Why D&D games are all essentially the same and edition warriors should cool it

boing
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I cut my teeth on D&D back in 1979, though really my first exposure to RPGs was Melee some kid brought to a Boy Scout jamboree. I agree that all versions of Dungeons and Dragons are essentially the same game, the levels an extension of old table top war games with units being “green”, “veteran”, “elite”, and skills defined by roles. Fighter, mage, thief, in the same vein as infantry, cavalry, artillery.

Traveller, Champions and GURPS took a different tack, with characters defined by what they knew. Traveller had the neat little game before the game, where what you did defined what you learned. And where you could die before the game even started! I still played AD&D, but I preferred other games.

I stuck with GURPS in the end, as it is still the same game it was back in 1986 when it first came out, the editions merely tweaking skills and mechanics here and there. I even started working out a way to do Dragonlance in GURPS, as a cinematic campaign.

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Heck, even classic Traveller is still being published by Marc Miller. What differentiates the Traveller versions is also the setting, with each a different feel because of the world they are in. Classic Traveller is mostly the Spinward Marches just after a war with the Zhodani, MegaTraveller where the Third Imperium splinters after the assassination of the emperor, The Next Era is rebuilding after a virus caused a collapse of interstellar civilization. GURPS Traveller is an alternate timeline where the Third Imperium does not fall, and so on.

Really, the main draw of Traveller was the setting, never the rules. It’s just that the rules often seem designed to fit the setting rather the other way round. To me, it’s a question as GM if using the rules makes running the game easier, or if using GURPS and adapting the style is better. I find the latter, because games I run use rules to ensure fairness over GM fiat, but should avoid page turning.

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Personally, should I feel the urge for some play in the peculiar genre that D&D carved out for itself, I’ll reach for 13th Age, but with the right group you can enjoy pretty much anything.

I must admit that “we stuck with this one system forever” is a bit baffling to me, but it doesn’t surprise me that the ones people say that about are often heavily simulationist, kitchen-sink ones like GURPS and Hero - where with a bit of a tweak you can pretty much simulate anything. I’m somewhat moving in a different direction myself, looking into rules-light systems which try to do specific genre emulation. Really liking Mothership to that end, for example.

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And completely avoid the abomination known as 4th Ed

We hated 4th Ed so much we moved over to Pathfinder (as many older players did) and have never looked back.

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Were they trying to cram Magic The Gathering mechanics into D&D?

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I haven’t watched the video, as I’m at work. so it’s possible this is already covered.

They were trying to attract the World Of Warcraft crowd, so made D&D as close to WOW as they could

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Indeed GURPS 4e Traveller take place MUCH earlier, closer to when Earth and the Empire first discovered each other.

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Your loss, it has by far the most solid and balanced system of any version of D&D. Possibly the best at being a game that any RPG has come so far.

(And no, there weren’t any WoW mechanics, nor was 4e an attempt to capture the Warcraft crowd. That’s just very tired edition war rhetoric.)

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What I find slightly ironic is that both Diablo and WoW are highly influenced by how D&D does things, with levels and abstract damage. It may be that Wizards wanted to make D&D 4e easier to adapt to online gaming, but I don’t think that was so much the focus as tabletop play testing was.

But again, I am viewing from the outside, since I prefer GURPS. Or even The Fantasy Trip, for that matter. My knowledge comes mostly from the discussions on various forums as it was released.

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I do have to say, I hadn’t heard any of the particular edition complaints yet when I first tried 4e.

My honest first reaction was “why is this using video game style skill trees.”

The real thing I hated though was how dependent so many skills were on playing on a grid. I just don’t like playing on a grid with minis. I know there were rules for not using a grid but they favored grid play heavily.

More recently I’ve played a lot of adventurers league when I had no other options and hated it.

I don’t mind 5e generally though. We have played a ton since the online character sheets are so easy to use, I will give that to WotC. We have mostly been playing online since the pandemic started and it was the easiest thing to play over video chat so we leaned on it. We have played other settings with D&D rules just for the convenience.

To be fair D&D was not my first game and has never been my favorite. I am an Old World of Darkness kinda gal.

And for that I used to be stuck on 2nd ed except for Vampire where 3rd ed improved some rules. 20th anniversary rules are good and easier to start a new player with. I do hate Vampire 5e, the mechanical changes do actually change the nature of play too much to fix with house rules.

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We do know what the design goals for 4e were, and adapting the game for online gaming wasn’t one of those. The main problems with 3e were the proliferation of character options - classes, races, feats, magic items, spells and prestige classes – which made balancing things enormously difficult for both the designers and DMs; and the built-in inequality between various classes, famously summed up as “linear fighter, quadratic wizard”, meaning that as they gained levels, full spellcasters left everyone else behind in both power and versatility.

WotC did a very good job fixing this in 4e, but it meant the loss of a lot of options, the boosting of martial characters like fighters, and the reduction in power of wizards, druids, clerics and such. The end result was a really mechanically sound game, as I mentioned, and one that was far easier to DM, especially at higher levels, but it did lose a lot of atmospheric legacy stuff and the freewheeling character-building metagame aspects of 3e that appealed to a lot of 3e fans.

5e D&D does a pretty good job at presenting a version of the game with a more “traditional” feel. While it’s not as mechanically solid or well-balanced (IMO), it still fixes 3e’s most glaring problems like the piling up of bonuses from different sources (such as buff spells and magic items), keeps spellcasters from completely overshadowing other classes, and makes fighters actually very good at fighting things, even if they can be bit lacking when they can’t solve problems with a sword.

(Why is the “video game adaptation” accusation wrong? Because in a video game you could have the computer handle all the myriad options, keep track of spell durations, areas of effect, and the overlapping bonuses from different sources, and all the rest that made high-level 3e so slow and cumbersome. In the campaigns I played that reached high levels, the players of spellcasters used Excel sheets for their characters, to keep track of spell slots, bonuses, and so on.)

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I think some of the miscommunication here is about feel.

A video game can have complicated mechanics in the background but still feel very simple to play.

No one would say a table top game with a bunch of math and spreadsheets to keep track of feels like playing WoW.

I’ve much more often seen it said that an overly streamlined game feels like a video game.

Video game feels means that decisions feel simple and mechanical with less room for role play or fudging for narrative.

When it is too obvious what the correct thing to do is all the time in a game I feel like I should be playing a video game instead. Optimization is boring for me and for the people that I like to game with. “Game balance” is often a word that signals “no fun” in my personal experience.

When I feel challenged to problem solve creatively and take weird chances, and play off of the DM and other players, then I’m roleplaying.

On the other end I also don’t like too much math or tables or spreadsheets, never been a fan of Gurps.

I like a fun setting with usable rules that I can bend when I need to.

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How is not playing a game I hated “my loss”? If you like the game, more power to you. Enjoy yourself. This was not my experience.

And the feeling of the mechanics being designed to attract the WOW players was our feeling at the time, not “edition war rhetoric”. This was literally what we said when we decide to stop playing. And for reference I have been playing and GM-ing D&D since 1978, so I have a good feeling for the different versions.

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My favorite system was always GURPS 3e.

Now I mostly do D&D 5e because that’s what everyone else is interested in playing. =sigh=

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from Imgflip Meme Generator

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If only I had the time… *snif

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