I suppose they could have called it 'Extra thing' but that has the same issues. What is your grand solution?
"Every turn you may take a main action and a secondary action." Some characters won't have any options for their secondary action (though this is pretty rare by mid level) and will have to skip it.
I don't really see how that is different than "Every turn you may take a action and a bonus action. Some character won't have any options for their bonus action (though this is pretty rare by mid level) and will have to skip it.
It isn't. The problem is that "bonus" is a bad choice for the name because it makes people think they're getting extra actions.
I suppose they could have called it 'Extra thing' but that has the same issues. What is your grand solution?
"Every turn you may take a main action and a secondary action." Some characters won't have any options for their secondary action (though this is pretty rare by mid level) and will have to skip it.
I don't really see how that is different than "Every turn you may take a action and a bonus action. Some character won't have any options for their bonus action (though this is pretty rare by mid level) and will have to skip it.
It isn't. The problem is that "bonus" is a bad choice for the name because it makes people think they're getting extra actions.
But... they are getting an extra action. The general rule is that you only get one action and your movement. You only get to take a bonus action if some feature gives you a specific extra action.
But... they are getting an extra action. The general rule is that you only get one action and your movement. You only get to take a bonus action if some feature gives you a specific extra action.
No, they're gaining the ability to use an action they already had.
General note: saying something is "confusing for new players" does not automatically make something bad design, or a bad decision. new players are still players, and players are expected to know a minimum portion of the rules of a game they are interested in playing. It is good DMing - and indeed, good co-playering - to help a new player learn and absorb the rules of the game. But attempting to remove all possible sources of confusion in an ill-guided attempt to make learning a game easier leads to a game becoming a watered-down vanilla tapioca pile of slop with no depth, no engagement, and no staying power.
At some point, a "New Player" needs to make an effort to learn the game. Eliminating needless confusion is good, and an action point system could potentially do so, but I guarantee "New Players" will find action points confusing, too. Someone who is not a lifelong gamer finds any sort of gaming to be horribly confusing because Gaming In General has its own language and its own rules and customs. D&D is not a gateway game. It is built for gamers, by people who technically call themselves gamers. You need to learn how to game in order to play the game
You don't need to do it all at once, and you don't need to be good at it. But you do need to learn some things at some point, and forgetting that learning the rules is required to play is how you end up at fantasy reskinned Tic-Tac-Toe.
But... they are getting an extra action. The general rule is that you only get one action and your movement. You only get to take a bonus action if some feature gives you a specific extra action.
No, they're gaining the ability to use an action they already had.
Can you explain what you mean? I sincerely do not understand what you're saying at all. Bonus actions are not things that everyone has. The rules are really clear about this:
You can take a bonus action only when a special ability, spell, or other feature of the game states that you can do something as a bonus action. You otherwise don’t have a bonus action to take.
Can you explain what you mean? I sincerely do not understand what you're saying at all. Bonus actions are not things that everyone has. The rules are really clear about this:
You can take a bonus action only when a special ability, spell, or other feature of the game states that you can do something as a bonus action. You otherwise don’t have a bonus action to take.
That rule is, frankly, gibberish and should be deleted. The idea that merely possessing an ability suddenly changes your action economy so you gain an action type you did not previously have doesn't make any sense, and calling it a 'bonus' action naturally leads to the idea that you should be able to take multiple of them in a turn.
General note: saying something is "confusing for new players" does not automatically make something bad design, or a bad decision.
The issue is really about "unnecessarily confusing". An ideal rule is clear, concise, easy to use, and accomplishes what you want it to do; if you can make it better at one of those things without being worse at others, you should. Unfortunately, a lot of changes improve in one way at the cost of being worse in another way, and then you have the problem of which you value more. 5e generally places high value on 'easy to use' at a cost in clarity and weird rules anomalies.
I can agree that the phrase 'bonus action' could have been better coined, but I do like the concept of bonus actions as secondary set of things you can do. If they just gave you two main actions, then why not just take the attack action twice or cast a spell action twice in almost all cases etc. Or if you got action 'points' to spend just go for whatever combination of points is most effective. Having a character with a couple different bonus action options for me helps to keep things interesting.
Player should be shrunk down to 4 categories: Movement, Attack, Object Interaction, and Bonus Action. Free Action is absorbed into either Object Interaction or Bonus Action.
Player has 4 options each turn. Choose 3. That is all they get.
You have completly unlocked my thinking. I tried to stay inside the perimeter of the actual system, but to read 'Object Interaction' and '4 categories' made me realise I need to go out of the box. Thank you.
Complex games exist. DND doesn’t need to be one of them.
What makes for a bad rule is a rule that the target customer base dislikes (for various reasons including “it is difficult to understand”).
No matter how much you might disagree, dropping a kid who can barely count right into a Calculus class and trying to justify it by saying “he’ll have to learn Calculus sometime» and “the other students can help him catch up to speed” is STUPID.
I agree with this goal. But dnd as it is is still too complex for my players, not in terms of being able to memorize rules, but in terms of wanting to do so. They have professions, family life and other hobbies, they dont want to put more time into it than the session.
But we live in a dndbeyond and VTTs time. They dont have to any more. Just click on the + near your attack, you dont have to memorize the rules that determines it's a +3 or a +4. So we can have more options than before for that kind of players.
Right now they look at the action tab, read the texts and choose one action. Number of spell left ? Loot at the red squares.
So if you have a system that stays simple I 100% agree, but permits a little more choice of actions, presented in a readable and interactive way, they will be able to use it. They are all used to video games, they know how to do complex sequences and evaluating choices. They just dont want to learn the inside out of the engine in the same way they dont want to do the maths to choose their next weapon in their video game. They look that the sword do more crit, but they dont add up or multiply or use whatever ingame formula to know if it's actually interresting. And then they find builds online.
More choice does not make the game more complicated. It's analysis paralysis the real problem as it bogs down the game. So it's the presentation of the choices which is the more important.
The current system does not support the idea of spellcasters talking about what spells to cast etc on their turn, so that really isn't impacted by these changes or not. That's all just up to the DM and how much mid combat chatter/planning they personally allow. The PHB suggests brief utterances or gestures.
Gonna point out to all the folks parroting 'Paradox of Choice' and "Complexity is always bad forever let's get rid of every last rule in D&D and make it into fantasy Tic-Tac-Toe"... . .. ...that you're playing an open-ended game in which virtually any action one wishes to take can be attempted. Tabletop RPGs have, bar none, the largest choice and option pool of any game ever devised, because that option pool is limited only by the verisimilitude of the fictional world and the DM's patience for janky ****ery.
Perhaps, rather than belittling people for not having the mental capacity to handle a diversity of options within the game, we can try trusting folks to know how to handle themselves? Or at least trust their tablemates to help them out?
The current system does not support the idea of spellcasters talking about what spells to cast etc on their turn, so that really isn't impacted by these changes or not. That's all just up to the DM and how much mid combat chatter/planning they personally allow. The PHB suggests brief utterances or gestures.
If I had a 6 second egg timer I would bring it to my table. That would end a lot of the nonsense. It would also drive away many many players.
I don't know, that basically just accomplishes you identifying as "a DM with strictures" with little actual game benefit other than DM command. You're strict on meta, ok. Problem is D&D isn't virtual reality and the relationship between player and character is imperfect, as asymptotic as any creative mix of abstraction and representation. D&D is a team sport without a locker room or practice field, usually. I mean, sure if you can get a cult of players to create a "playbook" for any and all encounters instead of allowing them in combat to discuss as a team how the party may contend with a particular challenge, yay you. But strictures like this, while often articulated by frustrated DMs, the ticking clock stressor just seems like unreal realism.
If you ever worked around people who practice real life tactics and look at actual use of force or after action reports, you usually wind up with documents that take at least 10-15 minutes to read, let alone produce, describing under a minute of 'action.' Egg timer forcing to me sounds too much like the DM refusing to let players think about their characters and also is very presumptuous of the DM's ability to lay out the scene so that "real time" action processing of kinetics and supernatural metaphysics can be performed. A reasonable call of "time" should be allowed if the player's mind is truly flatfooted, but if there's a productive conversation on action going on, imposition of time stressors is just layering on unnceccessary fog of war and reeks a bit of "gotcha DMing".
