I try not to write negative pieces in this space. There is already so much negativity on the Internet that i don't really like to add to it, and there is also so much positive stuff that I prefer to focus on it those things. But there is a difference between a negative reaction that is merely negative, and a negative reaction that provides a vehicle for refining one's own positive position on something. It's not just negativity for the sake of negativity, but negativity toward something.
It is in the later category that I place Episode 17 of the "Reading D&D Aloud" Podcast, released on July 14th of this year. The podcast is co-hosted by Ben Riggs, author of Slaying the Dragon, a history of late-stage TSR, and Scott Bruner, an academic studying ttrpgs. For what it is worth, I really enjoyed Slaying the Dragon and generally liked Riggs's previous podcast Plot Points, though I thought his rending of garments over the end of 5e's dominance over the hobby a few months back was silly and wrong-headed. This podcast, though, was bad. Maybe the wildest part was Bruner stating that 5e is "perfectly balanced," which is an absolutely buck-wild statement--5e has virtues, but its "balance" is not remotely one of them.
But mostly it was bad in the now predictable way in the ttrpg space--it was over a half-hour of nostalgia-wank for older versions of D&D. In listening to this, I came to the realization that I am a thorough-going ttrpg modernist. I've been playing these games since 1989, but I hold basically no nostalgia for any of the old games as games (separate and apart from the experiences of playing those games). Modern games are better games, in basically every dimension, so much so that I truly don't understand the appeal of the OSR and OSR-adjacent games that insist on using those old mechanics and systems. Absolutely anything that you might want to do, including all of the things that are seen as characteristic of those older games, can be done, and better, with newer (better) systems. Moreover, much of the argument and rhetoric on the other side is really about a combination of straw men of various kinds and bad faith posturing, trying to pass off nostalgia as Boomer-esque "the Kids These Days" complaints.
The specific example that shows this off from the podcast was an extended discussion of the purported dichotomy between "combat as war" and "combat as sport." Combat as war, which is said to characterize older versions of D&D, was far more serious because it was much more challenging, unpredictable, and with higher lethality, which required out-of-the-box thinking and problem solving. Modern combat as sport, by contrast, is consequence-free and non-substantial because the lethality is reduced. As I previewed, I think this is a completely false dichotomy. More specifically, I think combat as war is not a real thing. The people who say they are doing "combat as war" are either (1) playing a sport with different rules; or (2) playing a bad sport; or (3) both.
Since we are talking about "combat as sport," let's talk about sports, specifically baseball. Ted Williams, arguably the greatest hitter in history, famously said that "hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports." To that end, Williams had one full season, 1941, in which he had a batting average over .400 (technically his season average in '52 and '53 was over .400, but he only played a couple of games those seasons, on account of the fact that he was doing his other job--being a fighter pilot and fighting in the Korean War). Batting average is a bit of a complicated metric, but if you want to simplify it down, this more or less means there was only one season in which the greatest hitter in history failed to do the thing he was trying to do fewer than 6 times out of 10. And the scope of this achievement is demonstrated by the fact that no one in the major leagues has hit over .400 since Williams in 1941 (Tony Gwynn hit .393 in 1994; George Brett hit .389 in 1980). Coming down from the truly exceptional results to more normal ones, failing only 7 times out of 10 in a given season--hitting .300--is a standard benchmark for being a really skilled and productive hitter. Baseball is a game in which the rules and structures of play are stacked in favor of the pitcher and against the hitter to a very significant degree.
By contrast, if you turn to football (American), the league leader in completion percentage for quarterbacks over a season in the NFL hovers around 70%. On the other end of the spectrum, and at the risk of kicking someone who is down, Bryce Young--the 1st Overall draft pick in 2023--had a completion percentage of 59.8%, a number low enough to raise questions about his viability as a starting NFL quarterback. Ted Williams fails 6 out of 10 times and he is the GOAT; Bryce Young succeeds 6 out out 10 times and he might be a bust.
If you talk to people who are really into either baseball or football, you will get opinions about the tuning of batting versus pitching and the passing game versus pass defense. But in a big picture sense, baseball is built around the idea that hitting is really hard and mostly unsuccessful, while football is tuned around the idea that passing is usually going to work. If you changed the difficulty scale of either element, you would radically change the play experience. In the baseball example, if you made hitting much easier, baseball scores would be in the hundreds and games would take days--and we know this because cricket batting is much easier, and scores are in the hundreds and matches take multiple days.
The point is that difficulty is not good or bad; difficulty is a game play element that needs to be integrated into and coordinated with the goals of the game as a whole. Turning back to ttrpgs, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with making combats very difficult. If the goal of the exercise is to stack the deck against the players and require them to use tricks or out of the box thinking in order not to have PCs die like flies, then that can and should be built into the structures of the game. Pathfinder 2e, for example, is known for its challenging combats that require players to exercise tactical skills. But that level of challenge is always within the context of the game as it is designed. Hard fights with high danger that require outside the box thinking are still a sport; they are just hitting a baseball as opposed to throwing a football. They are not "war," they are just tuned differently.
Because the real problem with all of this "combat as war" talk is that it is immediately followed (as it was in the podcast) with the idea that "combat as sport is for entitled soyboy players these days who can't handle losing, whereas the Real Men of the past embraced combat as war." And that's exactly the same as saying that quarterbacks are soy because they succeed most of the time, while baseball hitters are tough and macho because they mostly fail. That's nonsensical in the sports context and equally dumb in the ttrpg context. Difficulty is a motivated game design choice to create a particular sort of play experience. It has nothing to do with how macho you are.
