This week’s Long, Rambling Introduction™ is non-optional. Without it, people won’t know what the hell to make of this mess of an article. So, I’m moving the Long, Rambling Introduction™ below a header to keep people that normally skip this bulls$&% from missing a necessary introduction.
The Total Necessary Introduction That’s Neither Long nor Rambling
You get three articles for the price of one today. Except each article is about a third as long as the articles I usually write. So, you’re technically getting one disjointed mess of a three-part article for the price of one. But, since I’m claiming it’s three separate articles, I don’t have to worry about how to segue from one topic to the next. I can just insert a couple of hard breaks and call it a day.
Here’s the deal. First, I’m going into crunch time for the next two weeks on a couple of projects. Second, I’m going on a sabbatical retreat thing to decompress from interacting too much with too many extremely passionate readers who don’t know when enough is enough. I posted a couple of updates and a transcript of an emotional breakdown recently. Check those out. See if you can spot the exact moment that my spirit broke.
Meanwhile, there’s a handful of topics that came up during some of the actual good, fun interactions with readers that weren’t trying to crush my soul. These topics – there’s three – arose because of things I said in my recent social interaction articles. And, if I’m going to continue talking about social interaction, I should probably deal with these topics. But the three topics in question also have broader applications and implications. There are some pretty fundamental issues of game design, adventure design, and the GM mindset wrapped up in them.
Problem is, none of these topics requires enough discussion to fill an entire article. And I really can’t squeeze three more articles into my release schedule right now anyway. So I decided to write a mini-article about each one, staple them together, and pass them off as actual content. Which I am now flinging at you as I run out the door to start my vacation. And yes, I do consider working overtime for two weeks on projects without any interruptions from the outside world a vacation. Thank you.
Anyway, here’s your article. Bye!
How to Really Play D&D
Did you ever notice that there’s nothing that really tells you how to play D&D in the core rulebooks?
I don’t mean that the way I usually do. Usually, when I say that, it’s because I’m b$&%ing about f$&%ing awful D&D is at telling GMs how to be GMs. How to set the scene and invite the players to act. How to resolve actions. How to narrate the results and transition from scene to scene. D&D does explain that those things will happen in the game. The first chapter in the PHB basically spells that s$&% out. And then, after deluging the players with six chapters of character generation information and zero context for it, the PHB finally tells you how to use the rules to properly resolve actions. But the GM’s left to figure out how to do all the other stuff for himself.
But that’s not my complaint this time. This time, I’m complaining that the PHB doesn’t actually tell players how to play the game. And that’s why players – and GMs – have no f$&%ing clue how to deal with a social interaction scene. But let me illustrate my point with an example that has nothing to do with social interaction.
In the bloated and overdesigned house rules for my home D&D game – which I’m no longer running for reasons – in the house rules for my home D&D game, there’s a bunch of things I included – things I started to include; they were a work in progress – in my D&D house rules, I included a bunch of elements that were meant to facilitate a more structured form of the basic exploration-based, dungeon-delving gameplay I really liked. I added stuff for the players to do before an adventure to properly prepare for their expedition. And rules for establishing base camps in the wilderness so the players would have a safe place they could return to each day during long delves into large adventure sites. And I added stuff the players could do after the adventure was over to recover from their adventure, to build up their characters, and to seek out the next adventure. And all of that s$&% was intended to basically create a broad gameplay loop for exploration and dungeon-delving.
There were obviously some assumptions baked into those rules about how the game should be played. There had to be. There’s no other way to build a gameplay loop. In this case, I figured that basically, every adventure that involved leaving town, heading out into the wilderness to do a thing, and then coming home had the same basic structure. After learning about their quest, the party would prepare for their adventure. They’d buy expendable supplies and consumables, buy specific equipment they think they might need, do some research about the site and the challenges they expect to face, hunt around for side quests related to the main quest, and acquire temporary boons and buffs that’d help them during the adventure. Not necessarily in that order. After that, they’d travel to the adventure site. If the site was small, they’d go in, do their thing, and be done. But if the site was large enough to need several days of delving, they’d establish and secure a base camp near the site to which they could return to recover each day. Once the heroes finished their adventure, they’d head home, sort out the loot, keep what they wanted, sell the rest, train to bank their XP, [REDACTED] to benefit from their [REDEACTED], upgrade their equipment, recover from long-lasting injuries and conditions, and finally start looking around for the next adventure.
