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

[Vaalingrade]

Because the guidelines are for an attrition game,

Without ever explaining what that means or how that affects the game.

 

[pemerton]

In RPGs you decide your past.

In some RPGs. Not in Classic Traveller. Or in some versions of RuneQuest. Or in some versions of Pendragon. Or in Wuthering Heights.

I'm sure there are many other RPGs too where players don't get to decide their PCs' pasts.

I, for one, see it as very much less realistic to do this via an expenditure than via a random roll.

Fate decides if you live or die (the random roll), not the player. Such a system would never work for me, personally.

<snip>

As long as the dice (combat rolls) indicate you continue to live, you get to make choices on what your PC does in their life. You don't get to decide if you get hit or not, what damage you take, if you make or fail a saving throw, etc. all the time. PCs can use features to hedge their bets, of course, but when it comes to death saves you are entirely in the hands of Fate.

In D&D, players get to decide whether or not their PCs are courageous. This is not a universal feature of RPGs - in Classic Traveller, for instance (published in 1977) there are moral rules that govern PCs (and the players who play them) identically to how they govern NPCs (and the GMs who play them). Burning Wheel is a more recent RPG that also has player/PC-affecting morale-type rules ("Steel").

In D&D, players get too decide when their PCs need to rest, or not - there are no rules, for instance, for falling asleep on watch. And as @EzekielRaiden noted, a player gets to decide whether or not their PC succumbs to temptation (contrast, say, The Dying Earth (Pelgrane version), where the player does not get to decide this unilaterally).

I believe you that you prefer death saving throws to a "will to live" mechanic. But I can't take the notion that one is more realistic than the other at all seriously.

 

[CreamCloud0]

all characters (or at least the protagonists) get to choose how courageous they are,

except of course, when they fail a save against fear

 

[AnotherGuy]

(a) The majority of players are not interested in random, irrevocable, permanent death as a major, prominent consequence.
(b) They prefer other kinds of consequences: moral/ethical dilemmas, the gain or sacrifice of personal power/resources/tools, interpersonal relationships and their development over time, political or social stuff, etc. In large part, this is because whether those consequences are good, bad, or indifferent, the show goes on.

D&D very much provides very little assistance with (b)
It requires DM ingenuity to pull (b) off well enough, so that the consequences matter.
It is why many DMs still rely on (a) as a reliable consequence because the game is just...simply put...not that evolved.

(a) and (b) labelled by myself.
With regards to personal power/resources/tools I'm assuming not the type that is refreshed every long or short rest, because that is not a consequence worth speaking about.

 

[pemerton]

except of course, when they fail a save against fear

Sure. My point is about the actual fear that actual people in the real world sometimes experience.

It's a deliberate feature of D&D that players do not need to make any sort of roll to see if their PCs break or not. (The same if a PC is tortured - the player gets to decide whether and for how long their PC holds out.)

But this feature has nothing to do with realism. It's a game-play feature, related to the game's wargaming origins. Part of what a player is meant to decide is whether or not it is rational to keep their PC in a combat, or to retreat.

People can like what they like - but claims about the realism of mechanics, as opposed to the realism of fiction, are not plausible.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Exactly. One medium encounter won't challenge your group.

If you only give a group medium encounters, you should have them face around SEVEN of them. If you give them only deadly encounters, they should still face around THREE.

5e is and can only work as an attrition game. It will not as be satisfying when you play it the wrong way.

I don't think three regular deadlies will be much of a challenge. You need to go double the normal deadly budget at least. I think it is problem that the game has no codified language to express these higher difficulty encounters. It took me quite a while to figure out that the normal encounter budgets are a joke and the CR is meaningless. Even as an experienced GM I would appreciate actually useful guidelines. Now I just throw whatever at the players and hope for the best. I will probably accidentally TPK them at some point.

 

[pemerton]

D&D very much provides very little assistance with (b)
It requires DM ingenuity to pull (b) off well enough, so that the consequences matter.

On the one hand, I can see where you're coming from.

On the other hand, I think it's very easy to exaggerate the problem. The original AD&D OA presents PCs as having loyalties - to their families, to their martial arts mentors, etc. These features of PC background make it easy enough to present players with situations where what is at stake for their PCs, and what they (the players) care about, is "moral/ethical dilemmas, the gain or sacrifice of personal power/resources/tools, interpersonal relationships and their development over time, political or social stuff, etc".

I think there are systemic reasons why engaging with that sort of stuff is often downplayed in the D&D-sphere of RPGing, but I think the reasons are more to do with received cultures and methods of play, rather than how hard D&D as such makes it. I mean, Ron Edwards has spoken about his thematically-laden 3E D&D play. It began with two PCs, a Half-Elf and a Half-Orc born of the same (human) mother, meeting at her funeral . . .

 

[Crimson Longinus]

On the one hand, I can see where you're coming from.

On the other hand, I think it's very easy to exaggerate the problem. The original AD&D OA presents PCs as having loyalties - to their families, to their martial arts mentors, etc. These features of PC background make it easy enough to present players with situations where what is at stake for their PCs, and what they (the players) care about, is "moral/ethical dilemmas, the gain or sacrifice of personal power/resources/tools, interpersonal relationships and their development over time, political or social stuff, etc".

I think there are systemic reasons why engaging with that sort of stuff is often downplayed in the D&D-sphere of RPGing, but I think the reasons are more to do with received cultures and methods of play, rather than how hard D&D as such makes it. I mean, Ron Edwards has spoken about his thematically-laden 3E D&D play. It began with two PCs, a Half-Elf and a Half-Orc born of the same (human) mother, meeting at her funeral . . .

It think that all sort of higher level goals and defeat conditions are commonly present in D&D games, but those are way easier to have on strategic rather than tactical level. It is relatively easy to have "mission goal" that can fail or succeed without the failure meaning the death of the PCs. (Stop the cultist from performing the ritual, save the princess, avenge my brother etc.) But it it is harder to make it so that every individual fight has such goal independently, and not only as an increment for the main goal. Thus the attrition is still useful.

 

[Nefermandias]

And that difference, plus fairly short adventuring days (which, I understand, is part of the problem - I get that)

That's pretty much all of the problem, and that's why I am really sad they have (likely) not included variant rest rules in the new DMG

 

[AnotherGuy]

On the one hand, I can see where you're coming from.

On the other hand, I think it's very easy to exaggerate the problem.

Maybe.

I think there are systemic reasons why engaging with that sort of stuff is often downplayed in the D&D-sphere of RPGing, but I think the reasons are more to do with received cultures and methods of play, rather than how hard D&D as such makes it. I mean, Ron Edwards has spoken about his thematically-laden 3E D&D play. It began with two PCs, a Half-Elf and a Half-Orc born of the same (human) mother, meeting at her funeral . . .

Bolded emphasis mine. Just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, when you mean received cultures, you're meaning the playing table or friend circle cultures? i.e. real world cultures