D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[Distracted DM]

A very surprising post by Keith Ammann of TMKWTD. I'm passingly familiar with the blog, I check it out every now and again and I've always been interested to see how Keith breaks down monsters and suggests how they'd work in a fight. This is surprising to me, at least, because in the 5e-sphere this blog and book series etc. are fairly well known, and this guy really is not jiving with 5e24.

The relevant part of the post starts after he's talked about the Colossus.

I apologize for the long quote, I considered picking it apart and just quoting the particular stuff but I think it's almost all important to the discussion.

On top of that, I have certain … feelings … about D&D 5E24. One of the things I love—and I speak in the present tense—about 5E14 is, even as it substantially streamlined D&D’s rules and options, it still both maintained the feeling of playing classic D&D and permitted play in a wide range of styles, from gritty, grimy low fantasy to wild high fantasy and everything in between. But it was clear from the moment the 5E24 Player’s Handbook dropped that D&D was going all in on wild high fantasy, to the exclusion of other styles, and also that it had chosen to fully indulge a decade’s worth of munchkin demands for MOAR POWER!

Knowing that 5E24 was coming, I had fully planned to seize the opportunity to update Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Player Characters and in the process improve it as a teaching tool. I was excited to do so, in fact. But when I held the PH24 in my hands and paged through it, the realization came over me that PCs don’t need the help anymore. They’ve been failure-proofed. There’s almost no error a player can make, at this point, that will end their character’s adventuring career prematurely—not unless their DM goes full adversarial, which I don’t condone. And DMs had a hard time posing appropriate challenges to higher-level PCs already! It’s only going to get harder from here. (The restructured combat encounter difficulty guidelines in chapter 4 of the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide will help with that somewhat, at least.)

But it’s not just the shift in the balance of power between DMs and PCs that bothers me about 5E24. There’s a palpable change in design approach between 5E14 and 5E24. In 5E14, it seems to me, the designers began with a narrative in mind, then thought about how best to implement that narrative mechanically. The sense I get from 5E24, on the other hand, is that the designers began with mechanics they wanted to implement, then came up with narratives to rationalize the mechanics. Which is how you end up with warlocks signing lifetime contracts with supernatural entities whose identities they don’t even learn until they’re level 3, and Beast Master rangers who form bonds with immortal spirits instead of, you know, wild animals. (The ludicrous overuse of the adjective “spectral” to describe how PCs’ abilities manifest, combined with the fact that you can undo so many decisions you regret having made with just a good night’s sleep, calls to mind a line from the song “Type” by Living Colour: “Everything is possible, and nothing is real.”)

Now, I happen to think that the MM25 is probably the best of the three revised core books of D&D. All three are flawed, but the MM25 is the one whose strengths most outweigh its flaws. I’m running an Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden game in which I’m using 5E14 rules and character creation but 5E24 monster stat blocks whenever they’re available, and I’m liking the feel of that particular combination. But at the same time, since the freaking dawn of creation, the normal distribution of human ability scores in D&D has been from 3 to 18. That’s foundational. It’s bedrock. Anything outside that range is either subhuman or superhuman. I’m OK with the fact that 5E has always allowed PCs of high enough level to raise their ability scores above 18, because at that point, we’re talking about heroes of legend—but other humans, in my opinion, should still fall within the 3-to-18 range. Yet the MM25 gives us guard captains who are as strong as Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, the record-breaking strongman who played Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane on Game of Thrones; bandit crime lords who are more dexterous than Miyamoto Musashi, Lionel Messi, or any present or past member of Cirque du Soleil or the Flying Karamazov Brothers; and cultist hierophants, pirate admirals, performer maestros and noble prodigies—noble prodigies!—who are more charismatic than Martin Luther King Jr. or Beyoncé. (The most bonkers example is the warrior commander, “skilled in both combat and leadership,” who has the Constitution of Rasputin, greater Dexterity than any acrobat, athlete, dancer or swordfighter who’s ever lived, and Strength that surpasses Björnsson’s … together with Charisma that’s merely on par with, say, Justin Trudeau’s.) What are we even doing here? These are clearly instances in which “line go up” took precedence over maintaining internal logical consistency. And I’ve made a career out of creating, and helping others create, imaginary worlds that come alive because they’re internally consistent.

So there’s all that, but there’s also the petty stuff, such as the fact that turning The Monsters Know What They’re Doing into a 5E24 blog would require me to commission new art for the banner and site icon, because liches can’t cast cloudkill anymore. I mean, what the heck, guys.

He goes on to talk about how he's looked at 5e alternatives, other game systems, but isn't sure where to go next (I was tempted to leave a comment about A5E), but it seems like 5e24 is definitely not getting his attention going forward.

So he likes the monster power of MM25, but doesn't like how they executed it, giving guard captains 18 strength and the like. Actually, I've had this problem as well, in that in order to present a proper, believable challenge to PCs I've had to use unbelievable methods: upping NPCs and other creatures stats to levels that seem crazy in the context of the world, but they end up working satisfactorily on a mechanical level. This is largely how the MM25 operates.

Overall I have to say that his points all hit home for me, and I'm curious what y'all think... and, as per the questions he poses later on in the post, what direction you think he should take?

