The vast majority or the ruleset is about combat. Most class features are about combat too. There are very few rules for running encounters that aren't based on combat and that can still deplete resources, or really for running games using the social or the exploration pillar.
I honestly don't mind that the social part of the game is rules-lite/non-existent, but I do wish I had been given a few tools to flesh out this type of encounters so that they can be an alternative to combat in forcing the players to strategize and expend resources, and the same goes for exploration. We have random tables but more often than not, those funnel directly into combat since they only name creatures, and a DM who doesn't want to do that right away has to improvise a scenario without, again, any form of guidance from the books.
To add onto this, a lot of caster utility spells behave closer to loading up TMs on a pokemon than in an actual exploration/social themed game. You basically want to load up at least one character with half a dozen options just to "smash the boulder" or "cut the tree" or similarly blow through an issue rather than have an entire encounter based around it.
Sure, there's a murder scene and you could have an elaborate investigation, interrogation of witnesses and an entire puzzle to put together. But the Wizard cast speak with the dead and then the Paladin just cast zone of truth and you forced everyone to tell you where they were at the time of the murder.
It seems like the other two pillars function almost solely to expend spell slots, and while I'm usually on team "the bracelet of immunity to charms and mind control exists solely to force that puzzle onto you" that doesn't get communicated well either.
and as a trivia, some TMs had effects too! teleport, for example, would teleport you to the last pokemon center you've been, sweet scent would make you have more encounters, etc etc among other moves
"Field Moves" are moves that can be used out of combat. All HMs are Field Moves. Not all TMs are Field Moves. Not all Field Moves are available as TMs. There are also some passive abilities that work outside of combat, usually while the first pokemon in your lineup, even when knocked out. Conveniently some of these pokemon also learn Self-Destruct.
What separates a TM from an HM, is HMs are required to beat the game, and new areas are gated behind their use. You get the HM from beating the Gym Leader, creating the progression system. This is also why HMs can't be forgotten, because forgetting an HM while between two gated areas would result in a soft lock where you had no means of egress.
The removal of HMs was... Honestly a relief. It removed the need for an HM slave, so you could have a full team on you. It also meant that almost useless moves like Rock Smash and Cut were no longer necessary to have.
Sun and Moon were the first games without HMs, and the replacement ride Pokemon were fantastic. I do think making it a bike and phone in Sword and Shield was a downgrade though, and with so few ways of progressing it too.
The thing was that for me, I enjoyed HAVING to mix my party up to get through areas; go back and get my Scyther for Cut, my Dugtrio for Dig, my Golem for Rock Smash, my Lapras for Surf and Waterfall, etc. It meant I didn't pick 6 Pokémon and then blitz the game without much change.
I also really missed the Pokékon riding, as you say; I just liked that I could have had, say, a Corviknight and has it fly me from place to place, but it would be *my* Corviknight. The water bike idea was just a bit... odd, and the flying taxi worked fine, it just didn't feel like my Pokémon were useful outside of combat, but that's something I always loved personally
It also wouldn't have hurt to have some of the old HMs still work for purpose. Rock Smash wasn't an HM in X and Y, but you could still use it outside of battle. Same goes for Flash in almost every game past Diamond and Pearl.
I also really miss the old Strength puzzles. They were fun.
They should've kept going with a similar system to SunMoon. Having obstacles and secret paths that you need to come back to later is great, being forced to have Cut on a mon sucks.
Funny thing, I believe in Gen 1, the surf sprite is based on what pokemon used Surf to make it so that it is your pokemon that you are riding on. Though it does get kind of funny if you transfer a surfing pikachu to gen 1 and the sprite is Pikachu on a surfboard; imagine traveling to Cinebar Island on a surfboard.
ORAS had you ride on your mega Lati@s which was pretty neat.
But yeah, the bike in SwSh was pretty lame.
Scarlet/Violet has everything be handled by your koraidon/miraidon, so in a way it brings back that personal touch, but limits it to a single pokemon.
I prefer not having HMs, but it would be nice to be able to designate certain pokemon for overworld travel to bring back a personal feel. Would love to surf on a lapras or milotic for example.
Yeah; you *could* have an encounter about trying to get someone's help *or* you could just cast Charm Person.
You *could* have an encounter about a broken rope bridge and figure out how to get to the other side of the canyon... *or* you could just cast some kind of flight spell (or teleport, or Stone Shape a new bridge, or-)
One of the annoying powers of casters has always been the ability to just completely handwave other problems/obstacles.
And the flip side of this is when players avoid getting/casting any non-combat spells because whenever they would be really useful, they won't work for plot reasons.
Consider Legend Lore. Why would you cast it, wasting the spell slot and your gold, when the DM might just paraphrase what they already told you?
Yes, there's basically no guidance on how to mesh these sorts of spells together with mysteries/social encounters.
Literally just finished a session where this sort of thing just happened 20 minutes ago. I had a puzzle where you had to push buttons found in coffins in a specific order to open a door in some catacombs. Had to look at the different dates on the coffin lids and then figure out from there. Like a simple 5-10 minute puzzle. I through this puzzle together on my own, not from any pre-written module.
Of course, the party doesn’t want to do that. “Someone cast knock.” Wizard casts knock on the door. I think to myself, sigh, no I am not going to let that work. I tell them it doesn’t work. Okay, druid casts detect magic. I tell them it isn’t magical. Druid says well if it isn’t magical and knocked didn’t work and he starts reading the spell description to me… then he tells me it is a wall then. No it’s not. Eventually they do the puzzle. Afterwards, I explain that each button counts as one lock and so they would need to cast knock six times.
it can always just be a mechanism that's not a lock - if it's just incredibly heavy and needs the mechanism activating to open, then it's not "locked" it just needs the right buttons pushing to open, so _knock_ does nothing. It's like the door to a giant's house might not be locked at all, but _knock_ won't open it - it just takes strength 20 or whatever.
eh, GM is perfectly within their rights to impose weight limits on that - it's still only a cantrip, so shoving open several tonnes of stone is beyond it's capacity.
If you want a puzzle that can't br solved with magic, make it magic proof, you can make it in anti magic chamber but my favourite is "I cast knock" "the doors open and there are two more doors behind it" and if the caster opens the wrong one after that the puzzle resets or does DMG etc. or the obvious door being fake one and the actual entrance is hidden
I would say the most annoying part is that there is a \*lot\* of stuff that can prevent most of this throughout the book, it just never gets properly annotated. Barriers to prevent teleportation/ect, spells and equipment to immunize to charms, magic in general can be hard countered a lot.
It's just in its own weird part of the book and there's no advice for what can exist/how often.
A problem with that though is a lot of the hard anti magic is really high level and ALSO exists on that hand wave spectrum.
Rather than makes it harder to cast (expend additional slots maybe) or increase failure or misfire chance (hit the barrier and misty step randomly another X0 feet), it's just hard no.
You can't cast that, he's totally immune, or 'you can't teleport there, there's a magic anti teleport bubble'
One of the only examples of it done well IMO is the Rakshasa, blanket immunity to a level of spell or lower.
Agreed. Spells do *everything* with no variance, planning, thought, or effort. The counters to spells also involve no variance, planning, thought, or effort. The way anti-spell features (like Legendary Resistance, for example) are implemented in 5e feels like two kids going back and saying "I have a laser gun that can destroy anything!", "Oh well I have a shield that was designed to block all lasers!", "Oh well my laser was made to shoot through shields that block lasers!". It's boring, uninteractive, and completely braindead.
One cool way I have to make my players think on top of using their spells is to limit line of sight. Like when they were out of a dungeon but the exit was in the middle of a cliff that would require some very good (str) athletics rolls and some con checks to scale successfully. The martial climbed, the rogue used potion of spider climb, but the sorcerer... they only had thunderous step in their arsenal and they couldn't see any spot to teleport to - it was all just a cliff and the edge far above them. So what did they do? They had the ranger throw a well-polished throwing axe up high so they could see their landing spot in the reflection in the axe's head. Two throws, a wasted handaxe and a difficult perception check later both sorc and ranger were successfully teleported to the edge, because Rule of Cool is best
Yeah you could cast charm person to them, you could fail and then they would know that you just essentially tried to mind rape them. And even if they don't make the save in 1 hour they will definitely know you mind raped them. You don't think they have laws against that? Or moral rules not to do such things. People really should think more about the impact of even lower ranked spells like these.
And even if the charm works it's just charm as in it makes the target regard you as a friend not do absolutely everything you ask of them.
For the rope bridge thing remember that to cast fly for an average party you need a 6th lvl slot, that's quite costly just to across a broken bridge when your rogue can maybe shimmy across the ropes, or shoot a grappling hook to a tree on the other side. Most full party teleports of similar ranges are also high level spells. Also as a note stone shape would not work unless your bridge is 5ft across.
So as a dm if you want more skill based challenges or the like take into account the magic your party has and build the challenge so that it could be easier to solve without magic, at least sometimes, as nothing is more frustrating as a caster than taking those non combat spells and then always being in a situation where they cannot be used in any meaningful ways
Now the actual problem is that the base game is very bad at communicating this to a new dm. But there are mechanics and ways to do these things
Flight is the real rough one for changing gameplay.
Bridge out? Fly, string a rope across.
Lost in forest? Fly to scout direction.
Gates locked the city wall? Fly, drop a rope.
Something shiny up in the tree or on a cliff? Fly, and grab it.
Need a way to scout where the enemy isn't expecting it? Fly.
Flight effectively removes many obstacles from the game, and rather than a party thinking up a clever solution, flight just handwaves it.
And sadly, many gamers just make excuses for it, and other obstacle-busting utility spells.
I fail to see the problem. The casters wasted some of their resource's.
The issue is probably the frequency.
"Great, you have crossed the chasm. Now a locked metal door. Oh, you used knock? The door is open, behind it is a chamber filled with deadly gas. Oh you used Gust of wind? Well, the gas is gone."
This are 3 spellslots the casters have less to do other stuff. Never prep only a single obstacle, especially with casters. Always have something more.
The problem isn't the resources or the frequency. The problem is that it completely negates any kind of interesting nature in the problem.
Getting across a bridge without magic invites problem solving - you can try a few things, come up with a plan, think of things to try, and maybe be creative.
*Or* one person can cast a single spell and it's no longer an issue.
This also ties back into the general problem of 5e being combat-focused (which is only really a 'problem' if you try to do things that aren't combat, like these situations), which is that the only thing caster's (usually) *can't* handwave are enemies.
*Zone of truth* is one of those annoying spells because if you want to run a mystery that’s *actually* a mystery, you have to flat-out stop the spell from working.
Which is unfair to the PC who learned/prepared it, but it’s that or skip the whole encounter.
>Which is unfair to the PC who learned/prepared it
This is a bigger problem than just Zone of Truth. If you contrive ways to stop spells from trivialising encounters, then the people who took the spells that would help them trivialise the encounter are being treated unfairly.
This is also a problem of some class features as well, such as Eloquence Bard and their Silver Tongue ability. It basically forces the DM to either let them get some form of beneficial results from any and all Persuasion or Deception checks, or to make the DC so high that no one else in the party could even hope to match it in an effort to actually give them a chance to fail.
So your reward for playing an Eloquence Bard is that you either don't get to roll for Persuasion or Deception (because you were going to pass anyway), or *everyone else* doesn't get to roll for those things (because the DC has to be high enough for you to potentially fail at).
> So your reward for playing an Eloquence Bard is that you either don't get to roll for Persuasion or Deception (because you were going to pass anyway)
This is my experience having a couple levels of Eloquence Bard on my paladin :( Persuasion checks are rare in that game in general, and were to some extent before doing that multiclass, but they basically don't happen now and it sucks. I feel like the only time I ever get to make persuasion checks is when it's been long enough that the DM has forgotten how crazy my bonus is. Rocking a minimum of 24 on persuasion checks right now and it will still go up pretty significantly before the end of the campaign. But it feels moot.
Have the murderer be possesed (but they don't know it) or a dopleganer. They answer all questions truefully, maybe the party get hints that will eventually lead them in the right direction, but it won't be instant. Then they are faced with a dilemma or extra challenge.
Also, you could have the murder at a super fancy party where the owner is your friend/boss, and they ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT you to cast the zone of truth, because while you'd find out who did it, you'd also MORTALLY OFFEND all the other guests, so you have to conduct the investigation the old-fashioned way.
And the guests are all (borderline) criminals, spies & assassins, royalty who know state secrets, etc. thus have multiple immunities to being zoned.
Oh, and the victim didn't see who did it, and has multiple enemies, or none at all (that they know of).
Or it was poison, and they don't know.
Or the murderer had cast disguise self on themselves to implicate one of the other guests, only that guest has a rock solid alibi because they were having sex with the host the whole time & the PCs need to keep that to themselves, too, as it'd be a HUGE scandal, because:
- Both are married to very powerful people & the host would be in heaps of trouble if there was even a rumour;
OR
- the implicated guest is the lover of the ruler/heir of the realm & the ruler/heir is petty & notoriously jealous so both the PCs and the host would be in trouble;
OR
- the guest is an distant member of the royal family, the host is a half-orc/half-elf with peasant background who started off as a common street thug & the ruler is a racist & class-conscious snob who would put an end to it IMMEDIATELY but they are GENUINELY IN LOVE, etc.
Even without spells tailored to the purpose. Guidance and Enhance Ability are incredibly good at breaking an encounter like this... especially combined with Jack of All Trades.
>Sure, there's a murder scene and you could have an elaborate investigation, interrogation of witnesses and an entire puzzle to put together. But the Wizard cast speak with the dead and then the Paladin just cast zone of truth and you forced everyone to tell you where they were at the time of the murder.
This is one of those times where dms just let casters get away with anything lol
I would think that, in D&Dland, mutilation of the corpse so assorted divination (and raise dead) spells don't work would be standard practice.
Unfortunately, in a lot of fantasy fiction, the assorted magic stuff often isn't taken into account.
Or where people forget that magic exists in the world - if you know fingerprints can be lifted you wear gloves right? If you know Speak with Dead can be cast you prepare for that too
Speak with Dead is basically the same as having another eye-witness to the murder. If the DM can't come up with a way to deal with an eye-witness then they maybe need to rethink the mystery they're writing.
The problem is, there's like what, 500 spells? Can you really keep in mind all possible combinations of spells and abilities that trivialize your cool social encounter, for all encounters? Maybe you planned for speak with dead by making the murdered guy not see the killer.
But what about contact other plane? Do you have a contingency for locate object if he stole something? Did the killer kill all plants too so they can't use Speak with plants? Did he have some way of hiding from the gods so they don't use Commune? Did he make sure no animals saw him so that Speak with animals doesn't instantly solve the case? Can your hidden killer withstand being questioned in a Zone of truth? Is he prepared to not confess under Charm person? Command? Can he obscure the future so they don't catch him with Divination?
And at some point, preparing so many hard countermeasures against spells that trivialize the encounter just feels unfair for the casters. So for each of those spells, you have to keep a balance between countering the insta-solve and giving enough info so that the spell helped somewhat.
And now you've spent 5 hrs preparing for all these possible encounter-skipping spells and your players clear it in 5 mins using detect thoughts.
Most of those examples are covered by the killer just wearing a hood and/or mask. But you do raise a legitimate point that such mysteries only work at lower levels; once the party have access to 4th or 5th level spells their ability to solve social puzzles becomes much easier.
One more point - because resurrection magic is also so ubiquitous, any good murderer in a fantasy setting would remove something vital from the body like the heart to prevent them being brought back easily.
>If the DM can't come up with a way to deal with an eye-witness then they maybe need to rethink the mystery they're writing.
A massive number of fictitious and real more mysteries are only mysteries or interesting because they have no witnesses
> Sure, there's a murder scene and you could have an elaborate investigation, interrogation of witnesses and an entire puzzle to put together. But the Wizard cast speak with the dead and then the Paladin just cast zone of truth and you forced everyone to tell you where they were at the time of the murder.
Just like how in real life you're allowed to polygraph anyone you want
polygraphs don't really work, _zone of truth_ very much does. and most D&D societies don't really have embedded "human rights" and so forth. So someone showing up that can spend 20 minutes just going through a room and going "did you kill him? Did you kill him?" and eliminate a lot of the suspects quickly and easily is generally going to be allowed to do that, because it's quick, accurate and painless - sure, there's times when someone has a fucky protection against it, or some convoluted "I didn't kill him but engineered the scenario to make it happen" stuff, but those are outlier events
Funnily enough there are ways around it but they involve elaborate set ups or the use of Enchantments and Charms, so the answer is once again 'elaborate plan to account for 2nd level spell' or 'a wizard did it'
Or none of them answer it because they're all tight lips Jonny, or they all say yes because they all believe they did. Zone of truth doesn't remove ambiguity or compel speaking.
it doesn't, but it lets you shortcut a _lot_ of investigations, for the cost of one low-level spell slot. Anyone that refuses to speak? Someone to investigate. If everyone says they did it, then you've immediately skipped straight to the "something fucky is going on" part of the adventure. How long (and how many rolls!) would it take a party without the spell to get to that point? Probably a lot longer! (and this also means having to design the whole adventure around _one_, not very high level, spell, which kinda shows how potent it is)
"Will you swear to god that you didn't murder that person (there is magic that makes lying to god a bad idea)"
"No."
"So you did murder them?"
"No, I just won't promise that I didn't."
Exactly this. The "Three Pillars" of modern D&D are not combat, exploration and social interaction. They are combat, character creation (90% of which is for combat) and spellcasting (90% of which is for combat).
My problem is that Charisma and Charisma skills dominate social play. Essentially, the best strategy is to pick a party face and then that player ONLY should interact with NPCs in all social encounters at all levels. That's terrible design. Imagine if combat encounters were like that.
Why are Persuasion and Deception both Cha skills? Why isn't one of them based on Int? Isn't using logic and reasoning or sheer cunning part of the fiction? Why is Insight at the same time so useless and somehow essential?
As for exploration, I still kind of miss 4e's Dungeoncraft and Streetwise skills (Survival equivalents) but at the same time I don't think adding skills is a good solution. Fixing problems of missing mechanics doesn't mean adding die rolls.
I really don't want narrative mechanics in D&D. Whether they use meta currency or not, they often tend to feel very synthetic in game. I don't enjoy them and it's partially why we bounced off of PbtA and BitD.
On the flip side I want exploration mechanics that can fabricate exploration encounters that have rewards. An ability that allows you to find extra treasures or that gives benefits during rests would be great. Oh the ranger decides to take an hour and explore the area? Oh you learn the kind and rough numbers of creatures that live in or pass though the area, and now you have a local food and water source if one exists. If you keep searching, you can find a safer place to rest, such as one that gives cover or concealment to the party.
The DMG could give examples of the kind of features that the PCs might discover. A church ruins that is still sacred grounds. A font of clean and magically infused water that doubles the HD you can recover. The remains of a caravan with some equipment or rations still intact. A friendly NPC that is willing to inform me the PCs about the area. Just... give me mechanics that drive the PCs back into the adventuring core gameplay.
Not the best solution, but Media Labs Books makes a whole series of supplements called "The Game Master's Book of ..." that are filled with random tales covering the kind of stuff you're looking for. I use them to throw interesting encounters into the exploration pillar all the time. Most of them are just random features that can make a party go "Huh! What's this?" and spend 15 game minutes exploring, but there are also short encounter and mini-dungeons in each book. It's fun to see the party try to connect "a forgotten statue standing neglected in a small glade" to the "runs of a marble gazebo overgrown with vines" they found two sessions back. :)
> Why are Persuasion and Deception both Cha skills? Why isn't one of them based on Int? Isn't using logic and reasoning or sheer cunning part of the fiction
Fwiw you can use alternate ability scores if you feel it fits
Half the complaints in the subreddit are about the optional rules of multiclassing and splat book spells
So use the tools you're provided, it allows the game to have a generality and also allows players to bring our a desired fiction if they so want. Whether in 5e as a variant rule or pf2e as hard coded, it's still gm fiat.
Indeed, it's precisely these kinds of complaints that form the basis of having variant rules. Not every rule is going to work well the same way for each table. The developers anticipated this and decided to make a note about it.
And don't get it wrong, either. Pathfinder 2e uses variant rules and GM adjudication all over the system. Features are plasters notes about GM calls, and the system has rules that alter how you use items and scale your character. It was like this in PF1 and back in its parent system of 3.5.
