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.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Anything can be taught provided people are willing to learn.

Preferences cannot be taught. They simply exist, or don't. They might arise from exposure...but they also might not. "I can teach you to like this!" is a massive error.

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.

Except it isn't. Like it literally isn't. A "sheer gamble" makes it a roulette-wheel situation. That is not what it is. At all. The game has designed math. You may dislike that fact all you like--it's still true. It is not "a sheer gamble". The game literally isn't designed that way--and it never was, not even in OD&D.

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 have no idea what "The old 'thrill of victory' piece" means.

More to the point: You're right, but you're missing two critical things. First, it's not "winning too often", it's winning without earning it too often. Victories you earn are always valid, doesn't matter if you've won 10 or 1000 or 1,000,000. A good general winning ten battles in a row doesn't feel like the tenth battle was a dull waste of time. Second, you're forgetting that losing too often also sours things, but in the opposite direction. It's not just that there's no thrill to be had, it's that even the victories taste like defeat.

That's the problem here. Hyper ultra mega lethality where you lose characters left and right doesn't feel good. It sucks. A lot. And given how much crappy awful darkness there is in our world right now, a lot of people are not interested in an experience which will grind them into the dirt, spit on them, and call them names for daring to do anything cool or heroic or exciting.

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?

No, because I've never seen that happen. Mostly because if that did happen, then 19/20 times, it would end in disaster, ruining the enjoyment of the evening and leaving me feeling depressed, like I'm a total failure who never deserves happiness.

Again: you cannot teach preferences. Your preferences aren't mine. You are never going to be able to teach me to like this, and while I feel this more strongly than the average bear...the average bear agrees more with me than she does with you on this.

Too much death is worse--much worse--than too much victory. For most folks, it's that simple.

No worries.

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

And I disagree.

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.

And you don't think that maybe, just maybe, your group is not a representative sample because you've specifically selected for people who share your tastes, and selected against those who are completely the opposite?

The fact that you, a self-avowed OSR-style GM who actively cultivates a devil-may-care, hyper-mercenary attitude amongst your players. That's not how most people play D&D, and you will not succeed at "teaching" people that their preferences should be yours.

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

You may think that if you wish, but it's a well-known problem in psychology. Humans over-value negative events and under-value positive ones. Not universally, this is a statistical thing. It's called the "negativity bias", and it is an extremely real and often very serious problem. If on Tuesday Bob has a good event, and then on Wednesday he has a bad event, he will feel worse about the bad event than the good one most times, even if both events are equally impactful. Bob will almost never feel neutral after this. Even if we switch the order, bad on Tuesday good on Wednesday, the good event will not entirely compensate for the bad event unless it is much more good than the bad event was.

This is simply a part of general human nature. There will, of course, always

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.

Except you can't. Like in old-school D&D you literally can't. In modern D&D, you can. That's part of my point.

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".

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.

First part: I already said that? Like that's what I literally said. Chance exists to prevent ossified SOPs and flawless plans. Second: I consider this a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing is made so no one plays it so nothing is made. PLENTY of high-level adventure paths have been made by Paizo and ENWorld and have done fantastically well, e.g. Zeitgeist goes all the way to 30 in the original 4e version.

"There's a reason" may be "they don't make it so no one plays it".

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.

Then those rules should not be present in the PHB. If they aren't intended to be used--if they're meant as a supplement to the actual game--then they should be just that. A supplement.

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

Why? It's a fact. I have a miniature pinscher that is almost 21 years old. Does that change the fact that most miniature pinschers don't live past 16 years old? No, it does not. Hence: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Data has to be collected correctly, and if you don't, it's...gonna be a problem.

In what way can you declare that an individual, personal experience, affected by all the vagaries of individual existence, becomes a general statistical fact? A sample size of 1 is statistically meaningless. Like it literally cannot be used for statistics--you'd get divide-by-zero errors.

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

No. Games have degrees of randomness. This black-and-white thinking will lead you astray.

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

Again, there are degrees of randomness. This is one that has a low degree of randomness.

Blackjack, for example, is a game with a moderate degree of randomness. That's why card-counting is forbidden in casinos. It's a skill that gives you a meaningful advantage, even though the game is still random.

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.

It is some degree of random. Not the same as absolute pure randomness or no randomness whatsoever. See above: some card games are more random and others are less. Poker, for example, is more random than blackjack in most cases, because poker involves much less information presented to the player.

Bridge is a good example of a medium-randomness game. It has a very strong skill component, but a lot of the information is not directly available to the player. Craps and roulette are good examples of almost totally random games, where skill plays little to no part and there's functionally no information the players could obtain to change that.

