WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Lanefan]

OK, back to this - sorry 'bout the delay...

You are misunderstanding. Combat is the easiest way to access the loss condition. It is actually about the only way to do it. However, the challenge of the game for experts isn't found in the statblocks. The challenge isn't found in a rule that says you take double damage from every hit.

The challenge of the game, from the player perspective, comes from the Dungeon Master's arrangement of the pieces. A horde of 10 zombies isn't a challenge for a level 5 party. A horde of 10 zombies hidden in a poison cloud might be. A horde of 10 zombies hidden in a poison cloud where a quest item is also hidden, meaning the players need to fight and search at the same time, and the area is a maze of tunnels could be insanely challenging for that party.

But the zombie statblock doesn't tell you to put them in a maze filled with poison gas. It can't tell you that, because they need to be used in many different ways. And the tools to design that encounter are all in the books. It's all there. You just have to piece them together.

Agreed on all.

However, those ten zombies aren't (usually) the only thing the party will face in a given day/adventure; and the system has a lot to say about accessing the loss condition over a period of time - a series of combats where each one leaves you with fewer resources.

5e waves at this with its stated intent of a 6-to-8 encounter day; but that's unsustainable in most reasonable settings (and anecdotally from what I read on this forum, it seems many don't run it that way), and the characters still get everything back the next day - there's no ongoing attrition to speak of.

And if the DM tries to add in any lasting attrition the system quietly encourages the players to fight against this.

No. I don't need it to be 40% or 20% or anything like that. If I want them to be equipped with different weapons, then I equip them differently. And the books spell this out. The MM mentions altering monsters on pg 6 as a sidebar, talks about equipment changes on pgs 9 and 11. It is all there. They told you exactly how to modify the enemies. What they didn't do was write a variant for every possible type.

And frankly, thank the gods they didn't, because the MM would have tripled in size. Sure, this is "technically" homebrewing, but it is also just pure modularity of design. You have the tools, put them together how you want. The statblocks are just the base templates.

Agreed about having the tools; but examples of how they'd look in use would be helpful too, for a new DM. The Gnoll example I gave might be one such.

I don't care about player pushback. I care about the ease of actually doing the thing. I've just listed a ton of ways to make things more difficult, but it is a lot harder to know how to make it easier. Honestly, like I said, it is additionally very hard to know if you CAN make it easier when you are first starting out.

I kinda disagree there. Making things easier is - in complete isolation - neither easier nor harder than making things more difficult. But you're not doing it in isolation. You've got players, and they are going to react to the changes you make - almost invariably with pleasure if-when you make things easier and with displeasure if-when you do the opposite.

Sure, and ancient people learned to hunt because they starved if they didn't. Doesn't make it BETTER to learn hunting under those conditions.

Just because older editions were more challenging out of the book doesn't mean they were better, or that people enjoyed them more. I've had many people either quit or almost quit DnD on me because of how hard it was for them to make a 5e Character. And you may scoff, because 3.X characters were so much more complicated. But do you know what that really means? That means that those people who might be interested in the hobby as a way to express their creativity would never play. They'd see how hard it was and say "Ah, this game clearly isn't intended for me" and leave.

And I'm more or less fine with this. The game expects a certain degree of buy-in and always has. It's not for everyone.

That said, char-gen has been overly complicated ever since 2e; even 1e was a bit much if one went by RAW.

You are a DM with decades more experience than myself. If I can figure out how to alter the baseline of 5e to be challenging, even as I buff player abilities, then I'm certain you are capable.

I may have more experience as a DM (not sure about that) but none of it is with 5e - you'd have more of a sense of how to tweak 5e than I. My approach would probably start with a sledgehammer and end up with something nigh-unrecognizable as anything 5e-based.

But for those people who still don't understand even the simplest parts of optimization, I'm glad the baseline game is a bit easier. Let them learn and grow, and then SHOW THEM how to ramp it up when they are ready, rather than complaining that all new players only care about winning and will destroy the game.

My issue is this: that which a new player starts with becomes that which that player quickly becomes accustomed to. Thus starting hard then easing off is likely to produce happier players in the long term (as they're already familiar with the game being difficult) than is the reverse.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The problem is that a major Marvel movie will cost you something like half a billion dollars to produce. There just are not enough hardcore fans to make a movie profitable. If you can't make films that appeal to a wider audience of casual fans you will be bankrupt in short order.

