D&D 5E Why my friends hate talking to me about 5e.

[MichaelSomething]

Militarily it sure is. Retreat can lead to a number of benefits - usually because it's cheaper to give it up than shed too much blood or other expensive resources to keep it. Managing territory, knowing when to defend it vs give it up when facing a strong enemy, is an important aspect of strategy.
Not that adventuring PCs really have territory, per se... they're usually the invader on the offensive.

A wise man once said,
"You gotta know when to hold'em;
Know when to fold'em;
And know when to walk away"

 

[DND_Reborn]

Yeah, you kind of did. And do.

You realize you aren't even responding to what I was talking about, don't you?

Again you act as though the only possible states are "death waits behind every corner"

Again, what again? I certainly didn't act like that...

My response was to the BOLDED comment above.

I certainly do NOT act like the only possible states are "death waits behind every corner" and have not said that it is the only state.

In fact, my "Candyland" comment did precisely what it was supposed to do--challenge the OP to think about what they do want, which was the question I asked immediately after the comment.

Then when the OP wrote this

I admit, my right eye twitched at the candyland comment, because I have seen people disparage the games of others with comments like that.

I immediately wrote:

Well, I apologize if you saw it as disparaging, that wasn't my intent so much as to make my point and challenge you with what you do want.

Which was precisely the intent--to challenge the OP. Who admitted my "bluntness" (which was my intent--not to disparage) had this affect:

But after stopping to read DND Reborn's post, I felt he did make a good point- if my experiences have led me to think that player death can lead to a fail state for my session, or even my campaign, what is the alternative?

So, mission accomplished.

Like a lot.

People seem to dislike when I say I don't like a certain play style, so maybe being straight up insulting with this 'Candyland' crap isn't a way, yeah? It's not challenging, it's just confrontational.

Actually, any one any time trying to 'challenge' people in a discussion are actually just trying to justify being unnecessarily aggressive. It's on par with 'I'm just doing a social experiment' or 'I'm just asking innocent questions'.

It was challenging. Blunt? Sure! Honest? Yes. But also effective. You might feel it was "unnecessarily aggressive", to which I say...

Also, if you don't care for the tone of my post (when it was said in good humour), ignore me. If the person I was responding to didn't seem to take offense, why should you?

Otherwise, read my other posts and you'll see I am actually trying to help.

 

[pemerton]

I think the point @Micah Sweet is trying to make is that the action in the RPG is not a safe one, battling against men and monsters who are trying to outright kill you more often than not.

OK. I think everyone participating in this thread is aware of this. But that doesn't tell us anything about how combat should be adjudicated, and whether or not combat in a RPG is fun and engaging only if PC death is on the line. Which was what @Micah Sweet asserted in post 157.

If there’s no risk then can we actually fail? If there was no chance to fail were you ever actually in danger?

Who does the "you" in the second sentence refer to?

The players of a RPG are (typically) not in danger. The risks they are exposed to (from gameplay - I'm ignoring the wider social context) are boredom, frustration, anti-climax, and similar experiences that often occur when a game doesn't play as one hoped that it would.

If you weren’t in danger then why did we play through four rounds of combat just now? or were we just going through the motions because fighting things is what you do in DnD? That just sounds like busywork, And If failure isn’t an option is what you achieved can it really be called victory?

I still don't know who your pronouns are referring to: the PCs (they're in danger, but they don't play through any rounds) or the players (they're not in danger, and they're the ones who play through rounds). You also seem to be equating "failure" with "danger" in a way that is confusing.

As I posted upthread, the reasons for playing through a combat can be many. They might be similar to the reasons for playing friendly hands of cards, or for spending time solving crosswords. It's possible to be stumped by a crossword; but that doesn't mean you can't pick up another one and try that. It's possible to lose at cards, but as I posted if playing friendly hands then the response is simply to deal another hand and keep playing.

In the context of RPGing, presumably we resolve combats to find out what happens, both during and as a result of the fighting. That is completely independent of whether or not the death of PCs is in prospect.

I personally find Prince Valiant a far more engaging RPG than 5e D&D, even though 5e D&D has extensive rules for the death of PCs, while Prince Valiant contains the statement (p 26 of the rulebook) that "Normally, death is not an important part of Prince Valiant."

I would say the same of Torchbearer 2nd ed: and in Torchbearer if the players initiate a Capture or Drive Off conflict, rather than a Kill conflict, then PC death will not be on the line.

