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

[Cadence]

Apologies for the reply delay. Camping over the weekend.

Here's the model:

(Fiction) Rogue attempts to open lock.
Triggers
(Mechanic) Check succeeds
Triggers
(Fuction) the lock opens.

This is compared to:

(Fiction) fighter attacks
Triggers
(mechanic) attack roll succeeds
Triggers
(Mechanic) damage roll reduces hp

There is no final trigger to fiction for the attack roll.

The thing hit knows it has taken some combination of cuts, bruises, burns, scrapes, bad karma accumulation, weariness, exhaustion, lowered mental and physical durability, and/or weakened will to live that have moved it a bit towards unconsciousness and death?

(What is the "Function" after a knowledge type roll usually?)

D&D is specifically a system without a death-spiral/injury system because hp doesn't associate directly with a wound.

Lack of death spiral seems good.

A fighter with 50 hp gets hit with a dagger for 4 points of damage. We say "ok, that took less than 1/10th of the PC's hp, it's a superficial wound." The next round, the fighter gets sneak attacked by a rogue with a dagger for 26 points of damage. Significant hit right? Better than half the fighter's hp. Still the same type of dagger, so what changed? How did the rogue get 26 points out of a 1d4 dagger, and what did it do the fighter to take five times the damage?

It did a lot more of some combination of cuts, bruises, burns, scrapes, bad karma accumulation, weariness, exhaustion, lowered mental and physical durability, and/or weakened will to live that have moved it a bit towards unconsciousness and death. If someone is playing basketball or soccer against someone skilled vs. someone not skilled, does doing the former make one come out of the match a lot more exhausted than they come out of the later, and need a longer recovery time before playing again?

We say, "well, the rogue is a master of anatomy, and he got a blow that made some grievous wounds." But the fighter isn't suffering from any grievous injury. He doesn't have any broken bones, ruptured organs, internal bleeding, or the like. He isn't blinded, stunned, or even knocked prone. In fact, he's fine enough to action surge and bum-rush that sneaky little bugger who backstabbed him, even with 60% of his total hp gone.

Which all goes back to point: Attack rolls, AC, saving throws and HP damage don't represent anything in the fiction directly, and there is no one correct way to narrate it.

Very true. But not having a single correct way to narrate it seems very different than it not being anything in the fiction. If a player says "Charlie (the bard) attempts to put the bar into a good mood by performing", how should it be narrated? It feels like there is no single way to narrate it.

HP is meat? Explain how a fighter who took a dagger wound can use second wind and heal it up.

Is the addition of second wind (in 5e), or the Warlord healing (in 4e) a change of type since the earlier editions?

HP is luck? Explain how rogues are the masters of defeating other's luck? Healing to full doesn't matter narratively because HP doesn't matter narratively,

In reading a story about Conan or Fafhrd or Aragorn or Percy, do they always say where the blows fell or how badly they were burned? Or is it sometimes that they're getting worn down? Or that they just seem battered by the attack? In lots of stories is it only the last shot that is narrated even if it took more than that to get them there? Does even the last shot need narration?

Spoiler: The Fall of Hurin - JRR Tolkien

Spoiler: He stood alone at Gjallerbru - Walt Simonson

all that matters in the intended action (I attack, I cast fireball, etc). The resolution (the roll vs AC, the saving throw, the HP damage) does not. Its but a means to figure out who lived through the encounter. Flavor it how you like.

I find it very strange that the big critical early in combat for a ton of damage isn't important in and of itself to the characters in the game, even though the monster still gets its full attacks and isn't dead yet and that different DMs would narrate it in different ways. But others' mileages may vary.

HP are partially meat, and our characters aren't superheroes, that explains how all hits are minor.

To me it feels like the fighter taking 60 hp of damage and going to half in the first round of combat isn't minor to the fighter or how they react in the game, just because the game isn't fine grained enough (or death-spirally enough) to give them penalties to hit on it.

But, it doesn't really explain how my character can swim in acid without dying or ever being so much as scarred. So on and so forth.

I am all for rules giving instant death or horrendous injury for some things that seem like they should... ("I wade across the lava..." "I reach my hand into the vat of molten steel...")

