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jackMost new editions of DnD come with ideas where I think "oh, that's a good idea" at the time, but it's hard to see more clearly whether they actually made things good or not.
5e introduced Advantage and Disadvantage. Basically, if you're attacking or attempting something similar in any advantageous situation, from hiding, or attacking someone impaired, or a long list of other scenarios, you get advantage -- you get to roll two d20 instead of one and choose the better. It also "turns on" some special abilities like the rogue's backstab. Disadvantage is the same but you have to choose the worse.
At first, I thought it sounded sort of gimicky and simplified. In 3.5e those would all be a +4 or a -4 or something, and would stack, and that felt real-er somehow, maybe because it's just what I'm used to.
But even though I still haven't had a chance to play much, the more I thought about it, the more I'm interested in it. I thought about the probabilities and what's interesting is that it never makes something possible or impossible, it basically halves the chance of succeeding or failing. But that actually simplifies a lot of things, it means you don't need to worry about the action being pointless or automatic, but it will *always* make it easier or harder.
That makes it easier to apply in a range of situations without worrying about the fine detail too much. And as someone pointed out, it allows a lot more free-form combat. If someone wants to swing on the chandelier, you don't have to respond, "ok, but it won't actually help", you can easily say, "sure, acrobatics check DC 15, if you succeed you'll have advantage". If they take some out-of-combat action that should help them but you're not sure how much -- advantage is probably appropriate.
In particular, 5e reduced the size of many modifiers relative to the range of a d20 dice, so many more things are within the "possible, whether likely or not" range not "always unless you roll a 1" or "never unless you roll a 20". That means, the number of +4 bonuses has to be strictly limited or players will go from "balanced" to "basically always hit" with the right shenanigans. But advantage/disadvantage doesn't have that problem, the underlying chance is the same.
I don't quite like the hack that "advantage and disadvantage cancel out" but it's probably necessary.
Vulnerability and resistance are similar, they double and halve the amount of damage dealt. That means you can have monsters or characters which care about particular damage types, but never be in a situation where it's trivial or pointless to fight.
Balance for what timescale
I struggled to put this into words, but it seems like old editions of DnD were balanced for a campaign. There are all sorts of rules that only make a difference if you expect to play the same character through all the levels, classes that are weaker early on but stronger later or vice versa. More like roguelikes than most modern roleplaying sessions.
3.5e is more balanced for a day. You recover many of your resources each night. Throughout a day, you need to judge how many spell slots and similar resources to expend and still have some in reserve. But you're not really expected to do that between days: "we had a really lucky first session so now we'll have an easier time in following sessions" whether because you found some good magic swords or found a clever way to bypass the orc army, or whatever, is the exception not the rule. And honestly, the GM should probably fudge things so each day has about the same amount of interesting challenge, not set up a campaign you play fifty sessions of and let good or bad outcomes affect the next dozen sessions -- that's fine, but it's not what 3.5e is made for.
4e is balanced for a single encounter. As much as people try to say otherwise, most of the polish goes toward ensuring that each encounter is a tactical match for the party. Just like a 2e party might shy away from a too-deadly dungeon but a 3.5e party assumes the dungeon is balanced for them, a 3.5e party might choose which encounters they can handle, but a 4e party is expected to just find all encounters at the "fun challenge" level.
4e does this very well, and I know people who've found it works fine for all the other aspects of roleplaying, but for me it just doesn't work well. It's great at tactical combat if that's what you want. But being focused on particular encounters means that the rest of the story is warped around them: it's hard to have any sneaking in anywhere or dramatic negotiating, if you always have to end in the same fight anyway.
5e zooms out to 3.5e scope again, which suits me well. I'd be interested to play an old-school campaign too, but I probably don't have time.
5e introduced Advantage and Disadvantage. Basically, if you're attacking or attempting something similar in any advantageous situation, from hiding, or attacking someone impaired, or a long list of other scenarios, you get advantage -- you get to roll two d20 instead of one and choose the better. It also "turns on" some special abilities like the rogue's backstab. Disadvantage is the same but you have to choose the worse.
At first, I thought it sounded sort of gimicky and simplified. In 3.5e those would all be a +4 or a -4 or something, and would stack, and that felt real-er somehow, maybe because it's just what I'm used to.
