Difficulty Dial?

[DonTadow]

I think if they make a easy to understand challenge system, then DMs can do this on their own. Though the system should point out that -2 levels is easy 0 normal etc. I would be a fan of most publisher adventures having scaling for both easy and hard (or lower levels and higher levels).

I would like to see different death rules. Easy demeans the term heroic. Alternative death rules would be more preferable. DUring minor encounters in my pathfinder game, i havea gruesome injury chart and during major battles death is on the table. Of course all these rules are sidestepped by the stupidity rule, which always results in death.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I don't buy your basic assertion here at all. I think you're conflating "chance of instant death at any given instant" with "difficulty". Even if you simply equate it with PC attrition rate, which IMHO is a pretty simplistic sort of way to look at it, there's no indication IME that 4e is somehow inherently 'less difficult' than say 2e. I have approximately similar PC attrition in my current 4e campaign as I did in my previous 2e campaign a few years ago. Same setting, pretty much the same sort of challenges and whatnot, pretty much similar results.

I'd note that in between I ran some other 4e stuff, including one full campaign in which PCs never died. That game though was played online and was more story heavy and it was just less fun to have PCs getting killed. There were still plenty of tense moments though and the game didn't come across (AFAIK) as 'easy'. It was just focused on different things. The players were wrapped up in accomplishing strategic goals and the interests of their characters. Threat and difficulty came from a different source. I'd say 4e was pretty good for this because it is not hard to set things up so you have a good idea how likely it is someone will get killed, etc.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Sure, Tomb of Horrors was a hard adventure.

But that doesn't make 1E a "hard" edition. There were also groups who barely had to worry about death, who had more magic (spells and items) than they knew what to do with, wishes to obtain fantastic results, etc.

Some of my strongest characters were 1st or 2nd edition characters.

Look at how easy it was to kill giants and dragons in 1E, for comparison. HP were so low and spell damage so high. Of course, it bounced back that way too - dragons who breathed for their hp? Uhoh.

In 3E, save DCs could get _far_ more extreme, making it far easier to just randomly die. Conversely, there were many encounters decided by literally the first character to act. Doesn't get much easier than that.

In 4E, monsters could be so much more resilient and PCs had far fewer ways to become immune to their effects. Conversely, a group with preparation and teamwork finds random death extraordinarily difficult such that TPKs often outnumber deaths and both rare, even as individual fights seem difficult.

Every edition has a variety of intelligent decisions influencing an amazing degree of design decisions. And there's no gain to being blind to those decisions.

I've played (and written) some extremely hard 3e and 4e adventures, too. If you wanted something as difficult, or harder, than the Tomb of Horrors, it wouldn't take much to do so. Certainly, the system doesn't prevent it.

So, take a step back from any particular prejudice about an edition and scientifically break it down to what you're _actually_ looking for and talking about. Then, we can have a fruitful discussion.

Well, you put your money where your mouth was, and I'm actually quite impressed. I still think 3d6 down the line, with save or die death traps galore, and 1 hp 1st level characters is harder but oh well you made darn good points. It's just my belief and many others in general that game design use to focus on higher difficulty whether you're assessing Gygax D&D, Wizardry 4 or Kid Icarus. These games are largely outdated due to being difficult. Now it seems game design is based on low attention spans and ease of entry. Once again, I'm not saying which is better, but a true all encompassing D&D would accommodate both the virtues of inauguration and challenge.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is not subjective at all. Try running a fifteen year old through an old Gygaxian adventure. Yeah, that's what i thought. Hard doesn't necessarily mean better. I'm not looking for an argument here. However saying that AD&D was harder is subjective is EXACTLY the kind of argumentative BS that hurts D&D. EVERYONE who played AD&D knows it was harder. What are you trying to prove here? By trying to be less controversial, you have instead created an argument where there was previously none. Don't blame me for making this an issue. I stated a statistical fact and you disagreed with bland subjuctiveness. Not only this, but you gave opinions from a moderator's point of view as if they were absolute. Please try harder to contribute to the conversation next time and bring useful knowledge to the table, or I will feel inclined to pull my monetary support from this site since they are so willing to employ those who haven't earned it.

Sorry, but IMHO this is utter drivel. The sort of Gygaxian insta-gank "difficulty" you are talking about is first of all so utterly trivial to supply that it has nothing to do with edition. A TWELVE year old can make up "locked chest with poison needle trap, save vs poison or die if you fail to disarm the trap before picking the lock" (honestly I can find this text in my first dungeon that I wrote at 12, lol). That same situation can be dropped into 4e in a heartbeat. Likewise I can NOT use it in AD&D.

The deeper problem is that there are other, and IMHO better, types of challenges for which AD&D was rather poorly suited. SoD gauntlets were fun when I was young and didn't know more about building an interesting adventure, but there are WAY better ways to do it now and 4e in particular has good mechanics for that.

For instance instead of a trap going off is 'KERSPLAT!' how about a trap where the PC gets poisoned and you have one hour to find the antidote? Heck, add another dimension and if the players are clever they can learn about the trap ahead of time and go get the antidote BEFORE they get poisoned. Now, I can do that in any set of rules, and you might say it is 'less difficult' than kersplat, but it is also a heck of a lot more fun than "awe, you rolled low, make up a new PC". In my mind the added dimensions that the players have to engage with makes it a trickier and more difficult adventure, even though the chance of a PC dying is probably a little less.

 

[GM Dave]

Personally, I would rather replace the iconic level system with a group of four or five complexity levels.

The trouble with a 'level' system is that eventually a player starts to 'grow' beyond certain challenges. Orcs and goblins tend to be replaced by trolls and drow in a DnD level system. An adult red dragon that used to be a fearsome terror shrinks to become a pet that gets slapped down hard if it gets out of line.

The reason for this is the bonuses and defenses are often linked to levels that are designed to 'grow' with the player. This is fine if you want to play the story of the village child that grows in power to eventually take on titans in mortal combat but if that is not your story then a level system does not match up well.

A complexity system would set up the game around an easy setting where it is very similar to a OD&D character sheet with one or two types of attacks (weapons or spells) and not much else beyond what the players describe with their words.

Complexity levels would grow and have at the top tier be a full set of choices of feats, skills, weapon choices, spells, powers which would require a large amount of management to keep track of all the choices.

The removal of the level from the consideration would mean that a dragon would be difficult or easy based upon how the DM set the monster in the story. The DM would not have to worry that if the players ignore the dragon for two months to go bash goblins and orcs that the dragon has now become weak and punny compared to the players 'new' abilities.

Could players be rewarded with advancement in such a system?

I think there are plenty of non-mechanical rewards that would then become the focus of the story. I'm planning to use this approach in my latest campaign with rewards of servants, towers, labs, access to NPCs, and other things instead of XP. I'll leave it up to the players to decide when they want to add complexity to their characters with more spells, feats, and dodads.

This brings back things to the trouble with a level system is that the surroundings of the characters need to 'level' up or things start to become easy and have little challenge (a style of play that players can choose to do but it should be a DM/Player choice and not a forced mechanic of the system). If you want to have goblins be easy to fight then that should be how those goblins are made.

Players and DMs could also decide a points in time to change levels of complexity. This would mean just adding more options of what they can do in a combat. Instead of a swing of a sword it might be 'Mattock of the Titans' blow that requires a large club and has a chance to stun if the blow hits.

 

[LeStryfe79]

You know, I played multiple characters back in the day who had few hit points and crap stats and were faced with overpowering dragons and demons around every corner. Guess what? i was scared. I thought outside the box, I hoped for the best, and did whatever I could to survive with my fellow adventurers. Often times I succeeded to live another day. No, it wasn't as methodical as making my way through encounter after balanced encounter while scoring the same old incremental loot upgrades as I progressed, but guess what? For me, the satisfaction was twice as sweet!

Different playstyles for different folks I guess. Hopefully this is what D&D 5ed is all about...

 

[Pilgrim]

That is not subjective at all. Try running a fifteen year old through an old Gygaxian adventure. Yeah, that's what i thought. Hard doesn't necessarily mean better.

Many fifteen year olds grew up playing AD&D, with those adventures.

My son, at 14 was playing AD&D with our adult group of players in ToH, nothing "hard" about it, and even commented how in some ways, he prefers it to 4E. So...

 

[LeStryfe79]

Well to each his own then. I wasn't trying to start that kind of argument. I do think that certain dials need to be consolidated though. I'd hate to see a racial dial that allowed for human stature, elven ears, dwarven beards, and halfling feet on the same character (we tried this too at one point though, hahaha)

 

[Harlander]

With regards to the original "easy, medium, hard" 'settings' described in the first post, I think it'd be better to have individual dials for each of the subcomponents: lethality, challenge 'balancedness', death penalty.

You could have examples of each described, and the effect they tend to have on play. Mix and match to your content.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Yeah, but like everything else in 5ed, I feel there should be packages that consolidate options. Those options would still be available individually of course, but for those who want a simpler list of choices, playstyle packages could provide some fun, non fiddly directions.