Franchise Original Sin / Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The common complaint about the 3rd Edition and its permutations was being too focused on spellcasting to the point of casters being broken. Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, in truth, had always been around in D&D. There's a reason nearly every high-level character in most settings was a caster; the original 1st Edition Player's Handbook has dozens of spells that hit Story-Breaker Power level. 3e simply removed many of the things that had made casters something of a gamble to play, while also making warrior-type classes much less impressive. In particular, the lament of warriors being tactically boring was even worse in 1st Edition, where warriors had almost no options outside of simple attacks. It was acceptable then, because the warrior still had an important job and role, but when the casters could take care of themselves, the warrior-type characters resigned themselves to a long career of saying "I move and attack" over and over. This was also due to a fundamental change in focus; the main benefit of Fighting Men in the early editions was that they gathered political power and armies of followers while being the only ones that could use things like magic swords. When magic items became democratized and the focus shifted much more to small-scale adventure parties this all became meaningless. Basically wizards still got to be Merlin, but fighters got demoted from King Arthur to "Third Knight From the Left".
  • 3rd Edition often ran into problems regarding followers, from the popularly-house-banned Leadership feat to the bitter attempts to balance out companions gained as class features in the next two. Such problems were already present in earlier versions of the game, though. Many found the follower and stronghold rules convoluted and boring, and just throwing tons of your weak allies at problems to soften them up was seen as a dull strategy to actually play out at the table even if it worked. The difference was that in 3rd, it wasn't too hard to build a follower, cohort, or animal companion who was actually strong enough to keep up with the rest of the party, meaning a competent player could effectively control two or more characters at once.
  • A common gripe about 4th Edition was it being too encouraging to a "magic items grow on trees" mindset, accusing it of being a Monty Haul edition. But the roots of this dated back to 3rd, which had a wealth-by-level chart in the Dungeon Master's Guide that encouraged DMs to give their players a specific amount of gold to buy magic items with. Adventurers wearing impressive magical gear even at low levels and the "magic mart" mindset were worked into the game — it was simply an effort to make sure that the DM didn't wind up overequipping or underequipping the party. Where 4th Edition differed was actively building the wealth-by-level chart into the game's design, virtually requiring players to have specific level-appropriate magical gear just to keep up with their enemies — a DM who didn't use wealth-by-level in 3e was merely making the game harder for his players, a DM who didn't use wealth-by-level in 4e was pretty much signing the party's death warrant. As if to underline this, the magic item section was moved from the Dungeon Master's Guide to the Player's Handbook. The result was that magic items no longer carried the special nature of their earlier counterparts, becoming something expected rather than desired, and low-magic games or settings became an exercise in suicide. WotC seemingly realized the problem and provided rules for replacing the constant magical item upgrades with a simple level-based inherent ability upgrade system in Player's Handbook 2, but the damage was done. It's almost certainly not a coincidence that the next edition, 5th, scaled back this mindset hard, removing the prices on almost all magic items bar basic healing items and pretty much explicitly claiming that "magic marts" don't exist... although, ironically, the game is still designed around players acquiring a relatively wide access to magic fairly early on, and the various official adventures all tend to hand out magical items like candy.
  • In turn, the availability of magic items in all editions from 3e onwards was something some gamers had already expected, growing up as they did on the Gold Box adaptations of D&D. Given the low graphic quality, single player mode, and limited options for storylines, the license use was essentially down to using trademarked cover art and names for monsters and especially magic items and spells. In first and second editions of the game, it was virtually impossible (and not especially worth the effort) for a magic-user to copy all existing spells into his spellbook; in the Gold Box games, it was not only worth the effort, it made the magic-user the single most important member of the party. When the players whose first taste of D&D was these games tried to join actual tabletop, they found the comparative scarcity of magic punishing, and DMs (and writers) tried to accommodate.
  • The games probably had a larger impact with the abundance of actual magic items. Even low-level games like Pool of Radiance or Champions of Krynn would have all of the characters using weapons and armor of +1 or better by the end of the game, along with Gauntlets of Ogre Strength or Girdles of Giant Strength. Comparatively, the magic item generation for the tabletop game seemed awfully stingy, even with the gamebooks' "high magic" option for treasure distribution. It feels wrong to both PCs and DMs to have a 4th level character who only has a Masterwork weapon and a couple potions to their name compared to the much richer characters of the same level in any of the computer games.
