D&D 5E What are the "True Issues" with 5e?

[Composer99]

I mean, it might be very well and good for WotC to create content in its books that appeals to, say, a 5% niche of its player base if that niche is disproportionately buying those books, relative to the rest of the player base.

At the same time, and keeping in mind that I have argued pretty strongly in favour of WotC making an effort to appeal to multiple player constituencies, I do think D&D would be a better game overall if its core rules were more tightly focused on its biggest, broadest player constituencies. That probably means cutting out the vestiges of the detailed equipment rules and the dungeon/wilderness exploration content that you have to patch together from the PHB and DMG and having an "adventuring kit" equipment item that basically covers all your mundane gear and something like a generic "challenge" framework (skill challenge/clock/whatever implementation WotC research discovers players want to use) for exploration/travel.

For instance: "Can the player characters navigate the Jungles of Doom and reach the Temple of Doom in time to stop the Cult of Doom from conjuring the Demon of Doom?" is (hopefully) an interesting question in an adventure. (Do feel free to read that with a classic mid-Atlantic accent or 1960s Hanna-Barbera-superhero-cartoon voiceover narration.)

If you just run that in "speed of plot action movie style", then the answer to that question is to dispense with the business of navigating the jungle and to just tell the players that their characters arrive in the nick of time and have to fight a combat with a "skill challenge/clock event" layered on top of it; if they fail the challenge then the Demon of Doom turns up to make the combat much more difficult (hope you didn't blow through your spell slots getting through the rest of the temple!). The goal here being that even if you couldn't be bothered to deal with the navigating through the Jungle of Doom, the climax of the quest still needs to rest on the player characters' own efforts and the choices the players make regarding how to conserve resources or what to prioritise doing during the final encounter.

If you want a little more mechanical heft, then you run some kind of skill challenge/clock thing. Say, the party has to roll three Wisdom (Survival) checks to navigate the Jungle of Doom. (I'm just spitballing here; an actual challenge would probably be iterated a bit better.)

• Each time one of these checks fails, they lose a bit of time and there's some kind of complication - they get lost, or an obstacle bars their path, or they get attacked by robot zombie T-rexes, or whatever (maybe make up a random chart of possible complications); they might lose more time if they handle the complication badly, or at least not fall too far behind if they handle it well.
• In between each check, there could be a complication not related to the checks that can cause them to lose time if they handle it badly; this makes sure that even if they easily succeed all the checks, interesting stuff happens and interesting decisions have to be made and the tension is ratcheting up.
• If they lose too much time (by failing all the checks and handling too many of the complications badly), they get to the Temple of Doom worn out and the Demon of Doom is on the loose. Good luck!
• For each check they succeed, the situation they face when they reach the Temple gets easier - the Cult has had less time to prepare for their arrival and the conjuring is further away from completion. Succeeding on all three checks and breezing through the Temple makes for a less dramatic finale but the PCs also get the endorphin rush of a "critical success", and get to feel awesome as they rotflolstomp through the Cult of Doom, so that's all good.

Those two approaches are the kind of thing I'd think would be the best fit for the modern player base, and in fact the game would be better designed if it did a better job of supporting just them in the core rules. (At least, that's the case if my guess about the player base is correct.)

If the "we want a hexcrawl or pointcrawl or B/X style wilderness exploration!" player constituency is big enough, then you-as-WotC provide a module for them to run the Jungle of Doom quest in, say, the DMG; if it's not big enough for core rules but is big enough for WotC support, it goes into an adventure (à la Tomb of Annihilation) or an "of Everything" supplement. If that's just not a big enough player constituency for WotC support, you point them to a Trusted Partner™ on D&D Beyond or DM's Guild or what-have-you.

 

[pemerton]

But when they need to dig up something they're using shovels and/or pickaxes.

I take @overgeeked's point to be that those are mere colour.

That chart is mind-bogglingly incorrect. There is no way you can tunnel 25 feet in an 8 hour work day for one individual through hard rock. That would likely even be far too fast with the use of explosives.

