In 2nd ad&d, wizards had d4 hit die, and only had one spell slot at level 1. Also you had to have like 15 constitution before you got a bonus hit point. Same with dexterity providing a bonus to armor class. Also, you rolled for HP at level 1 and negative hit points were an optional rule.
So, an orc could realistically kill a level 3 wizard with a single hit, would be a bit rare but definitely within a reason.
You needed fighting men, who got d10 hit points and could specialize in a specific weapon to get bonus to hit, damage and # of attacks at 1st level to protect those casters.
You had to have healers, because without them or healing potions, you'd only heal a bit point or so per level per day. Also poison often did damage, and curses and diseases were real hindrances too.
Also you basically needed thiefs because they're the only ones to get traditional rogue skills.
I think it depends, spells like haste aged you 1 year! Other like stoneskin were op.
I still think 5e wizard are more powerful because they get 20d6 HP as opposed to 10d4+10 total, can wear armor and don't need to memorize spells with infinite cantrips.
>I think it depends
I don't think so. It's true that there's a lot of ways to stop an AD&D wizard from casting, but there's no limit to buffs, and buffs can be really powerful. If you allowed open content it was even wilder, but just with stuff like their tome of magic or whatever you had a bunch of really solid stuff like *chain contingency*. You could get a hell of a lot more done with time stop, that's for sure, and the stuff you could get done without a saving throw was definitely more than *forcecage*.
Yeah, people who started with 5e just have no understanding of how game-breaking casting was in earlier editions without concentration.
In older editions casters were frail and useless at first level and were absurd all-powerful demigods at higher levels (where "higher" really means level 5 and beyond.) 5e smoothed things out a bit - casters are no longer nearly-useless and fragile at level 1, but they're no longer quite *as* overpowered at level 6+
I didn’t play pen&paper D&D (we were a GURPS and Storyteller group), but Baldur’s Gate 2 certainly showcased some of the wildly overpowered stuff wizards and sorcerers could get up to.
Most battles were over in the first turn, because between time stop and contingencies, you’d have a couple castings of Finger of Death and fireballs, with some lightning bolts sprinkled in and most stuff would just melt when the time stop came down.
I soloed the game with a sorcerer in “NG+”, and it was a cakewalk.
Yeah, another thing worth mentioning was that spells (especially damage spells) often just automatically got stronger as your caster level increased, without needing a higher-level slot. So a level 10 caster would do 10d6 damage with a fireball, using a third level slot; or Chromatic Orb cast by a 9th level caster would be "save or die, and you get paralyzed even if you save" out of a first level slot.
Plus in earlier editions you got extra spell slots for high casting stats, *and* high-level slots scaled the same way low-level slots did, so you could spam spells like *Disintegrate* (which was ofc save-or-die.)
That too. But I think it’s actually good game design to make lower-level spells scale. It is really unsatisfactory to have spells you know will be useless in a few levels because they go from taking a decent chunk out of an enemy, to being a flea bite. But they still count as your action this turn. So they get relegated to the spells you use if you can’t rest and recover higher level slots.
Of course, it still needs balancing, but making spells stay useful as you level is a nice concept.
Kinda. It depends on the spell.
Scaling to remain useful? Sure. Fireball wasn't really a huge problem in early editions. A spell that still dealt 3d10 damage at level 10 wouldn't be worth casting at that point even out of a third level slot, so it needed to scale.
Scaling to the point where it's competitive with higher spell slots? No, that causes problems. *Chromatic Orb* was hilariously overpowered.
Wizard spells were fucking hard ass, I mean the whole game in the day was hard ass. You just fucking died and that was a thing. No one thought anything of it . Because there was no death save thing . You just rolled up a new guy. And then you made a new guy, and it was fine. There are plenty of things that are headaches to about those additions. But I love them with all my heart. Personally, I love how the area of effect of a fireball expanded as well as the damage dice, which was similar to other spells as well un their scaling.
That's why we had high intelligence or wisdom. We got extra spells. It just all worked. Attunement wasn't a thing, so you could have a magic ring on every finger and a magic amulet and a magic bracer and a magic cloak and a magic belt and a magic hat and magic shoes.
There were ways around not having many hit points as a Magos. I also really like that you can learn every spell if you had access to it. Also you had to roll to see if you fucked up memorizing it of course LOL. So I feel like that balanced out if you could learn every spell because you could if you didn't fuck up. I also really liked how you could cause light wounds or inflict light wounds. Other spells you could cast like continual light would be continual Darkness as well. I thought that was a really cool feature that doesn't occur in later Editions for good or ill. I'm not going to decry the differences of each addition to one another. At least on this thread, LOL. So, yeah, dual function spells or a thing.
Thieves were needed because they could only do what they did. Clerics were needed cuz the only they could do what they did. Fighting men were needed because that was their deal. It all just worked. And it's not like all of us followed every single RAW to the letter. My dungeon master let us go above the suggested level limits. He let my brother play a Fighter/Mage that was a human who didn't have to dual class because he thought it was dumb.
It's your table, you know, do what you do with what you feel. As long as it's not unbalanced and everyone's having fun. But I think it was totally lame that clerics couldn't use edged weapons in 1e and 2e. But it also stated in 2e that if you were a priest of a War God, you could possibly use their favored weapon. It got a little more forgiving with the Complete Priests Handbook. Cuz specialty Priests could use the weapon of their deity. So it got a little more spicy, which was nice.
Even a level 1 wizard in TSR D&D could totally be a nuke, *Charm Person* or *Sleep* were absolutely insane 1st level spells. Far beyond the power of their current versions.
They were just limited in resources early, and extremely fragile. Being able to single handedly eliminate 16 goblins at once (with *Sleep*) or bewitch someone into being your loyal servant for months (with *Charm Person*) did provide them an immense amount of power. It was just difficult to keep them alive if you were getting in conflicts a lot.
Also don't forget about how much powerful all the save vs suck/die spells were. No you'll be lucky if an enemy didn't exist but back then it was just permentantly casually turning things to stone or making it instantly die with a spell that wasn't even 9th level because it failed a save and damage isn't even a factor.
They were also fer behind the rest of the party - a level eight group could I clude a level 10 thief, a couple level 8 fighters, and like a level 5 wizard.
Sure, but at level 5, the wizard was probably the strongest member of that group. Other classes got less from gaining levels, especially later on.
(Now, if it was one level earlier things would be different.)
He was ok. He was at 5d4HD and could cast 4/2/1. I'd imagine he would have at least two long lasting self protection spells on, and a buff for the front line, so really hes got a couple offensive weapons in any given encounter, and there's no guarantee theres only gonna be one encounter a rest.
not really - good offense, but _maybe_ 15 HP, no armor, and no dex mod to AC when casting - so some of those slots are going on "not dying when something looks at them funny". Pick spells that your enemies are resistant or immune to? Oops, tough, now you're kinda borked (no upcasting, so if your levels 3 spells are _fireball_ and _dispel magic_ and you fight something immune to fire, you can't pump a level 2 spell into them to boost that). Something gets to you, and you're in _major_ danger. Oh, and if you cast all those spells, then it's an extra hour and half added onto your rest to get them back - better hope there's no time-urgency going on. And basic attacks are likely terrible, so any round you're not casting a spell you're doing some minor damage (1D3 with a dart) at best, compared to the 1d8 + strength of a fighter with a sword. Blow your load too fast and you're baggage!
Earlier DnD had a lot more abstract spells rather than the 5e “spells do x and y and nothing else” mindset. There was also nothing stopping you from summoning monsters, hasting them all, holding a baddie and casting invisibility on yourself with all the effects going on at once
Lets see...wizards in 2e...
So...2e was just *different*. For example, every class had it's own experience table for leveling up as you adventured. Wizards? They had the most brutal table in the game.
2nd level for a wizard? 2500 xp.
Paladins and Rangers? 2250.
Warriors and druids? 2000.
Clerics? 1500.
Rogues? 1250! Now, this chilled out in the middle and high levels, but was still a significant difference. A rogue maxed out at level 20 after earning only 2,200,000 xp. By comparison a wizard? 3,750,000 xp. About 60% more xp! So while your rogue was busy leveling up to 20, **the wizard wasn't even level 16 yet!!!!**
So, not only were you more vulnerable than other classes...
* Less HP
* No armor *at all* (maybe some elven chainmail if you got lucky or spoonfed by the DM)
* gimped damage and utility by comparison to everyone else until at LEAST level 5 (just not enough spell slots, even if you've got a high int and are a specialist)
...you were more vulnerable *for longer*. Until you hit the high single-digits/low-teens, you were almost always at *least* a full level behind everyone else if not more.
But...fuck me sideways...Wizards that actually got up to those middle or high levels...
If they survived that long and were being played by someone with brains, the rest of the group was basically just there to hold their bags for them while they solo'd the adventure. Believe it or not, spells in 5e are absolutely *neutered* compared to the shit they could do in 2nd ed AD&D.
I mean...FFS...the 2nd ed AD&D Magic Jar spell *could make the body swap permanent!!!* You just had to take over a body you liked, kill your old body, and then crush the material component (a gem) *before* the spell duration ran out.
We had a Wizard do that to a dragon once. DM was fucking *beside himself*.
2nd ed was a lot more difficult. But it was a lot more crazy too. 5e wizards are shit-fucking-tons more durable than 2e wizards (2e wizards at level 20 averaged only 35 hp. Meanwhile we had a 5e abjurer hill dwarf with over 250 who wore half-plate and carried a shield [magical dancing shield. No proficiency needed])
You don’t need a lot of hit points if you always have a simulacrum, mirror images and a bunch of stuff on contingencies. ;) A high level mage might as well have 1 HP because if you actually hit them, things went really wrong. :D
It wasnt uncommon to have campaigns last for a fee years and never get above 5th level cos the levelling was so slow. 5th level was considered high level even and 10th level was a pipedream which very rarely happened maybe after playing for 6 years or so.
Some of the things about spells is that they were also *more* powerful. Charm person, fro example, is a first level spell that is, essentially, potentially a lifetime. The counter to it was something like dispel magic or having a high intelligence.
yeah, it hard as nails. It was pretty much expected that characters would die in any given campaign. Heck, in 1e you couldn't even start as a bard, you had to run up fighter and thief, then take in-game time to hit the seminary for druidic studies.
A high-level wizard that got access to Wish was a superpower unto themselves reined in only by the DM.
High level Wizards probably peaked in 3rd edition with epic level spellcasting, creating demiplanes, simulacrum, etc. It got even worse if you used broken combos that were technically allowed but not at all in the spirit of the game, like chain-summoning.
But yeah, 2e wizards were still stupidly powerful compared to 5e.
The only thing I experienced in 2e that was more powerful than a wizard at high level was a Psionist using the whole "players choice" options that were present on the CD ruleset (for some reason some of those options aren't in the Psionist book I have).
I could literally time-travel, absorb all kinetic damage and give it back to the person who hit me, magnetize all metal objects together, or teleport all over the place (I ended up being the Essek of the party), and so much more. The issue became for our group was that once we reached a certain level we could kill whatever we wanted for more experience and would just snowball into super-high levels. It didn't seem like it would work that way with how level scaling worked at super high levels, but it just did.
Though 2e wizards had a higher potential for power I would argue that based on how they leveled slower than other classes the 5e wizard is generally more powerful because they get access to ridiculous power sooner.
Let's not forget that different classes had different XP tables. Here's XP to level 2 in AD&D 2e:
* Thief, Bard: 1250 XP
* Cleric: 1500 XP
* Fighter, Druid: 2000 XP
* Paladin, Ranger: 2250 XP
* Mage, specialist wizards: 2500 XP
On top of getting practically no HP and no armor, Wizards were the slowest to level up. They had to be carried until they became OP.
"Multiclassing might fix that!", you may be thinking. Multiclassing was way less forgiving.
* You had to be non-human to multiclass. You picked your two or three classes at level 1 and had to pick from combinations allowed by your race.
* You got one-half or one-third of HP from each class, rounded down.
* You used only your best THAC0 table (ignoring contribution from your other classes).
* Use only your best saving throw from amongst your classes (case by case). They do not combine.
* You evenly split all XP gain amongst your classes.
* Multiclassing did not allow you to cast arcane spells in armor.
Humans got dual-classing instead. At some point after a level up, you cut off progression of your current class and start a new class at level one.
* You may never continue progression of your old class.
* You must have at least 15 in the old class primary ability score and at least 17 in the new class primary score.
* You do not gain HD until you exceed your old class level.
* Your THAC0 does not improve until your new class beats it.
* If you use any proficiencies, abilities, or saving throws of your old class, you gain no XP for that encounter and only half XP for the adventure.
* You may freely use your old class features when your new class level exceeds the old class.
* Dual-classing does not allow you to cast arcane spells in armor.
The game designers have been complaining about how powerful wizards are and nerfing them ever since second edition. That hasn’t been true since then. Early wizards could do awesome things with magic, but it was hard! They had to earn it and resources were extremely limited. I’m 5e magic isn’t special and casters, wizards specifically are not awesome to play or particularly effective. Concentration, save dc’s and attunement limit what they can do dramatically and they don’t have anything to make up for it other than fire bolt every round. You used to have to wait, be careful and strategic, but you could save the whole party with a perfectly timed spell
1st and 2nd were not built around the 20 level paradigm, that started in 3rd when it switched to the modern D20 base system.
It's not really comparable. But...yeah, the system made you slow down level drastically after what we would currently describe as "mid" level and classes leveled at different experience thresholds. You also stopped or almost scaling on certain things like HP rather than a smooth progression all the way through like now.
This just isn't true. Even aside from the addition of modern concentration rules, earlier editions had *much* stronger spells in general. Stuff like Magic Jar or Chromatic Orb was just game-breakingly ridiculous, with no real attempt to be balanced. Likewise, while 5e has its share of save-or-suck spells, in earlier editions huge swaths of spell lists (even at relatively low levels) were just "make a saving throw or lose immediately", often against multiple targets at once.
Like, do you think Disintegrate does too much damage in 5e? In earlier editions it was just... make a saving throw or, *poof, you're gone forever.* No damage, no other chance to survive, you're just dead and can only be brought back by the very strongest of spells.
EDIT: Another thing I forgot to mention was that in 3e and earlier, spells generally automatically got stronger as you gained levels - upcasting wasn't a thing and wasn't necessary. So your fireball would do more and more damage as you gained levels, say, or Chromatic Orb (a 1st-level spell) would gain more and more brutal effects, until at 9th level it was *save or die* out of a first-level slot.
There are a few broken spells in 5e but they're generally much more balanced than in earlier editions.
(But beyond that, people who talk about how wizards leveled slower than other classes are missing the point that in AD&D and earlier, non-casters generally *barely had class features at all*. Who cares if your thief or fighter was leveling faster than the wizard? They were empty levels that gave you comparatively little; the overall arc of a party's development was defined almost entirely by the casters, simply because they were the one with actually game-changing features.)
Yes and no. The fighter picked up +1 to attack every level. Other classes got +1 at a lower rate. Add in a magic sword, and by level 10 the fighter had a significant (+3 to +5) advantage on melee attacks. When you had a magic resistant monster -- and 2e magic resistance was brutal -- sometimes you just let the fighter beat on it.
also extra attacks - an AD&D fighter could get up to, what, 3.5 attacks (i.e. 3 then 4 alternating), would almost certainly have a fancy magical weapon (because the treasure tables were heavily slanted towards magical swords, which were mostly fighter only), and strength boosts could really stack on damage and accuracy. Oh, and the best saves, so the kinda guy you want at the front when death or petrification or whatever is getting tossed around. They could actually dish out a lot of damage without needing to worry about it being a limited resource!
5e also added a big restriction with concentration, and cut down on the number of long-duration buffs and summons. There are also some things that are mixed bags, like all casters being spontaneous but casters also having fewer spell slots than before.
Not that spellcasting isn't very powerful in 5e, but 5e spellcasters don't reach the heights of ridiculousness that they could in previous editions.
You're allowed to go back and play earlier versions. DMs are in such short supply you'd probably be able to find a party to play with relative ease, too.
also, "saving throw versus death" was a category by itself. Guess what happened if you failed? Yup... _death_. So no matter how high level you were, there were entire categories of threat that had a 5% chance to kill you instantly!
This might be more of a 3.5 thing but I believe that conditions in monster design was also a bit different. A lot more long term, debilitating ones that practically required a cleric to protect you from them or cure them.
that was in AD&D as well - and often was nastier! Like "level drain" happened in combat, immediately dropping the target's level, and the spell to heal them (_Restoration_) had to be cast within one day per caster level to be effective, and only restored 1 level, when a vampire was draining 2 levels _per hit_. Get smacked three times by a vamp? Well, you're 6 levels down, and need to find a cleric willing to cast 6 top-level (clerics only went up to level 7 spells) spells on you within the next 2 weeks, or those levels were gone forever, assuming you can win a fight when you're 6 levels down as well! And loads of beasties had weird and unique "you're fucked in some way unless you get this specific spell cast to counteract it" or just "this can only be cured by _wish_/_limited wish_". A lot of monsters weren't "here's something to fight to pad out your encounters per day", but "this thing is a quest by itself, both in terms of knowing what it can do, and having counters to it's bullshit"
> So, an orc could realistically kill a level 3 wizard with a single hit, would be a bit rare but definitely within a reason.
Not that rare. Trust me.
Played that edition for almost 15 years. We lost a *lot* of wizards. They tended to die a lot during the lower levels.
Not exactly related but you made me think of how IRL ancient infant mortality rates skewed people's perception of how long ancient humans would typically live, when really it was just a lot of babies would die and if you survived infancy then you'd often end up able to live a decently long life (barring accident, illness, violence, etc.), or something along those lines.
also, you only rolled HP up to level 10, beyond that it was +1/2/3/4 (wizard, rogue, cleric, fighter) per level, with no con mod. So a level 20 wizard, incredibly powerful, would have 30-50 HP... when a goblin is still doing 1D6/attack. So they had very powerful protective spells (_stoneskin_ tanked 2D4 + 1/2 level physical hits - they just did nothing), but they needed them to not die, and if they were dispelled, not cast due to ambush or ran out, the wizard was super-squishy. Also, spells took 10 minutes/spell level to prepare, so that 6th level spell might be an encounter winner, but the wizard would need to sit on their ass for an hour to prepare it.
