Korak said:
I'm not sure I had the right impression from your first post. Can you provide a more specific example to illustrate your point for me? What skills or proficiencies (not game concepts, but meta concepts) did a player have to have in previous editions to be a "good" or "skilled" player that are no longer needed or relatively as important in 3e, and what about the 3e rules makes causes that situation?
I'm not Ourph, but I believe I can have a go at answering this.
The change here happened in the early 1980's, and it's not so much about "previous editions" as being specifically about early 1e (and the Basic game versions which came out at the same time).
Later in the 1e period, and certainly by the time 2e came out, there was assumption that the purpose of the game is to generate Story, and the way to do that is for the DM to devise a Plot. I blame Tracy Hickman, personally; he started it with Pharaoh and made it worse with Dragonlance.
But earlier D&D was much more gamist in its approach. The mechanisms were a bit primitive and required a lot of suspension of disbelief: A "campaign" was a single, huge megadungeon comprising many levels of several hundred rooms each, with monsters and puzzles placed fairly arbitrarily within that megadungeon. There were usually several staircases between levels, and often chute traps or elevator rooms or other ways of getting the players to change levels involuntarily. Each level was tougher and more rewarding than the one before.
The 1e DMG had huge amounts of content devoted to this apparatus. There were whole appendices (Appendices A, C and G are probably the critical ones) comprising many packed pages, and these described in detail precisely what monsters should be encountered on what levels and precisely how much treasure they should have.
The players then
chose their path through this complex megadungeon, and this is the first point I want to extract in answer to the question. They decided when to change levels, so they chose their own level of difficulty/reward.
Then in the 1980's, that paradigm somehow changed. Monster Level (which was 1e's relatively rough and ready version of CR) was used to populate whole modules rather than regions that the player could choose whether or not to enter. This mirrors how CR is presently used, and it's the principal point I object to about CR.
To come back to your question, the matters relevant to "good" or "skilled" play from this 1970's style related to ways and means of adventuring in areas at the limits of your character's ability:
- Scouting. You found out what you were up against by spells such as Wizard Eye or Augury, or else you captured a prisoner and extracted the information from it (which I think was the original purpose of spells like Charm -- to enable good-aligned players to use this tactic without needing to resort to torture).
- Escaping. You learned to cut your losses and flee or surrender when necessary.
- Planning. You learned to lure difficult monster onto grounds of your own choosing and kill them from ambush (the 1e Surprise rules were absolutely mean).
- Negotiating. Particularly if you weren't a good-aligned player, you learned to bribe monsters to go away if the encounter didn't look likely to be profitable -- or to accept a bribe from them to go away.
All these are perfectly possible in 3e, of course. But it's my perception that most 3e players don't scout ahead, don't take prisoners, don't run from battle or surrender, don't negotiate with hostile NPCs, and when attempting to kill a powerful monster, always go directly for the frontal assault.
I think a lot of the problem is that in the 1980's a character death became quite a major drama. Sometimes, there were tears.
In the 1970's, many players were miniatures wargamers and they were accustomed to taking casualties. There was a very callous doctrine of acceptable losses. Rolling a new character only took about five minutes, so you just sucked it up and re-rolled and pitched back in at the next opportunity. But the later style with super-elaborate character generation made death much more of a pain, and it somehow became the DM's job to make sure the players survived.
And, of course, you could resolve a melee involving a party of 12 characters and their 19 henchmen and hirelings -vs- a dozen bugbears, two dozen goblins and their dogs in about ten minutes, so combat took up much less gaming time.
I'm not pretending this 1970's style was perfect. It certainly had its problems! But I think it contains valuable lessons to be learned in today's game.
