Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
This post is building on the prior post about the general design principles in early D&D. One topic that came up and is somewhat interesting is how you can glean some ideas about the principles the designers were using through the system.
As I noted before, early D&D (OD&D and 1e) could be kind of a mess- more of a toolkit or a modular system that was created through a series of individual decisions than a system designed from the ground up to "make sense." As such, there are few grand design principles you can see in the game like you might in later and more modern games- things like unified checks (for the d20), or bounded accuracy. Nevertheless, I think that some of the following are concepts that Gygax and other early designers were using that are reflected in the early rules. As you can see, some of them continue to be reflected in D&D's design (less so in other games), while others have been minimized or discarded.
One of the things to remember when looking at these early design principles is that many of them came from a background in the wargaming hobby- after all, that's where the early designers cut their teeth.
Now, without further throat clearing (as excess verbiage is the antithesis of weal!), here are some of those early design principles:
A. Niche protection.
The people who lived on the internet were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
Niche protection is one of those principles that has to be inferred; you won't find it referred to as such in any of the core books. But this principle animates both the class design as well as numerous other features that flowed from the class design. In much the same way that wargames would have "specialist" pieces with different functions, it was assumed that classes would fulfill different roles in the de facto adventuring party.
You had the core two classes- the Fighter (Fighting Man), and the Magic User. Roughly, the Fighter was the primary front-line character, and the Magic User was akin to artillery- devastating, but vulnerable if you got close to it. After those two, you get the third core class- the Cleric. The Cleric (originally modelled after a Van Helsing vampire hunter) was the original gish; able to cast spells (although not the great offensive ones that the MU had) and able to fight (although not with the same hit points and weapons and ability that the fighter had). Later, you had the last of the core four- the Thief, which was always an odd fit, both because of the skills, and because Gygax seemed to delight in nerfing the Thief at almost every opportunity.* Nevertheless, the Thief's abilities were different than those of the other four.
Later, "subclasses" sprung off of those classes, but niche protection remained strong. While spell lists had some overlap, it was minimal, and even those spells that overlapped would change depending on the class (the reincarnation table for a Druid and a MU were different). The most powerful magic items were often "coded" to a particular class. You wanted to use a talisman of annihilation and a sphere of annihilation? Better be a magic user. Want to use a Spade of Colossal Excavation (heh)? Better be a fighter. And so on.
For the most part, classes were designed to provide characters abilities that would allow them to contribute to the party in a way that others, lacking that class, could not. This could, at times, be aggravating- many people were familiar with the need for the Cleric to load up on healing spells, but it was certainly present.
Remnants of niche protection and the class system remain in 5e, although greatly tempered by feats, subclasses that mimic other classes, overlapping spell lists, and lack of gating magic items by class.
*Seriously, the PHB Thief was already plenty weak. Then Gygax spent time in the DMG complaining about Thief skills. "The following additional explanations of thief abilities will help you to prevent abuse of these activities by thieves...."
B. Balance is rough, and can be achieved over time or through massive drawbacks.
The doctors warned them, “Don’t go home and look this up.” That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.
It's not that early D&D was completely unconcerned with balance- just not overly concerned with balance. There was certainly no attempt to work it out with mathematical precision. However, the conceptual ideas used to create balance can often seem foreign- none more so than the idea that balance isn't an instant thing, but instead can be measured over a longer period of time. In other words, it's okay if something is more powerful now, if it's not as powerful later; on the other hand, it's okay to suffer now, if you're going to be more powerful later.
If that seems unclear, the easiest illustration is the infamous demi-human level caps. Demi-humans (the term that referred to the playable non-humans back then, which was inclusive of Elves, Half Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves, Halflings, and Half Orcs) were provided a number of abilities that human PCs did not get immediately when they were created; an Elf in AD&D, for example, could multi-class, was almost immune to sleep and charm, had +1 to hit with a bow or sword, spoke a number of extra languages, could see in the dark (infrared....ahem), had better chances to discover secret and concealed doors ... oh, and could naturally move silently. Not to mention being able to min/max ability scores (+1 Dex, -1 Con). In other words, it was an absolutely massive advantage to be an elf at early levels.
The flip side of those massive advantages was, of course, the level cap. And the level caps were (except Thief) punishingly low in many cases. An Elf with less than a 17 strength would max out at 5th level in fighter- even an 18 strength would only get you to 7th level. All those early advantages were frontloaded, and choosing not to have them (playing a human) would pay off later when you weren't level capped.