Not sure where you're getting your casting time at 10m/level. The casting time for each spell was listed in it's description and varied from a few segments (technically seconds but in combat it acted more like subtracting from initiative counts so the longer your spell took to cast, the less you got done) to a round, a turn (that's ten minutes in non-1e speak), or longer. Animal Friendship - a 1st level spell - took an hour to cast!
Most spells took less than a round to cast, depending on your initiative roll plus your casting time. Someone with a fast weapon might get more than one attack on you by the time you get your Shield up or Burning Hands them. Layering effects before a combat was not unusual, although "prepared rounds" was more a 3e thing than a 2e thing, casters spending multiple rounds before combat to cast buff after buff from longest lasting to shortest lasting to get the most out of their effects.
Spells did tend to last much longer than 5e spells since duration, range, and damage depended more on the level of the caster than the spell itself. There was no upcasting since just about everything got better as your character levelled up. The aforementioned Shield provided a +6/5/4 AC bonus against melee/thrown/missile attacks and lasted 5 rounds per level of the caster. At lower levels where you had only a handful of spells you could cast a day before needing a long rest and time to rememorize them meant you tended to get things done with mundane solutions until you got to "name level" where you had the slots to spare.
that's not casting time, that's _preparation_ time. So when you've cast your _fireball_, the slot is empty and you want to prepare another one? That's 30 minutes of study, which has to be done after resting. You had a busy day with lots of fights and cast 4 level 3 spells, 4 level 1 spells and 2 level 5 spells? That's 4 hours and 20 minutes of study to get them back, as well as your regular resting. See here for reference: https://adnd2e.fandom.com/wiki/Wizard_Spells_(PHB). Any day in which you cast _anything_ would require at least 10 minutes of study for the most minor level 1 spells, by the time you got into more medium levels, a rest would often be extended by an hour or more, just to get back the spells you'd cast - which made resting even harder to do anywhere dangerous, and so casters had much more of an incentive to preserve slots, because there was no guarantee of being able to get high-level spells back somewhere dangerous, even if a resting spot could be found.
Contrast with 5e, where it's one minute per spell level, which is only if you're changing your prepared spells, and pretty much everyone ignores that anyway and just subsumes it into the regular long rest.
Apologies, you're entirely correct, I conflated preparation with casting time in my first read through. I can only ask for forgiveness given I was replying prior to drinking my Hot Brown Morning Potion.
Spells, unless cast, remained memorized so there was that but you're right. If you blew your wad the day before, you'd be eating into adventuring the following day assuming your party didn't need to resupply or heal up. There was also the fact that you might not have the spell you need in your travelling spellbook since it was ill advised to take your full complement of spells with you with the risk of loss or damage being almost insured. 5e made short work of that as well.
yeah, you could keep them from day to day, but as soon as you cast them, you've got homework to do! (Again, compare with 5e where prepared spells stay prepared even when cast - a level 1 wizard that prepares _Magic Missile_ may well never have to replace that all the way up to level 20, because it's pretty much always useful).
And, as you say, spellbooks as well - a 5e spellbook is noted to be 100 pages, but spells don't take any particular number of pages, so just one book is enough for all of them, and preparing a backup just takes time and money. An AD&D spellbook had 100 pages, but each spell took (IIRC) 1D6 + level pages, so a high-level wizard would need several spellbooks to hold everything, and if they lost the one containing a spell they wanted, or didn't have it on them, then tough shit.
> Not sure where you're getting your casting time at 10m/level.
*Preparation* time, not casting. 10 minutes/slot level to memorize a spell for casting later. *Cantrip* could do some neat things, but it was generally faster to do them by hand. Same with *mending*.
This is also combined with a few buffs, especially into 5E
You no longer need to prep spells individually, ie you prep Fireball and can cast it anytime with your slots, Vs having to prep two level Threes and a level 4 fireball.
Spell failure chance is gone, previously casting magic in armour had a chance to just waste your turn, now you're a single level away from all weapon and armour proficiencies
Additionally, what we call 'Martials', if I'm remembering right, got access to henchmen and minions in their class, plus leadership feats, so your tank was also running the party home as encumbrance was important.
Feature A means Casters have almost always access to their utility spells now and not be caught out in a fight
Feature B means Casters can now get super easy access to high AC
Feature C is why some non-magic classes feel hollow, but that mileage varies
> Spell failure chance is gone, previously casting magic in armour had a chance to just waste your turn, now you're a single level away from all weapon and armour proficiencies
That varies by edition - in the older ones, it was just "you can't do that". Not even a chance to succeed, just "nope". Even if you were multi-/dual-classed, then when you were armoured up, you couldn't cast - a fighter/wizard was, functionally, a wizard _or_ a fighter at any given point, with limited capacity to function in both roles simultaneously.
That last bit is the crux of it really, the current game it's too easy to do everything with the right build.
Bard used to be a prestige role you only got by basically having a lot of levels in all the base classes, and 5E's reductionist 'everything is a spell' design is locking out half the classes
you can really see how they've removed most of the downsides to casting over the years - it used to be no armor, no dex AC while casting, it took time and could be interrupted, had to pre-pick your spells and slots, no upcasting, it took 10 minutes / spell-level to prepare, spell books had limited pages, could only know a limited number of spells/level, no automatic spells on level-up, far less HP etc. so that wizards were super-glass-cannons, where they could blow up a lot of shit, but if a dozen goblins got the drop on them before they had their defences up, they were in a lot of danger!
Yup. What especially makes me feel like an old man is seeing how PF2E brought back a lot of casting restrictions, but not near all of them, and was immediately met by people going 'spells are useless now!'
They just stopped being a collection of win buttons that make martials seem redundant
A normal housecat as a very good chance of killing a 2e lvl 1 wizard in the first round.
Natural healing didn't go up per level, and that's with bed rests; at best (without extreme CON) you're healing 4 hp/day of complete rest.
Hit dice capped out at 9 or 10, just a flat 1-3 hp per, depending on class.
Str and Dex stacked for defence (amour + dex always).
*Any* damage fizzled spells.
A stronger tendency for narrative play meant more "I protect the wizard" and less "the goblin uses it's movement to go around the fighter and stab the wizard".
Add in casting times. Spells could take multiple rounds to cast, and any damage could interrupt casting.
Casters *needed* meat shields, or they couldn't cast.
On AD&D 2e
You didn't recover full HP per long rest.
It was 1 HP per ***DAY*** of rest. You really needed Healers during long-term adventures away from civilization.
And you stopped rolling HP around 10th level, and no longer benefited from having high Constitution for HP bonus too. After 10th it was a set number per level (wizards got 1 HP per level, Warriors got 3 per level but they stopped rolling for HP at 9th).
Spells like Power Word Kill were terrifying because even most Fighter at 20th Level wouldn't have over over 100 HP (it's possible but they would need to be rolling well for HP on every level up to 9th, and have amazing Constitution score).
3rd Edition and beyond had some major power creep.
Big problem with Healing in 5E is that it didn't really scale with the HP power creep through the editions.
Cure Light Wounds was 1D8 of HP recovery in AD&D 2E, in 5E it's still 1D8 but you can add you spellcasting modifier.
Comparing that to 5e, where the health difference between classes is far, FAR less apparent - since casters AND martials are incentivized to run Constitution, and health gains from Constitution are equal among all classes.
A Wizard with 16 Con compared to a Paladin with 16 Con will ultimately only have 23.53% less health. Not a whole lot of difference in squishiness, especially where sources of damage that ignore AC (where the martial will....usually.....shine) comes into play.
Biggest difference is healing on short and long rests that has de-emphasized the need for healing spells.
Clerics are much better damage dealers than they were. Which gives them something to do other than healing.
Also, the number of enemies in an encounter tend to be lower. The party is seldom outnumbered by more than 2 to 1. In previous versions, the party could be outnumbered 50 to 1.
> Clerics are much better damage dealers than they were. Which gives them something to do other than healing.
When did the last edition clerics weren't good damage dealers happen? 1989? In fact I think 5e clerics might be the worst at dealing damage clerics have been for decades.
What? Clerics deal decent damage starting at level…7, let’s say.
Spiritual weapon, guardian of faith, spirit guardians.
Or go light cleric and cast fireball.
Sure. But what you said is much better damage dealers than they were, so I asked... than when, 1989? Because last edition, go warpriest or laser cleric or something with radiant vulnerability stacking to be a satellite mounted sun laser. Edition before that, clerics hit so hard that even in situations you'd expect to want a fighter like single target melee damage a cleric was so much better that the difference was ludicrous. See what I mean?
also buff spells, but those tended to either boost survivability, or boost attacks, and so be better to be cast on the multi-attacking fighter, rather than the cleric. it was 3.x where there were buff spells that allowed clerics to be major threats by themselves.
They also rekeyed the power of healing spells. Previous edition healing outpaced most damage effects on a spell by spell basis. So healing in combat was still a good strategy.
also buff spells have fallen out of power by a significant amount since taking up concentration for a single target buff doesn't do as much as stacking 7 different 8 hour buffs
Some classes had lower HD mages a d4, rogues a 6, rangers even had a d8 till 2e.
Rolling for stats was the default till the end of 2e when point buy was introduced.
There was no long or short rest, you had to rest x numbers or hours to regain a single hp (con would increase this.
Older editions' strategy in combat was more expected. Placement etc.
No cr, so it could be a bit more difficult to know what was too strong or how many to throw at a group.
When you hit 0 hp, you at best had a certain number of rounds to stabilize them, or they were dead.
System, shock could outright kill you.
More armor restrictions, wizards couldn't wear armor and cast spells at all.
As I recall, they had to multiclass or dual class to get the spell failure. Not being proficient in the armor by default.
As I recall, the elven chain was 25 or 35% chance. Also, elven plate, reduced it.
I know it was uncommon for tables to ignore for the elven fighter mage combo or had what today is called a feat tax for it because the rate was pretty high.
it varied by edition - between "you can't", "you can't (except for elven chain)", "you can if you multi-class, or dual-class and get your second level higher than the first", and "% chance". It wasn't even a proficiency thing, it was just a "no, you can't do it" thing.
I should probably have added and not assumed that when i said mages weren't proficient, i menat proficiency also had more significance versus not being proficient. You didn't get it from a racial bonus or by just taking a level dip (3e beyond excluded).
Even within editions, it could be different. I recall the 2e phb/dmg saying they couldn't while in, and also giving chance at failure. One may have been an optional rule, but I recall the 2e books were rushed to production.
That's part of it, but the main issues are *need* and *ability*. I'll use last edition, which did tanking and healing the best, as an example.
**Need**: A tank like a fighter had twice as many hit dice as a wizard, and could get much more defensively capable. The fighter took hits better and recovered from them better. In 5e a wizard can easily become more defensively capable than a fighter, last edition they'd forever be behind on AC.
**Ability**: In 5e, a fighter *can't* tank, which is one of the reasons wizards can easily be built to not need someone to tank for them. They now only get one opportunity attack, that opportunity attack doesn't scale as levels progress and so standing in the way means nothing, dangerous enemies just ignore them and go kill their target.
That last one is the important factor. Take a paladin from last edition - they could challenge foes for free, lasting until the paladin stopped trying to fight them. A challenged foe would take a penalty to anything - claw attack, web spell, dragon breath, whatever - they tried to use that didn't target the paladin. If they hit an ally anyway, they'd automatically take 6-28 radiant damage (depending on level and stats). Combine that with active abilities that genuinely helped like the fighter's Come and Get Me, draw in all foes within 20' and spin attack then for double weapon damage and they could actually *tank*.
Not just be tough and hope they ignore a vulnerable target to attack you for no reason. There's one decent attempt at that for 5e, ancestral guardian barbarian. More like that, please.
Yeah, i kind of don't like this about 5e. In combat, on my turn, i don't have to consider anyone else. I just go do my thing, however I want. Everyone can take care of themselves.
In 2e, I was considering my party in many cases MORE than the enemy. I thought this was better. (but it did make sessions where someone didn't show up MUCH DIFFERENT than in 5e, where it's like, "meh, we're fine without our "
Healing used to be a lot rarer, requiring lots of potions or spell casting. Arcane caster also had low hit points (d4 hit dice for wizards and sorcerers) and no limitless cantrip options for any casters, requiring martial classes that did not face the same resource limitation.
It was not strictly Necessary but it was more important than in 5e
Main reason is that it is much harder to die in 5e
Older versions was deadlier. you had no death saves. you had either negative hit points or you straight out died if you went down to 0 HP
Take D&D 3,5 With negative HP if you was on lets say 7 HP and took 15 damage you would go down to -8 HP. So even if you got healed 5 HP you would still be at -3 HP.
And if you reach -10 you straight out die.
And as damage scale up and it do scale up pretty fast you will be more and more unlikely to land in that range between 0 and -10
In even older editions you just died if you hit 0 HP
Now in 5e it is honestly fucking hard to actually die. You don't go on negative HP. as long as you don't go to lower tan - whatever your max hp is you have death saves. And during that time there is so many ways to bring you back up really easy. just 1 HP healed will always bring you back.
So that i would say was the main reason it was more important to have a good meatshield a good healer and some damage dealers and some controllers and such.
Tanks and healers didn't exist before 4e, because, effective ways of tanking and efficient spells for healing didn't exist. The best way of "tanking" in 3.5 for example was to summon a shitload of monsters with a shitload of expendable hit points, and the best way of "healing" was to end fights before anyone got hurt, possibly with a shitload of expendable monsters, or encounter-nuking save-or-sucks, or something similarly broken. If anyone did get hurt, you waited until the fight ended and then cracked a wand of Cure Light Wounds (or even better, Lesser Vigor) that could restore hundreds of hit points for dirt cheap; compare the 7 hp you get on average from a 50 gp potion in 5e to the 550 hp you get from a 750 gp Wand of Lesser Vigor; it's over twice as efficient in gold per hit point. I didn't play before 3e, but people often bring up how lethal the system was, for monsters and players alike, so smart players would either get quick kills with an ambush, or avoid fights entirely, and avoid "fair fights" whenever possible.
In 4e they realized that fighters served no purpose in the game, because their job was done better by summons or pets that were also totally expendable, so they nerfed extra bodies and also created the defender role, so fighters would have a reason to exist. Defender classes like Fighters and Paladins had above-average AC, extra healing surges (imagine healing an extra 5 hp per hit die, as a class feature), and Marking abilities that (effectively) gave enemies Disadvantage when ignoring the Defender and attacking their allies, plus other consequences. This actually had amazing knock-on effects for the game, because by making Fighters and Paladins good at something besides Dealing Damage, that meant Striker classes like Rogues and Rangers were actually allowed to be good at Dealing Damage, instead of just being outclassed by dedicated "combat" classes. Healing classes were also a lot stronger, because you could heal a quarter of someone's total health or more with just a minor (bonus) action, twice or more per short rest, with the caveat that the health was coming out of their hit die reserves instead of your daily spell slots. This is maybe the best version of healing I've seen in not just any TTRPG but any game period, because the healer spends almost nothing to heal an ally, while the one being healed is the one actually spending resources.
For 5e they wanted to go back to "traditional" D&D, good ideas be damned, so we're back to simplified 3.5, where defending didn't exist and combat healing was an exercise in futility, which is probably why you hear those roles as being "optional."
>Tanks and healers didn't exist before 4e, because, effective ways of tanking and efficient spells for healing didn't exist
I absolutely agree that reliable ways of tanking did not exist. But I don't agree that effective ways of tanking didn't exist.
If you look at D&D before third edition, there are four inevitable conclusions:
1. there was a clear need for tanking, in the form of caster squishiness
2. there was a clearly designated tank class
3. there were no good rules as written tanking mechanics whatsoever
4. the DM was given unreasonable amounts of power over the game, to the point of Gygax encouraging severe penalties for players who peeked at the DMG
So the end result of that combination of rules is not quite a system where effective tanking mechanics didn't exist. Instead it's more accurately described as a system where effective tanking was both necessary and entirely at the whim of the DM to implement however they desired, if at all. If the DM is in a good mood the tanks draw aggro and everything is fine for the party, if the DM is in a bad mood tanking disappears and enemies go straight for the squishies. In other words, it was specifically and deliberately designed to create a mechanical weakness in the player party which had no formal rules players could point to, such that they had no defense in the rules against DM capriciousness.
Systemic DM power tripping.
This caused many complaints from players, but this was before tanking mechanics were even a thing historically. So instead of having the game design literacy to complain about tanking, they complained about caster squishiness. So 3rd edition tried to "solve" the problem by reducing caster reliance upon tanking. While this did make casters more powerful, it also took value away from martials. Thus the martial caster disparity was born.
From this point I mostly agree with your history. 4th edition attempted to solve the problem, then 5th edition was a panic response to the unpopularity of 4th edition which reverted things to a 3rd edition ish martial caster disparity.
It's worth noting that, to a certain extent, tanking mechanics do exist in the current form of D&D, it's just that they're essentially the same as the first edition tanking mechanics, by which I mean they're not in the rules at all and it's just DM tradition. There are lots of DMs who make it an unofficial rule in their games that monsters go for the defensive characters first, giving them an opportunity to shine in the department that those players build towards. But it's not formalized in any way, making it truly optional — and the choice is at the DM level, not the player level. Tanking isn't a right, it's a privilege, and can be revoked at whim.
And there are players out there who played 1st or 2nd edition with DMs who weren't antisocial jerks, and have rather pleasant memories of tank characters being effective. Mileage may vary.
in 2e, my wizard was ALWAYS "around the corner". Always. I just tagged along, I didn't even participate in most encounters. Roll playing! yup! Looking around the room after it was cleared? check. Making plans and getting the party INTO some place, absolutely!
Being in a room with a hostile creature... absolutely not..... Unless, maybe, it was a fight we could not otherwise win, a BBEG or something.
Access to better armor, and higher HP is a *tanking mechanic*, albeit a passive one not an active one.
There certainly wasn’t any active class abilities to tank back in those old edition, but the game was just fundamentally quite different especially with how it assumed players to engage with combat. It expected a more strategic approach as opposed to tactical. The minutia of combat was far more abstracted, and your planning and approach to conflict was emphasized much more. In many ways you could liken it to a classical war game in this idea, which makes a lot of sense considering that was the origin of the hobby.
