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

[Umbran]

The problem people (including me) see is when experienced adventurers then go on to hunt Rodents of Unusual Size, rather than trolls or winter wolves or displacer beasts - opponents that just have bigger numbers, rather than opponents that are dangerously different.

This sounds much less a mechanics issue, or specifically a bounded accuracy issue, and much more an adventure design issue. The game gives you the trolls, winter wolves, and displacer beasts if you want them, after all.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

BTW, regarding hobgoblin phalanxes and such, this is definitely something one could do with 5e too. There are swarm rules, though it seems the writers do not seem to like to use them except for swarms of tiny critters. But the concept works with other creatures too, and there are rules for a skeleton swarm (a large swarm of medium skeletons.) I'm not really a fan, but the rule structure does exist, and I can see how it might be useful for mass battles.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I mean, it kind of is. 5e’s math paints a picture of a universe in which even the mightiest swordsman the world has ever seen can be overwhelmed by a swarm of untrained peasants. 4e’s math paints a picture of a universe in which, with enough training, you can become so powerful that no mere mortal poses any threat to you (unless they have trained just as extensively).

Kind of disagree with this. The math doesn’t paint a picture, the fiction does.

If, in 10 years of play, a 20th level fighter is never overwhelmed by a swarm of untrained peasants, does it really matter if theoretically, in a white room, you could send enough peasants (whose morale doesn’t break after the first 50 gets massacred) to eventually overwhelm the fighter?

From a fictional perspective, is this really any different from representing the same situation in 4e as a skill challenge with the outcome of failure that the 20th level fighter gets overwhelmed?

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Statistics in 4e were designed to be fluid. They are not a representation of a static world where every ogre you encounter is a level 6 monster with 100 hit points and swings a big club. In that world, ogres would cease to exist when the characters get too strong to be bothered by them. 4e made it simple and effective to adjust the numbers so ogres could exist in the game for as long as you wanted to have them. That's empowering the narrative, not the opposite. Some people get it.

Likewise, a minion doesn't actually have 1 hit point. It is an in-game expression that represents a particular narrative where heroes are able to fell large groups of potential (albeit minor) threats with a single blow. This was designed to create cinematic fight scenes without slowing the game more than necessary. Again, the game mechanics help support the narrative at the expense of offending the logic.

Can 5e do this? I don't know. I've not had a lot of experience with it, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But what I've learned from playing BG3 is that level and balance are not critical to the game. My party of level 4 characters can clear out an entire camp of goblins, ogres, and more, even with bad rolls, bad optimization, and bad strategies. Likewise, it became clear after many restarts of the game that I did not need to pass every skill check to arrive at an interesting or more optimal outcome. It's not actually about the battle, or the dice, but the path I chose to move the story forward. And it was my story that became more important than the story being told at me.

I suspect (and hope) that is how most 5e games are like. At least, that is the game I would enjoy. I see every video or comment that claims how to find the most incredible, optimal build for 5e is missing the point. You should be able to play this game regardless of the character you play, and without needing to adjust or compensate behind the screen. And this is what I believe bounded accuracy was designed to do. But I couldn't tell you if it worked all the way to level 20. Then again, I have rarely seen a group get past level 10. (I got as high as level 8 once, but I have yet to get past Act 1 in BG3.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which means the abstraction can, and should, change if doing so gets closer to the actual state of affairs.


Not at all. It follows that the rules should prioritize efficacy and functionality. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Consistency is not an unalloyed good. It has many benefits, and thus we should not dismiss a wise consistency. I myself am an advocate for a wide variety of particular kinds of consistency, e.g. unified resolution mechanics, not on the brute fact that they are consistent, but rather because their consistency leads to something else that is valuable in itself, such as making it easier, simpler, and more natural to adjudicate, or to speed up the learning process (which is, was, and always will be the single greatest hurdle to getting people into the hobby.) Requiring that the rules rigidly produce only and exactly one description of something, when that thing's value is necessarily relative to the context in which it appears, is a foolish consistency, pulling us away from efficacy and functionality.


But that was exactly my point...?


But it does change. By definition! You don't get street view data when you're looking at the whole Earth. It isn't just too small to see, it is in fact not there. And once you zoom in to see the street view, geographic data like contour lines isn't there. It's genuinely not displayed. Because that's not what is useful or relevant in that context.

The globe itself remains what it is. Main Street is always there, in terms of the territory. But when we look at states and continents, we do not render Main Street. When we look at Main Street, we do not render states and continents. The data isn't simply "currently out of view." It is genuinely not present on the map until it is called up--and other data is necessarily put away when one does this. That's the whole point.

The map is not the territory--and different maps actually do have different information on them. The territory always remains whatever it is (I assume you grant that we're looking at the territory only in one particular moment.) But which parts of the territory are in fact on the map, and which ones are intentionally left off the map, varies by context. It is precisely the same with the level 2 solo ogre and the level 14 (or whatever) minion ogre. Different data has been represented in the abstraction, because we have proverbially "zoomed out."


You have simply made the argument circular. It is consistent because it must be; it must be consistent because it is.

I'm saying that it is useful to allow non-consistency in this context, because the thing we wish to represent--the danger posed by this threat--IS different today than it was six months ago. The creature is the same, but the context is different, and the context is always what matters.


