D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Imaro]

Again, I don't know what would lead anyone to believe that 4e is more limited in this respect than 5e. If, for some bizarre reason, you wished to base all your DCs off some other thing, you can simply scale all DCs by level and do whatever you want (IE you'll be essentially wiping out the built-in progression by breaking the fiction-to-DC linkage entirely and establishing some other one). In such a setup the players will still be free to spend extra resources on skill bonus growth and get better at things, but the results would be pretty similar to what they look like in 5e, with only a modest increase. The only real difference would be that you wouldn't experience ANY level-based growth. OTOH 4e comes with a steady flow of feats and you can simply routinely spend one now and then to gain a little bonus growth.

The issue here is its a lot harder to ADD range to a compressed system. Its not that hard to trim range out of a wider system because you can always just ignore part of the range in various ways.

I don't think I'm understanding what you're saying so how about a practical example... what are my guidelines in a 4e that doesn't scale by level? What is a very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard and nearly impossible DC? How does the fact that everyone gets a level scaled bonus affect my DC's? In a system where scaling DC's are accounted for in the math I don't see how it's less work to remove some range of numbers and still play the entire game without running into issues.

 

[I'm A Banana]

All of this illustrates what I like to call the 'fallacy of the hard die roll'. RPGs are not more or less challenging based on what the DCs are. Challenge is injected into the game in a variety of ways, but none of them are 'being able to roll a 20', because there's no challenge in dice rolling.

The die is luck.

Getting the die to a higher number with limited resources - that is challenge. Bring me your blesses, your ability score bumps, your Help actions yearning to breathe free. That's the challenge.

But of course, it's an opt in challenge - you could just not bypass the lock. That's fine, too.

What makes a game interesting, and can create genuine difficulty, is when you create hard choices, and when you have situations where the players have to do a lot of different things, be inventive, whatever in order to get their chances of success to be reasonable.

....exactly what upping your piddly 1st-level proficiency bonus to something resembling a fair chance to undo that lock can be!

As essentially a 'saving throw' there's no compelling reason to use really easy DCs for instance (IE once things have gone pear shaped its fine to toss the players a bone and let them try to fix it with some Hail Mary).

Man, there is a HUGE psychological difference between a DC and a saving throw.

Also, philosophically, "tossing the players a bone" is tantamount to "removing consequences," and thus sets up the failure as potentially unsatisfying gameplay (as I experienced just the other week with a newbie DM in 5e!).

What you REALLY don't want is the players choosing a course of action, investing resources in it, and then at the end coming up against the locked door that can now only be opened with a low-probability, forcing the inevitable failure to either thwart the mission or force the players to go back and pay their way forward in some other way all over again.

It is fine if the mission fails. But it is almost always bad adventure design to let one roll come between success and failure, regardless of the odds on that roll. A lock with an outrageously high DC is not something that is gating off necessary content for your play experience.

I CAN imagine a few cases where you could deliberately set up something like this, to put the party in a pickle maybe, but in that case there need not be any check at all, they just reach a hopeless dead end and need to backtrack.

Why not just let them figure out if they can bypass it? Maybe rather than pick the lock, someone brought a vial of acid, or the fighter has a crowbar and doesn't know the meaning of the word "closed door." Or there's a back entrance that they just haven't found yet. Or whatever.

The point is, the idea that '4e is built around lots of easier checks vs a few really hard ones, so its an easy mode game' is simply fallacious. It rests on a deep misunderstanding of the uses of probability in RPGs.

Well, I'm not saying that.

