D&D 5E Final playtest packet due in mid September.

[Majoru Oakheart]

That's true. It's very explicit. But that really invites change. For example, it does make clear that there are no called shots, which IME has made everyone and their mother try their own variation of how to do called shots and injuries.

Yeah, we tried it once, I believe. Until someone pointed out that the entire point of having a critical hit was that you hit someone in an important spot. Of course you were ALWAYS aiming for vital spots. The enemy is specifically protecting those parts. Therefore, a crit shows you successfully hit what you were aiming for. It's the same reason there was no longer any "facing", you faced all directions because you always turned towards wherever it was important to face.

We debated it very briefly when the game first came out. But we all agreed that the point of the system was to make all of this abstract so we didn't need detailed rules for facing and called shots. There were a number of other system out there that had rules for these things. If we wanted rules for that, we could simply switch to those systems.

I think it might be that I played so many different systems...but our solution was almost never to house rule. If we didn't like a system, we switched to one we did like. That's pretty much why we stopped playing Rifts. It was possible to house rule the system into working correctly. But house ruling takes so much effort that it wasn't worth it. We'll just play games that work well.

The books are a guideline to help the DM make decisions, and a common language and set of expectation, but each individual situation is always adjudicated by the person in charge, not the rules.

Doing so does require trust, and clearly, this is an issue for some people.

The problem is, trust has to be earned. I also don't think most people know what their doing. Everyone THINKS they know what they are doing. But few people actually do.

I saw a test that was done where they showed that nearly every person thinks they are "above average". It's a concept called "Illusory Superiority". Basically, in tests people think they are more popular than they are, they think they are smarter than they are, they think they are better than the average person at most tasks.

The problem is, that not everyone can be better than average. Most DMs feel they are, however. Their rules decisions are better than the ones made by the designers of the game and better than other DMs. Their house rules are brilliant and the perfect way to solve problems.

Which leads people to overconfidence and not noticing the problems that are right in front of them. It can cause huge amount of bias towards a certain player, a certain class, or a certain playstyle...often at the expense of their players who aren't having any fun. The irony, of course, is that illusory superiority also applies to bias. The average person feels they are way more immune to bias than anyone else. Plus their believe in how much people like them means they often won't notice when their friends aren't having fun.

Which all comes down to the fact that it's actually MORE likely that the rules in the book will be better than ones that the DM has invented since the designers have more time and experience working on rules than DMs do. While the DM will think the opposite.

That's not to say that designers have never made a bad rule. But it's likely that whatever you come up with to replace it is actually worse.

On one hand, I can see where that's coming from. On the other hand, it is clearly a problematic idea. For one thing, all the classes shouldn't be equal. If we're out doing adventuring stuff and one guy plays a minstrel who channels the magic of music (bard) and one guy plays a mighty warlord who fought his way to leadership of the tribe (barbarian), I do not expect them to contribute equally. I'd be pretty insulted as the barbarian player if they did.

That just shows your bias against bards. I can easily reverse that situation:

One guy is playing a powerful magician who, by playing his harp can command people to do his every command, can inspire people to fight long after they should have died, can heal someone near death to completely healthy with but a song, and can cause his enemies to stand still while he kills them or even fight each other. Meanwhile another guy is playing someone whose really good at fighting with a sword. I wouldn't expect them to contribute equally. I'd be pretty insulted as the Bard player if they did.

Let's put it another way. Let's say you were playing a Hockey board game. One player only has a 1 in 20 chance to get the puck into the goal, he skates a quarter of the speed of another player, and he runs out of stamina after 5 minutes of playing and has to sit down on the ice and catch his breath for 2 minutes. The other player scores 15 out of 20 times and doesn't have any of the disadvantages of the former player.

Now, you can say "Well, the first player is playing a fat, nonathletic guy, so I would expect he'd be worse than the other player." However, the point then becomes, if the point of the game is a hockey game...why offer "fat, nonathletic guy" as an option? Hockey games are interesting because nearly every player on both teams are of similar athletic skill. Having someone on the ice who was REALLY bad in a pro game wouldn't be fun to watch, it wouldn't be fun for the other players on his team, it wouldn't be fun for the players on the other team, and it wouldn't be fun to be the guy who was bad.

