D&D General Matt Colville: "50 years later we're still arguing about what D&D even is!"

[Minigiant]

It’s not even just the shifts in classes and races.

Heck.

I keep saying the Martial/Caster divide exist because the idea of what a high level wizard is shared amongst the community but each table, city, and design group has a different idea of what a high level fighter is.

We all agree on the Archmage and High Patriarch. But the void creates 20 concepts of the Grandmaster Swordman and Prince of Thieves.

And as time marches on, more ideas of the level 18 fighter/barbarian/rogue/ranger/etc are created.

 

[el-remmen]

(I'm of the opinion it's all literature.)

I know it's a tangent, but in my opinion (and for what it is worth, I have a PhD in Contemporary American Literature & Popular Culture), literature is not a way of writing, it is a way of reading.

So yes, it is all literature, if you read the text with the attention and contextual understanding with which more traditional "literature" is read (and I am using both the terms "read" and 'text" broadly).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I played 3E through its full duration and beyond, but this really was one change, all the other arguments about flavor and meaning aside, that I felt negatively impacted gameplay for me. It was not simply shifting from rolling under (though I like the feel of that and the intuitive nature of it), it was the shift to these largely uncapped bonuses and target numbers that changed how the scaling worked

Unfortunately, it's a change that was almost surely inevitable.

There's almost no design space if you keep such a hard cap on the range of numbers. Keeping numbers from growing too big, too fast is an admirable goal. But people*like* "number go UP!" Video games know this and use it (and, sometimes, abuse it) to sell games.

 

[Minigiant]

I played 3E through its full duration and beyond, but this really was one change, all the other arguments about flavor and meaning aside, that I felt negatively impacted gameplay for me. It was not simply shifting from rolling under (though I like the feel of that and the intuitive nature of it), it was the shift to these largely uncapped bonuses and target numbers that changed how the scaling worked

Unfortunately, it's a change that was almost surely inevitable

Roll Under and Roll Over push to different styles.

Rol Over urges difficulty and escalation actions.
Roll Under urges reliability and getting better at regular stuff.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Unfortunately, it's a change that was almost surely inevitable.

There's almost no design space if you keep such a hard cap on the range of numbers. Keeping numbers from growing too big, too fast is an admirable goal. But people*like* "number go UP!" Video games know this and use it (and, sometimes, abuse it) to sell games.

I don't know. I mean I did really like 3E and it does do that well (but it also changes the feel of play a lot). I played both editions for about an equal amount of time and my preference certainly remains more with roll under (especially for things like NWPs versus how skills work in 3E). But I can see roll over with less of a cap is a design choice that works for what they want to do

 

[mamba]

For those of us who don't have an hour to listen, is there a synopsis?

the discussions we have today are not all that different / around similar topics as they were back then (although some have been settled long ago), and everyone plays the game differently, there is no one way to play D&D 'right'

 

[BookTenTiger]

I know it's a tangent, but in my opinion (and for what it is worth, I have a PhD in Contemporary American Literature & Popular Culture), literature is not a way of writing, it is a way of reading.

So yes, it is all literature, if you read the text with the attention and contextual understanding that more traditional "literature" is read (and I am using both the term "read" and 'text" broadly).

I like this!

 

[Remathilis]

The 3E sorcerer, the Greyhawk thief ... possibly the UA cavalier, although that wound up removed from the game. I don't recall the 3.5 warlock catching quite so much flack.

(And the 4E warlord is obviously the one you think people are thinking of. )

I still remember when 3e came out and a guy I knew in college who was a DM immediately banned it and declared it the stupidest thing ever because it was a wizard without a spell book and in his words, the only way you could harm a wizard was to target his spell book (which he did with alarming regularity). Spell books and familiars were basically targets on your back.

(He was also a big fan of Gods taking away your divine powers, which meant most people ended up fighters in his game. He also didn't keep a regular group of players long, but I digress).

 

[CleverNickName]

We are?

I guess I'm out of the loop.

 

[roguish]

Huh, I'd never thought of the DM (or referee / umpire, this is directly inherited from wargames) being conceived in the early days as a teacher making up problems for Prussian officers in training students to solve, hence the Gygaxian adversarial DM style.

And the benign version was "the problem is hard or deliberately misleading, but for the purpose of making the student better", while the less benign version was "the problem is hard or impossible to solve, and the student doesn't learn anything, so the teacher is bad".

I find this fascinating. To be clear, I don't want it anywhere near me, it's the opposite of my jam (it's a bloody roleplaying game, not homework), but I do understand it, and it's very interesting, and it explains SO MUCH about oldschool DM, err... arrogance.