Some mechanisms (often ported from the old days) are putting the incentives in the wrong place - blog post discussion

[Composer99]

It's not just carrots and sticks, but also chickens and eggs.

People no longer look for certain types of gameplay because the rules required for it to work are no longer supported by the game.

If anything, the fact that the "Hickman Revolution" happened during the age of 1e AD&D and B/X-BECMI, where dungeon-crawling or procedural world-sim play were still what the mechanics of the game supported and encouraged, belies this assertion.

Another thing that belies this assertion are all the arguments over what D&D ought to be like, both here and elsewhere, which suggests that the game still has many different player constituencies whose visions for the types of gameplay the game ought to support (or better support) are often at odds with one another.

 

[kenada]

In this recent post by Trilemma Adventures creator Michael Prescott he muses about how for some rules the incentives are all wrong, so no wonder we just ignore those rules.

Why would any player track encumbrance when the best outcome is "no change" and the worst is a decrease in your overall effectiveness? Instead, make it so if you are "lightly" encumbered, you actually get some advantage/bonus like +1 to your attack rolls or something.

He applies similar thinking to rules that are often handwaved away like Light and Spell Components. Instead give a bonus when someone shines extra light (it's easier to find cool stuff) and when someone uses a special Spell component they get a nice bonus

And to me, the Bloodied condition in 4e was a great one for HP - of course you wanted to track the loss of those HP - you wanted to be able to use your bloodied-trigger powers!

Any other areas of your favorite games where the incentives are not in the right place?

Whose Mechanic is it Anyway?

Here's a simple principle: (1) The player who needs to use a quantity should be the one tracking it. If you're the one who updates your rog...

blog.trilemma.com

I don’t find the examples in that post compelling. The proposed encumbrance system works because the tracking is automatic. It has nothing to do with framing the default as a bonus. If the players had to do accounting (or other tedious work) to track their status, it wouldn’t provide any more motivation to accurately track and may provide some to be sloppy or to petition to ignore tracking. Light and darkness suffer from the same problem.

An example of how a game handles light and darkness well is Torchbearer. Every check results in a turn of the grind. Every four turns of the grind imposes a condition on the PCs. The duration of light sources is measured in turns, and the durations are short (two to four turns for standard sources), so you can’t really forget. You are motivated to have light sources because darkness is bad (−1 success after a roll plus lots of things you can’t do).

 

[ichabod]

I explained it in post 18, you quoted it in post 19 but badly missed the point and didn't seem to grasp it. You might need to review the rules themselves in order to understand how they were different from the awful 5e carrying capacity rules

Carrying Capacity :: d20srd.org

I understand the carrying capacity rules in 3.5 and 5, I just don't see how it's relevant to my point, which you seem to have completely missed, so I guess we're even.

 

[tetrasodium]

I understand the carrying capacity rules in 3.5 and 5, I just don't see how it's relevant to my point, which you seem to have completely missed, so I guess we're even.

The 5e carry capacity and encumbrance rules are just terrible. Changing them from a penalty to s bonus won't change that. Instead of ignoring an almost pointless rule to avoid a penalty they are unlikely to reach players would just be ignoring an almost always pointless rule to keep a bonus they are almost never going to lose. The end result is the same because the design of the rule itself is awful.

 

[pemerton]

Spell components are one of them, because they fundamentally miss why the spell is there. You "handwave" spell components just like you handwave weapons. As in, only if you are ignorant, but 99% of the time it's not going to slow down the game with additional modifiers. I'm not just comparing spell components to weapons gratuitously - they server the exact same purpose*. Allowing a caster to be disarmed. Without it, you can't capture them safely so you can only kill them. A DM who lets a gagged and tied up caster cast their full complement of spell is... well, likely one will make that mistake. But if a DM says they are ignoring spell components, tell them that you expect to be able to cast every spell naked, bound and gagged, have them tell you no, and then realize the DM isn't actually ignoring spell components but doesn't actually understand what their house rule means.

When I see people talk about ignoring spell components, I generally understand them to be referring to material components.

We don't need material components in order to have bound and gagged caster be unable to cast spells.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

This seems like a perspective problem. Say encumbrance drops your speed by 10 feet. You don't want to track it because it's just a penalty involved, nothing positive. Fine: reduce everyone's base speed by 10 feet, but you get an extra 10 feet of movement if you're not encumbered. Functionally, it's the exact same situation. But now you want to track encumbrance because there's a bonus involved?

