D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[niklinna]

There's a fair bit of tangy truth to that article. Good thing I like tangy! Blades is probably my favorite system at the moment.

<Gets out rulebook to read it again.>

Okay I should clarify. Actually I think Blades in the Dark is pretty well written...for learning how to play the game. The problem is that, after you've read it, it kinda fails as a reference manual. Things are located where they logically come up in presentation, but then when you want to find something later, it often isn't where you expect it to be, and then the essential bit is often one sentence in a paragraph. But it is all there. And it does have an index. (And what the heck, PDFs are searchable anyhow.)

 

[Garthanos]

Yeah, I can't let that go. Having played 1E and (since the pandemic) now a ton of OD&D, those two editions explicitly require a lot of patching and filling out. Much moreso than 5E.

That is how I remember 1e as well but the house rules I remember being the most common back in the day were not patches but whole sale new magic systems and the like (perhaps the people interacted with were just agressive)

 

[Minigiant]

The real difficulty comes from the stuff that repeats. If you're doing a piracy campaign, you're going to want to have some idea about how to handle naval battles and swashbuckling -- the odd judement call isn't going to cut it. The mental overhead is too much, and pretty soon you'll rule youself into a corner.

The other problem is: as a DM or GM, I want my players to be able to make informed choices about tactics, and meaningful decisions about what they do with their characters. If they're in a naval battle, they need to have some idea of their odds against that man-o'-war, and the risks involved in fighting it. If I'm winging everything, I have much less ability to provide that information.

Say it again louder so the people in the back.

D&D at is core is based on informed decision against unknown targets with predictable possible results.

Anything the players might encounter or perform more than than twice needs to have a set of pinned down rules for them to make proper decisions. And that's mostly where editions come in as they determine which situations should be expected.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Who needs rulebooks when you can learn D&D by watching Matt Mercer??

You're making a joke... but you actually speak the truth.

People have been saying for years now that more new players have actually learned what D&D was, understood what the game was about, and figured out how it was played by watching people actually play D&D on YouTube and Twitch... much moreso than ever reading "how to play" instructions in any book.

So while I don't think at the time of 5E's release they ever expected Actual Play to become their instruction manual for D&D... they most certainly accept that good fortune now. And thus blowing X amount of pages at the front of the book on your prototypical "Here's what a Roleplaying Game is, and here's How To Play" chapter is probably not gonna happen anymore. This is 2022 and social media is our instructional manual for pretty much everything.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You're making a joke... but you actually speak the truth.

People have been saying for years now that more new players have actually learned what D&D was, understood what the game was about, and figured out how it was played by watching people actually play D&D on YouTube and Twitch... much moreso than ever reading "how to play" instructions in any book.

So while I don't think at the time of 5E's release they ever expected Actual Play to become their instruction manual for D&D... they most certainly accept that good fortune now. And thus blowing X amount of pages at the front of the book on your prototypical "Here's what a Roleplaying Game is, and here's How To Play" chapter is probably not gonna happen anymore. This is 2022 and social media is our instructional manual for pretty much everything.

I think you make a good point here. I don't know if it was quite the case at the start of 5E when the books were written, but I’d say it’s very clearly the case now. It’ll be interesting to see how that impacts the 1D&D books.

My guess is that it will be even less focused. Fewer procedures and processes and more “make it all up”. Which is perfectly fine, but it promotes a certain kind of experience at the expense of others.

This is why I think the idea of editions don’t matter… while the gist is great in a kumbaya kind of way (though Dungeoncraft didn’t even manage to really pull that off)… is wrong. The changes from edition to edition create significantly different play experiences.

 

[gorice]

I learned dnd with the 1991 "black box" set.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Also, I love your shapeshifter class. In proper D&D tradition, I will call it an Odo.

And once they did an adventure with lots of boats, they did an expansion of boat fighting rules.

Once the players know what they can do on a boat with 2 ballista and a mangonel, they’ll know that the Amnian frigate with 6 mangonels and a for and aft ballista “swivel gun” is something they can only engage with using very smart tactics.

I don’t think those rules needed to be in the core books in order to call the core books a complete, playable, game.

Likewise, I don’t think that the game needs to have specific rules for how to end a scene and move on to the next one, it just needs good pacing advice for DMs.

I think what I’m trying to get across is that this argument is what I mean in all those past threads where I argue with @Campbell and @Manbearcat and others about whether D&D 5e is a narrow or very broad game.

Procedural specificity helps run a specific kind of game. It doesn’t help, IMO, run a game where the next adventure could be a “second story job” at the top of a mile tall tower, which could easily end with a skyward chase on sky coaches weaving through the towers and bridges of Sharn, or could be a delve into an abandoned tower overrun by aberrant corruptions of goblinoids and drakes, where the floors of the tower can be moved by levers in a control room, and the matriarch of the aberrant drakes can call reinforcements repeatedly and eat other aberrations to heal herself, or a tourney that is really one facet of a much more complex heist wherein the mark is a high level participant of said tourney, or a trip to a character’s home to investigate a murder and look into the secrets of the church the PC is a Paladin of.

I wasn't suggesting that they needed to include boat fighting rules in the base game (maybe in Spelljammer, though?).

