Exploration and social - the two pillars that have no mechanics

[NichG]

There's plenty of stuff about how to make/engage with a hexcrawl to capture the journey through uncharted wilderness. Things like blazing trails, building roads/outposts, establishing supply lines sound like downtime activities, and incidentally building an outpost is already listed there in Downtime activities in the DMG. To build an outpost it costs 15K gold and takes 100 days or if it's more of a trading post in style/type then 5K gold and 60 days. So sure add a line in the table for what 1 mile of road costs in gold/time, and maybe a line or two about how construction time/cost for everything should increase for remote locations but I'm not seeing this as exploration pillar stuff, it sounds like background stuff that costs time/money but if anyone decides to pay that cost simply gets done with maybe a complication or two that come up like with all downtime activities.

To be clear, my stakes in this conversation are not about the question 'does 5e D&D already have exploration rules'. I'm invested in the original question of whether it's a good thing or not to have exploration rules, and what kinds of exploration rules are helpful to have for what kinds of gameplay. I'm not making any claim about the presence or absence of those rules or rules like them in 5e D&D.

Here my point was, in the context of a campaign like 'we must go to this specific location and kill this specific enemy and get this specific MacGuffin as soon as possible', exploration rules are going to be a distraction because the players already know what they must do - and there's nothing for it but to go and do that thing. But in the context of a hexcrawl, knowing that your current carry capacity and skills and spells only lets you range 3 days from civilization before turning back, but there's an interesting site 5 days away becomes a problem to work through. So there its useful to have those things somewhat formalized because then you get emergent subgoals for free.

Being the general of an army where you are controlling/moving troops and fight at the battlefield level even if being described by the DM at the character level just doesn't sound like D&D, and more to the point would be some combat pillar variant/offshoot and not exploration pillar related.

Not really? The battles might be, but getting troops where they need to be when they need to be and supporting them would all be world-level logistics and infrastructure stuff. No reason you can't do that in a D&D campaign - it was kind of central to play in older editions at least. In AD&D even if you weren't general of an army, there were rules for hiring NPC porters and torchbearers and support archers and so on, and engaging with those rules was sort of necessary for low levels not to be ridiculously lethal to PCs. That sort of play became less common around 2e with a transition to more story-driven campaigns, but even in 3e there are bits and pieces of it scattered around - Stronghold Builder's Guide, Heroes of Battle, etc. Also in 3pp stuff like the Black Company d20 books, with better or worse approaches.

A good rules framework can help flesh out those possibilities and make it easier to see how it could be part of what characters in a D&D campaign are involved in, rather than just 'some NPC takes care of those details' or 'armies are obsolete, 4-6 person squads of high level demigods are where its at'.

For dungeon tricks do you mean things like presenting a locked door with a secret way through. Like say there's a locked door that can't be opened by picking the lock because there's no visible lock to pick, but there's a nearby pool that if they explore they find a passageway that leads to the other side of the door where a lever can be used to open the door. But obviously written/presented in a nicer manner, with good descriptions and maybe a map.

Sort of, except more like there not being the design of 'this door is locked, they must find the secret way through' but instead things like, here is a structure with all sorts of infrastructure that is part of it - chimneys for air and smoke, places where water has eroded its way through, collapsed sections, places where roots have grown in, maybe the walls or floors are thin in particular places and can be broken, etc. Different characters will have different ways of engaging with those details, based in part on what's on their sheet.

A character might be able to turn into a gas and use the chimneys to 'skip' large portions of the dungeon, access certain areas in advance of the progression of the group, etc. Or they might be able to scry on all things connected to a body of water or talk to plants and get advanced notice of different parts of the dungeon layout. Or maybe they can play music that lures any sentient dungeon inhabitants to their location wherever it can be heard, resulting in the goblins or kobolds or whatever unlocking the way and revealing secret doors. Or at higher level, maybe a character can teleport to anywhere within 20ft they can see; but with a magic item that lets someone see through walls, now they can skip around between nearby adjacent rooms without going through, but they still need to find passages to disconnected rooms further away. Or they're a druid and can treewalk their way along the roots of the giant tree that has broken through various places in the dungeon. Maybe they're a monster tamer and can bait creatures with Burrow speeds that live around the dungeon to get them to dig extra tunnels for the party to go through.

Go even more abstract and you could have things like a scholar figuring out the layout of a dungeon by looking at how the builders must have used it and cross-referencing cultural construction practices from that time. Like 'oh, the Vainon Elves who built this had a form of geomancy based on directions to the three nearby elemental nodes - the kitchen is always built as a curved room closest to the Fire node, and the master bedroom always built on the opposite side of the complex'. Similarly, getting advance knowledge of likely guard patrol patterns, what sort of dungeon life might be around (and perhaps how to avoid it or quell it without fights), etc.

And with dungeons that are more in the form of 'facilities' intended to actually 'do things' rather than just be dangerous, different characters might have different abilities with regards to bringing the facility back online, engaging in its remote functions, etc. Maybe the ancient dwarven factory has sluice gates that would flood certain sections with lava where the orc army is currently camping; or if not that, perhaps by fiddling around with things you can use the dwarven mechanical drop-hammers to craft adamantine gear.

Again, not making a statement '5e doesn't have these things', but giving an example of the sorts of richer exploration mechanics can flesh out play and also inform how to build such things to engage with a variety of choices and build options and so on. Like, knowing that 'dungeon radar range' is a thing some characters have might make you think 'aha, I can have room layouts such that where you stand is going to matter with regards to radar range, so now finding spurs that go out into the heart of unmapped regions is actually a kind of reward'.

[Sorinth]

To be clear, my stakes in this conversation are not about the question 'does 5e D&D already have exploration rules'. I'm invested in the original question of whether it's a good thing or not to have exploration rules, and what kinds of exploration rules are helpful to have for what kinds of gameplay. I'm not making any claim about the presence or absence of those rules or rules like them in 5e D&D.

Here my point was, in the context of a campaign like 'we must go to this specific location and kill this specific enemy and get this specific MacGuffin as soon as possible', exploration rules are going to be a distraction because the players already know what they must do - and there's nothing for it but to go and do that thing. But in the context of a hexcrawl, knowing that your current carry capacity and skills and spells only lets you range 3 days from civilization before turning back, but there's an interesting site 5 days away becomes a problem to work through. So there its useful to have those things somewhat formalized because then you get emergent subgoals for free.

Fair enough but the question of does 5e have exploration rules is important for a shared understanding, because it's perfectly valid to not like the way 5e handles something, but if 5e does have rules for handling that situation then the complaint shouldn't be that 5e doesn't support it. There must be a different reason driving that complaint, and figuring out the real cause is how the debate can move forward.

Not really? The battles might be, but getting troops where they need to be when they need to be and supporting them would all be world-level logistics and infrastructure stuff. No reason you can't do that in a D&D campaign - it was kind of central to play in older editions at least. In AD&D even if you weren't general of an army, there were rules for hiring NPC porters and torchbearers and support archers and so on, and engaging with those rules was sort of necessary for low levels not to be ridiculously lethal to PCs. That sort of play became less common around 2e with a transition to more story-driven campaigns, but even in 3e there are bits and pieces of it scattered around - Stronghold Builder's Guide, Heroes of Battle, etc. Also in 3pp stuff like the Black Company d20 books, with better or worse approaches.

