D&D General Kicking the tires vs. puncturing the tires; being effective vs. breaking the game

[Clint_L]

My personal taste runs towards creating a great story; everything else is secondary. So we'll break any rule we need to if it makes the story better. But in general the rules are useful constraints to help channel our creativity.

Winning at the game of D&D by doing tons of damage or whatever doesn't interest me in the least. Actually, the opposite - it turns me off. It's besides the point for what I am trying to accomplish.

 

[Charlaquin]

Is an unbreakable game really possible? If it was, would the flavor be leeched out of it?

4e was pretty darn tough to break, despite having some of the same bloat issues as 3e, so I’d say yes, it is possible. 5e is also pretty robust, with the most broken things you can do still seeming quaint compared to 3.Xe’s version of broken.

 

[kigmatzomat]

5e, like most editions, goes weirdest on spells. As a player of a 14th level lore bard, it was incredibly difficult to resist Simulacrum and Mirage Arcane.

On one hand, for the price of a couple mid level spells I can have a 14th level caster's worth of spells, except these spells cast themselves, can maintain concentration, are mobile, can activate magic items, have skills and a non-trivial amount of hit points. Or I can make a (paladin) ioun stone of of defense, that stays near me giving immunity to fear, bonuses to saves, resistance to spells, can actively protect me, can summon a steed with no duration and can heal me! This ignores the possibility of having a simulacrum make their own simulacrum, resulting in mirror-image/clone scenarios.

On the other hand is a somewhat ridiculous ability to rework 1 square mile/640 acres into a swamp, lake, volcanic doomscape, or a massive fortress that doesn't require concentration and lasts more than a week. Want to bring Birnam Wood to Dunsinane? No trouble! Maybe you need to fight dryads and just want to turn a forest into a grassy plain. Bothered by a troublesome dragon? Let's see how well it does inside an iron fortress. Relatives coming to visit? One estate with gardens coming up! Amazing how many benches, banquets, bed pedestals, shelves and closets are built into the structure itself.

 

[Umbran]

Is an unbreakable game really possible? If it was, would the flavor be leeched out of it?

Can you make an unbreakable game? Starting with the broad definition of "game": Sure you can! I double-dog-dare you to try to break the game of Go while staying within the rules as written.

But Go's rules are extremely simple - downright elegant, even. The action space for play is highly restricted. RPGs traditionally have highly complicated rules, with much greater action spaces for play, in which much of the space may not even invoke the rules in a meaningful way.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Is an unbreakable game really possible? If it was, would the flavor be leeched out of it?

"Possible" is generally a poor question, as you would have to prove that no set of rules can't be broken, which is a pretty tall order. A single counterexample would put it to rest, and it's not that hard to construct a trivial (and thus uninteresting) game that can't be broken.

The bigger question is: How unbreakable can a game be made without being trivial?

And I would say the answer is "pretty unbreakable." 4e and 13th Age both fit that bill pretty well. 13A is a bit looser--some of the discussion around its Backgrounds talks about the possibility of "breaking" those rules by giving yourself a "Good at Everything +5" background--but even then, all that does is give you +5 to skill rolls, which is hardly game-breaking in most contexts. (Someone else would likely get +2 or +3 to most rolls, so...you're really not getting that big an advantage.)

The second question is impossible to answer without having actual games to look at. In the generic, we cannot say anything either way.

 

[Oofta]

"Possible" is generally a poor question, as you would have to prove that no set of rules can't be broken, which is a pretty tall order. A single counterexample would put it to rest, and it's not that hard to construct a trivial (and thus uninteresting) game that can't be broken.

The bigger question is: How unbreakable can a game be made without being trivial?

And I would say the answer is "pretty unbreakable." 4e and 13th Age both fit that bill pretty well. 13A is a bit looser--some of the discussion around its Backgrounds talks about the possibility of "breaking" those rules by giving yourself a "Good at Everything +5" background--but even then, all that does is give you +5 to skill rolls, which is hardly game-breaking in most contexts. (Someone else would likely get +2 or +3 to most rolls, so...you're really not getting that big an advantage.)

The second question is impossible to answer without having actual games to look at. In the generic, we cannot say anything either way.

I'm not sure I would say that 4E was "unbreakable". Compared to 3.x perhaps, but that's a pretty low bar. I knew people that specialized in cheesing out PCs in 4E and would do things like ensure that the enemy couldn't get close and then attack the enemy use ranged attacks from a greater distance than the enemy had (sorry, too long since I played I don't remember the exact combo). Maybe it didn't "break" the game, but it sure did make it boring when he did this kind of stuff. Especially at higher levels the module we played for LFR simply negated PC's abilities because it was too easy to control the battlefield. I know the DMs occasionally got a bit frustrated with some of my PCs and I don't ever intentionally "bend" the rules.

