I completely agree!
Thing is, at the table nobody else wants to sit through possibly hours of me looking after personal-to-the-character downtime stuff, and that's fair enough; so I'll go to the pub some night with the DM and we'll sort it then. Failing that, at some point there'll be a lot of back-and-forth by email.
In the fiction, the rest of the rather large adventuring company we're all part of aren't going to sit on their duffs doing nothing while my mage futzes around for possibly several in-game months. We've got about six different story arcs on the go, never mind the ones waiting in line until we can get to them.
Sure, but there is not always a need for them to be sitting around and doing nothing. They can be involved.
I'm not saying that I've never talked to people outside the game about long-downtime, I've done it more than a few times. But the story being crafted is "these people in this world". For me, if there is a major event going on and part of the party is going to go deal with it, the rest of the party follows. They don't just take off and leave their friends behind to face something like a Lich or a rampaging dragon.
So, we often do downtime at the same time, and some times we just circle the table asking what each person wants to do.
I have something like five or six active characters in that game plus two others that are long-term out of action (one lost her mind, another got reduced to a Con of 5 through repeated death-revive cycles). In other words, there's more than I can play all at once, so parking one of them for some downtime makes, on a completely metagame level, a lot of sense. Conveniently, it's also exactly what this character would do: she has some big-time political ambitions in her long-term goals, and laying the groundwork for that isn't really do-able in the field.
Never had a game where anyone had more than one active character. It just isn't how we approach the game.
Unsustainable if the setting isn't knee-deep in monsters. 6-8 encounters a day - let's be generous and say half will be social and-or exploratory, and the rest combat. That's 3-4 fights a day. Multiply that by a lot of days and a lot of adventurers and - unless they're out to kill every demon in hell or something - the setting falls apart.
Not really. There is a theoritical limit to undead, but it is in the billions for a setting. Most monster populations are sustained, so while it would be possible to drive some of them to extinction, you'd have to be fighting the same thing over and over and over again. I mean, equate something like owlbears to Black Bears and you are looking at likely over 300,000 in just part of the setting. And to kill even half of that would require fighting two owlbears every day, four times a day, for over a hundred years. Sure, if there are thousands of adventurers all fighting just owlbears, and winning, then you might depopulate the area, but that's REALLY stretching it. And that doesn't account for literally any other type of monster, or the monstrous humanoids.
Sure, Europeans killed many of their native large predators, but it took a long time and most DnD monsters are WAY deadlier than anything on earth. I don't see it as a serious concern.
From the strictly gamist sense, this is correct.
I try to look at it from the reality-of-the-fiction sense, that being something of a mirror of our own reality, and if-when there's a big conflict with gamist concerns (here the obvious example is hit point recovery) then gamist concerns can kindly go take a hike.
Problem. This is a game. We aren't engaging in a mirror simulation of reality, we are engaging with a game. And it is only when people start saying that it must be a reality simulator that this is ever a problem. And again, I refer you back to your initial point, which was that the game has been made "too easy" because the designers were "too spineless" to stand up to players. But this is a good
GAME design. And they are
GAME designers.
True, but even if it's a spectrum one can choose which end to trend toward.
True, but that doesn't mean every single player always wants to trend towards less difficulty.
I neither buy into nor have any sympathy for the bolded theory.
shrug
Two studies were conducted to understand why subtraction with fluency is harder than addition. In Study I, 33 kindergartners were individually asked t…
www.sciencedirect.com
By analyzing children's accuracy and reaction time, it was concluded, in light of Piaget's theory, that subtraction is harder than addition because children deduce differences from their knowledge of sums.
Micro reflects macro. Adding is easier than subtracting. Maybe I'm stretching this from simple math to game design, but I notice that I've never seen a game designer start from an incredibly complicated system then trim it down, unless they are working from someone else's design which was already complicated. No one started computer programming by writing the unreal engine then reducing it down to Pong.
Adding is just easier.
Yes, it's easier than 3e...but that's kinda like saying brain surgery is easier than rocket science.
So, we are in agreement that a less complex and easier system is better for the players.
It's badly designed for me, hence my not playing/running it.
Right, but this conversation started with you making claims about the health of the hobby as a whole, not whether or not you like it. I wouldn't have engaged with you over "I don't like how 5e was designed, which is why I don't play it" but you went with "5e's design is going to lead to the death of the game" which is a much stronger and less personal claim.
Funny, I had exactly the opposite experience. I played a lot of chess in high school against a wide variety of opponents, very enjoyable. Later in life, while I was by no means a good chess player at any time, the people around me were worse; meaning I quickly got bored winning all the time and thus don't play any more.
I never got to the point of playing it in high school. I was done before Middle School. Or at least early middle school.
And yes, it is also possible for a game to be too easy. But, again, DnD 5e has a fix for exactly that.
Something to keep in mind is there's two different types of "easier".
5e, in comparison to 0e or even stripped-down 1e, is not easy to learn from scratch at the table; particularly if the DM is using feats and other various bells and whistles. I'm all for making the game easier in this regard.
But 5e in comparison to 0e or 1e is, inarguably, easier on the characters in the fiction and by extension the players at the table. Win conditions are too easily met, loss conditions too infrequent, and in-play challenges too watered-down. That's where I'm pushing back.
And I disagree with you. In-play challeges are only as "watered down" as the DM makes them. I recently ended up with a discussion with Maxperson who claimed to want a monster ability that cuts player level in half with a single save. Chunk, half your levels are gone til you recover. He made it til a short rest. You could make it permanent. Loss conditions are infrequent because the only loss condition is, for many groups, ending the game.
I think there is a tremendous difference here that you aren't seeing, because of how you look at player characters. Most people can lose a character, but it disrupts the entire part of the game they want to explore. They don't want to be cog #5 in the machinery of the story of The Blackscale Mercenaries. They want the Blackscale Mercenaries to be Yue Silverhorn, Shea The Gilded, Trosk Bladehammer, and Seven, and they want to tell the story of their adventures.
People often reference Tolkien in the discussions about DnD, and this is one of the few places that this makes sense. The Fellowship of the Ring isn't a cast of 50 people who come in and out of the story. They don't have Aaragorn leave the party to go and become the King of Gondor, or Gimli killed off to be replaced by Boian. In fact, only one member of the Fellowship is actually killed. Boromir, who is most famous for being the member of the Fellowship who is killed.
Yes, we risk death for our characters, because we want that taste of danger, but since the majority of people play the game with an eye to having one, long-lasting character whose stories they can tell, the game is appropriately designed to make permanent death difficult.
That doesn't mean all our victories are handed to us, or that we suffer no setbacks, or that we don't gain any "real" sense of accomplishment from our victories. I'll note that you have survived all of your life, and I'm sure you felt a sense of accomplishment even when you weren't in a life-or-death situation. Challenges don't have to be just death or just status conditions. If that was all people wanted, Video Games do it better. The challenge of TTRPGS comes from out-of-the-box solutions, from setbacks that are not mechanical in nature.
Just because a character survives til the end of the story doesn't mean they didn't face real challenges. 90% of all stories have the main character survive until the end. We know they aren't going to die off, because that's not the point of the story. The point is "how do they win". You may not like that, but I'm getting very very tired of people confidently asserting that the challenges I provide my players aren't real, and they didn't earn their victories, just because I keep the body count low.