D&D 3E/3.5 Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E

[Shardstone]

It is ironic that a lot of people in this thread say that those that powergame essentially bully and ruin tables, despite the fact that the people making this argument are coming off as incredibly rude and refuse to entertain any other ideas. Taking the moral highground and ignoring the world around you isn't how you win an argument, or hold a civil discussion.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Again, this reveals a difference in play goals.
[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] 's pursuing the play goal that powergaming can provide within 5e (if my understanding is correct). That's not the same as making an "effective" character. There is a HUGE range of "effective" that isn't "perfectly optimal," though someone chasing the powergaming dragon probably wouldn't have fun with most of that range. Someone with a different play goal cares about that optimization less - they only want to be as effective as they need to be to see if their character finds her long-lost father, which is the real reason they want to play. Those people can play melee bruisers with an AC of 14 and a STR of 15 and cruise along quite well if they want, because being optimized isn't a goal and they're effective enough to contribute and survive. The player just doesn't have fun in milking the options for all they're worth. There's nothing that MAKES them do that.

I'm not at all certain what it is you think here is Hemlock's play goal. My observation on the superiority of missile combat is, in my mind, almost totally unrelated to playstyle at all. Playstyle is a player thing. The superiority of missile combat is an observable fact of the PCs' universe, observable to NPCs as well as PCs. It is in fact the answer to the question, "Why are there even any humans left? Why haven't they all been eaten by bulettes and purple worms and dragons?" Answer: missile weapons and horses and Bounded Accuracy. At least, at my table that is the case.

I do have a player who has in the past expressed some distress at the fact that melee combat (e.g. barbarians) has turned out to be a bit of a chump game instead of awesome like he was expecting. I tried to help him out with some tactical advice (use stealth, fight at night, etc.) but the fundamental reality of the situation is that melee really is just kind of bad. Unless I'm willing to distort the entire universe to cater to this player's desires (I'm not) he's left with the choice to either adapt (do things that are effective in the 5E ruleset, either changing tactics or changing characters) or lower expectations ("I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight, but it's a biiig knife and I hope I get to stick it in someone!") If you want a game where melee is good, you'll want to follow AD&D's example: create a large number of monsters from elementals to werewolves which can only be effectively engaged in melee or by expending memorized spells. I.e. get rid of at-will cantrips, and make magical bows require magical ammunition to pierce weapon resistance, and vastly bump up the number of monsters which require magical or +1 or +2 weapons to damage them. 5E is not that game.

In terms of play goals and the 8 kinds of fun, my observation is tied most closely to Fantasy: the desire to experience a living, breathing world to interact with. Thinking through the implications of the 5E ruleset and the kinds of societies that result from it is part of Fantasy, not powergaming. I do enjoy powergaming as a player (seeing the math comes very naturally to me), and for that reason I like challenging scenarios (Deadly or harder) and I absolutely hate the tedium of playing through or running easy encounters (but I do it anyway when necessary because my players are not necessarily like me)... but there are in-character reasons too. Even a big beefy Str 16 Dex 11 Paladin who just happens to have been born big is still better off much of the time picking up and using a bow instead of charging into melee. Because I'm a natural powergamer, if that's my Paladin he's probably going to multiclass and learn some attack cantrips--but even if I were playing in a totally relaxed, non-powergaming style and were planning on sticking with pure Paladin all the way to level 20, he'd still prefer missile combat to melee against most foes just because it makes sense from an in-character perspective. Opposable thumbs for the win!

 

[I'm A Banana]

Here's some of the things that point me at your goal being something more than simply "being effective:"

The superiority of missile combat is an observable fact of the PCs' universe, observable to NPCs as well as PCs. It is in fact the answer to the question, "Why are there even any humans left? Why haven't they all been eaten by bulettes and purple worms and dragons?" Answer: missile weapons and horses and Bounded Accuracy. At least, at my table that is the case.
...
I tried to help him out with some tactical advice (use stealth, fight at night, etc.) but the fundamental reality of the situation is that melee really is just kind of bad.
...
he's left with the choice to either adapt (do things that are effective in the 5E ruleset, either changing tactics or changing characters) or lower expectations ("I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight, but it's a biiig knife and I hope I get to stick it in someone!")
...
I do enjoy powergaming as a player (seeing the math comes very naturally to me), and for that reason I like challenging scenarios (Deadly or harder) and I absolutely hate the tedium of playing through or running easy encounters (but I do it anyway when necessary because my players are not necessarily like me)
...
Because I'm a natural powergamer, if that's my Paladin he's probably going to multiclass and learn some attack cantrips

So when you say this:

In terms of play goals and the 8 kinds of fun, my observation is tied most closely to Fantasy

That's not the whole story, it seems. Most people don't just fire on one type exclusively, and any game pursues multiple aesthetic goals, so no big shock. We don't look for just one thing from our games usually.

