My primary concern is all those surveys they are planning to have.
A good rule of thumb is: "If you try to make everyone happy, nobody will be happy."
Another good rule of thumb is: "People often just think they know what they want until they actually get exactly what they requested."
Which is in direct contrast and direct support to yet another good rule of thumb of my own: "Those, who think they know what's best for everyone, likely don't."
They hit a win with 3.5e and another of a completely different type of win with 5e. Was that from direct player feedback or their own research of observation? What caused 4e's less-than-stellar reception? Was it just guessing to see what works? Was 4e based on player feedback or a focus on digital DMing? Was 5e looking at other popular RPGs and seeing which styles had wider audiences? What directed 3e/3.5e's development? Is it a smart move to maintain back-compat? Do they have a target group at the least?
Whether or not I'm part of a targeted audience is less important to me than choosing an audience to target. Vague goals most often lead to messy developments. (Just look at the high-profile video game disasters. The interviews usually include something about a vague idea of what gameplay they wanted to do but not a consolidated goal or, worse, coming up with the gameplay first without a goal at all and trying to attach something to it.)
All I have are questions and concerns about how their they're guiding their development, and the answers will probably be revealed only after the update/edition/whatever comes out.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
5e, on the other hand, has unquestionably been hijacked and seized...
This implies 5E was forced in a different direction than the designers would have chosen to take it, which is just silly. D&D is thriving in the 5E era. WotC have probably been popping champagne non-stop for the last half decade or so. It's not a hijacking if a majority of the people involved wanted it to happen and are happy with it.
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It's almost like a tabletop RPG without a significant story component is just a really slow video game with terrible graphics, and a tabletop RPG without a significant gameplay component is just a book you have to put way too much effort into reading...
5e, on the other hand, has unquestionably been hijacked and seized...
This implies 5E was forced in a different direction than the designers would have chosen to take it, which is just silly. D&D is thriving in the 5E era. WotC have probably been popping champagne non-stop for the last half decade or so. It's not a hijacking if a majority of the people involved wanted it to happen and are happy with it.
As I understood the comment, he was referring more to the hijacking of the definition of role-playing in 5e more than the mechanics of the game. I took it to mean that the definition of role-playing historically in D&D was a reference to playing a fantasy combat character in a fantasy adventure game and adventure modules were written to support this premise being predominantly geared towards combat encounters and exploration. Which I think is pretty true about adventure writing in past D&D editions.
The Hijacking premise as I understand it is that in modern D&D culture players have redesigned the term to be about theatrical/narrative storytelling and a part of that hijacking includes making the claim that this is how D&D has always been. So its two forms of hijacking, the re-defining of the term itself and then re-writing the history of the definition. Which I think is also pretty accurate, I mean how often do you hear people claim "we have always done it this way" on this forum. That definitely has not been my experience.
I played the game for over 30+ across hundreds of groups, I have been a participant in D&D forums since we were doing it on BB's and every community since and until Matt Mercer showed us how its done on Critical Role I had never seen or heard of anyone running D&D games like that... ever. The closest thing to that style I had even heard of was either LARPing or how people were doing it in Vampire The Masquerade scene, but even that was quite different.
If you sent critical role back in time and showed it to D&D players back then, I think it would have been a pretty eye-opening experience for them for one, but more importantly, I don't think anyone would have considered it role-playing, this would have been called LARPing most likely.
The definition of role-playing has definitely changed which I think would actually be fine, the meaning of words changes over time in particular those used in popular culture but I think the strange thing about the word role-playing is how we try to re-write the history of what it used to mean.
Yeah seems like the hobby has changed for the better IMO. Despite my grumblings with aspects of 5e I can't argue that it is a supremely flexible system that allows you to pull out a pretty wide array of stuff.
You can make it what you want so easily I find it hard to believe that whatever you have in mind would not be possible.
Do you want to have hard ASI for races? Yeah you can do that...nothing stopping you.
Limit the races you have in your setting? Easy to do...you just give a list of what players can pick from.
Do not like how a spell works? Homebrew with 5e is about as easy as any system I have worked with. Just change the spell.
Grimdark tone? Change up how death saves work. Cap CON at a certain amount. Make monsters hit harder/impose greater debilitations.
