The concept of 'organic' growth in D&D

[WiserOdin032402]

What's with people obsessing over having 'organic' growth in D&D and being against having developments such as 'artifact sword', 'flying/swimming mount' or 'gets army' codified somewhere in the system? Or getting hung up on the fact that starting off as one class and then eventually developing into another entails being weak at both rather than being as strong as someone who single-classed? It seems like a concept people talk about a lot and want because it sounds right, not because it works at all with a level-based system. This goes doubly so when it comes to a very specific mundane class that we have a million threads about, they want the class that shall not be named to get artifact swords, flying mounts, an army, and so on but have issues with the idea of tying that to levels because that would deny them 'organic' growth.

Honestly what gives with these people? Why are they playing D&D and not looking for another TTRPG that suits their needs?

[Foxwarrior]

Why are they playing D&D and not looking for another TTRPG that suits their needs?

Because reading is haaaaaard, and finding TTRPGs which really do organic growth is hard too. Speaking of which, do you know of any? I've been fantasizing about how I'd write one recently, but haven't bumped into much that already exists, at least not with organic growth that actually makes characters orders of magnitude more powerful over time.

[GnomeWorks]

What's with people obsessing over having 'organic' growth in D&D and being against having developments such as 'artifact sword', 'flying/swimming mount' or 'gets army' codified somewhere in the system?

I think tying it to level is awkward because you get in the situation of the game mechanics being very dissociated from the fiction.

You go up a level in the dungeon, and now Bob the Fighter suddenly has an artifact sword for... no apparent reason. Or a hippogryph. It's harder to justify those with a reasonable in-world explanation if they happen at an arbitrary class level.

Maybe it's possible to write that in a way that's satisfying?

Or getting hung up on the fact that starting off as one class and then eventually developing into another entails being weak at both rather than being as strong as someone who single-classed?

I've been pondering the martials problem lately (in the context of D&D 5e), and my conclusion is that when I get to them, I'm going to write them as either 5- or 10-level classes, with the capstone being some kind of "pick one of these other clearly-magical classes from this list, you gain X Y Z features from their earlier levels, and you can take level 6 in that class as your next level."

It's not... perfect, but I think it conserves the notion of an everyday regular guy with a sword at the levels that the concept works in, and gives them a reasonable way to pokevolve into something that doesn't suck in a manner that doesn't suck.

On the other hand, I've started writing nonmagical classes with an attitude of "over 10th level, no fucks given." I gave a class one of the abilities from the deck of many things as a thing it can do every day, and I don't care, it's fine.

[WiserOdin032402]

Because reading is haaaaaard, and finding TTRPGs which really do organic growth is hard too. Speaking of which, do you know of any? I've been fantasizing about how I'd write one recently, but haven't bumped into much that already exists, at least not with organic growth that actually makes characters orders of magnitude more powerful over time.

Best one I can think of is Symbaroum but Symbaroum is Low Fantasy Spooky Forest Simulator which happens to be leveless and classless and uses experience points to buy perks n' shit. But again, it's the kind of game where most characters can and will be killed in one hit by a well-placed battleaxe strike...which is what some of these people wanted and they lapped it up when I showed them it.

I think tying it to level is awkward because you get in the situation of the game mechanics being very dissociated from the fiction.

You go up a level in the dungeon, and now Bob the Fighter suddenly has an artifact sword for... no apparent reason. Or a hippogryph. It's harder to justify those with a reasonable in-world explanation if they happen at an arbitrary class level.

Maybe it's possible to write that in a way that's satisfying?

Well that requires handling shit in a certain way now doesn't it? It would require an examining of how EXP and Levels work outside of just 'stab orc, get better at stabbing orc' or 'zap orc, learn how to bend reality to your whim'. We'd have to make it so you can only gain levels after doing....something like a small training montage or resting or something but nobody has time for that anymore. It's a marathon rush from level 1 to level 20 to save the world, downtime be damned.

Owning books on older editions and listening to my father and his friends wax nostalgic I learned really fucking quickly that classes that don't get magic in older editions ended up being Elothars and that was a sort of unspoken rule. It's not that your class got things at those levels, it's that those things showed up in the massive monty haul loot piles and by the time the magic users and the clerics started to seriously matter as classes the Elothars had massive amounts of swag and gimmies to let them keep up. It just so happened my dad had the crazy idea that instead of killing the dragon he should beat it into submission and make an ally out of it and it lined up perfectly that there were rules for that, those sorts of things.