But even though I still haven't had a chance to play much, the more I thought about it, the more I'm interested in it. I thought about the probabilities and what's interesting is that it never makes something possible or impossible, it basically halves the chance of succeeding or failing. But that actually simplifies a lot of things, it means you don't need to worry about the action being pointless or automatic, but it will *always* make it easier or harder.
That makes it easier to apply in a range of situations without worrying about the fine detail too much. And as someone pointed out, it allows a lot more free-form combat. If someone wants to swing on the chandelier, you don't have to respond, "ok, but it won't actually help", you can easily say, "sure, acrobatics check DC 15, if you succeed you'll have advantage". If they take some out-of-combat action that should help them but you're not sure how much -- advantage is probably appropriate.
In particular, 5e reduced the size of many modifiers relative to the range of a d20 dice, so many more things are within the "possible, whether likely or not" range not "always unless you roll a 1" or "never unless you roll a 20". That means, the number of +4 bonuses has to be strictly limited or players will go from "balanced" to "basically always hit" with the right shenanigans. But advantage/disadvantage doesn't have that problem, the underlying chance is the same.
I don't quite like the hack that "advantage and disadvantage cancel out" but it's probably necessary.
Vulnerability and resistance are similar, they double and halve the amount of damage dealt. That means you can have monsters or characters which care about particular damage types, but never be in a situation where it's trivial or pointless to fight.
Balance for what timescale
I struggled to put this into words, but it seems like old editions of DnD were balanced for a campaign. There are all sorts of rules that only make a difference if you expect to play the same character through all the levels, classes that are weaker early on but stronger later or vice versa. More like roguelikes than most modern roleplaying sessions.
3.5e is more balanced for a day. You recover many of your resources each night. Throughout a day, you need to judge how many spell slots and similar resources to expend and still have some in reserve. But you're not really expected to do that between days: "we had a really lucky first session so now we'll have an easier time in following sessions" whether because you found some good magic swords or found a clever way to bypass the orc army, or whatever, is the exception not the rule. And honestly, the GM should probably fudge things so each day has about the same amount of interesting challenge, not set up a campaign you play fifty sessions of and let good or bad outcomes affect the next dozen sessions -- that's fine, but it's not what 3.5e is made for.
4e is balanced for a single encounter. As much as people try to say otherwise, most of the polish goes toward ensuring that each encounter is a tactical match for the party. Just like a 2e party might shy away from a too-deadly dungeon but a 3.5e party assumes the dungeon is balanced for them, a 3.5e party might choose which encounters they can handle, but a 4e party is expected to just find all encounters at the "fun challenge" level.
4e does this very well, and I know people who've found it works fine for all the other aspects of roleplaying, but for me it just doesn't work well. It's great at tactical combat if that's what you want. But being focused on particular encounters means that the rest of the story is warped around them: it's hard to have any sneaking in anywhere or dramatic negotiating, if you always have to end in the same fight anyway.
5e zooms out to 3.5e scope again, which suits me well. I'd be interested to play an old-school campaign too, but I probably don't have time.
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Date: 2019-01-23 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-24 08:25 pm (UTC)Also, I know this is near-heresy to past-me, but the Vancian magic thing never really worked because you just filled up with whatever did the most damage - sure, all kinds of utility spells _could_ be useful under the right circumstances, but except in the rare case where you know what circumstances are going to come up, you're better off with a Fireball because there will probably be someone to cast a Fireball on.
3e eased this pain a lot for clerics with the ability to cast any prepared spell as a healing spell. If I were running D&D tomorrow, I'd probably have magic-users assemble two lists; if RAW you have n spells of this level, you pick n damage spells and n non-damage spells, cast a total of n. This lets you have some utility spells and see if the right circumstances do arrive.
In Vance (and The Dying Earth RPG) you can only memorise one copy of each spell. That might be going too far (low-level 3e magic users with bigger quotas per day might even not be able to fill all their slots) but I think there might be something to be said for some limit along those lines, especially now clerics are no longer wanting to take n-1 Cure Serious Woundses and maybe something else.
