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

[Monayuris]

That right there. You (and several others in this thread) have been conflating "I want to play a certain character" with "I'm making unreasonable demands that the DM must cater to".

THEY. ARE. NOT. THE. SAME.

Wanting to play a paladin isn't an entitlement. It's a part of the rules. It's an option in the PHB. Having to gamble to play one isn't fun. That's not in the same park as "cater to my drow ranger clone with all 18s or I'm leaving!" Yet it's been stated several times that letting someone play a paladin who didn't legit roll a 17 Cha will only lead to them demanding to play half-dragon Balor necromancers with the wand of Orcus.

So let's be clear and reset all the goal posts. My position is as follows:

1. Not all character options need be allowed.
2. If you've allowed an option, I should be able to select it. Not gamble on the hope my next character might get the rolls needed to play it. If paladins are allowed by you and I want to play one, I should be able to. No questions asked.
3. The more choices about my character you pull out of my hands and put to fate, the less connection I have to them. It's one thing to randomly roll scores, it's another to roll them in order and have my class/race choices limited (or even forced) by them.
4. My options for weak or unfortunate characters shouldn't be suicide by kobold. That includes the fighter with 1 hp, the mage who only knows detect magic, affect normal fires and feather fall for spells, or the Thief whose high score is a 12.

Most of these concerns are about OS D&D, as 3e onward has mostly fixed them.

Never seen any issue with the paladin requirements.

Everyone I've played with rolled their stats hoping they could make paladin. When they fail to qualify, a collective groan is issued from the group and then they move on and pick a class. No one considered it unfair. The dice rolled as they did - not much you can do about that.

As far as weak or unfortunate characters... we always used max hit points, but even low stat characters... it was a challenge and a badge of honor and an expression of skill to get that weak character to survive. A mage with detect magic and 1 hp... bring it! It's part of the challenge and taking on that character adds to the challenge.

I would never suicide by kobold any character, I would fight tooth and nails to keep that character alive despite the weak stats because if that weak character makes 2nd level, it would be an accomplishment.

But I think this may be another change in the game. The game now is less about the intrinsic challenge. Back when we played as kids and teens, it was: roll up a character and try to keep it alive (when the rules of the game worked against us in every way). Succeeding and leveling up was a condition of beating the game.

The game has now become more of a way to express a character idea and so intrinsic challenge is less desirable. Success and leveling up is now more about developing and idealizing the character.

 

[Monayuris]

No, but if you insist on people playing as rolled, that's the obvious out, and I've known people who would keep doing it under your conditions until you got sick of it just to make a point.

Again, after your characterization in your second to previous post about anyone who doesn't want to take just anything the dice give them, my willingness to assume good faith on your part here has departed. You don't get to demonize people who don't want to do it your way and then try and claim the moral high ground.

I prefer roll the dice in order and take what you get. But I'm generally ok with "if you don't like that set of stats, reroll".

Point buy or even roll and assign creates so much hemming and hawing about where to optimally place stats that sometimes its just better to go with an organic straight roll.

Maybe a player rolls an interesting array and it might spawn some creativity... what to do with an 16 str, 16 int? Which also gets around some of that pigeon-holing that you find.

Point buy or assigning creates issues.

When you have point buy or assign stats you put your stats to optimize. If one wants a fighter, one puts their best stats in str, dex, and con. Then people complain that fighters are useless in social situations or don't have the int to be leaders. Optimization leads to all the issues that people have about fighters.

Instead if you roll down the line and end up with str 12, con 8, cha 14... maybe that's a fighter with a weakness but is destined for leadership. You would not have that fighter any other way since that 14 would go to con instead, and that 8 would end up in cha (and in so doing ruin an interesting role-playing opportunity for an optimized character and then complain that your character sucks in social situations).

 

[Azzy]

When you have point buy or assign stats you put your stats to optimize.

