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

[Maxperson]

I would say Aragorn does a lot with magic in the book. In addition to the curing, you have what happened on the Throne in the Wilderness and what happened with the legion of the dead.

Alegedly this all had to do with him being part Elf, not due to being a Ranger.

More than just part elf. He also traces his bloodline back to Luthien who was half-elven/half-maia(angel). I'd wager the maia blood does more to give him his powers than the elf blood does.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Well a lot of the complaining was about fixing things few people gad actual problems with.

I was there. People had problems with the things that were fixed.

I know because I was one of them.

 

[Hussar]

There's also just simple double tap - an attack on an unconscious character is a crit, crits cause 2 failed death saves. For fun, have the unintelligent monsters knock someone unconscious and then drag them off to be eaten.

Personally, I love damaging auras for just this sort of thing. But, if you make it clear to the players that monsters WILL target downed targets, their actions will reflect this - being downed is extremely dangerous and there's a definite sense of desperation if someone drops. The whole "whack a mole" thing disappears pretty quickly when monsters will finish stuff off. Something with two or three attacks can drop the low HP character and straight up murder the character right after.

It all depends on the DM. People are right. Earlier editions were deadly in that it didn't need the DM to kill off PC's. Live to dead was a pretty short trip sometimes. 5e now puts it squarely in the DM's court for how deadly the game will be.

 

[Zardnaar]

I was there. People had problems with the things that were fixed.

I know because I was one of them.

You can always find one.

It's reception and rapid demise suggest otherwise. 5E cut a lot of problem spells and feats for example.

Hell 5E would probably run better powered by the 4E engine or tweak the 5E one to resemble it.

 

[Oofta]

Personally, I love damaging auras for just this sort of thing. But, if you make it clear to the players that monsters WILL target downed targets, their actions will reflect this - being downed is extremely dangerous and there's a definite sense of desperation if someone drops. The whole "whack a mole" thing disappears pretty quickly when monsters will finish stuff off. Something with two or three attacks can drop the low HP character and straight up murder the character right after.

It all depends on the DM. People are right. Earlier editions were deadly in that it didn't need the DM to kill off PC's. Live to dead was a pretty short trip sometimes. 5e now puts it squarely in the DM's court for how deadly the game will be.

The problem I had with earlier editions was that it was far too easy to be accidentally deadly. Raise dead has always been there of course, and revivify just means the player isn't twiddling their thumbs until the group can haul his carcass back to town. I just don't see a huge difference being caused by rule changes. Rules change because most people don't want "Oops you're dead" on a regular basis. As you said above, easy enough to add back in if you want.

But there's this weird adversarial attitude some people seem to have. That if the players are having fun it must come at the cost of the DM. That, I think, is complete nonsense. I will make the campaign as deadly as the group wants it to be without any house rules required.

Ultimately I want my players to have fun, not lord my deadly might over them. With one group part of our fun is seeing how far I can push them without actually going over the edge. With another? Their just out to have fun so that's the game we play.

 

[The Sigil]

As a DM if I want to ensure PC death, I can always fall back on infinity dragons.

This to me has derailed from “do players want balance” to something else entirely… a complaint about how the game isn’t deadly enough .. or too deadly.

Let’s go back to the original question.

I liked the post that took the DM factor out of it to point out players generally want their characters to be balanced “with respect to each other” so each of them gets a chance to have the spotlight. That is a statement I can get behind, and is entirely different than “balanced with respect to encounters (individually or in series).”

since different folks have different preferences for PC nova frequencies in encounters (every time? Once per 5 encounters in an adventuring day? Never?) we seem to mostly be arguing about how many encounters the dial needs to be tuned to. Which leads to proxy arguments about action economy, the proposed length of an adventuring day, the in practice length of an adventuring day, long and short rest frequency, and so on.

