D&D General "It's not fun when..."

[Oofta]

Speaking of failing can be fun, for the most part I agree. It's kind of like how I like my food seasoning, I want subtlety and nuance. If something is all just one overwhelming flavor then for me it's frequently less enjoyable.

However it can be taken too far. Back in 3.x days they had spells Holy Word and Blasphemy. For those that are unaware, the spells took effect on every creature within a 40 foot radius of the opposite alignment, evil for Holy Word and good for Blasphemy. I was playing in a Living Greyhawk region County of Urnst when a high level monster cast Blasphemy. The creature was high enough level that because of the level cap it automatically paralyzed, weakened and dazed every good aligned PC in the party. For 1d10 minutes.

This was also the region that had a super powerful dragon that also kidnapped and impregnated female PCs without the permission of the player or a chance to avoid it other than to hope it never found you. We had to do a quick stone shape spell to hide in the side of a cliff when it flew overhead so that my wife's PC wouldn't just be automatically taken.

So taking PCs out of play (our PCs would have died except the other PCs burned special favors to save us) when they have no chance at all? No fun. Doing things to players that cross the line into abusive? Even worse in my book.

I was told later that no one in the region played a PC with a good alignment and even the women rarely played female characters because of things like this.

 

[Reynard]

This was also the region that had a super powerful dragon that also kidnapped and impregnated female PCs without the permission of the player or a chance to avoid it other than to hope it never found you. We had to do a quick stone shape spell to hide in the side of a cliff when it flew overhead so that my wife's PC wouldn't just be automatically taken.

Wait, what? The game had a rape dragon?

 

[Umbran]

But it would be even less fun to not die. Indeed, one of the most fun parts of the game is when I had to take like six tries to beat the 9th sister, and a lot of the time when I'm playing I'm thinking "I'm not playing well enough to be beating the game this easily."

But, the play loop on videogames is a different beast. The point is to work that one encounter over and over until you figure it out or your button mashing skills improve until you succeed. Those repeated losses are eventually rewarded with success, and you get to see the direct connection between the prior effort and the success. The repeated loss loop is clearly and directly connected with the eventual success. And, with typical respawning, the only thing the player has lost is time.

The failure mode in a videogame is not typically loss at an encounter - it is the ragequit.

But you don't typically get a bazillion tries at an encounter in D&D. You get one shot. The efforts and frustrations of losses are not directly tied to an eventual success, in an emotional sense.

 

[tetrasodium]

Perception is reality. in one version the character has been knee capped, In the other the creature just had a freakish amount of hitpoints. players shouldnt know everything or be warned about everything. that makes for booooring games

While this is not entirely untrue or without merit it does have consequences of mindnumbing battles where players dump their nova into a black hole & dig in for a rest to repeat it again soon because they just watched monsters shrug off a couple rounds of nova.

In the context of d&d though it's especially irksome because there was once a solution in place that made players say "hey guys we should probably switch gears like so, this is the bbeg(or whatever)" . Conveniently that solution both discouraged save or die/save or lose as well as counterbalanced having N characters in the combat who play the odds by making 2/3/4 attacks for x per attack against those who make 1-2 for 1.5x-2x in a way the GM could tune as needed. Casters switched to force multiplier & risk mitigation spells or slow & steady but critical damage giving everyone a chance to shine together as a team over the entire fight. Now all of those fun & unfun things on the caster side are treated the same while both types of martial styles are treated the same in a way that dramatically favors one style in every way.

 

[Oofta]

Wait, what? The game had a rape dragon?

Yes. We played one con there and never went back.

As I said - there are lines the game should never cross, at least not without explicit permission of everyone at the table. Whoever made the decisions about this region (each region was independently run) saw those lines and blew right past them. Game went from not fun (blasphemy) to jaw dropping bad.

 

[Reynard]

The party fighting a heroic, effective, but losing, battle until the wizard drops a fireball on them is awesome.

Dropping that fireball and killing them all in the first round... is an issue of encounter design. When the party wizard has Fireball, how did you make an encounter that could be defeated by a single use of the spell? They're all low hit points and bunched up to start? What was the GM thinking?

