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

[Thomas Shey]

I think that's true to some extent, but not sure it applies here. There are discussion boards that pick apart the mechanics and playstyles and such of other games, but this particular issue of encounter balance doesn't seem (to me) to really come up.

Then again, no other game has as many total 3rd party adventures being published, so the notion of some sort of playstyle labels is maybe a lot more relevant to D&D.

Well, referencing my post above yours, note a lot of games don't have levels, and the way advancement does or doesn't impact combat effectiveness requires a lot more picking apart. Its pretty near impossible to systemize how much problem two RQ characters will have with a given opponent because there's so many moving parts, but with experience you can make some educated evaluation by looking at relative skill, armor and damage output. Past that the gaps are (barring some particular magical augmentations that aren't always common) just not that large; a character with 75% skills, 6 point armor, doing D8+D4 is probably going to beat a character with 50% skill, 4 points of armor and doing D6+D2, but the effect of fumbles and criticals in the system makes to the question of how certain that is fraught.

Another related thing about this is that the D&D combat model tends to create a certain flattening that isn't common with a lot of other games; to the degree its present its usually because the game system's metacurrency ends up serving the same function as D&D style hit points to drag out a fight and flatten gusting.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Overall agree, but unfortunately economics disagrees. WotC doesn't want a coded system to guide DMs purchases, as they want them to buy them all. Since they have a limited release schedule, part of the business model is based on DMs buying most/all the adventures, as they are almost half the yearly release. While it would greatly improve customer service to help DMs only purchase what is best for them, it would likely cut into their overall profits.

Definitely agree with you re: WotC, but given the huge number of 3rd party publications some sort of labels could be useful for non-WotC adventures.

 

[Hussar]

A point I’ve argued a few times is that rpgs aren’t really games. They are game creation engines. You don’t play DnD or Call of Cthulhu.

What you actually play is the confluence between the game and what the Table has created. You can’t just make a character and play DnD. You need an adventure of some sort and that adventure is created partially using the game but a lot more by whoever created that adventure and then the larger campaign.

Because of that virtually every table is creating a new one off game every campaign. There might be some commonalities between one table and the next but there are probably far more differences.

And because so many of those differences are intangible, it’s nearly impossible to really discuss the game in anything more than very vague terms.

 

[overgeeked]

You could easily design a scalable to party size encounter. But tactical acumen is not something the game could account for. That would still be on the DM.

The smallest possible party size in D&D is one. So make that your baseline. Make the balance point one monster vs one PC in one encounter. The fewest encounters you could have in a day, while still having any, is also one. So balance the PC’s resources around that.

Whether that one PC is solo play or one-on-one doesn’t matter. And you can easily scale that up from there. Five PCs means five monsters. Adjust according to need. Your group not tactically minded, play the enemies less tactically and/or have fewer of them. Your group is tactically minded, play the enemies more tactically and/or have more of them.

 

[Bill Zebub]

We don't talk about THAC0, no no no

 

[Redwizard007]

I've always been a little resistant to even considering what Colville, Mercer, or even Gygax thought about a given issue, but I really like this rant.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's a good general idea, but it's antithetical to WotC's goals and design. They really seem to think everyone plays the game exactly the way they designed it to be played. And you can see this in their seemingly genuine surprise at the puchback over the baked-in playstyle design. You can see this in the design of both 4E and 5E with their assumptions about gameplay. In 4E it was a party of 5 using maps and minis. In 5E it's a party of 4 having 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day. If they removed that terrible assumption, then a system like Matt is proposing could work. Otherwise it'll just cause fewer DMs to pick up the modules as they're not tailored to their group. As it stands, DMs who run modules buy more of them and tailor them to the group. Which is what WotC wants. More sales. This kind of system would cause fewer sales. A non-WotC company could use this and likely do well with it. Here's to hoping MCDM does so.

While there is an assumption that informs things like encounter design, I don’t think they do think or expect that at all.

People exaggerate the supposed “imbalance” between classes on different rest models. Wotc built the game to work fine regardless of number of encounters per day, the 6-8 is just there to have a comparison point for purely at-will vs fully long rest characters. And it works for that. The rogue does the right amount of damage per attack to match the average damage of a wizard using every spell slot to do single target damage, and then has broad competence at will to match the wizards “utility nova” ability with spells.

