[5e experts] major philosophical notes in 5e design: bounded accuracy, ...? I'm trying to pull together a canonical list of sources for "here's what 5e's all about". Bonus points stars for links to pre-release articles/AMAs/&c.
Pillars of Play, making Proficiency matter?
(I feel like Inspiration and (Dis)advantage got lots of hype, but they strike me less as philosophy than "let's simplify it, folks." Which, itself, might be a philosophy they talked/wrote about?)
5e is described by its marketing materials as:
The core of D&D is storytelling. You and your friends may tell a story together, guiding your heroes through quests for treasure, battles with deadly foes, daring rescues, courtly intrigue, and much more. You can also explore the many worlds of D&...
@Magician Thanks--just read that one this evening. I've trawled through much of RPGSE's posts on the matter and, sadly, find few stable links to primary sources. It strikes me as passing into folklore at this point, and I'm on a quest to preserve history. (Read: don't feel like grading the test I gave today.)
Sometimes you can luck out with archived page/search results in a search engine and do something like site:wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx in google and find terms you're looking for, then get the archive of the actual page
(Also, some of the comments in the archived page amuse me given the relative positive reception of 5e)
Ooh, a possible treasure trove of 'lost' articles here
I'm still somewhat miffed they quietly dropped their initial design goal of modularity that would let players customize the system to a desired degree, and potentially play 4e-style characters alongside the newer simpler ones. It was a lofty goal, it's understandable they couldn't make it work, but to my knowledge they never just said "sorry, no can do".
@Magician Yeah, I've got a very close friend who's (a) a 40-year player, and (b) still pretty sour on 5e because of that. He, like you, will admit that it was a huge claim to try to stake, but is sad they didn't do more.
Was speed of play ever discussed much? (I came back to D&D right at the end of Next playtesting, from 2e, so I'm not super-up on what the discussions were like.) How 'bout back-compatibility?
Personally, I took it as a turning point from "we're trying to do something different to 4e but you can still play the game that way if you put some effort in" to "4e never happened".
Backwards compatibility was discussed a bit, at least there was a big implication of conversion methods from any given edition to 5th. I think that mostly just ended up being a PDF released a while back, though
This article kind of discusses a newer philosophy for how they're maintaining 5th as a development studio, but doesn't so much go into actual 5e gameplay philosophy.
Thanks--I've found the archive.org listing of the Legends & Lore archive--I'll probably spend the next few days procrastinating educating myself on that little bit of history.
Yep! Looks like the archive ended shortly after 5e came out (which is probably around the time they switched to the new site), so I think it should cover a good chunk of the 5e development timespan.
@doppelgreener Is it acceptable to post legitimate answers to questions without RAW or canon, when the OP has requested them. Even when simple logic seems to handle the situation without needed to resort to RAW or canon?
@GypsySpellweaver Not really, cuz "they asked for RAW/canon" is the only thing keeping that question open, and ought to be respected. Otherwise it'd be "you're doing homebrew so just keep homebrewing".
Kinda thought so, that's why I didn't make it an answer. No problem with it being deleted either. Each stack has it's own culture and I not one to buck that.
Ideally, an answer that wants to circumvent the question requirements ought to also answer the question. For example, a good answer would say either "This rule here says not needing air means you can't drown" or "all the monsters that don't need air also can't drown" or "there's no rules at all, here's what I checked, but here's what would be logical, choose whatever."
@GypsySpellweaver Well, you could offer a different kind of answer. But because they asked for RAW/canon, you need to explain why you're ignoring that before you head off in a completely different direction.
And that explanation needs more rigor than folks are usually willing to put into what they consider obvious (your "simple logic"), so it's easier to simplify the policy into "no, probably not."
@GypsySpellweaver Thanks for respecting that. Our comment policy enforcement is unusual. It's the default but other stacks are far more relaxed with comments so people are used to ignoring those rules, but we can't afford to do that because then the site would be 10% answers 90% unceasing vitriolic religious warring.
I may not know the rules of the road in a foreign land, but when the mounties give me a ticket, I can't get out of it by saying "I'm not from around here." I did know enough to come to chat with it than make a soon to be deleted comment chain about it.