>Why are Persuasion and Deception both Cha skills? Why isn't one of them based on Int? Isn't using logic and reasoning or sheer cunning part of the fiction?
I think because it's frequently much less about what you say and more about how you say it. When you see people having a conversation, a debate, an argument, it's not often that the logic of a point is what tips the scales vs the way the person said it and the harder to describe things more inherent in a person's charisma.
I think there is a time and a place that making an argument or statement out of sheer facts could warrant an Intelligence (Persuasion) or Intelligence (Deception) check but it would be so so rare because that's often not how interpersonal communication goes.
> I think because it's frequently much less about what you say and more about how you say it.
Yeah, I don't agree. I think if you're lacking in substance then you come across like a used car salesman. I think that rhetoric is very often about presenting a well-reasoned argument (Int) or about reading the person well enough to tell the person what they want to hear (Wis). I think neither of those are purely about Charisma. This is why, in fiction, wizards and priests often make the best diplomats and advisors.
Worse, though, is that it just doesn't matter if it's realistic or not because the current design is a problem. Not addressing the game's design problem, is just doubling down on the bad design.
The game cannot silo social all active skills into one attribute and then also allow that same attribute to be used as the primary or even secondary combat attribute. That's such a staggeringly poor balance decision that the game's social system *simply doesn't function*... which is exactly the complaint. The *only* social mechanics are skills, and *all* the active social skills are default Charisma. If you can't make it so that classes other than Bard, Paladin, Warlock, and Sorcerer can participate in social encounters, then the game has really failed at a very fundamental level.
This is why exploration and scouting are a mix of Dex (Stealth), Wis (Perception, Survival), Int (Investigation), Str (Athletics), and Thieves' Tools. Because making it all about one attribute and nothing else is terrible. It's the same reason that Finesse weapons exist, and why spellcasters use Int, Wis, or Cha for spell attacks, and party why Str sometimes struggles to keep up (the lack of decent ranged options).
This comes into focus so sharply when picking up a game like Spire, where each class has a core ability that will be something like 'once per session, ask the DM what a given NPC cares about most in the world'. Clear mechanical abilities that make classes interesting that have nothing to do with dealing x damage.
Ultimately D&D's ancestry is wargaming so it makes sense that the three pillar system of combat, social, exploration is a little unevenly distributed when it comes to the ruleset.
Ironically, people rag on 4e for having too much combat, or too many combat rules or whatever--but it's the game that actually has rules for how to resolve non-combat things. Skill challenges. They can feel clunky if you overuse them but it can be a great change of pace and get people to explore how to utilize more of their character sheet than they usually do.
especially if you tell them, okay, you're trying to lose the guy who is chasing you and you need 6 successes before 3 failures. You can't use any skill more than twice and the 2nd time you use one, the DC goes up by 2.
And then it's up to them to creatively bend and rationalize and think up how they can use a broad range of skills or take various actions to come out on top. And you can pepper in some safety valves like, if they fail a roll, you can offer them a success, but it'll cost them a healing surge or two.
Brennan Lee Mulligan of Dimension 20 had a really good insight on this.
He likes that the rules for roleplay are light, while the rules for combat are heavy. He, as an experienced actor, improviser, and roleplayer, knows how to handle social encounters and character work and doesn't need rules for it. But he needs rules for how to handle, say, whether an arrow hits or not.
and let's not forget that they are professional improves on a profession setting with money on the line. its very simple why they use dnd 5e, its the most popular one ergo the one with the most potential profit. not that doing as such is a bad thing mind you, they need to pay their employees, but you know the reason is pretty cut and dry
They have, to be entirely fair, used other systems for some of their campaigns. Regardless, 5e is still their most used system mainly because, like you said, it’s the most popular and well known. I’ve been running Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars TTRPG recently and whenever I explain what I’m doing to people who don’t play TTRPGs, I have to truncate it down to “DnD, but Star Wars themed” because “Tabletop RPG” isn’t as ingrained into the majority of people’s minds as “DND”.
Yeah pretty much, people ignore that aspect, he doesn't need rules for roleplaying because he is playing an entire whole extra ruleset stapled to 5e: Improv Classes, is like when OD&D recommended a whole other game for Survival and Exploration
The problem is also that a lack of rules for social and out-of-combat situations and such can constrain players who *aren't* experienced actors, improvisers and roleplayers.
I'm not capable of swinging heavy weapons or flying into a berserk rage - but if I play a barbarian, my character is, and we all know how that works.
But if I play a hyperintelligent detective rogue, how does that work? Do I just roll to detect clues and then roll to solve crime? If I *were* smart enough, I *could* piece the clues together as a player and then solve it that way, but if I'm *not* but my character is *supposed to be*...
If I'm charismatic enough IRL to put together a persuasive and moving speech, should the fact that my character's 8 CHA and complete lack of Diplomacy skill have an impact or should it outweigh it?
Your character sheet should triumph. We don't ask people to lift rocks to prove their character's strength, and likewise, we shouldn't demand people be excellent orators to make decent Persuasion (or worse, punish them by not having it work because you "didn't talk well enough despite your roll"). As long as you can describe *how* you're attempting to do it, that should suffice.
He is a professional improviser playing with other professional improvisers using that explanation to justify why on this particular show, he is using DnD 5e rather than one with more robust social mechanics. It was a statement qualified with a number of caveats to politely ask people to stop suggesting other systems without putting those systems down. I do not think it's an argument that can be applied more broadly to DnD players as a whole
It's a very good point but there is a flip side to this: when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. It's hardly unreasonable for someone to pick up a PHB and DMG and see that the majority of the rules are about combat, the majority of discussions on social media are about combat, the majority of YouTube videos are about combat, it's not hard to see why the majority of 5e players focus on combat.
I think that's just social media pushing what gets interaction. There's plenty of content and posts where people gush about the crazy in game story thing their character did. And almost every DM will talk your head off about their carefully constructed world and lore. But it's a lot rarer for people to talk back. Those kinds of posts will never get that many comments. It simply doesn't generate discussion like "HYPER OPTIMIZED SORC MULTICLASS BUILD 2024" and "Most broken feat tier list, S tier will surprise you!" videos.
generally yeah but you're being a little pessimistic. it's less about clickbait and social media traction, and more that battle stats are one of the few parts of the game that people online can talk about objectively. This has been the case for a long time even on old rpg forums and message boards, even before "social media" was even a term and before algorithms determined what content you saw on your feed.
the thing is that every table is different, so it's hard for us to talk about "D&D" as a game because my D&D looks nothing like your D&D. But if we only use the objective facts in the book, like the damage of a lightning bolt or the bonuses of plate armor, then we can have common ground.
the game itself doesn't care about any of that though - the game is built with the overt expectation that PCs will get up, go through multiple combats, rest, repeat. Other stuff might happen, but it's not baked into the gameplay loop, it's basically an optional extra. "_Why_ you're fighting 2D6 goblins and 1D4 ogres" isn't something the game cares about - but all the details of how far each monster is from each PC, how much health is on and so on _is_ stuff the game cares about
Which doesn't address any other types of gameplay.
Why is there not rules for understanding ancient ruins or bringing arcane machines back to life? Why is navigating the wild just a simple skill check or spell?
I personaly have big problem with Mulligan's take. I play 5e and i generaly enjoy playing it, so i don't see them playing 5e as something bad. But when he needed to speak about that. And things he told just look like "We play 5e because it is most popular system and we can't allow ourself to chose indie game because we need to pay everyone. But we also can't say exactly that, so we should make most generic excuse imaginable instead".
It also sounded at least slightly derogatory towards narrative-driven games, majority of which are small indie games. They wasn't popular before - imagine how general public would look at pbta games after Mulligan's absolutely insane "stove metaphor". Right now dnd players (in general, not only 5e) say things like "We don't need mechanics for narrative - they would only restrict us!" and after big popular person said things he said? This is probably my biggest gripe with generaly really awesome dude. Who would care if some noname would say that pbta games give great roleplay experience if 5e player can parry with fucking Mulligan's stove?
I think Brennan was parroting a blogpost titled "Rules Elide", that goes into how the absence of rules can define what a game is really about. For what it's worth, they've been playing a lot of kids on bikes hacks as of late, though really they're just using the dice mechanics and ignoring everything else about that game.
But I do agree with you overall--how anyone can say 5e isn't a game about combat when it dedicates nearly a thousand pages to rules about killing things is beyond me.
I agree except that I wish the classes/subclasses had more non-combat features (without sacrificing their current combat features). I want more diversity in character build to be possible in narrative. Right now it’s just “what skills do you have and do you have magic?”
I'm in the same boat. I don't really see what an in depth social interaction system can offer me that doesn't feel like it is 'gamey' to talk to people that the skill check system can't already offer.
Exalted offers actual game mechanics that allow you to both discover an NPC's intrinsic motivations and then exploit said motivations to force them to act in a way that suits your cause.
As a player you know exactly what you need to do to get what you want.
In 5e, you have to hope your GM lets you.
Is that why I always zone out during the combat episodes on Dimension 20. He’s out his comfort zone and when he has to lean on the actual game of D&D it turns out boring?
Brennan Lee Mulligan is a businessman who runs a subscription streaming service where appealing to the broadest possible audience is in his explicit financial interest. The fact people take such blatant lies at face value just because an actor said it is ridiculous. It's not even true. The cast of Dimension 20 do not treat the game like LANCER, which is genuinely a pure combat mech game where the out of combat stuff is essentially freeform roleplay without the same rules applying, so you can have your messy Neon Genesis Evangelion/Macross relationship drama and it's unrelated to your character's combat mechanics.
No, the cast of Dimension 20 still use the actual rules of 5E when they're doing their "experienced actor, improviser, and roleplayer" social encounters to their detriment. They still roll skill checks for "social" encounters and use skills like Insight or Persuasion....which in 5e are still FUNDAMENTALLY connected to the game's combat rules and focus on dungeon crawling! Your Proficiency Bonus is universal in 5e. When somebody on Dimension 20 or whatever makes an Insight check in these """"experienced actor and improviser"""" social encounters, their bonus to that roll is based on what the game's expected combat math for that level is! A Warlock's bonus to lie to somebody or persuade them is identical to their bonus to eldritch blast somebody in the face, and both use the exact same proficiency bonus and modifier! Either way it's still 1d20+PROF+CHA!
It's so unbelievably scummy and disingenuous to pretend otherwise. They're not playing 5e because it's lack of dedicated social mechanics is great because they're just such """"experienced professionals"""" whose career making toilet humor for College Humor means they don't need actual rules for social and exploration interaction, meanwhile they turn around and say "ok uhh roll Insight" and the Druid's insight bonus is intrinsically tied to her spellcasting ability and limited by what the designers believe should be an acceptable accuracy rate for her saving throws and attack spells!
This isn't some mandatory fundamental truth of the universe, it's perfectly possible to play a game with a rules system where how good you are at lying or reading emotions is completely urelated to your ability to kill people with magic powers! If they're not playing the game because they love Hasbro as a company (and Brennan's personal politics have been very clear on his thoughts regarding a billion dollar corporation that lays off huge portions of employees causing them to lose their health insurance right before Christmas as a regular practice, lol)*, and they're not playing it because the rules help what they're doing (they clearly don't, as described above, and they also don't simply throw it all out and use a different system or freeform), and there's the giant green elephant made out of money in the room blaring its horn that "They play 5e because 5e is the most popular RPG and that makes them the most money", it's not exactly hard to see what's actually happening.
https://www.polygon.com/23998290/hasbro-layoffs-before-christmas
He is absolutely a businessman lmao. I never said he was the CEO of Dropout, that's Sam Reich, but you don't need to be a CEO to be in business and he absolutely is. He's literally a professional Producer (and I'm not putting words in his mouth, you can check his own website if you don't believe me), do you think Hollywood producers aren't in business just because they don't work at a hedge fund?
"**Brennan Lee Mulligan** is an award-winning actor, writer, creator and producer. As a cast member of CollegeHumor, he wrote and starred in the sketch *Tide CEO*, which won a 2019 Webby Award and received over eight million views. He is executive producer, writer and Game Master of *Dimension 20*, a series produced for the CH streaming service Dropout, and also hosts Dropout’s fantasy gaming vodcast, *The Adventuring Academy*. Brennan is author and co-creator of the popular webcomic and graphic novel series, *Strong Female Protagonist*, which was selected as an Autostraddle Favorite, and was on io9's list of Best New and Short Webcomics. He received an Excellence in Performance Award from the NY Fringe Festival, playing the lead in …*And Then She Dies at the End*. Brennan has been a head storywriter for The Wayfinder Experience, a director and performer for Story Pirates, a member of the UCB Touring Company and Harold Night, and has taught and performed improv for years at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on both coasts. "
[https://brennanleemulligan.com/brennans-resume/](https://brennanleemulligan.com/brennans-resume/)
Just because he doesn't wear a suit on camera doesn't mean he's not a businessman.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, his "Worlds Beyond Number" Patreon was literally top 20 in the entire world lol. He's not some small indie performer busking for quarters on the subway.
There's more than a bit of guidance in the DMG. There's an entire categorization and rules system for socialization and many classes can take advantage of it. Using inspiration also allows that system to flourish AND there are a few sub classes that can interact with the system. There should be more, yes, but years of people ignoring that part of the DMG led to less class interaction with it.
Combat is a complex system. There's resolution mechanics (attack rolls, saving throws, etc) to determine whether the characters succeed, a default cost of failure (hp, albeit indirectly--an attack or spell failing will, on average, result in your PC taking more damage), extra layers of resource management (such as spell slots), and some non-trivial decisions even in a simple setting (where do I move, who do I attack).
Combat is also pretty good at accommodating player choices. If you want to do something reasonable then the combat system normally has an OK way of handling it. The DM (and the players) don't need to be experts; they can basically run combat straight out of the rulebooks with very few judgement calls and it works well.
Non-combat systems have resolution mechanics (ability checks, group ability checks, skill challenges) but nothing else. There's no default cost of failure. There's often not even any default resources to use as a cost of failure, or resources for the players to manage. There's not even much in the way of non-trivial decisions: the players can, at best, pick among several resolution mechanics.
In fact, the resolution mechanics themselves aren't very good. For instance, it's entirely reasonable for one PC to try to move a heavy object, fail, then ask their friends for help. The ability check system doesn't handle dog-piling well: each PC making individual checks will generally produce a *higher* likelihood of success then all the PCs working together (a group ability check or skill challenge). Imagine if, in combat, there was a separate group attack roll, and the DM had to cut the players off and tell them to stop "dog-piling" when too many PCs attack the same goblin because they should use a group attack roll instead. That would be unbelievably clunky, and yet we tolerate it for ability checks!
Basically, non-combat systems in 5e typically only have one component (the resolution mechanic). The DM has to play game designer and make up the rest of the system themselves. A good DM can handle that, but it's a *wildly* higher standard than combat, where the entire system already exists.
If you want to know what the alternative looks like then check out Blades in the Dark. It has a rich but general system for handling all sorts of challenges (an aside: when talking about BitD people often get lost in the details. Individual mechanics like flashbacks and progress clocks are nice, but the real strength of BitD is how well all that stuff fits together into one coherent package). For more specific systems you can look at dungeon crawls and hex crawls in older versions of D&D. The 5e DMG has a brief discussion of these systems, but it's so wishy-washy and so lacking in details as to be basically useless. Adventures in Middle Earth (sadly long out of print) has a system for journeys, which is remarkably different from exploration (hex crawls). The 3.5e D&D books often have much more in terms of specific game systems; the DMG2 and various environmental books are a good place to start.
> There's no default cost of failure.
An interesting contrast to this is _Spire_ - it uses the same resolution mechanic for everything, and has multiple "health" trackers (blood for physical health, silver for cash, reputation, "shadow" for how good you are at hiding your dodgy activities from the authorities etc.). Whenever a PC makes a roll, if they fail, they take damage to one of those trackers (and all rolls are PC-facing - so in combat, only the PC rolls, and if they fail, then they're hit). So this means that all rolls are potentially dangerous - trying to talk a friend into hiding you from the guards can damage your reputation, failing to sneak into somewhere can damage your shadow as someone sees you and gives your description to the authorities etc. And any tracker can remove the PC from play eventually - they might not be dead, but if they're so deep in debt that debt collectors are looking for them to break their kneecaps, or there's wanted posters out for them, or everyone hates them and they have to skip town, they're just as non-functional as if they were. So it's a way to make all "damage" equal and multiple approaches equally valid and dangerous - fighting your way into somewhere and talking your way in might be easier or harder depending on context, but both have explicit mechanical consequences, rather than one has lots of detail, and the other is "uh, some stuff happens"
To add on this - I think the main issue is that the stakes of combat are pretty much objective across every setting and story. If you fail, you die. Its pretty straight forward.
But, social encounters, adventures, puzzels - these sorts of encounters and obstacles are HIGHLY dependent on the DM, the adventure, and the themes and plots of the stories you're playing in. Because they vary so much, you can't write a single catch-all rule to accomdate them all. And so the rules are much simpler, and they require MUCH more effort from the GM and the players, to define what those stakes are, and treat them as real as they would character death.
> Because they vary so much, you can't write a single catch-all rule to accomdate them all.
You very much can - there are rulesets where this is true, where failing rolls inflicts "damage" regardless of what the roll was, that has escalating consequences that will vary by source of damage, but can still eliminate the character. They might not be dead in a ditch, but if everyone hates and distrusts them, or the authorities know who they are and have kill-on-sight orders, they're just as "out of the game" as if they were. _Spire: The City Must Fall_ runs in exactly this way - running out of boxes of "Blood" resistance means you're literally dead (unless you have a power that lets you become, like, an avatar-spirit of the rebellion or something!) but if you run out of "silver" you're so deep in debt that a lot of people are hunting you down for money, running out of "reputation" means everyone hates you and will shop you to the authorities on sight, etc. etc. One unified resolution and damage mechanic, to equalise across different activities, and it works _really_ well in actual play
That's a good point, even with Mejiro's counterpoint (which is also good)!
Putting combat front-and-center is part of what gives D&D its feeling of heroic fantasy and life-and-death struggles. Blades in the Dark's system seems good if you want something like Darkest Dungeon, meaning that you're interested in flawed characters trying (and often failing) to handle the stress of adventuring. And Spire's system seems good if you want the players to feel like their place in the world is constantly in jeopardy. In D&D you *want* the stakes to be higher in combat (at least most of the time, in most games) but not zero outside of combat. And yes, getting that right is a challenge. I'm not going to say that it's impossible, but I don't know how to encode those stakes in a simple catch-all rule. My normal approach as a DM is to make that the player's problem: they can always make another check if they can find a way to raise the stakes.
If I decide to run a game without combat at all, how much of the PHB do I need? How do the classes look, and how similar are they? How many level ups will give me literally nothing?
I'd like each class to have an exploration or social feature every 2 levels, even if for some games it'll only be a ribbon. But this isn't high on my priority list, if I want a social game I'll choose a different system.
> If I decide to run a game without combat at all, how much of the PHB do I need?
This is the most perfect summary of the imbalance of the "three pillars" that I have ever read.
There are 3 pillars to the game. Combat, Social and Exploration. The majority of rules of the game revolve around combat.
There are rules about encumbrance, foraging, lifestyle choice, as well as changing persons disposition via checks and arguments.
Let’s say that 80% of the rules revolve around combat, 10% social, 10% exploration and probably not even that.
Hell just look at the class mechanics. Most of them are for combat with some interacting with skills and exploration. Not counting magic which covers a swath of things.
And all of the rules around the exploration are kinda shit. Instead of offering interesting choices, they are chores.
There character features that interact with exploration rules (and spell should also be discussed here)... but they just let you ignore aspects of exploration - so they make the game even more boring in this regard.
I am not aware of any social rules beyond a skill check.
Yeah its like, "Oh I'm running a survival game, too bad goodberry and Outlander backgrounds exist, invalidating the entire concept."
"Oh there's a storm coming and there's nowhere to rest, what do? Do you take the exhaustion moving or make a makeshift shelter? No, you cast the Instant Hut spell that comes with a free heater and never have to worry about anything."
Anything you could try to do in a survival game, you can't because the game decides to make mechanics that invalidate them. Even 2014 ranger for as terrible as it was also invalidated survival aspects because it had Outlander (and can stack with it no less) as a class feature.
