D&D 5E Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?

[Lanefan]

Encounter budgets have NOTHING to do with "making the party win."

Unless of course, as a GM, it serves your intentions. In which case, you ABSOLUTELY want to have guidelines to serve that intent.

The key word here is "guidelines". The older editions were forgiving enough in their math (and the style of play was different as well) that if you threw something at the party they in theory couldn't handle they might get lucky and handle it anyway, or just run away. But the curve was much flatter.

3e (and, from what I gather, 4e) made the curve much steeper. In my current old-school game I intentionally threw a Hill Giant at a 1st-level party to see what they'd do (I'd already decided that if the party ran away the giant wouldn't chase them). So what did they do? They charged right at the thing - and killed it! (at cost of almost half the party) Try that in 3e or 4e.

In any number of situations, it may be perfectly reasonable to encounter a TPK-level threat, or a milquetoast pushover encounter in a given scene. The scene setup, world, situation, etc., may allow for either in a perfectly "simulationist" fashion. As long as the GM can rationally provide a "simulationist" reason for the encounter, either one may fit the bill.

But which one does the GM actually WANT the players to experience? Totally up to the GM.

In this light, having ENCOUNTER GUIDELINES is a massively good thing---because you've set up the encounter the way you expect it to play out.

Agreed, except...

How many GM's have set up a scene in a game, thinking it should be a "manageable" encounter, consistent with the "simulationist" needs of the setup . . . . only to have the party struggle mightily to stay alive, or be a total pushover with unexpected post-scene consequences?

...this, at least IME, happens all the time! Probably again due to that flatter curve I noted above; sometimes the party gets lucky, sometimes the enemies do. And that's realistic both from a game-world sense: nothing is guaranteed in the fog of war - and from a gamist sense: dice can be fickle things. And personally I prefer this; as predictable encounters get boring very quickly both for DM and players.

And while the PCs can do their best to gather information before an encounter, realism suggests they probably won't know everything every time, or worse; that what they think they know is erroneous.

Lanefan

 

[billd91]

There are 5 books* so far, the series is currently projected to go another 2 - sometime.

What I'm trying to convey here is the idea that characters coming and going during the course of an open-ended campaign is good for the game. Martin is one of very few authors who seems to see his book series the same way; even though in theory it's going to reach a closed end at some point, right now it has a very open-ended feel to it. And a PC who is only around for 2 adventures out of 5 is, I rather suspect, something that would be seen in my game far more often than yours.

Most fantasy series work more like closed-ended adventure paths where the PCs (or the great majority of them) are by design supposed to survive through the whole thing.

* - you say you haven't read these books; I highly recommend you change this forthwith!

Lan-"winter is coming"-efan

I think most of the characters in Martin's novels will survive until they're done with the part they have to play just like any other novel or set of novels. But, I think, Game of Ice and Fire differs in that while there's one overall progression of time, there are a variety of stories unfolding at different rates. The novels themselves focus on different stories at different times. The first novel, A Game of Thrones, is very different from the rest because it's the prologue to the interkingdom warfare and main characters in it pass from the stage because their parts are played (and set up the situation for the rest of the series).
So, I don't think of it as really being open ended at all - just that it tells multiple stories that conclude and open at different times. Kind of like a campaign setting in which multiple but inter-related campaigns occur.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The point of tight encounter guidelines, math, and budgeting is not system bias towards "the desired outcome of the party winning." The point is to create a formalized, predictable, reproducable baseline for the GM.

There is a massive difference between "encounter guidelines" and "challenge rating", and that difference lies in their intent. Encounter guidelines, like wealth-by-level guidelines, tell you what you should be doing. Challenge rating merely describes what something is.

 

[Ahnehnois]

But the fact of the matter is, it's the knowing that no one is safe from anything that, at least in part, makes the books a good read and the show interesting

You might know who ordered someone's murder in a petulant rage or arranged it as a political assassination, but certainly most of these deaths are not honorable, and in many cases the character getting killed isn't aware of or involved in his own death. It's a far cry from the D&D notion of a challenging encounter, certainly.

 

[Imaro]

You might know who ordered someone's murder in a petulant rage or arranged it as a political assassination, but certainly most of these deaths are not honorable, and in many cases the character getting killed isn't aware of or involved in his own death. It's a far cry from the D&D notion of a challenging encounter, certainly.

Oh I definitely agree... and sometimes you don't find out who is actually behind things until much further down the road... I think, though I might be wrong, this clashes with @pemerton 's views on what he calls "secret backstory"... something I believe he neither cares for nor uses in his own games but I have used to great effect with my players.