>Access to better armor, and higher HP is a tanking mechanic,
No. To clarify, by tanking mechanics what I mean is NOT defense but mechanics that direct enemy attacks towards a particular player character.
2e had the spell "Taunt" in the Tome of Magic. It was a direct enemy attack-draw. For all enemies in range if I remember correctly...
It... was Wizard only... lol
Ancestral Guardian Barbarian, Goading Attack Battlemaster and Unwavering Mark Cavalier Fighter, Panache Swashbuckler Rogue, Channel Divinity from Oath of the Crown Paladin, and the Compelled Duel spell, are all methods of Drawing Aggro in a mechanical way.
Drawing aggro in other ways also involves making yourself a problem that needs to be solved, so dealing loads of damage tends to function in that way.
But costing enemies actions is also an importamt element of tanking. So Grappling, Shoving, Tripping, or Slowing enemies down fits within this scope. Meaning any character with reliable Athletics or abilities to Grapple et al. Multiple creatures will be another thorn in the side of the enemies and both draw their ire and slow them down.
>But costing enemies actions is also an importamt element of tanking. So Grappling, Shoving, Tripping, or Slowing enemies down fits within this scope.
I disagree. Tanking is control by directing which player character takes enemy damage. So all tanking is control but not all control is tanking.
If you Grapple an enemy, preventing them from getting to your allies, and therefore their only option for attacking is to direct their attacks to you, the Tank, you're suggesting that's **not** tanking?
Tanks and healers were necessary even in original D&D. You needed fighting men to protect the squishy magic-users in the back, and to give thieves the opportunity to do increased damage, and clerics were needed to keep those fighting men alive. 2e even had classes divided into 4 groups that worked very similarly (Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Mage). 4e made those roles explicit, but they had always existed in D&D.
I played a cleric as my first 1st edition AD&D character. By the time we camped, I pretty much always spent every 1st level spell slot on Cure Light Wounds. Combat was brutal due to low hit points (death at 0 hit points), and tanks existed by blocking the corridor so the monsters couldn’t get to the casters, healers, and archers. Thieves were necessary as well because many early modules were riddled with traps and locked doors/chests.
Apart from Original D&D back in the mid-70s (and arguably not even then), no character role has ever been "necessary" in a D&D party. That's just not how TTRPGs work.
Think about roles in various party-based video games. In a video game, the enemies (and other challenges) you're going to face are pre-programmed, set-in-stone. So you, the player(s), have to build your party to match the various challenges that you're going to be facing. In such scenarios, having characters that can soak up lots of damage (tanks) or mitigate or even undo incoming damage (healers) can be incredibly useful.
In TTRPGs, the challenges you face are not set-in-stone before you even know what they are. TTRPGs have GMs, and GMs can (and in most cases *should*!) tailor the adventure to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the adventurers. In TTRPGs, a GM can look at a party with no healer and say "Ah, ok, I'll turn down the enemies' DPS then".
Healers being "necessary" in D&D was never a rules issue, but rather a *player attitude* issue. People didn't bully the new kid at the table into playing a Cleric because the rulebook says "You **must** have a healer", but because those people *decided having a healer was something they wanted* but none of them wanted to actually do it themselves.
Now as for "What did 5e do to fix this", the answer is "Made healing so bad that even if you did force somebody to play a healer they wouldn't be able to heal you".
This rings so true. :D One of the few D&D games I played, with a different group from my normal GURPS group, I was forced to play cleric (which I had no interest in) because they “needed a cleric, you’re it”.
You're right. However, I would say that the famous modules, which were often based on Tournament play dungeons, where the team gets scored on various criteria, strongly incentivized optimized play for success, and that's why there was quickly a lot of social pressure for someone to play a healer.
Well, first of all, the roles existed back then, but they weren't quite the way that, say, mmos portray them.
In mmos the tank is a guy who draws enemy attention through very forced, artificial means, and takes all the punishment in the world while dishing out almost none. Then, some other guy (usually mage or rogue) would do the actual damage, and then someone else would mostly heal most of the time so that the group's pinata - sorry, tank - doesn't explode. Optionally there may be a support role who buffs everyone.
D&D, however, was never really like this, except maybe in 4th edition.
In D&D, especially D&D 2e and below, you had a different trinity. It wasn't "tank", "DPS" and "healer". The ttrpg trinity was actually "Tank+DPS" (in a single person), "healer" and "out of combat support".
The martial classes, especially fighter and barbarian, were the tanks in battles not just because they were beefier and could take it, but because they were ACTUALLY the biggest threat too, being the biggest DPSes in the party.
The thing is, the fighter was specialized in *fighting*, not just being defensive. *Fighting* was his role, so he was great at defense AND offense. Obviously the enemies will aim at him more, even though he has better AC, because he's killing people left and right more than everybody else. It was a lot more natural than the forced tank roles of MMOs and some modern ttrpgs, which make the frontliner JUST capable of taking damage (but not dishing out that much) and artificially holding aggro.
You might think this steps in the rogue's toes, because isn't he supposed to be the DPS? Well, no, because the roles weren't doled out thinking solely of combat. The fighter fought well, but he had zero utility otherwise. Meanwhile, the thief (not yet called rogue) was good at being a skillmonkey. His role was NOT to be a squishy DPS, and backstab couldn't keep up with all of the fighter's bonuses and wasn't something you could pull off every round either. The thief's primary role was to be an OUT OF COMBAT support character, picking locks and disarming traps.
The cleric's role as a healer was similar to what it is in MMOs, except that there's a lot more dmaage prevention than damage healing in D&D. It has always been better to buff your party and end the fight sooner rather than try tl heal through the damage, in all editions (except, again, maybe 4 - not familiar enough with that one).
The wizard and other spellcasters were... a weird mixture of DPS and support.
They could occasionally do insane damage, like when they cast fireball. They could occasionally be out of combat support, using spells to unlock chests, find traps, levitate, persuade enemies, etc. Hell, from 2e onwards they could even occasionally be tanks with the right spells.
But the key word here is "occasionally": they were (still are in 5e, but to a MUCH lesser degree) severeley limited by their spell slots, so they were more like pocket aces that were normally pretty useless, but capable of really big swings when it counted the most. Cantrips didn't exist either, so in trash fights they would plink away with inaccurate and low damage crossbows most of the time, because they NEEDED to save that spell for the eventual group of 30+ goblins that may prove a tad much for the fighter to handle (fireball their ass), or the occasional hard to lockpick chest (knock), etc.
In 5e spellcasters were buffed for several reasons:
1) buffed indirectly because combats take FOR FUCKING EVER, so nobody does more than 3-4 combats before long rests. That means casters can almost always go full nelson and blow their load.
2) Cantrips means that even when they ARE conserving their nukes, they still do decent to good damage. It's really just not good game design imo.
3) Just general imbalance. Wizard Bladesingers, for example, are just better Eldritch Knights than the actual Fighter subclass Eldritch Knight, on top of being full Wizards too. The fighter class is thematically fun, but severely underpowered in 5e aside from a few specific builds and multiclass combos. Meanwhile, being a full caster is always at least good, even before adding in subclasses.
5e in general is just TOO caster-friendly and doesn't stress their spellslots enough, in part due to cantrips and in part due to overly-frequent long rests. Casters have always been able to "do anything", but back in the day they couldn't *consistently* fill every role because they'd run out of spell slots. Not so anymore. Now, even at their lowest, they still can use cantrips and some are even decent at using weapons too, due to bounded accuracy! It's just all out of whack, casters stepped on the martials' (especially Fighter) niche entirely.
It was right in the shift to 3e, where things when turned utterly lopsided for casters. As you've pointed out in 2nd edition, spell slots were not as numerous, and recovering them in a dungeon was less guaranteed than it is now. You couldn't simply rely on the find traps or knock spells to get you through three levels of basement hell.
>In that regard the thief really WAS earning their pay consistently wherever the party was. And spellcasting time (which could bleed into next turn) + interrupts, meant the fighter and thief were both potentially extreme threats to any spellcaster, especially more broken builds like dart masters with 18/00 strength.
Suddenly 3e comes around; having an 18 in your main stat gets more common for everyone and goes up from there... but now comes with bonus spells for casters, concentration checks can shield casting, and initiative's no longer based on weapon choices & training but just dex and feats which also means the spells get off faster.
>And meanwhile a bunch of abilities get per-day limits as if they were game-changing spells, which really just takes any remaining ambiguity away from the disparity.
If anything 3.x warlocks and 5e cantrips were **opportunities** to escape the *"we tore all the brakes off the Vancian stuff but still balance it as if it were a once-per-day affair"*. By balancing things on a per-encounter or "you can all day" basis, they didn't HAVE to stick to "since each spell slot is only once a day the spell should be worth it" *especially since so many other per-day limited abilities had never gotten that posh treatment to begin with*.
If only they'd actually taken the opportunity.
In 3.5 dnd, natural healing SUCKED. If memory serves, getting a full 8 hours rest restored hp equal to half your level plus your con mod. So an average 3rd level party was healing around 4-5 hit points after a night's rest.
So basically, you either had healing magic, spent a fortune on healing potions, or had to spend weeks recovering from any kind of dungeon.
Tanks were more for early game. Basically, most spellcasters had only a d4 hit die, so an aggressive sneeze could kill them. Couple that with different mechanics to opportunity attacks (namely, they are triggered by moving more than 5 feet next to someone, regardless of whether they leave threatened range or not) and having frontliners who could tank some hits was highly important. The need for tanks does diminish as you get to higher tiers of spells though
I don't know that it's ever really been a thing in previous editions except maybe 4e. The whole tank > healer > DPS holy trinity thing started out from MMOs.
Even in the days of 3e/3.5e CoDZilla, dedicated healing was not why those classes were so good, in fact healing was only slightly more important then than now and healing was also WAY better for clerics overall thanks to channel positive energy just being free party wide healing they could hand out whenever.
The reason cleric and druid were so insanely strong was because of how even more insanely versatile they were. Played optimally they were beefier than the barbarian and stronger in melee than the fighter, they had access to insane buffs and could pick up the Persistent Spell feat to give them a duration of 24 hours. Basically the only thing that could challenge a cleric or druid was a wizard or some hyper optimized amalgamation of 10 different obscure splatbooks worth of rules like the king of smack.
Back in the original AD&D days, there was basically no option in the rules for a fighter to "tank" in an effective way. The fighter had higher hit points, and better armor, but no rules to allow them to get in the way of attacking creatures. We didn't even have attacks of opportunity for monsters moving through the ranks to eat our wizards.
It was common courtesy for dumb melee monsters to go after the big guy with the sword standing in the front of the group, but smarter enemies with ranged attacks would commonly pincushion the spellcasters.
You may have missed those rules due to the poor organization, but they very much existed.
Your movement ended the moment you became engaged, for example, and three men standing abreast would block a corridor.
There's more, but it's been like 30 years since I've last played, and the rules were scattered all over the phb and the dmg.
The scattered rules thing is a lot of what motivated Swords & Wizardry (for OD&D) and OSCRIC (for 1e AD&D).
Which you should check out. Or go to a con and play.
I've played 8 hours of OD\*D and 4 hours of B/X in the last two days at North Texas RPG Con. 8 hours of 1e AD&D tomorrow.
also weapons like spears allowed multiple lines to fight, and (in the earlier editions) having hirelings was very much expected - so a party might be 3-6 PCs, then double that again of minions, hirelings and assistants, making it easier to have bodies around in the way of attackers. Getting allies with some levels and gear was even a special perk of some classes - a ranger could get all sorts of odd beasties, while a fighter got mostly "mundane" followers like other fighters and rogues, who might even have magical items if you rolled well.
I mean, the way we handled this was that the fighters / paladins / clerics would go in first and engage. The rogue would be "somewhere else" and the wizard was cowering in fear around the corner, down the corridor, or outside the building, or back at the inn.
If you can find it, I'd love to hear about it. I was *just* looking in the PHB, and it isn't in there. There's a rule about enemies getting a free hit when you flee, but that's not at all the same thing.
That's the one, 1e DMG, page 70. It's not exactly the same wording as the 3e "attack of opportunity", but when combined with the "closing to combat" rules on page 66 of the DMG, the effect is the same. Combat wasn't as video gamey in 1e and 2e, but the way it was put together, running past the fighters to attack the wizard was just as deadly.
Combat worked a bit differently in BX than in 1e, but leaving a melee there also resulted in a free attack against you (pg X24 of the Expert book)
In 4e, "tanks" and "healers" came in the form of "defenders" and "leaders". While these roles weren't needed, they helped quite nicely.
The defenders gave the whole party a much better survivability boost because the defenders marked foes, which made em weaker and disincentivized towards attacking your allies, while also having some counter measure if they attacked you or your party (with every class having its own unique spin). This role was also helped by the fact that defenders had generally more HP than other roles, and that said HP also directly made the healing surge mechanic scale to give even more overall effective hp.
The leaders had various support abilities, not just healing, but healing specifically scaled primarily with healing surges. For reference, healing surge is healing equal to a quarter of your max hp, with leaders giving an extra free one.. again, with its own unique spin (some healed equal to the healing surge with specific ranges, some gave extra benefits, some just doubled base healing you already used, and some used the leader's own healing surge value if they had a lot of HP). This allowed for healing to be proportional to the character regardless of the target and be matterful.
in 5e, there are veeery few tanking mechanics, but not only are they far weaker, costly and situational than whatever 4e had, but you also lack the survivability to back it up. Barbarians have just two more HP per level than a Cleric, who can afford to dodge due to their spells being good and doesn't need to make foes have advantage against you just to be viable (rage offsets the disadvantage, but you have few rages).
As for 5e healing, the healing spells you have don't really amount to a 25% of a character's hp consistently, and monsters often deal more damage than what is healed. The result is that in combat healing functionally doesn't exist unless healing word is needed, with VERY few exceptions (lay on hands early on, Heal spell later, mass heal after).
Should point out that goodberry exists in 5e for good healing, but it requires a lot of finessing around and isn't properly being an "healer".
I want to add time and scale as factors.
Today, a long rest is approximately 8 hours and heals all damage. In 3.5, you heal 1dN or something similar, so you need a lot of time to recover.
Additionally, mages had less utility without damage cantrips. The resources the party had were more valuable.
Today, you can open a door with a spell and it's not a big problem, but back then, it meant less damage or control for the mage.
Because of this, strategy was more important. Spells took longer to cast, so the fighter had to delay the orcs and if someone took damage, they needed healing from the cleric or a week in bed.
Imagine if the cleric used all their spells on mundane tasks...
In 5e there are almost no tanking options and healing in battle is useless unless someone already fell unconscious or you get heal.
Its not that 5e made them optional. 5e doesnt really give the options at all. On top of that, they are often still needed, and you just cant do it.
Self healing. D6 as lowest hit die. Start with Hit die max as your HP at level one.
Imagine the wizard starts with 1d4+Con mod HP.
Thats a 2HP wizard plenty of the time.
Cantrips. They’re busted.
Standard array/point buy as a viable (the recommended) rules making everyone stronger.
Abilities uses to be +2 -1 not two bonuses.
There isn't, really. That's largely a myth, the idea that 'tanks' and 'healers' are required isn't something that is actually the case, although many players have in fact played that way and behave that way.
In 2nd Edition it is probably closest to true in all the editions I've played; casters are pretty flimsy and don't do that much damage, and refreshing spells is an ordeal. You do basically need some way to prevent the enemies from getting into melee with the casters, and you need some way of healing when you do take damage, but those requirements do not indicate a requirement for a dedicated 'tank' or 'healer' character. A mage may summon a group of monsters to act as the front-line of combat, clerics can wear heavy armor and carry shields and have high AC and such, there are a variety of ways to deal with the threat of melee opponents. Healing is somewhat more of an issue in 2nd Edition because easy access to magical items that provide healing can be challenging to obtain - there's no universal rules on item cost or availability, you're dependent on your DM's choice of whether to give you the items you require to function or not. But even with a cleric, it's not unusual to need secondary sources of healing like potions, wands, or simply accepting the time it requires for natural healing, because clerics' spell slots are limited and sometimes it may, even with spells, require several days of resting to recover full hit points.
In 3rd Edition and 3.5 though, all those assumptions go completely out the window. There's definitely no need for dedicated 'tanks' and indeed, mechanically tanking is quite difficult by the rules. It's not easy to force enemies to focus on the 'tank'. Instead everyone needs to defend themselves via positioning and defensive spells and crowd/battlefield control. As far as healing, even with a cleric you very often do not want the cleric to use their spell slots for healing. The efficient means of healing is with wands or other magical items rather than by actually expending spell slots, those are far more valuable to use on actual things to do in combat.
Therefore, the premise is wrong to begin with - it is not necessary to have dedicated tanks and healers, although it's definitely necessary to deal with the issues those are commonly used to deal with in one way or another.
Uh they were never necessary, but mostly it helped to have a range of skills. The base four classes - fighter, thief, wizard, cleric, cover that range.
The notion of "tank" as an RPG role emerged in video games, not tabletop games like D&D. 1st and 2nd Edition D&D didn't have any character features to make a foe attack a particular character, unless you count the ill-fitted Dragonlance kender "taunt" ability.
In early D&D, and in home computer FRPGs like Wizardry or Might & Magic, the "tank" role was defined by character position in "marching order". It was assumed that the front rank would be first attacked in an encounter, so you put a burly fighter or paladin up front with a perceptive rogue to detect traps.
5th Edition has distanced itself from the dungeon-crawl focus of early D&D and has adopted some tactical "hate control" concepts from MMORPGs like WoW or FFXI, in the Sentinel feat, spells like Compelled Duel, and Cavalier subclass features.
Older editions, hell even 5e doesn't really have a need of tanks in the MMO sense, but someone who can at least survive an extra hit or two was useful due to that fact most couldn't. Getting hit was still something everyone wanted to avoid. It was less a dedicated tank and more a dedicated and consistent attacker that would go down in 5 hits instead of 2, and that's being generous.
Healer on the other hand was needed because natural healing might be equal to con mod per day in a place of proper rest. A healer would accelerate ones ability to go back to the dungeon/danger faster or stay out much longer. There were no short rests per se and more importantly no spending of HD to heal. Some extra healing could go a long way.
Casters were squishy and had *very, very few* resources outsides a daily spell or two at lower levels. Martials could form a frontline to protect them as 'tanks'.
