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

[payn]

Sure. The rules don't really discuss how to make any use of the relative numbers of successes vs failures to enhance the overall experience, but every DM I've ever had who has run them has done so. While I would understand folks feeling lost or direction less for trying to achieve this, if you find the "group binary" inadequate or dull...why wouldn't you do this? It's not like it's against the rules in any way.

I think its the tradition of skills being mostly binary with tangible results. Jump a rooftop gap for instance is usually based on a DC. You do, or you do not make the jump. Which leads to folks thinking diplomacy type skills are do or do not in making people do exactly what they want.

While degrees of success is becoming more and more used and popular, I think the D&D space is gonna lag behind for quite some time in this space. Folks will, of course, implement it in their games, but its not to be expected, IME.

Sure. That's the dynamic situation part I mentioned. Each roll, success or failure, changes the state of play. Some SCs aren't super amenable to that (for example, if the group is collectively doing research or gathering intel, it doesn't make much sense that every single roll results in a major change to the state of play), but chase scenes are one type where it's both extremely fitting and especially valuable to do so. If the quarry gets far away, the hunters get desperate, and if the hunters are snapping at their heels, the quarry gets desperate. Each "moment" (for lack of a better term) in the scene is in a different place with different context, meaning what is valuable vs negligible vs harmful is constantly changing.

Maybe the party Barbarian had the strength and speed to leap across rooftop after rooftop, so her success forces the quarry to dive down to street level in the hopes of disappearing into the crowd. But then the Bard's cunning and skill with leveraging the masses erases that advantage, so now the quarry, desperate and running out of options, starts vandalizing shopkeepers' stalls so that the PCs get caught in the resulting disaster. The Wizard tries to help with Arcana, essentially to reverse the damage, but it's too much too fast for them to fix all of it at speed, and the quarry slips further ahead, out of direct line of sight. Then the Sorcerer tries to persuade folks to tell her where the quarry went, but the crowd is just too upset and briefly blames the party for the issue, putting the quarry almost out of reach now. In the height of this tension, the Paladin, knowing that his god is hoping to make inroads with the population of this city, begs for a sign, a route to take, and is given one that cuts the quarry off at the pass, miraculously clear of people or obstacles.

The quarry has made it to the very gate of their hideout, but the party has caught them: two failures before four successes, an imperfect victory but a victory nonetheless. Had the Paladin failed, it would be there and three, and I'd probably rule that as the quarry has gone to ground, but the party knows for sure where that is and even some of its defenses. They failed to truly stop their opposition, but it was an extremely narrow loss, a cloud with a bright silver lining.

This way, every success does in fact matter. They aren't fungible. Further, even a failed SC isn't the worst thing, if the successes earned them enough benefits that they can still call it progress. It's sort of a mixture of "fail forward" and "focus on the fiction". Having seen this in action with at least three different DMs, it's a big part of why I love 4e so much (and why I find Dungeon World so comfortable to DM even though it is nowhere near crunchy enough for my preferences.)

I love it, seems very cinematic! I know a lot of folks I played with had issues with Paizo's PF1 chase system. "Clean up the vendor stall? Why cant I just cast phantasmal killer on the target and get this over with???" So, it can be hard to implement with skill play minded players.

 

[James Gasik]

I think the problem is, your DM would have to be one hell of a storyteller to turn what is, in effect, a series of die rolls, into a visceral action sequence like say, the market chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Then again, this is the same problem with combats, so I guess if you've solved one, you solved the other.

 

[payn]

I think the problem is, your DM would have to be one hell of a storyteller to turn what is, in effect, a series of die rolls, into a visceral action sequence like say, the market chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Then again, this is the same problem with combats, so I guess if you've solved one, you solved the other.

Its pretty easy in Traveller where I ask the players to be part of the narrative. They look at their skills and we negotiate results of a check and take it from there. With D&D, everything is defined and binary to a point its not conducive to this cinematic framing.

 

[James Gasik]

Its pretty easy in Traveller where I ask the players to be part of the narrative. They look at their skills and we negotiate results of a check and take it from there. With D&D, everything is defined and binary to a point its not conducive to this cinematic framing.