Well, I hope they keep making them as long as they can. Keeping Disney in the black isn't my responsibility, and I'd rather content creators makes stuff I like than stuff I don't. I'm sorry if that somehow makes me a monster.

 

[Lanefan]

Either. As I prefer more narrative play, splitting my roleplaying between multiple characters or switching between multiple characters would be particularly jarring.

I don't mind narrative play either, but the narrative I'm keen on is usually bigger than just that which affects my character: it's the narrative or story of the company/party. That story carries on regardless of which character I happen to be playing at the moment; and sometimes having different characters means one just fits in better in the moment than another.

Example: in the game I play in we just got done with an adventure that really had my #1 mage's interest, as it had to do with thwarting an invasion of her home country. But after that adventure I pulled her from play as she's got a laundry list of downtime stuff to see to, meanwhile the next adventure (currently in progress) involves fulfilling a quest that, once done, will rid the land of a lich. My goody-good Cleric is all up into that, so into the party he comes!

I had a different play experience in 1e—death wasn't inevitable and didn't occur nearly as frequently as it seems to have for you.

Question, if I may: when did you start playing?

I ask because, between the combined influences of UA and Dragonlance, the 1e environment after about 1984-5 was considerably different than prior. I started in 1982 with people who had been at it since 1980, and it all had a kind of wild-west devil-may-care feel to it that I've always liked.

Hell, running one character in 3e became too difficult and complex after a certain levels (said as someone that played two characters that managed to epic level).

I hear you, says he who at every opportunity forgot what feats his character had even when they'd have been damn useful at the time...

 

[Lanefan]

You really didn't get the impact of the final scene of Wandavision with the Darkhold, did you?

Can't speak for the poster you're replying to, but in my case I didn't get the impact of ANY scene of Wandavision; and won't until-unless it gets a physical release of some sort.

Ditto all those other I-hear-they're-good shows that are only available via streaming.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Can't speak for the poster you're replying to, but in my case I didn't get the impact of ANY scene of Wandavision; and won't until-unless it gets a physical release of some sort.

Ditto all those other I-hear-they're-good shows that are only available via streaming.

So... you never will?

I'm as big a proponent of getting physical media as you'll find, but I realize a lot of media is just never going to be commercially available in physical form and we're creating an archeological black hole for when surviving humanity looks back. There's going to be like a forty year span where we apparently stopped creating visual media except in rare temples to the gods Barnes and Noble, the latter of which appears to be the later form of the god of dynamite and global achievement.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Believe me, the sad oinking about 'superhero fatigue' started way early. Maybe not 2010, but real early.

People now use Endgame in hindsight, but that's not the whole story. I remember people just flat out celebrating that Thor: The Dark World wasn't as good as the others because that meant the franchise was on its way out. It's the same thing as people who keep saying D&D is dying: delicious sour grapes.

I feel like it's a bit pretty wild to characterise people as pigs for not having identical tastes to you, dude. I mean even to me, a sassy wanker, that seems out of line and a little extreme.

Sometimes people do get fatigue a lot earlier than others.

I didn't get it with superheroes, but I did get it with zombies. I honestly I was 100% over zombies by like, say, 2006/7 at the absolute latest, and more like 2003. This was because I'd starting liking zombie stuff way earlier, being one of the people who got into '70s and '80s zombie stuff in the '90s. Whereas most people didn't seem to get zombie fatigue until I dunno, more like 2015 or something, or even later. That doesn't make me a bad person or mean I was "oinking" or whatever, I was just bored with it a lot sooner. I was definitely hoping the genre would take a break, and especially The Walking Dead and it's spin-offs, which is the absolute nadir of zombie stuff, the most misanthropic (with a sideline in misogyny), least interesting, most extremely contrived drama, and so on.

I remember that re: Thor 2 but that's fine, isn't it? It was a terrible movie. Iron Man 3 before it was also a bad movie (sorry Shane, you lost it man), and IMHO, The Winter Soldier was also not at all a good movie and really the first MCU movie that seem to exist purely to shove the metaplot forwards. So it did look like the MCU was kind of vanishing up it's own bum.

It's true that there was some talk before Endgame, but it's 2020, post-Endgame, where this started to be a common sentiment.