I will stick by my premise that people are psychologically poor at probability and if you tell someone they should win 50% of the time, they think the game is rigged against them unless their actual win rate is 70%. Similarly, tell someone they have a 90% hit chance and their brain turns that into “I can’t miss.” So no matter where you think “balanced” is, my contention is that psychologically, players don’t want whatever that number you might choose is, they want the odds titled past that number in their favor for it to “feel” balanced. This isn’t an indictment of players, it is human nature.

What a DM needs to do to make the players feel the game is balanced is find the sweet spot where failure occurs intermittently to remind the players they don’t have plot armor, but not so frequently they get frustrated. As Matt Colville puts it, “the bad guys don’t know they are the bad guys” and when you get into a fight with them, “they are trying to kill you” (but I in the DM role am NOT trying to kill you, I in the temporary role of the baddies am trying to kill you).

It is one of the things that I feel makes low level play “better” - hit points are low, dice are swingy, and if I am rolling every roll in front of my players, it is likely one of them drops to 0 hp. Rolling in front of them lets them know I am neither cheating “in their favor” (their victory is earned) nor against them (they are not being screwed because I am angry/a jerk/want to “win” once in a while). I am also an advocate for multiple failure states, morale checks so not every fight is to the death, and alternate dight endings like if one of the PCs goes down, giving them an option to surrender, collect their dying, and leave. Any intelligent enemy would prefer to save his resources and allow the PCs to slink off in defeat rather than have to fight to the death. Of course, the se one time the PCs attack, the BBEG is less likely to be forgiving!

In other words, more reasonable villains and less “tactical combat to the death!”

And FWIW, I have found that one PC going down (not necessarily dying) every 4-5 game sessions or so, with death coming only when the party is foolhardy or the dice are particularly uncooperative (perhaps every 5 to 10 times a PC drops the dice might do him in - I haven’t kept track - foolhardy actions are far more frequently the cause… in one case I took the player aside after the session and pointed out several implicit warnings and a couple explicit warnings he had blown past because I wanted to help him recognize the implicit warnings in the future… the explicit ones I reminded him of but didn’t feel I needed to further explain … when I said “this course of action is likely to get your character killed” I wasn’t joking) seems to be about the right amount for players to “feel” the stakes are real without getting frustrated.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As a DM if I want to ensure PC death, I can always fall back on infinity dragons.

This to me has derailed from “do players want balance” to something else entirely… a complaint about how the game isn’t deadly enough .. or too deadly.

Let’s go back to the original question.

I liked the post that took the DM factor out of it to point out players generally want their characters to be balanced “with respect to each other” so each of them gets a chance to have the spotlight. That is a statement I can get behind, and is entirely different than “balanced with respect to encounters (individually or in series).”

since different folks have different preferences for PC nova frequencies in encounters (every time? Once per 5 encounters in an adventuring day? Never?) we seem to mostly be arguing about how many encounters the dial needs to be tuned to. Which leads to proxy arguments about action economy, the proposed length of an adventuring day, the in practice length of an adventuring day, long and short rest frequency, and so on.

I will stick by my premise that people are psychologically poor at probability and if you tell someone they should win 50% of the time, they think the game is rigged against them unless their actual win rate is 70%. Similarly, tell someone they have a 90% hit chance and their brain turns that into “I can’t miss.” So no matter where you think “balanced” is, my contention is that psychologically, players don’t want whatever that number you might choose is, they want the odds titled past that number in their favor for it to “feel” balanced. This isn’t an indictment of players, it is human nature.

What a DM needs to do to make the players feel the game is balanced is find the sweet spot where failure occurs intermittently to remind the players they don’t have plot armor, but not so frequently they get frustrated. As Matt Colville puts it, “the bad guys don’t know they are the bad guys” and when you get into a fight with them, “they are trying to kill you” (but I in the DM role am NOT trying to kill you, I in the temporary role of the baddies am trying to kill you).

