D&D 5E Starter set unboxing photos

[Stormonu]

He's probably going to die.

He's got an AC of 14-15 and 6-7 HP, maybe 8. The ogre hits Black Dougal on an 8-9. If Black Dougal didn't put enough points into Con (+0) the Ogre will drop him off base damage alone (6) and the ogre only needs to roll moderately well (8+ on 2d8) to straight kill Black Dougal. For each +1 to Black Dougal's Con mod his odds get better, though he's almost certain to be knocked unconscious in the first round, and will always have some risk of being one-shot (even if he pumped all his points into Con his HP soft-caps at 10, so a crit will always kill him.)

Ouch - sounds like Dougal's best chance is to put some distance between himself and the Ogre, if he can. Okay, if Dougal gets initiative over the Ogre, can he make an attack then move away, hoping the others can block for him (i.e., get the fighter up to take the brunt of the attacks)?

Conversely, if Dougal does take a hit and assuming the Fighter, Wizard and Cleric move in after seeing their friend go down, can the remaining three hope to drop the Ogre before they are all killed? Assuming the Cleric takes an action to try and revive Dougal and get him back in the fight, will Dougal be too far in negative hit points to revive? If they can get Dougal back up into the fight, does it improve their chances of winning this fight any? 79 hit points seems like a lot to chew through.

Back in B/X days, I actually had this happen to a party. They were able to kill the Ogre, but only because the Ogre rolled a 1 for damage when he hit the fighter.

Dougal by himself is clearly out of his league - but does the party working together have a decent chance of winning this fight (without permanently losing chararcters) or is CR 2 WAY over the heads of 5E 1st level characters?

 

[LFK]

Ouch - sounds like Dougal's best chance is to put some distance between himself and the Ogre, if he can. Okay, if Dougal gets initiative over the Ogre, can he make an attack then move away, hoping the others can block for him (i.e., get the fighter up to take the brunt of the attacks)?

Conversely, if Dougal does take a hit and assuming the Fighter, Wizard and Cleric move in after seeing their friend go down, can the remaining three hope to drop the Ogre before they are all killed? Assuming the Cleric takes an action to try and revive Dougal and get him back in the fight, will Dougal be too far in negative hit points to revive? If they can get Dougal back up into the fight, does it improve their chances of winning this fight any? 79 hit points seems like a lot to chew through.

Back in B/X days, I actually had this happen to a party. They were able to kill the Ogre, but only because the Ogre rolled a 1 for damage when he hit the fighter.

Dougal by himself is clearly out of his league - but does the party working together have a decent chance of winning this fight (without permanently losing chararcters) or is CR 2 WAY over the heads of 5E 1st level characters?

The level 1 party can win this fight, for sure, but they have a very high risk of losing a character. The Ogre is very easy to hit and has mediocre saves, so that's not a huge hurdle. Most characters are going to be hitting the Ogre on 6+, and his best save is +3, making that a save on 10+ vs. average 1st level caster DCs.

The real issue is that with 59 HP he's going to get 2-4 actions since it's gonna take the party ~8 attacks to kill him. He only needs 11+ to hit the Fighter, and hits hard enough that it's not all that crazy for a 1st round hit of 10 (low average), putting the Fighter down to 2 HP, and a second round hit of 14 (high average) killing the Fighter outright. Even if she uses Second Wind (which she damn well better at 2HP) the average is 6HP, putting her at 8, still very likely to be knocked out by the next attack and well within the Instant Death danger zone. That right there is the huge danger: 1st level PCs have so few hit points that it's very, very easy to hit that Instant Death threshold if the PC is low, and a crit will kill pretty much any of them.

As long as they don't get unlucky with an Instant Death they have Second Wind and 2 CLWs and should be able to kill the Ogre without taking a death, but they'll be spent for the day.

If Dougal wins initiative he can attack and back out, unless you're using the tactical module, in which case he has to disengage to avoid the Opportunity Attack (he doesn't get Cunning Action, which lets him attack and disengage on the same turn, until 2nd level)

If Dougal loses initiative and takes a hit there's a very good chance that he died outright. At the very least he's almost certainly down for the count due to the Ogre's base 6 damage. If he goes down, but doesn't die outright, he's probably going to be okay. Maybe. His biggest damage is going in with his dual shortswords, but then he's just playing Ogre Roulette again with his life, so he's better off pulling back and whipping out his bow.

C2 is surprisingly difficult for a level 1 party, but not impossible. I really, really wouldn't recommend going into this fight, but what makes it so bad almost entirely comes down to the quirk of level 1's low total HP making the threshold for Instant Death very attainable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If 5E takes a mechanical "must be this tall" approach to monster design, that will turn off a lot of people.

As LFK has pointed out, you're conflating two issues, that being:

A) Making monsters on a very tight template so they are easy to quantize.

and

B) Having a system for categorizing monster difficulty that is worth the paper it's written on.

A can make B easier. A is not required for B. Working B is a huge asset to a DM, and a desirable thing to have. Bad/Malfunctioning B is actively harmful to a game.

 

[BryonD]

As LFK has pointed out, you're conflating two issues, that being:

A) Making monsters on a very tight template so they are easy to quantize.

and

B) Having a system for categorizing monster difficulty that is worth the paper it's written on.