Except that there is a reason. The 88-HP ogre cannot produce the kind of experience you intend with this. It just can't. That's the whole point. You are hoping and praying that coincidence will fall in your favor. We can do better; we can design better.

You can design differently. 4e followed a different design philosophy in this area (and in others) than every other edition of D&D, and many other RPGs, by making mechanical representation of similar or the same objects relative to context. Some people prefer this method. Others don't, and there are advantages to each that are valued by different folks. Neither method is better than the other; it's all just preference.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's just maths. If the GM says double all your damage dice, then you will win more easily. Glossing that instruction with because you're wearing a Girdle of Giant Strength (Cook/Marsh Expert version) doesn't suddenly make it "genuine".

I know that the players in my 4e game felt that their PCs were more powerful when they were fighting Hobgoblin phalanxes, rather than individual Hobgoblins, because they said as much. They noticed the difference in the fiction.

This is why there is more than one RPG.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Precisely. Keeping mechanical representation rigidly fixed, and simply hoping that changes in player stats will by happenstance result in the monster transitioning from "terrifying threat" to "minor annoyance"....just doesn't really get the job done. It's not that there isn't a theoretical way for it to happen, I'm sure someone could come up with some (dare I say it) white room arguments to the contrary. But in practice, it's just...not how 5e ends up playing.

I suspect this is, at least in part, because HP has to bear effectively the whole burden of representing monster scaling, given AC is damn-near static once you get to ~20, but damage output scales in a pretty chunky, uneven fashion and much, much more slowly than HP. Creatures at the absolute bottom end of the progression (e.g. CR 1 or less) may be usable aplenty, but once you get to CR 4 or so, things plateau so much that it's just too much work to use lots of those monsters. Typical HP for a CR 4 creature is well over 100 (reportedly in the 116-130 range), and even a well-equipped high-level Fighter simply can't cleave through that in one attack.

Even if we assume a Fighter has a +3 weapon, +11 attack bonus, 4 attacks per attack, and hits with every one of those four attacks (which will be much higher than actual expected damage output, even accounting for crits), that's at best 8d6+32 = 60. It takes pulling out all the stops to potentially take out a CR4 creature in a single hit as a level 20 Fighter, which everyone always tells me is the king of damage and should be absolutely destroying everything. Heck, even throwing in GWM without any accuracy penalty (which would definitely be an exaggeration of damage), that's still only 100 total damage--a Fighter who lands every single GWM attack cannot consistently kill a CR 4 creature in one round.

So we're stuck having to work with pretty much CR1 and CR2 creatures exclusively if we want anything like "minions," and that roundly interferes with the "this enemy, who was once a deadly danger, is now barely chump change." Further, typical damage is in the 27-32 range, meaning ~29.5 damage on a hit. Even if we assume a low but moderate hit rate (typical attack bonus is +5, player AC is rarely higher than about 18 without a shield, so 40% is on the low end of reasonable), a swarm of, say, six of these creatures is going to get around 71 damage in on the first round, and probably another 30-40 on the second....when a 20th-level Fighter, we'll assume maxed Con, only has about 15+11x19 = 224 HP. So, despite this being only a quite "small" group of "weak" creatures, going up against one of the allegedly strongest characters around...you're still looking at taking a major beating (albeit possibly distributed across the party) and not actually cleaving through these things quickly at all.

Perhaps we should all compromise by playing 1e or B/X, where hit points and damage are lower and you can potentially one-shot a mechanically objective goblin while still being threatened by it.

 

[tetrasodium]

Kind of disagree with this. The math doesn’t paint a picture, the fiction does.

If, in 10 years of play, a 20th level fighter is never overwhelmed by a swarm of untrained peasants, does it really matter if theoretically, in a white room, you could send enough peasants (whose morale doesn’t break after the first 50 gets massacred) to eventually overwhelm the fighter?

From a fictional perspective, is this really any different from representing the same situation in 4e as a skill challenge with the outcome of failure that the 20th level fighter gets overwhelmed?

Agreed. The scenario you quoted is nothing more than a means of narrating "rocks fall/lightning strikes Bob dies" in fiction rather than an example of a mind numbing combat scenario something anyone should be expected to actually sit through. Designing the game around supporting a hypothetical fiat scenario with actual combat is obviously counterproductive to gameplay.

At least oddities like the peasant tail gun &locate city bomb were generally accepted as funny thought experiments unlikely to see actual play rather than something to defend or puzzle out what they added.

 

[Maxperson]

Well then not forcing the DM would require

20 levels of Material Plane monsters
20 levels of Echo Plane monsters
20 levels of Inner Plane monsters
20 levels of Outer Plane monsters

With each subcategories. Dragons and Giants and Humaniods for Material .Feywild and Shadowfell for Echo. 4 elements for Inner. Good and Evil for Outer.

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.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think most people have an issue with there being orc runts that are weaker and orc war chiefs that are much more powerful. They probably don't even have a problem with over time the exact same orc runt becoming a war chief later. Here the difference in power is diegetic: the orc actually got more powerful in the fiction too.

It feels a bit different when the change in stats is not actually representing a change about the creature, rather than just a change in their narrative role. This is basically how minionisation used to work. Now neither of these is objectively wrong, but it is understandable if some people are fine with the former but not the latter.


Yeah, that's quite fair.

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.