I’ve seen some say that 5e and it’s okay style promote bad player habits among its players and DMs. I have only ever played 5e once and it wasn’t my thing. But I don’t know exactly which bad habits people are talking about? What bad habits does 5e promote? How does it promote them exactly?
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There are no "bad habits" it promotes. There are no "good habits" it promotes. There are things that people will suggest are definitive ways you are Supposed To Play™ which 5e does or doesn't do, or is effectively opposed to. Those people aren't any different than metal nerds screeching about how this or that band is or isn't Real® metal.
People around here are too fricking autistic to understand that people have different opinions. Don't bother asking these sort of questions here.
Polite sage for responding to a question that will only cause shitfestering butthurt.
Mostly what he says but if i have to be autistic about i think it's a matter of perspective that the game design engorces: thisay vary greatly depending on the edition in case but ultimately d&d is a game about managing resources scarcity (hp pool, spell slots, uses per day, magic charges, etc...) without much dept beyond that. If you think about if one have to describe the pov the players and dm have about the characters it would be a third person one since the game doesn't have mechanics for psychology, wounding, and minutia of details (as for example the different parts of an armor and how interchangeable they are) by default pushing so the investment for the character on a superficial level (as in i'm more interested in what abilities my character has rather than how they work and why).
Probably i'm just blabbing about non-sense but i guess this is the best that i can do to illustrate a mostly non-issue.
>There are no "bad habits" it promotes. There are no "good habits" it promotes.
One bad habit I've seen both from players and streamers is to directly look at the stuff on their sheet and only think in terms of that. This style of play isn't supported anywhere in the PHB or DMG and is actively contradicted by the procedures given.
I'm not sure whether Critical Role etc. are to blame for this or bad habits holding over from 3.x, in addition to what
said.
>One bad habit I've seen both from players and streamers is to directly look at the stuff on their sheet and only think in terms of that. This style of play isn't supported anywhere in the PHB or DMG and is actively contradicted by the procedures given.
It's mechanically the only way to play past a certain level point. Eventually, you hit the point where the difficulty of the tasks you're required to do is impossible for anyone who hasn't specced into it (though this has been an issue with every edition of D&D.)
The 'hardcoded' nature of spells and spell slots (as opposed to systems with more fluid spellcasting options like GURPS or WoD) makes this doubly true for spellcasters. If the GM puts a boulder in your path, the Wizard needs to look at their sheet and accept that:
-If the difficulty to move it is higher than 20+Characteristic Mod, they can't engage with it without magic
-if they don't have a spell prepared to deal with it, they can't engage with it with magic.
Have you never heard of skills, roll bonuses, teamwork and most important of all, MOTHERFRICKING ITEMS (no, not magic items, regular items like a stick and rock aka lever or pulley via block and tackle)?
Point to the lever and pulley rules in the 5e books.
You being able to improvise a situation where your DM says, "yeah I guess that works" is not a feature of the system or the words printed on the pages.
>Point to the lever and pulley rules in the 5e books.
Here you go, anon.
>Block and Tackle
>Adventuring gear, 1 gp, 5 lb.
>A set of pulleys with a cable threaded through them and a hook to attach to objects, a block and tackle allows you to hoist up to four times the weight you can normally lift.
>Source: PHB, page 151. Available in the SRD and the Basic Rules.
You're supposed to use the group check rule for that. Or passive checks if they're not actively doing the thing.
>To make a group ability check, everyone in the group makes the ability check. If at least half the group succeeds, the whole group succeeds. Otherwise, the group fails.
INSIGHT CHECK!
>WoD
WoD is not a system is magic tea party with a bad math.
>I'm not sure whether Critical Role etc. are to blame for this
You think the voice actors who develop complex backstories and character interactions - as well as unique voices - for their characters have encouraged a culture of limiting a character to numbers on a sheet?
homie, you high?
To play devil's advocate, because I generally agree with the point you are making, the game still teaches people that:
>Everything is about most efficient damage dashing, and nothing else matters, so you end up with players that are only interested in min-maxing murderhoboing
>Except the only thing to do is hurling attacks at each other, until one side of the combat dies, no questions asked, so it's just "I attack [Roll]" and "I attack again [Roll]" type of gameplay
>Measuring everything in terms of class-level axis, especially in games that don't have classes or levels, which leads to all sorts of miscommunications, wrong assumptions and out-of-habit behaviour
But other than that, it's just going autistic about people having fun wrong and all those three issues can be easily worked through in less than 5 minutes, so no biggy.
This is insanely incorrect. When you practice any craft, you need the ability to objectively see and compare with your goal so you can improve. People who take this attitude will never improve, and their games, at best, will never evolve past mediocre.
I notice that a lot of the people who insist that D&D is guiltless always point to the DM to fix it or how their table just does it differently. Never once questioning that the inadequacies of the rules, the actual published books that people paid for, being so weak that it frequently puts its players into situations that require them to play in a way that specifically avoids the problems present in those rules or to make up new rules for themselves that allow them to enjoy the game in the way they want, since even attempting to play as the designers intended turned out to be boring or actively unfun.
no that's just outright wrong. What happens is bad GMs will blame anything but themselves and then when they try to get sympathy for the problem people point out the obvious. No one "insists DnD is guiltless" that's just a moronic spin.
You just proved my point by insisting the problem is bad GMs.
>saying I'm wrong proves I'm right
can you be moronic on another board.
But he's right. His entire point is people blame everything but the system. When the system fights you, it's clearly the system's fault.
My point is that people blame everything on the system, to cope. Pretending it's "fighting against you" just screams "I've never run a game before".
Your point is dumb.
Your opinion is worthless
Just from personal experience, I tend to find the opposite. I play mostly OSR, and when I hang around 5e communities, I constantly find the DMs fixing, fussing, and fiddling with dozens of rule systems trying to work around faults of the system, but never actually considering the system at self could be the source of their issue. Such as their implementation and usage of a skill system when they're trying to do exploration and puzzle-solving.
I think it's mostly just your assumption that they're fiddling is due to a "fault of the game system" it's more or less a "feature of TTRPGs". It's nowhere near DnD exclusive. No game system is perfect for any game you could want to play or any setting you could want to play in and even when you find one close to what you want, it may not be perfect. Game systems are best when they're broad or easily manipulated so you have that option. You could always limit yourself to only what the game allows, treat the books as a bible. That's fine if you're starting out or your players are, sure. Some people need that security.
But seriously anon. No matter what rule system you put in front of people they'll tweak it and change things just because they can, and especially if you tell them not to. TTRPG systems are there as a guide to how you run things not your god.
People butcher and stitch together Frankenstein monsters of game rules to homebrew a system, and that's when not playing DnD. That's just normal for a lot of people. My first games were like that. My main group is like that. I have another group I've played with where the usual GM and the usual players are strict about the rules, but that's pathfinder and seems to be how pathfinder players are.
>I think it's mostly just your assumption that they're fiddling is due to a "fault of the game system"
Even outside of the cases in which I simply just spoke with them, directly worked with them, and pinpointed their flaws as being inherent with the system, and specifically in the cases where I AM making that assumption, I can make that assumption because I simply see them struggling with the same exact things I struggled with and in the same manner.
>No matter what rule system you put in front of people they'll tweak it and change things just because they can
One issue I've always had with the TTRPG community overall, even outside of D&D, is the DIY-attitude leads a lot of people to reinventing the wheel. It's why there's such a huge problem with people doing shit like, say, creating an entire Cyberpunk system out of it inspite of other games existing, including ones that are very mechanically similar, such as Carbon 2185 (5e-based) vs. Cyberpunk Red (Original that took some good ideas out of 5e to streamline).
This is indeed very much a flaw, and as you say, it will happen, sure. But the community should try to help each other out as best they can. Even though 99% of them are doing it to be shit-eaters, there's a really good reason why "Have you tried not playing D&D" is a mantra here.
>You are wrong!
>Anon lists legit complain
>I said you are wrong, ok?
>I play mostly OSR
Here we go. OSRgays are even worse than 4rries.
>Being bitter as you face your better
No need to pout. You can simply join us.
>Join the delusional club, where playing old shitty editions of a broken game is better than playing new edition of broken game, fuelled by fake nostalgia toward past that never was, all in the crowd of 20-something talking about the shit that happened when their parents were teens
Thanks, I will pass this "pleasure" and simply not play DnD at all, while mocking homosexuals like you.
Learn to read, you fricking hylic. D&D has problems as a game and it's mechanics drive people to develop certain habits and playstyles or either ignore the rules or make up their own. When you point this out, people insist that's not a problem with D&D, it's a problem with the players. Which is exactly what you just did.
>learn to read
>proceeds to say a lot of unrelated shit
ok
>drive people to develop certain habits and playstyles
Vague, not even inherently bad things, just implied bad
>or either ignore the rules or make up their own
literally a good thing for developing as a GM
Bullshit. There are a ton of idiots who think D&D can't fail but only be failed.
And I can say there's a ton of people who like to swallow live frogs every day. Doing that doesn't make an argument that it's a common thing and it definitely doesn't prove it has even happened outside of my imagionation.
I came back a few days later just to address these stupid posts.
inb4 you tl;dr, read and learn something
Let me give you an analogy through mathematics. A minority of mathematicians are vehemently opposed to set theory as the foundational approach to analytic mathematics. They have lots of different issues with it, ranging from the axioms to impossible infinities to vagueness of sets. These people work arduously to disrupt the ubiquitous acceptance of set theory, often wondering why the idea that won the popularity contest gets to be right (because that's really all that happened - ZFC just caught on first). They sometimes literally devolve into histrionics with their lamentations about the failure of most mathematicians to see the intrinsic and inherent flaws in set theory, and cannot understand why no one seems to care that it's so wrong.
At the same time, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, by Godel and then Tarski, that mathematics is inherently incomplete, inconsistent, and cannot define fundamental truth. Dozens of axiomitizations of all of mathematics have been produced since the early 20th century, and none of them escape the simple reality that mathematics itself cannot produce a solution for every possible problem that can be stated, or a statement for every thing that is true. Set theory can't do it, topology can't do it, category and model theory can't do it. It's impossible.
And that's what those guys still whinging about set theory fail to understand. They mistakenly have it in their head that there is some superior version of mathematics which will miraculously evade the issues they have with set theory. Everyone else realized it's pointless. The most you can hope for is a sort of math that is better at solving the problems you're interested in.
There is no fundamentally "better" math. There is what works for you and your problems, at best.
Cont. next post.
>There is what works for you and your problems, at best.
You literally just invalidated your entire post through this one line. You set objective goals and make objective determinations in whether or not you approach them. Everything else you typed is garbage sophistry.
To finish up.
Everyone else in mathematics goes on, perfectly fine with accepting the inherent limitations and still solving problems. The minority opposed to set theory continues to complain impotently while no one listens to them.
You guys are the people b***hing about set theory.
5e does not promote any "bad" or "good" habits. It's a set of rules to play a specific kind of game. You don't like the fact that it's popular, and the people want to play games like it. You invent a bunch of stupid shit about how this ruins players or scares them out of the hobby or keeps them locked down into 5e, exactly how anti-set theorists invent a bunch of bullshit about how instructing set theory fundamentally ruins the ability of mathematicians to solve problems.