Or, at least, it should be a motivated game design choice. The other problem with this silly rhetoric about how macho the old school games are is that it is often deployed to cover up or excuse bad game mechanics and bad design. And nowhere is this more true than when talking about 5e and its CR system. First off, it has become fashionable in these sorts of discussions (as Bruner did on the podcast) to decry the very idea of CR or any similar system as a new imposition of soy notions of a "balanced encounter" onto the purity of the D&D experience. Nonsense. Going all the way back to OD&D, monsters were organized by Hit Dice into a hierarchical power system, which was tied to the idea of "dungeon level" and a similar progressive power increase. The fact that Hit Dice is not a very good encounter balancing system doesn't change the fact that it was an encounter balancing system.
Like Hit Dice, the purpose of systems like CR is to give the DM the ability to assess the difficulty of an encounter when deployed against a party of PCs of a particular level. These systems are good or bad insofar as this communication of information is accurate. What the DM does with this information is always a separate question. If I want to throw a really hard combat challenge at the players, I am free to do that in OD&D or 5e or Pathfinder 2e or 13th Age (or 4e). The difference is that in Pathfinder 2e and 13th Age and 4e--games with good encounter balancing structures--I as the DM am much more likely to know exactly how hard the fight is going to be, and in fact be sure the it will indeed be a very hard fight in play. Whereas with 5e or OD&D--games with bad encounter balancing structures--I am guessing in both cases. If you as the DM for whatever set of reasons don't want to know how tough a particular fight is going to be, then you are free to ignore this information. But there is no utility at all to having bad mechanics in this space, which is what 5e and older editions of D&D have. And it certainly isn't a virtue.
But it is not just the CR system that gets covered up by this weird machismo. At some point during the podcast, there was a discussion of the MCDM RPG, and the fact that PCs do some damage on every attack. This was, again, portrayed as giving everyone a participation trophy and not being sufficiently manly. That completely misses the point of what MCDM RPG is trying to do. MCDM RPG, like several recent games that use 5e as both a jumping off point and a set of problems to fix, recognizes that a turn where you make your attack, miss, and thus do nothing (which happens a lot in D&D) is a bad play experience. It's not that players have some sort of ontological entitlement to making the HP number of the monster go down, it's that in a game where the only real result of combat is to make the numbers go down, not doing that means you have effectively done nothing. "Lose a turn" is always the least enjoyable possible game mechanic because you basically don't get to play, and the player is here to play the game. Now, there are a variety of different solutions to this problem. One is to make failure interesting, with a diverse set of narrative consequences--Daggerheart, drawing on the fiction-forward tradition, goes in that direction. One is the MCDM RPG approach. But framing objections to missing in combat as players being soft covers over and excuses the very real design problem (especially when you pair it with the cyclic initiative model of D&D, so the player might not get to do anything for a while) within D&D and derived games.
Or consider another rant in the podcast about how 5e conditions are weak because they don't embody save or die effects. Unless you are playing a DCC/Shadowdark funnel where each player is running multiple characters, character death means that the player doesn't get to play anymore. And, again, the player showed up at the table to play D&D, and so you are taking that out of their hands. It's one thing if a character dies as a result of some sort of satisfying story element or lengthy, dramatic fight. But having your character get bitten by a giant spider and failing a saving throw during encounter #1 and thus having to sit out the rest of the session is a bad play experience. Losing weeks or months of character progression via old-school energy drain is a bad play experience. Getting rid of these sorts of things made the game better. And this goes both ways, as well--for every save or die effect that could be directed at the player, there was a similar effect that could be pointed at the DM's monsters. And whether you like 5e's concept of Legendary Resistances or not (spoiler: I don't), it is at least a nod to the idea that the DM should be allowed to have fun letting his or her Big Bad Boss Monster run amuck for a bit.
The thing is, I do think the scales are tipped too far in favor of the players in the context of 5e, and everything we have seen about the 2024 books suggests that it is about to get worse. I don't think 5e provides a good play experience for the DM at all, and worse seems completely unconcerned with the DM's play experience (Sly Flourish a/k/a Mike Shea has a good discussion of this on a recent podcast of his). But the solution to this problem is not to throw super-challenging, un-calibrated, un-fun encounters at players and kill off their characters left and right, and then beat your chest about how macho the whole thing is. That's not fun for anyone except a DM who is a bit of a sadist. The fact that this sort of thing used to happen on the regular in D&D, whether the DM and players wanted it or not, was a design problem that later editions appropriately and at least somewhat successfully addressed. This is a move in the right direction.
At the end of the day, D&D is a game. Games are supported to be enjoyable and engaging for the people playing them. It is not an exercise in enduring tedium and bad outcomes in the name of "building character" or to advance some purported virtues. Challenge and creative problem solving and immersion (which is another can of worms--looking at you, Black Lodge Podcast) are instrumentals that can add to the fun, but they are not goals in and of themselves. So much of the discussion in the ttrpg space, especially coming out of this nostalgic well, seems willfully ignorant of the fact that these are games. Players and GMs are, in fact, entitled to an enjoyable play experience. The experience of playing this game has to be fun, and if it is not fun then you should be doing something else with your precious free time. Why play a game that isn't fun? Why are you here? Let's just acknowledge that, and not pretend this is about something else.
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