D&D 5E Tedium for balance. Should we balance powerful effects with bookkeeping?

[Lanefan]

I would say that post-1e, D&D has been more of a heroic adventure game with heroic resource management. You need to manage your HP and other limited resources. That hasn't changed.

What has changed is the time scale. Whereas previously resources were recovered at a slower rate, they've generally gotten faster. There's been a shift from managing resources across the adventure, to managing them over an adventure day.

Agreed on the summary, though I see all of these developments as steps backward.

I'd add that in 5e money as a resource - and the associated management of such - has also become less of a concern.

IMO, the reason for this shift is that many people prefer the faster pace, and the reduction of mundane resource managment, and the designers recognized this.

I have a far more cynical take: marketers realized a faster-paced game means that in the long run they can sell more product - adventures, splat books, etc. - and influenced (or ordered?) the designers to move in that direction.

 

[overgeeked]

I have a far more cynical take: marketers realized a faster-paced game means that in the long run they can sell more product - adventures, splat books, etc. - and influenced (or ordered?) the designers to move in that direction.

Or that most people are playing RPGs for escapism and don’t find tedious bookkeeping fun.

Or that most people are not playing RPGs as wargame-style logistics simulators, so the designers moved the game to where the fans already were. And from the looks of things, most fans were already abandoning that style by the mid ’80s.

Or that…

 

[Lanefan]

It's not "just preference." There are ways to improve overall reception. That's literally the point. That's why one part of rule design is collecting user feedback.

Throwing up your hands and just saying "it's all preference so there's nothing to say" is defeatist. We can find ways that make things work better--in the sense of being better-received by players, of actually getting used by most people instead of being ignored, of opening up the design space and seeing what else can be done with it.

Not quite IMO.

Yes we can find ways that make things work better, but it'll be each of us finding our own ways that make things work better for ourselves, because a great many of those found ways are going to be different from - and disagree with - each other.

All we need from WotC is a solid underlying framework, preferably using discrete modular subsystems such that changes to one don't have too many knock-on effects elsewhere, and then we can kitbash the hell out of it. And any leftover design space is ours to fill in as we want.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's not "just preference." There are ways to improve overall reception. That's literally the point. That's why one part of rule design is collecting user feedback.

Throwing up your hands and just saying "it's all preference so there's nothing to say" is defeatist. We can find ways that make things work better--in the sense of being better-received by players, of actually getting used by most people instead of being ignored, of opening up the design space and seeing what else can be done with it.

I've seen several attempts to make the inherently boring not boring.

The best I've seen is just not doing it and using something like the loadouts in Knives in the Dark where what you're carrying only matters when you use it and otherwise you don't have to pretend to care about bookkeeping.

Otherwise it's just not worth saving and hopefully will be gone or rendered vestigial in 6e.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I say who ever steams themselves writing up a level twenty character in 3.5 (Pathfinder 1E is fine too) automatically wins whatever argument they were making in this thread!

 

[Fanaelialae]

I have a far more cynical take: marketers realized a faster-paced game means that in the long run they can sell more product - adventures, splat books, etc. - and influenced (or ordered?) the designers to move in that direction.

My take on this is that more people preferred a faster-paced, reduced-tedium game and the designers listened. If lots of people didn't enjoy those changes, then it wouldn't be as popular as it is.

I mean, how dare the game designers create a game that lots of people enjoy!? They might as well be reaching their greedy little mitts directly into my wallet and helping themselves to the contents thereof! The sheer temerity of it all!

Back in the day, there were dramatically fewer options if the style of a game didn't suit your preferences. Even if the game existed, good luck actually finding a copy unless you had a FLGS in your neighborhood that could get it for you. I didn't, and I remember reading and re-reading Rick Swan's Complete Guide to Role-playing Games as a kid, dreaming of being able to own many of the games described therein. That probably is a significant root cause of why, now that I can order games online, I literally need to add a whole lot more shelving to my office soon because I have stacks of RPG books on the floor reaching almost as high as my waist. It's a nice problem to have.

