D&D 5E Thievery in 5e - still relevant?

[Willie the Duck]

2e had xp for gold, it was just optional.

Great, so the people who* didn't use the optional xp for gold rule still found uses for gold (or didn't as the case may be). I think the larger point is that the 5e scenario of there not being a clear and obvious reason to collect non-magical treasure is hardly new.
*cue pointless debate over proportion where everyone assumes that how they did it BitD was the most common way it was done

 

[Tony Vargas]

I did not play 2e as avidly as 1e AD&D - in 1e there were many built-in money-pits to keep your characters starved for gold. I do not recall whether 2e eliminated all of them, but even if it did, officially, DMs running those games where lack of anything to do with gold did not seem to be an issue, may well have retained the ones they liked.

Prior to 5e, D&D was very much a treasure-hunting game. It was profoundly so in 0e & 1e. The assertion that it wasn't prominent in 2e is news to me.
3e & 4e made gold central in an entirely different, "player entitlement" kinda way, with expected wealth/level as gauge for the DM. And, yes magic items were the primary money pit.

5e has neither expected wealth/level nor myriad money-pits. Hunting for magic items in 5e makes sense, if you're given the opportunity, but the game doesn't give the DM much in the way of lines to color between or outside of in that, either.
5e is derivative of earlier editions of D&D, but it doesn't always seem to be self-aware when it comes to what it's recycling. Just like, Adventurers go out and hunt treasure, it's what they do, players have always been enthused for treasure hordes, they always will be, the game needn't prompt that in any way... when fans point out there's little use for gold in 5e it's, like, someone's always complaining, unless it's loud and disruptive enough to render the community toxic and harm the brand, it means nothing, D&D has always been an always will be the best-selling TTRPG...

 

[bloodtide]

D&D doesn't generally have very good resolution processes for escaping capture or imprisonment. 4e can be an exception, via skill challenges.

I guess if your just talking about some mechanical crunchy game rules.

The Always Fun game: Make a mechanical rule roll to Escape.

The Classic game: I've had players trapped in a Illithid prison on the Abyss for just over six months of game time, over 25 game sessions.

It's very different.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It always amazes me how we made an enemy of fun.

 

[Lanefan]

I find backgammon fun to play more-or-less at every moment. Likewise the Reiner Knizia game Battle Line.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a game that I play regularly that I find to be not enjoyable in meaningful periods - maybe ship vs hip combat in Classic Traveller can have that problem? But that's probably why my Classic Traveller game doesn't feature ship vs ship combat, since I worked out that it's not really fun to play!

Notable here is that your example of a game that has un-fun periods is an RPG, because that speaks to something RPGs have that many other games don't: greatly varying modes of play as the game rolls along. And each of those modes might be fun for some but not for others,

In D&D some players might get bored during social scenes as they want to get on with the fightin' and killin'; while other players (at the same table!) get bored with all the combat and get more enjoyment and fun from the social scenes, or from exploration, or whatever. The player who likes everything is IME uncommon.

Thus, I've always taken it as a simple fact of life that there's going to be periods in the game that are more fun for some players than others, and the trick then becomes to somehow try to manage things such that those periods don't go on too long.

 

[Lanefan]

D&D doesn't generally have very good resolution processes for escaping capture or imprisonment. 4e can be an exception, via skill challenges.

On a granular level it can be done well enough (which is all I need); that there's no high-level-view mode of resolution isn't to me an issue.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, in D&D, which has detailed, if occasionally punishing, systems for combat, little or nothing to cover social interaction, a tradition of meticulous exploration, expansive spellcasting and long lists of magic items, the play experience certainly varies a great deal from moment to moment and player to player. All the more so when when a character is virtually excluded from one or another of those modes by random stat roll, class restrictions, want of the right item, lack of options, and the like.

But that's not RPGs in general - tho it's understandable to think of it as such, given D&D's overwhelming domination of the industry, and exemplar status.

D&D doesn't generally have very good resolution processes for escaping capture or imprisonment. 4e can be an exception, via skill challenges.

One of the things D&D lacks is any sort of narrative system for getting the party out of the kinds of extremely tight spots with bad odds that are so common to protagonists in genre. Escaping from a combat you're losing is another one that's standard genre fare that D&D hasn't usually done much to cover.
I guess the "social contract" also comes into it. If "capture & escape" scenes are a thing in genre (a way to get information when the villain monologues, for instance, is a classic) and the game emulates genre, players might not have PCs go to extremes to avoid capture when they're beaten, or, indeed, take extreme measures to avoid risky encounters where they might be beaten.

 

[bloodtide]

Notable here is that your example of a game that has un-fun periods is an RPG, because that speaks to something RPGs have that many other games don't: greatly varying modes of play as the game rolls along. And each of those modes might be fun for some but not for others,

In D&D some players might get bored during social scenes as they want to get on with the fightin' and killin'; while other players (at the same table!) get bored with all the combat and get more enjoyment and fun from the social scenes, or from exploration, or whatever. The player who likes everything is IME uncommon.

Thus, I've always taken it as a simple fact of life that there's going to be periods in the game that are more fun for some players than others, and the trick then becomes to somehow try to manage things such that those periods don't go on too long.

My point is also to add the more large scale "all the players are not having traditional super happy fun" for long stretches of game play...and sometimes several game sessions. In any Simulated Reality Immersive game, the players have to accept the reality. And reality, even simulated reality, is not always endless happy fun.

Being captured is an obvious one, but their are plenty of others. Really "all" the players might dislike anything as "not being fun". The classic player can accept this in game play.....the modern player does not.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In decent genre fiction, the hero getting captured is not un-fun for the reader, and the hero later escaping might be especially entertaining.
A decent genre TTRPG should capture that.

Which reminds me... treasure hunting in genre is ambiguous, the hero can be motivated by treasure-hunting, but so might the villain, and greed can still end up being a very bad thing. Classic editions did try to capture that, a bit, with fiendish traps and cursed items awaiting the too-greedy, even if they didn't exactly draw a line for what too-greedy was...

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, in D&D, which has detailed, if occasionally punishing, systems for combat, little or nothing to cover social interaction, a tradition of meticulous exploration, expansive spellcasting and long lists of magic items, the play experience certainly varies a great deal from moment to moment and player to player. All the more so when when a character is virtually excluded from one or another of those modes by random stat roll, class restrictions, want of the right item, lack of options, and the like.

But that's not RPGs in general - tho it's understandable to think of it as such, given D&D's overwhelming domination of the industry, and exemplar status.


One of the things D&D lacks is any sort of narrative system for getting the party out of the kinds of extremely tight spots with bad odds that are so common to protagonists in genre. Escaping from a combat you're losing is another one that's standard genre fare that D&D hasn't usually done much to cover.
I guess the "social contract" also comes into it. If "capture & escape" scenes are a thing in genre (a way to get information when the villain monologues, for instance, is a classic) and the game emulates genre, players might not have PCs go to extremes to avoid capture when they're beaten, or, indeed, take extreme measures to avoid risky encounters where they might be beaten.

I suppose you have to question whether or not the game actually emulates genre then.