As a long-time player and DM, one thing that has always bothered me is the excessive amount of magical stuff that some teams can accumulate. As much as I understand that a +1 weapon or suit of armor is nice, once the character finds a better item, the old one goes in the bin. The idea that it might be a family heirloom or have some emotional meaning for the character is often irrelevant.
For some years now, I have given my players two options with regard to such items: Their character can regard them as simple tools to be discarded as soon as something better comes along or they can try to keep them as a sort of legacy item.
A legacy item is one that the character is going to use and rely on a lot and, as a result, the item becomes stronger or better in some way. You can define this as the character becoming more familiar with the item, unlocking hidden powers at certain times, or whatever. Another way to do this is whenever a better version of something comes along (a +2 weapon versus a +1), the player can choose to keep the original weapon and come up with some idea for a mission or scenario that explains why the item is suddenly better.
This solves a lot of problems in my games because players tend to put their faith in what they have and make it last longer rather than tossing it at the first opportunity.
How do you all feel about this and do you have any other suggestions for handling this part of the game?
There already is a system in place for your “legacy” items, many legendary and artifact class magic items have 3 stages, going from dormant>awakened>exalted. If you want legacy items in your game you could use existing material or homebrew your own stuff using the same format.
I think a good mix of legacy and “discardable” items is best. That way some stuff has lasting sentimental value and scaling usefulness but the issue with all magic items being that way is that players will run out things to find after a certain point. They will lose that “oh cool a new magic item, can’t wait to use this” feeling. And that’s the entire flip side and counterpoint to your concern of items being tossed aside when something new is found.
Everything in the end comes down to two important points.
1) Whats fun for the DM
2) Whats fun for the player
I don't think there is a right or wrong answer. I've seen or done multiple things in my experience in DND. In one campaign, i DM'd for someone who was really in love with a magic deck he had built with swords of fire and ice, light and shadow, etc. So i worked it in as a homebrew item that had augment slots. These augments were things he could find over time, and could do different things. For example, in the early going it might be +1 elemental damage of whichever gem was in contained. As it got later in the campaign, it scaled with these augmentations that he was able to find or have crafted, to the point where he got extra dice to roll to determine the scope or chance of the augment succeeding in full. and he loved that, because he so long as he wasn't engaged in battle could swap out and it allowed him the opportunity to play a melee character that he felt had some ability to do more than swing repeatedly.
Another character loved being able to carry 3 or 4 swords around and choose at will. So we bent the rules there to allow him more weight and more attuned weapons, but he struggled to understand how to use trinkets. Another character beyond that was a loot goblin that would compare and contrast, and wouldn't even taken the swords to sell them and simply would throw them on the ground once he was done.
When it comes to Heirloom situation, i prefer to let the player tell me what they have fallen in love with, and if they do then i can work with it. As long as they interact with the world i build, i get my joys there, so it's a nice give and take
Traditional D&D is about killing monsters and finding loot, and one of the loot categories is 'better gear', so if you let people upgrade their existing gear, you've just eliminated a major category of reward. However, in more story-oriented games eliminating the gear treadmill may be a feature (despite what people tell you about 'bounded accuracy', gear is still quite important in 5e).
Traditional D&D is about killing monsters and finding loot, and one of the loot categories is 'better gear', so if you let people upgrade their existing gear, you've just eliminated a major category of reward. However, in more story-oriented games eliminating the gear treadmill may be a feature (despite what people tell you about 'bounded accuracy', gear is still quite important in 5e).
I'm unfamiliar with the term 'Bounded Accuracy.' Please explain.
I've ran into this; I can appreciate your question and I'd like try an experiment:
I have two magical suits of armor, which one do they choose:
(+1)The Skulker's Guild Suit. This brown and grey intricate leather suit of armor is fashioned in northern style, adorned with dark silver clasps. It's embossed with the Skulker's insignia in a raised design that you later learn represents a high ranking officer (The Night Watchman).
(+3)The Circle of Asmodeous Guard Suit. Burnished with umber and dark leather swaths, this suit identifies a serving member of the Circle's military force, slightly rugged with finer angles and edges with the markings of a ground soldier in the Asmodeous cult. You recall that all nearby townspeople and citizens associate this group with human sacrifices and demonic worship.
I guess my question is if your players would throw away their guild armor (Skulker's) for the cult armor. Because the greater implication is that there's consequences for wearing armor associated with a Dark Cult.
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Traditional D&D is about killing monsters and finding loot, and one of the loot categories is 'better gear', so if you let people upgrade their existing gear, you've just eliminated a major category of reward. However, in more story-oriented games eliminating the gear treadmill may be a feature (despite what people tell you about 'bounded accuracy', gear is still quite important in 5e).
I'm unfamiliar with the term 'Bounded Accuracy.' Please explain.
Bounded accuracy is a concept introduced in 5e to keep lower CR or level creatures relevant threats to high level characters.
In previous editions, you could get creatures with 35 AC and characters with +28 to hit modifiers (or something like that :) ... big numbers anyway). Magical weapons and armor could be +5 to AC or to hit. Multiple magic items could be stacked due to the lack of the attunement mechanic. So a +3 pair of swordsmans glives that gives +3 to hit and damage could be combined with a +5 weapon with +5 to hit and damage with a girdle of storm giant strength giving an additional +9 to hit and damage plus their base to hit went up with level.
This meant that a low level creature could only ever hit a high level creature on a 20 (assuming that even a 20 allowed for an automatic hit). In addition, higher level creatures could have 3 or more attacks.
In the end this meant that there were effectively different games between low level/low magic and high level/high magic.
5e introduced the concept of bounded accuracy - This meant that + to hit was limited as were target ACs. A pack of low CR creatures can remain a threat to a higher level character. The maximum to hit in 5e without magic is +11 (+5 from stat and +6 from proficiency at level 17+). This means that a creature with an AC of 21 is hit on a 10+ or about 55% of the time. However, a level 1 character with +2 proficiency and a +3 from a stat still has a +5 and will hit the same AC21 creature on a 16+. The level 20 character has more attacks, they will have more magic items (limited by attunement slots to prevent unlimited stacking), they will have more class abilities and spells, but a level 1 character is not irrelevant - just less powerful.
The idea behind "bounded accuracy" was to limit the bonuses to hit and AC so that the range of values is such that there is improvement from level 1 to 20 but that low level characters did not become irrelevant.
For the most part, I think it achieves that goal though I know folks who chafe under the magic item limits (though a DM can easily modify that in their games).
Yeah this is the age-old question. Should Aragorn have traded away his nonmagical ancestral sword Anduril to Gandalf in exchange for his magical sword Glamdring? That would have been crazy in the story.
Tiered magic items are a good solution, and scarcely implemented in 5e.
