WRT to failure rates in magic, it is not the concept that is flawed, but a question of implementation. Let;s work with the Shadowdark version. You cast a spell. Say it is a 1st level spell. If I remember correctly, the "DC" was 10 plus the spell level, so in this case, 11. A d20 is rolled against that number, and the PC's Int bonus was tacked on. Assuming a +3 to Int, that would mean a 65% chance of a 1st level spell working properly. I can't remember if the caster level was also added to that d20 roll, but it would make sense to. So, going with 5e stats, we could have a 4th level caster, with an 18 Int (+4), and now that DC 11 is going to succeed 90% of the time. Now, that almost trivializes the risk. But some modification to that mechanic would create a situation where casters could, and should, fail occasionally.
Yeah I get that, but that is on top of the already built-in failure rates (saving throws, missing to hit rolls). Its a bit like adding a % miss chance to attacks on top the already existing to hit roll. Its sort of like a double penalty in many cases when it comes to magic in 5e.
Easy fix: get rid of having casters having to make attack rolls or their targets having to make saves. You roll to cast and it works or it doesn't.
That is how ShadowDark handles spellcasting. The caster does not additionally have to make an attack roll and targets do not additionally have to make saves.
This streamlines spellcasting.
One of the beautiful things about 5E is the simplicity of its core mechanic. You want to do something. You are given a target number. You roll a d20. Add or subtract any modifiers. Meet or beat that target number. Done.
Were all spells handled as simply as requesting the caster make a roll it would be simpler. Expecting particularly new players to remember which spells require an attack roll and which ones require saves be made when wizards these days have more spells than necessary unnecessarily complicates things. I have been playing and running D&D for 41 years. And I laugh when people talk about all the unnecessary rules in AD&D. Because I had no trouble then remembering everything to be remembered about one of my players' characters without consulting the rules. Fewer spells that would be in a character's arsenal. Now there is constant page-turning to be reminded how any one spell might work in that regard. Even other DMs I know and with whom I have played have found this to be the case. Constant page-turning at their tables. Or constantly having to look up this or that spell online.
You yourself admit a spell already has a chance of failure. If an attack roll or save is needed. Why not eliminate that and just replace it with something simpler?
Its a good point but there is a difference. Much of the magic infrastructure of 5e D&D is built around the idea of compared power levels. The power level of the caster vs. the power level of the target. So as a "not real, but you get the point example" a 1st level Wizard casting a Charm Person stands no chance of charming an ancient dragon, because the dragon has a very high save, but a 20th level Wizard can probobly do it, because the difficulty of the save the dragon has to make will be really high.
This depth of the mechanic is meaningful and while Shadowdarks version is "simpler" it inherently lacks this mechanical depth. Which is fine for a simple game about dungeon crawling and dungeon survival, its not fine in a story focused fantasy RPG like D&D. The complexity of the mechanics is not a flaw of 5e as you see, its a feature, its designed very intentionally to be complex and that is not a failure of design, it is quite literarly designed that way on purpose to get the exact outcome that it has.
A lot of times old school gamers want to have this conversation about how "old school games are better designed because their simpler". This is a very strange position to hold as modern D&D is more complex, very intentionally to service an audiance that demands that complexity. If the game was simplified as you describe, there would be fewer people playing it.
In other words, 5e's complexity is WHY people play 5e, to suggest it would be better if it was simpler is a gross misunderstanding of this audience. If anything, a huge part of the audience (the second largest part of the D&D community) doesn't play 5e and they play Pathfinder 2e instead very specifically and exclusively because 5e is not complex enough and lacks the depth that Pathinder 2e offers.
The reality is that the OSR community, the old school gamers that want simpler games is so small and so insignificant that they literarly don't matter enough to giants like D&D to even bother listening to their feedback as potential 5e players. Like Wizards doesn't even bother creating optional rules for a simpler form of the game even though they could very easy add a simple chapter like that in the DMG, like for example how to adjust 5e to be simpler and more effective as a dungeon crawl survival game. I mean Shadowdarks core rules fit on a napkin, it would not take much to include the entire thing in the DMG. The reason they don't is that they have an entire beach of sand (customers) and the OSR is like 1 grain of sand. So irrelevant that they simply don't matter at all.
And I'm saying this as a OSR enthusiast, but that is the reality of the situation, the OSR is a laughably small community. If we all gathered in one place we would be lucky if their was 30,000 of us. That isn't even worth coming into work for Wizards of the Coast.
Its a good point but there is a difference. Much of the magic infrastructure of 5e D&D is built around the idea of compared power levels. The power level of the caster vs. the power level of the target. So as a "not real, but you get the point example" a 1st level Wizard casting a Charm Person stands no chance of charming an ancient dragon, because the dragon has a very high save, but a 20th level Wizard can probobly do it, because the difficulty of the save the dragon has to make will be really high.
This depth of the mechanic is meaningful and while Shadowdarks version is "simpler" it inherently lacks this mechanical depth. Which is fine for a simple game about dungeon crawling and dungeon survival, its not fine in a story focused fantasy RPG like D&D. The complexity of the mechanics is not a flaw of 5e as you see, its a feature, its designed very intentionally to be complex and that is not a failure of design, it is quite literarly designed that way on purpose to get the exact outcome that it has.
A lot of times old school gamers want to have this conversation about how "old school games are better designed because their simpler". This is a very strange position to hold as modern D&D is more complex, very intentionally to service an audiance that demands that complexity. If the game was simplified as you describe, there would be fewer people playing it.
In other words, 5e's complexity is WHY people play 5e, to suggest it would be better if it was simpler is a gross misunderstanding of this audience. If anything, a huge part of the audience (the second largest part of the D&D community) doesn't play 5e and they play Pathfinder 2e instead very specifically and exclusively because 5e is not complex enough and lacks the depth that Pathinder 2e offers.
The reality is that the OSR community, the old school gamers that want simpler games is so small and so insignificant that they literarly don't matter enough to giants like D&D to even bother listening to their feedback as potential 5e players. Like Wizards doesn't even bother creating optional rules for a simpler form of the game even though they could very easy add a simple chapter like that in the DMG, like for example how to adjust 5e to be simpler and more effective as a dungeon crawl survival game. I mean Shadowdarks core rules fit on a napkin, it would not take much to include the entire thing in the DMG. The reason they don't is that they have an entire beach of sand (customers) and the OSR is like 1 grain of sand. So irrelevant that they simply don't matter at all.
And I'm saying this as a OSR enthusiast, but that is the reality of the situation, the OSR is a laughably small community. If we all gathered in one place we would be lucky if their was 30,000 of us. That isn't even worth coming into work for Wizards of the Coast.
I get what you're saying. But it's not as if combat couldn't be afforded a greater level of mechanical depth taking more into consideration "compared power levels" with it not being all about a target's DEX and/or worn armor but additionally its overall prowess and experience perhaps reflected in its proficiency bonus or something else and not just that of whoever is taking a swing when it comes to how likely or unlikely it is they are going to hit that target.
Should it be just as easy for a starting 1st-level character to hit an unarmored but seasoned 15th-level warrior with a DEX of 15 and an active AC of 12 than it is for them to hit a 0-level shopkeep blessed with the same DEX but who has never seen a day of combat in its life?
I am not advocating for this level of simulationist play. Just to be clear.
I do think there is an underappreciated beauty to simpler design. Remember D&D before D&D introduced skills? A player wasn't looking at his or her character sheet to see what the character could do. The player was dreaming up ways to do what they wanted the character to do. Described this. And the DM arbitrated. The larger audience for what D&D has become may not want this. And that's fine. But I do believe more rules has perhaps unintentionally meant more self-imposed constraints and struggle to understand why anyone would want that in a game that basically allows us to escape the very real constraints of our world for a few hours once a week.
I have always liked thieves. As a class. But there is a good article out there about how when thieves first became a class—remembering that originally it was just three of what are now considered to be the core four—was when a lot of player agency was lost and with it much creativity. Because they gave this new class access to skills everyclass had previously had access to. If more abstractly.
It's funny you say ShadowDark is the crawler while 5E is the "story focused fantasy RPG" provided a few people in this thread have been arguing for the past twenty four hours about how 5E is basically just a slash 'em up.
Regarding ShadowDark being nothing more than a dungeon crawler this is what I had to say about that the last time you made that claim:
The majority of tables in the book are for generating urban locations and encounters in them. I use it for what is other than just excursions into what lies below the streets and beyond the walls ultimately an urban crawl.
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling? Because to me it is really just 5th. Edition only broken down to core classes and removing rules bloat and making use of some of the innovations we have seen in the OSR to make it look and feel more like B/X and games that emulate B/X. B/X and BECMI were certainly more than mere dungeon crawlers. These were and remain used for domain level play.
Baron de Ropp mentions in response to people saying it is just a dungeon crawler that he started running a campaign using the system as soon as the pdf was made available before the books shipped and that it was still going at the time of recording. Critics want to say it can't do anything else. Many of them have probably never even looked inside the thing. They only need to hear or read someone say it and they suspect that assessment is the truth.
I think you're really stretching the idea of "melee" classes here.
And I think you're missing the point. It's a spectrum, it's fluid. There are few options for fighters, rogues and barbarians to cast spells - but they all have them. And in a perfectly similar fashion, there are few options for full casters to go melee - but they all have them. Except sorcerers. Precisely as I stated.
It makes no difference to me how many classes there are. You could have a class called Arcane, and have wizard, sorcerer, warlock and so on be options for that class. For all I care, there could be four classes (fighter, priest, wizard, rogue) and the same number of options as we have with the current rules.
But anyways: I don't think there's too many casters. Essentially, only barbarians can't cast spells (although magic can sort of happen around them), and only sorcerers can't fight in melee, and everyone else is some variation of gishyness. Or ... you know, has the option to be so. There are just as few pure casters, as pure melee.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
The fact that just about every class has a casting option, or a melee option, just means players have more flexibility in creating the character they want. It doesn't mean your fighter has to cast spells
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Active characters:
Green Hill Sunrise, jaded tabaxi mercenary trapped in the Dark Domains (Battle Master fighter) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Regarding ShadowDark being nothing more than a dungeon crawler this is what I had to say about that the last time you made that claim:
The majority of tables in the book are for generating urban locations and encounters in them. I use it for what is other than just excursions into what lies below the streets and beyond the walls ultimately an urban crawl.
