Voss wrote:
Hmm.
I rarely find class interacts with roleplaying in any way at all.

There are a few exceptions, like wizard = educated, and barbarian= unfortunate cultural stereotype, or street urchin= rogue, but thats more player choice than something set in stone.

Roleplaying is more about personality and back story, not class mechanics.
--
your example puzzles me, because except for crit % (which isn't an in-character roleplaying characteristic at all), swinging an axe well is in there by default, and boasting intimidation is easily accomodated by skills (either from class or background).

Your not wrong per se, but it does tend to point you in a very strong "thematic manner" towards what you should be doing with said character. Sure maybe your Frenzied Berserker is an uncultured rage monster, while someone else's is channelling the spirits of his honorable ancestors via ritual but then both these characters will essentially have the same in game choices in using there abilities and powers because of the class they took and level they are at. It is restrictive rather than permissive and if you spend a bit of time actually watching people play D&D you see how their class shapes their RP and character choices.

Perhaps my example is bad, but it comes down to a player being able to shape their character's abilities based on their vision for a character, rather than be told that your character can do X, Y, or Z no matter who their character is. The more I have played RPGs the more stale and railroading the class/Level system feels.

Of course, this is all like, my opinion man. Other people feel very differently and need the guard rails in place or enjoy the meta-game almost as much as the game itself. That is all well and good, different people like and need different things.

I get the feel that 'class' is much like 'alignment' in that it doesn't really affect much but it is where people who are good at role-playing really distinguish themselves.

That said, i found alignment to be useful at the character generation stage to work out how much of a 'hook' was needed to explain why the party were banding together.
And class can be useful to show when you are spontaneously casually role-playing along, provided it's different to your IRL class...

 Easy E wrote:
They need a more "a la carte" system where there are martial skills, and magic skills, and players can use skill points/XP to "Buy into" whatever they want IF they can meet the base requirements to simulate different archetypes or not at their choosing.

Games like exalted spring to mind from that description. Stats and skills that can be advanced freely, and ability trees that are locked by skill minimums.

I do feel though that constraints and limitations can be the source of creativity too, coming up with a reason that your barbarian is educated but still the victim of uncontrollable rages for example!

You do not need classes to do that though? They are just arbitrary bonuses linked to a "class" choice?

I suppose it is supposed to represent your "background" but there are a lot of different ways to handle that which are less binding, since classes also impact your advancement too?

I guess I have no idea what "classes" are suppose to represent after all. <Shrug>

They're supposed to broadly reflect what your character was learning/doing as an adult prior to you playing them.

Right, so then why does it continue on after you start playing?

 Easy E wrote:
I guess I have no idea what "classes" are suppose to represent after all. <Shrug>

The original D&D classes were intended to create clear archetypal character roles for each player - regardless of personality the warrior was always the most skilled combatant, the rogue always the most skilled thief, etc. And then the ongoing levels and xp charts were intended to keep them broadly on equal footing for the range of encounters they would face.
Most of it was fairly arbitrary -
https://orbitalflower.github.io/rpg/people/gary-gygax-quotes.html#character-classes

Class based games in general do tend to me a mix of guiding players down a path while ensuring they keep up with the other characters. The more choice you have the easier it is to make mechanically bad choices and fall out of sync with everyone else (assuming the underlying balance is sound in the first place). Makes it easier for casual players that don't want to skip out on the 'roll-playing' part of the roleplaying but also don't want to read too deeply into the options.

 Easy E wrote:
Right, so then why does it continue on after you start playing?

Because it's an iconic feature of the first and most recognizable/popular/best selling rpg system in top of being useful especially to new players? I'm not saying it's my personal preference (I prefer classless fully customizable systems myself) but I also recognize its merits.

I am going to argue (to continue to generate commentary and discussion) that classes are NOT helpful to new players.... at all.

I have taught dozens of players how to RPG and they find D&D much harder to wrap their heads around with all the bonuses, classes/sub-classes, niche cases, spell lists etc. They get hard coded into "Tank, Hitter, Healer, Support" instead of learning how to play an RPG.

Rules-lite systems are MUCH easier to teach new players the basics of RPG and get playing. Plus, they are less pigeon-holed from the outset while they learn and experiment with what is fun for them!

The reason why D&D is so popular, is because it is fun to talk about the "meta" because there is a lot you can unpack to try and squeeze out that last bit of extra power or oomph. It is also fun to "put together" various classes and abilities because there are so many of them. Many players LOVE this part of the experience and it gives you lots to talk about when you are not actually playing the game. This is a great benefit for semi-experienced players.

Rules-lite systems do not have this depth. Therefore, outside of the game there is very little to talk about mechanically or outside of an actual session. Less fun outside the game, but more fun when actually playing as you are not hard coded into a role from the start and are exploring the world instead of "Your class benefits" and staring at your sheet trying to figure out the minutia.

 Easy E wrote:
I am going to argue (to continue to generate commentary and discussion) that classes are NOT helpful to new players.... at all.
Rules-lite systems are MUCH easier to teach new players the basics of RPG and get playing. Plus, they are less pigeon-holed from the outset while they learn and experiment with what is fun for them!

You seem to be comparing complex class-based rules to rules-lite systems.

Masks (and all games under that system) is extremely rules light, but also heavily pigeonholed into classes. At the other extreme something like exalted has almost no concept of a class but can get absurdly complex both in creation and gameplay.

Something like masks isn't even using the class structure for game balance, it's just there to give a starting point for a player to work from and without it the whole game would probably hit choice paralysis in the first session despite its simplicity.

I like all kinds of RPGs, but I really do like Dungeons and Dragons for exactly what it is. Class based, archetype focused, kick in the door beat up the monster fun.
I like the wargamey aspects to it, I love dungeon exploration and I love weird and wacky monsters.

It's not the be all and end all of RPGs, and I think a lot of issues come from people thinking that they can port whatever game or genre into Dungeons and Dragons. I hear people saying they run D&D with almost no combat and I kinda think, what's the point? Why not play a game that supports that? Or people who talk about running a narrative, why not use a system structured for that sort of stuff, with storytelling mechanics and so on? D&D is great at what it is for, which is exploring dungeons, killing dragons, and stealing their stuff.

A.T. wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I am going to argue (to continue to generate commentary and discussion) that classes are NOT helpful to new players.... at all.
Rules-lite systems are MUCH easier to teach new players the basics of RPG and get playing. Plus, they are less pigeon-holed from the outset while they learn and experiment with what is fun for them!

You seem to be comparing complex class-based rules to rules-lite systems.

Masks (and all games under that system) is extremely rules light, but also heavily pigeonholed into classes. At the other extreme something like exalted has almost no concept of a class but can get absurdly complex both in creation and gameplay.

Something like masks isn't even using the class structure for game balance, it's just there to give a starting point for a player to work from and without it the whole game would probably hit choice paralysis in the first session despite its simplicity.

It's not just rules lite, though. As you say, you can get quite a lot of crunch out of systems that are level/classless. The systems used to define a character are not directly linked to the systems used to act in the game world. You can have rules lite level/class systems and you can have complex crunchy point buys. GURPS is basically crunchy point buy. The Genesys games (including starwars) are class based point buy rules lite with a narrative focus.

That doesn't change what classes do. Classes pigeon hole people and they stop them from thinking of their characters as people and instead as a list of features.

A way I have described this to people is super man versus spiderman.

When you ask someone who Superman is they say "Well he has super strength and can fly and has heat and x ray vision and..."
It's a list of class features.

When you ask someone who Spiderman is they say "He's a kid who got bit by a radioactive spider. And it's power and responsibility because his uncle ben died. And he works at the daily bugle taking photographs..."
It's a description of a character.

Classes are the first one and people often describe their dnd characters in that way. "Well I am a level 12 barbarian with a 2 handed axe." and it's classes fault. They inherently start people thinking in those terms. It's not just detrimental, it's antithetical to everything a rpg is supposed to be about.

Not strictly DnD but Zine Quest 3 just started. So there is about to be a big rush of small indie RPG and RPG modules going up on Kickstarter in the next week or so. So those of you that like to collect these little one-shot rules and things. Have at it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/zinequest

 Lance845 wrote:
...it's antithetical to everything a rpg is supposed to be about.

Role playing game.

Classes are one form of game structure, existing to moderate the game side of the RPG. Different players will see them as restrictive and intrusive, or important to setting the underlying rules of the world, or as a useful tool to fill out all the little mechanical details that they don't want to have to think through and keep track of. The role playing side can be as much about taking on a role as creating one, adding personality to the the characters in a larger story.

Dungeons and Dragons invented and defined the RPG as a genre. It can hardly be antithetical to what those games are about.
It's fine not to like it though. Perfectly valid. But trying to narrow RPGs down to one specific thing that you like and labelling the other stuff you don't like as wrongfun is a bit closed minded.

 Da Boss wrote:
I like all kinds of RPGs, but I really do like Dungeons and Dragons for exactly what it is. Class based, archetype focused, kick in the door beat up the monster fun.

I like the wargamey aspects to it, I love dungeon exploration and I love weird and wacky monsters.

I think this hits the nail on the head. At first, it was almost an Model vs. Model wargame using theatre of the mind and resolution mechanics only. Once everyone got on board 100% with Minis, it really is just a Model vs. Model highly detailed skirmish game with some other stuff bolted on for non-combat.

When I play it with that mindset, it works really well. Great point Da Boss.


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 Da Boss wrote:
Perfectly valid. But trying to narrow RPGs down to one specific thing that you like and labelling the other stuff you don't like as wrongfun is a bit closed minded.

Not trying to do that at all. Just having a conversation, in fact I try to pinpoint some of its inherent appeal earlier.

Nah I was responding to Lance. Who has some great points to make, but sometimes comes across a bit too absolutist about this stuff. Not trying to shut down the conversation either.

 Da Boss wrote:
Dungeons and Dragons invented and defined the RPG as a genre. It can hardly be antithetical to what those games are about.
It's fine not to like it though. Perfectly valid. But trying to narrow RPGs down to one specific thing that you like and labelling the other stuff you don't like as wrongfun is a bit closed minded.

DnD invented it more or less on accident and long before any truly formal study of game design theory. What DnD was trying to do was make a dungeon crawl version of a table top war game. The RP part of the RPG was basically a happy accident.

I am not talking about what I do or do not like. I am talking about the mechanic that is over 50 years old, as you pointed out, and put in place while trying to create something else entirely is a outdated mechanic that has detrimental impact on the intended purpose of the actual genre that exists today. This isn't opinion. This is an assessment of the mechanic and it's impact.

The part where you talk about intended purpose of the genre is opinion. I agree, the class structure has an impact which is detrimental to the style of game you enjoy, and I think many people agree with you about that.

But where I disagree with you is that something as broad as the RPG hobby has one "intended purpose". It's too reductive, and is in my view just an attempt to lend extra weight to your argument that it doesn't need, because the argument is fine on it's own.

 Lance845 wrote:
I am talking about the mechanic that is over 50 years old, as you pointed out, and put in place while trying to create something else entirely is a outdated mechanic that has detrimental impact on the intended purpose of the actual genre that exists today. This isn't opinion. This is an assessment of the mechanic and it's impact.

In your previous post you used superman vs spiderman for a class features vs character example - but what you actually described was crunch vs fluff.

In any game system both superman and spiderman would have super strength, and each would have as much or as little backstory as the player provided.

Class systems provide a structure. I'd suggest looking at the masks system as it is a free download for the character files - the system is so loose on rules that it has a 'moment of truth' advancement for players where everyone just sits back while that player tells the story instead, but it still uses classes to hold things together in a way that makes it quick and easy for a player to pick the system up.

I liked the what Warhammer RPG did it where classes are professions which help to cohere the idea of your character.

Like say this campaign I want to play a character skilled with a bow and good at hiding in the woods, seeing the poacher or gamekeeper class would help you get an idea about why your character is good at those things, what sort of equipment they would have, what sort of social interactions would be common for them etc. instead of choosing those things from a list without context.
I can see the argument that they are not necessary, but they are basically just a list of ideas to help get the creative juices going!

Even in DnD, people tend to play all these crossbreed and expanded material classes that no-one has ever heard of. This lets them pick and chose what they want, so it's not really restricting anybody.

Da Boss wrote:The part where you talk about intended purpose of the genre is opinion. I agree, the class structure has an impact which is detrimental to the style of game you enjoy, and I think many people agree with you about that.

But where I disagree with you is that something as broad as the RPG hobby has one "intended purpose". It's too reductive, and is in my view just an attempt to lend extra weight to your argument that it doesn't need, because the argument is fine on it's own.

I hear you and I appreciate what you are saying. But it's in the name. It's not Munchkin where you ARE just a race and class and power level (If you are lucky enough to get those cards). It's a ROLE PLAYING game. The RP is front and center. It's the actual genre we are talking about. And by no means am I saying anyone should not have their fun however it is that they want to have their fun.If some group prefers more eleborate Muchkin then they can always just not RP and do that and have a blast. I am not calling it wrongfun. I am talking purely mechanically about the genre and the mechanics used within in.

A.T. wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
I am talking about the mechanic that is over 50 years old, as you pointed out, and put in place while trying to create something else entirely is a outdated mechanic that has detrimental impact on the intended purpose of the actual genre that exists today. This isn't opinion. This is an assessment of the mechanic and it's impact.

In your previous post you used superman vs spiderman for a class features vs character example - but what you actually described was crunch vs fluff.

In any game system both superman and spiderman would have super strength, and each would have as much or as little backstory as the player provided.

Class systems provide a structure. I'd suggest looking at the masks system as it is a free download for the character files - the system is so loose on rules that it has a 'moment of truth' advancement for players where everyone just sits back while that player tells the story instead, but it still uses classes to hold things together in a way that makes it quick and easy for a player to pick the system up.

I am not talking about crunch versus fluff. I am talking about the psychological impact certain mechanics have on it's players and how that impacts game play. Whether you are aware of it or not game mechanics work not just mechanically but psychologically and create certain skews in the way players experience game play. When you crack open a dnd book over the last 50 years players describe their character in the same order that they create them. I am a Elf (pick your race) Wizard (pick your class) with a dagger (pick your equipment). That is not a coincidence.

It's a role playing game that begins and ends the entire character creation process by asking you what you can do instead of who you are with a rules lite bit tacked onto the end saying "Now make up some gak for fluff!" that is so disjointed from the rest of the character creation experience that most people would have a hard time remembering everything thats in there and the bits they do remember are going to be the statistical entities (what color is your hair/eyes? How tall are you? What color is your skin?) Again, nothing Spiderman about it.

Now... DnD 5e does take some halting steps towards being better. Choosing your "Personality and Background' as step 4 in the character creation right before equipment but also right after they talk about levels first, races second and classes third. You would THINK that talking about a characters background first might inform the choice in class but thats not what these mechanics are about.


Genesys is classes done better. Not great yet, but better. In that the "classes" in the starwars RPG are kind of like an overlay that gets placed over your character and makes certain options cheaper in a point buy system while not restricting you from other options. But then you can choose any other overlay from any other "class" so that you can make your character to fit whatever story you are giving them. I get the idea of making the mechanics digestible for players. But what classes are is people doing it this way because they have been raised to do it this way by the game that invented doing it this way when they were trying to make a different game. We have learned a lot in that time and there is no reason to keep doing things in a bad way because.

 Lance845 wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I am going to argue (to continue to generate commentary and discussion) that classes are NOT helpful to new players.... at all.
Rules-lite systems are MUCH easier to teach new players the basics of RPG and get playing. Plus, they are less pigeon-holed from the outset while they learn and experiment with what is fun for them!

You seem to be comparing complex class-based rules to rules-lite systems.

Masks (and all games under that system) is extremely rules light, but also heavily pigeonholed into classes. At the other extreme something like exalted has almost no concept of a class but can get absurdly complex both in creation and gameplay.

Something like masks isn't even using the class structure for game balance, it's just there to give a starting point for a player to work from and without it the whole game would probably hit choice paralysis in the first session despite its simplicity.

It's not just rules lite, though. As you say, you can get quite a lot of crunch out of systems that are level/classless. The systems used to define a character are not directly linked to the systems used to act in the game world. You can have rules lite level/class systems and you can have complex crunchy point buys. GURPS is basically crunchy point buy. The Genesys games (including starwars) are class based point buy rules lite with a narrative focus.

That doesn't change what classes do. Classes pigeon hole people and they stop them from thinking of their characters as people and instead as a list of features.

A way I have described this to people is super man versus spiderman.

When you ask someone who Superman is they say "Well he has super strength and can fly and has heat and x ray vision and..."
It's a list of class features.

When you ask someone who Spiderman is they say "He's a kid who got bit by a radioactive spider. And it's power and responsibility because his uncle ben died. And he works at the daily bugle taking photographs..."
It's a description of a character.

Classes are the first one and people often describe their dnd characters in that way. "Well I am a level 12 barbarian with a 2 handed axe." and it's classes fault. They inherently start people thinking in those terms. It's not just detrimental, it's antithetical to everything a rpg is supposed to be about.

.....But you can also describe them the opposite way

"Superman is an alien who is the last survivor from the planet Krypton who got sent to earth and who lives as mild-mannered Clark Kent so that he can learn about the latest happenings..."

"Spider-man can shoot webs, crawl on walls, he's got super strength, spidey-senses.."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I am going to argue (to continue to generate commentary and discussion) that classes are NOT helpful to new players.... at all.
Rules-lite systems are MUCH easier to teach new players the basics of RPG and get playing. Plus, they are less pigeon-holed from the outset while they learn and experiment with what is fun for them!

You seem to be comparing complex class-based rules to rules-lite systems.

Masks (and all games under that system) is extremely rules light, but also heavily pigeonholed into classes. At the other extreme something like exalted has almost no concept of a class but can get absurdly complex both in creation and gameplay.

Something like masks isn't even using the class structure for game balance, it's just there to give a starting point for a player to work from and without it the whole game would probably hit choice paralysis in the first session despite its simplicity.

Masks is a fun, interesting example for me because it does almost (in my eyes) the exact opposite approach to class that DnD does.

In DnD, your class dictates the mechanical abilities that your character has. You can describe them and why your character has them in any way you like, and your character's personality can be whatever you want it to be, but at the end of the day, you need to come up with some kind of reason why, for example, your druid can turn into animals, or your wizard can cast magic spells, or your artificer can invent/enchant things. With the way multiclassing works and the fact that the system at the end of the day just isn't that deep, it is actually fairly alacarte - tbh I think if you had a system where you could take any abilities you want but they're in 'trees' then you'd essentially end up with the same thing, or something awfully similar. You'd probably spread out the choice rather than having each tree have a dozen-odd choices at level 3 and then be linear from then on out, but regardless of what you want to call it it'd end up fairly similar.

In Masks, you dictate whatever mechanical abilities that your character has, and your Playbook dictates the archetype that you're going to be fulfilling and the tropes you want your personality to play into. And that works great for heavily 'trope based' mediums like Superhero stories, or monster of the week detective shows. I've also adapted Masks pretty successfully into an ensemble cast fighting-based anime show setup.

 Lance845 wrote:
When you crack open a dnd book over the last 50 years players describe their character in the same order that they create them. I am a Elf (pick your race) Wizard (pick your class) with a dagger (pick your equipment). That is not a coincidence.

But is that due to classes?

If the 3rd edition DnD handbook started with a whole chapter on character background, motivation, and personality followed by choosing a class that best fits them for example ?

the_scotsman wrote:
tbh I think if you had a system where you could take any abilities you want but they're in 'trees' then you'd essentially end up with the same thing, or something awfully similar. You'd probably spread out the choice rather than having each tree have a dozen-odd choices at level 3 and then be linear from then on out, but regardless of what you want to call it it'd end up fairly similar.

See the exalted game system for an example of this.

It has it's ups and downs - you create a character, think about their backgrounds and motivations, decide you want them to be a master swordsman with a side in sorcerery and now you have to read through the 36 interlinked charm cascades (see image).
Though there was also the starwars system where each character class was their own self contained ability cascade, something of a half and half approach.

A.T. wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
When you crack open a dnd book over the last 50 years players describe their character in the same order that they create them. I am a Elf (pick your race) Wizard (pick your class) with a dagger (pick your equipment). That is not a coincidence.

But is that due to classes?

Yes. More specifically the level/class system used by D20.

If the 3rd edition DnD handbook started with a whole chapter on character background, motivation, and personality followed by choosing a class that best fits them for example ?

No. Because the entirety of D20 is a cohesive system of mechanics that encourages you to do nothing but kill for reward. Experience points are only distributed for killing enemies in 3rd. Loot is rewarded for killing enemies. It wasn't until 4th when they started even considering a diplomatic situation an "encounter" that should be treated with skills tests with goals and experience rewards for completion. And even then that was the less common of situations. None of this is existing in a vacuum on it's own. It's part of a system of mechanics that function together to build the game play experience. Class is one component in that that fits VERY well in with the other components of D20 to build the experience it was original designed for. A single model per player tactical war game with loot and advancement.

Again, 5th makes some measure of headway on this. The few components of character background that have mechanical presence actually do help you to see who your character is. Backgrounds help you see who they were so you can map out how they got to where they are. But 3.x and before? A complete wasteland of murder hobos.

 Lance845 wrote:
No. Because the entirety of D20 is a cohesive system of mechanics that encourages you to do nothing but kill for reward. Experience points are only distributed for killing enemies in 3rd. Loot is rewarded for killing enemies.

Firstly, xp mechanics and class mechanics are two entirely different things.

Secondly, it has been forever since I played a 3e game where xp and loot are distributed in that way. It's a guideline just like the wealth by level chart and challenge rating so that inexperienced players and DMs have something to work with. And still has nothing to do with the class system.

 Lance845 wrote:
Backgrounds help you see who they were so you can map out how they got to where they were. But 3.x and before? A complete wasteland of murder hobos.

The last 2nd ed game I played in featured a character referred to by the party as 'the thief'. He had a complex background and motivations, was an active driving force in the plot, and was primarily a spellcaster who killed almost no-one across many levels of gameplay with xp being handed out completely by the book.

Last exalted game I played in was populated entirely by murderhobos.

 Lance845 wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
When you crack open a dnd book over the last 50 years players describe their character in the same order that they create them. I am a Elf (pick your race) Wizard (pick your class) with a dagger (pick your equipment). That is not a coincidence.

But is that due to classes?

Yes. More specifically the level/class system used by D20.

Yeah, it couldn't be that the inspiring work of fiction that created dungeons and dragons was based on characters whose personality was often defined by things they could do, and often people who go into roleplaying games are interested in creating characters that feel like existing tropes in fiction, gravitating towards settings where characters are commonly described based on their abilities first and personalities second.

When you ask someone to describe Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf, or Aragorn, what percentage of people do you think would start with

A) their fantasy race
B) their capabilities in a fight
C) their personalities

I would put money on A or B making up over 90% of responders.

(sidebar: this is why I think your "Spider Man Vs Superman" comparison is unrealistic. A person asked to describe either will almost certainly describe their abilities prior to describing their personalities. Most likely what you'd get is their basic abilities, costume/appearance, and then their backstory/origin story which might include some aspects of their personality/personal conflicts. There is almost no chance that someone would talk about 'great power, great responsibility' before the fact that Spider Man can climb walls, spin webs, etc.)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
There's a reason why the most common/successful RPG settings are those for whom characters can be quickly described and based on their abilities:

-High Fantasy Ensemble Cast Settings
-Urban Fantasy Modern Halloween Monster Settings
-Spy/Heist Movie Ensemble Cast Modern Settings
-Superhero Team Settings
-Science Fiction Ensemble Cast Settings
-Horror movies with a single monster/threat and a group of heroes rather than a sole protagonist

The kind of media that people tend to want to gravitate towards when playing or designing RPGs typically uses tropes as a way to quickly define and establish a large number of characters so the audience can track who's who without spending an inordinate amount of time establishing the character, and the quickest way to do that is by giving the character a distinctive appearance or a distinctive set of abilities.

This isn't some secret conspiracy driven by DnD's original designers, it's a natural outgrowth based on the fact that RPGs naturally lend themselves to genres where a larger group of distinctive characters are given equal screentime rather than a sole protagonist.

I am not claiming conspiracy and i am not saying players cannot go against the grain to do other things with a system that is built to encourage you to do otherwise.

I am participating in a discussion about the mechanic of level/class systems and what it does to players perception of their characters and how that impacts game play. Everyone is different and you can get outliers and with experience people can and will break the mold. But if you are talking about what the system does to and for new players then thats what i am talking about.

DnD is the often used lense of this discussion and that lense is old and mired in out dated legacy design decisions that stick around because.... Reasons.

An anecdote about the good rp you had in a 2nd ed game isnt discussing what the mechanic does. Your dm decideding to make up his own rules for loot and exp isnt discussing the system as is.

LotR has nothing to do with the original dnd. It has EVERYTHING to do with adnd. But adnd was still built around the skeleton of single model chainmail.

Systems exist with good character mechanic models (point buy/levelclass/hybrid) and good character creation that help new players become a person inside the world they live in instead of a PC beat stick dropped into the middle of a field and ready to kill. D20 not only isnt one of them, its one of the worst.

 Lance845 wrote:
I am not claiming conspiracy and i am not saying players cannot go against the grain to do other things with a system that is built to encourage you to do otherwise.

I am participating in a discussion about the mechanic of level/class systems and what it does to players perception of their characters and how that impacts game play. Everyone is different and you can get outliers and with experience people can and will break the mold. But if you are talking about what the system does to and for new players then thats what i am talking about.

DnD is the often used lense of this discussion and that lense is old and mired in out dated legacy design decisions that stick around because.... Reasons.

An anecdote about the good rp you had in a 2nd ed game isnt discussing what the mechanic does. Your dm decideding to make up his own rules for loot and exp isnt discussing the system as is.

LotR has nothing to do with the original dnd. It has EVERYTHING to do with adnd. But adnd was still built around the skeleton of single model chainmail.

Systems exist with good character mechanic models (point buy/levelclass/hybrid) and good character creation that help new players become a person inside the world they live in instead of a PC beat stick dropped into the middle of a field and ready to kill. D20 not only isnt one of them, its one of the worst.

Your premise here appears to be that, because the character creation system in dnd 5e is laid out such that you select

1 race
2 class
3 ability scores
4 background

that leads players, naturally, to primarily describe their characters in terms of gameplay only...despite the fact that race in dnd has a relatively minor impact on how your character approaches gameplay as compared to your class and a much greater impact in terms of how they become a person inside the world they live (because race in dnd is essentially a shorthand with added visual language for how we would consider 'culture' in our human world where multiple different species of sentient being do not exist).

And your premise here relies, basically, on the player just...I don't know, not reading the first paragraphs of the section? before it gets into "Step 1: choose your race"?

"Your first step in playing an adventurer in the Dungeons & Dragons game is to imagine and create a character of your own. Your character is a combination of various statistics, roleplaying hooks, and your imagination. You choose a race (such as human or halfling) and a class (such as fighter or wizard). You also invent the personality, appearance, and backstory of your character. Once completed, your character serves as your representative in the game, your avatar in the Dungeons & Dragons world.

Before you dive into step 1 below, think about the kind of adventurer you want to play. You might be a courageous fighter, a skulking rogue, a fervent cleric, or a flamboyant wizard. Or you might be more interested in an unconventional character, such as a brave rogue who likes hand-to-hand combat, or a sharpshooter who picks off enemies from afar. Do you like fantasy fiction featuring dwarves or elves? Try building a character of one of those races. Do you want your character to be the toughest adventurer at the table? Consider a class like barbarian or paladin. If you don't know where else to begin, take a look at the illustrations in this book to see what catches your interest.

Once you have a character in mind, roll on these steps in order, making decisions that reflect the character you want. Your conception of your character might evolve with each choice you make. What's important is that you come to the table with a character you're excited to play."

But hey, maybe you're right. Maybe these unspecified other RPG systems are infinitely superior, and would never approach character creation in such simplistic terms - they would certainly approach things COMPLETELY differently. Let's just look at the last one you mentioned, GURPS. I'm just going to google GURPS fantasy and look at the first free PDF I can find on google, which looks to be the fourth edition.

Character creation is on page 104, and section one is, oh, "Racial Templates."

After that we have "Occupational Templates". Well that's completely different from Classes clearly, an occupation is how you fit into the world, it's not just what the combat capabilities of your character are. The first ones listed are, let's see:

Archer: This template works for any light
missile troops who provide support
to cavalry or heavier infantry. The
longbow is the classic weapon, but
other options are available

Artificer: Artificers are the technology specialists of fantasy worlds. They can’t
use spells or other forms of magic, but
they can make devices that seem
equally wonderful and mysterious to
the untrained, such as singing birds
made from gold, temple doors that
open by themselves, or Greek fire.

