So, a few weeks… no, it was more than that… let me check…
Okay, so seven months ago in the summer of 2019, I wrote this bulls$&% article analyzing D&D based on ten criteria that game designer Mark Rosewater had published under the title Ten Things Every Game Needs. Oh, what a different time it was back then. Back then, for example, I was so f$&%ing sick and tired of the way people in the gaming community had a tendency to judge things based on the people saying them, not the actual ideas themselves that every Long, Rambling Introduction™ had become about forestalling arguments I imagined would happen based on the fact that actually f$&%ing did. All the time. And then I decided to moderate the absolute s$&% out of my site, locking down my comment section to such a degree that all comments took 24 to 48 hours to appear. And then, I saw how that stifled all conversation and ruined my comment section and realized that if I wanted to enjoy the wonderful benefits of the free and open exchange of ideas, I had to risk letting s$&% in. And then I realized that this is a f$&%ing game about pretend elves and I could just not let s$%& get to me and be willing to take the time to clean up the actual s$&% when it did start to pile up. And yeah, that would be hard and yeah, that would take work and no, I couldn’t automate that, but anything worthwhile requires hard work and a certain amount of being willing to pick up other people’s s$&%. And if I couldn’t do that stuff, maybe I couldn’t be a content creator.
Memories light the corners of my mind;
Scattered pictures, of the way we were…
Anyway, that whole article fell apart after just five of Rosewater’s ten criteria because I realized that Dungeons & Dragons, especially the 5th Edition, but also especially pretty much all the editions, and also most mainstream tabletop role-playing games, and also a lot of indie role-playing games too, but especially D&D 5E, were missing huge chunks of the things that make games games according to a renowned and accomplished game designer who worked at the same f$&%ing company on a different game that had left D&D in the dust in terms of sales some 20 years ago. And, in fact, had been so successful that it allowed Wizards of the Coast to go from a company no one had ever heard of to the company who could afford to buy D&D and save it from collapse.
Now, I had totally forgotten about that article. I had left it basically incomplete and had suggested I might come back and finish it in some future month’s BS article. Obviously, I never did. But recently, a couple of things reminded me of it, though. First, there was the conversation I had with some of the players in my own, personal D&D 5E about the growing size of the all-consuming blob monster that is my house rules document. In it, I mentioned some little things that I was thinking of cleaning up because I didn’t feel like I had enough general hooks or tools to do anything with that would affect the game beyond the encounter level. I won’t go into any detail about that. Because I’m sure no one is interested in the fact that exhaustion would be a really useful mechanic if it weren’t so f$&%ing crippling at even the weakest levels and also about exhaustion is really similar to several other game conditions and mechanics that are all presented as huge, disorganized blocks of text and that there’s a real missed opportunity in not building a generalized format for “staged, longer-lasting effects” that could then have been used to build exhaustion, to build starvation, to build dehydration, to build diseases, to build curses and cursed items, to build poisons, to build injuries, to build demoralization and sanity effects, and that could also be used by GMs and adventure designers to build other, specific things to use in their adventures. As I talked about how it was a real missed opportunity that the designers didn’t notice how they had a bunch of things that all worked pretty similarly and how they could have polished them all into a general tool and then used that tool to build the specific afflictions the base game needed and also allow GMs and game designers to use the same tool to build more.
Finally, I got kind of frustrated and said, “what really drives me crazy is how much I have to work to bring any lever or hook or incentive or disincentive into the game that isn’t hit point loss.” And one of the players, who is also a GM, said, “yeah, it keeps shocking me how sparse this game is.”
So that reminded me about the Rosewater thing. The other thing that reminded me was that I got several messages on various channels out of the f$&%ing blue in the span of two weeks that were like “hey, are you ever going to finish that Rosewater thing?” To which I glibly replied, “the Rose-what who now? Wasn’t that a sled?”
Anyway, here we are. The World of D&D According to Rosewater… According to Angry. Part 2.
Course Prerequisites
Okay kiddos, listen up. If you read the Long, Rambling Introduction™, you know what you’re about to read. If you didn’t, this article is my no-more-than-once-a-month Random Bulls$&% ranty, bloggy article. The one where I just get to talk about whatever I want. And bash whatever I want. And insist that I could do it better. This article is also a continuation of an article I wrote last July called The World of D&D According to Rosewater… According to Angry. And it’s about analyzing D&D and TTRPGs in general based on an article published by Magic: the Gathering lead designer – but not creator – Mark Rosewater entitled Ten Things Every Game Needs.
In the interest of actually getting to the meat of this article, I’m not reviewing that stuff. I’m just picking up where I left off. If you haven’t read the previous article AND the article that inspired it, you probably won’t get much out of this or understand what’s going on. Moreover, in the end, I know I am going to end up apologizing a little bit to D&D. But just a little bit. Because I’ve come to realize that there’s a major shift in perspective that needs to happen in the RPG design space. And, really, a lot of people are paid to be way smarter than me about game design seem to have missed it.
So, go back and read or reread those articles and then come back here so we can get on with…
6. Surprise
Rosewater says that every game needs elements that the players can’t predict. He says that people have an inherent desire to be surprised. And, yeah, I agree. For what the agreement of some a$&hole D&D blogger on the Internet is worth. I’m sure it’s a great comfort to Mark Rosewater.
Now, that said, I like to use the word tension. Because, whereas good ole Maro comes from a communications background and learned about the three elements of effective communication being comfort, surprise, and closure; I come from an accounting background, which doesn’t help at all. But I also have a pretty strong background in literature, film, and narrative analysis. And there, you learn about the importance of tension and the rise and fall of tension. In point of fact, the pacing curve that measure the ebb and flow of dramatic tension has low moments where things seem like they will be okay, high moments and reversals where things are suddenly called into question, and a climax and resolution that resolves the central conflict in the story. In other words, moments of comfort, moments of surprise, and a moment of closure.
Call it what you will – call it surprise, call it tension, call it uncertainty – surprise represents those moments where we hold our breath and wait to see what happens next because we genuinely don’t know what’s coming. There’s an outcome we might be hoping for. And there’s an outcome we might expect based on probabilities and guesses. But we really don’t know.
And role-playing games are loaded with surprises. And not just the ones you’re thinking of right now. Because I know you’re sitting there and saying, “that’s dice, dice are the surprises, I bet it’s dice.” Good for you. Yes. The random determination of the outcomes of specific actions is one of the elements of surprise in a good role-playing game. But not the only ones. They are, in fact, the lowest ones. The basest ones.
Another major element of surprise is that four other human brains are determining what happens in the game. Each player makes decisions for their own characters. No other player – no GM – knows exactly what any given player will do. Moreover, sometimes the players themselves don’t know what the character they are controlling will do. Sometimes, they find themselves in a situation they are not prepared for and they will have to make a decision on the spot. And until they actually think it through, they don’t know what their character will do. That’s why I actually encourage players not to go too deep into the background and psychobabble about their character and why I tell players not to narrate what their characters are thinking, just what they are doing. Humans are not telepathic, which means everything everyone does is a surprise to us. And an opportunity to discover something about our fellow humans.
Given the idea that playing games is actually about training useful skills for functioning in the world, we are drawn to games and stories that surprise us because it equips us to cope with the fact that the world is full of surprises.
And because role-playing games are so lacking in constraints – because anything that the players and the GM can imagine can happen – there’s a huge possibility space for what can happen at the table. And then because the GM can rewrite the game on the fly, the game can pretty much keep up with any surprises. As long as the GM can handle it.
I would actually say that of everything on Rosewater’s list, it’s this thing – surprise – that really makes RPGs different from RPGs. I’m not saying other games can’t be surprising, but TTRPGs are the MOST surprising. They have the biggest possibility space to choose from and those possibilities are constantly spinning out of five imaginations that get to operate with much fewer constraints than in other games. Magic: the Gathering is always going to end with one wizard killing another. And it’s always going to play out as two wizards flinging spells chosen from a finite pool of possible spells. Yes, a lot of depth grows out of that. I’m not saying that. But think of all the different ways a conflict between two wizards could play out in a game of D&D.
But, for surprise to work, you have to be able to access that possibility space in a reasonably practical. Wow, that’s a pretentious sentence, isn’t it? What the f$&% does that mean?
