Hex Crawl 23 #56: Fifth Edition's Incrementalism (and Hidden Catastrophism)

 Two hexes southeast and two northeast of Alakran.

 

Let's while away the time it takes to cross this barren tract of land with the first of a series reflecting on my experience using Fifth Edition D&D to run this hex crawl's campaign.

The first issue I want to talk about is something I now call incrementalism vs. catastrophism in game design. I brought it up a long time ago but with different terminology. So let's define these things.

An incrementalist approach in game design advances action in gradual steps. Elements are slowly built up or worn down. Moves advance the game state in limited rather than victory-defining ways. Hit point mechanisms in D&D and other games are a perfect example. 

A catastrophist approach allows moves that drastically affect the game state, reaching victory in one difficult move, eliminating or bypassing a component of the game. Chainmail's original combat results table, where any figure could kill any other with a good enough dice roll, is the prototype for effects that bypass hit points entirely in D&D and its descendants, such as save-or-die poison, incapacitating effects, and so on. 

The idea to inflict poison in hit point damage rather than save-or-die, for example, can be sighted as early as 1976, where it appears in Jennell Jaquays' notes for Borshak's Lair in The Dungeoneer, though it may have still an earlier precedent; and poison via HP is now almost completely dominant except in the most die-hard of old-school catacombs.

So, one thing evident in 5th edition (and somewhat left over from 4th) is that most catastrophic effects have been reduced to incremental ones. This is true of incapacitating effects like hold, blinding, paralyzation, even petrification, which have now been drastically reduced in effectiveness by repeating saves at the end of the affected being's turns. The intent is clear: being out of action is no fun. However, some people feel the effects have become much less powerful, making monsters and control spells less scary. There are also arbitrary exceptions to the rule, like the charm person spell (but not, for example, harpy charm).

Death, too, has lost its sting with the death save mechanism, again kept over from 4th. The "deathwatch" would be fine, if stopping it were a little more difficult. But with the number of ranged healing spells, characters become rubber dolls, knocked down by huge amounts of damage (if they avoid an insta-kill) and bouncing back up again to fight as if nothing happened. 

Although a number of houserules for grittier combat are proposed in the DMG, I personally like the idea of using the exhaustion mechanism, which is fairly impervious to some of the cheesier ways to recover - so, you gain a level of exhaustion when you're brought back from 0 hp and when you fail a death save. Because 6 exhaustion = dead with no excuses, and because the character is mildly inconvenienced up to 2 levels and starts really feeling it at 3, these rules seem like a good way to reel in the feel of immortality that sets in around 3rd level and above, without hitting characters with completely put-of-range challenges.

So, the 5th edition incrementalist rules changes (relative to Pathfinder and 3rd edition, anyway) have been griped about voluminously. But another consequence of 5th edition's combat-focused inheritance from 4th is that many non-combat aspects of the game have been made easier and less interactive, resulting in catastrophic rather than incremental solutions. As some examples:

• Perhaps it is not fair to burden 5th edition with the perpetually controversial ability of fairly low-level D&D spells to punch holes in intrigue and mystery scenarios -- ESP and speak with dead in particular. But by making such spells as identify and detect magic subject to ritual casting, effectively taking up no resources but time,  much of the mystery of magic places and items in-adventure has been taken away.
• Equally annoying is the "cantripification" of non-combat dungeon challenges like lighting an area, opening chests safely, low-level repairs and construction, or cleaning off slime and gloop. What used to be accomplished with material equipment and ingenuity, or at best at the cost of a spell slot that could be used in combat,  is now accomplished with an inexhaustible array of cantrips. Apparently, magicians should be magic, but it's also my belief that low-level wizards should still take part in the material engineering challenges that are part of adventuring fun.
• I'll have more top say about 5e's abandonment of the economic game, but already if you are trying to use domain-level economic elements, there are a few poorly thought-through spell ideas, like the strategic use of plant growth which at character level 5 lets you double the harvest of a square mile of land for a year.

 Many of these problems present themselves as power balance problems. And indeed, catastrophic effects require their own catastrophic countermeasures, which when done too obviously get called out as clunky "silver bullets." All this is playing to the narrative that catastrophic effects are no fun and poor design, but there's also a sense in which an overly incremental environments are boring, lacking tension and "wow" factor just as much as the expectation that every RPG challenge will be a perfectly balanced combat arena.