D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[payn]

My experience playing and reading 5E adventures suggests that it works best with scene (or perhaps to avoid confusion - encounter) based design built around set piece that are encounters placed within a branching (but ideally well pruned) pre-defined grand narrative.

I don't think this distinction or these limitations/styles take away from 5E as a system (or OD&D for that matter), and I am not trying to suggests that 5E fans should play dungeon crawls, even using X or Y rules or systems. However, I do think that one of the places we suffer as a hobby is trying to claim that a games can be all things at once, rather then acknowledging that different rule sets and play cultures aim at different things.

Again the questions I find compelling are:

What form of adventure design best supports the particular system of 5E (or 5E clones/alikes) and its preferred play style?

Why wouldn't this be the WotC style "epic"?

Why would it instead be something akin to the 1980's TSR module system of drop in location based adventures (or even mini-portal realm adventures like Castle Amber...)?

Agreed, mostly. I think 5E is more flexible than folks give it credit. Part of the awkward bits of 5E is around having SAD and MAD classes, as well as, short rest and long rest ones. Those combinations make a game design stretched in my opinion. It makes published adventure design more difficult since you have no idea what the party make up will be, and as noted, it can be quite varied in 5E. Though, it offers a wide assortment of play styles and adventures too.

I dont think the hobby suffers at all. I think folks say things like that becasue they dont like things they dont prefer. The internet has taught folks to make up arguments for why things they dont prefer are bad instead of just another option.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Agreed, mostly. I think 5E is more flexible than folks give it credit. Part of the awkward bits of 5E is around having SAD and MAD classes, as well as, short rest and long rest ones. Those combinations make a game design stretched in my opinion. It makes published adventure design more difficult since you have no idea what the party make up will be, and as noted, it can be quite varied in 5E. Though, it offers a wide assortment of play styles and adventures too.

Awkwardness is a small price to pay to avoid saminess!

 

[payn]

Awkwardness is a small price to pay to avoid saminess!

Honestly, I think the idea was to build for modular design, which sadly got punted during NEXT.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Awkwardness is a small price to pay to avoid saminess!

If only it were merely awkwardness. That would be wonderful.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If only it were merely awkwardness. That would be wonderful.

A lot of people are also fine sacrificing ease of use and game balance too.

 

[Hussar]

I've only seen this once, in a 3rd edition game.

The party were on some kind of floating platform, with another platform nearby. The whole area was shrouded in mist, and we had no idea how far down it was to the bottom.

The armour-wearing fighter, quite strong but with no ranks in Jump, decided to jump across to the next platform. The DM explained it was a moderately difficult skill check (which I took to be DC 15, which probably worked out as about a 20% chance of success for this character after adjusting for Strength and the armour check penalty) and the consequences for failure could be severe since we didn't know how far down it was.

The player did anyway, failed the check, and then failed the Reflex save to grab hold of the edge of the platform and prevent the fall. The fall killed the character.

The player then blamed the DM for the character's death. As far as I could tell, he learned nothing from the experience.

You’re lucky.

I had a player in 3e who died time and again for utterly preventable stupid reasons. Went through like seven characters in the same campaign.

Fast forward two decades and I had a completely different player do the exact same damn thing. Suicide by stupidity.

There just are players out there like this.

 

[tetrasodium]

I...genuinely do not know what you are saying with "that self deprecating attitude."

And when I'm talking about these things, I'm genuinely not kidding when I say this is the second or third combat of the entire campaign. Not "we went several levels and did a bunch of adventures." I'm talking about things where the group hadn't even actually been together long enough to even know what the other characters could DO yet. And yet we were having bandits jump us in the middle of a critically-needed short rest after the third combat of the entire game, so the DM denied us any healing (because we hadn't finished the short rest, see) and then had a squad of bandits roll in. At which point, we TPK'd (except, as noted, the Rogue who managed to run away).

Having already had literally the second combat of the game end in a "we barely survived" and my character specifically would have unavoidably died without the DM actively (and begrudgingly) allowing a remove curse, and then the third combat being again "we barely survived," only to get jumped by bandits after only the second short rest we'd ever taken in that campaign, yeah. I was done. I was thoroughly demoralized and had no desire to continue playing in that game, despite the other people there being friends.

I am, if you'll pardon the pun, deadly serious when I say that I have, on at least two (possibly three) occasions, been put in a situation where we got a full or near-full party wipe at or before second level, for literally no other reason than that we decided to go to where the adventure pointed us. In the first two of those cases, both times the group had no more money than a 1st-level character starts with, so each group had no meaningful ability to acquire new tools. Each group had had fewer than four fights (three in one case, two in the other) before the TPK fight, meaning we'd had nowhere near enough time to learn how to work together as useful teamwork. In both cases, any spell slots we had were mostly depleted because, again, we'd already had a rough combat recently.

There literally wasn't anything we could do. We were taking the adventure at face value, going to a place we were supposed to go, and stumbling into a combat at that place. On two different occasions, with completely unrelated groups (one a group of friends, the other a group of strangers), this resulted in a TPK (or effectively one.)

This has nothing to do with underestimating my own capabilities (which I guess is maybe what you were meaning?), and everything to do with there literally just weren't any options we could have used.

WHAT CAN A FIRST LEVEL CHARACTER DO???

For God's sake, you act like the power of friendship is some magical fairy-dust that can turn any problem into beautiful success. That is simply not true. And it is especially not true in low-level 5e, where an ogre emitting a particularly aggressive fart might kill a character.

