D&D 5E UA and depth of complexity

Sacrosanct said:

Whereas I agree many tables pushed the rogue into a DPS role, I think this statement is more about playstyle than the game itself.

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No, it's about the game.

The game, IMO, doesn't emphasize combat over exploration.

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That's true, but it's not true of the design of classes.

For example, in our games exploration is probably more than combat, and thieves in 2e really shined as skill monkeys in that regard (2e allowed you to distribute your points to your skills how you saw fit, rather than flat progression of 1e).

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No, 2e thieves are lousy as skill monkeys. Yes, the 2e Thieves Handbook is one of the best RPG supplements ever written, but it never addresses the basic problems with the class.

1) Leaving aside that the NWP system is welded on to the 2e framework rather than a strong integral part of it, it remains true that the NWP system is the best skill system 2e had. Yet, the thief had the worst access and progression to NWP of any class. Maybe if the thief got a NWP every level or every other level, you could argue for the thief in the skill money role, but it didn't.

2) The thief skills represented only a very narrow fixed band of skills, and they suffered from a huge problem in utility. At low levels, thief skills were so unreliable that in effect the thief was not skilled at all. Failure rates for most skills were in the 60-70% range, and the skills were such that failure penalties were usually very high - often death or immediate risk of death. Don't try to solve 'Tomb of Horrors' using skill checks. I've always said that you can tell how skilled the player of a AD&D era thief is, by the fact that the skilled ones almost never use their thief skills for anything. They are best treated as a sort of 'saving throw' rather than an actual skill. By high level though, when your thief skills were starting to get to be reliable, virtually every other class had a more reliable means of solving out of combat problems - spells. The cleric was a vastly better trap finder than you, and so was a wizard with a wand. The cleric was better at moving silently than you were. The wizard was vastly better at hiding than you were, seeing as he didn't need shadows and could freely move around while hiding. The wizard was also a vastly better wall climber than you (he didn't even need a wall!). And your skills were still so unreliable, you were probably better off in the long run letting the fighter just trigger the trap than checking for it. The abilities to distribute your points as you saw fit, didn't make you a skill monkey - it meant only that there was at least 1 skill you could be sort of reliable in at low level, before magic made your job obsolete. By the time you had reliable skills in limited areas, you had to really work to make them relevant.

Doesn't 5e directly address this, with feats like Lucky that are available to anyone?

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No. Then you are just a lucky member of some other class.

In fiction there is a whole range of characters which either don't make sense when translated to D&D or are very lackluster when translated to D&D. Consider the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. How are they a member of the party? Are they just 1st level henchmen? Why are they so valuable? Just handwaving the problem aside as power of plot actually highlights the problem rather than solves it. Or consider Tika Waylon from Dragonlance? She's a fighter (at first) only because nothing else makes sense. Probably the most obvious example of this is Saka from 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'. There are actually 'fighters' in the setting, who can compete with magic wielders on equal or almost equal terms. Saka however isn't one of them. Sure, he levels up in fighter in the third season under the tutelage of a new master, but most of the time Saka's contributions are more ineffable. Yet, he clearly is as important member of the team as anyone else in it, despite being the ordinary on a team of demi-gods. Some game systems can handle that; D&D isn't one of them.

Celebrim said:

The Sherlock Holmes. D&D has never had a viable true skill monkey, and the increased emphasis of combat over exploration has only made it worse, which is why rogue seems to have morphed into a striker/dps role.

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Even the old Thief had a backstab that could do a lot of damage, even if it was rare he got to use it. 3e's version, Sneak Attack, was a lot clearer and more useful and gave the Rogue something worthwhile to do in combat, but it could still be useless a frustrating proportion of the time. 4e & 5e made SA more consistently useful.

3e also made the Rogue a 'skill monkey,' at least compared to everyone else. (The sheer number of skills in 3e and the rank system did make it very hard to be genuinely great at wide enough range of things to have a character who's prime contribution was his skillset, though, I'll admit. You could go crazy with one skill, like a Diplomancer build, and optimize yourself far enough out ahead of the curve to be downright broken. But, for the most part, you had to invest max ranks just to keep up, with the swinginess of contested rolls further complicating the attempt.) While you could get really good at some skills, you became increasingly awful at others - the gap between untrained or cross-class and max-ranks could completely overwhelm the d20.

