The new stuff is very role play oriented, and yet, if you look at what changes they propose it's very player oriented and very combat driven, which is paradoxical.
At the heart though, D&D is the haven for theater kids, not the old school war strategist nerds. (I don't think games like outdoor survival or the pen and paper war games my uncles used to play even exist anymore).
I remember characters being easily drawn up in a few minutes and then most of your time was dungeon delving, and you didn't need much in the way of your character having a back story or the game itself needing that much of a story.
These days, it's about story. I love it, and to avoid some of the issues you are all discussing it's good to have conversations with your players regarding what they want to play and how your story is going to go.
The biggest drawback is that players have an idea as to what they want to play as and a fabulous backstory and how they think their character's story needs to play out, and they get REALLY REALLY REALLY upset when they roll crap (and i get it. consecutive bad rolls SUCK, but a player should be able to role play weaknesses and occasional screw ups), and most of it comes from not understanding what a GOOD character is (the flaws), and part of it is being so invested in that one character, that it's hard to let them fail or die.
That failure and death is built into AD&D and original Basic, but in expecting it, it also doesn't do much role play. The hard part of any edition is finding balance.
My gaming crew is a mixed bag of old-school players, modern gamers and converts (in both directions), its a very diverse group you could say in terms of how they identify what D&D is, how it should be played, what is important in the game and so on. I really don't see all that much difference between them to be honest. I mean there are points of contention, but nothing that gets in the way of these players being in the same campaign. I have never heard anyone proclaim that "our" role-playing was different than "other peoples" role-playing. I know there is often this presumption for some reason that role-playing was different in 1e compared to how it is now in 5e, but, I can tell with 100% certainty, not a damn thing has changed in years I have been around.
So far as I can tell the only difference between old-school and new-school gaming is that modern players look down on their character sheet too often to figure out what they can and can't do which is something that I(we) train out of new players in a couple of sessions.
The new stuff is very role play oriented, and yet, if you look at what changes they propose it's very player oriented and very combat driven, which is paradoxical.
At the heart though, D&D is the haven for theater kids, not the old school war strategist nerds. (I don't think games like outdoor survival or the pen and paper war games my uncles used to play even exist anymore).
I remember characters being easily drawn up in a few minutes and then most of your time was dungeon delving, and you didn't need much in the way of your character having a back story or the game itself needing that much of a story.
These days, it's about story. I love it, and to avoid some of the issues you are all discussing it's good to have conversations with your players regarding what they want to play and how your story is going to go.
The biggest drawback is that players have an idea as to what they want to play as and a fabulous backstory and how they think their character's story needs to play out, and they get REALLY REALLY REALLY upset when they roll crap (and i get it. consecutive bad rolls SUCK, but a player should be able to role play weaknesses and occasional screw ups), and most of it comes from not understanding what a GOOD character is (the flaws), and part of it is being so invested in that one character, that it's hard to let them fail or die.
That failure and death is built into AD&D and original Basic, but in expecting it, it also doesn't do much role play. The hard part of any edition is finding balance.
My gaming crew is a mixed bag of old-school players, modern gamers and converts (in both directions), its a very diverse group you could say in terms of how they identify what D&D is, how it should be played, what is important in the game and so on. I really don't see all that much difference between them to be honest. I mean there are points of contention, but nothing that gets in the way of these players being in the same campaign. I have never heard anyone proclaim that "our" role-playing was different than "other peoples" role-playing. I know there is often this presumption for some reason that role-playing was different in 1e compared to how it is now in 5e, but, I can tell with 100% certainty, not a damn thing has changed in years I have been around.
So far as I can tell the only difference between old-school and new-school gaming is that modern players look down on their character sheet too often to figure out what they can and can't do which is something that I(we) train out of new players in a couple of sessions.
I'm not saying that old players and new can't get along. ;)
I mean to say that the hobby has evolved and changed and that there's very distinct differences from then and now.
As or "training out of them" habits... I'm not trying to train anyone to do anything. Each group kind of takes a few sessions to gel and get into understanding how to work together (either as a tactical squadron or as a theater troupe or somewhere in between).
My point is that players want more role play in general, and they invest more into characters and that investment helps facilitate the desire for their character to be "the chosen one" or "the dramatic one" (the one where he narrative focuses on their backstory). They want their characters to shine the brightest.
This is radically different from rolling some dice, deciding on playing a fighter, a cleric, or a wizard, and then beating the crap out of monster #31235 in dungeon number #2483.....
Honestly, this shouldn't be taken as a surprise anyhow. Even in video games, we moved from little pixellated plumbers saving princesses because reasons????? to games that get big budget movie and netflix series adaptations....
My point about the proposed changes is that narratively, they seem to remove a lot of individuality and player choice consequences.
My point is that players want more role play in general, and they invest more into characters and that investment helps facilitate the desire for their character to be "the chosen one" or "the dramatic one" (the one where he narrative focuses on their backstory). They want their characters to shine the brightest.
This is radically different from rolling some dice, deciding on playing a fighter, a cleric, or a wizard, and then beating the crap out of monster #31235 in dungeon number #2483.....
Man I need to teach a class on D&D history, there is so much terrible information out there. I know that the OSR is to blame because there are so many people who proclaim to be "old school gamers", by doing all of this golden age stuff, but you have to understand that what most of the OSR thinks old school gaming is based on their reading of the old school rules not from the experience of being there actually playing during this period. No one past the 80's during 1e era and I quite literally mean no one, not even Gygax played the game RAW or even anything approaching it.
What you are describing was a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was and even before my time, by the mid 80's the game had evolved into largely a free-form role-playing theatre it is today and it didn't happen magically because new players arrived, it happened because the players of that time´, myself included evolved the game to what it is today. The rules followed not to long after, long before even 2nd edition AD&D the average D&D game had skills, feats, sub-races, sub-classes, and bound accuracy, hell I had the first Dragon Born in my game in 1984, we called them Draconians, but same difference.
Everything you see in 5e today, down to the tiniest detail was invented by the old-school D&D community ages ago, 5e was built on essentially 40+ years of community content scraped together mostly by consultant game designers, most of which are writing books for the OSR today. Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks. Their masterpiece was 4e, which frankly was a great game, it just wasn't D&D and the reason it wasn't D&D is because they did not use the 40 years of evolution that the game community developed.
This perception that old-school gaming is somehow done differently than modern gaming is one of the biggest lies in D&D. Trust me when I tell you that I'm as old school as it gets, my game is as old school as it gets and if you joined my game you would not think that I or the players in my game are doing anything "differently" than you are in your game today. You would feel right at home. Your game is my game, I know, because I evolved my game to be the game you're playing now.. if that makes any sense. Like 5e is an OSR game for all intents and purposes.
I know that the OSR community is pretty crappy to modern gamers (I have been guilty of this myself in the past), but it's mainly because this total re-writing of D&D history and who controls "the truth of it" has become almost like American politics. It's just stupid and when you come to that realization by actually sitting down at a table with gamers from different eras, it becomes painfully obvious that there is literally no difference between the presumably different D&D cultures.
Don't bite, there is no such thing as "how the game used to be played", that is some shit Gygax and Arneson did in the 70's when they were testing their prototype and I know there are purists out there that would wholeheartedly disagree and quote rulebooks which gives away the fact that they weren't there. No one ever actually used 1e AD&D rules, the book was full of suggestions, not rules. but I digress and apologize for the rant.
All Im saying is Modern role-playing as you know it basically started around 1984 with D&D modules like Dragons of Despair. The rules have continually evolved of course but what role-playing is hasn't changed even a little bit since then.
My point is that players want more role play in general, and they invest more into characters and that investment helps facilitate the desire for their character to be "the chosen one" or "the dramatic one" (the one where he narrative focuses on their backstory). They want their characters to shine the brightest.
This is radically different from rolling some dice, deciding on playing a fighter, a cleric, or a wizard, and then beating the crap out of monster #31235 in dungeon number #2483.....
Man I need to teach a class on D&D history, there is so much terrible information out there. I know that the OSR is to blame because there are so many people who proclaim to be "old school gamers", by doing all of this golden age stuff, but you have to understand that what most of the OSR thinks old school gaming is based on their reading of the old school rules not from the experience of being there actually playing during this period. No one past the 80's during 1e era and I quite literally mean no one, not even Gygax played the game RAW or even anything approaching it.
