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

[EzekielRaiden]

If you build a game (say, 3E) oriented around the party overcoming preplanned challenges, and the games has hundreds of specifically coded player-facing exceptions (i.e. spells, and some other class/race features) that allow challenges to be bypassed or obviated, this does seem like the natural result of play.

If you want a game where those challenges are overcome with a certain range of tempos, then maybe the game shouldn't encode hundreds of exceptions!

Precisely, though you are arguing something parallel to but not on the same track as @pemerton I believe.

That is, I believe his argument is that, because the spell is offered at that level, it can't be defined as obviously inappropriate for players to have at said level, otherwise the designers wouldn't have offered it then. Your point, one step to the side, seems to be that it was unwise of the designers to offer that spell at that level, because they had designed a game where the fun of it was specifically intended to be overcoming certain kinds of obstacles, and yet then they saw fit to include resources and features that make those very challenges irrelevant.

I am reminded of an argument I've seen from a handful of people, more or less that this is the intent: that you should transcend some challenges over time, but in so doing encounter a different, new, non-commensurate challenge or challenges to replace them, and that this very thing is what gaining levels does or should represent. The problem I find is that that is a great idea that D&D has never, ever done, and 3e was absolutely, positively terrible at achieving even the tiniest portion of it, and especially terrible at doing anything whatever to support DMs trying to run the game that way. The only time D&D ever got close was the transition between "early" game dungeon-crawling and the later "domain (management)" play, where fighters would transition from personally invading every orc's pantry to murder them and steal all their stuff, to sending out paid retainers to do that, where clerics would go from bringing light to dark places and into guiding the flock and finding others willing to take up the mantle, where wizards would retreat to their wizard towers and begin searching for ioun stones, etc.

At least in that transition, there was a clear change of state, and the players' goals and motivations would shift in response to their shift in power, responsibility, and resources. But you never totally left the dungeon-crawling behind, AIUI. You just left the "this is beneath my station" ones, where you were killing three goblins in a hallway, to your lackeys. Big ones, against dragons with their hoards or demiliches or whatever? You bet your hindquarters, the Lady of the Manor and Friar Fryer and Ferdinand Fortescue, Esq., D.Mag, OBE, VCR, etc. etc., are going to be the ones to go there and claim the wealth and power and prestige (or, like as not, die trying). So even when there was an intended and coded-in change of state, it didn't actually eliminate the old challenges of murder-holes and their murderous hole-dwelling denizens. It just made the party picky about their murder-holes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No one ever said every player is going to enjoy @Lanefan 's (or my) game, but it seems we both manage well enough.

Lanefan absolutely does think this though, because he explicitly said he wants the game to be hard-coded to work his way, and anyone who wants something else has to do the work of paring it back.

Which is especially ridiculous as a claim, because paring back difficulty is like removing salt from a dish, aka, nigh impossible. Adding difficulty, especially difficulty of the bovine feces variety that old-school play so delights in, is trivially easy. Gygax did it constantly (again, the ear seeker).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Precisely, though you are arguing something parallel to but not on the same track as @pemerton I believe.

That is, I believe his argument is that, because the spell is offered at that level, it can't be defined as obviously inappropriate for players to have at said level, otherwise the designers wouldn't have offered it then. Your point, one step to the side, seems to be that it was unwise of the designers to offer that spell at that level, because they had designed a game where the fun of it was specifically intended to be overcoming certain kinds of obstacles, and yet then they saw fit to include resources and features that make those very challenges irrelevant.

I am reminded of an argument I've seen from a handful of people, more or less that this is the intent: that you should transcend some challenges over time, but in so doing encounter a different, new, non-commensurate challenge or challenges to replace them, and that this very thing is what gaining levels does or should represent. The problem I find is that that is a great idea that D&D has never, ever done, and 3e was absolutely, positively terrible at achieving even the tiniest portion of it, and especially terrible at doing anything whatever to support DMs trying to run the game that way. The only time D&D ever got close was the transition between "early" game dungeon-crawling and the later "domain (management)" play, where fighters would transition from personally invading every orc's pantry to murder them and steal all their stuff, to sending out paid retainers to do that, where clerics would go from bringing light to dark places and into guiding the flock and finding others willing to take up the mantle, where wizards would retreat to their wizard towers and begin searching for ioun stones, etc.

At least in that transition, there was a clear change of state, and the players' goals and motivations would shift in response to their shift in power, responsibility, and resources. But you never totally left the dungeon-crawling behind, AIUI. You just left the "this is beneath my station" ones, where you were killing three goblins in a hallway, to your lackeys. Big ones, against dragons with their hoards or demiliches or whatever? You bet your hindquarters, the Lady of the Manor and Friar Fryer and Ferdinand Fortescue, Esq., D.Mag, OBE, VCR, etc. etc., are going to be the ones to go there and claim the wealth and power and prestige (or, like as not, die trying). So even when there was an intended and coded-in change of state, it didn't actually eliminate the old challenges of murder-holes and their murderous hole-dwelling denizens. It just made the party picky about their murder-holes.

Yup. I'm not sure if you are for or against domain management tradition gaming, but it's right up my alley.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Lanefan absolutely does think this though, because he explicitly said he wants the game to be hard-coded to work his way, and anyone who wants something else has to do the work of paring it back.

Which is especially ridiculous as a claim, because paring back difficulty is like removing salt from a dish, aka, nigh impossible. Adding difficulty, especially difficulty of the bovine feces variety that old-school play so delights in, is trivially easy. Gygax did it constantly (again, the ear seeker).

Well, I certainly would personally like to see a tougher default, but I also know we're never going to get one from WotC. Fortunately there's lots of other options that suit me better.