This is one area where I enjoy the pathfinder way. You don't find a magic item, you find a rune which you can apply to an item. So you find something that gives +1 to hit, and then slap it on whatever weapon you like. It means that the character can take up the ancestral sword that's been in the family for generations and just keep using it. Eventually, they find a +2 rune, and can remove the +1 (they don't stack, but can be swapped freely). They hand their old +1 off to someone else in the party, or put it on their secondary weapon. It's also much less bookkeeping for the DM, since they don't need to know which weapons every party member is using. They just hand over a +1 and let the players figure out who can make the best use of it. And it can go on pretty much anything, like hand wraps for a monk.
The system is a little different, in that to hit runes and damage runes are generally separate, meaning the +1 to hit doesn't apply to damage, but it would be simple enough to say it applies to both if they wanted to port that system over. And it also allows you to find, say, a rune that adds 2d6 fire damage, and you can put it on anything also -- not just a flame tongue sword, but a hammer or a glaive, or those hand wraps for the monk. Its super flexible.
Traditional D&D is about killing monsters and finding loot, and one of the loot categories is 'better gear', so if you let people upgrade their existing gear, you've just eliminated a major category of reward. However, in more story-oriented games eliminating the gear treadmill may be a feature (despite what people tell you about 'bounded accuracy', gear is still quite important in 5e).
That is true to a point, but I think there is a lot more to it than that.
For starters, the primary method of earning XP was finding treasure, 1 gold worth of treasure hauled back to town was worth 1 XP. You earned almost nothing for fighting monsters, completing quests or anything else. Treasure was almost exclusively the only way to advance in the game in a meaningful way and this was very intentional as the only way to get treasure was to go into remote locations (aka dungeons) to find it. The primary obstacles to getting that treasure (aka XP) was monsters and traps. This was an important concept in D&D because by design, the game had an inherent player motivation built into the mechanics. You didn't need story excuses to get players to self-motivate to "do something" in the game, the game itself provided all the motivation anyone ever needed. If you want to advance, you have to get XP, to get XP you had to find treasure, to find treasure you had to go into dungeons and in dungeons were monsters and traps. Pretty simple and very direct concept. That said, fighting monsters was not the main point, in fact, fighting monsters was the key to failure as monster balance was designed to very quickly and very easily kill player characters. The point was not to fight monsters, the point was to find treasure, monsters were just an obsticle you had to deal with.
So far as balance went, character abilities were severely underpowered. This meant that while levels increase your hit points and occasionally you gain some other minor improvements, by and large you were always severely outgunned by comparison to monsters of equal level which were measured by Hit Dice. By design, a monster with X hit dice, could kill any character of X level. Meaning that at 1st level a 1 HD monster could kill you with a single attack and this remained true at all levels. You know this today as bound accuracy, but that is just a flashy term for something that has existed in D&D since 1st edition.
Equipment was the great equalizer, it was how you gained an edge mechanically over monsters (the main obstacle in the game). The better your gear the more likely you were to survive and even thrive and DM's never had to worry about the balance of gear because it simply raised the Hit Dice of monsters the players could handle. Meaning a party of 5th level characters fighting a party of 5 HD monsters were in a 50-50 fight, but the equipment would turn that in their favor.
This aspect of the game has been largely abandoned in modern D&D. For one, treasure is not really a contributing factor to advancement at all or motivation in the game. Advancement instead is either based on monster XP (by RAW) or milestone XP (By modern culture). Monsters for XP is generally not used by modern players because it does exactly what old school D&D is falsely accused of being about, aka.. fighting monsters. That is a modern, not old-school D&D thing. Most modern DM's prefer milestone-based XP but milestone XP has no inherent motivation for the players... meaning you get XP or more commonly you advance in level regardless of anything you do as a player, in most cases since DM's try to keep group level balance in a game, even showing up to game sessions is not required. I once played in a game that I didn't show up to for 3 sessions and leveled up twice.
In either case, in modern D&D magical equipment is treated as a problem but it kind of works the same way it did in old school D&D which also had bound accuracy. Its the great equalizer. Meaning if you have really good magical gear, it just means you can handle things above your level. Not really inherently a problem. I think the only reason its seen as such is that modern D&D has the premise of intentionally balancing the game, meaning DM's strive to have balanced encounters which was never really a thing in old school D&D. Having unbalanced encounters was a normal part of the game as you were not expected to fight your way through the game, in fact, this was a sure fire way to fail as an adventuring party. Fighting monsters was not the goal, it was the obsticle and if you treat it as such in modern D&D you would have the same result essentially as old school D&D.
I guess my point in all this is that while modern D&D goes about getting the same result differently, it does in fact work exactly as "traditional" D&D.
As for the legacy thing, aka, the He-Man sword, its not really a thing in D&D and sometimes its just better accept the method of a game than try to change it and risk breaking it.
For starters, the primary method of earning XP was finding treasure, 1 gold worth of treasure hauled back to town was worth 1 XP. You earned almost nothing for fighting monsters, completing quests or anything else.
That's not actually true. The xp value of treasure was equal to the gold piece value adjusted for difficulty. To quote the DMG (p85)
Convert all metal and gems and jewelry to a total value in gold pieces. If the relative value of the monster(s) or guardian device fought equals or exceeds that of the party which took the treasure, experience is awarded on a 1 for 1 basis. If the guardian(s) was relatively weaker, award experience on a 5 g.p. to 4 x.P., 3 to 2,2 to 1,3 to 1, or even 4 or more to 1 basis according to the relative strengths. For example, if a 10th level magic-user takes 1,000 g.p. from 10 kobolds, the relative strengths are about 20 to 1 in favor of the magic-user. (Such strength comparisons are subjective and must be based upon the degree of challenge the Dungeon Master had the monster(s) pose the treasure taker.)
In addition, it's dubious whether most xp was actually from treasure; treasure tables weren't that generous.
For starters, the primary method of earning XP was finding treasure, 1 gold worth of treasure hauled back to town was worth 1 XP. You earned almost nothing for fighting monsters, completing quests or anything else.
That's not actually true. The xp value of treasure was equal to the gold piece value adjusted for difficulty. To quote the DMG (p85)
Convert all metal and gems and jewelry to a total value in gold pieces. If the relative value of the monster(s) or guardian device fought equals or exceeds that of the party which took the treasure, experience is awarded on a 1 for 1 basis. If the guardian(s) was relatively weaker, award experience on a 5 g.p. to 4 x.P., 3 to 2,2 to 1,3 to 1, or even 4 or more to 1 basis according to the relative strengths. For example, if a 10th level magic-user takes 1,000 g.p. from 10 kobolds, the relative strengths are about 20 to 1 in favor of the magic-user. (Such strength comparisons are subjective and must be based upon the degree of challenge the Dungeon Master had the monster(s) pose the treasure taker.)
