Disadvantages of Advantage

[Arilyn]

I have been using a mix of both. As Saelorn says, sometimes the activity should allow characters to succeed where they normally couldn't. This is where the helping rules really break down, in particular. If you can't move that boulder, a buddy helping will make no difference.

Advantage/disadvantage works great for other situations. Buy everyone a round of drinks at the tavern, get advantage on asking for information. Clothes looking a little unfashionable? Disadvantage on talking your way into that party.

So, I mix and match numerical adjustments with advantage/disadvantage. It's easy to do both, and I believe is is a simple adjustment which makes play better.

 

[pogre]

I come at it from a fairly non-analytical view: Rolling 2 dice is fun.

 

[Sebastrd]

I come at it from a fairly non-analytical view: Rolling 2 dice is fun.

There is literally no more important consideration when designing a game.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

One way to logically integrate it might be to add a flat +2 or +5 for equipment such as block and tackle, crowbars etc and then use advantage for psychological effects such as encouragement from allies, focus etc.

That gets more complicated, though. The one big advantage of Advantage is that it's easier to determine at a glance, and you lose that when you have different mechanics covering different types of advantages. (It might even be easier, at that point, to just give flat bonuses for inspiration and focus - since then you're only dealing with the one mechanic.)

A big problem with older editions of Shadowrun is that modifiers could either come in the form of having extra dice to roll, or in lowering the target number required for success. Since you were rolling handfuls of dice whenever you wanted to do something, anything that lowered the TN was a huge bonus; but you can't lower a TN below 2, so any extra reductions were wasted, and you wanted to start stacking dice at that point. (They solved that problem in later editions by making the Target Number constant, so that all bonuses were just extra dice.)

The other big advantage of Advantage, aside from its simplicity, is that not stacking means there's no point in trying so hard. One thing that you see in something like Pathfinder is that someone will try to stack as many bonuses from as many different sources as possible in order to maximize their chance of success, which can be exhausting for the player to go through all that. When you just have Advantage, you know when it's okay to stop.

Like I said, there are a lot of trade-offs, so it all comes down to what makes sense in the context of the rest of the game; and even then, it's down to personal preference.

 

[CubicsRube]

It's no more complicated than a system of flat bonuses already is, especially if you keep the distinction clear.

You had a problem with advantage, that is a way of addressing that.

Any system is going to be more complex than advantage so i dont know what you want.


I am perfectly happy woth advantage and disadvantage in my games and hand them out like candy
Beyond the ststistics, as said before, rolling two dice and getting to pick the best gives a visceral feeling of fun, which is what I am for when I play.

 

[the Jester]

So far, the only place I've disliked doing away with the fiddly modifiers vs. just using dis/advantage is when running an army-scale combat using the playtest rules from Unearthed Arcana. Also, I dislike the lack of a combat bonus for high ground. But overall, the dis/advantage system is awesome and far superior, at least for my taste.

 

[RevTurkey]

I find it can be fun when rolling advantage...but...I find it depressing as hell when constantly facing disadvantage rolls. Hate that.

I also miss the purity of a roll of a d20 to determine an outcome. Coming from the earlier days of D&D (1981 onward...) I grew up with the one die roll to hit etc and I find Adv/Dis a bit gimmicky. Get off the grass kids etc...

I especially found it irritating playing ‘Adventure in Middle Earth’ where many opponents substitute attack rolls for the victim making saving throws instead. I played an armoured knight, fully suited and booted and with a nice big shield. Kept getting goblins throwing daggers and such...completely bypassing my AC and making me use saving throws and because of conditions I would be at disadvantage a lot...saving against one of the character’s weak stats..DEX. Just got hit all the time. Rubbish way to do it. I failed, failed, failed and failed again...round on round....horrible....I hate the advantage/disadvantage system because of that alone. Not fun in the slightest.

I feel it is just too swingy and punishing when on the wrong end of a skill you are already poor at. One reason I got rid of my 5e books, because it is tied into the system quite a bit. Just my experience, sure others love it and fair enough.

 

[aramis erak]

D&D 5 Advantage/Disadvantage is great for D&D; it's the right level of fiddly for that genre.

My tolerance for long lists of mods has waned with age. Still, WFRP 1E is in the groove, too.

 

[5ekyu]

Saelorn
"A big problem with older editions of Shadowrun is that modifiers could either come in the form of having extra dice to roll, or in lowering the target number required for success"

I was going to ref WoD as in,1st printing VtM.

There things varied the number of dice rolled, the threshold needed on each die for success and the number of sux needed for "success" and it was obvious quite a few times the designers needed to have hired statisticians at least for one afternoon of review.

I loved that game and got years of great play out of it but it was in spite of things like that.

To the main question... Two points.

1 False Precision - i have come to not be a fan of small modifiers and especially lotsa modifiers of different types and sizes. My position is simply thing, significant digits matter. You dont as a rule gain anything by reporting outcomes to the third decimal point when one of your measurements was "handfuls". RPGs tend to be working at the "handfulls" or "heaping spoonfull" level of precision at best and by the time you start pretending to be making choices at the "is it worth 1% or 3%" level, you are fooling yourself about the actual granularity cuz likely for every "one percent modifier" you sweated there will be a half dozen 10% sized swimgs you hand-waved or just ignored.

2 Consistency in degree... A modifier to be useful needs to provide a rsther consistent pattern as far as "how much does it help" that both a gm and player can see. This is where to me things like roll 3d6 sum - HERO - fail with +2 or +5 etc... A +2 might only result in changing outcome so rarely it doesnt matter or may have a major impact on odds (succeed on roll of 6+ instead of 4+ vs succeed on roll of 9+ vs 11+) and that doesnt track or align with in game features like " difgicult task" vs "easy task."

So to my way of thinking, a modofier system needs to work with not getting too hung up on minutae and to provide "consistent feeling" swings...

It also needs to allow for changing the upper reach in some cases and just changing odds within the same reach in others.

DnD 5e for instance has advantage but also a system built on situational DCs. So a gm can choose to lower a dc or raise it at the moment of assignment or change of circumstances ot to allow advantage (or both)

But with there basic DC levels being 5 apart and the sizes of advantage and disadvantage - it seems a reasonable balance to me.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I was going to ref WoD as in,1st printing VtM.

Yeah, it's the same issue, but I always like to remind everyone that the World of Darkness rules were entirely copied from Shadowrun. (Nothing against World of Darkness, just giving credit where it's due.)

So to my way of thinking, a modofier system needs to work with not getting too hung up on minutae and to provide "consistent feeling" swings...

It also needs to allow for changing the upper reach in some cases and just changing odds within the same reach in others.

DnD 5e for instance has advantage but also a system built on situational DCs. So a gm can choose to lower a dc or raise it at the moment of assignment or change of circumstances ot to allow advantage (or both).

On the one hand, yes, it's important to not get too caught up on the specifics so that you lose track of how the rules work as a whole. On the other hand, this is still a game, and you can't meaningfully play a game if the players don't understand the rules. One issue with how 5E works, where the DM can either lower the DC or give Advantage to the check, is that the players don't necessarily know which way it's going to be - and that detail can be incredibly important when they want to decide which action they're going to take.

The other big issue where ambiguity hurts 5E is in the difference between Perception and Investigation, because the things that they govern can be so similar in terms of what they look like, but the mechanical difference for any given character can easily be a ten-point swing. I would have preferred if they'd spent more effort on distinguishing between them, and less effort on calculating specific numeric modifiers.

(To its credit, the system does try to establish some general guidelines for both of those issues, but it can still be hard to make sure that the DM and the players are all on the same page.)