[EDITION WARZ] Selling Out D&D's Soul?

[Keldryn]

1e specifically assumes henchmen. A player with average Charisma is going to pick up about four of them, but a paladin might have ten or fifteen. The only time you're playing 1 character and 0 henchmen should be at first level when you can't afford a hench. As it says in the DMG, henchmen make the difference between success and failure in the long term.

By the time you're 9th level you've got henchmen, hirelings, and followers, and most likely a whole bunch of men-at-arms and other flunkies looking after your stronghold. One 9th level AD&D character usually represents more actual people than a whole party of 3e.

I've very rarely ever seen henchmen used in any edition or flavour of (A)D&D. I've never cared for them as a DM, because they're essentially just disposable PCs. Nodwick isn't purely the result of one author's imagination. As a player, it's just more bookkeeping, and the heroic legends -- at least the ones that I am familiar with -- are usually about the small band of heroes, not the small band of heroes and their dozen flunkies who open all the doors and chests for them.

I have doubts the the majority of 1e games actually made use of henchmen in the way you describe.

 

[Ourph]

The player isn't doing anything wrong, he is just doing what he is normally rewarded for but every once in a while he gets punished for it instead.

Isn't that just part of playing a game though? I hate to bring up Chess again, but to put it in perspective, there is a range within games from a 100% strategic/tactical game like Chess where there isn't any randomness and a player is in complete control of their fate to a game like War (the card game) where there's no strategy and winning/losing all comes down to luck. D&D falls somewhere in the middle. As long as you are incorporating chance, there's always a possibility that a player will do everything right and still wind up "losing". You might be a masterful Monopoly player, but if you get unlucky and land on the wrong squares or draw lots of the negative Chance and Community Chest cards you can still lose.

It seems to me that in a game that is partially based on randomness and chance the possibility of something unexpectedly good or unexpectedly bad happening (and being challenged to cope with the consequences through good play) is part of the fun. Rather than labelling the occasional, randomly generated, negative event as "negative reinforcement" I look at it as a necessary reminder to good players. In other words, occasionally suffering a setback even if they are doing everything right helps good players remember why they bother doing everything right. If they didn't, this stuff would be happening to them much more frequently.

 

[Keldryn]

Me, I figure that the grizzled veteran warrior and the effete rapier wielding dilletante should be mechanically different. In 1e, if I had two fighters with the same stats, there would be absolutely no difference mechanically between them. And, yes, I say that's boring.

Not only that, but in 1e (or 2e), the lightly-armoured rapier-wielding dilletante wasn't really a viable character option. There wasn't really any way for a high-dex Fighter wearing lighter or no armour and wielding a lighter weapon to actually be effective in combat compared to a high-strength, heavy-armour wearing-fighting wielding a heavier weapon. 1e tried specialized NPC classes like the Duelist, and 2e had kits like the Swashbuckler, but 3.x allows such a character to be workable from the core rules, without a bunch of plug-ins. Granted, there is still a bias toward the high-str, high-AC Fighter in 3.x, but your high-dex, lightly-armoured Fighter with the Dodge-Mobility-Spring Attack feat chain is a lot less likely to get laughed at by all the other Fighters and could still hold his own in melee.

Look, I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but, think about this: What is the most lethal 1e dungeon of all time? Most would say Tomb of Horrors. How many monsters are there? Three? Four? And the demi-lich is pretty close to a trap anyway.

The most lethal adventure in the 1e era had almost no monsters. That pretty much says it all about how wimpy monsters were compared to PC's in 1e.

I don't think it's a very well-designed adventure anyway. I've got the module, I ran it a couple of times many years ago, and it's just chock full of "save or die" moments that pop out of nowhere. The risk of unpredictable and immediate death in that module far outweighs any rewards gained within the Tomb.

 

[Keldryn]

To me, the notion that was expressed earlier that the game was not supposed to be played by those that failed english 101, is indicative of an elitist attitude.

And from that, I think the rest of the comments on elitism originated. I think that if anyone uses such an argument (paraphrased: "such and such doesn't have the proper knowledge gained from proper studies, so they shouldn't play the game"), one should be prepared to get involved in a debate on elitist views on the game and the playing of the game.

/M

Yeah, I think it might have been me who threw the word "elitist" into the (recent) discussion.

Sorry.

