D&D General 6E But A + Thread

[Zaukrie]

Shadow of the Weird Wizard

Tell me about the GM side. Because all I own is the player side.

One thing I notice in most of the posts is a very PC centric set of answers, and not much about the burdens (and joys) of being a DM>......

 

[Faolyn]

Or just a scenario.
"Get this message to the King of Gondor across the mountain of giants" is very different depending on if you have the Sending spell or not.

How much of a story would Lord of the Rings been if Gandolf just cast Teleport or Disintegrate?

Or Harry Potter if Locate Creature was available?

So you DO expect every designer to know every spell a player could possibly have.

IMO, a medieval fantasy world shouldn't have to work around someone suddenly pulling out a cell phone.

The thing is, GMs don't necessarily need to know every spell the PCs have, but they should know what's in the system and actually plan the world (and adventure) around that. A world with teleport and sending in it will be different from one that doesn't have that spell.

Maybe sending only works if both parties have a receiver, or there are spells or creatures that can intercept them or even hack the messages, so they're not quite as reliable as one might hope. Maybe Mount Doom and its surrounding territories are covered by anti-teleportation wards (or worse, wards that divert teleportations to less amenable places than Mount Doom), and only the bad guys have the key to get around them. Maybe whatever creature Harry Potter was looking for is wearing a collar that prevents it from being detected by a locate creature.

Or maybe sending works as written, so even if party doesn't have to cross the mountain of giants, there's a different problem they have to face. Maybe the King won't aid them because a sending spell is considered rude; you have to send actual people if you hope to get any favor from royalty. Maybe teleportation works as written, but it pings alarms and now everyone and their personal army is after the party. Maybe whoever has the whatever creature Harry Potter was after made sure to keep it more than a thousand feet from any meddling kids so locate creature won't work.

(Look, I can't remember from either LotR or HP.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I am not talking about video games and what works well in Video games does not necessarily translate to what works better in D&D.

Thinking that design is utterly and absolutely different for TTRPGs vs other kinds of games is a nonstarter.

You are simply wrong. Yes, we need to consider somewhat different things. But the vast majority of it is the same, because both of them are game design.

5.5 Design was heavily based on surveys, so I think the opposite is actually true. Surveys and playtests got us what we got in 5.5. Supposedly 5.0 was based on that as well.

Further time and time again it was the surveys that prevented WOTC from taking bolder steps and got them to undo the bigger changes they had in the UA. Many of these changes that were in the UA and then cut specifically made the game more balanced and they were rejected.

I do agree there are many people on message that complain about these things, but I have no way of knowing whether they are a majority or a minority, and I also see plenty of people complaining about the large number of fans that won't let WOTC make big changes.

You...

You do realize that those surveys, from WotC's own data collection, were very specifically telling WotC that people hated the fact that Champions, Berserkers, and Beast Masters were demonstrably weak and flawed, right?

That people genuinely disliked that some options were overpowered and other options were underpowered, and that design very specifically is why 5.5e has a bunch of the stuff it has in it, right?

5.5e is very literally my point being made for me. Actual people, the people WotC thinks are worth listening to, are telling them--and thus also you--that balance actually does matter to them.

You are demonstrably, objectively wrong if you think people in general, customers in general, don't care about balance. They do. We have the data to prove it. The only alternative is that you have to reject WotC's data collection as flawed and bad, and always has been.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you play published adventures there are some with a boatload of magic. I just finsished a 5E conversion of a series of greyhawk adventures from 1-20 (Village of Homlett, Temple of Elemental Evil, Scourge of the Slavelords, Against the Giants, Queen of Spiders). The DM gave us whatever was in the game, modified to 5E rules.

We had a ton of magic items. At games end (level 20) my Ranger personally had Bracers of Defense, Ring of Protection, Staff of Striking, Staff of Whithering, Staff of Swarming Insects, Staff of Frost, Wand of Paralyzation, Rope of Entanglement, Wand of Fear, Dagger of Venom, two daggers +1, Hand Axe +1, Short Sword +2, two Javelins of Lightning, Javelin +2, Heavy Crossbow +1, several scrolls and several potions.

I would change out what I was attuned to every short rest after I burned through charges on one item.

We did have two intelligent swords plus a flame tongue, a Frost Band, a short sword of Life Stealinig, a Girdle of Giant Strength, another Javelin of Lightning and some other great weapons, but other party members got those as I was more of a caster/controller.

This genuinely flabbergasts me.

I have never seen this many magic items. Not in any campaign I've ever played. Period. None. Not a single one, not in any edition, not even in other systems. Never.

It's...frankly kind of hard to believe this is true given I have, as stated, never seen this. Not from anything official, not from anything homebrew, not from anything 3PP. Flat-out never.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This genuinely flabbergasts me.

I have never seen this many magic items. Not in any campaign I've ever played. Period. None. Not a single one, not in any edition, not even in other systems. Never.

It's...frankly kind of hard to believe this is true given I have, as stated, never seen this. Not from anything official, not from anything homebrew, not from anything 3PP. Flat-out never.

Pretty common in 1e at least. Just go skim through those modules. Magic items were everywhere. By design, because they were used as a way to keep fighters and other mundane classes up to power with casters after name level.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Six to twelve in-game months.

Which can go by in a flash at the table or, more commonly IME, take years to go by at the table as people keep adventuring in the meantime; and adventuring days can easily take a session each to go by (last night's session as an example: in in-game time we started at 2 pm one day and ended at noon the next).

