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

[Micah Sweet]

I picked those rules at random, not based on what you would find irritating. I haven't found any GM rules in narrative games to be even slightly irritating.

All games demand certain behaviors from the GM. "Be a neutral referee" or "impartial but involved" demands a specific behavior that works to actively prevent the GM from taking certain actions (such as anything that would fall under the rule of cool, or anything that would be described as "antagonistic" or "fan of the players").

All of that stuff, no matter what game it's found in, is IMO best presented as advice, not rules.

 

[Umbran]

All of that stuff, no matter what game it's found in, is IMO best presented as advice, not rules.

In D&D, perhaps.

In general, there's nothing wrong with a designer building certain behaviors for GMs, players, or both, in rules. It would allow curating a game to provide a specific experience. If you don't like that experience, you just don't buy that game.

 

[AlViking]

In D&D, perhaps.

In general, there's nothing wrong with a designer building certain behaviors for GMs, players, or both, in rules. It would allow curating a game to provide a specific experience. If you don't like that experience, you just don't buy that game.

I agree but that also holds true for D&D in my opinion. It's not a bad thing to acknowledge that if you don't like a game there are others out there.

 

[kermit4karate]

In D&D, perhaps.

In general, there's nothing wrong with a designer building certain behaviors for GMs, players, or both, in rules. It would allow curating a game to provide a specific experience. If you don't like that experience, you just don't buy that game.

Kinda like the Banker in Monopoly, but the Banker isn't responsible for managing a very big world.... Mostly just Broadway and Park Place. Plus there's those condos and that jail.

 

[kermit4karate]

I agree but that also holds true for D&D in my opinion. It's not a bad thing to acknowledge that if you don't like a game there are others out there.

Honestly, I think the rulebooks for many TTRPGs (inc D&D) are so long, plus zillions of official supplements, that there's no way in heck most people would even interpret the rules the same way.

The rules can't all be taken literally in a 350-page tome.

 

[Lanefan]

Also like @AlViking, I'm not disputing there are bad GMs, but I'd bet money that as a percentage, there are MORE bad players than there are bad GMs.

What I've found over time is that the bad DMs and bad players often aren't the same people.

I've seen bad players become good DMs and I've seen good players become bad DMs.

My off-the-cuff theory is that there's a degree of self-confidence and maybe ego required to be a good DM but too much of it tends to make one a bad player; flip side, an otherwise good player lacking this is liable to fail at DMing.

 

[Lanefan]

Forget 30 years of what MY eyes and ears have shown me, from my own experiences with strangers, friends or work colleagues: I have encountered a LOT of people are just really awful at GMing, whether through inexperience, ignorance or just being pricks.

It depends, too, on one's definition of 'awful' and how high one sets the bar.

Some might think a DM is awful just because she neutrally and fairly runs a lethal-to-the-characters game and they don't like losing their characters.

Some might think a DM is awful just because he won't allow their favourite character species-classes-concepts into the game for whatever reason.

Some might think a DM is awful just because some unpleasant things (slavery, colonialism, racism, etc.) are portrayed as being accepted norms in the setting.

Thing is, even though they might not be to a specific person's taste, none of these make a DM awful. And yet even in this thread I've seen pretty much just this: examples of awful DMs where further inquiry shows their only "fault" was one of the reasons above.

There's a huge difference between an awful DM and a DM that for whatever reason you'd simply choose to not play with.

 

[Lanefan]

To me, no. The rule is "here is how species work." In 5.14, the presented races are described as the most common options; in 5.24, it just says "the following options are detailed." Neither book has a rule (or even an implication) that the options are limited to what's presented. Thus, creating a new species doesn't alter, remove, or create a rule.

Whether intentionally or not, this take shows a strong bias: that it's OK to add more species but not OK to remove some of what's already there.

As in, it's acceptable to add Hill Giants to the PC-playable list but is a less (or not) acceptable thing to remove Aarakocra from that list.

Personally, I'd rather that bias not be present.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In D&D, perhaps.

In general, there's nothing wrong with a designer building certain behaviors for GMs, players, or both, in rules. It would allow curating a game to provide a specific experience. If you don't like that experience, you just don't buy that game.

Sure, but I'm replying to someone who wants to apply this idea of hard rules for GMs to D&D and similar games. I disagree.

 

[Lanefan]

You can always do individual milestones for lower-level characters, but there's not supposed to be lower-level characters in this sort of game.

That in itself is sad, that everyone's expected to be and remain the same.

To me, that's an absolute terrible mentality to have. I would never want to play with a GM like that.

You wouldn't want to play with a GM who actually made the game challenging and where the threats were real rather than paper tigers? Because 5e run by the book is just that, compared even with 3e, never mind the 0e-1e.

You do you, I suppose, but as a player knowing everything's going to be a cakewalk would bore me to tears real fast.

So: (1) All items are interchangeable and meaningless to the players. (2) Because they know that you are willing to destroy things, so there's no point caring about their belongings.

If you care about it, don't take it into the field and put it at risk. Seems simple enough.

There's been far more power creep with magic than anything else over the editions.

I agree, and IMO it needs to be nerfed hard. Not by making magic less effective, but by making it riskier and harder to use.

This also doesn't speak well of your ability to judge the players' enjoyment of the game.

I'm just not as concerned about pinpoint balance as some are. I look far more at long-term trends for balance than I do at whether a given character was able to do much in the combat I just ran. Trying to balance in a moment-to-moment manner is IMO largely a fool's erranc.

And yet you have no problems with casters being versatile and having more abilities than they had before (via spells that are new to them or even the game).

I have a problem with casters being too versatile, for sure. That said, if a player wants to invent a spell (assuming it's not completely broken) I'm happy for the input and I'll find a way to incorporate it into the game. It's rare, but it does happen.

Which again speaks to the thread's title: here's an option that is practically guaranteed to make the game more interesting--to make combats more interesting--and yet it's getting thrown out without even being tried, because it may make some characters more versatile.

Let's take a series of numbers we're trying to balance, where higher broadly represents more powerful and-or versatile. Right now they look like:

4-5-4-4-5-7-4-5-4

Clearly, it's the '7' that's out of whack. Me, I'd do what's needed to bring that 7 down to a 5 and probably call that good enough.

Bringing all those 4s and 5s up to the 6-7 range would be massive power creep and also a stupid amount more work, not gonna happen if I'm doing it though it does seem to be the general WotC approach.

But here's the tricky one. It might be tempting here to balance everything at 5; but that too would represent overall power creep: sure you're losing two points (7 down to 5), and yet you're also adding five points by bringing those 4s up to 5. For me, a range of one integer out of ten is good enough to be good enough; I don't need it to be any finer-tuned than that.