Post by Finarvyn on Jan 14, 2012 11:10:53 GMT -6
D&D through the editions -- an old-timer’s perspective
Disclaimer: I’ve been playing OD&D since the 1970’s and never really left it. I’ve tried all of the editions and keep coming back to the original, so clearly my view of the game has its own bias. I wanted to share my perspective of the game and what I hope happens in 5E.
OD&D (the boxed set with little tan booklets) began as a simple miniatures game turned RPG. While you clearly could use a sand table or battleboard, we never did. To me, the evolution from miniatures game to RPG began when we saw the action in our minds and described the action in words instead of seeing little dudes move around on a board. OD&D came with three classes (fighting man, magic-user, and cleric) but others soon followed. The thief made the “big four” as far as we were concerned, but we often allowed rangers and paladins and monks and druids from the OD&D supplements. When you put all of the rules to OD&D together it practically adds up to AD&D, but the philosophy is different. While AD&D was an attempt to standardize and codify rules, OD&D comes off as a more random and serendipitous journey where the DM gets to decide a lot more about style and flavor of play. The boxed set of OD&D was clearly designed where 4th level was impressive and characters capped out a little after 8th level. Monsters were built for this range of character, spells were written for this range of character, and so on. As the supplements pushed character levels higher more spells were needed and badder monsters had to be created. While the original dragon was the ultimate bad boy in the monster stable, as time passed the dragon became less fearsome as individual characters could go toe-to-toe with them.
The Basic D&D (BD&D) and Advanced D&D (AD&D) split caused some interesting things to happen. BD&D was a lot more like OD&D only race became class so that you could play an “elf” instead of an elfin fighter or elven magic-user or whatever. This probably becomes one of the first things that a 5E designer will have to deal with, as it was a big part of the first division that caused a demographic split in the D&D fanbase. BD&D did it’s own thing through Holmes Basic, Moldvay/Cook B/X, Mentzer BECMI, the Rules Cyclopedia, and eventually some boxed sets. Lots of fans like the way the game evolved, others don’t.
Advanced D&D was the foundation for the modern line supported by WotC. AD&D was mostly a compilation and reorganization of OD&D plus selected elements from Dragon Magazine (and The Strategic Review before that). The plan was to create a game for the ages; one that would be a standard set of rules for tournament and convention play. AD&D was supposed to be the Monopoly of RPGs as a game where the rules would finally be set in stone and complete.
As with most things imagined by creative people, AD&D wasn’t “complete” and continued its growth. Unearthed Arcana, continued support in Dragon Magazine, and other creativity along the way caused AD&D to continue to evolve into what became 2E. Much of the focus of 2E was on character depth, as skills and kits became a standard along with optional rules such as being able to split stats into substats in order to maximize bonuses. As 2E players found more ways to work the rules to their advantage, the “roll play versus role play” arguments began. For D&D, each edition creation has caused some degree of fan fragmentation.
3E was (to me) a natural evolution from 2E. 3E put a heavy emphasis on skills and brought in “feats” which were neat ways for characters to bend the rules to their advantage. 3E attempted to streamline the game system, pushing d20 dice rolls to the forefront, creating a unified XP chart for all classes, re-defining armor class so that bigger is better, creating a more standard scale for attribute bonuses, reducing the number of saving throws to three key categories, and probably other ways that don’t occur to me at the moment. The problem was that AD&D/2E players saw this as too much, too fast. They saw 3E as a new game and not a gradual evolution of the older rules. This seems to have caused a major rift in the D&D community, and many older players disliked 3E because of the radical level of change. (Even if many of the changes potentially made the game “better.”) One drawback, from a DM perspective, was that monsters got many of the same perks as players so monster stat-blocks ballooned into large piles of numbers that included stats and skills and feats instead of the one-line monster data found in the old TSR modules for OD&D or AD&D in the 1970’s and 1980’s. NPCs were equally challenging, as they also needed stats and skills and feats in order to be competitive with the players. For me, at least, running a game of D&D became gradually less fun as the DM paperwork grew.
4E continued the evolution, but again with major upheaval. New races were introduced as standard, skills were reduced, spells became “powers” and suddenly everyone got some, saving throws became types of defense, and so on. More player options seemed to translate into more DM frustration, at least in our group. So many rulebooks flooded the market that no one seemed able to keep up with the options, and then the switch to the Essentials line meant that some rulebooks didn’t quite match other rulebooks for the “same” edition. Although the game rules underwent some streamlining and simplification, the number of power options made 4E harder to master in some ways. In the old days I could read a thin rulebook and grasp a class in a couple of pages, but in 4E and Essentials the rulebooks were a lot thicker and the quantity of powers made it a lot harder to juggle the details in my mind. I found myself encouraging my players to understand their slice of the rulebook and hoping that they got it right, because I didn’t have the time or motivation to read and understand everything about each class.
