D&D General Self-Defeating Rules in D&D

[Paul Farquhar]

If a game asks you to be king later on, it should start you of as a village chief.

I don’t see why. I can think of plenty of historical examples of other paths to kingship. Henry VII for example started out as an adventurer with a dubious noble background.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A minor point: All the "adventures" (patrols) I have been on, the above is pretty realistic. Which is why our adventuring group (squad) would always bring a dedicated trained medic if possible.

Just saying its another way of looking at it...

That's a strange comparison to make imho.

A medic in the military - who are very different to adventurers, I should note, unless they're behaving in a truly criminal way - may well save someone's life, but he doesn't make you heal literally 10x faster or more. If you take a 5.56mm round right through the thigh, he might be the difference between you bleeding out and not (or that might be down to the soldiers around you and their training), but he's not going to be the difference between you walking around in a week vs walking around in several months, certainly not reliably. You're going to be in hospital and rehab for probably months either way.

It's actually kind of the exact opposite of the situation I'm describing. I don't object to magical healing saving lives in scary situations - I object to it being required to regain HP at reasonable rate, which is what is typically proposed.

Further, PCs who can magically heal in D&D aren't "medics" in virtually all cases. It's not their MOS. It's just one of many, many things they can do. They're already the most powerful classes in the game, generally speaking - Full Casters (and arguably Paladins, who are also very powerful) - and this is just another way of advantaging them, and making them indispensable. Which is not something that benefits the game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That’s a fair point—domain play and “name level” benefits absolutely existed, and they gave players a direction beyond the dungeon. I’m not denying their presence in the rules.

The distinction, though, is between possibility and priority. The support for strongholds, hirelings, and domain play was there, but look at what TSR (and later WotC) actually poured most of their energy into: modules, monster manuals, treasure tables, spell lists, and combat rules. That’s what drove the play experience for the vast majority of groups.

So yes, those other elements were supported, but they were ancillary—occasional codas to the main loop of fighting and looting. They weren’t the throughline reinforced by published adventures and product lines. The heart of the game has always leaned toward combat as the central activity, with everything else serving as padding for those who wanted more than just that.

You can even see the same tension today with the new 5e “bastions” system. It’s an obvious callback to strongholds and domains, but whether it becomes an integral part of play will depend entirely on whether Wizards actually builds it into the expectations of published adventures and campaigns. If it remains tucked away in rulebooks for tables to use or ignore at will—just like domain rules before it—that’s a clear signal it’s still a vestigial subsystem, not something truly embraced as part of the game’s core loop.

I would say how important those rules are is much more based on what the table wants than how much more rules support the game gives you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If a game asks you to be king later on, it should start you of as a village chief. This is the fundamental problem of Domain play in DnD.

Why? That demand makes no sense to me.

 

[payn]

My point was that most of those spells and abilities didn't help you "solve the dungeon" in a way that avoided combat. Read Magic wasn't going to get you to that sweet xp for gp, knowing the slope of a hallway might help you avoid a trap but it's not getting you any more gold that way. My point was that exploration is what you do between combat encounters and has been secondary to it since the games inception. The fact that 5e reduced it to a footnote is irrelevant since it was always just the glue between fights.

I just think the idea of exploration is the primary importance of older D&D and combat was a fail state doesn't feel like it jives with much of the printed material from that era, especially the classic modules outside of occasional oddballs like Tomb of Horrors.

This is butting up against the skill play thread, but yeah, skill play was popular then, but is not now. It wasnt the only way the game played as evidenced by modules either. I would suggest all the pointing to the rules as suggestions of how the game is to be played isnt proof the game wasnt meant to be played that way. It is a suggestion that you follow "answer IS on the character sheet" mentality instead of rulings over rules philosophy. The game challeneges you, the player, not your character.

 

[Stormonu]

Why? That demand makes no sense to me.

I will say that in Birthright, you could be a King, Archbishop or Archmage and be 1st level ruling a domain. You'd probably fall to the Gorgon, but even the 2E DMG mentions that a King could be a 0-level character.

Spoiler

I can't imagine myself having the leader of a country being a 0-level or 1st level NPC/PC, but I guess if you wanted to play a "boy king" like Arthur, or inexperienced Prince, son of a Baron (of which I had a player that had such due to a high roll in 1E's class level table), it might happen.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I will say that in Birthright, you could be a King, Archbishop or Archmage and be 1st level ruling a domain. You'd probably fall to the Gorgon, but even the 2E DMG mentions that a King could be a 0-level character.

