D&D General Explain Bounded Accuracy to Me (As if I Was Five)

[FrozenNorth]

I doubt bounded accuracy was intended as a weapon in the eternal battle against the DM.

Regardless of intention, the fact that 5e adopted unified proficiency progression for attacks rolls, saves and skills means that allowing untrained PCs to attempt checks is a direct consequence of bounded accuracy.

I view this as a good thing.

 

[Argyle King]

Well, yeah, with the right items and build choices, you can make your character impossible for some monsters to hit, but that doesn’t just happen automatically as a result of gaining enough levels, which is I think what they meant about bonuses “not being an assumed part of character advancement.” Also, while you can push your bonuses high enough that you can’t miss, you should never encounter a monster you can’t hit. As far as I’m aware, the highest AC on a WotC-published monster is 23, which any 1st level character can hit as long as they’re proficient with their weapon and don’t have a penalty to the relevant ability score.

There’s a difference though between building a character that monsters struggle to hit, and the situation you had in 3e and 4e, where every character who lived long enough would get to the point where some monsters literally could not hit them ever. With bounded accuracy you can still achieve the fantasy of being nearly untouchable, but doing so requires a commitment of resources, and even if you do commit those resources, you still have to respect the fact that enough kobolds (or whatever) could still take you down.

I think it’s pretty indisputable that WotC did a poor job of communicating what they were going for with the whole “bounded accuracy” thing. I do think they succeeded in what they were actually trying to do, but even at the time there was a lot of confusion about what that was. And it’s really only meaningful in contrast to 3e and 4e, so to newer players it’s got to be even more unclear what this “bounded accuracy” waffle is even about. PF2 is probably the more relevant point of comparison for players who started with 5e.

I suppose I can see that.

Though, the commitment to resources needed tends to be as simple as buying a shield at first level. Later magical items do push things to more of an extreme, but it's my perception that new species options and floating bonuses make it easier to achieve before magic items are a factor.

For me, I had once thought that "bounded accuracy," magic items being "optional," and talking about multiple pillars of play meant that 5e wanted to work toward more breadth of play rather than a heavy focus on a vertical structure of going 1-20.

Obviously, yeah, the advancement through the levels and increasing +N items is part of what people expect from D&D, so I never in any way entertained the idea that 5e would ditch that. I suppose it's more that I thought 5e would lean toward a different playstyle and world building style. Part of why I had thought that is because the words used to describe design goals meant something different to me than what the folks saying them meant.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

We see Aragorn fight off the Ringwraiths, and Gandalf is a literal demigod. What sort of terrible hack GM would use lowly goblins to threaten such high level characters?

 

[DEFCON 1]

That's not the 5e design, though. 5e's BA monsters are balanced for attrition over 5-8 encounters, where the non-BA monsters weren't. the length of encounters is not the only issue. In fact, the length of a 5e combat is close to prior editions. The problems are that 1) monsters are mostly large bags of hit points to slog through, and 2) the adventuring day means that the first 4-7 encounters are no real threat, it's the last encounter when the group is low on resources(hit points being only one of those) that has real risk attached to it.

Encounter design and Bounded Accuracy are two different things. A DM can change up an encounter's strength (and thus "challenge") whether it's the first encounter of the day or the 15th, and BA has nothing to do with it. No one needs to remove BA from the game to challenge their table if they want to.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Really? In al the RPGs you have played you have not noticed that most of them, in their mechanics design, are more interested in supporting a theme, tone, feel, or fiction than rigid wargame or board game style balance?

That's not what you said.

What you said, bolded for emphasis:

The majority of RPGs don't actually worry as much about "balance" as D&D does, because they recognize that RPGs are a game where balance is actually kind of unimportant.

Every RPG I've ever seen has understood that balance is actually quite important for making a game that is interesting to play--especially if that game offers multiple distinct pathways to victory meant to support distinctive playstyles. Players tend to get upset when, say, one specific method is simply universally better at dealing with problems, or when an expected and typical playstyle choice gets unfairly punished for bad, unjustified reasons. Even when it's a single-player game!

