Unspoken Rules in D&D 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by dungeon fog dungeon fog's web-based map making platform is perfect for any dungeon master looking to create their own custom maps using dungeon fog you can create gorgeous homebrew battle maps from multi-level dungeons to natural environments and much much more you can export high-res maps to print or use on a virtual tabletop or even send a fog of war version to a tv or projector a premium subscription includes over 3000 high-resolution map-making assets with dozens more added every month follow the links in the description below or visit dungeonfog.com to try it out for your next game and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm cali mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode now it's no small secret that when running dungeons and dragons or any other tabletop role-playing game there's a lot of important rules that are in the books itself but it's no small secret that for everything that is in these books there's a lot of things that the books don't explain and don't tell you how to do there are a lot of nuances to the game of dungeons and dragons that rely on assumptions made that lay outside of the rules presented in these books and although there are a lot of social contracts and social obligations that do fall into this category as well that's not what we're going to be discussing today instead we want to look at some of the mechanical features that are important to know that might not be represented properly within the pages of these books by understanding these unspoken rules of the game we can actually make the rules work a little bit better for us as both players and dungeon masters there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling so to start dungeons and dragons 5th edition is a game that is played from levels 1 to 20. now if you look at a lot of the modules presented the way that leveling works in dungeons and dragons and several other elements you might notice that there is actually a very defined sweet spot that a lot of the creators of dnd already know about but you might not and that sweet spot is between the levels of 5 and 10 where the real magic of dungeons and dragons happens even though dungeons and dragons stretches all the way from level 1 to 20 and many house rules and indeed rules supplements in prior editions have allowed player characters to achieve levels higher than level 20. in dungeons and dragons 5th edition quite specifically the game mechanics seem to work their best between levels 5 and 10. these are levels of the game where the expectations on what player characters can accomplish the types of monsters that they can face and indeed the just fantasy of the worlds of dungeons and dragons is best encapsulated in fact the game has probably been play tested more extensively between the levels of around level 4 to 11 than any other level you might notice when you're setting up to play dungeons and dragons that those first few levels most monsters actually pose a significant threat of death to low level characters and once your character reaches levels 17 18 19 20 you are basically punching gods in the face without sweating about it as soon as you hit level 5 you can feel the power of your character come online it's where you get your extra attacks or your special features that really define the classes of dungeons and dragons and between 5 and 10 is when you really get to explore what your character is made of a lot of fantasy fiction fits best within what happens in a d game between level 5 and 10. and a lot of the media that we tend to consume is inspiration for dungeons and dragons doesn't really line up with the kinds of capabilities or adventures that happen in higher level dungeons and dragons so it is important to note that the characters feel most grounded and like the expectations of the game are best delivered that's not to say that high-level dungeons and dragons is not possible to balance nor is it not fun it is awesome but you do have to kind of shift your expectations a little about what the game is going to be like at those higher levels of play we've seen a lot of data come out from websites like d d beyond that indicate that a lot of d d campaigns tend to peter out after that point and the fact that the official modules so rarely go beyond level 13 really is galvanizing i think a big part of our d community towards this sweet spot of d d and the higher levels feel a little bit under supported and neglected once you pass that level 10 mark you should expect to put a little more effort into trying to challenge those players and also expect them to possibly destroying combat encounters with their amazing super heroic abilities one of the other unspoken design conceits of dungeons and dragons fifth edition that actually sets it quite wildly apart from previous editions particularly third edition dungeons and dragons is that in dmv 5e player characters npcs and monsters don't play by the same rules basically the rules for creating a non-player character and when a dungeon master makes an npc you don't have to use the player character rules for building npcs in fact all of the templated npcs in the monster manual and volo's guide to monsters were not built necessarily by using the same rules as player characters they were built by using the monster design rules which work very differently one thing that's important to note when you're looking at creating an npc or monster versus a player character is that the guidelines put in place in fifth edition dungeons and dragons four player characters are there to keep them grounded in a form of progression that makes sense as they move through an adventure or campaign setting whereas your monsters can actually manipulate and change these rules in ways that would be too powerful for a player character to wield but might make sense as a tool for world building storytelling and narrative explanation within your game now there is something to be said for the vera similitude that is gained by having npcs monsters and players kinda sorta use the same rules after all they draw from the same spell lists and use the same spells and everyone has ac and hit points the capabilities of npcs can often be individually much higher than the capabilities of a player even though they're facing each other here's a really great example of this the challenge rating 12 archmage in the monster manual is capable of casting 8th and 9th level spells but they're challenge rating 12 and are an appropriate challenge for player characters that are level 12 and only have access to level 6 spells the npc gladiator is roughly the equivalent of a 18th level fighter but is a challenge rating 5 npc adversary in volo's guide to monsters there is a