 

[pemerton]

It was almost always possible to know if a new player's background was only/mostly d&d/pf/etc but something other than d&d & no rpg history was often less clear. Players in that first group tended to do what they could to make introvert characters with no links & no meaningful problems alongside a bunch of combat focused stuff

<snip>

Sure there were exceptions, but I can't imagine those player created quests going too well because of that experience.

Heh, I see we've played with some of the same players. And, yes, I do agree with this assessment. The lengths that players, and yeah, in my experience it's players who exclusively play D&D, will go to fence off their character from any and all outside influence is staggering.

Yup, this fits with my experience, too. As I said before, I think there are definitely a subset of players who really just want to play a cooperative board game, head down to the game table and roll some dice and enjoy what's in front of them, and trying anything else is like pulling teeth.

I've played with a relatively stable group of of players for most of my adult life, and we had what 4e would call "player-authored quests" as part of our play back in the 90s playing Rolemaster. In fact I first did that sort of thing playing AD&D in the second half of the 80s.

In both cases it wasn't as thought-through as how I approach it now, and the systems were quite as robust in their support of it. But my personal experience has not been that players predominantly want to play FRPGs as a cooperative board game (which is not to deny that there are many such players in the world). And when I tried to run B/X or AD&D in that style - ie somewhat by-the-book for those systems - I was terrible at it! So the change in D&D, with 4e, to actually aim at supporting an approach closer to what I was familiar with was very noticeable to me.

Honestly, this is not an area where I think how the games are presented matters much. When a GM wants to do a carrot or stick, manipulating experience is the easy and obvious way to do it (gold/magic items work too, at least in the latter day, but they're far less consistent and often require more thought) so I expect that's what was done no matter how it was presented.

Perhaps. I think there's good reason to think that the gap between how 4e was presented and how it was played may have been as wide as (what I believe) to be that same gap in the case of AD&D and B/X. (I don't have any evidence beyond hunch and conjecture to support my claims about what was going on in 1978 that you replied to - I'm just relying on my sense that the sale of AD&D books was extending well beyond a hobby-store wargaming-type crowd.)

On the other hand, I think there was probably much less of this sort of gap in the case of 2nd ed AD&D- the system as presented encouraged the GM to use the full suite of tools (XP awards, treasure, presentation of situations, adjudication of action declarations) to control player behaviour and the outcomes of play, and this was the norm I encountered for D&D play during the 90s and I still get the impression it is quite common. Personally I feel that that sort of play is probably more common than the boardgame/wargame style that the posters I've quoted at the top of this post describe; but I've got nothing but impressions (including my impression of who WotC targets 5e D&D at) to underpin that feeling.

 

[Remathilis]

Here, we are talking high level. Not low level nobodies.
Reaching that level 14th+ in 1ed was an achievement in and of itself.
Now? No so much.
There is a big difference between high level play in 1ed and in 5ed.
1ed, 1000 goblins. A group of 15th level characters will destroy them. They are no match.
5ed, 100 goblins. A group of 15th level characters? You get the Flee you fools!

Again, design philosophy is in play here. BA means that low level threat remains dangerous at high level. It also feels less heroic than 1ed where low level threat were non existent at high level because they were irrelevant. Heck, a 14th level fighter would make 14 attacks per rounds on the goblins (double that if hasted)... High level monsters had a higher AC in general making hitting them harder, but HP were lower making them more vulnerable to spell attacks.

Here, it is not because a high level fighter could stave off 500 goblins (with appropriate gear by the way) that makes it counter intuitive. It is the fact that almost every character can reach it in 5ed. That 14th level character in 1ed was an achievement worth noting. Now, it is just a number.

I think the reason is that the curve is shallower. It starts higher, but doesn't rise as exponentially as it had previously. PCs are more competent and durable than previous editions, but they don't raise taller as much as wider. Raw numbers don't go up as high due to BA, but PCs get more abilities to choose from.

 

[Cadence]

Here, we are talking high level. Not low level nobodies.
Reaching that level 14th+ in 1ed was an achievement in and of itself.
Now? No so much.
There is a big difference between high level play in 1ed and in 5ed.
1ed, 1000 goblins. A group of 15th level characters will destroy them. They are no match.
5ed, 100 goblins. A group of 15th level characters? You get the Flee you fools!

