D&D 5E Poll: What is a Level 1 PC?

[Lanefan]

And essentially what you are saying is "The DM should be thrown in the deep end without much in the way of system notes to tell them what likely outcomes are". The point of the 4e balance is to give a three session DM the same facility with designing straightforward scenes and knowing what the outcomes will be that a six month year DM would have in previous editions - and a three month the equivalent of a two year and a two year the equivalent of a five year (after that the knowledge curve flattens out).

It's like learning from a pretty good teacher rather than pure trial and error.

In the end, however, trial and error is still going to be the teacher that gets listened to.

Advice and instruction on how to DM a game and do it well is great, but this lesson is best learned by doing, not reading. If nothing else, a new DM might not even realize what the advice is talking about until she's run an adventure or two and seen what can crop up. In any edition.

Best advice for any new DM: always make the first adventure you run a disposable one-off, and don't start your real campaign until after you've run that first shakedown adventure.

Lanefan

 

[Neonchameleon]

Experience? Common sense? Whatever shred of my once formidable intellect which remains? Pick whichever satisfies you.

But you have norelevant experience of how it works when it does. You yourself have admitted it. So you don't have the experience here. As for "common sense", common sense said heavier than air flight wouldn't work. And I question the 'common' part of common sense for someone who has the time and desire to custom craft every single monster they use rather than using them out of the monster manual.

Dare I ask what qualifies you (and only you) to speak so authoriatively on the topic?

Actually, a significant number of its adherents think it does. That's the problem.

And now you are simply contradicting yourself. You're saying that I'm saying I'm the only one qualified and now you're saying that the problem is that many think it works. Make up your mind because these two can not both be true. In actual fact, neither is true. @pmerton speaks as much about encounter building tools and skill challenges as I do. And many in this thread have spoken about 4e's balance. And this is not a problem.

My argument is that implementation is irrelevant and that the goal of providing encounter building rules is not a worthwhile one in the first place.

And my argument is that you have an easy to disprove assertion there. One system that works and provides demonstrable benefit is enough to show that your argument simply doesn't hold. 4e provides this.

I think of it as learning how to walk with crutches. It might "work" some of the time, but the outcome won't be nearly as good if you just stood on your own two legs.

Oh, think of it as whatever you like. The fact is that you have no experience of seeing this sort of system work well, and your "common sense" can say that crutches do the same job as training wheels all you like - it doesn't make it so.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

The idea that you have no idea how an encounter will resolve before checking to see if it meets the DMG definition of a challenging encounter is something I have great difficulty believing.

/snip

Funnily enough, when I started running Savage Worlds, one of the first things I bemoaned was the lack of encounter design guidelines. Not knowing the system very well beforehand - after all I was just starting - meant that it was a lot of trial and error before I actually got enough experience with the system to have a decent idea what makes a good encounter.

Ahn, unless I'm mistaken, I believe you started with 3e D&D and have rarely DM'd any other system. Is that true? Because, if it is, you have very little idea how much of a step forward in encounter design the CR system really was. Prior to 3e and d20, I'd never seen a CR system for an RPG. Which meant a lot of trial and error. The CR system is one of the best things d20 gave RPG's. I actually have very little interest anymore in playing any system that doesn't have something similar.

 

[Ahnehnois]

And I question the 'common' part of common sense for someone who has the time and desire to custom craft every single monster they use rather than using them out of the monster manual.

And I question that of someone who has the time to post about a game on message boards but not to do basic background work for that game that takes a fraction of the time.

One system that works and provides demonstrable benefit is enough to show that your argument simply doesn't hold. 4e provides this.

I've yet to see it demonstrated convincingly.

The fact is that you have no experience of seeing this sort of system work well

As far as I can tell from any of these posts, neither do you.

Moving on...

Ahn, unless I'm mistaken, I believe you started with 3e D&D and have rarely DM'd any other system. Is that true?

I run CoC pretty regularly, and occasionally other d20 offshoots and the BSG rpg (in general, lighter rules and different settings than D&D). Speaking generally, I am an experienced and expert DM. I would not, however, pretend to have the extent or diversity of rpg experiences that some of the people on ENW do who are twice my age and/or have a lot more free time for gaming than I do.

