How D&D 3rd Edition revolutionized the game (New School vs. Old School)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 มิ.ย. 2024
- Part 1 went over the Top 10 rules changes in 3rd Edition that made it revolutionary: • The TOP 10 ways 3rd Ed...
0:00 Higher power level
1:57 Permanent, customizable characters
5:15 "Rules, Not Rulings"
9:43 Combat As Sport
13:53 GM as entertainer/co-player
15:37 Final Thoughts
"A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" (by Matthew J. Finch + Mythmere Games):
friendorfoe.com/d/Old%20Schoo...
RULES LAWYER PLAYLIST on D&D + Pathfinder history:
• History of D&D and Pat...
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Good point by @mirtos39 : I think I should have acknowledged that rules codification can, in its own way, prompt a response by some GMs to favor rules adherence and SIMULATION (yes, something I say characterized that the Old School style) over entertaining/storytelling/storymaking. It definitely is true that there were DMs and groups before 2000 who forged memorable stories with older systems, and that there are groups today who would thrive under a less-codified system than modern D&D or Pathfinder.
Consider it an open invite for old school play open---I'd love to have you at my table.
By the by, there are a few resources on the thief and thief abilities you should look at: Ranger Lemure has an excellent video on how thief skills work in OSR style AD&D games. As does Bandit's Keep on the defense of the thief in OSR style games. And PDM has a great video on running a rogue old school style, too.
But no, thieves and rogues in general are not the front line flank attackers they became in 3rd edition or 5 e. For a thief to be an effective combatant you really have to think outside of the box and engage with the environment. The role of light flank attackers would fall to lightly armored fighters with high dexterity in an OSR style game.
On the magic front--it is more rare, but it is also much, Much more powerful. Just check out the difference between a 5e project image and an 1st ed project image and you'll see what I mean.
It's worth noting that 3e didn't "cause" all of these changes. Players were playing narrative-heavy games with powerful characters in earlier systems too-the age of TSR D&D novels inspired narrative- and character-driven games long before 3e came around, and it wasn't uncommon for DMs to fudge rolls to avoid early character deaths and/or hand out a few too many magic items to spice things up and make characters more interesting. 3e didn't reinvent the wheel, but it offered players something better-suited to the style of game many of us were already running; it updated the game to reflect the sensibilities of current players.
This isn't to say you were suggesting 3e caused all of this! I just wanted to add some perspective as someone who began with 2e AD&D and still has fond memories of those days. I greatly enjoyed these videos for the trip back through memory lane. There are definitely lessons modern gameplay and adventure design could learn from some of those older rulebooks and modules!
To add to this comment, it was a publisher-side push already for AD&D, specifically which Dragonlance kicked loose. The Dragonlance campaign setting (and others that were later introduced with the box sets) already went to great lengths to suggest "permanent" player characters. In fact, even the more hostile settings such as Ravenloft and Dark Sun kind of implied that you'd be playing less expendable characters. Suggestions to start characters off at higher levels with more hit points, and pushing for a more "big picture" of narrative-driven adventure campaigns, all translated directly to the table. Other material published for AD&D only went on to further cement this, such as the "Complete (class)" books for individual classes, which also offered more customization and inspiration for individual classes.
In my experience, it was quite common for pre-WotC game tables in the 1990s to put heavy emphasis on individual characters and heavy narrative. In fact, I'd say this was, for most people, the main appeal to play tabletop RPGs, as opposed to video games. To that end, I think what WotC actually did with 3e was to more clearly and explicitly bake these things into the core experience.
Yes. I've long argued that the modern Old School Revival is really kind of a new thing. Maybe close to what the earliest players coming out of wargaming did, but not at all the default for AD&D at the height of it's popularity. Plenty of new players took inspiration from heroic fantasy novels and even TSR's own modules to run narrative and character driven games, rather than just sandboxy dungeon and hex crawls.
To add to what you're saying, I think the fact that all the most famous modules, including early ones, assumed characters of level 7 or higher, as early as the Giants series, shows that there already was some acceding to people wanting more "memorable" adventures with inner logic. TSR was initially reluctant to publish modules. Their idea of what stories can and should be told under the system was already shifting from their original conceptions, by 1978
@@jeffmacdonald9863
I was writing an in depth reply to you, but this jerk has ads that destroy anything typed in a comment when the ad comes on...
long comnent short.
ADND was NOT made for telling stories. Demons and devils were not in 2e to appease Satanic Panic, thus player growth. 3e had internet, thus player growth.
During 2e, White Wolf made a new game BECAUSE ADND was NOT made to tell stories.
The fights betweeb ADND players and Vampire players of White Wolf, were fewer than the fights betweeb ADND and 3e/5e players.
They accepted each other more in the 1990s.
So it was not the game that changed, but like 5e, a new group came in and took over the game and changed it from what its fans of 20 years liked to something else. Just like 5e did to 3e/4e players.
This fighting is caused by WotC provoking it.
There was nothing wrong for people playing a "story" in ADND, modules are railroads, the problem is claiming thus is some sort of evolution just because it cyanged DND specifically. No, this story was done before Wh8te Wolf, they just made it popular. It has a place in gaming, but turning all tames, or even DND into "story" instead of what it was meant to be is WRONG.
Just design a new game like White Wolf did for a new style of game is the CORRECT way.
Think I got all in there I lost to the ads.
@@Lepidoptera666 I second that comment.
I was part of a RPG club, and was part of the people who moved away from old D&D (AD&D, AD&D2), to play RPGs likes Call of Chtulhu, Vampire: The Masquerade, In Nomine/Magna Veritas, etc.. At that time, the players of D&D were fewer and fewer, because the game was just dungeon crawling, and the rules never supported any kind of storytelling nor social interaction/combat, which might have incited game masters move to other games (and thus, forcing the players to do the same). Actually, the D&D people either joined us, or went to play Magic: The Gathering or even paint ball, which didn't need a dedicated game master.
At the time the Open Gaming License, I saw it as a cheat: To me, D&D had lost the RPG wars, so they came up with that concept to try to come on top again. Even more because it was not a real open source license. The new systems introduced in D&D3e might also have been there to attract players of other games back.
This focus on D&D as an alias to RPG needs to die. Even more in a channel that promotes so heavily Pathfinder.
11:42 The distinction between "combat as war" (trying to win before the fight starts - as Sun Tzu said, "the greatest victory is that which requires no battle") and "combat as sport" (trying to win after the fight starts) is pretty insightful, and I think it's revealing of the sheer amount of resources we can count on nowadays (lots of spells, abilities, powerful rests and whatnot). I like how even today many people still use the "combat as war" approach (bards are pretty good at that, being able to defuse all kinds of conflicts with no resource cost), even if they're not as pressed to do so.
I entirely agree with your sense that in the earlier editions of DnD there was a massive disconnect between what the game rules said and how people played. This is the first time I am hearing that 3rd edition formalized a consensus of independent house rules but, looking backwards, that is one of the most logical and concise explanations of the “theory of game evolution“
I agree with a lot of what you said, except for the GM as entertainer. That was ABSOLUTELY going on before 3.x. Sure, there were some GMs who were playing against the player, but that was pretty much a rarity by even the early 80s. So many OSR campaigns in the 80s and early 90s were indeed campaigns and about telling thrilling stories. Dark Sun, Ravenloft, etc, all were about telling great stories.
If anything Id say I noticed that people telling stories went away during the early years of 3.x.
I remember meeting players who came out during the 3.x era (not all, or even most) that honestly felt that if there wasnt a rule for it, it couldnt be even attempted. "Yes, but" or "No, and" wasnt in their vocabulary.
I play modern games, but I also think a lot of great storytellign is lost byt the modern game.
Makes sense! The codified rules, in their own way, can prompt GMs to stick to rules adherence/simulation in a way that can stifle story-making
I got to agree with this one--it was called the Hickman revolution which illustrated the importance of a good story as a part of a good module. It started with I-3 Pharaoh, written by Tracy and Laura Hickman--great module by the by, and kept growing from there.
The big difference between what we were doing and now is that all those early stories were pretty self contained and short, so entire campaign arcs weren't dependent on one character surviving from one adventure to the next. In his, X-treme dungeon mastery, Tracy Hickman points out there's nothing more boring than just grinding out experience points just to reach the next level. If the risks aren't real, the game loses it's vitality.
@@andrewlustfield6079 exactly. once you reach a certain level (and that level isnt very high) consequences go out the door.
@@mirtos39 That's why things that are save or die are important tools for encounters to have--not every one of course, but even 5th-7th level characters are wary when they tangle with something like giant spiders--and why phase spiders are something most parties run from. Admittedly, certain things like level draining undead never made a great deal of sense, but adopting something equally terrifying that does make sense and jibes with folklore like an unholy exhaustion mechanic---well, now we're talking.
@@andrewlustfield6079 I think in 3e thats true. But its become less and less with every edition. ive been running games for approx 40 years. I agree with save or die encounters, but the problem is later editions made death not really a big deal once you reach a certain level. unless its a TPK, death became the cost of doing business. 3e wasnt so bad because there was some consequence. but it still wasnt the same level of consequence as old school. 5e made death a joke. just the cost of doing business. pf2 (which i like a lot) also makes it not that big a deal really. as long as your group survives, death isnt that big of a deal. though they at least made it harder to get resurrection spells. Pf2 has some more consequence with the resurrect ritual at least for a critical fail.
This is the real problem with modern gaming (and i like modern gaming, but i also like old school) is the lack of consequence. DM/GMs shouldnt be out to kill the characters, but at the same time, there should be consequences for failure and death, and not just a gold piece cost. That isnt real consequence.
It's always fascinating to me to hear about just how different TSR d&d was from WotC d&d. If you didn't know the titles of the rpgs, I think you could be fooled into thinking they were completely unrelated games.
