D&D 5E Players railroading dungeonmasters

[Oofta]

That's very true, and I'd venture a guess that's how most players have always thought about it over the years. To me though it still feels artificial and implausible merely because of how fast character can (and oftentimes do) go from "powerless" to "superpowered".

In the case of your dwarf... they were a priest for 100+ years getting nothing whatsoever in terms of power (whether that be spells or fighting skill or health etc.). But then for whatever reason they acquire those abilities because they become an "adventurer"-- they go traipsing through a series of caves killing a bunch of rats and wolves-- and now suddenly not only do they now have all this new power, that power essentially begins increasing massively over a matter of hours, days, and weeks. 100 years of leading prayers and doing research and helping townsfolk and healing the sick in the clanhold gives them nothing... but becoming an adventurer and killing a bunch of wild animals and maybe a couple goblins and they're suddenly superpowered compared to everyone else around them.

That's the kind of thing that I see as illogical story progression and why I choose not to use the game mechanics of leveling to indicate anything about who characters are and what characters have done in the past. It just doesn't make any sense.

There's a difference between soft power and clerical power. Assume for a moment that gods only have so much magic they can hand out; in my world it roughly corresponds to the number of worshippers. So a priest is working to support their god by leading an example, bringing people to the faith. The work they do is no more or less important.

So becoming a cleric can be a reward or it can be a necessity. This priest has brought in (or retained) many followers for years. He has served his god well, just not on the front lines. I mean, who is more important. The pilot flying a jet? All the people that support and maintain the jet? In this case the priest is the maintenance crew while the cleric is the pilot. That doesn't make the maintenance crew less important. A maintenance guy being given the opportunity doesn't suddenly become an ace pilot just because he knows how to maintain the engines. It's simply a different skillset.

In addition my campaigns span years because PCs regularly have months of downtime between adventures. Like professional athletes, they don't get the skill from the game per se it's the training between the games that matter. They learn from their games but they actually improve skills during downtime.

Or, just ignore it all. It's just a game and it doesn't have to be logical to be enjoyable.

 

[Asisreo]

There's a difference between soft power and clerical power. Assume for a moment that gods only have so much magic they can hand out; in my world it roughly corresponds to the number of worshippers. So a priest is working to support their god by leading an example, bringing people to the faith. The work they do is no more or less important.

So becoming a cleric can be a reward or it can be a necessity. This priest has brought in (or retained) many followers for years. He has served his god well, just not on the front lines. I mean, who is more important. The pilot flying a jet? All the people that support and maintain the jet? In this case the priest is the maintenance crew while the cleric is the pilot. That doesn't make the maintenance crew less important. A maintenance guy being given the opportunity doesn't suddenly become an ace pilot just because he knows how to maintain the engines. It's simply a different skillset.

In addition my campaigns span years because PCs regularly have months of downtime between adventures. Like professional athletes, they don't get the skill from the game per se it's the training between the games that matter. They learn from their games but they actually improve skills during downtime.

Or, just ignore it all. It's just a game and it doesn't have to be logical to be enjoyable.

For Narrative concerns, DMs really really should consider a healthy dose of downtime between adventures since characters could be gaining this power over the course of several decades instead of a week.

It helps the pacing tremendously and it also helps the plot when the PCs get 2 year advanced foreshadowing, the NPCs feel like they had time to connect with the PCs, and long processes like constructing Keeps or crafting Magic Items becomes much more likely.

 

[Lanefan]

Why do they have to be nobodies? One of my characters’s backstories was he was an arch Druid who was ensorcelled by a powerful fey. He went missing 100 years previously only to come back as an old man trying to remember his a past and slowly regaining the memories (and levels) he lost.

OK, but given as 5e doesn't have mechanics of any kind for level loss (unlike 1e where explaining this would be simple: the fey could drain levels like a Vampire) how do you mechanically explain the loss of levels and abilities over those 100 years in a manner consistent with everything else in the setting? It can't have been due to 1e-style level draining; 5e flat-out doesn't have that, so it had to have been some sort of time-based thing...which also doesn't exist in 5e but is probably easier to bolt on than 1e-style level drain would be.

