D&D General ENWorld is better that the pundits…change my mind

[renbot]

going to get less of them here

That sounds like something an AI would say!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I realize I am stricter than average…I might handicap myself as player to an extent due to my anti cheese bias.

But some online advice is utterly silly. Someone tortures the English language to sort of justify some combo that would not work at a majority of tables.

Pet peeve of mine (but I am uptight about trying to play by intended rules…).

In some of those cases I guess at least they are clear in what the goal is.

Yeah, I err towards Rules As Intended. The "let's break the game for fun" thing got tiresome for me five minutes into the 3E era.

I do have an optimizer in my games, but he's not abusive about it and the fun of knowing how to do it is more important to him than actually being able to punch a hole through an iron golem at level one.

 

[Composer99]

A lot of those argumentative discussions also give birth to some wonderfully creative ideas and as someone who is not bound to RAW and always in search of inspiration and creativity, I find Enworld extremely useful on that front.

I dunno.

On the "control spells wreck boss fights, hence legendary resistance" thread, there were a few good ideas about alternatives to legendary resistance. For instance, if memory serves, one person suggested that action-denial spells (hideous laughter and so on) could prune away legendary actions. I don't recall that those ideas were cropping up past page 5, though, and that thread is now going on 40+ pages. It could be that some more new ideas are cropping up as latecomers to the thread offer their throughts, of course, but having exhausted my patience with the thread I'm not inclined to dig through it to find them.

Also, I just don't care enough about whether or not legendary resistance is a design problem that needs solving that I would even want to find a solution to it. So whether or not people are coming up with alternatives to legendary resistance is just... not pertinent to me, no matter how creative they may be. Mind, I'm not saying other folks are wrong in thinking legendary resistance is a problem - after all, Mearls himself admitted it was a kludge! - or that they're wrong to seek out solutions to it. More power to them.

Perhaps so. Personally, I just...naturally take a detail-oriented approach and attempt to respond to claims as they are made. When possible, I strive to capture the whole of each point, and when I fail to do so, I attempt to make up for it.

Well and good! All I can do is point to my own personal experience.

In a way, reading and participating in a hobby discussion forum is also a hobby, so if I don't have anything (that I think is) interesting to say, I usually don't participate, and I'll very quickly abandon a thread I'm reading if it stops being interesting or if it's getting tedious or tiresome to read through, for the same reason that I'll abandon a book or video game. Obviously, everyone else views their hobby forum participation differently, or finds different things interesting (or not) than I do, so I can't expect my take to be universally held.

For what it's worth, viz. fisking, I actually do think fisking is quite valuable in many contexts, especially when close reading is important. I just personally find it exhausting to read, especially when reading on a hobbyist discussion forum is also part of my hobby. (Back in the day, I used to participate more extensively in medicine-related discussions on medical-themed blogs, where proponents of quackery would frequently get fisked. That was the Lord's work, you might say, but still exhausting to read through, which among other things is why I eventually drifted away from participating in such discussions.)

Finally, I should not like to give the impression that I was singling you, or any of your interlocutors, out specifically, and I apologise if you felt compelled to reply out of a sense that I was doing just that. That thread just happened to be the most recent example I could think of of the kind of thing I was pointing at. I've been here long enough to have a long enough posting history that I may well have fisked a post or two myself! Most importantly, as long as there is something you found interesting or even enjoyable about those discussions, then please don't take anything I have to say as reason to stop having them in that particular format!

 

[Stormonu]

Do you disagree that D&D is and has been presented as, played as, and seen as a teamwork-based game for, at the very least, the entirety of the new millennium thus far?

Yes.

D&D IS a teamwork game, and there's several cases already built in.

Bardic Inspiration (if not the whole bard class). Guidance. Healing Word. Commander's Strike. Healing Spirit. Rogue's Sneak Attack. Twilight Cleric. Paladin's Auras. Bless.

Many, many more examples, especially of the "one sets them up, another takes them down" abilities, powers and even advice (focus fire).

 

[cbwjm]

This. The casuals dont care and even the veterans dont care that much.

Wife can powergame very well buy she usually plays a weaker character vs the best. Eg she played celestial Warlock vs another one. Next character is a knowledge cleric.

I'm kinda if similar. Pick something fun but I'll powergame it up to a point. 5.0 I played Champion fighter and a monk. No one else would at least those builds.

