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

[Minigiant]

You can slap "planar" or "fire" on orcs to put them on Olympus/Arboria or the plane of fire if you want to use them. You don't need 4 complete monster books like that in order to not force the DM. Or the DM can make monsters if he wants to do 1-20 on the inner or outer planes and not repeat a lot.

The game definitely supports going from the material to the outer planes best, but it can already be played completely in any of the above categories if the DM wants to do it.

Sure that works with flexible DMs.

But this is the D&D community. Any DM who isn't home brewing the majority of their stuff is demanding that WOTC or Paizo or Whomever to cater directly to them is a complete opposite method of the next guy. They want fire hoplites not orcs with the fire template.

 

[Maxperson]

Sure that works with flexible DMs.

But this is the D&D community. Any DM who isn't home brewing the majority of their stuff is demanding that WOTC or Paizo or Whomever to cater directly to them is a complete opposite method of the next guy. They want fire hoplites not orcs with the fire template.

Then make them. WotC doesn't have to make a full 1-20 spread for every possible way to run the game. Currently they have enough to do 1-20, including with planar creatures. It may not have as many as you like, but you can make them if there aren't enough.

 

[Minigiant]

Then make them. WotC doesn't have to make a full 1-20 spread for every possible way to run the game. Currently they have enough to do 1-20, including with planar creatures. It may not have as many as you like, but you can make them if there aren't enough.

If they were willing to that this thread would be dead by now.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yup. A creature's mechanics changing because in setting the creatures has changed, and a creature's mechanics changing because its narrative role has changed are very different things, and they don't really work together. You have to decide what you value more in the game, and people have.

Enforcing this design principle dooms you to a guaranteed disparity between the experience offered(/"promised") by the rules and the actual experience people will have with them. Which is why combat is fundamentally not that satisfying in 5e--even in implementations of it designed to be much more interesting, like BG3.

And I would argue that the vast majority of people who play 5e--because the vast majority of them don't know anything about 4e--haven't said a damn thing about what they "value more" or not.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This would make sense if one actually used stats objectively, which 4e doesn't. So comparison of commoner vs demon prince is irrelevant, as that's not gonna happen nor is something the game cares about. NPC stats get changed to create desired narrative experience in relation to the PCs, so any comparison between NPCs is meaningless. And of course if we start to compare NPCs, 4e approach produces absurd results like commoners being able to one shot high level minions.

It also makes sense if the world objectively exists, but the

And no, commoners cannot do that. Not to my knowledge, anyway. Because, guess what? They can't hit high-level minions.

You also wouldn't design fights pitting such things against one another anyway. Because fights are from the perspective of player characters. Commoners would not even rise to the level of a hazard or trap in most high-Heroic contexts, let alone anything else.

This is like saying that relativity can't possibly be true because different perspectives disagree on things like the order of events. This is demonstrably false. We know that the relativity of simultaneity is weird and confusing and can lead to events being comparatively reversed in two reference frames that are moving relative to one another. Once you account for that motion, however, no confusion nor ambiguity exists, though different perspectives might reach the same conclusion for different reasons. (Frex, muons have too short a half-life to be able to reach Earth's surface normally, but we actually do observe them from cosmic radiation striking the upper atmosphere. This is only possible because of relativity. From our perspective, where the particle is moving crazy fast, we observe the particle to experience time dilation, its clock slows down relative to ours. From the particle's perspective, the world proceeds at exactly the same rate everywhere, but the travel distance from the upper atmosphere to the ground is contracted, allowing it to reach the ground within its half-life.)

So pick the context that the fight occurs in. Commoner-centered, or Paragon-/Epic-centered.

Either it's a fight from a commoner-centered perspective, in which case you'd never use minion rules in the first place, or it's from a Paragon/Epic-centered perspective, in which case the commoners wouldn't be participating as individual combatants. Maybe as a massive swarm of commoners, but even then I'd expect them to be exceedingly weak even in comparison to Paragon-tier threats and genuinely irrelevant (other than as set-dressing cannon fodder) for any Epic-tier fight.

Once you have set the perspective, your alleged "absurd" results evaporate. The world itself remains exactly what it is, no more and no less; the mechanics to represent it differ depending on what representation is relevant. Like any data representation, really. Sometimes you need mean, median, and mode, and sometimes you need variance(/SD), skewness, and kurtosis. (I once got flying colors on a stats project because I dug deep enough into the statistics--using skewness and kurtosis--to identify that a seemingly-uniform distribution was, almost certainly, actually a bimodal distribution with the two sub-distributions partially overlapping in the middle.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is ONE monster of CR4 with 120 HP, weretiger, but paired with horrible 12 AC, rest are from 97 HP to 36 HP, averages around 65 HP

Take up the issue with WotC. I'm using their own monster CR math, directly published in the book. (You can see a copy of these numbers here, where the author refers to them as "pretty much right" amongst other things.) If it's wrong, they're literally telling people to create monsters with way too much health. Not that this surprises me in the least. It's an open secret that numerous MM creatures don't actually follow the claimed math for determining a creature's CR, and I have seen credible claims from credited consultants that in most cases this is because their CRs were tweaked ad-hoc due to playtesting.

Also, that's only counting monsters in the MM. There are several more CR4 monsters than that--e.g. at least one in MPMM, and several spread across various adventures, which have roughly that amount of HP (e.g. the Clockwork Stone Defender from MPMM has 105 average HP and is a CR 4 creature.)

so yeah, if you take tankiest CR4, you will need on average 5 attacks with +3 greatsword and GWM, but for most you will need 3 attacks.

and if you are facing several of them, it's time for action surge, 8 attacks with 15% crit chance and almost certain 1 killed per round will give you 9th attack as bonus action.
2nd round again action surge, that is 18 attacks in two rounds. That certainly looks impressive.

