D&D-isms

[Tanarii]

That's a bit different from "the world is the GM's plaything". I've had a doozy of a time with some people who keep trying to defer to me and treat me as an absolute rather than a chair among equals.

D&D-ism:
Being a dungeon master is hard work that requires extensive knowledge of the rules and lots of prep time.

[Bohandas]

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I don't play D&D actively enough (or at high level) recently to know if that's the case though. My suscpicion is that a lot of folks playing a pure caster in D&D will either sit around doing nothing and let the fighters take out the mooks, or will, in fact, gleefully blast them to bits with spells. Very few will actually do the math, realize that their relatively poor AC is still well past good enough to avoid taking any more damage than the fighters (AC past "nat 20 required to hit me" just don't matter, right?), and their wimpy damage with a melee weapon is still plenty to take out those low hp opponents quickly. So yeah. They *should*. I'm curious how many actually do though. Like, if the wizard has a full set of spells and the first encounter of the day is said mooks, what would they do?

My money is on "blast them", but I could be wrong.

In any case, that's generally how I end up playing turn-based d20 CRPGs like Temple of Elemental Evil and (to a lesser extent) Kingmaker

[Alcore]

Giant in the Playground

I don't play D&D actively enough (or at high level) recently to know if that's the case though. My suscpicion is that a lot of folks playing a pure caster in D&D will either sit around doing nothing and let the fighters take out the mooks, or will, in fact, gleefully blast them to bits with spells. Very few will actually do the math, realize that their relatively poor AC is still well past good enough to avoid taking any more damage than the fighters (AC past "nat 20 required to hit me" just don't matter, right?), and their wimpy damage with a melee weapon is still plenty to take out those low hp opponents quickly.

if it is that unbalanced then...

As a player: *turns to the GM* "why are we even rolling?"

As a GM: *why the **** am I making them roll? Leans over the table. "You come across seven goblins and two are shamans. They are much weaker than you. [I]Who wants to describe their demise from the party?"

So yeah. They *should*. I'm curious how many actually do though. Like, if the wizard has a full set of spells and the first encounter of the day is said mooks, what would they do?

My money is on "blast them", but I could be wrong.

if stressed for time (due to plot) it is blast them. Usually with sleep.

I tend to favor Occultists who have medium armor and martial weapons. Witches for a full caster option (the race usually provides defensive or offensive melee options) where, yes; charge right on in with quarter staff and mage armor might be on. At low levels a board and stick is the go-to trying to be the rogues best friend. With a penalty for the shield I might never hit a mook but all my job is is to threaten.

Pathfinder even has a rule for aid another adding +1ac to someone else. More than one tunnel was done with my squishy in the second row with a longspear. You help the party. If you are not doing anything you're failing. Some use Daze to cost one enemy a round. They use that every round.


I don't like playing rocket tag so most spells don't ever tough the enemy directly and my feats are combat focused.

[Quertus]

if it is that unbalanced then...

As a player: *turns to the GM* "why are we even rolling?"

As a GM: *why the **** am I making them roll? Leans over the table. "You come across seven goblins and two are shamans. They are much weaker than you. [I]Who wants to describe their demise from the party?"

There’s actually a rather hefty list of reasons why players and especially GMs might want to actually roll things out. Including attrition (it matters (or can matter) what you lose in this fight), meaningful decisions (did you kill the bandits, or capture them alive?), roleplaying (Katniss Everdeen seems to just be begging to become the poster child for the difference/importance of combat roleplaying), external factors (being watched, time crunch, reinforcements, noise, etc), incomplete information (you don’t know what level these goblins are, or whether they’ve poisoned their blades - do you dare attack with only 10% of your power?), theme/feel, setup (now that you’re used to fighting goblins…), and flukes (we all missed that one particular kobald?!).

You help the party. If you are not doing anything you're failing.

Eh, that’s complicated. When the Rogue is finding and disarming traps, the best help the BDF, Wizard, etc are likely to provide is to stay out of the way. Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, believes that it’s best for an academia mage not to interfere in battle so long as a) there are trained combatants dealing with things, and b) “they’ve got this”.

“Not helping” is a valuable tool in the “spotlight sharing” toolkit.

Stranger, there’s groups where PCs being an active hindrance to the party is not just accepted, but encouraged. Not my cup of tea, but point is, while I prefer cooperative play, it is sadly not fair to assume it as a universal truth.

if stressed for time (due to plot) it is blast them. Usually with sleep.

