Really the thing here is that going by the more precise definitions of the words, D&D is not a strategic game, it's a tactical one. That is to say, one about deciding how to employ your options in the moment. Ergo features are essentially a necessity in providing a suite of tactical options to choose from. Case in point, do you light a hooded lantern so you have the best chance of spotting melee ambushes or traps in a dark environment before you're in the middle of them at the risk of giving away your position and making yourselves targets for ranged ambushes, or do you take advantage of a general capability to move effectively in the dark to attempt to go unseen at the risk of missing a trap or ambush until you're in the middle of them? This is the definition of the players making a call in the moment based on their fixed capabilities, their knowledge of the situation, and what their characters would do.
The game's direct antecedent—Chainmail—was a strategy game. D&D historically grew out of playing strategy games and deciding to add a referee to determine the outcomes for things players might want characters to do for which there might not be rules. Which is to say that historically D&D was the exact opposite of what you claim. It's not about rules and the options these provide players. In fact an old-school approach to the hobby doesn't even see the rules as being there for the players. But just a resource for the DM.
Dude, there has literally never been a point in the half century of D&D's existence where this wasn't true.
I have been playing since 1983. I played more 1st. and 2nd. during their lifecycles than any other edition since. With the possible exception of 5th. If you truly believe it's just a misunderstanding why there is so much content on YouTube and Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond about how 5th. slows things down with players often taking forever to decide what to do so tethered are they to their character sheets or it's just a misunderstanding why more than one of the core tenets of the OSR movement are responses to these very issues then I can only assume you are not engaging with many in the hobby beyond your own circle and this has left you with a rather myopic view of what D&D is and with little to no familiarity with what it once was and what many still expect from it.
Again with the straw manning. Now you are adding "every" to the equation.
As for bad roleplaying: using an array of abilities as little more than buttons to be pressed requires zero roleplaying.
This was one of the biggest criticisms of 4th. Edition and remains one of the biggest criticisms of 5th. A player who just says on his or her turn I do this or I do that when this or that just activates some feature or demands a roll isn't roleplaying at all. Roleplaying requires at least some degree of observation and description. That is what I meant by prioritizing player skill over character abilities. Players actually getting creative. If the player isn't even describing what his or her character is doing that player is not roleplaying. No matter how much what they are doing is informed by the rules. A perfect example of this is Rage. Most players just say I rage. And the mechanical benefits of their having done so are then activated. How many players bother to describe what happens when they do so and maintain at least some level of description throughout the duration of their raging?
On that note: How many players these days only bother to describe what they are doing in the hope their doing so will grant them Advantage?
Middle-Earth is a lower magic setting than even Dark Sun. Magic in Middle-Earth is exclusively the province of semi-divine beings, and the most powerful wizard in Middle-Earth relies more on swordsmanship than on spells, with most of his magic being things that a 4th level D&D character could duplicate.
While completely true, it's also entirely irrelevant to the point that darkness is a story and combat tool. A tension builder that to all intents and purposes simply doesn't exist.
Darkness is more of a staple of storytelling than ... almost anything. Except in the game that's built almost entirely on storytelling.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I agree about monsters, I am discussing solely for PC's.
I found out running Shadowdark that NO PC's have darkvision, and ALL monsters do. It makes for a vastly better game. There is nothing stopping you as a DM from making a house rule that wipes out PC darkvision, for all the reasons that you gave. That being said, I make it clear to players that in my game a light source nearby ruins darkvision. That alone changes the dynamic, quite a bit.
This. I don't even have my 2024 Players Handbook yet and I already have a House Rules document for it. There is only one thing on it, this the complete document so far.
Why does WOTC have to make a change that you are perfectly capable of making at your own table? I personally don't have a problem with Darkvision. Nerfing things just to be doing it is never fun or the answer. You don't like Darkvision? Cool. Edit it out of your table like a person earlier said.
ShadowDark won four gold ENNIEs. It also won this year's Three Castles Award for best game design. None of the ancestries have darkvision. And the way darkness is treated in the game is just one of the many things that make it worthy of all the praise and promotion it has been receiving.
OK. But ShadowDark is a game that exists for people who are looking for a different experience than they get from D&D. You see the name ShadowDark, and you assume that darkness is a Big Deal in the game. (Or you immediately think of overly-pretentious Vampire players from the 90s.)
It won awards. That probably means it's good at what it intends to do. Not that what it intends to do is a thing all (or even a large fraction of) gamers want.
It's currently the flavor of the month for the OSR people. Great. I hope they have fun with it. But the idea that D&D should do a thing because it's popular with a population of gamers who organize around a rejection of what D&D's been doing doesn't make a lot of sense for D&D.
If you want the experience of ShadowDark, you should play ShadowDark, not argue for turning D&D into it.
If I want the experience of the DIE RPG, I should play it, not argue that D&D needs more metatextual commentary about the nature of stories and the player-character relationship.
This is a false dichotomy you've somehow invented; player creativity is not mutually exclusive / at odds with a crunchy ruleset or mechanical depth.
We are seeing a trend of players looking to their character sheets to decide what to do. Wasting time at our tables by weighing up their every mechanical option instead of using their own wisdom or intelligence and not those of their characters to make decisions within more reasonable timeframes. Many a DM has complained about this. If it's not the bloat that is the cause of this what is it? Just selfish players insisting on being in the spotlight for more time than necessary?
3rd. Edition hardcovers can be had for as little as 10-20 dollars.
