D&D General Styles of D&D Play

[Oofta]

Can you please stop with the edition warring? Is that really too much to ask?

No, 5e does not talk about success at a cost, "just like 4e". It really doesn't. 5e presents skills as binary pass/fail. There's a bit of advice buried in the DMG about the notion of degrees of success or failure, but, there's nothing about the notion of success at a cost. There's barely any advice on the notion of group checks.

But, then, why would you want any sort of success at a cost? That's just rollplay, right? After all, you can only have success at a cost if you're rolling checks. ANd, you have REPEATEDLY claimed that that's rollplay and not something you want to do. So, which is it? Freeform roleplay or roll play?

You were the one saying that a skill challenge would resolve the issue. I'm just stating my opinion that a systematic approach would not solve the issue. Either the DM is trying to give the player the hint that what they are doing will eventually fail, or their just a bad DM. As I've stated repeatedly I use complex skill challenges all the time that are similar to skill challenges, I just don't use a scorecard of successes and failures.

As far as what the 5E DMG, I was talking about Success at a Cost in Chapter 8.

 

[Oofta]

Goodberry is a first level spell

Which only helps if you have a druid in the party or someone willing to take the magic initiate specifically for that spell. Neither is all that common.

 

[Imaro]

Sure, but character death in video games is an annoyance as opposed to a danger, so food survival shifts to keeping up with the curve of where you are in the game, and that challenge persists all the way through.

See my edit... its been a while but me Andy friends wereable to breed animals to eat, enough to sustain all of us and some pet wolves... I want to say it was boars but I haven't played in a while. The only thing that could disrupt this was... monster attacks on the settlement we built.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah. And I'm saying that framework encourages the players to do whatever they're best at and force the DM to make it fit. Not the way I like to play. Have fun though.

Kinda. The bolded portion, "As long as the player or you can come up with a way..." I would do away with. I'm not going to play the PC and come up with a way to make a skill work. That's the player's job. He needs to tell me, "If I jump on the wall near the corner and jump to the other side back and forth going higher and higher, I can get to the top without climbing. Parkour!" That could work. I'm not going to do that for him, though.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Success at a Cost is great and there are many ways to implement that system.
You could
1. Treat all failures as Success at a Cost for a fast paced game.

2. Treat any fail of 4 or less = Success at a Cost

3. You could rank Success at a Cost and implement it through an entire module or AP thus ramping up the difficulty.
i.e. A Success at a Cost of 4 with the original DC of the task being 12 means
1-8 = Failure
9-15 = Success at a Cost
16+ = Success (DC 12+ Rank 4)

It is a great tool, I suspect under-utilised by many.

 

[Micah Sweet]

See my edit... its been a while but me Andy friends wereable to breed animals to eat, enough to sustain all of us and some pet wolves... I want to say it was boars but I haven't played in a while. The only thing that could disrupt this was... monster attacks on the settlement we built.

You can breed boar, wolves, chickens, and lochs (big rideable bantha-like creatures) over the course of the game for food. Learning to breed and maintain your stock is part of the survival aspect of Valheim. But you also need to constantly gather other materials to make your food, and to keep up with where you are "adventuring" you need to do that in dangerous areas. That's how video game survival works.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Success at a Cost is great and there are many ways to implement that system.
You could
1. Treat all failures as Success at a Cost for a fast paced game.

2. Treat any fail of 4 or less = Success at a Cost

3. You could rank Success at a Cost and implement it through an entire module or AP thus ramping up the difficulty.
i.e. A Success at a Cost of 4 with the original DC of the task being 12 means
1-8 = Failure
9-15 = Success at a Cost
16+ = Success (DC 12+ Rank 4)

It is a great tool, I suspect under-utilised by many.

Absolutely. I use a version of it in my houseruled Level Up game.

 

[Imaro]

You can breed boar, wolves, chickens, and lochs (big rideable bantha-like creatures) over the course of the game for food. Learning to breed and maintain your stock is part of the survival aspect of Valheim. But you also need to constantly gather other materials to make your food, and to keep up with where you are "adventuring" you need to do that in dangerous areas. That's how video game survival works.

