D&D (2024) D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024)

[EzekielRaiden]

There is no reason to make it personal just because we are talking about indefensible design choices you happen to like.

....what??? This is design I hate! I have genuinely no idea how you could possibly think I like this design.

we were talking about encounters, those nearly always are things that primarily depend on monster capabilities in ways that make 5e's inept monsters extremely relevant. Monster design does not exist in a vacuum. Monster capabilities & PC capabilities need to be designed as part of a broader interconnected thing, calling 5e's failure to do so "DM empowerment" is nothing of the sort. These problems extend well beyond monster design though, you need only look at the wide array of half baked incomplete and downright unusable optional & variant rules in the current DMG for more examples.

Okay. The defense given for these things, over and over and over by 5e boosters, was that their half-baked-ness is a feature, not a bug. The rules don't work, so the DM is forced to make something that does. That's literally what people said DM Empowerment meant.

 

[Micah Sweet]

....what??? This is design I hate! I have genuinely no idea how you could possibly think I like this design.


Okay. The defense given for these things, over and over and over by 5e boosters, was that their half-baked-ness is a feature, not a bug. The rules don't work, so the DM is forced to make something that does. That's literally what people said DM Empowerment meant.

That's not my claim. I like the 5e ruleset, but I want clear guidelines for many situations, modeled as closely as is practical to in-setting reality, and I want the game not to try to shame me when I choose to not use those guidelines.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's not my claim. I like the 5e ruleset, but I want clear guidelines for many situations, modeled as closely as is practical to in-setting reality, and I want the game not to try to shame me when I choose to not use those guidelines.

"Not try to shame you"? Seriously? Where the hell do any DMGs "shame" you for not using the guidelines?

The hyperbole is so thick I literally can't see a real point here.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm not the one saying always or never here, except in relation to your comments (and if I'm forgetting something, please feel free to call me out on it and I will happily apologize). Quite frankly, I think expecting every participant to be willing to compromise on any issue whenever it comes up as a disagreement or be labeled as a bad actor (how I read your claim of acting in bad faith) is simply an unrealistic demand. If this is what you need at all times from any group of players to feel comfortable playing with them, it might take some time to find a good fit.

I note, here, that you have not even attempted to rebut any of my points. You have simply declared it unrealistic and washed your hands of it.

It really isn't that weird. People somehow IRL manage to work out their different preferences without totally falling apart. Marriages somehow survive despite the fact that neither participant is the "master" of that relationship who calls all the shots. Friendships somehow survive despite the fact that no one is "in control" of the friendships and telling the other friends what to do.

If they can do that over and over and over and over with things that are far more consequential and practical than pretend elfgames, I don't see how you can argue that there are frequent, dramatic, diametric oppositions that cannot even in principle be resolved. Because that literally is your argument: There are breaks that CANNOT be resolved, period, ever. You said that. Not me. You are the one who said "never resolvable" was on the table. Not me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Not try to shame you"? Seriously? Where the hell do any DMGs "shame" you for not using the guidelines?

The hyperbole is so thick I literally can't see a real point here.

I'm talking about Dungeon World and other PbtA games, where the rules provide hard boundaries on what the GM is allowed to do. The style of several of those books (I've read DW, AW, and MotW) seems to me to pressure GMs into towing the line rules-wise.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I note, here, that you have not even attempted to rebut any of my points. You have simply declared it unrealistic and washed your hands of it.

It really isn't that weird. People somehow IRL manage to work out their different preferences without totally falling apart. Marriages somehow survive despite the fact that neither participant is the "master" of that relationship who calls all the shots. Friendships somehow survive despite the fact that no one is "in control" of the friendships and telling the other friends what to do.

If they can do that over and over and over and over with things that are far more consequential and practical than pretend elfgames, I don't see how you can argue that there are frequent, dramatic, diametric oppositions that cannot even in principle be resolved. Because that literally is your argument: There are breaks that CANNOT be resolved, period, ever. You said that. Not me. You are the one who said "never resolvable" was on the table. Not me.

I didn't specific refute your points because it being an unrealistic expectation from humanity is IMO refutation enough, even if in general I agree. I also didn't say never, I said not always. And many people compromise on those important things because they feel what they're getting is more important than what they're giving up, and even then one could argue whether or not said compromise is worth it in every situation. Not necessarily the case with "pretend elfgames" (I really hate that phrase). Moving on from something that won't be fun enough for you when that is the primary stake is, IME, pretty common, and not acting in bad faith from my point of view.

 

[tetrasodium]

....what??? This is design I hate! I have genuinely no idea how you could possibly think I like this design.

Moving on.... The rules forcing the DM to personally act as the bad guy to finish a rule or subsystem an endemic pattern through section after section of the rules & not limited to monsters or encounter related stuff.