@Kotath and others. I already stated a solution earlier today.
As of today, players have the following "potential activities": Movement, Attack, Object Interaction, Free Action (don't get me started on how this is abused), and Bonus Action.
It can be simplified. Free Action is subsumed into Bonus Action, which is renamed as has been suggested "Secondary Action". So now there are only 4 options for a player:
Movement, Attack, Object Interaction, and Secondary Action. Player chooses 3 every turn. No more. Someone wants to fool around and decide what goes under Object Interaction and what goes under Secondary Action? OK, a discussion can be had about that.
Does this mean a re-work of may class features? Yes. Too bad, WOTC, do your job.
You want all free actions to become bonus actions? So, talking to your fellow party mate can’t be done in any round that you are using another bonus action?
Works for me.
Last week I ran a 1e game and 5e game. In both games, under heavy combat, at least one player decided that they would have a conversation about tactics, and I am not talking about "You go there on your turn". Combat is 6 seconds, which includes sidling around for a decent hit, or setting yourself up for defence, or whatever. But it is NOT designed to be for a Bard to recite some soliloquy, or the spellcasters to freeze time and discuss who will cast what. That is done OUT OF COMBAT.
You seriously think some Rogue when trying to crack a lock on a door while the Orcs bear down on the party is going to be riffing with another player? Watch Aliens. The most pithy thing you hear anyone say is "whatever you are going to do, make it fast".
So yes, you could Attack, Object Interaction, AND Secondary Action aka talk to another player. But you are still limited to only 3 items on the 4 item menu. I am well aware that most people that want their chars to be gods capable of everything in a single round will hate this. They are playing a different game than I am.
Nothing you said is even distantly related to the question I asked.
I asked if you want a player to be unable to say anything if they are performing some other bonus action.
Now, because what you said isn’t related to what I said, we have four options
1.) A player can say anything, but no more than x seconds AND perform another bonus action
2.) A player can say anything, but no more than x seconds and can’t perform another bonus action
3.) A player can say anything he wants as long as he wants and perform another bonus action
4.) A player can say anything he wants as long as he wants and can’t perform another bonus action
Which do you want, 1 or 2?
A character has a six second limit for verbalizing or what have you in a combat round. Forcing a player to a six second limit is misguided simulationism. A PC is a character played by a player. Your thinking isn't recognizing a distinction. Combat's a stew, marinate on that.
Golly, this has gone somewhere while I was away. All I'm gonna say is that if we're talking about whether someone is being a good DM, maybe we've lost the point of the thread.
The jank around free actions is difficult to manage because the game is so open-ended. Like, if you made the rule "you can use any object as part of your movement if it's needed for your movement, and use any object as part of your action if it's needed for your action," that sounds reasonable, except now a character can draw his sword, attack with it, sheathe it, use his second attack to draw another sword, attack with that, sheathe it, then use his movement to grab a rope, swing across a gap, open a door, go through it, and pull a lever to drop the elevator on the other side, descend to the bottom, and step out all in one turn. Is that too much? That feels like too much. Limit it to just one object per activity, though, and you end up with a character not being able to get his potion out of his bag and drink it in the same turn. It's tricky.
That said, there's a lot of people on the D&D design team. I'm sure they can figure it out if they put their minds to it.
There’s a big difference between have multiple decision points and having multiple options. There’s also a big difference between differences of kind and differences of degree.
And if you feel so strongly in your argument that you prefer to ignore the science of how to build a good game so that you can have what you want, it raises certain questions.
Do not cite the deep magic to me, Wren. I was there when it was written.