You're midwits. You're like undergrads who think you know something but don't understand that undergrad is for the foundational knowledge of a field, only.
So frick off and learn to think before you tell anyone else they're stupid.
You don't know what sophistry is and couldn't identify it if an example was given first. You also have the reading comprehension of a 1st grader.
>You don't know what sophistry is and couldn't identify it if an example was given first. You also have the reading comprehension of a 1st grader.
If two full character-limit posts making a moronic math analogy to demonstrate why you are "technically correct" for having a lazy attitude that will never improve your game is justified ISN'T sophistry, then at the very least it is the definition of malding.
Man he really typed all that shit trying to prove that 5e doesn't cause bad behavior, but it clearly gave him brain damage.
I like you.
uhh, people aren't upset that mathematics is incomplete and undecidable. First off, the whole thing with set theory *was* to have all of those things, so the people "bitching" about it are also the people who originally wanted it, by your logic.
Most of the complaints about set theory are things like how the core operators don't say anything about the objects of study. An alternative can merely have nicer properties or core conceptual metaphors to be preferred as a basis.
Set theory allows you to take a subset of any set, but is 2 a subset of 3? (Zermelo's? von Neumann's?) You'd ostensibly want the core operations of the theory to have something to say about the embedded mathematics, otherwise why use it?
Mathematicians got along just fine without set theory before then. Working mathematicians don't actually use ZFC anymore than programmers actually use Unicode (may as well call it Secticode)
We should like for the core conceptual metaphors to an area of mathematics (a number "line", a complex "plane", a "geometry" of interaction)
If you use something like homotopy type theory or even just category theory, it actually has things to say about the forms which you've formalized within it. Asking if there's a good framework wherein the operations are closed and have illuminating properties when you embed the mathematics is a perfectly reasonable request, and the same applies to asking if there's a good way to go about playing DnD. There's plenty of things that aren't categories, for instance, but most of the objects humans seem to naturally find interesting and useful end up being characterizable as categories.
(cont.)
Similarly, there are ways we tend to prefer to play DnD which are more enjoyable, and trying for a system which captures them is still desirable, 5e is arguably not that.
That's so wrong and stupid.
"THerRE iS nO AnYtHInG" is such a failure to engage with thought. have a nice day.
You're pretty upset at a post you didn't read.
I don't know if that's the way I would put it, my players and I say that 5e is D&D with the training wheels on. It simply eliminates many complex or "problematic" classic mechanics and is very generous with things like spell slots and natural healing compared to any previous edition.
>compared to any previoius edition
so you're moronic got it.
When 5E first came out it wasn't too bad but later down the line 5E started to become its own monster of a culture and with more and more books trying to cater to that 5E culture.
>Kitchen sink fantasy that is too scared to go all the way into a true gonzo kitchen sink
>Spells that don't promote imagination because of strict rules
>Said spells are always better then any gear or skill you are anybody else in the party will have and can and have destroyed entire campaign ideas unless said spells are outright banned
>While spellcasters get new stuff constantly martials get bread crumbs and don't even get interesting weapons, just what die and damage type
>Because there is no system in place to punish bad or multiple rolls people will skill dogpile onto something or roll for something over and over again
>The culture devolved into "I roll for X" instead of describing how they want to talk to the person or if they are even going to use their gear to try and climb up a castle wall
>Likewise nobody ever takes into consideration of their surroundings, the person will roll stealth in an empty, brightly let room to try and pickpocket the king or that they tracked in mud
>The alignment chart is supposed to be a guideline but people use it as an excuse to justify bad player behavior like "I set the mayors house on fire because I am chaotic good and the mayor is a meanie!" while the party is still inside talking to the mayor
>The system itself promotes people to make rolls that they shouldn't make, like the -1 strength wizard pushing a boulder out of the way because the DC 17 check still gives him a 15% chance with no punishment for failure, assuming he just doesn't cast a spell
>People entire personalities are just class+race and one dimensional and flat
The latter half of what you said started way earlier than 5e, and is more about bad DMing than bad system. (not defending 5e, just sayin)
Well, yeah. Most of these problems have been around since the normalgay influx of 3e and have just carried through because it is now the D&D way. The few they tried to fix in 4e like
got reverted because 4e as a whole failed, not because their fixes for those things failed.
skill challenges in 4e fixed half those problems but WOTC is too fricking dumb to keep good ideas
Skill challenges arent even a 4e original (half the FR adventures in 3e had them, as did even the 2e Draconomicon Hlal-chase) and they were the most half baked in 4e.
Half your problems are in fact you not reading the copypastereplace text from 3- i mean 5e DMG.
>There is zero incentives to take a negative trait or make "bad choices" in a supposed roleplaying game
>The game is extremely easy on top of the DM pulling punches a lot so players end up getting extremely entitled
>Players expect the DM to always drop a story and gameplay into the players laps while the players do nothing but make funny voices and jokes as "RP"
>This in turn makes the players honestly horrible at the three pillars of an RPG, combat, exploration and roleplay
>If a DM does run the game like its supposed to its too easy for people who played other RPG's and too difficult for people who are used to baby mode 5E
>So in the end combat has zero meaning in a game that is combat focused so there is no need for fighters or barbarians, exploration is just "go to new square" so gear and rangers are useless and roleplay is useless unless you want to violate somebodies mind with magic or try to roll a 20 to get free shit
>Despite D&D 5E's constant whining about being nice and be inclusive they do not promote table top manners or etiquette so people are always on their phone not paying attention, stealing from the party and causing TPK's because its "funny" and "you can just make up a new character
>This has cause two distinct players in 5E, those who can't handle character deaths what so ever because they want to jerk off on how cool their characters are or people who play it like a video game
>Everything is poorly balanced
>Because of HP bloat and everything being easymode everything feels like a cheap super hero movie with everyone always making jokes, nobody ever feels threatened and on the off chance they are they will start complaining to the DM that the game is too hard or they are being unfair
>"Oh no I got a disease, I may as well make up a new character now!"
That is most that I can think of right now. A lot of new people picked up 5E, got told its the best and easiest system for a new player to play TTRPG's when that is false and this greenhorn culture of what these noobies think RPG's should be based on how their own personal table played and what they saw on TV and people sharing goofy stories on the internet things got out of hand fast. This is fine, most people here had stupid and goofy games. The issue is that these people never grew out of it or they found a system that promotes a goofy game to begin with. There are so many new people they quickly outnumbered the old guard or even new people who wanted to play normally. If these goofy people played with a normal group they would constantly complain and whine until they were either dropped or somebody left, then the people who stayed adapted that same goofy tone of play where everything is a joke and no real adventures are to be had.
People started looking towards other systems and found out if they wanted more crunchy games that existed, or games that actually had proper rules and opportunities for roleplaying that existed. Nobody wanted to deal with class clowns anymore that would constantly sabotage people or games for a quick joke, or people who came in from skyrim playing like sociopaths fricking over the rest of the group. And yes, while these problem players exist everywhere a lot of it was concentrated on D&D 5E and these other systems seemed to be a safe haven. Even for groups who are normal they got sick of D&D 5E with it only supporting one type of playstyle, spellcasters who just want to goof around. So everyone moved onto something else while the RPG posers stuck with D&D 5E which has now become a cesspit of lunacy with it pushing politics and everyone b***hing about how their group is horrible when that is the kind of play that they themselves promoted.
I am done, thank you for coming to my ted talk
is zero incentives to take a negative trait or make "bad choices" in a supposed roleplaying game
5e is literally the first time the PHB tells you to add a flaw to your character as part of the chargen process. And inspiration exists to award players for non-optimal, but flavorful behavior.
>The game is extremely easy on top of the DM pulling punches a lot so players end up getting extremely entitled
Bogus. Low-level 5e can be very deadly, sometimes more so than 3.x or AD&D. Several published adventures include encounters that can knock a character unconscious in one or two hits, including the introductory adventures in the starter and essentials kit. A DM can decide to pull punches, or strike a downed character for two immediate death save failures.
>Players expect the DM to always drop a story and gameplay into the players laps while the players do nothing but make funny voices and jokes as "RP"
From this point on you're not even talking about the system anymore.
>It's mechanically the only way to play past a certain level point. Eventually, you hit the point where the difficulty of the tasks you're required to do is impossible for anyone who hasn't specced into it (though this has been an issue with every edition of D&D.)
Bounded accuracy is supposed to prevent this in most situations, or at least make it much less pronounced than in 3.x or 4e where the system can't model things too far outside the party level range. Either they're attempting something that is actually nearly impossible, or the DM is shit at designing challenges.
>If the GM puts a boulder in your path, the Wizard needs to look at their sheet and accept
No, they don't need to. Find another path. Climb the boulder. Walk around it. Build a mechanism to move it. Hire some guys to help you move it. Most of these wouldn't be on your sheet in the first place.
>Most of these wouldn't be on your sheet in the first place.
>Find another Path
Perception or Investigation, if another path exists.
>Build a mechanism to move it
Tool Proficiency.
>Hire some guys to move it
Is this affordable with the Gold and other valuables I have on hand?
If you don't look at your sheet first, the table just gets bogged down with "GM I'd like to try make a mechanism to move this boulder" "Ok, cool, you've got tinkers tools right?" "Oh, right, I don't, never mind."
Either you're writing in bad faith or you're too braindamaged to put your fricking sheet away and think for yourself. Not everything has to be a check. You only make a check if the DM tells you to. And as a DM you only call for rolls if failure would be meaningful or interesting. Also as a DM, you don't put a fricking boulder in front of the party if there is no way for them to get around it and there are no other goals to pursue.
You literaly have never played 5e to say any of the things you are saying.
And you haven't read the PHB or DMG.
>Also as a DM, you don't put a fricking boulder in front of the party if there is no way for them to get around it
In my experience the most interesting and memorable things happen when you throw something at the party which even you have no idea how to solve.
True. Having others surprise you with what they can come up that you couldn't think of on your own is the best part of... any group activity really. Just don't depend too much on the players being smarter than you.
Don't make getting around the boulder the only goal for them to pursue, moron.
>Also as a DM, you don't put a fricking boulder in front of the party if there is no way for them to get around it and there are no other goals to pursue
And this is why the other anon was saying 5e is extremely fricking easy. Literally can't place anything hard to do in front of the pmayers, per the rules.
I'm sorry dude, you took a complete L and you're out here trying to act like the "I build a mechanism to move the giant rock" argument is somehow something that doesn't make you examine your character sheet.
>Also as a DM, you don't put a fricking boulder in front of the party if there is no way for them to get around it and there are no other goals to pursue.
funny you bring that up because somebody ran an official D&D module that did just that
>I build a mechanism
>Okay give me tool check/int check to see if you actually manage to do so
It's COMPLETELY reasonable for a GM to ask. Just because they can allow things without a check doesn't mean they will do so whenever you want.
Yes, it can be reasonable for the GM to ask for a check. This is about looking at your sheet as a player in order to search for checks to attempt because you have a proficiency somewhere.
>no one has EVER solved a puzzle
>no one has EVER solved a riddle
>no one has EVER moved a boulder
>no one has EVER used their skill checks in interesting ways
>no one has EVER improvised
Nobody adds flaws to their character and if they do it's always something autistic like pacifist or is obsessed with cats. And nobody rarely uses inspiration and if they do they do it for jokes and now apparently if you roll an epic nat 20 which just further proves my point of how bad 5E culture is where people just sit around playing with dice instead of properly interreacting with things.
