D&D 5E L&L December 16th Can you feel it?

[DEFCON 1]

Then you should think about if RPGs are really what you want to play or if games with less non combat content would be more to your liking.

Or you can have both. All classes which are designed to be at the very least capable in a fight... but easily pretty bad at it by you just not building it in such a way during character creation that they're good at it. Take lower than normal prime ability scores so your to-hit is low. Only carry weapons you aren't proficient in so that you always attack with Disadvantage (or don't carry weapons at all.) Don't wear armor. There's all kind of ways to be pretty bad in combat if you want to be.

But you don't need WotC to design a class for you so that you have no choice but to be bad at it.

 

[Remathilis]

So how is it a secret door then when it can't be missed?

So all boss monsters and magical macguffin's can be found just by following the obvious doorways?

Then you should think about if RPGs are really what you want to play or if games with less non combat content would be more to your liking.

Yes, because D&D is either Diablo or Amatuer Dinner Theater and nothing in between.

I recall the dark days of 2e; we rarely did dungeons, went games without rolling dice, did infrequent combat, and still nobody played the non-combat classes (Thief, Bard, Druid, or non-evocation Specialists). Why? Because when combat DID come, nobody wanted to sit that out. It was exciting and people wanted to live. It took 3.5 before people regularly played non-dual classes thieves.

A character should be good in a fight and out of one. A fighter who can't do anything but hit is as useless as a rogue who can't do anything in a fight. We can differ on what those elements are, but no class should be forced to just twiddle their thumbs in a combat. This is true if we're doing Game of Thrones or Sucker Punch.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

So how is it a secret door then when it can't be missed?

This isn't an absolutely perfect solution. But it's the best of bad choices: End the game here because the PCs missed the roll and won't ever get to the next room in the dungeon, don't use any secret doors at all even if it would make sense within the fiction to have them there, don't use dice to determine whether secret doors are found making all the PCs exactly the same at finding them, or fudge one die roll that no one except you will ever know you did(which means the players and their characters will think "Cool, there was a secret door here, that means there's something behind it, and my character was good enough to find it.")

Then you should think about if RPGs are really what you want to play or if games with less non combat content would be more to your liking.

I'm not really sure where you are going with this comment. It appears that you are simultaneously trying to insult me for not being enlightened enough or smart enough or something to know how to play the non-combat portions of D&D while insinuating that D&D is ABOUT the non-combat parts of the game so no one needs to be good at fighting.

All I can say about that is that in the 21 years of playing D&D across 5 editions(or 8 if you count 3.5e, Pathfinder and D&D Next) as well as over 30 other different RPGs with over 500 different players across 3 countries that D&D is over 60% combat.

There is some regional variation and I've played with a couple of people who tended to emphasize the non-combat portions more than others. But given the number of groups I've played with who emphasized the combat portions even more than the average, it easily tips the average to 60% or higher.

In an average session of D&D that lasts 5 hours, at least 3 hours of that will be spent fighting. Expecting someone to play a character who is really bad at fighting in a game where 3 hours in every 5 are spent fighting is silly.

Given that the last 2 hours are generally 80% spent on non-mechanical play(i.e. simply roleplaying with no die rolls), the difference between classes during this time is nearly insignificant. So, saying "But this class is so good at non-combat mechanics to make up for their lack of combat ability" isn't really a valid tradeoff.

Being good for about 24 minutes every 5 hours isn't worth spending 3 hours being completely useless.

 

[Blackbrrd]

This isn't an absolutely perfect solution. But it's the best of bad choices: End the game here because the PCs missed the roll and won't ever get to the next room in the dungeon, don't use any secret doors at all even if it would make sense within the fiction to have them there, don't use dice to determine whether secret doors are found making all the PCs exactly the same at finding them, or fudge one die roll that no one except you will ever know you did(which means the players and their characters will think "Cool, there was a secret door here, that means there's something behind it, and my character was good enough to find it.")

