The Problem With Talking About D&D 

For him it was a cool suggestion, for us it was the perfect answer. Insert "I'm not the Messiah!" Meme.

Fuse, I came down here to comment this exact thing. Two great minds think alike.

It's a cool starting point, but definitely not a complete solution. Matt alludes to it, but these ways of breaking things down (tactical vs drama, playercount) are two factors that he has noticed, in his own experience, tend to generate disagreements on the kinds of discussions he pays attention to. Does his experience automatically mean that these are the most useful ways to categorize players and that splitting adventures this way will instantly fix the problem and each adventure built for a deep-red heavy-wargamer 6-player table group will work for *every* deep-red heavy-wargamer 6-player table? Probably not. That's why he's saying he doesn't "have a solution" -- it's a starting point for how to look at things, not something that will resolve the problem of assuming your table is the same as another table and therefore only the rules/system must be what needs to be discussed. Two deep-red tables would still get in an argument here, most likely. What would be super helpful is doing a comprehensive study of playstyles and table/group variables, and then correlating those with how much a given group enjoys or matches a given adventure or encounter, how easy/hard they find it, etc. That would let us (with a bit of science) determine which specific aspects of a table have the biggest impact and then categorize groups in a way that matches this. Maybe one axis is the level of tactical mastery of the best player at the table -- or maybe it's the floor of the weakest tactical player at the table that's more important? Does it make a big difference if you have a wide range of roleplaying comfort zone, with one casanova so impressive at getting in character and voice acting they make you want to always let them succeed in social situations without rolling even if their character *should* be a low-CHA brute that shouldn't be that good in social scenes, and then another player in the group can't even bring themselves to speak in character and always just narrates that their PC says something about X? Does that variance matter, or only the average comfort level? Does voice acting matter to how players perceive social encounter difficulty? So many unanswered questions we need to figure out before we can get to nailing down a proper categorization system that will be *useful* for improving the ROI on adventures, encounter design and overall content for RPG tables.

Even if the scale solution was implemented, it would be difficult to incorporate every game element as a codified scale type when crafting homebrew adventures kowtowing to the ever elusive fallacy of game balance, and regarding published adventures doing the same, you'd still have whiners online going on about "weh X adventure EXISTS AT ALL and is therefore an affront to my widdle thenthitivity, they don't make enough of Y adventure, nobody buys X adventures noh moh, get X go broke weh". Ultimately, the problem with talking about D&D = other people. The solution may already exist: getting to know your group via Session Zero + Post Sessions. Groups supersede games in the RPG sphere. It ain't perfect, but at least it engenders a mutual understanding and seamless adaptation to any perceived flaws in a session (lest I allude to yet another shopworn example of Crit Role... post-Acaba, of course). The fact that D&D Beyond lacks a gamers' Tinder ("Gamr" perhaps?) for matching compatible players to groups is a massive oversight.

@@commandercaptain4664 Obviously there will never be a perfect solution, but the whole point is that it's something that can work if done right & better than the nothing we have now.

L5R sounds like a once in a lifetime phenomenon for nerds. Those of us that were too young to be there eagerly anticipate the next big thing, and hope you’re the one to make it happen Matt. No pressure though, just keep doing what you’re doing!

Reading this makes me miss playing the CCG

@@watersage7395 Reading this makes me sad that I only found out about the CCG in 2013, after having played the TTRPG for years. Wish I had gotten in early.

That's so cool.

Yes! I really need to learn this skill. It's not so much that I want to say, "this is how it should be done." It's more like, "this is how I do it." So that's the language I need to start using at all times. When a player doesn't like the way I do something, they may say so, but it doesn't mean I will change the way I do it, and if I don't, that should be the end of it. I say that because I believe the same if the roles were reversed and I was the player. I need to play this DM's game, not debate them every time our opinions don't match. I've been that player, and I've been the DM dealing with that player. It's a mutual respect sort of thing.

Big damn yes.

