D&D (2024) What could One D&D do to bring the game back to the dungeon?

[Reynard]

Probably a few, but I think it's still mostly Xers and Yers.

Complete tangent, although maybe not completely and totally so: why have "the powers that be" decided that generation Y needs to be forgotten and folded into either X or the Millennials? Their pop culture and generational experience is really pretty significantly different to either. I don't think that the gen x cohort who came in the early to mid 80s to D&D and had a B/X and 1e experience really had the same experience or the same expectations of the game as the gen Y cohort that came in during the 2e era. Sure, plenty of Gen Xers continued to play through the 2e era and maybe even liked an awful lot of what was happening, but the point is that they also had a completely different experience that the Gen Y cohort did not have.

Aren't GenY just the "elder millenials" -- the "only 90s kids understand" cohort? I did not realize they were considered a separate generation" from a colloquial standpoint.

But, yeah, those that discovered D&D in the 90s probably have a very different set of experiences and certainly a different flavor of nostalgia. I am a BECMI kid, the tail end of GenX. Technically I was part of the Hickman generation but since it was just me and my brothers with the Basic, Expert and Companion rules and no modules, my formative gaming years were defined by those rules: D&D campaigns are a) stuff you come up with off the top of your head, b) intended to change in style and scope over time. I discovered AD&D later and really liked it. I played 2E the longest and deepest but I still treated it like BECMI -- I never used modules and the only setting we ever played in that wasn't homebrew was Dragonlance.

Anyway, my point is that had I been a part of the "D&D community" when i discovered the game I would probably be more nostalgic for Planescape and Spelljammer than i am.

 

[Clint_L]

I see nothing in 5e that is limiting your ability to run that kind of a game - just have a session 0 with your players and lay out your vision. I don't understand why there seems to be a suggestion that the rules need to change to coerce one particular style of play that has largely gone out of fashion.

If you want to run a dungeon crawler, run a dungeon crawler. I've done dungeons crawls in every edition of the game. This thread seems more about worrying about how other folks choose to play rather than just focusing on our own tables.

AD&D was more dungeon oriented because the game grew out of super simple dungeon crawls using Chainmail rules to build up hero characters that were ultimately intended for wargaming. But as the game evolved it moved to larger and larger environments with more and more focus on story. That's all that happened.

 

[reelo]

Aren't GenY just the "elder millenials" -- the "only 90s kids understand" cohort? I did not realize they were considered a separate generation" from a colloquial standpoint.

But, yeah, those that discovered D&D in the 90s probably have a very different set of experiences and certainly a different flavor of nostalgia. I am a BECMI kid, the tail end of GenX. Technically I was part of the Hickman generation but since it was just me and my brothers with the Basic, Expert and Companion rules and no modules, my formative gaming years were defined by those rules: D&D campaigns are a) stuff you come up with off the top of your head, b) intended to change in style and scope over time. I discovered AD&D later and really liked it. I played 2E the longest and deepest but I still treated it like BECMI -- I never used modules and the only setting we ever played in that wasn't homebrew was Dragonlance.

Anyway, my point is that had I been a part of the "D&D community" when i discovered the game I would probably be more nostalgic for Planescape and Spelljammer than i am.

Those born between 75 and 85 are known as "Xennials". The "Oregon Trail" generation. Analog childhood, digital adolescence.
A lot of us started with the Revised 2nd Edition, or the Rules Cyclopedia I guess.

 

[Cadence]

Those born between 75 and 85 are known as "Xennials". The "Oregon Trail" generation. Analog childhood, digital adolescence.
A lot of us started with the Revised 2nd Edition, or the Rules Cyclopedia I guess.

I hadn't heard the Xennials one before, careerplanner.com (for what that's worth) had this chart:

 

[Desdichado]

That's what the redefinition of Gen Y is, yeah—"older Millennials". But when I was getting my MBA in the very late 90s, Gen Y was defined by marketing people as its own generation. I've never been clear why someone decided to change that and Gen Y was folded into Gen X or Millennials, depending on where the cutoff is pinged, because I think Gen Y as a generation cohort, has its own unique values and its own unique experience. It certainly has its own unique pop culture experience, which is what matters most for our particular discussion.

