The more of Mearl's postings I read, the more I'm convinced that the success of 5E as a system is a happy accident rather than deliberate. Either that or it's really Jeremy Crawford who's sitting at the steering wheel.
Ridiculous. The design goals and concepts that Mearls is talking about are a big part of why 5e is successful.
@
TwoSix, @
Maxperson,
Two observations. First, I agree that not all build combinations would make sense. But just taking sub classes times races, we get 2,960 (assuming I counted right) alternatives. Even if 90% of those don't make sense for some reason, that leaves close to 300 options. Heck, make it 99% and throw in a smidgeon of feat/build/multi-class choices (i.e. champion fighter with dex vs strength, sword and board vs great weapon) and I think there are more builds than I could ever personally play.
Ultimately you're going to have a few builds that do approximately the same thing. Blaster caster, control, hit things with melee, or hit things with ranged (I may be missing an option or two and there are combos). That's just the nature of the genre and foundation of the game. Are different ways of achieving that goal really going to feel all that different?
Or ... what from a mechanical perspective what would you want to see? Not talking "I'd like to do a <insert class or prestige class I may or may not have heard of>", but mechanically. What gaps are missing? If you want to run a shaman for example, how does that differ from a druid (perhaps with multi-class) other than flavor that could be added with a background?
I know you weren't talking to me, here, but I had to respond anyway.
First, yes, they feel different. Fighters and Paladins are very different, and a Fighter/Cleric would also be very different from a Paladin. There are at least three ways to make some kind of assassin (not hit man. "Guy hired to kill people" isnt what assassin means, archetypally). You've got Shadow Monk, any Rogue (most are just better than assassin, TBH, but if you want to infiltrate socially Assassin rogue is good), Gloom Stalker Ranger, and you can build a Warlock or Bard pretty easily to be an assassin. Even if we break that down to "stealth focused, quick, agile, assassin, that is specialized in coming from nowhere to gank fools and then disappear", we've got rogue, shadow monk, and gloom stalker. The three play completely differently.
I still don't understand why "no one person could personally play all the options" is relevant. No one person is going to want to play all the options, even if there are only 100 combinations. (I mean, some people are into literally everything in dnd, but most aren't) I'm not going to play a pure wizard, I'll probably never even multiclass cleric, Fighter may as well just have 3 levels, because I'd only ever even consider fighter for a 1-4 level dip, and level 4 would just be to not lose out on a feat, I have maybe two concepts for a druid, maybe 3 for barbarians...my point is I'm just not going to play everything in the PHB, not because there are too many options, but
because I'm not even vaguely interested in half of them. It has nothing to do with wanting to play a thousand combinations, never repeating a single option even if I play the same edition for 30 years. That just isn't even on the same map as why I want more options, rather than fewer.
DnD has been a detailed game since partway through 2e. 5e didn't change that. In a mechancially detailed game, I want to craft a character that is mechanically representative of the character concept. Others want mechanically distinct characters taht they can then build a concept out of. Others love the challenge of taking a build that is at cross purposes, like a Kobold Monk/Paladin, and making it stand usefully next to the "normal" builds at the table.
Others tend to have weird character concepts, and without a lot of options that are "smaller" than class and race, they can't play those concepts without having a significantly weak character, mechanically. (I know, some folks like playing weak characters. Others don't. Having options helps one group without hurting the other)
I do think that the last part is interesting, and there have been whole threads on it. Unfortunately, when folks list things they still want in the game, they are met with seemingly intentionally unhelpful (and often disrespectful) "advice" on using existing options to cobble together a Frankensteinian approximation. [sblock=For me], I still want a character that fills the niche of the Star Wars Noble, or as I've been calling it, the Captain. A broad set of characters that are united under the umbrella of being mostly non-magical, surviving on wits, charm, and knowledge. It would be a third "skill monkey" class, with a lot of it's combat determined by subclass, and would include ideas like the tactician, the vanguard, the scholar, and the partisan/idealist/inspiring passionate guy.
I'd also like a character that is based on at-will teleportation, and abilities that extrapolate out logically from being able to blink around constantly as their primary ability. The Shadow Monk is almost there, but level 6 is halfway through most character's careers, and I'd rather get it sooner, and not have the incredible distance and extra benefits tacked on. HOnestly, if I had a DM that was more open to homebrew, I'd just take a spell or two away at level 3, and give an at-will teleport speed (ie use your movement), with a speed boost in dim light or darkness, and keep the level 6 ability as an upgrade. Now, you can teleport with your speed, and use a bonus action to teleport 60 feet, and gain advantage on your next attack. [/sblock]
A lot of playtesting went into 5E that being said I do think maybe Jeremy Crawford does not get as much credit as he deserves. From Sage Advice and everything else I wonder he is more of the tactical mind behind 5E whereas Mike is the overall big picture guy/narrative guy...