The same thing works in terms of D&D classes. Bard could be a class that plays a lute and makes people feel slightly better or it could be an all powerful mind control specialist with healing. Isn't it better for the game that the bard's powers are designed around what makes them roughly equal in strength with a raging barbarian or a skilled fighter?

For another thing, there are different types of games. If we're playing urban intrigue, the balance between druid, rogue, and fighter favors the rogue, makes the fighter sit on his hands a lot, and marginalizes many of the druid's abilities. If we're fighting battles in the wilderness, the druid becomes dominant, the fighter useful, and the rogue a supporting player. Context matters.

It CAN matter...the question is, should it?

Imagine and urban campaign where the fighter uses his size and strength to push people around to get the answers he wants. He fights off the ambush of thieves in the ally. He uses his contacts in the city guard from his time in the army to get favors. Meanwhile the Druid uses their tracking skills to find the people they are looking for and asks the rats for clues while using his ability to become a cat to spy on their foes.

Imagine a wilderness battle where the Rogue stays hidden in the underbrush, climbs trees and strikes out with his bow in complete silence, taking the enemies by surprise.

Context doesn't have to make anyone worse than anyone else. Each class has their own way of solving problems. Sometimes one method IS slightly better than another. But it doesn't need to be overwhelmingly better. No class has to be so bad in any situation that they might as well not be there.

The best interpretation is that any character should be good at the things he's supposed to be able to do. Trying to go beyond that has been...problematic.

That's the problem...what a class "should" be able to do changes dramatically from person to person. I'd prefer that what a class can do be dictated at least 50% by balance. After all, a Wizard who can wave his hand and cause everyone in town to obey him for the rest of his life seems like something magic "should" be able to do...but it doesn't make for a fun game for either the other players or the DM.

On the other hand, trying to analyze the balance of things that are inherently different (like bards and barbarians, or knowledge skills and diplomacy, or magic missile and charm person) is a fruitless endeavor. And when people go overboard on trying to do that, bad things can happen.

Those things aren't inherently different, however. They are both adventuring classes that want to accomplish adventures. How effective they are at finishing the adventure CAN be compared.

Combat is easy: Damage dealt vs damage taken is an easy number to compare for any class. It's not necessary easy math to do....but it can be compared.

How easy it is to solve certain common problems in a D&D game is fairly easy compared as well.

The problem is that when most of these comparisons are done, they show that certain classes are absurdly more powerful than other classes. When this is pointed out to some people, they go into defensive mode and say things like "I don't care what your numbers say, I like Wizards just the way they are" or "That may be the case, but if you lower Wizard's power down to what you are proposing they will be no fun to play anymore and the game won't be D&D to me anymore."

I kind of approached that way at first. But then what I discovered is this. There are tons of specific little rules. Sometimes, people forget them. Occasionally, this causes problems, but usually it does not. The game experience is pretty robust.

Tell that to my players the first time a PC dies and then after the battle found out that the DM miscalculated the enemy's AC by 1 point when we missed by 1 four times.

Then people stop thinking that the game experience is pretty robust and people start demanding the DM calculate things correctly in the future...in addition to bringing the PC back to life.

Bolded line is key here. You assumed the rules existed for a reason. I assume that reason was because some guy thought it was a good idea. Which is not nothing, but is not exactly gospel in my eyes either.

I assume that whatever I come up with, even if I have no experience gaming and am doing so off the cuff with no rationale or study behind it, is better than what some game designer came up with. I'm probably brighter than they are to begin with, and my specific knowledge of my players and my situation and my desired tone is an almost infinite advantage over their perspective. The point of buying a book of rules is mainly to save the time it would take me to write my own.

See above about illusory superiority.

I agree that tone is something each group has to decide on their own. But tone is so often ingrained into the system itself that changing the tone requires rewriting the entire ruleset. If you are rewriting the entire rule set then you are no longer saving the time it requires to write your own rules.

