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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9821468" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Right.  And I think a lot of this falls down to unintentional and unexplained design.  Gary & co made some terrible design decisions and quite a few great and amazingly-popular ones.  While Gary immediately saw, for example, xp and leveling up as a "killer app", many other ideas they were throwing at the wall, and not necessarily clear themselves on what bits were really good and important or not.For some elements, whether it be encumbrance management or mapping by verbal description, they really never explained the appeal or made clear the FUNCTION of these parts of the game and how they made for interesting decisions, fun, and tension.When they were just selling to wargamers they could assume some common shared knowledge and cultural values.  Including logistics being an important part of war and a way a skillful commander displays their superiority and gains advantage compared to a less-skilled one. When they were teaching new gamers themselves they could personally convey the importance of encumbrance, and SHOW the tension in the mapping/'don't get lost!" sub-game. But the books don't really teach those things.So once the game got out to non-wargamer sci-fi fans (as early as '75), and once it exploded into the larger pop culture in '79, the way it sold and was described was more commonly "here's a way to act out and LIVE IN fantasy adventures like your favorite novels!"  And novels don't tend to focus on logistics.  Exciting ones also tend to have fast-paced plots which don't resemble adventurers (for example) going on a delve for treasure then going back home to rest for a week, then go back again.  So we see immediate and ongoing changes to make D&D better at supporting fast-paced action like in novels.  Healing becoming increasingly quick from edition to edition (with a minor regression from 4E to 5E) most prominent among them, but also alongside the loss of dungeon-crawling procedures, and encumbrance becoming increasingly vestigial as treasure became sidelined into an ancillary goal rather than a central motivation and challenge.</blockquote>

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