Paradox of Choice is not a fixed, unchanging law of physics. Every single human being has different thresholds for what counts as 'Paradox of Choice'. Magic: the Gathering has billions of possible deck combinations and choices even just within whatever current horseshit passes as Modern, and it's been enormously more financially successful than D&D for thirty years. World-changingly popular games such as Minecraft embed a dizzying profusion of choices into their basic make-up, and those games are expanded exponentially by a legion of third-party mods. There are millions and millions of people for whom 5e's ruleset is basic, straightforward, and easy to keep in mind as they play. Any halfway competitive TCG gamer who's memorized thousands of cards and thousands more interactions between those cards can keep 5e in their brain without any effort at all.
Is everyone able to do so? No. But pretending no one is able to do so is disingenuous and overly dismissive. And frankly, eliminating any complexity in action economy won't last. 5e's action economy started off simple too, and then eight years of game development happened. Classes, subclasses, and feats were introduced to allow a broader diversity of options because there was unused design space for those things to take up. This thread exists because people are unsatisfied with 5e as it currently stands, and a comfortable majority of suggestions throughout the thread are seeking greater granularity and depth. There certainly exists a strong undercurrent asking for simplification, but even in that instance many of those requests are to clean up poorly designed game elements rather than to eliminate choice in a choice-driven role-playing game. Things like "make unarmed combat and grappling less infuriatingly weirdly written and bad", as opposed to "eliminate bonus actions and make players have to choose between a Move or an Action on their turn."
Unused design space will eventually be filled, should a game be given the chance to grow. The more space is filled, the bigger a game gets. Simply how the whole thing works. And frankly, if a DM relentlessly told me I was too stupid to handle being able to make choices in my choice-driven tabletop RPG and tried to spoon-feed me a single fixed on-rails path instead, that would be a table I would leave as swiftly as I could.
That's simply not what this game is meant to be. And I don't think anybody here would truly argue otherwise.
And if you feel so strongly in your argument that you prefer to ignore the science of how to build a good game so that you can have what you want, it raises certain questions.
The paradox of choice isn't about building a good game, it's about shopping. To the extent it's relevant to game design, it's in the observation that having a larger number of choices means decision making is slower and confidence that you made the right choice is lower. This is true but... so what? We don't play games to be efficient, and you're not supposed to be confident that you made the right move. The normal goal of a conventional game is complexity high enough that the best choice is not immediately obvious, but low enough that it's possible to be better or worse at the game.
The problem for RPGs is that there's an enormous range in how much complexity people want, and not everyone cares about the 'game' aspects at all. And in any case, good presentation will smooth the process of choice no matter how many choices are available.
@Kotath and others. I already stated a solution earlier today.
As of today, players have the following "potential activities": Movement, Attack, Object Interaction, Free Action (don't get me started on how this is abused), and Bonus Action.
It can be simplified. Free Action is subsumed into Bonus Action, which is renamed as has been suggested "Secondary Action". So now there are only 4 options for a player:
Movement, Attack, Object Interaction, and Secondary Action. Player chooses 3 every turn. No more. Someone wants to fool around and decide what goes under Object Interaction and what goes under Secondary Action? OK, a discussion can be had about that.
Does this mean a re-work of may class features? Yes. Too bad, WOTC, do your job.
You want all free actions to become bonus actions? So, talking to your fellow party mate can’t be done in any round that you are using another bonus action?
Works for me.
Last week I ran a 1e game and 5e game. In both games, under heavy combat, at least one player decided that they would have a conversation about tactics, and I am not talking about "You go there on your turn". Combat is 6 seconds, which includes sidling around for a decent hit, or setting yourself up for defence, or whatever. But it is NOT designed to be for a Bard to recite some soliloquy, or the spellcasters to freeze time and discuss who will cast what. That is done OUT OF COMBAT.
You seriously think some Rogue when trying to crack a lock on a door while the Orcs bear down on the party is going to be riffing with another player? Watch Aliens. The most pithy thing you hear anyone say is "whatever you are going to do, make it fast".
So yes, you could Attack, Object Interaction, AND Secondary Action aka talk to another player. But you are still limited to only 3 items on the 4 item menu. I am well aware that most people that want their chars to be gods capable of everything in a single round will hate this. They are playing a different game than I am.
Nothing you said is even distantly related to the question I asked.
