D&D General Can we talk about best practices?

[pemerton]

Did you give your dot-points or similar list already up thread (apologies if I missed it)?

No. I'm riffing on @hawkeyefan's list.

Ultimately I'm not the best person to give best practice advice for 5e D&D because I don't play it! I just observe it. But having observed a new campaign with new players recently - and hearing my daughters reports of how disappointing she found it compared to some baby-steps RPGing she's done with me - I'm absolutely convinced that (i) there is ample scope for best-practice advice, and (ii) 5e D&D is quite different from some other versions (eg Moldvay Basic; even 4e) in lacking even very basic statements or unavoidable presuppositions of structure or process to "make the game go" for those who are coming to it for the first time.

I don't think (ii) is helpful, let alone inevitable. Hence my opinion re (i).

 

[clearstream]

It's not controversial, to my knowledge, to talk about best responses in chess to various openings.

I find it hard to belief that 5e D&D is so different from all these other leisure pursuits that we can't talk sensibly about best practice ideas.

On the one hand, I agree with you that we ought to be able to talk sensibly about best practices for D&D (or RPG generally).

On the other hand, that is not going to be at all the same as talking about best responses in Chess to various openings. That's really an in-character different project.

 

[overgeeked]

To be blunt, because in this context I think your desire to discuss "best practices" is read, correctly or not, as an attempt to beg the question as to whether they are, based on your particular expectations in a game. If that makes you unhappy, it does, but its absolutely the way its coming across.

Yes, I think best practices exist for gaming. At no point do I claim to know what they are. There are clearly better and worse ways to role-play just as there are better and worse ways to engage players and better and worse ways to run a hexcrawl. None of that means right or wrong, just more or less efficient and more or less effective. If your goal is X you should try A, B, and C while trying to avoid G, H, and I.

Its manifestly unuseful to try to do something which adds up to instructions as to how to best do something until you have everyone mostly on the same page as to what that something actually is, unless you want to frame every part of it with the assumptions in use. If you don't understand why that is, I don't know what to tell you.

While I can understand what I assume is the thought behind this, it's literally impossible to do. As a group we can't even agree what a role-playing game is. To say nothing of smaller subcategories of activity commonly conducted within that space.

If it allows you to have the conversation your looking to have, is adjusting your language really that great a sacrifice?

Not really, no.

I didn't object to best practices to begin with, but my philosophy is that if other people find it problematic, adjust accordingly. It's virtually no effort on my part, and it makes the experience of others more positive, so I can't really see why I wouldn't. The alternative is a frustrating experience for me that other also perceive negatively (and who wants that).

Trouble is someone will always come along and find something problematic. Even if just to be disruptive. Of course not all instances of problematic things are people being disruptive.

Oh yes. I work in IT, don't get me started.

The term "best practices" is not a phrase that is used in conversational English. It's only ever used as a term of art. So if you start a thread about "best practices," anyone familiar with the term is going to assume that's what you mean by it.

It is becoming common in conversational English. I do not work in a field where the phrase "best practices" is a thing and yet it's something I've heard fairly regularly from people who also do not work in fields where the phrase is a thing. To me, and the way I am using it, the phrase "best practices" simply means: these things work better than other things not listed.

And since "onetruewayism" is in fact an issue that crops up regularly on these forums, with people issuing sweeping declarations about The Right Way To D&D, it's not an insane assumption that when somebody uses a term which is literally synonymous with onetruewayism--and even mentions in the OP that they anticipate complaints about that!--that's exactly what they mean.

The trouble with pointing at anything and everything that is a declarative statement and saying "onetruewayism" is that the phrase loses meaning and it prevents honest conversation. It's become a bogeyman.

 

[pemerton]

On the one hand, I agree with you that we ought to be able to talk sensibly about best practices for D&D (or RPG generally).

On the other hand, that is not going to be at all the same as talking about best responses in Chess to various openings. That's really an in-character different project.

Best practice for ballet dancers is going to overlap at least a bit with best practice for gymnasts, and both will overlap a bit with best practice for acrobats, and all will be as different from best practice for responding to chess openings as would be a 5e D&D best practice guide. Maybe more different.

I get that different leisure activities are different, and that they differ in the ways that they are different from one another, and that some admit of more mathematical precision (eg chess, backgammon) than others (eg dancing, fly-fishing).