In addition, it's dubious whether most xp was actually from treasure; treasure tables weren't that generous.
Adjustments for difficulty aside, the point is that to get XP, you had to find treasure and in most cases, it would be 1 for 1. In 0e and B/X you didn't even have this adjustment as a rule, it was just straight 1 for 1.
Leveling up was not a slow process in D&D, even if your DM was not very generous with quest XP. If you used modules, or used modules as a guide, the treasures found therein were quite generous. For example in the Keep on the Borderlands adventure, there is over 35, 000 gold worth of treasure that can be found in the Caves of Chaos and this is a 1st level module and that is just what is in the module not accounting for random monsters and encounters. This was pretty standard in D&D modules and remained so throughout its lifetime.
The point is that the rules and module design all support the premise that treasure was the primary motivator and road to success and XP. D&D could just as well have been called Dungeons & Treasure Hunters. The purpose of this was to get players exploring locations (aka dungeons) as this was one of the key tiers of the game (exploration).
Modern D&D takes a different approach, the point of the game is to walk through a story and that story is in the control of the DM who adjusts and adapts it to ensure players stay on the rails and in some fashion continue to walk the path of that story. With this comes the idea of balance and maintaining bound accuracy balance. This means that players don't "find" treasure or magical items they are "given" these things at an appropriate time in the story. A 1st level character can't get lucky and find a +3 Long Sword... you are given a +3 Long Sword at the appropriate level as part of a planned and balance-controlled thing in the game. In Classic D&D this sort of thing didn't really exist and breaking bound accuracy was something that could and often did happen because of treasure charts and random treasure etc..
As such this problem of replacing legacy gear or guild gear (the HE-MAN Sword) and all that stuff. Seeing as the DM controls what players find and don't find, with no randomness involved and the games bound accuracy structure ensures that characters are always balanced by their level this shouldn't be a problem.
I gotta say, there is an error in your points OSR.
First, it was not just treasure or even primarily so. It was slaughter, lol. A bullette was worth 2300 xp plus 12 xp per hit point of the bulette. 3000 XP was enough to push you a good chunk of the way all by itself to the next level until you hit the 10+ level stuff (AD&D DMG).
Monsters in the specific adventure you cite later were worth about four times the XP of the treasure.
Now, I will grant that both the outright slaughter of creatures and the importance of coin have been pretty much knocked out of their once primary purpose for the game (that’s the continuing shift away from war gaming and more towards role playing that has been the undercurrent since 1970 — yes, before the game existed). However, that hasn’t released their importance in the role playing aspect at all; look to the general suggestion of buy high sell low for equipment that (I note with a wry chuckle) really never degrades.
That cool normal sword that the level one Fighter bought is still working fine at level 20. But he’s broke, has no stronghold (because they were never supposed to se them up in 5e, whereas in 1e that was expected) and he’s got no followers (the disposable troops you earned in 1e, lol) so he is still out there adventuring even though he’s equal to what we used to think of as a level 50.
5e operates in a very different way, and one of those ways is that it purposefully gets rid of gear as a driving factor of the game (which is hilarious given how many video games are little more than gear hunts these days).
So, to that point of yours, that it is now about the interactions, yes. I haven’t used XP seriously since probably 2002. We switched to a milestone system ages and ages ago.We called it story points, but same thing.
That’s what matters now, and you are right to note that it is more about the story. WHich bugs me, because I love travelogue adventures and open worlds, and while I will always have a story and prepare hooks and all that, really in the end, it is up tot he players. They get to go wherever they want.
And that style of play doesn’t mesh well with 5e. Because that style requires more crunch, lol.
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I gotta say, there is an error in your points OSR.
First, it was not just treasure or even primarily so. It was slaughter, lol. A bullette was worth 2300 xp plus 12 xp per hit point of the bulette. 3000 XP was enough to push you a good chunk of the way all by itself to the next level until you hit the 10+ level stuff (AD&D DMG).
Im not sure how you are calculating XP, but even at max hit points a Bullette would barely be worth 2300 XP and that XP is divided among all characters in the party, so assuming a typical party of 6, each character would gain around 380 XP. Considering that fighting such a monster would be absolutely foolish before a party of 6 was around 9th level, you would need to fight around 375 of them to level up your average character.
The point is that 2300 XP at 9th level is pocket change compared to the types of treasures you can expect to find at 9th level.
Monsters in the specific adventure you cite later were worth about four times the XP of the treasure.
Again I'm not sure how you are calculating XP but if a party killed every monster in the Cave of Chaos it is unlikely most characters would even reach level 2 from that XP.
5e operates in a very different way, and one of those ways is that it purposefully gets rid of gear as a driving factor of the game (which is hilarious given how many video games are little more than gear hunts these days).
So, to that point of yours, that it is now about the interactions, yes. I haven’t used XP seriously since probably 2002. We switched to a milestone system ages and ages ago.We called it story points, but same thing.
That’s what matters now, and you are right to note that it is more about the story. WHich bugs me, because I love travelogue adventures and open worlds, and while I will always have a story and prepare hooks and all that, really in the end, it is up tot he players. They get to go wherever they want.
And that style of play doesn’t mesh well with 5e. Because that style requires more crunch, lol.
5e operates on the presumption that players don't need inherent game motivations or personal ambitions, in fact, it kind of discourages it. The assumption is that that story motivations are enough. In the end, D&D is still a game, old school or new school and players are going to do the thing in the game for which they are rewarded and avoid doing the things for which there are no rewards. It's why most 5e games feel like railroads, because ultimately, the motivation for which you are rewarded is to follow along the DM's story as this is how you earn milestone XP, by progressing through the pre-written series of events the DM has laid out before the game started. Stray from that and you are derailing the campaign, in essence, slowing the progress and likely slowing your milestone XP rewards. Unless the DM simply gives rewards for participation irrelevant to anything which to me is even worse, because it means nothing you do as a player actually matters.
In such an architecture, do players earn rewards through play or do they simply get rewarded for sticking to the pre-programmed plan?
For me personally, milestone XP has completely ruined D&D, its absolutely destructive to the spirit of the game. In an architecture where you can play a whole session and get no XP or you can play a session and gets tons of XP, aka, depending on how successful you are, what you do, how you manage yourselves and what decisions you make, that is a game in which you earn rewards. If you get the same "ding" regardless of what you do, or worse yet, you get the "ding" by reading the queues of the railroad... I mean, I kind of don't see the point of the game.
I guess its a playstyle thing but I don't want to play in the DM's story, I want to collaborate with my partners (the other players) to decide what our story will be and I want that decision to determine our success through gameplay.
