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

[Laurefindel]

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.

To be fair however, that’s essentially what his quote was about: the style of play that benefited for his analysis is no longer really supported in D&D 2024.

Regardless of what I think of him and of my own preferred style of play, he’s not wrong about that.

 

[Minigiant]

I think another issue with simulationists that have a low fantasy narrative tint to their thought is that, they have not ever figured out how to make the simulation work when the magics are super heroic.

5e 2014 didn't support low power fantasy play. That was just being level 1-3.

 

[Minigiant]

To be fair however, that’s essentially what his quote was about: the style of play that benefited for his analysis is not longer really supported in D&D 2024.

To be fair an argument can be made that his style of play was not supported in 2014 either. 2024 is not that much different from 2014 mechanically.

So it comes off about complaining about looks and actual mechanics.

 

[Pedantic]

That's fair. From my perspective, it's relatively easy to generate supporting fiction from rules inferences (like magically empowered humanoid monsters being fiends or elementals), but I can understand a desire to have some of those inferences be more concrete and detailed.

I do have less sympathy when complaints are not "These rules aren't generating a fiction" but in reality are "These rules are generating a fiction I don't like", which is how I view the "ranger spirit pet" complaints. Rangers as a class using magical rituals to summon spirits in the shape of animals makes perfect sense for D&D-like fantasy; if you don't like it, that's a personal preference, not a failure of the game design. Creators are always going to make aesthetic choices we might not like!

Well, that's kind of exactly it, isn't it? Fiction as a constrain on design, vs. a tool to explain the design. The problem with D&D's toolbox nature and long history is that the anchoring on which fiction is constraint and which fiction is irrelevant are super variable from user to user.

Really it's always going to come down to legacy. D&D is in constant conversation with itself, so you can't do a ranger from nothing, you have to do a ranger in tension with all the other variants of that muddled class fantasy. There's obviously nothing objectionable about the ranger summoning a spirit as a starting point, but if you can point to prior rules that supported a different fiction, it's hard to call someone unreasonable when that fiction is cut off.

 

[Pedantic]

To be fair an argument can be made that his style of play was not supported in 2014 either. 2024 is not that much different from 2014 mechanically.

So it comes off about complaining about looks and actual mechanics.

I get it, I'm still baffled that you can publish an RPG without a skill system, and then people will think it has a skill system (ironically something 5.5 took the tiniest of steps towards changing), but I think that's down where individuals have indexed. @TwoSix is right to call out these problems look like molehills with a greater exposure to more games; whatever depth of rules context the author thought 5e had that has been stripped back in 5.5 feels small when you look at games that did a lot more from the outset to set that context up than 5e ever did.

I don't find the complaint any less empathetic for that comparison. Particularly given how much 5e grew the hobby, you'd expect to find people just coming in now and realizing the thing they want is to spin up setting details from rules implications. That 5e provided less meat to them at the outset doesn't exclude such people from the group to begin with, nor mean they can't be disappointed further. They just started from a different point on the scale than someone coming from 2e or 3e.

 

[TwoSix]

Really it's always going to come down to legacy. D&D is in constant conversation with itself, so you can't do a ranger from nothing, you have to do a ranger in tension with all the other variants of that muddled class fantasy. There's obviously nothing objectionable about the ranger summoning a spirit as a starting point, but if you can point to prior rules that supported a different fiction, it's hard to call someone unreasonable when that fiction is cut off.

Oh, totally agree. No one is wrong with not liking a decision that cuts off a fiction you liked. It's more how the general tenor of those complaints become "the design is doing something wrong" rather than "I don't agree with that decision". A lot of complaints seem to fail to recognize that there's a LOT of daylight between "I would have done things differently" and "The way they did it is wrong."

 

[Pedantic]

Oh, totally agree. No one is wrong with not liking a decision that cuts off a fiction you liked. It's more how the general tenor of those complaints become "the design is doing something wrong" rather than "I don't agree with that decision". A lot of complaints seem to fail to recognize that there's a LOT of daylight between "I would have done things differently" and "The way they did it is wrong."

I've come around to making both critique and design in RPGs much more explicit about design goals. We waste a lot of time on "this was designed badly" when we mean "I want this goal to inform the design." It's frankly a more frustrating conversation, because the rebuttal is usually just "I don't want that" and then you have to figure out how to exist in the room together, but it would be nice to at least acknowledge quality in design is a different scale altogether.

 

[Mephista]

To be fair (and acknowledging we have to give a lot of grace if someone was basing a sim perspective on 5e to begin with), the complaint isn't adversarial, it's about inclusion; why was my design goal not worth the complexity?

It's not that someone else put some part of the gameplay experience first, it's that they didn't do the follow-up work to justify the choice and meet whatever naturalistic criteria the sim proponent measures worlds against.

Here's the thing. They did. Like with the whole warlock level 3 patreon video and the backlash that came from it. JC provided an in character, story-based explanation. It just wasn't popular.

 

[TwoSix]

I've come around to making both critique and design in RPGs much more explicit about design goals. We waste a lot of time on "this was designed badly" when we mean "I want this goal to inform the design." It's frankly a more frustrating conversation, because the rebuttal is usually just "I don't want that" and then you have to figure out how to exist in the room together, but it would be nice to at least acknowledge quality in design is a different scale altogether.

Fortunately, both online discourse and the industry as a whole have gotten a lot better about explicit design goals over the last decade or so. Most books I've received over the last 5 years or so (and some before) have provided a lot of sidebars focused on design goals and intent.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Keith is allowed to feel that 2024 D&D is too bright and big and high powered for him.

His mistake, IMO, is in insisting that it marks a major break from 2014. It's a matter of degrees, but not a new vibe.

The kind of play he misses -- which was definitely not a continuous thread from 1E through 2014 D&D -- is found in the OSR. I hope he takes the opportunity to play in a few games of Shadowdark, Castles & Crusades or Old School Essentials. (Mork Borg likely doesn't have nearly the tactical grit that he wants.)

Conversely, if he wants to stick with crunchier systems, the MCDM folks would be thrilled to send him all the Draw Steel material they've got. And I suspect Pelgrane Press would love to have him try out 13th Age.

But when I hear the complaints like I hear Keith is making, they're almost always followed a year or so later by the revelation that the person is now a happy OSR player.

Find your bliss, Keith.