We record most of them, I’d recommend that level of flying on a wall
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Similar to Tulpa, this sounds also like a group that’s really used to Modern D&D where if there isn’t a rule with how you’re supposed to interact with something, there’s a feeling that it’s verboten.
Mork Borg is very much out of the 0D&D tradition, where it’s expected where if you want to do something, even if it’s not in the rules, you suggest how it should work (even! especially! if you’re a player) and the group achieves consensus on that.
Personally, I think that this is the best possible way to have a TTRPG and to achieve what Tulpa brings up in their post, I can see why it would feel very “nothing there” to people used to post-AD&D rulesets.
ETA: Or to put it another way, this is absolutely intentional design. The individual group is intended to create those interactions, often out of whole cloth.
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Must be something in the air. Colville just put out a sort of meandering conversational (but not terribly long) video adjacent to this topic
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What do you guys do to make fights seem like high stakes? Or encounters that are conversational? d20 fighting is always so… boring? And rolling CHA to make someone like you also seems boring? I just don’t get it.
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My fights suck the dick off a dogg so I have no idea. I’m also wondering this.
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I haven’t found a real solution other than to play a system that isn’t 5e. The rigid turn order and number of decisions everyone has to make each round basically forces the game to lose momentum. You can do a little bit to streamline it from the GM side by not giving each monster individual turns but that can also fuck with the action economy.
IMO the action economy is the real root of the issue - each actor in a combat can only do so much on their turn and in order to be effective must get the most effect out of their actions. That seems pretty intuitive on its face but with the way actions are allocated per actor it means that combats have to be organized in a certain way or they get too lopsided, really narrowing what even has the potential to be fun and locking combatants into a pretty rigid list of possibilities that harshly limit both player and GM choice.
To give a concrete example: a party of 5 players fighting a dragon. This should be a fight of legendary proportions, but the number of actions the PCs get vastly outstrips what a single enemy gets. 5e tries to paper over this with “legendary actions” and “lair actions” but this is plainly just a hack. As they are super special tools that you not otherwise encouraged to use it’s not a natural way for GMs to build encounters and if you stick with official materials it’s something you only see in high level combats. And practically they are so rarely used that it’s easy for the GM to forget about or have to spend a lot of time looking up during already slow combat. The other solution in play is to compensate by boosting the power of the dragon’s individual actions and/or its ability to soak up player actions, but this puts a straightjacket on how these encounters are set up and makes it very hard to compose more varied encounters out of different types of enemies. A dragon has a society of kobolds that comes to its defense, how does that play out in combat where adding just 75hp worth of kobolds to the dragon fight might completely overwhelm the players’ actions? It’s not impossible but it is a huge amount of work and any miscalculation leads to either a TPK or the GM desperately fudging rolls. Instead of an interactive event it is forced to become a setpiece and fuck it if I wanted that I’d just play a videogame.
In my mind the humane alternative is to stick with much less rigid combat where players or enemies have the freedom to take big or small actions as appropriate and the pacing is determined by the people at the table and not a spreadsheet. This moves the emphasis from overcoming a numerical challenge back to a collaborative storytelling style that matches the game outside of combat (this of course assumes that is the goal of the game, but as a convert to the tulpa philosophy of ttrpgs it is for me)
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i’m usually a player but some ideas:
space - map layout, differing terrain, interesting elements (cliff edge, stack of barrels), positions of forces
time - things change (bridge collapses), other monsters appear (escalation)
goals beyond defeating the monsters (stop the wizard casting the summoning spell)
I think the main thwarting factor is players not being engaged with the tactical elements or expecting the combat to be balanced (by which they mean, the party is very likely to win).
some situations can be either deadly or fairly easy, depending on how the party react. for example, an overwhelming number of weak enemies that can be fought at a choke point - i feel like some parties will just wade in, and even if the choke point is used, some players will hate it because they aren’t getting to use their cool powers.
Also trying interesting things like pushing the barrels over on the kobolds has to be at least as effective as just using whatever combat powers you have. I think 5e is terrible for this as everytime i see a new class, almost all of it is extra combat powers.
i know a dm who uses critical hits & misses to introduce changes/interest during combat. i’m not sure what i think of that, using their tables there is a 1 in 7200 chance of starting an apocalypse every time you attack. i guess thats still pretty unlikely over the course of a campaign.