You're bringing up 3rd edition in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options?
Dude, there has literally never been a point in the half century of D&D's existence where this wasn't true.
I have been playing since 1983. I played more 1st. and 2nd. during their lifecycles than any other edition since. With the possible exception of 5th. If you truly believe it's just a misunderstanding why there is so much content on YouTube and Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond about how 5th. slows things down with players often taking forever to decide what to do so tethered are they to their character sheets or it's just a misunderstanding why more than one of the core tenets of the OSR movement are responses to these very issues then I can only assume you are not engaging with many in the hobby beyond your own circle and this has left you with a rather myopic view of what D&D is and with little to no familiarity with what it once was and what many still expect from it.
Again with the straw manning. Now you are adding "every" to the equation.
As for bad roleplaying: using an array of abilities as little more than buttons to be pressed requires zero roleplaying.
This was one of the biggest criticisms of 4th. Edition and remains one of the biggest criticisms of 5th. A player who just says on his or her turn I do this or I do that when this or that just activates some feature or demands a roll isn't roleplaying at all. Roleplaying requires at least some degree of observation and description. That is what I meant by prioritizing player skill over character abilities. Players actually getting creative. If the player isn't even describing what his or her character is doing that player is not roleplaying. No matter how much what they are doing is informed by the rules. A perfect example of this is Rage. Most players just say I rage. And the mechanical benefits of their having done so are then activated. How many players bother to describe what happens when they do so and maintain at least some level of description throughout the duration of their raging?
This is how it has ever been. 1e wasn't some paradise of player creativity. Most people were just "I hit the orc". They didn't spend so much time agonizing over their options because they didn't have any. 1e classes were extremely lacking in that regard. That didn't make for better or worse play. Creative players were still creative. Rote players weren't. Ditherers would find something to dither about.
Overall, I'm pretty sure that the quality of role-play has increased since then: It's more established as a practice in modern gamer culture, the game provides more scaffolding to support it, and players are generally more invested in characters they created, instead of rolling their stats and playing another fighter because that's the only thing they can play.
Why does WOTC have to make a change that you are perfectly capable of making at your own table? I personally don't have a problem with Darkvision. Nerfing things just to be doing it is never fun or the answer. You don't like Darkvision? Cool. Edit it out of your table like a person earlier said.
ShadowDark won four gold ENNIEs. It also won this year's Three Castles Award for best game design. None of the ancestries have darkvision. And the way darkness is treated in the game is just one of the many things that make it worthy of all the praise and promotion it has been receiving.
OK. But ShadowDark is a game that exists for people who are looking for a different experience than they get from D&D. You see the name ShadowDark, and you assume that darkness is a Big Deal in the game. (Or you immediately think of overly-pretentious Vampire players from the 90s.)
It won awards. That probably means it's good at what it intends to do. Not that what it intends to do is a thing all (or even a large fraction of) gamers want.
It's currently the flavor of the month for the OSR people. Great. I hope they have fun with it. But the idea that D&D should do a thing because it's popular with a population of gamers who organize around a rejection of what D&D's been doing doesn't make a lot of sense for D&D.
If you want the experience of ShadowDark, you should play ShadowDark, not argue for turning D&D into it.
If I want the experience of the DIE RPG, I should play it, not argue that D&D needs more metatextual commentary about the nature of stories and the player-character relationship.
This is a false dichotomy you've somehow invented; player creativity is not mutually exclusive / at odds with a crunchy ruleset or mechanical depth.
We are seeing a trend of players looking to their character sheets to decide what to do. Wasting time at our tables by weighing up their every mechanical option instead of using their own wisdom or intelligence and not those of their characters to make decisions within more reasonable timeframes. Many a DM has complained about this. If it's not the bloat that is the cause of this what is it? Just selfish players insisting on being in the spotlight for more time than necessary?
3rd. Edition hardcovers can be had for as little as 10-20 dollars.
You're bringing up 3rd edition in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options?
Dude, there has literally never been a point in the half century of D&D's existence where this wasn't true.
I have been playing since 1983. I played more 1st. and 2nd. during their lifecycles than any other edition since. With the possible exception of 5th. If you truly believe it's just a misunderstanding why there is so much content on YouTube and Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond about how 5th. slows things down with players often taking forever to decide what to do so tethered are they to their character sheets or it's just a misunderstanding why more than one of the core tenets of the OSR movement are responses to these very issues then I can only assume you are not engaging with many in the hobby beyond your own circle and this has left you with a rather myopic view of what D&D is and with little to no familiarity with what it once was and what many still expect from it.
Again with the straw manning. Now you are adding "every" to the equation.
As for bad roleplaying: using an array of abilities as little more than buttons to be pressed requires zero roleplaying.
This was one of the biggest criticisms of 4th. Edition and remains one of the biggest criticisms of 5th. A player who just says on his or her turn I do this or I do that when this or that just activates some feature or demands a roll isn't roleplaying at all. Roleplaying requires at least some degree of observation and description. That is what I meant by prioritizing player skill over character abilities. Players actually getting creative. If the player isn't even describing what his or her character is doing that player is not roleplaying. No matter how much what they are doing is informed by the rules. A perfect example of this is Rage. Most players just say I rage. And the mechanical benefits of their having done so are then activated. How many players bother to describe what happens when they do so and maintain at least some level of description throughout the duration of their raging?