And again, 5E is really easy, its only really dangerous if you are moronic or you play with a moronic group. And yes, the modules are poorly written and balanced because I had one official module want somebody to touch an obvious death trap to solve a "puzzle", everyone knows this.
And I am talking about the systems culture and the mechanics that promote that culture. Maybe if you read what I posted instead of autisticly shit flinging ALL THE FRICKING TIME when somebody says something you hate you would know. Your style of writing is easy to pick out.
I played with both random groups and friend groups and out of the four friends groups I played only one was good and we moved on from 5E to the year zero engine. Once again, I am talking about the 5E culture and how that came to be. If you want to talk purely about mechanics I also have some examples in there also but then you are just twist it anyway and say "but the player/ DM can fix that" which goes against the concept of a purely mechanical rule. 5E was an ok system at first that is just shit now and the mechanics itself promotes that bad culture. The only thing more important then the rules is how those rules are interpreted or even ignored which a lot of 5E groups do to have lol so randum games.
>And inspiration exists to award players for non-optimal, but flavorful behavior.
Most other systems I have played award experience or points in return for flaws actually being roleplayed/existing. That's encouraging flawed characters, not inspiration.
That's kind of a shit way to do things IMO, I mean so is 5e's inspiration which is a horrible reward, but there are alternatives in the DMG variant rules section (such as Hero Points or Narrative Points).
IMO the best mechanics for this are something like how Digimon Digital Adventures does Aspects. You sit down with the GM and come up with two traits, one major and one minor, and they both have a positive and negative trigger for a +4/-4 for your major and +2/-2 for your minor. For example, a guy who's good at sports but is a total moron might get a +4 to any check for a physical activity such as jumping a gap or lifting something heavy but -4 to a check to any sort of intellectual work such as deciphering code or recalling some knowledge that's kind of obscure. The best part of the DDA system is that you get one use of the major and two of the minor per session, BUT you can choose to take the negative of either when it would apply to regain a use once per session.
Of course, this teaches players to just take the L and rely on the party too, and I always double check my aspects in DDA when I have to make a check and even if I would get nothing from it I proc the negative if it would apply.
There are actually rules like that in 5e's variant rules, Background Proficiency which makes it so that instead of picking proficiencies from your class and background, your background influences when the bonus would apply to skill checks.
>For example, the player of a character with the noble background could reasonably argue that the proficiency bonus should apply to a Charisma check the character makes to secure an audience with the king. The player should be encouraged to explain in specific terms how the character's background applies. Not simply "I'm a noble," but "I spent three years before starting my adventuring career serving as my family's ambassador to the court, and this sort of thing is second nature to me now."
I think that's a great alternative.
>Bogus. Low-level 5e can be very deadly, sometimes more so than 3.x or AD&D.
Do you work for WotC? Only if you can choke to death on the marshmallow fluff that comprises combat.
>Because of HP bloat and everything being easymode everything feels like a cheap super hero movie with everyone always making jokes, nobody ever feels threatened and on the off chance they are they will start complaining to the DM that the game is too hard or they are being unfair
/thread
The worst cultural change on D&D was the idea that "the DM is not your enemy, he is responsible for your fun."
Big mistake.
Although the DM shouldn't be a psychopath trying to ruin the fun, players should believe and play the game with the mindset that: "Yeah, the DM is doing everything possible to kill my character, and we are trying to defeat his plans." and as a bonus "what happens in the games is not the DM's fiat, but it's just the setting, the npcs and the world reacting to the characters' activities."
I don't remember precisely when that happened, but the moment the D&D culture broke with those premises, it started its descent into this thing we have today.
It broke with those premises in like the mid seventies.
Although I'm also not sure how you can simultaneously tell people that they're just seeing the consequences of their actions, and also that the DM has manufactured everything in the game to happen to kill you.
>It broke with those premises in like the mid seventies.
Yeah right..
>Although I'm also not sure how you can simultaneously tell people that they're just seeing the consequences of their actions, and also that the DM has manufactured everything in the game to happen to kill you.
Maybe you should use a little bit of your imagination, although if you play 5E, you have none left.
But the thing is, the DM isn't doing everything possible to kill your character. A good DM is one who gives a challenging but fair obstacle for your character to overcome.
And the challenge is what I consider to be fun, so in that sense, the DM is responsible for my fun, and isn't my enemy because an enemy would just drop a rock on my character.
Although I'm sure when most players say "the DM is not your enemy, he is responsible for your fun" they mean the DM should just hand the players free wins.
>players should believe "DM is doing everything possible to kill my character"
"believe" is the key word
A good DM makes the players truly believe that while managing the game to be fun and fair.
Frick, I run counter to both mindsets. I'm not responsible for my players' fun and neither I'm actively trying to kill them. I'm very transparent with my players: we're in this together co-creating a story. Why the frick is this mindset so difficult to get into?
Co-creation implies a level of responsibility, and to nerds that sounds suspiciously like work.
It's a social setting. Unless you're socially stunted, you always have a level of responsibility to help foster a collaborative environment. If that sounds like work to someone, why not just play a videogame?
Skill challenges don't work on a math level even if they tried over and over again to fix them.
4e math is utter shit. It took years to have a functional MM.
Stop promoting that garbage, moron.
>4e math is utter shit. It took years to have a functional MM.
2 years to have a good MM, as opposed to 5e having 9 years to have no good MM at all?
D&D is the most commonly played system, and people on /tg/ are maximo autismo. That means many of them join random online games with other autists and have bad experiences, which they then generalize to the system they were playing rather than to the mindset of the players. This post and this post
are prime examples. At a glance I'd say at least half of these complaints don't have anything to do with the system at all, and simply describe instances of bad play. This homosexual is literally blaming D&D for members of the group being on their phones.
I'm convinced most of this shit comes from people who join shit groups online, and is parroted by people who don't join any groups at all. Because anyone who actually plays TTRPG's in good faith will tell you that your group matters a lot more than which system you're playing. The last time I played Vampire the group fell apart after three sessions because two people got into some b***hfight outside of said group and didn't want to be in the same room together anymore. And then made up, but the game never continued. If I were a total moron, I'd now be filling threads with b***hing about how Vampire only encourages drama queen behavior and other shit.
Have you considered that "generalizing people who play D&D" and "generalizing people who critique D&D" are just two sides of the same coin?
Why are you spending so much time effectively proving how stupid and non-self-aware you are?
The skill roll thing was the same in older edition, the problem is easily alleviated by exploration turns but 5e has no rules for them.
>While spellcasters get new stuff constantly martials get bread crumbs and don't even get interesting weapons, just what die and damage type
This is the most annoying shit and I have no clue how WotC/Game Designers in general don't see this as an indicator of a massive problem.
It's because 5e has ~13 classes. Only 3 of them, fighter, rogue, and barbarian, have no spellcasting.
Which is stupid. Bards shouldn't be mages and I'll die on this hill.
Based. They autisticly took the "The bards magic comes from his words and music" way to literally.
Bards in the Welsh tradition had a bit of magic, didn't they? In the days of legend and dragons?
I don't care about goatfrickers, a bard as an archetype already has a distinct enough identity in inspiring allies and distracting enemies with song and dance. If anything it should be closer to a rogue subtype than a mage.
There's already sorcerers, wizards, warlocks, druids, priests and paladins if you want to be Harry Potter, leave something for the rest.
>Just make everything mundane, covered in shit and brown
>Or else I will get a seizure
Be my guest, I guess
>mundane
>bards
I don't think there's a more colorful class out there anon. Do you know what makes wverything feel samey and boring? Every class being a flavor of mage except for barbarians, rangers and fighters.
>Point
>(You)
So not just dumb, but also illiterate, huh?
>Because there is no system in place to punish bad or multiple rolls people will skill dogpile onto something or roll for something over and over again
This is never the system's fault. I see this complaint about multiple games but this is ALWAYS the DM's fault.
You should not be asking for a roll if there is no consequence for failure.
The culture devolved into "I roll for X" instead of describing how they want to talk to the person or if they are even going to use their gear to try and climb up a castle wall
>Likewise nobody ever takes into consideration of their surroundings, the person will roll stealth in an empty, brightly let room to try and pickpocket the king or that they tracked in mud
>The alignment chart is supposed to be a guideline but people use it as an excuse to justify bad player behavior like "I set the mayors house on fire because I am chaotic good and the mayor is a meanie!" while the party is still inside talking to the mayor
>People entire personalities are just class+race and one dimensional and flat
Likewise these are all symptoms of player/DMside behaviours. If someone can't RP I'm not going to blame the system, and if someone does some stupid shit like asking to hide in an empty room it's the DM's fault if they say yes.
there is no system in place to punish bad or multiple rolls people will skill dogpile onto something or roll for something over and over again
Because you don't. This is not how skill checks are supposed to work. Any 5e DM that lets them work like this is a pushover, or hasn't read the rules.
Take 10 and Take 20 existed explicitly to prevent this
You can still dogpile in 5th ed. Even with a high DC, five people rolling have a high chance to pass. 4th ed fixed this as skill challenges punished multiple failures.
or you could just steal the way other systems do it, like shadowrun where
>if you don't have the skill, you can't really do shit
>if you and another party member both have the skill, you can't both roll that skill, instead one person has to actually do the thing and the other rolls his skill to add assistance bonus dice to the main roll
No, you don't. You have a primary roller and treat the rest as doing the Help action
Does that work for awareness type checks because that's where I find this causes the most issues. Because each character spots the thing or not independently but if even one passes they immediately share the information.
5e is fine, 3.pf is the edition that 'teaches bad habits' - specifically, it's a system that encourages you to invest and tells you that optimization is part of the system by design. It's basically the only system that makes that level of optimization required in order to hit the difficulty checks, and there's an idea that teaching players that games are this complicated or difficult discourages them from learning other games (which they assume will also be complicated and finicky).
Then again, people have b***hed about (new game) ruining games forever since the beginning of games.
Don't forget that one of the main design philosophies was trying to be like magic the gathering. Like how there are some bad cards to be pack filler there are some bad feats and even classes to pick from.
Correct anon is correct. 3.pf braindamaged an entire generation
Based anon.
Ivory tower game design is the fricking worst.
t. gays complaining that he needs to design his character to be good at something in order to be good at something
3.5 and Monte Cook's cancerous design philosophy damaged the entire hobby and refined the murderhobo into a memetic virus that permanently infects the brain of anyone who plays those awful games for too long. After too many sessions, players become obsessed with power curves and broken builds and trying to one-up the DM at every turn.
That cancer led to an overcorrection that eventually led us to the bloated indie scene where every homosexual was publishing improve theater prompts and trying to pass them off as TTRPGs. As well as giving us an overabundance of people with just enough dedication to want to make a whole game, but not enough intelligence or creativity to do anything more than re-skinning the PbtA ruleset, thus funneling most people back to D&D because it's the most game-like, without being overloaded with crunch. It's not that D&D is good, just that it's better than the overwhelming, extremely visible, indie crap that sits just outside of the D&D space and discourages anyone from wading any further out unless it's to jump on a heavily well-established IP, like Warhammer or Star Wars.
based Monte hater
I love how 3e still makes OSRgays, 4rries, and none-plays-this-game fans still eternally butthurt to this day.
