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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6685421" data-attributes="member: 996">I think the idea was probably that you'd play the game for a long time, becoming familiar with the inner mysteries through experience and building 'player skill,' until the challenge of play palled, and then you would become a DM.  Kinda like the whole Sith master-apprentice thing.  I doubt that ideal actually happened much, but there are a lot of assumptions used in classic D&D (like campaigns consistently making it past 10th level) that never really panned out. Not exactly my experience.  I saw more, longer, and more divisive arguments in the classic D&D era than the modern.  I think it had a lot to do with the age of the groups I was in at the time, as well as the hobby being fairly new.  But the rules themselves had plenty to do with it, too, as they were very open to interpretation, tempting 'rules lawyers' to 'make a case' for the DM interpreting them in their favor.  One appeal of running the game with lots of self-authored variants was that no one could argue with you about what /you/ meant by a rule /you/ wrote. ;P  3e didn't cut down on the arguments so much as change their nature, as they went more from impassionedly arguing for an interpretation to pedantically establishing the Rules As Written.  I see less arguing in 4e and 5e.  In the former, because the rules are clear enough there's little need to argue for long (so not fewer arguments, just much shorter ones), in the latter, because the core resolution relies completely on DM interpretation, so the DM's unquestioned authority is naturally established from the get-go (so fewer arguments, tending more towards 'gaming the DM,' then contesting the meaning of the rules).  Neither completely prevents arguments, but they both cut down on them.  In a sense, the idea that there's some odyllic perfectly-level-appropriate encounter that the DM can try to approximate when he designs a dungeon has been with us since the beginning.  Classic D&D often used HD/levels as if they were interchangeable, as if a 3rd level character and 3HD monster were somehow equivalent (they weren't, but it was occasionally implied), monsters appeared in encounter tables in the DMG by (dungeon) Level, which also implied certain monsters were appropriate for certain level parties (though, even PCs of the same level weren't exactly equivalent), modules were published as being 'for' PCs of a range of levels, like 1-3, or 8-12 or whatever.  So, yes, the sense of an n-level encounter has always been there.  3e was the first time it was codified into encounter guidelines, they just didn't work well.  In 4e, they actually worked, that's why it's seen as 'starting' with 4e.  It might be as reasonable to say it ended with 4e. That's a decidedly negative spin, but yeah.  More positively, the game is designed/presented as a 'starting point,' for the DM, which avoids the implication that said starting point is not useable as-is. Sure, DM Empowerment means DM-player 'negotiations' are going to be from a position of DM strength.  With power comes responsibility, the 5e DM is responsible for his table, how enjoyable his campaign is, how his players get on, and so forth to a greater degree than in 3e or 4e, where players shared more of the responsibility.  You can think of it as the DM's reward for assuming that more burdensome and responsible position, being that he doesn't have to compromise on his vision of the campaign as much as the players must compromise on their visions of their characters. There may be no place for the class in the DM's campaign.  That's often the case, a class, item, race, spell or whatever may simply be inappropriate to the setting or theme or tone of the campaign.   Clearly it doesn't fit into the theme of any campaign such a DM would run.  But, yeah, even if it's just personal distaste, completely unfounded, it's the DM's prerogative to run the sub-set or super-set of the game that he chooses, as he chooses.  Whether he can find players, at all, being the prime constraint on that prerogative.</blockquote>

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