D&D 5E (2024) CoDzilla? Yeah Na Its CoDGFaW.

[EzekielRaiden]

Applies to every rpg.

No, it does not.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

 

[Zardnaar]

No, it does not.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Well most RPGs could benefit from editing or a 2E to clean them up.

Most successful ones get a 2E eventually. Most die with a whimper.

You seem to expect perfect and no RPG can really do that.

You would need around 3 years of design, 2-3 years of playtesting to find the worst bugs and if you released it the excitement is gone as people have been playing it for 2 or 3 years already.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Anything can be taught provided people are willing to learn.

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.

As players, we can and do use all kinds of skill and in-character abilities and so forth to push the odds in our favour; even sometimes to the point of obviating or avoiding having to roll dice.

But once the dice roll, all that odds-shifting etc. is done. At that point it becomes a sheer gamble, where you'll either win or lose.

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?"

That's precisely what the enjoyment is derived from! The old "thrill of victory" piece holds true here. And if you win too often that thrill becomes diminished to the point of irrelevance, while if you never win there's no thrill to be had.

I mean, has your table never given a roaring cheer when someone rolled that nat 20 at the perfect moment when everything was on the line and anything less meant doom and destruction all round?

I meant nothing negative to you about it, so I apologize for giving offense.

No worries.

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".

What I'm sensing, though, is a reluctance to accept those streaks in any form.

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 ran a session last night where for the most part everything that could go wrong for the PCs did go wrong, short of a full TPK. Between them they lost 8 levels, and one of the PCs may have been rendered unplayable as anyone who sees him (including the other PCs) becomes filled with dread that this PC is about to die in a very messy way, taking out the surrounding neighbourhood in the process, and thus the best place to be as farther away from him.

An email from one of the players today included "What a session!" and "edge-of-the-seat exciting", which doesn't sound very disappointed to me.

To the bolded: I kinda think that's a you thing and doesn't extrapolate to everyone.

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.

Make it a roulette wheel where there's in-game rules-supported ways and means of affecting the odds, however, and you've got a proven winner.

That said, part of the reason for having chance in the game is to at times take the players' best-laid plans and squash them dead by, in effect, flat-out saying "no, this ain't gonna happen this time".

"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.

There's a reason not much gets produced for high-level 5e, that being that the vast majority of play in in the low-to-mid levels, up to maybe 12th-14th range.

As for 1e, there's design up to 20th-ish level but the intent is that the playable range is about half that, with the rest of the design in place mainly for two reasons:

--- to tell DMs how high-level NPCs work in order to facilitate creating foes, mentors, trainers, and so forth
--- for those few tables that want to (or dare to) try playing at those levels.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

I keep seeing this statement, not just from you, and disagree with it every time.

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!

A game is either random or it is not. And any degree of randomness, no matter how small, makes a game random.

Chess is not random. Nor is Checkers, along with a very few other games where the only variable is player skill.

Any game that involves rolled dice, shuffled cards, and the like is by definition random, even though in some of those games player skill is also very important. Take Bridge: the unavoidable random element is the hands the four players get dealt, the skill piece is how they then bid and play those hands.

Dice-based RPGs are an odd duck in that they have an occasionally-avoidable random element where skilled play can sometimes negate or avoid invoking randomization by making an outcome certain. Most of the time, though, the random element is unavoidable, and all the players can do is use what the game gives them to try to bend the odds in their favour.

So, my take from there is that once the odds are set and the randomizer is invoked, lean into it! Enjoy the thrill of the gamble!

Okay. Tell me: What does the Fighter have which is even remotely akin to spell creation?

Nothing.

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.

By the book, yes. If one takes steps to make magic not necessarily quite so reliable, though, it's not quite so cut and dried.

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.

Most new DMs these days are likely to follow the rules as written as best they can. I don't think there's anything controversial there.

This is different from the 1e days, when brand new DMs were told right there in the DMG to tweak things to make the game their own (and then in the same book told not to, in typical Gygaxian contradictory form), and many of them did just that either right out the gate or very shortly after.

Today's new DMs aren't getting that same advice right up front, and thus it takes longer for them to even think of tweaking the rul;es never mind actually doing so.

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...

I prefer items be more easy come, easy go. And - again in the spirit of randomness - I'm quite happy if a low-level party stumbles across some high-powered item; while I don't want it to happen every time, I want the chance to be there.

As for "riding roughshod over my work as GM", I think if I'm planning things down to the point where the presence or absence of a few items is going to that-badly upset the apple cart, either I'm doing it wrong or the game's math is far too finely-tuned.

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.

Thing is, I think you and I would disagree fairly deeply over what we'd consider to be a good playable game, and we ain't the only viewpoints out there.

Better design, I think, is that which can be tweaked to suit the vast majority of cases.

 

[Lanefan]

Especially with the existence of creatures immune to non-magical weaponry! Imagine a 1e Lich who just drops anti-magic shell rather than engaging in some kind of spell duel with PC's, knowing full well that there's nothing they could do to hurt it!

There's a reason Liches endure for hundreds if not thousands of years; that reason being their ability to do smart things like this.

 

[Lanefan]

I. Don't. Care.

The design is what the game is, and not only can but should be evaluated for all of its contents, not merely the commonly-used parts. The whole thing matters, and if there are designs in it that are ill-considered or outright deleterious, they should be addressed (fixed if fixable, cut if not.)

The commonly-used parts are what matters most to the most number of people using the system.

But that isn't what's happening here at all. Instead, it is precisely the reverse. People--most specifically @Lanefan but to a lesser extent @Zardnaar and others--are saying that we should be doing the reverse of what you're saying. That we should be dismissing modern sensibilities and forcing anyone who plays D&D to have the old-school experience.

The old-school experience (though not necessarily all of the old-school design) is D&D.

And that's what irks me: that edition by edition the changes in design are actively trying to change the experience, rather than just making things work better while trying to give the same (or very similar) experience.

 

[Lanefan]

That's a pretty damning conclusion.

If most editions are so badly designed that it is not hard to improve any of them, doesn't that mean we've been paying designers for sub-par product for years and years now?

Because each one gives us a foundation on which to build our own system(s) tailored to suit what we want the game to be, or additional/new ideas to incorporate into such.

Why should I pay for product that is so flawed?

You're paying for the inspiration it can give you.

A vague analogy is buying a house you intend to renovate the hell out of vs buying a house you never intend to change.