Let me give you some examples of what I mean. Let’s imagine a hypothetical tabletop role-playing game called Hypothetica: The Gedanken Chronicles.
A group of players in H:tGC encounters a fire elemental. Now, these are very dangerous creatures because they are immune to almost all forms of attack. They are just clouds of animate fire. But, the designers of H:tGC never wanted the players to feel ineffective or disadvantaged or penalized. So every hero in H:tGC has a magical ability of Elemental Attunement. They can shift, at will, the type of damage their best attacks deal. So every hero immediately turns their attack types of ice. Surprising no one.
Now, H:tGC has a pretty decent skill system. There’s a goodly list of skills players can use to define their characters. But if a player encounters something that they don’t have a skill for, they have to default to a trait roll. And those rolls are penalized due to the lack of specialized training. Moreover, every action that fails in H:tGC carries a negative consequence. If you take an action and fail, the party will end up suffering a negative condition. Also, retries aren’t allowed. Once an action is failed, it is failed forever for everyone in the party. Now, the party finds themselves in a position where they have to negotiate with a demon to bargain for their own souls or something. Only one character in the group has a social skill. And the only social skill they have is fast talking. So, they step up and try to con the demon out of their souls. Surprising no one.
Now, H:tGC really leans into wilderness exploration. Because exploration is fun s$&%. So, the map of the world is divided into small regions called Realms. And there’s a lot to do in each Realm. Realms always have something unique to discover. And Realms have several stats that determine how they affect movement, foraging, visibility, and so on. Every Realm also has a unique list of monsters that can be encountered in that Realm. And also, there’s a list of crafting resources to turn up in every Realm. And every Realm has an elemental affinity that affects magic. And every Realm has a spiritual affinity based on the governing nature spirit. Of course, the civilized Realms also have an alignment, settlement, government type, economic state, a list of trade resources in demand, and a list of trade resources supplied. Neat, right? But, as a GM, what will you do when the party decides to head off into a Realm that you haven’t defined in advance? Because that is a lot of s$&% to stat out just to make the Realm playable. The GM quickly realizes that if he’s not prepared in advance with all of those stats, it’s almost impossible to come up with them on the fly. It’s just too damned complicated. So, instead, he makes sure the party never wanders too far afield. And he never entices them by letting them see something on the horizon that would take them elsewhere on the map. And so, neither he nor his party can actually explore the world and be surprised by what they find.
Now, any similarities you see between Hypothetica and any real, published game, living or dead, are purely accidental. And I’m being completely serious. I’m not parodying anything or trying to make you think of a specific game I want to throw shade on but don’t have the stones to call out by name. I’m just trying to show SOME of the MANY ways that a set of rules can get in the way of players accessing the possibility space that allows for the level of surprise that a TTRPG can provide. Whether the game makes it difficult to think outside of the explicit possibilities it provides or whether it makes the possibilities it provides so effective in so many situations that there’s never a reason to move beyond them or whether the game’s mechanics make it so difficult to improvise and create and invent that it’s painful to ever do it, an RPG can get in the way of its own surprises.
How do I rate D&D 5E? Well, I don’t want this to be another article just bashing D&D for its failings. Like I said, my perspective has changed since I wrote that article so long ago. But I do think that D&D trips over itself on its way to surprise and creativity a lot. Or rather, I think there’s a lot to trip over. And, as a result, to keep the tension high, D&D overelies on random chance that is really, really dicey. Ha. See, I don’t see the way D&D implements “roll to see if you succeed or fail” as much of a satisfying surprise because there’s simultaneously too much and too little riding on the die roll. And the solution D&D goes with to that problem is to add more die rolls. In truth, I think there’s a big issue at the core of the d20 mechanic that “bounded accuracy” was trying to solve, but it was a solution to the wrong problem.
But let’s move on from surprise. Because surprise isn’t everything. There’s also…
7. Strategy
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
Rosewater describes strategy as the components of the game that allow players to get better at playing the game over time. Okay. Fine. Let’s go with that definition for a moment. Because Rosewater actually brings up TTRPGs here. And you really should read what he says. Because it’s really… weird. I’ll come back to it in a paragraph or two. Let’s consider the definition as is first.
Do you get better at playing a TTRPG over time? Well, there’s no doubt that you get more powerful as you play. But is that the same as getting better at playing. See, there’s this argument people LOVE to bring up about avatar strength vs. player skill. The idea is that when you are faced with a challenge in the game, your ability to overcome that challenge is based to some extent on game statistics and probabilities and to some extent based on how well you formulate and execute a strategy for overcoming that challenge. Get it?
Now, the reason I say that what Mark Rosewater says is weird is that he seems to switch between player skill and avatar strength. He talks about the idea of getting better as you play as a form of leveling up. And then he mentions that this is reflected in experience and level gain in RPGs. That said, I think it’s just a clumsy use of terminology. Because he also says something very apt: he says that the game giving you more tools at higher levels is the way the game rewards you for getting better at the game. Maybe. Like I said, it’s a little unclear. And I don’t want to nitpick at a misunderstanding.
Here’s the point, though: character advancement is very different from strategy. Character advancement is not the same as getting better at the game. Getting better at the game involves recognizing the choices that are more likely to lead to victory, recognizing the way different game elements interact and seeing ways to capitalize on it, that sort of thing. But there’s a problem with strategy that makes people very uncomfortable.
If there are better ways to play, there are worse ways to play. That’s just basic f$&%ing logic. And if you can get better at the game, you can start out worse at the game. Same logic. And if a person can get better at the game, they can be bad at the game. And if they can be bad at the game, they have to work to get better. And also, if they can be bad at the game, they might never ever get good at the game. Even if they work at it. Which they may not want to do.
And this is where we start to get into dangerous words that upset the sort of people that I don’t give a f$&% about anymore, so I’m going to use those dangerous words. This is where we get into issues of exclusion and inclusion and gatekeeping. And I’m talking about ACTUAL exclusion and inclusion and gatekeeping. Not the bulls$&% Internet bigots scream about to prove how not bigoted they are. Not skin color and sex and that sort of crap. I mean, inclusion and exclusion in terms of the approachability of the game and a minimum skill set required to get enjoyment from the game. For example, if the game requires teamwork, that means the game has a social component that makes it hard for less extroverted, less social, or disabled individuals to enjoy. Or the fact that D&D involves a lot of reading and math and so people who are bad at those things – or dyslexic people – may struggle to enjoy the game.
That sort of stuff is WORTH discussing. Unlike the other bulls$&%. But it’s also outside the scope of the article. I have to acknowledge it because it actually creates a really strong case for saying “maybe it’s okay for this game to be the sort of game you aren’t expected to get better at.” Maybe this game doesn’t need strategy. After all, if you can play it right out of the gate with minimal skill and have a great time, won’t it still be a great time after ten years of playing it without ever having to get better?
Now, obviously, there’s a few reasons why it’s desirable to allow people to get better at your game. Humans are naturally wired to want to improve. We find acquiring skills and seeing progress satisfying. On average. And beyond that, improvement adds depth of play. As player skill increases, new options open up for the players to use advanced strategies and change their game experience. Consequently, the level of challenge can rise, which allows not just for bigger numbers, but different types of challenges and play experiences.
But there’s another argument for why strategy is important. And it has to do with the fact that Rosewater’s quickie definition isn’t the whole story. Yes, strategy is the thing that you experience when you get better over time. But let’s go back to the train of logic that led us to concerns about approachability and inclusion: if you can get good, you can be bad. If you can get good and be bad, that means there are choices and strategies in the game that are better and choices and strategies that are worse. Some choices are more likely to lead to success. Some choices are more likely to lead to failure. Which means the choice you make helps determine the outcome.
Without the concept of strategy – of good and bad ways to play – your choices actually don’t matter. You could make random choices – or no choices at all – and still have the same chance of succeeding.
The truth is that strategy and surprise work against each other in a dynamic tension arrangement in the same that you definitely remember that inertia and catch-up work. They push and pull against each other. Surprise prevents you from predicting the outcome. Strategy lets you nudge the outcome towards what you want. A game of pure strategy and no surprise is one in which the outcome is assured. Just pick the right choice and there’s nothing in doubt. A game of purse surprise is one in which it doesn’t matter what you do because the outcome is totally out of your hands.
