Microgaming in the Dead Zones: Odd Trends in 5e DMing - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

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#1 shintashi Jul 29, 2015 8:59:14	So a long time ago, at the same time nicknames for playing styles like twink, powergamer, and munckin were being codified in our little community of 200 or so gamers, a few of us got together and made up the term "microgamer" to describe a trend that started to surface when Call of Cthulhu/Rolemaster fans started to trickle over to D&D and brought with them their habits and notions about power parity in an adventure. You all probably have your own definitions for what these different terms mean, but here's what we had them defined as to help illustrate the differences. Twink was a shorthand for Social Twink, someone who uses rules exploits to optimize social interactions to manipulate the storyline NPCs and even other players to their advantage. Not particularly useful in a dungeon full of mindless zombies and Gygax death traps, the Twink for our town began to manifest in white wolf, particularly LARP settings. The munchkin was the type that rolled lots of dice, intentionally. Their character sheet optimized might look like a regular character sheet with an extra "zero" on the end of all relevant numbers. Why do 4d6 damage when 40d6 is better? Why have a stat of 5 when 50 sounds awesome? My favorite quote that I remember hearing while walking into one of these games was "17 successes to the head!" being yelled - in a game where each success added +1 damage and you only needed 7 to kill most people. What traits were left of powergaming once these other two terms were codified amounted to people who through rules exploitation and dramitas managed to manipulate the outcome of the campaign to suit their purposes, or otherwise produced a power curve that looked asymptopic, rising rapidly to infinity like the acceleration of a drag race car. The most interesting power gamers were the ones that could shame the munchkin stat/damage monsters but appeared innocuous otherwise - the Zatoichi effect. Well anyway, Microgamers are the opposite of these various power hungry players. Their drives tend to be all about reaching the lowest common denominator. If the lowest "high" attribute someone has is 15, and there are 3 or four other people with 18, 19, or 20, they demand everyone else lower their attributes to 15, preferably 14. They are the ones who explain Conan the Barbarian had 24 hit points and never made it past level 5. They will explain that spells above Cantrip are godlike and legendary and should be worshipped for what they are, divine reality warping power that virtually no one should ever have. A +1 sword is Apocalyptic in Nature, they can spend their own lives acquiring rooms full of dusty old books to acquire one, and though they know, tragically, that even upon acquiring the sword +1, it will enable their 10 strength Fighter to scratch the evil monster, before being horribly slaughtered by his wicked awesomeness, the sacrifice will not be in vain, for after going through the other 7 players, each who will dutifully pick up the fallen +1 sword and slash desperately at the monster (presummably a CR 3 or less) eventually, before the cleric, down to 1 hit point drops to one knee, the bloodied monster will grow bored and irritated, and wander back to its cave to sleep for a generation. Or something to that effect. The important thing is that the microgamer gets to produce another low powered character as quickly as possible. I'm probably not doing microgamers justice, and their psychology still escapes me, but I have seen plenty of it creep here and there. I was once handed a piece of paper at a Microgame and told "yeah, you can join our (I think it was pathfinder) and here's your stats available". I think the highest attribute was a 13 or 14. No, I'm not making this up. When looking over races, the Microgamer will have humans, human looking things, and things that look absolutely nothing like humans but statistically have no racial characteristics more powerful than an ordinary piece of clothing. Microgamers do not define heroes in the 1980s Action movie vein, rather, Heroes are tragic, beloved fools who go off to wars to die. The best heroes are the ones who die for what they believe in, but only if they die. If they actually succeed, they lose their hero status and become "broken" and too powerful, like, you know, a "powergaming munchkin twink". Microgames rarely see anything d20 go past level 5. To them, level 5 is the pinnacle of godlike achievement, and is a dish best served cold on a silver platter to the nearest abberration, dragon, or man eating giant. For microgamers, monsters are all Lovecraftian in power, and villain - hero relationships are the next episode of Saw. So this is what I noticed recently with 5th edition, that I actually didn't see at all in 4th edition, and seldom in 3rd edition. Except, in 5th edition, it appears to be like a virus, particularly with the magic items. I've never seen anything like this before. There are discussions of bounded accuracy, and then statements about how magic items are not assumed to be part of 5th edition. Now, you have to understand, when I got into D&D back in the day, I knew guys who had spread sheets to keep track of magic items. People would have castles with rooms dedicated to their conquests. There's a guy down the road who has a 20+ year old campaign where a kingdom actually has a factory producing healing potions. I think what happened with magic is people moved into one of two camps. On the one side, you have Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie, Disney's Aladdin, Gummy Bears, Xena Warrior Princess, Charmed, and Harry Potter. On the other you have Conan the Barbarian, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Vikings. Everybody has their own views on what is correct. But what can be said, of the middle path, is that a Magic Item factory voiced by the late Robin Williams is probably too lose, and one Valerian Steel weapon per campaign against the Armies of Ice Zombies is probably too tight. What bothers me, is that there are a lot of people, new to D&D, being "informed" that +1 weapons are extremely rare, priceless, and totally out of character with the 5th edition system. That seems to be disengenuous, and while I understand the Wizards of the Coast people don't want to upset any of their player base, I think when they choose Forgotten Realms as their core setting, they were making a silent statement that it was intended to be a high magic setting, and "rare" magic items and low level characters with low stats would be exceptions to the norm, rather than the norm. All I had to do to prove my point was walk into the fantasy novel section of the local book store, and see a trilogy of Elminsters on one side of the shelf, and a couple of cover paintings of Drizzt on the other.
#2 Tempest_Stormwind Jul 29, 2015 11:44:49	You seem to use "microgamer" in two contexts - those who advocate for low power in their games, and those who argue against magic items. The specific argument you have against the first kind goes away if you use point-buy (yet again, rolling for scores creates far more problems than it solves); the interesting part is why it goes away (it's not what you think). Curiously, the reason it goes away is the same reason you'll find effective in challenging the second type of microgamer - and challenging yourself. (I'm also going to set aside your characterization of "twinks". I'm a long-time power-gamer, and the logic is never "why do 4d6 when 40d6 is better?" but rather "why spend the extra cost to get 40d6 if 4d6 is enough? And if it isn't enough, how much more do we need and how cheaply can we get it?". "17 successes to the head!" is viscerally satisfying, but it's overkill - and overkill is not optimizing. Context - in this case of cost and demand - is vital to the numbers side of the game. The kind of player you're talking about is not one who seeks power, but one who blindly seeks power - and this is no different from a person who plays "the hero", ignoring that everyone else at the table also wants to be a hero. These players aren't troublesome because they seek power - they're troublesome because they're immature. (I use 'munchkin' exclusively to refer to immature players.) Historically, they've been challenged by DMs seeking to beat that power-hunger out of them, when the DM instead should be encouraging them to be a better team player. But I digress.) Back in the 3e era, a wonderful article called Calibrating Your Expectations was written. I maintain it's the single most important article ever written for that edition of D&D. It's particularly interesting because it went "let's set aside our pre-existing expectations, and see what the game's engine itself tells us to expect". And, surprise surprise, it wound up with the best-of-the-best-of-the-best of real-world humanity, the multi-Olympic athletes and the Einstein-grade scientists... being around level 5. (The article also mentions that it was inspired by Ryan Dancey, who first proposed that 3e D&D had "tiers" of gameplay, with levels 1-5 being gritty, levels 6-10 being heroic, levels 11-15 being wuxia, and levels 16-20 being superheroic. There's a lot of bickering about the labels and decision points, but broadly speaking, no one disputes his basic premise.) I bring this up because what you describe is a similar problem - coming into the game with one set of assumptions (you seem to assert that what you call "microgaming" is wrong, and that magic swords aren't rare, and so on), and simply asserting those assumptions, rather than seeing what the system itself says (both explicitly through prose, and mechanically through rules). Microgamers, as you describe them, have the same problem. So why don't we look at the game itself and see what it has to say? In the case of ability scores, the microgamer you describe has his own notion of what scores are appropriate - "the highest attribute is either a 13 or a 14" and all that. You have your own notion, which is presumably higher (but not that much higher, since you similarly decry players who seek power). Meanwhile, the game itself uses a point-buy system that caps ability scores at 15 (pre-racial-modifier), and makes getting that 15 somewhat expensive. In fact, it strongly suggests an array of 15 / 14 / 13 / 12 / 10 / 8 to start (possibly adjusting things from there, using a universal framework). The game's sample characters (intended to introduce people to the game) all use this array, and characters based on this array are the benchmark against which NPCs and the entire challenge rating system were devised. That's pretty strong evidence against the microgamer's view of ability scores. You can similarly extend this to see what monsters the game's XP system determines are "easy" vs those that are "deadly" and see how the microgamer's love for Lovecraftian superhorrors stacks up - the game makes suggestions, based on adventuring day experience, of how difficult the fights the PCs should be seeing are, and Lovecraftian superhorrors are definitely out of the scope of what low-level heroes should be fighting, for instance. (Similar problems showed up in earlier games, too. For instance, I, personally, don't like playing too much higher than levels 12-15 or so in 3.X, because your characters get too powerful for the kinds of challenges I like to face. This gave birth to the notion of E6, for instance - a gameplay variant where levels stopped progressing at 6th, and a variation of the Epic rules kicked in there instead. Basically, this "locked" the game to the lower-end of what Ryan Dancy identified as "heroic fantasy" - if you like heroic fantasy, you can play an extended game of it using E6 without ever worrying about growing "too" powerful and being forced to retire. In 5e, the equivalent would likely stop at one of the appropriate tier transition points, recognizing that they like viewing, say, trolls as an Oh Crap monster (as a level 3 character might) instead of as a speed bump (as a level 12 character might). This is a problem in recognizing that your expectation maps on to a gameplay tier, not so much a fault of the system at tiers other than that.) That's not to say the microgamer's vision is wrong - just that he prefers a weaker, lower-level character than the game itself seems to provide. THAT is a difference in playstyle preference, and one the gamemaster can accommodate - but it's not the default vision of 5e. Similarly, the vision of a single magic sword being significant is not based on some adherence to microgaming - the DMG says so quite explicitly, and the developers are on record speaking at length about how the game works without access to magic items. The reason you didn't see this in 3.X or 4th is because those systems were not designed the same way. PCs of level X had Y gp worth of magic items included in the assumptions of what they could do, and magic items were balanced to a particular power level based on that price. Take away their toys, and several characters simply couldn't scratch the foes the game system said they were fighting. Give out too many toys, and lower-level characters crush encounters that they should have run from. This led to a rigid set of "wealth by level" rules for both editions, where your gold budget for magical equipment was every bit as important as your experience point total. Combined with a magic item economy where they were freely purchaseable (and customizable, in some cases), and you wound up with every single new sourcebook that had a magic item in it supplying something that players viewed as an option they could freely take (similar to a feat), instead of as a reward the DM might hand out or an objective to quest toward. (There were even tiny aspects of this in previous editions, actually. Viewed this way, magic swords are seen in the same light as class features - something you, and the game, assume you'll be getting as part of your progression. The paladin - as early as the first AD&D handbook in 1978 - had abilities listed in it that kicked in if you had a Holy Sword (the predecessor of the modern Holy Avenger). This stoked desire for such a sword in paladin players, since you couldn't use one of your special powers without one. When 3e came along, it kept that ability... but it moved it into the text of the sword itself, which meant players (at least those who didn't read the DMG) didn't know how special that sword was to their class. 