D&D 5E Tedium for balance. Should we balance powerful effects with bookkeeping?

[Dausuul]

No. That's exactly the opposite of what is being said here. What is being said is:

"You have to keep track of the number of arrows your character has"
"Oh. Okay. And if I do that, I do 10x as much damage as if I don't?"
"Yes, exactly. So, what else would you like to play instead?"
"What do you mean? I'll endure whatever tedium you throw at me to do 10x damage."
"....but it's so tedious!"
"Yes, and? Tedium is fine if it makes me win that hard."

Tedium doesn't work, because LOTS AND LOTS of players are perfectly willing to endure tedium in order to get enormous power. They will, of course, take whatever steps they can to minimize the tedium to the lowest possible level they can while still keeping all the power, but yeah, plenty of players will JUMP at the chance to do incredibly powerful things with tedious methods, hating every second of the tedium!


How do you mean? It's very simple.

Is tedium--boring, mind-numbing, uninteresting, dull rules-manipulation--a valid way to discourage players from using degenerate strategies?

And the answer is, demonstrably,

hell no.

Because players will endure lots of tedium in order to become stupidly powerful. Even if that means they have less fun!

This is something they realized on the Magic: The Gathering side a while ago; I think Mark Rosewater has an article about it somewhere. Players generally try to accomplish the goal put in front of them, using whatever they believe to be the most effective means. If those means are tedious, they will enjoy the game less but they will continue to use those means.

Using tedium for balance is therefore a double failure: It does not achieve its goal of balance and it results in less fun, even for the players taking advantage of the imbalance.

 

[Stormonu]

Not tedium, but simply having in place for reference/DM use but not open to player use. I think 9th level spells were included to show how powerful characters in the game world could get and for when the DM needed to reference them, but as I look back on them, I don't think they were created with the expectation that PCs would ever get to use them (I think the game was really meant to cap out at 15th level or so, and everyone would be tired of play by then to go start a new game). But, then some groups decided they wanted to keep playing to actually get to use them...

 

[bloodtide]

Tedium doesn't work, because LOTS AND LOTS of players are perfectly willing to endure tedium in order to get enormous power.

The problem is that it's often not made hard enough. Yes some players will put up with some of it....but there is a limit.

How do you mean? It's very simple.

Is tedium--boring, mind-numbing, uninteresting, dull rules-manipulation--a valid way to discourage players from using degenerate strategies?

And the answer is, demonstrably,

hell no.

Because players will endure lots of tedium in order to become stupidly powerful. Even if that means they have less fun!

Except players have limits....then it works just fine.

also, hold on, another thing about this - if the only way to balance something is to prevent people from using it in the first place, then it clearly ISN'T balanced to begin with, and there's no reason for it to exist to begin with.

I would not say it's the only way.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

The problem is that it's often not made hard enough. Yes some players will put up with some of it....but there is a limit.

and when they put up with it, then they're just using the unbalanced thing without any actual limits. so there's no actual balancing going on.

Except players have limits....then it works just fine.

so the balancing factor is "well, eventually players will just stop using it"? that goes back around to why have it at all, then?

I would not say it's the only way.

that doesn't seem to match with the rest of what you're saying.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The problem is that it's often not made hard enough. Yes some players will put up with some of it....but there is a limit.

The limit is extremely high for a large portion of the player base. This is a documented phenomenon in design contexts significantly bigger than the tiny little niche that is TTRPGs, let alone D&D specifically.

I explicitly did say that this method can work for specific groups. Same as how RP-based restrictions can work for specific groups, with specific players, because those RP restrictions are tied to what that specific person is comfortable doing or the like. Similarly, it's not that it is completely impossible to drive people away from using overpowered mechanics through tedium. It's that it won't work for most groups.

Like, let's put it this way. Let's say 20% of players have an extremely high tolerance for tedium, such that while it is theoretically possible to design something too tedious even for them, it's extremely difficult to do so. 20% have a moderately high tolerance, meaning it is somewhat difficult, etc. all the way down to 20% that have no tolerance for it at all, meaning any amount of bookkeeping or tracking is enough to send them to the hills. Number these Type I, Type II, etc.

The odds that you'll have at least one Type I player in any randomly-selected group of five players are over 67%. If we allow at least one Type I or II, those odds rise to over 92%. Even if Type I players occupy only 10% of all players, you've got a 41% chance of seeing one in any given group of 5 people. That's why this doesn't work. Because even if Type I players are rare (only 10% of players), the odds they'll appear in any particular game are actually very high. And I don't actually believe they're rare! I think they're pretty common. Many of them play Wizards today, because...well, that's kind of how Wizard has been designed in most editions of D&D.

Except players have limits....then it works just fine.

Those limits are much too high to make this practical for the vast majority of mechanics.

I would not say it's the only way.

I mean, yes, that's sort of the point. This method fails far more often than it succeeds, when other methods would succeed.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Give your party a magic weapon with "when the character hits a target, the player can do push ups. Increase the damage by the number of push ups the player has done."

 

[Stormonu]

Give your party a magic weapon with "when the character hits a target, the player can do push ups. Increase the damage by the number of push ups the player has done."

Damn, I'd do negative damage!

 

[Fanaelialae]

its not a video game. The players taking a week down because the fighter got nearly killed or did get killed and they have to resolve that is perfectly within normal game play. How freaking boring to have a continue button everytime the party hits a roadblock.

It was never a week of downtime. The cleric would have them full in a day or two. You're not waiting on the fighter's hp to recover, you're waiting for the cleric's spell slots to recover.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It was never a week of downtime. The cleric would have them full in a day or two. You're not waiting on the fighter's hp to recover, you're waiting for the cleric's spell slots to recover.

Not my favorite mechanic for healing.

 

[Umbran]

The problem is that it's often not made hard enough. Yes some players will put up with some of it....but there is a limit.

As others have already said - there is a point at which the restrictions and effort you have to put on to balance a thing is a sign that the thing should not exist in the rules as an option for players to take.