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling? Because to me it is really just 5th. Edition only broken down to core classes and removing rules bloat and making use of some of the innovations we have seen in the OSR to make it look and feel more like B/X and games that emulate B/X. B/X and BECMI were certainly more than mere dungeon crawlers. These were and remain used for domain level play.
Baron de Ropp mentions in response to people saying it is just a dungeon crawler that he started running a campaign using the system as soon as the pdf was made available before the books shipped and that it was still going at the time of recording. Critics want to say it can't do anything else. Many of them have probably never even looked inside the thing. They only need to hear or read someone say it and they suspect that assessment is the truth.
Though we are here to talk about D&D 5th edition not Shadowdark, I think this is a good question and I think the answer syncs up nicely with the topic.
In short, the answer to this question is simple, rules are designed to enforce a genre and specific playstyle, that is how game design works. What you are suggesting is that in the absence of rules, it supports all genres and all playstyles. This is simply not true, it can be, YOU can make it that, but that is through the application of a playstyle, one not written or codified, not explained or elaborated on describing how to do it, it is YOUR invention, YOUR playstyle. Its something you add to the game, its not what the game was designed for.
THE playstyle of any game, be it Shadowdark or 5th edition D&D and everything in between is defined by the rules written for the game, that becomes the genre and the playstyle, its what the game supports. The absence of rules does not create support for anything. Again YOU can invent your own way to make that absence BE something, but that is not game design, that is personal playstyle.
Shadowdark supports Dungeon Crawling, there are no other rules, architecture or instructions anywhere in the book that suggest otherwise. Can it be more? Of course, YOU, I or ANYONE can do whatever they want with it, we can turn it into a game about running a tavern and play "theatre" for hours never leaving for an adventure, never fighting a monster, just talking to patrons, serving drinks, and cooking dinners for our patrons and that is what the game can be about. The game however has nothing in the rules that would support that playstyle, we, would simply invent that. We could, not even bother making mechanical characters using the Shadowdark rules, ignore every word in that book and still create that "theatre" experience. But.. is that the purpose of Shadowdark? I think not.
Now I will say, you can design a game that does what I call "anti-support", a game that with the rules actually makes it difficult, even impossible with heavily altering the rules or ignoring them to create a certain genre. For example 5e is a game in which a dungeon crawl survival game is basically impossible. There are way too many rules and mechanics in the game that quite literally circumvent and make it impossible to create that experience at the table, you have to literally redesign the game and that is EXACTLY how and why Shadowdark was created. The designer took the 5th edition rules, altered them to create a very specific genre, a very specific playstyle within the fantasy adventure spectrum, aka.. a Dungeon Crawling Survival Game.
Matt Colville explains this better than I can but.. yeah, game design is a real thing. It does beg the question, what is 5th edition D&D's playstyle? That's a really tough question and I think Colville says it best, its a game about nothing and I think that is as good an answer as any.
Regarding ShadowDark being nothing more than a dungeon crawler this is what I had to say about that the last time you made that claim:
The majority of tables in the book are for generating urban locations and encounters in them. I use it for what is other than just excursions into what lies below the streets and beyond the walls ultimately an urban crawl.
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling? Because to me it is really just 5th. Edition only broken down to core classes and removing rules bloat and making use of some of the innovations we have seen in the OSR to make it look and feel more like B/X and games that emulate B/X. B/X and BECMI were certainly more than mere dungeon crawlers. These were and remain used for domain level play.
Baron de Ropp mentions in response to people saying it is just a dungeon crawler that he started running a campaign using the system as soon as the pdf was made available before the books shipped and that it was still going at the time of recording. Critics want to say it can't do anything else. Many of them have probably never even looked inside the thing. They only need to hear or read someone say it and they suspect that assessment is the truth.
Though we are here to talk about D&D 5th edition not Shadowdark, I think this is a good question and I think the answer syncs up nicely with the topic.
In short, the answer to this question is simple, rules are designed to enforce a genre and specific playstyle, that is how game design works. What you are suggesting is that in the absence of rules, it supports all genres and all playstyles. This is simply not true, it can be, YOU can make it that, but that is through the application of a playstyle, one not written or codified, not explained or elaborated on describing how to do it, it is YOUR invention, YOUR playstyle. Its something you add to the game, its not what the game was designed for.
THE playstyle of any game, be it Shadowdark or 5th edition D&D and everything in between is defined by the rules written for the game, that becomes the genre and the playstyle, its what the game supports. The absence of rules does not create support for anything. Again YOU can invent your own way to make that absence BE something, but that is not game design, that is personal playstyle.
Shadowdark supports Dungeon Crawling, there are no other rules, architecture or instructions anywhere in the book that suggest otherwise. Can it be more? Of course, YOU, I or ANYONE can do whatever they want with it, we can turn it into a game about running a tavern and play "theatre" for hours never leaving for an adventure, never fighting a monster, just talking to patrons, serving drinks, and cooking dinners for our patrons and that is what the game can be about. The game however has nothing in the rules that would support that playstyle, we, would simply invent that. We could, not even bother making mechanical characters using the Shadowdark rules, ignore every word in that book and still create that "theatre" experience. But.. is that the purpose of Shadowdark? I think not.
Now I will say, you can design a game that does what I call "anti-support", a game that with the rules actually makes it difficult, even impossible with heavily altering the rules or ignoring them to create a certain genre. For example 5e is a game in which a dungeon crawl survival game is basically impossible. There are way too many rules and mechanics in the game that quite literally circumvent and make it impossible to create that experience at the table, you have to literally redesign the game and that is EXACTLY how and why Shadowdark was created. The designer took the 5th edition rules, altered them to create a very specific genre, a very specific playstyle within the fantasy adventure spectrum, aka.. a Dungeon Crawling Survival Game.
Matt Colville explains this better than I can but.. yeah, game design is a real thing. It does beg the question, what is 5th edition D&D's playstyle? That's a really tough question and I think Colville says it best, its a game about nothing and I think that is as good an answer as any.
(1) I did not say the absence of rules means a game supports all genres and playstyles.
(2) I asked you quite specifically what rules are missing from ShadowDark that mean it is just a game for dungeon crawling:
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling?
Can you not answer this question?
Instead of just saying its rules only support one thing explain exactly why that is? You say its rules support this and only this. How so? What is missing?
The theme of the game implies that this is its author's intention. But as far as rules go they are as conducive as those in just about any early edition of D&D to different genres or playstyles. How is ShadowDark any more of a dungeon crawler than Basic D&D? Can you answer this question?
You keep making this about "rules." But what it really seems to be about for you is theme.
What you are saying about ShadowDark would be like saying a pirate-themed iteration of D&D does not support any other genre or playstyle beyond D&D with pirates because it does not say so in the book when the mechanics might be identical to those in D&D but for the addition of some seafaring rules and rules for resolving combat at sea.
If ShadowDark seems as if it is only for dungeon crawling it is because of what is little more than fluff and how torchlight is handled and some tables specific to "attacking the light." And because the same predictable charge gets leveled against just about any rules-light OSR game by people who have never even bothered to crack them open.
The actual mechanics of the game be they for combat or skills or spells or whatnot make no such assumptions. They are as conducive as Basic D&D to running practically anything medieval fantasy.
(1) I did not say the absence of rules means a game supports all genres and playstyles.
(2) I asked you quite specifically what rules are missing from ShadowDark that mean it is just a game for dungeon crawling:
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling?
Can you not answer this question?
Or for that matter why are the rules that are present only for dungeon crawling? You say its rules support this and only this. How so? What is missing? The theme of the game implies that this is its author's intention. But as far as rules go they are as conducive as those in just about any early edition of D&D to different genres or playstyles. How is ShadowDark any more of a dungeon crawler than Basic D&D? Can you answer this question?
Fair enough, I was trying to answer it in an abstract way but I think I can answer this with specifics.
You mentioned B/X and I think that is a great basis for example and to answer the specific question.
Basic 1st edition rules included rules sufficient enough to run very basic adventures. Beyond the rules for character creation which included Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User and Thief, each with mechanics geared towards "dungeon crawling" It included rules for encounters and combat and show play example focused on a dungeon crawl. It it also included rules for retainers and had complete list of equipment.
Arguably the same rules coverage that Shadowdark had. So ask yourself this. Why Expert rules? What was the point of adding more rules? Can you not have a wilderness adventure using the Basic rules? Why do you need an Expert ruleset that covers rules for horses, Titles, Obstacles to Movement, Special Wilderness Travel, Food, Rest, and mercenaries? Why did they include rules for designing a wilderness and create specific rules for wilderness adventures?
Basic didn't have any of these rules from the Expert set, is that mean Wilderness Adventures were assumed and supported with Basic and if so, why the need for Expert set rules for wilderness adventures?
The game continued to be expanded to include the companion and master sets which add rules for Dominion control, mass combat, hex crawl rules... Was Dominion, Mass combat or hex crawl not supported in the Basic set by the absence of rules?
Shadowdark doesn't have an expert, companion or master set that describes how to execute these other elements of the game. How does hex crawling work in Shadowdark, how do you build a keep, how do you raise an army etc etc.. These mechanics that appear in other games are the designer's way of saying "hey you can do this in our game" and by that design they are saying "this is what our game is about".
Everything in Shadowdark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon, there are no other rules to suggest that anything else happens in the game, that the game is about anything else. So yeah, by the reading of that book, what you can derive from it is that the game is about Dungeon Crawling and by the absence of any other rules, its not about anything else.
5e for example is not about raising armies and having mass combat, it does not support that style of play. BUT... You can get the Strongholds and Followers 3rd party supplement and with that supplement, now you can... now you have support for that style of play.
Since everyone is discussing Shadowdark in the post, I went and looked it up for myself because I've never heard of it before reading this thread. It looks like the creators are basically just making Basic D&D within the framework of heavily stripped-down 5e. Looking at the books, I can see why people are saying that the RPG looks like it is catering to just being a dungeon crawl game. Even the website refers to the players as crawlers and this is the first paragraph mentioned on the website "In Shadowdark RPG, you and your group of crawlers use magic, steel, and wits to delve into mysterious ruins, lost cities, and monster-infested depths. Wondrous treasures and long-forgotten secrets await you! But don't let your last torch burn out, or you could be swallowed by the Shadowdark..."