I agree. when I first started looking at DMing 5e, I watched a lot of content with, I don't want to call it bad advice, but it was advice that wasn't good for my table. I don't think those creators take into account that this game is more of an art than a science. it's a lot like playing a musical instrument. some techniques are just out of place depending on the style of music being performed. there are some great content creators out there, so I keep looking, but there are some that aren't as good as they would be if they took the time to understand that.

Oh man. In my game last Sunday I had one of those "sorry, we're going to have to roll back the clock on this game because I did not understand that encounter's difficulty." I had heard Rot Grubs are more dangerous than they 'ought to be' but I was running an adventure out of the book and trusted, wrongly, that two 3rd lvl characters could pull the weight of an estimated 4-6 lvl 1 characters. We'll be making some changes next Sunday.

There is zero way of balancing combat in advance. You never know if the dragon keeps rolling 5's and 6's on is breath, or only 1's. You never know if the players are going to be playing otpimally or suboptimally this encounter, etc etc. You CAN'T balance, which is why I design most of my encounters to be adaptive and rely on morale checks. This way, the players can intentionally influence the combat by killing leaders, etc.

@@Sound_Tech One of those classic monsters that is pathetically weak "by the numbers" but has some extremely lethal or debilitating ability that wrecks parties. I've been there, and I empathize.

Meh. I'd rather just run Pathfinder 2nd edition, where the encounter building math actually works so I don't have to do any of that.

Been doing it for 42 years and I still adjust right up until the last minute.

Same! I was waiting for the Bruno reference. LOL

Oddly enough it still kind of feels like a joke because of how few people are likely to take this seriuously.

Hey I follow you on twitter :)

@@GazpachoTabletop :D

"Thats a good point. However consider my counter-argument.... [roll initiative]."

This reminds me of one of the few 4e games I played. Our party stumbled into a cavern full of goblins, half a dozen of which were in the middle of fighting over a tin "crown" to see who would be the next king. Our rogue turned to me, the wizard, and asked "Can you make that thing glow on command?", and after I said yes stepped forward to the goblins rushing at us and said we were sent by their gods to show them their new king by placing the crown on their heads. After one natural 0 on a persuasion check, and being surrounded and held at spear point, my character placed the crown on three goblins' heads without doing anything. On the fourth, I cast Continual Light on it. And that's how we had to sort out attempting to sort out how we could travel from town to town with 50 or so goblins in tow. They had decided to follow their prophets and ended up being a hilarious headache for the party and the DM for several months. When it got way too inconvenient to have them follow us around due to having to enter a city to embark on sea travel, we found them a spot away from settlements and declared it their holy land and walked off "to identify the next great goblin leader" elsewhere.

Considering the average Kobold life experience, the party was most likely just correct there, lol.

I *also* have been reading Elusive Shift!

I've just finished both the Elusive Shift and The Game Wizards. If anything they've impressed upon me the need to better archive and preserve TTRPG history. Stuff like En Garde! and Lord of the Dice seemed to really mess with the foundations of a TTRPG but I'd never heard of either of them. I've come away with the take that maybe there is no such thing as a bad game, just different games.

@O. M. I've only ever played one game of Paranoia and I was in tears laughing most of the time.

Iirc Paizo does/used to do that with their Pathfinder adventures. I remember a Pathfinder 1E adventure where they would advise you on how to tweak encounters for bigger/smaller groups. At some point the party had to argue a case in court and the thing had a scoring system to evaluate how well they did based on the evidence they provided and it did say that you could have them roll a few checks or have them go through the whole trial. It was pretty neat

"I run two tables and the same adventure is very different at the table." This is very true. I started with a table of experienced players and one of newbies, and have watched them play identical modules in totally different ways.

r/PoliticalCompassMemes does this except with political viewpoints. Maybe someone can make a TTRPG compass?

@@carterswafford2222 dew it! :D

@@carterswafford2222 You mean an alignment chart?

You could just ask the other person what their experience is...

