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

[Thomas Shey]

Comparing a life and death situation to a hobby style situation can not be compared.

Of course they can. You simply didn't like it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I think that's right. Here's a simple example of something I've seen at every single table since getting back into this in 2018: healing. Every party has had at least one character who can do a big bunch of healing, right? Yeppers, but then it has also happened that these parties eventually find their way to Ye Olde Magick Shoppe in which they immediately hunt down as many healing potions as they can stuff into their packs. Every party I've been in, this has happened. As best I can tell, no one even sees any unusual about it.

Given healing potions were one of the few things you could find to buy even early on, I'm not sure how this shows much has changed.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Because the OP was about how the game has changed over the decades, not just how character creation has changed, I’ll throw in a ( probably in vain) attempt to widen the thread:
Is Monty Haul still a thing in 5e?

good question. In general treasure has been deemphisied, so I wonder if anyone still playes that way. At the very least it must get an update in naming cause no 20 year old knows who monty hall is.

 

[Minigiant]

Monty Haul...
Haven't seen that ugly head in a while.

5ed pretty much assume no magic items which is a sad thing. I would have liked to see magic items with bonuses to damage in the form of fire, cold, electricity, necrotic, poison, arcane, radiant, physical and thunder. Instead of having creature with zounds of HP, make their AC a bit higher (especially boss type) and it would have been way better. Now, with bounded accuracy, giving a single +1 item can become problematic for the inexperienced DM (and even some experienced ones). A single plate +1 with a +1 shield can become problematic. AC 22, add shield of faith, warding bond, haste let's be crazy blur means AC 25 (30 if disadvantage does work). Not impossible to hit, but pretty much hard even for the average monsters.

You can still load upon magic items.

The issue is that the DMG and MM assumptions are based on no bonuses from magic items. If you add magic item bonuses, you must use stronger monsters.

It seems like a "Duh!" moment but most DMs don't get it.

So MH does not come from the items a character can have in 5ed. It comes from feats, multiclassing dips and the fact that many classes are charisma based allowing quite a few crazy combination.

In 1ed, Monty Haul was easy to remove. Simply use Mordenkainen Disjunction. Anti-magic shell and so on. A beholder with enough minions could become the downfall of MH characters too. But in 5ed? The power is built-in the character, not its items. Items are just a bonus.

agreed

5ed isn't MH. It is a new ball game. The OP Character. No wonder most campaigns never go higher than 11th level. Most DM can't handle the amount of power the PC have in a reasonable way.

DMs don't go past level 11 because its not balance and there is little content for it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The 1e DMG didnt come out until '79, so how were all those NPCs stats created before then?

Pulled out of people's butts, most likely. Honestly, I don't remember even ever listing an attribute for an NPC in the OD&D days; the only thing I'd generate for them was hit point; other than that I just assumed they were somewhere in the midrange and moved on.

 

[Helldritch]

Of course they can. You simply didn't like it.

Nope, it was simply illogical and you were simply comparing oranges with apple. Both are fruits. It is all they have in common and not enough to say they are the same. Which is exactly what your hyperbolic example is. Showing a bad example does not force another to like or hate it. It is simply bad. Find something else and we can go further. You don't like rolling, that much is evident. It is simply a preference. Neither is right or wrong.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You can still load upon magic items.

The issue is that the DMG and MM assumptions are based on no bonuses from magic items. If you add magic item bonuses, you must use stronger monsters.

It seems like a "Duh!" moment but most DMs don't get it.

You can always question how many of them even realize it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Nope, it was simply illogical and you were simply comparing oranges with apple. Both are fruits.

Given at least one other poster clearly got it, afraid I'm going to stick with my prior response. I'm not going to waste time watching someone ignore multiple examples because they "don't apply" or are "apples and oranges".

 

[Minigiant]

They usually were, but talking about them in the context of not being able to reach certain sorts of classes really understates it; often it was about extremely specific classes or attribute setups.



It wasn't just about power, however; sometimes it very much wasn't. But if you could only get a character you wanted by getting Specific Combination X, then die rolls could be a massive barrier between what you wanted whether it was a case of power or not. And something sort-of like it as in your examples wasn't going to get the job done.

But isn't that all due to locking character types behind specific sets of ability score thresholds and only having one or two options for the character type families?

If you wanted to play a W and the only options for a W are sets X,, set Y,and set Z, then you either get lucky to get X, Y, or Z, "ensure" you get X Y or Z, or be unhappy.

 

[Helldritch]

Pulled out of people's butts, most likely. Honestly, I don't remember even ever listing an attribute for an NPC in the OD&D days; the only thing I'd generate for them was hit point; other than that I just assumed they were somewhere in the midrange and moved on.

Which was your style, not mine.
My players really liked the stuff I was coming up with (read here homebrew). And quite a few of them were DMs in their own right and they often asked me for my adventures when it was over. If a few things in there were simply fallacies and made up stuff with no basis, I would have been crushed under criticism or a critical hit from a thrown array of dice. So everything I was coming up with had to be fleshed out when playing a homebrew adventure. Even the random encounters were fleshed out in advance.