Does it? I've played a lot of D&D, and a lot of Rolemaster which is close to D&D in the way it presents its characters. And I've never thought of adventurer as a career. It's an idea that I've heard of, because I gather it's a thing in the Forgotten Realms.
D&D General Hot Take: Uncertainty Makes D&D Better
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
I'm thinking of Gygax's AD&D. There are charts in the DMG combat section - base morale is a function of HD, and their are mods to the roll based on circumstances. There are results for morale failure based on degree of failure, but I can't recall if they give the GM discretion or not.
Edgar Ironpelt
Explorer
I'm for a happy medium on this point. Some uncertainty is good, and both too much and too little can be bad.
There's temptation in both directions. "If some uncertainty is good, then lots and lots of uncertainty must be better!" and "If limiting uncertainty is good then eliminating uncertainty must be better!"
Now finding the right amount of uncertainty is an art, and different groups will like to see different levels. The PCs need to be able to deal with the uncertainty on offer; they need to be flexible and to have reserves (and be allowed to be flexible and have reserves). If the PCs are too brittle, or if they operate too close to the edge, they'll frequently and routinely get wiped out, and this is a Problem. (Unless you're playing a game where the PCs are expected to routinely get wiped out. It's a possible play style but not my cuppa. Not at all. Not at all.)
There's temptation in both directions. "If some uncertainty is good, then lots and lots of uncertainty must be better!" and "If limiting uncertainty is good then eliminating uncertainty must be better!"
Now finding the right amount of uncertainty is an art, and different groups will like to see different levels. The PCs need to be able to deal with the uncertainty on offer; they need to be flexible and to have reserves (and be allowed to be flexible and have reserves). If the PCs are too brittle, or if they operate too close to the edge, they'll frequently and routinely get wiped out, and this is a Problem. (Unless you're playing a game where the PCs are expected to routinely get wiped out. It's a possible play style but not my cuppa. Not at all. Not at all.)
Edgar Ironpelt
Explorer
<Raises hand> This old USENET post isn't by me, but I unreservedly endorse it.
RPGs and video games differ from most ordinary board games in that
there doesn't have to be a loser. I think it's reasonable that they
attract mindsets which aren't very interested in losing; and a lot
of RPG groups successfully cater to this.
If I enter into playing, say, chess with the expectation I will never
lose, I'm being an idiot and I'm bound to be disappointed. Not even
the World Champion gets that. But if I enter into _Heroes of Might
and Magic IV_ (which is what I'm currently playing) with the
expectation that I won't lose, I'm not hurting anyone, and it's not
unreasonable that I may get what I want. (Especially if I turn the
difficulty down--and I may yet do that, because the losses are really
more annoying than challenging.)
Whether the player still wants it when she gets it is another question,
but for at least some players in some situations the answer is "yes."
I don't think I would still be playing Heroes if I lost even 1/3
of the time. In a board game, I know I have to give my opponent
a fair shot, but here there's no such obligation; the only thing
against winning all the time is that it may detract from the challenge,
and for me, right now, I'd rather win than have a really strong
challenge.
If this is a personality flaw it's an awfully common one; I think
it's better just regarded as a preference.
A common problem with such games is that they are entertaining for
the players but not for the GM. I get tired of having my NPCs
wiped out time and again; I spoiled a campaign recently by engineering
a TPK in the attempt to make things "a bit more challenging." Clearly
I overshot, but by game contract I shouldn't even have been trying.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
I don't know about "better" or "worse," "good" or "bad," but I can say this much: I have more fun when the game is more random. (And I say this as the DM.)
I want random encounters, random treasure tables, random weather, roll your stats, roll your hit points, roll your damage, all of it. The dice are there for a reason and I want to use them.
I want random encounters, random treasure tables, random weather, roll your stats, roll your hit points, roll your damage, all of it. The dice are there for a reason and I want to use them.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
Extreme results occur in D&D all the time, it's just that the rules of D&D only interpret 5% of them as extreme outcomes, and only in the context of an attack roll. You keep conflating results and outcomes, and it doesn't strengthen your case. As you yourself have pointed out, unlike in PbtA, most D&D outcomes are known, and assigned to an uncertain result.