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.

And here you are having to concede the point I made above: randomness is not black-or-white. It's a gradient.

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!

Nah. Not my preference. Gave it a shot, hated it thoroughly. I'd rather never play an RPG again than do that.

Nothing.

Okay. So...you have one class that can, officially, expand its capabilities. You have another class that cannot expand its capabilities. Do I need to spell out how "X can increase its capacities, even if it doesn't always do so, but Y cannot ever increase its capacities"?

You've been quite clear in the past that every power has to come with a cost. What cost did the Wizard pay for being able to invent new mechics for itself, that the Fighter did not pay? It can't be the weakness--that's already balancing against the existing spells like time stop and wish. So...what cost was paid for this?

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.

Then the book should have already done that.

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.

What? No, certainly not with 5e. 5e actively encourages GMs to treat the rules as meaningless suggestions to be cast aside whenever, wherever, and however they feel like. It's one of the most irritating things about it!

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.

Ah, but is it "tweaking" things? Or is it "wholly reinventing the game every other session"? Because I have had far too much of the latter already.

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.

I prefer a small number of signature items that the player truly values and cares about. "Easy come, easy go" makes for "yawn, next?" in my experience--items aren't valued, they're just disposable trash because you know it'll all be taken away sooner rather than later.

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.

I mean that's what happens when the players acquire massive amoutns of loot or no loot at all, with zero control or reference.

Wait...do you think WBL means players MUST have EXACTLY those values...? Good Lord, no wonder you think it's a terrible thing! It's just a benchmark. Do you think it's a problem that monster design has a typical/expected HP by level, even if many monsters don't follow it precisely?

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.

Certainly. That's why I always include elements in my design proposals that I know, without doubt, are not for me, but which would please others. Or, better still, elements which serve both of our needs in different ways, and which empower GMs to make their own decisions about what kind of game they should have.

I just demand that the game itself actually be...y'know, one that genuinely runs, and runs well, for the playstyles the designers intended and told the players about. If it actually needs changes just to function, it's a bad game. If it is requiring the GM to act like the flight computer of the F-117, constantly making corrections because the plane cannot fly without such corrections because it is inherently aerodynamically unstable, then no, that's not acceptable and I don't think you should have to accept that any more than I do.

Again, this is why I push SO HARD on the need for "novice levels" (read: robust, well-made rules for going from "the absolute bare minimum mechanics to be 'a character'" to "everything except one tiny missing piece to be a proper 1st level character") and, relatedly, the need for "incremental advancement" rules (read: robust, well-made rules for doling out little tiny pieces of a character's next level-up benefits). Because such rules don't just support you--they support several playstyles that I, personally, have no interest in, AND ALSO support brand-new players getting a gentler but still challenging introduction to the D&D experience. (Or an utterly ungentle one, if that's what the GM desires--but no GM is forced to be ungentle, nor to be gentle for that matter. They choose what end to turn these robust rules toward.)

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

But what does "tweaked" mean? Because for me, "tweaking" is making small, I emphasize small, situational adjustments--a number here, a spell there. The way you describe it, it's much more like "alright, I'm going to rebuild the spell system from the ground up", which looks nothing like "tweaking" to me, and instead looks like paying for the privilege of having to do all the designers' work for them.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

Are they, or are they not, part of the game system?

Are they, or are they not, part of the intended design balance?

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

No, it is not. It is one kind of D&D. It is not ALL of D&D, it never was, and it never will be.

To assert otherwise is to tell me that I'm having badwrongfun. Or, I suppose, if someone were foolish enough to tell you that the OSR-style experience is somehow not D&D, then that would still be telling someone that they're having badwrongfun.

I'm not saying your fun is bad or wrong. It's yours. I want you to be able to have as much of that fun as possible in a game we can all play, so that we genuinely do have a meeting of the minds, we genuinely do have ONE game that provides robust support to both you AND me.

But that cannot happen if you insist that your way of playing is the only way to play D&D. That, right there, is one-true-way-ism.

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.

Okay. You can dislike that all you like. The fact of the matter is, these other experiences are--consistently!--better-received by the players than the one you personally prefer.

I should think you would want me as an ally, seeing as how I specifically want games that support you wholeheartedly, avoiding the bullcrap of fig-leaf support and actually, sincerely giving you rules meant to be good and well-built and useful to you. I've been very consistent about this for at least the past 12 years, possibly more.

 

[Zardnaar]

Preferences cannot be taught. They simply exist, or don't. They might arise from exposure...but they also might not. "I can teach you to like this!" is a massive error.