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Date: 2019-01-25 01:07 pm (UTC)Yeah, indeed. Although I seem to remember (not first hand) that you might have a single lucky charm person swing a session if you got a new ally.
I know this is near-heresy to past-me, but the Vancian magic thing never really worked because you just filled up with whatever did the most damage
Yeah. I think in theory it was another example of "planning for a campaign, not a session": that you got a big leg up if you prepped right, so the dungeon was hard the first time when you didn't know to expect frost creatures, and a lot easier when you took the effort to load up on them in advance.
But in practice, I think campaigns where that happened became (or always were) less common. So prepping for the best loadout every day was what you did.
I like your variant to ensure a mix. 5e has shifted towards this with:
* cantrips (mostly attacks) you can cast any number of times, so you always have a "normal" attack and some utility available without prepping them separately
* prepping a list of spells, but being able to spend your spell slots on any of them, not preparing a fixed number of each (so you can prep one good fire spell and some utility spells and use N fire spells, or N-2 fire spells and two utility spells)
* ritual spells -- for spells for which it makes sense, you can instead take some time (10 minutes?) to cast it, but without expending a spell slot or needing it prepared, so you don't need to worry about preparing for utility situations much, even though you'd want to prepare if you thought you might need it in a hurry.
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Date: 2019-01-26 12:51 am (UTC)I'm not sure I have ever run a dungeon that was not either a) in a setting that would give a reasonable amount of contextual clues from the beginning ("You've been hired to get rid of the frost giants who live up on this snowy mountain" striking me as a reasonable hint that fire spells will likely be more use than ice ones) or b) allowed the capacity for going in and scouting it out enough to learn that sort of thing and then going home again to equip appropriately. (Not that a sufficiently timid or gung-ho group of characters can't scupper such planning entirely.)
I do like those different kinds of casting as a paradigm, though my mind tends to drift towards specialists in each particular modality as interestingly different to play.
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Date: 2019-01-26 12:18 am (UTC)I have always had a strong preference for character classes to play in ways that feel distinct, which leads me to be disinclined to solutions that feel to blur different classes into each other or make them work overly similarly. The old "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" issue seems to still be a thing without a really good solution in any big-name game; I am unhappy with approaches that actively nerf magic, or try to make the whole game feel like a 3e campaign capped at level 6, but I fear that so long as there is a vocal portion of the fanbase objecting to their Plain Guy With Sword feeling "unrealistic" or "anime-ish", we're not going to get something focused as much on making high-level fighters feel a scale of powerful that keeps up with high-level wizards, which is the direction I would favour.
I rather like "first-level characters aren't Indiana Jones and unless they are careful they will be the decorative skeletons that warn Indiana Jones there's a trap here" as a general paradigm, but first-level wizards who have a significant chance of dying if they anger a housecat did strike me as overdoing it. It's harder for me to feel higher levels as the scale of achievement I'd really like them to be if the early bits were too easy, and it's definitely a hard thing to balance the early levels feeling too easy with them killing people too easily, though I can think of a few 3.5 and PF low-level adventures that do an impressive job.
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Date: 2019-01-26 11:17 am (UTC)It sounds like you want to play campaigns that go on long enough that people have time to, and benefit from, getting to know the 3.5e mechanics enough to play at higher levels, in which case maybe that already suits you best (perhaps borrowing some of the principles from 4e and 5e to make fighters genuinely equivalent to high level wizards in ways other than just damage output).
I think a lot of my experience is that I've never played a campaign that's gone on that long, so something that focusses on an adventuring party in the mid levels works well for me.
I partially agree about specialisation. I think it's often most fun when people work *together*, and that's most naturally achieved if they have different, complementary, abilities. I think again there's something about scope. 4e made for GREAT cooperation at the tactical level because everyone had abilities that affected lots of detail, it was like a board game in a good way (although also, for me, in a bad way). Other editions were more like "you need the fighter in combat, the rogue when sneaking, and the wizard twice a day", which works well if all those things are quick, but badly if they're extended. 5e tries to do something between but I've not played enough to see how it works.
I think it's important that, unless combat is simplified a lot compared to most 3.5e/4e/5e combats, all characters have stuff to contribute in combat, but ideally they have *different* stuff.
