D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[dave2008]

In general your experience with 5e and old school gaming (1e/2e/OSR) seems very different than mine, so I am not going to argue with you about our different experiences. They are just that - our experiences.

However, I do want to point out something abut this:

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."

Participating in a combat is a choice in D&D (at least usually IME). And sometimes the correct choice the PCs need to take is to avoid combat. This can be through social interaction, careful planning, or strategic avoidance. Some fights are unwinnable, but that doesn't mean PCs can't grow and continue their story.

 

[Remathilis]

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.

Rarely does a stupid death result in learning and introspection on a player's behalf. It usually ends in the player feeling betrayed and seeking revenge, either by stacking the deck (min maxing) or leaving. In 20+ years of D&D, I've never taught a player a lesson they weren't already willing to learn.

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

I feel sorry for anyone who still holds this self deprecating mindset after their first few sessions &⁵e designed to cement that mindset. I've seen this attitude in players occasionally in past editions, but it was generally limited to extremely new players approaching it with the mindset of a video game or similar competitive game where they need act as the first last and only mind on the island of every man for himself. I'm those past editions those extremely new players sometimes proactively looked at the risks where they quickly learned the depths of how far teamwork & collaboration in games like d&d early on. Other times those players had to look into that abyss of risk retroactively after things had gone sideways. Sideways can be anything from one or more PCs almost dying or using far more resources than reasonable to compensate for poor choices all the way to one or more players scolding them from the bully pulpit of a dead PC. In both subsets of players the players had to communicate their strengths and weaknesses so they could discuss how the party can better work together with a higher degree of teamwork & efficacy.

Now in 5e I see that self deprecating attitude in a significant plurality if not majority of new players and any efforts by anyone at the table to communicate in ways once needed to crack the ice are rebuffed as an offensive overstep to be ignored. That dismissal is reinforced by 5e's extreme lack of risk at anything because everyone quickly learns that there is no risk of every man for himself Unless the GM resorts to fiat and adversarial adventure design that can squarely aim the blame for failure at the GM. Even if someone at the table looks at the failure and tries to discuss what the PCs could have done differently, wotc has firmly entrenched the idea that it doesn't matter because their meat computer cheated to unfairly cause that failure just as the bolded bit of your post asserted before listing off scenarios where you were helpless unless someone had been prepared for those obvious party weaknesses with buffs debuffs battlefield control coordination and so on that would have previously been temporary combat avoidance and so on built up in the party teamwork muscles session after session.

When that sort of party teamwork structure never develops, it causes the problem where instead of seeing the Trainwreck coming early enough to dial it up to 11 so the party can seize the W the party just tips from "everything is fine" till immediately crashing into the L with no toolset developed to right the ship because they've convinced themselves they are powerless and avoided considering anything that might get suggest otherwise. After all, 5e has taken great pains to mislead you into thinking that your choice to put all of the party's eggs into shock &awe has nothing to do with the loss, it's that GM who designed the encounter who owns 100% of the responsibility.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In general your experience with 5e and old school gaming (1e/2e/OSR) seems very different than mine, so I am not going to argue with you about our different experiences. They are just that - our experiences.

However, I do want to point out something abut this:


Participating in a combat is a choice in D&D (at least usually IME). And sometimes the correct choice the PCs need to take is to avoid combat. This can be through social interaction, careful planning, or strategic avoidance. Some fights are unwinnable, but that doesn't mean PCs can't grow and continue their story.

Okay. What was I supposed to do at first level, literally dealing with the second combat of the game, which we did not know was there and could not have avoided if we wanted to continue literally our first adventure?

Because these things keep happening before reaching level 3. Often before reaching level 2.

 

[tetrasodium]

Okay. What was I supposed to do at first level, literally dealing with the second combat of the game, which we did not know was there and could not have avoided if we wanted to continue literally our first adventure?

Because these things keep happening before reaching level 3. Often before reaching level 2.

There's always something. Next time talk to your fellow players and put your heads together.

 

[dave2008]

Okay. What was I supposed to do at first level, literally dealing with the second combat of the game, which we did not know was there and could not have avoided if we wanted to continue literally our first adventure?

Because these things keep happening before reaching level 3. Often before reaching level 2.

Like I said, I am not interested in discussing your specific experience. Our experiences are different and that is OK.

 

[billd91]

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?