I took a PDF of the 4E Player’s Handbook and did a copy-paste of powers information into Word to try to make my own simplified 4E rules set, and I only did levels 1-10 for the “big four” classes (fighter, thief, wizard, cleric) and key races (human, elf, dwarf, Halfling) and it all came to over 40 pages. That seems to be too much material, since I only used a third of the levels, a third of the classes, half of the races. Doing a quick page estimation, the five key Essentials books (Rules Compendium, two “Heroes of” books, Monster book, GM book) comes to around 1600 total pages of rules. The OD&D boxed set runs around 110 pages, plus 70 for Supplement I Greyhawk, plus 24 for Supplement II Blackmoor (ignoring the module), and 22 pages for Supplement III Eldritch Wizardry (ignoring psionics and artifacts) running the total “rules” page count for OD&D to be around 226 pages. The page count for Essentials is still roughly 7x as large as for OD&D.
Which brings us to 5E.
1. My top priority would be to cut the page count for the core rules. A lot. Give me a single core rulebook under 250 pages for all major races and classes. (Holmes Basic does a lot in 64 pages. I don’t need 5E to be that thin, but that’s a great example to model from. Heck, Castles & Crusades has two books, each at around 125 pages, and that makes another great model to look at.)
2. Make simple listings for powers without all of the flavor text. If players want to have supplements of powers with full details print them, but keep the core rulebooks simple.
3. Keep the core rules designed to handle lower levels and leave high-level play for expansion books. Let the core rules end somewhere around level 10. Have supplements for levels 11-20 or 21-30 if you like, but the heart of the game should keep things simple.
4. Build skill and feat options into simple class templates. Allow characters to do cool stuff, but limit the options to a reasonable number.
To me, much of the rest is just details. If you want more races or more classes, that’s fine. If AC goes up or down as armor improves, I can deal with it. If there are bigger or smaller stat bonuses, hit point totals, or whatever I can cope. Give us a simple, thin, easy-to-play core rulebook and a bunch of options that folks can buy if they want to grow their game in different directions. That’s the only way I can think of to encourage both the OD&D/AD&D and 4E crowds to play the same thing.
What I don’t need is a dozen books in order to play D&D.
Disclaimer: I’ve been playing OD&D since the 1970’s and never really left it. I’ve tried all of the editions and keep coming back to the original, so clearly my view of the game has its own bias. I wanted to share my perspective of the game and what I hope happens in 5E.
OD&D (the boxed set with little tan booklets) began as a simple miniatures game turned RPG. While you clearly could use a sand table or battleboard, we never did. To me, the evolution from miniatures game to RPG began when we saw the action in our minds and described the action in words instead of seeing little dudes move around on a board. OD&D came with three classes (fighting man, magic-user, and cleric) but others soon followed. The thief made the “big four” as far as we were concerned, but we often allowed rangers and paladins and monks and druids from the OD&D supplements. When you put all of the rules to OD&D together it practically adds up to AD&D, but the philosophy is different. While AD&D was an attempt to standardize and codify rules, OD&D comes off as a more random and serendipitous journey where the DM gets to decide a lot more about style and flavor of play. The boxed set of OD&D was clearly designed where 4th level was impressive and characters capped out a little after 8th level. Monsters were built for this range of character, spells were written for this range of character, and so on. As the supplements pushed character levels higher more spells were needed and badder monsters had to be created. While the original dragon was the ultimate bad boy in the monster stable, as time passed the dragon became less fearsome as individual characters could go toe-to-toe with them.
The Basic D&D (BD&D) and Advanced D&D (AD&D) split caused some interesting things to happen. BD&D was a lot more like OD&D only race became class so that you could play an “elf” instead of an elfin fighter or elven magic-user or whatever. This probably becomes one of the first things that a 5E designer will have to deal with, as it was a big part of the first division that caused a demographic split in the D&D fanbase. BD&D did it’s own thing through Holmes Basic, Moldvay/Cook B/X, Mentzer BECMI, the Rules Cyclopedia, and eventually some boxed sets. Lots of fans like the way the game evolved, others don’t.
Advanced D&D was the foundation for the modern line supported by WotC. AD&D was mostly a compilation and reorganization of OD&D plus selected elements from Dragon Magazine (and The Strategic Review before that). The plan was to create a game for the ages; one that would be a standard set of rules for tournament and convention play. AD&D was supposed to be the Monopoly of RPGs as a game where the rules would finally be set in stone and complete.
