Unpopular D&D Opinions

[kyoryu]

I think this healing and permanent injury discussion touches on one of my unpopular opinions: Resurrection magic is good for the game and shouldn't be restricted.
This is because permanent injuries and long term conditions are almost non-existent. What this means is the only danger to use to create tension with the characters is damage, and damage has the awkward problem of periodically resulting in death. Resurrection shunts the problem towards resources, allowing for short-term tension and long term consequences without wiping out a fun character.

In short, for 5e, resurrection is good.

I generally agree with this.

I totally agree with the high level idea: Having death as the only consequence has a bad effect on the game, because it makes failure exceptionally rare. While resurrection magic is a solution, shifting the problem to resources/inconvenience, my personal preferred method is plot-level consequences.

[Cluedrew]

And, being me, I'll disagree.

That is, it doesn't matter to me how many people call a sponge or coral a plant, or a spider an insect, they're still wrong. So long as "plant" and "animal" , "insect" and "arachnoid", continue to hold their RAI meaning.

Of course, here we go. Did you watch the tomato video I posted? It actually talks about this a lot.

But more generally I have an important question for you: Why should I care? No really, why should we care what the exact definition of role-playing games is? Because that is the frame that the definition will be created in. I have a definition of role-playing games that is in my pocket. I haven't given it because it isn't supposed to be a general definition and I have no interest in defending it as such. It exists entirely to explain something about role-playing games for a different thread I was going to make. And I'm happy with it because I think it does well enough for that.

For communication, the fuzzy definition works. The only communication issue about role-playing game I have ever had is "there are other role-playing games other than D&D". And that is pretty hard to improve on.

Funny thing, the vast majority of people I've played Chess with recently do attempt role-playing with the pieces.

Well I want to hear this story now, can you tell me it?

[Quertus]

Of course, here we go. Did you watch the tomato video I posted? It actually talks about this a lot.

But more generally I have an important question for you: Why should I care? No really, why should we care what the exact definition of role-playing games is? Because that is the frame that the definition will be created in. I have a definition of role-playing games that is in my pocket. I haven't given it because it isn't supposed to be a general definition and I have no interest in defending it as such. It exists entirely to explain something about role-playing games for a different thread I was going to make. And I'm happy with it because I think it does well enough for that.

For communication, the fuzzy definition works. The only communication issue about role-playing game I have ever had is "there are other role-playing games other than D&D". And that is pretty hard to improve on.

Well I want to hear this story now, can you tell me it?

I don't watch videos on my phone - finite data plan and all that. Is it a "tomato is a fruit" (or "ketchup is a vegetable") thing?

Why should you care how I define RPGs, or how RPGs "should" be defined? Well, we've come full circle, I guess: because you care that I claim that certain things aren't RPGs.

There are those who treat Chess figures not unlike GI Joe or Barbies. And there are those who want to know the full story, about why the Bishop is closer to the royalty than the Knight, or who, exactly, the "Rook" is. Much more than some war gamers cared about the character of their playing pieces in RPGs. (You love stories as much as I do, but, sadly, I seem to be an Earthdawn Demon; such skills of storytelling remain forever beyond my reach. However, speaking of stories, is there a story behind "are there RPGs other than D&D"?)

[Saint-Just]

I don't watch videos on my phone - finite data plan and all that. Is it a "tomato is a fruit" (or "ketchup is a vegetable") thing?

Technically yes, but it talks reasonably precisely about a) things having multiple definitions and b) some definitions being more objective than others and c) just because definition is more precise doesn't mean it's a better definition in all situations and d) that doesn't mean all definitions are equal, or a matter of taste or something.

I mean it is a well-made video, it would take me at least as long to recapture its' main points as for another person to simply watch it. The only way to sped up process would be to find some service which rips out subtitles from the Youtube videos, because that video is at least 99% reducible to its' audio track.

