Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9418026" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I like to think of this in terms of evolution. I like to think about most things in terms of evolution, TBH; my masters thesis was on evolutionary pressures and language. But I also note that WotC has repeatedly used evolutionary language to describe their design principles behind the One D&D/2024 project. In fact, it's been their main analogy since it launched. So, let's look at the implications, because Snarff's arguments imply some looming problems for WotC's plan.In a simple way, we can see player characters as D&D's alpha predators, and all the mobs as basically prey. They essentially exist to get eaten and turned into delicious experience points (milepost levelling makes this process less granular, but it still more or less persists). Power creep means that PCs are continually becoming better predators. But, as Snarff notes, the prey is more or less static. This is unsustainable!Natural systems more or less evolve towards equilibrium until some disaster or another occurs. But D&D is not a natural system. There isn't the same evolutionary pressure on the prey as there is on the predators (specifically, the pressure to please players).DMs can account for this by just adding more mobs. But that starts to get unwieldy, and also changes the game experience in ways that we might not like. Having to fight three red dragons to get the same challenge as fighting one just ain't the same. So, yeah, eventually you have to reset the game.I think this has a lot of implications that I hadn't put enough thought into for D&D2024. Because the player characters: their power level is definitely a-creeping in a pretty significant way. I'm not going to really argue about this; I've been play testing it for awhile and so have a lot of other folks, and that is the universal conclusion. But I'll give you one example: nu monk. I've been struck by how much more powerful it is than the 2014 iteration. In this case, the power hasn't so much crept as sprinted past Usain Bolt. So I've been simulating a lot of different encounters to see just how much stronger it is, and here's one result that stands out, given my dragon reference above: a 2024 Level 20 Mercy monk can solo a CR24 ancient red dragon and finish at full health almost 100% of the time.That's more than a little power creep.I agree with Umbran that power creep hasn't been the main cause of previous edition changes. I think the main cause of previous edition changes was financial and legal crises at TSR, and then a desire by WotC to basically figure out how to better mainstream the game.But that changes with a so-called evergreen edition, which is what 5e is supposed to be. Because the power will keep on creeping, and it'll likely creep a lot faster for players than for mobs. If Snarff's argument is correct, then WotC's stated design goal of sticking with 5e forever and allowing it to gradually evolve is probably doomed, unless they keep evolving the mobs at the same pace as the player characters. But that runs up against their backwards compatibility design goal. It seems like a pickle!I've previously been quite a cheerleader for WotC's new evolutionary paradigm. As I said, I'm a sucker for evolution. But I have to confess that reading the OP made me reconsider it from a monster's perspective. If WotC wants it to work, they HAVE to keep evolving the monsters at the same pace as the player characters in order to keep that treadmill, that equilibrium, functioning. We haven't yet seen the details of the new MM, but from their public statements, I am not confident that WotC has evolved the mobs at the same pace as the characters.</blockquote>

Verification