D&D 5E Wandering Monsters 01/29/2014:Level Advancement...

[Lokiare]

It seems, as I'm certain will come as a complete surprise to you ;P, that you do not have it right.

My point is more this...

This has a combustion engine, rides on wheels (four wheels even!), transports people places, has a steering apparatus, is composed of various metals and plastics. We'll call this...a car.

View attachment 60461

Now, I've taken a combustion engine, wheels, transports people places, has a steering apparatus and is composed of various metals and plastic. Now, I'm gonna change the engine, cuz we can tell people they'll use less gas! We're gonna change the wheel size cuz some people have voiced concerns over the previous design of the wheels. I'm going to use different metals and plastics in different proportions...cause, ya know, I'm an innovator like that. We've had some complaints about the fiddliness of shifting gears...so how about a brand new optional gears and "start/stop" systems! Then we're going to add a few some bells and whistles and remove other ones, since we all know everyone loves bells and whistles but they haven't seen THESE bells and whistles with a car before! EVOLUTION! INNOVATION! WHOO, I'M ON FIAH!

Here, check this out! IT'S A CAR!

View attachment 60462

And for those who like a simpler system, we're also putting out "Car: Essentials!"

View attachment 60463

What's the difference? They both go at 40mph max? The second one of course has a radio and air conditioning. I'd almost rather be driving that than the one you have to hand crank at the front to start and which 20% of the time blows up or catches fire...

 

[Zaukrie]

We do mot use xp at all in my campaign. I tell them when they should advance. I think xp is helpful for non-home campaigns and beginners.....but I do not get why anyone with years of experience cares for xp rules.

 

[Desdichado]

It seems, as I'm certain will come as a complete surprise to you ;P, that you do not have it right.

Oh, but I think I do. See below.

My point is more this...

This has a combustion engine, rides on wheels (four wheels even!), transports people places, has a steering apparatus, is composed of various metals and plastics. We'll call this...a car.

IMG

Now, I've taken a combustion engine, wheels, transports people places, has a steering apparatus and is composed of various metals and plastic. Now, I'm gonna change the engine, cuz we can tell people they'll use less gas! We're gonna change the wheel size cuz some people have voiced concerns over the previous design of the wheels. I'm going to use different metals and plastics in different proportions...cause, ya know, I'm an innovator like that. We've had some complaints about the fiddliness of shifting gears...so how about a brand new optional gears and "start/stop" systems! Then we're going to add a few some bells and whistles and remove other ones, since we all know everyone loves bells and whistles but they haven't seen THESE bells and whistles with a car before! EVOLUTION! INNOVATION! WHOO, I'M ON FIAH!

Here, check this out! IT'S A CAR!

IMG

And for those who like a simpler system, we're also putting out "Car: Essentials!"

IMG

Nice try, but tractors don't serve to transport people. Your analogy would have been better if you'd used a picture of a bus.

But it still doesn't work, because your description--separate from the pictures of tractors--actually describes exactly what has happened to cars. Other than at a very superficial, high level view, there is not one detail that remains the same as it was on the Model T.

In particular, you're hanging your hat on how XP is awarded and how characters progress, which hasn't even been the same in any version of D&D ever. Why you'd home in on that and say that "it's not D&D anymore if this changes" would therefore seem odd; as the thread has demonstrated, that seems to indicate that starting with 2e (at least) D&D already wasn't D&D anymore, because it got rid of the XP for gold paradigm. Specifically referencing role-playing XP awards is so far off the reservation from the original paradigm that you can't even call it the same system anymore at all.

And how about me? Yeah, you said it's totally fine that I play at my table with ad-hoc XP awards and "OK, now it's time to level up" paradigm. Thanks for that, by the way. You have no idea how much it was worrying me that people thought I might be making a mistake somewhere on the internet with how I approach my hobby. But you don't even connect your own dots. Am I not playing D&D anymore, then? I think few of the people who do leveling and XP that way would accept that label; that their game is now not-D&D because of a rather minimal impact house-rule that they've adopted.

I get your point that if you change too many things, then it's not recognizable as the same game anymore. Sure. But in this case, you seem to be drawing an extremely arbitrary line in the sand around XP awards and leveling. There's plenty of ways to do that. Heck; the fact that it's a subsystem that has been modified and played around with and tweaked with literally every single new edition or version of the game suggests that it's a subsystem that hasn't quite settled into its place yet, either because it does a poor job of meeting its original design intent, or the design intent has changed due to changing priorities amongst the gaming community at large. Or at least the developers perception of such change.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Your examples of extremes do portray one aspect, though. Both cars cause issues for the average person. The first requires too much maintenance, isn't safe, it's expensive, doesn't have modern luxuries, etc. The second costs alot for speeds the average person will never drive, the insurance alone even if the car were free would be burdensome, maintenance is costly, etc. Thus, a baseline that suits the average person is a better example of a modern car choice, that's why neither of your examples is a best-seller now.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Isn't extending analogies fun?

