D&D General The Crab Bucket Fallacy

[Scribe]

5e has been prioritizing old tropes and old archetypes hoping to excite new fans who haven't seen them before.

This isn't it.

5e wasn't released to excite new fans. It was released, and we know this, as an apology edition, to play the hits, because D&D, as it was released, is good.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It really shouldn't, based just on the number of skills, and the number of skills/character. It shouldn't take broad incompetence in the rests of the party, leading to everything resting on the performance of a single expert, to make having a skill as a class feature a meaningful way of contributing.

Cool, that is a necessary part of 5e, and wouldn’t invalidate bonus proficiencies even if it were.

5e's skill system doesn't seem to be up to the challenge, tho. Thanks to BA and the d20 distribution, mere proficiency in a skill, or even proficiency and a high stat, doesn't deliver consistent performance within that skill.

It does tho. You don’t need expertise to do a thing well.

That's not even a black mark against 5e, since the point of BA, was to give everyone a shot at most checks (especially attack rolls, but checks in general).

Right…which is why expertise ain’t needed to be good at a skill.

But it does mean that, short of Expertise, you can't really hang your hat on simply having skill proficiency, and lacking it, and having your prime requisite add to only one skill, well, that's getting pretty unfortunate..

It means the opposite of that.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Redundancy is only an issue if the non-combat uses of skills are so limited that they're always resolved by a single check against a single skill be a single character.
Furthermore, defining/balancing a class or character by giving it exclusive access to a skill is just a particularly narrow form of niche protection.

IMX with range of systems, too many skills is worse for a game than not enough, and open-ended skills, or skills otherwise added mid-stream, create incompetence....

Eh, there is always room to improve things. It makes no sense that the “You’re a druid, Harry” skill is split among 3 skills (Nature, Animal Handling and Survival), while there is a single Wizard skill (Arcana) and single Cleric skill (Religion). Performance doesn’t really make sense in a system that uses tool proficiencies for musical instruments and is likewise a little too niche for an adventuring party.

 

[Cadence]

Going back about six pages...

I think most of the long term groups I've been in have tried different games: Gamma World back in the early 80s, Star Frontiers and V&V in the mid 80s, Twilight 2000 in the late 80s, VtM and Star Wars in the 90s, Call of Cthuhlu, Shadowrun, Brave New World, Fate, and 13th Age in this millenia. I'm trying to think back, and I think there was one group in the early 80s that only played D&D (but that DM ran lots of other games for different groups), one in the 90s where we only played D&D (two unrelated long campaigns), and one recently that only played D&D (a shortish campaign and a follow-up).

I can understand a long-time single campaign groups not changing systems. And I can understand groups that don't stay together more than one game or have mass turn-over of members and that need lots of recruitment not changing. But for the long time groups that play together (maybe with partial turn-over as the years go on), is it uncommon to try multiple things?

 

[Oofta]

I didn't say 4E was a failure, I said 5E is much more successful. Like grew the community hugely that many indie companies are making more money than ever right along side it. They saw no need to fundamentally redesign the game to refresh interest and promote sales. They are looking at doubling down!

By appealing to factors of nostalgia and accessibility. 5E is designed to hit the feels, and its slower progression rate aimed at keeping casuals involved. They are not aiming the game at die hard aficionados because we are a much smaller piece of the pie. We scare away all the other fish. Those folks would think we are a bunch of dorks wasting our working day hours arguing this stuff. They simply dont care, and they really like 5E, while outnumbering us 9-1.

I think you need to add a few zeroes to the "9".

 

[Tony Vargas]

You don’t need expertise to do a thing well.

Doing a thing well means doing it consistently. d20 resolution just isn't well suited to that, BA makes it even harder to get remotely right.
5e has two solutions to that. 1) the DM simply narrates success without calling for a check. 2) Expertise.

But for the long time groups that play together (maybe with partial turn-over as the years go on), is it uncommon to try multiple things?

My personal experience in a succession of groups over the decases has been that people do want to play other games, but it's usually one person really in love with that other game, and everyone else indifferent to or one or two even repelled by it. I ran AD&D for 10 years, for a group of players most of whom would have each been happier playing something else - V:tM, GURPS, Champions, Shadowrun, Battletech ("dude, it's not even an RPG" "Hey, guess what's out Mechwarrior!", and I don't remember what all else...) ... we did play a variety of games, but no one of them very long, since the ethusiast wouldn't be able to keep up the effort of running it... OK, actually, we did manage some Champions, back then, round-robin GMing in a shared world . By the end of that campaign, the remaining players (and some new ones) were down with Champions and Storyteller (shared-world, again), and that lasted, oh, 5-7 years, maybe....
Then, new group, 3.0 ... (and then I was That One Guy who kept insisting on running Champions...)

 

[Oofta]

Going back about six pages...

I think most of the long term groups I've been in have tried different games: Gamma World back in the early 80s, Star Frontiers and V&V in the mid 80s, Twilight 2000 in the late 80s, VtM and Star Wars in the 90s, Call of Cthuhlu, Shadowrun, Brave New World, Fate, and 13th Age in this millenia. I'm trying to think back, and I think there was one group in the early 80s that only played D&D (but that DM ran lots of other games for different groups), one in the 90s where we only played D&D (two unrelated long campaigns), and one recently that only played D&D (a shortish campaign and a follow-up).

I can understand a long-time single campaign groups not changing systems. And I can understand groups that don't stay together more than one game or have mass turn-over of members and that need lots of recruitment not changing. But for the long time groups that play together (maybe with partial turn-over as the years go on), is it uncommon to try multiple things?

Heck if I know. But I've pretty much always stuck with D&D. As much as I would like to get together more often, most groups get together about once a month, there simply isn't that much time to try something new. If we do something different, it will be a board game.

 

[Cadence]

Heck if I know. But I've pretty much always stuck with D&D. As much as I would like to get together more often, most groups get together about once a month, there simply isn't that much time to try something new. If we do something different, it will be a board game.

I'm used to weekly or every other week... I can understand once a month changing things.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

So the game will change when it changes, and until then, complaining about it will have as much effect as yelling at clouds. I can't argue with that.

Pretty much! My approximately 1,432 threads on Greyhawk have yet to cause it to be released as a setting. Maybe the 1,433rd thread will do it ....

You just have to have the serenity to accept that which WoTC likely won't change, the courage to yell about it even when other people don't care, and the wisdom to occasionally log off.

Or something like that.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Doing a thing well means doing it consistently. d20 resolution just isn't well suited to that, BA makes it even harder to get remotely right.
5e has two solutions to that. 1) the DM simply narrates success without calling for a check. 2) Expertise.

That isn’t at all my experience playing and running the game, nor does it fit what I see in actual play shows, or stories about sessions of play on Reddit, TikTok, etc, or the games I’ve supervised at the library or been unable to tune out when at my local game store.