An example I found after a quick google search from this site (bold added)

Progress through hard rock could be very slow and it was not uncommon for tunnels to take years if not decades to be built. Construction marks left on a Roman tunnel in Bologna shows us that the rate of advance through solid rock was 30 cm (12 inches) per day. ​

​

Even assuming high quality steel for the tools, it's not going to increase it by much. Which is the issue I have - the people that wrote these guidelines had no freakin' clue what they were talking about. So we'd just substitute 1 SWAG for another.

Two things.

First, you asked whether or not D&D had ever had rules about moving earth by hand. I pointed to some.

Second, you seem to have misread the DMG chart. It does not talk about "tunnelling 25 feet". It refers to 25 cubic feet of rock. So what it posits is that, in 8 hours, a single tunneller can dig a 5' x 5' x 1' long tunnel into hard rock.

I don't know what the cross-sectional area was of the Roman tunnel you describe, nor how many miners were working on it; but the same page of the DMG posits 12 human miners can work at once "Assuming that a typical shaft will be 10' wide, and arched to a 16' (or so) peak, including scaffolding, where appropriate". The cross-sectional area of that typical shaft sounds like it's around 150 sq feet (10' x 11' plus a 5' R semi-circle), which means that with 12 miners moving (per the chart) a total of 300 cubic feet per day, progress would be 2 feet tunnelled per day. Which is not wildly different from the historical Roman tunnel that you mentioned.

Now I've got no idea where Gygax got his figures from. I don't know how accurate there are. But your criticism of them seems to rest on a pretty significant misreading.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You seem to be conflating two diametrically opposed ways of resolving travel in a drama-centric fashion.

In what is often called "trad" or "Hickman revolution" RPGing, the GM makes a decision about what the next event/story beat will be, and narrates accordingly. An early example of this that I'm familiar with, that actually predates Hickman, is found in the example dungeon in the book What is Dungeons & Dragons, which was published in 1982. That dungeon has a "freeze frame" room - when the PCs arrive at the room, the prisoner is about to be sacrificed to the giant lizard by the evil priest. There is no "objective" timing to this - it is a GM-stipulated dramatic event, triggered by the PCs arriving in that part of the dungeon.

I think @Red Castle is describing a similar sort of approach.

In what are sometimes called "narrativist" or "story now" games - Apocalypse World is probably the most famous; Burning Wheel is one of my favourites; 4e skill challenges are the best instantiation with the D&D-verse - the GM does not pre-author arrival just in the nick of time, or just too late. Rather, these would be success results or failure results that are narrated in response to the appropriate check(s) made to resolve the travel. For instance, rushing through the enemy complex to try and rescue someone looks like (in AW terms) Acting Under Fire (where the "fire" is do I get there in time?). On a 10+the PC gets there in time; on a 7-9 the GM "offers a worse outcome, a hard bargain, or an ugly choice" - eg you can rescue your friend, or stop the villain, but not both (so many adventure stories features this sort of thing); on a failure the GM can makes as hard and direct a move as they like - you fail the rescue, and your friend is dead.

The two approaches are diametrically opposed because of the very different ways they locate the decisions of the participants vis-a-vis how the outcome is established. But the existence of either, or both, of them shows that it is quite straightforward to have dramatic-centric travel in RPGing.

Then why, I ask, are travel times listed at all, for anything? Why do overland maps exist?

 

[Micah Sweet]

The post I was replying to asserted that it should matter. That is what I am disagreeing with.

If they asserted that it can matter, in some RPGing, well that would be quite uncontroversial.

I don't know what you mean by "narrativism", but you're not using it in the way it is used by the person who brought it into the lexicon for describing RPGs (ie Ron Edwards).

I also don't know what you mean by "unnecessary". Unnecessary to whom? For what?

I could care less about Ron Edwards, first of all.

