Level Up (A5E) You don't hate exploration, you hate survival

[Xethreau]

the problem with milestones is the design of the game and it's increasing difficulty for the DM to juggle things at High level is that Milestones enable lazy DM's who want to play something epic like save the world but don't want to deal with High level to just ignore leveling. And even when the DM is being fair about the Milestones it can sometimes appear to be unfair. That's why people don't like Milestones it just appears unfair from the surface and most DM's don't put effort into making sure everyone knows that it is being done fairly. And far too many just don't use it fairly and use it as a way to avoid high level without restarting thier game, or getting table buy in to quit leveling.

Ironically, although XP systems create a facade of fairness, 5e XP (and that of systems which inherit it like A5e) doesn't offer much of a compelling standard against which to measure milestones. That is to say, even the crapiest and most unfair milestone leveling standards are likely more rigorous of expectations than standard 5e XP leveling.

Per my previous analysis, high level play has a surprisingly low number of encounters per level. We would expect that each level would require the party to expend their daily resources several times over to level up; we call the expendeture of all one's daily resources an "adventuring day." For high-powered characters with a lot of resources, that's a lot of long adventuring days---a lot of encounters! However, using A5e's Encounter Points Per Day system, we can see that at high level you don't need to spend all your daily resources in order to reach the next level: starting at 11th level, most characters can reach the next level even before completing one full adventuring day! By that point you've moved right past MCU flavor and stright into Gurren Lagann.

IMO that is not expected or desired. In that case, it would seem to me that "just do whatever" would be far better advice than following the RAW.

(And in case anybody was wondering, this is the reason why I say resource management doesn't matter in 5e. There is rarely a reason past 3rd level not to go full blast; at 11th level it is practically law. But maybe people like it that way.)

 

[Morrus]

The OP has a history of posting onetruewayism and getting really aggressive with anybody who dares to disagree. Does it on Facebook and Discord too. Friends of the site owner so never gets moderated for it.

Also considers us ‘unhinged’ because we didn’t agree.

View attachment 348139

You know the rules. Address the argument, not the person. Drop this line of conversation, please.

 

[Xethreau]

The problem with survival is that you're not expending effort to succeed, you're expending effort to not fail. It's just not an exciting feeling. It's also very binary: you have food or you don't, you have water or you don't. There's no strategy or interesting decision to make, you don't even have any incentive to pick different types of food since anything will do. 'Food' might as well be a non-descript mush you can put in ration sized jar.

And exhaustion as it exist is too debilitating to be something you could decide to accept for the sake of expediency, it just lacks granularity.

And survival is already something we do everyday, no matter how fancy our dwellings and food get, it lacks a certain allure.

When presented in this way, I would hate survival games too. Most survival video games, for example, are not my bag.

A decent survival TTRPG would need to make resource management strategic and attrition engaging. It would also need to make the image of survival heroic and emotionally thrilling. 5e utterly fails at all this for the reasons you describe, and A5e does its best to address this at least a little (but the odds are already stacked).

[Edit] Come to think of it, it is almost as though a game that were genuinely good at the dungeon crawl would naturally lend itself to overalnd survival as well.

 

[Undrave]

An awful lot of people play survival video games, where food/water keep you from not dying. They seem to be having fun.

Your claims that it is exhausting and not fun, and that we're all trying avoid real life stuff and survival's too close to it, are personal and subjective. No more than that.

I think it works better in a video game than in D&D.

 

[lolsworth]

I think it works better in a video game than in D&D.

Really? How so?

Exploration works great in games, but survival? Most "survival" games to my knowledge are more about a crafting loop or surviving escalating combats.

What is a game which does survival well?
Ps I also love valheim, but wouldn't classify it as survival. Again, it's just a crafting loop

 

[Schmoe]

@PJ Coffey You definitely didn't convince me that I don't like survival. I think your article might have been a little more persuasive if you had spent time setting up a hypothetical reader who was struggling with certain aspects of the exploration pillar and then tied those aspects to the survival component specifically. But at the end of the day it's definitely subjective. Some of my players really love the planning and survival aspects, and I enjoy it too.

