D&D General "It's not fun when..."

[Oofta]

When it comes to legendary resistance, I just roll the dice and say the target made their save, at least most of the time. Other times I like to flavor it with the head goblin grabbing a minion and interposing the minion at the last moment or similar which makes it more interesting as minions scramble away.

Definitely PCs being knocked out of the fight can be not fun. If it's guaranteed to be for the entire combat you can hand them a monster and let them kill their fellow PCs. But if it's just bad luck that they keep failing a save? That's rough. On the other hand, I don't want to totally avoid those options either. I do tend to switch up spells, even if I change that spell/ability that will have the PC sitting on the sidelines be dominated. Killing fellow PCs is more fun than twiddling your thumbs.

Other things that are not fun? Arguments at the table. I just shut it down when I'm DM. I'll listen, but then make a ruling to keep the game going. We can chat after the game unless of course it will make a dramatic difference in the moment.

But I also think always saying yes or always succeeding is not fun, at least not for me. Sometimes I want to be told I can't do what I was thinking, it forces me to think outside the box and come up with alternatives. I had a high level rogue with reliable talent, it was kind of boring when I knew I couldn't fail certain tests. Being frustrated now and then makes it more special when something else does work.

Anyway those are the things off the top of my head.

 

[Shiroiken]

It's not fun when

Sorry guys, something's come up...

 

[Scribe]

I am more interested in where conceptual ideas of "what's fun" intersect with design -- from the core system level to the individual adventure, spell and monster level.

I drop things into 3 general buckets.

Type 1: "I want to do a big splashy thing even if it doesnt work!"
Type 2: "I have a complex approach, but if it works, its worth it!"
Type 3: "I have a challenge in front of me, the most efficient way to solve it is all that matters."

I'm sure folks can associate this with some other game design principles or concepts.

All 3 are fun, sometimes to the same person, sometimes to different people at the exclusion of one type or another.

An ideal system, or adventure will have monsters and spells that accommodate all of them (even Counterspell), and for me, the BBEG encounter needs to touch on each, in some way.

 

[el-remmen]

OK, so here's something I don't find fun: not being able to do anything on your turn in combat. Whether that's because the dice were against you or because you've been confused / paralyzed / otherwise lost your turn. It's especially not fun when it happens on multiple consecutive rounds, and then the other players start teasing you about how useless the PC you envisioned as being pretty badass is turning out to be.

Once, near the end of my "Out of the Frying Pan" campaign, a character failed a save against Unholy Word or some spell with lots of potential nasty effects depending on alignment and level cast by one of the party's greatest enemies who they were facing for the final time. This character ended up paralyzed near the end of a session, and, because the combat was a long running one and the spell's duration was long, remained paralyzed for the entirety of the next five hour session, and then finally was free of the effect in the first hour of the session after that.

He ran an NPC for that time and the party had the challenge of moving their paralyzed ally with them and out of danger. Fun was had by all. He did not complain. It remains a story we tell. Though I do remember apologizing to the player for how the chips fell.

 

[pukunui]

Once, near the end of my "Out of the Frying Pan" campaign, a character failed a save against Unholy Word or some spell with lots of potential nasty effects depending on alignment and level cast by one of the party's greatest enemies who they were facing for the final time. This character ended up paralyzed near the end of a session, and, because the combat was a long running one and the spell's duration was long, remained paralyzed for the entirety of the next five hour session, and then finally was free of the effect in the first hour of the session after that.

He ran an NPC for that time and the party had the challenge of moving their paralyzed ally with them and out of danger. Fun was had by all. He did not complain. It remains a story we tell. Though I do remember apologizing to the player for how the chips fell.

Yeah, there are ways to mitigate it. My daughter's PC got trapped in a mirror of life trapping near the beginning of a recent session, so she ended up playing the NPC hireling instead. That's fine.

I'm talking more about when the dice are just repeatedly against you. Or times where, like, your barbarian gets feebleminded and you literally can't make the save and the rest of the party can't help you right away ... and there isn't a handy NPC for you to run instead.

The thing is: that's kind of part-and-parcel of a dice-based game. It's the risk you take by playing with random number generation. While it's not fun in the moment, I don't know that I'd want to change it.

 

[overgeeked]

It's about when people make arguments for rule changes based not on balance or system issues, but just on the basis of what's fun.