It's one of the many features.
Also FYI:
>Monte doesn't understand Timmy cards
>You don't understand what he means with Ivory Tower Design
>You don't understand what 3e is about
Now keep seething, or just off yourself, moron.
D&d supposed pillars were social, exploration and combat:
For social in the entire game there is some in the class fluff (like warlocks having patrons) with no real explanation to how it works and a single table for reactions that it's so basic most people just do it 100% freeform instead
Exploration don't even get a simple table, pretty much the only way of interacting with the world is a skill test or the utility spells (that are too restrictive to balance the fact they simply can't fail)
Combat is of the only time people really interact with the mechanics, and they are at the same time shallow and restrictive so that "basic attack" every turn is the best course of action to not handcap your friends as to even 5e lovers complain it's the most boring part of the game
The game teaches new players that the mechanics exist purely to put them down (as in combat) or as a "yes or no oracle" (skill roll), and all the enjoyment comes from the moments you can ignore the rules and just roleplay
>all the enjoyment comes from the moments you can ignore the rules and just roleplay
Honestly, I think this is the absolute fricking worst habit that D&D imparts. It ruins players for complex games that are actually competently made, because they get used to the idea that rules are something to be overcome, rather than something that can add to the experience.
Yep, and then game designers decide that rules are bad, so they make lazy pseudo-games with virtually no rules and don't think very hard about the rules they do include. Then ex-D&D people buy it on the basis that it gets rid of the thing they hated about D&D.
This isn't exclusive to 5th edition though. It's been part of D&D for decades.
Same thing with the absolute worst habit that D&D teaches: expecting balanced encounters. This shits all over verisimilitude, discourages creative thinking, because you expect to be able to deal with everything using standard tactics, and even takes away simple power fantasy fulfilment, because you never really get to just obliterate the opposition.
I respectfully disagree. One of the worst gaming experiences I ever had was not due to GMs or players, it was the old Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) Game based on Rolemaster.
In a dungeon we found a stone chair. I said my Hobbit would sit on it, wondering if it was enchanted.
I had to roll to sit down.
I failed the roll.
I botched the critical failure chart.
My Hobbit died in a shower of blood as a shard of loose bone pierced his femoral artery.
From a fricking *chair*.
So respectfully, sometimes rules as written just aren't fun. And isn't fun kind of the point?
It was you gm fault for not properly preparing you players for the threat levels of his game. A badly written "gotcha!" scenario is ruleesystem independent.
Wait, people don't normally roll to use furniture in MERP? Seriously?
I assumed you were exaggerating a scenario with a trapped chair anon, sorry to hear that your gm was THAT moron.
I played D&D 5E when it first came out, excited to finally play a TTRPG for the first time after hearing some of my dads war stories even though there were only a couple and not that exciting. After playing for a year and a half I knew that RPG's had to be more. Social was boring because people just goofed off for 5 to 10 minutes without moving the plot along and even if I had a solid argument I still had to roll for it hoping I rolled over a 6. Exploration was non existent and combat while a little exciting would always be over because somebody cast a spell and yet somehow people still got their asses kicked and dragged on forever.
Exploration was 10 pages in the pre-printing draft. It’s present but they cut it.
Because you shouldn't need 10 pages of autism to run exploration. A couple of survival checks, some perception checks, tracking resources and you're good.
If you're an experienced player who has played and read previous editions and other systems, it's fine... But D&D 5e is ostensibly supposed to be Babby's first RPG and for damned near every part of the game the books are written like
>lol I dunno just do some more combat and then hurry to the next scene so you can do more combat ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Where previous editions outlined all the possible challenges and interesting possibilities a certain wilderness might have. Tables and example DCs for different things. Optional mechanics and subsystems. Yeah, you can just extrapolate the estimated difficulty and figure it out yourself, but 5e doesn't even really teach that to it's players.
The "I want to play a Pirate Ninja Jedi half elf half giant who rides a pterodactyl and has a baby terrasque as a pet." kind of bad player habits.
That seems to be more of a product of Critical Role or the General freakshit nature of theatre kids who just found out abou D&D. At this point these things may all be the same.
Back in the onset of 3.0 this was already everywhere. Once people learned about templates it got worse.
>can I be a half angel hlf demon half vampire? Trust me it makes sense from my lore!
Ay caramba.
Tell me you're too young to be using Ganker without literally getting banned.
You're describing munchkins. There are letters to Dragon Magazine in 1981 from players crowing about how they killed Elminster, Reincarnated him as a racoon and made him into a hat for their 8th level Barbarian. Players had to be constantly consoled that Artefacts and Relics came with downsides.
In the nineties, I saw Werewolf the Apocalypse Storytellers complaining about Werewolf characters showing up wielding "twin klaives", despite ONE klaive being a major, serious item with deep history, earned only through major heroism and deep personal risk. Not even signature White Wolf characters had two.
It's a tale as old as time. You're just either a total n00b, or dishonestly pushing your ridiculous identity politics.
that's every game until you get into your 20s, no relation to the system
As Dungeon Masters its out job to say "yes and..." to these things.
Have you considered that maybe VtM is what made your friends so b***hy?
it's a whatever game, i don't really like it just cause it's bland. but i still end up playing it because it's the one people actually play. if i had to name a bad habit it promotes it'd be on new DMs mainly. the adventure modules are fricking bad, and they're what all the new DMs pulled in by 5e's popularity will use as a model, ergo their adventures will be fricking bad. this isn't really unique to 5e though, horrible adventures have been a thing since the beginning, but for a ton of DMs 5e will be their first experience. still the adventures are notably awful, especially dragon heist which is some of the worst shit i've ever seen
>I’ve seen some say that 5e and it’s okay style promote bad player habits among its players and DMs
On its own, it does not. When in the hands of an illiterate or incompetent group, they will misinterpret or ignore important parts of the documentation and develop bad habits, but that's more on their laziness.
>But I don’t know exactly which bad habits people are talking about?
They're morons who don't know what they're talking about. They'll go with shit like MUH COMBAT IS THE ONLY WAY! when the DMG specifies that there are other ways to gain levels and that GMs should offer equal or greater XP for non-combat solutions or opt for milestones.
5e is a tool, and just like any tool, when a moron uses it they're going to frick things up. /tg/ doesn't want to admit this, of course, because then they'd be admitting they're morons.
>5e is a tool,
I don't mind building my own things but when an official expansion (spelljammer, ravenloft) fails to deliver anything new because of how restrictive and repetitive the current system is and if I have to put in so much effort changing rules and homewbrewing crap to get what I want like dark sun I am just going to move onto another system or make my own separate from 5E's shitty base.
>(spelljammer, ravenloft) fails to deliver anything new because of how restrictive and repetitive the current system is
Spelljammer has new rules for spelljamers and spelljammer combat as well as new races for players and guides on how to construct your own adventures in the astral planes, which is how books should work rather than restricting you to the (always) shitty official settings. Ravenloft also has new player options and guidelines on how to run gothic horror in 5e. Again, just because it doesn't have autistic amounts of mechanics doesn't make it bad.
>what I want like dark sun
Oh so you're just an edgelord, got it.
>I am just going to move onto another system or make my own separate from 5E's shitty base.
Do that, you won't be missed when you inevitably wind up as a nogames.
>He is defending 5E spelljammer and ravenloft
I know you are making bad faith arguments for (you)'s but c'mon
Look, Officially printed settings all suck ass, I would much rather they give me the tools I need to make my own rather than shovel their pre-made shit down my throat.
I'm going to throw out all their race options and setting fluff anyway and make my own, it's far better they just give me tools rather than pandering to the lowest common denominator (people who run pre-made settings).
>Spelljammer has new rules for spelljamers and spelljammer combat as well as new races for players and guides on how to construct your own adventures in the astral planes,
I feel as though you only skimmed yhe book and didn't read in any depth. Spelljammer was a huge let down both mechanically and narratively. The Spelljammer combat you describe is just a contested dice roll to see which Wizard control the vessel from their spelljamming helm, and a truly absurd wait timw before trying again. As well, Wildspace and the Phlogiston were gutted and replaced with silvery nothingness of the Astral Plane. You don't even need to navigate it, you just know where you're going. Its very disengaging.
I was really hoping they would capture a gonzo sense of adventure, but what we got were some paper-thin ideas with no elaboration to back them up.
>implying liking Dark Sun makes you edgy
weird desert races, an actually interesting way to balance mages, previously found only in something like RIFTS where it's literally illegal to be one, killing super evil slave masters, etc.
yeah, that's me, the edge lord alright
If liking quality things that are cool makes me an edgelord then so be it.
The dm guide is a giant manual of bad habbits. The ideas within it are legitimately harmful enough to justify being burned
Elaborate.
inb4 eight encounters per day
>The dm guide is a giant manual of bad habbits.
Again you're actually moronic. The only people who think it's full of "bad habits" are actual autists who need every single tiny thing explained to them and who think that if the books don't explain in minute detail what being dead means that death means nothing.
The DMG is actually the opposite.
It explains so many things in autistic detail that you cannot expect a DM to juggle as many balls as the DMG suggests that you need to. It's like how the official 5e campaigns suck for new DMs. Why? Because they don't offer any advice on how to improvise or craft the story for your group - they just write out block text for everything and assume its all you need.
>It explains so many things in autistic detail that you cannot expect a DM to juggle as many balls as the DMG suggests that you need to
You're confusing the 5e DMG with the PF2E DMG.
>It's like how the official 5e campaigns suck for new DMs
Official campaigns/settings for ANY system suck dick. They're always shit, not matter what, and will pale in comparison to anything you make for your friends.
>Because they don't offer any advice on how to improvise or craft the story for your group - they just write out block text for everything and assume its all you need.
Each group is different. They literally can't do that without making the book 2000 pages long. They give you tools to work with.
I haven't seen anyone complain about the actual bad habits 5e fosters, which is churning out GMs that only know how to railroad. Every single campaign wotc has put out is a terrible railroad. Most of them are railroads with some sort of baffling gimmick mechanic stapled on top (looking at you, dragon heist). Is there good shit in there for a more seasoned gm to utilize? Yes, absolutely. But if you're a brand new gm, fresh off the starter box, and want to run a module for the first time, you're fricked. The 1pp modules are going to, without fail, teach you the absolute wrong lesson, every single time.
>Most of them are railroads with some sort of baffling gimmick mechanic stapled on top (looking at you, dragon heist).
Dragon heist is such a bafflingly badly designed module. It is incredible because there are the bones for a great sandbox urban adventure.
The 4 villain gimmick is... Like, I don't understand how it made it out the pitch meeting. It's so bad, eats up so much page count, actively makes the module worse, and I don't understand what the supposed benefit is. It doesn't add replayability or anything. It's crazy it got published the way it is.
Replayability for DMs? I don't know. My guess is they had two villains written out, couldn't decide which one to cut. Then some guy in the meeting suggested to raise it to four.
my guess is it's written for the podcast market, so different groups can run different villains and add rewatchability for viewers. paizo has said the majority of their adventure audience doesn't play them, just reads them like novels. add podcast-watching and the dismal state of these fricking books makes a lot more sense. a lot of them are not designed with playability in mind, and even the ones that are are gonna be written by authors trained on the unplayable ones.