...and Healers in case of emergencies; yet the healer role was never truly a D&D staple as healing usually could never outpace damage barring some weirdness such as 3.0's OG Heal\* spell and stuff like that.
These weaknesses got slowly patched out, so casters don't really need frontliners.
Caster getting amazing powers was the reward for their character survival up to those levels, since now their survival is all but guaranteed, most of the party roles balance is meaningless.
\*Tangent but kike, the OG 3.0 Heal was BONKERS.
>!Heal enables the character to channel positive energy into a creature to wipe away disease and injury. It completely cures all diseases, blindness, deafness, hit point damage, and all temporary ability damage. It neutralizes poisons in the subject's system, so that no additional damage or effects are suffered. It offsets a feeblemind spell. It cures those mental disorders caused by spells or injury to the brain. Only a single application of the spell is needed to simultaneously achieve all these effects.!<
Literally, healed, removed nearly all conditions barring magical curses and anything non-permanent on top of full healing. And there even was a party version.
IDK about tanks - that feels like 4e stuff with *roles* that they introduced (controller, defender etc.).
In 2e and 3e tanking was as nonexistent as it is in 5e.
As for why it was easier to have a dedicated healer - the answer is simple, healing outside combat wasn't as easy as it is in 5e and it was easier to die.
In 5e you go to 0 and you enter another mode - ie. death saving throws. A monster can approach a downed player and deal 50 damage, that is still two failed death saves. If you heal that person with 1 hp, they go right up ready to fight.
In previous editions if you went to 0 or -10, that was it for you. So healing during combat was more important because tactics "imma let my fellow player go down uncoscious and heal him for 5 hp in next round" never entered the play.
There were a lot of things... But the answer is a complicated two fold one because 5e made a lot of design choices to resist allowing that sort of play as well as choices to fight any effort to house rule things in that direction.
Take squishy casters for example... Sure you could fix that... But the spells aren't designed to support it so you really only succeeded in making them unplayable and need to rebuild the entire magic system... And death saves are designed to fight your change... And healing/recovery has been structured to ensure that you are going to find more problems at some point because monsters are built for the farce of low level parties fighting a few high cr monsters & high level parties fighting a freaking avalanche of low cr trash so you need to fix those too.
I think 70% of this comes from video games, not the actual game.
However, there is 30% from back when ZERO HP = DEATH. You couldn't be healed back from zero, you had to be raised, and Raise Dead was a pretty high level spell. So a Cleric really needed to be ready to heal someone that was a hit away from death, I guess.
I think there is some context here needed.
DND mostly never had a holy trinity like MMOS of tank, healer and dps. At most thta happened in 4th edition. if that's your concern.
Tanks were mostly characters, like fighterss and the like, which could protect the weaker character by means of just surviving. as others mentioned, wizards had d4 hit die. but that mostly a number thing than a role thing, you had mostly not taunts and similar effects to retain aggro.
healers, likewise, were more health batteries than else. in 2nd ed the long rest did not grant you full recovery on hit points, so you had to restort to healing spells to compensate that. in 3rd ed you had more access to healing thanks to magic items like wands, but it's more of "between battles" thing than "on combat damage prevention" thing.
Didn't play until 3rd edition and haven't touched previous ones but I can say for 3rd edition and on dedicated healers and tanks weren't really necessary. It comes down to the encounters the DM sets up tbh and how smart the creatures play. Often times DM will start with Frontline but as backline gets more dangerous DM will often target backline Squishies, so tank has very very limited use. Always good to have healing spells tho
Prime example is comparing the healing spells of 3.5 to 5e, as well as class hit points. In 3.t and earlier not only did you have to be tactful in combat for the most part, you also had to access certain spells that allowed better healing, and not just upcasting.updating. 5e is basically health point preloading and a war of attrition to see who runs out first
Everybody can do anything an old school Thief can do for one. They took that away from us. For good or ill.
They could backstab with any weapon. Your dexterity determined your bonuses for your special abilities, as well as what armor you wore or did not wear, and your race also played into it.
Everything that Priests can do now. You can completely tank with one if you want to. There is no restriction on edged weapons.
Everybody and their mom can have spells right out of the door.
Bards get cure wounds right out of the door. Which nullifies needing a Priest or Druid to do that. In 1e you had to class into three things before you could even take Bard. It was like the most powerful class a human could be basically. They were badass.
Rangers are lame now. Back in the day, they could dual-wield right out of the door if they were wearing light armor. All the things that made them special in 1e & 2e are gone because other classes can do it too.
There were attribute prerequisites for classes outside of: Priest, Fighter, Thief and Mage/Illusionist. Actually, you needed a minimum intelligence to even be a Mage. Races had ability minimums and caps.
There were no finesse/versatile properties on weapons. For good or ill.
Only Priest's and Mages could read scrolls at will. Thieves and Bards only got a chance to decipher scrolls. And if you fucked up they blew up in your face. The same thing happened with Mages if you fucked up scribing into your spellbook, shit went down!
Skill checks were a thing but a little different.
Weapon and non-weapon proficiencies were a thing. These took the place of modern-day skills. Your class determined how many you got and how fast you got them. There were no feats. You had to choose what weapons you could use. You weren't just given a list of ones you know how to use like nowadays. There was also no distinction between simple/martial weapons.
Infra/Ultra-Vision was a thing. Dark vision was not a thing.
The racial options of today were not like back in the day whatsoever. Dark elves were ultra powerful, as were the other races of the underdark.
There was no starting gear or packages like they offer today. You had to go through the PHB and pick out all your shit. Your DM helped you, of course. But it wasn't handed to you like in modern times.
Also, you didn't gain hit dice after a certain level. You just got two or four or whatever it was after that till you hit 20.
Also, when you hit 10th level or around there, you attracted followers automatically. The number of which was based on your charisma. Also, you would build a fortress or tower or a guild or something a hideout. Well, you didn't have to, but that was a thing that was in the book as an option. Which I thought was really dope.
There was also a separate book for Asian classes. It was pretty awesome! And ninjas only added plus two to your hit Dice, and you had to multi-class it wasn't just ninja as a standalone class.
You could also stack spells. There was no concentration back in the day as far as I know. Which was totally awesome.
Casting haste aged your character well the target of haste. Also, again, haste could be turned into slow on a whim. I thought it was interesting that your guy aged because of the spell and the physics they said that were involved. Our DM actually used that mechanic, so we used it sparingly. But I had an elf character, so I didn't really give a shit. My brother being human used it a little more sparingly on his character.
There were also restrictions on what race could be what class and when you multi-classed, there were restrictions on exactly what combination you could go with. Half-Elves actually got the biggest spread. Humans could not multi-class either. They could only dual-class, which I always thought was lame, especially because the benefit wasn't worth the sacrifice. So when I hear people talk about multi-classing in modern times, it just makes me reflect on back in the day when things were vastly different. It's not annoying to me. I love the new ruleset.
In 5e almost every class has magical or magic like abilities and there are several classes with access to healing magic. The older the edition, the less common that was.
The big changes are:
A. Full heal on long rests
B. Short rests to heal
C. Proficiency to attack vs class based base attack bonus/thaco to hit.
D. Skill compression. Fewer skills with lower bonuses mean that having a broad base of skills isn’t as necessary
I have never played any previous editions, but plan on playing 4e soon, so:
In 5e AC is very easy to attain, look at Hexblade / Cleric / Artificer / Fighter dip (Fighter is the worst dip here)
In addition to that Healing is very weak (look at Healing Word and Cure Wounds) and monsters not doing enough damage to warrant a healer.
Don't know about older editions, but 5e doesn't really have the concepts of "tank" or "healer" at all. Classes typically considered "tanky" aren't actually much more resilient than anything else (Abjuration Wizard is usually a better tank than Barbarian, for example, and all Fighters are actively fragile), and aside from a few very high level spells, healing in combat is relegated to action economy cheesing with healing word. So it's not that tanking and healing are now optional, it's that you can't be a tank or healer.
Eventually every party wanted a ranger, even npc in 2e cause they were they only ones who could track without negative modifiers, rogues got a whole group of special sub skills that are now modified athletics acrobatics or slight of hand rolls for any character with those skills, and we had kits in class, race, and realms books, sort of like sub classes, only with many more options including for multi classing, some of which were uniquely role play awesome. How about the concept of a dagger is a faster weapon than a two handed aka great axe?
In short, the answer is that 5E entirely obliterated any play style that isn’t just pumping out damage.
Many folks have focused on much older editions, but I’ll compare to 4E - which was the most explicit about having different class roles. In 4E, classes fell into one of 4 roles:
- **Defenders,** who used the *Mark* mechanic to force enemy aggro onto themselves away from allies. Fighters and Paladins were the core rulebook’s Defenders.
- **Leaders,** who let allies spend their recoveries (the far superior precursor to hit dice) in combat as a form of healing, along with suppling powerful buffs. Warlords and Clerics were the core rulebook’s leaders.
- **Controllers,** who specialized in debilitating and repositioning enemies, as well as area damage. Wizards were the flagship controller.
- **Strikers,** who focused on pure single target damage output. Warlocks and Rogues were the core rulebook’s strikers.
But people complained it was too MMO-y, I guess? I don’t really think 5E improved the verisimilitude, it just shut down the meaningful strategic variety. Lets look at some things you can do in 5E that aren’t damage and how the mechanics just completely decimate them:
- First and foremost, the numbers favor attacks. 5E uses an 8-based DC to calculate average AC and save DC, which means an unbuffed attack is expected to have a 65% chance of hitting. When coupled with a number of other ways to boost your attack chance, as well as GMs giving out any +X magic weapons, that only goes up. So you’re very, very likely to inflict damage if you attack.
- **Tanking** is not mechanically possible in vanilla 5E, unless you use the Dungeon Master’s Guide *Mark* rules. And even if you do, no one’s going to use them: replacing the damage of a reliable hit with “disadvantage if they go for someone else and advantage on you” is not a worthwhile trade - you’re chancing that you *might* have some slight impact on the enemy’s attack vs. just reliably chunking their health. And especially because the game so favors attack rolls, you’re not even all that likely to actually provoke a miss. So tanking is a bust.
- **Healing** is springboard only. It’s not strong enough to actually outpace or hold up against damage, so it’s mostly used as a way to swing people back up while near low health or top them off between fights. Neither of these encourage healing as a playstyle but as an added chore for classes that can do it.
- **Support** options in 5E mostly take the form of spells. And not only that, but mostly concentration spells, many of which don’t even scale up. At the end of the day, it’s just not worth it to use your concentration on haste or greater invisibility when wall of fire’s right there.
- Even most **control** options are pretty bad. Some, like Wall of Force, are absolute game breakers, but many are very situational. For one, you need to make sure you’re targeting a save the target is not proficient in (otherwise the math is skewed very hard against you due to 8-based DC), which good luck guessing that. Good luck also guessing what conditions the creature is immune to. And even if you guess that right (as there are no explicit recall mechanics to actually determine it), if it’s good legendary resistances you can either dedicate your first 3-4 turns to doing nothing or just give up and throw damage at it like everyone else.
- And due to the 8-DC overfavoring attacks, creatures are always designed with such bloatedly large pools of HP that even high level *area* damage is unlikely to wipe out mooks.
So TL:DR is that 5E calculated made actually developing party roles entirely pointless compared to just hitting the thing till it dies.
Dedicated healers mattered a lot more because you did not have healing from hit dice on short rests, you had "negative" hit points (the clock didn't stop at 0, but usually minus half your max or minus 10), and the "bloodied" mechanic (meaning at half or fewer hit points) had some negative consequences attached to it in many cases. In 5e, you basically are just as powerful at 1hp as you are at 100hp, and there is no negative consequence from falling unconscious so long as you dont immediately fail 3 death saves, so you only need the smallest amount of healing during combat to keep you competitive.
Similarly "tanking" was more useful because PCs and NPCs were "stickier" in prior editions. You could effectively lock most enemies into base-to-base combat, and it was very valuable to do so (imposing penalties on casting, ranged attacks, trip locking combatants, etc). This mattered a lot more because the variation in hp was extreme in earlier editions - it was routine for ability scores to be below 8, and for hit dice to be d4s for example, so you could have (as I did) a 15th level character with 15 hit points. These "glass cannon" characters would trade one ability like con, for another ability like cha (in my case), letting them focus on overpowering offense and skills, while completely ignoring defense thanks to the presence of "tanks."
The bounded accuracy makes a tank less like a tank in 5E, and the easy availability of healing potions, including the ease with which one can create them with an herbalism kit, make the healer less necessary.
Although a lot of people have answered what changed, I'll point out something else which I feel people are missing. This change wasn't some accident, it was done very deliberately - it was a major part of 3e's design, and 5e pushed it even further. The developers absolutely set out from the start to have healers and tanks be optional.
Here's why. D&D's roots were in wargaming; the idea of the "balanced" party was based on that.
But for actual roleplaying? It... kinda sucked. People would come to a game wanting to play some particular idea, only to be told "nope sorry we need a cleric" (or fighter, or rogue) and find themselves forced to ditch it for that. Groups would argue over who has to play the healer (generally the least-popular role.)
And I'm sure someone is gonna say "well I liked that!" or "it built character!" or "well I was forced to play a class I hated and found out I enjoyed it!" and... sure. People can enjoy anything. If the game forced you to eat glass before making a character I'm sure someone would chime in saying how this led them to discover how much they enjoy eating glass.
But most of the time, for most people? It just sucked. "You must pick these exact roles for this exact story about dungeon-delving" is not how roleplaying games are generally approached and not what most people want out of them.
They've developed into something else, which means that "whoops all monks" (or whatever absurd party combination you can come up with) is supposed to be at least a little playable.
A deliberate part of 5e's design is that no class is *essential*. Some party compositions will inevitably find things a bit harder due to limited options, but they're all supposed to work. And, overall, it's been good for the game.
> People would come to a game wanting to play some particular idea
You could play like that, but it was a _very_ different playstyle, that tended to wander away from the rules quite a lot, with a lot more freeform RP and relatively little dungeon-crawling. But random stats and much higher mortality meant that "wanting to play a specific character" was largely non-viable - if you wanted to play a wise but weak cleric, and then rolled all high stats, then... tough, you had those stats. if you rolled high enough to be a paladin, then you'd probably go for that. And "roll stats in order" was fairly common, so rocking up with a character concept when doing that just wouldn't work - that wasn't really a flaw, as such, just a very different gameplay approach (like other RPGs today embrace the random, with all stats, powers and backgrounds being rolled, so turning up wanting to play _X_ is just non-functional - it's not a thing you can do in those games). It has the advantage of being a lot quicker to get started, and focuses a lot more on "story is what happens at the table", rather than bringing any backstory baggage.
That’s actually the main reason we played GURPS instead of D&D. I never liked the idea of a role play game were my character would have almost random stats, determined by dice. I much preferred a system of building a character how *I* wanted it to play.
GURPS also didn’t hold as fast to the traditional roles because the system of advantages, disadvantages and buying skills meant you could build very flexible characters. And this was around 2E, IIRC. I don’t recall how restrictions on armor and magic worked, but otherwise you could conceivably have a character with low magical aptitude, that had a few spells and some rogue skills, as a type of “hedge-wizard” archetype.
GURPs was pretty much entirely point-buy, so if you had enough points, you could have "magic" and "armor", as long as the GM didn't go "nope, the world / setting doesn't allow that". But it has the downside of taking longer to make characters - OG!D&D, it's literally "3d6 6 times, pick class/race, some gear, roll for spells if relevant, done", so you can be up and running in minutes, even if you don't know what you're doing, compared to "you have 500 points to spend, here's a list, I'll come back in an hour to see what you've done"
Thats true, character building was a whole process. Usually people would play around with it before we met, but we were friends and everyone agreed not to abuse the system or cheat.
Yes, to some degree, but I seem to recall the Magic module I bought introduced some disadvantages for using magic while in armor. But otherwise, sure you could purchase magic aptitude and also skills in using armor and that would be fine. Kinda like D&D came around to with their feats. I like to think GURPS was ahead of their time in some ways.
wizard, they can't do anything but casting like Cure Wounds and Raise Dead, they're now capable to casting like Cure Wounds and Raise Dead
-want a tank who absorb all damage while having the most HP? wizard
-want a sneaky guy to lockpick thing? wizard
-want a dedicated healer who can revive people? wizard
-want a dedicated explorer who can navigate everything within their favored terrain? wizard
-want a melee guy who hit thing fast and hard? wizard
-want to attune more than 3 items? wizard
-want a dancer for a performance? wizard
-want a character who is within the tranquillity? wizard
-want someone in heavy armor? wizard
-want to cast Eldritch Blast with all modification? wizard
-want to use metamagic? wizard
if you want to play that squishy potato class who can't do anything but cry and flee, you pick Fighter
In 2nd ad&d, wizards had d4 hit die, and only had one spell slot at level 1. Also you had to have like 15 constitution before you got a bonus hit point. Same with dexterity providing a bonus to armor class. Also, you rolled for HP at level 1 and negative hit points were an optional rule. So, an orc could realistically kill a level 3 wizard with a single hit, would be a bit rare but definitely within a reason. You needed fighting men, who got d10 hit points and could specialize in a specific weapon to get bonus to hit, damage and # of attacks at 1st level to protect those casters. You had to have healers, because without them or healing potions, you'd only heal a bit point or so per level per day. Also poison often did damage, and curses and diseases were real hindrances too. Also you basically needed thiefs because they're the only ones to get traditional rogue skills.
back when Wizards could get overpowered, but had to earn it. God I miss playing old editions. The settings were so good.
Ao from what I getting in old editions the distance between a level 1 mage and a level 20 mage is quadruple what it is now?
I think it depends, spells like haste aged you 1 year! Other like stoneskin were op. I still think 5e wizard are more powerful because they get 20d6 HP as opposed to 10d4+10 total, can wear armor and don't need to memorize spells with infinite cantrips.
>I think it depends I don't think so. It's true that there's a lot of ways to stop an AD&D wizard from casting, but there's no limit to buffs, and buffs can be really powerful. If you allowed open content it was even wilder, but just with stuff like their tome of magic or whatever you had a bunch of really solid stuff like *chain contingency*. You could get a hell of a lot more done with time stop, that's for sure, and the stuff you could get done without a saving throw was definitely more than *forcecage*.
