D&D General Why TSR-era D&D Will Always Be D&D

[Oofta]

It all depends on what part of the game you look at. If all that matters is the bolded bit above, then every edition is functionally identical. Yet the mechanics, in some editions, makes the differences quite glaring.

Sort of. Spell levels are not identical to caster level. Check. Quadratic casters, linear non-casters. Check. Stupidly OP spells. Check. 5E and TSR D&D have these but 4E does not.

With 4E with had a completely different concept of how classes worked. Everyone shared the same AEDU power structure. Yes, there has been change, growth and additional flexibility. But a wizards is still identifiable as a wizard even if the mechanical implementation varies slightly

But not really. Different classes advancing at different rates. Nope.

Seems minor to me.

Race-based level limits. Nope.

We ignored.

Penalties for races. Nope.

Lack of bonuses now. Same diff.

Level drain. Nope.

True. Then again, we never used it.

Multiple dice systems. Nope.

Not sure what you're talking about.

Long healing times. Nope.

Unless you use the gritty rest rules like we do. Then again, in actual play it never came up anyway. We'd either drink potions, stop by the local temple or the cleric would heal us all.

Time spent memorizing spells beyond resting. Nope. DM-controlled spell acquisition. Nope. DM-controlled magic item creation. Nope.

None of these were ever a thing in any group I played with.

Meaningful magic items. Nope.

Really? No meaningful magic items in 5E? I'll have to tell my group that when I strip away all their goodies.

Hit point caps. LOL, nope.

Yep, there's been HP and damage inflation. But ultimately it's just fluff.

Resource management. LOL, nope.

In my game PCs run low on spells on a pretty regular basis. It's dependent on the game, but the 5 minute work day has always been a potential issue.

Niche protection. Nope.

Disagree.

Things to spend gold on. Nope. Domain management. Nope.

TSR printed, what 5,264 books? Well, would have been 5,265 except they combined halflings and gnomes into 1 book because small races get no respect. Nowadays they leave some of the less popular options to 3PP. Colville's Stronghold Builders Guide has some interesting options for example.

Then again I never played with a group that used any of the optional domain rules.

TSR D&D has these but 4E and 5E do not.

5E has more in common with 4E than TSR D&D. 5E has a thin veneer of TSR D&D wrapped around WotC D&D. That’s it. All the meat. All the texture. It’s still WotC D&D.

Looking at your post, it looks like we were, and continue to, play different games. Which isn't surprising. There were a ton of options and many of the TSR era rules were ignored or houseruled in most groups.

Where you see major differences, I see cosmetic changes and things that had little or no impact on actual play of the game. Kind of surprised you didn't mention how drastically different THAC0 was., With 4E? It was in your face that it was a completely different system that only shared some labels and lore.

 

[Oofta]

You know, it's funny, I've played Gnomes in AD&D (and 4e, if Svirfneblin count), but I thought their reasons to scrap the Gnome were pretty good. The race has no niche that isn't covered by another Race. Heck, even the original Halfling subraces suffered from a bit of this, with Stouts being Dwarf-like and Lightfoots being Elf-like.

I never understood all the fuss, but I think it had more to do with the addition of Tieflings and Dragonborn than anyone truly feeling the Gnome was a valued player race.

I was kidding about the gnomes. On the other hand they outright stated that they held back half the dragon types because they wanted to give people a reason to by MM 2, I assumed gnomes were kind of along the same line.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

What's the saying? "The past cannot be changed, it can only be remembered." Or something like that?

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past"

 

[MGibster]

And because a road was taken 50 years ago, and it's really hard to switch paths now.

If once you start down the AD&D path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Path dependency is a very useful concept to understand that is helpful in understanding why many things are the way they are and so resistant to change. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the concept, it's often helpful to think of the poem so familiar to most, The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.

I just need you to understand that I will never forgive you for inflicting poetry on us.

Later, we would see some echo of that in the "weapon v. armor table" in the 1e PHB, but for the most part ... by the time that D&D was being played in the 70s, armor class was already somewhat inscrutable. Yet here we are, still using the term. Why don't we change? Well, primarily because people use it. They are familiar with it. It's part of D&D.