Obviously, fun is subjective so I would really like it of folks would avoid badwrongfunning stuff. It's okay to say you don't think this or that would be fun, but don't attack posters over their preferences.

I am more interested in where conceptual ideas of "what's fun" intersect with design -- from the core system level to the individual adventure, spell and monster level.

Let's try and use examples, especially changes between editions or variant rules or house rules to talk about fun and design.

In games like D&D, especially the WotC editions, the fun is generally assumed to be some variation of being a badass and having an effect on the fiction...usually the bigger the better. Not necessarily winning with the press of a button, but that could be part of it, more that it's about fulfilling that power fantasy. So things like failing a check, missing, a spell not working, and a spell being counterspelled or resisted is less fun than passing the check, hitting, and the spell working.

But, weirdly, too much of that kind of fun becomes just as boring as its opposite. Easily succeeding and winning constantly is just as boring, if not more boring, than failing and losing constantly. I think when this stuff comes up it's more about the right balance of wins and loses to keep things interesting. It's not interesting to always win nor is it interesting to always lose. The interesting bits, to me, are the struggle and the challenge and the back-and-forth nature of the dice. The swing...the gamble...the anticipation of not knowing. The moment between letting go of the dice and the dice coming to a stop. Insert Willy Wonka meme here.

To me, 5E has gone off the deep end with character empowerment, meaning it's just always winning and that's the basic assumption of the game. Anything less than say 90% winning is seen, somehow, as "always" failing. I vastly prefer the old-school approach in games like B/X, AD&D, WFRP 2E, etc where your chances of success were much lower but, importantly, failing was also made to be interesting in its own right. Like climbing a wall. In AD&D, you're supposed to roll when the person is half-way through the climb. So you're half-way up a wall. Now you roll. That's tension. That's drama. Now most players and DMs make that roll at the start of the climb and the player nopes out of the idea if the roll is bad. How boring.

This is one of the things that bugs me about people saying they want drama and story in their games. Okay, so then why do you hate losing or failing so much? For there to be drama and story there has to be both up beats and down beats. If it's all up beats, there's no tension, no drama, and no story. If you want drama and story your characters have to lose sometimes. And no, not maybe 10% of the time, far closer to about 50% of the time. That's roughly how most stories work. Robin Laws has written a lot about mapping story to RPGs. He's worth the read if you're interested in story in RPGs. Anyway...

Another example is Vancian magic. In AD&D, you have to pick the specific spell that you cast with that specific spell slot ahead of time. This limits the character, makes them less flexible, but it also forces players to get creative with their spell use and forces players to try to plan ahead. In 5E, you prep several spells and can freely cast any of them with any of your slots. This gives the character more options, makes them more flexible, but it also means they don't have to be as creative with their spell use and players only have to have a vague notion of what the day might bring. I prefer the AD&D style as it pushes creative use of spells and players having to think and plan. That's more fun.

Same thing with "encounter balance" in WotC editions vs TSR editions. The assumption now is that not only are all encountered balanced around the party but that all encounters should be fights and fights the party can, generally speaking, easily win. The assumption back-in-the-day was that the world existed independently of the party and that whatever the party encountered, it encountered. You roll up a wandering band of 100 goblins...then the party of four 1st-level characters encounters a band of 100 goblins. Hope they can hide, bargain, barter, beg, plead, run, etc...and the players had better be thinking carefully about how to handle that encounter or they'll die. Again, I prefer the AD&D style because that's more fun.

 

[Oofta]

In games like D&D, especially the WotC editions, the fun is generally assumed to be some variation of being a badass and having an effect on the fiction...usually the bigger the better. Not necessarily winning with the press of a button, but that could be part of it, more that it's about fulfilling that power fantasy. So things like failing a check, missing, a spell not working, and a spell being counterspelled or resisted is less fun than passing the check, hitting, and the spell working.

But, weirdly, too much of that kind of fun becomes just as boring as its opposite. Easily succeeding and winning constantly is just as boring, if not more boring, than failing and losing constantly. I think when this stuff comes up it's more about the right balance of wins and loses to keep things interesting. It's not interesting to always win nor is it interesting to always lose. The interesting bits, to me, are the struggle and the challenge and the back-and-forth nature of the dice. The swing...the gamble...the anticipation of not knowing. The moment between letting go of the dice and the dice coming to a stop. Insert Willy Wonka meme here.