You'll note, for example, that Baldur's Gate 3 did three critical things that deviate strongly from how 5e is designed, in order to make even a small dent in the extreme bias toward spellcasters being the dominant strategy of play:
1. Weapon properties actually matter, rather a lot, and usually act to significantly enhance the damage or utility of anyone who isn't a full spellcaster.
2. Absolutely showering the player with magic items, particularly weapons and armor, most of which are near-useless for full spellcasters, and many of which are no more nor less useful for part-casters like Paladins.
3. Including all three primary spellcaster classes (wizard, cleric, druid) as recruitable allies, so even players who don't choose to play one of those classes still get access to all those goodies.

If, for example, it was significantly worse to play through the game as a Fighter than any other class, you bet your hindquarters players would have been Extremely Upset. Just as, for example, players were Extremely Upset with the design of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you could get through essentially the entire game with a purely pacifist, stealth and conversation focused build....except for the mandatory boss fights that cannot, in any way, be skipped or avoided and which specifically prevent the vast majority of non-lethal options from having any impact at all. Eidos genuinely kicked a hornet's nest with that one.

Balance is very important. The boogeyman folks love to bring up, the fictitious strawman of some kind of incredibly delicate, diamond-perfect system that produces an absolutely flawless result 110% of the time? Sure, that's unimportant, because it's never been important, and was never the point of balance. But balance is an extremely important tool in the designer's arsenal, and players do in fact tend to get upset when the balance fails, meaning, when degenerate solutions, dominant strategies, and/or perverse incentives start affecting gameplay.

Because that's what a lack of balance is: you have degenerate solutions, dominant strategies, and/or perverse incentives that negatively impact gameplay. You either go back to the drawing board and incorporate these dominant strategies as expected parts of play (as, for example, Warframe did with bullet jumping--much to its credit, because bullet jumping is super fun), or you correct the faulty design that created this problem in the first place (as, for example, Helldivers has recently done, reducing the power of a handful of weapons that were too versatile for their damage output.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

We see Aragorn fight off the Ringwraiths, and Gandalf is a literal demigod. What sort of terrible hack GM would use lowly goblins to threaten such high level characters?

Ah, yes, the same excellent GM who repeatedly uses BS deus ex machina to save the party from problems he created, who revives dead characters with a new "mission" from God rather than allowing any real consequences, and then forces a heroic ending to the campaign even though a player had actively chosen to turn to the dark side.

That GM?

Or do you want to retract the example of a novel, which works almost not at all like a TTRPG, as though it were a useful model for how a GM should build encounters or design monsters?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Ah, yes, the same excellent GM who repeatedly uses BS deus ex machina to save the party from problems he created, who revives dead characters with a new "mission" from God rather than allowing any real consequences, and then forces a heroic ending to the campaign even though a player had actively chosen to turn to the dark side.

That GM?

Or do you want to retract the example of a novel, which works almost not at all like a TTRPG, as though it were a useful model for how a GM should build encounters or design monsters?

No I don't. Sentiment was expressed that it would be somehow silly or boring for high level characters to be threatened by something as feeble as goblins. But it works fine, and it is not an issue in either a game or a novel.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ah, yes, the same excellent GM who repeatedly uses BS deus ex machina to save the party from problems he created, who revives dead characters with a new "mission" from God rather than allowing any real consequences, and then forces a heroic ending to the campaign even though a player had actively chosen to turn to the dark side.

That GM?

Or do you want to retract the example of a novel, which works almost not at all like a TTRPG, as though it were a useful model for how a GM should build encounters or design monsters?

A lot of pixels have been spilled on all the ways in which Lord of the Rings wouldn’t make for a good D&D campaign. But oftentimes we do that because it’s ironic. Since it is a novel not an RPG campaign, there’s a vast possibility space in imagining what a D&D campaign whose narrative mirrors Lord of the Rings might look like at the meta-game level. And it’s generally more entertaining to imagine it being an awful train wreck of a game, because that contrasts very amusingly with LotR’s status as one of the most influential works of fantasy ever created. But, like, it could also be interpreted charitably, and it’s not for nothing that people often think of LotR as a positive example of the kind of narrative they hope for in a D&D campaign.

 

[Umbran]

... and the entire system intentionally wants to give an option for PCs never graduating to more interesting monsters would still be a problem though.

Why is giving an option a problem?

 

[Shardstone]

Holy macaroni this video is good.