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

[Zardnaar]

Personally, this is why I favor having a game that is, at base, either wholly or primarily encounter-based, but which may offer or include daily-based things as an option.

Because it's damn near impossible to rebalance daily resources to work on a per-encounter basis. It's not easy to rebalance encounter resources for a per-day basis, but it's a damn sight easier than the other way around. Of course, there's also the option of making everyone have both per-day and per-encounter resources, but the edition war has made even the hint of a suggestion of a proposal in that direction more toxic than Lake Karachai.

People have expectations from D&D so they can't really do drastic changes.

Probably work better as a 10 level game and everything is short rest and at will based like Warlock. Spells can stay the same.

It's also a waste of time writing a formula for encounters as every group is different. 2E had about the best approach. Basically a heap of guidelines and dont use creatures immune to stuff if half the party can't hurt them.

It's an art form not a science.

 

[Umbran]

Sonething similar to this.

Except in D&D you have the if something goes wrong (or blatantly stupid) you're dead level of risk.

In your D&D, sure.
But every table can be different.
Not everyone has to use the same risk. And that's okay.

 

[Umbran]

Having been banged up on carnival rides and roller coasters a few times, I've come to accept that their risk is real.

If the risk were real (meaning, large enough to be a real concern), people would have died, and the rides (and amusement parks) would close.

Thousands and thousands of people ride them without injury. There is no real (again, meaning appreciable) risk.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah, I feel a lot of players want that, and more appear every day (trained by the most popular current rules).

I'm sorry, I failed to notice where you gave any substantiation to that narrative.

Before you answer, please note that "plausible narrative" is not actual support. It is just as plausible that the most popular current rules became popular because it gives more people what they want. If folks didn't like the play experience, they would not continue to play to be "trained" to like it.

It's very frustrating, because I've never wanted that as a player or a DM.

Sorry. Can't help you.

RPGs are a form of media. All media change tropes and patterns and themes over time. You either learn ways to find your fun in the new presentations, or the medium goes on without you.

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, it pretty much is a roll of the dice--or at least that's the intent. That's (part of) why casinos shuffle multiple decks together, so that things like card-counting (an actual strategy!) are harder to do.

If they shuffled multiple decks together for poker it would become possible to get a hand of five of a kind, which isn't normally possible without cheating.

Absolutely none of that is part of chess, which is sort of the point.

Oh, I dunno - psyching out your opponent is a part of chess too.

 

[Steampunkette]

If the risk were real (meaning, large enough to be a real concern), people would have died, and the rides (and amusement parks) would close.

Thousands and thousands of people ride them without injury. There is no real (again, meaning appreciable) risk.

Yup. This^

I have run games where there was literally never any chance any of the PCs were going to die unless they murdered each other. It still -felt- dangerous, and I still played enemies as ferocious and tactical. I just stacked the deck in such a way the PCs were going to win. The players never learned it was theater and it shouldn't matter if they did, later.

Because it didn't stop anyone from breathlessly telling me how much fun a given session was, or telling their friends or spouses about the cool things that happened. And those experiences and sessions and the joy and camaraderie that was had by all were just as real as they couldn't have been in a "Dice fall where they may" session since stuff would almost certainly have gone -way- different.

Like. I get it. Some people want to play the game as a complete random chance simulator. And I do that, too, to varying degrees based on the story being told. But sometimes?

Sometimes the dice just get in the way.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

Do people want balance?

IDK, wtf is "balance," define your terms. It means different things to different people.

Well apparently here, "balance" means "risk of characters dying in combat". Don't ask me why, that's not at all what I would define "balance" to mean, but these forums are a weird place sometimes

 

[Hussar]

If a PC obtains resistance to cold damage and all my frost giants are now fire giants, I’m sure challenging them, but that’s just a jerk move, lol.

But, I pointed to official module encounters. Nothing bespoke. Run straight out of the book. I’ve killed one of full dead ones n phandalin and come close lots of times.

Heck after the behir it was six gibbering mouthers that, had things gone even slightly different, could easily have resulted in pc deaths.

I’d point out that neither the behir nor the mouthers are m ant to be particularly difficult encounters.

I just don’t understand what people are doing at their tables.

 

[Hussar]

Well, just from simple encounter calculations, a party of two 7th and two 8th level PCs against those encounters rank as Deadly and Hard.

So, sure if you are typically throwing such things at your PCs, the players are probably exhausted!

But isn’t this exactly what is supposed to happen? Folks are repeatedly talking about how they cannot challenge their groups and here you’re saying that it’s working exactly as intended.

 

[pemerton]

In Torchbearer 2e, which has been most of my RPGing for the past couple of years, PCs can't die unless death is explicitly on the line - either (i) because the PCs are in a kill conflict, or (ii) because a PC is sick or injured (these are both technical conditions that can be acquired by failing a test or losing a contest) and the GM announces that "death is on the line" as a possible consequence of a failed test.

If a PC does die, then provided they have one unspent Persona point (a type of "currency" that players can accrue via play), the player can spend the Persona and declare that the PC has "the will to live". This then triggers a set of rules, in which the player and the GM both have decisions to make about changes to the PC sheet, and which also require the player to explain how their PC miraculously survived.

In 20 sessions of play, we have had one PC "die" twice and another once. One all three occasions, they had the will to live.

None of this stops the play of the game being intense. When my players initiate combat, generally it is to capture or to drive off (rather than to kill), because they don't want death to be on the line. Those combats are not less intense because the PCs aren't at risk of death.

As I already mentioned upthread, another RPG I've played in the past little while is Prince Valiant. It's default approach to stakes is that death is not on the line. Only if the fiction makes death the only real stakes (eg someone has been hurled over the parapet of a high tower; or someone is lying injured on a desert battlefield, bleeding and without water) does it come into play as a possibility. This doesn't stop conflicts, including combats, being intense.

I don't think that intense and engaged play requires making players think that death is on the line if it is not.