Nice, right? A good structure for dungeon delves and exploration adventures. And the GM can use it to create hard choices and add extra challenges and decision points. If the party has plenty of time and money, they can really rock the preparation phase. Buy plenty of consumables, make sure they’re blessed and buffed out the wazoo, all that crap. But if there’s a time crunch, they have to decide what parts of the prep phase matter most. And if they’re doing it in a tiny village, they might not be able to do as much as they want simply because the resources aren’t there. If they know enough about the site – or can learn enough – to surmise it’ll take them a week of delving to explore it all, they can make sure they’re ready to establish a solid camp. Hire guards or buy guard animals, scribe some spell scrolls of alarm, and buy a chest with a good lock. But if they have no idea where they’re going, they may be underprepared for a long delve. They might have to rush to the goal and leave half the site unexplored. Or they might return to town, wasting time and resources, to resupply for a longer adventure. Or they might finish the adventure and then come back later prepared to fully plumb the massive site’s murky depths.
This also lends itself to a deeper advancement system whereby, as the characters gain wealth, equipment, XP, and [REDACTED], and as they add allies and hirelings and pets to their party, they’re able to travel farther afield and overcome more extreme wilderness obstacles to reach and then explore larger and more remote locations more completely. I mean, if I were designing a game and wanted to claim exploration was one of the CORE MODES OF GAMEPLAY, I’d include some s$%& like this.
Anyway, I started putting all the little elements into place. I figured out how to structure in-town activities – downtime activities, if you must – and how to change the resting mechanics to differentiate sleeping in a bed in town from making camp. And I came up with a system for handling expendable supplies. Obviously, I’ve been working on crafting. And working on a system for pets and hirelings and companions. And I have that [REDACTED] system in the offing. And I even came up with a couple of neat ways to offer lingering boons, buffs, and blessings the players could acquire before – or during – their adventures. Like getting a blessing from a priest before you leave town or working out or honing your equipment or finding an ancient shrine or magical fountain down a side passage or completing a side quest and getting named an elf-friend or whatever.
But I made a big mistake. I offered all these options – well, I started to – but I never explained how to use them. I never told the players how to play a proper dungeon adventure. So, for example, it never occurred to my players that they might establish a base camp near a large site so they could explore it more efficiently. Which meant it never occurred to them that they might hire a couple of guards for their camp or, at least, to invest in a couple of stout chests with good locks. And now that I think about it, maybe the fact that no one ever thinks about base camps is why so many people have such f%&$ed up ideas about encumbrance. But I digress. Point is my clever rules counted for nothing because it never occurred to the players that they should do anything other than show up, kick in the door of the dungeon, and start cutting a bloody swath until they ran out of map or they ran out of hit points.
There’s a few assumptions built into D&D about how D&D should be played. They’re not as strong as the ones I built into my game because D&D’s approach to structure is “LOLWUT,” but they are there. You just have to look really, REALLY hard to see them. The most obvious one is the fact that D&D expects the players to take a short rest every two encounters or so and a long rest every six encounters. It’s a minor assumption, but an important one. Because you have to plan your adventures around it.
D&D tells you how to use its mechanics to resolve actions, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how to string those actions together into anything. Except for combat. It sure as hell shows you EXACTLY how to play out a pitched battle to the death between two equally powerful squads of mixed combatants. But it doesn’t tell anyone – GM or player – how a social interaction scene should play out. How to win a social interaction. Just to pick one totally random example of something that D&D claims is a core part of the game experience.