Again, design philosophy is in play here. BA means that low level threat remains dangerous at high level. It also feels less heroic than 1ed where low level threat were non existent at high level because they were irrelevant. Heck, a 14th level fighter would make 14 attacks per rounds on the goblins (double that if hasted)... High level monsters had a higher AC in general making hitting them harder, but HP were lower making them more vulnerable to spell attacks.

Here, it is not because a high level fighter could stave off 500 goblins (with appropriate gear by the way) that makes it counter intuitive. It is the fact that almost every character can reach it in 5ed. That 14th level character in 1ed was an achievement worth noting. Now, it is just a number.

I think the reason is that the curve is shallower. It starts higher, but doesn't rise as exponentially as it had previously. PCs are more competent and durable than previous editions, but they don't raise taller as much as wider. Raw numbers don't go up as high due to BA, but PCs get more abilities to choose from.

Is the fighting hoards of goblins kind of a red herring for judging power? In 1e, it doesn't apply to, say, fighting Dwarfs (1HD), Hobgoblins (1+1 HD), or Orcs (1HD).

A History of the Fighter’s Extra Attacks versus Low-Level Monsters

In page 25 of the AD&D 1e Players Handbook, beneath the “FIGHTERS’, PALADINS’, & RANGERS’ ATTACKS PER MELEE ROUND TABLE”, you have this special note for a Fighter: The origin of…

songoftheblade.wordpress.com

As an aside, did having a rule like that have any inspirational effect on the mook rules in later games (4e or 13th age), or did they just spring independently from an earlier idea?

 

[pemerton]

(What is the "Function" after a knowledge type roll usually?)

I'm pretty sure that @Ovinomancer meant "fiction", not "function".

The thing hit knows it has taken some combination of cuts, bruises, burns, scrapes, bad karma accumulation, weariness, exhaustion, lowered mental and physical durability, and/or weakened will to live that have moved it a bit towards unconsciousness and death?

I agree with @Ovinomancer that a mechanical resolution that tells us to plug-and-play some fiction or other that we choose, that is (i) not specified or dictated by the mechanics, and (ii) doesn't matter to what happens next at the table, is very different from a mechanical resolution that actually dictates some more-or-less determinate fiction that actually does matter to what happens next. (In Ovinomancer's post, that was the opening of a lock so that the PCs can now pass through the door.)

But not having a single correct way to narrate it seems very different than it not being anything in the fiction.

It seems to me that you are treating the fiction here as having content beyond what anyone at the table knows - eg you are saying that, because in the fiction the hit point loss is pushing the outcome of the combat towards some or other conclusion, there must be something taking place in the fiction even though no one knows what that is.

I think that there are instances of D&D play that sit at odds with that sort of "platonism" about the fiction of D&D combat - eg the PC fighter suffers a large amount of hp loss, but is not debilitated by that hp loss (because that's what the rules say), and then wins the combat, and then is healed with (say) a couple of Cure Serious Wounds spells. The fact that the fighter was not debilitated seems at odds with supposing that that the fighter had suffered serious wounds; but the fact that the fighter needed CSW to fully recover pushes the other way.

But even if one doesn't agree with the previous paragraph, or thinks that those sorts of cases are rare enough that they can generally be disregarded, there is still a big difference in the experience of play between positing that something or other is occurring in the fiction, though we the players don't know what it is (much like we as readers don't know the style or colour of Sherlock Holmes's underwear), and the lock-picking case where we the players know what is happening. I don't think the Holmes's stories would be so popular if they told us that Holmes had solved the case, but left it as an exercise for the reader to posit what occurred in the fiction so as to bring that about, telling us nothing more than that, as we turn each page, Holmes has done something-or-other to make the resolution of the case more evident to him!

If a player says "Charlie (the bard) attempts to put the bar into a good mood by performing", how should it be narrated? It feels like there is no single way to narrate it.

The analogue of this, on the hp model, would be to have Charlie's players make a series of performance rolls opposed in some fashion by the tavern-goers, with the numerical results of those rolls feeding into the final determination of whether or not the tavern-goers are put into a good mood, but with there being nothing determinate established about what anyone is doing or how anyone is feeling on the way through the process, at the end of each individual roll.