I don't think that playing through just APs is a particularly hallmark of 5e culture. A substantial number of WotC's own 5e adventures have been anthologies, though I can see people wanting to engage in a deeper story than an episodic dungeon of the week coming from successful streaming shows. I'm just not sure it's any more pervasive in 5e culture than the adventure anthologies.

As far as dungeon crawling, I don't think 5e is any less suited to it than any other edition, really. Most of the criticism about things like resource management avoidance existed in prior editions as well, so applying it to 5e is largely bunk. Same with things like darkvision which was pretty much just as widespread when it was infravision in the AD&D days. Combat is pretty fast in 5e - it certainly returns it to AD&D-like speeds compared to 3e and 4e. And the use of skills like Perception and Investigation just cut through the tedious pixel-auditing of 1e - and good riddance. The main reason 5e doesn't seem to be the dungeoncrawling edition, to me, is that dungeon crawling is kind of passé among my kids' generation. And I don't blame them. Dungeoncrawling can be boring. Really, really boring, particularly in a megadungeon. Smaller episodic dungeons, each with its own story, are much better because the dungeoncrawling has a more interesting context and is broken up into more manageable chunks - so I'm definitely sympathetic to Colville there.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I feel sorry for anyone who still holds this self deprecating mindset after their first few sessions &⁵e designed to cement that mindset. I've seen this attitude in players occasionally in past editions, but it was generally limited to extremely new players approaching it with the mindset of a video game or similar competitive game where they need act as the first last and only mind on the island of every man for himself. I'm those past editions those extremely new players sometimes proactively looked at the risks where they quickly learned the depths of how far teamwork & collaboration in games like d&d early on. Other times those players had to look into that abyss of risk retroactively after things had gone sideways. Sideways can be anything from one or more PCs almost dying or using far more resources than reasonable to compensate for poor choices all the way to one or more players scolding them from the bully pulpit of a dead PC. In both subsets of players the players had to communicate their strengths and weaknesses so they could discuss how the party can better work together with a higher degree of teamwork & efficacy.

Now in 5e I see that self deprecating attitude in a significant plurality if not majority of new players and any efforts by anyone at the table to communicate in ways once needed to crack the ice are rebuffed as an offensive overstep to be ignored. That dismissal is reinforced by 5e's extreme lack of risk at anything because everyone quickly learns that there is no risk of every man for himself Unless the GM resorts to fiat and adversarial adventure design that can squarely aim the blame for failure at the GM. Even if someone at the table looks at the failure and tries to discuss what the PCs could have done differently, wotc has firmly entrenched the idea that it doesn't matter because their meat computer cheated to unfairly cause that failure just as the bolded bit of your post asserted before listing off scenarios where you were helpless unless someone had been prepared for those obvious party weaknesses with buffs debuffs battlefield control coordination and so on that would have previously been temporary combat avoidance and so on built up in the party teamwork muscles session after session.

When that sort of party teamwork structure never develops, it causes the problem where instead of seeing the Trainwreck coming early enough to dial it up to 11 so the party can seize the W the party just tips from "everything is fine" till immediately crashing into the L with no toolset developed to right the ship because they've convinced themselves they are powerless and avoided considering anything that might get suggest otherwise. After all, 5e has taken great pains to mislead you into thinking that your choice to put all of the party's eggs into shock &awe has nothing to do with the loss, it's that GM who designed the encounter who owns 100% of the responsibility.

I...genuinely do not know what you are saying with "that self deprecating attitude."

And when I'm talking about these things, I'm genuinely not kidding when I say this is the second or third combat of the entire campaign. Not "we went several levels and did a bunch of adventures." I'm talking about things where the group hadn't even actually been together long enough to even know what the other characters could DO yet. And yet we were having bandits jump us in the middle of a critically-needed short rest after the third combat of the entire game, so the DM denied us any healing (because we hadn't finished the short rest, see) and then had a squad of bandits roll in. At which point, we TPK'd (except, as noted, the Rogue who managed to run away).

Having already had literally the second combat of the game end in a "we barely survived" and my character specifically would have unavoidably died without the DM actively (and begrudgingly) allowing a remove curse, and then the third combat being again "we barely survived," only to get jumped by bandits after only the second short rest we'd ever taken in that campaign, yeah. I was done. I was thoroughly demoralized and had no desire to continue playing in that game, despite the other people there being friends.

