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

[EzekielRaiden]

I'll give you points for the alphabetical trivia!

Though of course I flubbed it by correcting the first time I used the word "fifth" but not the second. (D is, of course, the 4th letter.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Though of course I flubbed it by correcting the first time I used the word "fifth" but not the second. (D is, of course, the 4th letter.)

It's ok. The ampersand bit is top-notch!

 

[Lanefan]

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 merely the flip side of the current state, where anyone who wants a harder game has to do the work of adding the difficulty in. And...

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).

...from very long experience as a kitbasher I can tell you this is almost without exception dead wrong.

Idiocies like ear seekers aside, from a pure white-room design prespective there's little if any difference in design-level difficulty between making the game easier and making it harder.*

At the table, however, a vast degree-of-difficulty difference emerges: it's usually light-years harder to get players to accept increased difficulty in the game than to have them accept it becoming easier. Hence my take that having it default to hard to begin with is the way to go, with options provided to make it easier: the players will be far more open to the changes you want to make, thus greatly reducing at-table and-or pre-campaign arguments.

* - not to be confused with making the game more or less complex. Adding complexity to things is easier than removing it IME, but the more-less complexity axis is not the same as the easier-harder axis.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which is merely the flip side of the current state, where anyone who wants a harder game has to do the work of adding the difficulty in. And...

...from very long experience as a kitbasher I can tell you this is almost without exception dead wrong.

Idiocies like ear seekers aside, from a pure white-room design prespective there's little if any difference in design-level difficulty between making the game easier and making it harder.*

At the table, however, a vast degree-of-difficulty difference emerges: it's usually light-years harder to get players to accept increased difficulty in the game than to have them accept it becoming easier. Hence my take that having it default to hard to begin with is the way to go, with options provided to make it easier: the players will be far more open to the changes you want to make, thus greatly reducing at-table and-or pre-campaign arguments.

* - not to be confused with making the game more or less complex. Adding complexity to things is easier than removing it IME, but the more-less complexity axis is not the same as the easier-harder axis.

My experience backs this up. Most players I've met are very resistant to anything that makes things tougher on their PCs. Better to start at a higher floor IMO.

 

[James Gasik]

In fairness to Lanefan and Micah, I've seen their point in action. AD&D is rife with rules that simply got ignored or scaled back because people didn't care for them. More favorable character generation, death at -10 hit points, max hit points at first level, softening demihuman level limits; these were all things I saw quite often!

DM's who preferred letter of the law, hardball gaming where you struggled to survive and earned few rewards were rarely well-regarded. You put up with them because, well, in our foolish bliss, we thought even bad D&D was better than no D&D, but you eventually tired of having to fight tooth and nail for any semblance of success as an adventurer.

A high mortality rate and meager rewards might be more realistic, but I don't know many people who play D&D for the realism- people who wanted that seemed to gravitate towards other games. Or stick to their heavily house-ruled older versions of D&D, and in both cases, scoff at us younger players for not being able to handle "real gaming", lol.

How favorable D&D's rules are to players has waxed and waned over the years, but in general, it has seemed to become less concerned with high risk, low reward playstyles. I can understand why, to people who like that sort of thing, why it feels that D&D is leaving them behind.

Why? I have no hard data. But it seems to me that the playerbase itself has changed, and WotC is simply trying to adapt to what they think that base wants, without fully committing to anything, so as not to ostracize any particular subset of that base.

This unfortunately doesn't do anything to fully satisfy the extreme edges of the player base at large. The people who want Harry Potter Wizards and Shonen Fighters, yelling out the names of their attacks and mowing down foes left and right aren't really being better served than the people who want a 13th-level Ranger foraging for food in the wilderness and engaging in ruthless survival challenges straight out of a Jack London story.

Even if it leans towards one direction more, the modern game isn't going to fully commit to either, for risk of hemorrhaging players en masse to seek out systems more to their liking.

Which just leads to a lot of spirited debates about "what D&D is". The game tries to have it both ways, having "old school" dungeon crawling and exploration, while happily including all the various ways players can easily opt out of such challenges. It espouses a rapid advancement rate so players can eventually see those dizzying heights of power- far too fast for most DM's to keep up. Classes that lack full casting don't really get a lot of major power upgrades, however, as the game is fairly flattened- many high level abilities don't really feel that powerful. Conversely, full casters still get regularly fed a major jump in power ever two levels, because anything else apparently doesn't "feel like D&D".

