D&D General Does WotC use its own DMG rules?

[Thomas Shey]

I think we chase a hopeless goal. Encounters are easy and hard for different reasons for different groups. Maybe it's true the bad guys shouldn't be flying if the good guys don't have a good ranged option. But the DM should be able to eyeball a lot of this with experience and while inexperienced it should be easier to compensate for his mistakes.

I think there's a difference between "Encounter guidelines can't entirely do the job" and "encounter guidelines are useless without GM intervention". I've seen at least three games (one entirely outside the D&D sphere) that had ones I considered useful, even if they weren't perfect, self-operating systems.

 

[Vaalingrade]

“Address them” in what way? State that the numbers are meaningless if the players have no way to harm the monster (or visa versa)? I think that even for beginners that is bleedin obvious!

IT's not when the book insists that such an encounter is balanced and doens't offer ways to deal with it aside from hope people will intuit that it doesn't work and there's no way to deal with it. You can modify a flying encounter by having aerial terrain or ceilings, for example. That's the kind of thing the DMG should do.

You heard the phrase “show, don’t tell”?

1) Show Don't Tell is terrible advice in explained and unmodified in and of itself. Hiding information from the audience because people are too lazy to include the CHAPTER of advice that comes with that quote does no one any favors.

2) We're talking about a guidebook. It's supposed to tell you things. This idea that DMs need to learn by wasting their and everyone else's time so the people who don't need it can have a goo read and a good laugh at the newbies failing is an albatross around the hobby's neck.

 

[AnotherGuy]

This is and will be a forever problem with a game like D&D.
With a multitude of classes, subclasses, party compositions, party numbers, terrain, visibility, magical items, character options as well as ever-expanding PC options, new or half editions, and monster redesigns....and Bob Loblaw - the numbers keep changing with no real focus on doing actual playtests to determine better rules for managing encounter design.

 

[Minigiant]

The DMG at bare minimum should address common variables like flight, party composition and hard gated effects like requiring magic items or a certain spell to be effective.

It can't because those aspects were not specifically designed as gates at the time.

They became gates after the fact.

2014 5e and 2000 3e was designed on feels and vibes. That's why when stuff with mechanically weak you people didn't notice at first because they designed them based on how they looked.

2024 5e and 2004 3.5e was just attempting to rebalance around something that was still at a skeleton of just vibes.

Most people do not want to admit that adventure design and DMing is just finding out what kind of feeling you want to create and putting out material that invoke like those feelings. Like cooking by reading the recipe and going off script at step 1..

 

[Micah Sweet]

It can't because those aspects were not specifically designed as gates at the time.

They became gates after the fact.

2014 5e and 2000 3e was designed on feels and vibes. That's why when stuff with mechanically weak you people didn't notice at first because they designed them based on how they looked.

2024 5e and 2004 3.5e was just attempting to rebalance around something that was still at a skeleton of just vibes.

Most people do not want to admit that adventure design and DMing is just finding out what kind of feeling you want to create and putting out material that invoke like those feelings. Like cooking by reading the recipe and going off script at step 1..

Which is why finding or making a recipe you like and then following it in subsequent design is good practice.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It can't because those aspects were not specifically designed as gates at the time.

The time 'you must be this magical to play' became a gate was somewhere in the early 2000's. How long did 5e need to realize what the edition it was pretending to be was doing?

 

[Minigiant]

The time 'you must be this magical to play' became a gate was somewhere in the early 2000's. How long did 5e need to realize what the edition it was pretending to be was doing?

No, you got it backwards.

It's not "you must be this magical to play" became a gate.

Its "I added a bunch of cool stuff but I forgot to think about how it's supposed to deal with X"

In all but one edition of D&,D, everything is designed separate from each other.

It's the DMs giving the barbarian OP magic throwing hammers and handaxes because the designers didn't think about how it would hit a flying enemy when they keep adding cool rage stuff.

It's sorta like the Justice League. Superman Batman Wonder Woman, Flash, and Aquaman are all created separately. Then you put them together.