Which is not really a knock against 4E, it's not like 5E is immune to this either. But no version of the game has ever been completely immune to cheese. Sometimes one person's effective PC is another person's cheese weasel.

 

[Blue]

Okay, "broken" as a ruleset to me is Pun Pun. For those not familiar, it was a literally all powerful yet legal creation back in D&D 3.5ed using rules, subclasses, and creatures from various different books that slotted together in a loophole-ly way to make a ridiculously omnipotent character.

But the premise of "Night level 'competitive' play vs. more standard doing what seems cool and works" doesn't work at all for me as a divider. Both are valid modes of play, with different tables having different preferences. As long as the party is roughly the same power level, the DM can challenge them. They have, after all, all the monsters. Splitting out optimizers with system mastery is just as wrong of a concept as splitting out new or casual players and saying they are playing wrong.

A much more interesting point of "breakable" is in a game like D&D where relative power level is important*, how do we put everyone at the same level. I know that I willingly tune or detune characters to match the power of the group, and really 5e makes it generally easy to be in the same ballpark as long as a player doesn't shoot themselves in the foot such as with poor multiclassing choices or low prime ability scores (you will feel a +1 mod when everyone else has +3 or +4).

Some games have mechanics to correct for this over time. For example a common mechanic in many PbtA games is to mark their XP equivalent on a failed roll. So characters that fail more often will increase in power level so that the party is consolidated. But with the level-based approach of D&D that's not granular enough, and also D&D has never tried to balance the number of rolls per class so a direct port isn't a good fit.

So right now we have that power level of characters can vary both on the system mastery of the player (including "borrowed" system mastery using a guide or build from others) as well as the intentions of how strong a character they want to build.

* I mentioned games where "relative power level is important". Part of that is that a common solution for challenge is lethal combat, and a failure penalty for that is character loss, which is much more punitive then in many other games where failure is just a downbeat like in any story, movie, or novel. Many games that don't put player fun-reducing penalties on character or party failure don't need to have everyone as balanced. Marvel Heroic Roleplay for instance can have a buddy barhopping night with Thor and Hawkeye, and both characters will feel important and have time to shine, even though their power levels aren't even in the same postal code. Masks: A New Generation explicitly has a playbook where you have no powers but still want to be a superhero, and a playbook where you have so much power you can't always control it. No problems mixing either of them along with other heroes or each other. While it's a foreign concept to the type of game D&D is, where balance is important for a DM to consistantly provide challenges and give everyone spotlight, other types of games can deal with it in significantly other ways.

 

[nevin]

5E doesn't break easy.

Honestly, unless I see:

A) A player wanting to multiclass CHA classes

or

B) A few very select races/subclasses

I don't there's even a point in worrying about 5E being broken by player choices. The one way 5E often does break is bad DMing and/or houserules.

Now player parity is a slightly different issue and not the same thing as breaking the game. If one player goes for "normal" optimization - i.e. an EK Fighter with GWF, GWM, not even PAM (none of this being insane reach-y stuff), and another player is just a normally optimized Warlock, and then third player chooses to be like, a bad Rogue subclass and allocates his skills without any attention to his stats or even what makes a Rogue work, and well then yes, the third player will be noticeably less effective but who is the one screwing up? I don't think it's the first or second player. They're doing logical, reasonable things that don't break the game. If anyone is "breaking the game" in this scenario, is the guy bringing in anti-optimized character when all they had to do was pay slightly more attention. But really no-one is.

4E was much better if you wanted all the players on an equal footing because it was much easier for a player to find the guiderails, as it were, and classes were even more even.

Honestly it doesn't even break then. Simply throw those CHA multiclass baddies at them and you'll find out all balance out. I've found the best way to deal with the "GameBreaking" ideas is say no or use them against the party once they've shown the world it's possible.

 

[Stormonu]

When I evalute D&D mechanics, I'm looking at story first and mechanics second. If anything comes up where the mechanics cause an inconsistency or abuse of story elements, I will not hesitate to cut it off at the knees. I can understand players seeking out "I win buttons", but sometimes if you want an interesting game you may just need to say "No."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Honestly it doesn't even break then. Simply throw those CHA multiclass baddies at them and you'll find out all balance out. I've found the best way to deal with the "GameBreaking" ideas is say no or use them against the party once they've shown the world it's possible.

I don't think you even need to do that, really, it just makes it so the weakest PCs are likely half the power of the strongest, instead of 70%, and most groups will tolerate. I mean, half the RPGs we've all run over the years feature larger power disparity - it's not even close to as bad as 3.XE or PF1. You just need to make sure you spotlight the weaker PCs appropriately.