...and immediately decided that they were BS and we could do better. The well-oiled machine was always in our heads, not the book, because we already knew what we wanted before reading that part.

I'm seeing a reoccurring theme: "I'm better than other people, especially game designers who are stupider than me and know less about game design"

I'm of the opposite opinion. Which is why I follow the rules so closely. Anyone who has the time to spend 8 hours a day doing nothing but testing, thinking about, and writing rules knows infinitely more about the subject than I do. They've considered, tested, and thrown out all my ideas for reasons that will never occur to me long before I even had them.

I've had a lot of confusing situations lately. For example, one character teleported above a flying enemy and wanted a full attack during his fall. I said no. Is there a rule to back that up? I doubt it. Don't much care, the right answer was clear enough on principle.

That's one of those corner cases. I'm certain I wouldn't allow more than one attack in that situation either. It doesn't cover every situation, that's for sure.

Maybe for organized lay. What I saw with 3e was that instead of everyone doing their own thing, everyone was doing their own thing but sharing it on the internet. Because that was still when the internet was just becoming universal. Before it was just about what one DM thought, but now people like me can go online and talk game theory. Which, if anything, emboldens us to make changes. I think that modern (i.e. post-2000) houserules have a lot more substance behind them, and are shared commonly between groups more often. Given what I see and what I read, I seriously doubt that massive houseruling has become less common.

The problem is that the vast majority of players don't come on message boards. ENWorld in particular is filled with people who love to tinker. There's a reason that the vast majority of people I know aren't members here. Most of them feel that the type of people who come to ENWorld think about the game too much.

I have one player in particular who started reading threads here and his brain nearly exploded. He told me "It's easy, you just follow the rules in the book, I don't understand why there is all this debate about what Bards should or shouldn't do or how healing works or what the tone of their game is or what house rules they should have....you just play the game. Why think about it so much?"

When I go to conventions and talk to random people about D&D, almost no one mentions house rules they have. In fact, the vast majority of conversations about D&D with random people are about the power level of certain spells or class features as they are written in the book.

To me, D&D is a form of self-expression, and that expression happens through the DM and players creating as much of the experience as possible. I look at a DM's setting as an extension of his personality.

That's a lot of weight to put on a campaign setting. Setting is just a tool. I don't play D&D to self express. I play D&D to have a fun time killing monsters, taking their stuff, and ruining the bad guy's plots. If an adventure has a cool bad guy or an interesting story, I'm in. In the same way that if a book has an interesting story I'm in. It's cool that I get to modify the story slightly with my decisions but I'm there to be entertained.

Just like when I DM I'm there to entertain the players. My ideas and plots are often not that entertaining. So, I steal from people who are more creative than I am. Thus, campaign settings and purchased adventures.

That way my players can fight their way through the Temple of Elemental Evil and fight cool battles against interesting opponents instead of playing Temple of Blandness with 100 battles against generic Orcs, which is likely what I'd write.

To me, a DM without houserules would be like a director handing a bunch of actors a script and saying "go do that" without any further instruction.

This is no more true than if I put a copy of Final Fantasy 1 into my NES and played it without hacking in to make Fire1 do 1000 points of damage. Or played a game of Monopoly using the rules as written.

It's a game. We're all playing it. Even the DM. Games have rules to make sure no one has an advantage over the other players. Even the DM.

Besides, the DMs job is way more complicated than that. If D&D was a movie, the DM has to serve as the Writer, Director, Producer, a bunch of Actors, Lighting, Special Effects, Camera Operator, Sound, Prop Wrangler, The Laws Of Physics, and often Caterer.

The Laws of Physics in a movie are sometimes changed...but rarely. People fall at the same rate they do in real life, people can see just as far, etc. The Laws of Physics are pretty much the rules in a game. They determine what happens. Yes, sometimes the writers change the laws of physics so their story works better. But most of the time they are left unchanged. I view rules the same way. Why change them if you don't have to? As a DM you already have to worry about ALL those other things.

