D&D (2024) Command is the Perfect Encapsulation of Everything I Don't Like About 5.5e

[Not a Decepticon]

"Bathos" - the term keeps coming up but I've no idea what it means.

Bathos - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Short answer: That scene with Loki and Hulk in first Avengers movie that Hollywood has copied ad nauseatum ever since.

As for commitment, that's what keeps me showing up each session week after week and year after year. But as I said before, while what happens in-character can be taken seriously, it certainly doesn't have to; and I'll add that if your game sometimes includes elements of PvP (mine does!) where the characters could be double-crossing each other or getting violent with each other etc. then taking it seriously is anathema to anyone having a good time.

And now you're conflating getting invested in the roleplay and story with inability to tell what happens to your characters from a personal attack, which is one hell of a strawman.

 

[mamba]

So we're all cool that anyone trying to convince a target to breathe poison, jump off a galloping horse, swim in plate mail or throw themselves off a cliff attempting to fly is effectively wasting a first level spell slot to do nothing more creative than "do nothing for one round" if even that.

sounds about right, at first level it should not be that powerful. If you find no good use for it, use a spell that does harm, this is not the one to cast then

 

[Daztur]

I do not disagree with the idea that 5.5e will be similarly not so great for getting new DMs injected into the hobby.

That's why I fully expect the rumblings of a 6th edition to begin sometime in the next four to six years. An edition made from the ground up for the new blood that 5e brought in, rather than the (IMO incomplete/half-baked) effort represented by 5.5e. Every edition "update" or "revision" has a shorter lifespan than the pre-update did.

Yes, I think 2030 is a good general guess for 6e.

As for the earlier part about how different campaigns focus on different parts, sure, I can grant that. My problem is that even in games where it's supposed to be the focus, it's often... well, lackluster at best. Most DMs are not particularly good game designers. Not having actually playtested rules for stuff just tends to mean DMs default to not very engaging tried-and-true basic solutions, which get boring or even frustrating very quickly. Hence why I mentioned encumbrance. It's a rule so often deployed in games, and yet almost never actually interesting other than the ways it'll end up screwing you over.

I've been playing a Blades in the Dark campaign and for the first time I'm having a game in which encumbrance is actually interesting. I've always liked the IDEA of encumbrance rules but have generally found them to be a real pain in the ass in practice. However, BitD is proving to me that they can be done well. Having them be slot based is absolutely essential and I even think the metagame aspect of the system ("I've decided right now what my character has had in his backpack all along!") could be a great mechanic for rogues to help make then more cunning and better at planning ahead than their players.

Your example of the players being afraid of pissing off Apollo is interesting, but that strikes me as reflecting more your skill at world building, rather than the fact that you threw around bolts of divine intervention capriciously. My players are deathly afraid of exhibiting bad etiquette when they meet up with noble genies, even their Jinnistani prince "friend", yet they've never personally suffered from a noble genie's wrath.

Well another part of it is that the players had a much easier time wrapping their heads around Apollo than "Insert Fantasy Sun God Name Here" seeing them get terrified when some NPCs were planning an expedition to Hades and nope out of that was great fun.

But a few bolts of divine intervention was fun, had a god get cranky early on when one PC stole some sacrificial goods from one god to give to Hades instead. Players never forgot that, and I think "terrified of pissing off gods" fits the vibe of Greek Myth a lot more than the weird Pseudo-Medieval Catholicism you get as default in D&D.

I'd like to say there were fewer ambiguous rules in 3.XE than 2E, but that wasn't true. As a proportion of the total rules, 3.XE had fewer ambiguous rules, but it had so many more rules than 2E that you bumped into ambiguous ones just as often.

We saw combats that'd have been resolved in 15-30 minutes in 2E take 2+ hours in 3.XE, even after playing for years. Especially if anyone wanted to try anything fun or clever.

With 3.5e, at least for me, the rules were often pretty unambiguous but there were so damn many of them that no DM I ever met even tried to follow all of them, so whenever I started a new campaign as a player I often had no idea how X, Y, or Z would actually be run at the table since each DM seemed to pick and choose different chunks of 3.5e rules to follow and different chunks to handwave. With 2e, 4e, or 5e I generally have a much better sense of how things will go down when I sit down to play while 3.5e was often a complete crapshoot.

