D&D 5E SR and DR; is there a place in Next for them?

[Falling Icicle]

1.) Is the a place for DR/SR in the next edition of D&D?

I sincerely hope not.

2.) How should SR be handled to keep wizards from directly nuking, but still active in a fight?

Why should wizards be kept from directly nuking? That's like saying fighters should be kept from swinging their weapons.

3.) How should DR be done: all or nothing? Resist partial blows? Should it be against silver, magic, +X items, or various special materials based on monster?

There's already resistances in the game that make a creature take half damage from a particular type of attack. That's more than enough punishment for using the "wrong" type of attack against a monster.

There's better ways of representing the weaknesses of various creatures. Perhaps werewolves are vulnerable to silver weapons and can't regenerate the damage from them. Instead of making monsters all but immune to the "wrong" weapons, I'd rather make them weaker against the right kind of weapon. The carrot is more fun than the stick. Sure, you might run into the occasional monster that has alot of resistances and immunities and such, but those should be rare and terrifying creatures, the kind of menaces that are the focus of an entire story. 3.x used this mechanic far too often, IMO.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

There is a mechanic to resist spell effects in D&D and it is saving throws (or defenses in 4e). There is a mechanic to resist physical effects in D&D and it is armor class. Adding a second mechanism on top of this only makes things confusing to little purpose and a lot of frustration.

SR and DR should stay dead.

For a simple and basic game sure, keep such stuff out of the core I suppose. However, what you may find confusing, frustrating and of little purpose others find an important mechanic to carefully differentiate the capacity of and define the flavour of certain creatures. It's like one of those remote control cars that can go forward or when it goes backwards the little trolley wheel turns so it can reverse in a circle. While this keeps things simple yet usable, some people want more control over their remote control car - be it true steering, speed control, suspension and shock absorber settings and so on.

For me, DR or 4e resistances are like that true steering in the RC car: kind of essential to the experience I want. While I could tolerate them in a module, I would prefer them to be an assumed and integrated part of the experience. [I would love to see Armor as DR properly incorporated into the game but alas...]

SR or MR on the other hand is a kludge of a mechanic that I think can be better thought out. There are far better ways of moderating the power of magic.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[drothgery]

3e included SR because many high level spells no longer required saving throws. If you change that, I don't think you need to keep SR around.

... which led to every modestly powergaming caster player developing a good database of spells that bypassed SR and/or taking feats to improve chances of beating SR.

 

[TwinBahamut]

People who don't play 4E tend to forget that it didn't have spell resistance partially because there was no mechanics to build spell resistance upon. Namely, 4e didn't have any mechanical divide whatsoever between "magic" and "non-magic". It didn't use any of the extraordinary/supernatural/spell-like nonsense that 3E needed in order to keep such things straight. It simply didn't matter what caused a burst of fire or whatever, it just mattered that it was fire.

I really wish that 5E would continue that. The giant divide between magic and non-magic is pretty pointless and mostly exists as a consequence of the terrible balance divide between casters and non-casters. If the game is actually balanced, than spell resistance is a pointless mechanics that just causes an arbitrary group of players to not have fun. If it is used as a balancing mechanic, it only works if magic and non-magic are unbalanced by default, which is a terrible situation.

Sadly, 5E looks to be headed directly into the situation I'm not hoping for, so I expect there to be a strictly defined magic/non-magic divide and spell resistance.

Damage reduction (AKA resistance) is a perfectly fine mechanic that I would hope to see brought back, though. Preferably in the 4E form where it is a more unified and easier to use system, though.

 

[Traken]

I'd personally like to see spell resistance be less all-or-nothing like in 3.5. Instead, there should be some horribly complicated (or not) system to determine how powerfully spells affect a creature.

For example, a creature can have 1/2 spell resistance. All effects of spells against this creature are halved. Half damage on nuke spells. Half duration on buffs. Half the bad effects of a curse.

Positives: No more "haha, no spell for you". It should scale pretty well since more powerful spells will have correspondingly more powerful effects. There's not really a way to bypass the entire thing since it would affect all spells.

Negatives: Complicated. Would require massive amounts of rules and/or DM arbitration. Smaller is better which is generally considered bad.

 

[Yora]

DR and SR are fun, and I want them in. There might however be better ways to do it than 3rd Edition did.

 

[MerricB]

3e included SR because many high level spells no longer required saving throws.

No; 3E included SR because AD&D included Magic Resistance. A lot of issues in 3E came about because it was using a new framework to model AD&D, and didn't fully comprehend the implications.

 

[MerricB]

AD&D (and Eldritch Wizardry) included Magic Resistance to represent the unworldly abilities of outer-planar creatures: not only were they some of the few creatures in the original MM with negative ACs, but they were immune to a lot of spell effects!

Unfortunately, when 3.*E started putting in attack spell effects that bypassed SR, it changed it from "awesome outerworldly creatures" to "find the trick to defeat this monster".

 

[am181d]

In an ideal world (for me specifically) armor would grant damage reduction and not positively affect defense (nee AC) and hit points would represent actual damage.

But in a world where AC is a mix of armor and agility and hit points are a mix of luck, vitality, and damage capacity, I don't think we need damage reduction as a separate thing. If you want to increase a monster's damage capacity, give it more hit points.

As far as spell resistance goes... I've *always* hated spell resistance. If you have saving throws, you don't need spell resistance. Just fix the math and allow higher level creatures have a legitimate chance of saving against previously no-save spells.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Regardless of what you call it, there does need to be a provision by which when you hit and deal damage, sometimes you deal less. This comes up often with objects, but since sometimes the line between creature and object is blurred (e.g. golems), it should exist for everything and everyone. It is also important that weapons be ineffective against various monsters because D&D, whatever else it is, is fantasy. Sometimes you need silver. Sometimes you need a holy avenger.

3e made the mistake of treating DR and hardness differently; hopefully 5e will integrate the concepts.

I'd sure like to see armor as DR and blocking as DR rules as tactical options as well.

There needs to be some kind of magic resistance; separate from saving throws. I'm not a huge fan of SR (as it makes the more powerful casters too powerful), but I wasn't a fan of flat percentages (as it really makes the more powerful casters look like fools). Maybe there's an in-between solution.

In any case, making everything an attack roll is not a deep enough mechanic.