Bugbears are Easy Kills (Play-Test)

[ren1999]

The party got wacked by one Hobgoblin chief and totally wacked a bugbear and a Kobold inside of 1 round and a half.

The ElfWizard just has to sneeze a MagicMissile in a Kobold's direction and the little lizard fries. Not very exciting.

In the weapons table it says that the morningstar is a 1d10 damage weapon.
In the bugbear's stats it says it is a 2d4+2 damage weapon. +2 comes from the strength advantage. Where does the 2d4 come from?

The armor looked correct. Leather is AC12+dex mod+2+lightShield+1 for an AC15.

I could not understand the extra damage Bushwack bugbear feat. Anybody know?

I finally understand the Rogue's take 10. It was also explained that if the DC+5 is less than the character's 10+skill ranks that he or she doesn't have to roll.

No, no, no. There is no such thing as automatic success in the real world. You could sneeze and miss a helpless Kobold.

You could break your pick off in a lock. There is always a chance for Mr. Murphy's failure.

Automatic successes, damage and half-damage is boring. It would be a deal breaker. Game designers please kill automatic success in a flame strike.

I noticed that when the Kobold attacks with damage of 1d4-2 that if it rolls a 1 that means the character gets healed +1 hit points. This was a problem in other editions. We made a rule that said that the damage is just 0. But still. I think 5th edition should eliminate all negative damage bonuses for this reason.

 

[Dausuul]

No, no, no. There is no such thing as automatic success in the real world. You could sneeze and miss a helpless Kobold.

So, what you're saying is that five percent of the time when you're driving to work, you crash your car? If you work a five-day week, that means you average two accidents a month. I'd hate to see your insurance rates.

The granularity of a d20 is limited. When an event has a probability less than 2.5%, "auto success" may be a better model than "fail on natural 1." You could institute more elaborate systems to increase the granularity, but I don't see the point. For a lot of tasks, the chance of failure is a fraction of a percent; it's so small that it's not worth modeling.

Also, if you can sneeze and miss a helpless kobold, a kobold should be able to one-shot you with a lucky hit, hit points be damned.

Automatic successes, damage and half-damage is boring. It would be a deal breaker.

It's been in every edition of D&D ever, I don't see why it suddenly becomes a deal breaker in 5E. A wizard casting a spell outside of combat never sneezes and ruins it. Both 3E and 4E allowed auto-success if your skill bonus was enough to make the check on a natural 1. Lots of spells deal half damage even on a save. If you don't like it, house rule it or lobby to change it, but why would this by itself cause you to reject the entire game?

I noticed that when the Kobold attacks with damage of 1d4-2 that if it rolls a 1 that means the character gets healed +1 hit points. This was a problem in other editions. We made a rule that said that the damage is just 0. But still. I think 5th edition should eliminate all negative damage bonuses for this reason.

I took it for granted that any attack which hits deals a minimum of 1 damage. I'm fairly sure that's been an explicit rule in all previous editions--it certainly was in 3E. I see they forgot to include it in the playtest, but it's bloody obvious what they had in mind.

 

[Janaxstrus]

The party got wacked by one Hobgoblin chief and totally wacked a bugbear and a Kobold inside of 1 round and a half.

The ElfWizard just has to sneeze a MagicMissile in a Kobold's direction and the little lizard fries. Not very exciting.

In the weapons table it says that the morningstar is a 1d10 damage weapon.
In the bugbear's stats it says it is a 2d4+2 damage weapon. +2 comes from the strength advantage. Where does the 2d4 come from?

The armor looked correct. Leather is AC12+dex mod+2+lightShield+1 for an AC15.

I could not understand the extra damage Bushwack bugbear feat. Anybody know?

I finally understand the Rogue's take 10. It was also explained that if the DC+5 is less than the character's 10+skill ranks that he or she doesn't have to roll.

No, no, no. There is no such thing as automatic success in the real world. You could sneeze and miss a helpless Kobold.

You could break your pick off in a lock. There is always a chance for Mr. Murphy's failure.

Automatic successes, damage and half-damage is boring. It would be a deal breaker. Game designers please kill automatic success in a flame strike.

I noticed that when the Kobold attacks with damage of 1d4-2 that if it rolls a 1 that means the character gets healed +1 hit points. This was a problem in other editions. We made a rule that said that the damage is just 0. But still. I think 5th edition should eliminate all negative damage bonuses for this reason.

