Has D&D become too...D&Dish?

[The Shaman]

The RAW are easily modified into a low-magic game:

(1) Give less XP. I recommend 1/2 of what is suggested per RAW.

(2) Give less wealth and magic in treasure hoards.

(3) Use lower CR monsters to reflect the change in PC abilities. This has the added benefit of further slowing level progression.

(4) Don't include magic shops in your campaign.

I also took the liberty of changing the crafting rules to make producing magic items more arduous, but otherwise that's pretty much how I handled my three-point-oh game.

 

[diaglo]

Now, if only the power scale was linear, then we would not have a problem. In previous editions, we had a slow level advancement and a exponential power growth. Now we have faster advancement and we still have that exponential growth.

Maybe this is what is affecting people. They just have no time to adjust to the power.

i think you are correct.

edit: the game design is basically expecting the learning curve to be complete by mid levels. but in fact, since new things are still being added at even Epic levels it makes it difficult for referee and players alike.

the referees have trouble scaling encounters based on the new skills/powers/feats/whatever. and the players have trouble dealing with the adjustment of tactics based on their new powers/items/whatever.

it isn't until many trial and error attempts before the group finally figures things out for them. some of the groups may give up by then. and end up playing something else like Rifts or Traveller or Fudge or ...

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Another thing, thinking back to the comments about uneven class progression and the perception of 3e power creep.

Wizards took so much more XP to gain levels than the other classes (especially at high levels), that high level wizards were relatively rare PCs compared with fighters and thieves.

Because multiclassing required XP to be split over all classes, you didn't see people just suddenly choosing to add a few levels of [insert class here] just to gain some kind of bonus or ability. Multiclassing in earlier editions was a pain. The result was that most people played a character that had one class, and one class only for the life of the character.

Not saying the changes are good or bad, but are likely major factors in the perception of how different things used to be.

 

[Dracorat]

Well, let me throw out one example of an almost strictly D&D conceit that's been mentioned a few times throughout this thread.

[Clerics, clerics and more clerics]

Some of these things are desired, of course, but certainly not all of them.

This whole post sounds like cynical speculation to me.

 

[Dracorat]

And for the record, every person I have gotten introduced in to my games has come with one basic understanding...

"In D&D I can do anything"

I don't often (in fact cannot recall a single instance of) hear the statement "I want to play Aragorn".

 

[lukelightning]

I like "D&Dish" D&D. Yeah, long complex plots can be fun, but in the game I'm running I feel I was a bit too ambitious with my plans, so I've scaled back and turned that "big long campaign against a hidden enemy" into a chapter instead of a book, so to speak, and have made more site-based adventures.

 

[The Shaman]

The whole super-fantasy dungeon-crawl mindset, plus the hilarious economy issues, are an overly common feature of the game. I think a better approach would be to see PC's as exceptional, as the Ebberon setting does- but this kind of thinking should be the baseline, not a campaign-specific exception.

From the snippets I've read, this sounds like the premise of Exalted.

The very nature of an RPG being a group activity usually precludes having campaigns that feel like the classic novels. As RPGs developed, players realized this and many decided they prefered the worlds to feel like the game they were playing, rather than supposed worlds simulated, but not feeling the same because of the needed changes to make a fun game. That's how the current "make the game world fit the game" trend started.

(Emphasis added by this poster.)

This is really interesting. I believe it extends beyond just D&D, which to my mind is a fantasy subgenre all its own, to much of the fantasy genre as a whole: building a society from the floor up with magic as a fundamental technology, rather than tacking it on like a pink flamingo on the lawn. This approach to D&D settings reflects a larger trend in fantasy, one shaped in no small part by the thirty-plus year influence of the game and gamers on the genre.

Another trend in fantasy that's made its way into Dungeons and Dragons is a tendency for heroes to become more like superheroes in terms of their abilities. A 12th level fighter in 1e AD&D was a powerful dude, far better than most of the opponents he was likely to face, usually packing a potent magic weapon and magic armor, a couple of potions in a pouch and maybe a magic ring or amulet or other beneficial doo-dad - the same 12th level fighter in 3e could be wielding a fire giant's Huge magical flaming keen axe (thanks, Monkey Grip!) or shooting a slew of arrows at a target with one pull of the bow (thanks, Manyshot!) and is, if keeping to the appropriate wealth-by-level guidelines, decked out with an impressive array of magic items fitted into various 'slots,' and facing an collection of critters and baddies (or goodies, if you're into that sort of game) specifically designed to challenge him at that level. (Before anyone gets into a white lather, I'm not suggesting that one is better than the other, merely that the character examples are different in terms of what they can and can't do and how the game was structured to chellenge them.)