One of these people did suggest a sort of 'plot coupon points' in a tongue in cheek manner, then seriously considered it, then suggested that it should be tied to both level and how magic native magic a class has as a sort of 'specific gimmie voucher' or whatever.

I've been pondering the martials problem lately (in the context of D&D 5e), and my conclusion is that when I get to them, I'm going to write them as either 5- or 10-level classes, with the capstone being some kind of "pick one of these other clearly-magical classes from this list, you gain X Y Z features from their earlier levels, and you can take level 6 in that class as your next level."

It's not... perfect, but I think it conserves the notion of an everyday regular guy with a sword at the levels that the concept works in, and gives them a reasonable way to pokevolve into something that doesn't suck in a manner that doesn't suck.

On the other hand, I've started writing nonmagical classes with an attitude of "over 10th level, no fucks given." I gave a class one of the abilities from the deck of many things as a thing it can do every day, and I don't care, it's fine.

Honestly after binging the fuck out of old Gaming Den fighter threads and watching a metric fuckload of historical combat videos and pirating some old adventure movies and reading an old book or several I've determined that Sneak Attack is such a stupid class feature to lock to one mundane class that it almost gave me an aneurysm. I've been designing two separate mundane classes, one more fighting like and one more thief like, but both semi-customizable action fantasy hero classes that are 10 levels long....in fact I've been designing most of my classes as 10 levels long and when I'm done with all the base classes I could want, then I'll make 'Prestige Classes' which have all sorts of fun things that take you from 11 to 20. Who knows, it might work out.

[Ice9]

Speaking of which, do you know of any? I've been fantasizing about how I'd write one recently, but haven't bumped into much that already exists, at least not with organic growth that actually makes characters orders of magnitude more powerful over time.

I haven't found one either, but I'd really like to.

IME, "associated" power growth - ie. directly from in-game actions - is a lot more satisfying than disconnected power growth. As in, "I can swim in lava because I beat the volcano god at arm wrestling and made him teach me how" is cooler than "I can swim in lava because 10 game sessions have gone by".

However, it's a lot harder to balance, and seems to usually lead to either:
A) The things the give you power are outside your control, so it becomes pretty much "you have what abilities the GM feels like giving you".
B) The things are within your control, which means any character that doesn't do them as much as possible gets left in the dust - like a character who gives away their money and ignores magic items in a D&D game.

I guess ideally:
1) The actions that lead to power would be at least partially under player control - not guaranteed, but you can initiate the attempt without GM charity and success/failure isn't just fiat.
2) You can't productively spend more than a fraction of your time/resources on this, so characters can have other goals and activities without falling far behind.
3) The actions are thematic for the type of characters you're playing, so it's not weird (fiction-wise) that all the PCs do them.

[owlassociate]

Part of this could be having more developed and intrinsic rewards baked into the challenges and opponents, and have those rewards be more accessible to fighter-types. Like say, defeating an efreeti tyrant in a wrestling match grants you an army of fire giants and the ability to summon lava elementals because now the Plane of Fire respects you. Or maybe bathing in dragon's blood grants a half-dragon template (AoE breath weapon and flight), but does enough damage that it would kill a level-appropriate character of a non-warrior class. Now the fighter is a wizard by way of the monster manual, and they don't even know it.

[Ancient History]

Balancing hard and soft counters with game advancement can be tricky.

If, let us say, you have a monster with more hit points, that's usually a soft counter. You need to do more hits to get the same result, but as long as you can do more hits, you don't need to change how you hit. You can swing the same sword or cast the same spells and its fine.

If the monster has the same hit points but Damage Reduction, that's a harder counter. You still have to deal more damage to get the same result, but there are usually exceptions that can bypass the damage reduction - silver weapons, magic weapons, fire, that kind of thing. So that incentivizes characters to go out and get the more-effective weapons. You usually don't absolutely need the improved weapons, but it's a lot more difficult to overcome without them.

A hard counter is something like a vampire that can only be killed or defeated by some specific means. There are some enemies that just can't be dealt with except with a magic sword, or a silver bullet, or what have you.