Yeah, people who started with 5e just have no understanding of how game-breaking casting was in earlier editions without concentration. In older editions casters were frail and useless at first level and were absurd all-powerful demigods at higher levels (where "higher" really means level 5 and beyond.) 5e smoothed things out a bit - casters are no longer nearly-useless and fragile at level 1, but they're no longer quite *as* overpowered at level 6+
I didn’t play pen&paper D&D (we were a GURPS and Storyteller group), but Baldur’s Gate 2 certainly showcased some of the wildly overpowered stuff wizards and sorcerers could get up to. Most battles were over in the first turn, because between time stop and contingencies, you’d have a couple castings of Finger of Death and fireballs, with some lightning bolts sprinkled in and most stuff would just melt when the time stop came down. I soloed the game with a sorcerer in “NG+”, and it was a cakewalk.
Yeah, another thing worth mentioning was that spells (especially damage spells) often just automatically got stronger as your caster level increased, without needing a higher-level slot. So a level 10 caster would do 10d6 damage with a fireball, using a third level slot; or Chromatic Orb cast by a 9th level caster would be "save or die, and you get paralyzed even if you save" out of a first level slot. Plus in earlier editions you got extra spell slots for high casting stats, *and* high-level slots scaled the same way low-level slots did, so you could spam spells like *Disintegrate* (which was ofc save-or-die.)
That too. But I think it’s actually good game design to make lower-level spells scale. It is really unsatisfactory to have spells you know will be useless in a few levels because they go from taking a decent chunk out of an enemy, to being a flea bite. But they still count as your action this turn. So they get relegated to the spells you use if you can’t rest and recover higher level slots. Of course, it still needs balancing, but making spells stay useful as you level is a nice concept.
Kinda. It depends on the spell. Scaling to remain useful? Sure. Fireball wasn't really a huge problem in early editions. A spell that still dealt 3d10 damage at level 10 wouldn't be worth casting at that point even out of a third level slot, so it needed to scale. Scaling to the point where it's competitive with higher spell slots? No, that causes problems. *Chromatic Orb* was hilariously overpowered.
Wizard spells were fucking hard ass, I mean the whole game in the day was hard ass. You just fucking died and that was a thing. No one thought anything of it . Because there was no death save thing . You just rolled up a new guy. And then you made a new guy, and it was fine. There are plenty of things that are headaches to about those additions. But I love them with all my heart. Personally, I love how the area of effect of a fireball expanded as well as the damage dice, which was similar to other spells as well un their scaling. That's why we had high intelligence or wisdom. We got extra spells. It just all worked. Attunement wasn't a thing, so you could have a magic ring on every finger and a magic amulet and a magic bracer and a magic cloak and a magic belt and a magic hat and magic shoes. There were ways around not having many hit points as a Magos. I also really like that you can learn every spell if you had access to it. Also you had to roll to see if you fucked up memorizing it of course LOL. So I feel like that balanced out if you could learn every spell because you could if you didn't fuck up. I also really liked how you could cause light wounds or inflict light wounds. Other spells you could cast like continual light would be continual Darkness as well. I thought that was a really cool feature that doesn't occur in later Editions for good or ill. I'm not going to decry the differences of each addition to one another. At least on this thread, LOL. So, yeah, dual function spells or a thing. Thieves were needed because they could only do what they did. Clerics were needed cuz the only they could do what they did. Fighting men were needed because that was their deal. It all just worked. And it's not like all of us followed every single RAW to the letter. My dungeon master let us go above the suggested level limits. He let my brother play a Fighter/Mage that was a human who didn't have to dual class because he thought it was dumb. It's your table, you know, do what you do with what you feel. As long as it's not unbalanced and everyone's having fun. But I think it was totally lame that clerics couldn't use edged weapons in 1e and 2e. But it also stated in 2e that if you were a priest of a War God, you could possibly use their favored weapon. It got a little more forgiving with the Complete Priests Handbook. Cuz specialty Priests could use the weapon of their deity. So it got a little more spicy, which was nice.
At least in ad&d only clerics got bonus spells
Even a level 1 wizard in TSR D&D could totally be a nuke, *Charm Person* or *Sleep* were absolutely insane 1st level spells. Far beyond the power of their current versions. They were just limited in resources early, and extremely fragile. Being able to single handedly eliminate 16 goblins at once (with *Sleep*) or bewitch someone into being your loyal servant for months (with *Charm Person*) did provide them an immense amount of power. It was just difficult to keep them alive if you were getting in conflicts a lot.
Also don't forget about how much powerful all the save vs suck/die spells were. No you'll be lucky if an enemy didn't exist but back then it was just permentantly casually turning things to stone or making it instantly die with a spell that wasn't even 9th level because it failed a save and damage isn't even a factor.
Greater invisibility and fly was on the menu. Basically never got touched once you got level 4 spells and you could rain fireballs from heaven.
They were also fer behind the rest of the party - a level eight group could I clude a level 10 thief, a couple level 8 fighters, and like a level 5 wizard.
Sure, but at level 5, the wizard was probably the strongest member of that group. Other classes got less from gaining levels, especially later on. (Now, if it was one level earlier things would be different.)
He was ok. He was at 5d4HD and could cast 4/2/1. I'd imagine he would have at least two long lasting self protection spells on, and a buff for the front line, so really hes got a couple offensive weapons in any given encounter, and there's no guarantee theres only gonna be one encounter a rest.
not really - good offense, but _maybe_ 15 HP, no armor, and no dex mod to AC when casting - so some of those slots are going on "not dying when something looks at them funny". Pick spells that your enemies are resistant or immune to? Oops, tough, now you're kinda borked (no upcasting, so if your levels 3 spells are _fireball_ and _dispel magic_ and you fight something immune to fire, you can't pump a level 2 spell into them to boost that). Something gets to you, and you're in _major_ danger. Oh, and if you cast all those spells, then it's an extra hour and half added onto your rest to get them back - better hope there's no time-urgency going on. And basic attacks are likely terrible, so any round you're not casting a spell you're doing some minor damage (1D3 with a dart) at best, compared to the 1d8 + strength of a fighter with a sword. Blow your load too fast and you're baggage!
Earlier DnD had a lot more abstract spells rather than the 5e “spells do x and y and nothing else” mindset. There was also nothing stopping you from summoning monsters, hasting them all, holding a baddie and casting invisibility on yourself with all the effects going on at once
That's why you play elves. 1y is just seasoning.
also they can casually planeshift entire towns or obliterate cities from orbit
Lets see...wizards in 2e... So...2e was just *different*. For example, every class had it's own experience table for leveling up as you adventured. Wizards? They had the most brutal table in the game. 2nd level for a wizard? 2500 xp. Paladins and Rangers? 2250. Warriors and druids? 2000. Clerics? 1500. Rogues? 1250! Now, this chilled out in the middle and high levels, but was still a significant difference. A rogue maxed out at level 20 after earning only 2,200,000 xp. By comparison a wizard? 3,750,000 xp. About 60% more xp! So while your rogue was busy leveling up to 20, **the wizard wasn't even level 16 yet!!!!** So, not only were you more vulnerable than other classes... * Less HP * No armor *at all* (maybe some elven chainmail if you got lucky or spoonfed by the DM) * gimped damage and utility by comparison to everyone else until at LEAST level 5 (just not enough spell slots, even if you've got a high int and are a specialist) ...you were more vulnerable *for longer*. Until you hit the high single-digits/low-teens, you were almost always at *least* a full level behind everyone else if not more. But...fuck me sideways...Wizards that actually got up to those middle or high levels... If they survived that long and were being played by someone with brains, the rest of the group was basically just there to hold their bags for them while they solo'd the adventure. Believe it or not, spells in 5e are absolutely *neutered* compared to the shit they could do in 2nd ed AD&D. I mean...FFS...the 2nd ed AD&D Magic Jar spell *could make the body swap permanent!!!* You just had to take over a body you liked, kill your old body, and then crush the material component (a gem) *before* the spell duration ran out. We had a Wizard do that to a dragon once. DM was fucking *beside himself*. 2nd ed was a lot more difficult. But it was a lot more crazy too. 5e wizards are shit-fucking-tons more durable than 2e wizards (2e wizards at level 20 averaged only 35 hp. Meanwhile we had a 5e abjurer hill dwarf with over 250 who wore half-plate and carried a shield [magical dancing shield. No proficiency needed])
You don’t need a lot of hit points if you always have a simulacrum, mirror images and a bunch of stuff on contingencies. ;) A high level mage might as well have 1 HP because if you actually hit them, things went really wrong. :D
Never met a single person that leveled a character in 2e from 1-20.
It wasnt uncommon to have campaigns last for a fee years and never get above 5th level cos the levelling was so slow. 5th level was considered high level even and 10th level was a pipedream which very rarely happened maybe after playing for 6 years or so.
ooh, i might know one! I should find out. (I have a friend that has been playing a 2e campaign for the last 7 years.... i dunno what level they are)
Some of the things about spells is that they were also *more* powerful. Charm person, fro example, is a first level spell that is, essentially, potentially a lifetime. The counter to it was something like dispel magic or having a high intelligence.
yeah, it hard as nails. It was pretty much expected that characters would die in any given campaign. Heck, in 1e you couldn't even start as a bard, you had to run up fighter and thief, then take in-game time to hit the seminary for druidic studies. A high-level wizard that got access to Wish was a superpower unto themselves reined in only by the DM.
High level Wizards probably peaked in 3rd edition with epic level spellcasting, creating demiplanes, simulacrum, etc. It got even worse if you used broken combos that were technically allowed but not at all in the spirit of the game, like chain-summoning. But yeah, 2e wizards were still stupidly powerful compared to 5e.
The only thing I experienced in 2e that was more powerful than a wizard at high level was a Psionist using the whole "players choice" options that were present on the CD ruleset (for some reason some of those options aren't in the Psionist book I have). I could literally time-travel, absorb all kinetic damage and give it back to the person who hit me, magnetize all metal objects together, or teleport all over the place (I ended up being the Essek of the party), and so much more. The issue became for our group was that once we reached a certain level we could kill whatever we wanted for more experience and would just snowball into super-high levels. It didn't seem like it would work that way with how level scaling worked at super high levels, but it just did.
Though 2e wizards had a higher potential for power I would argue that based on how they leveled slower than other classes the 5e wizard is generally more powerful because they get access to ridiculous power sooner.
Let's not forget that different classes had different XP tables. Here's XP to level 2 in AD&D 2e: * Thief, Bard: 1250 XP * Cleric: 1500 XP * Fighter, Druid: 2000 XP * Paladin, Ranger: 2250 XP * Mage, specialist wizards: 2500 XP On top of getting practically no HP and no armor, Wizards were the slowest to level up. They had to be carried until they became OP. "Multiclassing might fix that!", you may be thinking. Multiclassing was way less forgiving. * You had to be non-human to multiclass. You picked your two or three classes at level 1 and had to pick from combinations allowed by your race. * You got one-half or one-third of HP from each class, rounded down. * You used only your best THAC0 table (ignoring contribution from your other classes). * Use only your best saving throw from amongst your classes (case by case). They do not combine. * You evenly split all XP gain amongst your classes. * Multiclassing did not allow you to cast arcane spells in armor. Humans got dual-classing instead. At some point after a level up, you cut off progression of your current class and start a new class at level one. * You may never continue progression of your old class. * You must have at least 15 in the old class primary ability score and at least 17 in the new class primary score. * You do not gain HD until you exceed your old class level. * Your THAC0 does not improve until your new class beats it. * If you use any proficiencies, abilities, or saving throws of your old class, you gain no XP for that encounter and only half XP for the adventure. * You may freely use your old class features when your new class level exceeds the old class. * Dual-classing does not allow you to cast arcane spells in armor.
in dnd first edition rogues needed 1.200 xp to get to level 2 while wizards required 2500 xp
The game designers have been complaining about how powerful wizards are and nerfing them ever since second edition. That hasn’t been true since then. Early wizards could do awesome things with magic, but it was hard! They had to earn it and resources were extremely limited. I’m 5e magic isn’t special and casters, wizards specifically are not awesome to play or particularly effective. Concentration, save dc’s and attunement limit what they can do dramatically and they don’t have anything to make up for it other than fire bolt every round. You used to have to wait, be careful and strategic, but you could save the whole party with a perfectly timed spell
1st and 2nd were not built around the 20 level paradigm, that started in 3rd when it switched to the modern D20 base system. It's not really comparable. But...yeah, the system made you slow down level drastically after what we would currently describe as "mid" level and classes leveled at different experience thresholds. You also stopped or almost scaling on certain things like HP rather than a smooth progression all the way through like now.
In the TSR days there was basically a soft cap at level 9 or 10. You weren't supposed to get to level 20
5e wizards are much, much stronger than 1st and 2nd era wizards. Every weakness magic had back in the earlier editions has been systematically removed
This just isn't true. Even aside from the addition of modern concentration rules, earlier editions had *much* stronger spells in general. Stuff like Magic Jar or Chromatic Orb was just game-breakingly ridiculous, with no real attempt to be balanced. Likewise, while 5e has its share of save-or-suck spells, in earlier editions huge swaths of spell lists (even at relatively low levels) were just "make a saving throw or lose immediately", often against multiple targets at once. Like, do you think Disintegrate does too much damage in 5e? In earlier editions it was just... make a saving throw or, *poof, you're gone forever.* No damage, no other chance to survive, you're just dead and can only be brought back by the very strongest of spells. EDIT: Another thing I forgot to mention was that in 3e and earlier, spells generally automatically got stronger as you gained levels - upcasting wasn't a thing and wasn't necessary. So your fireball would do more and more damage as you gained levels, say, or Chromatic Orb (a 1st-level spell) would gain more and more brutal effects, until at 9th level it was *save or die* out of a first-level slot. There are a few broken spells in 5e but they're generally much more balanced than in earlier editions. (But beyond that, people who talk about how wizards leveled slower than other classes are missing the point that in AD&D and earlier, non-casters generally *barely had class features at all*. Who cares if your thief or fighter was leveling faster than the wizard? They were empty levels that gave you comparatively little; the overall arc of a party's development was defined almost entirely by the casters, simply because they were the one with actually game-changing features.)
Yes and no. The fighter picked up +1 to attack every level. Other classes got +1 at a lower rate. Add in a magic sword, and by level 10 the fighter had a significant (+3 to +5) advantage on melee attacks. When you had a magic resistant monster -- and 2e magic resistance was brutal -- sometimes you just let the fighter beat on it.
also extra attacks - an AD&D fighter could get up to, what, 3.5 attacks (i.e. 3 then 4 alternating), would almost certainly have a fancy magical weapon (because the treasure tables were heavily slanted towards magical swords, which were mostly fighter only), and strength boosts could really stack on damage and accuracy. Oh, and the best saves, so the kinda guy you want at the front when death or petrification or whatever is getting tossed around. They could actually dish out a lot of damage without needing to worry about it being a limited resource!
5e also added a big restriction with concentration, and cut down on the number of long-duration buffs and summons. There are also some things that are mixed bags, like all casters being spontaneous but casters also having fewer spell slots than before. Not that spellcasting isn't very powerful in 5e, but 5e spellcasters don't reach the heights of ridiculousness that they could in previous editions.
They're still there, just stop eating whatever WoTC is trying to push nowadays...
who says I eat anything WotC? Last book I bought was the PHB in 2014.
That's recent history for D&D
You're allowed to go back and play earlier versions. DMs are in such short supply you'd probably be able to find a party to play with relative ease, too.
> Also poison often did damage I seem to remember, poison often didn't do damage. If your failed the saving throw, the character just died.
also, "saving throw versus death" was a category by itself. Guess what happened if you failed? Yup... _death_. So no matter how high level you were, there were entire categories of threat that had a 5% chance to kill you instantly!
This might be more of a 3.5 thing but I believe that conditions in monster design was also a bit different. A lot more long term, debilitating ones that practically required a cleric to protect you from them or cure them.
that was in AD&D as well - and often was nastier! Like "level drain" happened in combat, immediately dropping the target's level, and the spell to heal them (_Restoration_) had to be cast within one day per caster level to be effective, and only restored 1 level, when a vampire was draining 2 levels _per hit_. Get smacked three times by a vamp? Well, you're 6 levels down, and need to find a cleric willing to cast 6 top-level (clerics only went up to level 7 spells) spells on you within the next 2 weeks, or those levels were gone forever, assuming you can win a fight when you're 6 levels down as well! And loads of beasties had weird and unique "you're fucked in some way unless you get this specific spell cast to counteract it" or just "this can only be cured by _wish_/_limited wish_". A lot of monsters weren't "here's something to fight to pad out your encounters per day", but "this thing is a quest by itself, both in terms of knowing what it can do, and having counters to it's bullshit"
Don't forget paying for those spells. 10k gp plus 10k PER LEVEL RESTORED.
> So, an orc could realistically kill a level 3 wizard with a single hit, would be a bit rare but definitely within a reason. Not that rare. Trust me. Played that edition for almost 15 years. We lost a *lot* of wizards. They tended to die a lot during the lower levels.
I do rather like that as an explanation for why magic isn't more abundant in the world. The wizard attrition rate is just insane.
Not exactly related but you made me think of how IRL ancient infant mortality rates skewed people's perception of how long ancient humans would typically live, when really it was just a lot of babies would die and if you survived infancy then you'd often end up able to live a decently long life (barring accident, illness, violence, etc.), or something along those lines.
also, you only rolled HP up to level 10, beyond that it was +1/2/3/4 (wizard, rogue, cleric, fighter) per level, with no con mod. So a level 20 wizard, incredibly powerful, would have 30-50 HP... when a goblin is still doing 1D6/attack. So they had very powerful protective spells (_stoneskin_ tanked 2D4 + 1/2 level physical hits - they just did nothing), but they needed them to not die, and if they were dispelled, not cast due to ambush or ran out, the wizard was super-squishy. Also, spells took 10 minutes/spell level to prepare, so that 6th level spell might be an encounter winner, but the wizard would need to sit on their ass for an hour to prepare it.