A good rules framework can help flesh out those possibilities and make it easier to see how it could be part of what characters in a D&D campaign are involved in, rather than just 'some NPC takes care of those details' or 'armies are obsolete, 4-6 person squads of high level demigods are where its at'.

Getting troops where they need to be by escorting them or clearing the way for their arrival seems like it would be fully supported without any additional rules. I'm guessing what your looking for would be rules for how that impacts who wins/loses the battle, if so then sure I can understand that being defined as a lacking rules but at the same time it's not something that I think should be in the core rules, it should be 3rd party and/or splat books.

And the talk of hirelings relates to the first point above since the hiring of hirelings like porters and mercenaries are covered in the 5e rules. So if your unhappy with how 5e handles the hiring of porters, which is perfectly valid criticism because you're 100% right that we've lost that old school feel of needing to hire porters to carry all the loot you got from clearing out a dungeon like you did in older editions. But the problem isn't that 5e doesn't support it or doesn't have rules to engage with, because they are there in 5e, you're not getting that old school feel due to something else. Figuring out what that something is would help with the debate if continuing with that example.

Sort of, except more like there not being the design of 'this door is locked, they must find the secret way through' but instead things like, here is a structure with all sorts of infrastructure that is part of it - chimneys for air and smoke, places where water has eroded its way through, collapsed sections, places where roots have grown in, maybe the walls or floors are thin in particular places and can be broken, etc. Different characters will have different ways of engaging with those details, based in part on what's on their sheet.

A character might be able to turn into a gas and use the chimneys to 'skip' large portions of the dungeon, access certain areas in advance of the progression of the group, etc. Or they might be able to scry on all things connected to a body of water or talk to plants and get advanced notice of different parts of the dungeon layout. Or maybe they can play music that lures any sentient dungeon inhabitants to their location wherever it can be heard, resulting in the goblins or kobolds or whatever unlocking the way and revealing secret doors. Or at higher level, maybe a character can teleport to anywhere within 20ft they can see; but with a magic item that lets someone see through walls, now they can skip around between nearby adjacent rooms without going through, but they still need to find passages to disconnected rooms further away. Or they're a druid and can treewalk their way along the roots of the giant tree that has broken through various places in the dungeon. Maybe they're a monster tamer and can bait creatures with Burrow speeds that live around the dungeon to get them to dig extra tunnels for the party to go through.

Go even more abstract and you could have things like a scholar figuring out the layout of a dungeon by looking at how the builders must have used it and cross-referencing cultural construction practices from that time. Like 'oh, the Vainon Elves who built this had a form of geomancy based on directions to the three nearby elemental nodes - the kitchen is always built as a curved room closest to the Fire node, and the master bedroom always built on the opposite side of the complex'. Similarly, getting advance knowledge of likely guard patrol patterns, what sort of dungeon life might be around (and perhaps how to avoid it or quell it without fights), etc.

And with dungeons that are more in the form of 'facilities' intended to actually 'do things' rather than just be dangerous, different characters might have different abilities with regards to bringing the facility back online, engaging in its remote functions, etc. Maybe the ancient dwarven factory has sluice gates that would flood certain sections with lava where the orc army is currently camping; or if not that, perhaps by fiddling around with things you can use the dwarven mechanical drop-hammers to craft adamantine gear.

Again, not making a statement '5e doesn't have these things', but giving an example of the sorts of richer exploration mechanics can flesh out play and also inform how to build such things to engage with a variety of choices and build options and so on. Like, knowing that 'dungeon radar range' is a thing some characters have might make you think 'aha, I can have room layouts such that where you stand is going to matter with regards to radar range, so now finding spurs that go out into the heart of unmapped regions is actually a kind of reward'.

But what does this actually look like in context of say the DMG? Do we need these for lack of a better term "dungeon features" like a chimney defined with explicit rules for what size characters can fit, or thin walls with an explicit strength check to break through? They sort of do it already for some stuff like portcullis, secret doors, webs, slimes/molds, so sure adding a few others might make sense, and adding some more fantastical examples like a giant dwarven hammer used for adamantine forging like BG3 could be worthwhile but I think this is somewhat where the core of the debate should be. Do we want a catalogue of examples that the DM can take from and drop into their dungeon, or do we want advice on how the DM should go about building their own unique/custom ones. I'm personally on the side of better advice for how to make your own.

And for the record I love ideas like getting a burrowing creature(s) to create your own passageway through a dungeon, but I don't like the idea of this being an explicit feature of a monster tamer subclass or feat. To me that doesn't provide a richer exploration pillar, because it's the player creativity that is providing the richer experience and not having a variety of buttons to press. I do think the DMG could/should give better advice about how to handle creative player ideas because let's face it, there will be some great ideas but there will also be a bunch of stinkers. How the DM handles those things go a long way to setting the tone of the campaign as well as encouraging/discouraging those creative solutions. And that's true for all pillars of play, look at Improvising an Action in the Combat pillar, if those improvised actions often end up worse then a regular attack action then players will stop trying to be creative and improvising their actions and press the "I Attack" button until over and over again until combat is over. Whereas if they are more powerful then a normal action then players will always be on the lookout for that stuff.

[Snowbluff]

Many argue the rules do give guidance - DC 5 for very easy, 10 for easy, 15 of medium etc. Of course that is not enough because there is no guidance on what makes something easy or hard. What is easy for one DM is hard for another, and they think that's hunky dory or the DM who disagrees with their interpretation of the difficulty of a thing is playing the game wrong, depending on the person. In the hypocritical view, they think it's horrendous for two trees in different campaigns should have the same climb DC by a given example in a climb table but have no issue with all non-magical plate mail in every campaign everywhere is AC 18.

This unqualified strawman doesn't do anything to prove that subjective difficulty is a bad thing. Even if you disagree that there should be fixed DCs for everything, a variant for difficulty or rules for situational bonuses for different universes would be needed. What is hard to one DM in their game world is simply not going to be hard to every GM. Sometimes, convincing the king that Ratly the Sinister is in fact an evil advisor is going to be a 10 to one person in their trope heavy and meta-joke ridden narrative, or a 25 in another GMs tragedy about the abuses of power. An overly gamified and inflexible system would cause more problems and arguments about which of these 2 is correct.

[Sindeloke]

Do we want a catalogue of examples that the DM can take from and drop into their dungeon, or do we want advice on how the DM should go about building their own unique/custom ones. I'm personally on the side of better advice for how to make your own.

Why not both?

There's a core book and multiple supplements with monsters in them, that you can take from and drop into your dungeon. There's also advice in several places about how a DM should generate their own. There's a core book full of spells and multiple supplements full of even more, and there's also advice on how a DM should balance custom spells that they might create. There's a core book with races and multiple supplements with more, and also advice on how a DM can create new ones.

But if you do have to pick, I think the examples are better, because in every single one of those cases I just listed, the advice given on building your own is pretty limited and bad... but the community actually has a bunch of very good resources on how to do it. Because as long as a large suite of examples exists, there will on average be enough good ones that they can, and will, be reverse-engineered. But if there's only advice, it has to be complete, and detailed, which you can't guarantee. IOW you can get advice from examples even if the examples are shaky, but it doesn't work the other way.

Also, advice-only will always require prep work from the DM, while examples can save time for a quick one-shot, which is the reason people buy, eg, monster supplements; they want to have something they can just use.

[NichG]

Fair enough but the question of does 5e have exploration rules is important for a shared understanding, because it's perfectly valid to not like the way 5e handles something, but if 5e does have rules for handling that situation then the complaint shouldn't be that 5e doesn't support it. There must be a different reason driving that complaint, and figuring out the real cause is how the debate can move forward.

