D&D 5E 5th Edition has broken Bounded Accuracy

[the Jester]

Did you just snip a comment and completely misconstrue what was said? Why yes you did.

Nah. Though I was a bit tongue-in-cheek in my approach, I was out-and-out attacking your tendency to state things as absolutely true when they're actually just your experience. And you did, in fact, say, in essence, "No, your DragonLance game is something that makes your input in this thread invalid." Or at least, that's how

No. I do not think either of you would provide good guidance for someone playing 5E using the point buy system with the generic limitations of the game in place using a WotC designed module run in a very straightforward fashion. The conventions in Dragonlance are very different. They have very little applicability to core D&D. If someone were asking about Dragonlance, I think you would both be extremely helpful.

reads to me. Misconstrued? I don't think so. Maybe I misunderstood your meaning, but it sounds an awful lot like "My D&D experience is a more valid D&D experience than yours". Perhaps you intended more nuance- and looking at your post again, I admit that there is more nuance than I initially gave it credit for- but the fact is, you seem to post a lot of things in absolute terms- 100% guaranteed, everyone knows, nobody, etc- that are far from absolute, and so I simply took your post as more of the same. If I misinterpreted your meaning, my apologies, but I think it's pretty easy to see where one might get the impression I had, just based on that aforementioned absolutism that keeps coming up.

 

[Fanaelialae]

The hand would hold it where it is per the grapple rules. The range is 120 feet. You still have to get the melee to where the creature is. Hand is a concentration spell. Fly is a concentration spell. Do you attempt to use the hand possibly failing to grapple the creature or use the more fly guaranteeing the melee can get to the creature?

Hand is an excellent choice in a party with ranged power. Holds the dragon in place. Allows you to do damage. Ranged attackers tee off on it. Less reliable with melee. We went with fly.

I really wanted to try hand. The breath weapon hit so hard that missing a concentration check was almost guaranteed. Once I got hand at 9th level, I had 56 hit points. Dragon breath weapon does 54 points of damage. I could have used a 4th level slot to cast fire shield on myself to DR. I was holding back my 4th level slots for group flies.

I am going to try Bigby's sometime. I really wanted to try this spell. I hope I get to play a wizard in a group with ranged martials next time I play a wizard. I don't want my most sure tactical option to be fly.

I disagree that every DM is going to rule that Bigby's keeps the dragon in the air. If a fighter managed to leap on a dragon's back as it took off and grappled it in the air, would the dragon just hang in mid-air in defiance of physics? Not in my game! Similarly, Bigby's hand isn't strong enough to lift a huge size dragon (unless there's some campaign specific thing where your dragons are made from balsa wood or some such). As a result, it isn't unreasonable to assume that the dragon would fall when grappled by the Hand.

As I said in my previous post however, this is the DM's call to make and as a result the efficacy will vary based on the DM.

Another debated spell. Fly was more reliable. Telekinesis is a great spell.

You can't waste time with appropriate CR dragons. Damage is too high. You have to use reliable means to win. At least in standard sized parties without much magic. I had 56 hit points at 9th level. Cleric maybe had 60 to 65. Fighter I think had 90 because he took toughness. You can't be wasting any time. Breath weapon 54 average damage. He's going to hit someone. Followed by melee attacks with Legendary action. Full hit point dragon played intelligent will usually sweep in for one quick kill using its breath weapon and actions, then start to use its mobility to avoid damage.

Lair action, legendary action, and melee attacks you're usually looking at 70 to 100 DPR depending on how many times he hits. If you leave a soft target like a caster in visible range, he will kill that target and then leave. At least that is how we play. So it is important not to leave a soft target open to initial attack. With the low hit points, the dragon will kill a soft, low AC target. So you want to send in the armored martials to draw its agro first, then enter battle.

Makes some of the tactics a little tricky.

Wizard doesn't need to be in any danger. Just enter the fight inside of Otiluke's Resilient Hamsterball. Then when you're ready (after the dragon has breathed), drop the Hamsterball and ready Telekinesis. When the dragon gets within about 30' of you grab him out of the air and put him to the ground. Now your melee beats the restrained (and therefore much less dangerous) dragon to death while you stand back and enjoy the show.