Genuinely curious, as I've been toying with designing (as yet unsuccessfully) mechanics for slowly losing levels due to sheer time and lack of practice.

the fact that the most powerful and influential npcs in 5e (like lords and nobles and kings and influential merchants) don’t have class levels makes it perfectly reasonable for a player to say, “I’m a famous artisan renown for my paintings”.

they put down their brush and are experiencing the world through adventuring to give themselves inspiration.

It’s not a game breaker that they have renown or are influential.

Seems like an awfully risky way to get some art inspiration. Put another way, once you've got the inspiration it kinda helps if you're still alive to make use of it.

 

[Lanefan]

That's very true, and I'd venture a guess that's how most players have always thought about it over the years. To me though it still feels artificial and implausible merely because of how fast character can (and oftentimes do) go from "powerless" to "superpowered".

In the case of your dwarf... they were a priest for 100+ years getting nothing whatsoever in terms of power (whether that be spells or fighting skill or health etc.). But then for whatever reason they acquire those abilities because they become an "adventurer"-- they go traipsing through a series of caves killing a bunch of rats and wolves-- and now suddenly not only do they now have all this new power, that power essentially begins increasing massively over a matter of hours, days, and weeks. 100 years of leading prayers and doing research and helping townsfolk and healing the sick in the clanhold gives them nothing... but becoming an adventurer and killing a bunch of wild animals and maybe a couple goblins and they're suddenly superpowered compared to everyone else around them.

I'm completely with you up to here.

That's the kind of thing that I see as illogical story progression and why I choose not to use the game mechanics of leveling to indicate anything about who characters are and what characters have done in the past. It just doesn't make any sense.

But here you lose me. In my way of looking at it, if that Dwarf had been a stay-at-home temple cleric for 100 years it would without question have picked up some levels along the way, albeit rather slowly...which means I'd have to veto that background-as-written because - as you say - it doesn't make any sense (and would bring the PC in at much higher than 1st level!). Your secondary profession(s) - miner, cook, gemsmith, engineer, whatever - is what you mostly did before adventuring; build your background around that.

 

[Lanefan]

For Narrative concerns, DMs really really should consider a healthy dose of downtime between adventures since characters could be gaining this power over the course of several decades instead of a week.

It helps the pacing tremendously and it also helps the plot when the PCs get 2 year advanced foreshadowing, the NPCs feel like they had time to connect with the PCs, and long processes like constructing Keeps or crafting Magic Items becomes much more likely.

Nice in theory.

Doesn't happen in practice, unless the PCs intentionally ignore both a) the adventure hooks I've planted as the campaign's gone along and b) whatever adventuring ideas they've come up with on their own*, in favour of taking some downtime.

More common IME, to the point of near-universality, is as soon as the downtime forced by training and treasury division is over they're looking to get back in the field ASAP.

As a player there's times when I'd love lots of downtime! (that is, provided my PC's rich enough to afford what s/he wants to do)

* - an example: in the game I play in we - as in the 30-40 characters (both PC and NPC) who loosely make up our adventuring company - just got punted out of the place we'd been using as an informal adventuring base. So, a group of us went out, found a cave complex that'd work great as another base, and cleared out the occupants. But getting the required amount of downtime (both in-fiction and at-table) to design and in-build that place will likely be, I fear, somewhat akin to pulling teeth. Some of us players are simply more interested in downtime stuff than others, who just want to keep on adventuring.

 

[HJFudge]

On reading more of this thread it is quite clear to me that some folks put way more effort into trying to explain game mechanics than I do.

I nor my players have ever really concerned themselves with why an elf who is 300 yrs old (or whatever) would only be lvl 1. I have never really tried to explain hit points or critical hits either. They are merely game mechanics that are used to make sure everyone around the table has a fun time and understands whats going on game-wise. Narratively my game does not need nor rely on mechanics of any kind really. The story goes on, we use the game aspects to help gauge success or failure which influences the narrative and provides direction, but trying to make sense of things like levels/hp/whatever is a fools errand and adds nothing to my table.