The fun and engagement comes (in Prince Valiant) mostly from the fiction, and also (in Torchbearer) from the mechanics and the skilled play of the system. The fact that, in the fiction, defeat for PCs takes a form other than PC death doesn't make the play of the game less fun and engaging. And for the reasons that @EzekielRaiden and @James Gasik have given, it can make the game more fun and engaging, as there is not the prospect of being evicted from play for an extended period.

 

[Nightfly]

If that's the kind of game a group is after then more power to them, but I feel like they'd be better off playing a game where that's the default kind of fantasy the game cares about instead of slowly whittling away at 5th edition to get it there

I hope I'm not derailing this thread by replying to this three days later, but this really struck a cord with me.

I hear this all the time: if you want an "old school" feel, go play 1e or Basic (or a retroclone like OSRIC). But if what if you want an OSR feel, but don't want to go back to those nonsensical 1e saving throws? Or to wizards being useless dart-throwers at level one, and gaining levels at a snail's pace, but then turning into gods? I could go on, but I'm not trying to start another dumb edition war. You get my point: I want some old-school sensibility without losing all the improvements we've made in the game over the last 40-ish years. There's a lot that I miss from the D&D of my youth in the early 80s, but there's also a lot that I never, ever want in my game again.

So "just use Old-School Essentials" (or whatever) isn't necessarily the answer. It isn't for me, at least. Discussions like this one serve a purpose -- some of us love 5e, but want the threat of death to be a little more toothy.

 

[Nightfly]

Kind of a BECMI/BX design with a 4e mentality and 5e maths.

Make this game and you can have all my money.

 

[James Gasik]

I hope I'm not derailing this thread by replying to this three days later, but this really struck a cord with me.

I hear this all the time: if you want an "old school" feel, go play 1e or Basic (or a retroclone like OSRIC). But if what if you want an OSR feel, but don't want to go back to those nonsensical 1e saving throws? Or to wizards being useless dart-throwers at level one, and gaining levels at a snail's pace, but then turning into gods? I could go on, but I'm not trying to start another dumb edition war. You get my point: I want some old-school sensibility without losing all the improvements we've made in the game over the last 40-ish years. There's a lot that I miss from the D&D of my youth in the early 80s, but there's also a lot that I never, ever want in my game again.

So "just use Old-School Essentials" (or whatever) isn't necessarily the answer. It isn't for me, at least. Discussions like this one serve a purpose -- some of us love 5e, but want the threat of death to be a little more toothy.

Ok, but look at what you need to do to get that old school feel. First, you might need to go back to rolling hit points for players and monsters. The current hit point progression as levels rise gives a very generous "average result rounded up", which I feel gives characters of all levels a good, padded hit point total that they can rely on.

Then you might need to cut this hit point progression down to a slow crawl after level 10 or so.

From here, you might need to remove healing word from the game, and change cure wounds so that it can't be upcast, instead bringing back cure serious wounds as a 4th level spell, cure critical wounds as a 5th, and heal as a 6th level spell. Oh and also perhaps remove breath of life.

Bards may have to lose access to healing spells entirely.

From there, you might replace death saving throws with "death at 0", 2e "death's door" that lets you linger to -10, losing a hit point each round, or even 1e's original version, which as I recall, lets you linger to -3. And removing "heal from 0" from the equation.

Now if that's not enough for you, perhaps add a critical hit table for more fun, such as this gem from Dragon #39.

At this point, you may find your game sufficiently resembles the gritty risk of previous editions to ensure challenging play with cautious, fearful adventurers. If this does not suffice, however, perhaps you might have a copy (or precure one) of Grimtooth's Traps, an excellent series of tomes designed to make D&D (or any game, really) into an exercise truly worthy of "real gamers".

 

[Stalker0]

Just eat the OA and dash.

Yeah but then the bad guys just dash as well, and then reengage with you, so your eating an OA on every turn and not really getting away.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ok, but look at what you need to do to get that old school feel. First, you might need to go back to rolling hit points for players and monsters. The current hit point progression as levels rise gives a very generous "average result rounded up", which I feel gives characters of all levels a good, padded hit point total that they can rely on.

Then you might need to cut this hit point progression down to a slow crawl after level 10 or so.

From here, you might need to remove healing word from the game, and change cure wounds so that it can't be upcast, instead bringing back cure serious wounds as a 4th level spell, cure critical wounds as a 5th, and heal as a 6th level spell. Oh and also perhaps remove breath of life.

Bards may have to lose access to healing spells entirely.

