Opinion: Will D&D ever acheive caster vs martial balance? [Archive] - Page 3

Psyren

2022-08-04, 09:59 PM

I'm flipping this around though and saying its more that it should be players responsibility to figure out what they want to do, whether they can do it, and whether there are in-character actions that can be taken which would make it become possible to do it. E.g. if the Fighter can't contribute, I don't want it to be because Fighters sometimes just can't contribute, I want it to be because the Fighter's player has consciously chosen not to contribute in those cases (in which case it's their responsibility), or because their player has not yet figured out the way to be able to contribute (in which case its an active ongoing player skill challenge). The worst end is something like the problem where for some reason 'we have to have a Fighter' but things are slanted such that playing a Fighter locks you out of all the other interesting stuff going on. Healbot clerics have this problem more than Fighters, but it is a thing that can happen.

If the fighter can't contribute in any way, period, it means I designed the encounter badly.

I mean, basically yes. If we're talking about how I'd like to see D&D be, rather than how it has been, I don't want classes or subclasses to be particular linear or even tree-like paths that are the most important thing about a character and tell you 90% of what you need to know about them. I think its better if people are in the mindset to talk about 'my character, who happens to have some training as a rogue' than 'my rogue character'. If there's some principle by which spells can be stolen, maybe you need to put in 20 sessions worth of XP gain to get that, and maybe there are positive prerequisites you need to meet in order to get that, but I don't think you should never be able to get that because you earlier learned how to store victims life essence in crystals. I'm not saying that one can't design a game like that or that its objectively bad, but it moves opposite the direction I think would be helpful for things to move in order to resolve the issue of this sort of character conceptualization imbalance in high-end play.

Anyhow, I think I'm saying even something more radical than you read, because I'm saying that anyone should be able to go and invent a 4th, 5th, or 6th kind of thing that isn't in the list of classes, subclasses, PrCs, etc. 'My character is going to take these three months of downtime to try to consolidate their experiences hunting savanah dragons on telekinetic surfboards into a formal school of practice - I want to make the Grasssurfer Nomad PrC' should be a normal kind of thing that happens in campaigns.

Or, some warrior who is frustrated at all of the ethereal enemies they've had to face over the years just takes a year off, goes to Threshold, plunges their hand into the interface between this life and the next ten thousand times, learns the trick of touching the ethereal, and its now a thing. The idea 'a character could go and do that, without a class ability or feat that lets them come up with new abilities' should be normalized, IMO.

As others have said, you appear to want a classless system.

Gotcha.

I still think rules would be necessary to prepare the DM for high level play. I remember reading in 3e, probably the Epic Level Handbook, explaining Teleport. Rather than seeing it as a detriment to Journey play, it could mean it allows access to new types of adventures. Perhaps a location can only be accessed through Teleport. Work with the spell, not against it.

Have a chapter or a couple of pages that teaches the DM how the game dynamic changes. Show that it is expected and accepted these new powerful abilities PCs have access to alter their options and approaches to solve problems. Old obstacles becomes obsolete. New ones take their place, especially those the PCs couldn't possibly have overcome previously because they lacked these high level/power abilities.

They can break it down into Tiers if they want. Ok, maybe despite Feather Fall the Level 4 Fighter with 20 ST can't jump down from a height of 20 ft unharmed as far as the game universe works. Surely that shouldn't be an issue at level 11 and tell the DM that. Even if I don't get my way of DC tables for skill use, they can at least tell DMs things they wouldn't allow or made so hard at level 3 should be allowed or made easy at level 12 or whenever. Have a section labeled "Guy At The Gym" and explicitly tell the DM at some level PCs go beyond Olympic and Professional Athlete limitations. As wonderful a swimmer Michael Phelps is, he's no Beowulf. PCs should be emulating Beowulf.

I can meet in the middle on this.

As they apparently removed the rule that 20 auto succeeds on a saving throw a cloak of resistance is more or less required for characters now in 5e. Otherwise characters can be shutdown and or killed without any chance of getting out of it or surviving. there is one monster in the monster manual that has a DC 21 constitution save to stop taking 6d6 damage. you keep taking it until you save or die. If you have a -1 for something you cannot make a DC 20 save thus now auto fail so much more than just that.

To be fair if you're fighting a Pit Fiend with 9 Con you probably shouldn't survive that encounter :smalltongue:

Mechalich

2022-08-04, 10:01 PM

well no they could still dump out a bunch of new spells in every splat but now each spell would list its weak effect and its strong effect. You could base them off key words so classes/ sub classes with the necromancy keyword would get full effect on necromancy spells, this would allow you to seamlessly add in new classes/sub-classes without needing to go back and say these caster class gets those spells to.

That works until someone comes up with a completely new keyword and gives that keyword a bunch of powercreep boosted options so that it is now better than the old ones and everyone switches to the new thing and the game goes from having a whole bunch of approaches to just one. This has happened many times, 5e is actually a good example here in that it ended up being more balanced than previous versions of D&D because they published an order of magnitude less books. Yet new options are still presenting balance issues as the edition matures.

And, this is a D&D specific problem because as the market leader D&D has to publish, a lot. It can't just throw out an extremely well tested core book as a complete system. You even have to accept at least a modicum of power creep, because players want new stuff that's better than the stuff they already have. Just publishing fluff material without new and useful player options is the path to bankruptcy, as both TSR and later WW discovered.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-05, 07:14 AM

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-05, 07:22 AM

It would also make it harder to sell new books, since you can't just print 20+ New Spells for everybody to slap onto existing characters. Follow the money.

As they apparently removed the rule that 20 auto succeeds on a saving throw a cloak of resistance is more or less required for characters now in 5e. Otherwise characters can be shutdown and or killed without any chance of getting out of it or surviving. There is one monster in the monster manual that has a DC 21 constitution save to stop taking 6d6 damage. You keep taking it until you save or die. If you have a -1 for something you cannot make a DC 20 save thus now auto fail so much more than just that. That's a good thing, though, it forces the PCs to be innovative in how they tackle that monster. Also, lesser restoration or a paladin's lay on hands solves this. A monk is immune to this. Protection from Poison cast before the fight cuts the damage in half. And so on. A Fighter or a Barbarian fighting this has proficiency in CON saves, and thus is probably about +4 or +5 if their level is not too far from the CR (19). And the barbarian, if raging, cuts the damage in half. (The nasty part is the 'can't heal' aspect). The at will fireball is kinda cool for clearing out any summoned minions, but that's a tricky choice for the Pit Fiend as that forfeits the four attacks that is has.

Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +14 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 22 (4d6 + 8) piercing damage.
The target must succeed on a DC 21 Constitution saving throw or become poisoned. While poisoned in this way, the target can’t regain hit points, and it takes 21 (6d6) poison damage at the start of each of its turns. The poisoned target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on itself on a success.

As others have said, you appear to want a classless system. What's the best example of a game that has that which works well?

To be fair if you're fighting a Pit Fiend with 9 Con you probably shouldn't survive that encounter :smalltongue: Too right.

This has happened many times, 5e is actually a good example here in that it ended up being more balanced than previous versions of D&D because they published an order of magnitude less books. Yet new options are still presenting balance issues as the edition matures. Fewer books, but yes, and even with the smaller output the balance efforts have been riddled with holes.

Just publishing fluff material without new and useful player options is the path to bankruptcy, as both TSR and later WW discovered. As was simply not knowing how to manage a company, and allowing its payroll to bloat in the former case.

awa

2022-08-05, 08:11 AM

That works until someone comes up with a completely new keyword and gives that keyword a bunch of powercreep boosted options so that it is now better than the old ones and everyone switches to the new thing and the game goes from having a whole bunch of approaches to just one. This has happened many times, 5e is actually a good example here in that it ended up being more balanced than previous versions of D&D because they published an order of magnitude less books. Yet new options are still presenting balance issues as the edition matures.

And, this is a D&D specific problem because as the market leader D&D has to publish, a lot. It can't just throw out an extremely well tested core book as a complete system. You even have to accept at least a modicum of power creep, because players want new stuff that's better than the stuff they already have. Just publishing fluff material without new and useful player options is the path to bankruptcy, as both TSR and later WW discovered.

I mean based on the described system a new keyword would be a super weak because it would have fewer spells associated with it. No I suspect the power creep would be the same power creep you always see some each batch would bring a collection of weak average and strong spells, the weak spell will never be used and are thus forgotten, the average spells occasionally used if they are thematic and fun and the strong spells horded and added to an ever growing pile of broken stuff. Because its like natural selection, serpent kingdoms had a lot of content but you only every here about the one or two that could be used in broken builds. If you design a hundred new spells and 1 of them is Op that spell is the one people will remember because its the one that finds its way on to the internet.

Which is part of the problem with wizards their extreme ability to cherry pick abilities are hugely enhanced by broken options unlike a fighter who even if they find several broken trick or combos are limited in their ability to make use of it.

The proposed system would at least mitigate the problem because it limits their ability to cherry pick the best abilities. Of course just because a solution only improves a situation but does not perfectly solve it and/or future proof it does not mean its not an improvement.

Psyren

2022-08-05, 10:41 AM

well no they could still dump out a bunch of new spells in every splat but now each spell would list its weak effect and its strong effect. You could base them off key words so classes/ sub classes with the necromancy keyword would get full effect on necromancy spells, this would allow you to seamlessly add in new classes/sub-classes without needing to go back and say these caster class gets those spells to.

Yeah, but then you have to put work into making sure each class has an equally balanced selection of fun spells, and that would be hard when trying to maintain a 300+ entry spell list.

More seriously, I think that's by far the best solution I've seen. Giving a strong incentive for people to be "On Theme" without requiring a strict balancing between spell schools (A Divination wizard isn't screwed on combat spells, they just use weaker ones, and a 6d6 fireball is STILL quite good). People would still raise hell about it, but if I were redesigning D&D from the ground up that's what I'd do.

Instead of going through every spell and adding weak effect/strong effect, I think it'd be much easier to just add better incentives directly to the subclass, similar to how Evokers get sculpt and empower to encourage evocation use. Necromancer and Illusionist for example could use a redesign.

If you want a nerf to go with that, force them to prepare X spells from their school, or even X spells at each spell level, similar to how AT and EK have school restrictions for their spells known.

What's the best example of a game that has that which works well?

I'm the wrong person to ask, I can't stand classless systems. (The closest I can get to them is a game like Morrowind or Divinity that are technically classless, but include a bunch of class packages you can start from anyway.)

The good news is you're in the right subforum for this question.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-05, 10:56 AM

Instead of going through every spell and adding weak effect/strong effect, I think it'd be much easier to just add better incentives directly to the subclass, similar to how Evokers get sculpt and empower to encourage evocation use. Necromancer and Illusionist for example could use a redesign.

If you want a nerf to go with that, force them to prepare X spells from their school, or even X spells at each spell level, similar to how AT and EK have school restrictions for their spells known.

School is a bad way of doing anything, because schools are neither internally nor externally nor even thematically balanced[0]. And you need to nerf the core spells, because they're (in many cases) just too strong in and of themselves, even without any kind of incentive. Such as (for instance) polymorph and it's utterly insane[1] CR cap. If you want to keep the power level the same, you have to nerf the spells pretty heavily and then and only then add in thematic incentives. Balance by addition only doesn't work, it inevitably causes spirals.

[0] You have things as wide as "transmutation" and as narrow as "divination" or "illusion". You have utter randomness of which school has which spell (wall of stone is...evocation).

[1] No, CR = level isn't how this works. CR X is a medium encounter for an unoptimized party of 4 level X's. Moon druid Combat Wildshape, the epitome of regular shapechanging, caps at CR 6 and scales as CR = level / 3 (beyond level 2). And has limits on things like flying until level 8+. /rant

Psyren

2022-08-05, 11:25 AM

School is a bad way of doing anything, because schools are neither internally nor externally nor even thematically balanced[0]. And you need to nerf the core spells, because they're (in many cases) just too strong in and of themselves, even without any kind of incentive. Such as (for instance) polymorph and it's utterly insane[1] CR cap. If you want to keep the power level the same, you have to nerf the spells pretty heavily and then and only then add in thematic incentives. Balance by addition only doesn't work, it inevitably causes spirals.

[0] You have things as wide as "transmutation" and as narrow as "divination" or "illusion". You have utter randomness of which school has which spell (wall of stone is...evocation).

[1] No, CR = level isn't how this works. CR X is a medium encounter for an unoptimized party of 4 level X's. Moon druid Combat Wildshape, the epitome of regular shapechanging, caps at CR 6 and scales as CR = level / 3 (beyond level 2). And has limits on things like flying until level 8+. /rant

I agree that if you're willing to go through all 300+ spells (and that's just core) and nerf/reassign them, that's the superior option. But if you're not, schools and their associated subclasses are indeed another lever you can use.

NichG

2022-08-05, 12:33 PM

@NichG: my point about archetypes came about as part of discussing axing base wizard class in favor of a slew of more thematic & restricted casting classes. If I understood your concept of wish-completeness right, what you want out of a game does not in fact need the base wizard class or any other "generic wizard archetype" class. The reason being, it's perfectly possible to give all those other classes their own game paths to wish-completeness. One of the simplest methods is attributing wish-like powers to a game object that is external to any class fiction, such as an archetypal wish-granting device. Pre-wish abilities of each class are then balanced so that all have a shot at competing for that device.

This approach also satisfies your desire for characters to be defined by more than their class fiction, because past a point, they are more defined by what they would wish, or have wished, for. And since wishes allow for so many different things, these can be anything.

Yes, it doesn't specifically require 'wizard' as the archetype. I think the basic ingredient of 'wish-completeness' in a ruleset doesn't require literal Wish access, but rather it naturally arises from the existence of abilities, even fairly limited ones, that let players use natural language to modify the rules. That basically puts you into a sort of Godel self-reference situation where through iteration of those abilities in conjunction with the progression of the game world in response, eventually the game can be flexible enough that any situation can be dealt with. The difference between Wish and other approaches is that Wish might do that all at once, whereas with other approaches there's more of a game to it as it has to be built up one brick (or clause) at a time with the whole structure remaining self-consistent through that entire process.

Then it's just a matter of what makes the process of doing that feel accessible and aesthetically appealing as gameplay. Any setting with an overdeity who could ostensibly be petitioned in a sense gives all characters Wish-complete status, but in a form that's impractical to center play around and also a form that's particularly aesthetically unappealing to a lot of players (to do something, ask the powerful NPC to do it for you!). I personally like the idea of invention or research being the mechanism for rules text invention, because the consistency check of 'whatever you invent has to be explained as relating to things that exist' keeps things from immediately becoming too arbitrary, gives rise to emergent gameplay, and still in the end does allow arbitrary rule injection to take place with enough effort. But its less formalized than, say, playing Magical MacGyver by combo-ing specific spells.

In the end it can actually be a quite small modification to D&D, you just have to say 'any character can research a new ability, feat, skill, class, spell, maneuver, etc; the player should suggest what the new thing will do and how that connects with existing things or with experiences the character has had, the GM assigns any prerequisites to obtain the ability, any prerequisites for researching the ability (funds, components, power source, etc), determines the power level of the ability (as an equivalent spell level), sets the specific mechanics of the ability to do what the player suggested, and uses that overall judgment to read off a DC, research time, and relevant skill from a standardized table. The character spends the time, expends the research materials, makes a check against that DC, and if successful that ability is now an option for them to obtain in the standard ways that players can have their character obtain abilities (they can take the class at level-up, they can learn the spell or maneuver however their mechanics learn such things, they can retrain a feat into the new feat, etc) - and eligibility for said thing can be propagated to others if the character chooses to teach them.'

If people actually use that bit of rules text, everything else can build from there. You don't need to get rid of all the classes or change up the leveling system or going to a point-buy system or make Fighters become Cuchulainn automatically at Lv20.

In practice though, it can be a bit of a hurdle to get players to treat that as an always-there option. And it has the downside of being a hard for players to predict how the GM will assign power levels, requirements, and how exactly the GM will interpret broad phrasing into specific mechanics. Of course the process should be a negotiation to make sure everyone is satisfied. But in a way, that already puts it ahead of making unsafe Wishes.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-05, 01:07 PM

[1] No, CR = level isn't how this works. CR X is a medium encounter for an unoptimized party of 4 level X's. Moon druid Combat Wildshape, the epitome of regular shapechanging, caps at CR 6 and scales as CR = level / 3 (beyond level 2). And has limits on things like flying until level 8+. /rant

Wild shape doesn't cost a spell slot.
Wild shape can be done over a thousand times in a day if a level 20 druid does it every six seconds. (In theory, 10 x 60 x 24)
Wild shape does not require concentration.
At level six and after, wild shape does magical attacks.

None of these is true for polymorph .

Recommendation: step back from the ledge and get off the soap box. :smallwink:

Your previous suggestion (CR = Spell Level) is probably good enough as a tweak if you are set on polymorph being the problem (which it is not, IMO). If you want to implement that in our weekly game I will support that move, since I'd like to see if it makes much difference.
I'd suggest warning the wizard and either getting his buy in, or, letting him swap out polymorph for something else.
I enjoy the occasional romp as Kong, but a couple of times he turned me into Kong when I had something else in mind. (Went along with it anyway, since Kong is good silly fun).

My estimate: he'll roll with it and keep it since the offensive use is still handy.

Beyond that, your idea of polymorphed form's CR = Spell Level is a little bit Tasha's in flavor.
The various summon spells therein index a number of the summoned beast, undead, aberration, celestial, draconic spirit, and fey to spell level.

My nephew just turned level 9 as a cleric. (DM = me). I asked him if he was going to prepare Summon Celestial.
His answer was "Uh, what's that?"
More the fool me. It's in the compendium for our roll20 game so he looked it up.
His last email to me included "drool! must have!" as part of the response. :smallbiggrin:
I have created a monster celestial something that will amuse the other players and bite my monsters in the butt soon.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-05, 01:13 PM

Yes, it doesn't specifically require 'wizard' as the archetype. I think the basic ingredient of 'wish-completeness' in a ruleset doesn't require literal Wish access, but rather it naturally arises from the existence of abilities, even fairly limited ones, that let players use natural language to modify the rules. That basically puts you into a sort of Godel self-reference situation where through iteration of those abilities in conjunction with the progression of the game world in response, eventually the game can be flexible enough that any situation can be dealt with. The difference between Wish and other approaches is that Wish might do that all at once, whereas with other approaches there's more of a game to it as it has to be built up one brick (or clause) at a time with the whole structure remaining self-consistent through that entire process.

Then it's just a matter of what makes the process of doing that feel accessible and aesthetically appealing as gameplay. Any setting with an overdeity who could ostensibly be petitioned in a sense gives all characters Wish-complete status, but in a form that's impractical to center play around and also a form that's particularly aesthetically unappealing to a lot of players (to do something, ask the powerful NPC to do it for you!). I personally like the idea of invention or research being the mechanism for rules text invention, because the consistency check of 'whatever you invent has to be explained as relating to things that exist' keeps things from immediately becoming too arbitrary, gives rise to emergent gameplay, and still in the end does allow arbitrary rule injection to take place with enough effort. But its less formalized than, say, playing Magical MacGyver by combo-ing specific spells.

In the end it can actually be a quite small modification to D&D, you just have to say 'any character can research a new ability, feat, skill, class, spell, maneuver, etc; the player should suggest what the new thing will do and how that connects with existing things or with experiences the character has had, the GM assigns any prerequisites to obtain the ability, any prerequisites for researching the ability (funds, components, power source, etc), determines the power level of the ability (as an equivalent spell level), sets the specific mechanics of the ability to do what the player suggested, and uses that overall judgment to read off a DC, research time, and relevant skill from a standardized table. The character spends the time, expends the research materials, makes a check against that DC, and if successful that ability is now an option for them to obtain in the standard ways that players can have their character obtain abilities (they can take the class at level-up, they can learn the spell or maneuver however their mechanics learn such things, they can retrain a feat into the new feat, etc) - and eligibility for said thing can be propagated to others if the character chooses to teach them.'

If people actually use that bit of rules text, everything else can build from there. You don't need to get rid of all the classes or change up the leveling system or going to a point-buy system or make Fighters become Cuchulainn automatically at Lv20.

In practice though, it can be a bit of a hurdle to get players to treat that as an always-there option. And it has the downside of being a hard for players to predict how the GM will assign power levels, requirements, and how exactly the GM will interpret broad phrasing into specific mechanics. Of course the process should be a negotiation to make sure everyone is satisfied. But in a way, that already puts it ahead of making unsafe Wishes.

I'm not sure how this is different from "ok, if you want something different, talk to the DM and figure something out." Unless the point is that the DM can't say "no, that doesn't fit the world or the campaign at all" and must allow the thing to be researched. Which is bonkers. And even the "can't say no but can impose any condition they want" model implies that the DM can say "yes, you can, but it would take 10 years of downtime and the campaign will be over by then".

Cooperative, open-ended games that work well involve substantial trust between the participants that everyone is trying to work towards the fun of the group as a whole (which necessarily includes individual fun). And that implies that the participants are willing to find solutions to things that people want to do. In the limit of infinite (justified) trust, those tables don't actually need binding rules or mechanics at all. Mechanical elements are nice as labor-saving devices, but they're just tools to be used, not rules that bind. Being open to homebrew (and not making a hard dichotomy between "homebrew" and "official material") is an important thing, but trying to mechanize it and formalize the mechanisms just means you'll end up removing the trust and trying to substitute it with rules that will work...sometimes. For parties that use them exactly. And will be picked apart just like the epic spell creation rules of 3e and turned into weaponized, "RAW says you must let me" arguments at tables that don't have the necessary trust levels.

Basically, trying to mechanize this doesn't help the tables that are already playing well because they're already doing this to the degree that's comfortable and will actively exacerbate the issue at tables that aren't. Because now it'll be "get this one over on the DM" and the most inventive player will break the game. And those types are often already playing casters.

------

Additionally, I'm of the opinion that being "wish complete" is actually horrible for games. Systems work well when they're confined to relatively narrow windows of applicability. D&D is first and foremost a game about adventure, not a Factorio/life simulator. Limits on what people can do and what they can learn to do (especially along archetypal lines) are critical to actually getting the kind of narratives the game is built for. In fact, most of the vaunted "versatility" and "flexibility" of casters is a mistake, because they have breached those limits. Specifically wish itself--it's a busted spell that creates all sorts of distortions both in worldbuilding and in gameplay. Even at lower levels--the expectation is "magic can do anything, including make me a god, if I word it well." Which can't be true and retain any semblance of a sane world, narrative, or game. If wish were "duplicate any wizard spell of level 8 or lower, using regular cast times, components, etc" it'd still be in the running for strongest spell. But it wouldn't be "turn the world upside down if you can slip one by the DM".

Wild shape doesn't cost a spell slot.
Wild shape can be done over a thousand times in a day if a level 20 druid does it every six seconds. (In theory, 10 x 60 x 24)
Wild shape does not require concentration.
At level six and after, wild shape does magical attacks.

None of these is true for polymorph .

Recommendation: step back from the ledge and get off the soap box. :smallwink:

Your previous suggestion (CR = Spell Level) is probably good enough as a tweak if you are set on polymorph being the problem (which it is not, IMO). If you want to implement that in our weekly game I will support that move, since I'd like to see if it makes much difference.
I'd suggest warning the wizard and either getting his buy in, or, letting him swap out polymorph for something else.
I enjoy the occasional romp as Kong, but a couple of times he turned me into Kong when I had something else in mind. (Went along with it anyway, since Kong is good silly fun).

My estimate: he'll roll with it and keep it since the offensive use is still handy.

Beyond that, your idea of polymorphed form's CR = Spell Level is a little bit Tasha's in flavor.
The various summon spells therein index a number of the summoned beast, undead, aberration, celestial, draconic spirit, to spell level.

I wouldn't impose the "use wildshape rules" on polymorph because yes, it's different. But its current state is just wrong. And personally, I'm not going to change anything for a game in play. It is what it is and I'll deal with it. New games, however, will have a rule (probably CR = spell level) from day one.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-05, 01:16 PM

But its current state is just wrong. And personally, I'm not going to change anything for a game in play. It is what it is and I'll deal with it. New games, however, will have a rule (probably CR = spell level) from day one. Not sure how I can help you play test that, but I'd be happy to. :smallsmile: (And if you are going to drop the CR, can we include monstrosities too? Can we? :smallbiggrin: I know someone I'd love to turn into an owlbear ... )

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-05, 01:33 PM

Not sure how I can help you play test that, but I'd be happy to. :smallsmile: (And if you are going to drop the CR, can we include monstrosities too? Can we? :smallbiggrin: I know someone I'd love to turn into an owlbear ... )

To be really honest, I'd want to whitelist shapes in that case. As in "you can transform them into (list)." With additional shapes for different spell levels. Owlbears? Fine. But there are a lot of monstrosities with really annoying, if not actually broken abilities in players hands. annoying more for slowing down play and requiring hefty rulings on use.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-05, 01:54 PM

To be really honest, I'd want to whitelist shapes in that case. As in "you can transform them into (list)." With additional shapes for different spell levels. Owlbears? Fine. But there are a lot of monstrosities with really annoying, if not actually broken abilities in players hands. annoying more for slowing down play and requiring hefty rulings on use. Not a bad idea, IMO, or you run into the old "pub diving" exercise that is a part of the summons wrinkle in the first place.

NichG

2022-08-05, 02:12 PM

I'm not sure how this is different from "ok, if you want something different, talk to the DM and figure something out." Unless the point is that the DM can't say "no, that doesn't fit the world or the campaign at all" and must allow the thing to be researched. Which is bonkers. And even the "can't say no but can impose any condition they want" model implies that the DM can say "yes, you can, but it would take 10 years of downtime and the campaign will be over by then".

Cooperative, open-ended games that work well involve substantial trust between the participants that everyone is trying to work towards the fun of the group as a whole (which necessarily includes individual fun). And that implies that the participants are willing to find solutions to things that people want to do. In the limit of infinite (justified) trust, those tables don't actually need binding rules or mechanics at all. Mechanical elements are nice as labor-saving devices, but they're just tools to be used, not rules that bind. Being open to homebrew (and not making a hard dichotomy between "homebrew" and "official material") is an important thing, but trying to mechanize it and formalize the mechanisms just means you'll end up removing the trust and trying to substitute it with rules that will work...sometimes. For parties that use them exactly. And will be picked apart just like the epic spell creation rules of 3e and turned into weaponized, "RAW says you must let me" arguments at tables that don't have the necessary trust levels.

Basically, trying to mechanize this doesn't help the tables that are already playing well because they're already doing this to the degree that's comfortable and will actively exacerbate the issue at tables that aren't. Because now it'll be "get this one over on the DM" and the most inventive player will break the game. And those types are often already playing casters.

Well as we've seen in this thread and elsewhere, 'what the mechanics are' is only one component of what makes a game. Another really huge component is 'how people feel like the game is supposed to be'. Limits people impose on themselves or on others, expectations people bring, directions that people go to for solutions to problems versus things which occupy a blind spot. So there is a difference between a game which puts negotiation with the DM front and center, versus a game which hides it into 'well if all else fails, you can do this thing...'. Even if both games are mechanically identical, the presentation of the game can influence the table culture and the way people approach 'how the game is played'.

That's why I'm kind of laughing behind my hand at 'you want a classless game, not D&D'. Because I think most of what I want is achievable (and has been achieved at tables I've been at) without directly changing much of the mechanics at all, but rather just by having a culture which centers the idea that the mechanics being mutated during and by the course that play takes is normal rather than exceptional.

Like with the martial/caster disparity, I don't think the core of the issue is skill points per level or DPR or anything like that, though those things can cause problems or exacerbate issues. Fundamentally it's that you have one set of players who is approaching the game looking at certain characters (those with a martial theme) as first and foremost being lists of constraints, and another set of players who is approaching the game looking at a different set of characters (those with a magical theme) as first and foremost being lists of options. Of course the people who view their character's mechanics as 'extra things on top of baseline that I get to do' are going to wield more power than people who view their character's mechanics as 'directions I should restrict myself in order to express a theme'.

Shaping the way people view and interpret the game and 'how it should be played' is more effective at bringing practical balance here than any number of fighter fixes or wizard nerfs. Because if you have someone who fundamentally views the game as an exercise in maximizing toolkit and MacGyvering solutions to things, squishing down the wizard into a constrained theme just means they'll find other ways to be a generalist elsewhere.

Additionally, I'm of the opinion that being "wish complete" is actually horrible for games. Systems work well when they're confined to relatively narrow windows of applicability. D&D is first and foremost a game about adventure, not a Factorio/life simulator. Limits on what people can do and what they can learn to do (especially along archetypal lines) are critical to actually getting the kind of narratives the game is built for. In fact, most of the vaunted "versatility" and "flexibility" of casters is a mistake, because they have breached those limits. Specifically wish itself--it's a busted spell that creates all sorts of distortions both in worldbuilding and in gameplay. Even at lower levels--the expectation is "magic can do anything, including make me a god, if I word it well." Which can't be true and retain any semblance of a sane world, narrative, or game. If wish were "duplicate any wizard spell of level 8 or lower, using regular cast times, components, etc" it'd still be in the running for strongest spell. But it wouldn't be "turn the world upside down if you can slip one by the DM".

I think this is just an irreducible difference in our tastes and what we want out of gaming. The D&D-based games (and for other systems more generally) I've enjoyed the most over the last 15 years have been the ones that flew directly in the face of your claims here.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-05, 02:27 PM

Well as we've seen in this thread and elsewhere, 'what the mechanics are' is only one component of what makes a game. Another really huge component is 'how people feel like the game is supposed to be'. Limits people impose on themselves or on others, expectations people bring, directions that people go to for solutions to problems versus things which occupy a blind spot. So there is a difference between a game which puts negotiation with the DM front and center, versus a game which hides it into 'well if all else fails, you can do this thing...'. Even if both games are mechanically identical, the presentation of the game can influence the table culture and the way people approach 'how the game is played'.

That's why I'm kind of laughing behind my hand at 'you want a classless game, not D&D'. Because I think most of what I want is achievable (and has been achieved at tables I've been at) without directly changing much of the mechanics at all, but rather just by having a culture which centers the idea that the mechanics being mutated during and by the course that play takes is normal rather than exceptional.

Like with the martial/caster disparity, I don't think the core of the issue is skill points per level or DPR or anything like that, though those things can cause problems or exacerbate issues. Fundamentally it's that you have one set of players who is approaching the game looking at certain characters (those with a martial theme) as first and foremost being lists of constraints, and another set of players who is approaching the game looking at a different set of characters (those with a magical theme) as first and foremost being lists of options. Of course the people who view their character's mechanics as 'extra things on top of baseline that I get to do' are going to wield more power than people who view their character's mechanics as 'directions I should restrict myself in order to express a theme'.

Shaping the way people view and interpret the game and 'how it should be played' is more effective at bringing practical balance here than any number of fighter fixes or wizard nerfs. Because if you have someone who fundamentally views the game as an exercise in maximizing toolkit and MacGyvering solutions to things, squishing down the wizard into a constrained theme just means they'll find other ways to be a generalist elsewhere.

I don't disagree that presentation matters. Personally, I've always played (both 4e and 5e are the ones I've actively DM'd significantly) with "ok, if you want something, let's talk about it and figure out how/if it will work" as the driving force. But always within the limits the setting and fiction provide--for example, my setting will never have chemical explosives. Period. Full stop. Why? Because I don't like the aesthetic and set up the metaphysics to avoid it (and drive other things). There might be crystal/alchemy-based things that create "explosions", but they don't work by expanding gas or chemical reactions. And you'll never get anything that looks or acts like a firearm. Similarly, you will never be able to research an ability (spell or not) that lets you "steal the concept of X". Why? Because there once was such a thing. And it led to the Dawn War and the creation of the planes as we know them now. Concepts (capital C) are literal metaphysical entities (psedo-platonic, except they can incarnate, be interacted with, and be fragmented). And messing with them creates Concept Bombs, which are...bad news. And thus the Powers that Be have nailed shut that loophole.

For me, "magic" is API calls against the universe. There are only a limited set of these. "Inventing" new magic isn't actually doing so--it's just finding a not-previously-documented API call. And the return values (ie results) depend on the server (the universe), not as much the caster. And not everyone needs spell slots (or even cantrips) to perform magic--there's tons of magic out there that people use constantly. Certain rhythms that produce (minor, ephemeral) effects like "flies are 10% less likely to land on a horse nearby" or "things you consider to be weeds glitter in your sight". And sacrificial magics (blood or otherwise) just need a sacrifice and a strong will. Anyone can do those. In fact, spell-casting is one of the least common forms. And certainly not the most powerful.

I think this is just an irreducible difference in our tastes and what we want out of gaming. The D&D-based games (and for other systems more generally) I've enjoyed the most over the last 15 years have been the ones that flew directly in the face of your claims here.

Probably. But if I want "do whatever you want" out of a game, why burden it with all those things like rules? Just do freeform. Much more honest. And prone to the same "the most persuasive player walks all over everyone else" dynamic that "wish-complete" has if not gated hard by the world and the expected system playstyle. And most frequently, only some of the people at the table want it. And the rest find it annoying when their efforts to, as they see it, actually play the game get sidelined by someone using it as a crazy super-minecraft-in-creative-mode experience.

----

Beyond that, if you're going to allow research, you need to have the possibility of it failing and actually blowing up in your face. Researching magic (especially) needs to be dangerous. You want to find the true name of <entity>? Better not fail in summoning the lesser ones, otherwise you may not come back at all. You want to research a better fireball? Hope you're wearing flame-and-magic-proof garments. Want to develop a feat that lets you jump 300' into the air? Better take a lesson from the inventor of Icarian Flight (cf Morrowind) and have some way of falling softly first. Etc. If it's just a free "insert coin (check/money/etc), get power" thing, that's both boring and breakable.

Vahnavoi

2022-08-05, 02:27 PM

@NichG: see, if I want to play around with arbitrary language statements, I will usually just play wholly in a natural language, a la play-by-post freeform. Mostly, I just wanted to point out what you want is multiply realizable, with some ways being fairly simple & traditional.

I rank vying for attention of an overdeity there with vying for a wish-granting device - sure, some people might hate the idea of depending on an externality like that, but as far as gaming and mythical archetypes go, it's one of the low-hanging fruits. Fight for who becomes the overdeity, winner grant favors to those you desire, repeat from the beginning.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-05, 02:38 PM

I rank vying for attention of an overdeity there with vying for a wish-granting device - sure, some people might hate the idea of depending on an externality like that, but as far as gaming and mythical archetypes go, it's one of the low-hanging fruits. Fight for who becomes the overdeity, winner grant favors to those you desire, repeat from the beginning.

Personally, getting the attention of an overdeity (one who doesn't actually depend on worship) is also traditionally not safe. Sort of going up to the Lady of Pain and starting to pray to her to her face. The only time they pay attention to mortals is if you've done something very wrong and are about to crash the system. And their first impulse isn't "grant favors" (that's the lower gods), it's "squash the trouble spot".

In one of my campaigns, there's a player (playing a time-focused wizard) who is obsessed with meeting the Archon of Time. The Archon is a limited-purpose overdeity--things involving causality and threatening linear time are in her domain, as a former incarnation of the Concept of Causality (who, after some shenanigans, ended up ascending as the Archon). So he went hunting for a way to get her attention. So far, he's got hints of a ritual that might let him do this without suffering curious and totally unrelated accidents before he completes the ceremony. Those who have tried before have either found something going horribly wrong that draws their attention elsewhere, have had cats kick over candles at critical moments (causing the ritual to explode and obliterate the caster) including people who were in isolated demiplanes and never had seen a cat. Etc. Because she does not want to be contacted as a general rule.

So I'd consider attracting the attention of an overdeity to be almost uniformly a Bad Thing. People pray (a la Fiddler on the Roof) "Gods bless and keep the <overdeity>...far away from us".

In fact, I'd say that most of the time, you don't want to attract any deity's direct attention. Best case they want to manipulate you. Worst case they want to obliterate you. None of those are good options.

Satinavian

2022-08-05, 02:40 PM

That's why I'm kind of laughing behind my hand at 'you want a classless game, not D&D'. Because I think most of what I want is achievable (and has been achieved at tables I've been at) without directly changing much of the mechanics at all, but rather just by having a culture which centers the idea that the mechanics being mutated during and by the course that play takes is normal rather than exceptional.
I certainly wouldn't want to play that. Houserules are fine, but playing in an ever-changing rulesystem ? No, thanks, i like my consistancy.

I am fine with ruleblocks that are basically toolkits and allow PCs to craft their very own abilities, companions, spells - as long as those kits have very clearly defined rules and limits.

NichG

2022-08-05, 03:29 PM

I don't disagree that presentation matters. Personally, I've always played (both 4e and 5e are the ones I've actively DM'd significantly) with "ok, if you want something, let's talk about it and figure out how/if it will work" as the driving force. But always within the limits the setting and fiction provide--for example, my setting will never have chemical explosives. Period. Full stop. Why? Because I don't like the aesthetic and set up the metaphysics to avoid it (and drive other things). There might be crystal/alchemy-based things that create "explosions", but they don't work by expanding gas or chemical reactions. And you'll never get anything that looks or acts like a firearm. Similarly, you will never be able to research an ability (spell or not) that lets you "steal the concept of X". Why? Because there once was such a thing. And it led to the Dawn War and the creation of the planes as we know them now. Concepts (capital C) are literal metaphysical entities (psedo-platonic, except they can incarnate, be interacted with, and be fragmented). And messing with them creates Concept Bombs, which are...bad news. And thus the Powers that Be have nailed shut that loophole.

For me, "magic" is API calls against the universe. There are only a limited set of these. "Inventing" new magic isn't actually doing so--it's just finding a not-previously-documented API call. And the return values (ie results) depend on the server (the universe), not as much the caster. And not everyone needs spell slots (or even cantrips) to perform magic--there's tons of magic out there that people use constantly. Certain rhythms that produce (minor, ephemeral) effects like "flies are 10% less likely to land on a horse nearby" or "things you consider to be weeds glitter in your sight". And sacrificial magics (blood or otherwise) just need a sacrifice and a strong will. Anyone can do those. In fact, spell-casting is one of the least common forms. And certainly not the most powerful.

Probably. But if I want "do whatever you want" out of a game, why burden it with all those things like rules? Just do freeform. Much more honest. And prone to the same "the most persuasive player walks all over everyone else" dynamic that "wish-complete" has if not gated hard by the world and the expected system playstyle. And most frequently, only some of the people at the table want it. And the rest find it annoying when their efforts to, as they see it, actually play the game get sidelined by someone using it as a crazy super-minecraft-in-creative-mode experience.

----

Beyond that, if you're going to allow research, you need to have the possibility of it failing and actually blowing up in your face. Researching magic (especially) needs to be dangerous. You want to find the true name of <entity>? Better not fail in summoning the lesser ones, otherwise you may not come back at all. You want to research a better fireball? Hope you're wearing flame-and-magic-proof garments. Want to develop a feat that lets you jump 300' into the air? Better take a lesson from the inventor of Icarian Flight (cf Morrowind) and have some way of falling softly first. Etc. If it's just a free "insert coin (check/money/etc), get power" thing, that's both boring and breakable.

I'm definitely not saying there shouldn't be structure to things, just that for me I want that structure to be open-ended and extensible. It's like the difference between 'my setting will never have chemical explosives' versus saying 'in this setting, changes in temperature do not lead to changes in pressure, and pressure in general is not determined by the number of atoms or molecules in a volume but rather is tied to total mass'. The latter makes traditional chemical explosives not work, but it doesn't rule out that someone could find a way to make a chemical explosive. They couldn't just say 'I invent chemical explosives!' 'ok, roll for it!', they'd have to put together things which, given what has been established about how the setting works, should logically lead to an explosion. Of course that's not what you want or why you structure things the way you do, because you're aiming for an aesthetic to survive whatever the players might do, whereas I generally don't want to do that - if the players want to push against an aesthetic they don't like, that's engagement and I want it to be viable to do so!

So for me I want there to be structure, but that structure shouldn't start from defining the limits that will hold absolutely and working backwards; rather the structure should inform how the elements of the world work together and then allow those to be combined to build upwards step by step. The sort of holy grail setting concept for me would be one in which that low level structure can be recombined to produce maybe only specific higher level structures, whose elements themselves could be recombined to produce a broader set, and so on - but with each step requiring some kind of thing to be done at larger and larger scale within the world to enable it. Nested infrastructure all the way up, producing options for specific and identifiable conceptual novelties at each stage, and having corresponding specific and identifiable conceptual problems naturally emerge in order to achieve those.

Anyhow, about rules. Rules serve a number of purposes other than control and limitation of scope. I find that the most important things for rules to do are:

- Transfer the ability and responsibility to resolve 'what happens next' to players at the table other than the GM. This serves two purposes - one to allow offloading of some of the mental effort to step the world forward, the other to give players guarantees about specific things such that they can form plans without having to engage the GM in their planning, which itself has a number of benefits in parallelism, preventing information from leaking that the characters aren't aware of, preventing the GM from contributing to the plan and then being biased towards its success, etc.

- Provide inspiration as to what kinds of things might be possible that wouldn't be obvious solely from the mindset that a player brings into the game. Sort of like how it can be easier to write given a prompt on a topic instead of a blank sheet of paper.

- Provide concrete hooks to attach concepts to and to render conceptual things tractable. It's easier to communicate 'this power makes you supernaturally lucky' if players are rolling literal dice and the power translates to a re-roll. It's easier to communicate 'this power represents the in-universe consequences of being able to break the 4th wall' if you can implement it as 'you can reach over and change one letter on another character's character sheet' or something gimmicky like that.

- Provide concrete examples of how the GM (and here I'm taking the stance of 'for each campaign, the GM authors the mechanics, setting, etc appropriate to that campaign') is thinking about how the world works, reducing the degree of mismatch in expectations.

Those particular uses of rules work well with mutability as a fundamental property, because each of them has to do with communicating about how things currently are, and observed potential for mutability or mutation of the rules directly corresponds to an indication that things about the world could change or have changed. That's nice to have as a meta-game cue to make certain things particularly salient, for example.

What I don't usually need rules for is to establish hard limits and bounds. That's kind of how I thought when I was introduced to the hobby, but when I GM'd that way it led to problems, and I encountered a number of GMs who went totally the opposite direction and surrendered control over those things the rules were particularly cautious about. And what I learned from playing with those GMs is that a lot of the kind of aggressive over-reach that players do is a reaction to feeling a limit. If someone says 'I use Wish to become a god' and your response is 'okay, you're now a god, I'm completely prepared to run this campaign! What kind of god stuff did you want to do first?', then often the reaction is actually to pull back on power rather than push for more. I ran a campaign testing this by basically making starting characters have the ability to - for free - author their own abilities as long as those abilities didn't directly try to assert an effect over other characters of the same supernatural variety as them, and I found that in general the players found a level of power they were comfortable with and were willing to more or less cruise there for far longer than you might expect; in fact, it took shocks from adversaries operating on a higher scale to get them to actually make broader use of that potential.

And ultimately I've learned to be able to construct questions which no amount of power lets you cut through and make irrelevant so no matter where the game goes as far as raw ability to shape reality I never have to be in fear that it will make the game impossible to GM.

In my experience, all of this stuff like 'X is dangerous an you should emphasize how dangerous it is' just eggs players on. That's like putting a flag up that 'what you're going for is so worth it that even the GM is afraid of what happens if you get it'. I mean, you can do that and play with that tension intentionally - it's a great tool to make something seem sweeter when the player actually gets it - but I wouldn't want to be using that tool out of concern that without it players might run roughshod over the setting or something like that. I have no interest in being on either side of trying to teach the players a lesson about hubris.

Now, making things dangerous as a way to intentionally incentivize power-seeking behavior? That I can get behind. 'This is a high-level zone but if you manage to figure out a trick survive it early you can sequence break' is an aesthetic I rather like.

@NichG: see, if I want to play around with arbitrary language statements, I will usually just play wholly in a natural language, a la play-by-post freeform. Mostly, I just wanted to point out what you want is multiply realizable, with some ways being fairly simple & traditional.

I rank vying for attention of an overdeity there with vying for a wish-granting device - sure, some people might hate the idea of depending on an externality like that, but as far as gaming and mythical archetypes go, it's one of the low-hanging fruits. Fight for who becomes the overdeity, winner grant favors to those you desire, repeat from the beginning.

Sure. But it's like, Dwarf Fortress is Turing Complete, so I could theoretically engineer a computer in it that could run Skyrim. But that wouldn't be a good way to play Skyrim. It's useful as a demonstration to show that the space of options is wide enough that we have the freedom to search for the options to achieve the goal that we also actually like, rather than getting overly stuck on details that aren't so important.