 

[Micah Sweet]

In fairness to Lanefan and Micah, I've seen their point in action. AD&D is rife with rules that simply got ignored or scaled back because people didn't care for them. More favorable character generation, death at -10 hit points, max hit points at first level, softening demihuman level limits; these were all things I saw quite often!

DM's who preferred letter of the law, hardball gaming where you struggled to survive and earned few rewards were rarely well-regarded. You put up with them because, well, in our foolish bliss, we thought even bad D&D was better than no D&D, but you eventually tired of having to fight tooth and nail for any semblance of success as an adventurer.

A high mortality rate and meager rewards might be more realistic, but I don't know many people who play D&D for the realism- people who wanted that seemed to gravitate towards other games. Or stick to their heavily house-ruled older versions of D&D, and in both cases, scoff at us younger players for not being able to handle "real gaming", lol.

How favorable D&D's rules are to players has waxed and waned over the years, but in general, it has seemed to become less concerned with high risk, low reward playstyles. I can understand why, to people who like that sort of thing, why it feels that D&D is leaving them behind.

Why? I have no hard data. But it seems to me that the playerbase itself has changed, and WotC is simply trying to adapt to what they think that base wants, without fully committing to anything, so as not to ostracize any particular subset of that base.

This unfortunately doesn't do anything to fully satisfy the extreme edges of the player base at large. The people who want Harry Potter Wizards and Shonen Fighters, yelling out the names of their attacks and mowing down foes left and right aren't really being better served than the people who want a 13th-level Ranger foraging for food in the wilderness and engaging in ruthless survival challenges straight out of a Jack London story.

Even if it leans towards one direction more, the modern game isn't going to fully commit to either, for risk of hemorrhaging players en masse to seek out systems more to their liking.

Which just leads to a lot of spirited debates about "what D&D is". The game tries to have it both ways, having "old school" dungeon crawling and exploration, while happily including all the various ways players can easily opt out of such challenges. It espouses a rapid advancement rate so players can eventually see those dizzying heights of power- far too fast for most DM's to keep up. Classes that lack full casting don't really get a lot of major power upgrades, however, as the game is fairly flattened- many high level abilities don't really feel that powerful. Conversely, full casters still get regularly fed a major jump in power ever two levels, because anything else apparently doesn't "feel like D&D".

What about high risk, high reward? Where's the high risk? It seems that risk goes down, but reward goes up.

 

[pemerton]

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.

When you say it like this, it sounds so obvious . . .

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 think that @TwoSix and I are thinking along pretty similar lines.

To me, it's just weird for people to complain about 3E playing out in exactly the sort of way one would expect. Like, how are 8th or 9th level 3E PCs going to be constrained to confronting travel challenges in a "hard-scrabble" fashion? Unless you make them all be fighters and perhaps rogues.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My experience backs this up. Most players I've met are very resistant to anything that makes things tougher on their PCs. Better to start at a higher floor IMO.

And in my experience, you don't get people to accept the difficulty in the first place. Which is what I said to begin with.

Setting that floor that you and Lanefan describe would be game design suicide. It just doesn't work for a game like D&D trying to be everything to everyone.

The fault in your argument is the hidden premise that everyone would be totally chill with the extreme difficulty you advocate for, if only they just started that way. And that's utterly ridiculous. Just look at another major game that tried that: New World. It wanted to be the MMO equivalent of what you describe, and when it did closed beta testing...the designers realized there simply, flatly weren't enough people on board for it.

People will just walk away if that's the difficulty you set.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And in my experience, you don't get people to accept the difficulty in the first place. Which is what I said to begin with.

Setting that floor that you and Lanefan describe would be game design suicide. It just doesn't work for a game like D&D trying to be everything to everyone.

The fault in your argument is the hidden premise that everyone would be totally chill with the extreme difficulty you advocate for, if only they just started that way. And that's utterly ridiculous. Just look at another major game that tried that: New World. It wanted to be the MMO equivalent of what you describe, and when it did closed beta testing...the designers realized there simply, flatly weren't enough people on board for it.

People will just walk away if that's the difficulty you set.

It doesn't have to be extreme (your word, not ours), just more challenging than at present.

 

[pemerton]

The fault in your argument is the hidden premise that everyone would be totally chill with the extreme difficulty you advocate for, if only they just started that way. And that's utterly ridiculous.

It doesn't have to be extreme (your word, not ours), just more challenging than at present.

WotC has been actually testing what default level of difficulty will sell the most number of books, for quite a few years now. Is there any reason to think that the conclusion they've reached is wrong?