I asked if you want a player to be unable to say anything if they are performing some other bonus action.
Now, because what you said isn’t related to what I said, we have four options
1.) A player can say anything, but no more than x seconds AND perform another bonus action
2.) A player can say anything, but no more than x seconds and can’t perform another bonus action
3.) A player can say anything he wants as long as he wants and perform another bonus action
4.) A player can say anything he wants as long as he wants and can’t perform another bonus action
Which do you want, 1 or 2?
Huh...sorry, you have utterly lost me.
Movement, Attack (V components exempt), Object Interaction all have zero opportunity for a conversation. Let's assume that "conversation" is a Secondary Action. (I am trying to avoid the confusion of a Bonus Action). So yes, a Wizard could Move, cast a spell with a Verbal Component AND have a quick conversation. But on the same turn as that the Wizard could not also try to pick up some fancy looking stick he saw on the floor.
Look, frankly, 5e, in fact, almost any edition has done a terrible job with conversation when under Initiative. It is utterly ludicrous for a Wizard to be casting some spell AND having a conversation in the same combat round. But certain concessions have to be made. So a Wizard can cast a "bonus action" leveled spell and a Cantrip on the same round, both with V components. But to suggest that same Wizard can ADDITIONALLY have a convo with a char...just no. If "conversation" is a Secondary Action and the Wizard has already burned an Attack (guess it can should be renamed Action) for a V based Cantrip, and a Secondary Action for leveled V based "Bonus Action" spell, then yeah, the Wizard is left with only Movement or Object Interaction.
I mean, what, a Wizard is casting Tiny Hut, and the group asks him midway through the spell his opinion on if they should attack the orcs that are passing by but have not noticed the group, and the Wizard gets to answer????
I think he's asking you whether you count talking as a bonus action or a free action (assuming I'm not misunderstanding him). But yeah, this thread has gotten kind of confusing.
Extensive research has been done on this. It is called “The Paradox of Choice” and is pretty much settled in psychology. More choice MOST DEFINITELY increases complexity and anxiety.
Interresting, I will do some reading on that. It will also trigger some interresting question at my virtual table as all 5 players are psychologists. :)
That is an interesting idea, it does limit a lot of free actions though. Maybe you could just say "You can do one thing that classifies as a free action per a round."
It isn't. The problem is that "bonus" is a bad choice for the name because it makes people think they're getting extra actions.
But... they are getting an extra action. The general rule is that you only get one action and your movement. You only get to take a bonus action if some feature gives you a specific extra action.
No, they're gaining the ability to use an action they already had.
General note: saying something is "confusing for new players" does not automatically make something bad design, or a bad decision. new players are still players, and players are expected to know a minimum portion of the rules of a game they are interested in playing. It is good DMing - and indeed, good co-playering - to help a new player learn and absorb the rules of the game. But attempting to remove all possible sources of confusion in an ill-guided attempt to make learning a game easier leads to a game becoming a watered-down vanilla tapioca pile of slop with no depth, no engagement, and no staying power.
At some point, a "New Player" needs to make an effort to learn the game. Eliminating needless confusion is good, and an action point system could potentially do so, but I guarantee "New Players" will find action points confusing, too. Someone who is not a lifelong gamer finds any sort of gaming to be horribly confusing because Gaming In General has its own language and its own rules and customs. D&D is not a gateway game. It is built for gamers, by people who technically call themselves gamers. You need to learn how to game in order to play the game
You don't need to do it all at once, and you don't need to be good at it. But you do need to learn some things at some point, and forgetting that learning the rules is required to play is how you end up at fantasy reskinned Tic-Tac-Toe.
Please do not contact or message me.
Can you explain what you mean? I sincerely do not understand what you're saying at all. Bonus actions are not things that everyone has. The rules are really clear about this:
That rule is, frankly, gibberish and should be deleted. The idea that merely possessing an ability suddenly changes your action economy so you gain an action type you did not previously have doesn't make any sense, and calling it a 'bonus' action naturally leads to the idea that you should be able to take multiple of them in a turn.