I can't imagine myself having the leader of a country being a 0-level or 1st level NPC/PC, but I guess if you wanted to play a "boy king" like Arthur, or inexperienced Prince, son of a Baron (of which I had a player that had such due to a high roll in 1E's class level table), it might happen.

I would say if that person doesn't level up quickly and get a lot of help, their kingdom is going to stay intact for long.

 

[TiQuinn]

My point was that most of those spells and abilities didn't help you "solve the dungeon" in a way that avoided combat. Read Magic wasn't going to get you to that sweet xp for gp, knowing the slope of a hallway might help you avoid a trap but it's not getting you any more gold that way. My point was that exploration is what you do between combat encounters and has been secondary to it since the games inception. The fact that 5e reduced it to a footnote is irrelevant since it was always just the glue between fights.

I just think the idea of exploration is the primary importance of older D&D and combat was a fail state doesn't feel like it jives with much of the printed material from that era, especially the classic modules outside of occasional oddballs like Tomb of Horrors.

But remember that the XP for gold was far more than the XP for defeating monsters, whether that was by killing them or subduing them. So if the dungeon had a hidden cache of gold behind a mysterious third level that was only accessed from the stairwell, and your dwarf character happened to notice that "Wow, this is really strange...the distance between level 1 and level 2 is much shorter than the distance between level 2 and level 3 - I wonder if there's something in between here..." and you find a secret door that gets you a treasure chest with 1000 GP - that's a experience gained just by using some character abilities that have nothing to do with combat.

And while I don't recall if any of the 1e books had this, I remember that 2e had optional rules for gaining XP based on your character actually doing class-based stuff, like casting spells. If you wanted to, you totally could reward your spellcasters for each spell they successfully cast. It tended to be forgotten because the downside is that it means yet another thing either the players or the DM have to track, which is why we never used it at our table, but the concept was there at least.

 

[Pamphylian]

I think the “GP outweighed kills in XP” point gets repeated as if it’s a silver bullet, but I don’t think it proves what people often think it does. Gold was never the goal in itself—it was the token that converted into XP, and XP was always what players actually cared about. What does XP buy you? Levels. And what do levels give you? More hit points, better attacks, more spells—all of which are overwhelmingly focused on combat.

So while the fictional wrapper of early editions was “you’re delving dungeons to haul out treasure,” the mechanical loop was “treasure → XP → levels → combat power → deeper dungeons and nastier monsters.” If the real goal was simply “get enough gold to be comfortable, fed, housed, and worry-free,” most campaigns could have wrapped up by level 3 or 4. But that wasn’t the loop anyone was playing. The loop was escalation: get stronger so you can fight bigger things.

That’s why the majority of rules in every edition—OD&D, AD&D, and onward—are devoted to combat: weapon tables, attack matrices, morale, initiative systems, spells (most of them combat-oriented), etc. If gold was truly the “point” of the game, you’d expect equally robust mechanics for managing wealth, building trade networks, or influencing the economy. Instead, treasure existed mainly as a scoring mechanism to fuel advancement toward the thing the rules actually cared about: fighting.

So I’d frame it this way: early D&D carried a survivalist skin—resource management, light, wandering monsters, encumbrance—but those were pressure valves designed to make combat decisions riskier and to give treasure a context. Over time, that skin peeled away, but what was left exposed was the skeleton that had always been there: kick down doors, fight monsters, get loot, repeat.

That’s why the survival rules feel vestigial today. They were never equal pillars alongside combat—they were scaffolding to support the combat-and-advancement loop. Once the design shed XP-for-gold and heroic fantasy took over, the scaffolding wasn’t needed anymore. But D&D still carries it, so it lingers as a kind of half-alive tradition.

I totally buy that what you call the “survivalist skin” was always subservient to the combat gameplay loop at most tables most of the time - I certainly can’t speak from history (I wasn’t there) but that is my sense from reading the rules and playing early editions. “Combat is a failure state” taken fully literally* doesn’t really match my experience of most D&D sessions of whatever edition (with the exception of a few very memorable ones)

That being said, I think this skin not being the central element of gameplay does not imply that it was vestigial-on-purpose from the outset. Whenever I’ve played with a functional version of the “survivalist skin” and taken it seriously, my dungeon delving experiences are almost always richer, from either side of the table. No one element (light, time, food, money, wandering monsters) is essential to consider at all times, but collectively, these elements add weight to player decisions, the bread and butter of rpgs, because they are now embedded in a system of cause and effect beyond just the individual combat encounter/trap/puzzle. Stripping out the scaffolding, the matrix of time and resource management, from the monster fighting puts most of the responsibility for risk and tension within a given isolated combat, rather than in broader strategic decision making.