So many ways to accomplish just about any objective.
My primary concern is all those surveys they are planning to have.
A good rule of thumb is: "If you try to make everyone happy, nobody will be happy."
Another good rule of thumb is: "People often just think they know what they want until they actually get exactly what they requested."
Which is in direct contrast and direct support to yet another good rule of thumb of my own: "Those, who think they know what's best for everyone, likely don't."
They hit a win with 3.5e and another of a completely different type of win with 5e. Was that from direct player feedback or their own research of observation? What caused 4e's less-than-stellar reception? Was it just guessing to see what works? Was 4e based on player feedback or a focus on digital DMing? Was 5e looking at other popular RPGs and seeing which styles had wider audiences? What directed 3e/3.5e's development? Is it a smart move to maintain back-compat? Do they have a target group at the least?
Whether or not I'm part of a targeted audience is less important to me than choosing an audience to target. Vague goals most often lead to messy developments. (Just look at the high-profile video game disasters. The interviews usually include something about a vague idea of what gameplay they wanted to do but not a consolidated goal or, worse, coming up with the gameplay first without a goal at all and trying to attach something to it.)
All I have are questions and concerns about how their they're guiding their development, and the answers will probably be revealed only after the update/edition/whatever comes out.
All good wisdom and points you make here, well said. But just because it was a good business move for the group-currently-in the-Captain's-seat-at-DnD doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't be unhappy about the direction they took my long-enjoyed game, or the degree to which they have chosen to cast me aside. I grew up with D and D. I am nostalgic for how it was for most of my life, and I DO NOT like roleplaying lol. It is completely fair and reasonable for me to speak up about that and declare my outrage. Especially in a this specific forum and this specific thread.
Then start a game with almost 0 RP and mostly combat. You can just run mega dungeons. Its not hard to make that happen in 5e.
You are using a rhetorical tool to exaggerate my argument to the extreme, and thereby make it look silly. I have never claimed that there should not be a significant story. In times past there wasn't, but AS I HAVE SAID, I do not seek a return to that, no matter how much you might want to exaggerate my view to the contrary.
And you're using aggressive and combative language to suggest other people are actively, maliciously "stealing" your D&D away from you and thus cast anyone who plays differently than the OSR crowd in a criminalistic light.
Critters ain't "hijacking" shit. You want to play a mindless, low-stress dungeon crawl where the objective is to get to all the phattest lewtz at the bottom and your character is nothing but a skinsuit with superpowers you pilot around the game space? Literally nobody is stopping you. None of us are going to break into your house and steal your dice bag so you can't play your OSR-style dungeon crawl games anymore. If that's the kind of game that gets your tail tingling, play it! Have fun with it! Make it the best damn dungeon crawl you can! There's a rich third-party ecosystem of OSR content and even entire spinoff game systems like Dungeon Crawl Classics to support it.
All this anal clenching over The Destruction of D&D As We Know It is nigh entirely unwarranted. You do you, and I'll do me. You don't have to play in my games, and I don't have to play in yours. Keep your D&D alive by playing it.
And they clearly are not supported in 5e's published adventures, which dedicate almost none of their text to the combat situations.
This is absolutely false. I own multiple published adventures, and have read more. Combat is a HUGE part of all of them, save Feywild. It may not take up scads of PAGE SPACE but adventures like Storm King's Thunder, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Descent to Avernus are absolutely assuming and presenting an approach that's combat heavy.
And they clearly are not supported in 5e's published adventures, which dedicate almost none of their text to the combat situations.
This is absolutely false. I own multiple published adventures, and have read more. Combat is a HUGE part of all of them, save Feywild. It may not take up scads of PAGE SPACE but adventures like Storm King's Thunder, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Descent to Avernus are absolutely assuming and presenting an approach that's combat heavy.
DotMM is basically a mega-dungeon and has a ton of combat.
Salt Marsh has a ton of combat encounters....The Abbey is a great example.
Out of the Abyss you can streamline to "you fight your way out of the Underdark" if you want to
I played the game for over 30+ across hundreds of groups, I have been a participant in D&D forums since we were doing it on BB's and every community since and until Matt Mercer showed us how its done on Critical Role I had never seen or heard of anyone running D&D games like that... ever.