4e was too tightly designed, as much as I love it, because it paired that tight design with enormous numbers of moving parts and options, and a huge math scale, which made power differences seem bigger than they were. 5e squashed the math scale, vastly reduced the moving parts and options, and defines thing more loosely. As a result, ironically, the same phenomenon occurs, where people crunch numbers and see a couple points of difference and perceive it as dramatic. But it isn’t. You have to compare “broken” CharOp builds to tiefling elemental monks or something to get an actually problematic power differential, and even then it’s not noticeable at tables that don’t try to optimize for combat.

 

[Azuresun]

It's a good general idea, but it's antithetical to WotC's goals and design. They really seem to think everyone plays the game exactly the way they designed it to be played. And you can see this in their seemingly genuine surprise at the puchback over the baked-in playstyle design. You can see this in the design of both 4E and 5E with their assumptions about gameplay. In 4E it was a party of 5 using maps and minis. In 5E it's a party of 4 having 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day. If they removed that terrible assumption, then a system like Matt is proposing could work.

Regular reminder that the DMG does not mandate 6-8 encounters, it gives it as ONE example of how an adventuring day could go. Further proof that nobody read that section for themselves.

 

[Hussar]

You could easily design a scalable to party size encounter. But tactical acumen is not something the game could account for. That would still be on the DM.

The smallest possible party size in D&D is one. So make that your baseline. Make the balance point one monster vs one PC in one encounter. The fewest encounters you could have in a day, while still having any, is also one. So balance the PC’s resources around that.

Whether that one PC is solo play or one-on-one doesn’t matter. And you can easily scale that up from there. Five PCs means five monsters. Adjust according to need. Your group not tactically minded, play the enemies less tactically and/or have fewer of them. Your group is tactically minded, play the enemies more tactically and/or have more of them.

Been there. Tried that. You’ll never get it past again. Too board gamey.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

He's both right and wrong--or right only to a point, and very wrong after. Every table does have its own context, and the game needs to account for that. Ironclad, absolute rules with no variation would not function. But he is wrong to make so much of the resulting so-called "variety."

Thing is...we're all humans, we share a heck of a lot of common features. This forum is for English-speakers, and for most D&D fans, English is their mother tongue. (There are exceptions, even on this forum, I know, but D&D is "natively" English-language.) The vast majority of people who play D&D share the overall Western cultural zeitgeist. Even with the growing cultural exposure of D&D, the vast majority of players are "nerds," usually at least a little bit math-inclined.

So, we all start from the same text--the rules sitting before us--and we (well, most of us) have both overall human thinking processes AND a shared bedrock of cultural and social experience. That's gonna mean we often draw the same conclusions, for the same reasons. We will often recognize that a particular design idea is just generally clever, because good design can transcend tables. And we recognize that there are a ton of mechanical elements that will be nearly or truly universal, e.g. you aren't really playing "D&D 5e" anymore if you aren't rolling d20s for most of your "did it work"/"did you avoid it" rolls.

This might seem trivial, but it's utterly vital. It tells us where actually effective design must lie: extensible frameworks, not individual rules.

Because IF D&D were just a collection of ironclad individual rules, Colville would be 100% correct. But it isn't--or, at least, it shouldn't be. And, contra his claims, it IS possible to some extent to account for a wider degree of variation on things. Yes, if you go for the absolute extremes (e.g. only a single PC vs 8+ PCs) you're going to run into issues...because extreme cases are ALWAYS issues when statistics are involved. But 4e's XP Budget rules actually work extremely well to gauge the difficulty of encounters and challenges even if you don't have all four "roles" present. More importantly, having those roles in the first place helps you identify what might go wrong so it becomes easier to adjust if you need to: in other words, you can make design that is better for supporting DM tweaking.

Sooooo....yeah. We can still talk about it. But we have to let go of both the fiction that (as he says) D&D can be "solved," AND the fiction that every table is a unique and special snowflake completely unlike any other table ever. Doubly so when SO. DAMN. MANY. DMs adamantly insist on EXCLUSIVELY playing "Tolkien races only, no firearms but 15th century plate armor and 16th century swords" etc. etc. There's a hell of a lot more in common than different between most tables.

Edit:
Oh God, then he starts talking about modifying monster stats on the fly during combat. No, nope, sorry, uh-uh. I already knew that he actively engages in cheating his players (to the point that he will even stage rolling dice while fixing the result, so people will think he actually rolled something he didn't), but modifying encounters on the fly to fit your preconceived notions of what they "should" be? Noooooooope. That's a flag so red we need to invent new color words to describe it.