This makes sense. Even with all the changes to the game over the years, I've always been able to reocognize it as D&D. And why would we change terms that work perfectly fine and are generally well understood by almost all participants? In fact, for other games, I sometimes hate it when they try to invent terms to replace something already in common use. Vampire 5E does this when they refer to player characters as, well, shoot, I forget now, because I'm not going to use the stupid term they came up with when PC already exists.

 

[Lanefan]

True. Then again, we never used it.

You never used level drain in 0e-1e-2e?

You had very kind DMs.

Not sure what you're talking about.

Multiple dice systems = d20 for some things, d% for others, roll-under vs roll-over, etc.

None of these were ever a thing in any group I played with.

Refer to comment above re kind DMs, particularly re DM-controlled (i.e. random) spell acquisition and DM-controlled item creation.

Yep, there's been HP and damage inflation. But ultimately it's just fluff.

It's fluff that affects game play, though. For example if neither you nor the opponents have many hit points compared to the damage the other can deal out, both you and they are going to think twice before venturing into combat.

 

[Oofta]

You never used level drain in 0e-1e-2e?

You had very kind DMs.

Multiple dice systems = d20 for some things, d% for others, roll-under vs roll-over, etc.

Refer to comment above re kind DMs, particularly re DM-controlled (i.e. random) spell acquisition and DM-controlled item creation.

It's fluff that affects game play, though. For example if neither you nor the opponents have many hit points compared to the damage the other can deal out, both you and they are going to think twice before venturing into combat.

But my point is the same. I'm not saying they're the same, obviously things changed. But you had wizards casting spells, fighters swinging swords, hobbit thieves halfling rogues stealing my precious while having a special attack that did extra damage.

In 4E everyone had a PC represented by the same grouping of powers that worked like a tactical card game*. There was a homogenization of character implementation into AEDU powers.

The details obviously changed, the structure and interactions I experienced in TSR D&D are similar to 5E. The detailed implementation doesn't really matter as much as the overall structure.

P.S. we rotated DMs a lot so we probably took it easy on each other.

*People I played with started cutting up their power list and putting them into card sleeves. I'm not saying it was bad design, just how we played.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Having played AD&D, I agree with most of this, but didn't all those spells exist too? Clerics could create water (and later food and water), Leomund's Tiny Hut was there (though, admittedly, it wasn't an invincible bivouac), etc.?

This is something that always surprised me when I started playing 3e. Suddenly, a spellcaster's ability to trivialize wilderness survival was a big deal among a lot of DM's I played with, and quite a few on early forums, and has remained so to this very day- but the precursors of all these spells were around in 1st and 2nd Edition! Did no one use them back in the day?

Not so much our group. But I can tell you why!

The opportunity cost seemed higher then. We need those healing spells badly. Spell slots in general seemed harder to come by.

No cantrips means light 1st level spell if out of torches…

Everything including arrows were more precious (in our group). So even if we had the spells we did not throw them with impunity.

I have not played 1e since 1999, so time obscures. We also usually had a barbarian or ranger along Too so perhaps the DM was too generous with this hand waving it…

 

[Maxperson]

Side note: for those of us who like consistency in our game-world physics, this spell write-up is a disaster!

The spell is specifically noted as not providing protection from missiles etc., which means untended solid objects can pass through. Yet it's assumed (but, oddly enough, not mentioned) that the Hut protects those inside from snow or hail - which are also solid objects.

I don't see any real inconsistency there. It's in the portion about weather, so presumably the spell was designed to keep weather, including hail, out. Since it's specifically weather that's kept out, it's not inconsistent to allow rocks or other missiles in. Unless it's literally raining cats and dogs, then those are kept out, too.

 

[Orius]

Snarf's initial post seems to be just a long winded way of telling us about the sacred cows of D&D.

And I think edition differences tend to be a bit overstated. It's not that they don't exist but people blow them out of proportion. Different play styles across editions seem to have a bigger impact.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Snarf's initial post seems to be just a long winded way of telling us about the sacred cows of D&D.

And I think edition differences tend to be a bit overstated. It's not that they don't exist but people blow them out of proportion. Different play styles across editions seem to have a bigger impact.

Depends what you mean by that.

Because of an oddity of my play history, I did not play any version of D&D (as compared to run it) between OD&D and D&D4e. While I didn't really like 4e for various reasons, I liked it immensely more than I did OD&D in the end. You could argue that was because of my playstyle, but it was clearly a case where it did make a difference, and a significant one.