It goes on, Assassin, Bandit, Barbarian, etc with the description primarily being based on 'what your character does in combat.' You choose your background in step 3 rather than step 4, but that's only because you determine your basic stat attributes by taking the base values defined by your class and adding your template.

It does say that you can just define your own template for your class - sorry, Occupation - yourself, and that the templates provided are only examples, but that's the thing: They're the ONLY examples listed, and they are primarily combat-based.

I fail to see how a system where I start by choosing a race, and I choose "I want to be an elf" and that gets me:



would encourage me to more narratively determine how my character fits into the world, vs choosing "I want to be an elf" and that gets me:



I learn approximately equal amounts about the culture assigned to elves from both, I get a few mechanical abilities from both. The only thing you could say is "excessively combat oriented" about the dnd race rules here is that I get training in a few extra weapons and some magic for being an elf, but the racial description in GURPS refers to combat multiple times - talking about how I 'rely on agility rather then strength' and about how my leaders have 'centuries of skill in warfare.'

 Lance845 wrote:
An anecdote about the good rp you had in a 2nd ed game isnt discussing what the mechanic does. Your dm decideding to make up his own rules for loot and exp isnt discussing the system as is.

It was the xp chart from the core book - hence "xp being handed out completely by the book". Core rules had xp for character actions, and all pre-written adventures had xp for story actions including solving puzzles and avoiding conflict.

I find myself kicking at a moving net here though. The original argument presented by Easy E was "I am going to argue that classes are NOT helpful to new players.... at all." - followed by your spiderman superman class vs character post. We seem to have strayed away from that.

Its acording to 99% of the materials. The phb has rules for exp by cr based on monsters. Remember, traps mostly didnt have cr in 3rd. And social enxounters had none what so ever. Traps did have a very complicated system for calculating cr to determine what a trap COST to build it. It COULD be used to give it a exp value but wasnt really designed that way. The MM had exp values all over the place. And while the dmg did have the blanket statements of "...or do what you want." All over the place the general rules for exp even presented there was Monsters CR = exp.

A singular example in one post is not my entire argument. Which also goes for scottsmans post which i will respond to when i am at a computer to do so (currently typing on a phone). My "premise" is not one component of an argument. My premise is that mechanics have actual impact on the way players percieve and interact with the game and it effects game play. When you line up 7 races and a dozenish classes with a level system that does things to the players. HOW those things are built is a major component of that. But again, we are discussing it through the lense of dnd. So how dnd presents it has its impact and its not good for new players. It starts them off on entirely the wrong foot. When is the last time a new player sat down for dnd at your table and knew what town he was born in? What region/country he was from? What ties he had to a community? When was the last time your brand new to rpgs player had any idea of how how that character got to where he was in session 0/1? How does the level/class characyer creation and advancement system do ANYTHING to make your new player feel like they are playing an actual person?

the_scotsman wrote:

Spoiler:

 Lance845 wrote:
I am not claiming conspiracy and i am not saying players cannot go against the grain to do other things with a system that is built to encourage you to do otherwise.

I am participating in a discussion about the mechanic of level/class systems and what it does to players perception of their characters and how that impacts game play. Everyone is different and you can get outliers and with experience people can and will break the mold. But if you are talking about what the system does to and for new players then thats what i am talking about.

DnD is the often used lense of this discussion and that lense is old and mired in out dated legacy design decisions that stick around because.... Reasons.

An anecdote about the good rp you had in a 2nd ed game isnt discussing what the mechanic does. Your dm decideding to make up his own rules for loot and exp isnt discussing the system as is.

LotR has nothing to do with the original dnd. It has EVERYTHING to do with adnd. But adnd was still built around the skeleton of single model chainmail.

Systems exist with good character mechanic models (point buy/levelclass/hybrid) and good character creation that help new players become a person inside the world they live in instead of a PC beat stick dropped into the middle of a field and ready to kill. D20 not only isnt one of them, its one of the worst.

Your premise here appears to be that, because the character creation system in dnd 5e is laid out such that you select

1 race
2 class
3 ability scores
4 background

that leads players, naturally, to primarily describe their characters in terms of gameplay only...despite the fact that race in dnd has a relatively minor impact on how your character approaches gameplay as compared to your class and a much greater impact in terms of how they become a person inside the world they live (because race in dnd is essentially a shorthand with added visual language for how we would consider 'culture' in our human world where multiple different species of sentient being do not exist).

And your premise here relies, basically, on the player just...I don't know, not reading the first paragraphs of the section? before it gets into "Step 1: choose your race"?

No. Because despite any fluff that exists there is no "culture" in dnd out of the PHB, the DMG, or anything outside of setting books. DnD does not have a setting by default in 5th ed. It's "nominally" the forgotten realms. But only because the way they describe some races matches up with forgotten realms. 3rd was by default Greyhawk so at least there was a default setting there. Of course the Gazetteer was a separate book released much later. You get basically vague descriptions of some stereotypes about an entire group of people.

"Your first step in playing an adventurer in the Dungeons & Dragons game is to imagine and create a character of your own. Your character is a combination of various statistics, roleplaying hooks, and your imagination. You choose a race (such as human or halfling) and a class (such as fighter or wizard). You also invent the personality, appearance, and backstory of your character. Once completed, your character serves as your representative in the game, your avatar in the Dungeons & Dragons world.

Before you dive into step 1 below, think about the kind of adventurer you want to play. You might be a courageous fighter, a skulking rogue, a fervent cleric, or a flamboyant wizard. Or you might be more interested in an unconventional character, such as a brave rogue who likes hand-to-hand combat, or a sharpshooter who picks off enemies from afar. Do you like fantasy fiction featuring dwarves or elves? Try building a character of one of those races. Do you want your character to be the toughest adventurer at the table? Consider a class like barbarian or paladin. If you don't know where else to begin, take a look at the illustrations in this book to see what catches your interest.

Once you have a character in mind, roll on these steps in order, making decisions that reflect the character you want. Your conception of your character might evolve with each choice you make. What's important is that you come to the table with a character you're excited to play."

See. Without a setting what is the new player given to create a backstory with? What in any of that actually makes the character into anything like an actual person?

Maybe it would help if I gave you a contrasting example. Every single game ever made by White Wolf most famous for the World of Darkness games. Every. Single. Game. they make comes with a deep background that is baked right into the choices you make in your character creation. Now these books have absolutely HORRIBLE layout and are organized like complete gak. So don't think that helps new players at all. But from step 1 of making your character in any of those games you are building a person who inhabits a place in that world. You have family, friends, mentors, organizations, enemies, and rivals at your disposal. You have options for how you became what you are. They ask you from the beginning how your Mage awakened. How your Vampire was turned. How your Scion found out about his divine lineage. When your Aberrant super hero discovered his powers. They show you the world around you and present what these groups CAN mean and then ask you what these groups mean to you.

The things you spend your points on to build your character inherently invest you in who your character is not simply what they do and what they can look forward to doing when they have killed enough goblins.

But hey, maybe you're right. Maybe these unspecified other RPG systems are infinitely superior, and would never approach character creation in such simplistic terms - they would certainly approach things COMPLETELY differently. Let's just look at the last one you mentioned, GURPS. I'm just going to google GURPS fantasy and look at the first free PDF I can find on google, which looks to be the fourth edition.

Character creation is on page 104, and section one is, oh, "Racial Templates."

After that we have "Occupational Templates". Well that's completely different from Classes clearly, an occupation is how you fit into the world, it's not just what the combat capabilities of your character are. The first ones listed are, let's see:

Archer: This template works for any light
missile troops who provide support
to cavalry or heavier infantry. The
longbow is the classic weapon, but
other options are available

Artificer: Artificers are the technology specialists of fantasy worlds. They can’t
use spells or other forms of magic, but
they can make devices that seem
equally wonderful and mysterious to
the untrained, such as singing birds
made from gold, temple doors that
open by themselves, or Greek fire.

It goes on, Assassin, Bandit, Barbarian, etc with the description primarily being based on 'what your character does in combat.' You choose your background in step 3 rather than step 4, but that's only because you determine your basic stat attributes by taking the base values defined by your class and adding your template.

It does say that you can just define your own template for your class - sorry, Occupation - yourself, and that the templates provided are only examples, but that's the thing: They're the ONLY examples listed, and they are primarily combat-based.

I fail to see how a system where I start by choosing a race, and I choose "I want to be an elf" and that gets me:

Spoiler:

Elves are the quintessential fantasy
race: very similar to humans (and
cross-fertile with them, in many settings), but exceptionally beautiful,
ageless, and naturally magical. Some
descriptions make them superb
artists, while others say that they ultimately lack creativity; this version
avoids either option, while making
them sensitive to the beauty of landscapes and living creatures. Elves normally live in forested areas. They use
their magic to enhance the growth
and fertility of their forests. Survival
rolls in an elven forest are at +1 or better. They find clearing the land repugnant, and since elven leaders have centuries of skill in warfare, elven forests
tend to stay forested.
Elves are comparatively slender,
relying on speed and agility more than
raw strength. Determine their height
normally from their ST and add 2

Attribute Modifiers: ST-1 [-10]; DX+1
[20].
Secondary Characteristic Modifiers:
Per+1 [5].
Advantages: Appearance (Attractive)
[4]; Magery 0 [5]; Perfect Balance
[15]; Telescopic Vision 1 [5];
Unaging [15]; Voice [10].
Racially Learned Skills: Connoisseur
(Natural Environments) (A) IQ-1
[1]-9.

would encourage me to more narratively determine how my character fits into the world, vs choosing "I want to be an elf" and that gets me:

Spoiler:

Age. Although elves reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, the elven understanding of adulthood goes beyond physical growth to encompass worldly experience. An elf typically claims adulthood and an adult name around the age of 100 and can live to be 750 years old.

Alignment. Elves love freedom, variety, and self-expression, so they lean strongly toward the gentler aspects of chaos. They value and protect others' freedom as well as their own, and they are more often good than not.

Size. Elves range from under 5 to over 6 feet tall and have slender builds. Your size is Medium.

Darkvision. Accustomed to twilit forests and the night sky, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.

Keen Senses. You have proficiency in the Perception skill.

Fey Ancestry. You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep.

Trance. Elves don't need to sleep. Instead, they meditate deeply, remaining semiconscious, for 4 hours a day. (The Common word for such meditation is "trance.") While meditating, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.
If you meditate during a long rest, you finish the rest after only 4 hours. You otherwise obey all the rules for a long rest; only the duration is changed.

Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and Elvish. Elvish is fluid, with subtle intonations and intricate grammar. Elven literature is rich and varied, and their songs and poems are famous among other races. Many bards learn their language so they can add Elvish ballads to their repertoires.

Elf Weapon Training. You have proficiency with the longsword, shortsword, shortbow, and longbow.

Cantrip. You know one cantrip of your choice from the wizard spell list. Intelligence is your spellcasting ability for it.

Extra Language. You can speak, read, and write one extra language of your choosing.

I learn approximately equal amounts about the culture assigned to elves from both, I get a few mechanical abilities from both. The only thing you could say is "excessively combat oriented" about the dnd race rules here is that I get training in a few extra weapons and some magic for being an elf, but the racial description in GURPS refers to combat multiple times - talking about how I 'rely on agility rather then strength' and about how my leaders have 'centuries of skill in warfare.'

I by no means was saying GURPS was good. I said GURPS was crunchy point buy. See above with the white wolf games. Look up the legends and adventures life path character creation for Forbidden Lands. Look up Coriolis. A game where the first choice in character creation is determining what your crew aboard a fire fly style space ship does (are you space truckers/traders, archeologists/explorers, mercenaries, etc..?), then building your ship, then determining your position on the crew, THEN picking your "class" which only provides you 3 pieces of equipment and an increase to the max you can raise a single attribute and a couple choices of talents (basically feats). "Class" like you describe race is barely an influence in what your character can be and only a small piece of the whole as opposed to dnds.90% of what they are. These games start you off by investing you in the world and putting the player in the headspace of thinking of their character as a person within that world.

DnD just says "How do you want to kill monsters? Are you a rmored warrior? A tough barbarian? A devote Paladin? etc etc...".

There is such a gap between what is good for a new player and what dnd gives you that they are not even in the same weight class.

 Lance845 wrote:
Its acording to 99% of the materials.

Well in this case the 1% was the entire experience reward section of the DMG.
To quote directly from the source (condensed):

Chapter 8: Experience
This chapter contains instructions for determining specific experience awards. It also gives guidelines about awarding experience in general. However, it does not provide absolute mathematical formulas for calculating experience in every situation.
Fun - players should be rewarded with experience points since they are making the game a good experience for all.
Survival - although having a character live from game session to game session is a reward in itself, a player should also receive experience points when his character survives.
Improvement - when a player thinks up a really good idea--solves a difficult puzzle, has his character talk the group out of a tight situation, or just finds a novel way around a problem--that's worth experience points
Variable Goals - In addition to the constant goals listed above, every game session will have some variable goals. Most of these come from the adventure. Some may come from the players' desires. Both types can be used to spur players on to more effective role-playing.
Story Goals - When the DM sets up a story, he decides how many experience points he thinks the player characters should get for accomplishing the big goal. This must be based on just how difficult the whole adventure will be. If the characters successfully accomplish this goal (which is by no means guaranteed), they will earn this bonus experience.
Group Awards - All characters earn experience for victory over their foes. A creature needn't die for the characters to score a victory. If the player characters ingeniously persuade the dragon to leave the village alone, this is as much--if not more--a victory as chopping the beast into dragonburgers!
Individual Experience Awards - divided into two categories. First are awards all player characters can earn, regardless of class. After these are the awards characters can earn according to their character group and class. This information is given on Tables 33 and 34.

Followed by charts, etc - for example Player role-plays his character well* = 100-200 (*This award can be greater if the player character sacrifices some game advantage to role-play his character. A noble fighter who refuses a substantial reward because it would not be in character qualifies.)

 Lance845 wrote:
The phb has rules for exp by cr based on monsters. Remember, traps mostly didnt have cr in 3rd.

3rd edition? DMG(3.5), page 70 onwards. All traps sorted by challenge rating (and also listed that way in the SRD files)
Page 40-41 for XP notes for non-combat encounters, roleplaying awards, story progression, puzzle solving.

 Lance845 wrote:
But again, we are discussing it through the lense of dnd. So how dnd presents it has its impact and its not good for new players. It starts them off on entirely the wrong foot.

I asked you earlier how you would feel if the PHB started with a chapter dedicated to the characters background and motivations, with the same class system after that point.
You replied with the murderhobo point - so with that hopefully addressed I point you back to the original question - if the problem you are seeing really the class system itself or its prominance as the first thing the player works with?

 Lance845 wrote:
When is the last time a new player sat down for dnd at your table and knew what town he was born in? What region/country he was from? What ties he had to a community?

I can honestly say that whether or not any of the hundreds of characters I have played over the decades had this information was entirely down to me, and not to the system.
Sometimes I figure out a background. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I do a bit.
Whether or not the game system in question has a class or free-form advancement has had no bearing on it at all.

This is just going to inevitably descend into the eternal if/then bucket of interactions with Lance about RPGs.

If not DnD - Highlight All Postitives, Downplay All Negatives

If DnD - Afford Absolutely Zero Flexibility, Make Wild Claims About What Does And Does Not Exist Within The System

You want me to go look at a White Wolf game - I'll use the only one Im familiar with and have the PDF for on my Drive, which is Changeling the Lost.

Step 1 of character creation: Core Concept.

This doesn't have a "step number" in dnd 5e, it's just the first few paragraphs, but otherwise it asks pretty similar questions. Basically, it asks you to come up with an overall idea for your character prior to ever choosing a race (in this case, half a race, because everyone in Changeling is half human, but same general idea)

Step 2: Attributes. So you allocate your skill points first in this system rather than allocating them after choosing race and class. OK.

Step 3: Skills. Basically we got a modernized version of DnD's skill checks, and by modernized I mean it's a modern setting, not that mechanically they function much differently because they don't. In DnD, my skill proficiencies are primarily driven by my race and class selection, and my background. In changeling I have absolute freedom, I can just say "OK I pick Firearms, Weaponry, Brawl, Stealth, and Survival for my chartered accountant" and I'm off to the murderhobo races.

Step 4: Specialties. Nothing I've picked so far has done anything to inform the reason my character is a part of this group

Step five I pick my race and my court, step six I pick my Merits which are like specialties but not, step seven I pick my various hit points and resources and such, and step eight, finally, the game asks me "so, uh, what's your guy like?"

I'm not being facetious there: "By this point, your character has been established pretty
well in terms of dots and rules. You know what he’s good at, what he’s not so great at and what he hasn’t a chance in Hell of accomplishing barring a miracle. But all of this is just one half of the character; much as an actor takes the character written on the page and infuses it with life, you must now decide how to bring the dots and points together to create a living, breathing character. What’s he like, physically as well as emotionally?"

I know a lot about my particular character's experiences in becoming a half-fairy, I know all about their magical abiliites, just how much fairy magic they've got going on, what their secret disguise face looks like and what their true monstery face looks like, I have a general idea of what skill checks they're gonna be good at, and I know what emotion they need to inspire to get glamor points and what court they have fealty to, but I know very little about why they're in a group of people acting and working together. And that's something you run into as a group trying to play this game immediately: Why are we all here? Why is this happy pixie fairy person who wants to inspire joy and comfort in humans around her palling around with the shadows-themed spooky detective who gets power from making people feel like they're being watched?

At a certain point though that can be OK: this isn't a game where your characters are necessarily supposed to be a well oiled team, you're a group of hopefully very distinct freaks who have to do something together and what that is is driven by the GM. You're supposed to be weird fairy monster people, and so you know the most about how you interact with the weird fairy monster world. if you set up a game of Changeling the Lost and then had the players try to RP in a high fantasy world where everything fairy related was out in the open and the characters had no reason to hide their identities or do stuff in secret, then you'd be wasting your fething time using this sytem over a different system designed to support that kind of a game.

DnD is a game about the players being wandering adventurers. Ultimately that's your job. By default, you're going to be roaming from place to place, encountering adventure and danger, and interacting with most locations as first time visitors rather than as people familiar with the areas. It's a setting designed to emulate a high fantasy adventure, and that's what it works for, so "how does your character do a fight" is ultimately pretty important.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
When is the last time a new player sat down for dnd at your table and knew what town he was born in? What region/country he was from? What ties he had to a community? When was the last time your brand new to rpgs player had any idea of how how that character got to where he was in session 0/1?

Literally all of them, every time, no matter what game system we were running. Do you let people sit down at your table WITHOUT knowing this stuff?

Changeling campaign: I was running this one, I let all players know they were going to be starting in a small town outside of pheonix Arizona with a fairly large population of changelings of various backgrounds and affiliations who want to get away from court politics and lead quiet lives, and also that they all work together as members of a sort of community town council (they didn't stay there long, but that's where they started). Everyone had a background for their character, and why they wanted to come to this small town to get away from excitement and settle down.

Masks campaign: We started in a mundane high school, so "why are you here" was obviously baked in. I had every character pick two other members of the group and come up with a reason why they hang out with that person to establish them as a group, and everyone had their family situation in mind (exchange student from a race of aliens who look like reverse mermaids with human bodies and fish heads who was instructed by her diplomat father to conceal her superhuman abilities to avoid freaking out the humans, rich boy who flunked out of a private school who gains ghost themed powers and starts wearing a mask so he can start a tiktok channel about doing ghost adventures, edgy teen who was raised by a pair of ultra-supportive straightlaced superhero dads who decided to decided to run away from home because she didn't have anything to rebel against, earnest orphan who was adopted as a Young Ward by a woman presenting herself as a dark brooding batman style superhero who then got arrested for super villainy and is being held at a facility that would be incredibly easy for her sidekick with her particular powers to break her out of.)

Quarantine Remote DnD campaign #1: We started super by the book with mines of phandelver, which I think comes with an immediate reason for you all to be there at the time. We had my mother in the camaign so she was a relative of the people who you're trying to find, and she'd hired the rest of us on. We all have backgrounds, towns we're from or at least areas, things we want to be doing, and ways in which we are and aren't as familiar with the various other members of the party.

Quarantine Remote DnD campaign #2: We all started in a scientific expedition to a newly discovered island, so we all came up with reasons were hired on to the expedition or in one case had a plan for how the expedition discovered us, as well as how well we knew eachother from the boat ride over. I was there as part of the team of academy scientists with a specialty in studying insects, one person was an attache from the royal army, one person was a ranger brought in with the cartography team to try and map out the geography, and one person was a miniature golem we found in the ruins in session 1. Most of us kept details from our backstories purposefully vague so that we could add to them later on with relatives, connections, areas we'd lived, exes, etc to keep our characters invested in the campaign.

The initial argument had nothing to do with D&D. It was the idea that class systems do not help new players.

As I think about this more, I have softened a bit. I think some sort of initial template, class, archetype, or background to start with that gives some initial benefits or factors is good. However, once play actually begins, I see Classes as a pigeon hole for players.

After all, my background is as a Corporate Executive, Efficiency expert, Small Business Owner, and Baker. Therefore, I might get some bonus skill points here and there, maybe a bonus to 1 attribute, and some unique starting equipment involving a rolling pin and computer with statistical analysis tools.

However, if I started fighting monsters and going on "adventures" today why would any of that impact how I get better at adventuring? Sure, it might give me some initial benefits.... but it would not shape my adventuring skills going forward that a level based class system does.

Instead, if I actually started going on adventures and killing monsters I would probably want to spend time getting better at driving, shooting, and long distance running! These would have very little to do with my "Business Guy" class. After all, I am an adventurer now!

 Easy E wrote:
Instead, if I actually started going on adventures and killing monsters I would probably want to spend time getting better at driving, shooting, and long distance running! These would have very little to do with my "Business Guy" class. After all, I am an adventurer now!

There aren't many games that lock you into a class, though long gaps between levels and unified xp (i.e. 3rd edition rather than 2nd edition dnd) does make it increasingly difficult to change the focus of a character.

I suppose that is not unwarranted as far as systems go in terms of it being more difficult for established characters to change course. There was a variation on class systems in a mech game called 'lancer' - while the class skills were replaced by parts licences each 'class' represented three levels of investment in a particular area: novice through to master. Opening up any given level of a class allowed you to use all of the options at that level but your character had an absolute total of how many options from all of their classes they could take at any given point.

Yeah, I feel that. Our Masks campaign definitely felt like it had a natural 'lifespan' because of the way that there just wasn't that much to the various classes, and we unlocked everything they could do and basically completed the story we were telling with the various characters after like 5 months of weekly play. Some of it comes down to intentionality - Masks doesn't feel like a system designed for your characters and campaign to last forever. Your characters are supposed to go on some adventures, learn some lessons, grow up, and move on from the scope of being awkward teen superheroes. It's a genre defined by tropes, and the classes help to guide you along playing out one of those tropes.

In a game where it's portraying a less trope-driven genre, I think classes can absolutely be more of a detriment and it's better to just use them as a start-up template.

Newbie DM here, running for some friends. What are some good ways to get through to people that, just because their (dnd5e) class doesn't have a feature, or they're not proficient in a skill, that they can still use it? Or get them to use features that they do have, that are useful, without outright telling them to use it in a situation?

For the example, I gave my party a little puzzle to get some extra treasure, and the party as a whole is handling things well. They're not stumped or anything, but only 3 of the 5 people are interacting. I wrote the puzzle to require no class features, spell slots, or limited resources to beat, with many flexible ways to get through it. I've got a paladin and Wild Magic barbarian who don't think they can do anything, and aren't really trying their skill checks to gather information, despite saying that there are things they can do.

Being new to this whole thing relatively speaking, I'm not sure what to do with the situation. I know there's plenty for them to do, using class features or not, but vaguely saying that they can doesn't seem to help. I don't want to just tell them what they can do. What would you/should I do in a situation like this?

 Thadin wrote:
Newbie DM here, running for some friends. What are some good ways to get through to people that, just because their (dnd5e) class doesn't have a feature, or they're not proficient in a skill, that they can still use it? Or get them to use features that they do have, that are useful, without outright telling them to use it in a situation?

For the example, I gave my party a little puzzle to get some extra treasure, and the party as a whole is handling things well. They're not stumped or anything, but only 3 of the 5 people are interacting. I wrote the puzzle to require no class features, spell slots, or limited resources to beat, with many flexible ways to get through it. I've got a paladin and Wild Magic barbarian who don't think they can do anything, and aren't really trying their skill checks to gather information, despite saying that there are things they can do.

Being new to this whole thing relatively speaking, I'm not sure what to do with the situation. I know there's plenty for them to do, using class features or not, but vaguely saying that they can doesn't seem to help. I don't want to just tell them what they can do. What would you/should I do in a situation like this?

I'm not currently GMing any of the campaigns I'm playing in, but the "PBTA Approach" to skills and abilities out of combat is something we've stuck with in DnD as well.

That's basically "You (the player) don't need to say the name of your ability. Tell the DM what you want to do, and the DM will tell you what ability to roll."

obviously, if you were trying to make a Nature Check which you have a +5 in, and your Dm just always defaults to asking you to roll Investigation when you're looking around for stuff, even if it's in a natural environment when Nature would make sense, then you can ask to roll Nature instead. But I've found this keeps things flowing more in terms of the players continuing to do roleplay.

.....I will say I don't enjoy straight up puzzles in an RPG setting very often. It takes someone REALLY skilled at crafting them for the situation to be "The players play their characters as their characters do what they would do to figure out a puzzle" and not "The players stop roleplaying and try to work together to solve a puzzle originally designed for fifth graders that's being verbally relayed to them, making it much harder to do"

all the iconic "Character solves a puzzle" scenes from movies that we remember, like Indiana Jones in Last Crusade, are good and memorable not because of how clever the puzzle is, but because of the character interacting with the puzzle. Frequently this involved that character making very obvious mistakes - like misspelling the latin name of god - for the audience to feel like Clever Lads and knowing something the character didn't know for a second.

I feel like I avoided the ambiguity well, because rather than a spoken-out puzzle that I can slip up on, I made a map using Dungeonfog, and made the clues for the puzzle built in to the visuals of the map, but also let players just roll skill checks, if they couldnt see anything, or just wanted to skill check. I will take in to consideration the comment about puzzle though. I'll have to ask my party how they felt about it afterwards.

The PBTA Approach, is something I do too. They want to do something, I determine what they roll after they say what they want. Or, they can just tell me what they want to roll, and I provide the info based off of the skill they chose.

My biggest hurdle I feel, is helping the players realize just what their character can do, and that they're not so limited, without straight-up telling them, in the moment, what things they can try or use. I intend to go over all of this with them, after the puzzle is cleared, and my advice-seeking is mostly geared towards that. Helping players realize what they can do. Just saying "You can try anything, or ask me anything, don't feel limited by that" hasn't got the point across, I feel.

Yup, that's always a challenge. Particularly for those characters that don't have 'special stuff' written out on their sheet or spell list.

I can't think of an RPG I've ever played in where we didn't run into the problem of having players who are more engaged and interested and tuned in than others, and having the GM trying to straddle the line between not making the entire campaign for the people who turn up and get into it, and also not trying to throw stuff at the unengaged players who just aren't into it.

Even in my current friends-campaign which is far and away the single best RPG experience I've ever played in, we have a player who in any given session will be having either a Bad Day or a Good Day. On a Good Day, he provides a fun, fairly silly but not overly obnoxious character who's engaged with what the party is doing but isn't really as concerned with his own background or doing things specifically for his character, and on a Bad Day he's just not participating unless prompted.

At the end of the day, it's OK to put more effort into the players who put more effort in back for you.

Try actively asking them now and then what they are doing while the other characters go about their investigations, and maybe highlight that it doesn't necessarily have to be to do with the solution. just what the actual character is doing at that moment. In other words, they're,probably not just standing motionless staring into space, so,prod the player for some specifics. even if they go for something unrelated. With a little DM magic, you can tie that unrelated activity into the encounter and bring it back to the group as a whole.

For example, you ask the Barbarian what they're doing and they say they're just restlessly pacing, waiting for a fight. Turn that passive action into an active,one by asking for a perception check, and based on the roll, there's new information for the group as a whole. Maybe they do really well, and notice recent tracks or hear nearby motion that might even hint at the next encounter. They might roll badly and with the classic DM trick of stressing that they definitely feel safe for the moment, the reverse psychology of a low roll in fact ups the tension for the party as a whole, adding new impetus to solve the puzzle.

