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

[M_Natas]

The push back I got was, “why is my swordsman shooting a cannon? Shooting a cannon has nothing to do with my concept”

Replace “cannon” with every other part of crewing a ship and it’s the same.

Honestly I think this is why 5e has the ship combat rules it has. Players have strong concepts of what their character should be doing and pushing them outside of that box results in players checking out of the game.

I kinda see their point even if it’s not one I share. But since that is their stance, it doesn’t really matter what mechanics I use. The mechanics aren’t the issue.

So, as I said, I’ve completely abandoned the ship combat system and start ship combat at the point of boarding.

But that is really a player problem. Characters are more than their character sheet and their class/race/background.

If I put a catapult or cannon in front of my players, they will use it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Encumbrance is a limitation. Limitations by itself invite creativity and are necessary.

Caveat: they can invite creativity, and can be necessary. But they also can be stifling, and can be not only unnecessary but actively harmful. Consider the Comics Code Authority and the Motion Picture Production Code/"Hays Code". That was a set of limitations on what stories people were allowed to tell. By your unqualified standard, that necessarily means stories written under it were more creative than ones not written under it, and that we needed these limitations in order to have films worth watching. I think--I hope!--you agree that this is not true.

Hence, we must have more than just the fact that it is a limitation. Some limitations absolutely do breed creativity; a classic example from video game design is Silent Hill, with its use of fog to obscure the significant technical limitations of the PlayStation, allowing spaces to seem bigger than they were. Instead of a roadblock that would have derailed the game (the player being able to see that the game's world is in fact quite small and can't be rendered fully), they were able to leverage that limitation into a profoundly creepy atmosphere by intentionally taking away the player's ability to see things from a distance.

Just declaring "it's a limitation!" is not enough. You must explain why it is a good limitation, a limitation which invites a creative solution on someone's part, rather than a bad limitation, like the Hays Code/CCA, which literally just prevented people from telling anything but dull, flat, milquetoast stories. "Limitations by themselves" are not a good thing (though they may not be strictly a bad thing either.)

In the special case the limitation of how much a character can carry gives the game strategic depth, invites dilemmas and problems to solve and makes the game feel more realistic.

Again, realism alone is not particularly productive. We don't track post-traumatic stress disorder for adventurers who are near-constantly in grave mortal peril. That would be significantly more realistic than the cartoonishly badass, inviolable heroes we tend to focus on--indeed, dropping that is one of the ways literal actual superhero stories have tried to become more realistic!--and yet there is essentially no effort and even less appetite for such things. Hence, realism alone is not the value--it must contribute to something else.

And the assertion that it "gives the game strategic depth, invites dilemmas and problems to solve" is the issue. I'm saying it doesn't do that. It just adds tedium that must be worked through before one can get back to ACTUALLY caring about strategy and tactics and interesting dilemmas to resolve. What is the strategic depth of "oops, you're now carrying 1 pound too many, now you suck at everything, better drop something!"? There isn't any. And in the vast majority of cases,

Without encumberance, the rules for eating and drinking, the tracking of resources like Torches, Rations, Arrows ... you remove the strategic game aspect of exploration.

Not at all. There are many ways to have strategic exploration in games which don't narrowly track encumbrance and simply mete out annoying penalties for failure to comply.

The interaction of encumbrance rules with the rest of the world creates the exploration game itself. With that rule, there is no exploration game. It would devolve to just "I look for that thing in area x until I find it or until random encounters kill my group".

There ARE no such interactions! That's my point! It's literally just "are you above the line? Y/N." If you are, you get annoying penalties. If you aren't, nothing changes. That's not a dilemma! It's not even going to induce difficult choices! You would always either just prevent it happening in the first place (which is what the vast majority of players do), or you would shed whatever item you can calculate as being the least essential to your future success/least important for avoiding future problems.

Now, without encumbrance, they just go and search every hex field until the find clues.

Not at all! Even if there isn't encumbrance, they may only have X units of food, perhaps because of limited funding. (It's not like they can just carry an infinite quantity simply because you don't track encumbrance!) Or maybe they choose not to carry food at all, or are not able to, and want (or have) to hunt for it themselves, which actually does create decision-points (do we stock up on food as we go, hoping to live off the land? Or do we get lots of food now, expending other resources, but saving time later?) Other aspects of kit and equipment can similarly limit what is possible or practical without caring about encumbrance: you can only wield a few weapons, you can only wear a single piece of armor/clothing at a time, you can only manage a certain number of pack animals, etc., etc. And all of those things can actually reward better play, not exclusively punishing poor play (though they may also punish! Depends on how the rules are written.)