Now a magitech (defined here not as "steampunk" or the like, but rather magic as a fundamental force in the universe integrated into the lives of the members of society) and superheroes game-world and gaming experience doesn't appeal to everyone, so for these players there is a fundamental disconnect that occurs when the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game comes to reflect this larger trend.

It's possible to run a D&D game without those conceits, but it does take some tweaking the system to get to that point. Me, I choose to play different systems instead, systems that hit my sweet spot out of the box rather than requiring retconning of features that I don't care for. I've been re-reading The Fantasy Trip after many, many years, and remembering why I thought it was such a cool system in the first place. It is much closer to my sweet spot as a gamer than D&D ever was, and years of refining my own gaming tastes make it even more appealing now than it was in the early Eighties when I was introduced to it. Its genre conceits and its mechanics reflect the sort of fantasy games I like to run better than those of D&D, and without requiring patches over sections of the system that don't fit my concept of the setting or the characters' place in it.

So to answer the OP, no, you're not alone, and yes, D&D is too "D&Dish" for my tastes.

 

[JoeBlank]

Interesting...

In the campaign I'm running, there's only one God. (That the players know of) There are druids, but the "new" religion from the southern Empire has been pushing its way into the Kingdom. The peasents and commoners tend to still put more stock in the "old ways" of the Druids, but pay due respect to this new idea favored by the nobility.

I wanted to do something a bit different then the seemingly common pantheon of gods approach.

there are still areas in the campaign world that revere other gods or pantheons, the players just haven't gotten there...

If and when my kids move into the realm of religion in our game, we may start with just one god. But for now I am avoiding the subject all together. Take for instance the Harry Potter books. Plenty of magic and monsters, injury, death and healing, but no talk of religion. That is what I am aiming for.

For now, they just want to kill things and take their stuff.

 

[JohnSnow]

<Snip my comments about Clerics>
This whole post sounds like cynical speculation to me.

Hmm...Nah. Although I can't deny that I wonder what the future of the cleric class is. I'd have to be blind not to notice that several of the perceived "balance" issues of late (which have even been mentioned by WotC's designers and developers) have been around clerics. Well, them and the polymorph spell.

Clerics, today, are almost a deus ex machina for character healing. A particular group could do without its holy-man, but, in the Core Rules defaults, it CAN'T do without magical healing. So...scrap it. Get rid of it. Let's cut down on the amount of spellcasting. One thing that tweaked me in Unearthed Arcana was the "Spellcaster" (Generic Class) having to choose to be a "divine" or "arcane" caster. If he chose arcane, his spells were arcane spells, chosen from the entire PHB list, but he had to risk arcane spell failure if he wore armor. If he was divine, he could wear armor without risk of spell failure. The downside was...umm...

Now forgive me, but that's just WHACKED! There's no functional difference between the caster (I repeat, either type can choose ANY spell). But if he's "divine," he can wear armor and if he's "arcane," he can't? Talk about enforcing a D&Dism for no reason.

The Design & Development team has made comments about how people have to be encouraged (that is, bribed) to play clerics. The obvious fix is to change the game so that the cleric isn't necessary.

And the recent comments that polymorph treads on the druid's "turf" bothers me because one of the oldest tropes of fantasy is shapeshifting into other forms. So now our spellcasters can't do it as well because we've got a nature-boy class whose "schtick" that is?

That's just dumb. Fix polymorph by making it a scalable spell. Heck, fix all the spells so that they're scalable. It would simplify the spell lists and several of the balance issues. The other fix I'd almost bet on in a future edition of the game is the sorcerer getting the heave-ho.

Now that's cynical speculation.

 

[JohnSnow]

I had to interject here on one comment that I should just let go, but I won't...

shooting a slew of arrows at a target with one pull of the bow (thanks, Manyshot!)

*LAUGH* I've done this. In the real world. Yes, it was only two arrows. This is classic trick archery stuff. I realize Hawkeye and Green Arrow do this...but I don't have any problem with a medium-high level D&D character being as competent and powerful as what I would call the "human" characters from superhero comics. Captain America, Hawkeye, Batman, Green Arrow - those are GREAT characters to emulate at the high end of the D&D power scale.

Balancing that with magic-using classes has always been difficult. And probably always will be.

Back to our regularly scheduled discussion...