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

[clearstream]

Gating things by luck favors the lucky or the dishonest. You might as well set up d100 tables that randomly determine your race, class and alignment.

I like my dice to determine the success of what I do in game, not what I play. I did years of that style; playing what the dice let me until I finally got lucky enough to roll what I wanted only to be shanked by a goblin two sessions later.

You may have fun with that play. More power to you. I have reached the point that this kind of play is dissociative; that isn't my character, it's a toon, a pawn, a game piece no more interesting than the top hat in Monopoly or Professor Plum in Clue. I have no attachment beyond an occasional amusing anecdote, and most of them don't have names (either they are forgotten to time or never got named in the first place).

I'm enjoying mechanisms where direction is set by player, but details are up to RNG.

For example, where player can ensure that say WIS is a strong score, but they do not say exactly how strong or precisely where other scores land.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Nobody is stopping you from rolling Barney Fife. Folks are just done with being forced to.

Plus, lets get real. Its more about others rolling Barney Fife. I suspect those that made it through the player funnel of AD&D have fond memories of rolling well and another player being saddled with a chump. It likely accounts for the weird machismo that runs rampant through the OSR.

 

[billd91]

Nobody is stopping you from rolling Barney Fife. Folks are just done with being forced to.

Interesting metaphor. Even more interesting when you know that, despite being inferior to Andy in virtually everything (lower stats), Barney Fife was the character played to the point that he generated 5 Emmys. So... maybe it's the way things play out and not what you start with that generates the memories.

Plus, Barney was a good son, bought his folks a septic tank.

 

[Remathilis]

If you like. You're the one saying you don't want randomness and chance to come into a game that revolves around randomness and chance.

I want my randomness and chance to begin when my character steps into the world. I want him to to have a fighting chance against the foes he faces. The dice gods might be fickle and he still might die, but I brought a fully capable character to the fight.

The first opponent in an RPG shouldn't be chargen. I shouldn't have to be lucky or dishonest to play the character I want. Random rolls during chargen should be for inspiration or indecision, not to tell you what to play.

We'll agree to disagree, but I see no inherent value in random chargen except to laugh at the toon that is soon going to meet his end in some hilarious fashion.

 

[payn]

Interesting metaphor. Even more interesting when you know that, despite being inferior to Andy in virtually everything (lower stats), Barney Fife was the character played to the point that he generated 5 Emmys. So... maybe it's the way things play out and not what you start with that generates the memories.

Plus, Barney was a good son, bought his folks a septic tank.

...and carried his bullets in his shirt pocket because he might shoot himself, which his profession was law enforcement. Have fun, but I'm done with it.

 

[overgeeked]

There's a difference between chance in play, and chance in creation, where a good or bad roll on a stat has a disproportionate weight to any individual roll afterwards in play.

Yes, and?

 

[tetrasodium]

The truth is, prior to 3e, D&D had crap support for higher power play; it needed a lot more work than TSR was willing to do to do so. D&D is not a game structure that easily supports multiple power levels, because there's too many moving parts, and those will always be built with some default power level in mind; they always have been. So doing the additional design work to seriously support multiple power levels has always been something that was at best done in a half-way sort of fashion (if you think in most older versions of D&D just starting with better attributes was going to make the bottom end seem significantly less drudgy, I have a bridge to sell you).

The proof is you can trivially sub in lower attributes as arrays or a point distribution in modern D&D versions, but would that satisfy the complaints? No, I'm betting it wouldn't in most cases, because those aren't the only design elements that influence this.

So, in practice, its back to the same thing: who's ox is being gored.
11

It's strange that you'd comment about how 3.x was the first that had something other than "crap" support for high power play as an option while we are discussing how modern d&d has made it the only supported style by removing things like the pointbuy options weaker starting levels & more difficult recovery 3.x had then jump to erven older editions to switch topics from how modern d&d has changed.

I quoted a few of the 8(one has 4 so technically 11) earlier from the 3.5 dmg pg169/170 methods for generating stats & wouldn't be surprised if the 3.0 dmg had the same or similar. When talking about prior editions of d&d, 3.5 is very much a prior edition. The importance of having a low baseline that the gm can choose to dial up is that it's easier to give players free & better stuff than it is to nerf or take it away. Back in the days of ad&d and 3.x it was common to see houserules & things that provided a higher powered start, those houserules could be used to stoke enthusiasm & player buyin for a game/campaign concept but you almost never see the same in reverse now because it's an extreme uphill battle in a system with too many other components designed to fight it(death saves, long/short rests & extreme recovery/etc).

