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

[EzekielRaiden]

There's also what I call the "Decker problem". If anyone has played Shadowrun, they know what I mean. One character is going off and engaging in solo play while the rest just sit around and wait.

And, conversely, that when there's no Matrix stuff to do, the Decker ends up having nothing to contribute. (I haven't much experience with SR, but at least SR5 seemed to help mitigate this by making most Deckers at least a little bit capable of Rigger work and vice-versa.)

SR also demonstrates the other side of this perennial conundrum: magic is really, really good. SR has very similar problems to D&D in that regard, where the power provided by magic is often seen as superior to the (in-universe) "mundane" stuff like cybermods or bio/genetic stuff. And it has just as many acrimonious debates about mages being overpowered!

 

[pemerton]

I'm just visualizing this.

It's Friday night and I'm in a game where I'm playing a character I don't want to play because the game 'needs' certain roles covered and I'm the chump this time.

Instead of smacking down some monsters, we get something out of our pay grade sicced on us and the DM expects us to run... but then kills my character because 'running is dangerous'.

So I just spent my precious time not playing the game and not playing the game as a character I'm interested in, then being excluded from the game (via character death) for doing the not playing the game the DM wanted me to do.

Why am I still at the table?

There are a lot of solutions to this problem, within the world of RPGing. Some of them are applicable within the world of D&D, including - I reckon - 5e D&D. I don't think any of them begins with complaining about players these days . . .

 

[Micah Sweet]

Any class is good or bad based on the player and their decisions. Imagine someone has this crazy idea to play a Kobold strength based Fighter (15 Strength!) with a greatsword because they think it's funny- I would agree, but obviously there's going to be a problem here.

A Sorcerer is spectacularly easy to mess up, since you need to go over their spell list with a fine toothed comb and be very careful with what spells they choose. I know a player who thinks Witch Bolt is the best level 1 spell ever, and nothing you say can convince him otherwise.

What bugs me most isn't if one person optimizes or strategizes or does neither of these things, it's really more when nobody thinks about optimizing the group. DM will have a session 0 and ask what people will play, and about the best you get is one guy grudgingly saying he'll play a Cleric, so everyone goes "yay, we don't have to worry about heals!"...and session 1 begins and the guy is a Dwarf Tempest Cleric who refuses to use Healing Word and wants to wade into melee and go kaboom.

Which is fine, but that means if you go down, he's not going to be much help. Or someone is like "behold! my warlock/shadow monk with devil's sight!" and then when he goes down, you can't use healing word on him because the target line is a creature you can see!

Witchbolt should be the best 1st level spell ever. The fact that it's woefully underpowered hurts me every time I see it.

"UNLIMITED POWER!" Indeed.

 

[Eric V]

But, there's the issue.

It's all about cost/benefit. What are the costs of scouting - well, there's a non zero chance that your scout is going to fail to be sneaky (and, over time, that chance changes from non-zero to virtually guaranteed without magic) and touch off an encounter that the scout absolutely can't win. And, if the scout isn't quick enough, it is entirely possible that the scout dies as a result.

So, what's the benefit here? You gain a couple of rounds worth of information about the situation ahead of you. Which, by and large, doesn't actually help you all that much. What difference does it make that you know that next cave has two trolls in it vs the entire party learning that there are two trolls in that cave? You might gain a surprise round? Maybe? The rogue can't really do anything about the trolls, particularly, so, the scout goes up, sees the trolls, reports back to the party, who then goes and confronts the trolls.

Versus, the party simply wanders forward, being careful of traps and whatnot, but, not particularly stealthy, and meets the trolls.

Is the information really worth the risk? For many groups, no, it's not. I used to really wonder why groups didn't scout more, but, then I realized that by and large, having a PC scout was pointless. At best it was a waste of time, while one player got to play and everyone else sat on their hands waiting. At worst, it alerted monsters and left the party badly out of position and was often a major disadvantage.

The only time I see scouts anymore is with renewable resources - far, FAR better to risk a small amount of gold on a renewable familiar than actually send a PC ahead.

There's a simpler way to deal with scouting that avoids the "decker" issue and also prevents it from taking up too much time.

1. DM assigns a DC based on the environment that is being scouted.

2. Scout makes a skill check of some kind (dependent on the environment, I suppose)

Failure: Things didn’t go so great. Nothing came of your scouting. Maybe an encounter you had to flee from.

Normal success: Something you learned while scouting, or anticipated, gives you an advantage for the battle. You gain a +4 bonus to initiative this battle.

Hard success: As a free action at some point during the battle, you can grant one of your allies a reroll on an attack roll or save. That ally must take the new result. You must explain how something that happened while you were scouting contributed to this benefit.

