Hot take: get rid of the "balanced party" paradigm

[KYRON45]

Agree up to here.

Disagree here. In my view, any GM worth their salt won't change a thing. It's on the players to find ways and means of overcoming the challenges neutrally and fairly presented by the GM, and if the PCs they chose to play turn out to be individually or collectively sub-optimal against some of those challenges then so be it.

Optimizing is also a buzz word.
Play the game the way you like but its a symbiotic relationship...a DM without players is about as valuable as players without a DM.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In theory, 5e should be able to handle parties of mixed level better than 3e or 4e could because of bounded accuracy. In practice, the high-scaling of damage and hp makes this exceptionally difficult, especially at differing tiers.

Something like Dungeon World handles it just fine, however.

What's funny is I think you could pretty easily fix this with 5E, simply by relatively increasing base HP (a lot), massively decreasing HP gain by level, and decreasing damage gain by level.

Its all numbers tweaks and whilst it might not work with a damage-dice based system like 5E uses (it'd be a lot easier with largely fixed damage mods), you could get there, and I think a lot of 5E-inspired systems around today are moving in this direction.

And yes Dungeon World plays pretty fine with mixed levels.

 

[Rune]

I have.

I've met several DMs in fact who "hit the ground running", and also several who, despite years, or even one case, decades, of experience, were still absolutely terrible DMs.

There's a difference between "good" and "perfect". Every DM has stuff to learn, sure, but with good advice and a fundamentally good attitude and/or the right mindset, you can be an extremely decent DM immediately. Especially if you've been playing RPGs a long time - but I can think of one person who came to DMing having only played less than a year of a single D&D campaign, and was immediately writing very good adventures and running them really well. She was very smart about DMing though and had read and thought a lot about it. The only mistakes I saw her make were in not realizing how players respond to certain stimuli, and I've seen experienced DMs make similar errors.

So I think it's just not true to suggest all DMs start bad and get good. Or that all DMs improve really even.

Oh, I’ve certainly met some who have never improved.

I just think that making mistakes (even big ones that would rival a “GM horror story” in some reddit thread) is inevitable in GMing over any extended length of time. Because part of GMing is experimenting.

My use of the term, “bad,” is an oversimplification, of course. I think the only truly bad GMs are the ones who aren’t willing to experiment and grow (because that means they aren’t willing to pay enough attention to the players to adapt to the group dynamic).

 

[Desdichado]

Agree up to here.

Disagree here. In my view, any GM worth their salt won't change a thing. It's on the players to find ways and means of overcoming the challenges neutrally and fairly presented by the GM, and if the PCs they chose to play turn out to be individually or collectively sub-optimal against some of those challenges then so be it.

See, and that's the whole entire essence of my "hot take." That whole paradigm is what I call passive-aggressively punishing the players for not building the party that the GM thinks that they need to have in order to succeed. That's not a GM worth his salt. That's very, very, very bad GMing. So bad that I'd hesitate to even play with one who has that attitude. I've been part of groups for years at times in the past where someone had to suck it up and play the cleric even though nobody really wanted to play a cleric, because without one, the party wasn't expected to be successful, for instance, or someone had to play a trap-finding specialist rogue, because otherwise traps would threaten TPKs on a regular basis, etc. Either someone takes it on the chin and the game sucks for them because they're playing a character that they don't want to, or the game sucks for everyone because they're frustrated at constantly getting challenges that have nothing to do with the party, and the smug af GM tells them that it's their fault for not creating a balanced party with all of the traditional roles filled.

I say absolutely and definitively screw that. You want me to go into a dungeon full of undead and stupid af traps when nobody's playing a cleric or trap-finding rogue? No. We'll either go find another dungeon, or skip the dungeons altogether and get involved in smuggling into the Free City with the local organized crime, or something else instead. Two can play at that "I don't care what you are bringing to the table" routine and if a GM plays like that, I'm ready to fight fire with fire as a player, or walk away completely and play with a better GM. It's not like its a high bar to clear or anything.

 

[Desdichado]

I’ve never met a good GM who wasn’t a bad GM first, though. Myself included.

It is a learned skill/art and it takes practice to find out what works both in general and for each group.

Mistakes are an important part of the process.

Yes, clearly. That's true for almost any endeavor, so not really relevant here, though. The point of this thread is to talk specifically about a practice that's somewhat common in the D&D GMing universe that I think is hot garbage and should be done away with, with a tangent about playstyles thrown in because it's also interesting.

There's another tangent that I have no part of about balance between classes across levels, but that's a non sequitur too.

