Tag: ttrpg

Can’t see the forest for the trees

5.5e Player’s Handbook is out and some folks are going through it. Treantmonk has a video exploring the updated version of the Ranger, and while he goes through all the features and analyzes them decently – including comparisons with the Ranger variants from 5e and the 5.5e playtest for context – he still seems perplexed by people not liking this new version. I think he’s too lost in the details to see the big picture.

Conceptually, Rangers are supposed to be wilderness specialists. Specifically, they’re supposed to specialize in ranging (travelling across a wide area) – that’s why back in 1e, Rangers weren’t allowed to own more than they could carry. That specialization just isn’t meaningful in 5.x D&D – it’s not that you can’t be good at it, but rather that the game just doesn’t care about it. In fact, it actively avoids engaging with anything like logistical concerns: encumbrance; ability to forage for supplies or even the need to do so (q.v. Goodberry); ability to replace scarce resources like ammunition (you can tell the game doesn’t care about this because if it did, spellcasters using damaging cantrips would be seen as having a significant advantage over characters using thrown and projectile weapons); travel challenges like environmental hazards and getting lost; etc. All this means the Ranger’s core concept doesn’t have any real place in 5.x D&D.

Another issue he seems to gloss over is the move to make the Ranger more of a spellcaster. This is another systemic issue in 5.x D&D: the transition to make basically every character intrinsically magical in some way, even if they aren’t a spellcaster per se. Yes, Rangers learned to cast spells back in TSR-era D&D: starting at 8th level (Paladins started gaining their spells at 9th). You know what else happened around that level? Fighters and Clerics started to gain their strongholds, with Thieves and Magic-Users not far behind. Characters in that level range were transitioning away from the life of itinerant dungeon-delving and starting to embed themselves in the world in a larger context. In the language of 5e, they were moving to a different tier of play*. Rangers and Paladins should start off as spellcasters – they should have other points of interest to their classes to distinguish them from Fighters without needing spellcasting, ideally until at least 5th level, and preferably until 9th**. But because 5.x doesn’t care about the Ranger’s core activities, it mechanics it can use to help provide a distinct identity without falling back on spellcasting.

Is there anything we can do about this? I don’t see a lot of options: either we have to houserule 5.x to care about what Rangers do and then redesign 5.x Rangers to actually do that; or we have to reduce Rangers’ design space in the game (perhaps demoting them to be a mere Fighter subclass, at which point they only need as much distinctiveness as an Eldritch Knight); or we give up and just accept a lot of feel will continue to see them as a bad class***.

* Except that none of the tiers identified in 5e or 5.5e really match up with this – the 5.x descriptions of tier 3 (almost identical between 5e and 5.5e) say things like “Other characters gain features that allow them to make more attacks or to do more impressive things with those attacks. These adventurers often confront threats to whole regions.” (emphasis added; 5.5e PHB page 43).

** I like using 9th level as a tier breakpoint because it’s when Clerics – and thus PC parties – gain the ability to revive the dead under their own power. 5.x blurs the line a bit with the 3rd-level Revivify spell, but even so I think gaining the ability to Raise Dead is a real turning point in PC power, and should be recognized in how it can transform play. A similar concern applies to Teleport in earlier editions, or Teleport Circle in 5.5e – the ability to bail out of locations without having to traverse obstacles is transformational. Assuming the group and the game care about challenges like these, of course.

*** A bad class isn’t necessarily a weak class – you could give Rangers + 10*Ranger level to all rolls, and it would make them much more powerful. It still wouldn’t make them feel like much of anything except overpowered.

Posted on by azabaro 0

A quick test to see if a class change is overpowered

If you’re thinking of making changes to a class, you’re probably concerned about doing something that makes the class too powerful – I believe the current term is “overtuned”? There’s a quick heuristic you can use in strongly class-based games like D&D.

First, pick a benchmark class – this is a class seen as one of the more powerful ones for the game, if not the most powerful. Let’s assume we’re looking at 5e, and the benchmark class is wizard.

Second, you ask these questions:

1. Is the class I’m modifying at least as powerful as the wizard before making these changes?

2. Will the change make the class I’m modifying more powerful than the wizard?

3. Am I doing anything to reduce the power of the wizard?

If the answer to all 3 of these is no, the change probably doesn’t make the class overpowered. We can’t be too certain – a change may not make a class too powerful on its own, but may do so in concert with various build choices like feats or multiclassing combinations. But this is a good first approximation.

