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

[tetrasodium]

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'.....

I'm not sure I'd call "how Lanefan actually runs his game" or "how a few others have /do run their game" an "experiment".

The point isn't that the DM is enforcing the RAW, it is that the RAW itself was bad. It is an arbitrary restriction that adds nothing to the fun and is personally nonsensical, but DMs will use it just because it's RAW. Which is why the RAW has to change. A Good DM should probably look at the situation and make an exception since it harms little and increases fun and goodwill. A lesser DM will enforce it because it's the Rules and try to justify not only its inclusion but its necessity.

The section of the rules you are referring to as "bad" RAW was mitigated by the presence of alternative attribute generation methods, I posted options five earlier. The "problem" goes away if some of the various options were used & goes back to the question of why you feel obligated to force a gm to accept a style of your choosing after accepting the initial "use x" & not getting the result you wanted.

It's only modern d&d with a set of rules (both RAW & effectively RAI) that tries to "force" one particular style. Modern d&d does that by omitting all other options & emptying the gm's toolbox in favor of a "rulings not rules" shaped IoU.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They didn't bother to build blackguards like PCs when they first showed up. They were just listed like monsters. I don't recall a huge amount of space being taken up for other NPC classes like shaman and the like, either.

Blackguards are from 3rd ed as a prestige class. Antipaladins appeared in Dragon Magazine as an NPC class. Are you talking about 5e? Because I am not.

And paladins are a PC class if you roll the prerequisites, so they belong in the PH. No matter how rare they are.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This does not address whether it's fair, and that was the entire point of the post. What you do in response to unfairness does not affect whether it's unfair in the first place.

It's fair if you understand and agree to it ahead of time.

 

[Lanefan]

The Hardline method was 3d6, in order. You had to meet the classes minimum as well as the minimums and maximums for your race. In 1e, if you rolled low enough on a score, you were FORCED you be a different class (ie, if your strength was a 3, you could only be a magic-user!) Top off with rolling for HP, rolling starting gold for gear and rolling to see what M-U spells you knew. RNG controlled most of your character creation choices. (I believe in 1e you also randomly rolled for a secondary skill. At least you got to choose your proficiencies when that came along). Even your height, weight and age was determined randomly. The most choices you had was name and alignment.

Now, I honestly don't know too many people who played to this extreme, but that was technically the default method.

Other than racial min-maxes, which we've dealt with in such a way as to shift the 3-18 bell curve to whatever range that race would have for that stat, this is largely how we've always done it and still do.

Roll stats (and rearrange) - check. (and yes, an extremely low stat can force a class)
Roll hit points - check.
Roll starting wealth for raw 1st-levels - check. (starting wealth for new higher-level types is also randomized but the DM deals with that)
Roll for spells known - check. (using the 1e DMG guidelines: one offensive, one defensive, one or two neutral, and Read Magic)
Roll for secondary skill - check*.
Roll for age, height, and weight - check*.

Also:

Roll for number of non-native languages known, and what they are - check*.
Roll for literacy - check. (though mages as a function of class are automatically literate in their native language)
Roll for "attributes and quirks"^ - check, though this one can be skipped if a player so desires.

* - for these you can choose from a close-to-average range (or for secondary skills and languages, from a list of basics) OR you can roll with the chance of getting something more extreme/interesting.

^ - this is a grab-bag table of things beneficial and baneful, everything from "snores loudly" to "is very short-sighted" to "has an extra finger on each hand" to "has high (or low) tolerance for [cold-heat-bright light]" to "can innately detect magic if very close to its source" to "gets seasick very easily", etc. It's completely optional but IME most players roll on this table for every PC they create.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's only modern d&d with a set of rules (both RAW & effectively RAI) that tries to "force" one particular style. Modern d&d does that by omitting all other options & emptying the gm's toolbox in favor of a "rulings not rules" shaped IoU.

I'm not sold that its any harder or unlikely for someone to houserule what they want than it was to use optional rules for this in the old days, especially when they were siloed off in the GM guide as was often the case. Both put a thumb on the scale for using the default rule.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's fair if you understand and agree to it ahead of time.

This still turns on there being a meaningful choice beyond "Don't play a game". Its not like in the old days that if you bailed out of one game using these rules the next one probably wasn't doing the same, and even now there are often practical limits on when and who you can game with. So "agree" is doing some pretty heavy lifting in this sentence.

 

[Lanefan]

(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)

That is interesting, and might represent the seed that grew into pre-gen characters being included in many old-school adventure modules.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This still turns on there being a meaningful choice beyond "Don't play a game". Its not like in the old days that if you bailed out of one game using these rules the next one probably wasn't doing the same, and even now there are often practical limits on when and who you can game with. So "agree" is doing some pretty heavy lifting in this sentence.

True. Back in the day, it was rough if you didn't like certain aspects of 1e or Basic. Good thing we have so many options now!

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm not sold that its any harder or unlikely for someone to houserule what they want than it was to use optional rules for this in the old days, especially when they were siloed off in the GM guide as was often the case. Both put a thumb on the scale for using the default rule.

There is no subjectivity or room for opinion on the oubjective provable fact that modern d&d omitted both the less powerful/more restrictive attribute generation methods as well as the kind of guidance that once accompanied them for how they influence the results.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Er...in 1e you'd be rolling in the proper SIWDCoCh order...

You cannot be an elf per the RAW. Is that acceptable? For a number of people: no.

We fixed this, though at cost of adding some complexity to char-gen for non-Humans, by developing charts that convert your 3-18 roll to whatever it would equate to on that race's bell curve.

So, if the Elf Charisma range is from 8-18 that's their bell curve for that stat, so if you've got a rolled 6 in Cha that bell curve adjustment would kick it up to about a 10 - but only in the eyes of non-Elves! Similarly, the Elf Strength range is 3-17, so anything higher than 10 in Strength will get knocked down a point.

Thus, having to meet stat requirements in order to play a species Goes Away.

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.

Removal of racial min-max is a terrible idea, meanwhile keeping it as it was is probably also a terrible idea. Bell curve adjustments for the win.