D&D General What Should Magic Be Able To Do, From a Gameplay Design Standpoint?

[EzekielRaiden]

I mentioned this before, but, I think it got lost in the scrum.

Imagine a simple fix. In order to learn a higher level spell of a given school, you needed to learn two spells from that school, but, one level lower. So, 2 1st level spells would let you learn a 2nd level spell from that school. Considering most casters only gain 2 spells known per level, that would sort out the arcane casters pretty well.

You could go broad - learning lots of lower level spells, or you could go deep - focusing your learned spells into a single school or two.

Would this not massively sort casters out?

I assume that is not two unique spells per higher level spell, because I don't think 5e could support that across all spell levels at present. Certainly, I don't think there are 2⁸ = 256 first-level spells of any single school, let alone all of them.

So, at least implicitly, this would mean specializing in two schools per Wizard, unless you get extra spells via scribing from scrolls or spellbooks. Once you hit 19, you'd be free to minor in a third, but you wouldn't get too far.

It has potential, though I would expect there to be a sidebar for the Wizard talking about how players and DMs should handle finding new spells in the world, as that becomes rather more important if a PC is, functionally albeit not formally, locked to two spell schools.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And that's fine of course. But I will take exception to your description of PCs playing in games whose playstyles aren't your preference as "pet squirrels" (not even sure what that means, but it feels uncomplimentary), nor your implication that caring about survival, or encumbrance, means you aren't "heroes" by whatever definition you are using for that term.

It is generally not "heroic", in the sense of a tale focused on the doing of great deeds and the people who do those deeds, to spend significant amounts of time on activities like:

• Ensuring you have enough food to eat, water to drink, etc. If doing so is in fact a stiff challenge, it portrays the characters as too feeble to be truly great, and instead barely scraping by. If it isn't a particularly difficult challenge, it instead feels like busy work, which isn't any more "doing great deeds"-y.
• Finding shelter against the elements on the regular, not just when specifically delving into harsh and unforgiving territory. This is a bit looser because bravely delving the depths is a pretty established heroic act, but again, if you're needing to put in major effort merely to potentially have any kind of place to sleep, that is certainly gritty, but it pulls away from the doing-great-deeds emphasis and toward the ordinary and plain. Less epic adventure, more barely-surviving hobo.
• Evading hostile denizens/wildlife. Some amount of "evade the wildlife" is perfectly fine; we sort of expect that, because smart heroes pick their battles and don't just throw themselves into danger willy-nilly. But when it becomes a "you MUST avoid conflicts you haven't won before they started", again it pulls away from the heroic experience, because it makes the characters feel fragile, weak, and easily killed, rather than hardy, strong, and ready to challenge great threats.
• Fending off serious danger from (relatively) small threats. It's heroic to assault a dragon's lair and the kobold warren that serves said dragon. It's less heroic to stumble upon a kobold warren while doing something else and needing to turn around or avoid the warren because that's a genuine existential danger, it pulls away from the heroic experience because...well, it feels like you're basically saying "nope, can't do that, a small band of kobolds is just too dangerous for us". It's fine for a heroic experience to begin with small and weak opponents (how many games, tabletop or video game, begin with killing rats in absurdly spacious sewers?), but if that remains your focus across a broad swathe of the campaign, it no longer feels like a heroic experience in most cases, and instead feels like weak fools scrabbling in the dirt for pennies.

There might be other examples, but those cover the basics I think. It's an important issue, the feeling that you're a Big Damn Hero that isn't afraid of a little peril, and having too many (or too severe) things that drag the camera back down to dirt level will tarnish the heroism and turn the experience into gritty survival rather than heroic derring-do.

 

[James Gasik]

It isn't even about starvation. One of the fun things about encumbrance is players having to choose between gear and gold. Gear often means survival, and you can count rations in that. But rations are bulky and heavy, and the more of them you carry, the less loot you can carry.

