D&D 5E Some things I don't care for in the D&D culture

Inchoroi said:

Not to derail, but I've been thinking about taking a look at Swords & Wizardry to steal adventure ideas from...how is it?

As for the OP, I say give 5e a try with some good friends you know that value the same things you do. You'll be surprised at how awesome it is. Take as faith that game balance is something that's at least semi-necessary in a table-top game, but 5e does a fairly good job at that, while focusing on the story more than anything else. You all tell the story together, after all. Its not just the DM's story.

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It's a cleaned up late original edition with sups 1&2 integrated. It's what Holmes' should have been had there been an Expert to go with it. With the option for ascending AC. The art style is reminiscent of Moldvay-Cook.

S&W Whitebook is S&W restricted to just the original boxed set, and with pre-Supplement-1 hit dice.

If you want as pure a 0E as you can get without having to learn to read "Gary-ese", S&W is the game.

The only chunk I find missing from S&W is the castle building costs...

Sword of Spirit said:

Is this, or should this, be the goal of every RPG?

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Not necessarily, but it's the goal of D&D 5e as designed.

DaveDash said:

For the record I don't think absolute balance is fun. Flavour is important too, and flavour is achieved through differences.

However players should feel like they can all contribute to each pillar of the game on a more or less even footing, depending on what they enjoy the most. That is achieved through a semblance of balance.

What you also need to understand is that D&D competes with MMOs and such for time. That's where I need to draw players from, and ensure my D&D sessions are more fun than their MMOs, otherwise they will just play those instead.
To many MMO players, balance, mechanics, and builds are very important. Take those things away and you're basically left with a glorified fantasy version of story time.

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IMHO the MMO players can stay plugged into their computers for all I care. I'm not going to run WOW on the tabletop to cater to them. If they want a tabletop rpg game then they should expect play to be quite different from an MMO. A tabletop game is first and foremost a social gathering. Playing together and having fun as a group is more important than who has what bonuses to this or that. Obsessing over builds and mechanical capabilities as a thought excise is one thing, inflicting it on a table of players is another. The worst aspect of that behavior is that it has a very introverted focus. Players have fun during a rpg session in many different ways. Meeting mechanics based challenges with precisely defined character abilities is only one of them and may not be very important overall depending on the group. Helping everyone in the group have a good and memorable time is far more important than using a particular build or squeezing every drop of cheese out of the rules as possible.

The thing I like the least in the D&D culture, is the baked in conceits of the game. Rather than the game being designed to be as generic as possible, it hard-coded many mechanics and assumptions into the game that are specifically not generic (vancian casting to name one, along with Tolkien-esque assumptions, good/evil-law/chaos axis, great-wheel, named spells, etc). Whether one is playing in an actual D&D campaign setting or not, the rules have always defined, to one degree or another, a specific setting or genre of its own - one I oft times find inconsistent with general fantasy. It wasn't as much of a problem for me in earlier editions. The simpler the rules were in earlier editions, the less prominent those conceits were. But as D&D matured and new iterations written, they were hard-coded into the rules more and more. 5E has stepped away from that a bit, though it did so through simplifying of rules rather than a conscious effort to be generic (they've succeeded at being Generic D&D, less successful at being Generic Fantasy).

All in all though, this is a pretty minor thing for me. Especially with 5E, I find it relaitively easy to houserule to a more generic type of fantasy (especially with 5E), and I enjoy tinkering with game rules. But D&D's momentum toward becoming its own genre has always been a little bit of an issue for me. I've always wanted D&D to be the rules that allow you to play any genre of fantasy; with the basic rules as generic as possible, and setting conceits presented only in supplemental setting or genre materials.

aramis erak said:

It's a cleaned up late original edition with sups 1&2 integrated. It's what Holmes' should have been had there been an Expert to go with it. With the option for ascending AC. The art style is reminiscent of Moldvay-Cook.

S&W Whitebook is S&W restricted to just the original boxed set, and with pre-Supplement-1 hit dice.

If you want as pure a 0E as you can get without having to learn to read "Gary-ese", S&W is the game.

The only chunk I find missing from S&W is the castle building costs...

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I'll have to give that one a look too, and for what's missing it'd be easy enough to just use D&D 0e or 1e resources to in-fill. That said, "Gary-ese" is to me a large part of what makes the game the marvel it is.

El Mahdi said:

The thing I like the least in the D&D culture, is the baked in conceits of the game. Rather than the game being designed to be as generic as possible, it hard-coded many mechanics and assumptions into the game that are specifically not generic (vancian casting to name one, along with Tolkien-esque assumptions, good/evil-law/chaos axis, great-wheel, named spells, etc).

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Though they've become more hard-wired as time's gone by, those things have mostly been in since pretty close to Day 1. And all of those are just fine - I'd far rather the game's conceits be based on Tolkein than on Salvatore, for example.

As for the OP: seeking balance for balance's sake - particularly short-term or here-and-now balance - is a fool's errand, as it seems the designers are slowly realizing. To some extent the culture seems to have drifted towards players always wanting to be involved all the time with everything, even if it makes no in-game sense. 5e seems to have a decent underlying balance upon which you as DM can build whatever you like.

Rules lawyers, unfortunately, are as built-in a part of the game as anything [MENTION=59506]El Mahdi[/MENTION] lists in the quote above; all you can do is find a way to gently (or maybe not so gently) ease them out of your game if that sort of play isn't your style.

