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

[Micah Sweet]

There's basically no cost to recovery. You fully heal and recharge everything automatically regardless of the quality or condition of your sleep. You sleep in the street, full recharge. You sleep on a roof, full recharge. No matter how many times you were dying no matter how many death saves you failed (as long as it's not three in a row) and no matter how many hit points you lost...you're 100% perfect after a little shut eye.

It makes wandering monsters on journeys pointless. Unless you happen to get two encounters in a given day, and then it only matters for the second wandering monster encounter as you're 100% perfect again the next day...so you're literally just wasting time. Or you jack up the resting rules when out in the wilds. It's much easier to interrupt a long rest to make the PCs feel the threat of the wilds. But then to make that work you have to have wandering monsters and force them to miss a long rest...which they'll simply stop all forward progress regardless of the dramatic consequences and rest until they finally get a long rest.

Unless, of course, you believe the official line on it taking a full hour of combat to interrupt a long rest. That's hilariously bad design. They really, really want to push superhero fantasy. So you either run the ridiculous 6-8 encounters in a day or you jack up the rest mechanics or you throw an entire day's worth of encounters at the party in short order...which then screws up the balance of the short rest classes. I really hope WotC removes the short rest recharge mechanics on fighters, monks, warlocks, etc.

It'll likely be some version of this for each short-rest class:

"Recharge. When you spend [an action, a reaction, a bonus action, 5 minutes in rest, 1 hour in rest, etc], you regain all expended [ki points, maneuver dice, psi dice, warlock spell slots, etc]. You can use this trait a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest."

Or they'll make short rests 5-minutes long again. LOL. Wouldn't that be something. But with the removal of any and all references to short rests in the recent races, they're likely to just remove it entirely for balance reasons. Or both. Rebalance based on long rests, include a recharge ability, and make Hit Dice spending short rests take 5 minutes.

What's going to be really interesting is the reaction of the people who came in with Critical Role and 5E. Their baseline is this style of basically unhurtable and nearly unkillable PCs. Any downward change won't go over well. Other than writing the possibility of death out of the game entirely they don't really have anywhere to go up.

Has WotC staff ever weighed in on the 6-8 encounters issue? With as much flak as it has received since the game was released it would be nice to hear any response from the IP holder.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Naw. It's not particularly any different. Sure, it might have taken two days to get all your HP back in 1e, but, rarely more than 3. And most of the time, 1 day.

You do realize there's a REASON why this sort of recovery has been added to the game right? it's being added because that's the way most of us play. It's simply a reflection of how the game has always been played. This is not some "Oh, we need kids gloves to spare the poor gamers" narrative that people keep spouting. It's more, "Well, since everyone is already playing this way, why not just make that part of the game so the game can get out of the way?"

This is the reason behind virtually all changes you see in the game.

I suspect most of us know that, we just don't like it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It never mattered how long it took for hp to recover, since however long it took, it was always "We rest until our hp recover." "Okay, X time passes, on with the adventure."

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Pointless" within a very narrow view of what the point of having encounters is. If you only view the point of encounters to be to cost the PCs resources that they might need in a future encounter before they have a chance to recover, then sure, maybe. But there are so many more possible points to encounters. To so many players, the encounter is the point. The purpose of their role-playing is to interact with the game world, and an encounter is interacting with the game world. It doesn't matter whether the encounter was planned or randomly-determined. It's an encounter, and therefore a chance to interact with the game world.

Expecting a widely-published game to prioritize one very narrow view of the point of the game is untenable, when there are so many other views of the point.

According to the rules, the point of the 6-8 encounters day is to diminish resources. Its a game that mechanically revolved around that idea.

 

[Alzrius]

What's going to be really interesting is the reaction of the people who came in with Critical Role and 5E. Their baseline is this style of basically unhurtable and nearly unkillable PCs. Any downward change won't go over well. Other than writing the possibility of death out of the game entirely they don't really have anywhere to go up.

The big downward change, at least compared to earlier editions, has been on overall PC power (particularly spellcasters) rather than survivability. A lot of people don't want superheroic PCs, but don't seem to want them to have any chance of being killed unless they make incredibly bad decisions and/or face an extraordinary run of bad luck.

 

[Jer]

W: "I cast True Seeing on the Barbarian so he can see the invisible monster."

DM: "True Seeing's description doesn't say it let's you see invisible though?"

W: "Here, it's in a sage advice."

DM: "Ok. Barbarian, you can see the hideous thing just fine."

B: "Great. I try to take it's head off."

DM: "Roll with disadvantage because it's invisible."

B: "But I can see it!?!"

DM: "Here, see this other sage advice I saw in the screen with the last one. Being able to see it doesn't negate the disadvantage."

Oh the wonders of clear rules and modern technology!

I mean, to me if anyone is bringing up Sage Advice at the table the whole table has already lost.

(Also as a DM I would tell my fellow DM to lighten up - they're burning a spell slot to be able to see the invisible monster. That's an even exchange just let them have it.)

 

[Cadence]

I mean, to me if anyone is bringing up Sage Advice at the table the whole table has already lost.

(Also as a DM I would tell my fellow DM to lighten up - they're burning a spell slot to be able to see the invisible monster. That's an even exchange just let them have it.)

Just pointing out what the rules are. Would hate for players to think there DMs were just winging it. ;-)

 

[Remathilis]

I disagree, in that if the DM's already in wing-it mode then the players doing something unexpected doesn't come as any big deal; the DM just goes with it. But if the DM's in "I've got this all planned out" mode and the players do something unexpected it's harder for the DM to both seamlessly react and at the same time let go of whatever was planned.

