[High 5e] 5e: HARDCORE MODE

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The choice for a lazy susan is appropriate, as almost every idea he had is conceived with the goal of doing less work at the expense of the game "running better" or something. Typical GM cocksuckery.

[deaddmwalking]

Running a game is a lot of work. A game that allows players the freedom to truly decide what they'd like to do and then do it means a GM potentially has a lot to consider. Most people aren't very creative on the spur of the moment, and fleshing out multiple encounters and/or characters that players can interact with on the fly is hard. Having a few 'short cuts' ready to at least buy time for a better planning session is worthwhile. So 'doing less work at the expense of the game "running better"', isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Sometimes you have to stat out opposition and plan level progressions and make sure that the antagonist has the abilities he needs to justify the threat he poses. And sometimes you can pull something straight from the monster manual and run it 'as is'. Using a monster manual is an example of making your life easier as a GM so you can spend your prep time in other ways. No problems there!

I reject any suggestion that GMing should be HARDER if you want to 'do it right' or something.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Good thing I didn't make that suggestion. If you watch his videos, this guy's 'shortcuts' are really just making gaping holes in the system and saying 'FUCK IT' whenever a problem arises. I'm particularly thinking of his 'system' where he just assigns a DC to entire areas and uses that for every action inside it, including AC.
I'd rather shoot myself in the dick than ever play garbage like that. If you can't be assed to give your grimdark orc chieftain an actual stat spread, I don't want to bother playing.

[Grek]

I think there's a difference between offloading the work onto the designers (who at least theoretically put some effort into coming up with good monsters for their manuals) and saying "Hey, what if instead of doing things that take effort, you half-assed it instead?" I would watch a video which reviews a monster manual and tells me which monsters in it at the coolest. I would not watch a video which informs me of an idea which I could have come up with by spending 5 seconds contemplating if I want to put in some effort into my GMing.

[K]

I honestly think that if you want the bad old days of the DM trying to kill you, Dungeon Crawl Classics-style is great. You just have to get used to the fact that stats are 3d6 with no choosing which number goes into which stat, the only character customization is the one time you choose a class, and adventures require each player to control 2-4 PCs. Life is cheap, and that’s OK.

Sure. But I do think that there's probably room for high lethality win-or-lose roleplaying that doesn't embrace grimdark retro stupid.

There are things like Heroquest and Runescape and Talisman. Not necessarily good, but the fact that they exist speaks to people wanting to play real heroes that still maybe just fight a dragon and fucking lose. It doesn't all have to be gongfarmers and ratcatchers for a game where your character might actually die.

-Username17

But it kind of does. Retro dungeoncrawling lives and dies by the comedy of unintended consequences and the comedy of persistence in the face of absurdity.

The comedy of unintended consequences is the bouncing lightning bolt that sometimes hits the party, the potion-mixing table, the magical fruit that you find in the dungeon that changes your sex, etc.

The comedy of persistence in the face of absurdity is the to-roll to hit where skilled warriors miss six times in a row and are defeated by critting nobodies, the party that sends summoned monsters down a trap-corridor because they are missing so many limbs from previous traps, the Vancian magic where your last spell might just be feather fall so you lasso an enemy and jump off a cliff and take them off it.

Without those two kinds of comedy, it's not retro.

[violence in the media]

Well, don't just tell us you like it. Explain what it is and why it's such a good idea.

It's not. The idea is you keep your map to whatever you can fit on a lazy susan and just add a few evocative terrain pieces, ignoring walls entirely. So long as you're truly just fighting a monster in the middle of a big room, sure, that's fine. But if you're doing that and not taking advantage of hallways and choke points and line of sight and cornering that walls bring, then I'm not really sure having dungeon terrain and a square grid is all that beneficial. You're better off with a hastily-drawn map and just using Zones or whatever your abstract positioning system of choice is.

I should have explained what I liked about the inspiration in the first place. Given that I played and ran games for years on a 24" x 36" battlemat, the idea of an 18" (I think that's what size his is, I have not re-checked) diameter area on a lazy Suzan isn't terrible. If that's not a large enough space, you can make a bigger one; 24" wouldn't be unwieldy. Basically, I liked the lazy Susan idea from years of people getting up and walking around the table to get to their miniatures or whatever. That's it.

Sure, he ignores walls, but I took that in the vein of other youtubers that say don't put down walls because they get in the way. Give impressions of them, or agree where they are. Not, "fight everything in a open cavern." Black Magic Craft talks about that with his dungeon tiles that he makes.

[JigokuBosatsu]

don't put down walls because they get in the way

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Maybe we should make a separate thread for trashing shitty Youtubers. I'm sure there are people out there ready to vent about some.

[Stubbazubba]

Admitting when I'm wrong: DungeonCraft's lazy Susan set-up is an abstract thing, he does not use the grid. That makes it a lot less terrible.

[violence in the media]

don't put down walls because they get in the way...

...of people being able to see things on the table. Have I just watched too many of these goddamn videos to get what these people are talking about without spelling it out?

HeroQuest doesn't use walls at all, and yet everyone seems to be able to discern where they are supposed to be. Even without explicit say so from Zargon.

[Grek]

The usual way to 'put down walls' is to draw a line on whiteboard/giant piece of paper that you're playing on, surely? If he's just saying 'don't bother with miniatures for fucking walls, why would you even want those, they're such a hassle' then I am in agreement, but I didn't use them in the first place so that wasn't really helpful.

[JigokuBosatsu]

What can I say, I love unintentional pleonasty.

[infected slut princess]

On the topic of what they are calling verisimilitude: the great unspoken assumption of RPGing is that the DM will not try to kill your characters.

The DM roleplays all the NPCs and monsters in the game, and some of those NPCs and monsters will want to try to kill your characters.

[Whipstitch]

The DM roleplays all the NPCs and monsters in the game, and some of those NPCs and monsters will want to try to kill your characters.

True, but even in the bad old days Gary & Dave explicitly referred to the DM's role as that of "campaign referee" and NPCs aren't supposed to be metagaming based on DM knowledge and goals. Even early on it was broadly understood that people appreciate it when bears act like bears and not heatseeking missiles that unerringly launch themselves at whichever party member has the lowest AC. People make fun of classic Gygaxian Fuck You monsters because their very existence is metagaming writ large and these days that's considered bad form outside of a 3 day weekend at Gen Con.

[Unity]

Why would you ever use any of these rules? TTRPG design hasn't progressed that quickly, but it sure as hell is better than 40 years ago.