D&D General What D&D Thing Has Changed The Most

[Lanefan]

You mean you can't turn back time?

Not without either a) turning back time for the whole party (which would cost the other PCs their classes as well, so unlikely to be a popular move) or b) ripping the character out of any further play or presence in the campaign.

Here's the situation that ultimately prompted me to invent Renouncement as a spell (1e-variant system):

A new PC comes into an established party and immediately meets the woman (another PC) who would become the in-game love of his life. The new PC is an Assassin, but quickly decides to become a Thief instead; which is easy both mechanically and in-fiction as converting from an Assassin to a Thief is fairly trivial.

Later these two decide to get married. She's a Cleric, so (as a wedding gift? don't quite remember now) he chucks in Thieving entirely - ideally as if he'd never been one - and takes up from-scratch training as a Cleric to the same deity as hers; meanwhile they settle down to happy married life - well, other than her occasionally going out adventuring with the old gang.

As the Thief was retiring from play in order to do this (from-scratch Cleric training takes years) I didn't have to worry about the specifics of just how the Thief class could go away all at once; but as I don't like loose ends I kept thinking about it and came up with the spell idea a few years later.

What would you have done?

The problem here is that no class should ever have been alignment restricted. And in 4e and 5e none are.

I rather like having some classes alignment-restricted just for flavour.

IMO if the mechanics have no business being involved in something where there are success/fail mechanics

Do you mean success-fail outcomes here? Playing to a bond or flaw doesn't have a hard-coded success/fail to it (unless you're using Inspiration in 5e, I suppose, but I do my best to ignore meta-mechanics like that) so why do mechanics need to be involved?

then they have no business being involved anywhere and we might as well simply freeform. And it is greatly to the discredit of D&D that e.g. a knight will fight exactly as effectively in the fight in defence of two gold pieces as they will to rescue their lover. The outcome is clearly measurable, the opposition is likely identical. So there are mechanics involved - but none for what is the most important part from a roleplaying perspective. The stakes.

The knight may not be the best example here, as if the knight's code demands she lay down her life to defend that which she's been tasked with defending, it matters not what the thing being defended is or even who tasked her with defending it.

But an ordinary fighter, say; then yes - while the fighter is just as mechanically effective in both situations she might very well decide to abandon the 2 g.p. in order to survive where she would not do any such thing if defending her lover. That's where the roleplay piece comes in; making non-mechanical decisions as to what your character (tries to) do next.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Not without either a) turning back time for the whole party (which would cost the other PCs their classes as well, so unlikely to be a popular move) or b) ripping the character out of any further play or presence in the campaign.

My point exactly. The class/level system hard-locks things that shouldn't be and makes them difficult to break out of, restricting roleplay.

Later these two decide to get married. She's a Cleric, so (as a wedding gift? don't quite remember now) he chucks in Thieving entirely - ideally as if he'd never been one - and takes up from-scratch training as a Cleric to the same deity as hers; meanwhile they settle down to happy married life - well, other than her occasionally going out adventuring with the old gang.

So what happened to him? He got mind-wiped? This confuses me in terms of actual character growth. He decided to never again hide? Or he forgot all his skills enabling him to hide?

And this is one reason I have a strong liking for the 5e subclass system. If you'd been playing 5e and had him ditch the assassin subclass in exchange for a custom-crafted cleric variant of the Arcane Trickster so he remained a rogue but a less razor-honed one this would have been excellent. But chucking in Thieving to the point it was as if he'd never been one is essentially hollowing out his mind and body and taking away all his previous abilities in exchange for new magic is just creepy and a major change in personality.

What would you have done?

Like I said, I don't believe in completely erasing someone's past or that they can. I'd have given him a new subclass representing him letting go of the being an assassin and both losing and rejecting his edge, and becoming a spellcasting cleric. But he could never be a completely new person merely a changed one from who he had been.

I rather like having some classes alignment-restricted just for flavour.

I don't like alignment in the first place and consider it to be a strong flavour that simply ruins dishes unless used very carefully. I can understand alignment-restricting assassins (although disagree) but the worst possible thing to do to paladins was alignment restricting them; I can't improve on UrsulaV's Paladin Rant, or "Crapsack Jedi with Guilt Issues".

