D&D General Can we talk about best practices?

[hawkeyefan]

Note how many of these are general group dynamic rules that could probably be ported over to almost any RPG whatsoever. That's largely my point about how, in absence of specifics about the game experience being tried for you almost have to work on that layer.

To some extent, sure. There is going to be some advice that is relevant to all RPGs because as different as they may be, there are still some similarities.

But this list I made specifically thinking about 5E. I would not make the exact list for other games, although there would certainly be some overlap.

And these are also my personal suggestions. There may be other folks who would, for instance, advocate for knowing as much about your PC before you start play so that you can accurately portray them through roleplay. On the GM side, you don't have to look far on this site to find people advocating for the GM as ultimate authority and that the players are playing in "your game" and all that. My suggestion to the GM to hold on loosely and to place the PCs into the place of utmost importance is, as I said not controversial, but it is a sentiment that certain posters would vehemently disagree with.

So again.....best practices for 5E in my opinion. Yes, that's a broad topic and my suggested best practices might change if the topic was "Best practices for an urban espionage game using 5E" or something else that was more specific. But that's fine.....I could always come up with that list if requested instead of endlessly talking about how the idea of such a list is badwrongfun.

 

[pemerton]

Here are my suggested best practices for 5E D&D. These are all just based on the general game itself, and not toward trying to run it a specific way, or trying to give it a specific vibe. These are just my opinion, of course.

Players:

• Remember that this is a group activity, and that the thrust of play will be about the group
• Don't try and make a character that will "win"- make a character that will be interesting, make a character you'd like to learn more about
• Be willing to engage with ideas offered by others, particularly the GM- the GM will establish a lot of the fiction in the game and will present most of the conflicts- be willing to engage with these ideas
• Hold on loosely to your preconceived ideas about your character- don't over commit to every detail before play even begins- allow space for discovery through play and adapting to what gets established
• Expect that sometimes the GM may make a ruling that may override the rules

GMs:

• Remember that this is a group activity and allow players to have as much input on how the game goes as possible
• Don't try to tell a specific story- create scenarios that you feel would be interesting, and then watch what the players have the characters do, and then build on that
• Be willing to engage with ideas offered by the players- try to never override or render meaningless any decision made by the players
• Be a fan of the PCs- the game is about them, not about your setting- keep that in mind and hold on lightly to your setting and NPCs as they exist only to see how they interact with the PCs
• Be cautious with making rulings that override the rules; when it does happen, be clear about your reasoning for doing so

I've come up with this list quickly and off the top of my head, thinking about my recent games of 5E as both player and GM. I'm sure I can could come up with more, or that I could expand and/or clarify these. And although I don't think everyone would agree with them all, I don't think any of them is all that controversial. But even so, I imagine there are plenty of other ideas out there that folks could offer along these lines.

Interesting. These do strike me as potentially controversial, because adhering to them seems to me likely to cause some difficulties in running a standard AP. I'm thinking of the "not building to win" - for skilled PC builders (probably many ENworld posters) I get this, but I think beginning players who build "for fun" might run the risk of having their PCs die in an early encounter! (I know that 5e is widely seen as "easy mode" compared to eg B/X, but having seen a new group of kids playing recently they really are not very good technical game players!)

I think the second dot point for GMs is also potentially controversial, because it bumps into some presuppositions of APing pretty hard.

So I might change those two if I wanted guidelines that are a good fit for "typical" 5e play, as best I have a sense of it. The Dying Earth RPG and Burning Wheel both give advice on how to allocate starting points which is more constraining than what is technically permitted, and I would probably suggest something similar for 5e D&D PC building. (Eg identify at least one stat that will support your PC in their main mechanical schtick and make sure that it starts at 14 or 16 or whatever experience tells us is an appropriate floor for generic effectiveness.) For GMs I'd want something about how to manage action resolution outside of combat, and also what to do if the result of a combat seems apt to disrupt the planned trajectory of events. I'm not sure what exactly the former should look like; for the latter, Prince Valiant has the concept of a Rescue Episode to be deployed in such circumstances, and while I've never used it, I can see what it's there for. Something similar - eg about how to approach total group capture and feed that back into the plotline, or how to handle rescues by allied forces - might be useful.