Not saying you can't use the rules to have a strictly roleplay, non-combat game with this system. But how they are advertising on their kickstarter website is that they are billing this as a Basic D&D, old school dungeon crawl game that is intentionally meant to be hard due to taking away the safety nets, such as eliminating darkvision and rolling 3d6 only straight down for abilities.
None of the discussion for the last bit has anything to do with the thread - the thread is about why there are different types of caster class, not about its fundamental efficacy at different pillars of the game.
To segue this topic back on course, 5e is designed to be rules heavy in some aspects of the game and rules light in others. Combat is rules heavy - most every action is clearly defined so there is no ambiguity of what occurs, keeping combat moving and ensuring there is little room for interpretation of deviation. Social interactions are rules light - while rules exist, the game explicitly wants players and DMs to make social decisions based on their character’s/NPC’s personality or mood.
Whether you like that or not is a subject for a completely different thread - but that is clearly what there designers were going for.
Now, back to the thread. Character creation is rules heavy by necessity, but is also a topic Wizards would prefer be rules light. What does that mean?
To ensure everyone is starting on the same page and there is no ambiguity about what your character can do, it has to be rules heavy - clearly defined rules ensure every single character functions in the same game and utilize the same exact system.
However, character creation is also the very thing 5e wants players to be flexible on - they want players to be able to conceptualize who or what their character is and play whatever they imagine. This is the fundamental justification for why parts of the game are rules light - not wanting strict rules to override player agency.
So, how do they square the necessity of something rules heavy with something that, in other aspects of the game, would be rules light? Options. Providing enough options to ensure players can find in the rules heavy system something that meshes with the visions in their head.
That is why we have three different types of class (casters, martials, and half-casters to spread the divide between the two). It is why we have classes within the same category with different power sources. For martials, you have the disciplined martial training of a Fighter, the primal strength of a Barbarian, the mental training of a Monk. For casters you have internal power of sorcerers, external power of Warlocks, the studious power of Wizards, etc.
And now we get to OP’s original question - why can’t different categories just be subclasses?
The rules heavy way Wizards has decided to go has been to define classes in terms of their power source, and subclasses in terms of the nature of that source. Under that system, a Barbarian is not just an angry Fighter - they draw their strength from the primal aspect of themselves, not from weapons training. A Sorcerer cannot be a subclass of Wizard, since Wizards definitionally studied for their powers, while Sorcerers did not. The entire system is set up so players can think about their character not just in terms of mechanics, but to find a power source which meshes with their character concept.
Now, is this good for the game? I certainly think so - I play with both experienced and new players on a regular basis. For experienced players, they can pretty much always find something that meshes with what they want to play and fits the character they came up with with the sole exception of a true psionic - something the game is lacking). For new players, asking “where did my power comes from?” helps ease them into roleplaying and to come up with their character, either at the game’s start or as they explore the game and realize what sets their character apart from others.
Different folks might see this differently. Some might see it as too constraining, others might see it as too complex and open. But, for me? It works. And, considering Wizards collects a whole lot of data on players and, based on that data, decided to double down on 5e instead of making a true new edition? Guessing the data shows this system works for the overwhelming majority of players.
(1) I did not say the absence of rules means a game supports all genres and playstyles.
(2) I asked you quite specifically what rules are missing from ShadowDark that mean it is just a game for dungeon crawling:
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling?
Can you not answer this question?
Or for that matter why are the rules that are present only for dungeon crawling? You say its rules support this and only this. How so? What is missing? The theme of the game implies that this is its author's intention. But as far as rules go they are as conducive as those in just about any early edition of D&D to different genres or playstyles. How is ShadowDark any more of a dungeon crawler than Basic D&D? Can you answer this question?
Fair enough, I was trying to answer it in an abstract way but I think I can answer this with specifics.
You mentioned B/X and I think that is a great basis for example and to answer the specific question.
Basic 1st edition rules included rules sufficient enough to run very basic adventures. Beyond the rules for character creation which included Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User and Thief, each with mechanics geared towards "dungeon crawling" It included rules for encounters and combat and show play example focused on a dungeon crawl. It it also included rules for retainers and had complete list of equipment.
Arguably the same rules coverage that Shadowdark had. So ask yourself this. Why Expert rules? What was the point of adding more rules? Can you not have a wilderness adventure using the Basic rules? Why do you need an Expert ruleset that covers rules for horses, Titles, Obstacles to Movement, Special Wilderness Travel, Food, Rest, and mercenaries? Why did they include rules for designing a wilderness and create specific rules for wilderness adventures?
Basic didn't have any of these rules from the Expert set, is that mean Wilderness Adventures were assumed and supported with Basic and if so, why the need for Expert set rules for wilderness adventures?
The game continued to be expanded to include the companion and master sets which add rules for Dominion control, mass combat, hex crawl rules... Was Dominion, Mass combat or hex crawl not supported in the Basic set by the absence of rules?
Shadowdark doesn't have an expert, companion or master set that describes how to execute these other elements of the game. How does hex crawling work in Shadowdark, how do you build a keep, how do you raise an army etc etc.. These mechanics that appear in other games are the designer's way of saying "hey you can do this in our game" and by that design they are saying "this is what our game is about".
Everything in Shadowdark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon, there are no other rules to suggest that anything else happens in the game, that the game is about anything else. So yeah, by the reading of that book, what you can derive from it is that the game is about Dungeon Crawling and by the absence of any other rules, its not about anything else.
5e for example is not about raising armies and having mass combat, it does not support that style of play. BUT... You can get the Strongholds and Followers 3rd party supplement and with that supplement, now you can... now you have support for that style of play.
Does that answer the question?
I have shelves' worth of game products dating back to '79 and shelves of RPG supplements and RPG zines with which to expand things as I wish. If I felt I needed rules "necessary" for hex-crawling—NOTE:ShadowDark has rules for generating overland hex maps. Which is to say your assertion that "Everything in ShadowDark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon" is false.—or for anything else I think I would be more than covered.
The games I run tend to be long-form city-based sandbox campaigns. ShadowDark and a solid city kit and nothing more handle this just fine. (Although I do always have the DMG and FF within reach for the former's random tables and the latter's less predictable monsters.)
ShadowDark is assuredly themed towards dungeon crawling. As was the Mentzer red box. A red box I used for years in conjunction with books intended for AD&D—like many of us did back then—to run whatever I wanted. Before I moved on to playing 2nd. Edition. Someone as enthusiastic as you are about the OSR cannot be unfamiliar with OLD-SCHOOL ESSENTIALS and how it aims to capture a similar amalgam of the basic rules of the game—Moldvay/Cook to be more specific—and AD&D (with the addition of the ADVANCED expansion). There are fewer pages in OSE Classic Fantasy that is essentially Basic and Expert dedicated to non-dungeon content than there are in ShadowDark. For what it's worth.
On that note: Why do you reckon the author has included more random tables for wilderness and city encounters and for generating locations in cities than she has included for dungeons if she intended ShadowDark to be strictly about dungeons?
Something else that shows your assertion that "Everything in ShadowDark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon" is false. Have you even looked inside the thing or have you just paid too much attention to critics who haven't bothered to either?
ShadowDark may be themed towards dungeon crawling. But as I said:
The actual mechanics of the game be they for combat or skills or spells or whatnot make no such assumptions. They are as conducive as Basic D&D to running practically anything medieval fantasy.
Since everyone is discussing Shadowdark in the post, I went and looked it up for myself because I've never heard of it before reading this thread. It looks like the creators are basically just making Basic D&D within the framework of heavily stripped-down 5e. Looking at the books, I can see why people are saying that the RPG looks like it is catering to just being a dungeon crawl game. Even the website refers to the players as crawlers and this is the first paragraph mentioned on the website "In Shadowdark RPG, you and your group of crawlers use magic, steel, and wits to delve into mysterious ruins, lost cities, and monster-infested depths. Wondrous treasures and long-forgotten secrets await you! But don't let your last torch burn out, or you could be swallowed by the Shadowdark..."
Not saying you can't use the rules to have a strictly roleplay, non-combat game with this system. But how they are advertising on their kickstarter website is that they are billing this as a Basic D&D, old school dungeon crawl game that is intentionally meant to be hard due to taking away the safety nets, such as eliminating darkvision and rolling 3d6 only straight down for abilities.
There is no doubt that the game is themed towards dungeon crawling.
But as I have just said: The book has more pages dedicated to wilderness and city encounter tables and tables for generating locations in cities than it does those dedicated to mere dungeon crawling.
Odd curatorial decision for a game strictly about dungeon crawling don't you think?
And as I have said:
The actual mechanics of the game be they for combat or skills or spells or whatnot make no such assumptions. They are as conducive as Basic D&D to running practically anything medieval fantasy.
A copy of the book and a setting supplement is all anyone needs to run said setting.
But we are supposed to believe because the rules for running a game are so focused on combat that combat is "the most significant part of the game"? They have tirelessly disregarded the very definition of a roleplaying game and how Gygax and Arneson themselves approached the game of D&D to assert D&D is really a combat-oriented game. It's worth noting that many of the even simplest of earlier modules would have more things to do in them than they would mere encounters. Rooms with puzzles and traps say. And this isn't to go into the interactions between fully fledged NPCs who were not just bags of HP in those that were more vast in scale and range.
The rulebooks gave more space to combat because players were required to roleplay just about everything else.
Amazing that this should be the case in what is known as a roleplaying game.
If the rules focus on those used to resolve combat it is because none are required for most everything else.
Few are those roleplaying games with complex rules for social interactions. Because there is no need to gamify what can be roleplayed.
There are quite a lot of games with social mechanics. This is for two reasons:
- The rules presented declare the focus of the game. You can, of course, color outside the lines, but you're largely out on your own.
Imagine, for a moment, a game focussed entirely on social interaction. No combat rules at all, but lots about how to adjudicate the rise and fall of characters' social standing. For its players, the "cut direct" is as common as "attack of opportunity" is to D&D players.
So, how often do you think combat of any sort will be in the game? There will be entire campaigns where nothing more than a slap across the face occurs.
Now imagine that a PC in this game feels so insulted that they challenge another to a duel. How well is roleplaying that out going to go? Which leads into:
- Without mechanics for adjudication, you fall back on the players' skills.
In the duel above, between two outwardly similar characters, one of the players has been doing historical fencing for a hobby for years. The other works on the Linux kernel for fun.