It may seem like the same, but the two are wildly different concepts and neither have anything to do with their being more or less story, or more or less role-playing. It has to do with the direction of the story, who controls it and how it evolves... one way is pre-determined, the other is an emergent story, one that develops and is driven by the ambitions, motivations and actions of the players. One rewards success, the other rewards participation.
As I noted, the 2300 was the bottom line. And that is direct from the DMG. And that is one monster, grabbed at random. An Orc guard was worth 20xp plus 2 per hp, so 42 XP if you use the standard of 11 hp for one. Treasure on him? Perhaps 11 cp, also going by dmg tables (7 to 16cp).
I took all the monsters, used the DMG XP lists (and had to turn to the descriptions in the module for some). That’s how. I mean, have all my 1e books right by me, so not hard.
Killing monsters was fundamental to how Gygax wrote the stuff. To argue otherwise isn’t accurate.
It is interesting you say that 5e feels like players in the DMs story. First, not arguing that, because I see a lot of it just here on DDB. But see, I don’t railroad. We did that when we were early in playing as well, but that was decades ago and at least hundreds of sessions.
I don’t need to railroad, though. I let the players decide where and when and just keep the encounters coming. You see, it is never my story. I create a framework, scenes, episodes, and outline, and that always comes after building a place that they can explore. That takes a lot of work, and a lot of effort, and when they do decide to pick up on a plot thread or something, it is on their terms.
milestones don’t need to be about completing a story. They can be about accomplishing a task. It takes 270 milestone points in my game to reach 20th level. Even if I am generous, that’s 270 sessions when not furthering a story. And it is a world. There are eight million stories in the naked city — how many more are there in a world? Plenty of fun even without getting into one of my gigantic campaigns with their fancy interleaved story arcs and variable genres.
now, yes, that is a different way of playing. But it isn’t for everyone, anymore than dungeon crawls or political intrigue or wilderness survival are.
what matters, though, is that more people are playing 5e by itself than all the previous editions combined. So it isn’t a bad thing that most of them just become superheroes in someone’s comic book. It has grown the hobby hugely, and that’s good no matter what game or rules set one uses.
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For me personally, milestone XP has completely ruined D&D, its absolutely destructive to the spirit of the game. In an architecture where you can play a whole session and get no XP or you can play a session and gets tons of XP, aka, depending on how successful you are, what you do, how you manage yourselves and what decisions you make, that is a game in which you earn rewards. If you get the same "ding" regardless of what you do, or worse yet, you get the "ding" by reading the queues of the railroad... I mean, I kind of don't see the point of the game.
This is a bit of a strawman you've got here, because you have a really narrow view of how milestone XP can be used. Have a little more faith in people - if it really was this dumb, it wouldn't be so popular.
The narrative of a game should be deeply intertwined with the challenges the party faces, so yeah my party gains a level after two adventures but it's not like they can just sit back and watch those adventures happen. They have to do stuff to succeed, just like they always did. The main difference is that they get to choose how they deal with the obstacles they are given. They are not penalized for stealthing by monsters instead of killing them, because I make that a challenge in and of itself. They are not penalized by choosing to save the prisoner before the castle collapses instead of plundering the loot from the vault. They get to do things their way - and if their way fails (and if this happens, there's probably one or more deaths involved), should they get nothing? Do you never learn from mistakes in real life?
Milestones are not the boogeyman that killed D&D. I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with it (and I'm jealous of your older edition experiences since you seem to be unaware that railroading was running rampant back then too). DMs have always varied in quality and in their understanding of how the game should work, it's not a "modern" problem.
I should probably clarify that my milestone system is much like a super simplified XP system with a bit of “cya” luck changing involved, lol.
you see I give out milestone points. It takes a certain number of points to reach your next level. That increases for each level (just like XP). The basic rule of thumb is 1 point per session, flat, but it also assumes no cliffhangers, lol. So sometimes it skips a session. If they hit certain key points in a story, they get a point. I can have five, six, seven stories going on at the same time. So that can speed it up a little. No pushing, they have to figure it out.
however, they can also use them like Hero points or inspiration. So they can change die rolls. If all the players in a single session spend a point together, they can get a rewind, undoing a previous action. It has to be all, though. So they sacrifice a bit of moving forward in order to fix a mistake.
not used often, but it can be pretty handy.
and when you do level up, you have to spend your points, returning your total to zero or much lower. And they decide when to do that. Some don’t use them after a certain level. They just keep collecting them, lol.
none of that is RAW or even RAI, but it is still a milestone system that rewards play, commitment (showing up. Can’t get a point unless ya play), and also moving forward in adventure. I also have hero points, lol, and inspo, so there is encouragement to do fun stuff.
In other words, I got candy and cookies. I need it, though: those random wandering of theirs aren’t level matched, so encounters might be with something way out of their league, or something well beneath it. I won’t know because random, but I don’t stress it. It is their story. If they want to end it on a dark note, ain’t no skin off my nose…
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5e operates on the presumption that players don't need inherent game motivations or personal ambitions, in fact, it kind of discourages it.
5e operates on the presumption that it's not the job of the game system to create game motivations or personal ambitions, it's the job of the DM and players.
As it happens, most 5e adventures are built on the theory of "bad stuff is happening and the PCs want to stop it" rather than "dungeon here, go loot it", but that's not a feature of the game system, and the core reason for the change is that "dungeon here, go loot it" is ... a kinda stupid adventure (also, the worst railroad I ever played was the Dragonlance module series, which was hardly 5e).
In the end, D&D is still a game, old school or new school and players are going to do the thing in the game for which they are rewarded and avoid doing the things for which there are no rewards. It's why most 5e games feel like railroads, because ultimately, the motivation for which you are rewarded is to follow along the DM's story as this is how you earn milestone XP, by progressing through the pre-written series of events the DM has laid out before the game started.
Some adventures are built pretty much that way, but this has to do with the difficulties of adventure design when you have have NPCs that are doing things instead of just sitting in place waiting to be killed. DMs running their own campaigns instead of prewritten stuff have a wide range of ways of handling xp and leveling.
As I noted, the 2300 was the bottom line. And that is direct from the DMG. And that is one monster, grabbed at random. An Orc guard was worth 20xp plus 2 per hp, so 42 XP if you use the standard of 11 hp for one. Treasure on him? Perhaps 11 cp, also going by dmg tables (7 to 16cp).
I took all the monsters, used the DMG XP lists (and had to turn to the descriptions in the module for some). That’s how. I mean, have all my 1e books right by me, so not hard.
Killing monsters was fundamental to how Gygax wrote the stuff. To argue otherwise isn’t accurate.