What you are describing was a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was and even before my time, by the mid 80's the game had evolved into largely a free-form role-playing theatre it is today and it didn't happen magically because new players arrived, it happened because the players of that time´, myself included evolved the game to what it is today. The rules followed not to long after, long before even 2nd edition AD&D the average D&D game had skills, feats, sub-races, sub-classes, and bound accuracy, hell I had the first Dragon Born in my game in 1984, we called them Draconians, but same difference.
Everything you see in 5e today, down to the tiniest detail was invented by the old-school D&D community ages ago, 5e was built on essentially 40+ years of community content scraped together mostly by consultant game designers, most of which are writing books for the OSR today. Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks. Their masterpiece was 4e, which frankly was a great game, it just wasn't D&D and the reason it wasn't D&D is because they did not use the 40 years of evolution that the game community developed.
This perception that old-school gaming is somehow done differently than modern gaming is one of the biggest lies in D&D. Trust me when I tell you that I'm as old school as it gets, my game is as old school as it gets and if you joined my game you would not think that I or the players in my game are doing anything "differently" than you are in your game today. You would feel right at home. Your game is my game, I know, because I evolved my game to be the game you're playing now.. if that makes any sense. Like 5e is an OSR game for all intents and purposes.
Don't bite, there is no such thing as "how the game used to be played", that is some shit Gygax and Arneson did in the 70's when they were testing their prototype and I know there are purists out there that would wholeheartedly disagree and quote rulebooks which gives away the fact that they weren't there. No one ever actually used 1e AD&D rules, the book was full of suggestions, not rules. but I digress and apologize for the rant.
That may be true for you, but in the 90's, as a teen I was tossed into BECMI and played with much older dm's that did play rules as written, down to encumbrance.
I remember wizards so scarily weak that I never bothered playing it, much less the "you need a multiple copies of the same spell remembered in order to catalyst it multiple times".
Different tables, different experiences.
The way basic was run for me back in the day I was a bit more survivable with the simplified rules, but yeah, it wasn't the same as it is now, and definitely not the same as original AD&D.
Rolls are dramatically simplified, percentage tables are gone, I vaguely remember negative HP before permadeath outside of basic, and so on.
THAC0 isn't nearly as convoluted or as complicated as people think, it's just a little more math than ,"is the number bigger?".
I don't remember ASI's. Maybe I never got high enough levels. I remember only one person who worked with our dm to get dual wield and that was the most of it.
I don't expect you to follow my threads, especially since this may be the first time we're talking, but I still like the old. I like that things were more deadly, or at least the thought of death was there. I like the harder difficulty to succeed on a check, though on both of these I'd prefer somewhere in the middle.
I'm not a fan of the 10th level problem where most games quit, but to be honest, I'm not really interested in levels beyond 4 or 5 because the monsters are terribly weak and the players are overpowered by design.
And yes, you were much more locked into your roles. The difficult enough skill checks helped to reinforce that .
Am I being a bit hyperbolic? Perhaps. But I also can tell you what I saw 30 years ago is not the same as today.
I hope you don't mind me engaging you in the discussion, I find it kind of fascinating.
BECMI and Basic were slightly different beasts than Original D&D and AD&D and there are two core reasons for it.
First, Oe and 1eAD&D, essentially, it was not possible to run RAW. The rules were intentionally vague, so even if you wanted to do it for some reason which Gygax in plain English in the DMG did not recommend, I'm not even sure how you would go about it given that every single rule in the book was contradicted several times.
B/X and BECMI were a little different mainly because the rules were clear enough that you could with minimal extrapolation figure out the rules or at least the intention of RAW. This is in big part why the OSR hangs the majority of its hat in that system. If you did in fact run it that way and I have to tell you that this would be a pretty unique table back then in my experienace (I say that with the understanding and acknowledgment that experiences can differ), you would be running it against the core advice of the game, in the same way, running 5e RAW is possible but the game advice tries to steer you clear of that because there is a higher purpose to the game.
Which brings me to my point. Regardless of which old-school version you pick (Oe, B/X, BECMI, 1e AD&D or 2e AD&D), all of these games were born from a core premise devised in the early designs of the game. Which is that, very intentionally, the point of the game was to get away from a closed rule systems (RAW). The original authors of the game, mainly Gygax and Arneson, but others followed, all understood and knew how to create closed (RAW) systems. These guys grew up designing war games with strict rules, strict timing of rules and excessively detailed rules resolutions. They intentionally made D&D an abstracted, open system with the intent that the gaps would be filled by a combination of the DM's adjudication, guided by recommendations and suggestions and of course, player role-playing which back then was described largely as narrativly described actions.
This meant for example that 0hp = dead, but only under the supervision and allowance of the DM. It wasn't a rule that was meant to be strictly followed, it was meant as a trigger for a DM adjudication. Does the character die? That is a DM decision, not a rule resolution. That decision was governed by suggestions and advice in the DMG, aka.. under what conditions should you enforce the core rule and when should you not, but it was a DM call. No one died at 0 HP unless the DM decided that it was warranted, this was in fact, THE rule for the game. I can understand that some DM's ignored the advice and just ran the rules and its in part what the OSR does in most of the retro clones.. aka, ignore the advice and central governance of the game and instead focus on the rules.
From the AD&D DMG, in Gygax's own words.
“Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonable severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may…There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!”
Essentially the point here is the same point modern gamers make, don't just let characters die because the dice told you do, assess the situation and determine what actually happens, this is the right of the DM.
The main advantage of modern D&D culture is that it has decades of gaming history, discussion, consideration and experience to draw from, on which to base the game's fundamental philosophy, but the reality is that old-school gaming, generally (with an acknowledgment that clearly some tables did not follow the advice of the book), was really not run any differently today than it was back then.
Role-playing works the same, the DM still balances encounters and determines how dangerous the game is, DM's can still follow or ignore the advice of the books, some tables ran RAW (apparently) while others took to heart the principle advice of the game, arbitration still happens as it always has.
I mean, its the same game, sure the rules are different and certainly core rules have impact on how the games circumstances can potentially be resolved, but whether you are making a 60% stealth check or rolling a 1d20 with a +5 modifier against a DC 15, the odds are the same. Its essentially a different mechanic that accomplishes the same thing.
I guess all I'm saying is that D&D is D&D. 1e or 5e, its really not that different.
If there is a difference, I would say at the heart of the game is the premise of narrative drivers. A round in 1e AD&D for example is 1 minute but you still only get 1 attack roll. The premise is that its an abstraction of the fight that gives an outcome of how you did by rolling an attack and potentially dealing damage. The premise here is that you describe how you attack, you detail the events which is what the game is kind of supposed to be about. Its not a tactical battle, its an abstraction designed to tell a story of a battle.
Modern games have kind of de-evolved a bit more into the tactical battle premise where each attack is a swing of a sword, we count squares and so on... but even this is being challenged by modern gamers because they are catching on to the fact that D&D is not supposed to be a tactical mini game, its supposed to be a story game and more and more I see modern gamers ignoring the "rules" and focusing on trying to tell a story even in combat.. Which I think is great, it means the game is getting closer and closer thanks to the community to what its supposed to be.
Interesting discussion though there are parts I agree with, others I disagree with and experiences that are substantially different.
Here are some of the comments that don't match my experience.
" No one past the 80's during 1e era and I quite literally mean no one, not even Gygax played the game RAW or even anything approaching it."
I've been playing since 1978, DMing and playing since 1980 or so. I've played mostly AD&D and 5e in terms of time invested over the years but have played 2e, 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder and dabbled in 4e but found 4e too generic and bland for my liking.
Through all of that, MOST of the folks I played with (as player or DM) ran the games more or less RAW (even AD&D). There were some house rules here and there but most games were run pretty close to the rules. I never played with anyone who re-wrote the entire to hit mechanism to get something like bounded accuracy. I never played with anyone who created feats, skills, sub classes or any other comprehensive expanded rule set (though feats and skills became standard elements in later versions of the game). DMs occasionally created cool special abilities or capabilities but it was more often enabled by a magic item than some re-write of the rules system.
"The rules followed not to long after, long before even 2nd edition AD&D the average D&D game had skills, feats, sub-races, sub-classes, and bound accuracy, hell I had the first Dragon Born in my game in 1984, we called them Draconians, but same difference. "
It sounds like you were really into modifying the system when you were playing but I found that the exception rather than the rule. I never encountered feats or skills (a la 5e or similar - at least until later versions of the game), and bounded accuracy was a figment ... as long as +5 holy avenger swords, +5 armor, +5 shields existed, bounded accuracy did not ... the only way to have any form of "bounded accuracy" was a low magic campaign. Home brew races/classes/sub classes/prestige classes etc ... were game elements introduced later, some via publications though example like the 1e bard at the back of the PHB gave examples of how classes could be combined if a DM was so inclined.
