D&D General What Is D&D Generally Bad At That You Wish It Was Better At?

[overgeeked]

you don't have to when you use die rolls to determine the outcome

Having to tell a player to roll to see if their character is smart enough to have an idea is policing their RPing. Not interested in that at all.

Or when the player self-polices in good faith by, for example, rolling under Int on a d20 to see if the character thought of the bright idea the player just thought of. Happens fairly often round here.

In 40+ years of playing D&D with several hundred players, I've never once seen that happen.

 

[James Gasik]

Also, how do you really determine what Intelligence or Wisdom is required to come up with a given course of action? "Rolling under stat" can still result in an average person coming up with genius tactics fairly often!

 

[mamba]

Having to tell a player to roll to see if their character is smart enough to have an idea is policing their RPing. Not interested in that at all.

oh, agreed, I was thinking of rolling to see if they eg persuaded the NPC

 

[Piperken]

This is a good observation. What do you think would be a good solution?

Hum, not positive. I think a DM can sand the edges by encouraging players to commit first e.g. X asks Y to cup their hands together above their knee, and uses that as a springboard to attack Z! vs. looking at the character sheet and asking Can I? and immediately grabbing the dice.

You'd probably need to retool the play loop and mechanics (such as going rules-light, as some mentioned); after a certain point, it may not be D&D. Which I like for other aspects.

 

[Remathilis]

Sure it does: the language used prevents a group from playing Cowboys & Indians™ or any other way except the way the game's designer(s) intended. That, is a bad game.

If my group wants to play Shadowrun using Pathfinder, I'm going to do it, and the game's designer(s) allow it with Rule 0.

Clue does not allow me to attempt to take over the world using troop movements. It's a bad game.

 

[Remathilis]

Keep in mind that in this thread we're looking at all of D&D from 0e to 5.5e as a collective whole. This greatly widens the variety of game styles D&D can handle well - you just have to start with the right edition.

I would still argue any edition of D&D will end up as high magic heroic fantasy. The level that happens changes, as does the amount of house running necessary to delay it, varies from edition to edition.

 

[Umbran]

For example, I think D&D is historically pretty bad at "courtly intrigue."

I'd agree. I'd broaden it to being bad at social interactions, in general. The rules basically say, "here's a skill you can roll, you figure out the effects" which is abdicating the whole thing to the GM.

Another thing that it is bad at is the underlying politics & economics that should be behind what we often call "domain play". Also, the economics underlying same.

Mass combat - or at least a framework for having a party of adventurers operating within a mass combat. And, beyond that, rules to chart the progress of a war...

 

[Umbran]

Clue does not allow me to attempt to take over the world using troop movements. It's a bad game.

I know you're being sarcastic, but I think we should all step back from this. No game can do everything. And that should be okay. Having things they don't do well doesn't make them "bad games". This will quickly become reductive, and start arguments.

We should not imply (or infer) that a gap we wish was filled means a game is bad.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I would still argue any edition of D&D will end up as high magic heroic fantasy. The level that happens changes, as does the amount of house running necessary to delay it, varies from edition to edition.

I think there's room to argue that very early-edition D&D includes something that isn't quite "high magic heroic fantasy."

That is, while magic exists, a lot of it is inaccessible to players, and getting a wizard to the level where they do have it is rough. Not impossible, but rough. That lowers the magic a bit. I wouldn't call any version of D&D truly "low magic", except maybe 4e if you ban a lot of stuff. (E.g. PCs can only be Martial characters or specific types of Monk, using the Inherent Bonuses rules, no Ritual Caster or at least sharply limited access, etc.)

Heroic is...hard to apply to early-edition D&D in the manner it was intended to be played--but note "intended." A lot of people wanted to be Aragorn or the like, when the intent was Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or the like, morally-grey mercenaries fighting not for Good but for Civilization, because that's where they could spend their haul from trawling the murder-holes. GP=XP, among other things, strongly encouraged a selfish, mercenary playstyle even for groups that maintained high internal cohesion (which was far from guaranteed; remember that the Cleric was created specifically to take the Fighter-turned-vampire "Sir Fang" down a peg.)

Lower levels, which is where most play occurred, were more like weird dungeon gritty fantasy. Higher levels leaned more in the high-magic direction (especially once players had a high-level cleric or MU in their character stable), but I'm not really sure that Gygaxian D&D ever really was "heroic" fantasy in the way that term is usually used. It's much more like classical Greek heroism, which was about being mighty and uncowed, not so much about being benevolent; "virtue" in its ancient sense, literally "manhood/manliness" (from virtus, an adjective derived from the noun vir, "man"), not its modern, Christianized sense of unimpeachable righteousness and moral rectitude.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I know you're being sarcastic, but I think we should all step back from this. No game can do everything. And that should be okay. Having things they don't do well doesn't make them "bad games". This will quickly become reductive, and start arguments.

We should not imply (or infer) that a gap we wish was filled means a game is bad.

The point is not to claim that Clue (or Risk, or any other specific game) is bad--it is to highlight how ridiculous it is to claim that a game lacking an official "Rule Zero" is axiomatically and inherently bad, while a game containing it is axiomatically and inherently good. Theory of Games's claimed standard of game-design goodness is just flat-out silly. There are many, many ways a game can be badly-designed, almost all of which have nothing to do with whether they contain "Rule Zero" or not. And, more importantly, the explicit presence (or explicit absence) of "Rule Zero" has no effect on whether the players of a given game can choose to play that game differently. No rulebook can control your brain so you are incapable of making changes; if it could, it would be an incredibly dangerous weapon of psychological warfare.

And it's doubly ridiculous to make this claim and then do absolutely nothing to back it up besides citing one, single, game that doesn't even do the thing claimed.