D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Lanefan]

I have heard it repeated with 100% seriousness--or, at least, zero effort to communicate joviality--multiple times on this forum, to say nothing of hearing it elsewhere.

"It's a joke" is one of the worst excuses for perpetuating incorrect or harmful things.

It's not incorrect.

Compromise IME is just a means of punting the root problem down the road. It rarely if ever actually solves anything.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Compromise IME is just a means of punting the root problem down the road. It rarely if ever actually solves anything.

I don't think that's remotely true, all of human civilization is based on compromises. Maybe some of them are harder to see than others due to classic "Fish don't know what water is" stuff but compromises are fundamental to living in a society. The only way to operate without compromise is to be a hermit, essentially. The same is true with RPG rules, for the most part. Virtually all of them are compromises, most systems make compromises.

I do think people should stop acting as if Larry David making a joke is fundamental philosophical truth though!

 

[Kromanjon]

I mean it's actually both.

It's incorrect for the reasons I gave. "Compromise" where everyone is actively unhappy about it directly leads to horrible things. It isn't "compromise" in anything but technicality; to assert that that is ONLY and ALWAYS what compromise is is flatly wrong.

It's harmful because it teaches people: don't compromise. You'll never be happy with a compromise, you'll always hate it, so...don't! Never compromise! Only accept whatever would make you actually happy.

Which leads to everyone being even more aggressive and treating negotiation and understanding as pointless drivel that just makes everything worse for everyone.

It is not though. I’ll put the quote here again to remind myself.

“A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied”​

― Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Seventh

What this means is that a good compromise demand that both parties give some ground. This should mean a measure of dissatisfaction but since dissatisfaction isn’t an on/off switch this fine. Also if both parties can see that the other has had to make some sort of sacrifice it alleviates some of that dissatisfaction. If only one party is dissatisfied it is a bad compromise and will lead to those “horrible things” of which you speak.

What this saying teaches then is that you should always seek mutual compromises, give and take, because anything else would be a bad compromise. It is a saying about reaching a middle ground to put an end to needless conflict.

 

[FrozenNorth]

And that can work, provided you don't have an issue with superhero PCs (which they remain in principle regardless of high you crank the numbers in modern official D&D). But what if that is a problem for you?

Then you aren’t responding to the argument, you are inventing a new one.

The comment that touched off the reponse, and that you agreed with was:

It's far FAR easier on the DM to softball a brutal game than to brutal up a softball game.

It IS easier to up the challenge in an « easy » game than to downgrade the challenge in a « hard » game, particularly for the experienced DMs that are more likely to have players that build powerful characters.

What you are saying is that a GM can increase the difficulty, they just don’t want to because they dismiss powerful PCs as « superheroes », even if they exist in a world where all creatures are powerful.

Which naturally begs the question: if the GM’s players enjoy playing powerful characters to the point that the players resist efforts to rein in their characters, why is GM trying to sell them on a game that they clearly don’t want to play?

When a GM sells a game the players don’t want to play, it falls apart. For instance, in a game I was a player in, one of the principal reasons the game fell apart was that the GM failed to identify what the players enjoyed in RPGs. The GM thought the characters would principally be motivated by greed and violence, and was completely taken aback when the party refused to kill people other than in the defense of innocents.

 

[Lanefan]

Even worse then. You've just raised the DM's burden--already THE single most enormous hump for any group wanting to play D&D, the eternal desert of "not enough DMs"--without in any way altering the final result.

Better to raise the burden on just one person (whose job it is to take on said burden anyway) than on everyone.

And splitting out the matrices does alter the final result.

This isn't a question of "is X edition more complex, overall, than Y edition?" This is a simple direct comparison of two things which--explicitly!--do EXACTLY the same thing. What is the value gained by having these 8 (good Lord almighty...) save categories, which are now a burden on every DM, when even 5e's unnecessary 6-stat-saves system is dramatically easier and produces identical results?

I've always felt saves should be at least somewhat based on what you're saving against, with different classes more or less resistant to different things. Saves vs poison should be different than saves vs magic or saves vs being turned to stone, and one can fine-tune some class balance if one uses a full matrix rather than just flat bonuses. In 1e, one of the things Fighters have going for them is that while their saves against most things are awful at low level, by high level they're often the best: their saves increase at a much faster rate than other classes, for most things.

A big reason behind my splitting out poison into its own matrix, for example, was I wanted Thief types to be better at saving against it (in the fiction, explained by their training with icky substances) but wanted it more fine-tuned than just giving them a flat bonus.