You'd just end up with the elitist toxoids using it to belittle less experienced or more casual players and DMs

The most likely answer IMO is how often your players short rest. 5e has long rest classes (clerics, wizards to some extent), short rest classes (monks, warlocks, barbarians sort of) and classes that don't really need to rest for resources at all (some fighters, rogues). Monks are by far the most heavily short rest dependent class since it refuels their ki and all their abilities depend on ki. So what people think of the monk's power level is IMO often a shorthand for how often their group takes short rests. The other possible answers are: * How well your monk player can take advantage of high speed: it takes some creativity, not everyone uses it effectively, and a monk that just runs up and stands there is gonna be defensively weak * How often you're fighting monsters with a high CON save: a monk's best ability is Stunning Strike which targets CON; if you often fight dangerous monsters with low CON and no legendary resistance like liches, the monk will often be able to totally take them out of combat for several rounds, which feels amazing. * How many people you're playing with: a monk is best as a sort of martial battlefield control. If you have a lot of players, this is a great addition. If you don't have enough players for a tank, a DPS, and a utility caster at least, it will be very obvious that the monk is not doing that thing you desperately need. * General system awareness: a monk is best as a sort of martial battlefield control. A savvy player will read their stats and do that, and be very effective. But a lot of players will instead just walk up and try to punch, and that's very much not what the monk wants to do (and this is unlike any other martial class, who can all at least tolerably do this).

I do like D&D optimisation. I do like just having fun. I have to say that even though monks are pretty awful on the optimisation scale, the only time out of the three monks I've played were I didn't have fun was for several levels of the four elements monk. My DM let me switch out to another subclass, which I appreciated. The sheer glee of the occasional stunlock of a BEG is just too good to pass up. Same campaign where I swapped out of four elements into a basic open hand monk, I managed to kill the first few rounds of a lich by running up a wall out of the reach of a group of zombies blocking the entrance to it's sanctum, stunning the lich twice while the rest of the party slaughtered zombies, and ducked out of line of sight before the third round when the lich could finally attack something and had more pressing concerns like a paladin that disagreed with the existence of liches. A potentially very lethal fight became a joke by using skirmishing mobility to take out a well positioned spell caster early. Several things to think of for playing monks, even if their DPS is pretty awful: * Do you have a rogue or any other character that can benefit on flanking bonuses? Monks can get pretty much anywhere on a battle map with a bit of creativity. * Is your GM not super deep into very crunchy combats? (optimisers tend to be extremely crunchy when they are a DM and like going "against" a crunchy DM, skews the results vs.going against a drama driven DM) * Do you end up with battle maps with spread out NPCs? * Does your DM like having a single caster to deal high DPS while they are sitting in the back of the line of scrimmage? * No other way of phrasing this, but how does your DM react to the phrase "I'm going to do some monk stuff"? If your DM is following the Rule of Cool, monks can get away with some crazy actions. Any example of Jackie Chan doing a thing in a movie will help with this.

Agreed with something someone else replied. Table size makes a much bigger difference than you would imagine for the monk. A smaller table is bad for a monk, a bigger table is much better by considerable margin.

Do you mean side convo between players? In online play asides from a GM to a lone player would be easier, not more difficult.

Also, its very hard to read people just through voice.

@@oz_jones I think this depends on past experiences. Growing up I played xbox live all the time where I had to be able to read someone based purely on their voice. So playing DND like that is natural to me.

Online adds a lot of smoke n mirrors you would never be capable of IRL too

@@quesoblanco444 yes but player to player while someone else is doing something sneaking into a castle door for example at a table can be whispered to each other is far harder

Well put. I recently ran a solo adventure for my friend whose character had a month of downtime to pursue their own goals. The players and admittedly myself joking referred to my friend's character as chaotic evil due to their past (very bloody) actions in the main campaign. As a result of this, I designed a handful of heavy-on-combat encounters because that's what I believed the player enjoyed. So what does this player's character do during these encounters? They manage to talk their way out of 90% of the encounters - including talking down their spiritual alter egos in a test to their god. It was truly fascinating.

@@wobbyism In the last campaign my party had a favorite tactic the gnome bomb the goliath fighter would grab the gnome wizard throw him in the middle of a group of enemies the wizard then would drop a bomb and then thunder step away . I never thought throw them gnome would be taken so literal then again what do you expect from 10 year olds.