Who's gonna win the duel, when the only extant mechanic is "convince the DM"?
To return to the first point, imagine the game has dueling mechanics. All of a sudden, it'll be a rare campaign that doesn't have somebody demanding satisfaction on the field of honor.
Mechanical support matters for roleplaying. If you collapse all the spellcasters down into, say, wizard and cleric, the druid, as a "priest of nature" will be inherently less satisfying, because it'll have less mechanical support. It'll play like a cleric, with mostly the same spell list and abilities. If it gets shapeshifting, it'll be a much less defining power.
But we are supposed to believe because the rules for running a game are so focused on combat that combat is "the most significant part of the game"? They have tirelessly disregarded the very definition of a roleplaying game and how Gygax and Arneson themselves approached the game of D&D to assert D&D is really a combat-oriented game. It's worth noting that many of the even simplest of earlier modules would have more things to do in them than they would mere encounters. Rooms with puzzles and traps say. And this isn't to go into the interactions between fully fledged NPCs who were not just bags of HP in those that were more vast in scale and range.
The rulebooks gave more space to combat because players were required to roleplay just about everything else.
Amazing that this should be the case in what is known as a roleplaying game.
If the rules focus on those used to resolve combat it is because none are required for most everything else.
Few are those roleplaying games with complex rules for social interactions. Because there is no need to gamify what can be roleplayed.
There are quite a lot of games with social mechanics. This is for two reasons:
- The rules presented declare the focus of the game. You can, of course, color outside the lines, but you're largely out on your own.
Imagine, for a moment, a game focussed entirely on social interaction. No combat rules at all, but lots about how to adjudicate the rise and fall of characters' social standing. For its players, the "cut direct" is as common as "attack of opportunity" is to D&D players.
So, how often do you think combat of any sort will be in the game? There will be entire campaigns where nothing more than a slap across the face occurs.
Now imagine that a PC in this game feels so insulted that they challenge another to a duel. How well is roleplaying that out going to go? Which leads into:
- Without mechanics for adjudication, you fall back on the players' skills.
In the duel above, between two outwardly similar characters, one of the players has been doing historical fencing for a hobby for years. The other works on the Linux kernel for fun.
Who's gonna win the duel, when the only extant mechanic is "convince the DM"?
To return to the first point, imagine the game has dueling mechanics. All of a sudden, it'll be a rare campaign that doesn't have somebody demanding satisfaction on the field of honor.
Mechanical support matters for roleplaying. If you collapse all the spellcasters down into, say, wizard and cleric, the druid, as a "priest of nature" will be inherently less satisfying, because it'll have less mechanical support. It'll play like a cleric, with mostly the same spell list and abilities. If it gets shapeshifting, it'll be a much less defining power.
There are indeed games with social mechanics. I have played some of them.
But we are talking about D&D.
As I said: you among others could really use reading Jon Peterson's Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games and The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity. Watching Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons.
Instead of just making up your own history of the game and pretending your preferred playstyle is what the game is really about. As if that isn't gatekeeper-y.
As I said: Arneson conceived of the idea of a roleplaying game as we know it by doing two things:
(1) adding a referee to adjudicate those things combat rules did not cover;
(2) doing this to create a game that was more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds than just simulating combat.
The very birth of the roleplaying game as we know it wasn't about ensuring there were comprehensive rules for everything the game was supposed to accommodate. That fact is undeniable. Gygax might have sought to change that by adding more and more to the rules throughout its early development. As did others at TSR over the course of its lifetime. But so many of these were unnecessary or unnecessarily complicated. When a simple rulings over rules approach could more than suffice. Even 5E has that philosophy baked into it. So why is it your game of choice?
If mechanical support for roleplaying is as you say so important then D&D does fail miserably in that regard. And yet it's most people's preferred system. Much of this may be brand loyalty. Or sunk cost fallacy. Or simply familiarity.
Why not open that question up to others? Why do people even bother to play D&D if they enjoy social interaction or the other stuff enough that it would make more sense for them to play a game that "better" supports that? If D&D is basically just a hack 'em up why aren't they playing other games? If they do just want a hack 'em up there are games that do that better! So what exactly is the purpose of D&D? To succeed due to nothing more than its name?
Talk of whether or not other games have rules for social interactions is missing the point. Many are the games that include rules for things D&D just handwaves. Funnily enough many are the games with more comprehensive rules for combat instead of their just handwaving so much in that regard by making things so abstract like D&D does. Does this mean you are playing the wrong game? Without Arneson and Gygax there would be no D&D. But you are expecting others to believe how they thought about D&D and how they even ran the game themselves and not only them but others in the early days of the hobby was "wrong" and they should have been playing something else? Give it a rest.
EDIT: Your own theory as well as your little analogy about dueling goes against what you have been arguing. D&D lacks rules comprehensive enough to account for many things I have had players of mine or characters of my own when playing attempt during combat. Many are the moments a DM must adjudicate how something is going to work in combat. All it takes is for a player to think off the page. Could the character not use this or that as a weapon? Not do this? Not do that? The PHB dedicates fewer than ten pages to combat rules and fewer than ten to what players might even do. For a game that is supposed to be all about the fightin' this seems awfully inadequate.
Few are those roleplaying games with complex rules for social interactions. Because there is no need to gamify what can be roleplayed.
There are quite a lot of games with social mechanics. This is for two reasons:
- The rules presented declare the focus of the game. You can, of course, color outside the lines, but you're largely out on your own.
[...]
- Without mechanics for adjudication, you fall back on the players' skills.
[...]
Mechanical support matters for roleplaying.
There are indeed games with social mechanics. I have played some of them.
But we are talking about D&D.
Yes. D&D has social and other skill mechanics now, and it's much better off for it. Players no longer need to play "fast talk the GM". People who are not suave con-men can play suave con-men without being penalized for it.
As I said: Arneson conceived of the idea of a roleplaying game as we know it by doing two things:
(1) adding a referee to adjudicate those things combat rules did not cover;
(2) doing this to create a game that was more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds than just simulating combat.
Here's the thing. That's not good enough. I give Arneson and Gygax full credit: they had no idea what they were doing. They were inventing a new type of game, but they didn't get it right on the first try. We've learned a lot more about how RPGs work in the past fifty years.
When a simple rulings over rules approach could more than suffice. Even 5E has that philosophy baked into it.
You can't have rulings without rules. 5e provides enough of a framework that one can make rulings on how arbitrary situations play out based on game mechanics and character abilities. Old D&D didn't. And yes, sometimes in 5e it still comes down to pure GM fiat. That is inevitable with as broad a scope of action as RPGs allow for. But it happens a hell of a lot less than you seem to favor.
(And yes, character abilities are the relevant thing, not player. This is a roleplaying game. One where we take on the role of a character who is not us.)
So why is it your game of choice?
It's not?
It's not even really my D&D of choice. It's where the players are, though, and it's fine as a system, and it has sorta-acceptable online tooling, which is nice. (I'd probably be playing some 4e as well if the tooling existed at a level where I wouldn't have to futz with it much.)
Talk of whether or not other games have rules for social interactions is missing the point. Many are the games that include rules for things D&D just handwaves. Funnily enough many are the games with more comprehensive rules for combat instead of their just handwaving so much in that regard by making things so abstract like D&D does. Does this mean you are playing the wrong game? Without Arneson and Gygax there would be no D&D. But you are expecting others to believe how they thought about D&D and how they even ran the game themselves and not only them but others in the early days of the hobby was "wrong"
I can't comment on the way they ran their games.
It didn't come in the box.
There's a reason that D&D's been adding skill mechanics since late 1e. "Roleplay it out" doesn't work reliably. Your emergent properties don't emerge. 4e, as combat-focussed a D&D as we're ever going to see in the modern era, also had the most ambitious attempt at non-combat resolution mechanics of any D&D.
Few are those roleplaying games with complex rules for social interactions. Because there is no need to gamify what can be roleplayed.
There are quite a lot of games with social mechanics. This is for two reasons:
- The rules presented declare the focus of the game. You can, of course, color outside the lines, but you're largely out on your own.
[...]
- Without mechanics for adjudication, you fall back on the players' skills.
[...]
Mechanical support matters for roleplaying.
There are indeed games with social mechanics. I have played some of them.
But we are talking about D&D.
Yes. D&D has social and other skill mechanics now, and it's much better off for it. Players no longer need to play "fast talk the GM". People who are not suave con-men can play suave con-men without being penalized for it.
As I said: Arneson conceived of the idea of a roleplaying game as we know it by doing two things:
(1) adding a referee to adjudicate those things combat rules did not cover;
(2) doing this to create a game that was more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds than just simulating combat.
Here's the thing. That's not good enough. I give Arneson and Gygax full credit: they had no idea what they were doing. They were inventing a new type of game, but they didn't get it right on the first try. We've learned a lot more about how RPGs work in the past fifty years.
When a simple rulings over rules approach could more than suffice. Even 5E has that philosophy baked into it.
You can't have rulings without rules. 5e provides enough of a framework that one can make rulings on how arbitrary situations play out based on game mechanics and character abilities. Old D&D didn't. And yes, sometimes in 5e it still comes down to pure GM fiat. That is inevitable with as broad a scope of action as RPGs allow for. But it happens a hell of a lot less than you seem to favor.
(And yes, character abilities are the relevant thing, not player. This is a roleplaying game. One where we take on the role of a character who is not us.)
So why is it your game of choice?
It's not?
It's not even really my D&D of choice. It's where the players are, though, and it's fine as a system, and it has sorta-acceptable online tooling, which is nice. (I'd probably be playing some 4e as well if the tooling existed at a level where I wouldn't have to futz with it much.)
Talk of whether or not other games have rules for social interactions is missing the point. Many are the games that include rules for things D&D just handwaves. Funnily enough many are the games with more comprehensive rules for combat instead of their just handwaving so much in that regard by making things so abstract like D&D does. Does this mean you are playing the wrong game? Without Arneson and Gygax there would be no D&D. But you are expecting others to believe how they thought about D&D and how they even ran the game themselves and not only them but others in the early days of the hobby was "wrong"
I can't comment on the way they ran their games.
It didn't come in the box.