As with most things imagined by creative people, AD&D wasn’t “complete” and continued its growth. Unearthed Arcana, continued support in Dragon Magazine, and other creativity along the way caused AD&D to continue to evolve into what became 2E. Much of the focus of 2E was on character depth, as skills and kits became a standard along with optional rules such as being able to split stats into substats in order to maximize bonuses. As 2E players found more ways to work the rules to their advantage, the “roll play versus role play” arguments began. For D&D, each edition creation has caused some degree of fan fragmentation.
3E was (to me) a natural evolution from 2E. 3E put a heavy emphasis on skills and brought in “feats” which were neat ways for characters to bend the rules to their advantage. 3E attempted to streamline the game system, pushing d20 dice rolls to the forefront, creating a unified XP chart for all classes, re-defining armor class so that bigger is better, creating a more standard scale for attribute bonuses, reducing the number of saving throws to three key categories, and probably other ways that don’t occur to me at the moment. The problem was that AD&D/2E players saw this as too much, too fast. They saw 3E as a new game and not a gradual evolution of the older rules. This seems to have caused a major rift in the D&D community, and many older players disliked 3E because of the radical level of change. (Even if many of the changes potentially made the game “better.”) One drawback, from a DM perspective, was that monsters got many of the same perks as players so monster stat-blocks ballooned into large piles of numbers that included stats and skills and feats instead of the one-line monster data found in the old TSR modules for OD&D or AD&D in the 1970’s and 1980’s. NPCs were equally challenging, as they also needed stats and skills and feats in order to be competitive with the players. For me, at least, running a game of D&D became gradually less fun as the DM paperwork grew.
4E continued the evolution, but again with major upheaval. New races were introduced as standard, skills were reduced, spells became “powers” and suddenly everyone got some, saving throws became types of defense, and so on. More player options seemed to translate into more DM frustration, at least in our group. So many rulebooks flooded the market that no one seemed able to keep up with the options, and then the switch to the Essentials line meant that some rulebooks didn’t quite match other rulebooks for the “same” edition. Although the game rules underwent some streamlining and simplification, the number of power options made 4E harder to master in some ways. In the old days I could read a thin rulebook and grasp a class in a couple of pages, but in 4E and Essentials the rulebooks were a lot thicker and the quantity of powers made it a lot harder to juggle the details in my mind. I found myself encouraging my players to understand their slice of the rulebook and hoping that they got it right, because I didn’t have the time or motivation to read and understand everything about each class.
I took a PDF of the 4E Player’s Handbook and did a copy-paste of powers information into Word to try to make my own simplified 4E rules set, and I only did levels 1-10 for the “big four” classes (fighter, thief, wizard, cleric) and key races (human, elf, dwarf, Halfling) and it all came to over 40 pages. That seems to be too much material, since I only used a third of the levels, a third of the classes, half of the races. Doing a quick page estimation, the five key Essentials books (Rules Compendium, two “Heroes of” books, Monster book, GM book) comes to around 1600 total pages of rules. The OD&D boxed set runs around 110 pages, plus 70 for Supplement I Greyhawk, plus 24 for Supplement II Blackmoor (ignoring the module), and 22 pages for Supplement III Eldritch Wizardry (ignoring psionics and artifacts) running the total “rules” page count for OD&D to be around 226 pages. The page count for Essentials is still roughly 7x as large as for OD&D.
Which brings us to 5E.
1. My top priority would be to cut the page count for the core rules. A lot. Give me a single core rulebook under 250 pages for all major races and classes. (Holmes Basic does a lot in 64 pages. I don’t need 5E to be that thin, but that’s a great example to model from. Heck, Castles & Crusades has two books, each at around 125 pages, and that makes another great model to look at.)
2. Make simple listings for powers without all of the flavor text. If players want to have supplements of powers with full details print them, but keep the core rulebooks simple.
3. Keep the core rules designed to handle lower levels and leave high-level play for expansion books. Let the core rules end somewhere around level 10. Have supplements for levels 11-20 or 21-30 if you like, but the heart of the game should keep things simple.
4. Build skill and feat options into simple class templates. Allow characters to do cool stuff, but limit the options to a reasonable number.
To me, much of the rest is just details. If you want more races or more classes, that’s fine. If AC goes up or down as armor improves, I can deal with it. If there are bigger or smaller stat bonuses, hit point totals, or whatever I can cope. Give us a simple, thin, easy-to-play core rulebook and a bunch of options that folks can buy if they want to grow their game in different directions. That’s the only way I can think of to encourage both the OD&D/AD&D and 4E crowds to play the same thing.
What I don’t need is a dozen books in order to play D&D.