As usual, the modern game has largely done away with the hunt for treasure as the motivating impetus behind play, so the "gear or gold" question is moot.

Even gear is lackluster and not really all that necessary. You just need food, healing potions, rope, a light source, and maybe something to poke or prod stuff with. And there's not a lot more gear you can buy anyways.

-You might say, but what about caltrops or vials of oil or acid? To which I'll say, unless you have prep time and a choke point, caltrops or ball bearings probably not worth it. Damage is so low compared to monster hit points, the cost to effectiveness ratio for things like acid are laughable.

Now you might be proficient in some useful tool, but you might even get that for free from a background (like Thieves' Tools).

 

[W'rkncacnter]

Make magic focus almost exclusively on the [...] "when would I ever use this??? [...]

presumably followed by "OH, THIS is when I would use this, how the HELL did we GET here???"

 

[Lanefan]

Getting bags of holding or portable holes depends on the DM. It will not happen in any game I run and I have not seen them available at any table- where I have played.

They're theoretically available in my game but they're quite rare and bloody expensive. Even with that, someone willing to wait for it could still commission an artificer to make one; and that over the years nobody's ever commissioned either of these items tells me all I need to know.

 

[Greg K]

It is generally not "heroic", in the sense of a tale focused on the doing of great deeds and the people who do those deeds, to spend significant amounts of time on activities like:

• Ensuring you have enough food to eat, water to drink, etc. If doing so is in fact a stiff challenge, it portrays the characters as too feeble to be truly great, and instead barely scraping by. If it isn't a particularly difficult challenge, it instead feels like busy work, which isn't any more "doing great deeds"-y..

So, Sam and Frodo were not heroic, because they had to find water in a stream at the edge of Mordor, Sam went mostly without water to ensure they made the journey to the Mountain, and Sam and Frodo kept going sure their trip was one way due to the hardship and wondering if they would be remembered after their death?

 

[Lanefan]

It is generally not "heroic", in the sense of a tale focused on the doing of great deeds and the people who do those deeds, to spend significant amounts of time on activities like:

• Ensuring you have enough food to eat, water to drink, etc. If doing so is in fact a stiff challenge, it portrays the characters as too feeble to be truly great, and instead barely scraping by. If it isn't a particularly difficult challenge, it instead feels like busy work, which isn't any more "doing great deeds"-y.
• Finding shelter against the elements on the regular, not just when specifically delving into harsh and unforgiving territory. This is a bit looser because bravely delving the depths is a pretty established heroic act, but again, if you're needing to put in major effort merely to potentially have any kind of place to sleep, that is certainly gritty, but it pulls away from the doing-great-deeds emphasis and toward the ordinary and plain. Less epic adventure, more barely-surviving hobo.
• Evading hostile denizens/wildlife. Some amount of "evade the wildlife" is perfectly fine; we sort of expect that, because smart heroes pick their battles and don't just throw themselves into danger willy-nilly. But when it becomes a "you MUST avoid conflicts you haven't won before they started", again it pulls away from the heroic experience, because it makes the characters feel fragile, weak, and easily killed, rather than hardy, strong, and ready to challenge great threats.
• Fending off serious danger from (relatively) small threats. It's heroic to assault a dragon's lair and the kobold warren that serves said dragon. It's less heroic to stumble upon a kobold warren while doing something else and needing to turn around or avoid the warren because that's a genuine existential danger, it pulls away from the heroic experience because...well, it feels like you're basically saying "nope, can't do that, a small band of kobolds is just too dangerous for us". It's fine for a heroic experience to begin with small and weak opponents (how many games, tabletop or video game, begin with killing rats in absurdly spacious sewers?), but if that remains your focus across a broad swathe of the campaign, it no longer feels like a heroic experience in most cases, and instead feels like weak fools scrabbling in the dirt for pennies.

There might be other examples, but those cover the basics I think. It's an important issue, the feeling that you're a Big Damn Hero that isn't afraid of a little peril, and having too many (or too severe) things that drag the camera back down to dirt level will tarnish the heroism and turn the experience into gritty survival rather than heroic derring-do.