Getting troops where they need to be by escorting them or clearing the way for their arrival seems like it would be fully supported without any additional rules. I'm guessing what your looking for would be rules for how that impacts who wins/loses the battle, if so then sure I can understand that being defined as a lacking rules but at the same time it's not something that I think should be in the core rules, it should be 3rd party and/or splat books.

And the talk of hirelings relates to the first point above since the hiring of hirelings like porters and mercenaries are covered in the 5e rules. So if your unhappy with how 5e handles the hiring of porters, which is perfectly valid criticism because you're 100% right that we've lost that old school feel of needing to hire porters to carry all the loot you got from clearing out a dungeon like you did in older editions. But the problem isn't that 5e doesn't support it or doesn't have rules to engage with, because they are there in 5e, you're not getting that old school feel due to something else. Figuring out what that something is would help with the debate if continuing with that example.

Well as I said, I have no stake in whether 5e has something or not, and I don't think it actually needs to be discussed in order to talk about whether in a broad sense it's desirable to have certain kinds of mechanics or not. It can be evidence in the form of '5e has this, I played with it, it was good' or '5e has this, I played with it, it sucked', but outside of that I consider it a digression, and I wasn't responding or making claims within the context of that digression.

Every game is effectively a homebrew game, and people will use or not use, add or not add, any number of rules. The thing I think is relevant here is the question - 'Should you include rules of this kind, when, and why?'. Whether you include them by realizing they already exist somewhere and just use them, or by writing a house rules document, or even just saying out loud as a DM at the table 'this is how I will handle things', it doesn't really matter to what I'm trying to get at here.

But what does this actually look like in context of say the DMG? Do we need these for lack of a better term "dungeon features" like a chimney defined with explicit rules for what size characters can fit, or thin walls with an explicit strength check to break through? They sort of do it already for some stuff like portcullis, secret doors, webs, slimes/molds, so sure adding a few others might make sense, and adding some more fantastical examples like a giant dwarven hammer used for adamantine forging like BG3 could be worthwhile but I think this is somewhat where the core of the debate should be. Do we want a catalogue of examples that the DM can take from and drop into their dungeon, or do we want advice on how the DM should go about building their own unique/custom ones. I'm personally on the side of better advice for how to make your own.

And for the record I love ideas like getting a burrowing creature(s) to create your own passageway through a dungeon, but I don't like the idea of this being an explicit feature of a monster tamer subclass or feat. To me that doesn't provide a richer exploration pillar, because it's the player creativity that is providing the richer experience and not having a variety of buttons to press. I do think the DMG could/should give better advice about how to handle creative player ideas because let's face it, there will be some great ideas but there will also be a bunch of stinkers. How the DM handles those things go a long way to setting the tone of the campaign as well as encouraging/discouraging those creative solutions. And that's true for all pillars of play, look at Improvising an Action in the Combat pillar, if those improvised actions often end up worse then a regular attack action then players will stop trying to be creative and improvising their actions and press the "I Attack" button until over and over again until combat is over. Whereas if they are more powerful then a normal action then players will always be on the lookout for that stuff.

So I'll go back to the thing I said about resolution mechanics versus toys.

Gaseous Form is an exploration toy. Making Gaseous Form available to a party changes the way in which certain architectural or geological features like chimneys and lava tubes become relevant. The 'exploration mechanic' being introduced when I talk about chimneys in dungeon design is the existence of a spell like Gaseous Form that lets something that would normally be a conduit for just air also be a traversable space. That doesn't have to be in the form of a DMG entry saying 'you can have chimneys that are passable by gaseous form!' to the DM. You can of course also have that - it doesn't change the player-facing mechanics or the resolution in that case, because its sort of obvious.

So do I want Gaseous Form to be explicitly in rules text somewhere? Yeah - its a toy for the players, it opens up exploration abilities in exchange for investment of build resources, and all the decisions about it are in the players' hands. So its good at creating traction with exploration aspects of gameplay - the existence of this button will get players thinking 'oh hey, I could sneak in through the flue!' and such rather than just 'lets kill the inhabitants room by room', which I want. And because this is specifically something in the players' hands, I want it to be recorded in text somewhere for them to access and manipulate. If, say, I introduced some ability like this during a campaign as homebrew, like a magic item that lets you turn into a liquid but you can only move downwards, or a power that lets you jump from fire to fire, I would either write that myself in a rules document or I'd want the player who discovered or received it to make an explicit record themselves in a shared campaign document, because once I've given out a toy I'm going to clear out my own headspace of those details - its not a promise about how things will be resolved, so as the DM I only need to be tangentially aware it exists and not constantly working it into my own game flow.

From the view of Gaseous Form, a chimney is not a resolution mechanic because there's not going to be something saying e.g. 'all dungeon rooms inhabited by living creatures will be connected to outside air by a chimney within at least 3 rooms distance'. But, you could have such a thing I suppose. If you had such a thing, it would enable players to plan around the guaranteed existence of chimneys (and do things like conclude 'oh, if we block a chimney and there's no other one within 3 rooms, then that will make a dungeon room uninhabitable'. That would be the benefit of saying it explicitly as a rule, rather than just suggestions and ideas. If that specific example is good or not depends on what you're trying to achieve with your campaign - on the plus side, it enables planning; on the minus side, it might be over-formulaic to the point where the details of 'this particular dungeon' don't matter because there's always a chimney and we can always just find them and block them to clear the dungeon.

Should we have such a rule? To answer that, what are the benefits and downsides? The benefit of a resolution mechanic is generally that it can be planned around - players could know that it makes sense to search the exterior of a dungeon for all the air holes, or come up with a plan to defeat the dungeon inhabitants by blocking the air holes and waiting for them to come out to fix them or just suffocate. The downside is that this particular phrasing will make all dungeons a bit more samey, and there's a risk of a single plan becoming standard operating procedure that is applied blindly without looking at the particular dungeon that is being dealt with - 'whenever we find a dungeon, plug the airholes'.

That probably doesn't add much to the game, so I personally wouldn't make a resolution mechanic out of chimneys like that. But I might resolve the downside somewhat by *generalizing* this to something like saying at the table OOC (but not in a rules document): "My dungeons all should take into account the air supply, and you can safely assume that there are reasons why particular underground spaces stay habitable and plan around it. It won't always be the same thing or the same way, but if you discover I've forgotten this then I've made an error." in which case I get the planning benefits but still allow each dungeon to be its own thing and maybe require a different approach.

What I'm arguing for is this sort of approach to thinking about whether you want to have a certain rule or not. Basically, to explicitly value the ability of players to make plans and to understand the way in which sections of the game are fleshed out by having points of contact (be they buttons or explicit promises about how things work) that the players can reason about and guarantee that they are mentally on the same page as the DM.

So e.g. if we're talking about troop movements, there's a difference between 'Logistics matters, and I will penalize you if your logistics get disrupted' and 'Moving more than 500 foot or 100 cavalry across open farmland makes that farmland non-productive for a year; do this to more than 20% of the farms around a population center and that population center will have starvation this year, and will suffer -2 Loyalty to your leadership and reign. Locales with negative loyalty have a 10% chance per point of negative Loyalty to join revolutions against you, and a 25% chance per negative Loyalty to contribute to plots against you'.