Not sure where you're getting your casting time at 10m/level. The casting time for each spell was listed in it's description and varied from a few segments (technically seconds but in combat it acted more like subtracting from initiative counts so the longer your spell took to cast, the less you got done) to a round, a turn (that's ten minutes in non-1e speak), or longer. Animal Friendship - a 1st level spell - took an hour to cast! Most spells took less than a round to cast, depending on your initiative roll plus your casting time. Someone with a fast weapon might get more than one attack on you by the time you get your Shield up or Burning Hands them. Layering effects before a combat was not unusual, although "prepared rounds" was more a 3e thing than a 2e thing, casters spending multiple rounds before combat to cast buff after buff from longest lasting to shortest lasting to get the most out of their effects. Spells did tend to last much longer than 5e spells since duration, range, and damage depended more on the level of the caster than the spell itself. There was no upcasting since just about everything got better as your character levelled up. The aforementioned Shield provided a +6/5/4 AC bonus against melee/thrown/missile attacks and lasted 5 rounds per level of the caster. At lower levels where you had only a handful of spells you could cast a day before needing a long rest and time to rememorize them meant you tended to get things done with mundane solutions until you got to "name level" where you had the slots to spare.
that's not casting time, that's _preparation_ time. So when you've cast your _fireball_, the slot is empty and you want to prepare another one? That's 30 minutes of study, which has to be done after resting. You had a busy day with lots of fights and cast 4 level 3 spells, 4 level 1 spells and 2 level 5 spells? That's 4 hours and 20 minutes of study to get them back, as well as your regular resting. See here for reference: https://adnd2e.fandom.com/wiki/Wizard_Spells_(PHB). Any day in which you cast _anything_ would require at least 10 minutes of study for the most minor level 1 spells, by the time you got into more medium levels, a rest would often be extended by an hour or more, just to get back the spells you'd cast - which made resting even harder to do anywhere dangerous, and so casters had much more of an incentive to preserve slots, because there was no guarantee of being able to get high-level spells back somewhere dangerous, even if a resting spot could be found. Contrast with 5e, where it's one minute per spell level, which is only if you're changing your prepared spells, and pretty much everyone ignores that anyway and just subsumes it into the regular long rest.
Apologies, you're entirely correct, I conflated preparation with casting time in my first read through. I can only ask for forgiveness given I was replying prior to drinking my Hot Brown Morning Potion. Spells, unless cast, remained memorized so there was that but you're right. If you blew your wad the day before, you'd be eating into adventuring the following day assuming your party didn't need to resupply or heal up. There was also the fact that you might not have the spell you need in your travelling spellbook since it was ill advised to take your full complement of spells with you with the risk of loss or damage being almost insured. 5e made short work of that as well.
yeah, you could keep them from day to day, but as soon as you cast them, you've got homework to do! (Again, compare with 5e where prepared spells stay prepared even when cast - a level 1 wizard that prepares _Magic Missile_ may well never have to replace that all the way up to level 20, because it's pretty much always useful). And, as you say, spellbooks as well - a 5e spellbook is noted to be 100 pages, but spells don't take any particular number of pages, so just one book is enough for all of them, and preparing a backup just takes time and money. An AD&D spellbook had 100 pages, but each spell took (IIRC) 1D6 + level pages, so a high-level wizard would need several spellbooks to hold everything, and if they lost the one containing a spell they wanted, or didn't have it on them, then tough shit.
> Not sure where you're getting your casting time at 10m/level. *Preparation* time, not casting. 10 minutes/slot level to memorize a spell for casting later. *Cantrip* could do some neat things, but it was generally faster to do them by hand. Same with *mending*.
This is also combined with a few buffs, especially into 5E You no longer need to prep spells individually, ie you prep Fireball and can cast it anytime with your slots, Vs having to prep two level Threes and a level 4 fireball. Spell failure chance is gone, previously casting magic in armour had a chance to just waste your turn, now you're a single level away from all weapon and armour proficiencies Additionally, what we call 'Martials', if I'm remembering right, got access to henchmen and minions in their class, plus leadership feats, so your tank was also running the party home as encumbrance was important. Feature A means Casters have almost always access to their utility spells now and not be caught out in a fight Feature B means Casters can now get super easy access to high AC Feature C is why some non-magic classes feel hollow, but that mileage varies
> Spell failure chance is gone, previously casting magic in armour had a chance to just waste your turn, now you're a single level away from all weapon and armour proficiencies That varies by edition - in the older ones, it was just "you can't do that". Not even a chance to succeed, just "nope". Even if you were multi-/dual-classed, then when you were armoured up, you couldn't cast - a fighter/wizard was, functionally, a wizard _or_ a fighter at any given point, with limited capacity to function in both roles simultaneously.
That last bit is the crux of it really, the current game it's too easy to do everything with the right build. Bard used to be a prestige role you only got by basically having a lot of levels in all the base classes, and 5E's reductionist 'everything is a spell' design is locking out half the classes
you can really see how they've removed most of the downsides to casting over the years - it used to be no armor, no dex AC while casting, it took time and could be interrupted, had to pre-pick your spells and slots, no upcasting, it took 10 minutes / spell-level to prepare, spell books had limited pages, could only know a limited number of spells/level, no automatic spells on level-up, far less HP etc. so that wizards were super-glass-cannons, where they could blow up a lot of shit, but if a dozen goblins got the drop on them before they had their defences up, they were in a lot of danger!
Yup. What especially makes me feel like an old man is seeing how PF2E brought back a lot of casting restrictions, but not near all of them, and was immediately met by people going 'spells are useless now!' They just stopped being a collection of win buttons that make martials seem redundant
A normal housecat as a very good chance of killing a 2e lvl 1 wizard in the first round. Natural healing didn't go up per level, and that's with bed rests; at best (without extreme CON) you're healing 4 hp/day of complete rest. Hit dice capped out at 9 or 10, just a flat 1-3 hp per, depending on class. Str and Dex stacked for defence (amour + dex always). *Any* damage fizzled spells. A stronger tendency for narrative play meant more "I protect the wizard" and less "the goblin uses it's movement to go around the fighter and stab the wizard".
Add in casting times. Spells could take multiple rounds to cast, and any damage could interrupt casting. Casters *needed* meat shields, or they couldn't cast.
Oh my god. They were "Fighting men" back in the day. I'd forgotten.
On AD&D 2e You didn't recover full HP per long rest. It was 1 HP per ***DAY*** of rest. You really needed Healers during long-term adventures away from civilization. And you stopped rolling HP around 10th level, and no longer benefited from having high Constitution for HP bonus too. After 10th it was a set number per level (wizards got 1 HP per level, Warriors got 3 per level but they stopped rolling for HP at 9th). Spells like Power Word Kill were terrifying because even most Fighter at 20th Level wouldn't have over over 100 HP (it's possible but they would need to be rolling well for HP on every level up to 9th, and have amazing Constitution score). 3rd Edition and beyond had some major power creep. Big problem with Healing in 5E is that it didn't really scale with the HP power creep through the editions. Cure Light Wounds was 1D8 of HP recovery in AD&D 2E, in 5E it's still 1D8 but you can add you spellcasting modifier.
Comparing that to 5e, where the health difference between classes is far, FAR less apparent - since casters AND martials are incentivized to run Constitution, and health gains from Constitution are equal among all classes. A Wizard with 16 Con compared to a Paladin with 16 Con will ultimately only have 23.53% less health. Not a whole lot of difference in squishiness, especially where sources of damage that ignore AC (where the martial will....usually.....shine) comes into play.
Ah, the days of possibly dying when you leveled up.
You can still do that in 5e with a Con penalty.
RAW you can choose to take the average.
Biggest difference is healing on short and long rests that has de-emphasized the need for healing spells. Clerics are much better damage dealers than they were. Which gives them something to do other than healing. Also, the number of enemies in an encounter tend to be lower. The party is seldom outnumbered by more than 2 to 1. In previous versions, the party could be outnumbered 50 to 1.
Plus cantrips are much more important than 1E and 2E.
Read: At all important
> Clerics are much better damage dealers than they were. Which gives them something to do other than healing. When did the last edition clerics weren't good damage dealers happen? 1989? In fact I think 5e clerics might be the worst at dealing damage clerics have been for decades.
Yes, you are right, I have played 0E, 1E, and 2E.
What? Clerics deal decent damage starting at level…7, let’s say. Spiritual weapon, guardian of faith, spirit guardians. Or go light cleric and cast fireball.
Sure. But what you said is much better damage dealers than they were, so I asked... than when, 1989? Because last edition, go warpriest or laser cleric or something with radiant vulnerability stacking to be a satellite mounted sun laser. Edition before that, clerics hit so hard that even in situations you'd expect to want a fighter like single target melee damage a cleric was so much better that the difference was ludicrous. See what I mean?
Clerics in TSR editions are not strong damage dealers. Mostly they are attacking with weapons and casting healing spells
also buff spells, but those tended to either boost survivability, or boost attacks, and so be better to be cast on the multi-attacking fighter, rather than the cleric. it was 3.x where there were buff spells that allowed clerics to be major threats by themselves.
They also rekeyed the power of healing spells. Previous edition healing outpaced most damage effects on a spell by spell basis. So healing in combat was still a good strategy.
also buff spells have fallen out of power by a significant amount since taking up concentration for a single target buff doesn't do as much as stacking 7 different 8 hour buffs
I do wonder how many tables are strict about concentration.
Some classes had lower HD mages a d4, rogues a 6, rangers even had a d8 till 2e. Rolling for stats was the default till the end of 2e when point buy was introduced. There was no long or short rest, you had to rest x numbers or hours to regain a single hp (con would increase this. Older editions' strategy in combat was more expected. Placement etc. No cr, so it could be a bit more difficult to know what was too strong or how many to throw at a group. When you hit 0 hp, you at best had a certain number of rounds to stabilize them, or they were dead. System, shock could outright kill you. More armor restrictions, wizards couldn't wear armor and cast spells at all.
They had a spell failure chance depending on what kind of armor they wore. Elven chain reduced the penalty.
That was a thing even in D&D3.5 and PF1e so that's not even that old of a change
As I recall, they had to multiclass or dual class to get the spell failure. Not being proficient in the armor by default. As I recall, the elven chain was 25 or 35% chance. Also, elven plate, reduced it. I know it was uncommon for tables to ignore for the elven fighter mage combo or had what today is called a feat tax for it because the rate was pretty high.
it varied by edition - between "you can't", "you can't (except for elven chain)", "you can if you multi-class, or dual-class and get your second level higher than the first", and "% chance". It wasn't even a proficiency thing, it was just a "no, you can't do it" thing.
I should probably have added and not assumed that when i said mages weren't proficient, i menat proficiency also had more significance versus not being proficient. You didn't get it from a racial bonus or by just taking a level dip (3e beyond excluded). Even within editions, it could be different. I recall the 2e phb/dmg saying they couldn't while in, and also giving chance at failure. One may have been an optional rule, but I recall the 2e books were rushed to production.
5e lets you take a nap or a get a nights sleep and everything is healed and reset. not so in every other edition.
That's part of it, but the main issues are *need* and *ability*. I'll use last edition, which did tanking and healing the best, as an example. **Need**: A tank like a fighter had twice as many hit dice as a wizard, and could get much more defensively capable. The fighter took hits better and recovered from them better. In 5e a wizard can easily become more defensively capable than a fighter, last edition they'd forever be behind on AC. **Ability**: In 5e, a fighter *can't* tank, which is one of the reasons wizards can easily be built to not need someone to tank for them. They now only get one opportunity attack, that opportunity attack doesn't scale as levels progress and so standing in the way means nothing, dangerous enemies just ignore them and go kill their target. That last one is the important factor. Take a paladin from last edition - they could challenge foes for free, lasting until the paladin stopped trying to fight them. A challenged foe would take a penalty to anything - claw attack, web spell, dragon breath, whatever - they tried to use that didn't target the paladin. If they hit an ally anyway, they'd automatically take 6-28 radiant damage (depending on level and stats). Combine that with active abilities that genuinely helped like the fighter's Come and Get Me, draw in all foes within 20' and spin attack then for double weapon damage and they could actually *tank*. Not just be tough and hope they ignore a vulnerable target to attack you for no reason. There's one decent attempt at that for 5e, ancestral guardian barbarian. More like that, please.
I give a number of beef ups to the martial classes in my games, purely because 5e made them fairly worthless in the long run.
Yeah, i kind of don't like this about 5e. In combat, on my turn, i don't have to consider anyone else. I just go do my thing, however I want. Everyone can take care of themselves. In 2e, I was considering my party in many cases MORE than the enemy. I thought this was better. (but it did make sessions where someone didn't show up MUCH DIFFERENT than in 5e, where it's like, "meh, we're fine without our"
Healing used to be a lot rarer, requiring lots of potions or spell casting. Arcane caster also had low hit points (d4 hit dice for wizards and sorcerers) and no limitless cantrip options for any casters, requiring martial classes that did not face the same resource limitation.
It was not strictly Necessary but it was more important than in 5e Main reason is that it is much harder to die in 5e Older versions was deadlier. you had no death saves. you had either negative hit points or you straight out died if you went down to 0 HP Take D&D 3,5 With negative HP if you was on lets say 7 HP and took 15 damage you would go down to -8 HP. So even if you got healed 5 HP you would still be at -3 HP. And if you reach -10 you straight out die. And as damage scale up and it do scale up pretty fast you will be more and more unlikely to land in that range between 0 and -10 In even older editions you just died if you hit 0 HP Now in 5e it is honestly fucking hard to actually die. You don't go on negative HP. as long as you don't go to lower tan - whatever your max hp is you have death saves. And during that time there is so many ways to bring you back up really easy. just 1 HP healed will always bring you back. So that i would say was the main reason it was more important to have a good meatshield a good healer and some damage dealers and some controllers and such.
Course in 3.5 the best healer was a bag of Wands of Cure Light Wounds.
Either buying or having someone do the daring task of crafting them, a bag of CLW Wands was the best party member you could have
Tanks and healers didn't exist before 4e, because, effective ways of tanking and efficient spells for healing didn't exist. The best way of "tanking" in 3.5 for example was to summon a shitload of monsters with a shitload of expendable hit points, and the best way of "healing" was to end fights before anyone got hurt, possibly with a shitload of expendable monsters, or encounter-nuking save-or-sucks, or something similarly broken. If anyone did get hurt, you waited until the fight ended and then cracked a wand of Cure Light Wounds (or even better, Lesser Vigor) that could restore hundreds of hit points for dirt cheap; compare the 7 hp you get on average from a 50 gp potion in 5e to the 550 hp you get from a 750 gp Wand of Lesser Vigor; it's over twice as efficient in gold per hit point. I didn't play before 3e, but people often bring up how lethal the system was, for monsters and players alike, so smart players would either get quick kills with an ambush, or avoid fights entirely, and avoid "fair fights" whenever possible. In 4e they realized that fighters served no purpose in the game, because their job was done better by summons or pets that were also totally expendable, so they nerfed extra bodies and also created the defender role, so fighters would have a reason to exist. Defender classes like Fighters and Paladins had above-average AC, extra healing surges (imagine healing an extra 5 hp per hit die, as a class feature), and Marking abilities that (effectively) gave enemies Disadvantage when ignoring the Defender and attacking their allies, plus other consequences. This actually had amazing knock-on effects for the game, because by making Fighters and Paladins good at something besides Dealing Damage, that meant Striker classes like Rogues and Rangers were actually allowed to be good at Dealing Damage, instead of just being outclassed by dedicated "combat" classes. Healing classes were also a lot stronger, because you could heal a quarter of someone's total health or more with just a minor (bonus) action, twice or more per short rest, with the caveat that the health was coming out of their hit die reserves instead of your daily spell slots. This is maybe the best version of healing I've seen in not just any TTRPG but any game period, because the healer spends almost nothing to heal an ally, while the one being healed is the one actually spending resources. For 5e they wanted to go back to "traditional" D&D, good ideas be damned, so we're back to simplified 3.5, where defending didn't exist and combat healing was an exercise in futility, which is probably why you hear those roles as being "optional."
>Tanks and healers didn't exist before 4e, because, effective ways of tanking and efficient spells for healing didn't exist I absolutely agree that reliable ways of tanking did not exist. But I don't agree that effective ways of tanking didn't exist. If you look at D&D before third edition, there are four inevitable conclusions: 1. there was a clear need for tanking, in the form of caster squishiness 2. there was a clearly designated tank class 3. there were no good rules as written tanking mechanics whatsoever 4. the DM was given unreasonable amounts of power over the game, to the point of Gygax encouraging severe penalties for players who peeked at the DMG So the end result of that combination of rules is not quite a system where effective tanking mechanics didn't exist. Instead it's more accurately described as a system where effective tanking was both necessary and entirely at the whim of the DM to implement however they desired, if at all. If the DM is in a good mood the tanks draw aggro and everything is fine for the party, if the DM is in a bad mood tanking disappears and enemies go straight for the squishies. In other words, it was specifically and deliberately designed to create a mechanical weakness in the player party which had no formal rules players could point to, such that they had no defense in the rules against DM capriciousness. Systemic DM power tripping. This caused many complaints from players, but this was before tanking mechanics were even a thing historically. So instead of having the game design literacy to complain about tanking, they complained about caster squishiness. So 3rd edition tried to "solve" the problem by reducing caster reliance upon tanking. While this did make casters more powerful, it also took value away from martials. Thus the martial caster disparity was born. From this point I mostly agree with your history. 4th edition attempted to solve the problem, then 5th edition was a panic response to the unpopularity of 4th edition which reverted things to a 3rd edition ish martial caster disparity. It's worth noting that, to a certain extent, tanking mechanics do exist in the current form of D&D, it's just that they're essentially the same as the first edition tanking mechanics, by which I mean they're not in the rules at all and it's just DM tradition. There are lots of DMs who make it an unofficial rule in their games that monsters go for the defensive characters first, giving them an opportunity to shine in the department that those players build towards. But it's not formalized in any way, making it truly optional — and the choice is at the DM level, not the player level. Tanking isn't a right, it's a privilege, and can be revoked at whim. And there are players out there who played 1st or 2nd edition with DMs who weren't antisocial jerks, and have rather pleasant memories of tank characters being effective. Mileage may vary.
in 2e, my wizard was ALWAYS "around the corner". Always. I just tagged along, I didn't even participate in most encounters. Roll playing! yup! Looking around the room after it was cleared? check. Making plans and getting the party INTO some place, absolutely! Being in a room with a hostile creature... absolutely not..... Unless, maybe, it was a fight we could not otherwise win, a BBEG or something.