Obviously, I wouldn't do organized play. And even if I was forced to start a new group whole cloth, I would still approach a game the same way. Clearly, our perspectives are worlds apart; you can do the organized or RAW games because your entirely philosophy is geared towards it, where mine makes those things anathema. None of this is intended as criticism, merely as an illustration of how differently two people can approach the same game.

I guess I still don't understand how someone can play a game but choose not to use the rules. To me, house rules are exactly the same as sitting down at a table to play Scrabble and have the first player play "WIN" and say "The game's over, I win!" and when you attempt to argue that that's not the way the game is played that they say "I'm the owner of the game, that gives me the ability to change the rules to whatever I want, I say that you immediately win if you play 'WIN'".

It sounds super arrogant and bossy that one player gets to decide for everyone else what the rules are unless all the players have agreed to play that game instead.

After all, if you are playing Hockey with the house rules that it isn't on ice, there's no puck, no one has sticks, there's a ball and you need to carry it down a large field to a scoring area....well, you're playing Football now, not Hockey.

So, when I sit down to play D&D...I kind of expect to play D&D. The rules are part of that.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is what 4e does in the case of skill challenges (but not combat, though, which can cause problems with resolution at the interface), and what Marvel Heroic RP does for its whole system: the scene is described in terms of difficulty, not time and distance, and so the "challenge" for the players then becomes more of a narrative one than a tactical one.

I think the problem is, my players really like finding out how fast they can run, how far they can jump and whether they are shooting enough lightning to kill 2 or 3 orcs. The details matter to them. The more details the better.

I'm planning on running Numenera and my players have agreed to try it. However, the system is rather abstract and I anticipate after a couple of sessions that the complaining will begin about how they "can't do enough". Because to them, what the can do is limited by the options in the book and the details of those options.

Give them a lightning bolt power that says "You can shoot 400 feet and if you hit an enemy, there is a 50% chance it arcs to another enemy within 100 feet This chance keeps going up to infinite targets. It does 10d6 points of damage but half damage to anyone wearing insulation." and they'll be happy forever.

Give them a power that says "You can shoot lightning. It gets more difficult the further away a target is and sometimes you might be able to hit more than one target" and they'll complain about how limiting the power is and how it feels like they can't do anything.

Which is funny because it's likely the 2nd power is WAY more open ended and versatile. But since the details aren't spelled out, it feels like it does nothing at all.

Although we learned to stop caring about "realism" in our games so no one consults the Book of Records anymore. We still consult the rules for the exact distance we can fire our weapon to the foot so we aren't "wrong".

 

[Ahnehnois]

The numbers I heard from some of the publishers was that the total number of 3rd party supplements sold was EXTREMELY tiny.
...
Everyone is hesitant to give out real numbers, of course, but the couple of estimates we got said that if you combined every 3rd party book sold you might add up to the numbers that just ONE WOTC book sold.

I saw some numbers that were guessed at that said most 3rd party supplements sold less than a 1000 copies. The BIG 3rd party supplements sold in the range of 20,000-30,000 copies. But the average WOTC book was likely in the range of 200,000-400,000 copies.

All of which is fair. I didn't use any 3rd party stuff at all for a while and I still use primarily WotC stuff, free stuff, and my stuff. However, even if you buy those numbers, it's likely that one common pool of people bought most of the WotC books, while many separate groups of people bought a small number of 3rd party supplements from different sources. I would guess that a fairly typical distribution is a DM who owns a ton of books, a few players who own some books, and maybe one or two small-niche products that someone in the group owns.

Even with small sales numbers, the average group probably took a dip in the 3rd party pond at some point. Certainly, there's enough of it that someone who uses 3rd party material is not an "outlier".

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I'm seeing a reoccurring theme: "I'm better than other people, especially game designers who are stupider than me and know less about game design"

I'm of the opposite opinion. Which is why I follow the rules so closely. Anyone who has the time to spend 8 hours a day doing nothing but testing, thinking about, and writing rules knows infinitely more about the subject than I do. They've considered, tested, and thrown out all my ideas for reasons that will never occur to me long before I even had them.