[GloatingSwine]

This unqualified strawman doesn't do anything to prove that subjective difficulty is a bad thing. Even if you disagree that there should be fixed DCs for everything, a variant for difficulty or rules for situational bonuses for different universes would be needed. What is hard to one DM in their game world is simply not going to be hard to every GM. Sometimes, convincing the king that Ratly the Sinister is in fact an evil advisor is going to be a 10 to one person in their trope heavy and meta-joke ridden narrative, or a 25 in another GMs tragedy about the abuses of power. An overly gamified and inflexible system would cause more problems and arguments about which of these 2 is correct.

That seems more like a sign that D&D doesn't actually support a huge range of themes terribly well, if it leads to players simply having no reasonable expectations of the possibilities of their characters within the system purely from the material accessible to them in the PHB.

There are two elements in play in this argument. DMs need flexibility to build the possibilities and impossibilities of a given scenario, which tables of opinion and what each one means in terms of what an NPC will give or do mesh poorly with (even if they're still vague like they were in older D&D editions, they just become both restrictive and vague which is the worst of both worlds) but players also need consistency in what to expect their characters to be able to achieve in the world. If they're taking proficiency in Persuasion they need to have a decent idea what they're buying.

[Snowbluff]

That seems more like a sign that D&D doesn't actually support a huge range of themes terribly well, if it leads to players simply having no reasonable expectations of the possibilities of their characters within the system purely from the material accessible to them in the PHB.

There are two elements in play in this argument. DMs need flexibility to build the possibilities and impossibilities of a given scenario, which tables of opinion and what each one means in terms of what an NPC will give or do mesh poorly with (even if they're still vague like they were in older D&D editions, they just become both restrictive and vague which is the worst of both worlds) but players also need consistency in what to expect their characters to be able to achieve in the world. If they're taking proficiency in Persuasion they need to have a decent idea what they're buying.

I don't see how. Theming isn't required to be a game structure. Demanding everyone to play the same kind of narrative is simply just lopping off large portions of the audience for no benefit. By letting the DC 10 and DC 25 DMs determine how they want the narrative to work, they can both coexist.

I think it is quite obvious that the expectations on how a narrative should be handles is up to the campaign that they are playing, be it created by the DM or within a campaign book. In fact, it's common piece of advice that you should set your expectations with your players in any game of any systems. It's a core tenet of roleplaying as a whole. Attend your session zero, or fill out your questionnaire, or just ask a question on how the DM wants it run.

[Yakk]

So there is a lot of talk about simulationism and fixed mechanics. "All jungles are different", "I don't want PCs to be able to roll dice to make someone friendly".

You don't need 100% simulationist mechanics to have rules for exploration and social.

Suppose we had a card adventuring game. One way to approach "explore a jungle" would be to have a difficulty rating on jungles, and you'd roll (using your modifiers) to see if something bad happens. The bad thing that happens would be fixed and based off your roll.

A different approach would be that being in a jungle causes a complication. That complication is random, like a card drawn from a deck of cards. The random complication has to be overcome and has consequences if not.

That model suddenly supports "not all jungles are the same". Even in a conversation, the fact that the complication isn't something the player chooses means that they cannot go "I use my charisma to make them friendly, then deception to have them give me all their money" is the option they always have.

Now in a TTRPG, the players have less structure and more freedom to act. But we can hang mechanics that aren't uniform on both social interactions and on environmental things, especially if we make the interactive bits be features of the environment and not just DCs.

...

For environments, having the idea of complications - things getting in your way, problems - that have to be overcome. Now you aren't making a survival roll to travel through jungle - some concrete problem occurs, and you can engage with it. DCs can be specific to the complication and even the approach taken.

Knowledge skills can apply; a trained nature check gives you more information about the complication.

A DMG can provide piles of such complications for each environment, each being a little set piece.

...

For NPCs, players already have bonds and ideals and goals. NPCs can have similar. You can make a system based on detecting what the bonds/
ideals and goals of an NPCs are; sometimes they might be unreachable in a single interaction. The NPCs overall goals and their immediate goals can differ, as well as their motivation for each of these goals.

Social mechanics can be about determining what the NPCs immediate goals are, how motivated they are, etc. Also, knowledge of social context and expectations (is this a situation where a bribe/tip is expected and normal, likely to be accepted, probably going to be rejected with prejudice, or something that would trigger hostility?)

Similar to environments, the PCs can set up a goal, and the DM can provide complications. The path from "goal" to "success" might be "you can't get there from here in this conversation", and finding *that* out can have mechanics, where failure has consequences.

Positive social interactions with someone can build trust, and that trust can be leveraged. Getting someone to be your friend from one interaction isn't very plausible unless their goals align with becoming your friend, but doing so after months of interaction is another thing entirely.

None of this is mind control. It can be shortcuts for the DM to note NPCs attitudes towards PC (count of slights and positive interactions), mechanics to track NPC personalities (goals, bonds, etc), and mechanics for the DM to produce for social complications.

Befriending an NPC might require determining their social bonds, doing things for those social bonds, helping them achieve their goals, doing so aligned with their motivations, etc. How well your attempts at doing so actually build trust might involve mechanics and checks; your high-charisma PC might get more trust (on average) out of helping an NPC's sister than the lower-charisma PC.

We have mechanics here, but we don't have mind control; this is a framework to track extended social interaction of a PC and NPC, where the NPC gradually starts to trust (or hate) a given PC (or the party).

You could even have rules on how an NPCs social status and influence can lead to a general change in attitude towards the PCs.

As a note, much of this also generates plot hooks: if you want to influence an NPC, you now have to find out what the NPC wants, and do stuff - which can involve adventure. And plot hooks are better than mind control DCs any day.

[GloatingSwine]

I don't see how. Theming isn't required to be a game structure. Demanding everyone to play the same kind of narrative is simply just lopping off large portions of the audience for no benefit. By letting the DC 10 and DC 25 DMs determine how they want the narrative to work, they can both coexist.

I think it is quite obvious that the expectations on how a narrative should be handles is up to the campaign that they are playing, be it created by the DM or within a campaign book. In fact, it's common piece of advice that you should set your expectations with your players in any game of any systems. It's a core tenet of roleplaying as a whole. Attend your session zero, or fill out your questionnaire, or just ask a question on how the DM wants it run.

Trouble is, sometimes playing the same kind of narrative is inevitable due to what the other rules say. Doesn't matter what kind of theme you're playing, on average a level 10 fighter can take a 200' fall, faceplant at the end of it, and get up like nothing happened (for all that he'll appreciate a healing spell or potion, he'll just walk it off).

And the same systems are supposed to apply to social scenes, D&D rules are for simulating a specific kind of heroic adventurer doing stuff (the kind that can do a 200' faceplant and get up again, once they've been around the block a few times). Sometimes it renders acknowledging that unavoidable and the more you wrench the bits where it isn't unavoidable away from the same sort of heroic adventuring theme the more jarring it is. Especially because when it comes to building the people they want to be in the world the players will often be making direct choices between those things, in a system that assumes they are all valued equally.

[Snowbluff]

Trouble is, sometimes playing the same kind of narrative is inevitable due to what the other rules say. Doesn't matter what kind of theme you're playing, on average a level 10 fighter can take a 200' fall, faceplant at the end of it, and get up like nothing happened (for all that he'll appreciate a healing spell or potion, he'll just walk it off).

