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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 3799081" data-attributes="member: 6777">When faced with such commentary, it's best, IMO, to nod politely and then walk away. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Anyway...I think the only thing that's really happened over the course of the various editions of D&D w/r/t to the thread topic is that the rulebooks have steadily gotten better at explaining a default mode of functional play, with better rule support. E.g., Merric's comment above about appropriate treasure.The whole "power" discussion seems more rooted in overall trends in the hobby itself, and reaction to said trends.I mean, imagine the continuum of distribution of game-authority seen in RPGs produced to date as, say, a ribbon 5' long. One end represents RPGs with authority strongly concentrated in one role, such as a GM. The opposite end represents RPGs where no one role has more authority than any other.Marked on this ribbon, every edition of D&D would likely fall within a 3" wide grouping somewhere towards the former end. There's variance, but not really significant in the grand scheme of things.The real difference is that now we know better.Sure, you can lump certain behaviors under "jerk DM" and question why anyone would play with one. There is, however, tons of anecdotal evidence all over gaming fora that show people do play with jerk DMs and that they did not (or even do not) know that gaming wasn't supposed to work that way.But now you can commonly find people talking about trust at the table, social contract, and  identifying behaviors that make for bad play—at the least, make for play they personally don't enjoy. Better yet, RPGs themselves are talking about it, D&D included. This is awesome.Ergo, I don't think there's a whole lot in current D&D that genuinely diminishes the DM's authority over the play experience w/r/t to previous editions. Sure, there's a lot more bits that are codified now, but that's not power-management... that's good design. In the end, the DM is still the final authority in D&D. IMO, 3.5 simply does the best job (so far) of advising DMs of how to use that authority for enjoyable play.Now, that some of this advice may dissuade DMs from using certain techniques, thus honking off people who see no issues with said techniques is just, well... tough noogies for those people. There is a certain amount of craft to RPG'ing, and crafts (ideally) evolve and improve. Such is life.</blockquote>

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