4e & 5e both solved that last problem, in cosmetically different ways. 4e by scaling skills rapidly with level, so trained was always about +5 better than untrained, but characters could still get big numbers at high level. 5e scaled only trained skills with level, but, under the BA philosophy, scaled them so little that they couldn't overwhelm the d20, either.

The Expertise of the Rogue and Bard is about the only way to really stand out with a skill, so they're candidates for the Sherlock Holmes or other Skill-Monkey concepts. For a non-magical one, the Mastermind Rogue archetype seems as close as we're likely to see without a full class devoted to such a thing.

The Normal. D&D has never had a viable class representing someone with intangible skills, such as luck, destiny, wits, or simply birthright.

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Hps model one type of luck, and any bonus could be conceived as luck rather than skill, if that's you're concept. Noble birth has been a possibility going way back. 3e had the Aristocrat and Expert as barely-PC-worthy oddball options. 2e had kits, 4e Backgrounds & Themes, and 5e backgrounds that could cover birthright. 4e did have the option of an epic destiny, if you were willing to wait to 21st level to write it on your character sheet. The 4e Warlord could model softer or less direct 'skill' (luck, birthright, destiny) with it's ally-boosting exploits. Fans even took it to an extreme with Warlord builds that were indifferent-to-poor warriors in their own right, 'lazy' or 'Princess' builds, that handed out actions rather than taking them.

So, yes, D&D has covered that in the past.

Typically it tries to shoehorn those persons into a 'fighter' class, but having the same class for gifted everyman and leader of soldiers and weapon master is problematic when typically fighter as implemented isn't even very good at what it's supposed to be, much less what it isn't.

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The fighter has been a highly-customizable 'weapon-master' in 3e, a staunch front-line one in 4e, and a quite lethal one in 2e & 5e. But, yes, it's been little more than that.

Animist Without Baggage.

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Shaman? Yep.

Hunter Without Baggage. Ranger is in the same boat.

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5e Outlander background works, the problem is appending it to the right class. Fighter may be a little lacking in skills, Rogue in toughness. Barbarian may be culturally off.
Or one of those may be just right, depending on your exact concept.

(Un)Holy Warrior without Baggage. Paladin is even worse....Why can't you out of the box make a holy warrior viable for every cult, theology, or deity you could conceive of? Or in other words, why is Paladin so very unlike Cleric, considering their conceptual similarities?

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MCing to Cleric is an option, if Cleric is otherwise acceptable. This sounds like something where PrCs could be good.

Barbarian without Baggage: Barbarian is doubly problematic. Originally intended to be a generic vaguely Conan inspired warrior from a primitive culture, the Barbarian never quite explained why this needed to be a thing.

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Nod. If any class could have 'just' been a Background, it's this one. But, it was a full class in the 3e PH1, so it'd've been undiplomatic to cut it or downgrade it so far.

Agreed. In particular, I think "leader" in the sense of "leader of armed men" is stealing something that ought to belong to the fighter, and the charismatic or intelligent fighter in particular.

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There's sadly no room left on the fighter chassis for that kind of thing. The PDK illustrates that.

The fighter tries to do too much, conceptually, with a design that's too focused and locked-in to contributing DPR. Sub-classes can't pull far enough away from that to do something else to a significant enough degree.

5e, to come through with a fighter that was nominally 'best at fighting,' put the fighter in a DPR box it can't be designed back out of. It needs to be left there, and clarified as being only for such concepts. New non-magic-using classes are needed to cover the wide range of things the fighter can't be stretched to handle.

Elfcrusher said:

I agree to varying degrees with your assessments, but aren't those flaws of existing classes, not empty design spaces?

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They are both. The flaws in existing classes is that they don't fill the necessary design space, but leave weird holes all over the place. In prior editions of D&D, designers tried to patch those holes by creating new classes specifically tailored to a particular part of the empty design space. Most of these however were poor fits to the whole hole, leaving yet more unfilled space.

The problem with your analogy is that it is a box is a poor analogy for a game system. Boxes are rigid. But a game system can remodel to fit more design space however it wishes. But even using your analogy, classes are rarely well fitted together so that regardless of your concept it either fits to a class or can be approximated by some amount of multi-classing between classes. Consider the simple example of a DM wanting to guard a temple of god of Justice sans Mercy with fanatical Templars, or create a war band of fanatical brainwashed storm troopers in the service of some nationalistic impulse. If he tries to fit a typical implementation of Barbarian to this task, it is in many ways well designed. But he will still be forced to deal with a class that has skills in nature not religion and military tactics, and which is supposed to be chaotic rather than lawful. The class is smaller than it needs to be, and its rigid and irregular shape makes it difficult to move into other design space.