 

[Lanefan]

IIRC, the legendary Dwarven magic resistance was basically a saving throw bonus. I don't think they actually had a Magic Resistance percentage as defined by the rules.

And neither race had as much magic resistance as Drow, which strangely enough, were allowed to be magic-users. Dragons had magic resistance too. Actually, there are a lot of monsters in AD&D that have high magic resistance (more than Dwarves), yet still possessed lot of powerful magic abilities. Why pick on Dwarves in particular?

Not sure, unless it was to make them clearly distinct from Elves and other PC races. Drow, Dragons, etc. weren't intended to be PC's and thus could be as unbalanced as they liked.

1e and 2e multi-classing (and the ridiculously convoluted dual classing) was one of the things I was happiest to see go in 3e. Unless you were playing in a long-term campaign, it was generally much more advantageous to multiclass in two classes, as you would usually only be one level behind a single-class character in each of your two classes. Once you started to hit 10th-12th level or so, you started lagging behind, but most campaigns didn't seem to last that long.

Ours do, in general. I ditched dual-classing ages ago and freed up racial multiclassing, but also put some restrictions on what could multi- with what and how well it would function in each class (mainly to stop some shenanigans that were going on with people multi-classing Rangers).

Re: Gestalt in 4e:

Is this just a gut feeling, or has their been some discussion from the folks at WoTC that have led to you believe this? I haven't been in the loop much lately, so I'm asking an honest question here.

Gut hunch, based on the ongoing "give the players what they want and they want it all" trend, and extrapolating from there.

Re: NPC's as party members:

I prefer not to, as I'd rather that the PCs know that they are responsible for whatever happens to them... whether than be victory or defeat. If the party is lacking in healing ability, I generally prefer to have them find a few extra healing potions, rather than give than an NPC cleric.

Unless you give out healing potions by the bucketful, they're no substitute for a spare Cleric. Having an NPC also allows me a chance to steer them right if they're getting nowhere, or steer them wrong if I'm feeling ornery...

Usually, the NPC I chuck in will be a spare front-liner of some sort...Fighter, Cavalier, whatever...unless there's a party-recognized glaring hole and they go out and recruit someone to fill it (sometimes Cleric, sometimes Thief, but surprisingly often Ranger).

Re: WotC research and the 4-PC party:

I think that assumption is true more often than not. Well, at least most DMs I've encountered really don't like to do that. I'm sure there were some holes in WotC's research, but it seems to be a fairly accurate picture of how the game is played by the majority of players, at least from my perspective. Which could be wrong, of course.

Over the 25-year-ish long run, we've settled into having usually 4 or 5 players at a time running a party of 6-12 characters at a time, with campaigns lasting 5-12 years. In other words, vastly different from the WotC norm...

Lanefan

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

A good question arises from this: Did and do you ever run games starting at a level other than first character level? If so, what criteria do you use in character creation -- one from a source other than you, such as the DM appendix, or something that you and/or your group created over time?

Sure. When I was a teen, I ran all sorts of silly games.

If you're talking about playing as a grownup, though, I may be a bad example of what you're trying to illustrate, because I've been running a game set in the same world for almost all my gaming life, and my group still call my wife "the newbie" because she didn't join the group until the mid-80's... The party is effectively immortal, because there are always some henchmen (yes that word again) who stay behind to mind the castles or something, so even a total party wipe doesn't mean starting afresh with new characters.

I did recently begin to run a 1e pbp game where the party began at level 6 or 7, but it's a bit of an unusual setup -- the party are former slaves of the drow, now escaped but still in the Drow realms, so nobody started with any equipment at all.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not saying that the dice shouldn't be able to make major changes. I just don't like setups where the players have no reasonable way of anticipating and/or avoiding what is about to happen, something springs on them, the player or DM rolls a die, and due to an unlucky roll, the PC dies, loses a point from an ability score permanently, loses a level permanently, or what have you. And I'm not just talking from the perspective as a player, but also as a DM. I think it punishes the players unfairly for essentially playing the game the way it is meant to be played.

Where to me that *is* playing the game the way it was meant to be played! The key thing is to tell the players up front that Bad Things Will Happen and they'll have to be prepared to deal with it (if they aren't, find other players) as part of the game.

