D&D (2024) Do players really want balance?

[dave2008]

Once the players start treating the change as a bluff there isn't much the gm can do to make it matter without driving a spike through the game and reinforcing the bad assumptions driving that resistance as both justified and reasonable.

What if it is not a bluff? In my experience being honest does not drive a spike through the game.

 

[Maxperson]

Agreed.

To clarify, I do run with long rests taking at least a couple days as a matter of course now, I made the switch almost a year ago- but a week ago someone commented on it and I tried to explain the reasoning behind such decisions.. I realized pretty quickly the above; they couldn't think about it from my perspective of trying to challenge them better, just from their perspective as players trying to succeed.

So just run the game the way you'd enjoy it being run, and hopefully your players enjoy the overall result, even if they won't appreciate the minutiae of why you do things the way you do.

I didn't phrase it in terms of challenge to the players. The way I put it was that I didn't like having to always throw 5-8 medium to hard encounters at them in a 24 hour period, which they agreed with. I let them know that 1 long rest a week allowed me to spread out the encounters while keeping the adventuring day balance intact. That it also lets me challenge them better is a side effect that I didn't bring up.

 

[tetrasodium]

What if it is not a bluff? In my experience being honest does not drive a spike through the game.

I even covered that in the section you quoted.

Interruptions with wandering/random encounters or whatever that are effective enough to put the hurt on PCs? There you go, the GM just proved to the players who was certain it was an unjustified nerf that it was done to brutalize/kill their PCs.

Monsters packup their dungeon & move? There you go... the nerf was so that adversarial G M could cheat them out of a win & any lost loot.

Bad things happen in the world because the players took a week off? There you go, that adversarial GM just proved to the players that the unjustified nerf was to make sure the PCs couldn't win & get blamed for a crapsack world.

When the players don't understand why it's an improvement and they refuse to adapt to what they see as an unjustified nerf you wind up with a scenario where any & all negative results from that refusal to adapt just reinforces the appearance of it being an unjust nerf. A large part of that is a result of how gritty realism is still an all or nothing explosive return of all things with almost no possibility of resting yourself into a death spiral like the gradual linear returns of past editions,

 

[Maxperson]

I even covered that in the section you quoted.

Interruptions with wandering/random encounters or whatever that are effective enough to put the hurt on PCs? There you go, the GM just proved to the players who was certain it was an unjustified nerf that it was done to brutalize/kill their PCs.

Monsters packup their dungeon & move? There you go... the nerf was so that adversarial G M could cheat them out of a win & any lost loot.

Bad things happen in the world because the players took a week off? There you go, that adversarial GM just proved to the players that the unjustified nerf was to make sure the PCs couldn't win & get blamed for a crapsack world.

When the players don't understand why it's an improvement and they refuse to adapt to what they see as an unjustified nerf you wind up with a scenario where any & all negative results from that refusal to adapt just reinforces the appearance of it being an unjust nerf. A large part of that is a result of how gritty realism is still an all or nothing explosive return of all things with almost no possibility of resting yourself into a death spiral like the gradual linear returns of past editions,

This is very player dependent. My players understand and expect logical consequences to their actions. If they hit an orc stronghold and then leave to rest, they expect the bodies and missing items to have been discovered in their absence. They know the stronghold will be on high alert when they return and new defenses raised.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Part of the problem seems to be that people see D&D as a “game” and when people play games, they want to “win.” I can’t recall where, but I saw a YouTube video on game design and balance where the psychology of games was discussed and I recall the statement that “players perceive a PVP game to be balanced not when they win 50% of the time, but instead when they win 70% of the time.”

Obviously, in a well balanced PVP game “fair” would be a 50% win rate (assuming similar skill). This means psychologically, players are poor judges of game balance as they are biased in favor of themselves.

D&D is seen mostly as a combat simulator and therefore players only think it is “fair” when they (or their characters) are at a significant statistical advantage in combat - and at least since 3e introduced challenge rating we actually saw that codified in the rules - a character of level X was a CR X encounter, and a “balanced” encounter for a party with 4 PCs of Level X is a CR X encounter… so fights are only “balanced”when the PCs have a 4:1 advantage. This is lunacy.