Because, if it is, you have very little idea how much of a step forward in encounter design the CR system really was. Prior to 3e and d20, I'd never seen a CR system for an RPG. Which meant a lot of trial and error. The CR system is one of the best things d20 gave RPG's.

I did play 2e before the 3e release. I certainly recall us having some issues as middle-school beginners, but encounter balance wasn't one of them.

I do, however, recall that the DM at the time 3e was released purposely forbade any of us from seeing his DMG or getting one of our own because he didn't want us to know the secrets within. The Monster Manual was actually my first book, and I learned the rules by reading monster stats. At one point, I could recite a solid majority of CRs from memory.

When I did get the DMG, I already had ideas shaping in my mind. I took one look at the chapter on how to use CRs, build encounters, and award XP, and immediately dismissed it. I've never looked back. I started writing my own monster stats and creating my own plots from day 1. While hardly flawless, even my first campaign was coherent, balanced, and generated some lasting memories. Nor do I take myself as some kind of DMing savant. (Nor did I have particularly helpful players or any expert supervision).

Moreover, when other DMs did try to use the CR guidelines, they were invariably befuddled by the results and struggled to maintain appropriate challenge levels. If there's any benefit to CRs and XP, my group did not observe it.

On the other hand, I've found designing stats for games that don't have the same assumptions about encounters or balance as D&D (particularly CoC) to be very informative.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Moreover, when other DMs did try to use the CR guidelines, they were invariably befuddled by the results and struggled to maintain appropriate challenge levels.

I'm not surprised. And this is the experience you are talking about. It is not relevant to 4e, and especially not the 4e of 2012. I doub that there is anyone who has been befuddled by the 4e system. (OK, you can probably find half a dozen people in the world). And it does provide very good results at least for heroic tier.

As for statting up shopkeepers as "basic background work", it is tedious, pointless, and unnecessary. It is simple makework - not something I don't have time for so much as something that adds nothing to the game (and in my experience actually detracts from it in play; the DM routinely having to flip pages of notes for the most minor details clogs things up). If I wanted to shuffle meaningless numbers around that will never be seen by anyone I could do that at work (and indeed do a lot of the time).

The 4e design rules are sufficiently good that I have on occasion got ten minutes in to a session, thrown out my entire notes either because the players were in a completely different mood to the one I'd prepared for or they had decided to go a completely different way to the way anticipated, and still provided about the right degree of challenge simply by using the 4e guidelines.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I'm not surprised. And this is the experience you are talking about. It is not relevant to 4e, and especially not the 4e of 2012.

Given that I was responding to a post regarding the virtues of 3e on its release, that response is indeed irrevlevant to 4e.

I doub that there is anyone who has been befuddled by the 4e system.

Solid evidence.

As for statting up shopkeepers as "basic background work", it is tedious, pointless, and unnecessary.

Generally, it is. Unless that character is going to be important, why bother statting? I certainly don't. What was your point?

The 4e design rules are sufficiently good that I have on occasion got ten minutes in to a session, thrown out my entire notes either because the players were in a completely different mood to the one I'd prepared for or they had decided to go a completely different way to the way anticipated, and still provided about the right degree of challenge simply by using the 4e guidelines.

The 3e system is sufficiently good that I don't have any notes.

Additionally, I don't generally purpose-build encounters. That is, I'll walk into a session with a couple of pages of NPC/monster stats without having established when or under what circumstances I will use them or whether they will be allies or enemies or even how powerful the PCs will be when I do. It's basically improvisational from that point onward. Currently I'm designing stats for NPCs that may be used when the party is 1st level, 10th level, or who knows. And yet, I don't find myself accidentally killing the party or wasting their time with pointless battles. D&D is very robust.

 

[B.T.]

After playing some more of 4e, I've decided that the combats are pretty boring. Every combat is the same: hit, hit, healing powers, hit, hit, monsters dead, PCs use healing surges. The monsters usually hit every round but don't do enough damage for anyone to care about. Monsters take forever to die and the group ends up grinding them down with at-wills once the battle is clearly won. I have never once felt truly threatened during an encounter. The only time I'm nervous about the outcome of a fight is when the healing runs out and we're trading 1[W] + stat attacks with the monsters and it's a toss-up as to which side will sandpaper the other to -1 first.

