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

[Lanefan]

They could have just made the game modular like they talked about in NEXT.

Unfortunately that ship sailed before it was even finished being built.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

Indeed, or something like that. To me big selling points of RPGs are immersion, the feeling of being a person in another world, and open-ended unpredictable stories that the play generates. To me, at least to a certain degree, the game outcome not following a recognisable (and thus predictable) narrative structure is a feature, not a bug. The latter is also why actual play shows are sometimes more interesting to watch than some sort of more scripted entertainment. This is also the main reason why I feel railroading is bad; we lose this quality.

 

[I'm A Banana]

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

For death specifically, no, not everyone cares about that.

I wonder if I can read something in those tea leaves, though.

What if "risk of characters dying in combat" is something of a signifier for "risk of failure"?

As a game system, D&D doesn't have a lot of out of the box ways for someone to fail other than character death, and character death is not something that commonly happens these days. What if that's producing this...vibe....that my decisions as a player don't matter? That success is inevitable, that I don't need to make good choices or use abilities in a smart way to win?

 

[pemerton]

Bolded emphasis mine. Just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, when you mean received cultures, you're meaning the playing table or friend circle cultures? i.e. real world cultures

Yes, real world cultures. Although these go beyond particular tables and circles of friends - I think they're established and propagated at a wider level (in the old days via module design, Dragon magazine, etc; these days via forums/reddit etc, blogs, youtube, etc).

 

[pemerton]

It think that all sort of higher level goals and defeat conditions are commonly present in D&D games, but those are way easier to have on strategic rather than tactical level. It is relatively easy to have "mission goal" that can fail or succeed without the failure meaning the death of the PCs. (Stop the cultist from performing the ritual, save the princess, avenge my brother etc.) But it it is harder to make it so that every individual fight has such goal independently, and not only as an increment for the main goal. Thus the attrition is still useful.

I don't really agree that it is all that hard to make it so that every individual fight has a goal that goes beyond attrition.

Or rather - I don't really agree that that is all that hard to do, if some other constraints or expectations are relaxed.

 

[Xenolith234]

Indeed, or something like that. To me big selling points of RPGs are immersion, the feeling of being a person in another world, and open-ended unpredictable stories that the play generates. To me, at least to a certain degree, the game outcome not following a recognisable (and thus predictable) narrative structure is a feature, not a bug. The latter is also why actual play shows are sometimes more interesting to watch than some sort of more scripted entertainment. This is also the main reason why I feel railroading is bad; we lose this quality.

I agree as well. I’m not in it to play nor DM an arcade game of D&D; I want it to feel and be as real as possible for my players, with all the highs and lows that comes with.

 

[pemerton]

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.

In my view, the basic issue for actor stance in D&D is this: the crunchiest part of the game is combat; and in combat, a player can infer from their remaining hit points how much risk they can take, how likely it is that a single weapon blow or bow shot might kill their PC, etc.

And indeed - as the parallel discussion in this thread about attrition, encounter design, etc shows - players are expected to engage in that sort of reasoning, as part of their play of the game.

That reasoning is not something that happens in actor stance.

 

[pemerton]

None of those require metacurrency to work (I really don't like metacurrency), and none of them matter as much as whether or not you die.

Rage uses-per-day is a meta-currency: it is regained on a long rest, and expended at the choice of the player.

There is no meta-currency for courage in D&D, because players have an unlimited power to choose for their PCs to be fearless. The fiction would actually become more realisitc if this was rationed via meta-currency, because at least sometimes (ie when the players choose not to spend their currency) the PCs might break as their courage fails them.

I'll also note that the notion of "whether or not you die" mattering is a narrative or game-play notion, not a notion that pertains to realism of the fiction!

 

[pemerton]

In D&D people roll to see whether or not they succumb to fear.

No they don't. There are no morale rules for PCs. And in many versions of the game there are no morale rules for NPCs either.

And there's no reason there couldn't be rules for falling asleep on watch, or falling to temptation. In fact, those both sound like saving throws to me, and I would welcome them, because they are more realistic to me and because they are in line with the style of the game.

There are no such mechanics. And introducing them would be a huge change in the way that the game is typically approached. I mean, consider how much hostility there is to player-binding social mechanics - what makes you think that temptation mechanics would be any less controversial? I mean, there's a reason that Pendragon is seen as very different from D&D in the way its personality mechanics work.

Your will to live mechanic is in line with the style of a different game.

In the AD&D UA, cavaliers have an ability to keep functioning when at negative hp. In the AD&D OA, sohei have an ability to choose to keep fighting an negative hp, but with the consequence that they can't be stabilised from dying.

Playing around with death mechanics, and decisions players are able to make about whether their PCs avoid or succumb to those mechanics, that involve other trade offs like free actions and bonuses and so on, has been a part of D&D since the mid-1980s. (That is to say, about 40 of the game's 50 years.)

So your claim about "the style of a different game" is not plausible. Particularly in the same post that suggests that it would be just a minor change to require a player to roll a saving throw to have their PC avoid angry pursuit of the fleeing bugbear, or avoid trying to steal a bit of the dragon's treasure, or <insert other temptation here>.

 

[pemerton]

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

No it doesn't. You asserted that players are "trained" by a ruleset. @EzekielRaiden responded that the direction of causation is the opposite: that players have a preference, and the ruleset - in pursuit of popularity - has come increasingly to reflect that preference.