D&D General Ranking the Pillars of Play

[CleverNickName]

For my gaming group, Downtime happens between gaming sessions, usually over email. We recap the events of the prior game, do some carousing to find out next adventure, do some shopping, etc. But it doesn't happen at the table, and very few dice are rolled... the DM will just email us our findings and clues, and we will start planning the next gaming session.

So for us it isn't really a pillar of play, it's what we do when we're not playing.

 

[overgeeked]

Theory: amount of control is proportional to the amount of satisfaction.

In my experience, players tend to have more control over the Combat pillar and the least amount of control over Exploration...so players tend to enjoy combat scenes quite a bit, and really hate having to 'waste time' disarming traps, solving riddles, and searching for secret doors.

Dungeon Masters are the inverse: they have the least amount of control over Combat and the most control over Exploration...so DMs tend to enjoy hiding things and inventing stuff for the players to solve, and see combat as something that slows (or even prevents) the party from 'making progress.'

And both sides of the table seem to have about the same amount of control over the Social pillar, so they tend to shrug at it. "Sure, we can talk to those guards, maybe try to bribe them...but if I get bored, I'm going to start stabbing them."

When I DM, I enjoy combat because I get to throw all kinds of weird stuff at my players. Monsters they've never seen, obstacles that frustrate their plans, terrain that's (hopefully) interesting, etc. It's not my favorite, but I don't hate it. As a DM I love exploration and kinda suck a bit at social.

When I play, I absolutely hate combat because it's always so monotonous and boring. Hurry up and wait. Pick a button on your character sheet and press it (and don't you dare try something that's not a button on your character sheet). Hope it works. Move on. Hurry up and wait. Round after round after monotonous round. Until the PCs inevitably win. Snooze. As a player I love exploration and kinda suck a bit at social, though I'm a bit better than as a DM because I only have one character to worry about.

To me, the exploration is the point of the game. To see what's out there. To pretend to be in a fantasy land and poke and prod and see what's there to discover. Find all the differences, all the similarities. Absolutely love exploration.

 

[Micah Sweet]

For my gaming group, Downtime happens between gaming sessions, usually over email. We recap the events of the prior game, do some carousing to find out next adventure, do some shopping, etc. But it doesn't happen at the table, and very few dice are rolled... the DM will just email us our findings and clues, and we will start planning the next gaming session.

So for us it isn't really a pillar of play, it's what we do when we're not playing.

See, I think you're playing whenever you engage with the game, whether or not you're actively adventuring. Downtime is absolutely part of that, and has the added benefit of making the world feel more real and alive (which matters a great deal to me). Level Up in particular provides some great tools for downtime.

 

[Stormonu]

Combat is the piece I enjoy the most, but combat, combat, combat bores the heck out of me.

As a DM, they're more sandpiles that bleed together than pillars. I don't think in aspects of "this is an exploration pillar event" or such. The game designers can worry about that sort of stuff. I just go with whatever seems the most fun for me and my players. If THEY want to spend an hour on describing the camp scene and less than five minutes in combat, guess what I'll spend my focus on?

So, in the end I voted "who cares, let's play!"

 

[Lanefan]

I know some people care for this, but I can totally leave it. I don't care about crafting, slow healing, shopping, building a house, training level ups, etc... Lets get to the action already!

Where I like to think of the characters as being more than just adventurers and having lives beyond dungeon-delving and other deeds of bravery, and would like to see the game give space for these non-adventuring aspects to develop.

And sure, shopping and crafting and training are part of it; but so are politics, stronghold-building, non-adventuring travel, research, invention, and-or simply sitting in the pub telling war stories (and making new friends a.k.a. party recruits in the process!).

Downtime serves another important function as well: it slows the in-setting pace of level advancement to, if not a reasonable rate, at least a slightly-less-ridiculously fast one.

 

[Lanefan]

For my gaming group, Downtime happens between gaming sessions, usually over email. We recap the events of the prior game, do some carousing to find out next adventure, do some shopping, etc. But it doesn't happen at the table, and very few dice are rolled... the DM will just email us our findings and clues, and we will start planning the next gaming session.

So for us it isn't really a pillar of play, it's what we do when we're not playing.

Which is fine if your players pay any attention to the game between sessions. Not all do (and IME some simply aren't willing to), and for those that do the degree of out-of-session participation is often forced to vary greatly by real-life concerns.