I absolutely would argue that and it wouldn't be difficult to do so successfully but it would not be based on anything Gygax and the original creators of the game said about the game in or out of the game. Quite contrary to popular belief, Gygax and Arneson were both quite obtuse and did not engage in debates with people trying to define what the game was about. It was a Fantasy Adventure game and that was about the jist of their depiction. Any such argument would be based on deriving a conclusion from the design of the game which speaks to the objective truth about it if you just look at the math.
Take a simple example. Now the average adventuring party is 5 to 6 strong and a typical character class needs about 2,000+ to level up from 1st to 2nd level.
Such a party can take on monsters of 1HD, 2HD tops before the danger level becomes extreme (aka, guaranteed player kills). Lets assume they are super brave and they fight 2HD monsters on average. Now lets assume these monsters always have max hit points, such a monster would be worth about 50xp. Lets assume a party of 5 characters and everyone using a class that requires 2,000 XP to level up. How many monsters do you have to kill? You nead to earn a total of 10,000 XP to get everyone to level up, 50 XP a pop that is 200 monsters.
Now that is best case scenario. 2HD monsters, max hit points you would still have to kill 200 of them. Statistically (mathematically speaking) there is about 0% chance that a group of 5 characters would survive such fights repeatedly. Meaning, sooner or later they would TPK.
This formula stays constant at all levels. It doesn't matter if you 1st or 15th level, you are always going to have to slay hundreds of monsters that you have about a 50-50 chance of defeating to level up.
The point is, it's statistically impossible to level up in 1e AD&D by killing monsters.
How can you argue the game is about fighting monsters, when its impossible to navigate the game successfully when doing so.
Alternatively, you need to find 10,000 gold worth of treasure. In Keep on the Borderland as an example, it's possible to earn 10,000 gold worth of treasure without ever leaving the keep itself. In fact if you do the math, there is more gold in the keep (about 43k) than in the caves of chaos (about 35k).
Every module ever written for 1e AD&D falls into the same basic architecture of heavy treasure distribution.
The whole "D&D is about fighting monsters" comes largely from the fact that you do in fact fight a lot of monsters, I mean, dungeons are full of them, but the rewards for doing that are slim and fall into the not worth category. You are generally motivated to avoid fights if you can, monsters are obstacles not the purpose of successful adventuring.
It would be more accurate to claim that 5e is exclusively about fighting monsters because XP rewards for monsters are without question the fastest way to level up which I suspect is while few people actually use this structure. In 5e, on average you are leveling up every 2-5 fights, I doubt it would take more than fighting 100-200 monsters to go from level 1 to level to level 20 by the XP rules in 5e. In 1e, 200 monsters you might reach level 2 depending on class. To reach 20th level I would say you need to fight around 4-5 thousand monsters in 1e AD&D and that is assuming you are fighting fights that are on the 50-50 scale, meaning each fight you have a 50-50 chance of TPK. If you are fighting lower HD monsters than your level, your probably looking 20k-30k monsters you have to kill to reach level 20.
As a long-time player and DM, one thing that has always bothered me is the excessive amount of magical stuff that some teams can accumulate. As much as I understand that a +1 weapon or suit of armor is nice, once the character finds a better item, the old one goes in the bin. The idea that it might be a family heirloom or have some emotional meaning for the character is often irrelevant.
For some years now, I have given my players two options with regard to such items: Their character can regard them as simple tools to be discarded as soon as something better comes along or they can try to keep them as a sort of legacy item.
A legacy item is one that the character is going to use and rely on a lot and, as a result, the item becomes stronger or better in some way. You can define this as the character becoming more familiar with the item, unlocking hidden powers at certain times, or whatever. Another way to do this is whenever a better version of something comes along (a +2 weapon versus a +1), the player can choose to keep the original weapon and come up with some idea for a mission or scenario that explains why the item is suddenly better.
This solves a lot of problems in my games because players tend to put their faith in what they have and make it last longer rather than tossing it at the first opportunity.
How do you all feel about this and do you have any other suggestions for handling this part of the game?
I've done a mix of both, sometimes a the same time, as I have players with different wants and/or needs.
There already is a system in place for your “legacy” items, many legendary and artifact class magic items have 3 stages, going from dormant>awakened>exalted. If you want legacy items in your game you could use existing material or homebrew your own stuff using the same format.
I think a good mix of legacy and “discardable” items is best. That way some stuff has lasting sentimental value and scaling usefulness but the issue with all magic items being that way is that players will run out things to find after a certain point. They will lose that “oh cool a new magic item, can’t wait to use this” feeling. And that’s the entire flip side and counterpoint to your concern of items being tossed aside when something new is found.
Everything in the end comes down to two important points.
1) Whats fun for the DM
2) Whats fun for the player
I don't think there is a right or wrong answer. I've seen or done multiple things in my experience in DND. In one campaign, i DM'd for someone who was really in love with a magic deck he had built with swords of fire and ice, light and shadow, etc. So i worked it in as a homebrew item that had augment slots. These augments were things he could find over time, and could do different things. For example, in the early going it might be +1 elemental damage of whichever gem was in contained. As it got later in the campaign, it scaled with these augmentations that he was able to find or have crafted, to the point where he got extra dice to roll to determine the scope or chance of the augment succeeding in full. and he loved that, because he so long as he wasn't engaged in battle could swap out and it allowed him the opportunity to play a melee character that he felt had some ability to do more than swing repeatedly.
Another character loved being able to carry 3 or 4 swords around and choose at will. So we bent the rules there to allow him more weight and more attuned weapons, but he struggled to understand how to use trinkets. Another character beyond that was a loot goblin that would compare and contrast, and wouldn't even taken the swords to sell them and simply would throw them on the ground once he was done.
When it comes to Heirloom situation, i prefer to let the player tell me what they have fallen in love with, and if they do then i can work with it. As long as they interact with the world i build, i get my joys there, so it's a nice give and take
Traditional D&D is about killing monsters and finding loot, and one of the loot categories is 'better gear', so if you let people upgrade their existing gear, you've just eliminated a major category of reward. However, in more story-oriented games eliminating the gear treadmill may be a feature (despite what people tell you about 'bounded accuracy', gear is still quite important in 5e).
I'm unfamiliar with the term 'Bounded Accuracy.' Please explain.
I've ran into this; I can appreciate your question and I'd like try an experiment:
I have two magical suits of armor, which one do they choose:
I guess my question is if your players would throw away their guild armor (Skulker's) for the cult armor. Because the greater implication is that there's consequences for wearing armor associated with a Dark Cult.
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Bounded accuracy is a concept introduced in 5e to keep lower CR or level creatures relevant threats to high level characters.