Then there's always the Mines of Moria random observation trick. Gandalf is trying to solve the riddle on the door, while Frodo is mostly just sitting there. But in a flash of inspiration, he asks Gandalf what the Elvish for 'friend' is and that gives Gandalf the missing piece of the puzzle, pulling him back from overthinking it. So to put it in DnD terms, the party are ultimately making no headway and starting to go round in the dreaded overthinking loop, so you pull the focus off them and onto the inactive players, with the aim of turning their actions into that little nudge back on track. You ask the Paladin what they're up to, and they say they're taking a quiet moment to pray while the party isn't in imminent danger. You narrate that while doing this, some chance thing leads them to notice an undiscovered element of the puzzle, prompting the rest of the party to change tack. If they're lighting a candle to pray, and the party have missed a hidden door, have a draft from that door extinguish the candle by chance, making sure to highlight where this happened. Even if the Paladin then doesn't follow up on that, someone else might, and the party is one step closer to success.

Ultimately, though, the moment a player realises the true scope of what they can do is not one you can force, it's something that'll click for each one in their own time. Last year I introduced some new players with no TTRPG experience (or gaming experience at all) to the game, and while they were all getting along fairly well from the start, the moment that sticks out is when, about 4 sessions in, one player picked up on an offhand comment I made in describing a tavern common room; she ended up using her newly acquired invisibility spell to sneak into a secret room behind the bar, only for the local crime lord to show up mid-investigation and add some real stakes and tension to the moment. It then clicked for that player that she had made that moment of tension and drama happen just by following up a throwaway background description, and I could tell them that she'd just figured out the true beauty of an RPG and how player agency works. Which is a long winded way of saying that they'll definitely get there eventually, and players being a little more passive until that 'aha' moment doesn't mean you or they are doing anything wrong at all.

 Paradigm wrote:
Try actively asking them now and then what they are doing while the other characters go about their investigations, and maybe highlight that it doesn't necessarily have to be to do with the solution. just what the actual character is doing at that moment. In other words, they're,probably not just standing motionless staring into space, so,prod the player for some specifics. even if they go for something unrelated. With a little DM magic, you can tie that unrelated activity into the encounter and bring it back to the group as a whole.

This is the way. As a DM, you always need to keep the spotlight of the scene moving from character to character, even if some of them are not really "doing" anything relevant at the moment. It is this moving spotlight that keeps players engaged and away from their electronic devices. Think of a movie or TV show, they are always cutting to different characters to build story, suspense, and help the audience understand the characters better.

Really skilled players will and can move the spotlight around for you too. However, I am guessing your players are not that experienced in RPG too.

A bit of an aside, but may help people choose to shift the spotlight around is I encourage RPG, "cool stuff", and paying attention at the table is by putting a pile of checkers in the center of the table. Whenever a player does something really cool, clever, or in character ANY ONE at the table can grab a checker and give it to them. This they can then turn in for Advantage/re-rolls (depends on system) OR save it for extra XP at the end of the game. Players are surprisingly stingy with handing these things out and sometimes you have to grease the wheels by handing out the first one.

Here's a question: Does anyone else really hate interacting with players about rules outside of the game? I find nothing is burning me out faster these days than having to discuss rules or systems with players outside of game. I just hate it, it sucks all the fun out of things for me. Every week there is some small debate about some aspect of the rules or systems we are using, some kind of "homework" I have to do clarifying things for the players or whatever.

Part of this is because of the half assed design of 5e where so much stuff is left to the DM to sort out. But I find I have absolutely zero interest in doing that these days. Just none. I also don't want to discuss character backstory or come up with tailored plots. I've made a huge world to interact with and a bunch of cool NPCs and I just want to meet up once a week and watch the players romp around inside that world and have fun. I don't have any interest in discussing spell options or whatever else outside of game.

And I've made that clear so many times to my group but this gak continues to crop up. I stopped a previous campaign because of this and specifically designed this campaign to minimise that sort of stuff, but it's still ongoing. Dunno, very frustrated. Definitely down to some personalities in the group but they are work colleagues and it is difficult to kick anyone out for various reasons.

Do you guys feel like that sort of thing is just the DM's "job"? Cos I'm here to have fun. I don't want a second job, I can barely handle my real one.

I rather enjoy rules discussions out of game/character both as a player and GM. As long as the GM isn't going completely wacko with a decision and stays consistent about its application both between players and npcs (no "one rule for me and another for thee" situation), I'm usually fine with it as long as he or she gives me the opportunity to change my character if my build is based around the typical/common application of the rule.

I used to, now it is like I have developed an allergic reaction to it or something. I just want to get on with the gameplay, I don't want to discuss the system behind it.

The first bunch of issues came with magic items, which I think are a core part of dungeons and dragons but the designers of 5e don't seem to agree. My first campaign went off he rails because of endless discussions about magic items and hunts for magic item shops and all this stuff. So my new campaign has no magic item shops at all, and I made up a system whereby every item is autosold on return to town, but you can buy the item back from the group, essentially getting it at half price. I also use gold as XP at the moment, so players have a nice (in my view) strategic choice between levelling at a faster rate or getting cool gear. The adventure I am running is a huge wizards conclave full of ruined towers, and it is a treasure hunt so I wanted to incentivise treasure hunting. There are rival gangs of NPC treasure hunters to content with as well as various factions in the ruins themselves, and the PCs can choose how to approach it however they like. There is loads of treasure and more items than people could ever need in this location, so it's not like they're short on cool stuff or money to spend.

I thought I had developed a fairly airtight system but problems have developed with players going into debt with other players or wanting to "hold" items until they get to town to be sold, so there is a constant running discussion about all this stuff and I am just completely turned off by it. You can say it is my own fault for not running things by the book, and perhaps that is so, but I thought it was a fairly easy system and I made a google sheet for the party that automatically broke the treasure value into shares for everyone allowing them to keep track of what they had received and so on. The latest wrangle is what about spellbooks and is it unfair and blah blah.

Urgh. Makes me just want to quit. Make this massive, fully mapped out with vision blocking adventure locale full of factions and rival adventurers to play around in and people basically want to argue over an excel spreadsheet.

To be fair, it's entirely possible that the reason they're quibbling is that they just find that system to run up against their enjoyment of the game. But given the DM/player dynamic, they'd rather just try and get the most out of the system than outright challenge you on its existence. I see what you're going for with a shared loot/XP/gold progression system, but equally I can see that the players just might not enjoy it, as it's a very big change from the standard DnD format of each of these things contributing in their own way.

From an outside perspective, it certainly does sound like something very unusual/unexpected to anyone with prior DnD experience, and I can definitely see it being unfun if they've not all agreed to such a mechanic beforehand. I know that if I were playing a game and discovered an awesome magic item, I'd be very sceptical of the DM that says that rather than using it, I have to essentially wait until the next adventure and then buy back the very thing I found, discount or no. Unless there's some built-in lore reason for such a delay (Artefacts are often cursed or dangerous, proper Identification of magic items is therefore essential, and the 'cost' represents getting that service performed, for instance), I'd say it's not out of order for the Paladin that finds a Holy Avenger to want to immediately start swinging it around, and get frustrated when they're told they can't based purely on a bespoke rework of the game's progression rules.

To some extent, you've got to cater to your players and if they're not enjoying an element of the game, maybe it just shouldn't be there. Which isn't to say the DM has no right to have as much fun as the players, but the ways to play DnD or any RPG vary so much that there always has to be some compromise. A game with a complex living economy that on paper is a work of genius simulation will be wasted on a party that just want to fight the biggest, baddest monsters, and a game where even two goblins and a dire wolf is a life-or-death tactical exercise is going to be lost on players that are after a personal narrative journey and see combat as an excuse to Do Cool Stuff rather than a wargame in miniature. Or in your case, a system designed to stop players endlessly chasing magic items as their own reward is clashing with the fact that they just enjoy having magic items as an element of their fun. I hope I'm not overstepping here and certainly it's not a criticism of you as a DM, but it does sound like they're trying to get around this system because in a perfect world, they just don't want it to be there in the first place.


More generally, I do find rules discussion out of game tedious, but it does only happen rarely with my group. Generally, when a strange interaction of rules comes up we just make a ruling in the moment (led by the DM) and from then on, that's the rule. We've only very rarely had a dispute last longer than that one decision, as a) we accept that whoever's running gets the final say and b) we're collectively more interested in keeping the game flowing than doing it 'right; (we already have so many bespoke magic items and such that even perfectly written rules would cause the odd weird interaction, so we generally just go on whatever's coolest and move on).

As for the 'effort' of character backstories and tailored plots, I honestly can't imagine running or playing a game without those elements. Again, each to their own, but for me that's what DnD is, on both sides of the screen. Whether it's creating a campaign narrative as DM or a single character as a player, it's a major creative outlet for me and without it, I might as well just go back to playing Warhammer or chess. And for a player to want to ramble about their backstory to me is demonstrative of a level of engagement in and respect of my game that it's only fair I reciprocate, and hearing just how much thought goes into that is a genuine privilege.

Thanks for the thoughtful and well reason response mate, I always enjoy your posts.

Just to clarify, the waiting til they sell the item thing was invented by the players. It is not something I stipulate. In my general experience, players just divvy the item up to whoever would be best at using it. But my group has a lot of very quiet people in it and one guy was just hogging all the magic items to a crazy extent, so they clubbed together an instituted this to try and curtail his behaviour. He also hogged items (and tried to control what items others had) in my previous game. So he's obviously a problem player, and normally I would kick him. Unfortunately due to the dynamics in play that is not really possible in this case (for reasons that are not worth getting into).

As to gold for XP in general, it's actually a very old rule that is part of D&D since the start. But it is unusual these days for sure. Most of my players have told me they like it because it helps to control this and makes it free of conflict, it's mostly one or two players whining against it all the time. So yeah it definitely impedes their fun but it enhances the fun of other people at the table (and they don't care about the whining because they don't have to engage). I think gold for XP is interesting. A lot of people don't use XP and assign it whenever they feel like it. That was how I did it for probably my first 12 years of playing. Then I decided I would like groups with mixed levels in them for a more interesting group dynamic, and was running more West Marches style games, so I gave XP for exploration and finding secrets. Other people give XP for achieving goals. These are incentive methods - the XP for goals basically rewards you for interacting with the story. Some people give XP for killing monsters, which incentivizes monster killing. My current game is based around the idea of adventurers as treasure hunters exploring ancient ruins. So to incentivise treasure hunting I wanted to try I out gold as XP. This encourages smart solutions with regard to solving problems and engaging with the world, and puts the acquisition of XP firmly in the control of the players. In effect, they decide what risks to take to get gold, and they decide when they level up, when they get items, and so on. Maximum agency for the players. I do not make up gold on the fly, the entire (massive) adventure location is stocked with treasure already, so it is something they can plan around and strategise for.

I don't really agree that you always have to compromise for player fun though. I did that for a long time and ended up with pretty severe burnout. Now I protect my fun a bit more fiercely. I'm not forcing anyone to play with me and if they don't like it it's fine if they stop. I may stop running for this group because the issues seem fairly difficult to solve and I have tried several times to do so (including directly telling the players about this stuff very bluntly).

I'm not worried about you criticising me as a DM. I've been doing this for nearly 20 years, I know I am very good at it. I am not as good as usual at the moment because I am just tired out in my life in general, but I'm still good. I have just developed a bit of a different style over time that is not what modern D&D is quite so much.

As to backstory, I think the real story is what we do in play. I like motivation, I like character, but I'm not interested in writing and interweaving five different stories into one cohesive narrative any more. I did that for years. Now, what you were before is not as important as what you are doing now. Who is showing up to the table, what are they doing, and why are they doing it? I give really high agency to my players within the world and allow them to chart their own path completely, and I put a lot of work into ensuring the world has a high level of fidelity and a sense of realism when they do it. In effect I try to simulate a fantasy world and let them immerse themselves in it rather than writing a fantasy story and letting them play through it, if you follow me. We get a cool story out of it, but that's what happens at the table and is often unexpected for all of us.

All of that said, you are probably right. The player (and kinda one other player) doesn't like the system and is bucking against it for that reason. He's been a problem for a long while. That is the real issue, my fatigue in dealing with the rules is really just fatigue from dealing with this person.

Thanks. I hope my long answer wasn't too boring. You helped me out here!

Fair enough, if the players are on board for the most part then most of what I said is moot, you just hear so many horror stories of games falling apart due to the DM and players just not being on the same page that I figured it was worth raising. And in my experience it can sometimes be hard to see that from the DM perspective if none of the players will actually speak up about it. (I'm lucky in that my brother will happily call me out when my games get too convoluted or self-indulgent and he feels the players could be getting more out of certain aspects )

If it's a single player that's the issue, then I think it really does need to be a dialogue not about the game but about the attitude to it. Even if you can't kick them altogether, a frank conversation about how it's affecting you and/or the other players might be inevitable, and in my experience it's better to do that sooner than later, especially if you're actively losing inspiration for the game because of it. I was in that situation a couple of years ago, where I'd walk away from perfectly good sessions pissed at a handful of things one player would consistently do that just didn't tally with what the rest of us were playing for, and I probably left that conversation way too late until we got to a complete gakshow of a session and the whole campaign fell apart for the better part of a year. It's since recovered, without that particular player, but I didn't realise until after we resumed how much I was starting to hate running the game because of that mismatch in attitudes. So yeah, lots of sympathy there, it's never pleasant and all too necessary at times.

Do you know if the other players are having the same frustrations with this one player? If they are, that definitely gives you a bit more of a chance to bring it up, as it then becomes a group issue rather than something that could just be seen as the DM saying 'my way or the highway' (whether that's the intent or not).

A slight tangent, but I really do think future DMGs need a bit of an expanded section of the out-of-game social side of actually maintaining a group, how to approach dealing with problematic players and such. There's all the advice in the world out there on how to structure an adventure or hack a monster statblock, but a dearth of genuinely good advice on dealing with the far messier side of things. The move towards tools for making everyone feel comfortable at the table is a good start, but a chapter on the day-to-day of holding a campaign together and resolving these conflicts wouldn't go amiss.

As for compromising, I certainly don't mean the DM should just cater to the players, and I agree protecting your fun is very important. I more mean it's a give-and-take rather than a meet-in-the-middle situation. For instance, one of my players ran a campaign for the group last year that was, on paper, a tactical survival game with a high level of danger, resource management, troops to command and all that jazz. Ordinarily, I'd find that setup pretty damn dull, but because he also put in some really great NPCs I could spend time interacting with it didn't drag at all and I really enjoyed it. So did the more tactically-minded player who loved getting the nitty-gritty of tactical battle that tends to go out the window in favour of action movie heroics in our usual game.. Of course, this can end up with the DM spread way too thin trying to please everyone (and themselves), especially in larger groups, but it's something I always try to keep in mind. Though again, if your players are on the same page aside from that one exception, then then you're doing it right!

Thanks for the history lesson on the gold-to-XP stuff, I'd honestly never come across it before (as a 5e newcomer who tried running an XP-based game for about 3 weeks before getting bored of the maths and switching to milestone). Doesn't really sound like something I'd enjoy, but it does seem like a very well though out update of the system and if the players are (mostly) on board then you can't say fairer than that!

Thanks. Milestone is the most popular way to distribute levels for a reason. It fits the style most people enjoy the best (a storytelling style). I've been messing around with other XP systems because I am interested in how the incentives impact the game aspect of the whole thing. The absolute worst I think is monster XP only. I am actually playing in a game that has that right now, and it is only because everyone playing is pretty experienced and likes to play fully in character that it is not creating weird situations.

As to the player, I've actually had several blunt conversations with him. He's just not really able to stop himself with these behaviours I think. Not a bad person, but he has some difficulties. Because of other factors, I don't really want to boot him. Other players get a bit annoyed but I think it mostly impacts me. I'm a people pleaser and his personality type is just kind of endlessly discontented, and that drives me crazy because I feel like I constantly have to address his unhappiness and he is always nagging on at me about this or that.

Ah well. We're both now middle aged men so we gotta sack it up. But it really frustrates me, especially when my patience is lower for other reasons.

I kinda feel like "the social monster" is the highest CR monster in D&D. It is definitely responsible for more campaign endings than any dragon or lich!

Tarrasque bard confirmed!

Idea for a character;

Goblin Rider.

Start as a Ranger, reach level 3 and go beast master to get pet. Then multiclass Fighter and go Cavalier. Use your pet as a mount and ride into battle gloriously!

 Thadin wrote:

My biggest hurdle I feel, is helping the players realize just what their character can do, and that they're not so limited, without straight-up telling them, in the moment, what things they can try or use. I intend to go over all of this with them, after the puzzle is cleared, and my advice-seeking is mostly geared towards that. Helping players realize what they can do. Just saying "You can try anything, or ask me anything, don't feel limited by that" hasn't got the point across, I feel.

I hate to sound like I am pitching a different system to you, but this is something GUMSHOE addresses by design and it does have a supplement for Pathfinder called Lorefinder that should be readily convertible to D&D. The premise is investigative skills auto succeed at finding core clues that advance the story, all you have to do is ask. Bonus clues require a point spend or a skill check. The system's advice for players not thinking to use a skill is, in short, to keep a list of characters and their skill and inform of what they found based on skill rank and spotlight sharing. For example, Character X as you have Knowledge ABC you notice the following clue... This teaches the player how to use their skills, and makes the player character relevant.

 Da Boss wrote:
Part of this is because of the half assed design of 5e where so much stuff is left to the DM to sort out. But I find I have absolutely zero interest in doing that these days. Just none. I also don't want to discuss character backstory or come up with tailored plots. I've made a huge world to interact with and a bunch of cool NPCs and I just want to meet up once a week and watch the players romp around inside that world and have fun. I don't have any interest in discussing spell options or whatever else outside of game.

The best "answer" to backstories and plots I have seen was in Ashen Stars (GUMSHOES). Players submit their own subplots that are related to the overall theme, and these may become the A or B plot of a session or episode as needed.

 Da Boss wrote:
I don't really agree that you always have to compromise for player fun though. I did that for a long time and ended up with pretty severe burnout. Now I protect my fun a bit more fiercely. I'm not forcing anyone to play with me and if they don't like it it's fine if they stop. I may stop running for this group because the issues seem fairly difficult to solve and I have tried several times to do so (including directly telling the players about this stuff very bluntly).

The GM is also a player, perhaps the most important player if the game cannot be run without a such a moderator. Thus, the compromise cuts both ways. The players ought to be as committed to the GMs enjoyment of the game as the GM is to theirs.

 LordofHats wrote:
Idea for a character;
Goblin Rider.

A little disappointed that it's not a character riding a goblin... :p

 LordofHats wrote:
Idea for a character;

Goblin Rider.

Start as a Ranger, reach level 3 and go beast master to get pet. Then multiclass Fighter and go Cavalier. Use your pet as a mount and ride into battle gloriously!

It's a fine idea but mechanically do you get enough of a benefit from Cavalier to justify the multiclassing? Admittedly I only looked at the first couple of levels of it but honestly I'd personally rather keep leveling up the ranger beast master pet mount.

Mechanically justifying it, idk. The idea is meant to be fun not optimal (in general, multi-classing is almost never optimal). But Fighters are fairly front loaded. A 2/3 level dip into fighter is probably one of the better multi-class options. Realistically, the better option is to just take the Mounted Combatant feat and be done with it. But I want my flavor dangit!

Really main downside to it is that it's a bit MAD and I'd need to prioritize ranger levels to keep the mounts stats up (it also delays extra attack at level 5 which is important for martial classes). A 3 level dip in cavalier though gives Action Surge, an extra Fighting Style, Born to the Saddle, Unwavering Mark, Second Wind and an extra proficiency plus heavy armor. All of those are glorious for the style of play the character would use.

The real question is do I make him a mounted archer, a lancer (Goblins can disengage as a bonus action, so hit and run is viable combined with Unwavering Mark), or a brawler with the pet as an extra attack and source of constant advantage. Under the new rules in Tasha's, the beast will automatically take the dodge action and can use it's full movement so it will be fairly survivable. My current Steel Defender is rather tanky for it's stat block and uses the same basic ruleset.

It would also be nice if I could get my hands on some crafted armor for the pet since their AC is still on the lower end.

Then comes the question of what mount to take? I has to be medium to serve as a mount. A boar has nice looking stat block for task and it seems fitting for a Goblin to have a boar as a mount.Giant Badgers have multi-attack which is very nice for offense. Giant Snakes have weren't that bad under the old beastmaster rules if you cheesed them. A giant Spider would be even more fitting than a boar and comes with a lot of nice mobility perks. A mounted archer on a giant spider could do a lot of silly stuff since the thing has innate access to spider climb. Nothing says gtfo like a goblin on a spider shooting arrows from the ceiling XD Hyenas and Wolves have pack tactics, which is a surprisingly nice perk for a more melee oriented build.

Of course, there's also the cheesy option of going full cavalier and using another PC as a mount XD

Fair enough. I'd suggest though since you mentioned getting heavy armor that you start in fighter instead of "dipping" into it which would imply multiclassing into it later. Multiclassing into fighter doesn't give you heavy armor proficiency iirc.

Goblin Wolf Rider or Spider Rider seems appropriate

Small rangers riding their companions has been a thing forever and it's a lot of fun. I played a goblin ranger that rode his wolf companion back in 3e.

@Da Boss-

Quibbling about the rules is half of the fun of D&D for a lot of people. It is all about the "meta" and how to maximize the rules. No different than a lot of games that way.

However, I am much more like you and am sick of that. That is why I do not DM D&D anymore. I still will DM, just not that system.

As for personalized Plots and character back stories, I am MUCH more sympathetic too. From a players perspective, all they have is their character and the fact they are even interested in this means they do not WANT to be just Murder Hobos.

Like you I create a world with a bunch of hooks. If they start tying it into their own back story and personal plots, that is fine by me; but I make them do the heavy lifting.

For example, a character wants to discover their long lost father? Great, what are you doing "in-game" to do it? What clues are you looking for? Who are you asking, where are you going to do it? Why are your companions coming along? I heavily improvise everything though so this actually helps my games run better though as the characters are propelling the action rather than me.

Likewise, I don't mind if they have backstories but the expectation that I will do the legwork for them I am resistant to.

 Da Boss wrote:
Likewise, I don't mind if they have backstories but the expectation that I will do the legwork for them I am resistant to.

I understand the collaborative experience as the player cannot expect substantially more effort from the GM then the players put it. Too often a backstory only locks a character's growth down by having completed some or all of it before starting game or has poor relevance if not outright conflicting with the campaign. However, having character goals and ambitions is important to having an arc to give the give the character more life than a recurring extra. This comes from the character's back story but must fit the theme and scope of the game or it becomes a distraction. The best wisdom I have found on that subject is as follows

Either before play begins, or after the first session, create a personal arc for your character, as seen at the end of this section. This is a series of brief suggestions your GM will use to weave an ongoing subplot around your character.

Your personal arc is a narrative hook around which your GM will weave occasional subplots. Over the course of a series, these stories will connect up to deepen, develop, and possibly change your character. Alternately, they might challenge PCs in ways that threaten to change them for the worse. When they overcome these challenges, they prove their heroism by remaining true to their essential selves.

Most contemporary procedural shows use personal arcs to fill out their characters over time. You know the formula even if you haven’t thought about it as such. While the full ensemble of characters tackles the problem of the week, the issues raised by that problem take on a particular relevance for one or two of the cast members. The personal story adds emotional impact to the problem of the week. Over time, as new personal stories build on past ones, the viewer sees a broader narrative linking the episodes.

Format your arc as follows:
1. A brief sentence or phrase expressing your character’s most important goal.
2. (Optional) A second sentence showing how this goal relates to the character's internal conflict between altruism and selfishness.
3. A brief sentence or phrase suggesting an introductory subplot featuring your character.
4. Another subplot that builds on the idea introduced in the previous one.
5. A third subplot concept, again building on the others.

As GM brings your ideas into play, you’ll periodically update your arc list to replace them.

For each of your three subplots, introduce an idea that is specific enough for the GM to latch onto, yet vague and open enough that you’ll still be surprised by the way it unfolds. If you're having trouble writing them, find a set of TV listings. Check out the one or two sentence episode summaries for a show you follow. See how they lay out the premise of the episode without revealing its conclusion. That’s what you’re shooting for here: the basic situation that brings your goal into play and gets your personal story rolling. How it ends up is up to you, the other players and the GM, as you make the story in the course of play.

Personal arcs are a vehicle for you to transmit story requests to your GM. They don’t allow you to circumvent the rules to get more stuff for your character or ship or to secure other
unearned benefits, If you try, you may discover that you have a sympathetic GM. This GM will work with you to remove your attempt to hose the rules, and find an equivalent idea that does fit the spirit of the concept.

On the other hand, you might find that you have a cunning GM, who gives you what you want, and then uses it as a way of getting you into trouble. In the end, you’ll face this interesting trouble, only to have the advantage you were looking for yanked away from you.

For that style of game (which I am totally cool with and I don't think it is bad) I think that is a great way to organise things. Having some structure to it helps keep the players on track.

But I dunno. Maybe I'll be up for it again in a few years but at the moment I'm more in the mood for people who want treasure and adventure, not people who need me to include NPCs they've invented or make the world revolve around them to some extent. Especially since I've found it really difficult to get my play groups to understand that D&D is a group game, and making your character in isolation like you are writing a short story about them is a ticket to an unsatisfying game. It's much more important to have a backstory for the GROUP than it is for any individual member. But most D&D games end up with a disparate group of misfits even if you try to force them to come up with a group backstory. And then each misfit has their own personal goal and quest, I mean at that point why not just go write some fiction about that character? None of that is going to help the game flow in a constructive way and it's all extra mental load for the DM. (I'm really exhausted for a bunch of reasons in my actual normal life so this is definitely colouring my perceptions here. I just want a straightforward game at the moment, just hanging out kicking in doors and beating up monsters.)

Anyway, thanks for that reply. Like I said above, I think the structure you provided is really good and I might use it if I ever perk up and want to have individual plots again.

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this, my newly finished tile sets:


And here's a wizards tower from an adventure module:






The small 2x2s are sculpted in milliput and then cast in resin with magnets inside so they "click" together. The magnets are spherical and so they can always rotate to find their polarity and you don't have to worry about alignment. The bigger tiles are foamboard with magnets in the bottom layer and texture drawn on with a pen and a ball of tinfoil on the top. Water tiles are blank resin or foamboard with acrylic caulk on top over a watery paint scheme. Furniture is mostly mantic, some D&D stuff.

That's really cool, must taken you ages to put together but well worth it! I really need to kick my 3d printer into terrain mode at some point soon and churn out some DnD scatter elements, even though I use map books the 3d elements I did make added a lot.

As for the idea of backstory, I honestly think having one is a dozen times more important for the player than the DM. Sure, as a DM it's nice when a player has put in enough effort to present me a few pages that tie their character into my setting and maybe give me some plot hooks down the line, but really, the reason I consider them necessary at my table, however simple or brief they are, is that character need to know who they are.

I know a lot of people take the route that starting an adventure is what makes your character, but I look at it like this: a 'normal' person doesn't decide that they're going to spend their life chopping up monsters and raiding tombs for a living. Simply by being an adventurer, you're playing someone who sit outside of a 'regular' life and as such, I feel you need to know why that is. There has to be an inciting incident somewhere, and while that can be session 1 of a campaign, it's a hell of a contrivance for the DM to set up why Billy the Sorcerer discovers he can do magic at the exact same time Sally the Barbarian figures out she really likes hitting things with a battleaxe, and Rod the Rogue develops a penchant for stealing things. Session 1 is obviously the inciting incident for this story and the group as a whole, but presumably to have been level 1 in something means at least some effort or lived experience has led you to that point.

Player characters aren't born when they take their first level in a class, and however simple or mundane or dramatic it is, they've lived a life before that moment they decide to solve their problems with spells and swords. Those experiences might have no bearing on the plot whatsoever, but what they will do is inform the way that person acts and sees the world. Even as simple a difference as an urban versus a rural childhood will have a character perceiving things differently, let alone all the usual wackiness of a PC backstory.

A backstory is an anchor, something to which your character's later actions are inevitably tied to, even if it's far removed from the actual plot unfolding. The trick to good roleplaying is being able to quickly and consistently work out how your character responds to the situations around them, and a backstory is your toolkit for that, especially early on. The details you have in your head about where they came from, how they were raised, what they did before the crazy life of an adventurer are the fulcrum around which their actions in the moment are going to pivot.