As an aside, on the other end, Generation Jones is a real thing too; the Baby Boomers don't just run right up in to Gen X without a significant gap in between where people had a very different experience. These cultural generational trends tend very roughly to last about a decade; and trying to make them longer dilutes their utility because "older Millennials" (really Gen Y) have little in common in many ways with the youngest Millennials who are pushing the Gen Z boundary, because the younger ones weren't even born yet when Gen Y was having a lot of their formative experiences.

I think that there's some utility on pinning these generations to playstyles. While not perfect, a lot of people who came in to the hobby at a certain point no doubt accreted a lot of habits that were current when they did so. The OSR seems to reflect a very early Gen X type of game, and it seems that a big chunk of that player base are Gen-Xers, although a lot of Millennials have been drawn into the OSR as well, and have put their own spin on it in many ways, because they don't have the context of having been taught to play with a Holmes or a Moldvay box in the early 80s while in middle school, so all that they can do is interpret what the text actually says without reference to what was actually happening "at the table" so to speak when those games that the OSR emulates were new.

5e is the iconic Millennial game system, however, and as people of other generations are wont to do, it gets both praise and condemnation for filling their expectations of Millennial habits and attitudes.

Gen Y and the 2e setting era tend to get forgotten, and I don't really know of very many people who talk about the influence that White Wolf's success had on the direction of D&D throughout the 90s, for instance, or if it was related to other rejections during the 90s of 80s pop cultural elements like corny action movies, synthesizer New Wave music, and D&D as something that was edgy and exciting and metal.

Or maybe it's just a total coincidence that Gen Y is kind of written out and disappeared as if they never existed as a unique generational cohort, and the playstyle and product style of 2e that was prevalent during the "Gen Y years" is largely ignored and forgotten too with the exception of some occasional nods to Planescape, Spelljammer or Dark Sun, etc.

 

[James Gasik]

Oh man. So many changes.

The nerf to exhaustion is a move in the right direction. You can use exhaustion from the "play test" without crippling the party from the off. For some that wasn't an issue but for others it was a game quitting line never to be crossed.

Light. Races would need to be changed, i.e. you'd need to not have something like 75% of all PC races have darkvision. You'd also need to remove light as a cantrip. Somehow center the effects of dim light (disadvantage on perception checks). Push for the black & white sight of darkvision to actually matter (like making lots of things dependent on color vision).

Food & Water. They are doing a bit of the work by removing the ribbon abilities from backgrounds (looking at you Outlander) along with swapping favored terrain out for expertise in the ranger. Both of these work to make exploration not automatic, which is a step in the right direction. Though with the default DCs of things like getting lost and foraging, expertise is effectively automatic exploration...but it's a start in the right direction. Also remove or nerf spells like create food & water, goodberry, etc.

Resting. This is the big one. RAW long rests in 5E give you too much. Long rests in the "play test" give you even more. You either need to nerf resting, or dramatically increase...basically everything on the DM's side of things to make 5E anything more difficult than a cakewalk. Things like wandering monsters every 10 minutes and start all those encounters at deadly. Definitely remove Leomund's Tiny Bunker.

Procedures. You'd actually need to put the procedures for dungeon crawling together in one place that's in the actual main books instead of sort of put them together in the two DM's screens focused on wilderness and dungeon exploration. And, of course, you'd need those procedures to be good and work as intended...and for that intent to be properly challenging the PCs and players.

Personally, I doubt WotC will ever do anything like most of those. Mainstream D&D has moved on. The new player base is more interested in high action, tough guy, badasses. The appetite for hard scrabble adventures with weak, near-peasant adventurers is still there, but it's a niche within a niche within a niche at this point.

Just a second. To get people "back" to the dungeon, we'd need to remove darkvision from 75% of the races.

I just want to point out, that in 1e, there were 7 races in the PHB. Of these seven, 6 had infravision, though some Halflings only had 30' infravision. So that's uh, 85.71%?

And if we're saying that "only seeing temperature" is a downside, well, I can't see how that's any better or worse than "disadvantage on Perception checks".

So why is it that we could dungeon crawl then, but now you can't?

