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

[Composer99]

I don't think Colville has said anything particularly controversial.

First, I think people on this thread are overstating the commonalities between gaming tables. To pick up on the wine analogy used upthread, there are pretty obvious differences - night-and-day, in fact - between, say, a white dessert wine and, say, Trius Red (a wine I'm very familiar with because that's one of the signature wines produced by the vintner my late wife used to work for). And I am perforce obliged to disagree with the sentiments expressed upthread: there often are tangible differences in flavour between two vintages of the same brand of wine (or two wines of the same varietal produced in different places, for instance - think pinot noir produced on the Niagara escarpment versus pinot noir produced in Napa Valley), because of differences such as:

• overall sunlight
• rainfall
• soil chemistry and microflora
• the barrels used in aging
• the yeast used in fermentation

These changes can be subtle, and perhaps even indistinguishable if you're not used to them. But that does not mean they don't exist, and it is mistaken to assume that's the case.

Gaming tables, to my mind, work very similarly. Some can have very big differences between them; in others, these differences may be more subtle - to the point where such differences may be indistinct to outsiders. But subtle is not the same as nonexistent. Differences can include (but are not limited to):

• native English speakers vs English as an alternate (second/third/etc.) language
• cultural geography
• family life and attitude towards RPGs
• individual player personalities (consider, for instance, the player "traits" discussed in the D&D 5e DMG pg. 6, which are elaborated upon in ENWorlds own LevelUp "DMG")
• access to "IRL" gaming communities (here I appreciate Colville's discussion of historical Avalon Hill wargames and why suitability for solitaire play was often such a concern)

Second, to my mind, DMing/GMing is a compromise between:
(1) Delivering the gameplay experience assumed/aspired to/aimed for/defaulted to by the game you are playing. (D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Paranoia each aim to deliver a very different gameplay experience, for instance).
(2) Delivering the gameplay experience you want to deliver. (This is how you, the DM/GM "play" the game, as it were, in that capacity.)
(3) Delivering your players the gameplay experience they want to have, individually and/or as an aggregate.

I say compromise because these all won't always be in perfect harmony, if indeed they ever are or can be.

Things like adjusting monster stats on-the-fly or fudging rolls are well and good - when done in the service of these three elements in an open and honest way. Problems arise - with respect to DM/GM conduct - when DMs/GMs aren't willing to engage in this compromise, or are misleading about the kind of gameplay experience they want to deliver.

(I should note that it's not always the case that a game is clear about the gameplay experience it aims to deliver, whether as a result of the designers being coy or as a result of the designers not having a clear idea themselves. D&D 5e strikes me as just such a game. Likewise, DMs and players don't always have a clear idea of what they want out of a game, and therefore what gameplay experience they want to deliver or be part of - in fact I suspect that's more often the case than not. This is why open and honest discussion and self-reflection are important.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Good post in general, but you're being needlessly harsh here. Drawing a firm line between the DM's game prep and the game itself doesn't make sense. The DM can set every encounter ahead of time, trying to plan the challenge level carefully, but if when the encounter actually happens they find they were wrong about how challenging an encounter is, changing it at that point is "cheating?" If the DM gets to set the encounters in the first place, why is changing them on the fly cheating?

Especially if, as I assume, Colville is using 5e, and unlike 4e or PF2e, nothing I've heard suggests that the encounter calculation tools in 5e work appreciably better than the ones in 3e.

 

[Thomas Shey]

(I've referred to "contemporary approaches" because in some more classic approaches the GM doesn't have the same degree of authority: monsters that have not already been placed in the dungeon key are supposed to be regulated by wandering monster roles rather than GM fiat.)

Though I should note this was not non-controversial even in the early days; I distinctly remember some discussion of "softkeying versus flexkeying versus hardkeying" even back in the day, maybe in A&E.

 

[Jahydin]

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.

When I run 5E I do this all the time since encounter balance really is all over the place, especially once you get into the double digit levels.

In order to make it "fair":" I don't modify numbers that have already been identified, I don't keep the change a secret, and I scale the rewards appropriately.

For instance, higher AC would be: "As you fight the orc you notice he's a bit more armored and than the others you've been fighting". I would then bump the XP from 100 to 125.

Would that make it less terrible to you?

 

[DND_Reborn]

Colville has spoken. What do you think?

I think I'm glad the settings could adjust the playback speed to x1.5. (j/k -- I do that with most youtube videos.)

He makes some fine points, of course, but nothing really surprising IMO. Do people actually think their game is run like others? I never do. There might be similarities of course, but that is why I often express in my posts the style or type of game I enjoy running and playing in.

While I definitely NOT agree with changing a monster's AC or HP DURING THE ENCOUNTER or fudging dice rolls to make an encounter harder or easier. However, I will change the encounter if I feel I made a mistake in the design and it is too easy or too hard, typically by adding or removing opponents. Having "reinforcements" arrive, for example, if the encounter was meant to be challenging but is going to easily. But, even those changes will only happen IF it makes sense to the narrative/game world. And I will not do it if the players come up with some great idea to overcome the challenge--it only happens if I made a mistake in the design.

When I run 5E I do this all the time since encounter balance really is all over the place, especially once you get into the double digit levels.

In order to make it "fair":" I don't modify numbers that have already been identified, I don't keep the change a secret, and I scale the rewards appropriately.

For instance, higher AC would be: "As you fight the orc you notice he's a bit more armored and than the others you've been fighting". I would then bump the XP from 100 to 125.