So ultimately, as a DM I'm every bit as fine with 'I was raised on a farm, and nothing at all weird happened, and I'm just going to wander around the world to get away from it for a bit' as I am with what people generally think of when you say backstory, that almost inevitably involves a lost sibling or an absent parent or a vague prophecy or a shadowy cult or whatever other clichés you want to throw in (sidebar: clichés are great storytelling tools, I'll never knock them). I don't ask that you hand me a novella or a day by day account of your character's tortured childhood, but I do ask that when I say 'who is this character?', you can answer with more than just a gender, race, class, level.

Short version: Steve Rogers can stand alone against Thanos' army because he's a kid from Brooklyn who doesn't like bullies. He was that person long before took 20 levels in Fighter and got a +3 shield.


The caveat to all of this is obviously that for my game, these things really do matter. For a loot-hunting, monster-slaying affair I definitely concede it's a little less important, though even in such a campaign as a player I'd still need some level of background to know who I was playing.

The game comes with backgrounds as part of character creation. So I think it's fine to have just class, race, background. My Cleric of Tyr is a Noble, and I decided she has disowned her family because they tried to use her position in the church to get out of difficulty.
That is a very short backstory, but I know who Iudex Camilla is. She's stern and unforgiving, the kind of person so dedicated to the idea of justice that she would disown her own family. But she's still a privileged noble at heart who doesn't really enjoy the rigors of adventuring and secretly yearns for the days of having servants and being clean all the time.
Why is she adventuring? To destroy the Cult of Orcus of course!

I think "I am this class, I used to be this, I became an adventurer because of [reason]" can lead to perfectly satisfying characters. There is no reason for multiple pages of bad fiction, it has no relevance for the game unless you are expecting your DM to read and include it all, which is generally my experience (people constantly guessing that this or that thing is connected to their backstory when it really isn't, because their backstory is not part of the campaign).

This may seem really harsh, but I think the trend toward long backstories is a bit...selfish? Like it excludes the other players from that part of your character. I think a cool group backstory is much more useful at the table to provide a context for the relationships in the group. The foibles of your PC are less important than how and why they are working with these other PCs.

If you give me a 4 page backstory I'm probably going to give it back and ask for a shorter summary, unless you're a great writer. And anything with hidden prophecies and secret royalty is probably not going to be a goer in my campaign unless we discussed it beforehand. Part of this is me not wanting to set up unrealistic expectations for the players - I am probably not going to follow through on that stuff, so you may as well leave it out.

I also think that you can have great roleplaying and character moments in loot hunting and monster slaying games. I'm playing in a game at the moment which is us tackling a megadungeon, and I'd say the quality of the roleplaying is equally good as any plot heavy intrigue game I've played. It might be because all of the players are DMs themselves though.

Funny you mention the 'secret royalty' thing, I've been waiting for a player to come to me with something like that for ages, because the way I see it, that's free plot! Admittedly if you're running a pre-written adventure it's just a burden, but for the kind of game I run I'm perfectly happy for a player to have a Chosen One destiny or an Aragorn-esque path to royalty. At a bare minimum, that character is then chasing something and will actively follow that instead of bumming around taking merc jobs or murderhoboing. You can definitely argue it hogs the spotlight, but I'm lucky enough to have a group that is a) small, so everyone gets plenty of time, and b) happy to have a given character be the focal point of an arc or even a campaign.

I rarely do group backstory, simply because one of the things I enjoy most about early campaign play is watching the players figure out how their various PCs fit together (or don't! I've had lots of fun with fractious early-game dynamics, but then I'm the kind of DM that'll happily let PCs draw swords on one another). It's certainly a useful tool, a campaign I played in last year used it to good effect placing us all as captains in the same army, but that was a level 10 start so we had to have had careers before the game started or it'd be very jarring, and that campaign was very linear with no real room or desire to go chasing personal plots because we had a murderous dragon to track across one of the Nine Hells... In that scenario, the shared origin was necessary, as there was no prior campaign and we were thrown right into the action, but for low-level starts I really do enjoy the 'misfit strangers coming together' angle.

I do agree that if a few lines and the Background trait is all you need to have an idea of who your character is then that's perfectly sufficient, and I'd not quibble with a player that brought that to me. Where I'd draw the line is someone saying that they don't know who their character is, only what they can do, and they'll figure out the personality while playing. That to me is just asking for inconsistency, erratic characterisation and personality retconning unless the player is very good (which, to be fair, I'd trust most of my regulars to be at this point, but fortunately for me they're mostly backstory fans as well). Ultimately, my rule is 'as much or as little as you need to know who your character is'. That can be a sentence or a short story, bullet points or prose fiction, and yes, good or bad in terms of quality. Writing for DnD is not writing a novel or a screenplay, and doesn't have to be nearly as good, just good enough that it gives a bunch of friends something to have fun with. I'll take 20 pages of bad fanfic, in-jokes and pop culture references over just a character sheet or a PC built solely for a mechanical gimmick.


I think I'd disagree with the 'selfish' angle for the most part, as when playing I'm still spectating the stories of my fellow players and a big reveal for them is something I can still very much enjoy, especially if that leads into further narrative impetus or the DM has worked elements of the A plot or other character's B plots into that arc. Again, depends on the campaign and the group, and it can definitely be taken too far (I've been in games where one player and the DM were cooking up so much between them that the rest of us had no chance to do anything of any value, but that's an extreme case and a bad game), but for the most part, for my tastes I'm happy to tag along for someone else's story if that story is good enough. The nature of a party as a group with at least mostly aligned goals and shared interests means that if player A needs to go and resolve some Haunted Past elements, B and C will have at least some reason to go along with it, if only to further the ends of the party. And if it takes the group too far off track, boom, you've got conflict, and conflict is drama, and that's what I'm here for.

You can certainly have good roleplaying without extensive backstory, my point was more about challenging the idea that backstory is for players to give to DMs in exchange for plot tokens, and instead framing it as a toolkit for those early sessions of roleplaying (especially for less experienced players. As you say, a group of long-time players and DMs is going to be much better equipped to improvise). I almost wonder if it'd be less divisive if 'history' was used instead, as I admit 'backstory' does conjure the idea of lazy tropes, player demands and a whole armoury of Chekov's Guns. 'History' is simply 'what happened to this character before now' while 'backstory' does to some imply a necessity for it to serve the fiction and provide setup for future events.

 Da Boss wrote:
If you give me a 4 page backstory I'm probably going to give it back and ask for a shorter summary, unless you're a great writer. And anything with hidden prophecies and secret royalty is probably not going to be a goer in my campaign unless we discussed it beforehand. Part of this is me not wanting to set up unrealistic expectations for the players - I am probably not going to follow through on that stuff, so you may as well leave it out.

I tend to find the best backstories are the ones that make sense of your mechanical choices and drives - the former gives context to help visualise the character and the latter is something the DM can work with to invest the characters in the plot.

Beyond that DMs have to start dealing with how backstory might impact current story and also expectations of players who may want to go off the rails and chase after the things they had written (or worse implied) into their own past...
DM: "the missive of the assassins guild demands compensation in gold or blood..."
Player 1: "I say we run!"
Player 2: "I say we fight!"
Player 3: (shuffles background) "I contact Baron Ulzoras, who is secretly an agent of the guild and who owes my family for saving his son during the Baha’al wars"
DM: "god dammit Dave..."

I think part of the divide, as much as a divide exists, is between people who see RPGs as a story with a narrative structure or a game/simulation that you tell stories about afterwards. I think I fall pretty squarely into the later camp. That doesn't mean I don't like roleplaying, that's part of the simulation to me, but narrative tropes and beats and all that are unimportant to my enjoyment and sometimes detract from it. I don't run games with a "plot" really at all, so sticking one in from a player background would be really weird. (btw, if me saying I don't have a plot makes you assume that my game is all murder hobos and loot, it could be. Sometimes it is, depending on the group. But other times my players engage deeply with the world and the game might seem very much like any plot heavy game, the difference is none of it is planned out in advance, it's an attempt to simulate what would happen in the game world based on the NPCs goals and desires and the actions of the party.)

I didn't used to feel that way, for a long time I would have classed myself as a Storyteller type player. But my tastes have shifted in recent years to the other side of things for whatever reason.

One of the things we're dealing with in our friends campaign currently is a divide between different styles of backstory.

One player has the dnd campaign as her current hyperfixation - writing tons of random backstory for her character, playing her character in side campaigns with other online friends and little, like...dnd minigame stream events? I don't know honestly.

And the other player, basically just wants to play to goof around, has an extremely simple backstory in the vein of "has some family who lived alone in the wilderness after his father deserted from the royal army, but he left to seek some adventure and ended up in the group"

It hasn't really resulted in any kind of tension among the group, but it does make it difficult to make story elements about either of them, ironically enough. For the former player, it's tough to fit anything into the elaborate web of existing backstory, and for the latter it's hard to find anything to grab on to, and when the DM does set something up for them, they just leave that ball RIGHT on the old Tee and ignore it.

Honestly, it's probably best to just let it go and not worry about it. Player A is having a good time basically writing fanfiction that doesn't matter much in game - great, that's fine. There's no expectation that the DM actually read any of it, and it doesn't have much impact on what the group is doing in the present day, so it doesn't matter.

Personally, I think if you're playing a roleplaying game you'll have a hard time avoiding a situation where your players want to be playing distinctive characters in a jumbled misfit group.

That's kind of...the default narrative most RPGs are set up to capture.

Again, that's the idea that an RPG is set up to capture a narrative. That is certainly one valid and fun way to play but there are others.

But you are right, people can write their fan fiction and enjoy it. The rub comes only if they get disappointed that it's not included in the campaign or hassle you for that. I'd rather have the latter player at my table because, honestly, they are less work for me. But if the former keeps all the involved backstory as just some interesting flavour or motivation in game without expecting me to read all of it or involve it, then absolutely go ahead.

I think the game is better, and more fun is had, when there is a unifying purpose behind the group. I don't care what it is really, the players can totally decide that themselves. They can be out for treasure or to fight evil or for any number of other motivations. But it's important to have some sort of reason to work together, because I don't tend to run "save the world" style games so there is no plot to push you together.

Often times, the back story is enough of a hook to let me start "Adventure 1" in the middle of the action like a chase, a fight, needing to escape, arrows/bullets flying everywhere, making a tense exchange, etc.

I also love when a player thinks something is linked to their backstory, even if it isn't. I even like it better when it isn't and the player then invests so much heavier into what is going on.

 Da Boss wrote:
Again, that's the idea that an RPG is set up to capture a narrative. That is certainly one valid and fun way to play but there are others.

But you are right, people can write their fan fiction and enjoy it. The rub comes only if they get disappointed that it's not included in the campaign or hassle you for that. I'd rather have the latter player at my table because, honestly, they are less work for me. But if the former keeps all the involved backstory as just some interesting flavour or motivation in game without expecting me to read all of it or involve it, then absolutely go ahead.

I think the game is better, and more fun is had, when there is a unifying purpose behind the group. I don't care what it is really, the players can totally decide that themselves. They can be out for treasure or to fight evil or for any number of other motivations. But it's important to have some sort of reason to work together, because I don't tend to run "save the world" style games so there is no plot to push you together.

Well yes, obviously there should be some kind of driving force behind why the group stays together, and it's better if it is semi driven by the players desires rather than the plot. In our campaign, initially the DM was massively overwhelmed by the sheer number of canonical playable races in DnD and the players coincidentally only rolled up humans, elves, and half-elves that they decided to start the world out with only humans and elves in it. As multiple players got interested in the charm of the non-human races, the focus of the story began to naturally shift towards finding where and why those different races were hiding out and stopping them from behind enslaved or eradicated.

Initially we had the setup of all being hired on for an exploratory expedition, and we all had to figure out why our character had accepted that job and what position they held within the expedition, with obvious limitations like "you can't declare yourself the leader."

RPGs don't have to be intended to capture a pre-planned narrative in order for people to want to play distinctive characters, though. There's a reason that it's extremely extremely common for RPGs to be set up to allow people to act out "Ensemble Cast" settings like the fellowship section of Lord of the Rings, the death star rescue section of Star Wars, heist movies, crime solving detective teams, superhero teams and the like, and it's extremely uncommon for RPGs to cast players as similar in background and purpose like a unit of standard soldiers (and if they do it's often the sillier types of RPGs like Paranoia)

"A bunch of drastically distinct characters working together for a common goal" is what an RPG is at its core, whether you're using it as a system of rules to totally improvise and see what happen or whether you're approaching it as a way to tell a story set up more in advance.



As an aside, a fun exercise for anyone who likes running RPGs when looking at an arc is the approach in one of my favorite casual RPG systems called Monster of the Week. The way that system has the GM set up the storyline is to plan out one arc at a time, and start by determining "what would happen in the storyline if the players sat around and did literally nothing." If that set of events is uninteresting - you need to up the stakes. If the players are faffing around - well, you've got a plan for how things escalate sitting right there.

Hmm, I'll agree that a group of disparate characters working together is how most games end up, but I think this is not actually a good thing or desirable in particular. And I don't think it's really what an RPG is at it's core either, but that might be a pointless debate.

I would say the similar purpose of finding treasure and becoming more powerful is the real motivating factor behind a lot of groups, and I think that is a fine motivating purpose. I've done soldiers or mercenary companies before, siblings and noble families, watchmen or just a Delver's Guild. All of those games were (in my opinion) more satisfying, more fondly remembered by the players than any of the games that were just a bunch of random people coming together.

It very much might be down to my style of game though. In the LOTR or Star Wars, the party is united against a singular, villainous threat. I often don't put something like that in my game directly, or at least, I don't force my players to be in opposition to them. So if there is no unifying threat, there needs to be some other reason to unify.

I'm not saying this to disparage other traditions by the way.

 Da Boss wrote:
Hmm, I'll agree that a group of disparate characters working together is how most games end up, but I think this is not actually a good thing or desirable in particular. And I don't think it's really what an RPG is at it's core either, but that might be a pointless debate.

Characters that stay together because the players stay together to play do not feel engaging. There must be a reason for the party to work together and to be sustainable due to who the characters are. Most systems gloss over this. I have seen it addressed directly in the rule book though

The Ashen Stars setting is designed to address the recurring problems of space opera roleplaying.

Classic space opera setting are hard to translate to roleplaying because they usually organize their ensemble casts along military or quasi-military lines. Chains of command make for clear fictional storytelling, but disrupt the joint decision-making that is the hallmark of an RPG session. Ashen Stars removes this issue by making its protagonists freelance law enforcers who organize themselves cooperatively.

 Da Boss wrote:

I would say the similar purpose of finding treasure and becoming more powerful is the real motivating factor behind a lot of groups, and I think that is a fine motivating purpose. I've done soldiers or mercenary companies before, siblings and noble families, watchmen or just a Delver's Guild. All of those games were (in my opinion) more satisfying, more fondly remembered by the players than any of the games that were just a bunch of random people coming together.

Characters need motivation to keep adventuring instead of playing it safe. Again, I have seen a system address this.

Players sometimes forget that actions that would be foolhardy based on their real-world experience are merely calculated risks in the context of a space opera setting and the action-adventure genre conceits that go with it. Reminding them of this essential context are Drives, motivating factors that propel each Laser into the storyline, hazards be damned. Drives prevent players from making boring, cowardly choices for their characters. They don’t require foolish or suicidal recklessness, just the same degree of courage and initiative you’d expect from a heroic protagonist.

When playing roleplaying games, we sometimes tend to overprotect our characters, who we identify with more directly than we do the lead characters of books or TV shows. This habit can bring the story to a halt as the PCs hunker down and avoid trouble when they ought to be leaping into it with gritted teeth or confident swagger. Even when the GM is able to work around this tendency, it feels discordantly out of step with the sorts of stories that inspire the game. Drives remind us to break this habit. Most of the time, a GM who realizes you’ve slipped into over-cautious mode and are holding up the progress of the story can spur you to action simply by reminding you of the drive. She might explain to you why your drive would spur you to action. Better yet, she could prompt you to explain it.

Hiseadmose wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Hmm, I'll agree that a group of disparate characters working together is how most games end up, but I think this is not actually a good thing or desirable in particular. And I don't think it's really what an RPG is at it's core either, but that might be a pointless debate.

Characters that stay together because the players stay together to play do not feel engaging. There must be a reason for the party to work together and to be sustainable due to who the characters are. Most systems gloss over this. I have seen it addressed directly in the rule book though

The Ashen Stars setting is designed to address the recurring problems of space opera roleplaying.

Classic space opera setting are hard to translate to roleplaying because they usually organize their ensemble casts along military or quasi-military lines. Chains of command make for clear fictional storytelling, but disrupt the joint decision-making that is the hallmark of an RPG session. Ashen Stars removes this issue by making its protagonists freelance law enforcers who organize themselves cooperatively.

That's... the opposite. A chain of command would actually give a narrative reason, but they've taken it out because it doesn't work for RPGs. 'Organize themselves cooperatively' is literally just 'the characters stay together so the players can play the game'

 Da Boss wrote:

I would say the similar purpose of finding treasure and becoming more powerful is the real motivating factor behind a lot of groups, and I think that is a fine motivating purpose. I've done soldiers or mercenary companies before, siblings and noble families, watchmen or just a Delver's Guild. All of those games were (in my opinion) more satisfying, more fondly remembered by the players than any of the games that were just a bunch of random people coming together.

Characters need motivation to keep adventuring instead of playing it safe. Again, I have seen a system address this.

Players sometimes forget that actions that would be foolhardy based on their real-world experience are merely calculated risks in the context of a space opera setting and the action-adventure genre conceits that go with it. Reminding them of this essential context are Drives, motivating factors that propel each Laser into the storyline, hazards be damned. Drives prevent players from making boring, cowardly choices for their characters. They don’t require foolish or suicidal recklessness, just the same degree of courage and initiative you’d expect from a heroic protagonist.

When playing roleplaying games, we sometimes tend to overprotect our characters, who we identify with more directly than we do the lead characters of books or TV shows. This habit can bring the story to a halt as the PCs hunker down and avoid trouble when they ought to be leaping into it with gritted teeth or confident swagger. Even when the GM is able to work around this tendency, it feels discordantly out of step with the sorts of stories that inspire the game. Drives remind us to break this habit. Most of the time, a GM who realizes you’ve slipped into over-cautious mode and are holding up the progress of the story can spur you to action simply by reminding you of the drive. She might explain to you why your drive would spur you to action. Better yet, she could prompt you to explain it.

That actually sounds awful. The GM has a mechanic that can force you to act against your best interests, and flagellate you into action. Even 'better,' the GM can force you to do a self-flagellation scene where _you_ have to explain to the group why you have to do it. That sounds in line with some of my worst RPG experiences- the Storyteller for a Mage game demanding I give an on the spot presentation about how my character's magic works, and 'I have correspondence 3 and use runes to symbolically connect locations' was an unacceptable answer.

I'm not even sure why its needed, to be honest. Most of my RPG sessions have involved a desperate hope that the party will be sensible instead of charging ahead doing something stupid.
Especially anything involving government officials and heads of state, where players simply assume that their characters can just wander in, be insulting and arrogant and are entitled to get away with it.

I like the idea of the lore/world building reflecting game reality. Thus, if you cannot have a chain of command in the player party there ought to be an in game acknowledgment and and alternative provide for in to feel "natural" or at least not forced. "This is how adventure's crew ships" instead of "since one of you cannot hold authority over the rest, we'll have to fudge something" The former is more satisfying for me.

Your Mage experience sounds awful. I am well aware that the Mage rule "require" explaining how the effect works within the characters own reality bending paradigm. I feel the storyteller should have worked with the player(s) to develop this earlier, assuming you were not cheesing the rules, given you a pass when you struggle and later help develop the this for you, or made the suggestion/explant it on your behalf. Collocating teleport? You draw circle and a some rune coordinates to create a portal, like a stargate.

GMs using the rules against player is rarely a good thing, after all, any tool can be abused. If the players are cheesing the rules the GM can explain that such does not fit the world and remind players of the RAW consequences if they intend to beat the story story to death with the rulebook.

Forcing or encouraging the PCs to act against self preservation? Depended on the game for me. When one is conducting an investigation, one cannot conduct it executively while laying low, especially when there is a timer. PCs may need help being heroic to face the danger and carry on. The parties I am in get stuck in "thing happened, this is the situation, what do you do?" - "I don't know. What am I supposed to do?" Go out end explore so the plot can find you.

Alternatively, if the PCs are reckless, their inner voice or the force or something, should tell them "this is a bad idea." When the party fails to head the warning, consequences happen and cinematic game over or party wipe and restart. Make a new party, and this one may take notice that the last party is decorating the palisade having insulted the local ruler. To me, this is analogues to, we are playing on continent X, my character gets on a ship to continent Y. That may be a story for another game, but said character has left the scope of the current one an I ma y make a new one if I choose to continue playing.

I get really mixed feelings on back story. A lot of it has to do with how humble/collaborative the player is, vs.how much they are servicing their ego at the expense of the world I've set up and the player experience.

Sometimes backstory discussions feel a lot like young roll players starting out who say "I go to the top of the hill, and I look around, and I see a snow storm coming"... and as a DM I say "No, It's still summer in this land, tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you the result." If they want to talk about and collaborate the evolution of their back story, including the natural responses of the world as I've written it as they flesh it out, cool. If they want to dictate what the world did in their back story, particular in relation to major details, I get less sympathetic.

It's kind of random. I was willing to work a 5th edition dragon-born into a 2nd edition world with no dragon-born just because they were totaly open to how they got there. I was also fine with the guy who wanted to play an elf paladin in 2nd edition (everyone's used to 5th), until he brought out this long story about who he was in the elf lands, his rank of command in their military, his intrigue with the royal court... before I had a chance to tell him that's nothing like what was going on in the elf lands. We worked it out, but it all comes down to their respect for fitting into the world and the effort the author puts into it and their experience, vs. asking the world (and the DM) to revolve around them.

 RegularGuy wrote:
I get really mixed feelings on back story. A lot of it has to do with how humble/collaborative the player is, vs.how much they are servicing their ego at the expense of the world I've set up and the player experience.

Sometimes backstory discussions feel a lot like young roll players starting out who say "I go to the top of the hill, and I look around, and I see a snow storm coming"... and as a DM I say "No, It's still summer in this land, tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you the result." If they want to talk about and collaborate the evolution of their back story, including the natural responses of the world as I've written it as they flesh it out, cool. If they want to dictate what the world did in their back story, particular in relation to major details, I get less sympathetic.

It's kind of random. I was willing to work a 5th edition dragon-born into a 2nd edition world with no dragon-born just because they were totaly open to how they got there. I was also fine with the guy who wanted to play an elf paladin in 2nd edition (everyone's used to 5th), until he brought out this long story about who he was in the elf lands, his rank of command in their military, his intrigue with the royal court... before I had a chance to tell him that's nothing like what was going on in the elf lands. We worked it out, but it all comes down to their respect for fitting into the world and the effort the author puts into it and their experience, vs. asking the world (and the DM) to revolve around them.

I would always rather someone comes to my table with backstory that either requires me to tell them 'no' to some details or alter some details of my world to fit the character, than someone show up with nothing but a character sheet and stat allocations. Every time. Always.

Obviously my preference if I got to pick every time would be 100% players who do their homework about the world we want to play in and make up characters that would be interesting in and cleanly slot in to the world, but a character that's a bit odd and incongruous is always better than a character who's just dull and flat and nothing.

Personally, I generally leave backstory purposefully vague and open, and shape them as the story goes on to fit the direction we're going in. I will never play an orphan whose family and friends are dead and the only people he knows and cares about in the entire world is the party. All my characters have living family, living parents, exes, previous jobs, all kept vague so that if there's some element of the story the GM needs to have buy-in for I can slot my character into that.

Generally that leads to fun situations like one of my current characters, who I started as a recent academy graduate in entymology who then got infused with druidic nature magic (I wanted to play a bug-themed druid as my core character concept) and his backstory evolved into him being raised as a pirate and he was so utterly terrible at it that his family sent him into academia under an assumed name to keep him from further damaging the family's reputation.

As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

 Easy E wrote:
As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

It's nice to hear things are creeping back towards normality!

 Easy E wrote:
As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

Is that the Jason Voorhees in space version?

 Kroem wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
As we are vaccinated, our group is getting together tonight to start The Curse of Strahd (sp).

Is that the Jason Voorhees in space version?

We completely monkey-wrenched the first combat encounter by NOT fighting. It forced our DM to scrambled a bit to key key ideas in. Overall, I think they were surprised that we were playing actual characters and not our usual archetypes, as they put in triggers that normally would have spurred us into combat.

Good times.

Hello everyone, i'm thinking about getting back into d&d - ive downloaded the free core rules and had a look and am now ready to actually buy a couple of rulebooks.

My question is: 5th ed seems to have been around for a while - is it likely to be around for a while longer? or should I wait since I probably won't get to play for a while?

 PaddyMick wrote:
Hello everyone, i'm thinking about getting back into d&d - ive downloaded the free core rules and had a look and am now ready to actually buy a couple of rulebooks.

My question is: 5th ed seems to have been around for a while - is it likely to be around for a while longer? or should I wait since I probably won't get to play for a while?

I asked the same question last year and got very conflicting answers basically in two camps. The first was that the variety of options in the recent Tasha's book resembles the more freeform/option types of books that appear in the last years of an edition combined with the fact that the edition has been around for almost 7 years (not including the two years of the playtest "next" period) is more than 3, 3.5, and 4th lasted. The second is that the game is still growing despite the number of years and is more popular than ever so they'd be foolish to stop that momentum prematurely. In the end, there is no definitive answer unless one of the people posting here are verifiably a c-level executive or creative at WOTC. If you buy into it, you're doing so with open eyes that it may be replaced sooner rather than later but you'll likely have a year's worth of notice (whether in a lack of products or an actual playtest for the 6th edition).

cheers warboss
I reckon I might procrastrinate for a while then , maybe look what else I can get free or borrow

I think there's still a wee while to go before a new edition. As Warboss says, they're on a boom right now, it would be a bit of a flamingo up to suddenly muck it up by introducing new stuff. I'd say another couple years plus before a new edition.

If you're thinking of starting up again I'd say jump right in, now is the perfect opportunity.

Honestly theres no real reason to wait on a new edition for D&D anyway.

You litterally just get the rulebooks and play whichever edition you and your friends like the most.


Theres a lot more support for the current edition (fifth) but 3.5 is still great and I hear 4 has alot going for it as well.

I take your point Eihnlazer, and I would be fine with house ruled 2nd ed, but I'm thinking finding people to play with may be easier if I am up on the newest stuff. I plan to start as a player and if it goes well hopefully DM.

3 sessions into Curse of Strahd and I am enjoying it. The Horror/Psychological aspects of it are very enjoyable and a change of pace for my normally combat focused fellow players.

I get the feeling none of them have played, Legend of the 5 Rings, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, or Top Secret before. In those games, (at least in my experience) fighting often led to death so it was best avoided.

I can see that they are stretching themselves both as players and as characters. Kudos to our GM too who is doing a great job playing out some of the morally ambiguous aspects of the game very well.

Like I said, this campaign is a very different approach to what these particular players are used to, so I am liking it a lot more than our usual dungeon crawl/quest scenarios.

Curse of Strahd is maybe my second favorite of the 5e premade campaigns, and my favorite is Yawning Portal which isn't really a campaign book so...

Strahd really manages to capture gothic horror in a way that I think a lot of games struggle to do. It's hard to make rolling dice to solve problems terrifying, so that it manages in DnD is pretty impressive imo.

 Easy E wrote:
3 sessions into Curse of Strahd and I am enjoying it. The Horror/Psychological aspects of it are very enjoyable and a change of pace for my normally combat focused fellow players.

I'm glad to hear you are enjoying it, I constantly hear good thing about Curse of Strahd.

I am currently crafting the stuff to play "Blue Alley" a Waterdeep Dragon Heist expansion WoTC gave away for free earlier in the pandemic. I'd say it's a fun house dungeon, so very different from Strahd.

I am (finally) setting up my first time DMing a game of dnd, and it's shaping up to be some really good fun!
Thus far I have a half-elf monk who is (possibly) the key to the ressurection of an ancient gold dragon, I have an Orc Artificer who is obsessed with becoming stronger so he can return to his tribe (from which he was exiled for being weak - strength 18, go figure...), and the third character is a sentient ooze who lives in a bucket hanging from the Orc's backpack. There is also a chronurgy wizard whos backstory isn't done yet, and a fifth character who I expect will be a druid.

It's a homebrew module I've been writing, where they are lookign to find the cause of the endless rains in the town of Greyhold, which has been rained on for some 237 years!

They will be meeting in the tavern of the town - the "Always-Rain Inn"!

