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

[gban007]

Correct. People say they want a "cool" Superman. But then the thing that actually succeeded was a dorky Superman, a Superman who was comfortable being kinda lame.

Directors had been giving people the Superman the public told them they wanted: complicated, gritty, grim, violent, willing to kill. James Gunn correctly--after some lobbying from Mr. Corenswet, I've been told--understood that making Superman cool is counterproductive. It seems like it's what we need, that we have to grunge him up a bit otherwise he can't appeal to the modern, jaded, cynical audience. But it isn't.

To make a successful Superman, you have to make Superman. And Superman needs to be the brightest thing in the room--that's the whole point of the persona worn by Clark Kent, the heart-of-gold farmboy from Kansas. Superman needs to be a little dorky, because only someone willing to be a little dorky can be sincere enough to be Superman. Superman needs to step back from being the absolute coolest thing he could potentially be, because he needs to be someone a child would willingly approach to ask for directions.

They've finally stopped giving people what the metrics and surveys and audience personality assessments "predicted" people wanted, and actually looked at what makes Superman be Superman?, and guess what, it's goddamn BRILLIANT.

Just so I understand, the proof that the directors etc were right to ignore what people said they wanted is the financial success of the new Superman film, but the financial success of 5e can't be used as proof that the designers of 5e were right in their approach?

 

[Lanefan]

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."

Ezekiel is, I think, advocating for the opposite; that lower level monsters not remain a meaningful threat as levels advance. Steeper power curve a la 3e-4e rather than flatter a la 1e and 5e.

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.

Every monster has a range of character levels to which it represents a viable threat without being either impossible to beat or a pushover.

Ideally, IMO, that range is fairly wide such that lower level monsters remain a threat longer and that low-level parties also have half a chance against higher-grade monsters.

 

[Lanefan]

You think the peasants stand a chance against a dragon? One that would just fly down an obliterate them with a breath weapon? That's kind of the point of dragons in 5e, enough armed soldiers can still be a threat to most dragons, especially young dragons. But they're still a massive threat.

How that relates to minions I have no clue.

Unless the dragon is itself supposed to be a minion in this example?

 

[AnotherGuy]

I've been on about their surveying since 1999.

I didn't even know they did one for 3e!

And as their surveying has been crap since 1999 it's not just a problem for 5e; 3e and 4e were similarly affected.

Join us Lanefan on this side of 2000, I guarantee you so much fun!

 

[AlViking]

I'm seeing an example, which is very different from a hard rule. Is there anything in there that says that you must have six successes before three failures; that you can't change it to five successes before four failures, or best out of three? Or that failure must mean becoming helplessly lost instead of circling back to their starting position?

Heck, is there anything that says you must do the goal of seeking a temple in a jungle as a skill challenge? That you can't let the players do a hexcrawl or just turn the whole thing into a montage and say "three days and many bug bites later, you're at the temple"?

It seems like there's plenty of wiggle room here.

The reason for everyone contributing is so that every player can do something, so that none of them feel left out. Is that a bad rule? There are times when it can be bad, such as when that one player truly has no skills they can contribute or their contributions would be unhelpful (which makes for great roleplay!), but that doesn't mean the rule itself is bad. Nor does it mean you can't let someone sit out once in a while.

Successes and failures depend on the difficulty, it went up to 12 successes before 5 failures. Meanwhile the guidance in the DMG was to use skill challenges unless something was resolved by a single roll.

"It’s not a skill challenge every time you call for a skill check. When an obstacle takes only one roll to resolve, it’s not a
challenge. One Diplomacy check to haggle with the merchant, one Athletics check to climb out of the pit trap, one
Religion check to figure out whose sacred tome contains the parable—none of these constitutes a skill challenge."

Obviously you could ignore skill challenges, that doesn't make it a good tool.

 

[AlViking]

Unless the dragon is itself supposed to be a minion in this example?