I don't like playing rocket tag so most spells don't ever tough the enemy directly and my feats are combat focused.

I could be mistaken, but I suspect most people wouldn’t consider “sleep” and “rocket tag” to be mutually exclusive sets. In fact, I think SoD/SoL effects usually evoke thoughts of rocket tag.

[Alcore]

There’s actually a rather hefty list of reasons why players and especially GMs might want to actually roll things out.

This was the best part of the post. A shame most your arguments break down afterwards...

Including attrition (it matters (or can matter) what you lose in this fight), meaningful decisions (did you kill the bandits, or capture them alive?), roleplaying (Katniss Everdeen seems to just be begging to become the poster child for the difference/importance of combat roleplaying), external factors (being watched, time crunch, reinforcements, noise, etc), incomplete information (you don’t know what level these goblins are, or whether they’ve poisoned their blades - do you dare attack with only 10% of your power?), theme/feel, setup (now that you’re used to fighting goblins…), and flukes (we all missed that one particular kobald?!).

My post was quoting a paragraph where the party wizard can wade into melee and will only suffer damage 5% of the time (nat 20).

Attrition: 5$ chance of it happening at all.

Meaningful decisions: if the party expresses the desire for captives. Sure.

Roleplaying: covered that in the post you quoted. Well... more implied.

(frankly all of this would of been taken into account when making the encounter in the first place but whatever...)

Setup: ... you add hobgoblins? Put them on worgs? Have them in a defensive position so the combat can last another ten minutes to possibly inflict such attrition? The thought you had just ends. Which is a shame cuz you were really building up for a moment before dropping momentum. 'Setup' is too generic a word to bring too much to mind.

Fluke: Ok, sure! Now I get a 5% chance to inflict attrition.

All of this time on a combat that could be better spent.

Eh, that’s complicated.

So was my post before you cherrypicked one statement and divorced it from it's context which leads too...

When the Rogue is finding and disarming traps, the best help the BDF, Wizard, etc are likely to provide is to stay out of the way.

Funny thing...

How one can take a statement about combat (wizards in melee to be specific) and taking it out of context the statement might not hold up. Language is funny like that sometimes... anyways;

I think there are a few spells to help the rogue get better. A fighter (or anyone) using aid other with perception can help if there is room.

“Not helping” is a valuable tool in the “spotlight sharing” toolkit.

Indeed. It is kinda hard to get the whole party to help each other. Sometimes some need to excluded so others can can be included but some don't want the spotlight. It's complicated.

I could be mistaken, but I suspect most people wouldn’t consider “sleep” and “rocket tag” to be mutually exclusive sets. In fact, I think SoD/SoL effects usually evoke thoughts of rocket tag.

Ok.

...are you responding to a statement I made? I am not reading where I said they were exclusive. The first quote is one example of one; "a rather hefty list of reasons why players and especially GMs might want to actually roll things out." While the other is unrelated to save or die. Crowd control is a real thing that tips battles one way that rarely outright win them.

[Telok]

Don't recall if this has bern mentioned but one D&D-ism that I tend to see coming from "long time" and/or "only plays" D&Ders is dogpiling or retrying rolls.

Typically in rl & dice pool systems if the strongest person in the group can't force a door, the Olympic swimmer can't swim a river, or the person with the most skill at say... writing poetry can't make something sound good, then untrained no-skill people aren't doing it either. But several D&D versions emphasize rolling high as more important than character stats & skill, at least at the levels most commonly played, the 1-12 range. This has trained people to throw more rolls at stuff without regard to if it's appropriate that the character should actually be able to accomplish it.

There's solutions of course, mostly aligned around [ya know, this isn't the place for that miff]. Because it works as a reward system for the activity in D&D, the players tend to carry the habit over to other games where the character being competent or incompetent at something translates into success & failure more than just rolling higher on a d20.

[Witty Username]

I think retry/all units move in is less a D&D ism more that other popular systems have rules for group actions.

In d&d, if the Olympic swimmer and the amatuer bodybuilder can't force the door individually, they can't force it together, where Call of Chultuhu has its rules for joining forces to have a higher functioning characteristic, and dice pool systems tend to have group rolls.

And retry always depended on context, I think the 3.5 stuctures of taking 10 and taking 20 are missed in 5e, as it gave a framework of high/low stress situations. Since checks tend to have no consequences or framework when they aren't needed it leads to a bunch of unnecessary rolling.

