D&D 4E Presentation vs design... vs philosophy

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[prabe]

I would imagine the Harlot table comes BEFORE the random disease table?

It would make sense, but nope. Diseases are on page 13. The harlot table is a subtable on the City Encounter Matrix, in Appendix C: Random Monster Encounters, on page 192.

I'm home, so I checked. The government table @lowkey13 is talking about is on page 89 (though that's just a list of types, not a random generation table). The Attack Matrices are on page 74 and 75.

 

[Arilyn]

Well .... you have to remember the context/time. This was more about using 3PP than about homebrew!

Gygax really had a ... thing ... about making sure that the money stayed with TSR, and he had a few screeds in both the rulebooks and Dragon Magazine (ESPECIALLY) regarding that.

That said, your memory is correct- he did stress that there was a need for minimum uniformity (so you could take characters from one campaign to another, say). But ....

Here's some relevant pull-text from the DMG:

It opens with:

What follows herein is strictly for the eyes of you, the campaign referee. As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another. Pronouncements there may be, but they are not from "on high" as respects your game.

....

The final word, then, is the game. Read how and why the system is as if is, follow the parameters, and then cut portions as needed to maintain excitement.

...and of course ....

Know the game systems, and you will know how and when to take upon yourself the ultimate power. To become the final arbiter, rather than the interpreter of the rules, can be a difficult and demanding task, and it cannot be undertaken lightly, for your players expect to play this game, not one made up on the spot. By the same token, they are playing the game the way you, their DM, imagines and creates it. Remembering that the game is greater than its parts, and knowing all of the parts, you will have overcome the greater part of the challenge of being a referee. Being a true DM requires cleverness and imagination which no set of rules books can bestow. Seeing that you were clever enough to buy this volume, and you have enough imagination to desire to become the maker of a fantasy world, you are almost there already! Read and become familiar with the contents of this work and the one written for players, learn your monsters, and spice things up with some pantheons of super-powerful beings. Then put your judging and refereeing ability into the creation of your own personal milieu, and you have donned the mantle of Dungeon Master. Welcome to the exalted ranks of the overworked and harassed, whose cleverness and imagination are all too often unappreciated by cloddish characters whose only thought in life is to loot, pillage, slay, and who fail to appreciate the hours of preparation which went into the creation of what they aim to destroy as cheaply and quickly as possible. As a DM you must live by the immortal words of the sage who said: “Never give a sucker an even break.” Also, don‘t be a sucker for your players, for you‘d better be sure they follow sage advice too. As the DM, you have to prove in every game that you are still the best. This book is dedicated to helping to assure that you are.

ahem

Again, contextually a little .... bit .... different .... than 4e.

I think Gygax was torn. The California group was doing things with the game Gygax hated, thus the feud between them over whether they were playing real D&D. Some thing never change. Gygax wanted to curb this "straying from his vision," especially from the more serious hobbyists. On the other hand, Gygax was a tinkerer himself, so yes, you are right he didn't actively discourage it. I think, however, he really wanted GMs to thoroughly understand his game and its underlying philosophy, before making changes. Master the game, then become a true Dungeon Master, with the skill to make changes that won't destroy the game.

Of course, a lot of tables immediately merged AD&D with the original rules, and skipped, changed and manipulated a lot of dials, which gave AD&D the reputation of being guidelines, not hard fast rules. I think it would be very hard to play AD&D exactly as written. Just throwing out the question. Did anyone do this?

And yes, 4e has a very different feel. I don't think Gygax would have approved of it at all. It's got heroes undertaking fantastic stunts at first level, and it's much more like moves from a video game. I didn't like 4e, but re-looking at it has softened my opinion. I think I could have fun with it, after all, but it really doesn't feel like D&D to a lot of players, and I agree. It was doing well, despite this. It wasn't a failure, just not the success, WOTC needed or hoped for.

I wonder what he would have thought about 5e...

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Arilyn]

It was a different time, for sure. When AD&D was first published, there were some raised eyebrows, and disappointed players who were used to the loose rules of OD&D, but people bought the game, and then happily changed things to their liking. You had to, in order to stay sane.

With all the games on the market these days and with designers having learned a lot over the decades, if AD&D was published today, it'd be stamped as"unplayable." And that prose! But all game writers copied Gygax prose and style in those early years. Bunnies and Burrows reads like a university thesis! And those bunnies were expected to do a lot of adventuring underground. Thought rabbits bolted underground to escape danger? I'm really getting off topic.

 

[Fenris-77]

I would imagine the Harlot table comes BEFORE the random disease table?