I am, if you'll pardon the pun, deadly serious when I say that I have, on at least two (possibly three) occasions, been put in a situation where we got a full or near-full party wipe at or before second level, for literally no other reason than that we decided to go to where the adventure pointed us. In the first two of those cases, both times the group had no more money than a 1st-level character starts with, so each group had no meaningful ability to acquire new tools. Each group had had fewer than four fights (three in one case, two in the other) before the TPK fight, meaning we'd had nowhere near enough time to learn how to work together as useful teamwork. In both cases, any spell slots we had were mostly depleted because, again, we'd already had a rough combat recently.

There literally wasn't anything we could do. We were taking the adventure at face value, going to a place we were supposed to go, and stumbling into a combat at that place. On two different occasions, with completely unrelated groups (one a group of friends, the other a group of strangers), this resulted in a TPK (or effectively one.)

This has nothing to do with underestimating my own capabilities (which I guess is maybe what you were meaning?), and everything to do with there literally just weren't any options we could have used.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There's always something. Next time talk to your fellow players and put your heads together.

WHAT CAN A FIRST LEVEL CHARACTER DO???

For God's sake, you act like the power of friendship is some magical fairy-dust that can turn any problem into beautiful success. That is simply not true. And it is especially not true in low-level 5e, where an ogre emitting a particularly aggressive fart might kill a character.

Again: I am literally talking about a situation where we had already barely scraped it through only the third fight of the entire campaign, where we had had multiple people drop to low single-digit HP, so we decided to take a short rest. At which point, we got jumped by several bandits who proceeded to down a PC on the very first turn, and down all but the Rogue by the end of the second turn.

What on earth could we have done?

 

[Gus L]

I don't think that playing through just APs is a particularly hallmark of 5e culture. A substantial number of WotC's own 5e adventures have been anthologies, though I can see people wanting to engage in a deeper story than an episodic dungeon of the week coming from successful streaming shows. I'm just not sure it's any more pervasive in 5e culture than the adventure anthologies.

As far as dungeon crawling, I don't think 5e is any less suited to it than any other edition, really. Most of the criticism about things like resource management avoidance existed in prior editions as well, so applying it to 5e is largely bunk. Same with things like darkvision which was pretty much just as widespread when it was infravision in the AD&D days. Combat is pretty fast in 5e - it certainly returns it to AD&D-like speeds compared to 3e and 4e. And the use of skills like Perception and Investigation just cut through the tedious pixel-auditing of 1e - and good riddance. The main reason 5e doesn't seem to be the dungeoncrawling edition, to me, is that dungeon crawling is kind of passé among my kids' generation. And I don't blame them. Dungeoncrawling can be boring. Really, really boring, particularly in a megadungeon. Smaller episodic dungeons, each with its own story, are much better because the dungeoncrawling has a more interesting context and is broken up into more manageable chunks - so I'm definitely sympathetic to Colville there.

I agree to an extent with the observations - not however with all the conclusions.

In my personal experience 5E dungeon crawls were boring and I also note they are not popular with the culture of play around the game. But I think this is because they aren't supported by the products, design, culture, or mechanics of 5e.

As an alternative, I find my OD&D (1974) house-ruled game has worked quite well for exciting dungeon crawl games ...

In general - and again I would argue this as an example of how the mechanics of 5E militates against the dungeon crawl, and so also the location based and sandbox style - it's precisely the sort of "roll to find it" and "roll to get clues" mechanics of perception etc, rather then the question and answer format of the older style of play (or more likely the Post 2011 OSR style of play that is often called older - it's hard to pin actual 1970's play culture down) makes exploration and unpuzzling the fantastical environment the primary locus of play.

My experience playing and reading 5E adventures suggests that it works best with scene (or perhaps to avoid confusion - encounter) based design built around set piece that are encounters placed within a branching (but ideally well pruned) pre-defined grand narrative.

I don't think this distinction or these limitations/styles take away from 5E as a system (or OD&D for that matter), and I am not trying to suggests that 5E fans should play dungeon crawls, even using X or Y rules or systems. However, I do think that one of the places we suffer as a hobby is trying to claim that a games can be all things at once, rather then acknowledging that different rule sets and play cultures aim at different things.

Again the questions I find compelling are:

What form of adventure design best supports the particular system of 5E (or 5E clones/alikes) and its preferred play style?

Why wouldn't this be the WotC style "epic"?

Why would it instead be something akin to the 1980's TSR module system of drop in location based adventures (or even mini-portal realm adventures like Castle Amber...)?