I am saying that the presumption that a DC should be within a narrow 40-60% or so band of success is a presumption that can lead to bland, predictable gameplay. A presumption that a DC is high if it makes sense to be high regardless of the PC's level is a presumption that can lead to some interesting problem-solving moments.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think I'm understanding what you're saying so how about a practical example... what are my guidelines in a 4e that doesn't scale by level? What is a very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard and nearly impossible DC? How does the fact that everyone gets a level scaled bonus affect my DC's? In a system where scaling DC's are accounted for in the math I don't see how it's less work to remove some range of numbers and still play the entire game without running into issues.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'removing some range of numbers'. If I were to run 4e and play the check system like 5e I would allow all DCs to scale with level, and just call things 'easy', 'medium', or 'hard' in all cases. I could add names for 'harder than hard' etc if I needed them, but as you yourself (IIRC) pointed out, you can use just 'easy', 'medium', and 'hard' in 5e too and its expected to 'play about the same'.

As for 'guidelines', you wouldn't have them. You don't have them in 5e! You've pounded on that point, that the system is 'vague' on purpose and the GM is supposed to make it up. If you want to play like 5e, then presumably you don't want such guidelines.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The die is luck.

Getting the die to a higher number with limited resources - that is challenge. Bring me your blesses, your ability score bumps, your Help actions yearning to breathe free. That's the challenge.

The point is, you all seem totally fixated on DCs. Yes, you can have a pretty close to, or entirely, impossible DC that acts as a spur to some sort of action which makes that DC not be an obstacle anymore. However, character build isn't the process for doing that, because it happens on a totally different time scale than a challenge in an adventure. (as an aside, I guess you could have a sort of "Inigo Montoya Scenario" where the character's ENTIRE GOAL is to get his DC high enough to carry off some check that his life is centered around. In that case though a DC seems like a poor mechanic to use). In any case, you want resource management, clever use of environment, resources, manipulation of opponents, or possibly other clever tactical/strategic actions to be key here.

So again, the use of a single high DC for this purpose, it is at best crude, and you cannot measure the difficulty of a scenario by probabilities of passing checks, its a meaningless measure unless your RPG is just a game of craps wearing fancy pants.

....exactly what upping your piddly 1st-level proficiency bonus to something resembling a fair chance to undo that lock can be!

I just addressed that above, you're operating on the wrong scale. Nor does 5e offer you such a possibility except over the scale of the entire campaign! At least in 4e you could do it say in the course of a tier.

Man, there is a HUGE psychological difference between a DC and a saving throw.

I entirely disagree, not when its presented in terms of something like "OK, make this Athletics check to catch yourself" or something like that.

Also, philosophically, "tossing the players a bone" is tantamount to "removing consequences," and thus sets up the failure as potentially unsatisfying gameplay (as I experienced just the other week with a newbie DM in 5e!).

I didn't say consequences had to be removed. There may be inherent consequences in the original failure, and a 'save' doesn't have to obliterate the failure (admittedly it does so in classic D&D, often). The fact that I'm now dangling from a rope 500' above the ground is usually significant enough and a lot more fun than 'oops your a splat mark down below'. This was rather aside the central point anyway. It was just illustrating where high DCs may actually be fun.

It is fine if the mission fails. But it is almost always bad adventure design to let one roll come between success and failure, regardless of the odds on that roll. A lock with an outrageously high DC is not something that is gating off necessary content for your play experience.

Or you can have a lock that indeed does gate off necessary content, but it is accessed through a high complexity skill challenge that has a lot of fun elements to it. I mean, granted, you probably want to make failure a resource cost vs a total dead end, but at least there were a bunch of checks involved and various points where the players got to use strategy. 5e doesn't help you really at all with this kind of situation. There's no SC mechanism, and many classes lack any sort of resource they can expend.

Why not just let them figure out if they can bypass it? Maybe rather than pick the lock, someone brought a vial of acid, or the fighter has a crowbar and doesn't know the meaning of the word "closed door." Or there's a back entrance that they just haven't found yet. Or whatever.

How does 5e's system facilitate this? It doesn't. I can achieve this exact effect trivially in 4e. Again, I have a whole SC system I could deploy if I wished that would make it an interesting mini-game if I want.

Well, I'm not saying that.