Well, not for the Bard, but for everyone else yeah...

 

[Lanefan]

Of course, a lot of tables immediately merged AD&D with the original rules, and skipped, changed and manipulated a lot of dials, which gave AD&D the reputation of being guidelines, not hard fast rules.

And the probably-unintended beauty of 1e was that it was in many ways robust enough to withstand all kinds of this sort of tinkering and still remain halfway playable.

I think it would be very hard to play AD&D exactly as written. Just throwing out the question. Did anyone do this?

Not that I know of around here. Certainly I never have, despite 35+ years of playing 1e-ish games.

 

[pemerton]

This thread has prompted me to think about what counts as a rules change, especially in the D&D context.

Writing up a new monster (or similar element in a list-based PG) doesn't seem like a rules change. But in AD&D changing the HD size of a particular monster, or of monsters in general, would be a rules cnange.

The second change - ie to monsters in general - is actually quite straightforward to understand. (And Gygax did it for the classes, upgrading them all except MUs, so why not do it for monsters if the game is playing too easy or too hard in combat?) It was quite a popular change in 4e, too.

But why change the HD size for just this monster? Why not just give it more (or fewer) HD, or plusses to its HD? There's a marginal significance here - giving more HD can change the attack chart for a monster, and even giving plusses to HD can change a monster's saving throw chart. But is managing the numbers to that degree of precision so important in AD&D? Personally I'd be hard-pressed to be persuaded that changing an particular monster's HD size adds anything other than a potentially confusing gimmick. (Shambling mounds notwithstanding.)

To pick on a different resolution system: surprise. It's not a rules change, in AD&D, to change the die on which surrpise is checked (for a particular monster, or class, or even circumstance) - the DMG flags this very possibility. Monks using d% rather than a regular die for surprise is a change, though, because it makes it impoosible to use the standard rule for determining the duration of surprise.

And shifting things to a different mechanic again (eg the Classic Traveller opposed throw mechanic) would be a change.

In a system like 4e or 5e D&D, with a relatively uniform resolution framework (check vs DC), I don't think setting DCs, or varying them from textual suggestions, really counts as a rules change. Setting DCs is part of the GM's job. But going to a different framework (eg rolling for surprise or initiative on d6) would be a rules change.

4e D&D probably has as many points at which rules might be changed as 5e, given the deep similarity of the two systems. Conversations among 4e players on these boards showed changes being made of the sort one would expect - initiative (including some people using side initiative), recovery rates (eg modifying rest times, especially for "daily" resources) and systems (eg recovery only in "havens", or more radical fiction-based approaches to recovering "encounter" resources), skill challenges, including or excluding feats, ignoring errata, etc. I didn't see many people changing the fundamentals of skill checks or atttack and damage rolls, but at a certain point why would you not just change games?

But there's certainly nothing in 4e that would make Gygax's government chart or tunneling matrix innaplicable!

 

[pemerton]

I think it would be very hard to play AD&D exactly as written. Just throwing out the question. Did anyone do this?

I would say that I tried to (c 1984), but failed. I didn't understand the initiative rules, especially in relation to spell casting. (I think those rules are in fact incoherent/contradictory, but the errors I made were independent of that.)

Re @lowkey13's post, we did 1 through 8, but as I said with respect to 2 got the initiatie rules wrong. I did some of 9 but I don't recall how consistently. At a certain point it becomes irrelevant because the PC or henchman cleric can use Cure Disease.

What we were weakest on, although only in retrospect can I fully appreciate it, is actually engaging in Gygax's "skilled play". At the time I could just see that there were flaws in the play experience.

Oriental Adventures (1985, I'm pretty sure) was the gamechanger for us back then (together with the article in Dragon 101 called "For King and Country", which was about getting rid of alignment). I would say all my GMing and most of my RPGing since is just a footnote to that!

 

[Don Durito]

The typo is that it references a singular light thrown weapon where it should reference plural, as a reminder that you need one per target. (and also to remind that not all the light thrown weapons need be the same - one could, I suppose, when targeting seven people in the blast throw daggers at three of them and shurikins at the rest)

With a crossbow or sling it's easy to assume you'd be using a bunch of ammo to generate the effect, no problem there.

I always wondered how it was supposed to work really, just in terms of consistency, as generally you need a minor action to draw a weapon unless you have the quick draw feat. If you have a magic weapon it's supposed to return to your hand automatically, but one presumes it would have to first at least reach the target, while the power suggests that your attacks are so fast that wouldn't necessarily be the case.