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

[Micah Sweet]

I think the default game should be easy with dials to make it harder. 5e is easy, but it is pretty simple to turn a few dials to make it a bit harder all the way to brutal. I know, we've messed with them and had to dial it back when it got to messy!

I prefer a game with a harder baseline. Starting with an easy game and making it more difficult tends to have players feeling persecuted, as you are going out of your way to increase difficulty, especially if turning those dials involves removing options or abilities the PCs might otherwise possess. Infinite cantrips are an example.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

My preferred system handles down PCs that way. Once you address the downed PC, you roll on a table with a variety of modifiers after the battle to determine what actually happened to the character. This often involves some degree of permanent injury (heal able via magic in downtime) and significant recovery time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

The players and the DM, yes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

The point is not that you're not telling a story at the end of the day, it's that telling a story is not the top priority of play, and you're not actively trying to make it happen. I prefer a game where you're exploring a world that reacts to your actions, and seeing and interacting with that world through your PC is the point of play. Story after the fact is a consequence, not a goal.

 

[the Jester]

This is a simple question with a lot of complex possible responses, so I decided to not do a poll.

The question is: should D&D be hard? That is, is D&D better when the chances of success are slimmer, when encounters and puzzles are more difficult, when a bad die roll or a poor decision can end lives, adventures or whole campaigns?

This is two different questions, actually.

"Should D&D be hard?" I would say that D&D should have an easily adjusted difficulty that different DMs can tailor fit to their group. 5e sort of has this, except that above about 3rd level, it's pretty hard to make a fair encounter with much of any chance of killing a pc. There should be advice about how to turn both difficulty and lethality up or down, along with a discussion about how they are related, but not the same.

"Is D&D better when the chances of success are slimmer, when encounters and puzzles are more difficult, when a bad die roll or a poor decision can end lives, adventures or whole campaigns?" That's obviously a matter of playstyle preference, but for my tastes, yes, absolutely.

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

I'd say I;d go 8.5 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. I like challenging games. I like potentially high lethality games.

And how do different kinds of "hard" interact?

Oooh, that's a very interesting topic. But I'm short on time. I'll try to come back to that, specifically, later.

 

[payn]

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.

I took the OP question as out of box default state of 5E and what level of difficulty would it be. I know I can houserule but I'm talking the default state of the game. If I wanted to up the challenge of 5E Id just got play PF1.

 

[Reynard]

I took the OP question as out of box default state of 5E and what level of difficulty would it be. I know I can houserule but I'm talking the default state of the game. If I wanted to up the challenge of 5E Id just got play PF1.

I wasn't really thinking about the difference between the rules' default difficulty versus house ruling it. That's a fine discussion to have, but I was more interested in how people feel about "difficulty level" in either (or any) case.

And I should note that "difficulty" isn't solely about lethality. Puzzles can be hard, thereby locking off rewards if the players can't solve them. NPCs can be tough nuts to crack, requiring more effort on players' parts to get them to cooperate or whatever. Stuff like that. (With the caveat that I am not talking about shutting down the game for failure in these scenarios, just that the challenge is higher with commensurate rewards.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is a simple question with a lot of complex possible responses, so I decided to not do a poll.

The question is: should D&D be hard? That is, is D&D better when the chances of success are slimmer, when encounters and puzzles are more difficult, when a bad die roll or a poor decision can end lives, adventures or whole campaigns?

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

And how do different kinds of "hard" interact?

Should all of D&D be "hard" in the full list of ways you have described here, such that everyone who plays D&D must play that way?

No. Emphatically no. Absolutely not.

Should D&D support "hard" challenges in at least a majority of the ways you've described here, such that anyone who would like to play closer to that style can, even if they won't get as ideal an experience as they would if that mode were baked into it?

Probably! The issue will come down to how close one can get to effective support. It is better to not support at all than to give crappy, token, and/or knowingly-poor support. As they say, "not gaming is better than bad gaming."

 

[R_J_K75]

And I should note that "difficulty" isn't solely about lethality. Puzzles can be hard, thereby locking off rewards if the players can't solve them. NPCs can be tough nuts to crack, requiring more effort on players' parts to get them to cooperate or whatever. Stuff like that. (With the caveat that I am not talking about shutting down the game for failure in these scenarios, just that the challenge is higher with commensurate rewards.)

I think it's important to make the distinction that a game being hard doesn't equal lethality. Subconsciously when I first answered that's what I was thinking. Actions absolutely should have consequences, but challenges should be within the players/PCs ability to accomplish.

 

[Reynard]

Should all of D&D be "hard" in the full list of ways you have described here, such that everyone who plays D&D must play that way?

No. Emphatically no. Absolutely not.

These sorts of discussion threads would probably be more fun and more productive if folks did not come in hot assuming the worst possible interpretation of the premise.