D&D General Reification versus ludification in 5E/6E

[Micah Sweet]

In order to have mass market appeal and to at least provide token support for all of it's potential settings, D&D is at least slightly lore-agnostic. The books will refer to various characters and concepts, but there's not many hard stances I can think of.

And when they do put a piece of lore front and center, like talking about The Weave in the magic section, you get people annoyed because that's a Forgotten Realms concept and shouldn't apply to other settings. Even statements like "magic is found in everything in the multiverse" could get pushback from people who don't care for the implication that their Fighter is somehow magical in any way!

And let's not forget that time they changed D&D's lore in the core books, doing away with concepts like The Great Wheel or having nine distinct alignments...

What do you mean? They changed the lore in the corebooks just now! Lots of stuff in 5.5 is different lore-wise.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Ok, ignoring the 6e thing.

The only thing that has been lost is the players trying to game the system by choosing the "best" animal (or whatever being summoned). So, now, your summoned animal is a single statblock that prevent cheese weasel power monkeys from using the Monster Manual as a shopping list to eke out every single bonus they can.

IOW, you absolutely can summon a "seal" or whatever animal you like to summon. What you cannot do is abuse the system, just like every other caster, and try to gain advantages over the game.

Fantastic.

Nah, this is wrong.

You can’t summon a flying beast to take soemthing to an ally, or a swarm of little critters to eat through a wooden wall or (as someone said) a constrictor snake to bind someone, or anything else. It’s a damage zone spell now, which is lame and boring and doesn’t do what the name implies.

I like ‘ludification‘ in D&D, but this example sucks.

And it didn’t have to, in order to solve the (overblown) problems with the spell. It could have been designed to allow a variety of options, similarly to the Summon spells that have multiple sub-options in the stat block they summon, but with 2-4 statblock options built into one. Swarm, Brute, Abductor, Scout, Mount, etc, are all variations that could exist within one variable statblock, allowing for the thing currently in the spell, or a big singular heavy hitter with single target attacks, or a protector that takes hits and punishes attacks, or a thing that binds targets, or a things that has expanded utility and is tiny.

I’d rather have seen the spell split into 2-3 spells than this boring “what if spirit guardians but for Druids” garbage.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

And let's not forget that time they changed D&D's lore in the core books, doing away with concepts like The Great Wheel or having nine distinct alignments...

best lore the game ever had…

 

[Hussar]

You can’t summon a flying beast to take soemthing to an ally, or a swarm of little critters to eat through a wooden wall or (as someone said) a constrictor snake to bind someone, or anything else. It’s a damage zone spell now, which is lame and boring and doesn’t do what the name implies.

Well, you can'T do that with this particular spell, true. Then again, to me, it's a small price to pay for stopping the players from constantly shopping through the monster manual to get just the perfect summoning.

Since the spell was going to deal damage 99% of the time anyway, nothing was lost.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, you can'T do that with this particular spell, true. Then again, to me, it's a small price to pay for stopping the players from constantly shopping through the monster manual to get just the perfect summoning.

Since the spell was going to deal damage 99% of the time anyway, nothing was lost.

Plenty was lost. I won’t repeat myself, since I already enumerated some of what was lost, but more was lost than gained. Better to just excise the spell than lobotomize it like they did.

 

[Hussar]

Plenty was lost. I won’t repeat myself, since I already enumerated some of what was lost, but more was lost than gained. Better to just excise the spell than lobotomize it like they did.

Meh. Losing players constantly gaming the system so they can eke out every single drop of power out of a spell is not a loss. The spell does pretty much exactly what it was always going to do, just with far less muss and fuss.

 

[Lanefan]

In order to have mass market appeal and to at least provide token support for all of it's potential settings, D&D is at least slightly lore-agnostic. The books will refer to various characters and concepts, but there's not many hard stances I can think of.

Which makes all kinds of sense.

What would be nice, though, would be "example" lore - maybe a whole series of sidebars each titled "How this might appear in a campaign" followed by a lore-based example of whatever concept or rule that page or section is covering. These lore examples would, ideally, tie in with whatever example setting is used in the DMG's worldbuilding section.

 

[mamba]

It's also a catch 22 because while people want explanations, they also don't want lore in the core books.

explanations for what HP and other core foundational things are / how they should be interpreted are fine, you can leave specific gods etc. to the supplements

Lore and explanations are not the same thing, and we still get more lore in the core and barely any explanation

 

[Hussar]

explanations for what HP and other core foundational things are / how they should be interpreted are fine, you can leave specific gods etc. to the supplements

Lore and explanations are not the same thing, and we still get more lore in the core and barely any explanation

You’re joking right?

If WotC came out with an explanation for ho, they’d get crucified. No matter what the explanation was, the hue and cry over forcing playstyle would be overwhelming.

WotC learned that you can never show how the sausage is made.

 

[Remathilis]

explanations for what HP and other core foundational things are / how they should be interpreted are fine, you can leave specific gods etc. to the supplements

Lore and explanations are not the same thing, and we still get more lore in the core and barely any explanation

Explanations explain how something happens. Lore explains why. Explanation says "clerics channel divine power into spells" while lore explains where divine power comes from.