D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Lanefan]

I'd love to know where you got that take, because I've never seen anyone actually say that.


No they don't. the 3.5 DMG even had a whole section on how to make house rules.

I wouldn't know, as I didn't buy any 3.5 stuff (I already had 3e).

Interesting to see that, though. I'll have to borrow a friend's book and see what it has to say.

One hundred percent false.

And I'd like to point out that Gygax very literally said that certain changes to the game (such as introducing firearms) would make it not AD&D anymore. Not "AD&D with house rules" but "some other game, not AD&D the way I envision it." He was the one who wanted the rules to be a straitjacket, at least in certain areas.

And then in another part of the book he'd exhort DMs to change rules as desired to make the game their own.

He wasn't exactly a paragon of consistency, ol' EGG.

He's right about firearms, though: including them really does butcher the romanticized medieval or early-Renaissance feel the original game is-was going for.

 

[Aldarc]

And in a way, that makes sense: characters in 4e generally have a broader suite of powers, skills, and abilities to call on than do their 1e counterparts who are considerably more niche-bound.

The question - which, as posts here indicate, was handled differently at different tables - is how much an unskilled character can do (in either edition) if anything. Can for example a character without any tracking skill even try to track someone? Can a character without any athletics skill or a climb % try any climbing?

'Cause if the answer is "no" then indeed, the 1e character would be more restricted.

Remember that all your skills in 4e D&D increased at a rate equal to half your level. So you have all skills in 4e D&D. It's only a question whether you are trained (an additional +5 to skill) or not. There are only two cases of "Trained Only" when it comes to the application of skills in 4e D&D that I recall in 4e PHB 1: i.e., using Acrobatics to reduce fall damage, and Arcana to detect magic.

Like getting a blue ribbon and a medal for just showing up. Unearned victories don't feel like victories to me. Facing a cohort of dangerous monsters only to find out they were minions was kind of a letdown after a while.

Unsurprisingly, I don't agree, but I acknowledge that tastes vary, and you have made your tastes abundantly clear.

IME, what makes minions worthwhile isn't how many HP they have but what they can do to you if you don't deal with them efficiently. You are giving up your turn to deal with minions instead of the bigger threat. So there is often some measure of cost analysis when playing in games with minions: e.g., 4e D&D, Draw Steel, Daggerheart, etc.

He's right about firearms, though: including them really does butcher the romanticized medieval or early-Renaissance feel the original game is-was going for.

Sorry but not having firearms in the Early Renaissance is the real anachronism. The early Renaissance (i.e., Quattrocento) were the 1400s. Firearms were being used in Europe since the 1300s. And it's really in that early Renaissance period that gunpowder and firearms began taking off in Europe.

 

[AnotherGuy]

You see a feature where I see a bug.

"Contextual challenges" do two bad things: they play hell with in-fiction consistency, and they serve to steepen the game's power curve which is already more than steep enough.

Consistency says the challenge is what it is, regardless of who or what is trying to beat it at the time.

Well here is where I agree and disagree with you.

For the opening of the door I prefer a consistent DC. It reminds me of the skill tables provided in 3.x with set DCs for checks.

For a monster though, given how
abstract hit points are, +
how the design behind encounters is ever changing because it is not an exact science, + the intricacies of high level play, +
the tediousness of tracking hit points in large complex fights, +
the ability to emulate certain fantasy tropes

Highlight why the redesign of a monster IS a feature (for me).

Now lets explore when you say "the challenge is what it is"
To who, to what? The PCs.
Why is this consistency important?
(A) Simulation? Ok but what if I don't value D&D's version of simulation given how so much of it feels metagame-y or abstract anyways?

(B) So players know the boardgame state? Well there are two options here.
1. The DM informs the PCs of the minions on the board. For 3 reasons I can think of:
(i) The DM would determine that that information would be known based on the character's experience.
(ii) That information need not be secret when elevating gamism and combat by in large is testing the players in a tactical mini-game.
(iii) The players would be aware at high levels at least who is a minion and who would not be. The boardgame state would not remain the same from 1st to 15th level. Thus the players would adapt.

