D&D 5E The Mainstreaming of D&D

[Jefe Bergenstein]

It’s also great fun for a significant number of people.

Then why arent more people running it that way? WOTC has admitted as much.

Just because an individual encounter is short and easy doesn’t necessarily mean it’s boring. Players have fun handily winning an encounter with only a few hp and maybe a low-level spell slot lost. And after a few of these, they stop being quite so easy. Eventually, they become pretty challenging. That’s good pacing! Now, not everyone enjoys resource management games, and that’s fine. That’s why the game gives guidelines for what an average group can be expected to handle, instead of restrictions on what a DM is allowed to run. If you don’t like the baseline parameters, they’re easy to change, and the game works just fine. But, again, it’s silly to complain that the game is too easy when you’re significantly undershooting the recommended difficulty.

Hey kids, keep digging through the crap and eventually it gets fun!

This was a case where 4E had it right. Treat encounters as memorable set pieces and handwaive the "there's 2 kobolds in a 10X10 room" cruft that takes as long to setup as play out. But during the playtest WOTC was sadly in divorced dad mode, desperate to bring the grognards back, so any good lessons learned from that edition had to be jettisoned.

 

[Reynard]

@Charlaquin doing gods work in here.

@Reynard you aren't alone. That's why I hope for Planescape, SOON.

I wouldn't expect any particular WotC release to be especially different than any we have seen thus far. Meaning that a Planescape book would probably be on par with Van Richten's: that is to say, pretty cool full of interesting ideas that still manages to paint within the lines and maintain a broad appeal.

But I'm not really just talking about WotC publications. It's a more general feeling. But like I said, my own games are what I want them to be and so that's great. I just wish when I look at D&D in general I would get excited and inspired.

 

[Charlaquin]

Didn't every damn edition market itself with a line like "Getting back to the Dungeon!" maybe it's time to admit we DON'T actually want to get back to the Dungeon? It's dusty, it smells weirds and it's full of Kobolds.

I dunno, I love the dungeon!

They railed against transparent encounter design?! A thing meant to make it easier to DM? What, did they get annoyed at the XP budget formulas and expected wealth per level tables too?

Actually, yes, a lot of them did.

It's probably their fault Monsters cast spells from the PC spell list instead of just having info in their stat block.

That one I don’t think we can blame on the playtesters. If I recall correctly, monster stat blocks were written with spells from the PC spell list from the first playtest packet. Though from what I remember the idea was to make the stat blocks easily condensible into just a few lines of text in the modules, i.e. “the cave contains 1d6 kobolds (AC 12, HP 4, darkvision, sunlight sensitivity, pack tactics, dagger: +4, 5’/20’, 1d4 piercing damage).”

I swear, the more I hear about those 5e play testers, the more I feel they went out of their way to pick the angriest grognardiest grognards who wanted to destroy 4e and hated anything that gave them even a single whiff of 4e.

Well, I’m talking about the open playtest, so anyone who was interested could participate. It just happened that most people who were interested were folks who wanted to make sure the next edition wasn’t like 4e (this was the height of the edition war after all). There were also those of us who loved 4e involved, doing our best to fight to keep the 4e’s best ideas around in some form.

The layout and formatting in 5e could be better (for one thing, I can think of 3 major improvements I could make to the Spell Section alone...) but I think homogeneity in formatting is good for the identity of a brand and for ease of use. It's not as exciting if you just want to LOOK at your D&D books, but it makes them way better to use if you know how to navigate them.

Yeah, the prevailing attitude was that folks didn’t want the presentation to look “too gamey.” Natural language and rules being integrated directly into descriptive text were highly demanded.

 

[Oofta]

Getting back to this point, is this true in your experience at all levels?

The other thing that works to prevent PC death are death saves. There have been times that I had a character that I felt really should have died but did not. Moreover, it seems there was some intentionality with that design that the game wouldn't be so lethal, or even that it would feel lethal but the characters were in less risk than it seemed.

Anyway, I'm not sure if a lack of lethality is what helped the game become more mainstream, except insofar as it suggests that character death be rare and meaningful.

Lethality rate has pretty much always been in the hands of the DM. As a DM I have infinite dragons.

