WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[AnotherGuy]

That's certainly a valid preference, but mine leans far more into @Lanefan 's camp than yours. I'm running my multi-PC game tonight, for example, and I have no idea which PCs they're actually going to run.

We too have a multi-character ToD campaign. Around just over a dozen or so perma-deaths while another 6-7 became NPCs. And there is around 16 or so active PC amongst 5 players.

 

[gban007]

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?

Spoiler: Spoilers

So, as Umbran says, in the TV series despite what she had learnt, Wanda still chose to study the Darkhold directly despite warnings of what impact it could have.

Regarding the movei itself - Doctor Strange does not have the Darkhold - it was destroyed in every iteration by Wanda. He did use it though, and we could see some of the corruption resulting from it in terms of the third eye, it remains to be seen what further impacts it could have - but he used it once in the movie, whereas Wanda was studying it for some time, with the feel of it potentially being months of studying and using it, and a lot of what she did in the movie was based on what she learnt from the Darkhold - so Doctor Strange had it briefly, used it once, vs Wanda having it for months and using it multiple times.

 

[codo]

Spoiler: Spoilers

So, as Umbran says, in the TV series despite what she had learnt, Wanda still chose to study the Darkhold directly despite warnings of what impact it could have.

Regarding the movei itself - Doctor Strange does not have the Darkhold - it was destroyed in every iteration by Wanda. He did use it though, and we could see some of the corruption resulting from it in terms of the third eye, it remains to be seen what further impacts it could have - but he used it once in the movie, whereas Wanda was studying it for some time, with the feel of it potentially being months of studying and using it, and a lot of what she did in the movie was based on what she learnt from the Darkhold - so Doctor Strange had it briefly, used it once, vs Wanda having it for months and using it multiple times.

There is also the difference of why they each used the Darkhold. Dr. Strange used it to save people he loved. While Wanda tried to use it to bring back those she had lost.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Correct, or any other streaming service.

 

[Azzy]

That's certainly a valid preference, but mine leans far more into @Lanefan 's camp than yours. I'm running my multi-PC game tonight, for example, and I have no idea which PCs they're actually going to run.

That's cool.

 

[Faolyn]

We too have a multi-character ToD campaign. Around just over a dozen or so perma-deaths while another 6-7 became NPCs. And there is around 16 or so active PC amongst 5 players.

What sort of backgrounds do your players come up with?

 

[Lanefan]

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

I completely agree!

Thing is, at the table nobody else wants to sit through possibly hours of me looking after personal-to-the-character downtime stuff, and that's fair enough; so I'll go to the pub some night with the DM and we'll sort it then. Failing that, at some point there'll be a lot of back-and-forth by email.

In the fiction, the rest of the rather large adventuring company we're all part of aren't going to sit on their duffs doing nothing while my mage futzes around for possibly several in-game months. We've got about six different story arcs on the go, never mind the ones waiting in line until we can get to them.

while we take another character on a different adventure.

I have something like five or six active characters in that game plus two others that are long-term out of action (one lost her mind, another got reduced to a Con of 5 through repeated death-revive cycles). In other words, there's more than I can play all at once, so parking one of them for some downtime makes, on a completely metagame level, a lot of sense. Conveniently, it's also exactly what this character would do: she has some big-time political ambitions in her long-term goals, and laying the groundwork for that isn't really do-able in the field.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Unsustainable if the setting isn't knee-deep in monsters. 6-8 encounters a day - let's be generous and say half will be social and-or exploratory, and the rest combat. That's 3-4 fights a day. Multiply that by a lot of days and a lot of adventurers and - unless they're out to kill every demon in hell or something - the setting falls apart.

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.

From the strictly gamist sense, this is correct.

I try to look at it from the reality-of-the-fiction sense, that being something of a mirror of our own reality, and if-when there's a big conflict with gamist concerns (here the obvious example is hit point recovery) then gamist concerns can kindly go take a hike.

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.

True, but even if it's a spectrum one can choose which end to trend toward.

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.

I neither buy into nor have any sympathy for the bolded theory.

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.

Yes, it's easier than 3e...but that's kinda like saying brain surgery is easier than rocket science.

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

It's badly designed for me, hence my not playing/running it.

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.

Funny, I had exactly the opposite experience. I played a lot of chess in high school against a wide variety of opponents, very enjoyable. Later in life, while I was by no means a good chess player at any time, the people around me were worse; meaning I quickly got bored winning all the time and thus don't play any more.

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.

Something to keep in mind is there's two different types of "easier".

5e, in comparison to 0e or even stripped-down 1e, is not easy to learn from scratch at the table; particularly if the DM is using feats and other various bells and whistles. I'm all for making the game easier in this regard.