A roll of 1 or 20 on a 1d20 is extreme. A roll of 1 or 4 on a 1d4 is extreme. The result of a coin flip is always extreme. That's what extreme means -- "at the ends." The fact that D&D doesn't allow for the interpretation of extreme results as outcomes in its rules is a case against uncertainty being beneficial to D&D, not for it. A system that makes good use of uncertainty is designed to do so.
You seem to understand this when you talk about PbtA, where the 2d6 curve and trinary core mechanic do make slightly better use of uncertainty, but then you say things like, "Failing to land a solid attack against a foe defending themselves is not an extreme result," and "D&D is sooo slooooow by comparison."
Do you understand why D&D5 is slow? It's because the to-hit math hasn't functionally changed since 1989 while hit point totals have substantially increased. The game was designed for trained combatants to miss (or be parried) all the time, because taking hit point damage at all was the 'extreme outcome.' The very fact that a D&D5 crit "isn't that extreme" is evidence that D&D5 does not make good use of uncertainty.
As a bunch of folks in the thread have tried to point out, uncertainty doesn't make vanilla D&D better by the numbers. There's a case to be made that risk is fun in any context, or that the rules of D&D could or should be adapted to make better use of uncertainty in defining outcomes, but no one seems content to make these cases.
Yeah, took a page right out of your book, didn't they?
Remathilis
Legend
Ironically, it's this style of play that could benefit greatly from AI. Randomly procedurally created dungeons, randomly generated content, monsters that run on simple logic systems and scripts, a DM who can assess nontraditional actions and can track things a human DM might find difficult. The more randomness you include, the greater the advantage automation and AI have.
Uncertainty suggests a cognitive state. What's the object of cognition?
We can talk about uncertainty in the results of dice rolls, and D&D offers this - people get excited by their natural 1s and critical 20s.
The analogue of these in Burning Wheel and Torchbearer is 6s that can be open-ended with a Fate point.
There is also just the uncertainty of waiting to see what the result of the roll is: all dice-based RPGs have this, though in dice pool games there is the extra element that more dice have to be read and grouped together. I think BW/TB/Prince Valiant is my favourite here, because you roll the dice, then you have to work out what you're rolled, but you basically know whether or not your won! - unless you have to make a call on open-ending 6s, but that's another go at the gamble.
MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has the "what did I roll" factor, but then you have to make optimisation decisions around total vs effect die, which are interesting but defuse the excitement a bit between the uncertainty of the roll and a sense of the outcome.
But the other aspect of uncertainty in a RPG is uncertainty about what will happen next in the fiction. Some of the least certain play I've had has been in zero-prep one-shots of Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights, and to just a slightly less extent In A Wicked Age. In a Wuthering Height one-shot, for instance, we started with a mute, republican-but-anti-Communist cleric inspecting the "heretical" works on sale at a socialist bookshop with an occult section upstairs, where the other PC worked; and ended up with the cleric dead and his ghost possessing the other PC, who was broken-hearted from repeated romantic rejection, so that the bookshop was burned down with the PC in it. On the way through we had political meetings, manslaughter and a body thrown into the Thames, arrest, imprisonment, a prison riot and escape that turned into a minor political uprising, and a friendly defecting police officer.
Our Torchbearer sessions are a bit less wild than that, in part because there are elements of prep that help anchor the fiction, but they are still pretty uncertain. Over the course of three sessions the NPC Megloss has moved from enemy to a de facto member of the party and hence ally to at least two of the PCs; his housekeeper Krystal has been turned into a gebbeth by a spiteful shadow that escaped from the heart of the Dreamwalker PC when she tried to cast a spell (the player failed the Arcansist check); the PCs have freed but (perhaps temporarily) driven off a demon of the Outer Dark, but only by placating it with an offer of Megloss as a sacrifice.
In my experience there is nothing particularly distinctive about D&D compared to these other RPGs that means it produces more interesting uncertainty, either in respect of dice rolls or fiction. That's not a criticism of D&D - it's not under any duty to stand out! But I'm not persuaded that a special focus on D&D will yield particular insight into how uncertainty contributes to RPGing.
We can talk about uncertainty in the results of dice rolls, and D&D offers this - people get excited by their natural 1s and critical 20s.
The analogue of these in Burning Wheel and Torchbearer is 6s that can be open-ended with a Fate point.
There is also just the uncertainty of waiting to see what the result of the roll is: all dice-based RPGs have this, though in dice pool games there is the extra element that more dice have to be read and grouped together. I think BW/TB/Prince Valiant is my favourite here, because you roll the dice, then you have to work out what you're rolled, but you basically know whether or not your won! - unless you have to make a call on open-ending 6s, but that's another go at the gamble.
MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has the "what did I roll" factor, but then you have to make optimisation decisions around total vs effect die, which are interesting but defuse the excitement a bit between the uncertainty of the roll and a sense of the outcome.
But the other aspect of uncertainty in a RPG is uncertainty about what will happen next in the fiction. Some of the least certain play I've had has been in zero-prep one-shots of Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights, and to just a slightly less extent In A Wicked Age. In a Wuthering Height one-shot, for instance, we started with a mute, republican-but-anti-Communist cleric inspecting the "heretical" works on sale at a socialist bookshop with an occult section upstairs, where the other PC worked; and ended up with the cleric dead and his ghost possessing the other PC, who was broken-hearted from repeated romantic rejection, so that the bookshop was burned down with the PC in it. On the way through we had political meetings, manslaughter and a body thrown into the Thames, arrest, imprisonment, a prison riot and escape that turned into a minor political uprising, and a friendly defecting police officer.
Our Torchbearer sessions are a bit less wild than that, in part because there are elements of prep that help anchor the fiction, but they are still pretty uncertain. Over the course of three sessions the NPC Megloss has moved from enemy to a de facto member of the party and hence ally to at least two of the PCs; his housekeeper Krystal has been turned into a gebbeth by a spiteful shadow that escaped from the heart of the Dreamwalker PC when she tried to cast a spell (the player failed the Arcansist check); the PCs have freed but (perhaps temporarily) driven off a demon of the Outer Dark, but only by placating it with an offer of Megloss as a sacrifice.
In my experience there is nothing particularly distinctive about D&D compared to these other RPGs that means it produces more interesting uncertainty, either in respect of dice rolls or fiction. That's not a criticism of D&D - it's not under any duty to stand out! But I'm not persuaded that a special focus on D&D will yield particular insight into how uncertainty contributes to RPGing.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
Well, until AI catches up with me, I have some pretty robust spreadsheets that I use when writing/running adventures. I got pretty familiar with pivot tables, pulldown menus, VLOOKUP, and Boolean expressions in engineering school, and I have built some really spiffy generators in Excel. Some of them have been set up to display Roll20 macros which I can then copy/paste into the chat window (usually for dice rolls and descriptions.)
With the click of a button I can generate an entire shop inventory, roll up a random encounter, fill out a treasure hoard, describe a potion, or create an NPC out of thin air. Sure, there are lots of online generators that I could use as well, but they never quite fit my campaign or the PCs...they are usually SRD Only, or Everything From Everywhere, and I usually end up doing multiple iterations until I find something I can use. (Not to mention having to juggle dozens of bookmarks to different websites.) Building my own generator does take some time up-front (about an hour), but saves me a lot more time in the long run because all of my generators are in once place, and all of the options and math have all been tailored to fit my own game.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Oh man do I love random generators. Especially Excel generators. Press a button and it spits out 100 random NPCs. Press a button and it spits out 100 random hexes. Pure unadulterated yum.
Neonchameleon
Legend
Yes it has. An average first level PC in any class in 5e has a primary stat of 16 and a proficiency bonus of +2 - for +5 to hit. Meanwhile a CR 17 Adult Red Dragon has an AC of 19. Our first level PC of any class needs a mere 14 to hit a CR17 dragon. Against something level appropriate like an orc the orc is AC 13 or 8s to hit.
By contrast an average first level PC with a Str of 16 gets no to hit modifier and has a THAC0 of, I think, 20 for a +0 bonus to hit. In 2e the Ancient Red Dragon has an AC of -5 which, pivoting to modern AC values is the equivalent of an AC of 25. Natural 20s or bust. Against a level-appropriate orc, the orc is AC 6 meaning 14 to hit for our first level PC (or 13 for a fighter with weapon specialisation).
The 2e characters basically can't hit that dragon and are almost half as likely to hit the orc as the 5e characters. On the other hand it probably takes two hits to bring down the orc in 5e and only one in 2e.