Yes, exactly
Now the person who gets the benefit is incentivized to track it

 

[Eyes of Nine]

But I think that only holds true if the DM is the one monitoring it, and if the rule is enforced consistently. Once the player is in charge of tracking the behaviour, the equation changes, because they are naturally going to be more attracted to enforcing rules that they perceive as beneficial, and ignoring or conveniently forgetting ones that they perceive as deleterious. So if you want the player in charge, I would only do it for rules that they can perceive as advantageous, whether framed in positive or negative terms.

I think there are very few DMs in the real world who track their players' encumbrance status

 

[Blue]

When I see people talk about ignoring spell components, I generally understand them to be referring to material components.

We don't need material components in order to have bound and gagged caster be unable to cast spells.

Both spell component pouches and arcane focus/druid focus/holy symbol exist. You can completely ignore it for all normal play, so ignoring it gains you absolutely nothing. THERE ARE NO GAINS TO IGNORING JUST MATERIAL COMPONENTS.

But there are losses. Such as non-caster foes "disarming" by taking weapons and material components but not realizing that leaves some spells possible for clever players for the once-a-campaign jailbreak. And looking for scavenged ones - some spells like Sleep or Spider Climb they might easily find the components.

And as mentioned there is a separate design purpose for expensive components, and stripping that away willy nilly without giving thought to the changes that will bring is also a bad thing.

So yes, I can believe you that some can ignore just material components. But since that's a worst-of-all-worlds solution with no benefits and some detriments, I hope that's rare.

Chesterson's Fence - know why someone put up a fence before you take it down - is very true for rule design as well.

EDIT: It occurred to me that a DM might see as an advantage of not having to worry about the free hand rules. As long as my fighter can use a longbow and shield at the same time as well, I'm fine with it... or rather, it equally doesn't make sense. Let's remove a balance point of needing a hand, but only from the caster classes because those are all the weakest, and leave it in place for everything else. Again, all detriment.

 

[ichabod]

The 5e carry capacity and encumbrance rules are just terrible. Changing them from a penalty to s bonus won't change that. Instead of ignoring an almost pointless rule to avoid a penalty they are unlikely to reach players would just be ignoring an almost always pointless rule to keep a bonus they are almost never going to lose. The end result is the same because the design of the rule itself is awful.

Okay, I see the confusion. I was trying to make a general point about bonuses and penalties. I was not trying to make a specific point about 5E carrying capacity. So even if the point doesn't hold for 5E carrying capacity because you fell those rules are horrible, the general point can still be applied to other cases.

 

[Composer99]

I see the thrust here, but it's misguided.

A default should be the baseline, never a modifier. The "oh, it's during the day, you get a bonus to sight based perception rolls" is straight out bad design.

This is objectively false.

In the first place, it's a bald assertion of principle with nothing to back it up. Sure, you can say any given mechanic is bad design and on the basis of any principle you assert, but so what?

In the second place, it's committing a pretty fundamental error in assuming "defaults" exist when they often plainly don't.

None of bright light, dim light, and darkness are "default/baseline/"normal" degrees of lighting, from which any other kind of lighting is a deviation. They're all simply "states of lighting", any of which could happen to prevail in a given area at any given time.

None of "unencumbered/lightly encumbered/heavily encumbered" (or more fine gradations of encumbrance) are "default/baseline/normal" degrees of encumbrance, from which any other kind is a deviation from the norm. They're all simply "states of being encumbered", any of which could happen to apply to a character at any given time.

In the final place, the ultimate test of a mechanic's design quality is "is the mechanic contributing to the kind of gameplay experience that I, the designer or homebrewer, want to engender, and to what extent is it or is it not doing so?"

I'd have to say that a mechanic that makes players actually want to care about how much their characters are carrying is a better mechanic than one that doesn't, even if the latter one happens to satisfy your (or even my!) design sensibilities. (It's pretty clear, to my mind, that you can use pound-weight encumbrance to make players care about how much their characters are carrying, but for the vast majority of players, seemingly, it's a terrible mechanic to use if you want them to want to care.)