There's a reason that D&D's been adding skill mechanics since late 1e. "Roleplay it out" doesn't work reliably. Your emergent properties don't emerge. 4e, as combat-focussed a D&D as we're ever going to see in the modern era, also had the most ambitious attempt at non-combat resolution mechanics of any D&D.
Just two things:
(1) The addition of skills has seen the game become less and less about player skill and more and more about character abilities. You yourself said D&D is a game. If you need to be reminded. It is. And now it is one in which far too many players of that game stare at their character sheets for aeons looking at what their characters can do instead of using what pulses between their ears to come up with something their characters might attempt.
What you say "doesn't work reliably" is a core feature not only of old games but also of new games that simulate them. Perhaps it doesn't work for you. But perhaps that is you and not the feature.
You know what doesn't work reliably? A model that sees many players not even bothering to describe what their characters are going to do or not even bothering to say what their characters are going to say or actually roleplaying some scenario because they can now just say Can I roll [ ]? And far too often DMs let them just make a roll and where it lands determines success or failure.
Many players will only describe what they do or say if they think it will grant them Advantage.
That model doesn't work reliably. Not if the game is supposed to be roleplaying game with actual roleplaying.
Previously one would have to use description and observation and then and only then would one be told what to roll if anything.
(2) Let me make for you a point I made for someone else.
Imagine someone who has experienced considerable trauma and who does not handle violence too well. Now it might be argued that there are better table-top role-playing games out there for such an individual. But if they wanted to try D&D telling them to maybe go away and play something else because violence is "just so integral" to the game is gatekeeping and is so at its most unconscionable.
What would you call it when your need for D&D to be little more than a facilitator of your own in-combat power fantasies supersedes the very real needs of potential players?
It is gatekeeping. And it is gatekeeping no less severe than that old grognards get accused of when it comes to whether or not D&D is for girls. You are turning into those old grognards and slamming your fist on the table and insisting D&D is about this and that and not other things and therefore not for others.
There's a reason that D&D's been adding skill mechanics since late 1e. "Roleplay it out" doesn't work reliably. Your emergent properties don't emerge. 4e, as combat-focussed a D&D as we're ever going to see in the modern era, also had the most ambitious attempt at non-combat resolution mechanics of any D&D.
Also I couldn't help but notice in your thorough response to my earlier post you oddly forgot to respond to this:
Your own theory as well as your little analogy about dueling goes against what you have been arguing. D&D lacks rules comprehensive enough to account for many things I have had players of mine or characters of my own when playing attempt during combat. Many are the moments a DM must adjudicate how something is going to work in combat. All it takes is for a player to think off the page. Could the character not use this or that as a weapon? Not do this? Not do that?
The PHB dedicates fewer than ten pages to combat rules and fewer than ten to what players might even do.
For a game that is supposed to be all about the fightin' this seems awfully inadequate.
The very birth of the roleplaying game as we know it wasn't about ensuring there were comprehensive rules for everything the game was supposed to accommodate. That fact is undeniable. Gygax might have sought to change that by adding more and more to the rules throughout its early development. As did others at TSR over the course of its lifetime. But so many of these were unnecessary or unnecessarily complicated. When a simple rulings over rules approach could more than suffice. Even 5E has that philosophy baked into it. So why is it your game of choice?
I don't think anyone is really disagreeing with your directly, but I think you are also not listening to the high level chorus behind the popularity of 5e.
Modern gamers don't want simplicity, they don't want rulings over rules, they want the exact opposite. They want complex architecture so that they can fiddle with mechanical character "builds", that is a big part of why games like 5e and PF2e are popular and they want to use those build to play a game on the table top. They don't want GM's to make "rulings", they want a reliable system that can be run RAW with clear and explicit rules so that everyone knows what the rules are and how they are executed with no surprises alterations.
I personally look at posts like those going about how Backgrounds are not flexible and how this is a major problem in the game. Now you and I, old school gamers look at that and shrug and just say... don't like it, change it.. whats the big deal.. but the point of that post is that the game should be crystal clear with the rules, it should have maximum optimization possible and it should be fully customizable from the get go... aka, the complaint is that its not complex enough to satisfy the desires of this community.
The OSR preaches simplicity, rulings over rules, game challenge... modern gamers don't want those things and modern D&D will never be those things because the modern D&D community outnumbers the OSR community literarly considerably more than 100,000 to 1.
I'm not trying to gate keep you but your message is about the equivalent to walking into a Vegan BBQ and complaining that there isn't any meat. No one is saying you can't join the BBQ, no one is saying you can't have your own meat BBQ, what they are saying is, don't come to a Vegan BBQ and then complain about it being a Vegan BBQ.
I don't think anyone is really disagreeing with your directly, but I think you are also not listening to the high level chorus behind the popularity of 5e.
Modern gamers don't want simplicity, they don't want rulings over rules, they want the exact opposite. They want complex architecture so that they can fiddle with mechanical character "builds", that is a big part of why games like 5e and PF2e are popular and they want to use those build to play a game on the table top. They don't want GM's to make "rulings", they want a reliable system that can be run RAW with clear and explicit rules so that everyone knows what the rules are and how they are executed with no surprises alterations.
I personally look at posts like those going about how Backgrounds are not flexible and how this is a major problem in the game. Now you and I, old school gamers look at that and shrug and just say... don't like it, change it.. whats the big deal.. but the point of that post is that the game should be crystal clear with the rules, it should have maximum optimization possible and it should be fully customizable from the get go... aka, the complaint is that its not complex enough to satisfy the desires of this community.
The OSR preaches simplicity, rulings over rules, game challenge... modern gamers don't want those things and modern D&D will never be those things because the modern D&D community outnumbers the OSR community literarly considerably more than 100,000 to 1.
I'm not trying to gate keep you but your message is about the equivalent to walking into a Vegan BBQ and complaining that there isn't any meat. No one is saying you can't join the BBQ, no one is saying you can't have your own meat BBQ, what they are saying is, don't come to a Vegan BBQ and then complain about it being a Vegan BBQ.
Are you forgetting how you asserted that "everything" in ShadowDark is strictly about how to "execute an adventure" in a dungeon? Only to be informed that it has rules for generating overland hex maps and more tables dedicated to wilderness and city adventuring than it does for dungeoneering? No admitting to your having been wrong in that regard? Because I don't play that game many like to play online where we see them going from one thing to the next because the one thing before the next "didn't work" and their rinsing and repeating this process without ever admitting to being wrong at any point. You're welcome to play that game. But if you lack even the modicum of humility it should take you to admit you overstated ShadowDark's emphasis on dungeoneering because you have't even read it don't expect me to play along.
What "modern gamers" want is not at all to my point. My point is a game needn't spell out things in the rules in order for its rules to be capable of accommodating those things. And that the actual historical development of the game and what people were able to do with even OD&D is evidence enough for this. Only not good enough evidence for some apparently.
You say The OSR preaches simplicity, rulings over rules, game challenge ... and it does. You call yourself an OSR enthusiast ... but then insist that a game not dedicating pages of rules to this and that is then not at all conducive a set of rules for doing anything but what is made explicit.
The attitude you have expressed in that regard is the antithesis of OSR philosophy. It goes against the very idea that a player might attempt something and the DM might arbitrate. Because if it's not at all in the rules what is that player doing?!??!
What OSR game(s) do you play out of curiosity?
EDIT: One of the main points made by Matt Finch in the primer that for many has become the bible as far as the OSR is concerned is about how it is better not to have explicit rules for things to foster at tables an approach where player skill is prioritized over character abilities. How instead of having a skill system that encourages players to look at their character sheets and then say Can I roll [ ]? the absence of one encourages players to get creative and think of what their characters might attempt and describe it and then have the DM arbitrate. The DM might even say Okay roll this or that. But the absence of rules specific to what players wish to do does not mean and has never meant their characters can't do such things. It does mean and has never meant the game isn't "made" for that.
I am not so sure you even grasp what it is the OSR is all about. You are one minute saying short of having specific rules dedicated to this or that a game is just not really for this or that and the next minute saying you are in favor of the OSR approach when this is about fewer rules and really any rules being for the DM and serving really no purpose but to perhaps inform a DM's decisions. You are contradicting yourself.
The variety of spell lists (Vs a common one) makes it easier for beginner players to have a variety of options. It makes a more meaningful choice for class choice - because choosing a Wizard gives you one list, while choosing a Cleric nets you a different one. However, once you're more experienced, it very much constrains you. You can't build a Wizard that heals (other than using a subclass that gets it for you and that specific set of spells at that), or a Cleric that Fireballs. A common spell list would provide much more variety.
The decision to differentiate Classes by their spell list furthers one of the main issues I have with 5e - the majority of your agency that you get to express is not "in-game" or even at one of your twenty potential level-ups, but in the first three levels, or in the first 15% of your game experience with that character. Compare that to STA or TOR where you're actively making decisions about your character's build at the end of each adventure (around three sessions). Spellcasters ameliorate this to an extent, allowing you to make small and temporary changes quite frequently via spell selection, but the spell lists dampen this.
I like the idea of spell lists because because it allows control of flavour - Wizards cast wizardy spells and Bards cast bardy spells - but it does constrain variety. I prefer how they differentiate Warlocks (I was glad to read that they'd ditched their reformation of their spellcasting) because it genuinely makes the class different to the others. I feel like an even better thing to do would be to create a more unique spellcasting system for each class - rather than how their focus is flavoured or the spell list.
I think the game is headed more towards pushing short rests (Wizards now work on short rests, for example). Hopefully that will make Warlocks more viable.
It's good to be back, Link! I missed the forums and ya'll in general. :)
I'm responding rather late but I do agree that D&D frontloads most of the complexity by overwhelming new players with a gimongous amount choices come at level 1. Outside of that, you also get your subclass very early game and some classes like the 5e Sorcerer and the 5e Warlock even pick that at level 1 as well. It's hard not to frontload complexity in D&D because players have to pick defining characteristics like their class, species and backstory before they can begin to play. However, at the same time, a better system would absolutely have less choices at the lower levels and more at the later ones. Finally, I really hope there aren't any classes in 1D&D that make players pick subclasses at level 1.
You bring up a lot of interesting points on spell lists and I've never even thought of the idea of reimagining the game so there aren't any. It seems interesting but I think we both agree that spell lists do a good job of preserving the flavor of classes and stopping Wizards from having boatloads of healing spells and fire spells. That would not only be overpowered, but also ruin the viability and uniqueness of the Cleric.
