Thursday, July 26, 2018

This post is probably not useful

Just as the title says; this post is going to be a lot of rambling and will probably help no one. But that's okay because I'm here to rant about some shit that's in my brain, and if it happens to ever be useful to someone that's great.

5E is a combat rules system masquerading as a roleplaying system.  The main purpose of mechanics in roleplaying systems that I run is to inform the storytelling and to add an element of risk/reward to the interactions. The problem, of course, is that in order for that to be true or for such mechanics to be useful the DM must have a certain amount of foundational knowledge about gameplay etc. That makes it hard to market a product based on this assumption and so instead the rules are designed for simplest possible accessibility and there is nothing wrong with that. At the end of the day though, mechanics inform the gameplay experience for players and by designing more combat mechanics you inform the players that this game is about combat. Today I'm picking on Monks as an example of a few overarching 5E design critiques and then maybe somewhere in there I can produce useful ideas.


I Got Beef With Monks - 

So this isn't a fair title, monks themselves have done nothing to me or my family. (Unlike warlocks, who know EXACTLY what they've done!) I mean I do think they're a bit over tuned that's not really important here. I'm just using Monks as a punching bag because I was thinking about design and monks and what monks could be, but this same thing stands true for basically all classes.

You ever notice how much of a monks kit is combat oriented? I could replace "monk kit" with 5E and still feel comfortable making that accusation, but again, we're gang beating monks today. Monks have a variety of moves and styles and the like, but all of their abilities are essentially geared towards combat, (The open palm is an interesting exception) and almost universally these are boxed in by very specific rules. And those rules get in the way of the Cinematic Bullshit that I want to see out of my monk players.

Jackie Chan doing Cinematic Monk Bullshit

So, remember earlier I said this would be a discussion about how mechanics inform gameplay right? So what kind of gameplay do we want from monks and how can we inform the player what the monk class means in terms of gameplay through mechanics which encourage the type of play we want? (The idea of class decisions informing DMs about the type of gameplay a player wants is a whole other discussion, but for now, let's just assume that you know about that.) 

What 



I mean what the actual fuck is happening here? 
Answer: Cinematic Monk Bullshit

Okay okay, at this point you're really irritated and you want me to just make my point and shut up already so here it is. Monks should be able to use their Ki points to just will things into existence. Or, more accurately the Monks should be able to will thematic (shadow monks have different abilities than open palm monks have different abilities than a kensei) bullshit into existence. 

You're fighting an Ogre, it misses you with an attack and you go "I use a ki point to slip inside his attack and try to land a blow to make him drop the club" and yeah dude, fuckin roll an attack and make that dude drop his club.

Your party is facing an adult red dragon and you know it's going poorly. You're front lining but you know you're hit dice aren't exactly huge so you'll need to find ways to introduce some Cinematic Bullshit to save yourself. The dragon lands a bite but only barely, you burn a few Ki points to boost your AC by doing the classic "grab the teeth" cinematic bullshit move. This creates an absurd tug of war between you and the dragon that can reduce it's DPS significantly or be rendered useless after around, either way, it's cinematic and simple. 

So how do you write rules for this? To be honest, I don't think you write the rules for this, I think you just put a big label of "Cinematic Cutscene Fights" and explain to your players what monks look like in your world. (Jackie Chan is a level 20 monk in my example characters list)  I love the cinematic bullshit, and I love the idea of using Ki as a resource that can be spent to do various cinematic bullshits. 









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