5e does something similar, by requiring attunement by a paladin.) Mathematically, you can look at the two places the game tells you how many magic items a party should find - the rules for creating a character at higher level, and the expected outcomes for treasure hoards (which includes the DMG's note that "typical" games roll a certain number of times on each hoard table). The latter is more generous than the former, but also only works if you actually play through all of those levels. Even then, though, you can't say these are exact - they make assumptions of typicality, which is explicit in the case of the start-at-higher-level bit (Low-Magic vs High-Magic games) but also implicit in the hoard tables ("My game isn't "typical"; it takes place in a world closer to Westeros than Faerun.") It seems that the game, as presented, assumes that magic items are found with reasonable frequency within treasure hoards, which are used to construct both carefully-guarded treasure rooms in dungeons and the rewards that wealthy patrons give to you for completing service. Both of these involve earning items chosen by the DM, rather than purchasing them on the open market. (In fact, the only magic item referenced as buyable anywhere in the core rules is the potion of healing, and the rules for creating these items by PCs suggest that NPCs can't turn a profit doing so by playing by the rules. Therefore, either they create them by decree somewhere (a crown enterprise need not turn a profit, or would earn a profit by subsidy, depending on the economy of the nation in question), or the NPCs have a shortcut or discount of some form or another (be it economy of scale or a magical tool that lets them produce it cheaper - say, a fountain that produces a liquid that's especially susceptible to storing magic, and is fiercely guarded as a national treasure). In this case, it actually seems like both of you are right, though I would accuse your (possibly hyperbolic) presentation of a microgamer of exaggerating. While +1 swords aren't "rare" or "out of character" with the setting, neither are they especially commonplace nor required to fight your foes. (I haven't run the numbers on this yet, but I strongly suspect the bigger impact of having one of those isn't the +1 - it's the ability to break through creatures' resistances to nonmagical weapons. You'll also notice that the combat-heavy classes who don't have the option of just using magic swords - Moon druids and unarmed monks - both get the ability to break through that resistance at level 6 or so, which is also around the same time the DMG's "start at higher level" rules would give other warriors an Uncommon permanent magic item, such as a +1 sword.) The actual numerical impact of the +1 is a completely separate issue (and this is where the math-heavy arguments about bounded accuracy show up, and I'd rather not dive down that particular rabbit-hole, so I'll just leave it there.) In short, the game itself is telling us about its own assumptions, if people would listen to it. There are aspects of it where the game shoots down the "microgamers" (just as readily as it shuts down the power-hungry strain of the munchkin). There are also aspects where it lends credence to at least part of the "microgamer" point of view, even though it points out that they're exaggerating. The questions of importance aren't who's right or wrong - it's 'will we listen to the game?' and "how do we need to properly adjust the game for our personal preferences?". PS: Magic item factories aren't all that uncommon if the setting assumes something like it. Guilds creating common magic items at scale is kind of a central notion of Eberron, for instance. Eberron similarly started with the assumptions the rules made - i.e. that according to the DMG, cities roughly have this population, and this proportion of the population is a low-level magic-user, and if you're buying a spell from them it costs this much gold.... - and examined the consequences of those assumptions in the rules. For instance, Continual Flame sheds light forever, and costs about 200gp. That's expensive for an individual - but very much within the tax budget of even small towns. With a slight bit of adjustment to fit the setting's particular aesthetic, the everbright lantern was born, and boom, we had street lights. (The result was not "let's find a magical way to do X", but rather, "magic does Z, so what would a society use Z for?".) The question, therefore, isn't why Eberron has street lights, but rather why other settings don't. Extended across the entire economy (in which high-level magic is rare, but low-level magic is quite common), you naturally find a niche for creating simple magic items at volume. (To prevent PCs from undermining the guilds, they have access to methods which produce these items cheaper because they're being built in numbers, by people who have magic of making in their blood, true. But that's just a fantasy-styled econonmy of scale at work - and a high-level PC (who is very rare in this setting) can still outdo it with powerful magic.) None of this is true if you're playing in a game where those assumptions are wrong. Dark Sun, for instance, lacks quite a lot of infrastructure, has to deal with an incredibly hostile climate, and has a culture of suspicion or hatred against magic (the cause of the aforementioned climate), and the ruling economy isn't free at all (in most cases, it's controlled by a tyrannical sorcerer-king). The assumptions about population size, magic availability, and costs given in the DMGs simply don't hold on Athas, so you wouldn't expect such a setting to produce magic item factories. It's all about context.
#3 shintashi Jul 29, 2015 23:24:11	I think the biggest problem with microgaming is the lack of awareness of the problem itself. If you begin treating trolls or dragons as old ones, and focus your theories of game play around despair and plots as a string of illustrations of why the efforts of heroes is hopeless, then you have converted what should otherwise be a relatively happy mountain dew drinking dorito eating magic missile in the darkness good time, into a theater of nihilistic tragedy. What impact does this actually have on the game, histrionic exagerrations asside? Well, I have seen more than one gaming group implode because of microgaming. I have seen microgaming take the mantle of rules lawyer, and that's a bit like an IRS agent showing up before you scratch your lottery tickets or read the dead uncle's will. Fun is like a nice icecream milkshake with one of those loopy straws, and then the microgamer just comes along with their giant fat bubble Straw and drain away all possibilities of happiness. I mean, the rules set is supposed to be presenting people with options to slay dragons. That dragon slaying notion is a metaphor used in the real world to describe overcoming any great obstacle or challenge. An executive might use it when acquiring a new elusive client for their corporation. Can you imagine the expression on an executive's face if his CEO said "no, you can't acquire Bro and Brothers Billion dollar contract, as it would be far too profitable and your comission, well it's just too much money for a mortal to acheive. The idea that you could buy your mansion and a G6 is completely ridiculous, as no human being should ever live long enough to see such things...in fact, I'm going to shut down the corporation right now and donate all our assets to charity, because we need to be more egalitarian. I think I'll have a lobotomy too, because my last IQ test put me at over 200, and that's completely ridiculous, since I'm not working at CERN. No CEO should have such a high intelligence". Strength scores in 5th edition say Push, Drag, or Lift. You can push, drag, or lift a weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity (or 30 times your Strength score). While pushing or dragging weight in excess o f your carrying capacity, your speed drops to 5 feet. Tiny Meeker bench pressed 1102 lbs in 2013 putting his strength at 36. Luis Cyr of Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Cyr is said to lift 500 lbs with one finger and 4337 lbs, putting his strength at 144. I only mention those quick examples because the notion that the best humanity has to offer, being "level 5" is kind of skewed. What level spell is the Manhattan project? That kind of thing. But a more optimistic way to look at humanity: Video of People Are Awesome 2015 - OFFICIAL
#4 AndyDay Jul 30, 2015 6:01:45	Love your post. It is thought provoking and interesting. I myself am a quasi micro gamer in the sense that you define it. I think. The diff with me being that I don't feel players should be stuck at low levels. Rather, the players should become powerful, and th world should respond accordingly. I draw a lot of inspiration from Exalted, but any superhero game gets to the same theme. It's not about acquiring power. It's about having power, and then deciding what to do with it. I find an oncongruence between the threats of a fantasy world like DnD and the way that world responds. If a lone Mage can blow down a castle that your family spent generations building... Nobody would build those kinds of castles. If casting Pass Without Trace would get a group of L33T soldiers through a picket line, then the way armies defend themselves would be entirely different. If a sorcerer can chuck a perfect, unblock able attack at a king, that king wouldn't have live audiences. If Druids could control weather there would never be drought and famin. I don't think the world would be 'medieval Europe with magic' it would be entirely different.
#5 AndyDay Jul 30, 2015 6:10:22	Love your post. It is thought provoking and interesting. I myself am a quasi micro gamer in the sense that you define it. I think. The diff with me being that I don't feel players should be stuck at low levels. Rather, the players should become powerful, and th world should respond accordingly. I draw a lot of inspiration from Exalted, but any superhero game gets to the same theme. It's not about acquiring power. It's about having power, and then deciding what to do with it. I find an oncongruence between the threats of a fantasy world like DnD and the way that world responds. If a lone Mage can blow down a castle that your family spent generations building... Nobody would build those kinds of castles. If casting Pass Without Trace would get a group of L33T soldiers through a picket line, then the way armies defend themselves would be entirely different. If a sorcerer can chuck a perfect, unblock able attack at a king, that king wouldn't have live audiences. If Druids could control weather there would never be drought and famin. I don't think the world would be 'medieval Europe with magic' it would be entirely different.