Wing it mode = when the players say "we go north" and the DM decides what is north = procedurally generated hexcrawls (with a slight variation of randomly rolled vs pulled out of the DMs kiester and squares vs hexes). It eliminates any preplanned material like stocked dungeons, modules and APs since there is no guarantee the players will take the hook.

"But Remathilis," you say, "a good DM could just repurpose a dungeon. He can add bread crumbs back to the module or he can add consequences that steer back to the AP's boundaries. That material isn't wasted!" To which I reply that nothing in that "random encounters" list is either, it just needs to be repurposed if the PCs don't take the bait. There is a meme I saw: a railroad is forcing your PCs to go to a specific town, a sandbox is giving them a choice of three towns, but they're all the same town anyway. What @Helldritch appears to be doing, though a little more formal than I do, is setting up the same kind of preplanned reusable content and fitting it where the PCs go.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Wing it mode = when the players say "we go north" and the DM decides what is north = procedurally generated hexcrawls (with a slight variation of randomly rolled vs pulled out of the DMs kiester and squares vs hexes). It eliminates any preplanned material like stocked dungeons, modules and APs since there is no guarantee the players will take the hook.

"But Remathilis," you say, "a good DM could just repurpose a dungeon. He can add bread crumbs back to the module or he can add consequences that steer back to the AP's boundaries. That material isn't wasted!" To which I reply that nothing in that "random encounters" list is either, it just needs to be repurposed if the PCs don't take the bait. There is a meme I saw: a railroad is forcing your PCs to go to a specific town, a sandbox is giving them a choice of three towns, but they're all the same town anyway. What @Helldritch appears to be doing, though a little more formal than I do, is setting up the same kind of preplanned reusable content and fitting it where the PCs go.

"You can pick any flavor, as long as it's chocolate". Yesh, that's what you have to do sometimes.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I don't even think the default of old edition D&D was even Sword and Sorcery. To me it felt more like Dark Fantasy was the norm.

As the editions ran by, the darkness over the whole setting rolled back and concentrated onto certain oppressively hopeless and unfair spots. I predict 1/4 of DMs in 5e do "You were doomed the second you accepted", "You've accidentally made it worse" and "You've been working for the bad guy all along" twists in their campaigns.

How old is "old edition?" Because I played D&D in the 90s (BECMI and 2e) and it never felt like dark fantasy or S&S unless you were playing Ravenloft or Dark Sun. High fantasy or epic fantasy was the norm. Mystara, Faerun, FtA Oerth and Krynn all felt high adventure. Maybe if you go back before 1984, the game has a darker or S&S feel, but we're talking maybe 1/5th of the game's existence was that.

Earlier editions of D&D very quickly developed into their own thing that wasn't really reflected in the fantasy fiction. Way too much fighting, worrying about resource management, delving dungeons for loot, etc. That's not reflected in the wider fantasy fiction. Sure, bits and pieces are, but all together? Outside of D&D branded or D&D mimicking media? Nope. But what happens when over 50 years you constantly ratchet up the power scale of the characters? You go from gritty faux sword and sorcery, to heroic fantasy, to epic fantasy, to superhero fantasy. Almost none of their powers are imbued from magic items any more. Everyone's just amazingly special and awesome...because. It's weird to me coming from old school D&D, but it is what it is. It's clearly here to stay, so it's get onboard or shuffle off to the old-folk's home clutching my AD&D books.

I think Overgeeked has this one spot on. D&D was, first and foremost, a game about dungeon delving (then wilderness hexcrawling, then in theory domain and army leading) with a light overlay of the designer's favorite fiction. The game was set up as a challenge of resource management, caution, risk and reward, and deciding when to press your luck. That forged the game feel more than any specific genre of fantasy fiction. Exactly what that resultant entity retroactively looked like depends on how your group played and when you got into the game -- the artwork, in particular, did zig one way or the other (although not consistently. The 1e DMG, for instance, had all those 'flee for your lives' type art pieces right alongside goofy cartoons).

Late 1e/2e (and late BECMI) started trying to specify specific themes, motifs, and feelings onto the game, but even then it just played around the edges (and sometimes failed, depending on the person. I know lots of people really like TSR-era Ravenloft, but I always found it to be Halloween-party horror instead of actual horror).

For me the split is infinite over-night healing. I don't know 3X well enough to say if it has superhero healing or not, but if it does, then I'd lump it together with 4E and 5E under that superhero fantasy label.

10 wands of Cure Light Wounds and a half dozen scrolls of restoration were trivially easy to craft, broke the resource-use expectations of the game wide open, and were used or not used in anecdote-only percentage of gaming groups. If Tetrasodium insists that their group didn't play that way, there's no reason not to believe it, while at the same time huge numbers of people had harder-to-reign-in PC resources in 3e than 5e specifically because of it. I should say those, along with scrolls in general, as the party wizard also never had to spend daily resources (dedicated to encounter-ending effects) on the occasionally needed knock or spiderclimb because they too could have an arsenal of scrolls prepared.

Has WotC staff ever weighed in on the 6-8 encounters issue? With as much flak as it has received since the game was released it would be nice to hear any response from the IP holder.

Not to my knowledge. They have stuck their necks out on rules questions they supposedly thought DMs could handle on their own, but have been remarkably silent on questions of 'why' or 'what did you envision when...' type things. I'd imagine their response would be something like "go reread what we did say about 6-8 encounters and more importantly what we didn't say. Also, didn't we include multiple alternate recharge mechanics in the DMG specifically for people who were looking for different options?" but that's probably me just projecting.