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

[billd91]

That pretty much sums up what I've seen. I hear all the time "oh you got into trouble, fool, you should have run". But then when I look at how the rules work, I'm like "this entire process looks like just as much of a pain as a fighting retreat would be" unless, again, you use the old D&D standby of "let's ignore the rules and just cast a spell to solve this problem".

You ever wonder how many soldiers thought similarly when their forces were routed and were being run down by enemy cavalry? How many cursed the decision made to engage in the first place?

Sure, this is a topic of discussion - and, again, an excellent example of how D&D can be hard to talk about. Some want to have a game of careful exploration and engagement in a dangerous environment where death may be around every corner while others want a game of action combat and few consequences and others want something with a different mix altogether. The answer probably has a lot more to do with aligning expectations between the players and DMs - do you have an agreement to have the monsters not pursue if the PCs run, do you want that to play out organically with some types of monsters pursuing and others not, or do you want them to always pursue to the point where PCs live a Hobbesian life - poor, nasty, brutal, and short?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well Tetrasodium, I don't know what to say. All I have is what I've seen to go on, and that's that running just never seems to work out.

I'm not going to speak specifically about 5e, which apparently has a Chase subsystem I don't know about and am thus not qualified to say, but this has generally been my experience with almost all RPGs from day one; unless they have a dedicated evasion subsystem, running is a loser.

 

[overgeeked]

Plus, and this is another point. We're told that it doesn't matter what characters you bring to the game, right? So what if you don't have a scout?

You miss out on all the benefits of having a scout.

Anyone who wears heavy armor is automatically removed from the equation due to the Stealth penalty. Depending on the intersection of race/class/background, you might have to go out of your way to be proficient in Stealth and have have the ability to not reveal your position if you try it.

Yes, there are trade-offs to make. If you want heavy armor you're going to suck at stealth. I don't see that as a problem. No one character should be good at everything.

We don't force people to be Clerics...

If you want to survive fights someone in the group should be some version of healer. The game works the way it does. If the players know that and choose to have no healers, well...that's a lesson they'll learn. Likely the hard way. Or, they just don't get into fights. And at that point, you're basically not adventuring, so why play D&D? Other games will better serve whatever other kind of fantasy you're going for.

I don't think the game should be modeled on "what, you didn't make a Dex-based character with darkvision?"

No one player is forced to play any one type of character, that's true. But it is a fantasy adventure game with a large amount of combat. If the players are so stubbornly individualistic that they all, as a group, refuse to cooperate in character creation...like say no healers, no tanks, etc...then they're going to have a bad time. They will learn the hard way that the game assumes someone needs to fill those roles. Or they just avoid combat entirely so it doesn't matter. But, again, at that point why play D&D instead of some other game that supports the fantasy your group actually wants to play?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why would any of it be easy? Adventuring is dangerous business. You get into a fight you cannot win and it’s difficult to run away without problems? Good. It’s supposed to be dangerous. In historical battles (pre-industrial warfare) most of the casualties were from one side breaking and fleeing.

Then don't be surprised that the take-home lesson most players are going to get is to fight to the bitter end.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I As I see it, the deterrent to scouting isn't because the game doesn't support it - the deterrent is the process of scouting exposes the scout to a considerable amount of danger... which it should.

At which point a lot of people are either going to decide its too dangerous to do, or aren't going to want to be the one to do it.

 

[overgeeked]

 

[Vaalingrade]

Some people want to play D&D as a superhero emulator with endless, pointless, drama-less, toothless fights. Others want to play D&D as a faux-medieval fantasy adventure game. Nothing wrong with either, or anything in between. But again, as per the video in the OP, that's kinda the point. Tables vary. Instead of pretending one-size-fits-all we should be open and honest about the differences in how we all play and what we're after. At some point maybe we'll realize that there are other games out there, and that they just might serve our tastes and our tables better than D&D. If you want fantasy superheroes, the actually purpose built superhero games will do an infinitely better job at that genre than D&D, and slapping a fantasy coat-of-paint over that will be infinitely easier than continuing to kludge D&D into something it's not.

Wait...

Aren't you the guy who says 5e is a superhero game (without a shred of evidence of its connection to the genre)?

Shouldn't I be the one trying to bully you out of the game?

I'm not because I don't want to gatekeep anyone out of the game, but still.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Exactly this.

The game handles it fine. The player doesn't want to risk their character. Those are two wildly different things. The game models the risk fairly well. So in that sense, it mechanically supports that dangerous activity. The problem is the player not wanting to take risks with their character. Adventuring is dangerous business. The first rule of making a D&D character is to actually make an adventurer. If your character doesn't want to go on adventures (you know...delving dungeons saving dragons, and killing princes) you've made a mistake somewhere.

