Those Quirky little things - What has been missing from D&D

As mentioned in my last dndnext playtest report, my players went exploring and stumbled over the minotaur caves, which are, as you might know, cursed so that you can not find the way out. And we had a lot of fun there.

It got me thinking. I have missed those quirky little things. It's kinda hard to put into words, but it seems to me that D&D used to be full of those. Weird spells with effects that lasted a long time, which made you do odd things (think old-school confusion, Otto's etc), items with weird and odd properties or abilities. There was just a lot of quirkiness, a lot of unexpected stuff packed in the rules. Then, with 3.x and later 4e, those things got slowly phased out. Maybe it was primarily 4e, but it seems to me that it started somewhat in 3.x already, with the standardization of the magic items. That was the first nail in the coffin, although the metaphor might be a bit harsh. But I hope that no one takes offence. While 3.x was never my favorite edition, it did fix some other issues I had at the time, and brought some remarkable new things to the game. And I am still a big fan of 4e.

Now, I obviously know that the fault might lie with me. The DM. After all, I could just have hacked 4e and introduced those quirky things, but still, fault, if one can speak of fault, still lies with the system. You see, in my opinion, when you make a game, or in this case, an edition of a game, you set the tone, the parameters for said game. Sure, some enterprising DM's will manage to twist and turn it into exactly what they want, creating their own version of the game, but to be honest, I think that the rest of us, most of us, tend to be very influenced by said parameters. So if WotC makes a game such as 4e, that relies on a very strict balance, where everything can be explained with some specific keywords, where all spells do not last longer than (save ends) or the end of the encounter (yes, I know about druid spells), where every item follows a fairly strict format and built.. Well, most of us will keep the game within those boundaries. At least at first. Of course, as an edition gets older, people start to experiment some more, but I want an edition of dnd that caters to that particular aspect from the get go.

I guess this is just my way of saying that I am happy about the way dndnext is heading. If the many blogs and L&L are anything to go by, as well as small things in the Caves of Chaos playtest, dndnext is refinding it's roots in the quirky old editions of yore. I mean, as mentioned in previous blog posts, I am now a big fan of (at least the occasional) save or die. Medusa petrifying should not end the next round or after 5 minutes. Wights should drain something permanently, not just cause necrotic damage and the player to lose a surge, something that he probably won't even need that day. There should be odd-ball curses, which can't be explained, which can't be dispelled, which can't be fitted into some frame. The minotaur curse was barely explained, there was no real framework for it, yet, it gave us (okay, maybe me more than my players, but..) a lot of fun, a lot more fun than anyone carefully constructed trap or hazard had in 4e for the last 4 years and thousands of hours.

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