That seems to be exactly what they've described as the way things are. Mike does concepts and basic mechanics, and Jeremy is the editor. The editor is always one of the most important jobs in any creative endeavor.
If I get the argument that you and @
doctorbadwolf are running correct, it's that attack checks are the same as ability/skeill checks except that instead of generating consequences for the shared fiction they trigger further mechanical processes.
Well, not exactly. An attack is an action. Narratively, you affect the enemy in a negative manner using your weapons. Then there is a separate, secondary, mechanic, that helps determine how wore down they are. What exactly that looks like in fiction is up to the DM and player. Just like failing to disarm a trap can trigger a separate, secondary mechanic of you getting rekt by the trap.
I think a courtly intrigue game of D&D is almost certain to involve issues around Charm Person and Suggestion spells - particulary if it's a game using the AD&D versions which (by contemporary standards) are super-high powered. At mid-level there will be ESP and other divination-related issues too (which 2nd ed-era stuff solved (for some value of "solved") by giving all diplomats a Ring of Mind Shielding or similar).
(The above is not theorycraft. It's extrapolation from experience.)
Respectfully, so what? That's the world. Diplomacy in a world of high magic is different from diplomacy in a world without magic, or a world with only LOTR magic, and will be different with different systems of magic, as well.
And I do mean "respectfully" with absolute sincerity. I respect your opinion, I just don't think that what you're talking about is something that makes DnD bad at courtly intrigue. It's a game wherein that intrigue will be different from in a game that is made to simulate what we expect from Game of Thrones and the Tudors. If you want "realistic, medieval, very grounded, courtly intrigue"...well, it's not the courtly intrigue part that makes DnD the wrong game for it!
Now, unpopular opinion warning; I really don't care, even a tiny little bit, about how adnd did pretty much anything. Every edition of DND before 4e, I played because it was the only TTRPG that anyone I knew had any interest in playing, and because I liked the story concepts, not because I thought they were mechanically well made, at all. PF is the best edition of DnD before 4e, IMO, but even it has too much mechanically nonsensical elements whose only purpose is to keep nostalgia intact.
In 4e or 5e, courtly intrigue works quite well.
But there are also some things that I disagree with you on, in terms of those spells and magic items. Casting Charm Person isn't invisible. You can get caught. There is incredible risk involved in using magic to force your will on someone, and its pretty damn easy to imagine such magic being a hanging offense, especially when used on a member of court. It's hard to imagine not being immediately attacked by the king's guard if you were to try to Charm the king, and got caught by the court mage, or just a keen eyed noble or guard.
That dynamic adds to the intrigue, and creates tempting tools that are very high risk/high reward, even if for some reason, the king doesn't have a court wizard and nobles don't have magic items.
[sblock=aside]I know some folks think that in a world with Fireball, no one is going to blink at Dominate Mind, but that is completely insane, IMO. The real world has machine guns, but that doesn't stop people from being filled with anger and disgust at the thought of being brainwashed, much less mind controlled. [/sblock]
The difference between a paladin and a ranger could be the difference between gain advantage when your honour would help and gain advantage when your knowledge of the wilds would help, but it's not.
It is, though, it just isn't the whole difference, luckily. In 5e, you can gain advantage, or inspiration, whenever your various traits and flaws and such, whether from your background, class, race, backstory, or experiences during play, come strongly into play. It's left vague, because leaving it vague doesn't create a less balanced game, and because enough of the player base doesn't want rules for it that they had to use rules that can be ignored.
(Also, and despite the name, GURPS is not especiallly generic. I think it offers a pretty consistent and fairly tightly focused gaming experience, of slightly low-powered Hero.)
It's incredibly generic. The focus isn't tightly focused at all. You can play low, mid, or high powered characters/campaigns, in any setting or genre, even mixing power levels in a single campaign if you want. You can play with all the dials turned on, or play the light version with all non essentials turned off.
I did some quick counts over at DnDBeyond because I was curious. There are
37 races
12 classes
80 sub-classes
34 backgrounds
60 feats
So mathematically, there are thousands of options depending on how you calculate it. I know ... you'll tell me that 99.9% of those are not "valid" options because it wouldn't make sense to run a <insert race> <insert class> and that <insert feat, background, whatever> wouldn't make sense. It's not that there aren't more options than you could play, it seems that most options are eliminated out of the gate or that playing a combination that isn't "optimal" isn't valid.
that stuff is only a prominent thing on the internet, man.
The actual thing is what I talk about higher up in this post. There aren't 1000 options for any given player, because most players don't want to play half the classes, but do want to be able to represent their character concept with mechanical specifcity, showing rather than telling what they can do, what they're good at, how they were trained, etc.
Even if there were more options, a lot of people would still gravitate to a handful of optimal options. It would be the same complaint or the complaint would be that there are so many options that build X is broken. Personally I'd be happy running my dwarven rogue or gnome barbarian because I don't care all that much about eaking out numerical supremacy, it's just not that important.