This argument misses an important point. Maybe the game designer is the best ever. But he's still designing for a generic audience. When I make house rules they are specifically to make the game more fun for me and my group. My group's preferences are not identical to the generic "average" group so I ought to be able to improve on the RAW for my group's specific gameplay.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

That just shows your bias against bards. I can easily reverse that situation:

One guy is playing a powerful magician who, by playing his harp can command people to do his every command, can inspire people to fight long after they should have died, can heal someone near death to completely healthy with but a song, and can cause his enemies to stand still while he kills them or even fight each other. Meanwhile another guy is playing someone whose really good at fighting with a sword. I wouldn't expect them to contribute equally. I'd be pretty insulted as the Bard player if they did.

Let's put it another way. Let's say you were playing a Hockey board game. One player only has a 1 in 20 chance to get the puck into the goal, he skates a quarter of the speed of another player, and he runs out of stamina after 5 minutes of playing and has to sit down on the ice and catch his breath for 2 minutes. The other player scores 15 out of 20 times and doesn't have any of the disadvantages of the former player.

Now, you can say "Well, the first player is playing a fat, nonathletic guy, so I would expect he'd be worse than the other player." However, the point then becomes, if the point of the game is a hockey game...why offer "fat, nonathletic guy" as an option? Hockey games are interesting because nearly every player on both teams are of similar athletic skill. Having someone on the ice who was REALLY bad in a pro game wouldn't be fun to watch, it wouldn't be fun for the other players on his team, it wouldn't be fun for the players on the other team, and it wouldn't be fun to be the guy who was bad.

The same thing works in terms of D&D classes. Bard could be a class that plays a lute and makes people feel slightly better or it could be an all powerful mind control specialist with healing. Isn't it better for the game that the bard's powers are designed around what makes them roughly equal in strength with a raging barbarian or a skilled fighter?

Your definition of "strength" is too narrow. Combat is only part of D&D, and I quite like the idea of playing a bard that really shines in the social side of the game and is significantly weaker on the combat side. As long as I contribute something in combat and get my spotlight time in the roleplaying, I'm perfectly happy.

 

[Ahnehnois]

This is going to take a while.

I think it might be that I played so many different systems...but our solution was almost never to house rule. If we didn't like a system, we switched to one we did like.

I don't get that. From my perspective, it's unrealistic to invest that much time and money in the hobby. Trying new systems is quite an endeavor.

That said, when I do look at or try new ones, I pretty much end up houseruling the aspects I like of the other ones back in, and then starting anew.

The problem is, trust has to be earned.

True. And people have to have the opportunity to earn it. Which to some extent means taking a leap of faith and spending some time in a DM's game when you don't know if he can DM or not.

I also don't think most people know what their doing. Everyone THINKS they know what they are doing. But few people actually do.

I don't think that knowing what you're doing is really that important. People learn from practice, regardless of whether they understand the theory of what they're doing or not. And natural talent plays into it too. In general, I think that people will naturally figure out a way to make things work.

I saw a test that was done where they showed that nearly every person thinks they are "above average". It's a concept called "Illusory Superiority". Basically, in tests people think they are more popular than they are, they think they are smarter than they are, they think they are better than the average person at most tasks.

True, but not really relevant. What's relevant is whether an "average" DM is good enough, regardless of how good he thinks he is.

That's not to say that designers have never made a bad rule. But it's likely that whatever you come up with to replace it is actually worse.

This whole line of discussion misses the idea of individuality. There isn't generally a good or a bad rule, merely good or bad for one particular situation with one particular group of people. As was already suggested above, I think that a DM's individual vision and knowledge of his group are what makes him better, not just actual talent/IQ/publishing experience.

That just shows your bias against bards.

I don't know that acknowledging their silliness counts as "bias".

One guy is playing a powerful magician who, by playing his harp can command people to do his every command, can inspire people to fight long after they should have died, can heal someone near death to completely healthy with but a song, and can cause his enemies to stand still while he kills them or even fight each other. Meanwhile another guy is playing someone whose really good at fighting with a sword. I wouldn't expect them to contribute equally. I'd be pretty insulted as the Bard player if they did.

