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

[Fifth Element]

If hitpoints aren't meat and high HP count doesn't represent superhuman durability, why exactly can you swim in acid, somersault from skyscrappers and all that, and then just shrug off and get back to fight as if nothing happened? No amount of luck, stamina and will to live are gonna help with such feats.

Also, if you're willing to accept that superhuman durability would allow you to survive such things, you have no business saying superhuman luck, stamina and will cannot help with them.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Given I've seen people outright say it does not belong in an RPG, I think you've been selective in what you've noticed.

or your bar for describing a reaction or position as "hostile" is vastly lower than mine.

 

[Kannik]

Because D&D is, and always has been, incoherent with respect to the abstraction that it uses or does not use with respect to hit point, as the circumstance may be.

I think that that the term used was/is "Hit Points" really points to the intentionality behind that abstraction. It wasn't called wounds, or vitality, or integrity, or health, or stamina, or durability, or capacity, or trauma resistance, or anything like that, just the very abstract and gamist "Hit Points" to be used as a catch-all phrase to tally points until you were departed, whether those parts came from swords, energy, mental attacks, exertion/exhaustion, stunning, and so on.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Did all day cantrips start with PF and 4e?

The first DnD all day cantrip was the Warlock's eldritch blast in 3.5, where endless repeatable magic was their "thing".

Later in 3.5 there were feats for converting a slot into an endlessly reusable spell for most spellcasters.

But even back in 1e you could have unlimited invisibility with a ring...so the definition of all day spellcasting is a little wonky if you limit it to slots.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We will have it for another fifty years because the Hit Points section and the Healing section will never be written one after the other in a seemless fashion.

So we will always have the idea that an orc greataxe can deal 8 damage and should take days to heal but it shouldn't cripple you nor affect your current skill as no one wants to deal with an injury table or the bloodied condition after every hit.

Yeah, its obvious there's some damage component in hit points, but where it lands and how much is likely always going to be vague because you need to resolve the healing magic with it somehow for it to make sense, and D&D has neither been willing to do that nor spell it out. I have an internal model that mostly works, but the way its written there's always going to be room for people to decide entirely different things and its going to always make any discussion bearing on it, to say the least, fraught.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Pulp characters tend to get beat to hell and suffer consequences they power through while getting pushed & pulled around by their ties to the world & their own weaknesses.

They also get injuries that usually don't slow them down nor particularly seem to move them on toward dying materially after the fight they occur in, and vanish by the next time you see them. That still doesn't make them superheroes, it just means they and superheroes derive from a similar style of storytelling.

The "pulp" comparison only works because it's not really a style of writing that is still seen much outside older rather niche novels. You can see that sort of thing reflected in some of the fste & Savage words interactions with bennies *fate points. D&d is missing too many pieces to call that one little speck of a link to pulp mere coincidence

those missing pieces smash hard into the design choices of modern d&d that strip the gm of tools that once exerted soft power over the Pcs. Based on my experience running fate for years, adding them to d&d would probably be half baked in feeling or just a disaster.

Soft. That's a really charitable way to refer to it.

 

[Kannik]

Okay. I'll bite. Without referencing the narrative, what mechanical challenges do you use in your games? What mechanical risks are involved?

I think there are still plenty of mechanical challenges, even if the resource-management ones have been reduced. Hit Point loss and death is still quite possible, it's just less swingy. There's also hit points as a resource to be taxed, exhaustion levels, and plenty of failures from failed skill rolls. Now, the latter might suffer you from a narrative perspective (in that you fail to achieve your aim in the moment), but given you are using the dice I still categorize it as a mechanical challenge.

However, the crux remains here that even if narrative challenges were all that remained the game would still be challenging. Following your observations, if people are more invested in their character and the story than they "should" be, then a narrative failure would be more devastating than a mechanical one. Again, I invited to consider that "less resource management challenges" does not equal "easy mode forever." If you say no thank you, then alright.

(And to be clear, I am not doing the reverse or saying that resourced based management and easy lethality are not challenging or vapid or denigrating the playstyle. Clearly not, given the bit I wrote about I3-I5.(

I always found that to be a laughably insincere quote from Gygax. For Gary to claim that, whilst also filling the AD&D PHB and DMG with all those charts and rules...that almost to a letter point toward simulation-realism is...a bit much. "It's a game, don't worry about simulation-realism...now here's 350 pages of simulation-realism stuff." Nah, Gary.

I know. I ignored that then, too.

Well, that's fine and dandy if you ignore what is written, but at least acknowledge that you are doing so when making sweeping "D&D has always been X" type statements. "I know Gary said this, and the rules indicate that, but my groups always played it like such and that's the (only?) way I can think about it."

As for whether AD&D was gamist or stimulationist, I think we need to remember the context of the time. Coming from a wargaming background and hence perspective, which highly tended towards simulation, even a little bit of gamism can feel quite extensive. Gary likely felt this was quite gamist, even if he indulged in what he loved from the wargaming side of things with his collection of Bohemian earspoons.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Heh, this seems to be a theme this week. Everyone seems to be talking about all the lamp shading we do when we player D&D.

Look at that. We're finding things that have changed, and things that have stayed the same.

Well, as someone who was there at the start, I honestly have to say there's only two significant things that have changed from back in the OD&D days: the really ridiculous degree of sudden-death has been hosed down, and enough options have been added that you at least are somewhat less likely to come up with character concepts that don't fit the straight-jacket of the class system. The rest of it may seem really significant to people steeped in the system, but from the perspective of someone who spent most of his gaming career outside of it, they seem trivial at best.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I am amused that my simple statement of fact got so many people arguing. I guess from now on any of the Cure Wounds spells can only heal a percentage of lost hit points and the rest will have to be healed some other way. Unfortunately, there is no cure for embarrassment, so I guess the PC of the person who mentioned that will just have to die. lol

 

[Thomas Shey]

A game where characters never suffer wounds sounds even more super heroic to me than one where they all recover from wounds overnight.

It doesn't have to be one where they never suffer wounds, but that until you get down to the "one sword swing and you're down" stage that they're trivial. That's a little stylized, but its hardly unprecedented in adventure fiction.