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

[Vaalingrade]

Superman, watching every one of this non-animated movies since the 80's.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You clearly don’t read superheroes stories then.

I write them.

 

[overgeeked]

I write them.

Do tell.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Do tell.

I write either the oldest or second oldest (next to Legion of Nothing) superhero webserial on the internet (14 years) and am part of the premier SH genre writers collected, the Pen and Cape Society.

So I ~might~ know a little bit about the genre.

There used to be a ton of civilian side characters before the 90's where they were winnowed down to the point Jon Rogers was lauded roundly for introducing Paco and Brenda plus Jaime's family in Blue Beetle without doing terrible things to him... Then the new 52 inflicted Paco with with the Black Beetle scarab and sent the main character across the entire country to separate him from his family while making Brenda hate him.

This was not an isolated incident. In the Big Two, the only surviving civilian casts are the legacy casts like the Daily Planet crew

 

[tetrasodium]

Or, they should play whatever game they like in whatever way they prefer. It's not up to any of us to determine what game any particular people should be playing, or how they play it. It's baffling that this still needs to be said.

Also, there are very notable genres in which combat is commonplace but protagonists are expected to survive in general. So in addition to being very judgmental, your comment is incorrect on its face, due to how broadly it's posited.

"expected to survive" does not require severing any risk of death & danger, In fact danger & risk of death creates story. Fate is a game almost entirely based on character & story development, combat in fate is both a vehicle for character growth through consequences and a death spiral on a rocket sled with so much pickup that there are rules for two different ways to lose a fight. Those rules are:

• Proactively realizing that you are a fragile human* shaped sack of meat rather than a god & conceding the conflict with a a loss you can live with. Your concede offer needs to be good enough for the opponent or they can just refuse if you aren't willing to flex in ways that are narratively interesting to their interests. If all you lost was stress, you get that back the next "scene" & in d&d terms that could very well be the next room in a dungeon.
• Fighting to the bitter end & getting taken out or Taking on something so far above your weight class that it crushes you like a gnat. When being taken out the winner can basically do anything in their power from dark willow:bored now to taking excallibur from where it fell & walking off or almost anything in-between. An opponent taking a magic item the player had to spend "refresh" on rather than improving the character directly is a pretty serious loss too.

In addition to what is usually a 1-4 point stress track a character has the following consequence slots in roughly these amounts (it depends on a few things) & they take this long to recover

• 2 mild consequences - You need to spend a scene that makes narrative sense recovering & make a skill check
• 1 moderate consequence - You need to spend an entire session dealing with it.
• 1 severe consequence - You need to wait for a significant milestone which in d&d terms is kind of like completing a major quest to start recovery. After you start that recovery you need to wait for a whole "scenario" to finish, which is pretty much like a full season of a tv show or the next major quest. Examples on page 163 include "Second-Degree Burn, Compound Fracture, Guts Hanging Out, Crippling Shame, Trauma-Induced Phobia." It's so horrible to go past here that having this used is immediate back row "save me guys I can see my lung!"
• An "Extreme consequence" that doesn't even have a box on the sheet because to take it you replace one of your existing character aspects with a consequence. To quote page 166 of the rulebook "That’s right, an extreme consequence is so serious that taking it literally changes who you are. Unlike other consequences, you can’t make a recovery action to diminish an extreme consequence—you’re stuck with it until your next major milestone. After that, you can rename the extreme consequence to reflect that you’re no longer vulnerable to the worst of it, as long as you don’t just switch it out for whatever your old aspect was. Taking an extreme consequence is a permanent character change; treat it as such." It's hard to map how long it takes to clear these to d&d terms & they might even make a character unplayable due to being bound to the ICU or something horrible like missing limbs given how many of the severe consequence examples make a lot of old school critfail tables look positively minor. Lethality risk & roots don't preclude story, they invite it when paired with the right mechanics

*or whatever

 

[Lord Mhoram]

That’s the point. Gamers typically want the benefits without any dramatic consequences. Even the possibility of dramatic consequences is too much. They don’t want actual stories.

It looks like you have misunderstood my point. Lets say I have a character who has a personality trait of "overprotective of young women" - I decide that the reason the character has the trait is that he has a little sister somewhere. It's there to flesh out a character and nothing else. There is no reason to ever bring in the sister in game as it nothing more than fleshing out personality - the character could have that personality quirk without justification, but the sister was invented for flavor and color nothing else.