This all assumes - not necessarily correctly, depending on table - that heroic derring-do is the consistently desired outcome on either or both sides of the screen.

Me, I'd prefer a mix, where they might be saving the world in one adventure and then not really saving anything in the next and causing loads of trouble in the one after that; with survival always being the underlying first priority and moments of heroic derring-do arising as and when they will.

Your latter two points above speak to seeking a steeper power curve, where it's expected that significant threats to low-level parties become irrelevant to higher-level parties. I'd prefer a flatter curve, where any given monster(s) can pose a viable threat to a wider range of levels; a pleasant side effect of this flatter curve is that it also allows for variable character levels within the party without the lower-level characters feeling useless.

 

[Lanefan]

Even gear is lackluster and not really all that necessary. You just need food, healing potions, rope, a light source, and maybe something to poke or prod stuff with.

And a weapons belt, your weapons and armour, a weapon/armour care kit plus whetstone, a flint-and-tinder (or some other means of lighting a campfire), a bedroll or tent or something else to sleep on/under, a waterskin or similar, and so on. Plus, of course, any specific gear related to your class e.g. quills-ink-paper for a wizard, holy symbol(s) and-or vestments for a cleric, poison for an assassin, etc.

And above all else, the very most important piece of adventuring equipment ever invented: a backpack.

And there's not a lot more gear you can buy anyways.

That in itself is sad.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So, Sam and Frodo were not heroic, because they had to find water in a stream at the edge of Mordor, Sam went mostly without water to ensure they made the journey to the Mountain, and Sam and Frodo kept going sure their trip was one way due to the hardship and wondering if they would be remembered after their death?

Precisely. They were not heroic. That's the whole point. The whole point of the Lord of the Rings is that it ISN'T looking at the obvious Hero. That Obvious Hero is Aragorn. For God's sake, he's literally the long-lost heir to the throne, descendant of an ancient bloodline, prophesied hero-king, wielder of the true king's sword reforged anew, his romance with the closest thing to an elven princess the setting has is literally seen as a reenactment of the greatest love story Middle-Earth ever bore witness to, etc., etc., etc., etc.

By comparison? Yes, absolutely Frodo and Sam are not heroes. They're channeling Tolkien's experiences fighting in the trenches of WWI, one of the least-heroic, most-horrible places we have ever sent the young and foolish to die for the glory of generals and emperors.

They are barely scraping by. They are hiding like rats. They are donning enemy uniforms to pass as goblins, because otherwise they'll be executed or they'll starve to death. And, in the end, Frodo falls to the Ring, showing that even his goodness is not absolute, it CAN be broken. It's only a fluke that gets the Ring destroyed at all--the greed and jealousy of Gollum, not the valor or virtue or stalwart heart of either character. Frodo is left a broken man, haunted by what he became in that moment, and Sam is chastened, his cheery disposition forever mellowed by the bittersweet taste of wisdom.

They are not heroes. Not in the ancient Greek sense, and not in the modern, Christianized sense. They are ordinary people broken on the wheel, who don't even actually save the day.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This all assumes - not necessarily correctly, depending on table - that heroic derring-do is the consistently desired outcome on either or both sides of the screen.

Not assumed. It's literally what the books tell us, and what Gygax himself wrote in the earliest texts. That's why I invoked that bit about how he describes HP, how a high-level Fighter being more durable than a trained warhorse makes it utterly ridiculous to argue that HP are meat.

Me, I'd prefer a mix, where they might be saving the world in one adventure and then not really saving anything in the next and causing loads of trouble in the one after that; with survival always being the underlying first priority and moments of heroic derring-do arising as and when they will.

