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

[EzekielRaiden]

Well I didn't say "design" goal. And businesses make decisions that impact the design all the time. Why is 3e different than 2e? They thought streamlining the game would make it more appealing and thus make it more sellable. Sales are the bottom line for a business. I'd argue that 5e returning in some odd ways to pre-3e thinking (not all by any means) was a business decision. They thought it would be the way to get more customers. That is always there goal.

It is a fact they could design a very OSR type game for D&D, or a very narrative version like Dungeonworld, or a neotrad game, or whatever. That decision impacts how the game is designed and that decision is a financial one.

Now once you've decided on the overall tenor of your game the smaller design details aren't constantly being impacted by profit. I agree there. But the overarching design was impacted by the profit motive.

The people who were engaged in that conversation at the time did, people to whom you had replied, hence why I said what I said. To whit:

I don't consider "make a lot of money" a game design goal in and of itself. More a consequence of other goals.

 

[Emerikol]

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.

I think we are mostly arguing meanings of words here so I don't see carrying this line of discussion further.

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 would have argued that ad hoc means you can do anything you want not that you have to do anything you want.

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.

So ad hoc and some pre-canned reusable ideas. I got it. To me, this was inherent in what I said.

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.)

Yeah I could go with six. The Fighter, Magic User, Cleric, Rogue, and Elf(your swordmaster), and Dwarf(give it some new name). Part of what makes today's game so unfun to me is the massive profligation of classes and races. Any world that contained all of these seems like a rare bizarro world which is fine for a one off but I'd hate to try to keep repeatedly doing this with every campagn.

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.

It's really a guideline not a rule. Rules aren't supposed to be broken. And if the guideline is not followed enough whatever is done is the new guideline.

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.

I'm not against exceptions based designed. I didn't like 4e at all but that is not solely because of exceptions based design. If someone offered me a million dollars I could make 5e fun with enough house rules but with that many house rules I might as well house rule another game.

I do like traits to imply things. So there is a middle ground. I'm fine with undead being driven by negative energy but I'm also fine with a particular monster overriding the negative energy part. If I was going to make a ton of these kinds of creatures then I'd probably like deathless as a trait. But I agree with you that no one should be bound on any given monster where they can't just change something.

 

[clearstream]

I didn't have the impression that the 5.0 DMG rules for building encounters of a wanted difficulty and for creating new monsters have been exactly popular in the last 10 years. And now that the 5.5 DMG content is getting revealed, there are already discussions about how once again encounters build and monsters creation rules aren't good enough once again. I think WotC designers have mentioned that they actually took good effort to "revise" these rules for the new DMG, which got me thinking... what exactly does it mean they "revised" them? I know it sounds like a dumb question, but bear with me...

For sure WotC does create encounters in their published adventures and monsters in most of their manuals. Therefore, WotC at least has been using a method for doing these things. It doesn't necessarily mean they use rules, but they aren't just doing it randomly. But do the DMG rules really match with the methods WotC use in their published material?

If indeed the DMG rules or guidelines are the same as what they use, this presumably is the result of 10 years of designing adventure encounters and monsters for this edition: what really did they have to work on so hard for the new DMG, other than simply put in words the method they already use? If on the other hand the DMG rules are something else, well the question is why are they even coming up with something like that instead of just telling us how they do it? This made sense back in 2014 when they had to write a DMG before actually designing many adventures and their encounters, and before knowing well enough if the MM entries were balanced enough, but after 10 years they should just either know how, or know they don't know how.

I can imagine that some of you at this point are already thinking, that maybe WotC doesn't really use any "rules" because building encounters and creating monsters "are an art, not a science". Well then, why doesn't WotC very honestly say so in the DMG? If the book's purpose is to teach people how to be an effective DM, and the truth is that you can't define "rules" for certain stuff, then it would be a good idea to teach that as well.

