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

[MichaelSomething]

The 4E designers listened to all the people who wanted rules only for combat because putting mechaical stuff into non combat stuff was unneeded...

 

[Ovinomancer]

I was not part of the edition war either. I was not aware that it was the angle of attack that was taken by one side. For me, the downside of 3ed was that it was a bit too close to MMORPG in execution. And yet, for me it was exactly this that we really liked. 4ed edition was great, but claiming that combat and combat mechanic were not its focus is simply ignoring the truth.

Claiming it's not the focus for any edition is ignoring the truth. That's not the complaint made, though.

5ed does combat a lot less efficiently than 4ed but what it lacks in combat, it makes up on the narrative side. 5ed is a generalist edition and it is exactly why it was so well received. You can easily do what you want with. No struggle at all.

I think 5e is far more efficient than 4e -- combats run faster. 5e is not a "generalist" edition by any interpretation I can put to that word -- is specifically made to follow D&D tropes and it strongly centers combat, as it is a D&D game. Knowing other systems, I'm hard pressed to say 5e is general at all. And it's only "easy" to "do what you want" if you write your own rules and/ or ignore the ones there. A great you can "easily" perform in any edition. See, for example, claims that 4e was only experienced as a skirmish game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The 4E designers listened to all the people who wanted rules only for combat because putting mechaical stuff into non combat stuff was unneeded...

What? 4e had more robust non combat rules than any other edition! Ulrika powers,pg 42 the skill system, skill challenge.... the claim 4e lacks on non combat systems is entirely unmoored from a clear analysis of the game.

 

[Jer]

The 4E designers listened to all the people who wanted rules only for combat because putting mechaical stuff into non combat stuff was unneeded...

I disagree - the 4e design was where skill challenges were introduced and they put effort into balancing out the skill system so that it didn't lead to the kind of "assured victory or assured failure" binary that you ended up with in 3e at higher levels.

I think they put more effort into the tactical combat for the game because that's where most of 3e's problems were perceived to be - especially with encounter balance and fights that weren't terribly dynamic. But they did innovate in the non-combat challenges as well - they just didn't make that part of the game as player facing as the combat engine was. Burying the skill challenge rules in the DMG, making skill challenge creation more complex than it needed to be, and not thinking about ways to allow players to initiate a skill challenge but instead putting it all on the DM means that it's an area of the game that got ignored by a lot of folks, even folks who enjoy the edition. It's actually not too hard to improvise a skill challenge, but you wouldn't know it from how the rules for challenges are written up in the 4e DMG..

 

[Minigiant]

4e and 5e in the part it keep was a change in the idea of "This is what I want to see played" vs "This is want I want to see".

A harsh reality of 0e through 3e was: a lot those editions' design... wasn't design. On not at least mechanical design. A lot of it was "I want to convert this from this bit of media". "I want to see this", and "wouldn't it be cool or interesting if..". The actual focus on how a mechanic would effect gameplay wasn't sharp. And that's where the wackiness and wonkiness in mechanics came in. Let's make skill classes with few skill points. Let's make classes who's main ways of interact with the game are disruptive with adventuring. Look at this broken magic item I just thought up.

4e and some parts of 5e put a lot more effort on making the mechanics foster the gameplay the designers wanted. And sacred cows and aethetics were slaughtered to get the endpoints desired.

That ways the core of the gripe many had with 4e. It was more fcused on getting D&D "to work" than many tolerated. However it showed the community the benefits of focused functional design.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I can't believe nobody's mentioned this yet... Way back in the old days of D&D, before spoken language, we had to communicate our intentions each round through interpretive gestures and monosyllabic grunts and whistles. You can imagine how long it took to get through a single combat! These days players don't just have the use of verbs and nouns, they also have adjectives, adverbs, pronouns... Modern D&D players don't know how easy they have it!

 

[overgeeked]

I think a lot of it comes down to the things talked about in this video about video games.

 

[Helldritch]

Claiming it's not the focus for any edition is ignoring the truth. That's not the complaint made, though.

Yep, but the fact that 4ed did it so well overshadowed its other good points. Of course all editions of D&D had combat. But before 4ed, never was it so well developped both on the players and DMs' side.

I think 5e is far more efficient than 4e -- combats run faster. 5e is not a "generalist" edition by any interpretation I can put to that word -- is specifically made to follow D&D tropes and it strongly centers combat, as it is a D&D game. Knowing other systems, I'm hard pressed to say 5e is general at all. And it's only "easy" to "do what you want" if you write your own rules and/ or ignore the ones there. A great you can "easily" perform in any edition. See, for example, claims that 4e was only experienced as a skirmish game.

Except for the length of combat at high level, 4ed did it way better. The length was a bit too long at top tier, but it could be managed by using minions.