But we can still talk about what it is to do them well, or better. It's sometimes, even often, rude to tell someone they're doing something poorly; nevertheless that's probably an inevitable shadow cast by any attempt to conceive of what it is to do something well. (And Gygax certainly wasn't shy in calling out some D&D play as poor practice.)

In this respect I just don't see that, or how, 5e D&D is different from all these other hobbies.

And I absolutely reject the notion that telling people to have fun is giving them useful advice at all. I mean, someone might have fun using the PHB as a frisbee, but that can hardly be what we have in mind when we invite someone to play some D&D with us.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Interesting. These do strike me as potentially controversial, because adhering to them seems to me likely to cause some difficulties in running a standard AP.

I meant controversial in the sense that I don't think I'm saying anything that has not been advocated for by others. I would expect some disagreement.

Like, I don't think it's controversial that many think that the GM has absolute authority. That comes up all the time. I think it's simplistic and misguided, but it's not controversial in the sense that I'm aware there are many who feel this way.

I'm thinking of the "not building to win" - for skilled PC builders (probably many ENworld posters) I get this, but I think beginning players who build "for fun" might run the risk of having their PCs die in an early encounter! (I know that 5e is widely seen as "easy mode" compared to eg B/X, but having seen a new group of kids playing recently they really are not very good technical game players!)

I probably wasn't elaborate enough in that bullet point. I'd clarify it a bit to say "Focus more on creating a character who is interesting than on one that can 'win'" or similar. I think that compared to some editions (mostly 3E, but probably all of them to some extent) that 5E punishes lack of system knowledge the least.

And for the instance of an entirely new group, that's one where the GM should indeed adjust things a bit to allow for the learning curve.

I think the second dot point for GMs is also potentially controversial, because it bumps into some presuppositions of APing pretty hard.

I can see what you mean. I don't think that Adventure Paths must be the pure railroad that many often cite. I also don't know if I'd say that the 5E published adventures really qualify as Adventure Paths, specifically. Some more than others, for sure, but not in their entirety, and not all of them.

So I might change those two if I wanted guidelines that are a good fit for "typical" 5e play, as best I have a sense of it. The Dying Earth RPG and Burning Wheel both give advice on how to allocate starting points which is more constraining than what is technically permitted, and I would probably suggest something similar for 5e D&D PC building. (Eg identify at least one stat that will support your PC in their main mechanical schtick and make sure that it starts at 14 or 16 or whatever experience tells us is an appropriate floor for generic effectiveness.)

The 5e PHB does this specifically, actually. It offers a "Primary Stat" for each character and suggests making that your highest ability score, and then offers suggestions about second choice, and also a suitable Background.

It could do a bit more, I'd say, but the basics are there.

For GMs I'd want something about how to manage action resolution outside of combat, and also what to do if the result of a combat seems apt to disrupt the planned trajectory of events. I'm not sure what exactly the former should look like; for the latter, Prince Valiant has the concept of a Rescue Episode to be deployed in such circumstances, and while I've never used it, I can see what it's there for. Something similar - eg about how to approach total group capture and feed that back into the plotline, or how to handle rescues by allied forces - might be useful.

I think that the DMG may offer some of this, but I don't recall off the top of my head. I certainly think more robust and (perhaps more importantly) more consistent advice on how to GM was offered. The DMG primarily consists of optional rules you can add to the game to kind of make it more X, or similar. There is some advice on GMing, but not nearly enough, from my recollection.

I think I'd also add in some advice for players about being willing to manifest their characterisation so as to embellish scenes, but taking cues from the GM and fellow players about when enough is enough, and corresponding advice for GMs about making space for this but not letting it (i) destabilise group harmony, or (ii) disrupt the general trajectory of events.

This is kind of what I was implying by my first bullet point about this being a group activity.

 

[Mort]

And I absolutely reject the notion that telling people to have fun is giving them useful advice at all. I mean, someone might have fun using the PHB as a frisbee, but that can hardly be what we have in mind when we invite someone to play some D&D with us.

Sadly, my son, who still views anything as a potential frisbee, would heartily disagree with you!

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the vast majority of what you list would apply to pretty much any trad game. I might have missed an exception.

