D&D 5E D&D Next Design Goals (Article)

[Dausuul]

No question and my argument wasn't about the math. Rather, how changing the math killed the baked in assumption of an upper boundary on how good ACs could be.

I'm not convinced that assumption was ever baked in very well. You would expect descending AC to "cap" (floor) at 0. But instead we had AC going all the way down to -10. Once you're allowed to go negative, who says you have to stop at -10? There's no reason you couldn't keep right on going, to -15, -20, or whatever, just as ascending ACs could keep going past 30.

If you have an arbitrary limit, people either respect it or they don't. I don't see why it matters whether that limit is a cap or a floor.

 

[P1NBACK]

Also, albeit more indirectly, can point to mechanics that do what the corresponding flavor says they do. Mechanic/Flavor alignment is, of course, a much bigger issue than "getting the math right", but if you don't get the math right, such alignment is fairly well "holed" before you even get out of dry dock. Then all the patching that goes on around these holes will create even more discrepancies.

Some people won't care, because the parts they do care about will (happen to) be fine. I wouldn't want to bet a wooden nickel beforehand that the parts a given person will care about will be on or off the "works fine" list, though.

I'm not sure I can think of an example of this. Like, I'm trying to imagine my last year (and our 48+ sessions) playing D&D where there was "math going wrong".

Can you give me an example? I don't mean to detail the thread. I'm just honestly curious.

 

[Gryph]

I'm not convinced that assumption was ever baked in very well. You would expect descending AC to "cap" (floor) at 0. But instead we had AC going all the way down to -10. Once you're allowed to go negative, who says you have to stop at -10? There's no reason you couldn't keep right on going, to -15, -20, or whatever, just as ascending ACs could keep going past 30.

If you have an arbitrary limit, people either respect it or they don't. I don't see why it matters whether that limit is a cap or a floor.

Maybe it was just the newness of the whole thing, but I can't recall a single discussion or argument for letting an AC go below -10.

OD&D and 1e AD&D used a lookup matrix not THAC0 so the limit was, in fact, extremely well baked.

I don't expect D&D to ever return to descending AC and lookup tables. My take was more of an "unexpected consequences" example. The simpler, more elegant math of d20 hit rolls are a big part of the scaling issues in 3e and 4e. Scaling issues that are lessened with bounded AC ranges.

I also don't expect them to be successful in instituting upper bounds on AC in the d20 model of roll + mod vs AC.

Doesn't really bother me though. I prefer swords and sorcery style campaigns to high fantasy so I usually reboot somewhere between level 10 and 14, regardless of version.

 

[Dausuul]

OD&D and 1e AD&D used a lookup matrix not THAC0 so the limit was, in fact, extremely well baked.

Sure. But that's a property of lookup matrices, having nothing to do with whether AC goes up or down. Whatever value is at the end of the chart is the baked-in limit, whether it's AC -10, AC 30, or AC sqrt(i).

I don't expect D&D to ever return to descending AC and lookup tables. My take was more of an "unexpected consequences" example. The simpler, more elegant math of d20 hit rolls are a big part of the scaling issues in 3e and 4e. Scaling issues that are lessened with bounded AC ranges.

You're drawing a connection between two things that are in no way connected. On the one hand, you have the simpler, more elegant math. On the other hand, you have the scaling issues resulting from unbounded AC. These are totally separate concerns. Yes, 3E decided to do away with a hard limit on how good your AC could get, but that decision could just as easily have been made with 2E-style negative AC. Conversely, 3E could have maintained the hard limit and capped AC at 30 while switching to the new math, and it would have worked just as well as the old -10 floor.

I don't expect to see a hard cap in 5E saying "You cannot ever have AC above such-and-such a value." I do think a soft cap is likely; barring crazy CharOp shenanigans, you simply won't be able to get your AC above a certain level. 4E was disciplined about this and I don't see why 5E cannot manage the same.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not sure I can think of an example of this. Like, I'm trying to imagine my last year (and our 48+ sessions) playing D&D where there was "math going wrong".

Can you give me an example? I don't mean to detail the thread. I'm just honestly curious.

Off the top of my head, here are 4

(3E) Nonfull casters and half casters only preparing buffs and utility spells as their caster level and DCs were too low to waste casting on an unwilling target.

(3E)The Truenamer.

(4E) Early solos and brute had too many HP. Early soldiers had too High AC.

(4E) Feat taxes needed to keep up with monsters

EDIT: Oh I forgot all the Skill vs "anything that isn't a Skill" checks like the 3.5 bard's fascinate song, or Demoralize.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I have yet to see any 4E Hate coming from anyone at WotC. I've said this before, and I'll say it again:

I challenge anyone on these boards to bring forth proof that anyone at WotC has done this since the anouncement of 5E.

