D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[EzekielRaiden]

The character moments it displays are those where you strain to get farther than anyone else has, even if it's not all the way to the end.

And I am still, fundamentally, left asking: What was the point? If the ending cannot even in principle be reached, why did I bother? At least if it could have been reached, had I simply made wiser choices, then the failure is on me--it's a "skill issue," to appropriate a usually dismissive internet phrase. (Though, of course, this then gets into the thorny issue of whether one is able to make wise choices or is simply given luck-of-the-draw, which IMO thoroughly invalidates the "it was on me" aspect just as badly as making it an inevitable failure.)

And when the foregone conclusion is death, the true character moments come in a) how you die and b) what you did in the career you had before you died.

Precisely! That is precisely the problem. When the death is "some random punk/orc soldier/sewer rat/etc. got a lucky crit," how you died provides no true character moments. When "what you did in the career you had before you died" is "at best 1-2 incredibly basic dungeon heists where you... [3d100 clattering] stole some jewelry from...the burial mound of...an ancient warlock," and in general is "you went into one murder-hole and never came out again," there are no such moments there, either.

That's my whole point. Hence: the bitter taste of unfulfilled dreams and the wistful contemplation of what could have been. You had been very specific that you were talking about the lowest of low-level characters, where players have no attachment to their characters at all. Exactly the point at which the way you died will almost never produce any kinds of true character moments, and the career you had before you died was nil because you hadn't done anything yet.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Of course - few things take as long as 250 page WotC tome. Adren-Vul?

I still find it funny that Coleville picked Castle Amber of all the 1E modules to make his point.

It's far closer to the modern epic then most. An entire secondary world/portal adventure with several chapters rather then a drop in location type ... so in many ways one of the least modular modules from the era. Not a bad one by any means, and I know he says he liked playing it ... but... Also I suppose Castle Amber is more in line with Coleville's preferred play style as it's far more structured, with clear story beats, and "trad" then a lot of the well known 1970's - early 80's modules.

Indeed, it’s a prime example of the “early modern” style with a strong narrative, characterisation, and stuff to do outside the dungeon beyond a hexcrawl. It’s more akin to Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Pharaoh, and what was going on with other RPG systems than a normal Expert set adventure. Definitely an outlier.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Precisely! That is precisely the problem. When the death is "some random punk/orc soldier/sewer rat/etc. got a lucky crit

That was the big shift that occurred early on in D&D. So far as Gygax was concerned, low level characters were just random punks who died meaningless deaths.

But starting very early, there was a desire in other quarters to tell more heroic stories. And this is were “being there” matters. It was in magazines like White Dwarf, it was in other game systems, largely forgotten and undocumented. If you didn’t live though it, the remaining ephemera doesn’t tell the whole story. Add to that propaganda from the OSR crowd, and it’s hard to get an accurate picture.

It looks like DL1, with its starting level 3-7 “heroes of the lance” came out of nowhere. It didn’t.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've been asking myself this question for decades.

Since I am normally longwinded, I will try to be brief:

Because it is more interesting to see what the hero(es) must sacrifice in order to achieve success, than to see the hero(es) die and thus eliminate all possible future stories.

This is quite beautifully illustrated in the Justice League episode, "A Better World part 2." TL;DR: the League is up against alternate-universe counterparts who went turbofascist dictators, the Justice Lords. The Lords are willing to kill. How will the League beat them? What sacrifice will they make? They negotiate a Presidential pardon for Lex Luthor, who turns over a power-disruption ray. It's still tense--and it grows new story, rather than ending all possibility of new story.

 

[tetrasodium]

That's why I always talk about random, permanent, irrevocable death. None of these sacrifices you speak of are random. They are very consciously chosen. I cannot overstate how VAST a difference a consciously-chosen sacrifice is over "random mook #112 got a lucky crit and you died." You'll also note how both BG3 and the Dragon Age games don't permanently kill characters off. BG3, you have the existing 5e rules, and every companion comes with one or more scrolls of revivify, and even those are rarely necessary because there's an NPC you can't avoid recruiting who can revive dead party members for you (albeit at a small gold cost.) DA games have nonpermanent death; characters stand back up. BG3 has non-irrevocable death; the dead stay dead, unless revived, for a cost. IMO, it's a slap-on-the-wrist cost and it would be implemented better if there were actual narrative consequences for death, as was the case in, frex, Planescape: Torment, but that's a separate issue.

Truly random, permanent, irrevocable death is rare in CRPGs, for a variety of reasons. That's why the best of them use costs and consequences that aren't the death of the player character in order to give weight to things. BG3, to continue the example, has the half-ilithid and full-ilithid transformations.

You write this as if nothing the hypothetical player &their party does prior to that "lucky crit" had any influence on the situation leading to the death. That's simply not true however, there's always something that the party or player could have done differently. It's important analyze the choices (not) made after a PC death rather than throwing your hands up and declaring it a powerless puppet of chance and luck or the party can't grow &do better in future. You can see how oppressive 5e's near certain safety is here in how nova shifted from what was often an emergency solution to a Trainwreck that could be coming over to an opening move.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That was the big shift that occurred early on in D&D. So far as Gygax was concerned, low level characters were just random punks who died meaningless deaths.

