NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6952947" data-attributes="member: 996">First, in the opposite direction, in 1979 (1e DMG & Village of Hommlet, I'll argue).   Then, in the direction you mean, c2000 (3.x/d20).That is, 'put the pieces on the table and roll the dice' is how games had generally been played before, a 'judge' at a wargame just mediated the rules for contesting players.  In the early game, the DM created dungeons and combats (using Chainmail) or hexcrawls (using Wilderness Survival), the creativity of dungeon-design was new, but the game-play was based on a wargame or boardgame (and though system-native rules for combat were quickly added, they weren't that different in nature).  The advice in the 1e DMG, IMHO, really cemented the role of the DM as trying to challenge the players with prepared adventures.  And Village of Hommlet presented a collection of NPCs that at least suggested some real 'living being' motivations (though it was still a little shaded to combat stats and treasure, so you could have raided the village like an above-ground dungeon).From then until 3.0, the DM was increasingly the auteur of the game, the rules were there as a starting point, but it was prettymuch entirely on him to make it work.  Then, WotC took over and shifted the emphasis from DM to player.  3.0 gave players unprecedented control over the definition of the characters they played, and consequently, a great deal more influence over the campaign, itself.  The DM still had a tremendous amount of work to do, but had CR guidelines (if not very dependable ones) as a tool to help with that, while the zeitgeist of the community gravitated towards 'the RAW' taking much pressure for rulings and rule modifications off the DM - and fostering a lot of criticism of the rules' relative lack of balance that, before, when it was only a DM issue, would have been irrelevant.  4e responded to those criticisms with a much more balanced and, perhaps incidentally, much easier-to-DM, system with much-simplified prep work using encounter building guidelines that were actually somewhat dependable - or even just running out of a module more or less cold.  5e of course, goes all the way back to AD&D (but not exactly all the way back to 0D&D), in putting everything on the DM again.  Evoking the Classic Game.  DM Empowerment.  Rulings not Rules.  It's a necessary part of keeping the resource-management meta-game challenging, and, incidentally, a way of imposing some sort of class balance. But it's such a great illusion if you can pull it off!A good point.  2e did beef up monsters (especially Dragons) considerably.  And 3e made monsters hit very hard, indeed, nudging the game towards a 'rocket tag' style (while optimized save DCs shoved it in that direction a lot harder) and the 5MWD, drawing lots of criticism...4e countered with milestone incentives for longer days, and classes that balanced with eachother regardless of day length, drawing lots of, well 'criticism' really doesn't do it justice...D&D was, as the first RPG, necessarily a relatively 'primitive' game that people adapted to their needs, and stayed so for a long time, building an established fan-base that demanded just that.  The thing WotC may have been thinking in 2007 (aside from "how are we going to hit $50million to be a 'core' brand?") was "D&D needs to build a new fan-base," even if that were the case, they must have radically underestimated just how reactionary that 'old' fan base was going to be.  Now that they're conforming to tradition, again, everything's fine.  They can't get a 'new' fan base (ie with radically new attitudes), per se, but they can grow the existing one, which could presumably slowly change over time, like any other little sub-culture, as the old guard kick the bucket, and it becomes safer to try new things.I can't consider fast-combat TotM (since we were talking about monster stats in combat) to be squarely 'middle-line' in terms of range of styles.  Not as far off on the edge as freestyle RP, but off on that side of the spectrum.  Rather, 5e sought to capture the feel of the classic game (and, IMHO, succeeded admirably).  Though you could always (at least try to) play D&D by-the-book, in most editions, as in 5e, making good use of it in any specific style probably meant tinkering under the hood a bit.  In 5e, specifically, the 'by the book' rules call for DM rulings frequently, so it's not a matter of needing to 'patch it up' when you deviate from the standard game, as needing to work with it as a matter of course.4e and PF monster stat blocks both used shading & headings to break things down in a helpful, easy-to-reference way.  5e didn't entirely abandon that kind of breakdown, but it did compromise it a bit for a more classic look.I don't recall ever hearing that goal mentioned.  Though, I'm sure they wanted to boost revenue, and, tiny as the RPG market is, and as big a part of it as D&D stayed, even when releasing no new product at all, re-claiming the #1 slot would all but inevitably be part of that.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />That guy may well have run games heavily back in the day, and be quite expert (ok, had been quite expert, at running AD&D).  By making the game reasonably familiar, they tap into that expertise, and, like riding a bike, the returning DM can get back up to speed fairly easily.  Brilliant, really.Sure, that's the DM's job.Ironically, while long-time gamers are acutely aware of things like that, and some of us may even be in the market for them for want of extensive prep/tinkering time, it's really new/casual gamers who benefit most from a clear/functional/balanced system like that.That goal did get floated during the playtest, but it was always, as I recall, in the context of /looking back at what made the game appealing to the player base, when they were new to it/, which was inevitably through that special lens of hindsight we humans all come equipped with...Aren't video-game 'boss fights' climactic battles at the end of a series of lesser fights leading up to them?  D&D's resource-attrition model has worked for that kind of thing since the beginning - and video games have imitated that.IMHO, Legendary creatures (and Lair Actions) are clearly intended as such support.Existing improvised weapon rules cover that action adequately.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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