I think you've hit upon an important question, though, which is: what is the core experience that 5e is supposed to support? Your remark about pacing is a red flag for me, because I always think of that sort of thing as something railroads do. How can players have agency if procedural advice for the DM amounts to 'go with whatever works for the story you want to tell?'. The DMG does actually have a few remarks that seem to encourage railroading.

It could be that the core experience of 5e, as written, is 'buy an adventure and get on the railroad.' I'm being a bit uncharitable, but only a bit. Obviously, we as players and DMs can do other things with it, but that's when the procedural gaps start to become annoying, and we need to invent stuff or import it from other games/editions.

Also, I want to note that other games (Apocalypse World is a well-known example) are able to cover a wide variety of situations without having lots of rules. I wouldn't use AW to run a dungeon-crawl, but then, it doesn't sell itself as a game that can run one.

Say it again louder so the people in the back.

D&D at is core is based on informed decision against unknown targets with predictable possible results.

Anything the players might encounter or perform more than than twice needs to have a set of pinned down rules for them to make proper decisions. And that's mostly where editions come in as they determine which situations should be expected.

Consider this me saying it again. Informed decision-making has value, at least for some players.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The relevance would be that, if house-rules are enough to make a single edition into "a different game," then surely outright edition changes--which, barring 1e->2e, have always been much more significant than a couple pages of house-rules!--must also produce "a different game." And if you grant that, then it seems you have to grant that edition matters, because you have granted that editions are different games.

Oh, editions absolutely matter. I'd be a huge hypocrite if I said otherwise. I just don't see the "too many house rules makes it a new game, and that's bad" implication I saw upthread as valid.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Also, I love your shapeshifter class. In proper D&D tradition, I will call it an Odo.


I wasn't suggesting that they needed to include boat fighting rules in the base game (maybe in Spelljammer, though?).

I think you've hit upon an important question, though, which is: what is the core experience that 5e is supposed to support? Your remark about pacing is a red flag for me, because I always think of that sort of thing as something railroads do. How can players have agency if procedural advice for the DM amounts to 'go with whatever works for the story you want to tell?'. The DMG does actually have a few remarks that seem to encourage railroading.

It could be that the core experience of 5e, as written, is 'buy an adventure and get on the railroad.' I'm being a bit uncharitable, but only a bit. Obviously, we as players and DMs can do other things with it, but that's when the procedural gaps start to become annoying, and we need to invent stuff or import it from other games/editions.

Also, I want to note that other games (Apocalypse World is a well-known example) are able to cover a wide variety of situations without having lots of rules. I wouldn't use AW to run a dungeon-crawl, but then, it doesn't sell itself as a game that can run one.


Consider this me saying it again. Informed decision-making has value, at least for some players.

Ship combat rules, in Spelljammer? Ridiculous!

 

[Fifth Element]

My first experience with D&D.

And mine. Damn you Bargle!

 

[Oofta]

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Also, I love your shapeshifter class. In proper D&D tradition, I will call it an Odo.


I wasn't suggesting that they needed to include boat fighting rules in the base game (maybe in Spelljammer, though?).

I think you've hit upon an important question, though, which is: what is the core experience that 5e is supposed to support? Your remark about pacing is a red flag for me, because I always think of that sort of thing as something railroads do. How can players have agency if procedural advice for the DM amounts to 'go with whatever works for the story you want to tell?'. The DMG does actually have a few remarks that seem to encourage railroading.

It could be that the core experience of 5e, as written, is 'buy an adventure and get on the railroad.' I'm being a bit uncharitable, but only a bit. Obviously, we as players and DMs can do other things with it, but that's when the procedural gaps start to become annoying, and we need to invent stuff or import it from other games/editions.

Also, I want to note that other games (Apocalypse World is a well-known example) are able to cover a wide variety of situations without having lots of rules. I wouldn't use AW to run a dungeon-crawl, but then, it doesn't sell itself as a game that can run one.


Consider this me saying it again. Informed decision-making has value, at least for some players.

So how is the procedural advice of "take a rest every [insert appropriate static number here]" and "have a random monster every [insert another number]" better than a railroad?

As far as modules, I have some sympathy for authors. Either you have a fairly linear module that is relatively easy to follow and there are standard expectations of "at this point the party will be level X" or you can have a sandbox. The former is easier to plan for and write while having the benefit of being fairly easy to follow for a DM. The latter gives you freedom but can be hard for an inexperienced DM to run. I know at least some modules fall into the latter camp and we've seen complaints about how DMs have a hard time following or knowing how to keep the adventure moving. I don't think there's an easy answer.

As far as what the rules tell us? They don't. Run the game that works for you. I don't see why that's a problem, I don't want a tightly constrained game that assumes I'm always going to be running a dungeon crawl, playing politics with dark forces, fighting against the inevitable slide into insanity, running a heist or any number of other relatively narrowly focused styles that many games enforce. I want to be able to bounce from one style to the next during the same campaign, sometimes in the same session.

The core experience of 5E (and most versions D&D) is to have flexibility to do a wide variety of things. That has weaknesses of course but it's what make the game worth sticking with over the decades for me.