 

[Ahnehnois]

There is a massive difference between "encounter guidelines" and "challenge rating", and that difference lies in their intent. Encounter guidelines, like wealth-by-level guidelines, tell you what you should be doing. Challenge rating merely describes what something is.

While that's a valid point, Challenge Rating is one of two things: it's either redundant with the concept of level or it isn't a valid measure of anything. I tend towards the latter view.

 

[Aenghus]

I found PCs being allowed to escape from overwhelming encounters more contrived than a succession of more or less balanced encounters. I've also seen more than one party butchered by an overwhelming encounter that went wrong, even when they tried to flee. (Some editions and some RPGs just make fleeing too difficult to be viable). It just goes to show how subjective this issue is.

Game of Thrones is amongst other things a deconstruction of heroic stories, so not a good role model if you actually want conventionally heroic stories. If the average D&D game was run like Game of Thrones, the party would be identified as potential threats by magic at low level by a big bad guy, and shortly after they would be all be poisoned or knived in an alley , any survivors being separated and scattered across the lands to fend for themselves.

Books and games are different creations, I don't find the above attractive as a campaign idea at all.

 

[Imaro]

Game of Thrones is amongst other things a deconstruction of heroic stories, so not a good role model if you actually want heroic stories. If the average D&D game was run like Game of Thrones, the party would be identified as potential threats by magic at low level by a big bad guy, and shortly after they would be all be poisoned or knived in an alley , any survivors being separated and scattered across the lands to fend for themselves.

Emphasis mine...First I would say this depends on how one defines heroic... but I understand your usage here, and to that I can only say it only becomes a problem if you assume your definition of "heroic" is the same for all or most D&D fans and only have that play style supported...

Books and games are different creations, I don't find the above attractive as a campaign idea at all.

Cool, but others can find the heavily weighted contrivances for the "heroes" too heavy-handed and not attractive as a campaign idea as well... You may not like GoT as a campaign idea (I find it a pretty cool idea and very old school in certain aspects was thinking of running something similar using DCC and allowing my player's to run multiple characters in the same world) but it must have some type of broad appeal to garner so many fans...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

While that's a valid point, Challenge Rating is one of two things: it's either redundant with the concept of level or it isn't a valid measure of anything. I tend towards the latter view.

Challenge Rating is supposed to be a convenient value, which serves as a function of level. Specifically, where level would indicate that something is an equal challenge to anything else of the same level (i.e. it's estimated to cost you 100% of your resources, so there's a 50% chance of either side winning), Challenge Rating indicates that something is X% less powerful than something of the same level, such that a party of that level would spend an average of 25% of its resources before securing victory.

Granted, it does lend itself quite readily toward use in Encounter Guidelines. If you want to pose a challenge that will cost the party 25% of its resources, then you should be able to throw them against an encounter with CR equal to their level, but there's no suggestion that it should be the case. It just avoids the confusion between over-use of the term "level" where a level 8 monster is designed to be X% weaker than a level 8 PC.

 

[Balesir]

Challenge Rating is supposed to be a convenient value, which serves as a function of level. Specifically, where level would indicate that something is an equal challenge to anything else of the same level (i.e. it's estimated to cost you 100% of your resources, so there's a 50% chance of either side winning), Challenge Rating indicates that something is X% less powerful than something of the same level, such that a party of that level would spend an average of 25% of its resources before securing victory.

In other words, it means exactly the same as an at-level, standard monster in 4E (the "same level NPC" would be an elite). The only substantive difference I see is that 4E levels actually bear some resemblance to an accurate gauge of the monster's capability.

Granted, it does lend itself quite readily toward use in Encounter Guidelines. If you want to pose a challenge that will cost the party 25% of its resources, then you should be able to throw them against an encounter with CR equal to their level, but there's no suggestion that it should be the case. It just avoids the confusion between over-use of the term "level" where a level 8 monster is designed to be X% weaker than a level 8 PC.

Excuse me? May I refer you to table 3-2 in the 3.5e DMG (pp.49)? I quote from the paragraph immediately above the table:

Table 3-2: Encounter Difficulty shows (in percentage terms) how many encounters of a certain difficulty an adventure should have.

(Emphasis mine).

It seems to me that 3.5e had almost exactly the same manner of "Encounter Guidelines" as 4E, and I assume you are referring to 3.x here, since they are the only editions (to my knowledge) that use CR. The 3.x "guidelines" were, of course, every bit as possible to discard or ignore as the 4E ones are - but they are not really any more possible to disregard.