"What you are describing was a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was and even before my time, by the mid 80's the game had evolved into largely a free-form role-playing theatre it is today and it didn't happen magically because new players arrived, it happened because the players of that time´, myself included evolved the game to what it is today."
In my experience again, this was not "a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was" which seems to me is both inaccurate and disingenuous to the folks who were playing in the '70s. The "dungeon crawl" style of play was what I think many folks encountered when they first started playing since it was the play style best supported by the books and published modules. In addition, many players (at least my associates :) ) were in high school and did not tend to be the most dramatically inclined to be honest, so games tended towards adventure and combat rather than social and role play. There are good reasons for the various memes around generic shopkeepers and shopping trips which was occasionally as close as the game got to "role playing". I'll also note that AD&D did not include very many specific rules for the DM to resolve social interactions. As far as I know, the closest would be the Encounter Reaction table in the DMG that rolled percentile dice and used charisma as a modifier to determine the initial reaction of creatures. Lack of ways for DMs to resolve non-combat situations tended to mitigate against role playing and more in favour of combat though once folks had played the game for a while, role playing was relatively easy to incorporate.
However, this play style wasn't limited to the "uninformed" folks of the '70s, it seemed to me it had much more to do with the average maturity of the players and the fact that D&D evolved from a table top tactical medieval fantasy wargame (see Chainmail etc).
As folks played more, experienced more, game plot lines and role playing tended to get more intricate. Sometimes politics or nation building became a focus instead of defeating the next big monster but it didn't have to do with the game mechanics itself - it had to do with the expanding horizons of the players and DMs. (This is all speaking from my experience so YMMV).
"That said, this forum is overflowing with people having problems in their games, looking for advice and as an experienced DM you would be hard-pressed to name a problem in your game, that I didn't solve decades ago in mine. When I answer a question with how I do things, it's something that has been field tested for decades, across hundreds of players. I was solving problems at D&D tables when Matt Mercer, Chris Perkins, and the majority of the people on this forum were somewhere between liquid form and grade school. This is not to say that you should listen to me because of that and follow my advice, but I do have quite a different experience with D&D than most people on this forum which means that my advice is going to trend away from what has normalized in modern D&D culture."
A lot of implied assumptions in that paragraph as far as I can tell.
1) Why does it matter if "the majority of the people on this forum were somewhere between liquid form and grade school"? It doesn't make your experience any more or less valuable. This is especially true when the game system has changed over the years so the real value of the experience is in understanding the personal dynamics of a player group rather than necessarily resolving a specific rules issue. In addition, there are a LOT of good DMs on these forums. Some who have DMed for just a few months or years and others who have DMed for decades. I've generally found most of their insights to be valuable even if their suggestions aren't an approach I would use in my own games and even if they were only "liquid" when I started playing :).
2) " it's something that has been field tested for decades, across hundreds of players". However, as you mentioned, this is within the context of a singular ongoing game world which imposes its own limitations on how you prefer to approach problems (as witnessed by the comments on backgrounds). Most of us here with comparable experience don't really have an issue with more complex player backgrounds as long as they don't directly contradict something I've already written down while in your case, the longevity and complexity of your game world imposes constraints on your answers and experiences that other DMs don't face.
"Everything you see in 5e today, down to the tiniest detail was invented by the old-school D&D community ages ago, 5e was built on essentially 40+ years of community content scraped together mostly by consultant game designers, most of which are writing books for the OSR today. Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks. Their masterpiece was 4e, which frankly was a great game, it just wasn't D&D and the reason it wasn't D&D is because they did not use the 40 years of evolution that the game community developed."
I honestly don't have the direct knowledge to interpret the validity of a statement like the above. There are some books on the history of D&D, but I have no idea if they address the supplemental rules, addons and homebrew that may have been used by various groups at various times over the years. However, "Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks." seems needlessly inflammatory and critical since 5e is a derivative of all the previous works including 3.5e and 4e and some of the ideas like feats/skills etc were present in earlier versions (3.5e certainly didn't have anything like "bounded accuracy" though but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a core design element in 4e) so it is hardly surprising that the designers of 5e (Crawford, Perkins, Mearls etc) drew from past experience and incorporated elements and concepts that worked well in previous editions. This is likely why 5e is so popular.
Personally, I think 5e is the best version of D&D produced so far and I've played all of them to one extent or another.
Anyway, the point of this reply was to point out that there are other perspectives and lots of folks with comparable experience contributing to these forums. Everyone's input is useful and in D&D there is rarely one correct answer :) (especially when the DM is free to adjust as they see fit ... though if folks want as "correct as possible", the rules forum is likely the best choice :) ).
I've been playing since 1978, DMing and playing since 1980 or so. I've played mostly AD&D and 5e in terms of time invested over the years but have played 2e, 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder and dabbled in 4e but found 4e too generic and bland for my liking.
Through all of that, MOST of the folks I played with (as player or DM) ran the games more or less RAW (even AD&D). There were some house rules here and there but most games were run pretty close to the rules. I never played with anyone who re-wrote the entire to hit mechanism to get something like bounded accuracy. I never played with anyone who created feats, skills, sub classes or any other comprehensive expanded rule set (though feats and skills became standard elements in later versions of the game). DMs occasionally created cool special abilities or capabilities but it was more often enabled by a magic item than some re-write of the rules system.
It really is a fascinating discussion!
I'm not challenging your credentials, or disputing your memory of events but if you did in fact primarily run 1e AD&D I promise you that you did not play RAW ever. The reason I say that is because playing 1e AD&D RAW or even anything close to it was physically impossible until OSRIC came in 2006 and essentially removed and clarified rules using a wide range of assumptions about what the rules were. It's essentially one guy's house-ruled version of the game based on something akin to a consensus of what it probably/maybe could be. In 1e AD&D there were too many rules contradictions and a complete lack of clarity on what qualified as optional rules or actual rules, or what the rules actually meant because technically the entire rulebook was a set of optional suggestions, not rules, which weren't even remotetly approaching anything that would qualify as clarity. Whatever 1e AD&D game anyone was playing at their table back then, I promise you was a white elephant compared to every other table not matter how much you tried to run RAW. Over at Dragonfoot forums, the same guys who have been playing the game for 50 years and still are playing are still arguing over what the 1e AD&D rules and rulebook are actually trying to say to this day.
"The rules followed not to long after, long before even 2nd edition AD&D the average D&D game had skills, feats, sub-races, sub-classes, and bound accuracy, hell I had the first Dragon Born in my game in 1984, we called them Draconians, but same difference. "
It sounds like you were really into modifying the system when you were playing but I found that the exception rather than the rule. I never encountered feats or skills (a la 5e or similar - at least until later versions of the game), and bounded accuracy was a figment ... as long as +5 holy avenger swords, +5 armor, +5 shields existed, bounded accuracy did not ... the only way to have any form of "bounded accuracy" was a low magic campaign. Home brew races/classes/sub classes/prestige classes etc ... were game elements introduced later, some via publications though example like the 1e bard at the back of the PHB gave examples of how classes could be combined if a DM was so inclined.
Again I have to disagree but I will do it with examples.
Skills were introduced very early on officially, first for 1e AD&D in 1985 Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, followed up by Survival Guides. For 1e Basic skills first appeared in Mystara Gazetteer's and later in the Cyclopedia.
Bound Accuracy existed technically since 0e and remained a part of the game until 3e. The official way to resolve ability checks or skills was to roll your ability score or under, or in the case of select skills like thieves skills it was a percentile die with no modifiers or using a d6 to do things like perception checks which never had modifiers either making this a fixed (bound) system that did not change regardless of level. The attack bonus used by 5e proficiency check advancement has almost the same progression as 1e classes.
You mention weapon and armor modifiers, but weapon and armor modifiers work the same way in 5e as they did in 1e. You have a +1 Long Sword, you get a +1 bonus to attack and damage, you have a +1 Leather armor you get a +1 bonus to AC, I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with bound accuracy.
Bound accuracy has always been part of D&D until 3rd edition when they got rid of it and brought it back by 5e. Grant it the mechanics of how bound accuracy worked was different, but it had the same result. Like if you were an elf you had a 2 in 6 chance of detecting something unusual, it didn't matter what level you were, it was a fixed system. Saving throws, attack bonuses, skill and ability checks, all worked in the confines of a fixed system. The only difference was that some progressions were class-based, rather than universal, but it was still bound accuracy in every sense.