 

[payn]

Lanefan absolutely does think this though, because he explicitly said he wants the game to be hard-coded to work his way, and anyone who wants something else has to do the work of paring it back.

Which is especially ridiculous as a claim, because paring back difficulty is like removing salt from a dish, aka, nigh impossible. Adding difficulty, especially difficulty of the bovine feces variety that old-school play so delights in, is trivially easy. Gygax did it constantly (again, the ear seeker).

I agree to a point, however, everyone seems to have a different salinity point they think is the ideal starting place. Then, everyone else has to adjust from there, which is easy to offer once you've satisfied your own taste. Finding an actual neutral place is nebulous in an RPG as much of it is based on preference.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yup. I'm not sure if you are for or against domain management tradition gaming, but it's right up my alley.

I have no strong preference one way or the other. It's just the closest D&D has ever come to having an actual change-of-state from one playstyle to another as a result of acquiring new features and resources that trivialize old categories of challenge.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree to a point, however, everyone seems to have a different salinity point they think is the ideal starting place. Then, everyone else has to adjust from there, which is easy to offer once you've satisfied your own taste. Finding an actual neutral place is nebulous in an RPG as much of it is based on preference.

Agreed.

I just think it's trivially obvious that forcing everyone to start with Tucker's Kobolds and work down is...not the correct spot.

Personally, my preference is to have a pretty rigorous asymmetrical balance, so that the DM has good but not perfect (say, 85%?) confidence that their encounters are the strength they should be. Then, if the DM wants a gentler experience, there are simple and easy things to do to make that happen. Harder experiences can be implemented through simply intentionally throwing outright tougher fights, and you can augment this with 13A style "Nastier Specials" either baked into the individual monsters, or written in a subchapter on the subject (or, most preferably, both).

 

[payn]

Agreed.

I just think it's trivially obvious that forcing everyone to start with Tucker's Kobolds and work down is...not the correct spot.

Personally, my preference is to have a pretty rigorous asymmetrical balance, so that the DM has good but not perfect (say, 85%?) confidence that their encounters are the strength they should be. Then, if the DM wants a gentler experience, there are simple and easy things to do to make that happen. Harder experiences can be implemented through simply intentionally throwing outright tougher fights, and you can augment this with 13A style "Nastier Specials" either baked into the individual monsters, or written in a subchapter on the subject (or, most preferably, both).

While I prefer the horseshoe and hand grenade CR of 3E/5E, I do think PF2s locked in system math allows for a better difficulty dial for GMs. It just gets a little too predictable for my taste. That seemed once on the menu for 5E, but modules went up in vapor when the game went gangbusters.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

While I prefer the horseshoe and hand grenade CR of 3E/5E, I do think PF2s locked in system math allows for a better difficulty dial for GMs. It just gets a little too predictable for my taste. That seemed once on the menu for 5E, but modules went up in vapor when the game went gangbusters.

Well, at least IMO, that's the beauty of 13th Age's "Nastier Specials" concept.

Nastier Specials are not designed for predictability! They are designed to be both scary and interesting--a big difference compared to a lot of "gotcha" monsters, which lose their interestingness as soon as the "puzzle" of the monster is understood. In 13A, a creature's XP rating does not include any Nastier Special features that creature might have (and the book explicitly says so). The game's baseline balance assumes you are not using them, but various creatures like dragons, mind flayers, liches, etc. have them baked-in, and (IIRC?) there's a section, possibly in the supplemental book 13 True Ways, with more generic Nastier Specials if you want to add them to other monsters.

This gives us the best of both worlds. Folks who want consistency in order to cultivate a specific kind of experience have exactly what they need, and don't need to do the laborious and often exhausting task of either (a) learning all the monsters they can't use because they're too hard or (b) tweaking all the monsters they ever use so they won't be too hard. Folks who want spontaneity and stiff challenge already have it, baked right into the rules as-is, they just have to elect to use them, rather than not using them.

I really cannot overstate my praise for (most of) the game design of 13th Age. It isn't perfect by any means, but it genuinely has a ton of clever fixes to long-standing design issues, implemented well. It just remains extremely obscure and unknown because it doesn't have the fourth, twenty-seventh, and fourth (again) letters of the alphabet emblazoned on the cover. (Yes, I said "twenty-seventh", the ampersand was considered a letter of the English alphabet at one time!)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, at least IMO, that's the beauty of 13th Age's "Nastier Specials" concept.

Nastier Specials are not designed for predictability! They are designed to be both scary and interesting--a big difference compared to a lot of "gotcha" monsters, which lose their interestingness as soon as the "puzzle" of the monster is understood. In 13A, a creature's XP rating does not include any Nastier Special features that creature might have (and the book explicitly says so). The game's baseline balance assumes you are not using them, but various creatures like dragons, mind flayers, liches, etc. have them baked-in, and (IIRC?) there's a section, possibly in the supplemental book 13 True Ways, with more generic Nastier Specials if you want to add them to other monsters.

This gives us the best of both worlds. Folks who want consistency in order to cultivate a specific kind of experience have exactly what they need, and don't need to do the laborious and often exhausting task of either (a) learning all the monsters they can't use because they're too hard or (b) tweaking all the monsters they ever use so they won't be too hard. Folks who want spontaneity and stiff challenge already have it, baked right into the rules as-is, they just have to elect to use them, rather than not using them.

I really cannot overstate my praise for (most of) the game design of 13th Age. It isn't perfect by any means, but it genuinely has a ton of clever fixes to long-standing design issues, implemented well. It just remains extremely obscure and unknown because it doesn't have the fourth, twenty-seventh, and fifth letters of the alphabet emblazoned on the cover. (Yes, I said "twenty-seventh", the ampersand was considered a letter of the English alphabet at one time!)

I'll give you points for the alphabetical trivia!