And that reveals that there’s a broad spectrum between strategy and surprise. They aren’t binary qualities. They aren’t things your game either has or doesn’t have. Your game needs some of both, otherwise it isn’t actually a game. At least not one anyone wants to play. There’s a reason the people who really ENJOY slot machines have so many little rules and superstitions and what-not. They have to believe they can affect the outcome.
The question is where to set the needle. Do you set it on more on the strategy side or more on the surprise side? And even once you set the needle, there’s a bunch of other needles to set. Like, I can decide that strategy is a huge part of my game, but I can also decide on what the minimum level of skill that’s needed to win is. And what skills you need. And how many. And how much you can improve at the game. And there’s all sorts of little considerations that affect those decisions. Like approachability. Like depth of play. And like accessibility.
I could write a whole article about just the topic of strategy alone.
But where does D&D land here? Well, if I’m totally honest, I have to admit the strategy built into D&D is pretty minimal. Any strategy that exists in the game is brought in by the game designer. D&D is purely fixated on the numbers and those numbers are stacked in favor of the players winning regardless of what they roll or how they manage their resources. Pretty much every resource the players have offers them the opportunity to boost the already substantial odds in their favor and if the players spend all of their resources, they still have a very good chance at winning if you build adventures and encounters by the book.
The problem is that D&D is a game that promises a lot of strategy. The basic conceit of a role-playing game is that your choices matter. You live or die – you succeed or fail – by the choices you make. Whatever you do has consequences and it’s your job to make the choices that get you to the goal. Whatever goals those are. But we already talked about that.
Fun
The reason I cut off the first article where I did – apart from realizing I had stopped doing critical analysis and was just kicking a puppy that was already unconscious – was because there was a point in Rosewater’s list where I stopped having interesting things to say. And it’s right here. Here, Rosewater observed that a game has to be fun. Playing it has to be enjoyable. And he notes that a surprising number of amateur and professional game designers forget this. And they get so wrapped up in their brilliant designs and mechanics and simulations that they forget to check if the game is actually fun.
He then goes on to note that fun is utterly and completely subjective and everyone has fun for different reasons and there’s no way to design fun or reason out fun. It’s the sort of thing you figure out at the playtest table. You put the game in front of people and see if they like it. And if they don’t, you go back and tweak some s$&% and try again. That’s the only way to know for sure.
And, yep, he’s right. That’s all true. Angry agrees.
Is D&D fun? Well, obviously, I can answer for myself. And the funny thing is that the answer is mostly yes. For all that I bash on the game, I enjoy playing and running it. When I let myself play and run it uncritically, it’s fun. It’s fun the way summer blockbuster movies are mostly fun. Like the Marvel movies. But I’m also just one data point. And one data point is a terrible way to judge anything, no matter how brilliant and stunningly handsome that data point might be.
But D&D is also fun for lots of people. It’s as successful as any previous edition. As far as we know. It’s presiding over the same growth of the fanbase that all the previous editions did. And it has expanded into some new and interesting places where people have discovered they can enjoy D&D without even having to play it. So, yes, D&D is fun. And there’s nothing more to say.
Except for the fact that this is where I had a giant perspective shift. Because D&D being fun may be the biggest problem. And I am not saying that in the hipster way of “it’s mainstream so it sucks” or “it draws attention away from legitimate games that are actually doing good things.” I don’t believe that bulls$&% at all. I think if your game can’t compete with a fun game because its head is lodged so far up it’s a$& that it thinks fun is someone beneath it, your game deserves to get outsold.
But I’ll come back to the fun thing in my closing remarks.
9. Flavor
Remember when I said I had hit a point in the list where I’d stop having interesting things to say? Well, it’s all downhill from here. Mark Rosewater points out that games need flavor – also called trappings – to provide context to the game’s mechanics and to create emotional investment. Poker is an example of a game with no flavor. It’s not about anything. The rules are the rules. You try to gather the best set of symbols and numbers you can with the different possible sets of symbols and numbers defined on an arbitrary list. Whoever’s set has the highest position on the list wins. Chess has a little more flavor. The pieces have names that identify their position in a military hierarchy and you play out a little war with those pieces, trying to keep your leader alive while killing the enemy leader. But the flavor is thin. M:tG has more flavor. You’re both wizards, the cards represent spells, there’s all sorts of world details about the different spells, there’s all sorts of backstory and lore, yadda yadda yadda. But, the lore in M:tG is also totally f$&%ing optional. I can prove it. I played M:tG for many years and I never gave a f$&% about one line of flavor text and I still can’t tell you who Innistrad was and why he was fighting with Nicolas Bolo in the world of Llanowart.
Apart from providing something to get emotionally invested in because most of us who are human beings who really can’t care about the plight of Mr. Strength 12; Intelligence 6, flavor also provides a way to understand and remember rules that are otherwise weird and arbitrary. For example, in M:tG, when two cards fight, you compare these two numbers or maybe those other two numbers sometimes and depending on the result, one of the cards gets destroyed and the player loses some of his 20 points. That’s a weird and complicated thing to remember. But if the cards are “creatures” and the numbers are “offense” and “defense” and the player’s points are “health” and the goal is to kill the other player and the monster can “trample” which means if he kills another creature, he just keeps right on running until he hits the opposing player and does some damage, then it’s a lot easier to make sense of just what the f$&% is happening.
And that’s one of the big things about the flavor of the game. When the flavor and the rules work together, they help you remember how s$&% works. Let me tell you something: it was a lot easier to explain spellcasting years ago when you could explain it in terms of memorizing spells and then having them magically wiped from your memory. Yes, it was a weird concept, but no weirder than anything else in that world. Now, it’s so f$&%ing arbitrary because everything just has these things called spell slots and why are they even called that because that implies that you are filling them with something but it’s really the number of spells that you prepare that are like spell slots that you fill and the spell slots are more like mana points and plus they work differently for every class and what the hell even are they anyway?
And it’s that rant and a thousand others like it that makes me say that D&D has a lot of surface flavor. There’s a lot of details in the world. But almost all of it is s$&% like the flavor text on the Magic cards rather than stuff that explains why the game mechanics are what they are. Stuff that helps make the rules more approachable and understandable and memorable. Most of it is just words.
And this is also why games that involve a particular setting are ALWAYS stronger, more approachable, and more popular than generic anygames.
I guess I did have something interesting to say there.
A Hook
The final thing on Rosewater’s list is a hook. You might call it a USP. You might call it the elevator pitch. It’s basically a quick, short, sharp summary that tells people what to expect from the game and why they want to play it. I could make a joke here about how no one who plays RPGs seems to be able to explain RPGs to someone who doesn’t play in one sentence, but, eh…
I don’t have a lot to say here because, look, D&D DOES have a strong hook:
You explore a world of magic and monsters and take on a series of grand adventures, gaining power, wealth, and fame; and you can do almost anything you can imagine in that world.
Bam. Elevator pitched. Who wouldn’t want to try that?
But, again, here’s where I run into a perspective problem. It’s the same problem I have with the problem of fun. And that is that there’s a problem of perspective here. In both analyzing role-playing games and in designing them. And now it’s time for my closing babble.
Sorry; Not Sorry
I’ve been very hard on D&D – especially 5th Edition – lately. And I do think it deserves it. It invites scrutiny simply because it’s big and popular and it represents an industry and genre as a whole. It’s kind of like how you can’t discuss fast food without discussing McDonald’s and vice versa. But the way I’m assessing it right now is unfair. I’m giving it criticism it doesn’t deserve, but I’m also not giving it criticism it – and probably ALL role-playing games – need to hear.
The original premise of this whole analysis was this:
There’s these ten qualities this renowned game designer says that all games need to have if they are going to be called games, let alone if they are going to be successful games. D&D is not technically a game, it’s a game system. It’s a tool for building and running games. The actual games are the adventures themselves. The ones that WotC and other companies sell. The ones that independent creators distribute. And the ones that homebrewer GMs like me create and run for their friends. Now, those games, no matter who designs, must meet the minimum definition of a game. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see how many of Rosewater’s qualities are baked right into the system of D&D and how many of them the adventure creator is expected to bring to the table?