Honestly, that's weird to me. I've been playing for three decades too, with 3rd edition covering the period of my life I played the most. Aside fom the live games I was active on WotC's forums (later Community) in numerous PbP games, and those all had a ton of non-combat encounters and challenges. I've been in my fair share of hack-and-slash groups too, certainly, but every edition from 2nd on (didn't play a lot of 1st) has had groups with heavy emphasis on roleplay in the sense of social interaction too. I recall sessions in Planescape that were more philosophy debate than combat, and that's the previous century and the previous IP holder. As an aside, I doubt very much that the CritRole group rolled any differently before they became Critical Role, and they were playing Pathfinder (AKA D&D 3.75), not 5E, until Matt decided 5E would be easier to follow for an audience of potentially a lot of TTRPG agnostics. CritRole's style is not their 5E style. It is and has been their TTRPG style period.
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And they clearly are not supported in 5e's published adventures, which dedicate almost none of their text to the combat situations.
This is absolutely false. I own multiple published adventures, and have read more. Combat is a HUGE part of all of them, save Feywild. It may not take up scads of PAGE SPACE but adventures like Storm King's Thunder, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Descent to Avernus are absolutely assuming and presenting an approach that's combat heavy.
I've just completed Dragon of Icespire Peak. Out of the thirteen quests, one was resolved peacefully. Kind of, they killed a deer. Even then, the party could have legitimately completed the quest via the use of cold steel. I mean, there was narrative to set the context of each fight, but it was definitely a combat centred adventure. My wife was really excited when she heard that The Wild Betond the Witchlight had no mandatory combat and that it was possible to complete without fighting - that's why we bought it in the end.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
That's all your job as the DM. There's resources out there for DMs to improve their combat gameplay. Look up Keith Ammann's The Monsters Know What They're Doing, which exists as both a sadly infrequently updated blog and a book I should really get around to buying. Keith doesn't just offer a handful of tactical pointers for a single encounter in a single book, he tries to improve the DM's mind enough that they can challenge their players with engaging and strategic battles on any map, with any creature, in any adventure that DM runs.
I don't need a four-page breakdown telling me how a hill giant fights. I can see it for myself plain as day in its stat block - it's a brawler that wants to close in and smash with its greatclub. It's got the speed to outpace most typical PCs and its best attacking option is by far its melee multiattack. It's dumb as rocks and not particularly wise either, so it prioritizes whatever's closest/smallest and easiest to smash, or whatever hurts it the worst if someone's throwing magic. It's basically an animal; it doesn't fight, it hunts, which means it'll rethink its life choices and bail if it takes too much damage and that it's going to focus on stuffing its belly rather than proving its might. If it can drop one PC, then grab that dead/unconscious body and run off with it to avoid further harm and eat its catch at its leisure, that's what it'll do.
Heh, all the "useless fluff" background lore and history on hill giants is actually quite useful for determining its tactics in any given encounter. That text tell me how the critter thinks, what its brain works like, and from there I can block out its tactics just fine. More complex critters require more complex tactics, but that's still within the realm of GM prep. If I'm bothering with a module at all I'd rather have background lore and information that informs the world than a bunch of finicky combat text I can damn well do myself.
Balance being objective or subjective kind of feels beside the point anyway. I think that balance is, to an extent, subjective because people will have different opinions on how hard an encounter should be, or an encounter may be more or less difficult for a given group due to any number of factors, or a class ability might see little use at one table but come up regularly at another. Even ignoring differences in player skill, just different party compositions can make what's a tough but fair encounter against one party a cakewalk for another.
None of that means balance is above criticism though. For example, from what I've heard Descent into Avernus has an enemy you can easily stumble across with fireball, at a point in the campaign you'll be level 2. I think that's bad design. Sure, a party of tiefling spellcasters with absorb elements or high dex might be fine. Some people may prefer the brutality of that, that the party could find this enemy and with a bit of bad luck, instantly be TPKd. But that doesn't mean it can't be criticized just because, subjectively, some people like it that way. Calling something subjective shouldn't be used as a shield to deflect discussion or criticism.
And they clearly are not supported in 5e's published adventures, which dedicate almost none of their text to the combat situations.