All of these have their place in designing a more challenging encounter in a game. Balancing them is tricky. If you need a magic sword to overcome an encounter, you now have a magic sword for (presumably) all future encounters. How does that work? How do you factor that in? Do you escalate, so that the next-harder encounter they need to find a more powerful magic sword? Etc.

Now extend that to game design: at what level do you assume that all characters have a magic weapon, so all enemies need to have the next level of Damage Reduction to compensate? At what point does the DR get so high that it slips from being a soft counter to a hard counter? If you're facing a demon with a DR XX/+5 holy weapons, and there's only one Excalibur in the setting, that's a whole fetch quest right there...and presumably all the other groups have to figure out something else to deal with similar foes.

I'm using the d20 parlance for all this stuff because we've all done the Wealth By Level arguments to death, but this is common to many more games. The idea that "X is a more effective weapon against Y" and "Z is the only thing to defeat Y" are super-common tropes, and stuff like Damage Resistance and Vulnerability are ways to mimic those qualified invulnerabilities/weaknesses.

[Chamomile]

Character customization is something that's really compelling in an RPG while having no analogue in the source material, so you can make arguments for twisting the dial between "character customization" and "narrative coherence" as far as you want in either direction. You can have characters' abilities come online arbitrarily and with absolutely no explanation because Dave wanted an artifact sword and we don't want to spend screen time getting him one but nor do we want to tell him he's not allowed to have class features until we find room in the plot to cram in an adventure about acquiring them. You can mitigate the problem by having the class feature be the ability to make an artifact weapon or raise an army, rather than having one just materialize.

You can also have characters whose abilities are defined by the adventures they have, where everything they can do has a backstory and in-universe plausibility to it, but also what powers are even on the table is at the whim of the GM. And you can mitigate this by having arm wrestling the volcano god offer one of several different options, so maybe the wizard gets a fireball and the fighter gets fire immunity and the rogue gets some kind of flashbang thing. That option is underserved and I'd love to see it explored, but I expect I'd be just as sick of it as the "arbitrary character weapon from nowhere" if it got as much attention.

You could make a game from the ground up intended to reconcile the two, where every class feature is associated with a certain kind of boss monster and the whole premise of the game is arm wrestling monsters for super powers, but that'd be a very specific Monster Hunter-y kind of campaign, not anything general purpose.

[Whipstitch]

Honestly what gives with these people? Why are they playing D&D and not looking for another TTRPG that suits their needs?

This is a super weird take given you can change a rpg by busting out a notepad. People want organic advancement because working with whatever tools you find in your environment and calling that your "build" teases a far more novel experience than writing down "wizard" or "druid with natural spell" and then sandbagging until the campaign ends because deep down you know you already won back during character creation.

Unfortunately, organic advancement is more art than science. Treating underperforming builds/classes as code for "I'll take whatever is in the mystery box and call that my advancement" can actually work rather well but if you over or undershoot your balance targets you can easily end up breeding resentment in the group.

[WiserOdin032402]

Great thread so far, I'm loving all of the responses. I'm going to address the question directed at me...and then maybe address some of the points brought up above? Who knows.

This is a super weird take given you can change a rpg by busting out a notepad. People want organic advancement because working with whatever tools you find in your environment and calling that your "build" teases a far more novel experience than writing down "wizard" or "druid with natural spell" and then sandbagging until the campaign ends because deep down you know you already won back during character creation.

Unfortunately, organic advancement is more art than science. Treating underperforming builds/classes as code for "I'll take whatever is in the mystery box and call that my advancement" can actually work rather well but if you over or undershoot your balance targets you can easily end up breeding resentment in the group.

I ask this because oftentimes when I talk to these people they rail against the class/level system of D&D like with the group I turned to Symbaroum. It saved them a bunch of time, effort, and tears trying to completely tear up all of D&D 5e (because holy shit they'd basically changed the game so much it was basically a different game and they were still unsatisfied) and make a whole new system that doesn't have all those nasty things they don't like that ruin their immersion and their pursuit of 'realism' (which is stupid enough for its own thread) and 'organicness' like classes and levels and hit points.

For the rest, being able to win the game in character creation is obviously somewhat of a failstate of the game and organic advancement is uh...questionable in a game with a very clear and very obvious measuring stick (levels). If we were to simply put in the DMG 'These classes underperform, they need gimmies from this list in this order as they gain levels' I'm pretty sure that'd cause a huge amount of upset from any player learning how the proverbial sausage is made.

[Foxwarrior]

You can also have characters whose abilities are defined by the adventures they have, where everything they can do has a backstory and in-universe plausibility to it, but also what powers are even on the table is at the whim of the GM. And you can mitigate this by having arm wrestling the volcano god offer one of several different options, so maybe the wizard gets a fireball and the fighter gets fire immunity and the rogue gets some kind of flashbang thing. That option is underserved and I'd love to see it explored, but I expect I'd be just as sick of it as the "arbitrary character weapon from nowhere" if it got as much attention.

You could make a game from the ground up intended to reconcile the two, where every class feature is associated with a certain kind of boss monster and the whole premise of the game is arm wrestling monsters for super powers, but that'd be a very specific Monster Hunter-y kind of campaign, not anything general purpose.

Yeah, I figured that the nice thing to do would be to present the players with a predefined world where they could look around and go "let's slay the dragon to get the scale mail and the Wings of Cover spell first before tackling the manticore" or whatever, but it's so much up-front development to make a setup like that, and you're basically putting any balance you want your game to have into the world design stage, so it becomes very difficult for some random DM to do a good enough job and they'd mostly be stuck with the game designer's setting.

[OgreBattle]

Some folks need an Achievement written onto the character sheet that gives a fiddly +1 bonus or so to feel like they're really role playing

Some folks need their character sheet to not be covered in fiddly +1 bonuses to feel like they're not a rollplayer.

D&D caters to both via outting it on the DM reading the player and feeding them what is asked for

[deaddmwalking]

From level 1, there's nothing stopping you from finding someone with an artifact sword, stabbing them, and taking it. I mean, other than they'll probably kill you, first. But ultimately, there's a certain amount of 'picking up random loot and using it' that you expect to happen, and it's bullshit if it can't.

Sometimes, rigidly codifying when you can get something that is 'better than you might expect' creates its own set of problems. Think of how many GMs that wouldn't let you accumulate wealth beyond the WBL guidelines...

If you want people to have things like swords that are appropriate for their letter, you should give them ability to 'upgrade ancestral weapons' in a level-appropriate fashion in tandem with their normal advancement; if they decide to swap out their ancestral blade for a different one, they should be able to do that, instead.

In 3.x terms, instead of 'Focused Weapon', you should have a Feat that gives you a Masterword sword that gets a magical bonus equal to 1/2 your level (ie, +1 at Level 2, +2 at level 4) or better, with normal magical weapon abilities as direct substitutes (ie, a +1 flaming longsword at level 4). 3.x also needed more feats and the ability to 'retrain' feats at every level, but in any case, something along the lines of an optional class ability that remains level appropriate is one of the easiest ways to implement having appropriate equipment without destroying verisimilitude.

[K]

For the rest, being able to win the game in character creation is obviously somewhat of a failstate of the game and organic advancement is uh...questionable in a game with a very clear and very obvious measuring stick (levels). If we were to simply put in the DMG 'These classes underperform, they need gimmies from this list in this order as they gain levels' I'm pretty sure that'd cause a huge amount of upset from any player learning how the proverbial sausage is made.

Magic item drops are a great way to boost individual PC performance, but it seems that most or all of player parties can't wrap their heads around handing out the magic items the party gets to the weaker individual characters.

I've seen many a group of people in DnD games look at me like I was crazy when I said "yeh, let's not sell that item and instead put it on the character who can get the most out of it." Usually, they think it's some kind of ruse to funnel the items to myself, but after a few sessions they tend to figure out that team play is the way to go.

I could imagine a game where that is simply codified in the rules, but sadly I think the socialist idea of people with the most need getting the most resources is a hard sell considering the history of RPGs.

[Foxwarrior]

Getting rid of magic item pawn shops is a simple step to making it so people have to distribute items to party members by usefulness instead of selling them in order to evenly distribute wealth throughout the party.

That said, designing the game so that some classes need magic items and some don't is far from mandatory... if you play upon the idea that players usually think of the "fair" distribution of wealth as being where every player gets an equal amount, you can pretty easily make it so wizards have to spend all their money on boring stat boost items while fighters get to go wild buying utility gadgets that let them reach the monsters.