I've had this experience too. Asked a very pointed question, 7/10 responses were totally irrelevant, 2 were openly hostile, only 1 useful & polite reply.

@@jbartnik1918 That's far better than the average internet experience!

Same experience. I asked for interesting uses of an ability. All answers where hyper specific nonsense to show how dumb the skill is, 3 exhagerations why the skill is op and 2 balancing tips in both directions. No one even remotely answered the question.

What's your sneak attack houserule? You can't leave us hangin like that!

@@cephelos1098 It's a simple change. Sneak attack or any precision damage can only be used with your main hand weapon. (If you only attack with an off-hand weapon that's fine too) I'm sure I'm going to hear about how now there's "zero reason" for anyone to make a Two-Weapon fighting Rogue, but 🤷.

I'm the same way, I've been playing with mostly the same people running a houserule-riddled SRD version of 3.5 for almost 10 years. I know 5e is probably better but I'm just too far gone.

+1 to this. MCDM are perfectly situated to design this themselves and start using it in their own products, especially Arcadia, and invite others to use it too by making it open and free (however that works).

There's a great Monte Cook blog post in Kobold's guide to Game design, about the realities of desiging a ''balanced'' rpg. He defines Balance in two ways, one of which can be meaningfully affected by the designer and the other by the group.

I don’t personally believe “balance” really exists in games like DnD. It’s an illusion that makes the number crunching players feel secure. If there was true balance, the players would lose half the time. In reality, the DM is just in charge of throwing “interesting” encounters at the party. If it is interesting enough, it will provide challenge to all those involved and as long as the number crunching players don’t die and feel at least a little bit challenged, they will put their “balanced” stamp of approval on the encounter and the DM is worthy to live another day. In reality, the DM is behind the screen tweaking things before and sometimes during the encounter, monkeying around with NPC motivations, and trying to come up with fun and unique twists and situations and features that can arise to make the encounter more “interesting”. Also, the mere fact that it is often 2-6 v 1 with the DM vastly outnumbered by players means that as far as brain power goes, it can never be truly balanced either.

@@DeGreyChristensen balance doesn’t just have a single context it can be used in. fitting contexts for „encounter balance“ would be: balance between being hard enough to be engaging, and not so hard it kills you. balance between being too short and taking too long. balance between perceived threat and actual threat. balance between agency and random chance. no one means „50/50 chance the players die“ when they talk about balance. thats a strawman, thats why its such a weak argument and so easy to pick apart. a „balanced encounter“ isnt just simply one that the players had fun with. its an encounter that they had fun with, „because it was balanced for the scales that are relevant for players to have fun“. you‘re mixing up cause and effect. if the fight is too easy and ends round 1, thats boring. if its too hard, and they all die, thats annoying. balance, here, is when the monsters seem unbeatable in round 1, are somewhat on equal footing to the players in round 2, fall on the back-foot in round 3, and are finally defeated in round 4. the exact numbers may vary by group of course, but the encounter still needs to be balanced to the strength of the group, in such a way that this „intended outcome“ is reached. ironically, this balance needs to be balanced against another type of balance. the DM needs to create a balance between the perceived agency of the players, and the predetermination of the aforementioned intended outcome. in other words, it cant be too swingy, were a single roll can decide if everyone lives or dies. but it also cant be such that the players (or worse, the DM) simply decide who wins. that is the entire point of using dice: to insert random chance. because chance is impartial. balance, here, is the DM designing the encounter in such a way, that random chance, while clearly present, can not actually divert the outcome from what the DM has planned. so in essence, encounters should be challenging, and require the players to expend their fictional resources; but also easy, so they win in the end. their course should also be determined by the players decisions, but ultimately decided by the dice. these four things need to all be present, but not be superseding one another. they need to „be balanced“.