Now that trait can cause dramatic consequence- a 15 year old girl is mistreated in an inn, so he gets involved. Drives the character, tells a story, has dramatic consequence... but never involves the actual sister. Actual story, sister not involved.

Champions/HERO has a great way to differentiate - NPCs that are around and Dependent NPCs, who are expected to be threatened and in trouble. World of difference between them.

 

[tetrasodium]

You obviously misunderstood my point. Lets say I have a character who has a personality trait of "overprotective of young women" - I decide that the reason the character has the trait is that he has a little sister somewhere. It's there to flesh out a character and nothing else. There is no reason to ever bring in the sister in game as it nothing more than fleshing out personality - the character could have that personality quirk without justification, but the sister was invented for flavor and color nothing else.

Now that trait can cause dramatic consequence- a 15 year old girl is mistreated in an inn, so he gets involved. Drives the character, tells a story, has dramatic consequence... but never involves the actual sister. Actual story, sister not involved.

Champions/HERO has a great way to differentiate - NPCs that are around and Dependent NPCs, who are expected to be threatened and in trouble. World of difference between them.

That's great, the sister doesn't need to come up until you as the player try to use her as a resource & then the baggage she brings is relative to the value she is as a resource. in modern d&d though there's really nothing the player characters need that can be impacted by her baggage other than threat to her.

That problem grows beyond just the gm not being able to do much other than threaten Mary Jane/Aunt Mae/Lois/etc though. Take the "overprotective of young women" that you yourself said is a desired personality trait of a hypothetical character & apply the pulp detective trope that often starts out with a thought/voiceover along the lines of: "I could tell the young woman wanting my help was all kinds of trouble I didn't need". with d&d characters they are free to ignore it entirely the second they decide they don't need that trouble & the GM is powerless to do more than ask if the player really want to ignore the npc with problems knowing full well he or she is powerless if the player says yes they do want to ignore the npc's complications.

 

[overgeeked]

So I ~might~ know a little bit about the genre.

You’re a dedicated fan-writer. Awesome. An important fact to keep in mind is that D&D isn’t superhero fiction. Also, really odd view you have of civilians in superhero fiction, considering…you know superhero fiction.

There used to be a ton of civilian side characters before the 90's where they were winnowed down to the point Jon Rogers was lauded roundly for introducing Paco and Brenda plus Jaime's family in Blue Beetle without doing terrible things to him... Then the new 52 inflicted Paco with with the Black Beetle scarab and sent the main character across the entire country to separate him from his family while making Brenda hate him.

This was not an isolated incident. In the Big Two, the only surviving civilian casts are the legacy casts like the Daily Planet crew.

Right. You’re ignoring that comic book writers are freelance work-for-hire and that, generally speaking, whatever they create that’s new is owned by the comic company. Big incentive to not add characters to someone else’s IP. And you’re skipping over all new civilian characters writers add all the time. Wonder why.

And look at how those legacy characters are used. Aunt May still have cancer? Gwen still dead or are her clones still running around? Spider-Gwen for the win. Reilly used Uncle Ben’s corpse to temp Peter. Kindred used Uncle Ben’s corpse as a prop. How’s Mary Jane these days? She married to Peter? Divorced? Separated? Living together? Engaged? That’s four mostly civilian characters from one superhero’s stable. All the rest are the same. Across all the rest of the books. It’s endless serial drama for all of them.

You’re a fan. So you know that superhero fiction is soap opera with spandex. Don’t pretend like the civilians in superhero fiction are perfectly safe. Literally the opposite. So again, if you think civilians in superhero fiction are safe…you don’t read superhero fiction. If you write superhero fiction where the civilians are safe, well…you should read more superhero comic books.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You’re a dedicated fan-writer.

No.

I am a professional published author you are disrespecting because you don't agree with him.

 

[Gradine]

So here's the thing: "fridging", that is specifically, killing a female character in order to give motivation for a male hero, is so old and bland and frankly misogynistic at this point that great storytelling it definitely is not.

In general, character death is frankly story death. Story is all about conflict, and dead people don't create more conflict (other than I guess rev-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz-sorry I fell asleep, where was I? Oh, revenge. yawn). On the other hand, living relatives can create all kinds of fun complications and conflicts that have absolutely nothing to do with mortal terror. Old debts, factional disputes, extremely poor decision making at the worst time, etc. They longer they live, the more sheninigans they can get up to and drag their adventuring friend along with. And who knows, they may still come in handy in a pinch!

There a reason The Mummy never killed off Jonathan.