Okay. The defense given for these things, over and over and over by 5e boosters, was that their half-baked-ness is a feature, not a bug. The rules don't work, so the DM is forced to make something that does. That's literally what people said DM Empowerment meant.

The trouble there is it matters to a critical degree where & how the half baked gaps fall in a ruleset. I'll use one of what is possibly the most illustrative & glaring examples in 5e to demonstrate, encumbrance specifically. The default rule is so overly generous that by design it fills the goal of creating a scenario that is self nullifying of any reason for it to even be used. There is a second variant of course, but it's so tight & restrictive that it just annoys everyone if the GM tries to force players to use it.

With the default method players regularly ignore it & never bother to even calculate their baseline standard loadout weight... Why would they even bother if not for that despotic tyrant of a GM forcing them to do it when the character sheet doesn't even pretend to support it in any form? So instead players make use of the incomplete container rules to cram hundreds of pounds of stuff in a pack that holds 30 pounds until some point where the GM notices something is off in a bad way & asks Bob how much he can carry vrs how much he is carrying.... Of course bob has never even recorded the weight of everything his PC is carrying so the answer requires the group to watch him to endlessly flip through the book just gathering that info so he can start adding it up... .Meanwhile Bob is grumbling about how wotc did polls to find out what is fun & didn't support any of this because it's not fun. Of course since the sheet lacks any support for recording it bob will need to repeat the entire process should he ever be asked again.

The second method avoids some of those problems, but it does so largely by just substituting in a different set due to the way that the limits are punishingly low. Thanks to various design decisions players no longer face any of the interesting choices of what to carry & who is strong enough to carry that thing the party felt weas important even if the noodle armed wizard & rogue couldn't carry their share of the seemingly important-thing(s). Since everyone can carry everything they might want to under the default & nothing interesting is gained as a result of the variant it just serves to prove that the GM is being a tyrant forcing them to track pointless things. While the new PHB kinda leaves a big void for encumbrance itself the character sheet maintains the implication that your GM is being mean if they are making you track something the sheet itself does not support.

"Not try to shame you"? Seriously? Where the hell do any DMGs "shame" you for not using the guidelines?

The hyperbole is so thick I literally can't see a real point here.

See above or pick a different subsystem like the yoyo death & dying clownshow the whole system is designed around. 2014 took steps to twist the system into a defensive thicket around the yoyo to ensure that a break there will require significant retooling of things. The new PHB adjusts one of the thorns in that thicket by giving players bigger heals that could theoretically support monsters that are tougher in more ways than just how many hp they have & better support tearing out the yoyo without it feeling like playing tag with a three phase power cable... but absent any indication to the contrary from wotc it could also be doubling down on the yoyo. The new DMG could have alternative death & dying rules that take a mallet to the yoyo... but once again we are back to the GM forcing a variant/optional rule that makes players feel nerfed & now when Bob suffers a reckless & completely avoidable PC death the blame is easy to shift exclusively to the fact that GM:Alice forced the group to use that yoyo-free variant.

It shames them like so: Well if only GM:Alice used the default yoyo rules Bob's PC wouldn't be dead & if only she accepted that encumbrance is unfun nobody would have needed to watch Bob look up & calculate everything he was carrying to find out that he was many hundreds of pounds beyond his capacity just so he could shrug & roll their eyes while throwing some HeavyStuff on someone like the wizard & rogue to completely ignore the problem while changing nothing of interest thanks to linear growth of strength to encumbrance capacity... Obviously Alice should have just used the default guidelines instead of making tougher monnters changing how death works & forcing us to watch bob calculate his encumbrance for the very first time.

 

[mamba]

I agree partially. I definitely want the superheroics dialed down (not likely from the official game, and I've accepted that and now play other games), but my threshold for rules is somewhat higher than 5.0 or 5.5 have offered. Quite a bit higher personally, though I dial it back for my players.

I know your threshold is higher, mine isn't, I'd even go slightly lower than 5e but mostly on simplifying classes

 

[Micah Sweet]

Moving on.... The rules forcing the DM to personally act as the bad guy to finish a rule or subsystem an endemic pattern through section after section of the rules & not limited to monsters or encounter related stuff.

The trouble there is it matters to a critical degree where & how the half baked gaps fall in a ruleset. I'll use one of what is possibly the most illustrative & glaring examples in 5e to demonstrate, encumbrance specifically. The default rule is so overly generous that by design it fills the goal of creating a scenario that is self nullifying of any reason for it to even be used. There is a second variant of course, but it's so tight & restrictive that it just annoys everyone if the GM tries to force players to use it.

