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

[Steampunkette]

insert video, here, of Travis Willingham having problems with 'reverse math'

 

[Micah Sweet]

BECMI lacked easy mode healing and old school monster design mitigated 5MWD to some extent.

BECMI also had multiple hexcrawl adventures where 1 encounter every few days worked.

Difference was no expectation of a balanced encounter. 4th level stumbling onto an adult dragon.tough luck. Roleplaying/tribute time.

So two self inflicted wounds from modern design. Well 3. Monster design, encounter design and easy mode healing.

As I said playing C&C random encounters with reasonably basic monsters PCs had to return to town.

What I'm hearing from this is that BECMI is great. Well and truly agreed. The B/X <slash> BECMI model base is my preference for classic D&D-style play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Smashing perfectly good cars is fun too

Not sure those two activities can be fairly compared.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I find it just the opposite. Bring up the notion that encounters should be balanced here and people will look at you like you asked for the children's menu and crayons.

I believe you're both right. You'll get judgment from one side of the aisle or the other no matter what you espouse.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Takes a long time in those games to make it that high though, and when you do the game wants you to start empire-building anyway.

 

[RangerWickett]

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

In 2E I saw a fighter solo a good chunk of the Green Bay Packers stadium. (One very bored morning waiting for a ride, we got out a sheet of paper and just rolled dice ticking off kills as Babb the Bold hewed through both teams of football players (statted as orcs) and then about 1300 people coming out of the stands and storming the field before they did enough damage to him to take him down.

 

[Remathilis]

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:

<snip>

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.

Of course, then you are giving the DM absolutely NO guidance on how to build encounters. How many orcs are appropriate for a low-level party? 10? 100? What about bugbears or gnolls? What about giants? I guess the DM could "figure it out" via the Guess and TPK method.

Then again, if you think the hallmark of a good DM is the amount of dead PCs you generate, that wouldn't be a problem for you.

 

[Composer99]

Point. That's the main problem though isn't? Nova buttons and easy healing and bulk HP?

Abd tge players of course even if Mearls is being slightly hyperbolic.

The main problem, by my reckoning, is when your game design ends up not matching the way the majority of your players want to play the game.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the majority of D&D players want to play D&D as a game of Big Darn Heroes, doing Big Darn Heroic things. To the extent that they want to be forced to make compelling decisions during play [*], tthe sort of decisions they want to make do not include considerations such as "will I have enough gas in the tank left to face the BBEG?" or "how should I balance carrying gear versus loot to reduce the chance of being ground down or slaughtered by a random encounter?"

Doing Big Darn Heroic Things usually means getting to unload your cool abilities during a fight - most of the time, during almost every fight, rather having to carefully measure them out over six to eight attritional combats.

Based on Mearls' remarks, it's fair to conclude that the playtesters they had were fine with the adventuring day schedule that they worked out, and I don't think that the design team could foresee the game's popularity. So they could not have anticipated the mismatch between designer intent and actual play habits. Be that as it may, the encounter paradigm they worked out doesn't match with how the bulk of the player base, seemingly, wants to play the game. Hence, ten years of arguing online over the five-minute adventuring day.

With that in mind, I'm definitely in favour of @Steampunkette's considering per-encounter pacing for player character combat abilities.

[1] And, just to be clear, I do not see this as a problem or a character flaw of players when they don't, in fact, want to be forced to make compelling decisions during play at all, much less speficially relating to attritional gameplay.

 

[Zardnaar]

The main problem, by my reckoning, is when your game design ends up not matching the way the majority of your players want to play the game.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the majority of D&D players want to play D&D as a game of Big Darn Heroes, doing Big Darn Heroic things. To the extent that they want to be forced to make compelling decisions during play [*], tthe sort of decisions they want to make do not include considerations such as "will I have enough gas in the tank left to face the BBEG?" or "how should I balance carrying gear versus loot to reduce the chance of being ground down or slaughtered by a random encounter?"

Doing Big Darn Heroic Things usually means getting to unload your cool abilities during a fight - most of the time, during almost every fight, rather having to carefully measure them out over six to eight attritional combats.

Based on Mearls' remarks, it's fair to conclude that the playtesters they had were fine with the adventuring day schedule that they worked out, and I don't think that the design team could foresee the game's popularity. So they could not have anticipated the mismatch between designer intent and actual play habits. Be that as it may, the encounter paradigm they worked out doesn't match with how the bulk of the player base, seemingly, wants to play the game. Hence, ten years of arguing online over the five-minute adventuring day.

With that in mind, I'm definitely in favour of @Steampunkette's considering per-encounter pacing for player character combat abilities.

[1] And, just to be clear, I do not see this as a problem or a character flaw of players when they don't, in fact, want to be forced to make compelling decisions during play at all, much less speficially relating to attritional gameplay.

I think there's a lot to be said ditching dailies and naking D&D a 6-10 level fame.

Could you sell it as D&D? Probably not.

 

[Zardnaar]

Of course, then you are giving the DM absolutely NO guidance on how to build encounters. How many orcs are appropriate for a low-level party? 10? 100? What about bugbears or gnolls? What about giants? I guess the DM could "figure it out" via the Guess and TPK method.

Then again, if you think the hallmark of a good DM is the amount of dead PCs you generate, that wouldn't be a problem for you.

You give the DM practical advice on how to build encounters. Less encounters more/bigger critters.

Less encounters merge several small ones add a bit more to account for AoEs.