D&D General The Problem with Talking About D&D

[Mezuka]

My first Basic D&D (1981) group had problems because of this. We soon discovered we were split in two camps.

My camp wanted action oriented dungeon delving adventures following the rules. The other half wanted realistic characters with complex backstories and arc stories. The group broke in two once they discovered Call of Cthulhu.

It was for the better. Both groups were happy. We sometimes made appreances in the other group to play a guess npc.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Yes - if anything, there isn't enough of this in the game publishing world. And more designer notes so we can better understand the ideas and make better choices!

I promise this isn't baiting or trolling--what do you think some sort of quantified approach might look like, and, as @Deset Gled mentioned, how would you avoid specific labels being sort of misrepresented or weaponized?

For example, would the back of Witchlight show high RP, medium combat, and a suggested age rating? Because maybe that's really what we're talking about, right--RP vs. combat. If something is combat-heavy I would assume a ton of thought put into balance, including specific guidance for adjusting it to fit different sizes and compositions of groups, whereas an RP-heavy adventure might still have a truly deadly fight or two, but balance should matter less, since there are fewer total fights to grind through.


But here's a separate, follow-up question: Would those kinds of labels make sense in most other games? Maybe so, because even without the same (imo very D&D-centric) focus on combat balance, it might be useful to get a quick sense of whether something has a smaller or larger focus on fights. But as you mentioned re: Masks of Nyarlathotep, so many other games have encounters that you can just avoid--that you don't have to fight through, or at least aren't expected to. And the implications would be very different. If I saw an Alien RPG adventure that was labeled as combat-heavy, I'd figure the players are going to burn through tons of PCs, since combat in that system is incredibly brutal. So do those labels really just apply to D&D and its specific set of challenges?

 

[Shardstone]

My belief is that WotC dug themselves into this hole. They did it by believing that perfectly balanced combat was a good goal to strive for.

I agree that D&D is now very much modeled after online combat games, and that's good. However, because of the strengths of the medium, the PCs have a potential infinite amount of resources that they can employ to overcome difficult challenges, including running away, finding allies, doing research, discovering magic items, and so on. However, WotC has created a game where a lot of these things are left nebulous or given little mechanical support, and the biggest focus is just on direct combat with groups of opposing enemies with none of the added nuance in the vast majority of these encounters.

If you are an experienced DM, which most of this forum seems to be, this is not much of a problem. You have so much material, both of your own creation and others, that you can easily fill in these gaps and create truly sublime experiences at your tables. However, new players, which it seems is the vast majority of modern day players, do not have this experience, and the first party material they buy offers very little of this itself.

I think if WotC focused a little less on rigid balance and a little more on giving the party other tools (generators for important allies, spells that could nerf strong monsters, an elegant mechanic for escaping a too dangerous foe, and so on) in their DMG, as well as advice on how to run various encounters of various difficulties in a narrative sense, then 5E wouldn't have near the amount of handwringing online that it does now.

Remember that 5E will never be PF2E, which is one of the most balanced games ever created (and a game I think is very very well designed). 5E has an audience who very much likes interactive narratives and discovery mixed in with their combat. Let's start giving groups these kinds of tools, and tell them not to worry so much about CR and more so about how a group of level 5 adventurers can possibly kill the Ancient Green Dragon through finding a number of long dead dragonslayers to learn ancient wisdoms from their souls and creating traps that will keep the green dragon from flying away and breathing and so on and so forth.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Chicken or egg? Do most other RPGs not have these discussions because there are not enough people playing them to have them?

Well, in some games either there's a much more compressed power level and/or any differences that are going to seriously impact balance are blatantly obvious. Once you get outside of those, a lot of games do have those sorts of discussions (I've seen plenty of it in superhero games over the years, usually mixed up with the question of how much people want or don't want the medium of a game to be identical to the native media for superheroes).

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I think he means more that you need some largish number of people playing, and all going to shared spaces to talk, to sustain discussions at all.

I think that's true to some extent, but not sure it applies here. There are discussion boards that pick apart the mechanics and playstyles and such of other games, but this particular issue of encounter balance doesn't seem (to me) to really come up.