I dunno about "creating a unique spellcasting system for each class", but I do like the idea of more spellcasting systems. However, so many PHB classes have some access to magic and creating and a understanding new system for each one would be a confusing nuisance for the devs and the players.
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It used to be that if you wanted to play an arcane caster able to cast fireball (let's say), you needed to play a wizard. Now there are actually very few 'wizard only' spells, and you can still get access to them without having to play a Wizard.
I tallied up all the PHB (2014) + SCAG + Elemental Evil spells a couple of years back and these were the totals for each class's spell lists:
Wizard: 256
Sorcerer: 164
Druid: 143
Bard: 125
Cleric: 106
Warlock: 88
Ranger: 50
Paladin: 45
Not only are the 4 arcane casters not interchangeable (warlock and bard spell lists are very distinct), you can fit the warlock's entire spell list in the gap between wizard and everyone else.
If anything, it's the sorcerer that has very few signature spells; they mostly work with a pared down version of the wizard spell list plus a handful of extras like Chaos Bolt and the new Sorcerous Burst.
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Its a good point but there is a difference. Much of the magic infrastructure of 5e D&D is built around the idea of compared power levels. The power level of the caster vs. the power level of the target. So as a "not real, but you get the point example" a 1st level Wizard casting a Charm Person stands no chance of charming an ancient dragon, because the dragon has a very high save, but a 20th level Wizard can probobly do it, because the difficulty of the save the dragon has to make will be really high.
This depth of the mechanic is meaningful and while Shadowdarks version is "simpler" it inherently lacks this mechanical depth. Which is fine for a simple game about dungeon crawling and dungeon survival, its not fine in a story focused fantasy RPG like D&D. The complexity of the mechanics is not a flaw of 5e as you see, its a feature, its designed very intentionally to be complex and that is not a failure of design, it is quite literarly designed that way on purpose to get the exact outcome that it has.
A lot of times old school gamers want to have this conversation about how "old school games are better designed because their simpler". This is a very strange position to hold as modern D&D is more complex, very intentionally to service an audiance that demands that complexity. If the game was simplified as you describe, there would be fewer people playing it.
In other words, 5e's complexity is WHY people play 5e, to suggest it would be better if it was simpler is a gross misunderstanding of this audience. If anything, a huge part of the audience (the second largest part of the D&D community) doesn't play 5e and they play Pathfinder 2e instead very specifically and exclusively because 5e is not complex enough and lacks the depth that Pathinder 2e offers.
The reality is that the OSR community, the old school gamers that want simpler games is so small and so insignificant that they literarly don't matter enough to giants like D&D to even bother listening to their feedback as potential 5e players. Like Wizards doesn't even bother creating optional rules for a simpler form of the game even though they could very easy add a simple chapter like that in the DMG, like for example how to adjust 5e to be simpler and more effective as a dungeon crawl survival game. I mean Shadowdarks core rules fit on a napkin, it would not take much to include the entire thing in the DMG. The reason they don't is that they have an entire beach of sand (customers) and the OSR is like 1 grain of sand. So irrelevant that they simply don't matter at all.
And I'm saying this as a OSR enthusiast, but that is the reality of the situation, the OSR is a laughably small community. If we all gathered in one place we would be lucky if their was 30,000 of us. That isn't even worth coming into work for Wizards of the Coast.
I get what you're saying. But it's not as if combat couldn't be afforded a greater level of mechanical depth taking more into consideration "compared power levels" with it not being all about a target's DEX and/or worn armor but additionally its overall prowess and experience perhaps reflected in its proficiency bonus or something else and not just that of whoever is taking a swing when it comes to how likely or unlikely it is they are going to hit that target.
Should it be just as easy for a starting 1st-level character to hit an unarmored but seasoned 15th-level warrior with a DEX of 15 and an active AC of 12 than it is for them to hit a 0-level shopkeep blessed with the same DEX but who has never seen a day of combat in its life?
I am not advocating for this level of simulationist play. Just to be clear.
I do think there is an underappreciated beauty to simpler design. Remember D&D before D&D introduced skills? A player wasn't looking at his or her character sheet to see what the character could do. The player was dreaming up ways to do what they wanted the character to do. Described this. And the DM arbitrated. The larger audience for what D&D has become may not want this. And that's fine. But I do believe more rules has perhaps unintentionally meant more self-imposed constraints and struggle to understand why anyone would want that in a game that basically allows us to escape the very real constraints of our world for a few hours once a week.
I have always liked thieves. As a class. But there is a good article out there about how when thieves first became a class—remembering that originally it was just three of what are now considered to be the core four—was when a lot of player agency was lost and with it much creativity. Because they gave this new class access to skills every class had previously had access to. If more abstractly.
It's funny you say ShadowDark is the crawler while 5E is the "story focused fantasy RPG" provided a few people in this thread have been arguing for the past twenty four hours about how 5E is basically just a slash 'em up.
Regarding ShadowDark being nothing more than a dungeon crawler this is what I had to say about that the last time you made that claim:
The majority of tables in the book are for generating urban locations and encounters in them. I use it for what is other than just excursions into what lies below the streets and beyond the walls ultimately an urban crawl.
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling? Because to me it is really just 5th. Edition only broken down to core classes and removing rules bloat and making use of some of the innovations we have seen in the OSR to make it look and feel more like B/X and games that emulate B/X. B/X and BECMI were certainly more than mere dungeon crawlers. These were and remain used for domain level play.
Baron de Ropp mentions in response to people saying it is just a dungeon crawler that he started running a campaign using the system as soon as the pdf was made available before the books shipped and that it was still going at the time of recording. Critics want to say it can't do anything else. Many of them have probably never even looked inside the thing. They only need to hear or read someone say it and they suspect that assessment is the truth.
And I think you're missing the point. It's a spectrum, it's fluid. There are few options for fighters, rogues and barbarians to cast spells - but they all have them. And in a perfectly similar fashion, there are few options for full casters to go melee - but they all have them. Except sorcerers. Precisely as I stated.
It makes no difference to me how many classes there are. You could have a class called Arcane, and have wizard, sorcerer, warlock and so on be options for that class. For all I care, there could be four classes (fighter, priest, wizard, rogue) and the same number of options as we have with the current rules.
But anyways: I don't think there's too many casters. Essentially, only barbarians can't cast spells (although magic can sort of happen around them), and only sorcerers can't fight in melee, and everyone else is some variation of gishyness. Or ... you know, has the option to be so. There are just as few pure casters, as pure melee.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
This
The fact that just about every class has a casting option, or a melee option, just means players have more flexibility in creating the character they want. It doesn't mean your fighter has to cast spells
Active characters:
Green Hill Sunrise, jaded tabaxi mercenary trapped in the Dark Domains (Battle Master fighter)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Though we are here to talk about D&D 5th edition not Shadowdark, I think this is a good question and I think the answer syncs up nicely with the topic.
In short, the answer to this question is simple, rules are designed to enforce a genre and specific playstyle, that is how game design works. What you are suggesting is that in the absence of rules, it supports all genres and all playstyles. This is simply not true, it can be, YOU can make it that, but that is through the application of a playstyle, one not written or codified, not explained or elaborated on describing how to do it, it is YOUR invention, YOUR playstyle. Its something you add to the game, its not what the game was designed for.
THE playstyle of any game, be it Shadowdark or 5th edition D&D and everything in between is defined by the rules written for the game, that becomes the genre and the playstyle, its what the game supports. The absence of rules does not create support for anything. Again YOU can invent your own way to make that absence BE something, but that is not game design, that is personal playstyle.
Shadowdark supports Dungeon Crawling, there are no other rules, architecture or instructions anywhere in the book that suggest otherwise. Can it be more? Of course, YOU, I or ANYONE can do whatever they want with it, we can turn it into a game about running a tavern and play "theatre" for hours never leaving for an adventure, never fighting a monster, just talking to patrons, serving drinks, and cooking dinners for our patrons and that is what the game can be about. The game however has nothing in the rules that would support that playstyle, we, would simply invent that. We could, not even bother making mechanical characters using the Shadowdark rules, ignore every word in that book and still create that "theatre" experience. But.. is that the purpose of Shadowdark? I think not.
Now I will say, you can design a game that does what I call "anti-support", a game that with the rules actually makes it difficult, even impossible with heavily altering the rules or ignoring them to create a certain genre. For example 5e is a game in which a dungeon crawl survival game is basically impossible. There are way too many rules and mechanics in the game that quite literally circumvent and make it impossible to create that experience at the table, you have to literally redesign the game and that is EXACTLY how and why Shadowdark was created. The designer took the 5th edition rules, altered them to create a very specific genre, a very specific playstyle within the fantasy adventure spectrum, aka.. a Dungeon Crawling Survival Game.
Matt Colville explains this better than I can but.. yeah, game design is a real thing. It does beg the question, what is 5th edition D&D's playstyle? That's a really tough question and I think Colville says it best, its a game about nothing and I think that is as good an answer as any.
(1) I did not say the absence of rules means a game supports all genres and playstyles.
(2) I asked you quite specifically what rules are missing from ShadowDark that mean it is just a game for dungeon crawling:
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling?
Can you not answer this question?
Instead of just saying its rules only support one thing explain exactly why that is? You say its rules support this and only this. How so? What is missing?
The theme of the game implies that this is its author's intention. But as far as rules go they are as conducive as those in just about any early edition of D&D to different genres or playstyles. How is ShadowDark any more of a dungeon crawler than Basic D&D? Can you answer this question?
You keep making this about "rules." But what it really seems to be about for you is theme.
What you are saying about ShadowDark would be like saying a pirate-themed iteration of D&D does not support any other genre or playstyle beyond D&D with pirates because it does not say so in the book when the mechanics might be identical to those in D&D but for the addition of some seafaring rules and rules for resolving combat at sea.
If ShadowDark seems as if it is only for dungeon crawling it is because of what is little more than fluff and how torchlight is handled and some tables specific to "attacking the light." And because the same predictable charge gets leveled against just about any rules-light OSR game by people who have never even bothered to crack them open.
The actual mechanics of the game be they for combat or skills or spells or whatnot make no such assumptions. They are as conducive as Basic D&D to running practically anything medieval fantasy.
Fair enough, I was trying to answer it in an abstract way but I think I can answer this with specifics.