[KorvinStarmast]

D&D-ism:
Being a dungeon master is hard work that requires extensive knowledge of the rules and lots of prep time.

That was never made a secret of. Laid out in plain English in the three little books, and the ones published thereafter.

[Tanarii]

That was never made a secret of. Laid out in plain English in the three little books, and the ones published thereafter.

But it's not something that necessarily carries over into running other games. Lots of them are intentionally designed so they require minimal prep, although that usually comes with a side-order of excellent improvisation skills. But sometimes it's highly procedural instead.

Of course, you can run a game of D&D with minimal prep. I've done it many times, both via improvisation and procedurally, as well as the old standby of "quickly scan the module before easy session". But that doesn't mean it's not an assumption of many D&D-ers, DMs and Players alike.

[KorvinStarmast]

But it's not something that necessarily carries over into running other games.

We appear to be in violent agreement.

[Quertus]

This was the best part of the post. A shame most your arguments break down afterwards...

Well, they’re not arguments. They’re not intended as “teach a man to fish”, or even “give a man a fish”, so much as “you know, there’s such a thing as fish…”.

But, since that gentle nudge wasn’t useful, perhaps a more practical example is in order?

Hmmm… let’s say the party can, on average, kill 5 goblins per round. So, fighting 20 goblins, they’ll last 4 rounds, averaging 10 goblin attacks per round, or an estimated attrition of 2 hits.

Now that you’ve fought 20 goblins, and gotten a feel for their threat, here’s 100 goblins. If your intuition is bad, or you’re bad at math, you might expect that to “cost” 10 hits to clear (or 5 hits if this misfortune is compounded by having good luck, and only being hit once in the “practice round”); however, if you are overconfident from your last engagement, and fight them in such a way that they can all attack every round, that’s 5x as many attacks per round for 5x as many rounds, for 25x the cost, a whopping 50 hits on average. That dawning horror of “this wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be” is priceless, and an important lesson to would-be adventures who look down their noses at pest monsters like goblins.

Or, if you’re better at math, or have a better intuition, you may realize that this isn’t as easy as it looks to some, and evaluate the costs of dropping limited resources (a Fireball or 3, grenades, summoning Space Vikings, whatever), attempt stealth or Diplomacy, look for advantageous terrain, or straight up turn tail and run away. Some of which may still happen in the first scenario, just perhaps only after the goblin-wielded clue-by-four lodges itself in your spine.

There’s also the cost/benefit analysis of “how much will it cost us to not have the ability to blow the Horn of Valhalla / drop this many Fireballs / have this healing magic later?”. It’s possible that, in the final analysis, “50 hits” is deemed the most affordable cost.

Of course, there may be other considerations. If you’re trying to bring the escaped princess home, while fighting 100 goblins, you’ve given your captive 20 rounds of lack of attention - time enough for them to “take 20” untying their bonds, or to leave a secret message for their coconspirators (via leaves of lorien or whatever).

There’s a very different feel and flow to actually running through that engagement, than what you get from “it’s 20 goblins - tell me how you win” “we beat them up and take their lunch money?” “that costs 2 blows” … “it’s 100 goblins, what do you do?” “We beat them up and take their lunch money?” “That costs 50 blows (and the Princess is untied, but you don’t know that yet)” “…what?”

And, again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of reasons why someone might choose to run through such an engagement, rather than simply narrate past it.

[gbaji]

My post was quoting a paragraph where the party wizard can wade into melee and will only suffer damage 5% of the time (nat 20).

[Indent]Attrition: 5$ chance of it happening at all.

Meaningful decisions: if the party expresses the desire for captives. Sure.

Roleplaying: covered that in the post you quoted. Well... more implied.

Yeah. I presented an extreme example, just as a baseline. But we can (should really) assume a range of difficulty from that point and maybe ask "Ok. At what point will the wizard just walk up and wack something instead of just standing back and either doing nothing, or cast spells?".

And yes, your counter point is well taken. We can ask "why are we doing this in the first place?. But I can also think of a few situations, maybe not as formulaic as Quertus', but there are some. And it does somewhat highlight the differences between D&D and some other less rigid class/level based games. In D&D? Yeah, once an encounter slides that far down the relative CR level, there is a tendency towards handwaving it away to save time, but that's part of the point here. The situation itself is less likely to be played out, so a "pure spellcaster" is less likely to ever even make such a decision in the first place.