Then again, no other game has as many total 3rd party adventures being published, so the notion of some sort of playstyle labels is maybe a lot more relevant to D&D.

 

[Shiroiken]

Overall agree, but unfortunately economics disagrees. WotC doesn't want a coded system to guide DMs purchases, as they want them to buy them all. Since they have a limited release schedule, part of the business model is based on DMs buying most/all the adventures, as they are almost half the yearly release. While it would greatly improve customer service to help DMs only purchase what is best for them, it would likely cut into their overall profits.

For his points about online discussion - I have gone on record that gaming discussing to understand what the other person is saying, and why, is generally far more constructive than discussion to prove them wrong.

The entirety of Reddit disagrees

This is not a thing in every RPG, or, I'd argue, most of them!

Most RPGs have a very distinct advantage over D&D: they're specifically built for 1 setting and type of play. D&D, however, must cater to everyone, over numerous settings and styles. This is the big problem that happened with 5E's encounter design: it baseline assumes resource attrition over numerous encounters, but a lot of DMs prefer to run only a couple of encounters. Since it's baked into the overall balance, there's no easy solution that satisfies everyone.

 

[overgeeked]

The real issue is that internet discussions about D&D - much like internet discussion in general - is not like real life discussion. It's segmented and self-selected in a way that folks around a table at a con discussing the game wouldn't be.

I've found quite the opposite. There's far more varied voices on the internet than you'll ever find at a gaming convention, mostly because the cost involved is so much lower. Con goers tend to be older with more disposable income, or the kids of older gamers with more disposable income. People on the net just need access to the net. The con goes are, by definition, more segmented from the rest of the gaming crowd and more self-selected than people on the internet.

 

[Jer]

I've found quite the opposite. There's far more varied voices on the internet than you'll ever find at a gaming convention, mostly because the cost involved is so much lower. Con goers tend to be older with more disposable income, or the kids of older gamers with more disposable income. People on the net just need access to the net. The con goes are, by definition, more segmented from the rest of the gaming crowd and more self-selected than people on the internet.

The wider internet? Sure.

The self-selected folks who stick around and argue on RAW threads? That hasn't been my experience.

 

[el-remmen]

Seems like the kind of no-brainer most people would agree with but from my experience on these boards, various of us do not really put into practice in our discussions.

 

[overgeeked]

I do like the idea of signaling that an adventure is skewered toward a given playstyle, but do you think that needs to be quantified or clearly delineated?

Maybe.

Wouldn't that just come across in the description?

Maybe. If the description was intentionally written to convey that info. And only if the description is quite thorough and long, or the module is quite short.

Like if I were running for a super tactical group, I'd give Strixhaven a hard pass, not because of some rating or color-coding, just based on the presented content and vibe. Meanwhile, a 3rd party book that's brimming with demons or whatever, sure thing.

Right. There are lots of ways to signal this. Absolutely. But reading a small chart or number on the back cover of a module is a time saver. Besides, unless the writer of that description is consciously thinking of conveying this same info, it might not even be a consideration. Strixhaven might have hyper-tactical combats buried in there, but because it was marketed a particular way, you won't know. Entirely you call to make, obviously, but if it's presented as another "magic school" and you see that it's rated for hardcore tactical combats, wouldn't that at least pique your interest? Maybe not enough to buy it, but enough to investigate further.

But even then, I think the notion that every demons-slaying encounter will or should be magically balanced...I mean, it sets up a weird paradox. If the PC group is pure tactics badassery, give them challenges that might be impossible to beat, but they can still see how far they get before retreating. Or maybe they surprise you and themselves and actually win? There's nothing impressive about being tactically proficient if the GM is constantly nudging and tweaking to keep things spicy, not not too spicy.

Sure, but it's also about group size and playstyle. It's not necessarily about balance. As Matt said in the video, combat balance is about way more than just how many players you have. It's how tactically minded they are, how optimized they are, etc. The DM knows the players. The module writer doesn't. So either the module writer has to convey that info, this module is tactics heavy and designed for a party of 5, or the DM has to suss that info out of the marketing or module itself. It's simply easier and a time saver to have that info explicitly labeled on the product.