I think I'd also add in some advice for players about being willing to manifest their characterisation so as to embellish scenes, but taking cues from the GM and fellow players about when enough is enough, and corresponding advice for GMs about making space for this but not letting it (i) destabilise group harmony, or (ii) disrupt the general trajectory of events.

 

[clearstream]

It's a term of art - and not only that it's a apparently a bit of a controversial one. So best approach (sorry) seems to be to simply not call it that but instead call it something like "suggested approaches to maximizing play experience.." - or something even less formal "suggestions on how to not make the same mistakes I did..."

That work better?

Introducing the term art as you have feels helpful to me and also perhaps a way to notice where people are justly reluctant to commit.

One can define techniques for oil painting, such as scumbling. No one needs to have any subjective opinion of scumbling: it's just an available technique.

On the other hand, one can't really define approaches to subject or even what is a proper subject for oil painting in a way that everyone will agree on. An artist such as Gerhard Richter has articulated a specific introspective and levelling approach, but there is no way that his approach can be said to be subjectively right for any other artist even though Richter is one of the most accomplished oil painters alive today.

Perhaps we must limit ourselves to technique?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I will have to note that as you get down that list, "best practice" discussions become fraught in almost the same way as here--because there's less agreement of what exactly you're trying to do. Even with football there's enough moving parts that the validity of many techniques is debatable depending on a lot of exterior factors such as composition of the team and the normal climate of the area.

And those are all games that have a specific set of win conditions and largely rigid rules as to how they work. Once you get to theater...well, yes, there are things some people present as best practices, but there are a lot of cases of people saying they're full of it too, because they are based on specific assumptions about what an actor is trying to do and what gets them there best that are not universal by any means. Look at just the response to method acting to see that, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Yes, opinions will vary.

But if you asked Bill Cowher what are best practices for coaching a football team, what you will get is an answer not a bunch of "well all teams are different, and the game changes over time" and other such waffling.

And if you ask Robert DeNiro about acting and then you ask Sidney Poitier, you will get very different answers. But you'll get answers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To some extent, sure. There is going to be some advice that is relevant to all RPGs because as different as they may be, there are still some similarities.

But this list I made specifically thinking about 5E. I would not make the exact list for other games, although there would certainly be some overlap.

I think the vast majority of what you list would apply to pretty much any trad game. I might have missed an exception.

(The sociodynamic structure of other types of games can be different enough some is irrelevant or actively counter-productive--a game that has much stronger power-sharing than trad games, for example).

But notice how few of these are really about the game operation, per se.

 

[pemerton]

I will have to note that as you get down that list, "best practice" discussions become fraught in almost the same way as here--because there's less agreement of what exactly you're trying to do. Even with football there's enough moving parts that the validity of many techniques is debatable depending on a lot of exterior factors such as composition of the team and the normal climate of the area.

And those are all games that have a specific set of win conditions and largely rigid rules as to how they work. Once you get to theater...well, yes, there are things some people present as best practices, but there are a lot of cases of people saying they're full of it too, because they are based on specific assumptions about what an actor is trying to do and what gets them there best that are not universal by any means. Look at just the response to method acting to see that, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Sure. That doesn't stop hundreds of books, blogs, YouTube videos, etc being published each year telling us how to be better actors, or better footballers, or even better lovers.

Disagreement over what is best is endemic to human life. It doesn't seem to paralyse discussion in these other fields, though, so why should it when it comes to RPGing. Why this insistence that all we can say is do what's fun?

EDIT: Ninja'd by @hawkeyefan!

 

[Thomas Shey]

Perhaps we must limit ourselves to technique?

Notice even technique discussions have already stepped down to trying to do pretty specific things. In my theater analogy, they're like teaching someone how to project properly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure. That doesn't stop hundreds of books, blogs, YouTube videos, etc being published each year telling us how to be better actors, or better footballers, or even better lovers.

Disagreement over what is best is endemic to human life. It doesn't seem to paralyse discussion in these other fields, though, so why should it when it comes to RPGing. Why this insistence that all we can say is do what's fun?

And they're just as controversial when it comes up in actual conversation. So why are you surprised it does here?