They will have some random encounters like hazards, monsters, the rivals, other nocs, other ruins or cool locations, that will give clues and so on ... and unless they TPK by one of those encounters, they just heal, long rest and continue until they find the temple.

These other things bring up a similar thing as the above. Bringing infinitely many tools and supplies is not possible even in a game that doesn't track encumbrance. Further, all that stuff about long resting? Completely unrelated to encumbrance. You're invoking completely separate rules here--long rests work as they work, unrelated to encumbrance unless you house rule a connection.

Now with encumbrance and ressource tracking, how will that adventure turn out?
First of all, they have to plan the expedition.

What on earth gave you the idea that not tracking encumbrance meant you don't have to plan at all? Now you're talking contradictions. First you treat them as though they infinitely prepare for all possible things. Now you're treating them as not doing any preparation at all! You can't have it both ways.

Because of encumberance and resource management, the game got more depth, more realism, more decision points, a heightened difficulty. It improved the same scenario tenfold.

Again, no, it doesn't. Most of that depth either comes from completely unrelated rules (like long resting, which has genuinely nothing to do with encumbrance!), or from things that are still true regardless of whether encumbrance is carefully tracked or not. Tools, supplies, preparation, training, and helpers/assistance cost money, and even if you don't track encumbrance, you certainly should be tracking money--and players ARE rewarded for spending their money wisely rather than foolishly. There is no equivalent of "I scrimped and saved and bought myself a +2 khopesh of nasnas slaying" when it comes to encumbrance--saving 10 weight on one adventure and 20 weight on another adventure doesn't give you 30 extra weight to play with in an adventure that comes after them.

There are no decision points because of the encumbrance. There are calculations because of it. What can you calculate is most efficient? That's not a decision. You do whatever is mathematically superior. It's literally what numerical encumbrance tracking is about. Now, I don't blame you for conflating calculations with decisions--this is an error a lot of people, and especially a lot of designers, frequently make. But it really is an error. Calculations involve no value-judgment. They're simply crunching numbers and picking the optimum. There is exactly as much decision-making involved in "keep your weight below N flibberweights" as there is in "take Great Weapon Master at level 4."

What is the advantage here? Realism alone does not justify annoying rules, because there are LOTS of annoying rules that could add tons of realism but which are actively avoided and clearly unwanted by most players. Limitations alone do not justify annoying rules, because limitation alone does nothing to foster creativity and can quite easily stifle it. No decisions come from this, only calculations--literally, it's all about calculating the weight you can hold, ranking what you can least afford to part with, and dropping everything after the point where you cross your calculated limit. And difficulty for its own sake is literally what I'm calling this--annoyances with no benefit! "Solving problems" is only valuable if the problems are interesting to solve--that's why we have so many jokes out there about the "word problems" kids had to solve in school and how pointless and annoying they were.

No, you don't have to play everything out in minutiae. But for example latest at a long rest I tell my players to remove a days worth of food / rations / water from their inventory.

Is that strategic depth? Is that actually a "problem" to solve, a "dilemma" to wrestle with? Or is it, as I have asserted, just bookkeeping to avoid annoyances?

 

[M_Natas]

Yea because opening a door takes up an hour or more of play time.

Repeatedly.

Look I’m just the messenger here. I agree with you. But I’m telling you that we’re very much the minority here.

I fixed the problem in Spelljammer. Nothing can cross gravity planes. So spell effects no ranged weaponry.

So encounters always start at the point of boarding. Everyone is happy.

But what do you do if one ship tries to flee? Without any ranged weapons that will take forever. And ships have all the same spelljamming speed, so no escaping but also no overturning ...

 

[Hussar]

But what do you do if one ship tries to flee? Without any ranged weapons that will take forever. And ships have all the same spelljamming speed, so no escaping but also no overturning ...

Who cares?

If one or the other flees, they get away. End of problem.

Again, let me repeat this.

My choices are:

1. Force everyone at the table to play something they have specifically told me they don’t want to do.

2. Skip that one part and do the other 99% of the campaign that they do want to do.

So I chose the latter. Again, I’ve used multiple different systems including ones that look like the house rules posted upthread. Very similar systems are on dms guild.

The players don’t want to do that.

I dunno why everyone keeps suggesting that the solution here is to convince them to eat their broccoli. They do not want to do ship to ship combat. I can’t make this any more clear.

So instead of endlessly banging my head against the wall, I just shift focus. Easy peasy. Now I have happy engaged players and it’s all good.