#6 shintashi Jul 30, 2015 8:44:09	well, castles actually used to get blown apart frequently in history. They had all sorts of explosives in Castle periods, but they were scattered across earth and specialized. The story of the fifth of November, is a bomb plot to destroy parlaiment, right? Guy Fawks was 1570-1606. So we are talking like a century after Malleus Maleficarum and 4 years before the King James Bible, but within the same time period as Ye Book of Daemonologie (1597), i.e., prime "Burn the Witch" times. John Dee, the Queens Magician was alive from 1527 to 1609, and in all likelihood, had access to gun powder. The Greeks had Greek fire and archimedes is said to have figured out a way to use mirrors to set enemy ships on fire. But if we are looking at what is actually possible for a human being to do, in terms of destructive capacity vs. norms, we have to remember that Magic is typically an esoteric, restricted kind of thing, but the effectiveness is not what is restricted. It is how many people in a given population are allowed to know it, afford it, or have authority to use it. The "normal" for human experience has also changed drastically since the 1970s. The neat thing about explosives is there is really no damage cap. I suppose there's a damage cap per cubic meter, but the volume is only limited by how strong and how much gun powder, alcohol, etc. you use. In D&D 5e, if you threw one of those big gallon+ jugs filled with Acid at a big monster, it would do damage values comparable to high level wizard spells. Microgaming is peculiar in that it wants to see people and possibilities as some how muted beneath the realm of possibility. Powergamers often create characters that are unbelievably powerful, but microgames do a similar disservice by lowering the expectations of human potential below the threshold of believability. Take White Wolf for example. There were two ways to run it: either you assumed everyone had normal resources plus normal skill sets that were not written down, and no skill checks or purchases were required, for things like food, clothing, and shelter, or you could rule that only skills that had dots were things you knew how to do, and only what was written on your character sheet was what you owned, clothing, apartment, car, food - everything. This runs into the "Boyscouts are level 20 rangers and the Pope is an Antediluvian" tropes. Because the rules can be enforced from a microgamer perspective, you can actually yield characters that are more incompetent than children, and have real human beings that are impossible to put into the rules set, because they speak more languages than the intelligence or "vampire generation" allows, or because they have too many proficiency slots for their "level", or whatever. Modern people in the 21st century are actually pretty badass. Our automobiles move faster than horses when we are on the freeway, and our planes are way faster than dragons. Our tanks and Jet fighters are more deadly too. What is the Armor Class of a Battleship Hull? We have Blue Tooth Telepathy operated magical bracelet Iwatches that have a range of thousands of miles. Our Archmages down at Los Alamos can cast fireballs with a range of 5,000-25,000 miles and have a Radius of over 1000 squares inflicting well over 50d6 damage. Did I mention I was a Burning Laser hobbyist? Basically, because of where we are in history, our technology is starting to look more and more like magic and magic items. And because of that, when some people build characters, what they define as heroic (better than whatever they have going on), can seem Over powered in some game systems, especially if the system mechanics define what you "can do" rather than "can't do". Microgamers abuse "can do" rules sets, because they enforce the limitations and costs of everything to the absurd, great ideas are crushed because there's no rule allowing you to do things like "move diagonally" or buy flammable alcohol and use it as an improvised weapon. Power gamers tend to abuse "can't do" rules sets because as long as it doesn't say they can't, they will. You see problems like this pop up with Spell Creation or Magic Item production. Actually, the Magic Item production in 5e is a perfect illustration of the Microgamer vs. Powergamer Argument. Our group recently came into a large sum of gold, so our Wizard and Bard got together to create a couple of +1 daggers, at level 3. The DM wanted to award them XP and didn't have a 5e reference point for it. The Powergamer approach might be to award obscenely high experience points and find a way to do the whole thing for free in some pocket dimension where it doesn't take any time. The Microgamer would argue that creating magic items is impossible for player characters, and if it were possible to create them, the level 3 characters are far too low level to do it, and if they were still appropriately high enough level, they couldn't afford it, and if they could afford it, they should be robbed in their sleep, since level 1-4 characters should never have more than "starting equipment ala page 38 of the DMG which is not to exceed 5d4x10 gp". Our DM wanted to award XP because in AD&D we did that. In 3rd edition, they charged XP for creating magic items, and Im not sure what they did in 4e. We ultimately messed around and assigned the items a CR value as a "monster" and awarded XP that way. A microgamer would argue that since 3rd edition had a precedent of charging XP, we should instead be charged the CR XP value for constructing the item. I think you get a clearer picture of what I mean by Microgaming, and how it can upset the flow of the game.
#7 Tempest_Stormwind Jul 30, 2015 9:16:56	Okay, upon seeing your replies, I think I see the problem. It's not that you necessarily disagree with either (though you do - that's just not the problem). It's when a party of non-microgamers has a microgamer join, and said microgamer is a jerk. This is exactly the same problem as the more common "group of RP-heavy players has an min-maxing munchkin join the party" or "group of casual or mechanical players has a drama queen munchkin join the party" scenarios. (Note: I exclusively use "munchkin" for "immature player"; not all min-maxers / optimizers are munchkins, not by a longshot, and not all munchkins are min/maxers. The drama-queen munchkin is the one who shows up with a character with a missing eye and arm, who disrupts the game with long monologues and soliloquies, and deliberately never picks a good move in combat "because it adds character".) What's happening here is that you've got a mismatch of player styles at the same game - where the disruption is caused by a microgamer - and you're taking umbrage at that. What sets this particular situation apart is that you're not doing the usual "run the filthy min-maxer out of town!" routine that I see disturbingly often, but rather going to the boards to see if the game system itself promotes the microgamer viewpoint. LOTS has been written on this - just not specific to the microgamer. It's entirely because people at the table don't have a shared set of goals for the game nor values for how to play it. Look up any of the civil threads on how to balance min/maxing and roleplay (that's the traditional conflict here) and you'll find things applicable here - after all, you're balancing "high power" and "low power". (Note: since "power" is set on the Character Level scale, I don't think this is as reconcilable as RP and min/maxing. You might have to settle for playing in a narrow level range, or adopting something simlar to E6.) shintashi wrote:
#8 shintashi Jul 30, 2015 11:28:21	not awarding XP for downtime activities? I think it seems odd you assumed we were in something called downtime. In another thread about what what people want to see in their adventures, I think i placed a heavy emphasis on the RP value of doing things that other people normally gloss over as non important downtime. Like, in a roleplaying game, it's not always a rollplaying game where dice are everything, and sometimes dice rolls exist but not in combat frequency. sometimes experience is awarded for clever roleplaying, or a good speech to a king, or overcoming foes or problems without even rolling dice. Take Cyberpunk 2020 for instance. You could shoot people every 3.2 seconds, but over the course of a session you might get 5- 10 improvement points (like experience points). But you could also get 2 improvement points for doing "down time study". Meanwhile, your Techie or Netrunner could build a new piece of technology or write an awesome program, and you could easily award far more than 2 improvement points for the new thing (which roughly correlates to new magic item or spell in D&D), even though it boiled down to one or two die rolls, a pile of cash, and then weeks or months of downtime. Generally, when characters are rewarded for creating something that takes a long time, it incentivizes creativity. Now be aware, that during the 20 days that two characters are making a couple of 1d4+1 weapons at a total cost of 1020 gold, they have already spent more money than they would ever get reselling these magic items (which are priced at 100-500 each, averaging 300 gp each if sold). Meanwhile, the Rogue, Paladin, and Cleric can spend 20 days killing monsters and clear far more than the XP awarded to the Bard and Wizard, to make matters worse, the Rogue actually found a +1 Bow and the Paladin got a Sun Sword in the treasure, so basically, it could easily play out that the Rogue and Paladin not only have magic weapons, but they also have nearly 3 weeks to level up during that "down time" where the Wizard and Bard are losing money (420gp more than buying would cost) and getting no XP, if we follow your Downtime Actions always = 0 XP rule. I think it's all relative to the Campaign, and part of that is the style of players and their previous game systems experience. Here's a really good idea to further this discussion. Existing magic items are in the DMG, however, if you ever saw the magic item tomes from 2nd edition, you would know those are just the tip of the iceberg. What do you do if the players want to make a magic item that isn't in the DMG? How to do you calculate the level and cost? Do you have them go through extra steps like exploring to get exotic components? Do you compare it to other items from previous editions to find out the "rarity" or is it automatically rare legendary because they created it? Is there a die roll involved like an arcana check, or a series of die rolls toward final success (like in Spells & Magic research)? Do the wizards need their own forge or lab? Should the player be rewarded for introducing something completely new and creative, or would they be better served killing orcs with fireballs, in a hack & slash campaign? And how do you suppose a Microgamer would respond to these questions?
#9 Tempest_Stormwind Jul 30, 2015 11:58:48	shintashi wrote:
#10 shintashi Jul 30, 2015 12:44:43	I am aware of the formula theory, and how it is basically left up to the DM. I actually flipped the DMG to that page, handed it to my DM, and said, "so what do we have to do?". If you read it, you'll notice it isn't as clear as the 2nd edition. For example, if we did this 2nd edition style, you would learn the Magic weapon spell, then you would learn the enchanted item spell, then the permanancy spell, or hire someone for a lot of money to cast it. There were spells that allowed you to transfer the lost constitution to some proxy, and variations thereof to get around the constitution loss, but it would be a 16th level wizard, or a 12th level channeler. Adapting some of that theory to 5th edition, you might #1, find the recipe, #2 require magic weapon (the DMG actually says no particular spell is required, which is shocking), then something that allows the 20 days to act as the ritual to make the magic weapon spell permanent. If the recipe is an approximation of material component values, plus exotic components, you might have to go quest for powdered jasper, the laughter of maidens, or the breath of a dragon, for example, depending on what the DM wants for that particular item. Now looking at this chart, you can see that buying the magic item is actually cheaper than making it. Like, almost always. So you are being charged time and money, to get something you could have for less time and money. The real question is whether the formula is harder to find than the magic item shop that sells the item you want to make. In our case, +1 weapons? No. Finding a shop that sells them was easier than finding the formula. We actually offered to trade a 12th level wizard book full of spells for the Formula, though I'm not sure whether my DM accepted that or not - they were busy selling a +1 Bow to the Rogue when we addressed the issue. MAGIC ITEM RARITY Rarity Character Level Value Common 1st or higher 50-100 gp Uncommon 1st or higher 101-500 gp Rare 5th or higher 501 -5,000 gp Very rare 11th or higher 5,001 - 50,000 gp Legendary 17th or higher 50,001+ gp BUYING AND SELLING Unless you decide your campaign works otherwise, most magic items are so rare that they aren't available for purchase. Common items, such as a potion of healing, can be procured from an alchemis t, herbalist, or spellcaster. Doing so is rarely as simple as walking into a shop and selecting an item from a shelf. The seller might ask for a service, rather than coin. In a large city with an academy of magic or a major temple, buying and selling magic items might be possible, at your discretion. If your world includes a large number of adventurers engaged in retrieving ancient magic items, trade in these items might be more common. our DM decided otherwise, although i did manage to persuade him that +3 is the new +5. Last session i had to explain bows no longer give two attacks per round. Typically, in our current group, I am the voice of reason and balance. The guy who says "that's too much gold... no... that's too much exp, no no, we don't need a +10 sword that increases our Dexterity to 30...wait, no, we probably shouldn't be rolling on the Artifact tables" My most recent experience: a request from my DM for Difficulty values for attempting my martial arts maneuvers without taking martial arts. Note that I scaled them to parallel 1st-9th level wizard spells, so this would be like a Barbarian asking what the Arcana DC is to cast Fireball and Wish...(insert picard Facepalm). 5th edition is only popular in our current group because of how leniant it is on people used to AD&D rules. The problem is those rules are set up for 0-3 million xp, not 0-300,000 xp. DMs want to award xp but they need to keep the scale in mind. It should be a 1:10 scale for XP, but the XP rewards are surprisingly similar to 1st and 2nd edition.
