D&D 5E (2014) 15 Petty Reasons I Won't Buy 5e

[Emerikol]

If nothing else - I, personally, run two different campaigns, in two different systems. I, personally, am living proof that buying one game does simply preclude buying a different game. Yes, my entertainment dollars are limited, but the situation is not so simple as, "Buy X and you'll never buy Y." That means the situation is not simple and straightforward competition. The ecosystem of hobbies and fandoms is more complicated than that.

I agree and this particular point should be emphasized. Still I don't think that this show there is no competition. Coke and Pepsi are good examples. Very few people who drink cola can honestly admit they drink only one or the other. There are a few though who can but not many. So Coke and Pespi view the market as every dollar spent on cola. If I spend exactly half my cola money on each then both companies want to get the other half.

In the rpg market, it is a bit different. Still, if I am really into a system, I will buy more supplements, more adventures, etc... than if I am not as into it. That is what I believe happened with 4e. A ton of people bought the core 3 but the system didn't really enthuse them or it didn't enthuse their friends and thus they played less of it and were less invested and bought less product over time. So I do believe Wotc and Paizo have a vested interest in increasing retention. Now one of Paizo's guerilla strategies is to produce many products that have cross system viability (like adventure paths) so that they can increase their share even amongst non-pathfinder players.

So I do agree with you that it is complicated. I disagree perhaps that competition and "defeating" opposing companies are not on their minds. Such an attitude though is within the context of what you have said. They have their markets and they want to grow and be strong. Anything blocking that progress is the "enemy" in a competitive sense.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I fell behind on this thread, so I don't know if anyone's still talking about it, but I would think that +x magic items make less of a difference to PC power than whether or not your players are optimizers.

The game has never given much in the way of advice like "If your players are a bunch of munchkins, you may want to add a few monsters, or make a few higher level. If they're terrible at making solid characters, go the other way." It assumes you can figure that out for yourself.

(There probably WILL be advice about it, though.)

 

[Halivar]

I fell behind on this thread, so I don't know if anyone's still talking about it, but I would think that +x magic items make less of a difference to PC power than whether or not your players are optimizers.

This has been true of ALL editions of D&D. CharOp > magic items.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

This has been true of ALL editions of D&D. CharOp > magic items.

True. +x Items in the hands of Optimizers would be the most powerful, but the DM can just not hand out that kind of item if the PCs are already OP. Or give 'em out and understand that NOW you've got to up the XP ante.

That should be pretty obvious. I'm not really seeing a problem with the +x items. There almost certainly will be a sidebar (in the least) talking about this sort of thing in the DMG.

 

[pemerton]

With regards to 3E and C&C not having dissociative mechanics; if you ever pop 3E, 4E, PF, and 5E in front of a group of 12 year olds who have never played a TTRPG before; they will point out all the completely dissociative mechanics that are involved in 3E / PF / C&C as well as 4E and 5E that make absolutely no sense in real life.

Got a truth bomb dropped on me earlier this week from my younger players; they astutely pointed out that most of us who believe 3E is simulationist probably started late 2E or with 3E, so our baseline perception of "simulation" is completely tilted towards 3E.

I started playing D&D in 1982 with B/X. I moved to AD&D in 1984. It was pretty obvious to me from the get-go that AD&D was not simulationinst. When someone showed me Rolemaster in 1990, I went out and bought a set straight away, and that was the system I spent most of my time GMing for the next 19 years.

3E was never appealing to me, because I saw it (and still see it) as an unstable mix of non-sim gonzo (attack and damage rules, the rules for initiative and action economy, a lot of the magic-use) and semi-sim gritty (the saving throw rules, the skill rules). I've always been puzzled by those who defend it on simulationist grounds, and my default assumption tends to be that those players are just not familiar with RM, HARP, RuneQuest and the other traditional simulationist fantasy RPGs that are out there.

