D&D 5E (2024) Mike Mearls explains why your boss monsters die too easily

[pemerton]

Key word is eventually. You think its tomorrow but its really 20-30 years from now.

I don't have a strong intuition about the timeline. But I've got no reason to think that those saying "tomorrow" or "2031" are any better placed.

And frankly, a product that sells strongly for the next 5 years looks to me like a win for WotC!

Again, I think you are the only one saying that. There is a difference between pointing out reality and discussing the things thar are important in life. People are not suggesting that commercial success is the only thing matters. They are simply stating the reality that commercial success is important to a business. It is a motivating factor for a business and more so for a large one with significant financial responsibilities.

In addition to this, I find the idea that there is something like a moral duty to make sure the game that you publish is good, by some standard of RPG design, is just not plausible.

 

[Zardnaar]

I don't have a strong intuition about the timeline. But I've got no reason to think that those saying "tomorrow" or "2031" are any better placed.

And frankly, a product that sells strongly for the next 5 years looks to me like a win for WotC!

I said 2031.

Longest lasting D&D in print. 3.x and Basic line. 17 years. That's 2014-31.

Counting revisions. OD&D to 3.0 was 26 years. They essentially revised OD&D over and over.

So wasn't pulling numbers out my ass. The quickest they can spam out a revision is 2 years, new edition 3 years. 2025 is almost done so 2028 or 29 is earliest we will see a new D&D if 5.5 tanks.

 

[mamba]

But the overwhelming evidence is that most of the people who want to buy D&D products from WotC do not want to play a game with this sort of tightness. They want the "balancing" of classes, of encounters, of rewards, and of incentives - including incentives to rest or to push on - to be in the hands of the GM.

I am not sure that the failure of 4e means that we can draw this conclusion, there was more ‘wrong’ with 4e than the tight balancing. From the dry descriptions to the setting changes, it feels like 4e tried its best to be as different from prior editions as possible, and it kinda got the corresponding response.

As to the rest being in the hands of the DM, I would like something similar to the DS approach that gives the control more to the players and makes it a real choice rather than a rest always being the correct choice mechanically.

Granted, incorporating the DS approach directly would change class design quite a bit, so they might have to find a different way, taking the DS approach directly is most likely a bridge too far for D&D / WotC

They want classes to have differentiated recovery suites - a fighter can swing their sword all day, and the idea of player-controlled abilities to deliver blows that really count (ie 4e D&D martial dailies) are seen as too "metagamey" or "unrealistic".

I would like a better balance, bump up the martials, nerf the casters.

Heck, as a first draft, get rid of full casters and have everyone as half caster equivalents. The casters can be based on the half-caster Warlock and the martials on the Paladin, flavor to taste. Stop around level 12.

Given the above changes you have to redesign anyway, might as well do it properly

Once all this stuff is punted to the GM, I think the idea that the system will nevertheless dictate an appropriate adventuring day by dint of sheer mechanical structure is gone.

agreed, but I want it in the mechanics and not on the DM in the first place. Not everything needs to or even should be controlled by the DM / a burden for the DM to bear

Yeah, I know, wishful thinking, WotC will never go for this. To me this is an extension of the ‘what do you want in 6e’ thread, what I wanted there is also something WotC won’t deliver, while my target keeps evolving with this additional goal

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm going to do something I hate doing and respond to your fisking with fisking in turn because this is going circles.

The DM is IN NO WAY blocking player action/limiting player agency.

It absolutely is railroading to shutdown a rest simply by declaring it impossible and there were pages of discussion on why that is the case earlier, you may want to jump in with some of those rather than expecting to rehash it from square one.
If the gm relies exclusively on narrative weight instead then there are absolutely no consequences that impact the PCs on any level other than inconsequential narrative ones. You yourself made that clear when you were unable to supply any beyond the narrative ones you were defending design with.

The group can rest if the wish, but there are logical consequences for doing so.

What are they on a mechanical level.

When they rest, time passes. Are you honestly advocating that the PCs operate inside some kind of time stop where, when they rest, the world freezes?

Why are you ignoring the fact that it does NOT matter? The gm can interrupt that rest with endless encounters and the 5e PCs will no longer be at risk of losing hp/resources at a rate faster than they are gained when they shrug off the interruptions by starting a new rest. What DOES matter is that I'm the players will feel like their GM is trolling them.

It doesn't matter if taking the rest means some narrative consequences pile on up until the world is so toxic that ending the campaign is the only real option and all the while players will blame the gm for designing no win guaranteed fail adventure after no win guaranteed fail adventure because they are certain that rest early rest often nova loops are the intended way of playing that wotc designed

You keep saying "at no cost..." Time passing is a cost. Often a fairly significant one. The players can choose to take the cost, or not.

Time is not a cost in 5e, it's a narrative detail. Follow that right into the nex bit of what you wrote

I'm not blaming players for anything, I've just never met players who don't understand that time is a cost. And I absolutely reject the notion that players will not engage with the fiction unless mechanics force them to do so.