#11 Tempest_Stormwind Jul 30, 2015 13:50:01	I didn't get to answer this bit earlier, but it's clearly weighing on your mind, so I suppose I'll deal with it now. I'll answer with the baseline - what the rules say, and more or less what I'd do - and then supply how I think a microgamer would answer. Unlike you, I won't stoop to hyperbole for my presentation of a microgamer. shintashi wrote:
#12 shintashi Jul 31, 2015 7:47:00	For example, yesterday i was in a game with a thief who was wielding a +5 axe for backstabbing, with an 18/93 strength, dealing +10 damage on their backstab. The Thief also had 8 million gold and was no longer interested in monetary wealth, they only wanted magic items. They were level 4. This is an excellent example of the generic powergaming or munchkin appellatives. But it is important to understand that while hyperbolic examples of a particular style of gaming are truly hyperbolic, there is truly no such thing as a hyperbolic example of powergaming - it is by its very nature, hyperbolic on a frequent basis, therefore, the extreme is the norm, and the less extreme is actually more characteristic of generic "higher magic" or "higher power" campaigns - the power scales there work, but they work at higher power scales than might be functionally safe for low level campaigns. It is important to recognize the same extremes exist in microgamers, and they should not be coddled or grouped together with low magic or low power campaigns with undue frequency. For example, the Microgamer would state that since the 3rd level-17th level examples of magic item creation or purchase rules were in the DMG, they simply did not exist as a reality that could be counted as part of the D&D experience, as everything in the DMG should be treated as atypical and outside the rules of bounded accuracy. Now personally, i find this sad, because one of my favorite races - the Aasimar, and one of my favorite parts of D&D - Spell Research, are both in the DMG now. In AD&D, Permanency, Enchant Item, and other necessary components for Magic Item construction and other effects similar to the Supernatural Gifts on DMG pages 227-228 were in the realm of player characters, in the Players Handbook. Aasimar used to be Player accessible (Planewalkers handbook and the players guide for planescape, etc.). Spells & Magic was a players option that covered spell research. So what happened in 5th edition? A lot of Player Material had the "brown cover" removed and replaced with a "blue" or "green" cover of DM guide labels. Microgamers consider anything DM only to be broken, over powered, and not useable material unless your DM is running a high level or high magic or weird game where they are personally taking responsibility. Basically, when customizing something new for D&D in 5th edititon, the microgamer pretends the material in the DMG does not exist, nor does the material in the monstrous manual. You only have the Players handbook material, and everything has to be based on Players handbook Pregen Stat characters WITHOUT FEATS (because those are optional only, and not part of the standard game) with no magic items or exotic races. In the microgamer universe, it is even questionable as to whether the Elemental Evil spells and Player Races are available, and most certainly not useable as reference for making suggestions to Wizards for New content, and certainly not useful for designing new spells. Actually, designing new spells is entirely unecessary in the Microgamer universe, because they would argue that if you want to do something, there is enough leeway in the existing classes and combinations that you can do whatever you want with the existing content (players handbook core typically being the only content in the universe), and if it would require something that is beyond that content, it is simply too powerful and broken and has no place in 5th edition...i.e., a catch 22. With microgamers, you cant introduce new content because the existing content is good enough for everything, but if the existing content is not good enough for a new idea, the new idea is too powerful and needs to be shot down. Just because i think 8 million gold is too much for a 4th level character, it doesn't make me a microgamer. There's a pretty big grey area for Game Balance. Microgamers break it just as readily as power gamers. They don't cease being microgamers because they hit extremes, it is the extremes that define them.
#13 Tempest_Stormwind Jul 31, 2015 10:20:00	For example, yesterday i was in a game with a thief who was wielding a +5 axe for backstabbing, with an 18/93 strength, dealing +10 damage on their backstab. The Thief also had 8 million gold and was no longer interested in monetary wealth, they only wanted magic items. They were level 4. This is an excellent example of the generic powergaming or munchkin appellatives.
#14 ankiyavon Jul 31, 2015 14:24:52	This thread is ridiculous. OP, you really need to work on your inclusiveness and tolerance. All I get out of this thread is "these people play differently than I do AND THAT IS BAD". Whether you're talking about microgaming, powergaming, munchkins, whatever, you have all these terms for people who play even a little bit differently than you, and you seem to hate all of them. Tempest_Stormwind wrote:
#15 shintashi Jul 31, 2015 17:01:43	ankiyavan, welcome to the discussion! You may have the topic confused for the intended goal, which is to address the opposite bell curve of disruptive gaming habits that have gradually become more popular, and how it has impacted the rules distribution in latter publications. Microgaming is a phenomenon I wish the gaming community to be aware off, and collecting the habits, hyperbole, and honest to gods real examples of the horrid consequences is necessary. There is plenty of sentiment and guidance for Powergaming, Munchkins, etc. But there is basically no one addressing the Microgaming aspect of Gaming. In a previous example, I pointed out how Spell Construction and Permanency was migrated from the PHB to the DMG, and how Feats, went from Standard character Design to Optional. I Pointed out how the Theme that the Game assumes magic items, being switched to "the game assumes no magic items" drastically changes the Game. As to the millions of XP the Rogue should have had, I pointed it out. They said something about the acquisition being based on mining adamantium or some such. Different changes to rules from one edition to the next can shift the balance either toward the player, or toward the DM, however, with Microgamers, it is always away from the Player, even if what is normally shunted to the DM is intended for Players. This E6 genre mentioned earlier definitely sounds like a Microgaming Campaign setting, although I haven't played it personally. Microgaming can also impact the Cosmology of a setting. Watching the timeline of certain NPCs rise to become unkillable deities while many of the forces of good, including NPCs and fantasy races reduced step by step in power, it paints a gradual mood shift. The shift is Lovecraftian in philosophy. Characters becoming more and more insignificant, muted. "Look at how insignificant you are. A tiny speck on a tiny pale blue dot in a vast sea of darkness". Here's an example... I challenge any of you to track the progression through time from BECMI to 5th edition of the power scale of the Named Pit Fiends, the Solar Aasimon, the Eladrin,Lolth, and Tiamat, where appearances exist. In 5e it was telling when the Gold Dragon took a hit compared with the Red. Gold Dragons used to be blatantly superior. But I suppose that's more of a moralist analysis of the changing of the guard... except for the fact that Microgamers tend to cheer for the bad guys... and the bad guys are winning.
#16 ankiyavon Jul 31, 2015 19:44:51	I agree that there are theoretically facts to discuss. But you're not discussing facts, you're starting from the position that this is a horrible thing and no one should ever support anything like it, and you want people to agree with you that the game is dying because it's changing slightly away from your own preferences. (Inasmuch as I accept that this is a real term, by the way, I would qualify as a microgamer. Except as a real thing, not as your hyperbolic example. Half of the things you are saying make no sense, and the other half might be true in theory but you've instilled them with an enormous moralistic complex that has no reason to exist.) An example of an actual trend: Magic item creation rules began in the DMG (and magic items in general). That's where they were prior to 3E. In 3E, they shifted to the PHB (although magic items themselves remained in the DMG, it was expected that players would read them to learn how their item creation abilities worked), and stayed there in 4E, and now in 5E, they're back in the DMG. This is not a new thing and it is not the end of the world, it's simply a return to a different set of assumptions that used to be the default. shintashi wrote:
#17 shintashi Jul 31, 2015 20:15:47	The game can be played any way anyone wants
#18 ankiyavon Jul 31, 2015 21:37:00	shintashi wrote:
#19 MechaPilot Jul 31, 2015 21:55:07	ankiyavon wrote:
#20 ankiyavon Jul 31, 2015 22:29:30	MechaPilot wrote:
#21 Awakened_Gazebo Aug 01, 2015 13:12:34	I love playing a microgamer* ... In call of Chtulhu.But thats an entirely differnt game than D&D. In those games its not about reducing the monsters HP to 0 first, its about gaining as many and quirky mental disabilities and the winner is the guy that dies the most entertaining way possible, preferably last. Weve also had chtulhu microgamers spill over in our D&D or shadowrun games, not understanding the genre differenses and being a total liability and a great annoyance to the rest of the table when they are whining about the others being munchkins with 16 or higher stats, or walking around in armour more than ½ an hour a day etc. And naturally vice versa with D&D players coming into our Chtulhu game... usually they tend to die first... kinda like the Chulhu players in D&D now that I think about it Im actually not sure if we even had a real defined term for that sort of player. We have power-gamers*, rules lawyers and munchkins as derogative terms The non-disruptive sort ( but then again, I dont think thats a microgamer in Shintashis eyes. I think his definition is the disruptive low power player) ** we see a power-gamer as something negative and unfun. A player with a cool character that happens to also be powerful isnt a power-gamer though
#22 Yunru Aug 01, 2015 17:53:59	I once ruined a game of call of chtulhu, story wise. Through a completely unplanned series of events, involving two different players following two different npcs, a plot essential character was killed, unravelling the story and jumping straight to the end game.
#23 Orethalion Aug 02, 2015 7:09:09	ankiyavon wrote:
#24 ankiyavon Aug 02, 2015 11:36:10	Orethalion wrote:
#25 Orethalion Aug 02, 2015 17:15:29	ankiyavon wrote:

Post/Author/DateTime

Post

shintashi

Jul 29, 2015 8:59:14

So a long time ago, at the same time nicknames for playing styles like twink, powergamer, and munckin were being codified in our little community of 200 or so gamers, a few of us got together and made up the term "microgamer" to describe a trend that started to surface when Call of Cthulhu/Rolemaster fans started to trickle over to D&D and brought with them their habits and notions about power parity in an adventure.

You all probably have your own definitions for what these different terms mean, but here's what we had them defined as to help illustrate the differences. Twink was a shorthand for Social Twink, someone who uses rules exploits to optimize social interactions to manipulate the storyline NPCs and even other players to their advantage. Not particularly useful in a dungeon full of mindless zombies and Gygax death traps, the Twink for our town began to manifest in white wolf, particularly LARP settings. The munchkin was the type that rolled lots of dice, intentionally. Their character sheet optimized might look like a regular character sheet with an extra "zero" on the end of all relevant numbers. Why do 4d6 damage when 40d6 is better? Why have a stat of 5 when 50 sounds awesome? My favorite quote that I remember hearing while walking into one of these games was "17 successes to the head!" being yelled - in a game where each success added +1 damage and you only needed 7 to kill most people. What traits were left of powergaming once these other two terms were codified amounted to people who through rules exploitation and dramitas managed to manipulate the outcome of the campaign to suit their purposes, or otherwise produced a power curve that looked asymptopic, rising rapidly to infinity like the acceleration of a drag race car. The most interesting power gamers were the ones that could shame the munchkin stat/damage monsters but appeared innocuous otherwise - the Zatoichi effect.

Well anyway, Microgamers are the opposite of these various power hungry players. Their drives tend to be all about reaching the lowest common denominator. If the lowest "high" attribute someone has is 15, and there are 3 or four other people with 18, 19, or 20, they demand everyone else lower their attributes to 15, preferably 14. They are the ones who explain Conan the Barbarian had 24 hit points and never made it past level 5. They will explain that spells above Cantrip are godlike and legendary and should be worshipped for what they are, divine reality warping power that virtually no one should ever have. A +1 sword is Apocalyptic in Nature, they can spend their own lives acquiring rooms full of dusty old books to acquire one, and though they know, tragically, that even upon acquiring the sword +1, it will enable their 10 strength Fighter to scratch the evil monster, before being horribly slaughtered by his wicked awesomeness, the sacrifice will not be in vain, for after going through the other 7 players, each who will dutifully pick up the fallen +1 sword and slash desperately at the monster (presummably a CR 3 or less) eventually, before the cleric, down to 1 hit point drops to one knee, the bloodied monster will grow bored and irritated, and wander back to its cave to sleep for a generation. Or something to that effect. The important thing is that the microgamer gets to produce another low powered character as quickly as possible. I'm probably not doing microgamers justice, and their psychology still escapes me, but I have seen plenty of it creep here and there. I was once handed a piece of paper at a Microgame and told "yeah, you can join our (I think it was pathfinder) and here's your stats available". I think the highest attribute was a 13 or 14. No, I'm not making this up.

When looking over races, the Microgamer will have humans, human looking things, and things that look absolutely nothing like humans but statistically have no racial characteristics more powerful than an ordinary piece of clothing. Microgamers do not define heroes in the 1980s Action movie vein, rather, Heroes are tragic, beloved fools who go off to wars to die. The best heroes are the ones who die for what they believe in, but only if they die. If they actually succeed, they lose their hero status and become "broken" and too powerful, like, you know, a "powergaming munchkin twink". Microgames rarely see anything d20 go past level 5. To them, level 5 is the pinnacle of godlike achievement, and is a dish best served cold on a silver platter to the nearest abberration, dragon, or man eating giant. For microgamers, monsters are all Lovecraftian in power, and villain - hero relationships are the next episode of Saw.

So this is what I noticed recently with 5th edition, that I actually didn't see at all in 4th edition, and seldom in 3rd edition. Except, in 5th edition, it appears to be like a virus, particularly with the magic items. I've never seen anything like this before. There are discussions of bounded accuracy, and then statements about how magic items are not assumed to be part of 5th edition. Now, you have to understand, when I got into D&D back in the day, I knew guys who had spread sheets to keep track of magic items. People would have castles with rooms dedicated to their conquests. There's a guy down the road who has a 20+ year old campaign where a kingdom actually has a factory producing healing potions.

I think what happened with magic is people moved into one of two camps. On the one side, you have Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie, Disney's Aladdin, Gummy Bears, Xena Warrior Princess, Charmed, and Harry Potter. On the other you have Conan the Barbarian, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Vikings.

Everybody has their own views on what is correct. But what can be said, of the middle path, is that a Magic Item factory voiced by the late Robin Williams is probably too lose, and one Valerian Steel weapon per campaign against the Armies of Ice Zombies is probably too tight.

What bothers me, is that there are a lot of people, new to D&D, being "informed" that +1 weapons are extremely rare, priceless, and totally out of character with the 5th edition system. That seems to be disengenuous, and while I understand the Wizards of the Coast people don't want to upset any of their player base, I think when they choose Forgotten Realms as their core setting, they were making a silent statement that it was intended to be a high magic setting, and "rare" magic items and low level characters with low stats would be exceptions to the norm, rather than the norm.

All I had to do to prove my point was walk into the fantasy novel section of the local book store, and see a trilogy of Elminsters on one side of the shelf, and a couple of cover paintings of Drizzt on the other.

Tempest_Stormwind

Jul 29, 2015 11:44:49

You seem to use "microgamer" in two contexts - those who advocate for low power in their games, and those who argue against magic items. The specific argument you have against the first kind goes away if you use point-buy (yet again, rolling for scores creates far more problems than it solves); the interesting part is why it goes away (it's not what you think). Curiously, the reason it goes away is the same reason you'll find effective in challenging the second type of microgamer - and challenging yourself.

(I'm also going to set aside your characterization of "twinks". I'm a long-time power-gamer, and the logic is never "why do 4d6 when 40d6 is better?" but rather "why spend the extra cost to get 40d6 if 4d6 is enough? And if it isn't enough, how much more do we need and how cheaply can we get it?". "17 successes to the head!" is viscerally satisfying, but it's overkill - and overkill is not optimizing. Context - in this case of cost and demand - is vital to the numbers side of the game. The kind of player you're talking about is not one who seeks power, but one who blindly seeks power - and this is no different from a person who plays "the hero", ignoring that everyone else at the table also wants to be a hero. These players aren't troublesome because they seek power - they're troublesome because they're immature. (I use 'munchkin' exclusively to refer to immature players.) Historically, they've been challenged by DMs seeking to beat that power-hunger out of them, when the DM instead should be encouraging them to be a better team player. But I digress.)

Back in the 3e era, a wonderful article called Calibrating Your Expectations was written. I maintain it's the single most important article ever written for that edition of D&D. It's particularly interesting because it went "let's set aside our pre-existing expectations, and see what the game's engine itself tells us to expect". And, surprise surprise, it wound up with the best-of-the-best-of-the-best of real-world humanity, the multi-Olympic athletes and the Einstein-grade scientists... being around level 5. (The article also mentions that it was inspired by Ryan Dancey, who first proposed that 3e D&D had "tiers" of gameplay, with levels 1-5 being gritty, levels 6-10 being heroic, levels 11-15 being wuxia, and levels 16-20 being superheroic. There's a lot of bickering about the labels and decision points, but broadly speaking, no one disputes his basic premise.)

I bring this up because what you describe is a similar problem - coming into the game with one set of assumptions (you seem to assert that what you call "microgaming" is wrong, and that magic swords aren't rare, and so on), and simply asserting those assumptions, rather than seeing what the system itself says (both explicitly through prose, and mechanically through rules). Microgamers, as you describe them, have the same problem. So why don't we look at the game itself and see what it has to say?

In the case of ability scores, the microgamer you describe has his own notion of what scores are appropriate - "the highest attribute is either a 13 or a 14" and all that. You have your own notion, which is presumably higher (but not that much higher, since you similarly decry players who seek power). Meanwhile, the game itself uses a point-buy system that caps ability scores at 15 (pre-racial-modifier), and makes getting that 15 somewhat expensive. In fact, it strongly suggests an array of 15 / 14 / 13 / 12 / 10 / 8 to start (possibly adjusting things from there, using a universal framework). The game's sample characters (intended to introduce people to the game) all use this array, and characters based on this array are the benchmark against which NPCs and the entire challenge rating system were devised. That's pretty strong evidence against the microgamer's view of ability scores. You can similarly extend this to see what monsters the game's XP system determines are "easy" vs those that are "deadly" and see how the microgamer's love for Lovecraftian superhorrors stacks up - the game makes suggestions, based on adventuring day experience, of how difficult the fights the PCs should be seeing are, and Lovecraftian superhorrors are definitely out of the scope of what low-level heroes should be fighting, for instance.

(Similar problems showed up in earlier games, too. For instance, I, personally, don't like playing too much higher than levels 12-15 or so in 3.X, because your characters get too powerful for the kinds of challenges I like to face. This gave birth to the notion of E6, for instance - a gameplay variant where levels stopped progressing at 6th, and a variation of the Epic rules kicked in there instead. Basically, this "locked" the game to the lower-end of what Ryan Dancy identified as "heroic fantasy" - if you like heroic fantasy, you can play an extended game of it using E6 without ever worrying about growing "too" powerful and being forced to retire. In 5e, the equivalent would likely stop at one of the appropriate tier transition points, recognizing that they like viewing, say, trolls as an Oh Crap monster (as a level 3 character might) instead of as a speed bump (as a level 12 character might). This is a problem in recognizing that your expectation maps on to a gameplay tier, not so much a fault of the system at tiers other than that.)

That's not to say the microgamer's vision is wrong - just that he prefers a weaker, lower-level character than the game itself seems to provide. THAT is a difference in playstyle preference, and one the gamemaster can accommodate - but it's not the default vision of 5e.