The theory is this: the more basic game design elements are automatically baked into the system, the fewer the adventure designer has to bring. That doesn’t stop the game designer from bringing them or improving them. But it does mean that a game designer that doesn’t bring those things is going to have a subpar or lackluster game in the end. And this is especially likely if the designer is just some homebrewer GM kid who wants to build fun adventures for his players.
Take, for example, the lack of a solid catch-up mechanic. Once the players start to lose an encounter, they are very likely to continue losing that encounter. And if they lose an encounter to the point that a character dies and they can’t easily add a replacement back into the game, they’re likely to be a disadvantage for the next encounter. And the next. And if the homebrewer GM doesn’t understand catch-up mechanics and doesn’t add something, then the death spiral will show its ugly head if the players have one really bad, unlucky encounter or the GM rolls a few too many crits. And the GM is going to take the blame for that s$&%. Players whose characters die in homebrew adventures tend not to blame D&D or themselves. They tend to blame the person who wrote the adventure. Just like when your 2nd-level party gets killed by three night hags in Curse of Strahd, you don’t complain about D&D being deadly. You say “wow, whoever wrote Curse of Strahd really f$&%ed up.”
However, if D&D had a Final Fantasy style limit break system wherein players who were on the ropes could make desperate, powerful actions to turn the tide of battle or if it had something like the item boxes in Super Mario Kart whereby there was a pool of dice on the table available for damage rolls and each round everyone took a die from the pool and the creatures or characters with the lowest hit dice got the first choice, the GM wouldn’t ever have to worry about the death style. The system already took care of it. There’d be no way to build a D&D adventure without a catch-up mechanic.
From that perspective, D&D should not be judged as a game, but as a toolbox for building games. Because someone has to build the actual games. It might be the designers at WotC making modules for the system. It might be third parties under contract. Or indie creators. Or it might be homebrew GMs. It doesn’t matter who it is. They all need the tools and they all need to be empowered to hit a standard of quality. AND NO: ADVICE IS NOT ENOUGH. In fact, advice is a copout. Do you know what I think when I see a statement like, “Hey, it’s really important that the players have some way to reverse an impending loss so whenever you make an encounter, make sure they have a way to turn the tide. It’s really important.” I think, “wow, if it’s so f$&%ing important and you know it’s that important, why the f$&% didn’t you actually design it right into the core f$&%ing rules I paid one-hundred-fifty-f$&%ing dollars for?! YOU’RE THE GAME DESIGNER!”
Here’s the problem though: D&D wasn’t designed for those game designers. It wasn’t designed for the designers and the indie creators and the homebrewers. It was designed to be fun to play. A lot of work, a lot of playtesting went into making sure the game system was fun. A lot of work went into making sure the player characters would have a lot of options and that they all felt like D&D and that the players would feel powerful and they’d never be penalized or feel ineffective and that they’d have tons of ways to customize their characters. It’s a player-focused game. Here’s a big ole pile of really cool options to make awesome characters and have fun adventures. And we’ll get to the Dungeon Master’s Guide in three months. Or whenever. And I don’t think the designers of D&D had any choice at all in that regard. I think the whole playtesting thing and the “make it as D&D as possible and make sure everyone player thinks it’s D&D and love sit” is a directive that came down from someone else. And that is my apology.
But that’s why I say that the fact the D&D scores so high on the criteria of fun and hook is actually a problem. Because, to be honest, the hook and the fun are the easiest things on that list. Seriously. The hook for any tabletop role-playing game is exceptionally strong. And tabletop RPGs play into so many different types of player engagements that its really hard for even a crappy game not to be fun for some people. Honestly, the people who have the least fun with poorly designed role-playing games are people like me who can’t stop ripping apart the system long enough to realize that playing pretend elves with a bunch of friends and doing whatever cool s$&% you can imagine is pretty much fun no matter what rules you cake around it.
Moreover, the fun and the hook both have the lowest barrier to entry. They require the fewest skills. I’m not saying everyone can build a good game with a solid hook. But, to steal a line from Ratatouille: “not everyone can build a fun game with a solid hook, but a fun game with a great hook can come from anyone.” Not everyone can balance inertia against a catch-up mechanic or find build a system that is approachable for new people but that rewards long-term play and increasing skill.
Role-playing games like D&D are in this weird place because they are games that are not games in themselves. I mean, in the video game industry, all of the companies – big and small – understand that the console isn’t what people are after. The console isn’t the thing people love. I mean, yes, people have loyalty to their consoles and some people have specific feelings on console design. Some people rightly feel, for example, that Sony seems to be the only company in the world that can design a controller for human f$&%ing hands instead of Brobdingnagian hulks (Microsoft) or tiny robots with rectangular hands (Nintendo). But these companies view their consoles as loss leaders. Those are the things they have to sell so they can sell games. Or license games anyway. It’s the games that people want to play. And thus, the consoles with the best games are going to be the consoles that are the easiest to make great games for.
I’m not saying that D&D shouldn’t be inherently fun. Of course, it should have fun baked in. But I’ve noticed an odd pattern lately. A growing pattern. Lots of GMs are doing a lot of work to D&D. They are looking to hack the system. They are looking to build more advanced encounters and adventures. They need more levers to pull. More things to drive the game and to manage the pace, the tension, the strategy, the surprise, all of it. Lots of GMs are struggling. Especially homebrewers. Lots of GMs seem frustrated with the adventures they’re running. And lots of GMs I’ve talked to are looking to jump ship from D&D these days.
But they’re players won’t let them.
And I think that illustrates what I’m saying better than anything else. The system isn’t designed for designers to make good games with, it’s designed for players to buy and demand that GMs run for them.
But I AM still having fun.
I can’t help but wonder how many of the problems with D&D we could reasonably have expected the designers to catch.
If a hypothetical guy called The Unhappy GM were to design and publish his own system, how much slack should we give him for any flaws that emerge in his brilliant new system after several years of use and scrutiny by thousands of people?
So what argument are you making here? That D&D deserves more slack because of its age and following? Or that hypothetical products that address a problem should be judged according to how well they accomplish that design goal?
I don’t see Rijst making any arguments. It’s more of a philosophical question, combined with excitement for a new and potentially brilliant game system.
Anyway, that’s my take on Rijst’s comment.
You’re right. In general, we can expect some flaws to be obvious early on while others become apparent only after repeated exposure.
Problems of the second category are easier to miss during the design and testing stages. I was wondering if it’s fair to pick on those as much as we’ve had a lot of time to digest everything since 5e was published. I didn’t know about all the open play tests though, I’m still fairly new to ttrpgs.
D&D 5E was announced as D&D Next in January of 2012. It had already been in development for an unknown period of time at that point and was being playtested in a closed and limited state as part of that design. Four months later, it went into public play-testing and stayed in public playtesting for approximately 18 months concurrent with design and development. After that, it returned to closed playtesting for balancing and a final spit and polish. The PHB and the first adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver, were released in July of 2014, while the remaining core rulebooks were released in Q3 and Q4 of 2014. Participation in the public playtest was free and numerous adventures and official events were released throughout the playtest cycle. So, disregarding how long it was in design and development to begin with and assuming the text for the PHB at least had to be finalized six months before the book went to print, which is extremely generous, that means the game was being tested by the public for the better part of two years. And that was a major selling point. This was supposed to be the edition that the fans wanted, the edition that was the best incarnation of everything D&D had ever been.
Now, I know they were making radical changes throughout the first six to nine months of that playtest, but even so, with that sort of closed, open, and then closed again playtesting for over two years, this should have been the most polished edition of D&D ever. Instead, it somehow still manages to feel rushed. And that is without me revealing anything I’m not supposed to know and confining myself only to what everyone knows about the development cycle.
But, in the end, I also don’t care about cutting anyone anyone slack. At the end of the day, a team of game designers working at the biggest RPG publisher in the world decided this was a finished product for whose core rules I should pay $150. Their names are inside the cover. The company published it. And they are selling it with that price tag. Every person has to judge, for themselves, whether they got the value they expected from those names, from that company, and for that price tag. That is how you evaluate a product. And this was – and still is – advertised as the best incarnation of D&D, the most playtested version, and the one that actually listened to its fans. I don’t think it’s unfair to judge the game based on the company’s own stated criteria. Nor is it unfair to judge it based on the design principles of another game designer who works at the same company, albeit on a different product line.
