D&D General Should D&D Be "Hard"

[dave2008]

I hate to be a broken record, but I had real high hopes for modularity in 5E. I was hoping it would act as a difficulty slider among many things. I think D&D would benefit greatly from it, but its not really needed because 5E is successful without it.

Are you saying you want something officially from WotC? Obviously there are some official sliders in the DMG to make things easier or more difficult, but there is also a whole host of things you can do make the game more or less difficult on your own too.

 

[dave2008]

I personally want to play a game that's challenging, even if that means I suffer character deaths along the way. However, I think the game is more popular if the challenges are easier, allowing casual players to succeed. Having built in options to increase the difficulty would be the best way to accommodate multiple styles of play. 5E tried this, to limited success.

Actually the DMG has a host of things that can make the game more difficult. I do see two major issues with how it has been implemented:

1. The DMG doesn't describe how you can use the various tools provided in the book to make a different style of game. It presents them all pretty discretely.
2. They don't have any adventures that highlight these alternate rules.

 

[dave2008]

D&D should tell a cooperative story. One that everyone has fun in.

I'm with @Reynard on this (I think). I think D&D can tell a cooperative story, but I don't think D&D necessarily should. I think it is OK to skip the story and just raid the dungeon to kill monsters and get the loot. My group enjoys both and I think that is OK and how it "should" be.

Set expectations in advance and go from there. This "Question" presented as a statement is, in the end, meaningless. Because it cannot be answered in a meaningful way.

I also think we can ask and answer questions without deeper meaning. It is a simple question with a simple answer (or at least can be). It is of course personal preference and all opinion, but it can be interesting to get peoples take nonetheless and I find meaning in understanding my fellow people a little better.

 

[soviet]

You might as well ask how savoury food should be.

D&D itself contains very different play modes across the editions, and is used for a variety of different play styles (many of which it is a poor fit for) in addition to that variation. Moreover, a significant part of D&D's fanbase (and designers) actively reject the idea that system matters, so any notions of solving problems through game design are going to meet significant pushback (see also: 4e).

 

[CreamCloud0]

There should always be the risk of character death. Permadeath....

D&D currently makes it too easy to recover from zero hp.

i wonder how much you'd have to reballance healing if you couldn't awaken downed party members from healing them until after the battle had finished, healing would still take them out of death saves and put them at positive HP, but they would be knocked out and wouldn't get up until the end of battle, unless you used a revivify equivilant(minus the 300GP cost) or medicine check

 

[Divine2021]

DnD should be whatever brings the players back to the table the following week. No more nor less. It isn’t very complicated.

 

[Minigiant]

If your tabletop D&D campaign had a video game style difficulty slider, what would you set it at? Why?

Normal

In video games
You die on Normal if you play bad
You die on Normal if you build underoptimized or joke characters
You die on Normal if you are undeequipped
You die on Normal if you ignore telegraphed deathtraps
You die on Normal if you don't learn fast

same in D&D,
Every "Load Game" is a PC death, major NPC death, or Major item loss.

D&D should not be Ironman Mode where loss is a TPK.
A reaload is a dead PC, dead major NPC, a lost settlement, or a lost major piece of equipment.

If you play smart, the PCs should survive a level of adventure 95%.

"95% is too high!"​

95% over 5 levels is 77.4%.
That means by level 5, 22.6% of the party should be buried.
Level 10, 40% of the original party should be dead, crippled, insane, or retired.
Post level 10, PCs have easy resurrection and be dealing is higher stakes than PC death.

 

[R_J_K75]

YES! I think 2E AD&D was a good spot between being too hard and too easy. For me my opinion is that 5E is so poorly organized in the PHB and DMG that its so hard to find the rules when you need them let alone remember them. Ive read on boards that yeah you can make 5E harder if you apply rule "x" or rule "y" but I've found prepping a game to that extent is just too hard and time consuming. So the answer is YES the game should be hard for the players/PCs but NO it shouldnt be hard for the DM to prep to make the game that way. Even though I've moved on from 5E, I hold out little hope that 2024 D&D will fix this problem.

 

[DarkCrisis]

It should be fair and actions have consequences.

5E feels like everything is stacked in the players favor which is less fun IMO. 3 saves to avoid a spell? 3 saves to avoid dying? Etc

I’d rather play as a Hero instead of a Superhero.

 

[Steampunkette]

I'm with @Reynard on this (I think). I think D&D can tell a cooperative story, but I don't think D&D necessarily should. I think it is OK to skip the story and just raid the dungeon to kill monsters and get the loot. My group enjoys both and I think that is OK and how it "should" be.

So you have a location, characters, events happening in sequence, presumably some structure with an antagonist in the last room of the dungeon...

That's a story. It might be considered 'rudimentary' by some, but it's still a story.

D&D without a story is just white-room theorycrafting which is fine if you wanna not bother with the whole "Dungeon" thing and just put down a blank grid with some characters and a monster to see what the DPR and TTD are... It's what I did when playtesting the Monstrous Menagerie, in part.

But then you're not playing the game. You're just kinda testing the system.