The burden on me-as-DM during play is fairly trivial - I look at a chart that's nailed to the back of my DM screen. Given as I'd be doing that anyway, there's no change to said burden by adding more matrices.

 

[Lanefan]

Of course.

If you can't get your players bought in, how is that the fault of the system in any way?

Do not blame the rules for your players being uninterested in playing the kind of game you're offering to run.

It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools....for the fact that customers don't want what he's selling.

I was in retail my whole career and believe me, you can only put so much lipstick on a pig before you have to just admit it's a pig and stop promoting it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What other answer is there? The rules aren't going to change. I can't change anyone else's opinion. I've bounced off other games or concepts, sometimes I was able to find advice or figure out resolutions for myself, sometimes I just had to look for alternatives.

But it starts with accepting what I can change and what I cannot. I can adjust my approach, I can adjust my attitude, I can find some alternative to modify the situation or I can just find something else. I don't see the point of complaining about something if I'm not willing to do one of those things.

Personally I don't have a superhero issue even if characters have more options than they did in the TSR days. If I did, I'd play something else. What other option is there?

My answer is changing the rules of the game, either by using a different base, adding 3pp support, or making my own. It certainly isn't, "Get over it. There's nothing you can do. Pretend this doesn't bother you so your players get what they want".

 

[FrozenNorth]

Ah, yes, the "DM has infinite dragons" argument. As a near-forever DM frankly I don't like to have to use harder creatures to challenge PCs who are OP for the level of creatures the game design means they should be facing.

What’s the counterargument then?

@Lanefan made a bald-faced claim that was also wrong and didn’t provide any evidence for it.

And that's fine!

It's far FAR easier on the DM to softball a brutal game than to brutal up a softball game.

I disputed the claim and justified my reasoning: the evidence of high-level monsters and challenges means that it is possible to increase the challenge of a campaign by substituting greater challenges. I also added that the DMs that tend to have more players with more experience in system mastery also tend to be more experienced and better situated to knowledgeably ramp up the challenges.

You and @Micah Sweet may not like the option, but it exists. Meanwhile no one has offered any justification for why it would be HARDER to reduce the challenge.

In my current game, now that the Rune Knight has retired, another player commented "Good, now you can stop ramping up the encounters to challenge him and the rest of us can take a breath!" (near verbatim). His PC is a Rogue (Arcane Trickster) / Wizard (War Magic) with about half the HP the Rune Knight had, and I often had encounters where one or more of the other PCs would be down, or well under half-HP, and the Rune Knight would be still ready for the next bout.

This seems like an issue concerning a power imbalance between classes, and believe me, I am sympathetic. But this is a different issue.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then you aren’t responding to the argument, you are inventing a new one.

The comment that touched off the reponse, and that you agreed with was:

It IS easy to up the challenge in an « easy » game than to downgrade the challenge in a « hard » game, particularly for the experienced DMs that are more likely to have players that build powerful characters.

What you are saying is that a GM can increase the difficulty, they just don’t want to because they dismiss powerful PCs as « superheroes », even if they exist in a world where all creatures are powerful.

Which naturally begs the question: if the GM’s players enjoy playing powerful characters to the point that the players resist efforts to rein in their characters, why is GM trying to sell them on a game that they clearly don’t want to play?

When a GM sells a game the players don’t want to play, it falls apart. For instance, in a game I was a player in, one of the principal reasons the game fell apart was that the GM failed to identify what the players enjoyed in RPGs. The GM thought the characters would principally be motivated by greed and violence, and was completely taken aback when the party refused to kill people other than in the defense of innocents.

IMO This is why some GMs end up running games they don't like and get burned out. The players don't want to compromise (and the culture tells them they shouldn't have to), and the GM gets tired of enabling play he doesn't care for.

 

[Lanefan]

I considered how actual access to spells was based on finding them (unless you were a cleric). I didn't want to muddy up the point with technicalities. The rules did state you gained a free spell of a new spell level when you became able to cast that level, but like all rules of the era, it was often missed or ignored.

Huh. We ignored a lot of rules, but not that one.

It makes sense in the fiction too. Training to level was hard-coded in 1e; you're being trained into a new spell level and the trainer says "Here's one you can practice on".

That said, I think the odds that a magic user would have access to 3rd or 4th level spell slots but have no 3rd or 4th level spells was very rare.

Indeed.