Sure, it's not guaranteed, but there are lots of ways to shore up your bet: Inspiring Word, Guidance, Portent, and Lucky, to name a few. Fly isn't guaranteed either. If your dragon can cast Dispel Magic (or simply has a handy cultist who can) you end up with a prone warrior kissing the ground. Heck, the dragon moves faster than the flying warrior so the dragon can potentially lead the warrior on a wild goose chase if its lair is big enough, then fly back and kill the rest of the party. I understand that Fly was very effective for you, and that's cool, but in the end nothing is foolproof. Telekinesis is riskier, but the reward is also greater (since if all goes well the dragon will be restrained and therefore a significantly diminished threat).

Sentinel can be quite good for halting a strafing flier if they don't have reach. You can mitigate that if the Polearm Master is also a Sentinel guy. That is quite a hefty feat investment.

Adult dragons don't have reach on their claws, so unless the DM is giving up a big chunk of damage they're going to be vulnerable to Sentinel. Ancient dragons are a different story, admittedly.

Young dragons aren't a problem unless there are a lot of them.

Yeah, someone mentioned a fight against 5 dragons and some goons, so I assumed they were young. Figured I'd throw in methods of dealing with them since it had been brought up.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I wasn't soliciting assistance.

So what were you doing when you asked me how I would beat a dragon using your party, then? (Quoted below.) Were you deliberately wasting my time, or just trying to pose as an expert by asking questions you thought would stump everybody? Why did I even bother writing #293 then? Boy am I glad I never wasted any time writing down any of the other tactics I thought of while shopping at Costco shortly after that (e.g. it's possible to have your cake and eat it too: the bard doesn't need to cast Heroism to beat fear, so he can indeed Polymorph into a giant ape and throw rocks), since you clearly weren't even going to appreciate the tips.

You have the following party to work with for your ideas, so you can work from the same situation we were in. Point buy. 8th level. Against Adult White dragon in its lair.

1. Paladin: Shield Master. Defensive Fighting Style. Oath of Vengeance. Human.

2. Fighter: Battlemaster. Human. Heavy Armor Mastery. Great Weapon Master Feat. Toughness.

3. Wizard Evoker. Forest Gnome. Resilient Con feat.

4. Lore Bard. Half-elf. Warcaster feat.

5. Life Cleric. Warcaster Feat. Human.

That was our party. 8th level against an adult white dragon in its lair on an iceberg we sailed to. Think up some strategies. Not an optimal party as we found out often due to a lack of darkvision and too many melee martials.

 

[Hussar]

I'd also point out that Celtavian's fighter types made absolutely no attempt to be at least competent at ranged attacks. Paladin has shield mastery and battle master is heavy armour and GWM feat and toughness. But, besides that, even without any bonuses, the White Dragon has to be at least 60 feet away in order to attack the party. It can never be further than that. So, our fighter types are getting 4 attacks per round, with bard and cleric buffs, sure, at disadvantage, doing about 10 points of damage per hit. 30- 40 points per round and the dragon isn't going to live that long. Never minding what the evoker is pumping out. There's no reason this group, as a group, from the ground, can't deal 50-75 points of damage per round.

An adult while dragon has 200 HP and an AC of 18. There's no reason the fighter types aren't hitting better than 50%, even with disadvantage (and with frightful presence, they're going to be eating disadvantage anyway), considering the range of buffs this party can put on. This party, without fly, should be putting the dragon down in three rounds. Four at the outside.

So, why did we need to make the fighter types fly again?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Sure, it's not guaranteed, but there are lots of ways to shore up your bet: Inspiring Word, Guidance, Portent, and Lucky, to name a few. Fly isn't guaranteed either. If your dragon can cast Dispel Magic (or simply has a handy cultist who can) you end up with a prone warrior kissing the ground. Heck, the dragon moves faster than the flying warrior so the dragon can potentially lead the warrior on a wild goose chase if its lair is big enough, then fly back and kill the rest of the party. I understand that Fly was very effective for you, and that's cool, but in the end nothing is foolproof. Telekinesis is riskier, but the reward is also greater (since if all goes well the dragon will be restrained and therefore a significantly diminished threat).