Congrats! Just a word of warning, be careful if the druid ends up going moon subclass as it's really unbalanced in combat at low levels once they unlock wild shape with the subclass.

Sentient Ooze...... that player sounds like one you will need to watch out for!

warboss wrote:Congrats! Just a word of warning, be careful if the druid ends up going moon subclass as it's really unbalanced in combat at low levels once they unlock wild shape with the subclass.

I'm aiming to build my campaign largely around goals and time limits rather than purely combat - whilst sometimes "kill everything" is the answer, I want players to have challenges beyond using their number-rocks to reduce enemy numbers to low numbers whilst keeping their numbers as high as possible!

Easy E wrote:Sentient Ooze...... that player sounds like one you will need to watch out for!

Honestly, I'm more concerned with the monk who wants to be the reincarnation of an ancient golden dragon! The ooze race & class is, after a thorough look through, underpowered by comparison to most races & classes, though it has some tricky things to work around (blindsight in 60ft and blind beyond this, inability to use weapons or armour (magical or otherwise), and the inability to speak (being mitigated through Message cantrip)).

But for now, we face the great and dreaded demon that is Scheduling!

Kill everything campaigns are boring, while the occasional episode of 'Kill Everything" is okay.

That is like.... my opinion, man.

From what I've heard, Artificers are wildly OP, so can be quite unfun if allowed to get out of control. But hope you campaign goes well :-)

 Kroem wrote:
From what I've heard, Artificers are wildly OP, so can be quite unfun if allowed to get out of control. But hope you campaign goes well :-)

Current thought is that if one character becomes exceedingly powerful, I will start arranging encounters which, if they descend to combat, will play against that character's weaknesses. EG lack of ranged, or susceptibility to wisdom saves. That sort of thing. I've gotten the gist that just upping the encounter difficulty will make other players feel obsolete, so I'll be thinking of tactics and such to counter these things rather than just making it more dangerous!

currently the artificer has a returning hand axe and Armour of Magical Strength (Scale Mail), both of which seem fairly unproblematic.

I need some help regarding illithid thrall lore please!
would someone who had been enthalled by an illithid....
1. be aware they had been enthralled
2. remember what happened during their enthrallment
3. still be sane afterwards

I've been lore-diving myself but wasn't able to find an answer - i've been stalling the end of the campaign i'm running because these questions are key to the 'final interaction' moment i set up, but this sunday is basically the final session and i'm still lacking.


HALP!!!

1-i would say would depend on how they stopped being a thrall
2- probably broken fragments, like they had been subject to some of the memory altering spells from the handbook
3- would base on how much they remember/what they did

Nice one, thank you.
The subject was cut off by the death of the controlling illithid so i wasn't sure if they would go into a holding pattern, become hyper-suggestible or turn complete vegetable.

 SirDonlad wrote:
Nice one, thank you.
The subject was cut off by the death of the controlling illithid so i wasn't sure if they would go into a holding pattern, become hyper-suggestible or turn complete vegetable.

An example that springs to mind is the old 'voidmind' template from 3.5 - the flayers could sense any changes in the creatures condition and take control of it at will but normally it operated under its own will (albeit servile to its masters).
https://www.realmshelps.net/monsters/templates/voidmind.shtml

Thats a really good callback A.T.
Plot fixed - thank you!

Anyone with suggestions with a campaign that wanders through the fae wilds?

 RegularGuy wrote:
Anyone with suggestions with a campaign that wanders through the fae wilds?

A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare?

 RegularGuy wrote:
Anyone with suggestions with a campaign that wanders through the fae wilds?

How much do you want to do yourself, and how much are you hoping will be pre-made? I don't know of any actual Feywild campaigns.
DMsGuild has a few things for free that might be useful for you, and one product.

"Faylark Meadow" is a free 11 page micro-dungeon taking place in a forest at the edge of the Feywild.
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/185893/Weekly-Micro-Dungeons--Faylark-Meadow

"The Feywild Exorcism" is a free 3 page adventure/encounter.
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/257471/The-Feywild-Exorcism?term=Feywild+Ex

There is also a free supplement for Fey character races:
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/195445/Fey-Character-Races?term=Fey+character+races

"Through the Veil: Tales of the Feywild" has 10 Feywild adventures. $15 PDF
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/310616/Through-the-Veil-Tales-of-the-Feywild?affiliate_id=31065

Thanks for those. I'm actually planning to adapt the old "Up the Garden Path" module into a situation where a fae festival has been disrupted by getting linked to an ancient earth festival happening in close proximity to a particle physics experiment (and the linking of these things is a side effect of something the players did earlier). Thus in their current fantasy world, the alternate worlds are getting pulled too close together and spilling into each other. They have to go into the faire and get rid of the probability elemental per the adventure module for everything to snap back in order.

So that's the backbone. So resources helping to sprinkle characters, situations, and events into the mix are perfect. So far I had them run into some fairy dragons who are going on vacation while their home is in turmoil, and the Nac Mac Feelge from disc world trying to steal someone's sheep. I'm planning to throw a pooka or kelpie in there as well.

Sounds cool, I hope the adventure goes smoothly for you.

I have been asked by the Artificer and Ooze characters in my campaign if I can work out a way for them to build a portable cannon and use it to fire the ooze at their enemies.

This is made more difficult because the artificer wants to be an armorer and so won't have a cannon as standard.

I am thinking of making a set of feats to make this work, and would appreciate some feedback on what people think (as artificers can become overly powerful, I don't want to be making a monster!)

Feat 1 - Dabbler: The artificer can take a second specialization. Each time they would level-up their specialization, they pick which one to level up. As such, a level 20 artificer who took this feat can't get their specialization to full power. Would this be OP? It's aimed at getting an armorer with a "level" of artillerist.

Feat 2: The Artificer can make custom ammunition which can house potions/liquids/ooze, for their cannon. The ammo will be consumable and expensive, so will prohibit them using it for every encounter.

Feat 3: The Ooze player can make a tiny ooze as a companion, which survives as long as it's within 100ft. of the ooze and turns into an acid puddle when it dies. They can telepathically communicate, and it'll have a weak statblock.

The combination is that, by multi-specializing into artillerist, making custom ammunition that can hold liquids, and producing their own little ooze who can fit inside, this will fulfil their requests.

What can go horribly wrong with this? The first feat is my most concerning one, as I know that specializing is an important balancing aspect of the game. Should I instead look to make a non-magical cannon for them to use, with ammunition, powder bags and such for limited uses?

I'll appreciate any help you can offer with this! I've promised nothing so I won't disappoint too much if I tell them no!

I warned you to look out for that slime character!

You could house rule the Catapult spell to work on the Ooze companion. Or base a new spell off of it.

Currently I'm saying that the Artificer will have to explain to me how they intend to build this cannon, and how they intend to safely fire a living thing out of it! I will support them on what would & wouldn't work (I am actually an engineer so this sounds really fun to me!) and I will let them decide how they will test it, transport it etc., and then I will give them time, costs, limitations etc. for it to make it useable but not something the game revolves around!

As for the Ooze, I can see why they would want some racial feats as the generic ones don't fit all that well for an Ooze! I've come up with a few:

• Make an ooze familiar, which has a weak attack, and can be absorbed & ejected from the oozes body
• Grow an eye, so they can see 120ft.
• Miasmic glow, to generate dim light up to 30ft.
• Mimicry, to be able to imitate inanimate objects as well as terrain, revealed if physically interacted with
• Stealth Crawl, to be able to move slowly whilst using Living Terrain

I'm also considering making a Feat for each type of Ooze, which would adjust their racial traits slightly, but haven't yet worked out exactly what I'm doing with this!

4th session of Curse of Strahd and we finally got into a fight. It was not our choice per se either, more of an ambush.

5th session tonight, but I continue to have fun with this campaign.

I'm glad (no sarcasm). I just found out we're missing our second consecutive session so am a bit bummed out myself.

Are you doing a combat light campaign on purpose or just a happy accident? I don't think it's ever taken me as a player or GM four sessions to have a first combat for a campaign.

 warboss wrote:
I'm glad (no sarcasm). I just found out we're missing our second consecutive session so am a bit bummed out myself.

Are you doing a combat light campaign on purpose or just a happy accident? I don't think it's ever taken me as a player or GM four sessions to have a first combat for a campaign.

More of a Happy Accident as our characters tend to solve problems with words more than with weapons so far. This is NOT normal for our players, so I am unsure what happened exactly! Our DM has given us opportunities but we have solved them with social interaction, or used other methods to avoid the combat.

Setting up the campaign, our DM did say this campaign had more investigation, social, and political intrigue than we normally had. Perhaps our players then over-compensated too far the other way!

I've now gone from DMing my first campaign to also DMing a solo campaign for my partner. I'm really enjoying both and I really hope I don't bungle it up and accidentally mix the two!

The group campaign has just arrived on board a ghost ship in the mountains, and the next session is booked in for Sunday!

The solo campaign has just found the mayor dead in his home after he failed to attend the harvest festival. I'm hoping this might continue tonight, but I'm not certain if we'll have the time!

So far I'm enjoying them both an awful lot! Also only had one combat per campaign, but then it was session 1 for both of them! Only one could be avoided though, to be fair - the other was an ambush on the road, so it opened with javelins being thrown at the party! The other was a shadow assassin who was still in the room with the Mayor, who only attacked because the character was investigating too much!

I'm working on a 4e campaign at the moment, a hexcrawl in the Nentir Vale. I'm aiming to use later monster manuals and tweak the monster math to fix my main issues with the system (low threat, high HP monsters at mid high levels) and I'm working on meaningful wilderness survival rules and a new take on skill challenges to make them fun (hopefully).

It's a consequence of me burning out on the terrible class balance in 5e, and re-reading my old 4e setting books and remembering how much I love the base setting for 4e.

Kinda doubt I'll have much buy in from players though so I'm ready to switch to 5e if I need to. 4e is more complicated and some of my players struggle a bit with 5e as it is.

While I disagree with your relative assessment of the editions, I wish you luck in finding likeminded players. It's almost always more difficult to find a group for an older edition (dnd osr and Shadowrun 5e being the exceptions I can think of off hand) and it's already hard enough to begin with for a lot of people.

I'd recommend playing to the strengths of the edition and going minis heavy with lots of figs, terrain, and maps. The extra visual aids might also attract people who are completely new but interested in role-playing but who are hesitant about their own abilities. Those are also going to be the type of players that likely don't already have a preformed opinion on which edition is best and are most open to different ones.

Yeah, I'm aware I'm definitely making the unpopular choice here. I'll definitely be using minis and terrain for my games, either way. 5e may end up being the easiest sell because it is more accessible at low levels.

I'm one of those people who likes all the D&D they've played. I enjoyed 3rd, 4th and 5th and I've enjoyed dipping my toe in the OSR (in fact a lot of my current DMing is heavily OSR influenced). I think 4e had a lot to offer in certain ways, but I can also see why it put a lot of people off and even it's strongest point in my view, the rules balance, was wobbly out the gate due to the first monster manual not following their own monster design guidelines.

I'm just tired of spellcasters being the stars of the show in 5e and how half finished some of the classes and subclasses seem to me, especially out of the box without the 50 euro fix books released years later (I'm thinking here of stuff like Assassin getting a poison making kit that does nothing etc, it's like "here's some homework for your DM to make a homebrew system for you, or you can buy this additional book for the complete rules for your class) while spellcasters get a complete and extremely developed set of rules.

I think if you guide players away from the bad options then 5e works okay. I still find the CR guidelines pretty useless, player AC is too easy to break rendering bounded accuracy null and void and the monster design is very boring and essentially relies heavily on adding spellcasting to monsters, which seems to be the only developed system in the game. Every other system they add to the game seems to be really handwavey and undercooked.

Of course, it has a lot of good sides too, like the accessibility, better balance than 3.X which is what people compare it to, faster combat, and certain mechanical changes that make the game flow better. It has a lot to recommend it, but after 7 years and multiple campaigns the flaws have just built up to the point where I want to take a break.

Just for the record, I wasn't trying to edition shame you. Play what you like/enjoy! I'm relatively new to 5e but I know how you feel as I burned out (despite really liking it) on 3.x after years of playing weekly both DMing and playing.

No worries! It's just on my mind because I'm pretty sure some of my players will be a bit reluctant to change ruleset, and I don't blame them really. I'm mentally preparing myself to shift back to 5e if there's too much unhappiness or they can't handle the additional complexity.

I also burned out on 3.5. I don't think I would go back to it for a while yet, though I have lots of fond memories of that game and it does a lot of stuff pretty well. 4e was the edition I ended up playing for the shortest time, that's a big part of why I want to revisit it and give it another proper go.

Mostly I think our group loves 5e precisely BECAUSE you've got extremely complex, fleshed out classes and classes where everything is incredibly simplistic.

DnD does, and in my experience always has, dragged crazy hard when a player takes more than like 30 seconds to figure their gak out during their turn in combat, because this is a game where playing out a full combat by the rules with substantial challenge takes like 4-5 rounds on average.

In the current group I'm playing with, we have 2 players who really want their actions in combat to be as simple as possible, 1 player who really likes doing something different each and every round and having a billion different choices, and 1 player who enjoys having a few options to play with. DnD 5e's structure generally seems to keep things even enough that nobody ever feels utterly worthless, and frequently the player who really just designed her whole character in a combat sense to be "I shoot bow" ends up doing the most damage with their action.

the big stumbling point tends to come in my experience when you've got players who end up stuck with fewer or more options than they want, or groups that just do not have the attention span/play frequency for even simple combat encounters to be at least 30-60 minutes long. 5e is kind of a compromise between a simple 'roll a few dice, the game doesn't drastically change between combat and roleplay' type system and a 'RPG stops, players set up a quick skirmish miniatures game every time they get into combat' type system.

No, to me D&D never really have that great of combat decision making. When you are attacked, you do nothing but remove Hit Points.

Some classes have a variety of choices, but generally the most common combat decision is either do I get close and roll my d20, or do I stay far away and roll my d20?* Most of D&D's decision is "strategic" in the sense that you make it pre-combat, as opposed to "tactical" as in decisions made while "in combat" to maximize effect.




* = Vast over-simplification.

I don't disagree with the point that 5e has classes for people who like complexity and people who do not. I think up to roughly level 10 it works pretty fine as far as class balance goes, and level 10 is about as high as most people go.

I do think there are some obvious trap classes, especially if the PHB is all you own - stuff like Frenzied Berserker, Beastmaster Ranger, Champion Fighter (arguably), Wild Magic Sorcerer and maybe even Assassin (depending on how your DM runs their game) are all pretty lacklustre. But if you keep people on the classes that are well designed in the PHB you will be fine I'd say.

It just bugs me because I dislike how much scenario control spellcasters get later on. It's not really about combat effectiveness but more the amount of control they end up having over the outcome of the other parts of the game, especially in the style of game I tend to run.

But no doubt, 5e is tremendously successful and popular for lots of good reasons, my reasons for being a bit burned out on it are quite personal.

 Easy E wrote:
No, to me D&D never really have that great of combat decision making. When you are attacked, you do nothing but remove Hit Points.

Some classes have a variety of choices, but generally the most common combat decision is either do I get close and roll my d20, or do I stay far away and roll my d20?* Most of D&D's decision is "strategic" in the sense that you make it pre-combat, as opposed to "tactical" as in decisions made while "in combat" to maximize effect.




* = Vast over-simplification.

In terms of the decision i tend to make with my character in combat, I've got:

Poison spray to deal damage at range without expending any resources
Spike Growth to either prevent an enemy from getting to the party or to deal damage when I know a particular enemy is going to want to move over an area
Entangle to attempt to disable melee enemies/create Advantage for the party rogue to use
Heat Metal to deal unavoidable damage at range to a single target
Wind Wall to deflect projectiles and deal damage to targets in a line
Moonbeam to deal the maximum amount of damage to a small area
Transform into a Pounce beast to attempt to deal damage and knock a target prone
Transform into a Charge beast to close to melee and deal damage
Transform into an AOE effect beast like an ice spider or swarm

All the Transform actions remove my ability to cast spells on subsequent turns and usually offer a much lesser effect to my spells but add a large amount of hit points to me. most of the actions I take deal some kind of damage, but each uses a different resource (or no resource) and most convey a distinct effect - disabling or partially disabling a target, affecting an area vs a single target, setting up damage over time, or reducing the damage my allies will take during the rest of the round.

We hang out at level six, and have been comfy there for months as it keeps combat fairly quick and easy to resolve, but as the player in the group most interested in having lots of options during combat, 10 prepared spells that I can swap at will, 10 spell slots of various levels, and 2 uses of wild shape.

All spells...... which speaks to Da Boss indicating that spell casters are the only fully fleshed out system in D&D.

I have had this discussion elsewhere, so ne need to really re-hash it here. Thanks though.

Speaking of d20 combat, I'm actually making a homebrew d6 combat adapted from 40k for my D&D game, mostly to accomdate a large combat story they group is about to get into.

Going to ratio armor classes to armor saves, every 10 hp or so will be equivalent to a wound, attacks per round transfers, THAC0s (I run 2.5 edition) normalized to ballistic/weapon skill, etc.

Should be fun for the big climax battle at the end of the story... I hope anyway.

I've used One Page Rules for mass battles and it worked very fluidly. After their turn, each player could activate a single unit and do some actions.

 Easy E wrote:
All spells...... which speaks to Da Boss indicating that spell casters are the only fully fleshed out system in D&D.

I have had this discussion elsewhere, so ne need to really re-hash it here. Thanks though.

Right, I think that was kind of my point. The spellcasting classes (or other various classes/subclasses who have more than the basic suite of options) provide players like me who want tons of options the ability to have them, while the simpler classes allow players who are mostly interested in the roleplaying aspect and just want a simple "I attack" to be the only thing they want to remember in combat to have their thing, and neither of us ends up feeling useless because I can only ever match the sheer damage output that they do by expending my most limited resources, and I always have a bunch of different interesting options to pick from in a fight.

Also I don't necessarily see it as *that* much of a huge problem if spells are one of the only super in-depth intricate systems in the game if almost everything can just do spells, and "spell" is just the word they use for basically any limited-use special action attack/effect. Theres a couple of systems like Maneuvers and monk...whatever, special monk stunts that they define as distinct systems, but they use "Spells" for magic spells, holy prayers, ranger and paladin special attacks, lots of monster special abilities, racial abilities and lots of subclass features.

I will definitely say though there are ways to create your character that absolutely bore the living hell out of me. I ended up playing a Barbarian just for 'this is who I want my character to be' reasons in my first introduction to 5e and I got bored of the complete lack of options that class has in about 2 sessions.

but if you actually know going in what your preferred playstyle is going to be, and you make your choice accordingly, you can make the mechanics fit your preferred level of complexity just fine. I eventually reworked that barbarian into a Fighter/Stone Sorceror and was much much happier with him.

 the_scotsman wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
No, to me D&D never really have that great of combat decision making. When you are attacked, you do nothing but remove Hit Points.

Some classes have a variety of choices, but generally the most common combat decision is either do I get close and roll my d20, or do I stay far away and roll my d20?* Most of D&D's decision is "strategic" in the sense that you make it pre-combat, as opposed to "tactical" as in decisions made while "in combat" to maximize effect.




* = Vast over-simplification.

In terms of the decision i tend to make with my character in combat, I've got:

Poison spray to deal damage at range without expending any resources
Spike Growth to either prevent an enemy from getting to the party or to deal damage when I know a particular enemy is going to want to move over an area
Entangle to attempt to disable melee enemies/create Advantage for the party rogue to use
Heat Metal to deal unavoidable damage at range to a single target
Wind Wall to deflect projectiles and deal damage to targets in a line
Moonbeam to deal the maximum amount of damage to a small area
Transform into a Pounce beast to attempt to deal damage and knock a target prone
Transform into a Charge beast to close to melee and deal damage
Transform into an AOE effect beast like an ice spider or swarm

All the Transform actions remove my ability to cast spells on subsequent turns and usually offer a much lesser effect to my spells but add a large amount of hit points to me. most of the actions I take deal some kind of damage, but each uses a different resource (or no resource) and most convey a distinct effect - disabling or partially disabling a target, affecting an area vs a single target, setting up damage over time, or reducing the damage my allies will take during the rest of the round.

We hang out at level six, and have been comfy there for months as it keeps combat fairly quick and easy to resolve, but as the player in the group most interested in having lots of options during combat, 10 prepared spells that I can swap at will, 10 spell slots of various levels, and 2 uses of wild shape.

The thing with the choices you are listing is that the vast majority of them are situational. So in every situation where they do not apply, they are not really a choice. They are the illusion of choice.

If the enemy has no projectiles, or is a single target, or are few in number and spread out, then Windwall isn't something you are going to use. You have better options. So check it off the list. Are enemies not clustered together? Then forget MoonBeam too. Is melee covered by the other characters? Ditch all your transformations as options. The strategy part that was mentioned is that you picked these options either by being that class or by making these choices with your class and it's given you this repertoire to draw on. But in any given decision making point you generally have only really 1 or 2.... MAYBE 3 things that are good decisions.

In that moment, the rest of your "choices" might as well not exist.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 RegularGuy wrote:
Speaking of d20 combat, I'm actually making a homebrew d6 combat adapted from 40k for my D&D game, mostly to accomdate a large combat story they group is about to get into.

Going to ratio armor classes to armor saves, every 10 hp or so will be equivalent to a wound, attacks per round transfers, THAC0s (I run 2.5 edition) normalized to ballistic/weapon skill, etc.

Should be fun for the big climax battle at the end of the story... I hope anyway.

I am personally a big fan of moving away from emulating mass combat and into emulating the FEEL of mass combat.

Basically, I don't need to calculate morale, combat for units, and individuals, and generals commands and whatever.

It's a lot of stuff to keep track of and the players don't really interact with any of it in a meaningful way to justify the amount of effort it requires. So instead I give the players things they can do in relation to the combat that can tip the balance of the STORY of the battle. And I turn each of those into a minigame or series of mico combats. Do they want to fight their way to key leaders and kill them? Well then they have x number of rounds fighting waves of 3-5 enemies to get to the general. If they cannot do it in time then some kind of boost to the general or debuff to the party, or change in the environment that makes things more difficult (maybe he has extra mooks in his actual fight?). And beating that general will result in a change to the story of the fight. Parts of the enemy army breaking up? Maybe it's 1 of 3 things that need to be done to end the fight favorably. Chuck in a time limit in terms of an actual timer or number of rounds of combat and if they cannot get enough things done the situation ends worse then it could have. Maybe named favorite NPCs died in the fight?

I don't need to keep track of all that crap that most mass combat systems try to track. I just need the players to FEEL like they have been in a mass battle and that their actions have consequences, good or bad.

 Lance845 wrote:


I don't need to keep track of all that crap that most mass combat systems try to track. I just need the players to FEEL like they have been in a mass battle and that their actions have consequences, good or bad.

^This is the way. In my experience, nobody is actually impressed or interested in you playing a solo wargame and trying to resolve mechanics you came up with on the fly to show that you're "following the rules" of the larger battle.

Either the battle is sufficiently close such that the player's actions can tip the scales one way or the other (in which case, don't bother with a wargame mechanic type thing and just incorporate the players using their allies as special attack options and such) or the battle is something of a foregone conclusion in which case why are the PCs even there?

As to the rest of the post, I'm good. I've done several pages of Lance's Magical Dancing Goalpost game, I'm set.

Yeah, the tactical vs strategic choice of D&D is really for a different thread.

In this thread, we ran into a bit of a challenge in our game and it is not the first time. There are plenty of hooks and ways to move forward in our game, but everyone is too busy doing useless stuff like shopping, gossiping (investigating), or what not and ultimately we spend a whole session or two not latching onto anything and just drifting aimlessly around.

Any one have good advice for a Player to try and herd his fellow cats along?

 Easy E wrote:


Any one have good advice for a Player to try and herd his fellow cats along?

One option would be to simply say "hey everyone, I'm going on to the next mission, anyone coming?", and see if it coaxes them to stop gossiping and start slaying!

 Easy E wrote:
Yeah, the tactical vs strategic choice of D&D is really for a different thread.

In this thread, we ran into a bit of a challenge in our game and it is not the first time. There are plenty of hooks and ways to move forward in our game, but everyone is too busy doing useless stuff like shopping, gossiping (investigating), or what not and ultimately we spend a whole session or two not latching onto anything and just drifting aimlessly around.

Any one have good advice for a Player to try and herd his fellow cats along?

We generally dont run into that problem very much besides just having long, meandering conversations in character that occasionally throw off the timing of a session as our DM kind of had it planned out. For the most part, I mostly just go with the old "well, we should probably get moving" and then we resolve the conversation later out of session in our discord group.

Yeah, such "subtle" calls to get on with it have not really been working....

It's kind of up to the GM to have something happen. Just because the players are not doing things doesn't mean the world isn't doing things. If they drag their feet then whats the consequence of that? That plot hook isn't waiting for them. What happens when the world decides to interact with them instead of waiting for them to interact with it?

Bonus points if the world hits them where it hurts and makes it personal.

I've been playing a ton of D&D recently with old friends over TTS. It's been pretty fun.

Though I've always wanted to GM an Only War game with them. I have the rules but I'm a little confused. Anyone know any good resources for some Only War tutorials?

@Easy E: If subtle isn't working, maybe pull a Leeroy Jenkins? Maybe the party needs someone to take charge?

@Lance845: I like your point about the world not waiting for them. It reminds me of how to messed with my players a little bit for meta-gaming when we restarted Lost Mines of Phandelver, since we lost all but two of the players and everyone else was new the returning players wanted to restart for them. I added a one shot at the beginning where the wagon got damaged before they left, and had to wait a few days for repairs. When they arrived at the goblin ambush they were so careful about their approach, but I had the goblins no longer waiting there because it was days later than the first time. They spent more than half an hour very slowly and carefully approaching the empty woods in the most advantageous way possible.

@Jarms48: I'm glad you have been having fun playing D&D recently. I don't know anything about Only War, so I can be no help. Sorry.

So I'm running a homebrew campaign at the moment and I'm hoping for a bit of fun input on where I can go from here and some monster ideas.

Here is the gist so far:

For this part of the campaign, it is all very classic gothic horror themed and currently deep in winter. It is aesthetically set in the early medieval period, small saxon towns, danger just around the corner and history is easily forgotten.

Characters are level 4, they've been helping out a small border town with various bits and bobs. They were all summoned by my big bad who sends them a magical note and is a necromancer living in a tower deep in the heart of a nearby forest. The players have yet to meet him but they have heard all sorts of strange tales and had some horrible visions. He seeks to awaken a sleeping god called the Hungering Maw. They are now trekking deep in the forest, nominally to help find some lost woodcutters but also hoping to at least meet the big bad. They find a wood elf village that has been ransacked and were attacked by undead elves. They find a stone circle that has been broken open and the stones scarred. They've also found notes about two elven warbands that set out to cut out the heart of corruption in the forest (one a nest of giant spiders and two the necromancer). While the elven warriors left, the cultists of the necromancer raised an ancient mighty warrior to do their bidding and slaughtered the village in a ritual to destroy the stone circle and complete the necromancers control of the forest. The use of the circle was pure happenstance to show their power and that they own the forest. Little to the cultists realise that the stone circle is actually a device that siphons power and prevents the fey from entering the material plane. The party have been attacked several times by fey creatures now (redcaps and darklings) and after killing the giant spiders and rescuing a firbolg who wants to close the fey portal. (In my setting, firbolgs are tree spirits given humanoid form and brought to life by wood elves in times of great peril). At the end of the last game, the firbolg said he would enact a ritual to close the portal and gave them each a task to prepare/set traps or some such for the fey minions which will assuredly attempt to stop the portal being closed once he begins. I have a little added twist planned that halfway through after a couple of waves of enemies, they are told they must journey into the portal and destroy a lodestone or something which is keeping it powered and kill something in the fey (maybe a hag?)

So my question really is thus: What do you guys reckon would be cool minions that will steadily attack the party before the portal opens fully? I don't particularly want to use darklings again although the elder's ability to cast darkness was very fun.


I have several tracks planned still for the party:

the main "questline" is essentially that the necromancer tasks them to uncover a lost relic in a tomb somewhere in the mountains which is the key to bringing back the Maw (they have the threat of muchos painio if they refuse and the added incentive is that they will receive 2k gold).

My other thing is that the baron of the town is now mysteriously ill and a thegn has taken over, one which had been "lost in the forest" for months and now suddenly returned and stiffed the party out of some money for a bounty on orc heads (they are still super mad about that). Also he's a werewolf.