D&D is inherently more demanding to DM than most RPGs, because it more heavily relies on DM interpretation by design than most RPGs (which has positive and negative effects), and also asks for significantly more prep work, and more adherence to certain concepts than most RPGs (like in encounter-building).

So at a baseline, if we grade RPGs on how hard they are to DM, D&D is already one of the ones which demands making more calls at the table, and doing more work before the table, hence probably one of the "harder" ones.

On the other hand, how easy is D&D to play if you have an experienced DM compared to other games. As a general rule, Indie games tend to take more of the weight off the DM's shoulders...but also put more on the shoulders of the players. For example, the basics of FATE are dead simple but ALL of the players have to have a good grasp of how the metagame fate point economy works in order to play, while in most D&D editions you can give a kid a simple "I hit it with my axe" character and be good to go. I've played 1e with kids in cases where I was strapped for time and I only gave them a ten minute run-down of what was on their character sheet, didn't teach them any rules, and basically treated the whole system of D&D rules as:

1. Player says what they are going to do.
2. A mystery happens.
3. DM tells them what the result is.

And things worked fine. Harder to do that with a lot of other games.

Add to that that the 5E DMG was both exceptionally poorly organised (even compared to older editions), and very, very lacking on the "Good advice on how to DM", especially for a newer DM, and you're creating a situation where one of the harder to DM RPGs has been made harder still to DM. Plus the DMG was featured a lot of largely irrelevant waffle (admittedly not uncommon in DM books for various games), which I think must have helped confuse people a bit re: what D&D was about.

Also except for organizing the DMG better and tightening up some definitions, I'm not really seeing how 5.5e is supposed to be easier to DM. A big thrust of 5.5e design seems to be power creep and new abilities for players, which just gives the DM more things to keep track of. The main thrust of 5.5e marketing seems to be based around tempting players with fun new naughty word for their characters, not appealing to DMs.

All I have to say is that if the 5E DMG is "rubbish", it doesn't hold a candle to wonderful Gygaxian advice like "If your players are overly cautious about going through a dungeon, make fun of them and call them cowards." Because nothing says good DM advice like belittling players while also having the dungeon filled with insta-kill traps.

The only real way to learn to DM is by doing it.

Mentoring matters a lot. I banged my hell into walls a lot during the 90's and kept on being confused as to why I wasn't able to make my games feel more like LotR, my son has struggled a lot less learning the ropes as he always asks me a lot of questions while prepping his sessions.

I mean, were you reading threads here or on RPG.net or...really much of anywhere for the first three or four years of 5e's existence?

Every single thread that had someone asking for advice about a rule was swamped with 10+ replies saying something to the effect of, "We can't answer your question, it's purely up to your DM" or "you're the DM, you figure it out." Often, the former would be followed by the latter once the original poster clarified, "I am the DM and I'm seeking advice."

It was genuinely infuriating to see the pervasive distaste for actually giving advice or support to brand-new DMs.

I think 5e really needed a clearer default adventure structure. 1e had this:

A. You start in a safe place.
B. You begin to travel into a dangerous place.
C. The dangerous place gets more dangerous the deeper into it you go, so you have to be careful.
D. However, the deeper you go the more loot you can get but you'll be drained down by constant less rewarding danger on your way to that loot.
E. Eventually the accumulating danger and attrition will overwhelm your greed to delve deeper and you turn around and try to figure out how the hell to get back home.
F. You get back to the safe place at the end of the session and lick your wounds and count your loot.
G. Repeat next session.

1e can do more than this, but this is VERY much the default. The Westmarches series of blog posts explained this structure beautifully, even that that came much later and was made with 3.5e in mind, 5e really doesn't have anything comparable and suffers from it. Shadowrun, despite its incredibly baroque rules, benefited enormously from having a really clear and easy to follow default adventure structure ("first Mr. Johnson shows up and offers you a job, then..."). The same goes for games that you'd think would be more niche than they are like Paranoia and CoC which also both benefit from having a default adventure structure that makes it easy for everyone to get on the same page and gives newbie DMs a clear model to follow and more experienced DMs a base to riff off of and eventually depart from.