Ok that’s clear, thanks for replying.
In a way, I think 5E is actually amazingly polished, in the same way that a totally generic, soulless but still absolutely enormous pop song is amazingly polished. I remember reading an article (that essentially praised 5E as the sole savior of RPGs, saying the genre had been dying before 5E rode in on its magnificent white charger and saved it) which had a quote from one of the developers that said, to paraphrase, that they playtested the hell out of the game and anything that didn’t appeal to everyone, that was out. Which, naturally, means basically nothing has drawback and characters are always awesome.
Interestingly, despite this apparent design by subtraction, they only ever subtracted (or effectively did, see also encumbrance ) mechanics and never any kind of character options or anything. So the default setting is a mish-mash of fantasy stuff, any given piece of which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the tone or story or what the GM’s going for, where magic is so common that its functionally impossible to make it at all special. And when this is the default, not presented as extra options, players get mad when you tell them not to play whatever they damn well please – and honestly, I do kind of get it, since at a certain point, 5E is all about who you’re playing, and not how you play.
Okay, first up, thank you for articulating some of my long running… challenges, with 5E. Had a whole lot of ‘debates’ with gaming friends over this particular issue, to which the response is just “Well, if a game is fun to play, I don’t think it can be considered poorly designed”. This does give a way of explaining my perspective on that small matter.
I have to say, the specific mention of catch up mechanics is something that has me interested/seems like a useful addition. I would definitely be interested in hearing more detail on what you think such mechanics might look like.
He’s mentioned a possible mechanic in one of his posts – I think it might have been the “fighting spirit” one? Basically, the disabled/dying state should instead be some sort of “you can move but can’t fight” state, which would allow players to retreat when the fight turns against them, instead of needing to first get the dying character back on their feet before you can run away with them.
That’s not a catch-up mechanic, it just mitigates a similar problem (it prevents player hopelessness by encouraging players to give up on an encounter when they can’t win, but by itself it doesn’t make it easier for them to win). Catch-up mechanics would actually work against that goal – they encourage players to keep going when they are losing, since dying would have a lower cost. A catch-up mechanic would be something like when a character dies, their ghost giving the party a minor buff for a day or so.
“…no one is interested in the fact that exhaustion would be a really useful mechanic if…” etc.
I would be more than interested! I am struggling exactly with the same problem, in my own house rules.
Please, your help on this point would be more than welcome!
Also, OT: thanks for restoring the free comments. Well done. No one is immune to mistakes, including writing s%&*# (I did it too). But well-intentioned people can try to improve if they are made aware of their mistakes.
Thanks so much for writing this… I think it really articulates some issues I’ve had in my gaming life that have been bugging me but that I couldn’t quite pin down. The idea that D&D (especially 5E) is made to create ‘awesome’ characters first and good adventures with good gameplay 5th or something pretty much sums it all up. It explains why, as much as I liked a lot of Pathfinder 2E’s dedign, it still rubbed me the wrong way – well, look at the book, the section on chararcters starts pretty much right off the bat, while the section entitled “Playing the Game” starts on pg. 442.
I guess it could be said that there’s a sort of tyranny of the players – there’s more of them than GMs, and so they tend to unofficially vote down anything that would disempower or limit their characters. I don’t hold this against players – I do the same thing when I’m on the other side of the screen, its perfectly natural to want to be awesome.
Maybe being more aware of this phenomenon will give me the courage to be more restrictive and make my players work more for their victories. Hopefully, after they’ve dusted themselves off and buried their dead they realize they had fun and that winning is better when you work for it (and as an added bonus, maybe they’ll try to work as a team?)… or maybe we’ll just go back to showing off our characters like everyone else is a sidekick and assuming I won’t kill them because they’re too important to die.
Say there are a group of people. One of them, lets call him Joe, has a short attention span, never takes anything that serious, and never focuses on anything.
“Lets go caving underground, it will be dangerous thou”
“Should we bring Joe?”
“Do we want to be successful and avoid failure in this activity?”
“Yes.”
“…probably not then.”
Or
“Lets go pretend caving underground in a game, it will be dangerous for the characters thou”
“Should we bring Joe?”
“Do we want to be successful and avoid failure in this activity?”
“Yes.”
“…probably not then.”
I don’t understand your point here, could you please clarify?
“From that perspective, D&D should not be judged as a game, but as a toolbox for building games.”
But then you write, “It was designed to be fun to play.”
Nope. It was designed to help a GM create a game that is fun to play. There is no fun in the rules. There are rules that enable a GM to create a fun experience, but without the GM there’s no game and no fun.
If someone wanted to evaluate an RPG ruleset as a game they’d have to include a GM in their assessment. But since every GM has different capabilities, it’s not possible to come to any useful conclusion about the ‘RPG as game’ question. Some GMs prefer lightweight rules, some crunchy rules, etc. and each brings their own set of tools to the toolbox.
So as a game? No. As a toolbox? Yes. Please evaluate it and critique it and modify it and add new tools to the toolbox.
Except it wasn’t designed that way. I’m evaluating it the way it was designed. And in the end, you’re just repeating what I said: that it SHOULD be designed as a toolbox.
The problem is, if I evaluate it as a toolbox, it sucks worse.
It was designed to be ‘fun to play’.
Almost all positive design choices in 5e come from a desire to make playing the game fun (particularly for the unfamiliar). The process of making a character, looking forward to what they’ll get, that stuff is nailed wonderfully. Looking over feats is fun instead of homework. Subclasses are a great way to have someone pick a general thing they want to be, and then an overseeable choice of extra flavour.
Advantage and disadvantage are WAY more tangible than getting a few +2’s. (I think they went too far with removing modifiers, because they work great together with advantage but it is still fantastic on its own).
Casting spells has been massively simplified so that players have an easier time looking up spell effects. No more touch and flatfooted AC, no more varying spell DC per spell level. You just write the magic number on the sheet and always use that number for DCs.
Some of these changes are neutral with respect to the DM (the classes – subclasses division can just be taken wholesale into a 5.5/6th edition no matter what)
But other changes, such as completely removing modifiers, has created a tough situation for DMs where it is harder to craft meaningfully different scenarios through them. Same with DR, same with flattening all skills into a single proficiency. Every time the choice was between something that inconvenienced the players in the moment vs giving the DM a different tool or gear for encounter tweaking, they’ve chosen not to inconvenience players.
They didn’t have to do this. They could’ve said players always get 8+prof+spell mod, but given DMs a section on “effective casters vs wild cards” where the effective caster gets like a +4 bonus but uses lower level spells (which they’ve had time to master because unlike the PCs mages that’s all they do), while the wild card has the maybe a 6 instead of an 8 but also readily accesses spells that the players are not able to cast themselves (or they have cool side effects like the sorcerer). These are the sort of subsystems I expect playtesting to iron out. Players never need to see these rules, but it gives the GM the ability to build in so much extra complexity.
“Hey, it’s really important that the players have some way to reverse an impending loss so whenever you make an encounter, make sure they have a way to turn the tide. It’s really important.”
It’s funny, but WotC actually has included catch-up mechanics in the past… for the monsters… in 4E. Boss level monsters unlocked new abilities at “Bloodied” (50% HP) and “Surge” (25% HP). And while, yes, this did play into the “MMO but on paper” vibe some people got out of 4E, it was a neat mechanic for the big fights, that the dev team actually took time to give GMs examples of what multi-stage boss fights should look like.
How hard would it be to give the players something like this? Whether it’s some sort of ability (damage, healing, defensive, whatever) that can only be used at moments of high stress (<= 50% HP), or that characters at low HP can take more actions for a brief time, or replenish expended resources, or whatever.
And please don't talk to me about magical healing, or even worse, the Breath of Life spell as being ways to "catch up". Reserving limited resources just in case bad things happen is what has lead to the trope of spellcasters not being willing to use their leveled spells, and insisting upon resting once they've used their biggest, baddest one, no matter how early in the day it is. Forcing the spellcaster to sacrifice a resource they already feel is too scarce, spells per day, on emergency contingency just feeds the problem, and in some ways, supports the "spellmiser" playstyle.