But D&D has never used a system like this out of combat. The closest it has come in classic D&D is the wilderness evasion process found in AD&D and B/X (and perhaps also in the original books?), but while that is very abstract in its resolution I think it is a single check. (I'll have to go back and look when I get a chance.) And the closest it has come in modern D&D is the 4e skill challenge, but the rules for a skill challenge are clear in the 4e DMG (and even clearer in the DMG2) that the GM has to narrate concrete fictional outcomes following each check, as a necessary step in then allowing the next player to meaningfully declare their skill check. Whereas it's a striking feature of D&D hp-based combat that an attack can be declared and resolved without needing to know anything about the fictional position other than the physical proximity of the attacking character to the target character.

In reading a story about Conan or Fafhrd or Aragorn or Percy, do they always say where the blows fell or how badly they were burned? Or is it sometimes that they're getting worn down? Or that they just seem battered by the attack? In lots of stories is it only the last shot that is narrated even if it took more than that to get them there? Does even the last shot need narration?

Spoiler: The Fall of Hurin

View attachment 154453

REH typically narrates Conan doing concrete things, like crushing the skull of a were-hyena, or narrowly avoiding being skewered by a sword-blow.

In LotR, JRRT takes a similar though less blood-spattered approach, particularly at crucial moments like when the Orc captain spears Frodo or Pippin stabs the troll.

To get this in a FRPG, I prefer a system that generates a narration of events and consequences, in combat, that (i) isn't simply optional - rather, like a 4e skill challenge, the game can't progress without the fiction being established, and (ii) feeds into the resolution of what happens next. (Ideally, (ii) should be a consequence of (i).)

Lack of death spiral seems good.

Most RPGs I play or have played have a "death spiral" - Rolemaster, RQ, Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, Classic Traveller (not within a single combat, but across combat), Torchbearer (ditto) - but not all - 4e D&D, Agon, Cthulhu Dark.

In RM, RQ, BW and Torchbearer, the death spiral mechanics also give us relative concreteness about what is happening in the fiction. And that matters to what happens next.

In MHRP/Cortex+, Traveller and Prince Valiant - and referring to my (i) and (ii) just above - the death spiral ensures (ii) even if the (i) is sometimes rather abstract (ie all we know is that the character is being set back). The (i) isn't always abstract, though.

Agon and Cthulhu Dark use one-roll resolution, and so even in combat resemble Ovinomancer's lock-picking case, not D&D combat. The concreteness is concreteness of outcome, and there is no abstract process that unfolds on the way through to it that is comparable to D&D hp attrition.

And 4e D&D uses a lot of devices outside of hp attrition - its focus on positioning, forced movement, and effects - to generate concrete fiction that satisfies my desiderata (i) and (ii) stated not far above, even if we don't get concrete information about wounds of the death-spiral variety.

I think those features of 4e D&D, which are relatively unique to it among versions of D&D, were definitely a significant change to the game.

 

[Jer]

As an aside, did having a rule like that have any inspirational effect on the mook rules in later games (4e or 13th age), or did they just spring independently from an earlier idea?

I think that Rob Heinsoo credited the idea for mook rules to Robin Laws's Feng Shui game IIRC.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Apologies for the reply delay. Camping over the weekend.



The thing hit knows it has taken some combination of cuts, bruises, burns, scrapes, bad karma accumulation, weariness, exhaustion, lowered mental and physical durability, and/or weakened will to live that have moved it a bit towards unconsciousness and death?

No, the player knows this. There is no directed requirement to create a fictional element for the character. We assume this as part of the ad hoc and arbitrary fiction that might be used. I say might because I believe few tables bother with descriptions of every bit of hp loss. I say arbitrary because no description that is generated ever holds any weight past the description. Whatever you describe never has any further use in the fiction and effectively goes away once it's done. No further fiction ever keys on or uses that description. The only thing that holds any weight is the mechanical value of remaining hp.

This isn't a bad thing, mind. Hp are valuable game tools. I'm not saying they aren't, and I'm not saying as hoc descriptions are bad either. I'm just pointing out how they actually work. Even in "hitpoints are neat" no description of injury ever has any further use in the fiction. This mode only looks at the equally arbitrary restoration of hitpoints to provide any meaning to the fiction of receiving wounds. The actual wounds, though, are meaningless; just the concept of wounds matters.

