D&D General The Problem with Talking About D&D

[James Gasik]

First off, the conversation I think I was having, with others - not you; was about people seeming to need explicit language in the rules to do stuff like forbid non human pcs in their campaign or whatever. Which, is counter to the ruling not rules ethos of the game and is a very 3.x RAW is King view of the game.

Secondly, I think it was ever thus, with regard to the diversity of playstyles, that D&D has been asked to service. With the exception of 4e and possibly in a different way Basic, D&D has not been very focused.


While I agree that 4e was very focused and clear as to what it was striving to be, I do not accept that 5e is not well designed. I think it is pretty good. I may have preferred 4e a few years ago I am increasingly impressed by the robustness of the 5e game.

Aside from that, however, 4e was commercially not as successful and 5e is a much more commercially successful game. Given that WoTC/Hasbro are looking to profit from D&D IP in the broader entertainment world, they have every incentive not to alienate any part of the market. So they would see broad appeal and lack of focus as a selling point and a marketing bonus.


I played back in those days, (though not with Dave or Gary) and my experience was that D&D followed lineages based on the DM and player that introduced players to D&D in an area.

I played many of those old Avalon Hill games back in the day and those rating systems were highly hit and miss.

Something can be very well designed, and not popular with a broad base of viewers. See "Oscar Bait" or "Cult Classic" vs. "Summer Blockbuster".

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Something can be very well designed, and not popular with a broad base of viewers. See "Oscar Bait" or "Cult Classic" vs. "Summer Blockbuster".

Yeah and?

I am not disputing the above sentence.

 

[tetrasodium]

Ok but what I'm talking is, per encounter xp. If you're using milestones, yeah, obviously there's no difference.

Let's say group A is like "we have 6-8 encounters per 5 hour session": standard xp allotment.
Group B has 5 encounters per 5 hour session: same xp allotment as Group A.
Group C has 3 encounters per 5 hour session, but those three encounters are worth less xp than what group A and B use.

The point of 6-8 is not leveling speed. Players have a given pool of resources expected to last them through a given challenge. In this case that challenge is 6-8 mediumish encounters. If you expand the size of the pool by adding extra rests to an adventuring day or shrinking the number of encounters with bigger encounters then more of that pool can or must be used on any given encounter causing the system's math to start pulling apart in various places the GM will need to start fixing on the fly or through a growing list of houserules.

You could say well what does it matter if the players are all having fun, the sorlock/fighter/monk heavy party is having a blast so who cares?... are they having fun in that world of cardboard? Even if the sorlock fighter & monk players are having a blast on rest number 5 or session number42 where they rest every fight are the cleric & wizard having fun with all those short rests too? What about the artillerist who gets nothing on a short rest but is likely to lose a turret they just deployed last fight, is the artillerist player having fun on rest number five too or is it just the free drinks?

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah and?

I am not disputing the above sentence.

Oh sorry, reflex, people talk about "commercial success" as a metric for how good something is a lot. I apparently missed the "aside from that".

 

[James Gasik]

The point of 6-8 is not leveling speed. Players have a given pool of resources expected to last them through a given challenge. In this case that challenge is 6-8 mediumish encounters. If you expand the size of the pool by adding extra rests to an adventuring day or shrinking the number of encounters with bigger encounters then more of that pool can or must be used on any given encounter causing the system's math to start pulling apart in various places the GM will need to start fixing on the fly or through a growing list of houserules.

You could say well what does it matter if the players are all having fun, the sorlock/fighter/monk heavy party is having a blast so who cares?... are they having fun in that world of cardboard? Even if the sorlock fighter & monk players are having a blast on rest number 5 or session number42 where they rest every fight are the cleric & wizard having fun with all those short rests too? What about the artillerist who gets nuthing on a short rest but is likely to lose a turret they just deployed last fight, is the artillerist player having fun on rest number five too or is it just the free drinks?

I suppose, but what about groups that aren't that good? See, my experience is mostly based on AL and a few home games, where the individual characters are generally fine, but the tactical ability varies widely, and the groups that form do not always mesh well. Some early AL mods insisted on large numbers of fights that were quite grueling, but later ones went with fewer but harder fights (as befits the "2 hour-ish" timeframe).

When a group worked together for awhile, like when we would do Curse of Strahd for a season, or churn through Storm King's Thunder on Sundays, they would start to perform better, but I saw a lot of variance.

*It doesn't help that in some AL sessions you didn't even get one short rest, let alone two. And in home games, you'd have like 2 or maybe 3 encounters per session.

 

[tetrasodium]

I suppose, but what about groups that aren't that good? See, my experience is mostly based on AL and a few home games, where the individual characters are generally fine, but the tactical ability varies widely, and the groups that form do not always mesh well. Some early AL mods insisted on large numbers of fights that were quite grueling, but later ones went with fewer but harder fights (as befits the "2 hour-ish" timeframe).