It is one of the things that I feel makes low level play “better” - hit points are low, dice are swingy, and if I am rolling every roll in front of my players, it is likely one of them drops to 0 hp. Rolling in front of them lets them know I am neither cheating “in their favor” (their victory is earned) nor against them (they are not being screwed because I am angry/a jerk/want to “win” once in a while). I am also an advocate for multiple failure states, morale checks so not every fight is to the death, and alternate dight endings like if one of the PCs goes down, giving them an option to surrender, collect their dying, and leave. Any intelligent enemy would prefer to save his resources and allow the PCs to slink off in defeat rather than have to fight to the death. Of course, the se one time the PCs attack, the BBEG is less likely to be forgiving!

In other words, more reasonable villains and less “tactical combat to the death!”

And FWIW, I have found that one PC going down (not necessarily dying) every 4-5 game sessions or so, with death coming only when the party is foolhardy or the dice are particularly uncooperative (perhaps every 5 to 10 times a PC drops the dice might do him in - I haven’t kept track - foolhardy actions are far more frequently the cause… in one case I took the player aside after the session and pointed out several implicit warnings and a couple explicit warnings he had blown past because I wanted to help him recognize the implicit warnings in the future… the explicit ones I reminded him of but didn’t feel I needed to further explain … when I said “this course of action is likely to get your character killed” I wasn’t joking) seems to be about the right amount for players to “feel” the stakes are real without getting frustrated.

Sounds good to me. That's the dream.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In RPGs you decide your past.

With the caveats noted by Pemerton, sure....but that was my point!

Even before you begin play proper, you have fundamentally violated the principle that the ONLY experiences one may have are those that map to real life. From the very moment you start--unless you literally only play characters prewritten by someone else--you are already breaking from how real life works. Total avoidance of such things is not only not practical, it's not even possible.

Hence: it cannot be the case that because a choice doesn't exist in real life, that choice cannot be part of the mechanics of the game. There are many other arguments one could make, but all of them must weaken the standard rather dramatically: "minimize the non-RL-like choices" for example, or "restrict non-RL choices to character creation and advancement." Both of those concede the simple fact that, in being a game in the first place, it cannot, even in principle, mirror real life at every moment of the play-experience.

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.

I don't understand the relevance of this statement to what I was saying, so I cannot meaningfully respond to it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I'm aware. This is why I draw as much as I do on DW, and to a lesser extent 13A and 4e D&D. Because the first is all about this stuff, and the other two are actually in the D&D-sphere and at least trying to do stuff within that space. E.g. Montages (from 13A) and Skill Challenges, although I admit that SCs were more like a very early prototoype rather than a finished model.

(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.

Of course. With the term "resources" I was thinking of things like beloved/load-bearing magic items, "signature" weapons, abilities (e.g. the possibility of permanently sacrificing one of your level 5 spell slots as a 10th level Wizard, or losing an eye/limb, etc.), or other sorts of relatively "permanent" things that don't come back. I fully agree that "resources" in the sense of short or long rest abilities are not a meaningful cost except at the smallest scales. Those things are generally best for scaring the players rather than eliciting durable responses. It's scary or dread-inducing to realize you've got a big fight coming up and have few resources left. It's gut-wrenching to have to choose between keeping your signature greatsword that you've sunk time and money and questing into vs averting the destruction of the city you've repeatedly risked life and limb to protect.

The problem, of course, is that this latter consequence? It's hard. It requires a hell of a lot more work. It requires players who care about playing the game, and DMs who care about what their players want and do. Death is easy--and that is both its greatest strength and its crippling weakness. It's the fast food of consequences: easy, simple, cheap, but lacking in the richness and impact of a "homecooked" consequence.

 

[pemerton]

You obviously can't have realism in everything, so my preference is to at least put in important things like life and death.

You can get a hell of a lot closer than D&D (any version) does - check out Rolemaster, Runequest, or even HARP or Pendragon.

Which goes back to my point - it's not at all true that a "will to live" mechanic would be out of sync with the general character of D&D as a RPG. It would fit right in!