And I’m not talking about rules. D&D doesn’t need more f$&%ing rules. It doesn’t need more prescribed actions and blocks of text and character abilities. It just needs to tell the f$&%ing players how things in the game work. Conceptually. It needs to tell the players they’re going to encounter NPCs who don’t want to help them. And that those NPCs will usually have a reason for not wanting to help. And it needs to tell them that social interaction is the best way to get help from such NPCs or to remove NPC obstacles when violence isn’t possible or desirable. And if they want to do that, the player should probably start by figuring out either why the NPC is opposing them or what the NPC values. Once they’ve felt the NPC out through conversation – and through judicious use of the Insight skill or any magical tools at their disposal – or by asking around or doing some research, they can try to overcome the NPC’s objections or to offer the NPC something the NPC wants that’s more valuable than their objections. They can also look for weaknesses they can exploit or try to gain leverage on NPCs. They can use lies and deception as well as make persuasive arguments. They’ll probably have to go back and forth with the NPCs several times in conversation and pay careful attention to what’s working and what’s not. They’ll need to remember that every NPC has a limited amount of patience for this kind of crap and once the NPC’s patience is worn down, the NPC won’t listen to anything they say. At that point, they’ll have to find another solution because further social interaction won’t get them anywhere. Of course, they can sometimes extend an NPC’s patience with flattery, apologies, bribes, and gifts, but even that doesn’t work forever. And players should know that some kinds of social interaction can have long-lasting, unintended consequences. Bullying tactics like intimidation can be effective against the right NPCs, but they almost always bring negative fallout later. Lies and cons can backfire when and if the deception is uncovered and if an NPC realizes you’re lying to them, they may shut down the conversation permanently. Charms and enchantments can be very powerful in social interactions, but once they wear off, the victim usually harbors permanent enmity against the party. Or might even make legal trouble for them.
Wouldn’t that spiel be nice? It’s way better than just showing the players the skill list and telling them how to roll a check. Hell, once the players understand the core dice-rolling mechanic in D&D, do they even NEED to know any more mechanics? Isn’t it more useful to know how to bend the odds than how to calculate them precisely?
When I say D&D doesn’t tell players how to play the game, that’s the sort of s$&% I think is missing. Hell, I think GMs could use that too. Learning D&D from the core rules is like learning how to play Magic: the Gathering by reading every card in the game. And nothing else.
Setting DCs Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
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The reason this s$&% baffles me is that I think D&D’s rules are actually really clear on this front. Say what you will about D&D, but it does not f$&% around when it has a chance to fling numbers and math in your face. It loves numbers and math. There’s an excellent list of proper DCs on PHB 174 and a longer discussion about how to use it on DMG 238. I don’t know why people need to invent a bunch of nonexistent mechanics about opposed rolls and using save modifiers when it’s so clear. A character does a thing. The GM sets a DC. The player rolls the dice. Done and done.
Except that’s a lie. As part of the Angry shtick, I pretend like I can’t fathom how anyone could be so thick-skulled as to not understand something so fundamentally simple as “pick one of these six DCs off this table here based on the difficulty of the task.” But I do understand the problem. I get why people think there should be more to it than that. It’s because people overvalue precision and granularity and objectivity. And they don’t trust themselves to be objective.
The precision and granularity thing comes down to this: if every task requires one of the same three DCs – because you mostly just use three of them – the players will eventually notice there’s only three numbers and they won’t feel that’s enough detail to actually differentiate one task from another. Especially when compared to the highly varied numbers on their character sheets. Except that the players won’t actually notice. Rarely do they roll the same checks twice. And it’s not like most GMs even announce the DCs required for a check. Players have no idea what they have to roll, they just know that 13 didn’t do it, but 18 did. And there’s a reason I’m focused on what the players notice and not the numerical reality of the game. And that’s because what the player’s notice is all that f$%&ing matters. Gameplay satisfaction is a matter of player perception. It doesn’t matter what the game designer KNOWS, it matters what the players SEE.
D&D wants you to believe that its numbers are precisely balanced, but that’s a load of bulls$&%. The difference between a DC 13 check and a DC 15 check is pretty f$&%ing insubstantial. Probability wise, the difference would only affect one check like that out of every ten. So why overthink it?
Why? Because of objectivity. Truth is, most GMs would rather have some hard and fast mathematical formula that gives an illusion of fairness than just use their guts to set a DC that feels right but might not be precisely, totally, exactly fair. If a player rolls a 14 against the GM’s gut-set DC of 15 – especially if the mathematical rules suggested a DC of 13 would have been better – the GM’s gut – and his willingness to use his best judgment – stole the player’s success. Of course, that’s not true. The difference between a 13 and a 15 is still really small. The player just got unlucky. That happens. It sucks, but it happens. It’s part of the game. But missing an ability check feels like a big deal because D&D is really heavily into an all-or-nothing, succeed-or-lose mentality. And no GM wants to see her players miss out on feeling cool or finding an awesome treasure because of one pip on a die. So, if you can blame the math of the game – the rules of the game – instead of your own judgment, at least that softens the blow. It’s one of the lies GMs tell themselves.
