Yeah, you describe perfectly the thing a lot of people found off-putting in 4e. Whilst I don't believe 5.5 will take us back quite to the levels it was in 4e, there definitely are some steps that seem to be going into "mechanics first, fiction as an afterthought" direction. The new stealth rules for example seem to be affected by this.
To me the main purpose of mechanics is to represent the fiction. I have no use for rules that "work" but which are not connected to the fiction.
Yup, exactly this. RPGs are Make Believe with rules there to provide structure, controlled randomness, and predictability. The only point of having rules is to support the make believe. When the make believe has to run after the rules there's a problem.
Sometimes I feel like forums are good venues for beating dead horses. If I state my opinion on something, and you don't find it persuasive, how likely is it that restating that opinion helps? But you see exactly that happen all the time. Many threads can feel like a youtube video on repeat. This isn't meant as commentary on people's enjoyment or use of forums, just an observation.
I'd encourage you to just step away any time you feel a conversation has progressed beyond usefulness. Convincing people with deeply held beliefs on topics that they are passionate about can be a fools errand.
Yeah, I've given up trying to convince people that my opinion is right. I'll just settle for convincing people that I actually hold my opinion and that I'm not just confused.
All these stories of fancy pants buttons and pennies(!), bah. We weren't no Beverly Hills rich kids! Back in my day we used scraps of paper with our character initials on them* and a string made out of bark fibers to measure distance! For monsters we used rocks and if you somehow managed to kill the monster you ate it! And we liked it!
*about the only 100% true part of this particular rant
Having monster minis be candies that you can eat if you kill the monster is top shelf DMing.
If all someone is doing is throwing some random object out the window then it's just wasting an action. You'd be better with grovel which makes them prone and wastes half their move standing next round. But that's not what the post I was responding to was saying, it was that the target would throw themselves out the window.
Well that all depends on what's around that could be chucked out the window. It could be something really important.
Your 'B' here is standard operating procedure in our games, EXCEPT just because Bob misses a session does not mean Bob's Cleric isn't still involved and doing stuff. It's just being played by those who did show up (and thus is to some degree at their mercy, though the DM always has veto over anything ridiculous) and thus won't be any more rested than anyone else when the next session starts.
Yeah, but having to have someone else play your PC for you is a hassle. It's a hassle that might be worth it but it's still a hassle. I liked the 1e standard of having one session be (roughly) one expedition from safety into danger and back again, it made it so much easier to juggle people with different schedules.
Don't get hung up about the ten-minute workday and all these problems wander away.
The ten minute adventuring day was a BIG issue in 3.5e for many tables and still crops up a lot in 5e. Telling newbie DM "don't get hung up" about it and the problem doesn't go away. Takes some workarounds and focus. Nothing insurmountable but they're things that need to be taught to newbie DMs as I have personally seen ten minute adventuring days derail campaigns in both 3.5e and 5e.
The difference to me is very clear. In your example of shoving someone out the window, the player is engaging the game, not manipulating the game rules to get a result. Same with all your other examples. In the Command example, the player is not using the game at all. They are abusing the vagueness in the description of the spell so they can gain extra utiity out of the spell that was never really intended.
Note, this isn't just about the Command spell. It's that the player does this over and over again with spell after spell - attempting to abuse the open ended nature of the poorly written mechanics in order to "win" the game.
I think that vagueness and the ability of players to manipulate it was there FULLY intentionally if I know the first thing about Gygax. I also don't really separate it from the world, as crafting exactly the right Command word for the situation you're in requires you to pay attention to the specifics of the scenario.
Yeah, I can see that if the player casts Command, commands the NPC to "Defenestrate" and the DM replies with, "Ok, he throws three copper pieces out the window", that won't cause ANY friction at the table whatsoever. Nope. High fives all around. Everyone's going to pat that DM on the head for doing such a great job.
Sure.
Yes, I'm sure. I've had very similar things happen at my table. The players groaned a bit, slapped their foreheads for not choosing a better command word, were happy that the NPC was wasting their turn and not attacking them, and then the game went on. This isn't so hard. The players trust me to not be a jerk but if they cast a magic spell to make someone throw indeterminate naughty word out the window and that results in the NPC throwing something random out the window that's everything working exactly as it should.
Do your players really cause problems about something like this where they've SUCCEEDED in making a dangerous enemy waste their turn? That's not what I've experienced as a player or DM at all. But then threads like this make me realize that how people play D&D is much more various than I expected.
Makes me wonder how many of 5e's issues are cause by the amazing idea that was the adventuring day. My theory is far too many for such a misguided idea.
A lot of things in 5e don't work as intended if you have more long rests than the designers intended. Looking at polls a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT of tables have more long rests than the designers intended. This mis-match of how the game was designed and how people actually play it is the biggest single issue in 5e and a lot of the other problems people have had with the game flow from that single cause.
For any hypothetical 6e fixing that mis-match should be the absolute top priority, honestly higher than any of my own personal gripes.
And yes I know good DMs can avoid having this kind of mis-match. But there are a loooooooooooooot of new/mediocre DMs playing D&D and making it easier for them to fix that mix-match would improve the experience at the average table a whole lot.
The number of fights isn't a pacing issue. Fights can serve a purpose in support of proper pacing. If you just jam the maximum number of fights into a session, your pacing is going to be off. So yeah, we are talking about very different things here.
I think we just have very different definitions of what "pacing" in an RPG implies. We're not really disagreeing about anything here except for semantics.
Edit: This is why I believe you see a lot of people who don't like rules heavy systems complain that they feel like they bog down. We saw this a lot with complaints about 4e combat.
Yes, how long the average fight takes has a really massive influence on how a game flows. If combat takes a long time there's a lot of pressure to make every fight meaningful, while if fights are fast you can have a whole series of running skirmishes and things flow very differently.
See, now this? This I 100% agree with.
And, if you wanted your summoned elephant to do stuff that an elephant could reasonably (or even somewhat unreasonably) be able to do? Zero problems. But, when you want your elephant (note, I'm using a generic "you" not
@Daztur You) to trumpet so loudly that it deafens the NPC beside it? Sorry, no. Not going to happen.
Yup, complete agreement. I would, however, let people make the elephant trumpet so loudly that people get advantage on their saving throws vs. command since they can't hear a command well with an elephant blasting in their ears
I think we want some of the same things we both want the Fiction to trump the exact wording of the Rules but we're going about it in somewhat different ways:
1. I want to follow the flavor of the various abilities rather than the exact rules so I want the rules to be somewhat flexible if the players are doing something that fits the flavor of an ability rather than the specific rules laid out.
2. You want to follow the flavor of the abilities rather than some random naughty word that the players have pulled out of their asses so you want the rules to be tight enough that that sort of random naughty word doesn't intrude.
We're mostly in agreement with what constitutes random naughty word that shouldn't intrude on the game, but some of the stuff that I think is good play in which the player is following the flavor of the ability and using it in a creative way that makes sense in the fiction is something that you file under "random naughty word."
We both want RAI to trump RAW all week long and twice on Sunday, but our "I" doesn't quite match up.