From there, you might replace death saving throws with "death at 0", 2e "death's door" that lets you linger to -10, losing a hit point each round, or even 1e's original version, which as I recall, lets you linger to -3. And removing "heal from 0" from the equation.

Now if that's not enough for you, perhaps add a critical hit table for more fun, such as this gem from Dragon #39.

View attachment 253394
At this point, you may find your game sufficiently resembles the gritty risk of previous editions to ensure challenging play with cautious, fearful adventurers. If this does not suffice, however, perhaps you might have a copy (or precure one) of Grimtooth's Traps, an excellent series of tomes designed to make D&D (or any game, really) into an exercise truly worthy of "real gamers".

Or… You know, just give a level of exhaustion at 0 hp. That sounds both much easier and much more enjoyable for everyone involved.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah but then the bad guys just dash as well, and then reengage with you, so your eating an OA on every turn and not really getting away.

As opposed to disengaging, in which case they don’t have to dash to reengage with you and have their action available to use multiattack, or cast a spell, or make a ranged attack, and you’ve covered less ground in the meantime, and they still have their reaction available.

 

[nevin]

seems like this boils down to bounded accuracy and limiting magic items limits the game options for Players and DM. 5e designers for the best of reasons created a far more limited version of D&D than everyone was used to playing. I also think the whole 5 ft this and f5 ft that to make the combat more tactical causes just as many problems if you want to play a heroic or high fantasy game. For me anyway flexibilty and options make a better game. And even as a DM I don't want to be worrying about who stepped 5ft this way or that way unless it's a dungeon crawl. It's just not fun.

 

[nevin]

Or… You know, just give a level of exhaustion at 0 hp. That sounds both much easier and much more enjoyable for everyone involved.

no old school feel is Monster's can kill you. paladins and rogues can kill mages, fighters and rangers can kill anyone in melee. Mages can only cast spells if the melee guys keep enemies from attacking them. Magic Items fill in the gaps when your party doesn't have a full set of 5 different player types.

 

[Shardstone]

People love to tell others on this forum to specifically not bother modding DND for any reason, and that if you want to tweak it for your table then you're wasting your time, and if you and your table enjoys it you're a 1-in-a-million outlier and a fool for ever broaching such a topic.

 

[Micah Sweet]

People love to tell others on this forum to specifically not bother modding DND for any reason, and that if you want to tweak it for your table then you're wasting your time, and if you and your table enjoys it you're a 1-in-a-million outlier and a fool for ever broaching such a topic.

Yeah. And yet when asked what they would do to change the game to what they want (as in a current thread) the list is so extensive that the resulting game borders on unrecognizable (to me anyway).

 

[Vaalingrade]

People love to tell others on this forum to specifically not bother modding DND for any reason, and that if you want to tweak it for your table then you're wasting your time, and if you and your table enjoys it you're a 1-in-a-million outlier and a fool for ever broaching such a topic.

Don't forget telling them to play another game.

Because god knows that the secret for the long term survival of the game is less players.

 

[Shardstone]

Yeah. And yet when asked what they would do to change the game to what they want (as in a current thread) the list is so extensive that the resulting game borders on unrecognizable (to me anyway).

Who cares if you recognize it if it isn't for your table?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Who cares if you recognize it if it isn't for your table?

No one really. But the fact remains that a fair number of folks here want the game changed in major ways, much more than WotC is expected to change it for the anniversary edition in 2024, or than, say, Level Up is changed from o5e. We're talking changes to the assumptions of the game in significant mechanical and lore-based ways. When I see that, i cant help but wonder if the person in question actually likes D&D, since they want to make it something quite different.

 

[Mannahnin]

No one really. But the fact remains that a fair number of folks here want the game changed in major ways, much more than WotC is expected to change it for the anniversary edition in 2024, or than, say, Level Up is changed from o5e. We're talking changes to the assumptions of the game in significant mechanical and lore-based ways. When I see that, i cant help but wonder if the person in question actually likes D&D, since they want to make it something quite different.

To be fair, D&D is quite different from itself. Compare OD&D to 4E to 5E, for example.

Some of us play different editions as well. And 5E is designed with a bunch of optional rules, some of which are so commonly used that you'd mistake them for core rules (like multiclassing and feats), some of which are semi-common (like the longer rest periods, or flanking), and others I never see anyone use. One of the virtues of 5E is supposed to be openness to tweaking.