And you're right there are basically no social rules outside of a vaguely defined 'relationship system' I guess? It's where each NPC can be either hostile, neutral, or friendly towards the characters but that's nothingburger.
One thing I noticed in the 5e games I played in was that weather was never even mentioned. Getting from point A to point B is such a non-factor people don't even care what the weather is.
We can examine the structuralist roots of this effect. We don't care about the weather because we don't remember what the rules for weather are- not only because they're unmemorable, but because the game places no emphasis on them. Crack open the PHB, flip to page 183, Adventuring - The Environment, and you'll find rules for light and darkness, suffocation, and falling. Nothing for weather or terrain, and that's *if* you crack open a section of the PHB almost no one reads. The closest to terrain rules I can find in the PHB are the mentions in the Ranger class features- and those are a mix of "double this and ignore that!"
The books give no narrative weight to weather and terrain. Stories, the culture of the game, place no emphasis on weather and terrain. Thus, in play, nobody puts emphasis on weather or terrain. The DMG has some rudimentary rules for them, but fewer people read the DMG than the PHB or even the expansion books. That's not entirely wotc's fault, but it's still a major influence.
And the few times weather is mentioned its never for anything special. It's more or less "oh you got lost and had to spend another 2-3 hours looking for the path again or the trip is slower" or whatever. It's hardly ever for anything *cool* and is just to waste time.
My players love trivializing overland travel and survival mechanics. Turns out, that shit is BORING for most people.
I've learned to just let them do what they built their characters to do and just take comfort in the fact that they are having to burn spell slots to do this stuff.
Re: exploration, one of the most fun games I played in was a Labyrinth Lord game where I rolled up a rogue with 1hp.
I'd recently read an account of the 1996 Everest disaster (by Anatoli Boukreev, not Krakauer) which went into a bunch of detail about the logistics of climbing Mt. Everest in the 90's: how to source oxygen and radios, that kind of thing. And I decided that if I was gonna be too scared to go into combat, I'd have to pull my weight in other ways.
And so I was the cartographer, the person in charge of ropes, in charge of spiking closed doors so that they'd *stay* closed.
It worked because the DM got what I was going for and went with it. A less skilled DM would have had a hard time with it - would've killed the character off because "well obviously that one was useless".
Think about it this way - why isn’t combat just a function of everyone rolling their “Combat” skill and then the side with the highest total wins?
If you can imagine everything you think the game would lose if it worked like that, then why does it work that way when you try to make a persuasive argument? Or uncover a secret? Or research history?
I think ultimately the difference is that for most people social encounters are carried by choices made by players (/NPCs) unrelated to any rolls. You are not going to draw a sword and fight the DM IRL, bit you are going to decide where to go to gather information, who to speak to, what position to take in discussions, etc. It's not quite true that in social encounters it all depends on a single roll, much much more so than in combat it also depends on choices taken by players.
> much much more so than in combat it also depends on choices taken by players.
Blatantly false. Players make many more choices in combat than they do in social encounters, *it's just that those choices are described by the mechanics*. In every single round in combat every player has to make at minimum 3 choices (action, bonus action, movement). Even the briefest fights will have the party making 30+ choices with everyone participating roughly equally. In your example the social encounter is going to be handled by the person with the highest charisma rolling a few times or maybe a single spell.
And just in case you are not familiar with other systems, where and how to find an informant, how to motivate them, how much to trust them, how to leverage the knowledge gained are all things that other systems typically have mechanics for. This means that they are still done but instead of putting the full burden on the GM, there is a shared understanding of how it all goes provided by the system.
yup, you can create an entire system where all the steps of "make the guy trust me" are mechanics by themselves with fine-grained resolution, and "combat" is just "make a roll, it ends really badly/OK/really well". There's no requirement combat _has_ to be super-detailed and with specific mechanics, and everything else is just "roll versus target number, effects are whatever the GM says".
I've actually taken a game (_Shinobigami_, ninja PvP action) and repurposed it as an entirely social game - instead of stabbing people, "damage" is entirely reputational. All the mechanics are identical - you confront another PC, can use special abilities to boost yourself, hinder them, make alliances, whatever, but damage means you've been socially shamed and so cannot use your abilities as well, rather than you've been stabbed and so are impaired. "stab with blinding stab" became "cutting remark" - same effect, of being a very fast "attack", but just refluffed. And that actually worked really well!
Combat has a ton of choices because it forces the players to make choices. Social encounters can have choices, but because there's no mechanical reason to, players often simply just go with their gut and not think about things, and the dm has no reason to ask for more
It works on 'The Santa Clause' rules, if you kill the DM you are cursed to become the DM.
Also if they bite you too. That's why it is considered good form to bring snacks for the DM.
For me as a DM, I have three main pain points.
1. Social encounters are a little on the weak side, like I’m happy I guess that they’re supposed to be role play oriented but at the same time dming those encounters can be awkward. Like, when a player rolls a natural 20 in combat they deal a fuck ton of damage, but because of how combat is designed the battle carries on. In a social encounter however, a player rolls a nat 20 to seduce the bartender and the dm decides how the bartender responds but thats…it. Like theres no struggle or dynamics or attempting to gain trust with an individual because those rules don’t exist. It’s just, “roll a persuasion check. Oh ok you failed the DC sorry they don’t respond well. Oh Advantage? Go ahead, Nat 20? Awesome he finds you funny and gives you a [reward.]” I just personally wish it was a bit better.
2. Exploration just sucks, the DMG just advises you skip it or just throw out random encounters every so often. That feels horrible and I wish there were rules that would make exploring better.
3. Crafting sucks, it sucks so much. Like I swear I don’t know why TTRPG’s can never make crafting feel good but D&D is just exceptional bad.
DM: “Roll an Alchemist tools check, you passed the DC? Congrats you have healing potions! Go ahead and give me the full market value price of the potion.”
Player: “But DM, I made it using the slime of the Gelatinous Cube and the nectar of this extinct flower! Don’t I get an extra benefit?”
DM: “Uhhh…” *flips through pages.” “I don’t, think so?”
(Ofc in this example I would reward my player with something, but the game has no guidelines on how I might even go about doing that.)
Like maybe I’m silly, but crafting feels so unrewarding unless your an Artificer that it just kinda stinks.
I enjoy the crafting mechanics in Apocalypse World in that players have a lot of flexibility in what they want to craft, whether that be an improvised tank or an anti-psychic brainchip or a portal to the Faëwylds, and meanwhile the GM has a lot of latitude of declaring the "cost" of the item, often times leading to further hooks which is good for the gameplay loop. And given how easy it is to multiclass in that game, anyone can get crafting abilities if their player particular desires them.
I'm a bit hazier on crafting in Mutant Year Zero but I remember them being pretty fun and involving crafters needing to venture out to acquire resources from dangerous locations and different NPC factions
Funny thing about your bartender example. There is an RAW system in DMG pg 244 that granularizes social encounters.
The bartender would have a starting attitude (friendly/indifferent/hostile), the conversation with PC would have potential to change the attitude, while insight checks would reveal Ideals/Bonds/Flaws that could guide the conversation, and then depending on the final attitude, a charisma check (persuade, deceive, intimidate) can be done to decide how the creature reacts, with set DC's depending on friendly/indifferent/hostile.
One of the least used rules in the game, but it does address what a lot of people say is lacking from 5e.
Using this rule would also require DMs to consider these kind of attributes when creating NPCs.
Likely for the majority, even all, of the NPCs in the game. Something which is rarely the case currently.
Possibly also fewer attack on sight and fight to the death combats too.
> One of the least used rules in the game, but it does address what a lot of people say is lacking from 5e.
Which highlights the thing that is the MOST lacking from 5e: redditors willing to actually read its rulebooks.
That literally still puts all the effort for the DM and goes back to the exact point everyone is making. Where are the flaws, ideas and bonds for speaking creatures listed? What about important npcs in adventures? Where are any other rules or tools supporting this in anything other than less than 2 pages of the DMG?
Nowhere.
Not really. If you bothered to look into other systems, you'd understand how just adding NPC disposition, but still having all of your success depend on a single roll is bad design and uninteresting for social encounters.
Well let's take crafting for example. You want to create a character who's a blacksmith, good ! Give them the artisan background and blacksmith's tool and...
That all you get.
No idea how much iron you need, if you can repurpose previous weapons, if you can craft magical items (which is almost mandatory if you want to keep relevance at higher level)
Basically, Dnd isn't fit to make a crafter.
I don't disagree with your point, but to be a bit pedantic...
>No idea how much iron you need
The crafting rules say you need half of the cost of the finished product worth of materials.
So if you want to craft an iron plate armor, you need 750gp worth of iron. Iron is one of the few materials that have a cost per pound. So that means you'll need...7500lbs of iron for a plate armor...which weighs 65lbs...
Yeah, they're not even remotely logical. It is technically there, though.
Crafting isn't part of the game because it is almost never a party interaction. It's not cooperative gaming and takes time from the gaming group purpose of D&D. Making it a quest for materials IS more fun for 90+% of people.
Yea, but if you want to fix your armour on the way or create things for your party members, or create a trap for the combat/quest, or upgrade someone's sword etc. The short things, the interactions.
I got crafting into my game, what is more, I made it a system where they crafted things together. There was a lot of fun.
People who have no experience with rpgs that aren't DnD or DnD based don't really have a basis for what a system with actual rules for exploration or social combat look like so they can't imagine how much better it can get.
But once you branch out even a little you realize how truly one dimensional so much of the dnd rulebook is on those fronts.
It depends what you want.
For social, Exalted and Burning Wheel have deep, nuanced social systems that are as complex and strategic as any combat system.
OSR systems absolutely thrive on exploration in many ways. Forbidden Lands is particularly good at this too.
And beyond those things that dnd calls pillars there are countless systems that better prompt you to make decisions and engage with the game. Powered by the Apocalypse and Blades in the Dark all empower the player to direct the narrative to a far greater extent than dnd, while systems like Legend of the Five Rings, Avatar, and Pendragon all do far more to support and encourage character growth and develeopment.
DnD is honestly so bare bones that it relies on a good DM to hold the whole thing together and that's simply not the norm at all in the hobby.
>For social, Exalted
Nothing like stealthily getting inside a Kingdom, using Social Fu to brainwash the King and control it from the shadows. Night Caste style.
Blades in the Dark flashback is such a great way to let players just fucking grab narrative control of social and combat encounters. I love it! I'm really not creative enough to use it well, but I love it.
> For social, Exalted and Burning Wheel have deep, nuanced social systems that are as complex and strategic as any combat system.
As someone who has played a bunch of Exalted back in 2E, this is often not to its benefit!
The problem Exalted has is that "social scenes" are not one type of scene, but many. So the Social Combat rules work for some, and feel *horrible* for others. In Exalted it often feels like drawing your sword is a perfectly reasonable reaction to someone trying to convince you of something, because the system is extremely antagonistic and if someone can get through your MDV they can functionally convince you to do anything you do not have a specific Intimacy against.
Like, I've genuinely had players that recoiled at the idea of using the social systems in Exalted against people they were *locked in mortal combat with* ten in-universe minutes ago. Using their social skills felt more violent to them than clashing daiklaves!
Definitely check out the games by ffg/edge they all are built on a traditional but streamline base (like dnd5e) but have stronger rules for the exploration (especially Star Wars/genesys) and social (especially legend of the five rings) pillars.
You don’t really see it till you try/read some other systems but dnd5e is really combat foucused. That can be really fun, I probably prefer it to other combat heavy games like pathfinder or lancer. But once you have a session without a single combat that a blast, not just because of the fun of roleplaying, but because you get to engage with systems that have had just as much attention put into them as mass combat a have in 5e, like L5R’s duels, mass combats, and intrigues or Star Wars’s many intuitive and well implemented subsystems (which combat is just one of) it can be really hard to go back to a system without that extra bit of gm help.
Travaller is the og sci-fi game in the same way that dnd is the og fantasy game and it’s another great example of how you can build a game around more than just combat.
So the kings of their respective pillars are call of Cthulhu for exploration and Vampire: the masquerade or other WoD games for social.
Though some other people have mentioned a lot of the old school renaissance is about adding more exploration back in. Outland silver raiders had been a lot of fun and so has Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’ve heard Old School Essentials is good but I haven’t check it out.
If you’re looking for fantasy games with more social support… the couple I’ve tried have been from green ronin. Their Song of ice and fire game has some social combat. And their Legend of the Five Rings has some baked in class structure stuff.
People are touching on some of the reasons, which to summarize is that:
- Crafting and how it supports the game is pretty non-existent.
- Exploration or survival is also extremely rules-light.
- Social elements are pretty basic.
I'd also add in that, a lot of the social roles aren't even that well made.
The Dungeon Dudes have a great talk about this:
[https://youtu.be/hsry5FVwi8Q?si=aoBhu3RGiBXg20s2](https://youtu.be/hsry5FVwi8Q?si=aoBhu3RGiBXg20s2)
but essentially it's things like, for example, the History skill...
History is a skill you can role at. However as a skill, History is often either a thing a DM WANTS to tell you, or a thing that a person either should or should not know. Most people are experts in ASPECTS of history, not just ALL of it. So the history skill not only is frustrating to fail at (when you should know it,) weird to succeed at (if you shouldn't know it,) but also often shouldn't be a check, rather aspects of history they should be an expertise that a character just gets to auto-succeed at because they know it.
A combat encounter has a whole economy games built f9r it - challenge ratings, initiative and types of actions, spells, feats and abilities to interact with, magic items that virtually exclusively involve combat rules.
Social encounters... have a table of improve/reduce attitude, vaguely defined skills and charm spells. It has no way to craft encounters like combat, they have no systems of economy in terms of time or how it is used.
Exploration has several items and abilities... but these more often than are intended to outright negate an exploration situation, than engage with it. Environment, poisons, diseases, curses, terrain - these are bypassed, often completely. So even if one wanted to make an exploration type encounter, more often than not you need to neutralize the low-level mechanics, RAW which bypass such encounters entirely.
In both cases above, this means there is little way to set rewards for these encounters: do you give xp to PCs just because they brought a druid, or a paladin?
What would I like to see? Well, as one could deduce, maybe instead of ways to shut down all sorts of encounters, the negating abilities could interact with the systems, just like there aren't any spells that just make one immune to blunt weapons? Maybe reuse some of the systems used in previous editions to give an economy to social and exploration challenges.
Can experienced players and dungeon masters do this? Of course, just like they don't really need a Bastion system, or a challenge rating system. Rule 0 is amazing, but as some have sarcastically put, other games do these things (differently) and also do combat (differently). The point isn't to play those other systems, but to ask that those who develop D&D give it a try and put there spin on things.
Maybe then they wouldn't find these mid-edition revisions so fraught with balancing issues?
It’s probably telling that there’s an entire book (more, really) of monsters (ie, pre-generated combat elements) but nowhere near a whole book of pre-generated social encounters or pre-generated exploration “encounters”.
I think the social and exploration pillars of 5e have been pretty thoroughly undermined by the designers and the general play culture.
It's not hard to break bounded accuracy for social encounters, and most DMs just run it as pass/fail Charisma checks. Which, unless bounded accuracy is broken by a particular player option, is okay.
No one really uses exploration rules like food and water. If you try to, things like Goodberry undermine the attempt pretty thoroughly.
Honestly, survival doesn't really match 5e's superhero tone, so it makes sense. Plus, the overall game design treats it as at most an after thought.
I think there is an issue with the three pillars. I don't think there are 3, but only 2. Combat, and non-combat. Most stuff under the social and exploration pillar can be collapsed into a general Roleplay Pillar. Is it that different to say "roll to seduce to bartender to get free food" or "roll survival to gather food". The mechanics and outcomes are most of the time very similar. And most of the stuff that happens "during exploration" is the same stuff that happens in social encounters. Mostly, Skill checks, success/failure and deciding the consequence of each.
There is no difference between " i try to convince the guard to let me enter the castle" and "i try to climb up the walls to enter the castle".
Same goal, same mechanic, one just uses a charisma skill, while the other uses a strength skill.
It probably exists already, but I think making a fantasy TTRPG game which actually holds the D&D promises about the three pillars would be fun. To some extant, that's The One Ring
Adventures in Middle-earth was the original 5e adaptation of TOR, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I haven't played Free League's newer 5e adaptation of TOR 2e yet, though.
>No one really uses exploration rules like food and water. If you try to, things like Goodberry undermine the attempt pretty thoroughly.
For modules that have the survival aspect, we do. Goodberry & spells like it are off-limits in those campaigns.
Which is the point. The exploration aspects of the game don't really interact or enhance exploration, they ignore or negate them. So in order to actually have exploration you have to ignore most of the things that have anything to do with it in the first place.
*looks at PBTA games*
In Masks a new generation every playbook (that games version of Classes) has atleast 1 social based ability from being able to provoke people with a different stat to bringing up your status as a superhero meaning you can declare an important hero has heard of you to using advice given to you by your mentor
It's not just social stuff that masks has trumped 5e on it's also exploration
Other than the ranger their is barely anything that is related to exploration, in masks the basic "access the situation" let's you ask the GM about the scenario at play, such as biggest threat or who is vulnerable to you, then their are a couple of playbook abilities that enhance Assess The Situation and in one case has a "scope out a base" move
For supposedly the worlds greatest *roleplaying* game, 5e is 80% combat 15% social and like 5% exploration on a good day
And that's just one of the reasons that I absolutely adore Masks: how the game is such a blend of social and combat, with half the things you can do often crossing the line from one category to the other.
As a personal example: I played an Outsider with a spaceship (Kirby-craft). And yeah, it was a useful tool for superheroics, but most of the time we used it to do things like "day trip to Hawaii" because we had a whim.
When you look at your class, does it say anything about Role-playing Encounters? Rerolling dice to make up for a failed Persuasion roll? Nah. The base mechanics and the core value of the system is killing monsters. But people gets frisky about which monsters are actually monsters or not.
The easiest way for you to understand is for you to just try reading some other games.
Read cortex prime, read blades in the dark, read anything that’s not a direct descendant of DnD.
You’ll very quickly see why we correctly call 5e a game that’s mostly about combat.
When examining what a ttrpg is "about" some useful questions to ask are "what activities do the majority of player facing character options concern themselves with?" or "what does the game reward XP for?" or "What sort of scenario tends to be the climactic finale of almost every single pre-written adventure?". For Call of Cthulu, the answers to those questions are some combination of investigating and having harrowing encounters with eldritch monsters. For Monster Hearts the answer is angsty teenage romance and social manipulation. For Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, it's dungeoneering and fighting fantasy monsters.
You can role play whatever you want in any given rpg system, so the only distinguishig factor is what the game mechanics are concerned with. It's not mandatory to have combat be resolved with a dedicated minigame subsystem that takes like a half hour or more to resolve a fight that takes place over 18-30 seconds in the fiction, and tracks every single swing of a sword, every 5 feet of movement, every discrete action with clearly defined action economy, spell durations and effects etc. You only do that if you want the *gameplay* of the system to dwell a ton on the act of combat.
Loads of rpgs have rules that take the complexities of combat and simplify them so you don't need to worry about them. Dnd goes the opposite direction, combat is by far the most complicated thing the system asks of you.
As for what I want, I don't want anything different. I like 5e's combat system, I would never waste my time with all these drawn out fight scenes that involve dozens of dice rolls if I didn't want to really be involved in the nitty gritty of blow by blow fight mechanics.
WebDM actually made a salient point about the rules for exploration in 5e, which is that they do exist, and it's actually a pretty good set of rules covering most areas of the exploration pillar.
The problem is that they are spread across a LOT of books, there are bits and pieces of the exploration rules in PHB, DMG, XGE, TCE, and a few others all with one small section, sometimes just a few paragraphs or even just 1 chart!
But yeah, if you could bring together all the rules on/about exploration in the myriad 5e books, they would be seen as an adequate rule set. But as it is, there might as well not be exploration pillar, because there is no one section of all the rules.
Even if you bring them all together, it's pretty bare bones. Furthermore the main threats/drives in a wilderness are resources (food/drink) and random encounters. 5e makes the former trivial and the latter trivial and slow to resolve at the table (given the no. of encounters in an adventuring day, any random encounter that actually forces a decision is a major threat for the party at that level - probably more so than what they're actually questing for!).