I'm really wanting to bring all the disparate things together finally, get them murdering that necromancer so we can go elsewhere but there's a fair few things left.

This is maybe just a bit of a ramble because I'm writing up things the day before the session but if anything wants to add anything please do!

Has there been any mention of a Fey focused rulebook? I say in my youtube feed that a Fey adventure is coming out but those don't typically have much in the way of race and character options as compared with core rulebooks (like Tasha's) and setting books (like Van Richten's).

The undead UA rules had a super quick turn around coming out just months later in Van Richten's and I'm curious if the Fey ones (like the Fairy and Owlfolk races) will as well.

You're in luck maybe. The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. It's supposed to come out this fall and to my knowledge is the first 5e book to really deal directly with the Feywild. It's announcement says it'll include new monsters, mechanics, and story hooks. A lot of the most recent adventure modules have been leaning in on providing more setting info.

 LordofHats wrote:
You're in luck maybe. The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. It's supposed to come out this fall and to my knowledge is the first 5e book to really deal directly with the Feywild. It's announcement says it'll include new monsters, mechanics, and story hooks. A lot of the most recent adventure modules have been leaning in on providing more setting info.

Thanks for the link! I think that's the one the video was talking about "leaking" recently (though I incorrectly typed it above as already out). Maybe it will have character options like new races? My only real experience in 5e is with Rime of the Frost Maiden and that definitely isn't devoted in any meaningful way to character creation options beyond a few pages of backstory hooks and starting gear.

So currently im running a pretty interesting Homebrew campaign loosley based off of a video game I started writing up about 7 years ago and never finished up.

It's based on 5th edition mechanics, but involves Mecha and other fantasy tech (lazer pistols with ammo they can only find in ruins).

There are 3 major factions all trying to dig up and activate the 7 "Evils" which are these uber powerful mecha from the ancient civilization that actually have AI. The Evils themselves only acknowledge certain people to pilot them so I can play on personality with them.

I havent designed them all the way out yet, but the party has already met the pilot of one of them and found the key for another (who has recognized one of the players as a potential pilot when he gets strong enough).

Another major change I made is you can only level 2 class's at any given time, until you reach level 20 in a class. Once you hit level 20, you are allowed to get another class up to level 10 as a subjob for the level 20 class (so yes, you can hit level 60 potentially).

There are NPC's out in the world at level 50 or so atm and its going to take years of RL play to actually get there so im not too worried about the logistics yet.

The only thing i've really put on paper atm is the Pilot Class and the generic mecha you get to use so Im sure details will be flubbed later on, but since most of the stuff is based off of a concept of my own making its working out fine.

They are still currently in the Pilot academy arc for now, which im thinking will end at level 7.

 warboss wrote:
Has there been any mention of a Fey focused rulebook? I say in my youtube feed that a Fey adventure is coming out but those don't typically have much in the way of race and character options as compared with core rulebooks (like Tasha's) and setting books (like Van Richten's).

The undead UA rules had a super quick turn around coming out just months later in Van Richten's and I'm curious if the Fey ones (like the Fairy and Owlfolk races) will as well.

Volo's has a fair few Fey races which is the ones I've been using. I dunno if there's any better home brew stuff.

 Eihnlazer wrote:


The only thing i've really put on paper atm is the Pilot Class and the generic mecha you get to use so Im sure details will be flubbed later on, but since most of the stuff is based off of a concept of my own making its working out fine.

They are still currently in the Pilot academy arc for now, which im thinking will end at level 7.

I am interested in hearing how it goes. I am not 100% sure d20 and some of the D&D tropes are the best for such a game, but I am interested in hearing what you find worked and did not work.

So, we are now hip deep into the campaign Curse of Strahd and have plot hooks littered everywhere.

We are on session 6 or so and accomplished 0 Milestones out of 15 or so! We will probably need at least 7 in order to get to the end of the campaign. At this rate, we might NEVER get this campaign completed.

Our party also keeps getting split, even over the past couple sessions we have been chanting "Do not split the party" and then..... we split the party in the next 15 minutes! Lol.

What are the milestones for? Advancing in level or the overall metaplot? Or both?

Sounds exhausting!

On mecha RPGs, there's one called Lancer I believe that is loosely based on 4e D&D. I've heard good things.

 warboss wrote:
What are the milestones for? Advancing in level or the overall metaplot? Or both?

I think it is for leveling mostly as you complete parts of the meta-plot....

I will let you know when we hit one!

 Easy E wrote:

 warboss wrote:
What are the milestones for? Advancing in level or the overall metaplot? Or both?

I think it is for leveling mostly as you complete parts of the meta-plot....

I will let you know when we hit one!

Ah, I got this one. Milestones replace experience. So when you hit certain points in the story, like clearing a dungeon, saving the princess, etc, you just go to the next level.

I believe its purpose was both to streamline DM record keeping, and discourage murder hobos- after all, if you get the same experience for solving the problem, regardless of how bloody your solution is, there's less incentive to kill everything along the way, just to be sure you have the exp for the next level.

That's what I figured based on my own (ongoing) experience with Rime but figured I'd ask just in case. Thanks. Yeah, in Rime, you have a set schedule of missions/milestone equivalents that you need to level up and once you get to a certain level you no longer get any XP for remaining missions in that book chapter. You can finish up the quests and get the treasure but you won't advance in level and so have to move to the next section of the book to meaningfully progress both the plot and your character advancement.

I really like using XP as a behavioural incentive in games. If your game is based around Monster Hunter, then XP for killing monsters makes sense. But that's probably the only time it does.

Other systems I've used:
XP for dungeon exploration in a megadungeon campaign, which was basically XP per room with a scaling factor for the level of the dungeon, along with bonuses for solving puzzles or defeating certain bad guys (and the nature of "defeat" was open ended).

XP for wilderness exploration in a hexcrawl campaign. Each location has 1-5 XP points. You gain the points for "dealing with" the location, and how you deal with it is up to you. It could be forming an alliance, stealing all the treasure, or killing everyone inside. Or a mix of those or any other meaningful goal. You need points equal to your next level to level up.

XP for gold! This works well for an old school campaign. Best if you use a dungeon designed for old school play so there's LOADS of treasure. The aim is getting the treasure out of the dungeon, and how you do that is 100% up to you. I also put in rival adventuring gangs to make it like a race and provide tension when both sides are trying to get to the same treasure. You pay the normal XP cost in gold coins. We have a treasure share system so everyone always gets equal shares and no one can steal from the group. All magic items are sold, but you can buy them, getting them for half price, if you want them (which allows you to put an assload of magic items in the dungeon and just let the players sort out what they want). It gives the players loads of agency over the pace of levelling, lets them manage risk reward, and also lets people make choices between powerful, expensive magic items and levelling up. I was surprised at how well it worked actually!

My current DM runs XP for killing bad guys, because the game is about defeating the cult or orcus and their demonic and undead minions. It's fine, but honestly out of all the XP systems you could use it's probably my least favourite because it's less open.

I used milestone for years, but rather than being strict about the milestones I just decided when the player should level up. But I find that approach gives me all the agency and the players none, and I like systems that let players make meaningful choices about advancement.

 Da Boss wrote:
Sounds exhausting!
On mecha RPGs, there's one called Lancer I believe that is loosely based on 4e D&D. I've heard good things.

The comp/con site (https://compcon.app/#/) tracks lancer mechs for online play, including round by round actions and the whole process of character creation and level up.

You need another site for the game itself though, something that supports a hex grid. The out of mech stuff used for in-between mission rp is fairly simplistic as the bulk of rules are for a tactical combat game - positioning and use of resources over several rolling encounters per mission.

10th session for Curse of Strahd down, and we are still mostly just faffing about. We are trying to resolve three adventure hooks..... at once by tying their resolutions into each other. As PCs we sure do like to complicate things, and our streak of avoiding combat continues.

It's great that you have gotten so many sessions played, but I'm sorry that not much is getting accomplished during those sessions. And I agree, players are experts at complicating things.

I have had session 2 of the campaign!

Our monk player had to bow out for a while due to work commitments, so the party is down to 4.

Session started where it left off with the players aboard a rotting ghost ship they found floating in the clouds around a mountain, as you do.

A search of the ship found skeletons in the crews cabins, lying in their hammocks. When they were touched, they woke with a start and attacked the party, acting strangely sentient - stumbling, reacting with fear, that sort of thing. The artificer attempted to break down through the deck to get to them, but the floor below rolled a 2 for constitution and he fell through that one as well!

After killing the skeletons, the party found a mysterious gem in a chest. As soon as they opened the chest, the ship lurched and started to heal before their eyes, becoming whole and new again, and the remains of the skeletons become remains of people. They emerged on deck to find themselves at sea, with 4 islands visible, and were accosted by the captain.

The captain asks who they are and asks what they did with his crew, did they see the shades, and basically asks them who they are. He them explained how the crew were attacked by shades, and asks if they saw anything. The players realise at this point that they were the shades, and the skeletons the crew. They try, semi-successfully, to tell the captain that the shades killed the crew and then they killed the shades. They probably would have been successful if they weren't carrying several parts of the crew whilst they were at it!

The captain explained to them how he came to be there and how they are now stuck in this place. He also explained that his charts were taken by some unknown creatures in the mist on one island, and the party have resolved to get it back. They then distracted the captain whilst the wizard cleaned up the mess that was the crew, and now they're long resting on their way to the island of steam!

All in all it's going really well!

 Syro_ wrote:
It's great that you have gotten so many sessions played, but I'm sorry that not much is getting accomplished during those sessions. And I agree, players are experts at complicating things.

For sure! It is totally our parties fault though, as we have been dangled so many adventure hooks, that we then just ignore for .... really bad reasons! LOL.

You know the idea of making sure your characters always have something they want to do, even if the bad guys aren't doing anything? Our characters are like that, but they also do not really care what the bad guys are up to either! Not the best for a pre-written campaign, and much better for a sand box game. When the DM told us to make characters and not murder-hobos this time, I guess we took the advice way too seriously!

@Easy E: Hopefully you guys are having fun, I agree with what you said that a sandbox would be perfect for your group, rather than pre-written. How's your DM handling the way things are going so far?

@some bloke: Sounds like an action packed two sessions. I'm surprised the captain is cool with the party tagging along, unless it's self preservation. This reminds me a little bit of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, although there are many obvious differences.

 Syro_ wrote:


@some bloke: Sounds like an action packed two sessions. I'm surprised the captain is cool with the party tagging along, unless it's self preservation. This reminds me a little bit of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, although there are many obvious differences.

The captain is somewhat overwhelmed at the amount of things he's learnt from the party. He is very much in shock, and may well recover at some point enough to contemplate revenge on them for his crew... He is also realizing that, if they manage to return to the real world, he is probably already dead. How helpful he will be has every chance of changing over time, especially as one of the players has said "whatever happens, nobody kill the captain, as we'll need him to drive the ship!"

Session 3 will be interesting, methinks!

 Syro_ wrote:
@Easy E: Hopefully you guys are having fun, I agree with what you said that a sandbox would be perfect for your group, rather than pre-written. How's your DM handling the way things are going so far?

They have been doing a smashing job! Sure stylistically, I would do things differently but his style has been consistent so that is just the way they do things, and it is working great.

He has adjusted his approach to our party a bit, as now the enemies are doing things a bit more "actively" against us as opposed to us actively opposing them. I guess that makes us the bad guys then? LOL

Speaking of adjusting his approach, this session the DM really took the bull by the horns and laid out the path for us via a combat, and NPC interaction.

However, I can tell that the written campaign wants players to go do X, then Y, then Z. Y and Z are too hard unless they have leveled with completing X first. Being the smart players that we are, we tried to tackle Y and Z at the same time and completely skipped out on X! Such "techniques" are a common issue with pre-gen D&D campaigns/adventures and a general flaw of "leveling" based systems overall.

I think the DM has now adjusted us appropriately, and we will be on our way!

I'm glad to hear the DM has been doing a good job and adjusting appropriately. I remember when my group bypassed a lot of story in a prewritten campaign, I sprinkled in some one-shot adventures and some of my own creations while they were ont heir way, to encounter and get them some XP before they got to the section that they skipped ahead to.

And some bloke, that does sound like it's shaping up to be exciting.

15 sessions of 3 hour increments later, and we finally completed a milestone with a copious assist from our DM about 4 sessions back practically telling us what to do next! LOL

Wow, your group really likes to go at their own pace. As long as everyone is having fun, that's what matters.

The hilarious thing is that we are all very experienced Role-Players. Two of us have been RPGing since the mid-80's! The other 4 have been doing it for at least 20+ years of combined experience as well.

We really have no excuse for being so incompetent! LOL

Wow, that is hilarious

 Easy E wrote:
The hilarious thing is that we are all very experienced Role-Players. Two of us have been RPGing since the mid-80's! The other 4 have been doing it for at least 20+ years of combined experience as well.

We really have no excuse for being so incompetent! LOL

As long as you're all having fun!

I personally enjoy making characters I'll never play so with that mindset I also enjoy levelling up as well. It doesn't have to be every session or two but I'd likely go mad if I played 15 sessions without a bump!

 warboss wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The hilarious thing is that we are all very experienced Role-Players. Two of us have been RPGing since the mid-80's! The other 4 have been doing it for at least 20+ years of combined experience as well.

We really have no excuse for being so incompetent! LOL

As long as you're all having fun!

I personally enjoy making characters I'll never play so with that mindset I also enjoy levelling up as well. It doesn't have to be every session or two but I'd likely go mad if I played 15 sessions without a bump!

I'm the exact opposite haha. Once I get to level 6 or 7 I'm like "ok, we can stop now, the character concept I have created is pretty much complete and I don't really require the ability to make a volcano erupt or to make every combat action take 12 minutes to resolve."

 the_scotsman wrote:
I'm the exact opposite haha. Once I get to level 6 or 7 I'm like "ok, we can stop now, the character concept I have created is pretty much complete and I don't really require the ability to make a volcano erupt or to make every combat action take 12 minutes to resolve."

I think we've got the complete mix of level-up styles in my local group:
- a player who hates any kind of game with slow level ups (even though they often play ridiculous and sometimes ineffectual characters they like adding new mechanics to them)
- a player who will happily play an extended period of time at the same level but is very focussed on distribution and advancement via party wealth and reward
- a player who always wants their character to be stronger/the strongest unbalanced computer game style where the game gets easier as you advance
- a player who just wants to do some specific thing well and isn't fond of having to dig into rules deeply to keep that going as levels/monsters go up.
- and me, who tends to learn enough to break a game regardless of levels and then dials it back.

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Also - cleric 1, wizard 1, dweomerkeeper 4. Entry with prodigy(planewalker), eldritch corruption and sanctum spell, extra slot feats. Wish yourself a ring of infinite wishes at 6th level and go nuts with the volcanos :p
D&D 3.5 was quite a thing.

Last session of Curse of Strahd our 4th level party of 5 went up against a big horde of critters. I think the combat had 45 opponents.

We were able to castle up in a chokepoint and kill them off as they approached. However, our martial class tanked about 60+ HP of damage from the little blighters. Two of us ended up going unconscious from damage, but no one really got to a point where death saves were involved.

To be honest it was a bit of a slog and more frustrating than fun. It really highlighted to me some of the flaws in D&D's combat system as well. Since we were in a choke point, maneuver was limited and it really bogged down to simply rolling to hit/damage, removing HP and deciding what spells to do when. Not a lot of fun, meaningful choices.

For me, fights like that are always so much more suited to a skill challenge scenario, where you abstract a few more things and let the players have a bit more freedom. Rather than tracking damage for each enemy or moving minis round a grid, 'zoom out' a little and basically decide that any number of zombies or whatever still aren't really going to bring a party to death's door, but instaead pose an obstacle to further progression that has to be overcome.

Keep the initiative structure and just play through the situation asking each player what they do each 'turn' to attempt to overcome the threat. So rather than a fighter swinging twice and killing 2 zombies, they spend their turn carving through the horde and with a good roll, maybe cut down 5 or 6, opening up some space and thinning the herd. The bard might then use that respite to throw up a Major Image and make some deception or performance rolls to divert the horde, in turn drawing their attention for the rogue to push through and start coming at them from behind, or even move on towards the real objective.

Likewise, the enemies aren't rolling 45 attacks a turn, instead if a player's attempt goes poorly then they take, say, 2d6 bludgeoning damage as the horde capitalises on their failure and gets some hits in. Depending on how you DM, the players don't have to be in any real danger of death here (because dying to a zombie horde is just not fun for anyone when there's an awesome vampire fight with some actual stakes in the next room), but it lets you have moments akin to Aragorn and Gimli's leap onto the causeway at Helm's Deep, or Black Panther's gauntlet run in Endgame where the odds are mathematically overwhelming, but by the very nature of being heroic characters the heroes get to (potentially) succeed and look awesome doing it.

Battles like this have become a staple of my campaigns, they allow for 'few vs many' scenarios to really take on a cinematic quality that regular combat just doesn't work for. Players get to do their cool stuff in new and intersting ways, and the sometimes-strange maths of the game go away for a bit to let the drama and action happen more freely. Very often I'll run such battles in two halves, with a big skill challenge sequence to get the players to the pivotal point of the battlefield, and from there switch into a traditional combat encounter for the climactic showdown. It also doesn't really get stale, as the skill challenge format works for anything from a pitched battle to a chase scene to a heist to an intense social encounter. Honestly, adding these elements to the game just opens up so many more possibilities, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

 Easy E wrote:
Last session of Curse of Strahd our 4th level party of 5 went up against a big horde of critters. I think the combat had 45 opponents.

We were able to castle up in a chokepoint and kill them off as they approached. However, our martial class tanked about 60+ HP of damage from the little blighters. Two of us ended up going unconscious from damage, but no one really got to a point where death saves were involved.

To be honest it was a bit of a slog and more frustrating than fun. It really highlighted to me some of the flaws in D&D's combat system as well. Since we were in a choke point, maneuver was limited and it really bogged down to simply rolling to hit/damage, removing HP and deciding what spells to do when. Not a lot of fun, meaningful choices.

Yeah the 5e combat mechanics aren't a good fit for mass battles. The one good thing I can unequivocally say about 4e was that the minion mechanic was helpful. There should also be a way to swarm up any monster for more abstracted mass combat like in the old FFG 40k rpg. I don't claim to be an expert in 5e so maybe they already exist as options somewhere...

 warboss wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
Last session of Curse of Strahd our 4th level party of 5 went up against a big horde of critters. I think the combat had 45 opponents.

We were able to castle up in a chokepoint and kill them off as they approached. However, our martial class tanked about 60+ HP of damage from the little blighters. Two of us ended up going unconscious from damage, but no one really got to a point where death saves were involved.

To be honest it was a bit of a slog and more frustrating than fun. It really highlighted to me some of the flaws in D&D's combat system as well. Since we were in a choke point, maneuver was limited and it really bogged down to simply rolling to hit/damage, removing HP and deciding what spells to do when. Not a lot of fun, meaningful choices.

Yeah the 5e combat mechanics aren't a good fit for mass battles. The one good thing I can unequivocally say about 4e was that the minion mechanic was helpful. There should also be a way to swarm up any monster for more abstracted mass combat like in the old FFG 40k rpg. I don't claim to be an expert in 5e so maybe they already exist as options somewhere...

It did in 3rd. Mob rules were... somewhere, modelled after swarms (barring the horrifying range of immunities that made swarms a problem).

4e's minions were interesting, but implemented in a weird way- where you had a 10th level cyclops with 100+ hit points and another with 1, because it was a minion, and were completely indistinguishable other than flavor text, and encountered at the same time.
What would've made more sense is just to give the minion tag to lower level enemies at a certain threshold (like say party level-5 or -7 or whatever). It makes it clearly that you've passed on from fighting goblins and rats and can just sweep them aside as your normal opponents are now ogres, giants, elementals, etc.

5e struggles with both lots of bodies and with mega-bosses (and I hate that they put so much emphasis on the latter). The game works best at small bands and 'boss fights' function better as 'dark councils' of 2-3 real bad guys with 4-7 lower level minions. Enough bodies to be interesting, but with a focus on the dangerous ones. But not so small a fight that you can just play 'dog-pile on the wizard' and stun lock the enemy boss. (or resort to 'legendary saves and actions' to BS your way out of the limitations of the game mechanics).

@Paradigm
No argument from me, but I am not the DM. I am just the player.

I would have run it very differently as well.

Voss wrote:

It did in 3rd. Mob rules were... somewhere, modelled after swarms (barring the horrifying range of immunities that made swarms a problem).

4e's minions were interesting, but implemented in a weird way- where you had a 10th level cyclops with 100+ hit points and another with 1, because it was a minion, and were completely indistinguishable other than flavor text, and encountered at the same time.
What would've made more sense is just to give the minion tag to lower level enemies at a certain threshold (like say party level-5 or -7 or whatever). It makes it clearly that you've passed on from fighting goblins and rats and can just sweep them aside as your normal opponents are now ogres, giants, elementals, etc.

It was probably the mass battle book that was tied in with the D&D minis game as well. I had it but got it mainly for the previews of upcoming minis in future sets as it had art for those. As for the minions, I thought they were implemented in the way you described with lower level enemies to provide fodder/filler but maybe I'm misremembering it. My time with 4e was very limited as our entire group decided it wasn't for us and disbanded after about two months (and an official adventure encounter where we knew there was no way we wouldn't win barring crazy bad dice rolls but also no way of winning it in less than an hour without just handwaving it away).

 Easy E wrote:
@Paradigm
No argument from me, but I am not the DM. I am just the player.

I would have run it very differently as well.

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting you could have done anything different! I just seize any chance to wax lyrical about skill challenge mechanics as it's the big thing I find absent from 5e so I assume a lot of people never really think about implementing such things (I certainly didn't until Matt Colville did a video on it). If and when a 6th ed rolls around, I really hope they mention this sort of thing in the DMG a little more, not even necessarily codified as an exact system but just a heads up to new DMs that strict initiative isn't the only way to run combat encounters.



One the broader issues of 5e combat design, I agree that as-written, party vs 1 villain fights are a little naff, but I actually think the likes of Legendary Actions and Resistances are their saving grace, and actually a system that could stand to be expanded a bit. I don't see it as going beyong the game mechanics, but rather, I'm totally fine with villains being able to do things the heroes just can't for the sake of a more interesting battle. Legendary Actions are a good start. but really the issue is how few high-CR monsters actually have options beyond 'attack' or 'cast' for their turns. I pretty much homebrew any major combat encounter these days and my first port of call is giving the main antagonist stuff to do. It's rare that I drop down a major enemy without at least one bespoke Bonus Action and Reaction, because once the enemies can start doing multiple different things on their turn, they become way more interesting to both run and face.

Take a standard Young Green Dragon for instance. As per the MM, it's got the standard ClawClawBite multiattack, a Breath Weapon on a Recharge* and a fly speed. That's it, that's it's whole turn, every turn, until the fight ends. Last time I ran one, I completely overhauled the statblock, and suddenly the fight has come character. Give it Advantage on Hide checks in undergrowth and a Bonus Action that lets it become Invisible in such terrain until it attacks. Now it's not a stack of HP and melee attacks, it's The Predator via DnD, and actually lives up to the lore the statblock comes with of a cunning ambusher. Throw in some class features, like the Rogue's Assassinate ability for auto-critting surprised creatures, and there's present danger even before you're rolling Initiative, which puts the party on edge and immediately ups the stakes. And when they do get a hit in, it has a Reaction to expel its acidic blood at them, punishing the first one foolish enough to charge in carelessly. That battle went down a treat, and was leagues more fun than the standard MM dragon statblocks which are, frankly, utter boring garbage.

Legendary Actions are a necessity to deal with the fundamental imbalance of Action Economy, and Legendary Resistances are there so that you don't get every single monster Polymorphed into a slug or Banished as soon as the wizard or cleric hits level 8, because as much as some players delight in these sorts of 'shennanigans', are they actually more fun than a proper combat encounter? No, pretty much never, and if as the DM your combat encounters are so dull the players would rather just skip them, you just need to start making more interesting encounters that are actually engaging and fun to play out.

So I think the issue is not really with 5e's core systems, but with the way the monsters are written to work within them. I'm hoping at some point we get a book with some more experimental monster design than Volo's or Mordenkainen's, but for now, the solution for the one-vs-many fights is to give the one options so that as the DM, you're making choices and as a player, you're having to actively think around the suite of abilities you're facing rather than just deciding who gets to take the hits for the turn. This video is an excellent start of that kind of design philosophy for anyone that hasn't seen it yet.


*As an aside, god I hate Recharge rolls. It takes all the choice out of using that creature and replaces it with a simple yes/no flowchart each turn. Stick the breath weapons on a 3/Short Rest recharge and lower their power a bit, and now you're managing useful-but-limited resources like a player rather than rolling each turn to see if you get your nuke back.,,

Good points Paradigm!

Curse of Strahd continues. I spent most of the game with a twig blight stuck to my face like a plant version of a face hugger. I could not get the darn thing off me, and everyone else was busy. I kept failing Str checks as my character is pretty weak, but it also kept failing to do damage to me.

Despite the twig blight debacle, it was a nice little encounter against some druids and the like. In combat encounters, I can see the D&D experience pay off as generally speaking we work pretty well together and act tactically.
Now, out of combat it is a different story. A couple sessions ago, we spent 2 hours of real time getting common, everyday lantern oil...... 2 hours! That was really frustrating. We had plenty of money to just out right buy it, but of course shenanigans ensued instead.

Our champion fighter has become a grappling and pinning machine. It helps that they have unarmed fighter. She broke her great weapon last session due to a bad roll of a 1, but they have been doing even better without it! Weird.

For 1 vs party fights, our DM essential gives any monster with multi attack multiple turns in which to act.

That offsets action economy issues while allowing big monsters to take more interesting actions than "pummel one player into the ground."

Anyone ever played in an RPG campaign where you failed at the main objective at the end of the campaign? I'm just curious as I've never been in one. Nothing specific to my current predicament but rather I was just reading a general RPG thread about a campaign PC failure and realized I've never had one. Not that I've been in genius level parties but rather you just keep trying generally until you do with only temporary roadblocks/missteps/speedbumps along the way but there always ended up being a do over somewhere whether written into the official adventure or by GM fiat.

Not that I recall. It is more common for the campaign to end for other reasons, which leads to the campaign never getting resolution.

Same here. I know I posted this in the D&D thread as that's the only RPG system I'm currently playing but I'd appreciate answers from any FWIW.

Closest I can think of is losing a fight we were definitely meant to win, thus causing the entire end of a campaign to have entirely different stakes than what was planned. We still won in the end, but going into that last session it was pretty apparent this was not how things were expected to go.

Last year I was in a campaign VERY loosely based on Descent into Avernus (more as a setting guide for Avernus than the actual campaign) and the finale for that went a completely different direction after we spectacularly failed to stop Arlhan the Cruel from summoning Tiamat into Avernus. We had 5 rounds to defeat him before his ritual was complete, and between bad rolls and decisions and the DM playing things very smart, we just couldn't do it. By round 5, one of us was dead, one down and one only just up, leaving Arkhan pretty much unopposed.

Thus, the final session, which was meant to be a showdown with Archduke Zariel at her tower, instead became an enormous battle against/on/beneath a freshly unleashed dragon godess with pretty much every major player in Avernus showing up to join in, whether for rulership, revenge or just for the fight. The PC that died soent most of the session as a resurrected vassal of Tiamat fighting against us, until the other two were able to knock him out of it. A personal highlight was going 1v1 with Arkhan on top of one of Tiamat's heads until Grog Strogjaw (yes, that Grog Strongjaw) 'This Is Sparta'd him off... It was truly epic, and we still won in the end, but the planned finale had to be completely scrapped as the DM had assumed (not necessarily wrongly) that we would at least beat Arkhan the first time and go up against Zariel a little drained, but not that he'd actually succeed in his quest to free Tiamat and that we'd have to deal with that.

To be philosophical for a moment, I'm not sure a campaign can really be 'lost' short of a TPK as while the players are alive, there's still the chance to do something if the GM is willing to keep running the game. Sure, Vecna ascends to the divine plane, but you can still Planeshift over there and try to kick his arse. The death knight takes the throne, but you can still try and deposehim or start a rebellion. I honestly think it'd be a pretty harsh and unfun GM that said 'no, the bad guys win and there's nothing you can do' while PCs are still alive and willing to try. Maybe that try is certain to end in a TPK, or they only avenge the world rather than saving it, but I'd at least them them play it out on the off chance they win, as I've run long enough to know that players are always coming up with solutions I have never even considered and I'm perfectly happy to let them try.