@@mayhemivory5730 you say it is bad to have the DM decide who wins, but your definition of a balanced encounter is one where the players always win by round 4-5 (give or take a round). How is that in any way consistent? In my experience, because I used to try to design every single encounter like this, calculating everything as best I could, players will eventually figure out that you are planning on their success. Eventually, they see that they are beating every encounter after a number of rounds when it seemed so daunting at first. This type of “balance” is hollow and scripted and gives credit to the term you used “perceived agency” meaning they never really have a choice. Or “perceived threat” meaning there really isn’t a threat. It just looks like there is. I design my encounters now without even considering my players (to an extent). I choose threat level based on what makes sense for the bad guys, the situation, and the story. I add as much interesting interactive features to the encounter as I can and I play the bad guys like they want to win. If the players are smart and roll well then they will win. If not, my players have learned that it is best to retreat and go back at it from a different angle. I do not bother myself with perceived balance, because this is just an illusion that eventually leads to disappointment when the players find out that it was designed to be beaten or that there is no real threat. I make my players feel like there is a very good chance their characters could die because there is a very good chance their characters could die in combat. Especially if they don’t think it through first. Since I have started doing this, encounter design has gotten a lot easier and less time consuming and my players have thoroughly enjoyed every combat encounter. The game as a whole feels more real and less like a hollow illusion for me and my players. There is real excitement on both sides of the screen when an enemy or monster is defeated because I truthfully didn’t know beforehand if they were going to pull it off. Before you accuse me of trying to kill off my player characters to prove how deadly my game is, I don’t. I give them ample warning about how deadly an encounter is through context clues and there is almost always a way out if they feel like they are getting overwhelmed. I have only ever had a few player characters actually die and even when that happened they enjoyed it and knew I wasn’t going overly hard on them. It was usually because of a bad die roll or a poor decision on their part. They recognized immediately what they did wrong in the movement relenting “oh, I should have cast a different spell, or used cover instead of just standing out in the open.” I don’t design impossible encounters, but I don’t consider any specific way of beating it. Every monster is technically killable, but sometimes it takes creativity to do it without loss of life. Once combat begins, I am very open to player creativity. If a player suggests a possible solution and it sounds even somewhat reasonable, I’ll let them roll for it. I want them to win, but I am not going to coddle them from behind a wall of “perceived threat”. I find that boring as a DM and in games where I did that, my players got bored from the lack of true threat. DMs obsessed with this kind of “balance” get so stressed out about finding that sweet spot, of hard enough to survive the first round or two, but easy enough to kill after round 4 or 5, that encounter design becomes an ever changing math problem. Screw that. I want an encounter that feels real. I want it deadly. And if my players find a way to kill the big monster or end the encounter in one round, I want to cheer with them because it obviously took a lot of creative planning to pull it off. Focusing on “interesting” and “realistic” encounters and forgetting about perceived balance takes loads of stress off the DM and makes for much more memorable encounters. And when the players do come out on top because of superior creativity, tactics, and a little bit of luck (cause a smart player leaves as little to chance as possible), they feel that much better about themselves. And as an added bonus, the numbers obsessed players will still think you put in the numbers work to make a “balanced” encounter. If you enjoy spinning your “balance” plates and creating the illusion of threat and agency for your players, then do what makes you happy. But I still feel like balance is an illusion. And if it is overwhelming balance in favor of the players winning every time, then I ask if it is really “balance” or just easy mascarading as scary or dangerous looking.

I do feel like balance between the classes is of some importance just to make sure everyone is having a good time during combat and feeling like their character is contributing. Balance between monsters and classes doesn’t matter because that’s all up to the DM.

I was thinking about the problem of general experience. It gets complicated if you play/run a lot of systems. AD&D Play, D&D 3e Play/GM, nWoD Play/GM, OSRIC/AD&D GM -- early experiences Homebrewer Designer Simple Superheroes, Designer Dungeons Unleashed Frequent convention player/GM, event organizer Occasional played/GM'ed influences: Hackmaster 5e, Universalis, Fate, Amber Diceless, Free Spacer, The Quiet Year, Serenity, Spark, Champions of Zed RPG'ing since 1999 I'm sure there's more to pack in there, but these are some of the relevant things.

@@composedreamgames1919 well, part of it is having a more specific topic or less specific "code" catagories, otherwise you need a biography lol For example, did the L5R code include MtG level of experience? Sounds helpful but tangential and less compact.