@doppelgreener Yesterday I got notifications of comments from another Stack, and it turned out to be someone reviving a three-year-old (and completely tangential) discussion that somehow got tacked onto one of my answers.
@kviiri Well there's probably something there somewhere, but it's far down beneath the surface in the deep-black. Between there and the surface is something they can ask on a fate forum but which wouldn't work on the Stack.
@doppelgreener Oh sure, it was good for closing, but I think it'd be answerable if they put in a few more words on the gamestyle they're seeking and asked if Fate was a good fit for that.
(because by what I've understood, Fate doesn't do tactical combat well, and it seems to me that's much of what Titanfall is about)
We've recently played a game in Fate about military actually being put in combat situations and it's worked fine. What matters is where the heart of it is. If you want chess tactics (or D&D 4e tactics), Fate's the wrong game. If you want a dramatic story about flawed individuals fighting tooth and nail and it's about them and their experiences, that's fairly friendly to Fate.
Stuff like Star Wars and various war movies feature what are ostensibly tactical combat situations, but it's not really about the tactical combat, it's about the characters and their experiences and etc.
At that point the "I maneuver to this grid space and use this special move and this special item to take out three guys" is not the interesting part; it's "My girl runs through that tightly packed passageway and takes a gut shot to reach the lever that will take those three guys out of the picture to save her friends."
@kviiri Yeah! And it's hard to recognise the playing field you're in -- what kind of stuff is actually available, what you can describe to usefully say what you want.
@Magician I just came back across this answer of yours, and it says fate struggles with immersion. Is that still your perspective? (I feel it's fine, and that not staying in the character's head the whole time helps with immersion.)
One of the first actual concrete desires I had for a RPG was "not the same" after some ten sessions of DnD 4e we played with little idea it was meant to be a combat game :)
Immersion is a weird thing. Some people say they lose it if they have to think about the rules even for a moment, but several friends of mine find author mode and transparent rules more immersive.
I guess it's a personal subjective thing, but in games where we've got a good shared understanding of the story, we can awesomely explore our characters and feel immersion, and stepping out of character to examine the rules and how we'd like to apply them isn't an obstruction -- I slip right back in.
OTOH, I've experienced powerlessness and suffering and frustration in D&D games and all but physically disengaged from the game -- all because I'm not in any position I can ever really discuss the rules, or feel I have any power to re-examine how I want them applied. At that point I might look like I'm still immersed, but I'm miserable and just going through the motions.
In our case, we tell more story-like stories by slipping into author mode pretty frequently; avoiding author mode may make you feel more like the character in the story, but it'll likely lead to a story that's not very story-like.
I guess how it works for me is because it's hard to disassociate anything that happens in the opaque sphere of the GM's head from the personality of the GM.
Seriously though, I know the pain of GM/world conflation on both sides of the table and so far I've found the only solution is to draw back the curtain in some way.
In D&D, I talked about my choices and explained why I was doing certain things from a GM perspective, and showed how the NPCs justify the choices I was making for them in different ways from how I actually made those choices.
For example, the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure was pretty terrible in a lot of ways. Plot-wise, it depended on each miniboss having some clue about where to go next that they obviously shouldn't have had.
As a player, I can't help my immersion breaking if I roll eg. d20 to see if an NPC lets me inside the castle and they don't despite my result seeming good. It instantly sets me in the "so my GM didn't want me to get in" mode instead of "so the NPC didn't want me to get in".
So I re-wrote it to have each miniboss holding onto a note from their leader giving them instructions and then telling them to destroy the note. Obviously they didn't.
Turned out some of them were double-dipping with a different enemy, and some of them were just dumb. The big boss got to make a little rant about being surrounded by fools.
Personally I think if there's an all-encompassing Rule 0 which can be applied to every RPG ever, it's "don't touch the randomiser unless you're okay with any result it might spit out."
But, again, there's a kind of "immersion" which means the GM "should" always call for a roll even if it's impossible.
