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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6958581" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I think basically you are dealing with the fact that 5e was designed to be a more barebones version of D&D, and its fans tend to prefer a certain sort of experience. It's certainly not as inflexible as they are claiming, and there is no such thing as doing it wrong if by doing it wrong someone means "Your setting isn't right". D20 is a very flexible system capable of handling almost anything with just a few tweaks, and if you are doing a fantasy game with normal fantasy expectations the system shouldn't break so easily that very simple patches won't be available.</p><p></p><p>As for switching to another system, let me assure you that you won't find a system that won't have to be patched a least a little to meet your specific needs rather than the default assumptions of the game. By switching, all you'll be doing is putting off finding those little annoying problems with the new system that you'll need to figure out how to deal with.</p><p></p><p>Someone mentioned GURPS. I learned a lot from running GURPS, and every GM should read the GURPS rules. But one of the things I learned from playing GURPS is that you shouldn't play GURPS. GURPS is like the 3rd best suited system to any game you would want to play. It's got a lot of amazing ideas, but you should pretty much always be looking for a system better suited to your game. And at this point, I feel the D20 family of games that were inspired by various incarnations of D&D will beat GURPS straight up at pretty much any genera. </p><p></p><p>I also mention GURPS because it has the rules solution to what I'm going to guess is the biggest problem you are having - stock D20 is lousy at dealing with distance. And while I'm not familiar with the 5e rules, I'm guessing that 5e in simplifying made the problem even worse.</p><p></p><p>The basic problem D20 has is that it's built with the assumption of dungeons, as you might have noticed, and so it assumes that most things that are important happen in small areas - 30 feet away, 50 feet away, maybe 100 feet away at most. And to keep things simple, D20 prefers to have simple easy to remember linear modifiers. For example, 3e had a -1 penalty to perception for each 10 feet further away something was. That works not too badly if you have fairly small environments and you constrain the action to those small environments, but you very quickly realize that if you take the rules literally the game breaks hard in large environments. </p><p></p><p>The problem here is that the math is wrong. The difficulty of perception doesn't increase linearly with distance. The actual math is that when something gets twice as far away, it gets four times harder to see. It's true that it's much harder to see something that is 20' away than something 10' away, but it's not true that the same increase in difficult occurs between 20' and 30'. The next interval with the same increase in difficulty is 20', not 10'. And the one after that is 40', not 10'. GURPS has a table that handles scale rather elegantly, but 3e tried to avoid tables. To handle scale elegantly in D20 (whether 3e or 5e or whatever), you'll need to invent a table for it showing how the linear increase in difficult requires an exponential increase in distance. (As a suggestion, each -1 penalty involves roughly 50% further out than the prior one. If you'd like a table, I can post the one I use for 3e, and you can tweak to inform your 5e Perception rolls.)</p><p></p><p>The other issue of scale you seem to be having is ranged weapons. In every edition of D&D, all things being equal, the party is best advised to specialize in ranged combat. It's not surprising you are having problems of balance between ranged and melee weapons. Let me explain the basic problem:</p><p></p><p>In reality, ranged weapons are vastly superior to melee weapons.</p><p></p><p>Most RPG systems have to cheat considerably to make melee weapons relevant. Ranged weapons have so much more theoretical combat power than melee weapons it's not even close. The ability to kill things from a distance, at a range at which the enemy may not have an effective reply is so much better than melee, that of course ranged weapons are superior. Even systems that don't try to simulate this end up simulating this. Consider the fundamental asymmetry involved in fight most monsters. Most monsters are vastly stronger and more deadly up close than a human is, even one armed with a piece of sharpened steal. Yet relatively few monsters are skilled ranged opponents. Consider the tactical asymmetry. Tactics are determined by terrain. All the tactical problems as GM might present to a player come down to, "How will you deal with moving across this terrain?" Ranged weapons render all those problems basically trivial. The most effective strategy a party can have is blast everything they see before it can reply. That's system independent. </p><p></p><p>I suspect 3e handles the ranged combat better than 5e because 3e has the concept of 'range increments', which meant that it got ludicrously hard to hit anything with a ranged weapon out at the limits of its range. But even so, 3e tried to evade the problem by making the range increments so ludicrously large that most of the time, a ranged attacker would have little or no range penalty to hit. In my game, to keep melee relevant, I had to make several small tweaks - one of which was halving the range increment of most weapons. (I also introduce a dodge bonus against missile fire based on speed, got rid of certain ranged weapon empowering feats, and I more or less inverted the 5' step rule to keep archers from being able to consistently step out of threat zones. You probably won't need to go that far unless you are as finicky as I am.) </p><p></p><p>Stop talking to system purists. Find some theory crafters and hammer in the tweaks you need. It's going to be a whole lot easier than switching systems mid-campaign, and more likely to solve your problems. Changing systems will just give you a new set of problems to solve.