No rule before its time?

[FireLance]

Some concepts that would probably be less popular now than earlier:

Race-class restrictions: e.g. dwarves cannot be wizards, elves cannot be paladins, etc.
Gender differences, especially if one gender is strictly inferior to another: e.g. female PCs are exactly like male PCs except that they have a maximum cap on Strength.
Level caps, especially if they are not applied across the board: everyone retires at level 10/20/30 is okay, halflings can only reach a maximum level of 8 while humans have unlimited advancement is not.

 

[WayneLigon]

Interesting questions, certainly.

What D&D concepts, of any edition, just wouldn't be acceptable to today's gamers? What rules and flavor would just fall flat for today's tastes?

Many of the limitations put on characters, but then those were just as unpalatable 'back in the day' as they would be today. Most GM's I know of on the local scene simply ignored them in earlier editions.

The strength limit for women is about the only thing that comes to mind, and I never can remember if that was an official rule or something that came up in The Dragon or something. We never used it, regardless.

What RPG concepts (genres, presentations, etc.) could not have been accepted (successfully introduced) sooner than they were?

I don't think there are any that come to mind. D&D has always been a very late adopter of many, many concepts as far as it showing up in a printed rule book; other RPGs were doing them successfully many years or decades before D&D decided to adopt them and many DMs ported those concepts in their games for quite a long time before they showed up in rules books.

Monsters-as-PCs? Old hat. 'Monsters! Monsters!' had that concept decades before 3E. OD&D even said you could specifically play a monster. It was only with the intro of AD&D that things puckered up in that regard, but the concept was certainly acceptable to gamers.

Teiflings as a PC race? That would have been perfectly acceptable; I can't imagine why it wouldn't have been. The 'no demons in D&D' thing from the 90's was a reaction by management, not a reflection of gamer tastes, and no GM I know of ever cared one whit about such things.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Any of the rules that make D&D more "video-gamey" would have not been acceptable in the 1970's. Anything that made D&D more like Pong just would have ruined the game.


Honestly, I'm unsure how most rules would have been "before their time." While the rules have evolved over the years, it isn't to me like there was a natural evolution that required intermediary steps to make later changes acceptable.

I think the game is one of limitless imagination, so innovative rules introduced before their time would have been accepted just as easily as any new rules are today: that is to say there would be people accepting of, and people opposed to the changes.