This is an adaptation from the scout forms Shifter druids have in 13th Age. Yeah, it's not terribly simulationist, but it solves several problems mentioned above re: scouting and quickly gets back to the whole table playing whilst also making scouting worthwhile.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Any class is good or bad based on the player and their decisions.

Well, yes, if you include in the decisions "I'm going to play this class." But as the other poster said, there can be things in the combination of campaign, local game culture, how the GM handles things and others that make a class generically bad there, and little the player can do will change that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And, conversely, that when there's no Matrix stuff to do, the Decker ends up having nothing to contribute. (I haven't much experience with SR, but at least SR5 seemed to help mitigate this by making most Deckers at least a little bit capable of Rigger work and vice-versa.)

For all the bitching about it, the SR5 decker almost always had something to do in combat, which was the tradeoff for primarily removing him from the "guy in the chair" mode.

SR also demonstrates the other side of this perennial conundrum: magic is really, really good. SR has very similar problems to D&D in that regard, where the power provided by magic is often seen as superior to the (in-universe) "mundane" stuff like cybermods or bio/genetic stuff. And it has just as many acrimonious debates about mages being overpowered!

You could make the argument, but there was enough overhead on just getting yourself up to speed with the things non-mages typically bought with gear I think its much more arguable in SR.

 

[Cruentus]

I'm just visualizing this.

It's Friday night and I'm in a game where I'm playing a character I don't want to play because the game 'needs' certain roles covered and I'm the chump this time.

Instead of smacking down some monsters, we get something out of our pay grade sicced on us and the DM expects us to run... but then kills my character because 'running is dangerous'.

So I just spent my precious time not playing the game and not playing the game as a character I'm interested in, then being excluded from the game (via character death) for doing the not playing the game the DM wanted me to do.

Why am I still at the table?

This seems strange to me, and players at my table do something similar - when creating characters for the game, they ask each other "What do we need?" rather than playing what they would find interesting. I think some of this goes back to older editions where if you didn't have a cleric, you had limited healing, if you didn't have a thief, you'd be gibbed by traps and locks, no wizard, no blasty spells or web or whatever, no fighter, no meatshield. I still find it strange and baffling.

We're playing in a Basic DnD game, and we have 1 Fighter (me, highest stat: 12 Strength), 2 Dwarves (fighters), and 1 Elf (fighter/MU). We haven't had much of a problem avoiding obviously bad fights, figuring ways around things, running or not engaging when necessary, etc. The DM insists on foisting an NPC cleric on us "for healing", when all he does is steamrolls the encounters (particularly low level undead).

I wouldn't play in a game where I wasn't able to choose what I wanted to play, unless it was a game pitched to a certain theme, where I was down with the theme. Otherwise, as you mentioned, you're wasting time playing a character you don't want to play, in a situation that would be arguably uninteresting.

I'm getting ready to kick off a 2e campaign in Greyhawk against Iuz, and I have 1 player so far, playing a Paladin (his 18 roll went into Cha), the rest of his stats generate no bonuses. It'll be interesting to see what the second player is going to opt for, but I'm going to tell them to play what they want, and I'll adjust accordingly (alternative means of healing, herbs, potions, logistical support back at their base, etc.).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do kind of agree that even non-class based games typically have some kind of role requirements based on what you're doing. The problem with a lot of traditional class-based games is that those functions tend to be heavily hard-coded. I think more modern ones like 5e or PF2e give you more options there (you can get a functional healer without it necessarily having to be a cleric or even any characters heavily primary focus if you have a couple of them.)

But in terms of just going in and playing whatever--I mean, even in my Fragged Empire game, everyone made sure they had a medic and a mechanic and a pilot. They didn't just leap in blind.

 

[Oofta]

I'm just visualizing this.

It's Friday night and I'm in a game where I'm playing a character I don't want to play because the game 'needs' certain roles covered and I'm the chump this time.

Instead of smacking down some monsters, we get something out of our pay grade sicced on us and the DM expects us to run... but then kills my character because 'running is dangerous'.

So I just spent my precious time not playing the game and not playing the game as a character I'm interested in, then being excluded from the game (via character death) for doing the not playing the game the DM wanted me to do.

Why am I still at the table?

This seems like quite the strawman. There are bad groups. There are bad DMs. Sometimes even good DMs make bad calls. Who's forcing you to play a PC you don't want to run? Why throw in the virtually guaranteed death scene of a PC you didn't want to run anyway?

Could this happen? Sure. Lots of things do. I just fail to see much of any relevance to anything anyone is discussing on the thread.

 

[Vaalingrade]

This seems like quite the strawman.

Traditional EnWorld definition of Strawman: 'Exactly the thing someone described upthread'.