D&D 5E reducing dominance of ranged: cantrips

[dkmurphy]

I'm a poor roleplayer in a roleplaying light group, and I feel the same way. One of our players is on his second warlock in two campaigns. The first one was slain outright by his patron for refusing to betray the party. He has a better arrangement this time, by all accounts. No one is dipping into warlock.



Certainly, I would get bored by doing the same thing over and over. That used to be the knock against playing a fighter.



Sorta. The DM won't put the time into building that NPC that I put into building my character, and he can't run an NPC party as well as 5 players can run 5 PCs.

This is absolutely true. However if the DM DOES want to offer more of a challenge to a player they can invest some time as online for help and get ideas to do that. The DM also is NOT obligated to disclose HOW an NPC or monster did something. As a player some of the most fun encounters were ones the DM tailored to challenge our party, and most likely broke some of the rules as written. It makes a better story and is more fun.



And tastes will change over time. In the late days of 3.5, I built a focused specialist wizard that just threw orbs of force. He was unstoppable, and being unstoppable was a lot of fun until eventually it wasn't. My last 3.5 wizard focused on battlefield control.



Sure, but if that player with the sorcerer chose Subtle Spell, the most un-DPR-ish of metamagic options, for just that kind of rarely occurring scenario, are you really going to foil all that investment for your story? I hope not.

Absolutely not. However most DM's are not trying to TPK the party. They might have something really cool planned and might railroad some of the details to get to a fun point. So let the player try things, and get creative. Be willing to change your plot/plan if the PC comes up with something clever and cool, or just say, no it didn't work..... the DM is under no obligation to explain HOW everything happens and why, so if the DM doesn't want the character getting out of the cell somehow it doesn't work. Generally DM's are trying to make a fun game. If your DM is a power hungry petty jerk, find a new DM that is more fun.


Yes, it is your job to bring the adversity, while avoiding inadvertent TPKs. There is no story otherwise.

In regards to me cheating as a DM. It is most often to AVOID a TPK. As a player I generally play wizards and rogues, and do so creatively and have a main villain in the background who gathers intel. I've also played longer than many of the players so I remember things that worked in various games in the past, and sometimes I make an encounter too hard. So I try to leave an out. Also as a DM I tell the players just because you MEET a monster doesn't mean you have any chance to beat it. I also give XP for overcoming and encounter, they don't have to murder hobo everything to advance in level. Most of my cheating is basically pulling a PC's butt out of the fire because they did something stupid and it would be unsatisfying for the character to die there. Much better a heroic death doing something memorable.



Or it could just mean that the player has chosen to fill a particular role in the party. You could have one caster who skews toward battlefield control and another who specializes in ranged attack spells, cantrips included, a third who focuses on AOE stuff, a fourth who mostly does buffs. Or one of your casters might split his attention between any two of those areas of focus. Over many levels, an odds and sods adventuring party can morph into a killing machine. In 4e, it started that way. The 4e adventuring party was a combat unit. The default construct was a leader, a controller, a defender and two strikers.

Never played 4e enough to know much about the system. It didn't feel like D&D to me. The few times I played it it WAS fun, but not the type of fun I was looking for. That said players often design a character for a certain role and that is ok. The DM has many options to challenge the players, and if they are not creative enough they can ask for help and ideas online and get tons of good advice. Best advice I can give is that the DM does not follow the rules as written and makes stuff up on the fly and is not held prisoner to the dice, but rather guides a collaborative story that is fun and satisfying for all the players, and in my opinion "cheating" as the DM makes that more possible.

A DM could just nerf a EB blaster for a certain encounter, hopefully a special one, like the BBEG has a special shield spell that works well against EB. It would be BORING to nerf the EB player ALL THE TIME for both the DM and the player, but having a few enemies that can somehow get around the powerful EB would be fun for both, but should be used sparingly so that it is still COOL.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Alatar]

In regards to me cheating as a DM. It is most often to AVOID a TPK.

I know. I've sat in the chair, and I've been at this for a very long time.

Never played 4e enough to know much about the system. It didn't feel like D&D to me.