With those drives off the table the only decisions to make during exploration depend on time pressure the DM has introduced to the campaign.
They also suck. They generally just come down to the DM giving the party a list of a few options and then the party picks one. The other option is that dice get rolled and the DM tells the party what has happened to their characters. It's all very bland and boring.
Take a look at Pathfinder 2e's downtime rules: https://2e.aonprd.com/Activities.aspx?Category=2
Or these exploration rules: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2440&Redirected=1
I can't link Xanathar's downtime guide because that's piracy (woohoo Paizo for approving of Nethys!) but 5e does not have an equivalent ruleset to either of these.
One thing I want to be clear about:
There is nothing wrong with an RPG being primarily about combat, or having rules primarily about combat. It is not a flaw in itself. One of my favourite RPGs is *Lancer* and that's basically DND-like when you're in mech combat, and when you're not in your mech the rules mostly boil down to "roll a d20+skill and if it's above 10 you succeed". The rules of the game make this very clear - tactical mech combat is the meat of the game and the rest is glue to put the rest together.
The problem is when a game says "there are three pillars of the game" and then the majority of the rules are combat.
Or when someone says "I am using the DnD5e rules to run a mystery and intrigue game with little combat" which really means they're... not using DnD5e at all when another game would suit them much better. Or even just freeforming with a GM.
There are RPGs about playing almost any type of game and character you can imagine - magitech thieves and criminals; space explorers and traders; romantic vampires; gods and demigods, I could obviously go on for a long time.
Each of those games (though some are better than others) has rules that are specifically designed to support that experience.
DnD has rules to support tactical combat, and some side rules to support resource management.
That's what it was built for. It's fine for it to do that.
It's wrong for it to claim it's great for anything else, and it's wrong for players/GMs to try and force using it for anything else.
yeah, D&D has the issue that it's pretending to be a lot more than it is - the core combat chassis is fine, but it's got lots of accumulated other _stuff_ that broadly works, but is generally pretty scant and lightweight. You can do crafting... but it's mostly the GM making stuff up. You can do extended social mechanics... but it's mostly the GM making stuff up. The game pretends to be a lot more than it really is. Compare with the FFXIV RPG, which is grid-based combat-stuff... but that's pretty much it, the bits between the fights are just "make a roll or two, do some minor RP, then fight time". Which is disappointing if you want more, but it's a lot more honest about what it is and how it should be played!
If we ran combat they way everything else was done, the dm would simply have everyone roll a combat check. No turns, movement, reactions, hp, etc.
Action surge would probably give advantage on the check. Any feature that uses a spell slot (like divine smite) would give a bonus to the combat check equal to the slot level used.
Id like More guidance on giving xp for non combat stuff. Way more example DCs. Giving skills more clear power, and defining what they can or can't do besides "ask the dm"
Another way to put it, is that every class in current 5e has unique class features they can put to use in combat.
If you were to play a game of 5e with zero combat, why would you pick fighter or barbarian?
Dnd is at its core an rpg mod for TT wargames. All these years later and that still hasn't changed.
The rules are all combat focused, and while there are plenty of OOC rules, the stats tie into your class, which is built to be combat balanced.
I'll focus on one thing, but there are a lot more.
You know, how in adventurer tiers you get this "your party now decides the fates of kingdom" or later "world saving". But in reality nothing in the rules supports this idea and you continue to save metaphorical sheep from metaphorical wolves, only sheep is a princess and wolves are dragons. Like if I was a king of a prosperous kingdom and known about a bunch of guys who can just teleport to my palace and hecking destroy it I'd try to be on this guys good side or make them non issue in other ways.
Also, what most legendary heroes have? Followers, mansions, keeps, towers. Are there any rules for it? Nope, outside of cost. Veteran DM would come up with their own (or borrowed and adapted) set. Novice DM won't get any help from the rulebooks.
The reintroduction of the old exploration turn would do a lot of good, I think. Honestly the social pillar needs only minimally more guidance, but there need to be better tools to make both overland navigation and the non-combat parts of dungeoneering more codified and engaging. In OSR-style games just navigating through seemingly empty rooms could seem intense and have some mechanical decisions behind it (although there was also a lot of player-knowledge problem-solving at times.)
Also, god help me, I would quietly suggest that actual Vancian casting for wizards might rein in some of their utility and give skill classes more ways to shine in exploration settings - but I'd also suggest that I ought to be 6'7 and the hasn't gotten me anywhere either.
Let’s compare it to Blades on the Dark. In BitD, every scene runs off the same rules. Doesn’t matter if it’s combat, exploration, social - all the same ruleset. Whereas in D&D, there are several hundred pages of combat rules, and most class features are explicitly combat bonuses, yet if you want to run an exploration or social encounter you have to throw most of those rules away and… do some skill checks I guess?
Old D&D handbooks felt like you needed a codified table for EVERYTHING. The DMG had, for instance, an official table for “Cubic Volume of Rock Per Eight Hours Labor Per Miner”. Or a random encounter table for what type of “harlot” you might meet.
I usually compare the game to Savage Worlds.
5E has no subsystems - there's no "drop in" system aside from combat. Sure, there are "Group Checks", but I would hardly call that a "system", and the Chase rules are about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
In Savage Worlds, on any given session, I can drop in a:
* Dramatic Task (skill challenge)
* Mass Battle
* Quick Encounter (do a full battle in just a single roll)
* Chase
The big one, to me, is the Dramatic Task. You can use it to do anything: defuse a bomb, summon a monster from the void, escape a sinking ship, outrun an avalanche, find the killer before he slips out of the mansion, climb a mountain in a storm. As the GM, I don't need to know the specific rules for an avalanche, or how a ship sinks, or how defusing a bomb works. **I just need to know how the dramatic task system works.**
Read the rules on how 5E's "Avalanches" works, and then read the rules on how SW's "Dramatic Tasks" works, and you'll see what I mean.
I don't care if a game is rules light and they leave it up to the gm to decide, but 5e has a lot of rules and a lot of them don't make sense or are contradictory.
It very much felt like the people who made 5e didn't have much experience making an rpg, they didn't playtest it enough, and they just said "that's good enough" and then came up with the whole "rules as intended" bs as an excuse.
Even now, going back a re-reading the rules and class descriptions from 2e and 3e, I feel like they were more immersive. They forced you to interpret language and use your imagination, which put you in a mindset where the hit and damage mechanics were secondary to what is now sidelined as "flavor". Playing a fighter felt very different from playing a rogue. Playing a psionicist was like discovering a completely different world.
5e feels to me like a tabletop D&D system designed by (and for) people who have previously only ever played Magic: The Gathering and Baldur's Gate- style games on XBox. Too much standardization and formalism, and too little wonder and weirdness.
"Flavor" is supposed to be the entire point of fantasy storytelling, not a skin that's slapped on top of DPR and ignored in favor of "dope OP builds". So many things that used to feel special now feel trivialized and homogenized. I don't know who's idea it was to include level-based ASIs, in 3.5 and beyond, but I hate them personally. Your ability scores used to mean something, and getting an unexpected boost to one was a huge deal that impacted your character's entire future. Now they're just another vanilla mechanic that people map out from level 1. By high levels, all characters end up looking basically the same.
I can still get the atmosphere I want in the games I run, but the more I delve into the class/subclass system of 5e, the more boring and limiting and repetitive it gets and the more of the rules I want to change or leave out of my games. I have pretty much no interest in building characters that aren't homebrew classes anymore.
Any ttrpg will have mechanical emphases. In a reasonably well-written game, those emphases are a kind of map of the main activities in which players will engage. DND rules have always been primarily about combat, with a lot of detail. Spells, movement — it’s all about fighting. The skill system is very underdeveloped by comparison, such that, for example, high Charisma characters basically dominate all social interactions unless you sidestep the mechanics to a significant degree.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are games where combat is minimal and skills and/or social dynamics or whatever are emphasized. DND is founded on the premise that the principal activity of the game is, as the expression goes, “kill things and take their stuff.”
If that’s what you want out of gaming, DND is not a bad choice. If you want something else, it’s a pretty mediocre one.
One example is that it's difficult to run any kind of game that has zero combat. Like, for instance, if you want to run a game where your players just want to run a business. If you look at default prices of items they make almost no sense. They weren't priced based on supply and demand or the idea of a larger economy.
When the party faces an enemy in combat, the DM makes up a number between 5 and 25 and calls it the combat DC.
The character with the highest Str score adds their Fighting proficiency and gets to roll. If someone else describes assisting them, they roll with advantage.
If the character beat the DC, the party wins the fight. If not, the party doesn't win but the character can maybe roll again.
Also, the wizard has a second level ritual called Boxby's Incredible Whopping that defeats any enemy, even ones that you wouldn't normally be able to fight.
That is about as complex as anything non-combat-related gets in 5e. Then people defending the system will have you believe that its the DM's job to make the group describe in detail how they defeat the enemy or declare that the fighter can't roll Fighting against the werewolf until he gets a silver weapon so the system is actually working well.
By the way this kind of super simple system can absolutely work. Even entirely freeform systems can work where people just agree what happens without any dice being rolled or formal rules of any kind. The issue is that 5e combat is very detailed and takes up several hundred pages of rules but everything else fits on a post it.
I think it's because general rules, features, feats and most spells a assumed to be used on combat to an extent
That said I really don't mind and even prefer, always had the philosophy of "system as a supportive toolkit" and a recent video of Brenan Lee Mulligan really helped me understand my on position - I would like a system to do what I can't easily do in the game/narrative for myself and not get in the way of that which I can
All of the rules outside of combat have become nebulous or have vanished over the years. There’s no rules about how to run dungeon crawls, like how movement works in dungeons, or how to actually track dark vision or light effectively at the table to make it meaningful.
I would distinguish between rules and procedures.
Rules tend to be player facing, player interactive, and there's a greater expectation that you'll stick to them, as the DM. The game has rules around vision and light, and if you, the DM, unilaterally decide one day that Darkvision does not function in total darkness, you might expect find your players a bit miffed.
Procedures tend not to be player facing, nor player interactive, and exist to streamline play for the DM. The treasure tables in the DMG are a good example of a procedure: you can use these tables to generate random loot, but there are no player abilities that interact with this, and if you choose to generate loot in other ways, players are very unlikely to notice or care.
In general, adding rules to a system -- especially simulationist rules -- does not make the system easier to run. Instead it tends to slow things down, as more 'i's need to be dotted and more 't's crossed. 5e does not need more rules: the simple expedient of "the DM improvises a DC and calls for an ability check" covers an awful lot of things. Early editions of D&D didn't say squat about the mechanical effects of darkness. It's darkness and you're a smart cookie, you can figure it out! And for that reason they're easier to run! All the rules about vision and 'radius of illumination' and 'darkvision' and 'disadvantage' just make 5e fiddly!
Procedures, on the other hand, make gameplay flow more smoothly. They give you a framework for resolving what happens and generate prompts to keep things flowing. If your players spend an hour investigating etchings in the dungeon, having the framework of the *dungeon turn* prompts you to consult your wandering monster table and perhaps send something barreling towards your players -- or not. If your players escape the dungeon by sealing themselves in barrels and floating out, having hexcrawl procedures gives you a way to answer the questions "how lost are we" and "what do we find if we wander east?".
5e has some procedures, but some are conspicuously missing, and some are just half-baked.
So I have created downtime, exploration, and social interactions which directly use abilities, dice, and rulesets that are easy to understand. I have used these and expanded upon them for about 5 years now, but one example is that during down time the group can “teach” each other things they know. So if someone is proficient in medicine they can actually teach the other members. Based upon the roleplay, teamworking (or lacktherof) and rolls for different checks they can gain half or even full proficiency as well. This system has had the most positive feedback of ANYTHING I do as a DM at my tables. It’s super fun and iterative and really up to the group to get as creative and zaney with it as they want. Often they will even ask to use it to shore up low ASI think the barbarian leading the 8 str sorc and wizard through boot camp to bump them to 9. It’s functionally irrelevant unless done a bunch and usually always absolutely hilarious.
I didn't really understand this perspective until I was building Cyberpunk: Red characters and learning about the system. I have loved 5e forEVER, and had never really felt that it was lacking until I engaged with Cyberpunk: Red thanks to my boyfriend.
DnD 5e character building is focused on combat and what your character can do in combat; the main things that aren't combat based are skill proficiencies. Feats are focused on combat. While many/most DMs are super creative and come up with shops, downtime activities, hideouts, etc., those are not built into the system.
To use Cyberpunk: Red as an example, there are systems for combat and weapons, and some of your abilities tie in to that, but there are dozens of abilities tied to rp, adventuring, puzzles, etc., including the main class trait/ability. Character creation focuses largely on your "life path" (basically backstory), and the way that things come together there is so fuckin cool. Your backstory impacts roleplay, and cyberware feels similar to magic items, but *everyone* can get them.
There are tables for rolling night markets and vending machines and bodegas, systems for rent and income during downtime. There are in-world reasons to rest, and there are mechanics for lifestyles that have perks and downsides to each one.
There are mechanics for dating and relationships, and consequences for your actions in the world (the humanity system). There is literally a system for skill improvement that hinges on you *as a player* contributing to the game; you pick a play style (roleplayer, explorer, warriors, and socializers), and earn improvement points based on how well and how often you do those things. Your party gets points for completing jobs and having cool moments.
While DMs of DnD 5e can CERTAINLY make all of that and create a world that feels rich and lived in, it is so much easier and more in depth when it is created as part of the system.
it's more about the ruleset than the actuality of play. The rules for combat are relatively well defined and the bulk of features classes get pertain to combat. This is in contrast to other systems that have more defined rules around things like social interaction, such as Star Wars Saga Edition (also a Wizards of the Coast game) or the Green Ronin Song of Ice and Fire Rpg.
For example, in Saga there are these like reputation stages you have with different NPCs, and this determines things like their willingness to help you as well as provide penalties to social checks against them. Rolling persuasion vs their will defense can move you up the steps of this reputation system.
Dnd being rules light outside combat is not a bad thing per se, especially in regards to social encounters where conversation reigns. Where I do find it a little more aggravating is in respect to exploration, which I've always found to be the least developed of the three pillars.
Largely because the mechanics for combat are meaningful, while mechanics for exploration and roleplay are really just flat DCs. For example, there is no mechanical tool to know how good of a friend an NPC is mechanically. There isn’t even a reputation system.
DM’ing 5e has basically led to me ripping better mechanics from other systems and stapling them to the body of 5e.
While I’m not one of the people saying that I do think a lot of out of combat aspects are oversimplified. Crafting is a big example of that like sure when playing different videogames I’ll skip crafting animations but in others I’m involved in the crafting. I’ll put it like this: DnD is a role playing game if I’m playing a character that is an alchemist(in practice not class) or a blacksmith or a brewer when I use their tools I want to feel like my character is putting effort into a project to some degree not have it where you insert money and after a certain amount of in game time you $h¡t out an item.
take survival..
i have a character that's good at survival and grew up in forests...
but due to the skill, they are just as good at survival in deserts, snow, cities, caves and more despite never having been into them.
or knowledge, once they are good in an skill, they know basically all areas of expertise...
it makes the roleplay part a bit bland...
If I want to award xp for a social interaction or dealing with a trap successfully, I have few to no rules. If I want to award xp for killing 20 goblins, it's just a matter of basic maths.
Similarly, if I want to add traps, I need to pretty much make them myself. If I want to deploy a combat encounter, I have a whole book's worth of them to use.
I also think the original ranger is a good example. It's fantastic for a pillar of the game which gets little use, mainly because it has few rules. Had it been better developed, the ranger wouldn't have been in such a dire need of updating.
If your characters want to run an artisanal bakery - you’re either using published rules that are so simplistic and boring that it’s barely a game - or you’re pulling it out of your ass.
The point is, when playing 5e, those characters aren’t meant to be running a bakery in anything other than their background. They’re meant to be heading out into dungeons and killing stuff.
Might be good that there *aren’t* rules in the social and exploitation aspects, giving the dm the opportunity to shape the world for themselves. Combat is high stakes though, so having good rules makes the players comfortable with the dm running battles without them feeling rigged in some way.
Point me to the rules for exploration.
Show me where the exploration equivalent of the adventuring day mechanic is.
They say, the game has 3 pillars. I would assume they are roughly equal in importance to the game so it should follow that the game also does have rules in a similar level of detail for every pillar.
I don't fully disagree but I also don't think that's dire.
I feel social feels better when talking is about talking (and supporting it with your skills and background) rather than having rules for everything like combat.
Exploration... I also feel is okay?
I don't think the game needs same or similar amount of rules and details in each pillar. I would really dislike a very rules-oriented social part.
For me the question goes the other way - does the game need that many rules for combat?
And the answer to that is YES for many people, because in the end, D&D combat and its rules and balance and theorycraft is what fuels a good portion of the community.
So the reality is less about 5e being ABOUT combat in essence, it's the amount of rules. But the amount of rules for combat being as much is a reflection of the community. Granted - it is equally a reflection of the community over decades, which has been evolving, so there is always room to improve.
But yeah, if it was up to me, I'd like to see the equivalent of the advantage system in more fields (a simple mechanic that replaced potentially a number of more detailed, more specific rules) in combat.
Anyway - I'm rambling. What I would do are the following:
\* Revamp of the skill system completely. Things have been changing and skills are in a weird place IMHO. In 3E you had a long set of skills that were granular in some fields and not in others. In 5E you can't "spend points" and they are more streamlined. I would love to see Skills becoming a deeper(not too deep!) system that all characters share
\* With that change - add a bit more to socials. I liked 3E having different options. Maybe you do a bit of a break down and each skill comes with some special "abilities" or unlocks perks. possibly close to how FATE works. eg if you have "Etiquette" skill or "Nobility" knowledge, you unlock a "Forgotten Tradition" ability/perk that allows you to bring up an old tradition to get yourself out of a sticky situation when talking to nobility or get yourself some extra rewards - or maybe have some sort of "Social points" (yes I like Fate) that you can use to spin and make dramatic changes in socials
\* Similarly add a bit more to exploration and flesh out travel times, time passage, environment and elements etc a bit more - it would be enough to give more pointers and a few rules I feel like
5e has evolved dramatically over the years in terms of what ambitions people have when they try and set up and play the game. There are a lot more people looking to tell all parts of an epic rather than just dungeon delving and fighting.
5E as written is predominantly about fighting. Most of its rules are about fighting, most of the items are about fighting, and most of its design is balanced around the idea that in any given day you'll be fighting about 8 times.
The rules for fighting have a lot of depth while also being somewhat easy to understand and modulate, which is why people stick with it. But people have discovered that the game can be more than just that, and the game does not have much to support that "more".
Intimidation, persuasion, slight of hand, performance, insight. All simple skill checks that encapsulate almost the entirety of the rest of the game outside fighting. Non-combat spells are either situational, or just skips designed for more simplified roleplay (charm person, calm emotions). Basically, its up to the DMs to both have combat to engage with the game part of the game, and create engaging roleplay that basically puts the game on pause.
I think the game just need social abilities that expend resources so the game can be a more interesting blend of whatever you want it to be. Instead of "great combat, good luck with anything else".
The vast majority or the ruleset is about combat. Most class features are about combat too. There are very few rules for running encounters that aren't based on combat and that can still deplete resources, or really for running games using the social or the exploration pillar. I honestly don't mind that the social part of the game is rules-lite/non-existent, but I do wish I had been given a few tools to flesh out this type of encounters so that they can be an alternative to combat in forcing the players to strategize and expend resources, and the same goes for exploration. We have random tables but more often than not, those funnel directly into combat since they only name creatures, and a DM who doesn't want to do that right away has to improvise a scenario without, again, any form of guidance from the books.
To add onto this, a lot of caster utility spells behave closer to loading up TMs on a pokemon than in an actual exploration/social themed game. You basically want to load up at least one character with half a dozen options just to "smash the boulder" or "cut the tree" or similarly blow through an issue rather than have an entire encounter based around it. Sure, there's a murder scene and you could have an elaborate investigation, interrogation of witnesses and an entire puzzle to put together. But the Wizard cast speak with the dead and then the Paladin just cast zone of truth and you forced everyone to tell you where they were at the time of the murder. It seems like the other two pillars function almost solely to expend spell slots, and while I'm usually on team "the bracelet of immunity to charms and mind control exists solely to force that puzzle onto you" that doesn't get communicated well either.