They are very different because of the assumptions of the game designers, as this video attempts to point out. I don’t know because I fell asleep halfway through
They still have far more in common with each other than differences, compared to the various (non-derivative) systems of the past and present. They still share core mechanics of d20 + modifier vs target number, Vancian-inspired spellcasting (slots, levels, pre-defined spells) , hit dice, saving throws, classes, levels, experience points... I could go on. Those distinctly different from Champions/Hero System, GURPS, Traveller, World of Darkness, PbtA, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, and dozens of other systems.
Since 3.0 (or more accurately since the OGL) there have been so many derivative systems that distort the notion of what it means to be an 'unrelated system'. I'm not knocking derivative systems (I enjoy PF2e despite generally disliking D&D-style systems), but it still saddens me how many people remain unaware of the plethora of TTRPG mechanics and how much they shape the gaming experience.
unironically, that's how I feel about 5E. I has so little in common with D&D that it doesn't really have any business calling itself that.
@@Ghost.in.the.Machine "They still have far more in common with each other than differences, compared to the various (non-derivative) systems of the past and present. They still share core mechanics of d20 + modifier vs target number"
no, they don't. d20 + modifier started in 3.0. Nothing in B/X, BECMI, AD&D, or 2E is d20 + modifier.
They share labels for some things but they don't share a game design lineage. 3.0 is a distinctly different game from earlier editions. The OGL isn't even the beginning of clone games or games content created to be used with D&D by third parties, TSR had been failing for over a decade to quash clones and supplements.
@@josephcarriveau9691Really!? No d20 + modifier? Interesting... So In B/X or BECMI if you roll to a d20 to hit and ADD any bonuses due to high strength or magical items you're doing it wrong? I mean It's the same process with 1e as well as 2e. Sure, you can adjust your character's THAC0 by lowering it based on that character's bonuses (i.e. 1 point of bonus lowers the THAC0 score by 1 point), but you get the same result just by keeping your base THAC0 and rolling a d20 and adding the modifiers directly to the die roll.
I started playing role-playing games in the late 80s. I remember that in the early 90s, at least in my country, role-playing games began to decline quite a bit in favor of Magic: The Gathering. And the main culprit for that was how frustrating it was to see your character die over and over again. And that didn't just happen in D&D, but in all role-playing games of the time with a few exceptions. In any case, as I said, it was very frustrating to see your character die in the same session in which you had created him, or that a character you had grown fond of died due to a bad roll. And that's when many DMs started applying homebrew rules to prevent their players from leaving the table and starting to play Magic. And this is not an exaggeration, I experienced it firsthand on many occasions.
Then, and assuming that what happened in my country could be extrapolated to the USA, it seems logical to me that WoTC (curious that the executioner was also the savior) adopted a less hardcore gaming philosophy. And along with D&D 3.0, many of the games of the late '90s and early 2000s adopted that less punishing approach to their game systems. And it seems like a logical evolution to me. Especially as role-playing games moved further and further away from the competitive experience of wargaming, in search of a more narrative experience. Because, if there is a TPK, the story is over.
Well, I didn't run a very deadly campaign at all in the 80s, and still Magic: The Gathering completely took over. We didn't think of using house rules because of MTG, we were absolutely using them already (some very questionable).
3e introduced me to a gameplay I craved for ages
This video and the previous really hammered home for me just how traumatized I still am from my time playing 2e. I show up to a public game with a folder of characters (10+) and flip through it to decide who I'm going to play, and if there's a newbie/unprepared player I'll offer them my selection, because I have ZERO personal/emotional attachment to any of the characters I painstakingly made. I expect them to die, and a part of me is disappointed every time the DM shows me mercy. The dragon rolled a 20, let the dragon rip me in half!
this has been a fun and interesting exploration. It does seem notable that retroclones seem to predominantly build off the d20 system or use entirely different mechanics to replicate the feel of the Old School rather than using the early D&D mechanics as they are
Outside of the nostalgia chasers, you'll find a lot of OSR people will readily admit that some mechanics were clunky and esoteric. I don't know a single person who thinks THAC0 is better than rolling to hit a target number lol!
It's more about the intent of the rules, and how they fit together that drives the modern OSR zeitgeist.
@@benjaminmckay6983 You are always rolling to hit a target number, even with THAC0
Me personally I have always fell into that middle ground, even back in the 80's and early 70's when running DnD as a kid. I liked many of the changes in 3e but not all of them, some I feel didn't go far enough and some went to far. I have always felt like I want to build a world for the players to explore and let them do what they want. That means not every thing is balanced, some fights are out of their league and some will be very easy depending on when they encounter them. I always felt that was the most fun style of game personally.
From what I've seen and heard, I think adventure paths like the Abomination Vaults and others like it are good because they ride the line between the idea of war and sport. You can run into something that's challenging or something that is certain death, regardless of your level at any given time just by going into a room. You get the rules and the danger all in one
I think that character driven plots was well established in TTRPG well before the 2000s. I think that this ethos really started to show up in the 80s and early 90s
In term of power level, Champions (1981) was the first popular super games which really focuses on powerful and recurring PCs. Cyberpunk (1988) also created a very different emphasis on the power level of the PC which often started geared up with implants and lot of gears.
Character focus story really became popular with games like Vampire the Masquerade (1991) and Werewolf the Apocalypse (1992) really changed the style of stories and power level of the PCs.
You are absolutely correct that many (maybe most) people didn't follow all the rules. The funny thing is that many of them don't remember it that way.
EDIT: Or they remember that not following the rules made their game better and conclude that following rules makes games worse.
I definitely remember bending and breaking the rules back then. From what I've seen in online discourse, the obsession with rules adherence is a much more modern phenomenon.
1st and 2nd ed DnD were barely games by modern standards.
9:20 As a long-time 2nd Edition DM (currently on seven years of the same Spelljammer campaign), I and other DMs I know absolutely stick to the thieving skill scores and checks. Keep in mind that in 2e, thieves get points that they put into those so they grow over time, plus their race, Dexterity, and armor can affect them. But yeah, to backstab you need your victim to be unaware or unsuspecting and that's tough in a combat situation. If a thief player wants to specialize in that sort of role, they can easily get those skills very high with just a few levels, but with the tradeoff that their other skills will suffer. It gives the player a lot of choice in what they want to specialize in.
I know Arduin (which started as published supplement rules for D&D and then became its own game) as early as 1977 was giving prices for magical equipment, magical treasures and items for the purpose of buying and selling. It also awarded Experience Points for a variety of activities outside of getting treasure or killing monsters. I also have supplements written to be compatible for both Arduin and AD&D from the 80s that give wholesale and retail prices for magical items (Dragon Tree Press’s The Book of Artifacts is such a supplement, listing prices for all sorts of magical things).
I note even in the earliest editions of Castles and Crusades (the first OSR game endorsed and advised on by Gary Gygax before his death) contains a Monte Cook style system for class abilities replacing the pick lock etc. etc, if you have the ability you simply to an attribute check with a debuff the opponents level.
I played adnd in middle school when my friends dad pulled out his old books and.ran a few games for us. Right after pandemic i wanted to give the game another try and bought all the 5e books, read them, watched a few youtube videos on 5e, and was seriously confused. It is a conpletely different game, for a lot of these reasons. Thanks for the video
Ronald, what an awesome video! Thank you so much for bringing these incredibly interesting background, history and thoughts about our hobby and passion.
Hope to keep seeing those in the future, you ROCK!
Started with Moldvay's Basic D&D; I experienced culture shock when a friend started running the plot and character-centric AD&D Dragonlance modules. At the first character death, I was ready to perform the ritual tearing-of-the-character-sheet, when the DM stopped me, then read the script of how the blue crystal staff brought the character back to life. I remember at first being confused, but mostly being disappointed that I didn't get to rip a character sheet.
Came back to D&D after years away and had a blast with 4e and 5e. Made a simplified 5e with a Basic overlay as a way to run quick one-shots to introduce new players to D&D ... but through that, began to realize that I was having more fun with older-style play (speaking as a DM - even as someone who had more fun DMing 4e than 5e, which might sound surprising). My current campaign has gone old school, actually a hybrid between old and new, where my players have lost characters from poor decisions, but also beat foes far beyond their level though clever shenanigans.
6:32 "Basically, you're bad at it unless you're good at it." Wow, this single phrase sums up a huge difference between today's mainstream big-publisher RPGs and a ton of indie RPGs. Without actually emulating old-school play directly, lots of indie games - whether "narrative-first" ones or just ones that use a small number of stats and fewer, broader basic mechanics - will present a mechanical frame that's like "this stat means you're good at all sorts of physical feats. here are rules you can use to adjudicate almost anything within that. come up with anything you think you can accomplish, and the GM will know how to roll and how difficult it should be." Not so much relying on rulings in any novel or unusual situation, but encouraging the old-school sort of improvisation and inventiveness by leaving your options wide-open within the fictional world. And it's really summed up by that paradigm - it's really refreshing when a game says that if you're the strong character, or the smart character, or the sneaky character, or whatever, then within your area of ability, you're can assume "you're good at it".
I honestly like coming into "combat as sport" scenarios with "combat as war" energy and strategies as a player, and mixing the two as a GM. Done well, you can get some of the most tense, epic battles you'll ever experience in game. I love throwing unfair encounters at my players just so I can watch them out-think me and overcome clearly stacked odds.
I want a little choice in combat, but I don't want combat to be the main focus of the game - and they became that. Miniatures on a grid was definitively a disaster (I notice our lawyer doesn't speak much about 4th ed :-P ).
I'm working on a simplified combat system with group initiative + rules for who gets to target who (if you win first initiative, you decide who to engage, but if the other side has a big tough fighter, you may have to get him busy before you can target others... unless you're a sneaky thief yourself etc. )
Eventually the lack of the Fear of Dying did ( or can ) eventually make players jaded or bored because the outcomes of fighting for one's life is - mostly - predetermined. - SPOT ON POINT---- having to create a new character - and fill out a IRS Tax sheet does shift a DM's willingness to let the dice fall where they may - into PC death- while an old school PC takes 6 minutes to create vs an hour.