The to hit math has significantly changed; hitting is now expected meaning that hits are a whole lot less triumphant. And armour is a whole lot less important. You're right that the game was designed for trained combatants to miss or be parried all the time. It's now designed for them to hit almost all the time; the change basically came in with 3.0 when the impact of stat modifiers changed drastically while armour and especially heavy armour remained almost unchanged and then again in 2014 when they decided to take all the level scaling out of AC in the name of "bounded accuracy" (in 3.5 the adult red dragon had an AC of 29 while in 5e the adult red dragon has a lower AC than a run of the mill CR 1/2 Hobgoblin)
I've been leading this charge
Baron Opal II
Hero
Really? Interesting. Adventuring as a career (with class just describing your skill set) was something that seemed apparent to me for decades.
However, as time has gone on I've come to decide that adventuring isn't a career but an estate. One that can be chosen more easily than the Clergy*, but also with a significantly higher mortality rate. Having them be the Fourth Estate** makes of further interest in social dynamics, I think. Tangential to the thread, anyway.
* In this case "Those Who Cast" and inclusive of wizards.
** Or Fifth, if one wants to keep to tradition.
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
Snipped for brevity, not to dismiss.
I think you're still making a lot of assumptions of equivalence with regard to the rules (monster choice and ability scores), but I acknowledge that the math does seem to check out, at least until I can take a more detailed look myself.
...Then I find your posts even more confusing than I thought!I've been leading this charge
DMZ2112
Chaotic Looseleaf
You are the kind of dungeon master I want and the kind of dungeon master I never want to be.
Seriously, you would enable all of my obsessions and feed all of my compulsions, it would be like anti-therapy
and also wonderful
Neonchameleon
Legend
That's because you've missed one of mine that got buried. So I'll rewrite....Then I find your posts even more confusing than I thought!
Predictability leads to more ability to plan and planning and testing your planning is fun. But 5e does not lean in to the positive aspects of planning either in the oD&D sense, the 3.X sense, or the 4e sense.
- oD&D involved operational planning. Resources, light management, time management and testing your luck against the wandering monster checks. Not in 5e at all that I can tell (and light is a cantrip, long rests are full recharges, and there's a lot of spells that make these issues trivial).
- 3.X involved strategic planning. Buying/making items (no longer a magic item market), layering buffs, and trying to win before the fight started. 5e has deliberately taken away the magic item market and included Concentration to minimise layered buffs.
- 4e involved tactical planning, combining powers with each other, using the terrain, and using forced movement to take advantage of the terrain. 5e has minimal forced movement, Advantage rolls up almost all the small modifiers, and Dex giving everyone full finesse melee modifiers and Str full thrown weapon modifiers means there's little point diving the back line or even immobilising the front line.
Remathilis
Legend
I give it 5 years before a chatbot style DM could spit that info out pretty effortlessly. What will be interesting is when AI can correlate that info simultaneously. You'll pop in the chat box "what is the weather?" And it will generate a weather cycle based on the exact location of the world, the date and time of year, historical weather patterns, variations based on other events (a local volcano erupting) and climate models pulled from real world metrology. Then, it keeps that knowledge in it's database and references it the next time the question is asked.
Imagine a world that not only generates a shop's worth of items, but can account for the effects of local bandit the PCs stopped, a visit by the Duke two weeks ago, a bad harvest of wheat, and other micro events that would be difficult if not impossible for a live DM to track. And then catalogues those events for the next time.
That will be the moment when AI will surpass meat DMs.When it can track variables no human could (or would) want to track. And in a large, collaborative application (like say, the Forgotten Realms) you could have it spit out results that rival reality.
And that will be child's play compared to 15 years from now...
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
I for one welcome our robot DM overlords.
I would absolutely use an AI co-GM that can keep all the fiddly details straight.
DND_Reborn
The High Aldwin
Yeah, generators have been part of my games since the very early 90's. First in QBasic, then Visual Basic, and now Excel. Most of them are still for AD&D, but they work well enough for 5E, too.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
This farce problem is a problem with how you envision things. I mean, if you imagine everyone swinging and whiffing, they sure it will seem farcical to you. In my game, though, a miss doesn't always mean you hit air. Your "miss" could strike a shield that blocks what would have been a killing blow. Your "miss" could be parried by a skillful opponent. Your "miss" could strike the dragon solidly, but fail to penetrate a thick scale. A round in which everyone misses doesn't need to be the farce you are making it out to be.
As for dump stat characters rolling high, well sometimes they get lucky. A dump stat individual isn't clueless or totally unable to accomplish things, and someone with a high stat isn't perfect. That's not farcical at all.
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