But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
I am perfectly aware of the presence of DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG and the countless supplements filled with options made available on these sites. I even mentioned them.
How many of those here versed in the current ruleset who are drunk on optimization use things that are unofficial?
Do you? Or will you only use what Wizards provide?
How many would be happy to sit at a table where a class doesn't work the way they have come to expect? Very few I suspect. Because they tend to approach character creation with their knowledge of the existing rules in mind to make decisions typically more about how they can do the most possible damage than anything else.
Home-brew settings is not at all relevant to the discussion.
Neither is really what home-brew rules you can dream up.
My point has been about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations.
It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironicallylimiting their options.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
In this very same thread there are some saying having "fewer options"—when what they really mean is having fewer choices to be made in line with the rules—is limiting. But it isn't. Not if you've a DM or players with a drop of creativity who do not see the rules as written as laws by which to abide. What's limiting is tethering yourself to a ruleset to the point you can't even begin to imagine the possibilities for a class or for a spell that might stretch beyond the rules as written. That is limiting. Whether they seek to limit themselves to just official stuff is beside the point. It's still limiting. And their then calling the very opposite of what is limiting "limiting" is ironic. Next time maybe read what I am responding to. Instead of just assuming I am calling it "ironic" for some to simply choose to play using strictly official stuff. There's nothing ironic about that. You're right. But when they then complain about the "lack of options" in earlier editions? As if we didn't just make things up to give ourselves options? That's ironic. (And don't tell me I don't know what irony means. I teach students to identify it in literature for a living.)
I guess if you never wanted a dwarf who could cast a spell or elf who could pick a lock. But there were some very non-negotiable limits BECMI. Limits which are only now, finally, fading away.
And your assertion that earlier editions were more about storytelling is patently false. At some tables it may have been about the same as it is now, but it was certainly not more about it then. No version of the game has a monopoly on any playstyle.
Yes. Limitless. Because a DM had it within his or her power to allow a player to play whatever he or she wanted. Regardless of what those "non-negotiable" rules said.
In one of the very first games I ever ran using the B in BECMI one of the players played a humanoid fox terrier as a character. We just made up any features for this playable race.
Did TSR come to my home and scold me for breaking their "non-negotiable" rules? They did not.
You are acting as if home-brewing started five minutes ago. We were doing in back then so players could play whatever they wanted.
No version of the game has a monopoly on playstyle. You are correct. But with more recent editions of the game increasingly more and more about combat to the point that now every single class is practically as adequate as any fighter is at it as far as dealing damage goes and with so many players today optimizing solely for purposes of damage and with next to zero official content about domain-level play despite how quickly characters become powerful it shouldn't be hard to see why so many 5E tables constantly have to endure the type of player who just can't wait to fight the next thing and who grows bored of anything that happens outside of combat.
Well, obviously a DM can allow anything. That’s as true now as it was then. But that’s irrelevant to the argument. We’re talking about what we like about a system, not what we like about our house rules. And if you think people now don’t house rule and change things to fit what they like, I’ve got news for you. And the idea that the game is now more about combat does not match my experience playing in those days. Early editions were dungeon crawls with monster hotel dungeons and traps that existed for no discernible reason. The plot was mostly, get more money and better loot. Repeat until your character dies. Role play meant giving your character a name other than Bob the VI, because your previous 5 Bobs had died.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. There were, eventually, non-weapon proficiencies. The name alone should tell you how early editions worked. The designers started to realize, wait, people want to do things out of combat? I guess we’ll tell them what they can pick up besides a sword.
It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironicallylimiting their options.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
You had to pretend half of the conversation hadn't even taken place so you could fail to grasp the irony of what they are doing. In this very same thread there are some saying having "fewer options"—when what they really mean is having fewer choices to be made in line with the rules—is limiting. But it isn't. Not if you've a DM or players with a drop of creativity who do not see the rules as written as laws by which to abide. What's limiting is tethering yourself to a ruleset to the point you can't even begin to imagine the possibilities for a class or for a spell that might stretch beyond the rules as written. That is limiting. Whether they seek to limit themselves to just official stuff is beside the point. It's still limiting. And their then calling the very opposite of what is limiting "limiting" is ironic. (And don't tell me I don't know what irony means. I teach students to identify it in literature for a living.)
Ok, that's fair. Also, I teach it for sociology and psychiatry. I can give ya that. Glad I checked while you did your edit -- the original was a tab bit different, but same point, and I would still have to give it to you.
But you still need to acknowledge that 5e is less limiting that B/X/BECMI as a ruleset, which was their point.
and the point that was made previously was that 5e is more limiting that earlier editions -- the original point was not that players limit themselves, the point was the the game itself is more limiting. You are now speaking about the players limiting themselves again -- which is not about 5e, which is still the core part of th e discourse as far as I am aware.
I am not seeing how this makes 5e a worse version -- all the points raised so far are about 5e being more restrictive than OSR -- and yet everything that can be done in OSR exct C/P the rules verbatim can be done with 5e.
So that isn't a benefit of something older over 5e. That's a difference in the players, and that's not the fault of either the company or the product (the published game, specifically).
I'm an old AD&D player, and disliked Basic -- and I still know a lot of old Basic players who disliked AD&D. It was a whole thing back then. The OG edition wars, in current terms.
I keep reading that B/X and 3.5 are somehow better than 5e, but the explanations I am being given are "it gave us more freedom" and there's nothing taking away that freedom in 5e. Hell, I'm still doing it and there's arguably more freedom, as I pointed out in my edit above.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Well, obviously a DM can allow anything. That’s as true now as it was then. But that’s irrelevant to the argument. We’re talking about what we like about a system, not what we like about our house rules. And if you think people now don’t house rule and change things to fit what they like, I’ve got news for you. And the idea that the game is now more about combat does not match my experience playing in those days. Early editions were dungeon crawls with monster hotel dungeons and traps that existed for no discernible reason. The plot was mostly, get more money and better loot. Repeat until your character dies. Role play meant giving your character a name other than Bob the VI, because your previous 5 Bobs had died.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. There were, eventually, non-weapon proficiencies. The name alone should tell you how early editions worked. The designers started to realize, wait, people want to do things out of combat? I guess we’ll tell them what they can pick up besides a sword.
Even Basic D&D back then had rules for domain-level play. Had rules for managing strongholds etc. So you are wrong. Those who made the game played with OD&D which was even more basic and ran long and involved campaigns using that system. Just because people like yourself might have ran it as little more than a "dungeon crawl" doesn't mean that was the case for everyone. I ran a years' long campaign that took place mostly at sea and in port towns. If players just saw one character after another die how do you figure we wound up with characters well beyond 10th level? Your post is full of what are nothing more than stereotypes about early D&D. Which I find funny given you say you played back then.
Earlier fighters distinguished themselves by being the only class that really progressed when it came to combat. Well. That and the fact the player would pour enough life into the character to make it stand out. Now the fighter is one of the absolute dullest of classes in the game. When a rogue with a high enough DEX and a Finesse weapon in its hand can outclass a fighter in combat the fighter is drained of much of its meaning. The archetypes add little to nothing to the class. I have played fighters who had much better and much more interesting options available to them through negotiations made with an accommodating DM.
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
How many of those here versed in the current ruleset who are drunk on optimization use things that are unofficial?
Do you? Or will you only use what Wizards provide?
How many would be happy to sit at a table where a class doesn't work the way they have come to expect? Very few I suspect. Because they tend to approach character creation with their knowledge of the existing rules in mind to make decisions typically more about how they can do the most possible damage than anything else.
Home-brew settings is not at all relevant to the discussion.
Neither is really what home-brew rules you can dream up.
My point has been about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations.
Ok, sorry about the formatting and such, but it is to make the points clearer.
First, the underlined bits. Unofficial stuff inherently includes homebrew. You cannot in good faith fix a goalpost and then move it. Pick one -- unofficial or not. If unofficial, then homebrew everything counts -- or narrow your specificity.
1 - How many out of 19,029,053 members? At least 9,514,526 -- all homebrew worlds. That "over half of all worlds are homebrew" data point has been solid for at least 40 years. Was up to 65% during the early 5e era. Has come down to just under 60% today. High was in AD&D where it was in the 70% range. By definition, those worlds use things that are unofficial. Less than one third of all games take place on official settings, and that third is divided up among all the setting as a whole, and then again by those who just use the setting and then dump their own homebrew on top of it.
2 - I use unofficial stuff all the time. Just never, ever 3rd party. We create it ourselves -- so it is all second party. Indeed, I am a bad girl: I use the PHB, DMG, TCE, XgE, MM, and MMotM. And only some of those are for anything other than ideas. My homebrew house rules is bigger than any one of those books at 600 pages. 2nd party is not official.
3 - Your first good point, but here you are blaming players again for the faults of the game itself. I can say that I agree -- hang out in any of the forums here and you'll see a ton of theorycraft. Head to r/dnd and it is worse; plus they punish homebrew and more. So there is certainly a sizeable chunk of the online community who thinks that way. I wonder why they they think that way.
Could it be that the games they play in are mostly about combat? Or, and hear me out, could it be that they are doing the same thing today that they did back in the old days, the hard edged days, the days when I ran an open game with all comers who would bring in the most optimized to kill shit PCs with all the fanciest magical items? That was 80 to 83. The goal of optimizing PCs is not new, not a "recent or sudden change in the player base".
That has been around since 0e. If there is math, math people will use it. If there is a way to game the system, engineering fans will game the system -- 1981, June, first time someone tried the dust explosion on me. LORDY i was pissed. I was also a teenager, but meh.
And additionally, a hell of a lot of players just want to smash the ugly monster with the big ass sword. That's all they want out of the game. So that's an appeal that falls apart on examination in context.
Now, you get to what you say your point is. I accept that, and on that basis apologize for the earlier confusion.
How does 5e not help that be accomplished? if anything, WotC's entire ethos from day one of taking over the company has been all about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations. That's not something that they can change or fix, though, and certainly not something that is the fault of problem of the game...
... and not the fault or problem of the players. It is patent that the majority of players (who are not represented entirely online) are more than willing to indulge their imaginations and be stunningly creative. I have a freaking ball joint doll as a species in my game, who is very androgynous until they imprint on the person they encounter first, and then they shift slightly to a form that is considered unthreatening. This is a playable race in my game that I would never have thought of on my own -- it came from one of the kids in our group.