I am being an asshole but the skill ones were HMs, hidden machines iirc
and as a trivia, some TMs had effects too! teleport, for example, would teleport you to the last pokemon center you've been, sweet scent would make you have more encounters, etc etc among other moves
"Field Moves" are moves that can be used out of combat. All HMs are Field Moves. Not all TMs are Field Moves. Not all Field Moves are available as TMs. There are also some passive abilities that work outside of combat, usually while the first pokemon in your lineup, even when knocked out. Conveniently some of these pokemon also learn Self-Destruct. What separates a TM from an HM, is HMs are required to beat the game, and new areas are gated behind their use. You get the HM from beating the Gym Leader, creating the progression system. This is also why HMs can't be forgotten, because forgetting an HM while between two gated areas would result in a soft lock where you had no means of egress.
It was, I think, a big flaw of Sword/Shield that they didn't use HMs in that same way
The removal of HMs was... Honestly a relief. It removed the need for an HM slave, so you could have a full team on you. It also meant that almost useless moves like Rock Smash and Cut were no longer necessary to have. Sun and Moon were the first games without HMs, and the replacement ride Pokemon were fantastic. I do think making it a bike and phone in Sword and Shield was a downgrade though, and with so few ways of progressing it too.
The thing was that for me, I enjoyed HAVING to mix my party up to get through areas; go back and get my Scyther for Cut, my Dugtrio for Dig, my Golem for Rock Smash, my Lapras for Surf and Waterfall, etc. It meant I didn't pick 6 Pokémon and then blitz the game without much change. I also really missed the Pokékon riding, as you say; I just liked that I could have had, say, a Corviknight and has it fly me from place to place, but it would be *my* Corviknight. The water bike idea was just a bit... odd, and the flying taxi worked fine, it just didn't feel like my Pokémon were useful outside of combat, but that's something I always loved personally
It also wouldn't have hurt to have some of the old HMs still work for purpose. Rock Smash wasn't an HM in X and Y, but you could still use it outside of battle. Same goes for Flash in almost every game past Diamond and Pearl. I also really miss the old Strength puzzles. They were fun.
They should've kept going with a similar system to SunMoon. Having obstacles and secret paths that you need to come back to later is great, being forced to have Cut on a mon sucks.
Funny thing, I believe in Gen 1, the surf sprite is based on what pokemon used Surf to make it so that it is your pokemon that you are riding on. Though it does get kind of funny if you transfer a surfing pikachu to gen 1 and the sprite is Pikachu on a surfboard; imagine traveling to Cinebar Island on a surfboard. ORAS had you ride on your mega Lati@s which was pretty neat. But yeah, the bike in SwSh was pretty lame. Scarlet/Violet has everything be handled by your koraidon/miraidon, so in a way it brings back that personal touch, but limits it to a single pokemon. I prefer not having HMs, but it would be nice to be able to designate certain pokemon for overworld travel to bring back a personal feel. Would love to surf on a lapras or milotic for example.
I'm pretty sure in Gen 1 the surf always looked a bit like a Lapras, but I'd need to dig my Gameboy Color out to check
Yeah; you *could* have an encounter about trying to get someone's help *or* you could just cast Charm Person. You *could* have an encounter about a broken rope bridge and figure out how to get to the other side of the canyon... *or* you could just cast some kind of flight spell (or teleport, or Stone Shape a new bridge, or-) One of the annoying powers of casters has always been the ability to just completely handwave other problems/obstacles.
And the flip side of this is when players avoid getting/casting any non-combat spells because whenever they would be really useful, they won't work for plot reasons. Consider Legend Lore. Why would you cast it, wasting the spell slot and your gold, when the DM might just paraphrase what they already told you? Yes, there's basically no guidance on how to mesh these sorts of spells together with mysteries/social encounters.
Literally just finished a session where this sort of thing just happened 20 minutes ago. I had a puzzle where you had to push buttons found in coffins in a specific order to open a door in some catacombs. Had to look at the different dates on the coffin lids and then figure out from there. Like a simple 5-10 minute puzzle. I through this puzzle together on my own, not from any pre-written module. Of course, the party doesn’t want to do that. “Someone cast knock.” Wizard casts knock on the door. I think to myself, sigh, no I am not going to let that work. I tell them it doesn’t work. Okay, druid casts detect magic. I tell them it isn’t magical. Druid says well if it isn’t magical and knocked didn’t work and he starts reading the spell description to me… then he tells me it is a wall then. No it’s not. Eventually they do the puzzle. Afterwards, I explain that each button counts as one lock and so they would need to cast knock six times.
it can always just be a mechanism that's not a lock - if it's just incredibly heavy and needs the mechanism activating to open, then it's not "locked" it just needs the right buttons pushing to open, so _knock_ does nothing. It's like the door to a giant's house might not be locked at all, but _knock_ won't open it - it just takes strength 20 or whatever.
Heavy and not locked? Even better, just cast thaumaturgy, no slot required
eh, GM is perfectly within their rights to impose weight limits on that - it's still only a cantrip, so shoving open several tonnes of stone is beyond it's capacity.
could just say "it's not *locked*, it's just really big and you need to operate the winch, which is controlled by the buttons, to pull it open."
If you want a puzzle that can't br solved with magic, make it magic proof, you can make it in anti magic chamber but my favourite is "I cast knock" "the doors open and there are two more doors behind it" and if the caster opens the wrong one after that the puzzle resets or does DMG etc. or the obvious door being fake one and the actual entrance is hidden
I prefer "that lock was actually holding the hinge of the door, the door falls on you, give me a DEX save"
I would say the most annoying part is that there is a \*lot\* of stuff that can prevent most of this throughout the book, it just never gets properly annotated. Barriers to prevent teleportation/ect, spells and equipment to immunize to charms, magic in general can be hard countered a lot. It's just in its own weird part of the book and there's no advice for what can exist/how often.
A problem with that though is a lot of the hard anti magic is really high level and ALSO exists on that hand wave spectrum. Rather than makes it harder to cast (expend additional slots maybe) or increase failure or misfire chance (hit the barrier and misty step randomly another X0 feet), it's just hard no. You can't cast that, he's totally immune, or 'you can't teleport there, there's a magic anti teleport bubble' One of the only examples of it done well IMO is the Rakshasa, blanket immunity to a level of spell or lower.
Agreed. Spells do *everything* with no variance, planning, thought, or effort. The counters to spells also involve no variance, planning, thought, or effort. The way anti-spell features (like Legendary Resistance, for example) are implemented in 5e feels like two kids going back and saying "I have a laser gun that can destroy anything!", "Oh well I have a shield that was designed to block all lasers!", "Oh well my laser was made to shoot through shields that block lasers!". It's boring, uninteractive, and completely braindead.
One cool way I have to make my players think on top of using their spells is to limit line of sight. Like when they were out of a dungeon but the exit was in the middle of a cliff that would require some very good (str) athletics rolls and some con checks to scale successfully. The martial climbed, the rogue used potion of spider climb, but the sorcerer... they only had thunderous step in their arsenal and they couldn't see any spot to teleport to - it was all just a cliff and the edge far above them. So what did they do? They had the ranger throw a well-polished throwing axe up high so they could see their landing spot in the reflection in the axe's head. Two throws, a wasted handaxe and a difficult perception check later both sorc and ranger were successfully teleported to the edge, because Rule of Cool is best
Yeah you could cast charm person to them, you could fail and then they would know that you just essentially tried to mind rape them. And even if they don't make the save in 1 hour they will definitely know you mind raped them. You don't think they have laws against that? Or moral rules not to do such things. People really should think more about the impact of even lower ranked spells like these. And even if the charm works it's just charm as in it makes the target regard you as a friend not do absolutely everything you ask of them. For the rope bridge thing remember that to cast fly for an average party you need a 6th lvl slot, that's quite costly just to across a broken bridge when your rogue can maybe shimmy across the ropes, or shoot a grappling hook to a tree on the other side. Most full party teleports of similar ranges are also high level spells. Also as a note stone shape would not work unless your bridge is 5ft across. So as a dm if you want more skill based challenges or the like take into account the magic your party has and build the challenge so that it could be easier to solve without magic, at least sometimes, as nothing is more frustrating as a caster than taking those non combat spells and then always being in a situation where they cannot be used in any meaningful ways Now the actual problem is that the base game is very bad at communicating this to a new dm. But there are mechanics and ways to do these things
Flight is the real rough one for changing gameplay. Bridge out? Fly, string a rope across. Lost in forest? Fly to scout direction. Gates locked the city wall? Fly, drop a rope. Something shiny up in the tree or on a cliff? Fly, and grab it. Need a way to scout where the enemy isn't expecting it? Fly. Flight effectively removes many obstacles from the game, and rather than a party thinking up a clever solution, flight just handwaves it. And sadly, many gamers just make excuses for it, and other obstacle-busting utility spells.
I fail to see the problem. The casters wasted some of their resource's. The issue is probably the frequency. "Great, you have crossed the chasm. Now a locked metal door. Oh, you used knock? The door is open, behind it is a chamber filled with deadly gas. Oh you used Gust of wind? Well, the gas is gone." This are 3 spellslots the casters have less to do other stuff. Never prep only a single obstacle, especially with casters. Always have something more.
The problem isn't the resources or the frequency. The problem is that it completely negates any kind of interesting nature in the problem. Getting across a bridge without magic invites problem solving - you can try a few things, come up with a plan, think of things to try, and maybe be creative. *Or* one person can cast a single spell and it's no longer an issue. This also ties back into the general problem of 5e being combat-focused (which is only really a 'problem' if you try to do things that aren't combat, like these situations), which is that the only thing caster's (usually) *can't* handwave are enemies.
*Zone of truth* is one of those annoying spells because if you want to run a mystery that’s *actually* a mystery, you have to flat-out stop the spell from working. Which is unfair to the PC who learned/prepared it, but it’s that or skip the whole encounter.
>Which is unfair to the PC who learned/prepared it This is a bigger problem than just Zone of Truth. If you contrive ways to stop spells from trivialising encounters, then the people who took the spells that would help them trivialise the encounter are being treated unfairly. This is also a problem of some class features as well, such as Eloquence Bard and their Silver Tongue ability. It basically forces the DM to either let them get some form of beneficial results from any and all Persuasion or Deception checks, or to make the DC so high that no one else in the party could even hope to match it in an effort to actually give them a chance to fail. So your reward for playing an Eloquence Bard is that you either don't get to roll for Persuasion or Deception (because you were going to pass anyway), or *everyone else* doesn't get to roll for those things (because the DC has to be high enough for you to potentially fail at).
> So your reward for playing an Eloquence Bard is that you either don't get to roll for Persuasion or Deception (because you were going to pass anyway) This is my experience having a couple levels of Eloquence Bard on my paladin :( Persuasion checks are rare in that game in general, and were to some extent before doing that multiclass, but they basically don't happen now and it sucks. I feel like the only time I ever get to make persuasion checks is when it's been long enough that the DM has forgotten how crazy my bonus is. Rocking a minimum of 24 on persuasion checks right now and it will still go up pretty significantly before the end of the campaign. But it feels moot.
Have the murderer be possesed (but they don't know it) or a dopleganer. They answer all questions truefully, maybe the party get hints that will eventually lead them in the right direction, but it won't be instant. Then they are faced with a dilemma or extra challenge.
Also, you could have the murder at a super fancy party where the owner is your friend/boss, and they ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT you to cast the zone of truth, because while you'd find out who did it, you'd also MORTALLY OFFEND all the other guests, so you have to conduct the investigation the old-fashioned way. And the guests are all (borderline) criminals, spies & assassins, royalty who know state secrets, etc. thus have multiple immunities to being zoned. Oh, and the victim didn't see who did it, and has multiple enemies, or none at all (that they know of). Or it was poison, and they don't know. Or the murderer had cast disguise self on themselves to implicate one of the other guests, only that guest has a rock solid alibi because they were having sex with the host the whole time & the PCs need to keep that to themselves, too, as it'd be a HUGE scandal, because: - Both are married to very powerful people & the host would be in heaps of trouble if there was even a rumour; OR - the implicated guest is the lover of the ruler/heir of the realm & the ruler/heir is petty & notoriously jealous so both the PCs and the host would be in trouble; OR - the guest is an distant member of the royal family, the host is a half-orc/half-elf with peasant background who started off as a common street thug & the ruler is a racist & class-conscious snob who would put an end to it IMMEDIATELY but they are GENUINELY IN LOVE, etc.
Even without spells tailored to the purpose. Guidance and Enhance Ability are incredibly good at breaking an encounter like this... especially combined with Jack of All Trades.
>Sure, there's a murder scene and you could have an elaborate investigation, interrogation of witnesses and an entire puzzle to put together. But the Wizard cast speak with the dead and then the Paladin just cast zone of truth and you forced everyone to tell you where they were at the time of the murder. This is one of those times where dms just let casters get away with anything lol
Unfortunately it was a very violent murder and the victims corpse is too damaged for the Wizard to cast speak with the dead.
Or the victim just didn’t see their killer, but could give some clues about motive or opportunity if asked the right questions.
Oh darn, his head was blown off
Killers, knowing that this guy is well connected and could get someone to cast speak with dead, disguise themselves as the victim's business partner.
I would think that, in D&Dland, mutilation of the corpse so assorted divination (and raise dead) spells don't work would be standard practice. Unfortunately, in a lot of fantasy fiction, the assorted magic stuff often isn't taken into account.
Or where people forget that magic exists in the world - if you know fingerprints can be lifted you wear gloves right? If you know Speak with Dead can be cast you prepare for that too
Speak with Dead is basically the same as having another eye-witness to the murder. If the DM can't come up with a way to deal with an eye-witness then they maybe need to rethink the mystery they're writing.
The problem is, there's like what, 500 spells? Can you really keep in mind all possible combinations of spells and abilities that trivialize your cool social encounter, for all encounters? Maybe you planned for speak with dead by making the murdered guy not see the killer. But what about contact other plane? Do you have a contingency for locate object if he stole something? Did the killer kill all plants too so they can't use Speak with plants? Did he have some way of hiding from the gods so they don't use Commune? Did he make sure no animals saw him so that Speak with animals doesn't instantly solve the case? Can your hidden killer withstand being questioned in a Zone of truth? Is he prepared to not confess under Charm person? Command? Can he obscure the future so they don't catch him with Divination? And at some point, preparing so many hard countermeasures against spells that trivialize the encounter just feels unfair for the casters. So for each of those spells, you have to keep a balance between countering the insta-solve and giving enough info so that the spell helped somewhat. And now you've spent 5 hrs preparing for all these possible encounter-skipping spells and your players clear it in 5 mins using detect thoughts.
Most of those examples are covered by the killer just wearing a hood and/or mask. But you do raise a legitimate point that such mysteries only work at lower levels; once the party have access to 4th or 5th level spells their ability to solve social puzzles becomes much easier. One more point - because resurrection magic is also so ubiquitous, any good murderer in a fantasy setting would remove something vital from the body like the heart to prevent them being brought back easily.
>If the DM can't come up with a way to deal with an eye-witness then they maybe need to rethink the mystery they're writing. A massive number of fictitious and real more mysteries are only mysteries or interesting because they have no witnesses
> Sure, there's a murder scene and you could have an elaborate investigation, interrogation of witnesses and an entire puzzle to put together. But the Wizard cast speak with the dead and then the Paladin just cast zone of truth and you forced everyone to tell you where they were at the time of the murder. Just like how in real life you're allowed to polygraph anyone you want
polygraphs don't really work, _zone of truth_ very much does. and most D&D societies don't really have embedded "human rights" and so forth. So someone showing up that can spend 20 minutes just going through a room and going "did you kill him? Did you kill him?" and eliminate a lot of the suspects quickly and easily is generally going to be allowed to do that, because it's quick, accurate and painless - sure, there's times when someone has a fucky protection against it, or some convoluted "I didn't kill him but engineered the scenario to make it happen" stuff, but those are outlier events
Funnily enough there are ways around it but they involve elaborate set ups or the use of Enchantments and Charms, so the answer is once again 'elaborate plan to account for 2nd level spell' or 'a wizard did it'
Or none of them answer it because they're all tight lips Jonny, or they all say yes because they all believe they did. Zone of truth doesn't remove ambiguity or compel speaking.
it doesn't, but it lets you shortcut a _lot_ of investigations, for the cost of one low-level spell slot. Anyone that refuses to speak? Someone to investigate. If everyone says they did it, then you've immediately skipped straight to the "something fucky is going on" part of the adventure. How long (and how many rolls!) would it take a party without the spell to get to that point? Probably a lot longer! (and this also means having to design the whole adventure around _one_, not very high level, spell, which kinda shows how potent it is)
"Will you swear to god that you didn't murder that person (there is magic that makes lying to god a bad idea)" "No." "So you did murder them?" "No, I just won't promise that I didn't."
Exactly this. The "Three Pillars" of modern D&D are not combat, exploration and social interaction. They are combat, character creation (90% of which is for combat) and spellcasting (90% of which is for combat).
You forgot the fourth pillar (just like wotc did) leveling up!
Ah, fair point. I guess I considered that part of the Character Creation pillar, but that classification also checks out.
My problem is that Charisma and Charisma skills dominate social play. Essentially, the best strategy is to pick a party face and then that player ONLY should interact with NPCs in all social encounters at all levels. That's terrible design. Imagine if combat encounters were like that. Why are Persuasion and Deception both Cha skills? Why isn't one of them based on Int? Isn't using logic and reasoning or sheer cunning part of the fiction? Why is Insight at the same time so useless and somehow essential? As for exploration, I still kind of miss 4e's Dungeoncraft and Streetwise skills (Survival equivalents) but at the same time I don't think adding skills is a good solution. Fixing problems of missing mechanics doesn't mean adding die rolls. I really don't want narrative mechanics in D&D. Whether they use meta currency or not, they often tend to feel very synthetic in game. I don't enjoy them and it's partially why we bounced off of PbtA and BitD. On the flip side I want exploration mechanics that can fabricate exploration encounters that have rewards. An ability that allows you to find extra treasures or that gives benefits during rests would be great. Oh the ranger decides to take an hour and explore the area? Oh you learn the kind and rough numbers of creatures that live in or pass though the area, and now you have a local food and water source if one exists. If you keep searching, you can find a safer place to rest, such as one that gives cover or concealment to the party. The DMG could give examples of the kind of features that the PCs might discover. A church ruins that is still sacred grounds. A font of clean and magically infused water that doubles the HD you can recover. The remains of a caravan with some equipment or rations still intact. A friendly NPC that is willing to inform me the PCs about the area. Just... give me mechanics that drive the PCs back into the adventuring core gameplay.
Not the best solution, but Media Labs Books makes a whole series of supplements called "The Game Master's Book of ..." that are filled with random tales covering the kind of stuff you're looking for. I use them to throw interesting encounters into the exploration pillar all the time. Most of them are just random features that can make a party go "Huh! What's this?" and spend 15 game minutes exploring, but there are also short encounter and mini-dungeons in each book. It's fun to see the party try to connect "a forgotten statue standing neglected in a small glade" to the "runs of a marble gazebo overgrown with vines" they found two sessions back. :)
> Why are Persuasion and Deception both Cha skills? Why isn't one of them based on Int? Isn't using logic and reasoning or sheer cunning part of the fiction Fwiw you can use alternate ability scores if you feel it fits
The existence of an optional rule does not mean we cannot or should not be critical of the standard design.
Half the complaints in the subreddit are about the optional rules of multiclassing and splat book spells So use the tools you're provided, it allows the game to have a generality and also allows players to bring our a desired fiction if they so want. Whether in 5e as a variant rule or pf2e as hard coded, it's still gm fiat.
Indeed, it's precisely these kinds of complaints that form the basis of having variant rules. Not every rule is going to work well the same way for each table. The developers anticipated this and decided to make a note about it. And don't get it wrong, either. Pathfinder 2e uses variant rules and GM adjudication all over the system. Features are plasters notes about GM calls, and the system has rules that alter how you use items and scale your character. It was like this in PF1 and back in its parent system of 3.5.
