D&D 5E Allow the Long Rest Recharge to Honor Skilled Play or Disallow it to Ensure a Memorable Story

[Ovinomancer]

That need not be true. The primary reason to play can be the experience, and the tedious tropes of linear story-telling may be set aside in favour of non-linear, dynamic, interactive story-telling.

I have no idea what you mean here. There's no requirement for linear or non-linear story-telling in my example -- whichever floats your boat it still applies. No swapping of bad sounding adjectives for nice ones makes your point less orthogonal.

 

[Bawylie]

I think you’re assuming “conflict” as some sort of collision of different priorities, which isn’t exactly what anyone is saying.

The placing of one goal avove another as a priority implies that they are in conflict. By conflict, we mean that they cannot both happen. To use your example, you cannot both allow the ambulance to speed on its way AND make it to work on time.

It’s one or the other.

Prioritizing absolutely is establishing a hierarchy of what is important. The safety of the person in the ambulance is more important than someone else making it to work on time.

Essentially, the person who pulls over for the ambulance is yielding the conflict. They are saying “yes that’s more important, you win”.

Now, to connect this back to gaming, I don’t think that a game must have one priority. I think it is something that likely shifts at goven points, and thise points and what goals take priority will vary by group.

Ok fair enough. Leaving my definition of conflict aside and assuming for the sake of argument there IS one - the moment you set a priority, you moot the conflict.

Circling back to the game, the question isn’t what or which you prioritize - it’s when and how. IMO, you establish a set of behaviors and values for yourself as a GM early, early on. And agree to a set of norms with your group when you assemble. that is to say, First your order your priorities. And the reason you do that first is so that when the situation arises in game where you have a conflict between whether to rest up or take the BBEG Now, that conflict is moot because you’ve already decided how you’ll handle that sort of thing.

 

[Bawylie]

Okay, so we moved from priorities don't conflict to priorities can rotate depending on what important right now to declaring this argument pointless clothes tearing. Cool. I'm glad that we're aligned that priorities can conflict but can also be swapped around eepending on what you want.

As for the usefulness of the argument, are you really here to tell people that they can't find this topic of interest or of possible use?

If your hallucination of my position leads you to believe I find the discussion of no interest or use, then there is indeed no point in talking to me about it.

 

[Bawylie]

No. Just no.

At the broadest, deepest level of zoom, every_game_ever_ is about fun.

I mean, yes, if your position is "degenerate forms of any play/game or people held against their will to play something or people who have an actual affliction but cannot stop playing something" means that the broadest, deepest level of zoom of those games cannot_be_about_fun.

Then sure.

But D&D 5e isn't excused from that. There can be dozens of degenerate, dysfunctional reasons for playing 5e that have nothing to do with fun. I can name hundreds of them the same way you can for Chess or Poker or Basketball.

I mean, just yesterday I went climbing for 1.5 hours exclusively as a technical training session. I didn't do it for fun. So I guess climbing, at the broadest level of zoom, isn't about fun.

Two days ago I played basketball in order to rehab a tweaked ankle and get used to the Florida heat and work on getting a specific brand of fitness up (which I can't get elsewhere). I didn't do it for fun. So I guess basketball, at the broadest level of zoom, isn't about fun.

Or someone doing a thing to escape a bad relationship/situation at home.

Or someone doing a thing (like poker) because they have an affliction.

There are so many examples of this. D&D 5e isn't exempt just because it says "have fun!" on page 3 of the PHB. I mean, the first time I ran it was an utter tutorial to work on my handling of the Social Interaction conflict mechanics and get a feeling for encounter budgeting/CR! It wasn't fun!

It’s not a given that every game is about fun.

Many games are about skill or competition. Some are even work for the participants to create entertainment for observers. Fun may be a byproduct, but not necessarily the objective.

Some games are, by design, psychological tests. Some are strategic assessments of forces or equipment. Fun, in that case, is neither anticipated nor designed for (but might still happen, or not).

 

[iserith]

It’s not a given that every game is about fun.

Right. Monopoly clearly isn't about fun and this is demonstrated every time I play it with my family.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I don't see anything at odds with these two approaches at all. But that could be due to different conceptions or definitions of what these things are. This is a pretty wanky conversation that looks to me like it escaped from a lab in the TTRPGs General forum and I had abandoned it prior to you summoning me.

Well, to state it again, there's the question of if a player has an option to perform an action that overcomes a challenge but does so in an unsatisfying way or making an action that fails the challenge but is fun and memorable. If the former is prioritized, they skilled play is prioritized. If the latter, then curation of story is prioritized.