Similarly, the vision of a single magic sword being significant is not based on some adherence to microgaming - the DMG says so quite explicitly, and the developers are on record speaking at length about how the game works without access to magic items. The reason you didn't see this in 3.X or 4th is because those systems were not designed the same way. PCs of level X had Y gp worth of magic items included in the assumptions of what they could do, and magic items were balanced to a particular power level based on that price. Take away their toys, and several characters simply couldn't scratch the foes the game system said they were fighting. Give out too many toys, and lower-level characters crush encounters that they should have run from. This led to a rigid set of "wealth by level" rules for both editions, where your gold budget for magical equipment was every bit as important as your experience point total. Combined with a magic item economy where they were freely purchaseable (and customizable, in some cases), and you wound up with every single new sourcebook that had a magic item in it supplying something that players viewed as an option they could freely take (similar to a feat), instead of as a reward the DM might hand out or an objective to quest toward. (There were even tiny aspects of this in previous editions, actually. Viewed this way, magic swords are seen in the same light as class features - something you, and the game, assume you'll be getting as part of your progression. The paladin - as early as the first AD&D handbook in 1978 - had abilities listed in it that kicked in if you had a Holy Sword (the predecessor of the modern Holy Avenger). This stoked desire for such a sword in paladin players, since you couldn't use one of your special powers without one. When 3e came along, it kept that ability... but it moved it into the text of the sword itself, which meant players (at least those who didn't read the DMG) didn't know how special that sword was to their class. 5e does something similar, by requiring attunement by a paladin.)

Mathematically, you can look at the two places the game tells you how many magic items a party should find - the rules for creating a character at higher level, and the expected outcomes for treasure hoards (which includes the DMG's note that "typical" games roll a certain number of times on each hoard table). The latter is more generous than the former, but also only works if you actually play through all of those levels. Even then, though, you can't say these are exact - they make assumptions of typicality, which is explicit in the case of the start-at-higher-level bit (Low-Magic vs High-Magic games) but also implicit in the hoard tables ("My game isn't "typical"; it takes place in a world closer to Westeros than Faerun.")

It seems that the game, as presented, assumes that magic items are found with reasonable frequency within treasure hoards, which are used to construct both carefully-guarded treasure rooms in dungeons and the rewards that wealthy patrons give to you for completing service. Both of these involve earning items chosen by the DM, rather than purchasing them on the open market. (In fact, the only magic item referenced as buyable anywhere in the core rules is the potion of healing, and the rules for creating these items by PCs suggest that NPCs can't turn a profit doing so by playing by the rules. Therefore, either they create them by decree somewhere (a crown enterprise need not turn a profit, or would earn a profit by subsidy, depending on the economy of the nation in question), or the NPCs have a shortcut or discount of some form or another (be it economy of scale or a magical tool that lets them produce it cheaper - say, a fountain that produces a liquid that's especially susceptible to storing magic, and is fiercely guarded as a national treasure).

In this case, it actually seems like both of you are right, though I would accuse your (possibly hyperbolic) presentation of a microgamer of exaggerating. While +1 swords aren't "rare" or "out of character" with the setting, neither are they especially commonplace nor required to fight your foes. (I haven't run the numbers on this yet, but I strongly suspect the bigger impact of having one of those isn't the +1 - it's the ability to break through creatures' resistances to nonmagical weapons. You'll also notice that the combat-heavy classes who don't have the option of just using magic swords - Moon druids and unarmed monks - both get the ability to break through that resistance at level 6 or so, which is also around the same time the DMG's "start at higher level" rules would give other warriors an Uncommon permanent magic item, such as a +1 sword.) The actual numerical impact of the +1 is a completely separate issue (and this is where the math-heavy arguments about bounded accuracy show up, and I'd rather not dive down that particular rabbit-hole, so I'll just leave it there.)

In short, the game itself is telling us about its own assumptions, if people would listen to it. There are aspects of it where the game shoots down the "microgamers" (just as readily as it shuts down the power-hungry strain of the munchkin). There are also aspects where it lends credence to at least part of the "microgamer" point of view, even though it points out that they're exaggerating. The questions of importance aren't who's right or wrong - it's 'will we listen to the game?' and "how do we need to properly adjust the game for our personal preferences?".

PS: Magic item factories aren't all that uncommon if the setting assumes something like it. Guilds creating common magic items at scale is kind of a central notion of Eberron, for instance. Eberron similarly started with the assumptions the rules made - i.e. that according to the DMG, cities roughly have this population, and this proportion of the population is a low-level magic-user, and if you're buying a spell from them it costs this much gold.... - and examined the consequences of those assumptions in the rules. For instance, Continual Flame sheds light forever, and costs about 200gp. That's expensive for an individual - but very much within the tax budget of even small towns. With a slight bit of adjustment to fit the setting's particular aesthetic, the everbright lantern was born, and boom, we had street lights. (The result was not "let's find a magical way to do X", but rather, "magic does Z, so what would a society use Z for?".) The question, therefore, isn't why Eberron has street lights, but rather why other settings don't. Extended across the entire economy (in which high-level magic is rare, but low-level magic is quite common), you naturally find a niche for creating simple magic items at volume. (To prevent PCs from undermining the guilds, they have access to methods which produce these items cheaper because they're being built in numbers, by people who have magic of making in their blood, true. But that's just a fantasy-styled econonmy of scale at work - and a high-level PC (who is very rare in this setting) can still outdo it with powerful magic.)

None of this is true if you're playing in a game where those assumptions are wrong. Dark Sun, for instance, lacks quite a lot of infrastructure, has to deal with an incredibly hostile climate, and has a culture of suspicion or hatred against magic (the cause of the aforementioned climate), and the ruling economy isn't free at all (in most cases, it's controlled by a tyrannical sorcerer-king). The assumptions about population size, magic availability, and costs given in the DMGs simply don't hold on Athas, so you wouldn't expect such a setting to produce magic item factories.

It's all about context.

shintashi

Jul 29, 2015 23:24:11

I think the biggest problem with microgaming is the lack of awareness of the problem itself. If you begin treating trolls or dragons as old ones, and focus your theories of game play around despair and plots as a string of illustrations of why the efforts of heroes is hopeless, then you have converted what should otherwise be a relatively happy mountain dew drinking dorito eating magic missile in the darkness good time, into a theater of nihilistic tragedy.

What impact does this actually have on the game, histrionic exagerrations asside? Well, I have seen more than one gaming group implode because of microgaming. I have seen microgaming take the mantle of rules lawyer, and that's a bit like an IRS agent showing up before you scratch your lottery tickets or read the dead uncle's will. Fun is like a nice icecream milkshake with one of those loopy straws, and then the microgamer just comes along with their giant fat bubble Straw and drain away all possibilities of happiness.

I mean, the rules set is supposed to be presenting people with options to slay dragons. That dragon slaying notion is a metaphor used in the real world to describe overcoming any great obstacle or challenge. An executive might use it when acquiring a new elusive client for their corporation. Can you imagine the expression on an executive's face if his CEO said "no, you can't acquire Bro and Brothers Billion dollar contract, as it would be far too profitable and your comission, well it's just too much money for a mortal to acheive. The idea that you could buy your mansion and a G6 is completely ridiculous, as no human being should ever live long enough to see such things...in fact, I'm going to shut down the corporation right now and donate all our assets to charity, because we need to be more egalitarian. I think I'll have a lobotomy too, because my last IQ test put me at over 200, and that's completely ridiculous, since I'm not working at CERN. No CEO should have such a high intelligence".

Strength scores in 5th edition say

Push, Drag, or Lift. You can push, drag, or lift a
weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity
(or 30 times your Strength score). While pushing or
dragging weight in excess o f your carrying capacity,
your speed drops to 5 feet.

Tiny Meeker bench pressed 1102 lbs in 2013 putting his strength at 36. Luis Cyr of Canada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Cyr

is said to lift 500 lbs with one finger and 4337 lbs, putting his strength at 144.

I only mention those quick examples because the notion that the best humanity has to offer, being "level 5" is kind of skewed. What level spell is the Manhattan project? That kind of thing. But a more optimistic way to look at humanity:

AndyDay

Jul 30, 2015 6:01:45

Love your post. It is thought provoking and interesting.

I myself am a quasi micro gamer in the sense that you define it. I think. The diff with me being that I don't feel players should be stuck at low levels. Rather, the players should become powerful, and th world should respond accordingly. I draw a lot of inspiration from Exalted, but any superhero game gets to the same theme. It's not about acquiring power. It's about having power, and then deciding what to do with it.

I find an oncongruence between the threats of a fantasy world like DnD and the way that world responds. If a lone Mage can blow down a castle that your family spent generations building... Nobody would build those kinds of castles. If casting Pass Without Trace would get a group of L33T soldiers through a picket line, then the way armies defend themselves would be entirely different. If a sorcerer can chuck a perfect, unblock able attack at a king, that king wouldn't have live audiences. If Druids could control weather there would never be drought and famin. I don't think the world would be 'medieval Europe with magic' it would be entirely different.

AndyDay

Jul 30, 2015 6:10:22

Love your post. It is thought provoking and interesting.

shintashi

Jul 30, 2015 8:44:09

well, castles actually used to get blown apart frequently in history. They had all sorts of explosives in Castle periods, but they were scattered across earth and specialized. The story of the fifth of November, is a bomb plot to destroy parlaiment, right? Guy Fawks was 1570-1606. So we are talking like a century after Malleus Maleficarum and 4 years before the King James Bible, but within the same time period as Ye Book of Daemonologie (1597), i.e., prime "Burn the Witch" times. John Dee, the Queens Magician was alive from 1527 to 1609, and in all likelihood, had access to gun powder. The Greeks had Greek fire and archimedes is said to have figured out a way to use mirrors to set enemy ships on fire.

