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

[teitan]

Well it would be this sentence.


If reading A is "a LOT like" reading B, then the two must be fairly similar. But it sounds like what you meant was "While reading 5.5e, I got feelings that reminded me of the ones I had while reading 4e." Because then the similarity is only in the feelings--not in the reading.

Ok buddy if you say so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You skipped over the part where you explain why not making that distinction keeps the example conflict from implying default assumptions.


The fact that you make no distinction is why it implies the default assumption is that the gm should be viewed as a paid service provider unable to refuse to allow a player at their table and/or not allowed to say no to things players want added to the world

Other than the attempt to put words in my mouth that I did not say, I literally don't think I understand any of the above. In particular, I don't understand your first sentence at all.

 

[tetrasodium]

Other than the attempt to put words in my mouth that I did not say, I literally don't think I understand any of the above. In particular, I don't understand your first sentence at all.

There is no putting of words. D&d is not a game like fate:dfrpg with a structured City & character creation where players are entitled to add things like "a village" to the world as part of a group activity.

Since the rules don't grant it, you need to justify why a player is entitled to modify the game world during character creation to create. 'a village". That justification so far rests entirely on an implied being entitled to modify the world by adding "a village" during character creation because the player wanted it so the gm who says no is... "excessively controlling" & "An extreme case", you need to explain why you as a player are entitled to create it to avoid also applying the same "because they don't want it" to the gm in a way that makes the gm saying no both reasonable and supported by the rules themselves. Given that both people can equally claim "because I [don't] want it", & the rules themselves support the GM, it must fall to default assumptions about the authority granted to individual player/gm roles during character creation to justify your claims like extreme & Excessively controlling... Hence questioning your implied default assumptions like all GMs should be treated as paid GM for hire employees who accepted a job offer or the gm is never allowed to say no.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Man, you really have no idea how to run a game with minimal prep, do you? It's amazing how you simply assume that everything is random and unconnected.

Mod Note:

That’s a tad personal, don’t you think? I certainly do. And making things personal is frowned upon here.

So, do better. (Everyone.)

 

[Bae'zel]

The HR books and the 2E settings come from an older model of D&D, where the game was considered in part a toolkit for running various types of fantasy games. At least one prolific poster on this thread has criticized this as a bad model for D&D, but I think it can be safely said at least that the current dominant model from WotC is that D&D is its own thing, and that settings should be tweaked to reflect D&D, rather than vice versa. Hence the disconnect between "using D&D to play in a DM's world" and "playing D&D because we want to play D&D specifically, with all that that entails."

The plethora of successful 3rd party 5e settings with very custom themes that are not “D&D kitchen sinks” prove that this is not really true.

I’ll vehemently stand on the hill that D&D is as much a toolkit to make your own settings, not only a “squish your vision into D&D’s multiverse”.

Adventures in Middle Earth worked just fine without Tortles or Beholders.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There is no putting of words. D&d is not a game like fate:dfrpg with a structured City & character creation where players are entitled to add things like "a village" to the world as part of a group activity.

And there's nothing that makes anything wrong with it; as such, my judgment of someone who has an overly rigid view of someone in his play group is at is. Its not about what the player is "entitled" to; its about what it tells me about what the GM's approach to other things in the game will be.

The fact you think a player wanting to do this as "entitled" says volumns.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Uh, wow. So this thread is a trip. I had wanted to comment earlier but when I went from the first... 15 or so pages and skipped to here, I had no clue how the heck we drifted so far. Spent the rest of the early morning trying to catch up. Anyways...

To comment on the original topic of the thread: on one level, I am kind of sympathetic to a few of his viewpoints. I do think some of the stating of monsters is just... weird and unnecessary? Like, yeah, it's weird that the Guard Captain (CR 4) need be Strength 18 when you could just as well make him a lesser strength and just give him a higher proficiency or just... I dunno, put in numbers that look right. I get that they have a formula, but it feels that sometimes they were trying too hard to stay within the formula when the last few editions have been specifically about getting away from justifying stuff with stats. At a certain level, this also feels like a problem with naming: the Bandit Crime Lord is probably closer to a legendary Bandit Lord, someone who is an amazing adventurer in and of themselves, hence why they are a CR11 on their own. It's a problem with the framing more than the stats themselves, in my opinion.

It isn't necessarily helped by the streamlining of some monsters. I'm going through the MM right now because I have a group of people from work who want to try "D&D" and I'm obliged to let them have a shot despite my misgivings, but I kind of get the idea of "Rend" from a "this moves quick" even if you lose definition. At the same time, some monsters kind of get hit bad with it (Hobgobbos really feel like they got made duller by giving them pack tactics. Congrats, y'all are now just super-Kobolds. lol) while others I think I like more. I will say that they while he talks about how things are more epic magic fantasy, taking away a lot of the mundane damage immunities honestly helps move away from "You need a +1 weapon to stand a chance", and a lot of physical resistances got saved for things that are either liquids or gaseous. Good move there.

I also get the complaint about the overuse of magic as an explanation about everything; I really dislike that more things have become spells rather than less. I understand why, but I really disagree with it. But one of the big cruxes of his argument, that the power creep is bad, I disagree with. If anything, I'm glad that things are more consistent across classes. Still not to what I want, but it's definitely an improvement. Like, yeah, I understand the frustration of having to get your Patron at 3rd level, but unless you were okay with completely doing away with multiclassing as we know it in 5E, the change was needed because of how powerful dips were.


