D&D General What Is D&D Generally Bad At That You Wish It Was Better At?

[EzekielRaiden]

So what about the reverse? How many Int 20 Wizard players are super-geniuses? When they do stupid things, should we police their roleplay by saying "you're too smart to do that"?

I would argue that it is quite possible for a highly intelligent person to make mistakes. That is, Wisdom is associated with judgment, not Intelligence; the former is about soundness of judgment, while the latter is about speed and precision. But if one wishes to take this route, there's a simple mechanism: Give the player with high Intelligence (or Wisdom, or indeed any stat, not just mental!) more leeway with one of my absolute favorite questions as a DM:

"Are you sure you want to do that?"

It has other variations ("Did you actually do/say that?" for when they've joked around and you want to be sure whether it was a joke or not; "Is that what you want to do?" if you aren't sure whether the player is actually enthused; etc.), but it is almost always THE most powerful tool I have for shaping player behavior.

A character with 20 Strength must know their way around using that strength, at least to some extent, even if they lack formal training. It seems reasonable that they would be slightly more likely to "know their own strength" as it were; not guaranteed, but more likely. So you give them more benefit of the doubt, give them a wider window of opportunity to pull back from something questionable or to reevaluate their decisions regarding whatever stuff they're good at. This respects the stats in question, without "policing" their roleplay, at least in my opinion.

 

[Remathilis]

Agree. I once saw a reviewer (correctly) refer to D&D horror as "a werewolf in every wood and a vampire in every cupboard" which is apt. D&D horror has a lot of the superficial trappings of the genre, but handles the execution poorly, IMO.

[Edit: As another post in this thread noted, you can run a good horror game with D&D, but doing so is mostly independent of the rules. The rules just don't mechanically support horror very well.]

Essentially my point. D&D horror often feels like a Halloween overlay to normal D&D play. Yeah, you are in a spooky castle with a vampire, but it's not particularly different than being in a dungeon with a wizard except in aesthetics. Now I don't necessarily consider that bad, buts it's a weak spot that D&D horror really can't stretch beyond that except with a major amount of work.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I can't see any player wanting their character to have such a low INT, WIS or CHA to begin with. If I rolled a 3 for any of my character's mental attributes, I would find myself hoping that my DM would allow me to reroll something higher for any one of them.

It wasn't an example meant to reflect real characters. It was meant to show that the argument presented creates a clear logical contradiction, that extremely weak mental stats provide absolutely no inhibition whatsoever, while identical weak physical stats cause crippling problems the character cannot escape from.

I agree that few players would ever want such a thing. But the net result is that, to use a slightly more realistic character, someone with straight 7s in Int/Wis/Cha can be just as judicious and perceptive as a character with 20 Wis, just as sharp and incisive as a character with 20 Int, and just as compelling and convincing as a character with 20 Charisma, just so long as the player is able to do those things....while physical stats get no such leeway.

This creates a severe perverse incentive: highly intelligent players are incentivized to dump Intelligence (unless playing Wizard or Artificer, of course) because they can get everything they need from it by just being smart. Highly persuasive players are incentivized to dump Charisma. Etc. Just turn on your personal charm and you're golden. That's demonstrably unfair to players who aren't geniuses or silver-tongued etc.

Didn't one of the earlier editions of D&D have a table or tables that said, 'if you have an ability score of X, you were considered to be Y in RL'? Ex. If you had an 18 for DEX, you were the equivalent of an Olympic-level long distance runner."

I have a vague recollection of hearing of something like this, but honestly I don't put much stock in such things.

 

[Remathilis]

Actually that's exactly my point. Thanks

But does the fact Clue doesn't have a rule 0 to make it Risk actually make Clue bad, or just narrowly focused?

I would argue D&D is treated far too broadly. As in, people really think that Dungeons & Dragons should support a large style of different styles and do so equally well (this thread is a good example for that belief) rather than really nail down one particular style (high magic heroic fantasy). Hell, my OWN complaint is that D&D's focus (HMHF) doesn't mesh with horror is proof enough I'm probably asking too much from the game to support without rework.