I'm not sure why you meeting other players who feel that way matters given that your post suggests you very much seem to have trouble separating narrative detail of the fiction and meaningful cost as distinct concepts D&d is not and has never been a game system that requires players to engage with the fiction... Those systems often tend to have mechanics that aid the GM in enforcing that engagement or shepherding the fiction's direction/integrity, d&d5e does not substitute its failure to supply GM tools on the matter being discussed with those tools either



Citing story development doesn't fix the fact that wotc made a game where PCs are able to output 5-6x more than expected by system math for the last decade+ and rather than providing any gm support they instead muddied the waters with claims that there is no encounter expectations or how an encounter could be literally anything like a puzzle or social interaction.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Narrative constraints to contain rules is always problematic, since there is no guarantee the narrative constraints exist or applies. And the mechanics also constrain the narrative - what if you want there to be 30 rounds of combat to get to the part where you finally rescue the princess from sacrifice, because you have a map of a nice dungeon and you have established in the fiction how many cultists and mercenaries the group needs to run their operation? That can't be, you mechanically must design your dungeon so that the party - at least with reasonably good play - can find a path to victory in 20 combat rounds, or you already preordained that the party or the princess are going to die.

Mechanical reasons for resting do always exist, and the benefits are balanced by narrative constraints that only sometimes exist.
Some spend a lot of focus on why there are narrative needs for the party to press on. But what if there is not? What if there really is no reason to expect 20 rounds of combat to happen from midnight to midnight? Sure, you can engineer to make that one fight really hard - but the one that has 4 abilities he was supposed to have to meter out over 5-8 combats now vs the one using 4 abilities that he was supposed to use every of those 5-8 combats is vs the one using the 2 abilities he was capable of using every other round of each combat will have a power difference in this encounter. That can easily get annoying to the people.

 

[Mort]

I'm going to do something I hate doing and respond to your fisking with fisking in turn because this is going circles.

It absolutely is railroading to shutdown a rest simply by declaring it impossible and there were pages of discussion on why that is the case earlier, you may want to jump in with some of those rather than expecting to rehash it from square one.
If the gm relies exclusively on narrative weight instead then there are absolutely no consequences that impact the PCs on any level other than inconsequential narrative ones. You yourself made that clear when you were unable to supply any beyond the narrative ones you were defending design with.




What are they on a mechanical level.

Why are you ignoring the fact that it does NOT matter? The gm can interrupt that rest with endless encounters and the 5e PCs will no longer be at risk of losing hp/resources at a rate faster than they are gained when they shrug off the interruptions by starting a new rest. What DOES matter is that I'm the players will feel like their GM is trolling them.

It doesn't matter if taking the rest means some narrative consequences pile on up until the world is so toxic that ending the campaign is the only real option and all the while players will blame the gm for designing no win guaranteed fail adventure after no win guaranteed fail adventure because they are certain that rest early rest often nova loops are the intended way of playing that wotc designed



Time is not a cost in 5e, it's a narrative detail. Follow that right into the nex bit of what you wrote

I'm not sure why you meeting other players who feel that way matters given that your post suggests you very much seem to have trouble separating narrative detail of the fiction and meaningful cost as distinct concepts D&d is not and has never been a game system that requires players to engage with the fiction... Those systems often tend to have mechanics that aid the GM in enforcing that engagement or shepherding the fiction's direction/integrity, d&d5e does not substitute its failure to supply GM tools on the matter being discussed with those tools either



Citing story development doesn't fix the fact that wotc made a game where PCs are able to output 5-6x more than expected by system math for the last decade+ and rather than providing any gm support they instead muddied the waters with claims that there is no encounter expectations or how an encounter could be literally anything like a puzzle or social interaction.

You're right, I think we're going in circles.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I think the idea is not that they don't care about anything. It's that what they care about is kicking butt at full power and looking awesome. Doing that most efficiently in the current system requires long rests after every significant engagement.

I like kicking butt and looking awesome but as a player I would probably walk out from any table that tries this naughty word after angry argument. I would rather not play at all than play with people who want to forcibly reduce the shared story we're telling to rules exploits.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I agree that there are issues and I agree that a day of time passing often is not a meaningful cost, but I also do not think that any RPG can function if the players do not care about the fiction at all.

 

[Mort]

I like kicking butt and looking awesome but as a player I would probably walk out from any table that tries this naughty word after angry argument. I would rather not play at all than play with people who want to forcibly reduce the shared story we're telling to rules exploits.

The disconnect seems to be:

There are some who believe narrative consequences are not "true" consequences and that players can just ignore them. That players are not exploiting the system, but playing as intended (by resting whenever mechanically optimal). Because the DM doesn't have the system mechanics to stop the players the DM is railroading them (the players) by having logical narrative consequences from player actions.

I find this argument unconvincing, but have said enough on it and won't be engaging in further circles!

 

[CreamCloud0]

Some people would find that an excellent excuse for a bunch of awesome fights.

Probably not if they come at such consistency that it prevents them from getting their long rests in, oh no, the bounty hunters who are out to capture those now-illegal adventurers specifically carry around scrolls of anti-tiny hut dispell magic? It’s the consequences of your inactions!