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

[billd91]

A lot has changed over the decades that fit into the tone, theme, and aesthetic - some of it having to do with rules, some of it even having to do with the technology/lavishness of the products.

When I pull out my 1e AD&D materials, particularly the Players Handbook, a lot of the characters depicted in the black and white art (particularly by Trampier) look like treasure hunters of questionable integrity (the ultimate murder hoboes), explorers of old ruins that would fit in with the location in the Hobbit (Mirkwood, Goblintown, Laketown, Erebor) and Lord of the Rings (Moria). Very gritty, very risky, danger around every corner. And the rules fit in with that - relatively mundane characters where even spellcasting - which was powerful - had weird requirements or hard to understand and that may have very weird niche applicability.

With each edition since then, and even with later 1e, we saw a lot better production values, more color, more bright and fantastic locations. And we saw the influence of other story, theme, and tonal ideas - fantasy that wasn't just influenced by pulp or Thieves World, but also 1001 Arabian Nights, Kurosawa films, Shaw Brothers films, more mythology, weird punkish extraplanar locations that had more in common with Mos Eisley cantinas than back alley bars in Verbobonc. And, if anything, that's kept going into things like Eberron.

And rule changes about survivability have shifted tone and theme. It's a lot less about survival because there are more robust tools to enable survival. That helps longer and more variable narratives appear and develop more frequently than in the earlier editions.

 

[HammerMan]

D&D has become increasingly not medieval. Not that it was ever was historically accurate, but it has increasingly looked more and more like a Late Rennisance or even later. Firearms, rapiers, and far more technological advances. Enlightened government and economics. Dress that is far more modern than anything. Knights and kings and jesters are all MIA.

It's not necessarily a bad thing: I like Eberron and Ravenloft which are very not medieval, but the core game has really stopped feeling like the middle ages.

I would take this a step farther... it isn't medieval or renaissance it's fantasy. It just pulled back the limits more and more and made it HIGH fantasy

 

[Jer]

I'm not sure that you can separate rules shifts from tone shifts, though I'd argue that's because the rules shifts lag behind the tone shifts around how people are playing the game.

What I will say is that there's much less of a focus on "survival" than there was back when I first started playing and much more focus on "story". The classic adventures I remember from when I was younger were either "you're delving into a hostile environment to find treasure" or "you're trapped in a hostile environment and trying to survive" or both. I'm thinking of things like Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City as examples of each of those. The story was mostly focused on scrambling for resources and figuring out how to get more powerful so you could scramble for more resources.

Sometime around when the Companion set came out my perception of the game started to shift away from survival in a fantastic location towards more heroic action. The Master's set inclusion of Paths of Immortality cemented it. Even though the Dominion Rules and the War Machine rules sound like an attempt to scale up the "survival" focus to larger stakes, it has the feel of shifting goal (and hence story) of the game from "grubby adventurers trying to make a buck" into "grubby adventurers trying to start an empire" and then to "grubby adventurers working their way to godhood". The art also shifted right around that time - the new Metzner boxed sets came out with Larry Elmore art instead of Erol Otus art, and Elmore's style is a cleaner, more heroic fantasy than Otus's artwork presented.

But then in the 90s - post 2e - things shifted again and D&D became an amorphous system that could contain settings like Ravenloft and Planescape and Dark Sun and the Realms all of them were D&D. To the point where IMO 3rd edition tone and style absorbed all of those elements and set a tone that was an amalgamation of all of them (and more as it also pulled from other pop culture fantasy). And it's been keeping that kind of amorphous kitchen-sink tone to me ever since.

 

[Minigiant]

I would take this a step farther... it isn't medieval or renaissance it's fantasy. It just pulled back the limits more and more and made it HIGH fantasy

It went from swords and sorcery to high fantasy to heroic fantasy.

Modern D&D is Heroic Fantasy. The world is reflected under the assumption of being littered with amazing heroes and mythical monsters. Too advanced for Medieval and too full of amazing folk for Renaissance. Kinda born out of the idea that there most be tons of replacement PCs, NPCs. and monsters out there.

 

[CleverNickName]

Oh man, it has changed so much.

The math and other gaming mechanics have gotten smoother and more intuitive. The unified d20 mechanic replacing THAC0, thief abilities, save throw charts, etc., was probably the most important shift in this department. Then later, attunement slots and the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic replaced the endless "stacking bonuses" problem that bogged down the math. The focus shifted away from arithmetic, which made it more approachable (and enjoyable, imo).

And then the Internet happened, and made accessibility and collaboration a lot easier. Online publishing tools have made it easier to create and share materials for the hobby, find likeminded people to play with, and to find/purchase materials that would otherwise be unavailable in stores. Internet live-plays of the game became popular, and each one demonstrates the multiple ways that the game can be played and the kinds of people playing it.

Which brings me to the biggest change I can think of, how the customer base has gotten larger and broader. Growing up in the 1980s, D&D was largely unheard of or misunderstood, and it was mostly the hobby of bookish teenage boys in the suburbs. Now all of the "cool kids" are playing it, even A-list actors and millionaire athletes, and it's one of the leading games (of any kind) in the industry.

The future is looking bright indeed for D&D.

 

[Mannahnin]

1e-3e is a game about wizards. its a game about powerful spellcasters and the parties that form around them (Gandalf is the easiest example but I am sure people can name dozens)

I don't think 1E or 2E are games about wizards. They have enough limitations and weaknesses that the Wizard, Fighter and Cleric are all essential components. Fighters are more dependent on magic items than the caster classes are, but their offense is good, and they're definitely the toughest with their HP and saves, even before they get magic items to give them more options and tricks. 3E was the birth of the quadratic wizard (and Cleric) as spellcasters got many more options while simultaneously having most of their limitations removed or mitigated.

 

[LordEntrails]

How much of these changes that we each see differently are due to our own growth and changes and we have aged?

 

[Charlaquin]

Using movies (Not D&D brand specific but in feel)

Early D&D was like Red Sonja, Beastmaster, Conan, and especially, Conan the Destroyer.

Middle D&D more like Willow, lord of the rings, Dragonheart

Current D&D is like Your Highness, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones, Anime stuff (im not familiar with)

Future D&D new hasbro movie and franchise?

Current D&D definitely doesn’t feel like game of thrones to me. GoT is very grim and gritty and extremely low-magic (though the magic does get “higher” as the series progresses, it still manages to feel like a very rare and powerful thing.) D&D, in contrast, feels very vibrant and bight, and is very high magic. D&D currently feels more like World of Warcraft to me; the fantastical elements are normal parts of everyday life. Certainly it can be run and played differently (and I try to run it so myself), but I definitely get the impression that the implied setting is extremely high fantasy, high magic, low “realism,” Mos Eisley Cantina world.

 

[Charlaquin]

I would take this a step farther... it isn't medieval or renaissance it's fantasy. It just pulled back the limits more and more and made it HIGH fantasy

It’s not actual Italian Renaissance historical period, no, but to me it feels very Ren-faire. Somewhere you expect to see Arthurian knights, Age of Sail pirates, vikings, samurai, and steampunk characters all intermingling, and a good half of them are probably also elves, or fairies, or anthropomorphic animals.

 

[Stormonu]

I agree it's gone from where the DM is expected to have tight control of the game - via mechanics and narrative - to being very open about player input and story. It's no longer the DM's story being laid out via module that has to be defeated, it's the player's story and what happens to the individual characters.

Likewise, I've seen it go from the days of being a lifestyle to a past time - from something that consumed almost all your thought and everyday energy to something to do between other activies (such as movie binging, playing video games or just chatting on a forum). Or at least, that's what's happened to my life when it comes to this game.