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

[Helldritch]

By that do you mean the “slow natural healing” variant or something else?

Are you using gritty realism to do that?

Seems like it would just force the five-minute work day unless there’s constant time pressure for everything.

Simply no healing on rest. You must spend HD if you want to heal. No HD left? No healing on rest.

I use my own variant of gritty realism. Short rest is 10 minutes, but I limit them to two. No amount of additional rests will let you replenish your short rest abilities. Same with long rest. You need to have 5-6 encounters before a long rest brings you any benefits. A long rest is 8 hours, but as long as you do not have 5-6 encounters, no amount or number of long rest will let you recover your abilities.

This help both for the narrative and the logic. Having a short rest last a day is too long and a long rest last a week breaks our sense of versilitude. Blocking both short and long rests this way keeps things at a logical level and a difficulty close to the gritty realism but still feels heroic enough to encourage players to do heroic style campaign in which, though the danger is high the feeling of being heroes is still present.

 

[HammerMan]

Simply no healing on rest. You must spend HD if you want to heal. No HD left? No healing on rest.

I use my own variant of gritty realism. Shirt rest is 10 minutes, but I limit them to two. No amount of additional rests will let you replenish your short rest abilities. Same with long rest. You need to have 5-6 encounters before a long rest brings you any benefits. A long rest is 8 hours, but as long as you do not have 5-6 encounters, no amount or number of long rest will let you recover your abilities.

this may be something that is off topic but I have to say I have(as both player and DM) played around ALOT with the rest mechanic, and found that it changes some dynamic... but it still feels like D&D. So everything else being equal changing by rest amount works well.

 

[tetrasodium]

Some evolutions are good. This is called evolution. When an evolution is not good, it is called devolution. Both terms are in the dictionary.

What I find a devolution might be an evolution for you. That is perfectly valid. But read on further and you will notice that there was some devolution in 5ed.

Take the feats for example. They were introduced in 3ed and kept expanding. 4ed added and modified some and Pathfinder fully embraced them. 5ed? It not only reduced them quite substantially in numbers, it made them an optional rule! Same with flanking and a few other. Where the number of rules and situations were more and more quantified in the evolution of D&D (just look at the amount of skills in 3ed....). Some devolution can be seem as an expungination of unneeded rules. An unneeded rules are often in the eye of the beholder (or edition creator in this case) only.

I'd add that the attempts to remove & optionalize the inclusion of those elements rather than robustly build them in the core with an optional removal is objectively a devolution. It's easy to remove or ignore given rules along with any edge cases that would have hooked onto them without needing to do anything extra to keep things running but when those rules are complex structural ones that should be feathered into many other aspects of the game like individual abilities magic items & so on those structures need to be in place in the core to optionally add them back in.

 

[HammerMan]

Some evolutions are good. This is called evolution. When an evolution is not good, it is called devolution. Both terms are in the dictionary.

interesting... I never knew that evolution had to be a positive. Now the idea of good/bad being subjective weirds me out a bit on how that works.

 

[Guest 7034872]

interesting... I never knew that evolution had to be a positive. Now the idea of good/bad being subjective weirds me out a bit on how that works.

It doesn't. The terms "evolution" and "devolution" only refer to speciation toward or away from greater complexity, not toward or away from anything like superiority.

 

[Umbran]

Some evolutions are good. This is called evolution. When an evolution is not good, it is called devolution. Both terms are in the dictionary.

It is not a term used in biology. That it is in the dictionary tells us that it is used. It does not tell us that its use is good.

The allusion to the natural process is false - creatures do not "devolve" in nature. Attaching the connotations of the natural process falsely grants rhetorical weight the point hasn't earned, and creates misunderstanding when people assume the natural process actually applies.

There have been changes you may like or don't like. You don't need the connotations beyond that.

 

[overgeeked]

Simply no healing on rest. You must spend HD if you want to heal. No HD left? No healing on rest.

I use my own variant of gritty realism. Shirt rest is 10 minutes, but I limit them to two. No amount of additional rests will let you replenish your short rest abilities. Same with long rest. You need to have 5-6 encounters before a long rest brings you any benefits. A long rest is 8 hours, but as long as you do not have 5-6 encounters, no amount or number of long rest will let you recover your abilities.

This help both for the narrative and the logic. Having a short rest last a day is too long and a long rest last a week breaks our sense of versilitude. Blocking both short and long rests this way keeps things at a logical level and a difficulty close to the gritty realism but still feels heroic enough to encourage players to do heroic style campaign in which, though the danger is high the feeling of being heroes is still present.

Ah. So completely dive into the RPG as game side and disconnect rests from anything like in-fiction logic. If that works for you, awesome.

 

[Helldritch]

It is not a term used in biology. That it is in the dictionary tells us that it is used. It does not tell us that its use is good.

The allusion to the natural process is false - creatures do not "devolve" in nature. Attaching the connotations of the natural process falsely grants rhetorical weight the point hasn't earned, and creates misunderstanding when people assume the natural process actually applies.

There have been changes you may like or don't like. You don't need the connotations beyond that.

Call it regressive evolution of you want. The results and conclusions are still the same. Whether you like them or not changes nothing. Some of the evolutions of D&D were removed or toned down. Arguing on the semantic gives nothing to further the discussion as you so often say. The intention conveyed by the word stays the same.

Edit:" though the reduction of the number of skill is a regressive evolution, I was all for it. It maybe a positive change in my book. But an evolution in gaming (more skills) was devolved into less skills."

 

[Helldritch]

Ah. So completely dive into the RPG as game side and disconnect rests from anything like in-fiction logic. If that works for you, awesome.

Actually, it is the reverse. It was to prevent zounds of short and long rests and to prevent the 5mwd as a bonus effect.

 

[billd91]

Really? I’ve found almost the exact opposite. 5E is better at this than 3X and 4E, but there’s still heaps more complexity in character creation than older editions and the basic rules are far more detailed and complicated.

Compared to what? Basic? Maybe. Compared to AD&D 1e, not a chance.