Do you mean success-fail outcomes here? Playing to a bond or flaw doesn't have a hard-coded success/fail to it (unless you're using Inspiration in 5e, I suppose, but I do my best to ignore meta-mechanics like that) so why do mechanics need to be involved?

There is an old saw "Measure what you value or you end up valuing what you measure."If an action has mechanical success/fail chances in the first place and they are not impacted by something (and you don't use @pemerton style justifications (which are fine)) then the mechanics are taking the active stance that it doesn't matter and either (a) only raw skill matters or (b) there are environmental factors that do matter but emotional connections don't.

It's not that mechanics need to be involved. It's that they are involved. A mother will be no more formidable and unyielding in defence of a child in D&D than she would in defence of an outhouse. And this makes a strong statement about worldbuilding and has a major impact on worldbuilding.

The knight may not be the best example here, as if the knight's code demands she lay down her life to defend that which she's been tasked with defending, it matters not what the thing being defended is or even who tasked her with defending it.

And if it doesn't then there is no mechanical difference.

But an ordinary fighter, say; then yes - while the fighter is just as mechanically effective in both situations she might very well decide to abandon the 2 g.p. in order to survive where she would not do any such thing if defending her lover. That's where the roleplay piece comes in; making non-mechanical decisions as to what your character (tries to) do next.

Except that retreating in D&D is normally a fool's option unless you are either a rogue or have magic to pull you out. Meanwhile if you were playing e.g. Fate which has actual mechanics for surrendering then the characters surrender.

And when you say "roleplay" in that context I hear "top down author stance, imposed on the character" rather than flowing organically. Fate, in my experience, encourages far more in the way of in character decisions as characters act in response to the gameworld and less author stance in which the player tells the character how they should act because the rules can't be bothered to underscore anything like emotional connections.

 

[pemerton]

(and you don't use @pemerton style justifications (which are fine))

What are @pemerton style justifications?

 

[Lanefan]

My point exactly. The class/level system hard-locks things that shouldn't be and makes them difficult to break out of, restricting roleplay.

Sometimes, yes. Without some sort of class system, though, how do you prevent every character from becoming good (or good-ish) at everything, thus having no real weaknesses they need other party members to cover off? It's this interdependence, IMO, that is the primary driver of party-based play making fictional sense.

So what happened to him? He got mind-wiped? This confuses me in terms of actual character growth. He decided to never again hide? Or he forgot all his skills enabling him to hide?

He had a change of heart* and not only decided to never again hide, but in-character wanted a means of completely disavowing that prior existence and turning his back on it.

* - self-imposed, not externally forced.

And this is one reason I have a strong liking for the 5e subclass system. If you'd been playing 5e and had him ditch the assassin subclass in exchange for a custom-crafted cleric variant of the Arcane Trickster so he remained a rogue but a less razor-honed one this would have been excellent. But chucking in Thieving to the point it was as if he'd never been one is essentially hollowing out his mind and body and taking away all his previous abilities in exchange for new magic is just creepy and a major change in personality.

Yes, it's a major change in personality; and that was the point.

Very similar to someone in real life undergoing, say, a religious conversion and wanting to disavow their past sins; only in a D&D setting there's (in theory) magic that can help with this disawowing process.

Like I said, I don't believe in completely erasing someone's past or that they can.

You'd just love, then, something that recently happened in the game I play in: my PC is married to another PC - their soap-operatic story is long enough that plugging it all in here would take me several weeks and probably cause retching in any who read it; suffice it to say things got complicated to the point where she recently ended up seeking out (and finding) means of having all her memories of my PC divinely erased "so they could start over". Problem is, his memories are still working just fine, thank you; and he's thoroughly unimpressed by this...

I'd have given him a new subclass representing him letting go of the being an assassin and both losing and rejecting his edge, and becoming a spellcasting cleric. But he could never be a completely new person merely a changed one from who he had been.

Which defeats the purpose and point of what the player was trying to have the character do: completely renounce one class and then start over from scratch in another.

I don't like alignment in the first place and consider it to be a strong flavour that simply ruins dishes unless used very carefully. I can understand alignment-restricting assassins (although disagree) but the worst possible thing to do to paladins was alignment restricting them; I can't improve on UrsulaV's Paladin Rant, or "Crapsack Jedi with Guilt Issues".

