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

[Ancalagon]

This doesn't say that games where players don't play at least naively strongly shouldn't exist. But everyone who's saying they like playing sub-standard characters should by doing so be openly acknowledging that they play their own version of the game and that that is not and should not be the default for open groups.

I'll quickly make a small comment here: Not everyone has the choice of being an optimal character. I've mentioned once or trice here that I'm a swordsman. But I never claimed to be a great one - heck "fair" would be a bit generous. I'll never be a great swordsman - I don't have the reflexes, I haven't been training since I was a kid, and heck I don't have the joints for it either. It's not my choice.

Where am I getting with this? Well, sometimes people who are not swordmasters but merely decent combatants (in other words, not fully optimized) are trust into adventure. And these people can make very valid, even fun characters to roleplay.

4: Either I'm overconfident or I think they are overconfident. Or both. Unless they came armed for me personally, I think that we're a tougher nut than they expected to be able to crack and the mistake is actually theirs.

If they crack you, you are dead. Don't let hubris get you. Play smart

5: Because running is the single most stupid choice on the table. If we run we get hit in the back. And unless I'm playing the monk or the wizard they can run us down and put spears between our shoulderblades.

Historical battles had the majority of their casualties inflicted after the rout started. When instead of trying to advance against enemies with weapons in hand they were skewering the slowest in the back. Indeed, all else being equal, staying to fight the ambush is probably the smart tactical choice and running is a choice that will almost certainly get the slowest of our party members killed.

sigh - ok this is my bad. I've been using "run" as a shorthand for "withdrawal" or "fighting retreat" or whatever, *not* a rout. I should have written it differently, and I apologize. Running away willy nilly is indeed a *terrible* choice, and history certainly tells us this.

6: It's better to live on our feet than die on our knees. And if I didn't make that decision I wouldn't be an adventurer.

... Is that quote inverted? Because that seems to encourage running away

7: I think they are bluffing.

See #4 - overconfidence?

8: They prepared the ambush - what on earth gives me the impression that the apparent obvious escape route is safe rather than another part in their trap?

Well... the way the party went through might also be a trap, granted. But the place the party is now is *definitely* a trap.

 

[pemerton]

I have a value that metagaming is bad. It's hard to avoid, but it's bad. Are you saying that metagaming is *good*?

In general I've got nothing against it.

For instance, as a player, it helps to remember that the game is a game, and so - for instance - choosing more-or-less on a whim to enter a dank dungeon full of dangerous enemies is part of what is needed to make the game work.

As a GM - which is the role I most often occupy - I am not going to decide via random die roll whether or not, inside the dank dungeon, the paladin of the Raven Queen encounters minions of Orcus. Of course I'm going to put those minions there, because that's what drives the game forward!

In the context of combat, I expect my players to pay attention to how many hit points their PCs have remaining. That's metagaming (the characters in the fiction have no way of knowing how much of their luck and "divine protection" has been ablated). And in designing an encounter, I think about how it will play out. In my most recent 4e session, for instance, I had the PCs' archlich nemesis conjure forth another lich from the phylactery one of the PCs was (inadvertantly) carrying around because I though it would be fun. That's metagaming too.

When it comes to the players committing there characters, I want the to know that, as a GM, I'm committed to keeping things moving forward. So the outcomes of failure might be adverse to the interests and desires of the PCs, but in general the shouldn't be adverse to the interests and desires of the players, to have an enjoyable RPGing experience.

If you are worried about being hunted down by enemy X, then you should be even more worried to be in enemy X's killzone.

That depend heavily on who the enemy is, and how "realistically" vs "cinematically" the GM adjudicates being hunted down.

For many D&D characters, for instance, it's far better (in mechanical terms) to be ambushed in armour than to be attacked while sleeping and unarmoured.

Why would you want to do that? Play it out! It's a fight. It' not the heroic "we shall prevail!!!" narrative that some people have said is baked into 4e (I don't have the 4e experience to know if this is accurate or not), but it's a valid encounter.

Spending inspiration to earn an escape is playing it out too (assuming that's a rule of the game). It's just at a higher level of abstraction.

I don't agree that rolling a d20 to see what happens in this 6 seconds of melee exchange is "natural" or "organic", but spending a resource to abstract that out to a 10 minute escape scene is "artificial" or "not playing it out". In both cases, it's expending resources that the game provides me with as a player, in order to make a move in the fiction.

But there are other mechanics that could be used too. D&D characters have attack bonuses, and ACs, and hit points; why not "escape bonuses" and "escape points"? Give players a mechanical lever for retreating from combat, and they'll do it more often.

