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

[Voadam]

In the fiction, neither Zorro nor Batman nor Indiana Jones nor Boromir nor Green Arrow nor Conan nor . . . has magical or supernatural power.

If we want a RPG that permits a player to play a PC whose adventures are likely to unfold in a similar fashion to any of these characters, we will need something that works pretty differently from low and probably even mid-level D&D. And if we want it to be an entertaining game to play, we will probably want rules for failure and success that are different from typical D&D - for instance, emulating one of these characters by simply stepping up their numbers so that victory against "mundane" obstacles is more-or-less guaranteed may not make for very satisfactory play.

I think most people would generally think of all of these characters as decently high level characters in D&D terms and not as low level characters.

Boromir might be a mid level character. Batman the original animated series might be low to mid level, in animated justice league he is definitely high level.

 

[Voadam]

You're talking about a supers game. I'm all for that, but they as you say follow different rules.

Or a pulp genre game, or an action movie based game. I see D&D fitting into both.

 

[Vaalingrade]

In part that's a chicken-and-egg situation: most players are not among those who like survival-style games (or west marches play, or "rogue-like" play) because most players who started with 4e-5e haven't really been exposed to such and thus haven't had a chance to determine whether they in fact like it or not.

Isn't it also possible that those play styles weren't what those players were exposed to because the existing players had already rejected them when starting their own games?

The most recent editions didn't take a different tact out of nowhere after all.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Boromir might be a mid level character.

Considering D&D rules, the Uruks might have just roll 1's for damage with non-composite bows over and over again. I don't recall him ever doing anything especially strong.

Batman the original animated series might be low to mid level, in animated justice league he is definitely high level.

Batman is... an issue for D&D. His power is being a good fighter and... having a lot of effective mundane equipment that D&D would never dream of these days but a lot of which were in the AEG.

 

[Lanefan]

"It's what my character would do" is a phrase used almost exclusively to admonish "bad" play, not to praise play.

And this, to me, is truly sad. "It's what the character would do" should IMO be the holy grail of roleplaying, for good or bad or whatever.

 

[Lanefan]

This. D&D is not like Fiasco where you are narrating out a story that can allow folks to explore the bounds of the game without causing discord. The group is expected to work together for at least a certain period of time under a heavy mechanical system. Which is why often the "its what my character would do" is met with a chorus of "that PC is out of the party because its what our characters would do."

And that's just fine with me.

 

[pemerton]

Well, they might also dislike gnomes, or really like drinking.

I think you called this “invocations of color”, in a long-ago thread when this topic came up.

Yes. (Except I would have called it "colour".)

And to me this gets to the heart of it: I'm in actor stance when decisions are low- or no-stakes; but I move to author stance as soon as things start to really matter; isn't - for me - play that demonstrates a commitment to actor stance only.

You can give the characters reasons to hang out together in the character generation phase. Pretty basic. But yes, sometimes situation develops in such a way, that those reasons no longer hold. This might mean someone needing a new character. That's fine.

Following on from what I've just posted in reply to @TwoSix:

It's not just reasons to stay together, although those are often so thin that taking it seriously as actor stance rather than author stance with a pretty light veneer of retroactive motivation.

It's the players understanding the whole structure of "plot hook", "adventure", "quest giver", "main quest", "side quest", etc - stuff that is manifestly not part of the fiction itself and not part of the way any person in the fiction would think - and then declaring actions on that basis while also inventing reasons why their PCs would make those decisions.

 

[Maxperson]

Oh. I'd better watch my grammar, then, as I've always seen those terms as being direct synonyms, and thus completely interchangeable.

I do as well, but in the context that the he was using, in-game meant rules as opposed to in-fiction. I didn't want to change the terms in my response.

 

[pemerton]

Well, I think this is getting into deeper difference between games and stories. (One which I alluded to earlier.) A story created by an author will follow a certain narrative formula. There are the kind of stories where even if things might seem dire and uncertain we will actually know for sure that in the end the hero will foil the bad guys' plans and get the girl. But when we gamify it, we have some some tough choices to make. Do we want a system which consistently reproduce this sort of story, or do we want to emphasise the feeling of peril, uncertainty and accomplishment by actually making things uncertain?

My preference is for uncertainty. But also satisfactory play. It's fairly straightforward to get that for a Conan-esque or Batman-esque character. Just not using traditional D&D mechanics - unless you give them spells, which is a bit weird for these ostensibly non-wizardly characters.

 

[Maxperson]

Considering D&D rules, the Uruks might have just roll 1's for damage with non-composite bows over and over again. I don't recall him ever doing anything especially strong.

Boromir was numenorean, or at least had an almost pure numenorean bloodline. The high men of numenor were not high men for nothing.