She wanted to play a robot maid warrior.
I'm just not seeing how you think that players are limited by anything, how they have their imaginations curtailed or how they are limited unable to think outside the box by 5e.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Why do i like 5e: I want to preface this with a little information I have son he just turned 15 he suffers from Epilepsy and Cerebral Palsy, and he is nonverbal. He is generally happy and watches the world with a smile on his face. He enjoyed it when we used to host our gaming groups on saturday and sunday (the pandemic killed that). He will never be able to play the game, my groups have always made an effort to include him even when we are on discord. This is important because almost two years ago i got to do the next best thing. My youngest sister Mandi who used to watch us play and steal our dice when she was a toddler, she came to me asking advice on which edition to use to introduce her children to D&D. I bought her the core books, and her family now has a regular game night. I got to pass on D&D to another generation; it does not get any better than that.
I disagree with this. The "a rising tide lifts all boats" was true of the OGL. Imagine if Hollywood only supported Marvel superhero films. Movies like the Green Mile or You've Got Mail or Harry Potter or LotR or Star Wars or Star Trek would not exist, or if they did, then they would be low budget off brand "b rated" films that would not attract much attention.
The same applies here, which is why WotC and Hasbro tried to end the OGL, because they do not want all boats to rise. They want a monopoly. If they succeed in truly making a monopoly, it will hurt the scope of rpgs, limiting them greatly. Sure, you continue to get the little indy dev games, but ultimately, no one but WotC would matter to the general direction of the hobby. Paizo is thankfully big enough to stand, but even then you can still get a duopoly, similar to how Marvel and DC are practically the only superhero brands. Sure other companies have done supers, such as the Megamind film, but honestly, Megamind is literally the only non-game superhero anything I can thing of that isn't Marvel or DC. We are very likely facing a similar outcome with WotC and Paizo, a situation in which most roleplayers won't be able to name a rpg company beyond those two except for a few players on the fringes of gamer society. ANd if Paizo doesn't get some good VTT options of it's own pretty quickly, there is a good chance WotC might even overshadow them.
I explicitly stated more than once that the "rising tide lifts all boats" aphorism is rarely true, and it being true of TTRPGs is one such rare case. However, I also pointed out upstream how common it is to see franchises in other media attracting mainstream popularity to the point of annoying fans of that media who prefer less mega-popular examples, yet other contenders in those media segments continue to flourish. Regardless, the TTRPG space doesn't "only support" D&D 5E, as your metaphor about movies suggests.
Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space.
It's interesting that you bring up superhero comic books. While you're right that Marvel and DC have the most well-known stables of superhero characters, other publishers have superhero comics that have achieved lasting popularity and led to TV shows, movies, and games. Spawn is likely the most well-known because it's the longest-running indie superhero comic, but there are plenty of other examples. But the comic book industry is an interesting comparison because the big two - Marvel and DC - cater to the superhero fans and ignore a lot of folks who want other kinds of comic book stories. And while there are indie publishers who have popular superhero franchises, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, Valiant, etc., publish comics that appeal to folks who want more than just superhero fare. If all you focus on is lamenting that indie publishers don't have their own Superman or Spider-Man then you miss out on amazing titles like Saga, The Walking Dead, Paper Girls, Resident Alien, Archie, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. And this is just like the way so many TTRPG systems have been developed that don't follow D&D's formulas (or even use a D20, let alone a D20-based system!). Yeah, I love playing D&D, but I also love playing Marvel Multiverse, Blades in the Dark, Girl by Moonlight, Deadlands, Tales of Xadia, and Monster of the Week.
If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D just... try to be more imaginative. Like all the people imagining up other games and systems. Don't let the "what ifs" of the slippery slope fallacy lead you into doom and gloom. D&D is the most popular it's ever been. Which I love. But everything else in the TTRPG space is more popular now because the space as a whole is getting more players, more attention, and more creativity.
I am going to risk it, and I hope I don't dinged for it, but I have kept thinking about some stuff while working on those damned books of mine.
A guess about Summation:
My read on some of this is that the problem is not the game itself, it is the way that many players of the game -- notably players who spend time online, in forums and on websites dedicated to D&D -- have an inordinate amount of focus and devotion to the concept of RAW, and are condemnatory of anything that is not RAW.
They will bad mouth people and ideas, and they will not join games on LFG sites or other places where the game is not played RAW or with too much homebrew -- which is often relegated to back corners or separate groups and forums by the larger sites and groups.
It is a culture, filled with more players than ever before -- the percentages may remain constant, butthe per capita is dramatically different. At least half the players engaging with the game today are uninterested or uncaring not only about the 50 years of lore and history in the game, they are even less concerned by the shifts in mechanics and playstyles. They have a set of expectations that they want met, and they are uninterested in changing or learning something new or different, because it affects their enjoyment of the game they do not take as seriously as some who have, perhaps, played long enough to watch all their hair fall out.
This makes it more difficult for those who have a strong idea of what they like (the different types of DM's, for example, in the video i lined to instead of an article because apparently video does better with folks these days) and a style of play that does not mesh well with what folks have seen in other forms of media about D&D, such as BG3, or Critical Role/Dimension 20, Stranger Things, Influencers on video streaming sites, or some NYT/Medium/Slash post.
This media is successful, and popular, and affects a sizeable chunk of the population, even those who are not found online.
This makes it more difficult for folks who operate, think, and create in a different/separate paradigm from the dominant one(s) to indulge their own way of interacting with the game, in whatever edition, form, or altered state.
In anger, frustration, and possibly some degree of resentment, they have laid the root cause for all of this at the footsteps of the design and implementation of 5th Edition, and, by extension, Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast division.
It is not that they "dislike" or "fail to understand" 5e or how it works or what it has or lacks (it has not been their cup of tea, which is perfectly cromulent), it is that the "kinds of players" that 5e has attracted are not considered good for their way of playing or style of game, and that previous systems with which they are more familiar (or variants of previous systems) are better suited, in their opinions, to the way that they play, and that is a further point of frustration and resentment.
In the Initial case, it is a challenge of a particular play style and approach that folks who have engaged with 5e appear to be unable to successfully comprehend the distinctive style and approach to playing the game that is sought. This is puzzling, as it appears that only when people encounter 5e before their approach do they have a problem adapting to their specific play style and approach, while those who encounter them first do not.
In a separate case, the core challenge is the obsessive nature with which online folks treat official products as the final arbiter of right and proper. They are also not fond of 5e in general -- as valid and fine an opinion as any other -- and feel that the particular part of the larger community around D&D and similar games is preferable to the majority of that same larger community that is, as they noted, seemingly obsessed with rules as written.
In this secondary case, they asserted that older versions were limitless, allowed for more negotiation with DMs, and were more personally preferable to them than the current game, due in large part to the seemingly endless number of persons for whom there is and only ever will be RAW 5e. They have a subtext of an older style and approach that placed the DM in a more primary role than today -- 5e is a Player Centric game, and there does seem to be some subtle course correcting going on with the 2024 version. They feel that in some way the company or the edition has made it so that the community is self-censoring their own imaginations.
If I am wrong about any of the above, please let me know.
I want to note that I do not disagree with this as a general premise. I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself -- that is a function of a secondary market and the broader sociocultural shift away from in person to virtual gaming, necessitating the development and use of Virtual Tabletops (including and not limited to the upcoming Sigil).
The game itself is adapting to meet this need -- it is still a product, and the goal of the product is to appeal to the greatest number of people possible (understanding that it cannot reach all people even in doing so) at which the 2014 edition has been wildly successful by any competent measure. The environment in concern, though, is a programmatic one, which by its nature tends to limit things in some way that is inescapable given current technological limitations. For example, I am less excited about Sigil in large part because of the aesthetic of it, the look of it. But I am interested in it because of the first person perspective and the ability to modify the setting. However, even should I find it of value, it will remain outside any real use on my part as intended, because I have so heavily modified my games.
This is not just true of DDB, however, this is true of any VTT. They remove the math solving need on the part of a player, they roll the dice, they take away the book keeping and such that was a large part of us older folks' experience with the game. They are only able to because they are structured to mimic the official rules -- and only the official rules. The RAW. This, in turn, creates a feedback where it becomes more and more difficult to find people who are not playing RAW because the tools and methods they use to interact with the game are entirely limited to RAW.
And those tools and systems are, unintentionally, hostile to any sort of homebrew that is not rigidly controlled and specific in format and style. And it is this system that I think has the greatest impact on the thinking and ideation of the second party -- if the majority of new players only know how to use character builders and Roll 20, then how will the adapt to a table top game that is far more imaginative and has broader ideas, bigger ideas than is possible with merely the default ruleset?
But that isn't 5e, specially, that is the root cause, or even Hasbro -- if anything, Hasbro is late to the game and playing catch up. This problem impacts OSR developers, as well -- many get their systems into these VTTs, only to find that the game play, well, sucks. because of the limiting and programmatic nature of the tools. It is, to borrow the phrase, an Innovation Shift -- VTTs are a disruptive influence akin to the introduction of the iPhone (to borrow an earlier comparative), upending the entire way that a whole industry operates.
And those of us who have a desire to be not late adoptees but laggards (to use Rogers' terminology) and cling to the previous model and approach will be left out. It truly is a precarious moment for anyone whose systems cannot be effectively programmitized and whose style does not mesh well with the resultant outcome of that programmatization.
Such as OSR folks, older edition players, and weird ass folks like myself who take the base rules and make them into something we think is cooler than all get out.
It isn't there quite yet, but if you follow the diffusion of innovation principles, then we are already past the tipping point -- critical mass is achieved.
It is that point which puts the criticism of 5e against the like of 5e in the crosshairs, such as this post and thread has done.
That's my thoughts for now and a while.
If I misrepresented the sides of the other two, I apologize and invite them to offer corrections.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
You are missing the point. All a homebrew rule is, is an official rule for your DM. It is still rules over rulings.
Here are a couple anecdotes from the first campaign I played, run by the DM that taught me and was taught by a DM that learned from Arneson.
