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

[overgeeked]

So in a book, you may be invested in a character, but they aren't your only connection to the story.

What else is, then?

 

[Vaalingrade]

What else is, then?

Most books either have a view point character who isn't going to die or multiple view point characters to distribute the focus.

Rare is the story written in first person where the main character dies and we suddenly go into third person omniscient.

 

[pemerton]

Try Lord of the Rings. Imagine Frodo and Sam as stoic, uncaring machines who never show a vulnerability. No one’s ever worried. They know they’re predestined to win without issue or struggle. They just win. No drama. No tension.

On top of what @Vaalingrade has posted about the role of character-identification in RPGing, notice that in LotR the protagonists ultimately succeed.

But things happen to them in the course of that success. Beregond finds himself banished from his home city. Legolas and Gimli become friends, completely changing their attitudes to one another's peoples and places. Merry and Pippin become warband leaders. Sam changes from gardener to statesman. And Frodo is unable to continue living on earth - only heaven can sooth his hurts.

Notice also that the story has beats. The success is not total. Gandalf fails to redeem Saruman. The fields of Rohan are burned. The party tree is cut down. The secret Elvish lands fade. Arwen (in the Appendix) is widowed.

It's straightforward to build a RPG that will emulate this sort of thing. (It wasn't always straightforward, but today all the technical design issues have been solved.) My favourite is Prince Valiant. I've also enjoyed LotR/MERP played using MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. I reckon it could also be done using The Green Knight, though I've only used that system for its pre-packaged scenario.

I think there are some obvious hurdles in the way of using D&D for this sort of RPGing, though: mostly that it tends to lean heavily on lethal combat as a source of tension, and that it has no straightforward way to put things like the cutting down of the party tree at stake in a manner that is independent of GM's say-so. I'm sure some individual tables have found various ways to deal with these hurdles.

Which brings me to this:

The 100gp starter quest mentioned is a good example, it's made even better by already having complaints that 100gp is insufficient in various editions when having enough gold actually mattered to the player characters rather than just a score ticker for the players to jot down.

<snip>

If the players think that it's not enough pay for the escort that is great because it means that there is a tangible reason they need more than 100gp & the gm can leverage that need to make some other better paying quest a more desirable choice for the players to take. That incentive & reward lever does not work if gold stops having any meaning after upgrading starter gear like in modern d&d.

<snip>

• GM: "The mayor offers you [a level appropriate reward not worth arguing over that shall be called Xgp] to investigate & deal with the [monster problem described moments earlier]"
• Alice: "You mentioned the mayor's office was lavish, I want to use my sleight of hand to steal the fancy lamp you described on the desk"
• GM: "You mean the desk the mayor is sitting at right now?"
• alice:"I rolled a 42 because he's flanked & that gives me advantage plus expertise because of my archetype thing"
• GM:"You know he's going to put 2&2 together when he notices the missing lamp right?"
• Alice: "doesn't matter I'll be gone by then & think we can take him if not"
• GM: *sighs & tells alice she steals the lamp so the game can move on
• Bob: "I want to persuade him to up that from Xgp to Xgp and a +1 weapon for all of us"
• GM: "roll persuade"
• bob:"eight!"
• GM:"the mayor kinda sighs & gestures from the dust ring where his lamp was to alice's bag offering even less with Ygp & a charitable inclusion of one +1 weapon of his choice to deal with the monsters while saying 'really?... are you for real?'..." The GM can't simply have the mayor toss the group out because he or she still has the rest of the session to fill.

One thing I notice about this is that it has nothing in common with LotR. The PCs in this post have no values, no families, nothing they care for. They are just gameplay avatars.

There's a find tradition of playing D&D with the PCs as gameplay avatars - KotB, White Plume Mountain, ToH, Ghost Tower of Inverness, Castle Amber, Isle of Dread, etc, etc all work like this. But you have to have buy-in from the players; and your challenges have to be compelling.

This episode with the mayor reminds me of things I've experienced - some mistakes I made in my first year or two of GMing, and things I've seen in RPG clubs and heard about on ENworld: the GM does not produce any compelling challenges, but gets upset when the players try and make their own!

There are pathways out of (what @Hussar has rightly identified as) the looming toxicity. But trying to beat the players around the head by withholding XP or threatening divine punishment isn't one of them.

