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

[Oofta]

Though this brings us to another "unfun" thing:

When the DM expects you to run away, but also tries to enforce the rules to prevent you from running away.

Most editions of D&D have a problem where it's not very easy to run away, because of the way movement and rounds work. 5E is very much one of them - it's virtually impossible to escape an enemy who can move at the same speed as you, and completely impossible to escape an even slightly faster one (barring magic or similar).

So sometimes a DM sics an insurmountable foe on you.

The correct reaction, and the one the DM wants, is to get away from it. But unless the thing is literally slower than you (which, say, 100 goblins are not lol), that requires the DM's cooperation, and it really requires the DM to not want to play out chasing your or whatever (rather roleplay it out or the like). The trouble is a lot of DMs don't get this. They have unreflected/unexamined belief that you can run away, and they try and play it out. And then you can't. Indeed if it's something like a dragon, it just catches you. I remember once making us run from a dragon, then having it chase us, and you could see he was genuinely surprised when it easily caught up to us. It's like buddy, did you not do the math?

So if you want the PCs to flee, let 'em flee. Even drawing it out a bit is unlikely to be as fun as RPing it without the rules.

Sometimes I've just narrated it but I prefer to do it as a challenge with group and individual checks. But I agree, if you want the group to run, give them clear exit signs.

Also give some thought to what happens if they fail and what the consequences could be.

 

[aco175]

Player vs. PC knowledge. I let some/most slide to the point that the group starts to deal with higher level monsters. I feel that every 1st level PC would know things like fire vs trolls and bludgeoning vs skeletons. What type of demon that is should require a roll.

Save or suck spells. The player that complains when the BBEG auto saves was not complaining the last few adventures when he blasted out of existence the troll, the giant, and 3 sub-bosses. But now, the spell sucks- or the rules suck. Too bad, these rules are there to make the big fight last more than one round.

I do not like running out of time on a night of play. My group plays after Boy Scouts and starts around 8:30. I plan to end around 10:30 and like to adjust so that we are not entering the big fight at 10:15 and get one round in before stopping. I just call the night before that, although we have played beyond that time even though one player needs to get up for school.

One thing I'm starting to not like as not fun are updated 1e modules. I'm finding that there was not a lot of time and effort to update them. The treasure tables especially, but the monsters as well. I'm running against the giants right now and the treasure is still from 1e and the book gives out gobs of it. The lack of making a new monster is poor as well when the book talks about the king of hill giants and then says to just use the stone giant stat block with these minor changes. It would not have been that hard to update the hill giant statblock. I'm finding that I need to change a lot.

 

[Xamnam]

Ah, fun. What a dangerous word. Is reading Finnegan's Wake fun? Is watching Schindler's List? Is playing Diablo? No, no, no, and yet we do it. Now, for certain, we have limited time in this world, and we want to spend it meaningfully, intentionally. No one wants to look back at free time spent poorly and wish they could have made another choice.

I'm going about this in this obtuse way because I've fought this fight too many times about video games. I've spent 70 hours in Getting Over It, a notoriously difficult and frustrating game, which many people felt was made just so that streamers could get rage clips out of it, but the reason I have that play total is because I've gone back over and over again. I've climbed that mountain over 100 times. I deeply appreciate what it is doing, and I've by no means mastered it, I still regularly encounter the issues that cause other players to scream that it's impossible. The entire game is a meditation on frustration, on set backs, on difficulty. 10 months before the release of that game, the developer posted on his blog Eleven Flavors of Frustration. While I've seen it dismissed as trolling, much like Getting Over It, the more time I've spent, the more I see the value in what he's getting at. In Dark Souls and its related games, there's been a lot of griping about the need to run back to bosses after you've failed. It's tedious, it's repetitive, it's boring, it's a waste of the time. While I understand why they get that reception, there's sincere value to the approach. It gives you a break from the frenzied pace of those fights, allowing a bit of relief between the bouts of tension. It gives you a minute to let your last attempt sink into your brain, building up your mental model of the fight. It makes the challenge not about this one singular instance, but the entire process of getting there, so that you have bested an entire area when you finally get to move on. Elden Ring, by comparison, lets you spawn right outside the boss arena much of the time, and that's been praised in terms of "Letting you get right back into the fun part," I think there's meaningful quality that has been traded away in that concession.