Again, its not just a question of what's best--its a case of establishing what you're actually trying to do in the first place. And the more that's not a given, the more problems there are in a best practice discussion.

 

[clearstream]

Interesting. These do strike me as potentially controversial, because adhering to them seems to me likely to cause some difficulties in running a standard AP. I'm thinking of the "not building to win" - for skilled PC builders (probably many ENworld posters) I get this, but I think beginning players who build "for fun" might run the risk of having their PCs die in an early encounter! (I know that 5e is widely seen as "easy mode" compared to eg B/X, but having seen a new group of kids playing recently they really are not very good technical game players!)

I think the second dot point for GMs is also potentially controversial, because it bumps into some presuppositions of APing pretty hard.

So I might change those two if I wanted guidelines that are a good fit for "typical" 5e play, as best I have a sense of it. The Dying Earth RPG and Burning Wheel both give advice on how to allocate starting points which is more constraining than what is technically permitted, and I would probably suggest something similar for 5e D&D PC building. (Eg identify at least one stat that will support your PC in their main mechanical schtick and make sure that it starts at 14 or 16 or whatever experience tells us is an appropriate floor for generic effectiveness.) For GMs I'd want something about how to manage action resolution outside of combat, and also what to do if the result of a combat seems apt to disrupt the planned trajectory of events. I'm not sure what exactly the former should look like; for the latter, Prince Valiant has the concept of a Rescue Episode to be deployed in such circumstances, and while I've never used it, I can see what it's there for. Something similar - eg about how to approach total group capture and feed that back into the plotline, or how to handle rescues by allied forces - might be useful.

I think I'd also add in some advice for players about being willing to manifest their characterisation so as to embellish scenes, but taking cues from the GM and fellow players about when enough is enough, and corresponding advice for GMs about making space for this but not letting it (i) destabilise group harmony, or (ii) disrupt the general trajectory of events.

Did you give your dot-points or similar list already up thread (apologies if I missed it)?

 

[Ovinomancer]

I said, just a few posts back, that D&D runs D&D (as opposed to anything and everything under the sun) but can be used for a fairly broad variety of playstyles, unlike more bespoke games that typically have a single intended play style.

You don't agree with that? Okay. You're entitled to your own opinion. I think the vast variety of play styles evidenced by folks talking about D&D just on ENWorld contradicts that opinion pretty solidly, but it's all subjective.

So, I made a number of arguments in those posts, and you've addressed exactly none of them, instead assigning me a position I didn't take (that people don't play D&D differently) and beat up on that. There's a term for this... something about men made out of straw? It's eluding me.

No, my point is that the rules as written for 5e present a very clear way to play in a number of places and that people still play however they want. And this causes issues, because a number of people play 5e in a way not supported by the rules. You can clearly see the evidence of this in the 5e forum with the number of posts complaining about how 5e is easy mode, talking about rest changes, talking about encounter frequency and strength, talking about how this or that subsystem doesn't work, etc. The core conceit of each of these threads is the expectation that 5e supports the play the poster is trying to do and blaming the 5e rules for the failure. This is 5e's fault, for promising, nay encouraging, people to play however they want. That sets up the expectation that the rules will support multiple approaches, when, in fact, they do not, they just fail in non-spectacular ways; they almost work. And, the usual response to this, as demonstrated by you, is one of two things -- either a blind assumption that an optional system actually works and will fix that issue (plot points, gritty rest variant, etc), or a presentation of a changed ruleset via house/table rules as if this is what 5e presents.

5e's problem is that it's rules actually do support a specific approach to play in a number of places and it's 1) not clear on these assumptions and 2) ignores them freely in printed adventures. A specific example is the daily XP budget for encounters, how well this integrates with the rest cycle assumptions, and how it provide balance for the various recharges in the class structure. Yet, this is the one of the first and most often jettisoned assumptions in the game, and one of the most complained about (5e is easy mode, I want 1 encounter a day to mean something, rests are unbalanced, class recharge mechanics are unbalanced). Even the APs ignore this, which leads to very uneven adventure sites (some are woefully underbalanced, some are massively overburdened). It's ridiculous, because the system as presented works very well to do exactly what it says it will do, people just don't want to play that way or adjust the approach they've had since the last edition.