This is how it has ever been. 1e wasn't some paradise of player creativity. Most people were just "I hit the orc". They didn't spend so much time agonizing over their options because they didn't have any. 1e classes were extremely lacking in that regard. That didn't make for better or worse play. Creative players were still creative. Rote players weren't. Ditherers would find something to dither about.
Overall, I'm pretty sure that the quality of role-play has increased since then: It's more established as a practice in modern gamer culture, the game provides more scaffolding to support it, and players are generally more invested in characters they created, instead of rolling their stats and playing another fighter because that's the only thing they can play.
I mentioned ShadowDark and its treatment of darkness and success not to suggest Wizards must follow suit.That is just you reading into my post what you want. I mentioned it to demonstrate that it's not as if the idea of darkness as a palpable threat is unpopular in the hobby.
No. I did not bring up 3rd. Edition "in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options." I brought up 3rd. Edition to show how little 3rd. Edition books can go for. Notably less than AD&D books. Because by then Wizards of the Coast had taken over and the books had already declined in physical quality.
Vast is the content on YouTube and many the complaints on Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond from DMs who have witnessed the game increasingly become more and more like a video game. With players just pressing those buttons and not roleplaying. You act as if the OSR was responding to nothing. That its more rulings not rules approach or prioritizing of player skill over character abilities just emerged in a vacuum. This was a call to a return to a more old-school approach to gaming. Gaming as I remember it when I played in the early eighties through to the early nineties. Players not being mired in the rules. Many not even owning the rules. Players describing ways to handle certain challenges. Not just saying Can I roll [ ]? You don't get to tell me over a decade of experience then and the ensuing thirty years of experience were simply imagined.
We are seeing a trend of players looking to their character sheets to decide what to do. Wasting time at our tables by weighing up their every mechanical option instead of using their own wisdom or intelligence and not those of their characters to make decisions within more reasonable timeframes. Many a DM has complained about this. If it's not the bloat that is the cause of this what is it? Just selfish players insisting on being in the spotlight for more time than necessary?
This is the most popular and accessible the game has ever been. Saying "many DMs have complained" about 5e crunch isn't a statistic, it means nothing; many DMs love it too. If you want an old school lack of mechanical options because you feel that's somehow easier to run, the answer is simple, stick to an old school game.
It should be noted, one person aggressively making up a fictional history and present of the game based on their own biased perspective has nothing to do with Darkvision.
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Back to the thread, as I am personally using the 2024 rules transition to implement some homerules I have long been contemplating, I am curious what others might think about a homerule changing all species Darkvision options to Low-Light Vision. Been thinking about this more and more since this thread got posted, and I am pretty pleased at how it likely plays out - while I fully understand Darkvision does not give you perfect sight in darkness, those penalties still generally trivialize the ability to use darkness as a fundamental obstacle for travel or explorations.
Low-light vision allows DMs to decide when darkness is a problem - there’s enough smokeless, eternal magical sources of light (or the old go-to of bioluminescent fungi) that you can give players low-light situations to make their species traits useful, while still having the option to say “and now you are somewhere very dark - do you risk a light source that can be a burning beacon to your position, even at great distances? Or do we risk the darkness.”
No. I did not bring up 3rd. Edition "in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options."
It was rather a non-sequitur, then.
I brought up 3rd. Edition to show how little 3rd. Edition books can go for. Notably less than AD&D books. Because by then Wizards of the Coast had taken over and the books had already declined in physical quality.
I'd rather think it's because there were far more 3rd edition core books printed than there ever were for AD&D, and because they've had less time to deteriorate and get lost. Supply and demand.
And maybe also because there's a relatively popular system that's built out from 3e, while all the AD&D derivatives are pretty obscure. If you wanna play 3e, pathfinder probably scratches that itch. If you want AD&D, the game everyone you're likely to play with knows is AD&D.
Can't judge the quality, but I seriously doubt any D&D book ever has been manufactured to high standards. Mass production and the desire to keep the price point low make it impossible.
Vast is the content on YouTube and many the complaints on Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond from DMs who have witnessed the game increasingly become more and more like a video game. With players just pressing those buttons and not roleplaying. You act as if the OSR was responding to nothing.
IIRC (and I may not; I wasn't paying that much attention), it grew out of people in the indie scene experimenting with the idea of old D&D as an exemplar of Gamist (Forge definition) design, and trying to modernize it while keeping the essence, and eventually those games found a small but enthusiastic audience outside their initial crowd.
That said, it's not like AD&D didn't have dark vision of sorts. It was just weirder and harder to adjudicate, but still extremely prevalent. (Everybody but humans had infravision.)
I agree about monsters, I am discussing solely for PC's.
I found out running Shadowdark that NO PC's have darkvision, and ALL monsters do. It makes for a vastly better game. There is nothing stopping you as a DM from making a house rule that wipes out PC darkvision, for all the reasons that you gave. That being said, I make it clear to players that in my game a light source nearby ruins darkvision. That alone changes the dynamic, quite a bit.
This. I don't even have my 2024 Players Handbook yet and I already have a House Rules document for it. There is only one thing on it, this the complete document so far.
by doing this, I hope anyone at your table sees the red flags in it. As you do not respect the lore of D&D.
There is a reason why some species have Dark Vision, and a reason why others don't. If only one set of Species had it, it would only be the ones from the Fey Wild or Shadow Dark Fel. Which BTW includes all the Elves. That's because Elf eyes are similar to Cat Eyes, as are most fey creatures. Something about the pure chaos of the Fey Wild does this. Likewise the Shadow fel is a creation of Shar the Goddess of Loss, and all the residents of that plane are corrupted by the darkness their.