 

[Reynard]

I hadn't heard the Xennials one before, careerplanner.com (for what that's worth) had this chart:

View attachment 269631

That's an interesting breakdown. Thanks for sharing. We could atomize it further, of course, getting down to say 5 year spreads based entirely on what cartoons were popular when members of the generation were between 6 and 11, say.

 

[Cadence]

That's an interesting breakdown. Thanks for sharing. We could atomize it further, of course, getting down to say 5 year spreads based entirely on what cartoons were popular when members of the generation were between 6 and 11, say.

The video game system they wanted games for, the computers they used, and what they listened to music on, all in middle school? (Atari 2600; C64 and TRS80; Cassette).

 

[Desdichado]

So why is it that we could dungeon crawl then, but now you can't?

While this only tangentially addressing your specific question, I think it's worth pointing out that there is really a vast gulf between the presumed playstyle of AD&D and OD&D, with B/X being more a continuation of the OD&D playstyle, and AD&D being the precursor to what would eventually become the 3.5 paradigm. Today, often tend to try and create a binary between the 5e crowd and the OSR crowd, but that doesn't always work because we are often sloppy in our references or ignore nuance between various older games and the playstyles that their rules were specifically written to address.

So we get a lot of OSRians refer somewhat pejoratively to elements of 5e design sometimes, like the assumption that darkvision means you can't dungeon crawl, while ignoring that nuance that AD&D from the 1977 PHB was significantly different from Moldvay from 1980. They're just running whatever version of the retroclone idea that they're running and merging all of that nuance together in their head as if old school were some monolithic playstyle that all versions and all players used throughout most of the 70s and 80s until the Hickman Revolution came along and ruined it all, or something.

UPDATE: On top of all of that, it's also often ignored that the OSR is its own emergent thing. While it gives a nod back to the 70s and early 80s games, it's not like they were recreated exactly as is, or played exactly as is. Even people who are old enough to have remembered them from back in the day have accreted all kinds of habits and experiences that have changed their tastes and preferences, even if its sometimes in subtle ways. I defy anyone who's 50-something running Old School Essentials to tell me that their current game is basically the same as their Keep on the Borderlands game that they ran while sitting on the grass at recess in 7th grade in 1981.

 

[James Gasik]

While this only tangentially addressing your specific question, I think it's worth pointing out that there is really a vast gulf between the presumed playstyle of AD&D and OD&D, with B/X being more a continuation of the OD&D playstyle, and AD&D being the precursor to what would eventually become the 3.5 paradigm. Today, often tend to try and create a binary between the 5e crowd and the OSR crowd, but that doesn't always work because we are often sloppy in our references or ignore nuance between various older games and the playstyles that their rules were specifically written to address.

So we get a lot of OSRians refer somewhat pejoratively to elements of 5e design sometimes, like the assumption that darkvision means you can't dungeon crawl, while ignoring that nuance that AD&D from the 1977 PHB was significantly different from Moldvay from 1980. They're just running whatever version of the retroclone idea that they're running and merging all of that nuance together in their head as if old school were some monolithic playstyle that all versions and all players used throughout most of the 70s and 80s until the Hickman Revolution came along and ruined it all, or something.

UPDATE: On top of all of that, it's also often ignored that the OSR is its own emergent thing. While it gives a nod back to the 70s and early 80s games, it's not like they were recreated exactly as is, or played exactly as is. Even people who are old enough to have remembered them from back in the day have accreted all kinds of habits and experiences that have changed their tastes and preferences, even if its sometimes in subtle ways. I defy anyone who's 50-something running Old School Essentials to tell me that their current game is basically the same as their Keep on the Borderlands game that they ran while sitting on the grass at recess in 7th grade in 1981.

First of all, thank you for this post, it's very illuminating (pun not intended, but hey), but I guess the question now is, when did the ability to see in the dark actually become an issue? I mean, I'm not sure how far back I have to go- the oldest D&D book I have in my possession is TSR 2001 (edited by Eric Holmes), and there we have Elves and Dwarves able to see 60' in the dark (so long as there is no light source within 30' of them), without any other penalty (an ability they share with all monsters, according to the text).

I'm assuming the difference there was the human-centric nature of the game- only humans could assume their own character classes, so it wasn't like you'd have a party of only Dwarves and Elves (though having a Dwarf or Elf 30' in front of the party to scout doesn't seem an odd idea to me).