Or, to put it in this thread's idiom - It is not fun when the encounters are not well-designed for the party.

True enough, but sometimes the GM screws up the encounter design or fails to foresee a particularly clever tactic or just forgets how a particular spell or class ability works. In those cases, something like legendary resistance serves a useful purpose and means the GM doesn't have to resort to total fiat to block a PC action that can just end an encounter.

Note that i am only talking about BBEG, set piece, boss fight situations.

 

[Charlaquin]

I’m gonna go ahead and say: sometimes things that are not fun in the short-term can make a game overall more enjoyable in the long-term. Is it fun to die in Dark Souls (or it’s ilk)? Not really, in the moment that it happens. Would the game be more fun if you couldn’t ever die? Absolutely not!

 

[Vaalingrade]

When you die in Dark Souls, you don't get booted back to character creation and loose literal hours of progress.

If D&D had a resurrection campfire for free, then the 'it's fun having loads of death in Dark Souls' would be analogous to death in D&D.

 

[Reynard]

When you die in Dark Souls, you don't get booted back to character creation and loose literal hours of progress.

If D&D had a resurrection campfire for free, then the 'it's fun having loads of death in Dark Souls' would be analogous to death in D&D.

One thing D&D could use is fast and simple character generation. Not that that would solve everyone's issues with death as a fail state, but for some portion of the player base the biggest concern is in fact the time and effort needed to make a new character. There's a benefit to "rolls stats, choose a class and take the standard kit" being the entirety of chargen.

 

[iserith]

One thing D&D could use is fast and simple character generation. Not that that would solve everyone's issues with death as a fail state, but for some portion of the player base the biggest concern is in fact the time and effort needed to make a new character. There's a benefit to "rolls stats, choose a class and take the standard kit" being the entirety of chargen.

Backup characters are required in my games. And I'll still often have pregens on top of that sitting around, just in case.

 

[overgeeked]

One thing D&D could use is fast and simple character generation. Not that that would solve everyone's issues with death as a fail state, but for some portion of the player base the biggest concern is in fact the time and effort needed to make a new character. There's a benefit to "rolls stats, choose a class and take the standard kit" being the entirety of chargen.

Absolutely. The alternative is to build multiple characters at the start and grab the next when one dies.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Either you're supposed to care about your character and flushing them down the toilet on the regular is bad, or you're not and it not. D&D should take a stance.

 

[Xamnam]

One thing D&D could use is fast and simple character generation. Not that that would solve everyone's issues with death as a fail state, but for some portion of the player base the biggest concern is in fact the time and effort needed to make a new character. There's a benefit to "rolls stats, choose a class and take the standard kit" being the entirety of chargen.

I'm very happy with my games at the moment, but I am curious to run one where people come in with explicit backup characters already built and see what changes that would engender.

 

[Umbran]

True enough, but sometimes the GM screws up the encounter design or fails to foresee a particularly clever tactic or just forgets how a particular spell or class ability works.

Yeah, but then shouldn't it be... "It isn't fun when the GM screws everything up?"

 

[iserith]

I'm very happy with my games at the moment, but I am curious to run one where people come in with explicit backup characters already built and see what changes that would engender.

My experience is that it doesn't change a whole lot, but it does keep the game moving forward when a character dies, which is my goal. I also like to make sure the backup characters are referenced from time to time during play so that when they're introduced it's an easy transition.

 

[Deset Gled]

When you die in Dark Souls, you don't get booted back to character creation and loose literal hours of progress.

OTOH, this is considered a key feature of Steel Battalion. YMMV.

 

[Reynard]

Either you're supposed to care about your character and flushing them down the toilet on the regular is bad, or you're not and it not. D&D should take a stance.

I don't think that is a game system level decision, it is an individual campaign level decision.

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, but then shouldn't it be... "It isn't fun when the GM screws everything up?"