In my experience again, this was not "a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was" which seems to me is both inaccurate and disingenuous to the folks who were playing in the '70s. The "dungeon crawl" style of play was what I think many folks encountered when they first started playing since it was the play style best supported by the books and published modules. In addition, many players (at least my associates :) ) were in high school and did not tend to be the most dramatically inclined to be honest, so games tended towards adventure and combat rather than social and role play. There are good reasons for the various memes around generic shopkeepers and shopping trips which was occasionally as close as the game got to "role playing". I'll also note that AD&D did not include very many specific rules for the DM to resolve social interactions. As far as I know, the closest would be the Encounter Reaction table in the DMG that rolled percentile dice and used charisma as a modifier to determine the initial reaction of creatures. Lack of ways for DMs to resolve non-combat situations tended to mitigate against role playing and more in favour of combat though once folks had played the game for a while, role playing was relatively easy to incorporate.
I'm sorry but this is just a myth, I mean it's not true in anyway at all and this is kind of the problem I have with the way people see the game back then compared to what it is now. Perhaps its just a timing thing, but things happened a lot earlier than I think you are remembering.
Yes, Dungeon Crawls were a big part of D&D and, they still are. Show me a book in 5e adventure released in the last 40 years that doesn't have a dungeons in it? Its few and far between. Dungeons are part of the game, they always have been but the content that opened the game up to other types of adventures was released as early as the mid 80's. 1e AD&D Wilderness Survival guide and Expert rules for 1e introduced the Hex Crawl, The Companion and Expert rules introduced Dominion Rules and Mass Combat rules paving the way for kingdom management, politics and warfware.. all of this happened by or before 85.
As for "resolving social interactions", yeah, of course, it didn't, it's a role-playing game, it never occurred to anyone who played or designed the game that social interaction rules were needed. You have reaction roles based on Charisma, but that was largely to determine a baseline during encounters. Social interaction rules were born when the art of role-playing started de-evolving for a brief period with nonsense like skill challenges which were quickly cut from the game because people despised them with a deep ceded passion. Thank god for Critical Role to beat this nonsense out of the game by example.
I do agree with you that these days people are more theatrical, they will use voices and they to mimic the artistry of what Critical Role does at their table which I will be the first to admit is definitely something of a new-age style of playing and running the game, but then again, Matt Mercer is in fact an old school DM. Acting in character, voicing your character etc.. this is not new, I will grant you its far more prevalent today than it was back then, but people did it in most games.
I honestly don't have the direct knowledge to interpret the validity of a statement like the above. There are some books on the history of D&D, but I have no idea if they address the supplemental rules, addons and homebrew that may have been used by various groups at various times over the years. However, "Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks." seems needlessly inflammatory and critical since 5e is a derivative of all the previous works including 3.5e and 4e and some of the ideas like feats/skills etc were present in earlier versions (3.5e certainly didn't have anything like "bounded accuracy" though but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a core design element in 4e) so it is hardly surprising that the designers of 5e (Crawford, Perkins, Mearls etc) drew from past experience and incorporated elements and concepts that worked well in previous editions. This is likely why 5e is so popular.
You don't really need to have any inside knowledge to understand where rules come from, the evidence is the books themselves.
Feats for example did not come from 3rd edition, they first appeared in 2nd edition AD&D in the Skills and Powers book. Sub-Classes first appeared in the D&D Cyclopedia as a couple of examples.
You are right 3.5 did not have bound accuracy, it was abandoned after 2nd edition AD&D and came back later on.
Now this next part, I understand is definitely more difficult to prove, but if you paid attention during the development of 5e and listened to what was being said and done, while having your finger on the pulse of the D&D OSR community, its super apparent, but of course quite difficult to prove. Still I believe the following to be mostly true.
Crawford, Perkins and Mearls were central to the release of the game and it's by their willingness to listen to fans and old-school game designers the game came to fruition for which we should all be thankful but they were barely involved in the design of 5e mechanics, most of the work for 5th edition game mechanics was contracted out to 3rd party's and specifically the 3rd party consultants played the most important role in the games development. This is because these guys (the trio) were still in shock over 4e and they did not understand how and why 4e was not successful. They did not have their finger on the pulse of the D&D community, so they reached out to people who were living and breathing the game on the ground level and actively producing successful content for D&D. You want to thank someone for 5e, go into the Players Handbook, look in the credits under Additional Consultation Provided By... Those guys there, those are the guys that made 5e for you, those guys essentially steered the game back to reality by explaining the inner workings of the D&D community that existed at the time, that would make or break the game. If it wasn't for them, god only knows what we would have gotten instead of 5e as Crawford, Perkins and Mearls, didn't have a clue what to do after 4e to make D&D work again. They were living in a bubble outside of the D&D community that continued to evolve outside of Wizards of the Coast without their influence.
I know that sounds incendiary and maybe it is a bit, but the biggest problem 5e had during its development was that the owners of the franchise did not understand why Dungeons and Dragon is the most popular and beloved game in the market, they were under the impression that it was "design" but its not, this game today lives and dies on one alter, nostalgia, culture and sacred cows. You tap into that part of the game and you win, you ignore it and you lose. It's that simple, proven by D&D's history beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Its why this entire venture into VTT's and trying to make D&D a digital platform is the next Wizard of the Coast disaster because they don't understand that D&D can never be a closed system. We are here debating, you and I, about what D&D is and isn't, how it is or isn't played, what it was or wasn't and while its fascinating and I love it, I'm certain both you and I are simultaneously right and wrong at the same time, which illustrates the point. You and I, our experiences, our love for the game and the passion we have for it, IS D&D, but that only exists in a game where there is never any real clarity about what it is and the boundless nature of an open system.
You make a digital version of that game and what you are doing is putting up digital walls, that not only strictly define what the game is and how it should be played, but you must now pay to unlock what little flexibility is going to be hidden within, the exact opposite of everything that D&D stands for as a concept. Its just my prediction, but I think VTT is going to be even a bigger disaster for the franchise than 4e was.
Finally, I just want to say, given how badly we have already derailed this topic that by no stretch of the imagination are my opinion's - instructions, objectively true, or somehow superior to anyone else's. I'm just one voice in a sea, perhaps my language is a bit commanding and vocal but don't confuse passion for anger or my fanaticism for the hobby as gate keeping. I have and will always remain of the opinion that if you are playing D&D in any form, your doing it right.
1. don't get so hooked into the rules as written thinking about this, you need to be flexible in your mindset. That includes asking the DM to clarify why it would be insight (note not CHALLENGE, but ask to clarify). The checks are vague and open to interpretation so that DM's can be flexible. I would interpret an insight check on this to see how insightful your character is at working out from what you see what sort of creature you might associate it as being from random bits and pieces you've hear over the years, in the same way that you might make an insightful prediction about how a fight might go by looking at the physique of the opponents and their demeanor going into the fight.
2. Being a DM is hard, there are so many moving parts to keep in order in your head and on the fly, and they send a lot of time out of game prepping stuff so you can have fun. The DM is giving you a 2nd option to make sure the game is accessible and fun for you, but sometimes it's not about making sense it's to give you a better chance at having an awesome moment in the game. Don't throw that in their face by being a little rules-lawyer about it. Take the roll, accept the DM's decision and enjoy the game, don't sit here and whine about the DM cutting you a break and offering you an option for a better check for you to roll. As the Players hand book says, the DM s ruling is final. Accept it, embrace it, enjoy it, move on.
All tables are different, the game HAS evolved. Not all rulebooks are picked up by players,
My comments haven't been about game mechanics evolving but the culture around the game and the culture around gaming at large (citing Mario) have evolved and changed as well to fit those new cultural norms.
I originally used Mario as an example saying we aren't as interested in being a plumber just chasing a princess cause reasons.
Well, new Mario games are essentially every bit the same structure and basis, but have added on bits of lore and background and now there's massive wikis to the fandom..
All for a franchise where in one game you run around a sewer trying to stomp on a bunch of creatures.... ( wish I could find that copy of Mario Bros for the atari)
Zelda has multiverse spanning timelines and yes, D&D has its own spelljammer and different campaign settings. (which, that could be a whole 'nother topic, as the core seems to have abandoned setting specific roles, races, and monsters for the most part it feels... which in itself could be another avenue for the longevity of each edition.. again.. tangents)
Anyhow, yes, individual worlds individual storylines naturally popped up, but at its core, this game is 90% battle tactics and mechanics with skills as a tack on, which, it can be argued in broad terms it always has been. But each addition and edition has tried to bring it all together and also aimed to be reflective of the current rpg zeitgeist, (hence the complaints about 4), and OneDnD isn't any different (though its getting its own complaints for mimicking everything wrong with the gaming culture at large),
One of the things that has steadily increased has been an emphasis on story over tactics, and as it may evolve as such over sessions within a group, it also has evolved as a cultural desire within gaming as well.