Having years pass between sessions is an excellent technique, too, and I have done this when it seems appropriate. It is not always so. But when I DO have years pass between adventures, I have also asked my players for a short paragraph or three on what there character has been up to in those years.

This, like backgrounds, helps get their characters thinking of themselves as part of the world. It is not the only tool that helps this, but it is a good one and very useful.

Thing is, the bolded parts are fine if it's my fifth character in that campaign and I've had time to build up some familiarity with your setting and what makes it tick; but if it's my first character I'm coming in blind unless you've provided a hella-big pre-game setting info dump.

And this is even true even if you're using a pre-fab setting e.g. Eberron or FR or wherever, as while I can read up on the setting-as-written it's all irrelevant until I know what you're changing about the place.

IMO the italicized bits are all that matters, and truth be told a backstory written with those purposes in mind might be something the DM never needs to see.

Obviously this is a situation where different people have different preferences, there isn't a right or wrong but rather more of a 'what works for me might not work for you' and vice versa.

But in most cases when I homebrew, Im getting to know my world as a DM as we play the same as the players. Am I more familiar? Of course. But I never ever know everything about my world. So as my players give me backgrounds or discuss background ideas with me, we work together as a group to shape the world. Because many times my players will have better ideas than I.

"So, why is your elf from the human kingdom, Bob?
"Well HJFudge, the human kingdom has been run for years on the sly by the Elves in secret. It was only 10 years ago that it was revealed to the populace and there was a huge revolution, and now humans and elves are on the outs. So my elf character decided to get out of dodge, having been instrumental in running the beurocracy for years but is now persona non grata"
"Oh thats a cool idea lets go with that"

In this case, I had no idea that Generic Human Kingdom had been basically a secret puppet state of the elves. Because of this background, it enriched and enlived that area of my world and guess what I needed to do 0 work for that. That was a freebie given to me by a player. Could I have said No? Sure could. Then the player woulda come up with something else. But in this example, it seemed like a cool idea so hey.

I guess my question is: Why WOULDNT you want your players to help you worldbuild? It helps offload the work from just one person to many and it allows them to feel as if they are part of it. You retain creative control (everyone understands you get to say No, and if they dont thats a player issue not an issue with backgrounds) and you can use the coolest ideas your players have to help tell awesome stories in an awesome setting.

 

[DEFCON 1]

But here you lose me. In my way of looking at it, if that Dwarf had been a stay-at-home temple cleric for 100 years it would without question have picked up some levels along the way, albeit rather slowly...which means I'd have to veto that background-as-written because - as you say - it doesn't make any sense (and would bring the PC in at much higher than 1st level!). Your secondary profession(s) - miner, cook, gemsmith, engineer, whatever - is what you mostly did before adventuring; build your background around that.

I definitely get what you are saying and acknowledge that you are at least trying to make a bit of sense of the situation by trying to restrict as much possible pre-story activity to justify the PC starting at level 1.

But here's the thing from my point of view: Dwarves and elves will gain XP and level up at the exact same rate as their humans compatriots when you play the game, and their maximum levels will all be about the same throughout the course of their "adventuring" lifetime. But because dwarves and especially elves live 3 to 9 times longer than humans... by any sort of metric of what gives a character "experience"... members of those races should have 3 to 9 times more XP and 3 to 9 times more levels than any human PC.

It is to put blinders on to any sort of logic to think that dwarves and elves only receive "experience" during the same 40 years that humans do (humans aged 20 to 60 before they retire). Average Human adventurers get no XP for the first 20 years of their lives, XP for the next 40, then no XP for the last 20. So human adventurers receive XP and levels for approximately half of their lives. Which means average dwarf adventurers that live to 350 years old should have like 175 years of adventuring, and elves that live to 700 years should have 350 years worth of adventuring. And if they gain XP and level up just the same as humans do (which we know happens because we all play the game)... the 350 years of elven adventuring should really allow them to get up to about probably Level 180. (Level 20 for humans x 9 times as many years adventuring as a human.)

