D&D 5E (2014) D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[Aeolius]

I know a lot of people who pick what sounds cool and I find them to be the most fun to play with.

But my spellstitched swarm-shifter dread necromancer emancipated spawn half-scrag sea kin lacedon with aboleth grafts IS cool!!

 

[ForeverSlayer]

But my spellstitched swarm-shifter dread necromancer emancipated spawn half-scrag sea kin lacedon with aboleth grafts IS cool!!

I'm sure he was once he became a Monster of Legend and added a few fiendish grafts.

 

[Ratskinner]

Yeah, not really. Show me any table and I'll show you players that will optimize if given a chance, and others that will resent the results of that optimization. Even my players, who are generally speaking interested in the story and role-playing aspects of the game, will absolutely pick the more numerically or tactically advantageous options. The knowledge of this fact is so ingrained into the game culture you may not even be aware of it. However, given the fact that Gygax felt it necessary to comment on optimizers MANY times in various places (1e is replete with this, too many to even mention) we can see that it has clearly been a central part of gamer's agendas from day 1. YOU can find it contentious, but 99.9% of the gaming community just consider it a trivially truth of gaming.

You seem to tying a lot of stuff together here, so I'm not sure exactly what is a "trivial truth".

However, I find this overstated and hyperbolic in general. I've played and run at tables at both ends of the spectrum and in the middle. IME, as [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] speculated, optimization seems to correlate with the participation of wargamers, Old-School Dungeoneers, and avid MMORPG players at the table. Of course, that's IME, YMMV.

 

[Mournblade94]

Given that Beowulf could rip the arms of monsters, fight Grendel's mother in her underwater lair, and fight a dragon, I actually have no doubt that, had the poet inlcuded a cliff in the narrative, Beowulf would have scaled it.

My intuition on St George is not quite as strong, but still fairly strong.

The odd thing is that, in AD&D the mage is knowledgeable in all things (by casting Legend Lore).

But in any event that is not what I said. I talked about a "modest cliff", not Mt Everest (which is the cliff analogue of "knowledgable in all things). I find a mage of the D&D scholarly variety who is not very knowledgeable in anything genre incoherent, yes.

I've seen you run this line before. It's an interesting analysis.

So start the new thread, please! I'd like to see you develop this a bit more.

I concede I talked about the extreme in impossible cliff and knowledge in all things, but for purposes of the discussion it does not really matter.

So genre appropriate means, any hard task the DM wants you to do? Why have the skill at all; just describe it as a success everytime? If the monk wanted Beowulf to climb a cliff, he could have just written it in because there were no rules to follow in mythology. Once we get to the game rules, it is not a simple matter of deciding a "writer could make him do it." There is no quantifier if scaling a cliff is genre appropriate or not. It is only genre appropriate if someone wants it to be, and it is just as easy for a DM to decide something is not genre appropriate as to say it is. 4e makes far too many assumptions about that. If the hero did not pack his climbing gear, his level should not be able to decide he climbs a cliff. If it does, don't have the skill system, leave the rules to combat.

The mage has Legend Lore but maybe he has not yet discovered the spell... Or didn't memorize it... or doesn't have it in his travelling spell book.

If 4e is going to assume all these tasks can be done because they are ambiguously "genre appropriate" (a misnomer) why have the skill system at all? Just assume the party has the resources because they are all cool heroes.

 

[Mournblade94]

For me this goes to genre issues - either 9th level PCs can make rivers trivial challenges, as they clearly are for Beowulf; or conversely they find themselves confronting bigger, fiercer rivers like the ones in the Elemental Chaos or the Feywild.

This isn't true in my 4e game, at least. The story element, the fictional positioning, is crucial - it's what marks the difference, for me, betweeen an RPG and a boardgame.

I think the problem lies inthe term genre appropriate, it is so arbitrary as to be useless. The river is not a challenge for Beowulf because the monk writing it back in 800 AD did not want to waste his daylight and ink writing about it. The writer does not make the obstacle that Beowulf cannot get past. maybe the cliff was too much for him? If so the Monk wouldn't have written it in the story, because who wants to read about Beowulf's failure?

In a game the failure is a very real possibility, and that is why genre appropriate is a weak term.

 

[billd91]

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In a game the failure is a very real possibility, and that is why genre appropriate is a dubious term.

