Blackbird71
First Post
I actually saw that option, which is why I specifically used melee combat for my example.
D&D 5E Considering "taking the 5th" (Edition); questions for those more experienced.
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I actually saw that option, which is why I specifically used melee combat for my example.
Well, a single attack roll in D&D has never really represented a single blow - particularly not in old-school AD&D, where a round was a full minute long. There's a whole lot of maneuvering, feinting, and whatever going on. A 5th level fighter, during all this jostling, gets two shots at actually succeeding in scoring a hit, while a 5th level wizard only gets one. Seen that way, the fighter is twice as accurate as the wizard.
Blackbird71
First Post
Sorry, but that's basing a pretty weak argument on a matter of semantics. The bottom line is that per attack roll, the wizard and the fighter would have the same chance of success and the same level of accuracy.
The bottom line is that 5e puts much less focus on the bonus on the roll to hit for the sole measure of accuracy and combat efficacy. This is what makes Bounded Accuracy possible. D&D is an abstract system and trying to map it directly to a process simulation of minute detail is bound to cause problems. Even if the wizard had proficiency (say from a race) in a decent weapon and a comparable strength to his fighter companion, he would still lack the hit points, armor, extra abilities (action surge, better crits, fighting style, multiple attacks, etc) that make the fighter a vastly more effective combatant.
This is the roughly similar to how 4e did it (a starting wizard with the same strength could have an analogous + to hit as a fighter there as well), and--say what you will about it--that was one of the most mechanically balanced editions. At first people did a double take, but this particular issue turned out to not be a problem at all.
Iosue
Legend
Well, let us take our hypothetical fighter and his wizard twin brother, both with STR 16. If they are unarmed, the fighter gets proficiency on unarmed strike because it is a simple weapon, while the wizard is not. So to make it a fair playing field we have to go with quarterstaffs. Here the fighter and wizard are equal until level 4, when they get ability score improvements. The fighter puts his into STR, upping his to-hit, while the wizard goes with Intelli-what's that? The wizard is going to put his ability score improvement into STR, too? Well, okay, so now they are still the same until 6th level. The strong wizard kinda sucks as a wizard, and kinda sucks as a fighter, but he's keeping pace with accuracy, at least. At 6th level the fighter gets another ASI. Now he jumps into the lead with a maxed STR. And stays there...unless the wizard maxes his STR at Level 8. At which point, congratulations to the strongest wizard in the world, I guess? He makes contact with his limited proficient weapons as well as a fighter does on a single roll. The amount of damage per round he's inflicting is far, far less than the fighter is doing. Meanwhile the fighter is now using his five remaining ASI to max out DEX, so his accuracy with ranged weapons is just as good as with melee.
Another way to look at it is that while the bonus may not differ for our weight-training wizard, from a pure probability standpoint, the fighter is increasing his probability to hit for the same damage as the melee wizard, or even more, with every action surge and extra-attack. The wizard takes his shot and misses -- his turn is done. The fighter takes his shot and misses -- his uses his second attack. That misses? He action surges. And so on.
Blackbird71 -- I'm not unsympathetic to counterintuitiveness. I, too, had a similar "Er?" reaction during the playtest when they replaced the class specific Weapon Attack bonuses with proficiency. But it's something you've got to see in play. In theory, a wizard can have the same bonus. In practice, they hardly ever do, and even if they do, they are not nearly the melee combatants fighters are. When accuracy is bounded, HP go up for harder challenges, rather than AC. When HP is up, it's not what chance you have to hit, but how much damage you're going to do on your turn. Fighters are guaranteed to hit more and hit harder than virtually any other class.
Another way to look at it is that while the bonus may not differ for our weight-training wizard, from a pure probability standpoint, the fighter is increasing his probability to hit for the same damage as the melee wizard, or even more, with every action surge and extra-attack. The wizard takes his shot and misses -- his turn is done. The fighter takes his shot and misses -- his uses his second attack. That misses? He action surges. And so on.
Blackbird71 -- I'm not unsympathetic to counterintuitiveness. I, too, had a similar "Er?" reaction during the playtest when they replaced the class specific Weapon Attack bonuses with proficiency. But it's something you've got to see in play. In theory, a wizard can have the same bonus. In practice, they hardly ever do, and even if they do, they are not nearly the melee combatants fighters are. When accuracy is bounded, HP go up for harder challenges, rather than AC. When HP is up, it's not what chance you have to hit, but how much damage you're going to do on your turn. Fighters are guaranteed to hit more and hit harder than virtually any other class.
Combat rounds last six seconds.
A fighter can get up to 4 attacks going, at level 5, each and every round, using polearm master and some fancy footwork. On top of moving 30 feet.
If you can imagine that each one of those 4 attacks represents more than a single swing in that time, go ahead. But I think the rules in 5th edition are clear.
Besides, why would 1 attack mean more than one swing of a sword for melee, but only one arrow flies for an archer. That archer can send exactly 3 arrows a round at level 5, with a feat. After which time, three checks are erased from the player's ammunition. 1 attack roll, 1 arrow gone. For consistency, 1 attack roll, 1 swing of the sword is made.