To illustrate my point, that is an on average 70 point damaging fall. A fighter has 10 + 6 * (level-1) HP by default, or 64. That's a fatal fall, for starters. Surviving would mean he actually put some effort into optimizing his character by having a good con score.

Now him getting up and saying Ratly is evil will have different consequences. In DC 25 GM land he's dragged away screaming his futile warning, too injured to fight back, while Ratly gives his evil smile and waves as he is KOed. In DC 10 land everyone goes "Wow!" and arrests Ratly. It turns when you jumped off of that airship to deliver the warning to the court, the themes of the result can still be carried through.

Which is to say, I am genuinely confused at the idea that powerful, heroic characters aren't allowed to have different kinds of narrative them in their stories. Hell, even Superman, a person with largely the same power set across most of his comics and stories, has different stories to tell about his nature and role. Past that you have takes like Invincible and The Boys that have superheroic characters but take a different spin on them. Rorschach yelling at Dr. Manhattan still had meaning at the end of Watchmen, even if (or because) his actions were in vain.

[GloatingSwine]

To illustrate my point, that is an on average 70 point damaging fall. A fighter has 10 + 6 * (level-1) HP by default, or 64. That's a fatal fall, for starters. Surviving would mean he actually put some effort into optimizing his character by having a good con score.

You're so close to getting it!

The point is that if the Fighter player does spend character build resources (attribute distribution and ASIs) on surviving that 200' faceplant he gets exactly the same return on that investment in every game of D&D played according to the rules in the book. Doesn't matter what your theme is, the fighter buys the same extra fall distance with the same ASI every time.

If he spent exactly the same amount of resources on the social features of his character, he should get the the same feeling that he has bought success where failure used to exist. And skill checks are really bad at that in D&D, so fiddling DCs to make some things hard or easy checks according to theme is a really bad idea with this ruleset.

DCs and the outcomes of skills should be appropriate to the sort of things D&D characters can reliably do where the rules are firm about them.

[Snowbluff]

You're so close to getting it!

The point is that if the Fighter player does spend character build resources (attribute distribution and ASIs) on surviving that 200' faceplant he gets exactly the same return on that investment in every game of D&D played according to the rules in the book. Doesn't matter what your theme is, the fighter buys the same extra fall distance with the same ASI every time.

If he spent exactly the same amount of resources on the social features of his character, he should get the the same feeling that he has bought success where failure used to exist. And skill checks are really bad at that in D&D, so fiddling DCs to make some things hard or easy checks according to theme is a really bad idea with this ruleset.

DCs and the outcomes of skills should be appropriate to the sort of things D&D characters can reliably do where the rules are firm about them.

This is like a new form of the Stormwind Fallacy. Character optimization exists ergo only one kind of story can be told.

This unqualified strawman doesn't do anything to prove that subjective difficulty is a bad thing. Even if you disagree that there should be fixed DCs for everything, a variant for difficulty or rules for situational bonuses for different universes would be needed. What is hard to one DM in their game world is simply not going to be hard to every GM. Sometimes, convincing the king that Ratly the Sinister is in fact an evil advisor is going to be a 10 to one person in their trope heavy and meta-joke ridden narrative, or a 25 in another GMs tragedy about the abuses of power. An overly gamified and inflexible system would cause more problems and arguments about which of these 2 is correct.

And my post already had answered the claim in itself. You should be able to change the DC for your game. Every variant of DnD has made accommodations for it for good reason. 5e just does it more with the subjective DC difficulty where as 3.5 used more conditional modifiers. Understanding expectations is an important aspect of roleplaying even before making considerations for this.

[Sorinth]

Why not both?

There's a core book and multiple supplements with monsters in them, that you can take from and drop into your dungeon. There's also advice in several places about how a DM should generate their own. There's a core book full of spells and multiple supplements full of even more, and there's also advice on how a DM should balance custom spells that they might create. There's a core book with races and multiple supplements with more, and also advice on how a DM can create new ones.

But if you do have to pick, I think the examples are better, because in every single one of those cases I just listed, the advice given on building your own is pretty limited and bad... but the community actually has a bunch of very good resources on how to do it. Because as long as a large suite of examples exists, there will on average be enough good ones that they can, and will, be reverse-engineered. But if there's only advice, it has to be complete, and detailed, which you can't guarantee. IOW you can get advice from examples even if the examples are shaky, but it doesn't work the other way.

Also, advice-only will always require prep work from the DM, while examples can save time for a quick one-shot, which is the reason people buy, eg, monster supplements; they want to have something they can just use.

Just to be clear when saying I prefer the advice it doesn't mean that I don't want any pre-made examples, having a few is good but I wouldn't want to see the DMG filled with examples. I don't know what the perfect amount would be but the DMG has essentially 7 dungeon features, 4 dungeon hazards, and 11 traps which seems fine but having a little more would also be fine. But space is at a premium and I'd rather not have 20 pages of stuff.

And I don't really agree that it requires more prep work, if I'm building a dungeon and want to put a climbable wall that brings you to a spot overlooking the next room and is a great ambush spot for the creatures in that room. If I have an image of what the wall looks like in my head of a all with lots of loose stones I can easily come up with a description and the associated skill check for climbing in this case DC 15 with failure being that you succeed in climbing but knock some of those loose stones which fall and make a loud noise alerting the creatures in the next room. However if there's a catalogue of wall types then I have to cross-reference the image I have in my head with what's in the catalogue, and then there's probably a discrepancy with what climbing it looks like, maybe the book says it's a DC 10 to climb. So I either have to break with what the book says this wall should be or change my image of the wall. And yeah as DM I can do what I want and I don't have to use what the book says a wall of loose stones should be but doing that does lead to friction when a player who knows the book says it's a DC 10 to climb and they rolled a 12 so should have succeeded.

[Yakk]

Just to be clear when saying I prefer the advice it doesn't mean that I don't want any pre-made examples, having a few is good but I wouldn't want to see the DMG filled with examples. I don't know what the perfect amount would be but the DMG has essentially 7 dungeon features, 4 dungeon hazards, and 11 traps which seems fine but having a little more would also be fine. But space is at a premium and I'd rather not have 20 pages of stuff.

And I don't really agree that it requires more prep work, if I'm building a dungeon and want to put a climbable wall that brings you to a spot overlooking the next room and is a great ambush spot for the creatures in that room. If I have an image of what the wall looks like in my head of a all with lots of loose stones I can easily come up with a description and the associated skill check for climbing in this case DC 15 with failure being that you succeed in climbing but knock some of those loose stones which fall and make a loud noise alerting the creatures in the next room. However if there's a catalogue of wall types then I have to cross-reference the image I have in my head with what's in the catalogue, and then there's probably a discrepancy with what climbing it looks like, maybe the book says it's a DC 10 to climb. So I either have to break with what the book says this wall should be or change my image of the wall. And yeah as DM I can do what I want and I don't have to use what the book says a wall of loose stones should be but doing that does lead to friction when a player who knows the book says it's a DC 10 to climb and they rolled a 12 so should have succeeded.

Now lets do this from the player perspective.

You describe a wall that a player might want to climb. The player either (a) has no idea how hard this wall is to climb if descriptions are not tied to DCs, or (b) knows how hard it is to climb roughly, based on its description, if DCs are determined by descriptions.

If you describe a wall that is easy to climb - that the player can clearly understand that he, as a 12 year old kid, could have climbed - and then a player rolls a 12, and you tell them "you fall, make a noise, and take enough damage to kill a 12 year old kid", that player is stuck with a "WTF" moment.