A big reason 4E tanked was the designers thought theorycrafting on forums was what was the typical 3E was.

It wasn't mostly casuals. My table was the odd one out and even then we didnt go as far as we could have. And we had 50 odd 3E books as well.

I suspect most groups lean towards casual side with maybe a splatbook vs 10.

Most recruits I find are newbie/casual. I've got 1 powergamer and two veterans.

Yeah, I think the vast majority of players just want to pick a character they like and don't really care about optimising or seeking out synergies with the group, they're there to have fun and if they end up with a party of dwarf fighters and a halfling thief then they'll run with that.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, I think the vast majority of players just want to pick a character they like and don't really care about optimising or seeking out synergies with the group, they're there to have fun and if they end up with a party of dwarf fighters and a halfling thief then they'll run with that.

Yeah synergy is usually happenstance.

Think I posted the "ideal" 5.5 party earlier. I want access to "key" spells and lots of damage if youre talking about combat synergy.

 

[Azzy]

I think it's a matter of course—communal discussion is always going to be better than listening to a talking head as it brings in more perspectives to the table.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes.

D&D IS a teamwork game, and there's several cases already built in.

Bardic Inspiration (if not the whole bard class). Guidance. Healing Word. Commander's Strike. Healing Spirit. Rogue's Sneak Attack. Twilight Cleric. Paladin's Auras. Bless.

Many, many more examples, especially of the "one sets them up, another takes them down" abilities, powers and even advice (focus fire).

Okay.

Do you agree that games are designed for one or more purposes, that is, that there are wiser choices and less wise choices, and the designer chooses which things are given incentives and which things are given disincentives?

So, for example, a hockey player wants to get the puck into the opposite goal, not their own goal, and punching someone's lights out is forbidden on pain of temporary (or perhaps more permanent) exclusion. Or, to use a relatively simple D&D example, when you run from melee with an enemy, that enemy gets an opportunity attack, because the game makers want to discourage that behavior for various reasons, but conversely they want some fluidity, so a given creature can only make one OA per round.

These are fairly "close to the rules" examples, so to be clear, I'm not claiming that D&D is designed for the rather daft purpose of merely enabling OAs. Instead, I'm using this as an example of the claim that D&D (like any game) is made for some particular purposes, and its designers intentionally chose to reward some behaviors and punish others, sometimes richly/harshly respectively.

Do you agree that at least D&D is designed with some set of purposes, that players are rewarded for pursuing and (potentially) punished for avoiding or opposing?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah, I err towards Rules As Intended. The "let's break the game for fun" thing got tiresome for me five minutes into the 3E era.

I fully do so as well. My problem comes in when the rules as intended directly and unavoidably conflict with the rules as written. By which I mean, the rules were written trying to make P happen, and instead they directly cause P to not happen. Like the designers openly pursued a goal and then their product didn't just fail in that purpose, it actively opposed that purpose.

Remember that one of the explicit goals of 3e was to make a system more balanced than 2e. Their end result was, arguably, the worst balanced edition that ever was or ever will be.

I do have an optimizer in my games, but he's not abusive about it and the fun of knowing how to do it is more important to him than actually being able to punch a hole through an iron golem at level one.

Most certainly. Folks characterize optimization as something only wicked hurtful players do to lord over others and break games. The vast majority of people who consider optimization don't do that. They just ask rules questions and try to make the most efficient choices within some set of limitations.

I once developed a character, complete with fairly substantial backstory, simply to answer the question, "Can one character have ALL the skills...without sucking?" And the answer is clearly yes, but those last like four-ish skills are not really worth the effort in most games.

"Charop" is a dirty word on many forums, and that irritates me greatly. Especially since that means its antithesis is portrayed as somehow virtuous, when it's not (IMO not even slightly so!), and doesn't even have the redeeming quality of at least contributing to group success.

 

[Seramus]

Yeah, I think the vast majority of players just want to pick a character they like and don't really care about optimising or seeking out synergies with the group, they're there to have fun and if they end up with a party of dwarf fighters and a halfling thief then they'll run with that.

Yeah, this is something I saw several times among people who bounced off PF2E. The game assumes a decent amount of cooperation between characters, and many people couldn't just "play the character they want", they had to engage with the system. Put four people together "just playing the characters they want" and things can get ugly in PF2E.

A DM can always adjust for it, of course.