I'm curious to see if anyone has 'lost' eithout the PCs being entirely killed/dominated/maimed beyond retaliation as I genuinely struggle to think of a situation where the campaign can truly end with the players still alive and kicking, and the villain's victory not just becoming the start of a new arc of the narrative.

A lot of GMs will write/run campaigns that more or less cannot be lost. They are designed from the ground up to often give players an illusion of real danger but nothing is ever really put in front of the players without the expectation that they will overcome it.

I have recently been on a bit of a kick with the idea that the players CAN'T really win. Not so much that they are destined to loose, but that there is no real win scenario.

They are presented with a situation and are meant to come up with an answer to try for but all answers have some kind of consequence. Maybe it's what they wanted and so, to them, they won. But I didn't write that. They did it on their own. And the consequences there of are theirs for better or for worse.

 Paradigm wrote:
Closest I can think of is losing a fight we were definitely meant to win, thus causing the entire end of a campaign to have entirely different stakes than what was planned. We still won in the end, but going into that last session it was pretty apparent this was not how things were expected to go.

Spoiler:

Last year I was in a campaign VERY loosely based on Descent into Avernus (more as a setting guide for Avernus than the actual campaign) and the finale for that went a completely different direction after we spectacularly failed to stop Arlhan the Cruel from summoning Tiamat into Avernus. We had 5 rounds to defeat him before his ritual was complete, and between bad rolls and decisions and the DM playing things very smart, we just couldn't do it. By round 5, one of us was dead, one down and one only just up, leaving Arkhan pretty much unopposed.

Thus, the final session, which was meant to be a showdown with Archduke Zariel at her tower, instead became an enormous battle against/on/beneath a freshly unleashed dragon godess with pretty much every major player in Avernus showing up to join in, whether for rulership, revenge or just for the fight. The PC that died soent most of the session as a resurrected vassal of Tiamat fighting against us, until the other two were able to knock him out of it. A personal highlight was going 1v1 with Arkhan on top of one of Tiamat's heads until Grog Strogjaw (yes, that Grog Strongjaw) 'This Is Sparta'd him off... It was truly epic, and we still won in the end, but the planned finale had to be completely scrapped as the DM had assumed (not necessarily wrongly) that we would at least beat Arkhan the first time and go up against Zariel a little drained, but not that he'd actually succeed in his quest to free Tiamat and that we'd have to deal with that.

To be philosophical for a moment, I'm not sure a campaign can really be 'lost' short of a TPK as while the players are alive, there's still the chance to do something if the GM is willing to keep running the game. Sure, Vecna ascends to the divine plane, but you can still Planeshift over there and try to kick his arse. The death knight takes the throne, but you can still try and deposehim or start a rebellion. I honestly think it'd be a pretty harsh and unfun GM that said 'no, the bad guys win and there's nothing you can do' while PCs are still alive and willing to try. Maybe that try is certain to end in a TPK, or they only avenge the world rather than saving it, but I'd at least them them play it out on the off chance they win, as I've run long enough to know that players are always coming up with solutions I have never even considered and I'm perfectly happy to let them try.

I'm curious to see if anyone has 'lost' eithout the PCs being entirely killed/dominated/maimed beyond retaliation as I genuinely struggle to think of a situation where the campaign can truly end with the players still alive and kicking, and the villain's victory not just becoming the start of a new arc of the narrative.

Good point as I hadn't thought about the TPK/almost TPK scenario. I was more asking about situations where the characters or at least most of the party survived but failed at the point of the campaign. Obviously dying would fulfill that requirement though! While reading your post, it reminded me that I ran myself, namely most of the 3.5 Red Hand of Doom campaign. We didn't actually finish it (got about 2/3 of the way) but I had to keep track of exactly how many days the players were taking during the campaign over the IRL months and they were definitely behind with all the extra rests they took along the way so that certain outcomes weren't really possible for them anymore. We never finished the campaign so I wasn't ever able to reveal the consequences of the (in)action.

 warboss wrote:
Anyone ever played in an RPG campaign where you failed at the main objective at the end of the campaign?

Never been in a campaign with a 'main objective,' to be honest. 'Adventure paths' were after my heyday in RPGs, and I was a military brat, then college, then moving around for work. Nothing lasted that long.
Player attrition (from other commitments/lack of interest) is always the Big Bad of any campaign.

 Paradigm wrote:
I'm curious to see if anyone has 'lost' eithout the PCs being entirely killed/dominated/maimed beyond retaliation as I genuinely struggle to think of a situation where the campaign can truly end with the players still alive and kicking, and the villain's victory not just becoming the start of a new arc of the narrative.

I've had PCs decide that the goal of the campaign was either beyond their reach or not of sufficient value to them, and bail out.
World is ending? Plane shift.

A number of lone survivors, particularly in call of cthulhu, the alcoholic detective character was so utterly plastered that when the rest of the party got on the wrong side of a few insanity checks he had already passed out and missed it.
Woke up the next day, everyone was gone and all was right with the world.

Games like the old firestorm peak adventure are also a good example of where you can fail without being killed or giving up. You can run out of time without the big bad ever knowing you were there, get stuck on the wrong side of a couple of portals, or if you do poorly enough you can get caught by the duragar and sold into slavery kicking off a new adventure arc... and potentially not even 'failing' the adventure long term if the partys' actions later lead to the new duragar leader kicking the big bad off their turf.

Not a campaign, but one game of Dark Heresy (40k) I ran saw the players investigating an attempting assassination attempt on their psyker. They had mixed success catching and not catching various red herrings before locking in on a community living in the wastes outside of regulated Imperium rule and brought the hammer down on them.
The actual 'villain' was a pious woman that they had pulled in half way through the campaign who kept trying to confess her guilt, and kept being cut off by suggestions that she abhor the witch more and tolerate the mutant less. At the time the players were poking fun at the psykers fumbled divination attempts that had defiled the cardinals antechamber (and almost summoned a daemon) and so they unknowingly parted ways on good terms with the assassin having renewed her faith in her actions.

Voss wrote:

 warboss wrote:
Anyone ever played in an RPG campaign where you failed at the main objective at the end of the campaign?

Never been in a campaign with a 'main objective,' to be honest. 'Adventure paths' were after my heyday in RPGs, and I was a military brat, then college, then moving around for work. Nothing lasted that long.
Player attrition (from other commitments/lack of interest) is always the Big Bad of any campaign.

Yeah, it definitely only could happen in a long (6 months +) campaign of dedicated players without much turnover otherwise there is no investment.

I've had several campaigns end in a total party kill, as well as some where we failed in what we were trying to do without dying. Meaningful failure is important for me to enjoy a game.

I have to admit that I am shocked how my current group keeps showing up Tuesday night, after Tuesday night. It is something special.

I'm jealous. We're averaging a monthly game this year instead of weekly. :(

Yeah, players' schedules are the real TPKs!

Over the last year since lockdown, my group has been trying to counter that by changing up our campaign formats a bit. Both myself and the other most frequent DM have completed multi-year 50-odd session epics and that's great when it works, but for the last 18 months we've switched over to more of a miniseries format; 6-12ish session campaigns with a strong thematic/narrative through-line and a lot of what we consider 'dead' time (travel, logistics, shopping) cut out to keep each session snappy and significant.

This has allowed us to cover all kinds of stories and tones and actually finish them, rather than being tied to a single overarching campaign on the rare occasions everyone's around, and endless (ultimately pointless) oneshots when we're down a player or two. In the last 18 months we've done the aforementioned Avernus game, a Potter-esque Magic School adventure, a low-level military campaign that was essentially escorting a supply wagon through dangerous territory on a time limit, and we're currently approaching the end of a Ravenloft game which is basically family melodrama meets gothic horror.

It's not the perfect solution, and part of me still wants to go back to long epic campaigns lasting hundreds of hours, but between jobs, universities and lockdowns that's just not going to happen for the forseeable future. This way, we get games finished that have slightly more stakes (and thus, investment) than the endless string of unconnected oneshots we were doing before, and it's allowed us as both DMs and players to do some really interesting and innovative stuff that a more traditional campaign just doesn't allow.

I'm sure a lot of people would look at these games and call them railroads given the very specific start and end points most of them have, but that's pretty much how our group rolls anyway; if the DM doesn't have a story to tell then we generally just don't bother, more freeform sandboxy games are just not our thing.

It allows for both PCs and the general narrative to be a bit more tailored towards a collaborative story as well. In the current Ravenloft miniseries, I have one of the two players playing the son of Strahd Von Zarovich. That wouldn't really be workable in a traditional campaign or even something like Curse of Strahd run by the book, but with just 7 sessions and two players, that's a story we can tell and it's perfectly feasible for the game to be 'about' that character without getting waring. Likewise, in the magic school game, big chunks of the narrative fell on an NPC rather than a PC, as somewhat ironically we did end up filling out the Harry/Ron/Hermione archetypes, but the two players were the latter two and the NPC was the one with the Chosen One business going on. Not really sustainable over 40 sessions, but over 8 is gave us some incredible moments watching and supporting this character's growth alongside our own.

So in short, if your group is falling apart over scheduling issues and such, mybe give this more concise format a try if someone in the group has an idea for it. It does take a lot of prep and is still at the mercy of Real Life's random encounters, but if you ask me 6-8 games and a complete story is better than 30 with no resolution, even if you're not getting games in more than once or twice a month.

I accidentally killed my mate's character the other week. It was meant to be a fairly easy fight against some mobs that had been giving the party some gyp for about 5 sessions on and off. The cleric got himself flanked and he got dropped, hit by a player AoE and then rolled a crit fail on his second death save.

It was literally a random encounter I threw in towards the end of an RP and travel session and boy oh boy did I feel guilty!

So session 18 of Curse of Strahd went off last night. I think this is going to be one of those 50 session epics at the rate we are going. 1 of 15 potential milestones done so far. We spent most of the night helping move some wine around Barovia.

This brought up two things:
1. Observers. How many of your groups have observers that come and watch the game?

Any given session and we have about 2 consistent observers, and a rotating cast of 2-4 others on any given night. Now, eventually, we will pull some of the folks who are there consistently to be players later. Sometimes, we have them be the monsters, or guest star as NPCs with the GMs help. However, this is a phenomenon I have not experienced before.

2. Olthannon also brings up another point, how do you deal with Character death in your games? To me, a character death should never be accidental. The players should have plenty of idea what their characters are getting into before they get into it, and second I always believe that the DM is not bound by the rules of the game; only the players are.

With my current group I am pretty sure that my approach to GMing is NOT their approach. Therefore, I wanted to get a feel for how GMs from other groups do things.

 Olthannon wrote:
I accidentally killed my mate's character the other week. It was meant to be a fairly easy fight against some mobs that had been giving the party some gyp for about 5 sessions on and off. The cleric got himself flanked and he got dropped, hit by a player AoE and then rolled a crit fail on his second death save.

So one of the other players threw an AoO attack down on their dying companion and killed them?

Sounds like a careless party rathern than a DM kill IMO.
There are plenty of things that would - i.e. having enemies deliberately dogpile a character when they are down, sneak attacks against the one guy in the party won't survive them, and the classic tomb of horrors "you open the door, make a DC23 fortitude save or be instantly killed... wait, no, wrong page, take 212 points of damage instead with no save... then make a DC23 fortitude save..."

PC deaths are a;ways tricky, and pretty much more than anything else depend on the kind of game you're playing. For a tense, old-schoold dungeon crawl every room should feel like it could kill you, be that by bad luck, carelessness or overwhelming danger. In a more dramatic game, obviously it;s best reserved for climactic moments of tension and the conclusion of narrative arcs. and so certain encounters are designed to be genuinely deadly while others (like most action beats in media) pose little genuine threat to the central characters, but often have stakes beyond that such as NPCs in danger or a ticking time bomb (literally or figuratively).

That said, sometimes the dice just get away from you. The Nat 1 Death Save is one of those things that you just can't prepare for, and sometimes fate takes its course. Likewise, sometimes players just do things that dramatically tip the balance of an encounter way away from what you had intended.

First PC to die in my game was a very squishy warlock who, on his first use of Summon Greater Demon, threw down a Barlguura and promptly lost control of it after one round. As the fight dwindled, it had fewer and fewer targets and it got to the point where all I could have it do was attack the Warlock, who at this point was a good few hundred feet from the rest of his fleeing allies. As a DM that's a rough situation, because you either have the monster act completely out of character, introduce a Deus Ex Machina to get rid of it or you play it straight and know that it's going to lead to a dead PC (this was a 2-player game, so any death was going to majorly effect the upcoming sessions).

In hindsight, there are ways I could have resolved that better (both the death and the subsequent return of that PC as first a Lingering Soul and eventually a full resurrection for the sake of the game continuing) but the main takeaway I've got from both that event and some future PC deaths (both as player and DM) is that when I'm running, the dice fall where they may. A lot of advice says to go easy on players, especially at low level, and fudge away that unlucky crit or max damage roll, but for me that just defeats the purpose. If the dice swing wildly and someone ends up dead, that's the game; I feel fudging it, even if the players never know, cheapens it somehow and I would rather live and die by the dice than have it all mean nothing.

That said, as a DM there are a few things I do to mitigate that risk in situations where I don't want death to occur. The NPC healer is always handy, and to some extent it's easy to rationalise most enemies not attacking downed PCs; if they're dumb beasts, they aren't going to feed or loot while still under attack, and for intelligent foes it's more prudent to deal with the active threats than waste time on someone out of the fight. At a certain point, depending on the campaign, some form of resurrection becomes at least somewhat easily accessible and if that's relevant, I do try and make sure the characters know such a thing is available ahead of time should the worst happen unexpectedly.

On the other hand, attacking downed PCs can lead to some tremendous tension, and for a certain type of enemy really make them a threat. I do save this for major antagonists, but just as you can rationalise not going for the kill, it's also not a leap for a lot of villains to understand and utilise the inherent upper hand (both mathematically and emotionally) a truly dead foe gives them. In such moments, I do offer any PC near enough the chance to use their reaction to try and divert the villain's attention somehow, and will often allow some kind of roleplaying to buy a moment's grace for the fallen ally. Typically, I'm more likely to go for one attack on a downed PC (thus making their next death save a 50/50) than I am to outright kill them with multiple strikes while down.

Final thing I do, and this is really going into a more cinematic style of game, is what I call 'The Boromir Rule'. This came up in the final session of my last game, where a PC that had been there from session 1 was finally killed outright by the villain, stabbed twice while downed. When that player's next turn came around, I made it clear to them that for all intents and purposes, they are dead when this fight is over. Their wounds are mortal and no amount of healing is bringing them back, but with the last of their strength they can buy a few moments more. This let the player stay in the fight for the last couple of rounds, really making their sacrifice count, and still gave the heartfelt and emotional final moments as the dust settled. Obviously, this can go wrong if the player doesn't buy into it thematically, as on one hand this idea does make them immortal for a couple of rounds, but overall I think it was far more satisfying that just having them bleed out unceremoniously or having to contrive a reason that this arch-enemy that was dropping 4 attacks a turn wouldn't spend two of them on a kill shot. Only to be used very sparingly, but one of the few ways to make a PCs death genuinely epic and emotional (hence Boromir).

I think pretty much every DM is going to have a slightly different approach to PC death and there really isn't a right one. Sometimes, the threat of it is enough that you have tension without any real danger. Sometimes, a DM is going to be ruthless and set a tone where life is cheap and death frequent. Most, I think, will go somewhere in the middle, wanting to avoid an unsatisfying death to wolves or zombies or nameless bandits while making sure the danger is real at certain critical moments. Likewise, you're going to get some very different perpsectives of resurrection, where in some games it'll be the norm that a fallen hero is just fine a week or two later, while others put a little more weight on it and add in a chance of failure or some other component such as a quest or permanent cost to the standard resurrection spells. Personally, I'm generally against 'cheap' resurrection for the most part, but not altogether against PCs eventually returning with sufficient strings attached.

I have now written almost certainly too much about the philosophy of killing imaginary characters with dice...

I was running a game of Forbidden lands where the magic is very dangerous and can potentially back lash against you if you are not careful. Early on... like ... session 4? The sorcerer of the party decided to cast a spell a little outside his skill which more or less guarantees SOMETHING is going to go wrong. Even worse, he did it to a NPC that was BARELY in their way and just wanted to show of by going overboard.

He ended up contracting a magical disease. The next day he gained no rest. Then he started degrading. A few days into their journey he had fallen unconscious and by the time they reached their next destination they did so carrying their friends corpse.

I have no problems with players killing themselves. It's usually pretty funny. We all had a good laugh and he rolled up a new character.

A.T. wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:
I accidentally killed my mate's character the other week. It was meant to be a fairly easy fight against some mobs that had been giving the party some gyp for about 5 sessions on and off. The cleric got himself flanked and he got dropped, hit by a player AoE and then rolled a crit fail on his second death save.

So one of the other players threw an AoO attack down on their dying companion and killed them?

AoE area of effect, not attack of opportunity.

Still, catching a player in an area spell in a game system where the area effect is known when you know they can be downed is a bit douchey unless they were ok with it was Drax in GOTG. It's a different story if you're in a more randomly generated system or a gritty theater of the mind one as players understand that risk ahead of time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Easy E wrote:

This brought up two things:
1. Observers. How many of your groups have observers that come and watch the game?

Any given session and we have about 2 consistent observers, and a rotating cast of 2-4 others on any given night. Now, eventually, we will pull some of the folks who are there consistently to be players later. Sometimes, we have them be the monsters, or guest star as NPCs with the GMs help. However, this is a phenomenon I have not experienced before.

I've had but admittedly rarely observers both most recently as a player in an online game and in person as a GM in the past. For the online game, it was a friend of the GM and a former party member in a different campaign and they mostly quietly observed in voice chat, only occasionally chiming in with a joke when we're all bs'ing. The in person game "observer" was the most annoying type of FLGS stalker that butts in on your campaign to argue rules/decisions/house rules mid combat in scenarios where the actual players were fine with the resolution; after a few polite responses and later unsuccessful requests to not interrupt, I told them they were not welcome to sit at the table and to bug off during the second session they "observed".

Our observers generally add to the fun, so I enjoy having them. Plus, they are a ready pool of new potential players when we rotate campaigns. They are also fill-ins for when a player can not make it, and generally do a very good job trying to role-play as the person who is absent!

Regarding "Let the Dice Roll as they May", I have a true "DM Confession" to make. I roll the dice a lot behind my screens BUT I do not care what the result is. If it is more interesting they get hit, they get hit, and take an appropriate amount of damage to make it interesting. Same with the monsters.

I actually find the random results of dice a lot less interesting. Pretty much the only people at my table where dice rolls matter is the PCs, and that is to measure their success. As the DM/GM, I determine the success based on what needs to happen to make the game cooler, harder, easier, quicker, etc.

If the PCs are into something, I can stretch it out or make it bigger! If they are lazy or not that invested, I can make it quicker and move on, or up the stakes to get their attention and make them engage fully.

Granted, D&D is a bit trickier to do this with, but I have been doing this for a lot of years so I have a general feel for the "flow" of a game, and can read my players reactions to things at the table.

Yeah, I fudge rolls when it's convenient to propel the story and increase the fun if I'm using a GM screen. If gming, I ask before the campaign if they prefer open or closed GM rolls. I fully admit that on occasion I will fudge rolls mainly (but not exclusively) in the players favor to avoid cheap shots like an npc alpha strike crit that drops a player with no recourse. I prefer to let players kill themselves whenever possible, giving them ample warning but not pulling punches if they ignore it repeatedly.

 warboss wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:
I accidentally killed my mate's character the other week. It was meant to be a fairly easy fight against some mobs that had been giving the party some gyp for about 5 sessions on and off. The cleric got himself flanked and he got dropped, hit by a player AoE and then rolled a crit fail on his second death save.

So one of the other players threw an AoO attack down on their dying companion and killed them?

AoE area of effect, not attack of opportunity.

Still, catching a player in an area spell in a game system where the area effect is known when you know they can be downed is a bit douchey unless they were ok with it was Drax in GOTG. It's a different story if you're in a more randomly generated system or a gritty theater of the mind one as players understand that risk ahead of time.

It was actually a smart move. So the cleric went down in the enemies turn and the fighter was up next, he cast thunderwave which with the dmg caused 1 death save failure but it also safely propelled clerics unconscious body out of the mob of enemies near to another player. Unfortunately in the turn order the cleric was then up next and he then rolled the natural 1 which is 2 failures and thus death.

Just one of those things but killing someone in a throwaway random encounter felt terrible.

I find deaths in throwaway battles help to cement the feeling of the world as a real place, but it's very much a style thing as Paradigm explained very well above. If I was your player I'd be satisfied that you weren't pulling your punches.

Yeah. I am always happy to see my own characters fall to the whims of the game and the decisions of the players. The only thing inoortant to me is that the players have agency. If the dm just decides they die with no chance or choice for the player thats a bunch of bull. But having players die because they made a choice and suffer the consequences... Fantastic.

Some groups/players don't like that. But unless i have real risks and stakes (or at least very convincing illusions of risks/stakes) i have a hard time being invested.

 Easy E wrote:
Our observers generally add to the fun, so I enjoy having them. Plus, they are a ready pool of new potential players when we rotate campaigns. They are also fill-ins for when a player can not make it, and generally do a very good job trying to role-play as the person who is absent!

Regarding "Let the Dice Roll as they May", I have a true "DM Confession" to make. I roll the dice a lot behind my screens BUT I do not care what the result is. If it is more interesting they get hit, they get hit, and take an appropriate amount of damage to make it interesting. Same with the monsters.

I actually find the random results of dice a lot less interesting. Pretty much the only people at my table where dice rolls matter is the PCs, and that is to measure their success. As the DM/GM, I determine the success based on what needs to happen to make the game cooler, harder, easier, quicker, etc.

If the PCs are into something, I can stretch it out or make it bigger! If they are lazy or not that invested, I can make it quicker and move on, or up the stakes to get their attention and make them engage fully.

Granted, D&D is a bit trickier to do this with, but I have been doing this for a lot of years so I have a general feel for the "flow" of a game, and can read my players reactions to things at the table.

There are two types of GMs in the world:

GMs that are OK with occasionally fudging a roll to make the game more interesting, and GMs who think that those in the first category should die a violent death for ever daring to besmirch the honor and purity of the perfect system of pure unaltered randomness.

To be clear, there is a huge difference between dying doing something stupid after the GM says "are you sure you want to do that" and dying as your character is trying to peak around the corner to get a look at the enemy in a firefight using a dodge action and having their head blown off by a reserved action and lucky crit.

The first is completely acceptable as choices have consequences, the second is a bit shady since what else was the guy supposed to do differently?

To be fair, 5e is forgiving enough that, outside maybe the first couple of levels, even that sort of astronomically unlikely crit (in that example, double nat 20s because of Dodge and then enough damage to KO) isn't necessarily curtains for your PC. With death saves there's at least two and as many as five rounds for another character to drag you into cover, drop a Cure Wounds or Lay On Hands or Healing Spirit, get a potion down you or even just stabilise you with a medicine check. Unless the DM is really gunning for that character to the point of sending enemies out just to get some coup de grace attacks in and finish them off, PCs really are fairly tough to kill outright within a round once they've got more than 20-30hp. Obviously a lone PC is much easier to bring down than one with proper backup, but usually it's either bad decisions or being outsmarted that leaves them in that scenario rather than just bad luck.

It can happen, of course, but to me that's just the nature of the game, the same chance/fate/'magic'/confirmation bias that leads to that clutch Divine Intervention roll working or the scrawny rogue successfully grappling the orc warlord or the Bardic Inspiration die giving you just enough to pass a crucial save can mean that poor old Bob The Level 2 Sorcerer gets mercilessly stabbed to death by a particularly vicious and lucky kobold. Again, it's all down to taste, but even as a DM who always goes for interesting and narratively-satisfying combat over particlarly tactically challenging or tough fights, without that chance then then the illusion just comes apart.

For months when I started playing, I ran encounters very much by the book in terms of difficulty and supposed threat level, and basically combat just became a chore for both me and the players. CR-appropriate encounters were cakewalks, boss fights were 2-round takedowns and players rarely if ever felt in any danger. Once I started pushing things a bit more towards threatening and eventually just realised the CR system basically runs on some fairly BS assumptions anyway, the game just came alive so much more. I can still count the PCs that have actually fully died in my games on one hand, but as soon as there was genuine peril and risk, everything just became so much more entertaining on all sides.


The other thought I often have on this topic , based on experience both sides of the screen, is that players typically worry about this way less than DMs. I think it's very easy for a DM to feel they've messed up when a PC dies, worrying if they balanced an encounter wrong or were too aggressive or if their custom monster statblock was unfair... while the player is already coming up with their next character by the end of the session. There's still a sense of loss or maybe disappointment in not getting to fulfil that character's tale, but there's the excitement of suddenly being free to try that cool new subclass, or experience rolepaying from a different perspective, or put together an awesome new aestheric for your next hero-to-be. I'm never one to have 'backup characters' like some do, as I tend to approach making a new PC as a response to the last one's demise (be it thematically, mechanically or narratively), but I can't say that, among the cocktail of emotions I get on losing a beloved character, there's not also just a little bit of excitement for what comes next...

On the other hand, when I kill a PC I'll torture myself for weeks on end about how I got to that moment, but hey, endlessly obsessing over how things might have been is part of the whole DM gig, right?

Even at low levels, the things that can outright kill you per the rules are very low. Trogs come to mind. Those things are crazy murderous for their CR and even those I don't think can outright kill you, just down a PC very easily.

A GM who is declaring "your head asplodes" in 5e is an donkey-cave GM.

Hobgoblins and bugbears are pretty murderous for their level. For the former, one or two running up into combat and the rest firing an arrow volley can seriously tilt an encounter towards TPK.

+2d6 sneak attack (effectively) for 1/2CR creatures is pretty absurd, especially when they come with sword, shield and bow stock. At AC18 they can be sticky for a 1st level party to deal with.

Similarly as level 1 monsters, bugbears _really_ don't need to be throwing out 4 damage dice (2d8+2+2d6) on the first round of combat or have base 2d8+2 for no particular reason.

Its like (same as 4e) the monsters in the first MM weren't built with a real understanding of what PC numbers (particularly defenses and HP) were like. Separate team, separate revisions before publication.

Okay, my dodging head exploding example was not D&D, it was Star Wars 2nd Edition, and it still bugs me to this day. I spent a good deal of time making this character and the first time I got to do anything..... zap..... head explosion. The second character I did not bother doing anything but the math. Thankfully Star Wars 2nd Edition character creation by the numbers was super quick. Why bother with anything else. LOL.

I get your points on D&D 5E all ready being pretty player friendly when it comes to death. I have played a lot of systems where that was not the case, so my view may have been shaded by those other systems where 1-hit kills WERE possible and healing was not always quick and easy.

I also have no real issue with death during Boss Fights, it is more death during random encounters that bugs me a lot. Since D&D requires a fair amount of time to build a new character and all RPGs take a bit of time to make them into a "real character" and not just stats, that means a death during a random encounter (or even grinding through the adventures combats) is extra grating to me.

As I mentioned above, a lot of character death means I do not bother too much with making a character beyond the numbers. There needs to be the right balance of risk and satisfying narrative needs.

Was WEG really that deadly? Or are you referring to one of the WOTC editions?

It can be, but I think it was more bad luck than anything and a "By the Dice" style of GM play. If you recall there was a wild die that could "explode".

Similar story but with me fudging it to avoid the outcome was the first session of a Cyberpunk Red game I'm running.

Literally the first shot fired by the bad guys in the first combat encounter of the campaign and it crits one of the PCs and blows off his arm. Yeah, I'm gonna fudge that one to a less permanent outcome

Just had session 19 of Curse of Strahd and oddly enough this same situation just happened. My character and another player character were walking to a wood shed at an inn, in a fortified town, in an area we had all ready checked out earlier. As we approached the door to get food at the innkeepers behest, the character I was with got blasted in the head by a sneak attack crit that took them to 0 and was 1 point away from Insta-Perm Killing him. If the GM had targeted me instead I would have been insta-dead.

We were in a town, my character had a passive perception of 18, and we had all ready checked out the area. It was a situation where we had no reason to expect such a lethal attack.

Now, since it was 5E I was able to save him with my last Cleric healing spell slot, but I am struggling to think what we could have done differently as players to avoid getting one-shot and almost insta-killed here. This was like going to your own fridge and getting sniper attacked by an assassin three blocks away that was hired by your angry Ex. This was almost a "You slipped in the shower and died" moment in the campaign.

Your GM is clearly a meme lord. He took you to the shed out back and shot you in the head ol' yeller style.