  • Virtually from release of the open gaming license, prestige classes were both lauded and loathed, allowing esoteric combinations to turn normal characters into Tank Mages, rendering significant portions of the party useless. This was, however, already true in the core books themselves, with the Dragon Disciple nominally being an advanced sorcerer but proving vastly more powerful as a monk. Moreover, in second edition, dual-classing was often considered a waste of time, but could eventually produce a mage/fighter with virtually none of the weaknesses of the individual class. Before even that, first edition had an obscure section of the Dungeon Master's Guide that allowed players to combine several classes to take an advanced class, the only one of its kind in those days, to be a warrior-legend based on old Celtic and Nordic tales: the Bard. Which is totally hilarious if you're aware that bards are often perceived as one of the most useless classes in D&D, albeit depending on edition. In addition, the AD&D version of multiclassing was even more powerful, especially at a table that houseruled away the racial restriction on levels. ^note  In AD&D, many of the experience levels from 1-10 required as much experience the character had gained thus far to be doubled to obtain the next level. So, if a character needed 16,000 experience points to reach level 5, they would need 32,000 to reach level 6. Multi-classing was handled by dividing your experience points gained by the amount of classes you had. While this sounds severe, in practice this typically meant that you were only one level behind for every additional class you had. In the above example, if a Fighter had obtained 32,000 experience to reach level 6, their multiclass Fighter-Wizard friend would only have 16,000 experience points (experience being divided by 2 in this case), still giving them enough to be around level 5 in each class. So, instead of being a level 9 Fighter, you could have a character who is a level 7 Fighter, level 7 Cleric, and level 7 Wizard, all with full powers for each class including a ton of spells for the relatively minor trade-off of having two levels less of fighter (mostly impacting THAC 0), and a lower average amount of hit points per level. If one was thinking of playing a Wizard or Cleric, however, you now only had two levels less of spell slots for your primary class but also gained a lot more spells for the other casting class plus the Fighter's access to weapons and armor in addition to higher average hit points.
  • Fourth edition's version of magic was often cited as dumbed down compared to prior editions, with only a handful of spells available, and themselves only usable once per encounter or day for the most part. Yet a similar situation was not uncommon in the earlier editions. Many magic-users would prepare only a handful of their possible spells, and swap them out rarely or for special situations, sticking to a small set of reliable spells (which, with casting limitations, could likely only be used a few times). 3e also introduced classes like the warlock, beguiler, and sorcerer, which featured much more limited casting choices than the wizard, and were generally considered alright. The difference was that 4e essentially took what had previously been a playstyle and turned it into writ law. Not helping was the perception that the new edition had stricken wizards of their ability to swap out spells entirely; this perception was wrong^note 4e wizards gain two Encounter, Daily and Utility category spells each time they gain access to a new power, whereas almost all other classes only gain one, and have to choose which spells they have access to for that in-game day as part of completing an extended rest, but the smaller list of powers that all classes have access to at any given time, and the fact that spell-swapping was a class feature baked into the wizard's class writeup, meant a lot of readers never realized it still existed, and it didn't much impact wizards anyway due to the much smaller list.
  • Similar to the above, Tome of Battle in 3e implemented a very caster-esque system for archetypes not really associated with casting. This created something of a Broken Base, but even those who weren't fond of the system accepted it as Necessarily Evil to level the playing field a little between the insanely broken caster archetypes and the mediocre melee archetypes. However, it seemingly proved a harbinger for 4e's class design, which proved very controversial in part because so many classes used an identical (or slightly tweaked) system of advancement, causing many to decry it as too streamlined for its own good.