A can make B easier. A is not required for B. Working B is a huge asset to a DM, and a desirable thing to have. Bad/Malfunctioning B is actively harmful to a game.

Agree that they can be different.
I was responding to the context of 4E as the example.

In that case the two items come pre-conflated, a package deal.
If they can break it up, I'm open to a fresh assessment.

It does occur to me that the 5E bounded system might make your desire easier to achieve.

 

[BryonD]

As far as "must be this tall", the game needs to have some measure of that, otherwise the DM's job is stacked against them. Dracoliches aren't appropriate foes for a 1st level party. Now maybe the DM just kinda knows that because, you know, Dracoliches. But what level party is a

...


If it doesn't, if, like 3e, the numbers are ultimately meaningless and misleading, then the system can actually be worse than saying "**** it, just guess."

I'm not saying there is no point here. But I am saying be careful what you ask for.
The 3E system sucked. And yet is was a vastly popular hobby-impacting game. To me that means it must be of limited importance.

I agree that it can be helpful for learning the DM's job. But I don't accept that the balancing act is ultimately all that hard. Yes, it takes some experience, but that isn't a bad thing.

Sounds like we agree that not forcing monsters into a math filter is a good thing.
If you can let monsters (etc) be a quality game mechanic model of the narrative thing, without arbitrary restrictions and then achieve a quality, reliable difficulty/challenge scale, then cool.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It does occur to me that the 5E bounded system might make your desire easier to achieve.

Indeed. It should be entirely doable, without forcing monster math into precise shapes (4E-style), if they just have a good idea of the general math of their system, do good playtesting, and approach it logically and with the lessons learned from the previous attempts.

 

[LFK]

I'm not saying there is no point here. But I am saying be careful what you ask for.
The 3E system sucked. And yet is was a vastly popular hobby-impacting game. To me that means it must be of limited importance.

I agree that it can be helpful for learning the DM's job. But I don't accept that the balancing act is ultimately all that hard. Yes, it takes some experience, but that isn't a bad thing.

Sounds like we agree that not forcing monsters into a math filter is a good thing.
If you can let monsters (etc) be a quality game mechanic model of the narrative thing, without arbitrary restrictions and then achieve a quality, reliable difficulty/challenge scale, then cool.

I actually don't dislike what 4e was doing with the "monster window", and I don't think it's better or worse than what 5e is aiming to do. I think they both tell interesting and coherent stories through their mechanics.

In 4e the philosophy is that Heroes naturally progress from local to national to global to planar goals, threats, settings, and opponents. A Paragon adventure looks and feels different from a Heroic adventure because you're out in the Elemental Chaos fighting Archons and Demons or Yaun-ti and Gith or so on.

5e is going more for an ecological approach, and assuming the characters are much more earthbound. Orcs are everywhere, so you never really stop running into orcs, and what's wrong with a trivial encounter, anyway, if it only takes a couple minutes of actual play time?

 

[Wolfskin]

Regarding the Starter Set price, I do feel they've sacrificed a few nice things to keep a low price tag- for instance, I would have loved to see a different cover for each booklet, as silly as that sounds.

However, these kind of decisions are not made by the game designers, they are handed down by business, and I wasn't going to buy the Starter Set until I saw the discount price on Amazon. If the Starter Set were $23 at a discount, and had a bunch of stand-up cardboard figurines and a battle mat, I would not pay an extra $11 for them and pass.

But that is, of course, because I don't use minis or battle mats; I can understand some people are yearning for them.

 

[mips42]

Wow, are you intentionally misrepresenting things? We all already mentioned that the discount price for the WOTC Starter Set is $12 (and some change), a couple times, before your post. That means the discounted Paizo set is almost twice the price of the discounted WOTC set.

You want to talk about intentionally misrepresenting things?
Okay, I'll play. I said "If the Starter Set is $20 and the Beginner Box is $23, the beginner box wins in value in my opinion."

Firstly: At the time of writing I had not seen any pricing for the Starter Set (not saying it wasn't there, just that I hadn't seen it).
Secondly: I CLEARLY said "IF the Starter Set is $20"... to most people this would seem to say that I hadn't seen the pricing and was making a value estimation based on the best information that I had at the time.
Thirdly: it's an OPINION. MY feeling, My take on where I thought the value of the Starter Set was based on what I saw and a best guess of pricing.
Fourthly: I concluded my original opinion with "just my $0.000001", a variation on the "my .02" Again another indication that it was an opinion.
Finally: at roughly $13, the value estimation of the starter set is improved, BUT this is a DISCOUNTED price. The regular retail listed at Amazon is $20. EXACTLY as speculated.
I stand behind the opinion I made at the time: I feel that, at $20 the Starter Set would be a poor value for the money compared to the Beginner Box at $23. At roughly $13.00 (discounted on Amazon), the value is improved, however we can't REALLY evaluate it until we can hold it in our hands, which won't happen until mid July.
I also stand behind another statement I made which was "I hope it's awesome".

 

[Wolfskin]

I get your point- for $3 bucks, the PF beginner box trumps the Starter Set, not argument here.

However, in Amazon the Starter Set is $13 and the Beginner Box $26; at regular retail, the Starter Set is $20 while the Beginner Box is $35.