The thing is, although you will find some groups that are happy to go back to more mindless dungeon crawls or to even go back to old rules, you will find just as many if not more that are happy to move on to the next edition or stay with this one...
Besides, If 5e is not discernably different or it all the basics of 5e are present in first edition, why are you such a proponent of going back to first edition? Why do you say that the older games are superior to what's out now or going to come out?
Besides, If 5e is not discernably different or it all the basics of 5e are present in first edition, why are you such a proponent of going back to first edition? Why do you say that the older games are superior to what's out now or going to come out?
I don't believe or have said any such thing. I run an older version of the game, though but I do this mostly because I have an ongoing campaign that has been running for over 3 decades and 5e doesn't do anything new that I don't already have in my game. Switching to 5e would be like switching from Coke to Pepsi, I'm sure it tastes different to some people and I'm sure we can probably, objectively prove that it is in fact different, but the differences are so marginal and mostly irrelevant, I'm not sure exactly why I would bother with it.
One of the things that has steadily increased has been an emphasis on story over tactics, and as it may evolve as such over sessions within a group, it also has evolved as a cultural desire within gaming as well.
Increased from 3rd edition and 4th edition, its almost caught up with 1st edition. Its evolving after it was de-evolve for 2 decades.
The thing is, although you will find some groups that are happy to go back to more mindless dungeon crawls or to even go back to old rules, you will find just as many if not more that are happy to move on to the next edition or stay with this one...
Old school gaming has never been about mindless dungeon crawling so I'm not entirely sure what you mean by going back to it, besides the "rules" had nothing to do with what sort of focus a game had anymore than modern rules are. Old school D&D was as much about Dungeon Crawls as it was about Hexploration, kingdom building, mass combat, politics and horror. It all depends on which setting and focus you chose,again, same as today. You telling me that Birthright was about Dungeon Crawling? Was Dragonlance about Dungeon Crawling? Was Ravenloft a Dungeon Crawl?
Learn your history m8. 5e has basically been ripping off old school D&D content for the last decade. Dragonlance: Shadow of The Dragon Queen, SpellJammer, Candlekeep Mysteries, Icewind Dale, Descent Into Avernus, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tales From The Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss.. just to name a few, you can rename these "Dungeon Crawls" all you want, we all know where they were copy/pasted from. You could fit all of the original content in 5e over the last 10 years on a napkin.
Besides, If 5e is not discernably different or it all the basics of 5e are present in first edition, why are you such a proponent of going back to first edition? Why do you say that the older games are superior to what's out now or going to come out?
I don't believe or have said any such thing. I run an older version of the game, but I do this mostly because I have an ongoing campaign that has been running for over 3 decades and 5e doesn't do anything new (enough) that I don't already have in my game. Switching to 5e would be like switching from Coke to Pepsi, I'm sure it tastes different to some people and I'm sure we can probably, objectively prove that it is in fact different, but the differences are so marginal and mostly irrelevant, I'm not sure exactly why I would bother with it.
One of the things that has steadily increased has been an emphasis on story over tactics, and as it may evolve as such over sessions within a group, it also has evolved as a cultural desire within gaming as well.
Increased from 3rd edition and 4th edition, its caught up with 1st edition. It's evolving after it was de-evolve for 2 decades.
The thing is, although you will find some groups that are happy to go back to more mindless dungeon crawls or to even go back to old rules, you will find just as many if not more that are happy to move on to the next edition or stay with this one...
Old school gaming has never been about mindless dungeon crawling so I'm not entirely sure what you mean by going back to it, besides the "rules" had nothing to do with what sort of focus a game had anymore than modern rules have. Old school D&D was as much about Dungeon Crawls as it was about Hexploration, kingdom building, mass combat, politics and horror. It all depends on which setting and focus you chose,again, same as today. You telling me that Birthright was about Dungeon Crawling? Was Dragonlance about Dungeon Crawling? Was Ravenloft a Dungeon Crawl?
5e has basically been ripping off old-school D&D content for the last decade, which is fine, nostalgia sells. Dragonlance: Shadow of The Dragon Queen, SpellJammer, Candlekeep Mysteries, Icewind Dale, Descent Into Avernus, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tales From The Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss.. just to name a few, you can rename these "Dungeon Crawls" all you want, we all know where they were copy/pasted from. You could fit all of the original content in 5e over the last 10 years on a napkin and most of the rules changes largley superficial alterations that use different math to get the same result.
My gaming crew is a mixed bag of old-school players, modern gamers and converts (in both directions), its a very diverse group you could say in terms of how they identify what D&D is, how it should be played, what is important in the game and so on. I really don't see all that much difference between them to be honest. I mean there are points of contention, but nothing that gets in the way of these players being in the same campaign. I have never heard anyone proclaim that "our" role-playing was different than "other peoples" role-playing. I know there is often this presumption for some reason that role-playing was different in 1e compared to how it is now in 5e, but, I can tell with 100% certainty, not a damn thing has changed in years I have been around.
So far as I can tell the only difference between old-school and new-school gaming is that modern players look down on their character sheet too often to figure out what they can and can't do which is something that I(we) train out of new players in a couple of sessions.
I'm not saying that old players and new can't get along. ;)
I mean to say that the hobby has evolved and changed and that there's very distinct differences from then and now.
As or "training out of them" habits... I'm not trying to train anyone to do anything. Each group kind of takes a few sessions to gel and get into understanding how to work together (either as a tactical squadron or as a theater troupe or somewhere in between).
My point is that players want more role play in general, and they invest more into characters and that investment helps facilitate the desire for their character to be "the chosen one" or "the dramatic one" (the one where he narrative focuses on their backstory). They want their characters to shine the brightest.
This is radically different from rolling some dice, deciding on playing a fighter, a cleric, or a wizard, and then beating the crap out of monster #31235 in dungeon number #2483.....
Honestly, this shouldn't be taken as a surprise anyhow. Even in video games, we moved from little pixellated plumbers saving princesses because reasons????? to games that get big budget movie and netflix series adaptations....
My point about the proposed changes is that narratively, they seem to remove a lot of individuality and player choice consequences.
Man I need to teach a class on D&D history, there is so much terrible information out there. I know that the OSR is to blame because there are so many people who proclaim to be "old school gamers", by doing all of this golden age stuff, but you have to understand that what most of the OSR thinks old school gaming is based on their reading of the old school rules not from the experience of being there actually playing during this period. No one past the 80's during 1e era and I quite literally mean no one, not even Gygax played the game RAW or even anything approaching it.
What you are describing was a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was and even before my time, by the mid 80's the game had evolved into largely a free-form role-playing theatre it is today and it didn't happen magically because new players arrived, it happened because the players of that time´, myself included evolved the game to what it is today. The rules followed not to long after, long before even 2nd edition AD&D the average D&D game had skills, feats, sub-races, sub-classes, and bound accuracy, hell I had the first Dragon Born in my game in 1984, we called them Draconians, but same difference.
Everything you see in 5e today, down to the tiniest detail was invented by the old-school D&D community ages ago, 5e was built on essentially 40+ years of community content scraped together mostly by consultant game designers, most of which are writing books for the OSR today. Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks. Their masterpiece was 4e, which frankly was a great game, it just wasn't D&D and the reason it wasn't D&D is because they did not use the 40 years of evolution that the game community developed.
This perception that old-school gaming is somehow done differently than modern gaming is one of the biggest lies in D&D. Trust me when I tell you that I'm as old school as it gets, my game is as old school as it gets and if you joined my game you would not think that I or the players in my game are doing anything "differently" than you are in your game today. You would feel right at home. Your game is my game, I know, because I evolved my game to be the game you're playing now.. if that makes any sense. Like 5e is an OSR game for all intents and purposes.
I know that the OSR community is pretty crappy to modern gamers (I have been guilty of this myself in the past), but it's mainly because this total re-writing of D&D history and who controls "the truth of it" has become almost like American politics. It's just stupid and when you come to that realization by actually sitting down at a table with gamers from different eras, it becomes painfully obvious that there is literally no difference between the presumably different D&D cultures.