This is absolutely false. I own multiple published adventures, and have read more. Combat is a HUGE part of all of them, save Feywild. It may not take up scads of PAGE SPACE but adventures like Storm King's Thunder, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Descent to Avernus are absolutely assuming and presenting an approach that's combat heavy.
DotMM is basically a mega-dungeon and has a ton of combat.
Salt Marsh has a ton of combat encounters....The Abbey is a great example.
Out of the Abyss you can streamline to "you fight your way out of the Underdark" if you want to
DotMM and Salt March are probably not the best examples for 5e adventures. DotMM is basically a 5e conversion of "The Ruins of Undermountain" from the 2e era, and Salt Marsh is just a collection of adventures from previous editions converted to 5e.
Out of the Abyss is a good example of a (mostly?) original 5e adventure that does a good job of supporting all three pillars.
That's my point tho it's that they have the "old school" style available in this system
If that is the case then I could use Storm Kings Thunder and Descent into Avernus as examples as I think they offer a great deal of combat and even motivations for the creatures you face.
Also I find that if you are not into RP then trying to find RP worthy material for your creatures to use in combat doesn't seem to compute for me.....You would be able to pull basically everything you need from the statblock and background from the source book they are in.
I am seeing a lot of heated discussion on what D&D should be and decrying what it has become. I would hope we can get away from that kind of thinking because I believe that D&D in its current form is inclusive of older styles of play as well as newer, RP heavy play. This frame of mind is exclusionary and it reminds me of my own first attempt to play D&D.
My join date on this site is the first time I played D&D, but it is not the first time I tried to play. Roughly 20 years ago, I tried to play in high school. There was a group of students who would spend their lunch period huddled in a hallway playing. I had seen them often and from what I had seen, it seemed like a lot of fun. One day, I decided to ask if I could join.
Now, fitness has been a lifelong pursuit of mine. I very much do not look like what someone thought of when thinking of a ‘nerd’ 20 years ago. When I asked them if I could join their group, they looked me over, looked at one another, and one of them told me “We don’t think this game is for you”. Then they turned their backs to me and waited for me to leave.
That experience is seared into my memory and put me off of D&D for 20 years. I missed out on two decades of something I now love dearly because people sought to shield the game from ‘them’. Critters are not ‘them’, they are ‘us’. This goes for all the other newer D&D players that owe their interest to streamers. These new players are not bastardizing your game, they are adding to it. D&D has grown in new directions and maybe even in ways that some may not like, but the game has not abandoned you or your interests. It just has made room for others and their interests. I hope you can make room for these other players too because gatekeeping D&D is the surest way to kill it. I do not wish to see the end of D&D in my lifetime. I hope no current player does either.
I think at this point we get it. Some players want the clock rolled back to another time for the "Next Evolutions of D&D" and some want things to move forward.
Now that that horse has been beaten to death, what kind of things to we actually think will happen?
I think that we might get slightly clearer language on some of the rules. I would also expect alterations to the Classes and Subclasses to deal with the most common complaints.
I think at this point we get it. Some players want the clock rolled back to another time for the "Next Evolutions of D&D" and some want things to move forward.
Now that that horse has been beaten to death, what kind of things to we actually think will happen?
I think that we might get slightly clearer language on some of the rules. I would also expect alterations to the Classes and Subclasses to deal with the most common complaints.
I really want to see the results from the survey!
If nothing else I want to see what the "community" wants to see changed. I know its not a complete representative example and those of us supernerds are the ones who likely filled it out.....but would be interesting to see what others thought of all the PHB subclasses.
If you pick a Ranger, you are screwed, your character will suck.
I realize that ultimately this is a YMMV thing but again: this is absolutely not true. While I have yet to run a ranger at higher levels, I can say for certain that below 10th, they're pretty dang good. I have a gloom stalker and I've never felt underpowered or left behind other classes.
Every choice a player makes should be appropriate for their level and equally good. It should not matter if you choose X or Y class, or Z class option, or D type or A type weapon. Those should all be narrative choices, things you pick to create an image of your character, a part of their story but it should be as effective as any other choice you could make.