Why buy and read a D&D adventure when you could just read an actual book or comic?
Why play a commercial adventure on-stream when the players might already know it? Shouldn't a selling point be that your group is running their own original story?
Sorry, I meant why run it when the audience already knows it as well?
The Alexandrian has a similar guess, but even if that is the case, it's not only dumb, but a poor implementation of a dumb idea.
5e players don't read
they stop at rule 0 "fun is the most important thing"
and never understand how the game works
rool of cule
I hate the word "fun" so much because people do stupid things for "fun" and the cost of everyone else enjoyment. They want "fun" by breaking the rules and being OP yet don't understand that constantly doing that cheapens the experience.
>What bad habits does 5e promote? How does it promote them exactly?
If you like the OSR style of play
>your character sheet is spartan, but the implication is that you can do much more than what is explicitly detailed
>characters can be created quickly so you shouldn’t throw a b***hfit if one dies, >a general expectation of sword and sorcery / mild horror for tone
then 5e teach opposite behaviors
>there are things you explicitly cannot do, like for instance try to knock a guy down as you hit him with your blunt weapon, without the enumerated powers on your sheet
>characters take a lot of time to build out of session, and the healing and dying systems cushion them a lot, making it less of a game and more of a narrative. You should spend a lot of time away from the table working on your sheet
>general expectation of tone like superheroes or WoW style fantasy
If you don’t care about any of those things or like those things in 5e, they won’t really come across as “bad habits” to you
being attached to a nigh unkillable character is pretty bad in this hobby
Hey remember to hate D&D and hasbro and like me Conor and my hedge fund alta fox because we have 2% of hasbro stock and would really like them to sell off WOTC so we can get a one off dividend payment and rake in a huge profit! It will absoltely frick wothc and hasbro and D&D but I don't care because I'm conor from alta fox and I asset strip companies and don't give a frick about you stupid roleplaying shit! Just give me my money you moronic nerds! Agencies have been spamming here to get some hate going for the board of hasbro who have been blocking my board takeover , the same people who ran the monster energy campaign. You do as your told. You've been told to hate D&D and hasbro and wotc and I've paid for your brains. I fricking own you.
What the frick am I reading? People hated D&D and WOTC ever sense 4E.
Alright anon you’ve peaked my interest. What’s their deal?
You know you've lost to rich people when you base your opinions on your hobbies entirely around whether or not they will hurt the financial interests of rich people. At this point you've ceded your brain to them, whether you're a good slave or a bad one, they run you.
Some bad habits that things like requiring a skill check for shit that shouldn't need a skill check, "I roll perception to find X" type of playing, grand narrative storyshittery (that causes a bunch of issues), introducing weird homebrew freakshit by players that just play as weird skinned human, and typically just a lack of imagination to problem solve. This isn't all 5e players I'm sure but I think it's at least a plurality of DMs/players that do those things. It's probably why a lot of campaigns fizzle out, why DM burnout is a thing, why there's so little DMs in 5e, etc. The books sort of promote it by giving the mechanics to do so but I think it's more so the culture around 5e that promotes these bad habits.
I've actually not had any bad experiences with 5E. The mechanics are lacking here and there, but overall it does a good job of emphasizing background in character creation first and foremost. Where it tends to lack is in any guidance for the DM on how to handle various issues that arise, such as group cohesion. D&D more so than many other RPGs out there, really emphasizes group play and how you're a team and not just individuals. But, there are no real mechanics for this. Like players should at least have long and short term personal goals and then shared long and short term group goals, but the latter is really not emphasized at all in character creation.
Other issues are just general lacking systems, but I think that's more so to do with trying to keep things mechanically simple. It's also why there is such a divide between martials and spellcasters (not in terms of power although that does play into it, but in terms of just me mechanics and options). This was done to please every type of player, if someone wants something stupid easy, you could give them a fighter and they won't really have to think too hard tactically. A lot of this could have been avoided by just making basic and advanced versions of most of the classes.
I find more so the toxicity in 5E coming from the community than anything. The game doesn't really promote you playing freak shit or being the center of attention, but for whatever reason that's become the popular thing in 5E.
There are some complaints about hp bloat and things like that, but I mean I've played in many RPGs, outside dungeon crawls or high lethality games, I've never had a character die (unless I wanted it to happen). It just doesn't happen, so I've never felt weird about hp bloat in 5E.
>such as group cohesion
That gets covered in the Session Zero part of Tasha's actually.
>Like players should at least have long and short term personal goals and then shared long and short term group goals, but the latter is really not emphasized at all in character creation.
Because it's less a character thing and more tied to the quests. That's how you do it, you say "you're all here to do this, this is how the campaign begins. Please make characters that fit this, if you don't I'll make you make a new one or change your current one to fit.". It's that easy.
>The game doesn't really promote you playing freak shit or being the center of attention, but for whatever reason that's become the popular thing in 5E.
Freakshit is a dumb buzzword in how /tg/ uses it. Humans can be freakshit in a setting where humans are rare/don't exist for example, but /tg/ would never accept that truth. Also, players wanting to play dumb shit that doesn't fit the setting has been around in every system for decades and sure as hell didn't start in 5e.
>I've never had a character die
Oddly enough I've had three character deaths all in an official module (Dragon of Icespire Peak). One to the cultists, one to the ochre jellies, and one to the orc raid on the hunting lodge. I find that I actively have to not kill the party if I don't want them dead.
Then again, I also tend to overestimate my players in other systems so having to pull something out of my ass to undo my mistakes in that regard is common for me; my games tend to be overly-lethal, to the point of being borderline unfair but that's more because I see my players as competent at system mastery for the stuff I run and overestimate their power.
No one has read Tasha's. And even then the group cohesion section is very weak. Third party content is much better at it tbh (Kobold Press has a lot of good stuff on themes which fit a lot better than just talking it out).
It's actually not that easy. You can't build a game under a single campaign idea, a lot of players need actually clear group goals or they fall apart very easily. Even if they're all onboard for the same campaign and have made characters that reflect such.
Freak shit is not a buzzword. It's very real and very promoted in current 5E.
I've only seen deaths in the 1-3 level region. Anything past that was incredibly narrative specific.
>No one has read Tasha's.
A lie because I have.
>And even then the group cohesion section is very weak.
It's fine, but you shouldn't need to worry about it. If you play with randos then you deserve all misfortune that falls upon you however.
>Third party content is much better at it tbh (Kobold Press has a lot of good stuff on themes which fit a lot better than just talking it out).
Sounds like autistic homosexualry for gigaautists who can't handle basic human communication/shilling
>You can't build a game under a single campaign idea
You absolutely can, unless you and your table are all socially moronic autists in which case this isn't the hobby for you.
>a lot of players need actually clear group goals
Yeah, that's literally the campaign idea. "You are all at X to do Y, make characters that fit that".
>Even if they're all onboard for the same campaign and have made characters that reflect such.
Then it's not a problem.
>Freak shit is not a buzzword. It's very real and very promoted in current 5E.
It absolutely is. In fact playing weird shit has been a staple since Gygax.
>I've only seen deaths in the 1-3 level region. Anything past that was incredibly narrative specific.
It's really not that hard, you're just softballing the players.
>This isnt a hobby for socially moronic autists
lol, Lmao even.
Something like a party inspiration system would be cool. Whether at the start of the campaign or after the players figure out their group dynamic, they could talk to the DM and establish a shared goal that gives each player some kind of meta reward if they all do it together. This can be either something serious or maybe even funny, it's just there to make it easy for players to tell the DM what kind of gam they want.
>We want to earn a point of collective meta currency when we clear out a monster lair that we know has killed an innocent person
>We want to earn a point of collective meta currency when we collectively do something that pisses off a group of elves
>We want to earn a point of collective meta currency when we achieve one of our king's goals
>Where it tends to lack is in any guidance for the DM on how to handle various issues that arise, such as group cohesion. D&D more so than many other RPGs out there, really emphasizes group play and how you're a team and not just individuals. But, there are no real mechanics for this.
That's something I haven't really found in any of the other, larger and older systems I've played. In Shadowrun you generally play a bunch of criminals and outcasts from society, but you form strong ties with the other runners because that's what the players at the table met up for. You have connections to tie your character to the world, but those rarely include other PCs. Call of Cthulhu lets you roll for connections, with a 10% chance of having another PC chosen. Pathfinder and The Dark Eye have nothing, and character generation in the latter is so convoluted you practically can't do it at the table. VtM has you create relationships with your coterie using a web of positive and negative relationships, in addition to determining coterie traits together. But that's only in the much-maligned-here V5. 20th Anniversary only gave you
>It is your responsibility to take on a role that’s
not detrimental to the coterie. Vampires are solitary creatures, so there has to be some reason you’ve joined up with your Kindred companions (the other players’ characters).
Having mechanics for party cohesion seems to be a rather new addition to the medium. I've heard a lot of PbtA games use those extensively as well, but I never played one. In the old days, you just assumed that the players showed up to have fun and kept the party together because of it.
The standard for TTRPG's was always just friends getting together to play a game they all want to play. As long as that happens, it's all good. The experience of one or multiple people joining that game while having a fundamentally different understanding of what "fun" is, is a relatively modern problem. The whole idea of mechanics is that they're abstractions of real actions, and there's no need to abstract the interaction you have with your own party in most cases.
Eh, 5e is a super alright system. I don't like what they did with the setting, where it's super duper high fantasy with all kinds of wacky fantasy races. I like the more grounded stuff with basic races, but that's just me.
The thing I like about 5e is the online platform, which makes creating characters super easy, playing online with friends super convenient and running encounters works (mostly) really well.
Personally, I blame the streamers. Learning to play by watching moronic internet clowns do bad improv is where most of the bad habits nugamers have come from.
This is actually a really good point. People who absorb TTRPGs through podcasts and livestreams completely forget how much of a production those things are. Podcasts are heavily edited. Recorded sessions where they have a whole studio with multiple camera angles and on-screen graphics and giant highly detailed diorama battle maps do reshoots and possibly even script out their jokes and storylines well in advance. Even livestreamed shows are done with every player involved knowing that they are putting on a performance for an audience, which drastically changes their attitude and how they'll behave, because it's about making strangers like them, not just playing the damned game.
The larger these productions get, where they start hiring whole crews, renting out studios, etc, the more you can assume that any *super epic* moment or gut-busting, off-the-cuff remark made by one of the professional actor players was likely meticulously planned and rehearsed before the cameras ever started rolling.