I find it interesting that you talk about the influence of video games and even Buffy, but don't mention that D&D had direct tabletop competitors that offered a different experience. I think the success of White Wolf and its suite of products (e.g., Vampire the Masquerade) helped push a change in player/DM taste that D&D had to reckon with in third edition.
As someone who's played a lot of 1st edition, I can confirm that nobody played it strictly RAW. And I think that was largely by design. If you look at the 1st ed DMG in particular, it looks and feels very "modular" -- you've got a lot of very discrete systems for different aspects of the game, which don't interact much. It's very easy to drop or modify some aspect of the rules without worrying about "breaking" the game. I don't think I've ever met anyone who used "weapon speed factors", for example, or worried about a flying monster's "maneuverability class".
Sometimes I hate how complex first level characters are in modern (3E and above) D&D. Backstories and such, perhaps, should be discovered during play, but I can see how character backstories can assist a DM in crafting a story in their adventures. I guess I just miss the whole dungeon crawling aspect with role playing coming naturally during play.
In my recent OSR-ish campaign, I encouraged players to fill in their backstories gradually (with me, of course). Don't overinvest in it early - not just because your character might die, but because you need to take a few steps in the game world to know how you'll want to be.
I agree with most of your thoughts. I just want to hightlight how most of these changes and paradigm shifts were already there for a long time in other RPGs, not just videogames. The long-lived wizards of Ars Magica bettering themselves for decades, the embrace of political intrigue of Vampire, the more or less detailed character backstories of Pendragon, Rolemaster, even Traveller...
Great video. The other difference I would add is that having a wealth of character build options versus having characters that are somewhat of a blank slate in that they are more or less mechanically similar is not that old school characters are completely disposable game tokens, as some people assume. Rather, what makes a character interesting is not their build but their decisions in the game. A character who has been going along with a party's clever plans and restricting their impulse to charge in who one day decides the stakes are too high and there's no time to delay and rushes in creates a moment that is hard to replicate when that approach is the status quo.
I view some of the balance between WotC and TSR D&D characterization as a balance between self-expression and agency. The plethora of options is the to help players express their preferred style. Some might choose too make a hyper specialized can't lose build, some might want versatility, some might choose options based on aesthetics. This is one area where I don't think 5e has really walked back at all. Instead 5e, as compared to 4e, has made that self-expression align more with modern sensibilities rather than a balanced combat game.
On the other hand, TSR D&D expects the players choices for their character to be the way in which a character is defined. Are they cautious? Are they bold? Greedy? Heroic? Selfless? Devious? While one can certainly define a 5e character with those sorts of traits, with the way the rules require a WotC D&D to prep, will they really re-shape the narrative? I find that characterization in WotC D&D tends instead to add flavor to the narrative rather than direct it's outcomes. The characters are unlikely to die and the plot is going to progress down the adventure path, whether our heroes are noble or base. This is because the DM must put in a lot of work to prepare that path. The characters matter as to how the events unfold, not whether they will or what those events are. 5e character options are used to express how a party travels the path, providing necessary spice to the DMs narrative. Old school characters are agents in the world choosing the path, though that generally makes for smaller moments of less superheroic scope.
As you say, these are two extreme of a spectrum.
Old-School for good or ill puts heavy emphasis on extraordinary being extraordinary and players as well as their characters having earned and deserved their scars and accomplishments through logistics, strategy, and cheer skullduggery.
I have heard one like combat as sport as "drugging wild animals before gladiatorial combat so that child emperor would get the thrills and bragging rights for killing them in front of an audience without posing any actual danger for them."
This falls back down to what each person considers a power fantasy. Is it more awesome to be a Superman in world of cardboard, or perfectly executing swings as friendly local Spider-Man.
With regards to the combat being fair, the 3e DMG (or was it 3.5?) specifically said that a certain percentage of fights should be way above the player's level and capabilities, and that they'd need to level the playing field or run.
To comment on the thief hiding check, I believe it is to be interpreted as if the thief was essentially magically hiding where logic doesn't apply. Anyone can hide under a barrel, but only a thief can hide in a tiny shadow.
I think there is good points made here about 3rd edition not defining gameplay. I would go as far to say that each edition beyond the first ones were reactions to the community more than they were works made in isolation. 3e was a response to adoption of certain optional rules and game play styles influenced by other media, 4e was a response to the chaos that the 3e game play invited and 5e was a response to the backlash that 4e created with its game balancing/codifying. Personally, I like 4e since it allows me to have a stable core that I can break out of for fun but rely on for stability. I never jived with 5e. It always felt a little to milk toast for me. And even though it definitely isn't rules light the game play feels that way to me, on both sides of the DM screen. And while I smile at the memories I had with 2e and 3e, I couldn't invest time into those again. That said there are things from every edition I like that I can incorporate into any game that I run. So I just end up playing D&D.
Regarding the article about Gandalf's D&D level, one thing was that Gandalf was intentionally conserving his power to the greatest extent possible, both because divine power in the Lord of the Rings is essentially a one-shot affair where every miraculous act you perform takes something away from you forever (this was Melkor/Morgoth's problem--every magical act he performed weakened him, and he couldn't stop doing magic, so he gradually dwindled from a god who could destroy mountain ranges and corrupt nearly everything in the world to an evil sorcerer barely more powerful than Sauron), and because it would be dangerous, both for himself and for Eru's master plan (which ultimately involved Men coming to the forefront of the world's events without need of any magic, to create the world of historical and modern times) for Gandalf to draw too much attention to himself.
Also, while this didn't apply to 1E rules, Gandalf is a sorcerer who casts from CHA. He did not learn magic, he *is* magic. D&D style wizardry did not exist in the Tolkien legendarium, magic was connected to the divine and you either had it or you did not. Despite being aesthetically far more removed from the signifiers that make up most D&D settings, the wizards from Earthsea are far closer in how they actually use magic to D&D wizards. Ged casts from INT. (though even this doesn't really apply very well to D&D because the whole plot of The Wizard of Earthsea is more or less set off by Ged casting a 9th level spell he doesn't understand at a low level of overall power and experience, and fucking everything up).
My pet theory, however, is that *all* characters in modern high-power RPGs are magic users, and even fighters use magic to give them the ability to leap huge distances, survive multiple grievous wounds, and otherwise augment their martial abilities to superhuman levels, which is also why many of their feats and weapon abilities are once per day--they're spells!
E: The article goes on to discuss the magical "weakness" of Middle-earth and this is actually a major theme in Tolkien's works! The power of magic in general is in constant decline from the Ainundalë to the end of the Third Age, and reaches effectively zero sometime in the Fourth Age. The magic of the Third Age is only the palest shadow of what was possible in the First Age or the Years of the Trees. Even humans in a D&D setting are more like the epic high elves of the Years of the Trees than the Men of the Lord of the Rings. A high level fighter is like Fingolfin or Túrin Turambar, not Aragorn or Gimli. And such characters were absolutely people who had magic flowing in them, and through them, who *were* magical, even if they didn't prepare a list of spells for the day.
Metamagic Feats are great but I do miss having my Archmage pop off an 18d6 Fireball for a 3rd level spell slot. Add a Ring of Wizardry to the mix and you can toss 10 of those. Capping them at 10d6 was a bummer. As I completely ignored recommended challenge rating, my parties tended to either die early or advance at up to one level per session at times. Giving a magic item the party could not use and 4 sheep per month to an Old Green Dragon to convince it to kill formorians the 4th level party did not stand a chance against was genius and how to advance to 5th level in one encounter.
9:40 - I don't know about OSR people living in nostalgia playing an edition they weren't actually around for... but as someone who was playing AD&D back when it came out - yes, we did make that thief roll at 10% like the chart said. We used the rules as they were written. It was brutal but that's how we did it. There's a reason there used to be old letters to Gygax asking for rulings. It was not the DM's place to make a ruling - the DM was there to play the adversary and go by the rules. If you needed a ruling you'd write a letter to TSR to get an answer. You didn't make ad-hock rulings any more than you'd make a ruling in chess that pawns can move a new way. That's called cheating. A DM that cheated was just as bad a player that cheated.
Things changed over the years. But in the 'old days', that's how it was. This was a much more niche hobby back in the day for a reason. It came out of wargames. The way we all used to play was barely tolerable even for those of us doing it. But if you don't know that you can survive without punching yourself in the face; then you're going to wake up every morning and punch yourself in the face until someone comes up with the revolutionary idea of not doing that. A paradigm shift. What seems obvious now was not imagined before. The changes started in other tRPGs and a number of different directions as people experimented. But the focus was originally on new rules, not on rulings. I stepped away from AD&D around the time AD&D 2E was coming out - so I can't say exactly when things changed for the D&D crowd. But the other tRPGs I went to were still all about rules and not about rulings until much later.
WOW!! And I thought that I was a hard-@ss DM back in the day! You and your groups may have not made their own rulings. But we did, and so did everyone i have ever gamed with in the 40 plus years I've been gaming. Whenever a rule either wasn't in the books, or the books made the rule about as clear as mud the DM made a call. The ONLY time we bothered to write TSR is when there was an argument in a ruling which we just couldn't accept. But... Even then any and all rulings that the DM made at the table stood until that SASE was returned to us (hopefully) with an "official" answer.
A possible interesting of Old-School as how it is played now is examining following: extremely rules light like Into the Odd, and how it was reiterated in either follow up Electric Bastionland or Mythic Bastionland. Old-School Essentials is cleaned up collection of Basic and Expert D&D rules supplements which might provide insight into more reference friendly writing, as well as how author views and ruled the game in his home game via his upcoming Dolmenwood campaign back which has rewritten OSE system (due to OGL debacle).