Now I'm writing this, I would be interested to play an older-school campaign where combats are straight-forward but it depends how much you're prepared, how stocked up you are on resources, etc. I'll have to see if I could make that work. The biggest problem is that it some ways it plays against later editions focus on more varied abilities.
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Date: 2019-01-26 07:20 pm (UTC)I would certainly ideally like to run campaigns that go on for long enough to cover a wide range of the zero-to-legend span, I am fairly solidly attached to longer-form narrative, buts I may have said before, I am unconvinced 3.5 actually works in the last quarter or so of that range. Then again, I am not aware of anything that really does that better.
I partially agree about specialisation. I think it's often most fun when people work *together*, and that's most naturally achieved if they have different, complementary, abilities.
Agreed entirely.
Other editions were more like "you need the fighter in combat, the rogue when sneaking, and the wizard twice a day", which works well if all those things are quick, but badly if they're extended.
Other editions do tend to focus quite a bit more on combat by default than I tend to favour.
I think it's important that, unless combat is simplified a lot compared to most 3.5e/4e/5e combats, all characters have stuff to contribute in combat, but ideally they have *different* stuff.
For myself as a player, I am entirely satisfied to take a sidekick role generally, including being the healbot in combat, because I think that can make for interesting roleplaying opportunities, but I'm aware that lots of people find not being able to actively contribute in combat boring.
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Date: 2019-01-28 04:12 pm (UTC)Yeah. I would in theory, but I've more naturally gravitated to intermediate lengths. Fortunately those are a lot more practical given my time availability :)
I am unconvinced 3.5 actually works in the last quarter or so of that range. Then again, I am not aware of anything that really does that better.
Yeah, 3.5e high levels are definitely a bit rough, but I don't know what you'd do instead. I can't think of any games I've heard of that even attempt something in that space. And it's naturally hard to have anything which (a) ties into the same mechanics used at lower levels and also (b) gives a feel of properly mythic characters, the archmages and warrior-kings.
I think part of the problem is that some people's idea of that level of attainment is normal humans who are just absolutely world class, but living in the same genre of film as they did at 1st level. And others is, obviously you can achieve superhuman hercules munchausen like feats of wuxia at that point, there's no point quibbling with what's realistic. And other people imagine something else, e.g. that you're literally demi-gods or otherwise have some specific world-buidling process behind being so awesome. And DnD tries to straddle all of those, which means you can end up without a clear idea of what you're imagining when, e.g. someone shrugs off a cannon-ball to the face. Is it "just a graze"? Are they unbelievably lucky and good at dodging? Or does it literally just bounce off?
So you have to make sure everyone's playing with the same interpretation in their head or it won't make sense. And you constantly run into questions like, "ok, NOW are we stretching the analogy of what hit points 'are'" and "so I'm the best wizard in the world but I can do this specific list of things, where's the, you know, original research?"
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Date: 2019-01-24 04:23 am (UTC)I did enjoy reading about the advantage and disadvantage mechanics, though. They seem like good tools for a GM to make it so that the players can exercise some amount of freedom in their choices and have it have real effects.
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Date: 2019-01-24 02:05 pm (UTC)You mean in combat, or during character creation?
Either way, yes, those are all a notable obstacles, although it's sad because I feel it shouldn't be. As a blogger I read put it, if people play sports as hobbies, the sports where you can join in and have a kick about without the need for a regular commitment or any competence or equipment in advance, are fun immediately and accessible to anyone who might want to give it a try, and the ones where you need to have all the equipment immediately and join a formal team with scheduled training before you can play at all, are only really open to people who are already committed to playing.
The equivalent being, there are plenty of systems where one person has one source book and can provide pre-generated characters to everyone else, and have fun for 2-4 hours, and more introductions to roleplaying should be like that (especially for people who don't have money to buy source books or don't have time or willingness to commit to a longer campaign up front). Ideally more people would be introduced to the hobby like that. But it often doesn't work out like that in practice.
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Date: 2019-01-24 02:52 pm (UTC)I think systems that are balanced and good for people who have no experience are the best way to get in, but that deviant requires having someone who has the material, is willing to teach it, and is good at teaching or to the point where someone gets into the hobby, and that is particularly tough to find in any hobby or sport.
