D&D General Matt Colville on adventure length

[tetrasodium]

Gotta love victim-blaming.

That's a wild claim given the number of posts where you've been engaged in doing just that. Without question d&d is a game where the death of a PC is one of the possibilities that can happen during play. Quite a few people have already pointed out how that's fine normal & sometimes healthy for an ongoing campaign even if you have a different view. You apparently wanted to play a game where that was not the case but when faced with a gm who refused to meet you "half way" you must have agreed☆ to play anyways or your PC could not have died at their table.

Your posts have spoken at length about a willingness to continue playing with a focus on the story of a single character no matter what. When a player with that sort of blinkered mindset encounters a PC death after joining a game where the default chance of PC death has not explicitly been crossed out by houserule it creates a disruption or worse for the players & GM who did not sign up for that disruption. The disruption is a player who is apparently uninterested in making a new PC spreading bad vibes at what everyone expected to be an enjoyable game even if one or more PCs died per the rules. Blaming the GM for the results of your choice☆ to play while the GM & fellow players now need to deal with the cloud of negativity from someone who feels "I am going to be so demoralized, I likely won't have the motivation to play anymore." goes back to the claim you made in the quoted post (420) and raises the question of who you were calling a victim.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I understand there are other stakes. But you are leaving out the context of this particular game we are talking about - D&D. The one where rules actually explain how you can die. And then the makers of the game spend an enormous amount of the book explaining combat. They even came up with a system of hit points to let the player know their character is about to die. If you want to houserule "no death," that's cool. More power to you.

Except I don't. But nobody ever listens when I explain what I actually do, so there's little point in saying more than that.

But please don't make it sound like a large majority of players don't use the death rule. They do.

I literally never said they did.

However, the system just makes it really hard for you to die. (I would also add, it puts DMs between a rock and a hard place when playing intelligent enemies.)

I'm aware. If there had been more and better systems built into healing, it would be significantly easier to provide well-built options supporting those preferences, rather than leaving every DM to kludge up their own approach.

I have solutions but no one will listen to them.

It's a losing battle, Mike. Rules have been positively identified as the enemy. They must be destroyed so we can finally have good games, as opposed to all the bad games that bad DMs "hide behind" to conceal their wickedness and incompetence (which are not to be distinguished from one another; "bad" is "bad" no matter the context.)

 

[DEFCON 1]

At the end of the day... if any individual has particular issues with how 5E plays, their choices or solutions in the matter are not that widespread. They either suck it up and play the game they have issues with... they spend a certain amount of time either adjusting 5E themselves to fit their preferences or a certain amount of time looking for a group out there in the world that has adjusted 5E already and their preferences luckily match... or they change games altogether to one that is a better fit and then put in the work to find other players interested in playing that other game as well. These are all viable solutions to the problem.

The one solution that isn't viable though is bringing up the issues in places like this and expecting WotC to change the game to "fix" them so that 5E becomes the game they want. Because they are just one person out of the hundreds of thousands of players out there and their issues are not universal. Not even close. So even when bringing the issues up to WotC in the one location where they might get looked at more closely-- the playtest surveys-- they are still one person trying to alter the direction of the aircraft carrier. It doesn't work. (General) you needs to be one of tens of thousands of people who all have the same issue and all bring the issue up and maybe an adjustment will get made "officially" by WotC down the line. But if you just sit on your hands waiting for it to happen, you will be miserable for years. It's not worth it. 5E as a game isn't worth it.

The sooner we all accept the reality of this 5E situation we are in and can solve our own problems, the happier sooner we all will be.

 

[Clint_L]

I've seen plenty of players just pick up D&D without reading any rules, in fact I did that myself.

And a couple of my current players haven't read the whole PHB after around 7 years. That's why they tend not to play casters - they got bored reading through the spell lists.

Why don’t they just know them if the game is that simple?

 

[Umbran]

Your posts have spoken at length about a willingness to continue playing with a focus on the story of a single character no matter what. When a player with that sort of blinkered mindset...

Mod note:
So, the character of your last few replies to this poster seems very personal, condescending, accusative, and kinda insulting.

Being fully aware of how that all gets moderator attention, are you absolutely sure you want to continue to carry out this discussion in this manner?

You have a chance to be better about this. Please consider taking the opportunity.

 

[TiQuinn]

So after watching the video finally, all I can say is that in all the years that I played D&D as a series of short adventures strung together to create a campaign, we maybe made it as high as 8th or 9th level. Not shabby, but always just shy of some of the really powerful spell levels, monsters, magic items, etc. That was in part our own fault back in the 2e days where we didn't understand experience point awards, though I think in our defense, it was poorly laid out what good experience point awards should've been but I digress...

It wasn't until 5e that we made it all the way to 20th level. And then the next campaign, we made it to 15th level before we hit the finale. Having played both, I can say that there were pros and cons to both approaches, and I certainly wouldn't say that one was inherently better than the other. This is kind of a sticking point I have with Matt Colville's takes - he gets very professorial, and very, very convinced of his stance on things, and of course, he has a fanbase that digs that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I.e. learn to play with FRIENDS. It’s what I did too.'

I don't know anyone who wants to play the games I am interested in playing. Of those who enjoy 5e/PF1e (which I have long accepted are 99% of the time the only games I'm ever going to play nowadays), all the friends I have who play, already play with other groups that don't include me, and they don't have room for more people. (I have, in fact, inquired.)

My only option is online groups if I want to play. That's...how it's been pretty much my entire gaming career.

I do think internet pick up groups are a problem.

Given how important internet pickup groups are for the future health of the hobby, one would think this would be rather concerning.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Given how important internet pickup groups are for the future health of the hobby, one would think this would be rather concerning.

Sure it’s a concern. Not much that can be done about it though. You can’t exactly ban all the horrible people from the internet!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure it’s a concern. Not much that can be done about it though. You can’t exactly ban all the horrible people from the internet!

No, you can't.

But "we can't make the problem cease to exist, so there's no point bothering to do anything about it" is wrong.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No, you can't.

But "we can't make the problem cease to exist, so there's no point bothering to do anything about it" is wrong.

“We have to do something! This is something, therefore we have to do this!!” Is the sort of knee-jerk stupidity that makes problems worse. Some things simply can’t be fixed.