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

[HammerMan]

This certainly underscores some of the differences in attitudes you see here and how value-laden terms make them out as badwrongfun.

it doesn't hurt that people can't ever compromise
(My interpretation of this or that rule is not playing by the book, me chooseing to use character skill over player skill means I don't rp, even my own opinion (labled twice that way in 1 post) got called out as 'don't use your head cannon)

everything is so super seriuse, and every rule not only has to be 100% RAW... but it has to follow the Interpretation of how it was written...

 

[Fifth Element]

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.

Anecdote aside - unfair is not necessarily equivalent to undesirable. If you know the rules before you roll and agree to them, it's hard to call it unfair. (Unless it's one player - let's call them the DM - who insists on using certain rules that no one else at the table wants to use). But you can still call it undesirable. You can still say it's not as fun, even if it's fair according to the rules. Those collective groans suggest that it was suboptimal for no one to be able to play a paladin.

 

[Thomas Shey]

She likes to be surprised, and work with what she gets. She also has near-Wheaton levels of bad dice luck.

That's where dicing within a point budget can work; if it exceeds the budget, you pull the attributes down, if it lands under it, you push it up. You still don't know what you're going to get, but it means you'll still land in the same range as people who aren't rolling, albeit not as efficiently.

 

[Fifth Element]

Exactly what obligation do I or any other GM have to act as life support for some Main Character Syndrome PC run by a player who refuses to use the chargen rules the GM has set for their table? If a player doesn't like the rules I set for a game they can find another table & I might even be able to point them in the direction of a GM with a table more suitable to their tastes.

This reads like "Why shouldn't I get to dictate everything at the table? Why should I care about what the other players in the game want to get out of the game? Don't they realize this is MY GAME?!?!?"

I submit that this is not a good approach to DMing, and never has been. You're playing a game with other people. Any time you're interacting with other people you should consider not only what you want out of the interaction, but what they want as well.

 

[Fifth Element]

Always nice when someone doesnt answer a question by answering a question.

Whenever possible, you should mentally append "IMO" to every statement you read on a message board. Depending on the language used in a particular comment, that's not always feasible. But it usually is feasible, and it certainly is in this specific case.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Big parts of that in most versions aren't attributes, though; they're lack of skills.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's room in the hobby in general for both approaches - randomly generated, non-randomly generated, etc. But given the gulf between the character styles the approaches entail, maybe there isn't enough room for them to exist comfortably the same table at the same time.

As I noted, you can have a compromise to some extent; use a pool of points and then let those who want to randomize randomize within that. What you can't get is a situation where the randomization is mandated and not mandated at the same time (or at least the random roll players are probably going to have to be understanding since at least some of the time they're going to land under those using build points (and the inverse, and how frequent will depend on how the point value is set up).

There's another issue that can run in tandem with this which has been brought up before; people's expectations about how a character should come out on the average. One person's "character that looks like typical ones in adventure fiction" is someone else's "ridiculous superhero", and the latter person's "regular everyman" character is someone else's "person who shouldn't be adventuring as a profession". That's actually at least as hard a problem to engage with, and while it often goes with the roll/not roll ethic, they aren't directly tied (you can have die schemes that push up the average, and point build range that enforces it).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Whenever possible, you should mentally append "IMO" to every statement you read on a message board. Depending on the language used in a particular comment, that's not always feasible. But it usually is feasible, and it certainly is in this specific case.

Yeah, there's also middle ground here. There's "this is my opinion", "this is objective truth", and "my experience suggests to me strongly that this is generally true, though its impossible to prove."

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was talking more about Multiple Abilty Score Dependency

In the old days a fighters needed STR (melee), DEX (missile), and CON (HP).

Well, really early on (pre-Greyhawk OD&D) they didn't need anything particular in anything but Strength because attributes had so little impact; all they really did if within your prime requisite was effect your experience (this was often true even after Greyhawk unless they were particularly high).

(Interesting fact I stumbled across while looking at the OD&D books yesterday I'd never realized; Men and Magic didn't even assume the players rolled their own characters; the phrasing suggests it assumed they were rolled by the GM)

Whereas a caster worked if you just rolled good INT or WIS. Good DEX and CON were just nice.

Though I'd argue that one attribute was more important for long-term play than those three were for a fighter. A fighter with middle-of-the-road attributes just hit a little worse, did a little less damage and had a little less hit points than one with good ones. A mage with a sub-par Int couldn't use higher level spells at all.

 

[billd91]

As I noted, you can have a compromise to some extent; use a pool of points and then let those who want to randomize randomize within that. What you can't get is a situation where the randomization is mandated and not mandated at the same time (or at least the random roll players are probably going to have to be understanding since at least some of the time they're going to land under those using build points (and the inverse, and how frequent will depend on how the point value is set up).

There's another issue that can run in tandem with this which has been brought up before; people's expectations about how a character should come out on the average. One person's "character that looks like typical ones in adventure fiction" is someone else's "ridiculous superhero", and the latter person's "regular everyman" character is someone else's "person who shouldn't be adventuring as a profession". That's actually at least as hard a problem to engage with, and while it often goes with the roll/not roll ethic, they aren't directly tied (you can have die schemes that push up the average, and point build range that enforces it).

There's definitely room to compromise around any proposed campaign as a whole while still having areas decisions are held firm. For example, I've always preferred rolling stats in D&D - partly because the values generated are independent of each other. So every D&D game I run (other than AL which has its own campaign rules) is rolled. But even in the days of 1e/2e, if someone wanted to play a character with pre-reqs and didn't make them with their rolls, we compromised. They assigned the stats as closely as they could get and then we just bumped them up to minimums for the class. They got the class they wanted, we didn't invoke the ugliness of dumping values to boost others.

And to your point about how people see characters (ridiculous superhero vs everyman), yeah, big differences there can suggest that the opposing views are just not compatible. Playing at the same table might not be in either player's best interests unless there's really no other game in town. And both are going to have to work to keep the peace.