Yes but the earlier point being made was that your "survival" needs change as you progress. It got to the point where we weren't really concerned with how to get food but instead better metals, or specific ingredients, beyter wood, etc. Outside of just scrounging for basic food, water and shelter

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Success at a Cost is great and there are many ways to implement that system.
You could
1. Treat all failures as Success at a Cost for a fast paced game.

2. Treat any fail of 4 or less = Success at a Cost

3. You could rank Success at a Cost
i.e. A Success at a Cost of 4 with the original DC of the task being 12 means
1-8 = Failure
9-15 = Success at a Cost
16+ = Success (DC 12+ Rank 4)

It is a great tool, I suspect under-utilised by many.

Completely agree!

In addition to this (which admittedly provides the gist, but doesn't develop it enough in the DMG) there are all sorts of great ways to customize the game in the DMG that people completely ignore when discussing 5e.

It's almost as if ... I'm searching for something here ... on the tip of my tongue ... oh yeah, no one reads the DMG.

(That said, it is difficult to discuss differences in editions when older editions get the benefit of DMGs and supplements and interpretations and actual play, while we can't even assume that people use options provided from in the 5e DMG).

 

[Maxperson]

Even without going into the depths of "should we count not obstructing as support", the way 3e, 4e, 5e works does actively obstruct character-driven play.

The most basic thing:
There's a Cleric. Over the course of the campaign, she sees full coffers of church officials, she sees how her benevolent god constantly looks the other way when someone is suffering, she glimpses into the cosmic game of chess between the gods. By level 10, she is sick of uncaring gods who can't possibly comprehend the lives of mortals, she is sick of the cosmic chess where people of flesh and blood she cares about are nothing but pawns, she is sick of all of it. She throws her holy symbol into the dirt and spits of it.

...and congratulations! She just turned into a pumpkin and can't play the game anymore, because anything that is challenging for a cleric without spells is a complete breeze for the rest of the characters, and anything that is challenging for the rest of the character is a death sentence for a cleric without spells.

Or else becomes devoted to her own ideal and gains spells from that. 5e for some inexplicable(and confusing to me) reason, reverted back to everything divine comes from the gods, but that's flavor and is easily ignored. 3e had ideals and philosophies you could be clerics and paladins of, so you didn't need gods. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that you don't need to pick one of the few hard coded "you can't do this" portions of the game and devote your character driven play to defying one of those few things. You can pick from the 99.99999% of other things that can drive your character that aren't going to run up against something like what you describe.

Just because there are a few things you can't do without the DM making exceptions, doesn't mean that the game is actively hindering the playstyle. Games don't have to allow you to do literally anything you can imagine or be hindering character driven play.

Because characters consistently outgrow previous threats, you can't have a lot of pretty basic ways a character can develop (cleric abandoning faith, warlock going into a confrontation with their patron, fighter turning into a medic) without quite unwieldy workarounds that either at least somewhat diminish the weight of the character-defining choice that was made or create a lot of weird implications that necessitate a retcon or both.

I don't understand what outgrowing threats has to do with any of that. You can abandon your faith at any level. You can have a confrontation with your patron at any level, though I'd argue that if you haven't outgrown many threats by the time you do, it will likely be the last thing you do. And a fighter can turn into a medic in a number of ways without anything weird.

Beyond that, at the most fundamental level, party-based game inherently constraints ability of the characters to pursue their own goals, because one character can't feasibly do much, and then everyone needs to agree to do thing [X]. Good luck with that, if the thing [X] is unrelated or detrimental or both to the common goal of the party.

Depends on the style of play. If it's character driven, you can EASILY run D&D such that the PCs are in 4 different areas of the world pursuing their own goals if you want. It's not hard. And that's if that's even necessary. Not all character driven play requires PCs to be apart from one another.

The players pick what drives their particular PCs. If the game needs you to remain together(and D&D doesn't), pick something that you can focus your play on that doesn't take you away from the group. It's easy.