Don't bite, there is no such thing as "how the game used to be played", that is some shit Gygax and Arneson did in the 70's when they were testing their prototype and I know there are purists out there that would wholeheartedly disagree and quote rulebooks which gives away the fact that they weren't there. No one ever actually used 1e AD&D rules, the book was full of suggestions, not rules. but I digress and apologize for the rant.
All Im saying is Modern role-playing as you know it basically started around 1984 with D&D modules like Dragons of Despair. The rules have continually evolved of course but what role-playing is hasn't changed even a little bit since then.
That may be true for you, but in the 90's, as a teen I was tossed into BECMI and played with much older dm's that did play rules as written, down to encumbrance.
I remember wizards so scarily weak that I never bothered playing it, much less the "you need a multiple copies of the same spell remembered in order to catalyst it multiple times".
Different tables, different experiences.
The way basic was run for me back in the day I was a bit more survivable with the simplified rules, but yeah, it wasn't the same as it is now, and definitely not the same as original AD&D.
Rolls are dramatically simplified, percentage tables are gone, I vaguely remember negative HP before permadeath outside of basic, and so on.
THAC0 isn't nearly as convoluted or as complicated as people think, it's just a little more math than ,"is the number bigger?".
I don't remember ASI's. Maybe I never got high enough levels. I remember only one person who worked with our dm to get dual wield and that was the most of it.
I don't expect you to follow my threads, especially since this may be the first time we're talking, but I still like the old. I like that things were more deadly, or at least the thought of death was there. I like the harder difficulty to succeed on a check, though on both of these I'd prefer somewhere in the middle.
I'm not a fan of the 10th level problem where most games quit, but to be honest, I'm not really interested in levels beyond 4 or 5 because the monsters are terribly weak and the players are overpowered by design.
And yes, you were much more locked into your roles. The difficult enough skill checks helped to reinforce that .
Am I being a bit hyperbolic? Perhaps. But I also can tell you what I saw 30 years ago is not the same as today.
I hope you don't mind me engaging you in the discussion, I find it kind of fascinating.
BECMI and Basic were slightly different beasts than Original D&D and AD&D and there are two core reasons for it.
First, Oe and 1eAD&D, essentially, it was not possible to run RAW. The rules were intentionally vague, so even if you wanted to do it for some reason which Gygax in plain English in the DMG did not recommend, I'm not even sure how you would go about it given that every single rule in the book was contradicted several times.
B/X and BECMI were a little different mainly because the rules were clear enough that you could with minimal extrapolation figure out the rules or at least the intention of RAW. This is in big part why the OSR hangs the majority of its hat in that system. If you did in fact run it that way and I have to tell you that this would be a pretty unique table back then in my experienace (I say that with the understanding and acknowledgment that experiences can differ), you would be running it against the core advice of the game, in the same way, running 5e RAW is possible but the game advice tries to steer you clear of that because there is a higher purpose to the game.
Which brings me to my point. Regardless of which old-school version you pick (Oe, B/X, BECMI, 1e AD&D or 2e AD&D), all of these games were born from a core premise devised in the early designs of the game. Which is that, very intentionally, the point of the game was to get away from a closed rule systems (RAW). The original authors of the game, mainly Gygax and Arneson, but others followed, all understood and knew how to create closed (RAW) systems. These guys grew up designing war games with strict rules, strict timing of rules and excessively detailed rules resolutions. They intentionally made D&D an abstracted, open system with the intent that the gaps would be filled by a combination of the DM's adjudication, guided by recommendations and suggestions and of course, player role-playing which back then was described largely as narrativly described actions.
This meant for example that 0hp = dead, but only under the supervision and allowance of the DM. It wasn't a rule that was meant to be strictly followed, it was meant as a trigger for a DM adjudication. Does the character die? That is a DM decision, not a rule resolution. That decision was governed by suggestions and advice in the DMG, aka.. under what conditions should you enforce the core rule and when should you not, but it was a DM call. No one died at 0 HP unless the DM decided that it was warranted, this was in fact, THE rule for the game. I can understand that some DM's ignored the advice and just ran the rules and its in part what the OSR does in most of the retro clones.. aka, ignore the advice and central governance of the game and instead focus on the rules.
From the AD&D DMG, in Gygax's own words.
“Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonable severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may…There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!”
Essentially the point here is the same point modern gamers make, don't just let characters die because the dice told you do, assess the situation and determine what actually happens, this is the right of the DM.
The main advantage of modern D&D culture is that it has decades of gaming history, discussion, consideration and experience to draw from, on which to base the game's fundamental philosophy, but the reality is that old-school gaming, generally (with an acknowledgment that clearly some tables did not follow the advice of the book), was really not run any differently today than it was back then.
Role-playing works the same, the DM still balances encounters and determines how dangerous the game is, DM's can still follow or ignore the advice of the books, some tables ran RAW (apparently) while others took to heart the principle advice of the game, arbitration still happens as it always has.
I mean, its the same game, sure the rules are different and certainly core rules have impact on how the games circumstances can potentially be resolved, but whether you are making a 60% stealth check or rolling a 1d20 with a +5 modifier against a DC 15, the odds are the same. Its essentially a different mechanic that accomplishes the same thing.
I guess all I'm saying is that D&D is D&D. 1e or 5e, its really not that different.
If there is a difference, I would say at the heart of the game is the premise of narrative drivers. A round in 1e AD&D for example is 1 minute but you still only get 1 attack roll. The premise is that its an abstraction of the fight that gives an outcome of how you did by rolling an attack and potentially dealing damage. The premise here is that you describe how you attack, you detail the events which is what the game is kind of supposed to be about. Its not a tactical battle, its an abstraction designed to tell a story of a battle.
Modern games have kind of de-evolved a bit more into the tactical battle premise where each attack is a swing of a sword, we count squares and so on... but even this is being challenged by modern gamers because they are catching on to the fact that D&D is not supposed to be a tactical mini game, its supposed to be a story game and more and more I see modern gamers ignoring the "rules" and focusing on trying to tell a story even in combat.. Which I think is great, it means the game is getting closer and closer thanks to the community to what its supposed to be.
Interesting discussion though there are parts I agree with, others I disagree with and experiences that are substantially different.
Here are some of the comments that don't match my experience.
" No one past the 80's during 1e era and I quite literally mean no one, not even Gygax played the game RAW or even anything approaching it."
I've been playing since 1978, DMing and playing since 1980 or so. I've played mostly AD&D and 5e in terms of time invested over the years but have played 2e, 3e, 3.5e, Pathfinder and dabbled in 4e but found 4e too generic and bland for my liking.
Through all of that, MOST of the folks I played with (as player or DM) ran the games more or less RAW (even AD&D). There were some house rules here and there but most games were run pretty close to the rules. I never played with anyone who re-wrote the entire to hit mechanism to get something like bounded accuracy. I never played with anyone who created feats, skills, sub classes or any other comprehensive expanded rule set (though feats and skills became standard elements in later versions of the game). DMs occasionally created cool special abilities or capabilities but it was more often enabled by a magic item than some re-write of the rules system.
"The rules followed not to long after, long before even 2nd edition AD&D the average D&D game had skills, feats, sub-races, sub-classes, and bound accuracy, hell I had the first Dragon Born in my game in 1984, we called them Draconians, but same difference. "
It sounds like you were really into modifying the system when you were playing but I found that the exception rather than the rule. I never encountered feats or skills (a la 5e or similar - at least until later versions of the game), and bounded accuracy was a figment ... as long as +5 holy avenger swords, +5 armor, +5 shields existed, bounded accuracy did not ... the only way to have any form of "bounded accuracy" was a low magic campaign. Home brew races/classes/sub classes/prestige classes etc ... were game elements introduced later, some via publications though example like the 1e bard at the back of the PHB gave examples of how classes could be combined if a DM was so inclined.
"What you are describing was a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was and even before my time, by the mid 80's the game had evolved into largely a free-form role-playing theatre it is today and it didn't happen magically because new players arrived, it happened because the players of that time´, myself included evolved the game to what it is today."
In my experience again, this was not "a style of play that was briefly done in the 70's before people actually figured out what role-playing was" which seems to me is both inaccurate and disingenuous to the folks who were playing in the '70s. The "dungeon crawl" style of play was what I think many folks encountered when they first started playing since it was the play style best supported by the books and published modules. In addition, many players (at least my associates :) ) were in high school and did not tend to be the most dramatically inclined to be honest, so games tended towards adventure and combat rather than social and role play. There are good reasons for the various memes around generic shopkeepers and shopping trips which was occasionally as close as the game got to "role playing". I'll also note that AD&D did not include very many specific rules for the DM to resolve social interactions. As far as I know, the closest would be the Encounter Reaction table in the DMG that rolled percentile dice and used charisma as a modifier to determine the initial reaction of creatures. Lack of ways for DMs to resolve non-combat situations tended to mitigate against role playing and more in favour of combat though once folks had played the game for a while, role playing was relatively easy to incorporate.