Excellent video. Here is a slightly different perspective. I think a major turning point was the publication of Deities and Demigods in 1980. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide of 1979, there are a lot of rules based around politics and keep management. However, Deities and Demigods provides suggestions for how your characters might become immortal, including the idea of tiered levels. If your goal is to become a lord (70s), you see the war game/dungeon crawl style. If your goal is to become immortal, you want to have more of a superhero style. This is emphasized further in the B/X (basic) rules of the 80s which went from basic (dungeons) to expert (wilderness) to companions (political) to masters (ascension) to immortals (play as demigods). These two styles were in tension throughout the 80s and 90s until 3e tipped things decisively to the superhero/epic hero style.
But you didn't start out as superheroes in Mentzer D&D. You spent a looong time as squishy mooks. Then you spent a lot of time as barons and stronghold keepers, and only then did you start getting into Hercules and Gilgamesh territory.
9:00 I DM an AD&D game and I play by the rules. I do use the thieving skills as written, because it is the main mechanic for thieves. In 2nd edition though, you choose how to place your points in the thieving skills as you level, so you can pick what to be good at. Say, at 1st lvl, you may have 40% move silently chance... by 5th lvl, your move silently could be 95% chance--possibly sooner, if you have a high DEX and racial bonus.... In that case, you could hit that by 3rd or 4th, if you chose to dump half your points each level into it. If you weren't wearing armor, then you get an even higher bonus.
Thanks for this breakdown, I've been playing since the 80's but your summary of these changes are very insightful. It's especially noticeable when people try to use newer rules to run an old school style game or vice versa. As the rules have changed the style of play also needs to adapt and change.
You did not touch on it but I wonder how much other games influenced this revolution. I'm thinking particularly of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - when it first came out it was such a different approach to what we were used to with AD&D. I think it upped the bar somewhat as to what was possible with a fantasy RPG and TSR had to find a way to respond and evolve.
9:00 as a person who plays OSRs but is not even old enough to remember the true OS, even if that's true I bounced off the 5e/PF exactly because when I tried be creative it always felt like more experienced players and DMs had the approach of "look, we're here to play 5e, not to game the system and cheese the encounter". Which was kinda weird coming in with the promise of "DnD is a game where you can do anything you can imagine and computer games cannot give you that experience". I'd say that a really good experience in modern mainstream ttRPG is comparable to Baldur's Gate, but at that point, why not just play Baldur's Gate?
I think a lot of the changes in D&D were not just inspired by video games but as a consequence of early attempts to make D&D-based video games. The old school rules supported a kind of improvisation and emergent stories that were better than most of us could have come up with as amateur fantasy authors, but video games based on these skeletal rule sets were very limited in their gameplay possibilities when implemented in software. The newer editions with their richer and more structured rule sets give game designers more tools to create rich computer-adjudicated worlds. Maybe one day we’ll see games that use AI-based referees based on old-school game systems that produce the same kind of weird and wonderful gameplay of the old days.
Yeah, it was weird how many Strategic Simulations licensed D&D games had a ton of the D&D spells (and even psionic powers, lol), but not really much use for them. The Realms of Arkania games (which were based on Das Schwarze Auge, a German RPG definitively more of the old school) was impressive in that a lot of the weirder spells actually had uses in text events.
The way I played was a mix of late 2e and early 3e.
Even when I played with RPGA it felt like a mix of both, now 4e and 5e totally feels like a different game, completely.
7:50 I like these points. I've only ever played 1 serious DnD 5e character; we're on 1 1/2 years of weeklyish gameplay into the 2nd part of the epic campaign. Big bonus and rolling a d20 are cool. However like you said if you have a +7 and getting a 2 on a easy DC 10 check was one of the funnest parts of the game so far, simply b/c of the hilarity that ensued. Also having a +8 to attack and missing on AC 14 target can also be fun.
Having passed through all the editions of D&D since BECMI, I can confirm that 3.0 didn't bring forth anything really new, except for the shifting in the basic mechanics. Even challenge rating was something you could completely ignore and give out experience in free form.
What it did well was customization of characters and being extremely DM-friendly when compared to older editions, since it had a lot of instruments to help a DM create new game features quite easily, despite the crunchiness of the rule system.
What it did poorly was balancing it all. They converted many things of 2nd edition into feats, but then they diluted old single features into new feat chains with unreasonable high requisites, probably for fear that they would be too good, while instead they made them too bad. The "basic combat maneuvers" being basically suicidal if attempted without the specific feat and relative feat tax prerequisite are a perfect example.
They removed a lot of the limitations spellcasters had without applying replacement limitations to their spells, which made them basically self-sufficient in many cases, not needing a party anymore.
Non casters had their specialty basically taken away from them, instead. The rogue, a skill-based class, was now no better than anyone else at using its class skills, so it could only safely use them against someone with corresponding cross-class skill (something that in Pathfinder was even removed), a fact which brought any rogue player to instinctively switch to improving sneak attack, a somewhat circumstantial feature, instead of skills, the main defining feature of the class, turning a support and scouting class into a squishy front line combatant or a poor opening shot sniper.
The fighter, the main martial class, now was highly customizable through its high amount of feats, but the dilution of the feats into feat chains and the absurdly demanding feat taxes in the prerequisites turned it into a weak one-trick pony most of the times. The weapon specialization chain, for example, required two feats and four levels to do less than what in second edition could be obtained with one slot at first level. And don't even get me started about dual-wielding. It seems to me that they were so worried that the fighter could become too powerful that they ended up balancing the feats looking at it instead than at the average character with only a few feat slots to spend.
One big, stupid thing 3.0 introduced, though, was the magic market. Combining that with the generic concept of "expected wealth", they basically made any control over game balance impossible. Also, there was no point into making creating magic items a really painful endeavor if you could just skip that and go buy whatever you needed. The"Christmas tree syndrome" was born.
In my opinion, what distinguish new school from old school is not much the play style, since all of that was present far before, but all the bad things 3.0 introduced, which continue to taint all the more recent editions, sometimes even more.
The "combat as war" football analogy is...just Blood Bowl
In case folks haven't mentioned, by the end of 1E those thief percentages were modified both by Dexterity and by (lack of) armor worn. We definitely did play by those rules.
One of the things from pre-3E was how little variation there was between characters of the same class without some heavy multiclassing. Pre-3E characters were more differentiated by their gear than any ability of the character. Non-Weapon Proficiencies were a joke... both in how many you got and how they impacted play
I feel Pathfinder 2e/Re has done this much much better than even 3E or 5E with the Ancestry Feats, Class feats, Class subtypes, and Skill Feats. It's much easier to have a party of a single classmor couple of classes and have those characters play very differently
That's true: 3e was heavily based on the idea that each character would be a different class and most classes were tailored for a role. Though there was a vestige of the old system with the cleric domain system. I did have an all-cleric party once, and that was pretty fun. The prestige class system did allow a lot that old customization back in after level 5 though.
@sophiejones3554 I think Pathfinder handles the variations better, with PF Remaster being the peak for me... between the subtypes and class feats and archetypes, you can have a party of al the same Class and have them play very different. And then the variation that you can add for Ancestry widens the variety... an Elf Cleric and a Human Cleric have a lot of variance because of Ancestry feats even if they're both War Priest Clerics of the same deity.
I think these two videos articulate the differences between old and new school very well while remaining as objective as possible. I agree with most of your points. I’m just on the other side of the fence in terms of my preferences (old school). I don’t think either one is better than the other, it’s just a matter of what kind of game you want. Regardless, you are right in asserting that 3rd Edition was a complete changing of the game.
I think the main difference between old school and new school D&D can be summed up by saying old school is a more referee-focused game and new school is more player-focused. Your fifth bullet point touches on this and talks about the GM’s role shifting to be more of a storytelling cheerleader for the PCs. I would go further and say that the GM’s role was reduced by taking some of the mechanical operations away from the GM and giving them to the players. Mechanically-speaking, the old school GM rolled more dice. Instead of a player rolling a persuasion or an intimidation check, the GM would roll an NPC reaction roll or a morale check. The thief wants to Hide or Move Silently? The GM would roll the dice and keep the result a secret from the player.
To rebut your rebuttal at 8:55, the rules of AD&D aren’t “bad.” They just don’t produce an effect you find satisfying. To be fair, I don’t find them satisfying either, which is why I play OD&D (1974). You are correct that AD&D was not a rules-light game. It was intricate, complex, and filled with non-standardized subsystems. It takes a while to master the system as a whole, but some people find that, once mastered, playing by-the-book AD&D produces the ultimate expression of the game (Anthony Huso at The Blue Bard blog and Jonathan Becker at B/X Blackrazor blog are two examples).
So how many people actually used the rules as written? Probably not most, but there were some. Keep in mind, the late-70s/early-80s was a time of tournament play at conventions where points were scored, and people were declared winners. This required set rules that were adhered to. There were also plenty of serious gamers with long-term campaigns and players with characters over 14th level. These campaigns took years to develop though. The players who had characters reach high levels achieved that status by becoming expert players that could outsmart their GM. Some of these players felt that if the GM was asking you to roll dice, you had already made a mistake. I think you oversell a little bit the impression that old school games were all low-level meatgrinders where few characters ever reached 4th level and little to no thought was given to character development or campaign story arcs. The stereotype does exist for a reason though.
On the whole, I think you are correct. Plenty of people ignored rules, changed rules, or added their own house rules to AD&D. The game actively encouraged this. Part of the fun of being an old school GM is hacking the rules. The Dragon magazine published tons of alternate rules and house rules in the early years. I don’t remember thief skills being something many people changed. I remember it was more things like using B/X’s 2d6 reaction and morale rules over AD&D’s % charts, ignoring weapon speed factor, weapon-vs-armor modifiers, spell components, combat round segments, etc. GMs could also choose not to roll dice when the players wanted to attempt something. You could just rule by fiat that the player jumps the pit, scales the wall, or successfully hides behind the wagon. And plenty of GMs (usually inexperienced ones), would fudge results behind the screen when they called for a roll before realizing they didn’t want to leave something up to chance. How you feel about this will help determine which side of the divide you’re on.