[KorvinStarmast]

Another open table technique from my “golden age” of gaming was the use of multiple DMs all supporting the same stable of characters. In those elementary school games I used to be able to play the same cleric in Matt’s campaign, then take it over to Nick’s campaign, run it through Steve’s campaign, and then bring it back to Matt’s campaign without any problem. Haven’t really tried that lately, but I can’t see any reason why it can’t work now.

We did that in high school and college quite a bit. DM's would occasionally "deactivate" an overly powerful magic item a lenient DM might have awarded to a low level character, but giving the DM a break while progress mostly moved forward was a part of the fun. Kept DM burnout low.

[Easy e]

Here is an unpopular opinion.

Travel time, night watch rotations, and random encounters are burdensome and take up too much time leading to campaign fatigue as they do not move you closer to the campaign's objective*. They are doing things for doing things sake and/or artificial attritional elements of the game to grind down your PCs.







* Unless the objective IS travelling and random encounters, but that seems like a campaign that would burn me out pretty fast.

[Xervous]

Here is an unpopular opinion.

Travel time, night watch rotations, and random encounters are burdensome and take up too much time leading to campaign fatigue as they do not move you closer to the campaign's objective*. They are doing things for doing things sake and/or artificial attritional elements of the game to grind down your PCs.







* Unless the objective IS travelling and random encounters, but that seems like a campaign that would burn me out pretty fast.

What exactly is encompassed in travel time here?

[Easy e]

Moving between destinations on an outside map is what I was thinking about at first.

I suppose you could also call it moving between relevant plot points too. That could be in all sorts of settings/locations.

[kyoryu]

Here is an unpopular opinion.

Travel time, night watch rotations, and random encounters are burdensome and take up too much time leading to campaign fatigue as they do not move you closer to the campaign's objective*. They are doing things for doing things sake and/or artificial attritional elements of the game to grind down your PCs.

It totally depends on the game.

If the game is really pretty much scripted and that's the point? Definitely.

If the game has more freedom, but there's still story in a form but not in the pre-scripted variety? Maybe, maybe not. If the risk of travel and staying overnight is supposed to be one of the things the PCs have to deal with in their decision-making, then it can add to the game. If not, maybe delete it.

If it's an exploration game? Then it probably needs to stay.

[MoiMagnus]

It totally depends on the game.

If the game is really pretty much scripted and that's the point? Definitely.

If the game has more freedom, but there's still story in a form but not in the pre-scripted variety? Maybe, maybe not. If the risk of travel and staying overnight is supposed to be one of the things the PCs have to deal with in their decision-making, then it can add to the game. If not, maybe delete it.

If it's an exploration game? Then it probably needs to stay.

It also depends on how "smooth" are those parts of the game at your table.

I don't think there is a lot of situations in which I would consider "worth it" to take the hex map out, determining the exact position of everyone in the encampment, randomly generating some obstacles/trees around the encampment, randomly generating some anonymous bandits or wild animals, and running a slow combat as everyone peoples are taking their time to place their fireball at exactly the right place to target a additional foes.
=> If your tables have already ages to resolve combats, it's better to make those combat count and get rid of every combat that doesn't feature an important named NPC.

On the other hand, if the combat is TotM, with the battle being finished in a few rolls as the losing side retreat/surrender early rather than doubling down on a suicidal encounter, I can totally see a lot of situations in which it would be a nice addition to a session.

[HumanFighter]

Wow, I did not expect this thread to take off the way it did. This has been truly eye-opening for me. Thank you all

[Tanarii]

Here is an unpopular opinion.

Travel time, night watch rotations, and random encounters are burdensome and take up too much time leading to campaign fatigue as they do not move you closer to the campaign's objective*. They are doing things for doing things sake and/or artificial attritional elements of the game to grind down your PCs.

* Unless the objective IS travelling and random encounters, but that seems like a campaign that would burn me out pretty fast.

Or unless you want time to be a meaningful resource and/or decision making to be meaningful.

