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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6532050" data-attributes="member: 2067">The part that isn't always "well duh" about having a good time is that it is each player's responsibility that everyone has a good time -- if that's the goal of your play, too, that EVERYONE have a good time, being overly precious about under what condition you allow yourself to have a good time means that in general company (ie, a group that enjoys a broad variety of experience), you're hindeirng that goal for everyone. Looking for and exploiting rules loopholes does likewise - it ruins the fun for others at the table, so it fails to support the goals of play, because everyone's fun is on every individual player. You show up to give Carl and Dave and Lashonda and DM Kathy a good time, too. If Dave can't have a good time because you're crying about HP-as-meat for an hour and Lashonda can't have a good time because she feels her character is useless thanks to your rules exploit, and DM Kathy can't have a good time because she's a good host and Dave and Lashonda are clearly not amused....you're failing at achieving the goals. Telling a memorable story is a goal of 5e play, so presumably the 5e system will tell a memorable story by default, assuming that the designers did their job. If you find that 5e is not delivering a memorable story, there's a few distinct possibilities.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> The designers failed and the rules don't facilitate this goal. Perhaps some other designers did better -- lets look into other systems that also have this goal.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> The rules do facilitate this goal, but the designers failed to present them in a way that was understandable and usable, leading to misuse of rules that would work fine when used as intended. The design was sloppy. Perhaps there's some advice online, or perhaps some other system did it better. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> You're being overly precious about what constitutes a "memorable story." Given that memorable stories can emerge out of a multitude of diverse circumstances, your insistence that this is not a "memorable story" is like our film fan's insistence that only wartime Fred Astaire musicals are "good movies." It's not that you're wrong, it's that you're being sensitive and intolerant of the diversity of possible experience here, and ruining your own good time, and thus causing the group to fail in the Goals of Play unless they all agree with you. The preferred solution there is to lighten the heck up and allow yourself to enjoy a broader selection of "memorable stories."</li> </ol>Saying that this is one of the goals of D&D5e play makes it clear that, for instance, if what you are seeking is a detailed tactical skirmish game, D&D isn't going to meet those goals. Or if you're looking for a robust world-building game, D&D isn't going to be what you're looking for. Or if you want a game of PVP competition, that's not D&D 's bag. But D&D in 5e is designed to provide an interesting story. If it doesn't realize those goals, it's either a design failure of some sort, or a failure of matching terms (ie, you're defining a "memorable story" as only something that includes HP-as-meat because no other story can possibly be memorable since nobody actually takes any injuries, or whatever; WotC is defining "memorable story" as maybe in part "involves fights that escalate in intensity with a real chance of character death, since that gives players character motivation and increases their level of risk gradually just like a narrative does"). Not any RPG experience -- but actually quite a wide breadth of RPG experiences. It's a common goal for an RPG, one that can be met in a diversity of ways. Just like "an entertaining movie" is a common goal for movies (but isn't a goal for every movie!), one that can be met in a diversity of ways. Insisting that only a narrow band of rules or movies creates this experience is being a precious little princess snowflake who can't abide anything that isn't "Just right."This is part of why it's good to explore other RPG systems, even if D&D is meeting all it's goals and you're having a good time -- there's plenty of rules out there that do things differently and still produce memorable stories, and it's good to have a lot of -weapons in your arsenal when it comes to RPGing.</blockquote>

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