D&D General Lethality, AD&D, and 5e: Looking Back at the Deadliest Edition

[overgeeked]

interesting. I deal with a lot more rules lawyers in 5e than I ever did in 1st and 2nd, Surprising with the dev's being so clearly in support of DM rules the table. In 3rd it wasn't really rules lawyers it was the players that wanted to argue if Wizards made a splat book you had to allow it.

I quit DM'ing for a few years over those players till I moved and found some sane ones. Then pathfinder saved the day and then rebuilt the same beast. LOL

WotC honestly seems split on this. They say rulings not rules, but are redesigning the game to remove as many of the places the referee needed to make rulings as possible.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Exactly. The “story” is whatever happens while we play the game, TPKs included.

That's how I've always done it. If your goal is instead to play out a "story" then of course you have to compromise on lethality (and likely verisimilitude in general) to make sure you maintain the chosen narrative. That's definitely a valid way to play, but not one I'd choose.

 

[overgeeked]

That's how I've always done it. If your goal is instead to play out a "story" then of course you have to compromise on lethality (and likely verisimilitude in general) to make sure you maintain the chosen narrative. That's definitely a valid way to play, but not one I'd choose.

And player agency, and it being a game, and…

Definitely not a way I’d choose either.

 

[Micah Sweet]

WotC honestly seems split on this. They say rulings not rules, but are redesigning the game to remove as many of the places the referee needed to make rulings as possible.

Sometimes I feel that the entire run of WotC D&D has been the designers trying to get to something like 4e with the game, where the rules are the priority and cover virtually every situation, but never being sure how far they can take any incremental change before their customers balk.

 

[overgeeked]

Sometimes I feel that the entire run of WotC D&D has been the designers trying to get to something like 4e with the game, where the rules are the priority and cover virtually every situation, but never being sure how far they can take any incremental change before their customers balk.

Depends on which customers. Most players seem to want things locked down tight and for the referee to be a meat-computer running code. Most referees seem to want to be able to make choices at their table and run the game how they want without a massive tome covering everything. Players push one way, referees push the opposite. There are more players than referees, and WotC’s running surveys, so it’s swinging towards the locked down rule for everything again.

They could reprint 4E with faster combat and I’d be overjoyed. It was the best version of D&D as a superhero fantasy game they ever did. That’s not always what I want from D&D, but it worked so, so well.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Depends on which customers. Most players seem to want things locked down tight and for the referee to be a meat-computer running code. Most referees seem to want to be able to make choices at their table and run the game how they want without a massive tome covering everything. Players push one way, referees push the opposite. There are more players than referees, and WotC’s running surveys, so it’s swinging towards the locked down rule for everything again.

They could reprint 4E with faster combat and I’d be overjoyed. It was the best version of D&D as a superhero fantasy game they ever did. That’s not always what I want from D&D, but it worked so, so well.

4e was a great game, but I feel it would have had a longer future if it hadn't been called "D&D".

 

[overgeeked]

4e was a great game, but I feel it would have had a longer future if it hadn't been called "D&D".

Absolutely. I know it’s a pipe dream, but I really hope we get some 4E stuff dropped into CC-BY. Oh, man…

 

[Clint_L]

One thing I notice is that even though "old school" D&D supposedly puts the DM in a much more authoritative position, I remember much more time spent arguing rules in the 80s. After a long break, coming back to the game with 5e, it feels like the DM has much more authority. For all the talk about collaboration and complaints I keep reading about overly entitled players, 5e seems to be played much less as game with rules than AD&D. Yes, it is partly because OD&D required you to fill in large gaps and AD&D rules were difficult to parse. But there was more of sense of game masters being referees and judges. "Rules lawyers" became a pejorative early on, but almost everyone I played with in 80s were rules lawyers to some extent. Challenging the DM on ruling now seems to be the height of poor gaming etiquette, which is a bit weird for a game when you think about it.

Could it just be that we were all younger back then, and all thought we were right all the time? Plus, now we've had time to grow some better interpersonal skills, quite a few of us through our relationship and work experiences, I suspect.

Back when we were teens, my friends and I occasionally got into passionate arguments about some stupid rule in the game, sometimes disrupting a whole session. But nowadays it's all very amicable; even when we disagree the general attitude is "eh, let's make a decision and roll with it; talk about it further later if we don't feel good about how it came out." Half my players (home games) are literal lawyers (including my best friend, who I started playing AD&D with more than 40 years ago), yet there is very little rules lawyering at all.

And I do think that 5e is much, MUCH more consistent than AD&D (not a shocker; they had decades to refine it), so there's consequently much less confusion.

 

[Lanefan]

TPK's suck for everyone if your playing to game as an ongoing story. With a few notable exceptions most of the DM's I know including me over the years have drifted away from even allowing such a thing because the whole purpose of the game is to get everyone together, play a story for as long as everyone wants too. Sucks to unintentionally end your story and have to start over.

Avoidance of TPKs is, in the end, largely down to the players and how they play their characters.

Someone has to be willing to bail out or run away even if it means being the sole survivor. That character can then round up a new party and return, with better knowledge of what awaits, in hopes of finding resurrectable parts of the previous crew. Or, that character can take steps to revive the fallen remotely e.g. paying through the nose for a well-worded Wish, if the DM allows such.

I've DMed exactly one (1) TPK in my life, but there's been several situations where only one or two characters survived out of six or eight or ten. Those few survivors, however, were able to keep the "story" going.

 

[Clint_L]

A few close calls but no TPKs on my record. Yet. I need to try harder!

Edit: In D&D, that is.