But this was true in other areas, as well. Magic Users were notoriously weak; with d4 hit points, no armor, and no cantrips, and few spells early on, playing a MU prior to level 5 was often an exercise in frustration; it was only when your spells really kicked in that the class became "worth it." Suffer early, profit later. Or, for that matter, Thieves. With Thieves, the class was weak starting out, but the supposed carrot was it had the most favorable XP table; you'd be gaining levels rapidly!
This (balance over time) is probably the feature that aged the worst, and AFAIK, doesn't really exist in 5e. As a design principle (such as it was), it simply wasn't very effective. The demi-human level caps were always notorious- most table found some way to avoid or ameliorate those level caps simply because it caused endless player frustration to have to stop progressing. The XP balancing never worked- the "fast advancing" Thief was always the same level, or one level ahead, of the slower advancing classes once you got past level 5. And while there was some merit to the way the MU was balanced, it also led to a lot of frustration for players. In short, if you provide the dessert early, the players aren't going to want to suffer for it later (level caps), and if you make the players suffer early, a lot of them will get frustrated before the class abilities really kick in.
Another, related concept is achieving balance through drawbacks. The two easiest examples of this are the Paladin, and Artifacts & Relics. For the Paladin, it's pretty clear- if you just look at the list of abilities that the Paladin has, it is massively overpowered. It is an insanely powerful class. But then.... how does it get balanced? By the drawbacks. In exchange for your giant list of superpowers, you-
1. Can't keep money other than a limited amount for specified purpose, and have to immediately give away 10% of everything they earn.
2. Can only associate with other good people (which means that your party can't contain assassins or druids, and only the rare NG thief).
3. Have a limit on magic items.
4. And, most famously, have to abide by a strict code- and if they perform an evil act (umm....) they are immediately stripped of their abilities.
That's some drawbacks! It's similar with the Artifacts & Relics. If you look back at the Major Malevolent Effects that Artifacts have, you quickly see almost everyone one is absolutely terrible (you know, things like "Change the possessor into a like artifact/relic" or "change alignment every time used") to the extent that drawbacks like losing a point off of your ability are the best ones to get!
In effect, the way to balance something powerful is to always make it a poisoned chalice- pair it with something awful... don't even get started on the powerful spells (or good ones, like haste) aging the caster. This design trend continues to pop up; reading the UA Barbarian was an exercise in masochism to determine just what sacrifices a person will make to get the shiniest car on the block. Luckily, this has also disappeared from modern D&D.
C. Gatekeeping via rarity.
Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them — or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.
Quick aside- I don't mean the modern, pejorative sense of gatekeeping. Just the older sense of the word. This is more about making things more difficult to "get" by making them more rare. In that way, there are really two aspects to this- one likely uncontroversial, and one moreso.
Starting with the easiest and simplest explanation- think of a random table for magic swords. A generic "Sword +1" has a 25% chance of being rolled on the table. A Vorpal Sword has a 1% chance of being rolled. Most people, I think, would intuitively agree with this- to the extent that you are randomly generating things, more powerful things should be more rare! That's the relatively uncontroversial part of gatekeeping via rarity.
Where it gets a little more fraught is when character abilities are gatekeeped in this manner. In effect, D&D (and AD&D) very much followed the "rich get richer" mode of game design, in that the best abilities often had prerequisites of other, high abilities. This could reach ridiculous extremes at times. But it also placed an inordinate amount of stress on the original rolls at character creation (remember that there were no ASIs or other easy ways to increase your scores back then).
Anyway, this is illustrated throughout the game. If you had an 18 strength (and were a Fighter) you were entered into the percentile strength lottery! If you wanted to be a paladin, you had to have incredible ability scores! If you wanted to have psionics, your chances of having them increased if you had amazing ability scores, and your psionic powers were better with insanely high ability scores! Most classes provided a 10% XP bonus for having a 15 or higher in your primary ability score! If you were a demi-human, your level cap would be higher with a higher ability score!
....and so on. With AD&D, the bonuses you got and the things that were unlocked (classes etc.) from having high scores just kept feeding on each other. The rarity of the score was supposed to be the limiting factor- it served the gatekeeping function to those bonuses, subclasses, and other abilities. In the actual play of many (not all) people, though, it either was a source of frustration due to power imbalances, or the source of .... creative rolling.
This is something that has also largely disappeared from modern D&D.