  • Ask an old-school player where the pre-made modules went wrong, and they'll probably tell you it happened when the designers started focusing on the story at the expense of making a fun adventure. The first real alteration to the Story to Gameplay Ratio happened all the way back in Ravenloft (as in, the original I6 adventure module), which featured an actual plot, a significant backstory, heavy roleplay, and a major NPC who was constantly acting in the adventure. But Ravenloft was still fairly nonlinear, had lots of opportunities to explore, and could vary heavily from session to session, and the significant NPC in question happened to be Strahd von Zarovich, the Big Bad, meaning his actual role in the plot gave him a sense of being a dynamic threat rather than Orcus on His Throne. Later adventures would drop all these things in favor of sticking the party on the railroad tracks, and the significant NPC would instead be a GMPC who would solve the adventure while the players watched. There's a reason Strahd is still a beloved character, while Elminister (who usually fulfilled the above role) is seen as a Creator's Pet.
  • Fourth edition got flak for removing the gnome and the half-orc from the original "core" line-up of races, and replacing them with the dragonborn and tiefling.^note Both were eventually added back in Player's Handbook 2. Earlier releases of previous editions of the game would often remove old races, even replace them with new ones, and the half-orc and gnome were actually two of the most commonly put on the chopping block—the half-orc in particular was actually the first race to ever be removed from the Player's Handbook, being booted from the line during the switch from 1e to 2e. This wasn't a popular move, but it was tolerated, and it was also understood that at least some of it was corporate-mandated by the infamously sanitation-minded management of the time. But, for an edition already seen as trying to break with tradition for tradition's sake, the "replacement" of two older races with ones that seemed designed to appeal to new demographics created some bad blood. The next edition would keep all four as "core" playable races, with less backlash.
  • One persistent problem through virtually all editions of the game was the intersection of attrition-based resource management, class balance, and the so-called "Five-minute workday". Essentially, some classes had limited powerful resources that they could use each day vs. classes (Fighters and Rogues) that could effectively function all day long as long as they were healed (which was not guaranteed). This made sense in the very early days when "dungeon-delving" was literally the vast majority of the game. The goal was to see how far into each dungeon a party could go before having to retreat (or having characters die). Encounters seldom taxed all of a character's resources at once, but gradually whittled them down into dangerous levels until risk of death was possible. When gameplay started becoming more narrative or taking place on road journeys, however, players got used to being able to use at least half of their resources in each fight. This would result in players who blew through all of their resources and wanted to rest to regain them back even though only a short period of time had elapsed since they awoke from the last rest, hence the "five minute workday". 5th Edition has made this problem more complex by adding in Short-Rest powers vs. Long-Rest, which now can put characters into one of three camps: Those who want to Long rest as often as possible, those who want to get by with just more Short rests (i.e., the Warlock), and those who want to try to complete as many encounters as possible in a day (i.e. Fighters, Rogues, etc.). Notably, the game design is based around six to eight medium to hard encounters per day, whereas a survey revealed that most groups run just one to three (A single combat encounter can, depending on its complexity and the roleplaying group, take a real-life hour for the longest ones, which severly limit how much can be done in a single roleplaying session). Notably, 4th Edition attempted to solve this problem by having virtually all classes function the same way and introducing the Milestone system, but the former resulted in many player complaints and the latter was laughably ineffectual as its main benefit was awarding Action Points, something usable only once per combat and each character was restored back up to one Action point after taking a long rest anyway.
• Exalted received a lot of flak in Second Edition for causing severe Too Bleak, Stopped Caring. However, even way back in First Edition, Black-and-Gray Morality was all over the place (to the point that one of the iconic heroes of the Dragon-Blooded was the biggest sex slavery kingpin in the setting) and the canon leaned toward "the world is going to be destroyed because none of the heroes can get their shit together." The difference is that there were plenty of examples of places and heroes who were really trying to do the right thing, and the less-developed state of the setting gave hope that the player characters might just make something better. In Second Edition, there's a much more mapped-out setting, but one with so few good guys (not to mention the inordinate focus on the Infernal Exalted) that a lot of players just asked why Creation is worth fighting for. Third Edition is trying to scale that way back.
• Legend of the Five Rings had the end of the Clan War, the Second Day of Thunder, the death of Fu Leng and the ascension of the Toturi Dynasty. Those events were a legendary if somewhat-controversial feat of storytelling, but the endless quest to make new tournament prizes caused the writers to always need to top that. Accordingly, the Imperial throne was thrown into churn, gods became targets so often that it was lampshaded in-universe, and major changes to the status quo became practically a Once an Episode event. Eventually, Alderac Entertainment Group had to discontinue the game and sell the property to Fantasy Flight Games, who went with a Continuity Reboot.
