A Change of Discussion

[pemerton]

I've run a campaign (Rolemaster, around 25-30 years ago) where two PCs were change self-based. It opens up a significant range of options that otherwise aren't available, when dealing with both NPCs and PCs!

 

[Teulisch]

D&D is about objectives. the most common 3 solutions are combat (damage), stealth, and social. so while party A may fight the goblins, party B may sneak past them undetected, maybe using poison or sleep spells at times where stealth is impossible. and party C will use their insanely high charisma to try to talk everyone to death (bards, paladins, sorcerers, warlocks, swashbuckler rogues).

the real problem is that at some point we moved away from the 'get treasure' ideal of 1e, and towards a 'kill everything for xp' style of game instead, where advancement (and thus treasure) is only ever a reward for murder. or worse yet, the entire game becomes a single 'save the world' quest with no room for anything else at all, the direction that many new modules have taken. you get more of the behavior that you reward, and less of any other behaviors. the modern D&D game often rewards only defeating combat encounters.

in older editions, 'trap' choices were intentionally built into the system. these days they are much less common, but some do still exist. some spells can be very situational. a lot of spells are about area control- fog cloud and grease, for example. they work better in confined spaces, where they can have a larger impact on the terrain. in a large open field, they cease to be meaningful spells because anyone can just go around them. it all depends on the context of the game. in this way, utility spells are useless if all you ever do is combat, but incredibly valuable when you get to be creative with their use.

 

[GMMichael]

What other ways could we, if so inclined, discuss character ability to move or shape a game other than DPR/DPS or whatever? No we don't have to...but for fun, how would we quantify it? What areas would be included? I am struggling to think of something as succinct as DPR/DPS perhaps because of the variability in actual play. But it seems that accessing, acquiring and avoiding targets and danger should be as important as DPR or whatever.

How about Victory Ratio, or the frequency with which a character's "build" wins the (exact) desired outcome in a situation?

You can use this for exploration: I found/didn't find the location/treasure/etc.

Social encounters: I changed his mind/got my way/etc.

Going out on a limb here, but I'm going to say that ease-of-observation isn't the only thing at play behind DPR metrics-popularity. You can also calculate DPR without actually playing a game, which is not something VR lends itself to. So, just rebrand DPR as an armchair-gamer's statistic, and maybe the rats will jump ship.

 

[Oofta]

While I agree with the concept, I don't know that there is any way you could develop a formula. Let's say you have two wizards, one focusing on DPR, the other on creative and useful spells. The former takes spells like chromatic orb (or whatever spell looks best on a spreadsheet), the latter takes grease.

The former does damage, the latter does not. Depending on the DM and the player, the former is going to be hands down more effective. But with the right DM and player the latter could be devastating to those monsters trying to climb a cliff to sneak attack the defenders at the gate.

But it's situational. Does the DM cater to or work with the player to maximize the effect of the non-damaging spells? Or only set up situations where you're in a 10 ft wide corridor where the monsters just have to tip-toe carefully over the grease that the always know about and know how to avoid?

So great concept, but I don't see how you could ever come up with real numbers. DPR calculated on a spreadsheet is simple and people can always claim that "the numbers don't lie" which may or may not be true. Personally I think a lot of 'optimal" builds are over-hyped and exaggerated while being overshadowed by other factors but that's another topic.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Yeah, there’s a world of difference between data and information. Information is data with context. At my one table, there’s a PC with a really high damage output. Yet, he’s also one of the two PCs most likely to botch a social challenge for the group. What looks like a star PC from the one side, doesn’t look so hot when you add the other. I guess you could calculate # of combat encounters defeated vs. # of social encounters succeeded at, both divided by total number of encounters throughout the session? Can you tell I’ve also had to work with metrics and KPI?

This reminds me of setting goals / KPIs for my employees. HR keeps on about measurable goals - but oft times what you want to encourage and reward aren't measurable in terms of here's an objective number. If I have one guy who's always dependable, will work the hours needed, and will stay with a problem with the tensity of a bulldog, what's the objective measurement I can put in vs. the guy who cherry picks the easiest tickets and turns in more of them than anyone else?

So white room DPR is something easy to calculate and compare, but just a portion of what we're looking at, just like number of tickets is a poor indication. It's the parts that are harder to numerically evaluate, or even more, vary by DM and table, that oft get overlooked because they aren't easy to evaluate.