Pex

2022-08-05, 08:07 PM

NichG

2022-08-05, 09:06 PM

This then is another way of saying give warriors more buttons to push to do things, which is not a bad idea. It's also another way of saying give rules for things and not have it be DM make it up. PhoenixPhyre likes to say spells do what they say they do, no more no less. He's not wrong, but the reason DMs are more willing to accept outside the box thinking of clever spell use is because the mechanics are already in place. Spells allow for wild things so any bit more is not out of the question to think about. The spell system already has built in limits of spell slots and defined DCs. The DM doesn't need to make up everything. He only needs to consider this one particular spell use idea. To give martials new stuff is different because there aren't as many guidelines. Yes, the attack roll is fine and dandy. Inventing a new battlemaster master maneuver isn't too bad. It uses up a limited resource and a defined DC calculation. It's the non-combat stuff where the trouble lies. There it's all DM make it up with no benchmarks to compare difficulties and no resource expenditure. If you want the ability for players and DMs to create their own new stuff then you need published words on paper in the rulebook stuff in the first place.

Tome of Battle gives an excellent template for non-caster-but-quadratic ability sets. You could use the maneuver/boost/stance/counter system for all sorts of stuff, not just hitting things with swords. There's already stances and maneuvers that let you fly, teleport, etc. There are ones that fluff-wise change how a character perceives things. Stance that lets someone perceive magical auras? Entities nearby on coterminous planes? Why not! Stance that lets you detect hostility even before it has turned into action - basically detecting murderous intent? Why not! Now scale that to high level and you have a stance that gives you spidey-sense for world-ending threats, sure!

Things which help others on the team in combat situations are also already there, so why not extend it - stance of leadership that lets you buff the rolls of people working directly under you? Why not! Counter that lets you take over a Hide or Move Silently check from someone else? Why not!

Could go even further afield. Why not have a maneuver that lets you replace someone's words as they speak by manipulating sound with your ki? Why not have a maneuver that lets you use your ki to drive out a disease? There are counters that let you replace arbitrary saving throws with Concentration checks after all, or 'end effects impacting you', so that's not so different. Modified version of Iron Heart Surge to cure someone else's illness, sure, why not?

Pex

2022-08-06, 01:41 AM

Tome of Battle gives an excellent template for non-caster-but-quadratic ability sets. You could use the maneuver/boost/stance/counter system for all sorts of stuff, not just hitting things with swords. There's already stances and maneuvers that let you fly, teleport, etc. There are ones that fluff-wise change how a character perceives things. Stance that lets someone perceive magical auras? Entities nearby on coterminous planes? Why not! Stance that lets you detect hostility even before it has turned into action - basically detecting murderous intent? Why not! Now scale that to high level and you have a stance that gives you spidey-sense for world-ending threats, sure!

Things which help others on the team in combat situations are also already there, so why not extend it - stance of leadership that lets you buff the rolls of people working directly under you? Why not! Counter that lets you take over a Hide or Move Silently check from someone else? Why not!

Could go even further afield. Why not have a maneuver that lets you replace someone's words as they speak by manipulating sound with your ki? Why not have a maneuver that lets you use your ki to drive out a disease? There are counters that let you replace arbitrary saving throws with Concentration checks after all, or 'end effects impacting you', so that's not so different. Modified version of Iron Heart Surge to cure someone else's illness, sure, why not?

I was so hoping 4E would be Tome of Battle + Psionics, but that dream did not come true. The battlemaster maneuvers were supposed to be for all fighters, but since they made it a subclass that shows they're afraid to do it. It's too late now for 5E, even 5.5E. We'll have to wait until 6E for the next opportunity, but that won't be until, guessing, 2030 at least unless 5.5E flops.

noob

2022-08-06, 08:00 AM

I was so hoping 4E would be Tome of Battle + Psionics, but that dream did not come true. The battlemaster maneuvers were supposed to be for all fighters, but since they made it a subclass that shows they're afraid to do it. It's too late now for 5E, even 5.5E. We'll have to wait until 6E for the next opportunity, but that won't be until, guessing, 2030 at least unless 5.5E flops.

Making one simple fighter(the champion fighter) was a good idea (historically(even now, it is true) fighter was the most played class especially for people starting out in dnd, it ought to have one easy to play subclass for this reason) however due to the subclass mechanic, a subclass can only be equally complicated or more complicated than the base class so due to the design idea of subclasses they could not make maneuvers be a base class feature and have a simple fighter subclass.
Subclasses are essentially prcs(lots of them even match prc concepts from previous editions perfectly) and I do not really understand why they decided to make all players basically forced to pick a prc, I think it was a poor decision and that subclasses ought to not exist or be optional like prcs used to.

It is as if they decided "People raged against us making dozens of manuals adding prcs so now prcs will be mandatory and we rename them so that people will not figure out we are spamming prcs again"

LibraryOgre

2022-08-06, 09:41 AM

Funnily enough, I made a classless (and raceless, for that matter) version of AD&D.

animorte

2022-08-06, 09:58 AM

Funnily enough, I made a classless (and raceless, for that matter) version of AD&D.

Too far gone to share?

Morphic tide

2022-08-06, 11:56 AM

What you want is a classless game. That's fine, but that's not D&D and D&D is not wrong about it. Classes are a specific suite of abilities. Depending on class you get a choice of abilities within that suite, but the choices are limited. Various abilities are locked behind being a certain level in a class. It's how D&D works; it's the game engine. If you can't accept it, then this is one instance where "D&D is not the game for you" is not meant as a derogatory insult.
Actually, the point being made is that "class" should not be a lock out for getting to accomplish a task. Different rates of progress towards specific tasks are described as fine, but not Fully Disallowed, and it's informed by the fact that spellcasters have sod-all such constraints as BRC posted just after you meaning it's something that's already a huge majority of the way there for some classes.

Fundamentally, the entire thread topic centers on the fact that spellcasters operate on a paradigm where "abilities within that suite" is a large number of selections from a gargantuan list with extremely limited or flat-out zero requirements for the choices you're making, usually with the ability to have an even larger set available to one character than they have on-hand, while martials have far fewer options that are far more restricted and far more locked-in. The Wizard and Cleric are 80% of the way to playing a classless game, while the Martials have to make a full class-level choice as to whether they can sneak around and stab people in the back or if they can be an effective long-range archer, no matter how obviously synergistic these are, because Rogue and Ranger were made different classes.

D&D doesn't do classes remotely sensibly because their scope is completely disconnected from eachother, because the Martials were never given a list honestly meant to operate like spell entries. You choose whether you're a Rogue or a Ranger, then a Rogue (Thief) or a Rogue (Assassin), binary-searching for increasingly specific skillsets instead of picking a "domain" of competency and grabbing things within it. Meanwhile the Wizard's only restriction is "on the Wizard spell list and can cast that spell level". Their basic concept comes back to the spellbook that lets them acquire more options as tied to them as their leveling benefits entirely independently of XP without any formal limit.

It doesn't matter if you constrain spellcasting by some kind of thematic specialization scheme, so long as spells remain the only high-volume ability addition scheme, because eventually some theme or other will be piled enough to revive the problem. You have to absolutely gut the business model, salami-slice and outright cripple spells to such an extent that not a single pre-existing setting continues to function, or cave and let the Martials join in on the fun of having expanding option lists for the detail work instead of forcefully mating archery to the Ranger with the occasional brute-force success from Fighter.

LibraryOgre

2022-08-06, 12:06 PM

Too far gone to share?

Sort of in a weird place; I wanted to start making it classless and raceless, but got bogged down somewhere, and moved on to another project.

https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2021/10/ad-character-creation-by-character.html

That's got the link to the 35 page document, including two psionics addenda (one for Comp Psi, one for S&P)

Pex

2022-08-06, 12:51 PM

Making one simple fighter(the champion fighter) was a good idea (historically(even now, it is true) fighter was the most played class especially for people starting out in dnd, it ought to have one easy to play subclass for this reason) however due to the subclass mechanic, a subclass can only be equally complicated or more complicated than the base class so due to the design idea of subclasses they could not make maneuvers be a base class feature and have a simple fighter subclass.
Subclasses are essentially prcs(lots of them even match prc concepts from previous editions perfectly) and I do not really understand why they decided to make all players basically forced to pick a prc, I think it was a poor decision and that subclasses ought to not exist or be optional like prcs used to.

It is as if they decided "People raged against us making dozens of manuals adding prcs so now prcs will be mandatory and we rename them so that people will not figure out we are spamming prcs again"

I don't object to Champion existing with 5E now, but upon need of a simple class barbarian would have fit the bill.

Actually, the point being made is that "class" should not be a lock out for getting to accomplish a task. Different rates of progress towards specific tasks are described as fine, but not Fully Disallowed, and it's informed by the fact that spellcasters have sod-all such constraints as BRC posted just after you meaning it's something that's already a huge majority of the way there for some classes.

True. Such a thing is well suited as something skill use would fulfill, but the game designers chose to leave that up to DM make it up instead of doing their job. Here's to hoping they fix that in 2024.

animorte

2022-08-06, 01:09 PM

Sort of in a weird place; I wanted to start making it classless and raceless, but got bogged down somewhere, and moved on to another project.

https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2021/10/ad-character-creation-by-character.html

That's got the link to the 35 page document, including two psionics addenda (one for Comp Psi, one for S&P)

I realize it's in your sig, but just want to note that entire site is a wonder to behold. I've been interested in designing a build-your-own class system and this is a great deal of inspiration, if you don't mind my utilizing some of it for in-house homebrew... ?

LibraryOgre

2022-08-06, 01:44 PM

I realize it's in your sig, but just want to note that entire site is a wonder to behold. I've been interested in designing a build-your-own class system and this is a great deal of inspiration, if you don't mind my utilizing some of it for in-house homebrew... ?

Go for it. If you want to talk about it, feel free to PM me.

noob

2022-08-06, 01:54 PM

I don't object to Champion existing with 5E now, but upon need of a simple class barbarian would have fit the bill.

No it could not have because starting players would still be picking fighter but then would suffer extra complexity.
The simplest class have to be named fighter specifically due to the media associations people have making them play this class specifically.
If you name the simple class barbarian people will imagine a shirtless savage man and there is fewer people that wants to play a shirtless savage man than people who wants to play the iconic fighter.
Fluff exists and that is why we can not swap around things and this is for this reason that the simplest class must be named fighter and not barbarian nor druid nor tophat maker nor bicycle man.

This is proof of the popularity of the fighter and its associated concepts that you want to shove your desires for complexity in this class specifically and not shove your desires for a complex martial in another class.
It is because of that popularity that it must be the simple class: people starting dnd should get a simpler to play class in order to participate without struggling with the rules and they will start with a fighter even if you make the fighter require 9 different phds and 50 years of study before being able to do anything with it, they will still start with the fighter then suffer then decide dnd is bad and play another game.

Tanarii

2022-08-06, 01:57 PM

Actually, the point being made is that "class" should not be a lock out for getting to accomplish a task.
I remember when this was the huge argument against the Thief class.

Personally I was fine with combat skills being locked out by Fighters & Clerics and their subclasses, when Magic-users were effectively non-combatants outside their artillery spells, and needed a wall of Fighters and Clerics between them and the enemy.

I was less fine with Thieves being very poor in combat and having low success chances and "locking out" anyone else from trying to hide or sneak or disable a trap. Then they introduced Weapon Mastery and General Skills in BECMI and NWPs in AD&D. The only mistake they made IMO was giving any of that to magic users.

3e made the mistake of tying Skill Points to Intelligence. That should never have happened.

In 5e, full casters should probably start with zero skill proficiencies from class. 2 from background only.

animorte

2022-08-06, 03:08 PM

3e made the mistake of tying Skill Points to Intelligence. That should never have happened.

In 5e, full casters should probably start with zero skill proficiencies from class. 2 from background only.

Someone made a logical statement upthread supporting Intelligence and skill points working together. Currently it’s the least useful ability to have unless it’s your casting stat. Strength is right there with it, imho.

I agree with this. Casters simulate skills through their massive selection of spells throughout the game in such a way that no manner of skill progression can keep up.

Pex

2022-08-06, 03:47 PM

No it could not have because starting players would still be picking fighter but then would suffer extra complexity.
The simplest class have to be named fighter specifically due to the media associations people have making them play this class specifically.
If you name the simple class barbarian people will imagine a shirtless savage man and there is fewer people that wants to play a shirtless savage man than people who wants to play the iconic fighter.
Fluff exists and that is why we can not swap around things and this is for this reason that the simplest class must be named fighter and not barbarian nor druid nor tophat maker nor bicycle man.

This is proof of the popularity of the fighter and its associated concepts that you want to shove your desires for complexity in this class specifically and not shove your desires for a complex martial in another class.
It is because of that popularity that it must be the simple class: people starting dnd should get a simpler to play class in order to participate without struggling with the rules and they will start with a fighter even if you make the fighter require 9 different phds and 50 years of study before being able to do anything with it, they will still start with the fighter then suffer then decide dnd is bad and play another game.

I prefer not to insult the intelligence of new players. Being a new player does not automatically mean unable to handle a complex class. A new player just hasn't played D&D before. Even if said player is new to RPGs that doesn't mean he can't handle resources. If the player had played board games there are many worker placement and resource management games. When a new player wants something simple, since he doesn't know the game he asks the DM "What's simple?" The DM says "Here, play a barbarian. The basics is say you rage and attack and you take half damage from everything that hits you." New player: "Half damage? Cool!" If he wants to imagine himself as the bare-chested muscle man hero he can. If he wants to wear armor, he can. He's learning the game, so at this point it doesn't matter he's not the tactical fighter doing maneuvers wearing full plate and shield. After he learns the game his next character can be that when he saw his party member doing it. Right now he's learning what all the dice mean.

noob

2022-08-06, 03:57 PM

I prefer not to insult the intelligence of new players. Being a new player does not automatically mean unable to handle a complex class. A new player just hasn't played D&D before. Even if said player is new to RPGs that doesn't mean he can't handle resources. If the player had played board games there are many worker placement and resource management games. When a new player wants something simple, since he doesn't know the game he asks the DM "What's simple?" The DM says "Here, play a barbarian. The basics is say you rage and attack and you take half damage from everything that hits you." New player: "Half damage? Cool!" If he wants to imagine himself as the bare-chested muscle man hero he can. If he wants to wear armor, he can. He's learning the game, so at this point it doesn't matter he's not the tactical fighter doing maneuvers wearing full plate and shield. After he learns the game his next character can be that when he saw his party member doing it. Right now he's learning what all the dice mean.
You imagine the gm understand the game or that anyone read and interprets what the rules means or understand how things works.
It is specifically because the players are intelligent that they will read the minimal amount of rules in order to play in order to save time, investing time in learning the game is a good idea only if you know you will keep playing it and you will know such thing only after a few sessions(or 0 or 1 session if you figure out you do not want to play it either by reading the rules or by experiencing the game).
This is why the first class they think to pick should be the simplest, it saves browsing time because they do not have to skip through multiple classes to find out which one to play.
This is also why opportunity attacks were removed in dnd 5e: they were extra rules that participated in the basic flow of the combat, it was a bad thing because it increased the amount of rules to know when starting to play, I have seen people forget them many times including my gms.

And as for barbarians not being bare chested mans that gets angry your statement is false, we all know that if the player of the barbarian makes it wear an armour and never make him get angry, people will still see this character like a bare chested angry man just like how a wizard wearing commoner clothes will still be seen as wearing a wizard hat and a robe with stars, the player can say they changed the fluff but the people around will forget it after a short time and restart imagining your character as if it had the stereotypical figure, the name of the class and the standard fluff are extremely important because people will keep forgetting the specifics of your character and default to the standard fluff when imagining your character.

The standard fluff of dnd characters had more influence on collective imagination than the rules of dnd or your vision of your own calm barbarian with a quick wit and full plate.
Most people do read as few rules as possible (some get away with learning none of the written rules and saying "I do that" then throw a 20 sided dice then the gm looks at if the dice is low or high and does stuff in function, generally comedic results on 1 or absurdly epic results on 20 because it is fun that way) anyway because it is the optimal move anyone smart ought to do (less time spent reading fictional fantasy rules is more time spent having fun or doing productive stuff), so minimise the amount of stuff to know and remember for playing a starting character.

The lower amount or rules, more space for leeway dnd 5e philosophy was likely also caused by this observation of people not really caring about the rules but I think they did not go far enough and made too many rules some of them being way too specific and letting way too little space for freedom(ex: weapon attacks rules).

Pex

2022-08-06, 06:20 PM

You imagine the gm understand the game or that anyone read and interprets what the rules means or understand how things works.
It is specifically because the players are intelligent that they will read the minimal amount of rules in order to play in order to save time, investing time in learning the game is a good idea only if you know you will keep playing it and you will know such thing only after a few sessions(or 0 or 1 session if you figure out you do not want to play it either by reading the rules or by experiencing the game).
This is why the first class they think to pick should be the simplest, it saves browsing time because they do not have to skip through multiple classes to find out which one to play.
This is also why opportunity attacks were removed in dnd 5e: they were extra rules that participated in the basic flow of the combat, it was a bad thing because it increased the amount of rules to know when starting to play, I have seen people forget them many times including my gms.

And as for barbarians not being bare chested mans that gets angry your statement is false, we all know that if the player of the barbarian makes it wear an armour and never make him get angry, people will still see this character like a bare chested angry man just like how a wizard wearing commoner clothes will still be seen as wearing a wizard hat and a robe with stars, the player can say they changed the fluff but the people around will forget it after a short time and restart imagining your character as if it had the stereotypical figure, the name of the class and the standard fluff are extremely important because people will keep forgetting the specifics of your character and default to the standard fluff when imagining your character.

The standard fluff of dnd characters had more influence on collective imagination than the rules of dnd or your vision of your own calm barbarian with a quick wit and full plate.
Most people do read as few rules as possible (some get away with learning none of the written rules and saying "I do that" then throw a 20 sided dice then the gm looks at if the dice is low or high and does stuff in function, generally comedic results on 1 or absurdly epic results on 20 because it is fun that way) anyway because it is the optimal move anyone smart ought to do (less time spent reading fictional fantasy rules is more time spent having fun or doing productive stuff), so minimise the amount of stuff to know and remember for playing a starting character.

The lower amount or rules, more space for leeway dnd 5e philosophy was likely also caused by this observation of people not really caring about the rules but I think they did not go far enough and made too many rules some of them being way too specific and letting way too little space for freedom(ex: weapon attacks rules).

Hulk smash. Doesn't get any simpler than that.

How NPCs react to a character is up to the DM. Barbarian is the first class in the book. New player can go with that. Rage, attack, take half-damage. Done. The fighter gets his maneuvers for those who want more tactical combat. A player caring about what his armor looks like is a player caring about roleplaying. All good. No, he can't wear full plate to be the knight in shining armor as a barbarian. That's the player learning his first lesson of what it means to be a class, to have certain abilities and not have others. He can still wear armor and have a shield if he wants or maybe he likes the idea of running around like Conan or He-Man knowing he has the option. That's for the player to decide. Lesson number two: the new player learns he has choices. Playing a simple class does not mean he never makes choices.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-06, 06:45 PM

In 5e, full casters should probably start with zero skill proficiencies from class. 2 from background only. Wizards, bards, sorcerers ought to all have Arcana and no others. (Then add performance for Bard). Then two from background.

Pex

2022-08-06, 09:32 PM

Wizards, bards, sorcerers ought to all have Arcana and no others. (Then add performance for Bard). Then two from background.

I don't give a Hoover spellcasters have spells. They are allowed to have skills likes everyone else. They are beings too. The idea they would study different things as warriors is why Class Skills are a thing.

Tanarii

2022-08-06, 09:37 PM

I don't give a Hoover spellcasters have spells. They are allowed to have skills likes everyone else. They are beings too. The idea they would study different things as warriors is why Class Skills are a thing.
Nothing says that 2 class skills is an entitlement. It's entirely possible that a full spellcasting class has enough inherent power that's all they should get. No skill at fighting, no extra skill proficiencies. Just (relatively speaking) lots of spells.

In theory, the same could be said about fighting or being a skill monkey. But it's pretty apparent that most folks consider those things where classes could have a bit of both (in different degrees), and maybe even a little bit of spellcasting on top of it.

Morphic tide

2022-08-06, 10:06 PM

Nothing says that 2 class skills is an entitlement. It's entirely possible that a full spellcasting class has enough inherent power that's all they should get. No skill at fighting, no extra skill proficiencies. Just (relatively speaking) lots of spells.
You're saying that it's fine for casters to be COMPLETELY removed from the mechanic representing actual knowledge, even when said knowledge is literally exactly that which governs their spells. It's fine to be very limited, but it's not fine to fully exclude them. By this "logic", it'd be fine to specifically exclude them from mechanics literally everyone else gets, monsters included, that are straight-up default rules because "it's entirely possible that a full spellcasting class has enough inherent power that's all they should get".

If that sentence is ever taken seriously, then the full spellcasting itself needs to be nerfed. Period, check, if it's at the point where it cannot be on the same character as default rules then it is an atrocity of game design, because that level of hyper-specialization is literally breaking the game by demanding parts of it not apply to somebody.

NichG

2022-08-06, 10:58 PM

It's more awkward to design in 5e, but in 3.5e you could basically just make it so that arcane spells are each associated with a particular Knowledge skill and require a certain number of ranks in that skill to be prepared as a book-caster. Yes the wizard will have lots of skills compared to others because of Int, but they'll also have extra considerations that they need to invest in those skills for. Give clerics and druids a few more skill points per level if you want to extend that idea to divine spells as well (or just make it 'all divine spells are Knowledge(Religion) or Knowledge(Nature) only').

Tanarii

2022-08-06, 11:07 PM

You're saying that it's fine for casters to be COMPLETELY removed from the mechanic representing actual knowledge,Nope. Just that it's possible to argue that their class shouldn't necessarily give them a proficiency bonus to 2 subsets of ability checks, for balance purposes.

Satinavian

2022-08-07, 01:10 AM

Psyren

2022-08-07, 01:12 AM

Folks - just because casters and martials can have the same proficiencies, doesn't mean you have to make them equally good at every task. Deciding to call for a check AND determining the results of a check are both up to the DM in 5e.

Rather than decree casters are only allowed to have Arcana or whatever else, you can buff martials by having their checks (physical and tool in particular) mean more.

Want your rogues to be trap masters? Let them be the only ones who can use thieves tools to hack and repurpose them against their enemies.
Want your barbarians to be olympiads? Let them make athletics checks to climb faster, or jump higher/further, than anyone else.
Want your monks to be wuxia savants? Let their acrobatics checks move them through enemies, avoid AoOs, through grapples and spell effects etc.

Satinavian

2022-08-07, 01:25 AM

Want your rogues to be trap masters? Let them be the only ones who can use thieves tools to hack and repurpose them against their enemies.
Want your barbarians to be olympiads? Let them make athletics checks to climb faster, or jump higher/further, than anyone else.
Want your monks to be wuxia savants? Let their acrobatics checks move them through enemies, avoid AoOs, through grapples and spell effects etc.
That would br fine if you make that stuff explicit class abilities. It is not, if the skills allow different things based on class without them being such.

But even if you do that, that would kinda link skills to classes even stronger which i don't think is particularly helpful. Skills are one of the few things where a character can be different from the starndard class trope. You could buld your barbarian as a scholar with anger issues or your rogue into a nomad scout with handle animals and survival and the only downside would be that your skills might not optimally synergize with your stats. But those builds get harder to justify, if barbarians only and explicitely would get cool skill stunts with athletics.

Pex

2022-08-07, 01:35 AM

Nothing says that 2 class skills is an entitlement. It's entirely possible that a full spellcasting class has enough inherent power that's all they should get. No skill at fighting, no extra skill proficiencies. Just (relatively speaking) lots of spells.

In theory, the same could be said about fighting or being a skill monkey. But it's pretty apparent that most folks consider those things where classes could have a bit of both (in different degrees), and maybe even a little bit of spellcasting on top of it.

While I was intending more about how spellcasting works, this is still the overreaction I mentioned earlier. Whatever fixes you think spellcasters need to make them more balanced, don't overreact in doing it to make them the new Sucks Donkey class. Denying them skill use is one such overreaction. You don't make them useless for everything that is not casting a spell.

Psyren

2022-08-07, 01:55 AM

That would br fine if you make that stuff explicit class abilities. It is not, if the skills allow different things based on class without them being such.

Why is that bad? Rogues and Rangers should both be great with traps. Fighters, Paladins, and Barbarians should both be athletes without peer. Monks, rogues, and rangers should be excellent acrobats. Paladins, Fighters and Barbarians should be expert riders. Rather than come up with a bunch of new common class features, just use the skill resolution system we already have, done.

But even if you do that, that would kinda link skills to classes even stronger which i don't think is particularly helpful. Skills are one of the few things where a character can be different from the starndard class trope. You could buld your barbarian as a scholar with anger issues or your rogue into a nomad scout with handle animals and survival and the only downside would be that your skills might not optimally synergize with your stats. But those builds get harder to justify, if barbarians only and explicitely would get cool skill stunts with athletics.

Why? That doesn't make sense to me. My barbarian getting extra stuff from Athletics that clerics don't get, doesn't mean he can't pick up Arcana if he wants to.

Satinavian

2022-08-07, 02:20 AM

Why is that bad? Rogues and Rangers should both be great with traps. Fighters, Paladins, and Barbarians should both be athletes without peer. Monks, rogues, and rangers should be excellent acrobats. Paladins, Fighters and Barbarians should be expert riders. Rather than come up with a bunch of new common class features, just use the skill resolution system we already have, done.Because what a class gives you should be spelled out in the rules. That is why we have rules about classes. Furthermore not everyone has the same mental image about what a class stands for and basing stuff on that is a bad idea.

And no, not every fighter/paladin/barbarian should be an expert rider. Maybe my fighter is heavy infantery or marine ? That is what the skill system is for.
3.x was way to restrictive with its class skills which is basically the same idea that certain classes should be good/bad at certain skills. It only made the game worse.

Why? That doesn't make sense to me. My barbarian getting extra stuff from Athletics that clerics don't get, doesn't mean he can't pick up Arcana if he wants to.Because the barbarian only gets the extra stuff from athletics if he actually succeeds in his athletics rolls. If he had a low athletics score, those features would be wasted. Which means there is suddenly a very strong incentive to actually take athletics as a barbarian because of the new synergy. That makes all barbarians more similar than before. It is another step towards "class is all that matters about a character".

I am convinced that skills being relatively decoupled from classes is a very good thing. I am not even happy about rogues and skills but i don't have a better idea what to replace it with so whatever.

noob

2022-08-07, 02:46 AM

Hulk smash. Doesn't get any simpler than that.

How NPCs react to a character is up to the DM. Barbarian is the first class in the book. New player can go with that. Rage, attack, take half-damage. Done. The fighter gets his maneuvers for those who want more tactical combat. A player caring about what his armor looks like is a player caring about roleplaying. All good. No, he can't wear full plate to be the knight in shining armor as a barbarian. That's the player learning his first lesson of what it means to be a class, to have certain abilities and not have others. He can still wear armor and have a shield if he wants or maybe he likes the idea of running around like Conan or He-Man knowing he has the option. That's for the player to decide. Lesson number two: the new player learns he has choices. Playing a simple class does not mean he never makes choices.

It does not matters how you dress your character because people around in the table will just read the name and assume a stereotypical character with specific clothing independent from how you dressed your character.
You assume something that is not normal, that the others will bother to learn the specifics of your characters.
As for choices, those are fine but only if you do not have to read rules to make them, choices that relies on the rules of the game itself makes the game harder to start playing because you have to read more rules.

Satinavian

2022-08-07, 03:07 AM

Honestly, my first D&D character was some AD&D halfelf fighter/cleric/wizard tripple class and i had a lot of fun with it. And the last time i ran a PF1-group with 4 players who never had played any kind of D&D before, they went with the classic fighter, rogue, cleric and sorcerer. But the fighter was played by the most rules minded player with most experienced with other system and he got bored. The rogue was played by a player good enough with rules but pretty bad at tactics and hardly ever got sneak attack, the sorcerer got played by someone not actually good at understanding rule text and sparked lots of discussion and the cleric was played by someone who actually wanted to play a healbot and was annoyed to have to read a new list of spells every two levels and to decide what to prepare.

Now, in hindsight, i might have guided each one to a better fitting class with similar thematic. Oh, how often have i wished to have done that. But first i am sure that significant number of newbies have no interest in the class fantasy of fighter or barbarian. And that having beginner/advanced core classes is not really something to stife for. More complex/less complex subclasses that still have a similar feel might work far better so everyone gets the intented complexity and the intended role.

noob

2022-08-07, 03:22 AM

Satinavian

2022-08-07, 03:37 AM

The subclass system means that the class itself must be as simple as the simplest subclass, subclasses does not helps at making simpler characters, it only helps at making more complicated characters.
Yes, it is difficult to get all that to work. The 5E structure is really not that good to implement a champion cleric, champion druid and a champion wizard to go along with the champion fighter. But if we really want "beginner classes" that is exactly what we need.

Luckily we are in the general roleplaying forum discussing in this topic all kinds of D&D and visions for its future, so we don't really have to restrict ourself too much to what works in 5E.

I find the talk about wheter beginners should be catered to by fighters or instead barbarians to be rather pointless and quite removed from the realities of actual beginners.

noob

2022-08-07, 04:22 AM

Yes, it is difficult to get all that to work. The 5E structure is really not that good to implement a champion cleric, champion druid and a champion wizard to go along with the champion fighter. But if we really want "beginner classes" that is exactly what we need.

Luckily we are in the general roleplaying forum discussing in this topic all kinds of D&D and visions for its future, so we don't really have to restrict ourself too much to what works in 5E.

I find the talk about wheter beginners should be catered to by fighters or instead barbarians to be rather pointless and quite removed from the realities of actual beginners.

I did make a "simplest wizard" subclass that have only passive abilities that are just directly additions to values so that you have to recalculate things only when you level up.
The issue is that you still have the spell slots and all those things.

Ignimortis

2022-08-07, 04:31 AM

Why is that bad? Rogues and Rangers should both be great with traps. Fighters, Paladins, and Barbarians should both be athletes without peer. Monks, rogues, and rangers should be excellent acrobats. Paladins, Fighters and Barbarians should be expert riders. Rather than come up with a bunch of new common class features, just use the skill resolution system we already have, done.

Why? That doesn't make sense to me. My barbarian getting extra stuff from Athletics that clerics don't get, doesn't mean he can't pick up Arcana if he wants to.

Because that means that classes are even more impactful, and also if you don't take Athletics on a Barbarian, you're suddenly just not using some of your features. I want any character with the same level of investment into a skill (plus stat) to be capable of very similar things. It would be far better to just make those things into a skill+skill feat system, and give martials noticeably more skillpoints and skill feats.

To the tune of spellcasters getting their casting skill (Arcana/Religion/Nature) and maybe two more (backgrounds and w/e), and a skill feat every three levels, whereas martials get six or even eight (and Rogue getting half again as much) skills and a skill feat every level.

The subclass system means that the class itself must be as simple as the simplest subclass, subclasses does not helps at making simpler characters, it only helps at making more complicated characters.

In its' current state, sure. But what if the subclass system actually could replace features with other features and alter your class on a fundamental level instead of being the cherry on top? That would unlock a myriad possibilities while keeping the space for simple Fighters. In fact, you could bake Champion into the base Fighter and say "just take no subclass, you're not really losing anything by that" - and then have something ToB-like for people who know enough of the system and aren't afraid to toss half of their class away in exchange for other things.

noob

2022-08-07, 04:56 AM

In its' current state, sure. But what if the subclass system actually could replace features with other features and alter your class on a fundamental level instead of being the cherry on top? That would unlock a myriad possibilities while keeping the space for simple Fighters. In fact, you could bake Champion into the base Fighter and say "just take no subclass, you're not really losing anything by that" - and then have something ToB-like for people who know enough of the system and aren't afraid to toss half of their class away in exchange for other things.

Congratulations on inventing alternate class features.
Dnd 3.5 used it only for weird things and power creep but there is no reasons why it could not be used for more ordinary things.

Ignimortis

2022-08-07, 05:23 AM

Congratulations on inventing alternate class features.
Dnd 3.5 used it only for weird things and power creep but there is no reasons why it could not be used for more ordinary things.

That and PF1 archetypes are how I would do subclasses, yes. It would be more complex than what 5e does, but that's the point - you build a base class to be less complex and then offer customization to people who are ready to go deeper.

3.5's power creep ACFs weren't always bad, either. Conjuration Specialist was busted, but Penetrating Strike for Rogue is practically required to function well. It's a kind of stealth errata, really.

Batcathat

2022-08-07, 09:02 AM

And as for barbarians not being bare chested mans that gets angry your statement is false, we all know that if the player of the barbarian makes it wear an armour and never make him get angry, people will still see this character like a bare chested angry man just like how a wizard wearing commoner clothes will still be seen as wearing a wizard hat and a robe with stars, the player can say they changed the fluff but the people around will forget it after a short time and restart imagining your character as if it had the stereotypical figure, the name of the class and the standard fluff are extremely important because people will keep forgetting the specifics of your character and default to the standard fluff when imagining your character.

No, we don't all know that. While I don't doubt that's true at some tables, it's hardly some universal truth. Yes, each class probably comes with some baggage but most people I've played with would be able to keep in mind that this particular barbarian doesn't wear a loincloth or whatever.

Pex

2022-08-07, 10:29 AM

Because what a class gives you should be spelled out in the rules. That is why we have rules about classes. Furthermore not everyone has the same mental image about what a class stands for and basing stuff on that is a bad idea.

And no, not every fighter/paladin/barbarian should be an expert rider. Maybe my fighter is heavy infantery or marine ? That is what the skill system is for.
3.x was way to restrictive with its class skills which is basically the same idea that certain classes should be good/bad at certain skills. It only made the game worse.
Because the barbarian only gets the extra stuff from athletics if he actually succeeds in his athletics rolls. If he had a low athletics score, those features would be wasted. Which means there is suddenly a very strong incentive to actually take athletics as a barbarian because of the new synergy. That makes all barbarians more similar than before. It is another step towards "class is all that matters about a character".

I am convinced that skills being relatively decoupled from classes is a very good thing. I am not even happy about rogues and skills but i don't have a better idea what to replace it with so whatever.

I don't mind Rogues (and Bards to an extent) being proficient in more skills overall than other classes, but I do mind through Expertise they can be better than other classes in their forte. Not that most Rogues would put Expertise in Knowledge Arcana or Athletics, but they could and outclass Wizards and Barbarians. Either remove Expertise altogether or probably better allow other classes Expertise in specific defined skills.

It does not matters how you dress your character because people around in the table will just read the name and assume a stereotypical character with specific clothing independent from how you dressed your character.
You assume something that is not normal, that the others will bother to learn the specifics of your characters.
As for choices, those are fine but only if you do not have to read rules to make them, choices that relies on the rules of the game itself makes the game harder to start playing because you have to read more rules.

You're assuming what other people think. It doesn't really matter what they think. What matters is the player's thoughts on his own character. He can describe his character as a barbarian wearing armor. If other people get offended that's their problem. It's already official in 5E barbarians can wear medium armor and use a shield. They don't have to be running around nearly naked. The rules provide a benefit if they do, but they don't have to. If you cannot conceive of a barbarian other than Arnold Schwarzeneggar in a loin cloth that's your problem.

noob

2022-08-07, 11:23 AM

You're assuming what other people think. It doesn't really matter what they think. What matters is the player's thoughts on his own character. He can describe his character as a barbarian wearing armor. If other people get offended that's their problem. It's already official in 5E barbarians can wear medium armor and use a shield. They don't have to be running around nearly naked. The rules provide a benefit if they do, but they don't have to. If you cannot conceive of a barbarian other than Arnold Schwarzeneggar in a loin cloth that's your problem.

I observed other players imagining my characters wrong rather often and it is why I talked about the issue of people defaulting to specific conceptions.

Tanarii

2022-08-07, 11:26 AM

Still a bad idea overall.

If you put a skill system in your game, you want every character to use it, not make it a tool of certain classes.
Then there is the issue that this basically makes casters incompetent in everything aside from their spells. "Incompetent at everything nomral" is not a class fantasy anyone wants to play.
Lastly, that would push caster players even more to pursue 5-minute workdays because they ar dead weight aside from spells.

While I was intending more about how spellcasting works, this is still the overreaction I mentioned earlier. Whatever fixes you think spellcasters need to make them more balanced, don't overreact in doing it to make them the new Sucks Donkey class. Denying them skill use is one such overreaction. You don't make them useless for everything that is not casting a spell.

I don't mind Rogues (and Bards to an extent) being proficient in more skills overall than other classes, but I do mind through Expertise they can be better than other classes in their forte. Not that most Rogues would put Expertise in Knowledge Arcana or Athletics, but they could and outclass Wizards and Barbarians. Either remove Expertise altogether or probably better allow other classes Expertise in specific defined skills.

This is why Martials can't have nice things. Because spellcasters have to get them too. They have to be good at combat, they have to be good skills, they have to be good not running out of resources, they have to have a casting fall back if god forbid they should run out of resources, they can't have limitations that might make it hard to cast spells sometimes. /grumblegrumble :smallsmile::smallamused:

noob

2022-08-07, 11:48 AM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-07, 11:54 AM

This is why Martials can't have nice things. Because spellcasters have to get them too. They have to be good at combat, they have to be good skills, they have to be good not running out of resources, they have to have a casting fall back if god forbid they should run out of resources, they can't have limitations that might make it hard to cast spells sometimes. /grumblegrumble :smallsmile::smallamused:

A little more seriously and focused, but this is why you can't solve D&D imbalance by tweaking the skill system alone. Casters have just as good access or better, plus spells that allow them to emulate or exceed anything a martial can do or skip the skill system entirely. X =/= X + 10. Or especially X =/= 10*X.

Anyone who uses STR for melee/AC but uses weapons needs 2 attack stats or is incapable at range. Casters generally only need one primary stat, and abominations like Hex Warrior allow them often to be good at weapons using their casting stat. Barbarians are hit especially hard if they want to fulfill one part of their class fantasy (use Unarmored Defense), needing high STR, DEX and CON while not having extra ASIs.

Bards get explicit expertise (while being a full caster), but even wizards can pick up skill empowerment, which is expertise in a can. In a floating skill of your choice at cast time. Knowledge clerics get floating expertise. Plus all the ways to completely obviate ability checks.

So if you simply say that ability checks can do more things...casters can do those things better, cheaper, and faster. You've widened the gap, not narrowed it.

To reach parity, you'd have to do something like one of the following
1. Give massive class features to martials and then forbid anyone from writing a spell that does anything similar. Since martials are far behind and would only gain narrowly-focused benefits, those would have to be major. To the tune of "teleport anywhere at will" or "permanent flight with a high speed" or "3e leadership in its most busted forms" or "3e diplomancy". None of which are conducive (IMO) to a good team game.
2. Give martials a full set of "spell-equivalents". Which means something like 9 tiers, picking one or two from ~20-30 choices every even level, with a total of several hundred choices. At that point, just be honest and say you're making everyone spell casters. Because that's what you've done. And yes, ToB was exactly this choice. The differences in refresh rates were not substantive--you could do the same thing with spells (cf the 5e warlock). They only weren't sword magic because they weren't labeled as such. But fundamentally ToB is exactly "what if martials were full casters and their 'maneuvers' were their class features".
3. Start by nerfing spells and the spell system. Make it so casters can't be built to do everything (even if each individual is more limited). That is, lay out some fundamental "if you pick wizard, you will be bad at X" lines that cannot be crossed. Throw out a lot of the existing spells and stop printing more of them (at least for a while). Once that's stable and you no longer have X = X + 10 but now martials are X and casters are Y (different, complementary capabilities), then you can adjust X and Y to bring equality. Because adding things to one side no longer adds them to the other, so the gap has a chance to shrink.
4. Or just give up and make everyone wish complete, which makes them all basically the same character. In the infinite power limit, all differences disappear.

Personally, I'd start by separating out a lot of the "utility" spells and no longer calling them spells at all. No one can cast them via spell slots. Instead, anyone (of the appropriate level) can learn via non-leveled means (finding the instructions, being taught them, purchasing the instructions, etc) and perform them. And then balance them in other ways. Component costs, time costs, explicit cooldowns, exhaustion penalties for performing them multiple times, narrative requirements such as "can only be performed at a consecrated temple to a god of X", etc. This would include most of the X Restoration/condition removal, resurrection, transport, information gathering, summoning and binding (for specific tasks only, not general minionmancy), "reshape the landscape" (aka fabricate/wall of stone in its permanent form) effects, etc. Leave spells to be the things that have to happen now if they're going to be of any use. Which is combat spells plus some others (such as revivify, which has to be done within a minute of death). That alone equalizes a lot of the non-combat portions of the game. And the combat portions are already fairly (but not perfectly) ok. And you're not forcing anyone to be a magic knight--these ritual things are stuff that everyone in the setting can do, just like almost anyone can learn to drive a car or use a computer in our world). They're just...alternate technology.

After that, then we can talk about explicit buffs and nerfs in general. But the playing field would look different enough already that I wouldn't commit to any changes ahead of time.

Satinavian

2022-08-07, 01:12 PM

To reach parity, you'd have to do something like one of the following
1. Give massive class features to martials and then forbid anyone from writing a spell that does anything similar. Since martials are far behind and would only gain narrowly-focused benefits, those would have to be major. To the tune of "teleport anywhere at will" or "permanent flight with a high speed" or "3e leadership in its most busted forms" or "3e diplomancy". None of which are conducive (IMO) to a good team game.
2. Give martials a full set of "spell-equivalents". Which means something like 9 tiers, picking one or two from ~20-30 choices every even level, with a total of several hundred choices. At that point, just be honest and say you're making everyone spell casters. Because that's what you've done. And yes, ToB was exactly this choice. The differences in refresh rates were not substantive--you could do the same thing with spells (cf the 5e warlock). They only weren't sword magic because they weren't labeled as such. But fundamentally ToB is exactly "what if martials were full casters and their 'maneuvers' were their class features".
3. Start by nerfing spells and the spell system. Make it so casters can't be built to do everything (even if each individual is more limited). That is, lay out some fundamental "if you pick wizard, you will be bad at X" lines that cannot be crossed. Throw out a lot of the existing spells and stop printing more of them (at least for a while). Once that's stable and you no longer have X = X + 10 but now martials are X and casters are Y (different, complementary capabilities), then you can adjust X and Y to bring equality. Because adding things to one side no longer adds them to the other, so the gap has a chance to shrink.
4. Or just give up and make everyone wish complete, which makes them all basically the same character. In the infinite power limit, all differences disappear.
Nr 1 and 4 sound silly, honestly. I could see 2 and 3 work.

Personally, I'd start by separating out a lot of the "utility" spells and no longer calling them spells at all. No one can cast them via spell slots. Instead, anyone (of the appropriate level) can learn via non-leveled means (finding the instructions, being taught them, purchasing the instructions, etc) and perform them. And then balance them in other ways. Component costs, time costs, explicit cooldowns, exhaustion penalties for performing them multiple times, narrative requirements such as "can only be performed at a consecrated temple to a god of X", etc. This would include most of the X Restoration/condition removal, resurrection, transport, information gathering, summoning and binding (for specific tasks only, not general minionmancy), "reshape the landscape" (aka fabricate/wall of stone in its permanent form) effects, etc. Leave spells to be the things that have to happen now if they're going to be of any use. Which is combat spells plus some others (such as revivify, which has to be done within a minute of death). That alone equalizes a lot of the non-combat portions of the game. And the combat portions are already fairly (but not perfectly) ok. And you're not forcing anyone to be a magic knight--these ritual things are stuff that everyone in the setting can do, just like almost anyone can learn to drive a car or use a computer in our world). They're just...alternate technology.
I would probably play that.

But the thing is, i would probably not play a caster in such a system. In many other systems i had magical characters whose complete magic took way too long for combat and such never used such in combat. Those characters are a lot of fun. But if all characters would work this way, that totally would be an "everyone is a magic-user world" which is not actually a bad thing. The idea that someone who teleports around, uses various magical buffs and debuffs, has crafting and information gathering magic and even magical healing somehow counts not as mage because they use heavy armor and a sword is strange, to say at least. But magic knights are cool and "magic is everywhere"-settings are as well.

Of course, after making skills something anyone can learn and all utility spells as well, one might go the next step into a complete pointbuy system and ditch all those stupid classes altogether. Hmm, oh that starts to sound like one of the systems i actually play and find much better than D&D. What a surprise.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-07, 02:59 PM

Nr 1 and 4 sound silly, honestly. I could see 2 and 3 work.

I agree that 1 and 4 sound silly. My personal preference is for something more like 3. But either way, we all should be honest about what we're doing and accept that yes, going down the route of ToB/etc is path #2, just without saying they're spells.

I would probably play that.

But the thing is, i would probably not play a caster in such a system. In many other systems i had magical characters whose complete magic took way too long for combat and such never used such in combat. Those characters are a lot of fun. But if all characters would work this way, that totally would be an "everyone is a magic-user world" which is not actually a bad thing. The idea that someone who teleports around, uses various magical buffs and debuffs, has crafting and information gathering magic and even magical healing somehow counts not as mage because they use heavy armor and a sword is strange, to say at least. But magic knights are cool and "magic is everywhere"-settings are as well.

I think I didn't explain things very well. The idea is to split the tooling for the two "scales" of play, namely the "in the moment" one where timescales are measured in seconds or minutes and the direct effects are measured in handfuls of individuals and 10s of yards, and the "strategic" scale where times are measured in hours or days (mostly) or even weeks and years and the direct effects are measured in regions, nations, and planes.