@BESW DnD also has that thing where even "success" and "failure" aren't really defined, so when rolling for a NPC to let me inside the castle which is off-limits, a success could mean anything from being directly lead to the central chamber I was hoping to reach to being refused entry but nicely.
I think it's partly a failed attempt to appear even-handed by invoking the rules as the cause of failure, but another reason (more legit in my eyes, but still kinda weird) is based on the feeling that rolling dice is how you do things: even if you can't succeed, you didn't actually DO the thing unless you rolled the dice.
In that paradigm, "doing a thing" triggers rolling dice. Always.
ttfn
@kviiri Thank you! I was not consciously of this perspective until we started playing games where rolling dice only ever happens when the GM says so, and there's no way for the players to accurately predict if the GM will say so.
My players kept picking up dice and rolling them after each action they narrated, without checking with me first.
It baffled me because it made complete sense to us and yet it obviously wasn't how the game was supposed to work.
I think this is one reason "talking is a free action" became a mantra for a large subset of the D&D community, actually--it signifies an action with no dice, no success or failure, a sacrosanct space in which the rules (and by extension GM fiat over the rules) are perceived to have no power.
I do think talking taking no action can be taken too far,... but also like, you could do a certain amount of it while attacking or moving or most of wtv else you are doing
BTW, @trogdor, while you're here. I'm liking a lot of the potential for a Miami-based game, but given how much more work GS121 adventure building already is compared to my recent prep loads... a fictional city might be easier.
though to be fair I don't know much about her other than the silly movies that probably don't quite get her character completely right (though to be fair in those she isn't given too much personality?)
@eimyr certainly interesting, but what is to stop me from just jumping to whoever I want all the time?
and stealing everyone's info straight out of their minds and such?
just, I figure if the character I make has to literally pretend to be specific people, that in itself makes it harder to walk around and do whatever he/she wants depending on who it is that is being impersonated
especially if that person runs into me
but also if they are not supposed to be where I am going, or wouldn't ask all the questions I am asking, and so forth
If you want, you can also trade any of the standard Investigative abilities (like Forensic Accounting) for a mutant Investigative ability at the same dice level, provided it's near the General mutant abilities you chose.
In this case, depending on choices, that'd be X-ray vision, thermal vision, microvision, or spatial awareness.
(Mutant City Blues is kinda complicated to type out.)
General abilities are in white without a magnifying glass, Investigative abilities have a magnifying glass, and the black boxes are, for the purposes of Gumshoe One-2-One, the Problem your character starts her first scenario with.
For a Gumshoe mutant, you pick three adjacent General abilities (hop Problems and Investigative abilities for free) and assign them five dice between 'em.
You can also switch out any of your regular Investigative abilities for a mutant Investigative ability that's adjacent to any of the powers you picked.
And you pick one of the black boxes adjacent to an ability you picked, and that's your starting Problem.
We don't have to adhere to it rigorously since we're not using the Mutant City Blues setting or themes, but it's the closest thing to a cryptid power mechanic we've got without making up one ourselves.
So, if you want to make up some powers and Problems that's no biggie, but use those as guidelines?
> NONDESCRIPT You blend easily into crowds and small groups, leaving little impression when you’re present, and remaining profoundly unmemorable after you depart. It’s not that you’re invisible; instead, you seem so boring that no one thinks to engage with you.
also, especially multiple personality disorder,.... why is that in a Role Playing Game?
it's bad enough that it is a mis-representation of mental illness,... but what place does that have exactly when I am playing a character who is the only thing in the game I can control?
I say it that way because the Hollywood "multiple personality disorder" thing would imply,.... not being able to control what I am doing when it flares up or something like that
It starts out with mood shifts and talking to yourself, then to your imaginary friends who you get to describe, and eventually the GM can force a check to see if you shift personalities under stress but you get to play all of them.
And if it goes too far you retire either to get psychiatric help or because another personality takes over completely and doesn't want to be a Mutant City Cop.
@ChanseHarry Hi! You'll need 20+ rep to type in chat, but you're welcome to hang out until then.
I do suggest you read the meta post Erik linked you in the comments; it should be helpful regarding topicality here. Stack Exchange is a Q&A site, not a traditional discussion forum; there are a lot of forums which are great for open-ended discussion, while this place tries to handle a different set of questions which forum threads don't handle so well.