Or, better yet, don't rely on a single dice roll for information you want the PC's to have. Use the three clues rule. Let them get access to a map that hints to the secret door, let them hear part of a conversation mentioning the door and finally, let them have a chance to just stumble upon it by pure luck/chance.

Relying on a single dice roll for important information/events is either bad adventure design, or you just stuff your adventures so full of stuff that if the PC's only discover a third of it, it's still a good adventure.

 

[Derren]

D&D is over 60% combat.

And as I said before, that is exactly the problem with D&D.

 

[Nikosandros]

And as I said before, that is exactly the problem with D&D.

For you.

I mean, it's a perfectly valid opinion, but for me (and I don't think that I'm alone), combat is a big part of D&D. I've run and played in plenty of intrigue and interaction heavy D&D campaigns, but combat has always been a part of those games.

I've got a lot of other games, when I want to play with a different style.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It's an often repeated philosophy. But it just isn't practical. It's impossible to make an interesting dungeon, for instance, without using secret doors. If a hidden door leads to another area of the dungeon needed to finish it, that immediately becomes a halt point if it isn't found.

As long as you use dice to determine whether you find things, these things will always be a point of failure.

There is nothing wrong with using dice if you like. The design of the scenario shouldn't rely on success at these rolls in order to continue. The secret doors in my home made dungeons usually lead to extra treasure or other "bonus" material. Nothing that will end the scenario or the entire campaign if it isn't found will EVER depend on making a roll.

Basically, something has to give. For some people, it's worth the risk that the adventure reaches a dead end when the PCs don't find a secret door. It's even easy to fix if the PCs reach the dead end. You can always just ask them to roll again and fudge the roll if need be.

Fudging to get a desired result is the biggest waste of time ever and antithetical to playing a game in the first place. If a secret door MUST be found or else the universe encounters a page fault simply decide that the last person using it left it partially ajar. Then say " there is an open secret door there, wanna check it out?" Beats the hell out of tossing dice over and over for a foregone conclusion.

It's unlikely. The design philosophy seems to be that all classes can contribute in a fight. Fighters fight better than everyone else. However, EVERYONE can fight.

Non-fighting characters simply aren't Player Characters. Which I'm good with. It's always been my philosophy.

Everyone CAN contribute during a fight, some just aren't very good at it. Wanna talk about heroic? Last session in my OD&D game the elf (adventuring as a magic user), stepped up to the front line to replace the hobbit fighter who took a mortal wound. He stood there in his AC 9 robes with his 4 hp and held his side of the line for 3 rounds before being cut down. All combat rolls were made openly, he just frikkin did it. He did what needed to be done although obviously unfit for it. What a hero!

 

[billd91]

A player whose character who has more than 6 hp remaining knows that the character's neck cannot be broken by a 10' fall. And, at least in my experience, players act on that sort of knowledge - much of the combat system in fact seems to be predicated on the assumption that players will use knowledge of their hit points remaining to tactical effect.

But what knowledge on the part of the character does this correspond to? How can the character know that s/he cannot be killed by an unexpected 10' drop, or that s/he cannot be killed by a goblin's sword blow?

Sometimes players do respond in a metagamey way, but that doesn't mean they're always right. Perhaps D&D Next should consider an exploding d6 for falling damage (roll 6, roll it again and keep going on any 6s)? As far as the goblin blow, I think it's entirely reasonable for a PC to recognize he's got your typical goblin outclassed and go in with a fairly blasé attitude. The player may do that recognizing his hit points are much higher than the goblin's but the PC acts based on his own assessment of skill at arms. On the other hand, we've dealt with that hit point overconfidence before with critical hit systems from house rules in 1e/2e, through the critical hits of 3e and 4e (sometimes also modified by house rules like the reasonably well known instant death if the crit roll and confirmation roll are both 20s).

 

[billd91]

Exactly. Not to mention, that I don't get all this obsession with realistic falls. It's not very realistic to walk away easily from being punctured by a long blade and what about being hit by a giant? Realistically a character ought to be reduced to a pulp.

