D&D General Self-Defeating Rules in D&D

[Jacob Lewis]

I don't agree that 'kick down the doors and fight the monsters, lather rinse level up repeat' is what D&D has always been about. I don't think OD&D and AD&D 1 were about that - consider how GP far outweighed kills in terms of XP.

I think the “GP outweighed kills in XP” point gets repeated as if it’s a silver bullet, but I don’t think it proves what people often think it does. Gold was never the goal in itself—it was the token that converted into XP, and XP was always what players actually cared about. What does XP buy you? Levels. And what do levels give you? More hit points, better attacks, more spells—all of which are overwhelmingly focused on combat.

So while the fictional wrapper of early editions was “you’re delving dungeons to haul out treasure,” the mechanical loop was “treasure → XP → levels → combat power → deeper dungeons and nastier monsters.” If the real goal was simply “get enough gold to be comfortable, fed, housed, and worry-free,” most campaigns could have wrapped up by level 3 or 4. But that wasn’t the loop anyone was playing. The loop was escalation: get stronger so you can fight bigger things.

That’s why the majority of rules in every edition—OD&D, AD&D, and onward—are devoted to combat: weapon tables, attack matrices, morale, initiative systems, spells (most of them combat-oriented), etc. If gold was truly the “point” of the game, you’d expect equally robust mechanics for managing wealth, building trade networks, or influencing the economy. Instead, treasure existed mainly as a scoring mechanism to fuel advancement toward the thing the rules actually cared about: fighting.

So I’d frame it this way: early D&D carried a survivalist skin—resource management, light, wandering monsters, encumbrance—but those were pressure valves designed to make combat decisions riskier and to give treasure a context. Over time, that skin peeled away, but what was left exposed was the skeleton that had always been there: kick down doors, fight monsters, get loot, repeat.

That’s why the survival rules feel vestigial today. They were never equal pillars alongside combat—they were scaffolding to support the combat-and-advancement loop. Once the design shed XP-for-gold and heroic fantasy took over, the scaffolding wasn’t needed anymore. But D&D still carries it, so it lingers as a kind of half-alive tradition.

 

[soviet]

I think the “GP outweighed kills in XP” point gets repeated as if it’s a silver bullet, but I don’t think it proves what people often think it does. Gold was never the goal in itself—it was the token that converted into XP, and XP was always what players actually cared about. What does XP buy you? Levels. And what do levels give you? More hit points, better attacks, more spells—all of which are overwhelmingly focused on combat.

So while the fictional wrapper of early editions was “you’re delving dungeons to haul out treasure,” the mechanical loop was “treasure → XP → levels → combat power → deeper dungeons and nastier monsters.” If the real goal was simply “get enough gold to be comfortable, fed, housed, and worry-free,” most campaigns could have wrapped up by level 3 or 4. But that wasn’t the loop anyone was playing. The loop was escalation: get stronger so you can fight bigger things.

That’s why the majority of rules in every edition—OD&D, AD&D, and onward—are devoted to combat: weapon tables, attack matrices, morale, initiative systems, spells (most of them combat-oriented), etc. If gold was truly the “point” of the game, you’d expect equally robust mechanics for managing wealth, building trade networks, or influencing the economy. Instead, treasure existed mainly as a scoring mechanism to fuel advancement toward the thing the rules actually cared about: fighting.

So I’d frame it this way: early D&D carried a survivalist skin—resource management, light, wandering monsters, encumbrance—but those were pressure valves designed to make combat decisions riskier and to give treasure a context. Over time, that skin peeled away, but what was left exposed was the skeleton that had always been there: kick down doors, fight monsters, get loot, repeat.

That’s why the survival rules feel vestigial today. They were never equal pillars alongside combat—they were scaffolding to support the combat-and-advancement loop. Once the design shed XP-for-gold and heroic fantasy took over, the scaffolding wasn’t needed anymore. But D&D still carries it, so it lingers as a kind of half-alive tradition.

You're disagreeing with something I didn't say. GP = XP doesn't make the game about getting gold. It (without a corresponding weight of kills = XP) makes the game about solving the dungeon without necessarily fighting the dungeon.

I agree that the rules (and the benefits from levelling up) are still largely about combat. Arguably this is still a failure state in play, and 'good play' is presumed to involve avoiding combat where possible, so this is intended as additional protection when things go wrong rather than necessarily an incentive or expectation that players will seek out combat as a first choice.

 

[Clint_L]

I think a lot of these simulationist rules are vestigial, but they are easy enough to ignore, and it’s okay to have them around for players who like a more hardcore game. More of them could be made optional so as not to confuse newer players.

 

[GobHag]

I agree that the rules (and the benefits from levelling up) are still largely about combat. Arguably this is still a failure state in play, and 'good play' is presumed to involve avoiding combat where possible

Well that's a ludicrous opinion in my eyes. Imagine if a stealth game's progression makes your skin more bulletproof and your guns bigger and explodier but treats anytime you get into a gunfight as a failure in play.