4e, on the other hand, is appealing to me precisely because it takes all the features of AD&D and B/X that avoid sim to make gonzo possible (eg saving throws, hit points, abstract positioning and action economy) but rebuilds them from the ground up to make an excellent, non-sim, heroic fantasy RPG.

This has been true of ALL editions of D&D. CharOp > magic items.

I'm not sure this is true for AD&D or B/X fighters. There isn't really optimisation of a fighter. (For MUs, of course, optimisation = spell selection and this generally does trump magic items. Though sensible use of scrolls and wands is also an important part of MU play.)

 

[pemerton]

They won't complain about magic items per level, because I'll give them what the book expects. Just like they didn't complain when I gave them proper gold/level in 3e.

Huh? I thought 5e didn't have expectations about money or magic.

when I'm setting encounters they are meant to succeed at, I consider what they can reasonably handle and I build towards what I want the outcome to be: easy success, challenging success, or pyrrhic victory (there are more "settings" than that on the dial, but that suffices). If it looks like things aren't developing the way I planned I either let it roll or cheat. Whichever feels like the better option at the time.

This sounds to me like you're trying to build to guidelines, but the guidelines aren't very reliable. Hence the need to cheat from time to time.

With 3e though (and more importantly the internets) it seemed more and more DMs were on about "encounter balance" and "rules expectations".

<snip>

DMs didn't just design encounters to wipe the PCs out, or the like, they had expectations about PC levels and numbers, and built encounters to certain difficulties accordingly.

That's not "balance" though, that's "building to what you want".

"Building to what you want" is exactly what I mean when I talk about encounter-building guidelines, and I've never encountered a poster who both (i) wanted such guidelines, and (ii) didn't mean the same thing as I mean. The only people I've ever encounter who use "encounter guidelines" to mean "building every encounter to party level" are those who are saying they don't want such guidelines.

those guidelines, as well-intended as they have been, also bring unintended consequences that affect the game. If the GM deviates from them on the low or difficult side and the players know of them, that breeds dissatisfaction.

I don't really follow this. The guidelines, in 4e at least, allow you in a reliable way to calculate how difficult an encounter will be, and also other things like how its pacing will work (eg there are guidelines advising on the likely effect of using lots of soldiers, lots of sticky terrain, etc).

The closest the game gets to suggesting actual encounter mix is on p 104 of the DMG:

For a group of nine encounters, here’s how they might be broken down.

ENCOUNTER DIFFICULTY

Level of Encounter   Number of Encounters
Level – 1             1 encounter
Level + 0             3 encounters, 1 major quest
Level + 1             3 encounters
Level + 3             1 encounter

That's not anything like a rule. It's not even a guideline. It's a suggestion. And notice that it has no suggestion for an encounter of party level +4, yet the DMG expressly contemplates the occurrence of such encounters: on p 123, on the section on tracking and rewarding milestones, it states that:

f the characters overcome an encounter that’s really hard, you can count it as two encounters, so they reach a milestone right away. An encounter that’s four or more levels higher than the characters should count as two encounters.​

What 4e offers is not terrific guidance on mixing encounter difficulties, which is fairly basic stuff. It offers reliable tools for measuring the difficulty of encounters, hence enabling the GM to build to what s/he wants. Having become used to this in 4e, the absence of it in another RPG would, for me, count as a reason against GMing that RPG.

I've run GURPS for 20+ years, and there is nothing even remotely like "a way to build combat/scene/encounter/whatzits in a balanced way".

I ran Rolemaster for 19 years and it similarly lacks any sort of encounter-building guidelines. Their existence in 4e was one big attraction for me.

In AD&D I tended to find it fairly hard to build to desired difficulty, in part because the maths is unpredicatable and in part because so many abilities (Petrification, Energy Drain etc) are so swingy.

Rolemaster has fewer swingy abilities (though it still has some, including melee combat in many cases!), but its maths is very unpredicatable, especially because of open-ended rolls and the prevalence of crit tables.