But starting very early, there was a desire in other quarters to tell more heroic stories. And this is were “being there” matters. It was in magazines like White Dwarf, it was in other game systems, largely forgotten and undocumented. If you didn’t live though it, the remaining ephemera doesn’t tell the whole story. Add to that propaganda from the OSR crowd, and it’s hard to get an accurate picture.

It looks like DL1, with its starting level 3-7 “heroes of the lance” came out of nowhere. It didn’t.

I mean, I understand that I didn't live through it. But I had presumed all of this was true. Dragonlance may have been what we might call the "trope maker," but not the "ur-example"--and a lot of the real candidates for ur-example are obscure today.

Iyiu write this as if nothing the hypothetical player &their party does prior to that "lucky crit" had any influence on the situation leading to the death.

Because, in my experience of OSR, that is precisely how it works. Unless "the choice to play at all" is what you're speaking of, which I don't really consider a valid response.

That's simply not true however, there's always something that the party or player could have done differently. It's important analyze the choices (not) made after a PC death rather than throwing your hands up and declaring it a powerless puppet of chance and luck or the party can't grow &do better in future. You can see how oppressive 5e's near certain safety is here in how nova shifted from what was often an emergency solution to a Trainwreck that could be coming over to an opening move.

Except that in almost every case that I hear about, it IS being a powerless puppet of chance and luck, where you often had at best a 1/3 or 1/2 chance of success even if you'd chosen wise actions. And that's presuming you weren't subjected to iterative probability on top of that.

Certainly, in the multiple near or actual TPKs I've seen in 5e, it's been literally because "I particpated in the combat that the DM wrote." The only way to not get obliterated by mummy rot or shanked by bandits while we took a desperately-needed short rest or not getting pulverized in literally the very first combat of the campaign would have been to refuse to play the game as offered by the DM.

 

[Gus L]

Paul Farquhar said,
(and I screwed up the quotes for)

Indeed, it’s a prime example of the “early modern” style with a strong narrative, characterisation, and stuff to do outside the dungeon beyond a hexcrawl. It’s more akin to Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Pharaoh, and what was going on with other RPG systems than a normal Expert set adventure. Definitely an outlier.

Castle Amber is rather unique - not Hickmanism like Pharoah (ugh that module ruins pyramids), and not Saltmarsh's experimental English style D&D. I think it really does a good job.

What I find interesting from Coleville's argument and to an extent his inclusion of Castle Amber, is that I largely agree that one doesn't NEED giant tomes, and that they are often not optimal ... but ... I don't know if they are not optimal for the kind of D&D that 5E has turned into? I am no expert on the play culture of 5E in 2024, but it strikes me that the dream of playing through a novel length story where your backstory is melded seamlessly with a tale of heroism and adventure is precisely the play experience that streaming culture and hence 5E culture are trying to offer?

As much as I might like the grittier, party as the basic narrative unit, location based dungeon crawl with room-by-room procedural exploration, complex gray v. gray morality and such of an older style sandbox and location based campaign -- it doesn't seem to be what 5E does well? For example, the game doesn't really offer "dungeon crawl" tools with 60 turn torches/dark-vision, a disinclination random encounters, milestone levelling, and a combat economy where encounters take a long time to play out, depend on a rest system, and the power curve is rather steep. Forgive me if my impressions are wrong, I've only played about a year of 5E, but it's just not the system for a sandbox and scattering of location based adventures?

I think Coleville knows this -- so what is he suggesting? Certainly 5 scene/room dungeons only go so far?

 

[cbwjm]

Has anyone said it should be for you?

Lots and lots and lots of people have said, to one degree or another, that it shouldn't be for me. I have never, not once, said that it should be for anyone, let alone for everyone. I have argued that folks over-value death as a consequence, but that's quite a bit different from the "what you describe literally means NO consequences AT ALL, so you obviously can't be playing a game that actually has failure conditions" arguments.

No one said it should be for me, I'm just participating in the conversation with my opinion on it which is, that it is not for me.

 

[amethal]

Also, there is the dark reflection if the "noble sacrifice ending": A character doing something monumentally and lethally stupid, which the player has been warned is monumentally and lethally stupid, and which they choose to do anyway, consciously and intentionally ignoring or dismissing the risk. That is also not a random death, but for rather a more disappointing reason. Namely, the player, ahem, fooled around and found out. A player who does this once usually does not need to be told thereafter that if you play stupid games, you will win stupid prizes, but if it does happen more than once, a heart-to-heart is almost certainly required.

I've only seen this once, in a 3rd edition game.

The party were on some kind of floating platform, with another platform nearby. The whole area was shrouded in mist, and we had no idea how far down it was to the bottom.

The armour-wearing fighter, quite strong but with no ranks in Jump, decided to jump across to the next platform. The DM explained it was a moderately difficult skill check (which I took to be DC 15, which probably worked out as about a 20% chance of success for this character after adjusting for Strength and the armour check penalty) and the consequences for failure could be severe since we didn't know how far down it was.

The player did anyway, failed the check, and then failed the Reflex save to grab hold of the edge of the platform and prevent the fall. The fall killed the character.

The player then blamed the DM for the character's death. As far as I could tell, he learned nothing from the experience.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Because, in my experience of OSR, that is precisely how it works. Unless "the choice to play at all" is what you're speaking of, which I don't really consider a valid response.

No, I mean D&D was already fragmenting into groups playing very differently by the early 80s. Although pre-internet some folk might not have been aware of developments elsewhere. D&D reaching the UK may have been something of a catalyst.