Incidentally, this suggests that any improvement to your benchmark class is a bridge too far, at least if that class really is the most powerful class already. For 5e, that means don’t buff wizards. Well, I’m sure the designers of 5.5e already know that…

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So, they’re teasing the new edition of D&D 

Wizards of the Coast is providing teaser videos, giving out advance text or even whole print copies to various influencers, who then go on to make their own videos. Speaking as someone who started playing in the mid 80s, I’d suggest people keep a few things in mind.

  1. If you’ve been having fun with the version of the game you’re currently playing, there’s no rush to get the new version, or to adopt it once you have it.
  2. If you haven’t been having a good time with the current version of the game, there still isn’t a big rush to get the new version. Everything we saw previewed in the playtests was fairly conservative in terms of design – changes more on par with the transition from 1st edition to 2nd edition than from 2nd to 3rd, or even from 3rd to 3.5 – which means the significant restructuring needed to deal with most people’s more serious issues probably isn’t in the cards.
    1. Need something a little more concrete? Consider all the talk about the lack of DMs for 5e. Now consider that all of the playtest material we saw was player-facing; there were literally no changes in them to give us a reason to believe the burden on existing DMs will be lessened, or that the path to creating new DMs will be improved. Similarly, the player-facing changes showed little interest in providing lower-complexity play options – feats were assumed to be mandatory and a significant part of even character creation. We haven’t been given any reason to believe the new version will do anything significant to accommodate people who it was previously pushing away.
  3. The talk of backward compatibility – the ability to keep using your old characters with the new version – is designer optimism at best. They don’t know how you’re playing the game because it’s almost impossible for them to figure out how the broader player base is even understanding their rules texts; that’s one of the problems with keeping things secret up to the moment of release. Go ahead and be hopeful it works out, but don’t be surprised if you need to rebuild your characters under the new system to have them work right.
  4. Sometimes the best thing a new version of the game gives you are things you can steal and bring back to an older version, or inspiration for other ways you might handle things. Or even just insight into design patterns you hate!
  5. Nobody’s analysis of the game text is the final word at this stage. Nobody’s. A lot of the online discussion like the story of the blind men and the elephant, with trying to extrapolate the whole of the situation from the tiny part they can perceive. But even the people who have access to the complete text of the rules don’t know how all this stuff is actually going to work when it hits the larger player base, at least partly because that’s the first time the whole thing will get a real playtest done at scale – across millions of players and months of play. Before then it’s all guesses, and the more gets changed in a new version, the more likely those guesses will be off the mark.
  6. All you can get for a few months to the better part of a year is speculation and a sense of discontent with what you already have. That’s the product of marketing, after all – unfulfilled desire. It’s probably better not to engage with all that if your goal is to enjoy gaming.
Posted on by azabaro 0

Alignment

Alignment has been the source of a lot of unnecessary arguments across D&D’s history. It’s kind of strange – if you look back at original D&D, it was just a faction marker: shirts vs. skins (or togas vs. woad if you prefer). Its only real effects were to determine what types of monsters you could recruit – a Lawful character could ride a pegasus and a Chaotic one a griffin, but not vice-versa – and which magic swords a character could use (since back then they were all intelligent enough to have their own alignments). But that was it.

Somewhere along the way alignment became a description of a creature’s morality – or more problematically, of an entire creature type’s innate moral character, regardless of their actions. Orcs who are Evil by birth; elves who are Good by nature even when they enslave each other (that’s from an actual Dragonlance module, by the way). There’s no salvaging that.

A lot of folks just discard alignment, and while I can’t blame them I feel it’s one of D&D’s more iconic contributions to popular culture – I don’t know how many 3×3 alignment grids I’ve seen for ways to close a bag of bread or whatever, and there’s even an entire subreddit for alignment charts. I think it would be a terrible mistake to throw away that mindshare if we can salvage the concept, especially if we can do something interesting with it.

My take

Alignment is the state of being mystically connected to an extradimensional reality – in traditional D&D cosmology, to one of the Outer Planes. This connection can arise in a number of ways:

  • Being composed of the substance of that reality (for example, demons being literally made of the Abyss).
  • Powerful supernatural effects like a curse, perhaps even one passed down for generations; or a Helm of Opposite Alignment.
  • Behaving in a way that supernaturally resonates with that reality via magical sympathetic principles.
    • This last is the route traditionally assumed for alignment – that a character is Chaotic because they behave chaotically.

