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

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not sure what the distance you need to be away from your party is to Stealth effectively. I think in older editions it was something like 90 feet (though I might be thinking of Elves and Halfling sneakiness). You certainly can't stealth as a group without magical support, given heavy armor, though, as usual, this is something magic solves handily with Pass Without Trace. If your DM has enemies use traps often, though, scouting ahead is probably not a good idea unless you can fly or have a climb speed.

Or, honestly, are good at spotting and evading them. Its not a coincidence that traditionally this is a job that's been done by rogues.

Unless your perception is very high, that disadvantage from darkvision is going to lower your passive Perception by 5, meaning you have to actively search for traps and even then, statistically fail more often than succeed, turning your Rogue into a shish-ka-bob.

Now you can build a character to be a better scout. But I'm still thinking an Imp or a Druid wild shaped into a bat are probably your best bets at low levels.

Well, this is partly a consequence of traditional design having its cake and eating it too. There's really no reason as many D&D monsters even have lowlight, let alone darkvision, as do.

 

[overgeeked]

Hit points. The older you get, the more typos you make. So when your party is at a full tank of gas, they are much more prone to taking risks. As their hit points deplete, they become less likely to do so. Eventually they reach a point where they are out of gas, and no longer wish to adventure today.

At this point, assuming they can retreat to some safe location, the action basically stops until they have regained enough hit points to feel comfortable continuing the adventure. So my hypothesis is that healing becoming more prevalent is simply a concession to keeping the game running so everyone is continuing to have "fun" longer.

I use quotation marks because one man's "fun" is subjective, but WotC is trying to appeal to a broad base of players, and I would go so far as to say that most players want to keep on trucking as opposed to not.

Now one can point out that, assuming the group is in a safe location, time can be handwaved away to allow them to complete their long rest so there is no break in action, but I know quite a few DM's who will "roll for random encounters" every hour on the hour- the longer the rest takes at these tables, the more likely you are to be jumped.

Also, there's a thread elsewhere on the site about "time pressure" and how important it is to the game. And apparently quite a few people seem to believe that it is vital and necessary to prevent players from strolling leisurely through adventures, lollygagging and sightseeing.

At these tables, healing had better be prevalent, or you aren't going to have great chances of success, I fear.

I think a lot of this is wrapped up in those assumptions and preferences we’re so bad at talking about.

Different players and DMs think different styles of play are fun. Some want combat as sport where every fight is as perfectly balanced as it’s possible to get and anything that prevents skipping ahead to the next fight is a waste of table time. While others want to sweat the details and play full-on combat as war fantasy [redacted] Vietnam.

To me, the less we sweat the details, the less we’re immersed in the world, the more explicitly a game D&D is (generally), the less interested I am. I want to track rations, water, encumbrance, etc. I want risk-and-reward to be a thing, beyond one fight or one day. I want that secondary world feeling like the travelogue portions of Lord of the Rings. D&D as a combat board game bores me.

I want to poke and prod at the world with a 10-foot-pole to discover secrets. I want to describe how my character does things. I want to avoid fights completely by coming up with a weird plan. I don’t want the DM to ask for a check and skip over all the fun bits.

 

[tetrasodium]

That's why I used "significantly". Obviously there's going to be some degree of risk, but its honestly better to lowball it than over-do it if you expect people to actually do so.



Eh. I'm not convinced a specialist in scouting should expect to have any problems while out. It could happen (running into something that doesn't care about Stealth for example), but sending a scout out is not the same thing as routine party splitting. And honestly, some of the failure states for being out (if you do run into something with, say, 3e blindsight, its entirely possible it'll be lethal depending on what it is, and may well be severe (its not that hard to cut someone off depending on the environment; indoors blocking doors is a thing, and outdoors we're right back to needing to be at least as fast as what's chasing you).

(I'm ignoring the "everyone spontaneously runs to help" unless Alice is nearby or they have some sort of telepathic communication; that absolutely is a risk you take if you send out a long distance scout.)