>What bad habits does 5e promote?
playing dnd
>Reinforcing the particular strain of min-maxing autism, the "I want to max-out my damage output in a single attack", and teaching it even to people that aren't remotely interested in grindfest combat
>Constantly stressing the importance of the most efficient and optimal build, due to the mechanics being designed in "all or nothing" philosophy
>Pidgeonholding every single character into very strictly and very narrowly defined roles, further reinforcing the importance of an "optimal build", in the process also making people think in terms of cookie-cutter characters that are defined by their stats and class first, second and last
>Actively discouraging players from any sort of creativity, and relying strictly on things that are stated in the charsheet, in the most literal way
>Denying any sort of outside-of-box solutions, solely to justify existence of multiple expansions covering in anal detail various minutae details
>Reducing everything into binary pass/fail outcomes, with absolutely nothing between, which obviously only further encourages the "all in" approach to playing
It's essentially 3.x e on crack when it comes to teaching and reinforcing terrible habits. The only difference is that this time around, it targets normalgays, rather than autistic shutins, so at least there are less meltdowns at the table
This is the sort of shit you only believe when you either never play, or play with total shitters and are too socially inept to recognize that fact.
What a monumental waste of good quads, on top of the sheer fricking irony of being the actual no-game statement.
This has always been my biggest complaint with the mentality that is reinforced by the action economy, the challenge rating system, and every single class ability. Why do you high stats? So you can hit more often and do more damage, while having more HP to survive more damage. Why do you want extra attacks and bonus actions? So you can do more damage on your turns to kill your enemies before they can do any damage to you. Why should you only do your best attacks and abilities on your turns? Because if you don't then they'll survive longer and have a chance to do more damage to you and that's bad because you have to manage your resources for the rest of the fights you have to do later.
People can play and run the game however they want, but that's on them, not the system. 5e, rules as written, tells you that every session should be a handful of CR-appropriate encounters per day of adventuring. If you run dynamic, chandelier swinging combat where players are doing things that aren't following the combat flowchart of their most optimal choices, that's cool for you, but the game itself directly informs players that optimized, power curve-informed play, is what the designers intended and built all the math and balance around.
That's not just DnD specific problem, but variety of games struggle with it in general. My observation is that the less the game depends on various statuses and effects, the more eager people are to go for the "max-out, full-frontal assault".
On one hand, you have stuff like GURPS, with the infamous "ox test" meme, where applying action economy logic is going to end with a TPK despite facing a farm animal. On the other you have games like Twilight 2k (the real one, not the shitty modern remake), where every single enemy is perfectly capable of putting half a mag of AK rounds into your chest, while everyone has very scarce ammo - so the trick is to not get shot, rather than trying to max-out your own damage output, hoping that the enemy will either run out of ammo of expose themselves from behind the cover. THEN there are systems like Hollow Earth Expedition or OVA, where a frickload of things are integrated together, so you can both just blindly charge forward and succceed OR play it cool and ALSO succeed, depending on how you imagine the whole combat playing out and how you've build your character.
Keep in mind that I never said that the game forces you to minmax (and that's what 3.x e was doing - you either min-maxed the shit out of your character, or you and your party had terrible time), but heavily encourages doing so. The reason why it's on crack is not due to the mechanics openly hinging on your min-maxing, but the way how the rulebooks are written repeating like a mantra that you should be min-maxing.
Also, go make a half-decent warlock that isn't a tiefling, a good ranger that isn't a half-elf or human and a good sorcerer that isn't an elf
>inb4 but muh lore
The lore was written to justify the class-race combo, not the other way around, especially given how it changes between editions.
>Also, go make a half-decent warlock that isn't a tiefling, a good ranger that isn't a half-elf or human and a good sorcerer that isn't an elf
I don't get the point here. Multiple races work well for each class
>and that's what 3.x e was doing - you either min-maxed the shit out of your character, or you and your party had terrible time
Most 3.x monsters are not remotely optimized.
... yes, and?
What's that even have to do with the point he was making?
The floor of optimization to deal with CR appropriate monsters in 3.5 isn't that high. With some exceptions, which tend to be individual monsters, you can be Tordek and be fine.
Also different anon, but you are textbook of yet another brain-damaged DDrone.
It doesn't matter how monsters are optimalised. What matters is the whole fricking ivory tower bullshit design, where you are given 10 options, but only 2 are actually worth picking, and from those, one is clearly superior in the end. And this cycle repeats each and every single fricking level.
So in the end of the day, by level 9-12, you are going to either pick time and again the most optimal choice, or you will end up with terrible character that will be severely underpowered and thus facing challenges he can't actually deal with
>inb4 other games also allow you to make terrible character
Yeah, except they don't. They don't openly tell you "figure it out, buddy", treating optimal build autism as a pre-requested skill to even sit to the game and not suffer the consequences of making non-optimal character.
>It doesn't matter how monsters are optimalised. What matters is the whole fricking ivory tower bullshit design, where you are given 10 options, but only 2 are actually worth picking
If the sub-optimal options keep up with the monster math, and Tordek the shitty PHB fighter broadly does, there isn't a problem with the game.
The problem is a social one of interparty dynamics, and the feeling of getting "shown up" by someone else in the party. This is the actual problem with the "ivory tower" design in 3.x. The monsters were balanced around Tordek, a Druid that hit things with a scimitar, and a blaster caster - laughably unoptimized play. The problem is that Tordek's player feels sad when Optimancer Supremus ends the fight in round 1 with a save-or-suck, and Tordek just gets to do mop-up. That Tordek the unoptimized fighter holds in own swinging at monsters is immaterial to whether his player feels bad.
>This is the actual problem with the "ivory tower" design in 3.x
Yet another anon and either you are baiting at this point, or are a genuine moron
>and Tordek the shitty PHB fighter broadly does
He doesn't though. He fares poorly almost immediately after level 1.
Level 5: 8.855 DPR vs 56 HP
Level 10: 23.49 DPR vs 136 HP
Level 15: 43.29 DPR vs 224 HP
This is just against monster HP and assuming he gets to full attack. He fricking blows dick against monsters, and this is without mentioning his complete dogshit saves.
>DPR
Fricking clown
Frick off, moron. A character who's 'good enough' isn't going to take 6 or 7 rounds to kill an enemy that isn't even supposed to be a major challenge. Tordek is shit and you're moronic for defending him.
He doesn't need to solo the monster. He needs to do enough so the PARTY can kill an equal ECL encounter in the 3ish rounds expected.
The party can do that with or without him. Better without him because there's no chance of his garbage saves being used against the party.
You can absolutely be more optimized. But to do about as well as the designers expected against most monsters doesn't require much.
What the designers expected doesn't mean jack shit compared to reality.
>It doesn't matter how monsters are optimalised. What matters is the whole fricking ivory tower bullshit design, where you are given 10 options, but only 2 are actually worth picking, and from those, one is clearly superior in the end. And this cycle repeats each and every single fricking level.
You didn't even understand what ITD means. You have been mad all these years over nothing.
Now read it moron.
Not even the same anon, but by gods you're a bitter shrivelled c**t of a personality.
That was my first post in the thread but I've been correcting morons for years.
Toughness is a powerful feat if you're a low-level spellcaster, particularly if you're a 1st-level spellcaster, and especially if you're a 1st-level spellcaster in a convention game. That's what it's for. EVERY element in the game is FOR something, every feat and skill is in the books for a reason, "Ivory Tower Game Design" refers to the idea that these reasons should not be explained (because discovering them for yourself is supposed to be part of the fun). The idea of "trap options" is a meme, 3e never had trap options. 3e imbalance mostly comes from the ideas that it mistranslated from AD&D (standardizing XP tables, removing fighter followers, etc), but it also must be said that 3e and the surrounding community created a high expectation of game balance which had not previously existed in any community.
Yes, I'm still a Monte Cook fanboy, and yes, it makes me mad that this is the only thing people remember from his blog, his blog was really good and I wish we were talking about it. But if you're going to complain about ivory tower game design and post the associated article then you can at least be bothered to read the fricking thing.
>Toughness is a powerful feat if you're a low-level spellcaster
No
Yes.
Cry harder.
Hush bb. Maybe the anon you are looking for will give you the reacharound you're asking for.
Toughness is a shit feat. The characters who could theoretically use it also start with a familiar that can give them the same effect. A 1st level con Wizard with Improved Initiative and a toad familiar is vastly superior to any other 1st level con Wizard.
>Toughness is a shit feat at 1st level
>Getting it for free is extremely powerful at 1st level
Christ mate, what are you even saying?
It's called opportunity cost. You have to trade much better effects for that +3 HP when it comes to feats, but you don't have to do that with core familiars because their effects are narrowed to Toughness, Great Fortitude/Lightning Reflexes/Iron Will, and Skill Focus. Toad familiars become shit when hummingbirds are on the table, too.
>you're going to complain about ivory tower game design
>I've been correcting morons for years.
And demonstrably being one in your spare time.
>Yeah, except they don't. They don't openly tell you "figure it out, buddy", treating optimal build autism as a pre-requested skill to even sit to the game and not suffer the consequences of making non-optimal character.
This is just a blatant lie.
What is the ox test?
It's quasi-meme thing. Essentially when playing with a new group, you let them go through character creation and then tell them to kill an ox (works regardless of setting and tech level).
The idea is that due to people being so accustomed to "I attack" and just rolling for hit & damage flow of combat, when faced with a system that operates on different principles, they will end up fricking themselves over. In this particular case, the ox can easily resist their swings (and most of them will probably miserably fail to begin with), while then using its bulk to just trot people down. The "lesson" from the test to be learned is that you should first aim your attacks, take status ailments into account or the fact that a big, heavy beast of burden is, well, big and heavy, so it can just toss you like a ragdoll, rather than simply dealing d6 damage.
Don't think about it as a serious situation, since it's a quasi-meme, but I did see similar situations in various games, where people were only thinking about maxing out damage while doing it ASAP (in a fashion typical to DnD), and the results were disastrous for them and/or the whole party.
And I think the more accurate portray of just how different games can be, while still sticking to GURPS, is the following:
If you aren't spending 3-4 turns just aiming your bow, you will never hit your mark, and "realoding" it takes 2 turns, too.
Tell that to someone who isn't used to such flow and they will instantly declare bows useless. Tell them a flintlock or a crossbow take 15 turns to reload (and then you still have to aim them) and they will call the game shit, despite never playing it.
Just from hearing it, it does sound a bit tedious. Games generally work well when you can do one at least one worthwhile action a turn. I would be annoyed if I only got to take a couple actions in combat because my weapon had to recharge for multiple turns while someone else could do something for free. But then again, I've never played GURPS, so I don't know what the flow would actually be like.
The flow is that the time flows, and so goes your moves.
The only game that goes even remotely close to GURPS actual speed in action is anything Ubiquity-based, because you can flat-out ignore the rolls, using predefinied values, on top of using a rule called "continous combat", so you literally count up and on the right number specific player declares their action and then you move to next person in order. Meaning you gan go through group of characters and 15 PCs in a single minute.
They don't understand that GURPS turns are 1 second in game and shouldn't take much longer than that from the player.
>Tell them a flintlock or a crossbow take 15 turns to reload (and then you still have to aim them) and they will call the game shit, despite never playing it.
I will do exactly that because games are meant to be fun and spending 15 turns reloading a gun isn't fun.
It can be. I speak as someone who has never touched GURPS but I'm guessing it adds dramatic tension since you have to be aware of the time it'll take for you to take another shot. Plus the enemies play by the same rules anyway (right?)
Nta, but every turn represents exactly 1 second, you dumb frick. Meaning you can do whatever the frick you please with your turns, WHILE reloading.
Meaning you are brain-damaged by DnD already, for you probably thought you have to skip fricking 15 turns, like the dumb homosexual you are, to get your weapon ready for next attack.
