In its hyper-extreme form it's like the lottery: you don't get frustrated when you lose
Speak for yourself.
Most people do in fact get frustrated. Even when they lose something like that. You're generalizing something that not only isn't general, it can't be "taught". Some people feel that way when they lose. Others don't.
Assuming a competent DM, there's rules alright in early D&D.
A dangerous assumption. Okay, no, that's not fair. My problem is, I disagree with this assertion. I have known many, many
competent GMs who were also very
inconsistent GMs. I've also known GMs (few, thankfully, but more than one...) who were extremely consistent...and
woefully incompetent. So competence and consistency are orthogonal--and a rules system which absolutely
requires characteristics humans are bad at expressing is, in my opinion, not a very good ruleset.
coring a hit when a hit is hard to get can be very satisfying. In its hyper-extreme form it's like the lottery: you don't get frustrated when you lose because you know (or should!) that you'll lose most of the time. Instead, the excitement comes if-when you win.
Coming back to this: People don't play D&D to play the lottery. They play D&D for a lot of reasons, but "to play the lottery
just to get to do the thing the game told me I could do" is not one of them. Like, not even slightly. I'm sure there's an
extremely small minority that does play it for that reason. But the vast majority does not, and making a game designed for that extremely small minority would merely kill the game, not persuade new folks to do a thing that I can guarantee you they
do not want to do.
Don't care. Irrelevant to my arguments.
If a few dice rolls count as "putting in a real effort, having a well-reasoned plan, and giving things your all" this chat ain't going to get very far.
What makes you think that's all that occurs...? For God's sake, isn't the fact that you actually DO have to plan, and marshal resources, and (etc., etc., etc.) exactly WHY folks love to call it "Combat as War" even though it's nothing of the sort?
For real, this is the most jaundiced response from you I've ever seen, and I'm kind of taken aback by it. I genuinely thought you saw...a lot more skill involved in play.
So...I genuinely have to ask, what do you
get out of playing D&D? Other than it being a shared social activity, of course. Because...as far as I can tell the ONLY thing you get out of it is the thrill of...losing a lot, and only winning randomly. Like, it doesn't matter what you do or how you act or what you know. You'll lose because the dice demand it most of the time, and you'll win simply because by their nature dice occasionally need to give high results or they're badly-made dice.
I just don't understand why that's fun. Genuinely. I have no idea what enjoyment is derived from, for lack of a better comparison, "Is the next card the ace of spades,
or do you DIE?"
Er, thanks for that. I played her as well as I could.
One of the Wizards was an Evoker, which was admittedly (and sadly!) the weakest subtype. Mine was an Illusionist, with Evoking blocked, and she was pretty darn good at it. As a player and for in-character reasons I kinda blundered into the best 3e strategy: specialize, specialize, specialize.
But the Cleric (then later, the Druid) was always the party's MVP.
I meant nothing negative to you about it, so I apologize for giving offense. You're correct that specialization is the (much,
MUCH) better choice in 3e rules. Generalists suck--nearly universally--without major optimization effort. Something I'm fairly sure you find dull? I believe I remember you saying something to that effect.
Unfortunately, illusion is also a weaker school unless you
even further specialize into the "Shadow X" spells, the ones that draw shadow-stuff from the Plane of Shadow to emulate other spells. If you do specialize therein, then Illusionists actually become INSANELY strong....but it requires a lot of obscure supplements etc. to get over the tedious and painful limitations. Which, again, I don't consider good design: having to do hours of bookkeeping and tedium to get two minutes of
possible glory is just not a great expenditure of time.
Frustration at a cold streak of rolling is understandable. It's also part of the game.
Frustration at being unable to overcome an in-character challenge is understandable. It's also part of the game.
You're covering up a hell of a lot of complexity with the very blithe "it's also part of the game" phrase. Just because something is part of the game doesn't make it good. Just because something is part of the game doesn't make it
well-executed by the people who made the game. Just because it's part of the game doesn't mean it SHOULD be part of the game. Etc.