• Warhammer: The End Times saw Chaos emerge victorious and destroy the world. This ending has been heavily criticized as excessively dark, especially since Chaos is given victories fans see as unearned, with many of them happening because the world's defenders acted uncharacteristically stupid. Chaos being a force that cannot truly be defeated, only delayed, has always been a major part of Warhammer. The issue fans take is that when the forces of Order were unified in the past, they have always beaten Chaos, saying that while Chaos cannot be destroyed, it has always been beatable. The End Times throws this out the window, saying that Chaos is invincible and the only reason the world's defenders lasted as long as they did is that the Chaos Gods toy with them at first and then destroy the world when they grew bored. Even by the Crapsack World standards of Warhammer, this reveal has been criticized as excessively dark and raises the question of what the point of getting invested in the setting is.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Fans of the game often bemoan the ever-increasing Power Creep. This is a thing the game has always done, and if anything, the creep was most noticeable in its early years. The first six or seven new sets in Japan were basically just the game introducing monsters that were better in every way than the ones in prior sets, and then introducing Effect Monsters that had the same stats as the Normals in prior sets but could actually do stuff. At the time, though, this was seen as a good thing, as the meta of early sets had been simplistic, slow, and dirt-stupid, and the more complex and useful cards made the game a lot more interesting. It's just that, with twenty years of cards accumulating, the game inevitably hit a breaking point, resulting in a meta where games between two skilled players with good decks rarely last more than three turns.
  • For all the complaints about later era Yu-Gi-Oh! becoming a "keep the opponent from playing at all" game or that it's "like playing solitaire while someone watches you", it can be hard to remember that lockdown/control decks have always been a part of the game. Even one of the most famous "old school" formats, Goat Format, was based around keeping the opponent from playing as much as possible. However, the speed of the game has drastically changed, making it far more noticeable when someone manages to lock you down turn one as opposed to several turns in. Earlier days of the game, there was at least a chance to either thwart your opponent before the setup or you had a way to set up counter-measures to stop the locks before it shut you down. Currently, it's completely possible off of one card to set up a wall of monsters with excellent defense and protection if you know the chain of events. A recurring joke of the game is "What's a turn 5?", mocking yet acknowledging how fast the game has truly gotten.
  • The banlist in its first incarnation was a major cap on the game's creep, ending the reign of Chaos Format as well as broken decks like Makyura Exchange or Scientist FTK. However, Konami also realized its value as an easy fallback for releasing something broken, which led to the cycle of deliberately releasing overpowered cards, presiding over a meta dominated by those cards, then once everyone owned a set, banning them for years on end, just in time for the next wave of overpowered cards that the old cards would have actually been balanced against.
  • Throughout the 2010s, it became increasingly evident that Burn cards (cards based on direct damage), especially of the "tribute a monster to do damage" variety, were overpowered, with many decks whittling the opponent to nothing before they could even get a turn. But in reality, these cards had always had the potential to be broken—the very first large-scale tournament in Asia, two years before the game's international release, was won by a player using a Cannon Soldier deck, and the aforementioned Scientist FTK used a pre-nerf Catapult Turtle to do its thing. At the time, the problem was perceived to be the mass-summon cards that both decks utilized, and it was believed that simply restricting those cards would prevent the problem. When the game's Power Creep hit the point that the mass-summons those decks were capable of were no longer outliers, nearly every card with a tribute-to-burn effect found itself on the banlist.
  • The Walls of Text on modern card effects have become an increasing source of contention since the 2010s, and overwhelmed players have suggested that the game start using keywords like Magic: The Gathering does. However, even in the early days of the game, there were cards like Relinquished, Thousand-Eyes Restrict, Last Turn, and Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning that have lengthy card effects (especially before the Problem-Solving Card Text method was introduced in 2011). The difference is simply that, in the game's earlier years, most non-Normal Monster Cards had one effect, so card effects that were several lines long were less common. The game's Power Creep has all but forced cards to have two or more effects just to be competitively viable, exacerbating the length of card effects.

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