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

[Micah Sweet]

I look at it this way; balancing things by making them annoying has a tendency to lead to scenarios where people avoid the annoying thing, making it a virtual ban, or find ways to do end runs around it, at which point "balance? what balance?".

For example, I find stealth mechanics to be annoying in most games. In real life, you can sneak up behind someone on open ground. In a game, you have several requirements and caveats to deal with before you can even roll the dice, such as needing certain levels of cover or concealment. Enemies tend to almost always have some special sense to take into account as well. Oh and obviously you can't have light, because then you blunder right into traps!

Now, before anyone starts typing "but that's all how it would work in real life"- that may be so, but every time I've tried to make a stealthy character in a game, I almost inevitably find myself in a situation where I'm easily detected by an enemy, and then have to try and escape a solo encounter while my party is a necessary distance away (meanwhile, I get ambushed by stealthy enemies all the time, lol).

It's to the point that I don't want to interact with stealth rules at all; I avoid being proficient in the skill and rarely bring it up as an option when planning; it's generally easier to just assume we'll be detected by our enemies and go from there.

Do you really think people would give up spellcasting if there were a few more restrictions on its use?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Shovels come in different sizes and shapes, earth comes in different densities and compositions, and strength/constitution would play into it. Short of another Wilderness Survival Guide with a fairly sizable chart, there's no way to tell a DM how much someone can dig with a shovel.

Bring on the fairly sizable charts, I say!

 

[Lanefan]

This is, as far as I can see, plain and simply false insofar as you are asserting it to be some sort of "objective" property of RPG gameplay.

I am comfortable asserting that for the vast majority of players currently playing D&D, "How much gear can I carry right now?" is not an interesting question that they want to be made to answer through the game's mechanics. A more-or-less unlimited carrying capacity would, for those players, be genuinely better because they can focus their time and energy on those questions they do find interesting enough to answer through gameplay.

Chess would be genuinely better for many players if their pawns could all move like queens so those players could focus instead on winning strategies without having to worry about the limitations of their pawns; but they can't, and thus have to put up with the challenges of pawns being limited to what pawns can do.

I'm also quite comfortable asserting that your preferences are very niche. Nothing wrong with them in and of themselves, but it would simply be a mistake for D&D to cater exclusively or even primarily to them.

Needless to say, I disagree on both counts.

I feel comfortable asserting that to the largest chunk of the D&D player base, their preference is either very casual "kick in the dungeon door and kill everything for its loot" gameplay, or character-driven gameplay with an overlay of strategic and/or tactical decision-making, and not for logistics-driven gameplay. "What dungeon are we knocking over in tonight's game session", "What goal is more important for me to pursue right now?", "What allies can I call upon in this situation, or what allies should I call upon?" or "Should I cast a spell right now and if so, what spell?" are interesting questions by such standards,

Odd though it may seem, I agree with all of that except the bolded.

What's being wilfully ignored, however, is that without in-game logistics none of these things can happen!

It's the same as hitting the road and focusing only on the interesting questions such as "which route do I take to get to town" or "where am I going on my road trip" while actively ignoring the boring-but-essential logistical question of whether the car has any gas in it.

while "Did I remember to bring a crowbar on this expedition or not" just isn't.

It might not be an interesting question but it's sometimes an essential one. See gas-in-car, just above.

Meanwhile, for players who do want to incorporate more mundane resource management and/or logistics-driven gameplay, it's not clear to me that a more "realistic" set of mechanics is going to do the trick. "How much stuff can I carry right now?" might or might not be an interesting question, but "How many pounds or fractions of a pound of stuff am I carrying that I have to spend precious table time computing?" is rather less likely to be.

I'll agree that tracking encumbrance is - ahem - cumbersome as it stands. The problem is that there really isn't anything else that's both simpler and equally (or more) realistic; and I don't like trading away realism for simplicity. I think the game long since did enough of that.

Finally, bluntly put, challenge is, at best, only minimally "objectively" good for gameplay, insofar as gameplay that is not-at-all challenging, or that is consistently underwhelming as regards challenge, is likely to be boring.