But if we are looking at what is actually possible for a human being to do, in terms of destructive capacity vs. norms, we have to remember that Magic is typically an esoteric, restricted kind of thing, but the effectiveness is not what is restricted. It is how many people in a given population are allowed to know it, afford it, or have authority to use it. The "normal" for human experience has also changed drastically since the 1970s. The neat thing about explosives is there is really no damage cap. I suppose there's a damage cap per cubic meter, but the volume is only limited by how strong and how much gun powder, alcohol, etc. you use. In D&D 5e, if you threw one of those big gallon+ jugs filled with Acid at a big monster, it would do damage values comparable to high level wizard spells. Microgaming is peculiar in that it wants to see people and possibilities as some how muted beneath the realm of possibility.

Powergamers often create characters that are unbelievably powerful, but microgames do a similar disservice by lowering the expectations of human potential below the threshold of believability. Take White Wolf for example. There were two ways to run it: either you assumed everyone had normal resources plus normal skill sets that were not written down, and no skill checks or purchases were required, for things like food, clothing, and shelter, or you could rule that only skills that had dots were things you knew how to do, and only what was written on your character sheet was what you owned, clothing, apartment, car, food - everything. This runs into the "Boyscouts are level 20 rangers and the Pope is an Antediluvian" tropes. Because the rules can be enforced from a microgamer perspective, you can actually yield characters that are more incompetent than children, and have real human beings that are impossible to put into the rules set, because they speak more languages than the intelligence or "vampire generation" allows, or because they have too many proficiency slots for their "level", or whatever. Modern people in the 21st century are actually pretty badass. Our automobiles move faster than horses when we are on the freeway, and our planes are way faster than dragons. Our tanks and Jet fighters are more deadly too. What is the Armor Class of a Battleship Hull? We have Blue Tooth Telepathy operated magical bracelet Iwatches that have a range of thousands of miles. Our Archmages down at Los Alamos can cast fireballs with a range of 5,000-25,000 miles and have a Radius of over 1000 squares inflicting well over 50d6 damage. Did I mention I was a Burning Laser hobbyist?

Basically, because of where we are in history, our technology is starting to look more and more like magic and magic items. And because of that, when some people build characters, what they define as heroic (better than whatever they have going on), can seem Over powered in some game systems, especially if the system mechanics define what you "can do" rather than "can't do". Microgamers abuse "can do" rules sets, because they enforce the limitations and costs of everything to the absurd, great ideas are crushed because there's no rule allowing you to do things like "move diagonally" or buy flammable alcohol and use it as an improvised weapon. Power gamers tend to abuse "can't do" rules sets because as long as it doesn't say they can't, they will. You see problems like this pop up with Spell Creation or Magic Item production.

Actually, the Magic Item production in 5e is a perfect illustration of the Microgamer vs. Powergamer Argument.

Our group recently came into a large sum of gold, so our Wizard and Bard got together to create a couple of +1 daggers, at level 3. The DM wanted to award them XP and didn't have a 5e reference point for it. The Powergamer approach might be to award obscenely high experience points and find a way to do the whole thing for free in some pocket dimension where it doesn't take any time. The Microgamer would argue that creating magic items is impossible for player characters, and if it were possible to create them, the level 3 characters are far too low level to do it, and if they were still appropriately high enough level, they couldn't afford it, and if they could afford it, they should be robbed in their sleep, since level 1-4 characters should never have more than "starting equipment ala page 38 of the DMG which is not to exceed 5d4x10 gp".

Our DM wanted to award XP because in AD&D we did that. In 3rd edition, they charged XP for creating magic items, and Im not sure what they did in 4e. We ultimately messed around and assigned the items a CR value as a "monster" and awarded XP that way. A microgamer would argue that since 3rd edition had a precedent of charging XP, we should instead be charged the CR XP value for constructing the item.

I think you get a clearer picture of what I mean by Microgaming, and how it can upset the flow of the game.

Tempest_Stormwind

Jul 30, 2015 9:16:56

Okay, upon seeing your replies, I think I see the problem.

It's not that you necessarily disagree with either (though you do - that's just not the problem). It's when a party of non-microgamers has a microgamer join, and said microgamer is a jerk.

This is exactly the same problem as the more common "group of RP-heavy players has an min-maxing munchkin join the party" or "group of casual or mechanical players has a drama queen munchkin join the party" scenarios. (Note: I exclusively use "munchkin" for "immature player"; not all min-maxers / optimizers are munchkins, not by a longshot, and not all munchkins are min/maxers. The drama-queen munchkin is the one who shows up with a character with a missing eye and arm, who disrupts the game with long monologues and soliloquies, and deliberately never picks a good move in combat "because it adds character".)

What's happening here is that you've got a mismatch of player styles at the same game - where the disruption is caused by a microgamer - and you're taking umbrage at that. What sets this particular situation apart is that you're not doing the usual "run the filthy min-maxer out of town!" routine that I see disturbingly often, but rather going to the boards to see if the game system itself promotes the microgamer viewpoint.

LOTS has been written on this - just not specific to the microgamer. It's entirely because people at the table don't have a shared set of goals for the game nor values for how to play it. Look up any of the civil threads on how to balance min/maxing and roleplay (that's the traditional conflict here) and you'll find things applicable here - after all, you're balancing "high power" and "low power". (Note: since "power" is set on the Character Level scale, I don't think this is as reconcilable as RP and min/maxing. You might have to settle for playing in a narrow level range, or adopting something simlar to E6.)

shintashi wrote:

shintashi

Jul 30, 2015 11:28:21

not awarding XP for downtime activities? I think it seems odd you assumed we were in something called downtime. In another thread about what what people want to see in their adventures, I think i placed a heavy emphasis on the RP value of doing things that other people normally gloss over as non important downtime. Like, in a roleplaying game, it's not always a rollplaying game where dice are everything, and sometimes dice rolls exist but not in combat frequency. sometimes experience is awarded for clever roleplaying, or a good speech to a king, or overcoming foes or problems without even rolling dice.

Take Cyberpunk 2020 for instance. You could shoot people every 3.2 seconds, but over the course of a session you might get 5- 10 improvement points (like experience points). But you could also get 2 improvement points for doing "down time study". Meanwhile, your Techie or Netrunner could build a new piece of technology or write an awesome program, and you could easily award far more than 2 improvement points for the new thing (which roughly correlates to new magic item or spell in D&D), even though it boiled down to one or two die rolls, a pile of cash, and then weeks or months of downtime.

Generally, when characters are rewarded for creating something that takes a long time, it incentivizes creativity. Now be aware, that during the 20 days that two characters are making a couple of 1d4+1 weapons at a total cost of 1020 gold, they have already spent more money than they would ever get reselling these magic items (which are priced at 100-500 each, averaging 300 gp each if sold). Meanwhile, the Rogue, Paladin, and Cleric can spend 20 days killing monsters and clear far more than the XP awarded to the Bard and Wizard, to make matters worse, the Rogue actually found a +1 Bow and the Paladin got a Sun Sword in the treasure, so basically, it could easily play out that the Rogue and Paladin not only have magic weapons, but they also have nearly 3 weeks to level up during that "down time" where the Wizard and Bard are losing money (420gp more than buying would cost) and getting no XP, if we follow your Downtime Actions always = 0 XP rule.

I think it's all relative to the Campaign, and part of that is the style of players and their previous game systems experience.

Here's a really good idea to further this discussion.

Existing magic items are in the DMG, however, if you ever saw the magic item tomes from 2nd edition, you would know those are just the tip of the iceberg. What do you do if the players want to make a magic item that isn't in the DMG? How to do you calculate the level and cost? Do you have them go through extra steps like exploring to get exotic components? Do you compare it to other items from previous editions to find out the "rarity" or is it automatically rare legendary because they created it? Is there a die roll involved like an arcana check, or a series of die rolls toward final success (like in Spells & Magic research)? Do the wizards need their own forge or lab? Should the player be rewarded for introducing something completely new and creative, or would they be better served killing orcs with fireballs, in a hack & slash campaign?

And how do you suppose a Microgamer would respond to these questions?

Tempest_Stormwind

Jul 30, 2015 11:58:48

shintashi wrote:

#10

shintashi

Jul 30, 2015 12:44:43

I am aware of the formula theory, and how it is basically left up to the DM. I actually flipped the DMG to that page, handed it to my DM, and said, "so what do we have to do?". If you read it, you'll notice it isn't as clear as the 2nd edition. For example, if we did this 2nd edition style, you would learn the Magic weapon spell, then you would learn the enchanted item spell, then the permanancy spell, or hire someone for a lot of money to cast it. There were spells that allowed you to transfer the lost constitution to some proxy, and variations thereof to get around the constitution loss, but it would be a 16th level wizard, or a 12th level channeler.

Adapting some of that theory to 5th edition, you might #1, find the recipe, #2 require magic weapon (the DMG actually says no particular spell is required, which is shocking), then something that allows the 20 days to act as the ritual to make the magic weapon spell permanent. If the recipe is an approximation of material component values, plus exotic components, you might have to go quest for powdered jasper, the laughter of maidens, or the breath of a dragon, for example, depending on what the DM wants for that particular item.

Now looking at this chart, you can see that buying the magic item is actually cheaper than making it. Like, almost always. So you are being charged time and money, to get something you could have for less time and money. The real question is whether the formula is harder to find than the magic item shop that sells the item you want to make. In our case, +1 weapons? No. Finding a shop that sells them was easier than finding the formula. We actually offered to trade a 12th level wizard book full of spells for the Formula, though I'm not sure whether my DM accepted that or not - they were busy selling a +1 Bow to the Rogue when we addressed the issue.

MAGIC ITEM RARITY
Rarity Character Level Value
Common 1st or higher 50-100 gp
Uncommon 1st or higher 101-500 gp
Rare 5th or higher 501 -5,000 gp
Very rare 11th or higher 5,001 - 50,000 gp
Legendary 17th or higher 50,001+ gp
BUYING AND SELLING
Unless you decide your campaign works otherwise,
most magic items are so rare that they aren't available
for purchase. Common items, such as a potion of
healing, can be procured from an alchemis t, herbalist,
or spellcaster. Doing so is rarely as simple as walking
into a shop and selecting an item from a shelf. The seller
might ask for a service, rather than coin.
In a large city with an academy of magic or a major
temple, buying and selling magic items might be
possible, at your discretion. If your world includes a
large number of adventurers engaged in retrieving
ancient magic items, trade in these items might be more
common.

our DM decided otherwise, although i did manage to persuade him that +3 is the new +5. Last session i had to explain bows no longer give two attacks per round. Typically, in our current group, I am the voice of reason and balance. The guy who says "that's too much gold... no... that's too much exp, no no, we don't need a +10 sword that increases our Dexterity to 30...wait, no, we probably shouldn't be rolling on the Artifact tables"

My most recent experience: a request from my DM for Difficulty values for attempting my martial arts maneuvers without taking martial arts. Note that I scaled them to parallel 1st-9th level wizard spells, so this would be like a Barbarian asking what the Arcana DC is to cast Fireball and Wish...(insert picard Facepalm).