It's hard to judge until the MM comes out, seeing as it's anchored on monster XP values. The procedure has been simplified in a sensible way - calculate an XP budget and spend that on monsters. That connects number of encounters with character advancement for groups that award XP for overcoming monsters.

Where I and some others had landed for 2014 was to work with CR rather than XP, following rules of thumb like Sly Flourish's. I personally divide encounters into attritional and lethal*, and all I need to know is whether an encounter is likely to be lethal. My rubric was if CR*2 > sum PC levels then = probably lethal. Encounters below that threshold are consistently unlikely to kill characters (there are a few creatures in the MM that are an exception to this). Above, pretty likely to be an interesting challenge.

*Recollecting here that attrition only matters if rests matter, which greatly varies group to group. And lethality only matters if your players fight everything, which again greatly varies group to group. How dangerous is an ancient dragon that has decided not to eat the characters unless they provoke it intolerably? That will depend on the players.

For my style of player-driven sandbox play, the new rules are a distinct improvement. The XP multiplier for encounter size in 2014 was pure nonsense (besides messing up the relationship between levels and encounters). That's gone. What I most I need is a procedure and measure by which that I can devise on the fly any encounter players opt into. An encounter budget is one of the more effective ways to offer that.

Overall, what I need to successfully run my game is a reasonable guide to lethality. Were I designing 2024, I would have removed the "low" threshold altogether, and gone with "attritional" and "lethal". As it is, I focus on the "high" threshold. If it's below that then it's low or medium (it seldom matters which.)

 

[Stormonu]

I kinda wish we could get a D&D lite, where it is a PHB, DMG & MM all in one book, like the old D&D Encyclopedia - though maybe cutting off at 10th level. It's a bit of a shame that D&D core is so expansive that it "needs" to be three books.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I kinda wish we could get a D&D lite, where it is a PHB, DMG & MM all in one book, like the old D&D Encyclopedia - though maybe cutting off at 10th level. It's a bit of a shame that D&D core is so expansive that it "needs" to be three books.

But what are you really gaining? A couple pounds less of carry weight? Is that really an issue for enough people to warrant some company going through the effort of printing one?

I mean we were given the Basic Rules back in 2014 that gave you what you wanted, other than the level 10 cut-off. Did you use it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

But what are you really gaining? A couple pounds less of carry weight? Is that really an issue for enough people to warrant some company going through the effort of printing one?

I mean we were given the Basic Rules back in 2014 that gave you what you wanted, other than the level 10 cut-off. Did you use it?

I mean, you'd be saving about $80-90, but for me I'll happily pay extra for a big book full of interesting and useful crunch.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Again, you're using "exception based design" entirely different from me, or how I've ever seen it used.

"Exception based design" is about each game element being designed as its own thing, as compared to "effect based design" where you start by designing core effects you're going to use repeatedly, and then try to assess how they compare to each other in general value, and build the specifics out of those effects. Some games are more formal about doing this than others, but I don't have much sign that throughout most of its like D&D has done this at all (I'll outright say 3e didn't, and I don't have much sign 5e spell design is any better).

So what you're talking about is an entirely different thing and not what I'm talking about. Bluntly, I just consider what you're talking about as coherent rules design at all.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I mean, you'd be saving about $80-90, but for me I'll happily pay extra for a big book full of interesting and useful crunch.

If price was really their issue with 5E... there were plenty of ways to get around that. The Basic Rules combined with the 5E SRD being the most obvious for a completely free D&D 5E. But it didn't sound like money was the problem.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So what you're talking about is an entirely different thing and not what I'm talking about. Bluntly, I just consider what you're talking about as coherent rules design at all.

Alright.

I consider 5e to be not using coherent rules design, then. As in, it actively avoids it in several places.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Alright.

I consider 5e to be not using coherent rules design, then. As in, it actively avoids it in several places.

Well, it doesn't surprise me that would be the case with the modern version of D&D since its rarely seemed to be a priority in the past.