See to me, the "obvious intent" of any rules widget, spell, class feature, or otherwise, if what the general flavor description says. Only after that has been acknowledged and accepted do we look at what the mechanics say, and said mechanics are subject to change if they don't provide a result in keeping with the fiction the ability describes. If said fiction allows for many possible results, so too should the mechanical representation of that fiction.
Right, which means that you should provide a flavor description that has as little vagueness as possible so that the DM can adjudicate things well and mechanics with a bit of wiggle room so that they can apply to everything that that flavor would apply to since you can't write mechanics for every conceivable situation, i.e. I don't care what strength modifier it has, the elephant you summoned with your "Summon Elephant" spell can't jump because it says right here in the spell description "you summoned an elephant" and elephants can't jump. 4e power descriptions drove me nuts since a lot of them were "you do stuff do a dude" with no specifics in the flavor text.
See, part of the fun of that for me as a player would be seeing what would happen. That's why I'm casting the spell - I want to do something that's more interesting than just deal damage and cause an effect. I want to play in this space with the DM, where I am using the divine magic of the gods to order a mortal to do something, and the mortal is resisting that command with all their faculties.
I am casting the spell because I'm inviting the DM to riff off of my idea. I don't have a particular end goal I NEED to have happen. The dude throws someone else out a window? Throws themselves out the window? Tosses their weapon out the window? Man, I took that risk when I went off-script, I'm three decisions in (I prepared the spell, I cast the spell, I decided to do something novel with it), I want the DM to take this toy and play with it however they see fit, if I wanted to do damage and have an effect, I had the option, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to screw around and find out
Exactly. I'm not trying to do cheese monkey tactics, often when I cast some off script spell I have no idea WTF is going to happen. I'm just lobbing the ball into the DM's court and letting him have some fun with something unexpected. This is one reason that my favorite class in 5e is a barbarian. I LOVE engaging in "hold my beer" D&D tactics and I fully expect a lot of them to blow up in my face and having d12 hit dice makes it easier for me to life through that and see another day.
I don't see that as a reason. It's more powerful because targets don't need to understand the command. The intent of the spell is now clear because you are limited to a specific set of commands with specified responses.
There's no reason to invent other reasons.
Yup, now there's no reason to be inventive. Everything is put in a neat little box just like in a board game.
Yeah I'd broadly agree. I feel like as someone who liked 4E, there isn't really enough of what made 4E good in 5E (primarily the tactical combat), but 5E also removed a lot of what made 4E bad for me, and most of what made 3.XE bad, so it works as a solid compromise.
A lot of the 4e-isms in 5e are under the hood. Proficiency works a good bit like how things scaled in 4e (just with bounded accuracy), 5e hit dice are based on 4e healing surges (but more boring, I miss healing surges so much), short rests are encounter-based stuff, sub-classes work closer to 4e subclasses than they do to PrCs or Kits, etc. etc. Now how the game actually plays is pretty different from 4e (much less rich tactical combat) but a lot of the basic assumptions of how the rules work have a lot of 4e in them.
That's why I think that some 4e fans are confused by comments about WotC heading in a more 4e direction with 5.5e. The stuff they liked about 4e (tactically rich combat) isn't really coming back but a lot of basic assumptions of how the game is set up are such as more keywords and less natural language, more rules and less rulings, flavor being stripped out and made more generic, off-brand uses of spells and abilities being blocked off, etc. etc. A lot of 4e fans didn't care so much about that stuff (they're just there for the tactical richness) and they're not cheering that, say, a dragon's more specific bite and claw attacks are being replaced with a more generic "rend." While a lot of people who didn't like 4e see things like the "rend" and on the 5.5e monster statblock and think, "heeeeere we go again."
Re: staying united I tend to agree also - part of this is WotC just screwed up too many times in a row but I think more is down to 5E failing to really give people anything to "grab on to" or really get excited about (even 2024, which should have been very exciting, is extremely muted), and part is that I think that some fraction of the people who came onboard with 5E are beginning to become aware of other RPGs, and seeing that maybe some actually do things that are more interesting to them than 5E. It doesn't help that 5E is relatively more work to both run and prep than most modern TT RPGs (and even a lot of older ones), which I think encourages DMs to branch out. I don't think 5E will stop being dominant, but I do think unless something major happens, ten years from now we'll be seeing a significantly larger proportion of the TT RPG market playing other games.
Yeah, I think WotC has made some missteps and 5.*e's domination of the TTRPG market will start to recede a bit but it won't be a collapse, just a slow chipping away with the overall market probably shrinking a bit. After the OGL fiasco the blood was in the water and the tiny little baby sharks have started nibbling.
I think this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what pacing is, and how it is managed within a TTRPG. Pacing is, at it's core, a response to the human attention span. Human's have an attention span of roughly 9 seconds. They can choose to refocus that attention on the same thing, repeatedly, for, on average, around 5 hours. These are just general guidelines, of course.