I can’t tell you how to get over that s$&%. But I can tell you that you really should. It’s such a small thing to worry about. Really. And setting the DC is easy. And if you’re going to be a GM, you have to learn how to trust your judgment. At least how to trust your judgment enough to handle an extremely low stakes situation like a game about pretend elves.
As for the precision and granularity thing, let me use a weird example to help you wrap your head around why it’s not a problem.
Imagine a hypothetical RPG wherein a player rolls a d6 for every action against a target number the GM sets. There’s no math. No bonuses. Nothing to add. And there’s no rules for setting target numbers either. Or modifying them. The GM just decides where the cutoff for success is on a scale from one to six.
Being a savvy GM trying to wrap my head around that system and resolve a player’s action, I start by asking myself whether, based on everything I know about the situation – even the stuff the player doesn’t know – whether the player’s idea is a good idea, an average idea, or a bad idea. Most ideas are average. They might work. They might not. 50-50. Good ideas involve some amount of awareness, planning, perception, or critical thinking. They show the player understands the situation, recognizes a weakness or opportunity, and is trying to exploit it. Bad ideas show a complete disregard for the situation. They ignore some important factor. That might because the player isn’t thinking or they’re just oblivious or they’ve misread the situation and reached a wrong conclusion.
Next, I ask myself whether the action capitalizes on the player’s character’s explicit strengths or requires the character to overcome one of their explicit weaknesses. I might look at strengths and weaknesses in terms of talent – or lack thereof – and training – or lack thereof. In D&D terms, that’d translate to good or bad ability modifiers and what proficiencies the character has.
With those two questions answered, I can easily set the target number for a straight d6 roll. Maybe I start by assigning TN 4 to average ideas, TN 3 to good ideas, and TN 5 to bad ideas. And then I subtract one if the player is capitalizing on a strength and add one if the player is overcoming a weakness. I could even add or subtract one OR two so as to differentiate between talent and training. And with that system, untrained, untalented characters implementing bad ideas will almost always fail; and trained, talented characters implementing good ideas will almost always succeed. Characters with either some training or some talent with average ideas have a slight edge and characters with both training and talent usually succeed even if their plans are only so-so. Trained, talented characters with a bad idea can still pull out a win, but they have a slight disadvantage. And all of that makes sense. That’s what you want. Players who come up with good ideas and use their character’s strengths should rarely fail. Players who ignore the world and the games’ situations and the stuff on their character sheets will almost always fail.
And that’s all the granularity you really want or need. You want only the granularity that’s derived from what the players choose to do – their plans; their player skill – and what’s on their character sheets – their talents and training; their avatar strength. The exact percentages don’t matter nearly as much as those patterns.
D&D reflects training and talent not in the DC, but in ability check modifiers. This means the only thing left for the GM to worry about is the “is this a good idea, an okay idea, or a bad idea” question when setting the DC. So, you can get away with just using three DCs for most of the game. Hell, given that most GMs use advantage and disadvantage to recognize good ideas and bad ideas, you could just use the same DC for everything in D&D and you’d probably be fine. I don’t recommend that, but it would probably work. Either way, though, if you try to set DCs with any more precision than the tables in the PHB and the DMG, you’re not adding anything to the game. You’re just worrying too much about nothing.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Passive Scores
I knew my defense of the passive check mechanic on PHB 175 would raise all sorts of arguments. And it did. And despite my heavy-handed insistence that I would brook no argument about it, I still had to do all sorts of brooking. But that’s the Internet for you.
Look, I don’t mind a good debate. But what I get is rarely a good debate. A good debate involves two parties sparring with points and counterpoints, listening to each other and forming counterarguments. A good debate is useful even when you don’t reach an agreement in the end. But what I get is lectured. And screamed at. And when I listen carefully and raise counterpoints, the other party usually ignores what I said and just repeats their argument again as if I didn’t understand what they were saying the first time. As if the only reason I could disagree with them is that I obviously don’t know as much as they do. Or because I am not open to considering other viewpoints.