What I wouldn't do for a little 3e-style imbalance. Give me some of that swinginess and lethality, please. The "outcome-based" monster design might make for balanced encounters, but they are bland and boring. Worse, the system discourages any sort of unbalanced encounter due to its existence and 4e monster design. In every fight, you're expected to win. If the DM picks a higher-level monster, you're not going to hit him reliably enough to win. If the DM picks a lower-level monster, he's not going to hit you reliably enough to pose a threat (not that he really posed a threat in the first place, but you know what I mean).

 

[N'raac]

I am placing everyone in the boat of learning together (as many are not lucky enough to have teachers). So yes, player feedback is absolutely critical to developing DMing skills, far more so than anything a DMG has to offer. And yes, there are some bumps in the road.

Incidentally, many singers learn that way too. Not everyone is classically trained.

Are you suggesting that reading a DMG with extensive encounter building guidelines builds good DMing skills or is a replacement for those bumpy early sessions? I'm skeptical of that.

I'm suggesting that reading a DMG with extensive DMing advice (which is not limited to encounter design) provides a basic foundation for the reader to run his game. It will be enhanced by player feedback, and there will be some bumps along the road. However, a good DMG will provide the basic map so the road can be located. It provides a far better basis than "Here's all the rules and a horde of creature descriptions - good luck with that!"

Your own experience is fine, but I suspect your DMing did not spring whole cloth from reading monster stats. I suspect, rather, that you absorbed a lot from playing experience under at least one other DM. I think the DMG has to anticipate that some groups are starting from scratch, and don't have an experienced DM to learn from.

 

[DEFCON 1]

What I wouldn't do for a little 3e-style imbalance. Give me some of that swinginess and lethality, please. The "outcome-based" monster design might make for balanced encounters, but they are bland and boring. Worse, the system discourages any sort of unbalanced encounter due to its existence and 4e monster design. In every fight, you're expected to win. If the DM picks a higher-level monster, you're not going to hit him reliably enough to win. If the DM picks a lower-level monster, he's not going to hit you reliably enough to pose a threat (not that he really posed a threat in the first place, but you know what I mean).

Well, if this is indeed a sentiment held by your entire playgroup... then it's quite easy for the DM to CREATE that imbalance within the system if he so chooses.

Even using a monster or group of monsters the same level as the party... all it takes is adding in simple monster abilities that do things like extend their crit range... give extra dice of damage on crits... give them multiple attacks per round, or extra attacks off of previous hits, etc. etc. etc. If you have the Monster Builder as part of DDI... this is even simpler.

The only issue you'll have is if you have some compulsion to "play by the book". And if that's the case... then you can also help your group out by using some of the later 4E monster books that are tuned to better solve the problems you mentioned.

Basically... if you actually want to play 4E, any problems you have with it can be fixed to your liking with a little bit of easy work and adjustment.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Your own experience is fine, but I suspect your DMing did not spring whole cloth from reading monster stats. I suspect, rather, that you absorbed a lot from playing experience under at least one other DM.

I certainly hope not! My experience before DMing, while I don't want to be rude, was not with anyone I would describe as being skilled or would want to emulate. It wasn't a ten year history of playing with expert DMs in gaming stores, it was a year or two of playing with inept teenagers in our parents' basements. Is that experience still relevant to my own development? Yes, somewhat. But it's not as if I learned to DM from a role model.

In my opinion, my approach to D&D has been informed far more by non-D&D sources. I took theater and film making classes as a child, and I'm the sort of person who listens to director's commentaries. I also was a heavy reader at that age. The process I use to create a D&D session is modeled after those sources far more than after anyone I met in an rpg context and far more than anything I read in a DMG.

On that note...

I think the DMG has to anticipate that some groups are starting from scratch, and don't have an experienced DM to learn from.

I'm sure there are.

I suspect most people that start playing D&D are not starting from absolutely nothing, as D&D's basic tropes go beyond the tabletop genre and most people will have at least played some type of computer rpg. I also suspect that most of them have experience playing other non-roleplaying games in group settings. I also suspect that they have some creative experience. The best thing a DMG can do to inform a beginner is to give you a recommended list of non-D&D sources to consult on how to create a plot, portray a character, or manage a group.