Sure, and one mechanical solution to that unfun element is LR.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's not fun when the distribution of power over the gameplay space is sharply skewed. AKA: "Casters rule, martials drool." To be a full spellcaster is to have enormous power over the game-space, power that can only really be curbed "by the rules," because that power is simultaneously well-defined and highly open-ended, on top of whatever the spellcaster can persuade the DM to let them do. This inherently and deeply unequal distribution of ability to affect the game causes a lot of issues for a segment of the playerbase...which is why the "LFQW" debate continues to rage on today. This could be addressed with a variety of different solutions, or a group of such solutions: lowering or diluting* the power of magic so it doesn't provide that much more control over the gameplay space, giving non-casters more codified power over the gameplay space, making all characters spellcasters and thus eliminating the distinction (often criticized, despite the fact that no edition has ever actually done it), separating utility magic from other forms of magic and making that separate system require more significant investment, or removing spellcasting classes so only non-casting options are available (again, oft criticized but never actually done before.)

Ironically, it is often not fun when the game is designed to pursue fun über alles. This can easily lead to a shallow experience, or a slow degradation of that fun over time. It's related to the problem of happiness: trying to be happy usually fails, often miserably, while dedicating your time and resources to something outside of or beyond yourself, despite not being directly happiness-creating, is often quite successful at producing happiness. (This is not some random theory thing, either; actual psych research has shown that people who put the most emphasis on being happy are consistently the least happy people, and even that simply being informed about the benefits of happiness can cause people to experience less joy!) Hence, it is unwise and likely even counterproductive to make fun über alles the goal of one's game design. One should instead identify the overall kinds of experience one wishes to evoke in players (e.g. wonder, excitement, dread, tactical acumen, etc.), and then set design goals which will (hopefully!) serve that end effectively and efficiently. One is likely to then find that fun almost accidentally falls out of the game in question. (This does not mean one should never ever consider fun as part of the design process. Just that focusing on fun over all other considerations can in fact actually be harmful to the experience of playing a game.)

It's not fun when a game describes itself as something it isn't, only for players to discover this after they've started playing. This is a major criticism I have of 3rd edition. It bills itself as a cooperative teamwork fantasy roleplaying game: a merry band of peers, supporting one another as they adventure through the dangerous, magical wilds of the world. Instead, mechanically, it is almost totally focused on individual contributions and the evaluation of events within a single turn. Action economy is king (as it is in almost any game--TTRPG or CRPG or whatever--that has such a thing), and the specific action economy of 3e dictates that teamwork-synergy is almost always inferior to simply doing something yourself. Heal an ally? No, don't bother--you're wasting an action to un-do an enemy action, rather than to do something to the enemy. Instead, use that spell slot to blow up the bad guys, getting the fight closer to resolution. Buff? Even worse! Now you're trading the realized act of doing something productive for the potential possibility of someone else doing something slightly more productive than they already would have. The rules themselves incentivize self-centered thinking and ruthless personal optimization. 5e has fixed some of these problems by introducing more sticks into the design of magic (Concentration being the big one), but by and large it has preserved an awful lot of what led 3e so astray. Fixing this is would require rewriting a significant portion of spells so that synergy and teamwork actually do provide bigger benefits than ruthless personal optimization. If one were designing a brand-new game, one would need to start from the presumption that teamwork should be better than solo contribution, and thus review all mechanics as they are introduced to see if they actually support that design goal. (Incidentally, that's an example of a design goal, which follows from the intended-play experience of teamwork.)

*Dilution, in this sense, would be stuff like forcing casters to roll for certain kinds of powerful utility spell effects, so that magic is not an instant-win button anymore.

 

[Charlaquin]

When you die in Dark Souls, you don't get booted back to character creation and loose literal hours of progress.

If D&D had a resurrection campfire for free, then the 'it's fun having loads of death in Dark Souls' would be analogous to death in D&D.

It’s just one example of a short-term not-fun thing making a game more fun overall than it would be without that thing. I’m not saying D&D would be less fun without character death*, I’m saying that sometimes short-term unfun serves greater long-term fun, as in the case of deaths in soulslikes. For a D&D example, look at something like, I don’t know, critical hits. It’s not fun to get crit, but the game is more fun with a crit mechanic in it.

*I do think it would be less fun for me, but different players have different preferences there, and it’s tangential to my point anyway.