OK, where to even begin.
Maybe I’ll begin by saying that you are allowed to like D&D. I do not and I prefer other games. But right out the gate, I would recommend not playing D&D.
When my friends and I play TTRPGs, we are looking for a great story. One that we can tell as a group. One that includes all the things we want to include. One that keeps everyone engaged at all times. One that lets us be creative with our imagination. One that trusts us to play the game without checking to rules so often that it disrupts the fun. One that keeps busy adults entertained for the next month until our next session.
BIG GRIPE #1: D&D does not trust the player to play the game creatively.
D&D gives players very rigid rules for everything. The conversion rates for money, the weight of objects, the difference between a running long jump and a standing long jump. If narrative is your goal, this works against you and limits you to playing within rules that may not even let you succeed in the creative solution you came up with. If you want to see narrative come first, you need to wave your hand at all these small fiddly details and let them take the back seat. Or even the trunk. Consider changing rules to be more vague and allow for creativity.
For example, consider a simple D&D spell like Move Earth:
Choose an area of terrain no larger than 40 feet on a side within range. You can reshape dirt, sand, or clay in the area in any manner you choose for the duration. You can raise or lower the area’s elevation, create or fill in a trench, erect or flatten a wall, or form a pillar. The extent of any such changes can’t exceed half the area’s largest dimension. So, if you affect a 40-foot square, you can create a pillar up to 20 feet high, raise or lower the square’s elevation by up to 20 feet, dig a trench up to 20 feet deep, and so on.
It takes 10 minutes for these changes to complete. At the end of every 10 minutes you spend concentrating on the spell, you can choose a new area of terrain to affect.
Because the terrain’s transformation occurs slowly, creatures in the area can’t usually be trapped or injured by the ground’s movement.
This spell can’t manipulate natural stone or stone construction. Rocks and structures shift to accommodate the new terrain. If the way you shape the terrain would make a structure unstable, it might collapse.
Similarly, this spell doesn’t directly affect plant growth. The moved earth carries any plants along with it.
-D&D Beyond, Basic Rules (2014), pg. 263
Immediately, using this spell requires a lawyer to cast. Is 10 minutes enough time to cast this spell? Is the target within 40 feet away? Is 20 feet high enough to reach my target? Is there even any dirt, sand or clay around to move since I can’t move stone or stone structures? Can I use a bonus action to BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.
For as open ended as this spell is, it still limits the caster to distance and time. What if we rewrote this to be vague, still contain a limitation and give the caster creativity.
Move Earth - The caster can slowly move loose earthy materials like dirt, sand, clay, etc. from a short distance away.
What about the time limitation? This kind of question, within the situation, I leave up to the table of players. If the creative action taken by the player sounds cool to everyone, then it rolls in favor of the players.
What about moving the plant life with the dirt? If this is relevant, the answer should lean in favor of the player's desired outcome.
What about trapping enemies? The earth moves slowly, so in a case like this the GM would decide to rule in favor of the enemy.
Can they move mud? Sure. The rule states “loose earthy materials like” which give the players the freedom to interpret the rule. The rule also uses the word “etc” to open up speculation.
Is the caster close enough? Well, are they a short distance away, yes or no? This is another question I leave up to the table. If a ‘yes’ will yield a more interesting result, then ‘yes’. Air on the side of fun.
What if the caster wants to make a huge, game breaking sized pillar of earth and end the campaign in the first session? Then the GM should have the foresight to see that the player is trying to extort the rules past the point of creativity. The GM can add modifiers to the roll to make it very difficult or inflict lasting effects on the character after success. Or if they are truly an unfun power-gamer, just boot them from your group.
Can the moving earth destabilize and knock down a structure? Yes, but leave this to the players to figure out. Let this be one of many discoverable uses of this spell. By listing it in the description, you show your hand. You don’t trust the players to be creative enough to use the toolkit your game provides them.
The last thing I’ll say about powers and magic in TTRPGs is that the GM and players should all be familiar with the acting rules of “Yes, and”. When improv actors create a scene from nothing, the actors build off of each other. They don’t have some sort of secret chemistry, they just accept whatever the other actor creates and build on it. If you’ve seen “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” you know what I mean. The actors trust each other not to try to dominate the scene with their own input and instead let the scene generate itself from everyone’s different input. This is how players should approach TTRPGs if they want to center their games more around narrative.
