D&D General 6E But A + Thread

[Reynard]

No, if you want to have "set piece encounter*" you would be expected to use the whole day's worth of XP. It is right there in the DMG:

" If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

and

"Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party’s adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest."

*I assume "set piece" means one big encounter for the day.

Preferably with waves of enemies, cool terrain and stakes bigger than kill em all.

 

[Stormonu]

It's 5e that strikes me as being the stingy edition when it comes to treasure, though as item destruction isn't a thing in 5e at least you get to keep what you find. (and you have to, as the rules won't let you sell it either!)

You can sell or otherwise turn over magic items for things you need in 5E. Both the 2014 DMG and Xanathar's discusses doing so - Xanathar going into more detail as a "downtime activity".

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Do we have enough ideas to make a new edition yet?

The other thing I’d like to see is fewer classes but more options to have those classes branch out into more unique specialties.

 

[Faolyn]

I'd assume that is adventuring days, not every single day of the life of the PCs. While undoubtedly some days will result in a number of encounters, some of those caravan days will be uneventful.

Sure, but it's still a ridiculously high number of encounters.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For people talking about a minimum or set number of encounters a day - that is really hard to do in a story-focused RPG. I mean if the story has you as a caravan guards traveling from Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep; that is about 40 days or so. If we are going to have a minimum of 4 encounters a day, that is 160 encounters on that trip. If you make these encounters medium difficulty, that is going to be enough XP to get from 1st level to around 12th level or so .... while traveling as a caravan guard.

It is a lot easier to do this in a wargame or something like that with no story to influence the number of encounters.

Then we cannot actually design a game that won't create massive perverse incentives, which in turn will distort the story we tell about those things.

Perverse incentives discourage people from playing archetypes they actually enjoy, and instead encourage them to play archetypes that give them power--or, more accurately, survival and success. Perverse incentives, which are always what is created by imbalanced design, discourage players from making choices based on what their values and interests are, and instead encourage them to make "choices" based on optimization. You simply cannot discourage optimization by making imbalance. Imbalance is precisely what fosters and rewards optimization, because it means there are clearly optimal paths, and everything else is intentionally shooting yourself in the foot. Even those genuinely ignorant of the rules can observe that some paths meet with greater success than others, and "meet with greater success" is exactly what imbalance causes.

You discourage optimization, and thereby encourage creativity, by making it so that there are genuinely distinct paths (no uniformity, truly different options), but each option is so close to equivalent mathematical performance that calculation fails to meaningfully distinguish them. Those are the conditions under which optimization becomes pointless, because it can no longer actually guide decisions. When that occurs, the only source that remains for distinguishing which choice is "best" is personal judgment, meaning, what the user values or is interested in, not what the system has designated as mathematically superior.

Story and mechanics need to be conversant with one another. That's what makes it a roleplaying game, and not either of those two things in isolation. The mechanics we use do, in fact, shape the stories we tell with them--and mechanics full of perverse incentives will distort the stories told. Usually for the worse, unless one is very specifically aiming to emulate the Tippyverse.

 

[Older Beholder]

Eberron as the default setting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Do we have enough ideas to make a new edition yet?

The other thing I’d like to see is fewer classes but more options to have those classes branch out into more unique specialties.

No, not really, because (as this very post shows), some folks want A, and some folks want Not-A, and some folks want "a thing that manages to be even more Not-A than the previous thing".

I want more classes with well-defined thematic purposes (I have a specific set of exactly 12 classes which I believe 5e has missed, though some of them I recognize as being...let's say "less mandatory" than others), which would have a relatively constrained but usable number of subclasses--probably on the order of 5-6 per class, for a total of somewhere between 100 and 150 subclasses for the entire game.

You want fewer classes, presumably down to the level of like 4-5, where each gets a bunch of specializations, far far more than we currently have. I have reasons for not liking this, but for the moment that is not my focus here. The point being, I imagine you and I agree more or less on the rough number (somewhere in the 90-150 range), but you want the "trunks" reduced and the "leaves" increased, while I want the "trunks" increased and the "leaves" decreased.

And then we have other people who hate BOTH the number of classes AND the number of subclasses. They want everything reduced. At least with you and I, it would theoretically be possible to find some happy medium where everything I want covered and everything you want covered still happens--probably more classes than you'd like, but fewer than I'd like. But for them? How could we achieve that? How could we possibly produce something that has just...flatly less of everything, while also having more?

 

[Scribe]

Do we have enough ideas to make a new edition yet?

Absolutely yes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

...this, which I can see the rationale for. I love the idea of there being lots of magic items in the game. At the same time, I loathe the idea of "wish lists", and prefer that the items found be random without regard to what particular characters happen to be looking for them.

Well, I'm afraid you're almost certainly going to have to accept that some people like, not necessarily "wish lists", but aiming for particular goals over time, which will include items. It's unavoidable. The existence of cool things inevitably will mean some people--indeed, a lot of people--will desire some particular thing or range of things to actually happen. Not "on command" but, y'know, looking forward to it. The design of the rules, even going back to 2e as I recall, VERY much punishes folks who don't specialize when it comes to directly usable equipment (armor and weapons mostly, but occasionally a couple other things that 3e would have called "wondrous items"), so such thinking is kinda encouraged by the rules themselves anyway, and has been for the vast majority of D&D's existence!

This doesn't mean that you, personally, need to start liking or using "wish lists" or whatever. But it does mean that, if 6e is going to like...succeed, in any meaningful sense, it's going to need to be compatible with their interests. It should also be compatible with yours, to be clear. It probably needs to default to one or the other, but it should not put up barriers to doing it the other way--at all. Overall, I'm generally inclined to think that a mild lean toward "I would really like to encounter certain items eventually" is unavoidable, again because the game makes specialization so important and thus punishes generalists rather significantly.

Alternatively, do you think you would favor something that would, say, allow a Fighter to personally retrain herself to using a new Fighting Style over an old one, if they simply encountered a cool thing that they like better than their current weapon? Or something that would allow them to expand their repertoire over time, so that the "golf bag" approach is actually rewarded, rather than punished?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is not what I mean when I say it. I typically mean to make them interesting and not just +bonus to hit and damage or AC or a Save.

Have you seen Mike Mearls magic item ideas for his 5e hack Odyssey? They are pretty close to what I want in magic items that are more magical.

Magic Items in Odyssey
Putting Magic Back in Magic Items

These are Google mail links. I cannot view them as I do not have access to your Gmail account. I assume you meant to link something else?