"Realistically" we know that ever since 1e, hit points haven't necessarily meant just the physical damage the PC can suffer. So those hits from a giant are, more often than not, not direct - until that last one removes the last of the PC's hit points and he commences his quest to lie still at room temperature.

The issue is that the hit point system, designed to give PCs increasing durability for combat and enabling them to take on tougher and tougher enemies as they get more skilled and powerful, doesn't easily work for that purpose and certain other kinds of catastrophic events like nasty falls. It fits the heroic fantasy and swords and sorcery motifs to have the PC survive from fight to fight without degrading his skills via the death spiral so we want a good amount of hit points and we don't want the death spiral. But falling off a cliff and blithely walking away doesn't fit the same way. That's why it becomes an issue.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

There is nothing wrong with using dice if you like. The design of the scenario shouldn't rely on success at these rolls in order to continue. The secret doors in my home made dungeons usually lead to extra treasure or other "bonus" material. Nothing that will end the scenario or the entire campaign if it isn't found will EVER depend on making a roll.

Fudging to get a desired result is the biggest waste of time ever and antithetical to playing a game in the first place. If a secret door MUST be found or else the universe encounters a page fault simply decide that the last person using it left it partially ajar. Then say " there is an open secret door there, wanna check it out?" Beats the hell out of tossing dice over and over for a foregone conclusion.

That's fine, but it prevents some perfectly valid and fun scenarios.

I almost always refer back to what I think as the atypical D&D adventure: An ancient tomb created by a powerful wizard forgotten by time. The wizard was so greedy that even in death he wanted to make sure no one took his wealth, so he created a dungeon filled with powerful magic traps and creatures who would guard his treasure for all eternity. There is but one record left of the tomb's existence and it happens to come across the PCs path. Will the PCs go and find the ancient wizards fortune? Can they beat the traps, monsters, puzzles, and obstacles put into their way to get to the end?

Of course they do, they are the heroes of the story, and like all heroes they will be the first people to defeat the traps and get to the end because they have the skills necessary to do so, far beyond that of normal people. They are all good fighters, they are all skilled in navigating hazards like the kind they'll come upon in the dungeon.

The ancient wizard was tricky and hid the treasure beyond many secret doors and traps. Success requires finding all the secret doors and avoiding or disabling all the traps. Which they will, eventually, by persistence and skill. Because otherwise, the story is about a bunch of bumbling idiots who found their way into an ancient tomb and FAILED to get past the traps to find the treasure. That's what happens in real life, not in fantasy stories.

The last person in couldn't have left the secret door open because there has never been another person in here. There is no hidden map of the place because that would defeat the point of making an almost impossible to navigate tomb to protect your treasure. There are no people who you can ask who will give you hints as there's no one left alive who knows the inside. There's just not a good story reason to leave the door open. It makes a better story for there to be a secret door and the PCs to find it than to not have a secret door or have it mysteriously open.

Everyone CAN contribute during a fight, some just aren't very good at it. Wanna talk about heroic? Last session in my OD&D game the elf (adventuring as a magic user), stepped up to the front line to replace the hobbit fighter who took a mortal wound. He stood there in his AC 9 robes with his 4 hp and held his side of the line for 3 rounds before being cut down. All combat rolls were made openly, he just frikkin did it. He did what needed to be done although obviously unfit for it. What a hero!

That's not heroic. That's dumb luck. Marvel at the prowess of the great wizard who, though completely inept at combat, stood in front of the enemies and hoped that the DM miraculously rolled poorly enough for him to survive.

That scenario conjures images of a frail elf in robes walking up to a line of goblins and closing his eyes and holding a staff out in front of him while the goblins tripped over their own feet repeatedly just as they were about to swing.

I'd prefer heroes like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies who kills a number of Orcs in a couple of seconds with his sword than the above scenario.

There's a reason that everyone in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings eventually learns to fight. They wouldn't be decent adventurers if they didn't.