That's not so common in other games (not even at all really). Every encounter is significant (and yeah, I'm limiting this to combat stuff for simplicity). I commonly toss "speed bump" encounters at my players. Part of it is for me as the GM to see how they respond and get a sense of their capabilities (especially early in an adventure), but it can also happen just because that's what would reasonably be there. The game isn't about tossing a mathmatically determined number of calculated difficulty encounters at the party each day. Sometimes, the opponents blocking the party's path are going to be relatively wimpy (relative to the party of course, but not to regular folks they're maybe expected to deal with). The minions of the evil bad guy they're fighting probably aren't that tough either. And heck. Maybe the main bad guy isn't actually that tough either (there are many ways to be "evil bad guy" that don't require "super powerful in combat").

I've always found the idea that the world somehow magically adjusts the powerlevel of random opponents and problems to the power level of the party to be ridiculous. I avoid it as much as possible (within the contraints of trying to avoid being a "killer GM" or just boring my players, of course). So the main thing they're doing is almost certainly scaled to their level, but random stuff along the way? It's scaled to the world around them. And as PCs become more powerful, those things are increasingly going to be somwhat "easy" for them.

Lots of time, it's not about difficulty, but time. Wimpy minions may be thrown in front of the party by some bad guy just to delay them while <some evil thing> is going on elsewhere. And yeah, it can also be about how they handle things. What level of force do they use? Is it "reasonable", based on the situation at hand? Or do they go full muderhobo? This becomes relevant to the whole "We just randomly ran into a group of local bandits and are steamrolling them" sort of scenario.


Ok. So that's a bit off the original scenario we were exploring, but this is about an examination of the thinking and playing process of players based on the system they learned on (or play primarily). I'm not sure where exactly we can nail down that hesitancy to wade into battle by a D&D wizard vs spell casting though, but I do tend to think that it's going to be a higher threshold than in other game systems. There's lots of cases in the games I play where even though a character absolutely has the ability to use magic to attack, they'll tend to use melee instead, and it's usually about resources, or even sometimes a RP thing "I haven't used my weapon in a while, these guys don't look too tough, so why not?".

[Witty Username]

Hm, here is weird call, player character death being a bad thing.
Most games other than D&D are fairly accepting of death as a consequence, and weak emphasis on encounter difficulty.

D&D has alot of mechanics to keep characters from dying or staying dead, and encounters don’t have alot of teeth to threaten characters in the first place.

[KorvinStarmast]

Hm, here is weird call, player character death being a bad thing.
Most games other than D&D are fairly accepting of death as a consequence, and weak emphasis on encounter difficulty.

D&D has alot of mechanics to keep characters from dying or staying dead, and encounters don’t have alot of teeth to threaten characters in the first place.

Correction: WotC era D&D has alot of mechanics to keep characters from dying or staying dead, and encounters don’t have alot of teeth to threaten characters in the first place. The TSR era D&D accepted PC death as a thing, though one was incentivized to try and avoid it.

[ToranIronfinder]

Correction: WotC era D&D has alot of mechanics to keep characters from dying or staying dead, and encounters don’t have alot of teeth to threaten characters in the first place. The TSR era D&D accepted PC death as a thing, though one was incentivized to try and avoid it.

Also hit point inflation isn't mirrored in many systems.

[gbaji]

Also hit point inflation isn't mirrored in many systems.

Level effects in general, I would say. Whether (and/or how much) you are affected by various spells in D&D often resolves to some function of relative level as well. Same thing with saving throws. So "trivial" has a different meaning in D&D than in other game systems.

Most other systems, those effects are no less likely to affect you based on how relatively powerful you are. You just gain more abilities, skill, items, spells, whatever to block, prevent, and reduce those things as you get more powerful. But you absolutely can't just stride around, convident that anything that's below "level appropriate encounter" can't really hurt you. Nope. Some wimpy bad guys who get the drop on you can still absolutely hurt you badly in those other systems.

So yeah, I think that does skew things to some degree. And yeah, I think that ties into the whole "just handwave trivial encounters away" bit in D&D, where in other game systems, there is no such thing as an entirely "trivial" encounter. Any bad guy could affect you in a negative way. Doesn't mean that as a group you wont still prevail, but can still make for interesting play, while in D&D it may just mean a bunch of meaningless die rolling.

