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

[clearstream]

Misspost

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Your open bias against Narrativism makes you label things that you dislike as "Narrativist" even when they actually align far closer and overtly with "Gamism." How about you just say that you dislike minion mechanics without needing to throw your hatred for Narrativism around on things that aren't even Narrativist? That's much easier and direct while also being factually true.

Completely agreed. Actually quite funny to hear minions called "narrativist" when they're nothing of the sort! I chose not to respond to it only because I feared backlash for doing so.

 

[clearstream]

It sounds like you are now laying a moral judgment on the narrative purpose of minions, and seemingly by extension those in favor of that narrative purpose. A valid opinion, but one liable to ruffle some feathers.

True. I have read here much addressing Goethe's first two questions. It is easy to see what the designers were trying to do: they spell it out. It is somewhat difficult to assess how well they accomplished it because of variance between groups, but I think making a comparison with other approaches sheds useful light on that.

But was it worth doing? Under what conditions might it not be worth doing?

I dunno about you, but it seems to me that the issue is the brutally ending sapient lives, not the amount of gameplay time spent doing so. That we show, or lack, respect for sapient lives based on whether we kill, not on whether it is effortless or laborious.

That said, this is a issue I have with the common violence aesthetics presented, even without minions involved..

Among the puzzles of fiction and imagination that have stood since Plato is the question of moral persuasion. Ian Bogost (in the context of videogames) expounded a notion of "persuasive games" which argues that games may function as rhetoric. Bogost wrote

Videogames [were] considered inconsequential because they [were] perceived to serve no cultural or social function save distraction at best, moral baseness at worst.​

​

In classical antiquity, rhetoric was understood as the art of oratory. Since then, some fields have adopted a more general understanding of rhetoric; for example, media studies now often covers visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively, in order to understand the function of rhetoric in photography and film​

​

In addition to becoming instrumental tools for institutional goals, videogames can also disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term social change.​

I would extend those observations to games generally, particularly those that in post-classical narratology are deemed to most cross-over with other forms of narrative. Assuming then that one accepts TTRPG can be morally persuasive, it seems straightforward to argue that one condition under which one might not wish to have greater mechanical support for "players get to enjoy carving through the mob like a knife through butter, feeling confident and powerful" would be if one held the moral concerns I briefly laid out.

Those are not objections to pretend killing per se. Fears that pretend violence will normalise actual violence are well-trod ground and I do not know them to be well-substantiated. Rather they are concerns with a rhetoric of indifference to, and indeed heightened satisfaction with, mass slaughter; in turn connected with a general resistance or at least conscious reappraisal of themes of colonization in games. (Notwithstanding that the precise condition I am saying voids minions mechanics of worth is one of holding the concerns I outline whether or not one holds any supposedly related concerns.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In fairness, it might very well be more than a small percentage overall; only those DMs tend to not be DMs for very long.

Whereas I find bad GMs stick to it nearly forever, because the kinds of personality traits that lead to a person being a bad GM are also the kinds of personality traits that lead to a person having zero or negative self-reflection, significantly inflated ego, and a desire for that ego to be validated by the praise of others. Negative feedback is to be dismissed, so even a string of bad games just means they're having bad luck with crappy players.

Being GM makes them the center of the universe and means anything that goes wrong has to be someone else's fault. Obviously. If something goes wrong under their watch, it couldn't possibly be that they made a mistake.

Of course, I also believe that truly bad GMs are uncommon to rare; I just think that there are a lot of rules and approaches which encourage poor GM practice, and which push potentially mediocre-to-decent GMs away from best practices and toward counterproductive or harmful ones. Hence why I think well-structured, well-presented, thoroughly-tested rules are of primary importance. They help push GMs in the other direction. They hamper outright bad GMs (not stop them, of course, but hobble them). They help players quickly and clearly identify bad GM behavior and address it, if it's coming from a merely not-great GM trying their best, or they help players get the hell out of dodge quickly when it actually is an outright bad GM. And then, they help lift merely weak to mediocre GMs up, teaching them better skills, showing them useful approaches, and building up their intuitions, so they can do better than they would alone, rather than worse.

Put another way, five bad DMs who only stick at it for a year each because all their players drift away do in fact outnumber one good DM who can keep DMing for a decade (over one or multiple campaigns, whatever) and still have players coming back for more.

Depends. But I do agree that a truly bad GM can have disproportionate impact, because they leave a string of shattered groups in their wake, while good GMs are more likely to keep one semi-kinda-sorta consistent group over time.

Five bad GMs might ruin 25 groups apiece in the time that ten amazing GMs run ten amazing campaigns, while 15 mediocre-to-poor GMs slowly grind down 15 groups in that time. Despite bad GMs being outnumbered five to one, the number of players burned by a bad GM is actually well in excess of the number that get a great GM and actually 1:1 with the number of players who don't have an outright bad GM.

A selfish and controlling person is likely to burn through relationships and hurt far more people than the number of people who find the love of a genuinely good-hearted and morally-upstanding person. Because when you do find the latter, for God's sake never let go.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

True. I have read here much addressing Goethe's first two questions. It is easy to see what the designers were trying to do: they spell it out. It is somewhat difficult to assess how well they accomplished it because of variance between groups, but I think making a comparison with other approaches sheds useful light on that.

But was it worth doing? Under what conditions might it not be worth doing?