Except it isn't. Like it literally isn't. A "sheer gamble" makes it a roulette-wheel situation. That is not what it is. At all. The game has designed math. You may dislike that fact all you like--it's still true. It is not "a sheer gamble". The game literally isn't designed that way--and it never was, not even in OD&D.


I have no idea what "The old 'thrill of victory' piece" means.

More to the point: You're right, but you're missing two critical things. First, it's not "winning too often", it's winning without earning it too often. Victories you earn are always valid, doesn't matter if you've won 10 or 1000 or 1,000,000. A good general winning ten battles in a row doesn't feel like the tenth battle was a dull waste of time. Second, you're forgetting that losing too often also sours things, but in the opposite direction. It's not just that there's no thrill to be had, it's that even the victories taste like defeat.

That's the problem here. Hyper ultra mega lethality where you lose characters left and right doesn't feel good. It sucks. A lot. And given how much crappy awful darkness there is in our world right now, a lot of people are not interested in an experience which will grind them into the dirt, spit on them, and call them names for daring to do anything cool or heroic or exciting.


No, because I've never seen that happen. Mostly because if that did happen, then 19/20 times, it would end in disaster, ruining the enjoyment of the evening and leaving me feeling depressed, like I'm a total failure who never deserves happiness.

Again: you cannot teach preferences. Your preferences aren't mine. You are never going to be able to teach me to like this, and while I feel this more strongly than the average bear...the average bear agrees more with me than she does with you on this.

Too much death is worse--much worse--than too much victory. For most folks, it's that simple.


And I disagree.


And you don't think that maybe, just maybe, your group is not a representative sample because you've specifically selected for people who share your tastes, and selected against those who are completely the opposite?

The fact that you, a self-avowed OSR-style GM who actively cultivates a devil-may-care, hyper-mercenary attitude amongst your players. That's not how most people play D&D, and you will not succeed at "teaching" people that their preferences should be yours.


You may think that if you wish, but it's a well-known problem in psychology. Humans over-value negative events and under-value positive ones. Not universally, this is a statistical thing. It's called the "negativity bias", and it is an extremely real and often very serious problem. If on Tuesday Bob has a good event, and then on Wednesday he has a bad event, he will feel worse about the bad event than the good one most times, even if both events are equally impactful. Bob will almost never feel neutral after this. Even if we switch the order, bad on Tuesday good on Wednesday, the good event will not entirely compensate for the bad event unless it is much more good than the bad event was.

This is simply a part of general human nature. There will, of course, always


Except you can't. Like in old-school D&D you literally can't. In modern D&D, you can. That's part of my point.


First part: I already said that? Like that's what I literally said. Chance exists to prevent ossified SOPs and flawless plans. Second: I consider this a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing is made so no one plays it so nothing is made. PLENTY of high-level adventure paths have been made by Paizo and ENWorld and have done fantastically well, e.g. Zeitgeist goes all the way to 30 in the original 4e version.

"There's a reason" may be "they don't make it so no one plays it".


Then those rules should not be present in the PHB. If they aren't intended to be used--if they're meant as a supplement to the actual game--then they should be just that. A supplement.


Why? It's a fact. I have a miniature pinscher that is almost 21 years old. Does that change the fact that most miniature pinschers don't live past 16 years old? No, it does not. Hence: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Data has to be collected correctly, and if you don't, it's...gonna be a problem.

In what way can you declare that an individual, personal experience, affected by all the vagaries of individual existence, becomes a general statistical fact? A sample size of 1 is statistically meaningless. Like it literally cannot be used for statistics--you'd get divide-by-zero errors.


No. Games have degrees of randomness. This black-and-white thinking will lead you astray.


Again, there are degrees of randomness. This is one that has a low degree of randomness.

Blackjack, for example, is a game with a moderate degree of randomness. That's why card-counting is forbidden in casinos. It's a skill that gives you a meaningful advantage, even though the game is still random.


It is some degree of random. Not the same as absolute pure randomness or no randomness whatsoever. See above: some card games are more random and others are less. Poker, for example, is more random than blackjack in most cases, because poker involves much less information presented to the player.

Bridge is a good example of a medium-randomness game. It has a very strong skill component, but a lot of the information is not directly available to the player. Craps and roulette are good examples of almost totally random games, where skill plays little to no part and there's functionally no information the players could obtain to change that.


And here you are having to concede the point I made above: randomness is not black-or-white. It's a gradient.


Nah. Not my preference. Gave it a shot, hated it thoroughly. I'd rather never play an RPG again than do that.


Okay. So...you have one class that can, officially, expand its capabilities. You have another class that cannot expand its capabilities. Do I need to spell out how "X can increase its capacities, even if it doesn't always do so, but Y cannot ever increase its capacities"?