But do you do that prior to beginning the encounter or after you start it? If before it begins, then you just have a variant of orc (for instance), but if you are in the encounter, thinking "They are hitting my orcs too much, I need to bump their AC." and change it mid-fight, that would certainly be questionable to me. However, like you said you don't keep it secret, so if your players are fine with it that is all the matters, right?

 

[overgeeked]

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.

Sigh. Yeah, it does. And the devs have said they balanced PC resources around 6-8 combats per day. Further proof that nobody reads that section of the DMG or pays attention to the devs.

 

[tetrasodium]

Often, I find a foregoing commitment to "combat does not have to be lethal if you don't want it to be" helps a lot here, but even then that can be dicey. So I have a secret weapon.

I change numbers....but I do it in the open. Not "I physically change the die" or whatever, I mean I tell the players, "That attack should have hit you. You KNOW that attack should have hit you. You have enough fighting experience to know that you absolutely should be bleeding on the floor right now...and you aren't. You don't have time to ponder the ramifications of this right this second...but SOMETHING is up." If I'm feeling fancy, I may add more flashy descriptions or give more specific details (especially if a good idea strikes). Works just as well for opponents if I "need" them to survive a little longer or whatever.

This, unlike fudging as described above, does not interrupt the ability for players to learn from consequences, because it isn't concealed from them. They can see that something is going on, and learn from/about it. They can do research later to try to figure out how it worked, how to exploit it, or how to prevent others from exploiting it. It becomes part of the experience.

At first glance before coffee my initial thought was "hmm that could be a good card to keep in the deck", but it's a card that carries a lot of problems @Micah Sweet mentioned them. That card is one that deploys plot armor & that might be ok in old editions where the death & dying mechanics don't already basically grant plot armor at all times but not in 5e. When I hit a Alice for 187 hp(or whatever) in the first round of a fight I want to last a bit with a mook's max damage crit & fudge that down players don't know it. Those players will likewise not know when the monster legitimately rolls snake eyes against an almost dead bob who then proceeds to live so he can kill the 7/xx monster Alice just crit with a his 3 point hit that saved the day at the last minute after feeling like he has been baggage for most of the session for whatever reason.





Back to the video's point though. Assumptions of table variance are a big problem in discussions about d&d, especially wrt table size for all the reasons he mentioned. In a 2-3 person game it doesn't matter much if Alice is wildly more effective at something Bob & Cindy don't do but in a 4-5 person group with Dave & Edith it's almost certain that Alice is going to share a party role & need with someone else making it more important for the GM to (as he put it)"compare one class to another & see how they dip into the action economy" or consider a different problem of "how does a class that has resources that can run out sit in a group with another class that can just do its thing every round & never runs out of anything". It's more important for the GM of a large group to do those things because there's only so many times that the GM can dramatically fudge the dice or create a job for aquaman before the efforts just draw attention to the problem & make things worse.

I run 4-5 person tables with long duration campaigns & pretty much always have. The strengths & problems I see are going to be different from those that someone running a game for 2-3 people to the point where questions like "what constitutes excessive charop/powergaming" is likely to be an entirely different scale just as how it can or should be dealt with at one table might not apply to the other. Often I see someone say that x is a problem because it causes P & Q under these conditions only for someone to come along just flatly stating that x is not a problem because the person bringing it up is an aberration not reflective of the game.


I don't think that he really touched on it, but another big communication roadblock of assumptions I often see is in if someone uses ToTM battlemats or capable VTT/Digital tabletops. In the past that was often a clear & obvious "well that's a totm/grid" issue I don't see & it was still largely the case till pretty recently because roll20 started causing player PC load issues as it grew much beyond the larger chessex mats making it still largely totm/battlemat. As VTT's & digital tabletops became more capable they started sliding into a midway between ToTM & battlemat strengths& weaknesses with strengths & weakness of their own that don't always map clearly to either of the others. Given that I found what looks to be two or three AR d&d projects in the first few search links I expect those will bring their own gameplay riches & rough edges that don't map well to the three we know & love today.

 

[Jahydin]

But do you do that prior to beginning the encounter or after you start it? If before it begins, then you just have a variant of orc (for instance), but if you are in the encounter, thinking "They are hitting my orcs too much, I need to bump their AC." and change it mid-fight, that would certainly be questionable to me. However, like you said you don't keep it secret, so if your players are fine with it that is all the matters, right?

This would be during the battle. And I only would do it when things were incredibly too easy. Oh, and I would never do this to make things easier (since that was never an issue), just harder.

I started off with giving them the choice of asking for "hard mode" during fights that were too easy, but quickly realized the answer was always "yes", so just started doing it without asking.

But yeah, never a secret, all die rolls made in the open, and always bonus rewards.

High level D&D is just so ridiculously overpowered, I have no idea how DMs manage to balance their encounters. I was running Out of the Abyss, so not many magic items and zero trips to the store, and STILL, every encounter was a cake walk.

That's when I realized 5E's purpose though. Even though as a DM I was secretly feeling terrible for not challenging them properly, the players were having the time of their lives. They loved the story and their characters and we all had a lot of fun. That's the point of 5E.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Don’t buy new adventures etc at release. Wait for others to read it and post reviews and thoughts. Then decide if you want it.

 

[Oofta]

Sigh. Yeah, it does. And the devs have said they balanced PC resources around 6-8 combats per day. Further proof that nobody reads that section of the DMG or pays attention to the devs.

The 5 minute work day has always been an issue. Why expect it to be different now?