However, this play style wasn't limited to the "uninformed" folks of the '70s, it seemed to me it had much more to do with the average maturity of the players and the fact that D&D evolved from a table top tactical medieval fantasy wargame (see Chainmail etc).
As folks played more, experienced more, game plot lines and role playing tended to get more intricate. Sometimes politics or nation building became a focus instead of defeating the next big monster but it didn't have to do with the game mechanics itself - it had to do with the expanding horizons of the players and DMs. (This is all speaking from my experience so YMMV).
"That said, this forum is overflowing with people having problems in their games, looking for advice and as an experienced DM you would be hard-pressed to name a problem in your game, that I didn't solve decades ago in mine. When I answer a question with how I do things, it's something that has been field tested for decades, across hundreds of players. I was solving problems at D&D tables when Matt Mercer, Chris Perkins, and the majority of the people on this forum were somewhere between liquid form and grade school. This is not to say that you should listen to me because of that and follow my advice, but I do have quite a different experience with D&D than most people on this forum which means that my advice is going to trend away from what has normalized in modern D&D culture."
A lot of implied assumptions in that paragraph as far as I can tell.
1) Why does it matter if "the majority of the people on this forum were somewhere between liquid form and grade school"? It doesn't make your experience any more or less valuable. This is especially true when the game system has changed over the years so the real value of the experience is in understanding the personal dynamics of a player group rather than necessarily resolving a specific rules issue. In addition, there are a LOT of good DMs on these forums. Some who have DMed for just a few months or years and others who have DMed for decades. I've generally found most of their insights to be valuable even if their suggestions aren't an approach I would use in my own games and even if they were only "liquid" when I started playing :).
2) " it's something that has been field tested for decades, across hundreds of players". However, as you mentioned, this is within the context of a singular ongoing game world which imposes its own limitations on how you prefer to approach problems (as witnessed by the comments on backgrounds). Most of us here with comparable experience don't really have an issue with more complex player backgrounds as long as they don't directly contradict something I've already written down while in your case, the longevity and complexity of your game world imposes constraints on your answers and experiences that other DMs don't face.
"Everything you see in 5e today, down to the tiniest detail was invented by the old-school D&D community ages ago, 5e was built on essentially 40+ years of community content scraped together mostly by consultant game designers, most of which are writing books for the OSR today. Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks. Their masterpiece was 4e, which frankly was a great game, it just wasn't D&D and the reason it wasn't D&D is because they did not use the 40 years of evolution that the game community developed."
I honestly don't have the direct knowledge to interpret the validity of a statement like the above. There are some books on the history of D&D, but I have no idea if they address the supplemental rules, addons and homebrew that may have been used by various groups at various times over the years. However, "Wizards of the Coast did quite literally jack and shit when it comes to the design of 5e, they copy and pasted and wrote the checks." seems needlessly inflammatory and critical since 5e is a derivative of all the previous works including 3.5e and 4e and some of the ideas like feats/skills etc were present in earlier versions (3.5e certainly didn't have anything like "bounded accuracy" though but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a core design element in 4e) so it is hardly surprising that the designers of 5e (Crawford, Perkins, Mearls etc) drew from past experience and incorporated elements and concepts that worked well in previous editions. This is likely why 5e is so popular.
Personally, I think 5e is the best version of D&D produced so far and I've played all of them to one extent or another.
Anyway, the point of this reply was to point out that there are other perspectives and lots of folks with comparable experience contributing to these forums. Everyone's input is useful and in D&D there is rarely one correct answer :) (especially when the DM is free to adjust as they see fit ... though if folks want as "correct as possible", the rules forum is likely the best choice :) ).
It really is a fascinating discussion!
I'm not challenging your credentials, or disputing your memory of events but if you did in fact primarily run 1e AD&D I promise you that you did not play RAW ever. The reason I say that is because playing 1e AD&D RAW or even anything close to it was physically impossible until OSRIC came in 2006 and essentially removed and clarified rules using a wide range of assumptions about what the rules were. It's essentially one guy's house-ruled version of the game based on something akin to a consensus of what it probably/maybe could be. In 1e AD&D there were too many rules contradictions and a complete lack of clarity on what qualified as optional rules or actual rules, or what the rules actually meant because technically the entire rulebook was a set of optional suggestions, not rules, which weren't even remotetly approaching anything that would qualify as clarity. Whatever 1e AD&D game anyone was playing at their table back then, I promise you was a white elephant compared to every other table not matter how much you tried to run RAW. Over at Dragonfoot forums, the same guys who have been playing the game for 50 years and still are playing are still arguing over what the 1e AD&D rules and rulebook are actually trying to say to this day.
Again I have to disagree but I will do it with examples.
Skills were introduced very early on officially, first for 1e AD&D in 1985 Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, followed up by Survival Guides. For 1e Basic skills first appeared in Mystara Gazetteer's and later in the Cyclopedia.
Bound Accuracy existed technically since 0e and remained a part of the game until 3e. The official way to resolve ability checks or skills was to roll your ability score or under, or in the case of select skills like thieves skills it was a percentile die with no modifiers or using a d6 to do things like perception checks which never had modifiers either making this a fixed (bound) system that did not change regardless of level. The attack bonus used by 5e proficiency check advancement has almost the same progression as 1e classes.
You mention weapon and armor modifiers, but weapon and armor modifiers work the same way in 5e as they did in 1e. You have a +1 Long Sword, you get a +1 bonus to attack and damage, you have a +1 Leather armor you get a +1 bonus to AC, I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with bound accuracy.
Bound accuracy has always been part of D&D until 3rd edition when they got rid of it and brought it back by 5e. Grant it the mechanics of how bound accuracy worked was different, but it had the same result. Like if you were an elf you had a 2 in 6 chance of detecting something unusual, it didn't matter what level you were, it was a fixed system. Saving throws, attack bonuses, skill and ability checks, all worked in the confines of a fixed system. The only difference was that some progressions were class-based, rather than universal, but it was still bound accuracy in every sense.
I'm sorry but this is just a myth, I mean it's not true in anyway at all and this is kind of the problem I have with the way people see the game back then compared to what it is now. Perhaps its just a timing thing, but things happened a lot earlier than I think you are remembering.
Yes, Dungeon Crawls were a big part of D&D and, they still are. Show me a book in 5e adventure released in the last 40 years that doesn't have a dungeons in it? Its few and far between. Dungeons are part of the game, they always have been but the content that opened the game up to other types of adventures was released as early as the mid 80's. 1e AD&D Wilderness Survival guide and Expert rules for 1e introduced the Hex Crawl, The Companion and Expert rules introduced Dominion Rules and Mass Combat rules paving the way for kingdom management, politics and warfware.. all of this happened by or before 85.
As for "resolving social interactions", yeah, of course, it didn't, it's a role-playing game, it never occurred to anyone who played or designed the game that social interaction rules were needed. You have reaction roles based on Charisma, but that was largely to determine a baseline during encounters. Social interaction rules were born when the art of role-playing started de-evolving for a brief period with nonsense like skill challenges which were quickly cut from the game because people despised them with a deep ceded passion. Thank god for Critical Role to beat this nonsense out of the game by example.
I do agree with you that these days people are more theatrical, they will use voices and they to mimic the artistry of what Critical Role does at their table which I will be the first to admit is definitely something of a new-age style of playing and running the game, but then again, Matt Mercer is in fact an old school DM. Acting in character, voicing your character etc.. this is not new, I will grant you its far more prevalent today than it was back then, but people did it in most games.
You don't really need to have any inside knowledge to understand where rules come from, the evidence is the books themselves.
Feats for example did not come from 3rd edition, they first appeared in 2nd edition AD&D in the Skills and Powers book. Sub-Classes first appeared in the D&D Cyclopedia as a couple of examples.
You are right 3.5 did not have bound accuracy, it was abandoned after 2nd edition AD&D and came back later on.
Now this next part, I understand is definitely more difficult to prove, but if you paid attention during the development of 5e and listened to what was being said and done, while having your finger on the pulse of the D&D OSR community, its super apparent, but of course quite difficult to prove. Still I believe the following to be mostly true.