…
i do wonder if it would improve combat if there were just 2 turns, player and monster, and the players get like a minute to discuss what they are doing. it kind of breaks the “this turn is 6 seconds long and you can’t say more than 6 seconds worth of stuff” thing but i think it might make the combats more fun (??)
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about CHA rolls, i think it’s difficult because i’d much rather roleplay situations like that, but it’s difficult if you are a player with low CHA playing a character with high CHA - making that player roleplay when they always say the wrong thing kind of sucks too.
i guess my solution would be to roleplay but view the high CHA player’s words as favourably as possible (?). (or to play a system which doesn’t have so many rolls tied to ability scores.)
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big fan of escalation to make combat less of a pushover. those gnolls running an extortion on travellers crossing at a ford? that eccentric boulder in the middle of the river is a bound earth elemental that wakes up once the party is committed (but the sorcerer controlling the binding is vulnerable on the other bank, maybe distract the archers and take them out). or a bar fight where the thugs are werebears: individually terrifying but with the action economy and situational awareness, not too hard to separate, bamboozle, and incapacitate.
these are tactical puzzles & if the players aren’t feeling it (wanting to plan out their special actions) then it’s pointless. best combat encounter I GM’d was the players spotting the rival group in a pub, avoiding them + stealing their horses + barring the doors + setting a fire. no initiative rolls, no moving on the grid, full experience rewards while they made a clean getaway
the 5e mindset is to batter your players to deplete their special moves so they’re slightly at-risk from a level-appropriate fight. which means even more pointless combat encounters to drain spell slots & 1/day powers. this is reasonable game design but hopeless roleplay design
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Yeah I wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. In a sense 5e is a compromise design, I mean strictly speaking everything is, but while it isn’t Warhammer or Gloomhaven or Divinity OS 2 it is a game that is chiefly concerned with tactical combat. If you don’t enjoy it you definitely shouldn’t be playing it. (Except if I make you because you not liking it is something I personally find very funny.)
The tactical design has come under a lot of hyperfocus recently because it’s an insanely popular game that has been out for 8 years now so it has been playtested in aggregate about a million times and its every flaw has been broken over the internet’s collective knee, but I think it’s worth remembering what we all found exciting about it when it came out. When I listened to the first few episodes of Adventure Zone (when it was still funny) and said to myself, man this sounds flexible and powerful without being too crufty. No zillion floating modifiers everywhere, no six paragraphs of grappling rules, no endless number scaling so by mid level things have like 35 AC and you’re rolling with a +17 attack bonus or whatever. Big “rulings not rules” vibes.
Bounded accuracy basically works. The action economy basically works. I mean like, irl, send five jobbers with swords after the world’s greatest fencer and he’s probably pretty fucked! That’s a fun fantasy to portray. I like that it discourages singular BBEG fights and encourages always having a bad guy posse, because that plays to the system’s strengths, which are terrain, movement and range (like in nettle’s and falsedan’s cool examples, above). Geography is pretty irrelevant when there’s only one guy to hit. Target selection forces topographical interaction.
That isn’t to say there aren’t eventually very exploitable problems in the game’s math, but I think the core bounded accuracy concept is a solid foundation to build a fun game on. Everything I’ve seen from the One D&D (god I fucking hate that name) playtest packets have been very encouraging, I would not be surprised if we got a very refined version of the game that addresses a lot of these problems. I’m optimistic.
I think the DMG says that the game is designed around six encounters per day which is like… I’ve never heard of a single table that plays like that. Who are they kidding. They would be so well served by abandoning the lingering idea that this is a dungeon crawling game, but of course they will not because a certain segment of legacy players demand that it remain. For better and worse D&D is about nothing so that it can be about everything, I don’t think that’s gonna change.
Yeah but this is a feature not a bug. There’s 3 core rulebooks and the longest one is just hundreds of pages of monster stat blocks to fight. The designers are not being coy about how they think the game is best played.
Personally I think this should be metagamed away immediately. The game is fun when it’s tactical and tactics require time and planning. I mean there’s game flow issues, but it’s not like players sitting around debating who should target what and how to best synergize their abilities is getting in the way of playing D&D, that is playing D&D.