This is a common complaint about 4e, and one with which I agree to an extent. They compromised too much of the atmospherics and heritage of the game in pursuit of an intrinsically balanced system. They succeeded in that effort. it was intrinsically balanced. But it gave up too much and it was a bit too focused on the tactical, wargaming approach at the expense of supporting and encouraging a more story focused approach, which was and is the long term trend in tabletop RPGs. These issues, the coincidence of this change coming on the heels of the OGL, and their strategic blunder of backing Piazzo into a corner by withdrawing the magazine licenses almost ended them. But, to their credit, they are making a nice recovery.

Best advice I can give is that the DM does not follow the rules as written and makes stuff up on the fly and is not held prisoner to the dice, but rather guides a collaborative story that is fun and satisfying for all the players, and in my opinion "cheating" as the DM makes that more possible.

I think most players would agree with that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

.. the coincidence of this change coming on the heels of the OGL, and their strategic blunder of backing Piazzo into a corner by withdrawing the magazine licenses almost ended them. But, to their credit, they are making a nice recovery.

That's overblown. D&D was one property of WotC, itself a subsidiary of a massive, fairly healthy corporation. It was hardly in danger of being 'ended' - shelved, perhaps, worst-case. Actually, D&D product was shelved for two years, much as the playtest kept it present in the community.

 

[Alatar]

That's overblown. D&D was one property of WotC, itself a subsidiary of a massive, fairly healthy corporation. It was hardly in danger of being 'ended' - shelved, perhaps, worst-case. Actually, D&D product was shelved for two years, much as the playtest kept it present in the community.

Oh, I'm sure Magic was never threatened. But D&D...

They created a direct competitor and ceded to it half their customer base. That was a strategic error.

Gleemax was a horror show. The site had an undead Visual Basic vibe from day one. From there, it rotted. The fumbling that was DDI never broke even, I am sure, and their failure to deliver on the promised virtual tabletop did not help their brand. At the time, this is what I expected to happen to a bunch of English Lit. people who didn't have a clue and farmed it out to some Microsoft Platinum Partner. I also heard back then that they had inadvertantly licensed themselves out of being allowed to run a virtual tabletop, but I don't know if that was true. Rumors often aren't. But it did sound plausible. It seemed in line with their other activities.

The new dogfood was a bust. The dogs wouldn't eat it.

The attempt to reanimate 4e with Essentials was a failure and another financial bust.

It was as if someone had handed them an automatic weapon and they proceeded to empty the magazine into their own foot. Most of the people at WotC went off in pursuit of other opportunities, not that WotC didn't always have a lot of turnover with much shrinking and growing in sync with product cycles. This time they went down to what? Eight people? Not enough to get a food truck to stop by at lunch time. Days of PB&J. Mike Mearls survived, though. They took a big hit. 4e cost Hasbro money, which is not the way it's supposed to work.

Mind you, I liked 4e. I liked Essentials. I bought the books. I subscribed to DDI. I even spent a little time on Gleemax before it was staked.

D&D vanishing for the foreseeable future was one of the possible outcomes. Hasbro could have shelved the IP or sold it off. But that did not happen, which is great. And having Pathfinder as an alternative has been great as well.

From where I'm sitting, the 4e adventure was a series of missteps that sent them tumbling down a staircase. That Hasbro decided to pick them up, brush them off and give it another go is fortuitous. Maybe their desire to protect the 3rd party licensing revenue stream was what did it. Maybe they are hoping to catch a little of what Marvel and DC caught. I don't know.

And what WotC has been doing since with 5e seems really smart and appears to be really successful. They've done a 180. So good on them. I hope they continue to flourish. Take my money, please.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Oh, I'm sure Magic was never threatened. But D&D...
They created a direct competitor and ceded to it half their customer base.

D&D, at the time, was an obscure/languishing product given a chance to bust out of it's past poor performance and attain 'core brand' status if it could bring in massive enough revenue. It didn't do that (neither did it do worse than ever nor give up 'half' it's customer base, the bar for failure was "bring in less than double the revenue of the entire industry, combined"), but the 'core brand' rubric went away, anyhow, making the 'failure' to generate MMO-like rivers of money moot.

Extinction was never a danger (a fear, perhaps). Like I said, worst case was being shelved. D&D was shelved, but only for 2 years and is back & doing fine on a more realistic budget & set of revenue expectations. The market is able to support both D&D doing as well as it ever has since the fad went bust, and PF well enough to keep much-smaller Paizo happy, any 'split' in the fanbase, notwithstanding.