Crawford, Perkins and Mearls were central to the release of the game and it's by their willingness to listen to fans and old-school game designers the game came to fruition for which we should all be thankful but they were barely involved in the design of 5e mechanics, most of the work for 5th edition game mechanics was contracted out to 3rd party's and specifically the 3rd party consultants played the most important role in the games development. This is because these guys (the trio) were still in shock over 4e and they did not understand how and why 4e was not successful. They did not have their finger on the pulse of the D&D community, so they reached out to people who were living and breathing the game on the ground level and actively producing successful content for D&D. You want to thank someone for 5e, go into the Players Handbook, look in the credits under Additional Consultation Provided By... Those guys there, those are the guys that made 5e for you, those guys essentially steered the game back to reality by explaining the inner workings of the D&D community that existed at the time, that would make or break the game. If it wasn't for them, god only knows what we would have gotten instead of 5e as Crawford, Perkins and Mearls, didn't have a clue what to do after 4e to make D&D work again. They were living in a bubble outside of the D&D community that continued to evolve outside of Wizards of the Coast without their influence.
I know that sounds incendiary and maybe it is a bit, but the biggest problem 5e had during its development was that the owners of the franchise did not understand why Dungeons and Dragon is the most popular and beloved game in the market, they were under the impression that it was "design" but its not, this game today lives and dies on one alter, nostalgia, culture and sacred cows. You tap into that part of the game and you win, you ignore it and you lose. It's that simple, proven by D&D's history beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Its why this entire venture into VTT's and trying to make D&D a digital platform is the next Wizard of the Coast disaster because they don't understand that D&D can never be a closed system. We are here debating, you and I, about what D&D is and isn't, how it is or isn't played, what it was or wasn't and while its fascinating and I love it, I'm certain both you and I are simultaneously right and wrong at the same time, which illustrates the point. You and I, our experiences, our love for the game and the passion we have for it, IS D&D, but that only exists in a game where there is never any real clarity about what it is and the boundless nature of an open system.
You make a digital version of that game and what you are doing is putting up digital walls, that not only strictly define what the game is and how it should be played, but you must now pay to unlock what little flexibility is going to be hidden within, the exact opposite of everything that D&D stands for as a concept. Its just my prediction, but I think VTT is going to be even a bigger disaster for the franchise than 4e was.
Finally, I just want to say, given how badly we have already derailed this topic that by no stretch of the imagination are my opinion's - instructions, objectively true, or somehow superior to anyone else's. I'm just one voice in a sea, perhaps my language is a bit commanding and vocal but don't confuse passion for anger or my fanaticism for the hobby as gate keeping. I have and will always remain of the opinion that if you are playing D&D in any form, your doing it right.
2 things
1. don't get so hooked into the rules as written thinking about this, you need to be flexible in your mindset. That includes asking the DM to clarify why it would be insight (note not CHALLENGE, but ask to clarify). The checks are vague and open to interpretation so that DM's can be flexible. I would interpret an insight check on this to see how insightful your character is at working out from what you see what sort of creature you might associate it as being from random bits and pieces you've hear over the years, in the same way that you might make an insightful prediction about how a fight might go by looking at the physique of the opponents and their demeanor going into the fight.
2. Being a DM is hard, there are so many moving parts to keep in order in your head and on the fly, and they send a lot of time out of game prepping stuff so you can have fun. The DM is giving you a 2nd option to make sure the game is accessible and fun for you, but sometimes it's not about making sense it's to give you a better chance at having an awesome moment in the game. Don't throw that in their face by being a little rules-lawyer about it. Take the roll, accept the DM's decision and enjoy the game, don't sit here and whine about the DM cutting you a break and offering you an option for a better check for you to roll. As the Players hand book says, the DM s ruling is final. Accept it, embrace it, enjoy it, move on.
Look, this is very derailed.
All tables are different, the game HAS evolved. Not all rulebooks are picked up by players,
My comments haven't been about game mechanics evolving but the culture around the game and the culture around gaming at large (citing Mario) have evolved and changed as well to fit those new cultural norms.
I originally used Mario as an example saying we aren't as interested in being a plumber just chasing a princess cause reasons.
Well, new Mario games are essentially every bit the same structure and basis, but have added on bits of lore and background and now there's massive wikis to the fandom..
All for a franchise where in one game you run around a sewer trying to stomp on a bunch of creatures.... ( wish I could find that copy of Mario Bros for the atari)
Zelda has multiverse spanning timelines and yes, D&D has its own spelljammer and different campaign settings. (which, that could be a whole 'nother topic, as the core seems to have abandoned setting specific roles, races, and monsters for the most part it feels... which in itself could be another avenue for the longevity of each edition.. again.. tangents)
Anyhow, yes, individual worlds individual storylines naturally popped up, but at its core, this game is 90% battle tactics and mechanics with skills as a tack on, which, it can be argued in broad terms it always has been. But each addition and edition has tried to bring it all together and also aimed to be reflective of the current rpg zeitgeist, (hence the complaints about 4), and OneDnD isn't any different (though its getting its own complaints for mimicking everything wrong with the gaming culture at large),
One of the things that has steadily increased has been an emphasis on story over tactics, and as it may evolve as such over sessions within a group, it also has evolved as a cultural desire within gaming as well.
The thing is, although you will find some groups that are happy to go back to more mindless dungeon crawls or to even go back to old rules, you will find just as many if not more that are happy to move on to the next edition or stay with this one...
Besides, If 5e is not discernably different or it all the basics of 5e are present in first edition, why are you such a proponent of going back to first edition? Why do you say that the older games are superior to what's out now or going to come out?
I don't believe or have said any such thing. I run an older version of the game, though but I do this mostly because I have an ongoing campaign that has been running for over 3 decades and 5e doesn't do anything new that I don't already have in my game. Switching to 5e would be like switching from Coke to Pepsi, I'm sure it tastes different to some people and I'm sure we can probably, objectively prove that it is in fact different, but the differences are so marginal and mostly irrelevant, I'm not sure exactly why I would bother with it.
Increased from 3rd edition and 4th edition, its almost caught up with 1st edition. Its evolving after it was de-evolve for 2 decades.
Old school gaming has never been about mindless dungeon crawling so I'm not entirely sure what you mean by going back to it, besides the "rules" had nothing to do with what sort of focus a game had anymore than modern rules are. Old school D&D was as much about Dungeon Crawls as it was about Hexploration, kingdom building, mass combat, politics and horror. It all depends on which setting and focus you chose,again, same as today. You telling me that Birthright was about Dungeon Crawling? Was Dragonlance about Dungeon Crawling? Was Ravenloft a Dungeon Crawl?
Learn your history m8. 5e has basically been ripping off old school D&D content for the last decade. Dragonlance: Shadow of The Dragon Queen, SpellJammer, Candlekeep Mysteries, Icewind Dale, Descent Into Avernus, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tales From The Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss.. just to name a few, you can rename these "Dungeon Crawls" all you want, we all know where they were copy/pasted from. You could fit all of the original content in 5e over the last 10 years on a napkin.
I don't believe or have said any such thing. I run an older version of the game, but I do this mostly because I have an ongoing campaign that has been running for over 3 decades and 5e doesn't do anything new (enough) that I don't already have in my game. Switching to 5e would be like switching from Coke to Pepsi, I'm sure it tastes different to some people and I'm sure we can probably, objectively prove that it is in fact different, but the differences are so marginal and mostly irrelevant, I'm not sure exactly why I would bother with it.
Increased from 3rd edition and 4th edition, its caught up with 1st edition. It's evolving after it was de-evolve for 2 decades.
Old school gaming has never been about mindless dungeon crawling so I'm not entirely sure what you mean by going back to it, besides the "rules" had nothing to do with what sort of focus a game had anymore than modern rules have. Old school D&D was as much about Dungeon Crawls as it was about Hexploration, kingdom building, mass combat, politics and horror. It all depends on which setting and focus you chose,again, same as today. You telling me that Birthright was about Dungeon Crawling? Was Dragonlance about Dungeon Crawling? Was Ravenloft a Dungeon Crawl?
5e has basically been ripping off old-school D&D content for the last decade, which is fine, nostalgia sells. Dragonlance: Shadow of The Dragon Queen, SpellJammer, Candlekeep Mysteries, Icewind Dale, Descent Into Avernus, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tales From The Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss.. just to name a few, you can rename these "Dungeon Crawls" all you want, we all know where they were copy/pasted from. You could fit all of the original content in 5e over the last 10 years on a napkin and most of the rules changes largley superficial alterations that use different math to get the same result.