challenge rating 7 npc warlock who can cast finger of death and feeble mind so it's actually quite appropriate and fine for npcs of pretty low challenge rating to have really powerful spells and abilities the player characters won't be able to access tell a much higher level another great example of this is an npc necromancer who can raise an entire army of undead that's an ability that's totally fine for a villain to have but might not necessarily be appropriate for a player to have at least as a willingness ability maybe that's a big power that they have to spend a lot of resources and time to gain on their own now when we are talking specifically about the spells of dungeons and dragons you should keep in mind that not all spells are created equal when we look at the archmage which is challenge rating 12 and can cast ninth level spells they have time stop as their big spell if you gave them meteor swarm instead that is a whole different story because you could party wipe a group of level 12 characters with that so it is important to note the power of the spells that you are giving your npcs because that can drastically change their power level as well and some spells work really really well and are really fun for a dm to use against the party that might actually be boring for the party to use and also the party can use some really powerful spells to totally undo a combat encounter that you might want to be careful giving to your npcs and monsters on the flip side there's certain rules and constraints for spells that make a lot of sense for player characters but you can actually unleash this for npcs for example there's been several adventures created over the history of dungeons and dragons that featured npc wizards who had multiple clones or multiple simulacrums these are things that would probably not be appropriate for the player characters to ever have but are totally fine if the npcs can do these sorts of things because that is under the discretion and control of the dungeon master now of course this isn't an invitation for a dungeon master to go on a total power trip and make npcs that are wildly inappropriate and unfair for the player characters to face it still requires discretion and intelligence but it actually means that with discretion and intelligence the dungeon master can break the rules in very careful and intentional ways in order to design the adventure that they need now a lot of people hear things like this and they do get worried that perhaps this is going to shatter the reality of what dnd is presenting but the fact is that dnd is not a simulator dnd is an abstract exception-based rule system so we need to look kind of at what our discretion is as a dm and how we can implement the sort of abstract nature of the rules of dnd dungeons and dragons has a very pulpy cinematic feel to it and it does a pretty poor job especially 5th edition d d of being anything close to a reality simulator or capturing reality in any sort of perfect way it is abstract because it is meant to generate cool things and cool scenarios and create some more of an impression in your mind or an idea central to this is that dungeons and dragons relies on a dungeon master it relies on a human being making good judgments and using their reason and their own sense of logic to be the arbiter of how the game world works it's these rule books don't produce something that can be easily translated into a video game style simulation that's why it's been so hard to have a very good dungeons and dragons video game that doesn't compromise on so many of the things that make dungeons and dragons magical the free-form and interpretive lens that you only gain by having a dungeon master so rather than feel like that is a constraint it's something that we actually have to lean in into it as well one of the things that we love about dungeons and dragons is the ability to do anything which is really what separates it from from video games in video games you're limited by where the designers put walls or what your dialogue options are but in the worlds of dungeons and dragons the dialogue options are endless the walls don't exist you can blow them up you can jump over them you can break them down and that is why we love dungeons and dragons the rules for dungeons and dragons often explain how things should work but they never say that things can't work and that's where you as a dungeon master need to step in and decide where the line is on what will and won't work within your worlds and that's where you become the most important asset that separates dungeons and dragons from just being a stack of rules into something much more magical at the same time because dungeons and dragons is an exception-based rule system and it is something that is abstract we also have to rely on that good judgment in logical ways the rules of dungeons and dragons don't say that a human player character can't have six arms and that they can't have two heads it's kind of assumed that you know that there's nowhere written that it says you can't have six arms they assume that you're going to use the rules in a slightly logical and well-balanced way and rely on the dungeon master to make the final call on what is and is not possible because the rules will always be an abstraction that can't totally capture the full range of things that might be possible this also works the other way as well where some of the rules will dictate the way certain things work that don't necessarily make sense logically for example if you have two ways to up your ac maybe you have natural armor but you're also wearing half plate you could make the argument that well just because you're putting on half plate doesn't mean that your skin is any thinner but we need to look at the rules-based system of dnd that let it be a game and make sure that we're falling in line with what is fair and what makes sense for the game itself and that's where you look at some of the rules and use those to dictate the reality in a rules-based system fundamentally the rules of dnd are built around a gigantic abstraction which is the hit point system which whether you want to call hit points meat points or stamina or anything else like that however you slice it it's an abstraction no human sized person could ever survive a direct hit from a giant wielding axe so when we resolve an attack of that fire giant attacking your fighter we know that even though you hit and took damage it obviously wasn't anything that could ever happen in real life because if a fire giant hit a real person in real life with an axe that person would be very very dead if you try to make the rules of dungeons and dragons feel super realistic they're gonna let you down while we're discussing what the rules do offer in these books there is