D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[cmad1977]

The problem here is that if I have to make an Athletics check at disadvantage, then I'll probably learn that it's not worth doing and not try again. In fact if I have to make a skill check in order to make a second roll such as an attack roll, the same problem remains.

This is part of the issue. Stunts need to be a better option than what is capable of being done otherwise. There is an opportunity cost. (This tends to become more significant when characters get their second attacks as then the opportunity cost of being unsuccessful increases.) 4e, which did have a stunt system, had this issue. You had to make an additional roll to do a stunt, which was the equivalent to having disadvantage.

And this means stunts tend to suffer from being at a tactical disadvantage. It is almost always better to make two attacks for regular damage than one attack for double damage. You are also usually better off, tactically, sticking with predictable outcomes, something you negotiate with the GM is by definition unpredictable.

Leaving it up to the GM demands the GM have a rock solid grasp of the percentages and odds for resolution.

It's not just will the GM let me do it, it's will the GM make it worth doing? (In the first case the answer is usually yes. In the second it's almost always, in my experience, no).

This is why the Dungeon Crawls Classics system works well. There is never an opportunity cost for attempting something beyond just attacking.

Maybe people just don't worry about the tactical tradeoffs. Maybe they just play 5e as some kind of collaborative storytelling (although it boggles my mind that you would use this system to do that.)

You’ve had bad DMs.

I don’t know what to say. My players do things that are off their sheets all the time. Sometimes at disadvantage or advantage(and man, disadvantage isn’t all that bad and is often mitigated by a variety of things).
If you don’t take actions your character might take because they might be hard… you’re not playing an RPG you’re playing a board game.

 

[loverdrive]

Well yeah…
I guess I’m just good about people doing things that aren’t on their sheets.
A lot times when I see someone poring over their sheet for something to do I ask
“What are you looking to accomplish?”
To which a poster above might say
“We’ll I want to use the table to force the 3 guards out the door… but it’s not on my sheet.”
To which I reply
“That’s ok. Maybe you pick up the table and… give me an athletics check(maybe at disadvantage vs a decent DC. Maybe make it contested if it’s a combat thing)
Done.

Well, doing something that isn't on your sheet in 5E is very uncertain. On the other hand, if my character is doing something that isn't covered by a move available to her in AW, I know what will happen next -- the GM will make a move within their restrictions, which means:

• The move can't be hard
• The GM is always a fan of my character
• Their move must organically flow from fiction

 

[pemerton]

Maybe people just don't worry about the tactical tradeoffs. Maybe they just play 5e as some kind of collaborative storytelling (although it boggles my mind that you would use this system to do that.)

I think there is a long tradition in D&D play of treating the numbers on a PC sheet - especially the skill numbers (cf defence numbers like AC, hp and saves) - as (in functional terms) descriptors that support largely freeform roleplaying.

 

[Don Durito]

You’ve had bad DMs.

No I haven't. This is a useless canard that adds nothing to the discussion.

I don’t know what to say. My players do things that are off their sheets all the time. Sometimes at disadvantage or advantage(and man, disadvantage isn’t all that bad and is often mitigated by a variety of things).

It sounds like your players aren't fully aware of the tactical trade-offs. They may be having fun, but it's still a flaw in the game. There's a tactical element to the game. Whether disadvantage is "that bad" is not the point. Obviously. It's whether you are actually better of not doing a stunt in the first place from a rational consideration.

I don't think it's unreasonable, in the tactical game, to both want a stunt to be fun descriptively and to be worth doing in the game.

If you don’t take actions your character might take because they might be hard… you’re not playing an RPG you’re playing a board game.

See my last sentence above. I just knew someone would respond to my post with some nonsense of this kind.

My point is simple, in order to be actually worth doing as a tactical game element (note the RPGame! - and if you don't want to engage with the game element of D&D, I don't understand the point of playing a rpg with so much game in it), the tradeoff for a stunt needs to be good. It needs to be unintuitively good (to the extent that a good GM - not an indifferent one, a good one I tell you - is most likely, in an off the cuff ruling, not going to make it good enough). It wasn't until I sat down and thought through the opportunity costs, that I fully realised why stunts were falling flat. So if you want to make stunts hard, then make them hard, but then the rewards have to be correspondingly even better.

 

[Don Durito]

So let's dive a little deeper and look at what the opportunity costs are for a Champion.

A level 5 champion has two attacks, with a Crit on a 19 or 20, which gives you a19% chance of critting on at least one of those attacks. (Obviously more if you managed to get advantage). If you have Great Weapon Fighter that Crit may well get you an extra attack (and the same if you knock someone down to 0).

The Crit effects matter here because, while it's still less likely than not to happen, it's something you get for free on top of just attacking. Even without the Crit the Champion has decent single target damage, quite possibly the best and most reliable single target damge in the group. There's a very good chance that the Champion attacking takes an enemy out of the fight (if not by their own damage, then by bringing them down low enough that another PC can take them down before they get another chance to act - and if that damage comes from an AOE or something like Spirit Guardians - it might not even cost that other PC anything.).