I think it's a mistake to equate financial failure and success of TSR D&D versus WotC with the state of either game's design at the time. To a certain degree, the market will follow what's supplied. TSR had flooded the market with products, and when WotC took over, it was the new shiny thing where you only needed 3 core books again, rather than a whole library.
3e was still rather rooted in the old school, which did not quite make as distinct of a cut between wargaming and narrative focus as you might think. Low level 3e RAW is as deadly as it was in previous editions; it wasn't until 4e that characters were more empowered. PF1 still carries this baggage from 3.X; and PF2 is closer in line with D&D4. 5e backpedaled on that somewhat.
If you look at the Leadership feat for 3.x and PF1 or how the core books still listed out tables of prices for strongholds and siege weapons, you'll notice it still carries the same baggage. There are some wargaming roots left over in there, but they are more vestigial, which they had already been becoming at the time of AD&D2 and BECMI D&D by the time of the Rules Cyclopedia. The focus on the persistent party of heroes was already there, even if low levels contradicted it. If you look outside the scope of famous modules that were remade for 5e, such as the ones published for settings like Dragonlance, Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, etc.; you'll see they had a strong focus on higher-level parties and narrative-heavy adventures. This was because they already assumed the "advanced" groups were settled in with characters with high survivability and were coming to the game for very different things than meatgrinders, dungeoncrawls, and wargames.
TSR failed because TSR failed, which was rooted heavily in bad business decisions.
Also famously in a CEO who proudly held the target audience (and by extension, the employees) in contempt.
I remember that we would make up our back story as we went. It was always a little scary when the DM started writing down what you said. You might pay for it later
And even though the rules didn’t necessarily like it, you were at a table with your FRIENDS. You didn’t want them unhappy. I started in 1977, and character death was pretty rare.
I'm a computer guy. In computer games this duality does also exist.
Games like Baldur's Gate are definitely new school. The player characters are supposed to survive until the end. Only one character is player-generated so the other ones can be scripted and have a programmed personality. Everything is balanced so that the player party can win (sometimes it is hard, but the chance of them dying to a kobold is low). These games implement as many rules as possible and they implement them mechanically, mostly as written. Many of this kind of game is balanced towards player characters with (near) perfect stats, because players will scum them anyway. You are expected to kill all enemies: an enemy still alive is wasted xp. Computer gamers are minmaxers.
Roguelikes tend to be more old school. Player characters are paper men without any personality. Often only one stat that is randomly generated and can't be changed. There is permadeath. There are all these special mechanics implemented that players are expected to discover. Like if you eat a floating eye corpse, you might get esp, so if you put on a blindfold (or wear a towel) you will see all monsters, but not the dungeon. You can dip your sword in a fountain and it might become excalibur and very powerful. Or it rusts. Lots of randomness, And unfair challenges are considered fair game. Sigmund of Dungeon Crawl is notorious: a very tough enemy that can show up early on. Meta play is expected. It is considered fair game to read the source code of the game in order to discover mechanics and there are wiki's that publish all that knowledge.
There is an audience for both.
@theRulesLawyerRPG since you asked yes a lot of us did run our games that way back in the day! Thieves were weak to start but levelled up fast. Getting backstab off was often difficult. I recall one Thief dying. A Level 2 Thief has 88% Climb and he rolled 89% and fell back into the pit trap he was trying to climb out of.
Yah, that’s how we ran it. I’m running BFRPG now and that’s how we are running it. The only modification I know of, which I think is fair, was to spend points in the different skills to improve at a pace the players wanted. I need to check if that was offered as an optional rule early on.
Regarding old-school thieves, think of those percentages as a saving throw for when the general chance to sneak failed, usually done as a 1, 2, or 3 in 6 chance just like bashing doors. The thief would first roll a d6 to see if they could sneak up like normal (one for silence and one for hiding if both were needed but you usually only needed one) and you would only roll percentile dice if you failed the first roll.
This is clever, but it's not how many played. To be honest, they did something different but comparable with climbing. Everyone would climb but the thief would roll a % on normally un-climbable surfaces. But it also varied.
So, don't quote me on this, but I think the 'you are a hero from the start' setup actually started in Ad&d 2e because of the popularity of Dragonlance. They released a series of modules that was more similar to the current 5e adventure type, where you were meant to play characters in the vein of the Dragonlance book cast (they actually included stats to play as the book characters) through a very scripted story, complete with not letting bad guys die because they need to show up later.
I think there were also some rules included (optional, probably) to make characters more survivable, but I don't know 2e that well.
You're quite right. The problem was... the rules worked against that objective.
Yeah Dragonlance was a big deviation from past modules. And as some have said, the push for more focus on story can be traced back to the 80s and 90s.
If you look at the actual rules for CR in 3rd, you'll see that a proportion of the encounters you run into should be overwhelmingly powerful. One of the jobs of the players is to determine when to "bravely run away".
The fact that some GMs only ran CRs in same range as the level range of the characters is a failing not of the rules but of the GM. And the assumption by players that there would be 4 encounters of equal level per day is a failing on the part of the players. Neither of those is intended as a mandate, just an average.
3e (which one can love or hate for perfectly legitimate reasons) must be one of the most misunderstood and misquoted set of DnD books. People forget about encounter building suggestion, don't understand and misquote what Ivory Tower is, and completely misunderstood the magic item - settlement table.
Ronald the Rules Lawyer does a good job ( although he still strawman / steelmans his preferences ) discussing skills and adjudicating rules and Rulings. Just look at his Disarm example- It all comes down to PACING. 3.0 , 4.0 and 5e with more rules codification and less DM " Rulings " + grid combat did and does slow the game down past the level of acceptability for some of us. Rulings over rules ( reminder - old school still has rules ) just has a faster pace,
The Referee vs Entertainer GM part got me thinking about in what camp i fall. I think i'm really somewhat in the middle with a little bit of a nudge into the direction of the referee simulation style. Sure, i want my players to win, i am happy when they're excited. But i'm also kind of out to kill them. Not unfairly or overly aggressive, but i absolutely do design dungeons, quests and problems intended to kill and massacre my players if they don't take it seriously. My combat encounters, traps and NPCs follow a general balance, but i will not ever nudge or adjust things behind the screen. I guess you could say that i turn the "If they die, they die" approach into a "If they fuck up, they fuck up" approach. (Which could also include dying)
I do miss morale rules. Players and Game Masters both are prone to target lock and treating most if not all fights as something worth dying for and group duels to the death. Either side taking prisoners or allowing an enemy to withdraw is usually not seen as an option. It's one of the most common forms of metagaming in my experience.
You wipe out half the other side in less than a minute [10 rounds] and they'll probably break and run. You do it in 30 seconds [5 round], it will probably be a full-out route instead of an orderly withdrawal.
Most 'New School' elements existed prior to 3.0, even in D&D. For instance there were quite a few ways that characters could be customized, with class kits (akin to PF2e Class Archetypes) and variant rules in books like "Player's Option: Skills & Powers". Much of the difference was (and still is) a function of how the GM runs the game and what variant rules they use. The biggest shift from Old School to New School in 3.0 is the 'default stance' presented in the DMG.
Probably the biggest 'innovation' of 3.0 was stepping away from classes as completely distinct entities and having a unified 'class chassis' of level progression providing the same basic features to all classes at the same time - hit dice, skill points, base attack bones, saving throw bonuses, feats and so on, ostensibly providing balance between classes (oops).
Of course, even that was not truly an innovation, classless systems of various sorts long predated 3.0, though most of them had different ways of progressing than levels (though many still had 'tiers' of play that could be compared to major level milestones).
For the more circumscribed math of AD&D, I would argue "Player's Option: Skills & Powers" was comparatively speaking more broken than anything 3ed put out.
I do wish 3.0 and its successors retained some type of morale system. Yeah, you can sometimes convince your GM that an enemy might run away or give up (often after making an intimidate or diplomacy check) but it is often at their whim, often costs an action that you could just use to kill them, and/or like P2E's demoralize it is a temporary effect that gives you a bonus during a fight, but doesn’t actually end it. It really pushes player more into being "murder hobos" because your other options are so unreliable.
Super interesting! I think most of us fall into some sort of hybrid of new/old school (at least I do) where I want the players to succeed, but they can definitely get in over their heads and get killed. And when that happens, it really sucks tbh but I don't hold back 😁
I loved this analysis and trip down memory lane Ronald!
I cut my teeth with 3.5 in college, and for several years it was all I ever knew. I was an obnoxious min-maxer (one of those folks you mentioned who spent more time building characters I never played than actually playing) and knew the rules in-and-out better than anyone else at the table. It burned me out and made me start to hate the system.
When 4th came out and none of us wanted to switch I discovered the old school through my own curiosity about the history of the hobby and the burgeoning OSR blogosphere (Philotomy's Musings on OD&D got me started, and James Maliszewski's Grognardia and Jeff Rients' Jeffs Gameblog made me fall in love with the OSR).
Now I mostly run my own homebrewed system, somewhere inbetween OD&D and B/X, and while I appreciate much of the advancements 3rd did I could never recommend it due to the culture of play it fosters. There was a reason I never wanted to DM during 3rd edition, but now I'm equally happy on either side of the screen, and have DMed far more than I played for the past decade and a half until recently.
3.5 never fostered that behavior. People like you that took for granted all the galaxy of misconceptions amplified in the forums did.
@@Kaiyanwang82 If mastery of the rules leads to degenerate behavior, and the system emphasizes system mastery (3.5 undeniably did) then the system encourages such degenerate behavior, even if only a minority of players actually reach that point.
@@Hushashabega Your "Mastery of the rules" is an illusion. You have in front of you a toolbox, and you decide to use all the tools at once, then complain the engine is ruined.
