D&D 5E Reflecting on advantage and disadvantage.

[Wolf118]

I like the mechanic. It's simple, can apply in any number of situations, and is easily understood. As far as the binary state goes, that helps prevent players from 'Advantage hunting', or trying to metagame to gain as many Advantages as they can. Plus, as mentioned before, using Inspiration or good roleplaying allows a player to offset a Disadvantage and make a situation more interesting and memorable.

We recently switched over to Angry DM's method of Inspiration (e.g., you start with Inspiration but can only use when you show that the action ties into one of your bonds, flaws, or personality traits) so we'll see if that changes how much Inspiration is used. However, I can see that a group which is more mechanically-inclined, looking for bonuses based on the benefits they provide, would see A/D as too simple and too limiting.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

The so called "bluntness" of the mechanic is probably the best thing about it. Instead of taking their time to collect small bonuses that can be added together for a big effect on the die roll, players vie for advantage or look for ways to get out of disadvantage, and they stop at that. I can think of lots of ways in which being able to stack bonuses would add granularity and subtlety, but I can't think of a situation where it would actually improve the game for us.

The AD/DS mechanic allows me to move brain power to my favored aspects of the game. I've been playing with it for almost two years now (including the playtest), and I can't see myself going back to a +N/-N model anytime soon. Even if I go back to DM 2E (the kind of possibility I never disregard ), I'll probably bring advantage back with me.

 

[Mercule]

I like adv/disadv. It's incredibly simple and balanced for "I don't want to overthink it" situations. If a player has a good idea or does something dumb, I throw adv/disadv at them and call it a day. If it's something they do repeatedly, I come up with a standard modifier for it. The group is aware of this attitude and okay with the target being adjustable. My biggest concern is that the Rogue is the most tactically creative player, so I have to think about whether Sneak Attack is also warranted; if not, he just gets a +/-2.

I didn't like it at first, but I've come to believe that the non-stackable/single-cancel nature of adv/disadv is a feature not a bug. It keeps things from getting out of hand when players are really, really creative (or rules-lawyery). A situational +/-2 is probably just as balanced as adv/disadv, but could be argued into a stack. Unless the GM is a real jerk, that's going to work in the players' favor, over the long run, and probably be unbalanced.

Another reason I like adv/disadv, is that it actually gives a bell curve benefit, with an effective bonus of +5, when you need to roll a 10 to succeed, but an effective +1 at the ends. It feels like a nice bonus all the time, though. Why is this a good thing? Because I don't like coin-flips. If the players already have a good chance of succeeding, then I'm entertained by a good idea, but there's no point in giving a huge reward. If it's a good enough idea, I'll probably just give them an auto-success; if not, they still have a chance of dramatic failure. If it's a bad situation, then they should probably come up with something more significant than clever positioning on a single roll to get out of it, but every little bit is worth something. If it's a middle-of-the-road challenge that boils down to a single roll, then a good idea is perfect for moving a 50% chance of success to a 75% chance. No matter what, though, a clever idea always gets a boost -- and I can use the same mechanic to do it.

As might be apparent, I tend to give out more advantage than disadvantage. It's just more fun. Ad hoc disadvantage generally comes in the form of players spending their Inspiration die to penalize an NPC. I don't think this is an official use for Inspiration, but it's been really good, especially the way we handle Inspiration. I went out and bought a handful of the ugliest dice I could find and assigned one to each player. When they gain Inspiration, I toss them their die. When they use Inspiration, they roll the die and then toss it to me. Inspiration is always rolled by the player, even if the other die is rolled behind the screen. That means the players can use inspiration to gain strategic information about major NPCs. It also ensures that there's no way for me to "dramatically fudge" the roll (whether or not I would is beside the point). It may sound like a small, niche thing, but my players got really excited when they realize the implications of the ruling. That's what matters.

 

[Ristamar]

I almost forgot about the bell curve. I appreciate that aspect of it, too.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

What choo talkin about Willis? Old school is all about keeping things simple. Complexity for its own sake is very much a new school idea.

Heh, descending AC's, THACO (or the 1E attack matrix), and whether or not you want to roll high or low on any given check apparently decided by a coin flip would have a word with you. I've taught people 1E, I've taught people 5E. 5E is head and shoulders more elegantly designed with more unified and streamlined mechanics. Just look at the strength score in 1st edition vs strength in 5th. 1E had one bonus to hit and one for damage, an open doors target number and a bend bars/lift gates %. For some bizarre reason, it gets percentile strength at 18, whereas other scores dont (UA cavaliers excepted) for... reasons? I'm in a 1E game right now (fighter/cleric multiclassers represent!), and all the mods are greatly more complex on 1E than my 5E character. Determining initiative, running combat, figuring out surprise - everything is more complex in 1E, save for skills, which are browbeat/sweet talk your DM because there arent really many guidelines for those.

 

[Imaro]

I've been pointing out the negative quirks of adv/dis since the beginning of the playtest, but most people have been simply too happy for its simplicity, that they refuse to see them.

Or maybe they are ok with the tradeoff. Personally I like it because of it's simplicity, the game doesn't bog down in bunch of minuscule ever-changing bonuses that player's are constantly trying to eke out of everything. This was definitely a bottleneck in both 4e and 3e, I'm ok with giving up some granularity in order to gain speed, it's a game of pulp/high fantasy adventure and the adv/disadv mechanic works for that feel (all IMO of course).

IMO the non-stacking isn't even the biggest deal with advantage, but rather the fact that (dis)advantage is also a condition that triggers a lot of special abilities, unlike the 3e vanilla +2/-2 modifier that you could always apply to represent various circumstances. Now if you over-use (dis)advantage freely, you have to be prepared that the PCs (and the monsters) will too often be allowed or otherwise prevented to use their special abilities and features.