Character build as a "thing" is a product IMO of overdesign, in that the more fine-tuned and complicated the designs get the more opportunities there are for players to game the system; and while some might enjoy this that ain't a game I want to play. To avoid this in 5e just strip away as many optional extras as you can (I'd start with losing both feats and skills) and look for a 0e or at most 1e level of numerical character complexity. It's do-able, with work.

Lan-"and don't at all worry about tweaking the game and system to make it your own; it's not like you have to stick to anyone's external standards"-efan

[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] covered 99% of it. It's like he's answered this question before.

I'll toss in that from your likes/dislikes 5e might be an excellent fit. This is also an excellent time to be a retro gamer. If you crave the earlier editions of D&D (you mentioned 1e in an earlier post), they still have support in WotC's digital store at dndclassics.com.

El Mahdi said:

The thing I like the least in the D&D culture, is the baked in conceits of the game. Rather than the game being designed to be as generic as possible, it hard-coded many mechanics and assumptions into the game that are specifically not generic (vancian casting to name one, along with Tolkien-esque assumptions, good/evil-law/chaos axis, great-wheel, named spells, etc). Whether one is playing in an actual D&D campaign setting or not, the rules have always defined, to one degree or another, a specific setting or genre of its own - one I oft times find inconsistent with general fantasy. It wasn't as much of a problem for me in earlier editions. The simpler the rules were in earlier editions, the less prominent those conceits were. But as D&D matured and new iterations written, they were hard-coded into the rules more and more. 5E has stepped away from that a bit, though it did so through simplifying of rules rather than a conscious effort to be generic (they've succeeded at being Generic D&D, less successful at being Generic Fantasy).

All in all though, this is a pretty minor thing for me. Especially with 5E, I find it relaitively easy to houserule to a more generic type of fantasy (especially with 5E), and I enjoy tinkering with game rules. But D&D's momentum toward becoming its own genre has always been a little bit of an issue for me. I've always wanted D&D to be the rules that allow you to play any genre of fantasy; with the basic rules as generic as possible, and setting conceits presented only in supplemental setting or genre materials.

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Heh. I feel exactly the opposite. There are many fantasy games on the market and even a few generic ones. D&D should not have to change the very things that made it famous and recognizable for the sake of more mass appeal. D&D has been its own genre from the earliest days, a mishmash of classic fantasy and gonzo crazy stuff from science fiction, horror, and whatever else a DM wanted to toss into the mix. Almost from the beginning there were those who wanted a different fantasy than D&D offered and some of them created their own games such as Runequest to better realize that vision.

D&D is fine conceptually as it was originally designed. It is certainly NOT generic fantasy, it has a distinct flavor. With so many other options to choose from on the market today I don't get why so many people insist on wanting to change D&D. Let D&D be itself. I'm not always in the mood for the D&D style and thats when I play other games. Playing a different game is so much easier than sitting around and hoping the designers at a particular company just happen to produce the perfect game under a particular brand.

D&D is not GURPS. I enjoy GURPS fantasy because it is NOT like D&D. I can play games with a completely different feel.

What [MENTION=66434]ExploderWizard[/MENTION] just said.

ExploderWizard said:

IMHO the MMO players can stay plugged into their computers for all I care. I'm not going to run WOW on the tabletop to cater to them. If they want a tabletop rpg game then they should expect play to be quite different from an MMO. A tabletop game is first and foremost a social gathering. Playing together and having fun as a group is more important than who has what bonuses to this or that. Obsessing over builds and mechanical capabilities as a thought excise is one thing, inflicting it on a table of players is another. The worst aspect of that behavior is that it has a very introverted focus. Players have fun during a rpg session in many different ways. Meeting mechanics based challenges with precisely defined character abilities is only one of them and may not be very important overall depending on the group. Helping everyone in the group have a good and memorable time is far more important than using a particular build or squeezing every drop of cheese out of the rules as possible.

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That's nice, but there are millions more CRPG gamers and MMO players out there than TTRPG roleplayers - so that style of play is actually exceedingly popular. MMO is also a social thing for many gamers, in fact, it's pretty hard to play most of them by yourself beyond the beginning.

Not that many people are interested in roleplay story time, only a tiny small niche of gamers. I'm not interested in it that much myself, yet I still love D&D in all its forms (TTRPG, CRPG, Boardgame). Even the small niche in the TTRPG community is divided among different flavours of RPG - and pathfinder + 3e + 4e are probably still more popular combined than 5e - which are all very 'mechanics' and rules focused TTRPGs.

It's fine if you want to completely dismiss that style of play, but I understand that the huge majority of gamers want that style of game, and I myself enjoy it and will quite happily cater for it.

If I wasn't a DM there would be nothing really for me to do in your version of D&D outside of game time. Tinkering with mechanics and builds is a mini game - outside of regular game time - that many many many people enjoy.

S'mon said:

Edit: I definitely don't want a game that attempts to have the experience mimic a MMORPG server, so DaveDash's approach is not for me. I tend to enjoy Semi-Free Kriegsspiel (or even Free Kriegspiel) with lots and lots of GM judgement. 5e is good for encouraging GMs to use their own judgement and not feel rules-bound.

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"Free Kriegspiel." Nice turn of phrase there.

BTW, I love that your .sig links to the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Fantastic poem.