Didn’t everyone have a Second Wind in 4e? Or was that just SAGA (speaking of systems that utilize the whole exhaustion thing as a broad system to hang mechanics on)
4E was a huge offender in the category of no way to turn the tide. The big problem with 4E was that most battles were decided by round 2-3 and it was just a matter of grinding down the enemy. Mainly because the battles were so long and there were so many nullifying mechanics, you just couldn’t easily get a lucky tide-turning play in 4E. Basically 4E took all the tide-turning mechanics like save-or-die and critical hits then nerfed them totally into the ground which only left a straight-up numbers game with very predictable results.
And no, magical healing isn’t a tide-turning effect. If anything magical healing is the opposite, because it’s a way to reverse a tide-turning effect. It amounts to a “counterspell” versus damage effects where you’re able to undo a damage effect. And the power of combat healing was another feature of 4E that made it extremely one-sided.
The thing is that in an RPG, it’s often the monsters that need the catch-up, not the player. This is because the majority of battles are going to favor the players, but that being said, you want the players to still feel the monsters could be a threat if they get unlucky. 4E did a real terrible job with that, where most battles were over before they began with monsters that just couldn’t win.
As far as bloodied buffs, honestly I’m against that sort of thing. Mainly because what it does is further encourage people to focus fire, which is already an insanely good tactic as it is in D&D. Providing more incentive to focus fire is not a thing the game needs. If anything, I tend to prefer the ability to get some bonus when one of your allies is downed. So you get a catch-up buff and it creates an interesting situation where focusing down a target isn’t always the best choice.
I am a little nervous about the idea of the *monsters* having a catch-up mechanism, unless that mechanism permits the characters to make new decisions or come up with new strategies.
Paraphrasing if not doing violence to Angry’s rough philosophy in this area, combat encounters are really only interesting insofar as they are decision trees. If your characters have hit a point in a combat encounter where no further decisions on how to handle the encounter are required – i.e. they can see clearly that they’re going to win because the enemy cannot hit them – then it is time for the DM to step in and say “You bathe in the monsters’ blood, well done, have some XP and some sweet moolah, let’s move on.”
As you say, magical healing for monsters is not a catch up mechanic, because it doesn’t give the characters a new option for dealing with the threat. It doesn’t force or allow the characters to choose some other way to end the encounter. The characters can keep on presumably using the same approach they did to bring the monster’s HP count down to 25% of what it originally was or whatever.
This is part of what makes Angry’s Paragon monsters useful: when a paragon monster’s hit point pool hits zero, all continuing effects on it are also ended, i.e. the Glitterdust spell you hit it with no longer blinds it, and given you don’t have that spell anymore, you have to think of some other approach to end the encounter.
My idea of a catch-up mechanic in this area is that if the monster hits X -1 hitpoints, its resistances change. Maybe its combat abilities get stronger, but it changes from being resistant to fire to being resistant to cold, so your snowballs don’t work on it anymore, you have to think of something else. You can’t just prolong the combat without choice in the hope that the monster will pull some 20s and bring a few players down to disabled, you have to force the players to ask if they should change approach (even if they don’t).
There’s plenty to comment on, but the one thing you mentioned that I have mixed/negative leaning feelings towards are catch-up mechanics. My opinion has been that characters have a range of abilities/powers/resources, and it is up to the players to use strategy to effectively employ these resources. In scenarios where a character (or party) has run out of resources or uses bad strategy, or if they are just unlucky, the game is an impartial mistress and characters may have to flee, lose, or in worst case scenarios death awaits.
Adding last ditch healing surges or deathbed magic nonsense or whatever the mechanic to me is cheap. There needs to be risk and consequences, and the game is already stacked enough in the favor of the heroes. The only scenario where I would differ is, if, as the GM, I really botched my planning and created an unwinnable scenario or completely unfair situation that the characters could not extricate themselves from – then, and only then would I consider the dreaded deus ex machina. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me though (I’ve been running for 30+ years so I honestly don’t remember) but I am always thinking about it.
Do you think the game needs catch-up mechanics? Your statement seems to say this, if so, why?
I think, more than anything, what Angry is saying in regards to catch-up mechanics, is not “Every table should have and use catch-up mechanics”, but more of “the base game system should have set in place a set of catch-up mechanics that can be used by players and monsters alike”. Having these mechanics spelled out in the actual game rules would make it to where the GM would not feel as if they had to perform the Deus ex Machina (either for the players or a planned recurring villain), which feels like a cheat to both GM and players alike, but rather put the ability to recover from a botch or critical misfortune in the hands of the players (or recurring villain) in a way that does not disrupt the flavor and pacing of the game. And sure, if you want, maybe there should be negative consequences for leaning into the catch-up mechanic (or limited uses), so the players don’t rely on it as the safety net or trump card, but rather the “‘Oh S$%&!’ button” it should be.
Less work and stress for the GM, more engagement and consequences for the players, fewer TPKs, and NO DEUS EX. Sounds like everyone wins that way.
The line of thinking shouldn’t be “if catchup mechanics were added to the game as-is, xyz would happen” but rather “if catchup mechanics were added to the game, designers could do xyz with the game as a result.” Run fewer encounters per day that are each more punishing than average, for example, or be more confident in the PCs’ abilities to cope with the coming encounters when they’ve already used more resources than were expected (and design around it).
I think Jay’s got it. The point isn’t that catch up mechanisms should be put in to make the game easier, but that they could be put in to retain tension and uncertainty throughout combat. Presumably they could apply to monsters as well.
Even something simple like “+1 to hit when bloodied” is a catch-up mechanism.
I think this point was addressed in the first article in the series.
I feel D&D wouldn’t necessarily need the type of atchc up mechanics that other games need. Since you have the option of changing the goal. In Magic, the goal is always to defeat your opponent, if you defeat your opponent you win the game and if you don’t defeat your opponent you lose the game. However, in D&D if you’re losing a fight against a hobgoblins you can try to retreat, or negotiate, or even surrender. So an encounter level catch up isn’t as important, but instead you’d want a large adventure scale catch-up mechanic.
One thing to remember is competitive versus non-competitive play. A catch-up mechanic certainly looms large in a competitive game because it becomes a bad social experience if one person out of four in the game quickly falls behind and spends the better part of two hours knowing they’ve lost but being unable to leave because the game will fall to bits if one player quits.
D&D at least is meant to be noncompetitive. (There’s obviously some viewpoints that see the GM – not the monsters, the GM – as the players’ adversary, but these are the viewpoints of morons, because the GM always has Rule Zero.) The general idea is that the players cooperate together to achieve a certain outcome: the classic four of mage, cleric, rogue, and fighter is built that way so everyone contributes to the party’s overall fortunes. It’s -presumed- that if the fighter goes down, the cleric will be healing him and the mage will be casting invisibility on the cleric so he doesn’t get swatted while he does so.
So my view would be the catchup mechanic in a RPG needs to be something group-based: if one or two characters go down in a fight, the remaining ones get some sort of emergency boost, a shot of adrenaline.
Yes, that’s a good point about moving the encounter goal to a different theater.
But for another example, consider the escalation die in 13th Age, which increases every round to give a larger bonus to all attack rolls. To compensate the monsters are commensurately harder, so players start at a disadvantage and gain momentum as they stay in the fight. Unless they’re fighting a monster who can also use the escalation die.
All healing in the middle of combat already counts as a catch up mechanic, and it does change what we expect characters to be able to accomplish.
It’s a tricky balancing act.
I house rule (like I assume most people these days do) that if your character dies you can make a new character at the same level. I think that is the catch-up mechanic that stops a player going “oh, Dave the Barbarian is dead, DND is OVER FOR ME”. Which, frankly, is the purpose of a catch-up mechanic – i.e. you never lose so hard that play is ruined. There is still RPG risk and consequence (which I agree is critical to dramatic tension) and the cost is that that character is gone forevermore, but the player can continue to engage with the game.
Angry was not talking about catch up mechanics for new characters to get to equal level. He was talking about catching up within something like a combat where there are two sides competing. Due to several design choices, D&D fights often spiral either towards easy victory or heavy defeat. One bad die roll at a critical moment can set an otherwise exciting fight down spiraling either side.
