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

[overgeeked]

So then mechanics move toward keeping PCs alive so they could both reach the climax and survive it.

Traditional RPGs are not designed to emulate story structure. You have to ignore every single thing that makes it a game to force a coherent story structure onto a game like D&D.

 

[Minigiant]

Traditional RPGs are not designed to emulate story structure. You have to ignore every single thing that makes it a game to force a coherent story structure onto a game like D&D.

that'smypoint

 

[overgeeked]

All true. The problem is, as far as the rules go, the DM still has the lion's share of the work, and the degree of responsibility assigned by the rules for both sides has not changed. Essentially, this means the GM has to do the same amount of work, but has less control of the result.

Orders of magnitude more work if the DM is expected to custom write a series of novels starring the players’ PCs.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Traditional RPGs are not designed to emulate story structure. You have to ignore every single thing that makes it a game to force a coherent story structure onto a game like D&D.

In 20+ years, at least 95% of the campaigns I've run or played in have had a coherent story, without ignoring any rules for the sake of creating a story. (we do ignore rules thatmake the game less fun for us, of course)

 

[overgeeked]

We implemented a homebrew body point/fatigue point system into D&D about 40 years ago that works pretty much like this. Body points always represent real injury and are harder to cure or rest back; most people have between 2-6 b.p. (size of roll is race-dependent rather than class-dependent) and the range of 0 to -9 is also b.p. Fatigue points - the usual h.p. you get from your class and level - go on top of these and represent fatigue, luck, and all that other stuff PLUS nicks and scratches in order to allow poison to work as intended.

BP/FP is a drum I've been banging on ever since.

We did much the same. More meat, equal to CON score, but crits dealt meat damage instead of hp. So even high level characters would fear for their lives. But we also did zero and you’re dead. Getting low and want to live…run.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Traditional RPGs are not designed to emulate story structure. You have to ignore every single thing that makes it a game to force a coherent story structure onto a game like D&D.

How many different systems have you played?

Because Torg (both old and new) ha e adventures divided literally into Scenes and Acts, with mechanics tied to both. Old WEG Star Wars had cut scenes in the adventures where you saw what the bad guys were up to as the players read a brief script.

Lots of old school RPGs were all about emulating a story.

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

pulp novels rarely told every minute of every day, it's not uncommon for days weeks or longer to pass between pages & chapters. the DM doesn't really have that sort of influence over time in modern d&d because by no longer being a slow process the players don't need to travel some period of time to get somewhere safe then rest for a long period to safely recover.

Spoiler: take the indiana jones red line travel sequences

Ignore the time that passes between movies & look just at the time passing while red lines are moving with those cut scenes. We could calculate how long it takes for those travel methods to take those routes, but that in no way shape or form will tell us how long indy was traveling because there were interactions & even adventures mixed into those stops. Some of those were hinted at with casual teaserclips, but one of the hallmarks of pulp stories is that those tend to be backported into the now & in some cases even reference future adventures that might happen later.

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

Soft Power: "The use of a country's cultural and economic influence to persuade other countries to do something, rather than the use of military power" Control over needed magic items & the economic inputs that can generate desired magic items is the very definition. You could include control over the timeskip & if any interactions beyond "we lock the door & sleep" is inserted into that timeskip is another missing example

I think a separate, but equal, element that ties into this and what @tetrasodium has been on about is that it wasn't just the setting that was important, it was that the DM was THE Most Important Player. It was HIS game, it was his vision that mattered, and it really didn't matter who the players are, what they did, or who they played; it was the DM that was the star of the show.

That's a extremely negative way of painting all of those things as some sort of dark triad set of traits, Micah Sweet said it better & more neutrally in #1907. Those things are not negatives, they just are.

• The GM is expected to run the world & setting in a believable manner & blamed if they don't
• The GM is expected to populate the world with interesting NPCs groups & events for the players to interact with & blamed if they don't.
• The GM is expected to provide some level of plot for the players for a few editions now & blamed if they don't.
• The GM is expected to provide adequate rewards to player characters & blamed by their players if they don't.
• If the GM does not show up, there is no game that day. Period... it just doesn't happen unless the gm made some other plans for the players
• so on & so forth
• The GM is expected to adjudicate the rules in a hopefully impartial manner & generally have a good grasp on enough of them to run things, the players are barely even expected to read the rules that pertain to their character.
• The GM is expected to develop the world to reflect how players interact with it, dsaving a village results in a saved village & such. IThe GM is blamed if they don't.
• The players are not really obligated to show up, great if they do but the game can go on if bob is late or noshow
• The players can interact with the world or not
• The players can treat the setting as a living breathing thing their character exists in, or they can treat it as a meaningless classified ads board that points to the next place to go kill things
• The players are allowed to make an impact on & maybe even (re)shape the world through their (in)action. They can choose to dive into that power & really get into it with goals, or they can shrug & look for something else to kill next

.As time progressed though, the game (first in the culture of it, and progressively in the rules of it) started to give the player's more agency. They had a say in the game too, beyond what thier dice rolls could affect. They wanted narratives that mattered, to grow attached to PCs (and more say in what that PC was). They wanted to be important too.

You aren't wrong, but that increased agency & increased narrative expectation provides more work for the GM who can't even say "well bob, you tried to persuade the npc failed your check& your character knows that it's not going to work like you the player hoped" with rules to support it overtly like fate's compels or the sort of soft powers GMs once had in past editions over things no longer needed by players.

Which of course has created the issues presented: the DM has increasingly had to share power and narrative vision with his players like a first among equals rather than the Rainmaker. His vision is compromised. He has lost narrative control. He had become a tour guide rather than a benevolent dictator. It's not about the DM and his world and the events of the player interacting with it, it's about the collaboration of players (the DM being one of them) to create a experience that benefits all.

In essence, the notion that it's the DM's game and he is the only important player is fading, and it is being replaced by the idea that every player, DM included, has a collective stake in the game.

I can see why that's a hard transition to make.

The GM does not have shared narrative control like players do, that was actually stripped from one of the early5e rulesets as mearls noted about compelling a player's "greedy rogue" to buy a map in the 5 generations of d&d recording. At best the GM can present things & run the world, but unlike when a player says "I persuade/intimidate/etc him" the GM has no such ability to do the same to players.[/spoiler]

 

[Remathilis]

All true. The problem is, as far as the rules go, the DM still has the lion's share of the work, and the degree of responsibility assigned by the rules for both sides has not changed. Essentially, this means the GM has to do the same amount of work, but has less control of the result.

Not going to argue that the DM takes on the harder responsibility in exchange for more (but not total) control. Which is why I suggested "first among equals" rather than being the sole arbiter of everything.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Traditional RPGs are not designed to emulate story structure. You have to ignore every single thing that makes it a game to force a coherent story structure onto a game like D&D.

Um, what? Have you never seen an adventure path or 5e adventure?

 

[Fifth Element]

Maybe I just got lucky and was always in groups where everyone enjoyed the story more than the same old boring hack and slash dungeon crawl.

One of the biggest things anyone should take away from a thread like this is that their experiences with various editions of the game should not be generalized. Games are played by groups of people, and the attitudes and preferences of those groups of people have a huge effect on how a game is played.