To me, 5E has gone off the deep end with character empowerment, meaning it's just always winning and that's the basic assumption of the game. Anything less than say 90% winning is seen, somehow, as "always" failing. I vastly prefer the old-school approach in games like B/X, AD&D, WFRP 2E, etc where your chances of success were much lower but, importantly, failing was also made to be interesting in its own right. Like climbing a wall. In AD&D, you're supposed to roll when the person is half-way through the climb. So you're half-way up a wall. Now you roll. That's tension. That's drama. Now most players and DMs make that roll at the start of the climb and the player nopes out of the idea if the roll is bad. How boring.

This is one of the things that bugs me about people saying they want drama and story in their games. Okay, so then why do you hate losing or failing so much? For there to be drama and story there has to be both up beats and down beats. If it's all up beats, there's no tension, no drama, and no story. If you want drama and story your characters have to lose sometimes. And no, not maybe 10% of the time, far closer to about 50% of the time. That's roughly how most stories work. Robin Laws has written a lot about mapping story to RPGs. He's worth the read if you're interested in story in RPGs. Anyway...

Another example is Vancian magic. In AD&D, you have to pick the specific spell that you cast with that specific spell slot ahead of time. This limits the character, makes them less flexible, but it also forces players to get creative with their spell use and forces players to try to plan ahead. In 5E, you prep several spells and can freely cast any of them with any of your slots. This gives the character more options, makes them more flexible, but it also means they don't have to be as creative with their spell use and players only have to have a vague notion of what the day might bring. I prefer the AD&D style as it pushes creative use of spells and players having to think and plan. That's more fun.

Same thing with "encounter balance" in WotC editions vs TSR editions. The assumption now is that not only are all encountered balanced around the party but that all encounters should be fights and fights the party can, generally speaking, easily win. The assumption back-in-the-day was that the world existed independently of the party and that whatever the party encountered, it encountered. You roll up a wandering band of 100 goblins...then the party of four 1st-level characters encounters a band of 100 goblins. Hope they can hide, bargain, barter, beg, plead, run, etc...and the players had better be thinking carefully about how to handle that encounter or they'll die. Again, I prefer the AD&D style because that's more fun.

There's no reason a 5E group could not run into a hundred goblins. There sre suggestions on how to build encounters but I throw them out the window now and then.

I agree that sometimes facing an insurmountable foe is more fun. It just has nothing to do with the edition of the game.

 

[Stormonu]

It's no fun when your character gets level drained, and those hours you put in getting them up in level just go away...

 

[pukunui]

It's no fun when your character gets level drained, and those hours you put in getting them up in level just go away...

Thank goodness they did away with that!

 

[tetrasodium]

It's also not like Legendary Resistance makes them immune to the spell. It just lets them auto-save. So if the spell does half-damage on a save, then there is still an effect.

I generally don't tell my players when a monster or NPC has used their Legendary Resistance. I just announce that they've made the save. My players are none the wiser.

That pressure pushing casters away from acting as high reciprocity force multipliers is itself a thing with unfun repercussions though. My players aren't setup for anything but main characters soloing near each other & I can't do anything that requires them to step up as a coordinated team because I lack the tools & they lack both understanding of how as well as tools that would allow them to shift gears to something that lets them be awesome together shoulder to shoulder. It's not fun for me as a GM & it's not fun for more than just my players as more than one post so far attests.

The only person it's fun for is The Star who is focused on raw maximum damage output. I saw a good example of it in a recent video that talks about how a caster can't reliably target a "formidable & scary" monster's weak area to do something rewarding for the group in a fight against that monster & the example is one that does not even deal damage or stop the monster from. attacking but even talks about fun.
This was the video,Back in 3.x we made a tarrasque go away & everything we did to nail it to the sky or whatever was a blast. Now in 5e I can say that I've been in two groups to kill one and we took a combined total of zero damage... Neither was fun, we just wanted it to be over because the cheese deployed against a target helpless to retaliate was mindnumbing*.

* One was murdered by shooting at it from a flying carpet & the other was not much better simply encircling it beyond dash range & kiting it.... Doing something awesome or creative was never even considered