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

[overgeeked]

Yes, of course the game has changed

Pizza and soda ====> pizza and beer.

Don't assume. We were rotten kids.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Because it doesn't feel rare if all your spotlight characters are "rare" things. In what way is magic rare, for example, if all the party are spellcasters?

Been my experience that most everyone was a caster, thanks to the janky multiclass rules that added an extra classes abilities at negligible cost.

Even if not, magic is never rare if it's player facing.

 

[Vaalingrade]

"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.

How does any of that fix the problem of my time being wasted on character I don't want to play just because 'risk reward' is something important to people who aren't me?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

OK, how else do you enforce rarity?

Let's take my current setting as an example, so I can't be accused of picking on anyone else.

In that setting Gnomes are a rather rare sight - there's only a few tens of thousands of them left worldwide, and many of those are widely scattered. Gnomes are, however, still a PC-playable species in my game. To reconcile the low odds of ever even meeting a Gnome with their PC-playable status, I want to somehow make them rare - but still available - as PCs, so as not to end up with a disproportionate number of them in adventuring parties.

It should be noted also that for a few classes Gnomes are a very optimal/powerful choice - their generally high Con, high Dex, and reasonable Int lends itself extremely well to low-hit-die back-line classes such as Thieves and Mages.

How would you mechanically enforce that rarity?

How does one "get good" at luck without cheating?

And if you actually mean get good at cheating, the door is that way...

In my case I would portray rarity via the NPCs and not worry about the PCs being a representative population.

There may only be 10k gnomes in the world but the gnomes tend to stick together, including when adventuring.


Kind of like how Harry Potter world has muggles as a major majority but the story follows wizards almost exclusively. See also Vampire the Masquerade.

 

[Micah Sweet]

How does any of that fix the problem of my time being wasted on character I don't want to play just because 'risk reward' is something important to people who aren't me?

Obviously if you don't enjoy that style of play...don't play that way. I don't see the issue here.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In my case I would portray rarity via the NPCs and not worry about the PCs being a representative population.

There may only be 10k gnomes in the world but the gnomes tend to stick together, including when adventuring.


Kind of like how Harry Potter world has muggles as a major majority but the story follows wizards almost exclusively. See also Vampire the Masquerade.

If the party is full of gnomes, then gnomes aren't rare.

And muggles never felt like the majority in Harry Potter, even if you know they're supposed to be. It's all about spotlight focus.

 

[payn]

In what way does that enforce rarity?

You enforce it with flavor. NPCs will be thrilled (or not) to meet a few gnomes out travelling. Have gnome like places on far ends of the map. Stories people tell and myths they talk about. Having a few gnomes in the party does not mean they are suddenly common.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You enforce it with flavor. NPCs will be thrilled (or not) to meet a few gnomes out travelling. Have gnome like places on far ends of the map. Stories people tell and myths they talk about. Having a few gnomes in the party does not mean they are suddenly common.

I can see where you're coming from. Personally I prefer the old way of showing these things, but your way would work too.

 

[billd91]

If the party is full of gnomes, then gnomes aren't rare.

Not rare in the party, no. But what if the players all want to be from the same gnomish community - or a family group?

I understand the desire to make sure something is rare in the campaign, but I really don't see that as being important for the party of adventurers. They're adventurers - they're already rare. Treating the PCs as a representative microcosm of the campaign, in my experience, can be conceptually problematic. The most common conceptual problem I've seen is people looking at the rules for PCs and then assuming that's how things work for everything in the campaign - specifically economics (the crafting and loot selling rules in various editions are NOT a general economic simulator) and the relative frequencies of fighters, thieves, clerics, and magic users in the campaign (needing a 9 in the prime requisite in AD&D may work for players, but that does NOT mean magic users should be as common as fighters in the campaign overall).

 

[JiffyPopTart]

If the party is full of gnomes, then gnomes aren't rare.

And muggles never felt like the majority in Harry Potter, even if you know they're supposed to be. It's all about spotlight focus.

There is a difference between rare in the world and rare in the story. Jedi are rare in the SW galaxy but ever present in the stories we see.

If you want gnomes rare in your world you can still have a party full of them in your story (see hobbits at the beginning of LotR). You can also have things not rare in the world but rare in the story (see humans in Gravity).

So the answer to the question about gnome rarity is to ask if you are talking world or story being told?

As said previously, have the gnomes in the entire history of the world never teamed up with each other on adventures? That's just odd for a normally procreated social being.