Mages would be the only ones doing magic at the "in the moment" scale. That's what spells are for--interacting at that scale. So a wizard might still be throwing fireballs and raising walls of stone...those walls would simply not persist outside that timescale (crumbling to dust due to requiring active magic binding them). And the (non-magic) knights wouldn't, they've be using physical means (mostly). Utility spells that function at this scale would still exist as such. And this isn't necessarily combat specific--consider the case where you're walking through a tight mountain pass and the ledge you're on starts to crumble. How do you overcome that (and not fall to your death)?

* A STR focused martial might simply jump. Their reflexes are good enough and their physical prowess is such that they can just make the jump. Or catch themselves on the ledge and pull up.
* A monk might run along the cliff wall, avoiding the broken area.
* A rogue-type might sling a rope across, Indiana Jones/whip style.
* A caster type would generally cast a spell, either floating or teleporting or something.

But at the strategic scale, everyone would have (if they chose) access to the larger-scale, less personal effects. You don't need a wizard to be able to teleport the group, you just need someone who has found the proper Incantation, is powerful enough (gating on character level) and is willing to pay the cost (whatever that ends up being). Anyone can make a deal with a devil, summoning one into a prepared circle. But it has costs and limits, and doesn't make them your slave. That is, it's much more in accord with the fictional paradigm. Anyone can pray hard enough (given the right power level and preparation, possibly requiring a sanctified church) to raise the dead. Has other costs, and the god you're praying to has to be willing to grant it for that person[1], but those are narrative-level concerns, not tactical-level ones.

Basically, moving all of the narrative-interaction effects into the "anyone can learn to do this if they want" bucket like ability checks instead of the "must have class levels in X to learn to do this" bucket. That way, they can be balanced (or simply disallowed) separately from the more tactical things.

Imagine if you asked (in real life) the world's richest person, the world's fastest person, and the world's smartest person to assemble in a distant city. How would they accomplish this task? Well, the fastest person could just run there using his "super speed" ability and the smartest person could invent a teleportation device or mechanized walker, and the richest person could hire people to carry him. Or...they could get on a plane and fly. Possibly even the same plane. Or rent/buy cars and drive.

Same as if you asked those people to research something. They'd probably just...use the internet to find information. One may be better at interpreting the information (or not, depending on what you're talking about whether financial or scientific information) than another, but the tools they'd use are basically the same.

The idea is to make a lot of the "utility"/"strategic" scale magic into just technology that anyone can, in principle, learn to use. Instead of binding it to class features. Leave the class features for the meat of the "how do you interact with the world on a personal scale" game.

Of course, after making skills something anyone can learn and all utility spells as well, one might go the next step into a complete pointbuy system and ditch all those stupid classes altogether. Hmm, oh that starts to sound like one of the systems i actually play and find much better than D&D. What a surprise.

There's a lot of difference left. Because how a "servant of the spirits of nature" approaches a problem at the personal scale and how a "talented and practiced warrior" and how a "roguish denizen of the shadows of civilization" approaches a problem at the personal scale should be, in an archetype-heavy, archetype-following game, be different.

If a trap gets sprung and a heavy blade is falling,
* A barbarian might catch the blade by sheer strength.
* A heavy-armor type might angle his shield or weapon to deflect it from him.
* A rogue or monk might nimbly dodge.
* A wizard or sorcerer or ... might shield themselves with magic or *blip* past it, using their magic to make sure they're not where the blade is when the blade is there.

Each of those has consequences (so they're not simply just different video game animations)--the barbarian and/or the fighter will probably take some damage from it (on their bigger health pool). The dodgy-type might fail and actually take a significant hit or might dodge into another trap. The wizard (etc) is spending resources to do that, or if they don't have the resources/right ability, might take the hit and really regret it. Or trigger another trap by their tactical teleport.

And each of these plays into the archetypes here.

And with skills, different archetypes are going to approach problems differently. If the party has to gather information about a local ruin,
* the bard might hit up the inns and start carousing, pumping people (subtly) for information
* the rogue might hit up the local underground, looking for information from people who have tried or artifacts people have gathered.
* The fighter or paladin might hit up the local militia (relying on their common bond of weapons and armor and duty).
* The druid might commune with the animals
* the wizard might hit up the library/local lore-masters and do research into the fundamentals.
* etc

All of those play to their skills and archetypes, while still applying the basic skill/ability-check system.

Honestly, I see D&D's ability scores as best representing archetypes and approaches, not physically-bound metrics. You can have a person with substantial physical strength whose Strength score is only middling (cf a dancer or gymnast). Because their approach to things isn't the direct "overpower it with physical force" approach that Strength represents. It's avoid and precisely move. Shooting a real bow requires substantial strength, but D&D!Dexterity. Because it's about precision of aim, speed, and more subtle interactions than just brute force "hit it harder". Wielding a sword properly requires a lot of finesse and coordination, but is D&D!Strength, because it's a very direct approach to combat. D&D!Intelligence is more about outhinking the problems rather than just being high IQ. D&D!Wisdom is about being connected with the world around you and perceptive of things, not making good choices.

So each ability score represents how suited you are to one particular approach to problem solving. And different archetypes naturally rely on certain approaches more than others, although some can pick one of a couple. They're less about physically modeling the universe and more about modeling the narrative and archetypes.

Is this canon? No. Absolutely not. But one of the things I think that D&D does worst is actually explain its (justifiable, if explained correctly) assumptions in sane, coherent ways. You can get the same results and make it make sense if you discard the (poor or limited or nonexistent) attempts the books make to explain why this was chosen and come up with other, alternative explanations that fit the same rules and fiction. At least that's my experience.

[1] no, the god of evil and undeath isn't going to be willing to bring back the champion of the god of holiness and radiance, normally. Nor will that champion be willing to be brought back by the priest of that evil god. Unless, of course, there are deeper things at play. But that's a narrative concern, not a mechanical one.

Pex

2022-08-07, 06:10 PM

Mechalich

2022-08-07, 06:31 PM

I think I didn't explain things very well. The idea is to split the tooling for the two "scales" of play, namely the "in the moment" one where timescales are measured in seconds or minutes and the direct effects are measured in handfuls of individuals and 10s of yards, and the "strategic" scale where times are measured in hours or days (mostly) or even weeks and years and the direct effects are measured in regions, nations, and planes.

I don't know how much doing this helps. Yes there are a number of 'strategic' abilities that are limited to casters, but most of the imbalance operates 'in the moment' as well. For example, if you give everyone access to overland flight, that doesn't make tactical flight, both in and out of combat, less valuable. A lot of caster powers, like mind control and minionomancy, are less powerful if you lop off the strategic end, but still absurdly powerful overall.

Sneak Dog

2022-08-07, 06:59 PM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-07, 07:24 PM

I don't know how much doing this helps. Yes there are a number of 'strategic' abilities that are limited to casters, but most of the imbalance operates 'in the moment' as well. For example, if you give everyone access to overland flight, that doesn't make tactical flight, both in and out of combat, less valuable. A lot of caster powers, like mind control and minionomancy, are less powerful if you lop off the strategic end, but still absurdly powerful overall.

I'll note a few things.

First, this isn't designed to solve the problem entirely. Just make a first pass to stop the bleeding without having to actually remove possibilities from the game. Some of those effects (especially minionmancy) need a second pass to tune them down tremendously. In 5e, that second pass is as simple as saying "use the Summon X line, not the Conjure X line".

Second, I'm coming from a 5e perspective, where a lot of that is much weaker. Not unavailable or balanced, but weaker. Concentration, if nothing else, makes a big difference. Minions are great in combat, but not so great outside of it. Flight is great and useful, but not "must have or you fail at any reasonable encounter." I fully accept that balancing 3e this way wouldn't help--3e's balance is irredeemable IMO. It's best to just accept that playing 3e with any care for balance means carefully curating which options are available at any given table so you can't have a straight, unoptimized monk at a table with an intended challenge point better suited to an wizard/incantrix/A/B/C or vice versa.

Third, at this point I'm looking at "sharing the wealth". Giving non-casters things they can do at the strategic layer. In part so that DMs can plan larger-scale challenges around a relatively stable set of capabilities. Not "oh, the wizard player dropped out so now I have to rework that whole sub-plot that has tight timelines and a floating castle". Just like needing to have a heal-bot cleric isn't the best for actual diversity of builds (and was duly dropped from 5e), having "make or break" abilities (where "break" here refers to possible courses of action, not the game as a whole) isn't great for the game IMO.

As a note, fly is on my list of "things I'd turn into an Incantation and remove as a spell" (Incantation is my working name for this concept). It becomes a party buff that takes setup, not a single-target "ha ha I can fly and you can't" thing.

Fly
Rare, 1 minute, Exclusive, Debilitating (1)
As the spell, except that it affects 4 creatures. Special: If you take 10 minutes and expend a golden feather worth 100 gp, it can affect up to 8 creatures.

Notes: Rare means "level 11+ to learn". And yes, that's a big bump up. But it corresponds to upcasting it to 6th-ish level. Exclusive means that you can only ever have one instance up at a time. Debilitating (1) means that casting it again before finishing a long rest causes 1 rank of exhaustion to everyone involved. Yes, this is a nerf to the tactical aspect, since it takes 1 minute to cast instead of one action. To which I say...good.

Satinavian

2022-08-08, 12:27 AM

I think I didn't explain things very well. The idea is to split the tooling for the two "scales" of play, namely the "in the moment" one where timescales are measured in seconds or minutes and the direct effects are measured in handfuls of individuals and 10s of yards, and the "strategic" scale where times are measured in hours or days (mostly) or even weeks and years and the direct effects are measured in regions, nations, and planes.
No, i get it.

You have two kinds of Magic. Kind A is long lasting, difficult (longer, costly often ritualistic) to cast with wide reaching or huge effects. Bind B is easy and fast to cast, produced only short term effects on a small scale.

But which of these would be understood as the "real magic" ? Obviously magic A, not magic B. How much someone would be understood as "magic user" would be linked mostly to their mastery of magic A, your incantations. Magic B, your spells look like little more than party tricks in comparison. Someone specializing in it is hardly more than a charlatain.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 09:05 AM

Lord Raziere

2022-08-08, 09:14 AM

No, i get it.

You have two kinds of Magic. Kind A is long lasting, difficult (longer, costly often ritualistic) to cast with wide reaching or huge effects. Bind B is easy and fast to cast, produced only short term effects on a small scale.

But which of these would be understood as the "real magic" ? Obviously magic A, not magic B. How much someone would be understood as "magic user" would be linked mostly to their mastery of magic A, your incantations. Magic B, your spells look like little more than party tricks in comparison. Someone specializing in it is hardly more than a charlatain.

I disagree. Magic A can be used by anyone, at least to some degree. It's commonplace. There are animal messenger stations in every hamlet, with sending booths in most larger towns. Magic A is like using the Internet, part of everyday life. Magic B is like movie hacking. It takes talent and special training. It's reserved for the big things, and getting someone to do it for you is expensive because of supply and demand.

No one says that grandma sending you stupid cat videos is an internet expert. And that's Magic A.

Technically both of these views are incorrect.

There is no real reason to think either are more real or requiring more expertise than the other. Its silly to claim either of them being superior, as they just serve different purposes. Magic A may be more useful for wide societal long term stuff, but Magic B is useful for making sure you win a fight or survive a deadly situation, or put on a performance. They're different useful for different things.

casters saying other casters magic is not as good as their magic is just another form of tribalism/elitism, nothing more.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 09:49 AM

Technically both of these views are incorrect.

There is no real reason to think either are more real or requiring more expertise than the other. Its silly to claim either of them being superior, as they just serve different purposes. Magic A may be more useful for wide societal long term stuff, but Magic B is useful for making sure you win a fight or survive a deadly situation, or put on a performance. They're different useful for different things.

casters saying other casters magic is not as good as their magic is just another form of tribalism/elitism, nothing more.

I mostly agree, but I'd put the thing that requires actual talent (ie not anyone can do without special and difficult training) slightly above (from a prestige standpoint) the thing that anyone can learn to do. Magic A is, for the most part, cookie-cutter magic. Like cooking a microwave dinner, you're just pushing the buttons on pre-written, pre-packaged spells. Magic B requires cooking "from scratch" under pressure.

Lord Raziere

2022-08-08, 09:58 AM

I mostly agree, but I'd put the thing that requires actual talent (ie not anyone can do without special and difficult training) slightly above (from a prestige standpoint) the thing that anyone can learn to do. Magic A is, for the most part, cookie-cutter magic. Like cooking a microwave dinner, you're just pushing the buttons on pre-written, pre-packaged spells. Magic B requires cooking "from scratch" under pressure.

Again, you can't actually assume that.

you just want that to be true, that doesn't mean in any given magic it will BE true. Magic A could be like architecture which requires a lot of time to make and build with a lot of people contributing to make sure everything works right, and Magic B could be as simple as throwing a rock or firing a gun.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 10:33 AM

Again, you can't actually assume that.

you just want that to be true, that doesn't mean in any given magic it will BE true. Magic A could be like architecture which requires a lot of time to make and build with a lot of people contributing to make sure everything works right, and Magic B could be as simple as throwing a rock or firing a gun.

Since I'm the one designing it...I think I can assume that safely. Because my comments are constrained only to the system I'm proposing, not all possible systems that look and smell kinda similar on first inspection.

So yes, being a Wizard or a Cleric or a Sorcerer (etc, ie an actual caster who can use Magic B) in this (proposed, hypothetical) scenario is something special and requires either inborn talent or long and arduous training. Very few people can even make it through the intro courses. And getting spells to go off reliably and effectively during stressful situations is (by definition) difficult. You have to do all the parameter calculation and substitution in your head on the fly.

Magic A is literally cooking from a recipe. The costs as well as the requirements are all set out. Sure, sometimes you need expensive things or long cook times. But the chances of failure are minimal as long as you have enough personal power to do the thing at all. And for a whole swath of the Incantations, that personal power requirement is...basically nothing. The only reason people don't routinely use them (when they don't) is that they haven't put in the time and effort to memorize the recipe. Just like people don't cook from a cookbook and go to restaurants because it's easier to have someone else do the cooking and cleaning up.

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-08, 10:45 AM

I was less fine with Thieves being very poor in combat and having low success chances and "locking out" anyone else from trying to hide or sneak or disable a trap. Then they introduced Weapon Mastery and General Skills in BECMI and NWPs in AD&D. The only mistake they made IMO was giving any of that to magic users.
I didn't play the game at this time, but I think I'd probably be in the same camp as you on this.

3e made the mistake of tying Skill Points to Intelligence. That should never have happened.
Agreed as well.

In 5e, full casters should probably start with zero skill proficiencies from class. 2 from background only.
This makes sense to me as well. After all, casters are so busy learning all of their l33t spells. But as mentioned, this won't solve most issues that people have with the disparity. For me it will help curb some of my issue with the disparity, which is wizards just being able to do generally everything besides casting spells.

@PhoenixPhyre: Do you mind expanding on a few points?

1. Why do you see something like Tome of Battle as being the equivalent of spellcasting? I get the sense that even were we to limit ourselves to maneuvers that can still be realistic or not obviously supernatural with energy damage etc, you would still consider it like spellcasting. Is that because it is a finite resource?

2. Would you consider the Battle Masters maneuvers to be in the same category?

3. Why is this not a desirable solution or attempt at a solution in your eyes? I think this was a big point of contention in 4th, where "everyone is a caster". The thought never crossed my mind until I read it here on the boards, and I'd say 4th edition is probably the most fun I've had playing a fighter. It's not clear to me how giving the fighter maneuvers makes them a spellcaster. Fighters should be able to move around the battlefield, order/coordinate ally tactics, decapitate or dismember enemies, cause bleeding wounds, etc. If they get a maneuver that is essentially a save-or-die, but it's because they're cutting someone's head off, I don't see that as a fighter being a spellcaster. I see it as a fighter doing fighter things.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 11:00 AM

@PhoenixPhyre: Do you mind expanding on a few points?

1. Why do you see something like Tome of Battle as being the equivalent of spellcasting? I get the sense that even were we to limit ourselves to maneuvers that can still be realistic or not obviously supernatural with energy damage etc, you would still consider it like spellcasting. Is that because it is a finite resource?

2. Would you consider the Battle Masters maneuvers to be in the same category?

3. Why is this not a desirable solution or attempt at a solution in your eyes? I think this was a big point of contention in 4th, where "everyone is a caster". The thought never crossed my mind until I read it here on the boards, and I'd say 4th edition is probably the most fun I've had playing a fighter. It's not clear to me how giving the fighter maneuvers makes them a spellcaster. Fighters should be able to move around the battlefield, order/coordinate ally tactics, decapitate or dismember enemies, cause bleeding wounds, etc. If they get a maneuver that is essentially a save-or-die, but it's because they're cutting someone's head off, I don't see that as a fighter being a spellcaster. I see it as a fighter doing fighter things.

1. You have 9 levels of things that you learn every other level, with a fixed number of "things you know" and gated by level. You have an "thing level" which determines directly how the "thing" behaves and scales and is based on your class levels. Each "thing", once used, comes back at some specific interval. "Things" are unconnected to each other, in the main. "Things" come in schools. Each class has a list of "things" they can learn, a "thing list", if you want. "Thing" == "spell" == "maneuver", almost 1:1. The only differences are in how, exactly, they refresh. Everything else is basically identical.

2. Less like, but not entirely unlike. Because there's no level gating, they all use the same resource (instead of tiered or individual resources), and they don't scale much at all.

3. Because "everyone is a caster" is boring (to me) and says you should just drop the whole class idea entirely (resulting in only one basic playstyle). And presumes that "high flashy magic" is the only way to play. Personally, I think the fiction does best if we allow people who aren't super flashy to play. And that means toning down the high end from "throwing down with gods on the regular" to "underdogs who may defeat demon princes but only by gathering allies and finding weak points and McGuffins, not by just charging in directly". As the fiction suggests. But this is just personal preference.

NichG

2022-08-08, 11:04 AM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 11:09 AM

I do think it's important to note that those particular aspects of spells and maneuvers aren't necessarily that strongly connected to the thematics of spells as magical. We don't really complain too much about systems that boast a unified resolution system where casting a spell or growing a plant or climbing a fence might all be 'make a dice pool, roll it, and see if you succeed'. So while its true that maneuvers share these aspects with spells, that doesn't necessarily mean that the system of maneuvers will fail to provide what some players are looking for in martial fantasy.

Of course those who specifically want martial = simple aren't going to get that from this...

But in this particular case, most of the maneuvers were portrayed (both in the fiction and mechanics) as being non-mundane. Not necessarily supernatural, but certainly beyond the mundane. When you're smashing through stone walls (Mountain Hammer) and you can only use that once before having to reset it by meditating, that's a magical thing even if it's marked as only Extraordinary.

Edit: and even more saliently, they're things that you
a) have to learn to do, and each person can only learn some of them
b) can forget how to do
c) have to have the appropriate class features to even do at all.
d) discrete packets of "thing"

That's not climbing a fence or a unified system at all, that's "access the <thing> system". And is the same for thing == spell and thing == ToB maneuver. ToB is vancian spellcasting as much as 5e casting is vancian spell-casting. The only differences are in wording and refresh rates.

Satinavian

2022-08-08, 11:13 AM

Magic A is literally cooking from a recipe. The costs as well as the requirements are all set out. Sure, sometimes you need expensive things or long cook times. But the chances of failure are minimal as long as you have enough personal power to do the thing at all. And for a whole swath of the Incantations, that personal power requirement is...basically nothing. The only reason people don't routinely use them (when they don't) is that they haven't put in the time and effort to memorize the recipe. Just like people don't cook from a cookbook and go to restaurants because it's easier to have someone else do the cooking and cleaning up.

Ok, so you literally can't specialize in magic A.

Still doesn't change that every kind of Magic that everyone uses or need or which can really change relevant stuff and thus is worth caring about is part of magic A, while Magic B can mostly replaced adequately by swinging a sword.
So in this case everyone is a mage. But some mages prefer, if they ever come into combat, spells to swords for some reason.

If the only thing that magic B has going for it is that it is hard to learn, people are really inclined to not care about it much.

Psyren

2022-08-08, 11:24 AM

I tried to play a strong thug as rogue once. The GM expected a normal rogue, and kept suggesting acrobatic lockpickingy stuff I was bad at while describing great feats when I did succeed, while subtly downplaying my athletics and intimidate checks (with expertise). Complete miscommunication, got cleared up later. Felt weird.

What was the actual build? Making your character mechanically one way and declaring them to be fluffed an entirely different way can "feel weird" on both sides.

It's better to have benefits be codified.

No, because those benefits should be allowed to vary by situation and table. Codification also promotes a culture whereby anything not codified shouldn't be allowed, and it pushes DMs towards rote memorization instead of creative adjudication.

And the skill resolution system we have can not work for it. It's subject to bounded accuracy and accuracy directly informs effectiveness.

Bounded accuracy has nothing to do with effectiveness. The results of a given check succeeding or failing don't have to be based on the roll at all, or at the very least those effects don't have to be exactly the same for two different characters just because they roll the same number for the same challenge.

Meanwhile, spell effects aren't bounded. They go absolutely wild at higher levels. Long-range teleportation, resurrection, demiplanes, mansions and feasts on demand without even mentioning wish. Effects which are entirely out of reach at level 3 become reliable at level 18. The barbarian will still be attempting to succeed the same strength checks due to bounded accuracy.

Changing the challenges the Barbarian is faced with as they level is the responsibility of the GM, as is the onus to avoid "ludicrous results."

NichG

2022-08-08, 11:59 AM

But in this particular case, most of the maneuvers were portrayed (both in the fiction and mechanics) as being non-mundane. Not necessarily supernatural, but certainly beyond the mundane. When you're smashing through stone walls (Mountain Hammer) and you can only use that once before having to reset it by meditating, that's a magical thing even if it's marked as only Extraordinary.

Edit: and even more saliently, they're things that you
a) have to learn to do, and each person can only learn some of them
b) can forget how to do
c) have to have the appropriate class features to even do at all.
d) discrete packets of "thing"

That's not climbing a fence or a unified system at all, that's "access the <thing> system". And is the same for thing == spell and thing == ToB maneuver. ToB is vancian spellcasting as much as 5e casting is vancian spell-casting. The only differences are in wording and refresh rates.

I mean, I've for example taken aikido, and there are specific things which I've learned how to do which would be different if I learned judo or something instead. Certainly vice versa, there are things which just are not taught in aikido which are taught in judo. Duelling with rapiers, German long blade stuff, etc all have specific terms and named positions and strikes. I'll grant the limited number of maneuvers learned, though that would be easily fixed by making them more spell-like, rather than less, and just let people learn them from instructors or martial scrolls regardless of how many they've learned so far.

b) As far as 'can forget how to do', how exactly do you mean? If you just mean that you can retrain or swap them out on level, well, that's true of feats, skills, and class levels too. If you mean the refresh mechanics, I don't think there's anything about the refresh mechanics that requires (or even really benefits from taking) that particular in-world interpretation of what's going on. Random refresh mechanics can be more naturally thought of as an abstraction of opportunities emerging in the ebb and flow of combat - you need your enemy to be in a certain position relative to you with their openings on the right side to use one maneuver, another is appropriate when your enemy is on guard and you have an extra half meter of space, etc. For the 'refresh whatever you want with an action' type, you can refresh the moment you take a breather, so I interpret those about being more about the user's balance and equilibrium and state of mind than about openings provided by the enemy.

c) That's a meta-level decision though. In older editions, you needed to be a thief to pick a lock or hear movement on the other side of a door. In other games like L5R/7th Sea you need to be of a particular school (which may be clan-locked but generally requires enough cost to get that you won't have more than one) to do certain types of combat moves. I don't think this is necessarily good or bad, but I don't think it's inherently particularly spell-like at a broader thematic level. Also, the ToB classes have a nice multiclass feature where levels in other classes count for half progression in any ToB class you have, AND you can learn maneuvers through feats if you really want to get them without a ToB class, so I think it actually moves in the direction to soften those boundaries.

d) Again, this is hardly uniquely magical, and is more of a game design thing than a thematics of magic thing.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 12:08 PM

I mean, I've for example taken aikido, and there are specific things which I've learned how to do which would be different if I learned judo or something instead. Certainly vice versa, there are things which just are not taught in aikido which are taught in judo. Duelling with rapiers, German long blade stuff, etc all have specific terms and named positions and strikes. I'll grant the limited number of maneuvers learned, though that would be easily fixed by making them more spell-like, rather than less, and just let people learn them from instructors or martial scrolls regardless of how many they've learned so far.

b) As far as 'can forget how to do', how exactly do you mean? If you just mean that you can retrain or swap them out on level, well, that's true of feats, skills, and class levels too. If you mean the refresh mechanics, I don't think there's anything about the refresh mechanics that requires (or even really benefits from taking) that particular in-world interpretation of what's going on. Random refresh mechanics can be more naturally thought of as an abstraction of opportunities emerging in the ebb and flow of combat - you need your enemy to be in a certain position relative to you with their openings on the right side to use one maneuver, another is appropriate when your enemy is on guard and you have an extra half meter of space, etc. For the 'refresh whatever you want with an action' type, you can refresh the moment you take a breather, so I interpret those about being more about the user's balance and equilibrium and state of mind than about openings provided by the enemy.

c) That's a meta-level decision though. In older editions, you needed to be a thief to pick a lock or hear movement on the other side of a door. In other games like L5R/7th Sea you need to be of a particular school (which may be clan-locked but generally requires enough cost to get that you won't have more than one) to do certain types of combat moves. I don't think this is necessarily good or bad, but I don't think it's inherently particularly spell-like at a broader thematic level. Also, the ToB classes have a nice multiclass feature where levels in other classes count for half progression in any ToB class you have, AND you can learn maneuvers through feats if you really want to get them without a ToB class, so I think it actually moves in the direction to soften those boundaries.

d) Again, this is hardly uniquely magical, and is more of a game design thing than a thematics of magic thing.

Note that exactly 1 class (in core at least) can learn new spells from scrolls or instructors. Wizards are the exception in many many ways. Most of them broken.

Each individual thing isn't determinative...but when the entire package matches, that says they're spells in disguise. Have you heard "once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action?" This isn't just 3 times, it's every single factor other than the label on the tin. ToB maneuvers and spells are as alike as generic brand white vinegar and name brand vinegar. Made in the same factories by the same methods, just with a different label slapped on at the end.

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-08, 12:09 PM

1. You have 9 levels of things that you learn every other level, with a fixed number of "things you know" and gated by level. You have an "thing level" which determines directly how the "thing" behaves and scales and is based on your class levels. Each "thing", once used, comes back at some specific interval. "Things" are unconnected to each other, in the main. "Things" come in schools. Each class has a list of "things" they can learn, a "thing list", if you want. "Thing" == "spell" == "maneuver", almost 1:1. The only differences are in how, exactly, they refresh. Everything else is basically identical.

2. Less like, but not entirely unlike. Because there's no level gating, they all use the same resource (instead of tiered or individual resources), and they don't scale much at all.

3. Because "everyone is a caster" is boring (to me) and says you should just drop the whole class idea entirely (resulting in only one basic playstyle). And presumes that "high flashy magic" is the only way to play. Personally, I think the fiction does best if we allow people who aren't super flashy to play. And that means toning down the high end from "throwing down with gods on the regular" to "underdogs who may defeat demon princes but only by gathering allies and finding weak points and McGuffins, not by just charging in directly". As the fiction suggests. But this is just personal preference.
Thank you for answering these questions.

I think point 1 sounds sort of like "the wizards got this mechanic first, therefore no one else can use it". I think other classes can make use of a similar mechanic without being spellcasters. But I should clarify that I wouldn't expect a system like this to make martials on a par with casters. I don't think you can do that without making martials essentially spellcasters with the ability to do things that spells can do.

But there are a lot of things that martials do in stories that they can't do in D&D without attempting a stunt and having a DM open to those things. As I mentioned in my first post in this thread, martials just need more stuff to do (IMO). So a system that is similar to spellcasting but isn't doing anything more than letting martials do cool stuff they do in stories wouldn't be making them "spellcasters" or "flashy". Because I agree with you on point 3. I don't want the fighter to become something not fighter-y in order to stay relevant at high levels. But I think there's a lot more they can be doing while still being fighters. How would you implement abilities that allow the fighter to do some of the things I mentioned above? Or do you feel they aren't needed?

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 12:17 PM

Thank you for answering these questions.

I think point 1 sounds sort of like "the wizards got this mechanic first, therefore no one else can use it". I think other classes can make use of a similar mechanic without being spellcasters. But I should clarify that I wouldn't expect a system like this to make martials on a par with casters. I don't think you can do that without making martials essentially spellcasters with the ability to do things that spells can do.

But there are a lot of things that martials do in stories that they can't do in D&D without attempting a stunt and having a DM open to those things. As I mentioned in my first post in this thread, martials just need more stuff to do (IMO). So a system that is similar to spellcasting but isn't doing anything more than letting martials do cool stuff they do in stories wouldn't be making them "spellcasters" or "flashy". Because I agree with you on point 3. I don't want the fighter to become something not fighter-y in order to stay relevant at high levels. But I think there's a lot more they can be doing while still being fighters. How would you implement abilities that allow the fighter to do some of the things I mentioned above? Or do you feel they aren't needed?

Where needed, I'd do one of the following
* If they're things anyone should be able to do (raising the baseline), make them part of the ability check system. Doesn't affect balance, per se.
* If they're martial (but not class) specific things, have a side advancement path (things gained at particular levels that don't "take up" class features)[1].
* If they're class specific, give them as class features. [2]

Fundamentally, I find the D&D magic system (writ large, speaking of the structure of spells and spellcasting generally) to be the absolute weakest part. It's neither thematic, archetypal, nor mechanically satisfying. Nor is it balanceable at all. Too many moving parts that can be cherry-picked to create broken things. In either direction, and this can happen by accident.

[1] I've got several ideas along the lines of "weapon talents" that everyone gets...but if you can cast spells from any of your classes you get them slower in proportion to how powerful of spells you can cast.
[2] But not "pick from this big list of tiered things with no internal cohesion". Because I think that's a bad idea for everyone and would like to move away from it even for spells. But recognize that's a bigger ask for spells, but going down a flawed, un-balanceable path further isn't a good idea.

NichG

2022-08-08, 01:04 PM

Note that exactly 1 class (in core at least) can learn new spells from scrolls or instructors. Wizards are the exception in many many ways. Most of them broken.

Each individual thing isn't determinative...but when the entire package matches, that says they're spells in disguise. Have you heard "once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action?" This isn't just 3 times, it's every single factor other than the label on the tin. ToB maneuvers and spells are as alike as generic brand white vinegar and name brand vinegar. Made in the same factories by the same methods, just with a different label slapped on at the end.

ToB maneuvers and spells use a mostly unified set of mechanical ideas, but again so does 'use ability checks for things'. If your desire is to have mechanically different subsystems, yes, this is an issue. For people who mostly want the thematics of fictional martial characters, that wouldn't necessarily be a desiderata. But in the end we're pushing for very different conceptions of the game, even if there are design elements we would both make use of. I just want to disentangle those criticisms which are because of specific vision as to the desired power level of play, and things which are because they actually don't address what people are asking for. Because in the end the reason this never really gets resolved is because people throw in so many contradictory constraints to the design process that there cannot possibly be any single system that would satisfy everyone. So what we're left with in the end is for each table to have the tools to customize the game to their liking.

In that regards, I do think ToB is a good answer - even 'the correct answer' - to what a segment of the player base wants. I think that E6 serves a different (but sometimes overlapping) segment who primarily wants to bring the power level of things down. I can also understand the desire for more thematic coherency between things, though I would approach it fundamentally differently I think and not care so much about thematic coherency within a character as I would thematic coherency associated first and foremost with particular sources of power - and then require for anything that 'does a thing' for it to explicitly call out the source of power that permits it to do that thing.

But something like 'I want thematic coherency, and I think it is best served by getting rid of tiered ability lists, so I want to convince the martial players that they should scorn tiered ability lists as a means to have more things to do when those players are primarily concerned about having nothing to do when there's a wizard at the table' makes things really hard to untangle.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 01:24 PM

ToB maneuvers and spells use a mostly unified set of mechanical ideas, but again so does 'use ability checks for things'. If your desire is to have mechanically different subsystems, yes, this is an issue. For people who mostly want the thematics of fictional martial characters, that wouldn't necessarily be a desiderata. But in the end we're pushing for very different conceptions of the game, even if there are design elements we would both make use of. I just want to disentangle those criticisms which are because of specific vision as to the desired power level of play, and things which are because they actually don't address what people are asking for. Because in the end the reason this never really gets resolved is because people throw in so many contradictory constraints to the design process that there cannot possibly be any single system that would satisfy everyone. So what we're left with in the end is for each table to have the tools to customize the game to their liking.

In that regards, I do think ToB is a good answer - even 'the correct answer' - to what a segment of the player base wants. I think that E6 serves a different (but sometimes overlapping) segment who primarily wants to bring the power level of things down. I can also understand the desire for more thematic coherency between things, though I would approach it fundamentally differently I think and not care so much about thematic coherency within a character as I would thematic coherency associated first and foremost with particular sources of power - and then require for anything that 'does a thing' for it to explicitly call out the source of power that permits it to do that thing.

But something like 'I want thematic coherency, and I think it is best served by getting rid of tiered ability lists, so I want to convince the martial players that they should scorn tiered ability lists as a means to have more things to do when those players are primarily concerned about having nothing to do when there's a wizard at the table' makes things really hard to untangle.

They tried "everyone has tiered ability lists that all refresh similarly and use unified mechanics, with some marked as supernatural and others not" as the centerpoint of 4e. That didn't work either.

There are segments of the player base that want mutually incompatible things. Tiered ability lists for everyone have tons of downsides and not many (IMO) upsided
Downsides as I see it
1. You have to print a crap-ton of buttons. And if you want any kind of thematicness, you have to print a crap-ton of extra, duplicating but with slightly different thematics and tags abilities. This is painful to shuffle through best case.
2. The system mastery and play-time complexity go way up, irreducibly. And you can't mix and match, so once you commit to it, you've lost any possibility of "simple" builds. Everyone must pay full freight.
3. The system is fundamentally impossible to balance without substantially homogenizing the range of possibilities (cf 4e). In fact, you introduce substantial intra-class imbalance with the very strong chance of leaving people well below the system's floor on accident.
4. You strongly encourage (at the system level) "button-pressing" thinking. Have button that addresses situation? Press it. Don't have a button? Sit there and complain you don't have a button to press and so can't do anything.
5. Encourages thinking of the game as a closed "must have permission to do X" board game, not an open ended "tell me what you want to do and we'll figure out how to do it, if it's possible" TTRPG.

Upsides...
1. You can print lots of abilities? Make lots of money by printing lots of things people need (MtG style)?

NichG

2022-08-08, 02:03 PM

They tried "everyone has tiered ability lists that all refresh similarly and use unified mechanics, with some marked as supernatural and others not" as the centerpoint of 4e. That didn't work either.

There are segments of the player base that want mutually incompatible things. Tiered ability lists for everyone have tons of downsides and not many (IMO) upsided
Downsides as I see it
1. You have to print a crap-ton of buttons. And if you want any kind of thematicness, you have to print a crap-ton of extra, duplicating but with slightly different thematics and tags abilities. This is painful to shuffle through best case.
2. The system mastery and play-time complexity go way up, irreducibly. And you can't mix and match, so once you commit to it, you've lost any possibility of "simple" builds. Everyone must pay full freight.
3. The system is fundamentally impossible to balance without substantially homogenizing the range of possibilities (cf 4e). In fact, you introduce substantial intra-class imbalance with the very strong chance of leaving people well below the system's floor on accident.
4. You strongly encourage (at the system level) "button-pressing" thinking. Have button that addresses situation? Press it. Don't have a button? Sit there and complain you don't have a button to press and so can't do anything.
5. Encourages thinking of the game as a closed "must have permission to do X" board game, not an open ended "tell me what you want to do and we'll figure out how to do it, if it's possible" TTRPG.

Upsides...
1. You can print lots of abilities? Make lots of money by printing lots of things people need (MtG style)?

Out of these, #4 is the one I'd say 'this is a serious problem about ability lists and it bothers me too'. I think I'd generally agree that point 5 is an important consideration in gaming but I think the issue is deeper than ability lists and I'm not sure I've managed to either see or build a system that really escapes this to my satisfaction. Ability lists may even help here because 'come up with a new ability' is a pretty clean way of moving things that weren't in the explicitly permitted category into the explicitly permitted category. I think the fundamental issue with 5 (and this connects to 4) is that in order to plan, the player has to be able to resolve potential actions in their head and come to the same conclusion as the GM would about 'what happens if I try to do X?'. Having mechanics provides specific channels along which that kind of planning can be done, but it also gives an advantage to the player if they can stick entirely to those channels. The best answer I have to this so far is to have a fast and slow phase of gameplay, where in the fast phase of gameplay you stick to mechanics you already have and in the slow phase of gameplay you do things which cause new mechanics to be invented and written down. But even something like that doesn't

I think believing point 3 was what made 4e fail, not because 'lists of tiered abilities = fail' - basically misunderstanding balance as being about the parts of play that can be automated and calculated in a white-room fashion rather than being about screen time and the ability to make contact with things in meaningful ways. 4ed doubled down on 'maybe D&D is just minis combat' and at least for me that's why it wasn't worth the time to bother with. The 'wrought iron wall made of tigers' analogy for the design philosophy is what made it a game that for me at least I had no interest in playing.

I think the issue with 2 is overstated and it relies on treating players as less capable than they actually are. I think 1 isn't really a bad thing and I think the 'thematicness' issue comes from what I mentioned before about trying to hold characters to single themes rather than trying to hold sources of power to themes, and then being okay with individual characters having some ability to mix and match between multiple different power sources

As far as upsides, the biggest one is that it takes part of the job of being in balance and makes it something that can be addressed through changes in play rather than requiring changes in system. That is to say, if you have a character build that isn't working, you need to rebuild the character or modify the mechanics of the character's fixed abilities. If the thing that isn't working is local to a particular arc or scenario in a broader campaign, that's really wasteful and it escalates small problems into larger ones. If everyone can hot-swap their abilities or actively seek out new abilities to fill gaps, it means that there's a natural in-character solution for problems that a character is having with contributing. That also helps create instrumental sub-goals in the campaign that don't need to be explicitly introduced by the GM. E.g. the rogue is having issues with a dungeon that has a lot of undead - fixed class ability system means that they have to maybe take a level of a PrC or take a feat (commit a permanent build resource), or just basically be playing something that isn't working well for however many games are spent in that dungeon. Learnable ability system means that the rogue could pursue rumors about how other rogues deal with undead and maybe find out about alchemical mixtures that they could apply to their blades which would let them sneak attack particular undead, or a specific kind of training to allow their stealth to work against Blindsight and Lifesight and things like that. The out of character problem is converted to an in-character problem, whose solution can constitute interesting gameplay (or not, if everything is for sale at the magic mart, but this gives you the choice of which way to lean as GM).

There's also the fact that the modularity means its correspondingly easier to fix things on the fly by letting some custom spell or maneuver drop as loot, versus having to replace how a thing with existing mechanics works. It's a bit simpler to ban certain abilities and add a few more than it is to rework a class whose class abilities are falling above or below the line you're aiming for.

But I'm not sure any of this really has to do with what is actually bothering most people about martial vs caster. They're side considerations which, while valid for aiming for a certain desired style of play, I don't think should be thought of as absolute requirements for anyone wanting to find a new level between martials and casters to worry about.

Vhaidara

2022-08-08, 03:37 PM

Edit: I guess one could argue that 4th "did this already" but I would counter that 4E flattened everyone down so much as to be effectively very similar and overly focused on damage.

Not reading through 20 pages, but I'm going to address this specifically. As a primary player of 4th "very similar and overly focused on damage" is very much an uninformed opinion on the system. I've made 3 distinct characters all out of the warlord class (both mechanically and fluffwise), and that was without touching the hybrid system. Factoring in the hybrid system, I have warlords who range from no damage dedicated supports to pure offense primary strikers. I have characters who tweak out one skill until it's a god skill, I've got others who go so broad they can roll any skill. I've got characters who invest into accessing ritual magic on otherwise martial characters to give small utility factors that fit that character.

I more talking about can they achieve balance in a D&D game with casters that have robust, creative, dynamic, and open ended spells?

This, meanwhile, I think is the core of the problem, one of definition. If casters (and only casters) have this, then...yeah, of course it will never be balanced. That's kind of definitional. And most people will argue that if you give martials this, then they aren't martials anymore. So with that restriction, it's kind of like asking "will 2 ever equal 10?". The groups have been defined in such a way that precludes them being balanced against each other.

I should also note that, as mentioned above, at the cost of at most 2 feats (Skill Training and Ritual Caster), any 4e character can gain access to rituals, which are those more robust open ended spells. I had the group's fighter in one game conjure a snowstorm to cover them while they ran a blockade to the enemy flagship, while the battlemind (think a cross between psychic warrior and warblade) cast another one to let the party swim and breathe underwater in case they got sunk or thrown overboard. I've seen a 4e bard use a ritual to basically create a street mob to storm a warehouse trafficking weapons and drugs (it was a special bard-only diplomacy based "ritual", since rituals are mostly a mechanical framework)

4e is, in my experience, one of the more open ended systems with its magic, because your powers aren't everything you can do. They're what you can do in combat, without rolling skill checks. I had a pyromancer get around a flaming wall by binding the fire into his sword (a magic item he had made and that was a focus of his character). The DM even gave me a discount on upgrading the enhancement bonus on it later because of the nature of the absorbed magic. Another character, a wind mage, used subtle wind magic to mess with the odds at a casino we were trying to cause a riot at by making all the games look rigged (more rigged). And on the mundane end, I had a brawler suplex a train and a berserker rip through steel walls with her bare hands (okay, dragon claws, but who's counting).

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-08, 03:42 PM

4. You strongly encourage (at the system level) "button-pressing" thinking. Have button that addresses situation? Press it. Don't have a button? Sit there and complain you don't have a button to press and so can't do anything.
5. Encourages thinking of the game as a closed "must have permission to do X" board game, not an open ended "tell me what you want to do and we'll figure out how to do it, if it's possible" TTRPG.

Upsides...
1. You can print lots of abilities? Make lots of money by printing lots of things people need (MtG style)? I concur with the 4&5 concerns, and of course the money machine that is M:tG is their cash cow.

Out of these, #4 is the one I'd say 'this is a serious problem about ability lists and it bothers me too'. I think I'd generally agree that point 5 is an important consideration in gaming but I think the issue is deeper than ability lists and I'm not sure I've managed to either see or build a system that really escapes this to my satisfaction.
I don't like having arcane casters in heavy armor.
It breaks the genre assumptions for me.

Diablo I ran into a similar problem as Ultima:
the Tank Mage was the ridiculous (without hacks) 'take it too extremes' example of something approximating god Mode. But, it did usually take items to achieve.

Psyren

2022-08-08, 04:01 PM

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-08, 04:43 PM

Where needed, I'd do one of the following
* If they're things anyone should be able to do (raising the baseline), make them part of the ability check system. Doesn't affect balance, per se.
* If they're martial (but not class) specific things, have a side advancement path (things gained at particular levels that don't "take up" class features)[1].
* If they're class specific, give them as class features. [2]

Fundamentally, I find the D&D magic system (writ large, speaking of the structure of spells and spellcasting generally) to be the absolute weakest part. It's neither thematic, archetypal, nor mechanically satisfying. Nor is it balanceable at all. Too many moving parts that can be cherry-picked to create broken things. In either direction, and this can happen by accident.

[1] I've got several ideas along the lines of "weapon talents" that everyone gets...but if you can cast spells from any of your classes you get them slower in proportion to how powerful of spells you can cast.
[2] But not "pick from this big list of tiered things with no internal cohesion". Because I think that's a bad idea for everyone and would like to move away from it even for spells. But recognize that's a bigger ask for spells, but going down a flawed, un-balanceable path further isn't a good idea.
I recall the weapon talents, and I think you might have shared that previously? Or maybe I'm thinking of someone else.

I don't have any issues with this honestly. What would the recharge mechanic look like?

1. You have to print a crap-ton of buttons. And if you want any kind of thematicness, you have to print a crap-ton of extra, duplicating but with slightly different thematics and tags abilities. This is painful to shuffle through best case.
I don't see this as a big issue, and I'm not sure to what degree it is true. How many new things have been printed on behalf of fighters so far? We got a handful of new maneuvers in how many years? I'm not sure why it would be different under a "power" system.

2. The system mastery and play-time complexity go way up, irreducibly. And you can't mix and match, so once you commit to it, you've lost any possibility of "simple" builds. Everyone must pay full freight.
Don't know about this either. Certainly it's not the case for me, or you, or anyone else in this conversation. But somehow, it's a primary factor in making sure there are no solutions for martials. Everything has to be kept simple for this mythical d&d player that can't understand the rules...