Sunny days, really, the doomsaying and hand-wringing so much edition war angst.

 

[Alatar]

neither did it do worse than ever nor give up 'half' it's customer base

Well, Pathfinder did appear to outsell 4e. Before either, 3.5 had all of that market.

Extinction was never a danger (a fear, perhaps).

I cannot gainsay that, having no insider information. I can attest to the fear, or at least the discomfort.

D&D was shelved, but only for 2 years

I wouldn't even call that being shelved. The lights never got turned off. They published no material, yes. But that was a strategy. The material wasn't moving. They had to make a break and move on. Keeping the users engaged with playtest material was a stopgap measure until the new version was ready.

and is back & doing fine on a more realistic budget & set of revenue expectations. The market is able to support both D&D doing as well as it ever has since the fad went bust, and PF well enough to keep much-smaller Paizo happy, any 'split' in the fanbase, notwithstanding.

Sunny days, really, the doomsaying and hand-wringing so much edition war angst.

Yes. Now if they'd only see their way to publishing electronic books, pdfs preferably. I don't really expect them to do it. It might be dumb to do it. I just wish they'd do it.

 

[Dausuul]

This is a common complaint about 4e, and one with which I agree to an extent. They compromised too much of the atmospherics and heritage of the game in pursuit of an intrinsically balanced system. They succeeded in that effort. it was intrinsically balanced. But it gave up too much and it was a bit too focused on the tactical, wargaming approach at the expense of supporting and encouraging a more story focused approach, which was and is the long term trend in tabletop RPGs. These issues, the coincidence of this change coming on the heels of the OGL, and their strategic blunder of backing Piazzo into a corner by withdrawing the magazine licenses almost ended them. But, to their credit, they are making a nice recovery.

4E was an example of a pattern I've seen in a number of gaming properties (not just RPGs; video game franchises do it too). I call it "excursion and return."

The game designer, whether out of hubris or need to juice sales, decides that with this release they're going to totally overhaul the game and redesign everything from scratch. Much hype ensues. When the game is released, however, a lot of players feel betrayed, and justifiably so; the whole point of buying Game X of a franchise is that you liked Game X-1 and want a polished, improved version of it. The new game might be a perfectly good game, but it's not what you laid down money for. Plus, you are now facing the possibility that you will never get that polished, improved version of Game X-1, if the company continues down this new road.

Some players embrace Game X. The rest revolt. Sometimes this kills the franchise dead. When it doesn't, however, the designers usually learn their lesson. When Game X+1 comes out, it follows in the pattern of Game X-1, and Game X is mostly pushed aside. However, the excursion isn't a total loss. Because Game X was such a massive redesign, it gave the designers a chance to try all kinds of crazy experiments; the most successful of those experiments get quietly incorporated into Game X+1. As a result, Game X+1 can end up substantially better than what came before it.

Of course, the players who did embrace Game X are left out in the cold. Sadly, there is seldom much that can be done about that. I kind of hope that Wizards eventually sees fit to put the 4E rules under OGL so that somebody can keep it going for the people who really dug it... but they probably won't. It's one thing to license your current ruleset in hopes of growing a 3PP community around it, quite another to deliberately encourage competition for the core product.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, Pathfinder did appear to outsell 4e. Before either, 3.5 had all of that market.

RPGs in general and D&D in particular tend to sell core books much more strongly than later supplements. PF's launch of core books came in 2nd to the crop of 4e supplements released at the same time. The WotC announced Essentials.... it was downhill from there, but even then it was a bumpy down hill. The actual Essentials core books did out-sell (or was it tie? Someone has the IcV2 numbers, I'm sure - and of course, those numbers didn't include DDI, which doesn't invalidate them in the eyes of PF boosters, while current IcV2 numbers showing D&D way out ahead are invalid in their eyes because they don't show PFs on-line sales) PF, but after that D&D went into a very slow publication cycle of supplements and trailed off heading into the playtest.

I cannot gainsay that, having no insider information. I can attest to the fear, or at least the discomfort.

I can agree with you there, I remember there was a fear, when Essentials came out, that if it wasn't successful it'd be the end of D&D (so support it or else!), that fear just proved to be overblown.

I wouldn't even call that being shelved. The lights never got turned off. They published no material, yes.