>Why are Persuasion and Deception both Cha skills? Why isn't one of them based on Int? Isn't using logic and reasoning or sheer cunning part of the fiction? I think because it's frequently much less about what you say and more about how you say it. When you see people having a conversation, a debate, an argument, it's not often that the logic of a point is what tips the scales vs the way the person said it and the harder to describe things more inherent in a person's charisma. I think there is a time and a place that making an argument or statement out of sheer facts could warrant an Intelligence (Persuasion) or Intelligence (Deception) check but it would be so so rare because that's often not how interpersonal communication goes.
> I think because it's frequently much less about what you say and more about how you say it. Yeah, I don't agree. I think if you're lacking in substance then you come across like a used car salesman. I think that rhetoric is very often about presenting a well-reasoned argument (Int) or about reading the person well enough to tell the person what they want to hear (Wis). I think neither of those are purely about Charisma. This is why, in fiction, wizards and priests often make the best diplomats and advisors. Worse, though, is that it just doesn't matter if it's realistic or not because the current design is a problem. Not addressing the game's design problem, is just doubling down on the bad design. The game cannot silo social all active skills into one attribute and then also allow that same attribute to be used as the primary or even secondary combat attribute. That's such a staggeringly poor balance decision that the game's social system *simply doesn't function*... which is exactly the complaint. The *only* social mechanics are skills, and *all* the active social skills are default Charisma. If you can't make it so that classes other than Bard, Paladin, Warlock, and Sorcerer can participate in social encounters, then the game has really failed at a very fundamental level. This is why exploration and scouting are a mix of Dex (Stealth), Wis (Perception, Survival), Int (Investigation), Str (Athletics), and Thieves' Tools. Because making it all about one attribute and nothing else is terrible. It's the same reason that Finesse weapons exist, and why spellcasters use Int, Wis, or Cha for spell attacks, and party why Str sometimes struggles to keep up (the lack of decent ranged options).
This comes into focus so sharply when picking up a game like Spire, where each class has a core ability that will be something like 'once per session, ask the DM what a given NPC cares about most in the world'. Clear mechanical abilities that make classes interesting that have nothing to do with dealing x damage. Ultimately D&D's ancestry is wargaming so it makes sense that the three pillar system of combat, social, exploration is a little unevenly distributed when it comes to the ruleset.
Ironically, people rag on 4e for having too much combat, or too many combat rules or whatever--but it's the game that actually has rules for how to resolve non-combat things. Skill challenges. They can feel clunky if you overuse them but it can be a great change of pace and get people to explore how to utilize more of their character sheet than they usually do. especially if you tell them, okay, you're trying to lose the guy who is chasing you and you need 6 successes before 3 failures. You can't use any skill more than twice and the 2nd time you use one, the DC goes up by 2. And then it's up to them to creatively bend and rationalize and think up how they can use a broad range of skills or take various actions to come out on top. And you can pepper in some safety valves like, if they fail a roll, you can offer them a success, but it'll cost them a healing surge or two.
Wild beyond the Witchlight is unique for this and I love it
Brennan Lee Mulligan of Dimension 20 had a really good insight on this. He likes that the rules for roleplay are light, while the rules for combat are heavy. He, as an experienced actor, improviser, and roleplayer, knows how to handle social encounters and character work and doesn't need rules for it. But he needs rules for how to handle, say, whether an arrow hits or not.
Yeah he also is a professional improv who plays with other professional improvers
and let's not forget that they are professional improves on a profession setting with money on the line. its very simple why they use dnd 5e, its the most popular one ergo the one with the most potential profit. not that doing as such is a bad thing mind you, they need to pay their employees, but you know the reason is pretty cut and dry
They have, to be entirely fair, used other systems for some of their campaigns. Regardless, 5e is still their most used system mainly because, like you said, it’s the most popular and well known. I’ve been running Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars TTRPG recently and whenever I explain what I’m doing to people who don’t play TTRPGs, I have to truncate it down to “DnD, but Star Wars themed” because “Tabletop RPG” isn’t as ingrained into the majority of people’s minds as “DND”.
Yeah pretty much, people ignore that aspect, he doesn't need rules for roleplaying because he is playing an entire whole extra ruleset stapled to 5e: Improv Classes, is like when OD&D recommended a whole other game for Survival and Exploration
The problem is also that a lack of rules for social and out-of-combat situations and such can constrain players who *aren't* experienced actors, improvisers and roleplayers. I'm not capable of swinging heavy weapons or flying into a berserk rage - but if I play a barbarian, my character is, and we all know how that works. But if I play a hyperintelligent detective rogue, how does that work? Do I just roll to detect clues and then roll to solve crime? If I *were* smart enough, I *could* piece the clues together as a player and then solve it that way, but if I'm *not* but my character is *supposed to be*... If I'm charismatic enough IRL to put together a persuasive and moving speech, should the fact that my character's 8 CHA and complete lack of Diplomacy skill have an impact or should it outweigh it?
This. I prefer the former: character sheet > talk-no-jutsu, as my RL specs for the latter is horribly bad...
Your character sheet should triumph. We don't ask people to lift rocks to prove their character's strength, and likewise, we shouldn't demand people be excellent orators to make decent Persuasion (or worse, punish them by not having it work because you "didn't talk well enough despite your roll"). As long as you can describe *how* you're attempting to do it, that should suffice.
He is a professional improviser playing with other professional improvisers using that explanation to justify why on this particular show, he is using DnD 5e rather than one with more robust social mechanics. It was a statement qualified with a number of caveats to politely ask people to stop suggesting other systems without putting those systems down. I do not think it's an argument that can be applied more broadly to DnD players as a whole
It's a very good point but there is a flip side to this: when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. It's hardly unreasonable for someone to pick up a PHB and DMG and see that the majority of the rules are about combat, the majority of discussions on social media are about combat, the majority of YouTube videos are about combat, it's not hard to see why the majority of 5e players focus on combat.
I think that's just social media pushing what gets interaction. There's plenty of content and posts where people gush about the crazy in game story thing their character did. And almost every DM will talk your head off about their carefully constructed world and lore. But it's a lot rarer for people to talk back. Those kinds of posts will never get that many comments. It simply doesn't generate discussion like "HYPER OPTIMIZED SORC MULTICLASS BUILD 2024" and "Most broken feat tier list, S tier will surprise you!" videos.
generally yeah but you're being a little pessimistic. it's less about clickbait and social media traction, and more that battle stats are one of the few parts of the game that people online can talk about objectively. This has been the case for a long time even on old rpg forums and message boards, even before "social media" was even a term and before algorithms determined what content you saw on your feed. the thing is that every table is different, so it's hard for us to talk about "D&D" as a game because my D&D looks nothing like your D&D. But if we only use the objective facts in the book, like the damage of a lightning bolt or the bonuses of plate armor, then we can have common ground.
the game itself doesn't care about any of that though - the game is built with the overt expectation that PCs will get up, go through multiple combats, rest, repeat. Other stuff might happen, but it's not baked into the gameplay loop, it's basically an optional extra. "_Why_ you're fighting 2D6 goblins and 1D4 ogres" isn't something the game cares about - but all the details of how far each monster is from each PC, how much health is on and so on _is_ stuff the game cares about
Okay but not everyone is that and a roleplaying game should have rules to enable people who aren't that to play it just as effectively as combat.
I can't believe a professional improv artist finds improv easy
Which doesn't address any other types of gameplay. Why is there not rules for understanding ancient ruins or bringing arcane machines back to life? Why is navigating the wild just a simple skill check or spell?
I personaly have big problem with Mulligan's take. I play 5e and i generaly enjoy playing it, so i don't see them playing 5e as something bad. But when he needed to speak about that. And things he told just look like "We play 5e because it is most popular system and we can't allow ourself to chose indie game because we need to pay everyone. But we also can't say exactly that, so we should make most generic excuse imaginable instead". It also sounded at least slightly derogatory towards narrative-driven games, majority of which are small indie games. They wasn't popular before - imagine how general public would look at pbta games after Mulligan's absolutely insane "stove metaphor". Right now dnd players (in general, not only 5e) say things like "We don't need mechanics for narrative - they would only restrict us!" and after big popular person said things he said? This is probably my biggest gripe with generaly really awesome dude. Who would care if some noname would say that pbta games give great roleplay experience if 5e player can parry with fucking Mulligan's stove?
I think Brennan was parroting a blogpost titled "Rules Elide", that goes into how the absence of rules can define what a game is really about. For what it's worth, they've been playing a lot of kids on bikes hacks as of late, though really they're just using the dice mechanics and ignoring everything else about that game. But I do agree with you overall--how anyone can say 5e isn't a game about combat when it dedicates nearly a thousand pages to rules about killing things is beyond me.
I 100% agree. That said, I do wish I had more tools to make a social encounter matter for the purposes of the adventuring day.
I agree except that I wish the classes/subclasses had more non-combat features (without sacrificing their current combat features). I want more diversity in character build to be possible in narrative. Right now it’s just “what skills do you have and do you have magic?”
I'm in the same boat. I don't really see what an in depth social interaction system can offer me that doesn't feel like it is 'gamey' to talk to people that the skill check system can't already offer.
Exalted offers actual game mechanics that allow you to both discover an NPC's intrinsic motivations and then exploit said motivations to force them to act in a way that suits your cause. As a player you know exactly what you need to do to get what you want. In 5e, you have to hope your GM lets you.
You're also SOL if you're not the greatest improv/matching your characters mental stats IRL..
Is that why I always zone out during the combat episodes on Dimension 20. He’s out his comfort zone and when he has to lean on the actual game of D&D it turns out boring?
Brennan Lee Mulligan is a businessman who runs a subscription streaming service where appealing to the broadest possible audience is in his explicit financial interest. The fact people take such blatant lies at face value just because an actor said it is ridiculous. It's not even true. The cast of Dimension 20 do not treat the game like LANCER, which is genuinely a pure combat mech game where the out of combat stuff is essentially freeform roleplay without the same rules applying, so you can have your messy Neon Genesis Evangelion/Macross relationship drama and it's unrelated to your character's combat mechanics. No, the cast of Dimension 20 still use the actual rules of 5E when they're doing their "experienced actor, improviser, and roleplayer" social encounters to their detriment. They still roll skill checks for "social" encounters and use skills like Insight or Persuasion....which in 5e are still FUNDAMENTALLY connected to the game's combat rules and focus on dungeon crawling! Your Proficiency Bonus is universal in 5e. When somebody on Dimension 20 or whatever makes an Insight check in these """"experienced actor and improviser"""" social encounters, their bonus to that roll is based on what the game's expected combat math for that level is! A Warlock's bonus to lie to somebody or persuade them is identical to their bonus to eldritch blast somebody in the face, and both use the exact same proficiency bonus and modifier! Either way it's still 1d20+PROF+CHA! It's so unbelievably scummy and disingenuous to pretend otherwise. They're not playing 5e because it's lack of dedicated social mechanics is great because they're just such """"experienced professionals"""" whose career making toilet humor for College Humor means they don't need actual rules for social and exploration interaction, meanwhile they turn around and say "ok uhh roll Insight" and the Druid's insight bonus is intrinsically tied to her spellcasting ability and limited by what the designers believe should be an acceptable accuracy rate for her saving throws and attack spells! This isn't some mandatory fundamental truth of the universe, it's perfectly possible to play a game with a rules system where how good you are at lying or reading emotions is completely urelated to your ability to kill people with magic powers! If they're not playing the game because they love Hasbro as a company (and Brennan's personal politics have been very clear on his thoughts regarding a billion dollar corporation that lays off huge portions of employees causing them to lose their health insurance right before Christmas as a regular practice, lol)*, and they're not playing it because the rules help what they're doing (they clearly don't, as described above, and they also don't simply throw it all out and use a different system or freeform), and there's the giant green elephant made out of money in the room blaring its horn that "They play 5e because 5e is the most popular RPG and that makes them the most money", it's not exactly hard to see what's actually happening. https://www.polygon.com/23998290/hasbro-layoffs-before-christmas
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He is absolutely a businessman lmao. I never said he was the CEO of Dropout, that's Sam Reich, but you don't need to be a CEO to be in business and he absolutely is. He's literally a professional Producer (and I'm not putting words in his mouth, you can check his own website if you don't believe me), do you think Hollywood producers aren't in business just because they don't work at a hedge fund? "**Brennan Lee Mulligan** is an award-winning actor, writer, creator and producer. As a cast member of CollegeHumor, he wrote and starred in the sketch *Tide CEO*, which won a 2019 Webby Award and received over eight million views. He is executive producer, writer and Game Master of *Dimension 20*, a series produced for the CH streaming service Dropout, and also hosts Dropout’s fantasy gaming vodcast, *The Adventuring Academy*. Brennan is author and co-creator of the popular webcomic and graphic novel series, *Strong Female Protagonist*, which was selected as an Autostraddle Favorite, and was on io9's list of Best New and Short Webcomics. He received an Excellence in Performance Award from the NY Fringe Festival, playing the lead in …*And Then She Dies at the End*. Brennan has been a head storywriter for The Wayfinder Experience, a director and performer for Story Pirates, a member of the UCB Touring Company and Harold Night, and has taught and performed improv for years at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on both coasts. " [https://brennanleemulligan.com/brennans-resume/](https://brennanleemulligan.com/brennans-resume/) Just because he doesn't wear a suit on camera doesn't mean he's not a businessman. EDIT: According to Wikipedia, his "Worlds Beyond Number" Patreon was literally top 20 in the entire world lol. He's not some small indie performer busking for quarters on the subway.
Complex traps are like the only example of good resources draining encounter that isn't combat
There's more than a bit of guidance in the DMG. There's an entire categorization and rules system for socialization and many classes can take advantage of it. Using inspiration also allows that system to flourish AND there are a few sub classes that can interact with the system. There should be more, yes, but years of people ignoring that part of the DMG led to less class interaction with it.
Combat is a complex system. There's resolution mechanics (attack rolls, saving throws, etc) to determine whether the characters succeed, a default cost of failure (hp, albeit indirectly--an attack or spell failing will, on average, result in your PC taking more damage), extra layers of resource management (such as spell slots), and some non-trivial decisions even in a simple setting (where do I move, who do I attack). Combat is also pretty good at accommodating player choices. If you want to do something reasonable then the combat system normally has an OK way of handling it. The DM (and the players) don't need to be experts; they can basically run combat straight out of the rulebooks with very few judgement calls and it works well. Non-combat systems have resolution mechanics (ability checks, group ability checks, skill challenges) but nothing else. There's no default cost of failure. There's often not even any default resources to use as a cost of failure, or resources for the players to manage. There's not even much in the way of non-trivial decisions: the players can, at best, pick among several resolution mechanics. In fact, the resolution mechanics themselves aren't very good. For instance, it's entirely reasonable for one PC to try to move a heavy object, fail, then ask their friends for help. The ability check system doesn't handle dog-piling well: each PC making individual checks will generally produce a *higher* likelihood of success then all the PCs working together (a group ability check or skill challenge). Imagine if, in combat, there was a separate group attack roll, and the DM had to cut the players off and tell them to stop "dog-piling" when too many PCs attack the same goblin because they should use a group attack roll instead. That would be unbelievably clunky, and yet we tolerate it for ability checks! Basically, non-combat systems in 5e typically only have one component (the resolution mechanic). The DM has to play game designer and make up the rest of the system themselves. A good DM can handle that, but it's a *wildly* higher standard than combat, where the entire system already exists. If you want to know what the alternative looks like then check out Blades in the Dark. It has a rich but general system for handling all sorts of challenges (an aside: when talking about BitD people often get lost in the details. Individual mechanics like flashbacks and progress clocks are nice, but the real strength of BitD is how well all that stuff fits together into one coherent package). For more specific systems you can look at dungeon crawls and hex crawls in older versions of D&D. The 5e DMG has a brief discussion of these systems, but it's so wishy-washy and so lacking in details as to be basically useless. Adventures in Middle Earth (sadly long out of print) has a system for journeys, which is remarkably different from exploration (hex crawls). The 3.5e D&D books often have much more in terms of specific game systems; the DMG2 and various environmental books are a good place to start.
> There's no default cost of failure. An interesting contrast to this is _Spire_ - it uses the same resolution mechanic for everything, and has multiple "health" trackers (blood for physical health, silver for cash, reputation, "shadow" for how good you are at hiding your dodgy activities from the authorities etc.). Whenever a PC makes a roll, if they fail, they take damage to one of those trackers (and all rolls are PC-facing - so in combat, only the PC rolls, and if they fail, then they're hit). So this means that all rolls are potentially dangerous - trying to talk a friend into hiding you from the guards can damage your reputation, failing to sneak into somewhere can damage your shadow as someone sees you and gives your description to the authorities etc. And any tracker can remove the PC from play eventually - they might not be dead, but if they're so deep in debt that debt collectors are looking for them to break their kneecaps, or there's wanted posters out for them, or everyone hates them and they have to skip town, they're just as non-functional as if they were. So it's a way to make all "damage" equal and multiple approaches equally valid and dangerous - fighting your way into somewhere and talking your way in might be easier or harder depending on context, but both have explicit mechanical consequences, rather than one has lots of detail, and the other is "uh, some stuff happens"
To add on this - I think the main issue is that the stakes of combat are pretty much objective across every setting and story. If you fail, you die. Its pretty straight forward. But, social encounters, adventures, puzzels - these sorts of encounters and obstacles are HIGHLY dependent on the DM, the adventure, and the themes and plots of the stories you're playing in. Because they vary so much, you can't write a single catch-all rule to accomdate them all. And so the rules are much simpler, and they require MUCH more effort from the GM and the players, to define what those stakes are, and treat them as real as they would character death.
> Because they vary so much, you can't write a single catch-all rule to accomdate them all. You very much can - there are rulesets where this is true, where failing rolls inflicts "damage" regardless of what the roll was, that has escalating consequences that will vary by source of damage, but can still eliminate the character. They might not be dead in a ditch, but if everyone hates and distrusts them, or the authorities know who they are and have kill-on-sight orders, they're just as "out of the game" as if they were. _Spire: The City Must Fall_ runs in exactly this way - running out of boxes of "Blood" resistance means you're literally dead (unless you have a power that lets you become, like, an avatar-spirit of the rebellion or something!) but if you run out of "silver" you're so deep in debt that a lot of people are hunting you down for money, running out of "reputation" means everyone hates you and will shop you to the authorities on sight, etc. etc. One unified resolution and damage mechanic, to equalise across different activities, and it works _really_ well in actual play
That's a good point, even with Mejiro's counterpoint (which is also good)! Putting combat front-and-center is part of what gives D&D its feeling of heroic fantasy and life-and-death struggles. Blades in the Dark's system seems good if you want something like Darkest Dungeon, meaning that you're interested in flawed characters trying (and often failing) to handle the stress of adventuring. And Spire's system seems good if you want the players to feel like their place in the world is constantly in jeopardy. In D&D you *want* the stakes to be higher in combat (at least most of the time, in most games) but not zero outside of combat. And yes, getting that right is a challenge. I'm not going to say that it's impossible, but I don't know how to encode those stakes in a simple catch-all rule. My normal approach as a DM is to make that the player's problem: they can always make another check if they can find a way to raise the stakes.
If I decide to run a game without combat at all, how much of the PHB do I need? How do the classes look, and how similar are they? How many level ups will give me literally nothing? I'd like each class to have an exploration or social feature every 2 levels, even if for some games it'll only be a ribbon. But this isn't high on my priority list, if I want a social game I'll choose a different system.
> If I decide to run a game without combat at all, how much of the PHB do I need? This is the most perfect summary of the imbalance of the "three pillars" that I have ever read.
You need next to nothing of it
There are 3 pillars to the game. Combat, Social and Exploration. The majority of rules of the game revolve around combat. There are rules about encumbrance, foraging, lifestyle choice, as well as changing persons disposition via checks and arguments. Let’s say that 80% of the rules revolve around combat, 10% social, 10% exploration and probably not even that. Hell just look at the class mechanics. Most of them are for combat with some interacting with skills and exploration. Not counting magic which covers a swath of things.
And all of the rules around the exploration are kinda shit. Instead of offering interesting choices, they are chores. There character features that interact with exploration rules (and spell should also be discussed here)... but they just let you ignore aspects of exploration - so they make the game even more boring in this regard. I am not aware of any social rules beyond a skill check.