3. The system is fundamentally impossible to balance without substantially homogenizing the range of possibilities (cf 4e). In fact, you introduce substantial intra-class imbalance with the very strong chance of leaving people well below the system's floor on accident.
Well, this can be a point once we determine what level of "balance" we're trying to achieve. I am not looking for martials to do all the things casters can do, because that wouldn't make sense.

4. You strongly encourage (at the system level) "button-pressing" thinking. Have button that addresses situation? Press it. Don't have a button? Sit there and complain you don't have a button to press and so can't do anything.
The alternative is what we have now, where there are no buttons other than Attack, Grab, Shove for martials. That to me is much more unacceptable.

5. Encourages thinking of the game as a closed "must have permission to do X" board game, not an open ended "tell me what you want to do and we'll figure out how to do it, if it's possible" TTRPG.
Agreed, because everything is encapsulated in powers. Not sure what the answer is. It seems to me that you want something that isn't wrapped up in a spell/power/maneuver text block. That implies, to me, a more robust combat system, where there are more global options, but that seems to go against your sentiment in point 2.

Upsides...
1. You can print lots of abilities? Make lots of money by printing lots of things people need (MtG style)?
Here is another upside... you can do cool stuff. You can actually perform cool stunts without needing buy-in from your DM. You have more options than "I move and attack", or "I stay in place and attack".

BRC

2022-08-08, 04:58 PM

They tried "everyone has tiered ability lists that all refresh similarly and use unified mechanics, with some marked as supernatural and others not" as the centerpoint of 4e. That didn't work either.

There are segments of the player base that want mutually incompatible things. Tiered ability lists for everyone have tons of downsides and not many (IMO) upsided
Downsides as I see it
1. You have to print a crap-ton of buttons. And if you want any kind of thematicness, you have to print a crap-ton of extra, duplicating but with slightly different thematics and tags abilities. This is painful to shuffle through best case.
2. The system mastery and play-time complexity go way up, irreducibly. And you can't mix and match, so once you commit to it, you've lost any possibility of "simple" builds. Everyone must pay full freight.
3. The system is fundamentally impossible to balance without substantially homogenizing the range of possibilities (cf 4e). In fact, you introduce substantial intra-class imbalance with the very strong chance of leaving people well below the system's floor on accident.
4. You strongly encourage (at the system level) "button-pressing" thinking. Have button that addresses situation? Press it. Don't have a button? Sit there and complain you don't have a button to press and so can't do anything.
5. Encourages thinking of the game as a closed "must have permission to do X" board game, not an open ended "tell me what you want to do and we'll figure out how to do it, if it's possible" TTRPG.

Upsides...
1. You can print lots of abilities? Make lots of money by printing lots of things people need (MtG style)?

I also feel like it brings about some thematic homogeneity.

In D&D spellcasting, a Sorceror isn't somebody with the Superpower to command Fire, they are capable of casting Fireball, which is a discrete ability with a discrete effect. While you could draw a progression: Firebolt, Burning Hands, Flaming Sphere, Fireball, Wall of Fire, ect for example, as different manifestations of a single "Power", that's not how the game treats it.

Which isn't a bad thing in of itself. That's a perfectly fine magic system, especially for an RPG, it simplifies a lot of things compared to something more general like "You have Fire Magic".

But I feel like if every class is handed a set of discrete tools, it breaks down the experience of playing different classes.

One class that, I think, does a great job of having it's mechanics and thematics carry through is the Rogue. The rogue has a very simple mechanic in Sneak Attack, but getting a Sneak Attack, even though it's not that difficult, feels like you're scouring the battlefield for opportunities to slip your knife between somebody's ribs. Attacking from hiding, waiting for your allies to distract them, or just kicking them while they're down or blind. This carries across the "Rogue" experience of somebody who fights dirty, making or exploiting opportunities rather than overcoming the enemy by raw skill, and piloting a rogue feels like a distinctly different experience than piloting every other class.

Playing a caster feels like you've got this massive arsenal of power, but you need to preserve it, because once you're tapped you're tapped. Playing a rogue feels like you're looking for opportunities to exploit.

However, if you use a 4e style system, that "Looking for opportunities" becomes "Find the right button for this situation", the same calculus that Casters make, juggling value and opportunity cost. The fact that one set of buttons is magic, and the other is cleverness and cunning kind of fades into the background, as it all becomes "Buttons".

I feel like the solution for fighters (and Barbs) is going to be some flavor of Opt-In complexity, possibly based on a risk/reward style decision, which makes sense to me. If a Caster is all about preserving power to use later, a Rogue is about seeking opportunities, a "straight" martial class should be thinking about risk and reward, like a swordsman standing there trying to judge how much to commit to an attack.

If we treat a PHB standard Fighter as the "Baseline", and leave that still in the game to be played if people want, then use Marksman/Power Attack as our model, but with more interesting effects than just bonus damage. I'd give fighters higher base accuracy to make this work, but.

Take a penalty to-hit in order to inflict status effects, or do some fancy maneuvering as a bonus action, or assume a defensive stance or throw a grappling hook to get up on the monster's back or what have you. Make their unifying mechanic something that feels like you're showing off how good at swords you are, and something that can be ignored if somebody wants to just roll dice and deal damage, but doesn't feel like ignoring it is just leaving power on the floor.

Pex

2022-08-08, 05:13 PM

Notafish

2022-08-08, 05:19 PM

I've waffled back and forth on posting in this thread, since I don't know if this point has already been covered, but if you have a campaign setting where both fighter-types and wizard-types are expected members of an adventuring crew, what is the in-universe reason?

If it's "fighters are common, wizards are rare," does this mean that players should not expect a free choice of what class they are going to play?

If it's "wizards are fragile; the party needs front-line muscle," then (for 5e), I think melee crowd control options need to be much more robust (and melee needs to be more dangerous for anyone who isn't acting as a "front-line" class)

If it's "magic is better, fighters and barbarians need to adapt or get left behind," that strikes me as a very different setting than the one implied in the game manuals.

If it's "there are some problems that only martial specialists can solve," there might need to be more enemies with anti-magical abilities, in addition to limits on what spells actually can accomplish. While I would likely find this obnoxious in a D&D game, having Pokemon-style strengths and weaknesses versus different classes for some encounters/monsters could also open up design space, potentially.

If the classic Magic-User/Thief/Fighter combo in-universe is more the consequence of out-of-combat needs (e.g., "if we are going into the ruins we will need an arcane scholar, a scout, and a quartermaster"), the non-combat pillars ought to have more official support and linkages to class archetypes (I wouldn't trust WotC to do this well), but this might also provide more justification for class features (like a flight spell, stealth, or even fighting styles) to be shared as party-level buffs.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 07:58 PM

Preface--I'm just coming back from the dentist. If the tone is snippy or curt, that's the reason. Not intent.

1. I recall the weapon talents, and I think you might have shared that previously? Or maybe I'm thinking of someone else.

2. I don't have any issues with this honestly. What would the recharge mechanic look like?

3. I don't see this as a big issue, and I'm not sure to what degree it is true. How many new things have been printed on behalf of fighters so far? We got a handful of new maneuvers in how many years? I'm not sure why it would be different under a "power" system.

4. Don't know about this either. Certainly it's not the case for me, or you, or anyone else in this conversation. But somehow, it's a primary factor in making sure there are no solutions for martials. Everything has to be kept simple for this mythical d&d player that can't understand the rules...

5. Well, this can be a point once we determine what level of "balance" we're trying to achieve. I am not looking for martials to do all the things casters can do, because that wouldn't make sense.

The alternative is what we have now, where there are no buttons other than Attack, Grab, Shove for martials. That to me is much more unacceptable.

6. Agreed, because everything is encapsulated in powers. Not sure what the answer is. It seems to me that you want something that isn't wrapped up in a spell/power/maneuver text block. That implies, to me, a more robust combat system, where there are more global options, but that seems to go against your sentiment in point 2.

7.Here is another upside... you can do cool stuff. You can actually perform cool stunts without needing buy-in from your DM. You have more options than "I move and attack", or "I stay in place and attack".

1. That was me. It's still super WIP/untested/unbalanced, but the document is here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/10_-Jh32QinqyekT3qPcI68KSqk0mG7yMdvVxtAQ2tms/edit?usp=sharing). For reference, my current working Incantation document is here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/18BwA_2ZVFezeVr7DaCrmSEvHE3DMsUHYsHoY8ADqnL8/edit?usp=sharing). The first focuses on combat stuff, but that's mostly because it's devoted to weapons.

2. Most of them are "once per turn" with no other recharge. Or flat out passive/always on. On quick look, none of them have recharge beyond that.

3. Imagine if you tried to match even the smallest full-caster's list of "things they can do" (aka spells). You're looking at printing over 100 new items. If you want to match wizards, you're looking at over 400. So either you print a crap-ton of items...or you admit that you don't really want to balance them anywhere near and can just give up before you get started. Content support is one major reason spells continually grow while non-casters don't--every new book (including setting and adventure books a lot of the time) prints new spells. In order to have balance by "everyone's a caster" means, you have to do that now twice (or more)--spells + <new thing> for each new "not a spell" category.

4. Oh it's absolutely a thing for me and my players. I've seen it many and many a time. Without spell cards (which have issues of their own), decision-making time and confusion go exponentially up and mental overhead rises really fast as well. And it's a whole other language and set of rules to learn. Spellcasting is basically a whole inner-platform set of rules within the rules, most of which are kinda :sideways-owl: weird (at least relative to the rest of the book). With tons more facts to remember (normal attack mod vs spell attack mod with this set of spells vs save DC (and which save?) vs which ones add modifiers to damage and which don't, etc). And that's not even getting into build time, where you're comparing N = big number items instead of usually 2 at most.

5. It actually doesn't matter what balance point you choose other than "anyone can do anything". Because with small independent chunks (aka spells), players have full freedom to pick the ones that are powerful and ignore the rest. Meaning it will always get power gamed. Most of the options you print will be ignored or only taken in very special cases. It's like doing point buy...with all spells of the same level having the same cost. Which is absurd.

6-7. I'm fine with...you know, trusting the DM. Nothing happens without his buy in anyway, so...yeah. The Improvise an Action option handles the bulk of the issues. My players already do cool things. Because I'm not thinking in "must have button" mode. That's the key--get out of the "I need to have explicit permission to do this otherwise the DM will say no" mindset and work with your DM to find things you think are cool. Which may or may not be things I think are cool. As a result of this, much of the issue just goes away. Not all of it, mind, but a lot of it.

This new ability check system. How exactly do you expect it to work? For things anyone can do, how are players supposed to know they can do them? How do they know how difficult it is to try? Are they supposed to read the DM's mind? Is it only do whatever the DM says they can do and never their choice? Maybe, perhaps, defined examples of tasks that can be done with a set target number to demonstrate different difficulty levels?

Unlike you, I trust DMs to not be stuck in button-pressing mode. A few sentences in the PHB about "in most settings, tasks like X, Y, and Z shouldn't need checks. And you can attempt anything that isn't actually impossible, although the DC may go up." And a few more pointed sentences in the DMG to let people do cool things and to ignore realism in favor of archetypal behavior (ie think hollywood, not your neighborhood) and put a knife in the Guy at the Gym. Things like "hey, that jump distance? That's a minimum with no check. Most settings are fine with up to about 50% more for a Medium check." Or "If you can imagine an action hero doing it, that's the baseline for things that don't need a check in most worlds."

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-08, 08:23 PM

LibraryOgre

2022-08-08, 08:30 PM

If you put a skill system in your game, you want every character to use it, not make it a tool of certain classes.
Then there is the issue that this basically makes casters incompetent in everything aside from their spells. "Incompetent at everything nomral" is not a class fantasy anyone wants to play.

Funnily enough, that's how the early Earthdawn worked... an Adept (which included all the basic characters) have a couple knowledge skills and an artistic skill (because doing art proved you weren't possessed by Horrors). However, it was partially because the skills were so much harder to learn... a normal fighter would know the Melee Weapons skill, but it was much harder to learn, and improve, than the Melee Weapons talent, which improved through magic.

Folks - just because casters and martials can have the same proficiencies, doesn't mean you have to make them equally good at every task. Deciding to call for a check AND determining the results of a check are both up to the DM in 5e.

Rather than decree casters are only allowed to have Arcana or whatever else, you can buff martials by having their checks (physical and tool in particular) mean more.

Want your rogues to be trap masters? Let them be the only ones who can use thieves tools to hack and repurpose them against their enemies.
Want your barbarians to be olympiads? Let them make athletics checks to climb faster, or jump higher/further, than anyone else.
Want your monks to be wuxia savants? Let their acrobatics checks move them through enemies, avoid AoOs, through grapples and spell effects etc.

To an extent, rogues already do this... their Expertise, and a thief's ability to Use an Item as a bonus action, means that they can make the most of proficiencies they have. Champions, too, have their extreme jumping, though that's not skill-based.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 08:33 PM

I think we've been around this block before already.

The double standard is as follows:

If I want cool buttons for martials because putting in a blurb about "stunts" and leaving it completely up to the DM leads to unsatisfactory results, this is labeled as me "not trusting the DM" and dismissed as a problem with my approach to the game.

On the other hand, people insist that the rules have to be so simple and bare bones and stripped down because somehow there are people that play pen and paper TTRPGs but also struggle with reading comprehension and words written on pages to such a degree that they can't be trusted to handle anything more complicated than "move, attack".

But this isn't considered "you know, NOT trusting the players". It's just a given. Oh, and only applies to martials, we can trust players to handle the bloated and complex magic system just fine.

Since it needs to be said, DMs aren't a class of infallible people, and players can handle rules just fine. Case in point, everything in D&D is becoming more and more magical, not less, with access to spells added into every facet of the game. If players were so meek, mild, and incapable as suggested in this thread, casters wouldn't be so popular and magic wouldn't be permeating through everything in the game. I'm trying to imagine my group of players as the the kind that couldn't handle more combat options and it's not possible, I can't even comprehend what that looks like. I don't even want to say what I feel like you're describing because I feel like I would get reported for saying it.

?????

That seems like a huge jump from me saying that yes, having everyone be full casters is a complexity increase, and a significant one. One that would be problematic for a lot of the players I've played with, and something I would find unpleasant. It seems like a huge case of excluded middle. Especially since I explicitly proposed several smaller complexity increases. There's room for complexity increases. Just not turning everyone into obligate full casters who have to wade through a morass of spells (or spell equivalents) to do their regular things!

Personally, I don't like the spell-casting system. I'm resigned to it, because changing it would be too much of a hassle. But I certainly don't want to extend it to everybody, like it or not. And that's the option we're discussing. Everyone, full stop, 100% is a full caster with 9 levels of "spells" and as many choices as at least a 5e sorcerer at every level. That's the bare minimum you'd have to do for that option to work.

Personally, I'd cut back the complexity of the magic system as it stands. A lot. The most spells anyone would have would be ~15, and those would be drawn from a much shorter list with fewer levels/grades. And much more of the budget would show up in the class features. Because I find "my only class feature is my spell list" (slight exaggeration) to be crappy design, not something to be envied and replicated.

DMs are inherently involved in every step of the action resolution flow, by design. At least in 5e. And I would strongly oppose any "mechanization" that would remove that. Because the DMs are the voice of the world, as well as the voice of what the characters would know that the players (because they're not actually there) can't know. If I wanted to play with a computerized, mechanized DM, I'd play a video game. They've got much better graphics in exchange for being closed systems where only things programmed in can be done. And that's the direction (even if not a 100% shift) that "everything of significance must be a button on your character sheet" takes us.

Edit: I'll also say that a huge drawback for me is the reduced predictability. Casters already have this problem--I have to have their current sheets pulled up to even have an idea what they can do. And that can change (for clerics, druids, and wizards) tomorrow. Which makes it much more difficult for me to plan engaging challenges. Not impossible, but more difficult. I can't predict "ok, I've got a 9th-level wizard. So he can fly and <do XYZ>." Because what if he decided not to take that spell? This isn't a show-stopper, but it makes it much harder to actually craft interesting, meaningful challenges and scenarios. Much bigger chance of either being overwhelming (because they decided not to prepare X or Y today) or a cakewalk (because I don't have all the spells memorized and he chose that one perfect counter). Which means balance (the whole point of this thread) is already out the window even between days of the same character. You can't balance that which you can't predict. And full-casters throw buckets of noise into the system. Tons of extra complexity for very little actual added value IMO.

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-08, 08:48 PM

?????
.....

.....

I... was also at the dentist?

:smalltongue:

That seems like a huge jump from me saying that yes, having everyone be full casters is a complexity increase, and a significant one. One that would be problematic for a lot of the players I've played with, and something I would find unpleasant. It seems like a huge case of excluded middle. Especially since I explicitly proposed several smaller complexity increases. There's room for complexity increases. Just not turning everyone into obligate full casters who have to wade through a morass of spells (or spell equivalents) to do their regular things!

Personally, I don't like the spell-casting system. I'm resigned to it, because changing it would be too much of a hassle. But I certainly don't want to extend it to everybody, like it or not. And that's the option we're discussing. Everyone, full stop, 100% is a full caster with 9 levels of "spells" and as many choices as at least a 5e sorcerer at every level. That's the bare minimum you'd have to do for that option to work.

Personally, I'd cut back the complexity of the magic system as it stands. A lot. The most spells anyone would have would be ~15, and those would be drawn from a much shorter list with fewer levels/grades. And much more of the budget would show up in the class features. Because I find "my only class feature is my spell list" (slight exaggeration) to be crappy design, not something to be envied and replicated.
I don't think we need everyone to be "casters". But I do think that your particular vision is going to leave a lot of people unhappy. I think a large part of the issues with 4th Edition is that people that really like wizards were disappointed with what became of the "magic system".

My aim at this is generally not to gut the magic system, but I admit that I'm not looking to make martials on a par with casters.

That said, in typing this I can't shake the feeling that wizards in particular, but even clerics "knowing every spell on their list" is just TOO MUCH.

DMs are inherently involved in every step of the action resolution flow, by design. At least in 5e. And I would strongly oppose any "mechanization" that would remove that. Because the DMs are the voice of the world, as well as the voice of what the characters would know that the players (because they're not actually there) can't know. If I wanted to play with a computerized, mechanized DM, I'd play a video game. They've got much better graphics in exchange for being closed systems where only things programmed in can be done. And that's the direction (even if not a 100% shift) that "everything of significance must be a button on your character sheet" takes us.
I think this is where we'll see most disagreement. I just don't like the idea that I have to play stupid dumb dumb fighter class because we have to be mindful of the precious players that get distracted by shiny things and pretty lights, but if Pex and I mention DM issues it's framed as "you're playing D&D wrong".

Edit: I'll also say that a huge drawback for me is the reduced predictability. Casters already have this problem--I have to have their current sheets pulled up to even have an idea what they can do. And that can change (for clerics, druids, and wizards) tomorrow. Which makes it much more difficult for me to plan engaging challenges. Not impossible, but more difficult. I can't predict "ok, I've got a 9th-level wizard. So he can fly and <do XYZ>." Because what if he decided not to take that spell? This isn't a show-stopper, but it makes it much harder to actually craft interesting, meaningful challenges and scenarios. Much bigger chance of either being overwhelming (because they decided not to prepare X or Y today) or a cakewalk (because I don't have all the spells memorized and he chose that one perfect counter). Which means balance (the whole point of this thread) is already out the window even between days of the same character. You can't balance that which you can't predict. And full-casters throw buckets of noise into the system. Tons of extra complexity for very little actual added value IMO.
Agreed. I'm in favor of a global increase in combat complexity, adding more options for any martials to partake in. DMs in that case would know what could be just by virtue of knowing the rules.

Psyren

2022-08-08, 08:56 PM

If it's "fighters are common, wizards are rare," does this mean that players should not expect a free choice of what class they are going to play?

PCs themselves are rare, so wizards being rare in the world does not and should not have an effect on the classes people choose to play at the table.

If it's "wizards are fragile; the party needs front-line muscle," then (for 5e), I think melee crowd control options need to be much more robust (and melee needs to be more dangerous for anyone who isn't acting as a "front-line" class)

It is dangerous. Monsters can do nasty stuff to casters who find themselves on the front line, and moreover not everyone wants to play a gish. Even the caster monsters now are getting some hard-hitting magical abilities that are not spells and thus cannot be countered or dispelled. Things get worse if the incoming damage causes them to drop whatever it is they're concentrating on for the group's benefit. And unlike 3.5, casters can't just swaddle themselves in buffs and items either.

If it's "magic is better, fighters and barbarians need to adapt or get left behind," that strikes me as a very different setting than the one implied in the game manuals.

Of course magic is "better" than not-magic, that doesn't mean non-casters can't meaningfully contribute.

If it's "there are some problems that only martial specialists can solve," there might need to be more enemies with anti-magical abilities, in addition to limits on what spells actually can accomplish. While I would likely find this obnoxious in a D&D game, having Pokemon-style strengths and weaknesses versus different classes for some encounters/monsters could also open up design space, potentially.

Spells have plenty of weaknesses already, the DM just needs to pay attention while reading through them.

There are a couple that are truly broken (Simulacrum comes to mind) but fixing or banning those takes moments.

If the classic Magic-User/Thief/Fighter combo in-universe is more the consequence of out-of-combat needs (e.g., "if we are going into the ruins we will need an arcane scholar, a scout, and a quartermaster"), the non-combat pillars ought to have more official support and linkages to class archetypes (I wouldn't trust WotC to do this well), but this might also provide more justification for class features (like a flight spell, stealth, or even fighting styles) to be shared as party-level buffs.

The game doesn't prescribe any particular "combo." It's your DM's job to tailor challenges to the party, no matter what pillar those challenges occur in. If you made a scout and your DM never allows scouting to matter or even work, that's not D&D's fault, that's a misalignment of expectations between you and them.

InvisibleBison

2022-08-08, 09:48 PM

DMs are inherently involved in every step of the action resolution flow, by design. At least in 5e. And I would strongly oppose any "mechanization" that would remove that. Because the DMs are the voice of the world, as well as the voice of what the characters would know that the players (because they're not actually there) can't know. If I wanted to play with a computerized, mechanized DM, I'd play a video game. They've got much better graphics in exchange for being closed systems where only things programmed in can be done. And that's the direction (even if not a 100% shift) that "everything of significance must be a button on your character sheet" takes us.

If "mechanization" moves a system towards being a video game, then "anti-mechanization" - the attitude that the DM should decide how everything happens, and the rules are just a default suggestion - moves a system towards being freeform. And while there's nothing wrong with playing freeform if that's what you want, on the one hand plenty of people don't want to play freeform and on the other hand if you do want to play freeform why are you going through all the effort of designing or buying a game system?

PCs themselves are rare, so wizards being rare in the world does not and should not have an effect on the classes people choose to play at the table.

I don't think this makes sense. It seems to me that if if there are two properties that are rare, having both properties should be even more rare, not just as common as having either one. Astronauts and chess grandmasters are both rare, but if you were playing an astronaut RPG and a third of all possible characters were chess grandmasters you'd think something was off.

I also don't think "PCs are rare" is necessarily the case. While obviously there is only one group of people who are actually PCs (unless you're playing in a shared campaign of some sort), the frequency of PC-esque people, folk who have the same sort of capabilities of and do the same sort of thing as PCs, strikes me as being mainly a setting element, with a wide variety of possible values.

Brookshw

2022-08-08, 10:05 PM

DMs are inherently involved in every step of the action resolution flow, by design. At least in 5e. And I would strongly oppose any "mechanization" that would remove that. Because the DMs are the voice of the world, as well as the voice of what the characters would know that the players (because they're not actually there) can't know. If I wanted to play with a computerized, mechanized DM, I'd play a video game. They've got much better graphics in exchange for being closed systems where only things programmed in can be done. And that's the direction (even if not a 100% shift) that "everything of significance must be a button on your character sheet" takes us.

Agreed. The emphasis on ever expanding formalization of the game is eventually what lead me to abandon 3e. I've encountered both players expecting the straight jacket the DM by insisting everything in the world needing to be rigidly defined by existing rules, killing DM and world creativity, while straight jacketing themselves by only considering what buttons they had on their character sheet, killing their own creativity. The game further reinforced button pushing as the only approach by constantly locking things behind ever expanding lists of buttons. New players tended to be the most fun to play with because they usually weren't seeing themselves as confined by the rules. YMMV.

If 5e hadn't returned to a more flexible approach, I wouldn't have bothered returning.

Back on topic, I have little desire for balance per se, but agree scaling back magic to avoid it's eclipsing of mundane's schtick would be good, or, adding a risk aspect so casters have to consider the ROI on using spell (possibly past a certain spell level). Iirc, Dark Heresy and it's ilk did surpass 4e sales despite having a magic system where the caster could REALLY ruin their day with bad rolls, so we know there is market acceptance of that approach; it's highly divergent from the current 'only bonuses' approach.

Psyren

2022-08-08, 10:10 PM

I don't think this makes sense. It seems to me that if if there are two properties that are rare, having both properties should be even more rare, not just as common as having either one. Astronauts and chess grandmasters are both rare, but if you were playing an astronaut RPG and a third of all possible characters were chess grandmasters you'd think something was off.

You're asking me to care whether sapphires are rarer than emeralds when all I care about is that I have a precious gem. No, I'm not playing an "astronaut RPG."

I also don't think "PCs are rare" is necessarily the case. While obviously there is only one group of people who are actually PCs (unless you're playing in a shared campaign of some sort), the frequency of PC-esque people, folk who have the same sort of capabilities of and do the same sort of thing as PCs, strikes me as being mainly a setting element, with a wide variety of possible values.

Then you clearly haven't read the DMG:

"Characters in {Tier 1} are still learning the range of class features that define them, including their choice of specialization. But even 1st-level characters are heroes, set apart from the common people by natural characteristics, learned skills, and the hint of a greater destiny that lies before them."

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-08, 10:11 PM

.....

.....

I... was also at the dentist?

:smalltongue:

Understood =)

I don't think we need everyone to be "casters". But I do think that your particular vision is going to leave a lot of people unhappy. I think a large part of the issues with 4th Edition is that people that really like wizards were disappointed with what became of the "magic system".

My aim at this is generally not to gut the magic system, but I admit that I'm not looking to make martials on a par with casters.

That said, in typing this I can't shake the feeling that wizards in particular, but even clerics "knowing every spell on their list" is just TOO MUCH.

Oh, I absolutely know that it wouldn't go over well. Which is why I'm not actually proposing such a system for D&D of any edition. That's a lost cause at this point. Just trying to stem the spread. As a much more limited option, I think that wizards, in particular, need a rework somehow. Class features other than "I have more spell slots" would be nice, IMO.

I think this is where we'll see most disagreement. I just don't like the idea that I have to play stupid dumb dumb fighter class because we have to be mindful of the precious players that get distracted by shiny things and pretty lights, but if Pex and I mention DM issues it's framed as "you're playing D&D wrong".

It's not even that. My experience with "new systems" is that uniformly, they promise lots of dials and levers...and then deliver mostly busywork. Most "skill frameworks" for D&D are infected with the same "martials can't have nice things" problem as the base is...except now that's codified as rule instead of being up to DMs. I have limited faith that adding more complexity would actually, in fact, add more cool things. It'd mostly just add...complexity. Which is an evil. A necessary one, but an evil.

And I think there's lots of room for just better guidance. Nothing in the system demands that martials be hobbled to below-the-Guy-at-the-Gym. But this is such a cultural (among D&D players) mindset that it leaks in anyway unless they take (which they haven't) steps to say "hey, don't do that." And that can fall well short of encoding specific assumptions into black-letter RAW.

Agreed. I'm in favor of a global increase in combat complexity, adding more options for any martials to partake in. DMs in that case would know what could be just by virtue of knowing the rules.

I think they could meet in the middle somewhere. Emphasize (and give more guidance on) Improvise an Action as step one (encouraging DMs to see it in a broad, enabling light, not a "here's a chance to punish the player for daring" light). Add in auxiliary systems (parallel tracks you can choose from). And also trim down the spell bloat. Will that happen? No. Absolutely not. If current trends are any suggestion, they'll just slap spells on people and call it a day, adding kludge on patch and not actually fixing anything. Have I mentioned that I don't trust WotC to actually implement anything anymore? They had good ideas and ok implementation at the start of 5e, then threw it all away for various reasons that are out of scope here.

Pex

2022-08-08, 10:21 PM

Unlike you, I trust DMs to not be stuck in button-pressing mode. A few sentences in the PHB about "in most settings, tasks like X, Y, and Z shouldn't need checks. And you can attempt anything that isn't actually impossible, although the DC may go up." And a few more pointed sentences in the DMG to let people do cool things and to ignore realism in favor of archetypal behavior (ie think hollywood, not your neighborhood) and put a knife in the Guy at the Gym. Things like "hey, that jump distance? That's a minimum with no check. Most settings are fine with up to about 50% more for a Medium check." Or "If you can imagine an action hero doing it, that's the baseline for things that don't need a check in most worlds."

In other words, you fix nothing because players can only do things if the DM lets them and not because they exist.

Gotcha.

Pex

2022-08-08, 10:23 PM

InvisibleBison

2022-08-08, 10:25 PM

You're asking me to care whether sapphires are rarer than emeralds when all I care about is that I have a precious gem.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I'm certainly not asking you to care whether wizards are more common than PCs, and I don't see how you could have come to that conclusion. I think one or both of us is misunderstanding the other.

No, I'm not playing an "astronaut RPG."

"Astronaut", in my example, was a metaphor for "PC". I doubt you're playing a game without PCs.

Then you clearly haven't read the DMG:

"Characters in {Tier 1} are still learning the range of class features that define them, including their choice of specialization. But even 1st-level characters are heroes, set apart from the common people by natural characteristics, learned skills, and the hint of a greater destiny that lies before them."

This isn't a just a 5e discussion, so I don't see how the 5e DMG is authoritative. But even if it was, nothing in there says that PCs are rare, just that they have abilities that "common folk" do not. If a setting had 15% of the population being PC-capable people, it wouldn't be contradicting that quote.

Psyren

2022-08-08, 10:35 PM

"Astronaut", in my example, was a metaphor for "PC". I doubt you're playing a game without PCs.

So what are the "chess grandmasters" then? Are they not PCs in your analogy?

I'm playing a game where everyone is a hero. The specific means of their heroism is irrelevant to me, sometimes I want to play one and sometimes the other.

This isn't a just a 5e discussion, so I don't see how the 5e DMG is authoritative.

Tell me, what is the point of discussing editions that are over and done with? Unless you have a time machine, the answer to the thread's question for an edition that's no longer being printed is obviously "no." Similarly, there's no point in discussing something that doesn't exist and whose design philosophy we have no inkling of.

But even if it was, nothing in there says that PCs are rare, just that they have abilities that "common folk" do not. If a setting had 15% of the population being PC-capable people, it wouldn't be contradicting that quote.

If all you can resort to is trying to split hairs about what percentage constitutes "rare" then I'll take that as a concession.

InvisibleBison

2022-08-08, 11:52 PM

So what are the "chess grandmasters" then? Are they not PCs in your analogy?

No, chess grandmasters stood in for wizards. Since my analogy seems to have failed, let me try again without it. You said that wizards being rare among the world should not affect the frequency of wizards among PCs, because PCs are also rare. I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premises. The odds of someone having two non-universal traits must be lower than the odds of having one of those traits. I agree that people should be free to play whatever sort of class they desire, without having to conform to any sort of statistical verisimilitude. But I am willing to admit that that's a gameplay contrivance, not anything that reflects the nature of the setting (assuming a typical D&D style setting, of course).

Tell me, what is the point of discussing editions that are over and done with?

The point of discussing old editions is to extract good ideas from them to incorporate into current or future editions.

Unless you have a time machine, the answer to the thread's question for an edition that's no longer being printed is obviously "no." Similarly, there's no point in discussing something that doesn't exist and whose design philosophy we have no inkling of.

The answer to the thread's question was well established hundreds of posts ago. The discussion has moved on to other issues. And if we're going to avoid discussions with no practical consequences we may as well just shut the forum down.

If all you can resort to is trying to split hairs about what percentage constitutes "rare" then I'll take that as a concession.

I quite clearly can resort to other things, as evidenced by the fact that I did so in the post you quoted.

Mechalich

2022-08-09, 01:25 AM

No, chess grandmasters stood in for wizards. Since my analogy seems to have failed, let me try again without it. You said that wizards being rare among the world should not affect the frequency of wizards among PCs, because PCs are also rare. I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premises. The odds of someone having two non-universal traits must be lower than the odds of having one of those traits. I agree that people should be free to play whatever sort of class they desire, without having to conform to any sort of statistical verisimilitude. But I am willing to admit that that's a gameplay contrivance, not anything that reflects the nature of the setting (assuming a typical D&D style setting, of course).

That's only true if the traits are not correlated. If 'Being a PC' is associated with 'statistically anomalous levels of narrative importance' and 'being a wizard' is also correlated with 'statistically anomalous levels of narrative importance' it is actually more likely that a PC would be a wizard than an NPC would. Consider, by way of example, the traits 'plays in the NBA' and 'is 7 ft tall.' Each of these traits is, on its own, quite rare, but if you look at historical data, you'll discover that a truly staggering percentage of US citizens in the past century who managed to top 7' have in fact played in the NBA.

However, is it decidedly not a closed debate as to whether or not PC's should be associated with 'statistically anomalous levels of narrative importance.' Big D*** Heroes is one way to play tabletop, but it is not the only way and certainly not a required way. It is even possible to build a TTRPG setting where PCs are explicitly prohibited from being part of the class of beings with the greatest power in the world. The Sword & Sorcery tradition tends to hew close to this, where the idea of a wizard protagonist would be at best bizarre.

Psyren

2022-08-09, 01:52 AM

Since my analogy seems to have failed, let me try again without it. You said that wizards being rare among the world should not affect the frequency of wizards among PCs, because PCs are also rare. I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premises.

It's simple - if wizards are playable, there are only 100,000 of them in a world of 300 million people, and you want to play a wizard, that means you're one of the 100,000. Figuring out the "odds" of that occuring are pointless; you already opted into being exceptional simply by becoming a PC in the first place. You can pick your class by rolling on a table or something if you want to but most of us would just rather play what we want to play.

The point of discussing old editions is to extract good ideas from them to incorporate into current or future editions.

Those older editions consider the PCs to be special too. That's one idea that isn't going anywhere.

Now, it's possible to run campaigns within the D&D system where that isn't the case, moving away from default assumptions like "heroic fantasy" to run something else. But said default assumption is what it is.

Satinavian

2022-08-09, 02:52 AM

Those older editions consider the PCs to be special too. That's one idea that isn't going anywhere.
First edition doesn't.
Furthermore, how special PCs really are is mostly a worldbuilding concern and something D&D generally lets the DM decide while only giving some rough guidelines.
And even if PCs were special that does not actually make wizards any more rare or special than rogues.

Notafish

2022-08-09, 09:56 AM

Of course magic is "better" than not-magic, that doesn't mean non-casters can't meaningfully contribute.

Isn't the point of the thread that many people find this to be a problem?

There are fictional universes where people with powers (magic, "super", or otherwise) are better-equipped to handle the action scenes. The default D&D universe, as presented in the DMGs and PHBs, is not one of these - there is nothing in the non-magical classes' descriptions suggesting that their class skills are less well-adapted to the adventuring profession than others. In-game, this actually holds pretty well for the single-digit levels, but once you hit the higher tiers of play, discrepancies in contribution value and spotlight time at the table become more apparent. Most campaigns don't hit those higher levels, but when that potential is offered it leads to awkward questions that should be addressed in the game materials but aren't.

You can have a setting where non-powered people are generally at a disadvantage in combat but that sufficiently trained or equipped heroes are a match for heroes with innate magic powers. The Avatar RPG is in one such setting, and it looks like they made the conscious decision to make bending/fighting style a secondary character feature so as to de-emphasize the question of bender-non-bender balance/encourage players to lean into other aspects of their role.

Psyren

2022-08-09, 10:30 AM

First edition doesn't.

That was abandoned as a baseline assumption for a good reason.

And even if PCs were special that does not actually make wizards any more rare or special than rogues.

I never said they were :smallconfused: Both, being PC classes, require talent and training that is beyond the majority of inhabitants in a published setting.

Isn't the point of the thread that many people find this to be a problem?

In the words of InvisibleBison directly above you: "The answer to the thread's question was well established hundreds of posts ago. The discussion has moved on to other issues."

There are fictional universes where people with powers (magic, "super", or otherwise) are better-equipped to handle the action scenes. The default D&D universe, as presented in the DMGs and PHBs, is not one of these - there is nothing in the non-magical classes' descriptions suggesting that their class skills are less well-adapted to the adventuring profession than others. In-game, this actually holds pretty well for the single-digit levels, but once you hit the higher tiers of play, discrepancies in contribution value and spotlight time at the table become more apparent. Most campaigns don't hit those higher levels, but when that potential is offered it leads to awkward questions that should be addressed in the game materials but aren't.

You're making a logical leap here. "Magic/spells are more powerful than non-magic" is not the same as saying "non-caster class abilities are less well-adapted to the adventuring profession." A bazooka can generally inflict more damage than a pistol, but that doesn't mean the pistol can't be the superior tool for a given job. If I need to discreetly assassinate the king, my odds are far worse with the former.

Xervous

2022-08-09, 10:31 AM

Isn't the point of the thread that many people find this to be a problem?

There are fictional universes where people with powers (magic, "super", or otherwise) are better-equipped to handle the action scenes. The default D&D universe, as presented in the DMGs and PHBs, is not one of these - there is nothing in the non-magical classes' descriptions suggesting that their class skills are less well-adapted to the adventuring profession than others. In-game, this actually holds pretty well for the single-digit levels, but once you hit the higher tiers of play, discrepancies in contribution value and spotlight time at the table become more apparent. Most campaigns don't hit those higher levels, but when that potential is offered it leads to awkward questions that should be addressed in the game materials but aren't.

You can have a setting where non-powered people are generally at a disadvantage in combat but that sufficiently trained or equipped heroes are a match for heroes with innate magic powers. The Avatar RPG is in one such setting, and it looks like they made the conscious decision to make bending/fighting style a secondary character feature so as to de-emphasize the question of bender-non-bender balance/encourage players to lean into other aspects of their role.

And my take is, if the devs intend something to be a certain way they should tell the users and highlight alternatives if the initial assumption is not desirable. There’s no suggestion for equal opportunities and engagement, just players’ imported expectations.

LibraryOgre

2022-08-09, 01:54 PM

You know, playing my PalLock this weekend, I really think variations on the Smite line of spells (and things like Hunter's Mark for Rangers) would do well as a guideline for fighter "stunts". "Hammering Strike"... for 1 minute of concentration, you can add 1d4 bludgeoning damage to your attack. Are you using Hammering Strike with a rapier? Maybe.

First edition doesn't [consider PCs special].

It most certainly does.

Most NPCs do not have levels... they're 0 level characters. The suggested rolling methods for PCs are superior to those suggested for NPCs, and the PH says that you should have 2 15s, explicitly because PCs are special characters. I'll have a citation in a moment.

Edit: 1e PH, page 9 "The premise of the game is that each player character is above average - at least in some respects - and has superior potential. Furthermore, it is usually essential to the character's survival to be exceptional (with a rating of 15 or above) in no fewer than two ability characteristics."

Brookshw

2022-08-09, 05:21 PM

It most certainly does.

Most NPCs do not have levels... they're 0 level characters. The suggested rolling methods for PCs are superior to those suggested for NPCs, and the PH says that you should have 2 15s, explicitly because PCs are special characters. I'll have a citation in a moment.

Edit: 1e PH, page 9 "The premise of the game is that each player character is above average - at least in some respects - and has superior potential. Furthermore, it is usually essential to the character's survival to be exceptional (with a rating of 15 or above) in no fewer than two ability characteristics."

Hmmm....Keep on the Borderlands quickly puts the party up against a bunch of Fighters, followed by some Clerics and an Elf, so I think we can reasonably say PC classes weren't actually the rare/special part.

Psyren

2022-08-09, 06:26 PM

Hmmm....Keep on the Borderlands quickly puts the party up against a bunch of Fighters, followed by some Clerics and an Elf, so I think we can reasonably say PC classes weren't actually the rare/special part.

I don't get this logic. Pitting the team of superheroes against a team of supervillains early on does not mean that every antagonist is a supervillain, it just means that's how that particular story was written.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-09, 06:27 PM

I don't get this logic. Pitting the team of superheroes against a team of supervillains early on does not mean that every antagonist is a supervillain, it just means that's how that particular story was written.

Or that supervillains are common in the world.

D&D (4e and 5e at least, and 2e either from what was posted) isn't a "slice of life" or "day in the life of a normal person" game. It's about heroes doing heroic adventures. And heroes doing heroic adventures do lots of out-of-the-norm things and meet lots of out-of-the-norm people/entities.

Mechalich

2022-08-09, 07:26 PM

D&D (4e and 5e at least, and 2e either from what was posted) isn't a "slice of life" or "day in the life of a normal person" game. It's about heroes doing heroic adventures. And heroes doing heroic adventures do lots of out-of-the-norm things and meet lots of out-of-the-norm people/entities.

D&D is about adventurers doing adventures. The 'heroic' part may or may not be true.

Some campaigns never operate under the assumption that the characters are heroic, some assume the characters are always engaged in a heroic narrative from the beginning, but the most common approach, in D&D, is that the characters evolve into heroes as they level up, usually sometime around level 5. That's when the PCs stop hunting down random bandit camps and unintelligent woodland beasties and start taking on real quests.

And the rules support this, first level characters have minimal capacity to do anything genuinely heroic. You can contrast them with a game like Star Wars Saga, where PCs get triple Max HP at level 1 and can absolutely tear through 'nonheroic' NPCs like Stormtroopers with ease.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-09, 07:39 PM

D&D is about adventurers doing adventures. The 'heroic' part may or may not be true.

Some campaigns never operate under the assumption that the characters are heroic, some assume the characters are always engaged in a heroic narrative from the beginning, but the most common approach, in D&D, is that the characters evolve into heroes as they level up, usually sometime around level 5. That's when the PCs stop hunting down random bandit camps and unintelligent woodland beasties and start taking on real quests.

And the rules support this, first level characters have minimal capacity to do anything genuinely heroic. You can contrast them with a game like Star Wars Saga, where PCs get triple Max HP at level 1 and can absolutely tear through 'nonheroic' NPCs like Stormtroopers with ease.

That doesn't fit the quotes above for 5e and 1e. 4e was even more explicit and mechanically enforced that--a level 1 PC was leaps and bounds better than a commoner. The same holds true in 5e.

Not to mention the cover blurbs:

5e, back cover, last sentence: "The world needs heroes. Will you answer the call?" ==> PCs are heroes from day one. And yes, fighting bandit camps is a "real quest". Just because you're dismissive of it and insist that only bigger things count doesn't mean that's not meaningful and is something "regular" people do. Because other wise they'd have already done it.

Also note that there's the Folk Hero background--a level 1 character can be explicitly called a hero before they even begin their adventure. The bar for heroism is not that high.

4e, back cover:
* Heading "The world needs heroes"
* Sentence 2: "the core rulebook ... provides everything players need to create and run heroic characters ..."

Sure, a level 1 5e PC isn't superheroic. Most of the time. But they're on the level of an Action Hero and well above the common man both in power AND potential.

Brookshw

2022-08-09, 07:45 PM

I don't get this logic. Pitting the team of superheroes against a team of supervillains early on does not mean that every antagonist is a supervillain, it just means that's how that particular story was written.

People statted with class levels include scribes, traders, bar patrons, and other run of the mill town dwellers not expected to be adversaries, nor described as being particularly special or supervillians, from a brief glance, looks like there are more classed run of the mill npcs than un-classed. The matter was how prevalent/special classed npcs were in early editions, in one of the earliest adventures they set a standard that class levels are everywhere. If they're everywhere, then classes wouldn't be all that special. I'm not going to do a deep book dive, but my recollection is that many early editions had no shortage of classed npcs all over the place.

Tanarii

2022-08-09, 09:23 PM

BECMI certainly doesn't expect that PCs are any more special than the next level 1 NPC. Stats are 3d6 in order. All mercs are level 1 Fighters. Demihuman NPCs are level 1 of the appropriate class. There are plenty of leveled NPCs available as DM monsters, and most tellingly about what the world is like, include encounter tables that include other adventuring parties. The modules and Gazetteers are full of leveled NPCs.

It's pretty clear that while adventurers may be more than a Normal Man, PCs are just one of many adventurers, that happen to be played by the players.

Mechalich

2022-08-09, 09:43 PM

Not to mention the cover blurbs:

The cover blurbs are marketing. Tabletop RPG marketing is a pack of lies.

The world may need heroes, but the average level 1 D&D character struggles to meaningfully overmatch the mechanical output of a wolf, and animal ordinary humans have been killing since the moment our species evolved. Don't believe the hype.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-09, 10:31 PM

The cover blurbs are marketing. Tabletop RPG marketing is a pack of lies.

The world may need heroes, but the average level 1 D&D character struggles to meaningfully overmatch the mechanical output of a wolf, and animal ordinary humans have been killing since the moment our species evolved. Don't believe the hype.