I ran GURPS game where the PCs were 1980s mercs who came up on some kikongo nogs using muskets and lemme tell you, it's pretty funny using musket volley formations against squad infantry with machine guns.
>GURPS ox test
Wtf is that, never heard of it before
Someone talked about it here
>essentially 3.x e on crack
Anon this is bullshit. 5e has few avenues for minmax bullshit compared to both 3.X and other DnDerivatives. It's no where near hard enough to necessitate minmaxing or optimisation, the system doesn't encourage it, it's just something autists will do when given the opportunity. Sub-optimal characters are completely fine in 5e but minmaxers gonna minmax.
The biggest product in any industry will always promote at least some bad habits, even if they aren't written into it. A large, unified community will form and codify some of those bad habits by rote and repetition, and then they'll be taught to new players. Nothing that can be done about that--even if the product specifically tries to train people away from those habits, the human element will always be stronger.
DnD and its derivatives teach many bad habits, 5e is not at all uniquely bad in this regard, someone who plays PF1e or 3.5 will also be mentally stunted when it comes to RPGs. DnDdrones are the only players I've ever seen who patently refuse to try other games.
In my years with tabletop RPGs it always seemed perfectly natural and desirable to try out new systems regularly, and to read the rules and gain an understanding of those systems when I played in or ran them. Yet DnDdrones will never do this, even if forced out of their little d20 enclosure, they never bother to read the rules or gain an understanding of what the game is about, they just assume it's like DnD.
DnD also teaches bad play habits, in addition to causing that weird brain damage. It teaches players Vancian magic which is so moronicly specific to DnD and its derivatives that it functionally does not exist outside, and this warps their notion of how magic should work as well as what magic-users should be like. Alignment is another DnD sacred cow that simply doesn't exist in normal RPGs because it encourages bad, and simplistic characterization.
DnD also teaches players that they gain experience primarily through killing, which isn't how the vast majority of RPGs actually work, and coupled with the aforementioned brain damage that DnD gives people indoctrinated within it, this leads to drones producing extremely inappropriate characters and failing to engage with most (nearly all) games.
DnD can be played and enjoyed, of course, but I think it should never be how you introduce someone to the hobby, because if they don't see what normal RPGs are like then they will almost always get the brain damage from this wretched system and then be permanently fricked up as a player. Make them play something else first and then try a new system or two out before introducing someone to DnD or its derivatives or you are consigning them to the RPG equivalent of a lifelong developmental disability.
Can confirm, i started with MERP and as result what i expected playing with other rulesystem is:
1. Don't frick around or you will find out, combat is either the result of an emergency (eg: an ambush) or the last resort when everything else fails because combat is dangerous, wounds hurt and your character may die regardless on how skilled he is, you lower your guard for a second and the bandit spilts open your skull with an axe;
2. When you venture off chart you better be damn sure to prepare accordingly, wasting your magic power on frivolities like conjuring water or ignore the cold may potentially frick you up when you need all your magic might to turn away a spectre or some other supernatural shit. Magic isn't cheap, be wary of using it.
3. If you want to survive you have to use your ingenuity out there. Think how to check if the chest is trapped, think to cover your smell before entering the wolves den, think how to escape a room before you enter one.
Conversely guys i know have started gaming with D&D 3.x+ don't give a shot about the world, only how to hyperspecialize their character and if that's makes you at risk no issue here, we will spam utility spells/magic items to cover their asses. The world isn't more scary and exciting than a fricking theme park.
God this so much. Every other game encourages people to think a little bit and use the tools at their disposal. Every D&D group I have ever played never used any sort of gear or item even after I have proved how helpful it is like the basic healers kit to the classic ten foot pole. They only rely on their magic spells to just win or to roll on a skill. The only person I have seen use gear was the rogue using lockpicks and the crowbar.
>When you venture off chart you better be damn sure to prepare accordingly, wasting your magic power on frivolities like conjuring water or ignore the cold may potentially frick you up when you need all your magic might to turn away a spectre or some other supernatural shit.
That's a bad habit you learned from MERP all right. Those frivolities are what you should use magic for when needed rather than slinging another fireball. Imagine getting caught up in an unexpected snowstorm and not having a way to weather the cold.
Way to miss the point moron. I was exactly telling that those "frivolities" should exist as backup emergency resources, they became frivolities when players start to spam them instead of carefully planning using equipment.
The biggest one is one battle -> long rest.
This is, to be entirely blunt, narratively logical and sensible, accurate to how expeditions tend to actually work, and so forth. But the mechanics are not designed for this. There's quick fix; a long rest requires a full 72 hours, making it a serious commitment. Anything less than that is a short rest. Magic-users recover 1 spell slot per level on a short rest, and Sorcerers fully recover their Sorcery Points. (there's a couple other tweaks that might be useful depending on your party)
It discourages healing in combat by making it mechanically difficult to do and suboptimal thanks to the death rules. You only want to heal someone after they've hit 0 and taken a death save, otherwise you're wasting spell slots/resources.
It has a lot of other flaws, but those are the two that strike me as building bad habits in players that carry to other games.
This is such a no problem/gm problem it's insane.
If you don't have any time pressure going on and the PCs can just dip out of the situation for 8 hours, you've fricked up.
Try again. The problem isn't on the GM side. It's in the basic design of the rest/recovery mechanics.
If your players can just leave the situation and sleep for 8 hours,you've created an uninteresting, stupid situation. You have only yourself to blame. This has literally never been a problem in any 5e game I've played.
>You only want to heal someone after they've hit 0 and taken a death save, otherwise you're wasting spell slots/resources.
Because no enemies who can blow you past your max negative hp exist, right? I swear, you nogames just keep making shit up.
...wait, do you think that's how it works? Holy shit. You realize that when you hit 0 hp, YOU HIT 0 hp. Flat zero. Even if you had 1 hp and got hit for 25498737, you're at 0. That's WHY it never makes sense to heal someone when they're not making death saves.
The problem. Is the mechanics. Not the gamemaster. I don't run 5e any more and, bluntly, never will again. But this is literally a thing that literally happens literally all the time. That simple fix solves the issue entirely. It's not even a big change. It makes the game immensely better. Why are you so mad about it?
No. They aren't. You stupid. Frick.
I honestly don't understand how you can be this fricking stupid and type. No wonder you had problems with 5e.
>Has no argument
>"Y-you sure are mad tho!"
K.
There's no argument to be made against someone seething incoherently. You don't understand the game's mechanics. That's clear. Hurling ad hominems doesn't make your case any better.
You're saying that the single encounter day is a design problem. I am telling you you're wrong. If you're letting your players get into a single fight, and then leave, go rest for eight hours,and then come back, that ISN'T a game mechanics problem, that is a gm problem. You haven't offered a coherent counter argument to that, you've just gone "nuh-uh, u mad, u so mad!"
If there is literally no time pressure and no consequence to the players sleeping for a full 8 hours after a single encounter, you have fricked up your adventure design. There are problems wrong with 5e, and there are problems with the short/long rest system, but you, as the game master, have to actively allow them to exploit it that way.
>You're saying that the single encounter day is a design problem. I am telling you you're wrong. If you're letting your players get into a single fight, and then leave, go rest for eight hours,and then come back, that ISN'T a game mechanics problem, that is a gm problem. You haven't offered a coherent counter argument to that, you've just gone "nuh-uh, u mad, u so mad!"
Why is it the GMs fault? HOW is it the GMs fault? When is it the GMs fault? What exactly is the GMs fault? These questions and more remain completely unaddressed by you.
But that's irrelevant, because it is a game design issue. The why is simple: the most popular classes are designed around long rest economy, and the least popular around short rest economy. Long rest economy wins out every time. This leads to an endless cycle of nonsense where the group fights an encounter or two but then, as is normal in the pace of play, they come to a stopping point and so they stop and take a long rest.
The solution is better rest mechanics. Not blaming GMs for not stringing their players along for multiple sessions without rests. Frick right off with that shit opinion.
Okay, so your argument is still "nuh-uh!" Cool, tight.
I'm sorry your brain is so smooth. That's a terrible handicap in life.
>Because he does not execute the scenario in Case: Players Do Nothing. The scenario does not freeze when the players take a nap.
What part of "tension naturally lulls" doesn't compute with you? If you don't let them relax from tension, tension stops being a thing, and then you're probably not having much fun. Just slogging through combat rolls. That's insanely boring for most people.
>If there is an evil plot, the antagonist have a scheme that they are executing if not interrupted.
This isn't a point. I know you think it is, but it's not. Just because "evil" is doing something doesn't mean it will be apparent to, let alone counterable by, "good."
>This isn't a point. I know you think it is, but it's not. Just because "evil" is doing something doesn't mean it will be apparent to, let alone counterable by, "good."
If the Evil Ritual requires steps A, B, C, and D to accomplish; the NPCs are going to be working to achieve them (and should generally be assumed to achieve them absent PC intervention, and reacting thereto). For location based scenarios, nature abhors a vacuum - if the PCs clear the caves of orcs, then go take a nap, it makes sense for them to come back to find scavengers like green slimes or carrion crawlers picking at the orcs corpses or the kobolds from the next floor down started moving in.
>it makes sense for them to come back to find scavengers like green slimes or carrion crawlers picking at the orcs corpses or the kobolds from the next floor down started moving in.
Not in the span of 8 hours it does. Even assuming a full day's travel, that's not a typical overnight change unless those creatures are native to that local-ecosystem, and even if they were, would not be that quick in finding/making serious changes. Only sapient creatures would be capable of that, and only if they are already laird in the area.
Not that anon, but I think you're getting too caught up in the nitty gritty of the narrative detail. Ultimately, anything you present as an issue can eventually be narrated around. The real issue though is that utilizing this narrative design which typically goes against the playstyle the game rules encourage will restrict the number of stories that you can make.
>By the 5e DMG:
The out-of-the-box math of 5e is heavily flawed and does not hold up to a lick of scrutiny. The challenge rating math most of all is insanely flawed, and I wouldn't use it as the paper to a ruler, let alone good guidance.
The math may be poorly designed, but it still did not intend a 5-minute workday. At least a part of this issue on the GM.
5e is full of newbies, it's no surprise that they run into problems when playing the game against its guidelines.
>but it still did not intend a 5-minute workday.
What it intends and what it actually does are two separate matters though. The discussion is that 5e,
out-of-the-box,
by design,
intended or otherwise,
naturally encourages players through its playstyle to have 5-minute workdays through many facets of game design. Such as the fact that long rests are incredibly easy to complete, they are insanely beneficial, the fact that the milieu of a fantasy adventure game typically encouraging long bouts of travel which are also shorthanded by 5e, which creates many openings for them to be completed in, the fact that the adventurers presented by WotC naturally tend towards using the milestone leveling system which encourages the DMs to give long rests after important events which are usually 1E/D designed, and merely the simple fact that so many of the player's cool powers are locked behind a long rest which encourages them to seek it ALL wind up contributing to players having 5-minute workdays.
>5e is full of newbies, it's no surprise that they run into problems when playing the game against its guidelines.
I think this is unintentionally the greatest condemnation of 5e by you. A newbie to 5e will wind up performing 5 minute workdays. That should honestly be the only real thing I need to corroborate everything I just stated above.
