D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[FormerlyHemlock]

Without wanting to just project myself onto you, I feel that "wasting play time" is connected enough to broader pacing issues that it at least has a hint of "story" to it. I'll summon [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] to get another opinion. *snip* Which leads me, circuitously, to a question for you if that's OK: do you use the Inspiration mechanic? And if you do, have you integrated it into your simulationist approach?

Ha ha ha. Inspiration is a funny case. Officially, yes, I use Inspiration. Specifically, I use the DMG variant that allows players to award inspiration to each other for anything that is awesome. In spite of that, nobody ever uses it for some reason and it's been practically irrelevant at my table.

Inspiration isn't that hard to integrate into a simulationist approach. All you need is to add an extra constraint on when you spend inspiration, that it must be somehow related to your bond. Voila! Now your spells are slightly harder to disrupt when you're desperate to keep your party members alive; or your negotiating skills are slightly sharper when you're on the trail of a lot of money. I haven't bothered to integrate it in this way because as I say, no one ever uses it anyway and we're having plenty of fun without Inspiration.

As a practical matter I do have some non-simulationist rules in play for the sake of my players. Specifically, I employ karma points which allow the players or the DM to break probability. I invented these originally just in case I ever wanted to handle the scenario that makes other DMs fudge dice, e.g. "the BBEG was supposed to get away but you critted him with your vorpal sword and ruined the plot." The idea is that I'd say to the players, in essence, "Hey, you won that round but I'm overruling your results in the interests of fun. But your choices still had an impact, so here's a karma point for you to likewise overrule probability in the interests of fun, when it suits you." In practice I'm such a strong simulationist that I haven't ever used it to save a plot, so what happens instead is that the players occasionally draw upon karma to escape a TPK or to paper over a retcon (e.g. "Oops, last session you won against the umber hulks by leveraging Evard's Black Tentacles, and I trusted you that it covers a 40' cube, but it turns out that it covers only a 20' cube. To fix this I'll declare that you were and are in a wild magic zone which doubles the radius of arcane magic spells. Both you and the neogi were aware of this because you're wizards, and it would have affected the neogi's Fireball if you hadn't Counterspelled it. Because stumbling across a wild magic zone just as combat is beginning is vastly improbably, I will charge you a karma point.") and I use it to make the players' lives more interesting in improbable ways ("an interdimensional portal opens and out comes: 1.) a demonic gargoyle (Nycaloth), 2.) a Fireball which roasts the Nycaloth and all of your remaining cows, 3.) a grey frog thing shouting battle cries and brandishing a sword at the Nycaloth. Now all your cows are dead and you need to find a new fuel source for your lifejammer. Oh, and there's a Nycaloth on your ship."; I'm also saving a karma point to make sure that a certain dragon nemesis locates a PC as soon as he comes back onstage).

You could argue that karma is still simulationist, it's just a way of including the actual players and DM in the simulation as omnipotent godlike entities. But eh, however you define it, it is my mechanism for explicitly acknowledging the metagame within the game world and allowing it to have an influence.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

*raised eyebrows* On the one hand you suggest that people who disagree with you are ignorant buffoons. (I don't know why you even bring this up. Pemerton has a good point about actuals vs. counterfactuals, but the only relevance breadth of game experience has on counterfactuals is that broad experience allows you to more easily see counterfactuals, which the same as seeing actuals in advance.)

We're talking about a poster who claims that many, possibly a majority, of RPGs are "not RPGs" because they don't happen to meet his very specific and rigid requirements for a game. So, while in some contexts your criticism might be telling, it makes utterly no impression on me here.

That being said, I'm not implying that [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is stupid, that his opinions are less genuine than anyone else's, etc. He's just clearly stuck to a very small patch of the whole RPG world. If he just said "I like what I like and that's just it" then nobody would have even batted an eyelash.

On the other hand you struggle to find an example of an RPG mechanic that could have been implemented in a different way. I don't know if that's because you're limiting yourself in an attempt to condescend to the hoi polloi, or because you genuinely can't think of a better example, but just for fun here are four alternate ways to implement armor:

I haven't 'struggled' to do anything. I chose a specific mechanic which precisely illustrated the point I wished to make, which was that there is a great deal of abstraction in all of these games and that any attempt to reduce even the LEAST abstract of game elements, in a game where the assertion was that its elements are highly concrete, to some concrete reality is doomed to failure.

The fact that you can quickly reel off 4 mechanically different approaches to roughly the same concept without breaking a sweat only tends to reinforce my point, doesn't it? If you can represent how well-armored someone is in such diverse ways its hardly advocating a very concrete interpretation for any one of those.

Shall we instead inspect that most central and, to some, concrete element of D&D, the ability score? We could go on and on...