As for why other species have it, their ancestors lived underground, or they are gemstones made mortal. Gnomes, Dwarves, Goblins, Orcs, and Kobold all can trace lineage to the deep places of their home worlds.
But some it can be argued either way, ie Dragonborn who may or may not be made by the magic of wizards or dragons.
Also the bird species may or may not be related to nocturnal species. Then we have one of my favorite species, who are literal cat people the Tabaxi.
The reason Humans don't start out with it (but can easily gain it) is because humans are not from underground or nocturnal societies. Humans mostly worship the day, and deities involving daylight or the harvest. (Seriously the 2 most popular human deities are Lathander and Chauntea.)
And if you don't think your deity comes into play with your abilities, you have not read enough of the books, novels, and general lore of D&D. As everything is technically god granted in D&D.
While completely true, it's also entirely irrelevant to the point that darkness is a story and combat tool. A tension builder that to all intents and purposes simply doesn't exist.
Darkness is more of a staple of storytelling than ... almost anything. Except in the game that's built almost entirely on storytelling.
Well, Darkness in Shadowdark serves the same purpose that Darkness served in B/X 1st edition, which is "to create tension and danger while in a dungeon", that is a direct quote from the designer. Shadowdark is a game that was designed with a big focus on dungeon survival (its a Dungeon Crawling Game).
Every version of D&D with the exception of 5th edition was designed with a very specific style of play in mind and a core gameplay loop it presumes, in fact, 99% of all RPG's are designed this way. 5th edition is unique in that it quite literally is about nothing specific. There is no "playstyle" built into the mechanics, no purpose or goal that was targeted as a foundation for the game, it has neither design pillars or even ambitions to be anything specific.
So far as I can tell the only design goal in 5e is to be the least offensive to the most amount of role-players possible. The issue 5e however has always had is that because its not designed for any specific playstyle or purpose, its just passable at everything at absolute best. Its a quite mediocre as dungeon crawler, a survival game, as a hex crawler, it has no rules for mass combat or kingdom building or politics, or espionage, its bad at open-world sandbox play, its a terrible storyteller system, its a crap tactical game, its pretty poorly balanced. It quite literally doesn't do a single thing well, but, it also doesn't absolutely suck anything either, which is kind of its thing if it has one.
Shadowdark is a really fantastic dungeon-crawling survival RPG, but it's completely void of serving any other function. It literally has rules for nothing else at all and I know some old-school gamers will proclaim that in the absence of rules/instructions is the "brilliance" of it, but that's just a bunch of horsecrap.
No. I did not bring up 3rd. Edition "in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options." I brought up 3rd. Edition to show how little 3rd. Edition books can go for. Notably less than AD&D books. Because by then Wizards of the Coast had taken over and the books had already declined in physical quality.
Quotes from the internet, results may vary.
Between 1979 and 1990, the AD&D 1st edition Players Handbook sold a total of 1,546,670 copies. Sales figures for 1978 are unavailable.
estimates that in the 3E era they were selling "150,000 to 200,000 Players Handbooks per year".
While the numbers and sources might not be 100% accurate, this gives an actual reason why. from 1979 until 1990 they sold 140k books a year on average, by 3rd edition they moved to 150k to 200k sales per year. Also the book quality stayed the same, although the art and design work got a lot better with the publishing of 2.5 in 1996. (Yes 2.5 was a thing, most of the 2nd ed books on ebay are from this era.)
Why are the older books worth more, because fewer of them are around, and even fewer of those are in usable condition. So using economics 101 (Supply and demand) say the demand is the same for every book, in all editions, as there is a constant rate of people trying to collect all books from all editions (Which is a thing BTW ) and say that every year the older books have a higher chance of being destroyed.
No. I did not bring up 3rd. Edition "in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options."
It was rather a non-sequitur, then.
I brought up 3rd. Edition to show how little 3rd. Edition books can go for. Notably less than AD&D books. Because by then Wizards of the Coast had taken over and the books had already declined in physical quality.
I'd rather think it's because there were far more 3rd edition core books printed than there ever were for AD&D, and because they've had less time to deteriorate and get lost. Supply and demand.
And maybe also because there's a relatively popular system that's built out from 3e, while all the AD&D derivatives are pretty obscure. If you wanna play 3e, pathfinder probably scratches that itch. If you want AD&D, the game everyone you're likely to play with knows is AD&D.
Can't judge the quality, but I seriously doubt any D&D book ever has been manufactured to high standards. Mass production and the desire to keep the price point low make it impossible.
Vast is the content on YouTube and many the complaints on Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond from DMs who have witnessed the game increasingly become more and more like a video game. With players just pressing those buttons and not roleplaying. You act as if the OSR was responding to nothing.
IIRC (and I may not; I wasn't paying that much attention), it grew out of people in the indie scene experimenting with the idea of old D&D as an exemplar of Gamist (Forge definition) design, and trying to modernize it while keeping the essence, and eventually those games found a small but enthusiastic audience outside their initial crowd.
That said, it's not like AD&D didn't have dark vision of sorts. It was just weirder and harder to adjudicate, but still extremely prevalent. (Everybody but humans had infravision.)
No. It wasn't a non sequitur either. Because it was in direct response to someone saying how expensive second-hand copies of earlier editions can be. Did you even bother to read what my post was in response to?
