What is the essence of D&D

[Hussar]

Well, no, @TheCosmicKid, that's not quite what he said. Not that 4e failed through no fault of its own. It failed BECAUSE it failed to learn the lesson of a successful D&D - Magic MUST be primary. That is the one trope the holds true in every single edition of the game. That magic, whether through class abilities or items, must be beyond whatever mere mortals can do.

It's not really a coincidence that all but, what, 3 PHB classes don't have any magic. I mean, they even let barbarians FLY and people accepted it. A ranger that didn't have magic? NO WAY! THAT'S NOT A RANGER. But a flying barbarian? No problems at all.

While I often find that @Tony Vargas takes his points too far, he's actually got a decent amount of evidence to back this one up.

 

[Lanefan]

... a paraliturgical celebration.

Never heard this term - does this mean the sort of celebration where you all go down to the pub, drink enough beer that you all forget any wrongs anyone else there has done to you, and all leave as the best of friends?

If not, it should.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeh it can but not if you decide to make wealth an utterly indeterminate thing. That only works in 3e and 4e actually. (ok one might be able to compute expected wealth in 1e and 2e from random encounter tables but not easy)

Something else to keep in mind from 1e-2e that almost completely vanished afterward was that wealth - as expressed by magic items owned - was much more easy come, easy go.

Fail your save vs a fireball or lightning bolt in 1e? Everything you're carrying now has to save individually, and some of those saves - particularly against lightning - ain't easy to make.

Makes it far easier as a DM to give out magic items when you know the odds are they won't last forever.

To be clear big climactic significant awesome is part of the imbalance. So magic is more powerful just sucks because it's basically a lime light issue. Oh right random crit fisher fighter gets limelight randomly instead of when its needed gee that cannot be a problem. (everybody should like lack of strategic and tactical choice)

Randomly hitting the big score can be far more fun than being able to predict and control when it happens.

Actiual seen use in the wild 3 or maybe 4 encounters a game week. Shrug assumptions about "encounters a day" having variable impact on your characters depending on which subsystem the game designer thinks is appropriate is a pretty willy nilly as far as everyone contributing. Kind of locks down the story flow. Instead of player choice.

Yeah, the adventuring day tends to end when either a) the casters run out of spells or b) the party in general runs out of hit points; and of those a) is far more common IME.

Presumption people begin campaigns at level 1 and play through out

Yes, that is the baseline assumption.

when even the games designers didnt do that ... regardless even if they do what you really get is constant imbalance not actual balance. so yeh that was bull when I seen it in 1976.

Point is no balance was never easy to achieve.

Compounded by some of the early-days balancing mechanisms being thrown out at the design level starting with 3e e.g. different advancement rates by class, casting becoming harder and harder to interrupt, etc.

 

[Hussar]

@Lanefan, something that gets left out though is that AD&D PC's were assumed to have more than 10 magic items each. Otherwise, the strictures on paladins don't make any sense. So, if we assume a 6-8 PC party, it's reasonable to think that most of the time, they would be lugging around 60-80 magic items. O.O

And, if we look at the old 1e modules, that wasn't actually a hard limit to reach. There were a LOT of magic items in those old magic items. Sure, a lightning bolt save was hard to make, but, they also weren't all that common. Blue dragons and 5th level+ wizards were about the only things that shot lightning.

Sure, you might be running through magic items, but, the point is, you had a LOT of magic items to run through.

 

[Zardnaar]

Wands of lightning were a thing.

Old D&D did a better job of elemental damage.

 

[aramis erak]

Never heard this term - does this mean the sort of celebration where you all go down to the pub, drink enough beer that you all forget any wrongs anyone else there has done to you, and all leave as the best of friends?

If not, it should.

It's not a distinction commonly made outside a theological context, and even then, it's not a commonly made distinction in West European theologies... but within a Byzantine, Coptic, or Syriac frame of reference...

Liturgical celebrations: divine liturgy - to use the roman term, the mass.
Paraliturgical: any other formal church services other than the Divine Liturgy.

For more, Forgiveness Sunday - OrthodoxWiki

 

[Garthanos]

e.g. different advancement rates by class,

Your 1e fighter was level 9 when the mage as 11 this did not do what people thought it did.

 

[Zardnaar]

Your 1e fighter was level 9 when the mage as 11 this did not do what people thought it did.

AD&D was funky.

B/X yeah wizard was behind.

 

[Garthanos]

casting becoming harder and harder to interrupt, etc.

So much eraticness ... to that implementation. I liked it in concept didnt see it actually do its thing in practice easy to interrupt at low level when it was most well rude (you get 1 magic thing only to do at low level and oops nope not today) and potentially very quickly a lot harder to do at high level when it really might be needed to keep them in line. Honest this is like boosting the availability of magic items of the fighter types IT seems like it can/could work in theory land but it really makes huge assumptions which failed in practice land like mages not getting the items.

 

[Garthanos]

Makes it far easier as a DM to give out magic items when you know the odds are they won't last forever.

Destroying magic items in stories usually seems a big deal... them volcanos and the like come in handy not so much incidental damage on a battlefield (important choices involved)

Randomly hitting the big score can be far more fun than being able to predict and control when it happens.

Really says who... (yes I know the gambler and its why you call it a big score and I call it a climactic - it is actually pretty telling)
Fluke die rolls honestly don't impress me as much as those based on choices remember the game was supposed to be about the player expressing their character through choices (such as what things seem important to the player and character) AND on top of that the class most interested in fighting had the fewest functional tactical and strategic choices IMHO that sucks.
TBH In the end I want having a really climatic effect to not be just because of resource management (it is part of it) but occurring because of a combination of that planning and team work and combining more than one characters abilities and exploiting features of the scene and so on to me that is way more interesting than just an ooh look the plastic said so. (or just the bald faced decision but even just the decision says something about the character and what the player considers important). To me things like the 4e slayer or champion in 5e lack expressiveness (and the 5e bm only seems a bit better with kill it fast dominating everything).