What game mechanics when introduced were absolutely hated?

[R_J_K75]

No, it wasn’t hated until after 3e came out with ascending AC and fans of 3e looked back and liked ascending better now that they played D&D without THAC0 and got that experience

I think it was more of a matter that when first learning 1E or 2E it was that you had to roll different dice for certain actions and then sometimes you had to roll high or had to roll low. 3E and d20 just made more sense by making most actions resolved by a d20 which was usually the higher roll succeeded. I know Im stating the obvious here but having myself made the transition from 1E/2E to 3E it made alot of sense back then. Its pretty crazy how fast 20 years has gone by.

 

[lowkey13]

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[JeffB]

Vancian casting was a definitely a sticking point from the beginning. The zine world/amateur press and third party products were full of hate and alternate systems. I still don't like it.

A lot of people also had (and still have) issues with HP and Armor Class.

Whole systems and companies were born out of not accepting D&D isms. Tunnels & Trolls and Runequest were direct responses to "what doesn't make sense" with D&D.

Despite all that- the majority of players have accepted these things as integral to D&D and part of the experience of the game.

 

[Celebrim]

1e & 2e

I can't remember a lot of things that were added being hated when they were added, but I do remember almost universal rejection of 2e's attempts at addition through subtraction. In particular, the initial rules that said Paladin's were just Fighters prompted a lot of hate, and were a big part of why I think the group I was with rejected the game at the time.

I think in general I can describe the groups I was with at the time as loving virtually every new option, even if in retrospect we should have realized that they were bad for the game. The things that 2e added to the game, like expanded NWP, a core class bard, dragons with regular stat blocks, and expanded spell lists were embraced. It's only where it was perceived as taking away things that it wasn't.

3e

I didn't hang out with a lot of people that hated 3e, and consequently I was probably it's biggest critic. And the bulk of my hatred was focused on Prestige Classes. There were individual options I didn't like, but it was only Prestige Classes that I came to hate as a concept.

Level of the spell is added to the DC to resist it. In a universe where the power of the casters already grew exponentially, this to me was the key tipping point that caused their power level to be out of control. There were other problems, but none so critical as the fact that unlike prior editions, as the caster leveled up, they could expect targets of their spells to be less likely rather than more likely to resist the effects.

Pathfinder, 4e, 5e

At will cantrips. I hate them. And while the players like having 'more', I think most of them also agree that they really put constraints on the game (or what can be a cantrip) that aren't fun.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Garthanos]

I consider things introduced to include those introduced in the very beginning of the formalized roleplaying as a hobby not necessarily something introduced later.

 

[atanakar]

I can think of two things that were hated at first but became widely accepted:

• Hated At-will Cantrips in 4e are now accepted by the vast majority of players of 5e.

• A single XP table for all classes received a lot of hate when 3e came out but has now been accepted for 3 editions.

 

[Garthanos]

Vancian casting was a definitely a sticking point from the beginning. The zine world/amateur press and third party products were full of hate and alternate systems. I still don't like it.

A lot of people also had (and still have) issues with HP and Armor Class.

Whole systems and companies were born out of not accepting D&D isms. Tunnels & Trolls and Runequest were direct responses to "what doesn't make sense" with D&D.

Despite all that- the majority of players have accepted these things as integral to D&D and part of the experience of the game.

yup

 

[Celebrim]

Then again, I think you could reuse this and say the original official introduction of cantrips (UA, 1e) was hated, and then got folded into the game.

It wasn't. What was hated immediately was that you had to trade a 1st level spell slot for 4 absolutely useless spells - remember adding things is good, taking away things is bad. So almost immediately, we started experimenting with different ways to get cantrips into the game without taking things away.

In 1987, I even introduced a house rule to my table that you could use at-will unlimited cantrips, figuring that since the spells had no real umph to them other than color, that they'd just be used as RPing flourishes. That rule lasted all of one session. Instead of being used as occasional flourishes to make the M-U seem magical, they were used all the time in the unrestrained manner of junior high kids with a bag of novelty gags.

We eventually settled on allowing a number of cantrips per day equal to your 1st level spell slots - which is very close to what 3e settled on except that 3e went a bit further and said that they could have a wee bit of 'umph'.

 

[lowkey13]

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