D&D 5E 2 year campaign down the drain?

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah. I get success with complication/consequences. I guess I don't like it happening twice as often as flat success (ish--I realize bringing in multiple dice changes the odds, there).

So, your criminal-as-a-lifestyle character either overreached his competency or didn't adequately plan for something. Even your example with the opponent in the knife fight kinda bespeaks something other than full competency (slash, not stab, hold the knife so it won't come out of hour hand, go for the quick kill).

I mean, really, five out of the six results on a die mean something has gone at least somewhat wrong. That's not a really good success rate. The game looks to me like the worst parts of Leverage (which I kinda hated) and the Kobayashi Maru. Clearly, I'm not the target market for it.

So when a Fighter in D&D hits a beholder for 22 points of damage but the beholder doesn't die, do you go "wow you screwed that up"? I mean, on its turn the beholder may blast his buddy with a disintegrate ray.

Is the Fighter bad at his job because the mechanics don't allow him to fully succeed at killing the beholder in one hit? Is this a sign of incompetence on the character's part, on more a sign of the power of the beholder and how dangerous it is?

 

[prabe]

So when a Fighter in D&D hits a beholder for 22 points of damage but the beholder doesn't die, do you go "wow you screwed that up"? I mean, on its turn the beholder may blast his buddy with a disintegrate ray.

Is the Fighter bad at his job because the mechanics don't allow him to fully succeed at killing the beholder in one hit? Is this a sign of incompetence on the character's part, on more a sign of the power of the beholder and how dangerous it is?

If the fighter's failure to one-shot the beholder directly caused him damage of some sort, or resulted in his being prone at the feet of the beholder's ogre minions, that'd be a fairer comparison.

As a practical thing, I know lower odds of unmitigated success (in BitD and I gather in PbtA stuff) are directly connected to the GM's not rolling dice (meaning that most of these checks are uncontested). I recognize that it's relatively sound mechanically, I just don't like the way it tastes in my mind.

 

[Fenris-77]

@prabe, perhaps you're missing the bit where the GM never rolls in Blades. The characters only get hit in melee when they miss on a 1-3 and sometimes on a 4-5. It's not about the character screwing things up, but just about complications ensuring. In many instances that have no direct index to character failure at all. I find the complications a marvelous tool for driving the narrative and it's not my experience that the players feel under skilled or incompetent. Rather the opposite mostly.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I don't play Blades, but I'm assuming complications work as in other games, and they don't have to imply anything about the character's success, or lack thereof. In the leaping from roof-to-roof example, a "complication" might be:

• Sticky tar on the roof where he landed
• Landed on a skylight and crashed through
• The roof is a dead-end
• Spotted by somebody (police? enemies?) in the alley below

In all of those examples the character succeeded perfectly at the action described by the player. It's just...complicated.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If the fighter's failure to one-shot the beholder directly caused him damage of some sort, or resulted in his being prone at the feet of the beholder's ogre minions, that'd be a fairer comparison.

As a practical thing, I know lower odds of unmitigated success (in BitD and I gather in PbtA stuff) are directly connected to the GM's not rolling dice (meaning that most of these checks are uncontested). I recognize that it's relatively sound mechanically, I just don't like the way it tastes in my mind.

I absolutely can understand it not being to your liking....tastes vary, and different games will appeal to different people.

I just wanted to clarify because you continued to characterize a Success With Complication as a kind of failure, which it really isn't.

 

[prabe]

@prabe, perhaps you're missing the bit where the GM never rolls in Blades. The characters only get hit in melee when they miss on a 1-3 and sometimes on a 4-5. It's not about the character screwing things up, but just about complications ensuring. In many instances that have no direct index to character failure at all. I find the complications a marvelous tool for driving the narrative and it's not my experience that the players feel under skilled or incompetent. Rather the opposite mostly.

As I said, the way the probabilities are set in BitD seems directly connected to the GM's not rolling (I thought I remembered the possibility of the GM throwing a decision to a die, so I didn't want to say "never"). I guess that part of how I personally would want to play a heist would involve a degree of care to avoid those sorts of complications that BitD doesn't seem to allow, even with the flashback mechanism.

 

[Fenris-77]

Interesting. I like Blades because its aces at heists and the party doesnt spend three hours planning ten minutes of play time. Blades does allow for planning, and indeed the party will benefit from better planning. It's just designed not to take forever. I'm a planner at heart, and I love a detailed plan, and I don't feel inconvenienced by the rules at all. YMMV of course. It did take a couple of sessions to really grok the connections between planning and the score, but I'm very pleased with the game now.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I had to watch some online play to really put everything I had read in the rules into the proper context. It helped that it was the author who was running the online game I watched.

 

[Fenris-77]

I had to watch some online play to really put everything I had read in the rules into the proper context. It helped that it was the author who was running the online game I watched.

I have to go check that out. Thanks.

 

[prabe]

It just seems to me that some of the sorts of complications that have been mentioned seem like the sorts of things the PCs should have learned about as part of their planning. Reading the SRD it seemed to talk more about the squalor of the PCs' lives and the way their lives of crime break them down than about the heists.

Anyway, as I was reading, I felt myself realizing that as a player I'd try to roll one die always and never resist anything, which was a strong message from a deep region of my brain that the game is not for me. Maybe there's something in the mechanics I'd enjoy, that I missed, but I have a suspicion I'll never know.