But the game doesn't do that. Instead it just handwaves away the other 650 years of an elf's life wherein the elf doesn't "earn XP", just so that they can play the game along with, next to, and the same way human PCs do. Which to me... is ridiculous and stupid and I refuse to jump through hoops to try and justify in the narrative why that happens. So I don't. To me... the narrative of the story and the world have virtually nothing to do with any sort of comparison to the D&D board game. All the board game does is give us something different to play while we are creating the narrative and story, and some ideas of what we adapt and repurpose from the results of the board game for additional details to the narrative and story. But almost nothing in the board game actually "happens for real" in the story, because the D&D board game make little narrative sense. (And all we have to do is just re-read the hundreds of "What are hit points?" threads to see exactly time and time again why that's the case.)

 

[Asisreo]

Nice in theory.

Doesn't happen in practice, unless the PCs intentionally ignore both a) the adventure hooks I've planted as the campaign's gone along and b) whatever adventuring ideas they've come up with on their own*, in favour of taking some downtime.

More common IME, to the point of near-universality, is as soon as the downtime forced by training and treasury division is over they're looking to get back in the field ASAP.

As a player there's times when I'd love lots of downtime! (that is, provided my PC's rich enough to afford what s/he wants to do)

* - an example: in the game I play in we - as in the 30-40 characters (both PC and NPC) who loosely make up our adventuring company - just got punted out of the place we'd been using as an informal adventuring base. So, a group of us went out, found a cave complex that'd work great as another base, and cleared out the occupants. But getting the required amount of downtime (both in-fiction and at-table) to design and in-build that place will likely be, I fear, somewhat akin to pulling teeth. Some of us players are simply more interested in downtime stuff than others, who just want to keep on adventuring.

If your players are eager to get back to adventuring inside downtime, that's great! It means they really like the adventures you've set up.

Downtime, though, doesn't mean it should take very long even if the downtime itself is long. When I have downtime, I tell the players how much time has elapsed before their default activity has passed. So if the wizard wants to craft a legendary item, I'd say "you spend the next two years isolated (or however your character interacts) trying to create the perfect custom legendary item. You've made significant progress but soon a pigeon with a sealed scroll in its mouth flies into your tower. The seal is from the king..."

So they had a huge leap of time but it took roughly 2 minutes of in-game time.


And your example sounds wonderful. Its precisely, in my opinion, what D&D is about. The party had a problem and they decided to deal with it in an organic and interesting manner. They could have waited to construct their own base and it may have had its appeal, but they made their own mini-adventure and their characters and the players themselves probably felt motivated since its something they personally care about.

Sounds absolutely fun and awesome if you ask me.

 

[Oofta]

I definitely get what you are saying and acknowledge that you are at least trying to make a bit of sense of the situation by trying to restrict as much possible pre-story activity to justify the PC starting at level 1.

But here's the thing from my point of view: Dwarves and elves will gain XP and level up at the exact same rate as their humans compatriots when you play the game, and their maximum levels will all be about the same throughout the course of their "adventuring" lifetime. But because dwarves and especially elves live 3 to 8 times longer than humans... by any sort of metric of what gives a character "experience"... members of those races should have 3 to 9 times more XP and 3 to 9 times more levels than any human PC.

It is to put blinders on to any sort of logic to think that dwarves and elves only receive "experience" during the same 40 years that humans do (humans aged 20 to 60 before they retire). Average Human adventurers get no XP for the first 20 years of their lives, XP for the next 40, then no XP for the last 20. So human adventurers receive XP and levels for approximately half of their lives. Which means average dwarf adventurers that live to 350 years old should have like 175 years of adventuring, and elves that live to 700 years should have 350 years worth of adventuring. And if they gain XP and level up just the same as humans do (which we know happens because we all play the game)... the 350 years of elven adventuring should really allow them to get up to about probably Level 180. (Level 20 for humans x 9 times as many years adventuring as a human.)