Please also take the tour and check out the help documentation, they're useful introductions to the site.
Whoops, sorry, got two new users mixed up. My bad.
And think about your character. You're not a hard-heeled detective or a well-bankrolled federal agent, you're the kind of person who chooses to write passionate (but probably poorly edited) articles about your community instead of having a job that actually, you know, pays money or has advancement opportunities.
How does your cryptid nature inform or subvert that?
(Your community is not the radical New Left, it's probably some kind of immigrant neighbourhood, but I think that video is a useful benchmark for a lot of the kinds of attitudes I'm imagining.)
it is sounding just a little like that X-men movie with the mutant cure thing
only a little, but still disturbing to some degree
I mean, to be fair I have been evaluated as "high functioning" but treating this as a disease rather than a difference from other people is disturbing to me
You may have seen the Light It Up Blue banners around Guam earlier this year? Autism Speaks was behind that. It's an autism advocacy organization which puts all its money toward a cure and very little toward actually assisting people affected by autism, has nobody with autism on its board, and is generally known for being condescending to people with autism and just nasty in its advertising.
it isn't always the case, but every once in a while I am reminded that a lot of people would rather put me (and of course other people) in a box
and yeah, a lot of these disorders on here seem kinda,... gracelessly placed here (not the least of which because some of them don't technically exist) but when Autism or Asbergers or wtv name is getting used is put in something I can't help but start to actually take it a little personal
and one of the powers is induce mental disorder? wtf?
Mythos insanity works for me because it's nondescript, party supernatural madness that doesn't even attempt to represent any particular mental condition.
...this is one reason I grudgingly respect Alan Moore's The Courtyard. It successfully depicts Mythos madness as completely unrelated to traditional mental conditions, but rather as the kind of overpowering change of perspective which is the effective core of Lovecraft's concept.
(The sequel stank like a dead Innsmouth local, a full return to familiar Alan Moore Sleeze.)
Notably Watchmen was more of a collaboration than purely an Alan Moore Spectacular. The more he does things on his own, and the older he gets, the more his works tend to progress from crazy-like-a-fox to crazy-like-a-sleazeball.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a great concept, but I felt the execution was sadly pedestrian--it just didn't double down on the premise hard enough to let me try looking past the sexism and racism one comes to associate with Alan Moore.
@trogdor Yeah. The comic is better in most aspects, but the ending of the movie is so much more logical than the ending of the comic, and that really bugs me.
@Miniman I will also say that the ending of the movie was my favorite part, it seemed like the right way to go, but it was not out of any comparison to the comic (cause again, didn't read that)
One of my friends was worried about her kid reading Tintin because of how racist especially the early ones are, but it was a teachable opportunity to study how Hergé changed his mind about groups of people after he actually met them and what he did to come to terms with his past works.
I'm not sure if links to non-sexual nudity is ok here, but there is a rather, err, artistic take on the racism in Tintin in Congo called Tintin au Congo à Poil (Tintin in Congo naked) which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.
@KorvinStarmast re: recent flag on the dueling/zweihander question: it seems to me like your recent comment wouldn't make sense without the context of the comment(s) that precede(s) it. I went ahead and deleted a handful, then saw your comment and undeleted the ones that seemed necessary to understand it. How's it look now?
@BESW Alan Moore just seems like one of those guys who likes to stick it to The Man without having a clear idea of what "The Man" is. Or at least that's how I felt with his "adaptation" of Harry Potter in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
He also seems like one of those guys who thinks grimdark edginess is "true art".
@KorvinStarmast Happens to all of us. (I assumed versalite was some experimental plastic that would function as bludgeoning when wielded 1H, but slashing when wielded 2H.)
so I'm writing up some homebrew rules variants that I plan on tacking on when I run Storm Kings Thunder. One thing I really want to play with is Exhaustion with the intent of the players focusing more on down time and in-between activities (ie, I don't care how long the module takes to finish, if we finish it at all)
I've got 3 things that I'm adding so far: When a character is out of Hit Dice, they can take a level of Exhaustion to regain Hit Dice equal to half their level, rounded up. A character cannot use this ability again until they’ve finished a Long Rest.