Or not. Or maybe you mean to include "optimizing" a character concept—like putting a 13 in the fighter's Cha for an entertaining gladiator or what not.

 

[Monayuris]

Or not. Or maybe you mean to include "optimizing" a character concept—like putting a 13 in the fighter's Cha for an entertaining gladiator or what not.

Even in 5e with 4d6 drop lowest... +1's in 5e are basically +0's. If you are using standard array and put a 13 in Cha, then one of your physical stats will be +0. Sure you can do that to create an interesting character and that's cool, but the rules of the game put a lot of pressure against doing so.

 

[Azzy]

Even in 5e with 4d6 drop lowest... +1's in 5e are basically +0's. If you are using standard array and put a 13 in Cha, then one of your physical stats will be +0. Sure you can do that to create an interesting character and that's cool, but the rules of the game put a lot of pressure against doing so.

Not everyone feels so compelled, is my point.

 

[MichaelSomething]

This forum isn't the only online place discussing this. Check out this twitter thread for takes many degrees hotter then you'll find here...

 

[Monayuris]

Not everyone feels so compelled, is my point.

Fair enough.

But we see tons of threads and complaints about martial classes being weak in social interactions and fighters being unable to rule because of low INT, or fighters being unable to solve traps or have input into exploration.

You can't go a week without a new thread about how bad fighters are at non-combat stuff.

The solution is obviously build fighters to be good at those things too, but at the expense of something else they could be good at in terms of combat. How many players would take that?

Players optimize and complain when their optimization doesn't help them in other areas.

 

[Minigiant]

Fair enough.

But we see tons of threads and complaints about martial classes being weak in social interactions and fighters being unable to rule because of low INT, or fighters being unable to solve traps or have input into exploration.

You can't go a week without a new thread about how bad fighters are at non-combat stuff.

The solution is obviously build fighters to be good at those things too, but at the expense of something else they could be good at in terms of combat. How many players would take that?

Players optimize and complain when their optimization doesn't help them in other areas.

The complaints are not that fighters must optimize and trade power from one place to gain power from somewhere else.

The complaints happen because the rate of return for tradeoffs for warriors classes are a lot worse that those for casters because the fighters are usually designed to use simple inflexible mechanics. As an edition ages, the warriors get more complex and the tradeoffs become more efficient. Then you get another complaint of why the warrior classes weren't made complex at the start.

This is usually due to Ability Score Dependency. In the olden days, every basic class was Single Ability Dependent (SAD) and the more powerful subclasses were Muliple Ability Dependent (MAD).

Then 3e realigned the classes and standardized the ability scores. So the warriors were MAD and spellcasters were SAD. And ability to adjust or increase the were lower.

Then 4e made every class have MAD and SAD options. As long as you rolled a good Prime, you can but your second highest score anywhere.

And in 5e, the game revert to 3e style SAD and MAD issues but not as drastic. Although technically every class is SAD, DEX and CON are too important for warrior classes to ignore without the DM playing favorities..

 

[Minigiant]

Even early on there was some wiggle away from that--you could trade at a loss points from one attribute to another to a limited degree. The whole "you'll be forced to get what and only what the rolls made possible" thing hasn't been a thing for literally decades anyway.

I was talking more about Multiple Abilty Score Dependency

In the old days a fighters needed STR (melee), DEX (missile), and CON (HP).
Whereas a caster worked if you just rolled good INT or WIS. Good DEX and CON were just nice.


A good fighter needed 2-3 good rolls. A good wizard needed 1 good roll.

 

[Ixal]

It became more combat centric, in the sense that all classes makes you a expert combatant while in 2E and before you had characters which were nit good in combat (and in 3E it was still possible to make a less combat character).
It adopted the video game holy trinity a bit by making rogues DPS.
For a time it tried to improve upon non-combat aspects of the game with skills, but has regressed again to a pure combat engine so compared to its beginning there was no change in the end.

And over time it became harder and harder to kill characters.