D&D General Is power creep bad?

[Micah Sweet]

This is an extremely one-sided way of viewing the situation. Does the exploration pillar have the potential to be dull and boring? Yes, though that's mostly down to the play style (if you're running D&D as a game of smart resource use where going over the details of supply and logistics is the whole challenge, then this is not annoying and arduous, on the contrary it's the whole fun!). If all you want to get to is the "fun part" where you can use your flashy abilities and fight setpiece encounters, exploration is supremely boring. Admittedly, modern D&D has gone quite far away from old-school exploration style, where things like spell slots and use limits to abilities were mostly about resource management, they're now about having cool setpiece battles. But these vestigial rules still exist, and there's a (fun!) reason for them to exist, if you run your game accordingly. All the "annoying and arduous" bits of 5E's rule system, such as managing your inventory, picking minor adventuring gear, checking for random encounters every 20 minutes etc. is part of the core gameplay loop of OSR games, and these games seem to take essentially the same rules as 5E and make them much more interesting. So I think calling exploration annoying and arduous and only something the DM enjoys is unfair.

However, the DMG doesn't teach you how to run exploration as a challenge of logistics, and most people's sensibilities run counter to that now. So Exploration is either this weird timesink that the DMs have a hard time running (because nobody told them how to do it), or you just want to skip over the details ("You make it to the next town where the quest continues..."). The problem that @Micah Sweet has pointed out is that Ranger and Outlander backgrounds imply in the game's fiction that you're a master of these challenges. Logically, people who enjoy the part about surviving in the forest or arduously tracking an enemy would pick these classes. But these specific options that cater to the exploration fantasy are the same ones that nullify that pillar - a party with a ranger never gets lost, and an outlander always finds enough food. So there's a massive mismatch between the kind of people who'd like the specific option's fantasy (people who want to run exploration in the old way, or something close to it) and what the option does (make exploration completely obselete).

I think it's very much possible to have an exploration pillar in 5E that isn't annoying and arduous, it's just that WotC doesn't bother catering to that audience anymore. Which is a shame, because completely ignoring that pillar makes some of the design choices that were holdovers from earlier editions even weirder, when these choices could be developed in a way that's fun for everyone.

Yet another reason why I play Level Up now. One of the best parts of the game is making exploration fun and meaningful.

 

[Reynard]

I think it's very much possible to have an exploration pillar in 5E that isn't annoying and arduous, it's just that WotC doesn't bother catering to that audience anymore. Which is a shame, because completely ignoring that pillar makes some of the design choices that were holdovers from earlier editions even weirder, when these choices could be developed in a way that's fun for everyone.

It appears that Level Up has managed it, as had Adventures in Middle Earth before that. I am sure there are other 3rd party solutions of which I am not aware. But the fact still remains that WotC doesn't seem to know what to do with the Exploration pillar, or the Social pillar for that matter, from a mechanical perspective.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To be fair to the others, since these options were in the PHB from the start, I wouldn't call this power creep but rather bad design. The pillar was already destroyed by the time things like newer backgrounds and spells made it even more trivialised for other class and backgrounds as well.

Fair enough. It just really hacks me off.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

That class and that background have features that trivialize exploration challenges to the point where you might as well just say, "After traveling uneventfully for a little while, you arrive at where ever you were going".

Yeah, I have to agree with others; it could certainly be bad design, but I don't think you can call the options available on initial release power creep.

(ninja'd by agreement!)

 

[Ondath]

That's so weird. From what I can tell, the Outlander background gives you proficiency in two skills, a musical instrument, and a language. You get an Origin feature, which is basically a distant land that you visited...no mechanical bonus. You also get the Wanderer feature, that lets you find food and water in the wilderness assuming there are any food and water to be found. And you get the standard PIBF personality traits. I really don't see how any of that "ruins" the exploration tier of the game. Or even how they can be considered "power creep."

The ranger class in the PHB is one of the most lackluster classes written, so this feels a bit like picking an easy target, but here goes. Rangers get a Favored Enemy, which gives them a language and advantage on tracking a creature. They get the Natural Explorer feature, which lets you pick one type of terrain and within that terrain, you can't get lost or be slowed down and you find twice as much food (again, assuming there is food to be found...two times zero is still zero.) Eventually the ranger gets 3 different monsters and 3 types of terrain. And again, I don't see how either of these abilities "ruin" the exploration tier. They make travel and wilderness survival easier, for sure--that's the whole point of the ranger--but is it any worse than the wizard's magical mansions and teleport spells?

I'm gonna have to disagree with ya'll.

If the whole point of exploration is to have some logistical difficulty by asking questions such as "how much food can we take? How far can we travel given the amount of food we have + whatever we can muster from the land we're going through?" or having risks such as getting lost, then these options ruin exploration. Outlander's feature makes foraging an automatic success, and Ranger's feature makes following a path or finding a destination a non-challenge (since once again, you don't get lost). I don't mean to say that these are essential parts of the game, you can have a perfectly fine D&D game that's more about set piece battles and the time spent travelling is just LotR-style montages of characters going through wilderness, but Ranger and Outlander both imply in their fantasy that they cater to people who like exploration. If you wanted to play a Ranger because you wanted to be the cool guy who succeeds at the exploration challenge, 5E will let you down because you will simply nullify the challenge.

And I'll agree that A5E has managed to offer a fun exploration pillar using the 5E chassis. Supply is a nice mechanic that is all about the "how far can we go given our food?" question that I mentioned, and Trials & Treasures giving explicit guidance and rules on how to run exploration encounters really makes it fun, dare I say even without having annoying and arduous inventory management if wanted.

 

[payn]

It appears that Level Up has managed it, as had Adventures in Middle Earth before that. I am sure there are other 3rd party solutions of which I am not aware. But the fact still remains that WotC doesn't seem to know what to do with the Exploration pillar, or the Social pillar for that matter, from a mechanical perspective.

Its a rock and a hard place. Some folks want those pillars expanded, others like them abandoned or as basic as possible because they have no use for them. This means folks who do like it are left to figure it out themselves.

 

[Reynard]

Its a rock and a hard place. Some folks want those pillars expanded, others like them abandoned or as basic as possible because they have no use for them. This means folks who do like it are left to figure it out themselves.

They could put it in a Xanathars or -- it'll never happen, but I'll say it anyway -- an actual DM facing book.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They could put it in a Xanathars or -- it'll never happen, but I'll say it anyway -- an actual DM facing book.

I miss those.

 

[Reynard]

I miss those.

This is a little off topic but I wonder if the hesitancy of the newer cohort of players to take up the GM mantle is related to the absolute desert of GM support in 5E?

 

[Helldritch]

I don't think power creep ended 3e, so much as they just ran out of good ideas because of the rate that they published new stuff. Towards the end a whole lot of what they were producing was just a variation of something that came before, or something new that was just....................bad. Too many bad books turned people off more than the power creep.

Well, both yes and no. The power creep did ended the 3.xed but PF took it and pushed it even further with good products. In a sense, PF was a 3.75ed. It took off when 4ed failed to rally most gamers. When 5ed got out, PF finally fell (but not their campaign world) as was expected of an edition that had outlived its normal life. But yes, so many bad books in the late life of 3.xed. It was a shame.