D&D General 5e System Redesign through New Classes and Setting. A Thought Experiment.

[Steampunkette]

The game is designed to emulate the prose. The prose is important to the game design. It’s far from irrelevant.

If the game was designed to emulate the prose, one player could take down a dragon, solo. And also the dragon would be his son. Because he banged the hot mom of the twisted monster he killed.

That is not the case.

The game is meant to play into the feel of fantasy stories, for sure. But not to emulate them in a particularly close way.

It's also a group game, which you didn't often see in fantasy stories before the advent of D&D. You typically had one protagonist, not four capable of covering different activities. SOMETIMES you'd get a party, but mostly it was just the Beowulf or Conan or whomever.

 

[Zardnaar]

If the game was designed to emulate the prose, one player could take down a dragon, solo. And also the dragon would be his son. Because he banged the hot mom of the twisted monster he killed.

That is not the case.

The game is meant to play into the feel of fantasy stories, for sure. But not to emulate them in a particularly close way.

It's also a group game, which you didn't often see in fantasy stories before the advent of D&D. You typically had one protagonist, not four capable of covering different activities. SOMETIMES you'd get a party, but mostly it was just the Beowulf or Conan or whomever.

I've seen fighters solo dragons. 2E though.

 

[Remathilis]

As have I in 2e. Which is why I can't help but roll my eyes when people talk about about OS Lethality. It's lethal for maybe four levels and then PCs build up enough clout that not every fight is a fail state. By 10+ level, they only fear archfiends and Gods.

 

[Lanefan]

I don’t really care what it did at gencon, for one that might have been too early for it, for another whether I like a game or not is not tied to how well it does there

Fair enough, but these big-tent conventions do serve as a pretty good bellwether for how popular a game is likely to be or become; and - like it or not - popularity leads directly to a) sales and b) a larger player base.

And sales then lead to the publisher a) surviving and b) being more keen on putting out supplements and other materials for the game and-or supporting it in general. Meanwhile the larger player base enhances your chances of finding others interested in playing or running said game.

 

[Lanefan]

I didn't say the game is "Bad".

I said the game is inherently imbalanced because the original designers didn't take into account the potency of novas and the 5 minute adventuring day.

Based on Mike Mearls, one of the people who designed the game in the first place, openly admitting that they'd overestimated how many rounds of combat players would be in during the day by a factor of 5.

There's at least two ways to fix this problem. Either inflate the hell out of NPC HP in order to make them survive long enough for the nova to be impactful but not end the encounter right away. This has the side-effects of both destroying CR calculations, and encouraging a long rest before every single encounter even harder.

I'm suggesting a different way that addresses the issue, directly. One that would make CR calculations actually -work- as they've been balanced.

Better idea: throw out the whole notion of CR.

There's just too many variables that the designers can't account for to allow any such system to work well enough to bother with:

--- party size; not every table plays with 4 or 5 character parties at exactly one character per player; some have parties of 2 or 3, others run parties of 6 or 8 plus henches and hirelings
--- party composition; a well-rounded party can take on a lot more than can an all-Rogue or all-Wizard party
--- optimization levels and-or acceptance at the table
--- amount of, and specific details of, magic items owned and-or being used by the party at the time
--- specific environment and terrain features present when the party meets the monster (a dragon in a confined space e.g. a cave will present much less challenge than it would outdoors where it can fly)
--- synergies or conflicts between monster abilities and-or environment (a monster that breathes cold will be far less effective in a very cold environment as the PCs will have already taken precautions against cold)
--- how increasing or decreasing the number of monsters changes things (4 dumb Orcs working together present very little more challenge than does a single dumb Orc, but 4 smart Dragons working together present a vastly greater challenge than would a single Dragon or even 4 Dragons one at a time)
--- dice.

Note that all of this has been true ever since D&D was invented, it's not just a 5e thing. 1e vaguely grouped monsters into levels, and even that didn't provide much if any guidance as to just how much of a challenge a given monster would represent right here, right now to the party facing it.

 

[Lanefan]

Nether of those are the correct reasons.

1) common sense aversion to a death spiral. No one goes into danger when they are exhausted - even if there is time pressure, going to your death ain’t going to help anyone. And this has always been the case since before 1st edition. You leave the dungeon and return to town when resources are low, because carrying on would be stupid.

2) Narrative rhythm. Fantasy heroes fight big monsters and powerful villains. They are not threatened by mooks and minions. Beowulf killed Grendel, Mummy, and a Dragon (but not all on the same day). It’s only the boss fights that matter, and that’s the way it should be.

3) continuous fights of similar difficulty that do not individually threaten the party are BORING. Combat should needs to be spread out between other kinds of activities, and that generally means across days or weeks. And the difficulty needs to be unpredictable, so every fight might be a life or death struggle so far as the players know.

Completely agree with 1.

Don't care about 2. I'm not trying to emulate "fantasy heroes"; instead I'd rather have it that even the most minor of combats is at best going to whittle down some resources and at worst could have long-lasting impacts. Boss fights are very much not the only ones that matter (and it can be a refreshing change of pace to have an adventure where there isn't a 'boss').

As for 3, yes lots of similar-difficulty fights can be boring, but if combat-resource attrition (which 5e does its best to ignore) is to be at all relevant this is really the only way to do it. Agree that the difficulty needs to be unpredictable; I'd go a step further and say that it also often needs to be unassessable until after the battle has begun.

 

[Zardnaar]

As have I in 2e. Which is why I can't help but roll my eyes when people talk about about OS Lethality. It's lethal for maybe four levels and then PCs build up enough clout that not every fight is a fail state. By 10+ level, they only fear archfiends and Gods.

Save or dies and energy drain are still threatening. I've seen level 15 2E fighters just outright die 1st room traps. In printed adventures.

 

[Lanefan]

Higher complexity.

Healing surges are simpler, because they don’t require any one character to hoard a resources to the benefit of the whole party, because the resource is in each character’s resource pool.

You just take a few minutes between scenes, mark off whatever resources are needed, and then move on.

Healing surges (or hit dice-based healing, same idea) add a new thing that every player has to track along with hit points, no matter what character they're playing. That's outright more complex than just the healer's player having to track remaining spells, which he'd still have to do anyway even if he never cast a cure spell.

Healing surges also add a whole new layer of mechanics - and thus, complexity - to healing in general.

 

[Lanefan]

If the game was designed to emulate the prose, one player could take down a dragon, solo. And also the dragon would be his son. Because he banged the hot mom of the twisted monster he killed.

That is not the case.

The game is meant to play into the feel of fantasy stories, for sure. But not to emulate them in a particularly close way.

It's also a group game, which you didn't often see in fantasy stories before the advent of D&D. You typically had one protagonist, not four capable of covering different activities. SOMETIMES you'd get a party, but mostly it was just the Beowulf or Conan or whomever.

That's what made The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings so unusual (and so good!) - they were adventuring parties, not just single heroes.

 

[Zardnaar]

Healing surges (or hit dice-based healing, same idea) add a new thing that every player has to track along with hit points, no matter what character they're playing. That's outright more complex than just the healer's player having to track remaining spells, which he'd still have to do anyway even if he never cast a cure spell.

Healing surges also add a whole new layer of mechanics - and thus, complexity - to healing in general.

And math. Players like rolling dice though do if you revived the idea i would use 5E version but more surges.

If you eant simple D&D its B/X or BECMI or better yet ascending AC clone.