In previous editions, you could get creatures with 35 AC and characters with +28 to hit modifiers (or something like that :) ... big numbers anyway). Magical weapons and armor could be +5 to AC or to hit. Multiple magic items could be stacked due to the lack of the attunement mechanic. So a +3 pair of swordsmans glives that gives +3 to hit and damage could be combined with a +5 weapon with +5 to hit and damage with a girdle of storm giant strength giving an additional +9 to hit and damage plus their base to hit went up with level.
This meant that a low level creature could only ever hit a high level creature on a 20 (assuming that even a 20 allowed for an automatic hit). In addition, higher level creatures could have 3 or more attacks.
In the end this meant that there were effectively different games between low level/low magic and high level/high magic.
5e introduced the concept of bounded accuracy - This meant that + to hit was limited as were target ACs. A pack of low CR creatures can remain a threat to a higher level character. The maximum to hit in 5e without magic is +11 (+5 from stat and +6 from proficiency at level 17+). This means that a creature with an AC of 21 is hit on a 10+ or about 55% of the time. However, a level 1 character with +2 proficiency and a +3 from a stat still has a +5 and will hit the same AC21 creature on a 16+. The level 20 character has more attacks, they will have more magic items (limited by attunement slots to prevent unlimited stacking), they will have more class abilities and spells, but a level 1 character is not irrelevant - just less powerful.
The idea behind "bounded accuracy" was to limit the bonuses to hit and AC so that the range of values is such that there is improvement from level 1 to 20 but that low level characters did not become irrelevant.
For the most part, I think it achieves that goal though I know folks who chafe under the magic item limits (though a DM can easily modify that in their games).
Yeah this is the age-old question. Should Aragorn have traded away his nonmagical ancestral sword Anduril to Gandalf in exchange for his magical sword Glamdring? That would have been crazy in the story.
Tiered magic items are a good solution, and scarcely implemented in 5e.
This is one area where I enjoy the pathfinder way. You don't find a magic item, you find a rune which you can apply to an item. So you find something that gives +1 to hit, and then slap it on whatever weapon you like. It means that the character can take up the ancestral sword that's been in the family for generations and just keep using it. Eventually, they find a +2 rune, and can remove the +1 (they don't stack, but can be swapped freely). They hand their old +1 off to someone else in the party, or put it on their secondary weapon. It's also much less bookkeeping for the DM, since they don't need to know which weapons every party member is using. They just hand over a +1 and let the players figure out who can make the best use of it. And it can go on pretty much anything, like hand wraps for a monk.
The system is a little different, in that to hit runes and damage runes are generally separate, meaning the +1 to hit doesn't apply to damage, but it would be simple enough to say it applies to both if they wanted to port that system over. And it also allows you to find, say, a rune that adds 2d6 fire damage, and you can put it on anything also -- not just a flame tongue sword, but a hammer or a glaive, or those hand wraps for the monk. Its super flexible.
That is true to a point, but I think there is a lot more to it than that.
For starters, the primary method of earning XP was finding treasure, 1 gold worth of treasure hauled back to town was worth 1 XP. You earned almost nothing for fighting monsters, completing quests or anything else. Treasure was almost exclusively the only way to advance in the game in a meaningful way and this was very intentional as the only way to get treasure was to go into remote locations (aka dungeons) to find it. The primary obstacles to getting that treasure (aka XP) was monsters and traps. This was an important concept in D&D because by design, the game had an inherent player motivation built into the mechanics. You didn't need story excuses to get players to self-motivate to "do something" in the game, the game itself provided all the motivation anyone ever needed. If you want to advance, you have to get XP, to get XP you had to find treasure, to find treasure you had to go into dungeons and in dungeons were monsters and traps. Pretty simple and very direct concept. That said, fighting monsters was not the main point, in fact, fighting monsters was the key to failure as monster balance was designed to very quickly and very easily kill player characters. The point was not to fight monsters, the point was to find treasure, monsters were just an obsticle you had to deal with.
So far as balance went, character abilities were severely underpowered. This meant that while levels increase your hit points and occasionally you gain some other minor improvements, by and large you were always severely outgunned by comparison to monsters of equal level which were measured by Hit Dice. By design, a monster with X hit dice, could kill any character of X level. Meaning that at 1st level a 1 HD monster could kill you with a single attack and this remained true at all levels. You know this today as bound accuracy, but that is just a flashy term for something that has existed in D&D since 1st edition.
Equipment was the great equalizer, it was how you gained an edge mechanically over monsters (the main obstacle in the game). The better your gear the more likely you were to survive and even thrive and DM's never had to worry about the balance of gear because it simply raised the Hit Dice of monsters the players could handle. Meaning a party of 5th level characters fighting a party of 5 HD monsters were in a 50-50 fight, but the equipment would turn that in their favor.
This aspect of the game has been largely abandoned in modern D&D. For one, treasure is not really a contributing factor to advancement at all or motivation in the game. Advancement instead is either based on monster XP (by RAW) or milestone XP (By modern culture). Monsters for XP is generally not used by modern players because it does exactly what old school D&D is falsely accused of being about, aka.. fighting monsters. That is a modern, not old-school D&D thing. Most modern DM's prefer milestone-based XP but milestone XP has no inherent motivation for the players... meaning you get XP or more commonly you advance in level regardless of anything you do as a player, in most cases since DM's try to keep group level balance in a game, even showing up to game sessions is not required. I once played in a game that I didn't show up to for 3 sessions and leveled up twice.
In either case, in modern D&D magical equipment is treated as a problem but it kind of works the same way it did in old school D&D which also had bound accuracy. Its the great equalizer. Meaning if you have really good magical gear, it just means you can handle things above your level. Not really inherently a problem. I think the only reason its seen as such is that modern D&D has the premise of intentionally balancing the game, meaning DM's strive to have balanced encounters which was never really a thing in old school D&D. Having unbalanced encounters was a normal part of the game as you were not expected to fight your way through the game, in fact, this was a sure fire way to fail as an adventuring party. Fighting monsters was not the goal, it was the obsticle and if you treat it as such in modern D&D you would have the same result essentially as old school D&D.
I guess my point in all this is that while modern D&D goes about getting the same result differently, it does in fact work exactly as "traditional" D&D.
As for the legacy thing, aka, the He-Man sword, its not really a thing in D&D and sometimes its just better accept the method of a game than try to change it and risk breaking it.
That's not actually true. The xp value of treasure was equal to the gold piece value adjusted for difficulty. To quote the DMG (p85)
In addition, it's dubious whether most xp was actually from treasure; treasure tables weren't that generous.
Adjustments for difficulty aside, the point is that to get XP, you had to find treasure and in most cases, it would be 1 for 1. In 0e and B/X you didn't even have this adjustment as a rule, it was just straight 1 for 1.