Older editions of D&D used quality boards, quality paper, and were stitched using quality methods. You can "seriously doubt" all you like. You are wrong. The current physical books use cheap glue, cheap paper, and cheap boards. I own old AD&D books. There is no comparison. They were produced using the sorts of standards we see from many smaller game publishers today prepared to put more time and effort into the physical product. Reviews from those who have in their hands the 2024 PHB often mention how finally Wizards of the Coast have at least decided to use better quality glue for binding. You can argue whether or not you believe these were better systems as that would be a matter of opinion. You cannot argue against the objective reality that cheap gloss boards and cheap almost magazine-like paper and cheap glue are not the same as the printed matte boards and quality thick paper and stitching we got with AD&D books.
The OSR grew out of people's disappointment with how modern editions of D&D no longer played like the game used to. It began during the lifecycle of 3rd. Edition and has only gained more ground throughout those of 4th. and 5th. It favors a rulings not rules approach. And favors bringing the game back to a time when the rules were for the referee. Instead of seeing players mired in rules and then expecting every option made available to them to be available to them at every table. It favors player skill over character abilities. As previously mentioned. Because the latter makes the game look and feel like a video game. When players can just activate some feature or ask if they can roll they become less and less inclined to even bother describing what they do. Many today only bother to describe what they do if they think it will afford Advantage.
I agree about monsters, I am discussing solely for PC's.
I found out running Shadowdark that NO PC's have darkvision, and ALL monsters do. It makes for a vastly better game. There is nothing stopping you as a DM from making a house rule that wipes out PC darkvision, for all the reasons that you gave. That being said, I make it clear to players that in my game a light source nearby ruins darkvision. That alone changes the dynamic, quite a bit.
This. I don't even have my 2024 Players Handbook yet and I already have a House Rules document for it. There is only one thing on it, this the complete document so far.
by doing this, I hope anyone at your table sees the red flags in it. As you do not respect the lore of D&D.
There is a reason why some species have Dark Vision, and a reason why others don't. If only one set of Species had it, it would only be the ones from the Fey Wild or Shadow Dark Fel. Which BTW includes all the Elves. That's because Elf eyes are similar to Cat Eyes, as are most fey creatures. Something about the pure chaos of the Fey Wild does this. Likewise the Shadow fel is a creation of Shar the Goddess of Loss, and all the residents of that plane are corrupted by the darkness their.
As for why other species have it, their ancestors lived underground, or they are gemstones made mortal. Gnomes, Dwarves, Goblins, Orcs, and Kobold all can trace lineage to the deep places of their home worlds.
But some it can be argued either way, ie Dragonborn who may or may not be made by the magic of wizards or dragons.
Also the bird species may or may not be related to nocturnal species. Then we have one of my favorite species, who are literal cat people the Tabaxi.
The reason Humans don't start out with it (but can easily gain it) is because humans are not from underground or nocturnal societies. Humans mostly worship the day, and deities involving daylight or the harvest. (Seriously the 2 most popular human deities are Lathander and Chauntea.)
And if you don't think your deity comes into play with your abilities, you have not read enough of the books, novels, and general lore of D&D. As everything is technically god granted in D&D.
"respect" is a bit strong a word. None of this lore matters in a homebrew world of the DM's own creation.
Shadowdark is a really fantastic dungeon-crawling survival RPG, but it's completely void of serving any other function. It literally has rules for nothing else at all and I know some old-school gamers will proclaim that in the absence of rules/instructions is the "brilliance" of it, but that's just a bunch of horsecrap.
The majority of tables in the book are for generating urban locations and encounters in them. I use it for what is other than just excursions into what lies below the streets and beyond the walls ultimately an urban crawl.
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling? Because to me it is really just 5th. Edition only broken down to core classes and removing rules bloat and making use of some of the innovations we have seen in the OSR to make it look and feel more like B/X and games that emulate B/X. B/X and BECMI were certainly more than mere dungeon crawlers. These were and remain used for domain level play.
Baron de Ropp mentions in response to people saying it is just a dungeon crawler that he started running a campaign using the system as soon as the pdf was made available before the books shipped and that it was still going at the time of recording. Critics want to say it can't do anything else. Many of them have probably never even looked inside the thing. They only need to hear or read someone say it and they suspect that assessment is the truth.
No. I did not bring up 3rd. Edition "in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options." I brought up 3rd. Edition to show how little 3rd. Edition books can go for. Notably less than AD&D books. Because by then Wizards of the Coast had taken over and the books had already declined in physical quality.
Quotes from the internet, results may vary.
Between 1979 and 1990, the AD&D 1st edition Players Handbook sold a total of 1,546,670 copies. Sales figures for 1978 are unavailable.
estimates that in the 3E era they were selling "150,000 to 200,000 Players Handbooks per year".
While the numbers and sources might not be 100% accurate, this gives an actual reason why. from 1979 until 1990 they sold 140k books a year on average, by 3rd edition they moved to 150k to 200k sales per year. Also the book quality stayed the same, although the art and design work got a lot better with the publishing of 2.5 in 1996. (Yes 2.5 was a thing, most of the 2nd ed books on ebay are from this era.)
Why are the older books worth more, because fewer of them are around, and even fewer of those are in usable condition. So using economics 101 (Supply and demand) say the demand is the same for every book, in all editions, as there is a constant rate of people trying to collect all books from all editions (Which is a thing BTW ) and say that every year the older books have a higher chance of being destroyed.
using paint to make a basic graph.