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6958581, member: 4937"] I think basically you are dealing with the fact that 5e was designed to be a more barebones version of D&D, and its fans tend to prefer a certain sort of experience. It's certainly not as inflexible as they are claiming, and there is no such thing as doing it wrong if by doing it wrong someone means "Your setting isn't right". D20 is a very flexible system capable of handling almost anything with just a few tweaks, and if you are doing a fantasy game with normal fantasy expectations the system shouldn't break so easily that very simple patches won't be available. As for switching to another system, let me assure you that you won't find a system that won't have to be patched a least a little to meet your specific needs rather than the default assumptions of the game. By switching, all you'll be doing is putting off finding those little annoying problems with the new system that you'll need to figure out how to deal with. Someone mentioned GURPS. I learned a lot from running GURPS, and every GM should read the GURPS rules. But one of the things I learned from playing GURPS is that you shouldn't play GURPS. GURPS is like the 3rd best suited system to any game you would want to play. It's got a lot of amazing ideas, but you should pretty much always be looking for a system better suited to your game. And at this point, I feel the D20 family of games that were inspired by various incarnations of D&D will beat GURPS straight up at pretty much any genera. I also mention GURPS because it has the rules solution to what I'm going to guess is the biggest problem you are having - stock D20 is lousy at dealing with distance. And while I'm not familiar with the 5e rules, I'm guessing that 5e in simplifying made the problem even worse. The basic problem D20 has is that it's built with the assumption of dungeons, as you might have noticed, and so it assumes that most things that are important happen in small areas - 30 feet away, 50 feet away, maybe 100 feet away at most. And to keep things simple, D20 prefers to have simple easy to remember linear modifiers. For example, 3e had a -1 penalty to perception for each 10 feet further away something was. That works not too badly if you have fairly small environments and you constrain the action to those small environments, but you very quickly realize that if you take the rules literally the game breaks hard in large environments. The problem here is that the math is wrong. The difficulty of perception doesn't increase linearly with distance. The actual math is that when something gets twice as far away, it gets four times harder to see. It's true that it's much harder to see something that is 20' away than something 10' away, but it's not true that the same increase in difficult occurs between 20' and 30'. The next interval with the same increase in difficulty is 20', not 10'. And the one after that is 40', not 10'. GURPS has a table that handles scale rather elegantly, but 3e tried to avoid tables. To handle scale elegantly in D20 (whether 3e or 5e or whatever), you'll need to invent a table for it showing how the linear increase in difficult requires an exponential increase in distance. (As a suggestion, each -1 penalty involves roughly 50% further out than the prior one. If you'd like a table, I can post the one I use for 3e, and you can tweak to inform your 5e Perception rolls.) The other issue of scale you seem to be having is ranged weapons. In every edition of D&D, all things being equal, the party is best advised to specialize in ranged combat. It's not surprising you are having problems of balance between ranged and melee weapons. Let me explain the basic problem: In reality, ranged weapons are vastly superior to melee weapons. Most RPG systems have to cheat considerably to make melee weapons relevant. Ranged weapons have so much more theoretical combat power than melee weapons it's not even close. The ability to kill things from a distance, at a range at which the enemy may not have an effective reply is so much better than melee, that of course ranged weapons are superior. Even systems that don't try to simulate this end up simulating this. Consider the fundamental asymmetry involved in fight most monsters. Most monsters are vastly stronger and more deadly up close than a human is, even one armed with a piece of sharpened steal. Yet relatively few monsters are skilled ranged opponents. Consider the tactical asymmetry. Tactics are determined by terrain. All the tactical problems as GM might present to a player come down to, "How will you deal with moving across this terrain?" Ranged weapons render all those problems basically trivial. The most effective strategy a party can have is blast everything they see before it can reply. That's system independent. I suspect 3e handles the ranged combat better than 5e because 3e has the concept of 'range increments', which meant that it got ludicrously hard to hit anything with a ranged weapon out at the limits of its range. But even so, 3e tried to evade the problem by making the range increments so ludicrously large that most of the time, a ranged attacker would have little or no range penalty to hit. In my game, to keep melee relevant, I had to make several small tweaks - one of which was halving the range increment of most weapons. (I also introduce a dodge bonus against missile fire based on speed, got rid of certain ranged weapon empowering feats, and I more or less inverted the 5' step rule to keep archers from being able to consistently step out of threat zones. You probably won't need to go that far unless you are as finicky as I am.) Stop talking to system purists. Find some theory crafters and hammer in the tweaks you need. It's going to be a whole lot easier than switching systems mid-campaign, and more likely to solve your problems. Changing systems will just give you a new set of problems to solve. [/QUOTE]
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