D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?

[Helldritch]

This is why, in the end, I understood why 4e, PF2e and similar moved away from treating NPCs/monsters similar to PCs, even though, coming from a Hero and RQ background I don't like it; things that work for PCs in terms of complexity are a nightmare when you're trying to manage them as a GM, as I learned while running D&D3.5 in the low teens.

(There are other issues where people have carried over expectations from the 3e design era--which after all, PF1e was pretty much an extension of--that aren't too benign either, but, well, people want what they want and not everyone who has these are players).

The mistake of 3ed was not to have NPC behave like PCs. It was to not give a enough example from which to build from.
Take the dragons. Only a few are fully build up. If the dragon you need isn't the one fully described, then tough luck, you'll have to build it from scratch.

5ed learned the lesson (as 4ed did) and gave us one example of each dragons in the book, all age categories included. The same goes with NPC humanoids. With the veteran, I can just change the race to "orc" and I have my veteran that I need. For the mage all the spells are there and I can change them. They expanded on that in MtoF and VGtM and gave us various levels for almost every classes in the PHB. Want a gladiator in better armor? Easy, put plate and shield and here you go.

3ed edition's way of doing monsters was tedious, yet, not so once you had a small data base on excel (which I did). But it was not at the reach of everybody and not everyone had a portable computer to access their data base. 5ed is way quicker and people learned from 3ed to quickly reskin monsters into what they needed on the fly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find death in my 1e-variant games remains about equally frequent after maybe 3rd level (it's more frequent before that) but perma-death drops off fairly sharply at around 5th-6th because by then a) players have more invested in their PCs and b) said PCs have accreted enough resources to afford revival spells without bankrupting themselves.

If it wasn't clear, I wasn't counting resurrected characters as "deaths", though obviously you could for some purposes.

(And as I noted, if you have a sufficient level cleric in the party, the cost dropped to nil at least in OD&D).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Nearly all of the anecdotes I have to go by that aren't from my own crew come from these forums. Make of that what you will.

That doesn't actually change anything, but just produces two potential selection bias vectors: forum posts in the first place, ones you pay attention to in the second. Anything non-systematic in reducing bias does that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's also the weight of ""I see X & these things contribute to it like so" stacked against "I don't see it". Some of these things like magic items not being needed by design are objectively true things wotc themselves regularly say as a thing that was done intentionally.

May well be, but what that means in effect is at least a matter of interpretation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The mistake of 3ed was not to have NPC behave like PCs. It was to not give a enough example from which to build from.

I can't really agree, at least by the low teens.

I recall running a relatively high level wizard with two moderate high level fighters as opponents.

It was prohibitively tedious to manage. That was intrinsic simply in the number of moving parts those classes had, with spells in the first place, feats in the second and even the reduced number of magic items in both. Some complex monsters (particularly dragons and demons) could end up having both, along with a fairly large number of special abilities.

It wasn't the construction I found problematic, but the operation, and that's intrinsic in the combination of large numbers of components and the fact D&D has been solidly centered on exception based design from day one.

 

[Azzy]

I can't really agree, at least by the low teens.

I recall running a relatively high level wizard with two moderate high level fighters as opponents.

It was prohibitively tedious to manage. That was intrinsic simply in the number of moving parts those classes had, with spells in the first place, feats in the second and even the reduced number of magic items in both. Some complex monsters (particularly dragons and demons) could end up having both, along with a fairly large number of special abilities.

It wasn't the construction I found problematic, but the operation, and that's intrinsic in the combination of large numbers of components and the fact D&D has been solidly centered on exception based design from day one.

I've had similar experiences with 3e. And I do not miss it.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Ah, 3e iconic monsters. "Let me tell you about the cantrips and level 1 spells the PCs will NEVER see."

 

[Hussar]

Not when you're having a discussion about the game as a whole on the internet with people you don't actually play with and are not actually planning characters for an actual campaign but discussions character design in broad strokes. In that context, it makes zero sense to assume people are talking about a specific campaign you may or may not run in your own game.


Agreed.

Irrelevant, of course, because we're talking about the modern game as a whole and how it has allegedly changed.

This is a pretty common trend. People never want to discuss the game as its published. They cannot distinguish between the game as it is/was published and the game they played for decades and have fold, spindled and mauled beyond any recognition beyond their own table. They have played so long that they have internalized many of the changes/interpretations they have made for their own table and cannot comprehend why these things don't apply beyond their own table.

 

[Hussar]

The AD&D 1E DMG is the greatest right book ever written. It is about 10,000 times more interesting and informative than the 5E version. Is the 5E version better organized? Yes. Is it more usable? Ppppppffffftttttt, no, it is NOT.

And, continuing to read the thread and linking to my post above, we have exhibit A

 

[tetrasodium]

May well be, but what that means in effect is at least a matter of interpretation.

"I don't see it" Clearly you are simply exhibiting selection bias .