So the opportunity cost for the Champion is actually quite high. You then combine that with the fact that the kind of effects that the Champion can gain from a stunt: eg, multi-target damage or control, are the sort of thing that other characters can do, characters that may not be able to put out the same kind of reliable damage the Champion can. So a Champion who gives up making his attacks with their single target damage and enhanced crit chance does so at an opportunity cost for the whole group, as it may well be the group can replicate what he would do with a stunt, but not what he would do with his normal attacks. Of course, if you have a whole party of Fighters and Rogues the opportnity cost for stunts is a lot less, as they let you potentially pull off effects that are not replicable.

So there's a lot there to trade-off. A good round from the Fighter, especially with a Crit, could potentially swing the whole combat. In addition, the chance that the Fighter, with his two attacks and high accuracy in 5e will fail to do anything at all is quite low.

You saw similar issues with the 4e stunt damage rules. You had improvised damage ratings for equivalent to at-will powers, Encounter Powers and Daily powers. Once you had all three Encounter Powers then you were usually giving up a potential encounter power to pull of a stunt, but with effectively disadvantage (because you had to pass a skill roll first) so really you should almost usually use the damage equivalent to Daily powers for stunts. This was not intuitive, however. The tendency is to low ball.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

We're also in an interesting position where the overall audience has contradictory intersectional identities, being weaponized in the narrative space lf the discussion. We've seen DND discussed as a representation of corporate power and as an oppressive force in this thread, painting indies as the scrappy, queer, diverse freedom fighters

But some gamers see their preference for DND (and the OSR too, but seperately) in populist terms-- seeing the movement to push them to have to play other games and specifically other kinds of games as a colonizing force, because the indie scene is seen in much the same way as academia/art circles are, as being a class unto themselves who talk down to populist interests and treat their values with derision.

So you end up with this struggle between the cultural values of what passes for our intelligentsia and the cultural values of the general gaming public clash and come into conflict, not even over social issues, but over game design principles and aesthetic values.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think the presence of organized play and other elements go a bit beyond that. They make it actively unattractive to fish in other ponds.

How so? Why would organized play discourage getting together with your friends to play Kids on Bikes? IME they encourage going to the shop to play TTRPGs, which ends up meaning the local shop has groups playing various games on a weekly basis.

Maybe people just don't worry about the tactical tradeoffs. Maybe they just play 5e as some kind of collaborative storytelling (although it boggles my mind that you would use this system to do that.)

5e is a collaborative storytelling game, for IME the vast majority of players. Not a tactical game.

So the opportunity cost for the Champion is actually quite high.

Why would a check to swing from a chandelier or slide down a rail or pick up the enemy to throw them into another enemy cost an action!?

The last example would require trading an attack in order to grapple, but none of them should be costing an action.

Also requiring the skill check to succeed in order to make the attack roll is bad adjudication. The only times that should occur are;

• if the stunt is being done in order to be able to get to a position where attack is possible, such as using acrobatics to parkour up to the ledge where an enemy archer is sniping from in order to stab them, or to tumble past the heavy in order to get to the back line.
• if the stunt, if successful, does something very very powerful, like taking out a support pillar, causing that high ledge to break and drop the archer down 20+ feet to your level, or accomplishes taking out an enemy that normally would take several attacks to take out. The pillar I still might treat as one attack.

We're also in an interesting position where the overall audience has contradictory intersectional identities, being weaponized in the narrative space lf the discussion. We've seen DND discussed as a representation of corporate power and as an oppressive force in this thread, painting indies as the scrappy, queer, diverse freedom fighters

But some gamers see their preference for DND (and the OSR too, but seperately) in populist terms-- seeing the movement to push them to have to play other games and specifically other kinds of games as a colonizing force, because the indie scene is seen in much the same way as academia/art circles are, as being a class unto themselves who talk down to populist interests and treat their values with derision.

So you end up with this struggle between the cultural values of what passes for our intelligentsia and the cultural values of the general gaming public clash and come into conflict, not even over social issues, but over game design principles and aesthetic values.

It doesn’t help that both groups you describe are right. D&D is a corporate power tool. The indie scene does talk down to people who prefer D&D in a very elitist way that mirrors how a lot of intellectuals talk to and about blue collar folks.

I mean, hey, clearly my preference to modify D&D 5e (a game the designers of which encourage modification) rather than only do certain types of gameplay when playing games built to only do that thing, is simply a result of me not knowing any better.

 

[billd91]

I think the presence of organized play and other elements go a bit beyond that. They make it actively unattractive to fish in other ponds.

Only in the sense that organized play offers you additional benefits of playing that game over others that don't do so. That doesn't make it unattractive to fish in other ponds, just more attractive to fish in the same pond.

 

[Umbran]

“It’s the same everywhere” is a fallacy. People behave differently in different places and contexts.

I think I'm not being clear. I am not saying that it is the same everywhere, at all times. That would be nonsense.

I am saying it is not particular to FANS. Fans, as people, are not significantly different from any random sampling of humans put into a similar place/context. It is an issue of the form of social context, not of the topic of that context.

 

[Umbran]

No tension at all, actually.

Deep investment in a thing doesn't excuse, and isn't even relevant to, the kind of toxic pile-on whining happening on twitter wrt the survey.

Indeed. Deep investment demonstrably tends to lead humans to behavior based on their emotional state, in which we tend to reject information that conflicts with our current feelings about the situation.