A different example would be if a player declares an action and the GM has to choose between going with prep and having that action trivialize what should be a climatic scene or if the GM should ad lib so that the action doesn't trivialize the sceen and the climax is preserved.

In both of these examples the tension is between skilled play and curation of story. There's not a wrong answer here. It's not a trap. It's okay either way.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If your hallucination of my position leads you to believe I find the discussion of no interest or use, then there is indeed no point in talking to me about it.

You're the one that characterized it a clothes tearing; a semantic argument. I'll be happy to be corrected. What did you think of the rest the points I made?

 

[iserith]

Well, to state it again, there's the question of if a player has an option to perform an action that overcomes a challenge but does so in an unsatisfying way or making an action that fails the challenge but is fun and memorable. If the former is prioritized, they skilled play is prioritized. If the latter, then curation of story is prioritized.

A different example would be if a player declares an action and the GM has to choose between going with prep and having that action trivialize what should be a climatic scene or if the GM should ad lib so that the action doesn't trivialize the sceen and the climax is preserved.

In both of these examples the tension is between skilled play and curation of story. There's not a wrong answer here. It's not a trap. It's okay either way.

The skill, such as it is, in my game would then be threading the needle so that you don't have to choose one over the other. Make the skillful choice that is fun, exciting, and memorable as player and DM. And thinking back on past play experience, including last night's session, we don't ever seem to observe this tension. This is why I think this discussion mostly exists in forums and not at tables. Or at least not at my table. I'll take people at their word if they are agonizing over this conflict at their own tables.

 

[Bawylie]

You're the one that characterized it a clothes tearing; a semantic argument. I'll be happy to be corrected. What did you think of the rest the points I made?

I think using CR as an example (likely unintentionally) introduces a flaw in your argument.

As I understand it, CR isn’t a window into a home game - it’s a show. As a show, it’s chief purpose is to entertain an audience. To that end, they’ve apparently prioritized “a good story” over most other (but certainly not all) concerns.

Doing that would inevitably create situations that many GMs would look at and think “Well, hang on, that’s not what I would do. The rules say XYZ. Should I be ditching the rules to do it the way CR does it?” Sometimes, yeah for sure. Sometimes definitely not. But the lens with respect to CR is that it’s a show, and therefore it weighs its watchability greater than most other concerns. You and I don’t have to do that. Our audiences are our players and ourselves. And that’s completely and totally different, even if the trappings look identical.

 

[prabe]

I think it was a bit of both, in a way. Just going off what the book says, his resources are pretty significant, but are not itemized. My players certainly tried to do a little of that...they eliminated some of Strahd's allies and minions.....but the scope of such a task is probably too large for them to have achieved in full.

So when it came time for Strahd to deploy his defenses, I still had an unspecified number of resources at my disposal. I went with an amount that I thought was reasonable, but more importantly, would make for a challenging encounter.

That sounds like an Adventure Path experience one of my fellow-players found ... frustrating. Tried to reduce the numbers of opponents in an upcoming battle, was eventually told by the GM that number of opponents was fixed. Had the GM known what we were doing before we started, he might have been able to adjust. Heck, he might have been able to adjust figuring it out in the middle. I never figured out why he didn't try, other than it was clearly supposed to be a big set piece thing.

You've mentioned several times that the players change what the story is about.....and I get what you're going for, but I don't really think that's an accurate way to phrase it. The players are going to determine how the story goes, absolutely. And I suppose they could change what the story is about if they just decide to walk off and become farmers. But the thrust of the game at that time was the struggle against Strahd. If there's a story, that's what it is. The players can determine if the characters succeed or not, but that's not really the same as changing what the story's about.

The story is about their goals. If they change their goals, then they change what the story is about. If they set as their goals, "Eliminate Stahd's assets, then eliminate Strahd," the story that emerges from play will be about that. If that means the story ends with a curbstomp, that's fine.

Yeah, I get that you don't like published adventures. I don't think your take is entirely accurate, but it's not without some merit. In this case, I largely incorporated the Curse of Strahd adventuer into my ongoing campaign, and made a lot of changes and so on. I didn't feel the need to explain all that, because the core conflict of the showdown with Strahd was intact, and that was what I was talking about.

I can easily see a similar scenario of an evil lord who has subjugated his people and the PCs are working against him coming up in a game that's entirely homebrewed, so I think perhaps your dislike of published adventures is skewing your view a bit here? Perhaps not, but it doesn't seem to be all that relevant a point to me.

I would have expected you to make changes to Curse of Strahd, yes.

I agree that something with similar themes could come up in a homebrew campaign. I think that since the players would choose what they're going to be doing, they'd be choosing what the story would be about.