That's a nice ideal, that precisely zero editions of D&D (or any other TTRPG I can think of) ever lived up to.
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I'm expecting, and actually hoping for some changes to alignment; either removing it entirely or stripping it way, way down. I really liked the 4e idea where the vast majority of PCs were expected to be "unaligned" and you only took some other, official alignment if it was truly central to your character. (iirc, you could even choose to only have one of the descriptors, like be just "good" without the lawful or chaotic. Or be just lawful, without the good or evil.) Paladins would often have an alignment, but your average fighter or wizard, not so much.
They could kick it out for most of the monster manual, too. Maybe leave it in for things like angels and devils, but most creatures could just be unaligned, and let the DM decide how they behave in each particular campaign. (I realize that the DM can already do that now, but well, that argument cuts both ways. And of course, some people need to see a thing written down to know they're "allowed" to do it.)
It already seems like that's the general direction they're going with stripping it out of stat blocks, and (imo) they really did have a good idea with the way they did it in 4e. Besides, pretty much no two people agree on how a character with a given alignment should behave -- removing it and an expectation would eliminate the confusion and arguments.
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My primary concern is all those surveys they are planning to have.
A good rule of thumb is: "If you try to make everyone happy, nobody will be happy."
Another good rule of thumb is: "People often just think they know what they want until they actually get exactly what they requested."
Which is in direct contrast and direct support to yet another good rule of thumb of my own: "Those, who think they know what's best for everyone, likely don't."
They hit a win with 3.5e and another of a completely different type of win with 5e. Was that from direct player feedback or their own research of observation? What caused 4e's less-than-stellar reception? Was it just guessing to see what works? Was 4e based on player feedback or a focus on digital DMing? Was 5e looking at other popular RPGs and seeing which styles had wider audiences? What directed 3e/3.5e's development? Is it a smart move to maintain back-compat? Do they have a target group at the least?
Whether or not I'm part of a targeted audience is less important to me than choosing an audience to target. Vague goals most often lead to messy developments. (Just look at the high-profile video game disasters. The interviews usually include something about a vague idea of what gameplay they wanted to do but not a consolidated goal or, worse, coming up with the gameplay first without a goal at all and trying to attach something to it.)
All I have are questions and concerns about how
theirthey're guiding their development, and the answers will probably be revealed only after the update/edition/whatever comes out.Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
This implies 5E was forced in a different direction than the designers would have chosen to take it, which is just silly. D&D is thriving in the 5E era. WotC have probably been popping champagne non-stop for the last half decade or so. It's not a hijacking if a majority of the people involved wanted it to happen and are happy with it.
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It's almost like a tabletop RPG without a significant story component is just a really slow video game with terrible graphics, and a tabletop RPG without a significant gameplay component is just a book you have to put way too much effort into reading...
Please do not contact or message me.
Yeah seems like the hobby has changed for the better IMO. Despite my grumblings with aspects of 5e I can't argue that it is a supremely flexible system that allows you to pull out a pretty wide array of stuff.
You can make it what you want so easily I find it hard to believe that whatever you have in mind would not be possible.
Do you want to have hard ASI for races? Yeah you can do that...nothing stopping you.
Limit the races you have in your setting? Easy to do...you just give a list of what players can pick from.
Do not like how a spell works? Homebrew with 5e is about as easy as any system I have worked with. Just change the spell.
Grimdark tone? Change up how death saves work. Cap CON at a certain amount. Make monsters hit harder/impose greater debilitations.
So many ways to accomplish just about any objective.
Then start a game with almost 0 RP and mostly combat. You can just run mega dungeons. Its not hard to make that happen in 5e.
And you're using aggressive and combative language to suggest other people are actively, maliciously "stealing" your D&D away from you and thus cast anyone who plays differently than the OSR crowd in a criminalistic light.
Critters ain't "hijacking" shit. You want to play a mindless, low-stress dungeon crawl where the objective is to get to all the phattest lewtz at the bottom and your character is nothing but a skinsuit with superpowers you pilot around the game space? Literally nobody is stopping you. None of us are going to break into your house and steal your dice bag so you can't play your OSR-style dungeon crawl games anymore. If that's the kind of game that gets your tail tingling, play it! Have fun with it! Make it the best damn dungeon crawl you can! There's a rich third-party ecosystem of OSR content and even entire spinoff game systems like Dungeon Crawl Classics to support it.