The comment made by one of the D&DN designers that seemed closest to me to 4E bashing was "skill challeges need to die in a fire."

First, I disagree. I like the skill challenge mechanic, when used well. I've designed many that flow seamlessly with the action, don't force players into them, and reward them in a structured way for overcoming something without resorting to combat.

Second, even if a designer dislikes Skill Challenges, literally incendiary comment seems like a really poor choice when trying to be inclusive.

It's nothing that will keep me from following the development of 5E, but it did rub me the wrong way.

Edit: Exact quote from 5E Info Page:

Skill Challeges - "I want them to die in a fire."

Not sure who the quote is attributed to, as the news page does not credit the designer.

 

[Gryph]

Sure. But that's a property of lookup matrices, having nothing to do with whether AC goes up or down. Whatever value is at the end of the chart is the baked-in limit, whether it's AC -10, AC 30, or AC sqrt(i).



You're drawing a connection between two things that are in no way connected. On the one hand, you have the simpler, more elegant math. On the other hand, you have the scaling issues resulting from unbounded AC. These are totally separate concerns. Yes, 3E decided to do away with a hard limit on how good your AC could get, but that decision could just as easily have been made with 2E-style negative AC. Conversely, 3E could have maintained the hard limit and capped AC at 30 while switching to the new math, and it would have worked just as well as the old -10 floor.

I don't expect to see a hard cap in 5E saying "You cannot ever have AC above such-and-such a value." I do think a soft cap is likely; barring crazy CharOp shenanigans, you simply won't be able to get your AC above a certain level. 4E was disciplined about this and I don't see why 5E cannot manage the same.

I think they are connected. I think the reason they did away with the cap in 3e was because it didn't make sense for the ascending math of d20 to have caps anywhere. That "doesn't make sense" only became an issue in d20 versions because they were trying hard to make all of the various subsystems intuitive and identical. I very much doubt that there was ever a discussion on whether it was desirable to cap AC. The decision was rolled into "open-ended makes sense for d20".

This is mostly speculative, though I do remember WoTC promoting the open-endedness of d20 as making more sense then previous versions.

Your earlier post was correct in that descending AC going to -10 never made sense. That was part of my very first post in this thread. The very non-intuitiveness of that system took it off the table in our many and varied houseruling discussions.

A lot of system balance properties in 1e were non-intuitive and undocumented and most of the damage done to them occured in 2e by the post-Gygax TSR designers. What Tweet and Cook and company did for 3e made perfect sense coming off of 2e, I just don't think they examined their own assumptions concerning open-ended math systems closely enough.

I think there is some reason to believe that the Mearls led team agrees to some extent. Hence, the columns referencing flatter math and threats remaing viable across more levels.

In short, d20 system math is easier and more elegant but prone to scaling issues that need to be addressed.

 

[Gryph]

Off the top of my head, here are 4

(3E) Nonfull casters and half casters only preparing buffs and utility spells as their caster level and DCs were too low to waste casting on an unwilling target.

(3E)The Truenamer.

(4E) Early solos and brute had too many HP. Early soldiers had too High AC.

(4E) Feat taxes needed to keep up with monsters

and (4E) monster damage expressions didn't scale at high end making late paragon and epic encounters too easy if you followed the encounter guidelines.

 

[Storminator]

I'm not sure I can think of an example of this. Like, I'm trying to imagine my last year (and our 48+ sessions) playing D&D where there was "math going wrong".

Can you give me an example? I don't mean to detail the thread. I'm just honestly curious.

Our last 3e campaign - the Savage Tide adventure path.

One player liked even ability scores (not sucking at anything) and to match the mini, took a short bow. When any Damage Resistance creature came up, she instantly became completely useless. At the same time, every (and I mean every last one) melee based character died in a grapple from which they had no possible chance of escaping. The last melee PC was a Char Ops Fighter/Scout/Swashbuckler/Dervish. The BBEG had a line in his tactics section that said he uses his awesome devastation attack when low on hp (~10 hp left, according to the text). The Dervish took him from 115 hp to -20 in a single round.

TL,DR: Some PCs were completely useless, other PCs so strong no foe could match them. No one was happy.

PS

 

[FireLance]

I can't imagine how you could have some characters with healing surges and others without healing surges at the same table. This is a daily resource used to throttle how much a character can do in a day. If one person has this limitation and others don't have it . . . not likely to work. But I'll be glad to be surprised if it does work.

Well, D&D has never had a problem with mixing characters with daily attacks and characters without daily attacks at the same table ... right?

In any case, it could be a matter of degree - something like the 1e and 3e monks' self-healing is pretty similar to a healing surge, anyway.