Again: I am literally talking about a situation where we had already barely scraped it through only the third fight of the entire campaign, where we had had multiple people drop to low single-digit HP, so we decided to take a short rest. At which point, we got jumped by several bandits who proceeded to down a PC on the very first turn, and down all but the Rogue by the end of the second turn.

What on earth could we have done?

When a player has decided that they are a helpless puppet of chance to such an extent that they have already decided they can offer nothing of value to their PC's survival they will also make choices in build & action that ensure they make no effort to contradict that decision. Taking that further is the fact that your claims of you & the group being so powerless to do anything in action or build that could have influenced the odds during or before the combats highlights you as the very definition of an unreliable narrator/witness to them. As I said, these kinds of things are for you to actively work out with your fellow players at the table, specifically while shifting from the self deprecating defeatist mindset to a positive & constructive one aimed at stepping up.

I am not one of your fellow players at the table. So I'll reiterate "There's always something"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When a player has decided that they are a helpless puppet of chance to such an extent that they have already decided they can offer nothing of value to their PC's survival they will also make choices that ensure they make no effort to contradict that decision. Taking that further is the fact that your claims of you & the group being so powerless to do anything in action or build that could have influenced the odds during or before the combats highlights you as the very definition of an unreliable narrator/witness to them. As I said, these kinds of things are for you to actively work out with your fellow players at the table, specifically while shifting from the self depricating defeatist mindset to a positive & constructive one aimed at stepping up.

I am not one of your fellow players at the table. So I'll reiterate "There's always something"

And I will reiterate: no there absolutely is not always something. Sometimes there are situations that the only way to not lose would be to reject playing the game.

I tried, very hard. I went down in multiple combats trying my very best to survive or, at least, help my allies survive. Part of the reason I dislike low-level 5e so much specifically IS that in so many cases there really, genuinely wasn't a choice beyond "openly insult the DM by rejecting the game they offered to run for us." A thing I will not do.

This has nothing to do with a defeatist attitude, and everything to do with some DMs are rotten garbage at encounter design. And I can say with absolute certainty that at least two of those DMs truly meant well and thought they were doing the right thing for the right reasons. They were, plainly and simply, wrong. And no amount of talking with them or my fellow players made a lick of difference.

 

[Lanefan]

And I am still, fundamentally, left asking: What was the point? If the ending cannot even in principle be reached, why did I bother? At least if it could have been reached, had I simply made wiser choices, then the failure is on me--it's a "skill issue," to appropriate a usually dismissive internet phrase. (Though, of course, this then gets into the thorny issue of whether one is able to make wise choices or is simply given luck-of-the-draw, which IMO thoroughly invalidates the "it was on me" aspect just as badly as making it an inevitable failure.)


Precisely! That is precisely the problem. When the death is "some random punk/orc soldier/sewer rat/etc. got a lucky crit," how you died provides no true character moments. When "what you did in the career you had before you died" is "at best 1-2 incredibly basic dungeon heists where you... [3d100 clattering] stole some jewelry from...the burial mound of...an ancient warlock," and in general is "you went into one murder-hole and never came out again," there are no such moments there, either.

That's my whole point. Hence: the bitter taste of unfulfilled dreams and the wistful contemplation of what could have been. You had been very specific that you were talking about the lowest of low-level characters, where players have no attachment to their characters at all. Exactly the point at which the way you died will almost never produce any kinds of true character moments, and the career you had before you died was nil because you hadn't done anything yet.

At the start of the campaign I'm still playing in, I rolled up two characters (standard procedure here) and put them in play.

One was to run out and test a new class - Necromancer - that was new to our system; and so came Zarine. Excellent stats, interesting background, and all that - and she lasted exactly 10 sessions before Ogre 1, Zarine 0. Didn't get out of her first adventure, and didn't really provide any chance to run out the class' features etc., but the fact I still remember this much* about her 17 years later tells me she was worth playing even if only for those 10 sessions.

* - I did have to check the DM's online records for the actual session counts.

The other was my chance to play some jokes on people. Jasmine was a double-class Nature Cleric (aka Druid)/Assassin who I introduced as a Thief. She hid her Cleric side for as long as she could but was found out fairly quickly; but while she was in play nobody ever learned what her other class really was. She lasted 18 sessions - which got her most of the way through her 2nd adventure - until a trap on a chest did her in. Losing her was more annoying - I had big plans for this character and she was just nicely rounding into form - but oh well, so be it.

Both of these short-lived characters provided me with ideas for future characters. Zarine was both based on and informed another character who I played in a one-off prior and then brought into the main campaign later. I've yet to try Jasmine again but at the level we're at these days there'd be no real way to keep anything hidden, and she was all about secrets.

Were both their deaths due to luck? More or less, yes: the Ogre could have swung at anyone within reach and Zarine got the short straw; and Jasmine was a simple failed save.

Do I think I wasted my time playing either of these characters? Hell no.

 

[Lanefan]

Since I am normally longwinded, I will try to be brief:

Because it is more interesting to see what the hero(es) must sacrifice in order to achieve success, than to see the hero(es) die and thus eliminate all possible future stories.

All possible future stories are not eliminated, however, once one stops thinking that the only story that matters is that of the hero.

The villain's story continues, and might be worth telling. Or, the general story around the hero-villain dynamic could be worth telling (GoT proves that in spades).