Your guess is as good as mine.

 

[Lanefan]

And IME, most people are in the middle. They do as good as recon as they can, but not so good that they are 100% correct.

Yep. And sometimes their recon is accurate, and sometimes not. I think we're in agreement here.

My point, though, is that if their recon isn't accurate there has to be a causal chain within the fiction to explain it even if the PCs (and thus the players) never find out what that causal chain is.

Their recon shows 50 pirates on the ship but when they get there to attack there's 100 carousing on the deck? Causal chain: another allied ship (which the PCs can see anchored in the bay if they look) just pulled into port and the two crews are celebrating the ship's safe return.

Their recon shows 50 pirates on the ship but when they get there to attack there's a skeleton watch of 2 on deck and all else is quiet. Causal chain: the captain led most of the crew ashore this morning for an away mission raiding an inland farmstead reputed to be the hiding place of a rival captain and what's left of her crew.

How very strange. Once I got out of college, I've gamed with very few real jerks, and my current group (whom I've been with for 15~ years) is pure gold. Yes, we have disagreements, but we work them out like mature adults. Nor are we a group of goodie two-shoes, as evidenced by yesterday's interrogation of an NPC that very quickly veered into torture and for all I know may go much darker next week. And we're not idealistic kids, either, since we range in age from early 30s to mid 50s, with me towards the upper end.

I started DMing while still in university and it was pretty wild-west stuff. And I got used to that, and came to enjoy it.

Good gravy. Why don't they just play video games, if they only want to beat each other up? It sounds like your group is highly disrespectful of both your time and effort.

Two things here:

1. I don't consider it disrespectful in any way. My job is to freeze the ice and provide the puck. After that, what they do is what they do and I just DM what comes.

2. I should mention that the group I have at the moment are really quite mellow. Three of the four aren't much for shenanigans while the fourth very much has that in his toolbox but is playing along with the rest. They're not goody-twoshoes either, though.

And if I'm a player and someone wants to play like that, I'll leave their butt at the inn. As I've said, I'm not going to adventure with someone I can't trust not to steal from me or slit my throat in the night. At the very least, it's not worth the risk involved, no matter how great their skills are.

And that's fair. No issue at all with an in-character solution to an in-character problem; though if the rest of the party ends up supporting the untrustworthy type it might end up being you roleplaying your first character out of the party and needing to come back with a second - who may or may not fit in any better. I've seen this many a time, usually when someone wants to play a Paladin or other super-goodly type and the rest of the party don't want such a thing anywhere near them.

 

[Lanefan]

I really do have to question how ongoing PvP approaches to things would work barring "PC Glow". And why I'd bother to keep playing with someone who habitually did this, even if I didn't know about it in-character.

What I find is that sooner or later one or both of two things happen:

1. The players by and large get it out of their systems and get on with adventuring.
2. Every potential new party member is vetted with alignment detection spells and the like, with unacceptable results being forthwith rejected (PC Glow be damned).

Usually '2' happens once a faction (be it the goody-good faction, the nasty faction, whatever) within the party has taken control, they then vet any new recruits to make sure they'll fit in with the established faction.

 

[Lanefan]

People don't like changes because:

(1) they're new, and new is scary
(2) because change implies that the way you've been playing is old-fashioned or out-of-date or even just plain wrong and how dare you say that
(3) because many changes are designed to make things simpler, which makes some people unhappy because they had to walk uphill both ways with no shoes in order to kill orcs, and if it was good enough for them it should be good enough for you.
(4) they got used to the old ways and don't want to learn new things.

I've found it fairly uncommon that people have other reasons than those.

You forgot one:
(5) the change is objectively worse/less functional/harder to use than what was there before (e.g. many so-called software "upgrades").

 

[Lanefan]

I didn't even know they did one for 3e!

At the top of the screen there's a "Features" drop-down. Click that. The second item on the list is a write-up of the survey they did leading up to 3e.