You mentioned B/X and I think that is a great basis for example and to answer the specific question.
Basic 1st edition rules included rules sufficient enough to run very basic adventures. Beyond the rules for character creation which included Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User and Thief, each with mechanics geared towards "dungeon crawling" It included rules for encounters and combat and show play example focused on a dungeon crawl. It it also included rules for retainers and had complete list of equipment.
Arguably the same rules coverage that Shadowdark had. So ask yourself this. Why Expert rules? What was the point of adding more rules? Can you not have a wilderness adventure using the Basic rules? Why do you need an Expert ruleset that covers rules for horses, Titles, Obstacles to Movement, Special Wilderness Travel, Food, Rest, and mercenaries? Why did they include rules for designing a wilderness and create specific rules for wilderness adventures?
Basic didn't have any of these rules from the Expert set, is that mean Wilderness Adventures were assumed and supported with Basic and if so, why the need for Expert set rules for wilderness adventures?
The game continued to be expanded to include the companion and master sets which add rules for Dominion control, mass combat, hex crawl rules... Was Dominion, Mass combat or hex crawl not supported in the Basic set by the absence of rules?
Shadowdark doesn't have an expert, companion or master set that describes how to execute these other elements of the game. How does hex crawling work in Shadowdark, how do you build a keep, how do you raise an army etc etc.. These mechanics that appear in other games are the designer's way of saying "hey you can do this in our game" and by that design they are saying "this is what our game is about".
Everything in Shadowdark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon, there are no other rules to suggest that anything else happens in the game, that the game is about anything else. So yeah, by the reading of that book, what you can derive from it is that the game is about Dungeon Crawling and by the absence of any other rules, its not about anything else.
5e for example is not about raising armies and having mass combat, it does not support that style of play. BUT... You can get the Strongholds and Followers 3rd party supplement and with that supplement, now you can... now you have support for that style of play.
Does that answer the question?
Since everyone is discussing Shadowdark in the post, I went and looked it up for myself because I've never heard of it before reading this thread. It looks like the creators are basically just making Basic D&D within the framework of heavily stripped-down 5e. Looking at the books, I can see why people are saying that the RPG looks like it is catering to just being a dungeon crawl game. Even the website refers to the players as crawlers and this is the first paragraph mentioned on the website "In Shadowdark RPG, you and your group of crawlers use magic, steel, and wits to delve into mysterious ruins, lost cities, and monster-infested depths. Wondrous treasures and long-forgotten secrets await you! But don't let your last torch burn out, or you could be swallowed by the Shadowdark..."
Not saying you can't use the rules to have a strictly roleplay, non-combat game with this system. But how they are advertising on their kickstarter website is that they are billing this as a Basic D&D, old school dungeon crawl game that is intentionally meant to be hard due to taking away the safety nets, such as eliminating darkvision and rolling 3d6 only straight down for abilities.
None of the discussion for the last bit has anything to do with the thread - the thread is about why there are different types of caster class, not about its fundamental efficacy at different pillars of the game.
To segue this topic back on course, 5e is designed to be rules heavy in some aspects of the game and rules light in others. Combat is rules heavy - most every action is clearly defined so there is no ambiguity of what occurs, keeping combat moving and ensuring there is little room for interpretation of deviation. Social interactions are rules light - while rules exist, the game explicitly wants players and DMs to make social decisions based on their character’s/NPC’s personality or mood.
Whether you like that or not is a subject for a completely different thread - but that is clearly what there designers were going for.
Now, back to the thread. Character creation is rules heavy by necessity, but is also a topic Wizards would prefer be rules light. What does that mean?
To ensure everyone is starting on the same page and there is no ambiguity about what your character can do, it has to be rules heavy - clearly defined rules ensure every single character functions in the same game and utilize the same exact system.
However, character creation is also the very thing 5e wants players to be flexible on - they want players to be able to conceptualize who or what their character is and play whatever they imagine. This is the fundamental justification for why parts of the game are rules light - not wanting strict rules to override player agency.
So, how do they square the necessity of something rules heavy with something that, in other aspects of the game, would be rules light? Options. Providing enough options to ensure players can find in the rules heavy system something that meshes with the visions in their head.
That is why we have three different types of class (casters, martials, and half-casters to spread the divide between the two). It is why we have classes within the same category with different power sources. For martials, you have the disciplined martial training of a Fighter, the primal strength of a Barbarian, the mental training of a Monk. For casters you have internal power of sorcerers, external power of Warlocks, the studious power of Wizards, etc.
And now we get to OP’s original question - why can’t different categories just be subclasses?
The rules heavy way Wizards has decided to go has been to define classes in terms of their power source, and subclasses in terms of the nature of that source. Under that system, a Barbarian is not just an angry Fighter - they draw their strength from the primal aspect of themselves, not from weapons training. A Sorcerer cannot be a subclass of Wizard, since Wizards definitionally studied for their powers, while Sorcerers did not. The entire system is set up so players can think about their character not just in terms of mechanics, but to find a power source which meshes with their character concept.
Now, is this good for the game? I certainly think so - I play with both experienced and new players on a regular basis. For experienced players, they can pretty much always find something that meshes with what they want to play and fits the character they came up with with the sole exception of a true psionic - something the game is lacking). For new players, asking “where did my power comes from?” helps ease them into roleplaying and to come up with their character, either at the game’s start or as they explore the game and realize what sets their character apart from others.
Different folks might see this differently. Some might see it as too constraining, others might see it as too complex and open. But, for me? It works. And, considering Wizards collects a whole lot of data on players and, based on that data, decided to double down on 5e instead of making a true new edition? Guessing the data shows this system works for the overwhelming majority of players.
I have shelves' worth of game products dating back to '79 and shelves of RPG supplements and RPG zines with which to expand things as I wish. If I felt I needed rules "necessary" for hex-crawling—NOTE: ShadowDark has rules for generating overland hex maps. Which is to say your assertion that "Everything in ShadowDark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon" is false.—or for anything else I think I would be more than covered.
The games I run tend to be long-form city-based sandbox campaigns. ShadowDark and a solid city kit and nothing more handle this just fine. (Although I do always have the DMG and FF within reach for the former's random tables and the latter's less predictable monsters.)
ShadowDark is assuredly themed towards dungeon crawling. As was the Mentzer red box. A red box I used for years in conjunction with books intended for AD&D—like many of us did back then—to run whatever I wanted. Before I moved on to playing 2nd. Edition. Someone as enthusiastic as you are about the OSR cannot be unfamiliar with OLD-SCHOOL ESSENTIALS and how it aims to capture a similar amalgam of the basic rules of the game—Moldvay/Cook to be more specific—and AD&D (with the addition of the ADVANCED expansion). There are fewer pages in OSE Classic Fantasy that is essentially Basic and Expert dedicated to non-dungeon content than there are in ShadowDark. For what it's worth.
On that note: Why do you reckon the author has included more random tables for wilderness and city encounters and for generating locations in cities than she has included for dungeons if she intended ShadowDark to be strictly about dungeons?
Something else that shows your assertion that "Everything in ShadowDark describes how you execute an adventure in the dungeon" is false. Have you even looked inside the thing or have you just paid too much attention to critics who haven't bothered to either?
ShadowDark may be themed towards dungeon crawling. But as I said:
The actual mechanics of the game be they for combat or skills or spells or whatnot make no such assumptions. They are as conducive as Basic D&D to running practically anything medieval fantasy.
There is no doubt that the game is themed towards dungeon crawling.
But as I have just said: The book has more pages dedicated to wilderness and city encounter tables and tables for generating locations in cities than it does those dedicated to mere dungeon crawling.
Odd curatorial decision for a game strictly about dungeon crawling don't you think?
And as I have said:
The actual mechanics of the game be they for combat or skills or spells or whatnot make no such assumptions. They are as conducive as Basic D&D to running practically anything medieval fantasy.
A copy of the book and a setting supplement is all anyone needs to run said setting.
There are quite a lot of games with social mechanics. This is for two reasons:
- The rules presented declare the focus of the game. You can, of course, color outside the lines, but you're largely out on your own.
Imagine, for a moment, a game focussed entirely on social interaction. No combat rules at all, but lots about how to adjudicate the rise and fall of characters' social standing. For its players, the "cut direct" is as common as "attack of opportunity" is to D&D players.
So, how often do you think combat of any sort will be in the game? There will be entire campaigns where nothing more than a slap across the face occurs.
Now imagine that a PC in this game feels so insulted that they challenge another to a duel. How well is roleplaying that out going to go? Which leads into:
- Without mechanics for adjudication, you fall back on the players' skills.
In the duel above, between two outwardly similar characters, one of the players has been doing historical fencing for a hobby for years. The other works on the Linux kernel for fun.
Who's gonna win the duel, when the only extant mechanic is "convince the DM"?
To return to the first point, imagine the game has dueling mechanics. All of a sudden, it'll be a rare campaign that doesn't have somebody demanding satisfaction on the field of honor.
Mechanical support matters for roleplaying. If you collapse all the spellcasters down into, say, wizard and cleric, the druid, as a "priest of nature" will be inherently less satisfying, because it'll have less mechanical support. It'll play like a cleric, with mostly the same spell list and abilities. If it gets shapeshifting, it'll be a much less defining power.
There are indeed games with social mechanics. I have played some of them.
But we are talking about D&D.
As I said: you among others could really use reading Jon Peterson's Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games and The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity. Watching Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons.
Instead of just making up your own history of the game and pretending your preferred playstyle is what the game is really about. As if that isn't gatekeeper-y.
As I said: Arneson conceived of the idea of a roleplaying game as we know it by doing two things:
(1) adding a referee to adjudicate those things combat rules did not cover;
(2) doing this to create a game that was more about emergent storytelling in fictional worlds than just simulating combat.
The very birth of the roleplaying game as we know it wasn't about ensuring there were comprehensive rules for everything the game was supposed to accommodate. That fact is undeniable. Gygax might have sought to change that by adding more and more to the rules throughout its early development. As did others at TSR over the course of its lifetime. But so many of these were unnecessary or unnecessarily complicated. When a simple rulings over rules approach could more than suffice. Even 5E has that philosophy baked into it. So why is it your game of choice?
If mechanical support for roleplaying is as you say so important then D&D does fail miserably in that regard. And yet it's most people's preferred system. Much of this may be brand loyalty. Or sunk cost fallacy. Or simply familiarity.