An example of a catch up mechanic on the monsters side would be that a bloodied monster makes a choice, either it fights with no concern for its future, or it flees at all costs. If it does the former, it will gain stuff like a second wind, more attacks per round or a special per X rounds becomes once per round for a short duration, etc. If it does manage to survive, it will be severely weakened afterwards, but all of a sudden a lucky heavy hit is not the be all end all. A cornered animal is super dangerous because they will strike without their usual priority of self preservation.
Alternatively for the players a catch up mechanic would be that the first time in a combat when a PC goes down, everyone who can see this gets an immediate reaction round (like a surprise round, but maybe more limited). That creates a concrete decision moment for the party. Either they use this extra bit of action time to get everyone fleeing, or they strike back at their full coordinated nova force in order to realign combat.
Perhaps all characters who took such an immediate reaction suffer some level of exhaustion after combat is over (and yes I would love to hear more on that done well), so that it impedes further exploration.
There are many ways you can build in catch up mechanics that don’t feel like every combat is rubber banded. So long as there is a good answer to ‘why wouldn’t we just always do this?’ Otherwise you’ll just end up with more extreme nova bursts that just make the problem worse.
You’re right D&D is pretty stacked in the players’ favour but I think it still worth discussing.
The first thing that pops into my mind is finding a better way to handle retreating. Like Angry said one character dropping can affect the whole party. This also seems like a good place to build up more interaction. Providing the party with a few different strategies to escape a hairy situation could be considered a catch up mechanic if they can get their fallen allies to safety and live to try again.
Maybe a lone character gains a crazy offensive advantage in combat if the rest of the party leaves the battlefield. As long as they have an appropriate bonus to make it a viable option, they could potentially turn the tides or die a memorable death. Either way the player needs to weigh the needs of the party against their own character’s needs.
That’s just an initial idea, but there’s a lot of things you could do just with the retreating idea, without making it too cheap.
in line with what jay said, there’d be a significant difference between what’d happen to the game if you added a catchup mechanic on top of things (which as you say are already stacked in the players’ favor) or if you redesigned a portion of each class’ abilities/powers/resources into catchup mechanic ‘oh shit’ buttons.
Not all catch-up mechanics are so explicitly named. Starcraft 2, for example, has very robust catch-up thanks to the many imbalances built into the game. Each player has certain advantages over his opponent, and the one who has more is considered to be ahead, but both sides are striving to exploit their advantages.
Dark Templar, for example, are not great in a stand-up fight, but because most units cannot normally target them, a player falling behind can build DTs and try to sneak them into a gap in their opponent’s detection and paralyze their production. High risk, high reward, not worth betting the game on unless you’re already losing.
Massive oversimplification, obviously. Still, searching for Greatest Starcraft Comebacks will turn up dozens of games, each featuring a player exploiting one of their few advantages or surprising their opponent to catch-up.
Thanks for finishing this. I didn’t even mind having to re-read your old $3i! or the Rosewater thing.
D&D 5e feels like a paint set that says it contains all the colors you need, but only gives a couple, and not the types you can mix to make others. When you point this out it says you can always go find your own pigments, learn how to create paint, and then use that since home made paint is compatible.
I’ve grown as a DM due to the limited pallet of colors, but more and more I wish the set gave me more colors to start with. There are lots of pictures I want to paint, but don’t have the time to create so many new colors that I might as well start from scratch.
The interesting thing about this, as someone who hasn’t played D&D since AD&D 2nd Ed as a twelve-year-old but has played plenty of other RPGs in recent years, is that from reading your articles it often feels like D&D is actually ahead of a lot of other games in a lot of ways.
I mean, I don’t care for the setting of D&D at all, or overly much for the rules mechanics (as I understand them from the outside), but from all your articles about encounters and resources and monster design, D&D clearly tries pretty hard to provide a framework for creating satisfying games.
Most other RPGs that I’ve come across… don’t. Here’s the Hypothetical RPG Big Book Of Monsters! This monster is called a Xyzzy. It has seven wings and three big teeth. OK, cool, so… can I throw the players up against a Xyzzy in the first encounter of the first session, or is that a guaranteed TPK? The HRPGBBOM never tells me. Ever. And I know there’s no guarantees even with CR and stuff, and that few adventures or sessions (and fewer interesting ones) are exactly six encounters with exactly one hard and one easy, etc. But at least D&D tells you something about what the expected outputs are for expected inputs. It’s something to work with. Pretty much all the RPGs I’ve played lately just gives you the tools and say: do what you like! OK. Freedom. But the freedom to run a painfully unsatisfying game because no player should even see a Xyzzy until they’ve levelled up twenty times and you only find that out after all the player characters are dead, is freedom that isn’t worth a damn.
So, yeah. I believe you when you say that D&D doesn’t do enough. Or in the right ways. Or whatever. But I give it credit for trying, or at least being aware that trying would be helpful.
Every healing ability that is usable during combat is a catch-up mechanic. Combat is a race to deal damage faster, and healing keeps one side from losing if they are falling behind in the race.
No one ever alpha strikes with a healing ability. If you had an entire team of characters that could ONLY heal, they wouldn’t be able to defeat opponents.
In light of this, it seems weird to complain that D&D doesn’t have solid examples of these mechanics, especially after establishing that almost all negative consequences funnel into dealing damage to hit points. Maybe these abilities are insufficient to the task, but there are a LOT of instances of them.
Angry, I think you’re going to put too much pressure on yourself to design the perfect game with no flaws when/if you eventually publish rpg system.
Every healing ability is a catch-up mechanic. The game centers around reducing enemy HP to zero before yours goes to zero, which means healing is about catching up in that race. You never start the first turn of the first combat with a healing ability.
Saying that 5e doesn’t have solid catch-up mechanics is weird. There are so many ways to heal, even when someone goes to zero HP.
Video games run rings around most RPGs in terms of popularity and general success on their design goals for one reason when you get right down to it: video games sell a complete experience, RPGs sell books of rules. Third edition is the apotheosis of this concept.
Rests are the Catch Up mechanic of DnD (on the Adventure scale, anyway).
Or… they could be, if they were designed a little better….
In a game about resource attrition, rests are about regaining some measure of lost resources (HP, curing wounds and conditions, refreshing spells or abilities and so on). The concept could be expanded to become an interesting game feature, rather than the anemic afterthought it currently feels like. Actions during rests might be limited, thus forcing players to choose WHICH resources they needed to prioritize recovering. Or maybe Rests are only given out when the PCs have been roundly defeated (such a status might require a change in the death mechanics to be less dumb or less final)… but it would fit the narrative pretty well. Think about it: In every good piece of heroic fiction, Rests are when the heroes, beaten and bloody, collect for a moment to hang their heads, then pluck up their courage, gather their resources and head out to face down their foe once more.
Maybe there are different sizes of rests that allow for different scales of aciton, and correspond to different narrative niches. The ‘five minute’ rest of DnD 4e? Well, you can take those at will, between encounters, but you only get to trade certain resources into other resources (hit dice into HP for example). The ‘1 hour’ rest of 5e, might allow you to recoup some bigger things, but they only come when the enemy doesn’t know the PCs are coming, or no longer considers them a threat (say after a defeat). “Downtime” or whatever it is between adventures might be what players use to recover things like lost limbs…. or other serious health issues… eldritch curses, maybe… things that tend to be more permanent than cuts and scrapes in your body-hugging leather armor.
The point is, all these things fill the same role, recovering resources, just at different scales, and thus have different places in the narrative….
Huh…. it’s almost like this is suggesting that different resources could be rated at different scales and thus could be accounted for in game design….. weird.
(I’m sure that was much less coherent than even Angry’s wildest ramblings, but I hope it helps somebody, or sparks some thought at least. ^^,)
The roguelike dungeon-crawler Darkest Dungeon does something a lot like this, where when resting in the dungeon different characters have different abilities they can use, and the party only has a limited number of points to spend on them (which could easily be time in a ttrpg). It could be cool to have something where there are a few default actions everyone can do – bandaging wounds, maybe recovering spell slots, and then some special things for each class, like a Paladin giving an inspiring speech to buff the party or a wizard performing a ritual to power up his magic going forward. The choice would mean you could recover lost resources if you needed, but if you’d been playing well and conserving them you could instead give yourself a little rewarding bonus.
For some reason, reading this article made me miss how things were back at 4e times.
I feel like a lot of these issues had been already figured out by the design, but they got rolled back when 5e came out.
