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

[saviirkad]

As a player, I would always rather reskin my concept to fit the GM's setting, OR have a set of new options that fit the setting, rather than just have a limited list of options available.

This is what we've done more than once, and each was successful in terms of maintaining setting tone and such. Like we did an all-human Diablo game where one PC was an elf, the trance rest was just treated as a paranoid warrior's conditioning. A loxodon's trunk simply signified this warrior's ambidextrous and quick draw abilities. I was an aasimar paladin, and the aasimar abilities were treated as if they were paladin abilities.

But that doesn't mean that I don't like restricted options to represent settings either. An upcoming game is going to use LotR 5e, and it'll be in the same world that our current game with an elven sorceress, reborn necromancer, warforged warlock and genasi druid exist in. The change, with accompanying restrictions, is to represent how far back in time we are going, basically chalcolithic. To a period where the same magic existed but access and control was very, very small. No wizard had figured out how to cast fireball yet, let alone improve the arcane formula enough to be reproducible by any wizard of low capability. The world is small because travel is limited, and that means that the dispersal of people is also limited, so even though the same species are largely present worldwide, that doesn't mean they're all available within the region we're playing in.

Reskinning and restricting are both valid tools, in my opinion, and which is better than the other will always depend on other factors. We reskinned Diablo because the restrictions felt burdensome, and we’re doing restrictions next because it feels freeing.

 

[Lazybones]

Back in the day I used to run a lot of campaigns in the CRPG Neverwinter Nights, which used the 3e ruleset and had a great toolset for developing user-created campaigns. In addition to a dozen or so generic D&D campaigns, I created an Ancient Greece/Bronze Age campaign, a Star Wars campaign, and several X-COM campaigns, including one from the perspective of the alien invaders. The Star Wars and X-COM games used a lot of community-created content. But the rules themselves were basically 3e (heavily modified in the case of X-COM, which used d20 Modern). Creating those kinds of mods is much easier in a tabletop campaign, since you don't need to create a slew of custom graphics, audio, hak files, and the like.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Could you though, really? Like, let's be realistic. If you're making low fantasy you're chopping the wizard, the dwarf, the elf, probably the halfling, I'd say you want to chop the cleric as well. That's already 3/4 of the most basic races and 2/4 of the basic classes. You're excising a lot of stuff right off the bat, to say nothing of how many creatures just aren't ending up used. How many items are being thrown on the chopping floor. So much of the work is being thrown away I'd easily say its at least 80% even when we're talking the most basic books of Basic, not even going into the expanded line.

D&D was, word of the creator, a work that had a cleric introduced just to counter a vampire. A game you could totally play as a balrog in, as long as it was a young one. A game where people took Deities and Demigods and saw it as an extension of the Monster Manual and set about forcing the gods to mine out salt in the ruins of a destroyed planet. I'd argue its never really been favourable to low fantasy


I mean, if you want Star Wars stuff that's easy. Grab psionics. Eberron has enough psionics and 5.14 even has a class that's flat out just rules as written intended to fulfill that fantasy. You can tease out what people want from something and provide assistance in making it happen. D&D has plenty of "Yeah this is totally just X". Want to play Elfquest characters? Ghostwise halflings. Want to play a Protoss? Xeph.

Ravenloft is a grab bag anyway. Ironically given how it functions its the setting most applicable to having a Jedi in it due to how that all works

Well, then you're a desert tortle. Because desert turtles exist. Or you're from the Last Sea with all of the surfing lizardmen, because we got to be reminded that Dark Sun is the setting with the surfing lizardmen. Rules as written, Yuan Ti and Kenku are completely fine and extant in Dark Sun, and there's nothing saying they're extinct there, so they could exist.

Ravenloft isn't a problem, as designed that setting just grabs people from everywhere so it could easily just grab a tortle from anywhere. Thay isn't a problem, Tortles exist elsewhere in FR, you're just from there and ended up in Thay in your travels. Eberron isn't a problem, everything from D&D exists somewhere in Eberron so, yeah, Tortles are in there by default. There's a wide massive ocean the books don't go too hard into and you're wanting Keith's blog to apply more

Luke Skywalker may not belong in there but you could easily write a character who starts off the same, a young farmboy from a desert planet with high piloting skills, and use that to play a character in Star Trek RPG of Choice (or that other one with the complicated scenario) easily, and that isn't too hard to fit in. Things go different of course, but the root idea can be played

One thing of note here: I don't think that any Star Trek RPGs include Jedi as class or ability set (though it might have rules for psionics of some sort that could be used to fill some of those functions, but it might not be sufficient without house rules compromises). And I suspect it also lacks a history of including them in previous editions or era sourcebooks or whatever Star Trek RPGs might have had over the years.

We're really extremely far off from the kind of setting restrictions we talked about originally, where it might go so far as to disallow races or classes from the core rulebooks! Jedi in Star Trek is definitely not the same thing as Dragonborn, Warforged, Clerics or Wizards - or even Tortles - in a D&D setting.

 

[GobHag]

It was toxic then it's toxic now. D&d is a game with a division of roles with differing authority over fiction & place in the shared narrative all bound up in the randomness of the dice. There is no telling of a story and none of the individuals involved in play have enough authority over all of that to qualify for the "your" moniker. Were wotc not caught up in an orgy of stormwind and oberoni chasing memes and battling edge cases as if they were the norm that kind of self selected survey brigading demands would have been dismissed with advice to go write a novel rather than treated as a slogan.

There has always been a telling of a story, irrespective of what DnD was 'meant' for, I have no respect for Gygax in this day and age so why should his preferences influence mine? And whatever that goal was has always been shifting and changing over and over in the decades that it existed, the bonds/flaws/goals alongside Inspiration more or less shown that even in '14 the new Devs goals have already been tainted with the desire to 'tell a story'

 

[Mecheon]

I haven't had orcs in my world since it was created around '86 or so.

No problems with the players at all.

A lok'tar-less world. Tragic

No. I said that the hypothetical gm told said player that Luke Skywalker Jedi of The Jedi Council does not fit in Star Trek and gestured at things that do. It does not fall upon the gm to make the rejected disruption work.

A DM's job is to facilitate the world for the players to run around in. They can provide alternatives, pick at the desired themes to help get the player's idea across.

Its not the DM's personal private ground to run around in. If they want one of those, they should get into novel writing, not dealing with the fact players can and will disrupt their setting

No the gm has the right to reject player backstory race class spells and so on when they want to run a game with a given set of themes and tones those options do not fit into. The two of you are demonstrating how badly wotc failed at supporting GMs in their choice to service posts like 311

A DM can also look at what is being suggested and provide alternatives rather than just smacking everything

And I'm sorry, how is this WotC's fault? If you want to blame anyone for D&D being a grab bag, then you probably want to look at TSR putting cowboy gods and Barsoom encounter tables into Greyhawk, to say nothing of having Gamera and Aura Battlers hanging out in space. Grab-bag stuff like that is in this game's lifeblood from the very beginning

See the earlier quote about players being a disruption by refusing to engage with the setting on a deep enough level to even complete character creation. This is not for the gm to solve for a player who is stuck on a disruptive character concept.

I'm sorry, are we talking different settings here? How are tortles of all things disruptive to Dark Sun?

The pulp nature of Dark Sun makes them fit in fine. You could just smack "The Valley of the Tortoise Men" in any Dark Sun map, set it up as some old tortles who know of the before-times, and are being hunted by slavers who want to throw them in the gladiatorial pits. Given the multiple types of lizardmen already in the setting, none of that is out of place

Also like, let's not forget one of Dark Sun's more popular races is a direct Forgotten Realms import. Thri-kreen aren't Dark Sun originals.

See themes and tones of the setting. If a character doesn't fit thegm is totally justified in saying "no it doesn't fit, this is the setting you need to fit". Wotc should have better supported gms rather than breeding a hostile environment where Crawford himself grinned with excitement while saying a class was designed to frustrate GMs

I don't understand why you're complaining about WotC on this one when this problem is TSR's problem. They made Forgotten Realms the "Everything is here!" setting. They made Ravenloft the "Everything can be dragged here" setting. They made Planescape and Spelljammer to give canonical explanation for how stuff can get around

If you don't like players exploring the depth of what the game has to offer and its options, then maybe the real problem is the company who produced no less than three different "This setting exists so you can use stuff from other settings" style setting books is the actual cause of your grief

Why on earth do you seem to think this is a problem for the gm to solve? You are demonstrating how toxically counterproductive wotc's "tell your story" & "designed to frustrate your gm" advice on these kinds of things has been.

Because the DM's job is to run a game with their players. This is a communal effort so everyone is working together. A DM who throws their hands up and goes "Doesn't fit" with no further advice is a DM who is going to find themselves without any players, and isn't going to be a DM any more, are they?

Completely agree. The idea that "D&D doesn't do generic fantasy very well" has always struck me as one of those instances where the speaker is saying more about themselves than about D&D. In more than three decades of playing multiple editions of the game, I've found that it, in fact, does do generic fantasy—and a lot of other kinds of fantasy—quite well. You just need to be willing to modify the system, and be adept at doing so. It's not enough to simply recognize that D&D is a toolbox; you have to know what the tools are, what each of them is good for, and which ones you'll need for your current campaign.

I'd argue that D&D does Dungeons and Dragons very well. A lot of those tropes have leaked out into the wider fantasy sphere, sure, but its very D&D coded when those things pop up and noticeable when it shows up. Its in the name alone, Dungeons and Dragons. If you have a setting that's more generic fantasy and medieval, in that there's no ancient ruins to delve into, and no dragons around, then... Why use Dungeons and Dragons for that?

 

[Mecheon]

One thing of note here: I don't think that any Star Trek RPGs include Jedi as class or ability set (though it might have rules for psionics of some sort that could be used to fill some of those functions, but it might not be sufficient without house rules compromises). And I suspect it also lacks a history of including them in previous editions or era sourcebooks or whatever Star Trek RPGs might have had over the years.

We're really extremely far off from the kind of setting restrictions we talked about originally, where it might go so far as to disallow races or classes from the core rulebooks! Jedi in Star Trek is definitely not the same thing as Dragonborn, Warforged, Clerics or Wizards - or even Tortles - in a D&D setting.

My go to remains asking what they're wanting thematically from the character concept. You can't have flat out Jedi, sure, but what is it specifically about Luke they're wanting in their game? Is it the farmboy from a desert planet coming to discover a wider universe? That's very possible and I don't see where there'd be a problem. If you're wanting the specific Jedi stuff, that's a bit harder but I could see going into the philosophical approach. No laser swords though

Or, well, you could go the Absolute Madness route where you use the justification of the fact that Transformers has crossed over with Star Trek and Star Wars, thereby implying the two are canon it at least one universe. Those Ewoks and Jawas in Iron Town gotta come from somewhere. Plus, well, D&D had Barsoom, Wonderland, Boot Hill, Averoinge, Gothic 19th Century Real Actual Earth and Modern Real Actual Earth in Ed Greenwood's Kitchen crossovers back in TSR days, we're absolutely throwing rocks in a glass house if we act like crossovers are too far a step in this system

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Yeah it's a shockingly shallow and rather unevidenced take from this blog.

The idea that 5E14 was "internally consistent" but 5E24 isn't, is frankly, well it's kinda dim as a take. There's no really any clever or generous way to describe it. That's at best a silly and rather vapid claim.

Also, literally every specific critique he makes, already applied to 5E14 right from the start, just to different examples! (I can go through them if necessary, but I suspect I'm just saying what we all know). That's just hopeless! I don't know what he wants to achieve here but it really lowered my opinion of his, well, comprehension and argumentation. Which does not reflect well on his blog, which is reliant on the assumption that he has strong comprehension of the monsters and argues how they should work.

Also the "munchkin's demands for MOAR power" stuff? Come on the hell on bro, even you cannot possibly actually believe that. The idea that 5E24 characters are more powerful (esp. to the degree that would please munchkins!) than 5E14 ones is extremely funny and demonstrate a complete and total failure to understand mechanics and particularly to understand min-maxing.

EDIT - I was trying to think if there was any possible perspective which could lead to you believing this - and I came up with one - if you looked solely at Martial classes (and I mean pure Martials, not Paladins or Rangers, I mean Paladins got nerfed for god's sake), you could claim they gained power - and they did. But not very much, and not enough to put them really on-par with Full Casters (just closer, and 5E was never so poorly balanced that that was a huge issue, and it still isn't). So basically this blogger, for all his claims of deep understanding of the game, is the most basic of edition-change warriors, the dude mad as hell because Martial characters didn't suck more this time (and/or magical characters didn't get buffed more). That type of dude has been mad at every edition change except 2E > 3E and 4E > 5E, and he was pretty suspicious of 4E > 5E because there wasn't much loss of power for Martials (indeed some of those dudes decried 5E for being too 4E-like re: Martials back in 2014).

 

[Stormonu]

I can see this is a serious discussion.

"It was Stalin in Poland with the Panzerfaust!"

 

[Chaltab]

EDIT - I was trying to think if there was any possible perspective which could lead to you believing this - and I came up with one - if you looked solely at Martial classes (and I mean pure Martials, not Paladins or Rangers, I mean Paladins got nerfed for god's sake), you could claim they gained power - and they did. But not very much, and not enough to put them really on-par with Full Casters (just closer, and 5E was never so poorly balanced that that was a huge issue, and it still isn't). So basically this blogger, for all his claims of deep understanding of the game, is the most basic of edition-change warriors, the dude mad as hell because Martial characters didn't suck more this time (and/or magical characters didn't get buffed more). That type of dude has been mad at every edition change except 2E > 3E and 4E > 5E, and he was pretty suspicious of 4E > 5E because there wasn't much loss of power for Martials (indeed some of those dudes decried 5E for being too 4E-like re: Martials back in 2014).

I feel like you're stretching a bit here. Even the Full Casters (especially Sorcerers) got more powerful in 2024, if not as much of a boost as Monks and Fighters. It's not incorrect to say that the ceiling for single-class builds has also been raised, Paladin excluded.

And while yes, using the word 'munchkin' in general does suggest a level of disconnect from the current discourse about game balance... I don't want to dump on him and I didn't really expect this thread to go for 48 pages. I perfectly understand feeling that the game has left you behind even if you're not good at articulating the reasons.