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GM's are you bored of your combat and is it because you made it boring?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8090857" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>I'm going to disagree, but not fully. 5e doesn't provide robust approaches that some other games do, but that's not a failure -- it's on purpose. D&D did originally expect the GM to be a game designer, using the rules as a primer or inspiration to make their game their own. This lessened somewhat in AD&D (both editions), but still provided a system that was expected to be customized by the GM. 3.x broke away from this by providing much more player-side focused play (with clear, expected rules for almost everything), which caused it's own set of issues because they didn't address the fundamental assumptions of GM designed play and just forced a single, main approach. 4e, interestingly, was as player-sided as 3.x, but did fix a lot of the fundamental issues, so it worked better (if you grokked the fundamental changes, which the designers did a poor job of explaining until much later in the 4e cycle). 5e has reversed course, and is back to providing a toolkit for the GM to, ultimately, design their own game. So, combat is very much an area that 5e expects the GM to do the work to tailor it to their table, and we agree here. Where we disagree is on this being poor design. I don't think it is -- it's very intentional and part of why I think D&D maintains it's overwhelming market share.</p><p></p><p>I also think that the other games that appear to provide more robust combat engines are pulling a bit of a magic trick. It's not that it's less complex or more robust but that the work that's required is both spread out across the scene and spread out across the table. In D&D, the GM has to make THIS moment fun, and is expected to do that work themselves so the players can enjoy it. In, say, Blades or AW, the table is responsible for creating the situation that's fun, and the PCs come with lots of baggage that's drug into the mix (so earlier work) of combat, and it's not the GM that's solely responsible for the combat -- it's mostly the players doing what the GM in 5e does, with the AW GM only having to deal with resolutions and reframes. The load isn't really all that different, but how it's shared out is very different. They do different things, and I don't think you can have the flexibility and strong vision story of D&D with one of those combat engines. To get good in 5e, you have to allow for bad to also happen. It's a toolbox rather than a set of Ikea directions (and I'm not comparing AW to IKEA directions by any stretch -- huge BitD fan here, and looking forward to trying some AW at my table) -- expecting everyone to be able to make IKEA furniture from tools and raw materials is hard, but functional is easy and mastercraft furniture is possible.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 8090857, member: 16814"] I'm going to disagree, but not fully. 5e doesn't provide robust approaches that some other games do, but that's not a failure -- it's on purpose. D&D did originally expect the GM to be a game designer, using the rules as a primer or inspiration to make their game their own. This lessened somewhat in AD&D (both editions), but still provided a system that was expected to be customized by the GM. 3.x broke away from this by providing much more player-side focused play (with clear, expected rules for almost everything), which caused it's own set of issues because they didn't address the fundamental assumptions of GM designed play and just forced a single, main approach. 4e, interestingly, was as player-sided as 3.x, but did fix a lot of the fundamental issues, so it worked better (if you grokked the fundamental changes, which the designers did a poor job of explaining until much later in the 4e cycle). 5e has reversed course, and is back to providing a toolkit for the GM to, ultimately, design their own game. So, combat is very much an area that 5e expects the GM to do the work to tailor it to their table, and we agree here. Where we disagree is on this being poor design. I don't think it is -- it's very intentional and part of why I think D&D maintains it's overwhelming market share. I also think that the other games that appear to provide more robust combat engines are pulling a bit of a magic trick. It's not that it's less complex or more robust but that the work that's required is both spread out across the scene and spread out across the table. In D&D, the GM has to make THIS moment fun, and is expected to do that work themselves so the players can enjoy it. In, say, Blades or AW, the table is responsible for creating the situation that's fun, and the PCs come with lots of baggage that's drug into the mix (so earlier work) of combat, and it's not the GM that's solely responsible for the combat -- it's mostly the players doing what the GM in 5e does, with the AW GM only having to deal with resolutions and reframes. The load isn't really all that different, but how it's shared out is very different. They do different things, and I don't think you can have the flexibility and strong vision story of D&D with one of those combat engines. To get good in 5e, you have to allow for bad to also happen. It's a toolbox rather than a set of Ikea directions (and I'm not comparing AW to IKEA directions by any stretch -- huge BitD fan here, and looking forward to trying some AW at my table) -- expecting everyone to be able to make IKEA furniture from tools and raw materials is hard, but functional is easy and mastercraft furniture is possible. [/QUOTE]
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GM's are you bored of your combat and is it because you made it boring?
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