This is definitely a thing! I don't really think it ever happens less often, I think it's a lot what we bring to the table in terms of where our baseline moods are that day and what the energy level is. I think you will get better, but I think when it comes to stuff like this, just like with what Matt is say, the key may be communication. Something I do with my table that might work with yours, is I'll often ask my players before the game what their vibe is, especially if people have had a hard week or seem kinda tired - that way I know I need to hold off on a big tactical encounter, or give them a shopping episode, or toss some monsters at them so they can get out some pent-up rage. It does mean you have to be a little looser with game prep but its worked out well when I've done it! I hope it helps!

Ooh that sounds like the kind of breakdown I need as a new DM ! (and is sadly missing from things like the essentials kit). Any modules in particular that you'd recommend for newer players? :)

That's because Matt has been following you around, hiding behind bushes, peeking around corners, to come up with new video ideas

@@MulryTime Incidentally, the whole "putting a refreshing spin on the module" is exactly why I'm stoked to run Curse of Strahd at this level next. In the module, Strahd is the proverbial "Puppet Master". As a Darklord ruling over a Plane of Dread, he rules from an absolute position of power. None can challenge his authority, and his constant underestimation of the PCs is largely the hubris that ultimately becomes his undoing. But in a 20th-level playthrough, that all changes. Strahd knows pretty much *immediately* that any one of them alone has the strength to best him, much less together. He will view his own role as being Barovia's defender; protecting his Domain from these intruders, and will marshal everything in his repertoire to thwart them. I'm still writing my GM notes before I run this, but the thought of it alone is... rather delicious.

@@MulryTime I realised my first comment got deleted for some reason! To answer your question properly: My players are a mixed bag. Some of them have decades of TTRPG experience, and some of them have only ever known 5e. The veterans appreciated the rare opportunity to play at 20th level nontheless and the newer players were doing so for the first time. That said, they were familiar with "optimised builds" found online that can go all the way to 20th level, and wanted to try those out. SKT was the first one we did, and that only took four sessions, each about 3-4 hours long. So much of that module lies in travel; in information-finding and in grueling combat encounters - all of which the party had efficient solutions for. In one encounter a Wizard took out six Frost Giants in a single round of combat, for example. And as for travel, well: That's what True Polymorph (into an Adult Gold Dragon) is for. HotDQ took much longer and was my favourite module. That first chapter as-written, your objective is simply to survive the night. The raiders are far too powerful and too numerous for low-level PCs to deal with. However, as 20th-level adventurers, that all changes - now you have every agency to be the heroes of the night; to thwart the raid and turn the night into not only a successful defense of the town, but use the opportunity to learn as much as you can about the raiders. After all, the townsfolk have no idea why they were attacked, or even who by. Just the fact they were 20th level really turned the module on its head, and so it ended up playing out like a true module campaign, but one that's almost like a "What if?" scenario. It was great.

@@MulryTime Ditto for magic items, too. I allowed my players to have *one* Magic Item from any official material, with the proviso that if they choose something that grants 'Wish', I'm running that completely RAW, and to be mindful of the 'fun' of other players at the table. Fortunately, nobody took stuff like that. But yeah, between things like the Belt of Storm Giant Strength and the Tome of the Stilled Tongue, there's so much cool stuff in the game that few people get to engage with. Downsides? It does rob the players of 'PC Growth' and the idea of character development from a mechanical perspective, but what you get in return is mechanical freedom. Build that character you always wanted to try and make. Or just make something silly and broken, like a Samurai who can make 16 attacks per turn. It's a breath of fresh air in that respect.

I play with a player who has a powerful character build but continually makes crazy, suboptimal combat choices due to their general lack of combat gaming experience. It drove me nuts at first, but now its one of the most entertaining parts of our sessions.

She sounds amazing.

Why so long? Does she take forever to come up with her action? Is there a lot of fumbling around by the DM figuring out what she should roll?