In 4e can build to the desired difficulty in a reliable way, without having to cheat, because the maths is predictable and abilities are not all that swingy (yet, at least in my experience, still interesting and engaging in play).

 

[evileeyore]

This sounds to me like you're trying to build to guidelines, but the guidelines aren't very reliable.

Nope. I read the 3e guidelines once and then never bothered to pay them head ever again (same with 4e).

When I ran 4e I routinely did things one of my players jokingly called "@#^$#@& CHEATING", stuff like the endless wave of minionized Zombies that started at 1/2 the party size that kept increasing and decreasing at a rate the players didn't figure out (it was a random number of zombies that was impacted by how "noisy" they'd been and whether the Cleric and Paladin used "divine" abilities). That encoutner ended with one party member "down" everyone (except the Rogue) almost down, and everyone having expended considerable non-renewable resources. it was also the only encounter the group occasionally reminisced about as "Man, that one was tough but epic".

Hence the need to cheat from time to time.

No, that comes from "I don't use guidelines" and "I'm used to running other games". In GURPS the "swingy" math is there... but it (like Rolemaster) is a bit less swingy (though players can easily have long runs of bad luck or explode with awesome luck - it can happen).

I ran Rolemaster for 19 years and it similarly lacks any sort of encounter-building guidelines. Their existence in 4e was one big attraction for me.

It's not a thing I even consider. It's cool that other people like it or need it, I'm not impacted by that. What I'm arguing against, in this thread, is the perception that the devs have to cater to every taste when it comes to writing said guidelines.

 

[pemerton]

I read the 3e guidelines once and then never bothered to pay them head ever again (same with 4e).

What guidelines are you referring to?

Guidelines for calculating encounter difficulty (which, given that you said upthread that you build to difficulty, I would have thought you might find useful)?

Or guidelines for encounter mix (which aren't a part of 4e, or any edition prior to 3E, but I gather are a part of 3E)?

No one in this thread is saying that s/he wants guidlines for encounter mix. But people in this thread are saying they find guidelines for measuring encounter difficulty useful, because it then helps build to difficulty. It was the lack of such guidelines in Rolemaster that increasingly frustrated me - despite 19 years, hundreds of sessions and thousands of hours of GMing, it remained mostly guesswork to determine whether an encounter would be easy or hard for the players to tackle.

 

[evileeyore]

What guidelines are you referring to?

Guidelines for calculating encounter difficulty (which, given that you said upthread that you build to difficulty, I would have thought you might find useful)?

The one in the 3e DMG. It wasn't useful because it was based on the party "having a certain amount of resources" which the game I ran wasn't founded on... because I largely ignored that section of the DMG.

Honestly... I largely ignored the 3e DMG entirely, it had almost nothing I required.


When I ran 4e the DMG was slightly more useful, I read it once, gathered from it the basics of building traps and "using terrain" and tossed it aside too. Though it got some use because we used magic items in that campaign (the 3e game was a Sword and Sandal theme).

...it remained mostly guesswork to determine whether an encounter would be easy or hard for the players to tackle.

Wasn't very hard for me. I knew what the party was capable of, I chose enemies based on those capabilities that I thought either (a) made the combat interesting or (b) should be there based on dreaded versimilitude.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

"Building to what you want" is exactly what I mean when I talk about encounter-building guidelines, and I've never encountered a poster who both (i) wanted such guidelines, and (ii) didn't mean the same thing as I mean. The only people I've ever encounter who use "encounter guidelines" to mean "building every encounter to party level" are those who are saying they don't want such guidelines.

Yeah, the "I don't want the DMG telling me to build to party level!" sentiment is always either a misconception (assuming the benefit of the doubt) or a strawman (assuming the worst) argument IMO. Maybe some gamers somewhere actually think that way due to poor reading comprehension, but nobody who spends time reading and posting on gamer forums has that problem, because there are too many of us who can point out "That's not what the DMG actually says. The encounter chapter is just a set of guidelines for building the encounters you want."