Leveling up was not a slow process in D&D, even if your DM was not very generous with quest XP. If you used modules, or used modules as a guide, the treasures found therein were quite generous. For example in the Keep on the Borderlands adventure, there is over 35, 000 gold worth of treasure that can be found in the Caves of Chaos and this is a 1st level module and that is just what is in the module not accounting for random monsters and encounters. This was pretty standard in D&D modules and remained so throughout its lifetime.
The point is that the rules and module design all support the premise that treasure was the primary motivator and road to success and XP. D&D could just as well have been called Dungeons & Treasure Hunters. The purpose of this was to get players exploring locations (aka dungeons) as this was one of the key tiers of the game (exploration).
Modern D&D takes a different approach, the point of the game is to walk through a story and that story is in the control of the DM who adjusts and adapts it to ensure players stay on the rails and in some fashion continue to walk the path of that story. With this comes the idea of balance and maintaining bound accuracy balance. This means that players don't "find" treasure or magical items they are "given" these things at an appropriate time in the story. A 1st level character can't get lucky and find a +3 Long Sword... you are given a +3 Long Sword at the appropriate level as part of a planned and balance-controlled thing in the game. In Classic D&D this sort of thing didn't really exist and breaking bound accuracy was something that could and often did happen because of treasure charts and random treasure etc..
As such this problem of replacing legacy gear or guild gear (the HE-MAN Sword) and all that stuff. Seeing as the DM controls what players find and don't find, with no randomness involved and the games bound accuracy structure ensures that characters are always balanced by their level this shouldn't be a problem.
I gotta say, there is an error in your points OSR.
First, it was not just treasure or even primarily so. It was slaughter, lol. A bullette was worth 2300 xp plus 12 xp per hit point of the bulette. 3000 XP was enough to push you a good chunk of the way all by itself to the next level until you hit the 10+ level stuff (AD&D DMG).
Monsters in the specific adventure you cite later were worth about four times the XP of the treasure.
Now, I will grant that both the outright slaughter of creatures and the importance of coin have been pretty much knocked out of their once primary purpose for the game (that’s the continuing shift away from war gaming and more towards role playing that has been the undercurrent since 1970 — yes, before the game existed). However, that hasn’t released their importance in the role playing aspect at all; look to the general suggestion of buy high sell low for equipment that (I note with a wry chuckle) really never degrades.
That cool normal sword that the level one Fighter bought is still working fine at level 20. But he’s broke, has no stronghold (because they were never supposed to se them up in 5e, whereas in 1e that was expected) and he’s got no followers (the disposable troops you earned in 1e, lol) so he is still out there adventuring even though he’s equal to what we used to think of as a level 50.
5e operates in a very different way, and one of those ways is that it purposefully gets rid of gear as a driving factor of the game (which is hilarious given how many video games are little more than gear hunts these days).
So, to that point of yours, that it is now about the interactions, yes. I haven’t used XP seriously since probably 2002. We switched to a milestone system ages and ages ago.We called it story points, but same thing.
That’s what matters now, and you are right to note that it is more about the story. WHich bugs me, because I love travelogue adventures and open worlds, and while I will always have a story and prepare hooks and all that, really in the end, it is up tot he players. They get to go wherever they want.
And that style of play doesn’t mesh well with 5e. Because that style requires more crunch, lol.
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Im not sure how you are calculating XP, but even at max hit points a Bullette would barely be worth 2300 XP and that XP is divided among all characters in the party, so assuming a typical party of 6, each character would gain around 380 XP. Considering that fighting such a monster would be absolutely foolish before a party of 6 was around 9th level, you would need to fight around 375 of them to level up your average character.
The point is that 2300 XP at 9th level is pocket change compared to the types of treasures you can expect to find at 9th level.
Again I'm not sure how you are calculating XP but if a party killed every monster in the Cave of Chaos it is unlikely most characters would even reach level 2 from that XP.
5e operates on the presumption that players don't need inherent game motivations or personal ambitions, in fact, it kind of discourages it. The assumption is that that story motivations are enough. In the end, D&D is still a game, old school or new school and players are going to do the thing in the game for which they are rewarded and avoid doing the things for which there are no rewards. It's why most 5e games feel like railroads, because ultimately, the motivation for which you are rewarded is to follow along the DM's story as this is how you earn milestone XP, by progressing through the pre-written series of events the DM has laid out before the game started. Stray from that and you are derailing the campaign, in essence, slowing the progress and likely slowing your milestone XP rewards. Unless the DM simply gives rewards for participation irrelevant to anything which to me is even worse, because it means nothing you do as a player actually matters.
In such an architecture, do players earn rewards through play or do they simply get rewarded for sticking to the pre-programmed plan?
For me personally, milestone XP has completely ruined D&D, its absolutely destructive to the spirit of the game. In an architecture where you can play a whole session and get no XP or you can play a session and gets tons of XP, aka, depending on how successful you are, what you do, how you manage yourselves and what decisions you make, that is a game in which you earn rewards. If you get the same "ding" regardless of what you do, or worse yet, you get the "ding" by reading the queues of the railroad... I mean, I kind of don't see the point of the game.
I guess its a playstyle thing but I don't want to play in the DM's story, I want to collaborate with my partners (the other players) to decide what our story will be and I want that decision to determine our success through gameplay.
It may seem like the same, but the two are wildly different concepts and neither have anything to do with their being more or less story, or more or less role-playing. It has to do with the direction of the story, who controls it and how it evolves... one way is pre-determined, the other is an emergent story, one that develops and is driven by the ambitions, motivations and actions of the players. One rewards success, the other rewards participation.
As I noted, the 2300 was the bottom line. And that is direct from the DMG. And that is one monster, grabbed at random. An Orc guard was worth 20xp plus 2 per hp, so 42 XP if you use the standard of 11 hp for one. Treasure on him? Perhaps 11 cp, also going by dmg tables (7 to 16cp).
I took all the monsters, used the DMG XP lists (and had to turn to the descriptions in the module for some). That’s how. I mean, have all my 1e books right by me, so not hard.
Killing monsters was fundamental to how Gygax wrote the stuff. To argue otherwise isn’t accurate.
It is interesting you say that 5e feels like players in the DMs story. First, not arguing that, because I see a lot of it just here on DDB. But see, I don’t railroad. We did that when we were early in playing as well, but that was decades ago and at least hundreds of sessions.