But it does mean that a big part of the fun for you IS in power-gaming. In MDA terms, this is probably "challenge," in a high-score sense (though I might prefer Nicole Lazzarro's description of fiero there, to put a pin on the emotion of it).

Indeed, why you're cool with 5e while the OP might struggle might be because fantasy offers more of a break from pure uncut challenge for you than it does for the OP.

If all you wanted was Fantasy, or even if you weren't looking for Challenge at all, none of the power-gaming elements would matter. So when someone else plays the game who is not really prioritizing Challenge, they only care about the relative effectiveness of ranged combat as much as they HAVE to. And if you're running a bog-standard 5e game, you don't really have to. Melee fighting works fine. Hulk Smash for the win!

 

[pming]

Hiya.

...raises finger into air...takes deep breath... Ahhhh.... *sigh* ...

...no. Not going to reply to everything because that would take a small novel to do. So, like Inigo Montoya...I'll sum up.

Powergaming is fine. Balanced gaming is fine. Heavy RP gaming is fine. Different folks of different gaming styles can play together...IF they are ALL willing to compromise. A good compromise means that nobody is completely happy.

A powergamer playing in a non-powergaming group? Nobody's going to have much fun. Plain and simple. It's not a matter of trying to convince one side or the other to just "deal with it and accept it". Nobody will have fun. So don't do it. In a perfect world, everyone would be able to play exactly how they want and it wouldn't affect anyone else's enjoyment; that world is not "an AL game at the FLGS". Yes, it sucks for the OP, but that's just the way it is. Sorry (for proof that it is this way...go back to page 1 of this thread and start reading the next 20 pages...).

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[pemerton]

people who aren't playing the game primarily for the rush of power gaming can still want mechanically effective characters, it's just that these mechanically effective characters are often in the service of some other play goal (something like, "Well, I don't want to die, because then I'll never get resolution on if Frankie the Half-Elf finds her long-lost father!" for instance points to character effectiveness as a prerequisite for someone focused on the narrative element).

<snip>

Preferences are often revealed in the few instances where the two become mutually exclusive - say, someone who must choose between taking a feat that reflects her character's journey (it's a feat that lets you cast locate person, say) but is perhaps less effective than a different feat (I dunno, crossbow expert). If you're in a situation where you CAN'T have both, which one you take says a LOT about what kind of goal you have for your play experience.

<snip>

It's nothing like a heirarchy, but it IS a difference in play goals. 1e, with its Dungeon Crawl focus, had a design that rewarded optimization, so it's not surprising that Gygax would value it highly. The 2e DMG which was the first time I encountered this concept of "winning" the game with mechanics, meanwhile, was suspicious of "too powerful characters" who would be "missing out on a lot of fun" if all they focused on was optimizing (in the process, completely missing the point that optimizing IS ITSELF part of the fun for some players!).

I think a lot of 2nd ed's advice to both players and GMs is driven by a fear that if players are able to exert significant influence on the content and direction of the shared fiction (other than in very superificial ways, like choosing the colour of a character's hat) then the game will break and there will be no stories of epic fantasy.

I think that fear is reasonably justified in context!, because 2nd ed AD&D doesn't offer many tools or mechanics or even simple GMing techniques for allowing a player-driven but story-generating game.

But 25 or so years on, with a wealth of RPG design between then and now, we don't need to have the same concerns, I don't think.

That's not to say that 5e can't break - like all editions of D&D a lot of action resolution involves cobbling together disparate elements (stats, feats, equipment, spells, items, plus whatever can be leveraged in the fiction), and a lot of that cobbling together takes the form of numbers, and if the numbers exceed the design parameters then the system won't cope. (I can report from personal experience that this can happen in the lore/knowledge subsystem of 4e if you have a Sage of Ages PC: the +6 bonus to all knowledge skills would be better implemented as a "roll twice and take the best", I think. I've heard it can happen in 5e with AC, and some people think it is a risk with the -5/+10 feats.)

But I would have thought that 5e would support more robust mechanical engagement with the goal of finding a long-lost father than simply not dying. Unlike 2nd ed, for instance, it has a working skill system, a personality/inspiration mechanic, and its enchantment spells (charm person and the like) aren't completely broken in non-dungeon environments.

If the best way to find the lost father is taking crossbow expert, because the game broadly resembles a Tarantino movie in its quest structure, then it seems that a player who chooses Locate Object has maybe misunderstood the GM's genre, or at least is pushing against it. Conversely, if the best way to find the lost father is to find the missing locket, then Locate Object seems like a more optimised choice to me than improving my character's shooting.

If the player chooses Locate Object, and the GM praises that (perhaps as the "non-power gaming choice"), and yet the GM still feeds the player a Tarantino movie experience, then I think the GM needs to learn some new tricks. Or at least be up front that choosing Locate Object is no more meaningful a choice in terms of the content and direction of the shared fiction than choosing a character's hat or hair style. (And we don't make players pay feat slots for those, do we?)