I am saying that the presumption that a DC should be within a narrow 40-60% or so band of success is a presumption that can lead to bland, predictable gameplay. A presumption that a DC is high if it makes sense to be high regardless of the PC's level is a presumption that can lead to some interesting problem-solving moments.

But there are 2 problems here. 1st 4e never says all DCs have to be in some fixed range. You can set a DC to be as high level as you wish, and the thing is, that numerically informs you as the DM that you have made something out of the PCs league, its utterly clear from the very nature of the DC selection process. And secondly, you very often DO want to make DCs that are in a certain range. In fact the vast majority of DCs should be easier than 60%. 5e's check system and improvising write up seem to directly ignore that reality.

 

[Celtavian]

How does 5e's system facilitate this? It doesn't. I can achieve this exact effect trivially in 4e. Again, I have a whole SC system I could deploy if I wished that would make it an interesting mini-game if I want.

This is false. 5E facilitates through the following process:

1. Player makes choice like pulling out crowbar or vial of acid.

2. DM decides if this works and how it works.

3. DM options for resolution:
A. Decides there is no reason it wouldn't work. There is no reason to roll. There is no serious time constraint or danger. He allows the door to be opened with a reasonable player choice without requiring a roll.
B. DM has made the door can only be opened by certain means. Any means other than the stated means or something similar allows it to open. Players must figure it out through trial and error.
C. DM has decided door is impossible to open.
D. DM decides door can be opened by crowbar or particular strength check or picks. He sets DC for each.
Door is heavily bound and barred. He gives it a strength DC and possibly provides advantage for using a crowbar. He puts a strength threshold such as an 18 strength to open door or the person has disadvantage, requiring two or three strength rolls to open the door.

And he decides it has a complex lock that requires a few Thieves' tools rolls to breach.

The system easily facilitates anything. It encourages you to hand-wave things that are unimportant. No more taking 20 or 10 or requiring any check. If the players have time and can get through the door, they do. If the players are under some kind of time constraint, the DM can fashion that dramatic tension in whatever fashion they deem interesting. Most DMs will fashion such tasks to make it fun for the player only throwing such obstacles at players prepared for such tasks or that might find them interesting. In 5E if the players come up with a good idea for breaching the door or whatever activity and he can find no reason not to allow it to work, the DM allows it to work. No time wasted rolling. No series of bad rolls requiring roll after roll after roll while the DM figures out while the players have failed as often as they have. It all focuses on the narrative purpose of the activity and the result of failure, which the DM should have determined before play for the key points when he will require skill rolls or non-combat rolls. He doesn't require rolls all the time any longer. Every door does not require a break DC. If the Big Bad Fighter or Barbarian is raging through a dungeon with doors he can break down, the 5E DM doesn't waste his time requiring rolls that might allow a wizard to break the door down with a lucky roll. The 5E DM uses his time to describe how the raging barbarian is bashing down doors like they are made of paper. If he does have a door in mind that only the big strong character can break down, he constructs the DC system to allow only this to occur with a high percentage rather than some lucky single roll like 3E did.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If he does have a door in mind that only the big strong character can break down, he constructs the DC system to allow only this to occur with a high percentage rather than some lucky single roll like 3E did.

How?

What makes you think that in any previous edition you would set DCs when it didn't make any sense for their to be a possible point of failure/success? In fact in my view all 4e really did was say "don't even present such trivial elements that don't need checks", though certainly you can provide them as set dressing or a way to give the plot logical coherence if you really want.

 

[Imaro]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'removing some range of numbers'. If I were to run 4e and play the check system like 5e I would allow all DCs to scale with level, and just call things 'easy', 'medium', or 'hard' in all cases. I could add names for 'harder than hard' etc if I needed them, but as you yourself (IIRC) pointed out, you can use just 'easy', 'medium', and 'hard' in 5e too and its expected to 'play about the same'.

You were the one who claimed all you had to do was remove a range of numbers... go back and re-read the post I replied too.

