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

[Cadence]

Really? This sort of player-management stuff has been around for ever. I encountered the issue first hand in the mid-80s. I read about it in the pages of Dragon Magazine. Gygax worries and rants about it in the pages of his DMG.

The poster didn't say it never happened before (they explicitly said it did in both of the paragraphs you chose not to quote, right?), but that it seems to be more common now.

 

[Fifth Element]

People play the game differently. Clearly some of them feel the statement is not a misrepresentation based on their experience.

Read it again: "it's fine if you don't think the DM should be anything but a cruise director..." This is specifically addressing other peoples' views, not their own. You don't get to say what other peoples' views are based on your own experience.

 

[Fifth Element]

In my experience, a lot of newer players don’t want to be challenged at all and do think of and treat the DM as their personal entertainment for an evening. I’ve had players insist on a long rest after taking one damage. Singular. As in one point of damage. I’ve had players rage quit in a vulgarity-laden tirade when their character was knocked to zero hp. Didn’t die. Just knocked out. I’ve had players insist I change every aspect of a 30-year-old+ homebrew world to suit their tens-of-thousands of word backstory. Players try to shoe-horn in all kinds of wild artifacts to the backstory of their 1st-level character with zero XP. The best so far is one player wanted a fragment of a Staff of the Magi…that had most of the powers intact. Players that simply decided they should get magic items and a heap of gold at the start of a game. And rage quit when called on it. Players honestly seem to want to start at 10-20 and only face 1st-level obstacles. If that.

Yep, there are some naughty word players out there. But it's always unlikely that your experience is the general one. And none of what you talk about here has anything to do with the system. You could play OD&D and get the same thing.

 

[pemerton]

The poster didn't say it never happened before (they explicitly said it did in both of the paragraphs you chose not to quote, right?), but that it seems to be more common now.

Those other paragraphs referred to the phenomenon occurring "sparingly" in past years, and not giving rise to "so many questions". My response is that I have never found it to occur only sparingly - I think it was ubiquitous at least in the 80s and 90s - and that it provoked many questions.

 

[Cadence]

Those other paragraphs referred to the phenomenon occurring "sparingly" in past years, and not giving rise to "so many questions". My response is that I have never found it to occur only sparingly - I think it was ubiquitous at least in the 80s and 90s - and that it provoked many questions.

So you've found no change in how often it occurs (in either direction)? Or was it more/less back when?

 

[Thomas Shey]

The poster didn't say it never happened before (they explicitly said it did in both of the paragraphs you chose not to quote, right?), but that it seems to be more common now.

Again, I saw plenty of it in the 70's. As noted, there are more D&D players out there now, and specifically more new ones than you've seen at any point in, well, a long long time, and in probably the other biggest surges, a big proportion came from wargaming at one point, and were returning players in another.

This still says nothing about any causation from the edition design.

(And in case anyone wants to say this is fanboy denialism, I don't like 5e at all. But this still seems a case of massive projection).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yep, there are some naughty word players out there. But it's always unlikely that your experience is the general one. And none of what you talk about here has anything to do with the system. You could play OD&D and get the same thing.

And as I can ascribe, people did.

 

[pemerton]

So you've found no change in how often it occurs (in either direction)? Or was it more/less back when?

My sense of it today is mostly drawn from what I read online, plus my exposure to 5e players from time to time. Like @Thomas Shey, I don't see any evidence that it is meaningfully different.

And there is nothing about 5e D&D that would make me think it should be different.

What I do notice is that (what I would tend to think of as) "weird" PC builds are more common - eg goblins, tabaxi, etc - but that's hardly a big deal and not an issue of player entitlement. I had a jackal-folk (Sibbicai) PC in my Rolemaster game back in 1992. (Monte Cook wrote them into RM before they turned up in Arcana Unearthed.)

And as I already posted, I took it for granted that players would play a role in locating their PCs and backstories within the shared gameworld back in the 80s.

 

[Hussar]

Heh. When I first started gaming on a vtt in the early 2000’s I literally went through over 100 players in about five years.

Most were fine. Many who dropped out were because of real life stuff. But the notable minority of asshats was a pretty constant stream. Everything you’ve seen at your 5e tables I saw back then.

That has never changed.

 

[Helldritch]

In my little corner if the world, I started to be recognize as a reference because I was defending our hobby in school board during the satanic panic period. I was often asked to go to other towns to "speak" to concerned people about our hobby and I was also running exhibit games so that they would better understand and accept the game for what it is, a game.

During BECMI, 1ed, 2ed, 3.xed, 4ed, I occasionally had questions about player management. Twice or thrice a year. And I had a lot of contacts even back then. I was involved in a lot of tournaments and exhibit games. So far, I have received more questions about player management than all other editions combined as these questions are almost every time we have our Friday Night Dungeons. It did not started immediately, it took about two years to really start and it rose in frequency a wee bit before the pandemic.

I wonder if YouTube style game shows are to blame though. They set the bar pretty high for new DMs to reach for. And these DMs allow a lot of leeway to their players. It not a bad thing per say, but it might explain some expectations that new players have. Unconsciously they might wish to start as the pro they see on YouTube thus creating backgrounds unsuitable to a DM's table and not understanding that what they see on the net is not necessarily the norm nor is it something that all DMs are ready to allow. They want to emulate what they watched but it is not necessarily what a DM wants to offer.

My first advice is often to have a session zero or at least a presentation of the DM's world and premises of his/her campaign before any character should be made. This usually correct the situation. But still... 5ed removed a few of the tools a DM had to adjust the game and the ones offered are optional, making them less than useful for inexperienced DMs. I wonder if we might not have a combination of factors here that make the problems so many new DMs have. (And some old one too it seems).