But 5e in comparison to 0e or 1e is, inarguably, easier on the characters in the fiction and by extension the players at the table. Win conditions are too easily met, loss conditions too infrequent, and in-play challenges too watered-down. That's where I'm pushing back.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Okay, well, that scene gives a reason for her behavior in the movie. The Darkhold is a corrupting influence*, and she fully immersed herself in it for some time, embracing its power trying to get back what she has lost.

I expect he'll see some impact of using it, but he was more aware of what he was dealing with, used it to a limited degree, and hasn't been as traumatized as Wanda, so... who knows where they'll take it.

*In the comics continuity, it is, for example, the book containing the spell that created the first vampire.

Right, but from your phrasing "for some time" and "trying to get back what she has lost" there are only two things I can see here.

Either people are wrong, and she didn't accept her loss and let go in the end of Wandavision, or after they finished and had her resolved to be better.... she gets far worse and goes murder-horror monster.

And I think this is a serious problem, because as I understand it, the end of Wandavision was her accepting her loss and resolving to let go and begin healing. That was the finale. And if that was the finale then turning around and basically saying "Psyche! She didn't get better!" is really bad for keeping an audience who liked her as a character and was invested in her recovery. And especially worse since it seems like her agency to heal was removed and she had to be "fixed" by another hero.

And if it truly is a corrupting influence... then it shouldn't matter how aware he was. It is a corrupting influence that has already turned one of earth's mightiest heroes into a monster. It'd be like the black-suit for spider-man. We don't expect to see it drop from turning one hero evil to being perfectly managed by another, unless the point is to highlight differences that are very not good for an ensemble cast like this.

Again, I haven't seen them, I'm just going off of what I've heard and similar examples.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I completely agree!

Thing is, at the table nobody else wants to sit through possibly hours of me looking after personal-to-the-character downtime stuff, and that's fair enough; so I'll go to the pub some night with the DM and we'll sort it then. Failing that, at some point there'll be a lot of back-and-forth by email.

In the fiction, the rest of the rather large adventuring company we're all part of aren't going to sit on their duffs doing nothing while my mage futzes around for possibly several in-game months. We've got about six different story arcs on the go, never mind the ones waiting in line until we can get to them.

Sure, but there is not always a need for them to be sitting around and doing nothing. They can be involved.

I'm not saying that I've never talked to people outside the game about long-downtime, I've done it more than a few times. But the story being crafted is "these people in this world". For me, if there is a major event going on and part of the party is going to go deal with it, the rest of the party follows. They don't just take off and leave their friends behind to face something like a Lich or a rampaging dragon.

So, we often do downtime at the same time, and some times we just circle the table asking what each person wants to do.

I have something like five or six active characters in that game plus two others that are long-term out of action (one lost her mind, another got reduced to a Con of 5 through repeated death-revive cycles). In other words, there's more than I can play all at once, so parking one of them for some downtime makes, on a completely metagame level, a lot of sense. Conveniently, it's also exactly what this character would do: she has some big-time political ambitions in her long-term goals, and laying the groundwork for that isn't really do-able in the field.

Never had a game where anyone had more than one active character. It just isn't how we approach the game.

Unsustainable if the setting isn't knee-deep in monsters. 6-8 encounters a day - let's be generous and say half will be social and-or exploratory, and the rest combat. That's 3-4 fights a day. Multiply that by a lot of days and a lot of adventurers and - unless they're out to kill every demon in hell or something - the setting falls apart.

Not really. There is a theoritical limit to undead, but it is in the billions for a setting. Most monster populations are sustained, so while it would be possible to drive some of them to extinction, you'd have to be fighting the same thing over and over and over again. I mean, equate something like owlbears to Black Bears and you are looking at likely over 300,000 in just part of the setting. And to kill even half of that would require fighting two owlbears every day, four times a day, for over a hundred years. Sure, if there are thousands of adventurers all fighting just owlbears, and winning, then you might depopulate the area, but that's REALLY stretching it. And that doesn't account for literally any other type of monster, or the monstrous humanoids.

Sure, Europeans killed many of their native large predators, but it took a long time and most DnD monsters are WAY deadlier than anything on earth. I don't see it as a serious concern.

From the strictly gamist sense, this is correct.

I try to look at it from the reality-of-the-fiction sense, that being something of a mirror of our own reality, and if-when there's a big conflict with gamist concerns (here the obvious example is hit point recovery) then gamist concerns can kindly go take a hike.