PCs have the power durability & recovery of superman plus even fewer ties to the world than Batman. Those extremes afforded to PCs goes along with the freedom to adopt or shed all of the other baggage they each have whenever doing so is convenient.

<snip>

Trying to shoehorn the kind of ties Clark & Bruce have into d&d in any meaningful way is incredibly difficult to do within the rules framework of D&D so filling mechanical requirements need to step into their place except they are no longer requirements.

most players will bend over backwards to minimize what laughably few flaws they might have in the game, maximize the benefits their characters are already dripping with, and have as close to zero ties to the world as possible. They shoot for all the power of Superman with zero downsides...which is the single most boring character it's possible to play.

Actually, it's trivial to have D&D PCs with the sorts of ties to the world that characterise the protagonists of LotR, or Batman and Superman. In 5e D&D it is Backgrounds that are the obvious hook for this, but it can be done in AD&D. I know, because I've done it. I've also done it in Rolemaster, which is - in these particular respects - functionally equivalent to D&D.

The main obstacle I tend to hear about, to those sorts of tie, is that when players try and build in their ties, the GM shoots them down or ignores them.

A more subtle GM error is to treat harm-to-relationships as a framing device rather than a consequence of failure. Doing the first thing is an invitation to players to have their PCs turtle, and to have their future PCs be orphaned men-with-no-names. Doing the second thing will produce functional GMing, using (more-or-less) the Apocalypse World technique of soft-moves first, hard-moves as follow-ups on failure but not success; eg "You hear that Luthor is heading for Lois's place - but his giant robot is wreaking havoc on downtime Metropolis" - now the player has to (i) choose priorities, and (ii) see if they can succeed in their action declarations. If they tackle the robot, and they fail to take it down within a certain timeframe (there are all sorts of ways to run threat clocks like this - from do it within three rounds to the skill challenge ideas of 4e to the clocks of AW/DW to the Doom Pool in MHRP), only then is Lois kidnapped. Which then supports new soft moves (eg Lex ties her to his nuclear warhead) and new hard moves if more checks are failed.

Again, there are features of D&D that can get in the way of soft-move/hard-move pacing (except in 4e, which supports it right out of the box), but I'm sure there are workarounds - beginning with making the stakes of success or failure on action declarations clear before the dice are rolled.

But anyway, if players don't want to play connected PCs; if they want to play relatively boring gameworld avatars; then pull out Tales of the Yawning Portal and see how they go recovering the stolen weapons from Keraptis.

 

[Cadence]

Most books either have a view point character who isn't going to die or multiple view point characters to distribute the focus.

Why is the new one never going to leave either?

Many long running TV series have characters rotate out (sometimes for plot reasons, sometimes for contract or IRL problem ones), and the fans pick another character to focus on - maybe even the replacement one. That's maybe hard to guarantee with a TV show, but in the RPG you get to cast and script the replacement.

 

[overgeeked]

Most books either have a view point character who isn't going to die or multiple view point characters to distribute the focus.

There you go. Multiple viewpoint characters all engaging with the same continuing story that doesn’t end simply because one character is no longer the viewpoint character.

Now, apply that to D&D. The game isn’t about your character. The game is about the group. The story isn’t about your character. The story is about the group’s adventures. The game/story doesn’t end if or when your character dies. It continues on with or without you and your character. But the story is changed in your character’s passing. You as a player can engage with the story of the group and want to see how it plays out...by continuing to play using a different character, something cheesy like a brother or cousin, or a whole new character, or having your dead character raised.

But that’s the point, really. It’s not about your character. It’s about the group.

I mean, we literally get an example of this in Lord of the Rings. Boromir dies…and suddenly, his brother…with a similar name…suddenly becomes an important character.

 

[pemerton]

As an ADDENDUM to my post just upthread:

I think there is also an approach to RPGing - maybe more common among young adults?, but that's just conjecture and perhaps an unfair stereotype - where the PC is more than just a gameplay avatar, but isn't expected to fail or suffer in any unexpected way (and perhaps not at all). On this approach, the PC is a type of player-projection into the fiction, and if there is to be failure or suffering it should reflect the player's preconceived arc for the character.

The main issue D&D poses for this sort of play, I think, it's apparent reliance on dice. But a 5e GM who is willing to go along with the player has plenty of ways of compensating for dice rolls in their narration out-of-combat (basically, narrate success or failure as the arc, not the dice, demand, using the roll to colour that narration); in-combat, on the othere hand, this produces all the fudging threads and debates that are a genre unto themselves.