Looking at it in terms of operant conditioning, it's just the application of a negative stimulus at random intervals. If you believe that players should be rewarded for clever ideas, playing in-character, making smart tactical choices, retreating when outmatched, and the like (which are all pretty clear examples of positive reinforcement), then why would you believe in inflicting severe consequences the die came up a 1 or 2 while the player wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary? The player isn't doing anything wrong, he is just doing what he is normally rewarded for but every once in a while he gets punished for it instead.

And then you get situations where the player knows what could happen but because his character doesn't know, he plays in-character and doesn't act on the player knowledge. Due to an unlucky role, the player ends up being punished for playing in-character, despite the fact that you are trying to encourage and reward such behaviour. It strikes me as inconsistent and unfair at times.

You're right. It is. But that doesn't make it wrong, and I say this as a player whose PC's have lost more than their share of lives, levels, and gear over time...

Lanefan

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

I understand the point you are trying to make, but don't necessarily agree. 3e does mathematically and systematically what any good AD&D DM was doing for themselves organically and with guidelines from the rulebooks like HD and the "Level" entry included in the AD&D MMII and FF (i.e. - looking at the strength of an encounter and determining whether it was going to be easy, medium, hard or nearly insurmountable for the characters that would be facing it).

The assumption I want to challenge here is the assumption that the DM needs to look at that at all. I realise that the way AD&D was often played in the 1980's, that assumption held -- but it's not what the actual rules say at all.

What the rules say is, paraphrased: "Creatures of this level will tend to be found on this dungeon level." And they also say that in the wilderness, creatures of any arbitrary level could be encountered at random... the underlying assumption was that wilderness adventures were for tough, experienced, competent characters who knew how to get out of the way!

It's simplistic, I realise, but very important.

In this paradigm the DM makes no judgment about who will be facing what encounter. It's the players who decide that.

 

[Keldryn]

The guidelines were used by the designers as part of the CR system (as were the standard 25 pt. buy stat array and the four PC party). You can call them "optional" if you want, but what you are really saying is that WBL guidelines are "optional if you don't mind the CR system becoming essentially worthless to you". IMO an "optional" part of the game isn't really optional if failing to use it means other parts of the game system stop working properly.

I don't see how failing to use the WBL guidelines stop the other parts of the game system from working properly. If you're giving out less treasure than what the WBL guidelines suggest, then you know that a monster of a particular CR is most likely going to provide a greater challenge than its specified CR. If you've been really stingy with treasure, then perhaps that CR3 monster might be equivalent to CR5. How does this make CR worthless? You use it pretty much the same way as before. It's just a way of getting an assessment of a monster's difficutly at a glance. If you know that you're giving out rougly 25% less treasure than the WBL guidelines, then you know that encounters rated as appropriate for the party's level(s) will be more challenging. I don't get the complaint.

That said, I'm not opposed to WBL guidelines - I don't think they are a bad thing - I just think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that AD&D's assumptions about equipment affect the way the game plays in the same way that 3e's assumptions do. 3e's assumptions are integral to the system whereas if AD&D considered the effect of equipment at all, it was as an abstract consideration where the main point is "too much is bad".

I disagree with that. Plenty of AD&D monsters required +1 or better weapons to hit, +2 or better weapons to hit, etc through +5 or better weapons to hit. Monsters with a very high number of hit dice pretty much assume that your PCs will have some magic armour or they will be dead in pretty short order, since AC doesn't scale up with level like hit points and the attack matrices do. 3e just makes it more clear as to what assumptions are made and breaks them down into wealth-by-level averages to remove a lot of the guesswork on the DM's part.

 

[Keldryn]

Dwarven items aren't divinely created. All "dwarven" items were simply expertly crafted items of dwarven make that were enchanted with the aid of elven magic-users (long ago when the elves and dwarves lived in peace, harmony and cooperation). The rift and enmity between the elves and dwarves occured when the elves (disagreeing with the uses the dwarves were finding for some of their items) withdrew their assistance in creating more magical artifacts. The dwarves, in their anger, destroyed all records of the elves aid in creating these items and reimagined them as family heirlooms handed down through hundreds of generations from mastercraftdwarves of ancient history whose skill alone was enough to imbue the items with magical puissance. This is why all dwarven-make magical items are 1) old, 2) rare and 3) jealously guarded by their dwarven owners.

That's one (rather stereotypical) way of explaining it. What if the Dwarf-Elf relationship didn't work that way in my world? Why weren't the Dwarves able to craft their own enchanted items before meeting the Elves? It doesn't satisfy my curiousity.