Depends on edition. A 4e character easily outmatches a wolf. In fact, a common wolf isn't even statted in the 4e MM. There are only superior, evolved versions (starting at level 2). A 5e character does as well (5e wolves being CR 1/4). Not all editions are 3e. 3e made a lot of bad decisions. But 3e =/= D&D.

And what should we believe about what a game considers itself to be other than the printed words themselves?

Psyren

2022-08-09, 11:13 PM

in one of the earliest adventures they set a standard that class levels are everywhere.

They did no such thing. "Heroes run into X" in no way means that "X is everywhere," that's just faulty logic.

D&D (4e and 5e at least, and 2e either from what was posted) isn't a "slice of life" or "day in the life of a normal person" game. It's about heroes doing heroic adventures. And heroes doing heroic adventures do lots of out-of-the-norm things and meet lots of out-of-the-norm people/entities.

Exactly.

hamishspence

2022-08-09, 11:40 PM

Depends on edition. A 4e character easily outmatches a wolf. In fact, a common wolf isn't even statted in the 4e MM. There are only superior, evolved versions (starting at level 2).

How is the level 2 skirmisher "Gray Wolf" superior, or evolved? That is one of the names for the common wolf, after all.

Brookshw

2022-08-10, 05:11 AM

They did no such thing. "Heroes run into X" in no way means that "X is everywhere," that's just faulty logic.
.

Not really, we're talking about historical context/state of the early days of the game. If the evidence shows PC classes cropping up frequently, then that's what the evidence is, for better or worse. Looking at it a bit further, only 4 npcs are level 0 schmucks, everyone else is at least a level 1 something.

Remember, this doesn't preclude changes in approach over time/editions, it just describes what TSR was doing in the earliest days; a time where pcs hired on a bunch of people.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-10, 07:14 AM

D&D is about adventurers doing adventures. The 'heroic' part may or may not be true. This. And for 5e, the description of tiers of play supports that approach. The PCs become heroic (or can, they may also become murderous thugs) during the course of play if they successfully complete their early adventures.
In the first tier (levels 1–4), characters are effectively apprentice adventurers. They are learning the features that define them as members of particular classes, including the major choices that flavor their class features as they advance (such as a wizard’s Arcane Tradition or a fighter’s Martial Archetype). The threats they face are relatively minor, usually posing a danger to local farmsteads or villages.
In the second tier (levels 5–10), characters come into their own. Many spellcasters gain access to 3rd-level
spells at the start of this tier, crossing a new threshold of magical power with spells such as fireball and lightning bolt. At this tier, many weapon-using classes gain the ability to make multiple attacks in one round. These characters have become important, facing dangers that threaten cities and kingdoms.

... but the most common approach, in D&D, is that the characters evolve into heroes as they level up, usually sometime around level 5.
Or level 4 in OD&D, which is named Hero.

That's when the PCs stop hunting down random bandit camps and unintelligent woodland beasties and start taking on real quests. I think level 3 or 4 is where that starts, but that's a quibble. In 5e your assessment is pretty good.

And the rules support this, first level characters have minimal capacity to do anything genuinely heroic. You can contrast them with a game like Star Wars Saga, where PCs get triple Max HP at level 1 and can absolutely tear through 'nonheroic' NPCs like Stormtroopers with ease. +1.

5e, back cover, last sentence: "The world needs heroes. Will you answer the call?" ==> PCs are heroes
Not quite: the PCs become heroes. They can also die while trying. As regards becoming heroes: when Dil showed up to join what became Enigma, she was a traveling bard with no home, and hadn't made her mark. The group became locally renowned (thanks to what they accomplished) but even in your own world's structure they could not formally register as 'adventurers' until around Tier 2. At that point you can (and I will) argue successfully that the PCs are at least heroic in capability, and are noteworthy beyond a given locale, and then fit into 'hero' as a descriptive easily. (Or wanted criminals / notorious outlaws if they go the murderhobo route)

Sure, a level 1 5e PC isn't superheroic. Most of the time. But they're on the level of an Action Hero and well above the common man both in power AND potential. We are using a lot of different meanings and senses of "hero" in this discussion, it seems.

BECMI ... It's pretty clear that while adventurers may be more than a Normal Man, PCs are just one of many adventurers, that happen to be played by the players. That's how AD&D published adventures evolved as well.

Remember, this doesn't preclude changes in approach over time/editions, it just describes what TSR was doing in the earliest days; a time where pcs hired on a bunch of people. Yeah, getting some henchmen was a useful approach, however, it also brought with it management responsibilities (you have to take care of your hirelings and henchmen or they will leave you, betray you, die, etc) that a lot of junior high and high school players were not ready for. It made a great deal more sense for the adult war gamers who started the hobby. Granted, some of the high schoolers were ready for that, but if you got a big enough group of players together you didn't need as many henchmen. But if you were in a small group? Hiring and recruiting and persuading henchmen was a huge factor in success. (See the various stories of Robilar/Rob Kuntz for examples of that)

Lastly: the encounter tables in Monsters and Treasure included class + level NPCs. One Magic User I played with got a significant boost to his longevity by using charm person on a third level fighter. That kept the fighter around for weeks, due to INT score and the "when charm person wears off" table (IIRC, that was first put into the Greyhawk supplement). He figured that it was such a good idea that he charmed another Fighter NPC - he was adventuring at second level with two 3d level fighters serving him. 5e, in comparison, has a bit of a harder time handling that.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-10, 10:00 AM

How is the level 2 skirmisher "Gray Wolf" superior, or evolved? That is one of the names for the common wolf, after all.

Ok, I misread that one. Mea culpa.

This. And for 5e, the description of tiers of play supports that approach. The PCs become heroic (or can, they may also become murderous thugs) during the course of play if they successfully complete their early adventures.
In the first tier (levels 1–4), characters are effectively apprentice adventurers. They are learning the features that define them as members of particular classes, including the major choices that flavor their class features as they advance (such as a wizard’s Arcane Tradition or a fighter’s Martial Archetype). The threats they face are relatively minor, usually posing a danger to local farmsteads or villages.
In the second tier (levels 5–10), characters come into their own. Many spellcasters gain access to 3rd-level
spells at the start of this tier, crossing a new threshold of magical power with spells such as fireball and lightning bolt. At this tier, many weapon-using classes gain the ability to make multiple attacks in one round. These characters have become important, facing dangers that threaten cities and kingdoms.

A person who saves a village is a hero, even if it's just a local village. You don't have to be important to be a hero. And even at level 1, you're still marked as different from the common people.

An adventure that ends in T1 is still about heroes even if they didn't slay demogorgon or do any world-shaking events. Heck, the Folk Hero background proves you can be a hero before the game even starts.

Psyren

2022-08-10, 11:15 AM

Not really, we're talking about historical context/state of the early days of the game.

I'm aware.

If the evidence shows PC classes cropping up frequently, then that's what the evidence is, for better or worse.

No, that's still bad logic. What adventurers run into frequently does not tell us anything about what non-adventurers run into frequently, that's insufficient to prove your conclusion that the world is populated with people that have class levels. That includes farmers, merchants, tailors, cooks, maids, children etc.

1e might not have thought to spell this out with things like population tables or setting books , but all of the professions above certainly existed.

Brookshw

2022-08-10, 01:06 PM

No, that's still bad logic. What adventurers run into frequently does not tell us anything about what non-adventurers run into frequently, that's insufficient to prove your conclusion that the world is populated with people that have class levels. That includes farmers, merchants, tailors, cooks, maids, children etc.

1e might not have thought to spell this out with things like population tables or setting books , but all of the professions above certainly existed.

Disagree. The only thing you can do is look at the evidence available. You're proposing there might be some other evidence that will demonstrate other than provided by KotB, but until it's produced it doesn't matter. Note that KotB does provide stats for some merchants and a smith, one merchant and the smith were a Fighter, one merchant was a lvl 0 schmucks. Assuming that other...mundane(?)...roles are all lvl 0s as well would be supposition at best.

I suspect there is more evidence out there to be found, heck, Gygax used to breakdown the distribution of tree types in Greyhawk, surely he would have given some kind of population distribution at some point.

Psyren

2022-08-10, 02:57 PM

The only thing you can do is look at the evidence available.

Sure, but you can still draw a faulty conclusion by doing so, which you are (still) failing to acknowledge or even consider.

https://xkcd.com/638/

I suspect there is more evidence out there to be found, heck, Gygax used to breakdown the distribution of tree types in Greyhawk, surely he would have given some kind of population distribution at some point.

Even if he did somewhere (feel free to link when you find it) and his vision of Greyhawk is that every single pig farmer and street vendor in the world has martial training, there's nothing about that model for D&D settings that makes it inherently better than PCs being special heroes. Indeed, the fact that you can only kind of point to one edition where this might be the case, does not do much to signify its superiority as a design paradigm. Heck, it doesn't even mean he did that intentionally, rather than say, the idea of NPC classes never occurring to him in the first place.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-10, 03:09 PM

Heck, it doesn't even mean he did that intentionally, rather than say, the idea of NPC classes never occurring to him in the first place.

Or the existence of NPCs without classes. Which is the default in 4e and 5e.

Brookshw

2022-08-10, 03:12 PM

Even if he did somewhere (feel free to link when you find it)

Already told you I wasn't going book diving, you want to prove your point you're welcome to do so, I'm not taking homework assignments. Also, knock it off with saying I'm failing to consider something. I've pointed out evidence and will now point you to your sig. As an added bonus, consider that in early editions being a non-adventure wasn't preclusive of having PC class levels, including for non-retired/never adventured individuals, and that each demihuman was a class, so that city of elves, an entire city of classed npcs.

there's nothing about that model for D&D settings that makes it inherently better than PCs being special heroes. Indeed, the fact that you can only kind of point to one edition where this might be the case, does not do much to signify its superiority as a design paradigm. Heck, it doesn't even mean he did that intentionally, rather than say, the idea of NPC classes never occurring to him in the first place.

Oh, I'm not saying it was superior, just that it was. It's entirely possible he never considered npc classes, though it seems his default for such was calling someone lvl 0. This was historical context (though I don't expect him calling someone a Fighter could have been unintentional considering he could have just called them nothing, which he did on occasion).

Satinavian

2022-08-10, 03:34 PM

Indeed, the fact that you can only kind of point to one edition where this might be the case, does not do much to signify its superiority as a design paradigm.
No, that would obviously just be matter of taste.

Psyren

2022-08-10, 07:21 PM

Already told you I wasn't going book diving, you want to prove your point you're welcome to do so, I'm not taking homework assignments.

Lmao? You're the one making the positive claim, that 1E does this differently than every other edition based on... the first encounter in a module I guess?

Also, knock it off with saying I'm failing to consider something. I've pointed out evidence and will now point you to your sig.

And I pointed out why your "evidence" is bunk.

As an added bonus, consider that in early editions being a non-adventure wasn't preclusive of having PC class levels, including for non-retired/never adventured individuals, and that each demihuman was a class, so that city of elves, an entire city of classed npcs.

"There was poor separation between class and race back then" != "PCs aren't special." And even if it was, the very fact that 1e was drastically different in thus regard further strengthens the point that this is an area they won't be going back to anytime soon.

Brookshw

2022-08-10, 08:40 PM

Lmao? You're the one making the positive claim, that 1E does this differently than every other edition based on... the first encounter in a module I guess? And you think that's incorrect and D&D did it otherwise? Why? Show your work. Incidentally, I will add nothing in the Red Box, White Box or D&D Compendium suggests PC classes as rare, and that Dragon #8 (July 1977) section on town building proposed categorizing your npcs into sections which includes PC classes, suggesting they're prevalent enough to be present in every town (town, not city or capitol), though it says nothing specific about the frequency of any inhabitants by type/class.

And I pointed out why your "evidence" is bunk. Not really, you offered some suppositions without any counter evidence. Work with what you know, not what you wish might be true.

"There was poor separation between class and race back then" != "PCs aren't special." And even if it was, the very fact that 1e was drastically different in thus regard further strengthens the point that this is an area they won't be going back to anytime soon. Nothing so far has established pcs as special back then, heck, the attribute suggestions Mark Hall mentioned align with a lot of the (edit: NPC's) pregenerated attributes in that module (ya know, the one that accompanied the starter set). Also, who cares if we aren't going back to it, that was never a topic I was discussing.

Sneak Dog

2022-08-11, 07:25 AM

What was the actual build? Making your character mechanically one way and declaring them to be fluffed an entirely different way can "feel weird" on both sides.
D&D 5th edition, 18 strength 12 dexterity expertise in athletics and intimidate from the top of my head. Straight rogue, no multiclassing. In other words, amazing at athletics in theory surpassed only by a bard specialising it.

No, because those benefits should be allowed to vary by situation and table. Codification also promotes a culture whereby anything not codified shouldn't be allowed, and it pushes DMs towards rote memorization instead of creative adjudication.

Bounded accuracy has nothing to do with effectiveness. The results of a given check succeeding or failing don't have to be based on the roll at all, or at the very least those effects don't have to be exactly the same for two different characters just because they roll the same number for the same challenge.

A DC is the difficulty of the task, not the difficulty of the task for Jeremy. The difficulty of the task for Jeremy is the DC minus Jeremy's ability score modifier, maybe proficiency bonus and/or class features, and maybe advantage/disadvantage for the situation or other weird reasons.

The effectiveness of an attack roll is determined by an attack roll and a damage roll. But the effectiveness of an intelligence check is only determined by the ability check's result. Combine this with the low scaling over 20 levels of most characters' proficient ability checks (aka bounded accuracy) and characters do not get much more effective at ability checks over the entire career.

Changing the challenges the Barbarian is faced with as they level is the responsibility of the GM, as is the onus to avoid "ludicrous results."

The level 15 barbarian will fail challenges they couldn't succeed at at level 5. This is not on the GM, this is on D&D 5e's system. What is a level 15 barbarian supposed to be able to do anyway? Lift a cart, a house, a filled tavern, a small mountain? Until we get proper concrete concepts of what a high level martial is supposed to do and be (beyond being able to contribute to combats), D&D won't achieve this balance.

Now, you are free to base DC's on what you think that character should be able to do. I might be wrong and that's even what you're supposed to do. But at that point the player can't make the barbarian they want. They can only make the barbarian the GM wants. While a 15th level wizard could summon a magnificent mansion in a minute by normal rules if built that way, a 15th level barbarian built to lift things may be able to sometimes lift a cart or sometimes a house depending on GM. Maybe even a small mountain.

This stifles the ability of players to create the character they want (if it doesn't involve spells). Which is what my example was for. I've actually experienced having a character concept, using the game's mechanics to implement it, but the GM's vision colliding with mine and overwriting what my character concept's strengths and weaknesses were. With a good GM too!

Xervous

2022-08-11, 09:48 AM

This stifles the ability of players to create the character they want (if it doesn't involve spells). Which is what my example was for. I've actually experienced having a character concept, using the game's mechanics to implement it, but the GM's vision colliding with mine and overwriting what my character concept's strengths and weaknesses were. With a good GM too!

I’d step back a bit from “player creating the character they want” to look at some higher level stuff. I’d rather not invite in “player picking whatever entitlement” as a distraction. The core concern is getting everyone on the same page. It’s my page when I’m GMing, your page when you’re behind the screen, and so on. Trial and error with hard locked choices such as class, attributes and proficiency can lead to long term dissatisfaction. Simply making the GMs aware of the hazards and inviting them to have early conversations with the players on how the open ended skill system will be treated would be a great step. One I might add does not assign a single suggested value. It merely makes the GM more aware that they, with their infinite power, have to mind this particular pinch point, work to set expectations early and with clarity, and to be ready to talk with their players when characters don’t perform the way the player was expecting.

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-11, 01:48 PM

Pex

2022-08-11, 02:26 PM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-11, 02:30 PM

One thing that occurred to me in thinking about all the advantages of playing the cooler type of fantasy hero, the Martial, is that the stronger monsters generally come with some combination of:

Magic Resistance
Resistance to Energy Damages
Condition Immunities
Legendary Resistance
Immunity to Energy Damages

However, casters have ways to avoid these obstacles, notably Summon spells, which wind up just doing exactly what Martials do anyways. Is there a way to approach this from the enemy side and make magic not always a no-brainer option against every monster type?

I certainly wouldn't do this for every monster, but I had a couple fun ones recently:

A treant-creature that (because it had grown and animated in a heavy wild-magic area) had developed the ability to copy spells that were cast within 30'. As a reaction, it could copy and recast (with the original modifiers but new targets) any spell of 5th level or lower cast within that radius. When the wizard opened combat against a pair of them with steel wind strike...oof.

The second was a dissonance entity (sort of a primal concept/spirit of the opposite of harmony) that could redirect spells used within 30' of it as a reaction. Basically switching targets (and taking over concentration if it required it). The wizard cast haste on an ally...and the enemy got hasted instead.

LibraryOgre

2022-08-11, 02:59 PM

However, casters have ways to avoid these obstacles, notably Summon spells, which wind up just doing exactly what Martials do anyways. Is there a way to approach this from the enemy side and make magic not always a no-brainer option against every monster type?

What was the line from OotS? "I have special abilities more powerful than your entire class?" (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0346.html)

One thing I have suggested, in talking about improving fighters with regards to other classes, is to allow them to break through magical defenses (such as weapon resistance). I mean, if you live in a magical world, faced with magical creatures, it seems likely that people would find ways of dealing with magic, even if they don't have it themselves.

BRC

2022-08-11, 04:20 PM

What was the line from OotS? "I have special abilities more powerful than your entire class?" (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0346.html)

One thing I have suggested, in talking about improving fighters with regards to other classes, is to allow them to break through magical defenses (such as weapon resistance). I mean, if you live in a magical world, faced with magical creatures, it seems likely that people would find ways of dealing with magic, even if they don't have it themselves.

I personally hate "Resistance to nonmagical weapons". It makes sense for some stuff, like constructs, but usually it's just not interesting, and basically every Caster bypasses it casually.

Consider, say, a Gargoyle. It's made of stone, so it's hard to damage.

Right now a Gargoyle is resistant to nonmagic, non-adamantine physical damage, which makes some sense. A Fighter has trouble damaging it unless their weapon is especially sturdy, either due to being magic, or due to being made of adamantine.

But, every caster element works just fine except Poison. Even things like Fire, Cold, or Necrotic.

If "Bypassing damage reduction" is going to be a thing, it should come from the other direction.

Here's how I would rework it.

The Gargoyle has the trait "Durable", and a list of weaknesses, things which bypass it's durability: Bludgeoning weapons, Magic Weapons, Force Damage, Acid Damage, Thunder Damage, Adamantine Weapons.
If an attack covers two weaknesses, say, an adamantine maul, the creature instead has Vulnerability to it.

Make casters jump through similar hoops to Martials as far as getting damage through defenses, and build in more vulnerabilities, rather than just making a bunch of creatures resistant to nonmagical attacks, forcing fighters to jump through hoops while casters just ignore that.

Another concept I play with is the idea of Microcrits. Where I've played with this, the trigger has been "Your final attack roll exceeds AC 20 or 5 above their AC, whichever is higher".

I feel like there could be some great martial design space there, especially with melee attacks against bigger monsters.

Psyren

2022-08-11, 04:43 PM

And you think that's incorrect and D&D did it otherwise? Why? Show your work.

You're still missing the point. You can cite every 1e module under the sun, modules are not campaign settings. They are written from the perspective of adventurers. They tell you little to nothing about the experience of any other perspective, because the players weren't expected to be inhabiting those perspectives.

Even the 1e "campaign setting" books, and I use the term extremely generously, tell us nothing about the countless smiths, barmaids, merchants and farmers occupying those settings, because Gygax and Arneson weren't interested in that stuff at the start. They were building a combat simulator, which surprise surprise, is exactly what Chainmail was (just on a larger scale.)

Nothing so far has established pcs as special back then, heck, the attribute suggestions Mark Hall mentioned align with a lot of the (edit: NPC's) pregenerated attributes in that module (ya know, the one that accompanied the starter set). Also, who cares if we aren't going back to it, that was never a topic I was discussing.

So you're focused on litigating the particulars of a dead edition that will never be relevant again. Fine, enjoy the cobwebs.

D&D 5th edition, 18 strength 12 dexterity expertise in athletics and intimidate from the top of my head. Straight rogue, no multiclassing. In other words, amazing at athletics in theory surpassed only by a bard specialising it.

That is massive overkill to be good at Athletics honestly. Just Expertise + 10 Str will actually make you on par with most Str-primary builds all on its own, and allow you to not suck at the Dex checks people don't expect you to suck at. Hell, if you're a Soulknife or an Arcane Trickster you might even beat most barbarians at it.

Having said that, there's nothing wrong with a suboptimal build so long as you communicate with the DM and party about it, which it sounds like happened eventually.

A DC is the difficulty of the task, not the difficulty of the task for Jeremy. The difficulty of the task for Jeremy is the DC minus Jeremy's ability score modifier, maybe proficiency bonus and/or class features, and maybe advantage/disadvantage for the situation or other weird reasons.

I didn't say anything about the DC varying by actor, I said the results. Those are not the same thing.

The level 15 barbarian will fail challenges they couldn't succeed at at level 5. This is not on the GM, this is on D&D 5e's system.

It's absolutely on the DM. If you don't think the 15 should have the possibility of failing, why are you calling for a roll? The system tells you not to do that, DMG 237, full stop.

BRC

2022-08-11, 05:14 PM

I didn't say anything about the DC varying by actor, I said the results. Those are not the same thing.

Elaborate on that please. Does the DC not correlate to the intended result?

2 Barbarians, one 4th level, one 15th level, each are presented with a big heavy rock blocking a canyon. They want to lift it up so their party can pass through. DC 16 Athletics check.

4th level Barb rolls a 13 +5 (+3 str, Proficiency in Athletics) gets an 18.

15th level Barbarian rolls an 8 (+5 Prof, +5 Strength), for an 18 as well.

How/why do you adjudicate that difference? Does the 15th level barbarian get to not just lift the rock, but chuck it out of the canyon due to their higher strength, even though they had the same result?

NichG

2022-08-11, 05:21 PM

I think if you want to go that direction, you're almost asking for 'allowing a skill check to do X' to be class features. So e.g. Fighter 15 and Barbarian 10 would give you 'This character can now use a DC 20 Strength check to break a wall of force'. Rogue 10 might get 'This character can use a DC 20 Dexterity check to avoid any source of damage once a round', etc. The 'spells' are specific heroic feats which having a certain class level gives you narrative permission to do and specifically withholds from characters without the class feature.

Brookshw

2022-08-11, 05:58 PM

You're still missing the point. You can cite every 1e module under the sun, modules are not campaign settings. They are written from the perspective of adventurers. They tell you little to nothing about the experience of any other perspective, because the players weren't expected to be inhabiting those perspectives.

Even the 1e "campaign setting" books, and I use the term extremely generously, tell us nothing about the countless smiths, barmaids, merchants and farmers occupying those settings, because Gygax and Arneson weren't interested in that stuff at the start. They were building a combat simulator, which surprise surprise, is exactly what Chainmail was (just on a larger scale.)

There's a fault with your logic. Anything and everything not described is exactly that, not described. You can't then take a lack of description, decide for yourself what it was, and then assert whatever you made up as right. If you have nothing to base it on other than your own narrative preference*, then you have nothing.

Gygax did intend to fully, to an absurd degree in my mind, want to describe his setting and expected others to do the same. I mentioned up thread he was so detailed he'd break down tree types, maybe it's just me, but I can't see actually expecting players to interact with stuff like 'this forest is 26% cypress trees, 13% oak, 30% maple...', so talking about 'offscrren' stuff is misleading. How he considered npcs with classes, well, I showed you what he did to start off, you don't like it, that's fine, but it certainly sets the pattern. Incidentally the article in Dragon I referenced wasn't even by him but seems to follow his lead. (Related, you're in the middle of yet another discussion on the merits of DC's in the 5e channel, I reference this only to point out that there's a lot of interest in following leads)

Unrelated, Leonard Patt deserves more credit for providing the inspiration for Chainmail.

*I'm positive you and Gygax didn't share a narrative/world building preferences, this was the guy who decided all female characters only got to roll 2d6 for starting str and con, while male characters got the standard 3d6, while practically acknowledging he was wrong to do it.

So you're focused on litigating the particulars of a dead edition that will never be relevant again. Fine, enjoy the cobwebs.

Yes, I was discussing the exact thing I said, in every post, that I was discussing. Shocking right?:smalltongue:

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-11, 07:32 PM

because Gygax and Arneson weren't interested in that stuff at the start. They were building a combat simulator, which surprise surprise, is exactly what Chainmail was (just on a larger scale.) That is so badly reductionist that it is wrong on multiple scores.

What Arneson came up with wasn't a combat simulator, it was something very different derived from the experimentation the Twin Cities group was doing with Dave Wesley's games, and it was an ever morphing thing as they tried to get the balance between playability, open endedness, and emulation. It was a moving target. Gygax certainly added more simulationism into AD&D 1e, which makes sense since he'd published more than one set of war gaming rules before. Chainmail (without fantasy supplement) was also a balance between playability and simulationism.
Any wargame has to be, ask Avalon Hill!
Their war games were scaled in difficulty and complexity based on how simulationist you wanted to be and how playable you wanted them to be. Optional rules in D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Blitzkrieg, 1914, etc, all allowed a little bit of flex in that balance point.

One of the nice things about B/X and it's later version of B-E-C-M-I was that it was a lot less simulationist and in my view more playable (lower barrier to entry) on the whole.

But back to the original point on this thread - casters and martials. If you look at the point values in Chainmail, for a Sorcerer or a superhero, it was a good thing that there was a chance for spell failure or there'd have been no balance at all. (See Chainmail 3d edition to see what I am talking about, in terms of the spell tables)

Is bringing a chance for spell failure back into D&D a good move now? I am not sure.
Saving throws represent a form of spell failure and always have.
Concentration loss does something similar.

Pex

2022-08-11, 07:39 PM

I personally hate "Resistance to nonmagical weapons". It makes sense for some stuff, like constructs, but usually it's just not interesting, and basically every Caster bypasses it casually.

Consider, say, a Gargoyle. It's made of stone, so it's hard to damage.

Right now a Gargoyle is resistant to nonmagic, non-adamantine physical damage, which makes some sense. A Fighter has trouble damaging it unless their weapon is especially sturdy, either due to being magic, or due to being made of adamantine.

But, every caster element works just fine except Poison. Even things like Fire, Cold, or Necrotic.

If "Bypassing damage reduction" is going to be a thing, it should come from the other direction.

Here's how I would rework it.

The Gargoyle has the trait "Durable", and a list of weaknesses, things which bypass it's durability: Bludgeoning weapons, Magic Weapons, Force Damage, Acid Damage, Thunder Damage, Adamantine Weapons.
If an attack covers two weaknesses, say, an adamantine maul, the creature instead has Vulnerability to it.

Make casters jump through similar hoops to Martials as far as getting damage through defenses, and build in more vulnerabilities, rather than just making a bunch of creatures resistant to nonmagical attacks, forcing fighters to jump through hoops while casters just ignore that.

Another concept I play with is the idea of Microcrits. Where I've played with this, the trigger has been "Your final attack roll exceeds AC 20 or 5 above their AC, whichever is higher".

I feel like there could be some great martial design space there, especially with melee attacks against bigger monsters.

A simpler solution is to bring back damage reduction. You can still have the special material/enchantment type that bypasses it altogether, but with raw power you can still damage the creature by doing more damage than its reduction threshold.

I think if you want to go that direction, you're almost asking for 'allowing a skill check to do X' to be class features. So e.g. Fighter 15 and Barbarian 10 would give you 'This character can now use a DC 20 Strength check to break a wall of force'. Rogue 10 might get 'This character can use a DC 20 Dexterity check to avoid any source of damage once a round', etc. The 'spells' are specific heroic feats which having a certain class level gives you narrative permission to do and specifically withholds from characters without the class feature.

This was suggested in a past thread and people (not me) had strong disagreement over it. One because it used DC tables, two because it added complexity, and three because it meant the DM can no longer fiat for those cases and their own personal fiat for their own game was paramount for everything.

NichG

2022-08-11, 08:22 PM

A simpler solution is to bring back damage reduction. You can still have the special material/enchantment type that bypasses it altogether, but with raw power you can still damage the creature by doing more damage than its reduction threshold.

This was suggested in a past thread and people (not me) had strong disagreement over it. One because it used DC tables, two because it added complexity, and three because it meant the DM can no longer fiat for those cases and their own personal fiat for their own game was paramount for everything.

You wouldn't really have DC tables - everything could be a 10, 15 or 20 if the system was designed so that bonuses don't grow with level. I think the bigger issue is how to organize the information, because unlike spells (where if you have the spell you can mark that down, and you don't just try to cast something without knowing it), in principle if some splatbook printed a class that got the ability to use the motion of air to sense the position an arrow came from using a Wisdom check, then that means that now you have to know that that class feature exists and say 'no, you can't' if someone without that class wants to figure out where an arrow came from in the dark or something like that. It probably works better if these are things that most people would say 'you can't do that with an ability check'. Actually, even better would be for each class to advance a small number of categories of skill trick (heck, just make it one per ability score), and then make these special uses require a certain number of points in a given category, because otherwise you have terrible interoperability, or likely need to reprint generic 'really strong character tricks' every time you have a class or variant that is also supposed to be strong.

Honestly though, this is a place where I'd prefer a system that has check results scale with level, rather than trying to keep the check DCs and results within a bounded zone and 'reinterpret what the result means' based on level/class. I suppose complexity/implementation/etc issues aside, scaling what a check means based on who is doing it just strikes me as being very 'informed attribute' in style, which is a personal pet peeve. I don't really like fiction where 'you're supposed to treat this person as smart' or 'you're supposed to treat this person as strong' or whatever, without their actions, behaviors, decisions, etc actually reflecting that in a grounded way. Stuff like 'the new villain beats up Worf to prove how strong they are', etc, I just find boring...

Sneak Dog

2022-08-11, 08:44 PM

I’d step back a bit from “player creating the character they want” to look at some higher level stuff. I’d rather not invite in “player picking whatever entitlement” as a distraction. The core concern is getting everyone on the same page. It’s my page when I’m GMing, your page when you’re behind the screen, and so on. Trial and error with hard locked choices such as class, attributes and proficiency can lead to long term dissatisfaction. Simply making the GMs aware of the hazards and inviting them to have early conversations with the players on how the open ended skill system will be treated would be a great step. One I might add does not assign a single suggested value. It merely makes the GM more aware that they, with their infinite power, have to mind this particular pinch point, work to set expectations early and with clarity, and to be ready to talk with their players when characters don’t perform the way the player was expecting.

Until the system sets up these expectations to comparable degrees, there will be no martial/caster balance. Right now, the casters are pretty concrete in what they can and cannot be and do. The martials are a mystery. Making the casters more fuzzy or the martials more concrete would work, but this mishmash is causing trouble. Like the GM needing to proclaim the capabilities of ability checks, a subsystem which martials rely on more than casters.
Besides, do you really want to have this talk at level 1 about what a level 1, 5, 10, 15 and 20 barbarian could and could not do to prevent this situation?

I didn't say anything about the DC varying by actor, I said the results. Those are not the same thing.

Alright. What else is the result based on besides the result of the ability check? Is this also explained anywhere in the D&D rules, implicitly or explicitly?

It's absolutely on the DM. If you don't think the 15 should have the possibility of failing, why are you calling for a roll? The system tells you not to do that, DMG 237, full stop.

A classic way to show progression is to pit someone against a challenge they struggled at before, or one that was literally impossible. Show them how far they've come.

If it's been established that task X is DC 30, then it's DC 30. It will be DC 30 and stay DC 30. The level 5 barbarian cannot possibly hope to succeed. Literally impossible for a PHB level 5 barbarian without magic items, as far as I understand. Their strength + proficiency is at most +8 but likely +7 or even +6. The level 15 barbarian has a +10, and potentially advantage. So what was once impossible is now a theoretical possibility, but really they'll just fail. (Unless it's a task which can be retried, in which case they can take their time and succeed. Fair enough.)
Alright. So something one struggled with. A DC 15 strength(athletics) check, something one would expect barbarians to excel at. All they get though is just the +4 (maybe just +2) progression. It's still challenging, somewhat of a struggle. Though spending a rage for advantage is somewhat less costly?

And that's why as GM I would call for a roll. Because the level 15 barbarian is still basically as good as the level 5 barbarian at being a strong person. Nothing implies that they improved to a groundbreaking degree.
(Well, as a strongman. As a combatant they've absolutely improved. Pit them against the foes they fought at level 5 and you'll see amazing growth.)

Psyren

2022-08-11, 08:45 PM

Yes, I was discussing the exact thing I said, in every post, that I was discussing. Shocking right?:smalltongue:

That you think there's a point to doing so, sure.

What Arneson came up with wasn't a combat simulator, it was something very different derived from the experimentation the Twin Cities group was doing with Dave Wesley's games, and it was an ever morphing thing as they tried to get the balance between playability, open endedness, and emulation.

I'm not saying they were actively trying to make that, or that combat was the only thing you could do back then. (You could bend bars too!) But we didn't even get nonweapon proficiencies until AD&D. Combat was the focus, and combatants were the world, or at least the window into it. And as grateful as I am that we started somewhere, that's not worthy of emulation.

Alright. What else is the result based on besides the result of the ability check? Is this also explained anywhere in the D&D rules, implicitly or explicitly?

Whatever you want it to be. "The DM decides the results of the players' actions," PHB pg. 6.

You might also want to read DMG 242, "Resolution and Consequences."

A classic way to show progression is to pit someone against a challenge they struggled at before, or one that was literally impossible. Show them how far they've come.

If it's been established that task X is DC 30, then it's DC 30. It will be DC 30 and stay DC 30. The level 5 barbarian cannot possibly hope to succeed. Literally impossible for a PHB level 5 barbarian without magic items, as far as I understand. Their strength + proficiency is at most +8 but likely +7 or even +6. The level 15 barbarian has a +10, and potentially advantage. So what was once impossible is now a theoretical possibility, but really they'll just fail. (Unless it's a task which can be retried, in which case they can take their time and succeed. Fair enough.)
Alright. So something one struggled with. A DC 15 strength(athletics) check, something one would expect barbarians to excel at. All they get though is just the +4 (maybe just +2) progression. It's still challenging, somewhat of a struggle. Though spending a rage for advantage is somewhat less costly?

And that's why as GM I would call for a roll. Because the level 15 barbarian is still basically as good as the level 5 barbarian at being a strong person. Nothing implies that they improved to a groundbreaking degree.
(Well, as a strongman. As a combatant they've absolutely improved. Pit them against the foes they fought at level 5 and you'll see amazing growth.)

So you'd call for a DC 30 roll when the player is level 5? That seems like a colossal waste of time.

Satinavian

2022-08-12, 01:05 AM

I for one would have no interest whatsoever in a game where a characters abilities are basically decided by GM handwaving.

If I were to play such a system with abilities kinda fuzzy, i would probably go for something like FATE. But even better would be to just not do so.

Ignimortis

2022-08-12, 05:40 AM

So you'd call for a DC 30 roll when the player is level 5? That seems like a colossal waste of time.
To establish how impossible that is to do, yes. The issue with 5e skill scaling is that things that were impossible to do with skills at level 5 scarcely become probable or even possible even at level 20.

I for one would have no interest whatsoever in a game where a characters abilities are basically decided by GM handwaving.

If I were to play such a system with abilities kinda fuzzy, i would probably go for something like FATE. But even better would be to just not do so.
Exactly. In fact, I tend to go to crunchy systems in part specifically so that I can tell the GM that my character does, in fact, have an ability that allows them to say "no" to the event currently trying to happen.

"Oh, a grapple? I teleport out with Misty Step."; "12P to the face? Good thing I've got like 45 soak dice"; etc. Telling the GM "no" has always been part of the fun for me, even if they're far from adversarial.

A simpler solution is to bring back damage reduction. You can still have the special material/enchantment type that bypasses it altogether, but with raw power you can still damage the creature by doing more damage than its reduction threshold.
Resistance being a fixed "half damage" is terrible for doing neat things with resistance. It's less complexity than basic JRPGs. I hate to praise Paizo again, but they did exactly right with Resistance and Weakness being supplemented with value X - how much less or more damage target takes from X. You could even keep the "half" - just write Resistance: Fire (halves) and you can still have Acid 10.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-12, 07:39 AM

To establish how impossible that is to do, yes. The issue with 5e skill scaling is that things that were impossible to do with skills at level 5 scarcely become probable or even possible even at level 20. I don't think I can agree with this.
Depends on proficiency, if you max your ability score, and if you get a little help. The game does feature teamwork, something a lot of this theoretical discussion ignores all too often. If you don't want to be part of a team, why are you playing D&D?

Let me illustrate: At level 20, you can have +6 proficiency, and a +5 mod boost. That gives you a 10% chance to do a nearly impossible task (DC 30) with no modifiers. Once you get +1d4 from guidance from an ally, and possibly and if you have a bard in the group +1d12 bardic inspiration, it is well within reach.
A level 1 character trying the same DC 30 task would find it out of reach, if unaided. +2 proficiency and +3 for their stat puts their efforts at just reaching a DC 25 on a roll of a nat 20. Again, guidance +1d4 and bardic inspiration +1d6 may put that DC 30 task within reach but it's still likely to fail

If DC 30 is nearly impossible for a low level character but achievable (to varying degrees of possibility) by a maxed out character, that makes narrative sense.

"Oh, a grapple? I teleport out with Misty Step.";
"12P to the face? Good thing I've got like 45 soak dice"; etc.
Telling the GM "no" has always been part of the fun for me, even if they're far from adversarial.
Temp HP; Counterspell, resistance to necrotic, all of that offers something similar in D&D 5e. (There's a different way to avoid stress or trauma or wounds in Blades in the Dark, but as we have not gone on a score yet I've yet to see how that plays out)

Resistance being a fixed "half damage" is terrible for doing neat things with resistance.
It's less complexity than basic JRPGs.
I hate to praise Paizo again, but they did exactly right with Resistance and Weakness being supplemented with value X - how much less or more damage target takes from X. You could even keep the "half" - just write Resistance: Fire (halves) and you can still have Acid 10. Resistance is less fiddly. Easy to figure out. For experienced to advanced players Damage Reduction is quite workable (just as Temp HP is).

Ignimortis

2022-08-12, 08:27 AM

I don't think I can agree with this.
Depends on proficiency, if you max your ability score, and if you get a little help. The game does feature teamwork, something a lot of this theoretical discussion ignores all too often. If you don't want to be part of a team, why are you playing D&D?

Let me illustrate: At level 20, you can have +6 proficiency, and a +5 mod boost. That gives you a 10% chance to do a nearly impossible task (DC 30) with no modifiers. Once you get +1d4 from guidance from an ally, and possibly and if you have a bard in the group +1d12 bardic inspiration, it is well within reach.
A level 1 character trying the same DC 30 task would find it out of reach, if unaided. +2 proficiency and +3 for their stat puts their efforts at just reaching a DC 25 on a roll of a nat 20. Again, guidance +1d4 and bardic inspiration +1d6 may put that DC 30 task within reach but it's still likely to fail

If DC 30 is nearly impossible for a low level character but achievable (to varying degrees of possibility) by a maxed out character, that makes narrative sense.

You just demonstrated the reverse. Things that are barely achievable by a single level 20 character are also barely achievable by a level 1 character with very basic assistance, but are still not guaranteed for a level 20 character with assistance. The assistance is actually more important than the changed capabilities of the character themselves. That 1d4+1d12 (which, granted, you are far from guaranteed to have) provides, on average, +8 to your roll. Getting 19 levels, on the other hand, provides you +6. There is a noticeable issue there.

Temp HP; Counterspell, resistance to necrotic, all of that offers something similar in D&D 5e. (There's a different way to avoid stress or trauma or wounds in Blades in the Dark, but as we have not gone on a score yet I've yet to see how that plays out)
Temp HP is less "no" and "ok fine but it's not my real HP so I care less". Counterspell is a great tool and one I've enjoyed using a lot, even counterspelling a counterspell of a much more powerful mage. Resistance is also not "no", it's "yeah but I take half".

Resistance is less fiddly. Easy to figure out. For experienced to advanced players Damage Reduction is quite workable (just as Temp HP is).
There are many things that could be made less fiddly. The issue is that every time you drop complexity, you also lose meaningful interactions, and how much you lose isn't always proportional to how much you gain (in fact, after a certain point, you lose a lot more than you gain).

Psyren

2022-08-12, 08:46 AM

To establish how impossible that is to do, yes. The issue with 5e skill scaling is that things that were impossible to do with skills at level 5 scarcely become probable or even possible even at level 20.

"Establishing impossibility" in 5e comes long before setting a DC. You are doing it backwards if you're using DC to make that determination. In fact, keep in mind that a level 5 with expertise can in fact hit DC 30 if you start the process backwards in this way. It's a 5% chance (Or 10% for a VHuman or CLineage) but it is possible. And that's before Guidance/Help/Bards too.

Here's a flowchart:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/945934606056685591/1006943280187052103/image001.jpg

Setting a DC only happens at the final "roll!" step.

I for one would have no interest whatsoever in a game where a characters abilities are basically decided by GM handwaving.

If I were to play such a system with abilities kinda fuzzy, i would probably go for something like FATE. But even better would be to just not do so.

Don't know if you're referring to me, but I'm definitely not advocating for "characters abilities decided by GM handwaving." And I have no interest in FATE either.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-12, 09:41 AM

You just demonstrated the reverse. Things that are barely achievable by a single level 20 character are also barely achievable by a level 1 character with very basic assistance, but are still not guaranteed for a level 20 character with assistance. I don't think so. At level 1 without assistance the DC 30 check simply cannot be done, and DC 25 is usually not achievable.
The DC 30 check at 20 is still mostly a fail but it can be achieved sometimes. (Expertise signficantly changes this). And with a little help from my friends, either of them is more achievable. I think that's bounded accuracy doing something good. At level 20 what was once hard becomes routine.

There are many things that could be made less fiddly. The issue is that every time you drop complexity, you also lose meaningful interactions, and how much you lose isn't always proportional to how much you gain (in fact, after a certain point, you lose a lot more than you gain). And this is where optional rules come in. Making things less fiddly means lower barriers to entry, less confusion among casual or new players.
It's eight years in, and half of my players in the Wednesday group are still casual players.

You are coming at this from "the expert player" perspective (which I can empathize with, system mastery is for me a part of the fun) and frankly, that was part of D&D 3.x's problem: going too far in catering to that subset of players.

I for one would have no interest whatsoever in a game where a characters abilities are basically decided by GM handwaving.
Given that D&D 5e isn't that, I am not sure where this comes from.

Satinavian

2022-08-12, 09:57 AM

Don't know if you're referring to me, but I'm definitely not advocating for "characters abilities decided by GM handwaving." And I have no interest in FATE either.Are you not the one who would give an easy DC for an athletic accomplishment to a high level barbarian, a higher DC to a low level barbarian and an "impossible, don't roll" to a low level wizard purely on your own imagination about what those archetypes should be able to do ?

And that the freedom to do this was basically an argument against finally including a proper skill system into D&D where the numbers on the sheets and the DC tables regulate what is possible for a character and what not ?

I mean, it is possible i have misunderstood you but that sounds exactly like "characters abilities decided by GM handwaving." And as i am seemingly not the only one reading your comments in this way, you might want to clarify.

Psyren

2022-08-12, 10:09 AM

Are you not the one who would give an easy DC for an athletic accomplishment to a high level barbarian, a higher DC to a low level barbarian and an "impossible, don't roll" to a low level wizard purely on your own imagination about what those archetypes should be able to do ?

No, that's not what I said at all :smallconfused:

You should establish one DC for the task regardless of the person attempting it. But you should only do that at the end of the process flow I provided above, not at the beginning.

Ignimortis

2022-08-12, 10:29 AM

I don't think so. At level 1 without assistance the DC 30 check simply cannot be done, and DC 25 is usually not achievable.
The DC 30 check at 20 is still mostly a fail but it can be achieved sometimes. (Expertise signficantly changes this). And with a little help from my friends, either of them is more achievable. I think that's bounded accuracy doing something good. At level 20 what was once hard becomes routine.
I don't see it that way. To me it means that the growth of 19 levels is about as important than having access to a cantrip and a level 1 bard feature (d4+d6, on average, produce exactly the same +6). And that's not how things should be, because there is no way that having access to a cantrip and a level 1 bard feature would matter as much when you would compare combat or magical capability. But skills? Skills, apparently, don't get to grow nearly as high. Expertise is either a class feature or comes from a feat, so far from every class gets it, and, in fact, no martial base class aside from Rogue gets it.

And yes, Rogue gets to automatically pass DC25 checks at level 17, which is good and proper. I'd also like for it to be able to easily pass a DC40 check, which should be outright impossible for level 1 even with support and minmaxing towards beating a specific skillcheck. I'd also like for non-Rogue martials to be able to pass DC30 on their own pretty much automatically and routinely try and succeed at DC40s and even DC50s with support.