All this anal clenching over The Destruction of D&D As We Know It is nigh entirely unwarranted. You do you, and I'll do me. You don't have to play in my games, and I don't have to play in yours. Keep your D&D alive by playing it.
Please do not contact or message me.
This is absolutely false. I own multiple published adventures, and have read more. Combat is a HUGE part of all of them, save Feywild. It may not take up scads of PAGE SPACE but adventures like Storm King's Thunder, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and Descent to Avernus are absolutely assuming and presenting an approach that's combat heavy.
DotMM is basically a mega-dungeon and has a ton of combat.
Salt Marsh has a ton of combat encounters....The Abbey is a great example.
Out of the Abyss you can streamline to "you fight your way out of the Underdark" if you want to
Honestly, that's weird to me. I've been playing for three decades too, with 3rd edition covering the period of my life I played the most. Aside fom the live games I was active on WotC's forums (later Community) in numerous PbP games, and those all had a ton of non-combat encounters and challenges. I've been in my fair share of hack-and-slash groups too, certainly, but every edition from 2nd on (didn't play a lot of 1st) has had groups with heavy emphasis on roleplay in the sense of social interaction too. I recall sessions in Planescape that were more philosophy debate than combat, and that's the previous century and the previous IP holder. As an aside, I doubt very much that the CritRole group rolled any differently before they became Critical Role, and they were playing Pathfinder (AKA D&D 3.75), not 5E, until Matt decided 5E would be easier to follow for an audience of potentially a lot of TTRPG agnostics. CritRole's style is not their 5E style. It is and has been their TTRPG style period.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I've just completed Dragon of Icespire Peak. Out of the thirteen quests, one was resolved peacefully. Kind of, they killed a deer. Even then, the party could have legitimately completed the quest via the use of cold steel. I mean, there was narrative to set the context of each fight, but it was definitely a combat centred adventure. My wife was really excited when she heard that The Wild Betond the Witchlight had no mandatory combat and that it was possible to complete without fighting - that's why we bought it in the end.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
That's all your job as the DM. There's resources out there for DMs to improve their combat gameplay. Look up Keith Ammann's The Monsters Know What They're Doing, which exists as both a sadly infrequently updated blog and a book I should really get around to buying. Keith doesn't just offer a handful of tactical pointers for a single encounter in a single book, he tries to improve the DM's mind enough that they can challenge their players with engaging and strategic battles on any map, with any creature, in any adventure that DM runs.
I don't need a four-page breakdown telling me how a hill giant fights. I can see it for myself plain as day in its stat block - it's a brawler that wants to close in and smash with its greatclub. It's got the speed to outpace most typical PCs and its best attacking option is by far its melee multiattack. It's dumb as rocks and not particularly wise either, so it prioritizes whatever's closest/smallest and easiest to smash, or whatever hurts it the worst if someone's throwing magic. It's basically an animal; it doesn't fight, it hunts, which means it'll rethink its life choices and bail if it takes too much damage and that it's going to focus on stuffing its belly rather than proving its might. If it can drop one PC, then grab that dead/unconscious body and run off with it to avoid further harm and eat its catch at its leisure, that's what it'll do.
Heh, all the "useless fluff" background lore and history on hill giants is actually quite useful for determining its tactics in any given encounter. That text tell me how the critter thinks, what its brain works like, and from there I can block out its tactics just fine. More complex critters require more complex tactics, but that's still within the realm of GM prep. If I'm bothering with a module at all I'd rather have background lore and information that informs the world than a bunch of finicky combat text I can damn well do myself.
Please do not contact or message me.
Balance being objective or subjective kind of feels beside the point anyway. I think that balance is, to an extent, subjective because people will have different opinions on how hard an encounter should be, or an encounter may be more or less difficult for a given group due to any number of factors, or a class ability might see little use at one table but come up regularly at another. Even ignoring differences in player skill, just different party compositions can make what's a tough but fair encounter against one party a cakewalk for another.