That wall was obviously easy to climb and not a death-defying feat for himself, in the real world, as a 12 year old kid. That this level 10 adventurer with superhuman strength failed based on a 1/10 failure chance (+10 modifier, rolled a 2) seems ridiculous.

Either (a) the DMs description of the world is not reliable, because an easy to climb wall morphed into one that requires heroic skill (DC 15), or (b) the heroic PC is reduced in competency to that of a bumbling fool (it takes a DC 15 check to pull off simple, mundane activity).

So you end up with DMs having to code their DCs orthogonal to their actual real-world content, or players practicing how to read the DMs mind.

Currently here is our guiding table:

Task Difficulty DC
Very easy 5
Easy 10
Medium 15
Hard 20
Very hard 25
Nearly impossible 30

[Sindeloke]

And yeah as DM I can do what I want and I don't have to use what the book says a wall of loose stones should be but doing that does lead to friction when a player who knows the book says it's a DC 10 to climb and they rolled a 12 so should have succeeded.

A few things come to mind for me, with this example.

#1, you actually didn't deviate from the theoretical guidance at all. If the DC is a 10 to climb, and your player rolled a 12 and climbed the wall successfully, then they performed as they expected to. Because you didn't actually set a DC for climbing at all - you decided climbing would always succeed. You set a DC for climbing silently. Your player failed a stealth check, which might well be set by that same guidance at 15 ("moving silently over loose, slippery terrain that can easily be dislodged: medium difficulty").

#2, even if you had deviated, single discrete deviations don't cause an issue, in my experience. If I'm winging it and I throw a "goblin" at my players, without looking up what a goblin is, but I accidentally give it 20 AC, my players aren't going to get mad at me and insist that the book says goblins have 15 AC. They'll assume they misunderstood when I described their armor, or that there's something special about these goblins. And I will go "oh, yes, right, obviously, there's something special about these particular goblins" and that can turn into useful worldbuilding or plot hooks if I want it to. Other tables might play it so that the player goes "don't goblins have 15 AC?" and the DM says "oh, right, sorry, yeah, your attack hits." Depends on your resolution style. But I expect that anyone playing a TTPRG has a good resolution style that the whole table can agree on, just as a baseline for playing, no matter what the rules are. Both the DM and the players will make mistakes; if that can't happen without causing a fight, the problem isn't with the game.

#3, That said, I'm actually really unlikely to ever accidentally give a goblin AC 20. Because I know that "goblin" falls into a particular category of difficulty - things under CR 1 - and I've run enough monsters of CR < 1 that I know an AC of 12-15 is appropriate and an AC of 20 is not. By the same token, if there were a lot of relatively easy to climb walls with DC 8, and the game encouraged you to use them regularly by making them as much a feature of a dungeon as the monsters in it, you would probably not accidentally make a loose stone wall DC 15 either. You'd just know from experience, without having to look it up, that 6-10 is the correct range.

#4, You want your player to feel confident that he can hit a given monster with a roll of [x] or more. This lets him make important choices about whether to use GWM, whether he should spend an action trying to get advantage, whether this foe is too easy to waste real resources on or too dangerous to fight at all. What makes the game fun is the ability to make informed choices, to exercise agency over your character's life. To not get blindsided by something. It's considered really poor form to put players in a combat situation they can't succeed with no warning. They should have that same informed choice, that same agency, when they decide how to approach a rocky slope that has something interesting at the top. That's the whole argument.

Now, some DMs like to hide AC from their players, but most people would still agree that a question like "does his armor look particularly sturdy?" would be reasonable and deserve a fair answer. And you get many attacks in a combat encounter, so it doesn't take long to get a good sense of what will hit. But with an ability check, you only get the one roll, there's no testing. So being able to accurately telegraph the target number is even more important. You and your player need to be on the same page over whether this is a DC 5, DC 12, DC 30.

So I can see what you're concerned about - you think a miscommunication is more likely, because your player is more likely to have a preconception that doesn't match yours. An that's certainly a possibility that wouldn't exist if there's no guidance for "loose stones" anywhere. But the problem is, without the player having that knowledge, there isn't any automatic communication at all. There isn't any system by which they can try a few times for minimal consequence until they figure out how dangerous it is. There isn't a way for them to intuitively know what you, personally, think is difficult. And there isn't a preexisting number. That preexisting number allows communication, because you and the player could both have the shared reference point. If you don't have a shared reference point, that's like not telling the players their target AC; it's fine if they don't have any preconceptions, but you have to be willing to tell them "it looks like a Medium challenge" and they have to know that means 13-17, or whatever.

[Telonius]

My perspective (as somebody who started off with 3.5): it's a delicate balance.

3.5 had a much more explicit description of DCs and social mechanics. Attitude changes with diplomacy checks were set values. If the target started off as indifferent (or hostile, or helpful), there was a set Diplomacy check you had to hit to alter that. Even back then, there were arguments about whether that was a good or a bad thing. Similar points on both sides. A high-diplomacy character could use their "diplomacy button" to trivialize encounters without actually roleplaying (various Diplomancer builds enabled this). Having a roleplaying game without expecting the players to play their roles, seems a little silly. On the other hand, expecting somebody to completely RP out a high-level Bard trying to persuade a target would be as unrealistic and unfair as expecting the Barbarian's player to bench-press a car when making a strength check. Some players just are not naturally charismatic, and telling them they can't live out that fantasy seems unfair.

Finding that balance - where a player still has agency, but it doesn't break verisimilitude - can be tough. 3.5 never really hit it right. While 5e's skill system is a lot more streamlined, it doesn't really resolve the balance. Because there aren't really any listed DCs, it just makes it the DM's problem to adjudicate. There are some good points to that; there's something to be said for making the person who knows what the table would expect or accept responsible for it. But it also feels like a bit of a cop-out for the rules to just shrug it off with not much guidance.

[KorvinStarmast]

This is like a new form of the Stormwind Fallacy. Character optimization exists ergo only one kind of story can be told.

I think I'll keep this thought handy.

General comment:

As to the "push button get candy" approach, it seems to me to be an artifact of players who are afraid of temporary failure within a game.

If we look at the bounded accuracy progression (based on some gross averages) the combat system leans toward a roughly 1/3 failure rate and a 2/3 success rate that stays about the same as the Tiers progress. (Saving throws are a different story, unless you are a monk).

If you fail at 1/3 of the locks you try to pick, is that something that will make you rage quit the game?
If you succeed at 2/3 of your persuasion checks, and fail at the other third, do you consider that success or failure?

Back to "exploration"

I prefer to call it "discovery" of which exploration is a subset. Part of the fun of a an FRPG is discovering the imaginary world.

[Aimeryan]

A high-diplomacy character could use their "diplomacy button" to trivialize encounters without actually roleplaying (various Diplomancer builds enabled this).

This sounds like a numerical issue, though, not a mechanical one. A similar argument could be make for the Attack action and Initiative - if you make it possible for a character to do a 1000 damage at will and have a minimum Initiative result of 50 then 99% of combat encounters might as well not even be mentioned. The solution there is to keep the numbers in check and to require resources to manage to keep things interesting - i.e., balance.

Because there aren't really any listed DCs, it just makes it the DM's problem to adjudicate... But it also feels like a bit of a cop-out for the rules to just shrug it off with not much guidance.

Yup. Especially since rules can be ignored if they don't fit your desires, where as no rules means the DM is FORCED to adjudicate, despite paying for the exact priviledge of having rules to not do that. This is the Emperor's New Clothes.

