D&D 5E New Rule of Three is up for 31 Jan. 2014

[Zaran]

IOW, how my group has played D&D always​.

No, The Mighty Grishnak in his platemail and five axes strapped to his back does not help scout for the party.

And that makes sense. But then there are situations where a group needs to be a bit stealthy and should have to take precautions. This could be anything and not just a Ranger's spell being cast. If the rogue goes up to each party member and helps each one stow gear or muffle things from banging together that should help with their stealth rolls. Also if I hear Group stealth, I think of one roll. Or at least One person being the main roll and others helping the roll. I would have no issue with the DC increasing for each member of the party participating in the Stealth roll as long as one flubbed roll doesn't always make the entire group fail.

 

[TwoSix]

1. Group stealth which the current rules makes nearly impossible (4-6 rolls means a really high margin of failure, even if you have high modifiers) is a feature and not a bug, because Ranger spells.

Uh....no...That's not an acceptable answer. lets say each individual character has a 20% chance of failure on the dice (meaning they have extremely high modifiers). Lets say we have the average of 5 characters. This means the chance of one member of the party failing is 1 - (.8 * .8 * .8 * .8 * .8) (multiply together the chances of succeeding at a roll to get the chance of not making it) or 67.232%. So if the entire party has an 80% of success individually, they have a 67.232% chance of being detected anyway as a group. I'm sorry, but it appears the team at WotC didn't run the math, or they have a desire to make the group reliant on magic. Just for fun a party that has members that have 20%, 20%, 20%, 40%, 60% chance of failure would give us 1-(.8 * .8 * .8 *.6 *.4) = 87.712% chance of failure. So if you have even one member that has a low chance you might as well not even try.

While I agree with your numbers, I think the question here is this.

"Assuming we're trying for a rough sense of verisimilitude, what should the failure chance be for 5 characters of equivalent stealth ability, compared to a single character?"

My gut feeling is that the failure chance should be higher, but not enough as to double the failure chance. Maybe have everyone roll, and if there are more successes than failures, the group succeeds?

 

[Derren]

"Assuming we're trying for a rough sense of verisimilitude, what should the failure chance be for 5 characters of equivalent stealth ability, compared to a single character?"

The same for each character.
I do not buy this "group stealth" what people seem to want here were a sneaky character somehow cancels out someone who can't hide. Everyone should make his own check and when one fails he (and only he) is spotted.

 

[Li Shenron]

1. The issue is the mechanic ... The more dice, the higher the chance of failure ... There needs to be a way to offset failures

The mechanic issue of multiple rolls is something I would like to see address, but in case of stealth I think the whole issue is actually pretty realistic. A stealth operation simply cannot afford a noisy member.

But the whole thing is complicated because of dice swinginess... so on one hand I'm totally fine with a half-orc fighter in noise full plate making it very hard for the party to sneak silently. But on the other hand, I'm not so fine with a party of 5 PCs good at sneaking having much more trouble than a party of 4, because one failure spoils the whole result.

I have similar problems with perception checks. I would like a party of 5 to have more chance at noticing something than a party of 4, but not too much a difference, but I have the feeling that just rolling one perception check each (and needing only 1 success) makes success too easy.

That said, I'd have no idea how to solve this issue...

 

[Halivar]

And that makes sense. But then there are situations where a group needs to be a bit stealthy and should have to take precautions. This could be anything and not just a Ranger's spell being cast. If the rogue goes up to each party member and helps each one stow gear or muffle things from banging together that should help with their stealth rolls.

I would consider this an attempt to "aid another" with a +2 bonus for the affected character.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Exactly. This thing should be at the printers now if they are going to hit their release date...

I believe we established in the guessing the release date thread that with the way modern printing works that it needs to be at the printer about mid-March in order to release at Gen Con.

Given that it takes a couple of weeks to a month for typesetting, I'm guessing they actually have a couple of more weeks to tweak things before they are done.

Also, keep in mind that most of these articles are actually written a week or two in advance of being published to their website.

Still, WOTC does move fast and I certainly see them as a company that would be tweaking rules until the last second without any real playtesting.

 

[Sage Genesis]

It sounds to me like a character will not be able to dual wield until their class gets an extra action. I do not like this one bit.?

No that's not what they're saying. What they mean is, two-weapon fighting doesn't stack with bonus actions. You can do one or the other, but not both at once. That doesn't mean that two-weapon fighting has a prerequisite in the form of access to bonus actions though. (Rodney clarified as much in the comments section below.)

 

[Ed_Laprade]

*sigh* 40 years in and they still can't get their facts straight, despite being told over and over again that they're wrong. Mail armor is QUIET, leather armor is NOT !!! (Not without a lot of oil and elbow grease, anyway.)

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Medium armor is still ineffective for a fighter. I already said my piece in the comments, but I'll very briefly summarize the conclusion.

After lower levels the only medium armor with any incentive for use by a fighter is mithral scale. If you prefer to avoid stealth disadvantage you can wear mithral scale instead of plate at the cost of one point of AC. The problem is that if mithral isn't standard purchasable armor dragon scale is your only top-end choice which has disadvantage and worse AC than plate. An effective fighter either has to wear heavy armor, or go all Dex and wear light. Note that neither heavy nor light armor requires a mithral version to maintain it's effectiveness relative to medium armor. Medium requires mithral merely to keep up.

A fighter should be able to choose a balanced approach with a Dex of 14 and have a benefit from wearing medium armor--which he can't right now without supposing the existence of items that will be treated by many DMs as equivalent to magical armors.

 

[GX.Sigma]

The mechanic issue of multiple rolls is something I would like to see address, but in case of stealth I think the whole issue is actually pretty realistic. A stealth operation simply cannot afford a noisy member.

But the whole thing is complicated because of dice swinginess... so on one hand I'm totally fine with a half-orc fighter in noise full plate making it very hard for the party to sneak silently. But on the other hand, I'm not so fine with a party of 5 PCs good at sneaking having much more trouble than a party of 4, because one failure spoils the whole result.

I have similar problems with perception checks. I would like a party of 5 to have more chance at noticing something than a party of 4, but not too much a difference, but I have the feeling that just rolling one perception check each (and needing only 1 success) makes success too easy.

That said, I'd have no idea how to solve this issue...

Yep, this is the real problem. Stealth and Perception, of course, are opposites--Perception is too easy because it only takes 1 success to succeed (take the best result from X d20 rolls), and Stealth is too difficult because it only takes 1 failure to fail (take the worst result from X d20 rolls). It's like super-advantage or super-disadvantage. And it's a pain to roll that many dice (how the hell am I actually supposed to adjudicate 5 bugbears hiding from 5 PCs?).

I think we need a general rule for group skill checks. Something that still makes sense why the clunkers shouldn't go on stealth missions, but doesn't have the nonsensical situation where the super-sneaky assassins can't sneak anywhere. Maybe just roll once, using the best (or worst, depending on which makes sense) modifier of the whole group? The passive perception rules already hint at this (there's only one roll, and only the highest perception modifier matters).