To expand on this a little bit, relying on melee + Fly against dragons has three failure modes that I know of:

1.) Dragon can Dispel it, inflicting 20d6 and wrecking your chances of hurting him in the process. Only works for spellcasting variants with Dispel, obviously.

2.) Dragon can run out the clock. 60' move Fly spell vs. 80' move dragon flight plus 40' via Legendary action means you're just not fast enough to force the dragon to engage against his will, so he always has the option of simply holding the range open for 10 minutes, at which point Fly goes away. Unless you have some way to induce him to engage (trickery, illusions, manipulating his psychological flaws/ego, etc.), Fly might as well not even exist. I play whites as brutal and stupid, so Fly would work against them, but it wouldn't work against a blue, green, or red unless you had occupied its lair or in some other way affronted its pride and taken face. Maybe it would work on a black because they're so eager to cause pain.

3.) The dragon can eat opportunity attacks in order to deprive you of regular attacks. The way this works:

A. If nearest PC is more than 100' away, close to 100' distance.
B. If nearest PC is less than 100' away, close to within 60' and breath on it, then fly back to 80'. PC has to Dash to fly within melee range of you, and if he does you just use legendary actions to tail swipe him three times for 45 points of damage, then on your next turn you either Disengage (rinse and repeat) or claw/claw/bite him and eat a single opportunity attack. Either way he's not getting more than a single opportunity attack against you each round, and neither is any other PC unless they manage to pincer you (which most PCs aren't smart enough to do). Fly is barely doing him any good at all.
C. If you can identify the spellcasters, eventually step B will lead to the warriors getting 200+' away from the spellcasters, at which point you eat a single opportunity attack to zoom right past the warriors into range of the spellcasters. Now they're the ones eating your opportunity attacks to get away (barring Misty Step/Dimension Door), and next round you can breath on them or claw/claw/bite. If you do it right, you may even get to watch the warriors fall for 10d6+ in the process.

Counter-countermeasures: The party can deploy counter-countermeasures that speed the warriors up some more. Haste and Expeditious Retreat will both prevent #2 and #3 from working at the cost of an additional concentration slot.

In short, using Fly for melee warriors against dragons is tricky and has lots of ways to go wrong. If that's how you like to play, go for it, but having a strong ranged component to your force is much safer. None of the above dragon tactics work if the dragon is getting hit for 40+ DPR at long range each round.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'd also point out that Celtavian's fighter types made absolutely no attempt to be at least competent at ranged attacks. Paladin has shield mastery and battle master is heavy armour and GWM feat and toughness. But, besides that, even without any bonuses, the White Dragon has to be at least 60 feet away in order to attack the party. It can never be further than that. So, our fighter types are getting 4 attacks per round, with bard and cleric buffs, sure, at disadvantage, doing about 10 points of damage per hit. 30- 40 points per round and the dragon isn't going to live that long. Never minding what the evoker is pumping out. There's no reason this group, as a group, from the ground, can't deal 50-75 points of damage per round.

How do you get from "4 attacks per round at disadvantage" to "30-40 points per round"? That looks more like 10 DPR to me. 4 attacks at +8 to hit (8th level character with Str 20) with disadvantage vs. AC 18 (adult white dragon) for 1d6+5 points of damage, equals 10.32 DPR including crits. (Without disadvantage it would be 19.4.) Meanwhile the white dragon is breathing on them for 12d8 (DC 19 Con for half) every round--because on the rounds when it has no breath weapon ready it has no reason to be closer than 160'.

Edit: also, while it has to be 60' away to attack, by the end of its turn it can be up to 140' away, and by the end of the next PC's turn it can be up to 180' away. So only one javelin-chucker is going to get to throw his javelin.

Even if the Evoker is hitting it with 20-odd points of damage from Fireball each turn, and the bard and cleric are somehow inflicting another 10, taking 30-40 points of damage total to inflict 216 HP of total damage on four enemies is a winning game for the dragon. And I'm betting the Evoker doesn't last more than two breath weapons at the outside, so that 30-40 will soon drop to 10-20.