2. The DM doesn't inform the PCs of the minions on the board. For 1 reason I can think of.
(i) To trick players into using more resources unnecessarily. IMO it works like a bad gotcha. Lose more than you gain at the table and in the fiction with such a policy.

Hope that rambling above makes some sense.

 

[Lanefan]

Sorry but not having firearms in the Early Renaissance is the real anachronism.

Yes, and I think the point is that it's a very intentional anachronism built in a) so that firearms don't take over from swords and bows the way they did in the real world and b) so fireworks and big booms remain the purview of mages.

Then again, most D&D settings have anachronisms at every turn anyway, be they intentional or not; so what's one more?

 

[Aldarc]

Yes, and I think the point is that it's a very intentional anachronism built in a) so that firearms don't take over from swords and bows the way they did in the real world and b) so fireworks and big booms remain the purview of mages.

Then again, most D&D settings have anachronisms at every turn anyway, be they intentional or not; so what's one more?

But my simulationism!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To be fair, the mechanics and narrative purpose of minion rules are quite explicit, and pretty much holler @clearstream 's point at the top of their metaphorical lungs. The general combat/monsters rules IMO were not explicitly written to support the power fantasy of tearing through oodles of nameless bad guys, but the minion rules absolutely were.

The point remains. "This is bad because it means you're killing a lot of sapient lives really fast!" is a criticism that applies just as much to "oh, you scale past goblins really fast, those are just trash mobs".

If valuing the sanctity of each sapient life is supposed to be a criticism of minion rules, it is identically a criticism of D&D--every version.

For goodness' sake, the 1e Fighter specifically got a bunch of attacks so they could lay low a bunch of weak targets in a single turn. Like that was the whole point of that class feature, to mow through a whole bunch of targets really fast. This is something baked into D&D's DNA. To complain about it now, when it was never a problem before--to want to go back to what was already there? No dice. It's special pleading, plain and simple. We must make an exception to excise a thing that D&D has already been doing and which the current edition explicitly made as one of its design goals.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I tend to read @clearstream's comment as one said in jest, not for serious discussion.

I am pretty confident it is not in jest.

 

[AnotherGuy]

When 4e came out I, enthused by some of the preview stuff I'd seen, bought the core three books and put some serious thought into what I'd have to do in order to use its supposedly-better system to give us the same feel and playstyle we already had and liked.

You can probably imagine how far that process got before I just said screw it, we're staying with what we've got.

Out of interest how much of 2e's Handbooks, 3e, 4e's Rituals, or 5e has found its way into your table's game?
And how do you incorporate new rules - the table voted, the DMs (as I know it's more than just you) or you alone?

 

[AlViking]

Yes, and I think the point is that it's a very intentional anachronism built in a) so that firearms don't take over from swords and bows the way they did in the real world and b) so fireworks and big booms remain the purview of mages.

Then again, most D&D settings have anachronisms at every turn anyway, be they intentional or not; so what's one more?

The primary anachronism is that magic works, it's reliable and widespread enough to have standardized spells and schools. Yet we still expect it to resemble the real world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Remember that all your skills in 4e D&D increased at a rate equal to half your level. So you have all skills in 4e D&D. It's only a question whether you are trained (an additional +5 to skill) or not. There are only two cases of "Trained Only" when it comes to the application of skills in 4e D&D that I recall in 4e PHB 1: i.e., using Acrobatics to reduce fall damage, and Arcana to detect magic.


Unsurprisingly, I don't agree, but I acknowledge that tastes vary, and you have made your tastes abundantly clear.

IME, what makes minions worthwhile isn't how many HP they have but what they can do to you if you don't deal with them efficiently. You are giving up your turn to deal with minions instead of the bigger threat. So there is often some measure of cost analysis when playing in games with minions: e.g., 4e D&D, Draw Steel, Daggerheart, etc.


Sorry but not having firearms in the Early Renaissance is the real anachronism. The early Renaissance (i.e., Quattrocento) were the 1400s. Firearms were being used in Europe since the 1300s. And it's really in that early Renaissance period that gunpowder and firearms began taking off in Europe.

I agree about the firearms. Never seen any non-aesthetic reason to exclude them from D&D if you are including other gear from the same or later era.