Except that this isn't how anyone I've ever seen looks at bards and barbarians.

Now, you can say "Well, the first player is playing a fat, nonathletic guy, so I would expect he'd be worse than the other player." However, the point then becomes, if the point of the game is a hockey game...why offer "fat, nonathletic guy" as an option?

Because there is some value in playing someone who isn't a savant at what he's doing?

More to the point, D&D isn't a hockey game. It's open-ended. Some games involve more things that barbarians are good at, while some are more bard-friendly.

The same thing works in terms of D&D classes. Bard could be a class that plays a lute and makes people feel slightly better or it could be an all powerful mind control specialist with healing. Isn't it better for the game that the bard's powers are designed around what makes them roughly equal in strength with a raging barbarian or a skilled fighter?

No.

Trying to take an apple and an orange and make them the same is not a worthwhile exercise. I think it's a lot more important that the bard class lets the player feel like he's playing a bard than that it compares favorably to some completely disparate class. If the well-rendered bard isn't useful enough to be in the game at all, cut it, don't try to change it into something it's not.

Which, for example, is exactly what happened with the cleric. It used to play like you'd expect a divine caster to play, but they kept trying to power it up because they thought it was too weak. Now it's needlessly powerful. Not enough to ruin the game, but enough to piss some people off, that's for sure.

Context doesn't have to make anyone worse than anyone else. Each class has their own way of solving problems. Sometimes one method IS slightly better than another. But it doesn't need to be overwhelmingly better. No class has to be so bad in any situation that they might as well not be there.

Sure they do. Take the example (which basically every book on DMing suggests at some point) of a society that bans magic. What good is a wizard then? He's a decent sage I guess. But there are plenty of more banal examples. Sometimes you're fighting an enemy that's resistant to damage and one character just can't damage them. Sometimes you need a skill that someone just doesn't have. I hardly think that a well-designed game precludes the possibility of a character sometimes being rendered useless.

That's the problem...what a class "should" be able to do changes dramatically from person to person.

True. That's what houserules and other forms of customization are for!

The problem is that when most of these comparisons are done, they show that certain classes are absurdly more powerful than other classes.

Not really. When these comparisons are really done, it's not as a thought experiment but in the game. The game seems to be working fine; I'm not aware of any imbalances at the level you suggest.

Let me go back and check my latest session where there 10th level martial characters with minimal casting abilities (barely) beat a tricked out 16th level full spellcaster (PF witch).

Tell that to my players the first time a PC dies and then after the battle found out that the DM miscalculated the enemy's AC by 1 point when we missed by 1 four times.

Then people stop thinking that the game experience is pretty robust and people start demanding the DM calculate things correctly in the future...in addition to bringing the PC back to life.

Given that I tend to err on the players' side, that usually doesn't happen. But if it happens, it happens. I don't see them complaining, because they know that however we get there, the final outcome is likely to be good.

I'm seeing a reoccurring theme: "I'm better than other people, especially game designers who are stupider than me and know less about game design"

Again, you've missed the point. It's not that I'm better than other people, it's that specific is better than general. That being said...

I'm of the opposite opinion. Which is why I follow the rules so closely. Anyone who has the time to spend 8 hours a day doing nothing but testing, thinking about, and writing rules knows infinitely more about the subject than I do. They've considered, tested, and thrown out all my ideas for reasons that will never occur to me long before I even had them.

My feeling has always been that if they were all that smart, they wouldn't be designing games for a living. To me, D&D is a hobby dominated by amateurism. I am not aware of any professionals, only paid amateurs. They might be pretty good, but I doubt they're better than the rest of us.

The problem is that the vast majority of players don't come on message boards. ENWorld in particular is filled with people who love to tinker. There's a reason that the vast majority of people I know aren't members here. Most of them feel that the type of people who come to ENWorld think about the game too much.

Personally, most of the players I know aren't on forums like this, but it's more because they don't have time or because they don't feel welcome, not because they aren't interested in game theory.