 

[Hussar]

I was counting on the bard and the cleric to be providing buffs. After all, [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION] has been pretty insistent that you can get advantage/buffs/whatever, to such high points by 8th level that the -5 from Sharpshooter/GWF becomes meaningless, so, I'd assume that the effective -5 for disadvantage would be similarly easily overcome.

For it to start its round at 60 feet to breathe, means that the dragon has eaten at least 4 attacks already. It had to. Remember, our fighters do have a range of 120 feet with javelins. Plus a 30 foot movement. Any round the dragon breathes, it's going to eat 4 javelins, possibly 6 with Action Surge. Or, 6 every round with a simple Haste spell. I'm not saying the fighters can do it on their own. I'm saying that they don't need to fly to do it either. At some point, the dragon's going to want to bring down it's big damaging attacks - and that means melee.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I was counting on the bard and the cleric to be providing buffs. After all, @Celtavian has been pretty insistent that you can get advantage/buffs/whatever, to such high points by 8th level that the -5 from Sharpshooter/GWF becomes meaningless, so, I'd assume that the effective -5 for disadvantage would be similarly easily overcome.

For it to start its round at 60 feet to breathe, means that the dragon has eaten at least 4 attacks already. It had to. Remember, our fighters do have a range of 120 feet with javelins. Plus a 30 foot movement. Any round the dragon breathes, it's going to eat 4 javelins, possibly 6 with Action Surge. Or, 6 every round with a simple Haste spell. I'm not saying the fighters can do it on their own. I'm saying that they don't need to fly to do it either. At some point, the dragon's going to want to bring down it's big damaging attacks - and that means melee.

Okay, I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I want to know if I'm overlooking something. Let's say you negate disadvantage. That's still only 19.4 DPR between the two javelin-chuckers. How do you get from there to 30-40? Are you assuming high-level fighters with 3 attacks per round?

 

[Celtavian]

Nah. Though I was a bit tongue-in-cheek in my approach, I was out-and-out attacking your tendency to state things as absolutely true when they're actually just your experience. And you did, in fact, say, in essence, "No, your DragonLance game is something that makes your input in this thread invalid." Or at least, that's how



reads to me. Misconstrued? I don't think so. Maybe I misunderstood your meaning, but it sounds an awful lot like "My D&D experience is a more valid D&D experience than yours". Perhaps you intended more nuance- and looking at your post again, I admit that there is more nuance than I initially gave it credit for- but the fact is, you seem to post a lot of things in absolute terms- 100% guaranteed, everyone knows, nobody, etc- that are far from absolute, and so I simply took your post as more of the same. If I misinterpreted your meaning, my apologies, but I think it's pretty easy to see where one might get the impression I had, just based on that aforementioned absolutism that keeps coming up.

I posted the 100% because I've spent the last whatever months discussing this with other people breaking down the math so many times that I've reached the point of fatigue. More than a few of us have already shown mathematically and anecdotally that ranged is better than martial. That concentration narrows solutions and limits caster tactics. Part of this like the concentration is intended. Not sure if they intended the GWM and Sharpshooter discrepancy, but it happened.

I get this is a public forum. When you have discussed in other threads with equal fervor the same discussions and had them proven mathematically and experientially by yourself and others, you start to kind of feel a bit irritated when you have to explain them again because new people that must have missed the other discussions start to jump in with the same arguments. I imagine in the future I should just give up and feel confident that what has already been proven is true, but won't apply to everyone's games due to what DM's allow or party size or whatever other numerous different factors affect each group's game. I would like some of these concerns possibly addressed by the game designers because my players prefer to follow the rules in the book. It's like pulling teeth to limit to GWM and Sharpshooter without an official change.

