D&D (2024) What happened to proficiency bonus times per day?

[JohnSnow]

Unpopular Opinion: the game shouldn’t have “per day” abilities at all.

If you want something to be used infrequently, just make it either hard enough to activate, or draining enough to use, that it only gets used infrequently.

No more per day kludges required.

 

[payn]

Unpopular Opinion: the game shouldn’t have “per day” abilities at all.

If you want something to be used infrequently, just make it either hard enough to activate, or draining enough to use, that it only gets used infrequently.

No more per day kludges required.

I’m of the opposite opinion, but I do think the game is better as either a per adventuring day or per encounter design and not a hybrid.

 

[JohnSnow]

I’m of the opposite opinion, but I do think the game is better as either a per adventuring day or per encounter design and not a hybrid.

I find “adventuring day” design dictates a particular play style. Not everyone wants to be tied to “X encounters per day,” when you can’t easily adjust the dial on X.

 

[TwoSix]

Unpopular Opinion: the game shouldn’t have “per day” abilities at all.

If you want something to be used infrequently, just make it either hard enough to activate, or draining enough to use, that it only gets used infrequently.

No more per day kludges required.

Related opinion: Make all strong abilities use expensive reagents, most of which can only be gathered via adventuring. The challenge in the game becomes gathering more reagents than the party expends.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I’m of the opposite opinion, but I do think the game is better as either a per adventuring day or per encounter design and not a hybrid.

I mean, it's quite possible to design a game that does both. You just have to actually, y'know, design it to be both, as opposed to retaining 50 years of cruft from six completely different design goals without any consideration of how to actually integrate them into a functional structure.

But God forbid we actually treat game design as, y'know, design as opposed to pure artistic vision without any trace of improvable technique or theory. That's telling players what they're allowed to play!

 

[payn]

I mean, it's quite possible to design a game that does both. You just have to actually, y'know, design it to be both, as opposed to retaining 50 years of cruft from six completely different design goals without any consideration of how to actually integrate them into a functional structure.

But God forbid we actually treat game design as, y'know, design as opposed to pure artistic vision without any trace of improvable technique or theory. That's telling players what they're allowed to play!

Monopoly could be redesigned as a euro to be a better balanced game, but then it wouldn’t be Monopoly anymore.

 

[JohnSnow]

Monopoly could be redesigned as a euro to be a better balanced game, but then it wouldn’t be Monopoly anymore.

True. But someone might actually play it as anything but a drinking game or a rite of passage.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Monopoly could be redesigned as a euro to be a better balanced game, but then it wouldn’t be Monopoly anymore.

Are you saying, then, that the essence of D&D is to be a game bad at what it tells you it's for?

 

[payn]

Are you saying, then, that the essence of D&D is to be a game bad at what it tells you it's for?

Well, that’s entirely a matter of opinion as to the regard of its value. I don’t have a problem using D&D as a fantasy RPG.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, that’s entirely a matter of opinion as to the regard of its value. I don’t have a problem using D&D as a fantasy RPG.

Your point was that you can redesign a game to be one that is actually good at what it is designed to do--Monopoly designed to be a better-balanced economic simulator (as opposed to an intentional demonstration that monopolies result in financial ruination), D&D designed to actually provide interesting encounter- and daily-based resource-consumption gameplay--but that doing so kills the spirit of the game in question. It ceases to be itself, and becomes some other thing.

Is that not correct?

But if so, then that implies that D&D telling us explicitly that it is a game where daily and encounter resources both matter, means that the game is explicitly telling us that it's about something that it's bad at doing. Either it needs to drop one end or the other, or it needs new design to be actually good at the thing it tells us it's good at, but either way, if my understanding of your argument is correct, D&D must cease to be D&D in order to do that. Hence, the essence of D&D is to be bad at what it tells the player it is for.