D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?
- Thread starter Morrus
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Thomas Shey
Legend
Certainly well beyond the typical random D&D player; even in the 3e era there was a hell of a lot of range here. Probably well beyond what you can do with the current version of D&D. It usually either requires massive amounts of broken options (D&D 3e) or a lot of detailed component chunking that can produce unexpected synergies (Hero System or other detailed build systems).
And that's assuming people do so as a default. Please reference Hussar's post a couple up. Just because the tools exist doesn't mean everyone is building a bomb.
A question that sages have pondered lo these many long years . . .
Again from p 97:
Concealed doors . . . are doors which are hidden in some way - behind a curtain, covered with plaster, a trap door under a rug, etc. They differ from secret doors in that once their concealment is uncovered they are obviously doors.
Secret doors . . . are portals which a re made to appear to be a normal part of the surface they are in.
So the difference seems to be whether the portal itself is of a hidden nature, like the classic bookshelf passageway in an whodunnit (a secret door), or its a normal door that has been screened.
Personally I think the "covered with plaster" example is not a very happy one, as it makes me want to know how thick the plaster is, at what point plaster becomes the same as the bookshelves or stone flags that typify many secret doors, etc. This issue came up in the original ToH run-through at Origins - what follows is from Alarums & Excursions #4 September 1975:
Finally we entered the central entrance, and headed down the 20' wide passage. The walls were plastered and covered with murals. 40' down there was a picture of two dogheaded beings holding a coffer- which stuck out of the wall. I decided that we could do without Anubis's kin and continued. Our elves reported no secret doors or traps. Ten more feet and out #2 and #3 fighters fell into a trap and lost minor bickerings with three poisoned, 5' spikes each. Poor quality elves we have hear, thought I. We dragged them out. Should our Patriarch raise them from the dead? After 5 hours in the Barren Lands my condition might have been described as numb. With a hazy idea of saving the spell for later I ordered them dropped back into thee pit for later recovery. Neither the Paladin nor the Patriarch protested. The Dungeonmaster did not tell them they should have (both were neos.) No one suggested that we take their useful equipment along with us (one had a bag of holding.) At this point I ordered a Locate Traps spell used- a bit late- and we avoided two more pits on the way down to the end of the corridor- 60'. Still plastered walls, still the elves detected no hollow spaces or hidden doors. What a time to pick defective elves! . . .
We got out along the crawlway. The room was plastered, the elves detected nothing and I had not yet grasped that a 1/2" of plaster was elf proof. Gygax's elves have to see secret doors, reasonable but not what I am accustomed to. . . .
Someone else had a brilliant thought- what's behind the plaster? We broke some and found a door. Blasted insensitive elves!
How this relates to, or is consistent with, the DMG text I've quoted is a problem I'll leave for someone else to resolve!
I'd say that it's almost the norm in my experience. In the past I'd split charop into threeish groupings
- trash: absolutely no thought to a trash character that might be fun but is probably unoptimized to the point that even giving it powerful boons & powerful items was basically a no risk thing because using them for extreme power would generally be a difficult bar to meet with so many things having prerequisites. These were mostly played by newbies who were pretty much just tooling around having fun week after week. These players are the reason +5 holy avengers were a thing
- mildcharop: These PCs were played by players who put in some level of forethought needed to meet prerequisites & such at minimal cost & optimal gain. These could be played by any sort of player but they generally wanted to have fun & were willing to engage in a it of horse trading along with conspire with the gm if it meant everyone had fun or they got to be awesome. absolute power might not be as important as absolutely awesome a couple levels earlier
- Hyperoptimized: Everyone knows punpun but there were so many lesser versions & all of them had their own strengths/weaknesses along with what were generally equipment requirements, These were almost always a big problem at the table but usually relied on crazy person yarn map style umpteen splatbook builds & that alone could be used as grounds for reasonably refusing or reasonably restricting them as a gm without other players questioning the gm for doing so.
In modern d&d it takes real work to deliberately make anything that comes in sight of those trash PCs making them all but unheard of. The barest hint of effort is all that's needed for mild charop PC levels of power. Then to top it all off that last hyperoptimized little more than "well I read the races, the feats, & chose a race that fits well with those", they can be phb or phb+1 making it hard for a GM to cry foul without looking like the bad guy even to the casual wall flower types just showing up week after week to hang out. That's not limited to just charop where the GM is forced into being the bad guy, look at the "optional" & "variant" rules for things like encumbrance feats & magic items alongside the system's expectations & expectations.
I think the tautological "most games don't use feats" claim of modern d&d is a severe case of GiGo & as a famous author once put it "lies damn lies and statistics". There are a lot of reasons that d&d beyond characters are going to skew low & the first ASI or two is often going to get used for a +2 rather than a feat even in games that do allow feats. Under those conditions it's simply not reasonable to conclude that most tables "don't" use feats simply because there is an over representation of characters that don't yet have a feat. If the claim was as solid as is often claimed wotc wouldn't devote so many pages to feats book after book.
That doesn't make your experience universal either & what amounts to little more than "nope don't see it, that's just you" doesn't quite balance out against "here are problems & this is how they impact things". Dismissing the problems that result from the choices modern d&d makes as mere "laser focused power gamers" while dismissing the ways older editions having room built in for GM calls to appear more neutral or even generous is not reasonable. Despite your experience of not encountering them, these flaws still exist in modern d&d.
Put in other terms... I personally have never probably played football in a way that makes brain injuries a concern & the same can likely be said of most people who have ever played a game of football in their life, but it's still a serious & documentable problem that can be explained.
Fifth Element
Legend
You're ignoring the glaring difference: you're claiming that your experience demonstrates that modern D&D necessarily plays a certain way, because it's been played that way in your experience. Meanwhile @Hussar is not trying to say that their experience demonstrates that modern D&D plays in a specific way (different from your claimed play style), but that the differences in experience demonstrate that modern D&D does NOT necessarily entail a certain playstyle, either yours or theirs. The two positions are not two sides of the same coin.
Fifth Element
Legend
This analogy is all kinds of ick. First it equates DMs with parents and players with children, which is incredibly demeaning to players. It also equates healthy vs. unhealthy eating (a thing that can have actual health consequences) with preferences in elfgames, which distorts the importance of the discussion beyond all recognition.
So add this to the pile of hyperbole which makes it difficult to take the argument seriously.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Admittedly I haven't read the RAW on this in a while but I don't remember the 1-in-6 applying to everybody. I could easily be wrong on this.
ETA: and reading later posts proves that I got it wrong.
No I'm not ignoring it. The two styles are different. Those differences come with both pros and cons. I pointed them out in contrast to show that parts of the old ways had pros that were being ignored.
Except the analogy is not about the players at all. It shows another example of "being the bad guy" in order to use tools stripped from gm control to influence game play in ways that guide things like plot story world cohesion the gm"s own comfort & so on without clawing back those tools from the system first. Those things are the child. It's fine if you don't think the gm should be anything but a cruise ship guide for the wish fulfillment for a table of Mary Sue characters berift of influence risk & consequence but that is one of the big problems with the style modern d&d brings in the process of throwing out old style pros in order to alter old style cons.
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Hussar
Legend
Oh hey. Totally understandable.
Fifth Element
Legend
In that case the analogy is entirely nonsensical, because you can't "be the bad guy" with respect to those things, because those things don't have feelings. They don't care, they lack the ability to care because they're abstract constructs.
This kind of misrepresentation is becoming really tiresome.
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