Like everything in 5e that isn’t combat this is heavily vibes based and kind of catch as catch can, like there aren’t any explicit rules about what a successful Persuasion check actually does for example. Again I think this is both a strength and a weakness. I think yeah ideally reliance on mechanics here bridges gaps between players and their characters, it helps empower the fantasy that your character is not you and they have capabilities that you do not. It’s not a substitute for roleplaying; rather it introduces the Hand of Fate into your conversation, it represents the thousand little details, the material conditions that give inevitable context to every social interaction. Succeeding on the roll means some kind of beneficial movement occurs, but what direction that movement is in depends on what you roleplayed leading up to it. Deciding what succeeding on the persuasion roll actually means is itself roleplaying, a creative act - it’s the juice. It’s the fun!
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This was your plan all along
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Gotta hype second edition for adding the lengthy ecology sections to pad out each full page monster listing in the Monstrous Compendium. It broke my brain for designing dungeons and now I’m more focused on figuring out how everything eats and survives than how it’ll all jump out at players or stand around treasure rooms though. Maybe that’s why I fall back on skeletons so much.
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Skeletons are handy because they don’t invite any thorny ethics questions, too
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I’m not gonna link another Colville vid I am such a simp for my prog rock beard daddy. But I’ll just say: everybody loves zombies.
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There’s an old story game called Dogs in the Vineyard that set up conflicts as a series of escalations, from words to fists to guns. It influenced how I run conflicts in just about all games. In our No Rangers Allowed game, I try to have fights be something that happened after conversation failed, and I will often allow various skill checks and attempts to de-escalate during the fight (both because I’m a big softie about imaginary violence and because I feel its realistic for fights to not always be ‘to the death’)
Otherwise:
interesting fights make the environment and context of the fight a major feature. There are all kinds of non-combat complications you can put into a battle that makes it more exciting than just another tactical combat on a grid.
One example was a dungeon that was magically linked to a crown so that when the crown moved, so did the dungeon. The crown turning sideways caused the dungeon to turn 90 degrees as well. Cuba’s character was hanging from an immovable rod and fighting off demons while Shrug’s character melted the walls with stone to mud spells to cause non-flying demons to plummet to their dooms.
Right now, the players are in a dungeon that is within the body of a giant vampiric beetle. Not only do its movements cause the entire dungeon to shake (non-flying characters have to make dex saves to keep their footing occasionally) but it puts a time pressure on them because the beetle is crawling towards a city that it will likely destroy if the players don’t do something to intercede.
Even something as simple as fire or flooding can make a fight much more attention grabbing. A fire in a tavern that spreads to surrounding tiles every round is always a wonderful feature in a fight. Fighting off monsters while also trying to stay above the surface of rising water? Also a great complication
Other things that I like to do, and this relates to factoring de-escalation into the combats, is to roll morale on the players’ opposition to see if they keep fighting. Almost every fight, I have a break point when I will start making morale rolls for my monsters/npcs. If they fail their morale checks, they’ll usually surrender or flee. This works to shorten the fights and to avoid making the pcs look like a bunch of murderhobos wreaking havoc. Even animals avoid fighting to the death, so any sapient creature would certainly do the same.
CHA rolls/persuade checks/whatever:
I call for these rolls when I am unsure how an npc will react to what a player has said, and their reaction will be interesting whether or not the persuade check succeeds. It’s not a mechanic, at least in my games, that can let you avoid all difficulties. At worst, it takes an npc from a position of not wanting to deal with the PCs at all to being willing to make a deal with the PCs if they give up something of value.
This is rambly but I hope it gives you some ideas.
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That too! Although I love making everyone feel guilty after fights.
In the last game I ran I had some spilled goblin blood unintentionally complete a ritual for an evil god, and then a whole situation where the owl bear the players killed was just being territorial because it had a newborn cub who then got scooped up by a scummy entrepreneur.
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does anyone have a link to a thorough summary of this new “dnd is creative commons now” development? what’s included, what it means, etc.?
text preferred over video
The EFF published a good article when the OGL update was first leaked:
This is one of the better descriptions of the legal plausibility/ramifications of the OGL changes. This was written before WoTC/Hasbro modified their plans but still important to understanding the whole situation. gizmodo has been following the story and all its twists and turns.
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