The issue is really about "unnecessarily confusing". An ideal rule is clear, concise, easy to use, and accomplishes what you want it to do; if you can make it better at one of those things without being worse at others, you should. Unfortunately, a lot of changes improve in one way at the cost of being worse in another way, and then you have the problem of which you value more. 5e generally places high value on 'easy to use' at a cost in clarity and weird rules anomalies.
I can agree that the phrase 'bonus action' could have been better coined, but I do like the concept of bonus actions as secondary set of things you can do. If they just gave you two main actions, then why not just take the attack action twice or cast a spell action twice in almost all cases etc. Or if you got action 'points' to spend just go for whatever combination of points is most effective. Having a character with a couple different bonus action options for me helps to keep things interesting.
You have completly unlocked my thinking. I tried to stay inside the perimeter of the actual system, but to read 'Object Interaction' and '4 categories' made me realise I need to go out of the box. Thank you.
I agree with this goal. But dnd as it is is still too complex for my players, not in terms of being able to memorize rules, but in terms of wanting to do so. They have professions, family life and other hobbies, they dont want to put more time into it than the session.
But we live in a dndbeyond and VTTs time. They dont have to any more. Just click on the + near your attack, you dont have to memorize the rules that determines it's a +3 or a +4. So we can have more options than before for that kind of players.
Right now they look at the action tab, read the texts and choose one action. Number of spell left ? Loot at the red squares.
So if you have a system that stays simple I 100% agree, but permits a little more choice of actions, presented in a readable and interactive way, they will be able to use it.
They are all used to video games, they know how to do complex sequences and evaluating choices. They just dont want to learn the inside out of the engine in the same way they dont want to do the maths to choose their next weapon in their video game. They look that the sword do more crit, but they dont add up or multiply or use whatever ingame formula to know if it's actually interresting. And then they find builds online.
More choice does not make the game more complicated. It's analysis paralysis the real problem as it bogs down the game. So it's the presentation of the choices which is the more important.
The current system does not support the idea of spellcasters talking about what spells to cast etc on their turn, so that really isn't impacted by these changes or not. That's all just up to the DM and how much mid combat chatter/planning they personally allow. The PHB suggests brief utterances or gestures.
Gonna point out to all the folks parroting 'Paradox of Choice' and "Complexity is always bad forever let's get rid of every last rule in D&D and make it into fantasy Tic-Tac-Toe"...
.
..
...that you're playing an open-ended game in which virtually any action one wishes to take can be attempted. Tabletop RPGs have, bar none, the largest choice and option pool of any game ever devised, because that option pool is limited only by the verisimilitude of the fictional world and the DM's patience for janky ****ery.
Perhaps, rather than belittling people for not having the mental capacity to handle a diversity of options within the game, we can try trusting folks to know how to handle themselves? Or at least trust their tablemates to help them out?
Please do not contact or message me.
I don't know, that basically just accomplishes you identifying as "a DM with strictures" with little actual game benefit other than DM command. You're strict on meta, ok. Problem is D&D isn't virtual reality and the relationship between player and character is imperfect, as asymptotic as any creative mix of abstraction and representation. D&D is a team sport without a locker room or practice field, usually. I mean, sure if you can get a cult of players to create a "playbook" for any and all encounters instead of allowing them in combat to discuss as a team how the party may contend with a particular challenge, yay you. But strictures like this, while often articulated by frustrated DMs, the ticking clock stressor just seems like unreal realism.
If you ever worked around people who practice real life tactics and look at actual use of force or after action reports, you usually wind up with documents that take at least 10-15 minutes to read, let alone produce, describing under a minute of 'action.' Egg timer forcing to me sounds too much like the DM refusing to let players think about their characters and also is very presumptuous of the DM's ability to lay out the scene so that "real time" action processing of kinetics and supernatural metaphysics can be performed. A reasonable call of "time" should be allowed if the player's mind is truly flatfooted, but if there's a productive conversation on action going on, imposition of time stressors is just layering on unnceccessary fog of war and reeks a bit of "gotcha DMing".