People who kill dragons for breakfast should not be stumped by things that are impossible for people who can be easily torn apart by half a dozen common wolves. Casters get there through magic. Non-spellcasters should get there through being impossibly good at skills. Instead we get spellcasters who can cross planar boundaries and martials who can kill a dozen wolves barehanded, but cannot cross a 60-ft wide ravine without outside help.

You could also just lower the power level that dragons never become trivially easy enemies, of course. But even then skills scale extremely poorly.

And this is where optional rules come in. Making things less fiddly means lower barriers to entry, less confusion among casual or new players.
It's eight years in, and half of my players in the Wednesday group are still casual players.

You are coming at this from "the expert player" perspective (which I can empathize with, system mastery is for me a part of the fun) and frankly, that was part of D&D 3.x's problem: going too far in catering to that subset of players.
I wouldn't mind that nearly as much if the developers actually printed good optional rules and expanded on mechanics. WotC have released one new class in 8 years and it has one new mechanic, that being infusions (which are item-bound invocations, but even that is more than what we've got otherwise). The only sourcebook that even tried to do something with skills was Xanathar, which was almost 5 years ago. In that same timeframe, 3.5 printed a whole ton of stuff that was, frankly, optional.

"just do it yourself"/homebrew isn't an answer, especially for more conservative groups/GMs, who tend to take official content with much less salt than anything unofficial.

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-12, 10:44 AM

And this is where optional rules come in. Making things less fiddly means lower barriers to entry, less confusion among casual or new players.
It's eight years in, and half of my players in the Wednesday group are still casual players.

You are coming at this from "the expert player" perspective (which I can empathize with, system mastery is for me a part of the fun) and frankly, that was part of D&D 3.x's problem: going too far in catering to that subset of players.
This is where I must part ways with Korvin, who I feel is like a kindred spirit on this forum because I normally agree with most of what they say :smallfrown:.

I truthfully don't understand the dividing line on this "system mastery" notion. It seems to me to be arbitrary and look, essentially, like the following:

1. Things need to be super simple and dumbed down for "casual" players.
2. The magic system is an absolute and total exception to rule 1, to the maximum possible degree that anything can be an exception to something.
3. This also assumes that the DM is not a "casual" DM, but an "expert" DM that can handle the looseness and vagueness of the rules expertly and keep the game flowing smoothly and without issue.

This seems like we may as well be picking cards off a table to design the game: Let's see, I'll choose "super simple rules for newbs" and... let's go with "complicated magic system" and then... "newb players but master DMs". Cool, great! We'll call it 5E!

Pex

2022-08-12, 11:04 AM

I don't think I can agree with this.
Depends on proficiency, if you max your ability score, and if you get a little help. The game does feature teamwork, something a lot of this theoretical discussion ignores all too often. If you don't want to be part of a team, why are you playing D&D?

Let me illustrate: At level 20, you can have +6 proficiency, and a +5 mod boost. That gives you a 10% chance to do a nearly impossible task (DC 30) with no modifiers. Once you get +1d4 from guidance from an ally, and possibly and if you have a bard in the group +1d12 bardic inspiration, it is well within reach.
A level 1 character trying the same DC 30 task would find it out of reach, if unaided. +2 proficiency and +3 for their stat puts their efforts at just reaching a DC 25 on a roll of a nat 20. Again, guidance +1d4 and bardic inspiration +1d6 may put that DC 30 task within reach but it's still likely to fail

If DC 30 is nearly impossible for a low level character but achievable (to varying degrees of possibility) by a maxed out character, that makes narrative sense.

Temp HP; Counterspell, resistance to necrotic, all of that offers something similar in D&D 5e. (There's a different way to avoid stress or trauma or wounds in Blades in the Dark, but as we have not gone on a score yet I've yet to see how that plays out)
Resistance is less fiddly. Easy to figure out. For experienced to advanced players Damage Reduction is quite workable (just as Temp HP is).

Yes and no. You are right that teamwork should be encouraged. The warrior should need the spellcaster as much as the spellcaster should need the warrior. However, there is still room for a warrior to be able to something Really Cool all by himself - the so called DC 30 task. Obviously not everything possible everywhere that's DC 30, but particular things that fall within their forte should be possible. It should not be controversial for a 15th level warrior to climb a 100 ft high cliff face of ice just because he wants to. A wizard could get up there since level 3. The game rules should allow for this and need to be blatantly specific in telling the DM this is supposed to happen and completely, totally, unapologetically ignore Guy At The Gym realism.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-12, 11:13 AM

I'd say that the martial should have features that let him do Cool Things (tm) without having to roll at all. Just like casters do. Ability checks are, IMO, for those things not covered by explicit class features, things anyone can (at least in principle) attempt.

And then both of them should have Cool Things that require various rolls (attack rolls, saving throws, or ability checks).

And then both of them should have Cool Things they can't do and have to rely on others for.

Not the same Cool Things (necessarily, although probably some overlap) in all cases.

Psyren

2022-08-12, 11:40 AM

I wouldn't mind that nearly as much if the developers actually printed good optional rules and expanded on mechanics. WotC have released one new class in 8 years and it has one new mechanic, that being infusions (which are item-bound invocations, but even that is more than what we've got otherwise). The only sourcebook that even tried to do something with skills was Xanathar, which was almost 5 years ago. In that same timeframe, 3.5 printed a whole ton of stuff that was, frankly, optional.

"just do it yourself"/homebrew isn't an answer, especially for more conservative groups/GMs, who tend to take official content with much less salt than anything unofficial.

The current content pace for 5e is fine, as is the lack of predefined DCs. If you want significantly more than that, then yes, "make it yourself" is indeed the answer.

Yes and no. You are right that teamwork should be encouraged. The warrior should need the spellcaster as much as the spellcaster should need the warrior. However, there is still room for a warrior to be able to something Really Cool all by himself - the so called DC 30 task. Obviously not everything possible everywhere that's DC 30, but particular things that fall within their forte should be possible. It should not be controversial for a 15th level warrior to climb a 100 ft high cliff face of ice just because he wants to. A wizard could get up there since level 3. The game rules should allow for this and need to be blatantly specific in telling the DM this is supposed to happen and completely, totally, unapologetically ignore Guy At The Gym realism.

DC 30 is nearly impossible to do "by yourself." It requires significant talent, substantial training (high level/expertise/both), the assistance of magic, and even after all that, luck.

"I can do a DC 30 thing by myself" should not be a standard or routine thing for anyone. But when you have enough of the four things above to have a good chance at achieving it, a lot of easier things should be automatic for you.

Satinavian

2022-08-12, 12:24 PM

No, that's not what I said at all :smallconfused:

You should establish one DC for the task regardless of the person attempting it. But you should only do that at the end of the process flow I provided above, not at the beginning.
Then we have had indeed a misunderstanding. If you make your decisions about whether the task is possible and eventually what the DC should be without regard for the person attempting it, then everything is fine.

As for the flow chart, that is basically correct. Though i do hand out occosianally high DCs for difficult tasks that the current group can't possibly do. Both because i might be wrong about what exactly the group can do with buffs and whatever and to give the players some orientation about how difficult the task is in case they try later under better circumstances or build to be able to do stuff like that.

warty goblin

2022-08-12, 12:42 PM

At some level I think being able to beat higher DCs is just... not a very interesting or nuanced way to portray skill expansion, for a couple of reasons.

It makes skill linear. At level 8 Bob has a 5% chance, at level 10 he's up to a 10% chance. A very small set of activities that were completely impossible before can now be done 5% of the time. Big freaking deal. Yes some of this is an artifact of the d20 and 3d6 makes those skill increases a lot punchier, but it still doesn't really feel like expanding capability, and therefore doesn't really feel like learning new stuff.

Craft skills are a great example of this. I've recently started to learn metal engraving and inlay. I now know how to do basic patterns, and can do them pretty reliably with a small chance of catastrophic failure. I did not go through a period where I could engrave successfully 10% of the time, but after grinding a while am up to a 30% success rate. I can just do that thing now.

Thus is much closer to how magic works in D&D. The party wizard doesn't have a period of 5% fireball success, he/she just goes from not being able to fireball to fireballing.

I think in general this would be a much better model for skills. Make a richer set of skills with discrete levels of mastery (untrained/ apprentice/ journeyman/ master/ legend type deal), give good examples of the sorts of tasks and success probabilities each level has, and clearly gate things off. An apprentice blacksmith can't forge a sword, a journeyman can do it 90% of the time. Only a legendary smith gets to make Excalibur. A completely untrained person can't scale a vertical cliff with bad handholds, an apprentice can do it 70% of the time, a master auto-succeeds.

Maybe you integrate attributes as a bonus, e.g. you add your str bonus to climbing checks, but only those checks your mastery level entitles you to make. You could also use attributes as access gates, sure anybody can hit apprentice climbing, but you gotta have Str 16 or whatever to hit master.

The last part of this equation is to tie developing non-magical skills to non-magical advancement, and sharply limit magic's ability to duplicate (some) skill effects. Maybe a 3rd or 4th level spell can duplicate journeyman crafting, and very powerful, expensive magic can manage master level stuff, but legendary results simply cannot be achieved by magic. Ever. Full stop.

The idea is that a skill based character ends up with a raft of reliable capabilities that expand in scope as they level up, and are better than their magical equivalents. There's already plenty of stuff magic can do without a skill analog, actually enforcing the converse seems fair.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-12, 12:43 PM

Then we have had indeed a misunderstanding. If you make your decisions about whether the task is possible and eventually what the DC should be without regard for the person attempting it, then everything is fine.

IMO, possibility is intrinsically a character and circumstance bound determination. What's possible-with-effort for one character may be impossible for a different one and trivial (possible-without-meaningful-effort) for another.

Take the simple task of "reaching the bottle on the high shelf (6' above the ground)" and three different (exaggerated) characters:
* For wheel-chair-bound Joe with no magic, this task is impossible. If he wants that bottle, he's going to have to find a different way to get it.
* For Tiny Tim (height 3', arm-reach 4.5'), this task is possible, but will require him to climb on something or jump. If he has a sufficient stool, it's trivial. Otherwise, it may need a check.
* For Goliath Greg (height 8'), this task is trivial.

For only one character (and only one circumstance for that character) is a check even possibly[1] needed (and thus a DC needs to be set). For all the others, you short-cut and just give auto-success (Greg or Tim with stool) or auto-failure (Joe).

And there are many many others. Only members of the Cult of Obscurity and specialized scholars who have studied that exact thing know the meaning of the symbol found in their inner sanctum. If your character doesn't have the in-character "fact" that they are either a member of that cult OR have studied that exact thing (possibly during play or established as backstory and accepted as such by the DM), they fail. If they do, they might (depending on other factors) need a roll. Or not.

This is how you handle the "absurd" results--if breaking down the door requires a check for Muscle-Bound Greg, it may (based on circumstances and other factors) be impossible for Weakling Wesley.

Only roll checks for things where you've already carved off all the unacceptable results on either side. That way you're guaranteed to find the results useful. Whether those unacceptable results are so because they're absurd (failure at a trivial task, success at an impossible one) or because the consequences are unacceptable ("you fail and nothing happens, time doesn't matter" OR "rocks fall everyone dies" on a routine task), they need to be filtered out first.

And no game system can do that for you, because what is unacceptable/absurd/annoying/etc at one table may or may not be such at other tables. Ability checks are not made or decided in the abstract--they're always tied to one specific character trying one specific thing in one specific situation in one specific world. And all of those factors matter to the resolution.

[1] or not if the consequences for either success or failure aren't interesting and meaningful. "You fail but have plenty of time to try again and nothing else happens" isn't interesting OR meaningful. IMO wasting time on a check is pointless in that case.

NichG

2022-08-12, 01:09 PM

Psyren

2022-08-12, 01:19 PM

For non-D&D systems, I rather like the idea that all of the modifier/roll/etc stuff determines how much something costs (in terms of time, resources, energy, etc) rather than whether or not a specific thing is successful. It's an awkward fit for D&D as is, but maybe doable...

It's quite easily doable, just implement "Success At A Cost" or "Degrees of Failure" from the DMG, and then apply different resource/time/etc. penalties to each rung or range. Note that even a failure to meet the established DC can be "success at a cost."

In general, asking 'did you succeed?' is less interesting than other questions you could ask the game's random number generator, but that's a whole other conversation...

The point of my earlier post is that "did you succeed/fail" is not where the DM has to end the challenge. Rather they should also be asking "what does 'success/failure' mean?" or "how much did you succeed/fail?"

Satinavian

2022-08-12, 01:21 PM

IMO, possibility is intrinsically a character and circumstance bound determination. What's possible-with-effort for one character may be impossible for a different one and trivial (possible-without-meaningful-effort) for another.

Take the simple task of "reaching the bottle on the high shelf (6' above the ground)" and three different (exaggerated) characters:
* For wheel-chair-bound Joe with no magic, this task is impossible. If he wants that bottle, he's going to have to find a different way to get it.
* For Tiny Tim (height 3', arm-reach 4.5'), this task is possible, but will require him to climb on something or jump. If he has a sufficient stool, it's trivial. Otherwise, it may need a check.
* For Goliath Greg (height 8'), this task is trivial.

For only one character (and only one circumstance for that character) is a check even possibly[1] needed (and thus a DC needs to be set). For all the others, you short-cut and just give auto-success (Greg or Tim with stool) or auto-failure (Joe).
Well, either the game is detailed enough to have drawbacks/flaws like wheel-chair-bound and size categories than those can be used. Or it has not and uses more broad strokes and does not simulate such minor details, then it should be equally difficult for all three.

Ability checks are not made or decided in the abstract--they're always tied to one specific character trying one specific thing in one specific situation in one specific world. And all of those factors matter to the resolution.
And that is exactly the mindset i would never want to see in the game.

NichG

2022-08-12, 01:38 PM

It's quite easily doable, just implement "Success At A Cost" or "Degrees of Failure" from the DMG, and then apply different resource/time/etc. penalties to each rung or range. Note that even a failure to meet the established DC can be "success at a cost."

The point of my earlier post is that "did you succeed/fail" is not where the DM has to end the challenge. Rather they should also be asking "what does 'success/failure' mean?" or "how much did you succeed/fail?"

In terms of talking about a system here, the idea would be to actually systematize it and bake it into core mechanics rather than have to improvise what the cost or degree of success/failure are about...

In non-D&D systems, I've for example used a mechanic where the attributes are summed up into three pools (Body, Mind, Soul). Harmful things like attacks or spells have a Major and Minor effect, characters roll to apply an effect offensively and can roll to avoid an effect where the threshold to avoid the Major part of the effect is lower than the threshold to avoid the Minor part. If their roll to avoid is short they can decide, after rolling, to pay points out of the pool corresponding to the effect to make up the difference. When using an offensive ability you can decide before rolling to invest points from pools to add extra effects to the Major or Minor consequences. So the entire system pivots around deciding 'will I be affected?' and 'how much can I get away with putting into this attack before the defender is just going to pay to get out of it entirely?'

Basically what I mean is, the 'cost' isn't just 'GM gets to add a complication', but its actually coming from resources that the player can build around. More 'your roll to pick the lock determines how long it takes, according to this table' rather than 'roll to see if you pick the lock, if you fail you can still pick the lock but oh look you set off an alarm'

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-12, 02:00 PM

Well, either the game is detailed enough to have drawbacks/flaws like wheel-chair-bound and size categories than those can be used. Or it has not and uses more broad strokes and does not simulate such minor details, then it should be equally difficult for all three.

And that is exactly the mindset i would never want to see in the game.

Without this, you might as well play a video game. If you can't trust the DM to adjudicate the fiction-mechanics interface, then you shouldn't play with them at all. That's their primary job. The rules don't run the game. The DM does.

Dr.Samurai

2022-08-12, 02:12 PM

There's a world of difference between making things up whole cloth and adjudicating beyond the rules when necessary.

DMs don't just sprout from the ground with expertise in DMing. This is the Expert DM/Newb Player dynamic I just mentioned, where the assumption is that the game must favor n00b players that can't be trusted to learn rules systems, and expert DMs that have to be able to adjudicate everything because almost everything that isn't a spell or attack is left up to the DM to figure out.

Let's just acknowledge that this isn't the only way to design a game, instead of pretending it has to be this way.

Satinavian

2022-08-12, 02:30 PM

Without this, you might as well play a video game. If you can't trust the DM to adjudicate the fiction-mechanics interface, then you shouldn't play with them at all. That's their primary job. The rules don't run the game. The DM does.
The GM controls the world, the player controls the character. That does extend to the fiction. The GM does set the DCs and stuff in a way they best represent the world. The player mechanically builds his character in a way best fitting his imagination.

Or to say it differently : The GM decides how difficult something is but the player decides how good his character is. When the DM starts to modify DCs based on who attempts stuff, he infringes on the sphere of the player to control part of the shared fiction.

Psyren

2022-08-12, 02:39 PM

In terms of talking about a system here, the idea would be to actually systematize it and bake it into core mechanics rather than have to improvise what the cost or degree of success/failure are about...

In non-D&D systems, I've for example used a mechanic where the attributes are summed up into three pools (Body, Mind, Soul). Harmful things like attacks or spells have a Major and Minor effect, characters roll to apply an effect offensively and can roll to avoid an effect where the threshold to avoid the Major part of the effect is lower than the threshold to avoid the Minor part. If their roll to avoid is short they can decide, after rolling, to pay points out of the pool corresponding to the effect to make up the difference. When using an offensive ability you can decide before rolling to invest points from pools to add extra effects to the Major or Minor consequences. So the entire system pivots around deciding 'will I be affected?' and 'how much can I get away with putting into this attack before the defender is just going to pay to get out of it entirely?'

Basically what I mean is, the 'cost' isn't just 'GM gets to add a complication', but its actually coming from resources that the player can build around. More 'your roll to pick the lock determines how long it takes, according to this table' rather than 'roll to see if you pick the lock, if you fail you can still pick the lock but oh look you set off an alarm'

The "roll on these tables for each task to determine results" approach is not inherently badwrongfun, but it's not what D&D is going for. Nor should it. Rolemaster is a fine game for those looking for that experience, but turning D&D into Rolemaster would be a recipe for disaster. (Hell, just making it 3.5 again would also be disaster - the folks who like 3.5 already have 3.5.)

Let's just acknowledge that this isn't the only way to design a game, instead of pretending it has to be this way.

No one is saying this is "the only way to design a game." Just that we believe it's the superior way to design D&D. i.e. the game the thread is about.

NichG

2022-08-12, 03:17 PM

The "roll on these tables for each task to determine results" approach is not inherently badwrongfun, but it's not what D&D is going for. Nor should it. Rolemaster is a fine game for those looking for that experience, but turning D&D into Rolemaster would be a recipe for disaster. (Hell, just making it 3.5 again would also be disaster - the folks who like 3.5 already have 3.5.)

I did preface this by saying that while I liked the idea, I found it an awkward match for D&D. I don't think its so much an issue of having a billion tables with tiny details, but rather its an issue of redesigning the system from the ground up to not be concerned about the question of 'whether you succeed' and instead re-writing everything by saying 'this level/rank investment/etc means that X is now something you can do', while at the same time creating new resource pools whose specific function is to be taxed as a consequence of doing those things (with rolls mitigating the degree to which those pools are taxed). If every roll costs an action and points of resource, then things like 'your lockpicking roll determines how long it takes' can just derive naturally from that.

Maybe a good example is Cypher System. If you modified that so that Effort could be spent after rolling rather than before, it'd basically be 80% of the way to what I'm describing. And Cypher System is not particularly detail-oriented or crunchy, though it is more so than something like FATE.

Slipjig

2022-08-12, 04:26 PM

And I for one have no concrete vision of what a level 15 fighter is supposed to be over a level 5 fighter, nor the same for barbarian/rogue.

The best contemporary model I can think of for a level 15 Fighter or Barbarian is Kratos from God of War. His abilities are clearly beyond the range of human possibilities, but he's what the Guy-at-the-Gym aspires to be when he grows up. Hercules from the myths also doesn't really get up to anything that a level 15 Fighter or Barbarian couldn't do.

High-level Rogue examples are a little trickier, because the mythic rogues to be Tricksters who outsmart their opponents.

One reason both the MCU and LotR examples fall apart is that the idea of "leveling up" doesn't really apply in either setting. Captain America has basically exactly the same amount of power in WWII as he does in Endgame (except for what he gets from Mjolnir). Aragorn becomes more powerful because he found a powerful magic item/McGuffin at the end of a quest arc, not because he "leveled up". (Iron Man and Dr. Strange are both clear exceptions, but both of them are continuously working at improving themselves/their gear.)

There is definitely fiction out there where certain characters clearly Level Up over time (the Dresden Files being a good example), but it's not the norm in most fiction. In most fiction most characters maintain a pretty constant power level from start to finish (unless they start out too weak to face the challenge and becoming powerful through training/magic items/divine gifts is a major plot point). But leveling up simply isn't a concept that applies in most fictional worlds.

Pex

2022-08-12, 05:00 PM

The current content pace for 5e is fine, as is the lack of predefined DCs. If you want significantly more than that, then yes, "make it yourself" is indeed the answer.

DC 30 is nearly impossible to do "by yourself." It requires significant talent, substantial training (high level/expertise/both), the assistance of magic, and even after all that, luck.

"I can do a DC 30 thing by myself" should not be a standard or routine thing for anyone. But when you have enough of the four things above to have a good chance at achieving it, a lot of easier things should be automatic for you.

A DC 30 check is a game mechanical way of showing this particular PC can do it when another PC can't. True, a class ability can just say "You may now climb walls of any height and material any time you want to." It's a matter of preference. Using the skill system is merely a way of doing it and likelier easier to manage since the system already exists instead of ad-hoc thinking of possibilities. DC 30 represents things that normally can't be done but eventually can be. They're not 'Never, ever can be done'. They are only 'Can't be done right now'. The point is to on purpose yes absolutely forget realism accept and declare a warrior can do it by himself.

At some level I think being able to beat higher DCs is just... not a very interesting or nuanced way to portray skill expansion, for a couple of reasons.

It makes skill linear. At level 8 Bob has a 5% chance, at level 10 he's up to a 10% chance. A very small set of activities that were completely impossible before can now be done 5% of the time. Big freaking deal. Yes some of this is an artifact of the d20 and 3d6 makes those skill increases a lot punchier, but it still doesn't really feel like expanding capability, and therefore doesn't really feel like learning new stuff.

It can't work perfectly now because there are no benchmarks. DMs don't know the difficulty of a task, so they have to make it up and different DMs have different opinions on the difficulty of a task. How hard is it to climb a wall? DC is DM make it up. One DM's just climb the wall is another DM's DC 10 is another DM's DC 20. To make it work the game designers need to do their job and define the difficulty of various tasks with DC numbers. When they do that then can make the math work. If the math isn't working then maybe they need to increase or decrease the DC to get the percentages right until the math does work. Of course there is no way they can account for every possible scenario situation for everything. They aren't supposed to. All that's needed are examples. When the rules are explicitly telling the DM these tasks are DC 10, these are DC 15, these are DC 20, then the DM has a better idea of what DC to assign a task the rules don't mention. The rules can also throw in DCs not multiple of 5 to help DMs not default to everything is DC 15.

I noticed often times during a combat a player rolls to hit AC 14 against a tough foe and thinks he misses when in reality he hits and surprised when the DM says so. Even after all these years of 5E players still think tough monsters equal high AC. This is how DMs are when it comes to DCs of skill use. They will default to DC 20 or 15 because it's supposed to be "challenging" or otherwise worry about making it too easy in fear of breaking the game. DMs need to see ink on paper physical evidence that the game defines various tasks they would give DC 15 or 20 when they have to make it up now are actually DC 10 and even DC Yes should the game designers actually do their job. Of course there are tasks the game would say are DC 15, DC 20. DMs need to see those numbers for comparisons.

Without this, you might as well play a video game. If you can't trust the DM to adjudicate the fiction-mechanics interface, then you shouldn't play with them at all. That's their primary job. The rules don't run the game. The DM does.

DMs are not perfect people. They don't always know what is an appropriate DC for a task or even a roll should happen at all. It's not about trust in the DM. It's about a person learning how to DM. The new DM has no clue on anything other than what he learns from reading the rules. The rules telling him to make it up doesn't help. It's not enough to say if you think something is easy give it DC 10. Is climbing a wall easy? Is jumping down from a height equal to your ST score easy? Is knowing the abilities of a creature you see easy? The DM has no clue, so he makes it up and that's how we end up with warriors can't do anything while spellcasters can do everything because all the spells are laid out telling you how they work with precise values of DC numbers.

InvisibleBison

2022-08-12, 06:01 PM

Without this, you might as well play a video game. If you can't trust the DM to adjudicate the fiction-mechanics interface, then you shouldn't play with them at all. That's their primary job. The rules don't run the game. The DM does.

Wouldn't this more or less preclude playing with a new DM? After all, even if they've been playing for a while it takes some time for someone to figure out how best to run a game, and while they're in that learning period they can't be relied on to get everything right. And for similar reasons, wouldn't this attitude also prevent you from joining a game being DMed by someone you haven't played with before?

Brookshw

2022-08-12, 06:39 PM

Wouldn't this more or less preclude playing with a new DM? After all, even if they've been playing for a while it takes some time for someone to figure out how best to run a game, and while they're in that learning period they can't be relied on to get everything right. And for similar reasons, wouldn't this attitude also prevent you from joining a game being DMed by someone you haven't played with before?

Eh, even seasoned DMs screw up or forget rules regularly, ultimately what you're looking for with a DM (and players for that matter) is a level of trust that everyone sitting down to the game is aiming for everyone to have fun playing. A basic level of trust is just necessary for a game to work, same way we trust the batter not to turn around and take a swing at the catcher instead of the ball.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-12, 07:01 PM

Eh, even seasoned DMs screw up or forget rules regularly, ultimately what you're looking for with a DM (and players for that matter) is a level of trust that everyone sitting down to the game is aiming for everyone to have fun playing. A basic level of trust is just necessary for a game to work, same way we trust the batter not to turn around and take a swing at the catcher instead of the ball.

Yeah. You don't have to trust that they'll do it "right" (because there is no such universal thing in this case), just that they're trying to help everyone have fun. And that if there are disagreements, you can talk them out like adults without getting offended or being offensive. If you can't resolve your differences one way or another, then you leave the table. Because it's not about doing it right, it's about everyone having fun. And what's fun for one may not be fun for another. There's no fault, just disagreements over taste, unless you try to force someone else to play your way or otherwise act improperly (as judged by the table's culture, which will vary).

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-12, 09:44 PM

People who kill dragons for breakfast have a DM who isn't doing his job. And no, we don't need more splats the way 3.x did, No. No. No. And no, we do not need more classes. No. No. No.

Yes and no. You are right that teamwork should be encouraged. The warrior should need the spellcaster as much as the spellcaster should need the warrior. However, there is still room for a warrior to be able to something Really Cool all by himself - the so called DC 30 task. Obviously not everything possible everywhere that's DC 30, but particular things that fall within their forte should be possible. It should not be controversial for a 15th level warrior to climb a 100 ft high cliff face of ice just because he wants to. A wizard could get up there since level 3. T.e game rules should allow for this and need to be blatantly specific in telling the DM this is supposed to happen and completely, totally, unapologetically ignore Guy At The Gym realism. Mostly in agreement with you on should - tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd

Ignimortis

2022-08-13, 12:31 AM

And no, we don't need more splats the way 3.x did, No. No. No. And no, we do not need more classes. No. No. No.

The thing is, I would agree that we don't need more classes - if the current number was actually used well instead of being wasted on multiple differently wrapped full casters with very little to actually distinguish their potential playstyles on the class level, and multiple non-casters with extremely similar game plans, too. If you did actually have 13 extremely distinct classes with subclasses/archetypes that would provide further differentiation, then yes, we might avoid needing more classes. But as of 5e, class design is still holding onto things that presume a "classplosion" that would fix issues with existing classes by providing new ones eventually.

Therefore, one either needs to change how classes and subclasses are designed, or make more classes with noticeably different mechanics behind them - or announce that "yes, that is the extent of how far we are willing to go design-wise, and we won't be making anything actually new". The only caster who is noticeably different from the rest is the Warlock - and even that only because of how their casting is structured, not because of actual spells available to them. The only martial who is noticeably different from the rest is the Monk - and even then only because they get a special resource and active abilities for that resource as a baseline and get to ignore certain baseline rules more flagrantly (i.e. not just manipulate numbers) than the rest.

have a DM who isn't doing his job.
Considering that adult, fully ready to fight, MM dragons show up as early as CR13 (which is a trivial fight by level 17 even if you don't optimize all that much), it's not about the DM, it's about the system. There are dragons that would be a trivial fight for a level 20 party, and perhaps even for a level 20 character on their lonesome if they have some way to prepare for it. Which is why I said that one potential way to change that would be to just drop the power level enough that even an adult dragon is more than average for a max-level party.

Pex

2022-08-13, 02:29 AM

Considering that adult, fully ready to fight, MM dragons show up as early as CR13 (which is a trivial fight by level 17 even if you don't optimize all that much), it's not about the DM, it's about the system. There are dragons that would be a trivial fight for a level 20 party, and perhaps even for a level 20 character on their lonesome if they have some way to prepare for it. Which is why I said that one potential way to change that would be to just drop the power level enough that even an adult dragon is more than average for a max-level party.

No. It's Dungeons and Dragons. PCs are supposed to be able to defeat dragons. That's a feature.

Ignimortis

2022-08-13, 03:30 AM

No. It's Dungeons and Dragons. PCs are supposed to be able to defeat dragons. That's a feature.

Then people who can routinely and quite possibly on their own (routinely, not as a final boss that takes months of preparation, favours called in, artifacts being forged or retrieved, ect) beat up fully grown dragons - shouldn't be even remotely in the same ballpark as people who can, as a group, quite possibly lose to a small pack of wolves.

The way I see it, to resolve that you can either make dragons as impossible as a DC50 check - and cut down everything to the same level of power to match, or you make skills do impossible things at high levels because you already routinely do impossible things in combat and magically.

Or, well, you just tell everyone "we never intended for skills to be a function of a character on the same scale as combat prowess and/or magic would be". In which case, I think Rogue and every martial with a skill-focused feature are owed some significant improvements.

animorte

2022-08-13, 05:58 AM

The thing is, I would agree that we don't need more classes - if the current number was actually used well instead of being wasted on multiple differently wrapped full casters with very little to actually distinguish their potential playstyles on the class level, and multiple non-casters with extremely similar game plans, too. If you did actually have 13 extremely distinct classes with subclasses/archetypes that would provide further differentiation, then yes, we might avoid needing more classes. But as of 5e, class design is still holding onto things that presume a "classplosion" that would fix issues with existing classes by providing new ones eventually.

Therefore, one either needs to change how classes and subclasses are designed, or make more classes with noticeably different mechanics behind them - or announce that "yes, that is the extent of how far we are willing to go design-wise, and we won't be making anything actually new". The only caster who is noticeably different from the rest is the Warlock - and even that only because of how their casting is structured, not because of actual spells available to them. The only martial who is noticeably different from the rest is the Monk - and even then only because they get a special resource and active abilities for that resource as a baseline and get to ignore certain baseline rules more flagrantly (i.e. not just manipulate numbers) than the rest.

I do believe you have a grand misconception at play here. I definitely see where you’re coming from, but you should take a look back at older editions where there were in fact fewer classes (sans 3.pf unlimited). The differences were far more notable because there were fewer classes.

If you want some kind of tank guy, how different can it really be from our existing beefy melee martials? If you want somebody with skills, how distinct can you possibly make it from the Rogue or Bard? If you want to do different magic things, what type of spell use/progression can possibly be added without being envious of what the existing spell casters are already capable of?

Essentially, how can you expect unique enough designs to warrant entirely new classes while subclasses (granted not all of them) already do an excellent job of this.

I would take a look at the Sidekicks as an example: Expert, Spellcaster, and Warrior.
- First, they have a much greater balance with each other in their current state than our actual classes.
- Next, they are all distinctly different from one another with no real recognizable overlap.
- The Spellcaster already takes steps to set itself apart by having choosing your spell list right at the start, each of which is extremely different.

Each one of those base Sidekick classes could have been our primary source all along (but perhaps that would be a different system entirely). If subclasses are built from those specifically, setting apart each one would still be SO much easier and provide more room for changes than our current system allows.

All of that aside, everything that we currently have provides a much greater thematic approach to the game. I don’t think that should be overlooked. Every Cleric having Channel Divinity allows them to give each subclass a wildly different purpose with it. Every Druid having Wild Shape allows each subclass to change into specific things far from the limit of animals. Every Rogue having Sneak Attack lets some subclasses achieve it in different ways and with different affects. Every Sorcerer having meta magic gives room for each subclass to draw their power from a different source.

Our current system does a great job of providing an extremely diverse cast of thematic approaches, which is often equally important as mechanical. But adding more base classes will likely do nothing to improve either without being redundant.

Ignimortis

2022-08-13, 07:30 AM

I do believe you have a grand misconception at play here. I definitely see where you’re coming from, but you should take a look back at older editions where there were in fact fewer classes (sans 3.pf unlimited). The differences were far more notable because there were fewer classes.

*snip*
No, it doesn't work like this. The earlier editions that aren't 3.5 or 4e had fewer classes - and also much more primitive mechanics and game design. And it's partly to blame for D&D's issues that it still attempts to hold on to those designs. 4e made a valiant effort and, if allowed to actually iterate upon itself for a couple more editions, might've been much, much, much better than 5e. In fact, I look favorably upon 4e's base design, because I think that I understand what they were trying to do, and the general idea is excellent, a real diamond in the rough. It needs some significant cutting and adjustments, but it still does quite a few things better than either 5e or, in places, 3.5.

As for 5e being unimprovable with more classes, that comes down to several things. First, there are things you cannot improve without removing classes that are clearly too far ahead of the game. Second, there are certain rules and design decisions that further reinforce the aforementioned classes' dominance.

If I actually want a tank guy, my options are extremely limited, because "tank" doesn't mean "hard to kill", tank means "hard to kill, can force enemies to waste effort on them, and can also protect allies from unexpected assault". One out of three is bad. Barbarian is not a tank, Fighter with Protection FS is rather bad at doing those things even if you dump everything you have into it (Shield Master for CC, Cavalier to try and force enemies to attack you, Sentinel to actually stop them from just saying "I get away and focus on my real target"), Paladin is not a tank.

If I wanted to design an orthodox tank, I would start with them being able to move up to their land speed and intercept an attack against a friendly target, taking damage instead of them. That would be a level 1 ability with no limitations on use other than it taking up your Reaction, and subsequent class/subclass abilities would improve on it massively, including the tank getting multiple Reactions per round. That's how tanking works, you take damage so that other people don't. The basic ability to take a lot of damage without dying qualifies you for frontline, but not for tanking.

If I actually want a different spellcaster, I can imagine at least half a dozen designs that would work differently from what we have, but the issue here is that Wizard, Cleric and Druid are all terribly designed classes. They are 80% spells, 20% class features at best, and their spell lists are huge, AND they get to change them every day. I could, indeed, make a few different spellcasters that all played very differently from each other, and would be rather different in problems they are able to solve. But they would not be a match in power and/or versatility to Wizards or Clerics or even Lore Bards. They, at best, would measure up to Sorcerers or Warlocks.

If I actually want a skill guy to be different, first I'd have to make some more skill rules than "DM assigns a DC or produces a DC from an opposed roll, you roll against it, if you have expertise, congrats, you're good at the skill so you can beat some DCs more often". Then make skill feats, make proficiency levels other than 0-1-2, make skills an actual part of the game that matters as much or almost as much as other major features. As of now, yes, the only features that matter skill-wise are Expertise and Reliable Talent, neither of which are either impressive or at all modular.

I could, technically, spend a couple weeks (actual workdays, not half an hour per day) to write a new "core 13" set of classes for 5e. But that would inevitably require actually doing something about parts of the game that aren't the combat engine. And then, probably, about the combat engine, because it is also lacking in depth. And by that point I'd have to do something about the MM, because 90% of it is terrible and would be even more terrible by then. And then I'd realize that I'd written something akin to PF2 with better classes and different baseline rules, so I might've as well as started there instead of 5e to save me some work.

animorte

2022-08-13, 08:04 AM

-snippy-

You confirmed a lot of what I was inferring. In order to improve the system, we need to to start with a simpler and weaker concept and build up from there. A lot of what we have can’t possibly be modified without redundant concepts and maintain pace with the power level.

The problem with taking a step back is that most people are accustomed to the power creep we have developed that every long-lasting game eventually appeals to.

This goes back to the caster vs martial thing. We have too many spells that do far too much.

I am legitimately interested in your alternative methods to solve some of these problems. I always appreciate a learning experience and differing views.

noob

2022-08-13, 10:48 AM

animorte

2022-08-13, 11:09 AM

As you noticed the level system is designed so that higher level characters are more powerful, it is the entire point of such a system, as long as dnd have a level system, adventurers will become stronger in longer games.

Ok, you misunderstood my point entirely.

I agree with everything there, but I’m specifically referring to the game of D&D itself, not any specific adventure or a campaign. Over time, if a game has been around long enough, it will have noticeable bumps in power. We see this especially in Pokémon: TCG, Magic the Gathering, WoW, League of Legends, so forth and so on, etc…

This is commonly referred to as power creep.

Ignimortis

2022-08-13, 12:41 PM

You confirmed a lot of what I was inferring. In order to improve the system, we need to to start with a simpler and weaker concept and build up from there. A lot of what we have can’t possibly be modified without redundant concepts and maintain pace with the power level.

The problem with taking a step back is that most people are accustomed to the power creep we have developed that every long-lasting game eventually appeals to.

This goes back to the caster vs martial thing. We have too many spells that do far too much.

I am legitimately interested in your alternative methods to solve some of these problems. I always appreciate a learning experience and differing views.

Step 1: Go through the spell list. Quite possibly delete everything above spell level 7. if you ever do epic levels, might wanna revisit those spells for that. Consider perhaps redistributing spells into 6 levels instead of 9, but it's not a requirement or anything.
Step 2: Keep going through the spell list. Consider the function of each spell. Excise or severely rework every spell that works better with every new monster book. Consider that, perhaps, Polymorph does not need to exist in its' current form. Pathfinder 1e seems to have tackled it (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/polymorph/) just fine, by only letting you take on specific abilities instead of whole statblocks. Tasha's seems to have figured out how to work with Summon X, and perhaps you can keep it like that - a specific Summon (Type) spell that lists at best 4 creatures. Maybe make them tap into the caster's action economy by making them spend bonus actions to command the summon.
Step 2.5: Consider whether the schools of magic even work properly, i.e. gating certain effects and properties to certain schools. If not, try and find a different method of classification, hopefully with 5+ categories.
Step 3: Continue going through the spell list. Keep considering functions of each spell, this time to assign a proper school for each of them. No, Acid Arrow is not Conjuration, it does the same thing as Evocation spells do, therefore it has to be an Evocation spell. It's less important what the spell does on a narrative level and more to what end it is cast. If a spell deals direct damage to the target, whether that is a telekinetic projectile or gust of wind or fiery blasts, it's Evocation. If a spell creates target-centric defenses, it's Abjuration. Etc, etc.
Step 4: Remove Wizard. Draft up a new "Wizard" that chooses their schools (no more than 25-33% of available divisions, so if you have 4, they get to choose 1, if you have 8, they get to choose 2, if you have 5 or 6, they maybe get 2, but perhaps one is at a reduced potency) at level 1. Every spell of the non-chosen schools is completely locked for them. They cannot learn them, period. For example, a Conjuration/Transmutation specialist cannot produce either Mage Armor or Magic Missile or even Firebolt. Perhaps keep the idea that one school is their primary and gets extra bonuses.
Step 5: Remove Cleric. Draft up a new Cleric that chooses their domain at level 1. Their spell list aside from Bless and Bane is completely decided by their domain, to the extent that a Death Cleric simply doesn't have access to Cure Wounds. Furthermore, the domain spell list is very limited, with maybe 5-6 spells per spell level. However, the Domain also provides multiple bonuses to a very specific playstyle that radically differs from other Clerics. A cleric of War and a cleric of Knowledge should be completely different in play, to the extent that cleric of War is basically a paladin/warlord with divine guidance, and a cleric of Magic is closer to a wizard in most respects, and certainly is unsuited for the frontlines.
Step 6: Remove Druid. Completely. Nature Cleric will suffice as "druid", just as some morally upright subset of War Cleric will suffice as Paladin. Store the shapeshifting aspect of the Druid somewhere dark and dry, you might want to write up a non-caster shapeshifter class later on.

Frankly, I'm not even done with magic, but I'll stop here for now.

noob

2022-08-13, 01:44 PM

Step 1: Go through the spell list. Quite possibly delete everything above spell level 7. if you ever do epic levels, might wanna revisit those spells for that. Consider perhaps redistributing spells into 6 levels instead of 9, but it's not a requirement or anything.
Step 2: Keep going through the spell list. Consider the function of each spell. Excise or severely rework every spell that works better with every new monster book. Consider that, perhaps, Polymorph does not need to exist in its' current form. Pathfinder 1e seems to have tackled it (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/polymorph/) just fine, by only letting you take on specific abilities instead of whole statblocks. Tasha's seems to have figured out how to work with Summon X, and perhaps you can keep it like that - a specific Summon (Type) spell that lists at best 4 creatures. Maybe make them tap into the caster's action economy by making them spend bonus actions to command the summon.
Step 2.5: Consider whether the schools of magic even work properly, i.e. gating certain effects and properties to certain schools. If not, try and find a different method of classification, hopefully with 5+ categories.
Step 3: Continue going through the spell list. Keep considering functions of each spell, this time to assign a proper school for each of them. No, Acid Arrow is not Conjuration, it does the same thing as Evocation spells do, therefore it has to be an Evocation spell. It's less important what the spell does on a narrative level and more to what end it is cast. If a spell deals direct damage to the target, whether that is a telekinetic projectile or gust of wind or fiery blasts, it's Evocation. If a spell creates target-centric defenses, it's Abjuration. Etc, etc.
Step 4: Remove Wizard. Draft up a new "Wizard" that chooses their schools (no more than 25-33% of available divisions, so if you have 4, they get to choose 1, if you have 8, they get to choose 2, if you have 5 or 6, they maybe get 2, but perhaps one is at a reduced potency) at level 1. Every spell of the non-chosen schools is completely locked for them. They cannot learn them, period. For example, a Conjuration/Transmutation specialist cannot produce either Mage Armor or Magic Missile or even Firebolt. Perhaps keep the idea that one school is their primary and gets extra bonuses.
Step 5: Remove Cleric. Draft up a new Cleric that chooses their domain at level 1. Their spell list aside from Bless and Bane is completely decided by their domain, to the extent that a Death Cleric simply doesn't have access to Cure Wounds. Furthermore, the domain spell list is very limited, with maybe 5-6 spells per spell level. However, the Domain also provides multiple bonuses to a very specific playstyle that radically differs from other Clerics. A cleric of War and a cleric of Knowledge should be completely different in play, to the extent that cleric of War is basically a paladin/warlord with divine guidance, and a cleric of Magic is closer to a wizard in most respects, and certainly is unsuited for the frontlines.
Step 6: Remove Druid. Completely. Nature Cleric will suffice as "druid", just as some morally upright subset of War Cleric will suffice as Paladin. Store the shapeshifting aspect of the Druid somewhere dark and dry, you might want to write up a non-caster shapeshifter class later on.

Frankly, I'm not even done with magic, but I'll stop here for now.

Schools are completely unequal between each other(ex: conjuration school is way more useful than the enchantment school) and also some schools are way more powerful at higher levels(ex:necromancy) or at lower levels than the rest thus making you pick between being good later or earlier which is bad design.
The split in schools is essentially thematic: they did not think about the balance between the effects of the schools when making them because that was not the point.
Splitting the spells in different ways will not help, what you need is to redesign the spells else the casters will still have absurd tools other characters will never get.
For example should divination spells exist at all? They are here just to disrupt the entirety of the plot.
Should teleportation be available when it is made so the players do not use the environment that the gm made and to be used by npcs to kill sleeping adventurers after a scry?
Spells does things nothing else does and that is why it is unbalancing, the fighter is engaging the plot on the terms of the gm, the spellcaster is doing its own things.

Anyway if you just resplit all the spells and make so that each wizard have 25% of the spells adventurers can just make a 4 wizard team and have roughly as much endurance and polyvalence and power as 4 of the old wizards and what changes is just that there is 4 separate counters of different types for the spell slots.

Also what about the warlock?
Or the bard?
Or the artificer?
Or the ranger?
Or the eldritch knight?
Or the arcane trickster?

Batcathat

2022-08-13, 02:21 PM

Spells does things nothing else does and that is why it is unbalancing, the fighter is engaging the plot on the terms of the gm, the spellcaster is doing its own things.

I don't think casters doing things no one else can do is a problem by itself, but rather the fact that they can do (more or less) everything everyone else can do and things no one else can. Having clear rules for what magic can and especially cannot do wouldn't solve class imbalance by itself, but it'd certainly help.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-13, 02:35 PM

I don't think casters doing things no one else can do is a problem by itself, but rather the fact that they can do (more or less) everything everyone else can do and things no one else can. Having clear rules for what magic can and especially cannot do wouldn't solve class imbalance by itself, but it'd certainly help.

