D&D 5E Why Don't We Simplify 5e?

[GMMichael]

I think Skill challenges need to come back, revamped and fixed, given the bad rap they got in 4e. Probably drop "Skill" and just call them Challenges...

Erm, the thread is about the (lack of) streamlining 5e conversation. Are you proposing adding more rules? Simplifying the name of the challenges is a start, I guess...

 

[Eubani]

Erm, the thread is about the (lack of) streamlining 5e conversation. Are you proposing adding more rules? Simplifying the name of the challenges is a start, I guess...

Many of us disagree and are saying further streamlining would be harmful to the game and that some areas need a bit more meat to get the most out of them.

 

[overgeeked]

It's in part about time

How much time do you have as a GM to prepare? How much time does the group have to play? And what do you want to focus you prep time and your play time doing?

For example, I use to run a Yoon-Suin game and the party had to travel far to explore this rather large dungeon due to a dire prophecy. The trip there was 6 weeks - big journey!. So I had a number of encounters of all kinds on the way - a troll inkeeper, brigands, local politics, an oracle, rival priest etc etc on the way. But we only play 3 hours every 2 weeks. After a few sessions, we were still not at the dungeon yet!

So we just skipped ahead the rest of the way.

For my money, the best use of NPC prep time is figuring out their occupation and a goal. A long list of medieval occupations, say 50-100 entries is enough. And either a list of or a framework for generating goals. Even something as simple as "I want to [verb] the [noun]" can be enough to get things going. The goal could easily be a hook for the PCs or motivation for the NPC. It can do double duty like that. Knowing what they do, i.e. an occupation that hooks them into the world, and some specific thing they want to accomplish is far more interesting at useful at the table than knowing whether they're secretly in love with a tree stump or some such. Though now that I say that I want to make a woodsman who fell his beloved treant or dryad's home by mistake and is pining for their return.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Any encounter you create needs to account for the standard three possible outcomes: The characters succeed, the characters partly succeed, or the characters fail. A chokepoint exists only if you fail to account for failure and what that might mean for the forward momentum of the adventure.

Which is why I said "potential". Sometimes there's no easy soft-failure state obvious.

Totally with you on skipping ahead if the destination is more interesting than the journey, though! I think that's just a natural decision based on how you wish to enjoy the game.

I'd characterize it as a matter of degree; the journey can be interesting--but it requires a greater degree of effort to do so, and its not going to be so for everyone equally no matter what you do, so is the struggle to try actually worth it?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, merchants:

• sell necessities and luxuries
• have far-reaching contacts across the region
• pass on gossip and adventure hooks
• hire guards to keep their goods safe
• carry news from town to town
• report situations that cry out for the attention of adventurers

Those things should be the focus of the encounter, not the merchant themselves.

Yes, but is every merchant going to have even one of those (other than the first)? Every time? If they do, do they bring interest, or distraction?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Many of us disagree and are saying further streamlining would be harmful to the game and that some areas need a bit more meat to get the most out of them.

Yeah, I can't say my critiques about 5e are that its too complicated.

 

[mrpopstar]

I'd characterize it as a matter of degree; the journey can be interesting--but it requires a greater degree of effort to do so, and its not going to be so for everyone equally no matter what you do, so is the struggle to try actually worth it?

I think it's worth it!

Yes, but is every merchant going to have even one of those (other than the first)? Every time? If they do, do they bring interest, or distraction?

I don't find it difficult to give my merchants purpose. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't find it difficult to give my merchants purpose. Your mileage may vary.

What I'm suggesting is that if every merchant has something interesting about them, that in and of itself is odd. After all, on the road you could run into five merchants in two days. If everyone of them has news I've not heard, is a useful contact, or is hiring guards, that's going to start to look pretty odd. It starts to approach every stranger on the road being a secret wizard or a king in disguise.

 

[mrpopstar]

What I'm suggesting is that if every merchant has something interesting about them, that in and of itself is odd. After all, on the road you could run into five merchants in two days. If everyone of them has news I've not heard, is a useful contact, or is hiring guards, that's going to start to look pretty odd. It starts to approach every stranger on the road being a secret wizard or a king in disguise.

If the characters are undertaking a long, uneventful journey on a moderately active road, you'd check for a random encounter once every 4 to 8 hours. That's a 15% chance 2 to 4 times a day of a random encounter occurring.

Assuming you've assembled more than just merchant encounters when creating your random encounter table, I don't anticipate you encountering five merchants in two days.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If the characters are undertaking a long, uneventful journey on a moderately active road, you'd check for a random encounter once every 4 to 8 hours. That's a 15% chance 2 to 4 times a day of a random encounter occurring.

Assuming you've assembled more than just merchant encounters when creating your random encounter table, I don't anticipate you encountering five merchants in two days.

You might not anticipate it, but it still can happen; I've had it happen. With numbers not too dissimilar to yours (merchants were, I think, about 30% of the expected road encounters because, honestly, merchants are some of the commonest people to use roads).

The point is, with any decent travel time, you're potentially going to get a lot of encounters, especially on roads, and a lot of them are going to be relatively similar. Differentiating them starts to become not just difficult, but becomes freakish, because the honest truth is most of them just aren't things almost anyone is going to care about, and making them care about them creates its own set of issues.

There's a reason that even in fiction, a lot of this stuff is elided, and that's even in picaresque stories.