Honestly, whilst I don't feel it (maybe because I don't think I ever will until we get a non-Fox X-men show or movie series done well), that timing makes sense. It reminds me of World of Warcraft, actually. The original "story" of World of Warcraft, which derived from events in Warcraft 3, basically ended at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. That didn't stop people playing, the population initially kept going up into Cataclysm, which started a new, unrelated and largely unmoving story, and then people stopped slowly stopped playing. I think Endgame was the culmination of a decade-long thing for cinema-only MCU fans, many of whom had gone from kid-to-adult in that period (to judge from the endgame audience, I don't I've ever seen that many 20-somethings in a movie theatre except maybe when I saw American Pie on opening day in Santa Monica, in the theatre closest the pier lol), so it's natural a lot of them had questions like "what now"? And 2020 was terrible at answering those question.

 

[Umbran]

Can't speak for the poster you're replying to, but in my case I didn't get the impact of ANY scene of Wandavision; and won't until-unless it gets a physical release of some sort.

Ditto all those other I-hear-they're-good shows that are only available via streaming.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, if any.

 

[Staffan]

I remember that re: Thor 2 but that's fine, isn't it? It was a terrible movie. Iron Man 3 before it was also a bad movie (sorry Shane, you lost it man), and IMHO, The Winter Soldier was also not at all a good movie and really the first MCU movie that seem to exist purely to shove the metaplot forwards. So it did look like the MCU was kind of vanishing up it's own bum.

Huh. I get Thor 2 and Iron Man 3, but Winter Soldier? I thought Winter Soldier was one of the stronger movies of the MCU, particularly in how it wove the genres of "Superhero movie" and "Spy thriller" together.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The problem is that a major Marvel movie will cost you something like half a billion dollars to produce.

That's not really true.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Marvel-Cinematic-Universe#tab=summary

Unless you only call Avengers movies "major" then most MCU stuff tops out around $250m. Not cheap but not inconceivable either. Infinity War was $365m (but looked weirdly cheap anyway), Endgame was $400m (and looked more like it), and those are the closest to your figures.

It's certainly true that if the audience reduces dramatically they'll have to make more budget-friendly stuff.

The more setting cannon a franchise has, the more movies people are required to watch to have the background needed to understand a movie.

No.

That's a decision. You never have to use all that canon.

It's not magic. No-one is coming into the writer's room with a gun saying "You'd better incorporate significant plot elements and references to a dozen movies over a decade".

So it's wrong to say more canon = more movies "required". The potential problem does get larger, sure, but potential problems and actual problems are different things. And there is always a temptation to try and just live on the fanservice, but the MCU hasn't really done that with movie canon, interestingly. 80%+ of the weird fanservice in the MCU is comics references, not stuff from movies long ago.

Will Marvel have to keep an eye on it? Absolutely. I mean what they should probably do is just hard-limit the number of movies that can be referenced in any major way by another movie for their writers, to like, I dunno, 2-3, and try and make sure they mostly reference stuff from the last decade. It's kind a gross franchise-y IP-management-y approach but it's the way to "win" here imho.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Huh. I get Thor 2 and Iron Man 3, but Winter Soldier? I thought Winter Soldier was one of the stronger movies of the MCU, particularly in how it wove the genres of "Superhero movie" and "Spy thriller" together.

Some people think that, I know. I did not think that. I thought Winter Soldier was a pretty tedious movie despite Chris Evans being excellent as always, and it was absolutely rubbish as a spy thriller and not that great as a superhero movie. YMMV.

Note I didn't like Civil War either (though wasn't quite as bored by it), because the plot is just beyond contrived and stupid and it requires Stark to suddenly lose 60 points of IQ and become an authoritarian (from being anything but earlier on) overnight. Can that happen? Well Twitter says maybe but, it was dumb in the comics and it was dumb in the movie. I don't even like Stark, note, it just, was such a silly character direction. And the whole plot was just a big oof.

But some people love it, and it had good fight scenes, I still love Cap deflecting Iron Man man's blasts with his shield, that really worked as an effect.

 

[humble minion]

Other point I have read Blackrock and Vanguard, the most important investment funds in the world, have changed of the owners, and this could cause a radical revoluntion in the global economy, and also in the entertaiment industry.

I may be misreading here, but this is an odd statement. I worked for Vanguard for several years up until a couple of weeks ago, and I heard nothing of this.