 

[Ancalagon]

Cops and Robbers was ok when I was a kid, but then I grew up and now I'd rather play Grand Theft Auto 5.

ie, the fifth edition... a suspicious coincidence...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I don't know enough about real-world hand-to-hand combat to know if this is a common and/or well-regarded tactic.

But it doesn't resonate with my personal sense of D&D genre, which is a mix of LotR, REH Conan, the 70s and 80s Marvel Conan comics, the film Excalibur, and a few other bits-and-pieces.

I've got nothing against the mechanical elements of the tactic: perform an action that grants advantage and then improves your action economy as against your opponent. Within the mechanical framework of D&D, that is one good way of establishing a high degree of combat superiority.

For me, it's the fiction that seems wonky, relative to (my personal sense of) genre.

Can you do the same thing with some sort of dazing rather than proning attack?

Not by RAW, and probably for good reason--one of melee's only advantages in 5E is that whereas ranged attacks are disadvantaged against prone targets, melee attacks within 5' are at advantage. So if it were just as easy to inflict Stunned on an enemy as Prone, granting advantage to ranged attackers instead of disadvantage, melee attacks would ironically be relatively even weaker than they are today. Today there are instances where you deliberately choose not to knock the enemy prone depending on the tactical situation; but you'd never choose not to stun the enemy.

If you were inventing a rule to allow anyone to stun you'd want to be cognizant of this fact--your house rule would need to ensure that stunning is harder than pushing. Spitballing, and borrowing a bit from the Battlemaster/DMG Disarm precedent, I'd say: "Anyone can spend a melee attack to attempt to stun the opponent. This requires a successful melee attack. If the attack hits, it does no damage, but the target has to make a Con save with DC = (damage roll) or be stunned until the beginning of its next turn."

I chose "beginning of its next turn" and not "end" partly to keep it balanced with Push prone (which is also neutralized easily at the beginning of a turn, so does not impair enemy attacks) and partly to avoid shenanigans with stun-locking--although note that you could still stun-lock somebody using this rule if you are carefully about how you utilize the Ready maneuver. To me that means it's about the right level of difficulty. It has a niche, and a fairly wide one, but it's not a dominant strategy.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'll quickly make a small comment here: Not everyone has the choice of being an optimal character. I've mentioned once or trice here that I'm a swordsman. But I never claimed to be a great one - heck "fair" would be a bit generous. I'll never be a great swordsman - I don't have the reflexes, I haven't been training since I was a kid, and heck I don't have the joints for it either. It's not my choice.

Where am I getting with this? Well, sometimes people who are not swordmasters but merely decent combatants (in other words, not fully optimized) are trust into adventure. And these people can make very valid, even fun characters to roleplay.

I've got nothing to add, just quoting for so much truth.

This is one of the charms of rolling for stats--sometimes even rolling 3d6 in order. Inspiration strikes in funny ways and sometimes you wind up playing a character you never, ever would have made voluntarily.

 

[Ancalagon]

This thread is a bit all over the place - I think my retreat example derailed a bit - my point was just to show that there should be more than one "fight script" but oh well.

As far as TotM vs grid: An important difference in 5e is the absence of flanking. In 5e if your friend is there besides you he or she can help by well, helping (ie giving advantage), hitting your foe so it dies quicker, or (if you are a rogue), allow you to start making sneak attacks.

In 3e you needed to flank, not just "be there" for a lot of this to happen (+2 to hit, sneak attack). And because that is a much more precise position, the grid sorts of become needed.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

There is pretty much just one fight script though, particularly for ranged characters. (I think on a scale of 'most choices' it's Spellcasters >> Melee Combatants > Ranged Combatants). If you asked me when I get to play I'm probably a 'powergamer' and the thing I don't like about 5e from a 'powergaming' perspective is a lack of intresting choices in combat (Edit: Unless I play a spellcaster, which is a restriction I could do without)).

I think combat needs to be exciting and engaging, and for me that comes from:

A) Interesting tactical challenges
B) Clever monster design
C) Interesting decisions to make to respond to A or B
D) Meaningful stakes
E) Vivid descriptions

I think this is a non controversial list. D & E are very campaign/GM dependent so I'm not going to discuss them. Let's say you're playing a battlemaster fighter, level 14, archery style, with the crossbow expertise feat. From watching that build for 14 levels I am confident that I could write a very simple decision tree/script that would make a 'correct' move in combat every time (it's going to need some help on positioning maybe). It's going to be something like:

'move to maximum range at which you have unpenaltised attacks on the target. If enemy AC is X or higher, full attack without using the -5 to hit penalty. If enemy AC is lower than X use the full attack with the -5 to hit +10 to damage. In case B, use precision on any attack that misses by less than X'

If I can simply formulate what my character should be doing in combat, I'm not making interesting decisions. I'm not making any decisions at all, I'm just following the script.