[Blatant Beast]

3.5 had a much more explicit description of DCs and social mechanics. Attitude changes with diplomacy checks were set values. If the target started off as indifferent (or hostile, or helpful), there was a set Diplomacy check you had to hit to alter that.

The DMG has that chart still in 5e.

One issue with D&D Social Encounters is that there are a number of different ways to handle them, as a matter of practice.

I've used the general rule that when conversation starts, if you say something that is not a meta-question or about mechanics, your character says it.

Even with that rule in mind, often times, I will make an exception. In one game, one of my friends is a very quick witted professional comedian/actor, with a PC with a low Charisma.

The player will crack us up, with the funny things he says to NPCs, and then we make him roll his actual check, and when that goes poorly, the player cracks the group up again, by mangling what they initially said.

In that same game, is a friend of mine that is neurodivergent on the autism spectrum, and extemporaneous speaking is not a strength of theirs, and they are playing a Bard.

In their case, I let them just describe what they would say, and let the die roll determine the degree of success.

Sometimes, applying the rules equally, can be unfair.

[Sorinth]

A few things come to mind for me, with this example.

#1, you actually didn't deviate from the theoretical guidance at all. If the DC is a 10 to climb, and your player rolled a 12 and climbed the wall successfully, then they performed as they expected to. Because you didn't actually set a DC for climbing at all - you decided climbing would always succeed. You set a DC for climbing silently. Your player failed a stealth check, which might well be set by that same guidance at 15 ("moving silently over loose, slippery terrain that can easily be dislodged: medium difficulty").

#2, even if you had deviated, single discrete deviations don't cause an issue, in my experience. If I'm winging it and I throw a "goblin" at my players, without looking up what a goblin is, but I accidentally give it 20 AC, my players aren't going to get mad at me and insist that the book says goblins have 15 AC. They'll assume they misunderstood when I described their armor, or that there's something special about these goblins. And I will go "oh, yes, right, obviously, there's something special about these particular goblins" and that can turn into useful worldbuilding or plot hooks if I want it to. Other tables might play it so that the player goes "don't goblins have 15 AC?" and the DM says "oh, right, sorry, yeah, your attack hits." Depends on your resolution style. But I expect that anyone playing a TTPRG has a good resolution style that the whole table can agree on, just as a baseline for playing, no matter what the rules are. Both the DM and the players will make mistakes; if that can't happen without causing a fight, the problem isn't with the game.

#3, That said, I'm actually really unlikely to ever accidentally give a goblin AC 20. Because I know that "goblin" falls into a particular category of difficulty - things under CR 1 - and I've run enough monsters of CR < 1 that I know an AC of 12-15 is appropriate and an AC of 20 is not. By the same token, if there were a lot of relatively easy to climb walls with DC 8, and the game encouraged you to use them regularly by making them as much a feature of a dungeon as the monsters in it, you would probably not accidentally make a loose stone wall DC 15 either. You'd just know from experience, without having to look it up, that 6-10 is the correct range.

#4, You want your player to feel confident that he can hit a given monster with a roll of [x] or more. This lets him make important choices about whether to use GWM, whether he should spend an action trying to get advantage, whether this foe is too easy to waste real resources on or too dangerous to fight at all. What makes the game fun is the ability to make informed choices, to exercise agency over your character's life. To not get blindsided by something. It's considered really poor form to put players in a combat situation they can't succeed with no warning. They should have that same informed choice, that same agency, when they decide how to approach a rocky slope that has something interesting at the top. That's the whole argument.

Now, some DMs like to hide AC from their players, but most people would still agree that a question like "does his armor look particularly sturdy?" would be reasonable and deserve a fair answer. And you get many attacks in a combat encounter, so it doesn't take long to get a good sense of what will hit. But with an ability check, you only get the one roll, there's no testing. So being able to accurately telegraph the target number is even more important. You and your player need to be on the same page over whether this is a DC 5, DC 12, DC 30.

So I can see what you're concerned about - you think a miscommunication is more likely, because your player is more likely to have a preconception that doesn't match yours. An that's certainly a possibility that wouldn't exist if there's no guidance for "loose stones" anywhere. But the problem is, without the player having that knowledge, there isn't any automatic communication at all. There isn't any system by which they can try a few times for minimal consequence until they figure out how dangerous it is. There isn't a way for them to intuitively know what you, personally, think is difficult. And there isn't a preexisting number. That preexisting number allows communication, because you and the player could both have the shared reference point. If you don't have a shared reference point, that's like not telling the players their target AC; it's fine if they don't have any preconceptions, but you have to be willing to tell them "it looks like a Medium challenge" and they have to know that means 13-17, or whatever.

Well first off, the point of the example was your claim that having pre-made features to drop in means less prep work, and that's simply not true. I can very quickly come up with a description of the feature and any relevant skill checks needed. When there's a big book of dungeon features that I don't want to ignore because it can cause friction then it's a lot more prep work to check if the feature exists, possibly change the description I had in mind so that I get a DC that matches what I want, etc... it can easily end up as more prep-time.

And sure if one time the DC doesn't match the description it's not going to be a problem for 99% of players, but if it consistently doesn't match because I've chosen to ignore the book of dungeon stuff then it will surely upset a much larger % of players. And in every thread about skill checks you'll see people who if there were set DCs that the DM ignored would not want to play with that DM.

Finally I would add if there is no set DC for climbing loose stones then there's no miscommunication, they can just ask how hard it looks to do, whereas if there was a set DC in a book then there's more chance of a miscommunication because they don't think they have to ask because they think they already know what it should be.

Now lets do this from the player perspective.

You describe a wall that a player might want to climb. The player either (a) has no idea how hard this wall is to climb if descriptions are not tied to DCs, or (b) knows how hard it is to climb roughly, based on its description, if DCs are determined by descriptions.

If you describe a wall that is easy to climb - that the player can clearly understand that he, as a 12 year old kid, could have climbed - and then a player rolls a 12, and you tell them "you fall, make a noise, and take enough damage to kill a 12 year old kid", that player is stuck with a "WTF" moment.

If I describe a wall as Easy to climb then I would use the Easy DC simple as that.

[InvisibleBison]

If I describe a wall as Easy to climb then I would use the Easy DC simple as that.

In that case, why bother describing how difficult the wall is to climb at all? If your descriptions are just a proxy for the DC, using fixed keywords to represent each level of DC, why not just discard the obfuscation and tell the players the DC directly?

[GloatingSwine]

This is like a new form of the Stormwind Fallacy. Character optimization exists ergo only one kind of story can be told.

Who was talking about character optimisation? Not me, that's for sure.

I was talking about how the hard and fast rules written in the book allow players to have firm expectations about what their characters can and can't do, and how the choices they can make which interact with those hard and fast rules also interact with the much looser rules using the same resources and giving them the same weights and values.

That means that if you try and use skill checks and DCs to generate a theme you are fundamentally misunderstanding how D&D is intended to model player interaction with the world to the detriment of the players if they make the "wrong" choices.

This isn't even anything about roleplaying, calling it the "Stormwind Fallacy" isn't even a straw man of my argument, it's misrepresenting it completely in every particular.

If narratively important persuade checks are so high you can't form a reliable strategy for success using your build resources because the DM didn't want you to win that way because of "theme" but wanted to watch you fail at trying so set a dumb DC for the task, spend all your build resources on killing power based on black letter rules and roleplay whatever you feel like irrespective of the precious theme because your social build choices didn't matter anyway, you couldn't use them to reliably succeed if you tried.