 

[steeldragons]

Isn't extending analogies fun?

It IS, isn't it. I am prone to prefer the food ones myself, though.

 

[DMZ2112]

You seem to be under the impression that the goal of this is accuracy, and so it fails if it is not accurate.

That's not the case.

If you find your X lasts longer or shorter than the game's initial assumptions, that's not a sign of the uselessness of that assumption. The goal isn't accuracy, it's measurement, and that measurement need not be precise to be useful.

You're mixing accuracy and precision, which are two different things.

You're right that the measurement should not be precise -- precision by definition does not serve a potential range of targets. You don't want precision in these circumstances. But my point is that this measurement can't possibly be /accurate/. You do need accuracy, because without accuracy you /will/ miss your target. You might as well just make numbers up, which is essentially what the developers would be doing by picking an arbitrary session length and frequency.

Forgive another pithy one-liner, but if a measurement is neither accurate nor precise, it's not much of a measurement. If the purpose of the XP/month assumption is not to estimate the amount of XP awarded in a month of my campaign, what purpose is it supposed to serve?

It is pithy, and even kind of clever. And yet, it's sort of like complaining that you missed by a foot or two with a hand grenade. Complete accuracy isn't important.

I'm not saying a perfectly accurate measurement should be made, I'm saying that it shouldn't be measured in the first place, because /if/ it is not accurate -- which it cannot be -- it serves no real purpose and has no functional value.

It lacks relevance, wholesale.

 

[Mistwell]

Analogies are useful when describing a complicated topic where the audience isn't familiar with the complexities of that topic, and so you need to create an analogy where the audience does understand the issue.

They are, in general, useless for D&D discussions. The discussion of the rules themselves is almost always clearer to this audience, than the analogy itself. You're almost never clarifying anything with the analogy, and it just results in dueling analogies which spiral into meaningless focus on higher and higher levels of minutia that get further and further from the point you were trying to make to begin with.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not saying a perfectly accurate measurement should be made, I'm saying that it shouldn't be measured in the first place, because /if/ it is not accurate -- which it cannot be -- it serves no real purpose and has no functional value.

It lacks relevance, wholesale.

Well, that's clearly not true, in spite of the logic and definition posting that you've gone to to demonstrate it. If the designers percieve (and I would believe this is their apparent perception, based on the fact that they've tried to nail this down and referenced this repeatedly) that most customers want a certain leveling speed that is measured in terms of length of real-time play, no matter how it's measured (in hours, or sessions, or whatever) then they need to try and approximate it and work backwards from there.

That's kind of the opposite of irrelevant. That doesn't mean that you haven't raised some important caveats about the assumptions used to develop the approximation. But that's all that means.

 

[Desdichado]

Analogies are useful when describing a complicated topic where the audience isn't familiar with the complexities of that topic, and so you need to create an analogy where the audience does understand the issue.

They are, in general, useless for D&D discussions. The discussion of the rules themselves is almost always clearer to this audience, than the analogy itself. You're almost never clarifying anything with the analogy, and it just results in dueling analogies which spiral into meaningless focus on higher and higher levels of minutia that get further and further from the point you were trying to make to begin with.

My initial analogy with the cars was perfect for my purposes. Which, let's face it, were to take advantage of an opportunity to be flippant.

That said, it'd be interesting (to me, at least) if I could get some discussion going around the non-analogy portion of my post. Which I'll helpfully requote right here.

In particular, you're hanging your hat on how XP is awarded and how characters progress, which hasn't even been the same in any version of D&D ever. Why you'd home in on that and say that "it's not D&D anymore if this changes" would therefore seem odd; as the thread has demonstrated, that seems to indicate that starting with 2e (at least) D&D already wasn't D&D anymore, because it got rid of the XP for gold paradigm. Specifically referencing role-playing XP awards is so far off the reservation from the original paradigm that you can't even call it the same system anymore at all.

And how about me? Yeah, you said it's totally fine that I play at my table with ad-hoc XP awards and "OK, now it's time to level up" paradigm. Thanks for that, by the way. You have no idea how much it was worrying me that people thought I might be making a mistake somewhere on the internet with how I approach my hobby. But you don't even connect your own dots. Am I not playing D&D anymore, then? I think few of the people who do leveling and XP that way would accept that label; that their game is now not-D&D because of a rather minimal impact house-rule that they've adopted.

I get your point that if you change too many things, then it's not recognizable as the same game anymore. Sure. But in this case, you seem to be drawing an extremely arbitrary line in the sand around XP awards and leveling. There's plenty of ways to do that. Heck; the fact that it's a subsystem that has been modified and played around with and tweaked with literally every single new edition or version of the game suggests that it's a subsystem that hasn't quite settled into its place yet, either because it does a poor job of meeting its original design intent, or the design intent has changed due to changing priorities amongst the gaming community at large. Or at least the developers perception of such change.

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