As for other systems...
I know my fair share too. And yes, 5ed is faster than most. But it is poorly implemented unless you heavily use optional rules. It is exactly because 5ed is relatively generic that it can shine in so many styles.
Role Play? 5ed can do it easily with a nice pace for narrative. Since combat is so downgraded in 5ed, it leaves for a nice narrative styles that fits YouTube. CR is but one example.
Exploration? As any RPG it can be done. The rules are a bit light and you pretty much need splat books such as XGtE.
Free Form? Monsters and NPC are well defined and easy enough to improvise without much problem.
Dungeon Crawl? Yep, easy to do if you follow the 6-8 encounters.
A Diceless game? A bit harder, but we have done games in which no dice were used. Mainly RP.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yep, but the fact that 4ed did it so well overshadowed its other good points. Of course all editions of D&D had combat. But before 4ed, never was it so well developped both on the players and DMs' side.

The overshadowing is another of those misrepresentations that went with the edition war. This claim was made by people trying to categorize the game in a specific way. And almost always paired with misrepresentations of the non combat pieces, claiming obviously wrong things and trying to sweep them aside. 4e entirely supported entire non combat sessions of play with robust mechanics and direction on how to do it and award experience for it. No other edition of D&D has had such clear and direct guidelines for non combat play.

Except for the length of combat at high level, 4ed did it way better. The length was a bit too long at top tier, but it could be managed by using minions.

Better is subjective. That there's much less to track in 5e isn't subjective, and both systems drive to resolution of combat well. Fewer pieces, same resolution, and that's why I said 5e is more efficient in combat. Better didn't come into it.

As for other systems...
I know my fair share too. And yes, 5ed is faster than most. But it is poorly implemented unless you heavily use optional rules. It is exactly because 5ed is relatively generic that it can shine in so many styles.

5e is only faster than some, and those are games that intentionally design for more detailed combat. There's huge numbers of systems that make 5e look glacial in combat resolution. I have no idea what you're saying is purely implementation -- your antecedent to it is unclear. 5e isn't very generic at all, especially on combat, I'm not at all clear on your line of training here.

I like 5e, mind, and choose to spend some of my limited time playing it. I'm not claiming it's bad. Far from it. But I don't at all consider 5e to be generic.

Role Play? 5ed can do it easily with a nice pace for narrative. Since combat is so downgraded in 5ed, it leaves for a nice narrative styles that fits YouTube. CR is but one example.

The detail of a combat engine has zero bearing on roleplaying, unless you mean something idiosyncratic by that. And if so, then it would stand to reason that an even smaller combat engine would do better for roleplaying than 5e? Is that the claim?

Exploration? As any RPG it can be done. The rules are a bit light and you pretty much need splat books such as XGtE.
Free Form? Monsters and NPC are well defined and easy enough to improvise without much problem.
Dungeon Crawl? Yep, easy to do if you follow the 6-8 encounters.

Ok. Um. You can make up monsters too play 5e isn't a ringing endorsement for being generic. It should be expected that you can make up threats for any RPG! The exploration bit is off as well, because it's not really establishing what generic here.

A Diceless game? A bit harder, but we have done games in which no dice were used. Mainly RP.

At that point, you're not even using the mechanics in the game! So weird to say that abandoning the rules of the game is a strength of the game.

 

[Helldritch]

The overshadowing is another of those misrepresentations that went with the edition war. This claim was made by people trying to categorize the game in a specific way. And almost always paired with misrepresentations of the non combat pieces, claiming obviously wrong things and trying to sweep them aside. 4e entirely supported entire non combat sessions of play with robust mechanics and direction on how to do it and award experience for it. No other edition of D&D has had such clear and direct guidelines for non combat play.

Better is subjective. That there's much less to track in 5e isn't subjective, and both systems drive to resolution of combat well. Fewer pieces, same resolution, and that's why I said 5e is more efficient in combat. Better didn't come into it.

5e is only faster than some, and those are games that intentionally design for more detailed combat. There's huge numbers of systems that make 5e look glacial in combat resolution. I have no idea what you're saying is purely implementation -- your antecedent to it is unclear. 5e isn't very generic at all, especially on combat, I'm not at all clear on your line of training here.

I like 5e, mind, and choose to spend some of my limited time playing it. I'm not claiming it's bad. Far from it. But I don't at all consider 5e to be generic.

The detail of a combat engine has zero bearing on roleplaying, unless you mean something idiosyncratic by that. And if so, then it would stand to reason that an even smaller combat engine would do better for roleplaying than 5e? Is that the claim?

Ok. Um. You can make up monsters too play 5e isn't a ringing endorsement for being generic. It should be expected that you can make up threats for any RPG! The exploration bit is off as well, because it's not really establishing what generic here.

At that point, you're not even using the mechanics in the game! So weird to say that abandoning the rules of the game is a strength of the game.

All your points, taken individually, you are perfectly right. 5ed is however, the result of all its components. It is the fact that the combat is less developed than before (but more than some other games) that it can be so able to be generic. Most mechanics of 5ed have been epurated, expunged of a lot of over complicated rules and systems in favor a rule light system. This a case where the results is way greater than its parts.

To see things as I do, you can't take one aspect and analyse it the way you do. You have to take the whole into account. The same goes with 4ed. The combat part was so well developed compared to the rest, that it was taking all the space available.