We need to divorce ourselves and the players from the notion that the game is “fair” when we are massively advantaged. Perhaps we do this be reframing the balance conversation away from “can you win a straight up fight” and toward the 50% success rule of “do you expect half your characters to die in the course of a typical adventuring day? If not, the game is not balanced.” This takes us closer toward older editions where it was less about “winning all the fights” and more about “surviving is victory” as our fairness criteria and knowing 1 retreat is an option and 2 there is a 50/50 chance I won’t even make it out alive.

I mean, Rogue One was a much more compelling story to me than Episode 7 of Star Wars… because you actually felt like there were stakes and a noble death can be more satisfying as a story than running through a story successfully thanks to Plot Armor.

I couldn't agree more, but good luck getting the bulk of the RPG playing public to go along with that. Like I said, variant rules and such are usually read negatively by players, because the game is so leaned in the PCs favor that most of them by necessity make things tougher in some way.

Simplicity and power fantasy are the quick and easy path to the most profit. Throw in name recognition (including nostalgia-bait) and a big marketing budget, and you have modern D&D.

There's nothing wrong with liking the game that results from that business strategy. Many people do. But that's what it is to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I didn't phrase it in terms of challenge to the players. The way I put it was that I didn't like having to always throw 5-8 medium to hard encounters at them in a 24 hour period, which they agreed with. I let them know that 1 long rest a week allowed me to spread out the encounters while keeping the adventuring day balance intact. That it also lets me challenge them better is a side effect that I didn't bring up.

I actually have a hard time having that conversation with my players, at least having it in that way. We are very focused on what makes logical sense in the fiction, and that often has little to do with exactly how many resource-expending encounters happen over a given period of time. What you're describing is a very anti-immersion conversation from our point of view.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I mean, Rogue One was a much more compelling story to me than Episode 7 of Star Wars… because you actually felt like there were stakes and a noble death can be more satisfying as a story than running through a story successfully thanks to Plot Armor.

The issue there is that Rogue One is a movie that you watch and D&D is a game where you create a character and embody them.

We love watching other people die (for some reason), but don't like dying ourselves or as our avatars.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I even covered that in the section you quoted.

Interruptions with wandering/random encounters or whatever that are effective enough to put the hurt on PCs? There you go, the GM just proved to the players who was certain it was an unjustified nerf that it was done to brutalize/kill their PCs.

Monsters packup their dungeon & move? There you go... the nerf was so that adversarial G M could cheat them out of a win & any lost loot.

Bad things happen in the world because the players took a week off? There you go, that adversarial GM just proved to the players that the unjustified nerf was to make sure the PCs couldn't win & get blamed for a crapsack world.

When the players don't understand why it's an improvement and they refuse to adapt to what they see as an unjustified nerf you wind up with a scenario where any & all negative results from that refusal to adapt just reinforces the appearance of it being an unjust nerf. A large part of that is a result of how gritty realism is still an all or nothing explosive return of all things with almost no possibility of resting yourself into a death spiral like the gradual linear returns of past editions,

It sounds like you just need to come with better gritty rest mechanics. Maybe something where you get back parts of your health over a longer time, or there's mandated bed rest based on how severe the injury ultimately turned out to be. This also has the side effects of justifying downtime and encouraging players to have multiple PCs available for when one is convalescing.

 

[Xenolith234]

I couldn't agree more, but good luck getting the bulk of the RPG playing public to go along with that. Like I said, variant rules and such are usually read negatively by players, because the game is so leaned in the PCs favor that most of them by necessity make things tougher in some way.

Simplicity and power fantasy are the quick and easy path to the most profit. Throw in name recognition (including nostalgia-bait) and a big marketing budget, and you have modern D&D.

There's nothing wrong with liking the game that results from that business strategy. Many people do. But that's what it is to me.

Agreed 100%. Any perceived loss of power or ramp up in difficulty is taken as a slight against their character. Maybe since they don’t see the DM side of the screen, they think that the game is already balanced fairly? But then again, that calls back to the game balance of them winning fights 70% of the time being “fair”. I’m not looking to kill characters or be a terror of a DM, I’m just looking for stakes and challenge and the actual threat of character death.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Agreed 100%. Any perceived loss of power or ramp up in difficulty is taken as a slight against their character. Maybe since they don’t see the DM side of the screen, they think that the game is already balanced fairly? But then again, that calls back to the game balance of them winning fights 70% of the time being “fair”. I’m not looking to kill characters or be a terror of a DM, I’m just looking for stakes and challenge and the actual threat of character death.

Me too, friend. Me too.