If time as a resource is considered an artificial attritional element and discarded, depending on the edition that can easily cause additional issues you'll need to address. Probably also ones that will be considered artificial attritional elements if that's the lens the game is being viewed through, but it's helpful to be aware of that because it'll require breaking out the house rule toolkit.

If there are no meaningful decisions to be made before or during travel, then that's also not a factor. Things like no difference between traveling routes in terms of safety or method of locomotion / speed of travel.

[Cluedrew]

Is it a "tomato is a fruit" (or "ketchup is a vegetable") thing?

Building off what Saint-Just said, I would say yes, but it is the most in-depth and complete examination of that "thing" I have ever seen or heard.

Why should you care how I define RPGs, or how RPGs "should" be defined? Well, we've come full circle, I guess: because you care that I claim that certain things aren't RPGs.

Maybe I should of lead with the "we" part. I'm more trying to get at the idea of what is the purpose of precisely defining what is a role-playing game. Because there really isn't a true "essence of role-playing games" we can define because we made it up. All role-playing games are things that people have invented, the term of role-playing game was something people made up and every thing that has been declared a role-playing game was done by people. So the idea is to help frame the question with why we are asking it. Does that make sense?

And there are those who want to know the full story, [...] ([...], is there a story behind "are there RPGs other than D&D"?)

The first part is the part that gets me, is there a partial story here to fill in? There is no back story or flavour text in the game.

Heard of the Playgrounder's Fallacy? Might not actually be a logical fallacy, more people assuming we are talking about D&D 3.5e. It is the type of thing that created that, where people would wonder why we are asking a system agnostic question, the answer is in the player's handbook. Or like the fantasy heartbreakers which are really just remixes of D&D and didn't take ideas from other systems. I have forgotten the exact stories but those are the types of things that make me want to point out there are other role-playing games.

[Tanarii]

Building off what Saint-Just said, I would say yes, but it is the most in-depth and complete examination of that "thing" I have ever seen or heard.

I watched it, and the argument being made in regards to tomatoes (and even Planets) is bunk.

OTOH the argument being made about Art might be appropriate to the ongoing conversation.

[Pex]

Here is an unpopular opinion.

Travel time, night watch rotations, and random encounters are burdensome and take up too much time leading to campaign fatigue as they do not move you closer to the campaign's objective*. They are doing things for doing things sake and/or artificial attritional elements of the game to grind down your PCs.

Preach it!

I'm in a campaign where we have to do it every single in game night of traveling. Most of the time nothing happens after the Perception check. The DM will provide a meaningless flavor text. There are random encounters during the day, not all combats and a few have been fun, but it's mostly a waste of time. The bright spot is the DM does give a decent amount of XP for these encounters, so even though I want to get on with the main adventure already "mostly a waste of time" is probably not an accurate description to a neutral observer. However, I maintain it's very annoying for me that when it takes a week to reach a destination we have to play out every single day of travel, more so that we play only every other week and we're lucky if a game session will cover two days of traveling.

I joined a new campaign that just started that's also following this same pattern of keeping watch. We're rolling Perception checks just for the sake of rolling, and we don't even get flavor text when nothing happens. This campaign uses milestone leveling so it feels more of a waste of time. Last game session we were supposed to enter a dungeon for a predetermined adventure set up from the previous game session, and we didn't get to enter it until 3 hours after the game session started.

Are we there yet?!

[Telok]

The glorious thing about the winderness random encounters is you can expect not to have to hoard resources. Noise in the bushes? Fireball. Random animal in the road? Flamestrike. Smoke in the distance? Meteor storm!

The other thing is you can use the excuse that because everything is trying to kill and eat you* you're justified in massively overkilling everything and trying to eat it.

Oh, you're a martial without any fancy useful abilities? Sucks to be you, play a real class next time.

*yeah, not perfectly true. But you should overlook that as hard as you can.

[HidesHisEyes]

It'll get pretty gritty pretty fast if the adventuring day goes as a normal encounter pace and the players don't do everything they can to avoid combat. Or at least face significantly easier challenges than their capabilities under normal resting.