I don’t need to railroad, though. I let the players decide where and when and just keep the encounters coming. You see, it is never my story. I create a framework, scenes, episodes, and outline, and that always comes after building a place that they can explore. That takes a lot of work, and a lot of effort, and when they do decide to pick up on a plot thread or something, it is on their terms.
milestones don’t need to be about completing a story. They can be about accomplishing a task. It takes 270 milestone points in my game to reach 20th level. Even if I am generous, that’s 270 sessions when not furthering a story. And it is a world. There are eight million stories in the naked city — how many more are there in a world? Plenty of fun even without getting into one of my gigantic campaigns with their fancy interleaved story arcs and variable genres.
now, yes, that is a different way of playing. But it isn’t for everyone, anymore than dungeon crawls or political intrigue or wilderness survival are.
what matters, though, is that more people are playing 5e by itself than all the previous editions combined. So it isn’t a bad thing that most of them just become superheroes in someone’s comic book. It has grown the hobby hugely, and that’s good no matter what game or rules set one uses.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
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This is a bit of a strawman you've got here, because you have a really narrow view of how milestone XP can be used. Have a little more faith in people - if it really was this dumb, it wouldn't be so popular.
The narrative of a game should be deeply intertwined with the challenges the party faces, so yeah my party gains a level after two adventures but it's not like they can just sit back and watch those adventures happen. They have to do stuff to succeed, just like they always did. The main difference is that they get to choose how they deal with the obstacles they are given. They are not penalized for stealthing by monsters instead of killing them, because I make that a challenge in and of itself. They are not penalized by choosing to save the prisoner before the castle collapses instead of plundering the loot from the vault. They get to do things their way - and if their way fails (and if this happens, there's probably one or more deaths involved), should they get nothing? Do you never learn from mistakes in real life?
Milestones are not the boogeyman that killed D&D. I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with it (and I'm jealous of your older edition experiences since you seem to be unaware that railroading was running rampant back then too). DMs have always varied in quality and in their understanding of how the game should work, it's not a "modern" problem.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I should probably clarify that my milestone system is much like a super simplified XP system with a bit of “cya” luck changing involved, lol.
you see I give out milestone points. It takes a certain number of points to reach your next level. That increases for each level (just like XP). The basic rule of thumb is 1 point per session, flat, but it also assumes no cliffhangers, lol. So sometimes it skips a session. If they hit certain key points in a story, they get a point. I can have five, six, seven stories going on at the same time. So that can speed it up a little. No pushing, they have to figure it out.
however, they can also use them like Hero points or inspiration. So they can change die rolls. If all the players in a single session spend a point together, they can get a rewind, undoing a previous action. It has to be all, though. So they sacrifice a bit of moving forward in order to fix a mistake.
not used often, but it can be pretty handy.
and when you do level up, you have to spend your points, returning your total to zero or much lower. And they decide when to do that. Some don’t use them after a certain level. They just keep collecting them, lol.
none of that is RAW or even RAI, but it is still a milestone system that rewards play, commitment (showing up. Can’t get a point unless ya play), and also moving forward in adventure. I also have hero points, lol, and inspo, so there is encouragement to do fun stuff.
In other words, I got candy and cookies. I need it, though: those random wandering of theirs aren’t level matched, so encounters might be with something way out of their league, or something well beneath it. I won’t know because random, but I don’t stress it. It is their story. If they want to end it on a dark note, ain’t no skin off my nose…
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
5e operates on the presumption that it's not the job of the game system to create game motivations or personal ambitions, it's the job of the DM and players.
As it happens, most 5e adventures are built on the theory of "bad stuff is happening and the PCs want to stop it" rather than "dungeon here, go loot it", but that's not a feature of the game system, and the core reason for the change is that "dungeon here, go loot it" is ... a kinda stupid adventure (also, the worst railroad I ever played was the Dragonlance module series, which was hardly 5e).
Some adventures are built pretty much that way, but this has to do with the difficulties of adventure design when you have have NPCs that are doing things instead of just sitting in place waiting to be killed. DMs running their own campaigns instead of prewritten stuff have a wide range of ways of handling xp and leveling.
I absolutely would argue that and it wouldn't be difficult to do so successfully but it would not be based on anything Gygax and the original creators of the game said about the game in or out of the game. Quite contrary to popular belief, Gygax and Arneson were both quite obtuse and did not engage in debates with people trying to define what the game was about. It was a Fantasy Adventure game and that was about the jist of their depiction. Any such argument would be based on deriving a conclusion from the design of the game which speaks to the objective truth about it if you just look at the math.
Take a simple example. Now the average adventuring party is 5 to 6 strong and a typical character class needs about 2,000+ to level up from 1st to 2nd level.
Such a party can take on monsters of 1HD, 2HD tops before the danger level becomes extreme (aka, guaranteed player kills). Lets assume they are super brave and they fight 2HD monsters on average. Now lets assume these monsters always have max hit points, such a monster would be worth about 50xp. Lets assume a party of 5 characters and everyone using a class that requires 2,000 XP to level up. How many monsters do you have to kill? You nead to earn a total of 10,000 XP to get everyone to level up, 50 XP a pop that is 200 monsters.
Now that is best case scenario. 2HD monsters, max hit points you would still have to kill 200 of them. Statistically (mathematically speaking) there is about 0% chance that a group of 5 characters would survive such fights repeatedly. Meaning, sooner or later they would TPK.
This formula stays constant at all levels. It doesn't matter if you 1st or 15th level, you are always going to have to slay hundreds of monsters that you have about a 50-50 chance of defeating to level up.
The point is, it's statistically impossible to level up in 1e AD&D by killing monsters.
How can you argue the game is about fighting monsters, when its impossible to navigate the game successfully when doing so.
Alternatively, you need to find 10,000 gold worth of treasure. In Keep on the Borderland as an example, it's possible to earn 10,000 gold worth of treasure without ever leaving the keep itself. In fact if you do the math, there is more gold in the keep (about 43k) than in the caves of chaos (about 35k).
Every module ever written for 1e AD&D falls into the same basic architecture of heavy treasure distribution.
The whole "D&D is about fighting monsters" comes largely from the fact that you do in fact fight a lot of monsters, I mean, dungeons are full of them, but the rewards for doing that are slim and fall into the not worth category. You are generally motivated to avoid fights if you can, monsters are obstacles not the purpose of successful adventuring.
It would be more accurate to claim that 5e is exclusively about fighting monsters because XP rewards for monsters are without question the fastest way to level up which I suspect is while few people actually use this structure. In 5e, on average you are leveling up every 2-5 fights, I doubt it would take more than fighting 100-200 monsters to go from level 1 to level to level 20 by the XP rules in 5e. In 1e, 200 monsters you might reach level 2 depending on class. To reach 20th level I would say you need to fight around 4-5 thousand monsters in 1e AD&D and that is assuming you are fighting fights that are on the 50-50 scale, meaning each fight you have a 50-50 chance of TPK. If you are fighting lower HD monsters than your level, your probably looking 20k-30k monsters you have to kill to reach level 20.