soul, to tick a box in order that all the boxes be ticked?

Don't get me wrong--I love me some good symmetry. But worldbuilding parsimony shouldn't be ignored. Indeed, when possible, it should be embraced.

This I think is part of your admiration of 4e rather than an objective fact. In my own subjective opinion, 4e and to a lesser extent 5e both made unwarranted changes to lore so that the setting would explicitly revolve around adventurers. If you like that, more power to you, but it's just a preference.

 

[Blue]

I'm going to rephrase this in a way that might seem reductio ad absurdum, but is actually apt when you consider that D&D was the first RPG.

Do we need new models of car, or should everything be backward's compatible to Ford's Model T? And by everything, I mean road speeds should be determined using the Model T's safety features and all of the surrounding context as well.

Because this is the TTRPG "industry". We evolve. We work out better mechanics and concepts, like a universal roll. We adapt to new trends in what us hobbyists want. We change the game to include concepts that weren't around, and may not fit into previous editions.

So our choices become to either only use those that backward fit, not only into the rules but the numbers. If the first version of skills go +1 to +20, then we cannot introduce bounded accuracy. We need to keep PC vs. monster math consistent, which also means keeping things like amount of PC healing consistent, which also means... I could go on. It also means burdening everyone with only driving stick - which can be fun, but doesn't mean everyone wants it.

So, do we force everyone who wants to play D&D to only drive historic cars, with all of their limitations, and various bolt-on expansions that can only update things that are effectively absent from the rules, and then locking in whatever concept is used there. Or do we allow those who want historic cars to drive them, those that like 80s muscle cars to drive them, and those who like electric cars with smart cruise control to have those?

 

[Corinnguard]

The regular elemental planes were already a mistake. The only way to make them adventure-capable is to remove that which actually makes them distinct and exciting. To adventure in the Plane of Fire, you have to either have it stop being, y'know, completely inhospitable nothing, or you have to make the complete inhospitability of the place irrelevant to the party.

What would you have in place of the Elemental Planes? There is 4e's Elemental Chaos. There's World of Warcraft's Elemental Plane, which resembles a tectonically active Material Plane world beset by all sorts of natural disasters. I wouldn't matter the latter in D&D.

 

[nevin]

Conversely, I would absolutely feel shackled if we had been stuck with 3e (not even 3.5, just 3e) for the past 20+ years. I wouldn't have the knowledge to fix the numerous, crippling problems the system has, and the vast majority of "homebrew" for it is, as anyone who has perused dandwiki knows, so very piquant that calling it "rotten garbage" is a hurtful and unwarranted insult toward rotten garbage.

One person's garbage is another person's Kimchi or thousand year old egg. As someone who started gaming without All the garbage to dig through i'll say this. Be careful what you wish for......All that garbage is far better than relying only on your gaming company to provide what you want.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This I think is part of your admiration of 4e rather than an objective fact. In my own subjective opinion, 4e and to a lesser extent 5e both made unwarranted changes to lore so that the setting would explicitly revolve around adventurers. If you like that, more power to you, but it's just a preference.

Do you make a habit--or, indeed, even a one-off fling--of playing anything else?

Because I would be genuinely shocked to hear that even 1% of players play D&D in a way that doesn't involve going on adventures, and thus, involves playing adventurers, who are people that go on adventures.

It's like saying that there should be extensive rules and descriptions for devaluation of goods due to market concerns and carefully-designed rules for epidemic/pandemic spread. These things are just...not useful to the vast majority of players, and I'm counting DMs in that. If all you care about is that there's a place that "thing made of fire" comes from, there are far better alternatives.

Spending a dozen pages talking about a place no one can go to, with events that are never relevant, orchestrated by factions that never intersect with the accessible world, solely so you can have an explanation for why a handful of creatures sometimes, occasionally, appear? It's just wasteful. There are much better things to do with those twelve pages.

What would you have in place of the Elemental Planes? There is 4e's Elemental Chaos. There's World of Warcraft's Elemental Plane, which resembles a tectonically active Material Plane world beset by all sorts of natural disasters. I wouldn't matter the latter in D&D.

I'm fine with the Elemental Chaos. Anything taken from WoW should be scrutinized to the nth degree because it's the same "calling it rotten garbage is an insult to rotten garbage" issue. You could do something like Zeitgeist, where planes exist but are largely inaccessible other than calling stuff from them. Or something like Shadowrun, where it's a bit silly to suggest that there needs to be a "plane of fire" in order to have spirits regarding fire appear. In my home game, Al-Akirah is the "elemental otherworld," a place suffused with elemental magic, to the point that regular animals and plants are innately aligned with elemental powers there, and elemental spirits spontaneously manifest out of the ambient energy present...but it's all mixed together unless separated by things like those animals, plants, and spirits, or the sapient denizens (which, for the area corresponding to the region where the players live, are genies and their attendants/servants/slaves/wider populations.)

There are many options. We can do much better than "plane that is fully, 100% literally nothing but empty air, except for the spots we've added that corrupt it with non-air stuff so that there's actually something to do." We can have politics that flow back and forth, places of commerce and diplomacy, wild and alien entities, without needing to harp so hard on the "and there's an infinite, empty ocean of pure water where nothing ever happens and no one interesting can live, let alone does."

One person's garbage is another person's Kimchi or thousand year old egg. As someone who started gaming without All the garbage to dig through i'll say this. Be careful what you wish for......All that garbage is far better than relying only on your gaming company to provide what you want.

I'm a 4e fan. I'm long past "relying" on WotC for a damn thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm going to rephrase this in a way that might seem reductio ad absurdum, but is actually apt when you consider that D&D was the first RPG.

Do we need new models of car, or should everything be backward's compatible to Ford's Model T? And by everything, I mean road speeds should be determined using the Model T's safety features and all of the surrounding context as well.

Because this is the TTRPG "industry". We evolve. We work out better mechanics and concepts, like a universal roll. We adapt to new trends in what us hobbyists want. We change the game to include concepts that weren't around, and may not fit into previous editions.

So our choices become to either only use those that backward fit, not only into the rules but the numbers. If the first version of skills go +1 to +20, then we cannot introduce bounded accuracy. We need to keep PC vs. monster math consistent, which also means keeping things like amount of PC healing consistent, which also means... I could go on. It also means burdening everyone with only driving stick - which can be fun, but doesn't mean everyone wants it.

So, do we force everyone who wants to play D&D to only drive historic cars, with all of their limitations, and various bolt-on expansions that can only update things that are effectively absent from the rules, and then locking in whatever concept is used there. Or do we allow those who want historic cars to drive them, those that like 80s muscle cars to drive them, and those who like electric cars with smart cruise control to have those?

Whether or not a new mechanic is "better" than an older one is subjective. This assumption is IMO really twisting this discussion out of shape.

 

[billd91]

I didn’t claim it was unrealistic. Although, the fact that having a better credit rating limits how good you can be at shooting guns certainly is.

Both are true. It is very literally outdated - new games haven’t been designed that way for a long time. That I like more modern approaches to skill systems is a preference.

I don't think it's a question of being outdated. It's not like point-buy systems in which a player allocates finite resources among powers, skills, and other abilities they want or may find useful aren't still around and thriving.