[Iduno]

Because reading is haaaaaard, and finding TTRPGs which really do organic growth is hard too. Speaking of which, do you know of any? I've been fantasizing about how I'd write one recently, but haven't bumped into much that already exists, at least not with organic growth that actually makes characters orders of magnitude more powerful over time.

Best one I can think of is Symbaroum but Symbaroum is Low Fantasy Spooky Forest Simulator which happens to be leveless and classless and uses experience points to buy perks n' shit. But again, it's the kind of game where most characters can and will be killed in one hit by a well-placed battleaxe strike...which is what some of these people wanted and they lapped it up when I showed them it.

I think tying it to level is awkward because you get in the situation of the game mechanics being very dissociated from the fiction.

You go up a level in the dungeon, and now Bob the Fighter suddenly has an artifact sword for... no apparent reason. Or a hippogryph. It's harder to justify those with a reasonable in-world explanation if they happen at an arbitrary class level.

Maybe it's possible to write that in a way that's satisfying?

Well that requires handling shit in a certain way now doesn't it? It would require an examining of how EXP and Levels work outside of just 'stab orc, get better at stabbing orc' or 'zap orc, learn how to bend reality to your whim'. We'd have to make it so you can only gain levels after doing....something like a small training montage or resting or something but nobody has time for that anymore. It's a marathon rush from level 1 to level 20 to save the world, downtime be damned.

That sounds like you might want Earthdawn. You level up individual abilities instead of everything at once (increasing you level or "circle" only gains you extra hp and access to more abilities), and learning new abilities requires a trainer. You also may not improve any skill unless you used that skill to gain the xp.

I am not convinced it's a great system, but it does try out a lot of very interesting ideas.

[WiserOdin032402]

That sounds like you might want Earthdawn. You level up individual abilities instead of everything at once (increasing you level or "circle" only gains you extra hp and access to more abilities), and learning new abilities requires a trainer. You also may not improve any skill unless you used that skill to gain the xp.

I am not convinced it's a great system, but it does try out a lot of very interesting ideas.

I'll have to look into it. I think I should make it very clear that I'm fine with D&D, I've read more than enough here and read enough of the older editions to know how much of the game is straight cargo cult programming. It's that I happened to end up with some 5e groups that don't actually like D&D 5e but that's all they're willing to play and they haven't looked at other TTRPGs. I want to understand why people stick with D&D to the point of making massive homebrew documents that completely rewrite the RPG as a whole, why they balk at the game design decisions I proposed on the basis of 'but it's not organic' and what they really truly mean by 'organic', and find out why for the love of god I'm so hellbent on helping these people. So far this thread is helping me understand a little bit.

Again, this thread is great so far, I'm liking a lot of the answers I'm seeing, though Cham and Owl make me think that I should devote some time to a Blue Mage class. I'm still pondering on the posts by Ancienthistory, deaddmwalking, and K. It's a lot to take in as someone designing his own little 3.95 heartbreaker.

[Neeeek]

Because reading is haaaaaard, and finding TTRPGs which really do organic growth is hard too. Speaking of which, do you know of any? I've been fantasizing about how I'd write one recently, but haven't bumped into much that already exists, at least not with organic growth that actually makes characters orders of magnitude more powerful over time.

Best one I can think of is Symbaroum but Symbaroum is Low Fantasy Spooky Forest Simulator which happens to be leveless and classless and uses experience points to buy perks n' shit. But again, it's the kind of game where most characters can and will be killed in one hit by a well-placed battleaxe strike...which is what some of these people wanted and they lapped it up when I showed them it.

I think tying it to level is awkward because you get in the situation of the game mechanics being very dissociated from the fiction.

You go up a level in the dungeon, and now Bob the Fighter suddenly has an artifact sword for... no apparent reason. Or a hippogryph. It's harder to justify those with a reasonable in-world explanation if they happen at an arbitrary class level.

Maybe it's possible to write that in a way that's satisfying?

Well that requires handling shit in a certain way now doesn't it? It would require an examining of how EXP and Levels work outside of just 'stab orc, get better at stabbing orc' or 'zap orc, learn how to bend reality to your whim'. We'd have to make it so you can only gain levels after doing....something like a small training montage or resting or something but nobody has time for that anymore. It's a marathon rush from level 1 to level 20 to save the world, downtime be damned.

That sounds like you might want Earthdawn. You level up individual abilities instead of everything at once (increasing you level or "circle" only gains you extra hp and access to more abilities), and learning new abilities requires a trainer. You also may not improve any skill unless you used that skill to gain the xp.

