Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

Lanefan · Oct 4, 2018

Hussar said:
Nope. Even by RAW you are wrong here. The ONLY time you roll initiative, by RAW is when combat starts. You CANNOT use initiative in any other case. Initiative is the first part of combat. And, you cannot actually have one without the other in D&D. Nor does initiative lead to direct opposition. You have the opposition (combat starts) first, and then the contest among the actors to find out who acts first in combat (initiative).

Since we're being all sticky about RAW and all that.

What's it called, then, when a random roll is required to sort out timing of multiple events in a non-combat situation, or in a situation potentially leading up to combat?

Example: a character has gone into town alone to do something and - unknown to her - is about to be assassinated. Your party can every now and then (say, once per ten minutes for 30 seconds each time) scry this character to make sure she's OK. Another local group have twigged that your friend is in danger and are moving to rescue her.

Multiple events whose order needs to be randomly determined - and note that ties here are perfectly acceptable, any combination of these things could in theory all happen at once:

- the assassination attempt
- the rescue attempt
- your party's scrying
- the character doing whatever it is she went into town to do

So while there's all kinds of ways a DM could sort this out on her own with a few dice rolls, how would 5e RAW do it?

pemerton · Oct 4, 2018

Maxperson said:
I already acknowledged that it was a part of the combat system. It is just not combat itself.

What does that mean? Choosing the target of an attack is also part of the combat system, but not combat itself. Making an attack roll is part of the combat system, but not combat itself.

Combat itself is a complex structured mechanical process - which some sort of loosely correlating fiction - which all thse things are elements of. And I'm pretty sure that [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] has a firm grasp on this point. What he is saying is that combat involves direct opposition - a clash between two sides - and hence that it would be wrong to argue that one of its key constituent elements, namely, determining the sequence in which that clash unfolds by way of the initiative mechanic, cannot be a contest because it does not pertain to direct opposition.

Sadras · Oct 4, 2018

Good grief. Footraces, initiative/combat, light/heavy systems

You guys need to get another hobby.

Harzel · Oct 4, 2018

Lanefan said:
There's strongholds, castles and fortresses; though why parties don't more often pool their resources and build just one castle as a home base for everyone baffles me.

Dude! You can't be serious! Have you ever tried to arbitrate an interior decorating argument? I mean, you can have everyone have their own wing of the castle, but then there's still the questions about the great hall and the guest quarters, not to mention everyone wants to be near the garden and away from the middens. Now you could try separate keeps sharing some fortifications, but you'll have an endless debate about whether we really need that high a wall or that deep a moat, and OMG the plantings - shrubberies vs. no shubberies - they'll just never agree.

Now, I know what you're thinking: ok, you'll go in together to get a big parcel of land at a good price and at least our castles will be close together. Nope, not gonna work out. First off, there's the issue of who gets the high ground. Then it's your turret is blocking my view of the mountains. And the damn rogue is trying to add on an octagonal tower - didn't we agree on no weird-shaped castle additions? The fighter will want to clear cut the whole area for defensibility and pasture, while the druid insists we preserve the wood as a home for the timid forest creatures. Believe me, I was president of our HOA for a few years; I know how this goes.

No, no, much better for everyone if we get as far apart as possible and build to our own desires. Even if you end up laying siege to my castle at some point, that's still worlds better than being neighbors, much less roommates.

clearstream · Oct 4, 2018

cmad1977 said:
Yes it is. Page count is irrelevant. The rules are simple to grasp and easy to run with. Hell, players don’t even need to know any rules beyond ‘tell the DM what you want to do and how. If he asks you to roll a die do so.’
5e is a light system.

Rules count is relevant, and that is frequently somewhat associated with page count. 5e is an intermediate to heavy system. Light systems are RPGs like Paranoia.

cmad1977 said:
If you find it to be complex I don’t know what to tell you.

It is complex, anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't thought it through

As a digression (why not, we've digressed all over the place in this thread) rules complexity is generally judged by the size of the state space, although in cognitive terms it should also be judged by number of dimensions for change, and whether those interact. Another factor in complexity is how many decisions are being made, and cognitively the factors bearing on and the implications of those decisions.

This is why I judge 5e in the main tiers of play to be possibly more complex than 3e, because I think on a straight count of decisions 5e characters have more options. That said, I've only thought about the main actions and the character abilities (from class, archetype, background, race). I think at higher tiers the two converge and perhaps 3e is more complex (if optional elements like prestige classes or epic skill uses are factored in).

So to be more concrete about your claim that 5e isn't complex, the rebuttal is straightforward: the state space is vast, and each round of combat there are a great many decisions to be made, and those decisions interact with one another and with a large collection of parameters.

clearstream · Oct 4, 2018

Jester David said:
The thing is, it's not a "house rule". You're not changing a rule or really adding a rule per se. You're making a ruling.