Bennett Foddy uses the word flavor in that post, and I think that's a good approach. In the dish of free time hobbies, too much of a singular flavor, and you're going to get exhausted. Oops, All Horror can wear you out, no safe harbor to lean upon. Nothing but easy wins can be candy for breakfast, occasionally tempting but tongue numbing over time. Brutal challenge, unless you're uniquely determined, can drive people away who were once otherwise enticed by the meal.

So, we have to be careful when we look at the word fun. I don't think it implies the holistic nature that words like engaging, satisfying, rewarding do. At the end of the day, that's what I, and what I fundamentally think all players want to describe our time spent at these tables as, rather than just "fun". But I don't say all this to rob the word fun of its value, but rather, to emphasize its place within the context of the play experience, and how it contributes to the nuanced texture that leaves players actively wanting to come back.

So, to get back to the actual thing that was asked. One of the most uniquely praised aspects of TTRPGs is the freedom to do whatever you want (for varying degrees of freedom depending on the system). When looking at fun, in a way that can't be copied by other media nearly as well, I think that's a pretty great target. So, the opposite of that, negation, is a good place to start when looking at the most dangerous counterbalance. You can see the sparking idea here, Legendary Resistance, can easily come across as a complete negation of the players goal. When you try and hit a monster, you at least get to try and hit it, and see if luck is on your side, but LR lets the game just say that your action has become meaningless. Now, obviously, there's value to using up a resistance, and as I went into too much detail above about, value to not necessarily getting what you want. However, I think any area where a game is offering up negation as a response to a player's bid for agency, action, and freedom is one that needs to be handled with a very deft touch. A dash of it goes a very very long way, especially in the minds and memories of players.

 

[Reynard]

Ah, fun. What a dangerous word. Is reading Finnegan's Wake fun? Is watching Schindler's List? Is playing Diablo? No, no, no, and yet we do it.

Blasphemer!

So, to get back to the actual thing that was asked. One of the most uniquely praised aspects of TTRPGs is the freedom to do whatever you want (for varying degrees of freedom depending on the system). When looking at fun, in a way that can't be copied by other media nearly as well, I think that's a pretty great target. So, the opposite of that, negation, is a good place to start when looking at the most dangerous counterbalance. You can see the sparking idea here, Legendary Resistance, can easily come across as a complete negation of the players goal. When you try and hit a monster, you at least get to try and hit it, and see if luck is on your side, but LR lets the game just say that your action has become meaningless. Now, obviously, there's value to using up a resistance, and as I went into too much detail above about, value to not necessarily getting what you want. However, I think any area where a game is offering up negation as a response to a player's bid for agency, action, and freedom is one that needs to be handled with a very deft touch. A dash of it goes a very very long way, especially in the minds and memories of players.

This is a good argument presented in a way I had not considered. Thank you. How, I wonder, do things like immunities relate to the idea of negation, or even healing?

 

[TwoSix]

Knowing that this isn't what you are asking about, I still wind up with an aside - The stated complaint is that "the BBEG shrugs it off with no effect." The stated complaint is NOT, "I didn't win the fight with this one spell."

There is this huge expanse between "no effect" and "I win!". The complaint, as stated, does not imply a broader point that players are entitled to win with one spell.

Agreed. Probably the bigger point is that there shouldn't be spells that end challenging encounters with one casting if a save is failed. I can see the case for spells that can bypass encounters outside of the combat phase in D&D type games, but not to just end combat once initiative has been rolled.

 

[tetrasodium]

But now, the spell sucks- or the rules suck. Too bad, these rules are there to make the big fight last more than one round.

Damage reduction & spell resistance were previously tools the gm could use for exactly that reason and do so in ways that encouraged further adventure or to engage in strategies that involved hescy teamwork. Because those could be deployed often they encouraged players to build in ways that optimized for the teamwork. The hooks for that build influencing set of tools are no longer present though, they've been replaced by an imprecise crude sledgehammer that's unfun for all involved & does nothing to encourage teamwork in fights or teamwork focused builds.

 

[Cadence]

Though this brings us to another "unfun" thing:

When the DM expects you to run away, but also tries to enforce the rules to prevent you from running away.

Most editions of D&D have a problem where it's not very easy to run away, because of the way movement and rounds work. 5E is very much one of them - it's virtually impossible to escape an enemy who can move at the same speed as you, and completely impossible to escape an even slightly faster one (barring magic or similar).

So sometimes a DM sics an insurmountable foe on you.