Vanguard has an unusual ownership structure in that it’s owned by its investors in proportion to their investments. They can’t just ‘change owners’.

 

[codo]

Well, I hope they keep making them as long as they can. Keeping Disney in the black isn't my responsibility, and I'd rather content creators makes stuff I like than stuff I don't. I'm sorry if that somehow makes me a monster.

I am sorry, but I am not trying to call you a monster. I was just saying what you want would not be profitable for Disney. It is fine that you want what you want. There is nothing wrong with it. I just disagree with you. Just because someone disagrees with what you say they are not calling you a monster.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I feel like it's a bit pretty wild to characterise people as pigs for not having identical tastes to you, dude. I mean even to me, a sassy wanker, that seems out of line and a little extreme.

Didn't characterize anyone any way. It's just what it sounded like. I'm from the country, I've heard sad oinking.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Right, so canon of their own doing, which essentially boils down to the writing and plotting.
We shouldn't move the blame from piss poor writing and plotting to the nebulous term canon.
People messed up, badly. It is not some quasi-external force they had no control over.

"canon of their own doing, which essentially boils down to the writing and plotting." So... you define canon as just writing and plotting... which is true. Canon is generally written and involves the plot, but then.... "We shouldn't move the blame from piss poor writing and plotting to the nebulous term canon." Huh?

You want to define canon as just writing and plotting, then say that bad writing and bad plotting shouldn't get shifted to canon? Why not? The entire problem is based around the concept of canon. And this isn't making canon some "quasi-external force" they cannot control. Canon is like juggling knives. Small numbers of knives are easier to juggle than large numbers, it doesn't make the number of knives an uncontrolled outside force, but if someone cuts themselves because they went from juggling three knives to thirty, the problem is likely the number of knives they were juggling. And no matter how amazing a juggler you are, no matter how skilled, there is a limit to how many knives you can safely juggle without incident. So we have seen from canon, the larger it gets, the harder and harder it is to utilize. And especially as multiple creatives involve themselves in the same plot, the harder and harder it is to keep a handle on it all.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You really didn't get the impact of the final scene of Wandavision with the Darkhold, did you?

Considering I never saw Wandavision myself? No. Hard to understand something you never saw.

However, I trust the people whose review I was pulling this from (They have done an immense amount of good literary, movie, Television and even comic review). They also mentioned that now Doctor Strange has the Darkhold. Does that mean he is going to murder-monster people? Is that the impact of the Final Scene of Multiverse of Madness?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, if any.

I think they're saying they don't subscribe to Disney+.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I am sorry, but I am not trying to call you a monster. I was just saying what you want would not be profitable for Disney. It is fine that you want what you want. There is nothing wrong with it. I just disagree with you. Just because someone disagrees with what you say they are not calling you a monster.

Ok, what do you want them to make then? What would make you happy?

 

[Vaalingrade]

Considering I never saw Wandavision myself? No. Hard to understand something you never saw.

Spoiler

However, I trust the people whose review I was pulling this from (They have done an immense amount of good literary, movie, Television and even comic review). They also mentioned that now Doctor Strange has the Darkhold. Does that mean he is going to murder-monster people? Is that the impact of the Final Scene of Multiverse of Madness?/spoiler]

Spoiler

Probably.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Agreed on all.

However, those ten zombies aren't (usually) the only thing the party will face in a given day/adventure; and the system has a lot to say about accessing the loss condition over a period of time - a series of combats where each one leaves you with fewer resources.

5e waves at this with its stated intent of a 6-to-8 encounter day; but that's unsustainable in most reasonable settings (and anecdotally from what I read on this forum, it seems many don't run it that way), and the characters still get everything back the next day - there's no ongoing attrition to speak of.

You aren't making sense.

You agree with me that the difficulty lays with the DM to formulate the encounters. You then state that resource attrition over the day is something DnD does. Cool.

You then state that 5e was balanced around 6 to 8 BASELINE encounters (my emphasis added) but that that number of fights is unsustainable. Well... cool? Maybe it is hard to have 8 fights in an adventuring day, but then you just need to alter the fights to suck the same number of resources. Again, this is a pure DM tool. Ten Zombies doesn't drain the same number of resources as ten zombies in a maze filled with poison gas. But the base game, and the base assumption of 6 to 8 encounters, only assumes ten Zombies.