So I wanted to toss those out for conversation, and also elicit other people's thoughts. What other design principles do you see in early D&D? Do you think they have any continuing validity in the modern game?
As I noted before, early D&D (OD&D and 1e) could be kind of a mess- more of a toolkit or a modular system that was created through a series of individual decisions than a system designed from the ground up to "make sense." As such, there are few grand design principles you can see in the game like you might in later and more modern games- things like unified checks (for the d20), or bounded accuracy. Nevertheless, I think that some of the following are concepts that Gygax and other early designers were using that are reflected in the early rules. As you can see, some of them continue to be reflected in D&D's design (less so in other games), while others have been minimized or discarded.
One of the things to remember when looking at these early design principles is that many of them came from a background in the wargaming hobby- after all, that's where the early designers cut their teeth.
Now, without further throat clearing (as excess verbiage is the antithesis of weal!), here are some of those early design principles:
A. Niche protection.
The people who lived on the internet were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
Niche protection is one of those principles that has to be inferred; you won't find it referred to as such in any of the core books. But this principle animates both the class design as well as numerous other features that flowed from the class design. In much the same way that wargames would have "specialist" pieces with different functions, it was assumed that classes would fulfill different roles in the de facto adventuring party.
You had the core two classes- the Fighter (Fighting Man), and the Magic User. Roughly, the Fighter was the primary front-line character, and the Magic User was akin to artillery- devastating, but vulnerable if you got close to it. After those two, you get the third core class- the Cleric. The Cleric (originally modelled after a Van Helsing vampire hunter) was the original gish; able to cast spells (although not the great offensive ones that the MU had) and able to fight (although not with the same hit points and weapons and ability that the fighter had). Later, you had the last of the core four- the Thief, which was always an odd fit, both because of the skills, and because Gygax seemed to delight in nerfing the Thief at almost every opportunity.* Nevertheless, the Thief's abilities were different than those of the other four.
Later, "subclasses" sprung off of those classes, but niche protection remained strong. While spell lists had some overlap, it was minimal, and even those spells that overlapped would change depending on the class (the reincarnation table for a Druid and a MU were different). The most powerful magic items were often "coded" to a particular class. You wanted to use a talisman of annihilation and a sphere of annihilation? Better be a magic user. Want to use a Spade of Colossal Excavation (heh)? Better be a fighter. And so on.
For the most part, classes were designed to provide characters abilities that would allow them to contribute to the party in a way that others, lacking that class, could not. This could, at times, be aggravating- many people were familiar with the need for the Cleric to load up on healing spells, but it was certainly present.
Remnants of niche protection and the class system remain in 5e, although greatly tempered by feats, subclasses that mimic other classes, overlapping spell lists, and lack of gating magic items by class.
*Seriously, the PHB Thief was already plenty weak. Then Gygax spent time in the DMG complaining about Thief skills. "The following additional explanations of thief abilities will help you to prevent abuse of these activities by thieves...."
B. Balance is rough, and can be achieved over time or through massive drawbacks.
The doctors warned them, “Don’t go home and look this up.” That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.
It's not that early D&D was completely unconcerned with balance- just not overly concerned with balance. There was certainly no attempt to work it out with mathematical precision. However, the conceptual ideas used to create balance can often seem foreign- none more so than the idea that balance isn't an instant thing, but instead can be measured over a longer period of time. In other words, it's okay if something is more powerful now, if it's not as powerful later; on the other hand, it's okay to suffer now, if you're going to be more powerful later.
If that seems unclear, the easiest illustration is the infamous demi-human level caps. Demi-humans (the term that referred to the playable non-humans back then, which was inclusive of Elves, Half Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves, Halflings, and Half Orcs) were provided a number of abilities that human PCs did not get immediately when they were created; an Elf in AD&D, for example, could multi-class, was almost immune to sleep and charm, had +1 to hit with a bow or sword, spoke a number of extra languages, could see in the dark (infrared....ahem), had better chances to discover secret and concealed doors ... oh, and could naturally move silently. Not to mention being able to min/max ability scores (+1 Dex, -1 Con). In other words, it was an absolutely massive advantage to be an elf at early levels.
The flip side of those massive advantages was, of course, the level cap. And the level caps were (except Thief) punishingly low in many cases. An Elf with less than a 17 strength would max out at 5th level in fighter- even an 18 strength would only get you to 7th level. All those early advantages were frontloaded, and choosing not to have them (playing a human) would pay off later when you weren't level capped.
