D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[UngeheuerLich]

Uh...okay. That's not what I said though, so... I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is: wrong application of the oberoni fallacy.
Also: I acknowledged in my post that I want different rules in the 24 edition.
So quoting only parts of my post is disingenious.

My observation: the oberoni fallacy is always cited to discredit someone who does not mind the default rules (which work for many people) and suggest using a house rule to fix the problem for yourself so it suits your playstyle.

There have never been rules that serv any playstyle and there have always been houserules because of that.

 

[Art Waring]

This is a not-to-be-understated factor, and good point.

Millennials in general, are a lot less snobby and jerk-y in general about nerdy stuff than Gen-Xers. All the classic "sneering nerd" stereotypes, whilst perhaps predating Gen-X, were certainly very present in Gen-X, and even by the time of Xennials like myself, had dropped off steeply. A lot of my earlier experiences with RPGs were of "sneering nerds" who were older than me (luckily I had a Gen-X cousin who wasn't a sneering nerd, who taught me to play). And I can say that, IRL at least, I've never been that "sneering nerd". It's outside my repertoire. I'm having trouble even thinking of a "sneering nerd" my age or younger, despite being able to think of loads a few years or more older.

And I've seen this apply to Millennials generally - and not just about RPGs - but about all games, and just nerdy subjects in general. There's just way less sneering about people not knowing stuff than with Gen-X. (One example it's easy to see this with is Star Wars - the violence with which opinions about Star Wars are held just drastically increases once you get to like 48-50 or older - 30-somethings or 20-somethings tend to have pretty soft opinions about SW, even if they are big fans, whereas it's easy to find a 50-y/o SW fan who thinks he "owns" SW and is ready to strike down upon anyone who has the "wrong" SW opinions).

Absolutely agree.

IMO, the scene today is completely different than back in the 80's/90's. People are more friendly and less condescending. Today I have found a lot of more open minded gamers than in the past, the sneering elitism was very much prevalent years ago and I for one am glad to see it fade into history.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My point is: wrong application of the oberoni fallacy.
Also: I acknowledged in my post that I want different rules in the 24 edition.
So quoting only parts of my post is disingenious.

I had not felt that part was relevant to my point. Your logic was stated as:

1. The default rules don't work (or at least not well)
2. An optional rule exists which works (or works better)
3. Therefore there is no problem with the rules

That is the Oberoni fallacy: asserting that because the rules can be changed to fix a problem, there is no problem. That fallacious conclusion is wrong. There is a problem. I omitted one sentence where, yes, you admit that there is in fact a problem and you would prefer it to go away. That omitted sentence does not affect your stated argument with regard to the rules as they currently exist. If anything, the omitted sentence is reinforcing the Oberoni fallacy here, because you straight-up admit there's a problem while denying there is a problem!

My observation: the oberoni fallacy is always cited to discredit someone who does not mind the default rules (which work for many people) and suggest using a house rule to fix the problem for yourself so it suits your playstyle.

Because that's exactly what the fallacy is! It is saying that because the problem can be houseruled, it isn't a problem. That is a straight fallacy, or worse, a legit self-contradictory assertion.

There have never been rules that serv any playstyle and there have always been houserules because of that.

Uh...no? That is simply false. I have played in absolutely RAW games that were perfectly cromulent experiences because the game system was actually well-designed to begin with.

 

[payn]

I legit do not understand this statement. At all.

1. If you are a player, how do you know what level the fight is? How do you determine how the combat "should" go? Doesn't the influence of dice, tactics, and terrain usage make a sufficient level of variation? How are you achieving such perfect levels of prediction with so little information?

The bounded stat generation method and +1 per level creates a very tight math binding and every +1 is YUGE. If you are level enough above your opponent, you reliably score critical hits, while your opponent has very remote ability to do so. Now something on level is going to be much more fair, and tactics will grant advantages, but you have little ability to punch above your weight (like you can in many previous editions) because the offense and defense is so critically bound. The AP writers learned this lesson and have reduced the frequency of any encounter +3 level of the party (TPK city).

The bonus of this, of course, is a very narrow gap in PC ability amongst each other. A lot of what folks have come to know as system mastery relies on tactical play and learning to use abilities (the rub is that those abilities are funneled into smaller and smaller choices as your challenges increase, which is ironic because that's kind of how feats were funneled). Higher level enemies have strong defenses against spells and maneuvers, so tactics are the PCs only option to win(survive) the fight. Fans like this because solo fights are actually interesting instead of a pummel fest over in a round or two.

