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

[clearstream]

I've seen some rather out there criticisms of 4e, but, wow, this one takes the cake.

It's exactly what I wrote: a criticism of the minions mechanics. As I'm sure I've said elsewhere, I like 4e overall.

I'm not aiming for characters to feel confident and powerful because they can mass slaughter creatures with 1 hit point.

 

[Parmandur]

I would say this conservatism also applies to the open playtest "design by committee" aspect of 5e as well. They put out some really cool stuff in the playtests only to see it nerfed into oblivion by the people who insist on having things like resource management be a major part of the game. There seems to be a general shift away from resource management these days (look at the recent threads here about tracking ammunition, food, etc), and yet we end up with things like druids who can only turn into animals a paltry number of times per day and arcane archers who can only do their special trick arrows a paltry number of times a day.

I would love to see the game become more liberal with resource management. Back when I DMed 4e, I experimented with applying the recharge mechanic to PCs' encounter and daily powers. It worked great! The players loved it and it didn't noticeably overpower them. I'd love to do something like that in 5e as well.

I think resource management is pretty key to D&D being D&D, but I can understand them desire for a game with a similar moment to moment playstyle that isn't about that. The Plotweaver system Brotherwise Games is using for the Stormlight Archives RPG does that: it mostly plays like 5E moment to moment, but all resources are per Encounter, with a lot of DM flexibility on how to measure a "Scene".

 

[AlViking]

It's exactly what I wrote: a criticism of the minions mechanics. As I'm sure I've said elsewhere, I like 4e overall.

I'm not aiming for characters to feel confident and powerful because they can mass slaughter creatures with 1 hit point.

Do you have the same issue with John Wick, James Bond, pretty much every action movie and TV show? Because that's what they were trying to model. Nameless hirelings dropping like flies is pretty common.

I'm not saying its good or bad, its just an odd aspect of the game to call out as different. The vast majority of enemies in D&D only exist to be defeated by killing them.

 

[Maxperson]

Side note: in a module I wrote and ran a few years ago I kinda did just this: a big ol' Blue Dragon that in her prime would have summarily slaughtered the party was, when they found her, falling apart due to what seemed like sheer old age. Blind, decrepit, slow, arthritic - she was a shadow of her former self physically. She still had her brains and guile, however, and still breathed lightning for a rather stupid amount of damage (save for half) thus was still threat enough to drag two PCs down with her.

Later they found her wretched condition was caused by a very magical crystal (which also happened to be what the party was there to find) she had eaten 50-odd ago that had slowly been killing her from the inside out ever since.

Dragonlance did it as well with the super ancient and senile red dragon who thought the human refugees were her dead(I think) children. Blanking on her name at the moment.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Dragonlance did it as well with the super ancient and senile red dragon who thought the human refugees were her dead(I think) children. Blanking on her name at the moment.

Flamestrike was her human name, I think.

 

[clearstream]

I'm not saying its good or bad, its just an odd aspect of the game to call out as different.

Upthread you called out the 4e minions mechanics because you found "the dichotomy of the "low level" ogre having over a hundred HP vs an ogre with far better AC and hits for far more damage having 1 HP is incongruous to a lot of people".

Is it right to understand that you don't mean that all the other 4e mechanics are incongruous: you only mean that the minions mechanics are? That incongruity motivates your disfavouring the minions mechanics but does not necessarily motivate you to disfavour other 4e mechanics.

 

[Faolyn]

No version of D&D hews to the morals of ancient or medieval cultures. Never has. Look at the definitions of Law and Good in any edition and that is most certainly NOT ancient or medieval morality. Not by a long shot.

I'm pretty sure the only game I've seen that's actually tried to get players to stick to an ancient or medieval culture was FATAL, and of course that game did it wrong.

 

[AlViking]

Upthread you called out the 4e minions mechanics because you found "the dichotomy of the "low level" ogre having over a hundred HP vs an ogre with far better AC and hits for far more damage having 1 HP is incongruous to a lot of people".

Is it right to understand that you don't mean that all the other 4e mechanics are incongruous: you only mean that the minions mechanics are? That incongruity motivates your disfavouring the minions mechanics but does not necessarily motivate you to disfavour other 4e mechanics.

Which is not answering my question. I don't understand why killing minions is different than any other monster. It seems like you're saying killing minions bad, killing standard monsters not bad.

Its fine I just don't understand why.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't believe 4e plausibly hews to the morals of ancient or medieval cultures. That version incorporates alignment -- "A character's alignment (or lack thereof) describes his or her moral stance."

Which leaves it wide open for by-table interpretation.

That doesn't matter to parts of your argument, but for me it scotches any worries about incorporating contemporary morals into our imagined worlds. And the latest versions of D&D do that quite openly.

I've noticed. It's annoying.

That noted, I can enjoy worlds that alter morality in specific ways: I don't feel bound to make the imagined morality the same as our own.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with this apparently-upcoming reboot of Dark Sun in terms of whether (and how much) its rather edgy morality gets nerfed.

 

[clearstream]

Which is not answering my question. I don't understand why killing minions is different than any other monster. It seems like you're saying killing minions bad, killing standard monsters not bad.

Its fine I just don't understand why.

I'm not certain I fully understand it either. I have a real-world ethical concern related to colonialism and its supporting tropes. One of the more egregious has been the depersonalization and mass slaughter of peoples. Usually I find myself able to sustain separateness between such compunctions and play. That I don't in this case potentially relates to the concept of "bleed" as defined in Nordic LARP.

Bleed is experienced by a player when her thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of her character, or vice versa. With increasing bleed, the border between player and character becomes more and more transparent. It makes sense to think of the degree of bleed as a measure of how separated different levels of play (actual/inner/meta) are.​

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Bleed is instrumental for horror role-playing: It is often harder to scare the player through the character than the other way around. An overt secluded dice roll against a player's perception stat is likely to make the character more catious.​

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A classic example of bleed is when a player's affection for another player carries over into the game or influences her character's perception of the other's character.​

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...games rely on bleed either to influence player's actions or to achieve higher purposes in the premise. For example, Fat man down uses bleed to encourage the players to reflect over society's treatment of fat people. Playing Doubt close to home regularly causes bleed as a consequence of using own experiences in the game and re-living relationship situations or reflecting on relationships. Sometimes, the entire purpose of a game is to create bleed.​

The purpose of the 4e minions mechanic in the designers' own words is that "The players get to enjoy carving through the mob like a knife through butter, feeling confident and powerful." For me that produces "bleed" somehow connected with my real-world ethical position: I find myself paying a price that I don't wish to pay to sustain the lusory attitude of separateness.

It seems possible that my morally-motivated preference has revealed something that can be seen in TTRPG and not in traditional authored linear narrative. Roughly that through bleed a player can feel compunction about what they will pretend to do; and this arises on account of their being author, actor and audience. So here it is not the worry that the fiction will have real-world moral consequences, but that one doesn't want to imagine and pretend to do some sort of thing one finds immoral in real-life. As other posters have stressed, morality stays firmly located in the real-world.

The above might not be right in every detail, but it seems directionally accurate to me based on the conversation thus far.