@@Kaiyanwang82 There is no explicit modularity in 3rd edition, beyond the obligatory statement of rule 0. The game presents a veritable smorgasbord of options and tells players to build their characters. The assumption that all tools should be used at once is there from go. If you play your games differently, more power to you, but the effort it takes to houserule the jank out of 3rd I found could be far better applied to just using a different system.
@@Hushashabega Selecting specific manuals or spells or feats, or avoiding combos 90% unintended, is NOT an houserule. You are grasping at straws my dude.
i've noticed as dnd evolves the best house rules eventually become codified. so things like crits were never in the rules on 0dnd and adnd, but because other some other ttrpgs used crits, so many tables were house ruling them into their dnd Games, it eventually become codified. it just made the game more fun and it drove players wild. most games will sprinkle a ton of good ideas and the best usually float to the top while the bad mechanics are replaced.
Fantasy series definitively had long stories with the same cast of characters before Buffy and the others you mentioned. I got into David Eddings' series, but there were dozens like it. But even AD&D had this sort of story: Dragonlance was exactly this kind of story. It's the Sword & Sorcery vs. Epic divide in fantasy fiction, and while I do think Japan vastly preferred the latter (and shaped D&D towards it), it was by no means just them.
great vid
@6:15 - or u get the hollywood feat of Richard Gere in his "First Knight" movie wher ehe gets an attack of opportunity when he tries to disarm... and does his spin thingy +12 to your roll.. or lowering 20 to be 17-20,.,,
Many of the changes in games style were already present in late AD&D modules like “Dead Gods”, for example
Honestly I find it a little odd to separate it into old school and new school when I feel like 3e in all of it's forms is an under represented 3rd school (I usually call it middle era, though 3rd school is rather fitting, might use that in the future). It's true that the lethality shows a general decrease over the course of editions, but other game elements have come and gone. 5e feels like a regression from 3e rather than a progression.
I agree. 1E was more basic and deadly, 2E was less so, 3E was very different and focused on characters as sustained heroes, 4E and 5E were designed to be 'safe' and to get new players into D&D.
While I agree with everything here, in my long TT RPG history, we played the same games very differently, over the years, between different DM between different people. We had more brutal, old school lil players era. We had more soft era. We had mostly combat mechanics era. We had mostly roleplaying era where combat want even always about rolling dice and math.
Game was about the rules. But the best rule was, forget the rules and have fun.
Great video.
In our Pathfinder 1E game, we use a Luck System! We have had characters go through 18 luck in one battle!
Luck Values: (-7) - 24
-Expenditure 1d4 Luck (Must have at least 1 positive Luck Point): You may use Luck to affect one event brought about by an action you take or one that directly affects you. (Examples: Hjalmar using Luck to make Admiral Blood fail a save against a spell HE cast. Timbo using Luck to disarm Admiral Blood. Slayn using luck to make a save vs Zone of Truth which he was affected by. Combat Rewind a la Rick vs. Pixies)
-Expenditure (1d4) x2 Luck (Must have at least 1 positive Luck Point): You may use luck to affect one event brought about by someone else's action which has no direct impact on you. (Examples: Bob using luck to rewind Slayn's fireball thus saving 3/4s of the party, but having no effect on him because of evasion. Using luck to make the Shin ship's guns misfire. They were targeting the ship not one individual.)
-Every time you advance a level, roll luck as per the table below. ADD this to your previous total up to the maximum defined below. Hopefully this will prevent Luck dump battles right before you advance.
Only work for the last 10 rounds
Player Luck
Plyer Level Luck Roll Max Luck
1 1d4 4
2-3 1d6 10
4-7 2d4 16
8-15 3d6 20
16-20 4d6 24
There's a luck system I've wanted to try: Rolled a 1? You may spend a luck point to reroll, and you got a 15, yay! But at some point in the future, in a situation of similar seriousness, the DM may suddenly replace your next 15 with that 1 you swapped out!
@@Mnnvint so a bit of Cypher System GM Intrusion
As a first edition /white box dm I would try to avoid killing the entire party UNLESS they did something extremely stupid. For example the party would kill every one they met without talking to them (They were supposedly mostly an LG party). After several warnings they attacked a high level Lawful Good party, killed a paladin, and were quested by the Patriarch to destroy the "Temple of the Red Dragon" they didn't think I would send a group of mid level characters against a Red Dragon, they were wrong it was a punishment for being stupid. Oh, some of them did survive... Darn!
Any chance of a video on how the introduction of the Thief class (with its skills) effectively stopped almost everyone else from doing Thief things?
That's an interesting topic! Don't know if I'll do a vid yet tho
It never happened. Only thieves opened locks, backstabbed, climbed effectively...etc. It's true, though, that almost everyone looked for traps, but it was because the system made a necessity of it. 3e simply added the possibility for other classes to attempt those things, usually with less proficiency than a thief.
@@Lanarch 2e and 3e both effectively made it impossible for non-rogues to find traps. Only the rogue classes had Find Traps, so, logically nobody else could. Likewise, in 3e, only the Rogue had the Trapfinding ability. Only Rogues could find traps with a Search DC higher than 20.
@@bluntpencil2001 That's right (with some exceptions). But it allowed it, while 2e prohibited it. And it only was one old thief skill (two with backstabbing). All other characters could learn to climb, hide, steal, open locks... In my games it didn't stop anyone from doing "thief things". Most of them were still done by rogues, but it was not unusual to have some other character acting as a "2nd option" or helping the rogue (as we now had subsystems for it). Also, it didn't stop anyone from using all the old tactics; we still carried the good old 10' pole. The manual even gave ideas on how to disable or avoid traps without the skill.
@@Lanarch when the game only had three character classes people would search for traps by explaining how they did it. They've disarm the traps the same way. Traps were more puzzles.
One thing 3E gave us which still a problem. NPCs had to follow the same rules are PCs. Or Npcs had to follow the build rules. While it was great I could have a 20th level commoner blacksmith, some gamers want me to create monsters/npcs who follow the rules. Where in 1E I could have a black smith who had AC 14 and 5th level fighter ability and no one said a thing.
I did notice a big problem with 3E when converting an Green Dragon with 14th thief abilities. At a full out run in forest terrain he still had something like a +20 move silence roll. This is when I quit building NPCs by the rules.
"in 1E I could have a black smith who had AC 14 and 5th level fighter ability and no one said a thing" - that's an homebrew because old games assume commoners have 1HD. That's why there is a "common man" THACO line. Which is something you can do in 3e too.
This is a player attitude issue, not an editions issue. If your players don't care that your monsters aren't built by the rules, then you can just not. But some players always expected monsters to be built according to the same rules their player characters were. Also, a +20 move silently for a green dragon? I don't think that can possibly be correct, even for a wyrmling.
@@sophiejones3554 If I remember correctly, I was overlaying a thief class on it. I think it was 14th level thief.
@@RottenRogerDM ah ok, 14 levels of rogue plus dragon INT, I suppose I could see that. I think I get what the issue here might have been since you were porting an old monster. The 3e dragons are a lot more powerful than the ADND ones, inherently. Besides that, the new classes are also more powerful. Basically, a lot of things have just been scaled up in power between 2e and 3e. It's still relatively balanced, except of course when it's not: and you seem to have run into an edge case here. It's generally not necessary to give dragons base class levels in 3e. When you want a dragon to have PC abilities, it's often better to put them straight into a prestige class (most don't require a base class and dragons ought to have the skill or attack bonus requirements without class levels). Any true dragon is just a non option for a low level party, the kind that couldn't consistently make a DC 20 check (remember, a level 6 should be able to make a DC 20 check 70% of the time in 3e). You might want to check out other monsters with a lower level adjustment, or homebrew something. There is a draconic template which can be given to animals. I tend to use that for low level draconic themed encounters (a draconic cat ends up with only a +12 move silently, which is extremely good for an ECL 7 monster and guaranteed to scare the pants off your players when it ambushes them, but will definitely not wipe them). A wyrmling dragon on it's own, no class levels, has an ECL of 10 in 3e. If you put 14 levels of a character class on top of that, you'd end up with an ECL of 24. ECL is "effective character level". Basically, a character of X level would have a 50-50 chance against this creature in single combat. A party can generally only handle a monster with an ECL of five levels higher than their average, *at most*. So a wyrmling dragon 14th level rogue is an encounter for a 19th level party, probably. A 19th level bard or rogue, won't have any trouble hearing this dragon coming: even the ranger or druid will probably hear it. But a 5th level bard or rogue, wouldn't stand a chance let alone any other class. Like I said though, if your players don't mind monsters not playing by the same rules they do then go for it. All you need to do is tell people that's how your game will be in session 0. If that bothers them (it would bother me, even if we were playing 2e: it breaks my immersion in the world when how my character works doesn't match how the world works) they will just decline to be in your game.
I never played 3rd edition or even 2nd edition. After we played AD&D and BECMI back in they '80s we went to ICE Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) in the early '90s which had fewer monster types but a much richer skill and combat system that was a lot of fun. Looking at that 3rd edition character sheet it looks influenced by ICE Rolemaster/MERP.
What I remember from MERP was the critical roll table. In my first (and only) combat in that system, I got attacked by a wolf, who promptly bit off his own tongue in a feat of ridiculously bad luck.
It was certainly a deadly system, and unlike in D&D, you were not immune to instant random death no matter how high level you were.