I agree that, because of the nature of randomness, patterns like that will emerge at random. A truly uniform distribution must produce clumps sometimes; randomness is clumpy, just
unevenly clumpy. That is not the same thing as saying "these streaks should be common", nor "these streaks being commonplace is inherent to the game". Mostly because both of those statements are--objectively--false. It is a design choice. There are other choices. I find that the consequences of this choice are more negative than positive, because they tend to leave players disappointed
most of the time, only feeling a tiny spot of joy when the streak finally breaks. That doesn't swing the pendulum far enough. Bad events feel worse than equivalent-strength good events, even when both are genuinely equally common. A good event has to be
especially good in order to compensate for a string of bad events; or the bad events have to be
especially unimportant in order for the good event to outweigh them.
I see absolutely none of that analysis in your assertions. Frankly, your assertions come across as, "This is the game I remember, that I had fun with, and everyone else is just stupid for not seeing the obvious fun in it."
So, looping back to the "speak for yourself" from the start: I don't enjoy this experience, this "fail fail fail fail fail fail fail fail (one small success) fail fail fail fail fail fail" thing.. At all. I dislike it intensely. I find it, as I have told you before,
soul-crushing. It is so far removed from my experience of "fun" that I find it hard to articulate just how
much I dislike it, without going overboard. Any game where my skill, my plans, my effort, is
totally overwhelmed by chance is a game I have little to no interest in playing.
Chance exists in the D&D design space to
complicate matters, so that we cannot simply apply deductive reasoning until we have developed a flawless flow chart. It does not exist to invalidate all effort and strategy and prior growth. It does not exist to make every action a roulette wheel where success is a remote distant possibility. It does not exist to destroy predictive value. It is there to ensure we have to
play to find out what happens, not just
reason.
Trying to force D&D to be a mere roulette wheel would, I guarantee you, kill the game.
This isn't very helpful.
You complain about Mages getting abilities at high level, I point out that most games (at least in 1e) didn't get anywhere near that level in large part because the game was designed that way, and you say you don't care.
"We died a lot and thus never got to high level" does not excuse bad design. I mean, imagine if you were selling a car, and you told your buy, "Yes yes yes, I know that every single Winto explodes after reaching 150,000 miles, but
get real, nobody ever drives THAT many miles with a single car! It's not ACTUALLY a problem, because nobody would ever drive that long on one car!"
I don't
care that the failure state is uncommon, unlikely, whatever else. It is there, hard-coded into the game. It should not be there. It's that simple. Hence, no, you are
incorrect to say that this isn't a problem because it only happens at levels rarely-if-ever reached. That is, in fact, an
admission that it is a problem, it's just not a fatal one because it's uncommon.
And
wish is just the obvious, emblematic thing. A 9th-level Wizard--with 5th level spells--is no slouch.
Gygax didn't have 40-50 years of prior trial and error to fall back on. His designs were far from perfect, no argument there; but given that to begin with he, Arneson, and the rest were breaking entirely new ground I'd say they by and large didn't do too badly.
Neither did the designers of 3e (~25 years) nor 43 (~30 years). But notice what happened here: You dismissed the efforts of those other editions solely on the basis that they were ham-handed with their designs. I then rebutted that ham-handedness with design has been with us from literally the very beginning, and never went away. You then reply with, effectively, saying that ham-handedness by itself is not a problem, it needs other reasons in order to be a problem. Okay.....so....why doesn't that argument apply to your original thesis, and thus, we should judge the ham-handed actions of later editions
in context, just as we judge the ham-handedness of Gygax and Arneson in context?
I watched a hockey game last night that, while the overall play was quite even, was almost completely determined by luck:
The plural of anecdote is not data. "I saw a sports match decided by luck, therefore luck is
all that matters in sports" is not a valid argument. Likewise, "I've seen D&D combats determined solely by luck" does not mean that luck is all that matters in D&D combat design, either. You would need to show that it's
always the case that luck is the most important deciding factor, and I know without doubt that you cannot do that. Hence, your strident claims remain unevidenced: You have yet to show me even one reason why the inclusion of random number generation in a game means that, at all turns, strategy and effort not only are, but
should be overwhelmed by that randomness. Forget the is/ought problem; you haven't even shown that it IS that, let alone that it should be so!
In some settings or campaigns magic items aren't made new at all any more. In others, they only come from the deities. In others (and I think this is the general default other than in 3e) they're made by off-screen non-adventuring NPCs.
