D&D General Reification versus ludification in 5E/6E

[Lanefan]

Are these exceptional crafting and maintenance skills something the PCs can theoretically learn? Why do only hobgoblins have them?

More to the point, can Hobgoblin PCs learn those skills? I mean, everything's PC-playable now, right?

 

[I'm A Banana]

But only the dm is seeing any of this. The player should never know how a monster is doing its exact damage. That a monster does X or Y damage is irrelevant to getting into the head of your character because you, the player, have no idea how the sausage is made.

The first hiccup here is that being a hobgoblin with a longsword matters to the DM, too, in as much as the DM is pretending to be a hobgoblin with a longsword and not merely facilitating a mathematically determined outcome between two buckets of numbers. That consistency isn't JUST important for payers.

The second is that players read the MM, too. It's not a secret.

Yes, but let's say the hobgoblin was sleeping, and someone stole their shield and armor; we wouldn't then assert that the hobgoblin's AC was still 18, right?

Right, this is the bit that's so weird and frustrating, where we're drawing this strange dischotomy between gameplay and detail, when that function of derivation and extrapolation is ideally a function of gameplay. If AC is a function of actual physical armor in some cases, a PC can want to get a creature out of armor to make it easier to fight, and can know what will happen when they do.

I do think it's worth mentioning that game designers often operate very easily under the more gamey assumptions, because that's part of what they need to pay attention to. In order to get the math right and get the desired outcome, a hobgoblin with a longsword needs to be less of a prop and more of a bucket of numbers. But that's where the fragility or robustness of your game design comes in. If giving that hobgoblin a greatsword dramatically impacts the outcome that your designer-math tells you needs to happen and so you find yourself trying to find excuses for why hobgoblins can't use greatswords or why they never sleep (and D&D, especially in early e's, was FULL of this kind of "drow weapons evaporate in sunlight" kind of kludges) and...you're lost. You've replaced trying to be a fantasy hero with trying to play a fantasy game.

It's why this kind of thing keeps coming up. Late 3e, all of 4e, now late 5e....it's a lesson TTRPG designers keep failing to learn, because it's not primarily how most of them think of the game mechanics. Putting the numbers first is "efficiency" and "consistency" and "elegance," but keeping them messy is hard and weird and leads to occasionally unsatisfying play.

It's one of the conundrums of quantification that once you can put numbers to things, the numbers often become more important than the things.

 

[Lanefan]

Funny you should mention this. It's an error from 2014, where their AC is Armor Class 18 (chain mail, shield). And it too has a longbow and even a notation on using it's longsword two-handed. Yet it doesn't offer an alternative AC either. In fact, no monster in the MM has an alternative AC (except maybe lycanthropes?). It's one of the many simplifications made. And I'm fine with that as long as I never have to see "AC 15 (+1 Dex, +3 studded leather, +1 light shield), touch 11, flat-footed 14" again.

"AC 15 (Dex 12, studded, shield)" is good enough; as from there you can easily extrapolate the touch and surprise ACs. Listing it there also saves you having to list the armour and shield again under equipment. And, you can easily swap out the armour or shield if you like and adjust accordingly; this mostly tells you these creatures can and do use both armour and shield when they can.

As for damage, "Dmg: by wpn +6 (prof, str 14)" does the trick, and allows the DM to equip any weapon to this guy and know what it'll do.

 

[Pedantic]

I do think it's worth mentioning that game designers often operate very easily under the more gamey assumptions, because that's part of what they need to pay attention to. In order to get the math right and get the desired outcome, a hobgoblin with a longsword needs to be less of a prop and more of a bucket of numbers. But that's where the fragility or robustness of your game design comes in. If giving that hobgoblin a greatsword dramatically impacts the outcome that your designer-math tells you needs to happen and so you find yourself trying to find excuses for why hobgoblins can't use greatswords or why they never sleep (and D&D, especially in early e's, was FULL of this kind of "drow weapons evaporate in sunlight" kind of kludges) and...you're lost. You've replaced trying to be a fantasy hero with trying to play a fantasy game.

I'm not actually sure I agree here, I think this is game design all the way down. The problem is that the gameplay loop, the point of interactions players are "supposed" to have with the game is generally insufficiently ambitious, or too generalized. The game design task does not end with making an encounter last approximately Y rounds and drain Z resources. If anything, that's what's been reified; the baseline evaluation of how encounters work has gone from a tool to guide the secondary encounter design task to a target.

I think that's what drives the overreaction that becomes "balanced encounters are fundamentally a mistake" or "we need to simplify enough I can use HD directly." The problem we're actually dealing with, "how do I know what players can overcome?" is a much harder question, and we keep answering simplified versions of it instead of grappling with it directly.

 

[el-remmen]

"AC 15 (Dex 12, studded, shield)" is good enough;

Yeah this is basically how I list similar AC in my customer stat blocks. I actually go a step further and list AC with shield and without shield. Yes, I can figure it out on the fly without the number there but when there are multiple hobgoblins, some of which are fighting with sword and shield and others are shooting from a far with long bows and maybe one dropped it shield to use her sword two-handed, having the different potentially common AC numbers listed helps.

 

[Remathilis]

The slog piece is a drawback. The bolded piece is both a feature - combat shouldn't be nearly as predictable as 4e-5e make it - and a bug, in that the randomness will tend to even itself out pretty fast.

To make it more random (or more swingy, depending on how one looks at it), I think the answer is to reduce everyone's* hit points by a third, or maybe even a half, while leaving the rest the same.

* - exception: commoners and other creatures who only have a very few hit points to begin with.

Lower HP encourages Nova play. The answer to 5e's problem with sloggy combat was to build characters who could deal massive damage early and then rest and repeat. Now, I understand that there are some players and DMs with players bursting down a bad guy before they have a chance to act. But that is unsatisfying for others.

 

[Remathilis]

More to the point, can Hobgoblin PCs learn those skills? I mean, everything's PC-playable now, right?

Those are fey hobgoblins. PC hobgoblins are a different branch of humanoid hobgoblins.

 

[TwoSix]

But the idea of a DM having to roll 16 attack rolls per round in a fight against four hobgoblins is both time consuming and repetitive (not to mention much more random since there is a higher chance if missing and crits). That's what turns D&D into a slog for combat.

Well, more repetitive; it's actually less random. More checks just means the results are going to regress towards the mean.

A monster with 1 attack for 50 damage is a lot more random than a monster with 50 attacks for 1 damage.

 

[TwoSix]

More to the point, can Hobgoblin PCs learn those skills? I mean, everything's PC-playable now, right?

I don't give humanoid NPCs abilities that I wouldn't also let a PC of the same race and culture (if relevant) also acquire.

Now, it might not be easy to get, of course.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Those are fey hobgoblins. PC hobgoblins are a different branch of humanoid hobgoblins.

Only in 5.5. This is I think a much broader question.