The problem isn't a packing problem. It's a problem in making well shaped pieces.

Celebrim said:

No, it's about the game.

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No, it's about playstyle. Otherwise, show me in actual game rules where is says that you will should be playing in one particular pillar over the others. I don't recall a quote like that anywhere. Maybe I'm wrong and you can show it to me.

That's true, but it's not true of the design of classes.

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Yes it is. Classes are designed with all three pillars in mind. That's why rogues have a lot of class abilities that help out of combat, and things like remarkable athlete, non-combat spells, etc all exist

No, 2e thieves are lousy as skill monkeys. Yes, the 2e Thieves Handbook is one of the best RPG supplements ever written, but it never addresses the basic problems with the class.

1) Leaving aside that the NWP system is welded on to the 2e framework rather than a strong integral part of it, it remains true that the NWP system is the best skill system 2e had. Yet, the thief had the worst access and progression to NWP of any class. Maybe if the thief got a NWP every level or every other level, you could argue for the thief in the skill money role, but it didn't.

2) The thief skills represented only a very narrow fixed band of skills, and they suffered from a huge problem in utility. At low levels, thief skills were so unreliable that in effect the thief was not skilled at all. Failure rates for most skills were in the 60-70% range, and the skills were such that failure penalties were usually very high - often death or immediate risk of death. Don't try to solve 'Tomb of Horrors' using skill checks. I've always said that you can tell how skilled the player of a AD&D era thief is, by the fact that the skilled ones almost never use their thief skills for anything. They are best treated as a sort of 'saving throw' rather than an actual skill. By high level though, when your thief skills were starting to get to be reliable, virtually every other class had a more reliable means of solving out of combat problems - spells. The cleric was a vastly better trap finder than you, and so was a wizard with a wand. The cleric was better at moving silently than you were. The wizard was vastly better at hiding than you were, seeing as he didn't need shadows and could freely move around while hiding. The wizard was also a vastly better wall climber than you (he didn't even need a wall!). And your skills were still so unreliable, you were probably better off in the long run letting the fighter just trigger the trap than checking for it. The abilities to distribute your points as you saw fit, didn't make you a skill monkey - it meant only that there was at least 1 skill you could be sort of reliable in at low level, before magic made your job obsolete. By the time you had reliable skills in limited areas, you had to really work to make them relevant.

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This simply isn't true. In 2e, you got to choose how you distributed you points. A 1st level halflng thief with 17 DEX could have a Move Silently score of 55%, and hide in shadows of 55%. Don't wear armor and that goes to 65% and 60% respectively. And that's at 1st level. At 2nd level you can bump those up to 80% and 75% respectively. That's just an example. You got to choose how to specialize, and if you wanted to min/max in a particular skill area, it was very easy to do so

No. Then you are just a lucky member of some other class.

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The net result is the same though. So why would you want another class/subclass that had lucky built right in if you could have it as a feat anyway? Seems like that's incredibly redundant, and a waste of time and white space.

Tony Vargas said:

Even the old Thief had a backstab that could do a lot of damage, even if it was rare he got to use it.

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Not only was it rare that he got to use it, but at best it meant that for one round he did about as much damage as a fighter. After weapon specialization, even that wasn't true.

3e's version, Sneak Attack, was a lot clearer and more useful and gave the Rogue something worthwhile to do in combat, but it could still be useless a frustrating proportion of the time...3e also made the Rogue a 'skill monkey,' at least compared to everyone else.

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The 3e implementation of Rogue is my all time favorite (just as in many ways its my least favorite implementation of 'fighter', elegant though the design is). But it's greatly hindered by the tentative cautious implementation of the skill system in 3e. It's almost like the 3e designers were afraid that skills might have too big of an impact on the game, so they toned them down to of tertiary importance. A more robust confident implementation of the skills, combined with a decently explained and well-called out 'stunting' system would have solved the problem perfectly.

