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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6261643" data-attributes="member: 32740">D&D has definitely evolved.  If you read the original rules - the 1973 three booklets - you can see that it wasn't really even a roleplaying game yet.  At least it wasn't what we think of as a roleplaying game TODAY.  It was a game of TEAM dungeon exploration.  The DM made the dungeon and the players explored it as a team.  The fun was to be found in the DM trying to confuse the players with mazes, puzzles, tricks, traps, map elements that might confuse and frustrate the players attempts at accurate maps or whatever wild new stuff he dreamed up.  This was all a NEW experience.  Where today we would simply have a thief make a skill roll to find a trap the game did not yet HAVE a thief class.  Players had to pry clues out of the DM with their questions, try to catch important elements in his descriptions that would suggest that a trap might be present.  The DM might then describe HOW the trap worked and the players would have to puzzle out how to disarm it, to get around it, or destroy it.  The thief class did arrive in one of the first rules supplements but this illustrates how the gameplay was notably different from D&D or other RPG's of more recent design.  The timekeeping was based heavily on the TURN - a time period of about 10 minutes.  The 1-minute round was just a sometimes-used subdivision of that.  Movement, searching, mapping, spell durations... just about everything was being measured in Turns.  All weapons did 1 die of damage - 1d6.  Only with the first rules supplement  (Greyhawk) were weapons given different damage dice and other mechanical differences.Now as I said things DID evolve.  1st Edition ADVANCED D&D (1977+) had a gazillion rules by comparison that were really mostly house rules that had been written and used by Gygax or others for those original rules over the preceeding several years.  But those rules definitely were having big changes on gameplay.  You can probably also see how players who are big fans of the original game might not like how more recent takes on D&D rules approach gameplay with random skill rolls, mathematically efficient character "builds", and players knowing to choose the correct rule out of hundreds or thousands to apply to achieve victory, rather than the DM continually inventing things that DEFY rules and require player ideas and ingenuity that only sometimes rely on their character's abilities as defined by the game rules.This is not so much a matter of disrespect of any edition of the rules.  It is a matter of noting how the editions have ACTUALLY changed.Anything that isn't combat pretty much fits the description of something not combat-related.  There's good reasons why combat occupies so much of the rules for any RPG.  Combat happens a LOT, and EVERYONE is involved in it, though perhaps to greater or lesser degrees.  Combat has very drastic results - life or death - and that can happen in a very short time.  But it isn't much fun to reduce combat to, "You run into a monster and fight it.  The fighter and magic-user die."  Combat is more fun and interesting when it's slowed down in comparison to the rest of the game - when you can take time to play it out in greater mechanical detail.  I guess one of the big questions is how you want to split the time you spend playing - how much combat versus how much exploration, how much verbal interaction with NPC's, how much whatever else.Combat gets a disproportionate amount of rules devoted to it - it shouldn't always be taken as an indication of how much of the gameplay should BE combat.  It's more just an indication of how important combat is when it DOES take place.</blockquote>

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