 

[Remathilis]

I think there's room to argue that very early-edition D&D includes something that isn't quite "high magic heroic fantasy."

That is, while magic exists, a lot of it is inaccessible to players, and getting a wizard to the level where they do have it is rough. Not impossible, but rough. That lowers the magic a bit. I wouldn't call any version of D&D truly "low magic", except maybe 4e if you ban a lot of stuff. (E.g. PCs can only be Martial characters or specific types of Monk, using the Inherent Bonuses rules, no Ritual Caster or at least sharply limited access, etc.)

Heroic is...hard to apply to early-edition D&D in the manner it was intended to be played--but note "intended." A lot of people wanted to be Aragorn or the like, when the intent was Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or the like, morally-grey mercenaries fighting not for Good but for Civilization, because that's where they could spend their haul from trawling the murder-holes. GP=XP, among other things, strongly encouraged a selfish, mercenary playstyle even for groups that maintained high internal cohesion (which was far from guaranteed; remember that the Cleric was created specifically to take the Fighter-turned-vampire "Sir Fang" down a peg.)

Lower levels, which is where most play occurred, were more like weird dungeon gritty fantasy. Higher levels leaned more in the high-magic direction (especially once players had a high-level cleric or MU in their character stable), but I'm not really sure that Gygaxian D&D ever really was "heroic" fantasy in the way that term is usually used. It's much more like classical Greek heroism, which was about being mighty and uncowed, not so much about being benevolent; "virtue" in its ancient sense, literally "manhood/manliness" (from virtus, an adjective derived from the noun vir, "man"), not its modern, Christianized sense of unimpeachable righteousness and moral rectitude.

Just to define my terms:

High Magic just means that magic is generally accessible and present. PCs get spells and magic items fairly regularly and often can access more powerful magic through NPCs (for a cost, of course). Obviously, the speed of access changes edition to edition, but I don't think there is an edition by RAW where you don't end up awash in magic if you make sufficiently high enough level.

Heroic Fantasy doesn't necessarily mean the PCs are good, just that the game pushes you towards play that focuses on larger-than-life villains and amazing actions. Even the most cynical dungeon delves occasionally poke their heads out the ground to stop evil cults, eldritch beings, and demon invasions. And as D&D gets higher in level, higher HP, better access to abilities/spells/stuff allow them to do greater deeds. As you said, Heroic in the Greek sense vs. the modern sense.

 

[Theory of Games]

Okay...but that causes your argument a serious problem.

Because now there's a line you can cross, where too many changes make it a completely different game. Meaning, your clean "if X, then good, if not X, then bad" dichotomy cannot apply. You yourself have now accepted that there are degrees of change.

So that's now three problems, none of which you have actually addressed in any meaningful fashion:

1. You insist that this one axis is the only possible way that a game can be badly designed. I have given you a counter-example: a game that claims to be about combat, but which has no rules whatsoever for actually doing combat. You have not actually responded to this counter-example, except to blow it off.
2. Your standard has been that the game must explicitly say that you can change it--that it must have "Rule Zero"--and yet you then cite a number of games (chess, football, poker) which do not have "Rule Zero" or anything analogous to it. Which means you have now taken both sides of the issue: a game is good if and only if it explicitly includes "Rule Zero", but it is also good so long as it does not explicitly reject "Rule Zero", but then you cite other games that don't explicitly reject it but merely allude to it or imply it or whatever else. So what is it? Unless you actually settle on an actual position here, your argument looks like whatever you feel like pointing to at any given moment.
3. And now, as noted above, you admit that there are such things as degrees of change, and some of those degrees can be too much, so in fact you admit that there are games that are bad because you have to transform them into some other game entirely in order to actually play them. Which means that merely having explicit, official permission isn't even enough now, because the base game needs to be fitting enough as-is so that you don't have to completely rewrite it, thus producing a totally new game.

Far from being a clean, neat, simple standard, your standard has taken every possible position, including those that are directly self-contradictory; you have dismissed counter-examples with nothing more than "nuh-uh!" in slightly more words; and you have openly admitted that the simplicity of the standard evaporates even by your own analysis!