First) My party had arrived at an elven city, and as important guests they wanted us protected but it would look bad if we went around in armor, so they made us clothes enchanted with protection. Easy enough mechanically to just give the otherwise ordinary, if well-made, clothes an armor bonus. Well, my character having had trouble hiding asked for black clothes. Another player asked me why, and I responded that I tended to get better rolls when I can in my mind how and why my character would be successful, and black clothes are hard to see in shadows. The DM said it made sense and not only described my character's clothes as seeming to almost suck in light, she also gave me a bonus to hide from the clothes. No one else got any skill bonuses from their enchanted clothes, and no one cared. No one derided it as unfair or unbalanced. But more importantly, The DM didn't go searching through the book to see what options were available. The DM simply translated what they wanted into mechanical terms and said that. It made it easy to communicate that my clothes really did make it easier to hide, and I wasn't even a rogue. Further, it was also specific. There was no question about how much it helped me hide, and more importantly, it did actually help me hide by affecting my rolls when I rolled to hide, and unlike 5e's advantage, helping me hide was scalable, allowing the DM to set the hide bonus to be a measure of how much it helped me hide. Advantage can't do that. Advantage (at least as 5e does it) is an all or nothing affair.
Second) in the same game, each player took turns rolling the random encounters. One player kept rolling an eagle, an ordinary eagle. Notable here is that it was never a combat encounter, cause guess what, encounters did not need to be combat. Anyway, she rolled this eagle several times in a row it was her turn to roll. The DM had it be the same eagle every time. Then the player finally rolled something other than the eagle, which surprisingly fit because we were in a dungeon, Then on her next random roll, she rolled the eagle again. As we had just walked into an animal handling room with pens and cages of various animals, the DM worked into the game that the eagle was trapped in one of the cages. Then, when the player freed the eagle, the eagle became her animal companion, even though she did not have the class feature. Didn't matter that was getting an extra class feature. It fit the story. But it was quite handy that she could just take the feature and have a general guideline on how to handle her new companion. This shows two things done that are not really done these days. First, the DM used the existing mechanics as shorthand. The DM didn't need to explain anything about what the player could do with her animal companion, nor what skills she would need, just had to give her the animal companion feature and done. Common understanding. Second, the DM took randomness and worked it into the narrative. Sure some still do this in some form, but it is almost always just another combat encounter with an unknown enemy. But my DM here did not just make the encounter happen as some stand alone unexpected event. She worked it into the narrative tying it both back into the history of the campaign and setting up for the future of the campaign (as she had told us that she had figured the bbeg had captured the eagle when the player rolled something else for once).
Notice how in both of these anecdotes, mechanics were used in ways outside the traditional use of mechanics, and they were not homebrew options, but rather just unique situations not dictated by the mechanics yet the mechanics served as shorthand communication and the ability to make something actually matter to rolls that normally would not.
The DM didn't treat the rules as a "how to play," instead she played first and used the rules as mere aids to accomplish her goals. Additionally, none of us looked at the rules for what to do or how to do it. I didn't even expect the bonus to hide, but rather I asked for roleplay reasons and the experience of seeing things in my mind as I made choices or when I rolled. I didn't look at the rules choose something from some table.
SandeebaRezYouri - That is not the point the above user is making. That is the point you are trying to make, but you do not get to just decide to insert your own points into another user's post because it fits your narrative. I will also note that, once again, you are being inconsistent to the point of being hypocritical in your posting--after all, you ranted in another post about how 5e leaves too much up to the DM (which you said could result in inconsistent rulings or confusion)... and are now trying to justify your love of earlier editions by saying that DMs could just translate things into DM-contrived mechanical terms (resulting in the very same problems you said 5e had).
There's some other nonsense you write, like your trying to say "encounters did not need to be combat" as if that was a unique feature of earlier editions not existent in 5e... even though 5e explicitly makes the non-combat encounter a clear part of the game.
Your anecdotes, your inconsistency in articulating your own points, and your clear lack of understanding of 5e are, however, are helpful. In an earlier post, I said your problem seemed to be a lack of understanding of 5e--after all, the near totality of your posting on 5e has demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of 5e's rules and systems, as nearly every single person on this thread has pointed out to you. I realize now that I was wrong--your problem is not that you do not understand 5e; it is that you do not seem to fundamentally grasp any edition of D&D.
At its core, your anecdotes about prior editions of D&D share a common thread - a dedication to using the "Rule of Cool" instead of looking up the rules. It is pretty clear you played earlier editions fast and loose with the official rules, confusing your lackadaisical approach to the game for how the game was designed to be played. Perhaps that was because you were younger and the rules were less important in your youth; perhaps it was because you did not really understand the rules; perhaps it was because your group just wanted to do what they thought might be cool, rules be darned. No matter the reason, it is clear you gained an anarchistic view of earlier editions that is not really supported by the reality of those editions' rules, many of which were far more intensive than 5e's.
Naturally, if you go from a game system where you decided not to learn the rules and do whatever you want, assuming without verifying there were no rules to support your Rule of Cool philosophy and start looking at 5e in terms of the rules... well, of course you are going to think 5e is stifling. But, here's a little tip for you - if you and your friends who ignored most of the 3.5 rules want to ignore most of the 5e rules, you are welcome to do that in 5e as well.
Now, there is nothing wrong with playing by Rule of Cool as the superseding authority. I certainly would not want to play at your table--but that is the joy of D&D. As long as you find a table that is a good fit for you, there is no true wrong way to play.
It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironicallylimiting their options.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
But more so, there's nothing in 5e, as a product or a game or even the marketing, that limits the creative player. I am at a loss here trying to figure out how folks think that it does (when the explanations have all been about how people limit themselves, which, you know, is a choice, like limiting yourself to game editions other than 5e).
First, people often limit themselves without knowing it, and without intending to.
Second, there are multiple ways a limitation can be implemented. It's true that 5e does not explicitly deny creativity, but 5e's very design has an influence on the very structure of thinking of the players. Some players can remain unaffected by that, but it is a very subtle thing that goes by unnoticed, and such influences are not some esoteric thing that people can't control. Right now, people in power around the world use these exact kinds of subtle influences to manipulate the masses. But these influences are not always done intentionally, but sometimes they are.
Take for example, early windows, as in the operating system for computers. There was once a literal cheat sheet for designing windows programs, which did things like establish that check boxes were square and intended for when multiple options could be selected, and radio buttons were circular and for when only a single option could be selected, because then as became familiar with windows programs, they would subconsciously learn these rules and it would improve clarity, as people, without knowing why, would see radio buttons and just know that it meant they had to choose only one option. Most people never even realized it happened, never saw the cheat sheet. They just absorbed the information the same way children learn their first language.
This effect always happens. Sometimes designers take control of this effect, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes designers use this effect for something intentional and there end up also being unintended learned things as well.
5e is no different. The very structure of it teaches things, and not all those things are simply how to play. The notion of the role mechanics have in the running of the game, is one of those things. And both 5e and pf2, both encourage looking at mechanics in the same way players consider the mechanics of Chess. Homebrew vs wotc written mechanics is utterly meaningless to this point.
One thing that did not escape my notice, is that you still just have pre-written classes and races. You are not telling us how you create a unique for each player's unique character concept. No, you tell us about the classes you create that your players choose from the same as they would from the core book. When my DM gave my character's clothes a bonus to hide, it was a unique thing that represented a narrative choice. I did not choose an option from the book, nor did I choose an option from houserules the DM made. I made a purely narrative choice, and the DM did something unique to represent it.
You on the other hand, still think in terms of creating a set of rules and following those rules, and you consider creative freedom to be your ability to make your own rules. You don't give examples of making rulings. Even earlier, with the "traps" that your players circumvented without rolling a check, did not describe an occasion of the players forgoing the use of a mechanical option they had, but instead the players did not have a mechanical option, which forced them to do something not based on mechanics, further, the traps in the examples were not traps that one would disable anyway. So what were the alternatives? Perhaps a better question for you to answer, is "have your players ever been in a situation in which there was an obvious solution that would involve rolling a simple check that they could reasonably have done, that they instead tried something else anyway?"
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To answer your question bout the 7 types of DM, I'm a mixture of the Worldbuilder and minimalist. You might question that since I like 3.5 over 5e. How can I be the minimalist? Because, like the description of the minimalist, I let players try stuff. They want to do something, I do not look up whether it is allowed or not in the rules, instead I consider how it could be done according to how my world works, and then I consider whether it has any impact on rolling dice or permanent results to the character, if yes to either, then I figure out how to represent that with the mechanics. If a roll will be required, I judge what roll works best, and what bonuses or penalties best represent the effects that would impact the character's performance. I use the mechanics as a tool to make the player's choice happen and also have meaning.
I could easily go ultra light and just have players roll a d20 for everything, but by having skills and such, things they do can have an impact on their success, and that makes choices matter, even when they are not simply looking at the mechanics as a menu of choices. I could do the same without mechanics, but then I'd just be making mechanics in my head. If I play freeform, and I give a player a cloak that aids hiding, then I have to remember that they have a cloak that makes hiding easier, and I have to remember how much that cloak helps (are they basically invisible, or is just hunter's camo that provides a minor boost to hiding but only in woods?), in which case I'm making mechanics, but just keeping them all in my head.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
On the contrary, fighters distinguished themselves by being like different people, the same way people in the real world distinguish themselves. Having different personalities and different tastes. They didn't need mechanical options to distinguish themselves.
Anecdote, played a fiery sorceress once. There was nothing about her magic or abilities to distinguish her. She was your bog standard pyromancer. What distinguished her was her personality, how I played her, how she responded every time the idiot rogue pinched her butt and nearly got himself roasted alive. How she took on the challenge of needing to calm her fiery nature to get close to the unicorn, how she responded when the party figured out she needed to and looked at her. There was not a single thing about her mechanically to distinguish her. I didn't even build her as she was a pregen character for the module.
"And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. "
And this is false. They used to roll to see if encountered monsters were hostile or not, because guess what, sometimes you would encounter an orc who was not interested in fighting at fighting at all.
I keep reading that B/X and 3.5 are somehow better than 5e, but the explanations I am being given are "it gave us more freedom" and there's nothing taking away that freedom in 5e. Hell, I'm still doing it and there's arguably more freedom, as I pointed out in my edit above.