It feels as though a lot of people are missing the point about catch-up mechanics. It’s not about having some last-ditch ability a character can pull out if they’re losing a fight. It’s about making sure that a game doesn’t get dragged out long after the outcome has already been determined. Monopoly, for example, tends to be an incredibly boring game because once one or two players happen to have acquired the majority of properties, there’s no way for the other players to catch up with them. But it might take another hour or longer before one of them actually wins, so there are several players just going through the motions knowing that there’s absolutely no point in playing.
D&D combats are short enough that it’s simply not an issue there. If you make bad choices or get really unlucky you might lose, but if you’re only fighting for 4 or 5 rounds, and the outcome isn’t clear until after at least 2 or 3, it doesn’t feel boring or dragged out. The potential issue with D&D is instead at the longer term adventure or campaign level. If the players do too badly in the first fight, they may not be capable of continuing and may need to head back to town for healing, recruiting characters who aren’t dead, and so on. And if they’re on a time limit to save the princess, they know it’s now impossible for them to manage it in time. But there are still two days of adventuring left before they would actually reach the climax. Do they just carry on in a dead duck adventure knowing they can’t win? Give up and start a new one? Expect the GM to fudge things so victory is actually possible?
The problem isn’t that the players have lost, it’s that they lost too early and now don’t have any choices – boredom, quitting, or throwing out any consequences. Losing a climatic fight is fine, and doesn’t need any last-minute catch-up powers to avoid it. Losing an early fight and spoiling the rest of an adventure is much more of a problem. Of course the GM is always able to fix things behind the scenes if they want to, but the whole point of the article is that it would be much better if there was something built into the system instead of relying on the GM to recognise the problem and invent a fix themselves.
Apologies for the double post, but thinking about it there are a couple of interesting examples. Firstly, video games. A lot of early adventure games are considered really rather poorly designed, because it was possible to fail them long before you actually knew you’d failed – if you missed picking up an object early on, you might be unable to complete a puzzle several hours later. The adventurers above may not even have realised they’d screwed up early, but it will still feel like a massive let-down when they discover the princess was already dead and all the time in between has essentially been wasted.
So the better games generally had what was effectively a catch-up mechanic; usually simply allowing you to go back to previously visited locations. So instead of finding out that you’ve wasted hours with no possibility of winning, you get told that you’ve screwed up and given the opportunity to fix it. It doesn’t translate directly to RPGs because it removes the possibility of actually losing, but the principle is there.
The second example is chess. Notably, chess doesn’t have any kind of actual catch-up mechanic, but it does have clear rules on how to get out of a dead-duck game whose outcome is already known, and it makes an interesting contrast to most other games. Usually, it’s considered rather unsporting to the point of outride rude to quit a game just because you’re losing. In chess, it’s actually considered rude not to do so, since you’re just dragging things out when everyone already knows the winner. The difference is in having the rules for resigning (or agreeing to a draw) explicitly stated as part of the rules. In most games, quitting is seen as not being within the rules and therefore bad in some way, but in chess it’s just a normal way for the game to end. Quitting a game of Monopoly is rude, seeing football players walk out of a game halfway through is almost unheard of, but almost no professional chess games ever make it to checkmate. Boxing and martial arts also usually have rules about ending a match early if someone is losing too badly.
I would argue that a game doesn’t actually need a catch-up mechanic at all. What is needed is a way to avoid wasting time continuing to play when the eventual outcome is already known. A catch-up mechanic is one way to do that, but an official way to call an end can work just as well.
I remember you talking about a TRPG module that guides the GM in a villain-chase for the player characters: but then ends before climax and tells the GM to finish it.
What if H:tGC had similar instructables for Elemental Monster encounters?
It guides the GM to show a landslide smothering the fire, or someone dumps water on the elemental. Then it starts another encounter “Now you and your players understand elementals in H:tGC, finish building this encounter and play it.”
And then other small instructables could be released for other special cases?
Good thing it’s all hypothetical.
“what really drives me crazy is how much I have to work to bring any lever or hook or incentive or disincentive into the game that isn’t hit point loss.”
This sentence highlights one of the biggest complains I have with 5E, but I could never state so succinctly. 5E has so many issues with the lack of any long-term consequences. It really sucks.
What’s really nuts is that they were on their way to that polished system with the condition track in d20 Star Wars Saga Edition. It was kludgy as implemented, hooked into the hp system as it was, but it was really easy to understand and wouldn’t take much to finesse into more specific conditions. I could see hooking progressive blindness, deafness, taint, etc to saving throws and condition track.
Am I the only one who finds talk of a big problem at the core of the d20 mechanic more interesting than the rest of the article?
I’m guessing, but maybe he was referring to the basic stats? Str, etc. Angry has written about how stats could be handled better several times, and stats are pretty fundamental to D&D’s d20 mechanic…
Your typo “game of purse surprise” immediately conjured the image of a mimic coin purse in my head.
Not a mimic in the shape of a coin purse. Too easy.
A bag of holding shaped like a coin purse filled with gold coins and mimics shaped like gold coins.
3.5e had Gold Bugs, if I’m remembering things right. Little swarms of flesh-eating critters that looked exactly like ancient gold pieces 😛
“what really drives me crazy is how much I have to work to bring any lever or hook or incentive or disincentive into the game that isn’t hit point loss.”
I could say the same thing about 4E, and I state that as an avid 4E GM. It seems to be a D&D problem, not necessarily tied to a specific edition. But, like Angry said, D&D is designed to prioritize “fun” and “a hook” and certainly a “flavor.” D&D has sacred cows, but by this point we’ve learned enough as game designers to realize those cows aren’t producing as much milk as they should. I think that this is why 5E feels flat and lacks heart. To fix this, some of the other aspects Rosewater brings up need to be emphasized.
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Honestly the whole problem of D&D’s popularity doesn’t come from it being fun, it’s the fact that it’s a big brand name. Today’s D&D is a hollow shell of what it was, driven totally by blind brand loyalty. It’s the Call of Duty of tabletop gaming. I had one player in particular that pretty much utterly hated 4E, but he kept buying all the books, kept wanting to make it work (he had more 4E books than I did and I was the DM). Even though I repeatedly pointed to a giant library of different other RPGs that we could try instead, he’d rather just play D&D and hate it. Hell, I even convinced him to play Mutants and Masterminds once, and he loved it, but after that one session he wanted to to back to 4E D&D, the game that he repeatedly complained about and called a boring grind (and it was).
Even the players that jumped ship from 4E, most of them went to pathfinder or stayed on 3E, so basically they were still playing D&D even when they weren’t playing D&D. Even if you convince some to roam, they usually don’t roam far. And sadly the 4E era was actually a GOOD era for getting people to try different things, the modern time is even worse.
Enter the 5E era, which “everyone” seems to love. It’s not a good game, it’s a barely mediocre job that’s applauded as God’s gift to RPGs just because it’s the big brand name and it has a few sporadic moments of fun here and there. But I’ll straight up say it: D&D 5E sucks. The only reason most of us consider it at all is because it’s easy to get a group for. And it’s sad, because there’s a lot of great games out there, but the vast majority of the player base will never get to play them.
“The system isn’t designed for designers to make good games with, it’s designed for players to buy and demand that GMs run for them.”
D&D is applauded the way it is today because it appeals to the sheep. Angry says it best when he says its a game for players to throw at the GMs and demand they run them.
I just started getting back into D&D after a good 15 years or so and yeah, I want those knobs and levers! GIVE ME MORE TOOLS! Where are these 3 pillars of game play/modes? All I see is a stale and repetitive combat mechanic. If you take the game at face value it really is just tabletop bowling where the GM is constantly resetting the pins. The players knock them down and feel good about themselves. I come home from game night and my wife asks me this question. “Did you win?” F*&$ if I know, I’m the GM. If I “win” then everybody else loses. Anyways its not about that. I just do my best to make the content as epic as possible.
I find myself drooling over Angry’s next post about hacking game mechanics because I’m just dying for something innovative beyond HP walls.
D&D IS fun, but man do I have to put in a lot of work to keep it exciting these days. I keep trying to pull my players away from it but the Achilles heel of that strategy is D&D is incredibly accessible for pretty much everyone. Introducing anything with some real meat is like pulling teeth.