D&D (2024) Do players really want balance?

[EzekielRaiden]

D&D-alike games have had varying degrees of actor stance over the years. No one's asking for pure, but some of us are asking for more than WotC's current version of 5e assumes.

From where I'm sitting...it's pretty hard to see the difference between asking for "more" and asking for pure. You've made quite clear over the years that you won't tolerate much of anything impinging upon actor-stance play.

Any particular reason to believe they're going to do that? There's not much in WotC 5e to this point that feels written for experienced players to me.

Unfortuantely, no, not really. But I've rather given up on them designing the game in pretty much any ways that I actually agree with. If they do in fact improve the DMG, I can at least take solace in the notion that, despite the rules being a massive cock-up in my not-so-humble opinion, at least the guidance will help grow a new generation of attentive, responsive DMs.

This argument boils down to "your preferences are not popular". So what? I don't really see your point here.

It's not just that they are not popular. It's that they are not popular and never will be.

I still maintain that it is important--VERY important, in fact!--for D&D to offer well-built support for this approach. But it will never again be the core focus of the game, because WotC is quite well aware that trying to market a "Soulslike" experience to a casual audience is financial suicide. I may think rather little of their design chops WRT 5e, but even I know they aren't that foolish.

 

[pemerton]

The default play style has changed, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting it to be better/different or at least provided with solid variant rules to tailor it to different desires. The default playstyle was different before, and now it’s something else. Designers could’ve just as easily retained the older playstyle and provide variants for lighter play, more social mechanics, less death, etc. But they didn’t. They threw it away and offered very little to replace it. That’s all this comes down to across all legacy DMs who miss the older style, IMO.

Sure, we can all play older versions, but we don’t want to be left in the dust. We want the new shiny material, but also to be supported in our varying playstyles. If the game was more challenging across tiers - exploration and combat, what stops you from just making it easier? Why is it folks that want it more challenging that are in the wrong?

I haven't ready any poster telling you that you're in the wrong. But I think I agree with @Hussar - it's pretty easy for you to step up the challenge, if you want to.

And tuning the difficulty for less wargame-y and more casual players seems pretty sensible from the point of view of a publisher who wants a wide range of people to pick up and play their game.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The problem is that players will always outnumber DMs if it’s a popularity vote for rules, and given the opportunity, will optimize the fun out of the game. People, and consumers, are notoriously unreliable at presenting fixes to things they see as problems.

Oh, there's a very simple approach to fixing that.

Don't let them.

Seriously. Don't let them optimize the fun out of it. I completely agree that that's a serious issue, and it's one that genuinely affects 5e because they absolutely left the barn door WIDE open for it. But you absolutely can close that barn door without producing a game that is dull, boring nothing where no choices matter etc. etc. It just requires a lot of testing...and actually setting design goals rather than useless feel-good phrases that are (intentionally or not) a mere smokescreen for "we're going to do what we were going to do anyway, and we'll massage the data to ensure it." (Seriously, an absolute crapload of the surveys and polls for "D&D Next" were pure push-poll trash. Some of those polls literally did not let you say no to a proposed idea. I'm not even joking.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Or - and I'll bang this drum yet again - put out two parallel and inter-compatible versions of the game. They might be called...let's see...how does Basic and Advanced sound?

I mean, I do like that idea.

I just think it's a lovely idea that doesn't work. Much like a la carte multiclassing or "monsters are written with the exact same rules as PCs". They're parts of the wide and easy road leading to design hell.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Re the bolded: I'd posit that people do in fact want real life, only overlaid with fantastic elements like dragons and magic and four-sun worlds in order to make it a different (and maybe more enjoyable and certainly more interesting) version of real life than what they get the rest of the week.

I...don't see how. People don't want to file taxes. People don't want, as I noted, meaningless deaths that dead-end all of the things the deceased cared about. They don't want to deal with reams of bureaucracy and hours and hours spent doing menial tasks while Nothing Much Happens, even though every single one of these things is and has been part of human life for more than two thousand years, and most of them have been part of human life for as long as there have been settled humans.

The vast majority of things that actually look like "real life" aren't on the table. So...what exactly do you think is left of real life, once we've replaced all the depressing and pointless and grating parts with fantastic elements? Because I'm pretty sure the only things that are left are, as I said, the ones compatible with drama.