FANTASTIC video. You perfectly articulate the differences between OSR and modern games. To answer your question, no, NO ONE (including Gygax) played strictly according to the AD&D rules. I love B/X D&D but I admit those thief abilities are WAY too low (but yes, we did strictly adhere to them). My issue with 5E and P2 is if the characters almost never die, why are there so many rules? To me it's winning in slow motion. As a player, I HATE knowing the current encounter can't kill me. With most "paths" I feel I could walk away from the table, show up for the final battle, and not miss anything. I know you prefer P2, but I love your analysis and your channel. Rock on, Rules Lawyer! --Professor DM, DungeonCraft
Thanks for the video! You have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to Old School play. Folks definitely find new RPG rules sets engaging mechanically just as they always have in wargames. Moving further and further away from reliance on RPGing by increasing a reliance on rules and pre-fab backgrounds doesn't make folks better at roleplaying. Having more mechanics to handle aspects previously roleplayed through verbal interaction between players and game masters is not codifying roleplay, it avoids roleplaying. Saying rules from the early days are "bad" is conflating a lack of writing and editing elegance with not being able to write enough rules. That's like saying a baby is a poor communicator so we have to give the baby bionic arms and legs to make it a better person. You fundamentally misunderstand roleplaying from an Old School perspective, and perhaps roleplaying in general.
The open paragraphs of the 1st and 2nd edition DMG specifically mentions that they aren't rule books, they are guides. Every single "rule" was in fact a suggestion.
I studied law also, but a different law, not made up laws by man, but the laws of nature!!
You really need to play oldschool so you can actually understand it! ITS ALL ABOUT GOLD, BUT....One totally missed, and often failed to be followed in AD&D 1e is found on page 86 of the 1st edition DMG!!!! You get gold to level, but you also have to pay gold to level, and the amount of gold you need to level, will often be more gold then you have, because of the numbers, but also because you got some of your xp from fighting, or magic items!!!!!!!
Page 86 1e DMG
You have to make decisions!!!! do you spend your gold on leveling up ...OR... do you spend your gold on say... buying that set of platemail!, or hiring a someone to watch your mule train that you just spent good gold on! You have to spend money on upkeep, ie your lifestyle, eating, partying, maintaining your stronghold, so you dont get what little gold you have stolen from you by other players, or NPC's
Page 86 1e DMG
oh... also look at Page 35 DMG : Each player character will automatically expend not less then 100 gold pieces per level of experience per month.
How many Hit Points do you get by resting? 1 hp per day if average constitution. you have to spend some time in town. resting, fixing your armor, researching, traveling, where do you keep your money? do you carry it all? you need to establish that early on, or everthing you have will be lost! YOU HAVE TO KEEP TRACK OF TIME IN YOUR WORLD! THING OF IT LIKE YOUR PLAYING A GREAT BIG TABLE TOP MMO! THE 1e DMG IS BASE RULES TO PLAY THE GREAT BIG MMO! if you just want to dungeon delve, just play basic d&d, but AD&D includes almost everything you need to run not only a dungeon, but a world, a wargame, some real (Made Up Fantasy World) where you are but a small cog in the world, the world does not run around you! over and over again, but you live in a world! You make your own stories, sometimes you follow some stories the DM has operating in his world, sometimes you don't! Once you understand this, you will understand why there is such nostalgia for the old system of play. but of coarse everone who played had a different experience.
Take Keep on the Borderland, you are playing your first game of D&D ever, and you kill some of the fighting Kobalds, then you come to the room with the non fighting female and children Kobalds !!!!!! WHAT DO YOU DO!!!! You have a moral quandary! Does your paladin kill them all because "THEY ARE EVIL"??????
In 5e what do you do? you kill everything you see, because that where you get your XP and every time you play the game you get a new level and some new cool feat? REALLY, that is a STORY??? Well, to me its a very poor story, but everone seems to think they have a story with 5e, no they are just playing a set of stats and following a predetermined progression codified on the pages of the PHB, which is the same for every character they can make!!!! I shake a perception check, and then I shake in intuition check, I shake a perception check, and then I shake a Nature check, but my ranger everytime he shakes a nature check he shakes a 3 and the teifling artificer from another plane of existance shakes a 18 every time a Nature check is called for, so obviously my ranger sucks at being a ranger, but that artificer is a great ranger, really that a better story?
3d D&D did not grow like you said in the video because of the rules, it grew because of video games! Video games introduced so many more people to the concept, and there is a lot of history as to what was happening in the gaming world, as well as the companies, and the real world that is largely responsible for how the game grew. People play what they are given, not necessarily what is best! MTG has had a big influence on RPG and vis-a-versa .
I finally started playing a few games of 5e, over the last few months, ( i live in a small town nowdays, and not lots of players, and havent played for a couple decades due to life). I have to say, 5e sucks in everyway that the internet says it does, and in a whole lot more ways that never gets mentioned. You talk about player stories, only in 5e you only have the bad stories the DM trys to force on you. More is Less, Less is more!!! You think you dont have any stories for your characters if you play a 1e character for multiple years, playing multiple days a week all summer long and every weekend in the winter? You and the dm and the other players create your stories, they can never be duplicated, and they dont come off the pages of a poorly written module!
If you want to play old school, you have to find a group of people who have NEVER played D&D, start fresh, buy Keep on the Borderlands, and play to keep your character alive!! you have to expand the surrounding country side, and create your OWN world, your OWN local area, and your OWN characters. 5e Characters suck!!! there is no story to them, they are but a flash in the pan, they can not be customized in 5E, everything is codified in rules, which means you character is exactly like everyone else's character, all the extra races are only stat bonus, and destroy the ability to play in a customized world!!!!!!! You see, if you have a DM who has created his own world, and you show up and say, "I going to play a Teifling" it says so in the book, and I have all these abilities! and he says Teiflings dont exist, you have a instant argument, and you have just told the DM that his world, that maybe he has spent months, years, or even decades building, doesn't matter to you! 3e to 5e told the DM to just get lost, we do not value you!
From the preface of the AD&D DMG : " when you build your campaign you will tailor it to suit your personal tastes. In the heat of play it will slowly evolve into a compound of your personality and those of your better participants, a superior alloy. And as long as your campaign remains viable, it will continue a slow process of change and growth. In this lies a great danger, however. THe systems and parameters contained in the whole of the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS are based on a great deal of knowledge, experience gained thru discussion, play, testing , questioning and (hopefully) personal insight!"
SEE PAGE 86 of the DMG!!!
See Page 37 of the DMG
TIME
TIME IN GHE CAMPAIGN
"Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. the stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful"
"YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT"
Until you understand this, you can not understand why 5e sucks! the short rest, the long rest, they destroy the game!!!!!!!!! whether you like the skill system or just rolling under your stats, the short rest totally destroys the game!
You really think a 1e player has less invested into his character, then the someone who just picks and chooses the best skills and feats from a book to make his "power build" really!!!
You legitimately get a 3rd or 5th or 9th level character old school, and you will TOTALLY UNDERSTAND!!!!!!! Dont tell me you are not invested in your character in 1e ! and if you cant get your character beyond 1st level in 1e, you SUCK as a player, and really, maybe you really should be playing 5e because that is the game for you, you never have to think about what your doing, because, the DM is never going to let anything bad happen to your character! you deserve to play 5e, because you personally suck as a player, no matter how many 20th level characters you have played in 5e! Hasbro sells games to children like Chutes and Ladders, oh ya, even in the children's games, like for 3-5 year olds, they have the long chute that if you land on, it sends your 3 year old child almost back to the beginning!!! seems like 5e players are not even as mature as 3-5 year olds playing chutes and ladders!!!!!
DMG page 86!
Do the math!
Character customisation was not an invention for 3e though. I would love to see a comparison between D20 based systems and D6 systems like shadowrun. Shadowrun e.g offered a wide range of PC customisations already in the early 90s.
I miss the “good old days” of 3.5 sometimes, then I remember the hilarious lack of balance in 3.5. I still miss prestige classes though. They were a cool idea, imo.
Are you confusing 'more powerful' with 'unbalanced'? Or are there some examples of 3.5 being unbalanced?
@@markmurex6559 Martial classes scale linearly, Wizards (and Clerics/Druids) scale quadratically. The insane versatility of certain classes made other classes near obsolete in the short term and completely obsolete in the long term. Why would someone ever (mechanically) play a fighter compared to a druid with Natural Spell, or a cleric with Divine Metamagic? Tome of Battle (best martial design ever made) alleviated this issue somewhat, but an alleviation isn't a solution to a problem.
@@TheMarkJoergensen Tome of Battle had interesting ideas but it was horribly designed, and by people that didn't understand basic world or planar mechanics of D&D. See Crusaders with (Ex) cures or Swordsages with (Ex) teleports. The errata for the book is emblematic, with it becoming the Complete Mage errata after a while, and NOBODY ever bothered to address that. ToB had good ideas, as an example make Swift and Immediate actions available to martials. But if I want that, I can play Pathfinder (which I did).
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY - people didn't play casters at full most of the time. Nor DMs made everything available to caster, and interpreted every rule in the most favorable to casters way. If they did, playing a warblade wouldn't help.
Awesome job on this series of videos. You did a great job of presenting both eras without denigrating either era or the people who enjoy them.
The hell he did. He made plenty of insults to older editions and players due to his ignoramce of the facts.
@@Lepidoptera666 I'm one of those people that knows the older editions of the game are superior in every way and I didn't feel insulted at all.
Old school was about surviving, new old is about living
A 5th level D&D pc would have absolutely zero chance of defeating a Balrog.
Feeding the algorithm
Two different style of games... i do think i prefer more high power games. Making a character is fun. Customizing them is also fun. Playing as them is also fun.
With pure old-school dnd style of play it made sense to not even bother to name your character till you hit level 3 and such - your character literally starts out as nobody and it's sensible to start investing time into them once they become more likely to survive for long
The difference is much about when you start investing them. I think it's good to meet the campaign world first.
I loved your first video, very comprehensive. Still, you need to play old school when you have a chance. DMs were not referees at all, on the contrary. With unbalanced encounters, mortal dice rolls and rulings over suggested and optional rules, the DMs worked hard to keep PCs alive and make room for their creative solutions. Now we have the rules, its a sport, PCs do what their character sheet tells them and the DM is just a referee. Lame.