I think you did do a good job of talking about the exciting potential of exploration. In fact, I loved the suggestion to incorporate interludes with prompts for the players to relive something about their character's lives! I stole it for my games, and I think my players will really enjoy that. Thanks.

 

[lichmaster]

the problem with milestones is the design of the game and it's increasing difficulty for the DM to juggle things at High level is that Milestones enable lazy DM's who want to play something epic like save the world but don't want to deal with High level to just ignore leveling. And even when the DM is being fair about the Milestones it can sometimes appear to be unfair. That's why people don't like Milestones it just appears unfair from the surface and most DM's don't put effort into making sure everyone knows that it is being done fairly. And far too many just don't use it fairly and use it as a way to avoid high level without restarting thier game, or getting table buy in to quit leveling.

This seems more of a table- or people-you-play-with problem, more than about the solution itself. I used it in pretty much all of the campaigns I DM'd from 3rd edition onwards, from low to high levels, and it always worked.

I've been playing for a very long time with my closest friends, so there is trust (something you seem to say may be an issue)
I also played with other people I didn't know before, and in all cases where the interaction with people was good, we happened to play using milestones.

There's nothing unfair about milestones per se, but I guess some people want to see XP grow after killing each single kobold, and feel deprived of something if they don't get those XP.

 

[lichmaster]

Ironically, although XP systems create a facade of fairness, 5e XP (and that of systems which inherit it like A5e) doesn't offer much of a compelling standard against which to measure milestones. That is to say, even the crapiest and most unfair milestone leveling standards are likely more rigorous of expectations than standard 5e XP leveling.

Milestones aren't about "fairness", they are just a way to set the pace and progress of the PCs vs the rest of the story and world.
If "fairness" is a concern, I'd point out at how encounters are built waaay before lamenting that with milestones I'm not leveling up fast enough...

Per my previous analysis, high level play has a surprisingly low number of encounters per level. We would expect that each level would require the party to expend their daily resources several times over to level up; we call the expendeture of all one's daily resources an "adventuring day." For high-powered characters with a lot of resources, that's a lot of long adventuring days---a lot of encounters! However, using A5e's Encounter Points Per Day system, we can see that at high level you don't need to spend all your daily resources in order to reach the next level: starting at 11th level, most characters can reach the next level even before completing one full adventuring day! By that point you've moved right past MCU flavor and stright into Gurren Lagann.

I noticed this too. I honestly don't know what happened, but from the days of 3rd ed to today, it seems that the desire to design a consistent system with some actual maths is simply gone in favor of a more "broad strokes" approach (to put it very mildly).
I do prefer DMing 5e by far, but man the system is not consistent.
Especially on this topic, do you remember I drafted a document precisely about how to change the XP to next level so that one could set the number of encounters first, and from that derive the xp to next level? It seems I was tapping into something, then...
That is to say, it seems that the numbers for xp to next level, xp per monster/encounters and encounters per day were kind of tossed up because they seemed right, without realizing that they are actually badly inconsistent (at high levels).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it works better in a video game than in D&D.

In some ways, yes. I'd still rather have it in D&D than not.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This seems more of a table- or people-you-play-with problem, more than about the solution itself. I used it in pretty much all of the campaigns I DM'd from 3rd edition onwards, from low to high levels, and it always worked.

I've been playing for a very long time with my closest friends, so there is trust (something you seem to say may be an issue)
I also played with other people I didn't know before, and in all cases where the interaction with people was good, we happened to play using milestones.

There's nothing unfair about milestones per se, but I guess some people want to see XP grow after killing each single kobold, and feel deprived of something if they don't get those XP.

My issue with milestones is that you miss out on feeling a sense of accomplishment on a small scale, but only on a large one. Ultimately it really doesn't matter what you do; you can drift along at the back of the group and still level so long as the party crossed the DMs arbitrary line, which if it has any basis at all is solely narrative, ie, you level when it is appropriate to the story that you level. Not my preference.