 

[M_Natas]

Caveat: they can invite creativity, and can be necessary. But they also can be stifling, and can be not only unnecessary but actively harmful. Consider the Comics Code Authority and the Motion Picture Production Code/"Hays Code". That was a set of limitations on what stories people were allowed to tell. By your unqualified standard, that necessarily means stories written under it were more creative than ones not written under it, and that we needed these limitations in order to have films worth watching. I think--I hope!--you agree that this is not true.

Hence, we must have more than just the fact that it is a limitation. Some limitations absolutely do breed creativity; a classic example from video game design is Silent Hill, with its use of fog to obscure the significant technical limitations of the PlayStation, allowing spaces to seem bigger than they were. Instead of a roadblock that would have derailed the game (the player being able to see that the game's world is in fact quite small and can't be rendered fully), they were able to leverage that limitation into a profoundly creepy atmosphere by intentionally taking away the player's ability to see things from a distance.

Just declaring "it's a limitation!" is not enough. You must explain why it is a good limitation, a limitation which invites a creative solution on someone's part, rather than a bad limitation, like the Hays Code/CCA, which literally just prevented people from telling anything but dull, flat, milquetoast stories. "Limitations by themselves" are not a good thing (though they may not be strictly a bad thing either.)


Again, realism alone is not particularly productive. We don't track post-traumatic stress disorder for adventurers who are near-constantly in grave mortal peril. That would be significantly more realistic than the cartoonishly badass, inviolable heroes we tend to focus on--indeed, dropping that is one of the ways literal actual superhero stories have tried to become more realistic!--and yet there is essentially no effort and even less appetite for such things. Hence, realism alone is not the value--it must contribute to something else.

And the assertion that it "gives the game strategic depth, invites dilemmas and problems to solve" is the issue. I'm saying it doesn't do that. It just adds tedium that must be worked through before one can get back to ACTUALLY caring about strategy and tactics and interesting dilemmas to resolve. What is the strategic depth of "oops, you're now carrying 1 pound too many, now you suck at everything, better drop something!"? There isn't any. And in the vast majority of cases,


Not at all. There are many ways to have strategic exploration in games which don't narrowly track encumbrance and simply mete out annoying penalties for failure to comply.


There ARE no such interactions! That's my point! It's literally just "are you above the line? Y/N." If you are, you get annoying penalties. If you aren't, nothing changes. That's not a dilemma! It's not even going to induce difficult choices! You would always either just prevent it happening in the first place (which is what the vast majority of players do), or you would shed whatever item you can calculate as being the least essential to your future success/least important for avoiding future problems.


Not at all! Even if there isn't encumbrance, they may only have X units of food, perhaps because of limited funding. (It's not like they can just carry an infinite quantity simply because you don't track encumbrance!) Or maybe they choose not to carry food at all, or are not able to, and want (or have) to hunt for it themselves, which actually does create decision-points (do we stock up on food as we go, hoping to live off the land? Or do we get lots of food now, expending other resources, but saving time later?) Other aspects of kit and equipment can similarly limit what is possible or practical without caring about encumbrance: you can only wield a few weapons, you can only wear a single piece of armor/clothing at a time, you can only manage a certain number of pack animals, etc., etc. And all of those things can actually reward better play, not exclusively punishing poor play (though they may also punish! Depends on how the rules are written.)


These other things bring up a similar thing as the above. Bringing infinitely many tools and supplies is not possible even in a game that doesn't track encumbrance. Further, all that stuff about long resting? Completely unrelated to encumbrance. You're invoking completely separate rules here--long rests work as they work, unrelated to encumbrance unless you house rule a connection.


What on earth gave you the idea that not tracking encumbrance meant you don't have to plan at all? Now you're talking contradictions. First you treat them as though they infinitely prepare for all possible things. Now you're treating them as not doing any preparation at all! You can't have it both ways.


Again, no, it doesn't. Most of that depth either comes from completely unrelated rules (like long resting, which has genuinely nothing to do with encumbrance!), or from things that are still true regardless of whether encumbrance is carefully tracked or not. Tools, supplies, preparation, training, and helpers/assistance cost money, and even if you don't track encumbrance, you certainly should be tracking money--and players ARE rewarded for spending their money wisely rather than foolishly. There is no equivalent of "I scrimped and saved and bought myself a +2 khopesh of nasnas slaying" when it comes to encumbrance--saving 10 weight on one adventure and 20 weight on another adventure doesn't give you 30 extra weight to play with in an adventure that comes after them.