(The sociodynamic structure of other types of games can be different enough some is irrelevant or actively counter-productive--a game that has much stronger power-sharing than trad games, for example).

But notice how few of these are really about the game operation, per se.

Okay, but so what? And I don't mean to be flippant with that......I genuinely am not sure what is the issue with the idea that my suggestions about best practices for D&D 5E could be applied to other games.

Do you feel we need to get so specific to 5E that the advice can't be more broadly applied? If I said that it's a best practice for GMs to "Always share any DC prior to the player making the roll; establish the difficulty of the task so that the player can make an informed decision about whether to attempt the action or not" would that be more what you are expecting, or hoping for?

And if so, couldn't this also be applied to other games that use DCs or Target Numbers? In other words, won't there always be at least a bit of overlap?

 

[pemerton]

This is kind of what I was implying by my first bullet point about this being a group activity.

I'm also trying to express some sort of integration of player contribution with GM contribution under the premise that the basic trajectory of play is set by the GM. This is what Edwards used to call "participationism". I think that that's the closest thing we have, to date, as a "technical" label for Critical Role-ish play.

And I think it's something for which (i) good advice is needed, and (ii) the old chestnut "You can do anything your character could do as a person in the fictional world" is unhelpful and even misleading.

 

[Fanaelialae]

So, I made a number of arguments in those posts, and you've addressed exactly none of them, instead assigning me a position I didn't take (that people don't play D&D differently) and beat up on that. There's a term for this... something about men made out of straw? It's eluding me.

No, my point is that the rules as written for 5e present a very clear way to play in a number of places and that people still play however they want. And this causes issues, because a number of people play 5e in a way not supported by the rules. You can clearly see the evidence of this in the 5e forum with the number of posts complaining about how 5e is easy mode, talking about rest changes, talking about encounter frequency and strength, talking about how this or that subsystem doesn't work, etc. The core conceit of each of these threads is the expectation that 5e supports the play the poster is trying to do and blaming the 5e rules for the failure. This is 5e's fault, for promising, nay encouraging, people to play however they want. That sets up the expectation that the rules will support multiple approaches, when, in fact, they do not, they just fail in non-spectacular ways; they almost work. And, the usual response to this, as demonstrated by you, is one of two things -- either a blind assumption that an optional system actually works and will fix that issue (plot points, gritty rest variant, etc), or a presentation of a changed ruleset via house/table rules as if this is what 5e presents.

5e's problem is that it's rules actually do support a specific approach to play in a number of places and it's 1) not clear on these assumptions and 2) ignores them freely in printed adventures. A specific example is the daily XP budget for encounters, how well this integrates with the rest cycle assumptions, and how it provide balance for the various recharges in the class structure. Yet, this is the one of the first and most often jettisoned assumptions in the game, and one of the most complained about (5e is easy mode, I want 1 encounter a day to mean something, rests are unbalanced, class recharge mechanics are unbalanced). Even the APs ignore this, which leads to very uneven adventure sites (some are woefully underbalanced, some are massively overburdened). It's ridiculous, because the system as presented works very well to do exactly what it says it will do, people just don't want to play that way or adjust the approach they've had since the last edition.

Fair enough. I wasn't trying to strawman. That's what I thought you were strongly implying in the posts I'd quoted.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your meaning.

Yeah, sure, 5e could certainly benefit from a more in depth explanation of the design and implications thereof. Although I'm not sure how much it would help. I suspect the people who complain without first taking the time to understand the design, would be the same people who complain without first taking the time to read the explanation of the design. I guess everyone who had read it could quote chapter and verse in response to those complaints.

 

[overgeeked]

Okay, but so what? And I don't mean to be flippant with that......I genuinely am not sure what is the issue with the idea that my suggestions about best practices for D&D 5E could be applied to other games.

Do you feel we need to get so specific to 5E that the advice can't be more broadly applied? If I said that it's a best practice for GMs to "Always share any DC prior to the player making the roll; establish the difficulty of the task so that the player can make an informed decision about whether to attempt the action or not" would that be more what you are expecting, or hoping for?

And if so, couldn't this also be applied to other games that use DCs or Target Numbers? In other words, won't there always be at least a bit of overlap?

Similarly, at some point we can simply trust that the reader is smart enough to realize that advice for one game might not be transferable to another. Or that some advice for one game will be transferable to another while other advice will not be.