Whereas for me, if "survival being the underlying first priority" is the name of the game, you've killed it. You've destroyed everything beautiful about D&D, and turned it into yet another dull meatgrinder where nothing interesting happens except by the fluke of the dice. Everything is just people being horrible to each other, grubbing for every last coin and a morsel. I deal with far, far too much of that in my daily life. Worries about whether we can make ends meet. Worries about whether we can put food on the table. Worries about violence near and far--wars and terrorism and gangs. Worries about drugs, both the prescribed and the proscribed.

When you reduce the world to nothing more than the grim algebra of necessity, when you treat heroism as a silly distraction, all you do is kill the joy and beauty that could come from the experience. At least for me.

Your latter two points above speak to seeking a steeper power curve, where it's expected that significant threats to low-level parties become irrelevant to higher-level parties. I'd prefer a flatter curve, where any given monster(s) can pose a viable threat to a wider range of levels; a pleasant side effect of this flatter curve is that it also allows for variable character levels within the party without the lower-level characters feeling useless.

I don't see either of those things as a positive, so yeah, of course I'm talking about that. I find there are (much, much, MUCH) better ways to represent the kind of thing you speak of, without all of the massive UNpleasant side effects of a "curve" that is functionally flat. Because that's what people keep pushing toward, over and over and over and over, as though that would somehow be amazing. It wouldn't be. There is, in fact, actual value in a curve that really does observably grow, in the level range people regularly play, rather than one where the threats you faced at first level remain incredibly dangerous at 10th.

Edit: Also? Your point is basically "but what about the other ways?"...when mine was about "this way is by far what most people actually want." I am fairly certain you disagree with this point--and I'm also equally certain that all available data shows you are wrong. Some players love a good challenge. Some players love a game that is gritty down to its bones and never becomes anything else, where heroics are at most a sometimes food.

But most people? Most people want a reasonable challenge that feels like their choices made a difference, where random luck doesn't $#!+ all over them half the time, where they really are doing great (and usually good) things. Statistics conclusively show that players prefer good/noble/heroic endings over evil/selfish/gritty endings when they can choose between them. Statistics conclusively show that people like hard but fair conflicts (see: Elden Ring and other "Souls-like" games). Statistics clearly show that only a very slim minority (~10%) even attempts brutally-difficult, no-holds-barred, permadeath type challenges, and even fewer succeed.

However, as I have so often said before, none of this means that the gritty style of play should be abandoned. It's just not the primary focus of D&D's design, and hasn't been since at the very least 3e, and probably since mid-2e. Hence, options should be available to support this style, since it is classic and definitely has its fans (many of whom are, like you, diehard fans--which is a good thing!) That's why I advocate for novice-level rules that are baked in from the very beginning and presented as no more nor less good and right and true than any other part of the game. That's why I advocate for stealing the 13A "incremental advance" rules, so players like you who want a near-flat levelling curve can absolutely have it and have it sing for you, while those who want a moderate curve can have it, and those who want a steep one can also have it, all without forcing anyone to play less of the game as a consequence. It's why I praise solutions like DCC's "funnels" and 13A's Druid, where truly clever game design manages to resolve seemingly impossible conflicts.

Your way is good. It deserves to be part of D&D. But it is not, and cannot be, the default that everyone must be forced to march through or else spend hours and hours slamming their faces against the game's design to try to squeeze what they want out of it.

And, to loop that back to magic (since I've gotten off-topic again): Magic is a part of this whole conundrum. The high-cost, incredibly-open-ended magic that some folks have advocated for in this thread actively encourages bad behavior. It actively encourages DMs to be punitive and harsh, to dangle tempting carrots and then slam down on every attempt at creativity lest that attempt be used as a foot in the door. It actively encourages players to be manipulative and coercive to their DMs and their fellow players (not the characters, the players); to finagle and trick and lie to their fellow players and their DM, to do everything they can to wrest ultimate power while paying nothing at all. And that whole time, the archetypes that don't have access to that magic are locked in the cage of not-even-mundane, but still suffer the negative consequences of punitive DMs and all the rest.