I

I don't play D&D to self express. I play D&D to have a fun time killing monsters, taking their stuff, and ruining the bad guy's plots.

It seems like a strange hobby to choose then. There are plenty of simpler and easier ways to kill monsters and take their stuff. This was less true when D&D was started, but now there's a (much larger than D&D) industry of computer games and tabletop wargames for people who want that.

You certainly don't have to use D&D as an artistic medium, but that aspect of it is there.

Just like when I DM I'm there to entertain the players. My ideas and plots are often not that entertaining. So, I steal from people who are more creative than I am.

Well, everyone steals. Shakespeare stole. They still create something new out of what they stole.

That way my players can fight their way through the Temple of Elemental Evil and fight cool battles against interesting opponents instead of playing Temple of Blandness with 100 battles against generic Orcs, which is likely what I'd write.

I'm beginning to see a recurring theme here: a lack of self-confidence. If you're at ~2500 posts on a D&D message board, I think you'd come up with something better. For me, D&D is a great venue for personal growth, and a great way to try and build the confidence to do stuff like that.

This is no more true than if I put a copy of Final Fantasy 1 into my NES and played it without hacking in to make Fire1 do 1000 points of damage. Or played a game of Monopoly using the rules as written.

Given that D&D is open-ended and has no defined outcomes, I don't think that's really a fair comparison. D&D has more in common with children playing house or running around a playground making fake gun noises at each other than with a video game.

That being said, even games with close-ended objective rules are subject to modification. Before D&D my big thing was the Civilization games. There's an entire modding community built around them, and the games have been coded in increasingly modifiable ways to allow that.

It's a game. We're all playing it. Even the DM. Games have rules to make sure no one has an advantage over the other players. Even the DM.

I don't think that's true. In many organized games there is some sort of referee, who does have absolute power over the people playing the game. It's the referee's job to police himself, not the rules' job. There is nothing preventing a baseball umpire from deciding who wins and loses a game through a variety of direct or indirect mechanisms. Of course, one hopes that umpires who do that will be removed from their job.

The same is even more true of a DM. The DM has absolute discretion, can dictate any outcome, and the players can't change that. The only things they can do are build a relationship with the DM, or leave.

Besides, the DMs job is way more complicated than that. If D&D was a movie, the DM has to serve as the Writer, Director, Producer, a bunch of Actors, Lighting, Special Effects, Camera Operator, Sound, Prop Wrangler, The Laws Of Physics, and often Caterer.

No kidding.

The Laws of Physics in a movie are sometimes changed...but rarely.

I'd say that's analagous to 'DM cheating'.

It sounds super arrogant and bossy that one player gets to decide for everyone else what the rules are unless all the players have agreed to play that game instead.

Well, they have agreed to play. They've sat down for a game of D&D. There's a DM. It's right there in the rules. If anything, I find that players are usually begging for the DM to take a more authoritative stance and dictate more things to them, because they don't want to have to think about anything other than managing their character and having fun.

So, when I sit down to play D&D...I kind of expect to play D&D. The rules are part of that.

Personally, the experiences I looked on as inspirational to D&D were improv exercises in drama class, beginner filmmaking, and my own storytelling around the campfire. I could have a completely satisfying D&D-like experience with no rules. I use the rules because they give us a common language and an alternate reality matrix to play with. They're an add-on to the experience, in my book.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Seems relevant, so let me go ahead and do this cross-thread quote here:

Empowering DMs
Ultimately, all design is local. The kinds of characters the people at your table play are unique to your particular table. If classes are to serve the point of “what kind of character I am,” then the mechanics are only useful in as much as they support that kind of character. This means that class is subjective -- arbitrary. What is worthy of a class at one table might not be worthy of a class at another.

Conceiving of class primarily as a construct of the needs of our own worlds and stories, it’s easy to see that the traditional D&D classes and definitions can be much improved for our own games. Rather than cling to typical D&D classes, my own ideal scenario would have DMs making classes that are unique to their own worlds. If I’m playing a Planescape game, for instance, my faction affiliation is probably more important than whether I use spells or swords, so maybe THAT can be my class. Maybe in a 13th Age game, I use the Icons as classes rather than the typical classes. In Dark Sun, I have gladiators and templars; in a Steampunk game maybe nobles, scientists, soldiers, and explorers.

