D&D General Styles of D&D Play

[Imaro]

typically, people need to eat to survive.

Typically people need much more than just food to survive.

 

[Lanefan]

And if one wishes to play a divine caster...?

Then you'll just have to accept the drawbacks with the benefits.

See, this is a thing that's been allowed to ruin D&D's design ever since WotC took over (and arguably, even well before then): players complaining about drawbacks and yet still wanting the associated benefits, and the designers acting on those complaints.

Wizard players complained about spells being interruptable, so interruptability nearly disappeared. They complained that combat spells took too long to cast, so casting times for those spells disappeared. Thief players complained about not being able to do much damage in melee, so backstrike (now, sneak attack) rules were eased to the point of absurdity. The list goes on for ages, I won't bore you with more.

And here you're doing the same thing: complaining about having to put up with a drawback (divine oversight) in order to get a very powerful benefit (divine spells). If I'm a designer those complaints are music to my ears provided those classes are still being regularly played, in that it shows the drawback-benefit trade-off is working as intended.

Major gods must hardly have any time for anything but watching their millions of worshipers.

That's why they have lots and lots of minions and other immortal servants, to do that work for them.

 

[Minigiant]

auto-changed the 4 to 1 here because I split the list, annoying. Pretend it still says 4.)

If the DM is calling for individual checks like this, shouldn't they be resolved in isolation? So for example yes Jocinda succeeds in finding a sheltered campsite and Corach succeeds in catching a few fish in the stream but Brakk fails to find any useful firewood and Petra utterly blows her attempt to forecast the weather. Tramasine, however, is sure she knows which way the group needs to go once daylight returns tomorrow as she spotted a landmark just before darkness fell.

Rather than batching all this together into one overall success or failure, why not play through the ramifications of each aspect? They've now got a good campsite and some food, and they know where they're going tomorrow, but they've no way to cook that food and no idea what the weather's going to do. So what do they do now?

Many DMs call for checks which happen in sequential order.

John does X. If he success, they run into a Y. Jane attempts to bypass the Y. If she success, they run into a Z. June attempts to bypass the Z. If she success, they run into a ZZ. But June failed and the party is locked out of this path.

I've no problem with one player (in character) dominating a scene that the characger is largely designed for. Here, a Ranger or Druid should be the star. That's not to say they're the only contributors, though; as with any situation, it's on the players to find ways to insert their characters into the scene.

But what if a player with less meta knowledge of the subject or less outgoing wants to be involved. They act the knowledge to be useful or or the personality to get in the conversation with helpful info.

If the ranger is the only on excited about foraging or tracking, it's fine. But if 2 or more are interested, it's up to the players and DM to figure out how to share stoplight as it isn't enforced.

I'm not a fan of gamism intruding all that much; and the swinginess of the d20 is largely in the DM's hands in any case, by putting these rolls on a sliding scale of success (e.g. Brakk's roll to find firewood could also bake in what/how much he finds, such that on a high 'success' roll he finds lots, on a narrow 'success' roll he finds enough but it's wet or hard to light, on a narrow 'fail' roll he finds some but not enough to last the night, on a worse 'fail' roll he doesn't even find enough to cook the fish, and only on a very poor roll does he not find any at all).

More broadly, this allows one roll to resolve a number of corollary issues simply by putting it on a sliding scale rather than binary pass-fail. Yes it's a bit GM-fiat-y in that the GM has to come up with this sliding scale pretty much on the fly each time; but that too is a bit realistic in that no two situations are going to be the same anyway

I'm not a fan of gamism intruding all that much; and the swinginess of the d20 is largely in the DM's hands in any case, by putting these rolls on a sliding scale of success (e.g. Brakk's roll to find firewood could also bake in what/how much he finds, such that on a high 'success' roll he finds lots, on a narrow 'success' roll he finds enough but it's wet or hard to light, on a narrow 'fail' roll he finds some but not enough to last the night, on a worse 'fail' roll he doesn't even find enough to cook the fish, and only on a very poor roll does he not find any at all).