Mearls and Crawford should be open to these types of changes if the player-base proves that a particular feat or rule is causing problems with the core game assumptions using both math and experience. That is what we have done with a few of these things. I'm hoping they get addressed in some fashion. So when someone says, "It's not really a problem" and uses their own very far away from Core rule assmptions game, I don't want Mearls and Crawford to think that the problems using the rules mostly as written in the Core Books are fine. Because they aren't. They should be willing to do a little clean up to make things consistent across the game and help us DMs whose players want official rulings before we change something like Sharpshooter (this is the worst offender) being far too powerful compared to other forms of martial combat.

 

[Celtavian]

I disagree that every DM is going to rule that Bigby's keeps the dragon in the air. If a fighter managed to leap on a dragon's back as it took off and grappled it in the air, would the dragon just hang in mid-air in defiance of physics? Not in my game! Similarly, Bigby's hand isn't strong enough to lift a huge size dragon (unless there's some campaign specific thing where your dragons are made from balsa wood or some such). As a result, it isn't unreasonable to assume that the dragon would fall when grappled by the Hand.

As I said in my previous post however, this is the DM's call to make and as a result the efficacy will vary based on the DM.

It depends. If a Large Fighter with fly grappled a dragon in midair, I would probably say he held it in place. He has a means of staying aloft. If the dragon move involuntarily, it automatically breaks the grapple because the player can't move if he has used his move up.

The hand is the same way. If the hand grapples the dragon and you have the dragon fall, the hand can't move. It has already moved the amount if can move. So you would free the dragon if the hand had to stay in place and the dragon moved. The hand is magical. Don't suddenly start applying weight and physics to a magical force hand or even an enlarged fighter.

If you start doing that, then the reality is that even a large magical force hand or enlarged fighter would have zero change of grappling a dragon. Same as the strongest human in the world would have zero chance of grappling an elephant or rhino in the real world. In fact, you could take the strongest, most skilled Olympic wrestler in the world, he can't grapple a wild tiger or a lion or a bear. So suddenly bringing in the idea that "weight" matters is a bad idea. You can only use the spell descriptions. A Bigby's hand is strong enough to grapple a huge creature, thus strong enough to hold it aloft.

As usual, you rule as you wish. That's how I see it.

Wizard doesn't need to be in any danger. Just enter the fight inside of Otiluke's Resilient Hamsterball. Then when you're ready (after the dragon has breathed), drop the Hamsterball and ready Telekinesis. When the dragon gets within about 30' of you grab him out of the air and put him to the ground. Now your melee beats the restrained (and therefore much less dangerous) dragon to death while you stand back and enjoy the show.

Let me ask you the same question Verbal Kint asked Dave Coulon in The Usual Suspects, "What if you miss?"

Sure, it's not guaranteed, but there are lots of ways to shore up your bet: Inspiring Word, Guidance, Portent, and Lucky, to name a few. Fly isn't guaranteed either. If your dragon can cast Dispel Magic (or simply has a handy cultist who can) you end up with a prone warrior kissing the ground. Heck, the dragon moves faster than the flying warrior so the dragon can potentially lead the warrior on a wild goose chase if its lair is big enough, then fly back and kill the rest of the party. I understand that Fly was very effective for you, and that's cool, but in the end nothing is foolproof. Telekinesis is riskier, but the reward is also greater (since if all goes well the dragon will be restrained and therefore a significantly diminished threat).

So feats and abilities you're not always going to have. When a strategy starts to rely on specific feats and abilities you won't have access to, that is not a strategy at all. That's something I would have to plan from level 1. I'm not going to do that.

Adult dragons don't have reach on their claws, so unless the DM is giving up a big chunk of damage they're going to be vulnerable to Sentinel. Ancient dragons are a different story, admittedly.

We didn't have Sentinel. But that did become a more effective tactic without the reach. Though the dragon will probably choose a different target if the Sentinel guy is keeping him locked down. That could be a problem as well.

Yeah, someone mentioned a fight against 5 dragons and some goons, so I assumed they were young. Figured I'd throw in methods of dealing with them since it had been brought up.

We had to cast protection from energy to deal with them. Five breath weapons too much. Otherwise, not so tough at level 10 or 12 when we fought the Dragon Flight. Still needed fly[/] to get them in range. Too many to try to take them down piecemeal by knocking them out of the air.