The Expertise of the Rogue and Bard is about the only way to really stand out with a skill, so they're candidates for the Sherlock Holmes or other Skill-Monkey concepts. For a non-magical one, the Mastermind Rogue archetype seems as close as we're likely to see without a full class devoted to such a thing.

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Probably. I consider it the single hardest design problem relating to classes in D&D. I've been working on it for years, and never quite been happy with the results. I'm getting there, but since I'm one of the few really forging into this territory, it's slow going. The trick is come up with a way to differentiate being really skillful from being magical. I don't want to limit skill use by the same sort limitations magic has (number of times per day, specifically) because skills don't really feel like that and attempts to explain them in that manner run into disassociated mechanics.

Hps model one type of luck, and any bonus could be conceived as luck rather than skill, if that's you're concept.

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Yes. The trick is doing that in a way that feels unique - neither a spell nor simply high skill - and then balancing with both. One problem is that you want to discourage going 'nova' with the PC's luck, resulting in some of the problems observed with pace of play and spells.

Nod. If any class could have 'just' been a Background, it's this one. But, it was a full class in the 3e PH1, so it'd've been undiplomatic to cut it or downgrade it so far.

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I think it needs and deserves the same treatment Thief got when it broadened its concept out to Rogue. The core idea of a martial combat whose strength is more a matter of willpower and emotion than consummate skill is I think a good one. But the implementation is poor.

dave2008 said:

We have already seen a pass at prestige classes. I think we may see another go at them down the road. I also think we will eventually see more feats. But I am with Cap'n Kobold, I don't think we will see metamagic or maneuvers extend to all classes. For better or worse, they don't want to revise existing classes. Even an eventually Ranger revision will be an addition and not a replacement.

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Prestige classes got shot down hard in the survey: the concept, not the specific implementation. They've said that one is DOA for the forseeable future.

Feat chains are also a no go, on their basic design principles. Metamagic will remains Sorcerer schtick, for sure.

I can forsee UA with more feats, and more spells.

Sacrosanct said:

No, it's about playstyle.

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I've been playing for more than 30 years now. I'm not going to get into a playground, "I'm rubber; you're glue..." argument with someone that flashes from one non sequitur to another.

This simply isn't true. In 2e, you got to choose how you distributed you points.

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Didn't I just talk about that? Didn't I mention my admiration of the 2e Thieves Handbook? At what point did you decide the problem had to be that I just didn't know the rules?

A 1st level halflng thief with 17 DEX could have a Move Silently score of 55%, and hide in shadows of 55%. Don't wear armor and that goes to 65% and 60% respectively. And that's at 1st level. At 2nd level you can bump those up to 80% and 75% respectively. That's just an example.

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It's an example I covered in the post you quoted, yet you are responding with what is essentially my own evidence to contradict me? I don't even think you've bothered to read closely enough to understand what I'm saying. I can concede all of what you just wrote their without contradiction.

Do you have any idea how many hours of play time I have playing AD&D era thieves? It's a lot.

The net result is the same though. So why would you want another class/subclass that had lucky built right in if you could have it as a feat anyway? Seems like that's incredibly redundant, and a waste of time and white space.

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You seem to have a bad habit of responding only to the part where I don't explain my viewpoint. If you would read the next paragraph, perhaps my viewpoint would not seem quite so inexplicable. No, quite obviously, the result is not the same. But to describe it in yet another way, what I'm going for is an archetypal fairy book hero, of the "Valiant Tailor" mold. Claiming that the Valiant Taylor is just a fighter who also happens to be lucky, defeats the whole point that the Valiant Taylor is not actually the hero he is mistaken for, and so must rely on a solution that isn't (only) prowess at arms. I'm talking about an 'everyman hero' class, who has narrative power or plot protection as it's primary feature. No class can do that presently, and certainly any class that could would have to give up other tools of narrative force. That is to say, a spell is a sort of tool (a very powerful tool) of narrative force that allows the player to assert a certain truth about the environment, transforming the scene in some way. What I'm talking about is a different tool of narrative force, that would be implemented differently both mechanically and thematically.

Celebrim said:

A more robust confident implementation of the skills, combined with a decently explained and well-called out 'stunting' system would have solved the problem perfectly. ...

I consider it the single hardest design problem relating to classes in D&D. .. The trick is come up with a way to differentiate being really skillful from being magical.