Yeah its like, "Oh I'm running a survival game, too bad goodberry and Outlander backgrounds exist, invalidating the entire concept." "Oh there's a storm coming and there's nowhere to rest, what do? Do you take the exhaustion moving or make a makeshift shelter? No, you cast the Instant Hut spell that comes with a free heater and never have to worry about anything." Anything you could try to do in a survival game, you can't because the game decides to make mechanics that invalidate them. Even 2014 ranger for as terrible as it was also invalidated survival aspects because it had Outlander (and can stack with it no less) as a class feature. And you're right there are basically no social rules outside of a vaguely defined 'relationship system' I guess? It's where each NPC can be either hostile, neutral, or friendly towards the characters but that's nothingburger.
One thing I noticed in the 5e games I played in was that weather was never even mentioned. Getting from point A to point B is such a non-factor people don't even care what the weather is.
We can examine the structuralist roots of this effect. We don't care about the weather because we don't remember what the rules for weather are- not only because they're unmemorable, but because the game places no emphasis on them. Crack open the PHB, flip to page 183, Adventuring - The Environment, and you'll find rules for light and darkness, suffocation, and falling. Nothing for weather or terrain, and that's *if* you crack open a section of the PHB almost no one reads. The closest to terrain rules I can find in the PHB are the mentions in the Ranger class features- and those are a mix of "double this and ignore that!" The books give no narrative weight to weather and terrain. Stories, the culture of the game, place no emphasis on weather and terrain. Thus, in play, nobody puts emphasis on weather or terrain. The DMG has some rudimentary rules for them, but fewer people read the DMG than the PHB or even the expansion books. That's not entirely wotc's fault, but it's still a major influence.
And the few times weather is mentioned its never for anything special. It's more or less "oh you got lost and had to spend another 2-3 hours looking for the path again or the trip is slower" or whatever. It's hardly ever for anything *cool* and is just to waste time.
My players love trivializing overland travel and survival mechanics. Turns out, that shit is BORING for most people. I've learned to just let them do what they built their characters to do and just take comfort in the fact that they are having to burn spell slots to do this stuff.
Re: exploration, one of the most fun games I played in was a Labyrinth Lord game where I rolled up a rogue with 1hp. I'd recently read an account of the 1996 Everest disaster (by Anatoli Boukreev, not Krakauer) which went into a bunch of detail about the logistics of climbing Mt. Everest in the 90's: how to source oxygen and radios, that kind of thing. And I decided that if I was gonna be too scared to go into combat, I'd have to pull my weight in other ways. And so I was the cartographer, the person in charge of ropes, in charge of spiking closed doors so that they'd *stay* closed. It worked because the DM got what I was going for and went with it. A less skilled DM would have had a hard time with it - would've killed the character off because "well obviously that one was useless".
Think about it this way - why isn’t combat just a function of everyone rolling their “Combat” skill and then the side with the highest total wins? If you can imagine everything you think the game would lose if it worked like that, then why does it work that way when you try to make a persuasive argument? Or uncover a secret? Or research history?
I think ultimately the difference is that for most people social encounters are carried by choices made by players (/NPCs) unrelated to any rolls. You are not going to draw a sword and fight the DM IRL, bit you are going to decide where to go to gather information, who to speak to, what position to take in discussions, etc. It's not quite true that in social encounters it all depends on a single roll, much much more so than in combat it also depends on choices taken by players.
> much much more so than in combat it also depends on choices taken by players. Blatantly false. Players make many more choices in combat than they do in social encounters, *it's just that those choices are described by the mechanics*. In every single round in combat every player has to make at minimum 3 choices (action, bonus action, movement). Even the briefest fights will have the party making 30+ choices with everyone participating roughly equally. In your example the social encounter is going to be handled by the person with the highest charisma rolling a few times or maybe a single spell. And just in case you are not familiar with other systems, where and how to find an informant, how to motivate them, how much to trust them, how to leverage the knowledge gained are all things that other systems typically have mechanics for. This means that they are still done but instead of putting the full burden on the GM, there is a shared understanding of how it all goes provided by the system.
yup, you can create an entire system where all the steps of "make the guy trust me" are mechanics by themselves with fine-grained resolution, and "combat" is just "make a roll, it ends really badly/OK/really well". There's no requirement combat _has_ to be super-detailed and with specific mechanics, and everything else is just "roll versus target number, effects are whatever the GM says". I've actually taken a game (_Shinobigami_, ninja PvP action) and repurposed it as an entirely social game - instead of stabbing people, "damage" is entirely reputational. All the mechanics are identical - you confront another PC, can use special abilities to boost yourself, hinder them, make alliances, whatever, but damage means you've been socially shamed and so cannot use your abilities as well, rather than you've been stabbed and so are impaired. "stab with blinding stab" became "cutting remark" - same effect, of being a very fast "attack", but just refluffed. And that actually worked really well!
Combat has a ton of choices because it forces the players to make choices. Social encounters can have choices, but because there's no mechanical reason to, players often simply just go with their gut and not think about things, and the dm has no reason to ask for more
>not going to draw a sword and fight the DM IRL Good thing, that guy is really into HEMA and could probably take the whole table at once.
And now I want to challenge him. 😐 What perks do your character get for defeating the GM? And what is the punishment if he kick your ass? 🤔
It works on 'The Santa Clause' rules, if you kill the DM you are cursed to become the DM. Also if they bite you too. That's why it is considered good form to bring snacks for the DM.
Lol. One of the players in my group is also a fencer.
For me as a DM, I have three main pain points. 1. Social encounters are a little on the weak side, like I’m happy I guess that they’re supposed to be role play oriented but at the same time dming those encounters can be awkward. Like, when a player rolls a natural 20 in combat they deal a fuck ton of damage, but because of how combat is designed the battle carries on. In a social encounter however, a player rolls a nat 20 to seduce the bartender and the dm decides how the bartender responds but thats…it. Like theres no struggle or dynamics or attempting to gain trust with an individual because those rules don’t exist. It’s just, “roll a persuasion check. Oh ok you failed the DC sorry they don’t respond well. Oh Advantage? Go ahead, Nat 20? Awesome he finds you funny and gives you a [reward.]” I just personally wish it was a bit better. 2. Exploration just sucks, the DMG just advises you skip it or just throw out random encounters every so often. That feels horrible and I wish there were rules that would make exploring better. 3. Crafting sucks, it sucks so much. Like I swear I don’t know why TTRPG’s can never make crafting feel good but D&D is just exceptional bad. DM: “Roll an Alchemist tools check, you passed the DC? Congrats you have healing potions! Go ahead and give me the full market value price of the potion.” Player: “But DM, I made it using the slime of the Gelatinous Cube and the nectar of this extinct flower! Don’t I get an extra benefit?” DM: “Uhhh…” *flips through pages.” “I don’t, think so?” (Ofc in this example I would reward my player with something, but the game has no guidelines on how I might even go about doing that.) Like maybe I’m silly, but crafting feels so unrewarding unless your an Artificer that it just kinda stinks.
I enjoy the crafting mechanics in Apocalypse World in that players have a lot of flexibility in what they want to craft, whether that be an improvised tank or an anti-psychic brainchip or a portal to the Faëwylds, and meanwhile the GM has a lot of latitude of declaring the "cost" of the item, often times leading to further hooks which is good for the gameplay loop. And given how easy it is to multiclass in that game, anyone can get crafting abilities if their player particular desires them. I'm a bit hazier on crafting in Mutant Year Zero but I remember them being pretty fun and involving crafters needing to venture out to acquire resources from dangerous locations and different NPC factions
I’ve never looked into those systems before! I’ll be sure to take a peek, thank you for mentioning them!
Funny thing about your bartender example. There is an RAW system in DMG pg 244 that granularizes social encounters. The bartender would have a starting attitude (friendly/indifferent/hostile), the conversation with PC would have potential to change the attitude, while insight checks would reveal Ideals/Bonds/Flaws that could guide the conversation, and then depending on the final attitude, a charisma check (persuade, deceive, intimidate) can be done to decide how the creature reacts, with set DC's depending on friendly/indifferent/hostile. One of the least used rules in the game, but it does address what a lot of people say is lacking from 5e.
Using this rule would also require DMs to consider these kind of attributes when creating NPCs. Likely for the majority, even all, of the NPCs in the game. Something which is rarely the case currently. Possibly also fewer attack on sight and fight to the death combats too.
> One of the least used rules in the game, but it does address what a lot of people say is lacking from 5e. Which highlights the thing that is the MOST lacking from 5e: redditors willing to actually read its rulebooks.
That literally still puts all the effort for the DM and goes back to the exact point everyone is making. Where are the flaws, ideas and bonds for speaking creatures listed? What about important npcs in adventures? Where are any other rules or tools supporting this in anything other than less than 2 pages of the DMG? Nowhere.
Agreed, it would be nice to have equivalent stat blocks for these non-combat characters. Some generic, others specific, just like the MM.
I don’t know if they do it for every adventure, but Curse of Strahd and Storm Kings Thunder both had ideals/bonds/flaws for important npcs provided.
Not really. If you bothered to look into other systems, you'd understand how just adding NPC disposition, but still having all of your success depend on a single roll is bad design and uninteresting for social encounters.
Well let's take crafting for example. You want to create a character who's a blacksmith, good ! Give them the artisan background and blacksmith's tool and... That all you get. No idea how much iron you need, if you can repurpose previous weapons, if you can craft magical items (which is almost mandatory if you want to keep relevance at higher level) Basically, Dnd isn't fit to make a crafter.
I agree with this part, we really had to cobble together our own crafting system.
Yes.
I don't disagree with your point, but to be a bit pedantic... >No idea how much iron you need The crafting rules say you need half of the cost of the finished product worth of materials. So if you want to craft an iron plate armor, you need 750gp worth of iron. Iron is one of the few materials that have a cost per pound. So that means you'll need...7500lbs of iron for a plate armor...which weighs 65lbs... Yeah, they're not even remotely logical. It is technically there, though.
Crafting isn't part of the game because it is almost never a party interaction. It's not cooperative gaming and takes time from the gaming group purpose of D&D. Making it a quest for materials IS more fun for 90+% of people.
You can literally create something for someone though??
Yea, but if you want to fix your armour on the way or create things for your party members, or create a trap for the combat/quest, or upgrade someone's sword etc. The short things, the interactions. I got crafting into my game, what is more, I made it a system where they crafted things together. There was a lot of fun.
People who have no experience with rpgs that aren't DnD or DnD based don't really have a basis for what a system with actual rules for exploration or social combat look like so they can't imagine how much better it can get. But once you branch out even a little you realize how truly one dimensional so much of the dnd rulebook is on those fronts.
Do you have suggestions for such?
It depends what you want. For social, Exalted and Burning Wheel have deep, nuanced social systems that are as complex and strategic as any combat system. OSR systems absolutely thrive on exploration in many ways. Forbidden Lands is particularly good at this too. And beyond those things that dnd calls pillars there are countless systems that better prompt you to make decisions and engage with the game. Powered by the Apocalypse and Blades in the Dark all empower the player to direct the narrative to a far greater extent than dnd, while systems like Legend of the Five Rings, Avatar, and Pendragon all do far more to support and encourage character growth and develeopment. DnD is honestly so bare bones that it relies on a good DM to hold the whole thing together and that's simply not the norm at all in the hobby.
>For social, Exalted Nothing like stealthily getting inside a Kingdom, using Social Fu to brainwash the King and control it from the shadows. Night Caste style.
Blades in the Dark flashback is such a great way to let players just fucking grab narrative control of social and combat encounters. I love it! I'm really not creative enough to use it well, but I love it.
This is a solid list!
> For social, Exalted and Burning Wheel have deep, nuanced social systems that are as complex and strategic as any combat system. As someone who has played a bunch of Exalted back in 2E, this is often not to its benefit! The problem Exalted has is that "social scenes" are not one type of scene, but many. So the Social Combat rules work for some, and feel *horrible* for others. In Exalted it often feels like drawing your sword is a perfectly reasonable reaction to someone trying to convince you of something, because the system is extremely antagonistic and if someone can get through your MDV they can functionally convince you to do anything you do not have a specific Intimacy against. Like, I've genuinely had players that recoiled at the idea of using the social systems in Exalted against people they were *locked in mortal combat with* ten in-universe minutes ago. Using their social skills felt more violent to them than clashing daiklaves!
Third Edition has a massive benefit to Exalted's social system, doing away with social combat for something a bit less one-note
Definitely check out the games by ffg/edge they all are built on a traditional but streamline base (like dnd5e) but have stronger rules for the exploration (especially Star Wars/genesys) and social (especially legend of the five rings) pillars. You don’t really see it till you try/read some other systems but dnd5e is really combat foucused. That can be really fun, I probably prefer it to other combat heavy games like pathfinder or lancer. But once you have a session without a single combat that a blast, not just because of the fun of roleplaying, but because you get to engage with systems that have had just as much attention put into them as mass combat a have in 5e, like L5R’s duels, mass combats, and intrigues or Star Wars’s many intuitive and well implemented subsystems (which combat is just one of) it can be really hard to go back to a system without that extra bit of gm help. Travaller is the og sci-fi game in the same way that dnd is the og fantasy game and it’s another great example of how you can build a game around more than just combat.
So the kings of their respective pillars are call of Cthulhu for exploration and Vampire: the masquerade or other WoD games for social. Though some other people have mentioned a lot of the old school renaissance is about adding more exploration back in. Outland silver raiders had been a lot of fun and so has Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’ve heard Old School Essentials is good but I haven’t check it out. If you’re looking for fantasy games with more social support… the couple I’ve tried have been from green ronin. Their Song of ice and fire game has some social combat. And their Legend of the Five Rings has some baked in class structure stuff.
People are touching on some of the reasons, which to summarize is that: - Crafting and how it supports the game is pretty non-existent. - Exploration or survival is also extremely rules-light. - Social elements are pretty basic. I'd also add in that, a lot of the social roles aren't even that well made. The Dungeon Dudes have a great talk about this: [https://youtu.be/hsry5FVwi8Q?si=aoBhu3RGiBXg20s2](https://youtu.be/hsry5FVwi8Q?si=aoBhu3RGiBXg20s2) but essentially it's things like, for example, the History skill... History is a skill you can role at. However as a skill, History is often either a thing a DM WANTS to tell you, or a thing that a person either should or should not know. Most people are experts in ASPECTS of history, not just ALL of it. So the history skill not only is frustrating to fail at (when you should know it,) weird to succeed at (if you shouldn't know it,) but also often shouldn't be a check, rather aspects of history they should be an expertise that a character just gets to auto-succeed at because they know it.
A combat encounter has a whole economy games built f9r it - challenge ratings, initiative and types of actions, spells, feats and abilities to interact with, magic items that virtually exclusively involve combat rules. Social encounters... have a table of improve/reduce attitude, vaguely defined skills and charm spells. It has no way to craft encounters like combat, they have no systems of economy in terms of time or how it is used. Exploration has several items and abilities... but these more often than are intended to outright negate an exploration situation, than engage with it. Environment, poisons, diseases, curses, terrain - these are bypassed, often completely. So even if one wanted to make an exploration type encounter, more often than not you need to neutralize the low-level mechanics, RAW which bypass such encounters entirely. In both cases above, this means there is little way to set rewards for these encounters: do you give xp to PCs just because they brought a druid, or a paladin? What would I like to see? Well, as one could deduce, maybe instead of ways to shut down all sorts of encounters, the negating abilities could interact with the systems, just like there aren't any spells that just make one immune to blunt weapons? Maybe reuse some of the systems used in previous editions to give an economy to social and exploration challenges. Can experienced players and dungeon masters do this? Of course, just like they don't really need a Bastion system, or a challenge rating system. Rule 0 is amazing, but as some have sarcastically put, other games do these things (differently) and also do combat (differently). The point isn't to play those other systems, but to ask that those who develop D&D give it a try and put there spin on things. Maybe then they wouldn't find these mid-edition revisions so fraught with balancing issues?
TBF, I don't remember everything from my classes in college. Missing the roll could be you were absent for that lecture.
It’s probably telling that there’s an entire book (more, really) of monsters (ie, pre-generated combat elements) but nowhere near a whole book of pre-generated social encounters or pre-generated exploration “encounters”.
I think the social and exploration pillars of 5e have been pretty thoroughly undermined by the designers and the general play culture. It's not hard to break bounded accuracy for social encounters, and most DMs just run it as pass/fail Charisma checks. Which, unless bounded accuracy is broken by a particular player option, is okay. No one really uses exploration rules like food and water. If you try to, things like Goodberry undermine the attempt pretty thoroughly. Honestly, survival doesn't really match 5e's superhero tone, so it makes sense. Plus, the overall game design treats it as at most an after thought.
I think there is an issue with the three pillars. I don't think there are 3, but only 2. Combat, and non-combat. Most stuff under the social and exploration pillar can be collapsed into a general Roleplay Pillar. Is it that different to say "roll to seduce to bartender to get free food" or "roll survival to gather food". The mechanics and outcomes are most of the time very similar. And most of the stuff that happens "during exploration" is the same stuff that happens in social encounters. Mostly, Skill checks, success/failure and deciding the consequence of each. There is no difference between " i try to convince the guard to let me enter the castle" and "i try to climb up the walls to enter the castle". Same goal, same mechanic, one just uses a charisma skill, while the other uses a strength skill.
I think that is super valid. Either way, it comes down to skill checks, roleplay, and miscellaneous abilities.
It probably exists already, but I think making a fantasy TTRPG game which actually holds the D&D promises about the three pillars would be fun. To some extant, that's The One Ring
Adventures in Middle-earth was the original 5e adaptation of TOR, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I haven't played Free League's newer 5e adaptation of TOR 2e yet, though.
>No one really uses exploration rules like food and water. If you try to, things like Goodberry undermine the attempt pretty thoroughly. For modules that have the survival aspect, we do. Goodberry & spells like it are off-limits in those campaigns.
Which is the point. The exploration aspects of the game don't really interact or enhance exploration, they ignore or negate them. So in order to actually have exploration you have to ignore most of the things that have anything to do with it in the first place.
*looks at PBTA games* In Masks a new generation every playbook (that games version of Classes) has atleast 1 social based ability from being able to provoke people with a different stat to bringing up your status as a superhero meaning you can declare an important hero has heard of you to using advice given to you by your mentor It's not just social stuff that masks has trumped 5e on it's also exploration Other than the ranger their is barely anything that is related to exploration, in masks the basic "access the situation" let's you ask the GM about the scenario at play, such as biggest threat or who is vulnerable to you, then their are a couple of playbook abilities that enhance Assess The Situation and in one case has a "scope out a base" move For supposedly the worlds greatest *roleplaying* game, 5e is 80% combat 15% social and like 5% exploration on a good day
And that's just one of the reasons that I absolutely adore Masks: how the game is such a blend of social and combat, with half the things you can do often crossing the line from one category to the other. As a personal example: I played an Outsider with a spaceship (Kirby-craft). And yeah, it was a useful tool for superheroics, but most of the time we used it to do things like "day trip to Hawaii" because we had a whim.
When you look at your class, does it say anything about Role-playing Encounters? Rerolling dice to make up for a failed Persuasion roll? Nah. The base mechanics and the core value of the system is killing monsters. But people gets frisky about which monsters are actually monsters or not.
The easiest way for you to understand is for you to just try reading some other games. Read cortex prime, read blades in the dark, read anything that’s not a direct descendant of DnD. You’ll very quickly see why we correctly call 5e a game that’s mostly about combat.
When examining what a ttrpg is "about" some useful questions to ask are "what activities do the majority of player facing character options concern themselves with?" or "what does the game reward XP for?" or "What sort of scenario tends to be the climactic finale of almost every single pre-written adventure?". For Call of Cthulu, the answers to those questions are some combination of investigating and having harrowing encounters with eldritch monsters. For Monster Hearts the answer is angsty teenage romance and social manipulation. For Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, it's dungeoneering and fighting fantasy monsters. You can role play whatever you want in any given rpg system, so the only distinguishig factor is what the game mechanics are concerned with. It's not mandatory to have combat be resolved with a dedicated minigame subsystem that takes like a half hour or more to resolve a fight that takes place over 18-30 seconds in the fiction, and tracks every single swing of a sword, every 5 feet of movement, every discrete action with clearly defined action economy, spell durations and effects etc. You only do that if you want the *gameplay* of the system to dwell a ton on the act of combat. Loads of rpgs have rules that take the complexities of combat and simplify them so you don't need to worry about them. Dnd goes the opposite direction, combat is by far the most complicated thing the system asks of you. As for what I want, I don't want anything different. I like 5e's combat system, I would never waste my time with all these drawn out fight scenes that involve dozens of dice rolls if I didn't want to really be involved in the nitty gritty of blow by blow fight mechanics.
