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

[Crimson Longinus]

It's special because it's the boring one. Because it's the one that ends the character's story and removes them from the narrative.

Please understand that this is just your personal hang-up because you for some reason do not get the dramatic impact that a character death can bring to enhance the story. If you don't like it, don't use it, but stop this hyperbolic nonsense.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Please understand that this is just your personal hang-up because you for some reason do not get the dramatic impact that a character death can bring to enhance the story. If you don't like it, don't use it, but stop this hyperbolic nonsense.

I understand actual drama and actual good writing choices as opposed to cheap shock and the terrible way pop culture has mutated audience expectations.

I also understand the difference between a story you read or watch and a game you interact with and have a different parasocial connection with.

Please stop acting like you know what I know and understand then being way off base and rude with it in hypertypical internet fashion. This is the second time this week.

 

[Lanefan]

You want me to actually name names? Fine. I hate doing that, but you have demanded I do so, so I will. The main two I can remember off the top of my head are @Lanefan and @Maxperson. The former has explicitly said to me, despite my efforts to find any other avenue, that a DM-player arms race is not only good and proper but absolutely correct, and that players actively misbehaving for their own jollies, regardless of the consequences that has for other people at the table, is their inherent right.

To be fair, it helps if-when all the players are of the same mindset, such that a grinning "Oh, you wanna play like that, do ya?" is the accepted response to any PvP shenanigans.

He actively rejected any notion of needing to be a "responsible adult" at the game table.

Not quite. Let's not overstate things here.

I want people to be responsible adults at the game table in not throwing drinks at each other or breaking the furniture etc., and to keep their in-game arguments in character rather than let them spill over to out-of-character disputes.

In character, however, all such "responsible adult" requirements come off. Barring a very few things that are off the table for reasons of common decency, the characters can do whatever they like to each other and try to do whatever they like to the setting, though the setting will respond and likely produce consequences for any abuse it takes. As in, if you kill the mayor's son the local authorities will be out looking for you and your names will soon be mud through much of the region.

As long as we're all laughing, we're good.

 

[tetrasodium]

Weird how death somehow pulls the curtains shut on a character's story in a game where a a dead PC can come back from death with revivify, reincarnate, raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, & no doubt other methods. Players somehow having such a severe misunderstanding is a major flaw in how 5e presents PC risk & death to players.

 

[TwoSix]

To be fair, it helps if-when all the players are of the same mindset, such that a grinning "Oh, you wanna play like that, do ya?" is the accepted response to any PvP shenanigans.

Not quite. Let's not overstate things here.

I want people to be responsible adults at the game table in not throwing drinks at each other or breaking the furniture etc., and to keep their in-game arguments in character rather than let them spill over to out-of-character disputes.

In character, however, all such "responsible adult" requirements come off. Barring a very few things that are off the table for reasons of common decency, the characters can do whatever they like to each other and try to do whatever they like to the setting, though the setting will respond and likely produce consequences for any abuse it takes. As in, if you kill the mayor's son the local authorities will be out looking for you and your names will soon be mud through much of the region.

As long as we're all laughing, we're good.

I think the social contract, and the players' acceptance of it, matters a great deal here.

If I'm walking down the street and someone tackles me, I have the right to be upset and not want to be tackled. If I put on a helmet and shoulder pads and walk onto a football field while a game is being played, I renounce any right to be upset if someone tackles me.

If someone is on the outside of the football game and wants to get onto the field and participate and not get tackled, they have the right to ask, but they should certainly have no expectation of the participants actually granting that request.

If it isn't clear, @Lanefan's game is the football field. If you go onto the field of their game sessions, expect and ask for no quarter.

 

[Lanefan]

Death is not the only form of real risk.

Now that level drain, item destruction, permanent stat loss, and so forth aren't in the game, what "real risks" are left other than death?

Death is not the only form of "ultimate failure."

If you don't think it is possible to survive while also experiencing ultimate failure, I honestly don't know what to tell you. Many, many, many, MANY people throughout history have survived their experiences of ultimate failure, where death would have been more successful. I frankly find it a bit hard to believe that you don't know of a single instance of something like this.

Keep in mind the one huge difference between reality and (most people's) D&D settings: in reality death only happens once per person. In D&D, revival effects exist such that death can potentially happen multiple times per person. Therefore, death can be and is a "fail" state while also possibly not being permanent; putting it on a par with the other Bad Things I listed above, of which it is the only one remaining.

Now, if you don't have revival effects in your game that's different; and in that case I'd strongly encourage you to put back in some or all of those other long-term or hard-to-fix mechanical fail-states to take death's place.

I see mechanical fail states (level loss, revivable death, etc.) as being quite different from non-mechanical fail states (we failed on the mission, we got run out of town, the prince got killed on our watch, etc.) because, while unfortunate in the fiction, none of those affect the PCs' ongoing mechanical development and power gain.

Yes...but the rules themselves fight against you about it. Spells that obviate every part of actually surviving--food, water, shelter--are available as early as level 1, or occasionally level 3 or 5 for the particularly hefty stuff. Create food and water nixes literally any form of sustenance-based survival mechanics permanently once you have a 5th level Cleric (or particular flavors of Druid or Warlock, or 9th level Paladin/Artificer). Create water is a 1st level Cleric spell, and can be acquired through a variety of other means (and it was also a Druid spell in 5.0, but it seems to have been removed in 5.5e).

5th edition D&D is not, has never been, and will not ever be particularly supportive of this playstyle. I consider this a damn shame, because, just as you say, some groups love this stuff. I don't generally love it, but I'm on record arguing for many things I don't personally have any interest in, but which I think absolutely need to be supported.

Hear hear to this. Sometimes we even agree on things.

 

[Maxperson]

It did not.

In no way can what the martial power source be construed as magic unless someone is making that stupid 'taunting is mind control' argument.

Take it up with WotC. They determined that it was non-traditional magic, not me.

Edit: Looking at the fighter abilities, I'd say Unbreakable which would allow the fighter's skin to stop a sword strike would be supernatural. I'm sure there are more abilities that fall outside of natural.

 

[TwoSix]

Weird how death somehow pulls the curtains shut on a character's story in a game where a a dead PC can come back from death with revivify, reincarnate, raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, & no doubt other methods. Players somehow having such a severe misunderstanding is a major flaw in how 5e presents PC risk & death to players.

Character death isn't that uncommon in 5e, particularly once you get into the mid-levels. "Actual character retirement due to death", if the player didn't want that to happen, is pretty much unheard of.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Take it up with WotC. They determined that it was non-traditional magic, not me.

They didn't call it magic at all.

Your example, even in the bolded part, says it's not magic.

 

[Lanefan]

I am saying that the designers should design the game so that optimizing it IS playing it. That the designers should be making a game where using and leveraging the rules IS the fun the game is designed to produce.

How on earth does that have even the SLIGHTEST intersection with adversarial DMing?

The intersection comes when the DM, in hopes of keeping the game challenging, also starts optimizing. Boom - now you have an arms race.