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Think about what people say about someone who's really skillful. "He's a wizard with computers." "That surgeon has worked miracles." "It's like music from God." "He has magic hands."



In the fantasy genre, magic is strictly supernatural. It's not irrational, but the repeatable procedures you go through to get a magical effect to not map to those that produce similar effects, naturally. You want to heal someone, you don't treat the wound or given them medicine, you chant and wave a feathers at them. You want to destroy an army, you don't charge into it swinging weapons, you chant and wave a staff at them.

The line between skill and magic isn't what you accomplish, but how you accomplish it. And that doesn't demand a hard game mechanic outside of things like wanting anti-magic fields or curses only magic can remove.

I don't want to limit skill use by the same sort limitations magic has (number of times per day, specifically) because skills don't really feel like that

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A mechanic like n/day isn't about how you do things, just how often you do them - and that can be nothing more than a matter of game balance or dramatic pacing.

and attempts to explain them in that manner run into disassociated mechanics.

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If you accept that 'dissociated mechanics' is a real thing, you've already failed. It's like you're trying to design an airplane without challenging the notion (held with some conviction at the close of the 19th century, in spite of, y'know, birds) that heavier-than-air flight is impossible.

Yes. The trick is doing that in a way that feels unique - neither a spell nor simply high skill - and then balancing with both. One problem is that you want to discourage going 'nova' with the PC's luck, resulting in some of the problems observed with pace of play and spells.

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Usage limitations other than (and/or more flexible than) 'per day,' can help with that, putting pacing (and thus nova'ing) more in the hands of the DM.

I think it needs and deserves the same treatment Thief got when it broadened its concept out to Rogue. The core idea of a martial combat whose strength is more a matter of willpower and emotion than consummate skill is I think a good one. But the implementation is poor.

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So, what? Rage would be one of several alternatives? Or would it just have less baggage/more flexible 'fluff' attached to it?

Celebrim said:

They are both. The flaws in existing classes is that they don't fill the necessary design space, but leave weird holes all over the place. In prior editions of D&D, designers tried to patch those holes by creating new classes specifically tailored to a particular part of the empty design space. Most of these however were poor fits to the whole hole, leaving yet more unfilled space.

The problem with your analogy is that it is a box is a poor analogy for a game system. Boxes are rigid. But a game system can remodel to fit more design space however it wishes. But even using your analogy, classes are rarely well fitted together so that regardless of your concept it either fits to a class or can be approximated by some amount of multi-classing between classes. Consider the simple example of a DM wanting to guard a temple of god of Justice sans Mercy with fanatical Templars, or create a war band of fanatical brainwashed storm troopers in the service of some nationalistic impulse. If he tries to fit a typical implementation of Barbarian to this task, it is in many ways well designed. But he will still be forced to deal with a class that has skills in nature not religion and military tactics, and which is supposed to be chaotic rather than lawful. The class is smaller than it needs to be, and its rigid and irregular shape makes it difficult to move into other design space.

The problem isn't a packing problem. It's a problem in making well shaped pieces.

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Topologically equivalent.

Celebrim said:

I've been playing for more than 30 years now.

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Congrats. I've been playing for 35. So what. This means nothing.

I'm not going to get into a playground, "I'm rubber; you're glue..." argument with someone that flashes from one non sequitur to another.

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non sequitur? You claimed the game never had a true skill monkey and ever increased emphasis on combat and I disagreed. I said that's a playstyle choice, and not a game design choice and you doubled down and said it was the game. So show me where in the rules where it says combat is the pillar you should be playing more importantly over the others.

Didn't I just talk about that? Didn't I mention my admiration of the 2e Thieves Handbook? At what point did you decide the problem had to be that I just didn't know the rules?



It's an example I covered in the post you quoted, yet you are responding with what is essentially my own evidence to contradict me? I don't even think you've bothered to read closely enough to understand what I'm saying. I can concede all of what you just wrote their without contradiction.

Do you have any idea how many hours of play time I have playing AD&D era thieves? It's a lot.

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You said:

At low levels, thief skills were so unreliable that in effect the thief was not skilled at all. Failure rates for most skills were in the 60-70% range

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And I said that's not true, because it's not. I gave an example as to why. A 2nd level thief with an 80% chance is not low. And at 3rd level, it can go to 95% and 90% respectively. Sorry, but your claims are not true and easily proven as such.