Monks also work fine with an align restrict, as do Clerics. Paladins work better if you allow them to be any extreme alignment rather than just LG; as long as the Paladin's main point is to dial its ethos and alignment - whatever it is - up to eleven and leave it there.

There is an old saw "Measure what you value or you end up valuing what you measure."If an action has mechanical success/fail chances in the first place and they are not impacted by something (and you don't use @pemerton style justifications (which are fine)) then the mechanics are taking the active stance that it doesn't matter and either (a) only raw skill matters or (b) there are environmental factors that do matter but emotional connections don't.

It's not that mechanics need to be involved. It's that they are involved. A mother will be no more formidable and unyielding in defence of a child in D&D than she would in defence of an outhouse. And this makes a strong statement about worldbuilding and has a major impact on worldbuilding.

Maybe. It's a pretty simple workaround to houserule in the idea of anyone being able to go berserk (even easier in my game where there's no such thing as a Barbarian or Berserker class) in extreme conditions only e.g. a mother defending her child and losing.

Except that retreating in D&D is normally a fool's option unless you are either a rogue or have magic to pull you out. Meanwhile if you were playing e.g. Fate which has actual mechanics for surrendering then the characters surrender.

Curious: how can mechanics for surrendering work without taking away the agency of those accepting the surrender?

That said, sure sometimes retreating isn't the best idea but if the DM's being at all realistic about things, other times it is.

And when you say "roleplay" in that context I hear "top down author stance, imposed on the character" rather than flowing organically. Fate, in my experience, encourages far more in the way of in character decisions as characters act in response to the gameworld and less author stance in which the player tells the character how they should act because the rules can't be bothered to underscore anything like emotional connections.

Please elaborate. I know nothing abut Fate as a game, and it kind of reads here as though you're suggesting Fate has rules that do - to use your phrase - underscore emotional connections. Shouldn't a character's emotions be something determined only by its player? I'm confused.

 

[James Gasik]

I'd institute retraining as an option then, if the player truly feels that they can no longer play a Rogue. However, I do want to point out that this is the stuff of many an epic tale- a man who did bad things in the past finds love, gets married, turns his life around, and then, years later, something happens and he's forced to come out of retirement...so there's merit in not making those skills "go away".

 

[Neonchameleon]

What are @pemerton style justifications?

Partly Fortune in the Middle. I googled for your 4e stories about your campaign's paladin but couldn't find them

Sometimes, yes. Without some sort of class system, though, how do you prevent every character from becoming good (or good-ish) at everything, thus having no real weaknesses they need other party members to cover off?

It depends what you mean by "some sort of class system" because yes there is bound to be some attractor if you point buy. But the core problem isn't the class system but the level system that says that everyone with given stats is going to gain expertise in almost the same way. Three famous examples that have class-like systems but have shattered the level system for much more organic growth are Apocalypse World's playbooks, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's Career system, and Star Wars: Edge of Empire/Genesys' Career system.

He had a change of heart* and not only decided to never again hide, but in-character wanted a means of completely disavowing that prior existence and turning his back on it.

So what he wanted was to be brainwashed beyond what was possible in the world, literally changing his personality in an irrevocable way based off a snap decision that erased part of his old experiences. This is an understandable wish but actually doing so is a form of suicide and any good or even neutral deity should have refused the request. (And a chaotic one wouldn't have followed through completely on general principles).

You'd just love, then, something that recently happened in the game I play in: my PC is married to another PC - their soap-operatic story is long enough that plugging it all in here would take me several weeks and probably cause retching in any who read it; suffice it to say things got complicated to the point where she recently ended up seeking out (and finding) means of having all her memories of my PC divinely erased "so they could start over". Problem is, his memories are still working just fine, thank you; and he's thoroughly unimpressed by this...

I would be too!

Which defeats the purpose and point of what the player was trying to have the character do: completely renounce one class and then start over from scratch in another.

Was that what the player was trying to do or was it what the character was trying to do?