No game can serve all interests. Back in the older editions, my groups house ruled things to increase the pace. We had more generous rates of natural healing (often something like level + Con HP bonus recovery for long rests) and allowed the creation of non-magical healing balms that cured 1d3 HP, which we stock piled. We allowed leveling mid-adventure. It didn't fix the issues, but it ameliorated them a bit. Nowadays, my group is happy with the pace and doesn't need house rules for them, whereas it sounds like you do (if you want to achieve the style of game you're looking for in 5e, at any rate).

There are in fact a considerable number of games based on 5e that do bring the game into a slower-paced and/or resource-oriented play style. Into the Unknown, Five Torches Deep, King of Dungeons, Adventures in Middle Earth. Moreover, there are a considerable number of fantastic games in that space that aren't based on 5e, such as Worlds Without Number (which just released Cities Without Number if you're looking to do a Cyberpunk/Shadowrun-esque game), Into the Unknown, and Ultraviolet Grasslands. If the folks you're playing with aren't interested in those kinds of games, then I dare say the issue is simply that of a difference of play preferences.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've seen several attempts to make the inherently boring not boring.

The best I've seen is just not doing it and using something like the loadouts in Knives in the Dark where what you're carrying only matters when you use it and otherwise you don't have to pretend to care about bookkeeping.

Otherwise it's just not worth saving and hopefully will be gone or rendered vestigial in 6e.

And where I found defeatism in the previous argument, here I find pessimism. Arguing that logistics are inherently boring is simply false. Logistical challenges can make for genuinely interesting gameplay; if they did not, Factorio would have crashed and burned, rather than being quite popular. Or the (opt-in) automation of games like PlateUp! and other "start off doing it yourself, then set up a system to do it for you" games.

There can be ways to invigorate logistics as a gameplay element. They just aren't used much in D&D.

 

[Vaalingrade]

And where I found defeatism in the previous argument, here I find pessimism. Arguing that logistics are inherently boring is simply false.

Or the result of observation.

The gameplay of Factorio is an entirely different animal then the bean counting of D&D. And for things like Factorio and Satisfactory, the entire gameplay loop is dedicated to making it playable, including building and creation mechanics that just aren't going to translate to pen and paper.

Let the poor thing die with some dignity instead of tormenting players with attempt after attempt to force them to have fun with this roadblock between them and fun.

 

[Dausuul]

Re logistics... I'm imagining an adventure where the PCs have tightly limited supplies and no easy way to recover them. If you run out of arrows, your bow doesn't work. Run out of food, you starve. Every day and every battle, your resources dwindle and it's a race to beat the villains before you run out.

That actually sounds like a lot of fun. (Though I think not everyone in my group would agree; and it also poses class balance problems.)

But in practice, my experience of tracking supplies is that it doesn't matter in 90% of games. With the kind of money adventurers accumulate, plus utility magic, it's trivially easy to supply yourself with whatever you need. D&D is simply not designed to support real logistics challenges. So it becomes a bookkeeping exercise, neither challenging nor fun, and I'd rather just abstract it away.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Re logistics... I'm imagining an adventure where the PCs have tightly limited supplies and no easy way to recover them. If you run out of arrows, your bow doesn't work. Run out of food, you starve. Every day and every battle, your resources dwindle and it's a race to beat the villains before you run out.

That actually sounds like a lot of fun. (Though I think not everyone in my group would agree; and it also poses class balance problems.)

But in practice, my experience of tracking supplies is that it doesn't matter in 90% of games. With the kind of money adventurers accumulate, plus utility magic, it's trivially easy to supply yourself with whatever you need. D&D is simply not designed to support real logistics challenges. So it becomes a bookkeeping exercise, neither challenging nor fun, and I'd rather just abstract it away.

Only because WotC 5e can't be bothered to care about anything other than constant empty thrills. Logistics can matter if you play a game that supports it.