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

[Lanefan]

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.

Despite the promises made during playtest that said we would be able to make it into a pretty good facsimile of any prior edition...

 

[Lanefan]

One can have a wound of the spirit, I suppose.

Just pointing out that the game's official rules don't use the word 'healing' so there's no need for some weird crisis over "How is luck healed?" It's not that game. Never has been.

If the official rules don't use the word "heal(ing)" then what has the Heal spell been renamed as?

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

PRO: 5ed is a very good balance between ruling and roling and it is a very robust baseline to build homebrewed worlds.
CONS: Inflation of weird and fantasy elements. Less wide in embracing different customers age. More focused on social interaction. Generally watered. For me it has lost all the disturbing aspects that made it intriguing. Decisively switched from Vance/Tolkien to Rowlings/Sanderson.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

D&D began to reabsorb the genre and media that broke off from it and changed.

What fantasy was changed and when the fans of new fantasy came to D&D, D&D had to change with match the different audience.

Less medieval. Less European. PCs were not typical of their race and class. More definition of higher levels. More exploration of the parts talked about but not visited or discussed.

Or in simple terms. The PCs and special monsters used to be exceptions to the normal world . Now what was exception is the norm. PCs are now exceptions to the exceptions. Before there were 10 paladins. Now there are 10 factions of 1,000 paladins, each with their own oaths.

your and many other posts in this thread make me thing of only one word: INFLATION

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

But it does not mean that it is a bad reference. The witcher isn't as high fantasy as many other reference and yet, it works quite well. In fact, it works wonderfully great!

because is Vance an Lieber-like. It is a matter of fantasy versus real elements. You have to balance. For being really immersive it has to be as realistic as possible, with some sparse elements of fantasy inside. Fantasy elements are the weird and funny part but realistic elements are the foundations of your world that make it solid and credible.

 

[Hussar]

Despite the promises made during playtest that said we would be able to make it into a pretty good facsimile of any prior edition...

Dude, you feel lied to? I'm a 4e fan. Welcome to my club.

 

[Hussar]

because is Vance an Lieber-like. It is a matter of fantasy versus real elements. You have to balance. For being really immersive it has to be as realistic as possible, with some sparse elements of fantasy inside. Fantasy elements are the weird and funny part but realistic elements are the foundations of your world that make it solid and credible.

Yeah... no.

I'll take my fantasy worlds over the boring retreads of 20th century fantasy thanks. Give me China Mieville, Stephen Erikson or Glen Cook or Terry Pratchett. "Worlds that are just like really piss poor historical reenactments with a thin veneer of magic that don't make any sense" is not what I'm interested anymore.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yes, several posts have asserted this. @Hussar does the best job of it above, but that argument is "well, I could increase party power by giving out magic items and then decrease it later by destroying them." 5e doesn't use that method, but offers much the same abilities through much more open and functional encounter math so that the GM can better balance things. Also, open math allows for better monster creation understanding. The tools moved, they didn't become less. Sure, you can't yo-yo magic items at a whim as GM, but the need you're citing for doing so is provided by other tools. If you can't adjust, the problem isn't in the tools, but that you want to play older edition with newer edition. They are different games and do things differently. Expecting the same tools to address problems that have moved seems contraindicated.

This is an odd argument. One, the GM's friend didn't stack for multiple instances. Two, bonus types wasn't a GM's tool, it's was an annoying system development of 3.x, which was entirely player facing and gameable by players -- not GMs. So the GM's friend (and not bonus types) are the thing for comparison. GM's friend was a small, often pointless addition to 3.x. This is because the skill check was most likely either going to crush the DC because it was focused or be so far from it because it wasn't focused that +2 wouldn't help. I ran entire games of 3.x where I didn't even bother using it because it didn't really matter. Dis/advantage usually matters, or matters much more often than the GM's friend of 3.x ever did. It does it differently, and the complaint it's either there or not has some validity, but not in showcasing that it isn't a new, effective tool for the GM. It is an effective tool, and one I find far more useful than the GM's friend (again, because quite often the GM's friend just did not matter at all).

