AbdulAlhazred
Legend
The problem I have with the 5e version is it that it is built on a paradigm that isn't the central paradigm of the game, which is an ever increasing ability to accomplish the same task. 'Easy' doesn't MEAN anything because its not actually descriptive except in some abstract sense that never exists in any actual game (some sort of 'common man' that nobody actually plays and is a different level than all but the level 1 PC).This is a bit late to the party -- my time for forums is somewhat limited these days -- but I guess I'm confused by all this 4e p42 hype.
First of all, 5e has rules for this kind of thing:
Its not 'unworkable', but it is inelegant and AT THE TABLE its not so intuitive. It also fails to inherently provide a guideline for people who are devising DCs. 4e DCs work better because you always know what the appropriate DC should be for the type of fiction you will present at level X, the easy, medium, and hard DCs for that level (and possibly for a range of levels up to 5 higher if for instance you want a 'major obstacle' type encounter, like a boss fight situation).
Page 42 IS the ability check rules. There HAS to be a 'DC Chart' of some sort and every game has one. At the level of the pure mechanics of numbers and dice there's no difference between 3e, 4e, and 5e, except where your bonuses might come from and how fast they accumulate. The question is about presentation of information.It's just that 5e's "rules for things the rules don't cover" is just "the rules." The ability check rules already cover everything. There's only one set of DCs because DCs don't scale with level outside of 4e. There's no damage listed because 5e doesn't strictly limit or scale damage the same way 4e needed to. And these rules are robust enough to tell you how to resolve anything in the game for skills or ability checks or saves. If you take the same table and change "DC" to "AC", you can see how attacks work, too. Instead of taking up a whole page, it takes up half a column. Yes, there are some things not in it, but basically everything is there.
This really is not true. In fact anyone with experience building/running higher level PCs will quickly tell you that the opposite is true. Its rather easy to run a 4e skill check modifier up into the +40 range, and if you TRY you can achieve values in most skills up into the +60 range. A character spending ALMOST nothing on his primary skills will still move it up at a +1/level pace. Beyond that its absurdly easy to get items and powers that let you succeed far more often. There are a plethora of 'roll again' options you can acquire, and MANY "+5 when using Skill X to things of type Y" (IE Long Jumper, Born of the Sea, etc) sorts of things.3e had a problem with bonuses going off the end of the d20. You'd have a target DC of 25 as "hard" and a bonus of +30 by level 10.
4e solved it by trying to force everybody to always use the middle of the die. The major problems with this are a) since the game was built with min/maxing in mind, if you invested everything you could and took all the "feat tax" feats, your bonuses still fall behind the target DCs by ~1 per tier of play,
'Secondary' skills are still useful to PCs at all levels. Not in all situations at very high level, but they're far from being as hopeless as you would make out. The DC chart has a differential spread to it in order to allow for this. At level 1 the spread between medium and hard DC is 5, at level 30 it is 10. The easy DC also has a growing spread even beyond that. So at level 30 an easy DC is 24. With a +15 for level and AT LEAST a +1 for stat growth you will still pass the easy level 30 DC on an 8, the ONE LESS NUMBER THAN THE SAME PC NEEDED AT LEVEL 1. The medium DC grows by 20 pips, your 'I have nothing put into this skill at all' PC still only loses 4 pips vs level 1. He may fall off the end of the hard DC, but this is a character that has a 12 in a stat using an untrained skill to perform a task requiring GODLIKE ability. There has to be SOME POINT IN THE SYSTEM where you cannot succeed. Beyond that by level 30 MOST characters will have acquired some sort of reroll, at least a couple points of bonus that can be applied, and/or there will be easily acquired situational bonuses (IE from leaders, etc). A level 30 with an 'off' skill should STILL be able to garner a 75% chance of actually passing a medium check, often more. Most characters will do better than that.b) it quickly left secondary stats in the dust as there weren't enough bonuses or resources to keep up everything, so if you wanted to do something that wasn't your schtick, you were not going to succeed (possibly falling off the other end of the die, depending on when you were playing).
Nor is the choice in 4e between no bonus and a large bonus. MANY characters have training in a non-primary-stat skill. MANY characters have boosted stats and are NOT trained in corresponding skills. Many characters happen to acquire bonuses or ways to simply bypass various skill checks. So the more usual cases in 4e are that you can TRY a high level hard DC, you're just taking a big risk, or you can simply do something else (fly around the obstacle, swim, spider climb, teleport, etc).