But the game doesn't do that. Instead it just handwaves away the other 650 years of an elf's life wherein the elf doesn't "earn XP", just so that they can play the game along with, next to, and the same way human PCs do. Which to me... is ridiculous and stupid and I refuse to jump through hoops to try and justify in the narrative why that happens. So I don't. To me... the narrative of the story and the world have virtually nothing to do with any sort of comparison to the D&D board game. All the board game does is give us something different to play while we are creating the narrative and story, and some ideas of what we adapt and repurpose from the results of the board game for additional details to the narrative and story. But almost nothing in the board game actually "happens for real" in the story, because the D&D board game make little narrative sense. (And all we have to do is just re-read the hundreds of "What are hit points?" threads to see exactly time and time again why that's the case.)

Let's assume for a moment that humans lived 500 years. Every once in a while people get tired of their profession and go on to do something else. I'm a software engineer and one day I decide I don't want to do that any more so I go back to school and become a brain surgeon.

Did my years of experience writing code go away? No. Does it have any impact on my career as a brain surgeon? No. Experience that elves and dwarves have in their lives prior to adventuring is orthogonal to their new lives. It's up to the DM to decide how much, if any, impact any PC's background has outside of combat.

There are no "levels" for non adventuring careers, so it has no significance to the game mechanics. So, yes, it "handwaves" all those years of experience because, just like my experience developing software has no relevance to brain surgery, it makes no difference to the new path other than the standard proficiencies and minor benefits you get from backgrounds.

That, and the dwarf/elf that is hundreds of years old is an exception to the general beginning adventurer and I'm not sure what kind of structure you could put into place that would make any sense from a game perspective. Not that I think one is necessary in the first place, of course.

 

[Mort]

I definitely get what you are saying and acknowledge that you are at least trying to make a bit of sense of the situation by trying to restrict as much possible pre-story activity to justify the PC starting at level 1.

But here's the thing from my point of view: Dwarves and elves will gain XP and level up at the exact same rate as their humans compatriots when you play the game, and their maximum levels will all be about the same throughout the course of their "adventuring" lifetime. But because dwarves and especially elves live 3 to 8 times longer than humans... by any sort of metric of what gives a character "experience"... members of those races should have 3 to 9 times more XP and 3 to 9 times more levels than any human PC.

It is to put blinders on to any sort of logic to think that dwarves and elves only receive "experience" during the same 40 years that humans do (humans aged 20 to 60 before they retire). Average Human adventurers get no XP for the first 20 years of their lives, XP for the next 40, then no XP for the last 20. So human adventurers receive XP and levels for approximately half of their lives. Which means average dwarf adventurers that live to 350 years old should have like 175 years of adventuring, and elves that live to 700 years should have 350 years worth of adventuring. And if they gain XP and level up just the same as humans do (which we know happens because we all play the game)... the 350 years of elven adventuring should really allow them to get up to about probably Level 180. (Level 20 for humans x 9 times as many years adventuring as a human.)

But the game doesn't do that. Instead it just handwaves away the other 650 years of an elf's life wherein the elf doesn't "earn XP", just so that they can play the game along with, next to, and the same way human PCs do. Which to me... is ridiculous and stupid and I refuse to jump through hoops to try and justify in the narrative why that happens. So I don't. To me... the narrative of the story and the world have virtually nothing to do with any sort of comparison to the D&D board game. All the board game does is give us something different to play while we are creating the narrative and story, and some ideas of what we adapt and repurpose from the results of the board game for additional details to the narrative and story. But almost nothing in the board game actually "happens for real" in the story, because the D&D board game make little narrative sense. (And all we have to do is just re-read the hundreds of "What are hit points?" threads to see exactly time and time again why that's the case.)

It's trivially easy to justify that humans, driven to adventure, just spend that much more percentage of their lives adventuring (ie gaining levels) than dwarves or elves (even those driven to adventure). So a 30 year old human adventurer can be the same level as a 180 year old dwarf or a 300 year old elf. Sure the elf and dwarf have lived longer, but they spent a larger % of their life doing other stuff.

Sure it's a hand waive, but it works AND it also puts some nice differences in (so elves aren't just pointy eared humans).