I think this explains a lot of the current style of dungeon design, a mostly linear sequence of carefully designed and balanced, often hermetically sealed combat encounters (a style that reaches its apotheosis in Pathfinder 2e). The ideal contribution of the survivalist skin (and in my experience, often the reality) is that players start thinking above the level of the encounter, about the dungeon or dungeon level as a whole.** The monster fighting fundamentals by themselves can feel a bit impoverished on their own, by comparison. I can understand why a surprising number of modern D&D players say that they find Dungeon crawls (half of the titular Ds, at least!) boring! They frequently no longer have the supporting infrastructure that imbues them with much additional tension and consequence.

*I don’t think it’s originator meant it fully literally, but it is sometimes taken as such
** I am using dungeon in a pretty broad sense, any interconnected location full of risk and reward

Yes, the best design is always one that caters perfectly to your own preferences, while leaving options for folks who prefer differently to adjust.

As I understand my proposals, my argument is that folks who prefer differently won't have to adjust! The systems they already don't interact with still won't have to be interacted with, they'll just now work for those who want to interact with them. I suppose some responses in this thread suggest that some tables do infact get value specifically out of these things not working but still existing in their non functional form (e.g. players loving to say they have darkvision when the DM says its dark) - I still optimistically, maybe delusionally, think with a little bit of thought and modularity all of these varied preferences can be accommodated in a single system, and that we can have our cake and eat it too.

Depends what you think of when you envision the world of Tolkien. Modern DnD heroic fantasy has every character being Legolas, Gandalf, Galadriel, etc. Ridiculously powerful characters are certainly part of Tolkien's world, although the story mostly focuses on the less powerful characters, so when I think of a "Tolkien simulation" I would envision something much more nitty gritty survivalist than heroic fantasy

It's kind of interesting that this particular maybe rather narrow vision of heroic fantasy has become so dominant to be the genre D&D is designed for, since I don't think this was always the case. Considering a broader "adventure" genre to draw from, just thinking about film, we have gameable elements in what you might call gritty survivalist threats in everything from Indiana Jones (with a scene where the last torch literally burns out) to Dune (with its prominent survival elements) to the Mummy (a bit of both).

 

[Pamphylian]

When people bring up Tolkien as an example of what fantasy they feel D&D should emulate, don't forget that at some point, even the Professor got tired of his characters having to forage for food everywhere, and just gave the party enough lembas to last the remainder of their journey!

Very true! But I don't think it was acquired until Tier 2 Play!

The films (been too long since I have read RotK) also have Gollum tossing a bunch Lembas over the cliff at one point - seems a rather gameable moment if you have working food rules - in enemy territory, which is desolate mountains, what are we gonna do? Eat Shelob? Rob some maggoty bread from orcfort?? Sounds kinda fun IMtwistedO

I think it's time to let torches go.

I don't think there is any possible way 5E or 6E or 7E can make people excited about or interested in torches. Torches have been doomed since 2nd Edition at the absolute latest (just look at early-2E FR books and how obsessed they are with "glowglobes" or w/e they're called). They're not an interesting or fun thing to think about for 95% of players, and for the few who do love that stuff, there are multiple RPGs focused on that particular subject, or using it as a huge mechanic.

In a game where Light, Continual Light/Flame, other magical light sources and so on are common, trying to make torches happen is absolutely "trying to make 'fetch' happen".

I think there are a lot of other simulationist-adjacent elements that could be made engaging, but torches absolutely isn't a possibility for D&D. They can be ruled out. Healing is similar - every single "I want changes to downtime healing" proposal I've seen is identical in where it ends - "Make it totally trivial if they have a magical healer of any description, and insane pain if they don't!!!" and without any gameplay-based reasoning for this it just seems like cargo-cult nonsense.

Better darkness/darkvision rules would be great though.

Perhaps I am strange and paradox-strategy-game-brained but I don't think I've ever found torches a logistical hassle or accounting bother. You just have to remember who is holding it, and yeah maybe the fighter can't hold their shield at the same time, and maybe has to bring a few, but they can also light things on fire. And yeah, at some point you get enough magic that it is no problem, but that's progress! But it is such an iconic element of so much fantasy/adventure literature, film, imagery - seems pretty sad to remove from low levels.

I think the nice thing about torches, from a gameplay perspective, versus darkvision, is that they can go out. A badly timed gust or an orc with a bucket of water can be very bad when you are starting out. Then, you start getting magical solutions, more secure, but maybe can be dispelled and in any case have a cost (not really in 5e, but that's partly my point in OP), and then eventually you are so powerful that you have defeated darkness easily, that most ancient enemy of humanity! And you've earned it, but now you have other things to worry about.