Nobody is stopping you from rolling Barney Fife. Folks are just done with being forced to.

Nobody was stopping your GM from letting you roll a hero pointbuy an elite member of your race or start with an elite hero with notable experience & levels because those options were available to simply point at, those are the only options presented in modern d&d though.

Plus, lets get real. Its more about others rolling Barney Fife. I suspect those that made it through the player funnel of AD&D have fond memories of rolling well and another player being saddled with a chump. It likely accounts for the weird machismo that runs rampant through the OSR.

Not at all, a lot of the people on the other side of the discussion are mostly GMs. When players start with lower stats I as the GM have more room to bring them up through cool magic items they can be excited about over the course of the campaign. When level 1 is actually dangerous & it takes a few levels to really get to a point where a character is considered seasoned then I as the GM have those levels I can horsetrade for more enthusiastic buyin because players are discussing how I'm going to let them be awesome rather than endure a list of ways that I'm going to be nerfing them.

 

[Plane Sailing]

One of the changes in theme that I’ve noticed is the players place in the campaign world.

In OD&D, BEMCI, 1e, there was an implied advancement from being dungeon crawlers to becoming landholders with broader responsibilities. They didn’t give many rules around that beyond the rules for setting up castles, temples etc and attracting followers, but it assumed that there would be a bunch more role playing around that.

2e I wasn’t really around for, and can’t speak to. Interesting that it had settings like Birthright which might be considered the apotheosis of this strand.

3e sent the theme ‘back to the dungeon’ with a vengeance. Gone was any implication of growing to take a position in the wider world. 4e continued this trend and I’ve not read 5e fully but wouldn’t be surprised if that continued. Basically doing the same kind of thing all the time with challenges scale around you. Interestingly 4e did consider three ‘tiers’ of play, but I was disappointed that it seemed more about how weird your battlefield is, rather than doing different types of thing.


That’s not to say that people didn’t do campaign building with all versions of the rules; it’s just that the early sets of rules clearly marked “here was a different level of play”.

 

[overgeeked]

Plus, lets get real. Its more about others rolling Barney Fife. I suspect those that made it through the player funnel of AD&D have fond memories of rolling well and another player being saddled with a chump.

I have terrible dice luck. I've learned to roll with it and enjoy the ride. It is a game after all.

It likely accounts for the weird machismo that runs rampant through the OSR.

Some people like a challenge, others don't. There's a real sense of accomplishment from overcoming adversity, rather than hiding from it.

Again, to quote Worlds Without Number:

"While this kind of character fragility can be dismaying to players of many modern games, there's a point to it beyond mere bravado. A character who accomplishes grand adventures and survives horrible perils this way has actually accomplished something difficult. There were no plot points in his favor, no narrative tweaks to ensure his survival, and no cushion of fate to keep him from being pulped by a bad choice.

The player made a lot of very good choices, picked the right battles to fight, and made decisions that were objectively wise if they've managed to get this far, and they've done it while absorbing the inevitable amount of bad luck that honest dice would have thrown at them. There's a genuine feeling of pride and accomplishment that comes from bringing a hero that far. The PCs that didn't make it are just proof that the game wasn't rigged in their favor."

Winning, getting far, or beating a game rigged in your favor isn't something you did because of skill or even persistence or luck. It's something the game handed you. Saying you had a character start at 1st-level (or 0-level) and get to 13th level in an old-school game actually means something. Some people enjoy playing Dark Souls or Darkest Dungeon, others don't. Some think Sims is too hard or Civilization on settler is just too much. It takes all kinds. Everyone has their preferences.

I want my randomness and chance to begin when my character steps into the world. I want him to to have a fighting chance against the foes he faces. The dice gods might be fickle and he still might die, but I brought a fully capable character to the fight.

The first opponent in an RPG shouldn't be chargen. I shouldn't have to be lucky or dishonest to play the character I want. Random rolls during chargen should be for inspiration or indecision, not to tell you what to play.

We'll agree to disagree, but I see no inherent value in random chargen except to laugh at the toon that is soon going to meet his end in some hilarious fashion.

You step into the game world at character creation, not after it. Character creation is literally how you step into the game world.

You don't see the point unless it's mapped out beforehand, I don't see the point if it's mapped out beforehand. Shrug.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Yes, and?

Like I said, why not up the stakes. Let them roll for what type of attack/save/skill check die they get. Some guys get stuck rolling d6 for the entire game for everything, others get 2d20. What, aren't you MAN ENUFF for the challenge?!