But I don't think ANY edition of WotC-D&D has had the same kind of clear well laid out and easy to follow default adventure structure. The 4e community on rpg.net developed one (based on 1-2 big epic battles per session etc.) but that was bottom-up and developed years into 4e. It was a really fun way to play 4e but the 4e devs really didn't present a clear model of how to play 4e in a fun way right off the bat (Keep on the Shadowfell was famously bad for example).

To make ANY version of D&D fun to run communicating a default adventure structure and pacing is paramount for both DMs and players. Once you get this down you can go off in other directions.

I'm just not really seeing this from 5.5e when this should have been the absolute paramount priority for making 5.5e better for DMs.

Uh...no? That has nothing to do with the claim made.

The claim made was that a significant number of brand-new DMs with 5e were burned by that process, and thus chose to exit the hobby rather than sticking around. That doesn't say one thing about whether zero "DM(s) who started with 5e [are] good DM(s)"--just that a significant number of people who would, or at least could, have been good DMs now don't run D&D at all because they had a bad experience.

My experience looking at how people responded to questions for the first, as noted, 3-4 years of 5e's run strongly reflects this. As does my experience with my first...at least two, probably three 5e DMs. They were inspired to give it a shot. The opacity of the text, the difficulty of getting actually useful advice from other people, and the rules letting them down led to disappointment and frustration, and they haven't DM'd again since. (That number would be four, but the fourth actually did come back to DMing about six years later.)

One thing I've noticed a lot in online discussions of 5e (although not my own bubble at all) is people bemoaning how they have to ALWAYS DM because nobody else wants to or how hard it is to find a good DM. This hasn't been my experience at all, our biggest problems is people trying to rush the current DM along so that other people can get their turn in the big chair but it seems pretty pervasive. Since I haven't run into it personally I was mostly chalking it up to a simple influx of newbies but now you've gotten me thinking more about how to make 5e easier to DM besides "mentor my son" (so far so good on that front, but hardly a universal solution).

 

[mamba]

I mean, these "fans" won the 4e edition war. Why shouldn't they continue doing what they did? It worked before.

there are only so many options to let WotC know that they are moving in the wrong direction (from one person's perspective)... you kinda do have to stop buying their stuff if you want change. Once enough people do that, they probably will affect change, until then....

4e 'lost the war' because there were enough people that rejected it, whether that happens to 2024 remains to be seen, but I find it unlikely

 

[SableWyvern]

And now you're conflating getting invested in the roleplay and story with inability to tell what happens to your characters from a personal attack, which is one hell of a strawman.

It seems pretty clear to me @Lanefan is simply saying that if you allow PCs to hinder or harm each other, it's important that everyone remembers it's just a game, and doesn't get so invested in their characters that an in-game betrayal feels like a real betrayal. You can still take it seriously, but you can't take it too seriously. (see also, Diplomacy).

 

[Not a Decepticon]

It seems pretty clear to me @Lanefan is simply saying that if you allow PCs to hinder or harm each other, it's important that everyone remembers it's just a game, and doesn't get so invested in their characters that an in-game betrayal feels like a real betrayal. You can still take it seriously, but you can't take it too seriously. (see also, Diplomacy).

That is still WAY different from actively mocking people for trying to get immersed or invested the way bathos works.

 

[Hussar]

Meanwhile the bard is giggling at all of you with his Dissonant whispers spell which has never been language dependent and deals direct damage.

I wonder why no one has been bitching about that for the past ten years.

 

[mamba]

Did you not read or just ignore the rest of the statement? Most people are the end user. We weren’t affected.

I read it, that is why I replied the way I did... of course we are affected when 3pps have to close down

 

[mamba]

I’ve never stated that anything was hard to Dm.

the one you replied to did however

 

[SableWyvern]

That is still WAY different from actively mocking people for trying to get immersed or invested the way bathos works.

OK, sure. I may have overlooked some context somewhere, because I'm not sure what we're talking about now. Feel free to disregard my previous comment, I probably have no clue what I'm on about.