Even if this was a real problem (have you actually experienced this in game??)... which I'm not sure it is (I mean what is too much or too little usage for various abilities)... wouldn't it be minor at best... I mean if you're using advantage & dis-advantage too often... wouldn't it just even out in the end? If you're using one more than the other then you'll eventually find your leanings out in play (either your game skews easier or it skews harder) and if necessary adjust... though I think 5e PC's after 3rd level are robust enough that skewing either way slightly won't cause much issue.

Yeah, you're not the only one. Perhaps it's because the "honeymoon" isn't over yet, or because people don't run into the issue very often, or they're just too pleased with the overall system, I dunno. But yeah--people (including yours truly) were pointing this out back in the playtest, and not terribly many people even reacted. A lot of those that did gave the Standard 5e Response: "You're the DM, you fix it!" (even when the listener...isn't actually the DM.)

Or maybe it's because people have weighed it in their games and the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages (see what I did there... ) of using the mechanic. Or maybe it's a problem that doesn't really happen often if ever n practical play. I just ended a year long campaign up to 10th level and I can't say adv/disadv caused any serious issues for us. But then as DM I was also able to (at least somewhat) regulate the frequency of the conditions... so maybe that helped, but then every DM is going to do that.

I think they're both significant concerns. Advantage/disadvantage, probably more than anything except maybe Proficiency, is the "core mechanic" that the whole engine is built around...and it's quixotic to the core. Most of the time, both of them are supposed to be relatively rare/unusual things, and it's clear that certain features are balanced around that being the case. But then you have other features that grant it all the time--class features, items, a few spells--on top of it being the default "bennie" handed out for good roleplay, and it being the intended replacement for the old "DM's best friend" aka the +/-2 situational modifier, and clearly some things (e.g. the Barbarian with Reckless Attack) are built expecting you to benefit from it on a regular basis.

Could you elaborate... which things are based on it being a rare or unusual thing? Again, from a practical standpoint of running the game I haven't had an issue here so I'm curious if I missed something...

So much--too much, I'd argue--rides on a single, non-stacking (and non-extendable), eliminable mechanic.

And I'd say that too much time was spent scrounging for and counting up minor changing bonuses previously, so I welcome the change and simplification.

 

[Lanliss]

Has anyone tried a "stacks up to 1" system for A/D? For example, if you have 5 advantage giving occurrences, but only 1 disadvantage, you still have advantage, because the 4 advantages left stack to 1. That would solve the "have it or don't" problem, right?

 

[Ristamar]

recently my character got hit by a poison gas. The disadvantage was applied to all my attack rolls in the encounter. The encounter was AC 8. I had a +7 to hit. So when i rolled to attack, I had to either roll a 2 or better in one die roll, or roll a 2 or better in two die rolls. If I had been a halfling, I would get to reroll the possibility of a 1.

While statistically, i could have rolled a 1 on my disadvantage, I didn't. Therefore, the disadvantage had absolutely no impact on my attacks. Meanwhile, if i had a -2 penalty, or a -4 penalty, for instance, my probability to miss would have tripled or worse.

I'm not sure that's a real problem. This edition is skewed toward players frequently hitting with their attacks, though I can understand why some people might not like that design choice.

 

[DEFCON 1]

recently my character got hit by a poison gas. The disadvantage was applied to all my attack rolls in the encounter. The encounter was AC 8. I had a +7 to hit. So when i rolled to attack, I had to either roll a 2 or better in one die roll, or roll a 2 or better in two die rolls. If I had been a halfling, I would get to reroll the possibility of a 1.

While statistically, i could have rolled a 1 on my disadvantage, I didn't. Therefore, the disadvantage had absolutely no impact on my attacks. Meanwhile, if i had a -2 penalty, or a -4 penalty, for instance, my probability to miss would have tripled or worse.

If you find that to be an issue-- that the encounter did not go from "almost a complete and total victory right from the start" to "slightly less chance of a complete and total victory right from the start", I might suggest that's more an issue of the encounter the DM threw at you, rather than the game mechanic being the thing that caused the problem. I mean, if the DM is tossing you a slam-dunk encounter where only rolling 1s is the only way to ever miss... having a different mechanic wherein you now only miss on 1s *and* 2s still says the same thing-- the DM is expecting and wanting you to curbstomp this thing and get it over with.

If he didn't want you to practically auto-hit the entire time... methinks he wouldn't have given you an encounter wherein that was possible, regardless of the negatives you got from the poison gas.

 

[ExploderWizard]

There's certainly elegance in simplicity. But I'm more of the old school of thought. I don't like too much simplicity. I like detail.

Heh, descending AC's, THACO (or the 1E attack matrix), and whether or not you want to roll high or low on any given check apparently decided by a coin flip would have a word with you. I've taught people 1E, I've taught people 5E. 5E is head and shoulders more elegantly designed with more unified and streamlined mechanics. Just look at the strength score in 1st edition vs strength in 5th. 1E had one bonus to hit and one for damage, an open doors target number and a bend bars/lift gates %. For some bizarre reason, it gets percentile strength at 18, whereas other scores dont (UA cavaliers excepted) for... reasons? I'm in a 1E game right now (fighter/cleric multiclassers represent!), and all the mods are greatly more complex on 1E than my 5E character. Determining initiative, running combat, figuring out surprise - everything is more complex in 1E, save for skills, which are browbeat/sweet talk your DM because there arent really many guidelines for those.

Complexity wise AD&D is more involved than 5E. Just the grappling system in the DMG is enough to make one's head explode.

Go back to OD&D for simplicity. No skills, no feats, 3 classes super fast play.