[ToranIronfinder]

Level effects in general, I would say. Whether (and/or how much) you are affected by various spells in D&D often resolves to some function of relative level as well. Same thing with saving throws. So "trivial" has a different meaning in D&D than in other game systems.

Most other systems, those effects are no less likely to affect you based on how relatively powerful you are. You just gain more abilities, skill, items, spells, whatever to block, prevent, and reduce those things as you get more powerful. But you absolutely can't just stride around, convident that anything that's below "level appropriate encounter" can't really hurt you. Nope. Some wimpy bad guys who get the drop on you can still absolutely hurt you badly in those other systems.

So yeah, I think that does skew things to some degree. And yeah, I think that ties into the whole "just handwave trivial encounters away" bit in D&D, where in other game systems, there is no such thing as an entirely "trivial" encounter. Any bad guy could affect you in a negative way. Doesn't mean that as a group you wont still prevail, but can still make for interesting play, while in D&D it may just mean a bunch of meaningless die rolling.

In WEG's Star Wars game, because of the way combined fire, a group of stormtroopers could be broken down into a single attack volley that could hit even a seasoned hero, so they stayed, in sufficient numbers, a real threat.

[Cluedrew]

Spoiler: Answer

Show

Well, the biggest one probably is "Combat is for combat characters". People coming from other games usually assume that you can build noncombatants as viable characters and that Fighters and similar classes are supposed to be far better at combat than anyone else.

The second thing that occasionally pops up is that the common faux medieval flavor of most D&D worlds is assumed to imply a real medieval feudal society with all its social classes, guilds, right, privileges and obligation etc. Now the thing is that i live in Europe and most players know quite a bit about medieval society. And when put into practice that really clashes a lot with D&D' Wild-West-with-medieval-aesthetics assumptions.

The third thing is that many players assume the default worldbuilding to be more robust. That is mostly about economy but also ecology (that includes all the monsters) and sociology. D&D players don't expect any of this to work when looking closely and outside of the dungeon-delving context, so they tread carefully. Non D&D players often do look carefully because they don't know better and then are utterly confused and waste way to much time trying to make sense of it.

Another thing might be how PCs are above regular NPCs. Or, most prominently, how in many 3E settings nearly everyone else is a first level commoner and PCs are special. that is not what people expect when they create a lv1 fighter or bard. They expect to have a young, inexperienced normal guy who might once grow into a famous heroes but is probably inferior in skill to most of the older people around.

I know I got a little distracted from the thread for a bit, but thank-you.

Being a dungeon master is hard work that requires extensive knowledge of the rules and lots of prep time.

Although this is (also?) a different sort of D&D-ism, when I saw this thread I wanted to shout "role-playing games take a long time to learn" which is one of the main excuses for not trying other systems. It may not be zero, but I've seen systems that you can learn and make your first character in less time than it takes to make a D&D character.

Correction: WotC era D&D has alot of mechanics to keep characters from dying or staying dead, and encounters don't have alot of teeth to threaten characters in the first place. The TSR era D&D accepted PC death as a thing, though one was incentivized to try and avoid it.

That may be true but... it has been (just) over 25 years, I don't think TSR D&D is really part of the cultural zeitgeist anymore.

[ToranIronfinder]

That may be true but... it has been (just) over 25 years, I don't think TSR D&D is really part of the cultural zeitgeist anymore.

Stranger things is part of the current gaming fad, and it explicitly references older D&D including character death. The TSR days could come back.

[Vahnavoi]

Old editions of D&D stop being relevant once pop culture stops recycling their trash.

This has yet to happen. The influence lives strong and well beyond confines of tabletop gaming. Have you played Dark Souls, for example? From the stupid-expansive list of various armors and polearms, to death lurking behind every corner, to god-damned chest mimics and rats in the sewers, it's full of old D&D spirit.

Now, you could point out, when Dark Souls did come out, it was deliberately going against the grain of then-current mainstream game design trends. To which I'd say, true, but that was over a decade ago, and it launched not only a franchise that had releases and remasters to this day, but also a ton of copiers.

A similar thing happened with roguelikes, such as ADoM, and the wave of renewed interest carried far enough that roguelikes and roguelites are reasonably popular genres on all big game consoles and gaming services now.

Now think of the undercurrents of the tabletop hobby, such as the OSR, and other retrogaming cliques that still play under rules similar to and inspired by old D&D. It shouldn't be particularly hard to imagine some such effort keeping the torch lit for old ideas and mechanics, considering it has happened and is happening.

