I think when he was talking about CR he was talking about monster challenge rating, its not at all reliable. In fact 5e's CR system is a hot mess. Still, 4e aside, its no worse than every other D&D and so it certainly can be lived with, as all 5e's quirks can be.
It was a design trade-off, not just a mess, IMHO. Bounded Accuracy lets one low-level monster write-up serve as both standard monster to low-level character, and minion to higher-level ones. Higher level monsters might as well be 'elites' to lower level characters. Apart from Legendary (Solo) monsters, 5e completely avoided the design challenge - and page count requirements - of secondary monster roles. The - ok, an - unintended(?) consequence that efficiency gain was that numbers had an effect on encounter difficulty out of proportion with just adding up exp values. A 3000 exp monster and 10 300 exp monsters just don't present the same challenge. The former might be beat down before it could do much to the party, the later might annihilate the party just as quickly by sheer volume of attacks. So the encounter design system became more baroque in consequence of monster design becoming more elegant.
We all know what you can do with them, but its a more obtuse system because the labels aren't meaningful relative to the only thing that matters in the game, the PCs.
That's a matter of the DM's style and campaign tone. The players are always going to matter, obviously, but their characters might not. They might be little more than avatars through which to experience the DMs world. Or the theme of the campaign could be one of futility in the face of vastly greater forces. :shrug:
Nobody cares about 'compared with all the challenges in D&D'. That comparison is of no value to the DM at the table.
Not true. When characters advance only a little in what they can do, pointing up the fact that they have advanced, at all, is helpful. Presenting tasks with some everyman measure of difficulty highlights that the PCs are, in fact, advancing, even if they players don't notice it much outside their hps totals and spell slots.
To me the context has always ("always" here means, well before I heard of 3E) be obvious. The idea that "hard" and "easy" are relative to societal norms is intrinsic to play.
I really hate the idea of "hard" "(to a 15th level character)".
So when your high level character succeeds on a task by rolling a 2, you'll RP it with "wow, that was hard?"
But I think that the connection between frame of reference and the means of implementing seems to extend well beyond language.
Hard relative to a hypothetical everyman or 'hard' relative to the character doing the task? It's really a trivial distinction. The kind of things folks blow out of proportion when they have nothing worthwhile to talk about.
IMHO the key, central, and most important thing that 4e ever did was to take a step back and re-examine the tenets and goals of the game, and then reshape the mechanics to serve those goals and tenets. The failure of 5e, such as it is, is in failing to do likewise.
I can't agree. 4e may have designed to certain goals and tenets, and done well. But, so did 5e. The difference, perhaps, was that 4e looked at professed or formal goals & tenets (D&D tries to emulate genre, it tries to provide class balance, it needs a wider sweet spot, etc...), while 5e looked at more at de facto ones (no one plays past level 10; magic needs to be magical, which means mechanically superior; magic items should make you just better; 1st level characters are supposed to die, it's a right of passage). To put it another way, WotC realized that D&D has built a product identity on how it had been, not how it should have been, tried to be but failed, or could become better. The reality of D&D, not it's potential, is what 5e strives for - and captures successfully. And, along with greatly lowered investment & cost-cutting, that's making it successful in the business sense, as well.
I could always trust the principles of the 4e designers when they created material.
Just for the first 2 years, really, and even then, only after an update cycle or two.
I don't know how to trust the 5e designers in the same way. Sometimes they do the most ridiculous things for reasons I can't even fathom.
Put on your nostalgia cap and try running an old module like Village of Hommlet or In Search of the Unknown or even Temple of the Frog or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks with 5e. And, don't be shy about turning on the 'GM force.' Some of those reasons might become evident.
Or not. You might be past your nostalgia phase. ;(
Its also hard to build a character to PASS DCs in 5e! So the problem is everyone has the same difficulty passing them. Sure, at very high levels the game just barely starts to really differentiate, but the fact that people constantly bring up level 20 Expertise characters and such is exactly a sign of the issue.
Again, that's an intentional trade-off. Bounded Accuracy tries to keep everyone participating in the skill arena, just as it tries to keep lesser monsters participating in combat, by keeping targets - whether AC or DC - in reach.
The threshold is a DC that an 'everyman' can't hope to touch - like 21+, but which the skilled specialist can manage around that magic 60% or so. 5e's odd affection for 5-DC chunks makes 25 the obvious candidate, and +17 is (max stat, proficiency, & expertise at level 20), indeed, that threshold. Using 21, though (there's no reason you can't), it drops to +12. Expertise gets you there faster, and even non-expertise gets to +11 eventually.
Hmm... to be honest, I thought it'd look a little better for 5e before I started typing that.... ;(
Every GM largely tailors their adventures such that the challenges are beatable in some way. Lets not even kid ourselves about that. Every published module features a byline "adventure for characters of level X to Y". To pretend otherwise is to again go into this unfathomable mumbo jumbo land where you pretend that you're playing some other game than you're really playing.
There /are/ sandbox style, 'status quo' campaigns, though. The DM places (probably doesn't bother creating) challenges where he feels they 'belong,' and the PCs investigate, pick one, and live or die by that choice.
Obviously some subset of people will just play in a way that is so idiosyncratic that a given set of rules won't match up with their needs, but 4e was the practical edition. It always took the road that the game was first and foremost a game played at the table by people. Sometimes it might not actually achieve some of what it attempted, but it was all engineered in the service of good play, not some theoretical aesthetic judgement of how D&D should be that has to be worked around in practice. 5e very definitely backed off from that.
That's the difference between a technically good game - designed to be a game - and a good game product - designed to be well-received by its target audience. 4e tackled severe problems D&D had had for over 30 years - but, anyone still playing D&D at that point had learned to deal with (if not exploit) those problems, even though they made it technically inferior, when judged only as a game. That's like taking nicotine out of cigarettes. Good idea, bad for business.