Problem. This is a game. We aren't engaging in a mirror simulation of reality, we are engaging with a game. And it is only when people start saying that it must be a reality simulator that this is ever a problem. And again, I refer you back to your initial point, which was that the game has been made "too easy" because the designers were "too spineless" to stand up to players. But this is a good GAME design. And they are GAME designers.

True, but even if it's a spectrum one can choose which end to trend toward.

True, but that doesn't mean every single player always wants to trend towards less difficulty.

I neither buy into nor have any sympathy for the bolded theory.

shrug

Fluency in subtraction compared with addition

Two studies were conducted to understand why subtraction with fluency is harder than addition. In Study I, 33 kindergartners were individually asked t…

www.sciencedirect.com

By analyzing children's accuracy and reaction time, it was concluded, in light of Piaget's theory, that subtraction is harder than addition because children deduce differences from their knowledge of sums.

Micro reflects macro. Adding is easier than subtracting. Maybe I'm stretching this from simple math to game design, but I notice that I've never seen a game designer start from an incredibly complicated system then trim it down, unless they are working from someone else's design which was already complicated. No one started computer programming by writing the unreal engine then reducing it down to Pong.

Adding is just easier.

Yes, it's easier than 3e...but that's kinda like saying brain surgery is easier than rocket science.

So, we are in agreement that a less complex and easier system is better for the players.

It's badly designed for me, hence my not playing/running it.

Right, but this conversation started with you making claims about the health of the hobby as a whole, not whether or not you like it. I wouldn't have engaged with you over "I don't like how 5e was designed, which is why I don't play it" but you went with "5e's design is going to lead to the death of the game" which is a much stronger and less personal claim.

Funny, I had exactly the opposite experience. I played a lot of chess in high school against a wide variety of opponents, very enjoyable. Later in life, while I was by no means a good chess player at any time, the people around me were worse; meaning I quickly got bored winning all the time and thus don't play any more.

I never got to the point of playing it in high school. I was done before Middle School. Or at least early middle school.

And yes, it is also possible for a game to be too easy. But, again, DnD 5e has a fix for exactly that.

Something to keep in mind is there's two different types of "easier".

5e, in comparison to 0e or even stripped-down 1e, is not easy to learn from scratch at the table; particularly if the DM is using feats and other various bells and whistles. I'm all for making the game easier in this regard.

But 5e in comparison to 0e or 1e is, inarguably, easier on the characters in the fiction and by extension the players at the table. Win conditions are too easily met, loss conditions too infrequent, and in-play challenges too watered-down. That's where I'm pushing back.

And I disagree with you. In-play challeges are only as "watered down" as the DM makes them. I recently ended up with a discussion with Maxperson who claimed to want a monster ability that cuts player level in half with a single save. Chunk, half your levels are gone til you recover. He made it til a short rest. You could make it permanent. Loss conditions are infrequent because the only loss condition is, for many groups, ending the game.

I think there is a tremendous difference here that you aren't seeing, because of how you look at player characters. Most people can lose a character, but it disrupts the entire part of the game they want to explore. They don't want to be cog #5 in the machinery of the story of The Blackscale Mercenaries. They want the Blackscale Mercenaries to be Yue Silverhorn, Shea The Gilded, Trosk Bladehammer, and Seven, and they want to tell the story of their adventures.

People often reference Tolkien in the discussions about DnD, and this is one of the few places that this makes sense. The Fellowship of the Ring isn't a cast of 50 people who come in and out of the story. They don't have Aaragorn leave the party to go and become the King of Gondor, or Gimli killed off to be replaced by Boian. In fact, only one member of the Fellowship is actually killed. Boromir, who is most famous for being the member of the Fellowship who is killed.

Yes, we risk death for our characters, because we want that taste of danger, but since the majority of people play the game with an eye to having one, long-lasting character whose stories they can tell, the game is appropriately designed to make permanent death difficult.

That doesn't mean all our victories are handed to us, or that we suffer no setbacks, or that we don't gain any "real" sense of accomplishment from our victories. I'll note that you have survived all of your life, and I'm sure you felt a sense of accomplishment even when you weren't in a life-or-death situation. Challenges don't have to be just death or just status conditions. If that was all people wanted, Video Games do it better. The challenge of TTRPGS comes from out-of-the-box solutions, from setbacks that are not mechanical in nature.

Just because a character survives til the end of the story doesn't mean they didn't face real challenges. 90% of all stories have the main character survive until the end. We know they aren't going to die off, because that's not the point of the story. The point is "how do they win". You may not like that, but I'm getting very very tired of people confidently asserting that the challenges I provide my players aren't real, and they didn't earn their victories, just because I keep the body count low.