Any serious dealer in second-hand books will tell you the physical quality of a book counts for something.
Pick up and page through an old AD&D book. Feel its cover. They weren't the sort of cheap gloss boards we expect to see on cheap coffee table books or cheap cook books found on bargain tables in the mall that have been the norm for D&D hardcovers since 3rd Edition.
Feel the paper. It is thick quality paper. Not almost magazine-thin paper.
Look at the binding.
These books are worth their asking prices not only because of their comparative rarity. They are collectable because they are quality physical products.
…I maintain that Darkvision is a terrible annoyance for DM's and is so prevalent amongst the different species that it is not a very 'special' trait. The endless arguments at the table - "Can't I see in that cave because of Darkvision? Do I even need a torch? Can we just communicate to our one party member without Darkvision everything we see so they basically have Darkvision?" The cycle continues….
Do people really have those arguments?!? At any table I play at, if the DM says, “no, the cave is too far away,” “you need one to see colors or it’s all like a reverse photo negative,” “no, I tell ya what, close your eyes and we’ll talk you through this living room, see how well that goes…,” that’s pretty much the end of it.
I agree about monsters, I am discussing solely for PC's.
I found out running Shadowdark that NO PC's have darkvision, and ALL monsters do. It makes for a vastly better game. There is nothing stopping you as a DM from making a house rule that wipes out PC darkvision, for all the reasons that you gave. That being said, I make it clear to players that in my game a light source nearby ruins darkvision. That alone changes the dynamic, quite a bit.
This. I don't even have my 2024 Players Handbook yet and I already have a House Rules document for it. There is only one thing on it, this the complete document so far.
by doing this, I hope anyone at your table sees the red flags in it. As you do not respect the lore of D&D.
There is a reason why some species have Dark Vision, and a reason why others don't. If only one set of Species had it, it would only be the ones from the Fey Wild or Shadow Dark Fel. Which BTW includes all the Elves. That's because Elf eyes are similar to Cat Eyes, as are most fey creatures. Something about the pure chaos of the Fey Wild does this. Likewise the Shadow fel is a creation of Shar the Goddess of Loss, and all the residents of that plane are corrupted by the darkness their.
If elf eyes are similar to cat eyes then they should not get Darkvision because cats don't get Darkvision. But also it's really weird that permanent Dusk of the Fey Wild is some how equivalent to complete darkness of the Underdark.
The game's direct antecedent—Chainmail—was a strategy game. D&D historically grew out of playing strategy games and deciding to add a referee to determine the outcomes for things players might want characters to do for which there might not be rules. Which is to say that historically D&D was the exact opposite of what you claim. It's not about rules and the options these provide players. In fact an old-school approach to the hobby doesn't even see the rules as being there for the players. But just a resource for the DM.
I have been playing since 1983. I played more 1st. and 2nd. during their lifecycles than any other edition since. With the possible exception of 5th. If you truly believe it's just a misunderstanding why there is so much content on YouTube and Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond about how 5th. slows things down with players often taking forever to decide what to do so tethered are they to their character sheets or it's just a misunderstanding why more than one of the core tenets of the OSR movement are responses to these very issues then I can only assume you are not engaging with many in the hobby beyond your own circle and this has left you with a rather myopic view of what D&D is and with little to no familiarity with what it once was and what many still expect from it.
Again with the straw manning. Now you are adding "every" to the equation.
As for bad roleplaying: using an array of abilities as little more than buttons to be pressed requires zero roleplaying.
This was one of the biggest criticisms of 4th. Edition and remains one of the biggest criticisms of 5th. A player who just says on his or her turn I do this or I do that when this or that just activates some feature or demands a roll isn't roleplaying at all. Roleplaying requires at least some degree of observation and description. That is what I meant by prioritizing player skill over character abilities. Players actually getting creative. If the player isn't even describing what his or her character is doing that player is not roleplaying. No matter how much what they are doing is informed by the rules. A perfect example of this is Rage. Most players just say I rage. And the mechanical benefits of their having done so are then activated. How many players bother to describe what happens when they do so and maintain at least some level of description throughout the duration of their raging?
On that note: How many players these days only bother to describe what they are doing in the hope their doing so will grant them Advantage?
While completely true, it's also entirely irrelevant to the point that darkness is a story and combat tool. A tension builder that to all intents and purposes simply doesn't exist.
Darkness is more of a staple of storytelling than ... almost anything. Except in the game that's built almost entirely on storytelling.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
This. I don't even have my 2024 Players Handbook yet and I already have a House Rules document for it. There is only one thing on it, this the complete document so far.
OK. But ShadowDark is a game that exists for people who are looking for a different experience than they get from D&D. You see the name ShadowDark, and you assume that darkness is a Big Deal in the game. (Or you immediately think of overly-pretentious Vampire players from the 90s.)
It won awards. That probably means it's good at what it intends to do. Not that what it intends to do is a thing all (or even a large fraction of) gamers want.
It's currently the flavor of the month for the OSR people. Great. I hope they have fun with it. But the idea that D&D should do a thing because it's popular with a population of gamers who organize around a rejection of what D&D's been doing doesn't make a lot of sense for D&D.
If you want the experience of ShadowDark, you should play ShadowDark, not argue for turning D&D into it.
If I want the experience of the DIE RPG, I should play it, not argue that D&D needs more metatextual commentary about the nature of stories and the player-character relationship.
You're bringing up 3rd edition in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options?
