Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8274520" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't really buy it though. And the only time I've seen someone claim a DM I knew was like that, I'd played with them, and it was just bollocks. Personal experience is always going to be limited, but there's nothing in D&D directing or guiding you to making failures universally catastrophic, and I'd argue 5E specifically words things in such a way that they probably shouldn't be. Of course the counter-issue is that very, very few people running 5E actually read/internalize the guidance.So I maintain that it's really odd that he's never played with a DM who thought otherwise, and that (unless I missed a post) he thinks D&D ought to work in the "catastrophist" way.I have come across catastrophist D&D DMs, but like two, ever. The big issue is really the d20 mechanic combined with the binary pass/fail, because it makes apparently unmitigated failures so common relative to games like Shadowrun. One of the "catastrophist" DMs I'm thinking of, in WoD games, you'd fail, but unless every die was a fail, he'd treat it as a sort of "soft failure". Whereas in D&D he did treat any failure as total failure. Ironically using "critical fails" on 1 probably helps out here, because the DM has to allocate mind-space to what would happen if you rolled a 1, so normal failures are probably less bad in such a game.As for "in opposition", what editions are you thinking of? OD&D and AD&D, that's clearly not true. Because you couldn't really "invest" in that stuff, you pretty much were fixed in terms of what you could do, and the spells available had utility across all kinds of situation. 3E, it's definitely possible to argue that it's true, so that's absolutely right for you. 4E it's absolutely not true, because even if you "optimize for stealth/social/utility", you're still a total badass in combat. 5E I would argue that the actual effectiveness difference is likely to be extremely small, and all the spellcasters will be relatively flexible, but you're agreeing with that.So 5E isn't the odd one on out. 4E is even most like that than 5E. OD&D and AD&D you just can't really do that.3.XE is the odd one out. Because that's the only edition where what you say is true.</blockquote>

Verification