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Date: 2019-01-26 12:30 am (UTC)I've adopted equivalent meta-rules into other systems, and it's usually a fairly straightforward thing both to port and to explain.
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Date: 2019-01-26 05:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:50 pm (UTC)The system stops working at higher levels because damage amounts are higher. To get around this, my house rule is that your maximum negative hitpoints is your Constitution score (not modifier) plus your level, instead of -10. And similarly, in systems which don't have this, it's well worth introducing a mechanic which means that people can be knocked out/disabled in combat rather than just dying.
I do think the possibility of character death is important in adding meaning and tension - but in general I want it to be meaningful, and I want players to have some ability to choose their risk appetite here, as some players are much more comfortable rolling up a new character and like taking risks, while others aren't. I find use of words like 'Are you sure?' or 'You can, but it could be seriously risky' can be helpful (though of course you need to make sure your players know what you mean). For example, if the party was fighting an ogre and it got a critical hit on a player, I might say, "the club smashes into you, doing 18hp and badly bruising your ribs. You have 2hp left. As you struggle to regain your breath, you see the ogre turning his attention to [Player B], who is still unhurt." If next round, the player says, "I hit the ogre again," I might say, "Are you sure? You are feeling very badly wounded." If they say "Yes", then - unless they were new to role-playing - I'd feel quite comfortable killing them, as they've had a chance to retreat/drink a healing potion/etc and a warning (if they were new, I would make sure they really understood what I meant by risky, but ultimately that is their choice).
I very rarely fudge rolls, largely because I do them in front of everyone, but I will try to make sure people aren't killed by a random sneak attack - and occasionally bend turn order / give an extra skill check or save - to ensure players have a chance to be rescued. And adversaries will usually have other objectives (e.g. 'steal the item; get away; keep their cave save) rather than have 'killing the PCs' as their primary objective. I won't drop a surprise dragon on a Level 3 party. But if the party goes into attack that dragon, when they know it's there, it's definitely a dragon, the NPC has warned them how dangerous it is and so on; well, the dragon won't mercilessly hunt them down (it will stop when they run away and may be unusually susceptible to 'distractions' to allow them to do this) but equally, I will allow its attacks which do enough damage to kill a level 3 character in one round to actually do so, if it rolls well.
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Date: 2019-01-26 03:55 pm (UTC)As for that possible dragon encounter, I suppose if it's in the module, it's there for a reason, but it seems like of a level 3 party doesn't have a plot reason to go after something that will kill them, then that's not a part of the adventure that needs mentioning. Feels a bit like a small piece of Tomb of Horrors slips in as a way of tempting characters so that they can be squished with delight.
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Date: 2019-01-27 11:04 am (UTC)Yes, totally! Ideally someone would be knocked unconscious near the end of a big battle where everyone contributed, not right at the start.
More broadly, I think part of the GM's role is to make sure the same character doesn't get piled on to in every combat. Maybe the cunning rogue will attack the party wizard, but the group of orcs head straight for the guy with the big sword out front - at the end of the day, you can generally find some reason to justify targeting decisions. Basically, as a GM, play the enemies in the way that's most narratively satisfying and best for your player's enjoyment, not just what's tactically best.
From some of what you've been saying, it seems as if you've maybe played in games where the GM has approached it very adversarially, more like a tactical board game. And of course that's a valid style of play if the GM and all the players enjoy it and are on board with it, but I don't think it's a style that most people (including me) would find most enjoyable.
As for that possible dragon encounter, I suppose if it's in the module, it's there for a reason, but it seems like of a level 3 party doesn't have a plot reason to go after something that will kill them, then that's not a part of the adventure that needs mentioning.
I wrote the adventure, so yes, it was there for a reason! I must admit, I've very rarely played bought modules (either as a GM or a player), so I'm not very familiar with what it was like.
For context, my current group is pretty experienced (all players have role-played for >10 years including 2 other GMs) and aren't that keen on detailed tactical battles: they look more for overall narrative and how to set up the situation - with allies, ambushes, etc. - so that when they are in combat they'll win.