 

[pemerton]

Ha ha ha. Inspiration is a funny case. Officially, yes, I use Inspiration. Specifically, I use the DMG variant that allows players to award inspiration to each other for anything that is awesome. In spite of that, nobody ever uses it for some reason and it's been practically irrelevant at my table.

Inspiration isn't that hard to integrate into a simulationist approach. All you need is to add an extra constraint on when you spend inspiration, that it must be somehow related to your bond. Voila! Now your spells are slightly harder to disrupt when you're desperate to keep your party members alive; or your negotiating skills are slightly sharper when you're on the trail of a lot of money. I haven't bothered to integrate it in this way because as I say, no one ever uses it anyway and we're having plenty of fun without Inspiration.

As a practical matter I do have some non-simulationist rules in play for the sake of my players. Specifically, I employ karma points which allow the players or the DM to break probability.

I've seen you post before about your karma system. We don't use anything so elaborate in my 4e game.

Player mistakes tend to get fixed up if someone notices in time, but otherwise they just go through (eg a few sessions ago the PCs won in part because I let the fighter take two free action attacks on the same turn, whereas there is a rule limiting this to one such attack per turn). The players just got lucky! (Because of 4e's looser approach to mechanics/fiction correlation, this luck doesn't need the sort of ingame explanation that you give in terms of, say, a wild magic zone.)

As a GM I am a bit more abusive of my authority in exercising takebacks/corrections - the notional justification is that I have to spread my brain out over multiple enemies. If I was playing among strangers we'd probably have to formalise it a bit more, but because my players are my friends they indulge me.

On simulationist inspriation, can you say a bit more about how the system you propose makes it simulationist? Is it a simulation of trying harder or more earnestly because what is at stake matters to the character? If that's right, then NPCs/monsters could have inspiration too, couldn't they? (Like the old AD&D MM entries where dragons, and maybe some other critters, got attack bonuses when defending their children.)

 

[pemerton]

I think you've articulated a particular point of view here which is consistent with broad exposure to multiple game systems. But it doesn't follow that broad exposure will generate this mindset. Breadth of exposure is ultimately a red herring here because the determining factor here is aesthetic: does the player like the aesthetics of statting up bone weapons just like steel ones and handwaving the difference as a change in reference frame (to use physics terminology)?

<snip>

I assume that you're cognizant of the fact that there are people who understand both playstyles and just don't like one or the other. If not, then we disagree.

I absolutely agree that exposure to multiple systems and approaches won't preclude preferring one to the other. Or even preferring some sort of intermediate - my "oil-and-water" dislike of 3E might, for some other RPGer, be a reason to like 3E because from their point of view it successfully squares an otherwise problematic circle.

I didn't take [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] to be saying that exposure to multiple systems will make someone like them all, though. I thought he was making a point about understanding how, in principle, an RPG might be designed in order to achieve the sorts of goals (eg challenging players, making PCs the central vehicles for the player experience, interact with a consistent fiction, etc ) that are at the heart of RPGing. So that someone who doesn't care for an RPG (as eg I still really can't get that enthused about Tunnels & Trolls) might still see how it is doing its thing as an RPG that someone else might quite reasonably get RPGing enjoyment out of.

 

[pemerton]

Shall we instead inspect that most central and, to some, concrete element of D&D, the ability score?

Random factoid from the AD&D PHB (1st ed, pp 9, 12) and DMG (p 15):

Strength is a measure of muscle, endurance, and stamina combined. . . .

The strength characteristic of a human or humanoid of any type, and of player-characters in particular, is more than a simple evaluation of the musculature of the body. Strength is a composite rating of physical power, endurance, and stamina. . . .

Constitution is a term which encompasses the character’s physique, fitness, health, and resistance. . . .

This character ability rating is a general heading under which falls the character's physique, health, resistance, and fitness.​

So STR includes musculature, endurance and stamina. Whereas CON includes physique and fitness. The contrast is almost palpable!

(In practice, I think most play of the game tends to reduce STR just to musculature, and to reduce CON to fitness and health. And to ignore some of the tensions that might tend to emerge when STR is very high but CON very low.)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

4e does involve strategic resources (eg Phantom Steeds, Thundercloud Towers) that can impact on operational/tactical matters in interesting and non-uniform ways. I think that's a point of agreement.

The players access to these (via their PCs) can be affected by action resolution within the relatively uniform, level-scaling device of the 4e skill challenge or 4e combat. I think that's another point of agreement.

Hence, outcomes in the operational/tactical space can feed back into the strategic space, again in interesting and non-uniform ways. I think that's a third point of agreement.

I suspect that [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] would probably be happy to agree with all this too.

I think that one point Hemlock wanted to make was that a system of scaling environmental challenges (eg Cave Slime) makes a type of GM laziness especially easy, of not changing the overall structure or deep nature of the game as the PCs level, instead just amping up the numbers and adding superficial descriptions (Astral Teflon Slime, Utra-violet Slime, etc) while leaving the basic dynamics of play unchanged.