Pacing is the DM incentivizing players to continually refocus their attention on the game being played, over their phone or other distractions. Almost every case of a bored player is caused by a pacing error.
Often you see pacing described as high and low beats. This is a simplfied version of the concept. You do, generally, want to alternate between high and low beats, but that is not the extent of pacing and only doing that can leave other glaring errors. Tension building is another aspect of pacing, you see this in novels and how they are structured, but that can be ignored here. It's not really relevant to the point.
A common example of a pacing error is the over narration of a scene. Going into depth, and describing every detail, is almost always wrong. If your narration exceeds around 9 seconds, you are asking the players to refocus on the same narration. Instead your pacing will be better if you narrate the basics and leave the specifics to questions from the players. The reason this is the case, is its easier to refocus on the answer to a question you asked than to maintain focus on a continued narration. In essense, the players are more invested in their question than your monologue.
This can be extended into the idea of buckets, each bucket is a player. And you put chips representing time in those buckets. You put these chips in these buckets whenever that player is being engaged directly, when they have the spotlight. Anytime the DM is narrating, you are only putting those chips in the DM's bucket. A player that goes too long without a chip being added to their bucket, will lose interest and become bored.
I think we're talking about very different things when we mean "pacing." I mean more "how many fights can you squeeze into one session" (big picture stuff) while you're talking about more micro-pacing where the DM tries to keep people's attention on the game 9 seconds at a time. I don't see anything to disagree with in your post except for...
The entire point of my rambling is that pacing is independant of game mechanics. You can use mechanical aspects of the game to facilitate aspects of pacing. But those mechanics themselves are irrelevant beyond their ability to fill that role. Your example of "pacing" issues within 5e's mechanics are simply not pacing issues at all. They are perceived game balance issues, and are completely unrelated.
This. This I completely disagree with. Different kinds of mechanics have WILDLY different handling times and can have absolutely MASSIVE effects on pacing in a session.
I'd really question if it is "harder" to do that with a lot of other games, myself.
With D&D, it also only really works to play it that way initially, at very low levels. If you try and play it that way with like, level 5+ characters, especially spellcasters, or anyone who has an actual abilities, I think D&D is actually significantly worse at that style of play than some other games.
Depends what edition you're playing. 1e works just fine with whole swathes of the rules being only known by the DM. Hell in 1e the rules that determine if the player can hit something or not with a given roll are siloed off in the DMG (THAC0 was 2e). I'm not saying this is the ideal way to run things, just that it's VERY doable, especially with non-spellcasters. Spell casters just need to know the basics of how their spells work, not necessarily all of the nitty gritty.
I'm also not sure most indie games do put more weight on the players in terms of rules-understanding. FATE kind of does, but PtbA games tend not to (they do ask for a different approach, but my experience with people new to RPGs is that they take to the PtbA approach as easily as the "trad" approach - it's swapping from one to another that's harder). A lot of popular games work at least as well as D&D if not better with the "say what they are going to do" approach, too - Call of Cthulhu, for example.
Those kind of games are fine for most players, but I find that a few people just go "does not compute" with Indie games and just can't wrap their heads around the basic assumptions of the game, while I haven't really had that with D&D.
The ones it works worst with in my experience aren't ones with meta-currencies or the like, like FATE, but ones with hugely complicated characters and enemies such that it's hard for the DM to manage them. For example, Shadowrun in most editions, HERO or GURPS at higher points values, D&D past level 5 or so (especially 3.XE or 4E!), Exalted, etc.
Shadowrun
When I played that I was a Luddite shaman because no way in naughty word was I going to wrap my head around how tech worked in that game. I had a lot of fun in that game but I had to treat a lot of it as a black box with the GM doing for me what I did for my 1e kids as in "hey GM I want to do X please tell me what to roll because I don't know how this naughty word works." Ended up working fine since I had a great Shadowrun GM but I STILL have no idea how a lot of its rules work. I think a lot of Indie games can't really work that way since they need the players to be more engaged with the rules.
This is largely true, yeah, especially post-internet.
D&D's spells are so powerful and reliable that you're very rarely having to try anything actually clever with them - it's usually just a matter of "Oh yeah that fixes that". If spells were significantly less powerful, but perhaps more flexible, I think we'd see a lot more actually-interesting use of spells.
My Platonic ideal of a D&D magic system is: "Okay, I can talk to spiders, fly for as long as I can hold an ice cube in my mouth, curse people to be unable to see dogs, and read the mind of anyone who's holding a fork. I want to get Joe Smith removed from his position on the Board of Directors of ACME Corp. within two weeks. Hmm..."
-old rpg.net post by "Random Nerd"
I like those kind of limits, they reward creativity, even though the example is a bit hyperbolic. Illusions are generally too open-ended and powerful and I agree with
@Hussar about them for the most part, but something like "curse people to be unable to see dogs" is so narrow that you HAVE to be smart in order to make use of that and that's just
chef's kiss