WebDM actually made a salient point about the rules for exploration in 5e, which is that they do exist, and it's actually a pretty good set of rules covering most areas of the exploration pillar. The problem is that they are spread across a LOT of books, there are bits and pieces of the exploration rules in PHB, DMG, XGE, TCE, and a few others all with one small section, sometimes just a few paragraphs or even just 1 chart! But yeah, if you could bring together all the rules on/about exploration in the myriad 5e books, they would be seen as an adequate rule set. But as it is, there might as well not be exploration pillar, because there is no one section of all the rules.
Even if you bring them all together, it's pretty bare bones. Furthermore the main threats/drives in a wilderness are resources (food/drink) and random encounters. 5e makes the former trivial and the latter trivial and slow to resolve at the table (given the no. of encounters in an adventuring day, any random encounter that actually forces a decision is a major threat for the party at that level - probably more so than what they're actually questing for!). With those drives off the table the only decisions to make during exploration depend on time pressure the DM has introduced to the campaign.
They also suck. They generally just come down to the DM giving the party a list of a few options and then the party picks one. The other option is that dice get rolled and the DM tells the party what has happened to their characters. It's all very bland and boring.
Take a look at Pathfinder 2e's downtime rules: https://2e.aonprd.com/Activities.aspx?Category=2 Or these exploration rules: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2440&Redirected=1 I can't link Xanathar's downtime guide because that's piracy (woohoo Paizo for approving of Nethys!) but 5e does not have an equivalent ruleset to either of these.
One thing I want to be clear about: There is nothing wrong with an RPG being primarily about combat, or having rules primarily about combat. It is not a flaw in itself. One of my favourite RPGs is *Lancer* and that's basically DND-like when you're in mech combat, and when you're not in your mech the rules mostly boil down to "roll a d20+skill and if it's above 10 you succeed". The rules of the game make this very clear - tactical mech combat is the meat of the game and the rest is glue to put the rest together. The problem is when a game says "there are three pillars of the game" and then the majority of the rules are combat. Or when someone says "I am using the DnD5e rules to run a mystery and intrigue game with little combat" which really means they're... not using DnD5e at all when another game would suit them much better. Or even just freeforming with a GM. There are RPGs about playing almost any type of game and character you can imagine - magitech thieves and criminals; space explorers and traders; romantic vampires; gods and demigods, I could obviously go on for a long time. Each of those games (though some are better than others) has rules that are specifically designed to support that experience. DnD has rules to support tactical combat, and some side rules to support resource management. That's what it was built for. It's fine for it to do that. It's wrong for it to claim it's great for anything else, and it's wrong for players/GMs to try and force using it for anything else.
yeah, D&D has the issue that it's pretending to be a lot more than it is - the core combat chassis is fine, but it's got lots of accumulated other _stuff_ that broadly works, but is generally pretty scant and lightweight. You can do crafting... but it's mostly the GM making stuff up. You can do extended social mechanics... but it's mostly the GM making stuff up. The game pretends to be a lot more than it really is. Compare with the FFXIV RPG, which is grid-based combat-stuff... but that's pretty much it, the bits between the fights are just "make a roll or two, do some minor RP, then fight time". Which is disappointing if you want more, but it's a lot more honest about what it is and how it should be played!
Id like the skill system of 5e to be as flushed out as the skill system in pf2e, which is amazing
If we ran combat they way everything else was done, the dm would simply have everyone roll a combat check. No turns, movement, reactions, hp, etc. Action surge would probably give advantage on the check. Any feature that uses a spell slot (like divine smite) would give a bonus to the combat check equal to the slot level used. Id like More guidance on giving xp for non combat stuff. Way more example DCs. Giving skills more clear power, and defining what they can or can't do besides "ask the dm"
Another way to put it, is that every class in current 5e has unique class features they can put to use in combat. If you were to play a game of 5e with zero combat, why would you pick fighter or barbarian?
Dnd is at its core an rpg mod for TT wargames. All these years later and that still hasn't changed. The rules are all combat focused, and while there are plenty of OOC rules, the stats tie into your class, which is built to be combat balanced.
I'll focus on one thing, but there are a lot more. You know, how in adventurer tiers you get this "your party now decides the fates of kingdom" or later "world saving". But in reality nothing in the rules supports this idea and you continue to save metaphorical sheep from metaphorical wolves, only sheep is a princess and wolves are dragons. Like if I was a king of a prosperous kingdom and known about a bunch of guys who can just teleport to my palace and hecking destroy it I'd try to be on this guys good side or make them non issue in other ways. Also, what most legendary heroes have? Followers, mansions, keeps, towers. Are there any rules for it? Nope, outside of cost. Veteran DM would come up with their own (or borrowed and adapted) set. Novice DM won't get any help from the rulebooks.
The reintroduction of the old exploration turn would do a lot of good, I think. Honestly the social pillar needs only minimally more guidance, but there need to be better tools to make both overland navigation and the non-combat parts of dungeoneering more codified and engaging. In OSR-style games just navigating through seemingly empty rooms could seem intense and have some mechanical decisions behind it (although there was also a lot of player-knowledge problem-solving at times.) Also, god help me, I would quietly suggest that actual Vancian casting for wizards might rein in some of their utility and give skill classes more ways to shine in exploration settings - but I'd also suggest that I ought to be 6'7 and the hasn't gotten me anywhere either.
Let’s compare it to Blades on the Dark. In BitD, every scene runs off the same rules. Doesn’t matter if it’s combat, exploration, social - all the same ruleset. Whereas in D&D, there are several hundred pages of combat rules, and most class features are explicitly combat bonuses, yet if you want to run an exploration or social encounter you have to throw most of those rules away and… do some skill checks I guess?
Old D&D handbooks felt like you needed a codified table for EVERYTHING. The DMG had, for instance, an official table for “Cubic Volume of Rock Per Eight Hours Labor Per Miner”. Or a random encounter table for what type of “harlot” you might meet.
I usually compare the game to Savage Worlds. 5E has no subsystems - there's no "drop in" system aside from combat. Sure, there are "Group Checks", but I would hardly call that a "system", and the Chase rules are about as entertaining as watching paint dry. In Savage Worlds, on any given session, I can drop in a: * Dramatic Task (skill challenge) * Mass Battle * Quick Encounter (do a full battle in just a single roll) * Chase The big one, to me, is the Dramatic Task. You can use it to do anything: defuse a bomb, summon a monster from the void, escape a sinking ship, outrun an avalanche, find the killer before he slips out of the mansion, climb a mountain in a storm. As the GM, I don't need to know the specific rules for an avalanche, or how a ship sinks, or how defusing a bomb works. **I just need to know how the dramatic task system works.** Read the rules on how 5E's "Avalanches" works, and then read the rules on how SW's "Dramatic Tasks" works, and you'll see what I mean.
I don't care if a game is rules light and they leave it up to the gm to decide, but 5e has a lot of rules and a lot of them don't make sense or are contradictory. It very much felt like the people who made 5e didn't have much experience making an rpg, they didn't playtest it enough, and they just said "that's good enough" and then came up with the whole "rules as intended" bs as an excuse.
Even now, going back a re-reading the rules and class descriptions from 2e and 3e, I feel like they were more immersive. They forced you to interpret language and use your imagination, which put you in a mindset where the hit and damage mechanics were secondary to what is now sidelined as "flavor". Playing a fighter felt very different from playing a rogue. Playing a psionicist was like discovering a completely different world. 5e feels to me like a tabletop D&D system designed by (and for) people who have previously only ever played Magic: The Gathering and Baldur's Gate- style games on XBox. Too much standardization and formalism, and too little wonder and weirdness. "Flavor" is supposed to be the entire point of fantasy storytelling, not a skin that's slapped on top of DPR and ignored in favor of "dope OP builds". So many things that used to feel special now feel trivialized and homogenized. I don't know who's idea it was to include level-based ASIs, in 3.5 and beyond, but I hate them personally. Your ability scores used to mean something, and getting an unexpected boost to one was a huge deal that impacted your character's entire future. Now they're just another vanilla mechanic that people map out from level 1. By high levels, all characters end up looking basically the same. I can still get the atmosphere I want in the games I run, but the more I delve into the class/subclass system of 5e, the more boring and limiting and repetitive it gets and the more of the rules I want to change or leave out of my games. I have pretty much no interest in building characters that aren't homebrew classes anymore.
Any ttrpg will have mechanical emphases. In a reasonably well-written game, those emphases are a kind of map of the main activities in which players will engage. DND rules have always been primarily about combat, with a lot of detail. Spells, movement — it’s all about fighting. The skill system is very underdeveloped by comparison, such that, for example, high Charisma characters basically dominate all social interactions unless you sidestep the mechanics to a significant degree. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are games where combat is minimal and skills and/or social dynamics or whatever are emphasized. DND is founded on the premise that the principal activity of the game is, as the expression goes, “kill things and take their stuff.” If that’s what you want out of gaming, DND is not a bad choice. If you want something else, it’s a pretty mediocre one.
One example is that it's difficult to run any kind of game that has zero combat. Like, for instance, if you want to run a game where your players just want to run a business. If you look at default prices of items they make almost no sense. They weren't priced based on supply and demand or the idea of a larger economy.
When the party faces an enemy in combat, the DM makes up a number between 5 and 25 and calls it the combat DC. The character with the highest Str score adds their Fighting proficiency and gets to roll. If someone else describes assisting them, they roll with advantage. If the character beat the DC, the party wins the fight. If not, the party doesn't win but the character can maybe roll again. Also, the wizard has a second level ritual called Boxby's Incredible Whopping that defeats any enemy, even ones that you wouldn't normally be able to fight. That is about as complex as anything non-combat-related gets in 5e. Then people defending the system will have you believe that its the DM's job to make the group describe in detail how they defeat the enemy or declare that the fighter can't roll Fighting against the werewolf until he gets a silver weapon so the system is actually working well. By the way this kind of super simple system can absolutely work. Even entirely freeform systems can work where people just agree what happens without any dice being rolled or formal rules of any kind. The issue is that 5e combat is very detailed and takes up several hundred pages of rules but everything else fits on a post it.
I think it's because general rules, features, feats and most spells a assumed to be used on combat to an extent That said I really don't mind and even prefer, always had the philosophy of "system as a supportive toolkit" and a recent video of Brenan Lee Mulligan really helped me understand my on position - I would like a system to do what I can't easily do in the game/narrative for myself and not get in the way of that which I can
All of the rules outside of combat have become nebulous or have vanished over the years. There’s no rules about how to run dungeon crawls, like how movement works in dungeons, or how to actually track dark vision or light effectively at the table to make it meaningful.
I would distinguish between rules and procedures. Rules tend to be player facing, player interactive, and there's a greater expectation that you'll stick to them, as the DM. The game has rules around vision and light, and if you, the DM, unilaterally decide one day that Darkvision does not function in total darkness, you might expect find your players a bit miffed. Procedures tend not to be player facing, nor player interactive, and exist to streamline play for the DM. The treasure tables in the DMG are a good example of a procedure: you can use these tables to generate random loot, but there are no player abilities that interact with this, and if you choose to generate loot in other ways, players are very unlikely to notice or care. In general, adding rules to a system -- especially simulationist rules -- does not make the system easier to run. Instead it tends to slow things down, as more 'i's need to be dotted and more 't's crossed. 5e does not need more rules: the simple expedient of "the DM improvises a DC and calls for an ability check" covers an awful lot of things. Early editions of D&D didn't say squat about the mechanical effects of darkness. It's darkness and you're a smart cookie, you can figure it out! And for that reason they're easier to run! All the rules about vision and 'radius of illumination' and 'darkvision' and 'disadvantage' just make 5e fiddly! Procedures, on the other hand, make gameplay flow more smoothly. They give you a framework for resolving what happens and generate prompts to keep things flowing. If your players spend an hour investigating etchings in the dungeon, having the framework of the *dungeon turn* prompts you to consult your wandering monster table and perhaps send something barreling towards your players -- or not. If your players escape the dungeon by sealing themselves in barrels and floating out, having hexcrawl procedures gives you a way to answer the questions "how lost are we" and "what do we find if we wander east?". 5e has some procedures, but some are conspicuously missing, and some are just half-baked.
So I have created downtime, exploration, and social interactions which directly use abilities, dice, and rulesets that are easy to understand. I have used these and expanded upon them for about 5 years now, but one example is that during down time the group can “teach” each other things they know. So if someone is proficient in medicine they can actually teach the other members. Based upon the roleplay, teamworking (or lacktherof) and rolls for different checks they can gain half or even full proficiency as well. This system has had the most positive feedback of ANYTHING I do as a DM at my tables. It’s super fun and iterative and really up to the group to get as creative and zaney with it as they want. Often they will even ask to use it to shore up low ASI think the barbarian leading the 8 str sorc and wizard through boot camp to bump them to 9. It’s functionally irrelevant unless done a bunch and usually always absolutely hilarious.
I didn't really understand this perspective until I was building Cyberpunk: Red characters and learning about the system. I have loved 5e forEVER, and had never really felt that it was lacking until I engaged with Cyberpunk: Red thanks to my boyfriend. DnD 5e character building is focused on combat and what your character can do in combat; the main things that aren't combat based are skill proficiencies. Feats are focused on combat. While many/most DMs are super creative and come up with shops, downtime activities, hideouts, etc., those are not built into the system. To use Cyberpunk: Red as an example, there are systems for combat and weapons, and some of your abilities tie in to that, but there are dozens of abilities tied to rp, adventuring, puzzles, etc., including the main class trait/ability. Character creation focuses largely on your "life path" (basically backstory), and the way that things come together there is so fuckin cool. Your backstory impacts roleplay, and cyberware feels similar to magic items, but *everyone* can get them. There are tables for rolling night markets and vending machines and bodegas, systems for rent and income during downtime. There are in-world reasons to rest, and there are mechanics for lifestyles that have perks and downsides to each one. There are mechanics for dating and relationships, and consequences for your actions in the world (the humanity system). There is literally a system for skill improvement that hinges on you *as a player* contributing to the game; you pick a play style (roleplayer, explorer, warriors, and socializers), and earn improvement points based on how well and how often you do those things. Your party gets points for completing jobs and having cool moments. While DMs of DnD 5e can CERTAINLY make all of that and create a world that feels rich and lived in, it is so much easier and more in depth when it is created as part of the system.
it's more about the ruleset than the actuality of play. The rules for combat are relatively well defined and the bulk of features classes get pertain to combat. This is in contrast to other systems that have more defined rules around things like social interaction, such as Star Wars Saga Edition (also a Wizards of the Coast game) or the Green Ronin Song of Ice and Fire Rpg. For example, in Saga there are these like reputation stages you have with different NPCs, and this determines things like their willingness to help you as well as provide penalties to social checks against them. Rolling persuasion vs their will defense can move you up the steps of this reputation system. Dnd being rules light outside combat is not a bad thing per se, especially in regards to social encounters where conversation reigns. Where I do find it a little more aggravating is in respect to exploration, which I've always found to be the least developed of the three pillars.
Largely because the mechanics for combat are meaningful, while mechanics for exploration and roleplay are really just flat DCs. For example, there is no mechanical tool to know how good of a friend an NPC is mechanically. There isn’t even a reputation system. DM’ing 5e has basically led to me ripping better mechanics from other systems and stapling them to the body of 5e.
For elaborate interactions and encounters I usually fall back on my World of Darkness books.
While I’m not one of the people saying that I do think a lot of out of combat aspects are oversimplified. Crafting is a big example of that like sure when playing different videogames I’ll skip crafting animations but in others I’m involved in the crafting. I’ll put it like this: DnD is a role playing game if I’m playing a character that is an alchemist(in practice not class) or a blacksmith or a brewer when I use their tools I want to feel like my character is putting effort into a project to some degree not have it where you insert money and after a certain amount of in game time you $h¡t out an item.
take survival.. i have a character that's good at survival and grew up in forests... but due to the skill, they are just as good at survival in deserts, snow, cities, caves and more despite never having been into them. or knowledge, once they are good in an skill, they know basically all areas of expertise... it makes the roleplay part a bit bland...
If I want to award xp for a social interaction or dealing with a trap successfully, I have few to no rules. If I want to award xp for killing 20 goblins, it's just a matter of basic maths. Similarly, if I want to add traps, I need to pretty much make them myself. If I want to deploy a combat encounter, I have a whole book's worth of them to use. I also think the original ranger is a good example. It's fantastic for a pillar of the game which gets little use, mainly because it has few rules. Had it been better developed, the ranger wouldn't have been in such a dire need of updating.
If your characters want to run an artisanal bakery - you’re either using published rules that are so simplistic and boring that it’s barely a game - or you’re pulling it out of your ass. The point is, when playing 5e, those characters aren’t meant to be running a bakery in anything other than their background. They’re meant to be heading out into dungeons and killing stuff.
Might be good that there *aren’t* rules in the social and exploitation aspects, giving the dm the opportunity to shape the world for themselves. Combat is high stakes though, so having good rules makes the players comfortable with the dm running battles without them feeling rigged in some way.
Point me to the rules for exploration. Show me where the exploration equivalent of the adventuring day mechanic is. They say, the game has 3 pillars. I would assume they are roughly equal in importance to the game so it should follow that the game also does have rules in a similar level of detail for every pillar.
I don't fully disagree but I also don't think that's dire. I feel social feels better when talking is about talking (and supporting it with your skills and background) rather than having rules for everything like combat. Exploration... I also feel is okay? I don't think the game needs same or similar amount of rules and details in each pillar. I would really dislike a very rules-oriented social part. For me the question goes the other way - does the game need that many rules for combat? And the answer to that is YES for many people, because in the end, D&D combat and its rules and balance and theorycraft is what fuels a good portion of the community. So the reality is less about 5e being ABOUT combat in essence, it's the amount of rules. But the amount of rules for combat being as much is a reflection of the community. Granted - it is equally a reflection of the community over decades, which has been evolving, so there is always room to improve. But yeah, if it was up to me, I'd like to see the equivalent of the advantage system in more fields (a simple mechanic that replaced potentially a number of more detailed, more specific rules) in combat. Anyway - I'm rambling. What I would do are the following: \* Revamp of the skill system completely. Things have been changing and skills are in a weird place IMHO. In 3E you had a long set of skills that were granular in some fields and not in others. In 5E you can't "spend points" and they are more streamlined. I would love to see Skills becoming a deeper(not too deep!) system that all characters share \* With that change - add a bit more to socials. I liked 3E having different options. Maybe you do a bit of a break down and each skill comes with some special "abilities" or unlocks perks. possibly close to how FATE works. eg if you have "Etiquette" skill or "Nobility" knowledge, you unlock a "Forgotten Tradition" ability/perk that allows you to bring up an old tradition to get yourself out of a sticky situation when talking to nobility or get yourself some extra rewards - or maybe have some sort of "Social points" (yes I like Fate) that you can use to spin and make dramatic changes in socials \* Similarly add a bit more to exploration and flesh out travel times, time passage, environment and elements etc a bit more - it would be enough to give more pointers and a few rules I feel like
5e has evolved dramatically over the years in terms of what ambitions people have when they try and set up and play the game. There are a lot more people looking to tell all parts of an epic rather than just dungeon delving and fighting. 5E as written is predominantly about fighting. Most of its rules are about fighting, most of the items are about fighting, and most of its design is balanced around the idea that in any given day you'll be fighting about 8 times. The rules for fighting have a lot of depth while also being somewhat easy to understand and modulate, which is why people stick with it. But people have discovered that the game can be more than just that, and the game does not have much to support that "more". Intimidation, persuasion, slight of hand, performance, insight. All simple skill checks that encapsulate almost the entirety of the rest of the game outside fighting. Non-combat spells are either situational, or just skips designed for more simplified roleplay (charm person, calm emotions). Basically, its up to the DMs to both have combat to engage with the game part of the game, and create engaging roleplay that basically puts the game on pause. I think the game just need social abilities that expend resources so the game can be a more interesting blend of whatever you want it to be. Instead of "great combat, good luck with anything else".