Automatic successes have existed since 3. Once you have 14 ranks of tumble, you can't fail the standard DC15 tumble, as 1's are not an auto-failure for skill checks. Same with using spellcraft to ID spells after a certain point, ride checks to dismount quickly, etc etc

This isn't new, just spelled out explicitly and for the better, in my opinion.

 

[Astrosicebear]

In the weapons table it says that the morningstar is a 1d10 damage weapon.
In the bugbear's stats it says it is a 2d4+2 damage weapon. +2 comes from the strength advantage. Where does the 2d4 come from?

Monster design is anything but done, but my guess it has something to do with racial weapon proficiency.

No, no, no. There is no such thing as automatic success in the real world. You could sneeze and miss a helpless Kobold.

You could break your pick off in a lock. There is always a chance for Mr. Murphy's failure.

Just rule that a natural 1 is always a miss, or failure and therefore does not allow for skill mastery bonus or slayer bonus.

Automatic successes, damage and half-damage is boring. It would be a deal breaker. Game designers please kill automatic success in a flame strike.

Suggestions? To me, nothing sucked more than rolling a 20, and having to confirm it only to roll poorly. Great success failure. The game is supposed to be about innovation and survival against the odds, looting and exploring, killing monsters and taking their stuff... not about rolling dice over just in case you did something that would be cool.

I noticed that when the Kobold attacks with damage of 1d4-2 that if it rolls a 1 that means the character gets healed +1 hit points. This was a problem in other editions. We made a rule that said that the damage is just 0. But still. I think 5th edition should eliminate all negative damage bonuses for this reason.

You're doing it wrong. Any damage that is below 1 is 1 instead. It's been in every core ruleset.

 

[jshaft37]

AD&D MM listed Bugbear's damage die as 2d4+1. Most of the monsters have roughly the same damage as the AD&D versions, with a modifier ranging from +0-+2. I was looking into some comparisons because I want to run N1 and U1.

 

[ren1999]

Thanks for all the comments.

I never knew that damage always deals at least 1.

My suggestions for replacing automatic damage or half damage is to have no damage at all when someone misses with a weapon.

Anybody know how Bugbear Bushwack works?

 

[keterys]

There's a chance damage is minimum 0 instead of 1.

 

[Tehnai]

Thanks for all the comments.

I never knew that damage always deals at least 1.

My suggestions for replacing automatic damage or half damage is to have no damage at all when someone misses with a weapon.

Anybody know how Bugbear Bushwack works?

Well, bugbears deal an extra 2d6 damage when attacking a target from which it is hiding. So essentially, if the bugbear would get advantage from being hidden, it also gets 2d6 extra damage. It's a toned down version of sneak attack.

 

[Fifth Element]

The ElfWizard just has to sneeze a MagicMissile in a Kobold's direction and the little lizard fries. Not very exciting.

I don't have a problem with this, at least in the sense that I've never found fighting kobolds to be exciting.

No, no, no. There is no such thing as automatic success in the real world. You could sneeze and miss a helpless Kobold.

Aside from the very valid "this ain't the real world" argument, there are things that are effectively automatic successes. For some things, you can have a 99.9% chance of success. But this cannot be modeled with the variability of a d20 roll, so auto success is much better than having a minimum 5% chance of failure for everything.

I think it's a good move to remove rolls like this. Save the rolling for the challenging tasks. Take 10 and take 20 from 3E are excellent rules, because they eliminate needless rolling.

You could break your pick off in a lock. There is always a chance for Mr. Murphy's failure.

Even 3E does not agree, since a 1 is not an auto-failure on a skill check.

Automatic successes, damage and half-damage is boring. It would be a deal breaker. Game designers please kill automatic success in a flame strike.

No, forcing players to roll a die for every darn thing is boring.

I noticed that when the Kobold attacks with damage of 1d4-2 that if it rolls a 1 that means the character gets healed +1 hit points. This was a problem in other editions. We made a rule that said that the damage is just 0. But still.

This has been corrected already, but a negative damage result has never meant that it heals the character, ever.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Thanks for all the comments.

I never knew that damage always deals at least 1.

in some editions but I ruled
That 0 damage could happen