D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

Also I'd like to comment how rude it is to suggest that my view and preference came because WotC told me to; I was already deriding what few OSR elements there was in 5e even before OGL came into view.

GobHag said:

I absolutely do not want my CoolStuff to be by the GM's beneficence, using and getting those CoolStuff is the very reason I play the system in the 1st place! Especially if that 'super common' comes from the GM already being experienced and knowledgeable! Maybe we should all just burn every rule and book that has ever been made and replace them all with 'Trust your GM' if this is what you consider a good thing!

If so many people decided to cushion the lethality maybe the lethality is the problem, and that leaving the problem as is to give DMs more power is just pure GM supremacist... Which is fine of course, I'm a player supremacist.

So yes, MY character and certainly not Your world

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Entitlement much? PCs always had cool powers and abilities built into the base classes/kits//PrCs/etc. I was talking about how the old way provided the GM with room to offer players additional CoolStuff in exchange for willingly collaborating with the GM who was attempting to collaborate with all of the players individuall. Your outrage over the GM having more authority to say no & expect PCs to be adapted than any one player has over the GM is tripping over it's own entitlement by ignoring the fact that the GM needs to do that with 3-5 players in a typical group.

The outrage in your post over the mere idea of willingly collaborating with the gm sounds nice in theory and probably goes over well with a focus group, but you ignore how that collaboration was a mutual dance of give and take where both sides had power. You are looking at it as a narrow zero sum thing, unfortunately the design of 5e encourages looking at it that way because that collaboration very much is now one where the gm has nothing to offer and players know they need nothing the GM can give to make them more cool. Despite a few claims throughout this thread, there was a certain level of fairness and bar of survivability that needed to be met or players would find a differentb GM. Both sides of the collaboration knew that and it is still true, 5e just removed the ability for the gm to participate.

tetrasodium said:

need nothing the GM can give to make them more cool.

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Yes, this is good. Well in an ideal world at least--5e clearly hasn't entirely crossed that line yet seeing Martials--but in my view, there is now a more balanced power dynamic between Players and GMs through a combination of culture and rules. Also there are now games out there where GMs have much less power to being non-existent of course it'd seep into DnD.

Also I don't consider this era to be the worst in regards to player power when 3.5 existed with all it's combinatorial glory.

GobHag said:

I absolutely do not want my CoolStuff to be by the GM's beneficence, using and getting those CoolStuff is the very reason I play the system in the 1st place! Especially if that 'super common' comes from the GM already being experienced and knowledgeable! Maybe we should all just burn every rule and book that has ever been made and replace them all with 'Trust your GM' if this is what you consider a good thing!

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It also assumes that the DM was willing to provide that benevolence. A DM was certainly under not obligation to provide cool stuff, and it is my experience that more often than not the opposite was true and the DM used the rules to bludgeon players into submission rather than provide carrots for good behavior.

I again point to settings like 2e Ravenloft where a combination of bannings (no paladins druids or bards native), mechanics (turn undead is weakened, spells nerfed), setting (demihumans are feared, good characters are hunted) and morality mechanics that requires DM adjudication (stealing from a bad guy is still stealing.That's a powers check!) in the hands of a bad DM makes "weekend in hell" more appropriate than you think.

Yeah I much rather the game come with the expectation players get X and DMs get Y rather than the DM be expected to bargain for your power.

Remathilis said:

It also assumes that the DM was willing to provide that benevolence. A DM was certainly under not obligation to provide cool stuff, and it is my experience that more often than not the opposite was true and the DM used the rules to bludgeon players into submission rather than provide carrots for good behavior.

I again point to settings like 2e Ravenloft where a combination of bannings (no paladins druids or bards native), mechanics (turn undead is weakened, spells nerfed), setting (demihumans are feared, good characters are hunted) and morality mechanics that requires DM adjudication (stealing from a bad guy is still stealing.That's a powers check!) in the hands of a bad DM makes "weekend in hell" more appropriate than you think.

