D&D General 5.5 and making the game easier for players and harder for DMs

[Reynard]

Also, VTT takes a lot of the load off the GM and players allowing for more of these options to shine. What point is too much and must have a computer is something to think about. However, a difficult question to answer as it seems to vary wildly amongst players.

VTTs create other kinds of load, though.

 

[Minigiant]

But really.

Is it that much more work?

Martials could shove, knockdown, and help before.

They just can deal damage while doing it.

Is the problem that more martials will actually shove now?

 

[Composer99]

On Challenging PCs...
I'm not terribly impressed by the assertion that "struggle makes the victory sweeter" when it comes to leisure time activities. Waiting for an hour in the line at the roller coaster doesn't make it more fun and enjoyable when you finally get on it. Suffice to say such a thing can be true for some and not true for others.

If anything I'm more inclined to agree with DMs posting here saying that more robust and harder-to-kill PCs are easier to challenge in combat, precisely because you can run things more no-holds-barred. That certainly tracks with my experience: in the game for adult players I wrapped up late last year, I ran large encounters with juiced-up numbers of enemies (and a few monsters from EN Publishing's Level Up!) in order to put the PCs through their paces, holding nothing back. It was great!

By contrast, the kids I'm running a game for at the moment are still figuring their way. The party druid's primary combat shtick is to cast shillelagh and get into melee. I can't recall the last time he's cast a levelled spell other than cure wounds in months, and he's hardly made any use of wild shape to scout or... do anything, really. Except for the party barbarian, who has a low bar to clear for effectiveness in combat - and yet who has still chosen an anti-synergistic primal path relative to his preferred fighting style! - the party is hard-pressed to overcome even simple combat challenges. Out-of-combat, they're not very good at taking the initiative. A few are only just finding their feet now with creative applications of their abilities outside of the Attack action. Any "real" challenge would tear the party up like a paper bag.

I could "teach some lessons" by killing characters off, but I'm not really interested. We aren't playing a Darkest-Dungeon-style dungeon crawler, after all.

As a bit of a follow-up/aside: most cinema-goers would, I think, agree that, say, Spider-Man: No Way Home was an excellent film, despite the fact that there was no genuine risk that Tom Holland's Spider-Man would die. (And indeed, the same is true for most celebrated action-adventure films.) That's because the questions the film is interested in asking don't require that kind of risk to challenge the protagonists.

In a similar vein, we hardly need to threaten the player characters with death to challenge them, provided the challenges are coming out of the players' conception for them and how they interact with the game world. The kinds of questions I refer to in the thread about resource management...

Instead, we're interested in questions such as:

• "What does your character want, and what price are they willing to pay to get it?"
• "How will your character choose between competing demands on their attention?"
• "What does the aggregate of your character's choices say about your character, who they are, and what they value?"
• "What does your character fear, and what are they willing to exchange, give up, or sacrifice to avoid or flee from it? Or are they willing to confront it, and what price will they pay to overcome it?"
• "Who is your character now, compared to ten or twenty sessions ago?"

I'm sure one can think of other questions along this vein.

are, in fact, challenges in their own way, much in the same way the choices Tom Holland's Spider-Man faces in Spider-Man: No Way Home are challenges not to his life, but to his character. These are the kinds of questions I'm interested in presenting to the player characters in the kids' game.

On Harder Game State Tracking
I'm much more inclined to be sympathetic to this concern! I recall it was hard work running some of the big set pieces in the game I wrapped up. I play a 4e game weekly, and while I'm enjoying it, it's quite apparent there's a lot to keep track of, especially now we're playing in paragon levels. If the 2024 release adds a lot of game state complexity, it can be quite a burden on DMs.

I like 4e-style monster design, and would say it would be to the good for 2024 MM monsters to adopt more of that approach as has been done with MotMM, with fewer boring sacks of hit points and more foisting of moment-to-moment tactical decisions on players. More interesting monsters to run are... well, more interesting and more fun! But that also increases the cognitive load on DMs.