More broadly, this allows one roll to resolve a number of corollary issues simply by putting it on a sliding scale rather than binary pass-fail. Yes it's a bit GM-fiat-y in that the GM has to come up with this sliding scale pretty much on the fly each time; but that too is a bit realistic in that no two situations are going to be the same anyway.

The benefit of gamism is that it ensures teamplay. The drawback is that it's unnatural.

 

[Aldarc]

typically, people need to eat to survive.

That's cause those people are weak.

 

[Lanefan]

Isn't almost any survival gameplay contrived?? I can't think of a single example where it's not that's just part of the genre.

In the 4e-5e style where encounters are generally designed to be dealable-withable by the party and lethality is correspondingly lower, and resources of various kinds are often easy to come by, you're probably right: survival play has to be contrived.

In older editions where the game world was out to kill you and random death seemingly lurked around every corner, survival gameplay was paramount even when basic resources such as food, water, and light were readily available. Having those resources unavailable just added to the PCs' woes.

 

[Maxperson]

Isn't almost any survival gameplay contrived??

It is to an extent, and up until Wish, magic doesn't cure all ills when it comes to survival. It does steadily cure more and more, assuming the party has access to it. However, the survival issues also become greater and greater as levels go up, so it balances out.

 

[Maxperson]

typically, people need to eat to survive.

They also typically need to breathe, but hitting them with monsters is not survival, it's combat oriented play. Food is a basic survival necessity, but it's FAR from the only one and making it plentiful doesn't take away from a heavy survival oriented campaign due to the other survival aspects that are present.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Typically people need much more than just food to survive.

sure like air, water, shelter and sleep, but those and food are the most fundamental needs, if you don't have those then it doesn't matter if you're armed to the teeth enough to take on a small army, if you don't have a source of food you're going to starve, you can't eat your sword, that's why it's typically emphasised as a key element in survival gameplay.

 

[Imaro]

sure like air, water, shelter and sleep, but those and food are the most fundamental needs, if you don't have those then it doesn't matter if you're armed to the teeth enough to take on a small army, if you don't have a source of food you're going to starve, you can't eat your sword.

My point is that a survival game can be based around various resources only one of which is food... in a world with magic the possibilities are even greater.

 

[Lanefan]

Many DMs call for checks which happen in sequential order.

John does X. If he success, they run into a Y. Jane attempts to bypass the Y. If she success, they run into a Z. June attempts to bypass the Z. If she success, they run into a ZZ. But June failed and the party is locked out of this path.

That would be situationally dependent. In my example of the party trying to make camp, in the fiction all those things would be happening more or less at the same time, with the party comparing notes once they'd all done those things and determining their next move based on the individual results of their attempted actions (they've got a good campsite, food (and water, remember those fish came from a creek), and a path; but no firewood and are at the mercy of the weather).

Your example here seems to indicate a sequential series of obstacles where one must be overcome in order to even get to the next; as in you have to bypass locked door X in order to get to trap Y, only after which do you get to locked door Z, following which is difficult climb ZZ where things go sideways. Here, clearly failure at any one step means you're probably not going any further...which is probably why the defenders put all those steps there in the first place.

In either case, bundling all these elements into a single-resolution mechanism IMO just isn't granular enough to do justice to the situation.

But what if a player with less meta knowledge of the subject or less outgoing wants to be involved. They act the knowledge to be useful or or the personality to get in the conversation with helpful info.

If the ranger is the only on excited about foraging or tracking, it's fine. But if 2 or more are interested, it's up to the players and DM to figure out how to share stoplight as it isn't enforced.

My take on that is that the spotlight is there not to be shared, but to be competed for.

The benefit of gamism is that it ensures teamplay. The drawback is that it's unnatural.

Well, it ensures team play only if the group acts like a team, which IME is never a safe assumption to make.