In this situation, they were following drow into an ancient elven burial mound. Some drow were guarding the door to the next level and, when they ambushed them, they disturbed the cave drake. They played this well (the dragon ate a drow) but now they had to get past this dragon. There were two ways to get past: either sneaking or, in another part of the dungeon (which the kobolds had already told them was significant) there was an ancient elven paladin ghost who would drive away the dragon if they persuaded him to. Putting an actual dragon there was the clearest way for me of signalling 'You are not meant to fight this obstacle head on' because, you know, DRAGON.
My players decided to use their druid to see if she could make it friendly (technically not allowed due to creature type, but I ruled they could try with a penalty). This was a great idea, but they failed (I think she needed an 18) and the dragon attacked. I made it attack using its claws and teeth instead of its breath weapon (which could have taken out the whole party) as not killing the party is more fun for everyone. Then after a round of very little success by the players and lots of damage, I said, 'You can see the dragon is preparing to use its breath weapon' (rules don't say you have to give warning, but I reckon in real life you'd probably be able to tell, right?). Three of the players then ran but one player chose to stay to have 'one more attack'. He got hit by the breath weapon, saved, took lots of damage but stayed upright, and then ran. That player (a) is experienced and totally knew what he was risking, (b) has a good reflex save and (c) is fairly relaxed about character death; he totally could have died then, but didn't, and that possibility increases enjoyment for all of us about his narrow escape and how he faced down the dragon.
After this, the party talked about sneaking but ended up deciding that was too risky and explored the other bit of the dungeon, found the paladin ghost, persuaded him of their righteous cause and using his help got past the dragon.
When my players, talk about this adventure, the dragon tends to be what comes up most, in a really positive way, about how they got to eat the drow, tried to tame it, got mauled, nearly killed and ultimately managed to get through after some difficult ghostly diplomacy. Basically, because of setting it up in that way, a Level 3 party got to have a genuinely meaningful set of encounters with a CR8 cave drake. Death was possible - and that was important - but I wasn't aiming to kill. For a group where it's all about the tactical battles, it wouldn't have worked, but for mine it did - I think at the end of the day as a GM it's all about knowing your group and trying to make it so there's something there for everyone.
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Date: 2019-01-27 05:32 pm (UTC)And yes, I worry for finding the GM that considers the players adversaries rather than collaborators because that won't be any fun at all.
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Date: 2019-01-28 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 04:27 pm (UTC)I think good games should try to avoid the problems you've described. And part of that is on the system, to make it so that a "natural" outcome of playing as expected is that character death, incapacitation, or even just being sidelined and not having anything to contribute, comes up rarely. And part of it is the module, of designing things so those outcomes are rare (e.g. not having instant death for walking into the wrong room either). And part of it is the GM, playing fair by not being too adversarial (except in situations where the players and GM share expectations), by knowing when to go easy on players (e.g. even if you don't fudge dice rolls, secretly substituting things a bit easier or harder as seems appropriate).
Even really inexperienced GMs often do this a bit, they realise that someone dying early on isn't fun, and even if they don't know how to handle it well, often do SOMETHING, whether it's "uh, can we pretend that didn't happen", or "an angel appears and uh resurrects you" which has its own problems but doesn't leave one player out.
The bigger problem is, people have different expectations of fun, but most people expect a reasonable amount of "I do the obvious thing, and have a fun game" and for MOST people being punished mercilessly isn't fun. But sometimes you get a GM who has different expectations and no-one's talked it through, and the GM lets players get screwed over, usually by accident, because they follow the rules and don't realise it might be a good time to fudge something. But you'd HOPE, that normal social stuff like, "is everyone enjoying this activity, if not, can we help that" would kick in, but sometimes it doesn't.
That can play out in many ways. Maybe the GM is used to experienced players and just treats new players the same way and doesn't think maybe they need some pointers. Maybe the GM wants to play the game by the rules and didn't realise the consequences. And of course, the reverse can happen too: if the GM wants a combat-light fun-heavy game or a rules-light acting-heavy game, or a tactics-heavy game and most players agree but one player doesn't, they may just not be suited to playing together, but hopefully neither will be rude about it.