When a group worked together for awhile, like when we would do Curse of Strahd for a season, or churn through Storm King's Thunder on Sundays, they would start to perform better, but I saw a lot of variance.

*It doesn't help that in some AL sessions you didn't even get one short rest, let alone two. And in home games, you'd have like 2 or maybe 3 encounters per session.

In all seriousness what about " groups that aren't good?"

• What if they need to run?... running has pretty much always been easy
• What if someone drops to zero? then all damage beyond that until negative max hp goes away if they get even a single point of healing
• What if someone dies? What if they do? Atr low levels there is the time honored tradition of changing the name at low levels but raise dead type spells have always been easy at higher levels & 5e makes it even easier
• What if they TPK? excellent opportunity fir the players to do something that has been getting bandied about a lot lately as the GM's duty & solution to all things. The players should engage in an honest discussion talking about what went wrong & how they can avoid it in the future Colleville has a great video on catastrophic failure
  Spoiler: here

  One more video coming that wasn't what I thought it was
  video at the timestamp where he goes into the discussion
• What if they run out of resources? Again this is a great chance for the players to engage in a discussion about things like party roles teamwork & what kind of resource burn on their part is a safe rate to avoid running out of resources due to players going nova.
• what about them?

 

[pemerton]

Because they are not being pushed to have the budget of 6-8 encounters per session?

that default assumption of resource drain also destroys any notion of wilderness exploration as a challenge as the characters only run low on resources after 6-8 combats between long rests...so you either house rule things or you let go of wilderness exploration as a challenge.

Fights per day only affect leveling if you're counting individual XP per fight. Most DMs seem to use milestones and/or story-based leveling. Most WotC modules seem to reinforce that.

So here's a thing I've noticed:

The idea that "long rest" = "end of session", as per @James Gasik's post on the last couple of pages, seems to be very prevalent.

Except that when it comes to wilderness exploration, the idea that "long rest" = "in game day" seems to get applied, as per @overgeeked's post quoted here.

Variations around these possible applications of the recovery rules - that is to say, different approaches to correlation of recovery periods to in-game and real-world periods of time, that are relative to different sorts of fiction - will produce very different table experiences.

 

[Campbell]

The truth is that basically balance does not matter for the vast majority of D&D groups I have seen because most tables do not see content that is nearly difficult enough for player characters to need to reach their limits. Stuff sort of related to balance does matter though. Like 'Can I have play of the game moments if play class X?'. If I'm playing a fighter, do I get to show off in the same way I can if I play a wizard? This is why I have always preferred stuff like psi-warrior or sorcerer/swashbuckler builds even if they are not always as effective as other melee builds - I get to show up in dramatic moments.

 

[James Gasik]

In all seriousness what about " groups that aren't good?"

• What if they need to run?... running has pretty much always been easy
• What if someone drops to zero? then all damage beyond that until negative max hp goes away if they get even a single point of healing
• What if someone dies? What if they do? Atr low levels there is the time honored tradition of changing the name at low levels but changing the name has always been easy at higher levels & 5e makes it even easier
• What if they TPK? excellent opportunity fir the players to do something that has been getting bandied about a lot lately as the GM's duty & solution to all things. The players should engage in an honest discussion talking about what went wrong & how they can avoid it in the future Colleville has a great video on catastrophic failure
  Spoiler: here

  One more video coming that wasn't what I thought it was
  video at the timestamp where he goes into the discussion
• What if they run out of resources? Again this is a great chance for the players to engage in a discussion about things like party roles teamwork & what kind of resource burn on their part is a safe rate to avoid running out of resources due to players going nova.
• what about them?

I take umbrage with running being easy. Every time I see it attempted, without a very specific ability such as a caster dropping a spell that can slow down pursuit, the enemies just catch you. While there are chase rules in the DMG, the line between "when combat ends" and when it's a chase now, is unclear.

Every instance I've seen of players attempting to run has had to deal with the combat rules. If you just turn and move away, you provoke opportunity attacks. If you withdraw, the enemy just moves up and attacks you again. It's like the old adage, you don't have outrun the enemy, just the slowest party member, but that leaves you without party members.

Plus, there are monsters who are faster than your party members. Quite a few of them. In another thread, I postulated the issue of a monster like the werewolf. If you encounter one at low levels without silver or magic weapons, people said "oh you just run away and come back prepared". Except, in wolf form, the creature has a speed of 40. Who is running away again? The Barbarian or the Monk?

Now if your caster can drop something that slows enemies down, or there's some stunt you can pull to do so, that's one thing, but for a guy stuck in melee with a monster, he's going nowhere.

 

[Vaalingrade]

"Why didn't you run?"

"Because I'm playing a fantasy, not a 'me' simulator." ~runs from game~