D&D (2024) What type of ranger would your prefer for 2024?
- Thread starter Horwath
- Start date
Vaalingrade
Legend
Making the DM waste their time being a game dev whether they like it or not is the issue.
Reef
Hero
If a DM having to decide if a task is Easy, Moderate , or Difficult is asking them to be a game dev, you’ve got a way lower opinion of people than I do. I mean, seriously, if they can’t make a decision like that, how are they possibly going to arbitrate all the other choices a DM constantly makes just as part of the job of being a DM?
Are you really going to try to lay out DC’s for every possible contingency? Accounting for all variables that might possibly come up? If not, you are still asking them to make a decision. And I can’t for the life of me see how asking themselves, “Hey, should this be Easy, Moderate, or Hard right now?” is any sort of stress at all.
Vaalingrade
Legend
I'm not taking away your ability to choose hard, medium or easy. I'm challenging the desire to take away an easy table to common situations. Or rather keep it away from them, having already been largely sacrificed to the unholy altar of Rulings Not Rules.
If we're going to use skills more, we need to make them faster and easier to use.
If we're going to use skills more, we need to make them faster and easier to use.
Vaalingrade
Legend
Every page with the wizard printed on it should suffice.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
It’s not a matter of forcing people not to use stock DCs, it’s a matter of teaching them not to need them. The tools DMs need are the skills to assess actions and determine if a check is needed to resolve them, and if so, what check and how difficult. What you’re advocating for is eschewing giving DMs the tools to do that, in favor of giving them a set of instructions to uncritically follow.
Every DM is necessarily a game designer, because the contents of the D&D rulebooks on their own don’t constitute a game; what the DM and players do together at the table is a game, the rulebooks only contain the tools needed to create a game. The DM or the author of a module has to use those tools to design the game the players will participate in. And even when running a module, a DM must still make decisions as a game designer, because no module can account for every twist and turn the game might take once the players start playing it. If that wasn’t the case, the module could be run better by a computer. This is why I advocate for teaching DMs how to make those decisions themselves, rather than giving them scripted processes to execute.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Sorry, missed this one earlier. It is absolutely true in real play that a game that only uses DCs 10, 15, and 20 runs perfectly fine. I know from experience.
Vaalingrade
Legend
I am literally advocating giving them a tool. You are literally advocating keeping it from them and making them do it themselves.
This is looking at people needing help and guidance and just saying 'lol, bootstraps'.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
In theory, I agree. The trouble is that if you want this to be a function of a skill, you either have to leave it up to DM discretion what the ranger is capable of doing with that skill (in which case you risk DMs sticking strictly to mundane applications), you you have to explicitly codify that the ranger can use their skills in this particular way (which implies that non-rangers can’t use their skills in that way, and in turn limits the potential scope of those skills for everyone else).
This is why I favor giving rangers good skill proficiencies, in addition to features that explicitly allow them to do fantastical things without skills. Is that similar to spells? Yes. But it doesn’t have to literally be spells, and in my opinion shouldn’t be.