This is how it has ever been. 1e wasn't some paradise of player creativity. Most people were just "I hit the orc". They didn't spend so much time agonizing over their options because they didn't have any. 1e classes were extremely lacking in that regard. That didn't make for better or worse play. Creative players were still creative. Rote players weren't. Ditherers would find something to dither about.
Overall, I'm pretty sure that the quality of role-play has increased since then: It's more established as a practice in modern gamer culture, the game provides more scaffolding to support it, and players are generally more invested in characters they created, instead of rolling their stats and playing another fighter because that's the only thing they can play.
I mentioned ShadowDark and its treatment of darkness and success not to suggest Wizards must follow suit.That is just you reading into my post what you want. I mentioned it to demonstrate that it's not as if the idea of darkness as a palpable threat is unpopular in the hobby.
No. I did not bring up 3rd. Edition "in the context of knocking 5e for giving players too many mechanical options." I brought up 3rd. Edition to show how little 3rd. Edition books can go for. Notably less than AD&D books. Because by then Wizards of the Coast had taken over and the books had already declined in physical quality.
Vast is the content on YouTube and many the complaints on Reddit and game forums beyond Beyond from DMs who have witnessed the game increasingly become more and more like a video game. With players just pressing those buttons and not roleplaying. You act as if the OSR was responding to nothing. That its more rulings not rules approach or prioritizing of player skill over character abilities just emerged in a vacuum. This was a call to a return to a more old-school approach to gaming. Gaming as I remember it when I played in the early eighties through to the early nineties. Players not being mired in the rules. Many not even owning the rules. Players describing ways to handle certain challenges. Not just saying Can I roll [ ]? You don't get to tell me over a decade of experience then and the ensuing thirty years of experience were simply imagined.
This is the most popular and accessible the game has ever been. Saying "many DMs have complained" about 5e crunch isn't a statistic, it means nothing; many DMs love it too. If you want an old school lack of mechanical options because you feel that's somehow easier to run, the answer is simple, stick to an old school game.
It should be noted, one person aggressively making up a fictional history and present of the game based on their own biased perspective has nothing to do with Darkvision.
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Back to the thread, as I am personally using the 2024 rules transition to implement some homerules I have long been contemplating, I am curious what others might think about a homerule changing all species Darkvision options to Low-Light Vision. Been thinking about this more and more since this thread got posted, and I am pretty pleased at how it likely plays out - while I fully understand Darkvision does not give you perfect sight in darkness, those penalties still generally trivialize the ability to use darkness as a fundamental obstacle for travel or explorations.
Low-light vision allows DMs to decide when darkness is a problem - there’s enough smokeless, eternal magical sources of light (or the old go-to of bioluminescent fungi) that you can give players low-light situations to make their species traits useful, while still having the option to say “and now you are somewhere very dark - do you risk a light source that can be a burning beacon to your position, even at great distances? Or do we risk the darkness.”
It was rather a non-sequitur, then.
I'd rather think it's because there were far more 3rd edition core books printed than there ever were for AD&D, and because they've had less time to deteriorate and get lost. Supply and demand.
And maybe also because there's a relatively popular system that's built out from 3e, while all the AD&D derivatives are pretty obscure. If you wanna play 3e, pathfinder probably scratches that itch. If you want AD&D, the game everyone you're likely to play with knows is AD&D.
Can't judge the quality, but I seriously doubt any D&D book ever has been manufactured to high standards. Mass production and the desire to keep the price point low make it impossible.
IIRC (and I may not; I wasn't paying that much attention), it grew out of people in the indie scene experimenting with the idea of old D&D as an exemplar of Gamist (Forge definition) design, and trying to modernize it while keeping the essence, and eventually those games found a small but enthusiastic audience outside their initial crowd.
That said, it's not like AD&D didn't have dark vision of sorts. It was just weirder and harder to adjudicate, but still extremely prevalent. (Everybody but humans had infravision.)
by doing this, I hope anyone at your table sees the red flags in it. As you do not respect the lore of D&D.
There is a reason why some species have Dark Vision, and a reason why others don't. If only one set of Species had it, it would only be the ones from the Fey Wild or Shadow
DarkFel. Which BTW includes all the Elves. That's because Elf eyes are similar to Cat Eyes, as are most fey creatures. Something about the pure chaos of the Fey Wild does this. Likewise the Shadow fel is a creation of Shar the Goddess of Loss, and all the residents of that plane are corrupted by the darkness their.As for why other species have it, their ancestors lived underground, or they are gemstones made mortal. Gnomes, Dwarves, Goblins, Orcs, and Kobold all can trace lineage to the deep places of their home worlds.
But some it can be argued either way, ie Dragonborn who may or may not be made by the magic of wizards or dragons.
Also the bird species may or may not be related to nocturnal species. Then we have one of my favorite species, who are literal cat people the Tabaxi.
The reason Humans don't start out with it (but can easily gain it) is because humans are not from underground or nocturnal societies. Humans mostly worship the day, and deities involving daylight or the harvest. (Seriously the 2 most popular human deities are Lathander and Chauntea.)
And if you don't think your deity comes into play with your abilities, you have not read enough of the books, novels, and general lore of D&D. As everything is technically god granted in D&D.
Well, Darkness in Shadowdark serves the same purpose that Darkness served in B/X 1st edition, which is "to create tension and danger while in a dungeon", that is a direct quote from the designer. Shadowdark is a game that was designed with a big focus on dungeon survival (its a Dungeon Crawling Game).