[KorvinStarmast]

That may be true but... it has been (just) over 25 years, I don't think TSR D&D is really part of the cultural zeitgeist anymore.

Season 1 of Stranger Things called, and would like to have a word with you. They are depicted playing Basic D&D - B/X - BECMI (pick a descriptive) which was the edition that put D&D into game stores in a box, created sales figures that staggered TSRs (few) stockholders, was the one linked to a cartoon show, and in a variety of ways got a whole generation of kids and teens into the game hobby.

[gbaji]

Season 1 of Stranger Things called, and would like to have a word with you. They are depicted playing Basic D&D - B/X - BECMI (pick a descriptive) which was the edition that put D&D into game stores in a box, created sales figures that staggered TSRs (few) stockholders, was the one linked to a cartoon show, and in a variety of ways got a whole generation of kids and teens into the game hobby.

Season one is set in 1983 though, so...

[Herbert_W]

I'm perfectly happy to count DnDisms from older editions of the game. So long as they (a) come from DnD and (b) are assumed to apply more broadly than they actually do, they meet the definition of what we're listing. Heck, we've just talked about a DnDism where the first place it spread was other parts of DnD: "A natural 20 always succeeds" which IIRC has only ever been true for attack rolls.

Anyways, here's some additions to the list. Apologies if some of these have already been covered. All of these are things I myself once wrongly thought to be universal. So, they might not be ubiquitous or even common DnDisms, but they are assumptions that can come from DnD.

Obligate optimization: A party of level n will face challenges deemed appropriate for a party of level n. You run the risk that your DM will misjudge and give you significantly harder challenges. This is especially true if they rely on the CR system, which can be misleading. Your party needs to be at least optimized enough to overcome the hardest challenges that you might face, and you don't always know in advance how hard that is, so higher optimization is safer. (Theoretically, the DM is supposed to adjust things to account for the actual capabilities of their party - but players often do not trust their DM to do this.)

Trap options: Some choices of feats, spells, classes, etc. are dramatically better than others, both in terms of individual power and in terms of how well they synergize with each other. Most character-build choices are permanent. (Yes, retraining/rebuilding is a thing, but it's kinda obscure.) It's possible to screw yourself over by making a "bad" choice. There's rarely an opportunity to try before you buy.

Flavor is expensive: Character death is a possible result of failure to optimize. No matter how interesting a character concept may be, they're boring once they're dead. So, if there's a conflict between flavor and optimization, then optimization becomes a "tax" that you have to pay in order to keep playing a character which leaves less in the "budget" for flavor.

A character of a given level only has so many feats, combined class levels worth of features, skill points, and expected wealth-by-level. All of this is tied to your character level. Every time you spend build resources on something that doesn't improve your character's capabilities, you're at a permanent disadvantage as a result. Sure, you can start making better build choices later - but then you'll be a higher level with higher expected power, and you'll still be behind.

Collective responsibility: One player's poor optimization can impair combat performance for the whole party, leading to other characters dying.

The response to this varies greatly by table. An individual player might respond to all of the above by insisting on roleplaying as they please and just accepting frequent character replacement - but this only works if the whole table agrees to it.

A more common response is to make optimization a collective responsibility. Hence, well-meaning players will gently (or not gently) "correct" players who make "wrong" character build choices.

Obligate specialization: Assuming competent but not cheesy optimization, it's hard for a character to be good-enough-to-matter in more than one role. Multiclassing (or otherwise splitting build resources) carelessly will usually result in a character who is good enough at multiple things to handle encounters below their level in multiple ways - but not good enough at anything to pull their weight in a level-appropriate encounter.

The bigger numbers treadmill: Sometimes leveling up expands your character's capabilities. Sometimes leveling up just gives you bigger numbers which you need to stay relevant in your role as your opponents have bigger numbers too. Getting off this treadmill and branching out may be tempting, but it's usually a trap option that'll cause you to fail to meet your obligation to optimize, so don't.

[AceOfFools]

Hm, here is weird call, player character death being a bad thing.
Most games other than D&D are fairly accepting of death as a consequence, and weak emphasis on encounter difficulty.

D&D has alot of mechanics to keep characters from dying or staying dead, and encounters don’t have alot of teeth to threaten characters in the first place.