So you'd (still) scale them by level...how... and how is that the same as 5e? No I said if one wanted to simplify it the book suggests using easy/moderate/hard and he game shouldn't break from doing so... what I didn't claim was that it was the same. I'm sure there are differences in play with different ranges being used.

As for 'guidelines', you wouldn't have them. You don't have them in 5e! You've pounded on that point, that the system is 'vague' on purpose and the GM is supposed to make it up. If you want to play like 5e, then presumably you don't want such guidelines.

No I haven't I said there were loose guidelines... I know what hard is for any relative or concrete definition of hard in my 5e game it is a DC of 20-25. What is hard in your 4e game played the same way?

 

[bert1000]

How?

What makes you think that in any previous edition you would set DCs when it didn't make any sense for their to be a possible point of failure/success? In fact in my view all 4e really did was say "don't even present such trivial elements that don't need checks", though certainly you can provide them as set dressing or a way to give the plot logical coherence if you really want.

This is my interpretation of 4e as well, and in fact the reason for the scaling DCs and typical 50-60% chance of success (or whatever it is).

4e made the choice to only use game "spotlight" and rolling dice on challenges that had decent chance of success and failure.

The DM is suppose to look to the fiction and just narrate (or skip) trivial obstacles and just outright block impossible ones. When it is a decent challenge for the party, you pull out the dice. The DM has a lot of flexibility on what constitutes a 'decent challenge' depending on genre/tone of the game your playing.

This was the source of all the "at high level every house suddenly has adamantine doors on it now!" silliness. Of course in most games they don't. Most houses have regular doors that are trivial to get through for your high level PCs. No rolling needed. However, IF the DM decides that a door actually is a challenge (because of material, warded, etc.) then you can pick an appropriate DC that reflects that.

I think this approach actually lends itself to MORE verisimilitude, not less.

 

[Eric V]

As there is usually only one DM at that table, obviously, the DM is the judge of 'better.'

Why does the DM's imagination trump everyone else's? Aren't we all playing a game together? What if I use a spell/ability creatively and it, by the rules, takes out the BBEG in one round, only for the DM to say, "That's anti-climatic, BBEG stays up." It's 'better' because he says so?

What if the DM isn't as imaginative as the rest of the players...his imagination still trumps everything else? Really??

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is nonsense. The DM determines how difficult things are. He can take the party's abilities into account to make the game challenging ('tailored') or he can create the world independently and let the players try to figure out which challenges they should take on and in what order ('status quo'). That's how it is in 5e, that's how it was in every prior edition, that's how it is, period.

I don't dispute that, I just note that just because a low-level party comes up against a high DC in 5e doesn't mean that something's broken, so thus having the assumption that the DC is not tailored to the party isn't inherently flawed (as AA was indicating).

It's a genre trope, as well. In the broader fantasy genre, and in heroic stories of any kind, really, heroes face many challenges, most of which seem to range from risky to overwhelmingly dangerous, with the Hero surviving by the skin of his teeth repeatedly. Design a game with random resolution to match that appearance, and every PC will die before any adventure is completed. No one will ever reach 2nd level. Rather, the game has to tune it to the rate at which heroes survive, not the way their challenges are portrayed. And the hero generally lives through all the challenges that take him up to that final confrontation at the climax of the story...

It's totally in-fantasy-genre to always succeed, but not it's not typically a very good gameplay element. Games are interactive, and part of that interactivity is shown by the ability to fail, to have the bad guy win, to decide to take those eagles to Mount Doom, etc. If there's no real failure state, there's no real game to play, it's just shared dynamic fiction (which can be fun in its own right!). No edition of D&D gets it that bad, but 4e at its most "fail forward-y" can produce that feeling of impotence in the face of success.