Why not open that question up to others? Why do people even bother to play D&D if they enjoy social interaction or the other stuff enough that it would make more sense for them to play a game that "better" supports that? If D&D is basically just a hack 'em up why aren't they playing other games? If they do just want a hack 'em up there are games that do that better! So what exactly is the purpose of D&D? To succeed due to nothing more than its name?
Talk of whether or not other games have rules for social interactions is missing the point. Many are the games that include rules for things D&D just handwaves. Funnily enough many are the games with more comprehensive rules for combat instead of their just handwaving so much in that regard by making things so abstract like D&D does. Does this mean you are playing the wrong game? Without Arneson and Gygax there would be no D&D. But you are expecting others to believe how they thought about D&D and how they even ran the game themselves and not only them but others in the early days of the hobby was "wrong" and they should have been playing something else? Give it a rest.
EDIT: Your own theory as well as your little analogy about dueling goes against what you have been arguing. D&D lacks rules comprehensive enough to account for many things I have had players of mine or characters of my own when playing attempt during combat. Many are the moments a DM must adjudicate how something is going to work in combat. All it takes is for a player to think off the page. Could the character not use this or that as a weapon? Not do this? Not do that? The PHB dedicates fewer than ten pages to combat rules and fewer than ten to what players might even do. For a game that is supposed to be all about the fightin' this seems awfully inadequate.
Yes. D&D has social and other skill mechanics now, and it's much better off for it. Players no longer need to play "fast talk the GM". People who are not suave con-men can play suave con-men without being penalized for it.
Here's the thing. That's not good enough. I give Arneson and Gygax full credit: they had no idea what they were doing. They were inventing a new type of game, but they didn't get it right on the first try. We've learned a lot more about how RPGs work in the past fifty years.
You can't have rulings without rules. 5e provides enough of a framework that one can make rulings on how arbitrary situations play out based on game mechanics and character abilities. Old D&D didn't. And yes, sometimes in 5e it still comes down to pure GM fiat. That is inevitable with as broad a scope of action as RPGs allow for. But it happens a hell of a lot less than you seem to favor.
(And yes, character abilities are the relevant thing, not player. This is a roleplaying game. One where we take on the role of a character who is not us.)
It's not?
It's not even really my D&D of choice. It's where the players are, though, and it's fine as a system, and it has sorta-acceptable online tooling, which is nice. (I'd probably be playing some 4e as well if the tooling existed at a level where I wouldn't have to futz with it much.)
I can't comment on the way they ran their games.
It didn't come in the box.
There's a reason that D&D's been adding skill mechanics since late 1e. "Roleplay it out" doesn't work reliably. Your emergent properties don't emerge. 4e, as combat-focussed a D&D as we're ever going to see in the modern era, also had the most ambitious attempt at non-combat resolution mechanics of any D&D.
Just two things:
(1) The addition of skills has seen the game become less and less about player skill and more and more about character abilities. You yourself said D&D is a game. If you need to be reminded. It is. And now it is one in which far too many players of that game stare at their character sheets for aeons looking at what their characters can do instead of using what pulses between their ears to come up with something their characters might attempt.
What you say "doesn't work reliably" is a core feature not only of old games but also of new games that simulate them. Perhaps it doesn't work for you. But perhaps that is you and not the feature.
You know what doesn't work reliably? A model that sees many players not even bothering to describe what their characters are going to do or not even bothering to say what their characters are going to say or actually roleplaying some scenario because they can now just say Can I roll [ ]? And far too often DMs let them just make a roll and where it lands determines success or failure.
Many players will only describe what they do or say if they think it will grant them Advantage.
That model doesn't work reliably. Not if the game is supposed to be roleplaying game with actual roleplaying.
Previously one would have to use description and observation and then and only then would one be told what to roll if anything.
(2) Let me make for you a point I made for someone else.
Imagine someone who has experienced considerable trauma and who does not handle violence too well. Now it might be argued that there are better table-top role-playing games out there for such an individual. But if they wanted to try D&D telling them to maybe go away and play something else because violence is "just so integral" to the game is gatekeeping and is so at its most unconscionable.
What would you call it when your need for D&D to be little more than a facilitator of your own in-combat power fantasies supersedes the very real needs of potential players?
It is gatekeeping. And it is gatekeeping no less severe than that old grognards get accused of when it comes to whether or not D&D is for girls. You are turning into those old grognards and slamming your fist on the table and insisting D&D is about this and that and not other things and therefore not for others.
Also I couldn't help but notice in your thorough response to my earlier post you oddly forgot to respond to this:
Your own theory as well as your little analogy about dueling goes against what you have been arguing. D&D lacks rules comprehensive enough to account for many things I have had players of mine or characters of my own when playing attempt during combat. Many are the moments a DM must adjudicate how something is going to work in combat. All it takes is for a player to think off the page. Could the character not use this or that as a weapon? Not do this? Not do that?
The PHB dedicates fewer than ten pages to combat rules and fewer than ten to what players might even do.
For a game that is supposed to be all about the fightin' this seems awfully inadequate.
I don't think anyone is really disagreeing with your directly, but I think you are also not listening to the high level chorus behind the popularity of 5e.
Modern gamers don't want simplicity, they don't want rulings over rules, they want the exact opposite. They want complex architecture so that they can fiddle with mechanical character "builds", that is a big part of why games like 5e and PF2e are popular and they want to use those build to play a game on the table top. They don't want GM's to make "rulings", they want a reliable system that can be run RAW with clear and explicit rules so that everyone knows what the rules are and how they are executed with no surprises alterations.
I personally look at posts like those going about how Backgrounds are not flexible and how this is a major problem in the game. Now you and I, old school gamers look at that and shrug and just say... don't like it, change it.. whats the big deal.. but the point of that post is that the game should be crystal clear with the rules, it should have maximum optimization possible and it should be fully customizable from the get go... aka, the complaint is that its not complex enough to satisfy the desires of this community.
The OSR preaches simplicity, rulings over rules, game challenge... modern gamers don't want those things and modern D&D will never be those things because the modern D&D community outnumbers the OSR community literarly considerably more than 100,000 to 1.
I'm not trying to gate keep you but your message is about the equivalent to walking into a Vegan BBQ and complaining that there isn't any meat. No one is saying you can't join the BBQ, no one is saying you can't have your own meat BBQ, what they are saying is, don't come to a Vegan BBQ and then complain about it being a Vegan BBQ.
Are you forgetting how you asserted that "everything" in ShadowDark is strictly about how to "execute an adventure" in a dungeon? Only to be informed that it has rules for generating overland hex maps and more tables dedicated to wilderness and city adventuring than it does for dungeoneering? No admitting to your having been wrong in that regard? Because I don't play that game many like to play online where we see them going from one thing to the next because the one thing before the next "didn't work" and their rinsing and repeating this process without ever admitting to being wrong at any point. You're welcome to play that game. But if you lack even the modicum of humility it should take you to admit you overstated ShadowDark's emphasis on dungeoneering because you have't even read it don't expect me to play along.
What "modern gamers" want is not at all to my point. My point is a game needn't spell out things in the rules in order for its rules to be capable of accommodating those things. And that the actual historical development of the game and what people were able to do with even OD&D is evidence enough for this. Only not good enough evidence for some apparently.
You say The OSR preaches simplicity, rulings over rules, game challenge ... and it does. You call yourself an OSR enthusiast ... but then insist that a game not dedicating pages of rules to this and that is then not at all conducive a set of rules for doing anything but what is made explicit.
The attitude you have expressed in that regard is the antithesis of OSR philosophy. It goes against the very idea that a player might attempt something and the DM might arbitrate. Because if it's not at all in the rules what is that player doing?!??!
What OSR game(s) do you play out of curiosity?
EDIT: One of the main points made by Matt Finch in the primer that for many has become the bible as far as the OSR is concerned is about how it is better not to have explicit rules for things to foster at tables an approach where player skill is prioritized over character abilities. How instead of having a skill system that encourages players to look at their character sheets and then say Can I roll [ ]? the absence of one encourages players to get creative and think of what their characters might attempt and describe it and then have the DM arbitrate. The DM might even say Okay roll this or that. But the absence of rules specific to what players wish to do does not mean and has never meant their characters can't do such things. It does mean and has never meant the game isn't "made" for that.
I am not so sure you even grasp what it is the OSR is all about. You are one minute saying short of having specific rules dedicated to this or that a game is just not really for this or that and the next minute saying you are in favor of the OSR approach when this is about fewer rules and really any rules being for the DM and serving really no purpose but to perhaps inform a DM's decisions. You are contradicting yourself.
It's good to be back, Link! I missed the forums and ya'll in general. :)
I'm responding rather late but I do agree that D&D frontloads most of the complexity by overwhelming new players with a gimongous amount choices come at level 1. Outside of that, you also get your subclass very early game and some classes like the 5e Sorcerer and the 5e Warlock even pick that at level 1 as well. It's hard not to frontload complexity in D&D because players have to pick defining characteristics like their class, species and backstory before they can begin to play. However, at the same time, a better system would absolutely have less choices at the lower levels and more at the later ones. Finally, I really hope there aren't any classes in 1D&D that make players pick subclasses at level 1.
You bring up a lot of interesting points on spell lists and I've never even thought of the idea of reimagining the game so there aren't any. It seems interesting but I think we both agree that spell lists do a good job of preserving the flavor of classes and stopping Wizards from having boatloads of healing spells and fire spells. That would not only be overpowered, but also ruin the viability and uniqueness of the Cleric.
I dunno about "creating a unique spellcasting system for each class", but I do like the idea of more spellcasting systems. However, so many PHB classes have some access to magic and creating and a understanding new system for each one would be a confusing nuisance for the devs and the players.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
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HERE.I know this comment has been buried by multiple pages of discussion by now but I can't let go how inaccurate it is.
I tallied up all the PHB (2014) + SCAG + Elemental Evil spells a couple of years back and these were the totals for each class's spell lists:
Not only are the 4 arcane casters not interchangeable (warlock and bard spell lists are very distinct), you can fit the warlock's entire spell list in the gap between wizard and everyone else.
If anything, it's the sorcerer that has very few signature spells; they mostly work with a pared down version of the wizard spell list plus a handful of extras like Chaos Bolt and the new Sorcerous Burst.
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