There are no decision points because of the encumbrance. There are calculations because of it. What can you calculate is most efficient? That's not a decision. You do whatever is mathematically superior. It's literally what numerical encumbrance tracking is about. Now, I don't blame you for conflating calculations with decisions--this is an error a lot of people, and especially a lot of designers, frequently make. But it really is an error. Calculations involve no value-judgment. They're simply crunching numbers and picking the optimum. There is exactly as much decision-making involved in "keep your weight below N flibberweights" as there is in "take Great Weapon Master at level 4."

What is the advantage here? Realism alone does not justify annoying rules, because there are LOTS of annoying rules that could add tons of realism but which are actively avoided and clearly unwanted by most players. Limitations alone do not justify annoying rules, because limitation alone does nothing to foster creativity and can quite easily stifle it. No decisions come from this, only calculations--literally, it's all about calculating the weight you can hold, ranking what you can least afford to part with, and dropping everything after the point where you cross your calculated limit. And difficulty for its own sake is literally what I'm calling this--annoyances with no benefit! "Solving problems" is only valuable if the problems are interesting to solve--that's why we have so many jokes out there about the "word problems" kids had to solve in school and how pointless and annoying they were.


Is that strategic depth? Is that actually a "problem" to solve, a "dilemma" to wrestle with? Or is it, as I have asserted, just bookkeeping to avoid annoyances?

It looks like you don't want to understand what I'm saying and made up your mind beforehand.
Encumberance works and interacts together with other rules to create meaningful interactions that force decision points in the game.
Without encumberance, the players can just carry as much food as they can afford. And at a certain point, money to buy rations is not an issue (If we go by Raw).

Encumberance in combination with ressource management is essential. Without it, players can just stockpile everything they come across and make ressoruce management mood. An encumberance system is necessary for the ressource management to be meaningful.
If I can can carry unlimited rations, I don't need to bother with ressource management. I don't need to bother with foraging, I don't need the Outlander Background or Survival Skill. I don't need hirelings or donkey to carry my stuff. I just carry everything I'll ever find or can buy around with me.

Without encumberance there is no ressource management (with things that need to be carried).

And it is more than a simple calculation, because of the limit amount of things you can carry you must decide, which suboptimal (in comparison to an optimal decision, which would be to carry everything) solution you take. Encumberance forces you to make a compromise, to not have the optimal decision if just carry everything.

Without encumberance, there is of course an optimal decision: carry everything. Buy all the rations you can buy, buy all the equipment you can possibly need and bring it with you.

Yeah, you can limit that also by the amount of money and the prices ... and you definitely should, additionally to tracking encumberance, because all those game rules interact with each other.

 

[M_Natas]

Who cares?

If one or the other flees, they get away. End of problem.

Again, let me repeat this.

My choices are:

1. Force everyone at the table to play something they have specifically told me they don’t want to do.

2. Skip that one part and do the other 99% of the campaign that they do want to do.

So I chose the latter. Again, I’ve used multiple different systems including ones that look like the house rules posted upthread. Very similar systems are on dms guild.

The players don’t want to do that.

I dunno why everyone keeps suggesting that the solution here is to convince them to eat their broccoli. They do not want to do ship to ship combat. I can’t make this any more clear.

So instead of endlessly banging my head against the wall, I just shift focus. Easy peasy. Now I have happy engaged players and it’s all good.

So you are agree that the 5e Spelljammer Shipcombat rules do not work (for your table)?

 

[Older Beholder]

Are people not interested in ship combat because there's never been good rules for it, or has there never been good rules for ship combat because people aren't interested in it?
It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation.

 

[jdrakeh]

Are people not interested in ship combat because there's never been good rules for it, or has there never been good rules for ship combat because people aren't interested in it?
It's a bit of a chicken/egg situation.

I'm interested in it, but it has historically never been handled very well in D&D. I just use other games when I want naval combat.

 

[Parmandur]

The 5e Spelljammer Ship combat rules are literally non existent.

They literally exist. You do not care for them. There is a difference.

 

[Lanefan]

Further, all that stuff about long resting? Completely unrelated to encumbrance. You're invoking completely separate rules here--long rests work as they work, unrelated to encumbrance unless you house rule a connection.

Don't need to houserule anything.

The more long rests they take, the longer they're in the field - which means they're going through more food, water, etc. which they either had to carry in with them (adding to their encumbrance) or forage in the wild.

Put another way, if their SOP is to long-rest and heal up after any noteworthy encounter, exploring a single dangerous hex could easily go from taking one day to taking several; and every day there's a party full of hungry mouths to feed...

So yes, in that way long-resting does tie in to encumbrance.