That said I've had characters change class (as opposed to a different mechanical representation of who they were now) but it was in their backstory. In a fairly recent game I was playing a 50 year old farmer barbarian - but his backstory was that he had been a wizard adventurer in his 20s and completely burned his magic out by grounding an entire ritual through his own magical channels. And although he had been famous and successful the looks of pity burned. So he retired to farming on the borderlands and now these whippersnappers need help. And he might never cast another spell again but he's strong and some of the magical channels were regrowing in his body. So he started from level 1 because his old class just didn't work. And yes it was traumatic.

Monks also work fine with an align restrict, as do Clerics. Paladins work better if you allow them to be any extreme alignment rather than just LG; as long as the Paladin's main point is to dial its ethos and alignment - whatever it is - up to eleven and leave it there.

The problem with paladins is that alignment just is not a good representation of ethos. And no clerics do not work fine with an alignment restriction; they should start with an alignment close to that of their deities but putting hard coded alignment in there both restricts fall narratives and infiltrator narratives.

Maybe. It's a pretty simple workaround to houserule in the idea of anyone being able to go berserk (even easier in my game where there's no such thing as a Barbarian or Berserker class) in extreme conditions only e.g. a mother defending her child and losing.

Oberoni Fallacy. When you say "it's a pretty simple workaround" what you mean is "the rules don't actually support this".

Curious: how can mechanics for surrendering work without taking away the agency of those accepting the surrender?

As a DM I'm a lot less concerned about NPC agency than I am PC agency. I have so many NPCs. If you can have morale mechanics (and IMO modern D&D would be better with them) you can have surrender mechanics.

Please elaborate. I know nothing abut Fate as a game, and it kind of reads here as though you're suggesting Fate has rules that do - to use your phrase - underscore emotional connections. Shouldn't a character's emotions be something determined only by its player? I'm confused.

Fate gives you abstract resource points which the player determines how to spend on anything with the appropriate mechanical weight set up (like relationships). The player decides where to spend the points, but emotional connections are a significant way of spending them. And they gain the resource points when something (like relationships or character flaws) is used against the character - or they can spend a point of their own to refuse.

Because these are abstract how you use them is up to you the player and it's entirely possible to set them up as pure emotional connections - or pure Vampire: the Masquerade style Blood Points if you pick the right aspects. Most players go for "don't sweat the small stuff and this is only an approximation".

And because you get fate points for aspects going against you it's likely you'll find a character that suffers from alcoholism the night before the big event asking for "jusht one more hic [fate point]. I can hic handle it." And on the day for Dutch Courage. Which will lead to trouble if you get one - but isn't so antisocial for the table as it is in D&D.

 

[pemerton]

Partly Fortune in the Middle. I googled for your 4e stories about your campaign's paladin but couldn't find them

This one?

Another semi-random factoid: at least one of my players regards some NPC "until end of next turn" effects as metagame effects.

What had happened was that a cultists had hit the paladin of the Raven Queen with a Baleful Polymorph, turning the paladin into a frog until the end of the cultist's next turn. The players at the table didn't know how long this would last, although one (not the player of the paladin) was pretty confident that it wouldn't be that long, because the game doesn't have save-or-die.

Anyway, the end of the cultist's next turn duly came around, and I told the player of the paladin that he turned back to his normal form. He then took his turn, and made some threat or admonition against the cultist. The cultist responded with something to the effect of "You can't beat me - I turned you into a frog, after all!" The paladin's player had his PC retort "Ah, but the Raven Queen turned me back."

There we have an example of a player taking narrative control on the back of an NPC's mechanic that the player knew nothing of until encountering it in the course of actual play. And at least for me, as a GM, that is the player of the paladin playing his role. And driving the story forward. On the back of a so-called "dissociated" mechanic.

I'm sure that player, or one of the other players in my game, could find interesting things to make out of the war devil's Beseiged Foe power, too.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd institute retraining as an option then, if the player truly feels that they can no longer play a Rogue. However, I do want to point out that this is the stuff of many an epic tale- a man who did bad things in the past finds love, gets married, turns his life around, and then, years later, something happens and he's forced to come out of retirement...so there's merit in not making those skills "go away".

Had the campaign gone on long enough (in game time) that certainly could have been a possibility; but by the time it finished he still hadn't even completed his acolyte training.

