D&D 5E What are the "True Issues" with 5e?

[Micah Sweet]

I've yet to meet the DM whose fun "consists solely in serving player needs". Just that part of the fun is making sure everyone has fun and in a 1v5 (or whatever) situation where the 5 have got fed up enough to complain they win.

If I really wanted something in a campaign that my players didn't, I simply wouldn't run that game. Maybe I'd run something else, or maybe someone else would GM.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Correct; because all of those examples of fancy things my character might do (pick a lock, etc.) come with a built-in chance of failure.

Character (and player) memory isn't perfect either.

So why not have the coupon have a chance of success?

You're just giving it a 100% chance of failure, as it were.

For my money, someone who has a PC with say, 18 INT and 16 WIS and the Survival skill shouldn't be on a level playing field with someone with INT 8 and WIS 8 (I am thinking of real characters here lol) who has no such proficiency.

But by relying 100% on the human, real-world player's ability to plan, and 0% on the character, you're putting them as exactly equal.

To me that's very similar to if you had a STR 18 character and a STR 8 character, giving them an equal chance to kick down a door, because IRL both their players are equally bad at kicking down doors.

I mean, just off the top of my head, maybe you should get on "equipment token" for having Survival, and then another for each +1 INT or WIS or something. And to cash the token, you make a Survival check (I'm assuming for Survival gear in this case). If you fail, not only did you forget, but so did your PC. Fair enough. If you succeed, sure, you're a scatterbrain, but your PC isn't, good thing too!

In the scenario I noted, the Survival-oriented PC would have, say, 5 tokens (maybe too many, I dunno), and the non-survival one would have 0 (well -1 one but it seems mean to take away his equipment just because his PC is dumb lol).

 

[SteveC]

It seems to me that the whole equipment list needs either to be expanded and much better explained, or vastly simplified. You certainly can have "outdoor gear" with a general description of providing protection for general environmental conditions and maybe a number of uses for something very specific, or a description of different gear with game effects. Or we can have the DM just run it. And largely ignore it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

TSR pushed out a bunch of questionable value. Things that if people really want to understand they can either get the PDF or do a quick lookup.

I had Aurora's catalog and thought it was cool. Unless it disappeared like some of my books seem to have done over the years it's still gathering dust on a bookshelf somewhere. Did I use it? Nah. I could literally count the number of times I used it on one hand and still likely have fingers left over to do a Scout's Honor. If you really want that kind of thing, it's still available over on dmsguild.

Well, there are always wacky outliers, aren't there?

The general discussion of Aurora's is that it was incredibly useful - in some cases it completely changed how people understood D&D society and gear.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

the Blades in the Dark system rewards gives you plot coupons depending on your encumbrance weight and class (you take a light, medium, or heavy load and then get a number of uses of class-appropriate equipment depending on your load with how visibly you're equipped being based on the load you chose).

i wonder how one might go about translating this to dnd. seems like an interesting thought experiment.

 

[Cadence]

Has anyone tried the survival things in Level-Up (A5E) to see how they flesh out one 5e possibility?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

i wonder how one might go about translating this to dnd. seems like an interesting thought experiment.

D&D had it before Blades in the Dark, weirdly enough.

The 4E Adventure "Blood Money" by Logan Bonner, in #200 Dungeon (yes I do have all that memorised) was the first time I saw the kind of tokens being discussed used in an RPG. I dunno if other systems had them earlier (I'd be unsurprised), but that certainly was earlier than Blades in the Dark by some margin.

You earned the tokens by doing preparation stuff for the heist you were going to take part in, in that case. The more/better prep you did, the more tokens you got.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I don't know anything about camping?

Should the DMG advise them to take their players on a camping trip to teach them how camping works???

 

[Lanefan]

So why not have the coupon have a chance of success?

You're just giving it a 100% chance of failure, as it were.

Well, yes, in part because such metagame mechanics are a non-starter for me.

But, the player's memory doesn't have a 100% chance of failure either. And it's not like there aren't equipment lists etc. to consult.

For my money, someone who has a PC with say, 18 INT and 16 WIS and the Survival skill shouldn't be on a level playing field with someone with INT 8 and WIS 8 (I am thinking of real characters here lol) who has no such proficiency.

But by relying 100% on the human, real-world player's ability to plan, and 0% on the character, you're putting them as exactly equal.

I get what you're saying here and can't really argue with the sentiment.

To me that's very similar to if you had a STR 18 character and a STR 8 character, giving them an equal chance to kick down a door, because IRL both their players are equally bad at kicking down doors.

I mean, just off the top of my head, maybe you should get on "equipment token" for having Survival, and then another for each +1 INT or WIS or something. And to cash the token, you make a Survival check (I'm assuming for Survival gear in this case). If you fail, not only did you forget, but so did your PC. Fair enough. If you succeed, sure, you're a scatterbrain, but your PC isn't, good thing too!

In the scenario I noted, the Survival-oriented PC would have, say, 5 tokens (maybe too many, I dunno), and the non-survival one would have 0 (well -1 one but it seems mean to take away his equipment just because his PC is dumb lol).

Or, to minimize the meta-mechanics, maybe just give the Survivalist a check to see if the piece of gear was in fact brought along, but without the tokens. (i.e. only certain classes/backgrounds even get such a check) That said, sometimes characters/players intentionally don't bring certain equipment in order to bring other seen-as-more-useful equipment (this is where encumbrance really plays up) and a check that had the potential of overriding that choice would IMO be poor design.

And I'm not that worried about everyday gear. It's those cases where something unexpected crops up where a particular tool would be the ideal answer that stick in my craw, when a player can spend a meta-bennie to just happen to have that tool on hand even though there's no other good in-fiction reason to have brought it.

 

[Oofta]

That's fine, as long as your simply advancing the opinion that  you don't care about stuff like that, and not that others shouldn't.

For some of this stuff there's 3PP, but WOTC has clearly picked a lane here and detailed simulation isn't in that lane. I understand some people may want other things but I'm also pragmatic enough to know that they aren't going to revisit the TSR days of a gazillion supplements. It didn't really work then, I see no reason it would work now.