D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Faolyn]

The inclusion of parasites and diseases was, I think, largely to make rooting around in fetid areas more hazardous and-or force more drain on spell resources. One could argue this is yet another, though minor, "loss condition" present in earlier editions that has since been stripped out.

I'm not sure if 5e even has Cure Disease as a spell any more, but IMO it should; if nothing else it's probably the single most important spell to a stay-at-home Cleric trying to help those under his care, and it often has field use for adventurers as well.

Cure disease was lumped under lesser restoration. It's a 2nd-level spell, which rather suggests that in order to create a "realistic" world in 5e, where disease is rampant, either spellcasting clerics of 3rd level and above are vanishingly rare; disease, or at least deadly and/or epidemic diseases, are very rare to nonexistent; or clerics in general are seriously unwilling to heal without massive payments up front.

(This is why I always say that you can't just include things and say "it's realistic!" because magic and nonhumans throws all that out the window. If your worldbuilding actively says that clerics are super-rare, then NPCs should be treating that PC cleric like an avatar--and then you have to hope that the players are OK with that.)

Anyway, the real world has twenty bazillion things in it, and it's impossible to produce a simulation for them all, at least not in a book format. So you have to pick and choose what's important for a very sim game to have and what level of detail is necessary. The disease section in the DMG is about two pages long and goes into rather disturbing detail involving each major organ group.

So... these things would need to be simplified. And how much can it be simplified before it stops being sim and starts being either nothing more than a flavorless mechanic (such as 5e's poisoned mechanic--disad on attack and ability rolls) or goes the other way and tells the GM and players how to model and flavor it, which is narrative enough to cause some people to break out into hives?

 

[Lanefan]

As usual, your jaundiced and frankly hostile descriptions of a game you haven't played, haven't read, and know almost nothing about are completely out of whack with what the actual game says.

Yes, there are rules which are binding on the GM. This is also true of D&D. Unless you're now going to claim that a player rolling a d20 and getting 20 on the die is now something that GMs are supposed to just discard completely? I had thought we had settled previously that the GM is bound, by the rules, to respect the rolls a player makes in the open?

Thing is, the player is equally bound by those same rules. If a player rolls a 1 to hit, she can't ignore that roll and say her character's attack hit anyway.

In D&D, I can think of a bunch of rules that are binding on players but not on DMs.

I cannot think of a rule that's binding only on the DM and not also on the players.

And if DW and other systems do have rules that only apply to the GMs but not the players, that might be the difference.

 

[Neonchameleon]

There are 15 conditions listed in the PHB that can be applied instead of damage.

In other words prefabricated parts.

You don't have to agree with my interpretation of the tone of the rules, it's just my impression.

So no actual play experience. Just comparing the instruction manual for a set of power tools with the tone of a "decorate your house with IKEA" guide. Of course the power tool guide is going to be more didactic.

But they consider it a new move "When you go alone into the Unhallowed Halls" for "You might want to create moves to reflect the effects of some particular threat..." to me indicates a different approach.

That isn't a move or a complete sentence. A move actually ... moves. What you have there is the trigger to a move - the first part of the creation of a GM.

So let's show how to turn it into an actual complete move. We know it's about the Unhallowed Halls and that it only triggers when someone goes alone; people are safe when they are together. So this feels like a wisdom check with badness and temptation. It's been a long time since I've Dungeon Worlded so my apologies.

When you go alone into the Unhallowed Halls roll +Wis. On a 10+ choose 2, on a 7-9 choose 1

• You can find your way easily back to safety
• The halls and their master do not twist your perceptions
• The ghost of an adventurer who fell in the Unhallowed Halls comes to you offering all the gear on their corpse in exchange for being buried in consecrated ground

Now that's a move of the sort you wouldn't find in D&D and is more visceral a choice than D&D normally offers - and certainly doesn't help you make. And it lets the player pick their poison.

As an aside I do not like Dungeon World; I find it a poor implementation of its concept. For better D&D meets PbtA I'd recommend Fellowship, Stonetop, or Daggerheart.

I have very few house rules for my D&D game that actually change anything because I personally don't need them. Obviously other people have different preferences and there's a ton of customizations done for D&D by third parties as well.

I have only a few 5e house rules. It does what it does but slowly and clunkily but is a playable system. As a GM I have two objections - how few tools and direct opportunities it gives me and how slow it is. As a player I dislike how on rails and un-rounded character growth is.

 

[Faolyn]

But, if we're using the rules the way they are supposed to be used, and it requires the DM to step in and curate those rules in order to address a more sim approach, doesn't that mean that the rules aren't really supporting a sim approach? In DW, agenda and principles are pretty clearly defined. You are told pretty explicitly how they are supposed to work in the game.