Again, picking at nits. It's created by beings who have the Actual Power. Whether they're dead and gone, whether they're gods, that's a completely irrelevant thing. What
is relevant is, that's the Fighter
borrowing somebody else's power. The Wizard can also borrow somebody else's power. Why is it totally a-okay that the Fighter borrows Wizard power in order to achieve great success, but it's somehow
not okay then that the Wizard, say, hires a bodyguard to keep the baddies off them?
This is just more examples of the incredibly irritating double standards woven all through D&D discussion. A Fighter having 50% or more of their power derived from
borrowing it from someone else is seen as totally cool and doesn't negatively reflect on them at all. But a Wizard getting just like, 10% of their power by borrowing it from others? Oh no that's what
proves that the Wizard is soooooo weak, because it can't do everything itself. Even though the Fighter literally could not achieve the success they do without magical equipment in early-edition D&D, and Fighters
cannot make that themselves.
Why are Wizards having their faults held against them, while Fighters are having theirs held up as some kind of bizarre strength instead?
Side note: if Illusionists ever got full Wish I missed it. They got Alter Reality, which is kinda their version of Limited Wish.
My apologies, this is my ignorance showing. I had looked it up, and saw
alter reality, but when I clicked the link, it brought me to the page about
wish--so I presumed that meant
alter reality was just an older or alternative term for
wish.
Regardless, we're still talking about a type of wizard who can...literally alter reality. Even if it's got limitations on it, I hope you can see why that's such a big deal. And yes, lower-level spells aren't as powerful as that, but that doesn't mean they aren't powerful. When your top end is "
literally rewrite reality to suit my preferences", there's a LOT of incredibly powerful stuff below that point. Like...nearly everything, as a matter of fact.
Spell creation was and remains very much a by-DM-approval thing. I'd like to see more of it, actually, but it's not popular among PCs as it takes them out of the field for quite some time.
Okay. Tell me: What does the Fighter have which is even remotely akin to spell creation? Wizards can literally get guaranteed, locked-in benefits--rules that will
always work, because they had to be specially hashed out--with just a modicum of GM-persuasion. Fighters, and all other non-casters, have no such thing. At all. Even when they DO get the negotation, they aren't getting a locked-in benefit. They're getting "well that was in that specific situation". They're getting "well you can't do that this time and I can't tell you why"--which I know you, yourself, have explicitly said can be a thing, and the GM may
never say why, and the players just have to like it or lump it, even though it's impossible to distinguish that behavior from capriciousness.
"Miserly" 5.xe DMs can't really be blamed for being such, as they're really just doing what the as-designed game tells them to do.
I disagree. If this is the age of GM empowerment, if we are to take seriously the idea that the rules are mere gossamer threads, mere suggestions to be brushed aside, then this argument cannot hold. If GMs are going to treat the rules like scrap paper, then it's on them, not on the rules, when they decide to be miserly. Can't have it both ways. Can't run and hide behind "but I was just following the rules!!!" when folks are also saying "eh, do whatever you like, you're the GM, you figure it out." Either what the rules say does in fact matter, and GMs are in fact under an expectation of abiding by them--in which case, the rules can and should be MUCH better-designed, so that instances where a GM would need to override them are
very rare--or what the rules say truly does not matter, in which case, the "I was just following
orders the rules!" excuse is gone.
Pick your poison. Doesn't really bother me much; either I can continue criticizing bad GM behavior (the second path), or I can continue pointing out that the rules should actually be, y'know, well-made in the first place.
Starting with 3e we've also had some form of (yuck!) wealth-by-level guidelines, which also skew very stingy in 5e at low-mid levels.
5e actually doesn't really have WBL. Not sure why you think they're so "yuck"y though. Items affect game math. Would you prefer that the game pretend items don't exist, so that their mere presence guarantees that the players will ride roughshod over your work as a GM? I doubt it, but I've been proven wrong in the past, so...
The advantage of having an experienced DM is that said DM knows when and how to tweak the as-written system so as to produce a good playable game.
The advantage of having a well-designed game is that said game does not need to be tweaked in the vast majority of cases, and is simply a good playable game nearly all of the time.