Then bump it up to CR 5. From what I can see, five different creatures solely from the Monster Manual have at least 120 HP at CR 5, and Volo's, MPMM, Bigby, and numerous adventures have added more. The problem remains effectively unchanged.

And fine, sure, let's look at the actual stuff here. Remember, the vast majority of the damage being dealt here comes from flat damage (STR, magic weapon, GWM)--critting, even on a greatsword, only adds ~7 damage, or ~8.33 with GWF. Not that impressive compared to the 18 flat damage (5 STR + 3 weapon + 10 GWM).

If using GWM, that's a -5 to hit. Average AC for a CR 6 creature is 15, so (with a +3 weapon) that's a net 75% hit chance (of which 15 points are crit): .6(8.33+18)+.15(2×8.33+18) = almost exactly 21 average damage per attempted attack. Given we're making 8, possibly 9 attacks in a given round (blowing through all the Fighter's resources in the process), we can probably assume that that average will be reasonably accurate overall. That means ~168 damage, give or take, per round. That definitely does (over)kill one target. So you can kill...at best...two of these things per round. By blowing everything you have to do so.

On any other round, you're doing ~84 damage. This is not enough to kill a single CR 5 creature in one turn, even on the basis of the average HP of actually printed CR 5 creatures (rather than the instructions for how to build a CR 5 creature, which claim such creatures should have 131-145 HP, not the 90 HP that is actually average for CR 5 creatures). A party of five level 20 characters going up against eleven CR 5s is not going to be having a "wow, look how effortlessly we're stomping these" even though they're literally fifteen levels beyond fighting such creatures as a main focus. The claimed experience--that things you once saw as deadly threats, but now see as gnats to be swatted aside--simply doesn't exist with 5e monsters past CR 3 or 4. It emphatically doesn't exist for monsters of CR 7+.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And that's where it loses me, in that IMO the mechanical representation of any individual creature should be locked in.

Yeah, sure, I mean - you do you - but as a game where the mechanics that "simulate" a creature (as far as they DO simulate it) can be designed in many different ways, achieving the same results, there's no reason for that beyond: You Like it That Way. Which is fine, of course!

Except, it is; or can be.

Sure, for anyone who wants it that way. You could just as easily avoid that, if it troubles you, by only using minions as "ogre youth" or "ogre rabble". Not every ogre has to be the equivalent to every other.

The same ogre you ran away from today at 1st level, who had 88 hit points and was statted out as an elite solo when you met it, is a 1-point minion when a much higher - let's say 17th - level party meets it the next day.

If you want it to be.

And yet when looked at by anyone else in the fiction the ogre itself hasn't changed a whit during the night. The only thing that's changed is the capabilities of PCs facing it; and those changes should already be more than enough to make the fictional difference you're after as a storyteller without having to mechanically change the ogre as well.

You don't "have" to change the ogre. You CAN change the ogre if you think it would make for a more dynamic encounter. Just like you can change systems, or editions, as I assume you'd prefer.

If that's the case it's a DM flaw, IMO; in that the DM should ideally be throwing some variability in there as per their strength, starting hit points, weaponry, etc.

I'm not sure that I'd quantify it being a "DM flaw" if you use the monsters as written in the MM without homebrewing them (although, like you, I absolutely WOULD alter those things, I just don't see it as a flaw - it's the game as written).

It's weird if, like me, you see a creature's mechanics as an agnostic and locked-in definition of how that creature relates to everyone in the rest of the setting, regardless who "everyone" might be at the time.

Sure. Again, you are free to have your preferences. The only part that I object to is when you (not necessarily you-you, but folks that feel that way) act like your way makes more "sense" or is objectively better. The creature is a creature in the world that can do certain things. The game can model that in a very many different ways. That way is neither better nor worse, it has flaws and it has benefits.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

IME not really. Consider a classic module like Against the Giants. Sure, you go from Hill to Frost to Fire giants, but at each location you still have orcs (as servants), ogres, even fire beetles IIRC! Several low level creatures are present to be encountered as well.

It isn't like all those weaker monsters aren't in the game world any more. They might be less common or more common in the more "dangerous" locations as PCs get higher levels. Even in something like LotR, the heroes are fighting more dangerous creatures, but the orcs and goblins are still around.

Yes, but that is ALSO true in any of the modern games. The discussion on what level threat you run into is speaking of the kind of encounter that generally threatens you at those levels, not the only things you ever run into (unless, maybe, you're plane-hopping).

That would be like saying your home-base town goes from having human and halfling NPCs to having angels and demons. Only if you go to where angels and demons live!

 

[Maxperson]

If they were willing to that this thread would be dead by now.

Vocal minorities keep lots of threads alive all over the internet.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Enforcing this design principle dooms you to a guaranteed disparity between the experience offered(/"promised") by the rules and the actual experience people will have with them. Which is why combat is fundamentally not that satisfying in 5e--even in implementations of it designed to be much more interesting, like BG3.

That's just your opinion, mate. A lot of people find it quite satisfying.

And I would argue that the vast majority of people who play 5e--because the vast majority of them don't know anything about 4e--haven't said a damn thing about what they "value more" or not.

Of course they don't know about 4e. Because 4e swiftly tanked as people didn't like it, so WotC had to replace it with 5e that became overwhelmingly the most popular edition ever.