The correct reaction, and the one the DM wants, is to get away from it. But unless the thing is literally slower than you (which, say, 100 goblins are not lol), that requires the DM's cooperation, and it really requires the DM to not want to play out chasing your or whatever (rather roleplay it out or the like). The trouble is a lot of DMs don't get this. They have unreflected/unexamined belief that you can run away, and they try and play it out. And then you can't. Indeed if it's something like a dragon, it just catches you. I remember once making us run from a dragon, then having it chase us, and you could see he was genuinely surprised when it easily caught up to us. It's like buddy, did you not do the math?

So if you want the PCs to flee, let 'em flee. Even drawing it out a bit is unlikely to be as fun as RPing it without the rules.

13th Age is the only system I've seen that really tries to address that...

 

[Umbran]

Agreed. Probably the bigger point is that there shouldn't be spells that end challenging encounters with one casting if a save is failed.

So, just to be picky about language - all encounters end on one something.

The issue isn't that one casting ends combat. It is that one casting ends combat "too quickly". I am not terribly sure there's agreement on what counts as "too quickly" though. If a wizard drops a dramatic fireball, well, isn't that what wizards are for?

 

[Reynard]

So, just to be picky about language - all encounters end on one something.

The issue isn't that one casting ends combat. It is that one casting ends combat "too quickly". I am not terribly sure there's agreement on what counts as "too quickly" though. If a wizard drops a dramatic fireball, well, isn't that what wizards are for?

There is an expectation that important fights are dramatic and extended. This is a feature of adventure entertainment literally since Gilgamesh was put to clay. So, the wizard dropping the fireball on the guards is awesome. The wizard dropping the fireball on the BBEG and lackeys and killing them all is not awesome.

 

[iserith]

Though this brings us to another "unfun" thing:

When the DM expects you to run away, but also tries to enforce the rules to prevent you from running away.

Most editions of D&D have a problem where it's not very easy to run away, because of the way movement and rounds work. 5E is very much one of them - it's virtually impossible to escape an enemy who can move at the same speed as you, and completely impossible to escape an even slightly faster one (barring magic or similar).

So sometimes a DM sics an insurmountable foe on you.

The correct reaction, and the one the DM wants, is to get away from it. But unless the thing is literally slower than you (which, say, 100 goblins are not lol), that requires the DM's cooperation, and it really requires the DM to not want to play out chasing your or whatever (rather roleplay it out or the like). The trouble is a lot of DMs don't get this. They have unreflected/unexamined belief that you can run away, and they try and play it out. And then you can't. Indeed if it's something like a dragon, it just catches you. I remember once making us run from a dragon, then having it chase us, and you could see he was genuinely surprised when it easily caught up to us. It's like buddy, did you not do the math?

So if you want the PCs to flee, let 'em flee. Even drawing it out a bit is unlikely to be as fun as RPing it without the rules.

D&D 5e has chase mechanics which use speed as a gauge, but also offer opportunities to hide at the end of every round plus complications that may slow down pursuers. The PCs can also "pay off" any complications that arise with Inspiration to avoid them, which monsters don't have. These rules are in the DMG though which nobody reads.

Speaking of fleeing: I was in a game the other day where the DM had our base of operations (a school of sorts in a large tower) attacked by some bad guys which included an adult red dragon. We are all around 5th to 7th level. My cleric, Wanda Curelight, was able to blast some of the invaders with a fireball and others slowed them down and finished them off, but we knew the red dragon wasn't anything we could handle, so we fled. As it turns out, this was the DM's expectation - we were meant to flee out a tower window and climb down a few floors to escape the immediate problem then head down the stairs and out of there. Only the tower was described as something like 200 feet tall, so falling was just as deadly as the dragon's fire, and not everyone - including my cleric - were willing to take the chance that the DM would call for a Strength (Athletics) check that would likely fail.

So two of us tried to get away in a mazelike library in hopes that the dragon would go after someone else. The other 3 characters climbed out the window. The dragon went after the two that went into the library. As soon as the dragon got within breath weapon range, my character was toast. The other fell shortly after that. The three that went out the window had some problems too and one of them died. This was 30 minutes into the session.

What was initially hailed as a shake-up to the campaign ended up being retconned after a 5-minute break of DM reflection. The DM's intention was to have us flee out the window to witness the destruction of our base presumably to set up a revenge arc or whatever. That didn't work out, so corpses were recovered and resurrected, and we were back in business. This was a dissatisfying moment, and the result of a DM who should have known better trying to push a particular outcome. The chase mechanics may have helped here (my cleric actually has a good Dex and Inspiration banked), but what would have also helped is not pointing a gun at something you're not willing to shoot, and not trying to force a particular resolution. I definitely find that sort of thing to be unfun.