D&D 5E Legend Lore says 'story not rules' (3/4)

[Balesir]

I'm not a fan of running 4e because it tries to make me do things like plan out encounters and fulfill wishlists and have knowledge of what a given NPC is "for" in a metagame context and what kinds of monster abilities make for a synergestic encounter and what kinds of monster abilities make for a grindy encounter and....y'know, that junk's hard for me. I don't play like that when left to my own devices.

Okay, that's a real and possibly impossible-to-bridge difference. Left to my own devices, I would be thinking about that stuff anyway, since otherwise I'd feel I was leaving myself a hostage to fortune. That being so, having solid system clarity for it so I can get it out of the way and do more interesting stuff instead is a real boon.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, the "ease" is subjective. I'm not a fan of running 4e because it tries to make me do things like plan out encounters and fulfill wishlists and have knowledge of what a given NPC is "for" in a metagame context and what kinds of monster abilities make for a synergestic encounter and what kinds of monster abilities make for a grindy encounter and....y'know, that junk's hard for me. I don't play like that when left to my own devices.

Well, encounter design does need some thought. OTOH I do a LOT of mine on the fly these days. I'll often find maps, or draw a few maps, of areas that the PCs are quite likely to visit, and lists of creatures/NPCs that go with them. So I can have a few basic templates, and then if I need a story element to go in, it will. IME this has taken less and less of my time and energy over the last couple years, so now I might spend 30-40 minutes a week specifically on encounters. I can spend my other hours on all the other stuff. I'd say I had to do all this in the old days when I basically tried to emulate TSR modules roughly. It was just not quite as easy, even if AD&D might be a bit more forgiving in terms of encounter design.

The "better" is, too. Easy can be boring, stale, artificial, uninteresting, without surprise or depth. Rules are part of the fun of a game.

The thing, as always, is to have complex rules where you want them, where it's fun, and to have easy, smooth rules where you don't want complexity, just results.

Because all design is local, each table (and possibly each player at each table, on different nights) has different desires for these things.

And lo, the designers promised modularity, and it there was much rejoicing.

I think you can always add more variety of subsystems on top of a simple core. In essence that is ALMOST what D&D did at the very start, except Gary seemed to have this bizarre idea that he shouldn't use his simple core for everything and make up something else more complex. Complexity had cache back then. 4e did no more than go back and actually use (and invert, but that's minor) the ability check mechanic and make it the main one. If you want to roll initiative with d6 or suprise checks ala AD&D, or have reaction rolls that use a different set of CHA bonuses and use d% go for it. The point is if you START with the consistent core mechanics then you're good, you can go from there. It seems quite a bit harder to remove all that stuff if it is already there.