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Date: 2019-01-28 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 11:24 am (UTC)But it's a common problem that people don't realise that or aren't good at it -- most published adventures ignore the problem entirely and expect the GM to cheat somehow, they don't even say things like "if the combats have been unusually easy/difficult, maybe adjust the difficulty of this combat".
I wonder if you happened to have some offputting experiences that have made other adventures feel a bit futile in advance. "Feeling obliged to min-max" is a problem I've heard of elsewhere, from having played adventures that have inadvertently treated the charcters quite poorly
requires having someone who has the material, is willing to teach it, and is good at teaching or to the point where someone gets into the hobby, and that is particularly tough to find in any hobby or sport.
Yeah, sadly good point. I forget that most people will learn from an "average" group, which may be ok but probably not great (and usually muddle through well if they happen to gel well with the group and the playstyle, or get put off if they don't).
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Date: 2019-01-26 04:09 pm (UTC)Some part of being a player in a campaign is wanting to feel successful enough that even if there are failures along the way, they don't suddenly become plot-important later. The kind of thing where "oh, having that vorpal sword we couldn't steal earlier would make this a lot easier, but it's not going to be impossible to do this." Instead of "oh, you encounter a group of guards that could only be hurt by that vorpal sword you failed your rolls on earlier! There's no way to go back now, so your characters are going to die and there's nothing you can do about it."
I feel that a lot of adventure modules as written shade toward the latter, and either rely on the GM to emphasize enough that they really need to keep at trying to get that vorpal sword because it will be important later, or to not care whether the characters go up in smoke and some other characters need to be produced.
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Date: 2019-01-27 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-27 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-28 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 11:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 12:42 am (UTC)It seems to me that the best way to get reasonably good campaigns out of existing zero-to-legend paradigm games requires a certain degree of going easy on low-level characters however experienced the players, and conversely, willingness to be remarkably ruthless at high levels when the PCs' capacities have exploded (with the underlying presumption that players who have been playing along to the point have acquired a reasonable handle on the system), which leaves playing the system exactly as written covering a range of whatever the middling levels are in the game.
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Date: 2019-01-26 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 07:27 pm (UTC)It does do some odd things to the odds though. It essentially makes difficult things virtually impossible (if you need a 19, disadvantage changes it from a 1 in 10 chance - unlikely but possible - to a 1 in 100 chance, virtually impossible; and even a 1 in 5 chance becomes 1 in 25). And of course the same thing happens at the other end with advantage, it becomes almost certain to succeed. You could argue that that's good, that if something's easy and you have advantage it should be almost certain, and vice-versa, but I'm not sure yet if I agree with that argument!
On systems, I think it's fair to say that second edition / AD&D is an objectively worse system in terms of balance, unnecessary complexity of rules, unbalanced spells(1) and so on. It was groundbreaking, but the newness shows. I recently played a short campaign with it for nostalgia's sake, and it was fun for that reason, but by level 4 we all decided we'd go back to 3.5 Whereas 3.5 / 4 / 5 are all mature systems which just have different emphases and which is better is more just a matter of taste.
(1) For example, the first level cleric spell 'Charm Person' allows you to effectively make a servant of someone will below average intelligence for a month, if they fail their save. After that month they...get another save. The level of commands you can give them include asking them to 'hold off a red dragon for a round or two'. What's more, it's strictly better than some of the second level mind-affecting spells!
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Date: 2019-01-26 11:41 am (UTC)Yeah, I borrowed that approach from someone who *did* design it for 3.5e and it was exactly a +something bonus like that. It was called "combat stunts". But I think it fits 5e even better.
It essentially makes difficult things virtually impossible
Indeed. My intuition says this probably works ok, partly because you don't expect most rolls to have advantage unless you really deserve it, partly because 5e reduces the amount of time your target is close to the ends of the d20 scale. But I've not actually tried how it feels in practice, I will need to investigate.
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Date: 2019-01-26 12:28 pm (UTC)Ah, that makes sense. I'd been unconsciously assuming that rolls would have (dis)advantage about as often as a roll in 3.5 has a modifier, but on thinking about it that doesn't actually make sense.
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Date: 2019-01-28 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-25 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 11:37 am (UTC)