AD&D 2e had minute long rounds, with turns taking up 10 minutes. This fits perfectly into the history of the game. Still, with 5e's 6 second turns, I can see a good slight of hand check allowing for a crowbar rope trick, or throwing a jar of worms at someone. Just have to be proficient at... whatever you can convince the DM you're using a skill for.

I think the main problem that people had with 4e is that they had all these powers for combat, and no powers for non-combat (until later material in 4e), and people were blinded by wanting to have a similar power mechanic outside of combat. They kept looking at the combat side and seeing how interesting it is, but with nothing being supported on the non-combat side. They always wanted to get to the cool powers thing, so non-combat didn't seem "viable" or "fun", that it was lacking. I loved 4e, both as a DM and as a player. It wasn't like there were many, if any, things besides skills and the like in 3.5e D&D during non-combat situations.

This is the paradox of TTRPGs that no one seems to understand. Most of the rulebooks are devoted to combat rules and abilities. Therefore, people think, the game should be mostly combat, AND that if there are no mechanics for the social side of roleplaying, that means the game does not support roleplaying. But the rulebooks have so much space devoted to combat and abilities because those are the things that are easiest to codify; the easiest to fill books with to sell to gamers. The heart of the game is freeform collaboration between players and DM, until an outcome is uncertain and a roll is required. Ironically, the more that games have noncombat or social abilities and mechanics in them, the less roleplaying there tends to be. It just becomes more of "I use X on Y. I rolled Z."

Coming from a mid 80's start in D&D, I honestly thought that D&D 4e was a decent RPG that just didn't feel like D&D. It felt too conforming between classes and way too much like you just kept repeating the same thing over and over. I've pulled a lot of what I consider great things from 4e like minions with 1hp and the "bloodied" condition into 5e, and it's been great. Level 20 capstones of a "get out of death free card" for each class is friggin amazing. But overall, it just didn't have that chaotic D&D feel, leasing to too many classes just feeling like they are doing the same thing over and over.

@@Dyrnwyn I tend to agree with you for the most part here. Just want to clarify that this depends highly on the group of people playing the game. I've had a few groups of people playing very highly socially mechanical games where we considered the game a rousing success if we did not have to roll a single die.

This is what I love about pf 2e; the game gives you the tools and design philosophies under the hood of the game, so making homebrew is super easy. I straight up make monster on the fly now when the pcs pick a fight with something I didn't expect or whatevs

@@nicholasromero238 I will have to give PF2e a shot sometime. If I can talk my players into trying a different edition ha ha

@@davidcollier2500 If not, hell, it's PF, just pop a LFG and you'll get SOME people.

@@davidcollier2500 I'd highly recommend the Beginner Box for that purpose -- it's an excellent intro the world and mechanics of Pathfinder for both GMs and players. It also has a follow-on adventure if the party wants to keep playing with those characters in that setting called "Troubles in Otari" that continues teaching the mechanics in a way that feels natural and fun. And if the mechanics of PF2e end up not suiting your group or you want a taste of that world before moving systems, Paizo is making a conversion of their hugely-popular Abomination Vaults adventure path to 5E, which takes place in the same town of Otari. While it obviously won't have the exact same feel, Paizo's adventure design is REALLY good and worth checking out, regardless of system.

@@davidcollier2500 Id have to second the beginner box; never played it myself, but I hear a lot of rave reviews; I introduced my group back when it was in playtest stages I personally love trying out different systems though, and I'd be lying if I said 5e didn't influence my DMing style and opened me up to the world of house rules and 3pp

I actually love 2e because of how easy it is to tweak the game to match the needs of my table and even campaign by campaign

I actually love 2e because of how easy it is to tweak the game to match the needs of my table and even campaign by campaign

@@nicholasromero238 Yeah, the subsystems and optional rules do a good job of letting you add those mechanics to the game to suit your table while still keeping a baseline of balance. 5E apparently had this in mind at its inception, but I don't think it really lived up to that design or idea.