2. If you are a DM, why are you using identical combats? Are you not providing rich opportunities (to both sides, to be clear) to do tricksy or dangerous things? Are you not using creatures with interesting actions or secondary effects so that even victory itself becomes a complicated affair? Are you including traps, terrain features, and other interact able/dynamic features to leverage (again, for both sides)? Are you making sure to throw some lower-level and highest-level combats at the party, or to have recurring opponents who don't gain levels and thus get weaker relative to the party as they grow?

The system math again determines success or failure based on tight level banding. So, if a monster has a some tricksey ability, I know exactly the chances it has of landing on the PCs based on the APL (also fun note having mixed levels of PCs is a recipe for disaster in PF2). Indeed you can add terrain and traps to spice up encounters, but you do so at the peril of TPK based solely on level. a +3 APL fight is already likely to wipe a party based just on basic attacks/defense and abilities. If you stay within the reasonable challenge band, you can kick the fight up a level by using traps and terrain for a more tactical experience.

This is why I legit do not understand these comments. People constantly grouse about "white room theory," but that's exactly what many of those same people use to denounce 4e- and PF2e-like effective and useful balance, while ignoring the techniques the books literally tell you to use in order to produce fun and engaging combats, completely stripping away anything except perfectly lockstep combats on flat, empty terrain. Of course if you do that the combats will be predictable and boring! That would be just as true in 5e under these conditions!

This is based on actual play experience. I am fortunate to have played on a VTT that revealed perhaps more of the math than it should have. I knew by second round that my spells/abilities had somewhere of about 10-20% chance of landing, and the enemies attacks had a 60% chance of hitting (and 20% chance of critting) which is a pretty alarming difference in an APL+3 fight. In past editions, I could use terrain, elemental weapons, surprise, etc.. to my advantage. In PF2 that works wonderfully, if you are facing an APL 0/+1 CR encounter. You kick it up a level or two and now you are relying on pure character abilities to get burdensome riders applied to the enemy to slow down their attacks and movement while you paper cut the enemy to death. Some see that as awesome tactical combat, for me its a painfully slow process in which most of my abilities have been sidelined and thus not fun. Obvious solution for me is to stick to APL+2 or lower encounters.

PF2 is a fine system and I appreciate its design. I just happen to prefer a strategy driven experience over a tactical one. Its really a matter of preference.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Absolutely agree.

IMO, the scene today is completely different than back in the 80's/90's. People are more friendly and less condescending. Today I have found a lot of more open minded gamers than in the past, the sneering elitism was very much prevalent years ago and I for one am glad to see it fade into history.

I'd go as far as to say this cultural change has impacted game design.

I'll use a specific example - oWoD Revised.

Whatever the designers later said, the public statements/interviews for what WW were doing with Revised, and indeed the actual books published for Revised showed very strong snobbery and elitist attitudes from the designers. Specifically that anyone who was playing oWoD games, particularly Vampire, as either somewhat "romantic" (i.e. "hot vampires in trouble" a la Anne Rice and lesser derivative writers), or as "superheroes with fangs" (aka "trenchcoats and katanas"), was Doing It Wrong and having Badwrongfun. It was both explained that Vampire was supposed to be a serious game of personal body-horror - and nothing else - and then the rules and lore were changed to ensure that was more the case (only partially successfully - you can't keep a good katana down, and people ignored a lot of the lore changes). A similar pattern repeated across the whole Revised line - it wasn't an accident that Revised Mages were massively less powerful/cool - the last gasp of 2E's vibe was really "Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure", before Mage Revised a year or so later stomped all over that kind of world.

But that wore off. People got over it. It didn't seem cool to be so snobby any more. We got all the 20th anniversary editions which, if anything, were slightly more gonzo than 2E (in at least some cases). And the latest Vampire and Hunter, whatever their sins, aren't snobby or trying to make you play a very specific/narrow way.

 

[delericho]

It boils down to this: if it wasn't 5E (pick a different edition, it doesn't matter) but all the other circumstances were the same -- a new edition in 2014, references in the media, Critical Role and streaming in general, etc... -- would D&D still be having a major pop-cultural moment?

In other words: is there something special about 5E that created this moment, or does it "just happen to be" that 5E is the current edition?

As others have said, it's both - had it been any other edition, it's likely that D&D would still be having a cultural moment as geek chic has somehow hit the mainstream; but 5e was remarkably well poised to take advantage of that moment, such that other editions probably wouldn't have been anywhere near as big.

My best guess is that D&D would be "out there" as something that was getting referenced a lot but that that wouldn't translate into people playing as much as it does now.

 

[Reynard]

I mean, you're basically doing what you're telling me not to right here - observing generational differences and trends - the way Gen-X designers created almost "apologies" (your words, I'd say "reactions") to Boomer stuff.