 

[CleverNickName]

See, I think you're playing whenever you engage with the game, whether or not you're actively adventuring. Downtime is absolutely part of that, and has the added benefit of making the world feel more real and alive (which matters a great deal to me). Level Up in particular provides some great tools for downtime.

Which is fine if your players pay any attention to the game between sessions. Not all do (and IME some simply aren't willing to), and for those that do the degree of out-of-session participation is often forced to vary greatly by real-life concerns.

These are excellent points...I think you might have changed my mind regarding Downtime as a "pillar" of the game. There are many, many ways to play a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game, after all. Perhaps Downtime is a fourth pillar of the game: it handles a lot of interaction between the characters in the story and the setting/NPCs, has its own risks and rewards, and engages a variety of character options, backstory, and abilities.

Which makes me wonder: is there a fifth pillar of the game, Creation? Rolling up a character, writing a backstory, planning out your character advancement, interacting with your fellow players and the DM to create a role within the group and within the story...I consider character creation as much a part of "playing D&D" as I do rolling dice and calling my actions. And the same on the DM side of the screen: writing stories, drawing maps, crafting encounters, rolling up monsters and NPCs...my fellow DMs spend hours and hours each week dreaming up the adventures for their players. That, to me, is how most DMs "play D&D" most of the time.

Maybe there are five pillars of the game: Combat, Creation, Downtime, Exploration, and Social.

 

[payn]

Where I like to think of the characters as being more than just adventurers and having lives beyond dungeon-delving and other deeds of bravery, and would like to see the game give space for these non-adventuring aspects to develop.

And sure, shopping and crafting and training are part of it; but so are politics, stronghold-building, non-adventuring travel, research, invention, and-or simply sitting in the pub telling war stories (and making new friends a.k.a. party recruits in the process!).

Politics and tavern story time are firmly in the social pillar for me so I dont need downtime for this. I do get what you are sayin, I just dont need it on the table or during the session.

Downtime serves another important function as well: it slows the in-setting pace of level advancement to, if not a reasonable rate, at least a slightly-less-ridiculously fast one.

Leveling barely makes sense to me if I try and logic it into settings and games, thats just all under the hood part of gaming for me. So, going from 1-20 takes as long as it takes which can be fast or slow.

 

[Lanefan]

These are excellent points...I think you might have changed my mind regarding Downtime as a "pillar" of the game. There are many, many ways to play a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game, after all. Perhaps Downtime is a fourth pillar of the game: it handles a lot of interaction between the characters in the story and the setting/NPCs, has its own risks and rewards, and engages a variety of character options, backstory, and abilities.

Which makes me wonder: is there a fifth pillar of the game, Creation? Rolling up a character, writing a backstory, planning out your character advancement, interacting with your fellow players and the DM to create a role within the group and within the story...I consider character creation as much a part of "playing D&D" as I do rolling dice and calling my actions. And the same on the DM side of the screen: writing stories, drawing maps, crafting encounters, rolling up monsters and NPCs...my fellow DMs spend hours and hours each week dreaming up the adventures for their players. That, to me, is how most DMs "play D&D" most of the time.

Maybe there are five pillars of the game: Combat, Creation, Downtime, Exploration, and Social.

Interesting idea. My only quibble would be with the name of your fifth pillar, as when I read "Creation" I took it to refer to the PCs creating things in-game.

I'd instead call it Prep, or some simile thereof. Player-side Prep is the roll-up, backstory, etc.; DM-side Prep - well, we all know what that is.

 

[J.Quondam]

Maybe there are five pillars of the game: Combat, Creation, Downtime, Exploration, and Social.

Yes, or something. This gets to something that's bugged me recently: that maybe the Three Pillar model isn't especially enlightening.* For example, I tend to view Social and Combat as just two different outcomes stemming from the same "NPC interaction" part of the game. That, in turn, is an branch off a greater "World interaction" part, perhaps an "Environment interaction" part which also includes some of the things we lump into Exploration, including traps, hazards, mapping, etc. There's probably a PC development part, too, which might include generation/levelling, survival, and downtime type activities in different branches. Probably other stuff, as well as parts that straddle lines (eg, puzzles, information gathering, etc). In other words, a more intuitive structure (for me, at least) might be "branches" rather than "pillars".

Or something. I haven't really developed my own thoughts on the matter. But that's probably a different thread, I think.

* Except that everyone is familiar with it, and it's an easy way to split up publications. Which, to be fair, certainly isn't useless!