You've been quite clear in the past that every power has to come with a cost. What cost did the Wizard pay for being able to invent new mechics for itself, that the Fighter did not pay? It can't be the weakness--that's already balancing against the existing spells like time stop and wish. So...what cost was paid for this?


Then the book should have already done that.


What? No, certainly not with 5e. 5e actively encourages GMs to treat the rules as meaningless suggestions to be cast aside whenever, wherever, and however they feel like. It's one of the most irritating things about it!


Ah, but is it "tweaking" things? Or is it "wholly reinventing the game every other session"? Because I have had far too much of the latter already.


I prefer a small number of signature items that the player truly values and cares about. "Easy come, easy go" makes for "yawn, next?" in my experience--items aren't valued, they're just disposable trash because you know it'll all be taken away sooner rather than later.


I mean that's what happens when the players acquire massive amoutns of loot or no loot at all, with zero control or reference.

Wait...do you think WBL means players MUST have EXACTLY those values...? Good Lord, no wonder you think it's a terrible thing! It's just a benchmark. Do you think it's a problem that monster design has a typical/expected HP by level, even if many monsters don't follow it precisely?


Certainly. That's why I always include elements in my design proposals that I know, without doubt, are not for me, but which would please others. Or, better still, elements which serve both of our needs in different ways, and which empower GMs to make their own decisions about what kind of game they should have.

I just demand that the game itself actually be...y'know, one that genuinely runs, and runs well, for the playstyles the designers intended and told the players about. If it actually needs changes just to function, it's a bad game. If it is requiring the GM to act like the flight computer of the F-117, constantly making corrections because the plane cannot fly without such corrections because it is inherently aerodynamically unstable, then no, that's not acceptable and I don't think you should have to accept that any more than I do.

Again, this is why I push SO HARD on the need for "novice levels" (read: robust, well-made rules for going from "the absolute bare minimum mechanics to be 'a character'" to "everything except one tiny missing piece to be a proper 1st level character") and, relatedly, the need for "incremental advancement" rules (read: robust, well-made rules for doling out little tiny pieces of a character's next level-up benefits). Because such rules don't just support you--they support several playstyles that I, personally, have no interest in, AND ALSO support brand-new players getting a gentler but still challenging introduction to the D&D experience. (Or an utterly ungentle one, if that's what the GM desires--but no GM is forced to be ungentle, nor to be gentle for that matter. They choose what end to turn these robust rules toward.)


But what does "tweaked" mean? Because for me, "tweaking" is making small, I emphasize small, situational adjustments--a number here, a spell there. The way you describe it, it's much more like "alright, I'm going to rebuild the spell system from the ground up", which looks nothing like "tweaking" to me, and instead looks like paying for the privilege of having to do all the designers' work for them.

You cant teach preferences as such.
You can have a fun table though that most like.

I've been playing with newbies a lot last 2 years. I filter for social aspects not mechanical.

Had a conversation Sunday. Player feedback "you've got yourself a great group".

That player has only experienced 2 stable groups one of them is mine.

2/5 are American, latest pickup ger character was murdered via PvP last group. Outright banned in my games booted from table.

And I'm running a newbie game.

Reputation matters I've been around locally for years and sone of the teenagers back in the MtG days are almost 40 now so they'll say hi occasionally.

3/5 are also DMs occasionally.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

Sorry, but...screw that noise.

I should not have to create the game. That's literally what we pay nearly two hundred dollars ($180, not counting shipping, from WotC directly) for.

If the book actually said, "This is not a game, it is merely our suggestions for how you can build your own game", D&D would die, and it would deserve it.

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

That and $5 might buy me a cup of coffee. Not sure; the prices keep going up.

Point being, I have zero need for "inspiration" from nearly two hundred dollars of books. I have more than enough inspiration for that, thankyouverymuch.

They call themselves "designers", not "muses". They're designing something. It should be designed well, or they shouldn't get paid. It's that simple.

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

This is a lovely analogy.

How many people buy a home expecting to need to fix-er-up?

How many people buy a home expecting a place they'll have to do minor maintenance on now and then, but can otherwise live in and make use of freely?

You're trying to make it so no one will ever be allowed to buy a house EXCEPT as a fixer-upper. I'm trying to make it so everyone CAN get a house they never intend to change, BUT if they want to, the house was already built with extension or expansion in mind (e.g. the foundation extends beyond the existing floorplan, the wiring has been carefully done to make new junctions easy to install, the walls are built with recyclable materials, etc., etc.)

One of us is demanding everyone follow the one true way. It isn't me.