[schm0]

Is it just me, or does it seem many of the threads on this forum devolve into the same old argument: gamists vs narrativists. Gamists want clear objectives so they can calculate the odds and win, narrativists want the freedom to set the objective to be whatever the story dictates at the time. Gamists laud the depth of combat mechanics, while narrativists point to the flexibility of the DC system, etc.

The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a perfect game that will make everyone happy. That's why the designers make it very clear that your table should adjust the game to meet your own personal preferences. And before someone yells "Oberoni!!!" I'd like for you to imagine making a game for millions of people and see if you could make all of them equally happy. It's an impossible task. The designers know this. You should know this. It's why they gave you the permission to change it. It's clay. If you don't want a lump of clay to play with, change it. Make a stick man, a pancake or a little pile of poo, whatever your heart desires. The game is never going to give you everything you want.

IMHO, 5e gives you a good, solid framework to build on. Despite the suggestion of the original post, there are rules that we can lean on. There are exploration rules. There are social rules. They may not be to your liking. Or they may work just fine. But the answer to what will work best for you and your table falls somewhere between a 24 volume encyclopedia set of mechanics and potential outcomes and, well, calvinball. If you want to keep playing 5e/1D&D, you need to decide where you sit on that spectrum, and what you intend to do to address it. Because the rules will be the rules, and whether you like them or not, we are meant to mold them as we see fit.

[Snowbluff]

The bottom line is that there is no such thing as a perfect game that will make everyone happy. That's why the designers make it very clear that your table should adjust the game to meet your own personal preferences. And before someone yells "Oberoni!!!" I'd like for you to imagine making a game for millions of people and see if you could make all of them equally happy. It's an impossible task. The designers know this. You should know this. It's why they gave you the permission to change it. It's clay. If you don't want a lump of clay to play with, change it. Make a stick man, a pancake or a little pile of poo, whatever your heart desires. The game is never going to give you everything you want.

Indeed. I think it needs to be stated that the Oberoni Fallacy definitely does not apply to the GM having to make rulings. Ruling is one of the reasons the DM is there in the game. The DM orchestrating the experience is part of the job.

Furthermore, I will reiterate my point that you have to talk to your table about the kinds of expectations there will be for the game. If you are worried that taking Actor wouldn't work at the table, ask your DM about it. Get their opinion on what they consider valuable and how the game's narrative will work. In any game, not just DnD, you have to set expectations with your group or it will have issues going forward.

[Witty Username]

If you fail at 1/3 of the locks you try to pick, is that something that will make you rage quit the game?
If you succeed at 2/3 of your persuasion checks, and fail at the other third, do you consider that success or failure?

I don't know about you but 99% chance of success has definitely been enough for me to rage quit Excom.

The consequences of failure matter a lot. It failure is 1d8 damage, we are used to that every day. If it is fall of a cliff and die, that can get frustrating even if it only happens 5-10% of the time.

[Xervous]

Is it just me, or does it seem many of the threads on this forum devolve into the same old argument: gamists vs narrativists. Gamists want clear objectives so they can calculate the odds and win, narrativists want the freedom to set the objective to be whatever the story dictates at the time. Gamists laud the depth of combat mechanics, while narrativists point to the flexibility of the DC system, etc.

Acknowledging forgeisms as overly generalized junk, these are not wholly reflective of the actual positions espoused in this or any recent discussion.

At no point has D&D seriously pursued anything resembling a storytelling focused rule set. All rolls the player performs are tied to actions and events experienced by the character in the moment. At no point does the game confront the player with a robust system that encourages actions that further the intended literary themes, said system doing so in a fashion that has no visible presence in the fiction.

The conflict is just over the balance of structured and free form play. For generating fun the structured portions offer a reliable reference point while the free form areas give the game some stretch to accommodate different tastes.

This topic keeps popping up because some character types are nearly entirely in the free form area for a system with low practical granularity in success rate and range of outcomes. Some people are fine with that in a vacuum. Some people are fine with that if they have an agreeable GM, but would prefer guidance nudging GMs and players towards a shared understanding. And others dislike it entirely on principle.

[Blatant Beast]

At no point has D&D seriously pursued anything resembling a storytelling focused rule set.

A game does not need the rules from White Wolf nor from Ars Magicka, in order to focus on story.
Notion, rejected.

[schm0]

Acknowledging forgeisms as overly generalized junk, these are not wholly reflective of the actual positions espoused in this or any recent discussion.

I could not find a definition for "forgeism". Is this a typo, or some cultural phenomena that I am not familiar with? As for whether or not my argument reflects what is being discussed here and at least three other threads on this forum, we'll just have to disagree there.

At no point has D&D seriously pursued anything resembling a storytelling focused rule set. All rolls the player performs are tied to actions and events experienced by the character in the moment. At no point does the game confront the player with a robust system that encourages actions that further the intended literary themes, said system doing so in a fashion that has no visible presence in the fiction.

Again, we'll have to disagree there. The three step process that runs the entire game is indisputably a storytelling mechanic. You describe the environment, the players tell you what they want to do, and you narrate the outcomes. That mechanic results in literal story-telling.

The conflict is just over the balance of structured and free form play. For generating fun the structured portions offer a reliable reference point while the free form areas give the game some stretch to accommodate different tastes.

Sounds to me like we're in agreement here, at least. This lines up pretty well with my summation, just using different words IMHO.

[NichG]

I could not find a definition for "forgeism". Is this a typo, or some cultural phenomena that I am not familiar with? As for whether or not my argument reflects what is being discussed here and at least three other threads on this forum, we'll just have to disagree there.

It comes from GNS theory being associated with an online community called The Forge. Thus 'forgeism'.

[Xervous]

A game does not need the rules from White Wolf nor from Ars Magicka, in order to focus on story.
Notion, rejected.

It was not my intention to invoke notions of such a horribly constructed system as some of the offending white wolf offerings. It’s simply an observation that while D&D can be and frequently is used to produce fun via storytelling, engaging with D&D does not necessarily mean the player is pursuing or deriving fun from storytelling. The GM and players have the choice of whether or not to make storytelling a focus of the fun, and they’re not striking down any rules to decide in either direction.

Again, we'll have to disagree there. The three step process that runs the entire game is indisputably a storytelling mechanic. You describe the environment, the players tell you what they want to do, and you narrate the outcomes. That mechanic results in literal story-telling.

If this structure is all that’s required for a storytelling system then you’ve drawn a broad categorization to include things like practical war gaming (such as kriegspiel) or a doctor walking medical students through a hypothetical patient diagnosis and treatment. The intent of the activity is what’s needed to filter out the war game and the medical hypothetical, as neither of those activities are performed for the purpose of telling or producing stories. D&D does not necessitate the intent and focus of creating and telling stories. While it is frequently used for such, the scope of a game like D&D is broader than simply just storytelling, and there are plenty of use cases for D&D that are not storytelling.

Forgeism…

Sounds to me like we're in agreement here, at least. This lines up pretty well with my summation, just using different words IMHO.

It’s mostly a matter of framing and implications. Gamism/narrativism/simulationism is a flawed sorting system that misses a lot of the specific desires and fun that a system can address or a player can crave. GNS and The Forge have baggage and an unflattering past. Please accept my apologies for confusing your unawareness for implicit praise of them.