Does the GM roll in the open? What did you guys agree to? I've also been almost one shotted by a ridiculous difficulty Rime of the Frost Maiden encounter (2-3 hp away from instadeath from full health in my case) but our GM rolls in the open and doesn't pull punches (and I'm ok with that). It sounds like you did what you were supposed to and just didn't luck out.

 Easy E wrote:
Now, since it was 5E I was able to save him with my last Cleric healing spell slot, but I am struggling to think what we could have done differently as players to avoid getting one-shot and almost insta-killed here. This was like going to your own fridge and getting sniper attacked by an assassin three blocks away that was hired by your angry Ex. This was almost a "You slipped in the shower and died" moment in the campaign.

Had something similar years back when a DM controlled character failed a sneak test and the guard turned around and critical-shot my character dead.
To add insult to injury the NPC was neither any good at sneaking, nor actually required to be sneaking at this particular point.

Sometimes you just need to know your DM, when it's a good time to run a sensible character, and when it's a good time to stat up a tank carrying two tanks as shields while hiding behind a tank. If it's the first time in 19 sessions though it's probably an anomaly... perhaps get a helmet just in case :p

 warboss wrote:
Your GM is clearly a meme lord. He took you to the shed out back and shot you in the head ol' yeller style.

Does the GM roll in the open? What did you guys agree to? I've also been almost one shotted by a ridiculous difficulty Rime of the Frost Maiden encounter (2-3 hp away from instadeath from full health in my case) but our GM rolls in the open and doesn't pull punches (and I'm ok with that). It sounds like you did what you were supposed to and just didn't luck out.

He normally rolls behind a screen on an app, but called the Player over to witness the initial roll and then to see the damage roll as it happened. Pretty standard for this DM when a crit comes up. I have no reason to believe he fudged/faked the initial almost insta-kill shot. He is a "let the dice land as they may" DM for sure. The group, that I am the newcomer too, is very "by the book".

I am just not convinced that is the "best way" to run a game. That's a bit of why I think if I tried to GM a different game for this group, it might go real bad as my GM style is VERY different from what they are used to. I am much less "by the book" and a lot more "cooperative narrative" type of approach.

Overall, I am pretty happy how my DM runs a game. Sure, there are a few quibbles I would do differently and around the edges, but it is a solid game (and group) overall.

I was more asking in reference to it being preferable for him to actually fudge the roll in your favor instead of a no-interaction-required cheap shot. Still make it an auto hit no matter your AC but just not a crit. YMMV

I don't think 'by the book' is the opposite of cooperative storytelling. I would consider myself a collaberative DM and I'm always rooting for the players, letting them bend the rules to do cool stuff, catering my design to suit them, but I also believe that when engaging with the game elements it's only fair that we're all on the same page and playing by the same rules.

Cheap shots are cheap shots and dick moves are dick moves, but a low-level enemy getting lucky on an ambush isn't either of those to me. I've lost enough would-be villains to Sneak Attack crits or first-round Divine Smite onslaughts to know that it goes both ways! As for fudging die, I just feel it defeats the purpose. The games I play are absolutely about telling a story, but the dice give that story both strucure and unpredictability and to ignore that just doesn't feel right to me. The most exciting moments in the game, where the tension and drama come to a head, the ones we remember, are crits at the last hope, or that 50/50 death save where a character's whole fate comes down to one roll, or the percentile dice chance that lands just right... and to me, those moments have power because as both player and DM, we trust the dice. We're not fighting them, we're letting them guide and provoke and inspire and at times, dismay and devastate us. We give the dice permission to have equal part in the story, the flipside being that (especially as a DM) we have power over when and where they can have that influence.

My approach is that if I'm not prepared for a player to fail a skill check or save, I don't ask for one. If I'm not prepared for an attack to be a max-damage crit, I don't roll it.If I don't want to run the risk of a player getting hit by a Lich's Disintegrate and turned to dust, I take that spell off the statblock before the game rather than leaving it there but pulling the punches in-game. But once the dice are cast, that's as close to canon as a bunch of friends telling stories in silly voices can have, as far as I'm concerned. Before games I will happily power up or down statblocks, invent new mechanics wholesale, restructure the fundementals of the game for an encounter or session, but once we start, I do things by what is written down and what is rolled.

The caveat to this is that this specifically applies to DnD and games of its ilk. When I'm not running 5e, I have a homebrew system for pulp adventure type games that is far more simplified and, crucially, has no rolling on the part of the DM. I might declare a baddie fires a gunshot at a hero and that player fails fhe roll to take cover or shrug off the hit, and from there, I have complete control over the outcome; early in the session, where the stakes are low and we're just getting going, that might be a graze or glancing blow that just needs some medical attention or slows you down a little. In the last 10 minutes of a oneshot, that same shot might take a player's arm off or fatally hit a nearby NPC as the stakes and drama are heightened that late in the game. But that is a system designed specifically to mimic pop culture action movies and adventure novels and so I'm making those decisions with regards for the larger narrative arc on the fly.

Now, I could do that same thing in DnD, deciding that the goblins are always going to deal naff-all and the dragon at the end of the dungeon is far more likely to do major damage, but the more developed combat system already takes that into account with the gulf in attack bonuses, damage die ect. with the potential for those results to deviate from the norm through the dice. That's the game. To apply further authorship over the top of that system feels unncessessary to me, the control I have in that situation is choosing what monsters I use, how I edit their stats pre=game, the environmental facotrs in play ect., while in my own system my control is less preparatory and more reactive.

All of this is just opinion, mind, and I'm certainly not trying to dissaude anyone from doing things their way. I just find digging into different GM styles very fascinating and the relationship between chance and drama is a particular favourite topic!

 Easy E wrote:

 warboss wrote:
Your GM is clearly a meme lord. He took you to the shed out back and shot you in the head ol' yeller style.

Does the GM roll in the open? What did you guys agree to? I've also been almost one shotted by a ridiculous difficulty Rime of the Frost Maiden encounter (2-3 hp away from instadeath from full health in my case) but our GM rolls in the open and doesn't pull punches (and I'm ok with that). It sounds like you did what you were supposed to and just didn't luck out.

He normally rolls behind a screen on an app, but called the Player over to witness the initial roll and then to see the damage roll as it happened. Pretty standard for this DM when a crit comes up. I have no reason to believe he fudged/faked the initial almost insta-kill shot. He is a "let the dice land as they may" DM for sure. The group, that I am the newcomer too, is very "by the book".

I am just not convinced that is the "best way" to run a game. That's a bit of why I think if I tried to GM a different game for this group, it might go real bad as my GM style is VERY different from what they are used to. I am much less "by the book" and a lot more "cooperative narrative" type of approach.

Overall, I am pretty happy how my DM runs a game. Sure, there are a few quibbles I would do differently and around the edges, but it is a solid game (and group) overall.

I am also very cooperative narrative. In most cases I try to have the players roll as often as possible so that the actions and the consequences are in their hands. I have sometimes adopted a "The player to the left rolls for the monster" in roll off systems. I won't tell them what the dice are for or what the monsters stats are. I just have them roll the dice good or bad.

The only times I make sure I roll and the rolls are hidden is when the players cannot know how good they did. Investigations. Spot checks. Listens. Things where if they do poorly and hear nothing they need to think they might have done great and heard nothing.

I do not think dice rolls are meaningless. I just think they are pointless for the DM.

They are very meaningful for players, and the illusion that the game works a certain way is very important to keep that illusion up. Ultimately though, that is all it is..... an illusion.

 Easy E wrote:
I do not think dice rolls are meaningless. I just think they are pointless for the DM.

They are very meaningful for players, and the illusion that the game works a certain way is very important to keep that illusion up. Ultimately though, that is all it is..... an illusion.

Ugh, no. Playing a 'game' like that means wading through someone's personal narrative and the players don't have any stakes or reason to be there as the DM just relentlessly rolls over them with his personal fanfiction. Hard pass.
I like my agency and choices with unpredictable results, even if you think its just an 'illusion.'

An RPG isn't a movie or a book. It operates on different rules, and doesn't have a script dictated by the one person behind the screen.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Paradigm wrote:
I don't think 'by the book' is the opposite of cooperative storytelling. I would consider myself a collaberative DM and I'm always rooting for the players, letting them bend the rules to do cool stuff, catering my design to suit them, but I also believe that when engaging with the game elements it's only fair that we're all on the same page and playing by the same rules.

It isn't at all. Having a common understanding of how things work is pretty necessary for cooperative storytelling, as is reciprocal relationship with game elements.
The worst sort of railroad nonsense comes out of throwing out the book.

What is a railroad? Is it when a character's actions have no bearing on the outcome? If so, how was that sniper attack that nearly killed my fellow party member not a railroad? There was not much we could do differently that would have made any sense.

Even with the "common understanding of how things work" you can experience the "worst railroad nonsense". With D&D I have experienced the worst railroad nonsense by being a slave to the dice and the rules. Rules do not equal "common understanding of how things work".

Heck the fact that you are saying RPGs function differently than other storytelling mediums all ready shows that despite us using the same rules, we have a different understanding of how things work. Mechanics have only a marginal bearing on creating that common understanding, and do absolutely nothing about railroading.

I also like my agency with unpredictable results. What is more predictable, a dice roll or a GMs fiat? One has a spectrum of possibilities and probabilities, the other is limitless. Like I said, mechanics are only the "illusion" of agency and chance as the players (including GMs as they are just players with a different purpose) ultimately dictate the results of any said dice roll.

We are getting off topic. Like I said, I like my group and GM a lot. There are things around the edges that I would quibble with but they are merely quibbles. I am having a great time playing again!

Voss wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
I do not think dice rolls are meaningless. I just think they are pointless for the DM.

They are very meaningful for players, and the illusion that the game works a certain way is very important to keep that illusion up. Ultimately though, that is all it is..... an illusion.

Ugh, no. Playing a 'game' like that means wading through someone's personal narrative and the players don't have any stakes or reason to be there as the DM just relentlessly rolls over them with his personal fanfiction. Hard pass.
I like my agency and choices with unpredictable results, even if you think its just an 'illusion.'

An RPG isn't a movie or a book. It operates on different rules, and doesn't have a script dictated by the one person behind the screen.

That is not what he is saying though. What he is saying is that the DMs rolls are not important. YOURS are. The GM book for Paranoia has a whole bit on how the GM does not roll dice. The argument goes something along the lines of "You are already the most powerful thing in the entire universe. Rules and rolls are for the players. To give them agency, actions, power of their own. The GM doesn't need any of that. Your job is to create conflict for the players to roll against. To craft tension. To set stakes and build a foundation so that the players walk away telling stories about what THEY did and what happened as a result. Why the hell do you need dice to do any of that? In what way do dice HELP you to do any of that?"

Which is 100% valid even if it's not your cup of tea.

No matter what game you are playing, beholden to dice roll or not, you are wading through the GMs narrative. He is the world around your characters and everything you interact with or that interacts with you. The GM rolling dice or not doesn't change that one bit. The GM rolling dice behind a screen just to convince you of the illusion that his dice rolls matter doesn't make one bit of difference. The fact that you find that dice rolling for the GM matters just means the illusion is in full effect for you.

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 Paradigm wrote:
I don't think 'by the book' is the opposite of cooperative storytelling. I would consider myself a collaberative DM and I'm always rooting for the players, letting them bend the rules to do cool stuff, catering my design to suit them, but I also believe that when engaging with the game elements it's only fair that we're all on the same page and playing by the same rules.

It isn't at all. Having a common understanding of how things work is pretty necessary for cooperative storytelling, as is reciprocal relationship with game elements.
The worst sort of railroad nonsense comes out of throwing out the book.

Bad GMs are bad wether they roll dice by the book or not. Most games in any system it is perfectly legal for the GM to make your life miserable as hell. And a GM doesn't need rules to make your life great.

The real question is "Is a Gm a player". And the vast majority of the time, DnD included, they are not. There is a very good reason the players get a Handbook and the DM gets a Guide. It's because the players have rules and the DM has suggestions and advice.

Those Paranoia developers? They made a GM screen that on the GM side just said in big bold letters "DO WHAT YOU WANT." Sure, they COULD have filled it with tables and rules and crap. But thats not fun. And waiting for a GM to reference tables just stalls the action. Just picking whatever seems interesting and moves things forward is often better.

 Lance845 wrote:
The argument goes something along the lines of "You are already the most powerful thing in the entire universe. Rules and rolls are for the players. To give them agency, actions, power of their own. The GM doesn't need any of that. Your job is to create conflict for the players to roll against. To craft tension. To set stakes and build a foundation so that the players walk away telling stories about what THEY did and what happened as a result. Why the hell do you need dice to do any of that? In what way do dice HELP you to do any of that?"

If the GM arbitrarily decides success and failure then why do the players need to bother rolling?

IMO the rules of a game create a framework for he world that the players can understand and play in. For example if one is trying to exhaust some resource of an opponent in combat or pull of a risky act they can have some sense of the odds / risks IF the GM is playing to the rules. But if the GM just fudges everything then the world becomes inconsistent and beholden entirely to their whims and memory.

That's not to say that GMs have to be slaves to the rules (particularly when it comes to sudden, unintentional player death), but the more they follow them the more agency the players have by simple virtue of being able to reasonably judge the pros and cons of their choices before making them.

A.T. wrote:
If the GM arbitrarily decides success and failure then why do the players need to bother rolling?

GMs set all target numbers and assigns difficulty, the rules are a guide but the ultimate decision maker is the GM. In D&D especially, they try to obscure the fact that the DM sets success measures by giving you a list of modifiers, conditions and stat blocking everything, but ultimately the DM decides which Mods apply and which conditions do not apply.

Let say you are in a dark cave, crossing a narrow stone arc, over an underground river. As a DM you decide how hard it is to cross. As a DM, you cold allow them to cross with no rolls at all as it is just another bit of landscape flavor text, you could call it easy to do with a straight attribute roll/athletics check, or you could make it hard to do with disadvantage and a Dex save with a negative mod because of the conditions. Same situation, but entirely different level of difficulty applied based on nothing more than the GM arbitrarily deciding and all within the "rules" of the game.

The "how the rules of the game work" is just illusion to make players feel like they can predict an outcome. That is why people play D&D in the first place, because real life is too unpredictable and chaotic; they do not want their fantasy life to be as chaotic. They want this illusion and will fight to maintain that illusion. This is why you bother rolling, to maintain the illusion or an orderly world and outcomes.

A good GM participates in the illusion. An amazing GM keeps the illusion going for the players, but is in control of the illusion.

 Easy E wrote:
...they do not want their fantasy life to be as chaotic.

Ha! Jokes on you, I play a stereotypically insane Chaotic Neutral Wild Mage!

 Easy E wrote:
As a DM you decide how hard it is to cross. As a DM, you cold allow them to cross with no rolls at all as it is just another bit of landscape flavor text, you could call it easy to do with a straight attribute roll/athletics check, or you could make it hard to do with disadvantage and a Dex save with a negative mod because of the conditions. Same situation, but entirely different level of difficulty applied based on nothing more than the GM arbitrarily deciding and all within the "rules" of the game.

I would consider that the GM following the rules. The clumsy fighter is still in more danger than the nimble elf - the choices made by the players matter in a consistent way. Even then the rules as written are helpful in keeping a GM from getting too caught up tailoring for players (i.e. making every lock in the world a super double masterworked lock to match the thiefs' skill rather than the location).

"Rules and rolls are for the players" gives me more the impression of the players rolling and then the GM disregarding the roll in favour of their preferred outcome. AKA the nimble elf falls off bridge regardless of his roll or build because the DM has decided it would be cool to force the party into a close quarters pit-fight with a new monster.

Do the rolls also not disregard build and player input to some extent? The nimble elf has a 5 or so percent chance to fumble what should be a very simple task for them, just because of dice.

The DM could set the DC for other players, but for the acrobatic rogue it could be such a mundane feat, that they simply dont need to roll.

edit: The savvy DM puts a monster in the bottom of their pit, and when the players circumvent it, they decide if it's worth it or fun for the players to still fight it later on. How'd the monster get in the pit? Does it roam and hunt through series of tunnels in this cave? etc etc

edited edit: Another example... A by the rules DM makes their players roll for every potential social situation. Persuasion, Deception, Insight. At every stop where they try to talk to people, it's one of those skills used. A player character may be built towards being socially adept and their player plays the character as so... But their dice are cold, and so, they've decided that this character really isn't all that social or suave or what have you.

A.T. wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
As a DM you decide how hard it is to cross. As a DM, you cold allow them to cross with no rolls at all as it is just another bit of landscape flavor text, you could call it easy to do with a straight attribute roll/athletics check, or you could make it hard to do with disadvantage and a Dex save with a negative mod because of the conditions. Same situation, but entirely different level of difficulty applied based on nothing more than the GM arbitrarily deciding and all within the "rules" of the game.

I would consider that the GM following the rules. The clumsy fighter is still in more danger than the nimble elf - the choices made by the players matter in a consistent way.

Yes, that is exactly my point! The GM decides the difficulty IS the rules. The rest are just details to help the GM set the difficulty.

However, as my example points out, the GM could also decide that the clumsy fighter and the nimble elf both do not need to make any rolls which makes them the exact same; or both need to meet the hard conditions where their differences apply. The rules do not tell the GM how to interpret the situation.

The rules do not say "When crossing a narrow bridge, in the dark, over an underground river, the difficulty is XX number to succeed". No they basically say, "Hard things to do require a test. Here are some mods to the test: In the dark -8, narrow walkway -2, wet from water -4. Decide which modifiers apply to the action."

Therefore, who is setting the difficulty? It is not the rules, it is the GM using guidelines that he could just as easily choose to ignore as apply.


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 Thadin wrote:
Do the rolls also not disregard build and player input to some extent? The nimble elf has a 5 or so percent chance to fumble what should be a very simple task for them, just because of dice.

The DM could set the DC for other players, but for the acrobatic rogue it could be such a mundane feat, that they simply dont need to roll.

Yes, exactly. Rolls are only there to determine the success or failure of the players. Again, D&D does a good job hiding the basic nature of the game with a lot of rules, mods, and stat blocks; but ultimately the dice rolls are for players to determine if they succeed/fail and what such success and failure looks like.

You could argue that DMs have guidelines for what a monster can do, but that is only there to highlight success and failures for player actions. You failed to detect the monster, you failed to alpha strike the monster to death, you failed to avoid the monster and it is still right next to you. Therefore, they hit you and injury you but not kill you, or mesmerize you, or knock you over, or kill you, etc.

So the point of all this is. Don't sneak attack your players to death when there is nothing they can do. It should ONLY be a consequence of their failure to make a clear choice. The defense that "it was the dice", is just as bad as "It is what my character would do" by a poor/inexperienced player.

Bad form is bad form, whether it's by the rules or not. 'It's What My Character Would Do' is often made the scapegoat for generally antisocial play and ruining fun for someone else at the table, but the issue is not the excuse, it's the behaviour. Players acting in character to the detriment of the party is not automatically a bad thing, if it doesn't harm anyone's enjoyment of the game, and likewise a player that is generally dickish and says 'My character wouldn't do this, but I want to stab that shopkeeper so I do', the excuse is irrelevant, it's the action that's objectionable.

By the same token, the DM who sets out to bushwhack a player character with an unavoidable crit sneak attack whatever is a dick. The DM who simply affords their NPCs the same agengcy as the players and takes that shot, knowing it might oneshot the PC but also not hoping for that and understanding it is very unlikely is not a dick for accepting that result when it comes up. A DM who is willing to ignore the dice might in fact not roll a crit, but decide that it is one anyway. If the DM is permitted to ignore the results of a roll, then what's to stop the antagonistic DM from deciding that they really want PC X dead, so that assassin definitely got a nat 20 on Stealth and definitely rolled a crit and max damage with their sneak attack?

Which, as always, comes down to not being a dick and not playing DnD to piss off your friends. I just object to the idea that a DM ignoring the rules is inherently more virtuous than one who abides by them. if anything, the DM abiding by the same rules as the players curbs the potential for abuse, though the nature of CR and levels means a DM that wants to kill their PCs is absolutely able to do so, you just drop whatever dragon you like on a party that's massively underlevelled and even with all the dice in the open, they're dead. But in the fix there is just don't play with people that are going to do that.

As per the structure of DnD, rolls are not there to determine the success of the players, they are there to determine the success of attempted actions. Doesn't matter whether it's a PC or a dragon, a shopkeep or a lich. Rolls represent the chance that things fail (hence, if there's no chance of that, no roll) and the likelihood they succeed (roll) or are superlatively successful, often leading to additional results (nat 20s/crits).

Again, every GM is free to do what they like, but I very strongly believe that as far as my own games go, a) the DM is 100% also a player, and has just as much reson to abide by the rules they enforce in their role as 'referee' (for want of a better term) and b) the dice are what makes this a game and not a collaberative novel-writing excercise, and to dismiss them as ephemera or sleight-of-hand to fool the players is both disrespectful to the people at the table and a misunderstanding of the nature of RPGs.

When it comes down to it, this is completely a matter of preference, but I know that if I were in this hypothetical situation, I'd be fine with the DM that had an NPC kill my character through sheer crazy luck, and slightly miffed at the one who pulled that punch if I ever found out. I would likely still enjoy their game if they told a good story, but I would at least mention that I wasn't thrilled about that aspect. Not because it's 'cheating' or poor sportsmanship, but because as much as I like the 'gamey' elements to be hidden away behind the narrative, they still underpin what we do and it is still part of the fun.

Maybe it's just me, but the thrill of a high roll at the right time is just as satisfying on the DM side of the screen as it is on the player side... though as my players will tell you, I can't ever seem to roll above a 10 so maybe it's just the rarity that makes it exciting!

 Paradigm wrote:
Bad form is bad form, whether it's by the rules or not. 'It's What My Character Would Do' is often made the scapegoat for generally antisocial play and ruining fun for someone else at the table, but the issue is not the excuse, it's the behaviour. Players acting in character to the detriment of the party is not automatically a bad thing, if it doesn't harm anyone's enjoyment of the game, and likewise a player that is generally dickish and says 'My character wouldn't do this, but I want to stab that shopkeeper so I do', the excuse is irrelevant, it's the action that's objectionable.

I'm actually in an analogue of that situation but with the morality reversed somehwhat. The GM has been dropping obvious hints about a duergar plot to destroy then conquer the region we're in including a literal letter we found talking about the plan. For literally weeks in game (months IRL) my player has been consistently outvoted (typically the line vote for) in addressing the threat in favor of fetch quests and random question marks above villagers in the road style missions. When the plot was about to be hatched they finally were forced to finally confront the duergar but decided that saving the towns was secondary to storming the castle since they figured it was futile and a waste of time. My character decided to split with the party and go defend the relatively helpless townsfolk whereas they stormed the castle.

As a player, I don't like being the odd man out seemingly on every big vote (the last big vote was whether or not to tax almost all of our first ever big payday as players to expand the group real estate empire that I had no stake in...seriously) and I try to take in stride but it does get to you eventually even if you have thick skin. As a good player in apparently a neutral/evil party (dunno since we didn't disclose it nor have I peeked in dndbeyond), I felt it better to split the party instead of being disruptive intentionally or playing against the fully established set behavior/style for the character. I talked it over with the DM and I will have a temp pc/npc to control instead.

I'm sure some considered it in part a TFG move and I'm definitely pulling the "but muh character wouldn't do that!" move while simultaneously splitting the party but I don't see any better option other for the character other than a heel turn/alignment change for the character.

 Easy E wrote:
'It should ONLY be a consequence of their failure to make a clear choice'

The trouble with the GM deciding to throw a bunch of modifiers onto things ad-hoc, or just making up a target off the top of their head is that the players only have a clear choice in that very moment, because the difficulty of a task doesn't exist until the GM invents it.

As I said earlier I don't think GMs should stick slavishly to the rules to the detriment of the game, but a little consistency is a good thing and that's what all those tables and target numbers are there for.

I think maybe some of the contention with the concept comes from DnD being a passive combat system for the players when they are being attacked. The player doesn't get to roll anything. They make no decisions. They have no agency. The monster attacks and the player takes damage or they don't. Even if a save comes into play it's not a choice the player makes. They are just told to roll dex and then they are told if they failed or not. The player has no choice in what their character does to react to whatever is happening and their only understanding of the roll is "Higher is better".

In a system where the player rolls defensively and offensively it's easier to see all the importance of the players actions and the complete lack of importance in the DMs rolls. I could assign the monsters a value much like "taking a 10" and then the players beat it or don't with their dodges and attacks.

In Paranoia the monsters do damage when the player fails their attack, not by attacking on their own. It's literally only the players actions that matter.

Or like I said earlier, I have the players roll for the monsters. So that it's ONLY the players that have rolls.


As for the DM being a player. They just very rarely are. They have no actual rules to follow. They don't have Game Play there fore cannot be playing a game. The GM really is a referee. Not the player up to bat, but the umpire making the call. The few exceptions that come to mind are games with meta currencies that turn the game into a asymmetrical one. FF starwars where the GM is trading darkside/lightside points with the players. Coriollis where the players actions feed the GM Darkness Points to fuel traps, environmental effects, monster attacks/powers and other things generally left up the the GM to just drop in whenever they feel like. The 2D20 Conan Game where the players feed the GM a meta currency used similar to but different from both the other examples.

The GM is a player then. They have rules and restrictions. They specifically can't do things without their currency and the rules that govern it's generation and expenditure force the GM into a player role. Nothing like that exists for the vast majority of TTRPGs.

When playing D&D, I want to play D&D which implies that the DM is going to follow the rules presented for combat and we're all going to see the outcomes together. I'd expect my DM to be rolling dice, and only fudging sometimes if they really need to (though I would be totally fine with no fudging and my character dying in all situations, I know that others might not feel the same and I think that's fine and valid).

If you want a diceless DM experience there are plenty of games that offer that - stuff like Masks for example allows for the DM to never make rolls at all. And it's designed that way, and that's the expectation when you sit down to play. I think that's a more appropriate situation to never roll at all.

If I played with a DM who never rolled at all in D&D I think I'd definitely prefer not to know that, and to believe fully that they were rolling. I think finding out it was all DM fiat would take a lot of the fun out of the experience for me.

 Thadin wrote:
Do the rolls also not disregard build and player input to some extent? The nimble elf has a 5 or so percent chance to fumble what should be a very simple task for them, just because of dice.

...except that they don't.

This is kind of the thing a lot of DMs (and players) struggle with - they basically just flatten characters' abilities by forcing a roll any time a player says "i do something."

a character who's really quite good at something in dnd can have a +6 or a +7 naturally quite easily. A simple task is something with a DC of 5, maybe 10 - but a DC10 theoretically should be something that your average joe shmoe has a 50-50 shot of failing if they were to try and do it.

I'm not particularly great at balancing, but if you asked me to walk across a log, I'd say I'd have about a 75% chance of complete success, no problem. Theoretical 'Edgimus The Uber-Rogue Assassin' the DnD character with +5 to Acrobatics...he just succeeds at any task that would realistically be a DC6 or lower. He is not going to slip on that log. He can jump moderate jumps.

It's just a habit that a lot of people have to

1 - if your player says they attempt something, have them roll!
2 - if they roll a 1 or a 2 or something on the die, see it as significant and feel silly for 'letting them get away with it' if you dont then make that number fail.

playing a lot of Masks in PBTA (Where the characters are, by default, superheroes, and are assumed to be able to do general super-heroic stuff like climb and jump and defeat mundane opponents) has helped me to recognize and drop this tendency, but it's a recent thing.


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 Lance845 wrote:
I think maybe some of the contention with the concept comes from DnD being a passive combat system for the players when they are being attacked. The player doesn't get to roll anything. They make no decisions. They have no agency. The monster attacks and the player takes damage or they don't. Even if a save comes into play it's not a choice the player makes. They are just told to roll dex and then they are told if they failed or not. The player has no choice in what their character does to react to whatever is happening and their only understanding of the roll is "Higher is better".

...I mean it is worth noting that this is how every roll in the game does work except that saving throws do have a fixed value of how high the roll needs to be.

You, the player, do not know the difficulty class I have assigned as the DM to...anything, including saving throws (unless you have meta knowledge)

 Da Boss wrote:

If I played with a DM who never rolled at all in D&D I think I'd definitely prefer not to know that, and to believe fully that they were rolling. I think finding out it was all DM fiat would take a lot of the fun out of the experience for me.

Which is why I always roll the dice, even if I don't always care what they say.

Sometimes, I just randomly roll dice, look at them, scribble something down, and then continue. It always makes the Players nervous and think about what they are doing.