I agree with Hemlock that Cave Slime and its relatives among the 4e system elements do lend themselves to this sort of laziness. I point to the HPE modules as evidence of this. *snip* A final thought for yet another rambling post (it's the middle of the night Melbourne time, why am I not in bed?): in AD&D campaigns the lazy design option tends to break down around 10th level (you've gone through all the basic humanoids, the ogres, trolls and most of the giants). You can broaden out a bit (look at how the D-series tries to do this - I am assuming that Hemlock would agree with this as an instance of broadening out to the operational and strategic), but I reckon many AD&D campaigns just fell apart at this point precisely because there was no material left to feed the lazy approach.

4e doesn't strike me as adding anything to this AD&D treadmill (for better or worse) accept another 20 levels of it if that's all a GM and/or his/her table can come up with.

But, again, to facilitate isn't to force or even to push.

Some good points above, especially the point about AD&D campaigns running out of steam at 10th level instead of moving to strategic challenges. And I agree especially with your last two paragraphs: I have said nothing at all about 4E because I have no experience with it, and (Fixed DCs) -> (Scope changes are encouraged) does not in any way shape or form imply that (Relative DCs) -> (Scope changes are discouraged).

In all of the above, the only thing I really would disagree with is that Phantom Steeds and flying towers are strategic resources. To me they still seem essentially operational, maybe even tactical. When I say "strategic challenges" I'm thinking of challenges that you basically can't fight tactically, e.g. your nation is starving because food imports are blockaded by enemy ships and you have no navy. Churchill didn't win WWII by killing Hitler with a machine gun; he won by getting Russia and the US on his side. (I'm not a WWII expert, so there may be better ways to frame this including "Hitler lost by attacking Russia in the winter.") Most official D&D modules that I've seen handle strategic threats by converting them back into tactical threats (see: the awfulness that is Rise of Tiamat in 5E, where the whole campaign culminates in a simple slugfest with Tiamat regardless of any diplomatic results with Szass Tam or the good dragons), or just by ending the campaign as you observed above.

In short, D&D doesn't come with rules by default for strategic play. Conjecture: when tactical and operational play becomes infeasible and unfun, strategic rules[1] must therefore be created, or play ceases. Relative DCs solve this problem by just making tactical and operational play continue ad infinitum.

-Max

[1] Strategic rules could be formal, "If X then deplete Y," or informal table conventions. The key thing is that players must feel they are able in principle to predict the consequences of their choices instead of being subject to DM whim. At my table this means giving them some simple 4X rules for what kind of income they can get from interplanetary trade and colonization.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

4e doesn't strike me as adding anything to this AD&D treadmill (for better or worse) accept another 20 levels of it if that's all a GM and/or his/her table can come up with.

But, again, to facilitate isn't to force or even to push.

OTOH, to play devil's advocate, there seemed to be a LOT of lazy 4e DMs. I'm not sure that had much to do with the SCALING though. It was just very easy to toss 5 monsters in a box-shaped room and go. When I hear people here talking about how their encounters were repetitive and didn't engage anything except the combat powers of the characters, that SCs were just lists of skills that you min/maxed your way through, etc. Well, I can only conclude there was certainly a pattern of DMing that lead to that.

My personal feelings on it are that you need all the designers and writers for a system on the same page about what that system is, how it works, and what sorts of material to present. 5e definitely has that. Whatever else the process that spawned it was, it was good for explicating the system. Its presentation is consistent, the adventure material seems consistent with the games sensibilities, etc. They sure never got that right with 4e, and maybe not even with 3e really. Thus 4e suffered from horrible adventures that played to the weakest parts of the system for instance, and its core books often presented material that was great, but failed to explicate how it would be used, or gave misleading impressions like "just scale all the DCs" and such.

I think fundamentally this is what makes 5e so much more palatable. People understand it, both because it leans more heavily on older conventions of play, and because its messaging is more consistent.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

On simulationist inspriation, can you say a bit more about how the system you propose makes it simulationist? Is it a simulation of trying harder or more earnestly because what is at stake matters to the character? If that's right, then NPCs/monsters could have inspiration too, couldn't they? (Like the old AD&D MM entries where dragons, and maybe some other critters, got attack bonuses when defending their children.)

Yes I think so, and yes. Whether it represents adrenaline or paying extra-close attention or refusing to give in to pain or whatever, in order to qualify as simulationist it would have to be an actual, observable in-world effect: "It's a well-known fact that a wizard protecting a loved one is marginally less likely to have his spells disrupted by an arrow to the chest." It can still be abstracted for playability's sake, but as long as it's representing a real phenomenon in the simulation, a simulationist is going to be okay with it.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Random factoid from the AD&D PHB (1st ed, pp 9, 12) and DMG (p 15):

Strength is a measure of muscle, endurance, and stamina combined. . . .