As long as there’s some kind of organised time pressure to prevent them from just resting for a full week whenever they feel like it. That or dungeons that you can’t easily back out of once you’re in.

[Willie the Duck]

I'm in a campaign where we have to do it every single in game night of traveling. Most of the time nothing happens after the Perception check. The DM will provide a meaningless flavor text. There are random encounters during the day, not all combats and a few have been fun, but it's mostly a waste of time. The bright spot is the DM does give a decent amount of XP for these encounters, so even though I want to get on with the main adventure already "mostly a waste of time" is probably not an accurate description to a neutral observer. However, I maintain it's very annoying for me that when it takes a week to reach a destination we have to play out every single day of travel, more so that we play only every other week and we're lucky if a game session will cover two days of traveling.

I joined a new campaign that just started that's also following this same pattern of keeping watch. We're rolling Perception checks just for the sake of rolling, and we don't even get flavor text when nothing happens. This campaign uses milestone leveling so it feels more of a waste of time. Last game session we were supposed to enter a dungeon for a predetermined adventure set up from the previous game session, and we didn't get to enter it until 3 hours after the game session started.

Fundamentally, I think if you are having a game where there is a 'main adventure,' then the entire purpose of the wilderness encounters has been obviated. When the wilderness random encounter tables and such were invented, those encounters (plus the dungeon encounters, of course) provided the advancement and hooks* that were the game. Since the game never has done a great job of explaining its fundamental gameplay loops, no one made clear when and why those encounters would be useful to the actual game (so many people continue to do them even when it doesn't serve their game).
*and potential of arriving at a destination at less than full capacity

[Tanarii]

As long as there’s some kind of organised time pressure to prevent them from just resting for a full week whenever they feel like it. That or dungeons that you can’t easily back out of once you’re in.

I mean, that's no different from Long Rests being 8 hours. If time isn't a meaningful resource in your campaign, you're going to have to deal with a 5MWD no matter what.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean, that's no different from Long Rests being 8 hours. If time isn't a meaningful resource in your campaign, you're going to have to deal with a 5MWD no matter what.

Eh, decoupling resource recovery from rest helps with that.

[Tanarii]

Eh, decoupling resource recovery from rest helps with that.

In which case you aren't talking about 5e's gritty realism rules any more.

[Easy e]

Or unless you want time to be a meaningful resource and/or decision making to be meaningful.

Sadly, my time as a player is the meaningful resource being depleted with this stuff, and that is more important to me than PC time and resource management in an RPG. (Serious question, is this the kind of stuff you put in blue text?)

Regarding meaningful decisions, I disagree. Is it a meaningful decision whether to take the road or to trek through the forest? Not really. Is it a meaningful decision on who takes watch when? No. Is it a meaningful decision to set-up camp and rest at night? No, it is a non-decisions.

Now, I have played many games where these elements of travel are taken as a given. I personally do not like them, and my opinion is that they add nothing to the game that could not be narrated away. However, others feel differently and that these types of situations ARE the game. That is fine too.

[kyoryu]

Sadly, my time as a player is the meaningful resource being depleted with this stuff, and that is more important to me than PC time and resource management in an RPG. (Serious question, is this the kind of stuff you put in blue text?)

Regarding meaningful decisions, I disagree. Is it a meaningful decision whether to take the road or to trek through the forest? Not really. Is it a meaningful decision on who takes watch when? No. Is it a meaningful decision to set-up camp and rest at night? No, it is a non-decisions.

Now, I have played many games where these elements of travel are taken as a given. I personally do not like them, and my opinion is that they add nothing to the game that could not be narrated away. However, others feel differently and that these types of situations ARE the game. That is fine too.

In some games it's important. In others it's not.

Clearly it's not in the games you play. That's cool.

[Anonymouswizard]

In which case you aren't talking about 5e's gritty realism rules any more.

5e has rules for gritty realism?