But this was true in other areas, as well. Magic Users were notoriously weak; with d4 hit points, no armor, and no cantrips, and few spells early on, playing a MU prior to level 5 was often an exercise in frustration; it was only when your spells really kicked in that the class became "worth it." Suffer early, profit later. Or, for that matter, Thieves. With Thieves, the class was weak starting out, but the supposed carrot was it had the most favorable XP table; you'd be gaining levels rapidly!
This (balance over time) is probably the feature that aged the worst, and AFAIK, doesn't really exist in 5e. As a design principle (such as it was), it simply wasn't very effective. The demi-human level caps were always notorious- most table found some way to avoid or ameliorate those level caps simply because it caused endless player frustration to have to stop progressing. The XP balancing never worked- the "fast advancing" Thief was always the same level, or one level ahead, of the slower advancing classes once you got past level 5. And while there was some merit to the way the MU was balanced, it also led to a lot of frustration for players. In short, if you provide the dessert early, the players aren't going to want to suffer for it later (level caps), and if you make the players suffer early, a lot of them will get frustrated before the class abilities really kick in.
Another, related concept is achieving balance through drawbacks. The two easiest examples of this are the Paladin, and Artifacts & Relics. For the Paladin, it's pretty clear- if you just look at the list of abilities that the Paladin has, it is massively overpowered. It is an insanely powerful class. But then.... how does it get balanced? By the drawbacks. In exchange for your giant list of superpowers, you-
1. Can't keep money other than a limited amount for specified purpose, and have to immediately give away 10% of everything they earn.
2. Can only associate with other good people (which means that your party can't contain assassins or druids, and only the rare NG thief).
3. Have a limit on magic items.
4. And, most famously, have to abide by a strict code- and if they perform an evil act (umm....) they are immediately stripped of their abilities.
That's some drawbacks! It's similar with the Artifacts & Relics. If you look back at the Major Malevolent Effects that Artifacts have, you quickly see almost everyone one is absolutely terrible (you know, things like "Change the possessor into a like artifact/relic" or "change alignment every time used") to the extent that drawbacks like losing a point off of your ability are the best ones to get!
In effect, the way to balance something powerful is to always make it a poisoned chalice- pair it with something awful... don't even get started on the powerful spells (or good ones, like haste) aging the caster. This design trend continues to pop up; reading the UA Barbarian was an exercise in masochism to determine just what sacrifices a person will make to get the shiniest car on the block. Luckily, this has also disappeared from modern D&D.
C. Gatekeeping via rarity.
Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them — or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.
Quick aside- I don't mean the modern, pejorative sense of gatekeeping. Just the older sense of the word. This is more about making things more difficult to "get" by making them more rare. In that way, there are really two aspects to this- one likely uncontroversial, and one moreso.
Starting with the easiest and simplest explanation- think of a random table for magic swords. A generic "Sword +1" has a 25% chance of being rolled on the table. A Vorpal Sword has a 1% chance of being rolled. Most people, I think, would intuitively agree with this- to the extent that you are randomly generating things, more powerful things should be more rare! That's the relatively uncontroversial part of gatekeeping via rarity.
Where it gets a little more fraught is when character abilities are gatekeeped in this manner. In effect, D&D (and AD&D) very much followed the "rich get richer" mode of game design, in that the best abilities often had prerequisites of other, high abilities. This could reach ridiculous extremes at times. But it also placed an inordinate amount of stress on the original rolls at character creation (remember that there were no ASIs or other easy ways to increase your scores back then).
Anyway, this is illustrated throughout the game. If you had an 18 strength (and were a Fighter) you were entered into the percentile strength lottery! If you wanted to be a paladin, you had to have incredible ability scores! If you wanted to have psionics, your chances of having them increased if you had amazing ability scores, and your psionic powers were better with insanely high ability scores! Most classes provided a 10% XP bonus for having a 15 or higher in your primary ability score! If you were a demi-human, your level cap would be higher with a higher ability score!
....and so on. With AD&D, the bonuses you got and the things that were unlocked (classes etc.) from having high scores just kept feeding on each other. The rarity of the score was supposed to be the limiting factor- it served the gatekeeping function to those bonuses, subclasses, and other abilities. In the actual play of many (not all) people, though, it either was a source of frustration due to power imbalances, or the source of .... creative rolling.
This is something that has also largely disappeared from modern D&D.
So I wanted to toss those out for conversation, and also elicit other people's thoughts. What other design principles do you see in early D&D? Do you think they have any continuing validity in the modern game?
