D&D 5E Toxicity in the Fandom

[UngeheuerLich]

To me, and without wanting to be too rude to your GM, that sounds awful. Just to begin with, there seems to be no framing at all. What's the fiction?

Sadly this was my experience with skill challenges too.
I did never find a way as DM to imbed them in the story.
Sometimes I made and still make a pseudo skill challenge and ask everyone what they are doing and have some rolls and look how well everyone does.
But not in a round by round by round basis and not formally with x successes before y failures.

 

[James Gasik]

To me, and without wanting to be too rude to your GM, that sounds awful. Just to begin with, there seems to be no framing at all. What's the fiction?

Basically, he had fallen into a trap that a lot of DM's I knew in the 4e era had, and, to be fair, some adventure writers as well. Because 4e has Skill Challenges, there was a sense that you "had" to have Skill Challenges in an adventure. And while there were good Skill Challenges, there were also questionable ones (IMO, at least).

I fell into this trap as well a few times without realizing it. I would be converting an old Dragon magazine adventure for my group, or even just an "old school" style adventure out of whole cloth, when I'd pause and realize "oh, I don't have a Skill Challenge!".

Thus, rather than organically making it as part of the adventure, I would be adding it after the fact, and sometimes, this turned out to be rather clunky as a result.

I never stopped using them, and, in fact, I tried to get creative with them (there was an adventure where this portside town was being attacked by aquatic creatures- I had like 4 actual encounters, and then between them, I had a running Skill Challenge to represent the mass battle, and the total number of successes would determine the fate of the town. Of course, I underestimated my party, and they got the "golden ending", lol, since they didn't fail any checks, which, in retrospect, made me wonder why I had bothered!), but I no longer felt like I "needed" them, and that made my sessions run more smoothly.

Of course, when I decided to run White Plume Mountain, that's when I realized it was a bad fit for 4e- most of the exploration challenges weren't really an issue for my group, even my attempt to buff a lot of the encounters fell flat, and even when I explained the mechanics of the giant crab fight, they decided to go full strength against the crab and not care about bursting it's bubble- and sure enough, they won, despite the damage of the boiling water!

I threw in the towel after the Sir Bluto fight, where I realized I was going to need to go back to the drawing board on the whole adventure.

 

[gnarlygninja]

Note trolling is not the fishing term. The fishing term is trawling. Same pronunciation but not the same word.

Trolling has always been toxic.

You're actually confusing trolling with trawling here. Both are fishing terms, and to my eye the one that uses bait resembles the internet usage more than the one with nets.

 

[pemerton]

when I decided to run White Plume Mountain, that's when I realized it was a bad fit for 4e

I think a lot of work would be needed to convert WPM to 4e in a satisfactory way. I did run a session of WPM earlier this year, but using my own AD&D variant. The PCs beat off some wandering wights, but got hosed by the heat tunnel + ghouls combo. Until they came back with some animated dead, who were able to soak the ghoul attacks!

 

[Hussar]

I am a fan of 4e, and I regularly defend it against people who don't seem to understand what it was really about. But there were issues with skill challenges. Whether this came down to skill challenges that didn't need to be skill challenges, or skill challenges that were badly designed, there were occasions where I felt, as a player and a DM, that the mechanic sometimes bogged otherwise fun adventures down.

To me, it was an area of the game that either needed more polish, or at the very least, a little more light shed onto it, to explain the hows, whys, and whens, so to speak.

Now this I will totally agree with. It really wasn't explained very well and the initial DMG version of skill checks left a LOT to be desired.

 

[Hussar]

You're actually confusing trolling with trawling here. Both are fishing terms, and to my eye the one that uses bait resembles the internet usage more than the one with nets.

I stand (well recline casually actually) corrected.

 

[Ancalagon]

Aquaman was dumb as hell, too long, but tons of fun. Better than most MCU affairs. Also remarkably good trident-fight! Two thumbs up.

I agree! there also were a few shots that were really really well composed - strikingly beautiful.

 

[Eric V]

Now this I will totally agree with. It really wasn't explained very well and the initial DMG version of skill checks left a LOT to be desired.

DMG2 for 4e did a great job in Skill Challenge advice, IMO.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure. I wrote what I wrote in five or so minutes, without the benefit of an editor, and without planning to sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies.

But the idea that events have a trajectory - a direction of motion, with threats and rising action and potential resolutions which might be good or bad for the PCs - is pretty central to the whole skill challenge idea. The 4e DMG does try to convey that, although it uses the word "story" more than I think is helpful.

I think understanding skill challenges requires a grounding in narrative convention and flow, and WotC has never been good at describing these things in their rulebooks, probably due to the oft-mentioned "marketing to 12-year-olds" issue.

 

[MNblockhead]

Regarding skill challenges, I never played 4e and learned about 4e-style skill challenges from a Matt Colville video where he spoke about how they could be used in 5e games. I really like them but I save them for special set-piece events. The most recent example I can think of is a escaping from a collapsing complex. Because the magic that held the place together was breaking down after killing the BBEG, there were magical vortices appearing, chunks of rock falling, creavases to get over, doors that got jammed shut. There were plenty of ways each character class could contribute, it was both smoother to run and more narratively satisfying than if I would have run it with just standard random-event tables and individual checks.

As for the main topic of the thread...toxic, trolls, flaming...I'm old enough to have grown up before internet culture. "Jerk" is still a fine term to explain rude people.