(What is the "Function" after a knowledge type roll usually?)

Typo shaming? You felt this was going to improve discourse?

Knowledge checks in D&D are a terrible bit of mechanics in my book anyway. They're used either for GM info dumps or a gates on what information the GM will allow players to operate on. As such, they are nearly entirely a meta mechanic. They are about what information the player is to be given. As such there is no fiction output change to knowledge checks. Instead they occupy this odd halfway point where they retroactively establish what the fiction was prior to the check. Knowledge checks don't trigger a change in the fiction; they tell you what the fiction already was but the player didn't know it yet.

 

[pemerton]

It seems a bit counter intuitive to call 5e easy mode/can't die, but then lament how a paladin can't 500:1 against goblins or solo dragons like he could in AD&D.

It doesn't seem especially counterintuitive.

The 500 gobins is a bit of a red herring, for the reasons @Cadence posted not far upthread: there is a rather arbitrary cut-off between (on the one hand) goblins, kobolds and 0-level mercenaries and (on the other hand) everyone else; but as you note, there is a different "steepness of the curve" between versions of D&D which produces the sort of phenomenon @Helldritch is pointing to.

But the fact that a high-level AD&D character demonstrates the heroic ability that results from this steepness of the curve doesn't tell us anything about how hard it is to get a character to high levels as if the game is played either as presented, or as is typical.

I can't comment on 5e, but the relationship between game play (as presented in the books) and levelling in 4e D&D is radically different from how it is presented in B/X and Gygax's AD&D. In the classic game, levelling is a pay-off for skilled and lucky play. It is possible to play a whole session of classic D&D and yet - due to back luck or poor decision-making - find little or no treasure and hence earn little or no XP. In 4e, though, playing the game means engaging in encounters and pursuing quests, and those are the very things that earn XP and hence levels and hence trigger the GM to provide treasure parcels. As a result, in 4e (as presented in its rulebooks) levels become simply a device for pacing the story of the PCs; they are not a reward for good play. (Even in 4e there's always the chance of PC death, but it's obviously lower than in classic D&D given the changes to the relativities of starting hit points and typical damage ranges, and Raise Dead is available relatively cheaply from 8th level.)

Another difference between classic D&D and 4e follows from the one I've just described: in classic D&D, Monty Haul play is a degenerate form of play, because it subverts the game's reward mechanism. But in 4e play there's really no such thing as a Monty Haul/non-Monty Haul contrast: the challenging part of 4e play isn't in finding the loot and advancing your PC, but rather in deploying your player-side resources successfully from moment-to-moment in conflict resolution. The degenerate case, for 4e play, is the GM presenting conflicts which don't place demands on the players' mastery of those player-side resources, and hence can be resolved by just "going through the motions" of play.

I don't know enough about 3E or 5e to know how either fits within this framework of comparison between classic D&D and 4e.

 

[overgeeked]

Speaking for myself only, I gladly followed (and enjoyed) the 3e, 4e and 5e bandwagon when it passed by.

Two years ago I switched to Fantasy AGE and three months ago to Shadow of the Demon Lord (excellent games) because something was bothering me. These games didn't remove the nagging feeling that I wanted something else.

Recently, it dawned on me that what I long for is a flatter character power progression, few character powers, the return of magic items (found while adventuring) as the only way for characters to gain non-class powers. In short, less integrated verticality, more randomized horizontality.

That is how D&D changed over the years IMHO.

(I'm not saying I will play TSR editions. I just can't. Too many design decisions I didn't like back then and still don't like today. Currently, I'm reading Castles & Crusades, so far it seems to strike a good balance between old and new D&D. Maybe I found what I'm looking for. I also have The One Ring 2e which could be a solution.)

You might also dig Dungeon Crawl Classics.

 

[Cadence]

Typo shaming? You felt this was going to improve discourse?

I thought you meant (Function) as part of a game loop I hadn't heard of before, and put it in quotes instead of parentheses because it felt more natural. I didn't even realize it was a typo (my brain apparently auto-corrected by adding the n instead of changing the u to an i). Reading it with fiction in there does make more sense now!

[the like above indicates no disagreements with other parts of the post]