Yeah. Or rules that if you have magic, you can't have X. Meaning things like casters can't get martial capabilities. Like...no weapons, no armor. Low health. If they want to mix it up and try to gish, they have to burn significant spell resources to break even with a martial. Enough so that their remaining capabilities aren't much better than a martial's other capabilities.

This whole thing of "I can have better armor, equivalent weapon attacks, AND still be a full caster with nearly full resources" needs to die in a fire.

Pex

2022-08-13, 02:35 PM

Then people who can routinely and quite possibly on their own (routinely, not as a final boss that takes months of preparation, favours called in, artifacts being forged or retrieved, ect) beat up fully grown dragons - shouldn't be even remotely in the same ballpark as people who can, as a group, quite possibly lose to a small pack of wolves.

The way I see it, to resolve that you can either make dragons as impossible as a DC50 check - and cut down everything to the same level of power to match, or you make skills do impossible things at high levels because you already routinely do impossible things in combat and magically.

Or, well, you just tell everyone "we never intended for skills to be a function of a character on the same scale as combat prowess and/or magic would be". In which case, I think Rogue and every martial with a skill-focused feature are owed some significant improvements.

Any excuse to brag about my barbarian.

Who's not able to defeat a dragon? My barbarian certainly could. The party is supposed to kill the dragon, not any one individual though my barbarian did once. My barbarian earned a reputation for killing dragons, even had a Naming Ceremony giving him the last name Banadragos which means dragon slayer. He wore non-magical dragon hide boots made from the first dragon he killed. He eventually got Dragonhide Armor, made by the dwarves he saved from the dragon he killed in single combat when their city was under siege and where the Naming Ceremony took place. The Dragon of the Mountain long threatened his childhood home. How happy he was to carry its severed head into town.

The 5E warrior classes are not lacking when it comes to effectiveness in combat. That is not where the imbalance lies.

KorvinStarmast

2022-08-13, 03:40 PM

No. It's Dungeons and Dragons. PCs are supposed to be able to defeat dragons. That's a feature. Sometimes.
Other times, the PCs die, and the dragon retains it reputation for being a dangerous and deadly creature. The balance point is an interesting one to try and negotiate.

Telok

2022-08-13, 04:25 PM

Mostly I think its that the current design team is either afraid to change anything or has content & design restrictions imposed from above, plus there's only two classes in D&D right now and they suffer from the "equal fighting ability" restriction.

See, the two classes are "fight guy" and "caster". Everything else is minor differences between variations and different spell lists. The big problem is that everything a character can really do with any confidence is what's explicitly allowed in their class abilities. Combine with a directive to have something every level and you get casters having half their levels filled with "more spells" while the fight guys have half their levels filled with variations on "more damage". Then the fight guys get their empty levels filled with "even more damage", "get to try a combat trick", or "this level you get explicit permission to do <thing> with the skill system". The casters empty levels get things like "better at spells", "improve fighting/damage", or "ignore the skill system to do <thing> magically".

So the devs can't or won't make new non-spell casting subsystems & powers for the fight guy class, but they can make new spells for the caster class. Then everyone has to be equal & good in combat, but the fight guy variants can only have a bit of extra damage-hp-ac/saves. And of course everyone can play "DM may I" with a vague & rules-lite noncombat sort-of--almost-a-subsystem.

To get to some sort of balance you have to first define what you mean by "balance". Then you need to actually have more than 2 real classes with some different words on the variants. Then you need to get developers with an actual vision of what the game can be, who are able to effectively convey that in writing, and let them do more than write new spells and and "like a spell but with different words" abilities.

Psyren

2022-08-13, 04:55 PM

A DC 30 check is a game mechanical way of showing this particular PC can do it when another PC can't.

Deciding whether a PC can or can't do something occurs before assigning a DC to it.

Moreover, even some level 1 characters can hit DC 30, so using that as a possibility barricade is flawed. Yes, it's not easy to get a +10 modifier that early on, but it's not impossible either. If you think something should be impossible, just don't call for a roll, it's that simple.

DMs are not perfect people. They don't always know what is an appropriate DC for a task or even a roll should happen at all. It's not about trust in the DM. It's about a person learning how to DM. The new DM has no clue on anything other than what he learns from reading the rules. The rules telling him to make it up doesn't help. It's not enough to say if you think something is easy give it DC 10. Is climbing a wall easy? Is jumping down from a height equal to your ST score easy? Is knowing the abilities of a creature you see easy? The DM has no clue, so he makes it up and that's how we end up with warriors can't do anything while spellcasters can do everything because all the spells are laid out telling you how they work with precise values of DC numbers.

No one expects DMs to be "perfect people." Making mistakes and learning from them are part of life. Why on earth are people so afraid of making mistakes? Fail faster.

clash

2022-08-13, 05:29 PM

I don't think casters doing things no one else can do is a problem by itself, but rather the fact that they can do (more or less) everything everyone else can do and things no one else can. Having clear rules for what magic can and especially cannot do wouldn't solve class imbalance by itself, but it'd certainly help.

I have often noodled with the idea of a spell system where magic can't deal damage directly. Magic gets all the control spells, buffs, debuffs and utility stuff but it takes someone with a weapon to actually deplete a creatures HP. Make the martials feel special by giving them their thing. So far it's been seen as too extreme to actually implement but I still think the idea has merit.

Brookshw

2022-08-13, 06:49 PM

DMs are not perfect people. They don't always know what is an appropriate DC for a task or even a roll should happen at all. It's not about trust in the DM. It's about a person learning how to DM. The new DM has no clue on anything other than what he learns from reading the rules. The rules telling him to make it up doesn't help. It's not enough to say if you think something is easy give it DC 10. Is climbing a wall easy? Is jumping down from a height equal to your ST score easy? Is knowing the abilities of a creature you see easy? The DM has no clue, so he makes it up and that's how we end up with warriors can't do anything while spellcasters can do everything because all the spells are laid out telling you how they work with precise values of DC numbers.

Huh? Just make stuff up has always been part of DMing. We manage to figure this stuff out before 3e introduced DC tables, could figure it out just fine without referencing the tables in 3e*, and a whole new crop of DMs have been able to figure it out just fine in 5e. Even if two DMs arrive at drastically different results, the game actively encourages the DM to change the rules to fit their table and campaign, so both DMs are right despite different results.

*Which could be woefully lacking in many ways. Knowing the abilities of a creature based on a check? In 3e you only got limited ability knowledge based on your roll and the DM has to actively decide which abilities to disclose with no guidance, do you talk about it's SR? Resistances? AC? Spell like Abilities? Attacks? Methods of movement? Mating habits? Who knows?

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-13, 06:57 PM

Huh? Just make stuff up has always been part of DMing. We manage to figure this stuff out before 3e introduced DC tables, could figure it out just fine without referencing the tables in 3e*, and a whole new crop of DMs have been able to figure it out just fine in 5e. Even if two DMs arrive at drastically different results, the game actively encourages the DM to change the rules to fit their table and campaign, so both DMs are right despite different results.

*Which could be woefully lacking in many ways. Knowing the abilities of a creature based on a check? In 3e you only got limited ability knowledge based on your roll and the DM has to actively decide which abilities to disclose with no guidance, do you talk about it's SR? Resistances? AC? Spell like Abilities? Attacks? Methods of movement? Mating habits? Who knows?

Yeah. And that last part? Also add in absolutely absurd at times. As in diplomancy. And that's inherent in any kind of globally-fixed, universal DC thing. At least if any kind of optimization is allowed.

4e did it even worse with the whole Bear Lore issue.

Pex

2022-08-13, 10:12 PM

Deciding whether a PC can or can't do something occurs before assigning a DC to it.

Moreover, even some level 1 characters can hit DC 30, so using that as a possibility barricade is flawed. Yes, it's not easy to get a +10 modifier that early on, but it's not impossible either. If you think something should be impossible, just don't call for a roll, it's that simple.

No one expects DMs to be "perfect people." Making mistakes and learning from them are part of life. Why on earth are people so afraid of making mistakes? Fail faster.

You keep missing the point that making something DC 30 is saying it's possible someday but not today. The 1st level character who does had help and got lucky. The 15th level character who does it should be because he wanted to.

Huh? Just make stuff up has always been part of DMing. We manage to figure this stuff out before 3e introduced DC tables, could figure it out just fine without referencing the tables in 3e*, and a whole new crop of DMs have been able to figure it out just fine in 5e. Even if two DMs arrive at drastically different results, the game actively encourages the DM to change the rules to fit their table and campaign, so both DMs are right despite different results.

*Which could be woefully lacking in many ways. Knowing the abilities of a creature based on a check? In 3e you only got limited ability knowledge based on your roll and the DM has to actively decide which abilities to disclose with no guidance, do you talk about it's SR? Resistances? AC? Spell like Abilities? Attacks? Methods of movement? Mating habits? Who knows?

The DM making it up is why you get DMs making things DC 15 or 20 and wondering why players stop bothering to try stuff and only do their class buttons. DM making it up is not about making up numbers. The game designers are supposed to make up the numbers. The player decides to interact with a Thing. The game decides how the interaction works. The DM decides why the Thing is there and the results of the interaction.

The bolded part is the other problem. That's the Mother/DM May I people complain about. That is why my warlock with 10 ST and not proficient in Athletics was able to swim a moat, climb a rock, climb a stone wall to get into a Keep's open window without a single die roll just because I wanted to while in another game my monk with 10 ST not proficient in Athletics was unable to climb a tree because I had to beat DC 20, i.e. roll a Natural 20. My warlock was Tarzan. My monk was George of the Jungle. That shouldn't be with the same build everything the same except for class. That's what happens when it's DC make it up. That is a bug, not a feature.

Psyren

2022-08-13, 10:23 PM

You keep missing the point that making something DC 30 is saying it's possible someday but not today. The 1st level character who does had help and got lucky. The 15th level character who does it should be because he wanted to.

I'm not missing the point. I'm saying you don't need DC 30 to generate that experience and feeling of growth. And if something isn't possible for a character, don't assign a DC to it at all.

The DM making it up is why you get DMs making things DC 15 or 20 and wondering why players stop bothering to try stuff and only do their class buttons.

Players who give up trying anything but their class buttons is not the games fault, it's the fault of a DM who is not properly applying the material. But even when that happens, it's not the end of the world, it's fixable.

DM making it up is not about making up numbers. The game designers are supposed to make up the numbers.

No, they're not. That way lies reams of Rolemaster tables for every little thing. No designers can make up all or even most of the numbers, even for a relatively simple TTRPG like D&D.

NichG

2022-08-13, 10:24 PM

I'd go on a different tack here. Making stuff up is fine. All GMs are game designers. But a big tool you have as a game designer is to telegraph things to shape player perception of stuff, to give players the ability to think in parallel when someone else is in the spotlight, to balance the cognitive load of play between the GM and the players, to enable players to plan things in advance - both during-game in-character types of plans, as well as downtime planning activities like how to build a character, what items to purchase with gold, etc. Making all of those things be uptime and bottlenecked by GM interactions isn't automatically bad gaming, but it is leaving a lot on the table, and it means you have a game that gets more tedious to play the more people are at the table (as opposed to something where as much extra overhead extra players bring, they can also take responsibility for the parts of the game that don't require adjudication and therefore help pay down that overhead).

Saying 'this is DC 30' when a character cannot possibly hit above DC 25 is a tool you can use to tell the player 'if the character wants to be able to do this, first they must figure out how to bring together at least a +5 additional bonus'. So it makes the growth of power not just be this passive thing that happens only at a meta level, but actually be something that is grounded by in-character needs. If you would ever want character builds to be 'organic', that kind of thing is a tool to signal the possible payoffs of different choices as to the direction of the character's growth.

Ignimortis

2022-08-13, 11:31 PM

Any excuse to brag about my barbarian.

Who's not able to defeat a dragon? My barbarian certainly could. The party is supposed to kill the dragon, not any one individual though my barbarian did once. My barbarian earned a reputation for killing dragons, even had a Naming Ceremony giving him the last name Banadragos which means dragon slayer. He wore non-magical dragon hide boots made from the first dragon he killed. He eventually got Dragonhide Armor, made by the dwarves he saved from the dragon he killed in single combat when their city was under siege and where the Naming Ceremony took place. The Dragon of the Mountain long threatened his childhood home. How happy he was to carry its severed head into town.

The 5E warrior classes are not lacking when it comes to effectiveness in combat. That is not where the imbalance lies.
Never said it was about effectiveness in combat. In fact, skills are supposed to cover for their effectiveness out of combat side by side with spellcasters... But somehow the most roguish of Rogues will never be able to pull half as much weight as a properly prepared Wizard.

Mostly I think its that the current design team is either afraid to change anything or has content & design restrictions imposed from above, plus there's only two classes in D&D right now and they suffer from the "equal fighting ability" restriction.

*snip*
Yes. Pretty much this. I agree with everything you said.

Schools are completely unequal between each other(ex: conjuration school is way more useful than the enchantment school) and also some schools are way more powerful at higher levels(ex:necromancy) or at lower levels than the rest thus making you pick between being good later or earlier which is bad design.
The split in schools is essentially thematic: they did not think about the balance between the effects of the schools when making them because that was not the point.
Splitting the spells in different ways will not help, what you need is to redesign the spells else the casters will still have absurd tools other characters will never get.
For example should divination spells exist at all? They are here just to disrupt the entirety of the plot.
Should teleportation be available when it is made so the players do not use the environment that the gm made and to be used by npcs to kill sleeping adventurers after a scry?
Spells does things nothing else does and that is why it is unbalancing, the fighter is engaging the plot on the terms of the gm, the spellcaster is doing its own things.

Anyway if you just resplit all the spells and make so that each wizard have 25% of the spells adventurers can just make a 4 wizard team and have roughly as much endurance and polyvalence and power as 4 of the old wizards and what changes is just that there is 4 separate counters of different types for the spell slots.

Also what about the warlock?
Or the bard?
Or the artificer?
Or the ranger?
Or the eldritch knight?
Or the arcane trickster?

Like I said, I'm not even finished with magic. Also like I said, some of the steps are exactly this: evaluate whether you can even fix the disparity issues between schools of magic and how each spell works.

Divination spells, for the most part, would probably go into the Rituals tab. There are very few Divinations (True Strike, Foresight) that actually function on a local scale, and one part of a magic rework would certainly be splitting magic into "Adventuring Magic" for use in real time, and "Rituals" for use on a larger scale, with Rituals being available to all classes if they so choose (probably by being mostly skill-based, actually - you can do Arcane Rituals by making Arcane skill rolls with appropriate feats, for instance). The few local-scale Divinations might be redistributed into other schools, I guess. As for your inquiry, I do not mind "disrupting the plot". This is what TTRPGs are for. I have never GM'd a campaign in which things have gone very close to how I intended things to go, and I'm perfectly fine with it.

Short-range tactical teleportation should be a thing. It enables a lot of more high-flying concepts, and if it invalidates low-level strategies like difficult terrain and ten-foot high walls with holes in them, then perhaps it's time to find other strategies. Long-range strategic teleportation should probably fall under "Rituals" and suffer from certain limitations, like actually having to have physically visited the place you're about to teleport to.

Spells doing things that nothing else does is fine. What is not fine is that only spells do that. Everyone should have their unique schtick that allows them to break the rules in their specific ways, and I don't mean "break the rules by having x3 the HP of other characters that level", because that's boring. Abilities that you have to actively make use of (not necessarily activated, just requiring you to think about how to use that to your advantage outside of the usual game plan), that's the ticket.

I am not against a 4-wizard team, but I think you underestimate the effects of even this half-finished process. The wizard now cannot have spells of 3 schools at the same time. Abjuration for Shield and Mage Armor? Sure, now you've got one more school. Evocation so that you have some form of offense that isn't melee attacks with no support features? Alright, you've made a battlemage. You don't have Sleep or Color Spray or Hold Person or whatever, though. And every single Wizard will have to go through the same process of choice - and not have a chance to change it every day. Yes, you can make four Conjurer/Abjurers and hide behind summoned creatures, probably. But summoned creatures do not punch above their weight class, and any hard encounter will have you struggling more than a balanced setup would have - especially if other classes get rewritten to have actual functions unavailable to other classes.

Warlock I'd drop back to 3.5. It'd be a great simple blaster caster with a few utility at-wills, for people who like throwing around magic bolts without bothering with spellbooks and spell slots and so on, and so on.
Bard I'm not sure about. I certainly wouldn't keep them as full casters, and their spell lists need to be even more restrictive as befits a support role class.
Artificer would probably need better magic item crafting rules to begin with. But even then, I am not sure that Artificer's "magical combat engineer" thing is important enough to not be scrapped, especially when talking about core.
Rangers cease to exist. They are either a Fighter or a Rogue subclass/archetype that balances combat strength with skill usage.
Eldritch Knight probably ceases to exist. You either make a separate Duskblade/Magus-like class for a dedicated gish, or multiclass Fighter/Wizard. Same for AT. Of course, one could always go back to Prestige Classes for such hybrids.

Telok

2022-08-14, 01:32 AM

. My monk was George of the Jungle. That shouldn't be with the same build everything the same except for class. That's what happens when it's DC make it up. That is a bug, not a feature.
Actually, George of the Jungle can climb trees more than 1 in 20 tries. That (and other reasons deeply tied to D&D's combat via attributes model) is why all players with any experience and non-story driven DMs want flight on their characters.

Players who give up trying anything but their class buttons is not the games fault, it's the fault of a DM who is not properly applying the material. But even when that happens, it's not the end of the world, it's fixable. Yet it keeps happening over and over and over again. There are bunches of DMs out there who read the DMG and didn't come to the same conclusions you did. All the praise for make-it-up DCs and "the DM shouldn't call for a check when they know they shouldn't call for a check" hasn't fixed or solved anything.

All GMs are game designers. No. Untill you can prove that all DMs know basic iterative probability calculations and they all want to write a bunch of new rules and they intend to create a new form of the game different from the one they bought... then you can say that.

In my experience most of them just want to pay for some books, read the books as instructions on how to play, and then sit down and play a game that just works. They tend to complain when they have to keep stopping and checking (or especially calculating for themselves) probabilities or decide if "the narrative" needs rolls of fiats, they just want to play and roll the dice. They complain when the CR & encounter system stops working half way through, they thought they were paying for other people to write working rules. They complain when players adopt strategies to avoid dice rolling for autosuccess via spells, they aren't thinking about how people react to continual random negative feedback for rolling dice. They complain when "op" spells like Tiny Hut "break" modules and they don't want to dig through forums & hours of Youtube blather to be told they have to make up rules to fix things.

D&D is not sold as a game for game designers to build their own game. Its sold as a game where novices can read the books once and play it without having to make up their own rules. Nobody is buying it with the expectation that the rules stop 75% of the way through and tell you to finish it yourself.

Satinavian

2022-08-14, 01:42 AM

No. Untill you can prove that all DMs know basic iterative probability calculationsNow that makes me chuckle. If only all game designers would be able to clear that particular hurdle.

Psyren

2022-08-14, 02:43 AM

Yet it keeps happening over and over and over again. There are bunches of DMs out there who read the DMG and didn't come to the same conclusions you did. All the praise for make-it-up DCs and "the DM shouldn't call for a check when they know they shouldn't call for a check" hasn't fixed or solved anything.

"Bunches" is not a standard I care about. Enough people get it that I think the system largely works. The presentation* can be improved, sure, but not at the cost of ripping up the floorboards/undermining the system as a whole.

*i.e. including some kind of process flow like what I linked above

EDIT: Also the notion that you need to understand "iterative probability calculations" to be a game designer is ludicrous.

Morphic tide

2022-08-14, 02:45 AM

I'm not missing the point. I'm saying you don't need DC 30 to generate that experience and feeling of growth. And if something isn't possible for a character, don't assign a DC to it at all.
...But you do need to be able to hit higher DCs reliably for the progression crunch to function, and with the 1d20+modifiers setup alongside relatively trivial assumed starting point of +5, DC 30 is in fact fairly inevitable. You could get a different one with a different rolling mechanic or different progression rate, but the fact of the matter is that your process of DCs being highly campaign-dependent defeats the entire point of having DCs. Why would DC 30 exist if you do not allow somebody below a +15 bonus to make the attempt despite hitting 1/5 success before that, and why would you stop calling for rolls for DC 20 when people only actually get a +15 bonus and "should" fail a quarter of the time if the roll were called for? This seems to be the kind of scenario you think is desirable.

Quite bluntly, you're saying that the skill system should be running on very soft reasoning based primarily on DM adjudication, making it so that anyone doing anything with skills doesn't really ever have safe "I can do X" understandings until multiple sessions in based on calling for checks to test the waters of what this particular DM lets the skills do. Which of course invites all the poor implementations, which is what explicit given numbers exist to prevent, which you specifically do not want because... It turns into "Rollmaster tables for everything"? Formulaic approaches and giving benchmarks that are useful abilities in their own right for the DM to go off of still do a lot of fixing the double-standard of 5e by not relying on DM adjudication to allow a character to do almost anything outside their explicit on-sheet buttons.

Simply put, your "take" is inapplicable to D&D because the most fundamental aspects of how it works with magic result in a terrible double-standard, and 5e has Bounded Accuracy being a tumorous blight on skill growth on top of this. The set of system properties in question just does not work, because it results in only the spellcasters are getting no-questions-asked narrative tools on a level remotely comparing to what the tiers of play are supposed to indicate of scope growth. A level 15 character is supposedly approaching world class, obliterating themselves a personal path through the landscape is tame compared to the significance of what they can seriously consider taking in a fight. Often even what they can expect to handle one-on-one.

Edit-to-reply-to-post-made-while-writing:

EDIT: Also the notion that you need to understand "iterative probability calculations" to be a game designer is ludicrous.

You really should for RPGs or wargames, because iterative probability calculations are exactly how you figure out the behavior of chance-based system elements at large scales or over long periods of time. The likelyhood of killing an over-CR enemy is very exactly this because you have to be running its offensive probabilities, in their separate damage and accuracy elements, against the party's defensive probabilities, for all those are mostly static, in addition to the party's inverse of this. All on a turn-by-turn basis, mind, which explodes dramatically in more basic branch-analysis efforts. Unless there's no chance-based elements in the game, iterative probability calculations are among the very best things to include in the design process, as they allow you to stress-test the math before you get to time-consuming playtesting. Which is especially important in RPGs with heavy game progression as there's not really any reasonable way to playtest the progression itself in a timely manner.

noob

2022-08-14, 05:31 AM

I am not against a 4-wizard team, but I think you underestimate the effects of even this half-finished process. The wizard now cannot have spells of 3 schools at the same time. Abjuration for Shield and Mage Armor? Sure, now you've got one more school. Evocation so that you have some form of offense that isn't melee attacks with no support features? Alright, you've made a battlemage. You don't have Sleep or Color Spray or Hold Person or whatever, though. And every single Wizard will have to go through the same process of choice - and not have a chance to change it every day. Yes, you can make four Conjurer/Abjurers and hide behind summoned creatures, probably. But summoned creatures do not punch above their weight class, and any hard encounter will have you struggling more than a balanced setup would have - especially if other classes get rewritten to have actual functions unavailable to other classes.

Warlock I'd drop back to 3.5. It'd be a great simple blaster caster with a few utility at-wills, for people who like throwing around magic bolts without bothering with spellbooks and spell slots and so on, and so on.
Bard I'm not sure about. I certainly wouldn't keep them as full casters, and their spell lists need to be even more restrictive as befits a support role class.
Artificer would probably need better magic item crafting rules to begin with. But even then, I am not sure that Artificer's "magical combat engineer" thing is important enough to not be scrapped, especially when talking about core.
Rangers cease to exist. They are either a Fighter or a Rogue subclass/archetype that balances combat strength with skill usage.
Eldritch Knight probably ceases to exist. You either make a separate Duskblade/Magus-like class for a dedicated gish, or multiclass Fighter/Wizard. Same for AT. Of course, one could always go back to Prestige Classes for such hybrids.

The idea was for each wizard to pick different schools to have together 100% of the spells(and thus have all the game breaking tools from things like permanent illusion(level 6 so still available) to scry or dimension door or even fabricate) and it seems you did not understand what I was trying to express.

As for the existence of the artificer it was considered so important that they did remake it in 5e while they did not remake the psion(which I really liked) nor remake the truenamer(it was a quite fun class even if the dcs scaled too hard, if it was remade in 5e it would be way more playable due to bounded accuracy and the fluff of it comes from common ideas) nor the binder(I love the fluff of it and it is quite balanced except for one specific vestige) nor any of the incarnum classes(lots of people did not like the "souls are blue" fluff but I think the subsystem for it was rather functional)
Although the 5e artificer is really weird in the sense that none of the stuff it makes is mass producible and most of it is not usable by other people while it is the entire point of the ebherron setting and it is the only thing that is defining in that setting(there is other stuff in that setting but they are not much different from what you get in other settings, the dragonmarked houses and dragons and dragon dragons are just more boring standard "dragon obsession" dnd content and the "when you die, there is no afterlife" is used in other settings too).

I guess mass production and adventuring are two radically different things and 3.5 putting them together was quite weird, it is like "capitalism: the adventure", it is done by people in real life a lot but way less common in fantasy fiction (maybe due to escapism?).

Brookshw

2022-08-14, 07:03 AM

The DM making it up is why you get DMs making things DC 15 or 20 and wondering why players stop bothering to try stuff and only do their class buttons. Why? Do they also stop attacking just because monsters have high ACs?

The game decides how the interaction works. Within the confines of the rules it chooses to give, sure. In this game, they decided the rules for the interaction is subject to DM interpretation and change. The game's been completely up front about this since day 1.

That's the Mother/DM May I people complain about. Sure, some complain, but the game's always been "DM may I".

No. Untill you can prove that all DMs know basic iterative probability calculations

Huh? My player's 10 yro son plays with us, his math and rule knowledge are what you'd expect from a 10 yro and definitely don't cover iterative probability calculations. He's talking about running a 1 shot with a custom system to do a Blood Bowl sort of thing. I fully support him.

Pex

2022-08-14, 09:18 AM

Why? Do they also stop attacking just because monsters have high ACs?

Unlike most of a character's skills, a PC's attack modifier increases as the levels progress so an AC 20 eventually is not a problem. Even so, yes, when an AC is too high players stop. At least the spellcasters can. They can stop making spell attacks and instead cast spells using saving throws. Warriors not so much. Unless they can get Advantage easily, such as barbarians and bow rogues who like to hide, they're out of luck. They have to think of other means, such as grappling or shoving to help other players. This is not a bad thing. However, this doesn't happen every combat. Many combats a warrior has a decent chance to hit the AC of a monster a few misses won't discourage. When every skill use DC is 15 or 20 because the DM made it up and the character will only ever have a +0 or +1, they stop trying.

Within the confines of the rules it chooses to give, sure. In this game, they decided the rules for the interaction is subject to DM interpretation and change. The game's been completely up front about this since day 1.

I know what they chose to do. I find what they chose to do a mistake. They were wrong to cling so heavily on "rulings not rules".

Sure, some complain, but the game's always been "DM may I".

Not as hard coded as you think. The reason we have skills at all today is because when they didn't exist people wanted to do stuff out of combat but the lack of rules for it made it troublesome. Many DMs just said "No". Others had to figure out how and no one was satisfied. Then we got non-weapon proficiencies. They helped, but it still meant "No" for everything else that you were not proficient in. 3E opened the door wide for non-combat stuff. You don't have to like how it was implemented, but it showed it was possible in D&D.

The more game designers did their job in saying how things were done the easier it was on the player to do things and the DM to say why things exist and establish the results of the players doing stuff.

NichG

2022-08-14, 09:56 AM

No. Untill you can prove that all DMs know basic iterative probability calculations and they all want to write a bunch of new rules and they intend to create a new form of the game different from the one they bought... then you can say that.

The moment someone sits down in that chair and starts running the game, they are acting as a game designer. They might be a bad one or a flawed one certainly. And if they're reluctant to take on that role, then yes I'd say that's going to make them a bad GM, full stop.

You think a GM doesn't need to know basic iterative probability calculations? Lets say you've got a locked down game where 'moving across a narrow ledge is a DC 15 Balance check'. So when the rogue is moving across the castle crenellation, one GM runs it as a single ledge and a single DC 15 check, another GM calls for a check for each separate ledge on the map, another GM calls for a balance check every move action distance, another GM is like 'you know what, there's no lip, this is a Climb check instead'. The same task ends up with wildly different difficulty. In those kinds of cases, a GM should understand the consequences of choosing to adjudicate something a certain way and make a decision about which way it should be adjudicated with the quality of the game going forward in mind. That is something that requires understanding iterative probability, and yes, it's game design.

If you make someone 'in charge of creating the scenario', or even just 'in charge of the game running smoothly', they're going to be making design decisions. Better to approach that with the mindset of 'yes, this person does have to be informed that they will be acting as a game designer and how to think about that role' than try to hide it and say 'no, no, GM's just execute the real designers' will'. Don't pretend everyone will run a game worth playing the first time they sit down with the books. I don't care what the system is, that isn't going to be true.

Pex

2022-08-14, 10:50 AM

The moment someone sits down in that chair and starts running the game, they are acting as a game designer. They might be a bad one or a flawed one certainly. And if they're reluctant to take on that role, then yes I'd say that's going to make them a bad GM, full stop.

You think a GM doesn't need to know basic iterative probability calculations? Lets say you've got a locked down game where 'moving across a narrow ledge is a DC 15 Balance check'. So when the rogue is moving across the castle crenellation, one GM runs it as a single ledge and a single DC 15 check, another GM calls for a check for each separate ledge on the map, another GM calls for a balance check every move action distance, another GM is like 'you know what, there's no lip, this is a Climb check instead'. The same task ends up with wildly different difficulty. In those kinds of cases, a GM should understand the consequences of choosing to adjudicate something a certain way and make a decision about which way it should be adjudicated with the quality of the game going forward in mind. That is something that requires understanding iterative probability, and yes, it's game design.

If you make someone 'in charge of creating the scenario', or even just 'in charge of the game running smoothly', they're going to be making design decisions. Better to approach that with the mindset of 'yes, this person does have to be informed that they will be acting as a game designer and how to think about that role' than try to hide it and say 'no, no, GM's just execute the real designers' will'. Don't pretend everyone will run a game worth playing the first time they sit down with the books. I don't care what the system is, that isn't going to be true.

That is why the game designers should have done their job and define how Acrobatics works with a DC table. Then the DM wouldn't have to figure it out with different DMs doing it different ways. The DM could focus more on why the ledge was there and the results that happen upon success or failure of that check.

Sneak Dog

2022-08-14, 10:56 AM

Why? Do they also stop attacking just because monsters have high ACs?

I know I have. Better to then run, take total defence actions, start making skill checks for goofy results or anything where I'm not just rolling a d20 to see if it's 18+ and passing turn in two seconds.

For regular skill checks I'd stop even earlier. Because failure on a skill check isn't just the opportunity cost of wasted time/resources, but frequently also a risk of actively negative results.

NichG

2022-08-14, 11:17 AM

That is why the game designers should have done their job and define how Acrobatics works with a DC table. Then the DM wouldn't have to figure it out with different DMs doing it different ways. The DM could focus more on why the ledge was there and the results that happen upon success or failure of that check.

Even if you lock down exactly how Acrobatics works to the most minute detail, you can never escape that the GM decisions about the scenario can vastly impact the actual game. Ultimately, it's a GM decision that determine whether Acrobatics could or would come up. Any modifiers that are permitted are again something that GM decisions can influence - if they decide that it rained the previous night, if they decide that the defenders poured oil on the battlements, if they decide that the castle is in the mountains or the forests or on an island in the ocean. Having a number in a table and very precise rules does not make it so that the GM doesn't have to understand the consequences of their decisions with regards to the game as a whole, any more than the player of a fighter can get away without understanding the consequences of weapon choice or their positioning on the battlefield with regards to 'who can I attack?'.

Basically the only real way to escape that is to go to something GM-less, in which case you still have a choice to make - do you want the flexibility to be able to go off-script (in which case now everyone at the table has to think like a designer sometimes rather than just one person, but you have the social dynamics of group negotiation rather than hierarchical negotiation in the case of breakdown of responsibilities, which may or may not be preferable), or you can sacrifice that too and basically get something that caps out around the level of the more complex boardgames out there.

Ignimortis

2022-08-14, 11:30 AM

Why? Do they also stop attacking just because monsters have high ACs?
Yes? It's called adapting to the situation. In fact, part of why I dislike default D&D martials is because they don't have a built-in way to adapt. As a caster, you have several saves to target and often ways to assist even without attacking the target. But if I make an AC30, Athletics +20 enemy? Congratulations to me, I have just stopped most martials from contributing to the fight at all unless I also design a contrivance that lets them bypass those issues - in that fight only, of course.

It's also part of why I liked martial adepts - Emerald Razor deals with one enemy type (hard armor/natural armor, doesn't dodge that well), Nightmare Blade series deals with the other (skill checks are ludicrously easy to boost, and while Nightmare Blade usually doesn't do as much damage, doing half damage to a target you wouldn't hit otherwise is still good), Mountain Hammer let you ignore DR when needed, White Raven Tactics lets other people act sooner so that they can do something about the enemy I'm having issues with...

The idea was for each wizard to pick different schools to have together 100% of the spells(and thus have all the game breaking tools from things like permanent illusion(level 6 so still available) to scry or dimension door or even fabricate) and it seems you did not understand what I was trying to express.
I understand that. But out of combat utility would be dealt with by Rituals, for the most part. Fabricate would be just gone, I see no real reason to have that in the game outside of "well, magic CAN do that too". Dimension Door needs a simple nerf - you need line of sight to the target.

As for the existence of the artificer it was considered so important that they did remake it in 5e while they did not remake *the other classes*
My general idea is that Psion did not pass the popularity test (a lot of people dislike psionics), and Artificer was remade because 1) Eberron was due to come out with a major 5e setting book; 2) it could be realized with the least amount of new mechanics involved. Binder and Truenamer would have both involved a completely new mechanic that doesn't really function like anything before, and which would have design considerations far removed from the usual 5e calculus of "ok, how much spellcasting does it get and what other resources does it have".

EDIT: Also the notion that you need to understand "iterative probability calculations" to be a game designer is ludicrous.
The notion that you can afford to NOT understand iterative probability calculations if you plan to deal with TTRPGs which heavily rely on dice rolls for resolving scenarios in game is ludicrous. You can avoid that if you design a diceless game that does not use RNG to function. But D&D is not that game, never has been either.

Satinavian

2022-08-14, 11:32 AM

Sneak Dog

2022-08-14, 11:36 AM

Even if you lock down exactly how Acrobatics works to the most minute detail, you can never escape that the GM decisions about the scenario can vastly impact the actual game. Ultimately, it's a GM decision that determine whether Acrobatics could or would come up. Any modifiers that are permitted are again something that GM decisions can influence - if they decide that it rained the previous night, if they decide that the defenders poured oil on the battlements, if they decide that the castle is in the mountains or the forests or on an island in the ocean. Having a number in a table and very precise rules does not make it so that the GM doesn't have to understand the consequences of their decisions with regards to the game as a whole, any more than the player of a fighter can get away without understanding the consequences of weapon choice or their positioning on the battlefield with regards to 'who can I attack?'.

Basically the only real way to escape that is to go to something GM-less, in which case you still have a choice to make - do you want the flexibility to be able to go off-script (in which case now everyone at the table has to think like a designer sometimes rather than just one person, but you have the social dynamics of group negotiation rather than hierarchical negotiation in the case of breakdown of responsibilities, which may or may not be preferable), or you can sacrifice that too and basically get something that caps out around the level of the more complex boardgames out there.

So you go to an inbetween, so that a player can decide to choose a rogue because at level 5 their athletics bonus lets climb a generic city/castle wall quite reliably, and at level 15 they can climb a glacier upsidedown. Even if the glacier of howling winds has a higher DC and the glacier of soft ice a lower one, and the royal fortress is made out of smoothened granite making it quite a lot harder.

Ballparks. 5e doesn't have even those.

NichG

2022-08-14, 11:47 AM

There is no need to go for absolutes. There is a lot of place between "DM tells a story in freeform" and "Tables rule everything". But that does not mean that everything that is between those poles is in the right place.

The nonmagical noncombat part of D&D is increadibly weak. And the resulting unpredictability and DM-arbitrarity leads to people avoiding it, when possible. This effect is so strong that it is responsible for a guge part of the perceived caster-martial imbalance, which is why it bleeds again and again in this discussion.

I guess to bring my point around to this, I think teaching DMs to understand that 'it's in your interest that the players have the ability to predict how things will go', that players knowing how their stuff works is a good and useful thing and showing specific examples of how to make use of that to achieve gaming ends, would help move the mindset underlying that kind of arbitrary and unpredictable adjudication such that 1) DMs who are very much in the 'it's my world and I want license to render it my way' wouldn't be so afraid of giving players information about how their own stuff works, even if how stuff works ends up different than what is printed and 2) Those things which do make it into tables would themselves be less the sort of 'exhaustive list with too many entries to be practical' style of thing that some people are complaining about, and would be more focused at specifically each thing being something where it's important in particular that players know how easy or hard that thing is.

Less 'wandering prostitute table for the lulz' design, more 'I want players to know that only 5% of people in this setting are born with the ability to use magic, so that when they see an inn with 10 patrons, five of whom are wizards, they can draw the conclusion that something is up'. Design more along the lines of 'its DC X to use your Perception to detect the influence of latent magical auras' or 'its DC Y to determine where an invisible creature moving around you is' that explicitly lets people know that something is on the table that they wouldn't have assumed or that they would have assumed they explicitly could not do, and less punitive stuff like 'here's how you calculate the fact that you can't see a city across a flat field from a high vantage point 5 miles away because of distance penalties'

Edit:

So you go to an inbetween, so that a player can decide to choose a rogue because at level 5 their athletics bonus lets climb a generic city/castle wall quite reliably, and at level 15 they can climb a glacier upsidedown. Even if the glacier of howling winds has a higher DC and the glacier of soft ice a lower one, and the royal fortress is made out of smoothened granite making it quite a lot harder.

Ballparks. 5e doesn't have even those.

My reply was about whether it was wise to try to pretend that GMs don't have to make game design decisions, or to embrace that and make the system give them the structure to teach them how to make those decisions well. I'm notably not arguing against there being tables or DCs or anything like that. I'm arguing against the fiction that somehow you can protect yourself from bad GMs by having enough tables.

Psyren

2022-08-14, 01:01 PM

The notion that you can afford to NOT understand iterative probability calculations if you plan to deal with TTRPGs which heavily rely on dice rolls for resolving scenarios in game is ludicrous. You can avoid that if you design a diceless game that does not use RNG to function. But D&D is not that game, never has been either.

You keep telling yourself that, and the game will remain accessible to anyone who wants to DM without a math degree regardless.

Quite bluntly, you're saying that the skill system should be running on very soft reasoning based primarily on DM adjudication, making it so that anyone doing anything with skills doesn't really ever have safe "I can do X" understandings until multiple sessions in based on calling for checks to test the waters of what this particular DM lets the skills do.

Two DMs being allowed to differ on what their tables can do with a check is a feature of the system, not a bug.

And quite bluntly, you're vastly overstating the degree to which most DMs would differ on most checks. To say nothing of the degree to which "multiple DMs differing" is even a problem for most people. I'd be surprised if most D&D players played in more than 1-3 concurrent campaigns over the course of an edition at all. What matters is what you and your DM agree on being allowed so you can both have fun, not some hypothetical spread of hundreds of other DMs you'll never even meet much less play with.

Ignimortis

2022-08-14, 01:53 PM

You keep telling yourself that, and the game will remain accessible to anyone who wants to DM without a math degree regardless.
For GMs? Certainly. Especially if actual game designers have a solid grasp of probability and establish, within their system, commonly used parameters that provide examples for GMs who might not be as good at probabilities as they are. And you certainly don't need a math degree. High school level understanding of statistics and a bit of research are enough for most game designers, because, frankly, they don't need a lot of precision. Ending up in the right ballpark should not take too much effort, especially with diligent playtesting.

And yet, somehow, we ended up with DC15 being "Medium" difficulty - an error on two levels of design - mathematical and UX both. Mathematically, it's far from "Medium" if a noticeably talented and at least somewhat proficient (+3 stat, +2 prof bonus) person succeeds at that 50% of the time. It's even less "Medium" when you realize that it still carries a 15% chance of failure for one of the best experts with superhuman aptitude (+5 stat, +6 proficiency). And on the UX level, "Medium" tells me absolutely nothing about the check. "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" are always relative, those measurements are not objective and, in fact, seem to imply that DC is supposed to be tailored to the one trying, except we have had confirmation that it's not actually designed that way.

I simply cannot see how having a basic table for most skills (especially in regards to things that are pretty much "interacting with basic physics" like Athletics and Acrobatics) would make the game worse. Do they take away the GM's ability to say that those rules don't apply to their game?

Sneak Dog

2022-08-14, 02:13 PM

My reply was about whether it was wise to try to pretend that GMs don't have to make game design decisions, or to embrace that and make the system give them the structure to teach them how to make those decisions well. I'm notably not arguing against there being tables or DCs or anything like that. I'm arguing against the fiction that somehow you can protect yourself from bad GMs by having enough tables.

My apologies, that's an entirely fair point I concur with. There's a lot going on in this thread simultaneously?

Two DMs being allowed to differ on what their tables can do with a check is a feature of the system, not a bug.

And quite bluntly, you're vastly overstating the degree to which most DMs would differ on most checks. To say nothing of the degree to which "multiple DMs differing" is even a problem for most people. I'd be surprised if most D&D players played in more than 1-3 concurrent campaigns over the course of an edition at all. What matters is what you and your DM agree on being allowed so you can both have fun, not some hypothetical spread of hundreds of other DMs you'll never even meet much less play with.

Unless imbalances within the two non-combat pillars of D&D and several rogue class features being complete unknowns until you've figured out your GMs ability check DC's for this campaign are features, I would call it a bug. And while I can't speak about most GMs (who can?), I can say that that a task that is DC 10 for one GM is DC 20 for another. Which is a significant variance.
Some ballpark DCs to teach DCs with actual examples would be good guidance for GMs and players alike.

Ability checks aren't some add-on subsystem you can ignore, or a component every class relies on somewhat equally. It actively competes against and synergises with spells and class features which are doled out in unequal fashion. Without some semblance of balance, games of D&D will suffer. Maybe not yours, and balance doesn't have to be incredibly tight, but...

Telok

2022-08-14, 04:12 PM

Why? Do they also stop attacking just because monsters have high ACs?

Yes, they switch to saves and opposed checks. Because waiting five minutes for your rolling two d20 attack, not seeing any 18+s and declaring your turn over is a pretty depressing way to spend an hour long combat.

Huh? My player's 10 yro son plays with us, his math and rule knowledge are what you'd expect from a 10 yro and definitely don't cover iterative probability calculations. He's talking about running a 1 shot with a custom system to do a Blood Bowl sort of thing. I fully support him.
Oh, so the 10 year old designed a third of the system and its working great? Or is he being handed the whole system and the expectation is it will just work without him having to make up new rules on the fly? Would you want him to run a D&D module with a bunch of printed DCs and make the "does this need a roll" descision each time for every character in the party? Isn't Blood Bowl literally a board game with nice tight rules that don't need people to make stuff up all the time? Oh wait, Blood Bowl is a combat and D&D combat works fine.

5e's combat works out of the box because the DM doesn't have to make up DCs from nothing or decide if the PCs need to auto-hit ot auto-miss every goblin, wolf, or bandit they fight. 5e's non-combat system doesn't just work without the DM apparently running a whole flowchart of decisions every time a PC tries anything, the DM can't read an official D&D module and apply the DCs because iterative probability makes lots of rolling a silly high failure rate and most DMs out there don't know why it doesn't just work.

Most DMs aren't and don't want to design a bunch of the D&D rule set. They didn't pay for the DMG in order to design D&D rules or find they need to know anything about probability in order to not **** up their games. They want clear rules where they can say "I don't know if the PCs should succeed", call for a roll, and not get -1 check characters blowing the +10 check characters out of the water several times a session. Saying "the DM's job is to fix this before it happens" is the same as saying "its not a problem because the DM can fix the problem". I've never seen a live game where this wasn't a problem. 5e combat works without premptive DM fixing & constant fiating hits & missed, non-combat could too.

Psyren

2022-08-14, 04:29 PM

I can say that that a task that is DC 10 for one GM is DC 20 for another. Which is a significant variance.

If your GM has narratively justified that task to require substantial talent and training to succeed at - after having gone through the steps to ensure calling for a check is appropriate in the first place of course - then DC 20 is appropriate. If they haven't, then you have the right to discuss the discrepancy with them like adults. And if they don't care about your ability to have fun, then they're a donkey cavity and no amount of book examples will change that.

Some ballpark DCs to teach DCs with actual examples would be good guidance for GMs and players alike.

"Ballpark DCs" undermine the entire point of the open-ended check system. At best, they should have an end-to-end example or two of the whole process, including at least one example of deciding not to call for a check at all - and even that I don't see as strictly necessary.