actually one rule that we think is still unspoken because so many people miss this rule that is written on page 263 of the dungeon masters guide and this is the idea that well you have the option to home brew and house rule all you want there are certain elements that can be really really tricky to mess around with and that is the action economy concentration or magic item attunement and the dmg actually states that these are three things that you should try to avoid touching the dungeon masters guide says beware of adding anything to your game that allows a character to concentrate on more than one effect at a time use more than one reaction or bonus action per round or attune to more than three magic items at a time rules and game elements that override the rules for concentration reactions bonus actions and actions and magic item attunement can seriously unbalance or overcomplicate your game the irony of all this is that the rules of dungeons and dragons fifth edition already have exceptions to this fighters have action surge there's time stop and the haste spell if you cast bestow curse or major image at a higher level those spells no longer require concentration so you can have those spells in effect while concentrating on another spell and the artificer in the eberron books can attune to more than three magic items at a time but these are all exceptions to those rules that have been carefully considered not necessarily just lucy goosey applied so if you are setting out to make your own house rules or your home brewing some sort of campaign setting these are the three rules that we're not saying you can't or shouldn't touch but they should be the last options that you look at for actually changing and if you are thinking of changing them be very careful and aware that even the dungeon master's guide does state that this is dangerous waters and that there is a chance of directly imbalancing your game by messing around with these components one of the things that you'll notice about many things that do make exceptions to these rules such as potions of flight and invisibility and speed that give the effects of the fly invisibility and hate spells without concentration or things like the fighter's action surge or the time stop spell is that all of these are limited use abilities they require the characters to either put a spell into effect use a very limited spell slot or something that only gains back on a short rest and they're all very very specifically grounded in certain ways so when the rules make an exception they do so very carefully the concentration mechanics and the magic item attunement mechanics are two that are argued a lot for being too restricting to player characters and yes i can imagine as a player character how amazing it would be to concentrate on two spells but you need to take into account the options that that actually presents you if you were able to do that consistently and how unbalanced the game could become as a player character i would love to be able to fly while invisible casting wall of force and cloud kill all at the same time it sounds like the most badass magic user i could ever imagine but the fact is that that's going to make it really really hard for the dm to actually challenge me and that is what we need to take into account is that these rules are in place to create a balance in the game that allows the dungeon master to present reasonable threats to the party without them being able to break the game by having 18 magic items we're not linked from the legend of zelda where we can just pull out 50 magic items from our pocket changing them on a whim in the middle of combat it's just unreasonable to imagine doing that in the worlds of dnd now of course when we mention this topic of balance which comes up a lot of times i think the most important element of balance that people forget about is that it's not about the player characters facing balanced combat encounters it's not about even the player characters having a fair balance between what they're capable of this is not a player versus player thing one of the biggest and most disruptive problems in game balance in dungeons and dragons as a whole is how much work gets thrown on the dungeon master to solve the problems of the rules and when dungeons and dragons gets unbalanced it creates a bunch of problems that the dungeon master has to fix and solve in order to make their game consistent and playable and something that they can manage at the table that's the risk of an unbalanced game not any sort of inequity between the player characters or the fact that they might face combat encounters that are too easy or too difficult i don't know the dungeon master is the weakest link in this whole thing and a stressed out overworked burned out dungeon master is the last thing that anyone wants to have because without a dm you don't have a game and if a dm is tearing their hair out over coming up with an adventure and balancing encounters then that's when the game is having a problem and while we discuss stressed out dungeon masters one thing that can stress out a dungeon master more than anything else is when they are trying to create their own campaign and the idea that they're going for is something that does not lend itself to the high fantasy elements of dungeons and dragons there are a lot of people out there who are very interested in playing different types of settings within the worlds of dungeons and dragons and because we all love and know dungeon dragons a lot of dms set out with this idea of let's make a really grounded and gritty d d setting or let's make a setting that's cyberpunk or maybe one that is a horror story murder mystery or possibly something that's a low magic setting where everybody just plays a regular person or a very high magic setting where you are the avengers or superheroes or things of that nature but we need to keep in mind what dungeons and dragons is at its core and that although it can lean in certain directions if you are trying to create a setting that doesn't fit the scenarios that dungeons and dragons excels at you might want to look elsewhere dungeons and dragons fundamentally as part of its core dna is a game about high fantasy heroes in pulp action sort of scenarios diving into dangerous and exotic environments where they battle horrific monsters and take their stuff now within that model there's a lot of room for things like political intrigue building strongholds going to war and doing interesting role playing and even different settings ones that modify the amount of magic in the world everything from dark sun to eberron and even convincing applications of worlds like middle earth and westeros but there is a breaking point where the rules of dungeons and dragons just won't capture the