The DM is the one who realize that their power sets are different and thus plays up Batman's intelligence or makes Aquaman have more diplomatic clout.

If somebody was making a supers team comic from scratch with characters they all made from scratch, they would not end up looking like the Justice League nor have their power sets outside of satire.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

With many of them I absolutely would, because too many of them show little sign they show a relationship to other similar elements. This is absolutely endemic to spell design, which is why you see some that are must-haves and others that are considered trap options.

I don't consider spells to be at all an example of "exception-based design." Mostly because I don't think 5e spells are particularly well designed at all. Each individual spell is almost always ad hoc. There is no baseline from which to make exceptions, which is a requirement for you to have something being "exceptional" in the first place. A design rule that is broken more often than it is followed isn't a rule.

That's actually a very good way of separating the two ideas for me: spells can barely be said to have any design system whatsoever, thus making nearly all of them unique one-off things, often with capricious and unexplained deviations (a problem only made worse by 5e's repeated efforts to port as many class features as it can into the spells system.) Some of this is legacy design exerting its oft-infuriating influence, e.g. fireball, but a lot of it is not, e.g. silvery barbs.

By comparison, exception-based design has to start from an otherwise universal rule, and then make exceptions only as needed. This of course comes with the great benefit that you aren't beholden to unforeseen weaknesses of someone else's design choices, but that great power comes with the great responsibility to use it sparingly--because if you really do have far more exceptions than regularities, "regular" no longer has any meaning, there is no system at all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't know what you think ad-hoc means to be honest. When you can create a new power without having to conform it to some system, that is ad-hoc. That is not a bad word.

To be "ad hoc" is to be without any structure, system, or consistency--it is things invented purely on the fly, usually makeshift solutions, "patches", etc. It may not be a generically bad word, but when used to refer to a designed system, I certainly think it is a criticism, not a neutral statement.

Exception-based design works by setting a clear baseline, a system, and then only deviating from it when you need to, because no system is perfect. "Ad hoc" design is where you do whatever, without any system in the first place.

I'm not sure I get your use of top down vs bottom up.

Where is the tree structure oriented?

When I say "top-down," I mean that 3e-like design wants everything to have a clear box, and no box should ever conflict with the category of boxes it's alongside, and no category should conflict with the other categories in its class, etc. To invent an example, without strict reference to actual 3.x rules, anything and everything that is a "creature" must have all the traits that every "creature" has. If you want something that is like a creature, but doesn't have all the same traits, it needs to be a completely distinct category in order to be valid. Any time you want to deviate, you must either invent a whole new category, possibly several layers up the tree. Hence my example of "undead" vs "deathless" before, or inventing whole new classes for the rather paltry reason of "stat swap and some ACFs".

Bottom-up is the opposite. "Creature" is considered a starting point, not a classification. You build upon what "creature" means--possibly changing some things along the way--rather than being confined only to what "creature" means. Metaphorically, you can build up and out, without having to stay only above foundation blocks.

This is the physics of the universe being related to the rules. If undead are powered by negative energy then it makes sense. Exceptions based will not try to adhere to any system.

See, this is where we differ. There is a system. The system is just not absolutely, 100% determinative. The rules recognize that no system ever can be perfectly determinative--you cannot have discrete, individual rules for every possible case. Hence, there is a default expectation, which can be relied upon in general, but which will not bar you from doing things differently if different is actually required. One emphatically should not deviate willy-nilly, but nor should one fear deviation either. The former would in fact be the anti-systematic, meaningless "do whatever" approach you described, while the latter would lock the system from ever adapting, adjusting, or responding when something doesn't work.

The system is just assemble the components and they don't have to relate.

No, it is not. The system is a baseline, but the content-creator (designer, DM, homebrewer, whatever) is expected to evaluate that system as it operates. That's where the relation lies: "I can see that these rules are too limiting, incapable of effectively achieving reasonable ends. Adjustment is required." That's not "ad hoc." It is the simple recognition that perfect systems don't exist, and thus systematic approaches to alteration are required.

I'm probably in the four classes to rule them all camp anyway. I realize that D&D seems intent on making classes their primary way of varying things but I don't need it.