And because that s$&% exhausts me like you wouldn’t believe – especially because even on a slow day I usually get it from a dozen people at a time – I basically try to shut down as much of it as I can. That’s why I’m so heavy-handed and try to make myself appear as unapproachable and disagreeable as possible. But you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about passive scores and why they aren’t so bad.
I said I knew all the objections people have to using the passive check mechanics. And the reason I know them all – and also the reason why I have a lot of good counterarguments and am unswayed by most objectors these days – is that I used to object to using the passive check mechanics. I mean, I used the rules. But I used them grudgingly. I saw them as a bit of useful streamlining that carried a heavy cost. Now, I see them as a useful mechanic that forced me to get over a lot of personal mental baggage and reevaluate what it means to be a GM.
The issue’s this. When you’re designing an adventure for your personal playgroup and know their passive scores, you’re effectively just deciding what happens by fiat. If you place a secret door, for example, and you set the Perception DC at 15, and you know Aelfwyn has a Passive Perception of 16, you’ve basically just decided that, when the party reaches the room with the secret door, Aelfwyn will spot it. At least, that’s what it feels like. And that’s crappy design, right? Apart from the idea of deciding the outcome by fiat, there’s also no point in making a secret door if you know it’ll automatically be spotted. And if you know the party won’t spot the secret door because the Perception DC is too high for Aelfwyn’s – or anyone’s – Passive Perception, you might as well not design anything beyond the secret door.
Now, it IS important to remember that Passive Perception isn’t the only kind of Perception. It’s just an auto-win kind of Perception that the players don’t have to do anything to trigger. If the party enters the room and the secret door doesn’t immediately start glowing because of their Passive Perception scores, they can still search for it actively. And then the dice will determine the outcome. But that doesn’t alleviate the whole problem.
I’ll also acknowledge right here that D&D doesn’t deal with the problem of players bogging down the game with endless active searching. That’s a problem that you can solve by having failed searches trigger traps – as the clever JH pointed out in my comment section on Patreon – or by building consequences into time-consuming actions as I did with my Time/Tension Pool mechanic. But that’s a totally separate problem and not what I’m discussing here.
The point is that you know – as a GM designing an adventure – that when you set a DC on something that allows a passive check, you’ve basically taken a die roll and a potential interaction out of the game and replaced it with an automatic freebie success. A gimme. That trap, that secret door, that undead monster’s weakness, it’s meaningless if the DC is so low that a Passive Perception or Passive Religion check is going to reveal it. So, what do you do? You game the system, of course. You sabotage it. You push the DCs high enough that the party won’t ever trigger anything with passive checks. They either take an active role by rolling actively to find s$&% or they’re s$&%-out-of-luck. And that means you’re making the challenges in your game harder for reasons that have nothing to do with the challenges themselves. You’re basically ripping the passive check mechanic out of the game without having the balls to, you know, just rip it out of the game.
I get this. I really do. I understand why it drives GMs f$&%ing bonkers. It drove me bonkers a bit too. At first.
So, what’s the real fix? Well, you can partially fix the issue just by doing what I told you to do in my last article about the Insight skill. That article basically included a rewrite of the Passive Perception rules as a tangent. Because that’s what I do. I hack entire rules as a tangent to my main point. Essentially, I said that Passive Perception checks shouldn’t highlight traps and secret doors so everyone can see them. It should just call attention to oddities in the environment that warrant further investigation so the party has to figure out how to investigate and what actions to take to figure out what’s there and how to disarm or circumvent it.
And I think that’s how all passive checks should work. Passive checks should only provide information. Information that creates new possibilities or that invites the players to interact with the world in ways they might not have considered or that empowers the players to make better decisions. Passive Perception alerts players to odd details in the environment but doesn’t give away what they mean or how to deal with them. Passive Insight warns you that an NPC’s odd behavior is, in fact, odd, but it doesn’t tell you why it’s odd or what the NPC’s real motives are. Passive knowledge checks give you information about a monster’s strengths and weaknesses or about the god to which that altar is dedicated, but it won’t fight the monster for you or even give you a bonus. You have to find a way to exploit the weakness. You have to solve the riddle on the altar. And passive checks don’t tell players anything they couldn’t also discover by other means. Or just guess. An attentive player might surmise that the NPC is acting weird just by paying attention to what they’re saying. A paranoid player might fear that every treasure chest carries a deadly trap. Scholarly characters can research the gods before they plunge into some ancient temple. And it doesn’t take a supergenius to figure out that the white dragon who breathes frigid cold and lives in the heart of a glacier might find fire a bit uncomfortable.
