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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 9875636" data-attributes="member: 5435">Wow, I wasn't expecting so much discussion from this thought exercise.I don't have the time or patience right now to collect citations, so I'm just going to respond to some ideas that stood out for me and hope their poster(s) recognize themselves.1. Design elegance vs diversity of play experience. This is a universal trade-off in game design. I fully understand the attractiveness of making a design choice like "every PC ability is a spell". There are many benefits for the designer, for the GM and for the player. But the flip side is that "Most PC abilities are magical", which is not great for a gritty, low-magic game, and side effects such as "Most PC abilities can be dispelled / written on scrolls / deployed into magic items." It is a design choice that changes the nature of the world. And that is not even the aspect that bothers me. The implied high-magic setting is not a design weakness. What IS a design weakness is that 5e has chosen to limit the design space of PC abilities in ways that seem small while reading the books, but which for me degrade the diversity of the player experience within the game. I think the players would benefit from a more diverse approach to species and class design, is all I'm saying. It is SO easy to just slap some cantrip or x/day spells on a concept and call it a day, and assume that it is balanced because you're using spells. It's harder to judge whether the gnome's tinker toys are balanced, or if giving a slime race stretchy arms and legs is balanced. But you know what? After 40 years of RPGs I think game balance is an illusion. The only balance that matters is if the players are all having fun interacting with the world in their own ways, and getting equal spotlight time in the storytelling.Hmm, that turned into a small rant. I'll conclude it by re-emphasizing that I do understand and appreciate the point of view that a game benefits from unified mechanics and elegant design.  I just think that 5e has gone a smidge too far. But this brings me to the next point that stood out for me:1. The skill system is too _____.  I didn't talk about the skill system in my first post, but I agree with many of the points made. I also have some nostalgia for the Pathfinder approach (spending a pool of points without cross-class penalties). For 5e I think there is a weakness in the system that is a matter of design rather than personal taste, and it is the low spread of bonuses compared to the high spread of the d20.  PC bonuses generally fall in the ranges 0-2 (untrained), 3-7 (trained), 8-12 (high tier or with expertise). Even highly specialized and experienced PCs are failing a DC20 skill check 30-40% of the time which just feels wierd to me. Another small issue is that very high DCs (say, DC 25 or 30) can be impossible even for legendary characters because the main mechanism to get a bonus is Advantage, not circumstantial or tool based. My skill bonus is +9, and the highest DC I can attain is 29--even with advantage, there is no chance of hitting 30.This can be solved with minor changes, starting with a larger list of codified tasks and examples of skill use, with fixed DCs, so that the players know what they are aiming for and whether their skill resources are well spent. But after these are written down, as a designer I would take a hard look at these tasks and ask questions like: "How often does it seem reasonable that various types of PC should succeed? Are the DCs representing that intuition correctly?  Does the distribution of success/failure unfairly cripple inexperienced PCs, or not sufficiently reward specialized PCs?  How can we encourage unlikely but dramatic outcomes?" I don't feel like the 5e design team ever did this, they just went with their elegant, unifying mechanic of d20+X and moved on. An optional rule could be to ask players to roll skills on 3d6 with exploding 6's in some situations, for example DCs above 20 where the DM judges that any PC should have at least a slim chance of success. 3. Concentration is overloaded. This idea did not occur to me at all, and I agree with it 100%. The discussion made me think of Earthdawn, a high-magic system where every PC had a skill called "thread weaving". A thread was basically a magical link to sustain a spell or attune to a magic item, and you could even weave threads to connect to other players if I remember right. Anyway, here again design elegance crushes design space. Maintaining multiple ongoing spells could indeed be a completely separate mechanic from maintaining concentration on a single spell under adversity. And if we made this split, then we suddenly have a great opportunity to finally give wizards something unique : as they level up they could become better at maintaining multiple duration spells, the same way that artificers gain the abilty to attune to more magic items. A worthy addition to 6e.There have been many other good points, but I'll get to them in some other post.Thanks everyone for taking an interest in this topic!</blockquote>

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