So... if you want the same resource attrition, but in fewer encounters, you just increase the difficulty. Not hard.

And as for getting everything back the next day.... how is that bad? You are saying that there is no ONGOING attrition, but the game isn't balanced around ongoing attrition, so why does this matter? It may not be something that YOU like, but it doesn't matter if it is daily or weekly recovery from the perspective of the game balance. The recovery period is just the recovery period.

And if the DM tries to add in any lasting attrition the system quietly encourages the players to fight against this.

So? If the player's don't want a lasting attrition system, why try and force it on them? It doesn't matter if the system encourages or discourages it, all that matters is if the players accept it and want it.

Agreed about having the tools; but examples of how they'd look in use would be helpful too, for a new DM. The Gnoll example I gave might be one such.

Sure, examples are nice. But examples are never required. Again, your initial point was that the health of the game was at risk because the designers were too scared to give the tools to the DMs to make things difficult. That's now false, you have the tools. But now is the health of the game based on having examples provided to you? That's a weird take

I kinda disagree there. Making things easier is - in complete isolation - neither easier nor harder than making things more difficult. But you're not doing it in isolation. You've got players, and they are going to react to the changes you make - almost invariably with pleasure if-when you make things easier and with displeasure if-when you do the opposite.

False. My players have never reacted with displeasure when I make things more difficult. And in fact, I've seen many people complain about things being too easy and being boring. The thing is, too easy and too difficult are both bad. Both are bad for players. You always want to be between the extremes.

And, in actuality, it is more conceptually difficult to tone down a monster without making it too weak, than it is to increase the difficulty of a monster. Addition is just easier than subtraction.

And I'm more or less fine with this. The game expects a certain degree of buy-in and always has. It's not for everyone.

That said, char-gen has been overly complicated ever since 2e; even 1e was a bit much if one went by RAW.

And it is now easier than it was in 3.X. If we aren't lower than 1e Character Creation difficulty, then complaining it is too easy or too few options makes no sense.

I may have more experience as a DM (not sure about that) but none of it is with 5e - you'd have more of a sense of how to tweak 5e than I. My approach would probably start with a sledgehammer and end up with something nigh-unrecognizable as anything 5e-based.

That is because you have purposefully avoided playing 5e. That speaks nothing to the system being badly designed.

My issue is this: that which a new player starts with becomes that which that player quickly becomes accustomed to. Thus starting hard then easing off is likely to produce happier players in the long term (as they're already familiar with the game being difficult) than is the reverse.

False. You don't introduce a kid to baseball by throwing 90 mph fastballs they can't hit, or being harsh on fouls. You start with a ballstand and a wiffle bat. And sure, some players never want to play the game beyond that, but those that enjoy the game often start to find it too easy, and seek more of a challenge.

I have first hand experience with this. I used to enjoy playing chess. Those family members who knew the game and would play with me took a policy of never "going easy" on me, so that I would "learn right". So, chess became this game I lost constantly and never had a chance of winning. That's boring, so I stopped playing. Anyone who would ask me to play now would be far better than me, so I'd lose, so no point in playing.

DnD starting easier is a good thing. Because for as easy as you think it is, I've seen the new players first hand. They are struggling with the game. They would quit if it was suddenly made much more difficult before they've had a chance to figure out the game at this level.

And yes, that can be frustrating. I've never had a group that I felt confident I could go all-out against as a DM. I wish I could sometimes. But that's not a bad thing, because I've also gotten multiple people hooked into my favorite hobby.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I don't mind narrative play either, but the narrative I'm keen on is usually bigger than just that which affects my character: it's the narrative or story of the company/party. That story carries on regardless of which character I happen to be playing at the moment; and sometimes having different characters means one just fits in better in the moment than another.

Example: in the game I play in we just got done with an adventure that really had my #1 mage's interest, as it had to do with thwarting an invasion of her home country. But after that adventure I pulled her from play as she's got a laundry list of downtime stuff to see to, meanwhile the next adventure (currently in progress) involves fulfilling a quest that, once done, will rid the land of a lich. My goody-good Cleric is all up into that, so into the party he comes!

For a lot of us? That downtime activity is part of the game and we would be frustrated not being able to go through it and instead writing it off as the unimportant part while we take another character on a different adventure.