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

[overgeeked]

I really liked how useful knowledge skills were in 4e. I wish they’d kept some of that. IIRC you could do more than just monster knowledge and research stuff with them, too. Like Arcana could be used to basically do a detect magic or an identify.

More babies WotC threw out with the bathwater.

 

[Hussar]

Yes, It also comes with problems comparable to the benefits

Huh? I might have missed something, but I was under the impression that we were talking about NPCs being put in situations comparable to their value & players revolting or wanting to ignore it when that happens not game balance. the problem is not that those backgrounds have better connections with more clout, the problem is that those backgrounds come with connections that can get themselves in worse trouble but the GM has nothing the player needs when they want to just shrug that problem off.

Yeah, I don't think we're on the same page here.

5e Character Backgrounds come with zero complications or connections. You, as DM, cannot leverage my Character Background in any way, shape or form. There's nothing there to leverage. It simply says that I am a (for example) Folk Hero which carries with it certain benefits. Or I have the Entertainer background, which carries different benefits. Again, there is nothing in those backgrounds that you can use as the DM.

So, since backgrounds in D&D are perfectly acceptable, why is it that if I make an NPC that gives me a plausible means to do something in game - such as leaving a door open, sure, it's a pretty unique bonus, but, whatever - then what's the problem. You said that the benefits must come with some sort of cost. But backgrounds come with no cost.

Are you saying that backgrounds are bad?

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't understand what you are trying to achieve in your GMing, which is undermined by a player's character having a sister who can leave the side gate open, or having the ear of the cardinal.

there were some random context free examples given when someone asked what benefits an npc could give & I tried to make them clearly obvious how they could be useful to a pc without needing to describe a scenario. It's not always guaranteed that players can get what they want, sometimes it's reasonable that a convenient NPC might be able to help arrange something by opening a door that might be more difficult to open in the plot themselves. Maybe the players tried to meet someone & got told by a secretary to come back in a week or go do something they don't want to do to jump the list because the NPC is not a good person who shares the same values as the PCs & bob thinks his background NPC can offer a third option. Nothing is undermined if I choose to allow that third option because bob created a string I can yank later when it's going to make for interesting plot.

If you want a deeper hypothetical reason why the hypothetical players are trying to do that.... Maybe the players are trying to solve a problem created by a mine polluting a faerie grove & they decided that meeting with the owner of the mine might let them make a persuade check that convinces them to stop polluting the faerie grove instead of dealing with the corrupted black puddings in the forest or exterminating the faeries that the NPC feels would solve her problems & justify a meeting much sooner Who knows, there could be any number of reasons a PC might want to call on their background connections. Calling on background connections has a cost of those connections being given reasons to call on their connections to a powerful PC. What the players think they might be able to do & what the players can successfully do are completely different from what the players can try. Interesting story can happen when the players try things even if those things might fail.

Managing the NPC:NPC interactions when some NPC pulls that string bob created isn't any problem because NPCs can act like real people with their own influences & resources in the world. When background NPCs are used like that & other NPCs react to them later it makes waves through the NPCs & groups in player backstories that complicate life & create & conflicts the PC has to deal with. We got started on this topic because there's nothing a PC needs in 5e that can be threatened when that happens.

edit: backstories have existed decades if not centuries before 5e introduced backgrounds. In order for the world & things within it to function like a living breathing thing it needs to act like it when poked at around the edges by the PCs, the only thing that I can think of functioning with no needs going around fighting problems like PCs is agent smith from the matrix.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

More babies WotC threw out with the bathwater.

You’ve said this exact phrase a couple times now, I think. I get that people like to crap on wotc, but I’d rather not have this sort of thing in my notifications. Please don’t quote me just to make a post that has literally no content other than complaining about wotc.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My personal view is that, for a lot of RPGing, this is an incoherent attitude. If the GM has turned up with one scenario ready-to-go, then either we play that or we all go home, yeah?

This assumes the only model is "We show up, the scenario's ready, away we go." Two weeks before my game, I present a series of three plot hooks for my Fragged Empire game; the players pick the one the want. Sometimes one of the others will lurk around for a while. But there's rarely a case of "this is what you have to engage with." Even in superhero games there are often multiple things going on at once, and you can at least backburner some of them (or fob them off on someone else).

Basically, I think your model of how games are administered is overly limited.

Obviously there are RPGs that don't depend on this sort of scenario-prep - modern ones like Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel, and old ones like dungeon-bashing D&D (it needs prep, but not scenario prep) - but even taken together these seem to be a significant minority of contemporary play. Most people seem to be playing GM-scenario-driven games. And in this case either the scenario sucks, or it doesn't, but it's a bit hard for me to see that it sucks more because my PC has a stake in it.

I don't necessarily agree. It raises the failure state in a way not everyone wants. I mean, its bad if the village girl gets sacrificed by the cult, but its on a whole different level if its your sister.

(NB. I am not resiling from my soft-move/hard-move posts upthread. There are many ways to give a PC a stake in a scenario without using the murder of their family as an element of framing.)

Sure. See my parenthetical sentence just above, and the posts it refers to.

But that's the gig. Honestly, too many GMs are only prone to using relatively hard motivators, and it takes very, very few of those before a player is over it. Add in the ones that keep going to the well too often even with softer ones, and here we are.

 

[pemerton]

The player might want the GM to frame that scene but the GM might be thinking "Wait a minute - let's back up and make sure you-as-character can even get to that scene, as it's not guaranteed in the fiction that you can."

Just because a player wants to be framed into a scene isn't enough reason for that scene to automatically happen, or happen right away, in exclusion of other setting constraints.

But if the PC has a sister who'll leave the side gate open, there is no setting constraint!

For example if there's usually at least a week's wait for an audience with Lady Carsa then IMO a player shouldn't be able to invent out of whole cloth an in-setting reason (in this case, a conveniently-placed NPC relative) to bypass that wait.

Why not?

 

[tetrasodium]

This assumes the only model is "We show up, the scenario's ready, away we go." Two weeks before my game, I present a series of three plot hooks for my Fragged Empire game; the players pick the one the want. Sometimes one of the others will lurk around for a while. But there's rarely a case of "this is what you have to engage with." Even in superhero games there are often multiple things going on at once, and you can at least backburner some of them (or fob them off on someone else).

Basically, I think your model of how games are administered is overly limited.

I uagree with your start. Usually i go in with two adventures plus the ability to adapt the bones of any past unused adventures on the fly based on what players do. With Rjenforge I can have hundreds of maps I can load in seconds on a digital tavlstop

 

[Hussar]

I uagree with your start. Usually i go in with two adventures plus the ability to adapt the bones of any past unused adventures on the fly based on what players do. With Rjenforge I can have hundreds of maps I can load in seconds on a digital tavlstop

Ahh to have that much time and energy to prep.

im typically only one session ahead of the disaster curve.

 

[Micah Sweet]

TSR pushed something like this, for a time, with their green-covered line of Historical Reference books...though they were decidedly D&D in periods of history, rather than the purer form you're describing here.

I loved those books. Still have a couple of them.

 

[Lanefan]

But if the PC has a sister who'll leave the side gate open, there is no setting constraint!

Why not?

I should have realized we've had this argument before: you don't mind players unilaterally authoring convenient ways around setting constraints, where I feel said constraints should be honoured by the PCs just like they are by anyone else in the setting.

Not going to go round the houses again on this one.