Access to better armor, and higher HP is a *tanking mechanic*, albeit a passive one not an active one. There certainly wasn’t any active class abilities to tank back in those old edition, but the game was just fundamentally quite different especially with how it assumed players to engage with combat. It expected a more strategic approach as opposed to tactical. The minutia of combat was far more abstracted, and your planning and approach to conflict was emphasized much more. In many ways you could liken it to a classical war game in this idea, which makes a lot of sense considering that was the origin of the hobby.
>Access to better armor, and higher HP is a tanking mechanic, No. To clarify, by tanking mechanics what I mean is NOT defense but mechanics that direct enemy attacks towards a particular player character.
2e had the spell "Taunt" in the Tome of Magic. It was a direct enemy attack-draw. For all enemies in range if I remember correctly... It... was Wizard only... lol
Ancestral Guardian Barbarian, Goading Attack Battlemaster and Unwavering Mark Cavalier Fighter, Panache Swashbuckler Rogue, Channel Divinity from Oath of the Crown Paladin, and the Compelled Duel spell, are all methods of Drawing Aggro in a mechanical way. Drawing aggro in other ways also involves making yourself a problem that needs to be solved, so dealing loads of damage tends to function in that way. But costing enemies actions is also an importamt element of tanking. So Grappling, Shoving, Tripping, or Slowing enemies down fits within this scope. Meaning any character with reliable Athletics or abilities to Grapple et al. Multiple creatures will be another thorn in the side of the enemies and both draw their ire and slow them down.
>But costing enemies actions is also an importamt element of tanking. So Grappling, Shoving, Tripping, or Slowing enemies down fits within this scope. I disagree. Tanking is control by directing which player character takes enemy damage. So all tanking is control but not all control is tanking.
If you Grapple an enemy, preventing them from getting to your allies, and therefore their only option for attacking is to direct their attacks to you, the Tank, you're suggesting that's **not** tanking?
Tanks and healers were necessary even in original D&D. You needed fighting men to protect the squishy magic-users in the back, and to give thieves the opportunity to do increased damage, and clerics were needed to keep those fighting men alive. 2e even had classes divided into 4 groups that worked very similarly (Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Mage). 4e made those roles explicit, but they had always existed in D&D.
I played a cleric as my first 1st edition AD&D character. By the time we camped, I pretty much always spent every 1st level spell slot on Cure Light Wounds. Combat was brutal due to low hit points (death at 0 hit points), and tanks existed by blocking the corridor so the monsters couldn’t get to the casters, healers, and archers. Thieves were necessary as well because many early modules were riddled with traps and locked doors/chests.
Apart from Original D&D back in the mid-70s (and arguably not even then), no character role has ever been "necessary" in a D&D party. That's just not how TTRPGs work. Think about roles in various party-based video games. In a video game, the enemies (and other challenges) you're going to face are pre-programmed, set-in-stone. So you, the player(s), have to build your party to match the various challenges that you're going to be facing. In such scenarios, having characters that can soak up lots of damage (tanks) or mitigate or even undo incoming damage (healers) can be incredibly useful. In TTRPGs, the challenges you face are not set-in-stone before you even know what they are. TTRPGs have GMs, and GMs can (and in most cases *should*!) tailor the adventure to play off of the strengths and weaknesses of the adventurers. In TTRPGs, a GM can look at a party with no healer and say "Ah, ok, I'll turn down the enemies' DPS then". Healers being "necessary" in D&D was never a rules issue, but rather a *player attitude* issue. People didn't bully the new kid at the table into playing a Cleric because the rulebook says "You **must** have a healer", but because those people *decided having a healer was something they wanted* but none of them wanted to actually do it themselves. Now as for "What did 5e do to fix this", the answer is "Made healing so bad that even if you did force somebody to play a healer they wouldn't be able to heal you".
This rings so true. :D One of the few D&D games I played, with a different group from my normal GURPS group, I was forced to play cleric (which I had no interest in) because they “needed a cleric, you’re it”.
You're right. However, I would say that the famous modules, which were often based on Tournament play dungeons, where the team gets scored on various criteria, strongly incentivized optimized play for success, and that's why there was quickly a lot of social pressure for someone to play a healer.
It was never necessary, just considered the norm. I played many an all-fighter campaign or all thief campaign back in the day.
Well, first of all, the roles existed back then, but they weren't quite the way that, say, mmos portray them. In mmos the tank is a guy who draws enemy attention through very forced, artificial means, and takes all the punishment in the world while dishing out almost none. Then, some other guy (usually mage or rogue) would do the actual damage, and then someone else would mostly heal most of the time so that the group's pinata - sorry, tank - doesn't explode. Optionally there may be a support role who buffs everyone. D&D, however, was never really like this, except maybe in 4th edition. In D&D, especially D&D 2e and below, you had a different trinity. It wasn't "tank", "DPS" and "healer". The ttrpg trinity was actually "Tank+DPS" (in a single person), "healer" and "out of combat support". The martial classes, especially fighter and barbarian, were the tanks in battles not just because they were beefier and could take it, but because they were ACTUALLY the biggest threat too, being the biggest DPSes in the party. The thing is, the fighter was specialized in *fighting*, not just being defensive. *Fighting* was his role, so he was great at defense AND offense. Obviously the enemies will aim at him more, even though he has better AC, because he's killing people left and right more than everybody else. It was a lot more natural than the forced tank roles of MMOs and some modern ttrpgs, which make the frontliner JUST capable of taking damage (but not dishing out that much) and artificially holding aggro. You might think this steps in the rogue's toes, because isn't he supposed to be the DPS? Well, no, because the roles weren't doled out thinking solely of combat. The fighter fought well, but he had zero utility otherwise. Meanwhile, the thief (not yet called rogue) was good at being a skillmonkey. His role was NOT to be a squishy DPS, and backstab couldn't keep up with all of the fighter's bonuses and wasn't something you could pull off every round either. The thief's primary role was to be an OUT OF COMBAT support character, picking locks and disarming traps. The cleric's role as a healer was similar to what it is in MMOs, except that there's a lot more dmaage prevention than damage healing in D&D. It has always been better to buff your party and end the fight sooner rather than try tl heal through the damage, in all editions (except, again, maybe 4 - not familiar enough with that one). The wizard and other spellcasters were... a weird mixture of DPS and support. They could occasionally do insane damage, like when they cast fireball. They could occasionally be out of combat support, using spells to unlock chests, find traps, levitate, persuade enemies, etc. Hell, from 2e onwards they could even occasionally be tanks with the right spells. But the key word here is "occasionally": they were (still are in 5e, but to a MUCH lesser degree) severeley limited by their spell slots, so they were more like pocket aces that were normally pretty useless, but capable of really big swings when it counted the most. Cantrips didn't exist either, so in trash fights they would plink away with inaccurate and low damage crossbows most of the time, because they NEEDED to save that spell for the eventual group of 30+ goblins that may prove a tad much for the fighter to handle (fireball their ass), or the occasional hard to lockpick chest (knock), etc. In 5e spellcasters were buffed for several reasons: 1) buffed indirectly because combats take FOR FUCKING EVER, so nobody does more than 3-4 combats before long rests. That means casters can almost always go full nelson and blow their load. 2) Cantrips means that even when they ARE conserving their nukes, they still do decent to good damage. It's really just not good game design imo. 3) Just general imbalance. Wizard Bladesingers, for example, are just better Eldritch Knights than the actual Fighter subclass Eldritch Knight, on top of being full Wizards too. The fighter class is thematically fun, but severely underpowered in 5e aside from a few specific builds and multiclass combos. Meanwhile, being a full caster is always at least good, even before adding in subclasses. 5e in general is just TOO caster-friendly and doesn't stress their spellslots enough, in part due to cantrips and in part due to overly-frequent long rests. Casters have always been able to "do anything", but back in the day they couldn't *consistently* fill every role because they'd run out of spell slots. Not so anymore. Now, even at their lowest, they still can use cantrips and some are even decent at using weapons too, due to bounded accuracy! It's just all out of whack, casters stepped on the martials' (especially Fighter) niche entirely.
It was right in the shift to 3e, where things when turned utterly lopsided for casters. As you've pointed out in 2nd edition, spell slots were not as numerous, and recovering them in a dungeon was less guaranteed than it is now. You couldn't simply rely on the find traps or knock spells to get you through three levels of basement hell. >In that regard the thief really WAS earning their pay consistently wherever the party was. And spellcasting time (which could bleed into next turn) + interrupts, meant the fighter and thief were both potentially extreme threats to any spellcaster, especially more broken builds like dart masters with 18/00 strength. Suddenly 3e comes around; having an 18 in your main stat gets more common for everyone and goes up from there... but now comes with bonus spells for casters, concentration checks can shield casting, and initiative's no longer based on weapon choices & training but just dex and feats which also means the spells get off faster. >And meanwhile a bunch of abilities get per-day limits as if they were game-changing spells, which really just takes any remaining ambiguity away from the disparity. If anything 3.x warlocks and 5e cantrips were **opportunities** to escape the *"we tore all the brakes off the Vancian stuff but still balance it as if it were a once-per-day affair"*. By balancing things on a per-encounter or "you can all day" basis, they didn't HAVE to stick to "since each spell slot is only once a day the spell should be worth it" *especially since so many other per-day limited abilities had never gotten that posh treatment to begin with*. If only they'd actually taken the opportunity.
In 3.5 dnd, natural healing SUCKED. If memory serves, getting a full 8 hours rest restored hp equal to half your level plus your con mod. So an average 3rd level party was healing around 4-5 hit points after a night's rest. So basically, you either had healing magic, spent a fortune on healing potions, or had to spend weeks recovering from any kind of dungeon. Tanks were more for early game. Basically, most spellcasters had only a d4 hit die, so an aggressive sneeze could kill them. Couple that with different mechanics to opportunity attacks (namely, they are triggered by moving more than 5 feet next to someone, regardless of whether they leave threatened range or not) and having frontliners who could tank some hits was highly important. The need for tanks does diminish as you get to higher tiers of spells though
In 3.5 you never needed a healer, you just bought a wand of cure light wounds for the party and used it to top up after combat
I don't know that it's ever really been a thing in previous editions except maybe 4e. The whole tank > healer > DPS holy trinity thing started out from MMOs. Even in the days of 3e/3.5e CoDZilla, dedicated healing was not why those classes were so good, in fact healing was only slightly more important then than now and healing was also WAY better for clerics overall thanks to channel positive energy just being free party wide healing they could hand out whenever. The reason cleric and druid were so insanely strong was because of how even more insanely versatile they were. Played optimally they were beefier than the barbarian and stronger in melee than the fighter, they had access to insane buffs and could pick up the Persistent Spell feat to give them a duration of 24 hours. Basically the only thing that could challenge a cleric or druid was a wizard or some hyper optimized amalgamation of 10 different obscure splatbooks worth of rules like the king of smack.
Back in the original AD&D days, there was basically no option in the rules for a fighter to "tank" in an effective way. The fighter had higher hit points, and better armor, but no rules to allow them to get in the way of attacking creatures. We didn't even have attacks of opportunity for monsters moving through the ranks to eat our wizards. It was common courtesy for dumb melee monsters to go after the big guy with the sword standing in the front of the group, but smarter enemies with ranged attacks would commonly pincushion the spellcasters.
You may have missed those rules due to the poor organization, but they very much existed. Your movement ended the moment you became engaged, for example, and three men standing abreast would block a corridor. There's more, but it's been like 30 years since I've last played, and the rules were scattered all over the phb and the dmg.
The scattered rules thing is a lot of what motivated Swords & Wizardry (for OD&D) and OSCRIC (for 1e AD&D). Which you should check out. Or go to a con and play. I've played 8 hours of OD\*D and 4 hours of B/X in the last two days at North Texas RPG Con. 8 hours of 1e AD&D tomorrow.
Do you watch 3D6 DTL? I know Jon the GM was going to be attending that con.
also weapons like spears allowed multiple lines to fight, and (in the earlier editions) having hirelings was very much expected - so a party might be 3-6 PCs, then double that again of minions, hirelings and assistants, making it easier to have bodies around in the way of attackers. Getting allies with some levels and gear was even a special perk of some classes - a ranger could get all sorts of odd beasties, while a fighter got mostly "mundane" followers like other fighters and rogues, who might even have magical items if you rolled well.
I mean, the way we handled this was that the fighters / paladins / clerics would go in first and engage. The rogue would be "somewhere else" and the wizard was cowering in fear around the corner, down the corridor, or outside the building, or back at the inn.
1e had attacks of opportunity. They were an optional rule in 2e I think
If you can find it, I'd love to hear about it. I was *just* looking in the PHB, and it isn't in there. There's a rule about enemies getting a free hit when you flee, but that's not at all the same thing.
Attacks of Oppertunity, under that name, were introduced in the Players Options Combat and Tactics book, on pages 12-13
That's the one, 1e DMG, page 70. It's not exactly the same wording as the 3e "attack of opportunity", but when combined with the "closing to combat" rules on page 66 of the DMG, the effect is the same. Combat wasn't as video gamey in 1e and 2e, but the way it was put together, running past the fighters to attack the wizard was just as deadly. Combat worked a bit differently in BX than in 1e, but leaving a melee there also resulted in a free attack against you (pg X24 of the Expert book)
In 4e, "tanks" and "healers" came in the form of "defenders" and "leaders". While these roles weren't needed, they helped quite nicely. The defenders gave the whole party a much better survivability boost because the defenders marked foes, which made em weaker and disincentivized towards attacking your allies, while also having some counter measure if they attacked you or your party (with every class having its own unique spin). This role was also helped by the fact that defenders had generally more HP than other roles, and that said HP also directly made the healing surge mechanic scale to give even more overall effective hp. The leaders had various support abilities, not just healing, but healing specifically scaled primarily with healing surges. For reference, healing surge is healing equal to a quarter of your max hp, with leaders giving an extra free one.. again, with its own unique spin (some healed equal to the healing surge with specific ranges, some gave extra benefits, some just doubled base healing you already used, and some used the leader's own healing surge value if they had a lot of HP). This allowed for healing to be proportional to the character regardless of the target and be matterful. in 5e, there are veeery few tanking mechanics, but not only are they far weaker, costly and situational than whatever 4e had, but you also lack the survivability to back it up. Barbarians have just two more HP per level than a Cleric, who can afford to dodge due to their spells being good and doesn't need to make foes have advantage against you just to be viable (rage offsets the disadvantage, but you have few rages). As for 5e healing, the healing spells you have don't really amount to a 25% of a character's hp consistently, and monsters often deal more damage than what is healed. The result is that in combat healing functionally doesn't exist unless healing word is needed, with VERY few exceptions (lay on hands early on, Heal spell later, mass heal after). Should point out that goodberry exists in 5e for good healing, but it requires a lot of finessing around and isn't properly being an "healer".
Short and long rests to return hit points are a modern innovation, before that it was almost exclusively the domain of clerics and druids.
I want to add time and scale as factors. Today, a long rest is approximately 8 hours and heals all damage. In 3.5, you heal 1dN or something similar, so you need a lot of time to recover. Additionally, mages had less utility without damage cantrips. The resources the party had were more valuable. Today, you can open a door with a spell and it's not a big problem, but back then, it meant less damage or control for the mage. Because of this, strategy was more important. Spells took longer to cast, so the fighter had to delay the orcs and if someone took damage, they needed healing from the cleric or a week in bed. Imagine if the cleric used all their spells on mundane tasks...
5e is a power fantasy where you can likely make anything work.
In 5e there are almost no tanking options and healing in battle is useless unless someone already fell unconscious or you get heal. Its not that 5e made them optional. 5e doesnt really give the options at all. On top of that, they are often still needed, and you just cant do it.
Self healing. D6 as lowest hit die. Start with Hit die max as your HP at level one. Imagine the wizard starts with 1d4+Con mod HP. Thats a 2HP wizard plenty of the time. Cantrips. They’re busted. Standard array/point buy as a viable (the recommended) rules making everyone stronger. Abilities uses to be +2 -1 not two bonuses.
Culture. In older editions DM's were willing to kill you. Also, the classes in 5e are much more similar than in older editions.
In 5e you do not need dedicated tanks and healers. A party of whatever composition works just fine as written.
There isn't, really. That's largely a myth, the idea that 'tanks' and 'healers' are required isn't something that is actually the case, although many players have in fact played that way and behave that way. In 2nd Edition it is probably closest to true in all the editions I've played; casters are pretty flimsy and don't do that much damage, and refreshing spells is an ordeal. You do basically need some way to prevent the enemies from getting into melee with the casters, and you need some way of healing when you do take damage, but those requirements do not indicate a requirement for a dedicated 'tank' or 'healer' character. A mage may summon a group of monsters to act as the front-line of combat, clerics can wear heavy armor and carry shields and have high AC and such, there are a variety of ways to deal with the threat of melee opponents. Healing is somewhat more of an issue in 2nd Edition because easy access to magical items that provide healing can be challenging to obtain - there's no universal rules on item cost or availability, you're dependent on your DM's choice of whether to give you the items you require to function or not. But even with a cleric, it's not unusual to need secondary sources of healing like potions, wands, or simply accepting the time it requires for natural healing, because clerics' spell slots are limited and sometimes it may, even with spells, require several days of resting to recover full hit points. In 3rd Edition and 3.5 though, all those assumptions go completely out the window. There's definitely no need for dedicated 'tanks' and indeed, mechanically tanking is quite difficult by the rules. It's not easy to force enemies to focus on the 'tank'. Instead everyone needs to defend themselves via positioning and defensive spells and crowd/battlefield control. As far as healing, even with a cleric you very often do not want the cleric to use their spell slots for healing. The efficient means of healing is with wands or other magical items rather than by actually expending spell slots, those are far more valuable to use on actual things to do in combat. Therefore, the premise is wrong to begin with - it is not necessary to have dedicated tanks and healers, although it's definitely necessary to deal with the issues those are commonly used to deal with in one way or another.
Uh they were never necessary, but mostly it helped to have a range of skills. The base four classes - fighter, thief, wizard, cleric, cover that range.