 

[DrJawaPhD]

Quote from the article:
In 5E14, it seems to me, the designers began with a narrative in mind, then thought about how best to implement that narrative mechanically. The sense I get from 5E24, on the other hand, is that the designers began with mechanics they wanted to implement, then came up with narratives to rationalize the mechanics.

That's a really good quote! It is very true. For me this is a great description of why 2024 rules are so much better - because balanced gameplay was prioritized first and DMs have to then figure out the narratives for (or just ignore) how things make sense in their world. I can totally understand others who prioritize verisimilitude over gameplay balance having the opposite reaction though.

 

[Chaltab]

Honestly I kind of expected a more.... thoughtful take from a storied blog like this rather than knee jerk gloom and doom about how PCs are invincible and the game is all about superheroes now. It just feels like such an edition change cliche at this point.

 

[Distracted DM]

Honestly I kind of expected a more.... thoughtful take from a storied blog like this rather than knee jerk gloom and doom about how PCs are invincible and the game is all about superheroes now. It just feels like such an edition change cliche at this point.

Do you think it's fair to call it knee-jerk?
But I understand how you say you expected something more "thoughtful," that's part of what the surprise was for me in reading the post... That it seems to repeat the common issues that I've seen voiced, rather than.. I don't know, try to come up with something else. But I think what we're reading here is someone who has come to accept that the direction WotC's 5e has taken is no longer for them. But for it to come from such a "storied blog" as you put it, that made its reputation and "fame" on 5e .. that's quite a post.

 

[Chaltab]

I say knee-jerk because they specifically described their reaction to reading the 2024 PHB rather than actual play with the 2024 rules as a whole. A lot of people thought the PCs were overtuned when the PHB came out, but the new monster guidelines, in my (admittedly limited) experience seems to compensate pretty well.

Perhaps they've since played with this iteration enough to have their impressions validated.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Honestly I kind of expected a more.... thoughtful take from a storied blog like this rather than knee jerk gloom and doom about how PCs are invincible and the game is all about superheroes now. It just feels like such an edition change cliche at this point.

Superheroes are just fantasy heroes who wear spandex.

 

[Sulicius]

I have seen some of the frustrations Keith has with the revision on some Discords before, and I understand him.

I think he's just left behind in another way of playing the game. When I read How To Defend Your Lair by him this summer, I bounced off of it hard. There is nothing in that book that actually helps me run a good game. The most egregious example, to me, was that he said that caves made for poor lairs.

I don't play the game for realism, neither do my players. 5e24 seems to be designed with our kind of play in mind.

I had to laugh when I saw that he was surprised about monster stats. To me, they are just numbers that I add to the dice. I don't think they are exact manifestations of the laws of physics.

The more I read his latest posts, the more I realize that I can't use any of his advice anymore. Not because the advice is bad, but because the revised rules and my preferred play style do not require the kind of analysis that Keith does. It's very in-depth and often imaginative, but not for me. I wish there was someone as talented who did make a blog, but with my style of play!

I hope he does Bigby's, only because it's probably my favorite monster book after reading it, but Book of Many Things would be interesting too.

I think he will have success reviewing 3rd party books as well, but it might not be as much of a financial success.

I wish him all the best.

 

[Minigiant]

That's a really good quote! It is very true. For me this is a great description of why 2024 rules are so much better - because balanced gameplay was prioritized first and DMs have to then figure out the narratives for (or just ignore) how things make sense in their world. I can totally understand others who prioritize verisimilitude over gameplay balance having the opposite reaction though.

To me there is a real struggle with a lot of people in the hobby of having the game look like a certain way and what the positive and negative aspects of it looking that way. And sometimes many people struggle with the aesthetics being pushed away for actual gameplay enforcement.

If the Guard Captain having 18 strength annoys you then that shows that you care more about how the captain looks then how it functions. The 18th strength along with the +2 proficiency bonus is there in order to get the +6 attack. If you reduce the 18 down to 12, you have to either create another three points of bonus that is unexplained or figure out a way to explain three more points of bonus.

Or The Beastmaster Ranger having a spiritual animal because a real animal would die and stripped the class of many of its class features. Thus requiring another class feature to allow the ranger to constantly be able to resurrect the Beast cheaply. Something else they might hate.

This is a problem that existed for the last 25 years or more. Gameplay issues that cannot be fixed by maintaining the exact same tone of the game genre because the genre tone itself does not have a solution for it.

 

[Mephista]

I remember when the paladin shifted from a mundane horse mount in 3e to a summoned beast in 3.5. The mundane concerns of caring for an actual animal were impractical when it came to dungeon delving. So, they got rid of it.

 

[Minigiant]

That's a really good quote! It is very true. For me this is a great description of why 2024 rules are so much better - because balanced gameplay was prioritized first and DMs have to then figure out the narratives for (or just ignore) how things make sense in their world. I can totally understand others who prioritize verisimilitude over gameplay balance having the opposite reaction though.

Also the issue is that many who state that they want to be narrative first then figure out the mechanical balance do it by either not defining the mechanics so there is nothing to balance or covering their eyes to never acknowledge the issues.

Frankly, that group had the reins for the first 10 years of 5e and never attempted narrative first solutions. Because when 2 narratives clash, one has to win and a choice was never made.

Really WOTC had no choice. If they didn't go mechanics first, they'd look worse and more cashgrabby.