Freedom isn't just about what is explicit. It is also about the encouragements and subtle influences. 5e encourages players to look at mechanics as a menu. Sure, players can look outside of the mechanics, but normally they will do so only when there are no mechanics. That is why 4e was hailed as being more free, because it lacked rules, players felt like they had more freedom, because simply having mechanics made them feel like they had to do things a certain way, even though the books explicitly said otherwise. 5e and pf2 are the same way. They subtly push for following mechanics, printed or homebrew.
And just because a lack of mechanics makes you feel more free, doesn't mean you actually are more free. In fact, that mindset limits your freedom, because even when you are comfortable being free when the mechanics are out of the way, when the mechanics do show up, you still feel the need to follow the mechanics, even if it is just following your homebrew mechanics. Sure you don't actually have to, but making homebrew mechanics is not defying the mechanical play, it is keeping the mechanical mindset.
Lastly, I want to reiterate, that I am not claiming any edition to be better than any other in a general sense. Each has different traits, and each fits different playstyles, and there isn't a right answer or a better answer to which playstyle you prefer to play. But there are always consequences, always costs, always a give and take.
"Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space."
They tried to end it. I'm not saying they weren't replacing it with something else, but they tried to end it. That why the lawyers that literally wrote the ogl originally had to actually speak up about the issue and say that the intent was for the OGL to be perpetual and not allowed to be ended and they were committed to making sure that WotC would not do so even so far as defending it in court. WotC and Hasbro claiming that they were just updating it is just the double speak description of what they were trying to do.
"If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D"
That is not what I was saying. there is this thing, which I have no good term for at the moment. It is the collective stuff that "everybody knows." It is usually wrong of course, but similarly there is the stuff that "everybody knows" and stuff the "everybody does" and similar "everybody" things that we might perhaps call the collective pool. Marvel and DC are in the collective pool. The others are not. It doesn't mean the other stuff doesn't exist, it just means they lack a certain ubiquitous recognition or reputation that exists almost subconsciously among the majority of members of a society. For example, in America "everyone knows" that animation is for kids or Simpsons kind of casual humor and not for serious mature storytelling. Doesn't matter that Japan proves that sentiment wrong every day and that there is a large and growing segment of Americans who watch the serious and mature Japanese animations, but anime and the serious mature storytelling in animated format is still not indoctrinated into the collective pool of what "everyone knows." And there are effects caused by that.
I am going to risk it, and I hope I don't dinged for it, but I have kept thinking about some stuff while working on those damned books of mine.
A guess about Summation:...
This post is well said. Puts a lot of things into words that I simply couldn't.
I don't agree with everything, but in large part I do agree.
"I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself "
This part however, I think that the companies are partly, and only partly, at fault. Companies want to monetize, and that is totally fair, so they certain have the means and motive to subtly shape their products to encourage trends in the direction they desire. They may not have created the idea of playing the games in a programmatic way, but they absolutely and intentionally help it along, because that makes it easier for them to monetize. I think it hurts the industry as a whole, even though you can't really say there is anything wrong with people playing that way, but the fact that both the major companies running shape what they do to focus things into a style more readily monetized still has rippling effects throughout the industry.
Certain Paizo folks have even said they explicitly do this for their PFS thing because they want every PFS session to have a consistent feel and therefore they set everything up specifically so that disparate GMs will still have a consistency in how they run things, and that means being programmatic.
A second point here, is that aside from the acceptance or programmability of mechanics is the use of mechanics. The fact that simply having an anti-trap skill, tends to make people think first of using the anti-trap skill for every trap, and to feel like someone in every party must have the anti-trap skill, and that for most, the only escape from that is to not have an anti-trap skill.
But it interests me that people also limit their view of mechanics to how they are used. Someone in this thread, I lost where it is, mentioned Disable Device as being exclusive to traps. No thought to the possible use for sabotage of general machinery, or if it might work on constructs (they are devices after all, and if it works on magical traps, why not magical devices).
That also reminded me of a discussion long ago about the DCs for climb. Someone in that thread had mentioned how no one needed to raise climb skill very high because none of the DCs listed in the book were high, and they listed the highest modifier in the book. My response was to lay out a narrative situation in which multiple of the additive modifiers in the book could easily result in extremely high climb DCS, such as climbing a cliff in the middle of terrible storm with minuscule handholds and a few other modifiers. It apparently never occurred to them that additive modifiers could be added together, likely because they had never seen it done, regardless of what the mechanics actually said even when they were reading the mechanics to make their example.
No, I wouldn’t wonder why you would be a minimalist, the point was to have you give me an idea of how your view is structured — that helps.
freeform is what I expected.
as the point about classes: yes, I have 20 classes. Each class a set fixed list of capabilities, an axiom, and an affinity. They also have a list of some several hundred different abilities they can choose from to customize their PC.
but I do operate from an Archetype basis. To me and to my players, when you step away from archetypes, it stops feeling like D&D. 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e all operated from the basis of an archetype, and that is a fundamental structure that holds all versions of D&D together. In broad game theory, there are Archetype, Skill, and Freeform bases, and those determine much of the overall structure. FATE, for example, is more a Freeform style, less concerned with concept. D&D is an archetype based system. Traveller did the Skill style.
stepping away from Archetypes makes it not feel like D&D. Doesn’t matter what the archetypes are, mind you, but they need to be present or I am uninterested. There’s a reason that we play only four games systems regularly despite having tried and worked on hundreds: we know what we like, and from there we just move on. Of them, we play D&D the most. But none of them escaped our re-engineering.
however, the archetypes serve as starting points for the development of a person of that world. The world is the Structure, and as such it sets the space that provides the limits, not the game. Nor does that inherently mean I that I still think in terms of classes - assumption without evidence. You have too narrow a sample to determine that from.
i do think in terms of rules. It is a game, and other than Calvinball, games have rules. All games. Indeed, the nature of games is predicated on the basis of rules — so anyone who is talking about games is talking about rules, fundamentally, and thus even you think in terms of rules.
the traps I mentioned— the ones you jumped to the conclusion were pit traps, even though I never described them as pit traps — were solved using several different mechanics. Just not ones that had a damn thing to do with any trap related skill or ability. Your response, though, highlighted that there was an absence of knowledge about 5es rules, and so rather than I respond, I deleted what I had been going to say.
you also forgot: the cleric did have a tool to disarm traps. And could have used it. So the question you asked is, again, still answers by the same response. Throwing sandbags to trigger spike throwers, lifting, hauling, positioning, and using a log — these all still had mechanical tests and challenges.
as for a narrative choice, everything in the books is a narrative choice, including the use of the mechanics or not using them. The narrative choice bit of the clothing is no different from my player’s deciding “that looks like a trapped area, let’s solve that problem” and then doing it. All of that was narrative, improvisational, and creative. So, again, no distinction and an empty argument.
The meta textual influence you reference requires specific evidence to use as an argument, though. I am aware such things exist, but I am also aware of how they operate, explicitly, and so I would need to have some concrete examples in order to accept that argument. How, specifically, do they teach looking at the game as a game of chess in terms of maximizing and optimizing?
last I checked, chess doesn’t allow you to alter how the pieces move. The optimization in chess is not in the game, it is in the player, and not a part of the game but an outgrowth of playing it.
if you mean the mathematical optimization to cause the greatest amount of damage, the game doesn’t do that — that is the outcome of the way that people play it — a way that encourages more combat. Reduce the combat, and the value in optimization for that purpose fades. But also, optimization is not a bad thing — everyone optimizes time, ability, skill sets, minutes used, and even their appearance. In real life, not the game. The game is just an expression of that same principle.
so that argument, thus far, appears empty as well. If more DM ran wilderness survival games, PCs would be optimized for that, instead — there are numbers involved. Engineers love numbers.
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All of your "criticisms" of B/X are exactly why it remains so popular among old-school gamers—even more so than AD&D—and why it's the preferred iteration of D&D for hacking in the OSR movement.
More OSR games are built on its chassis or are even direct or near direct copies of it than they resemble any other edition of the game. Including the most recent one.
I know, I have more B/X based games on my shelf, than all other games combined and my library is not small. In my view, B/X is the single best version of D&D ever, it is, in a word, a Dungeons and Dragons construction kit. A perfect baseline for making any kind of D&D you can imagine.
That said, using B/X in this way, is a considerable step above simply buying game and playing like 5e. It requires you to be a writer, a game designer, a dungeon master and even to a certain degree an artist. Its not an easy thing to create a holistic vision for a game from a base line like B/X. It takes quite a bit of work and dedication, but I do agree, this is exactly why its so popular with veteran DM's as it really is a perfect tool for creating your own vision.
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
I didn't miss your point, what I was pointing out is that the evidence is contrary to it. People don't limit themselves to "officially published options and supplements", they didn't back then and they do so even less now. I'm not a professional writer, game designer or publisher, what I am is an experienced DM and even I manage to sell the books I create on DM Guild very steadily. The reason people buy my books, the same reason they buy books from the guild in general is because people very specifically do not limit themselves to official options. Not everyone is comfortable designing and writing their own material, but the desire to expand their game beyond any limits is a huge driving force behind D&D. There is a massive 3rd party market. I wrote for example The Book fo Backgrounds: Volume 1 - Family Legacies in response to the fact that I thought the background options in the book were not narrative enough, not explicit or interesting enough and people love that book. I sell a few copies almost every single day. I think if people were as you describe limiting themselves, there is no way anyone would be buying books from a complete no-body novice writer/designer like me. What you are saying is simply not true.
5e's fan base is not the only one that was flexible like this. This was true in the 3e days and even in the 4e days. There has always been a drive to expand the rules and the game as a whole. It's in the DNA of D&D culture and really the only notable difference between OSR players and Modern D&D players is what system they use as their starting point, which I will agree with you, creates very different playstyles and games from either side can and often are built on very different philosophies, but there is also a tremendous amount of cross-over. There are more things in common between these two worlds than there are differences.
I mean I create content on DM's Guild and even though its made for 5e, most of this stuff is pretty system agnostic, I know because I use a lot of the stuff I create in my Old School Essentials games.
I think people in the OSR and I'm guilty of this too, often seek out differences in old school and new school gaming out of frustration of trying to get games off the ground in modern D&D culture and struggling to because of the popularity of 5e. It's such a force of nature, such an overwhelming influence that even among the OSR the most popular games are based on 5e... case in point, Shadowdark for example.
I have and always will be an OSR die hard and I will never stop trying to get modern gamers to play old school games as I mostly agree with you that in a lot of ways, those experiences are far more vivid than anything 5e can produce, but the more I play and the more I write for 5e, the more I realize that these perceived differences get smaller and smaller.
That is the point you are trying to make, but you do not get to just decide to insert your own points into another user's post because it fits your narrative.
You did exactly what you are accusing that user of doing. You replied to me with talk of published home-brew content showing you hadn't entirely read and understood—or you were just willingly misrepresenting—what I was saying. And did so just so you could try to insult me by pretending I was oblivious to all those supplements on DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG even though I myself had made mention of them. Mostly how needless they were and how so many of them are PWYW because they provide nothing any one of us couldn't dream up ourselves.
As my response to you pointed out I am not just talking about the rules in place in an official book. Although I am genuinely interested to know just how much trust you have in those who sell game supplements on DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG and who don't work for Wizards. How a DM might home-brew a class say still places limits on what can be done with that class. My main point has been about allowing players to use their imaginations to come up with—within reason—their own ideas as far as how their characters' classes or whatever go.
When we had "fewer options" at our disposal we were forced to do that. Many DMs encouraged this at their tables. A player watches this or that movie and says they want to play a character like [X]. [X] has features that don't quite match any of those afforded any class. The player gets to imagine how this might work. If the DM decides it is not too overpowered—remembering "balance" was the last thing on our minds back then—the player gets a character who can do some thing some character in some movie can do. And everyone is happy.
I have been playing in a heavily modified 5E game in which every level up sees the players negotiating what new class feature their characters will get or how an existing one will be improved. Because the DM prefers this more DIY/old-school approach and has grown weary of how predictable 5E has become after a decade of playing it. I have played my fair share of 5E as written. It is good at what it does. But it grows stale very quickly. You said "reality" does not support "my narrative." My "narrative" is that it is ironic when people complain about how there were "fewer options" baked into the rules in earlier editions of the game only for them to favor an edition that provides them with many in line with the rules but do so at the expense of a model that instead saw us relying on how illimitable the imagination is when it comes to getting what we want out of the game. I'd say reality supports that just fine.
"And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. "
And this is false. They used to roll to see if encountered monsters were hostile or not, because guess what, sometimes you would encounter an orc who was not interested in fighting at fighting at all.
Very much this. I think a lot of newer players find it hard to fathom that not every encounter that could potentially devolve into a fight must end in one. This is not to mention that it was not uncommon for adventuring parties to have to flee. Something that rarely if ever happens in a 5E game. Practically every encounter outside of what is clearly demarcated as a strictly social encounter is seen as a bag of Hit Points. That happens when you treat the game as little more than one in which to optimize every single character in a way it will deliver optimal damage.
Plus as I have already mentioned: Even B/X had rules for strongholds.
The notion the game was purely about combat because Persuasion or Deception or whatever weren't skills is preposterous. Because these were things players were required to ROLEPLAY. Not just roll.
Arneson said the purpose of a DM was to arbitrate whenever players wanted their characters to do things outside of combat. The very emergence of D&D is seen in its founders playing what were just war games but wanting a game that could be so much more. So acting as if early D&D was just about combat is historically false as well as preposterous.
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I am perfectly aware of the presence of DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG and the countless supplements filled with options made available on these sites. I even mentioned them.
How many of those here versed in the current ruleset who are drunk on optimization use things that are unofficial?
Do you? Or will you only use what Wizards provide?
How many would be happy to sit at a table where a class doesn't work the way they have come to expect? Very few I suspect. Because they tend to approach character creation with their knowledge of the existing rules in mind to make decisions typically more about how they can do the most possible damage than anything else.
Home-brew settings is not at all relevant to the discussion.
Neither is really what home-brew rules you can dream up.
My point has been about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations.
In this very same thread there are some saying having "fewer options"—when what they really mean is having fewer choices to be made in line with the rules—is limiting. But it isn't. Not if you've a DM or players with a drop of creativity who do not see the rules as written as laws by which to abide. What's limiting is tethering yourself to a ruleset to the point you can't even begin to imagine the possibilities for a class or for a spell that might stretch beyond the rules as written. That is limiting. Whether they seek to limit themselves to just official stuff is beside the point. It's still limiting. And their then calling the very opposite of what is limiting "limiting" is ironic. Next time maybe read what I am responding to. Instead of just assuming I am calling it "ironic" for some to simply choose to play using strictly official stuff. There's nothing ironic about that. You're right. But when they then complain about the "lack of options" in earlier editions? As if we didn't just make things up to give ourselves options? That's ironic. (And don't tell me I don't know what irony means. I teach students to identify it in literature for a living.)
Well, obviously a DM can allow anything. That’s as true now as it was then. But that’s irrelevant to the argument. We’re talking about what we like about a system, not what we like about our house rules. And if you think people now don’t house rule and change things to fit what they like, I’ve got news for you.
And the idea that the game is now more about combat does not match my experience playing in those days. Early editions were dungeon crawls with monster hotel dungeons and traps that existed for no discernible reason. The plot was mostly, get more money and better loot. Repeat until your character dies. Role play meant giving your character a name other than Bob the VI, because your previous 5 Bobs had died.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. There were, eventually, non-weapon proficiencies. The name alone should tell you how early editions worked. The designers started to realize, wait, people want to do things out of combat? I guess we’ll tell them what they can pick up besides a sword.
Ok, that's fair. Also, I teach it for sociology and psychiatry. I can give ya that. Glad I checked while you did your edit -- the original was a tab bit different, but same point, and I would still have to give it to you.
But you still need to acknowledge that 5e is less limiting that B/X/BECMI as a ruleset, which was their point.
and the point that was made previously was that 5e is more limiting that earlier editions -- the original point was not that players limit themselves, the point was the the game itself is more limiting. You are now speaking about the players limiting themselves again -- which is not about 5e, which is still the core part of th e discourse as far as I am aware.
I am not seeing how this makes 5e a worse version -- all the points raised so far are about 5e being more restrictive than OSR -- and yet everything that can be done in OSR exct C/P the rules verbatim can be done with 5e.
So that isn't a benefit of something older over 5e. That's a difference in the players, and that's not the fault of either the company or the product (the published game, specifically).
I'm an old AD&D player, and disliked Basic -- and I still know a lot of old Basic players who disliked AD&D. It was a whole thing back then. The OG edition wars, in current terms.
I keep reading that B/X and 3.5 are somehow better than 5e, but the explanations I am being given are "it gave us more freedom" and there's nothing taking away that freedom in 5e. Hell, I'm still doing it and there's arguably more freedom, as I pointed out in my edit above.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Even Basic D&D back then had rules for domain-level play. Had rules for managing strongholds etc. So you are wrong. Those who made the game played with OD&D which was even more basic and ran long and involved campaigns using that system. Just because people like yourself might have ran it as little more than a "dungeon crawl" doesn't mean that was the case for everyone. I ran a years' long campaign that took place mostly at sea and in port towns. If players just saw one character after another die how do you figure we wound up with characters well beyond 10th level? Your post is full of what are nothing more than stereotypes about early D&D. Which I find funny given you say you played back then.
Earlier fighters distinguished themselves by being the only class that really progressed when it came to combat. Well. That and the fact the player would pour enough life into the character to make it stand out. Now the fighter is one of the absolute dullest of classes in the game. When a rogue with a high enough DEX and a Finesse weapon in its hand can outclass a fighter in combat the fighter is drained of much of its meaning. The archetypes add little to nothing to the class. I have played fighters who had much better and much more interesting options available to them through negotiations made with an accommodating DM.
Ok, sorry about the formatting and such, but it is to make the points clearer.
First, the underlined bits. Unofficial stuff inherently includes homebrew. You cannot in good faith fix a goalpost and then move it. Pick one -- unofficial or not. If unofficial, then homebrew everything counts -- or narrow your specificity.
1 - How many out of 19,029,053 members? At least 9,514,526 -- all homebrew worlds. That "over half of all worlds are homebrew" data point has been solid for at least 40 years. Was up to 65% during the early 5e era. Has come down to just under 60% today. High was in AD&D where it was in the 70% range. By definition, those worlds use things that are unofficial. Less than one third of all games take place on official settings, and that third is divided up among all the setting as a whole, and then again by those who just use the setting and then dump their own homebrew on top of it.
2 - I use unofficial stuff all the time. Just never, ever 3rd party. We create it ourselves -- so it is all second party. Indeed, I am a bad girl: I use the PHB, DMG, TCE, XgE, MM, and MMotM. And only some of those are for anything other than ideas. My homebrew house rules is bigger than any one of those books at 600 pages. 2nd party is not official.
3 - Your first good point, but here you are blaming players again for the faults of the game itself. I can say that I agree -- hang out in any of the forums here and you'll see a ton of theorycraft. Head to r/dnd and it is worse; plus they punish homebrew and more. So there is certainly a sizeable chunk of the online community who thinks that way. I wonder why they they think that way.
Could it be that the games they play in are mostly about combat? Or, and hear me out, could it be that they are doing the same thing today that they did back in the old days, the hard edged days, the days when I ran an open game with all comers who would bring in the most optimized to kill shit PCs with all the fanciest magical items? That was 80 to 83. The goal of optimizing PCs is not new, not a "recent or sudden change in the player base".
That has been around since 0e. If there is math, math people will use it. If there is a way to game the system, engineering fans will game the system -- 1981, June, first time someone tried the dust explosion on me. LORDY i was pissed. I was also a teenager, but meh.
And additionally, a hell of a lot of players just want to smash the ugly monster with the big ass sword. That's all they want out of the game. So that's an appeal that falls apart on examination in context.
Now, you get to what you say your point is. I accept that, and on that basis apologize for the earlier confusion.
How does 5e not help that be accomplished? if anything, WotC's entire ethos from day one of taking over the company has been all about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations. That's not something that they can change or fix, though, and certainly not something that is the fault of problem of the game...
... and not the fault or problem of the players. It is patent that the majority of players (who are not represented entirely online) are more than willing to indulge their imaginations and be stunningly creative. I have a freaking ball joint doll as a species in my game, who is very androgynous until they imprint on the person they encounter first, and then they shift slightly to a form that is considered unthreatening. This is a playable race in my game that I would never have thought of on my own -- it came from one of the kids in our group.
