5e is in this weird space where, on the one hand, it’s loose and flexible, but on the other, it’s designed around balanced encounters and precise readings of kind of a lot of rules.
Don’t worry. It sounds like WotC is planning to fix the issue with not enough people wanting to DM their jank by implementing AI DMs in their new VTT.
They did say before that no one at Wizards was working on AI DMs, but it’s all but officially confirmed Hasbro had a 3rd party working on it for them. That’s why you gotta keep your eye out for those little loopholes. 😲
Yeah, I remember that. Along with the focus on digital tools, all I can think is, That’s a video game. You’re designing a video game. Those already exist. That is not what your flagship product is.
Seriously. If I want to play a video game, I can already do that. Even some amazing D&D video games! But the reason tabletop D&D and other RPGs haven’t been supplanted by video games isn’t because the technology wasn’t there yet, but because they do a different thing entirely. If they made Digital D&D, and even if it turned out amazing, it would be a completely distinct type of game, not a new edition of D&D.
This idea of dnd balance is not the design intent. Balance in 5e is actually very flexible. That’s why you have groups destroying encounters way over their power level and others dying to easy encounters.
The problem is not that 5e is hard to balance, the problem is that you are looking for a very tight balance that 5e cannot provide, for many reasons (stats, spells, the adventuring day, and several others).
If video published games publisher put out titles with gamebreaking bugs and expected the player’s computer or console to figure out what was wrong and fix them, there would be riots.
I’m always kind of amazed how many people defend WotC putting out products with so many weird problems and expecting DMs to just shadow-patch the issues and not complain about it.
Right? And a lot of websites provide a front end, but imagine if you had to look up the API docs, figure out auth, and do your own http post to reply to messages here. “it’s more flexible that way. the DM can decide if they want to use like postman, or requests, or write their own tool!”
I’m always kind of amazed that DND is such a big budget game that has so many weird problems.
Don’t need to hire proofreaders when people buy the books and post their own interpretations anyway!
If not for that we wouldn’t have story-driven adventures anyway. The game was initially focused on dungeon crawling.
Mechanically it still is
5e is in this weird space where, on the one hand, it’s loose and flexible, but on the other, it’s designed around balanced encounters and precise readings of kind of a lot of rules.
I found it an exhausting balancing act as a DM.
Don’t worry. It sounds like WotC is planning to fix the issue with not enough people wanting to DM their jank by implementing AI DMs in their new VTT.
They did say before that no one at Wizards was working on AI DMs, but it’s all but officially confirmed Hasbro had a 3rd party working on it for them. That’s why you gotta keep your eye out for those little loopholes. 😲
Yeah, I remember that. Along with the focus on digital tools, all I can think is, That’s a video game. You’re designing a video game. Those already exist. That is not what your flagship product is.
Seriously. If I want to play a video game, I can already do that. Even some amazing D&D video games! But the reason tabletop D&D and other RPGs haven’t been supplanted by video games isn’t because the technology wasn’t there yet, but because they do a different thing entirely. If they made Digital D&D, and even if it turned out amazing, it would be a completely distinct type of game, not a new edition of D&D.
Well, at least they promised that rumors of a planned $30 subscription fee weren’t true.
This idea of dnd balance is not the design intent. Balance in 5e is actually very flexible. That’s why you have groups destroying encounters way over their power level and others dying to easy encounters.
The problem is not that 5e is hard to balance, the problem is that you are looking for a very tight balance that 5e cannot provide, for many reasons (stats, spells, the adventuring day, and several others).
If video published games publisher put out titles with gamebreaking bugs and expected the player’s computer or console to figure out what was wrong and fix them, there would be riots.
I’m always kind of amazed how many people defend WotC putting out products with so many weird problems and expecting DMs to just shadow-patch the issues and not complain about it.
Right? And a lot of websites provide a front end, but imagine if you had to look up the API docs, figure out auth, and do your own http post to reply to messages here. “it’s more flexible that way. the DM can decide if they want to use like postman, or requests, or write their own tool!”
I mean this site is hardly the big budget Triple-A title equivalent of D&D. It’d be more like if the new version of Twitter/𝕏 did that.