idea that you as a dungeon master want to achieve and some dungeon masters immediately set out to make a ton of house rules to make the square peg that is dungeons and dragons fit into a triangular hole i was hesitant to branch out to any other system because i had spent a long time learning and researching and understanding dnd and i said to myself well i'm comfortable with this i'm comfortable with dnd and i don't really feel confident in branching out to another gaming system and i thought it would be a neat idea to write a halloween one shot that was a bunch of teens that go to a cabin in the woods and get assaulted by a murderous monster that they then have to escape from and kill in the end it sounded like a really cool idea and i started writing out all of these rules and everybody was going to play a human i changed the classes a little bit so that they didn't seem as medieval fantasy and were more real-world i tried to implement rules uh using the systems for firearms or other elements i tried to balance it out so that the monster was something that would threaten them but that they couldn't kill immediately and after months of trying this out i heard about monster of the week and somebody got me the book and i read through it and said oh yeah this is a hundred percent what i was going for why did i struggle so hard to try to make d and d this thing that it just wasn't able to fit into i have done this a number of times with trying to come up with a new way to use dnd to try something a little different when somebody has already done that work for me and i think the other major element here is after playing several rounds of monster of the week i actually picked up elements lessons and skills from playing that game that i was able to bring back to d d and it improved certain elements of the game for me even more so so i think by branching out don't be afraid to look at other systems don't be afraid to try things and it's actually going to make you better as a dungeon master when you come back to dnd and it might give you a nice vacation to try something that you maybe were interested in but had never considered branching out to a new rule set dungeons and dragons excels at certain things and it has a lot of flexibility to it but blades in the dark does fantasy heists better if you're trying to capture the true style of a horror author like hp lovecraft well call of cthulhu was built from the ground up to deliver on that sort of thing if you want to set your game in the future with science fiction technology well there's a ton of different versions of all the various warhammer 40 000 role-playing games and other excellent games like cyberpunk and much more that have been well built and well constructed to handle these sorts of things so it does behoove you to look at these other systems and i think kelly is completely right in that sometimes playing a different rpg that isn't d gives you a fresh idea of what the mechanics of dnd do really really well and give you things that you can draw on when you are running games of dungeons and dragons too sometimes the best advice about running dungeons and dragons is actually found in books that aren't about dungeons and dragons completely i learned so much from reading the cipher system rule books or from reading the power by the apocalypse various rule books so it's really really interesting to look at outside the box of dungeons and dragons and see other ways that you can broaden your horizons in that way and i found a newfound respect and adoration for that fantasy game that is about pulpy heroes fighting horrible monsters i leaned into that really really heavily and my games have been better for it so looking back at all the things we talked about today we hope that you found this video interesting i'm not gonna lie monty and i actually spent a lot of time trying to decide if this was a series of separate videos because they were all points that we felt were interesting to talk about but we didn't really know how they fit in the goal here is that we're not saying that you need to abide by the rules that we just mentioned as a matter of fact the major point is that these are just ideas and concepts to help you broaden your horizons on what is in the rule books of dungeons and dragons dungeons and dragons is obviously one of our favorite things to do it's our favorite game in the whole world and we love playing it and along the way we hope that we've learned a few things that can benefit anybody who's coming into this game and maybe hasn't thought of these things or maybe hasn't experienced things the same way we have so we hope that this video helps you out with thinking outside of the box and taking these things into mind when you're setting forth on your dnd adventures in your own campaign setting or in one of the pre-written modules and just keep in mind to have fun the way that works the best for you and to use your best discretion and intelligence as a dungeon master to make the game amazing for you and your players and have so much fun playing d these are just a few of those things that we felt the rules just don't communicate very clearly of course there's a ton of stuff as well about running session zero and the social contracts and how to manage the social dynamic of a role-playing game group and we've talked about that a lot in our other videos on session zero and principles for players so if you're interested in the social dynamics and the social rules that surround dungeons and dragons check those videos out as well they're filled with a lot of useful advice as well so this has been a look at the unspoken rules in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about any unspoken rules that you live by at your table in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the generosity and incredible help of our patreon supporters many of whom helped us in our monthly writer's room chat on our patreon only discord to actually put this episode together so a big thank you to all the patrons who joined us in the writers room last month to help generate ideas for this episode if you enjoy the work that we create here on youtube and want to get more involved with what we do on the channel please consider checking us out on patreon by following the links in the description below don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6 p.m eastern at twitch.tv dungeon underscore dudes you can find all the previous episodes of that campaign right up over here and we've got plenty more tips and tricks for dungeon masters running games with dmd5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 314,263

Rating: 4.9277864 out of 5

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: WgNF8M-XQW8

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020