5th edition is only popular in our current group because of how leniant it is on people used to AD&D rules. The problem is those rules are set up for 0-3 million xp, not 0-300,000 xp. DMs want to award xp but they need to keep the scale in mind. It should be a 1:10 scale for XP, but the XP rewards are surprisingly similar to 1st and 2nd edition.

#11

Tempest_Stormwind

Jul 30, 2015 13:50:01

I didn't get to answer this bit earlier, but it's clearly weighing on your mind, so I suppose I'll deal with it now.

I'll answer with the baseline - what the rules say, and more or less what I'd do - and then supply how I think a microgamer would answer. Unlike you, I won't stoop to hyperbole for my presentation of a microgamer.

shintashi wrote:

#12

shintashi

Jul 31, 2015 7:47:00

For example, yesterday i was in a game with a thief who was wielding a +5 axe for backstabbing, with an 18/93 strength, dealing +10 damage on their backstab. The Thief also had 8 million gold and was no longer interested in monetary wealth, they only wanted magic items. They were level 4. This is an excellent example of the generic powergaming or munchkin appellatives. But it is important to understand that while hyperbolic examples of a particular style of gaming are truly hyperbolic, there is truly no such thing as a hyperbolic example of powergaming - it is by its very nature, hyperbolic on a frequent basis, therefore, the extreme is the norm, and the less extreme is actually more characteristic of generic "higher magic" or "higher power" campaigns - the power scales there work, but they work at higher power scales than might be functionally safe for low level campaigns.

It is important to recognize the same extremes exist in microgamers, and they should not be coddled or grouped together with low magic or low power campaigns with undue frequency. For example, the Microgamer would state that since the 3rd level-17th level examples of magic item creation or purchase rules were in the DMG, they simply did not exist as a reality that could be counted as part of the D&D experience, as everything in the DMG should be treated as atypical and outside the rules of bounded accuracy. Now personally, i find this sad, because one of my favorite races - the Aasimar, and one of my favorite parts of D&D - Spell Research, are both in the DMG now.

In AD&D, Permanency, Enchant Item, and other necessary components for Magic Item construction and other effects similar to the Supernatural Gifts on DMG pages 227-228 were in the realm of player characters, in the Players Handbook. Aasimar used to be Player accessible (Planewalkers handbook and the players guide for planescape, etc.). Spells & Magic was a players option that covered spell research.

So what happened in 5th edition? A lot of Player Material had the "brown cover" removed and replaced with a "blue" or "green" cover of DM guide labels. Microgamers consider anything DM only to be broken, over powered, and not useable material unless your DM is running a high level or high magic or weird game where they are personally taking responsibility. Basically, when customizing something new for D&D in 5th edititon, the microgamer pretends the material in the DMG does not exist, nor does the material in the monstrous manual. You only have the Players handbook material, and everything has to be based on Players handbook Pregen Stat characters WITHOUT FEATS (because those are optional only, and not part of the standard game) with no magic items or exotic races. In the microgamer universe, it is even questionable as to whether the Elemental Evil spells and Player Races are available, and most certainly not useable as reference for making suggestions to Wizards for New content, and certainly not useful for designing new spells. Actually, designing new spells is entirely unecessary in the Microgamer universe, because they would argue that if you want to do something, there is enough leeway in the existing classes and combinations that you can do whatever you want with the existing content (players handbook core typically being the only content in the universe), and if it would require something that is beyond that content, it is simply too powerful and broken and has no place in 5th edition...i.e., a catch 22.

With microgamers, you cant introduce new content because the existing content is good enough for everything,

but if the existing content is not good enough for a new idea, the new idea is too powerful and needs to be shot down.

Just because i think 8 million gold is too much for a 4th level character, it doesn't make me a microgamer. There's a pretty big grey area for Game Balance. Microgamers break it just as readily as power gamers. They don't cease being microgamers because they hit extremes, it is the extremes that define them.

#13

Tempest_Stormwind

Jul 31, 2015 10:20:00

For example, yesterday i was in a game with a thief who was wielding a +5 axe for backstabbing, with an 18/93 strength, dealing +10 damage on their backstab. The Thief also had 8 million gold and was no longer interested in monetary wealth, they only wanted magic items. They were level 4. This is an excellent example of the generic powergaming or munchkin appellatives.

#14

ankiyavon

Jul 31, 2015 14:24:52

This thread is ridiculous.

OP, you really need to work on your inclusiveness and tolerance. All I get out of this thread is "these people play differently than I do AND THAT IS BAD".

Whether you're talking about microgaming, powergaming, munchkins, whatever, you have all these terms for people who play even a little bit differently than you, and you seem to hate all of them.

Tempest_Stormwind wrote:

#15

shintashi

Jul 31, 2015 17:01:43

ankiyavan, welcome to the discussion!

You may have the topic confused for the intended goal, which is to address the opposite bell curve of disruptive gaming habits that have gradually become more popular, and how it has impacted the rules distribution in latter publications. Microgaming is a phenomenon I wish the gaming community to be aware off, and collecting the habits, hyperbole, and honest to gods real examples of the horrid consequences is necessary. There is plenty of sentiment and guidance for Powergaming, Munchkins, etc. But there is basically no one addressing the Microgaming aspect of Gaming.

In a previous example, I pointed out how Spell Construction and Permanency was migrated from the PHB to the DMG, and how Feats, went from Standard character Design to Optional. I Pointed out how the Theme that the Game assumes magic items, being switched to "the game assumes no magic items" drastically changes the Game.

As to the millions of XP the Rogue should have had, I pointed it out. They said something about the acquisition being based on mining adamantium or some such.

Different changes to rules from one edition to the next can shift the balance either toward the player, or toward the DM, however, with Microgamers, it is always away from the Player, even if what is normally shunted to the DM is intended for Players. This E6 genre mentioned earlier definitely sounds like a Microgaming Campaign setting, although I haven't played it personally.

Microgaming can also impact the Cosmology of a setting. Watching the timeline of certain NPCs rise to become unkillable deities while many of the forces of good, including NPCs and fantasy races reduced step by step in power, it paints a gradual mood shift. The shift is Lovecraftian in philosophy. Characters becoming more and more insignificant, muted. "Look at how insignificant you are. A tiny speck on a tiny pale blue dot in a vast sea of darkness".

Here's an example... I challenge any of you to track the progression through time from BECMI to 5th edition of the power scale of the Named Pit Fiends, the Solar Aasimon, the Eladrin,Lolth, and Tiamat, where appearances exist. In 5e it was telling when the Gold Dragon took a hit compared with the Red. Gold Dragons used to be blatantly superior.

But I suppose that's more of a moralist analysis of the changing of the guard... except for the fact that Microgamers tend to cheer for the bad guys... and the bad guys are winning.

#16

ankiyavon

Jul 31, 2015 19:44:51

I agree that there are theoretically facts to discuss.

But you're not discussing facts, you're starting from the position that this is a horrible thing and no one should ever support anything like it, and you want people to agree with you that the game is dying because it's changing slightly away from your own preferences.

(Inasmuch as I accept that this is a real term, by the way, I would qualify as a microgamer. Except as a real thing, not as your hyperbolic example. Half of the things you are saying make no sense, and the other half might be true in theory but you've instilled them with an enormous moralistic complex that has no reason to exist.)

An example of an actual trend:

Magic item creation rules began in the DMG (and magic items in general). That's where they were prior to 3E. In 3E, they shifted to the PHB (although magic items themselves remained in the DMG, it was expected that players would read them to learn how their item creation abilities worked), and stayed there in 4E, and now in 5E, they're back in the DMG. This is not a new thing and it is not the end of the world, it's simply a return to a different set of assumptions that used to be the default.

shintashi wrote:

#17

shintashi

Jul 31, 2015 20:15:47

The game can be played any way anyone wants

#18

ankiyavon

Jul 31, 2015 21:37:00

shintashi wrote:

#19

MechaPilot

Jul 31, 2015 21:55:07

ankiyavon wrote:

#20

ankiyavon

Jul 31, 2015 22:29:30

MechaPilot wrote:

#21

Awakened_Gazebo

Aug 01, 2015 13:12:34

I love playing a microgamer*

... In call of Chtulhu.But thats an entirely differnt game than D&D. In those games its not about reducing the monsters HP to 0 first, its about gaining as many and quirky mental disabilities and the winner is the guy that dies the most entertaining way possible, preferably last.

Weve also had chtulhu microgamers spill over in our D&D or shadowrun games, not understanding the genre differenses and being a total liability and a great annoyance to the rest of the table when they are whining about the others being munchkins with 16 or higher stats, or walking around in armour more than ½ an hour a day etc. And naturally vice versa with D&D players coming into our Chtulhu game... usually they tend to die first... kinda like the Chulhu players in D&D now that I think about it

Im actually not sure if we even had a real defined term for that sort of player. We have power-gamers**, rules lawyers and munchkins as derogative terms

*The non-disruptive sort ( but then again, I dont think thats a microgamer in Shintashis eyes. I think his definition is the disruptive low power player)

** we see a power-gamer as something negative and unfun. A player with a cool character that happens to also be powerful isnt a power-gamer though

#22

Yunru

Aug 01, 2015 17:53:59

I once ruined a game of call of chtulhu, story wise. Through a completely unplanned series of events, involving two different players following two different npcs, a plot essential character was killed, unravelling the story and jumping straight to the end game.

#23

Orethalion

Aug 02, 2015 7:09:09

ankiyavon wrote:

#24

ankiyavon

Aug 02, 2015 11:36:10

Orethalion wrote:

#25

Orethalion

Aug 02, 2015 17:15:29

ankiyavon wrote: