D&D (2024) DMG 5.5 - the return of bespoke magical items?


log in or register to remove this ad

So instead of those rules being optional, should we be lobbying for them to be made core?
Instead of being forced to invoke optional rules just to level the playing field, we should start with as close to level as humanly possible, and allow folks to make up their own minds about whether optional rules would make their games better or not.

We should design a game that is agnostic about playstyle and make rules for it that (as far as practical) do serve all parties well.
I flatly disagree. A system that is totally agnostic about playstyle isn't a system. Some kind of design commitment is required. There must be some baseline. The baseline we choose should be one that would be difficult or impossible to massage into an existing game that lacked that baseline.

It is very, very easy to design a system that gives the DM no idea what effect their choices will have, that is mechanically unreliable. It is very difficult for a DM to impose mechanical reliability on a system that lacks them. Hence, the system should start from a position of reliability.

Often that serving-all-parties-well piece requires loosening the constraints a bit. A hard-coded rule-for-everything system simply cannot cater to as many playstyles as a looser each-DM-does-it-a-bit-differently system;
I have never advocated, and will never advocate, for a "hard-coded rule-for-everything system." Never. Such things are fool's errands. That's what 3e tried to be.

and after trying the former with 3e and 4e WotC learned this lesson and loosened things up for 5e. Results: a) a system that, while it certainly needs some tweaking, works well enough to be good enough and b) roaring success in the marketplace.
Don't lump 4e in with 3e's absolutely craptacular design here. 4e emphatically is not a "hard-coded rule-for-everything system", despite what its detractors love claiming about it. It is an exception-based design system. Rules matter, but they are not ironclad: make exceptions when they're needed, but don't go overboard.

5e goes overboard. The game breaks its own rules more often than it obeys them.

While this sounds good, it seems to run counter to your not-exactly-supportive remarks just above re optional rules; given that all of these "tools and advice" pieces would fall under the optional rules umbrella.
Not at all. Some baseline is required. That's unavoidable; we are embarked. A system that truly makes no design commitments whatsoever doesn't contain rules.
 

This tells me more about how you view and-or play your meatshield NPCs than you probably realize. :)

For me, any NPC in the party, even if it's someone's hench, is still capable of independent thought and of acting on said thought.
I did not say they were incapable of it. I said that they don't need it in order to do the task of being a meatshield. Which is simply true. You don't need a brain to be a spiky, hard-to-move barrier blocking the enemy. An inanimate object does that just fine. That's what fortifications with barbed wire are, after all. If "meatshield" is the long and short of what the martial character is doing, they are contributing nothing more than what an inanimate object could contribute (or, at most, an automaton.)

An inanimate object cannot survey the battlefield, evaluate which spell would be most effective for that battlefield, and then deploy that spell in, hopefully, the most effective location. You need either an actual sapient brain, or something equivalent.

In the party I've been running for the last 3 years the PCs have, up until quite recently, all been mid- or back-liners of some sort, with the front-line duties mostly being handled by a long-serving NPC Fighter. That Fighter was every bit as much a "character" as any of the PCs, making decisions (and not always the right ones!), giving input, and then going out and not-always-perfectly doing her job just like anyone else in the party.
What possible decisions can one make about "stand between allies and enemies, tanking hits, and retaliating"?

If the meatshield is someone's mind-controlled robot then sure, that's exactly how it'd work.

But 99+% of the time this isn't the case. Instead, the meatshield is a free-thinking person and IMO should be played with the same amount of care and thought as would an NPC caster in the party.
What free thinking, thought, and care???

Seriously. What thought is required to be an emplaced fortification?
 

I did not say they were incapable of it. I said that they don't need it in order to do the task of being a meatshield. Which is simply true. You don't need a brain to be a spiky, hard-to-move barrier blocking the enemy. An inanimate object does that just fine. That's what fortifications with barbed wire are, after all. If "meatshield" is the long and short of what the martial character is doing, they are contributing nothing more than what an inanimate object could contribute (or, at most, an automaton.)

An inanimate object cannot survey the battlefield, evaluate which spell would be most effective for that battlefield, and then deploy that spell in, hopefully, the most effective location. You need either an actual sapient brain, or something equivalent.

What possible decisions can one make about "stand between allies and enemies, tanking hits, and retaliating"?

What free thinking, thought, and care???

Seriously. What thought is required to be an emplaced fortification?
If the "meatshield" was your PC would you be so eager to play it as if it was a near-mindless automaton?

No? Good. Glad to hear it.

Now let the NPC be played the same way as you would your own PC and we're good to go. :)

Lanefan the character is a straight-up Fighter. Always has been. And I'd like to think that when he's in the field (as is currently the case) he's contributing a lot more all round than would this quasi-inanimate meatshield you speak of.
 

Instead of being forced to invoke optional rules just to level the playing field, we should start with as close to level as humanly possible, and allow folks to make up their own minds about whether optional rules would make their games better or not.
I'm not concerned with whether the optional rules level the playing field, tilt the playing field, or stand the playing field on its ear. I'm instead talking about the desirability (or not) of a) having a base system with lots of optional rules or b) incorporating as many of those optional rules into the base system as possible, maybe by only presenting several options without presenting a baseline or "core" version of a rule.

An example* of the latter: D&D could (and 5e kind-of has) say that for initial stat generation you have to use one of the following three optional systems: dice roll, point-buy, or standard array (and would then go on to explain the details of each one). That way, stat generation itself is core but the means of doing so are entirely optional.

* - presented as an example only, as I personally would never support it. :)
I flatly disagree. A system that is totally agnostic about playstyle isn't a system. Some kind of design commitment is required. There must be some baseline. The baseline we choose should be one that would be difficult or impossible to massage into an existing game that lacked that baseline.
Problem with that is it forces you to limit your potential audience.

I'd rather design a system that can equally well handle fantasy Vietnam, big damn heroes, high-drama story arcs, courtly intrigue play, rogue-like play, West Marches sandboxes, heists and treachery, short fast adventure paths, 10+-year campaigns, imbalanced characters, balanced characters, mismatched levels, no magic, high magic, monty haul, and whatever else the customer base decides to throw at it.

And yes, "equally well for all" is almost certainly going to mean "not perfectly well for any given one". And that's good, because it means we can in theory all use the same system for whatever we want it for.

As it stands there's several styles on that list 5e can't touch without massive kitbashing, which is why I don't play or run it. The right mash-up of BX-1e-2e, while still not perfect, easily gets a whole lot closer. Why is that? Two reasons: 1) they weren't designed to be as mathematically "tight" as the WotC versions thus allowing it more latitude in function and 2) they were built on discrete-subsystem design, which makes them far easier to tweak to suit one's preferences.
It is very, very easy to design a system that gives the DM no idea what effect their choices will have, that is mechanically unreliable. It is very difficult for a DM to impose mechanical reliability on a system that lacks them. Hence, the system should start from a position of reliability.
A fine sentiment in theory, but in practice it risks binding the DM (and-or the whole game) in the straitjacket of predictability.

Reliable = predictable. Predictable = boring.
I have never advocated, and will never advocate, for a "hard-coded rule-for-everything system." Never. Such things are fool's errands. That's what 3e tried to be.
At least we agree on that much. :)
Not at all. Some baseline is required. That's unavoidable; we are embarked. A system that truly makes no design commitments whatsoever doesn't contain rules.
And if that commitment consists of "here's the basic rules framework and here's a bunch of options you can use to build your own system on to that framework", isn't that good enough?

I had hoped that framework-plus-options idea was what they were talking about in 2013-14 when referring to the "modular" design 5e was going to have, that then got abandoned during playtest.
 

If the "meatshield" was your PC would you be so eager to play it as if it was a near-mindless automaton?

No? Good. Glad to hear it.
I never said I was eager to. I said that it is completely possible to do so. (As a matter of fact, I hate this fact!) Hence: BEING a meatshield and nothing else isn't a peer contribution to the group. You're a footsoldier, a caddy, a consumable resource to your caster "allies."

Now let the NPC be played the same way as you would your own PC and we're good to go. :)

Lanefan the character is a straight-up Fighter. Always has been. And I'd like to think that when he's in the field (as is currently the case) he's contributing a lot more all round than would this quasi-inanimate meatshield you speak of.
But that's not what the actual rules give you. The actual rules give you meatshield and...that's about it. That is, and has always been, my problem with this proposal. You aren't an equal participant. You're a footman to the Actually Important People.