 

[Blue]

D&D is (nominally) a game of resource-management, so the obvious metric for utility abilities is in how many resources they conserve. If you can conserve two low-level spell slots and 30hp by talking your way past a fight, then you can compare that to the 15hp that the barbarian's power attack saves by ending the fight one round earlier, and it's obvious that the first ability is better in that instance.

The problem is that, in practice, the resource-management aspect of D&D is irrelevant. You get all of your HP and spells back every morning, and the party will call it a day before they actually run low enough that it would affect their performance, so it doesn't matter whether or not you conserve anything by bypassing a fight. In fact, it feels disappointing to go to bed with all of your HP, because you know you were playing too conservatively; you should have been able to accomplish more in a day, if you had actually expended your resources rather than conserving them (whether or not that's actually true).

If D&D full sessions were applicable to some sort of monte-carlo repeated testing, I'd say that it wouldn't be to track resources saved - since as you point out there are no rewards for ending up with unused resources - but rather to determine the number of times that there was a resource outage during an adventuring day.

For example, damage taken is unimportant, but actions lost to being unconscious or incapacitated is. And that might be a failure of 0 HP or maybe failure to save against crowd control spells. Or just out of position with lousy ranged options is a partial demerit for a STR based melee combatant.

But D&D isn't that type of game. And since there is so much party dependent that still would likely not have much meaning. Is being at 0 HPs a lot because of low AC? A bad save that got hit a lot? Bad tanking or bad healing by someone else? Not enough battlefield control?

To sum up: I agree with you; how can we actually design a metric that is both measurable and useful?

 

[Ancalagon]

I would say that building a character only geared towards combat is a "trap option"

I recently made an EK/hexblade. In general the gish needs his magic to make himself better in combat, but I made sure to take some spells and invocation that had utility too. Find familiar, suggestion, illusions... He could have been more combat focused, but that is less fun overall imo.

 

[77IM]

Yes! For years I have been searching for a game that quantifies consequences.

Many games spend a lot of effort quantifying chances -- bonuses and penalties to your die roll -- which, granted, can be very important to your immediate, short-term decision-making. And most games have really well-quantified consequences regarding damage and combat effects, and hit points and death. But so many (including D&D 5e) completely just hand-wave other sorts of changes to the world, like persuading someone or discovering something. For example, convincing someone to give you the time of day is much less consequential than persuading your arch-enemy to join your side. Or, crafting a new pair of shoes that just looks cool is of much less consequence than successfully researching the BBEG's one weakness. Using disguise self to solve an encounter is much less consequence than using disguise self to solve an entire adventure.

Here are some games that make a good effort to quantify consequences:

• Blades in the Dark provides an excellent framework with its emphasis on numeric "effect" and its use of progress clocks. Progress clocks are kind of like HP, but for anything you wish to do; and effect is kind of like damage, but for anything. However, BitD doesn't provide concrete guidance as to how big to make a progress clock or what kinds of actions should have what sort of effect; everything is relative and it's up to the GM and players to work it out.
• A great little game called Jovian Despair has excellent failure-based mechanics in which your degree of failure determines whether you suffer a minor setback or a TPK. I'd love to see something similar for success.
• FATE's use of aspects and the "FATE fractal" (in which any game element can be given stats and interacted with as a character) could be considered a way of quantifying consequences.

Anyway, once you can quantify the consequences of any action, then it becomes easier to look at non-combat actions in terms of their expected consequences.

 

[FrogReaver]

You don’t win the game by being the best at combat but you can certainly lose he game by being bad at combat. (As long as death is considered a loss.

A failed deception or persuasion check may force you into a combat you otherwise could have bypassed but not bypassing a combat only means death if you ultimately die while in combat.

 

[Blue]

I would say that building a character only geared towards combat is a "trap option"

I recently made an EK/hexblade. In general the gish needs his magic to make himself better in combat, but I made sure to take some spells and invocation that had utility too. Find familiar, suggestion, illusions... He could have been more combat focused, but that is less fun overall imo.

I agree that a character built only around combat is a "trap option".

Unfortunately, I think a character built to be able to do everything is also a trap option. Because D&D is a cooperative, team-based game. And unfortunately combat is designed around all characters contributing synergistically, many of the other pillars of the game are not, and have little mechanical benefit from more then 1-2 who are good at a particular task.

For example, having a party of five who are all at the "very good" level of tracking is barely better than having one very good and one who can use the aid another (well, the non-combat version of it).

And there's an opportunity cost to being good at something, even if it's just another skill you could have taken.

So being able to do some things some from the set of "just a few good at" and all from the set of "everyone expected to be good at" (what else besides combat?) gives a character that can contribute well to the team without diluting their competence.