Why pretend like the game is more complex than it is? There is no benefit. In 2nd edition when rounds lasted one minute this was odd because archers still only could aim and fire X arrows which matched their attack rate in a minute. But real archers and specialists don't need anywhere near that long to aim and shoot.
The fighter isn't twice as accurate as the wizard, he's twice as fast at swinging his weapon around effectively into attacks. That's not the same thing. Why make more attacks than you can effectively land? Flailing around ineffectively is probably going to get a poor swordsman killed! Best to take his or her time and do it right.
A fighter with two attacks can move attack move, which also undercuts the idea of separating the number of attacks you can make on your character sheet, from the number of swings the character makes. Best to keep them identical. There is no need to complexify the game with baggage from previous editions. It's one of the good things about rules progress over the years. The simplification of the rules came about after realizing that one minute rounds made a lot of PC activities seem like a mime doing a bit on the street corner.
Bounded Accuracy makes a lot of sense, combined with proficiency. A very strong wizard who is proficient with swordfighting could very well make a single attack just as accurately as a similarly experienced fighter, but that fighter would follow it up with two more, and then another 3 if he wanted to. Something the wizard can't do.
Although I disagree that it's very similar to what 4e did. It built on 4e's innovation, and went further. Instead of making to-hit rolls stay in the same range through 1/2 level bonuses, we do it through proficiency bonus. The big difference is on the enemy side. They don't have their defenses increase to float up to match your increases in accuracy. So rising in levels results in actual increases in hit rate (for both the fighter and the wizard) relative to a given enemy, rather than a mirage.
So, superficially similar in one aspect (offense rises equally), but substantially different in effect (AC doesn't rise). This allows the wizard character, who still only has one attack to fall back on, to nonetheless still feel more powerful than he did at level 1 against a similarly armored opponent or monster. It's a contract that an RPG proposes a player of that game, if you play this character long enough and rise in rank, your character will actually become more powerful, and proficiency isn't a pass / fail, but actually increases in potency as it should. 4e doesn't actually increase accuracy. It breaks that contract between the player and his time spent playing the game and expecting to get better at swinging that sword. Only at specific levels is that contract renewed, like level 21. But aside from that, it is basically a time sink to rise in levels.
It's a big improvement in play as you gain levels. Actually it's somewhat between the old BAB system with scaling attacks and the 4e system. It's clear 5e is a hybrid approach that's better than both its predecessors in every way.
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Sword of Spirit
Legend
Yes, it feels off to me to from a thematically conceptual level, too. But you literally forget about it once you start playing and eventually start realizing that the universal proficiency bonus is such a good thing overall.
I liken it to the cyclical initiative introduced by 3e. Those who weren't around then may not realize that initiative in most RPGs before 3e came out was a multi-stage animal consisting of stating your intent in some sort of order, making rolls and applying a variety of modifiers in probably a different order, and risking completely losing your action that turn if things went wrong (or breaking verisimilitude by allowing you to change your action to something else entirely if and only if you couldn't complete your original action...yeah, that's believable). Quite frankly it was a mess--but we liked it! Or rather, we didn't know of any other way of doing it.
Then 3e came along and said, "Hey, forget that. Let's just roll initiative once, apply a static modifier to it, and then just everyone goes around the table in order and does whatever they want to at the time."
The gut reaction that I (and I'm sure I wasn't the only one) had was that it just felt off. It just wasn't as realistic. A faster character ought to be able to anticipate a slower character's actions and compensate, or make more weapon attacks, or...or...or...
But...once I actually started playing it, it didn't take long for me to realize it was one of the best things 3e did. The ease that it added to combat was well worth the minor adjustments to my understanding of what initiative and combat rounds entail. And most games since then (even ones that aren't d20) have followed suit, because it's just a better way of doing it.
Now, I can't say whether a universal proficiency bonus is a better way of doing D&D, but I can say I had exactly the same experience as with the 3e initiative revolution. It felt off at first, but once I started playing the game the benefits so far outweighed the problems that I pretty much forgot about the issues. After playing for months, I probably have thought about it maybe twice at the most.
So what you may want to ask yourself on that particular issue is how you felt about the 3e initiative change. If it faded out of relevance to you like it did to me, then this will too. If you still don't like 3e initiative, this may be worth taking into consideration. Hope that helps!
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
I think this gets causality backwards. GURPS had cyclical initiative at least as far back as 3rd edition, and presumably from the very beginning. (I never played GURPS 1st or 2nd edition, but it's pretty deeply baked into the system.) There's no reason to think that it originated with GURPS, but it sure didn't originate with 3E D&D.
(I dislike cyclical initiative anyway, for approximately the same reasons that you like it. It nullifies whole layers of tactical complexity, and also makes combat more dissimilar from non-combat.)
Sword of Spirit
Legend
GURPS probably did have it from the beginning, but most other games followed (A)D&D's lead on initiative. After 3e it seemed like everyone started doing it (though I'm sure there are exceptions). I'm not claiming creative origin for 3e, just phenomenon instigation.
If I had ever played a game with a tactically complex initiative system that was simple and fast I'd probably like it too. But as it is, speed of play and simplicity keep moving higher and higher up my scale of desirable RPG traits.