This sentiment only makes sense if you ignore that this isn't symmetrical risk; the person playing the scout is going to get all the risks the other PCs do, and an extra dose beside. Unless a player has a particular self-sacrificing streak, nothing about "making an adventurer" requires them to want to eat that extra dose.

 

[James Gasik]

But what is D&D in the first place is hotly contested, overgeeked, as I'm sure you can see. And just because one person looks at the game and says "aha, it should be played thusly" does not mean that is necessarily the "correct" way to play. I've played in most eras of the game, and I've seen how the game is constantly evolving and changing...and sometimes regressing as well.

But this is what the PHB says: "Above all else, D&D is yours. The friendships you make around the table will be unique to you. The adventures you embark on, the characters you create, the memories you make- these will be yours. D&D is your personal corner of the universe, a place where you have free reign to do as you wish."

And I want to point out the PHB doesn't tell you "this is how you should compose a group, these are the roles you should fill, and this is the procedure in which you must play the game". So telling people "you don't get it, D&D is meant to be this thing, not what you're doing with it" seems like you're expecting people to play the game in a way they are never really instructed to do.

 

[tetrasodium]

Well Tetrasodium, I don't know what to say. All I have is what I've seen to go on, and that's that running just never seems to work out. Perhaps if I saw an example in action it would be different, but it really seems to be a case of somehow being able to grok the instant the combat starts that it's too much for you, because once you're engaged in combat, if the enemies want to chase you down and kill you, it looks like you're stuck for losing at least one party member unless, again, you have a specific trick prepared to allow for it.

You remain in initiative, and the primary factor remains movement speeds. As to why someone would chase you, are you kidding? If they are running, you have the superior force, and these adventurers are busting into your territory. If you let them go, they just come back later. I guess a case could be made for luring enemies into an ambush by having them run after you? I don't know.

Oofta, here's the thing. I know I don't try to scout ahead because the game doesn't really support it well. Let me explain- obviously, I can't scout ahead with a light source. So I have to rely on darkvision, if I happen to possess it, which imposes disadvantage on my perception, which isn't ideal in case I bump into something that is also hiding.

Now presumably, intelligent humanoids use light because their own darkvision has this nifty penalty attached, but many monsters lack hands. Even if my Stealth skills can easily bypass the passive Perception of most creatures, too many times have I seen the scout, who again, can probably see at best 60 ft. (superior darkvision being fairly rare) ahead, blunders into their own solo encounter.

It happened to me one time, and I don't plan on ever repeating the experience. Now a Druid maybe, if available seems like a good choice, as would a familiar if you don't mind having to pay for a new one (on another forum, I saw a very lengthy discussion on what DM's should always target familiars, and it's not an unheard of practice).

The shift away from resource attrition combined with such a high pool designed for 6-8 encounters with trivial recovery means that players do not really feel much pressure to keep an ace in the hole & think ahead about when is the right time to bring out their hail Mary cards or think about how things might play out in a few rounds against the resource pools of each member of the group. When players are doing those things & communicating with each other about them at the table during fights they are able to see the writing on the wall to head for the hills while they still have resources to burn for getting away. When players do not do that they frequently wait until they have nothing left in the tank to aid their escape.

Even when that too late escape is in motion unlimited resources like attacks & cantrips tend to get sunk into attacking the thing they are fleeing from rather than using them to manipulate the environment to slow the attacker. Of course a werewolf is going to keep chasing people attacking it even when it has a fresh kill or some wounds to think about because doing otherwise will just result in continuing to be attacked while running away from the PCs it tried to let escape. When those attacks are being used to fell trees drop stalactites create difficult terrain & so on in ways that may be damaging the pursuer's home territory and/or possessions it makes letting these ones get away all the more justifiable to a werewolf or almost any other intelligent monster.

I'm not going to speak specifically about 5e, which apparently has a Chase subsystem I don't know about and am thus not qualified to say, but this has generally been my experience with almost all RPGs from day one; unless they have a dedicated evasion subsystem, running is a loser.

DMG252. Iwould be overselling it if I called it a vague handwave of permission to run a fast & loose totm chase. It's mostly some rough advice with examples in a table for dramatic events could be used to cause one side or the other to get hung up a bit by the environment if players aren't seeking it out themselves. Think of it like the knocking over shelves throwing furniture & weaving through difficult terrain like crowds kinda stuff that comes up in nearly any tv/movie chase scene.

Great video @overgeeked