Yeah, I hate it when the official adventures have things like "it is a DC 15 strength check to open any door in this dungeon. Also, the required path to advance this adventure goes through 8 doors." So... Just let them roll until they get it then?
Or "the players most search this corner specifically and succeed a DC 12 investigation check to find the secret door behind the bookshelf leading to the second half of the adventure. The not hidden door in this room just goes to side treasure." I... What? And the adventure conclusion does not have a "players didn't search for secret doors" option, they have to find that door to progress the adventure.
These are real checks in official adventures btw. Personally, I would never write an adventure that puts checks that have to be passed to progress. That is bad writing. Either the game stops until they succeed, or the story just doesn't happen.
There are multiple ways to "break" skill checks. Eloquence bards, for example. Instead of banning things left and right, just adjust your game with the expectations that the characters will do well in the things they have trained to do well. If the bard can auto-win Persuasion, build your tension around Insight checks or jealous rivalries that build with the bard's every success. If the rogue can pick every lock and disarm every trap, make sure you're not depending on traps to make a dungeon challenging. Just don't go so overboard that you never give them a chance to excel at the thing they were built to excel at.
You create the win conditions of the game. If being good at skill checks breaks your game, change the win conditions to rely less on skill checks.
My take on Peace Clerics is that if they deal damage to a creature, they should be stunned until the end of their next turn. This means the party needs those good buffs that much more, and it encourages the cleric to actually walk the walk.
That advice is hard to do with a published adventure. To change everything from a skill check when there is a secret door to... inexperienced players.. . asking them to say they are searching to find something.
I would LOVE to see some of these changes in action, but there are no DMs that specifically give alternatives. "Just do this..." How do you determine if someone finds a secret door without a skill check? And if they are just going to pass every skill check, what's the point of having a secret door?
That's how the game is broken - how to give challenges anymore?
I don’t really understand your issue here. What problem arises when your party finds all the secret doors?
The thing that many DM’s forget or maybe don’t even realize because we are so conditioned to win games rather than simply play together, is that the adventure progresses forward when the characters are successful. When they are not, it’s either side-tracked until an alternate solution is discovered or grinds to a complete halt. The point of the game is for the characters to be successful not for the DM to have impenetrable secrets. What good is a secret door that can’t be discovered, particularly if it takes using up some of the party’s limited resources to do so? What fun does this situation add to your game for anyone?
There's a bit of middle ground here. Finding secret doors, secret rooms, of Stuff That May Or May Not Be Found in general is essentially the same as convincing an NPC to help you, or intimidating the local sheriff so he doesn't throw you in the slammer, or disguising yourself to infiltrate a garden fête unnoticed, or forging a some incriminating evidence against the bad guy to hinder their nefarious plans while you find some genuine evidence, or any of a million other things: it helps you if you succeed, and if you fail you find another way forward. They shouldn't be automatically successful because the goal is to be successful in the end. There should be a fair chance of success, absolutely, and ideally these things work out more often than not (say 2/3 of the time, the rough target number for success bounded accuracy aims at), but the point isn't to have a win every step of the way - the point is to win by achieving the real goal, and stumbling and getting back up again along the way is part of the fun. The only real bad idea here is to have that final success hinge on whether the party finds something or not: if they fail one way, there should be other things they can do to progress further.
Well sure but having a peace cleric in the party doesn’t mean a free pass or an auto win; it means a given task is much easier equal to proficiency bonus times per day. At most, the party is basically guaranteed to find six secret doors each day. This is at the cost of performing any other challenging task with basically guaranteed success that day. When there are more than six challenges each day, the peace cleric’s presence becomes less and less disruptive with each subsequent one…so have more than six things your party needs to accomplish? It’s a super simple solution for any DM who does not have an adversarial attitude toward their players.
I maintain that the peace cleric is not the problem here. Having the characters find all the secret doors is not the problem here. The problem here is that the DM wants to win. They think the peace cleric is ruining their fun because they don’t understand the DM never wins in the traditional sense in D&D.