When players invest in informational skills – skills like Insight and Perception and Arcana and Religion – part of what they’re buying with their skill choice is access to information. Most of those skills – Perception aside – are hard to use actively. They don’t really bring about changes in the world. So it’s okay to let the players who choose those skills just have a little extra information. Especially because they still have to decide what to do with that information. And spend the resources to do it.
But beyond that, the key to getting over your passive issues – and they ARE your issues; the game is designed just fine and passive checks are part of the rules – the key to getting over your issues is just to learn to trust yourself when you’re setting DCs. Trust yourself to do it objectively. It’s kind of like that old theist’s dilemma about how you can possibly have free will if God knows the future. You can replace ‘God’ with ‘scientific determinism’ if religious debates make you uncomfortable, but science never promised you free will, so science gets to shrug and say, “you can’t; so what?”
The point is, you have a list of DCs and you have to decide whether something is super easy or easy or hard or stupid hard. Spotting a secret door, for example, or a hidden trap is usually pretty hard. Because they’re literally designed to be hard to spot. Well-made secret doors in cluttered environments with lots of seams and irregularities – like a library – might be very hard to spot. Likewise, traps are usually hard to spot. But a hastily dug pit in the woods hidden under a slapdash lattice of sticks covered with dry leaves might not be so difficult to notice. On the other hand, a falling-block trap that drops a chunk of the ceiling from 100-feet above the party and was constructed as an integral part of a dwarven tomb is probably very hard to notice.
So, you set the DC the way you’d set the DC. Sure, if you stop to think about it, you might remember that Aelfwyn is going to spot that kobold pit immediately, but who cares? You know the DC is fair and Alice made Aelfwyn according to the rules and pumped up her Perception because she wants to have the character who notices f$&%ing everything. The fact that she will automatically see the kobold pit is just a consequence of that. It’s no different than if you set a fair DC of 5 on a check and then someone made a character with a +4 modifier that couldn’t possibly fail on the roll. And, so help me, if anyone points out anything about automatic failures on 1s, I will f$&%ing punch them. It’s NOT the point.
The fact that the balance changes as the party levels so they’ll succeed more and more with their passive checks also doesn’t matter. Hell, that’s how it should be. Aelfwyn should miss fewer and fewer details as she levels up. But Aelfwyn probably shouldn’t still be dealing with hasty kobold pits when she’s 15th level either.
Beyond all that, I know every GM has a voice in their brain that complains every time the players succeed without having to roll a die. Every GM has a little “did they really earn that” sensor that goes off whenever they feel like the players didn’t have to work hard enough for something or didn’t burn enough character resources. And that sensor makes GMs do really crappy things. It stops GMs from ending fights early. It makes GMs demand initiative rolls and attack rolls and damage rolls when the rogue – on his own – sneaks up behind an unaware guard and just wants to garrote him dead. And it stops GMs from giving players information if they didn’t roll enough dice to earn the clues. But here’s the thing: dice rolls aren’t how you earn things. You earn things through player skill – making the right decisions – and avatar strength – having the right skills and abilities and using them. Dice have nothing to do with player skill or avatar strength. They’re random chance. They actually just take away things earned with smart decisions and well-built, well-used characters.
If you can get your head around all of that – and you really, REALLY should – if you can get your head around all of that, the only reason left to resist passive checks is because you like to be caught by surprise and knowing whether the players will spot a secret door in advance ruins your fun. And yes, people have said that to me. And in response, I slip the Angry back on and say, “that’s just a wrongheaded, stupid reason to twist and break the rules of the game and sabotage your players and bring a metagame mess into your game. If you want to be surprised by literally every tiny, little thing – if you need that much surprise to enjoy a game – get the f$&% out from behind the screen and be a player. If you can’t handle the omniscience, you can’t be a god.”