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

[Micah Sweet]

Still disagree. The DM controls the reward of XP. That is the power of the PCs.

And there's nothing stopping the DM from boosting the monsters, throwing infinite dragons at the PCs, and playing the monsters as smart, thinking creatures who generally don't want to die...as long as that all applies to a given monster. Nothing stopping DMs from having flanking monsters or monsters fishing for advantage.

Agency is a weird one. To me, agency isn't the players being able to choose anything that's printed in an official D&D book. Agency is the player having the ability to effect the world their character exists in. If you use the illusion of choice, that destroys player agency. Railroading destroys player agency. Limiting character creation options does not.

5E seems to have two big things going for it. 1. It's where the players are. 2. Dis/advantage. Beyond those two, it's not drastically different from any other edition of D&D. Most of the same basic rules, same general ideas, though the particulars here and there are different. You could remove a few things, tweak a few things, and roughly replicate any older edition with a bit of work. Though admittedly, some of those differences are huge. Superhero healing, PC power scale, etc.

The problem is, a lot of that stuff immediately gets players to balk, claiming that now it's too hard.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I am always amazing at how the anemic healing of 5e is called 'superhero'.

Unless you both consider all HP meat and the long rest reset as 'healing' instead of a reset of a game resource like it actually is.

If you regain hit points, by any means, that's healing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

HP isn't wholly "not wounds" either. It's meant to be whatever the DM deems them to be, though there's the common explanation of "a combination of wounds, luck, stamina, and other things (even if it's made weird that that's the explanation considering you can apparently heal Luck using Cure Wounds).

Agreed. There are plenty of situations where physical contact has to have taken place for the attack to make any sense at all (poison being the most obvious example).

 

[theCourier]

Yeah. I'm firmly of the mindset that not every hit point and attack is equal, personally. That's just how I cope with the odd little nature of HP in relation to the game's "reality" though.

 

[tetrasodium]

The point about magic items is true though. It's a "lever" I guess the word is, that the DM doesn't really have anymore. Because magic items tend to be a "big deal" - particularly when you can only have 3 attuned items, it means that the DM has less ability to massage the power level of the group.

Another way of looking at it is that D&D now has a flatter power distribution between groups. In one group, you might be absolutely dripping in magic items, meaning your power level is much higher than another table which doesn't have a lot of items. Now, you aren't really ever supposed to be dripping in items. The whole 10+ magic items expectation of AD&D isn't there anymore.

You don't need 10+ anymore, one or two will do it because they will never get churn out due to an assumed zero magic items.

 

[Vaalingrade]

If you regain hit points, by any means, that's healing.

Now that strains believability.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Now that strains believability.

From a certain point of view.

 

[Ovinomancer]

There's been a few great posts tackling this that I fully agree with. "GM says" only goes so far before it becomes an unknowable game of calvin ball. The GM can not simply devise all of the changes out of the gate because the players are a moving target in ways that requires a GM to consider how their changes will collide with every single race/class/feat/spell/etc both on their own and combined through possible multiclassing. It goes from "GM says" to "mother may I" contingent entirely on the players having 100% buy in and not making any efforts to subvert or take advantage of any unexpected rough edges. A very experienced GM might be able to predict what to look for & include a long list of one off edge case tweaks along with the initial change, but newer & less experienced GMs will have more trouble doing so and face as very high bar of needing to explain why they have all of these little nerfs rather than working with Alice or Bob (openly or not) to make them more awesome. Even if the gm changes everything on the backend there is still the missing "my players are incentivized to seek out fancy magic items and paths to obtaining or crafting them" breadcrumb
trail type tool.


edit: all of the power that used to come from magic items (and then some extra in some cases) didn't go away, the players have it by default so the GM no longer has that room to work within unless they either add more dragons upon dragons in a tiresome loop or directly nerf the players to reclaim that space to operate within.

You've erected a strawman of Calvinball to say that there's no GM authority that works the same as 1e. Here's the thing, though, Calvinball absolutely existed in 1e. I ran into it first with 1e (which was the edition I started with, even though I owned a Red Box before that). Calvinball is not an example of badness unique at all to 5e vice 1e. That said, 5e absolutely relies on the GM to define how the game works at almost every moment of play (especially outside combat) because the game has been designed to do this. I mean, look at the 3 paths of play presented in the DMG and you can see 3 radically different games assumed by the same set of rules! So, no, it is not a coherent argument to suggest that 5e is either less GM friendly than prior editions or devolves to Calvinball. You haven't made your case.

As far are new GM's making mistakes that disrupt the game, holy cow man, 1e was NOT any better about this at all.

 

[Kannik]

HP isn't wholly "not wounds" either. It's meant to be whatever the DM deems them to be, though there's the common explanation of "a combination of wounds, luck, stamina, and other things (even if it's made weird that that's the explanation considering you can apparently heal Luck using Cure Wounds).

The explanation straight from AD&D 1e:

Each character has a varying number of hit points, just as monsters do. These hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors. A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being killed. let us suppose that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This is the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The same holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.

(A Cure spell might be replenishing fatigue and hence skill, a blessing of luck by supernatural powers channeled through the spell, and perhaps even direct magical force protection. But of course HP has always been intended to be a very abstract thing, hence its very meta/abstract name.)

 

[Ovinomancer]

5ed added no new tools to the DM. All the tools always were there. Even in 1ed. What was removed is the control of power spike that the DM had over the players. By giving so much to the characters, 5ed tough it claims to give DM power back, did the exact opposite. Whenever I give some DM advice to younger or less experienced DM, I always warn them about the risks of BA and Magic Items in 5ed. There are ways to add more to hit in 5ed and they are even more powerful than their counter part in earlier edition. Advantage/disadvantage is incredibly good as a tool, but players can pretty much fish for adv in almost every combat. Especially if you include flanking.

Oh, um, advantage/disadvantage was in 1e? CR was in 1e? Encounter budgets were in 1e? Short rests? Yes, no new tools for a GM to play with pacing and challenge at all.

No, the complaint you're making is that you can't run the exact same game you did back then with 5e. This is a complaint I don't really get someone making -- it's not the same game, man. Of course you can't blow the dust off your old 1e notebook and have it work exactly the same! You couldn't in 3e or 4e, either, and both of those ACTUALLY reduced GM authorities! Instead, there's this odd complaint that a new edition doesn't work exactly like the old edition in some way? News at 11, man.

Both yes and no. As an experienced DM, I know when to say no or how to control the flow of the game without destroying the "agency" but less experienced will often either be overwhelmed or completely neutralize player agencies. Both outcomes are not desirable. As in all things, balance is what works out best. But 5ed is poorly build to provide good advice on how to achieve that on the DM's end.

I do so love the experience GM canard. There are more new players, and new GMs, in 5e that ever before in any edition prior. It's clearly not that hard or that bad. 5e is the most popular RPG on the market. This doesn't mean it's best (and you will not catch me making that argument), but it does mean that it can't be fundamentally broken and hostile to new GMs in the way you're presenting or else it wouldn't be successful! Unless you're prepared to argue that D&D will be successful because of the trademark even if it's a lousy game? I'd very much like to see that argument made, but only out of a sense of schadenfreude.

And though I point out the weakness of 5ed. I love it! It is just that it could have been better with a bit more leeway on the DM's side. But that is the way it is. Someday, it might change.

Look, man, I have a rep about pointing out problems in 5e. I'm rather disliked by a pretty wide contingent of posters because I say blunt things about the 5e. This, though? Not biting.