That said, I do agree that it is vital to have more than one way to solve any given challenge and it does seem that many published adventures do not prescribe to this school of thought. In that case, it falls to the DM to use their ultimate cosmic power to create challenging options for the party rather complain that the published challenge was too easy when they succeed or have them hopelessly mired when they don’t.
I maintain that the peace cleric is not the problem here. Having the characters find all the secret doors is not the problem here. The problem here is that the DM wants to win. They think the peace cleric is ruining their fun because they don’t understand the DM never wins in the traditional sense in D&D.
That said, I do agree that it is vital to have more than one way to solve any given challenge and it does seem that many published adventures do not prescribe to this school of thought. In that case, it falls to the DM to use their ultimate cosmic power to create challenging options for the party rather complain that the published challenge was too easy when they succeed or have them hopelessly mired when they don’t.
I never said I or the DM should or wants to win. You're making a very poor assumption of winning and losing or "win" adversely; that's a bold claim to another GM and then you've spoken about. It seems that you're saying the DM is not a player - as you're making a difference between "DM" and "players" instead of DM and characters. We're all players.
The "win" is to have fun for everyone. Not finding a secret door may mean the party has to go the long way around, or their villain gets away, or other story plots and beats happen. Finding the secret door is a different outcome or story. It's not about winning, but the challenges that come to the players and DM reacting to the story. The "win" is fun for both the DM and other players.
It is about the challenge of the game. This is a Role-Playing Game. When you disregard all challenges and just hand everything to the players, I might as well write a novel because I know they are just going to pass all challenges. That is why the Peace Cleric ruins fun -- not because I want to "win" (AGAIN NEVER SAID THAT), but because it lessens all challenges set. The villain never gets away, the other paths that took four hours to read never get explored, other ideas for the DM are just...... DOA because the characters always got the easy way. If the players pass - great! But it sounds like your experience, Born_of_fire74, is limited to everyone has to be rail-roaded XXX.
The issue is that my fun is lessened when I know the characters will always pass, which the Peace Cleric does. Stacking bonus on bonus and spamming is not the way D&D has been in the past (*2nd and 3rd only allowed one bonus from any source at one time). 5e has broken that rule, following in the tradition of 4th breaking the game as often as it could.
I do have limitations, however, as I do not have time to write my own games, so I use published adventures. I don't have time to manage "all cosmic power" when I might have 30 mins a week to set up a game. I also don't use this as you seem to have this as your win".
Secondly, I am not sure about any players you've had, but every group I know will refuse to have 6 encounters per day without demanding a long rest. I have never heard of a group not taking the "long rest because I used all my powers" approach. Not allowing rest is also taking away the other player's agency which I think you're overlooking.
So, Born_of_fire74, how do you stop these abilities and insist that the party has more than 6 challenges a day to stop the skill/power stack?
I am a person who always puts a new video game (which I have, like 30 mins a month to play) on "hard" because I want to experience the challenge and skill of the game. As a DM, the fun is to create and run challenges with characters. If characters just auto-win with every DC 15, it is not a challenge anymore. As character-players (we should start calling others character-players instead of player-characters or at least player's characters to show possessive) who never can miss a challenge, I can just hand them the whole adventure and say, "G'night! I don't have time to run anything, and you don't want to face any challenge as you have a Peace Cleric allowing you to never fail."
Do you not see the issue with overstacking bonuses? Or is the recommendation to just not DM anymore because D&D disregards all challenges now for power-creeping.
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Yeah, I hate it when the official adventures have things like "it is a DC 15 strength check to open any door in this dungeon. Also, the required path to advance this adventure goes through 8 doors." So... Just let them roll until they get it then?
Or "the players most search this corner specifically and succeed a DC 12 investigation check to find the secret door behind the bookshelf leading to the second half of the adventure. The not hidden door in this room just goes to side treasure." I... What? And the adventure conclusion does not have a "players didn't search for secret doors" option, they have to find that door to progress the adventure.