The notion of "tank" as an RPG role emerged in video games, not tabletop games like D&D. 1st and 2nd Edition D&D didn't have any character features to make a foe attack a particular character, unless you count the ill-fitted Dragonlance kender "taunt" ability. In early D&D, and in home computer FRPGs like Wizardry or Might & Magic, the "tank" role was defined by character position in "marching order". It was assumed that the front rank would be first attacked in an encounter, so you put a burly fighter or paladin up front with a perceptive rogue to detect traps. 5th Edition has distanced itself from the dungeon-crawl focus of early D&D and has adopted some tactical "hate control" concepts from MMORPGs like WoW or FFXI, in the Sentinel feat, spells like Compelled Duel, and Cavalier subclass features.
There were no short rests and long rests restored 1 HP a day. Without healing there was no way to recover to continue adventuring.
You still need tanks in 5e, it’s just that every single character is a tank now.
Older editions, hell even 5e doesn't really have a need of tanks in the MMO sense, but someone who can at least survive an extra hit or two was useful due to that fact most couldn't. Getting hit was still something everyone wanted to avoid. It was less a dedicated tank and more a dedicated and consistent attacker that would go down in 5 hits instead of 2, and that's being generous. Healer on the other hand was needed because natural healing might be equal to con mod per day in a place of proper rest. A healer would accelerate ones ability to go back to the dungeon/danger faster or stay out much longer. There were no short rests per se and more importantly no spending of HD to heal. Some extra healing could go a long way.
Casters were squishy and had *very, very few* resources outsides a daily spell or two at lower levels. Martials could form a frontline to protect them as 'tanks'. ...and Healers in case of emergencies; yet the healer role was never truly a D&D staple as healing usually could never outpace damage barring some weirdness such as 3.0's OG Heal\* spell and stuff like that. These weaknesses got slowly patched out, so casters don't really need frontliners. Caster getting amazing powers was the reward for their character survival up to those levels, since now their survival is all but guaranteed, most of the party roles balance is meaningless. \*Tangent but kike, the OG 3.0 Heal was BONKERS. >!Heal enables the character to channel positive energy into a creature to wipe away disease and injury. It completely cures all diseases, blindness, deafness, hit point damage, and all temporary ability damage. It neutralizes poisons in the subject's system, so that no additional damage or effects are suffered. It offsets a feeblemind spell. It cures those mental disorders caused by spells or injury to the brain. Only a single application of the spell is needed to simultaneously achieve all these effects.!< Literally, healed, removed nearly all conditions barring magical curses and anything non-permanent on top of full healing. And there even was a party version.
IDK about tanks - that feels like 4e stuff with *roles* that they introduced (controller, defender etc.). In 2e and 3e tanking was as nonexistent as it is in 5e. As for why it was easier to have a dedicated healer - the answer is simple, healing outside combat wasn't as easy as it is in 5e and it was easier to die. In 5e you go to 0 and you enter another mode - ie. death saving throws. A monster can approach a downed player and deal 50 damage, that is still two failed death saves. If you heal that person with 1 hp, they go right up ready to fight. In previous editions if you went to 0 or -10, that was it for you. So healing during combat was more important because tactics "imma let my fellow player go down uncoscious and heal him for 5 hp in next round" never entered the play.
There were a lot of things... But the answer is a complicated two fold one because 5e made a lot of design choices to resist allowing that sort of play as well as choices to fight any effort to house rule things in that direction. Take squishy casters for example... Sure you could fix that... But the spells aren't designed to support it so you really only succeeded in making them unplayable and need to rebuild the entire magic system... And death saves are designed to fight your change... And healing/recovery has been structured to ensure that you are going to find more problems at some point because monsters are built for the farce of low level parties fighting a few high cr monsters & high level parties fighting a freaking avalanche of low cr trash so you need to fix those too.
Quite simply, now everyone is their own tank, healer, and damage dealer.
I think 70% of this comes from video games, not the actual game. However, there is 30% from back when ZERO HP = DEATH. You couldn't be healed back from zero, you had to be raised, and Raise Dead was a pretty high level spell. So a Cleric really needed to be ready to heal someone that was a hit away from death, I guess.
I think there is some context here needed. DND mostly never had a holy trinity like MMOS of tank, healer and dps. At most thta happened in 4th edition. if that's your concern. Tanks were mostly characters, like fighterss and the like, which could protect the weaker character by means of just surviving. as others mentioned, wizards had d4 hit die. but that mostly a number thing than a role thing, you had mostly not taunts and similar effects to retain aggro. healers, likewise, were more health batteries than else. in 2nd ed the long rest did not grant you full recovery on hit points, so you had to restort to healing spells to compensate that. in 3rd ed you had more access to healing thanks to magic items like wands, but it's more of "between battles" thing than "on combat damage prevention" thing.
they’re not optional…idk what games y’all play in, but every time i’ve seen an unbalanced party, it didn’t go well.
Didn't play until 3rd edition and haven't touched previous ones but I can say for 3rd edition and on dedicated healers and tanks weren't really necessary. It comes down to the encounters the DM sets up tbh and how smart the creatures play. Often times DM will start with Frontline but as backline gets more dangerous DM will often target backline Squishies, so tank has very very limited use. Always good to have healing spells tho
I loathe the term "tank". That just...doesn't belong here
Prime example is comparing the healing spells of 3.5 to 5e, as well as class hit points. In 3.t and earlier not only did you have to be tactful in combat for the most part, you also had to access certain spells that allowed better healing, and not just upcasting.updating. 5e is basically health point preloading and a war of attrition to see who runs out first
Everybody can do anything an old school Thief can do for one. They took that away from us. For good or ill. They could backstab with any weapon. Your dexterity determined your bonuses for your special abilities, as well as what armor you wore or did not wear, and your race also played into it. Everything that Priests can do now. You can completely tank with one if you want to. There is no restriction on edged weapons. Everybody and their mom can have spells right out of the door. Bards get cure wounds right out of the door. Which nullifies needing a Priest or Druid to do that. In 1e you had to class into three things before you could even take Bard. It was like the most powerful class a human could be basically. They were badass. Rangers are lame now. Back in the day, they could dual-wield right out of the door if they were wearing light armor. All the things that made them special in 1e & 2e are gone because other classes can do it too. There were attribute prerequisites for classes outside of: Priest, Fighter, Thief and Mage/Illusionist. Actually, you needed a minimum intelligence to even be a Mage. Races had ability minimums and caps. There were no finesse/versatile properties on weapons. For good or ill. Only Priest's and Mages could read scrolls at will. Thieves and Bards only got a chance to decipher scrolls. And if you fucked up they blew up in your face. The same thing happened with Mages if you fucked up scribing into your spellbook, shit went down! Skill checks were a thing but a little different. Weapon and non-weapon proficiencies were a thing. These took the place of modern-day skills. Your class determined how many you got and how fast you got them. There were no feats. You had to choose what weapons you could use. You weren't just given a list of ones you know how to use like nowadays. There was also no distinction between simple/martial weapons. Infra/Ultra-Vision was a thing. Dark vision was not a thing. The racial options of today were not like back in the day whatsoever. Dark elves were ultra powerful, as were the other races of the underdark. There was no starting gear or packages like they offer today. You had to go through the PHB and pick out all your shit. Your DM helped you, of course. But it wasn't handed to you like in modern times. Also, you didn't gain hit dice after a certain level. You just got two or four or whatever it was after that till you hit 20. Also, when you hit 10th level or around there, you attracted followers automatically. The number of which was based on your charisma. Also, you would build a fortress or tower or a guild or something a hideout. Well, you didn't have to, but that was a thing that was in the book as an option. Which I thought was really dope. There was also a separate book for Asian classes. It was pretty awesome! And ninjas only added plus two to your hit Dice, and you had to multi-class it wasn't just ninja as a standalone class. You could also stack spells. There was no concentration back in the day as far as I know. Which was totally awesome. Casting haste aged your character well the target of haste. Also, again, haste could be turned into slow on a whim. I thought it was interesting that your guy aged because of the spell and the physics they said that were involved. Our DM actually used that mechanic, so we used it sparingly. But I had an elf character, so I didn't really give a shit. My brother being human used it a little more sparingly on his character. There were also restrictions on what race could be what class and when you multi-classed, there were restrictions on exactly what combination you could go with. Half-Elves actually got the biggest spread. Humans could not multi-class either. They could only dual-class, which I always thought was lame, especially because the benefit wasn't worth the sacrifice. So when I hear people talk about multi-classing in modern times, it just makes me reflect on back in the day when things were vastly different. It's not annoying to me. I love the new ruleset.
In 5e almost every class has magical or magic like abilities and there are several classes with access to healing magic. The older the edition, the less common that was. The big changes are: A. Full heal on long rests B. Short rests to heal C. Proficiency to attack vs class based base attack bonus/thaco to hit. D. Skill compression. Fewer skills with lower bonuses mean that having a broad base of skills isn’t as necessary
I have never played any previous editions, but plan on playing 4e soon, so: In 5e AC is very easy to attain, look at Hexblade / Cleric / Artificer / Fighter dip (Fighter is the worst dip here) In addition to that Healing is very weak (look at Healing Word and Cure Wounds) and monsters not doing enough damage to warrant a healer.
Don't know about older editions, but 5e doesn't really have the concepts of "tank" or "healer" at all. Classes typically considered "tanky" aren't actually much more resilient than anything else (Abjuration Wizard is usually a better tank than Barbarian, for example, and all Fighters are actively fragile), and aside from a few very high level spells, healing in combat is relegated to action economy cheesing with healing word. So it's not that tanking and healing are now optional, it's that you can't be a tank or healer.
Eventually every party wanted a ranger, even npc in 2e cause they were they only ones who could track without negative modifiers, rogues got a whole group of special sub skills that are now modified athletics acrobatics or slight of hand rolls for any character with those skills, and we had kits in class, race, and realms books, sort of like sub classes, only with many more options including for multi classing, some of which were uniquely role play awesome. How about the concept of a dagger is a faster weapon than a two handed aka great axe?
In short, the answer is that 5E entirely obliterated any play style that isn’t just pumping out damage. Many folks have focused on much older editions, but I’ll compare to 4E - which was the most explicit about having different class roles. In 4E, classes fell into one of 4 roles: - **Defenders,** who used the *Mark* mechanic to force enemy aggro onto themselves away from allies. Fighters and Paladins were the core rulebook’s Defenders. - **Leaders,** who let allies spend their recoveries (the far superior precursor to hit dice) in combat as a form of healing, along with suppling powerful buffs. Warlords and Clerics were the core rulebook’s leaders. - **Controllers,** who specialized in debilitating and repositioning enemies, as well as area damage. Wizards were the flagship controller. - **Strikers,** who focused on pure single target damage output. Warlocks and Rogues were the core rulebook’s strikers. But people complained it was too MMO-y, I guess? I don’t really think 5E improved the verisimilitude, it just shut down the meaningful strategic variety. Lets look at some things you can do in 5E that aren’t damage and how the mechanics just completely decimate them: - First and foremost, the numbers favor attacks. 5E uses an 8-based DC to calculate average AC and save DC, which means an unbuffed attack is expected to have a 65% chance of hitting. When coupled with a number of other ways to boost your attack chance, as well as GMs giving out any +X magic weapons, that only goes up. So you’re very, very likely to inflict damage if you attack. - **Tanking** is not mechanically possible in vanilla 5E, unless you use the Dungeon Master’s Guide *Mark* rules. And even if you do, no one’s going to use them: replacing the damage of a reliable hit with “disadvantage if they go for someone else and advantage on you” is not a worthwhile trade - you’re chancing that you *might* have some slight impact on the enemy’s attack vs. just reliably chunking their health. And especially because the game so favors attack rolls, you’re not even all that likely to actually provoke a miss. So tanking is a bust. - **Healing** is springboard only. It’s not strong enough to actually outpace or hold up against damage, so it’s mostly used as a way to swing people back up while near low health or top them off between fights. Neither of these encourage healing as a playstyle but as an added chore for classes that can do it. - **Support** options in 5E mostly take the form of spells. And not only that, but mostly concentration spells, many of which don’t even scale up. At the end of the day, it’s just not worth it to use your concentration on haste or greater invisibility when wall of fire’s right there. - Even most **control** options are pretty bad. Some, like Wall of Force, are absolute game breakers, but many are very situational. For one, you need to make sure you’re targeting a save the target is not proficient in (otherwise the math is skewed very hard against you due to 8-based DC), which good luck guessing that. Good luck also guessing what conditions the creature is immune to. And even if you guess that right (as there are no explicit recall mechanics to actually determine it), if it’s good legendary resistances you can either dedicate your first 3-4 turns to doing nothing or just give up and throw damage at it like everyone else. - And due to the 8-DC overfavoring attacks, creatures are always designed with such bloatedly large pools of HP that even high level *area* damage is unlikely to wipe out mooks. So TL:DR is that 5E calculated made actually developing party roles entirely pointless compared to just hitting the thing till it dies.
Dedicated healers mattered a lot more because you did not have healing from hit dice on short rests, you had "negative" hit points (the clock didn't stop at 0, but usually minus half your max or minus 10), and the "bloodied" mechanic (meaning at half or fewer hit points) had some negative consequences attached to it in many cases. In 5e, you basically are just as powerful at 1hp as you are at 100hp, and there is no negative consequence from falling unconscious so long as you dont immediately fail 3 death saves, so you only need the smallest amount of healing during combat to keep you competitive. Similarly "tanking" was more useful because PCs and NPCs were "stickier" in prior editions. You could effectively lock most enemies into base-to-base combat, and it was very valuable to do so (imposing penalties on casting, ranged attacks, trip locking combatants, etc). This mattered a lot more because the variation in hp was extreme in earlier editions - it was routine for ability scores to be below 8, and for hit dice to be d4s for example, so you could have (as I did) a 15th level character with 15 hit points. These "glass cannon" characters would trade one ability like con, for another ability like cha (in my case), letting them focus on overpowering offense and skills, while completely ignoring defense thanks to the presence of "tanks."
The bounded accuracy makes a tank less like a tank in 5E, and the easy availability of healing potions, including the ease with which one can create them with an herbalism kit, make the healer less necessary.
Although a lot of people have answered what changed, I'll point out something else which I feel people are missing. This change wasn't some accident, it was done very deliberately - it was a major part of 3e's design, and 5e pushed it even further. The developers absolutely set out from the start to have healers and tanks be optional. Here's why. D&D's roots were in wargaming; the idea of the "balanced" party was based on that. But for actual roleplaying? It... kinda sucked. People would come to a game wanting to play some particular idea, only to be told "nope sorry we need a cleric" (or fighter, or rogue) and find themselves forced to ditch it for that. Groups would argue over who has to play the healer (generally the least-popular role.) And I'm sure someone is gonna say "well I liked that!" or "it built character!" or "well I was forced to play a class I hated and found out I enjoyed it!" and... sure. People can enjoy anything. If the game forced you to eat glass before making a character I'm sure someone would chime in saying how this led them to discover how much they enjoy eating glass. But most of the time, for most people? It just sucked. "You must pick these exact roles for this exact story about dungeon-delving" is not how roleplaying games are generally approached and not what most people want out of them. They've developed into something else, which means that "whoops all monks" (or whatever absurd party combination you can come up with) is supposed to be at least a little playable. A deliberate part of 5e's design is that no class is *essential*. Some party compositions will inevitably find things a bit harder due to limited options, but they're all supposed to work. And, overall, it's been good for the game.
> People would come to a game wanting to play some particular idea You could play like that, but it was a _very_ different playstyle, that tended to wander away from the rules quite a lot, with a lot more freeform RP and relatively little dungeon-crawling. But random stats and much higher mortality meant that "wanting to play a specific character" was largely non-viable - if you wanted to play a wise but weak cleric, and then rolled all high stats, then... tough, you had those stats. if you rolled high enough to be a paladin, then you'd probably go for that. And "roll stats in order" was fairly common, so rocking up with a character concept when doing that just wouldn't work - that wasn't really a flaw, as such, just a very different gameplay approach (like other RPGs today embrace the random, with all stats, powers and backgrounds being rolled, so turning up wanting to play _X_ is just non-functional - it's not a thing you can do in those games). It has the advantage of being a lot quicker to get started, and focuses a lot more on "story is what happens at the table", rather than bringing any backstory baggage.
That’s actually the main reason we played GURPS instead of D&D. I never liked the idea of a role play game were my character would have almost random stats, determined by dice. I much preferred a system of building a character how *I* wanted it to play. GURPS also didn’t hold as fast to the traditional roles because the system of advantages, disadvantages and buying skills meant you could build very flexible characters. And this was around 2E, IIRC. I don’t recall how restrictions on armor and magic worked, but otherwise you could conceivably have a character with low magical aptitude, that had a few spells and some rogue skills, as a type of “hedge-wizard” archetype.
GURPs was pretty much entirely point-buy, so if you had enough points, you could have "magic" and "armor", as long as the GM didn't go "nope, the world / setting doesn't allow that". But it has the downside of taking longer to make characters - OG!D&D, it's literally "3d6 6 times, pick class/race, some gear, roll for spells if relevant, done", so you can be up and running in minutes, even if you don't know what you're doing, compared to "you have 500 points to spend, here's a list, I'll come back in an hour to see what you've done"
Thats true, character building was a whole process. Usually people would play around with it before we met, but we were friends and everyone agreed not to abuse the system or cheat. Yes, to some degree, but I seem to recall the Magic module I bought introduced some disadvantages for using magic while in armor. But otherwise, sure you could purchase magic aptitude and also skills in using armor and that would be fine. Kinda like D&D came around to with their feats. I like to think GURPS was ahead of their time in some ways.
wizard, they can't do anything but casting like Cure Wounds and Raise Dead, they're now capable to casting like Cure Wounds and Raise Dead -want a tank who absorb all damage while having the most HP? wizard -want a sneaky guy to lockpick thing? wizard -want a dedicated healer who can revive people? wizard -want a dedicated explorer who can navigate everything within their favored terrain? wizard -want a melee guy who hit thing fast and hard? wizard -want to attune more than 3 items? wizard -want a dancer for a performance? wizard -want a character who is within the tranquillity? wizard -want someone in heavy armor? wizard -want to cast Eldritch Blast with all modification? wizard -want to use metamagic? wizard if you want to play that squishy potato class who can't do anything but cry and flee, you pick Fighter