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A character has a six second limit for verbalizing or what have you in a combat round. Forcing a player to a six second limit is misguided simulationism. A PC is a character played by a player. Your thinking isn't recognizing a distinction. Combat's a stew, marinate on that.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Golly, this has gone somewhere while I was away. All I'm gonna say is that if we're talking about whether someone is being a good DM, maybe we've lost the point of the thread.
The jank around free actions is difficult to manage because the game is so open-ended. Like, if you made the rule "you can use any object as part of your movement if it's needed for your movement, and use any object as part of your action if it's needed for your action," that sounds reasonable, except now a character can draw his sword, attack with it, sheathe it, use his second attack to draw another sword, attack with that, sheathe it, then use his movement to grab a rope, swing across a gap, open a door, go through it, and pull a lever to drop the elevator on the other side, descend to the bottom, and step out all in one turn. Is that too much? That feels like too much. Limit it to just one object per activity, though, and you end up with a character not being able to get his potion out of his bag and drink it in the same turn. It's tricky.
That said, there's a lot of people on the D&D design team. I'm sure they can figure it out if they put their minds to it.
Do not cite the deep magic to me, Wren. I was there when it was written.
Paradox of Choice is not a fixed, unchanging law of physics. Every single human being has different thresholds for what counts as 'Paradox of Choice'. Magic: the Gathering has billions of possible deck combinations and choices even just within whatever current horseshit passes as Modern, and it's been enormously more financially successful than D&D for thirty years. World-changingly popular games such as Minecraft embed a dizzying profusion of choices into their basic make-up, and those games are expanded exponentially by a legion of third-party mods. There are millions and millions of people for whom 5e's ruleset is basic, straightforward, and easy to keep in mind as they play. Any halfway competitive TCG gamer who's memorized thousands of cards and thousands more interactions between those cards can keep 5e in their brain without any effort at all.
Is everyone able to do so? No. But pretending no one is able to do so is disingenuous and overly dismissive. And frankly, eliminating any complexity in action economy won't last. 5e's action economy started off simple too, and then eight years of game development happened. Classes, subclasses, and feats were introduced to allow a broader diversity of options because there was unused design space for those things to take up. This thread exists because people are unsatisfied with 5e as it currently stands, and a comfortable majority of suggestions throughout the thread are seeking greater granularity and depth. There certainly exists a strong undercurrent asking for simplification, but even in that instance many of those requests are to clean up poorly designed game elements rather than to eliminate choice in a choice-driven role-playing game. Things like "make unarmed combat and grappling less infuriatingly weirdly written and bad", as opposed to "eliminate bonus actions and make players have to choose between a Move or an Action on their turn."
Unused design space will eventually be filled, should a game be given the chance to grow. The more space is filled, the bigger a game gets. Simply how the whole thing works. And frankly, if a DM relentlessly told me I was too stupid to handle being able to make choices in my choice-driven tabletop RPG and tried to spoon-feed me a single fixed on-rails path instead, that would be a table I would leave as swiftly as I could.
That's simply not what this game is meant to be. And I don't think anybody here would truly argue otherwise.
Please do not contact or message me.
The paradox of choice isn't about building a good game, it's about shopping. To the extent it's relevant to game design, it's in the observation that having a larger number of choices means decision making is slower and confidence that you made the right choice is lower. This is true but... so what? We don't play games to be efficient, and you're not supposed to be confident that you made the right move. The normal goal of a conventional game is complexity high enough that the best choice is not immediately obvious, but low enough that it's possible to be better or worse at the game.
The problem for RPGs is that there's an enormous range in how much complexity people want, and not everyone cares about the 'game' aspects at all. And in any case, good presentation will smooth the process of choice no matter how many choices are available.
I think he's asking you whether you count talking as a bonus action or a free action (assuming I'm not misunderstanding him). But yeah, this thread has gotten kind of confusing.
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HERE.Interresting, I will do some reading on that. It will also trigger some interresting question at my virtual table as all 5 players are psychologists. :)
That is an interesting idea, it does limit a lot of free actions though. Maybe you could just say "You can do one thing that classifies as a free action per a round."
Edits: Clarifying my question.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.