I suspect that the people which are most annoyed at the ranger are the ones that love the concept and the theatrics of playing a ranger but are disappointed at how underwhelming the combat features are. 🤔

@@pedroscoponi4905 I'm feeling this tension emerging in my new game. I have two players, one took the MCDM Beastheart, the other is a Tasha's Swarmkeeper Ranger, both 3rd level. We ran a Danger Room as part of our session zero and they seemed alright but in seesion one, our Ranger was starting to feel the difference between the actions and decisions the Beastheart was able to make with his actions and companion compared to his few combat abilities.

@@pedroscoponi4905 that's sort of the point: the difference in everyone's expectations versus the reality of official DND rules. I played a ranger in one of my first ever campaigns, and (among MANY other issues with the DM) the DM refused to adjust anything to fit our style of play. I really wanted to play a ranger because I felt it would be fun to be a sneaky cover sniper for my crew. But combined with a min-maxer playing a tank and a nooblet DM who didn't know how to tweak or set up a game suited for everyone, it was one of the least entertaining gaming experiences I'd ever had. However, under one of my CURRENT DMs, I'm trying an archer again, and it's an absolute blast so far. To me, the base rules of the ranger are fine and make for a fun class, but the implementation of those rules at the table is where a class can fall flat. Hence OPs comment and Matt's video!

As an optimiser (hope I'm not about to get cooked for admitting that) I can happily confirm for you that ranger is actually a really strong class

It's actually the opposite for Ranger. Optimizers sing it's praises, even before, but especially after the Tasha's changes, but many players who wanted the fantasy of playing Drizzt, or a "master of their environment," were disappointed by Ranger getting a bunch of features that either totally invalidate the Exploration pillar, or don't help it at all.

To be fair, as a DM you're balancing a lot on your plate, so for newer DMs being given answers really provides a sense of security, stability, and something they can use as a good guide. When I started out, the very first game I ran was a mass dungeon crawl where I told my friends "I am going to run this purely monster meat grinder, with almost no role play" and we didn't even have enough time to finish everything I planned 😂 Now I've been running a campaign for 3 months with quite a lot of stuff happening story wise, lots of cool homebrew abilities, magic items, mosnters etc...it's been a wild ride from novice to less of a novice :)

I deleted a long message supporting your comment but to make it simple it's willingness of the DM and players to work together and be respectful is the #1 factor for having fun. #2 is alignment on the type of game you want to play.

The PHB Ranger isn't terrible from an optimized DPR point of view either. It can be both!!

@@GadoukenRising I mean i also agree, i just find it funny that people always talk about balance with combat being the only factor that most conversations take into consideration despite the game being a RPG and there is many other aspects that cant quantify "Balance" D&D was never ment to be "Balanced" because there is too many variables to every do it

@@Zertryx Definitely! I think people tend to focus on combat balance because there are lots of numbers to compare and many small factors that are easy to quantify. "Soft" skills/features for exploration and interaction are basically impossible to balance, and I think that's ok.

Conversely, I've talked with some other new DM's that feel compelled to homebrew everything. I usually suggest they consider adapting published adventures and modifying them as they like and makes sense for their campaign. Again, I feel like they are worried about changing published work, or on the other hand feel like a real DM must create everything from whole cloth. I started DMing with a mix of homebrew and the B-series of modules, which explicitly invited you to modify them and fill in the gaps, so it feels natural to buy a suit off the rack and take it to a tailor, rather than starting with raising sheep, so to speak. One thing I have noticed is that newer modules, and especially with the trend towards longer adventure anthologies, is the come with a ton of lore about setting, backstory, and factions that are rarely useful, and often dreadfully dull. But with all that detail, I think a lot of new DMs feel pressured into using all of that baggage, or not use the adventure book at all. I usually try to advise brand-new DMs to consider using published adventures to start with, just to get a feel for DMing without the work and stress of trying to do it all as t first, but change whatever doesn't fit as they like. I also point them to adventurelookup.com, and point out that we have a half-century of published content to draw from, and since they will need to adjust on the fly anyway (I'm stealing that line "encounter design doesn't stop just because you've rolled initiative") they can just swap in 5e equivalent monsters and tweak as a necessary in the moment. And to feel free to bring over abilities not in 5e and adjust for the party.