Of course, if the GM is hoping to run the players through their own arc then the conflict is obvious! I suspect that this is a relatively common cause of table explosions.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The 100gp starter quest mentioned is a good example, it's made even better by already having complaints that 100gp is insufficient in various editions when having enough gold actually mattered to the player characters rather than just a score ticker for the players to jot down.

Except I don't think in practice it even matters to the characters. If the stuff is still sitting in whatever bag they put it in three levels later, what shows it mattered to them? Because gold values are so out of the scope of any use for most characters in most incarnations of the game unless you can use them to, effectively, "buy power", that after the first couple of games its trivial. Look at the cost for, say, staying in a good inn for a year and the amount of gold in these things, and see how much they care. And that's been true all the way back to OD&D.

It's simple & it can fit a lot of obvious examples into it that don't need much in the way of supporting detail to convey an example made for purposes of discussion. If the players think that it's not enough pay for the escort that is great because it means that there is a tangible reason they need more than 100gp & the gm can leverage that need to make some other better paying quest a more desirable choice for the players to take. That incentive & reward lever does not work if gold stops having any meaning after upgrading starter gear like in modern d&d.

Then its rarely worked. As I noted, even back in OD&D it was, in practice, only a stand-in for getting experience. The players didn't give a damn about gold; they gave a damn about the experience it would give them.

That player to player self policing is important because the GM doesn't need to constantly stop the game for a talk about murderhoboism yet again or whatever every time someone gets an idea that might be unlikely to play out as well as they first thought it might. It's just not reasonable to expect the GM to choose between running a trainwreck created by a poor decision & stopping the game to engage in a discussion about murderhoboism or whatever when the GM needs to go into that talk virtually unarmed but modern d&d is structured to put the GM in just that position.

I completely disagree. If that's a problem, it needs to be worked out, not have a bandage slapped on it.

If that example isn't good for whatever reason there's another one below that touches on a completely different aspect of gameplay.



Speaking of d&d centric players tending to have a parochial view of solving problems as if they are the ones who can't find other ways that is completely unrelated to the system is a bit off base.

No, it really isn't. Because a number of those games have no more meaningful reward levels for players than you're complaining about. There's at least one whole genre where the only motivation for doing things other than purely in-game ones is experience, if that. Money is often either meaningless or tops off in its in-game effect early , quality gear has a low ceiling, and other things don't exist. Yet someone GMs get by running those without having metagame carrots to play with.

The idea that you have to have a bunch of carrots and sticks to motivate people is very much a case of people not being willing to talk to their players and go "What are you here to do?"

 

[pemerton]

There you go. Multiple viewpoint characters all engaging with the same continuing story that doesn’t end simply because one character is no longer the viewpoint character.

Now, apply that to D&D. The game isn’t about your character. The game is about the group. The story isn’t about your character. The story is about the group’s adventures. The game/story doesn’t end if or when your character dies. It continues on with or without you and your character. But the story is changed in your character’s passing. You as a player can engage with the story of the group and want to see how it plays out...by continuing to play using a different character, something cheesy like a brother or cousin, or a whole new character, or having your dead character raised.

But that’s the point, really. It’s not about your character. It’s about the group.

I mean, we literally get an example of this in Lord of the Rings. Boromir dies…and suddenly, his brother…with a similar name…suddenly becomes an important character.

I don't really get the obsession with characters dying. I don't recall any protagonist dying in the Earthsea trilogy. Conan gest crucified but doesn't die.

It's trivial to have high stakes, meaningful RPGing without death being on the table.

 

[overgeeked]

Yes, I know it’s trivial to hook PCs into the world. That’s not my issue.

But anyway, if players don't want to play connected PCs; if they want to play relatively boring gameworld avatars; then pull out Tales of the Yawning Portal and see how they go recovering the stolen weapons from Keraptis.

That’s my issue. I want characters who aren’t boring game pieces to move around in a faux boardgame style of play. Yet that’s what the majority of players offer up.

 

[overgeeked]

I don't really get the obsession with characters dying. I don't recall any protagonist dying in the Earthsea trilogy. Conan gest crucified but doesn't die.

It's trivial to have high stakes, meaningful RPGing without death being on the table.

If there’s no chance of death and the players make only invulnerable, uncaring, unconnected PCs…you’re playing a boardgame. And a rather boring one at that.