With that said, where the topic has gone... I dunno, as a forever GM, I feel way more inclined to try and collaborate with my players and get to where they want their concept rather than stifle it. Admittedly when I build a world or merely run a world, I'm okay with exceptions and oddities instead of hard, hard rules on what you can and can't be unless it's agreed on that the campaign is going to be something very specific. For example, in my most recent Pathfinder 2E game, someone wanted to be a goofy Tortle druid. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, there really aren't turtle-people in Golarion (or at least, any with PC stats that I can use). But I was okay with this; there were places in the world that people didn't go that he could be from (We chose the Sodden Lands) and even he didn't know his origins. I used a Titan Nagaji heritage as a background (Makes him slower but well-armored, which fit) and told him that we could talk about sticking with Nagaji or Iruxi (PF Lizardfolk) traits for future upgrades. It worked out fine, and I was very happy that my player got to enjoy that character.

Now have I told players they couldn't do something? Yes, but only when it was relevant to a game plot. My first 5E campaign I had a player who wanted to be a drow, but in my homebrew world, "drow" were not a real race: they were basically a myth created over time around non-elves seeing a secret elvish civil war ("Drow" was a bastardization of the archaic elvish word for "Imperial", and the "Drow" were Lawful elves who wanted to basically 'guide' the 'lesser races' secretly towards a more orderly world). All elves knew this, but they didn't share that information with outsiders. Knowing this, he made himself a Half-Elf and we moved on. But it was not something I simply shut down, it was something I had an in-world explanation for that he found satisfying. If he hadn't... maybe we would have worked something out further. It wasn't just a random world-building aspect, but something that was going to come up over time.

Ultimately, I think I'm just more okay with making that sacrifice myself. Now obviously there are limits to how far you can go, but I think it's way more interesting to try and make a player's concept work than try to water it down because it didn't fit your initial vision of the world.

 

[AlViking]

And there's nothing that makes anything wrong with it; as such, my judgment of someone who has an overly rigid view of someone in his play group is at is. Its not about what the player is "entitled" to; its about what it tells me about what the GM's approach to other things in the game will be.

The fact you think a player wanting to do this as "entitled" says volumns.

To me it depends. Are they asking or demanding?

 

[tetrasodium]

And there's nothing that makes anything wrong with it; as such, my judgment of someone who has an overly rigid view of someone in his play group is at is. Its not about what the player is "entitled" to; its about what it tells me about what the GM's approach to other things in the game will be.

The fact you think a player wanting to do this as "entitled" says volumns.

Spoiler: define entitled

entitled
adjective
en·ti·tled in-ˈtī-tᵊld en-
Synonyms of entitled
1
: having a right to certain benefits or privileges
After having saved the country, ain't they entitled to help themselves to just as much of it as they want?
—Mark Twain
2
: having or showing a feeling of entitlement (see entitlement sense 2)
spoiled, entitled children
his entitled attitude/behavior
leading an entitled life
We are also the so-called entitled generation, … told by helicopter parents and the media, from the moment we exited the womb, that we could be "whatever we wanted" …
—Jessica Bennett

Definition of ENTITLED

having a right to certain benefits or privileges; having or showing a feeling of entitlement… See the full definition

www.merriam-webster.com

Definition one not definition two. The reason I pressed you to explain or justify the implied employer/employee relationship or why the gm is not allowed to say no to adding "a village" on the same "because I [don't] want to" entitling the player to create it over the GM's objections is because that keeps the "I want a village created" then stays under definition one.


Your assessment of the gm as "extreme" and "excessively controlling" is indeed mere opinion, but it shifts towards definition two by having all of the social graces of telling the gm obviously unreasonable things like "it's MY story, shut it and do your job" during any character creation disagreement unless you can explain why the rules or something else prevent the gm from saying no or definition one entitle the player to force the creation "a village" even over gm injection

 

[Paul Farquhar]

To comment on the original topic of the thread: on one level, I am kind of sympathetic to a few of his viewpoints. I do think some of the stating of monsters is just... weird and unnecessary? Like, yeah, it's weird that the Guard Captain (CR 4) need be Strength 18 when you could just as well make him a lesser strength and just give him a higher proficiency or just... I dunno, put in numbers that look right. I get that they have a formula, but it feels that sometimes they were trying too hard to stay within the formula when the last few editions have been specifically about getting away from justifying stuff with stats

I think this gets to the nub of the problem the person in the original article has. It helps if you remember that in the early editions of D&D monsters, including NPCs like guard captains, did not have ability scores. Their hit chance, saving throws etc where keyed directly from their hit dice. It wasn’t until 3rd edition that everything had to have ability scores, and with that came the idea that stat blocks represented something real within the game world, rather than a narrative device. Now 5e looked back to those earlier editions - in many ways it’s an alternative timeline third edition. However, it didn’t quite manage to re-abstract ability scores for monsters. It was stuck with that because it’s not just used to determine attack rolls, it’s also needed for saving throws, damage, athletics checks etc. But the stat blocks are intended to remain under the hood (or behind the screen). Our guard captain may not actually have a strength of 18, but his skills and abilities give him the derived stats as if he did.