 

[KYRON45]

See, and that's the whole entire essence of my "hot take." That whole paradigm is what I call passive-aggressively punishing the players for not building the party that the GM thinks that they need to have in order to succeed. That's not a GM worth his salt. That's very, very, very bad GMing. So bad that I'd hesitate to even play with one who has that attitude. I've been part of groups for years at times in the past where someone had to suck it up and play the cleric even though nobody really wanted to play a cleric, because without one, the party wasn't expected to be successful, for instance, or someone had to play a trap-finding specialist rogue, because otherwise traps would threaten TPKs on a regular basis, etc. Either someone takes it on the chin and the game sucks for them because they're playing a character that they don't want to, or the game sucks for everyone because they're frustrated at constantly getting challenges that have nothing to do with the party, and the smug af GM tells them that it's their fault for not creating a balanced party with all of the traditional roles filled.

I say absolutely and definitively screw that. You want me to go into a dungeon full of undead and stupid af traps when nobody's playing a cleric or trap-finding rogue? No. We'll either go find another dungeon, or skip the dungeons altogether and get involved in smuggling into the Free City with the local organized crime, or something else instead. Two can play at that "I don't care what you are bringing to the table" routine and if a GM plays like that, I'm ready to fight fire with fire as a player, or walk away completely and play with a better GM. It's not like its a high bar to clear or anything.

There is a fine line between being a good GM and pandering to a bunch of players who want what they want.
GM for a while and see if what you want in a GM is reasonable.

 

[Rune]

There's another tangent that I have no part of about balance between classes across levels, but that's a non sequitur too.

Actually, my first instinct while reading your OP was to ask if you included level disparity in your consideration of enforced balance, but someone else got there first. So, less of a tangent to my mind than yours, I guess.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I just think that making mistakes (even big ones that would rival a “GM horror story” in some reddit thread) is inevitable in GMing over any extended length of time. Because part of GMing is experimenting.

I don't think so.

I'm sorry.

I think if you're talking teenagers or young twenties as "new DMs", yeah, sure, but I've played with a number of DMs who didn't start DMing until their 30s or 40s and they've been straight in as great DMs and it's been quite shocking actually because I assumed that it was more like what you're saying, that you had to make mistakes to learn.

Also some of us never make mistakes that would reach "GM horror story" levels. We just don't. I've been a nearly horror-story player (I'm thinking of the time at 17 I basically tried to derail a Castle Falkenstein game before, at the last minute, realizing I was the problem, not the game, and deciding to exit the game), but DM? Never. The worst DMing debacles I can think of that I was DM for are pretty small peanuts stuff, like "I made us play a new game that turned out to be really boring and total waste of everyone's time" or "I bailed on a campaign right at the start once because I couldn't figure out what to do with it" (sorry Mage: The Ascension guys, you had some great PC concepts!).

And that's having DM'd since I was 11 and am now 46. And none of the DMs who started at 30+ I've seen have had "horror story"-level issues either. I will note that pretty much all of them had jobs/experience which meant they possessed the baseline skills I listed above. If someone didn't have any of those skills and was 30+ I think they'd be in as bad a place as a teenager, but I'd also be a little concerned if someone 30+ didn't have any of those skills period lol.

 

[TwoSix]

See, and that's the whole entire essence of my "hot take." That whole paradigm is what I call passive-aggressively punishing the players for not building the party that the GM thinks that they need to have in order to succeed. That's not a GM worth his salt. That's very, very, very bad GMing. So bad that I'd hesitate to even play with one who has that attitude. I've been part of groups for years at times in the past where someone had to suck it up and play the cleric even though nobody really wanted to play a cleric, because without one, the party wasn't expected to be successful, for instance, or someone had to play a trap-finding specialist rogue, because otherwise traps would threaten TPKs on a regular basis, etc. Either someone takes it on the chin and the game sucks for them because they're playing a character that they don't want to, or the game sucks for everyone because they're frustrated at constantly getting challenges that have nothing to do with the party, and the smug af GM tells them that it's their fault for not creating a balanced party with all of the traditional roles filled.

I mean, it's generally understood by most of the posters here (not everyone, of course) that players and DMs who aren't being communicative of their wants and goals for gaming, and willing to walk away from a table that doesn't meet those goals, is exhibiting poor play procedures.

A DM who thinks a balanced party is a near-necessity for his planned adventure to succeed should state that upfront at session zero. If the party doesn't want to do that, he should either modify his plans (or expectations), let the players die, or gracefully withdraw his offer to run a game.

 

[Desdichado]

There is a fine line between being a good GM and pandering to a bunch of players who want what they want.
GM for a while and see if what you want in a GM is reasonable.

OK. I started GMing in 1982, since then I've GMed more than I play. Is that a long enough while to have an opinion here?