What is this weird obsession with A D&D being so lethal to characters come from? I and my friends have A D&D characters that we have played for real world decades. I've only played 5th edition for 4 or so years. But the death rates amongst characters seem to be the same or possibly even higher in 5th Ed.
I don't get the OSR love for AD&D, because the purported purpose of AD&D was to codify all the rules into an inflexible 'correct' way to play the game, according to the forward by EGG.
In addition to depriving Anderson of royalties, it was intended to facilitate tournaments (T series, represent), but of course failed miserably because it's just such a loose rules structure that Rulings are constant which is the opposite of what you want for a sport.
I feel 3.0 just fulfilled the promise made in AD&D.
The OSR I love is Mentzer D&D, but I love it a lot for the "least OSR" aspect of it: That it's honestly about gaining power and fame, and growing into a fantasy world in a forceful way, setting your stamp on it. Early deadliness isn't the virtue I care about at all.
The OSR takes a majority of its cues from classic D&D (OD&D< Holmes Basic, B/X, BECMI, Rules Cyclopedia), not AD&D. AD&D is still useful though due to monster and module materials being mostly compatible between all versions of TSR-era D&D.
As isolated systems though I agree, 3rd edition is functionally an evolution of AD&D.
Some of my favorite serial dramas are ones where the writers didn't have a story arc planned out from the beginning and both they and the audience could be surprised by what the story turned out to be about at the end.
And one of my favorite experiences in an RPG was a campaign where my guy started out as just a bit player in this ensemble show but when he reached second level he realized that he was the only member of the original party who was still alive. "Wait, you mean this whole time the story was about me?"
You kind of hint at it at one point, questioning whether people actually played using some of those old rules, but I think you're relying too heavily on what Old School Revival proponents say about how things used to be. There are definitely mechanics differences between AD&D and 3.x/PF that encouraged different kinds of play, but the OSR people greatly overemphasize the effects and how dominant that style was in the AD&D days. I'd honestly say that OSR is its own thing, drawing on older ideas, but not really a revival of the good old days.
Maybe in the earliest days - when people were coming into the hobby directly out of wargaming and often learning directly from GMs who'd learned from others in a short chain back to the original groups, but by even by the early 80s when most new players were just picking up the rules and maybe some modules things changed a lot. People started coming at it from fantasy novel background rather than a wargaming one and wanted characters and heroic adventures and the like.
The Hickman Dragonlance is usually pointed at as a big change, but even before then we saw long form campaign sets of modules like the Giants/Drow series, which can easily be seen as a precursor to the much later Adventure paths. These came out in the 70s. OSR proponents often point at sandboxy modules like the Keep on the Borderlands, but that was hardly the rule, even from the start.
And these published adventures obviously had some degree of balance built in. Level ranges were suggested. 3E introduced CR as a tool to make it clearer what kinds of challenges were reasonable, but it wasn't in any sense a free for all before then. You rarely just had overpowering monsters placed in low level adventures with the assumption that players would just do something brilliantly clever or die.
On a slightly different note, which is kind of a hobby horse of mine, talking in terms of Old School and New School is far to restrictive and betrays a focus only on D&D and very similar clones. There were plenty of RPGs out well before 3rd edition and the rise of the "New School" that were far more distinct from either AD&D or 3e than the two were from each other. Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Champions, Toon -- even things like Amber, which removed dice altogether.
Before we had WoW raids, geeks would head to a friend's basement and raid the dungeon. Like in WoW, if you weren't there your player was assumed to simply be top-side drinking at the bar. The shift to narrative-based story arch meant you could miss a session here and there and still level. The video game industry gave geeks the catharsis for raiding leaving the grognards holding firm to the realm of rulings not rules. 4e tried to bring structure to the game but those grognards cried "No more World of Warcraft". The video game industry has much to offer the TTRPG space but the few that dare to be different are loat in the crowd. It is time for D&D to die and let the industry fracture, and hope the chaos doesn't turn too many away.
I thought it was a good video. I've hated 5e, half interested in Pathfinder. I've tried building my own 3.5++ D&D system to fix flaws, but such a pain to get people to try anything. If VTT is doing the math and keeps the flow moving I think genuine diffs in characters through skills and feats is far better than the color theme of a stated wardrobe. Be nice if there were mods to tweak the game also toward gamer prefs in rules.
I'm sorry, but while I generally appreciate your thoughts and perspectives, you have made some disastrously incorrect assumptions and characterizations of the older play style here.
Even back in the BECMI days, we cared about our characters, and did not treat them as disposable. We did invent (limited) backstories for them, and wanted to see them affect play. It was *always* about creating a shared narrative, and the characters (assuming they did survive long enough) development over time, through their experiences. Was there a decent chance that character development would end with their death? Sure, but getting them to survive and grow was part of the challenge, and the fun of the game.
I think one would be wrong to make absolute statements about how people played, and I never intended to suggest these archetypes of play style were true for all tables. I'm focused on the effect that the rules had on styles, and at every table there surely was tremendous variation. To say that the change in the rules had NO effect on the general expectations and culture would be a mistake imho
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I absolutely agree that it had an effect. In some ways, it was a very positive change. In others ways, far less so, as I see it. I also think that some of your conclusions show your clear bias, and frankly, being as by your own admission you have literally never played an old school game, that fact also colors your perspective, as you are opining on a thing you've never experienced, only read about.
I love a lot of things about the modern school of gaming. I also think we've lost a lot in old school gaming which had value, and gave the characters definitive goals to strive for. Losing those elements changed the very intent and sprit of the game, and made it a wholly different thing that just kept the name intact.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG What you intended to do, and what you did are 2 different things.
You: "Old edition players were backward thinking wargamers that didnt think about how they played."
Old School Viewers: "Why the insult?"
You: "I did not intend to insult you, even though I purposefully used derogatory, absolute statements."
🤨
@@Lepidoptera666 Thank you. Yes, that was much of what I was trying to say. He used what seemed to me clearly derogatory (and yes, absolute, despite himself saying such absolutism would be erroneous) language regarding something he's not even experienced in reality, then reacts with some surprise when some folks very reasonably take offense. It's like someone who's only seen oranges deciding to have an opinion on their taste.
@@Gaurelin Since the OSR has a cult known as BroSR that is made up of people only recently (past 5 years) reading old edition rules and telling people how they played 40+ years ago, I stole the term "Youngsplainers" from either Polygon or Kotaku, to define these people like Rules Lawyer, who make assumptions and suppostions, spreading misinformation due to an uneducated and uninformed *opinion* of how games were played before they were born.
It is insulting for these people, like Rules Lawyer, to speak to which he does not know and to speak for other people without their consent...
...a "lawyer" should know better about consent, hearsay, conjecture, and libel/slander. 🤔
PS: Your post was a much more eloquent read than my snarky one. 😉
I played ad&d 2nd edition until 2017. The thief was amazing in that edition every level you got a number of points to distribute to all of the thieving skills. If I remember correctly they could go over 75%. However, they made the thief its own unique character that was different and very fun to play. I do not like thief characters from 3rd edition on they lost their charm and uniqueness.
It strikes me as strange that you don't talk about the influence of the greater gaming space on D&D, even if your intent is to focus specifically on D&D. Yes, 3rd Edition was a dramatic restructuring of how to approach the game of D&D, but from the early 1980s, onward, other systems were addressing every single factor you've listed, or parallels thereof. I love 3rd Edition, but not because it revolutionized anything, because it didn't. I love 3rd Edition because that's when D&D caught up to trends that were already established in the hobby.
Good points these fake historians do not take into account. Many game existed in the 80s that did thing differently, because consumers like different things.
The problem you not is 3e homogenized DND into nothing more than the same things ever other game was doing. Literally when ever other game became an OGL copy of DND.
3e was a low point of DND, where its individuality of the 80s was destroyed, and it just became another cog in the machine, like all other TRPGs.
I wouldn't say "GM as entertainer", rather "GM as collaborator". You want the PCs to succeed, and you don't want them to die USELESSLY. (Dying stupidly is another matter entirely, and stupidity gets more of my PCs killed than any other single factor.)
And even if you're telling a story, PC actions or inactions can and SHOULD derail the DM's narrative--but, hopefully, not to the point where the campaign has to be trashed. Can't tell you how many times I've had to retool, rearrange, or outright scrap story beats to accommodate PC randomness.
You really over play how much character death was part of pre-3e D&D. And you keep mentioning short term play. The game slowly went to 20th level. I don't see how you can square this with the vision of a highly lethal, "short term" experience you're describing.
I started with BECMI in the mid '80s and switched to AD&D 2nd Ed when it came out. The rules are different, but I don't play differently. I've always played in a way you described at modern.
3.5, 3, or even ad&d 2nd ed! ... give me those or give me death. Don't wanna try the 5th and I know the 4th was a sh1t show
Spoken like someone who didn't understand 4th, or had the misfortune of a DM who didn't understand 4th.
5e is pretty bad IMO. PF2e is pretty rad IMO.
You've never played 4e then if you think it's a shit show. By far the best edition, and it's not close.
dude i didn't explain but : my bro bought all the books... gave them to me cuz it was not what the group loved. And we kept playing 3rd ed and 3.5 since ... @@lugzgaming5074
you are young @@lugzgaming5074 we are from the 1980s. We started reading late 1st ed and AD&D 2nd ed black books... 1st ed the cuirette green/bourgogne covers on those books were so cool
You have the most bass ackwards understanding about DND before WotC owned it.
I am glad Legion of Myth called you out on your bull 💩
Dont talk about things you dont understand.
It makes sense why a lawyer would enjoy a game like 3e/Pathfinder - the constant minutiae text sourcing, perhaps even encouraged to argue their case for an action….no thanks. I literally “found the path” by ditching Pathfinder.
PSA: Read more Conan the Barbarian, it’s literally been proven that it raises testosterone.