Granted my group hates PC death, and thus gravitates away from games that force it, but death is a possible, even probable consequence of your actions is much more present than in DnD than what we tend to play. DnD has save or die effects where you can expect a single bad roll to kill a character.

Fate, Masks, Monster of the Week and most of the other PbtA games we’ve played don’t have explicit rules that cover death. A character who runs out of HP-equivalents is “taken out,” with player and GM working out exactly what that means (which can and has been death where dramatically appropriate). Although death tends to be more or less actually permanent in these systems.

Heck, even Spire and Heart, (which have a baseline expectation of the consequence system that a character will slowly be maimed, driven insane, and completely stripped of friends and standings as the character scrapes through), don't have a rule where a character MUST die as a result of NPC action; except the heroic sacrifice abilities a character can choose to take.

Relatedly, “Death is temporary and/or easily reversible” is a thing that is very, very true in DnD, and often completely untrue in games that either have death as much more common or much more rare.

[Cluedrew]

Stranger things is part of the current gaming fad, and it explicitly references older D&D including character death. The TSR days could come back.

Season 1 of Stranger Things called, and would like to have a word with you.

And Critical Role and Dimension 20 use 5e.*

Yes, there is a sub-culture within the D&D community where TSR gaming is still alive. You either of you want to claim that it is the equal to (or close to that) of the Wizards of the Cost era D&D in the present day?

And, to tie this back to the main thread topic, what problematic-when-carried-to-other-systems-isms are there in TSR D&D?

* Mostly? Critical Role at least seems to switch it up a bit. I don't actually follow either of these, I just did a quick search.

[Tanarii]

And, to tie this back to the main thread topic, what problematic-when-carried-to-other-systems-isms are there in TSR D&D?

Player paranoia
Attempting to game the DM

[ToranIronfinder]

And Critical Role and Dimension 20 use 5e.*

Yes, there is a sub-culture within the D&D community where TSR gaming is still alive. You either of you want to claim that it is the equal to (or close to that) of the Wizards of the Cost era D&D in the present day?

And, to tie this back to the main thread topic, what problematic-when-carried-to-other-systems-isms are there in TSR D&D?

* Mostly? Critical Role at least seems to switch it up a bit. I don't actually follow either of these, I just did a quick search.

But you said it was dead, which is a different thing, entirely. But I suspect if people had a good taste of pre-Wiess/Hickman/WOD gaming, their tastes might change a bit, and old trends come around back into fashion, my point only being the old tropes shouldn't be counted out as "dead." And stranger things is certainly a part of the "cultural zeitgeist."

As to the grognards, the hobby waxes and wanes, we are probably closer to a high point than a low, and every edition creates grognard, spoken as a West End Games Grognard myself, no one IMO has come up with a system that is as elegant as that one was.

5e is something that I think will get boring, character death may return, I'm not saying it will, or it will to the same degree, but the risk raised the excitement levels considerably--of course troupe play made it work better and you would likely need to get away from the story path system to make it really work.

[gbaji]

Obligate optimization: A party of level n will face challenges deemed appropriate for a party of level n. You run the risk that your DM will misjudge and give you significantly harder challenges. This is especially true if they rely on the CR system, which can be misleading. Your party needs to be at least optimized enough to overcome the hardest challenges that you might face, and you don't always know in advance how hard that is, so higher optimization is safer. (Theoretically, the DM is supposed to adjust things to account for the actual capabilities of their party - but players often do not trust their DM to do this.)

...

Obligate specialization: Assuming competent but not cheesy optimization, it's hard for a character to be good-enough-to-matter in more than one role. Multiclassing (or otherwise splitting build resources) carelessly will usually result in a character who is good enough at multiple things to handle encounters below their level in multiple ways - but not good enough at anything to pull their weight in a level-appropriate encounter.

Well written descriptions. And yeah. Those two together really create a set of problems. And it's something almost unique to 3x+ editions of D&D. You're given choices, but as you mentioned, some become "traps" to the rule of optimization and specialization, so you can't take them without a cost you may not be willing to pay. So there is a tendency towards extremely similar/optimized characters as a result.

This can be avoided with a table that trusts the DM to work things out, and you can ignore it and push forward anyway. But yeah, the whole CR balancing system, even when modified/adjusted, still results in a basic "theory of game encounters" that pressures players in particular directions. And I suppose we can call that a D&Dism, since some players will still try to look for optimization stuff when moving to other games.

It's particularly noticeable when you get new players to a fully skill based game (especially non-buy systems).