It is weird to me that you don't see a difference between calling GenXers gatekeepers, and pointing out the fact that the generation before makes most of the media one consumes. It strongly suggests that you think it is okay to paint a whole generation with a highly negative brush. But, hey, I am not a mod. I can't tell you to stop doing that. But I can certainly stop interacting with someone who thinks my generation is so bad. Bye.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But that wore off. People got over it. It didn't seem cool to be so snobby any more. We got all the 20th anniversary editions which, if anything, were slightly more gonzo than 2E (in at least some cases). And the latest Mage and Hunter, whatever their sins, aren't snobby or trying to make you play a very specific/narrow way.

Yeah, I'm in a very casual Werewolf 20th Anniversary game (we meet whenever we can, which isn't so often because it's a large group, so it might be once a month, it might be five weekly sessions in a row, who knows.) I'm dead certain the OWoD snobs would have a field day with our game. It's a bit silly, sometimes madcap, definitely not serious even half of the time and never about body horror, and absolutely has "superheroes with claws" vibes to it, we're the werewolves everyone Promoted To Antarctica to get rid of, and now slowly becoming the Big Problem Solvers. And it's fun. It's an enjoyable experience, getting that feeling of "this is a world that is straight up really screwed, but we can make a difference, at least for a little while."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It is weird to me that you don't see a difference between calling GenXers gatekeepers, and pointing out the fact that the generation before makes most of the media one consumes. It strongly suggests that you think it is okay to paint a whole generation with a highly negative brush. But, hey, I am not a mod. I can't tell you to stop doing that. But I can certainly stop interacting with someone who thinks my generation is so bad. Bye.

I love how I went to great lengths to point out that it isn't the entire generation, merely rather more true of Gen-X than Millennials, and apparently that's "thinking the entire generation is bad". Well, I guess some people just aren't interested in listening to what's actually being said. To be clear, for the record, Gen-X is not "all bad". Or even "mostly bad". That's wild. It's just if you're talking "sneering nerds", there are like, 90% more "sneering nerds" per capita than Millennials. That still leaves plenty of Millennial ones, you're just less likely to actually bump into one, per capita.

(As an aside, there are so many more Millennials in the US population it might actually be even - 50m Gen-Xers vs 83m Millennials IIRC. With only 90% more per capita I think that makes them about the same in total number of "sneering nerds", no?)

 

[LordEntrails]

Under normal rules, if players aren't deliberately hobbling themselves and don't have a forceful time pressure, they end up resting according to resource drain meaning the casters had an incentive to play pretty aggressively, but if the time pressure is on, they generally won't even want to stop for an hour and the short rest classes feel even worse. Plus, around a table of friends, there's a general sense that if someone wants to rest, the other party members aren't going to fight them about it arbitrarily. We did push, but the 6-8 encounter mark is rough, and we observed that it did take that much.

In my games, it's really not up to the players to decide when they do and don't rest. It's up to me when I give the opportunities for short and long rests based on how I design the encounters. IMO one of the biggest mistakes DMs make with 5E is letting the players decide when they get to rest and not designing encounters according to how many how many encounters between rests.

In a game that utilizes relatively accessible magic items, you had even more castings being thrown around (I know we banned the wand of fireballs and other casting increase items outright at one point) and I should emphasize that the number of encounters you need to burn out the spells was pretty high to begin with. This led to a scenario where it became very demanding to police the pace of any given adventure, and therefore to design encounters that weren't shut down by aggressive casting-- especially since spamming combat encounters to suck up resources isn't something the group generally enjoys, and the West Marches format at the time made it, so we couldn't wring multiple sessions of play out of a single rest.

I don't know your definition os "relatively accessible magic items", but I don't think we are playing the same game To me, magic items are not very accessible in the campaigns I run. Not until Tier 3 can the players normally impact what magic might be available to them, and then only as supporting items, not their main/major items.

So, speaking primarily as a 5e player who still hasn't played pathfinder 2e as long as I did 5e, that's my story, and in tandem with things I see out in the wilds of the community, is why I'm ambivalent about 5e's balance and accessibility. I think it back-loads a lot of its more user hostile elements, which is unusual for an RPG, and I think as a system, that might be its strongest claim to approachability. But I also think it's contributing to some serious salt build up by creating unhealthy pressures on the culture in the community.

Great post by the way. Not sure what you mean here at all about back loading or community pressures, but I do take this as a great example that no one system is for everyone. I gladly gave up 3.5/PF years ago and could only be brought back kicking and screaming. And PF2E holds exactly zero interest for me. But that's what is great about freedom, we all get to play the games that we enjoy.

Stranger things definitely dwarfs D&D but it came out in 2016? Right?

Yes it was.