If the GM isn't following the expectation of the game, then the GM is not playing the game as presented. This is always open -- you can make stuff up and go against expectation in any game. Why this is considered a strength of prior editions I'm not sure -- "hey, Bob, just ignore stuff and do your own thing!" "Thanks, Fred, this makes this edition so much better now that I'm ignoring things. It's the bestest at doing things because I ignore it and do what I want." "I know, Bob, such good design!"

The gm was not forbidden from making use of the GM's friend* & there were even examples in the dmg of it being used for penalties that make things more difficult based on the fiction of the gameplay described. Outside of specific abilities of characters & magic (items/spells) pretty much anything a player might want to do with it depended entirely on the GM deciding a bonus type and the GM deciding if that action would give anything at all, that's hardly "entirely player facing". It absolutely stacked if the bonus types were different, if you had two of the same bonus type & they were not circumstance bonuses they tended to not stack. That sort of simplification to empty the GM's toolbox of even optional tools in favor of PCs that just need their tour guide to provide life support for The Main Character is a symptom of the same shift thatthe GM not being able to make much use of magic items to affect balance & dangle (dis)incentives embodies.

"encounter math" through CRs has been a thing for a few editions with some of those editions still having room for substantial GM influence through magic items & gear, 5e may have tweaked it, but it's certainly not a new tool added to a GM's toolbox.

* edit: Yes it didn't exist prior to 3.x, but I never claimed otherwise

 

[Hussar]

The gm was not forbidden from making use of the GM's friend & there were even examples in the dmg of it being used for penalties that make things more difficult based on the fiction of the gameplay described. Outside of specific abilities of characters & magic (items/spells) pretty much anything a player might want to do with it depended entirely on the GM deciding a bonus type and the GM deciding if that action would give anything at all, that's hardly "entirely player facing". It absolutely stacked if the bonus types were different, if you had two of the same bonus type & they were not circumstance bonuses they tended to not stack. That sort of simplification to empty the GM's toolbox of even optional tools in favor of PCs that just need their tour guide to provide life support for The Main Character is a symptom of the same shift thatthe GM not being able to make much use of magic items to affect balance & dangle (dis)incentives embodies.

"encounter math" through CRs has been a thing for a few editions with some of those editions still having room for substantial GM influence through magic items & gear, 5e may have tweaked it, but it's certainly not a new tool added to a GM's toolbox.

Depends on what you mean.

Both "The DM's Friend" and CR don't exist in the game before 3e. And 3e is where you see a HUGE shift in where the DM's authority lies. Pre-3e, the DM held so much authority over virtually every aspect of play. How far can you jump? Well, that's a DM's call. Once 3e hits, the rules take up a massive amount of that. The obvious influence of Role Master on 3e is pretty clear. Where people get it wrong is they say that DM's lost authority to the players. That's not what happened. DM's lost authority to the rules.

Now, 5e has walked that back somewhat, but, nowhere near to the degree that AD&D had. 5e is still most definitely a d20 game and and that shows. The rules, while certainly less comprehensive than we saw in 3e or 4e, are still way more comprehensive than AD&D.

So, yeah, while CR and the DM's Friend aren't entirely new ideas, they certainly aren't old ones either. They came into the game at about the halfway point and were seen as a pretty significant departure from what came before.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

Yeah... no.

I'll take my fantasy worlds over the boring retreads of 20th century fantasy thanks. Give me China Mieville, Stephen Erikson or Glen Cook or Terry Pratchett. "Worlds that are just like really piss poor historical reenactments with a thin veneer of magic that don't make any sense" is not what I'm interested anymore.

While I really love Pratchett, I don't believe that his worldbuilding style is compatible with a rpg campaign setting.