That last bit alone makes challenge far more than "minimally" good for play, as boring play very quickly leads to no play and part of the point of an RPG is (usually) to have people continue playing it.

Beyond that, it is a useful element of gameplay when players find it interesting and enjoyable in and of itself. And, of course, even when players who are not Lanefan value challenge, it does not follow that a more "realistic" encumbrance mechanic is going to be an interesting and enjoyable way for them to experience challenge.

Sometimes you just gotta take the bad with the good in order to get to a desirable end result. A hockey player, for example, might love playing hockey and yet detest having to tape his sticks or sharpen his skates before the game; but he's still gotta do those things.

That said, I really do think there's an encumbrance/carrying system out there (as yet uninvented) that is both simpler in practice yet realistic in fiction.

 

[Neonchameleon]

2E also had the GP = XP rule. It's right there in the DMG. That fewer people chose to use it doesn't make it not exist.

It had it under the optional rather than the default rules from memory. Which is why it's in the DMG.

 

[Micah Sweet]

1e and 2e are much more different than is generally acknowledged because the XP system is so different. 2e cleaned up 1e - but if you're playing them relatively purely then 1e has the XP for GP rule meaning that it's a game about exploration, heists, and where combat is a failure mode. 2e's default XP rules are XP for killing and XP for acting like a stereotypical member of your class meaning that it's a game about slaughter and acting like stereotypes.

But if you switched then you at the time probably saw it as an improvement because you had either ditched the old XP rules or you kept them.

We kept the old xp rules and most of the core from 1e, but used new players options from 2e and the setting material.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Here's the thing.

In videogaming, there is a genre of games called survival sim games. Survival sim games have a niche popularity. Its fans are feverishly devoted. However they are few in number. And it isn't about marketing. Survival simulation just isn't popular to the general public.

So as long as D&D is going for widespread appeal, it will not focus on simulation of survival no matter how much its fans boast about how fun it is.

Are you sure? There are an awful lot of survival sims out there, and more coming out all the time.

 

[Composer99]

See, I'm of the apparently aberrant opinion that D&D the game does not need to reinvent itself regularly to conform to what its current designers and marketing team think "today's" players want. No other RPG does this, and being popular does not make D&D special.

That's where you're mistaken: D&D has been played for the most part as a game of heroic adventure since the early 1980s, and I daresay significant portions of the player base have been playing it that way since shortly after the game spread beyond the Wisconsin wargaming scene. It's just taken its publishers decades to catch up with what the bulk of players wanted all along (and arguably they're still not caught up).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right. Which is why we need a cross reference calculation chart. Type of shovel, cross referenced with type of soil, add in current ground moisture levels, potential obstacles like roots and stones! Remember to factor in depth as well since the soil composition may well change. Double check the weight of the character if it's dense soil and the character can stand on the shovel. Don't forget to include their strength modifier.

Phew. Okay, only a page or two of complex calculations, just be sure to cross reference with the soil type and density charts and we should be good to go! After all, don't want the DM just making up a number and going with it since most of the factors are arbitrary anyway.

I know you were being sarcastic here, but I'm going to pretend you're serious because I like the way I pretend you think!

 

[Minigiant]

Are you sure? There are an awful lot of survival sims out there, and more coming out all the time.

Still niche.

Even in most survival sims, once you get past the very beginning, you have all the tools to survival and are just stockpiling stuff and returning to normalcy.

Most survival sims devolve into a combat game, adventure game, base builder, or storyteller for a reason.

Survival simulation gameplay is niche and only liked in short bursts by most people.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's where you're mistaken: D&D has been played for the most part as a game of heroic adventure since the early 1980s, and I daresay significant portions of the player base have been playing it that way since shortly after the game spread beyond the Wisconsin wargaming scene. It's just taken its publishers decades to catch up with what the bulk of players wanted all along (and arguably they're still not caught up).

How do we really know? How many of that horde of new 5e players have even been  exposed to any other form of gaming? If all you give someone to eat is a Big Mac, then to them it's the best food in the world.