I don't think I would call it a dubious term. The question here is more along the lines of what genre we're talking about and which genre conventions to follow. Is Beowulf fantasy? If so, should fantasy characters be able to do the same things? Fantasy doesn't agree. Take Lord of the Rings. The fellowship tries to traverse a mountain pass... and fails. They don't succeed at some of the travails they encounter because they're big damn heroes and that's the genre convention. They fail (or succeed) because that fits the purpose of the author.

Beowulf would have failed the tasks the men crafting his stories wanted him to fail whether or not he was defined as being capable of ripping off Grendel's limb. If they wanted him to face a little more adversity and cleverly work around a problem, they would have had him fail the simple approach. The Greeks, despite having a big army with big, damn heroes like Ajax and Achilles, couldn't take Troy. They faced a complication and had to work around it, taking Troy by subterfuge. So what does that mean for designing a fantasy RPG? Insurmountable obstacles and failures at some attempts are OK.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not necessarily. After all, why would such a dragon kill a PC that presented no threat? And why would a dragon have a lair that a low-level character could find/walk into? A more likely progression is that characters of radically different power levels will encounter each other, but that the terms of that encounter will be dictated in part by their abilities and it will proceed based on what the two think of each other.

NPCs/Monsters don't have brains, they are intrinsically extensions of the GM's will, thus any judgment being made as to how to proceed is by definition the judgment of the GM, and is at the very least the subject of the GM's biases and subservient to his/her goals. Truthfully, I'm an Ancient Huge Chaotic Evil Red Dragon and a bunch of guys in armor etc come wandering into my lair, what do you think I'm going to do? Sure, I might toy with them, I'm cocky and its fun to watch the doomed little manlings twist and squirm. Of course if they attack me, insult me, look cross eyed at me, or when I almost inevitably get bored, then they are quite literally toast (I'm not Chaotic Evil for nothing after all).

OF COURSE it is possible that said dragon has some agenda that might potentially motivate it NOT to eat the PCs, but again you're modeling the threat level to the capabilities of the characters. Clearly if the dragon lair is a mile from town and easily found then when the low level party almost inevitably enters within you're going to choose to construct the dragon's agenda in such a way that something more interesting than, "Its the dragon's turn in the initiative, breath weapon, you're all dead" happens.

My point is that there is no such thing as this mythical pure agendaless sandbox. It is not just a legend, it is a myth, like unicorns are myths, because unicorns and agendaless sandboxes both cannot exist practically in the real world.

Combat is only likely occur if both parties think they can win and want to defeat the other guy for some reason. And once it starts, if one side is losing badly, they'll very likely be in run/negotiate mode.

That depends on your definition of 'combat'. When the level 1 party encounters the ancient huge red dragon, that may well not resemble combat so much as a Saturday afternoon BBQ, but surely there will at least be an initiative check, maybe even a bit of running around. Its not going to matter one lick if the party wants to negotiate, if that dragon was in the mood for roast dwarf all their pleas for mercy will do is amuse the great wyrm. Likewise good luck outrunning a dragon that can fly as fast as a running horse.

Now clearly, PCs will run from overwhelming danger, and they may often get away. They may negotiate or surrender too, and that might even work. However if you really objectively consider the habits and morals of most monsters its pretty unlikely there'd be any hope of escaping most such situations. Death may be delayed but evil humanoids are going to do something horrible to you, the undead will just eat you, most mindless monsters can't be reasoned with, etc. The results of most such encounters will be pretty grim, even if some remnant of the party does manage to escape.

Actually 4e characters are MUCH more likely to actually escape such situations, they have a bit of resiliency that is mostly lacking in previous edition characters, and running an escape sequence is pretty straightforward.

That aside though, I do find that many of my encounters, if I had created them under the CR/EL system, would fall outside the levels where there even is a suggested XP award. I don't find it uncommon at all to fight a battle where one side's basic combat numbers are higher than the others by double digits or similarly extreme disparities in special abilities exist. The game still plays fine. World doesn't stop turning.

Eh, the 2nd encounter I ever ran in 4e was a level 1 party vs a Carrion Crawler (level 7 controller IIRC). Well beyond what is recommended. They survived, killed the thing too. I've done many other such things. Works fine. You do have to either luck out or know your way around the encounter system of course. I probably lucked out in the above example, but it works. I think AD&D is a bit looser in some ways about what exactly you can pit against whom, but its not that much different. IIRC in 2e I once had a level 1 party fight a Hill Giant. It was a very low hit point Hill Giant, but it was still a nasty and for several characters fatal encounter. A 4e Hill Giant would be SLIGHTLY out of line, but mostly because monsters have fixed hit points. Downleveling it say 3 or 4 levels would work though.

To be fair, this is one reason why I like vp/wp. The one-hit kill factor is vastly decreased.

Again, not necessarily. While in many cases, you might be right that characters of disparate power are unlikely to fight to the death and a high PC mortality rate bogs the game down, I don't think the game is much fun unless, at least on occasion, the PCs are legitimately up against the odds. I find it quite thrilling as a DM to throw a battle at the party that I truly don't think they can win. For a variety of reasons, those usually turn out well.

To be fair, I occasionally do the reverse as well, though no one ever seems to talk about battles that are too easy.

Well, sure, the PCs should be 'up against the odds' often, but that is IMHO the thrust of 4e's encounter-based design, to maximize the likelihood that a given encounter will produce that result (if you want, you could of course go for a rout, which also works OK in 4e). Anyway, the point is you shouldn't have to use vastly different leveled things for that, in fact this was a big flaw in the CR/EL system, that small factors could mean a HUGE variance in ACTUAL challenge vs rated challenge. 4e succeeded in having its EL system be a pretty fair estimate. Even when you go against it at least it tells you what you're in for. IMHO DDN needs to do the same, and I'd like to see a good solid ENCOUNTER design system, probably based off that in 4e. It can be presented as one of several tools of course, but it would be a real shame to lose THAT feature of 4e.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

,

I don't think I would call it a dubious term. The question here is more along the lines of what genre we're talking about and which genre conventions to follow. Is Beowulf fantasy? If so, should fantasy characters be able to do the same things? Fantasy doesn't agree. Take Lord of the Rings. The fellowship tries to traverse a mountain pass... and fails. They don't succeed at some of the travails they encounter because they're big damn heroes and that's the genre convention. They fail (or succeed) because that fits the purpose of the author.

Beowulf would have failed the tasks the men crafting his stories wanted him to fail whether or not he was defined as being capable of ripping off Grendel's limb. If they wanted him to face a little more adversity and cleverly work around a problem, they would have had him fail the simple approach. The Geeks, despite having a big army with big, damn heroes like Ajax and Achilles, couldn't take Troy. They faced a complication and had to work around it, taking Troy by subterfuge. So what does that mean for designing a fantasy RPG? Insurmountable obstacles and failures at some attempts are OK.

Yeah, an army of Geeks would be scary.

 

[billd91]

Yeah, an army of Geeks would be scary.

Fixed

 

[Ahnehnois]

My point is that there is no such thing as this mythical pure agendaless sandbox.

Well, okay. My point is that there is no such thing as a "balanced encounter" or an "appropriate challenge"; at least, not in mechanical terms. The people at the table decide that.

As a DM, if you're trying to scare the PCs, you throw something tough at them. If you want a quick, fun, cathartic battle, you use something weaker. If you like the PCs, maybe you throw in a monster with a flaw that they can find. If you don't, you send a giant rust monster at them. There are any number of other factors that affect these kinds of choices.

in fact this was a big flaw in the CR/EL system, that small factors could mean a HUGE variance in ACTUAL challenge vs rated challenge

Oh indeed. That paradigm is dreadful. The solution to this is to throw out CRs, standardize monstrous and nonmonstrous advancement completely, and let the DM decide what to do with creatures and the players decide how to react to them. The entire concept needs to die in a fire. Hey, has anyone seen a red dragon?

NPCs/Monsters don't have brains, they are intrinsically extensions of the GM's will, thus any judgment being made as to how to proceed is by definition the judgment of the GM, and is at the very least the subject of the GM's biases and subservient to his/her goals.

You do realize that's called metagaming, right? The basic conceit of a roleplaying game is that the players adopt the perspectives of the characters and act as the characters would; including the DM with NPCs.

Not that metagaming is impermissible; sometimes it can be a useful tool. But the basic question in this situation is what would the monster itself do.