Again, this is just inaccurate in practice. Its not even really correct in theory. The growth in the hard DC in 4e is 23 points over 30 levels. You get 15 of those from level bonus. Stat bonus growth is variable but is ALWAYS +1 minimum, and typically for 'on' stat is between +4 and +6 (depends on your ED and if you started with 18 or 20 primary). +4 gets you total of +19, leaving only 3 points that are required from other sources. Core PHB1 probably assumed that would come from the Skill Focus feat (+3 on top of training). Even in PHB1 though there are quite a few feats that grant +1 to various skill checks, and some that grant more in specific situations. Magic is very inconsistent, but you can get up to +5 in many cases if you try. Rerolls are worth +4 and you can get them if you try.NPC DC and bonuses scale at +1 per level. PCs were supposed to get 50% of their potential bonus from level, 25% of their potential bonus from ability score, and 25% of their potential bonus from magic, but in practice they got 45% from level, 20% from ability, 20% from magic, and 15% from feats. And that still only got you 9/10ths of the way towards breaking even.
Oh fie! The original DC chart from DMG1 varies by only a couple of points from the current RC DC chart. The level one DCs are 10/15/20, the current ones are 8/12/19. The level 30 DCs were 25/29/33, and now are 24/32/42. So you can see there's a SLIGHT change at the higher levels, reflecting the idea that linear growth at +1/2 levels was far less than what really happened, which is more like +2/3 levels for 'good' skills. The original chart also assumed this was an untrained skill/ability bonus, later charts didn't make that assumption, so the actual numbers are even closer in practice.The thing I dislike about DMG p42 is that it's wrong. They errata'd the table. Twice. Once in the DMG errata (and in the table they published in DMG2), and again when they published the Rules Compendium, which gave yet another set of DCs to use for skill checks because the "add 5" rule for skills didn't work. So now there's three versions of the rule in three different books and none of them are complete or right. So, yes, DMG p42 technically aggregates the whole game onto a single, simple, extremely elegant page. Except the math is wrong.
And DMG p42 has to exist because the math is so complicated that you have to show it to the DM in order for him to do see what the system is even doing wel enough to improvise anything with any sort of accuracy.
Ummmmm, hogwash. Its exactly as complicated as 5e's system, where you have just as many bonuses and penalties, advantage, characters with the double skill bonus, etc. The DM still has to figure out appropriate damage, etc. Its all the same thing in that sense, except again with damage 5e doesn't help you. It gives FICTIONAL damage, but there's no indication of what to use it for. Should you have a giant boulder fall in a level 1 5e encounter? Who knows? In 4e you'd say "OK, its a level 1 encounter, a high limited damage expression is 3d8+3, so something that we should find in this encounter should do about the same damage as the nastiest daily attack a level 1 fighter can put out" and you devise your fiction (IE the size of the boulder) to plausibly fit that situation (assuming you want to go with appropriate challenges, you don't HAVE to do so, its only a guideline, but note that this ties to XP directly, so if you put a 4d10+15 damage giant boulder in there then you are going to give level 15 XP for that boulder).
Well, if this is a problem then it is such for ALL editions of D&D because in all of them you are constantly rolling dice. The dice rolling conventions of 4e and 5e are no different from any other editions. The SC system is no more than 'combat for non-combat' in essence, so if it doesn't work there then why is it OK for combat in 5e?You roll so many dice to resolve everything (due to number of hp of enemies, skill challenges, the save system, etc.) that the dice stop being a varying factor. Call it the law of large numbers, call it central limit theory, call it regression towards the mean; I don't know what it's actually called. Fair dice being fair, the more dice you roll the more your results look like the probability distribution. In that kind of a game you end up having to be extremely careful about even a +1 or -1 modifier because it has a real, tangible effect to give a +1 or a -1 to a die you roll 50 times. So you essentially can't rely on the DM to be capable of ad hoc rulings because the system has too many moving pieces to allow for it.
Beyond that the numbers of damage dice you roll in 4e aren't THAT many such that luck doesn't play a significant part. You can also get crits, which make a very big difference, etc. And finally, luck may play a modestly smaller part, perhaps. I don't think that's exactly terrible. 5e certainly has HUGE damage expressions and hit point totals too, often larger than 4e's. I mean a 5e fireball starts at 8d6.
I'm not saying that 5e solves all these problems. It doesn't. I'm just saying 4e's DMG p42 isn't something that was abandoned, nor is it something which worked particularly seamlessly.
Well, what was lost was the concept of level indicating degree of difficulty and XP award. There is no longer in 5e a mathematically elegant and simple way to know how hard a challenge is that you just follow without even trying. The big issues people have with CR reflect this too.
This is a sort of 'tongue-in-cheek' sort of thread in terms of denigrating 5e anyway IMHO. Its the sort of "OK, trot out your gripes and air them, even if its a bit exaggerated and silly", so ON THE WHOLE, I don't think there's anything drastically bad about 5e, but it did lose a bit of ground on 4e.