But that's kind of my point. You want any kind of actual impact without relying on adventure design, you decoupled resource recovery from testing. It's just another reason why 5e's variant rest rules are pretty terrible.

If you wanted to do gritty realism in 5e you'd peg resource recovery to specific times, Spell Slots recharge at midnight or that sorry of thing (Warlocks would tension a spell slot something like every 8/maximum slots hours). But 5e isn't designed for anything except letting the players destroy everything.

[LibraryOgre]

Eh, decoupling resource recovery from rest helps with that.

Though, of course, when talking about travel time, random encounters, etc., you're not just talking about spells. You're talking HP, you're talking food supplies, you're talking time... you might even be talking about torches, especially before 3rd level.

Later D&D seems to have stripped a lot of the resource management out of the game, especially at low levels when resources would be more likely to be scarce.

[Anonymouswizard]

Though, of course, when talking about travel time, random encounters, etc., you're not just talking about spells. You're talking HP, you're talking food supplies, you're talking time... you might even be talking about torches, especially before 3rd level.

Later D&D seems to have stripped a lot of the resource management out of the game, especially at low levels when resources would be more likely to be scarce.

I wasn't just referring to spend either, I just used them as an example.

And yes, modern D&D is missing almost all the resource management of the early editions. I kind of winner why they even bother with limited spells (okay, not really).

Casters might be more interesting moved towards the Warlock paradigm of fewer spells but at a higher level of base power, and just embracing the idea that characters are essentially at full power of they can get a short break. It's a very different game to early D&D, but it's better then trying to cater to two crowds with one game.

[Chauncymancer]

Sadly, my time as a player is the meaningful resource being depleted with this stuff, and that is more important to me than PC time and resource management in an RPG. (Serious question, is this the kind of stuff you put in blue text?)

In my experience this kind of thing has value specifically in a kind of open table game, where each game session is only allowed to occupy a certain segment of time (say one week) so that people do not skip two game sessions and come back to discover that their character has died of old age. In a situation like that, the passage of time can't really be narrated away at the table, so putting some game there is useful .

[kyoryu]

[QUOTE=Chauncymancer;25258037]

Sadly, my time as a player is the meaningful resource being depleted with this stuff, and that is more important to me than PC time and resource management in an RPG. (Serious question, is this the kind of stuff you put in blue text?)
/QUOTE]
In my experience this kind of thing has value specifically in a kind of open table game, where each game session is only allowed to occupy a certain segment of time (say one week) so that people do not skip two game sessions and come back to discover that their character has died of old age. In a situation like that, the passage of time can't really be narrated away at the table, so putting some game there is useful .

As pointed out, the amount of time required to do these things impacts it as well. If rolling and resolving an encounter takes fifteen minutes, that's one thing. If it takes two hours, that's a different thing entirely.

System design impacts what works and what doesn't in a given game.

[LibraryOgre]

Casters might be more interesting moved towards the Warlock paradigm of fewer spells but at a higher level of base power, and just embracing the idea that characters are essentially at full power of they can get a short break. It's a very different game to early D&D, but it's better then trying to cater to two crowds with one game.

Or, maybe, a mixture of powers that can be used all the time, ones that can be used once a fight, and ones that can only be used every day or so?

[Anonymouswizard]

Or, maybe, a mixture of powers that can be used all the time, ones that can be used once a fight, and ones that can only be used every day or so?

I'm up for it. Maybe we could let chargers take steps on an Exalted Road at level 11.

Nah, it'll never catch on.

To be more serious though, I don't think the way D&D limits magic actually matters beyond 'does it work for the intended playstyle', and I'm not sure Vancian as implemented does. 5e to me feels like it's supposed to be run more like 4e than 2e.

As a side note D&D could, if it reaches to, move entirely to at-will magic and be balanced. But it would have to give up some of the reliability, power, or safety people have come to expect. But that's a moot point, nobody playing D&D as their first choice realty wants to make that trade.