This proposal allows for a Hellboy-style character who is by origin tied to an infernal plane despite being completely out of sync with the ideals of that place; such a character isn’t born Evil, but they are born aligned with Hell (or just Lawful Evil) regardless of their feelings in the matter. This also allows for us to have weird objects (a rock that’s so evil just touching it will turn you into fiddler crabs!) or even places (which are strong in the the Dark Side), and corresponding phenomena for other alignments.

We still need to give alignment some mechanical definition. Let’s start with the following:

  1. A character may choose whether or not to have an alignment.
    1. If the character chooses not to have an alignment, they can simply write “unaligned” in any alignment field used to describe their character. A lot of beings are unaligned, including many people.
    2. If a player chooses to have an alignment, it never forces the player or their character to make certain choices or otherwise reduces the character’s agency or the player’s control over their character’s actions.
  2. Spells and effects which deal with alignment detect and operate on the mystical connection, not on the character’s thoughts, intentions, or historical behavior.
  3. Alignment has mechanical effects. A character
    1. Gets advantage on rolls to resist being forced, coerced, or manipulated into behaving contrary to their alignment’s ethics.
    2. Gets advantage on rolls to communicate with beings who share their alignment – they’re on the same wavelength.
    3. Gains Inspiration when they behave according to the ethics of their alignment at the cost of causing themselves non-trivial trouble.
  4. Available alignments
    1. The usual assumption
      1. There are 9 alignments, each made from a combination of choices along 2 ethical axes: Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic and Good-Neutral-Evil.
      2. Under this assumption, “Neutral” is simply a lack of a commitment along that axis, so a character who is Neutral on both the Law/Chaos axis and the Good/Evil axis is effectively unaligned. This means the standard alignment choices end up as follows:
        1. Lawful Good
        2. Neutral Good
        3. Chaotic Good
        4. Lawful Neutral
        5. Neutral (aka unaligned)
        6. Chaotic Neutral
        7. Lawful Evil
        8. Neutral Evil
        9. Chaotic Evil
      3. Each choice along an axis (other than Neutral) is associated with an ethic. A character doesn’t have to believe in the ethics associated with their alignment, but they may find it easier to adhere to those ethics in the long run – what’s that bit about the Dark Side being “quicker; easier; more seductive”?
        1. Law: the ethic of law is that things matter to the degree to which they endure over time. Transient things are ephemeral, less real (though views on this can be complex, since some transient things can be seen as part of a larger enduring whole, as with the cycle of seasons). A Lawful character will tend to adhere to traditions, plans, and other commitments even in the face of adversity.
        2. Chaos: the ethic of chaos holds that things matter to the degree to which they are present in the moment; more radical takes on this ethic claim the present is the only actual reality, with the past a ghost and the future merely a dream. A Chaotic character will tend to treat traditions, plans, and other commitments of all sorts as non-binding, or at least subject to reinterpretation in the moment.
        3. Evil: Evil’s ethic prizes the self, and more precisely self-interest above the interests of others. Evil characters aren’t necessarily unfeeling – they may like or even love some people, or feel loyalty to an organization or a larger entity like a nation or ethnic identity and therefore feel it’s in their own interests to help those people or groups – but fundamentally, an Evil character will tend to act in their own self-interest without concern for the interests of others.
        4. Good: Good’s ethic is easy to outline but hard to pin down: nobody’s interests are more important than anyone else’s, and therefore it’s only right that all parties be considered when determining a course of action. There’s still lots of room for disagreement: determining how to balance various interests against each other, especially when faced with the idea of a necessary sacrifice (for example, if there isn’t enough food or other necessary resources to go around) and even figuring out if something is considered to properly have interests of its own (does a magical construct carrying out the final orders of its long-gone creator? How about a nation-state, or an insect?). Even when faced with all these complexities, a Good character will tend to look for ways to act on behalf of others and try to avoid acting on their own behalf at the expense of others.
    2. Non-standard alignments. Some campaigns may have alignments other than the standard 9 alignments. For example, a campaign or setting might:
      1. Have the notion of an alignment of Balance (sometimes called True Neutral), whose ethic would involve trying to keep any of the other standard alignments from effectively marginalizing any of the others.
      2. Remove the Good/Evil axis and only use the Law/Chaos axis
      3. Build a completely distinct set of alignments around e.g. Aristotelian elements and the medieval humors and temperaments associated with them, so a characters alignment might be Sanguine (or Airy); Choleric (or Fiery); Melancholic (or Earthy); or Phlegmatic (or Watery).
Posted on by azabaro 0