These are real checks in official adventures btw. Personally, I would never write an adventure that puts checks that have to be passed to progress. That is bad writing. Either the game stops until they succeed, or the story just doesn't happen.
Well sure but having a peace cleric in the party doesn’t mean a free pass or an auto win; it means a given task is much easier equal to proficiency bonus times per day. At most, the party is basically guaranteed to find six secret doors each day. This is at the cost of performing any other challenging task with basically guaranteed success that day. When there are more than six challenges each day, the peace cleric’s presence becomes less and less disruptive with each subsequent one…so have more than six things your party needs to accomplish? It’s a super simple solution for any DM who does not have an adversarial attitude toward their players.
I maintain that the peace cleric is not the problem here. Having the characters find all the secret doors is not the problem here. The problem here is that the DM wants to win. They think the peace cleric is ruining their fun because they don’t understand the DM never wins in the traditional sense in D&D.
That said, I do agree that it is vital to have more than one way to solve any given challenge and it does seem that many published adventures do not prescribe to this school of thought. In that case, it falls to the DM to use their ultimate cosmic power to create challenging options for the party rather complain that the published challenge was too easy when they succeed or have them hopelessly mired when they don’t.
I never said I or the DM should or wants to win. You're making a very poor assumption of winning and losing or "win" adversely; that's a bold claim to another GM and then you've spoken about. It seems that you're saying the DM is not a player - as you're making a difference between "DM" and "players" instead of DM and characters. We're all players.
The "win" is to have fun for everyone. Not finding a secret door may mean the party has to go the long way around, or their villain gets away, or other story plots and beats happen. Finding the secret door is a different outcome or story. It's not about winning, but the challenges that come to the players and DM reacting to the story. The "win" is fun for both the DM and other players.
It is about the challenge of the game. This is a Role-Playing Game. When you disregard all challenges and just hand everything to the players, I might as well write a novel because I know they are just going to pass all challenges. That is why the Peace Cleric ruins fun -- not because I want to "win" (AGAIN NEVER SAID THAT), but because it lessens all challenges set. The villain never gets away, the other paths that took four hours to read never get explored, other ideas for the DM are just...... DOA because the characters always got the easy way. If the players pass - great! But it sounds like your experience, Born_of_fire74, is limited to everyone has to be rail-roaded XXX.
The issue is that my fun is lessened when I know the characters will always pass, which the Peace Cleric does. Stacking bonus on bonus and spamming is not the way D&D has been in the past (*2nd and 3rd only allowed one bonus from any source at one time). 5e has broken that rule, following in the tradition of 4th breaking the game as often as it could.
I do have limitations, however, as I do not have time to write my own games, so I use published adventures. I don't have time to manage "all cosmic power" when I might have 30 mins a week to set up a game. I also don't use this as you seem to have this as your win".
Secondly, I am not sure about any players you've had, but every group I know will refuse to have 6 encounters per day without demanding a long rest. I have never heard of a group not taking the "long rest because I used all my powers" approach. Not allowing rest is also taking away the other player's agency which I think you're overlooking.
So, Born_of_fire74, how do you stop these abilities and insist that the party has more than 6 challenges a day to stop the skill/power stack?
I am a person who always puts a new video game (which I have, like 30 mins a month to play) on "hard" because I want to experience the challenge and skill of the game. As a DM, the fun is to create and run challenges with characters. If characters just auto-win with every DC 15, it is not a challenge anymore. As character-players (we should start calling others character-players instead of player-characters or at least player's characters to show possessive) who never can miss a challenge, I can just hand them the whole adventure and say, "G'night! I don't have time to run anything, and you don't want to face any challenge as you have a Peace Cleric allowing you to never fail."
Do you not see the issue with overstacking bonuses? Or is the recommendation to just not DM anymore because D&D disregards all challenges now for power-creeping.