Neat! I just remember the problems of doing this in the last Star Wars game (Fantasy Flight), and trying to make the process of rolling funky dice exciting.

 

[payn]

Neat! I just remember the problems of doing this in the last Star Wars game (Fantasy Flight), and trying to make the process of rolling funky dice exciting.

That was an idea that seems better on the white board and is less exciting at the table. Folks hated the funky dice and while I loved what the system was doing, get why they didnt like it.

 

[Voadam]

There was a thread on the most fun you had in a TTRPG chase scene.

Mine was a 5e game using a sort of 4e style skill challenge to get an Indiana Jones type of feel that worked well. Focusing on the narrative and choices suitable for the players in the scene while structurally going multiple rounds of engaging each player one by one then resolving how the scene progressed based on their choices and successes or failures at their actions worked really well for engaging me and my group to resolve that situation.

5e out of the gate has some tools you can use but not a lot of great guidance.

 

[payn]

There was a thread on the most fun you had in a TTRPG chase scene.

Mine was a 5e game using a sort of 4e style skill challenge to get an Indiana Jones type of feel that worked well. Focusing on the narrative and choices suitable for the players in the scene while structurally going multiple rounds of engaging each player one by one then resolving how the scene progressed based on their choices and successes or failures at their actions worked really well for engaging me and my group to resolve that situation.

5e out of the gate has some tools you can use but not a lot of great guidance.

Mine was using Paizo chase system in Curse of the Crimson Throne. Overall it went well, except for the skill play old schooler. They just didnt like the fact they couldnt bring to bear the entire spell book at any moment to just simply end it.

After a long discussion, I realized they expected the GM to construct such a scenario where any given spell would not be effective, or lack line of sight, etc.. Thats just exhausting to me.

 

[Celebrim]

For example, I think D&D is historically pretty bad at "courtly intrigue." It is a staple of both historical and fantastical fiction, but there has never really been a mechanism in D&D that aids with courtly intrigue.

I disagree. I think courtly intrigue works best with a very light social system and D&D supports that perfectly. I've been in a courtly intrigue campaign.

It doesn't surprise me that "social combat" rules didn't work. I wouldn't expect them to. I would expect that it's very hard to do courtly intrigue without players mentally capable of intrigue and subtlety. A game system can't make a player an expert tactician, and that's true whether we are talking about physical combat or social combat.

D&D like any turn-based system is historically bad at chase scenes, and you have to hack it with a system of relative time and relative distance to get it to work. Really, anything that involves simultaneous action is hard within D&D or any turn-based game, though (ironically) BECMI with its phases and simultaneous declaration gets closest, and would allow you with some hacking to for example run a game of football (any form thereof) in D&D.

 

[James Gasik]

Mine was using Paizo chase system in Curse of the Crimson Throne. Overall it went well, except for the skill play old schooler. They just didnt like the fact they couldnt bring to bear the entire spell book at any moment to just simply end it.

After a long discussion, I realized they expected the GM to construct such a scenario where any given spell would not be effective, or lack line of sight, etc.. Thats just exhausting to me.

I'm reminded of a 4e skill challenge in a LFR mod where we had to cross a desert in Calimshan, and I was like "hey, my Cleric has a ritual that creates phantom steeds we can ride, as well as another that gives us food and water" and the DM sighed and kindly asked me not to, or there wouldn't be much of an adventure.

I stopped bothering to buy new Rituals after that.

 

[payn]

I'm reminded of a 4e skill challenge in a LFR mod where we had to cross a desert in Calimshan, and I was like "hey, my Cleric has a ritual that creates phantom steeds we can ride, as well as another that gives us food and water" and the DM sighed and kindly asked me not to, or there wouldn't be much of an adventure.

I stopped bothering to buy new Rituals after that.

Thats the issue with D&D needing to be all things, all the time.. Is it supposed to provide survival sim, or chase cinematics, or just allow magic to be an expediency button? Kind of hard to be all of that at the same time.