Every version of D&D with the exception of 5th edition was designed with a very specific style of play in mind and a core gameplay loop it presumes, in fact, 99% of all RPG's are designed this way. 5th edition is unique in that it quite literally is about nothing specific. There is no "playstyle" built into the mechanics, no purpose or goal that was targeted as a foundation for the game, it has neither design pillars or even ambitions to be anything specific.
So far as I can tell the only design goal in 5e is to be the least offensive to the most amount of role-players possible. The issue 5e however has always had is that because its not designed for any specific playstyle or purpose, its just passable at everything at absolute best. Its a quite mediocre as dungeon crawler, a survival game, as a hex crawler, it has no rules for mass combat or kingdom building or politics, or espionage, its bad at open-world sandbox play, its a terrible storyteller system, its a crap tactical game, its pretty poorly balanced. It quite literally doesn't do a single thing well, but, it also doesn't absolutely suck anything either, which is kind of its thing if it has one.
Shadowdark is a really fantastic dungeon-crawling survival RPG, but it's completely void of serving any other function. It literally has rules for nothing else at all and I know some old-school gamers will proclaim that in the absence of rules/instructions is the "brilliance" of it, but that's just a bunch of horsecrap.
While the numbers and sources might not be 100% accurate, this gives an actual reason why. from 1979 until 1990 they sold 140k books a year on average, by 3rd edition they moved to 150k to 200k sales per year. Also the book quality stayed the same, although the art and design work got a lot better with the publishing of 2.5 in 1996. (Yes 2.5 was a thing, most of the 2nd ed books on ebay are from this era.)
Why are the older books worth more, because fewer of them are around, and even fewer of those are in usable condition. So using economics 101 (Supply and demand) say the demand is the same for every book, in all editions, as there is a constant rate of people trying to collect all books from all editions (Which is a thing BTW ) and say that every year the older books have a higher chance of being destroyed.
using paint to make a basic graph.
No. It wasn't a non sequitur either. Because it was in direct response to someone saying how expensive second-hand copies of earlier editions can be. Did you even bother to read what my post was in response to?
Older editions of D&D used quality boards, quality paper, and were stitched using quality methods. You can "seriously doubt" all you like. You are wrong. The current physical books use cheap glue, cheap paper, and cheap boards. I own old AD&D books. There is no comparison. They were produced using the sorts of standards we see from many smaller game publishers today prepared to put more time and effort into the physical product. Reviews from those who have in their hands the 2024 PHB often mention how finally Wizards of the Coast have at least decided to use better quality glue for binding. You can argue whether or not you believe these were better systems as that would be a matter of opinion. You cannot argue against the objective reality that cheap gloss boards and cheap almost magazine-like paper and cheap glue are not the same as the printed matte boards and quality thick paper and stitching we got with AD&D books.
The OSR grew out of people's disappointment with how modern editions of D&D no longer played like the game used to. It began during the lifecycle of 3rd. Edition and has only gained more ground throughout those of 4th. and 5th. It favors a rulings not rules approach. And favors bringing the game back to a time when the rules were for the referee. Instead of seeing players mired in rules and then expecting every option made available to them to be available to them at every table. It favors player skill over character abilities. As previously mentioned. Because the latter makes the game look and feel like a video game. When players can just activate some feature or ask if they can roll they become less and less inclined to even bother describing what they do. Many today only bother to describe what they do if they think it will afford Advantage.
"respect" is a bit strong a word. None of this lore matters in a homebrew world of the DM's own creation.
The majority of tables in the book are for generating urban locations and encounters in them. I use it for what is other than just excursions into what lies below the streets and beyond the walls ultimately an urban crawl.
What rules would you say are "required" to run it for anything other than dungeon crawling? Because to me it is really just 5th. Edition only broken down to core classes and removing rules bloat and making use of some of the innovations we have seen in the OSR to make it look and feel more like B/X and games that emulate B/X. B/X and BECMI were certainly more than mere dungeon crawlers. These were and remain used for domain level play.
Baron de Ropp mentions in response to people saying it is just a dungeon crawler that he started running a campaign using the system as soon as the pdf was made available before the books shipped and that it was still going at the time of recording. Critics want to say it can't do anything else. Many of them have probably never even looked inside the thing. They only need to hear or read someone say it and they suspect that assessment is the truth.
Any serious dealer in second-hand books will tell you the physical quality of a book counts for something.
Pick up and page through an old AD&D book. Feel its cover. They weren't the sort of cheap gloss boards we expect to see on cheap coffee table books or cheap cook books found on bargain tables in the mall that have been the norm for D&D hardcovers since 3rd Edition.
Feel the paper. It is thick quality paper. Not almost magazine-thin paper.
Look at the binding.
These books are worth their asking prices not only because of their comparative rarity. They are collectable because they are quality physical products.
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ModeratorI am moving this thread to the Homebrew & House Rules forum as the entire topic of canning a rule is a house rule.
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Do people really have those arguments?!? At any table I play at, if the DM says, “no, the cave is too far away,” “you need one to see colors or it’s all like a reverse photo negative,” “no, I tell ya what, close your eyes and we’ll talk you through this living room, see how well that goes…,” that’s pretty much the end of it.
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If elf eyes are similar to cat eyes then they should not get Darkvision because cats don't get Darkvision. But also it's really weird that permanent Dusk of the Fey Wild is some how equivalent to complete darkness of the Underdark.