I think what you’re telling me is that I need to make people’s lights go out more often, your party will thank you for giving me this revelation
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Yeah it took me a longer time than I would like to realize that 5e is about anime superheroes in a fantasy world and not about the grotty old struggle for survival in a fantasy world
Probably because the game is full of references to that playstyle. There are vestigial rules for vision and encumbrance and survival that have little to no bearing on the game as it is played, except to mislead dms
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conversely, ryuutama looks like a cute anime, but is specifically about tracking resources and surviving the elements
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one of several games from which I tried to borrow mechanics to bring a focus on logistics to 5e
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yes but specifically fraes lamp
oh yeah it was so funny when lain lit one and immediately fell in a pool putting it out
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next time the lights go out im lighting brak on fire.
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ive been playing a lot of Kal-Arath, which is a solo or group sword and sorcery rpg. im playing by myself, which is nice because i get so nervous running for others. its basically mork borg with 2d6 instead of d20. i am getting inspired and kinda wanna do my own tables to play in a setting of my own design!
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Descending dice for stuff like ammo/rations/torches/lamp fuel is the way to go. (You buy an amount of something as a ‘die’, like you have d12 arrows, then every time you fire an arrow, you roll that die, if it’s a one, the die size goes down one, so you now have d10 arrows, anything other than a one, you just keep going.)
We used it in the Black Marshes games at ButtCon24 and it worked well, everybody picked it up pretty easily.
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I used this specific mechanic within the first 20 sessions of no rangers allowed and we ended up dropping it because 5e is actively hostile to logistics mechanics, even though this is by far my fav logistics mechanic (it’s so easy and straight forward)
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I’m kind of struggling to even figure out what other way there is, at least such as would be endorsed at a high level by someone thinking seriously about ttrpg design. (As opposed to just vestigial reflexive roll-for-everything behavior)
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Yeah I mean this obviously has a lot to recommend it for most purposes but I dunno, I think in the appropriate context it’s even a little thrilling to keep track of each individual arrow.
The other night we had the classic low denomination encumbrance problem and it was great. 800 silver pieces don’t seem so attractive when you can only carry 100 coins per gear slot (which you only have ~10 of) and your rented pack mule can’t climb down the slimy secret ladder into the ghoul nest you found them in…
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“You’re just letting players do whatever they want! Magical tea party! Possibly homosexual behavior!” was an actual rhetorical line in the 00s. Yes it was reflexive roll-for-everything behavior built on a foundation of adversarial ‘the players and the DM are enemies who are trying to destroy each other’ play. Grognards were the fucking worst
(one of the main opponents of ‘say yes or roll the dice’ was later credited as a consultant on 5e, one of the many reasons I will never pay for an official dnd product)
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I think if you’re doing the ultra-grimy room-by-room dungeon clear, actually keeping track of things works if you’re all the right kind of perverts for it; I think in literally every other situation you’re better off using descending dice.
But… like… what about the “roll the dice” half of the equation. Like “yes or roll” means “yes to simple or boring things, roll for anything where failure counts” which means… there’s all kinds of potential for failure… which means… the players aren’t just doing whatever they want…
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You’re assuming that reactionaries are either arguing in good faith or capable of sitting back and going hey wait maybe the way that we’ve always assumed we should do things maybe isn’t holy writ.
The amount that people lost their shit when there was something even mildly different from D&D even though nobody had taken their D&D away from them, and you could play it, even the old ones, if you wanted to, is wild.
(I’m guilty of this in part as well, I never gave 4e a fair shake until some folks on here convinced me that it was worth reconsidering.)
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Yeah they pretended that part didn’t exist or minimized it to score their rhetorical points. Plenty of folks pointed this out back then but it was not enough to stop an arbitrary culture war rift from opening between weird fascists and people who play elf games “wrong” (ie using gming techniques not derived from the holy book, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide)
edit: I found a quote from back then that illustrates the… poster’s madness that afflicted elf game hobbyists in the 00s:
there is a bloc of people who are convinced that this should be a “Law”; and want to apply it to strip control of games from GMs
Seriously
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While I do think that mechanically 4e had the right idea to refocus on tactical combat and abandon dungeon crawly pretenses I do think that the book is very anodyne and uninspiring, it’s hard to like even when I’m trying. Even the art’s got that boring ass Jim Lee look.
I’m pretty excited to try out Colville’s new game, which is very explicitly a Crufty Heroic Fantasy game and not anything else. And has that spice and verve that 4e is missing. Def gonna try to get the normie dnd group to let me run it after we’re done with this Icewind Dale campaign.
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its a damn shame that 4e, the one dnd system that actually had good combat design, never had a video game incarnation. It’s not my thing as a tabletop but at least I can recognize that its a coherent design, it’s just too honest about what modern dnd play is: going from planned encounter to planned encounter and fighting monsters using a laundry list of superpowers. (Which, again, nothing wrong with this, it’s admirable that 4e recognized that this is what modern dnd is and shameful that 5e backpedaled into pretending it was an everything game for everyone)
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I couldn’t get over 4e shuffling the bard, gnome, and druid into a secondary rulebook. Seemed very naked cash grab. Meanwhile as someone who sat out picking up third edition books, Pathfinder was one-ish book if you count the freebie intro monsters pdf, and I had a borders gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket.
It was kind of eye opening discovering some interesting 4e combat features recently by way of that poorly written nominally 5e based dark souls game.
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I thought PF was the biggest cash grab at launch because it seemed like little more than repackaging the d20 SRD in a new book.
By the time PF and 4e were the main dnd options I was blessed to have the option of ‘neither, I’ll play games that I like instead’
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