So what I want is less debates over what SHOULD be a class and what SHOULDN’T be a class, and more conversation about the basic elements of class-building that we can teach to any DM, so that ANYTHING can be a class, depending on what your own games need. Are you with me?

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340417-What-Is-Worthy-of-a-Class#ixzz2dMYvbRF5

 

[I'm A Banana]

Your definition of "strength" is too narrow. Combat is only part of D&D, and I quite like the idea of playing a bard that really shines in the social side of the game and is significantly weaker on the combat side. As long as I contribute something in combat and get my spotlight time in the roleplaying, I'm perfectly happy.

This keys into one of the big differences between a focus on the encounter (implicitly, the combat encounter) and a focus on the adventure as a whole. If being charming and erudite can accomplish the party's goals as much as being tough and killin' things, it's okay to be good at one thing and not at the other. If the party needs to raid the Temple of Elemental Evil, and the bard can talk the cultists into letting the party into the inner sanctum, that's useful. Unfortunately, because D&D has typically had rather unsatisfying systems for resolving things without stabby bits, it's something D&D has had less success with, which might be the root of the problem. If I'm a barbarian, I can roll dice and swing my axe and have fairly predictable results. If I'm a bard, depending on the DM and the edition, I might be playing a game of "Convince the DM," or rolling binary skill checks, or playing through a skill challenge where the wizard with Arcane Mutterings is going to beat my bard any time.

 

[Greg K]

This argument misses an important point. Maybe the game designer is the best ever. But he's still designing for a generic audience. When I make house rules they are specifically to make the game more fun for me and my group. My group's preferences are not identical to the generic "average" group so I ought to be able to improve on the RAW for my group's specific gameplay.

This. There are even a passage or two in the 3.0 DMG about the designers not knowing individual groups, their individual play style, party composition, etc. and, therefore, DMs may need to tailor things for their group and party at hand.

 

[N'raac]

True. And people have to have the opportunity to earn it. Which to some extent means taking a leap of faith and spending some time in a DM's game when you don't know if he can DM or not.

Remind me of how many new players have come to your game, and how many new GM's you have played with, in the past 10 years or so. Have you not been telling us you play with the same group over many years?

I don't know that acknowledging their silliness counts as "bias".

I think considering bards uniformly silly is as clear an expression of bias as any I have ever seen, which pretty clearly illustrates the point that most people have a tough time acknowledging their own biases.

Except that this isn't how anyone I've ever seen looks at bards and barbarians.

It seems no less biased than your glowing description of a Warlord followed by "some minstrel".

Let me go back and check my latest session where there 10th level martial characters with minimal casting abilities (barely) beat a tricked out 16th level full spellcaster (PF witch).

I'm sure we could poke any number of holes in the build or tactics of the witch with a full description. We would have some posters who conclude the witch should have mopped the floor with the PC's and others who feel the witch should have known he/she was completely outclassed and never even engaged.

To me, the first thing I look for in a solo spellcaster is "how many ways does this character have to evade, deter or get out of a melee", because once closed in melee, that spellcaster is dead. [Sidenote: No Lich needs any 4th level spell other than Dimension Door!] If the witch lacked the Fly hex, or ever landed to let the PC's engage in melee, that seems a tactically poor choice against four or more armed, armored adversaries.

My feeling has always been that if they were all that smart, they wouldn't be designing games for a living. To me, D&D is a hobby dominated by amateurism. I am not aware of any professionals, only paid amateurs. They might be pretty good, but I doubt they're better than the rest of us.

Whereas you, of course, would be a consummate professional in your own line of work...

NO QUOTE

You've commented above about the work of trying new systems. D&D with dozens of house rules and modifications is just as much a "new system", and a lot of work to get into. This is one reason players with limited time on their hands prefer one (or a few) favoured systems and prefer playing the game without a slew of house rules in each game.