Back in ye olden days, the game was swingier, but personally we tended to just house rule or just avoid the save or die aspects of the game. That, and being raised from the dead has always been part of the game.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Only time Death Saves has killed anyone since Ive played is from 1 of 2 things:

The other party members forgot or ignore the dying person who eventually rolls the 3 failures

OR

The dying player rolls a 1 when they already failed a death save.

Ive given thought to doing away with Death Saves and going back to just bleed out to -10 like in 3rd ed..... and doing away with the Revivify Spell.

 

[billd91]

Yeah, they are guidelines for a maximal experience, not the only way the game functions. Matt Mercer essentially never throws fights at the Critical Role crew that aren't cakewalks, because 7 PCs with no resource grind are basically unbeatable: but he still gives his players a fun time. He puts the fear of God into them with theatrics, rather than pushing the characters to their actual mechanical limits. The game plays fine that way, but yes without grinding PCs resources it will be hard to kill them.

You have a different take on Critical Role than I do. He doesn't grind their resources down... except when he does like the days in which they spent dealing with Lucien with little or no rest. He throws cakewalks at them... except when he doesn't like the encounter that killed Mollymauk, or the sphinx, the elder brain, or the various dragons they've encountered.

He generally doesn't grind them down with 6-8 encounters per day, true. That's not all that conducive to the format of game they're looking for because it would drag too much - but the set pieces he does put up are hard to describe as real cakewalks. I suspect a number of them could have ended up as TPKs if the group wasn't as good at cutting and running as they are. And that may be part of the difference. His players freak out and run because of the theatrics, the drama, and their desire to make sure their characters have a chance at playing out their story while other groups might buckle down and fight it out, probably winning but probably also racking up more net deaths overall. He also prefers to let the dice fall as they may and will stick the players with the consequences of their mistakes, so that too may have the net effect of encouraging them to run well before it's too late, something way too few players do.

 

[Undrave]

No, I honestly hope they never do an Edition change as significant as 3E>3.5 again.

Wouldn't 3.5>4E be a more significant change?? Wasn't 3.5 largely compatible with 3E stuff?

There's a long history of innovative ideas an products that failed. The Edsel, New Coke, Google Glasses, Android phones. So I don't think innovation is necessarily better. It can be, or we'd still be sitting in caves around the fire. Innovation and new ideas not necessarily good, nor is it necessarily bad.

Failiure is an important part of the process of finding good ideas. If you're too scared of another WiiU you're never gonna make a Switch.

 

[Charlaquin]

Campaign 1 PC Deaths

Campaign 2 PC Deaths

Might be a good idea to spoiler tag those.

 

[billd91]

Wouldn't 3.5>4E be a more significant change?? Wasn't 3.5 largely compatible with 3E stuff?

It was a much more significant change. But then not wanting a change any significant as 3.0 to 3.5 would also rule any as significant as 3.5 to 4.
That said, there were enough changes from 3.0 to 3.5 that a lot of OGL products became a lot less compatible. One of the big changes was weapon sizing. Now, it wasn't simply OK to have a halfling take the shortsword from the loot pile because it was one-handed and would work kind of like a longsword for him, he now had to hope that there were small versions of armor and weapons in the loot piles. And that was a PITA.

 

[Charlaquin]

Getting back to this point, is this true in your experience at all levels?

Well, I haven’t run 5e above level 11, so I can’t speak to all levels. But, I would say in my experience the game does get less lethal as the characters gain levels, but death remains a realistic risk at all levels (that I’ve run for) if you follow those guidelines.

The other thing that works to prevent PC death are death saves. There have been times that I had a character that I felt really should have died but did not. Moreover, it seems there was some intentionality with that design that the game wouldn't be so lethal, or even that it would feel lethal but the characters were in less risk than it seemed.

Death saves definitely help with survivability if your monsters don’t attack unconscious PCs. If they do… well, then characters who fall to 0 are very likely to die. I don’t stick to one or the other exclusively. Different opponents will react differently to unconscious PCs, depending on their motivations and goals.

Anyway, I'm not sure if a lack of lethality is what helped the game become more mainstream, except insofar as it suggests that character death be rare and meaningful.

For sure. While I find this line of discussion very interesting, it’s pretty tangential to the topic.