And that sucks. Nobody should be forced to do that. If they want to do that and nothing else, more power to them! But we shouldn't make everyone be stuck that way just because some people like playing that way.
 

If the "meatshield" was your PC would you be so eager to play it as if it was a near-mindless automaton?

No? Good. Glad to hear it.

Now let the NPC be played the same way as you would your own PC and we're good to go. :)

Lanefan the character is a straight-up Fighter. Always has been. And I'd like to think that when he's in the field (as is currently the case) he's contributing a lot more all round than would this quasi-inanimate meatshield you speak of.
You are conflating a character and a role, they are not the same thing, your character might be nuanced and multifaceted and contain much consideration about what actions they want to perform at any moment but the role of meatshield is not and does not, their methods and actions are about as simple and predictable as a brick.
 

Problem with that is it forces you to limit your potential audience.
This is always the case for all possible games, period.

People who hate roleplaying and mathematics will hate D&D. It is not possible to make something that looks and smells and quacks like D&D but which contains absolutely zero RP and absolutely zero math. You can maybe eliminate one side or the other without issue, but if you eliminate both, there isn't anything left.

So your whole argument rests on a point that is perfectly true, but also perfectly irrelevant. Designing ANY game forces you to limit your potential audience.

Hence, the best choice is to build a baseline that would be hard for an ordinary rando to make, but which a designer can make easily, and then implement as much as possible robust, front-and-center opt-in stuff to enable various adjacent approaches. You will never--never--enable all possible approaches. A game that enables all possible approaches has no rules.

I'd rather design a system that can equally well handle fantasy Vietnam, big damn heroes, high-drama story arcs, courtly intrigue play, rogue-like play, West Marches sandboxes, heists and treachery, short fast adventure paths, 10+-year campaigns, imbalanced characters, balanced characters, mismatched levels, no magic, high magic, monty haul, and whatever else the customer base decides to throw at it.
A system that is inherently unbalanced cannot be turned into one that is balanced by mere effort of will on the part of its users. That's my point here. This is a one-way thing. Adding balance where it doesn't exist is a Herculean effort. Eliminating balance where it is present is trivial. Achieving good asymmetrical balance is a difficult task for a designer, and a near-impossible one for the end user.

A cup of wine added to a barrel of sewage produces a barrel of sewage. A cup of sewage added to a barrel of wine produces a barrel of sewage. You can't have a barrel of wine unless you start with one. That's my point here. (Edit: Please, forgive the implication of the "sewage" term. That's simply the standard form of this phrase. I am absolutely not trying to say or imply anything about anyone's preferred style, period. If you prefer, "a quart of alcohol in bowl of juice produces a spiked punch. A quart of juice in a gallon of alcohol produces spiked punch." Or perhaps the idea that you can easily add salt to a soup that hasn't been salted enough, but you cannot take away salt from a soup that has been salted too much. Insert any spice there, really--you can add, but you can't subtract.)

Some things, you really do have to start on one end of the scale, and give people tools, advice, and examples for how to move to the other end. That's not special pleading, nor a judgment against any style or preference. It is simply how reality is: creating symmetry is difficult, while creating asymmetry is easy; disorder is easily achieved (indeed, it is the most common state of affairs), while order must be imposed with effort; there are always many more ways for a structure to be unreliable than there are ways for it to be reliable.
 
Last edited:

A system that is inherently unbalanced cannot be turned into one that is balanced by mere effort of will on the part of its users. That's my point here. This is a one-way thing. Adding balance where it doesn't exist is a Herculean effort. Eliminating balance where it is present is trivial. Achieving good asymmetrical balance is a difficult task for a designer, and a near-impossible one for the end user.
I don't know how this thread even got started or what the real argument is about but I do not think it is a herculean task to balance a game as DM that is not balanced at the beginning. I guess if you make the imbalance far greater than any edition of D&D has ever had then yeah you can take it super far. I balanced a lot in early editions of the game and it was something I did but I had a lot of other issues of far more concern.
 


Trending content

Remove ads

Top