She wanted to play a robot maid warrior.
I'm just not seeing how you think that players are limited by anything, how they have their imaginations curtailed or how they are limited unable to think outside the box by 5e.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Why do i like 5e: I want to preface this with a little information I have son he just turned 15 he suffers from Epilepsy and Cerebral Palsy, and he is nonverbal. He is generally happy and watches the world with a smile on his face. He enjoyed it when we used to host our gaming groups on saturday and sunday (the pandemic killed that). He will never be able to play the game, my groups have always made an effort to include him even when we are on discord. This is important because almost two years ago i got to do the next best thing. My youngest sister Mandi who used to watch us play and steal our dice when she was a toddler, she came to me asking advice on which edition to use to introduce her children to D&D. I bought her the core books, and her family now has a regular game night. I got to pass on D&D to another generation; it does not get any better than that.
I explicitly stated more than once that the "rising tide lifts all boats" aphorism is rarely true, and it being true of TTRPGs is one such rare case. However, I also pointed out upstream how common it is to see franchises in other media attracting mainstream popularity to the point of annoying fans of that media who prefer less mega-popular examples, yet other contenders in those media segments continue to flourish. Regardless, the TTRPG space doesn't "only support" D&D 5E, as your metaphor about movies suggests.
Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space.
It's interesting that you bring up superhero comic books. While you're right that Marvel and DC have the most well-known stables of superhero characters, other publishers have superhero comics that have achieved lasting popularity and led to TV shows, movies, and games. Spawn is likely the most well-known because it's the longest-running indie superhero comic, but there are plenty of other examples. But the comic book industry is an interesting comparison because the big two - Marvel and DC - cater to the superhero fans and ignore a lot of folks who want other kinds of comic book stories. And while there are indie publishers who have popular superhero franchises, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, Valiant, etc., publish comics that appeal to folks who want more than just superhero fare. If all you focus on is lamenting that indie publishers don't have their own Superman or Spider-Man then you miss out on amazing titles like Saga, The Walking Dead, Paper Girls, Resident Alien, Archie, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. And this is just like the way so many TTRPG systems have been developed that don't follow D&D's formulas (or even use a D20, let alone a D20-based system!). Yeah, I love playing D&D, but I also love playing Marvel Multiverse, Blades in the Dark, Girl by Moonlight, Deadlands, Tales of Xadia, and Monster of the Week.
If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D just... try to be more imaginative. Like all the people imagining up other games and systems. Don't let the "what ifs" of the slippery slope fallacy lead you into doom and gloom. D&D is the most popular it's ever been. Which I love. But everything else in the TTRPG space is more popular now because the space as a whole is getting more players, more attention, and more creativity.
I am going to risk it, and I hope I don't dinged for it, but I have kept thinking about some stuff while working on those damned books of mine.
A guess about Summation:
My read on some of this is that the problem is not the game itself, it is the way that many players of the game -- notably players who spend time online, in forums and on websites dedicated to D&D -- have an inordinate amount of focus and devotion to the concept of RAW, and are condemnatory of anything that is not RAW.
They will bad mouth people and ideas, and they will not join games on LFG sites or other places where the game is not played RAW or with too much homebrew -- which is often relegated to back corners or separate groups and forums by the larger sites and groups.
It is a culture, filled with more players than ever before -- the percentages may remain constant, butthe per capita is dramatically different. At least half the players engaging with the game today are uninterested or uncaring not only about the 50 years of lore and history in the game, they are even less concerned by the shifts in mechanics and playstyles. They have a set of expectations that they want met, and they are uninterested in changing or learning something new or different, because it affects their enjoyment of the game they do not take as seriously as some who have, perhaps, played long enough to watch all their hair fall out.
This makes it more difficult for those who have a strong idea of what they like (the different types of DM's, for example, in the video i lined to instead of an article because apparently video does better with folks these days) and a style of play that does not mesh well with what folks have seen in other forms of media about D&D, such as BG3, or Critical Role/Dimension 20, Stranger Things, Influencers on video streaming sites, or some NYT/Medium/Slash post.
This media is successful, and popular, and affects a sizeable chunk of the population, even those who are not found online.
This makes it more difficult for folks who operate, think, and create in a different/separate paradigm from the dominant one(s) to indulge their own way of interacting with the game, in whatever edition, form, or altered state.
In anger, frustration, and possibly some degree of resentment, they have laid the root cause for all of this at the footsteps of the design and implementation of 5th Edition, and, by extension, Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast division.
It is not that they "dislike" or "fail to understand" 5e or how it works or what it has or lacks (it has not been their cup of tea, which is perfectly cromulent), it is that the "kinds of players" that 5e has attracted are not considered good for their way of playing or style of game, and that previous systems with which they are more familiar (or variants of previous systems) are better suited, in their opinions, to the way that they play, and that is a further point of frustration and resentment.
In the Initial case, it is a challenge of a particular play style and approach that folks who have engaged with 5e appear to be unable to successfully comprehend the distinctive style and approach to playing the game that is sought. This is puzzling, as it appears that only when people encounter 5e before their approach do they have a problem adapting to their specific play style and approach, while those who encounter them first do not.
In a separate case, the core challenge is the obsessive nature with which online folks treat official products as the final arbiter of right and proper. They are also not fond of 5e in general -- as valid and fine an opinion as any other -- and feel that the particular part of the larger community around D&D and similar games is preferable to the majority of that same larger community that is, as they noted, seemingly obsessed with rules as written.
In this secondary case, they asserted that older versions were limitless, allowed for more negotiation with DMs, and were more personally preferable to them than the current game, due in large part to the seemingly endless number of persons for whom there is and only ever will be RAW 5e. They have a subtext of an older style and approach that placed the DM in a more primary role than today -- 5e is a Player Centric game, and there does seem to be some subtle course correcting going on with the 2024 version. They feel that in some way the company or the edition has made it so that the community is self-censoring their own imaginations.
If I am wrong about any of the above, please let me know.
I want to note that I do not disagree with this as a general premise. I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself -- that is a function of a secondary market and the broader sociocultural shift away from in person to virtual gaming, necessitating the development and use of Virtual Tabletops (including and not limited to the upcoming Sigil).
The game itself is adapting to meet this need -- it is still a product, and the goal of the product is to appeal to the greatest number of people possible (understanding that it cannot reach all people even in doing so) at which the 2014 edition has been wildly successful by any competent measure. The environment in concern, though, is a programmatic one, which by its nature tends to limit things in some way that is inescapable given current technological limitations. For example, I am less excited about Sigil in large part because of the aesthetic of it, the look of it. But I am interested in it because of the first person perspective and the ability to modify the setting. However, even should I find it of value, it will remain outside any real use on my part as intended, because I have so heavily modified my games.
This is not just true of DDB, however, this is true of any VTT. They remove the math solving need on the part of a player, they roll the dice, they take away the book keeping and such that was a large part of us older folks' experience with the game. They are only able to because they are structured to mimic the official rules -- and only the official rules. The RAW. This, in turn, creates a feedback where it becomes more and more difficult to find people who are not playing RAW because the tools and methods they use to interact with the game are entirely limited to RAW.
And those tools and systems are, unintentionally, hostile to any sort of homebrew that is not rigidly controlled and specific in format and style. And it is this system that I think has the greatest impact on the thinking and ideation of the second party -- if the majority of new players only know how to use character builders and Roll 20, then how will the adapt to a table top game that is far more imaginative and has broader ideas, bigger ideas than is possible with merely the default ruleset?
But that isn't 5e, specially, that is the root cause, or even Hasbro -- if anything, Hasbro is late to the game and playing catch up. This problem impacts OSR developers, as well -- many get their systems into these VTTs, only to find that the game play, well, sucks. because of the limiting and programmatic nature of the tools. It is, to borrow the phrase, an Innovation Shift -- VTTs are a disruptive influence akin to the introduction of the iPhone (to borrow an earlier comparative), upending the entire way that a whole industry operates.
And those of us who have a desire to be not late adoptees but laggards (to use Rogers' terminology) and cling to the previous model and approach will be left out. It truly is a precarious moment for anyone whose systems cannot be effectively programmitized and whose style does not mesh well with the resultant outcome of that programmatization.
Such as OSR folks, older edition players, and weird ass folks like myself who take the base rules and make them into something we think is cooler than all get out.
It isn't there quite yet, but if you follow the diffusion of innovation principles, then we are already past the tipping point -- critical mass is achieved.
It is that point which puts the criticism of 5e against the like of 5e in the crosshairs, such as this post and thread has done.
That's my thoughts for now and a while.
If I misrepresented the sides of the other two, I apologize and invite them to offer corrections.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
You are missing the point. All a homebrew rule is, is an official rule for your DM. It is still rules over rulings.
Here are a couple anecdotes from the first campaign I played, run by the DM that taught me and was taught by a DM that learned from Arneson.
First) My party had arrived at an elven city, and as important guests they wanted us protected but it would look bad if we went around in armor, so they made us clothes enchanted with protection. Easy enough mechanically to just give the otherwise ordinary, if well-made, clothes an armor bonus. Well, my character having had trouble hiding asked for black clothes. Another player asked me why, and I responded that I tended to get better rolls when I can in my mind how and why my character would be successful, and black clothes are hard to see in shadows. The DM said it made sense and not only described my character's clothes as seeming to almost suck in light, she also gave me a bonus to hide from the clothes. No one else got any skill bonuses from their enchanted clothes, and no one cared. No one derided it as unfair or unbalanced. But more importantly, The DM didn't go searching through the book to see what options were available. The DM simply translated what they wanted into mechanical terms and said that. It made it easy to communicate that my clothes really did make it easier to hide, and I wasn't even a rogue. Further, it was also specific. There was no question about how much it helped me hide, and more importantly, it did actually help me hide by affecting my rolls when I rolled to hide, and unlike 5e's advantage, helping me hide was scalable, allowing the DM to set the hide bonus to be a measure of how much it helped me hide. Advantage can't do that. Advantage (at least as 5e does it) is an all or nothing affair.