BIG GRIPE #2: Rolling dice is rife with ludo-narrative dissonance
If you want to attempt to do something risky in D&D, you roll a D20 and check the outcome against a predetermined number. Rolling higher means success, rolling lower means failure. Actions now occur in binary; they happen or they don’t. You get to play the game or you don’t. Only on a success does the player impact the game in any way. So taking higher risks is punished with the increasing possibility that you cannot perform that action.
Now, consider an alternative: the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) system.
This system requires each player to have only two six-sided dice. You roll them and add them together. This creates a more mathematical approach to risk taking when rolling dice.
I won’t get into the entire game design disaster that is rolling dice, but you need to know two things. First, if you roll one die (any size) the probability of getting each number is equally likely. This is called a uniform distribution. The probability of getting 1 or 6 on a D6 is 1/6.
All of that changes permanently when you start rolling more than two dice at a time and adding them together. 2D6 ranges from 2 to 12 and it creates a bell curve. The most common outcome is 7 because it has the most combinations when you add the results of those dice; it is 6/36. The probability of getting a 12 is 1/36. Now there is an expectation; you can expect numbers at and around 7. A critical success is just as likely as a critical failure. This means that rolling one die does not allow the player to have an expected number. There is no outcome that is more likely. The player cannot take a calculated risk when rolling one die.
To explore probability distributions more see the site anydice.com. (I'm still a math teacher.)
Where D&D presents a binary Success/Failure system, PbtA offers something more collaborative and interesting. Something more in line with “Yes, and”.
When someone rolls a 10-12, this is a success. This means the player that rolled, gets to tell the story about what their success looks like. The GM sits back and lets them tell the story. Again, this involves trust between the GM and players. Of course, you wouldn’t let someone run away with telling the entire outcome of the entire campaign just because they rolled a 12. If they do, you just eject them from your game. I’ve done it before.
A roll of 7-9 is a success with a complication. What the person wanted to happen happens, but the GM adds something that moves the scene in an unexpected direction. If they cast a fire spell, maybe they succeed but it's too much and burns an ally as well. If they make a daring jump, maybe they make it, but they crash land into something. If they throw something, maybe it lands perfectly where it was meant to, but breaks. This should sound a lot like “Yes, and” again. The goal of the GM here is not to wreck the players plans, but to transform them so the threat/tension escalates or changes direction.
A roll of 2-6 (we just say 6-), is a failure. This means that the GM decides what happens. Maybe the GM just wants the players to succeed and lets it happen anyway. Or the GM says it doesn’t happen, the threat is revealed to be much bigger and gets the upperhand. Maybe a player succeeds, but suddenly success is much worse than failure.
In one of my games, one player (Matt) was going in for a kill, but the players had never actually killed anyone in the campaign before. So I let the roll of 2 decide that Matt kills the bad guy by cutting his head clean off. Blood goes everywhere, everyone else in the party freezes, the enemies gasp and take a step back. I forced everyone to suddenly confront the reality of actually beheading a person and the gravity of it on everyone’s psyche. Matt's character, was forever changed and traumatized by his actions. He could never make successful attempts to console, reason, or emotionally appeal to anyone else. As a table, we all agreed that he saw violence as a fast and easy solution, but hated that it was the only one he ever wanted to use. So in the future when something needed to be killed, everyone worked together to enable him to do it because he was the only one that could bear the emotional weight. He got exactly what he wanted and it was nothing like he expected.
All this is to say that PbtA is meant to make every roll impact the scene you are playing out. When you roll, it's not for success. It's for control of the narrative. Adopt the TTRPG philosophy "Play to find out."
Recommended Reading
Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton
I had to read this for an Improv course I took in college. I use what I learned from it every day when I teach. In a way, it was much more relevant to teaching than some of the other filler material I had to do in education courses. This book will help with leading a TTRPG group too.
Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass by 1985Games
This is the current TTRPG my friends and I are playing and we’ve stripped away the 5E system to make it more in line with what I talk about above. The game has lots of good ideas, but they are held back by the 5E system. If the writers pivoted early and turned it to be PbtA, I think it would really sing. The other biggest issue here is that Obojima is meant to be Studio Ghibli inspired. Cosmetically, it is, but using the rules-heavy combat-centered 5E system is a contradiction. Ghibli media is not combat based. Its world building and story above all. Obojima needs to get out of its own way.
Mythic Bastionland and Into the Odd by Chris McDowall
These two books make use of distilling rules into flavorful little sentences. They are rules light, flavor heavy. You get very clear direction with the descriptions and rules, but you also have room to interpret and get creative. These books trust the GM and its players and I find that refreshing. Looking back at D&D after reading these books feels like putting training wheels back on a motorcycle.