 

[pemerton]

It just requires a lot of testing...and actually setting design goals rather than useless feel-good phrases that are (intentionally or not) a mere smokescreen for "we're going to do what we were going to do anyway, and we'll massage the data to ensure it." (Seriously, an absolute crapload of the surveys and polls for "D&D Next" were pure push-poll trash. Some of those polls literally did not let you say no to a proposed idea. I'm not even joking.)

While we agree on some things in this thread, we have different perspectives on this.

WotC is not a survey/polling company trying to collect scientific data about what the typical person/RPGer/D&D-player/whomever thinks about various options for D&D. WotC is a commercial publisher trying to make sure that it sells lots of copies of the stuff that it publishes. If it wants to use so-called "polls" or "surveys" as marketing devices, and of ways of making prospective customers feel like they are part of the design process, that's their prerogative! If some of the responses also serve as useful market research, well, good luck to them! They're not doing anything illegal or even unethical in the way they do this, as far as I can see.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

People are saying things like "It is easy to kill characters if you want to" like the GMs wanted that and framing this as GMs vs players. That is completely missing the point. I, as GM, don't want to kill the PCs, and I absolutely do want the players to have good time. Which means I want to give them actually exciting and challenging fights that are still winnable. And the game gives me basically no tools for achieving that. All the guidelines are so absurdly undertuned, that following them gets us just pointless boring slog with no challenge. I don't want, that, the players don't want that. So I just have to blindly guess how much overtuning the encounters will be enough to not to be a boring pushover but not a guaranteed TPK either. I've erred in the former direction several times in this guessing, and one day I'll err in the latter.

 

[pemerton]

The vast majority of things that actually look like "real life" aren't on the table. So...what exactly do you think is left of real life, once we've replaced all the depressing and pointless and grating parts with fantastic elements? Because I'm pretty sure the only things that are left are, as I said, the ones compatible with drama.

The most basic, or primordial, conceit of D&D is that there are places in the world - let's call them "dungeons" - where groups of people and creatures hang out in numbers that are (within some limits of plausibility about what human warriors might do) able to be confronted and defeated by a small group of warriors using skirmish-style tactics. And that these dungeon-dwellers are "clustered" in groups that, at least in broad terms, correspond to the ability of a particular "level" of warrior-band to defeat. And that in these same places, marvellous wealth can be had - and can be taken and enjoyed by the warriors who discover it on a finders-keepers basis, without being subject to any rules that might arise from family law, rights of manorial lords or sovereigns, meaningful taxation, etc.

That is already so far from reality that the notion of "looks like real life" really has no work to do.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

With the caveats noted by Pemerton, sure....but that was my point!

Even before you begin play proper, you have fundamentally violated the principle that the ONLY experiences one may have are those that map to real life. From the very moment you start--unless you literally only play characters prewritten by someone else--you are already breaking from how real life works. Total avoidance of such things is not only not practical, it's not even possible.

Hence: it cannot be the case that because a choice doesn't exist in real life, that choice cannot be part of the mechanics of the game. There are many other arguments one could make, but all of them must weaken the standard rather dramatically: "minimize the non-RL-like choices" for example, or "restrict non-RL choices to character creation and advancement." Both of those concede the simple fact that, in being a game in the first place, it cannot, even in principle, mirror real life at every moment of the play-experience.

I think it is generally understood in this stance, that decisions made while not actually playing the game, such as those related to character creation, do not count. The desire is to have the player/character decision space unified whilst actually playing the game.

 

[Zardnaar]

The most basic, or primordial, conceit of D&D is that there are places in the world - let's call them "dungeons" - where groups of people and creatures hang out in numbers that are (within some limits of plausibility about what human warriors might do) able to be confronted and defeated by a small group of warriors using skirmish-style tactics. And that these dungeon-dwellers are "clustered" in groups that, at least in broad terms, correspond to the ability of a particular "level" of warrior-band to defeat. And that in these same places, marvellous wealth can be had - and can be taken and enjoyed by the warriors who discover it on a finders-keepers basis, without being subject to any rules that might arise from family law, rights of manorial lords or sovereigns, meaningful taxation, etc.

That is already so far from reality that the notion of "looks like real life" really has no work to do.

Beautiful work this post. Just Beautiful