Second) in the same game, each player took turns rolling the random encounters. One player kept rolling an eagle, an ordinary eagle. Notable here is that it was never a combat encounter, cause guess what, encounters did not need to be combat. Anyway, she rolled this eagle several times in a row it was her turn to roll. The DM had it be the same eagle every time. Then the player finally rolled something other than the eagle, which surprisingly fit because we were in a dungeon, Then on her next random roll, she rolled the eagle again. As we had just walked into an animal handling room with pens and cages of various animals, the DM worked into the game that the eagle was trapped in one of the cages. Then, when the player freed the eagle, the eagle became her animal companion, even though she did not have the class feature. Didn't matter that was getting an extra class feature. It fit the story. But it was quite handy that she could just take the feature and have a general guideline on how to handle her new companion. This shows two things done that are not really done these days. First, the DM used the existing mechanics as shorthand. The DM didn't need to explain anything about what the player could do with her animal companion, nor what skills she would need, just had to give her the animal companion feature and done. Common understanding. Second, the DM took randomness and worked it into the narrative. Sure some still do this in some form, but it is almost always just another combat encounter with an unknown enemy. But my DM here did not just make the encounter happen as some stand alone unexpected event. She worked it into the narrative tying it both back into the history of the campaign and setting up for the future of the campaign (as she had told us that she had figured the bbeg had captured the eagle when the player rolled something else for once).
Notice how in both of these anecdotes, mechanics were used in ways outside the traditional use of mechanics, and they were not homebrew options, but rather just unique situations not dictated by the mechanics yet the mechanics served as shorthand communication and the ability to make something actually matter to rolls that normally would not.
The DM didn't treat the rules as a "how to play," instead she played first and used the rules as mere aids to accomplish her goals. Additionally, none of us looked at the rules for what to do or how to do it. I didn't even expect the bonus to hide, but rather I asked for roleplay reasons and the experience of seeing things in my mind as I made choices or when I rolled. I didn't look at the rules choose something from some table.
SandeebaRezYouri - That is not the point the above user is making. That is the point you are trying to make, but you do not get to just decide to insert your own points into another user's post because it fits your narrative. I will also note that, once again, you are being inconsistent to the point of being hypocritical in your posting--after all, you ranted in another post about how 5e leaves too much up to the DM (which you said could result in inconsistent rulings or confusion)... and are now trying to justify your love of earlier editions by saying that DMs could just translate things into DM-contrived mechanical terms (resulting in the very same problems you said 5e had).
There's some other nonsense you write, like your trying to say "encounters did not need to be combat" as if that was a unique feature of earlier editions not existent in 5e... even though 5e explicitly makes the non-combat encounter a clear part of the game.
Your anecdotes, your inconsistency in articulating your own points, and your clear lack of understanding of 5e are, however, are helpful. In an earlier post, I said your problem seemed to be a lack of understanding of 5e--after all, the near totality of your posting on 5e has demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of 5e's rules and systems, as nearly every single person on this thread has pointed out to you. I realize now that I was wrong--your problem is not that you do not understand 5e; it is that you do not seem to fundamentally grasp any edition of D&D.
At its core, your anecdotes about prior editions of D&D share a common thread - a dedication to using the "Rule of Cool" instead of looking up the rules. It is pretty clear you played earlier editions fast and loose with the official rules, confusing your lackadaisical approach to the game for how the game was designed to be played. Perhaps that was because you were younger and the rules were less important in your youth; perhaps it was because you did not really understand the rules; perhaps it was because your group just wanted to do what they thought might be cool, rules be darned. No matter the reason, it is clear you gained an anarchistic view of earlier editions that is not really supported by the reality of those editions' rules, many of which were far more intensive than 5e's.
Naturally, if you go from a game system where you decided not to learn the rules and do whatever you want, assuming without verifying there were no rules to support your Rule of Cool philosophy and start looking at 5e in terms of the rules... well, of course you are going to think 5e is stifling. But, here's a little tip for you - if you and your friends who ignored most of the 3.5 rules want to ignore most of the 5e rules, you are welcome to do that in 5e as well.
Now, there is nothing wrong with playing by Rule of Cool as the superseding authority. I certainly would not want to play at your table--but that is the joy of D&D. As long as you find a table that is a good fit for you, there is no true wrong way to play.
First, people often limit themselves without knowing it, and without intending to.
Second, there are multiple ways a limitation can be implemented. It's true that 5e does not explicitly deny creativity, but 5e's very design has an influence on the very structure of thinking of the players. Some players can remain unaffected by that, but it is a very subtle thing that goes by unnoticed, and such influences are not some esoteric thing that people can't control. Right now, people in power around the world use these exact kinds of subtle influences to manipulate the masses. But these influences are not always done intentionally, but sometimes they are.
Take for example, early windows, as in the operating system for computers. There was once a literal cheat sheet for designing windows programs, which did things like establish that check boxes were square and intended for when multiple options could be selected, and radio buttons were circular and for when only a single option could be selected, because then as became familiar with windows programs, they would subconsciously learn these rules and it would improve clarity, as people, without knowing why, would see radio buttons and just know that it meant they had to choose only one option. Most people never even realized it happened, never saw the cheat sheet. They just absorbed the information the same way children learn their first language.
This effect always happens. Sometimes designers take control of this effect, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes designers use this effect for something intentional and there end up also being unintended learned things as well.
5e is no different. The very structure of it teaches things, and not all those things are simply how to play. The notion of the role mechanics have in the running of the game, is one of those things. And both 5e and pf2, both encourage looking at mechanics in the same way players consider the mechanics of Chess. Homebrew vs wotc written mechanics is utterly meaningless to this point.
One thing that did not escape my notice, is that you still just have pre-written classes and races. You are not telling us how you create a unique for each player's unique character concept. No, you tell us about the classes you create that your players choose from the same as they would from the core book. When my DM gave my character's clothes a bonus to hide, it was a unique thing that represented a narrative choice. I did not choose an option from the book, nor did I choose an option from houserules the DM made. I made a purely narrative choice, and the DM did something unique to represent it.
You on the other hand, still think in terms of creating a set of rules and following those rules, and you consider creative freedom to be your ability to make your own rules. You don't give examples of making rulings. Even earlier, with the "traps" that your players circumvented without rolling a check, did not describe an occasion of the players forgoing the use of a mechanical option they had, but instead the players did not have a mechanical option, which forced them to do something not based on mechanics, further, the traps in the examples were not traps that one would disable anyway. So what were the alternatives? Perhaps a better question for you to answer, is "have your players ever been in a situation in which there was an obvious solution that would involve rolling a simple check that they could reasonably have done, that they instead tried something else anyway?"
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To answer your question bout the 7 types of DM, I'm a mixture of the Worldbuilder and minimalist. You might question that since I like 3.5 over 5e. How can I be the minimalist? Because, like the description of the minimalist, I let players try stuff. They want to do something, I do not look up whether it is allowed or not in the rules, instead I consider how it could be done according to how my world works, and then I consider whether it has any impact on rolling dice or permanent results to the character, if yes to either, then I figure out how to represent that with the mechanics. If a roll will be required, I judge what roll works best, and what bonuses or penalties best represent the effects that would impact the character's performance. I use the mechanics as a tool to make the player's choice happen and also have meaning.
I could easily go ultra light and just have players roll a d20 for everything, but by having skills and such, things they do can have an impact on their success, and that makes choices matter, even when they are not simply looking at the mechanics as a menu of choices. I could do the same without mechanics, but then I'd just be making mechanics in my head. If I play freeform, and I give a player a cloak that aids hiding, then I have to remember that they have a cloak that makes hiding easier, and I have to remember how much that cloak helps (are they basically invisible, or is just hunter's camo that provides a minor boost to hiding but only in woods?), in which case I'm making mechanics, but just keeping them all in my head.
On the contrary, fighters distinguished themselves by being like different people, the same way people in the real world distinguish themselves. Having different personalities and different tastes. They didn't need mechanical options to distinguish themselves.
Anecdote, played a fiery sorceress once. There was nothing about her magic or abilities to distinguish her. She was your bog standard pyromancer. What distinguished her was her personality, how I played her, how she responded every time the idiot rogue pinched her butt and nearly got himself roasted alive. How she took on the challenge of needing to calm her fiery nature to get close to the unicorn, how she responded when the party figured out she needed to and looked at her. There was not a single thing about her mechanically to distinguish her. I didn't even build her as she was a pregen character for the module.
"And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. "
And this is false. They used to roll to see if encountered monsters were hostile or not, because guess what, sometimes you would encounter an orc who was not interested in fighting at fighting at all.
Freedom isn't just about what is explicit. It is also about the encouragements and subtle influences. 5e encourages players to look at mechanics as a menu. Sure, players can look outside of the mechanics, but normally they will do so only when there are no mechanics. That is why 4e was hailed as being more free, because it lacked rules, players felt like they had more freedom, because simply having mechanics made them feel like they had to do things a certain way, even though the books explicitly said otherwise. 5e and pf2 are the same way. They subtly push for following mechanics, printed or homebrew.
And just because a lack of mechanics makes you feel more free, doesn't mean you actually are more free. In fact, that mindset limits your freedom, because even when you are comfortable being free when the mechanics are out of the way, when the mechanics do show up, you still feel the need to follow the mechanics, even if it is just following your homebrew mechanics. Sure you don't actually have to, but making homebrew mechanics is not defying the mechanical play, it is keeping the mechanical mindset.
Lastly, I want to reiterate, that I am not claiming any edition to be better than any other in a general sense. Each has different traits, and each fits different playstyles, and there isn't a right answer or a better answer to which playstyle you prefer to play. But there are always consequences, always costs, always a give and take.
"Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space."
They tried to end it. I'm not saying they weren't replacing it with something else, but they tried to end it. That why the lawyers that literally wrote the ogl originally had to actually speak up about the issue and say that the intent was for the OGL to be perpetual and not allowed to be ended and they were committed to making sure that WotC would not do so even so far as defending it in court. WotC and Hasbro claiming that they were just updating it is just the double speak description of what they were trying to do.
"If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D"
That is not what I was saying. there is this thing, which I have no good term for at the moment. It is the collective stuff that "everybody knows." It is usually wrong of course, but similarly there is the stuff that "everybody knows" and stuff the "everybody does" and similar "everybody" things that we might perhaps call the collective pool. Marvel and DC are in the collective pool. The others are not. It doesn't mean the other stuff doesn't exist, it just means they lack a certain ubiquitous recognition or reputation that exists almost subconsciously among the majority of members of a society. For example, in America "everyone knows" that animation is for kids or Simpsons kind of casual humor and not for serious mature storytelling. Doesn't matter that Japan proves that sentiment wrong every day and that there is a large and growing segment of Americans who watch the serious and mature Japanese animations, but anime and the serious mature storytelling in animated format is still not indoctrinated into the collective pool of what "everyone knows." And there are effects caused by that.