I am not convinced it's a great system, but it does try out a lot of very interesting ideas.

Specifically regarding magic items in Earthdawn, they get more powerful as the character using them unlocks more of the item's story.

Something that starts out as a +1 sword can become a crazy powerful artifact if the character does the right things.

One item (a bow) required the character to give the bow away to a frenemy with no expectation they would ever get it back, then have said frenemy give it back anyway to unlock its strongest abilities. This would be after doing 8 or so other quests to unlock the earlier levels of abilities.

It's been awhile (20+ years) since I've read the Earthdawn rules, but I thought that was an interesting idea, so it stuck in my head. In D&D terms, a player can inherit some family heirloom that awakens as they advance in level. They don't have to have an artifact sword suddenly appear, the one they already have can just get better over time.

[Username17]

I've seen many a group of people in DnD games look at me like I was crazy when I said "yeh, let's not sell that item and instead put it on the character who can get the most out of it." Usually, they think it's some kind of ruse to funnel the items to myself, but after a few sessions they tend to figure out that team play is the way to go.

I could imagine a game where that is simply codified in the rules, but sadly I think the socialist idea of people with the most need getting the most resources is a hard sell considering the history of RPGs.

I found that argument a lot easier to make back when 1st and 2nd edition AD&D. When 3rd edition let you trade 1000 gold pieces for a bullshit magic trinket, it became a lot harder to convince people to not sell an 8k item for half value.

-Username17

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I'll have to look into it. I think I should make it very clear that I'm fine with D&D, I've read more than enough here and read enough of the older editions to know how much of the game is straight cargo cult programming. It's that I happened to end up with some 5e groups that don't actually like D&D 5e but that's all they're willing to play and they haven't looked at other TTRPGs. I want to understand why people stick with D&D to the point of making massive homebrew documents that completely rewrite the RPG as a whole, why they balk at the game design decisions I proposed on the basis of 'but it's not organic' and what they really truly mean by 'organic', and find out why for the love of god I'm so hellbent on helping these people. So far this thread is helping me understand a little bit.

I'm not sure why you're so hellbent on helping these guys, but I do have some thoughts on the bolded part.

Over the years, hanging out on D&D forums vs general rpg forums, and playing in several groups... There is a subset of D&D players who not "RPG" players. They are D&D players. If it is not D&D, they will not play it. Full Stop. So they'll house rule whatever edition of D&D until the cows come home. But, God help you if you ever suggest any other game to them, they won't play it.

[WiserOdin032402]

Specifically regarding magic items in Earthdawn, they get more powerful as the character using them unlocks more of the item's story.

Something that starts out as a +1 sword can become a crazy powerful artifact if the character does the right things.

One item (a bow) required the character to give the bow away to a frenemy with no expectation they would ever get it back, then have said frenemy give it back anyway to unlock its strongest abilities. This would be after doing 8 or so other quests to unlock the earlier levels of abilities.

It's been awhile (20+ years) since I've read the Earthdawn rules, but I thought that was an interesting idea, so it stuck in my head. In D&D terms, a player can inherit some family heirloom that awakens as they advance in level. They don't have to have an artifact sword suddenly appear, the one they already have can just get better over time.

So like weapons of legacy but less shit and less likely to kill you. Okay so that move Earthdawn up a peg or two for my reading list. Enlightening, thank you.

I found that argument a lot easier to make back when 1st and 2nd edition AD&D. When 3rd edition let you trade 1000 gold pieces for a bullshit magic trinket, it became a lot harder to convince people to not sell an 8k item for half value.

-Username17

Well isn't this why 5th edition tried to move to 'Suck dick to get item'? And then had to immediately backpedal because enough of the monster manual pretty much ignores you if you don't have a magic sword that they had to make an entire system for auctioning items in XGtE?

I'm not sure why you're so hellbent on helping these guys, but I do have some thoughts on the bolded part.

Over the years, hanging out on D&D forums vs general rpg forums, and playing in several groups... There is a subset of D&D players who not "RPG" players. They are D&D players. If it is not D&D, they will not play it. Full Stop. So they'll house rule whatever edition of D&D until the cows come home. But, God help you if you ever suggest any other game to them, they won't play it.