Among the puzzles of fiction and imagination that have stood since Plato is the question of moral persuasion. Ian Bogost (in the context of videogames) expounded a notion of "persuasive games" which argues that games may function as rhetoric. Bogost wrote

Videogames [were] considered inconsequential because they [were] perceived to serve no cultural or social function save distraction at best, moral baseness at worst.​

​

In classical antiquity, rhetoric was understood as the art of oratory. Since then, some fields have adopted a more general understanding of rhetoric; for example, media studies now often covers visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively, in order to understand the function of rhetoric in photography and film​

​

In addition to becoming instrumental tools for institutional goals, videogames can also disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term social change.​

I would extend those observations to games generally, particularly those that in post-classical narratology are deemed to most cross-over with other forms of narrative. Assuming then that one accepts TTRPG can be morally persuasive, it seems straightforward to argue that one condition under which one might not wish to have greater mechanical support for "players get to enjoy carving through the mob like a knife through butter, feeling confident and powerful" would be if one held the moral concerns I briefly laid out.

Those are not objections to pretend killing per se. Fears that pretend violence will normalise actual violence are well-trod ground and I do not know them to be well-substantiated. Rather they are concerns with a rhetoric of indifference to, and indeed heightened satisfaction with, mass slaughter; in turn connected with a general resistance or at least conscious reappraisal of themes of colonization in games. (Notwithstanding that the precise condition I am saying voids minions mechanics of worth is one of holding the concerns I outline whether or not one holds any supposedly related concerns.)

See, I actually agree with the stance that games can be a tool of moral education and investigation.

I just still don't see how the thing you are targeting is in any way special.

There are much, much, MUCH more important things to fix, if our goal is to eliminate the lingering stench of colonialism from D&D. Minions are so far down the list, and share that spot with numerous other things, that singling them out for special attention is...as noted...special pleading.

Unless and until you can make an argument that actually does single out minion rules as specially different from the other parts of D&D that reek of colonialism, I stand by my previous arguments; they still apply, just now on the colonialism front, rather than the senseless-murder front.

 

[cranberry]

What criteria do you use to define a good, bad or mediocre GM's?

And why is it always on the shoulders of GM's? In my experience, I've seen more bad players than outright bad GM's

 

[AlViking]

So you are denying that the 5e designers based their design choices on the survey data? Or denying that their survey data is worth listening to?

Because I assure you it is not more useful to you than it is to me if we say that we can reject WotC survey data as flawed and incorrect. Much the opposite, in fact. And if we're only rejecting on this one specific issue, we're right back at special pleading.

I'm saying that you are making unfounded assumptions and a weird interpretation of survey data.

Some monsters have stronger versions, we've always had that. Meanwhile 5e has far lower numbers for AC meaning that lower level monsters can be a meaningful threat for longer.

What we do have? Plenty of monsters with hundreds of hit points, just scaled back a bit from the numbers we had on 4e.

Not sure what you mean by "outsole monsters" but a CR 1/2 Worg has 26 HP
CR 10 Dire Worg has a 147 HP, along with a big difference in damage potential as well.

Your statements about diegetic are vague and again I have not sure what you're trying to say. But the rules for 5e do seem to prioritize diegetic actions, resolutions and attrition.

What we don't have are minions.

 

[AlViking]

Well. It's nice to finally see folks call that out...twelve years late. I must beg your forgiveness for finding that a cold comfort at this point.


Because if that's the case, literally every claim every person has ever made about 5e being somehow correctly designed for the current market evaporates instantly--one cannot base any claims on sales, demographics, or anything else, because all of that is, by WotC's own admission, based on their survey data.

If the survey data is bad, everything that comes from it is bad. Fruit of a poisoned tree. That's substantially more useful to me than it is to anyone else.


Why make that exception? Money doesn't indicate good design either.

No survey will ever be perfect. Meanwhile I think the success of 5e as compared to previous WOTC editions speaks volumes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm saying that you are making unfounded assumptions and a weird interpretation of survey data.

Some monsters have stronger versions, we've always had that. Meanwhile 5e has far lower numbers for AC meaning that lower level monsters can be a meaningful threat for longer.

What we do have? Plenty of monsters with hundreds of hit points, just scaled back a bit from the numbers we had on 4e.

Not sure what you mean by "outsole monsters" but a CR 1/2 Worg has 26 HP
CR 10 Dire Worg has a 147 HP, along with a big difference in damage potential as well.

Your statements about diegetic are vague and again I have not sure what you're trying to say. But the rules for 5e do seem to prioritize diegetic actions, resolutions and attrition.

What we don't have are minions.

The designers specifically told us that the point of the existing 5e mechanics was to make monsters be outscaled in the specific way that minions are: not a threat individually but definitely a threat as a group.

Hence, you are simply wrong if you claim that they aren't trying to do this exact thing. And as you may have noticed...it didn't work very well, did it?

 

[AlViking]

The designers specifically told us that the point of the existing 5e mechanics was to make monsters be outscaled in the specific way that minions are: not a threat individually but definitely a threat as a group.

Hence, you are simply wrong if you claim that they aren't trying to do this exact thing. And as you may have noticed...it didn't work very well, did it?

Where did you get that conclusion? I literally stated "Meanwhile 5e has far lower numbers for AC meaning that lower level monsters can be a meaningful threat for longer."

I think it works far better than minions. In the DMG they discussed using mobs for large numbers of low level monsters which is what I do.

Meanwhile the core design of every version of D&D means that at some point monsters that were a threat at low levels are not a threat at higher levels.