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

[Fifth Element]

I'm curious to compare the word count between the AD&D and 5e DMG.

That might be interesting, especially since the AD&D DMG probably has 40% more words than it needs to communicate what it was trying to communicate.

 

[Baron Opal II]

That might be interesting, especially since the AD&D DMG probably has 40% more words than it needs to communicate what it was trying to communicate.

True, his prose was florid. However, I think there were more subjects covered and in greater detail. That would take a certain amount of time and effort to look into.

 

[Fifth Element]

True, his prose was florid. However, I think there were more subjects covered and in greater detail. That would take a certain amount of time and effort to look into.

True, but given that the subjects covered included such things as a wandering prostitutes table, I don't think simply enumerating the number of subjects would be terribly informative either.

 

[Remathilis]

This seems like a larger mismatch in expectation, in that things are expected but that's not how the system agreed to works. In this case, if you're going to engage a random chance mechanism to determine what options you can select, selecting an option first and then engaging and becoming upset that the mechanism didn't provide your wants seems to be a bad match. I 100% agree, though, that this is exactly what is happening. This tells me that the expectations of play are not being well aligned to the process of play. There's three ways to fix this -- adjust expectations, adjust process, or compromise. This is the fundamental discussion -- some are arguing that the expectations should serve process, some that process should serve expectations, and some that there's movement needed for both. But what's happening is that the examples are being argued rather than the fundamental questions -- should process or expectation drive play?

I think a lot of people would answer one way but an examination of their play would reveal many instances of the other.

For me, I like to try new things. When I played BECMI just starting out, I played at different types of PCs even with 3d6 because most classes had low thresholds for entry. I also named these characters after X-Men if they even got named at all, so it wasn't the most serious of gaming.

A few years later, I got pulled into an AD&D 2e group and my perception changed. There were so many new classes and races to try. New ideas that spurred imagination. The idea you could play anything you want (as long as you are lucky enough to roll it) increasingly didn't sit well. I wanted to try a ranger or a paladin and role-play out those ideas, not get stuck with another fighter because I rolled a 16 and not 17. The chaffing lead to the cheating and eventually to us treating ability scores min as guidelines more than actual rules.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Ha!

Even so, I'm looking at things like maritime adventures, magic item manufacture, and the like. Some things don't have a lot of interest anymore, like henchmen and gaining followers at an arbitrary level. But I think there was more sections in greater detail overall.

I have to say my aged eyes find reading the current 5e books much easier.

 

[David Howery]

I think back in the day there was no minimum Strength to be a fighting-man in OD&D. Not that that was much consolation since your Encumbrance capacity was going to be in the tank (and that was before Greyhawk penalized hell out of you for those stats).

well, the experiment was under 1E rules, so all those minimums applied. I suppose it was good that it was just an experiment and not some DM who insisted on '3d6 in order'.....

 

[David Howery]

Only if you look at Gygax's florid writing specifically. B/X and BECMI were written in simple and clear language. Early AD&D was not.

I never owned/read those two, but I have the Holmes rulebook... and it seems to be written very clearly and understandable. But, of course, it only goes to level 3...

 

[Micah Sweet]

That might be what you are discussing, but it's not what we were discussing.

In 1e, an elf MUST have an 8 Charisma. (PHB). You have a cool idea for an elf wizard. You roll in SDCIWCh order and get 9, 14, 12, 15, 10, 6. You cannot be an elf per the RAW. Is that acceptable? For a number of people: no. The rolls I got shouldn't disqualify me from the race I wanted. Not for something as common as an elf. Now you as a DM might opt to allow me to adjust something. Perhaps I can ignore the racial minimum and play an awkward elf. Perhaps you'll allow me to switch scores, or arrange them to taste, or maybe just raise a 6 to an 8 since that's not like it's going to be power creep. Or you can put your foot down, scream RAW is RAW and demand I play something else other than my elf idea.

THAT'S what people are having a problem with. And it was an easy problem to fix since removing racial min/max doesn't seem to have broken the game except for some people still upset halflings can get as strong as half-orcs.

But that's the game they agreed to. If the DM wants to throw the player a bone so they can play an elf (I would), that perfectly fine, but they are not obligated to because the player rolled poorly. Asking for an exception is fine. Not accepting "no" for an answer (if that's what you get) is not.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To follow on this, although my comment holds as a general case, you could in fact make the argument that 3d6 in order is not actually fair due to the ability requirements of a paladin. The 1E PHB presents playing a paladin as an option. But if you do 3d6 in order, your chance of rolling a paladin is 1 in 1,062 characters due to the requirements of 12 STR, 9 INT, 13 WIS, 6 DEX, 9 CON and 17 CHA. You could certainly make an argument that it's unfair to suggest that playing a paladin is a possibility in the game when the chances of doing so are that low. If you have say four players in the game it would take 266 parties of adventurers to expect to have one paladin in game. Even if each party lasts only one game session, and you play a session every single week, it would take over 5 years of playing to expect there to be one paladin rolled up. Much more realistically a typical character would last multiple sessions - some few will even last dozens or even hundreds of sessions. But even if they last an average of only say three sessions, you're now looking at 15 years for there to be one paladin. If someone were to argue it's unfair that the book (and DM) claims a class is available as a PC but you could play the game for a dozen years and no one has been able to play one, I would be sympathetic to that argument.

Edit: Can you imagine rolling say 15 STR, 12 INT, 13 WIS, 5 DEX, 16 CON and 18 CHA and being forced to play a cleric because any character with less than 6 DEX has to be a cleric?

I can understand being disappointed, but paladins are supposed to be quite rare under those rules. It's very clear. If you don't like it, and your DM is unwilling to compromise, you are welcome to play any of the all other editions of D&D where this is less of an issue.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Tangent, but may be relevant...

Do not confuse probability with observed frequency. A given group of people does not generate a statistically relevant number of characters. The probability that any one character will be above, or below, the set point-buy level may be known, but the frequency is only guaranteed to match that over large numbers of characters. A typical group is very likely to defy that it in some way or other, due to the small number of characters generated.

So, while the odds are one way, the result can easily be one person getting repeatedly hosed or favored by this approach.

My perception on this may be biased because back when I was playing OD&D and RuneQuest (the only games we ever played extensively with random roll) there were interlocking groups of players and GMs and amidst them probably hundreds of characters were generated (in part because of the mortality level, in part because people were sometimes playing more than one character, and in part because they rotated them out). I'm not completely uneducated in probability and it would seem unlikely when you're talking about that many rolls that they wouldn't show at least noticable trends.

Which doesn't mean that an individual player couldn't still either end up hosed or kissed on the lips by the gods, of course. Aberrations are aberrations. But then, as I noted there were various techniques for working around that from outright cheating to getting annoying substandard characters killed at first opportunity.