And I don't run it like 5e would have me, with retraining being a fairly quick and easy option that can be done between adventures. A class of any kind other than fighter is a lifestyle as well as well as a set of skills and abilities, and takes years to adapt to and master even to the point of calling oneself 1st level.

 

[Lanefan]

So what he wanted was to be brainwashed beyond what was possible in the world, literally changing his personality in an irrevocable way based off a snap decision that erased part of his old experiences. This is an understandable wish but actually doing so is a form of suicide and any good or even neutral deity should have refused the request. (And a chaotic one wouldn't have followed through completely on general principles).

Was that what the player was trying to do or was it what the character was trying to do?

Both. The player was quite willing to, in effect, roleplay the character right out of the game in order to follow what the character would do (and BIG props to her for this!); I-as-DM just had to find a useful way to react to what this character was doing.

I don't at all see it as a form of suicide. Believe me, there's been jobs I've had in the past that if I could somehow magically erase all memory of even having done them I'd sign on in a heartbeat!

That said I've had characters change class (as opposed to a different mechanical representation of who they were now) but it was in their backstory. In a fairly recent game I was playing a 50 year old farmer barbarian - but his backstory was that he had been a wizard adventurer in his 20s and completely burned his magic out by grounding an entire ritual through his own magical channels. And although he had been famous and successful the looks of pity burned. So he retired to farming on the borderlands and now these whippersnappers need help. And he might never cast another spell again but he's strong and some of the magical channels were regrowing in his body. So he started from level 1 because his old class just didn't work. And yes it was traumatic.

Much more is possible in backstory than during the run of play, for sure. I like your burned-himself-out play.

Something else D&D has never had, though, is any sort of mechanism for decay or loss of class skills due to simple non-use. For example, had your dude above not burned himself out and instead just let his wizarding skills decay over time, what does that decay look like and now - 30 years later - is any of it left to him? (btw if you know of any other system that has a halfway-coherent handle on this, I'm all ears!)

The problem with paladins is that alignment just is not a good representation of ethos. And no clerics do not work fine with an alignment restriction; they should start with an alignment close to that of their deities but putting hard coded alignment in there both restricts fall narratives and infiltrator narratives.

Given as Clerics are divine, the only real chance of an infiltration happening is at the divine level ratehr than the mortal (and one such has for a long time been a major back-plot behind my current game). A Cleric to an opposed deity won't feel comfortable entering a temple that is, in effect, consecrated against him; and alignment is a detectable thing (via magic or sometimes device).

Oberoni Fallacy. When you say "it's a pretty simple workaround" what you mean is "the rules don't actually support this".

I'm a hard-core kitbasher anyway so the rules not actually supporting something isn't much of an obstacle.

As a DM I'm a lot less concerned about NPC agency than I am PC agency. I have so many NPCs. If you can have morale mechanics (and IMO modern D&D would be better with them) you can have surrender mechanics.

I've always seen morale mechanics as DM-side guidelines rather than rules; and I prefer to (and prefer the game to) view NPCs and PCs as being the same in as many respects as possible. Thus, if I treated the morale section as actual rules I'd want to equally apply it to the PCs as well. This blows up player agency beyond what I'm willing to accept, however, so it ain't happening.

Fate gives you abstract resource points which the player determines how to spend on anything with the appropriate mechanical weight set up (like relationships). The player decides where to spend the points, but emotional connections are a significant way of spending them. And they gain the resource points when something (like relationships or character flaws) is used against the character - or they can spend a point of their own to refuse.

Because these are abstract how you use them is up to you the player and it's entirely possible to set them up as pure emotional connections - or pure Vampire: the Masquerade style Blood Points if you pick the right aspects. Most players go for "don't sweat the small stuff and this is only an approximation".

And because you get fate points for aspects going against you it's likely you'll find a character that suffers from alcoholism the night before the big event asking for "jusht one more hic [fate point]. I can hic handle it." And on the day for Dutch Courage. Which will lead to trouble if you get one - but isn't so antisocial for the table as it is in D&D.

So these fate points are in effect a form of meta-currency, then?

 

[jeffh]

I'd go so far as to say they're one of the definitive meta-currencies. They're probably the thing that codified that concept for a lot of people.