Versions of D&D and the Changing Antagonists

Whew, it's been a while since my last post! Holiday hustling and catching up on all three previous seasons of Vikings before the premiere of season 4 took up most of my free time. Not much in the way of gaming has happened in the past few months either.... My gaming group is on hiatus due to a serious illness in their family which affects them all.

That being said, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about older versions of D&D. My group was in the process of making new characters for an experiment. We are going to sample the same adventure in all the major D&D systems used over the last 30 years, from Basic Moldvay D&D all the way through to D&D 5.0! I've converted the module T1: Village of Hommlet into each system and the players will be using 3rd level characters to try each system. We're essentially looking for parts of the system that work, and trying to eliminate those that don't. In the end, we will likely adapt the parts that work into a stitched golem-like version of D&D agreeable to all.

In the process of looking over Original D&D, I noticed that there is a trend evident in the campaigns that continued through the AD&D line. Originally, the big-bad villain in the dungeons were dragons - the apex dungeon opponent. Against low-powered heroes with d6 hit points or so these were the epitome of danger and evil. However, as power-creep advanced through the editions, those low-level characters soon sneered and took out those sleeping dragons, pelting them with missiles from afar, or blasting them with spells and magic items while remaining out of range of their breath weapons. The dragon was no longer scary as players had learned all the nasty abilities of the dragons and all the ways they could foil them.

AD&D seemed to add in the material from the GREYHAWK and BLACKMOOR supplements, as well as the adversaries from the ELDRITCH WIZARDRY supplement. Along with this came a switch in the final adversaries of the game. Demons became the end-game opponents, with demon lords pulling the strings of the villains throughout the campaign. This is evident in the modules written by Gygax and Kuntz - the demoness Lolth in the GDQ modules, the demoness Zuggtmoy in the T1-4, the demon Kerzzit in WG5, the demonspawn Iuz who reigned in Greyhawk, etc. The GORD novels by Gygax climaxed with a demon-war. Demons were all the rage (and this may have negatively impacted the opinion of the game).

When Gygax was ousted, the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance campaigns came to the fore and dragons were once more set up as the endgame villains, along with undead and villainous gods. This is evident in the FR with Bane and the Zhentarim, the Red Wizards of Thay, and Takhisis in the DL campaigns. Demons were removed from the equation (banished, if you will, back to the Abyss). However, they kept creeping back into AD&D 2nd Edition until they could be contained no longer and reappeared with a vengeance at the end of that game version in the Planescape campaign. Of course, by this point, dragons were beefed up to be on an even level with demons, and AD&D had introduced more fiends in the form of devils and daemons. Still demons held the imagination and thrill in the game.

Third edition kept demons, but by expanding on the power of the characters, they were diminished in their power. With psionics removed in 2nd edition onward, and relegated to a game add-on that most DMs did not deal with, demons became just another run-of-the-mill creature to be encountered at mid-level and higher. I did not dabble much with 4th edition so I can't speak on the role of demons or other high-level antagonists in this game. 5th edition seems to have made demons somewhere between gods and dragons on the scale of power, but I'm not entirely sure they still have the same impact as 1st edition and earlier demons had on the imagination.

It's a shame that I won't be able to explore multiple levels of each version of the game. There simply isn't enough time in the day to do each system justice without having lived through the years of the various changes in D&D. If I could have been a better DM in the earlier years, I'm sure that I would still be running my first group through numerous adventures over the years. I'm happy with my 1st edition group but I'm quickly running out of material and options for them. Original D&D had an endgame, let's call it "retirement," which really does not apply to later editions. Having adventures beyond 14th level means leaving the Material Plane behind and adventuring in a realm of pure imagination belonging to the the DM. Most of us don't have the time or energy anymore to put that imagination to work. I just hope I can continue to challenge and entertain my players for many years to come!