Huh. I never thought of it that way. But yet some of them are system veterans of 3.5 and hard latch onto 5e and rebuke me whenever I point out that 5th edition books are overpriced garbage on par with apple products in how bad they are for the consumer compared to 3.5 and the like....strange times we live in.

I got in especially hot water when I pointed out all those mean and nasty skill rules that would take up 'thousands of pages of the PHB' fit in the 325 page PHB...which just so happens to be the same pagesize as the 5e PHB. Does all this make me a grognard?

[Username17]

Well isn't this why 5th edition tried to move to 'Suck dick to get item'? And then had to immediately backpedal because enough of the monster manual pretty much ignores you if you don't have a magic sword that they had to make an entire system for auctioning items in XGtE?

The key is that 3rd edition made magic items available but rare. That is, you could have whatever specific magic items you wanted, but the expected number of magic items you'd have at one time was very low. A fucking tenth level Fighter wouldn't be expected to have a backup magic dagger. And might not even have a magic bow. 4th edition doubled down on that, with even more build specificity and even less concurrent equipment.

5th edition flipped the script on availability but not on quantity. So you were still expected to see only 2 magic weapons by 10th level, but you didn't even get to pick what they were. That's worst of both worlds, and obviously they had to walk that shit back.

In AD&D you had a bunch of random stuff, but the operative word is that you had a bunch of random stuff. If your magic sword got broken or disenchanted or whatever, you switched to a backup magic weapon. If you're going to slot machine things, people need that many pulls on the lever.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

The key is that 3rd edition made magic items available but rare. That is, you could have whatever specific magic items you wanted, but the expected number of magic items you'd have at one time was very low. A fucking tenth level Fighter wouldn't be expected to have a backup magic dagger. And might not even have a magic bow. 4th edition doubled down on that, with even more build specificity and even less concurrent equipment.

Nominally. I think part of the problem was that in most of the written adventures and scenarios, every NPC had "level-appropriate" magic items. Which is fine, until you think about how many encounters your party is going to have between levels. So a lot of PCs are going to be looting lots of magical gear off of NPCs and magic bling becomes real. It's less of an issue with disposable magic items like potions or scrolls, but look at The Sunless Citadel.

Nominally, this is an introductory adventure for 4 1st-level characters. Mostly it's traps, dire rats and crap like that, but if you make a clean sweep you also get an everburning torch, Quaal's feather token (tree), +1 morningstar, wand of entangle, +1 longsword Shatterspike, Azan-Gund "Night Caller" and a couple scrolls.

[Dogbert]

What's with people obsessing over having 'organic' growth in D&D

Spoilers: "Organic" is neckbeard-speak for either of the following:

1) I want my players to ruin their own fun by making all the wrong choices, and I'll get this by withholding information from them, because I'm malicious.
2) I want my players to have no agency, because I'm a scaredy cat and I fear losing control of the game.
3) I genuinely somehow want one thing while actively working towards the opposite of that thing I supposedly want, because I make no sense.

[phlapjackage]

Specifically regarding magic items in Earthdawn, they get more powerful as the character using them unlocks more of the item's story.

Something that starts out as a +1 sword can become a crazy powerful artifact if the character does the right things.

One item (a bow) required the character to give the bow away to a frenemy with no expectation they would ever get it back, then have said frenemy give it back anyway to unlock its strongest abilities. This would be after doing 8 or so other quests to unlock the earlier levels of abilities.

It's been awhile (20+ years) since I've read the Earthdawn rules, but I thought that was an interesting idea, so it stuck in my head. In D&D terms, a player can inherit some family heirloom that awakens as they advance in level. They don't have to have an artifact sword suddenly appear, the one they already have can just get better over time.

So like weapons of legacy but less shit and less likely to kill you. Okay so that move Earthdawn up a peg or two for my reading list. Enlightening, thank you.

For your question of organic growth and artifact swords and multiclassing and so on, I'd say Earthdawn handles all of these problems really well. There are no mundane classes, so there's less (no?) worry about that. Levels exist but are much less important, it's almost a skill-based class system with levels added on. Flying/swimming mounts can be handled similarly to artifact weapons, iirc - your mount can upgrade and get more powerful as your character does, if you choose to invest char resources in that area.

Highly 2nd the recommendation to look at Earthdawn. I dunno about the newest edition(s) and whether they fix some of the problems or whatever.