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

[Thomas Shey]

Ain't that the rub? If HP = meat, then a high level warrior is nearly immune to weapons. If HP doesn't = meat, you can't survive a fall from a high place. It's almost like HP is completely abstract and can't represent anything in the fiction.

Its been a problem with level elevating hit points from day one. You can rationalize the way hit points work in combat as abstracting defense into the total so that what you're really dealing with is a roundabout way of dividing damage down, but for that to work right with the rest of the system, they'd have had to do something a little more sophisticated with healing, and done something different and probably more complicated with environmental damage.

So here it is, as a model that pretty much fails no matter how you approach it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The fact that a picture is blurry and pixelated doesn't mean it has no information.

It can be awfully hard to extract from it, though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Firebolt alone is more than enough to torch a building full of ordinary people at a distance. And you can do it all day.

So is a molotov cocktail, but it'd still be a pretty weak superpower even if you could to it all day.

But again, I've acknowledged magic overlaps with superpowers. It always has. But its got constraints few supers have and more versitility than all but a subset do. Its a poor model for developing supers except in the broadest sense.

 

[Vaalingrade]

~flicks cigarette lighter~

Time to join the Avengers.

 

[Cadence]

Time to join the Avengers.

Speaking of which...

 

[Thomas Shey]

The funny thing is, the people who don't want to vocalize why these changes were made include the game designers.

Mix of not wanting to be obvious that you can't make the system to suit everybody (since that was part of the D&D Next mission statement), and some of them perhaps not actually knowing, at least on a conscious level.

 

[overgeeked]

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.

Okay. And of those, what mechanical challenges, setbacks, consequences, etc last through a long rest? So far, I've only found curses, exhaustion (only 2+ levels), death, and consumable item use. If I'm missing some, I'd honestly love to know about them. Another is technically spent Hit Dice, but almost no one uses it that way. Everyone thinks a long rest resets Hit Dice, too, even though it's supposed to be 1/2 of your spent Hit Dice, not all of them. But whatever.

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.

I'm just more interested in the mechanical side of things because the narrative is purely table based. Your table of deep-immersion roleplayers are going to react quite differently to a narrative setback than a table of murder hobos. So, to be mechanically interesting, the game needs to have mechanical setbacks. Lasting consequences. Obstacles the characters have to deal with that cannot be napped away. That list above. There's four things. Those are the only angles for lasting mechanical obstacles for characters. That's nothing. Especially when most of them are trivial to overcome. Cursed? Find a cleric, scroll, or wait until your cleric hits 5th level. More than 2 levels of exhaustion? Rest more. Suffering from a slight case of death? If you're 1st through 4th level, find a high-level cleric or roll a new character. If you're 5th-level or higher, you likely have a caster who can fix it. Consumables running low, go to literally any town and drop a few gold...that you're more than likely swimming in after 1st level. And for food and water, forget about it. Cleric, druid, ranger, or Outlander and you literally never have to worry about food or water again.

So...where's the mechanical setbacks? Looks like the only one is death, and then only for a really short window.

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.

Context is wonderful. Let's look at the context. Gygax says in a 279-word paragraph "it's a game, not a simulation-realism" but then provides 350+ pages of almost pure simulation-realism rules. We need to be honest about that disparity and honest about the difference in weight involved. The weight clearly lies with the 350+ pages of simulation-realism rules. If you go with Gary's one paragraph, you have to ignore his 350+ pages of rules to do so. If you go with Gary's 350+ pages of rules, you have to ignore that one paragraph. I've yet to meet an AD&D DM who didn't ignore and/or laugh at that one paragraph. Most of them say some version of "I didn't buy the book to ignore 99.9% of it."

 

[Thomas Shey]

The PF ones were not that great outside utility. The damage was like 1D3 and never increased so you didn't really every use it beyond level 1.

The 2e ones are more useful in practice, but that's an artifact of how vulnerabilities are handled (though it may well be deliberate).

 

[Thomas Shey]

D&D uses hit points to represent different things at the same time. The system is very abstract, and does not stand up to scrutiny. But its advantage is its simplicity.

For some values of "simplicity".

 

[Thomas Shey]

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

I'm really not sure how to claim something isn't an RPG with X thing in it that isn't read as hostile to people who disagree. Its essentially an attempt to gatekeep them out of the hobby as you see it, and yeah, I think that's pretty hostile.