I'm not too concerned about the first part either, it's the fact that the GM needs to either shrug it off & accept that Alice scouting means that everyone is also scouting with her unless the GM says NO STOP to hold everyone back while they point at you the GM as the reason Alice is being splatted. Back when I used a battlemat & had scouting more ToTM there was some risk because the players had to rush after Alice from a first person perspective. When I switched to a capable digital tabletop I started seeing how many ways using ToTM & battlemats create risk that simply goes away with a capable digital tabletop unless the GM inserts themself as the reason they aren't allowing the players to help Alice.

 

[Hussar]

I this is an example of where it's hard to talk about D&D because, to me, the game supports scouting ahead perfectly fine. But then it matches some of my expectations here: yes - it's hard to scout ahead without darkvision in a lightless environment; yes - one of the risks is running into a hidden creature that is hard to see because it's dark; yes - you might blunder into a dangerous situation. The game deals with, thus supports, all of those issues just fine. As I see it, the deterrent to scouting isn't because the game doesn't support it - the deterrent is the process of scouting exposes the scout to a considerable amount of danger... which it should.

But, there's the issue.

It's all about cost/benefit. What are the costs of scouting - well, there's a non zero chance that your scout is going to fail to be sneaky (and, over time, that chance changes from non-zero to virtually guaranteed without magic) and touch off an encounter that the scout absolutely can't win. And, if the scout isn't quick enough, it is entirely possible that the scout dies as a result.

So, what's the benefit here? You gain a couple of rounds worth of information about the situation ahead of you. Which, by and large, doesn't actually help you all that much. What difference does it make that you know that next cave has two trolls in it vs the entire party learning that there are two trolls in that cave? You might gain a surprise round? Maybe? The rogue can't really do anything about the trolls, particularly, so, the scout goes up, sees the trolls, reports back to the party, who then goes and confronts the trolls.

Versus, the party simply wanders forward, being careful of traps and whatnot, but, not particularly stealthy, and meets the trolls.

Is the information really worth the risk? For many groups, no, it's not. I used to really wonder why groups didn't scout more, but, then I realized that by and large, having a PC scout was pointless. At best it was a waste of time, while one player got to play and everyone else sat on their hands waiting. At worst, it alerted monsters and left the party badly out of position and was often a major disadvantage.

The only time I see scouts anymore is with renewable resources - far, FAR better to risk a small amount of gold on a renewable familiar than actually send a PC ahead.

 

[James Gasik]

There's also what I call the "Decker problem". If anyone has played Shadowrun, they know what I mean. One character is going off and engaging in solo play while the rest just sit around and wait.

 

[tetrasodium]

There's also what I call the "Decker problem". If anyone has played Shadowrun, they know what I mean. One character is going off and engaging in solo play while the rest just sit around and wait.

Yep. I remember when deckers needed to hard wire in & you basically ran two sessions, one with everyone to get the decker & van into place then everyone but the gm & decker went for pizza while those two had a session that was hopefully wrapping up about the time everyone else got back for the decker to go home or maybe unlock a door between thumb twiddling.

One of my groups has a scout player who gets off on scouting everything to an obnoxious degree & because that group isn't using extra lethal rules I can not impress risk upon him no matter how I phrase "you don't feel comfortable going further because...." he as a player knows for a fact that his character is basically at zero risk from much shy of rocks fall or sudden beholder turns the corner & immediately casts disintegrate type things the group will blame me for. Sure I could throw wandering monsters at the players staying behind, but it doesn't matter to anoyone without attrition & the scout can probably be there in a round or two so they too can take part in a slog of combat.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not too concerned about the first part either, it's the fact that the GM needs to either shrug it off & accept that Alice scouting means that everyone is also scouting with her unless the GM says NO STOP to hold everyone back while they point at you the GM as the reason Alice is being splatted. Back when I used a battlemat & had scouting more ToTM there was some risk because the players had to rush after Alice from a first person perspective. When I switched to a capable digital tabletop I started seeing how many ways using ToTM & battlemats create risk that simply goes away with a capable digital tabletop unless the GM inserts themself as the reason they aren't allowing the players to help Alice.