Yeah I much rather the game come with the expectation players get X and DMs get Y rather than the DM be expected to bargain for your power.

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Unfortunately the opposite has become true, going off of one of the previous comments in this thread. Players bludgeon DMs into submission. “It’s MY character, not YOUR world.” And this is supposed to be a collaborative game. That just reeks of the player entitlement that’s become an issue in the culture.

DMing now is an act of creativity, collaboration, and although some do it for pay, most don’t. I don’t give up hours and hours of my time, preparing a game for 4-6 players, to be bludgeoned by the same amount of entitled players telling me how I need to cater to their each and every whim. It’d be extraordinarily selfish on their part.

I guarantee you that Critical Role has a tremendous amount of collaboration going on behind the scenes for session zero, the months leading up to it, etc., that doesn’t get revealed to viewers at all and they just see “ooh weird concept I’m gonna play that in my next D&D game” without any understanding of what happened behind the scenes to bring it to fruition.

I’m so far from an antagonistic/adversarial DM (perhaps because I only grew up in the very tail end of that era) though I’ll play the heel, but I also want the tools (beyond just monsters) to challenge both the players and the characters.

For instance, although the Dark Powers checks may be silly, I recently played The Count, The Castle, & The Curse. The way it evokes dread, fear, and stress in the players is through what’s called the stress die, which modifies the DCs based on what it’s currently set to, which goes up and down based on the players’ actions. I’ve never seen any other fear/frightened mechanic in D&D evoke so much stress in my players, and they all loved it.

Xenolith234 said:

Unfortunately the opposite has become true, going off of one of the previous comments in this thread. Players bludgeon DMs into submission. “It’s MY character, not YOUR world.” And this is supposed to be a collaborative game. That just reeks of the player entitlement that’s become an issue in the culture.

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Unfortunately also many DMs are bad Worldbuilders for RPGs.

I always go "For everything you ban, you ought to add something to entice".

A big problem with settings since 2e is that many of the nonkitchen sink ones don't have enough to excite every type of player.
Ultranarrow settings are best as their own RPGs as people come to the table with the same desires of what will be there and what types and kinds of PCs are allowed.

And then there is the fact that some players and DMS shouldn't really be playing together. Ban or nerf all casters and Johnny ComplexPC might not be a great fit.

Minigiant said:

Unfortunately also many DMs are bad Worldbuilders for RPGs.

I always go "For everything you ban, you ought to add something to entice".

A big problem with settings since 2e is that many of the nonkitchen sink ones don't have enough to excite every type of player.
Ultranarrow settings are best as their own RPGs as people come to the table with the same desires of what will be there and what types and kinds of PCs are allowed.

And then there is the fact that some players and DMS shouldn't really be playing together. Ban or nerf all casters and Johnny ComplexPC might not be a great fit.

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I can see that - although I have a ban/restriction/modification list for up upcoming campaign, I’m adding so much 3rd party content that far skews in the opposite direction.

Xenolith234 said:

Unfortunately the opposite has become true, going off of one of the previous comments in this thread. Players bludgeon DMs into submission. “It’s MY character, not YOUR world.” And this is supposed to be a collaborative game. That just reeks of the player entitlement that’s become an issue in the culture.

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Yeah, it's the mirror to DM entitlement and neither should be part of the larger culture, but I feel a small part of it is a course correction from decades of the DMs Master Plan trumping player autonomy.

I agree with most of your post except this bit:

Minigiant said:

Ultranarrow settings are best as their own RPGs as people come to the table with the same desires of what will be there and what types and kinds of PCs are allowed.

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I think the beauty of a narrow setting can be that it strongly pushes a game you're familiar with in new, different, interesting directions without it being a completely new RPG.

That is actually what I wish WotC had done and used settings as a method to highlight the modularity of 5e by making each setting have a unique set of rules / guidelines that go with it.