FrozenNorth
Hero
I want to second the greater diversity aspect. I love that players nowadays are coming to the table with a greater variety of characters and a greater willingness to explore the narrative aspects of their characters.
D&D 5E The Mainstreaming of D&D
Parmandur
Book-Friend
Van Richten's Guide to Ravenlodt just came out.
The dmg lists several different styles of play and adventure creation. I would argue, as others have done, that dungeon-crawling is more heritage at this point, and not really indicative of how people play, which is why this issues comes up so much (I would wager it's the most common gripe with the mechanics of this edition from what I've seen). Dnd has this wide open narrative framework in which anything can happen and then says, you must do 6-8 of this very particular thing, which is tied to in-game units (short and long rests). So if short rests aren't possible in the dungeon you've created, the game "breaks." At least a game like 13th age is more honest about how it approaches resource recovery, and 4e more honest in encounter design, though neither is my cup of tea.
fwiw, this style of play (6-8 discrete medium and hard encounters with exactly 2 rests) isn't really a "dungeon crawl" in the bx/1e sense.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
I disagree. Swingyness sometimes makes you work for your victories and sometimes just randomly hands them to you. Consistency, well… consistently makes you work for your victories, or consistently hands them to you, depending on how it’s been tuned. A certain amount of swing is exciting, but too much swing removes the sense of agency. There’s a line to be walked between feeling like anything could happen and feeling like you have a reliable sense of what the likely outcomes of your decisions will be.
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Parmandur
Book-Friend
People can say that, doesn't make it so: WotC has more of a finger on the pulse of what people are actually doing than some blogger. The game can be played with fewer encounters, but it will shift results from base expectations.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
D&D comes in lots of shapes and sizes, though. If the mainstream shape is leaving you cold and sad, pick a different one. Grab something a little weird and a little transgressive off of DriveThruRPG (or wherever), and make it happen.
I'm preparing to run my group through the old-school classic adventure, "The Isle of Dread." I recently got the remastered version from Goodman Games, and it's hitting my nostalgia buttons like crazy. Remember when you didn't need a battle mat to play D&D? Man, I miss those days. I'm looking forward to revisiting them.
Parmandur
Book-Friend
Never needed one, except for 4E. 3.x ran fine with TotM.
Grinding is the right word. Anytime I've been in a 6-8 encounter adventuring day, either as player or dm, it was tedious and took multiple sessions. It was not exciting. Obviously ymmv. But if that's the dmg-approved "base game," it's not a very interesting one.
Is the swinginess of deadlier encounters (and higher level play) intentional?
el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
To be honest, any claims I make about number of encounters a day are all determined in retrospect, because I never think about that stuff when designing an adventure. I design opponents, motives, places, and events. And then player choices (both intentional and inadvertent) tends to drive how many encounters they will face and what type - and I don't just mean, choosing when to rest (since resting is not always an option or they cannot be sure if it is one) but everything from which direction to take at the fork, the amount of noise they make, how they treat some NPC, what light sources they carry, how far they are from town or if they are in a town, and so on.
The game is capacious and flexible and that is how I like it. Personally, I prefer to think of encounter design organically over mechanically. For example, I will draw a map of a cool place for a set piece based on a vague notion and then I decide based on what I drew how hazardous and difficult the place might be or how the enemies might take advantage of terrain, or even what powers to give them, etc. . . But what I like about that capaciousness is that all these approaches (whether my take or someone much more careful about # of encounters and their difficulty or something else) can and do work fine.
The game is capacious and flexible and that is how I like it. Personally, I prefer to think of encounter design organically over mechanically. For example, I will draw a map of a cool place for a set piece based on a vague notion and then I decide based on what I drew how hazardous and difficult the place might be or how the enemies might take advantage of terrain, or even what powers to give them, etc. . . But what I like about that capaciousness is that all these approaches (whether my take or someone much more careful about # of encounters and their difficulty or something else) can and do work fine.
Ralif Redhammer
Legend
Having been in a band in the same town as Live (if anyone else remembers them from the 90s), I can understand that instant avoidance response.
In my experience, D&D 5e has been plenty deadly. As a DM, I've had one character die, and countless reduced to making death saves, and I am by no means a hardcase of a DM. I've been at a D&D Epic that ended in a TPK (and was still a blast).
While we're talking old school deadliness, after a certain point in an adventurer's career it's not like death was little more than an inconvenience and a GP siphon back in the AD&D days.
D&D has always run the gamut of tonalities, often within a single adventure.
Yes, 5e has some cutesy art, but so did 1e:
Love the wizard's eye-roll. And in turn, 5e has some darker art:
In my experience, D&D 5e has been plenty deadly. As a DM, I've had one character die, and countless reduced to making death saves, and I am by no means a hardcase of a DM. I've been at a D&D Epic that ended in a TPK (and was still a blast).
While we're talking old school deadliness, after a certain point in an adventurer's career it's not like death was little more than an inconvenience and a GP siphon back in the AD&D days.
D&D has always run the gamut of tonalities, often within a single adventure.
Yes, 5e has some cutesy art, but so did 1e:
Love the wizard's eye-roll. And in turn, 5e has some darker art:
