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

[TwoSix]

Yeah. Most Warforged in my game are artificers on Mechanicus.

I more or less injected Unicron into Mechanicus and has him be the dark brother of Primus for evil ones.

Gotta say, I like warforged transformers on Mechanus way more than Modrons.

Hmm...or maybe a factional split in Mechanus between the rational modrons and the irrational, radical warforged.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I'd argue we're in a better position at the moment because there absolutely was a stereotype of the controlling DM in the game, running awful games and killing people, but you having to play with them as that was the only game in town. The biggest DM and "This is what D&D is" being stuff like CR absolutely helps getting away from that, showing a more collaborative showing where you can absolutely see players have suggested some backstory stuff to chew on, and its been incorporated

D&D is collaborative fiction at the end of the day. Its shouldn't be controlled by either side

I definitely remember arguments about “killer DMs” in the Forum column of Dragon magazine, but never met any in real life. I believe that the very small size and relative isolation of my teenage AD&D groups actually curbed antisocial behavior by both players and DMs, as everyone implicitly understood that there was nowhere else to go.

I am not really used to the idea of players contributing to the setting lore, but many DMs complain that players do not engage with their homebrew campaign worlds very much, so maybe this is a good way to get those players more invested.

Do they still stick with the "They're from the future" stuff? The alien origin of mind flayers tends to be what I think of for them and was around at least in 3.5e. I don't think either 4e or 5e went into their origins, the only big illithid-centric work being BG3

I am not really sure about their lore anymore. I was OK with the older mind flayers from the 1977 MM, who were just these mysterious psionic squidheads who might be aliens (or maybe not). I lost interest in them once the designers went wild with what I like to call “illithidization”: gross body horror, endless niche variants of the original monster, and ever more convoluted and grimdark lore. They did the same thing with aboleths and some other powerful monsters.

I never cared much about related monsters like the githyanki or githzerai either. The proliferation of canon like the Blood War in later 2E and beyond was one of the things that led to me drifting away from the hobby for a long time. When it comes to weird proprietary D&D monsters, I always liked beholders, bulettes, displacer beasts, and owlbears much more than mind flayers anyway.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's not incorrect to say that the ceiling for single-class builds has also been raised

That you have to phrase it like that demonstrates that the stretch is definitely not on my part! Nor really yours! But on the blogger.

"Single-class" and "not incorrect" and "raised" is very different from:

also that it had chosen to fully indulge a decade’s worth of munchkin demands for MOAR POWER!

That's a lot! That's a wild and prima facie untrue claim to make.

We can argue that in some cases, if you only consider single-class builds (which were never the main offenders, balance-wise, and still aren't), there's a slight increase, but we're talking like, single-digit percent in most cases for non-Martials. Martials are the only ones where you can argue there's any measurable increase in capability (NB I would broadly consider the Monk to be "Martial").

That's not one mis-chosen word either. I mean, you generously say:

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.

But I just quoted what he actually said, which was a lot more than just "munchkin". This isn't just "not good at articulating the reasons", which would itself be odd given the person involved, who is extremely articulate and good at stating reasons, this is either active and intentional or truly disconnected-from-reality (not just "discourse", let's clear that right up, reality, the actual math, the thing he's claimed to be an expert on) mis-portrayal of the facts, from someone is absolutely definitely mechanically competent enough, and good enough at writing that they know what they're doing.

I do think that someone doing that earns themselves some criticism, frankly.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I definitely remember arguments about “killer DMs” in the Forum column of Dragon magazine, but never met any in real life. I believe that the very small size and relative isolation of my teenage AD&D groups actually curbed antisocial behavior by both players and DMs, as everyone implicitly understood that there was nowhere else to go.

Power-tripping DMs/GMs/Storytellers etc. are a real thing, and sometimes that power-tripping manifests as being a "killer DM", especially if the person has already had the idea that a good DM is a killer DM inculcated in them.

I'm not sure that antisocial behaviour is reliably curbed by "nowhere else to go". Most of the worst cases of DM (and to some extent player) behaviour I'm aware of are in fairly isolated groups and people often stuck with bad DMs or bad players because they felt they lacked alternatives. Rather I would suggest antisocial behaviour tends to be curved by everyone involved having a sort of mutual understanding of boundaries and appropriate behaviour, and the consequences for poor behaviour, whether stated or unstated.

I've met a small number of badly-behaved DMs over the years, and the only one that didn't shape up from pushback simply got deposed, and it was clear part of his behavioural mode was the result of being told DMs needed to act in a certain (bad) way by older players who felt that was how it was done (he was fine as a player). I was lucky in that the person who taught me D&D wasn't some killer DM or Monty Haul type (which seem to have been plentiful in the 1980s), but an older second cousin who was way before her time DMing-wise (basically acting like DMs do now). So I think what people teach others has a big impact here too.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I do think that someone doing that earns themselves some criticism, frankly.

Maybe he decided he would get more attention by going nutso.

 

[the Jester]

The Thri-kreen actually go all the way back to the early 1980’s, several years before FR replaced Greyhawk as the default setting for 1E. I remember seeing them in one of the 1982 AD&D Monster Card sets, and the art from those cards was the first thing that piqued my interest in D&D back in grade school. Those monsters soon appeared in hardcover in the 1983 Monster Manual II, but Thri-kreen remained somewhat obscure as I do not remember them being used much anywhere else in 1E materials.

I love the thri-kreen, but I am 85% sure that they are a rip off of Arduin Grimoire's phraint.

 

[mamba]

A non-zero amount of OSR games have plenty of room for totally-not-Runequest ducks, so. It just comes with the community

non-zero as in one, Dragonbane, or were you thinking of something else?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I love the thri-kreen, but I am 85% sure that they are a rip off of Arduin Grimoire's phraint.

They are also very similar to Alan Dean Foster’s Thranx.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Power-tripping DMs/GMs/Storytellers etc. are a real thing, and sometimes that power-tripping manifests as being a "killer DM", especially if the person has already had the idea that a good DM is a killer DM inculcated in them.

I'm not sure that antisocial behaviour is reliably curbed by "nowhere else to go". Most of the worst cases of DM (and to some extent player) behaviour I'm aware of are in fairly isolated groups and people often stuck with bad DMs or bad players because they felt they lacked alternatives. Rather I would suggest antisocial behaviour tends to be curved by everyone involved having a sort of mutual understanding of boundaries and appropriate behaviour, and the consequences for poor behaviour, whether stated or unstated.

I've met a small number of badly-behaved DMs over the years, and the only one that didn't shape up from pushback simply got deposed, and it was clear part of his behavioural mode was the result of being told DMs needed to act in a certain (bad) way by older players who felt that was how it was done (he was fine as a player). I was lucky in that the person who taught me D&D wasn't some killer DM or Monty Haul type (which seem to have been plentiful in the 1980s), but an older second cousin who was way before her time DMing-wise (basically acting like DMs do now). So I think what people teach others has a big impact here too.

Yeah, as one of the old farts of the board, I can say in the '70's that really top-down GMing was treated like it was the expected way for a long time, and as you say, that often translated into killer-DM tendencies (I'm ashamed to say I may have leaned into it a bit at the start). It doesn't seem as common now, but some things tend to be memetically long lived.

 

[Flying Toaster]

Power-tripping DMs/GMs/Storytellers etc. are a real thing, and sometimes that power-tripping manifests as being a "killer DM", especially if the person has already had the idea that a good DM is a killer DM inculcated in them.

I'm not sure that antisocial behaviour is reliably curbed by "nowhere else to go". Most of the worst cases of DM (and to some extent player) behaviour I'm aware of are in fairly isolated groups and people often stuck with bad DMs or bad players because they felt they lacked alternatives. Rather I would suggest antisocial behaviour tends to be curved by everyone involved having a sort of mutual understanding of boundaries and appropriate behaviour, and the consequences for poor behaviour, whether stated or unstated.

I've met a small number of badly-behaved DMs over the years, and the only one that didn't shape up from pushback simply got deposed, and it was clear part of his behavioural mode was the result of being told DMs needed to act in a certain (bad) way by older players who felt that was how it was done (he was fine as a player). I was lucky in that the person who taught me D&D wasn't some killer DM or Monty Haul type (which seem to have been plentiful in the 1980s), but an older second cousin who was way before her time DMing-wise (basically acting like DMs do now). So I think what people teach others has a big impact here too.

Oh I am definitely not recommending having a small pool of players or DMs as a general remedy for any kind of problems with a gaming group, just musing about how it worked out in one particular situation. Most of us were friends anyway and D&D was one of our main activities, so nobody wanted to be left out because of personality conflicts or rule disputes. We often managed to reach a consensus on house rules and other gaming issues without very much discussion because we generally felt the same way about things anyway, but obviously that is not common and not a general method anyone else could follow.