The perpetual struggle to claim one's own version is not a house rule, and some other guy's version is. I think it comes from a fear that a house rule is a lesser creature than an interpretation. FWIW I think a ruling means judging that based on the text and situation, a rule means X. So a ruling is RAI. Whereas a house rule is in place where the text needs to be added to or outright altered to reasonably have the natural language meaning desired.

To the case at hand, the precise mechanical outcome of a tie in Contests is expressly defined. The rules literally read "If the contest results in a tie, the situation remains the same as it was before the contest." Crossing the finish line, even tied, is not the situation remaining the same as before the contest. No one is saying a DM can't run it that way. I'm suggesting that it is a poor reading of "remains the same" to have things not remain the same: this is a claim about a precise mechanical outcome, not what we picture the scene to look like.

Jester David said:
You're deciding how the action is resolved in this instance, likely using the existing Chase rules in the DMG. Which isn't *that* different from deciding how a skill challenge is resolved in 4e, if even that. Really, a footrace is short and should probably just be opposed skill checks.

I can't honestly see why it isn't easier to have everyone make one standard ability check, and have them finish the race in descending order - high to low. To the point however, I'm also suggesting that the generality of "the DM... decides the difficulty of the task" gives scope for ruling this way without the degree of stretch required to use Contests.

clearstream · Oct 4, 2018

Lanefan said:
...the DC isn't set until after the rolls are made, at which point the DC is set as the value of the highest roll that is not the winning roll.

In other words it's a floating DC.

Agreed. Maybe part of this debate is simply that for some, a floating DC feels like it should always be a Contest, so they seek to fit those rules to it. In which case the literal text is unfortunate, but not really a barrier. For others (like me), I'm fine with a floating DC for a standard ability check.

From a design perspective the question is which is easier to manage. Revising Contests so that it covered both cases where a tie equated to no progress toward the goal, and cases where a tie equated to progress toward the goal, seems a tougher to me than putting that under standard checks, but the problem I would hit is that word Contests. I might feel that any time the DC was set by another creature's roll, it should be covered by whatever mechanics sit under that label.

Lanefan · Oct 4, 2018

Harzel said:
Dude! You can't be serious! Have you ever tried to arbitrate an interior decorating argument? I mean, you can have everyone have their own wing of the castle, but then there's still the questions about the great hall and the guest quarters, not to mention everyone wants to be near the garden and away from the middens. Now you could try separate keeps sharing some fortifications, but you'll have an endless debate about whether we really need that high a wall or that deep a moat, and OMG the plantings - shrubberies vs. no shubberies - they'll just never agree.

Now, I know what you're thinking: ok, you'll go in together to get a big parcel of land at a good price and at least our castles will be close together. Nope, not gonna work out. First off, there's the issue of who gets the high ground. Then it's your turret is blocking my view of the mountains. And the damn rogue is trying to add on an octagonal tower - didn't we agree on no weird-shaped castle additions? The fighter will want to clear cut the whole area for defensibility and pasture, while the druid insists we preserve the wood as a home for the timid forest creatures. Believe me, I was president of our HOA for a few years; I know how this goes.

No, no, much better for everyone if we get as far apart as possible and build to our own desires. Even if you end up laying siege to my castle at some point, that's still worlds better than being neighbors, much less roommates.

Joking aside, an all-hands stronghold can be done. They did it in my last campaign - fairly early on they did a huge favour for the king and were rewarded as a group with a bit of land to put a castle on and a bunch of money with which to build it. They built it, and they and others then spent the rest of the campaign adding to it; by campaign's end they'd poured maybe 100,000 g.p. into the place (including the initial 30K reward) and it was either the full-time home or part-time home base for about 30 characters.

In the game I'm playing in we're slowly working up to a similar kind of thing - one of the characters got the Keep card from a DoMT and put the keep in a useful/central enough place that a bunch of us are now living in or near it and slowly adding to it. Once we're done (if ever) it'll probably be similar in scale and numbers to the one noted above; except this one will have a new town beside it as well, also under our control.

And yes, there's occasional arguments.

Maxperson · Oct 4, 2018

pemerton said:
What does that mean? Choosing the target of an attack is also part of the combat system, but not combat itself. Making an attack roll is part of the combat system, but not combat itself.

The attacks, combat spells, taking and receiving damage, etc. You know, the combat portion of combat. The actual fighting. Simply picking the order people move in is not combat, even though it's in the combat portion of the game.

Maxperson · Oct 4, 2018

Sadras said:
Good grief. Footraces, initiative/combat, light/heavy systems

You guys need to get another hobby.

I'm directly opposed to that.

Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

pemerton

Legend

Sadras

Legend

Harzel

Adventurer

clearstream

(He, Him)

clearstream

(He, Him)

clearstream

(He, Him)

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus

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