I will rephrase, however: moving at the speed of plot is a narrative mechanic designed to service the dramatic needs of the PCs and the "story". To use the Six Cultures model (which I vastly prefer to anything generated by the Forge), it is anathema to Classic play, while a staple of Trad and especially Neo-Trad. Narrative play handles this quite differently as you say, but the goal is still to serve dramatic need. This is optional but by no means necessary in an RPG, and deeply unwanted personally.

 

[Red Castle]

Then why, I ask, are travel times listed at all, for anything? Why do overland maps exist?

Because there is people like you that care about those things, and that's okay. It is perfectly valid to want to play with that kind of information, to want a more simulasionist game. But for people like me, it is unnecessary... like the weight of every items carried. I just don't bother with those things, never did. I prefer it being just an abstraction. Does it means that I think they should remove it from the books? No, keep it there for those that want to use that kind of information in their games.

 

[pemerton]

Then why, I ask, are travel times listed at all, for anything? Why do overland maps exist?

Gygax included them because he wanted overland travel to have a board/wargame aspect to it.

Why did 4e include them? No good reason I know of - they're vestigial, like the 5e equipment list. I GMed a lot of 4e that included quite a bit of travel and I don't recall ever using the travel times for any purpose other than generating colour - as in, the PCs have moved from point A to point B on the map (either via free narration, or resolved as a skill challenge) and I as GM mention that X time has passed, where X equals the distance between A and B divided by the travel time in the chart.

If 4e hadn't included a chart I could still have generated the same colour by using the similar chart I have in a dozen other RPG books; or by using my own common sense.

I could care less about Ron Edwards, first of all.

I was asking what you meant by a term that has no meaning I'm aware of, in discussion of RPGs, other than the one he gave it.

I will rephrase, however: moving at the speed of plot is a narrative mechanic designed to service the dramatic needs of the PCs and the "story". To use the Six Cultures model (which I vastly prefer to anything generated by the Forge), it is anathema to Classic play, while a staple of Trad and especially Neo-Trad. Narrative play handles this quite differently as you say, but the goal is still to serve dramatic need. This is optional but by no means necessary in an RPG, and deeply unwanted personally.

Of course it's optional. I was replying to someone saying that travel time etc should matter, and to your post saying that you can't have that answer in a traditional RPG. It doesn't get much more traditional than D&D c 1982, and I posted an example from a widely-read book of that period which gives exactly the answer you say can't be given!

 

[Hussar]

I think a lot of people have never seen a game brought to a mind numbing crawl by a few rules Lawyers demanding the rules be followed because, well they are the rules. They think the rules help new DM's but they can just as easily take control away and ruin the game far faster than the DM who has no guidance.

On the other hand, games can also come to a slamming halt because the lack of rules leaves the game very open to misinterpretation and misinformation and misunderstanding.

 

[overgeeked]

Because there is people like you that care about those things, and that's okay. It is perfectly valid to want to play with that kind of information, to want a more simulasionist game. But for people like me, it is unnecessary... like the weight of every items carried. I just don't bother with those things, never did. I prefer it being just an abstraction. Does it means that I think they should remove it from the books? No, keep it there for those that want to use that kind of information in their games.

It is really weird where the abstraction vs simulation line lands. HP, AC, class, level, etc perfectly fine to be utterly abstracted. But the weight you can carry…based on abstracted ability scores…no, that must be as realistic as possible.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You can't do it in a traditional RPG without making it a less traditional RPG (ie, engaging in unnecessary narrativism).

As long as by "traditional RPG" you mean "games reacting against the explicit design decisions of D&D" and don't start pretending that D&D fits your ideosyncratic definition of a "traditional RPG".

Meanwhile my traditional RPGs include things like D&D, Marvel FASERIP, and even WFRP 1e with explicit Fate Points. Oh, and GURPS with explicit plot coupons.

 

[mamba]

If it doesn't need to be mentioned in the movie, why does it need to be mentioned in the RPG?

because the writer of the movie could / should take it into consideration when coming up with the plot. What we then see is the end result where the plot stays realistic, we do not need an excerpt about how it got that way. In a TTRPG that happens at the table, so the rules should mention it.