I'd call that being shelved...
but I was actually wrong (yeah, mark your calendars, someone on-line is admitting a mistake), a couple of modules got actually published & actually sold for actual money during the playtest, though they were more or less edition agnostic, they were still D&D. So I guess I have to take back the 'shelved' bit. ;(

Yes. Now if they'd only see their way to publishing electronic books, pdfs preferably. I don't really expect them to do it. It might be dumb to do it. I just wish they'd do it.

IDK. I understand the appeal, and it's not like putting them out there makes piracy appreciably easier (pirates, do have scanners, y'know), but it seemed like on-line options may have hurt book sales (of course there was a lot more to DDI than just some pdfs), and being able to point to a book selling well is clearer good PR than explaining combined book-and-pdf-and-subscription revenue and whether there's devoted fans buying both or whatever (which, again, is working for WotC, they can point to Amazon & IcV2 and be all 'D&D's #1, while Paizo is left hemming and hawing over the non-in-store-book revenue streams of PF).

4E was an example of a pattern I've seen in a number of gaming properties (not just RPGs; video game franchises do it too). I call it "excursion and return."

The game designer, whether out of hubris or need to juice sales, decides that with this release they're going to totally overhaul the game and redesign everything from scratch. Much hype ensues. When the game is released, however, a lot of players feel betrayed

Nod. Sometimes it can work to overhaul a product and make it better. Sometimes the customer base rejects the changes. In the case of D&D, the product had been little-changed for a quarter-century, then gotten a modest overhaul and dramatically gone Open-Source (sorta). Between spending 25 years purging their player base of anyone with the least distaste for D&D's myriad flaws, and giving anyone who cared to the tools to dig in and provide entrenched support the core rules of d20 in perpetuity, WotC pushed the pendulum over to the 'innovation' side pretty hard. That they tried to push it further with a more radical overhaul, addressing the games most persistent (even treasured, by those fans who'd stuck with it for 30+ years!) perennial failiings was, in retrospect, foolish. The market - as attested by the OSR craze that materialized - was ready for the pendulum to swing back toward tradition.

5e, belatedly, did just that.

Of course, that's all easy to see in hindsight. :shrug:

I kind of hope that Wizards eventually sees fit to put the 4E rules under OGL so that somebody can keep it going for the people who really dug it... but they probably won't. It's one thing to license your current ruleset in hopes of growing a 3PP community around it, quite another to deliberately encourage competition for the core product.

Nod. It wouldn't make sense, but it does make the 'betrayal' of 4e fans much more practical and real than the metaphorical 'betrayal' of earlier-edition fans, who had ready access to d20 OGL alternatives. And if it could be said they should've realized what they were doing in 2008, there's even less of an excuse for it now.

All in all, Hasbro's* custodianship of D&D has not been exemplary, in that sense. They've kinda got their act together at this point, but they've inflicted some damage that can never be repaired, and missed some opportunities that won't come along again while the original crop of D&D fans remains a meaningful factor in the community.



















*as opposed to WotCs, the wrapping-up of 2e, launch of 3.0 and d20 with the SRD & OGL by WotC before it was acquired by Hasbro, even if it set the stage for disasters that followed, were, I think, laudable, at least from this long-time fan(atic)'s biased perspective.

 

[Alatar]

IDK. I understand the appeal, and it's not like putting them out there makes piracy appreciably easier (pirates, do have scanners, y'know), but it seemed like on-line options may have hurt book sales (of course there was a lot more to DDI than just some pdfs), and being able to point to a book selling well is clearer good PR than explaining combined book-and-pdf-and-subscription revenue and whether there's devoted fans buying both or whatever (which, again, is working for WotC, they can point to Amazon & IcV2 and be all 'D&D's #1, while Paizo is left hemming and hawing over the non-in-store-book revenue streams of PF).

That's the rub with PDFs: cannibalizing their book sales. I would purchase both, if that's what it took, but making purchasing a PDF contingent on having purchased the printed book is an unwieldy logistical challenge. I don't know what the answer is, other than the answer we've got: NO. It's a problem. Information stubbornly kept in analog form is ignoring the expectations of the present. I want to be able to copy/paste spell descriptions into a document containing just the spells my character uses. I want the spell list open in one window with the spell descriptions open in another. I want to be able to search the text. And the vendor won't give me those things because of reasons, and unstated reasons to boot. Everything is subtext with corporate America. That's a fail.