If the 2024 revisions can offer any relief here, it would be better guidance on how to curate non-combat or exploration or social aspects of the game to reduce the importance of combat in the game. The less you need to turn to combat (which is the rules-heaviest part of play after all), the less cognitive overhead moment-to-moment.

 

[KYRON45]

I don’t see how PCs being more powerful and more survivable makes the DMs job harder. The DM’s job isn’t to kill the PCs.

Then why do PCs have hit points?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Except the complete lack of challenge, randomness, surprise, conflict, and drama sure. “Yay, I win again” lacks everything meaningful from both games and stories.

You apparently do not do improvisation. If you think improvisors make their scenes that easy for themselves, I can assure you, you are sorely mistaken, LOL. There's nothing more enjoyable than lobbing out offers to your scene partners that make them have to scramble to keep up. And in this particular case... you think the DM will just hand things to the players on a silver platter? Heh heh... no fricking way.

DMs know when players are trying to game the system to make things simple for themselves. So even if you skip the dice and just had the DM make arbitrary decisions on whether things succeed or fail based on dramatic tension and narrative conceit... believe me the PCs would still find themselves up the creek without a paddle. And in fact... they'd probably find themselves in even more hot water if the DM could just make narrative choices and not need to rely on dice at all, rather than the other way around.

 

[DarkCrisis]

And at the same time, they nerfed the summon spell specifically to make it easier for the DM.

The whole argument is not very sound.

Having classes with less outliers up and down and monsters that hit their challenge rating better is more than making up for any added status effect.

Especially when the only difference is, that now martials also inflict some of them. But I tell you what. If that makes people play more martial characters, it actually gets easier. Because the satus effects of martials are often inflicted in melee. And most effects mainly only that duel. And be it advantage to next attack, prone, disadvantage against next attack, slow or whatever, your player that inflicted the effect will probably remind you if you forget.

Keeping track of 8 wolves is easier than keeping track of 8 Orcs each losing and receiving various status effects each turn.

 

[Umbran]

By the by, such massive PC abilities would you still want to play a 2014 version? I guess it would depend on the class/subclass?

I don't think the ability to drink a potion is "massive" especially when it applies to the antagonists as well as the PCs. I don't think my players will gasp, and say, "Look at this massive ability to drink a potion! I'm all in!" or anything.

I think lack of subclass variety would be the limiting factor - my players probably won't want to start playing under those rules until there's more subclasses available.

 

[payn]

VTTs create other kinds of load, though.

Less and less everyday.

 

[Oofta]

Two players asked me to run a little arena battle for them with level 20 characters- one has played up to high level before, the other hasn't but is very mechanics+design-minded, and was curious about high levels.

I made a few encounters with appropriate cr creatures, first to warm up (some devils, a pit fiend, etc), then more proper stuff (a lich and an iron golem), then... Well, suffice it to say that two level 20 characters stomped the sht out of what they fought- the appropriate "deadly" stuff didn't even scratch them.

The second player really has no interest in high level play anymore- he understands why I don't like running tier 3+4 5e. Unless you want to turn your setting on its head just to challenge them, it's just a cakewalk.

Not sure what to say when I read things like this. I have never had difficulty challenging PCs at any level. The last fight for my previous campaign I came close to perma-killing one PC, had others in single digits at times. They were all level 20 and because of other constraints on time (one player was going to be moving) I hadn't worn them down as much as I wanted. Game or two before, I almost killed 2 PCs in what i thought was going to be a moderately difficult fight.

I have no magic formula, I don't fudge rolls one way or another, theoretically we're using basically the same rules, it wasn't a triple deadly fight according to my calculations. I do increase the number of legendary saves and actions to number if players in the party minus one. I also adjust monsters here and there.

The good news is that they acknowledge the issue and are taking steps including more high level monsters. But challenging high level PCs has been possible in every edition of the game.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Keeping track of 8 wolves is easier than keeping track of 8 Orcs each losing and receiving various status effects each turn.

It is not 8 wolves. It is 8 wolfes on top of the orcs with status effects and zones and so on. You compare apples to oranges.

Really. That whole topic is clickbait at best. Fearmongering probably describes it better.