In the early days of RPGs, they were still very much like wargames, they set up a scenario, and did your best to achieve victory conditions with the units provided. The challenge was to achieve victory, and there were no particular constraints on how.
...
5e's CR guidelines are back to being less than dependable, probably as an alternative to just chucking them entirely, in keeping with the classic D&D, wargame-like, philosophy.

Early days of tabletop RPGs or modern days of videogame RPGs. It's a little to see something that could describe a Deus Ex scenario or the gameplay of Skyrim be labelled so old-school.

I see it as really kind of a playstle thing. Compare tightly plotted JRPGs like Final Fantasy XIII with Western "open-world" RPGs, and they both have their distinct pleasures and foibles. The D&D I like to play is more Western in style than tightly controlled, but neither is better than the other, they just work different fun muscles (the fun of expression and discovery vs. the fun of creation and presentation).

So I don't thikn 5e's CR guidelines are "less than dependable." They're perfectly dependable - "hard" and "very hard" and "easy" have meanings in the world, independent of PC level. A hard DC is hard compared with all the challenges in D&D, not just at the level you encounter it. If you beat it at a low level, you've exhibited skill and ability, like a low-level run.

And you can not do it that way, if you want.

Yes, you can have a pretty close to, or entirely, impossible DC that acts as a spur to some sort of action which makes that DC not be an obstacle anymore. However, character build isn't the process for doing that, because it happens on a totally different time scale than a challenge in an adventure.

Right - gameplay is the process for doing that. Specifically, in D&D, using resources and exploring the world and asking questions of the DM in a back-and-forth matter. It's hard to build a character to trump DC's in 5e (at least without being high level to begin with). Much better to ask the DM: "What's the lock made of? Is it acid-resistant?"

I entirely disagree, not when its presented in terms of something like "OK, make this Athletics check to catch yourself" or something like that.

"Make this Athletics check to catch yourself" is a world apart from "Make this Strength save or fall," psychologically speaking. The former is empowering the character, showing how heroic and strong they are that they are able to actively turn a disaster into something not so bad. The latter empowers the effect, showing how dangerous and menacing the threat is, that it can force you to fall unless you do something to stop it.

The fact that I'm now dangling from a rope 500' above the ground is usually significant enough and a lot more fun than 'oops your a splat mark down below'.

Nah. Especially when you know that "oops splat you're a mark down below" isn't an option. When that isn't on the table, dangling from a rope 500' above the ground is almost dull. Because, really, you're not going to let me splat. If I say "I let go," there's going to be some flying bird that swoops around at the last minute and breaks my fall. If I then stab that bird, well, I landed safely in the treetops, maybe took some damage. I've got no real agency, I'm just here to roll dice and advance the plot.

How does 5e's system facilitate this? It doesn't.

Yeah, it does, by saying that the DC of the lock shouldn't necessarily depend on the level the party encounters it at. 4e's "DC is dynamic with your level" philosophy would mean that the party doesn't encounter locks that they don't have a fair chance to pick, but 5e's "DC is static with regards to your level and varies with the world" philosophy means that the party will encounter locks that are easy, locks that are difficult, and a range in between, depending on what their goals are and how they approach the adventure.

It's possible to ignore 4e's philosophy, just as it is possible to ignore 5e's, and neither is very difficult to do.

1st 4e never says all DCs have to be in some fixed range. You can set a DC to be as high level as you wish, and the thing is, that numerically informs you as the DM that you have made something out of the PCs league, its utterly clear from the very nature of the DC selection process.

In 5e, there is no such thing as a check out of your league. Just a check of varying difficulty for your league.

And secondly, you very often DO want to make DCs that are in a certain range. In fact the vast majority of DCs should be easier than 60%. 5e's check system and improvising write up seem to directly ignore that reality

It - correctly - disputes that what you say is reality. For a lot of tables, it really isn't. For a lot of tables, what the DC is will be a property of that thing (that lock, that chasm, that challenge), and it is up to the party to figure out how to beat that DC or go around it, not up to the DM to only give them challenges they can beat within expected margins.