Alright. I don't think we have much to discuss on that front then. I think D&D has somewhere between 18 and 25 fundamental class concepts; anything more than 25 (and this is a specific list, not just any 25) and you're making too fine a point, splitting frog hair four ways. But there are clearly multiple archetypes missing from the 13 that 5e offers, archetypes that other related games (both 5e-descended and more widely D&D-descended) have quite successfully articulated. The "leader of warriors" aka "Warlord", the "swordmaster-spellcaster" aka "Swordmage", the "psychic adept" aka "Psion", and the "Dr. Jekyll-alike" aka "Alchemist", are all examples of archetypes poorly handled by the 5e rules. The fact that we got something like six different "weapon attacker but also spellcaster" subclasses should indicate how big a hole that particular one is, for instance. (I also think the Rogue actually makes for a piss-poor Assassin, but that's getting into the weeds.)

Again, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by baselines. If you mean you create components, then sure but realize you don't have to use anything reusable to do exceptions based design. That is a decision (a good one probably) but you could design a game were everything were unique.

I'm saying actual exception-based design requires it. Otherwise it isn't exception-based design, because a rule that is broken more often than it is obeyed isn't a rule, and if there is no rule, there can be no exceptions. That's what differentiates "exception-based" from "ad hoc." The former has rules, they just aren't absolutely ironclad; you work within them until you see a clear need to work beyond them, and then you only work beyond them inasmuch as you actually have to.

Slavish adherence to existing design rules is obviously bad. So is constant violation thereof, meaning, there is no rule at all. Due deference, tempered by the understanding that some, uncommon/rare, exceptions will occur and should be addressed as such. Exceptions that prove the rules, one might say.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No, you got it backwards.

It's not "you must be this magical to play" became a gate.

Its "I added a bunch of cool stuff but I forgot to think about how it's supposed to deal with X"

You are speaking of why, of what caused the action to be taken. They are speaking of what, of the effect of the action taken.

"I did a whole bunch of things without thinking about how they would fit together" explains why we got into this situation. "You must be this magical to play" is the resulting situation itself.

It's sorta like the Justice League. Superman Batman Wonder Woman, Flash, and Aquaman are all created separately. Then you put them together.

The DM is the one who realize that their power sets are different and thus plays up Batman's intelligence or makes Aquaman have more diplomatic clout.

If somebody was making a supers team comic from scratch with characters they all made from scratch, they would not end up looking like the Justice League nor have their power sets outside of satire.

I disagree. It is perfectly reasonable to have a team created from scratch that has varying power levels like this, because as the author, you have absolute control over every single "participant" in the story. Not only does that mean no "participant" (fictional character, as opposed to real human player) can complain about getting the short end of the stick, but more importantly, you have the power to ensure that everyone actually IS a peer on the team, even though their personal powers may not actually match in a head-to-head scenario.

Otherwise, we could never have had the Fellowship of the Ring, where 4/9 members are untrained hobbits who have never held a sharp object larger than a kitchen knife (which would be closer to pocketknife sized for us), while one of them is a centuries-old prophesied restorer of the monarchy, and another is a millennia-old mid-tier angel in anthropomorphic body (and thus subject to some of the weaknesses and temptations of mortal flesh.)

Further, most adaptations these days emphasize two other things Batman has that his teammates don't. He's nearly immune to most psychic attacks because of his Determinator nature, and he has a budget so big, launching an entire fully-functional space station is a hidden line item in one subsidiary's paperwork. (Though, admittedly, the JL universe is much more technologically advanced than ours, with true sapient AI, cybernetic augmentation, prototype weather control systems, fusion power, etc., so it's not necessarily weird that Wayne Aerospace can launch a space station in secret.) That's a pretty clear example of the authors exploring the nature of the character, backstory and such, and leveraging it to create a more equitable playing field. Anytime the JL uses a tech gadget, it's either something Bruce invented, something his company developed, or at the very least, something he partially funded. (Even Cyborg, Steel, and other tech-genius supers tend to rely at least in part on Bruce's funding/materials/logistics.)