 

[Rhenny]

There is pretty much just one fight script though, particularly for ranged characters. (I think on a scale of 'most choices' it's Spellcasters >> Melee Combatants > Ranged Combatants). If you asked me when I get to play I'm probably a 'powergamer' and the thing I don't like about 5e from a 'powergaming' perspective is a lack of intresting choices in combat (Edit: Unless I play a spellcaster, which is a restriction I could do without)).

I think combat needs to be exciting and engaging, and for me that comes from:

A) Interesting tactical challenges
B) Clever monster design
C) Interesting decisions to make to respond to A or B
D) Meaningful stakes
E) Vivid descriptions

I think this is a non controversial list. D & E are very campaign/GM dependent so I'm not going to discuss them. Let's say you're playing a battlemaster fighter, level 14, archery style, with the crossbow expertise feat. From watching that build for 14 levels I am confident that I could write a very simple decision tree/script that would make a 'correct' move in combat every time (it's going to need some help on positioning maybe). It's going to be something like:

'move to maximum range at which you have unpenaltised attacks on the target. If enemy AC is X or higher, full attack without using the -5 to hit penalty. If enemy AC is lower than X use the full attack with the -5 to hit +10 to damage. In case B, use precision on any attack that misses by less than X'

If I can simply formulate what my character should be doing in combat, I'm not making interesting decisions. I'm not making any decisions at all, I'm just following the script.

This makes sense, but to me, a player who scripts combat in any way will always (eventually) get to the point where he/she gets bored with the game. To combat boredom, shift from focus on rules to focus on story, character personality and choices that are not dictated by rules and mechanics. If a optimizer can do that, he/she should have infinite fun. If the optimizer can't do that, boredom will ensue.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

This makes sense, but to me, a player who scripts combat in any way will always (eventually) get to the point where he/she gets bored with the game. To combat boredom, shift from focus on rules to focus on story, character personality and choices that are not dictated by rules and mechanics. If a optimizer can do that, he/she should have infinite fun. If the optimizer can't do that, boredom will ensue.

This is fine, but if you sat down with me and said 'hey dude, want to play a game with a strong focus on story and character personality and choices that impact the world, and a minimal focus on combat' and I said 'hey that sounds like a cool game, what are we playing, Mouseguard? I've always wanted to play that.' 'Nah D&D 5e' I'd conclude you probably missold your game to me. If we're playing with a focus on story, character personality and choices rather than a 'a fun and an engaging combat minigame' we should probably play something else that doesn't spend the vast majority of the very thick rulebook on stuff to do in combat. Like Monsterhearts, or Apocalypse world, or the Quiet Year.

Those games have a ton more story and collective worldbuilding focus. However, that's missing the point.

D&D is fundamentally about going into dungeons and killing dragons (It's in the title!). The game spends a ton of ink on rules for combat. Playing the recommended XP schedule, you're having 16 or so combat encounters per level up in the mid game, 8 during the early and late game.. That's a lot of combat encounters! I'm going to have something like ~240 combat encounters over my characters complete arc. If the game is going to support 240 combat encounters, each ~6 rounds (so 1,440 rounds of combat), I should be doing something interesting in those 1,440 rounds of combat.

Bottom line: 5e D&D is a heavily combat focused game out of the box. The fact that if I play a ranged fighter I could be replaced by a fairly simple flow chart suggests that I'm not being engaged by all that ink and all that time.

 

[happyhermit]

...
For instance, as a player, it helps to remember that the game is a game, and so - for instance - choosing more-or-less on a whim to enter a dank dungeon full of dangerous enemies is part of what is needed to make the game work.

That isn't true though, players/characters don't need to enter a dungeon more or less on a whim to THE game work. It might be required to make some games work, but not 99% of the ones I have been involved in (at least in the recent past). Characters can have a real hook ie; an item they want or need, someone they need to save, a problem that need solving, etc. Or the characters can simply have that type of personality, especially with the built in back-story and personality of 5e.

As a GM - which is the role I most often occupy - I am not going to decide via random die roll whether or not, inside the dank dungeon, the paladin of the Raven Queen encounters minions of Orcus. Of course I'm going to put those minions there, because that's what drives the game forward!

Anything the PCs do drives the game forward, while it might not drive the central "story" or "plot" forward, it those exist in said game. Rolling for monsters and putting things into a world that might be beyond the party in terms of "straight up" combat are entirely different things.