This post is well said. Puts a lot of things into words that I simply couldn't.
I don't agree with everything, but in large part I do agree.
"I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself "
This part however, I think that the companies are partly, and only partly, at fault. Companies want to monetize, and that is totally fair, so they certain have the means and motive to subtly shape their products to encourage trends in the direction they desire. They may not have created the idea of playing the games in a programmatic way, but they absolutely and intentionally help it along, because that makes it easier for them to monetize. I think it hurts the industry as a whole, even though you can't really say there is anything wrong with people playing that way, but the fact that both the major companies running shape what they do to focus things into a style more readily monetized still has rippling effects throughout the industry.
Certain Paizo folks have even said they explicitly do this for their PFS thing because they want every PFS session to have a consistent feel and therefore they set everything up specifically so that disparate GMs will still have a consistency in how they run things, and that means being programmatic.
A second point here, is that aside from the acceptance or programmability of mechanics is the use of mechanics. The fact that simply having an anti-trap skill, tends to make people think first of using the anti-trap skill for every trap, and to feel like someone in every party must have the anti-trap skill, and that for most, the only escape from that is to not have an anti-trap skill.
But it interests me that people also limit their view of mechanics to how they are used. Someone in this thread, I lost where it is, mentioned Disable Device as being exclusive to traps. No thought to the possible use for sabotage of general machinery, or if it might work on constructs (they are devices after all, and if it works on magical traps, why not magical devices).
That also reminded me of a discussion long ago about the DCs for climb. Someone in that thread had mentioned how no one needed to raise climb skill very high because none of the DCs listed in the book were high, and they listed the highest modifier in the book. My response was to lay out a narrative situation in which multiple of the additive modifiers in the book could easily result in extremely high climb DCS, such as climbing a cliff in the middle of terrible storm with minuscule handholds and a few other modifiers. It apparently never occurred to them that additive modifiers could be added together, likely because they had never seen it done, regardless of what the mechanics actually said even when they were reading the mechanics to make their example.
No, I wouldn’t wonder why you would be a minimalist, the point was to have you give me an idea of how your view is structured — that helps.
freeform is what I expected.
as the point about classes: yes, I have 20 classes. Each class a set fixed list of capabilities, an axiom, and an affinity. They also have a list of some several hundred different abilities they can choose from to customize their PC.
but I do operate from an Archetype basis. To me and to my players, when you step away from archetypes, it stops feeling like D&D. 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e all operated from the basis of an archetype, and that is a fundamental structure that holds all versions of D&D together. In broad game theory, there are Archetype, Skill, and Freeform bases, and those determine much of the overall structure. FATE, for example, is more a Freeform style, less concerned with concept. D&D is an archetype based system. Traveller did the Skill style.
stepping away from Archetypes makes it not feel like D&D. Doesn’t matter what the archetypes are, mind you, but they need to be present or I am uninterested. There’s a reason that we play only four games systems regularly despite having tried and worked on hundreds: we know what we like, and from there we just move on. Of them, we play D&D the most. But none of them escaped our re-engineering.
however, the archetypes serve as starting points for the development of a person of that world. The world is the Structure, and as such it sets the space that provides the limits, not the game. Nor does that inherently mean I that I still think in terms of classes - assumption without evidence. You have too narrow a sample to determine that from.
i do think in terms of rules. It is a game, and other than Calvinball, games have rules. All games. Indeed, the nature of games is predicated on the basis of rules — so anyone who is talking about games is talking about rules, fundamentally, and thus even you think in terms of rules.
the traps I mentioned— the ones you jumped to the conclusion were pit traps, even though I never described them as pit traps — were solved using several different mechanics. Just not ones that had a damn thing to do with any trap related skill or ability. Your response, though, highlighted that there was an absence of knowledge about 5es rules, and so rather than I respond, I deleted what I had been going to say.
you also forgot: the cleric did have a tool to disarm traps. And could have used it. So the question you asked is, again, still answers by the same response. Throwing sandbags to trigger spike throwers, lifting, hauling, positioning, and using a log — these all still had mechanical tests and challenges.
as for a narrative choice, everything in the books is a narrative choice, including the use of the mechanics or not using them. The narrative choice bit of the clothing is no different from my player’s deciding “that looks like a trapped area, let’s solve that problem” and then doing it. All of that was narrative, improvisational, and creative. So, again, no distinction and an empty argument.
The meta textual influence you reference requires specific evidence to use as an argument, though. I am aware such things exist, but I am also aware of how they operate, explicitly, and so I would need to have some concrete examples in order to accept that argument. How, specifically, do they teach looking at the game as a game of chess in terms of maximizing and optimizing?
last I checked, chess doesn’t allow you to alter how the pieces move. The optimization in chess is not in the game, it is in the player, and not a part of the game but an outgrowth of playing it.
if you mean the mathematical optimization to cause the greatest amount of damage, the game doesn’t do that — that is the outcome of the way that people play it — a way that encourages more combat. Reduce the combat, and the value in optimization for that purpose fades. But also, optimization is not a bad thing — everyone optimizes time, ability, skill sets, minutes used, and even their appearance. In real life, not the game. The game is just an expression of that same principle.
so that argument, thus far, appears empty as well. If more DM ran wilderness survival games, PCs would be optimized for that, instead — there are numbers involved. Engineers love numbers.
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I didn't miss your point, what I was pointing out is that the evidence is contrary to it. People don't limit themselves to "officially published options and supplements", they didn't back then and they do so even less now. I'm not a professional writer, game designer or publisher, what I am is an experienced DM and even I manage to sell the books I create on DM Guild very steadily. The reason people buy my books, the same reason they buy books from the guild in general is because people very specifically do not limit themselves to official options. Not everyone is comfortable designing and writing their own material, but the desire to expand their game beyond any limits is a huge driving force behind D&D. There is a massive 3rd party market. I wrote for example The Book fo Backgrounds: Volume 1 - Family Legacies in response to the fact that I thought the background options in the book were not narrative enough, not explicit or interesting enough and people love that book. I sell a few copies almost every single day. I think if people were as you describe limiting themselves, there is no way anyone would be buying books from a complete no-body novice writer/designer like me. What you are saying is simply not true.
5e's fan base is not the only one that was flexible like this. This was true in the 3e days and even in the 4e days. There has always been a drive to expand the rules and the game as a whole. It's in the DNA of D&D culture and really the only notable difference between OSR players and Modern D&D players is what system they use as their starting point, which I will agree with you, creates very different playstyles and games from either side can and often are built on very different philosophies, but there is also a tremendous amount of cross-over. There are more things in common between these two worlds than there are differences.
I mean I create content on DM's Guild and even though its made for 5e, most of this stuff is pretty system agnostic, I know because I use a lot of the stuff I create in my Old School Essentials games.
I think people in the OSR and I'm guilty of this too, often seek out differences in old school and new school gaming out of frustration of trying to get games off the ground in modern D&D culture and struggling to because of the popularity of 5e. It's such a force of nature, such an overwhelming influence that even among the OSR the most popular games are based on 5e... case in point, Shadowdark for example.
I have and always will be an OSR die hard and I will never stop trying to get modern gamers to play old school games as I mostly agree with you that in a lot of ways, those experiences are far more vivid than anything 5e can produce, but the more I play and the more I write for 5e, the more I realize that these perceived differences get smaller and smaller.
You did exactly what you are accusing that user of doing. You replied to me with talk of published home-brew content showing you hadn't entirely read and understood—or you were just willingly misrepresenting—what I was saying. And did so just so you could try to insult me by pretending I was oblivious to all those supplements on DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG even though I myself had made mention of them. Mostly how needless they were and how so many of them are PWYW because they provide nothing any one of us couldn't dream up ourselves.
As my response to you pointed out I am not just talking about the rules in place in an official book. Although I am genuinely interested to know just how much trust you have in those who sell game supplements on DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG and who don't work for Wizards. How a DM might home-brew a class say still places limits on what can be done with that class. My main point has been about allowing players to use their imaginations to come up with—within reason—their own ideas as far as how their characters' classes or whatever go.
When we had "fewer options" at our disposal we were forced to do that. Many DMs encouraged this at their tables. A player watches this or that movie and says they want to play a character like [X]. [X] has features that don't quite match any of those afforded any class. The player gets to imagine how this might work. If the DM decides it is not too overpowered—remembering "balance" was the last thing on our minds back then—the player gets a character who can do some thing some character in some movie can do. And everyone is happy.
I have been playing in a heavily modified 5E game in which every level up sees the players negotiating what new class feature their characters will get or how an existing one will be improved. Because the DM prefers this more DIY/old-school approach and has grown weary of how predictable 5E has become after a decade of playing it. I have played my fair share of 5E as written. It is good at what it does. But it grows stale very quickly. You said "reality" does not support "my narrative." My "narrative" is that it is ironic when people complain about how there were "fewer options" baked into the rules in earlier editions of the game only for them to favor an edition that provides them with many in line with the rules but do so at the expense of a model that instead saw us relying on how illimitable the imagination is when it comes to getting what we want out of the game. I'd say reality supports that just fine.
Very much this. I think a lot of newer players find it hard to fathom that not every encounter that could potentially devolve into a fight must end in one. This is not to mention that it was not uncommon for adventuring parties to have to flee. Something that rarely if ever happens in a 5E game. Practically every encounter outside of what is clearly demarcated as a strictly social encounter is seen as a bag of Hit Points. That happens when you treat the game as little more than one in which to optimize every single character in a way it will deliver optimal damage.
Plus as I have already mentioned: Even B/X had rules for strongholds.
The notion the game was purely about combat because Persuasion or Deception or whatever weren't skills is preposterous. Because these were things players were required to ROLEPLAY. Not just roll.
Arneson said the purpose of a DM was to arbitrate whenever players wanted their characters to do things outside of combat. The very emergence of D&D is seen in its founders playing what were just war games but wanting a game that could be so much more. So acting as if early D&D was just about combat is historically false as well as preposterous.