It's not important for most people that want a wide selection of options, either. The existence of CharOp discussion on forums doesn't really mean anything at all for the actual game. Most CharOp posters don't play CharOp builds in games, but even if the they did, they're a minority of players who enjoy having a lot of options. Conflating the two is inaccurate to the point of being counter productive.
Well, then. I'm going to take a page out of WotC's book and declare that the bolded word is now Reporpoised.
Por.poise
noun
1. a small toothed whale with a low triangular dorsal fin and a blunt rounded snout.
2. the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. (adapted by Maxperson, because language is flexible)
Ok, I lol'd.
But, just to make sure, you know that you've "missed" (intentionally, to make a joke?) the point, right? If you write an RPG and use the word that way in the book, yep, it's what that word means in that game.
Utterance, for example, and it's derivatives, are used to refer to any communication that isn't written. That's because our language only really satisfyingly covers spoken and written communication in anything resembling a concise manner. Even sign language, most people use words for spoken communication to refer to it. I have several friends who either are deaf, or have deaf famiy members, and "He/she/they said" is absolutely normal usage when referring to signing a statement. It's not the only usage, but it's perfectly normal, and only ever raises eyebrows where a pedant is in the room, and the pedant gets told to shut up, generally, because who likes a pedant?
This ties back to that post I didn't reply to (I really don't want to go back and find it to go into it in detail, sorry) about utterance and telepathy. Common usage is a term that exist in context. It doesn't matter that talking about telepathy isn't common, it matters what language is commonly used in those conversations that do happen.
Also, part of how language works, is that if the contextual meaning of a statement is clear, then the statement means that contextually clear thing, not whatever pedantic thing we can try to twist it into saying by picking apart the dictionary definition of every word.
I think this shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what motivates mechanical players. We're not looking for options to make good builds better, we're looking for options to make bad builds good, and thus increase the number of playable options.
That's one reason, yes. Like I said above, there's also representing a concept with mechanical specificity, and having a wide range of options within a "silo" of archetypal types of characters, ie "lots of kinds of rogue, or swashbuckler, or sneak, or acrobat, or brute, or knight", etc. It's really nice to have several ways to play a knight, and have them
play differently mechanically.
Thanks!
I'm gradually working through the thread, 70-odd posts from the end with a good number of those replies to me. So if you've already posted more I'll get to it in due course.
no hurry! I honestly probably won't go back and find that post now, the thread is moving too fast and there is so much to touch on. I hope I haven't left anything important unaddressed. If I have, feel free to remind me and I'll reply to it.
If the lock has hit points (or something similar), so that each success has no particular narrative meaning, I agree. But I don't think that's a standard resolution method in 5e. (And it's not how 4e skill challenges work, either - it's clear in the 4e DMG and made clearer in the DMG2 that each check in the skill challenge produces a change in the fictional which affects the fictional positioning of subsequent checks - which in combat is like movement, and some condition imposition, but not like hp loss.)
The proposed lock (not sure if this is in the actual 5e rules, because we just run locks and traps in ways that make sense to us, for the most part) doesn't have hit points, but does have something very similar, and just like hitting in combat, does have narrative impact.
You succeed on a check, and you're one step closer to the lock being open. if you fail, you're one step closer to being unable to pick the lock without spending a good deal more time, and you risk trigger any relevant secondary mechanism, if the lock is trapped or has an alarm, etc. You also take an amount of time, determined contextually, and that amount of time is greater or lesser depending on how well you succeed or how badly you fail. There are win and fail conditions, and consequences for getting the lock open, failing to do so, and for taking too long or getting it done especially quickly.
Which is a lot like combat, it just has different
secondary conditions and mechanics for resolving those secondary conditions. But the resolution of the actual action is the same.
As I alluded to, there are narrative consequences for hitting and missing in a fight. The most important is, ya know, the actual hit or miss. If that doesn't show up in the narrative, something is going wrong at the table, not with the rules.
Secondarily, the other person being more wore down, injured, bruised, discouraged, whatever, is a narrative element. It can then be used to try to gain Advantage on a call for surrender, for instance, or to convince an observer that you are very dangerous and not to be messed with, or simply to try and make someone afraid of you.
Where combat differs in DnD from exploration and interaction is not in the resolution mechanic (every single d20 check is the same mechanic, and I don't just mean that you're always rolling a d20), but in how hard-coded vs negotiated secondary conditions are.
I, for one, am glad of that, but right now I can't even remember
why we're talking about this? Something to do with determining where DnD 5e sits in terms of how rules heavy it is?
Obviosly, 5e is rules heavy compared to most PBTA games, or a lot of other indie games, and I'd say it's just as obvious that it's much lighter than most editions of DND.