None of that means balance is above criticism though. For example, from what I've heard Descent into Avernus has an enemy you can easily stumble across with fireball, at a point in the campaign you'll be level 2. I think that's bad design. Sure, a party of tiefling spellcasters with absorb elements or high dex might be fine. Some people may prefer the brutality of that, that the party could find this enemy and with a bit of bad luck, instantly be TPKd. But that doesn't mean it can't be criticized just because, subjectively, some people like it that way. Calling something subjective shouldn't be used as a shield to deflect discussion or criticism.
That's my point tho it's that they have the "old school" style available in this system
If that is the case then I could use Storm Kings Thunder and Descent into Avernus as examples as I think they offer a great deal of combat and even motivations for the creatures you face.
Also I find that if you are not into RP then trying to find RP worthy material for your creatures to use in combat doesn't seem to compute for me.....You would be able to pull basically everything you need from the statblock and background from the source book they are in.
Hello,
I am seeing a lot of heated discussion on what D&D should be and decrying what it has become. I would hope we can get away from that kind of thinking because I believe that D&D in its current form is inclusive of older styles of play as well as newer, RP heavy play. This frame of mind is exclusionary and it reminds me of my own first attempt to play D&D.
My join date on this site is the first time I played D&D, but it is not the first time I tried to play. Roughly 20 years ago, I tried to play in high school. There was a group of students who would spend their lunch period huddled in a hallway playing. I had seen them often and from what I had seen, it seemed like a lot of fun. One day, I decided to ask if I could join.
Now, fitness has been a lifelong pursuit of mine. I very much do not look like what someone thought of when thinking of a ‘nerd’ 20 years ago. When I asked them if I could join their group, they looked me over, looked at one another, and one of them told me “We don’t think this game is for you”. Then they turned their backs to me and waited for me to leave.
That experience is seared into my memory and put me off of D&D for 20 years. I missed out on two decades of something I now love dearly because people sought to shield the game from ‘them’. Critters are not ‘them’, they are ‘us’. This goes for all the other newer D&D players that owe their interest to streamers. These new players are not bastardizing your game, they are adding to it. D&D has grown in new directions and maybe even in ways that some may not like, but the game has not abandoned you or your interests. It just has made room for others and their interests. I hope you can make room for these other players too because gatekeeping D&D is the surest way to kill it. I do not wish to see the end of D&D in my lifetime. I hope no current player does either.
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I think at this point we get it. Some players want the clock rolled back to another time for the "Next Evolutions of D&D" and some want things to move forward.
Now that that horse has been beaten to death, what kind of things to we actually think will happen?
I think that we might get slightly clearer language on some of the rules. I would also expect alterations to the Classes and Subclasses to deal with the most common complaints.
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I really want to see the results from the survey!
If nothing else I want to see what the "community" wants to see changed. I know its not a complete representative example and those of us supernerds are the ones who likely filled it out.....but would be interesting to see what others thought of all the PHB subclasses.
I realize that ultimately this is a YMMV thing but again: this is absolutely not true. While I have yet to run a ranger at higher levels, I can say for certain that below 10th, they're pretty dang good. I have a gloom stalker and I've never felt underpowered or left behind other classes.
That's a nice ideal, that precisely zero editions of D&D (or any other TTRPG I can think of) ever lived up to.
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I'm expecting, and actually hoping for some changes to alignment; either removing it entirely or stripping it way, way down. I really liked the 4e idea where the vast majority of PCs were expected to be "unaligned" and you only took some other, official alignment if it was truly central to your character. (iirc, you could even choose to only have one of the descriptors, like be just "good" without the lawful or chaotic. Or be just lawful, without the good or evil.) Paladins would often have an alignment, but your average fighter or wizard, not so much.
They could kick it out for most of the monster manual, too. Maybe leave it in for things like angels and devils, but most creatures could just be unaligned, and let the DM decide how they behave in each particular campaign. (I realize that the DM can already do that now, but well, that argument cuts both ways. And of course, some people need to see a thing written down to know they're "allowed" to do it.)
It already seems like that's the general direction they're going with stripping it out of stat blocks, and (imo) they really did have a good idea with the way they did it in 4e. Besides, pretty much no two people agree on how a character with a given alignment should behave -- removing it and an expectation would eliminate the confusion and arguments.