Very, very little in D&D tells you how to get a most sim result out of the mechanics. And, if the DM is required to massage the world in order to fit the results that the mechanics are giving you, then those mechanics are not simulating the world.

I've been told repeatedly that the DM should NEVER change the world to fit the results of the mechanics. That's the opposite of sim play.

And note, the "fall if you fail by 5" only applies to climbing. What does missing an attack by 5 look like? Is it different from missing by 1? Or missing by 10? What does failing a performance check look like? Why did my performance check fail if I failed by 3 or by 6 or by 12? The rules are completely silent here.

While yes, D&D should include rules for this (even if only as "optional rules"), it's not hard to actually houserule it.

Combat--miss by 5 or less: minimal damage. Maybe 1 point, maybe equal to your PB or attribute modifier. If this damage would bring the target to 0 hp, they don't die but go unconscious. (You don't want to nickle-and-dime a target to death, after all.) What does this look like? You hit the armor but it doesn't penetrate, just rattles. Or you unintentionally pull your blow at the last moment, or your weapon turns due to a momentarily poor grip. Miss by 6 or more, it's a total whiff.

For Performance, you first need to ask yourself what a successful Performance check does. Which means thinking up all the ways you can use the skill that would be important for the game. (And this goes into my other post--how much detail is actually needed in a game, and how much is unwieldy fluff?) Xanathar's did a whole list using the tool proficiencies, and yes, they should have done it with the regular skills as well.

 

[AlViking]

Cure disease was lumped under lesser restoration. It's a 2nd-level spell, which rather suggests that in order to create a "realistic" world in 5e, where disease is rampant, either spellcasting clerics of 3rd level and above are vanishingly rare; disease, or at least deadly and/or epidemic diseases, are very rare to nonexistent; or clerics in general are seriously unwilling to heal without massive payments up front.

(This is why I always say that you can't just include things and say "it's realistic!" because magic and nonhumans throws all that out the window. If your worldbuilding actively says that clerics are super-rare, then NPCs should be treating that PC cleric like an avatar--and then you have to hope that the players are OK with that.)

You need a greater restoration (5th spell level so 9th level cleric or higher) in order to cure disease, lesser restoration removes the conditions Blinded, Deafened, Paralyzed, or Poisoned. The spell could be cast a total of 9 times in a day by a 20th level caster assuming they use higher level spell slots to do so. Not exactly going to stop a plague, although it would be difficult for many people to know who to cast it on.

Anyway, the real world has twenty bazillion things in it, and it's impossible to produce a simulation for them all, at least not in a book format. So you have to pick and choose what's important for a very sim game to have and what level of detail is necessary. The disease section in the DMG is about two pages long and goes into rather disturbing detail involving each major organ group.


So... these things would need to be simplified. And how much can it be simplified before it stops being sim and starts being either nothing more than a flavorless mechanic (such as 5e's poisoned mechanic--disad on attack and ability rolls) or goes the other way and tells the GM and players how to model and flavor it, which is narrative enough to cause some people to break out into hives?

Which is why I consider the approach the game takes than the actual level of abstraction or granularity. Any label we apply isn't ever really going to be accurate, for me it's more about am I looking at what happens in game and how what the character says and does is resolved. In a narrative game you're thinking about the impact on the story, in sim it's more what's the direct result first and then considering whether something else will happen because of that direct result.

But at a certain point the argument has about as much support and validity as how many angels can dance on head of a pin. Different games have different approaches that appeal to different things people want out of games.

edit - 9th level to cast 5th level spells.

 

[Lanefan]

Cure disease was lumped under lesser restoration. It's a 2nd-level spell, which rather suggests that in order to create a "realistic" world in 5e, where disease is rampant, either spellcasting clerics of 3rd level and above are vanishingly rare; disease, or at least deadly and/or epidemic diseases, are very rare to nonexistent; or clerics in general are seriously unwilling to heal without massive payments up front.

(This is why I always say that you can't just include things and say "it's realistic!" because magic and nonhumans throws all that out the window. If your worldbuilding actively says that clerics are super-rare, then NPCs should be treating that PC cleric like an avatar--and then you have to hope that the players are OK with that.)

The main limit is that there's only so many 3rd-plus level Clerics of which not all are stay-at-home healing types, and they each only have so many spell slots. They can probably keep up with the usual day-to-day demand - the in-game equivalent of a walk-in clinic, maybe? - but if there's an epidemic or plague they'll be overwhelmed in a hurry.