With the default method players regularly ignore it & never bother to even calculate their baseline standard loadout weight... Why would they even bother if not for that despotic tyrant of a GM forcing them to do it when the character sheet doesn't even pretend to support it in any form? So instead players make use of the incomplete container rules to cram hundreds of pounds of stuff in a pack that holds 30 pounds until some point where the GM notices something is off in a bad way & asks Bob how much he can carry vrs how much he is carrying.... Of course bob has never even recorded the weight of everything his PC is carrying so the answer requires the group to watch him to endlessly flip through the book just gathering that info so he can start adding it up... .Meanwhile Bob is grumbling about how wotc did polls to find out what is fun & didn't support any of this because it's not fun. Of course since the sheet lacks any support for recording it bob will need to repeat the entire process should he ever be asked again.

The second method avoids some of those problems, but it does so largely by just substituting in a different set due to the way that the limits are punishingly low. Thanks to various design decisions players no longer face any of the interesting choices of what to carry & who is strong enough to carry that thing the party felt weas important even if the noodle armed wizard & rogue couldn't carry their share of the seemingly important-thing(s). Since everyone can carry everything they might want to under the default & nothing interesting is gained as a result of the variant it just serves to prove that the GM is being a tyrant forcing them to track pointless things. While the new PHB kinda leaves a big void for encumbrance itself the character sheet maintains the implication that your GM is being mean if they are making you track something the sheet itself does not support.

See above or pick a different subsystem like the yoyo death & dying clownshow the whole system is designed around. 2014 took steps to twist the system into a defensive thicket around the yoyo to ensure that a break there will require significant retooling of things. the new PHB adjusts one of the thorns in that thicket by giving players bigger heals that could theoretically support monsters that are tougher in more ways than just how many hp they have & better support tearing out the yoyo without it feeling like playing tag with a three phase power cable... but absent any indication to the contrary from wotc it could also be doubling down on the yoyo. The new DMG could have alternative death & dying rules that take a mallet to the yoyo... but once again we are back to the GM forcing a variant/optional rule that makes players feel nerfed & now when Bob suffers a reckless & completely avoidable PC death the blame is easy to shift exclusively to the fact that GM:Alice forced the group to use that yoyo-free variant.

It shames them like so: Well if only GM:Alice used the default yoyo rules Bob's PC wouldn't be dead & if only she accepted that encumbrance is unfun nobody would have needed to watch Bob look up & calculate everything he was carrying to find out that he was many hundreds of pounds beyond his capacity just so he could shrug & roll their eyes while throwing some HeavyStuff on someone like the wizard & rogue to completely ignore the problem while changing nothing of interest thanks to linear growth of strength to encumbrance capacity... Obviously Alice should have just used the default guidelines instead of making tougher monnters changing how death works & forcing us to watch bob calculate his encumbrance for the very first time.

All of that is true as well, @EzekielRaiden , although I was thinking about PbtA when I wrote about shame, there are definitely parts of WotC 5e that evoke similar things.

 

[mamba]

Not at all! This is only true if you presume that every rule must be an individual, discrete, specific rule--one rule for every topic and one topic for every rule.

if it isn't, then you are inviting back in a lot of DM adjudication. I thought that is what you wanted to avoid

As soon as you allow rules to actually exploit abstraction for benefit--which is something absolutely every rule always has, every single rule is always, to at least some extent, abstracted from reality--you can actually cover a huge amount of space. 3e and its descendants are what happens when you try to have a rule for everything and everything having its rule--it will, guaranteed, fail.

I agree with the 3e part, but I am not sure how you think you can have vague generic rules covering swathes without inviting a lot of decision making by the DM back in.

The rules are extremely clear

but not at all specific, leaving a lot of room for the DM.

They just do clarity in a different--and more narrative--way than D&D does. As an example, I am regularly told by the rules themselves what I must do, or what I am allowed to do, as GM. This isn't hiding behind anything. It's a straight-up, clear instruction

kinda like the play examples in the PHB, maybe a little clearer / stricter, but the fact remains, having few generic rules opens a lot of decision space for the DM, it is not locking them down the way many detailed specific rules would.

That's literally what DM empowerment means

DM empowerment means vague, not well thought out rules that require the DM to 'fix' / 'make sense of' them? We have a very different idea of what DM empowerment is, I do not consider that empowering at all

Remember how for the first like three years of 5e, every single thread that involved a rules question had one of the first five or so replies contain a disclaimer in the vein of: "Unless your DM says otherwise, because whatever they say goes."

well, 'unless your DM says otherwise' is DM empowerment, but I do not need bad rules that leave gaps for the DM to operate in for that. I want good, clear rules and guidelines for encounter building, handing out treasure etc. I can still deviate from that, but not having them means leaving the DM in the dark and fending for themself is empowering, and that is about the furthest thing from empowering as far as I am concerned.

"Rulings not rules" means "make up whatever you want, whenever you want." Always has. It is absolutely antagonistic to consistency and DM responsibility. That's why I hate it so much.

that does not mean we should have bad, vague rules, it just means they are not the be all and end all. I can have rulings and still be consistent, in fact I think consistency is more important than following the rule as written.