 

[JonnyP71]

If I may suggest something to you and your party.... avoiding combat may be logical in a sense but you folks may be depriving yourselves of an awesome storyline tool. Great battles are the hallmark of a lot of our favorite fantasy novels... epic battles at the table make for great stories many years after the fact. Treating your combat encounters as nuisances takes away from that and makes it less memorable.

We know, we have them, some small skirmishes, some on an epic scale...

But our most memorable moments are the great stories. The fantastic improvisation of our DM, the fantastic homages to real people he sneaks into the story, the sparks of genius roleplaying which do happen from time to time, recurring NPCs with real reasons to be in our stories, PCs with genuine motives far beyond get gold kill monsters...

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

...most gamers are awkward and inexperienced in social situations...

It saddens me whenever I see this stereotype having been internalized by gamers, especially in the current era of things which were previously considered "geeky" and people whom were previously considered "nerds" in a derogatory fashion becoming much more popular and widely accepted.

Especially when it is being tossed about by someone that also seems to be claiming not to fit that very stereotype.

 

[Raith5]

To me, 5e is the biggest tent that D&D has. I've had groups of players that all have different styles work well within the system and enjoy themselves. There will always be some who are too far off to the extreme where the game may not work perfectly for them. Honestly, 3e/3.5e and 4e almost forced people to be powergamers. 5e is a shift back toward the center.

thecasualoblivion, your observations are valid and your preferences may not be met as well with 5e. That's ok. But, 5e is certainly an edition of D&D that has taken the most steps to cater to a wider array of playstyles.

I dont agree with this. I like 5e and despite having enjoyed 3e and 4e, I was not a pure power gamer in either of them. But I do not feel that 5e support a wider set of playstyles in practice. For good and ill 5e plays like 2e with cantrips.

And the problem is that the playstyles in D&D have evolved rapidly and have not just been created by narcissistic players. WOTC via 3e and 4e has actively created playstyles (and by extension, players) that have now been effectively dropped.

I would not like to play in a campaign with extreme power gamers or players who want to wear underpants on their head in lieu of armour - but D&D should support both. If 5e had more modularity as promised ad naseum early on in its development, then it could.

 

[Zardnaar]

This isn't my preferred edition by a long shot. I'd much rather play 4E, 1E/2E, or 3.5E(more or less in that order) than 5E, but due to life circumstances that have nothing to do with D&D, I find myself now starting Curse of Strahd.

I played a few sessions of 5E about a year ago, and I've been in the same room where more than a few sessions were played and I kind of watched.

Here are some thoughts:

1. My main dislike of the game comes from that I find it by far the most random of any edition of D&D, and being that random I never feel in control of my own destiny. It feels like the dice matter more than my decisions in play, or my decisions in character building. In 3E or 4E, good play could be and was often more important the dice. 1E/2E could be randomly dangerous, but that element of danger is mostly missing from 5E. 1E/2E was random but lethal, and there was a level of calculated risk involved in everything you did and your decisions thus mattered. 5E is random, but things don't seem to matter much. If you fail you fall on your face, not lose/die. This wasn't at all how I played in any previous edition.

2. Given this randomness, and my powergaming tendencies, I find myself playing selfish glass cannons. I say selfish because teamwork in 5E feels like taking one for the team, and that isn't my style. Selfishness also involves being a coward and letting other people take 5E's randomness to the face, which makes me feel better as it isn't happening to me. I say glass cannon because even high defense 5E characters seem fragile. High defense in 5E only seems to make you less fragile(while still being fragile), and from a powergaming standpoint it seems like a bad investment, better to just kill enemies faster.

3. I was a Defender roughly half the time throughout the 4E era. I never felt fragile nor felt like I was taking one for the team during any of that, while in 5E I feel both are true. So I'm not playing tanks anymore.

4. Playing support seems to feel like taking one for the team as well. Some people seem to enjoy that, but it's not my style.

5. The optimization guides on forums for 5E don't really seem as helpful for 5E as they were for 3E/4E.

6. Spellcasters seem a bit weak on the whole until cantrips start to scale

Hey you at least tried it out for a bit. We started a C&C game to run in addition to 5E for something different and I remember you not looking forward to it in the playtest on the WotC boards.

 

[ExploderWizard]

This thread grew so fast that if there was an answer to my earlier question I missed it: how exactly does 5e require players to ask the DM for permission to do things? Other than a few edge cases where the language isn't clear, my experience has been that my character has a bunch of abilities, and I get to use them when I want. Where does the "asking for permission" thing come in?

A concrete example would be great.

I find it very interesting that this has been brought up a few times now and the answer has been silence. I am playing a battle master fighter and in play so far there hasn't been any need to ask permission to do anything. The maneuvers are clear in description and I use them as I please. We are almost 7th level in that campaign and a question of "can I do this?" hasn't come up yet.