Ideally folks are clear in their posts about what edition they're talking about if they usually run a different edition (like Lanehan with his extensively homebrewed 1E), but even just talking about 5E, lots of folks play it in varying ways.

 

[Shardstone]

@Mannahnin exactly! Every single edition of D&D plays wildly different from what the other editions are. On top of that, a game that uses, for example, gritty realism is pretty different in feel then the standard vanilla rest system. So on and so on for changes.

The thing is, D&D is really only about rolling a d20, adding some modifiers, and having a pre-packaged abilities (race, class) alongside leveling up. Everyone who is always talking all this stuff about how changes make the game too different are just straight up failing to see outside of their own perspective. Adding subsystems to D&D also doesn't suddenly "not make it D&D" because your definition of D&D is PERSONAL, not GLOBAL. Even my definition above with the d20 + modifiers is really just a personal interpretation!

The point is, you can take the core chassis of D&D (d20 + mods + prof, advantage, AC, HP), and build a huge amount of subsystems (either independently used or altogether) and really modify the D&D experience in some very fun and interesting ways. That isn't a problem, and that doesnt mean you should just give up and play another game. I don't want to play another game, I want to play my version of D&D!

Its like someone orders a hamburger with non-traditional ingredients on it and you say "Bro you should just eat Tacos." What???

 

[CleverNickName]

Some folks really do get super-defensive about house-rules. It's baffling.

"I wrote a house rule to add (whatever) to the game. We really enjoy it; maybe you will too."
"You should just play something else if you want (whatever). Stop trying to change my game!"

 

[DND_Reborn]

Returning to the OP:

If your players want to try the house-rule in the video, here are some thoughts that would help go with it.

Exhaustion is a terrifying bad status ailment in 5e. It's very hard to get rid of a single level of exhaustion, and, as anyone who has ever griped about a certain Barbarian subclass knows, while one level isn't the worst, those penalties start to set in quick, which can make a character useless before long. Not to mention eventually dying anyways. Oh and you can't just toss off a lesser restoration and cure a level of fatigue, like in other versions of the game.

When we adopted a level of exhaustion a 0 hp, we adjusted lesser restoration, allowing it to remove a level of exhaustion but ONLY the first and second levels. You could upcast it to affect higher levels of exhaustion. For example, if a PC has 3 levels of exhaustion, lesser restoration cast with a 3rd-level slot would remove that one level.

Another house-rule is Endurance: you ignore the effects of exhaustion up to a level equal to your Constitution modifier.

For example, if you have CON 15, the first two levels of exhaustion to not affect you, however once you have a 3rd level of exhaustion, all the effects are there.

Then you have the fact that in-combat healing is deliberately not great in 5e, by design. I had a thread griping about this a few months back. The response I got was "lol, out of combat healing is too good, in-combat healing is fine". So even if a Cleric did nothing else but throw out his best Cure Wounds each turn on the Fighter getting the tar beat out of him by monsters to prevent him from taking Exhaustion, they would have a very hard time keeping up, and quickly run out of spell slots. And be unable to cast anything else they might want to.

A general house-rule we use for upcasting is Maximal Upcasting: when you upcast a spell and gain additional dice, those dice are considered to be maximum and you do not roll them.

So, the cleric with Wisdom 18 upcasts cure wounds using a 3rd-level slot. Instead of 3d8+4 you would get 1d8+4+16 (the max of the additional 2d8s). This gives you an average of 24.5 instead of 17.5.

We do this for all spells, so it has other impact of course, but it is one of our "Golden House-Rules".

And finally, with players running around with levels of exhaustion, you're not going to get many encounters done, I would think. So the "6-8 encounters to run the party of resources" gets thrown right out the window, as everyone is going to use all their resources as fast as they can, knowing they weren't going to do more than 3-4 encounters that day anyways.

FWIW, I don't run my game with the 6-8 encounters adventuring day, but play with the adventures completely organic. Sometimes the PCs might have just 1 encounter (or none LOL) and other times they might have a dozen! It just depends on what they are doing...

Any way, with the house-rules we've used, the effects of the added levels of exhaustion are mitigated quite a bit, BUT THEY ARE STILL THERE, which does still increase the over all sense of danger.

Now, concerning the end states of combat. Myself and others have proposed different end states that are possible. I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for with that. However, if you want to continue discussing that aspect, please let me know.

Otherwise, as I began, if your players are interested in adopting the video's suggestion, it might help to consider the above house-rules we've been using for well over a year now (well... maximal upcasting might be a bit shy of a year...).

Cheers.