When a character is out of Spell Slots, they can take levels of Exhaustion equal to an Expended Spell Slot to regain that Spell Slot. A character cannot use this ability again until they’ve finished a Long Rest.
and then 3 tiers of poison where they give levels of exhaustion. here's the minor poison: Affected creature takes a level of Exhaustion. After every long rest the creature can make a DC 10 CON Save. On save the Poison is healed, on fail the creature takes another level of Exhaustion. While Poisoned a creature can’t heal Exhaustion levels from Long Rests.
I'm wondering if that's more than enough, or if I should add other ways for the players to obtain exhaustion. I want it to be a threat, but I also don't want it get too bnoxious
But I think they're the only caster that can recover spell slots without resting. Wizards get a few on short rest while Warlocks get all of them. But they both require resting.
And so they would "benefit" less from this homebrew than another caster.
@Magician a modular dnd system, I think, just wouldn't look like dnd. I think it'd end up looking a lot more like FATE, and they probably didnt' want to diverge the game that much for this edition
@Yuuki hmm. remind me, does a sorc point more or less equal a spell slot level? ie a level 1 spell slot = 1 sorc point, level 2 = 2 points, etc?
I havent' played a sorc so I don't know them that well
@DForck42 I like that you're picking things that players can opt into or enemy debuffs. Tacking homebrew onto already existing things is something that I feel can cause a lot of problems.
Especially when it's a clear penalty like exhaustion.
@Yuuki so, what if I changed it to say "When a character is out of Spell Slots or Sorcery Points, they can take levels of Exhaustion equal to an Expended Spell Slot to regain that Spell Slot or equivalent Sorcery Points. A character cannot use this ability again until they’ve finished a Long Rest."
so a sorc of appropriate level could take 5 levels of exhaustion to regain 7 sorc points
@DForck42 I have no clue about item balance but does this mean that crafting a minor alchemical item (does 5e have tangleroot bags?) takes longer than a basic simple weapon?
What about reducing the crafting time if you have exceed the DC significantly or increasing the DC for crafting multiple items at once?
@Yuuki it depends on the rarity of the alchemical item, but most likely yes
@Yuuki I might have to explain that better
basically, your Total DC is something that you work towards over time. If you get an excellent roll one day then you got a lot of work done that day. if you didnt' roll so well then maybe your concentration was off
@Yuuki my comprosime for working on multiple items at once was the beign able to spend 2 hours on an item, but you roll with disadvantage
basically, the more you concentrate on a single thing, the faster it's made, whereas working on multiple things at once will generally take longer
I might need to change the wording of "Only one item can be crafted at a time" to something like "only one item can be worked on per time interval spent" or something like that
ie, you could either spend 8 hours on one thing, 4 hours a piece on two things, or 2 hours a piece on 4 things, and anywhere inbetween
Okay. Because an issue I had with one system (I think it was Pathfinder?) was that I had a plan to make an alchemist character but the crafting of minor alchemical tools like tangleroot bags and smoke rods took so long that it wasn't worth it.
I would expend far more tools than I could replace in any feasible sense no matter what level I was.
Taking 5 levels of exhaustion would be pretty risky, you are at half hp, disadvantage on most things, and can't move. And if you get hit by an ability that causes exhaustion, you die.
@DForck42 massive damage in the sense of "Damage which drops you to 0 hp, and the damage leftover is equal to or greater than your hit point max" is vanilla. I really should have called it "killed outright" since there is an optional rule called "Massive Damage"
The massive damage variant rule is something like "If a creature takes damage equal to or greater than half its hit point max, it has to make a con save or suffer some system shock"
5e is described by its marketing materials as:
The core of D&D is storytelling. You and your friends may tell a story together, guiding your heroes through quests for treasure, battles with deadly foes, daring rescues, courtly intrigue, and much more. You can also explore the many worlds of D&...
Specifically I'm looking for any advice on adapting FATE (or any generic RPG system really but I own FATE) for Titan combat. Thank You!
