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How has D&D changed over the decades?
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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8562286" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>I'm not sure that you can separate rules shifts from tone shifts, though I'd argue that's because the rules shifts lag behind the tone shifts around how people are playing the game.</p><p></p><p>What I will say is that there's much less of a focus on "survival" than there was back when I first started playing and much more focus on "story". The classic adventures I remember from when I was younger were either "you're delving into a hostile environment to find treasure" or "you're trapped in a hostile environment and trying to survive" or both. I'm thinking of things like Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City as examples of each of those. The story was mostly focused on scrambling for resources and figuring out how to get more powerful so you could scramble for more resources.</p><p></p><p>Sometime around when the Companion set came out my perception of the game started to shift away from survival in a fantastic location towards more heroic action. The Master's set inclusion of Paths of Immortality cemented it. Even though the Dominion Rules and the War Machine rules sound like an attempt to scale up the "survival" focus to larger stakes, it has the feel of shifting goal (and hence story) of the game from "grubby adventurers trying to make a buck" into "grubby adventurers trying to start an empire" and then to "grubby adventurers working their way to godhood". The art also shifted right around that time - the new Metzner boxed sets came out with Larry Elmore art instead of Erol Otus art, and Elmore's style is a cleaner, more heroic fantasy than Otus's artwork presented.</p><p></p><p>But then in the 90s - post 2e - things shifted again and D&D became an amorphous system that could contain settings like Ravenloft and Planescape and Dark Sun and the Realms all of them were D&D. To the point where IMO 3rd edition tone and style absorbed all of those elements and set a tone that was an amalgamation of all of them (and more as it also pulled from other pop culture fantasy). And it's been keeping that kind of amorphous kitchen-sink tone to me ever since.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 8562286, member: 19857"] I'm not sure that you can separate rules shifts from tone shifts, though I'd argue that's because the rules shifts lag behind the tone shifts around how people are playing the game. What I will say is that there's much less of a focus on "survival" than there was back when I first started playing and much more focus on "story". The classic adventures I remember from when I was younger were either "you're delving into a hostile environment to find treasure" or "you're trapped in a hostile environment and trying to survive" or both. I'm thinking of things like Keep on the Borderlands and The Lost City as examples of each of those. The story was mostly focused on scrambling for resources and figuring out how to get more powerful so you could scramble for more resources. Sometime around when the Companion set came out my perception of the game started to shift away from survival in a fantastic location towards more heroic action. The Master's set inclusion of Paths of Immortality cemented it. Even though the Dominion Rules and the War Machine rules sound like an attempt to scale up the "survival" focus to larger stakes, it has the feel of shifting goal (and hence story) of the game from "grubby adventurers trying to make a buck" into "grubby adventurers trying to start an empire" and then to "grubby adventurers working their way to godhood". The art also shifted right around that time - the new Metzner boxed sets came out with Larry Elmore art instead of Erol Otus art, and Elmore's style is a cleaner, more heroic fantasy than Otus's artwork presented. But then in the 90s - post 2e - things shifted again and D&D became an amorphous system that could contain settings like Ravenloft and Planescape and Dark Sun and the Realms all of them were D&D. To the point where IMO 3rd edition tone and style absorbed all of those elements and set a tone that was an amalgamation of all of them (and more as it also pulled from other pop culture fantasy). And it's been keeping that kind of amorphous kitchen-sink tone to me ever since. [/QUOTE]
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