The strength characteristic of a human or humanoid of any type, and of player-characters in particular, is more than a simple evaluation of the musculature of the body. Strength is a composite rating of physical power, endurance, and stamina. . . .

Constitution is a term which encompasses the character’s physique, fitness, health, and resistance. . . .

This character ability rating is a general heading under which falls the character's physique, health, resistance, and fitness.​

So STR includes musculature, endurance and stamina. Whereas CON includes physique and fitness. The contrast is almost palpable!

(In practice, I think most play of the game tends to reduce STR just to musculature, and to reduce CON to fitness and health. And to ignore some of the tensions that might tend to emerge when STR is very high but CON very low.)

On a further off-topic tangent: (A)D&D tends to treat physical attractiveness either as independent of all other attributes ("Comeliness") as as a derivative of Charisma. GURPS has no Charisma statistic, only Strength/Dexterity/Health/IQ. Accordingly, Sex Appeal in GURPS is based off of Health.

I think GURPS has the right of it. In real life, physical attractiveness and glowing health are not quite identical but very closely correlated. It's been said that "attractiveness consists simply in possession of a pleasant personality combined with a healthy constitution." In 5E I therefore tend to describe high-Con people as looking like movie stars, and high-Cha people as having intense, innate presence.

 

[Celtavian]

An anecdote on the same issue:

When we started 4e the party didn't have a leader - warlock (replaced by sorcerer at 3rd level), archer ranger, fighter, paladin and wizard (rebuilt as invoker at 16th level).

There was a bit of cleric/warlord multi-classing, though, and the fighter was a dwarf (second wind as minor action) and of course a paladin can lay on hands.

At 6th level the ranger was rebuilt as a hybrid cleric (1x/enc Healing Word). Other players at that point retrained out some of the healing abilities on their PCs.

In the end (now at 30th) the party has 1x/enc Healing Word (affects two targets, via feat), 1x/enc Word of Vigour (a cleric AoE power that allows HS expenditure), an encounter AoE on the fighter and one on the ranger/cleric that allow HS expenditure, plus the paladin's LoH, and two daily heals from multi-classing. And a daily Mass Cure Serious Wounds (two surges worth of surgeless healing) from the ranger-cleric. Plus one or two items that allow healing (eg Dwarven Armour).

The fighter is still a dwarf (able to second wind twice per encounter as a free action, via feats), and the paladin's Paragon Path allows Second Wind as a free action when bloodied. Plus most of the PCs can come back from death once per day.

Generally that is plenty of healing. The party just reached 30th by winning a level+8 combat, and not all that healing was used.

A fully dedicated healing cleric would be excessive, I think. The ranger-cleric hybrid provides a nice balance between support and offence. (The character uses off-turn ranger attacks to deliver quarry damage when the standard action is a cleric power.)

I guess if the party was stuck with only standard action second winds, and had no healer multi-class feats, a more dedicated healer might be required. But even then 3 healing words (or equivalent) would probably be enough, maybe with the Mass Cure Serious as well and perhaps some items or another daily power in reserve. A PC dedicated solely to healing would seem a bit excessive, and might make combat drag a bit (too much patching up, not enough damage infliction).

We don't use level+(x) or CR or any of that.

I calculate damage to be lethal, unavoidably lethal, at high level. As in there is nothing you can do to prevent yourself from being hit by lethal damage at some point in the fight save pure luck. Our encounter calculations center around DPR for and DPR against. The DPR number must be able to deliver a similar amount of damage to the PCs in challenging encounters. The NPCs must be able counter the parties tactics to prevent damage mitigation and to mitigate damage at a similar level. Tactical equality where fights come down to a bit of luck and perhaps one or two abilities the party possesses that the other team does not, which the PCs must figure out during the fight, very quickly. Only very powerful healing counters this effect. I build encounters to kill the party. The only counter is a powerful, dedicated healer to keep them alive that is highly focused on survival.

It's a different way of doing things. But we found CR and most of the encounter building systems woefully inadequate for use in our games. I use a system based on damage calculations and other common factors in a battle like AC and unique special abilities to specifically tailor extremely lethal encounters that push the PCs to the wall of death. I've become quite good at it after all these years of playing.

Thus our groups over the years have needed a powerful healer. Most of the group considers it a chore to play a healer. I don't like games that aren't lethal. I don't find it very fun if the party doesn't feel on the verge of death, spent of resources, with a member or two unconscious. That's fun for us. Or maybe it's just fun for me. So far only 5E has allowed me to build as I like and somehow survive without a dedicated cleric healer. We'll see if it holds up over time.