What, exactly, am I supposed to make of an argument that does such a thing? There's a reason I called it risible--other than repeatedly pointing out the problems, the only response I have left is to laugh!

As illogical as it may seem, nothing I've said invalidates my point: good games allow rules modification, bad games don't.

 

[Theory of Games]

But does the fact Clue doesn't have a rule 0 to make it Risk actually make Clue bad, or just narrowly focused?

I would argue D&D is treated far too broadly. As in, people really think that Dungeons & Dragons should support a large style of different styles and do so equally well (this thread is a good example for that belief) rather than really nail down one particular style (high magic heroic fantasy). Hell, my OWN complaint is that D&D's focus (HMHF) doesn't mesh with horror is proof enough I'm probably asking too much from the game to support without rework.

D&D HAS supported a large variety of playstyles for fifty years, which has contributed greatly to its longevity.

 

[Micah Sweet]

isn’t the blame that you do have to adjust the rules to get it to work in the first place?

If you need to adjust things then the game is not good at it on its own

I've always seen D&D as a framework upon which to build my homebrew. The challenge is always finding the version of that framework that works best with your preferences and those of your players.

 

[James Gasik]

I would argue that it is quite possible for a highly intelligent person to make mistakes. That is, Wisdom is associated with judgment, not Intelligence; the former is about soundness of judgment, while the latter is about speed and precision. But if one wishes to take this route, there's a simple mechanism: Give the player with high Intelligence (or Wisdom, or indeed any stat, not just mental!) more leeway with one of my absolute favorite questions as a DM:

"Are you sure you want to do that?"

It has other variations ("Did you actually do/say that?" for when they've joked around and you want to be sure whether it was a joke or not; "Is that what you want to do?" if you aren't sure whether the player is actually enthused; etc.), but it is almost always THE most powerful tool I have for shaping player behavior.

A character with 20 Strength must know their way around using that strength, at least to some extent, even if they lack formal training. It seems reasonable that they would be slightly more likely to "know their own strength" as it were; not guaranteed, but more likely. So you give them more benefit of the doubt, give them a wider window of opportunity to pull back from something questionable or to reevaluate their decisions regarding whatever stuff they're good at. This respects the stats in question, without "policing" their roleplay, at least in my opinion.

If it then becomes the DM's job to ensure that a high Int/Wis character has the opportunity to not make mistakes, then why don't we see more leeway with people playing Charisma higher than their own? Because, whether or not you've seen this in action, the socially awkward/high Charisma character can be talked over, ignored, or be expected to explain exactly how they are employing their ability to persuade, in a way that a high Strength character is not.

Nobody (I hope) is asking a high Strength character's player exactly how they are lifting heavy objects or grappling foes. But there is often a double standard with the non-physical ability scores. Which is made worse because while I know how much a character can lift with their Strength, there is no way for anyone to judge how intelligent someone with Int 16 is*, nor how persuasive someone with Charisma 17 is. In fact, the people who wish to police the roleplay of these ability scores don't even know where they would stand on this scale!

*There is the old Int x10 = IQ shorthand, but not only is that inaccurate because IQ has it's own problems as a metric, if Int 20 is the highest someone can have without magic, then it has to actually be equal to the smartest real world human, which is, I believe, something like 276.

 

[Theory of Games]

Back on topic:

Encounters and The Challenge Rating System

Back with old-school D&D there was no CR system. DMs were told,
"Most wandering monsters are the same level as the level of the dungeon (in other words, they have a number of hit dice equal to the number of the dungeon level)" - Basic rules, 1981

Look at that. Eezy-Peezy! No calculator required. Even with AD&D, a DM could throw a huge (but very young) dragon at a low-level party as an engaging, but not overwhelming, challenge.

But, the Rules Cyclopedia (1991) introduced optional Challenge Rating rules for some reason. With the release of D&D 3.0, a default CR system was unloaded upon unsuspecting GMs.

It was, and remains, a trap. It is a failed construct that has plagued D&D for the last 25 years and one needs only to look at online discussions of D&D 5e's CR rules to see how terrible the system is. 5e isn't a bad system, but the Challenge Rating rules need simplification.