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

[James Gasik]

When people bring up Tolkien as an example of what fantasy they feel D&D should emulate, don't forget that at some point, even the Professor got tired of his characters having to forage for food everywhere, and just gave the party enough lembas to last the remainder of their journey!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

One could argue (I would argue) that the play loop of classic D&D led to "name" level benefits like strongholds and domain play. So actually, you are getting enough money and fame to have a comfortable home from which to launch higher level concerns.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And yet, if D&D is about "solving the dungeon", it rarely happens any other way but combat. You got any stories about the Oceans Eleven style adventure where a group breaks in to the Steadying of the Hill Giants and sneaks past every guard to get their treasure. Or tell me about the group that successfully negotiated with all the monstrous denizens of the Caves of Chaos to hand over their treasure peacefully.

D&D has at best three classes that are built to handle the exploration and social elements of the game and a flat load of them to handle the combat side. The game actively discourages sneaking as a way to solve encounters (with heavy limitations on stealth, invisibility and surprise to avoid killing foes before acting, which should be encouraged if combat is a fail state) and most social encounters barely go deeper than a charisma check or a charm spell.

Yes, you can create nonviolent scenarios (When a Star Falls and Wild Beyond the Witchlight are both designed where combat is unnecessary) but most D&D adventures from Keep on the Borderlands onwards may pay lip service to the idea that combat should be undertaken lightly, but then provides no real alternative to it.

This is where there are IMO better versions of D&D that provide more support for the other pillars for all classes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It’s no surprise that many 5e players find worrying about torches and rations to be tedious accounting, as there is basically no chance of either ever really mattering. However, if they are mostly trivially accounted for, but occasionally Super Important for survival, ime they can be a lot of fun.

I think it's time to let torches go.

I don't think there is any possible way 5E or 6E or 7E can make people excited about or interested in torches. Torches have been doomed since 2nd Edition at the absolute latest (just look at early-2E FR books and how obsessed they are with "glowglobes" or w/e they're called). They're not an interesting or fun thing to think about for 95% of players, and for the few who do love that stuff, there are multiple RPGs focused on that particular subject, or using it as a huge mechanic.

In a game where Light, Continual Light/Flame, other magical light sources and so on are common, trying to make torches happen is absolutely "trying to make 'fetch' happen".

I think there are a lot of other simulationist-adjacent elements that could be made engaging, but torches absolutely isn't a possibility for D&D. They can be ruled out. Healing is similar - every single "I want changes to downtime healing" proposal I've seen is identical in where it ends - "Make it totally trivial if they have a magical healer of any description, and insane pain if they don't!!!" and without any gameplay-based reasoning for this it just seems like cargo-cult nonsense.

Better darkness/darkvision rules would be great though.

 

[SkidAce]

..."Make it totally trivial if they have a magical healer of any description, and insane pain if they don't!!!"...

A minor point: All the "adventures" (patrols) I have been on, the above is pretty realistic. Which is why our adventuring group (squad) would always bring a dedicated trained medic if possible.

Just saying its another way of looking at it...

 

[Jacob Lewis]

One could argue (I would argue) that the play loop of classic D&D led to "name" level benefits like strongholds and domain play. So actually, you are getting enough money and fame to have a comfortable home from which to launch higher level concerns.

That’s a fair point—domain play and “name level” benefits absolutely existed, and they gave players a direction beyond the dungeon. I’m not denying their presence in the rules.

The distinction, though, is between possibility and priority. The support for strongholds, hirelings, and domain play was there, but look at what TSR (and later WotC) actually poured most of their energy into: modules, monster manuals, treasure tables, spell lists, and combat rules. That’s what drove the play experience for the vast majority of groups.

So yes, those other elements were supported, but they were ancillary—occasional codas to the main loop of fighting and looting. They weren’t the throughline reinforced by published adventures and product lines. The heart of the game has always leaned toward combat as the central activity, with everything else serving as padding for those who wanted more than just that.

You can even see the same tension today with the new 5e “bastions” system. It’s an obvious callback to strongholds and domains, but whether it becomes an integral part of play will depend entirely on whether Wizards actually builds it into the expectations of published adventures and campaigns. If it remains tucked away in rulebooks for tables to use or ignore at will—just like domain rules before it—that’s a clear signal it’s still a vestigial subsystem, not something truly embraced as part of the game’s core loop.

 

[Lord Shark]

I think it's time to let torches go.

I don't think there is any possible way 5E or 6E or 7E can make people excited about or interested in torches. Torches have been doomed since 2nd Edition at the absolute latest (just look at early-2E FR books and how obsessed they are with "glowglobes" or w/e they're called). They're not an interesting or fun thing to think about for 95% of players, and for the few who do love that stuff, there are multiple RPGs focused on that particular subject, or using it as a huge mechanic.

I'd say torches have been irrelevant since 1E. Sure, you used torches and lanterns for a couple of levels -- and then the party cleric got to 3rd level and could create as many rocks, sticks, coins, etc., with continual light on them as needed.

 

[GobHag]

If a game asks you to be king later on, it should start you of as a village chief. This is the fundamental problem of Domain play in DnD.

 

[Remathilis]

But you also had more spells that had little to do with combat or were useful outside of it: Push, Read Magic, Audible Glamer, ESP, Forget, and the myriad Detection spells. You had racial abilities like Detect Slope, Detect Traps, Detect Concealed Doors, Determine Direction, etc.

High stats in Strength and Dexterity didn’t really impact your ability to fight unless they were at least 16 - Strength was more about carrying capacity primarily.

It’s not to say that combat wasn’t still a feature, but there was more exploration in the early days than later editions where I think it became more of a fig leaf.

My point was that most of those spells and abilities didn't help you "solve the dungeon" in a way that avoided combat. Read Magic wasn't going to get you to that sweet xp for gp, knowing the slope of a hallway might help you avoid a trap but it's not getting you any more gold that way. My point was that exploration is what you do between combat encounters and has been secondary to it since the games inception. The fact that 5e reduced it to a footnote is irrelevant since it was always just the glue between fights.

I just think the idea of exploration is the primary importance of older D&D and combat was a fail state doesn't feel like it jives with much of the printed material from that era, especially the classic modules outside of occasional oddballs like Tomb of Horrors.

 

[payn]

I think it's time to let torches go.

I don't think there is any possible way 5E or 6E or 7E can make people excited about or interested in torches. Torches have been doomed since 2nd Edition at the absolute latest (just look at early-2E FR books and how obsessed they are with "glowglobes" or w/e they're called). They're not an interesting or fun thing to think about for 95% of players, and for the few who do love that stuff, there are multiple RPGs focused on that particular subject, or using it as a huge mechanic.

In a game where Light, Continual Light/Flame, other magical light sources and so on are common, trying to make torches happen is absolutely "trying to make 'fetch' happen".

I think there are a lot of other simulationist-adjacent elements that could be made engaging, but torches absolutely isn't a possibility for D&D. They can be ruled out. Healing is similar - every single "I want changes to downtime healing" proposal I've seen is identical in where it ends - "Make it totally trivial if they have a magical healer of any description, and insane pain if they don't!!!" and without any gameplay-based reasoning for this it just seems like cargo-cult nonsense.

Better darkness/darkvision rules would be great though.

I think the way to go now is if you really really want darkness to be a factor, then you go with magic means. A place has been warded against light, or a group of underdark can cast darkness often, etc.. Make it part of the adventure itself, instead of a default mode because most folks gave up on darkness being a regular thing decades ago.