D&D General A History of Violence: Killing in D&D

[Micah Sweet]

It does answer your question and we all know you understand how it all works.
Most people aren't all people. What percent of all people does most people encompass? People like to have options. Even the illusion of choice is a comfort to people. There are quite a few games that aren't 5e and people buy them. And those companies seem to do quite well.
I know there is a cadre of people who are opposed to companies making money but that's how business works. When you produce something you want as many people to buy it as will make it profitable. It's all a gamble. Not everyone will like everything.
I believe it was you upthread that said we all have different play styles. That's why there is more than one RPG, more than one video game, more than one card game etc.

I agree. And yet I still get people right here trying to invalidate opinions because they're not shared by the majority.

 

[KYRON45]

I agree. And yet I still get people right here trying to invalidate opinions because they're not shared by the majority.

I'm no sociologist or any kind of ologist really but my guess is that people like to hide behind "most" or "the majority" because it gives us the safety of being in a crowd. We all like to think that how we're doing a thing is how most people are doing a thing.

Based on sales numbers alone there is no real way to know how "most" of the gazillion* 5e players do anything. We just hope that most of them are doing it the same way we are in the hopes that we aren't doing it wrong.

*gazillion is a good place holder. I felt bajillion would have been overkill.

 

[Mannahnin]

I've seen you do this a bunch of times and people explain it to you many times. Most players we know have zero interest in sitting around town doing nothing. They want to play the game and go on adventures.

Assuming that players want to play the game and actively do heroic stuff (whether given XP or milestone leveling) is a near-universal expectation to the extent that your assumptions on this particular area of player motivation are clearly more the exception than the rule.

I personally like XP, but I didn't change my behavior in a friend's Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign just because he was running milestone leveling, and as far as I could observe, neither did anyone else. To some extent milestone leveling could be argued to better support verisimilitude, because the group focused on our objectives and character interests, and weren't motived by trying to take on extraneous encounters or clear out rooms just because they'd be worth more xp.

Hypothetical player: "I gain a level after one session, right? So what if I say my PC just stays back in town while everyone else goes to check out the goblin raids?"

DM: "Then that guy never becomes an adventurer. He was called but found his courage lacking, and settles down in town with a safer job. Want to roll up a new character, or would you prefer to figure a motivation for this one to actually be part of the game?"

I want my character to survive and prosper. Prosperity might require adventuring, sure; but survival doesn't - and if I can gain levels by sitting around on the farm then it's clearly in my better interest (both as player and character) to do exactly that.

Again, as noted about re Curse of Strahd, Rime of the Frostmaiden is a hard-line adventure path with a clear sequence of events that are intended to occur (even if not necessarily in an exact sequence) and to which milestone levelling can be fairly easily mapped if not already noted right in the module. Further, if the campaign is set up as "We're playing this adventure path" then all have tacitly agreed to doing so when signing up for the game.

But - and I keep having to say this - not all campaigns are single adventure paths, which means when signing on for the game all you're committing to is playing your character and showing up for the games. There's no other inherent restrictions or expectations other than those you bring yourself.

And fi the system is going to leave such a wide-open loophole where I can game it so as to advance my character while doing nothing, I'd be an idiot not to take advantage of that. Solution: close the damn loophole and use a character-action-based reward system, preferably individual-character rather than group-based.

To correct the record, Frostmaiden is largely a sandbox early while the party explores the setting and gains some levels, then gradually funnels into more of an adventure path later.

Your proposition that "fi the system is going to leave such a wide-open loophole where I can game it so as to advance my character while doing nothing, I'd be an idiot not to take advantage of that" is bizarre. It's predicated on the assumption that the player is more interested in advancing their character power and ensuring their survival than on PLAYING THE GAME.

Hypothetical* player: "I gain a level after one session, right; and so does everyone else? So guys, why don't we all just stay in town for tonight's session, level up, and we'll be better able to take on the goblins next session?"

DM: > smoke rises from ears <

* - or maybe not so hypothetical, as I could easily see myself saying exactly this.

If you said this at my table the reply would be simple- "A session of adventuring. If you want to stay in town and take no risks, why did I waste my time prepping an adventure and why did you waste yours coming to my house? If you don't want to play the game, why did you agree to?"

If the group has agreed to play an adventure game and you come to my table attempting to subvert that goal and obstruct play, we'll have an out of character discussion about our shared goals. If they're not actually compatible, you'll not be a part of the game.

Downtime is part of the game, no matter what you insist the "vast majority" of gamers want. And even if you're right about popularity, who the heck cares?

I don't know what point you were trying to make here. My statement about the "vast majority" of gamers was simply saying that people play D&D to PLAY D&D, not to say their character sits around town while everyone else adventures. Even open world/STRICT TIME RECORDS games like Gary talks about in the 1E DMG, where some characters may be left in town healing or training while others adventure, aren't games where players are just CHOOSING to have their characters sit out of the action because they'd rather not risk their characters. Gary's expectation was that players still want to play, so if a given character is FORCED into downtime (or chooses it for something like magical research at the COST of being out of play), the player would almost inevitably play using a secondary character or henchman so they didn't have to sit out of the fun!

Player: ok, how about I come with the group, but stay in the back and contribute as little as possible to the party's actions?"

DM: " Then you're fine. Welcome to level 2, hero!".

