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

[GMforPowergamers]

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.

yeah, I am not happy with HP inflation, but your 'elemental' damage thing reminds me of what they did in 4e, and I miss... "as a bonus action this swords damage can be changed to cold"

 

[Helldritch]

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".

I got it too. It simply does not apply. Getting it and agreeing with are two birds of a kind. Of course, someone in your camp will scream at genius for your example, especially if they can't come with a good one themselves. But it does not change that your example is not on par with mine. Find something that works. Not something that appears to be working.

 

[Helldritch]

yeah, I am not happy with HP inflation, but your 'elemental' damage thing reminds me of what they did in 4e, and I miss... "as a bonus action this swords damage can be changed to cold"

This would have helped a lot with HP inflation.
Imagine a sword adding 2d6 fire damage or a wand of the warmage adding 1d6 damage of damage to spells. All classes could have benefited from these.

 

[Minigiant]

This would have helped a lot with HP inflation.
Imagine a sword adding 2d6 fire damage or a wand of the warmage adding 1d6 damage of damage to spells. All classes could have benefited from these.

Youmean the flame tongue that is already in 5e?

 

[Helldritch]

Youmean the flame tongue that is already in 5e?

Put any damage type. Be it 1, 2, 3 or even 4d6 of damage. Be it a dagger, an arrow, a war hammer, a dart or whatever. The flame tongue is indeed in 5ed. So are some others. The goal here, is to have varied damage.

 

[tetrasodium]

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?

Art least as it was described in thead&d 2e dmg. Not only is it a thing it's pretty much the norm for modern d&d. Pile the almost mandatory use of feats in a game not designed to consider them being used & the math that assumes no magic items The remote corners of Darksun's barest desert might be too high magic to avoid this. Sure the GM can engage in an endless game of escalating CR & customized monsters but most GM's are human rather than a transcendent being & eventually the wheels come off the system just as described.

 

[Micah Sweet]

5E doesn't assume you'll get magic items, so designs characters to have more stuff, powers, spells, abilities that are inherent to the character to compensate for the lack of magic items...then most DMs give out magic items anyway...because it's D&D...and about 1/3 of the DMG is magic items...so PCs are that much more powerful.

Unless you play an official 5e adventure. Then it does assume magic items.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I'm mostly arguing that it isn't necessarily power, and that often W wasn't three sets, but only one.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which was your style, not mine.

I'm just noting there was no particular reason for most NPCs to generate attributes unless you just wanted those to inform how you played them. Often they were too transient to matter, and when it got to things other than humanoids, there wasn't even consensus on what it'd mean.

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.

I'll just note even the limited number of OD&D adventures available rarely had any sort of attributes listed for most NPCs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

[Deleted because it was pointlessly surly.]