Definitely no tables or lists of a bunch of DCs like prior editions. If you want those so badly and don't want to make them up yourself, then there's always homebrew or third-party.

Ability checks aren't some add-on subsystem you can ignore, or a component every class relies on somewhat equally. It actively competes against and synergises with spells and class features which are doled out in unequal fashion. Without some semblance of balance, games of D&D will suffer. Maybe not yours, and balance doesn't have to be incredibly tight, but...

I'm aware that ability checks are important, keeping them open-ended is just as important.

Sneak Dog

2022-08-14, 05:51 PM

If your GM has narratively justified that task to require substantial talent and training to succeed at - after having gone through the steps to ensure calling for a check is appropriate in the first place of course - then DC 20 is appropriate. If they haven't, then you have the right to discuss the discrepancy with them like adults. And if they don't care about your ability to have fun, then they're a donkey cavity and no amount of book examples will change that.

Somehow the words the GM handbook uses seem to not get the message across. I'd say they are too vague and non-descriptive, and rely on the GM's judgement on a great variety of subjects too much.

"Ballpark DCs" undermine the entire point of the open-ended check system. At best, they should have an end-to-end example or two of the whole process, including at least one example of deciding not to call for a check at all - and even that I don't see as strictly necessary.

Definitely no tables or lists of a bunch of DCs like prior editions. If you want those so badly and don't want to make them up yourself, then there's always homebrew or third-party.

I'm aware that ability checks are important, keeping them open-ended is just as important.

Bounded accuracy undermines the ability check system more than spells do, and the highly detailed, reliable, specific and affordable spells undermine the ability check system more than any DC table would.
Because spells set the tone of your campaign. They're rigid and hard to homebrew and tweak a little to fit your campaign. There's a ton of them and they're core features to most classes. They declare the abilities of your PC's. The rules let you use ability checks from anywhere between wuxia and untrained commoner, but spells don't. They make you play D&D. So why would it be bad for ability checks to make you play D&D, so that we can then evaluate things like rogues' ability check bonuses in 5e?
D&D isn't an open-ended system since 3e. 5e just has an open-ended ability check system tacked onto it.

Pex

2022-08-14, 06:02 PM

Even if you lock down exactly how Acrobatics works to the most minute detail, you can never escape that the GM decisions about the scenario can vastly impact the actual game. Ultimately, it's a GM decision that determine whether Acrobatics could or would come up. Any modifiers that are permitted are again something that GM decisions can influence - if they decide that it rained the previous night, if they decide that the defenders poured oil on the battlements, if they decide that the castle is in the mountains or the forests or on an island in the ocean. Having a number in a table and very precise rules does not make it so that the GM doesn't have to understand the consequences of their decisions with regards to the game as a whole, any more than the player of a fighter can get away without understanding the consequences of weapon choice or their positioning on the battlefield with regards to 'who can I attack?'.

Basically the only real way to escape that is to go to something GM-less, in which case you still have a choice to make - do you want the flexibility to be able to go off-script (in which case now everyone at the table has to think like a designer sometimes rather than just one person, but you have the social dynamics of group negotiation rather than hierarchical negotiation in the case of breakdown of responsibilities, which may or may not be preferable), or you can sacrifice that too and basically get something that caps out around the level of the more complex boardgames out there.

The call for the check was asked because the player chose to interact with the ledge, so the DM activated the resolution. The game rules define how something works, but as they're just rules on paper a person needs to invoke them. That's not the DM deciding anything. That's the game being played.

NichG

2022-08-14, 06:53 PM

The call for the check was asked because the player chose to interact with the ledge, so the DM activated the resolution. The game rules define how something works, but as they're just rules on paper a person needs to invoke them. That's not the DM deciding anything. That's the game being played.

The DM decided there was a ledge rather than a sheer drop, or a hillside near a second-story window that would make for a more convenient access point, or a crack in the wall that might have to be squeezed through, or just that the guards have a rotation that's easy to time and if you sneak through the front gate at night during the right interval you can get in that way. The DM decided the location of the guard positions which in turn determine whether 'breaking in by walking along the crenellation' is an Acrobatics check or if its Acrobatics plus Stealth (another iterated probability difficulty hike issue...), or just an outright bad idea entirely since you'd be walking across a sight-line with no cover and no possibility of movement. The DM also decided who had what information about whatever it was that is motivating the party to break into the castle, whether it was in the dungeons or high up in the tower, whether it was locked away or carried around by someone who could be ambushed, whether there was even a castle in the first place.

For a fixed module, you might argue that those things were all decided by the designer of the module. But if you really commit to that position as the only valid play, you're also committing to a hard-railroad standard since that would mandate that the DM ensure the party never goes off-script enough to ever require them to make a decision about something.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-14, 07:11 PM

For a fixed module, you might argue that those things were all decided by the designer of the module. But if you really commit to that position as the only valid play, you're also committing to a hard-railroad standard since that would mandate that the DM ensure the party never goes off-script enough to ever require them to make a decision about something.

Exactly. Flexibility to decide what the world is at the level the characters encounter it is the only thing that allows open ended games. If there is agency, any fixed list of possibilities and robotic "just invoke the mechanics" DM'ing will fail.

------------

Beyond this, tables and lists don't actually teach people how to DM. In fact, as a pedagogic technique, they prevent learning. They're the bad kind of crutch, same as a cheat sheet on a test. They constrain the imagination and shortcut the process. Once you've learned how you, personally, and your tables are comfortable with checks being set, you're good. You never have to relearn it or really think about it more than incidentally. It becomes an automatic process. If all you have is didactic "memorize these" tables...you're stuck. You constantly have to reference those, and if you stray from the tables even in the slightest, you're floundering.

Do I agree that the (5e) DMG could do a better job of describing things and giving worked examples? Absolutely. Do I think that the right solution is to constrain everything to fixed tables[1]? No. Far from it.

[1] and yes, tables do constrain. At least they'd have to in order to satisfy the people here who value inter-table uniformity. Because if the tables are merely examples and aren't actually intended to be used as such, then (a) they're useless wastes of time and space and (b) you wouldn't get uniformity. There is a strong desire expressed in these threads for everyone else to be required to play the way the interlocutor wants. AKA bad-wrong-fun. For me, inter-table consistency of DCs is actively a negative. Heck, even within table consistency (at different points in the campaign) is a (weaker) negative. Because the world is more complex than that. If I want mechanical DMing that doesn't actually consider the whole scenario, I'll play a computer game.

Psyren

2022-08-14, 07:13 PM

Bounded accuracy undermines the ability check system more than spells do, and the highly detailed, reliable, specific and affordable spells undermine the ability check system more than any DC table would.
Because spells set the tone of your campaign. They're rigid and hard to homebrew and tweak a little to fit your campaign. There's a ton of them and they're core features to most classes. They declare the abilities of your PC's. The rules let you use ability checks from anywhere between wuxia and untrained commoner, but spells don't. They make you play D&D. So why would it be bad for ability checks to make you play D&D, so that we can then evaluate things like rogues' ability check bonuses in 5e?
D&D isn't an open-ended system since 3e. 5e just has an open-ended ability check system tacked onto it.

Neither of the things you mentioned (bounded accuracy and open-ended skills) stopped 5e from being the most successful D&D edition... well, ever. So declaring that those things "aren't D&D" doesn't really resonate.

Moreover, you can "evaluate a rogue's bonuses" just fine. You don't need uniformity across all tables to do that.

Brookshw

2022-08-14, 07:54 PM

Unlike most of a character's skills, a PC's attack modifier increases as the levels progress so an AC 20 eventually is not a problem. Even so, yes, when an AC is too high players stop. At least the spellcasters can. They can stop making spell attacks and instead cast spells using saving throws. Warriors not so much. Unless they can get Advantage easily, such as barbarians and bow rogues who like to hide, they're out of luck. They have to think of other means, such as grappling or shoving to help other players. This is not a bad thing. However, this doesn't happen every combat. Many combats a warrior has a decent chance to hit the AC of a monster a few misses won't discourage. When every skill use DC is 15 or 20 because the DM made it up and the character will only ever have a +0 or +1, they stop trying. A characters skills go up, even when they aren't proficient in them, as long as they choose to invest your stats every 4 levels, not even considering how you might become proficient in additional skills :smallconfused: Assuming standard stat distribution, Tasha's floating stats, and proficiency, you're looking at, assuming ACs of 15-20 as with the stats, the same 55-30% chance of hitting, it's no change, so not sure why one is discouraging and not the other. Also, +0 or +1 is pretty much worst case scenario, dunno why someone in that situation would expect to do well in those circumstances.

I know what they chose to do. I find what they chose to do a mistake. They were wrong to cling so heavily on "rulings not rules". I know what you mean, but lots of people are fine with it and have been since the days of D&D, can't say "wrong" other than in the context of for a particular table.

Not as hard coded as you think. The reason we have skills at all today is because when they didn't exist people wanted to do stuff out of combat but the lack of rules for it made it troublesome. Many DMs just said "No". Others had to figure out how and no one was satisfied. Then we got non-weapon proficiencies. They helped, but it still meant "No" for everything else that you were not proficient in. 3E opened the door wide for non-combat stuff. You don't have to like how it was implemented, but it showed it was possible in D&D.

The more game designers did their job in saying how things were done the easier it was on the player to do things and the DM to say why things exist and establish the results of the players doing stuff.

Disagree, exactly as hard coded as I think. DM's have always been able to change any rule they want (and have been advised to do so for the tables enjoyment and to cover gaps), technically they could cut out all the rules, toss in GURPS' rules, and they'd still be playing D&D and correctly DMing (an absurd example, but still correct). Don't forget that there were slots and skills back in D&D outside of AD&D, and that they essentially functioned the same as 5e does, i.e., the DM decides when a skill is rolled, if the objective was actually possible, how frequently they were rolled, and, though the targets were based on attributes rather that a DC, that distinction was meaningless because the DM was to hand out bonuses or penalties based on how difficult they thought the task would be, to the point that you needed a 1 to succeed (a 20 in the modern version), it was effectively what we have now. We didn't need to wait for 3e, and 3e's skill system left DMs having to guess at difficulty just as much as before. You and I have had this specific discussion about 3e using climbing trees, turned out a DM might have to choose from broad ranges to figure out how difficult it was (I believe it was a range of 12 integers).

Oh, so the 10 year old designed a third of the system and its working great? Or is he being handed the whole system and the expectation is it will just work without him having to make up new rules on the fly? Would you want him to run a D&D module with a bunch of printed DCs and make the "does this need a roll" descision each time for every character in the party? Isn't Blood Bowl literally a board game with nice tight rules that don't need people to make stuff up all the time? Oh wait, Blood Bowl is a combat and D&D combat works fine.

Last time he described it to me, he was planning a bunch of new rules, e.g., passing and intercepting, fumbling the ball, cheering, sneaking the ball, etc., basically a mix of combat and skill rules. He's put a surprising amount of thought into it, sounded like it could be fun. Considering D&D's a game, that's pretty much all you need, and it turns out kids know how to have fun even without knowing a bunch of math. Insisting they, or anyone, would need to posses specific skill sets aside from a desire to have fun to DM is just gatekeeping. I'll pass.

Lord Raziere

2022-08-14, 08:01 PM

Neither of the things you mentioned (bounded accuracy and open-ended skills) stopped 5e from being the most successful D&D edition... well, ever. So declaring that those things "aren't D&D" doesn't really resonate.

Hm. If the only identity DnD needs is success, then I'm not sure DnD is much of anything at all.

Define DnD other than being successful or popular please. Because if the gameline's only value is success, only measure is popularity, only identity is its success, then it has none for it gladly cast whatever it is aside to be whatever will make it more money.

What is the identity of DnD that you will say needs to be preserved, regardless of money made or success? That is a most important question to ask and to answer, I'd say.

warty goblin

2022-08-14, 08:09 PM

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-14, 08:16 PM

I mean I made up a sort of semi- competitive RPG for two when I was like 11. The rules, maps, monsters, artwork, item, everything. The math was gawdawful, but my buddy and I had a ton of fun with it.

Which is ultimately the point of a game, a social lubricant that leads to fun and enjoyment for all participants. I suspect of one engages with D&D (or any other RPG) 9n those grounds, rather than theoretical whiteboard standards, it works a lot better. Given how wildly popular D&D is right now, I'd say it seems to do exceedingly well as an enjoyable form of social interaction.

Exactly. My 10 year old nephew (then) ran several successful campaigns for his cousins in a world he created. Their grasp of the formal rules and mechanics was...poor...but they had tons of fun. And bonded. And that was successful D&D for them. I've found that personally, the more I let go of the "rules are a binding contract and should be followed" concept and lean into "rules are tools to be used where they're useful and discarded everywhere else", the better my games flow. Which means never asking the rules a question where there are options that aren't fun. And the only ones who can judge fun are the living people at the table. The developers can't--they're not at the table. The rules can't, they're inanimate printed words on paper (or electrons on a device). And I'd expect what options are fun will differ sharply between tables.

NichG

2022-08-14, 08:51 PM

Exactly. Flexibility to decide what the world is at the level the characters encounter it is the only thing that allows open ended games. If there is agency, any fixed list of possibilities and robotic "just invoke the mechanics" DM'ing will fail.

------------

Beyond this, tables and lists don't actually teach people how to DM. In fact, as a pedagogic technique, they prevent learning. They're the bad kind of crutch, same as a cheat sheet on a test. They constrain the imagination and shortcut the process. Once you've learned how you, personally, and your tables are comfortable with checks being set, you're good. You never have to relearn it or really think about it more than incidentally. It becomes an automatic process. If all you have is didactic "memorize these" tables...you're stuck. You constantly have to reference those, and if you stray from the tables even in the slightest, you're floundering.

Do I agree that the (5e) DMG could do a better job of describing things and giving worked examples? Absolutely. Do I think that the right solution is to constrain everything to fixed tables[1]? No. Far from it.

[1] and yes, tables do constrain. At least they'd have to in order to satisfy the people here who value inter-table uniformity. Because if the tables are merely examples and aren't actually intended to be used as such, then (a) they're useless wastes of time and space and (b) you wouldn't get uniformity. There is a strong desire expressed in these threads for everyone else to be required to play the way the interlocutor wants. AKA bad-wrong-fun. For me, inter-table consistency of DCs is actively a negative. Heck, even within table consistency (at different points in the campaign) is a (weaker) negative. Because the world is more complex than that. If I want mechanical DMing that doesn't actually consider the whole scenario, I'll play a computer game.

The lesson I'd like to be presented to GMs (via DMG or sidebars or whatever) is text talking about specifically what giving something a fixed DC in advance of that particular thing being called for can be used to achieve, alongside fixed DCs in the rules and explanation for what the designers in particular were trying to achieve by putting that particular thing in the player-accessible text.

I think the biggest weakness of the make-it-up-as-we-go-along DMs comes from entering a sort of reflexive and defensive stance with respect to setting DCs. That is, I think its easy to get into a pattern where being provoked to set a DC by a player leads to creating a precedent that causes problems later, and the reflexive reaction to that is to be defensive about letting players know the DC for basically anything until the DM is in a position to see how the players might be trying to abuse that. There's a lot of bad dynamics in that cycle - setting DCs based on whether you want the players to succeed or not (or choosing first the chance of success and then trying to figure out what DC would create that chance), players then exploiting that by asking for a DC early in the campaign and relying on the DM setting it relative to their current strength, so that it will end up getting locked in and be trivial later on, etc. There's a lot of mess basically, and as much as you might say 'well I and my group have an understanding', this kind of experience also creates overall player-vs-DM and even just overt anti-DM sentiments when people end up in a game where this kind of thing is being used as part of power struggles at the table.

So I'd much rather DMs understand early on that there are more reasons to set a DC than 'it came up during play', and many of them benefit from doing so well in advance. I'd want the culture to get out in front of that and make it not feel scary or like a loss of control or like being taken advantage of to communicate the DC for something (or the way it should be calculated) well in advance of it actually coming up. I want text that teaches DMs that broadcasting how something will work enables players to use it for planning and that in turn enables - and is even mandatory for - certain forms of play such as heists, strategic (vs tactical) encounters, base defense scenarios, etc. I want text that advises DMs that communicating a DC that is currently too high for the group to make can be used as a way to offer a concrete reward for building in a certain direction rather than in other directions, and as such as a tool to enable and encourage organic builds and to connect the mechanics to in-character motivations for power-seeking and self-improvement.

What I would like to see is less 'go fish' game design where DCs are a mechanism for DMs to try to create tension or difficulty in the moment by asking for rolls until someone fails and then playing off of the failure, and more thought about specifically how to utilize telegraphing and offloading of mechanical resolution as DM-ing techniques. Skills shouldn't be about defending against the DM's probes, but they should be about something where investment positively allows the character to increase the set of things they can know that they can reliably do.

Edit: And on the subject of rules, something that prompts DMs to think of rules as opportunities or ways to promise things to the players, rather than 'the way to figure out what happens' would be great. Promising things is a wonderful tool for getting people to be more confident stepping out somewhere which would otherwise be uncertain, and as such can be an incredible tool especially when trying to produce genre conventions that go against logic. For example, promising 'characters will not die without the players agreement' can be used to vastly increase how likely players are to engage in risky heroic behaviors.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-14, 09:25 PM

The lesson I'd like to be presented to GMs (via DMG or sidebars or whatever) is text talking about specifically what giving something a fixed DC in advance of that particular thing being called for can be used to achieve, alongside fixed DCs in the rules and explanation for what the designers in particular were trying to achieve by putting that particular thing in the player-accessible text.

I think the biggest weakness of the make-it-up-as-we-go-along DMs comes from entering a sort of reflexive and defensive stance with respect to setting DCs. That is, I think its easy to get into a pattern where being provoked to set a DC by a player leads to creating a precedent that causes problems later, and the reflexive reaction to that is to be defensive about letting players know the DC for basically anything until the DM is in a position to see how the players might be trying to abuse that. There's a lot of bad dynamics in that cycle - setting DCs based on whether you want the players to succeed or not (or choosing first the chance of success and then trying to figure out what DC would create that chance), players then exploiting that by asking for a DC early in the campaign and relying on the DM setting it relative to their current strength, so that it will end up getting locked in and be trivial later on, etc. There's a lot of mess basically, and as much as you might say 'well I and my group have an understanding', this kind of experience also creates overall player-vs-DM and even just overt anti-DM sentiments when people end up in a game where this kind of thing is being used as part of power struggles at the table.

So I'd much rather DMs understand early on that there are more reasons to set a DC than 'it came up during play', and many of them benefit from doing so well in advance. I'd want the culture to get out in front of that and make it not feel scary or like a loss of control or like being taken advantage of to communicate the DC for something (or the way it should be calculated) well in advance of it actually coming up. I want text that teaches DMs that broadcasting how something will work enables players to use it for planning and that in turn enables - and is even mandatory for - certain forms of play such as heists, strategic (vs tactical) encounters, base defense scenarios, etc. I want text that advises DMs that communicating a DC that is currently too high for the group to make can be used as a way to offer a concrete reward for building in a certain direction rather than in other directions, and as such as a tool to enable and encourage organic builds and to connect the mechanics to in-character motivations for power-seeking and self-improvement.

What I would like to see is less 'go fish' game design where DCs are a mechanism for DMs to try to create tension or difficulty in the moment by asking for rolls until someone fails and then playing off of the failure, and more thought about specifically how to utilize telegraphing and offloading of mechanical resolution as DM-ing techniques. Skills shouldn't be about defending against the DM's probes, but they should be about something where investment positively allows the character to increase the set of things they can know that they can reliably do.

Edit: And on the subject of rules, something that prompts DMs to think of rules as opportunities or ways to promise things to the players, rather than 'the way to figure out what happens' would be great. Promising things is a wonderful tool for getting people to be more confident stepping out somewhere which would otherwise be uncertain, and as such can be an incredible tool especially when trying to produce genre conventions that go against logic. For example, promising 'characters will not die without the players agreement' can be used to vastly increase how likely players are to engage in risky heroic behaviors.

A few responses:

I agree that rules set expectations. Which is one reason I'm against fixed DC tables--they set bad expectations (specifically that every tree is identical +-10%, every door lock is the same, and that it's all a numbers game to beat). But I use the idea of rules as fixed expectations quite a lot. I've got one rule where I promise that if you hand me a backstory character, I won't fold, spindle, mutilate, or kill them unless your character is in a position (both knowledge and opportunity) to intervene if they choose. Is that a narrative imposition? Sure. But it's worth it to me.

As for DCs...in my experience the game is like a river. It flows onward. No situation repeats twice, and the situations are critical to accurately setting a DC. So saying "this task is too hard for you...yet" (which is what setting an explicit DC above what they can do is doing) is identical to saying "no, you can't do that task". Because if they go away, level up, and try again...it's a different task at that point. With a logically different DC. I don't believe, in my heart of hearts, that DCs are really possible to set in the abstract. Opening a locked door? By itself, in a vacuum, it's not a check at all. It's only the framework around it (what happens if you fail on your first attempt? What happens if it takes 2x or 10x as long?) that makes it meaningful as something to even attempt to roll for. And those factors vary. And knowing it for one door doesn't help you at all for a different door, and the chances of coming back to the same door later under the same circumstances are just...basically zero. Not worth spending paper on.

Generally, I prefer if players think as little as possible in mechanical terms. Instead of trying to calculate "ok, I've got a X% chance right now, if I do XYZ I'll have a Y% chance..." I want them to be thinking in narrative terms. What would my character do? If the only way to reasonably succeed is to go meta and act like your character knows their in a game and knows the (very artificial) mechanics being used to translate between that fictional world and the world of the players[1], that's an actively jarring thing for me. I'll say that one of the smoothest[2] and most enjoyable one-shots I ever ran was one where basically no one knew any of the rules. They were handed character sheets, told "If I ask you to roll something, roll that die [pointing to the d20] and add the number next to that thing on your sheet. Higher is better." And you know what? They engaged with the fiction almost entirely. They didn't think in terms of actions, of chances, they simply acted like their characters. Including using ability checks for things--"Say's here I'm a soldier. Can I use that common bond to try to get the (former soldier) bandits to surrender?" or "Says I'm a religious person. Can I talk the priest into helping us by drawing on that shared bond?" Etc. Instead of treating their characters as playing pieces, designed to have the optimal chances of success, they acted like they were real people. Including doing things that were in-character, yet obviously sub-optimal from a rules standpoint. And it was tons of fun for everyone.

From that, I took the knowledge that rules are really just scaffolding. The ultimate reality of RPGs is free-form. But free-form is way too much work for just about any group. So we build rules to assist us. And the shape of those rules depends on the structure being built. Insisting that all scaffolds look the same or have the same features just makes them useless. Insisting that rules have inherent, rather than just instrumental, value produces play that I'm not fond of at all.

[1] because that's what mechanics do--they act as a UI or translation layer. They're not fundamental to either world, but they serve as the interface protocol where that protocol is needed.
[2] albeit one of the more exhausting ones, because I had to do all the translations back and forth in mechanical terms. Rules are useful, don't get me wrong. And having player-facing rules lightens the load on the one running things. But they're helps, they're not actually the important part of the game. The game itself, the fiction in which the characters are immersed, that is the important thing.

NichG

2022-08-14, 09:46 PM

A few responses:

I agree that rules set expectations. Which is one reason I'm against fixed DC tables--they set bad expectations (specifically that every tree is identical +-10%, every door lock is the same, and that it's all a numbers game to beat). But I use the idea of rules as fixed expectations quite a lot. I've got one rule where I promise that if you hand me a backstory character, I won't fold, spindle, mutilate, or kill them unless your character is in a position (both knowledge and opportunity) to intervene if they choose. Is that a narrative imposition? Sure. But it's worth it to me.

As for DCs...in my experience the game is like a river. It flows onward. No situation repeats twice, and the situations are critical to accurately setting a DC. So saying "this task is too hard for you...yet" (which is what setting an explicit DC above what they can do is doing) is identical to saying "no, you can't do that task". Because if they go away, level up, and try again...it's a different task at that point. With a logically different DC. I don't believe, in my heart of hearts, that DCs are really possible to set in the abstract. Opening a locked door? By itself, in a vacuum, it's not a check at all. It's only the framework around it (what happens if you fail on your first attempt? What happens if it takes 2x or 10x as long?) that makes it meaningful as something to even attempt to roll for. And those factors vary. And knowing it for one door doesn't help you at all for a different door, and the chances of coming back to the same door later under the same circumstances are just...basically zero. Not worth spending paper on.

Whereas I'd look at the situation and say 'I observe that this player is interested in this thing that is currently beyond what their character can reasonably do. This is an opportunity to get the player more motivated and connected with the game! If I make the promise that, should the player encounter something even close to this situation again, they can guarantee that they can do it as long as they pay the cost of a certain number of build resources or a certain amount of in-character preparation, then that is to my advantage as a GM. This is a great opportunity to increase engagement and produce emergent gameplay!' Rather than looking for a reason why I should not be bound to a decision I made now as a GM (because yes, the details *could* be different), I think its better to look at this as an opportunity - what could I accomplish as a GM if I concede a promise that should this happen again, the details won't be different?

I know how to craft arguments, even to fool myself. Just because I could argue something from, say, a position of realism doesn't mean it's in my interest or in the interest of the game to argue it. Maybe as a point of game design its okay if every stone wall is equally difficult to climb, and we don't really need +5s and -5s for rain or ice or ivy or crumbling stonework or whatever. Is the game improved by including that detail? What is gained, and what is lost? How will the experience of play be shaped by that choice?

I want GMs to be thinking about that, rather than just acting reflexively based on the most immediate argument that comes to mind (often this is something like 'realism' or 'verisimilitude' where in the end it comes down to personally choosing to be bothered by a detail or not). I'm not saying 'always take a gamist stance' here, but rather saying that abstraction is inevitable and its better to understand what the tradeoffs and make a conscious choice than to let oneself be motivated by reflexive reactions.

Generally, I prefer if players think as little as possible in mechanical terms. Instead of trying to calculate "ok, I've got a X% chance right now, if I do XYZ I'll have a Y% chance..." I want them to be thinking in narrative terms. What would my character do? If the only way to reasonably succeed is to go meta and act like your character knows their in a game and knows the (very artificial) mechanics being used to translate between that fictional world and the world of the players[1], that's an actively jarring thing for me. I'll say that one of the smoothest[2] and most enjoyable one-shots I ever ran was one where basically no one knew any of the rules. They were handed character sheets, told "If I ask you to roll something, roll that die [pointing to the d20] and add the number next to that thing on your sheet. Higher is better." And you know what? They engaged with the fiction almost entirely. They didn't think in terms of actions, of chances, they simply acted like their characters. Including using ability checks for things--"Say's here I'm a soldier. Can I use that common bond to try to get the (former soldier) bandits to surrender?" or "Says I'm a religious person. Can I talk the priest into helping us by drawing on that shared bond?" Etc. Instead of treating their characters as playing pieces, designed to have the optimal chances of success, they acted like they were real people. Including doing things that were in-character, yet obviously sub-optimal from a rules standpoint. And it was tons of fun for everyone.

From that, I took the knowledge that rules are really just scaffolding. The ultimate reality of RPGs is free-form. But free-form is way too much work for just about any group. So we build rules to assist us. And the shape of those rules depends on the structure being built. Insisting that all scaffolds look the same or have the same features just makes them useless. Insisting that rules have inherent, rather than just instrumental, value produces play that I'm not fond of at all.

[1] because that's what mechanics do--they act as a UI or translation layer. They're not fundamental to either world, but they serve as the interface protocol where that protocol is needed.
[2] albeit one of the more exhausting ones, because I had to do all the translations back and forth in mechanical terms. Rules are useful, don't get me wrong. And having player-facing rules lightens the load on the one running things. But they're helps, they're not actually the important part of the game. The game itself, the fiction in which the characters are immersed, that is the important thing.

I guess I take the view that it isn't either/or. The mechanics exist to make the narrative reality concrete and accessible to people who are not actually physically immersed in it. They are a way to abstract and summarize narrative realities in a way that allows players to act with the confidence that you or I could act with regards to things we do as fully embodied inhabitants of physical reality. I think not everything should have an exposed mechanic, because uncertainty and discover is something that can be part of the fictional reality too, and those things are interesting to explore. But there should be things which you do not want the players to have to ask you as the GM to tell them whether or not those things are reasonable. Mechanics are a way of creating that ability to reason and plan and resolve things independently of the GM. Explicit narrative control powers (dramatic editing points, etc) are another way. 'No god-modding' promises common to freeform online gaming are another way to do it - if someone says 'my character climbs that tree' then its no one's business other than the player of that character.

But one way or another it is a need that must be resolved, otherwise you're limited to stories about people who effectively are young children for whom every single thing is a new and uncertain experience. I like some of that in my gaming, but I wouldn't want that to be the everything of it.

Pex

2022-08-14, 09:49 PM

The DM decided there was a ledge rather than a sheer drop, or a hillside near a second-story window that would make for a more convenient access point, or a crack in the wall that might have to be squeezed through, or just that the guards have a rotation that's easy to time and if you sneak through the front gate at night during the right interval you can get in that way. The DM decided the location of the guard positions which in turn determine whether 'breaking in by walking along the crenellation' is an Acrobatics check or if its Acrobatics plus Stealth (another iterated probability difficulty hike issue...), or just an outright bad idea entirely since you'd be walking across a sight-line with no cover and no possibility of movement. The DM also decided who had what information about whatever it was that is motivating the party to break into the castle, whether it was in the dungeons or high up in the tower, whether it was locked away or carried around by someone who could be ambushed, whether there was even a castle in the first place.

For a fixed module, you might argue that those things were all decided by the designer of the module. But if you really commit to that position as the only valid play, you're also committing to a hard-railroad standard since that would mandate that the DM ensure the party never goes off-script enough to ever require them to make a decision about something.

Yes, that's what I've been saying. The DM decides why a Thing is there and determines the results of players interacting with that Thing. That's creating the gameworld, not creating the game. The game rules determine how the resolution of the interaction happens. The player decides to interact with the Thing.

A module is an author deciding why a Thing is placed. Some DMs need that assistance. "Need" is probably too strong a word. Other DMs prefer to homebrew their own world. I remember way back when playing 2E enjoying the games people were running. I wanted to try DMing myself. I was having a hard time trying to make up adventures. It stunk. For the longest time I thought I was just a bad DM. After years of practice learning what I was doing wrong and what was the players just not liking my style I got better. It would only be a few years ago, DMing my homebrew game in 5E, that I got a revelation. Having running out of ideas a player offered me old modules that were converted to 5E. As I was reading them over I had deja vu. Everything was familiar. It wasn't deja vu. It was actual memories. I played almost every module the player gave me. That was why those 2E DMs had such great adventures while mine sucked. They weren't DM geniuses. They were simply running a module. I had no clue there was such a thing back then. It was just the Player's Handbook, DMG, and Monster Manual. Eventually there were the Class Handbooks and Tome of Magic. Adventure modules? Never heard of them. Never saw them. It explained everything. I'm now running a new campaign. I started with Dragonheist and continuing with Undermountain. I still have my personal quirks for my own gameworld since I don't use Forgotten Realms, but I am definitely a lot better DM than I was. Ideas spark I wouldn't have thought of myself. Bless the DMs who can create and run their own adventures. I have enjoyed such campaigns. My barbarian game I loved so much was such a campaign. For those DMs, like me, who could use the assist from published modules, hooray for us.

Exactly. Flexibility to decide what the world is at the level the characters encounter it is the only thing that allows open ended games. If there is agency, any fixed list of possibilities and robotic "just invoke the mechanics" DM'ing will fail.

------------

Beyond this, tables and lists don't actually teach people how to DM. In fact, as a pedagogic technique, they prevent learning. They're the bad kind of crutch, same as a cheat sheet on a test. They constrain the imagination and shortcut the process. Once you've learned how you, personally, and your tables are comfortable with checks being set, you're good. You never have to relearn it or really think about it more than incidentally. It becomes an automatic process. If all you have is didactic "memorize these" tables...you're stuck. You constantly have to reference those, and if you stray from the tables even in the slightest, you're floundering.

Do I agree that the (5e) DMG could do a better job of describing things and giving worked examples? Absolutely. Do I think that the right solution is to constrain everything to fixed tables[1]? No. Far from it.

[1] and yes, tables do constrain. At least they'd have to in order to satisfy the people here who value inter-table uniformity. Because if the tables are merely examples and aren't actually intended to be used as such, then (a) they're useless wastes of time and space and (b) you wouldn't get uniformity. There is a strong desire expressed in these threads for everyone else to be required to play the way the interlocutor wants. AKA bad-wrong-fun. For me, inter-table consistency of DCs is actively a negative. Heck, even within table consistency (at different points in the campaign) is a (weaker) negative. Because the world is more complex than that. If I want mechanical DMing that doesn't actually consider the whole scenario, I'll play a computer game.

DC tables no more constrain than every saving throw DC of all class abilities of every kind is 8 + proficiency bonus + appropriate ability score modifier. No more constrained than every non-magical plate mail everywhere gives AC 18. No more constrain than DMG page 244 there is a DC table for tracking, DMG page 245 there is a DC table for conversation reaction, DMG page 246 there is a DC table for object AC, DMG page 247 DC table for object hit points. Heh, I forgot about the tracking DC table. I'm learning there are more DC tables actually existing than I thought. They don't cover all the skills, but it's far from nothing as I thought a few years ago. Mea culpa. Now it's just a matter of adding a few more DC tables to cover all the skills and place them in an easy to find spot. Having these tables be so close to the index it's easy to forget they're there. They should be in the beginning or at least the middle of the book, definitely before all the magic items, unlike after as they are now.

PhoenixPhyre

2022-08-14, 10:29 PM

Whereas I'd look at the situation and say 'I observe that this player is interested in this thing that is currently beyond what their character can reasonably do. This is an opportunity to get the player more motivated and connected with the game! If I make the promise that, should the player encounter something even close to this situation again, they can guarantee that they can do it as long as they pay the cost of a certain number of build resources or a certain amount of in-character preparation, then that is to my advantage as a GM. This is a great opportunity to increase engagement and produce emergent gameplay!' Rather than looking for a reason why I should not be bound to a decision I made now as a GM (because yes, the details *could* be different), I think its better to look at this as an opportunity - what could I accomplish as a GM if I concede a promise that should this happen again, the details won't be different?

I know how to craft arguments, even to fool myself. Just because I could argue something from, say, a position of realism doesn't mean it's in my interest or in the interest of the game to argue it. Maybe as a point of game design its okay if every stone wall is equally difficult to climb, and we don't really need +5s and -5s for rain or ice or ivy or crumbling stonework or whatever. Is the game improved by including that detail? What is gained, and what is lost? How will the experience of play be shaped by that choice?

I want GMs to be thinking about that, rather than just acting reflexively based on the most immediate argument that comes to mind (often this is something like 'realism' or 'verisimilitude' where in the end it comes down to personally choosing to be bothered by a detail or not). I'm not saying 'always take a gamist stance' here, but rather saying that abstraction is inevitable and its better to understand what the tradeoffs and make a conscious choice than to let oneself be motivated by reflexive reactions.

Sure, be intentional about it. But fixing DCs comes with expectations. For one, the horrible (IMO) expectation that tasks have atomic, immutable DCs and that doing task X === rolling check Y against DC Z. Why is that horrible? Because
a) it's false and creates absurdity within the narrative
b) it tends to waste tons of table time and produce unfun events
c) it encourages "accounting-style" character building.

(a) is because part of the difficulty of a task is the consequences. And the consequences are not constant. Opening a lock in the privacy and safety of your safehouse, with all the time in the world is a very different task than opening that exact same lock when failure means that an alarm goes off and all the hordes of hell descend upon you. Same lock, vastly different narrative difficulty. Saying that they're the same reduces the world to a cardboard caricature, a bad video game using stock assets. And wastes the entire potential of TTRPGs--the ability to respond to non-programmed things.

(b) is tied in with (a)--if climbing a rope is always a DC 10 check, then unless you have a +9 bonus, you will fail some times when the fiction says you shouldn't. And unless you have a -11 modifier, you will succeed some times the fiction says you shouldn't. Committing to always rolling (which is the commitment that having fixed, absolute DCs implies), says that the fiction doesn't matter. That only the math does. And that's really not fun. It reduces the game to one of "make sure you've got high enough bonuses that you never have to roll at all or face slapstick that breaks your character's fiction." Setting fixed DCs like that generally makes people engage with the mechanic less, by trying to avoid any case where they'll have to roll at all. It also implies really weird things about the world itself. For example, if climbing a rope is a DC 10 check...then cats can't climb a rope reliably. Because their climb modifier isn't that good. So you end up having to put in all these bodges anyway to reduce the absurdity.

(c) describes how 3e was--take X points in Tumble so you auto pass the Z check, P points in UMD so you can UMD ABC...that's the opposite of organic building. That's building to predetermined targets, whether it makes any sense for the character or not. Or be a caster so you don't have to engage in any of that because your spells do everything for you without any kind of a roll.

I guess I take the view that it isn't either/or. The mechanics exist to make the narrative reality concrete and accessible to people who are not actually physically immersed in it. They are a way to abstract and summarize narrative realities in a way that allows players to act with the confidence that you or I could act with regards to things we do as fully embodied inhabitants of physical reality. I think not everything should have an exposed mechanic, because uncertainty and discover is something that can be part of the fictional reality too, and those things are interesting to explore. But there should be things which you do not want the players to have to ask you as the GM to tell them whether or not those things are reasonable. Mechanics are a way of creating that ability to reason and plan and resolve things independently of the GM. Explicit narrative control powers (dramatic editing points, etc) are another way. 'No god-modding' promises common to freeform online gaming are another way to do it - if someone says 'my character climbs that tree' then its no one's business other than the player of that character.

But one way or another it is a need that must be resolved, otherwise you're limited to stories about people who effectively are young children for whom every single thing is a new and uncertain experience. I like some of that in my gaming, but I wouldn't want that to be the everything of it.

Exposed mechanics are scaffolding. And not everything needs scaffolding. Some capabilities are obvious from the fiction--if you're playing a game about superman, he can fly. He doesn't need explicit statements to that effect. Mechanics are for things that would otherwise be highly unclear. And I'm not against mechanics. But I want them to be as clear and as fictionally-grounded as possible. Not just abstract "push button, get result" things. And, in a class/level game, I want all the important ones to come from your class. Ability checks are a secondary system everyone can engage with, and as such, need to be as generalized as possible. Because if you're going down the route of actually trying to build in heavy levels of detail here (which is what you need to make fixed DCs make any kind of sense in any way)...you might as well just go whole hog and do a skill-based/point-buy system. Trying to hack it in to a class/level game is just reinventing the wheel, but kinda rectanguloid. So for me, ability checks should be entirely open-ended. That's where you put things that don't make sense to be class specific, but also can't be tied down to specific details. Because if they can, they should be class features instead. Everyone should interact with these auxiliary systems on an equal footing, while having a primary system that they have some special connection to.

Do they? No. Casters, in particular, have too many ways of boosting their interactions with other systems while still having an exclusive system of their own. That needs to change. More on the original topic, you can't improve balance via the ability check system without first breaking the idea that everyone gets to use it the same way...except casters, who get the same access everyone else has and more. Because any improvement you give generally gives casters more of an improvement, making the disparity worse. They have better ways of hitting higher numbers more reliably, as well as generally having more ways of just avoiding having to make a check at all. That needs to change before anything else can budge. Or any changes will just make the system less usable for everyone and push more people to ignoring martials anyway.

Morphic tide

2022-08-14, 11:01 PM

NichG

2022-08-14, 11:02 PM

Sure, be intentional about it. But fixing DCs comes with expectations. For one, the horrible (IMO) expectation that tasks have atomic, immutable DCs and that doing task X === rolling check Y against DC Z. Why is that horrible? Because
a) it's false and creates absurdity within the narrative
b) it tends to waste tons of table time and produce unfun events
c) it encourages "accounting-style" character building.

(a) is because part of the difficulty of a task is the consequences. And the consequences are not constant. Opening a lock in the privacy and safety of your safehouse, with all the time in the world is a very different task than opening that exact same lock when failure means that an alarm goes off and all the hordes of hell descend upon you. Same lock, vastly different narrative difficulty. Saying that they're the same reduces the world to a cardboard caricature, a bad video game using stock assets. And wastes the entire potential of TTRPGs--the ability to respond to non-programmed things.

(b) is tied in with (a)--if climbing a rope is always a DC 10 check, then unless you have a +9 bonus, you will fail some times when the fiction says you shouldn't. And unless you have a -11 modifier, you will succeed some times the fiction says you shouldn't. Committing to always rolling (which is the commitment that having fixed, absolute DCs implies), says that the fiction doesn't matter. That only the math does. And that's really not fun. It reduces the game to one of "make sure you've got high enough bonuses that you never have to roll at all or face slapstick that breaks your character's fiction." Setting fixed DCs like that generally makes people engage with the mechanic less, by trying to avoid any case where they'll have to roll at all. It also implies really weird things about the world itself. For example, if climbing a rope is a DC 10 check...then cats can't climb a rope reliably. Because their climb modifier isn't that good. So you end up having to put in all these bodges anyway to reduce the absurdity.

(c) describes how 3e was--take X points in Tumble so you auto pass the Z check, P points in UMD so you can UMD ABC...that's the opposite of organic building. That's building to predetermined targets, whether it makes any sense for the character or not. Or be a caster so you don't have to engage in any of that because your spells do everything for you without any kind of a roll.

Ehh... Again, I think with a shift in how you frame things, these can go from negatives to positives quite easily.

Rather than 'the fiction says' as some absolute, if you see the game more as a negotiation over what the fiction actually is, then a player choosing to achieve a +9 bonus means that they're purchasing the right to say 'the fiction says my character succeeds'. The value of the bid of 'I always fail this' is 11 points negative (meaning that basically that particular system can be read as not encouraging people to bid away any possibility of success at things in that range). Whether those particular ranges and values are desired is another thing entirely, and I would not argue 'yes, this is the best numerical system to do what you want!' at all, but at least once you start to see things this way it helps inform how a mechanical system should be that would actually play well with the kind of fiction negotiation you want to have at a given table. Maybe that means 'everyone can always take 10, but skill modifiers are lower overall' to bring 'always fails' up into range of 'always succeeds'. Maybe that means you want to go with a 4d6 system instead and make use of the narrowed variance relative to a d20. Maybe you like the chaos and want to go with a d100 and make it very expensive to achieve reliability.

I guess my point is, those choices all contribute to mood. You can leave it on the table, but I think you can get better results by embracing it fully and really using how people react to mechanics, how people use mechanics to communicate their wants and needs, etc.

Organic builds to me isn't about just people putting points wherever, its about the places people put points being influenced by what has happened in game so far. So knowing 'I need to invest 10 points to autosucceed on X' isn't specifically organic or non-organic. It's organic if the reason they choose to put 10 points there is because something happened during game and they decided 'actually, I want to autosucceed on this thing more than I want my original plan'.

Exposed mechanics are scaffolding. And not everything needs scaffolding. Some capabilities are obvious from the fiction--if you're playing a game about superman, he can fly. He doesn't need explicit statements to that effect. Mechanics are for things that would otherwise be highly unclear. And I'm not against mechanics. But I want them to be as clear and as fictionally-grounded as possible. Not just abstract "push button, get result" things. And, in a class/level game, I want all the important ones to come from your class. Ability checks are a secondary system everyone can engage with, and as such, need to be as generalized as possible. Because if you're going down the route of actually trying to build in heavy levels of detail here (which is what you need to make fixed DCs make any kind of sense in any way)...you might as well just go whole hog and do a skill-based/point-buy system. Trying to hack it in to a class/level game is just reinventing the wheel, but kinda rectanguloid. So for me, ability checks should be entirely open-ended. That's where you put things that don't make sense to be class specific, but also can't be tied down to specific details. Because if they can, they should be class features instead. Everyone should interact with these auxiliary systems on an equal footing, while having a primary system that they have some special connection to.

Do they? No. Casters, in particular, have too many ways of boosting their interactions with other systems while still having an exclusive system of their own. That needs to change. More on the original topic, you can't improve balance via the ability check system without first breaking the idea that everyone gets to use it the same way...except casters, who get the same access everyone else has and more. Because any improvement you give generally gives casters more of an improvement, making the disparity worse. They have better ways of hitting higher numbers more reliably, as well as generally having more ways of just avoiding having to make a check at all. That needs to change before anything else can budge. Or any changes will just make the system less usable for everyone and push more people to ignoring martials anyway.

I'm not going to leap forward and say 'ability checks for everything' here, because honestly I don't even play or run 5e, so I have no horse in that race... If I'm designing 'stuff you can do' in a void (e.g. not tied to being a patch on a specific D&D edition), I much prefer things like X ranks of investment gives you autosuccess at Y otherwise you can't do it, with the scale of what that 'success' gives you determined by a roll modified by ability score Z, and drop the whole 'roll to see if you succeed' idea entirely. So more like 'skill tricks' than skills or ability checks anyhow. So a player is deciding 'I want to be able to climb sheer walls' rather than 'I want to reduce my failure chance at climbing sheer walls by 20%'.