Come on. You're a more experienced DM than that. You know that characters who try to hide in the back still take on a share of the risk, and if they act truly cowardly and don't contribute, the other characters will tend to kick them out or give them a lesser share of the rewards.

Same as in 1E. Monster XP is divided among everyone who participated in fighting the monster, no matter how much or how little. Treasure xp is divided based on how the PCs divide the treasure, and that's almost always equal shares, even if PCs take on varying levels of risk. The Fighter at the front tends to take on greater risks, but OTOH their player also tends to get to DO more.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not sure why this is such a sticking point for you. We all have different playstyles.

Then there wasn't any point in objecting to how other people run their games now, was there?

 

[Thomas Shey]

What goes around comes around; and if I can help make that style common again by promoting it then that's what I'll do.

Promoting it is one thing; objecting to an approach other people do but isn't forced on you in any way, not so much.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree. And yet I still get people right here trying to invalidate opinions because they're not shared by the majority.

They could just say "So what? That's your problem."

I mean seriously here, when you're talking about a mechanical approach you don't like, and your complaints only make sense coming from a position the other people don't share, what sort of response do you expect? It doesn't help when your explanation of why seems, effectively, nonsensical (arguing in favor of experience as done in D&D because its less "gamist" comes across as, frankly, usually pretty rich) and when others claims of what a thing produces just doesn't produce that for most people.

I mean, seriously, I could come into D&D-related threads and complain about almost every D&D element I dislike too. And believe me, there's a lot of them. If I did, why should I expect anything but "D&D players don't care" from the majority of the participants? Because its clearly serving the needs of the biggest part of the gaming populace and has been for a long time, and that's why it still is as it is.

Being ignored or pooh-poohed is about the only reaction either of us should expect in those situations.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Come on. You're a more experienced DM than that. You know that characters who try to hide in the back still take on a share of the risk, and if they act truly cowardly and don't contribute, the other characters will tend to kick them out or give them a lesser share of the rewards.

You can get some pathological cases where "PC glow" or more specific interpersonal things (the person who hosts the game, the person who drives one or more people to the game, someone's sibling or spouse) interferes with this process, but that still doesn't make in game carrots-and-sticks a particularly good way to handle this sort of thing.

 

[Voadam]

If I've been playing Jocasta for ten sessions (or 2 adventures, or whatever other measure of seniority you like) and you've only been playing Kalemeth for half that time because he's a replacement for your first character Iolaus who died, then I'd say Jocasta - by virtue of having done more during play than has Kalemeth - should level up before Kalemeth.

Put another way, Kalemeth shouldn't get to inherit Iolaus' xp even though they're both played by the same player. And if instead of dying, Iolaus left the adventuring group to return to town and do other things, he shouldn't get further xp for that adventure.

I disagree.

If the goal is for the players to be members of a team in a group game with different positions then it is better for everybody to be equal levels but with different specifics.

Then characters should start out equal power and should stay equal. Characters who come in later should be different but equal to the characters of the team they are joining.

If the goal is not for characters to be members of a team in a group game but to competitively survive and individually advance in the campaign starting from zero at the beginning of the campaign then there is a different should where it can make sense for there to be differences in levels and for existing characters to be more powerful.

 

[Staffan]

This is why I still like 2e and OSR for the magic loot, but I think that makes sense. 5e really doesn’t need magic items - your character gets its uniqueness and power from the class abilities. In earlier games, you got that from the magic items. By the same token, I hear much more often from players about whether taking on a side quest or an encounter is worth the effort in 5e (again with milestone leveling). In 2e, if you don’t adventure, you don’t level and more importantly, you miss out on magic items. IME, that’s less of a thing with 5e.

This seems slightly disingenuous to me. When offered a side quest, the relevant question isn't "do we adventure or not." It is "Do we go on this seemingly irrelevant adventure, or do we continue with the main adventure plot?" Either way, you're still spending the same number of hours at the table having an adventure.

As players, our ability to wield weapons in a pretended fantasy is not connected to our ability to deal with social encounters in reality. Pretended social encounters are muddied by the fact that they can be resolved by real-world social skills. It’s harder to remove the role-play elements of a social encounters and have it solely rely on the characters ‘attacks’ and ‘defenses’.

I promise you, my PF2 character Melumbivilaroxinek's Diplomacy of +25 and Deception +22 far outshine my own ability to resolve social encounters. Mel makes sir Humphrey seem like an amateur. I, on the other hand, can't talk my way out of a wet paper bag.

Hypothetical* player: "I gain a level after one session, right; and so does everyone else? So guys, why don't we all just stay in town for tonight's session, level up, and we'll be better able to take on the goblins next session?"

DM: > smoke rises from ears <

* - or maybe not so hypothetical, as I could easily see myself saying exactly this.

This made the penny drop for me. You are suggesting that the advancement system needs to be proof against bag-of-ratsing – players who look at the wording of the rules and seek to exploit them in ways not intended. And much like someone suggesting they can use Whirlwind attack + Great Cleave + a couple of dozen 1-hp rats to get a couple of dozen attacks on the boss should be given a stern look and maybe a bop with a rolled-up newspaper, so should someone suggesting they get to level up after laying around in bed just because we're using milestones or session-based advancement. The rules should assume that players are interacting with them in good faith, not that they are trying to exploit them.

 

[TiQuinn]

This seems slightly disingenuous to me.

Look up the definition of disingenuous and then get back to me.