Anyway, the real world has twenty bazillion things in it, and it's impossible to produce a simulation for them all, at least not in a book format. So you have to pick and choose what's important for a very sim game to have and what level of detail is necessary. The disease section in the DMG is about two pages long and goes into rather disturbing detail involving each major organ group.

So... these things would need to be simplified. And how much can it be simplified before it stops being sim and starts being either nothing more than a flavorless mechanic (such as 5e's poisoned mechanic--disad on attack and ability rolls) or goes the other way and tells the GM and players how to model and flavor it, which is narrative enough to cause some people to break out into hives?

The middle ground would seem to be to provide a range-plus-default. For poison, there could be a whole laundry list of possible effects; the DM could choose or roll which it is if the module doesn't already say; with the default being the disadvantage effect.

 

[AlViking]

In other words prefabricated parts.

So no actual play experience. Just comparing the instruction manual for a set of power tools with the tone of a "decorate your house with IKEA" guide. Of course the power tool guide is going to be more didactic.

That isn't a move or a complete sentence. A move actually ... moves. What you have there is the trigger to a move - the first part of the creation of a GM.

So let's show how to turn it into an actual complete move. We know it's about the Unhallowed Halls and that it only triggers when someone goes alone; people are safe when they are together. So this feels like a wisdom check with badness and temptation. It's been a long time since I've Dungeon Worlded so my apologies.

When you go alone into the Unhallowed Halls roll +Wis. On a 10+ choose 2, on a 7-9 choose 1

• You can find your way easily back to safety
• The halls and their master do not twist your perceptions
• The ghost of an adventurer who fell in the Unhallowed Halls comes to you offering all the gear on their corpse in exchange for being buried in consecrated ground

Now that's a move of the sort you wouldn't find in D&D and is more visceral a choice than D&D normally offers - and certainly doesn't help you make. And it lets the player pick their poison.

As an aside I do not like Dungeon World; I find it a poor implementation of its concept. For better D&D meets PbtA I'd recommend Fellowship, Stonetop, or Daggerheart.

I have only a few 5e house rules. It does what it does but slowly and clunkily but is a playable system. As a GM I have two objections - how few tools and direct opportunities it gives me and how slow it is. As a player I dislike how on rails and un-rounded character growth is.

I've never had the opportunity or time to play DW but I have looked into it and was relaying my impression. Other than that I have no idea what you're even trying to say any more. The games work differently with different goals and presentation.

 

[Lanefan]

You need a greater restoration (5th spell level so 7th level cleric or higher)

I thought you still had to be 9th-level to cast 5th-level spells?

in order to cure disease, lesser restoration removes the conditions Blinded, Deafened, Paralyzed, or Poisoned. The spell could be cast a total of 9 times in a day by a 20th level caster assuming they use higher level spell slots to do so. Not exactly going to stop a plague, although it would be difficult for many people to know who to cast it on.

And that's a pretty serious hammer to disease-curing; Cure Disease used to be 3rd level (so, only needed a 5th-level caster).

That said, has 5e gone at all into the idea of stay-at-home or non-adventuring spells and abilities, as a worldbuilding aid? If yes, maybe this fits there.

 

[AlViking]

I thought you still had to be 9th-level to cast 5th-level spells?

Oops, I read the chart wrong. I'll fix it.

And that's a pretty serious hammer to disease-curing; Cure Diseaseused to be 3rd level (so, only needed a 5th-level caster).


That said, has 5e gone at all into the idea of stay-at-home or non-adventuring spells and abilities, as a worldbuilding aid? If yes, maybe this fits there.

I was quite surprised they got rid of cure disease myself, at the very least it likely should have been lesser restoration.

 

[Campbell]

Thing is, the player is equally bound by those same rules. If a player rolls a 1 to hit, she can't ignore that roll and say her character's attack hit anyway.

In D&D, I can think of a bunch of rules that are binding on players but not on DMs.

I cannot think of a rule that's binding only on the DM and not also on the players.

And if DW and other systems do have rules that only apply to the GMs but not the players, that might be the difference.

In Dungeon World there is complete asymmetry. The rules (basic moves and the like) only apply to player characters and the rules that apply to the GM only apply to the GM. The only thing that binds the GM are their agenda, principles and moves. There are no rules for how environments function, there are no rules for how NPCs might affect the environment or the player characters. The prep you are bound to is fairly minimal. Basically, you get massive carte blanche to have the setting intrude upon play, unbound by most of the things that constrain a typical D&D DM in return for abiding by some basic ground rules and using that freedom for the good of the game.

It obviously is a different approach but all this claptrap about flexibility is nonsense.