Now, I'm not saying 5e is good. I'm just saying that your statements aren't true.
A long rest requires the party to go completely uninterrupted for 8 hours, which requires them to be in a safe environment and have that time to spare. Essentially, it means that newbie GMs aren't running dungeons- which, from the published adventure I played (Frostmaiden) isn't a problem in official material.
And don't bring up Tiny Hut. By the time PCs can cast it, they're facing enemies with access to 3rd-levels spells that could dispel it.
In my experience, 5e only really functions properly inside a dungeon-type environment. This is what its adventuring day design is made around. It completely threw out the playtest's exploration rules and anything else that makes non-dungeon play particularly threatening or exciting. It's just that dungeons seem to have fallen out of popularity, or dungeon enthusiasts have jumped ship to OSR or stayed with their previous games.
>By the time PCs can cast it, they're facing enemies with access to 3rd-levels spells that could dispel it.
Why does every band of mooks have a spellcaster in it? Does someone capable of casting third level spells not have anything better to do than being a disposable lackey?
>Why does every band of mooks have a spellcaster in it?
Because 5e's CR system is a bit moronic. On a look, there's enemies with 3rd-level spells as low as CR 1/4 in official material.
Because fricking everyone in 5e is a spellcaster already, so there's no use in pretending it's not a super high fantasy world. Of course the bandits would have a wizard, they grow on trees.
I remember when there were people arguing Rope Trick wasn't a problem because you could have Goblins walk through throwing interdimensional fireballs everywhere for literally no reason to blow people out of it.
>A long rest requires the party to go completely uninterrupted for 8 hours, which requires them to be in a safe environment and have that time to spare
Apart from the numerous scenarios I just listed which make this fairly trivial, even in the more "deadly" adventures like Curse of Strahd, there's just the simple fact that this is already still insanely easy to accomplish. There's just simply no way around that. You even tried to poison the well with the Tiny Hut argument despite it very much invalidating the claim that this is somehow difficult.
Also, just so it does not go unaddressed, your standard 5th level encounter should NOT include something with dispel magic on it. That's just trying to counter-play the players at that point. Adversarial DMing is not encouraged or advised in any situation.
>5e only really functions properly inside a dungeon-type environment.
The problem is that it encourages 5e style dungeons, which are a specific design set that rely heavily on encounter-per-room design, where you enter, encounter the thing, and then are done with it. The book and rules do not do much to teach you to not have this design style/philosophy.
>Why?
Because the GM runs and (often) writes the scenario
>How?
Because he does not execute the scenario in Case: Players Do Nothing. The scenario does not freeze when the players take a nap.
>What is the GMs fault?
Not letting the scenario continue. If there is an evil plot, the antagonist have a scheme that they are executing if not interrupted.
>If there is an evil plot, the antagonist have a scheme that they are executing if not interrupted.
What if there isn't an evil plot? What if the PCs are just exploring or something and not being railroaded through the DM's novel?
>go rest for eight hours,and then come back, that ISN'T a game mechanics problem, that is a gm problem
Not that anon, and mostly just playing Devil's Avacado, but this actually could be a system problem. A quick example in comparison to OSR D&D is the fact that 8 hours rest will not fully restore the entire party. You only regain 1 HP per day in some systems, and 1 HP per WEEK in others. Even playing smartly by resting to recover spells, then having the Cleric cast all their healing spells repeatedly, it still means that a single stop could potentially take a couple of days just to heal everyone. Plus, with the time-crunch emphasis and wandering encounter checks + wandering encounters actually being deadly means wasting a couple of days in a dungeon, even without a time bomb ticking, is an incredibly unappealing idea.
>There are optional rules in the books/homerules you can do for the system!
I'm trying not to get into the nitty-gritty specifics of this particular argument (again), and more or less just trying to point out that the underlying default rules of the system will in fact change your play style and behavior. 5e, out-of-the-box, does encourage the 1E/D playstyle, while OSR games do not. You CAN GM special-sauce to get your playstyle, but why not just find something that works WITH you, not against you?
Nothing that 3.x didn't have, aside from the lower lethality encouraging being a careless dumbass.
>5e, out-of-the-box, does encourage the 1E/D playstyle,
By the 5e DMG:
>Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day
The math definitely doesn't assume the 5-minute workday, it's just that most GMs do not run it as intended. This is part design flaw, part failure to hammer this in to the GM, and part the GM's fault.
It's not the GM's fault if the natural flow of the game doesn't resemble the game's guidelines.
>Ally has 1 HP
>heal him for 10
>Enemy does 15 damage
>Ally is now at 0 HP and making death saves.
>Ally has 1 HP
>do not heal him
>Enemy does 15 damage
>Ally is now at 0 HP and making death saves
>Heal him for 10
>Ally now has 10 HP
The short rest being an hour does the same, some classes really want to do a short rest every encounter but most don't care. Its like they intentionally made a mechanic designed to cause arguments.
Yes, designing half the classes around short rest mechanics and the others around long rest mechanics means everyone just takes long rests.
I went the opposite direction. I have 6-8 encounters worth of monsters squished into a single multi-phase battle. I then gave everyone a magic potion that they can use an action to drink to gain the benefit of a short rest. The potion is good for 2 chugs and refills after a long rest.
5e has a culture of player entitlement and sky high DM expectations. When I say player entitlement I mean in the sense that 5e players expect the DM to approve of any character concept to matter how outlandish, and don't want their characters to receive serious setbacks without mutual consent. The DM is expected to cater to 4-6 of these, and make a world as polished as an adventure path, and be a voice actor, and be an event planner, and be like Matt Mercer (even though the players don't let the DM and each other work like Matt's do).
It's not really the crunch. If you aren't a pussy, those death saves go by quickly.
#1 thing that pisses me off about D&D and its derivatives: Almost everything requires investment into a specific spell/feat/trait to do. If you allow a player to do something that they don't have the spell/feat/trait for, game balance completely falls apart (not that there was much of it to begin with) because players who did make the necessary investments are completely invalidated. If you don't allow players to do things not described on their character sheet, you're discouraging creative problem solving. There are no effective guidelines for finding a middle ground between these extremes, and the game is so damn poorly balanced (did I mention that already?), so most DMs usually sit at one of these unsatisfactory extremes.
Most of the Bad Habits you're referring to aren't really 5e's fault as a System.
Most of the things people refer to as Bad Habits are standard new player things, like how a lot of bad fiction has similar teenager-y, fan-fiction-y traits like self-inserts, wish-fullfillment, mary-sues, purple eyes, and so on. It's stuff you're supposed to grow out of.
With the massive influx of new players, there aren't enough existing players around to serve as examples for new players to emulate, so now they're all taking cues from eachother, and cringey new player stuff is normalized. Also, the game's culture is now far more at the mercy of Wokeness, and Wokeness is often used as a tool to justify annoying, narcissistic, or pathological behavior as "self-expression," and smear anyone who criticizes you as a bigot. There used to be an obsession with being some sort of exotic non-human or edgy half-monster-who-fights-monsters character, but the whole POINT of these characters was that they were uncommon and inconvenient and often forced you to play a level behind everyone else thanks to their Level Adjustment. But all these options became too front-and-center, New Players latched onto them with a fricking death grip, and now Everyone is Special (which means that no one is).
Mind you, there were lots of examples of this much earlier in 3.5. Spellscales, Kender, the Book of Erotic Fantasy, all came from Based Glorious Golden-age 3.5.
>t. no-gamez tourist projecting
>t. no-gamez tourist projecting
>Based Glorious Golden-age 3.5
Some one clearly wasn't around for it.
They're just making shit up.
5E isn't that impressive but the same can be said about most versions of D&D. It's probably the better one because it's easier for people new to tabletop in some ways, because it's often gateway into tabletop due to being a mainstream name. D&D was never really that good, but if it's going to be the first thing people see, or the way people get eased into and acclimated to things, make it entry level imo. So 5e works better.
All the talk of it forming bad habits is moronic cope by people pushing other versions of D&D.
>It's probably the better one because it's easier for people new to tabletop in some ways
Can any fricking DDrone explain me their moronic logic of "DnD is easier to get into for newbies"? DnD is one of the most anal systems when it comes to mainstream and as far as getting into games, it's a dead fricking end for past 15 years. Like I get it, it was the first and only game you ever learned, and the time required to learn it meant you are forever against learning new systems in fear of repeating the process and time investment, but could you homosexuals stop sprouting this make-believe bullshit?
DnD isn't easier. It's not even "easy" when it comes to it (doesn't mean it's hard, it's just simply not easy). It's a moronic statement that all DDrones parrot from each other, failing to realise how fricked up their game of choice is in terms of actual learning curve and shit needed to known ahead of even playing
>b-but convention
Convention of what? DnD game logic is pretty much untranslatable to any other game, and the only ones that apply are d20 hacks, that are just shitty reskins of DnD to pretend it's a "generic" system.
>pretty new to tabletop still
>first two systems were vtm 20th and pf1e
I knew with the former that there'd always be some awkwardness with certain groups, but I didn't know people hated that 3.5 side of things this much. Even with how much hate I've seen thrown at Monte, most people I've met seem to be at least a bit nostalgic for that era, or yearning for that crunch. Is it really so bad to start with that kind of system, or is it just people who feel some real strong hate over it still?
Not really. It's a pretty comprehensive toolkit built on top of 20 years of ad hoc tinkering and subsystems added to AD&D. A lot of the issues are similar to 5e. More new players than the old guard can bring into the previous culture of play, people want to storyshit, etc.
There's some asshurt from people whose 90s games which used their own system had those replaced with a D20 version in the D20 boom (Traveller, CoC, Star Wars). On the whole, it grew the hobby and frankly rescued it from the slow death it was experiencing in the 90s.
I'd rather the hobby die than all the systems become homogenized grey d20 slop.
If you're in the habit of playing by the rules then it's a good habit.
It's not 2nd edition, which is objectively the best edition. These other buttholes are just salty about brown people being in the sourcebooks.
>It's not 2nd edition, which is objectively the best edition
Based. 2e get's shit on almost as hard as 4e when it's debatably the best version of the game. Every troglodyte just assumes you have to add every alt rule or splat book when those are ment to be picked and choosed from campaign to campaign not all at once.
This threads has me wondering what you guys have personally done to make dnd 5e interesting.
Unironically playing something else, even if simply different edition of DnD.
Well, what they do is go into any thread where someone has said something negative about D&D 5e and argue like spergs for hours, sometimes days, on end. This is good for 5e somehow.
you play it with other people.
Have you tried playing 4e?
Have you tried playing Pathfinder 2e?
I have. It's an interesting direction that had a somewhat shoddy landing. 5e should have been a major retooling and refining of 4es bones instead of being 3.5e with AEDU grafted on.
I haven't since I despise Pathfinder 1e and all of the D&D 3e off shoots of that era. I know it's similar to D&D 4e in some what's but idk if that's enough to get me to play it when I can go play any other fantasy game.
Isn't this tiring to you?
I don’t really think the issue is 5e as much as it is WotC’s (and TSR before them) module-dependent business model. Published adventures, especially long or interconnected ones, heavily encourage railroading and participationism, which are basically the two worst habits in the hobby.