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

[overgeeked]

I'm not sure why you feel the need to keep telling me that my bad experience with old school DnD fighters is wrong. It's my experience.

Someone asked for an example of a game where we felt like dirt farmer cannon fodder at low levels and how long ago we experienced it so I gave them a data point.

My table is a group of friends who have been playing together for just under 20 years now. Nobody is a jerk. The sour experience is a combination of the Harn setting (dirt farmer starting characters) with built in limitations of a 1st level fighter in the RC.

I have not at any point said RC is bad. I have not said fighters are bad. I have only said I won't play a fighter from the RC because I find it's lack of interesting mechanical abilities to be off-putting.

There is no need for you to pop in and defend the RC against a single person's opinion of a single class in the game.

I’m not telling you it’s wrong. I’m pointing out that there’s a bit more to it that you left out.

You commented that you hated the experience of rolling characters because you rolled a dirt-poor homeless character. Then revealed that two other players rolled well, but were stingy. If you don’t like rolling, cool. And I’m not talking about your experiences with fighters. Your complaint about a bad experience from random character gen wasn’t just because it was random…it was a bad time for you because you rolled poorly, and someone else rolled well, and they rubbed it in your face by making your character sleep in the street.

That’s way more of a “those players are jerks” thing than a “randomness sucks” thing.

 

[Lanefan]

This is an incredibly presumptuous thing to say. Beyond presumptuous. Thinking you understand another person's life to the degree that you can make this statement is indefensible.

"You" in the general sense, as in (almost) everyone has the time should they choose to.

Sure, people have to work and sleep and eat and so forth, but there's always some amount of time not devoted to these things and the choice then becomes whether to give that time to gaming or to sailboat racing or to beer-league ball or to arts and crafts or to travel or to whatever else.

And I'm by no means suggesting that ALL of one's spare time should go to gaming! What I am saying is that giving gaming, say, 5 hours a week rather than 3 hours every two weeks is quite likely to result in a better gaming experience if only because there's that much less in-session time pressure and sense of having to get things done right now.

 

[Lanefan]

Don't think that wasn't a train of thought in some old-school mindsets at the time. In DragonQuest, you had to roll if you wanted to play a nonhuman; you got three tries (and different nonhumans had different chances) and if you failed all three a human was what you'd be.

You'd probably get someone claiming it was because humans were supposed to be more common (and I get it can sometimes feel like the party is a traveling circus when their demographics are completely off from the population they're adventuring in), but I suspect strongly as much of it had to do with the fact the DQ nonhumans all were flatout better than a human overall, so they decided gating that with randomness was the way to go. Because adding a permanent benefit to the lucky or those who can cheat is somehow good.

Gating the unusual behind dice rolls is fine.

And yes, luck sometimes brings benefits. That's what luck is.

Cheating, however, brings a quick trip out the door - once.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

In other words, roll stats and rearrange.

 

[billd91]

He is being condescending, though.

Yeah, and so was Fifth Element. No wonder Willie the Duck's discouraged.

 

[payn]

I’m not telling you it’s wrong. I’m pointing out that there’s a bit more to it that you left out.

You commented that you hated the experience of rolling characters because you rolled a dirt-poor homeless character. Then revealed that two other players rolled well, but were stingy. If you don’t like rolling, cool. And I’m not talking about your experiences with fighters. Your complaint about a bad experience from random character gen wasn’t just because it was random…it was a bad time for you because you rolled poorly, and someone else rolled well, and they rubbed it in your face by making your character sleep in the street.

That’s way more of a “those players are jerks” thing than a “randomness sucks” thing.

Players shouldn't have to bail out the scrub or rely on GM golden showers to balance things out. Thats some real Oberoni baloney.

 

[Lanefan]

We had 1 character with about 200gp (they found a gem while thieving). 1 character was OK wealth (they rolled well for starting GP), and two destitute sleeping in the ground characters.

Yeah, that's a pretty impoverished group. Were I there I'd sooner or later have hit a point of "eff it" and tried taking on some encounters just to see if any treasure could be had by doing so.

I take it pooling and sharing party treasure wasn't a thing, if the Thief got to keep the gem?

But this takes me back to why I don't like fighters in early editions. The rogue and wizard had things they could do outside of combat to help themselves without having to face instant death at the hands of a wolf/kobold/goblin/bandit. In order for my character to contribute I HAD to expose myself to be one-shotted or just sling and run away and be relativy safe.

That's the lot of low-level Fighters. Missile weapons are your friend provided the party can keep a distance from their foes.

That said, I've found the overall lethality rates among low-level characters in my games are generally pretty even among the class groups (warrior-mage-cleric-rogue) though there's more variance by individual class: at the bad end are Cavaliers, who tend to drop like flies; but at the other end for some reason - probably sheer luck and a small sample size - Necromancers have shown as being nigh-unkillable.

 

[billd91]

Players shouldn't have to bail out the scrub or rely on GM golden showers to balance things out. Thats some real Oberoni baloney.

I'm SO not playing with you...

 

[Lanefan]

Players shouldn't have to bail out the scrub or rely on GM golden showers to balance things out. Thats some real Oberoni baloney.

They shouldn't have to rely on GM showers but wouldn't a party made up of Good characters tend to want to bail each other out, at least to some extent, in the name of party unity and collective strengthening? OK, the Thief scooped a 200 g.p. gem - let's use that money for decent room and board and better equipment now for all of us, and make a note that somewhere down the road we collectively owe that Thief a debt.

Now if the party are more of an all-for-me what's-mine-is-mine bent then sure, I get it: finders keepers and all that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No. It just gimps them to allow natural selection (aka death by kobold) to happen. It delays the inevitable.

Which is why after a while I saw a fair number of people just swordbush characters they considered inadequate.