Tetrasodium, I'm going to be a little blunt here: your incessant assumption that every player ever will not only play in a completely metagame fashion but that there's no way to keep that in check (or at least that somehow the tools for that have vanished because you can't use in-game carrots and sticks to do it) makes it immensely hard to have a conversation with you some times.

I've been GMing for 45 years now. I've had powergamers and people who make "convenient" assumptions about what they know for most of that period. After a very early and regrettable period, I've never done anything in that kind of situation but say "And how would you know they need your now?" I haven't always had perfectly reasonable players, and I've never particularly discouraged people from challenging me but somehow I got by. I don't think I'm some master of social control (and there have been some memorable shouting matches in my time to show that), but again, somehow I got by.

(And as I've mentioned I've been using a VTT since well before COVID, and it hasn't changed anything meaningfully.)

Basically, at some point if someone wants to make you the villain for enforcing the realities of the situation, let them. At some point they'll either get over it or walk away.

(This is not to say when such things happen there can't be legitimate, albeit slanted questions such as "Can we hear anything? Has Alice been gone an unusually long time?" or that the players cannot make efforts to make sure they always are in communication. But at the end of the day, so what?)

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's also what I call the "Decker problem". If anyone has played Shadowrun, they know what I mean. One character is going off and engaging in solo play while the rest just sit around and wait.

Well, the only way that's significant in the matter at hand is if the player is getting waaay ahead of everyone else, and IME, pointing out the risks there tends to hose that down pretty well.

 

[tetrasodium]

Tetrasodium, I'm going to be a little blunt here: your incessant assumption that every player ever will not only play in a completely metagame fashion but that there's no way to keep that in check (or at least that somehow the tools for that have vanished because you can't use in-game carrots and sticks to do it) makes it immensely hard to have a conversation with you some times.

I've been GMing for 45 years now. I've had powergamers and people who make "convenient" assumptions about what they know for most of that period. After a very early and regrettable period, I've never done anything in that kind of situation but say "And how would you know they need your now?" I haven't always had perfectly reasonable players, and I've never particularly discouraged people from challenging me but somehow I got by. I don't think I'm some master of social control (and there have been some memorable shouting matches in my time to show that), but again, somehow I got by.

(And as I've mentioned I've been using a VTT since well before COVID, and it hasn't changed anything meaningfully.)

Basically, at some point if someone wants to make you the villain for enforcing the realities of the situation, let them. At some point they'll either get over it or walk away.

(This is not to say when such things happen there can't be legitimate, albeit slanted questions such as "Can we hear anything? Has Alice been gone an unusually long time?" or that the players cannot make efforts to make sure they always are in communication. But at the end of the day, so what?)

actually I was talking about the lack of resource attrition & ultra low lethality insulating Alice's overextended scouting from risk. As to VTTs I said capable digital tabletop. Not all VTTs meet that bar, roll20 is barely passable & starts encountering load issues as map sizes start crossing chessex mat sizes for example.

 

[Thomas Shey]

actually I was talking about the lack of resource attrition & ultra low lethality insulating Alice's overextended scouting from risk. As to VTTs I said capable digital tabletop. Not all VTTs meet that bar, roll20 is barely passable & starts encountering load issues as map sizes start crossing chessex mat sizes for example.

It has nothing to do with visibility. I expect players to be entirely aware where the problem is (because they can see it) and they're still not going to "just happen" to get over there. And, honestly, I play plenty of games where the main risk for going out and scouting is getting cut off. If someone goes down, it doesn't matter much whether they're immediately dead or not. If they're capable of dealing with the problem that cuts them off by themselves--then they probably should be.

Basically, I've yet to see a game system people were blase about really extended scouting, and that includes games where death is a really uncommon event (like superhero games). So I'm afraid I'm just still not getting the problem.