You aren't really making your case here. Like...you're now telling me "oh, it could happen in a flash, but it's much more likely to take even longer than you're describing." That's not better for your argument. It's worse. It's literally conceding that your allegedly reasonable position has a very high likelihood of being even worse than I described!

Sometimes, yes. Or they use it sooner at a non-proficiency to-hit penalty and greater risk of fumbling, I've seen this done.

Okay. You need to know that people will respond not just negatively, but very negatively, to a design predicated on this happening frequently. People will simply choose not to play D&D, rather than put up with something like this. It's a non-starter from the jump.

I'd blame 3e's wealth-by-level guidelines for setting that trend; and 4e's fairly strict treasure-parcel system didn't help. 5e just doesn't like giving out treasure, period. If those are the only editions you've played then it's easy to see how experiences like yours could occur.

So maybe that's a change to propose for 6e: be way more generous with loot and treasure (and provide useful ways of spending it, too!) but also build in some sort of magic item destruction mechanism a la 1e to make it all a bit more easy come, easy go.

All I can say is, I don't think that would fly either. As noted, I've never once had a GM I would consider notably generous with magic items, whereas those who were extremely stingy with them have been commonplace--and that is reflected in, prior to this thread, essentially every self-report I've ever heard from anyone else.

So you'd be actively trying to change both player psychology AND that of GMs, at the same time. Even doing one of those things would be a profoundly difficult thing to achieve. Doing both? You're going to be having GMs actively fighting you the whole way even if you do in fact make the rules do this. Because those GMs will simply ignore the item generosity, but include the item destruction. So it becomes "extremely rarely find, extremely frequently lose", rather than easy-come, easy-go. Players will hate that, and GMs won't see any motivation to change--you'll have made the situation the worst of both worlds.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You aren't really making your case here. Like...you're now telling me "oh, it could happen in a flash, but it's much more likely to take even longer than you're describing." That's not better for your argument. It's worse. It's literally conceding that your allegedly reasonable position has a very high likelihood of being even worse than I described!


Okay. You need to know that people will respond not just negatively, but very negatively, to a design predicated on this happening frequently. People will simply choose not to play D&D, rather than put up with something like this. It's a non-starter from the jump.


All I can say is, I don't think that would fly either. As noted, I've never once had a GM I would consider notably generous with magic items, whereas those who were extremely stingy with them have been commonplace--and that is reflected in, prior to this thread, essentially every self-report I've ever heard from anyone else.

So you'd be actively trying to change both player psychology AND that of GMs, at the same time. Even doing one of those things would be a profoundly difficult thing to achieve. Doing both? You're going to be having GMs actively fighting you the whole way even if you do in fact make the rules do this. Because those GMs will simply ignore the item generosity, but include the item destruction. So it becomes "extremely rarely find, extremely frequently lose", rather than easy-come, easy-go. Players will hate that, and GMs won't see any motivation to change--you'll have made the situation the worst of both worlds.

You do know that @Lanefan has been running a successful game using his principles of play? For years? Many years? You act like his way couldn't possibly work and would inevitably lead to his players abandoning him.

 

[Chaltab]

Tell me about the GM side. Because all I own is the player side.

One thing I notice in most of the posts is a very PC centric set of answers, and not much about the burdens (and joys) of being a DM>......

You're asking the wrong person. I don't have either of the 'Shadow of' games.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't find arguments that "D&D isn't a metacurrency game" particularly compelling because of games like Savage Worlds.

The funny thing is I mostly agree!

I don't think it's an exceptionally compelling argument. I don't think it's remotely in that bracket/tier of arguments! C+ at best. I think it's an opinion, and frankly, not one I'm married to, but I do think seems correct to me ("seems correct" being, imho, one of the weakest forms of opinion). It's very obviously not impossible to make a very D&D-like and simply very good game with a core metacurrency (like Hope and Fear are in DH), but I think part of what makes D&D occupy this weird but successful niche between like, pretty serious gamism and mild narrativism and mild simulationism is that it mostly veers away from full-on "meta" stuff (or just manages to cover it up successfully, even if you can see the feet sticking out of the car trunk sometimes!), and I think lot of what made 4E good was that didn't veer away or engage in elaborate cover-ups. Roles were deeply meta, AEDU was pretty meta, and so on. But I think that also like, broke the niche for some people, like it wasn't something people explained well at the time, there was a lot of flopping and flailing and and ill-directed rage and imprecations to the gods about being "like World of Warcraft" (which I will never tire of pointing out is simply not accurate and indicative of a misunderstanding of both 4E and WoW, or the "I only play one videogame much so this is like that specific videogame" mindset, like people who don't read SF a lot read a famous/important SF book and think everything is like that book lol). Anyway, what they actually meant was "this game has meta-game considerations front-and-center, like WoW does" (somehow missing the fact that like 80-90% of videogames do, but see above). And like, yeah, so did every edition (I mean, HP, hello? Especially rapidly rising HP!), but they mostly cover it up enough you can pretend they aren't!

So I think whilst it could work, it's not, to my mind, a good fit for the D&D brand specifically.

 

[dave2008]

-I think 6E should extend the game back out to 30 levels again (like 4E did).

I am fine with 6e going back to 30 levels, but preferably not how 4e did it. 4e called them epic levels but they were nothing more then the previous level 20 stretched out to level 30. They didn't actually add anything, they just stretched it out. I would prefer levels 21-30 actually add something to the game.